< The real meaning of "6 7"

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BRITTANY LUSE, HOST:

So there's this trend that I cannot stop thinking about, and maybe you can't either - 6-7.

KIRA: My dad is trying to understand what 6-7 is. And, like, I don't know. Adults shouldn't use 6-7.

AUGIE: But that's kind of, like, what makes it fun 'cause parents don't really understand.

ALEX: I kind of feel bad for the parents.

LUSE: I cannot remember the first time I heard it, but it's been everywhere for months. And I have a very special guest here with me to talk about it. Sanidhya Sharma, welcome to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE.

SANIDHYA SHARMA, BYLINE: Hi, Brittany. Thank you so much for having me.

LUSE: Sani is an intern here at NPR, and he approached us about doing a story about this hugely popular trend. Sani, do you remember the first time you heard about 6-7?

SHARMA: Honestly, the first time I heard it was because of LaMelo Ball, an NBA player for the Charlotte Hornets who's, like, 6 feet, 7 inches tall. And all the 6-7 stuff was directed at him on TikTok. So that's just what I thought it was.

LUSE: Yeah. Sure.

SHARMA: But it went so much further than that. Six-7 is something kids just started shouting out this year.

LUSE: (Laughter).

SHARMA: It's a meme that reached a lot of kids, both in the U.S. and globally, because it spread partly through the internet. Math teachers reported not being able to get through their classes because their students just keep saying these two numbers.

LUSE: I mean, I have to say, I'm with the teachers (laughter). I've just been baffled by this. And I've seen so many posts, tweets, think pieces and explainers flying around trying to break down the trend to, you know, the old people like myself. So for those who may not be familiar, the gist is whenever you hear the numbers six and seven said in succession, you repeat them, and you do a little gesture with your hands. It looks like, you know, you're trying to decide between the two numbers or - I don't know - like, weigh two palm-sized oranges, let's say. And boom, call-and-response done. It makes absolutely no sense. It's not really meant to mean anything. It's just, like, an inside joke with no inside. I don't know. The whole thing is like, if you read too much into it, then you're kind of missing the point. So I'll say, I'm actually less interested in what the 6-7 meme means and more so interested in what it says about youth culture today.

SHARMA: No, for me, too. I just wanted to hear what made it so enjoyable for kids to participate in and what it actually brought to their lives that we might not be able to see.

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LUSE: Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luse, and you're listening to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.

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LUSE: We're going to get into how 6-7 became one of the biggest memes of 2025. But first, I want to return to the phrase we talked about last week, and that phrase is public media. The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 said that local public media stations should be responsive to their communities. To this day, that's what NPR member stations are doing in so many towns and regions where newspapers have stopped publishing by providing news and information to everyone. Even as digital paywalls rise elsewhere, we offer these resources for free, regardless of anyone's ability to pay. We still believe in this core commitment of public media at NPR. We always will.

But federal funding for public media, including NPR and local NPR stations, has been eliminated. You can help as we move into this uncharted future together by signing up for NPR+ at plus.npr.org. It's a recurring donation that gets you a bunch of perks like bonus episodes and more from NPR's podcasts, and it's an easy way to support public media. If you already go the extra mile as an NPR+ supporter, thank you so much. If you're not part of the Plus community yet, you can join right now at plus.npr.org. And, of course, I left you a link in the description of this episode. Now, let's get to some culture.

OK. So, Sani, you looked into this - 6-7.

SHARMA: I sure did. And the first thing I want to get into is what came before 6-7.

REBEKAH WILLETT: Growing up in rural Wisconsin (laughter), kids' culture eventually made it there, but it took a long time.

SHARMA: That's Rebekah Willett. She's a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies kids' culture. Six-7 isn't really new in the sense that kids have been sharing slang and memes forever.

WILLETT: When I was growing up in the '70s, I had a cousin who lived on the East Coast, and she would come to visit in the summer and introduce, like, the cool new slang. That's how kids' culture was transmitted. I learned the word dough to mean money in the 1970s from my cousin.

LUSE: (Laughter) Yeah. I mean, I know exactly what she's talking about. When I was a kid in the '90s, I learned new hand-clap games and songs from my cousins who lived in other cities. You know, my friends would pick up things from their camp friends from other states, and then we would share what we learned with each other.

SHARMA: And I remember when I was growing up in New Delhi, India, I was already so aware of all the Hindi memes and slang. But there was this rush that came from being in on trends that would trickle down from American internet. Not in, like, a weird, like, oh, America is so great and we want to know what's going on way, but we loved it because we could make it ours in so many ways. A meme I especially remember was Dat Boi, which was just a clip art image of a frog riding a unicycle. That's really it.

LUSE: (Laughter).

SHARMA: A classmate in 11th grade, I remember, printed out a cardboard cutout of it for their birthday party, and we were all gagged and gooped.

LUSE: (Laughter).

SHARMA: But that mechanism of global memeing (ph) has only sped up.

WILLETT: So I did a very quick poll of my international colleagues, including non-English-speaking countries. Six-7 in English has, of course, moved around the globe at pace.

SHARMA: And I think the total contextlessness of 6-7 is part of why it spread so fast. Kids in the U.S. are saying it. Kids in other countries are saying it. And none of them need to get anything because there is nothing to get. And it tracks, too, because so much of kids' culture has always been built on pure silliness, which, in my opinion, is one of the best things about being young.

YALDA T UHLS: It kind of fits into what some researchers call anti-sensical play.

SHARMA: That's Dr. Yalda T. Uhls, founder of UCLA's Center for Scholars and Storytellers. She has also spent time studying kids' digital media and culture.

UHLS: Kids are using randomness as a creative outlet, a bonding tool, a way to signal belonging. And the meaning of the meme is less important than the feeling of participating in a joke with your friends and connecting with your friends on something that is outside of the adult world.

LUSE: OK. But the thing about 6-7 is, like, a lot of it was transmitted through the internet - right? - like, right where adults could see it, too.

SHARMA: Yeah. And the first thing the adults wanted to do with it was make sense of it.

CALLIE HOLTERMANN: There was this huge crest of interest in it where a lot of national news outlets started covering it.

SHARMA: That's Callie Holtermann, a reporter from The New York Times who writes about style, pop culture and Gen Z. She wrote a story about 6-7 in November.

HOLTERMANN: There's also, though, this feeling that so many of us want to feel like we are plugged in to youth culture. Maybe it is a little bit related to the fact that, like, we all still want to hold on to being young or in the zeitgeist. So I do think there is some interest in the part of older generations, especially older generations that grew up online, in trying to stay plugged in to that online discourse that has, in some way, moved on from them.

LUSE: Oh, I can totally see that (laughter). I mean, you know, millennials were like the OG internet memers (ph). Like, I know a lot of our memes from back in the day didn't make any sense. And now kind of being on the other side of the fence, I could see how that would make some millennials, like myself, maybe feel a little older than they would like.

SHARMA: Well, I'm Gen Z, and I'm absolutely sure that'll never happen to me.

LUSE: (Laughter) OK. OK.

SHARMA: Anyway, parents might just also have less of a handle on what kids are looking at these days. Here's Anna North, senior correspondent at Vox, who wrote a piece on Gen Alpha's culture.

ANNA NORTH: When we just had television, like, the television lives in your house and your parents walk by and see it. But now, if you're a kid, you have a TV in your hand. It does, like, reverse the power dynamic in sort of a weird way, where suddenly your parents are like, whoa, like, you know, you know about this thing. I don't know anything about this thing. Explain 6-7 to me. Explain Skibidi. We're, like, looking at an 8-year-old and being like, tell me what you know.

LUSE: (Laughter) That is such a funny way to put it, but yeah.

SHARMA: So all that might explain why some adults wanted to understand 6-7 so bad. But what I also really wanted to know is what it brought to kids' lives.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: (Chanting) Six, seven, seven. Six, seven, seven. Six, seven, seven. Six, seven...

KIRA: For me, it's, like, really satisfying to say.

AUGIE: Well, it's kind of just, like, an excuse to be loud and yell.

LUSE: That's coming up. Stick around.

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SHARMA: A public school in Manhattan gave us permission to talk to students but requested we didn't name the school. I talked with five middle schoolers, and we're only going to be using their first names because they're minors.

SACHA: My name is Sacha (ph). I'm 13, and I'm in eighth grade.

KIRA: My name is Kira (ph). I'm in eighth grade, and I'm 13.

AUGIE: Oh. My name is Augie (ph). I'm 12, and I'm in seventh grade.

ALEX: My name is Alex (ph). I'm 12, and I'm in seventh grade.

MILLIE: My name is Millie (ph). I'm 12, and I'm in seventh grade.

SHARMA: So first, I just wanted to know what made it so fun.

KIRA: For me, it's, like, really satisfying to say. And we love it when the entire class starts saying 6-7 when, like, the teachers are, like, unintentionally saying 6-7.

AUGIE: Well, it's kind of just, like, an excuse to be loud and yell.

MILLIE: Those numbers, like, pop up in anything. And just, like, when you say it, it's just - like, everyone, like, a bunch of kids will just know and just, like, will, like, connect.

SACHA: In my opinion, I think that's, like, different from, like, Italian brainrot, like, stuff like that.

SHARMA: OK. Sacha is contrasting 6-7 with another kind of meme that's popular with kids right now - Italian brainrot. Italian brainrot is kind of weird AI-generated creatures that have nonsense fake Italian names. For example, a shark wearing Nike is called Tralalero Tralala.

LUSE: (Laughter) I've heard of this. I've heard of this.

SHARMA: And that's a very internet-based thing, but 6-7 is different. It bridges the culture they have online with the culture they have in real life.

SACHA: You can find 6-7, like, in the real world, like, in a food order or, like, in math class.

KIRA: You don't just walk across the street and you don't hear someone say Tralalero Tralala unless it's, like, a 5-year-old. But, like, you can say 6-7.

LUSE: Oh, that is so interesting. I mean, I can imagine that that just multiplies the fun.

SHARMA: Mm-hmm. And most of them said they did find 6-7 through the internet.

SACHA: I started hearing 6-7 on, like, TikTok and YouTube.

KIRA: Yeah. Somehow...

SACHA: Yeah.

KIRA: ...I found this YouTube channel when I was just doomscrolling. And he was, like, reviewing the 6-7 meme, like, a second (ph) animation. And he was just reviewing it. I don't even know how I got there.

LIAM MCBAIN, BYLINE: Wait. I want to clear something up. So when I think of doomscrolling, to me, it means, like, being on Twitter and, like, looking at all the bad stuff in the world and the politics and whatnot.

SHARMA: That was IT'S BEEN A MINUTE producer Liam McBain, who was there talking to the kids with me.

MCBAIN: Does it have a different meaning for you guys?

SACHA: Yeah. What - in our, like, thing, it's - doomscrolling is when, like, you scroll on, like, YouTube Shorts or TikTok constantly for, like, hours and hours.

AUGIE: Yeah, like, for hours and, like, you don't look away. You don't pay attention to the outside world.

LUSE: I didn't realize that for kids, or at least these kids, the doom part of the doomscrolling is just the scrolling itself, like, not necessarily the content they're looking at.

SHARMA: Right. So they're self-aware about their relationship to the internet. But also, these students I talked to were really clear about how their generation is perceived - that they're too online, and a lot of their culture and memes and connections live there. That's how they spread 6-7 so quickly. But they wanted to push back on some of the narratives that adults have created about them.

KIRA: For some reason, they call us, like, iPad kids. But, like, half the time, I see them, like, always on their phones, like, on the train, on the sidewalk, especially my dad, though, 'cause he's always watching TV. I'm pretty sure a lot of people do that, too. And then he's, like, saying, you guys need to get off your devices. You guys have been on it too long. And he leaves it out - the TV on for, like, 20 hours every day.

AUGIE: Like, my dad, whenever we're, like, watching a movie or whatever, he'll be on his phone for, like, half the movie. And then he'll ask me to get off my device.

MILLIE: I kind of want them to know that, like, there's going to be all these stupid things that they're not going to be able to, like, catch up and get into, so they shouldn't try. Like, I want them to try and be, like, funny and all that, but they shouldn't, like, try and be up to date on it. Like, you kind of know what I mean? And that, like, we're going to be on our, like, phones and all that. But there's times where, like, we're off it, and you guys don't, like, realize that.

LUSE: I mean, they raise a good point. Like, adults judge iPad kids, but we are technically iPhone adults.

SHARMA: And that made me think of something Yalda had said, too. As much as the internet can be potentially harmful, the IRL space is just not as popping for kids or adults as it used to be. And all of us are navigating that.

UHLS: Concurrent with the internet launching, adults started not really allowing young children out in open spaces. We don't have malls. We don't have places for them to hang without adults around. The internet was coming up at this point, and it became a place - the third space - where young children could hang out.

LUSE: I've also seen that adults have had the police called on them or been investigated for letting their kids play or be out in public unsupervised. Like, that used to be normal.

SHARMA: And so because of all this, for better or worse, the internet is just where kids' culture lives now.

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SHARMA: Do you feel like if you're not online, it makes it hard for you to be friends with people in real life?

SACHA: Oh, yeah. I would say yes, 'cause now with all these trends going, you might not know about other trends that, like, make you popular or, like, normal if you don't follow trends.

KIRA: Wait. There's this Short that keeps appearing on my For You page, and it's this British girl screaming because her mom sold her iPad for a trip...

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT #1: Oh, yeah.

KIRA: ...To, like, Thailand...

SACHA: Oh, yeah.

KIRA: ...Where they can both go. And she's, like, cursing, and the mom is, like, not even doing anything. I don't know. Some kids just don't know how to function without their gadgets. Otherwise, they'll just, like, genuinely crash out.

MCBAIN: So I'm hearing that, like, you do kind of, like, need it in order to, like, you know, be connected with people and kind of know what's going on, but some people take it too far. So you got to touch grass.

KIRA: Yeah. Touch grass.

LUSE: They're so aware of the internet's ability to keep them isolated, but also very aware of how the internet helps them form relationships. You know, to a certain degree, it seems like keeping up with meme culture is important to their social lives. But also, you know, what I heard earlier from Millie, you know, about wishing parents wouldn't try to get in on it, it sounds like kids also want to keep these memes for themselves.

SHARMA: One of the kids, Alex, said he pitied the adults, actually.

ALEX: I kind of feel bad for the parents 'cause with all this, like, new weird slang that kids are coming up with, they can't really understand their child sometimes. So...

MILLIE: Yeah. My parents always get super upset about it, and they try and they want to, like, connect with us. But, like, they're always like, what is this about? Why are you being like this?

SHARMA: That made me think about something Anna North said.

NORTH: Something that a lot of folks said to me is that kids kind of want a place where their stuff is safe from adult eyes. And I think that's always been true, but I think even more so now that kids are under a lot of surveillance. You know, parents are tracking them on their phones. When kids make stuff for one another on YouTube or on TikTok, adults are watching it. They're critiquing it. Adults are always, like, hand-wringing and worrying about kids. And again, that's always been true. But now it's everywhere, all over the internet all the time. Kids log on to TikTok and see, like, teachers talking about how they can't read. You know, there's enormous scrutiny on this generation. And so I think kids want a place where it's just for them and adults don't get it. And 6-7 is something that adults don't get.

LUSE: So its meaninglessness is protective almost.

SHARMA: You hit the nail on the head. Here's Rebekah again.

WILLETT: Six-7 is about playing with power.

SHARMA: She says it's not just 6-7, but all kids' culture - the clapping games and the songs and the memes. It's all protective and about taking some power back.

WILLETT: One of the reasons I'm fascinated with kids' culture is it's those creative, playful spaces that happen in between the structures of their day. And a large part of those structures are imposed by adults. Sometimes I use the analogy of paving stones. Kids' lives are these paving stones that are quite tightly fit for them by adults. And their culture is like the grass and the dandelion and the anthills that emerge in between those paving stones, and there is a lot happening in those spaces. If we look, it really does show their creativity, their playfulness, their agency, their power.

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LUSE: Listen, I get that we're part of the problem here, like, talking about a kids' trend that they kind of wanted to keep for themselves. But 6-7 is kind of over now, right?

SHARMA: Well, I wouldn't count it out just yet. Get it?

LUSE: (Laughter) That was a good one. That was very good.

SHARMA: Anyway, I vote it's still around. But something else is around the corner as well.

MILLIE: Me and, like, my friends, we try and say it, but, like, it's dying down. And, like, there's this thing going around about a great meme reset of...

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT #2: Yeah.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT #3: [inaudibleible] going around (ph).

MILLIE: ...Yeah - of 2026. So it may be dead by, like, then 'cause - yeah.

SHARMA: Wow.

MCBAIN: Wait. Say more about the reset.

MILLIE: So I don't know. Basically, it's been going around. I heard about it. Like, they just want to take apart all the memes and, like, just have new memes for 2026 and start new.

SACHA: What I heard from it is that, like, all, like, the brainrot...

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT #3: The brainrot's going (ph).

SACHA: ...And all the, like, things are going to vanish. And, like, the old ones, like, the OGs are going to come back.

KIRA: We're going to get, like, OGs like Nyan Cat.

LUSE: Wow. The circle of meme life continues. Honestly, I just hope a potato flew around my room comes back. I miss that Vine. I miss that Vine. But I guess what I want to see doesn't matter.

SHARMA: And the thing I'm thinking about after all this is that we're just so lucky to witness the silliness and fun of kids' culture, even if it is from afar.

LUSE: Sani, thank you so much for looking into this trend that I still don't fully understand.

SHARMA: My pleasure, Brittany.

LUSE: That was Sanidhya Sharma, intern on the NPR editorial graphics team.

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LUSE: This episode of IT'S BEEN A MINUTE was produced by...

MCBAIN: Liam McBain.

LUSE: This episode was edited by...

AARON EDWARDS, BYLINE: Aaron Edwards.

NEENA PATHAK, BYLINE: Neena Pathak.

LUSE: Engineering support came from...

JAY CZYS, BYLINE: Jay Czys.

LUSE: Our supervising producer is...

BARTON GIRDWOOD, BYLINE: Barton Girdwood.

LUSE: Our executive producer is...

VERALYN WILLIAMS, BYLINE: Veralyn Williams.

LUSE: Our VP of programming is...

YOLANDA SANGWENI, BYLINE: Yolanda Sangweni.

LUSE: All right. That's all for this episode of IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR. I'm Brittany Luse. Talk soon.

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