Rage Bait, 6 7, Algospeak … What Does It All Mean? w Etymology Nerd

18:27Adam Aleksic:The incels are a dangerous group. They don't like you? No, they don't. Like anybody who really talks about them. So I'm sorry for bringing it up. Oh, now they're not going to like me? I'm not going to know what it's... I'm going to be like, pizza? Yeah, no, I don't think you're... Yeah, I'm not going to get the language. But okay, so talk about a couple of the words, a few of the words you speak in your book about this and are writing your book about this. Chinese? Oh, yeah. No good? I've made a few videos about sort of, yeah, no can do. No can do. Sorry. That's an example from Chinese Pigeon English that sort of starts getting parodied and made fun of in English.

19:00Adam Aleksic:Long time no see is another one. And yeah, there's a sort of a trend of making fun of other cultures. Everybody does this around the world, but it depends on where your position is and how much power you're exerting over it. So I don't know the same way. Like it's funny when the Terminator says Hasta la Vista, baby. Like it's funny because it's a foreign language. That's sort of the joke. and in the same way a lot of african-american english is getting brought in through hood irony memes because it's kind of a joke that this is like a different style of speaking what is a hood irony meme um goofy ah was a popular one which stands for goofy ass but it sort of makes fun of how um debucalization just turning into an h sound happens in african-american english there's a lot of the low kerr can uniquely stuff um while those words are like that that particular word is just a new meme it's making fun of how low-key and genuinely are overused in african-american English.

19:50Adam Aleksic:So that's like hood irony as an example. Do you ever find when talking about this stuff, it's hard because it deals with like in groups, race, and a lot of kind of identity and a lot of the sensitive aspects of our culture right now? Do you find like what you do is hard for that reason? I think it's so beautiful to see identity expressed through language. Language is a tool of identity. The words we use are ways of expressing who we are. And I see a beauty reflected in that, that humanity is sort of just finding ways to pinpoint what our reality is and show that to other people. Define brain rot very clearly.

20:28Adam Aleksic:Meme genre where you repeat a bunch of stuff that's been trending. So the first brain rot that was really popular was skibbity riz Ohio ghiat. These were just words that were trending at the time in 2023. Last year we had like matcha labubu dubai chocolate that was making fun of um consumption that was over trending the dubai chocolate was everywhere the match was everywhere crumble cookie whatever it was making you gotta watch adam's ted talk on this which hits it at these moments but our jokes about that make fun of this this oversaturation but it's funny because like the two things are happening in the culture one is like these things are becoming legitimately popular like people were into matcha into La Boo Boo's and into Dubai Chocolate.

21:09Kids were saying Skibbity, talking about Riz, saying Ohio for things that were lame. So these things are happening. And then they just very quickly become a joke.

21:19Adam Aleksic:And then you have a backwash. That's the Skibba dialect of materialism. So it's like every time, it's like in any kind of culture. Low key and genuinely are being used a lot. Yeah, or any kind of like political movement. You have like a revolution and then a retraction, a revolution and then a retraction. Is that same thing happening? That's the idea of dialectics, that you're always going back and forth between thesis and antithesis, trying to find a new resolution, sort of reshaping where we are in our cultural moment with our jokes. And as soon as you make a joke about something, it changes reality.

21:45Adam Aleksic:It changes the nature of how we look at this stuff. The performative male, right, was an actual thing. But now that it's been labeled, you can't be openly a performative male in the same way. We write about this in your book, this idea that like words lose their meaning. And over time, they can just be dead on arrival. Particularly with overuse. I mean, And semantic satiation is when you say the same word over and over again, right? Cup, cup, cup, cup, cup, cup, cup. This doesn't make any sense. It might as well now call it a glork or something. But it's when you overuse a word. And so brain rot is us intentionally overusing words to make them devoid of meaning.

22:18Adam Aleksic:Once you say skibbity enough times, it loses any connection to the YouTube short series. It just becomes an indicator of the fact that we are online so much. It used to be everyone said slay. Now everyone's saying cooks. Yeah, both African-American English words. Both are African-American English words. I mean, again, it's always either incels or African-American English. It's 90%. Yeah. It's hard to necessarily like pinpoint. Pinpoint. Yeah. Yeah, because like it's like you have to really, when you are doing this, do you really study the culture? Like, do you go deep into the culture or do you really go into like a search rabbit hole of like when was this first used?

22:53As much as I can.

22:54Adam Aleksic:I think the first attestation is a way you do like historical linguistics. You look back at, oh, this was how this word was being used. this is the earliest time in this community. This gives me some context. And a lot of my work kind of diving into internet slang is like looking at the earliest memes using this phrase. When was the first meme? First meme ever? Yeah. We've always been making memes. It's a certain point we started labeling the memes, which was in 1976. This guy Richard Dawkins wrote a book, Selfish Gene. Yes. And he describes memes as like self-replicating units of culture. This is the first time somebody labeled a meme, but we've always had memes.

23:28Adam Aleksic:Like even hieroglyphics? Like we had a hieroglyphic meme. Yeah. So in Roman times, there was the Sater Square, which is like a sort of this palindromic square that people just like for some reason graffitied all over. There was the Jesus fish. I talk about that in my book. But people like just graffitied certain symbols over and over again. We've kind of lost the context of why a lot of this is said. Jesus fish seems connected to an early symbol for Christianity, perhaps. But we just lose it. I don't know. We're not in that cultural place anymore. Maybe that was really funny then. Maybe that was like hilarious.

23:59Adam Aleksic:We're like all laughing about Jesus fish. I also think memes are kind of, we're thought of in this funnier context now, especially because one thing that makes memes travel really quickly online is humor. Memes are just an idea we replicate between humans. Every single word is a meme. Every single action is a meme. Our facial expressions are different across different cultures. Those are memes. We literally have mirror neurons that mimic how people behave. We cross our legs in the same way. We adopt mannerisms and synchronies that other people have. You speak a lot about kind of how each of our diction, manner of speak, is very unique to the individual.

24:42And it made me think of, there's a time where I used to work and go to the Middle East a lot. And I remember speaking to someone that did security in the Middle East. and they said, oh, you know, when you land at Dubai Airport, there's actually something that would check for the gait, the way you walk, because an individual's gait is an extremely unique. Yeah, gait analysis. Yeah, extremely unique. And actually, like, you could disguise yourself, you could have fake identity, but, like, it'd be really hard to change how you move through this world. And it seems like you have a similar kind of theory of how we speak, or not even theory, it's proven.

25:14Adam Aleksic:No, yeah, that's how the FBI caught the Unabomber, right? Yeah, tell this story. Idiolect, idios in Greek, meaning one's own, same root as the word idiot. But idiolect is our own language. And we all have a completely unique way of speaking, kind of a linguistic fingerprint, because you are unique. There is nobody who speaks exactly like you. You have a certain educational background, a certain parental, even with your family, you'll speak in a familect, which is a dialect only spoken in that you have made up words for your situationship or whatever, you know. And all of that means that the exact combination of words you use, even the frequency of the words you use.

25:54Adam Aleksic:Maybe you have some of the same words, but you use them at a slightly different rate than other people. Maybe you say the word um at a slightly higher rate. Can you tell the story of the Unabomber? Because I find this fascinating. I actually met the guy who caught the Unabomber. Oh, I thought you were like, I met the Unabomber. No, not the Unabomber. I was in the Unabomber's college dorm at one point. Really? Kind of a weird intertwined history with the Unabomber. Highly recommend his manifesto. unironically it is a good read um apart from you know his broad takeaways but the start of it where he talks about the industrial revolution and how since then um society has abstracted more and more away from our natural way of being i think he actually kind of cooks there um he's cooking um and then he got cooked yeah yeah um but yeah he uh there is a sort of ongoing reaction against technology that the unabomber was very early to yes um but sorry his actual dialect his actual Yeah, right, back to his dialect.

26:47Yeah.

26:47Adam Aleksic:It was in his manifesto that it got published in the Washington Post and then some foreign newspaper as well. His brother read that and he was like, this sounds like Ted. And then he reported it to the FBI. They like cross-checked some stuff. I think the expression that was the real smoking gun was like, have your cake and eat it too. And he said, eat your cake and have it too. Yeah, he flipped it. And they matched that in a letter to his brother and in the manifesto. and that was the thing that got him. Wild. You're talking about like the familectic, this family dialectic. I think about it as words seem like they're meant to connect.

27:23Their language is meant to connect with each other but a lot of what you're describing is like language that's meant to separate from as a way to connect with some subgroup and does it seem like as a society we're doing that more? Like we have more divisive words in our culture now or more divisive language?

27:42Adam Aleksic:Yeah, I mean, we know about the echo chambers and filter bubbles and the hyper fragmentation of the media landscape, you know, all that aside, the language is also happening with that. So the K-pop stans are speaking completely differently than the incels who are speaking differently than the Swifties. And we're sort of fragmenting ourselves into different linguistic landscapes as well. But in another way, we are homogenizing. Yeah, that's speaking English, right? So there used to be 7000 languages in the world. I think every two weeks a new language dies out and that's going to keep on happening and we're going to be left with like the 200 main languages in the world.

28:16Adam Aleksic:50 % of the Internet is in English. So in one way, we are homogenizing by speaking English and by speaking with like these influencer accents. There's certain patterns that we all have to adopt. But in another sense, there is a new explosion of variety and diversity. And that's simply because language is a reflection of reality. And our reality is getting more centered around English, but it's also getting more diverse in the Internet communities. So we're simultaneously having a shift of globalization around a Western compendium, even though that's being really challenged in our politics and culture right now.

28:53But that is one reality. And then there's this great splintering of identities happening. And you're seeing that play out in a language process. It sounds like a paradox, but it's actually not.

29:01Adam Aleksic:Because we will always, exactly what you said earlier, we're using language both to connect and to separate. And that will always be a thing. Because we'll never want to be like everybody else. And we'll also want to be like some people. And that's, again, a very human basic function. And we'll keep on doing that. We want to be understood by everybody, but we will always feel misunderstood by some people. And that's the reality. The tragedy of, yeah. But you know, it makes me think. I grew up in Indonesia. and in Indonesia it's an archipelago there's many many different dialects that happen and languages actually that happen across the different islands there was one kind of centralizing language it's Bahasa Indonesia which is the simplest do you know anything about Indonesian?

29:39Adam Aleksic:I lived there for three months okay so you know do you speak Bisa Bishara Bahasa Indonesia? No Siddiquit? No not everybody spoke English but it's very very easy because it's one conjugation one tense right and so and sometimes you doubled up the word for emphasis or plural. Yeah, there's a lot of reduplication for emphasis, both in Malaysian and Indonesian. I remember thinking like, if all the world spoke one language, why wouldn't they speak Indonesian? Why would they speak English? Like English is so much more complicated than Indonesian. With AI and simultaneous translation, we won't have the need for a common language in some way.

30:14Adam Aleksic:Well, AI is an interesting thing to bring into it because English is a high resource language, meaning that there are more AI training texts than other languages. English and Chinese are high resource. Pretty much everything else, there's not that much corpora to train the models on, which means that AI outputs are always going to be more reliable and better in English. So it'll continue being repeated. Also, the fact that English is like the lingua franca, I guess, for lack of a better expression of the internet. English is the lingua franca of the internet. And the social media creators are incentivized to speak in English because they can reach a larger audience.

30:53AI is a really good transition for us because I want to talk about how, yeah, algorithms are really rewiring our language. And also, we're at this moment in artificial intelligence where we're moving from, potentially moving from, large language models being the basis of that to the discovery of like real world models or video learning models or all of these other new models. And I'm curious, you know, how you think about that as someone who who speaks in words, but also memes. So let's take it in each course. Let's talk about first what algorithms have done to our language and what the power structure is that like, is social media a democratizing force or is it a policing force?

31:36Adam Aleksic:I think we should be adversarially thinking about these platforms. And they are a medium and the medium affects the message. And whatever you say is shaped by the constraints. So the opening example I talk about in the book is like on a live that you can't say kill on TikTok. So people say on a live, that's very surface level. They shape every form of what we say, because the only way to get your message distributed is to adhere to the things that are going to go viral and certain words are going to go more viral. So we're going to say those, um, certain manners of speaking are going to go more viral.

32:11Adam Aleksic:So we're going to talk like that. Um, certain length of videos are like the even the format of the video which in 2022 or something tiktok started pushing minute-long videos because they're trying to compete with youtube and they're only monetizing minute-long videos so creators only make minute-long videos but that affects sort of the type of messaging that gets distributed they took away stitches and duets which was an early part of tiktok that made it feel like the effervescent conversation that drove people into the app they took that away they are trying to become more like youtube all the while youtube is trying to become more like TikTok.

32:45Adam Aleksic:Yeah, exactly. Sort of the platforms are converging on that. But their business priorities are 100 % shaping the way they structure our discussions. Okay, so I just want to slow it down a little bit. You're saying we should take an adversarial stance when it comes to these platforms because the algorithms have a way of shaping, determining how we will speak, what we will speak about, and yeah, the format in which it's done. And that's both in terms of words like we say sags instead of sex. Sure. Because we're going to be policed. We say unalive instead of dead or killed. Sorry. Right. And then there's also the carrots side of it.

33:24So those are the sticks. And the carrot side of it is like, make this video one minute. Make this tweet 120 characters or less. And that has been a huge problem because all of our reductiveness and our culture has come from – has it come from our social media?

33:38Adam Aleksic:I mean, that is the higher node. when we're talking about how viruses get transmitted from higher nodes to lower nodes in like an epidemiological network, the higher nodes are on social media. Or if it's not on social media, it's immediately going to get on social media. So these are the places where ideas are getting distributed. If you're not on social media, you're still going to be impacted by what's going on, all the clothes your friends are wearing, the music your friends are listening to. It's all still going to be downstream of social media. So the culture is starting there. And what's happening there is they're prioritizing attention.

34:06Adam Aleksic:They're measuring us in as many ways as possible, whether you're a millennial or whether you're a cottagecore, K-pop, Swifty, incel. Yeah, we're being market segmented. All of this is just ways of categorizing us in as many ways as possible so they can classify us, so that they can market to us better, so they can recommend us better ads, but so they can keep our attention for longer. All of that is what these platforms at the end of the day are trying to do. Then they create those attention incentives for influencers. We replicate that. Not really speaking how I would speak to a friend or to somebody who I'm really trying to communicate my most authentically to, but speaking in a way that is ultimately I always feel as somebody who makes videos nearly every day always feels corrupted through these platforms.

34:52And yet you do it.

34:53Adam Aleksic:I think it is a trade-off I make because I am trying to change people's minds. And I try to also push people off of my social media onto my sub stack or read my book where I can express my longer form thoughts without as much impediment. And do you think that works? Do you think people are moving? Because I think like, for example, in podcasts, clips, I think people say it's like, oh, I watch your podcast. I'm like, oh, you go to Spotify videos, you go to the YouTube and they're like, no, no, I watch the clips. I'm like, that's not listening to my podcast. I listened to, I listened to your podcast on Instagram.

35:25I'm like, literally impossible.

35:27Adam Aleksic:Right. So I refrain from saying that I'm speaking authentically here. I'm not sure I am. Occasionally I've said things that I think are slightly funnier or whatever, because it could potentially be turned into a clip. This isn't a real conversation. This podcast conversation that we're having right now. Do you think it's a real conversation? I mean, it's somewhat of, it's a pseudo conversation. It's a pseudo. There are moments where you're, yes. And I can feel sometimes the moments where you're like turning to the camera, maybe even. Am I? Sometimes. I'm sorry. Yeah. I think if I were talking to you, we'd probably have a similar conversation, but some of the directions would be different.

35:57Adam Aleksic:Some of the topics we'd cover would be different. We're saying things with this knowledge that there is an implied audience and that's normal. That's fine too. And I think it is authentic to be a communicator and to know what you're communicating about, what the context is, and then adjust for that. Hang tight for a second. We'll be right back. Hey, it's Naima here. I'd love you to take this 30 seconds is to share the episode with three people or three group chats that you think would find it interesting. Like you, they can tune in to Smart Girl Dumb Questions on Spotify, YouTube, Apple, or wherever you pod.

36:27And I know it's hard to find an hour in your life to have a long form conversation with us, but you could listen at like 2X. This episode is brought to you by Peloton.

36:37Adam Aleksic:Break through the busiest time of year with the brand new Peloton Cross Training Tread Plus powered by Peloton IQ. With real-time guidance and endless ways to move, you can personalize your workouts and train with confidence. helping you reach your goals in less time. Let yourself run, lift, sculpt, push, and go. Explore the new Peloton Cross-Training Tread Plus at onepeloton.com. And it's only 30 minutes, or you could listen at 3X, and your head might just explode. So maybe stick to 2X max. Back to this episode, which will hopefully make your head explode in a good way. And don't forget to share.

37:10I find, for example, like we have been told, and this is like something that feels the last 10, 15 years of media has been like, oh, these short form clips are going to help people go find your long form work. And I think that that is just like, maybe not true.

37:28Adam Aleksic:And I think partially true. Some people for sure bought my book and some people for sure read my substack. But I'm worried that is a very diluted fraction of people. And if I'm trying to reach a broader audience, which I am, because I think learning by etymology is one of the best ways we can become more media literate. We can become better as a society and recognize ourselves as humans and understand what our humanity is. And I'm trying to proselytize that message. But I think sometimes I get lost a little. Yeah, and I think your work does that. I think you are, in the sense that you're saying, take an adversarial position to the technology.

38:00Your work has organically shifted from kind of what I understand as somebody observing in a small slice your work. You went from being really kind of just very organically interested in the etymology of words and let me tell you all these things, like bird language and all, and this kind of very fun, happy, and to recognizing that your message was dependent on the medium to then the medium becoming part of your message and your commentary on Algo Speak and how our world is being redefined. It felt like an organic discovery for you.

38:34Adam Aleksic:I first went viral for making a silly little dolphin language. I made a language that imitated how dolphins talk and made a bird language. That was really fun. I liked it. I also was just talking about regular words and where they came from. As I started to work on my book, I kind of increasingly began to realize how all encompassing the medium is in everything we say. and my dolphin language only went viral because it generated spectacle and the emotion of awe is a high arousal emotion that is rewarded more in shares and comments. I feel like it would be irresponsible of myself to not recognize that and try to communicate that to my audience and try at every opportunity to get people to realize how deeply we're being infected by these social media platforms.

39:17Adam Aleksic:And the language is just the easiest stuff to see. It's the stuff we can track. The words to me are like little data points about what's going on with culture. And the history of wanting to police words is throughout history, we have had this battle. And right before you came to tape with us, we were sitting, my producers and I, and Johnny Simon, our engineer, was telling me, oh, you know, the 1980s, Tipper Gore tried to take out a bunch of words for music. And so we were listening to this Crossfire episode, and I'm going to have Johnny play us a clip of it in a second. But there was a battle in the 1980s around words and lyrics and music, which led to Frank Zappa coming on to Crossfire to have a debate about the world of policing words.

39:59And it strikes me that we used to fear that the state would police them, even with our First Amendment. And now we have a reality where social media platforms can police them. Yeah.

40:11Adam Aleksic:So there's Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1996 or something. The social media platforms don't have any responsibility for what their users say illegally. So we can just say things and then. Yeah, because Section 230 says that social media companies are platforms. They're not publishers. So they're not editing and determining what's said. And it was very important in the 90s for the internet to come to fruition for Section 230 to exist. But now a lot of people say, well, there's no accountability in social media. And they do have some editorial power in terms of their algorithm to determine what's being said.

40:42Adam Aleksic:They have a deep, deep editorial power. And I see that deeply defining everything. And we are in sort of a moral backlash to social media. There's social media bans happening in Australia and France. People are talking about in the US. It's definitely a cultural concern. How much are we being affected by this? Do you think that banning social media would make speech more free in a way? I'm not sure that's the solution. I think we do need to be rethinking Section 230 while still protecting smaller platforms. So it's not just the big tech companies edging out the rest of them. Can we play that clip?

41:15All the complaints were about words.

41:16Adam Aleksic:Take the pornography out there. Is there no filth, no obscenity that you think would qualify to be suppressed? We're talking about words, and I don't believe that there is any word that needs to be suppressed. There's no scientific or realistic reason why you should keep people from hearing certain words. Let me just follow that up. There are certain words you use to describe an act of fornication, which are brutal. I think he's talking about fucking. Yeah. What do you make of that? Do you agree with this idea that there is no word that should be policed? When I talk about this stuff, I always like to distinguish between language and culture, and they are incredibly intertwined.

41:59Adam Aleksic:But language is just our way of describing reality, and culture is that reality below it. Censoring words is silly to me. One, because we will find new ways to express this. And two, because it's a deeper structural issue of how our conversations are being set up. and that's the kind of the point where I want to distinguish between my descriptivist attitude of we should just identify what's going on with language to learn more about the world and then my cultural critic hat that I sometimes wear saying we should be thinking about the kind of conversations that get structured when everything is structured around engagement there is a certain kind of conversation that proliferates at the expense of other kind of conversations.

42:43Adam Aleksic:Sort of a reasoned, logical discussion does not go as viral as just a funny clip. Let me ask it this way. If there are five constituents, and maybe there are more than five, but five is a good viral, five is good for a clip. You know, there are five kind of constituents to our modern media economy. And it's the platforms, the marketers, the advertisers, the content creators, the users slash consumers, and then the government who in theory is supposed to have some impact here. Yeah. Who has the most power right now or stack rank them? Well, by far the platforms. And first, like, let me just even challenge some of the words we're using.

43:24Adam Aleksic:By calling it platform, I'm already connoting a sort of neutrality and accessibility that anybody who is standing on a platform in a metaphor, the platform is like a flat raised stage that if you're standing on it, you have a power to communicate. So theoretically, anybody using the platform should be the person who is responsible for what they're saying. You're saying I'm giving them a cop out and calling them a platform. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We should be thinking about them as mediators, as interceptors of our messages. And we say things because we're trying to go viral on the platform. Okay, so they have the most power, the platform slash spectacle makers slash deciders of the rules of the game.

44:00Adam Aleksic:Let me challenge with another metaphor. When we said content creator, content implies something that is contained. like the contents of a box or a drawer. So the metaphor here is that my video is the content and the box is social media. So like a medium is something that holds something. So if I'm a content creator, I'm making something to be held in the box of social media. And that means that my content is interchangeable with other content. I make content, you make content, somebody else can make content. It just becomes something that's transactional, commodifiable. When I go to content creator summits or something, there's so many people telling you, this is how I make content every day.

44:35Adam Aleksic:You got to make better content. And what we're doing is we're treating content as the goal of social media rather than a means to some other goal. Yeah. I like the word influencer, at least. I know it's like negatively coded toward women. As a man, I want to be reclaiming, I think mentioned, but I want to be genuine. You can do a get ready with me video too. Well, that's the association. I think it's beautiful to be influencing, to change minds. And that if I, if I recognize that my idea becomes the content, my video is the medium and my ideas of the content. And so it's no longer interchangeable with another random AI slop video.

45:07Adam Aleksic:It's now something deep and meaningful with the potential to change people's lives. Okay. So who has the least power in this food chain? I want to distinguish between the users as a mass demographic and users as individuals. Users as mass, there's sort of a group think that's going on and they would have the second most power to me. And I'm not, I'm not putting the blame on any individual person but we react to things based on our raw emotions we are more likely to click share and like if it triggers a high arousal feeling in our brain so that is humor fear and awe and those things make like define what goes viral and so there's this like what about rage where's rage rage yeah that's tied to yeah anger anger is another high arousal emotion I missed that yeah so anger fear rage um those make things go viral a feeling like contentment like being warm and cozy inside lowers like your stimulus in your brain and you are less likely to click that like button you are less likely so just simply feeling happy and cozy make something less go viral this is so sad because i feel like my whole like mode is that well then maybe you shouldn't be on social media as much no because it's like i don't i don't want to be right inspiring people to rage right so what i'm to awe.

46:24Adam Aleksic:No, awe is good. I try to wonder is like tangential to awe. You can evoke it. But there's a bias to the kind of emotions we can even feel on social media, the kind of emotions that are able to spread. I would love to spread contentment if I can, but it's a very difficult thing to do. So the aggregate sort of Carl Jungian, like collective unconscious is dictating a lot of what it means to grab attention. On an individual level, we can combat this. We can, you know, think as people, but it will always be the group think that dictates what goes viral. Okay, so they're the second most powerful. The group think.

47:01Adam Aleksic:Yeah. The users are, then the creators are making things for the platforms and the group thing. And then individuals are the least powerful. So just separating us from that mass entity, which reacts to things, you as a person probably have preferences about what you would like to see on social media. We know for a fact that those preferences are not like... Yeah. I think marketers have a lot of power. For sure. Less than they used to. Yeah, less than they used to in particular because of like Apple's changes too. One thing about the word influencer that I really like, it comes from Latin in plus fluetta, meaning to flow in.

47:35Adam Aleksic:So the original idea when it was borrowed into English was that a divine ethereal power was flowing in from the stars into other people's bodies through your body. So it's like this astrological thing that - Do you think that's what you do? Oh, I would like that. Yeah. But it doesn't have to be a celestial power. It's simply the idea of channeling something. And we use that when we talk about YouTube channels or Twitch streams, but there's this idea of a conduit. It's like an osmosis that's happening. Different than a content creator. Something is flowing between you and the other person. And so now when we think about the brand ecosystem, the brands would actually like us to be influencers.

48:10Adam Aleksic:And that's why we think about influencers as people showing brands, because instead of stars flowing through us, it's like some advertising company's brand flowing through us and then into the audience and affecting the audience. It's like Tide Pods, yeah. Yeah. Tide Pods flowing through us into homes across America, yes. My goal on social media, and it sounds like yours is too, is for cool ideas to be the things that are flowing through us. Like you have some, your ideas, let's ask more questions. My idea I think is similar of like, let's be more aware and literate of what's going on. we are starting with these moral principles or something and we hope to channel that yeah ideally there's times when i thought about making videos and then i thought about what is this video going to do and then i realized i'm just making content and then i just decided not to make that video there's ideas that i would love to spread to people that i just don't think are going to go viral and i never talk about them like for example what talk about them here let's make like let's have what are your best non-viral ideas well when i got into the set i thought it was fascinating that every single podcast has like a pink neon sign that uh the positioning of like there's like a semiotic signal that we're on a podcast that there's like a structure of chairs are arranged at a 45 degree angle which is like the optimal like or a 90 degree angle which is the optimal um like conversation angle uh people studies have shown that if we have conversations at 180 degrees, it turns more adversarial.

49:36Adam Aleksic:And if we have conversations facing away from each other, it doesn't work as well. So, and when they ask people to sit down in a room together and they say, oh, you're about to have a debate with each other, they sit on opposite ends and you're about to have a cooperate on something, then they sit kind of facing the same way. You're about to have a conversation, they sit at this angle. So, this is like, I don't know, I'm fascinated with the structure of chairs and how they influence our discourse. And maybe there's a certain amount of our chairs are also being angled toward cameras right now. Sorry, a really long tangent.

50:08Adam Aleksic:I would love to be able to talk about chairs and signs and seating placement. But it's sort of a longer, weird rambly thought I have that it's not, it's not, chairs don't go viral on social media. But I think maybe now these chairs will go viral. If any chairs are going to go viral, I feel like it would be these Calhoun chairs. These are really fantastic chairs. Do you think they're comfortable though? I've been vibing. So you're interested in like how physical, how the physical space changes the conversation. Right. I think the human brain can't help but think spatially. And that spatiality precedes all of our thoughts.

50:40Adam Aleksic:It is part of what defines our ongoing understanding of what's happening. And even when it doesn't seem like something spatial, like your phone is a 2D thing, right? You still feel like the home screen is home. It has wallpaper, like your home at home. You can lock it, like you can lock your front door. So your phone has all this spatial elements to it. Different apps have a different feeling to them. Just like moving between different rooms in your house has a different feeling to it. I was having this conversation with JR about chairs because I was saying we're at this thing. And I thought chairs are really bad.

51:08Like I don't like my back being a chair. So what I did is I turned around the chair and I was sitting like this. Like I turned the chair physically and I sat like this and I felt it was much more comfortable for me to have the back of the chair on the side of my body. and also when i'm on a flight if i'm flying in the back of a plane what i do is i sit like this

51:28and i think that this is how planes should be designed very comfortable and then you sit like this and you could sleep and that way people could egress like they could have like exit to the when you know if you're in the aisle like you don't have to i don't have to wake up with your crotch in front of my face right i just you know i'm sleeping i have a hoodie how

51:48Adam Aleksic:how viral it would be to have a podcast facing this way, right? Like we usually face this way because it's better for the cameras. Yeah. And faces are a thing that go viral as well. Yeah. I don't think this would be good for a podcast. This is for flying economy. This position is for flying economy. This position. Well, we're still able to have a perfectly functional conversation. Yeah. Sometimes. Well, this is a good way to have a sit, right? Wouldn't this be better for a podcast? No, it's the 180. It's too intense. Okay. I said it like this. I was immediately disagreeing with you. It really created the conflict.

52:27Okay. Sorry for that tangent. No, I love that tangent. I think it might be the first viral chair clip that the internet has ever seen.

52:37Adam Aleksic:Hopefully. Do you think our language is getting more woke? Has that moment ended? I mean, there's been a lot of commentary on the death of woke or maybe the rebirth of woke, dark woke, whatever. Dark woke? what's dark it's like woke but i don't know it's not gonna work um but there is sort of always this hesitancy people have about words that are prescribed unto us and that is that idea about obtrusivity that's why we don't want to adopt fetch when it's when gretchen is trying to push fetch and mean girls and in the same way like when it feels like it's the ivory tower institutions that are pushing latinx and no latino actually wants to be called latinx um the idea of imposition is something we react against.

53:17Adam Aleksic:If language is a tool of identity and someone's telling you this is what your identity should be, that feels bad. Part of the rise of woke is a good thing because I mean, I do think we should be conscious about other people and try to be nice and recognize those people. Like attentive to what the impact of our words or way of speaking is on other cultures or identities. Part of what I'm, I think, hopefully trying to do is just let people know about what this word means to a community and the power has in that community. And now you can make your own conclusions about how you want to use the word.

53:50Adam Aleksic:I certainly have words that I don't say because I think they would hurt some people, but I can't reasonably stop you from saying that word. But if we teach each other to be kind to one another, like why can't we rebrand wokeness as just being kind, you know? Kindness is contentment. Contentment doesn't go viral. Who uses words best? Is it politicians or marketers or artists? The far right 4chan incels. Really? They're very good at spreading their language through memes. Maybe I just got incels on the brain too much because I've been studying them. But I think they're incredibly adept at creating in-group language with intentionality.

54:28Adam Aleksic:They use it as a form of deliberate power and try to push that power onto other people. At what point does a group like that become more powerful in the elite? I mean the old institutions don't mean anything anymore it's it's the new institutions of who can talk on social media and that idea of the Overton window that range of what we can talk about is broadening and the fact that all those words I mentioned like Chud and Foyd are getting more mainstream and like the stuff like maxing like I'm drink maxing if I drink my water or whatever I'm water pilled that stuff has already been popular since like 2023 that was the first time this really started this wave hit the mainstream but it keeps on going there's this streamer named clavicular if you mention these people the problem is they just get more popular yeah and so i'm mentioning this stuff but i'm normalizing it by mentioning it so i'm i'm complicit in commenting on this uh i guess but i don't know there's there's also i don't know i i have a very different take on this whole idea of platforming what do you think about platforming i mean as a journalist You get it all the time, right?

55:34And I've had, you know, many conversations or interviews I've done with conservative voices and someone will write in and say, like, I can't believe you platformed this person. I think of it as like my job is to try to understand and have conversations that are revelatory or explicative or help understand or reveal something about somebody who is doing something in the world that has a power.

55:58Adam Aleksic:Do you think there's a boundary to platforming? Like, like far right Nazis? Like, is that okay? I mean, I don't know. Would I be interested in interviewing one? I have before for a documentary series that got canceled. I was in contact with a kind of German far right, probably neo Nazi. And I was in contact with him. And I didn't. I mean, it was part of the report of journalism producing that was done. No, I guess it is good to understand how these people think. But would I have a comment? I don't think on this show, I don't know that I would do it. But I don't know. I mean, would I completely say no, I would not ever.

56:39If my job is trying to understand, then I guess I would do that interview. Would that interview be a tougher interview? Sure. It comes back to this idea of hyperfragmentation in the world we live in, right? I think that if we don't have the ability to speak to people who aren't already in the channels that you happen to be in or be popular amongst, then that's not healthy.

57:00Adam Aleksic:I think there's a responsible way to platform. Like, for example, I don't think Jubilee Media is doing the like the 25 Nazis versus one. I thought it was a parody of it, but it's kind of like how they do it. Yeah, it's a very viral debate format of a circle. They are rage baiting. Oxford English Dictionary is rage baiting when they chose the word rage bait, by the way. Dictionary.com is rage baiting. This is a marketing strategy by the dictionary is more than anything. It's big word trying to like get you to talk about big word by more dictionaries. I just like worry to the point that we talk about words as a way of connecting and separating.

57:30Like I worry about the separation aspect of it. Like I think that identity is really important and it's also a way to misunderstand someone. And I used to think about it in the sense of like I'm a brown woman. I worked at the New York Times. So a lot of people, a lot of times people will project their anticipated politics onto me when I meet them. But in fact, I didn't grow up in this country. I don't have a hyper-partisan mentality. I voted both ways. I think that it's like an invitation to be misunderstood as well. So I think platforming is important because it rejects that somebody else speaks for you, which is ultimately what is important about identity.

58:08What's important about identity is not just how you look or the group that you're cast in, but the ability of each person to be understood. Because we are, like you were saying, you know, idiolectic. I think like we are each ourselves trying to be understood that makes sense I the one word I have

58:24Adam Aleksic:tattooed on my body as a linguist is the word umwelt it means it means the world as it is perceived by a particular person and I really like that idea that we all see the world in our completely unique ways conditioned by our upbringing our environment by the the friends and family we have all this is completely unique and I think we should try as hard as we can to understand each other's umwelt because i think that makes us better people and i think you can start with language but it also goes a lot deeper than that yeah i love that i love that word umwelt i've never heard it before there's also the other side of it though which is like a bit like the panopticon side of things where it was only reading to nahasi coates like between the world and me where he talks about the experience of being perceived as violent by people around you and what that does in terms of you know changing police culture and then how you will behave in that interaction and how you and and so like there is like this thing of who we are and there's this thing of who we are because someone perceives us as this thing application of the label is already a kind of violence yeah exactly did you read the florence nat book names are the name it's like a book where she writes about three different names that were given to the child or the protagonist and the the names are a reflection of like basically you read the book and it's like in every x years you meet the kid again and the kid has a different name and based on the name they experience of life is different for the whole family names are crazy like the fact that this label applies to your entire life and all the ways that you change and um that others know you from different angles with all with this name a crazy thing it's a always a sociocultural indicator as well like the fact that you have an english or not english sounding name uh like already kind of tells you the same thing as like all the racial labels we were talking about like it's yeah so So back in the day, like you used to like the names used to be a reflection of what people did, like a Smith or whatever.

1:00:16Adam Aleksic:Right. What would be the right surname for influencers? I did a video a while back that went moderately viral about how the modern way we save people in our phones. Like if I have somebody in my phone like Michael Tinder or like Anna Hinge or something like that is functionally an occupational surname. Or yeah. Yeah. That's I mean, one of my favorite games to play is is cell phone roulette. have you ever played? What was that? You unlock your phone, you stick it in the middle of the dining table. And then everybody gets to pick up a phone that isn't theirs and text one person in the phone. That's dangerous.

1:00:51Adam Aleksic:You can have a veto. You can have a veto. You can be like, don't text my mom right now. But usually people always go to the most ridiculously saved room, saved name. So they'll be like, oh, Juliet Rose Bar. That sounds like the person we're going to text and be like, hey, do you have my pineapples? Right. And start a crazy conversation with this person. It's a good game. Hang tight for a second. We'll be right back. Can we do a lightning round on words and ideas? Sure. Where did curse words come from? There have always been curse words. There's a great book by Rebecca Roach called For Fuck's Sake, I think.

1:01:23Adam Aleksic:But Fuck, for example, I think was like 13th century. There was some monk who was pissed at his like abbot or something and he wrote about other monks who go and fucant weaves in LA or something. And that meant other monks who go fuck woman in the nearby town. But that was the first time that word was recorded, but it might have been around for a lot longer, right? Because there's stuff like this that isn't recorded. So it's hard to know with a lot of curse words. No wonder Tipper Gore was so mad. Yeah, of course. There's a lot of fake origins for curse words because I think they captivate us particularly.

1:01:56Adam Aleksic:So at some point, somebody thought that fuck meant fornication under the consent of the king or shit meant store high in transit. It's never the acronyms. Can we have new curse words or are we like tapped out at the seven or so? It's hard because nothing's really shocking to us in the same way. I guess most of the worst curses right now are identity labels, but it's usually existing stuff. Yeah. Okay. Speaking of, fuck, marry, kill. The Oxford comma, the unalive euphemism or the dictionary? Kill the dictionary. Okay. I they're a weird institution projecting power that's not reflecting how language is and it's too often held up as a standard of language I would marry the Oxford comma I could marry the Oxford comma I am a long uh time Oxford comma enjoyer um it's really nice uh what do you like it removes ambiguity it just looks pretty you know it feels satisfying to me to complete a thought that way and uh I guess that just leaves on alive for for fucking um I guess that makes sense yeah i fuck with on the life yeah okay if you could fine us for one word like if you could fine people for one word what would it be i maybe the n-word or something i okay yeah i think that's a reasonable take i am not trying to nothing nothing like hashtag blast hashtag upset or obsessed i'm not trying to police your language really no okay okay what is the phonetically most ugly word that actually means something beautiful okay so i have looked into like the the moist stuff and like why we have that reaction against it.

1:03:29Adam Aleksic:Yeah, yeah. I don't hate it. So phonetically, there's no such thing as like a beautiful or ugly word. There's this idea of phonoaesthetics, how sounds feel to us. It might have been Tolkien who said cellar door is the most beautiful phrase in the English language or someone around that time. And we don't like moist. So all this just comes down to... Why is the reaction to moist? Explain this. I've had this fight with my friend Teresa Shaw who helped name this podcast. It's entirely a semantic association. It's just the feeling you get in your head when you think about what moistness connotes. Even if you think it's not separated from the meaning, it is tied to the meaning.

1:04:01What is it about monosyllabic words? I love monosyllabic words. I think they're the best words.

1:04:07Adam Aleksic:I mean, they're simple. They cut to the point. I like them. There's, I don't know, what's your question? I don't have a question. I was like, I just like them. There's sort of a distinction between like romantic and Germanic words. And Germanic words tend to be more monosyllabic. I think of them in my head as more brute to the point, more function words. You know, like those are usually I think it's more likely for a monosyllabic word to be Germanic and a Latin based word to be like a longer word. Yeah. Can you tell the origin of a word when you look at it? Sometimes I can vibe it out. I don't know where pajama came from, but I think I have looked it up before.

1:04:40What do you think about the world moving from large language models to like real world models? What does that mean for the work you do to the extent that that happens?

1:04:48Adam Aleksic:Just in terms of like the greater contextual kind of aspects of AI. Yeah. Like if all of a sudden AI isn't training just off of huge volumes of words. You're still measuring something. Yeah. Yeah. There's this really good book, Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott, which I highly recommend. It is about how anytime you measure something, you're going to mess it up. And states and institutions always have an incentive to measure stuff because the more you measure something, the more you can exert control over it. I think platforms today are behaving like states. But the example Scott uses is European forestry when it first got started in the 17th century or whatever.

1:05:27Adam Aleksic:They would just go and count all the trees and that was it. And then they cut down a certain number of trees. But then you miss the interrelated parts of the forest ecosystem, how all the animals and the different plants interact with each other. And you would end up killing a way larger portion of the forest than if you had notated more about the type of tree and where the tree is located and whatever. and by measuring something like right now we're measuring attention that's kind of like measuring the trees and forgetting the the forest i think there's other things that don't get reflected in social media metrics like respect for one another like contentment right that stuff gets lost when we're just measuring trees oh you asked about ai models um they also attempt to measure words we have natural sort of vibes about words they exist on a bunch of different dimensions for us and And sort of embeddings get kind of close to that because they represent words by how close they are to other words by trapping them in sort of a bunch of dimensions and comparing that to each other.

1:06:21Adam Aleksic:And it gets very close to our feelings about words. They can almost replicate the genderedness of a word. But there's all kinds of ineffable sensations we have about language, these phonoesthetics, this idea that cellar sounds pretty and moist doesn't. And maybe it can sort of get captured in the way usage is predicted by these models, but it always will fail to encapsulate your idiolect. Yeah. You have a unique way of speaking. Wouldn't it just have its own? Doesn't Chat Daddy have its own idiolect? It's very sycophantic. All the kind of models have their unique way of talking as well because they're trained in different texts.

1:07:03Adam Aleksic:They're reinforced with different things. So we know that Gemini and Chachipiti speak in a different quote unquote dialect and speak is also in quotes. So their dialects tend to homogenize the aggregate of what is considered the English language, which is also, you know, even defining what a language is, is impossible for linguists. We don't know what that is. We don't know what a word is. And so if you claim you know what it is, you're wrong. But also you have a unique sense about what you're doing with your language and your words. And if you talk to these things, it will homogenize us. The example I like to use and that I used in my TED talk is the word delve and how Chachipiti says the word delve way more than humans do because there is an error in the reinforcement learning process.

1:07:46Adam Aleksic:But now we have evidence that humans are also starting to say the word delve more because we see it being used by AI and now we're using it more. So it's messing with our sense of reality. It failed to capture language perfectly. It did it pretty well. It sounds pretty realistic, but there's still an uncanny valley. Oh, totally. When you talk to it, you're like, oh, this is an AI. But then you wonder if there are people out there that talk or write like AI. I mean, anybody on LinkedIn, honestly. It's like, oh, LinkedIn is the worst AI. My favorite influencer is the guy that does LinkedIn, reading out like, congratulations, Anna.

1:08:14Do you know who I'm talking about? He's a great.

1:08:16Adam Aleksic:It's like, if it's not AI, they're so in the AI headspace that it doesn't even matter. They're regurgitating. Because on LinkedIn, I think you're performing almost more than anywhere else. You're playing into the expectation of how you're supposed to be talking in this medium. To this idea of like measuring and measuring the wrong thing, like is the answer for social media companies to measure kindness or contentment? Or is the answer to actually stop measuring as much as we do? I think both. I think if we are to build a more meaningful algorithmic social media system, we should start finding ways to measure kindness and compassion and contentment.

1:08:56Adam Aleksic:But at the same time, we should just touch grass more. We should just hang out with people in real life and not think about quantifying every aspect of what we're doing. But it is a reality that we're online. And I don't think it's reasonable to tell people to just get offline. No, it's not. Though I did have this thought like over the break where I'm like, I think maybe in 15 years we're going to look at these phones like we looked at cigarettes. And we were just talking about that with one of the guests we were interviewing as well. The amount of time we spend on it and the access that we allowed into our lives and us into it.

1:09:29I think any new technology has that sort of both good and bad tools can be used for good and bad. Last lightning question. A lot of people are saying, oh, people don't know how to, kids don't know how to write anymore. They don't know how to spell anymore. Do you think that our language will over generations really change? Do you think that people will not be able to write?

1:09:49Adam Aleksic:It is kind of concerning about the literacy. I do think literacy is kind of a construct. I remember there was... Literacy is a construct. Yeah, it's how good you are at a certain medium. And we've defined that as the medium of reading. I think it was Socrates who was incredibly concerned about the advent of writing. And he thought it would make us remember things less. And by putting things into words, we are no longer relying on our own minds. We're relying on this extension of our minds. And that corrupted the human brain. I know. Thank God Socrates didn't see Chachipiti. He would not like it.

1:10:23He'd be dead. He would be unalived. Unalived himself.

1:10:27Adam Aleksic:There is, and then we relied on proverbs and oral tradition for a while. And those had incredible strengths for kind of sharing community values and keeping traditions going. And then we moved to print. And with print, we have now this ability to rapidly disseminate ideas to do all this stuff. And then we moved to this informal version of print, which is the internet. And now we're moving back to video and audio almost replicating real life there's this idea of the gutenberg parenthesis that there is a 500 year gap where we relied on writing as our main form of like epistemic basis of knowledge and and now um before that it was oral tradition and now we're going back to oral history we're back to just looking at visual history looking back to sights and sounds and we're not going to be reading as much neil degrasse tyson told me that aliens speak math that's their language the universe speaks math do you think of math is a linguistic construct i think people should read this book where mathematics comes from by george lackoff but there's this idea of embodied sensation as a precursor to even numbers so to come up with the idea of the number one you need to be able to perceive a discrete object you need to be able to see one finger and be like oh this is one finger yeah we all agree that's one it's not it's not one finger it's two half fingers it's three third fingers it's you know uh it's actually blending in with the air around it.

1:11:46Adam Aleksic:There are atoms from my finger melding into the air. It's not one finger at all. We made up a story in our heads that this one finger exists. It requires an observer, a perceiver. And now that we've created this idea that one exists, we can, oh, now there's another one. Oh, that's two. And so now we can make the entire basis of discrete math and the idea that one exists. We can start creating very predictable patterns and predict things about the universe using this. But it's ultimately just like another made up map and the map can never be the territory. To truly mathematically quantify the universe, you would need the universe itself.

1:12:16Adam Aleksic:So in the meantime, we can do this fake stuff with language, which is math. Math and language are the same thing to me. Yeah. It's funny. When Neil was on the show, he said something about like he felt bad for the linguist because yeah, he would probably bring a mathematician out to talk to the... I think he tweeted that once he got some heat. But one day I'll do a debate where you and Neil will sit at 180 degree angle. 180, yeah. Required. And fight with each other. Okay. Thank you so much, Adam, for doing this. We end every episode of Smart Girl Dumb Questions asking our guests who are so knowledgeable, and you certainly are, what they are dumb about.

1:12:44What's a dumb question you have that you've been embarrassed to ask out loud or just haven't dug into? Wow.

1:12:51Adam Aleksic:I've increasingly sort of realized that there are so many aspects of communication that I think are as valid as language that I am not as aware about. So we have feelings and then we express those feelings. And that can be through words, which I've spent my life studying. But also you can just play music. And to me, music is as valid a form of knowledge as language. And so to ask my question... Yeah, I was like, what's the question? Well, to ask my question, it's not something I can put into words, but I'm realizing that the entire medium of language is just as valid as music or art or something.

1:13:28Adam Aleksic:So it's less of a verbal question and more of I'm just trying to listen to more music because I'm realizing that I can teach me things on an equal level as any philosophical text or something. I love it. And you don't want to give us just like one question that you have? Like Mark Cuban wanted to know, why do people chew with their mouth open? Like Nail to Grass Tyson wanted to know, how do you get cranes up there? Someone asked, you know, should you run? Like the divorce attorney asked, like, why do we have graph paper? Like who came up with graph paper? There must be some question, some unanswered question that you have.

1:13:59It's unknowable.

1:14:01Adam Aleksic:Yeah, what's consciousness? What is consciousness? That's a great question. Yeah, that's a great question. We actually, I asked Jeffrey Hinton if AI is conscious and he said, no one ever agrees on what these words mean, consciousness or sentience. Right. It might be another construct, but I can't prove for myself that like this table isn't conscious. So like, it's sort of counterproductive to talk about AI consciousness because I guess it's probably different than what humans do. But I don't know whether if it has an input and an output, it feels something in the middle. I don't know that. Do you think we're conscious?

1:14:34Adam Aleksic:I don't know what that means. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know whether I'm brain and vet or whether I'm. Yeah. I certainly know I feel things. These two 11 year olds that came on the show, they asked, what is it like when you die and how do you know you're dead? I thought that was a really good question. That's a good thing. I think that's tied to the consciousness. We can solve those at the same time. Exactly. We'll figure it out. OK, thank you so much. Adam Aleksic. Grab his book. It's called Algo Speak. The next book will probably be about chairs or tables or something. Conscious tables is a two-book deal, I think.

1:15:09That will be the next one. Thank you so much for spending the time with us. We appreciate it.

1:15:12Adam Aleksic:Thank you for having me.

1:15:16So that conversation was fascinating and far-reaching. I went in dumb about the etymology of certain words, but also the origins of this whole meme culture, which for me feels much more new and novel than obviously Adam understood it to be, which was super helpful. I left a lot smarter about words and language as kind of an aperture to our culture and what's happening and how it's changing. And someone like the etymology nerd has such a front seat view into how our culture is changing democratically, algorithmically, AI-ly. And on the subject of AI, there's so much circulating out there, so much to read, like that viral Matt Schumer piece.

1:15:51But for me, one of the best things I've heard on the topic recently is the speech that Yuval Noah Harari gave at Davos. And he's the author of Sapiens, of course, that big red book that you may have read or seen around. And he gave a speech about whether AI can think. And he invokes that Rene Descartes line, like, I think, therefore I am. And has this to say about how humans have been able to kind of dominate over the rest of the animal kingdom. We rule the world because we can think better than anyone else on this planet. Will AI challenge our supremacy in the field of thinking? Now, that depends on what thinking means.

1:16:38Try to observe yourself thinking. What is happening there?

1:16:43Adam Aleksic:Many people observe words popping in their mind and forming sentences, and the sentences then forming arguments like all humans are mortal, I am human, therefore I am mortal. So if thinking really means putting words and other language tokens in order, then AI can already think much better than many, many humans. And then it gets really trippy because he says if words are the basis for everything, then what happens when AI can do words really well? As far as putting words in order is concerned, AI already thinks better than many of us. Therefore, anything made of words will be taken over by AI.

1:17:43If laws are made of words, then AI will take over the legal system. If books are just combinations of words, then AI will take over books. If religion is built from words, then AI will take over religion. Anyways, I think Yvald's whole speech is worth a listen or a watch, especially after you've heard this conversation. So go check that out. The link's below. And you can tell me what you think in your words, in the comments and reviews below, or by sending me an email at naima raza101 at gmail.com, or call us, 1-855-MY-DUM-Q. And by the way, we're still going to do part three of the Godfather trilogy.

1:18:23We're recording that in spring. So send in your questions about artificial intelligence and how we can have a good society. You can send those in on social at SmartGirlDumbQuestions if they're videos or call us. That's it for this week on SmartGirlDumbQuestions. I'll be back next week. This episode was produced with Desta Wunderad, Dana Balute, Healy Cruz, and Melissa Lee Gibson. It was edited by Darlena Cham, and it was mixed and engineered by the awesome Johnny Simon, who made me so much smarter about Frank Zappa and all things free speech. See you next week on Smart Girl, Dumb Questions. And I'm going to leave you with four words, like, subscribe, share, comment, and actually two more.

1:18:57Thank you. Bye.

1:19:28Adam Aleksic:This episode is brought to you by Athletic Brewing Company. No matter how you do game day, on the couch, in the crowd, or manning the snack table, Athletic Brewing fits right in. With a full lineup of non-alcoholic beer styles, you can enjoy bold flavors all game long. No hangovers, no buzz, no subbing out for water in the second half. Stock the fridge for tip-off with a variety of non-alcoholic craft styles available at your local grocery store or online at athleticbrewing.com. Your beer, fit for all times.