Welcome to Nice Ashes, I'm Mike.
And I'm Nate.
What are we smoking tonight, Mike?
We are smoking the Rough Rider Indian Head Sweets Maduro.
A Robusto size, nobody should be surprised by that.
What?
I know, right?
As noted, Nate and I were talking before the show, the cap is sweet, but not as sweet as
the last one.
I don't know, man.
I feel like it's equally as sweet.
You think so?
It's sweet for sure.
It's sweet.
I don't know, it's tough to tell.
I'm pairing this one with Guinness and I had some cranberry juice, so I have some cranberry
juice with a little tart.
Sure, you'll have to let me know how the tart goes.
I'm pairing this with the Bosun American IPA again.
So I ran out earlier today to get some podcast juice, is what I call it.
First few puffs of this are pretty good.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I think it's definitely a little more interesting than the Connecticut, I think.
It's definitely darker.
Yeah, I'm not sure if it's good interesting or bad interesting yet, but...
Definitely darker and I don't notice the sweetness as much.
Yeah, the cap is still very sweet, but the smoke is not as sweet.
Interesting.
The label on this is absolutely wonderful, yet again.
Oh, yes.
Yes, indeed.
What are we talking about today?
We are going to talk about something that I'm quite excited about, the topic-wise, not
necessarily using it or doing anything with it, but our topic for this episode is something
called AlgoSpeak.
Have you heard of AlgoSpeak, Mike?
AlgoSpeak, no.
I thought for a second you said Elkospeak, like the talk you do when you're drunk.
No, that's the podcast.
I mean, that's what you're listening to.
No.
So I know you've heard some AlgoSpeak, but what AlgoSpeak is, is it's algorithm speak,
so it's AlgoSpeak.
And what you do is you use different words to circumvent algorithms or AI.
So I've got this broken down into different topics.
So what we're going to go through, and I did this deal, I actually have, because I was
talking all about algorithms and AI and stuff, I actually printed out a research paper and
highlighted it and marked it up.
And I'm also using different articles as well, not just the journal, but if you hear paper
rustling and I'm not able to edit them out, it's because I thought what better way to
fight the algorithms and AI than to use physical paper and chop down a couple of trees.
So we're going to first talk about what AlgoSpeak is.
We're going to talk about other linguistic forms that might be similar.
We're going to then talk about why it would be used.
Then we're going to get into the fun list of AlgoSpeak words and what they mean, and
we're going to wrap it all up with a nice tidy bow with what the consequences of this
might actually end up being.
Are you ready for this, Mike?
I am ready to listen and enjoy my cigar and play with my dog and...
There we go.
So AlgoSpeak is kind of code words, turns of phrases perhaps, that users have adopted
in an effort to create brand safe lexicon that will avoid getting their posts removed
or down ranked by content moderation systems.
So when we're talking about AlgoSpeak, they're primarily used on online platforms, most notably
the biggest offender that came up and is the subject of the scientific journal.
I don't know if it's scientific, but it's from Sage Journals in their social media and
society volume nine, issue three, July, 2023, 2023, sorry.
And the article is called, You Cannot Say What You Want Using AlgoSpeak to Contest and
Evade Algorithmic Content Moderation on TikTok.
So the TikTok, I don't know what you call it, the post curator is, from what I gather,
pretty broad and doesn't, and they don't, their platform doesn't give any real reasoning
behind the things that they do with the actions they take, which has led to a lot of this
AlgoSpeak because the people are trying to find ways around getting shadow banned or
temporary bans from the platform or just getting their posts removed or not promoted.
So that's what it comes down to.
Any questions on that, Mike?
No, I actually know enough about that to understand what you're saying.
Okay, sure.
So that's basically what AlgoSpeak is.
We're going to get into the words a little bit later.
I wanted to talk about, is this a completely new phenomenon where people invent words and
things to get around this?
And it's not.
So tailoring language to avoid scrutiny predates the internet.
A lot of religions have avoided using the devil's name for fear of summoning him.
And then people living in repressive regimes also developed code words to discuss taboo
topics.
So you've seen the Jesus fish for Christians.
That was if you met somebody on the road back in whenever the fuck, you would draw half
of the fish with your walking stick.
And if they were a Christian, they would complete the fish.
So then you knew you were safe to talk about Jesus or I don't know, Lot's wife, daughters,
things of that nature, I don't know, and not be persecuted.
So there's definitely ancient, ancient.
But there's also a 19th century Russian satirist, Mikhail Saltikov.
Oh God shared Shedrin made use of a soapian language, meaning like ASAP's fables.
So it was allegorical and he and others use it to circumvent the censorship in Tsarist
Russia.
So the forbidden term revolution was replaced with a phrase called the big job.
There's another private language that was used by gay men in the early 20th century
in Britain.
It was called hilarious and rough trade referred to a working class sex partner.
There's also been rhyming slang, which has been employed to obfuscate one's meaning to
outsiders.
So a term like telephone would be replaced by a rhyming equivalent such as dog and bone
and then subsequently shortened to dog.
So a member of the gang could probably request another member call them and do it even the
presence of police.
And they just like, yo, talk to you on the dog or something like that.
I don't know how they would use it.
I'm not a gang member.
I don't know.
But you know, they would shorten these words, they'd rhyme it.
And so dog and bone would be shortened to dog because the full phrase would rhyme with
telephone and it would get shortened to further separate it from the true meaning.
There's also cockney rhyming slang, which emerged in 19th century London, which might
be the best known example.
And as far as the internet goes, there's a leet speak, which evolved in the 1980s.
And it's basically, that's the stuff that you see that changes the vowels to letters.
So leet wouldn't be L-E-E-T, it would be L-3-3-T. And that's the general basis of leet speak.
Right.
And you've seen some of those things, right?
Yeah.
I can, I used to be able to do it quick, but I can type and read leet for sure.
Okay.
That is a-okay by me.
And that's, I know exactly what you mean because there's a certain number that is banned in
certain countries that speak English.
And it's the number for the year of the American Revolution that has been banned.
Okay.
It's been associated in current times with certain things.
Other things, yeah.
Yes.
There's also text speak or chat speak or SMS language speak, which most of us who are Mike
and my age are familiar with because back when cell phones first became a thing that
every cool kid had, college student had, whatever, they charged you, I think it was five cents
per character, right?
So it resulted in dropping the vowels and that's where LOL came from.
That's where like U-R, like your cute came from like L-8-R, like later, like all of that
stuff.
The text speak when we had to do the T-9.
It was simultaneously, it was the messaging charges plus the fact that you had to hit
like the number three key three times to get the letter you wanted or something.
Yep.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
There's also LOL speak, which uses incorrect grammar or spelling as language plays, which
is like doggo lingo where they, people will mimic how they think a dog would talk in their
typing and things like that.
So basically it's all just how to modify written communication in networked and platform communities
where the community members would be able to understand it.
Whereas, you know, we're, you and I have a audio podcast, so people can listen to our
tone of voice and hopefully tell when we're joking or, you know, pick up contextual clues
on how we think or feel about a subject by the inflection in our voice.
But when you're talking purely digital is very difficult to do and one of the, one of
the reasons a lot of these different speaking styles came out is to portray some of those
feelings I suppose.
Yeah.
The example I'm thinking of is LOL versus LOL, LOL versus LUL, right?
Those are two different concepts that are related.
So yes, for sure.
Okay.
So why use algo speak here in the study?
It says that the number of videos removed by automation on TikTok increased from 2020
to 2022 with minor safety of minors, illegal activities, adult nudity being the main reasons
for the removal of the content.
And TikTok is known for also restricting content visibility for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans,
queer, disabled, and obese users without present guideline violations.
So TikTok has their user and community guidelines, but they've been restricting things that don't
fall under the guidelines, the community guideline rules.
So that's led to people needing to find a way around them.
And there's some actual good stories we're going to get into here in a little bit, but
some people use it to do the bad stuff, right?
So of course there's people that do bad things online and in, you know, real life.
Not that online isn't real life, but Mike has a very strong opinion about that.
I'm looking up something for you.
The Stephen Vandeveld is all over TikTok.
So apparently their algorithm doesn't prevent that.
Yeah.
Why would it?
Yeah.
But so there are people that definitely use the algo speak to continue doing their illegal
activities.
But there's other people that just do it to circumvent AI.
And then others do it to circumvent the AI, but in a way to talk about their experiences.
So sexual assault is a big one where you have victims of sexual assault trying to talk to
other people, other victims of sexual assault in these online communities where it's therapeutic
to be able to talk to people that have had similar experiences as you, but their posts
and their comments and their things are being flagged by the AI and removed even.
So they're not able to have that outlet.
Yes.
And they're not doing it in a way to encourage others to sexually abuse people or sexually
assault people.
Sure.
And there's people that do this to circumnavigate censorship, even though they're not engaging
in anything that's illegal.
It's just that there's certain hot button words that you're not allowed to say.
Even in context of being against those things, you're not allowed to say it.
Yes, that is true.
So we've got a quote here from the director of Fight for the Future, which is a digital
rights nonprofit advocacy group.
Evan Greer says that trying to stomp out specific words on platforms is a fool's errand.
One, it doesn't actually work, she said.
The people using platforms to organize real harm are pretty good at figuring out how to
get around these systems.
And two, it leads to collateral damage of literal speech.
Attempting to regulate human speech at the scale of billions of people in dozens of different
languages and trying to contend with things such as humor, sarcasm, local context, and
slang can't be done by simply downranking certain words, Greer argues.
So you've got the good, the people that are using these terms and phrases for good therapeutic
reasons and you've got people using them for bad reasons.
But if you ban all the bad reasons, you're also banning all the good reasons.
Right.
And these algorithmic speech is manipulated by the bad actors.
Look at the term map that's become popularized in the last year or two.
And that is apparently totally acceptable to talk about, but it's not.
You know what I mean?
I think it's not.
But if you use the magic words, then it is.
That doesn't make any sense to me.
It's not about the content.
It's about playing a game.
Yeah.
It's all about playing a game.
And there is one story here where, and you know, this study sent out invites to, I guess,
maybe 200 some TikTok users.
And of those, they got a subset to respond.
And one of those was a sex educator who posted videos on TikTok about sex education, you
know, which isn't inherently bad.
You know what I mean?
Like that's a good thing to have out there because it depends on your schooling.
And if your parents want to have that kind of difficult conversation with you, or if
you're in an abstinence only kind of environment, you know, you have to know.
Like knowing good sex education is very important.
And they were saying that they can't say you should put a condom on before having intercourse.
They have to now say, put a rubber band on your eggplant.
Which is just blatantly ridiculous.
Obviously, there's-
Well, it's ridiculous.
And the point they were making was, I have a serious, like it's a serious topic.
It's a serious like channel or account.
And I have to say these goofy things to circumvent being taken down.
Like I can't tell someone to put a condom on their penis without being, you know, shadow
band or flagged.
Like, that doesn't make any sense.
Right.
And so there's also users that have found that they can say certain words, but they
need to then edit their transcript or put different words on screen, which are algo
speak words to prevent their video from being taken down.
And so if they are in somewhat revealing clothing, they need to make sure they put somewhere
in their video or even say something like fake body, you know, this is my fake body.
So then the algorithm or the AI thinks that they're talking about a fictional body and
not their actual body.
And there was some concern because I don't know if it was a person trying to teach like
pole dancing or something else, but they were in, you know, moderately revealing clothing
and they were saying that all their videos were taken down, but they have all these videos
of women on the beach in super skimpy bikinis and those are all fine.
And those don't get taken down or anything like that.
So there's not really any consistency with the algorithms.
So these people that are trying to do things and if they're worried about the clothing
they're wearing, they need to put some other kind of algo speak term in the video to circumvent
the AI, the world we live in.
Exactly.
Hold on.
I just, this is why I shouldn't use paper reports.
I just asked all over my fucking scientific journal here.
Do you have any questions on why somebody might use algo speak, Mike?
No, I am intimately aware of why you would do that.
And we occasionally do that ourselves to discuss topics that could get us into some hot water.
Yes.
So this next part of the podcast here is going to include the algo speak terms and their
real English equivalent.
So if this episode gets like hidden, that's why here we go.
Algo speak words.
This is kind of an alphabetical order.
So if I were to tell you that my friend, the accountant needed some help with something,
would you know who I was talking about or what profession they had?
I would not.
An accountant in algo speak is a sex worker.
Interesting.
I didn't know that one, but I'm not looking for that on the internet.
So yeah, me either.
Mike, I lived through the Backstreet Boys reunion tour.
I don't know what that means either.
The COVID-19 pandemic.
Oh, is that what they call it?
One of them.
Okay.
I've heard different terms for that.
Yeah.
Let me pull them up here.
They've got more for that, for the COVID.
I think they're on this.
They also call it the vid.
They call it Panda Express, Panini or Panorama.
So those are all for...
I've heard all of that.
I've heard of the cough.
Okay, sure.
I've heard of getting the cough.
Yep.
Sure.
Next one.
I've got a whole list.
I'm not going to do all of them.
There's one called Blink in Lio, which is supposed to mean link in bio because I guess TikTok
tries to prohibit linking to external sites in your bio or something.
We have the clock app, which is TikTok.
Corn, which is porn or just the corn emoji.
Oh yes.
I remember the days when porn used to be referred to as prawn.
Oh yes.
P-R-O-N.
P-R-O-N, sir.
Holy shit.
I forgot I was talking to a four-channer.
Or P-R-A-W-N.
Yeah, that too.
Or P-R-4.
The next one is cornucopia, which means homophobia.
So a lot of these are kind of like rhyming.
Yep.
We've got Q-C-U-E-ANON, which is code for Q-ANON, right?
If you would just say it, Q-ANON.
But if you type it out, C-U-E-ANON, it's different, I guess, for the algorithms.
Fork and frog both mean fuck.
Grape means rape.
The Kermit sewer slide means commit suicide.
I've heard self deletion.
Okay.
One of my favorites, la dollar bean means lesbian.
Leg booty community means the LGBT community.
Oh, I've always heard the alphabet whenever they say alphabet.
Sure, yeah.
Nip-knops means nipples.
This is funny.
I feel like the nip-knops have to flop.
I don't know.
The not-see means Nazi.
SH means self-harm.
Schmex means sex.
And SEGS, like S-E-G-G-S, means sex.
Swimmers means vaccinated people.
Unalived means dead-killed suicide.
Self-termination.
Oh, SA.
You missed SA.
What's that one mean, Mike?
Sexual assault.
Mascara also means sexual assault.
Rapier, they have that one too.
That one's rape.
YT means white.
You can't say white anymore.
And now, Mike, when you said you hated the Olympic Committee, what you should have said
was I opposite of love the Olympic Committee.
Yes, I think they're highly regarded.
Yeah, and then we talked about Panda Express, Panini, and Panorama for the COVID-19.
SA is actually on here.
I just haven't got to it yet.
It's on this next page.
Sexual assault.
Sewer slide is suicide.
I've also seen that they need to use, if you're talking about crackers, like literal crackers,
like Ritz, you need to call them saltines because they take cracker being a hate speech.
Derogatory term.
Yeah.
Camping.
Do you know what camping is, Mike?
I mean, I know what camping is, but what does it mean in this context?
Abortion.
Oh, no.
So after Roe v. Wade got repealed, people would say, hey, someone's just got to go camping.
And that means crossing borders to get the procedure done.
Do you know what cheese pizza means, Mike?
Yes, I do.
Christopher Poole.
Okay, yeah.
So cheese pizza is the acronym, right?
So the CP would be child pornography.
There was something else I want to talk about because it was the swimmers and there was
another one too that meant the non-vaccinated.
Trying to remember.
There's so many of these words out there.
You wouldn't happen to remember what the two were.
There was the swimmers and then I thought it was like a dinner party.
It might have been the one.
Oh, I don't recall.
Yeah, I can't.
I did the research, but you know.
There's just too many.
Okay.
Anti-vaxxers groups have been changing their names to dance party or dinner party and vaccinated
people are called swimmers.
So that is what you need to know about that, I suppose.
And they've got a whole bunch of different words and emojis, which are hard to kind of
describe.
But the snowflake emoji means, what do you think it means, Mike?
Somebody who's a liberal.
Cocaine.
Oh, okay.
So a lot more fun than a liberal.
Yeah, a lot more fun than a liberal.
Snow, got you.
Yeah, yeah.
There you go.
So trees, trees.
They've been doing a lot of that.
There's a whole bunch of them.
So they do like O-U-I-D, the French pronunciation of weed for weed.
So some of the stuff's really original.
Right.
Trees, I know that one is for weed as well.
Yeah.
But I mean, if it gets them around the thing, it gets them around the thing, right?
Broccoli.
Anything that looks like it.
Yeah, pretty much.
And then of course, like the eggplant emoji, we all know what that means.
The peach emoji, I guess I would call it kind of like the raindrops slash squirt emoji means
ejaculation.
If we needed to say that, there's some fairly racist ones.
So if somebody is talking about like ninja or something, it's generally being racist
against black people.
Yes.
Do they mention in Minecraft?
No, they don't.
They might not have caught onto that one yet.
I mean, these are all by people that are either like studying it or trying to study it or
like news outlets that are like, oh, hey, I picked like the top 10 that almost anybody
with a brain could figure out.
Right.
I think most of the listeners know what in Minecraft means.
Let's do it in Minecraft or something, some version of that.
Yeah.
It's kind of like French haircuts.
Everybody can pretty much figure that one out.
Yeah.
Or you should be able to.
Are you about halfway with your cigar mic?
I'm a little over halfway actually.
Oh, perfect.
Yeah.
What do you think so far?
I like it.
It's darker.
It's not as sweet.
Yeah.
It was sweet at the very beginning, but it is darker.
Yeah.
It's nice.
The cranberry juice really makes it pop.
I'll tell you that.
Oh, that's good to know.
I'll have to try and find like a dry cider or something next time.
It's a nice mellow Maduro in my opinion.
The sweetener probably makes it easier to hide a cheaper leaf, I'm going to guess.
Yeah.
Probably so.
It's very pleasant, very nice.
Nothing spectacular to be honest, but very pleasant.
Yeah.
Quite pleasant.
Not particularly complex.
It's very similar to the other one where it's very stable.
Just mellow.
Yes.
This one's a little darker, a little sweet, not too much.
Yeah.
I agree.
So the TikTok users say that they can usually get away with saying the actual word, but
when it comes to any kind of like text in their videos and things, they have to use
the AlgoSpeak.
So, and I know that at least for our podcast, I run our audio through AI to generate a transcript
and then use that to get summaries and things of our episode for our episode descriptions
and some, you know, like hashtag keyword type of stuff.
And then the platform we use to actually upload and distribute also will run AI on our podcast
to generate the final transcript of the edited episode.
So I imagine TikTok has something similar, you know, a lot of these platforms, you know,
YouTube and stuff will auto-generate captions for, you know, hearing disabled people.
That's probably not the right word phrase.
Mike, that's probably like the nineties, what we'd call it in the nineties.
Hearing impaired.
Yes.
Hearing impaired or hearing challenged viewers.
So that's when the users would have to go and edit those generated stuff to include
the AlgoSpeak words and not the actual word to prevent it being taken down.
And here's kind of the big thing.
I mean, we're kind of going and moving into like the consequences of AlgoSpeak and things.
And this is maybe a little bit consequences of just AI and automated, automated anything
really these algorithms and these word searches and this AI stuff seems to really have a problem
with putting these terms into context.
So if you had a video that said, I hate Nazis and what the Nazis did was wrong, the AI would
flag the video as being pro Nazi because you mentioned Nazi.
So it doesn't take into the context, into consideration the context of any of these,
any of these things.
Right.
You'd have to say, I strongly dislike 1930s European politics.
Yeah.
Something like that.
Or you'd have to edit the thing to say the Nazis, right?
Yep.
At least your captions or your text of it.
So that's the, maybe the big issue is it doesn't take into consideration the context of what
you're talking about or what you're saying.
So if we were trying to put this episode on TikTok, we'd have an awful lot of trouble
because one, I'm not going to go and edit our transcript to change all the words to
algo speak and two, we're already over the TikTok video limit.
I think, I don't know.
I don't use TikTok.
I don't care to.
I've never used TikTok.
It is owned by the communist Chinese government and it is spying on you.
Now I realize that our government is spying on us through Palantir and Facebook and other
entities as well.
So that is not a specific criticism that makes China unique, but I'm against our government
doing it and I'm certainly against a adversarial government with pretty significant human rights
violations doing it.
So.
Yeah, for sure.
And so the main consequences of algo speak are that now that algo speak's been around,
the internet is still flourishing.
It wasn't a flash in the pan.
People like you and I, Mike, who aren't on TikTok and don't really care about algorithms.
I mean, I've never been shadow banned or banned from any platform.
Me either as far as I'm aware.
Yeah.
I did have some issues when I initially launched the Nice Ashes podcast Instagram account,
but we are smoking cigars and talking about cigars and use cigar hashtags and a lot of
other people do as well, but there were some posts that they thought were encouraging people
to smoke cigars, which we would never, never do.
No, of course not.
And maybe they thought we were trying to encourage them to drink alcohol, which, you know, we
would, maybe we really wouldn't do.
Like I don't care.
I don't care if you want to smoke cigars or not.
You know what I mean?
If you do, you do.
Is that really banned on Instagram?
I mean, the liquor company sponsored US sports.
We weren't, we weren't banned on Instagram.
It was just saying your posts can't be promoted or can't be shown to people that aren't your
followers.
And I was like, well, at that time we only had like four or five followers on Instagram.
So I was like, well, I kind of need more than four or five.
We're near in the 100 mark man on our Instagram.
So I'm pretty excited.
Nice.
But yeah, I mean, I wasn't, we weren't banned from Instagram.
There we just got, I just got a notification that, you know, we weren't being promoted.
And then I, I think I deleted a post or two or change something up and then that notification
went away.
So I think we're fine again.
So I mean, I can definitely see why people would use it.
And if I consistently talked about controversial topics in a way that wasn't meant to be educational,
I would be a lot more concerned about it.
I think.
Right.
Well, and that's, that's the thing.
Like you can talk, I've seen some wild, wild internet content where people are pro map
and they want to make the maps an acceptable part of the alphabet people.
And it's like, that to me is disturbing in the extreme, highly fascinating from like
the dystopian internet roles perspective, which I'm coming from, of course.
But I can't believe that it's not banned, but they, they know that they know how to
get around all the rules and use the magic terms.
And then they don't get banned even though they're just as bad as 1930s, central European
political actors.
And you know what I mean?
Like to me, they're in the same group, like of no-nos, you know?
Yeah, for sure.
And it's all internet nonsense.
You can call a map what a map is.
You don't have to use, you don't have to use the acronym.
Oh, on our show?
Well, I'm just saying like in real life, you can just call them a pedophile.
That's allowed.
Right.
Like they're bad.
They're not, they're not on the good team.
They're on the bad team.
So the big consequence is similar to the consequence of ad blockers.
I don't know if you've seen the ad blocker versus YouTube battle that's been raging.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
So YouTube's been trying to ban ad blockers because they love ads.
And then the ad blockers just get better.
And then YouTube bans the new ad blockers and the ad blockers get better.
And it reminds me of the radar detectors in like the nineties, early two thousands.
They're selling radar detectors for cars.
And then the cops came out with the radar detector detectors.
So then the cars came out with radar detector, detector detectors.
And it was kind of like, when is this man is going to stop?
Can't you just drive the fucking speed limit?
You know, but whatever.
So algo speak, some of these terms are now being flagged.
And even if they're being used in an educational way.
Now this scientific article made use of the term benign a lot.
So they were saying, you know, even people trying to use, I don't know, sexual terms
in a benign way.
And I was like, well, define sexual terms and define benign because it depends on the
age group of your consumers.
And now in America anyway, you're supposed to be 13 to have a social media account.
But I don't think 13 year olds should be exposed to like maps and, you know, cornucopia people
and things of that nature.
So the Olympic committee.
Yeah, that for sure.
Or a beauty pageant.
But right anyway, Balenciaga, Balenciaga.
Yeah.
So, you know, it's kind of like, well, define benign.
So they use benign an awful lot.
And I think they might have been trying to tow the politically correct because they actually
have a disclaimer at the end of their thing where they're saying, you know, we acknowledge
for our bias in our thing that we declare no potential conflicts of interest with respect
to research, even though we're all white people that are, you know, straight or whatever.
And I was like, well, that's kind of an interesting disclosure at the end of a scholarly article.
That reminds me of the math people that made a women's studies paper and they just copied
Mein Kampf and then changed some of the words and then they submitted it.
Yeah, I remember hearing about that.
Yeah.
Under fake names.
Yeah, it went over about as well as you would expect.
Well, because it got like crazed and lauded, but then they revealed that it was just Mein
Kampf with changed words for different groups, right?
Yep.
Of people, whatever groups those may be.
I have no idea.
I could tell you in Minecraft, but not here, unfortunately.
Join my server, won't you?
It's almost like 1984 needs to get solved by 1776.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Well, there's another algo speak for the Tiananmen Square where they use just the month and date
about the year to circumvent that censorship somewhere over there wherever Tiananmen Square
was alleged to have happened.
Right.
Well, I know that right now and hopefully our UK listeners can confirm this, I guess,
in the comments, but I've heard that 1776 is banned in a lot of the texts there, like
in England because there's some unrest going on and people are rallying around that as
a cover, if you will.
Sure.
Well, and if anyone needs algo speak, it's the fucking people in the UK.
God damn.
I know.
Yep.
So that's, I don't want to say anything that's going to get anybody in trouble or anything
like that.
I don't know how crazy it is there right now.
Yeah.
Well, you know.
The things that we're hearing is like insanity from our perspective, right?
Yeah.
Well, and we're an American based podcast.
I know the, what is it?
The UK government has threatened to somehow extradite American citizens criticizing the
UK laws.
So, I mean, I guess good luck with that.
Yeah.
Completely illegal, but that's okay.
Do we need to throw more of your tea into the harbor?
I mean, what the fuck, dudes?
I sent Nate a meme a while ago.
It was great.
Can I describe the meme, Nate, that I sent you?
Oh, you sent me one?
Yeah.
This was a while ago.
Didn't I send it to you?
The one where George Washington was sitting in his house drinking a beer and then the
British police showed up and he unalived them and he ripped, pulled open his chest in 1776
was tattooed on his chest.
Yep.
I remember I sent you that one of, it was like an American guy and he was sitting there
and he was holding like, he had like a AR-15 on the table and he had a couple of handguns
and he was drinking like Coors Light and the caption was like, me waiting for the UK to
come extradite me.
Yep.
So, that's the sort of thing we share around in America.
Yeah.
But now to be very clear to everybody, I did hear a story, of course, who knows if it's
true, but I heard some stories of people that were criticizing the UK, then they flew to
the UK and upon landing, they were apprehended.
So apparently they're taking it very seriously there.
But I think, and I'm not sure, I don't know, how does international law work, Mike?
I mean, if I'm an American citizen traveling to the UK and I have a travel visa or I'm
just there as a tourist and I have X number of days there, right?
I have protections under the embassy and things of that nature.
They can't enforce laws upon me that I didn't break on their premises.
I went to London for a month and I wasn't overly critical of the Queen or anything,
God rest her soul, I guess, right?
But I wasn't out protesting the Queen because if I was in a foreign country protesting their
government, of course they can arrest me for inciting whatever.
But if I make comments not on their soil, go there and don't make those comments on
their soil and then go back home.
That's no big deal.
I think that there they can't arrest you if you go there, if you're on their naughty list,
but they can't extradite you from the States.
If you went to an interpol country.
Yeah, they can arrest me, but would they be able to like, would that be able to stick
or would the embassy come in and be like, the fuck you guys doing?
No, because you're not Brittany Greiner.
Of course it would stick.
Oh, fuck, that's right.
I have to be a lame ass WNBA player.
Holy shit.
Okay.
Yeah, you're not not Brittany Greiner.
New goal in life.
Or what's her face, the singer that brought marijuana into the Netherlands illegally.
Yeah.
So even if I say something not on UK soil, go there with the intention of being a nice
boy, they could arrest me and call me a naughty boy.
I think so.
I think that's the real threat is that if you're too much of a naughty boy and you get
on their no no list, if you go to any European country, I think they could extrate you because
they're part of the interpol system there.
If I have all my understanding correct, which I'm not 100% sure of course, because I'm not
a European.
But if I was Islamic, they'd have to just let me go.
You know, I think that's pretty much it.
You know, you just got to.
Yeah.
And they'd pay for all my stuff and then I could implement Sharia law and I'll be right
with the world, right?
I think there's some criticism around that.
I'm not 100% sure.
Not for me.
I want to be able to travel.
Absolutely.
I'd like to go visit the motherland someday.
Maybe when they tone down their, you know, closeness to fictional worlds.
Yeah.
What are we going to call that?
Because you can't call it 1984 because that's the actual title of the book.
Right.
We can call it like Algo speak.
We call it like BB, like big brother or something.
Oh, exactly.
It reminds me of V for Vendetta, to be honest with you right now.
I know.
I was thinking about V for Vendetta a lot during this research and stuff.
And I was like, you know, I thought of the quote in there when the people with the Guy
Fox masks, just the regular people are going against the government.
And one of the people, they're in a car like passing and somebody, I can't remember, goes,
what do you think is going to happen?
And the response was the same thing that happens anytime unarmed people go against people with
guns.
Right.
So as far as I know, V for Vendetta is not banned in the UK.
So I'm not saying watch it, but remember, remember the 5th of November.
That's interesting.
We're talking about Algo speak in the sense of, hey, this social media platform that all
these kids are using, it's banned in all these words, man.
There's actual people living in the UK that can't use a lot of these words for fear of
prosecution.
Right.
Well, again, we live in America, so you can say some pretty crazy things and the government
is totally okay with you doing that.
But you can make some pretty wild statements.
Crazy to an extent, but yes.
Right.
Yeah.
You can have some pretty crazy beliefs and then say some pretty wild things that are
blatantly untrue.
As long as you're not Alex Jones.
Yeah.
And you can even publish your books and convince an entire swath of the population that you
found a magic hat in the middle of the desert with golden things in there from God.
And you can have multiple wives and soaking is somehow not sex.
Oh yeah.
I just learned about a new style of rap called drill.
I can tell.
Okay.
Have you heard of drill?
Nope.
I heard of mumble rap, but I didn't understand a word of it.
I've heard two different versions of events.
There's the official version, which is, oh, it's just a style of hip hop that's not about
sex and drugs.
It's about violence.
And then there's the criticism, which is like, these are gang members who are describing
killing people and this legal to produce drill and people have been arrested and prosecuted
based on their songs for murders that were previously unsolved.
So they're like snitching on themselves with this style of music kind of, you know, explaining
their gang land killings in inner city gangs.
And that's perfectly legal in the United States, which is wild, you know, but it is fine.
They can't arrest you for doing drill.
They cannot arrest you for doing drill, but they can use this music to assure their investigation
of a crime that has been committed.
So it's leading them to their suspects because they're self admitting murders.
They're fucking morons is what they are.
Like if they were making these drill songs about not real incidents, that it would be
perfectly fine.
Change a name or an event, homies.
Come on.
I mean, God damn it.
Yes.
And they're playing it on like music stations like over there.
So that's how quote unquote free our free speech is like you can make a song about murder
and they'll play it on the radio.
Yes.
Do you want to hear another interesting song to bit Mike?
This really has nothing to do with algo speak, but there was a very popular song by a very
popular artist who got away with saying fuck on air on every single station in America,
but one, the song you've certainly heard, the artists you certainly know, she is on
record for congratulating the radio station that censored it out, but it was the only
one station in America.
The song is poker face by Lady Gaga and not all of the pokers are pokers.
Some of them are fuckers and only one station caught it and censored it out.
I have never heard that.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
Isn't that wild?
I've also heard that the, one of the disturbed songs where they're saying all the people
on the left wing say, it's not actually raw.
It's fuck, but you know, like in a guttural scream kind of sense.
So it could honestly be anything.
It could be all the people on the left wing say, I'm trying to contact you about your
car's extended warranty, but like in a guttural kind of way.
Right.
It's disturbed.
I'm not going to tell you about anything.
Not drill rap, but anything else.
Yes.
I don't think that the members of disturbed who are by the way, all 50 some year old family
men now it's the perfect cover.
Mike is the perfect cover.
Yeah.
They might be involved with illegal activity, but it's not violent or illicit illegal activity.
Just like it wasn't Kyle gas putting that guy up on the roof at the Trump rally.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, it's wild and crazy times.
I mean, I'll go speak is one hand a way to circumvent censorship, which is good, but
it also serves as a way for the bad actors to circumvent legal repercussions, which is
bad.
The algorithms will only ever update to include the new words that are created.
And I don't know that they'll ever, unless there's a big enough backlash in the sense
of a mass exodus of users from the platform.
I don't know that they're ever going to update their AI or their algorithms to take contextual
hints or cues to determine which content to keep and which content to delete or deprioritize.
So it potentially could be, and I guess like pig Latin, I don't know the origins of pig
Latin or if that's a racist term.
I don't think it is.
I don't know.
Well, like that was a way to speak coded to other people.
It's not a complicated cipher by any stretch, but you know, ciphers and coded language have
been prevalent probably for as long as humans have been speaking, I would think, right?
Oh, for sure.
I mean, there's graffiti in Roman cities.
So yeah, for sure.
But I guess like algo speak could evolve.
Well, it will continually evolve as the AI and algorithms evolve to circum or to stop
it, right?
So it will eventually come to the point where for that rhyming stuff, like give the dog
a bone means telephone and then it got shortened to dog.
So it would, it will eventually get to the point where it will be something like, Hey,
this is the dinner party group.
And you're like, the fuck are you talking about?
And that means unvaccinated people.
But you would never know that based on just dinner party.
This is a dinner party group.
Cool.
I guess.
Like, well, I don't see much food here.
I came hungry.
What are we doing?
You know, so I guess it could eventually potentially evolve to the point where unless you keep up
to date on it and like cutting edge leading edge of all of this stuff, at some point,
this lingo is going to be unintelligible to those that aren't actively participating in
it.
Right.
And there's context.
I one time heard an elderly gentleman.
This is years ago at a gun range talking.
He said, Oh, we all bleed red here.
That was his code.
Yeah.
You know, yes.
Which was instantly understandable to everybody listening.
Well, yeah, you've got the, you know, that, and then you've got the blue bloods.
Right.
Exactly.
And, you know, for Americans, that's easily understandable.
That's an old, I don't even know what you would call it.
Just an old, um, linguistic thing.
You've got, you've got that for a lot of things like the purple hairs, right?
Like the old, old, uh, elderly population.
Blue hairs.
The blue hairs, blue hairs, purple hairs are different group.
Yeah.
We can't talk about the purple hairs.
Sorry.
Purple hairs from the record.
Let's write that from the record.
Yeah, the blue hairs, elderly people.
So there's always kind of these little terms to describe as, uh, something else.
I don't know.
Do you know anything about the history of the blue hairs?
Like is it, was that because it was not, uh, not allowed or socially acceptable to call
them elderly or?
They die.
The elderly women with gray hair would dye their hair.
Well, I know that.
That's bad and sometimes their hair would turn blue instead of like blonde.
Yeah.
Like that is literally.
I mean, I know that, but it wasn't really to circumvent anything.
Like nobody was, it was just an easier way to say that old person got bad dye for their
hair or something.
Yeah.
Basically.
Like that's too long to say.
Like, oh, hey, they grow the blue hairs.
And then it just kind of evolved into anyone that was a gray hair really.
And you'd say, oh yeah, the blue hairs are here for their dinner at three 30 in the afternoon.
Yep.
The gray plague.
Yep.
I know in an episode of a bluey, which is a great show, if you have kids and even if
you don't have kids, but they talk about the gray nomads and it's a Australian or New Zealand
show and the gray nomads are the old people that have the, the big campers and they drive,
you know, 20 miles below the speed limit.
And so the main characters don't want to get stuck or the dad doesn't want to get stuck
behind the gray nomads.
But of course they ended up doing so.
But you know, gray nomads.
I mean, that's another kind of term.
In America, we would call them snowbirds, right?
Like the elderly people that have the disposable income, they have the camper, the big RV,
and they go down to Florida or Arizona when the winter comes, you know, they're called
snowbirds because they leave when the migratory birds do.
Yep.
I have another good one for you.
I think I've told you this before.
Boomer cleaner.
Okay.
I don't think you've mentioned that to me before.
Do you tell?
Yeah, the boomer cleaner is what the young guys are calling COVID-19.
I was told that by my teenage nephew.
That's terrible.
Yep.
That's what the young guys are calling it.
I'm like, that is awesome.
My cigar has been out for a little bit, so I hope you're close to being done, Mike.
Mine just went out and I'm not going to relight.
I have probably an inch left and it's getting, I was getting that same sour note at the end
as I did with the other one.
Yes.
So I was like, no, we're done.
We're done.
Well, let's do, let's do final cigar thoughts.
I thought the last bit got sour as well.
I almost, I feel like I almost like the Connecticut a little bit better.
I feel like the pairing of the Connecticut wrapper and the sweet was better implemented.
I wanted to like this cigar.
It was very pleasant, but mediocre.
And I already rated it on our list so you can see what I put it as.
That's exactly what I was going to put it at as well because I definitely liked the
Connecticut better.
I think the overall, we both rated it a three.
I think the overall pairing of the Connecticut leaf with the sweet was better implemented
than the sweet and the Maduro.
I would still recommend the factory smokes sweet over either of these.
Yes.
But I recommend the, yes, but I recommend the refriter's sweets Connecticut over the
Maduro.
Right.
For sure.
So my impression for the Maduro was that this is a mid tier at best Maduro cigar with a
sweetened cap and the sweetened cap hides some of the imperfections of the leaf so they
could charge a little more for a lower quality product.
Whereas the Connecticut was actually paired together well, it smoked better.
It was just a better cigar overall.
Not that the rough rider Maduro was bad.
It was just boring and it did get sour.
It was boring.
Yes.
And the Connecticut did as well, but if you slowed down on the Connecticut, it was fine.
And the first two thirds of the Connecticut, I was eagerly smoking it.
I mean, it was just, it was very nice, whereas the Maduro was a little, it was underwhelming
in the sense that I would have rather been smoking another Connecticut from them.
For sure.
It's just not, it wasn't impressive to me.
It was perfectly fine.
It's a fine stick.
If I had this out on the golf course, it would be perfectly acceptable, both of them.
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
But for sitting down and talking or playing a board game, no, no.
I'd want something else.
Yeah.
And I think that if it came down to it, if they were priced the same and they were in
the store or on sale online somewhere, I would buy the Connecticut over the Maduro.
But I would buy the factory smoked sweets over either of them.
So there's that.
I agree.
100%.
Because we both have factory sweets in our Hamidors at home.
We do.
So we are biased.
Yeah.
Our personal stash.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like, so we're biased, I guess.
But it's a good place to start because until we can beat that factory smoked level, we
can't even bring up the cigar that shall not be mentioned by which all others are judged,
you know.
Yeah.
Well, that's the whole point of the show is.
So let's do a little cost comparison.
Either of these versus the factory smoked sweets, which is the cheaper stick?
Factory smoked sweets, of course.
That's what I thought, for sure.
Factory smoked sweets are cheap.
Yeah, they're like 100%.
They're reasonably priced.
Yes.
That's what my inclination was that I thought these would be a little bit more.
I did see, like I said last episode, I looked for pairing suggestions on these and the Tart
suggestion.
And there was a suggestion of like Merlot.
And I was like, well, that's going to be a whole different podcast if I crack and open
a bottle of Merlot.
Right, right.
But they said, you know, like it's an affordable stick.
And I was like, yeah, but you got the factory smoked sweets, which is infinitely better.
Now having smoked both of them.
These cost more than double the price of a factory smoked.
Holy shit.
More than double.
Yeah.
These are about the price of a Moontrans.
Which is still a budget.
OK.
Well, if we're paying the price of a Moontrans, then fucking smoke a Moontrans.
You know what I mean?
I agree.
No, I completely agree.
I know you agree.
Yeah.
But that's the point of the show.
Is it worth it to spend double the factory sweets on these?
No, absolutely not.
But is it worth it to spend the same price on a Moontrans?
100% all day long.
Take that to the bank and whatever they say, I guess.
I don't know what the algo speak for that is.
Don't have your accountant look into it because that means sex worker.
So I don't know why you'd be sharing your cigar purchases with your sex worker, but
you do you.
That one took me totally by surprise because again, I'm not looking for that sort of content.
You're not looking, but the reasoning behind it is accountant is such a benign and boring
job that nobody's going to look further into it.
Somebody starts mentioning like, oh yeah, I spoke with my accountant the other day.
You're going to be like, I don't give a fuck.
Where's the spicy memes at?
But they're really talking like they banged their sex worker or something.
Like I don't know.
Who knows?
I don't know what these kids do these days.
Had a date with an Olympian.
Indian.
Yeah.
At least we can make drill rap and put it on the radio.
Yeah.
Oh shit.
The cops are here.
What the fuck?
Just kidding.
So.
All right.
Well, uh, get the factory smoke sweet instead of either of these.
But if you see the Indian head rough rider sweets, Connecticut, not a bad pick, not a
bad pick.
I agree.
Thanks for listening.
Be safe.
Welcome back guys.