Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) - the age of algospeak feat. the etymology nerd

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

This week, Jamie talks with Adam Aleksik aka The Etymology Nerd about how relying on algorithms to communicate is changing the way we talk and scream at each other, and the inevitability that your nephew is going to grow up to say "seggs" without a shred of irony.  Learn more about Adam's work here: https://www.etymologynerd.com/ Pre-order Algospeak: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/468266/algospeak-by-aleksic-adam/9781529949148See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm not so bad when you take me on my mind I'm another character so you're so goodbye So, the internet is changing the way you talk and hold people's attention, and it's literally changing the way that we communicate on a fundamental level. Oh, okay, you guys didn't like that. Okay, let's try this delivery of the message instead.

The last year. Okay, for this, you do have to imagine that I'm doing my makeup effortlessly while openly trauma dumping. Let's get the music going again. Okay. So last year, during the peak of my career, I uprooted my life after getting no fault evicted from my apartment so two Vegas venture capital dickheads could move in, which they definitely didn't, and moved back to New England to be with my dad. And the real reason was that I wanted to date some guy in Maine who ultimately broke up with me after showing me David Cronberg's The Fly, which I think about a lot. How is that? Are you listening? Are you paying attention? Because in certain algorithms, these two approaches that I just tried, make up trauma dumping and screaming like there's a bomb in

the room. These two approaches are still the easiest way to get people's attention in short form algorithms. There's more ways than that, obviously, but these are kind of the time-honored traditions. Personally, I skew more towards reckless oversharing than volume 1,000 alarmist, but if you're neither, yeah, you might have a hard time reaching people on the internet right now. This is 16th minute, the podcast where most weeks we talk to and about the internet's characters of the day. But this week, it's a side quest episode. Today, we're going to speak to a Gen Z linguist about how the algorithm has fundamentally changed language and what the implications of that might be. And I have to say, I feel so fucking old talking about this.

But the term for these ways that we communicate to break through to the algorithm is called algospeak. Basically, the way we perform for the algorithm in order to capture not even people's attention necessarily, but the algorithm's attention that delivers our content to people. We've talked about it a lot on this show. I've talked to reporters on the subject and to content creators who are, beholden to it. And yeah, it's easy to dunk on these pretty identifiable passes to get our attention through speech, through memes, through editing techniques, through duration of video. But when you're living depends on it and the algorithm itself remains opaque, what option do you

have but to play the game? Start a podcast, of course. Although in a podcast environment that is increasingly reliant on video clips posted two algorithm spaces like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, that's increasingly untrue. But our guest today, who is both a professional linguist and a hashtag content hashtag creator, thinks that this is a very important conversation to have, and I agree, because most recently, he feels that it's fundamentally changed the way

that our elections are run. So, as a treat, here's my conversation with the etymology nerd, a K.A. Adam Alexic, a Harvard-educated linguist who's built a career across social media platforms talking about linguistics, and more specifically, Algospeak, since he was a teenager. Babe, wake up. The Oxford English Dictionary just published their shortlist for the 2024 word of the year. The top contenders so far include brain rot, demure, and lore, but the one I've had

my eye on the most is slop for low-quality AI-generated content. He's also written a book called Algo-Speak, how social media is transforming the future of language that will be published next year, and he came on to tell us how the algorithmic communication has and will continue to change how we understand each other and who our words can reach. Here's our conversation. Hi, I'm Adam on the internet. I'm known as etymology nerd. I'm a content creator and a linguist focusing on how social media is changing language. I am so glad that you are working on what you're doing and that you're a content creator as well. In my experience, most of what I've seen about algorithmic speak is by people who aren't creating content themselves. It feels a little disjointed. How did you first get interested in

etymology? Was content creation first? Was this interest for what? How did this sort of come together for you as a career? Right. Yeah. What you just said is super interesting because I don't think you can properly study it unless you're also in the weeds yourself. Like unless you're like on TikTok yourself. You don't, you can't like talk about the new TikTok words or how algorithms are shaping. Like if you feel it as a creator, you really do feel it. And academic linguistics is like super far behind. I mean, you need to make sure a word sticks around. You need to make sure it works as a research paper or something. And by the time these guys, all of their PhDs, they're 30 years old and they're not caught up with the new stuff anymore. They're internet ancient. Right, right. So my

story is I started, I just started with like an etymology blog. I was talking about word origins since like 10th grade. So I've been running that for like a while. Then I was graduating college with a linguistics degree and I started having to ask myself the same question. Everybody with linguistics degree asks themselves, which is like, what do I do now? And that's what I'm I started making content and so for about a year and a half now, I've been making short form videos on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. Yeah, as the etymology nerd, it's been a lot of fun. But I have felt kind of this interesting balance between my content creator side and my linguist side, and I keep studying both myself. And every time I'm on social media, just consuming it

passively, I also can't really turn off the little more analytical part. Like, why are they saying it this way? Why is it phrasing this way? You know, I totally agree that actually be our content creator yourself is kind of important to understanding it. Just like the internal anxiety of like, if I don't make this adjustment, I will functionally disappear in this space. We are ultimately like super subservient to whatever the whims of the algorithm are. I remember last summer TikTok announced that they are now only going to be paying people who make videos longer than a minute. So now all of our content, which used to be like under a minute, that's how it started out, suddenly had to shift to slightly medium form, if that was short form.

form. The way we're telling our stories changes with that. What's crazy to me is that like our stories, our storytelling is always shaped by the medium in which we communicate. When we didn't have writing or whatever, we used oral tradition and we had to rhyme our stories because that was the only way to remember like the long chunks of text like the Odyssey or whatever. Our stories were shaped by the lack of a written medium. And then we have written mediums and we start using chapters and we start breaking down things into subdivisions. And our stories again changed. We serialize things with newspapers or storytelling is changing with our medium. And again, now we are in this algorithmic medium where the way we communicate is shaped by the algorithm. It's responded to what the algorithm

rewards. And in the end, that's always engagement optimization. When it comes to communicating and needing to work around the algorithm to communicate effectively, or I guess to the most people, what are there any common misconceptions that you see, either on the content creation side or just in the way that it's perceived by people who don't make this stuff? Maybe not a misconception per se, but an interesting miscommunication that inevitably is going to happen every single time someone talks to someone on the internet. When I make a video, I maybe have like an idea of who my audience is. I like have a general concept of who's going to consume my video.

But in the end, the algorithm is going to push that to whoever the algorithm pushes to. They might push that to a different audience. They might push this to a larger or smaller group than I thought. and maybe a completely different demographic. And so I'm miscommunicating inherently in what I say. In the algorithmic sense, this is especially salient when we think about filter bubbles and how words can travel, ideas can travel out of echo chambers

and to the broader population when they spread as memes. It's something that it's very hard to think about because you consume content and you're like, oh, this was made for me. And I make content. I think, oh, I'm making this for whoever's going to consume it. There's a lot of nodes in this network that are completely lost when we think about what a insane mess social media is if you, like, zoom out. Going to your piece a little bit, I really appreciated how you pretty clearly contextualized

this communication shift that you're talking about, and you specifically use the term viral communication. Can you tell me a little bit about what that is? Yeah, in the past, public communication has always differed from one-to-one private communication for just having a conversation. It's just you and me, right? But if I'm speaking on a soapbox to a crowd, everybody in the crowd is going to hear my message. And that's called broadcast communication, one person broadcasting their message. And traditionally, media has had this type of broadcast communication. Over the radio, the example I used in the substack post you talked about was FDR during his fireside chats. He would just send his message out to 60 million

Americans. He would use it to dispel of misinformation, use it to explain his policies. But it's one person broadcasting their message to 60 million Americans at once. There's no scrolling away. There's no sharing this to another, you know, to a friend. It's just one person to a bunch of people. And with most media, it's been like that. Radio, television, it's people who tune in and hear the message. Since the late 2010s, we've had a huge shift towards viral communication, which is a different style away from broadcast communication.

Viral communication depends on shares and it depends on engagement. And if I send out a message on my TikTok, it's not going to immediately be seen by 60 million Americans. That'll be crazy. and no politician can speak like that anymore. Joe Biden, Kamala, Donald Trump, these people cannot immediately send their message to 6 million Americans. They have to rely also on the algorithm.

That means that they have to make their message, such as the algorithm spreads it. And the algorithm is only going to spread your message if it's good at getting interaction, if it's good for the platform, because the platform's business priorities always come first, and their priorities are to keep you on the app for as long as possible.

So they're going to see if the initial message gets interactions, gets shares, and then they're going to push it further. Also, the shares themselves are going to push it. But it's this sort of structure where instead of a top-down one person to a bunch of people communication, it's one person to some people, to a little more people, and then it spreads from there. But through this like network where more and more people are getting their content from some previous person up the line who has already consumed it. How do we see these algorithms attempt to be gamed by different candidates and different campaigns? were there things that stuck out to you as particularly effective or like, oh, no, the whatever,

the boomers whiffed it on this one? A lot of the stuff people have been worrying about since 2016, like echo chambers and filter bubbles. What I said earlier about this audience you think you're speaking to is not the audience you're speaking to. And meme-based communication, I think, is also critical. So one, they can build up their core filter bubbles. The Kamlob people had, everybody who was consuming their brat videos.

Everybody who was watching Bradb videos was voting for Kamlob. But none of the Trump supporters were getting that. the Trump supporters were, are getting a completely different style of content. Like probably the same people are getting like Haktua and what's up brother videos like more in the manosphere, like this kind of entirely different group that the brat people are not getting these videos at all. So we have these like two separate filter bubbles. Occasionally memes do trickle out and through these filter bubbles, but with memes always spread ideas. And I really like to say that language is interchangeable with memes on the internet. And that's all interchangeable with metadata too, because whatever the

algorithm picks up as like, this is trending. Oh, if brat is trending, then it's going to push brat as a trending thing because algorithms push trends to keep you on the app. And then creators make more brat content. They want to make a living. And then consumers consume more brat content. And so we're in this cycle of it becoming more and more trendy. And so trends are blown up from niche communities. Sometimes ideas do stay in these communities, but sometimes they blow up on a larger scale. And this is especially important when we're talking about communicating political ideas. Back in 2016, we had like Pepe the Frog. We had all these sort of extremes ideas that like you don't understand how crazy it gets at the core of the filter bubble, like the cats

and dogs type stuff that like people on the periphery don't see. On the on the like the super deep like part of Facebook where they are spreading these memes, that's not something like a lot of people and more progressive chambers are hearing at all. And we're hearing maybe things that sound a little more sane on the outside. But like deep in the center like the people who are most inside this network are getting the Q&N immigrants eating our pets kind of thing. I think for the for the people outside of that bubble, hearing that comment for the first time is completely shocking, where if you're inside of this separate algorithmic bubble, it's something you've been hearing for a while. You're in very different chambers, and the style of political communication to one audience doesn't reach a broad

audience. So it's sort of a new style of dog whistling almost where you can expect your core group to hear this really radical message, let's say. And then on the outside, it seems more palatable. And if you're not super deep into the groups, yeah. Are there examples that you can think of of people, it doesn't need to be a politician who have been able to navigate around this to cut through? Or is it just impossible to do at this point? It's impossible unless you're using broadcast communication. I think if you're using viral communication, you need to be communicating in different ways. I as a creator, I make some videos that I know aren't going to go viral, but I know they're for my core audience who cares about, like, linguistics.

So I make sometimes, like, more niche linguistic topics that I think my core audience is going to like, so I retain my core audience. And then I also make these broader, relatable videos about language and names. Names are very popular. Everybody likes to share to the people who have this name or whatever. Or trends, trending words, things that get interactions and are pushed further in the algorithm. So I know ahead of time, a lot of times that my videos are going to do better than other videos, but I'm making them for different kind of groups. I know somewhere from my core groups, somewhere from my outside groups.

In the end, though, I am modifying my speech for what I think is going to go viral. And I make videos about things that are trending because I know that's the best way to reach a bigger audience. From a creative standpoint, having to navigate and observe this constantly changing algorithm, do you find it at all creatively invigorating as someone who's making stuff all the time? Is it frustrating? Are there things? Because this is something that I have felt at different points. There are things that I would love to put out into the world.

But sometimes you're like, I really think. I think no one would see this just based on like what I've seen cut through. Totally. On a personal level, it's easy to feel frustrated that I have to conform my speech. I talk in a different accent online because I know it's like better for retaining my audience. I use more extreme language. I have to sometimes issue nuance. Like I can't get as into the weeds as I would like to get and sometimes something can be misconstrued.

I try to present things as best as I can, but inevitably something will be lost. I do think on another level, like, people always, artists throughout history have always had to conform to their medium. But fundamentally, I do think there are also patterns in what retain human attention. But, like, superlatives language has always been good for getting our attention. That's not a new human behavior. We'll be right back with more of my chat with Adam. Or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth. Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced.

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Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Podcasts. Welcome back to 16th Minute. I recently realized that one of my cats is more or less a ringer, visually and behavior-wise, for donkey from Shrek. Somebody! And here's the rest of my conversation with Adam Alexic, the etymology nerd. I want to ask a little bit about, specifically about that, the vocal

shift because as I was I read that in your piece but I was like I want to understand when you're shifting your voice what are you shifting it towards how are you shifting inflection what is like tick talk voice that you've found to be effective well I call it the influencer accent and um there there's the there's the most stereotype one like the hey guys say I'm doing my makeup routine there's like a little up talk there there's like uh maybe sometimes I'll do a little vocal fry they'll stress certain words to keep your attention. Now, I don't do that style. There are many different styles. That's the most, like, cliched one. There's, um, I do what I call an educational influencer action. Like I, I still, I stress certain words. I sound really excited. I'm going to talk

to you like this and it's going to hold your attention for a minute because that's what I need to do. But also, you'll see people like Mr. Beast as well. If you look at any Mr. Beast video, this man does not speak like that in real life, not even close. And like, he's also going to exaggerate everything. He's going to say, I just built this huge island. I threw a bunch of Influences on, like, he's going to talk like this, right? These are all different accents, but all geared at getting your attention. And there are some similarities. They'll, they're typically used uptalk.

You hang on every last word because it sounds like it's unfinished. So it keeps going and you want to hear more. Don't go. Please listen. I'm going to, I'm still going to stress certain words because if your attention starts to drift and I say something that sounds important, you're going to lock back in. And you're less likely to scroll away. Yeah, the influencer accents, which come in in different styles, all kind of do evolve

out of this attempt to hold on to your attention. When I return to old content that I liked, like, for example, if I'm going back to a, like, YouTube video essay that I enjoyed five years ago, it sounds different. The length is different. The delivery is different. The visuals that you would see a lot around that time are different. And it is, like you're saying, an extension of art, but it feels fascinating that you're like, oh, if this came out today, I don't know, you know, if it ever would have reached me.

Mr. Beast just, one of his employees leaked a manual about a month ago of like, it was like Mr. Beast's handbook to succeeding in Mr. Beast's productions. And it was this book he wrote for his employees about like how he goes viral. And I found it fascinating, both on a linguistic level and as a creator again, kind of looking at this from both lenses. But he explicitly mentioned in the book that he wants to make things as extreme as possible. He talks about retention so much. Every single page talks about retention multiple times because that, is the one thing you, like, really need to hold on to the audience. And then it's, then YouTube's going to push the video to more people. So it's like this kind of top level. You hit your first group. You retain that audience. And then YouTube's like, oh, people like this. They send it to more people. And that's viral communication again. Mr. Bees is so diabolical. It's, um, he's quite scary to me. He's very intentional with it. It's like, yeah, like you read the handbook and I mean, any I'm manipulating you, any creator is manipulating you. If we're going viral, that means we are playing with your emotions and your

attention. The only way to get attention is to do that. like if I say this is the best something, this is the most interesting something. That's usually how I start my videos like with some kind of crazy claim like that. And then that manipulates you a little bit because you're like, wow, the best something. I mean, there's a lot of interesting somethings, but only one thing can be the most interesting something. So now I hook you by playing with the psychological thing that all humans have. That's another sort of shift I've noticed in my own media consumption habits over time, where even if it's a creator I really like, usually I will not ignore, but like, assume that how they open the video is probably exaggerated or not true, something that you're like,

okay, I trust that they'll get to the nuance, but that can't be right. Right. It's a bit of a deal with the dough because, like, I mean, I at least feel like I'm trying to make good content. I feel like a lot of people also feel that, but you cannot be successful as an influence or less you somewhat playing to these things. And I mean, on a personal level, I just try to strike a balance where I do like try to cite my sources in my video. I do try to like not make, like actually fake claims, but just maybe hyperboise, like, slightly to the point of where I'm still not, like, misinforming. But it's, it's, it's something I think about frequently. And as I consume other media, I think about that a lot. When you are, because you're creating content on multiple

platforms, do you change your presentation from platform to platform? If so, what does that look like? Great question. Um, so for TikTok and Instagram, I'm just posting like the same one-minute video across all platforms. Most creators do that for like the short videos. So there's a lot of similarity between those three platforms. I'm branching on to long form YouTube where I do speak a little more relaxed and have less of this feeling of pressure. And I also spent a lot of time recently writing on substack and I just finished writing a book. And these are super long form and I can really nuance my thoughts and I think it's most authentic to how I actually want to communicate. But even for books I modify like I use maybe more correct English grammar, whatever that means,

but less like colloquial slang usage than I might use in a video. And the slang usage is actually maybe more authentic to how I speak casually. So there are, each medium does constrain you in different ways. And that's, I don't want to be too alarmist about this. I don't want to come in and say like, this is the end of the English language that like every linguist tries to tell people it's never going to be the end of English language. Well, that's a great way to start the video.

Right, right. Is this the end of the English language? Yeah. Let's find out. That is actually one of the few things I do find creatively interesting. It's like if I have to express this idea in three different ways, can I do it effectively in three different ways? That's like one of the elements I find a little more fun.

I really like about the internet is that it has democratized public communication. So in the past, like I mentioned FDR because the few examples we had of people who really were using broadband communication were the elites, like the politicians, the reporters, the people who all went through like elite universities or whatever, who all have like. fancy jobs. These are the only people who are able to communicate to you in the past. And since YouTube, since now, especially now in short-form video platforms, anybody has this platform. The elites no longer control communication. And in that sense, there's less maybe manufacturing consent of what media you're getting. There's more people criticizing the gun, which I think is a

good thing. I think that sort of democratization seems pretty good to me. And on another level, on the linguistic level, there's less of that formalization of language because when language is controlled by the elites, they're going to impose their grammatical rules like, oh, you have to capitalize this or not use this word or whatever. On TikTok, people just talk how they authentically talk a little bit closer to that, at least. There's more slang words happening because of that because they feel like they're able to use the language that they want to use. And I think that's pretty great. So again, pros and cons here. I do think it's not universally categorically bad. The way that you closed your piece, that you cited a speech that I had not heard of, but on paper is incredibly weird because, you know, you say...

Atma payments, the, yeah, the sigmas of Australia. The government is unsgiving to your side. Yeah, it's a West Australian senator who, like, used brainwrought words in her speech about how this government is capping. and then she urges you to vote for a government with more aura. But like, let's look at why she's using that language. She's using that language because she knows that clip of her is going to go viral. It was very clever on her part. And it did.

It did go super viral on multiple platforms because she used this kind of language, which evokes, like, which gets shares, which, like, gets people's attention. So paradoxically, like, it feeds back into itself. That's so weird. Shout out to the 22-year-old that almost certainly wrote that. I mean, we're constantly presented with the idea of in the U.S. in particular. And there's truth to it, but I feel like it's more complicated based on what you're describing, that, you know, politics are getting crazier or politics are getting weirder or worse.

But I think what your work sort of indicates is, sure, that may be true, but also there is some strategy to behaving in a more elevated way if you want to get your message to anybody. Like, you can't really be boring. Right. It's an underlying, like, I do keep coming back to this thing with any linguistic change that I write or talk about, that these are still underlying human behaviors. We're still humans that's not changed, right? And humans are always going to adapt to their medium, and they're always going to be using language in new ways and changing it. And we're just doing that in a new way, which is short form video. And that is worth talking about because it does somewhat change your language as well, emergently. It's,

It's caused new words to emerge faster, and it's caused memes to come and go quicker than they used to. So, like, a word might be popular. Like, demure was popular for, like, a week. And then it was, like, at least in my circles, it stopped being used. I talked to my 10-year-old cousin the other day, and she and her friends all say demure still. And I couldn't help thinking about the filter bubble thing, that, like, maybe I was in the initial filter bubble of who, like, Jules LeBron was talking to when she started making the demure videos but now it's filtered down to middle schoolers and middle schoolers are um they're not consuming that content but they're getting it from people who are using it and so like it trickles down

almost to other people so words and ideas the same this is also like an idea spreading with that and i talked to my 12 year old male cousin and he was talking about sigmas and uh i i that word emerged out of the manospheres so like i don't think he's like getting like blackpilled here but it is like interesting how these ideas and words travel through networks and filter down to children. And that's maybe something I'm a little concerned about, but also the words themselves I've distressed or not bad. Maybe just, yeah. Yeah, it's definitely a double-edged sword. I think I have a tendency to be a bit of an algorithm alarmist, partially in the way it causes people to communicate, but also just the opakness of it. Absolutely. The opaqueness is something that

that constantly just really deeply frustrates me as a creator. Instagram doesn't give you customer support unless you purchase meta-verified. TikTok doesn't tell you anything unless you're in there, special like secret TikTok program. Even so, like they don't communicate to creators really what their expectations are. They might just take down a video or they might just whatever. So creators are like especially afraid to take on the algorithm.

And that's like how we get algos speak like words like on alive instead of like suicide or something because you're afraid. But like you can still say the word suicide. It's just the algorithm might suppress your video. It might not. They don't even tell you. We're getting productive language change happening because of people being afraid of the algorithm or people trying to hijack the algorithm in ways that they might work, might not even work.

But if you start by using a certain word, like you say, Sigma's of Australia, that probably is going to be better for the algorithm. But it's also going to perpetuate the word stigma. And then maybe my 12-year-old cousin starts using it. Personally, I try to also not use algorithms as much as possible. I don't like how Spotify pushes the same trending song every time I finish a playlist. So I've turned off the auto play. I don't like, like on TikTok, I sometimes get like a video of like somebody playing jazz and I really like listening to jazz, but I feel this urge to scroll away and I ask myself, what is this urge coming from my, because my brain wants the dopamine hit of a slightly better next video.

So I've been sort of trying to train myself to stop and listen to the jazz video in its entirety. It is rough because we are kind of getting trained to have shorter attention spans for sure. A foot washed up, a shoe. with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases,

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Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness, the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets.

With over 37 million downloads, We continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Sometimes it's hard to remember, but...

Going through something like that is a traumatic experience, but it's also not the end of their life. That was my dad, reminding me and so many others who need to hear it, that our trauma is not our shame to carry, and that we have big, bold, and beautiful lives to live after what happened to us. I'm your host and co-president of this organization, Dr. Lyotra Tate. On my new podcast, The Unwanted Sorority, we weighed through transformation to peel back healing and reveal what it actually looks like, and sounds like, in real time. Each week, I sit down with people who live through harm, carried silence, and are now reshaping the systems that failed us. We're going to talk about the adultification of black girls, mothering as resistance, and the tools we use for healing. The unwanted sorority is a safe space, not a quiet space, so let's walk

in. We're moving towards liberation together. Listen to the unwanted sorority, new episodes every Thursday on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you. Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are short-term, highly regiment. correctional programs that mimic military basic training. These programs aim to provide a shock of prison life,

emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation programs. Mark had one chance to complete this program and had no idea of the hell awaiting him the next six months. The first night was so overwhelming and you don't know who's next to you. And we didn't know what to expect in the morning. Nobody tells you anything. Listen to shock incarceration on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Algo Speak is also something I find really fascinating and also seems to have shifted as time goes on.

I don't, you know, fault any creator for having to use it. But it is, it is interesting to me. terms like unalive, terms like particularly grape always really, uh, rubs me the wrong way. But weirdly ends up, it feels like kind of minimizing very serious things and almost like suppressing or not encouraging people to talk about, you know, serious issues. I don't know. I absolutely think that there is sort of a trend towards infantile language when we use replacement vocabulary. So like look at segs instead of sex or I do think great instead of I do think, like, a lot of our on-alive sounds a little more childish than suicide, right?

So I think, but it's because a lot of these words are coming out of memes, which are made by young people, and young people like using kind of fun-sounding childish language. There is a whole separate debate about whether or not this is good or bad. I've talked a lot of middle school teachers and guidance counselors about on-alive, and some of them feel like, yeah, they're not able to talk about the serious topic, which is concerning. But other people are saying, actually, it's opening up conversations. It's allowing middle schoolers to, some middle schoolers are learning the word unalive before the word suicide.

And it's allowing them to have these conversations, especially when they're using the word as a genuine euphemism. 60% of the middle school teachers I talk to are say that their kids are using unalive primarily as a euphemism for when they don't want to use kill. So one teacher said the students submitted an essay on Hamlet unaliving himself. And another one had a classroom discussion, the unaliving that happens in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Like, kids genuinely think this is like a serious euphemism for kill that sounds maybe nicer to say. So, like, we're seeing this online speak turn into the offline. And I actually, the title of my book, which is coming out, is Algo speak, how social media is changing a language that's available now. And I talk about a lot more.

That is really fascinating to me. And in a way that you're like, that's just a lateral language shift that's pretty interesting that in 20 years, you could have someone in public office saying unalive and be totally serious. I think we're joking about it now. I'm very sure that it's going to be a thing. That is really fascinating and an interesting way to sort of accelerate the growth of how we use language, how we talk and how we talk about very serious issues. And then there's the cynical part of me that it's like, it will never feel normal for me to hear a 45-year-old man say SIGs and I just never want to hear it. It's definitely the future. I know.

I know. I love it. Love it. Love it, love it. I think there's a lot of kind of co-terminosity with the memes and the metadata and the language, which I keep trying to spread this message that they are the same thing now. Like Riz trended last year because it was a hashtag, like a, or not necessarily a hashtag, but like the audio, like the algorithm picked up on that as a trending term. So it is metadata. And creators are using it because they know it's a piece of trending metadata.

But it's also a meme at the same time. It's like a funny Riz meme, whatever. And then, but it's also a word. So the word is the meme is, is the piece of information for the algorithm. And they love categorizing us. They love tagging us. I think there's been a lot of new words for categorizing ourselves and our identities, whether it's like cottage core or coquette or like all these new microlabels all also emerge out of the algorithm trying to find more information about us and then turning those into trends, which are also words. So it's all kind of connected to itself in that way. My last question for you. This is a podcast about

main characters of the internet, which is, I feel like, an increasingly challenging and rare phenomenon to sort of nail down because of, like you're saying, how quickly the algorithm tends to move now. So with regards to this show, I mean, because you spend so much time professionally and academically within the algorithm, do you feel that we will continue to get internet main characters in the way we once did? Will that change? How do you, where do you see that going. I think it's fascinating that you're putting this emphasis on the main character. I think there's been a trend towards the internet's trying to make you feel like you're the main character all the time. It's narrativizing. It's like when, why are all these memes starting with

POV? They're inviting you to experience something firsthand. That's why we talk about why we're in our era for something. Why this is something like we're explaining our lore. We're explaining our, I'm in my, you know, something arc. But like, we tend to serialize our own lives and pretend like we have this main character syndrome like we're we're going on side quests uh really i think all our lives are kind of meaningless um but the it feels good to not think that which is why the algorithm has been pushing stuff that makes you feel good makes you interact with the content and then share more so i think the reason we're all i think we're all going to be main characters in our heads because that's what the internet is telling us well well you heard it here first everyone you are in fact

the main character thank you so much to adam who you can find Everywhere. He's got over half a million followers on TikTok, a million on Instagram, half a million on YouTube. This guy knows his damn algo. So follow him to keep learning more. And you can also pre-order his book now at the link in the description. And next week, we begin our next deep dive into the era of personified brands. I'm talking Denny's being the most popular girl on Tumblr. I'm talking Wendy's Twitter feuds of the Twitter. 2010s. I'm talking woke stakeums during COVID. I'm talking the duolingo bird getting murdered for clout a couple weeks ago. How did American marketing arrive at a language at bird swimming and piss? The bone-chilling history starts next week. See you then. Please don't say Seggs. And for your moment of fun, here is that brainwrought Australian politician's speech Adam and I were talking about from Fatima Payman.

To the sigmas of Australia, I say that this goofy air government have been capping, not just now, but for a long time. A few of you may remember when they said there'll be no phantom tax under the government I lead, they're capaholics. They're also yappaholics. They yap non-stop about how their cost of living measures are changing lives for all Australians. Just put the fries in the bag, little bro. they tell us that they're locked in on improving the housing situation in this country.

They must have brain rot from watching too much Kaisenat and forgot about their plans to ban social media for kids under 14. 16th Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and I Hard Radio. It is written, hosted, and produced by me, Jamie Laughness. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichten and Robert Evans. The Amazing Ian Johnson is our song. supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad 13.

Voice acting is from Grant Crater. And pet shoutouts to our dog producer, Anderson, my cats flea and Casper, and my pet rock bird who will outlive us all. Bye. It's Black Business Month, and Money and Wealth podcast with John Hope Bryant is tapping in. I'm breaking down how to build wealth,

create opportunities, and move from surviving to thriving. time to talk about ownership, equity, and everything in between. Black and brown communities have historically been last in life. Let me just say this. AI is moving faster than civil rights legislation ever did. Listen to money and wealth from the Black Effect Podcast Network on IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

I just normally do straight stand-up, but this is a bit different. What do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club? Answer, a new podcast called Wisecrack, where a comedian finds himself at the center of a chilling true crime story. Does anyone know what show they've come to see? It's a story. It's about the scariest night of my life. This is Wisecrack, available now.

Listen to Wisecrack on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a strong. story to tell. And the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology is already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're looking for another heavy podcast about trauma, the saying it, this is for

the ones who had to survive and still show up as brilliant, loud, soft, and whole. The Unwanted Sorority is where Black Women, Fims, and Gender Expansive Survivors of Sexual Violence rewrite the rules on healing, support, and what happens after. And I'm your host and co-president of this organization, Dr. Leitra Tate. Listen to The Unwanted Sorority, new episodes every Thursday on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.