Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Do you speak Brain Rot? How the internet is changing language

Episode Date: June 13, 2024

Over the past few months, the term “brain rot” has gone from essentially meaning chronically online, to a fully fledged meme and ironic slang language. Adam Aleksic aka “the Etymology Nerd” and Harvard linguistics graduate joins Taylor to break down how the language of the internet is evolving.  Later, Taylor dives into stories from the week including big announcements from Apple’s WWDC, the shadowy right-wing backers behind a Mr Beast video, BeReals big sale, and a new word to describe AI generated garbage.  Full video of this episode will be available on Taylor's YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week, Apple announces AI-generated emojis and a big Siri update, the shadowy right-wing funders behind a Mr. Beast charity video. And our main topic, how words like Skibbitty, Sigma, Riz, Booning, Giat, and more evolved into a new cultural language on the internet. I'm Taylor Lorenz, and that's all coming up right now on Power User. If you're as brain-rodded as me, you've probably seen videos online like this. You would not believe your eyes if I'm one billion sigma guys. Elliot Cox translates pop songs into brain rot on TikTok, and if the lyrics seem

incoherent to you, that's the point. Over the past few months, the term brain rot has gone from essentially meaning chronically online to a fully-fledged meme and ironic slang language. It's almost like pig Latin for people that spend too much time on their phones. And my guest today is an expert on it. Adam Alexic is known as etymology nerd online. He's a Harvard linguistics graduate, with more than 1 million followers across social media. Adam, welcome. Hi, thank you for having me. So Adam, you're such an expert on internet language and etymology.

How did you get into this field where you're basically breaking down all of these internet words for all of us? Yeah, so I've been making online linguistics, edutainment content for about a year. I really am passionate about words and I wanted to share that online. The more I began to post online, the more I began to be interested in, in the internet culture and breaking down the linguistics behind what's going on there. So as a content creator and as an etymologist, I'm very fascinated in breaking down the etymology of the online space. And it seems like people are very interested in that, interested in finding out why we are using brain rot words. It seems like brain rot speaks to kind of maybe this person that's a little bit

too online or it speaks to this state of being where it's like you're so online that you speak this other language. Is that a fair sort of assessment of it? Absolutely. So it merged. actually out of reacting to people who are chronically online. That's the phrase people use for that. So the term was initially popularized in 2011 from an Elder Scrolls game where there's a disease called brain raw. And then people made like dank memes calling people who are online too much having brain rot. And then that got extended to TikTok became really popular in like 2021. So it does have this association that's always been there of being online too much. The idea that the internet is rotting your brain. When did it really start to become popular? When did you start to notice

it really picking up traction online. Yeah, it seems like when TikTok popularized it, 2021 or 2022, that's when the word began to hit a larger audience. There's a song called the Gen Alpha Rizzler song. So there's a lot of words there that are considered brainwrop. There's Riz, Skibbitty, Yacht, Ohio, Phantom Tax, these are all like quintessential examples of brain rot. Younger children are like slang words that seem to not have much function

but are tied to more memes and fads. I think that's another big part of brain rot that it's tied to these ironic trends online. When we think about brain rot content online, a lot of it repeats a lot of these same slang terms. So I was hoping we could sort of go through some of these slang terms and talk about their origins. Absolutely.

So, you know, the first is sigma maxing. We see people talking about sigmas, betas. A lot of that, you know, comes from these sort of 4chan type right-wing communities, at least as far as I'm familiar. Where did it all come from? And how did the concept of a Sigma kind of get mainstreamed? Yeah. So Sigma refers to the idea of a Sigma male, which in cells or the men's rights community used to describe their desired position outside of the social hierarchy of alphas and betas. So a Sigma was like somebody who went their own way. This and all the other words that were using maxing, cucked, pill, mewing, maugging, a lot of words come directly

from in-cell forums in the early 2000s. They were used on 4chan. They were used in other in-cell forums. They slowly filtered out to Reddit through Rate Me subreddits, where people wanted to learn more about their appearance and their in-cells commenting in those subredits. Then people on TikTok started using the terminology from there, mostly like girl talk beauty influencers,

talking about how you should maximize your jawline or something. Then we hit like kind of a post-ironic era where people are making fun of people who talk that way, but also the boundary gets blurred. So this pipeline for Chans to Reddit to TikTok has led to the mainstreamization of words like Sigma. Yeah. You also hear a bunch of other stuff like Giat and Riz. Can you go through kind of some of the top brain rot terms and just kind of give us a like one sentence explainer of what these terms speak to? Yeah. The words that don't come from in-cell culture come from either gay or black people 100% of time because these are the groups that have a need to build shared identity and this can be a genuine need in like minority communities and it can also

be an online group like in cells so these these small communities that create words then spread to larger groups so giott also comes from the african-american english community and it was originally an interjection from goddam like a pronunciation of goddam and it was exaggerated in a way that became popularized online. Then it became used as a noun for butt because people were confusing it since it was used to exclaim when you saw a butt and then people just abstracted that to the concept of a butt.

So that's how we got the word yacht. Riz and Phantom Tax just come from the streamer Kai Sinat. These are words that were coined on his live stream. Phantom tax is from a guy who lives, yeah, Phantom. He lives upstairs. It came from like him stealing my food. Funny. And then after he took it

after everybody on the internet just said like phantom tags i like that these are very popular among younger audiences gen alpha particularly skibbity is a nonsense word similarly it comes from this youtube short series called skibbity toilet which by the way was the number one most viewed content on youtube last year wow i had no idea was that big Another meme that's talked about in the genre of brain rot is Ohio. I mean, I feel like Ohio has just kind of become the capital of the internet these days. How did they get pulled into this? Yeah, it's just a meme from the idea that Ohio shows up in random context.

So there is a famous meme where an astronaut looking at the world and he realizes, wait, it's all Ohio. And then the other astronaut says always has been and then he shoots in. So in context like that, Ohio is the random state. So it's funny because it's random. Yeah, it's like sort of this generic state that it doesn't, I feel like have its own culture necessarily. Or like it kind of, it's not like a super southern state. It's not part of New England. It's kind of part of the Midwest, I guess. But yeah, it just seems to speak to this idea of like generic American life or something. Yeah. It definitely has a generic vibe going to. on at least to the people on the east and west coast. So I feel like this concept of people being so brain-rotted has really taken hold because

I think especially among older people, they can't keep up with all of these terms or all these trends or like being so online. How do you go about researching these terms? I mean, internet language evolves so fast. How do you track the sources of these and categorize them? Generally, it can be extremely difficult for somebody who's trying to approach us from an academic perspective. So by the time research linguists get around to this, it's going to be 10 years later, and these memes are all going to be dead. The words are going to be dead with them because they're

tied to meme lifespans. Sometimes the best starting points are actually know your meme, Wictionary, urban dictionary, these kind of user-generated repositories of language. And then they say, oh, this came from that. And then you can go back to the original source and see that and see if that seemed to have drawn from anywhere. But things can get lost. The internet is a double-edged sword because on one hand, we have this huge wealth of information of truth that language is developing in real time. On the other hand, it can be very hard to trace back where it actually comes from. I love Urban Dictionary as like a research tool because some of the definitions on there are just so unhinged. Tell me a little bit about how the internet and these platforms have shaped our language,

especially in the past, you know, a couple decades. It seems like we went from like emoticons to slang to now these certain sort of patterns of language and expression that I don't even know if it's like words, it's like ways of communicating. Can you kind of talk just about the evolution of social media speak, I guess, or maybe what people would call like Algo speak and how the internet's affecting the way we speak? Absolutely. So what I think we're getting out here is that language change today is extremely tied to social media, virality, trends, memes. So words come and go faster than than they've ever gone before because they're tied to these fads that blow up quickly online and then are gone. And in the past, words would still be tied to fads, but these fads would last longer because

not everybody was using them all of a sudden. Now, the internet has kind of democratized access to slang, and it spreads instantly. And it's very tied to algorithms too and how algorithms reward certain trends. So, for example, trending audios are big. If you interact with the song and the algorithm can then tell you like it, they'll then push you more videos with that same song. So for example, if you liked the Rizler song, you're now going to get more versions of the Rizler song, same with trending metadata. So if you have the hashtag Riz trending or the hashtag Skimity trending and you have liked one video with that, you're going to get more videos. So creators are now incentivized to make more videos with Riz and Skiviti content, which perpetuates the word and also is why so many people

have turned to using them ironically. But I think it's all very tied into the nature of social media, how certain creators are incentivized to use certain words, how the algorithm pushes those words to people, how it's tied to memes. I think it's all inextricable. Yeah. And I mean, speaking of the way that social media kind of affects our language, too, it also restricts it. I feel like people use these euphemisms now as well to get around different social media kind of restrictions on content. Can you talk a little bit about that and how has that affected? I mean, I noticed myself saying essay the other day instead of the full term, because I'm not even sure if that get us censored on the podcast platforms.

Yeah, so I don't think that's actually new. We've been euphemizing things as long as we've, you know, had, like, if it's uncomfortable, we've been euphemizing it. So you might see the word unalive as a euphemism for death or suicide. And that's not new either. The word deceased or passed away or kicked a bucket or all euphemisms for death. Even the word decease itself comes through Latin decas, which is the euphemism for the previous Latin word for death mort.

So we're seeing this same process play out in a new way. Yes, it is because of media censorship. But media censorship has also been around. So, like, you might see the euphemisms, which is also been around. So, like, you might see the euphismism. word segs as a euphemism on TikTok for the word sex because the algorithm might censor the word sex. But that kind of phonetic replacement is the same thing that an analogy I like to use is in 1948 Norman Mailer tried to publish his book The Naked and the Dead in which he had way too many

uses of the word fuck. His editor said, Norman, you got to like change some of these words. And he went through and replaced like the 2,000 uses of the word fuck with the word fug. So he changed the k sound to a g sound the same way people replaced the k sound in sex with a good. So sex to sex is exactly also avoiding media censorship. So that's why I like to tell people not to be too freaked out about this because it is something that's historically been happening. It's happening in a new medium now, and that might seem a little scary, little confusing, but we've always been finding euphemisms. In fact, they serve a very good function. So like middle schoolers who are saying SEGs and Unalive, which they are saying these words, it genuinely helps them talk about these topics better,

helps them deal with things like uncomfortable discussions. And alive sounds like a less scary word than kill or commit suicide. And it might help them have these frank conversations that they need to be having. So I don't think it's that alarming. But it definitely is accelerated and tied to social media censorship as well. Speaking of going back to the past, from a historical perspective, what parallels do you see with these conversations around brain rot with previous generations of slang? Was there a word for brain rot before brain rot that also spoke to the same sentiment? Yeah, well, the sentiment that the younger generations are ruining language, that's always been around.

They always spend older people who are less likely to come up with new words. They always react to these unfamiliar words because that's our human nature that we like, we see something that's unfamiliar to us. And our initial instinct is to push it away and be like, whoa, this is weird. Youth slang has always been around. It's always been influencing our language. The word okay was just a meme bad in Boston newspapers in the 1870s. It was like, I like to call it 1870s brain rot.

It was just circulating people like to use fake acronyms for things. So OK stood for all correct, but it was like misspelled. And it was literally a joke. But that meme caught on. It became a real word. But if that meme was around today, we would be calling it brain rot. So again, looking at historical examples, this isn't the craziest thing. If we do start using these words, that's fine.

That's how language change happens. It's always constant and ongoing. And it's not necessarily a scary thing. Well, I feel like part of the way that these words become mainstream is older people freaking out about them. Like I was mentioning kind of before we started recording, I wrote the article about Chugi for the New York Times a couple years ago. And I've never gotten more emails in my life, I think, on any other article than a lot of older people that sort of took this word and then ascribed it to Gen Z and almost kind of immediately killed it in a way. Can you talk about the generational dynamics between these words and how do they kind of progress? I feel like once. Absolutely. There's a lot of like moral panic among older people of like these young people are speaking a different language. Yeah. So because words are tied to memes, memes have lifespans. If a joke is used by your mother, it becomes unfunny. It's not in the in group anymore. There's no reason to keep using it. So when a word is tied to a meme like that, like I think skibbitty toilet, if you hear your mother saying skibbity toilet, it's probably going to become uncool and you're going to stop saying it if you're a middle schooler. So I do think like words like skibbity aren't going to stay around because they're tied to this idea. of comedy. There's a lot of slang words that do stick around that I think are less obtrusive. So in

linguistics, we have this idea that if a word is obtrusive, if it sticks out too much, then people parody it, it gets tied to a meme, and then it gets harder to actually take root in our language. But if a word is unobtrusive, if a word is like sliding under the radar there, for example, I did a video today on the word situation shift and how I think that one's really going to last, because that's also modern slang. It's been around the past four years or something, but we don't think about it as brain rot. We don't think about this as a toxic, you know, a new slang word. Older generations are making fun of them and sustaining it. We're not ironically using it. So I think that word has real staying power because it has a useful application and it doesn't

stick out too much, which is, again, why Chugi died. As soon as the old people started saying Chugi, we were done saying Chugue is Gen Z years. So that's my thought really matter. A lot of these brain rot terms are ascribed to Gen Alpha, which is really young. Are these terms actually originating and quite used by Gen Alpha? Or are they? just being ascribed to Gen Alpha when it's really Gen Z years and millennials and older are using them. So Gen Alpha is currently entering the eighth grade. They are definitely online. They are definitely using these words. I recently did a survey of 1,500 middle school teachers and parents. And I can say that they are definitely saying these days. Eighty-five percent of the teachers

and parents reported that their kids are saying rings. And I think 60 percent heard the word skibity. This is like four months ago. And it's also parents and teachers who are less in the loop. So it's safe to assume that these kids are using these words. And they are being associated with Gen Alpha. And I think that's because Gen Alpha is using them unironically. Gen Z is kind of using them to make fun of Gen Alpha. But also the boundary there gets a little bit blurred and who it, yeah. I think generations are kind of fake as well.

Yeah, 100%. I mean, so many people these days too are seeking to coin terms, it seems like, especially if you're speaking to like certain types of core or, you know, there's like a certain level of clout, I feel like, that comes from coining language that has made a lot of people on TikTok almost try to artificially make up words. Is this a phenomenon that you're noticing? And why do you think people want to create new language in that way? Well, it's always compelling to leave your legacy somehow, to have an impact on language permanently. I've tried to dabble by influencing my friends to adopt words. What are some words that you've tried to mainstream?

So I've tried to get the word noxious, meaning like cool, yo bro, that was totally noxious. Like I think that has real like potential. But in reality as a linguist, I know it's very hard like for somebody who just coined the word for it to actually become used. Because if it seems again too obvious that I'm like trying to push this, it's like why Gretchen couldn't make fetch happening Negro. It's like too in your face, too obvious. It is possible to coin a word and have it become mainstream. But it, as long as you're not pushing it too much. So like Dr. Seuss or Shakespeare or randomly coined a bunch of words, but they weren't like,

doing it for the purpose of coining words. So I think people who are like going out of the way to coin words and it's obvious that that's the point, I don't think it's going to work out. There was that chair meme in TikTok in 2021 where some guy was like, let's all use the chair emoji for laughing. And for a few days, everybody was doing it. But then I don't know, they suddenly stopped. Why didn't it stick around?

I think it was because it was tied to a meme. It was because it was way too obvious that it was like kind of forced. Once too many people were in on the joke, it stopped being interesting. It didn't feel natural. But somebody started using the skull emoji to mean laughter as well. So that, you know, it's interesting. True. I feel like emojis were such a thing that were shaping language, especially throughout the 2010s. And people would use emojis now. I feel like I'm seeing people saying emojis are cringe. It seems like people, I don't know if they use them less, but it seems different. And also they've added so many more emojis. How much of a role do you think in the future we're going to see, I guess, non-word communication, but things like emojis or emoticons, affect the way we talk. And our emoji is still relevant in how we communicate. 100% relevant. I think emojis evolve just like words do. I just publish an op-ed on this in the

Washington Post, which you can check out if you want to. But the idea that, so for example, the laughing crying emoji was used to signal laughter among everybody for like, since the emoji came out in 2011 to like maybe 2018 or something. But by that time, it started to be overused. In the same way I explained earlier, when your mom starts using a laughing cry emoji, it becomes uncool. So younger generations now try to differentiate themselves by finding a new way to express laughter. So we turn to like the crying emoji or the skull emoji. And we're not going to have like emojis overtake words entirely. We're seeing emojis kind of add a little layer, a little context to a sentence in the sense functioning as tone tags indicating humor or irony or whatever the purpose

of your emoji is. It adds like a little something to the sentence. So emojis do serve a really important function online to contextualize our communication. We're writing. We're writing. informally, which is something we really haven't done before the internet. Even when you're writing letters or something, there is still a formality to it. Otherwise, you're writing essays or something. But now, now we're texting each other, writing informally a lot. And there's a lot of meaning that can be lost. And to make sure your meaning is conveyed the way you want to be conveyed, you want to add a tone tag. And that's what the emojis are so useful for. I do think they're going to stick around. I think they have a very important staying power. But we are going to see them

evolve a lot. Yeah. I feel like it's also just in terms of texting and language of communication so much is also on like capitalization or spelling. I mean, I saw a viral tweet recently that was talking about K versus KK for saying okay. I guess it's kind of cool now to not capitalize letters. Like is that going to change anytime soon. And what role did these other things play? Another example is like the period, which is seen as passive aggressive. A lot of people like try to omit the period. Gretchen McCulloch has an incredible discussion of this in her book, because internet, which I also recommend people check out. But yeah, basically when we use lowercase letters or use punctuation a certain way, we're trying to convey informality.

The way we stylize our text is meant to convey tone. And when we type in capital letters, it seems a little more formal, but you want to come across informal. So we've reverted to doing lowercase because it seems more chill, more laid back. And I think that's, especially among young people who, the popular kind of zeitgeist is that we want to feel laid back and chill about things. back when I used uppercase letters and punctuation, people would be like, you're texting me really aggressively. Like, I don't like it. So I switched. I started using lowercase and I dropped my

periods and I've never gotten to comment like that again. So maybe that's how a lot of people adopt similar styles of writing. Yeah, I think there's all these subtleties. I mean, I think about this with voice chats because so many more people, at least in my friend group, leave these voice notes, I guess, on I message. And I feel like there's already norms emerging around those as well. Yeah, that's fascinating. I'll have to look into voice recordings. I personally don't use them because I get stressed out about thinking about how my voice works. And it's much easier to plan out with text. But that's another aspect that I'll have to look into. Yeah. Oh, my God. Well, people just ramble, which is why I love it. You can leave some long ramble. I listen to like all the

podcasts. Okay. So because new words are coming up all the time, how do you identify these new slang terms and start to see what's sort of pervading the internet? Absolutely. So my research is, literally going on TikTok and watching videos and going to the comment section and see what people are saying. And anytime I see something new, I make like a note of it and I try to see if that keeps showing up. And sometimes it's trending more, more to a point where I eventually, I feel like I'm ready as a linguist to talk about it. Because if it's just like ephemeral, like there for a moment, I don't really want to, it could be just tied to a very brief that again. I've started noticing this emerge is the word unc shortened for uncle, very popular in TikTok comments nowadays. I think

we're going to see a lot more of that. It's like just trending, also from African American English, but people don't know that. They see, they think it's a TikTok phrase. But that's something I saw people start saying unc like two months ago in a meme video comment sections. What other words have you seen popping off recently? A lot of the in-cell words are getting even more mainstream. So even a year ago when I started talking about this stuff, there's a lot of people who didn't know what Sigma was or maxing or PilderCock. I think these are like really, really becoming mainstream. in a kind of alarming way. Again, I don't think it's that bad because we are using them ironically. We're mostly making fun about how in cells talk, if anything, but they're definitely becoming

more mainstream. So, like, now words like mauging or mewing, which were relatively obscure in-cell concepts just like three months ago are now, like, much bigger on takeoff. So mewing for people who don't know what it is, it's basically this thing that you can do with your tongue that's supposed to improve your jawline. It became very popular in-cell. communities. Tell us about magging. Mogging is the idea of just like emmasculating another man. Yeah. I feel like it also got really popular in gaming. I was a big Fortnite person in the early pandemic and people will be like, you know, like mobbed like you're done. It's no longer being using the original in cell sense, but now it can just mean, oh, I'm better than you. I'm

mugged you in flag football or whatever. So there's like middle school and stuff like that. Yeah. One thing that is so interesting to me is somebody that writes a lot about young women on the internet. And I feel like they're always quite early adopters of slang, but we haven't really talked about them much. I mean, are they still driving slang culture? And how are they kind of impacting our language environment, I guess? Yeah. So young women particularly are more likely to innovate in language. And we do see a lot of linguistic innovation coming from them. But it's less like the kind of meme-based slang words. If anything, we're seeing more evidence that young boys are adopting words like Skibbidi and Riz in Ohio, because it's more tied to me.

and it's just like a way to show your mott show, I guess, by like talking about Riz or something. But we're seeing other kinds of innovation with young girls. We'll see use of filler words or conversational styles or certain slang words that aren't tied to like brain rot. I think brain rot is more male associated. One video that you did recently that I loved was about women putting like an extra syllable on different words. Can you talk about that?

Yeah. So I call that the white girl paragogy. When stop like, so when they like add a little extra syllable at the end of there. And John McWhorter has an excellent podcast that he did with Slate about this as well. So that's another great resource. But basically young women are adding what's called an exclamatory particle to their words. It's something that we see in East Asian languages. it's a kind of reaction to something that indicates the kind of exclamation you're doing.

So when you say stop, you're doing it kind of playfully. It's not like stop, which is more forceful. So the exclamatory particle modifies the statement to make it seem more informal. Well, I was so shaken by that video because I realized I was doing it all of the time. How brain-rotted would you say that you are spending all this time on the internet reading about all of these words? I have a crazy work-life balance. somebody who professionally studies brain rot. Like, I'm thinking about these words a lot.

And for doing research into info culture, particularly, I've had to go on 4chan and, like, look at these people using these words. And it's affecting me a little bit. I might use words around friends. They're going to be like, what? But I'm trying to also. Not only ironically for research purposes, but it is kind of a weird gradient there.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us and helping us unpack. all of these terms. Yeah, thank you for having it. It's super fun. When we come back, we're going to run through big headlines of the week, what Apple announced, and more. I'm here with my showrunner, Zach Mack, and we're going to go through some of the big stories this week. All right. Okay, so the biggest event this week was WWDC, Apple's annual big developer conference, where they announced all of their big features for the year. I don't know if you saw some of this stuff, Zach. I feel like the big news this year was AI. Apple introduced AI intelligence, basically this

generative AI system that's going to integrate into the whole phone. They're going to let you generate images, summarize text. There's a big Siri update. I don't know if this will get me to use Siri, to be honest, but they're building... Very is so bad. They just, they need help with Siri. It's so bad. Siri is atrocious. But they're integrating Siri with Chad GPT. They have this open AI partnership. So Siri's literally talking to me. This thing does not, it's interrupting me as I record. Siri doesn't know what's going on. Sorry.

But maybe with chat GPT, it might get better. I don't know. We'll have to see how that goes. Yeah, they're incorporating chat GPT because it feels like their AI is not totally ready yet. You know, they're going to go with the industry leader because I guess Apple's isn't totally there yet, which makes sense. Yeah, exactly. They've got a lot of catch-up to do, which is ironic because Siri was actually one of the first virtual assistance to the market a decade ago. Okay, the Gen Moji feature got a lot of attention.

Basically, it lets you create custom emojis based on a text prompt. I don't know why everyone is so hyped about this. I know we won't see how it really looks until it rolls out. I think it's supposed to roll out in beta this summer and then fully this fall. But I don't think Apple's working with the Unicode consortium on this. So I feel like these emojis are not really going to appear as emojis, like in our emoji keyboard. They're just going to be these like image generations that we're going to like text each other pictures. That's not a true emoji.

Okay, it's not a true emoji, but I still think there's a use case for it and that it's fun. And I don't know, so much of what we're sending back and forth are images and memes anyway. So it won't feel so different. Yeah, but that's not how we use. But yeah, I know you want the like emoji in the language of the text. I got you. I got you. We'll get to that.

That's the iPhone 17. It could be funny. The only thing is my favorite emoji parody ones are those ones that are really profane. you know the like emoji with a cowboy hat with the gun yes i like those ones so i don't know i it'll be interesting to see what limitations they put on this too in terms of guardrails i feel like people could end up generating some really ridiculous looking emoji but they're not even true emoji but it's it's getting more fun it's more creative i think it'll be fun for a week so that's my prediction you're going to be texting me a lot of gen moji yeah i mean i feel like this is all

Apple's stuff lately. Like, when was the last time you heard about the Apple Vision Pro? You know, it was fun for a week. I know. Yeah, it's true. They also announced things like iPhone mirroring. So basically to let you mirror your iPhone on your Mac, you can also interact with your iPhone directly from your Mac. I think that's probably fine. Also, I was laughing so hard at this update, which is the iPad calculator. I didn't know that iPads have never had a calculator on them. That seems wild to me. Yeah. So it is cool. Like what they introduced, they introduced this thing called math notes that basically lets you use this Apple pencil to write equations on the iPad and Apple solve it for you. That's very cool and futuristic.

They also launched this thing called SmartScript, which uses machine learning to improve the appearance of your handwriting and spell check your notes. I write incoherently, so that's great. But yes, I'm sorry, I cannot get over the fact that they didn't even have a basic calculator app for iPad until now. That is insane. And I just want every with an iPad to type in the numbers 531808 and then turn it upside down. It's really fun. Oh, my God. It's like this is so dumb. Yeah, exactly. The smart script thing seems cool, but at the same time, writing things down is so cumbersome. Every time I have to write something down, I feel like I'm

going back to the Middle Ages and it takes so long to actually write it out compared to typing it that it drives me insane. But I think it's cool. I mean, if I could write something like write a handwritten note and have it look nicer and send that somehow? Oh, I'm a big to-do list guy. I'm a very big to-do list. You physically write out your to-do list? Yep. Wow. All right. I could never. I have, I have a hundred to-do list. Every day I started a new to-do list and then I forget about everything, like by the time I get to the next day. And it just sort of, I feel like things bubble up if I need to get to them. Yeah, urgent. Those were all the big takeaways. I don't know. I feel like WWDC, it's always a big event, but it kind of gets less and less interesting as years go on.

It certainly doesn't have the same pizzazz as like the launch of the iPhone or like the launch of the iPad, you know, it's kind of like, oh, incremental AI updates. Yeah, I mean, you're talking about generational products. Yeah, the iPhone is probably the most important tech device in the last 20 years, right? So it's hard to match that every year. Yeah, but come on. If anyone can do it, it's Apple. That is true. If anyone can do it, it is them. Okay, so Be Real. Remember Be Real? I do remember Be Real. I still on my phone, but I am not logged on anymore. I don't even know. I never downloaded it to my new phone. But Be Real was acquired by Voodoo, a French mobile gaming company, for 500 million euros, which is a lot of money.

It's got 40 million monthly active users. It's not nothing, but it's certainly down from the height of its success. It's also been struggling to retain and grow its user base, and it's been looking for a buyer for a little while. Voodoo has other games like mob control, block jam, a bunch of stuff I've never heard of, to be honest. So, I don't know. I mean, it's a nice exit for Be Real, which was sort of a fad app, I would argue.

I don't think they'll be able to really innovate much on it. 500 million euros is nothing to turn your nose up at, you know. Oh, totally. They probably never have to work again. No, we don't know how much they've, like, you know, I can't remember how much funding Be Real took on, but I don't know the ownership structure, you know. Yeah. Do you think it cost that much to run Be Real?

Well, they have to build the app. They have to maintain the servers. It's not very complicated, though. It's a pretty, like, rudimentary app, right? Okay. This is what every non-tech person thinks about every app, though. It is complicated to run an app like that, especially to scale it to the level that it's scaled and have it work with efficiency. It's not nothing. I mean, I still think 500 million euros,

that's a great, like, good for them, you know, that app could have gone to zero. This idea, like, every time an app sells and people will be like, oh, you know, oh, 500 million, it's like the founders themselves are not getting that 500 million if they've taken on a lot of VC investment, if they've maybe bootstrapped a lot of it themselves too. We don't know what it's going to end up at. But I mean, look, it's a lot of money. I'm not trying to be like, ugh. Yeah, I'm sure they're fine.

It's a ton. It's a ton. It's a good deal for them, I guess. I was thinking we should pool our money together and buy, like, MySpace or the other social apps that people aren't using anymore, you know? Yeah. Well, MySpace has been bought so many times. Remember they lost all of our data? Thank God.

I do remember that. I think Justin Timberlake was involved in one of the purchases at some point. He was. Yeah. I wrote about that. way back in the day. I think there's something really wonderful about going back onto apps that no one else is on. This woman wrote this fantastic piece for The Verge years ago about digital ghost towns and basically going on to, I think it was mostly packed to Snapchat because like none of her

friends use Snapchat anymore. There's something liberating. I still have Peach on my phone. Remember Peach? I don't remember Peach. What is Pete? No, I don't remember Peach. I mean, I was like this like viral social network like a decade ago. There was just all these little Remember Ello? Yes. I never used it, but I remember it. Just like little things like this. I love like little like abandoned indie social apps.

Not that be real as indie at all, but maybe it'll have a second life. Okay. Let's talk about Mr. Beast and his Coke money. A nonprofit organization that's funded by Charles Koch, a right-wing billionaire, was a significant funder of this charity video that Mr. Beast released. The video was called We Schooled Schooled. hundreds of teachers, and it was uploaded on April 30th to the YouTube's Beast Philanthropy channel. It's basically a second channel to show a bunch of the charity work that Mr. Bees does.

And one of the sponsors listed is this organization called Stand Together, which showcases this private, non-profit middle school called the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta. Now, Stand Together was founded by Koch in 2003 as the seminar network, which is basically an array of political and advocacy groups supported by rich right-wing conservatives. And according to a 2018 investigation from the Intercept, Koch's network was instrumental in guiding the Trump administration's policy initiatives, particularly on climate. So Ryan Broderick wrote about this for Fast Company. Stand Together did not respond to his request for comment. But I actually saw this video when it came out, and I was going to write about it myself. But I think it's interesting. I think what I was going

back and forth with my editor is how big of a deal is this? Because they do tons of pop culture and celebrity partnerships. And actually The Guardian had a great article on that exactly, sort of how insidious this is. But I don't have a problem taking money from like right wing groups if you're going to do something good and you're not actively promoting them. I think what's concerning is Mr. Bees may be promoting it in the caption of the video. Well, it's concerning because we don't really know, right? Right. It's we don't know how much of this is being positioned by them versus him and how involved editorially they are, and that's what's concerning. I think it's really hard to do anything in media and not take shady money, right? Like not take dark money

from somewhere. It's pretty difficult. I think it's kind of insidious that this video is on education and public school teachers, considering that the Koch brothers have spent decades trying to dismantle public education. And I think, as you mentioned, it is concerning that we don't know the influence. We don't know the nature of this partnership. It is not a good look for Mr. Beast, is all I'll say. Yeah, it's sort of hard to tell how much he knows about it, how much they're involved. It's muddy. And that's what's, I mean, it's always concerning when it's like that opaque. I can tell you that one time I made a travel podcast, an independent travel podcast of my own. And I got a sponsor. And the sponsor was this small lab grown diamond company from the UK.

And I was like, oh, great. Like, you know, not blood diamonds, you know, small, you know, lab-grown diamonds, okay, da-da-da. You know, I find out months later, years later, that it's owned by De Beers. The company's owned by De Beers. So it's like, you know, I took the blood money too, you know? You took the blood money. You're complicit. Yeah.

It's just hard. Totally. And I'm not like trying to like cancel Mr. Beast or whatever. I'm sure his fans will say. Again, this is why my editor and I were going back and forth on writing about this is because what my editor was saying at the time is like, is this part of a larger campaign? Like, what is the nature of this partnership and is it ongoing? So far, I think there was this video and maybe a tweet. Like, I think he tweeted out the video, but it's essentially a pretty,

it looks like just a one-off, almost sponsored post. And I don't know if you can hold someone as accountable. Also, it's worth noting that tons of celebrities have also worked with this organization. It's not like he's alone. I just think that with his focus on philanthropy, be, especially because so many people are looking into his philanthropy initiatives, he should do more due diligence. Or maybe he aligns with that ideology. I think that's what the question. Yeah. I'm not against taking bad money and using it for good, as long as you're not promoting the bad cause. And I think that is what, you know, every content creator just needs to figure out. It's like, where is that line? Yeah. And we're stumbling into, like, it's hard to buy a phone without funding

something completely unethical. They're mining for coal bowl in the Congo, right? It's just like, we're just in this place. There's a huge difference between consumption and promotion. Yeah, that's a good point. No, that's a good point. I think if you are going to promote something, you do have a responsibility to know a little bit more about it. And use your platform responsibly. Obviously, I love language and internet language. And there was a great article in the New York Times this week about the word slop. And basically how the word slop has replaced the word spam, when we're talking about AI generated content. So when you're talking about all those bad Google results that come up,

it's considered slop or like the type of AI garbage that's taken over Facebook. People call it slop. And I've actually noticed more and more usage of this word. I just really like it. I feel like spam we've had for a couple decades. I think slop is a great term for the new era of garbage content. As your interview earlier in this episode points out, right? Like as the internet evolves, we need new terms to kind of capture what's going on culturally.

And I think slop is an appropriate term for that. I love this line in the Times article where it says, the term slop conjures images of heaps of unappetizing food being shoveled into troughs for livestock. Like that type of slop, AI-assisted search comes together quickly, but not necessarily in a way that critical thinkers can stomach. And the article in the Times also interviews Adam, who we had on. today. Adam is really the internet's etymologist these days. He's great. He's to go too. Awesome. All right. Thanks so much, Zach. That does it for the news. That's the show. Power User is produced

by Travis Larcuk and Jolani Carter. Our video editor is Brandon Kiefer. You can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. Our executive producers are Zach Mack and Ashok Kerwa. Power User is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you like the show, give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, we'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Power User.