Hello, hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of Fluently Forward.

Today on the podcast, we are going to be covering what the theme and the vibe of 2025 was in terms of pop culture and real culture and what was happening online.

Why I think it was kind of the year of brain rot and what's underneath all of these online brain rotty moments

that kind of, I don't know, put us all together, you know, the moments that we remember of

2025, the patterns beneath it. And what I think the year of 2026 is going to be for all of us

in life and culture and pop culture. So stay with me here for this episode because this isn't

quite like a deep dive on a celebrity or a conspiracy theory, although there's elements of both

inside of this. But it's more of a look back on 2025. And I wanted to do this episode because

I saw a TikTok the other day that was compiling all of the best moments of 2025. And as I was watching that video,

I was like, damn, this is kind of disturbing because all of these moments are so online and

nonsensical. And some people in the comments were like, wow, 2025 was really the year of

brain rot. Like we're totally cooked. Even saying the phrase cooked is like such

online language. But that's really how the past year has felt. And it's interesting because

we talk about how all of these algorithms online divide us so much. Like you can have four people

living under the same roof in the same house. But because of their different algorithms, at the

dinner table, each person might be talking about a completely different side of the internet

that somebody else might not even know existed. And there's been a lot of talk about this,

how as the years go on, there's less of a monoculture. I mean, I remember back in the day with

American Idol, you would always know who won, or every single football game or the Macy's Day Thanksgiving parade, like everybody would gather for these moments.

And it seems like now everything's just really split off and fragmented.

And you have a few of the monoculture situations.

You have, I don't know, when like, S&L skits go viral, when Luigi shoots someone, when the submersible ends up crashing at the bottom of the ocean.

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