The Wordcel Queen Of Silicon Valley — EP 89 Anna Gát

This week's episode is a little bit different. We're doing an intellectual deep dive into technology and society, and we're doing it with Anna Gat. She is the founder of Interintellect. It's a platform for having deep, thoughtful, meaningful conversations. Anna has developed a type of system over the years for having dialogues that are hopefully fruitful and that help people Add some intellectual texture to their lives. As such, we go through the tech industry, why people hate it, why people hate AI. Is this a good thing? Is this a bad thing? Is it warranted or not? We get into Elon Musk's writing style. We get into one of my favorite topics, which is engineers taking over the world and what this means for society. All kinds of juicy topics and on a Has big thoughts on them all. She is Hungarian by birth and a writer and, and screenwriter, um, by training and intellectual, uh, in her mid-30s. She basically changed her whole life to go chase after this inter-intellect idea due to some, some personal tragedy and drama in her life, which we get into a bit in the show. Um, she's just a cool, cool cat who has a big following online and among intellectual circles in Silicon Valley and beyond. And so, uh, you're going to enjoy this discussion. I am Ashlee Vance. This is Core Memory. Here we go. First of all, Anna, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you so much for having me.

It's a treat. I have all these friends that tell me I should be interviewing you.

Really? Oh, thank you, friends.

Reached out. Yeah, I got, I got lots of messages as well.

Really? Yes.

Wow. And, and so you're usually in New York, but you're doing some kind of a couple weeks in the Bay.

That's correct.

Yeah.

I'm actually on the fence about this a little bit because I'm based in New York. I've been living there for 2 years. Because if you're a European Jew, that's where you have to start. There are rules. That's like level zero. And now I'm thinking maybe I should come here.

This was going to be one of my questions.

Yeah, I'm feeling a strong pull and I'm emotionally conflicted about it. Yeah, because this is like so far away from home. Every time I walk around in San Francisco, I'm feeling like it's— I have a lot of friends here. You know, my investors are here. A lot of people I work with are here. But I might as well be in New Zealand in terms of like cultural proximity to where I'm from. I'm Central European. I'm technically from the Shire of Europe, if the Shire was something that commits horrible mistakes in wars and gets invaded all the time. We have like 2 hills and 2 rivers, one of which we don't like. So that's my like geographical backdrop.

You're Hungarian?

Yeah, I'm Hungarian. So here I'm like, you know, Alice in Wonderland. Like, you guys have everything. It's amazing.

All right, well, let's get into that in a second. But just briefly before we do that, I, you know, I, I intro'd you, but I was curious. I mean, how do you— you have an unusual life. How do you describe what you do?

Wow. It depends who's asking, right? I usually say that I'm a philosopher and a technologist. And if somebody's like, what's that? We don't understand. You lost us like 5 words ago. Then I say that my background is in philosophy and languages. And I run a technology startup.

Yeah. Okay. And you— and obviously you get a lot of attention for these salons that you have, this art of conversation and all of that. I mean, that's part of this and bringing this intellectual discourse to technology. Is that fair?

Yes. I mean, it was always my goal to build something where other people can run events that are not kind of poisoned by politics, that are not just about networking. They don't have a clear goal. That's the European side of me. And yeah, I run Interintellect. Anybody can host their own literary salons, workshops, book clubs there. It's going really well. We do very beginner-level stuff for young people, and we also now have the biggest publishers and the biggest thinkers, writers using our platform proactively.

And you guide people on how to make these successful?

So I don't know how long I should go back.

This is really the heart of what I'm interested in, your ideas. But anyway, now I just got—

I mean, you're a host as well, so I think we are colleagues in this sense. So my background is in languages and philosophy, but my career since my late teens used to be in film and drama. So I wrote plays, I worked with screenwriters and wrote screenplays as well. It was like European arthouse level stuff. But I also worked on more bigger budget stuff as a script doctor. And around 15 years ago, I started becoming very interested in the science of dialogue. And I started researching neurolinguistics, like what happens in the brain when 2 people are talking. I started looking at super early level NLP and what AI was doing at the time. In terms of languages and communication. And it was basically the understanding that since Aristotle, we had understood how to create good conversations in drama, but science is just catching up to this ancient knowledge to be able to mathematize it and express it through technology. I thought, okay, that's great. I spent 15 years trying to have fictional people have better conversations. And what if I did something that can do that for real people? And so Intersect was born first as an AI company, and I was building at the time very heuristics-based tools to help people have better dialogues. And then at some point I thought, this is too early. AI is too early for this. I'm just going to do super analog. Intersect literally started with an Excel sheet and my insomnia, and I built it that way. Can we do at scale materially better dialogues? for people without intervention. And so I started hosting. I mean, today we've done this tens of tens of times. We haven't had any toxic incident during any of the conversations for 7 years. So I know that's something in the kind of human engineering algorithm really beautifully works, but it's all theater. I take everything from Aristotle and classical dramaturgy. This is creating a set and setting, a play, and then let people play in that. And somehow the result is really good.

But you're not hosting all of these. So how do you push the other people in the right direction?

I don't push them. It's the magic. I host a lot of events myself on the platform. So I do a kind of role modeling, as VCs would say. It's really important. A lot of people, when they want to come on Interact and start their hosting career, they want to build their community, they want to build their practice, they first come to a couple of my events. And then of course I experiment and play with the genre a little bit, but they see the basic, which is a living room-sized group of people who usually don't know each other. There is a big topic or a big person present, something that removes whatever is being discussed from your immediate self a little bit that helps people have a little bit of space for the discussion. And then there is a way of doing it so that everybody joins in and everybody becomes a really good conversationalist, which is the magic part.

Yeah, it's like a lost art. And I see the children growing up. I have 2 boys who are actually quite personable and can strike up a conversation. I notice they're Not like I'm trying to compare them fully to their peers. I just noticed that these young kids are not the best conversationalists these days.

Well, just send them to Intern Select.

We'll help. So I wanted to go— I did want to go a little biographical. You come from a part of the world that's like near and dear to my heart. When I was— oh God, how old was I? I mean, I did a semester abroad in the Czech Republic at school, and then I did many months around the same time of backpacking through Europe. And Budapest was like this, um, when I went to visit there, it was a revelation for me. I was a Russophile growing up as a teenager and deeply into the Soviets and had read like all this Soviet literature. So just to like kind of get to see some of the remnants of this was, it was, it was cool for me. Um, I know it comes with a lot of baggage, but it was, it was cool to see for me.

Yeah.

And Budapest and then Prague kind of became my My two favorite spots. Prague's a little different these days than when I went to visit. I think I did my semester abroad in '99, so it was like it still was like a little more still had a few more less touristy and and and you had the gritty parts. Yeah, yeah. And it was I enjoyed that. Like they they did not like tourists. They didn't like Americans. It felt it was nice. You had to if you spoke a little Czech, you yeah you. the world would open up to you and it was cool. But so you grow up in this like quite famous family that's making a television, like an extremely popular television show, right?

Yeah, that was kind of wild. I always tell people here that my parents were super famous, but in a tiny country nobody cared about. So you learn a lot about fame and public life through that prism, that there is fame and it's so relative. In my Substack essays, I write a lot about fame and how, you know, I myself approach it. So my grandfather was a big film star during communism. One of my grandfathers, basically the regime picked him to be the everyman, the kind of Sean Penn-style roles always went to him.

Yeah.

He died when my mom was very young, so I never had a chance. Like, we never overlapped. And my parents, my dad had passed away and my mom is still active in her career. They spent their entire careers in television making TV shows. They had a couple of really big hits. I don't know, comparable in the US to the Golden Girls or something like that, like that level of you know, a basic tenet of culture, pop culture, or pop culture history.

I wonder, like, 80% of the population was watching these shows or something?

Oh no, 100%. There was one TV show. So you either watched My Mother in the '80s on Saturdays or nothing, or you didn't watch TV.

Okay.

These were the two options.

There was one channel.

Yes.

Okay.

Okay. Yeah.

And it was what?

Different times.

Like a sitcom or a drama or?

So they did a a comedic police show throughout the '80s. And then my dad did, I think his best TV show was just around the time of the change of the regime between 1989 and 1991, which took place in the army. But sadly, like the whole concept was the compulsory enlistment that still was going on during communism. And then basically communism disappeared underneath them. And they still did one more season because it was absolutely hilarious. I think that's a masterpiece. And then they stopped because this compulsion, this societal compulsion just went away. And then my dad also did throughout the '90s the first and to this day kind of the only big Hungarian sitcom. Basically, I think he sat down and on these VHS tapes watched a bunch of American sitcoms to try to decide, you know, the history and the format. And that ran, I think, throughout the '90s. So I grew up on the set. I grew up with the child actors there and saw how it's being pulled together.

So how did they— okay, so your mom's an actor.

Yeah.

And your dad's directing and writing.

He was a producer and director.

Okay. And then so—

Show creator.

And how— I mean, he must— they must have been confined in what they could say. Initially, or no? Were they pushing?

That's interesting. So in the '80s, yes. And I do remember I actually wrote about this in an essay, Three Prologues to Language, that one of my first interests in drama and dialogue science and dialogue writing was not even the fact that my parents were making these shows. I did learn, and I'm happy to talk about what you learn when you grow up that way. It was more that in the '80s, when I was still in kindergarten, there was this absurd vibe where parents adults were afraid of children, which you never really see. Maybe during the craziest woke era, you would see something like that. So I don't know, say you have a child who's 5 years old, and at home with your wife, you say that that article is clearly written by a propagandist, or that actress is only in this movie because, I don't know, she's with this big party officer. Or you would say that this hospital is falling apart because we went there to get a flu shot and, you know, there are like deer grazing in the corridors and the child is listening at the dinner table and you have to somehow ensure that the child is not going to go in and talk about it at kindergarten because then the kindergarten teacher hears it, who is maybe a big party apparatchnik, and they will report on you and you lose your job and nobody goes to university anymore in your family ever.

Yeah.

So I remember this weird tension and I think it does First of all, dictatorships and dictatorial structures do multigenerational harms to families, and people misunderstand how well they are able to keep an oppressive narrative outside their home. It actually poisons your relationship with your children, with your wife, everything. It's a full texture coverage in society. And so I remember that tension and always being told not to say things or say things differently when I engage with adults. And I think that was my first kind of peek behind the curtain that there is this thing we call language. And it seems like the truth, but that people might be like, there's subtext. I think I realized very early that there is subtext and that my parents are very, very aware of it.

And were your parents, were they trying to push buttons with their show or they were just trying, they, it wasn't that kind of show. They were just, they were just making entertainment. Like, was it a commentary, I guess, on the times?

I think through comedy, a lot of things are permissible. But I think it's very important for Americans to understand that during the Soviet regime, people didn't know, people could not fathom that it could ever go away. So I was working on a movie when I was still a screenwriter about the Chernobyl disaster and its coverage within the Hungarian evening news and the media. And I interviewed all these newsmen who worked like they were the morrows, you know, of, of, of Hungarian, um, the Hungarian media between like '85 and '89 or, or 1990. And, you know, I was very interested in the moral quandary of having professional excellence in such circumstances, um, because they were really the best, best, best, best, best, but the wider system was horrible. So what is your talent serving? I was very interested, um, um, in the movie. And one of the things that they always said was that even in, I don't know, September 1989, so one month before the Hungarian Republic was announced on the 23rd of October, 1989, on a balcony, they could not imagine that it's falling apart. The same way as we can't imagine that, I don't know, the United States would fall apart ever.

Right.

And if somebody comes and says that, you say it's Lindy, or that, you know, it has survived so many other things. And I think one thing that you learn as an Eastern European is that anything can go away. And if we like something and if we want it to stay— not saying that communism was like that, but there are good things in the world, um, like apolitical conversation spaces— then you have to have a couple of people who do this as a job to fight for their continued existence.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it's one of the reasons I'm so interested in part of the world. It feels like they're just always, for centuries now, just in the— caught between Russia and Germany.

We are the halfway house. Like, Hungary is like right the invadable corridor. And, you know, I mean, um, there are noble aspects of that as well. Like, we— Hungary had a, um, a prime minister in 1940 who committed suicide over the— this very a dilemma, a moral dilemma, because he didn't want to give the railway up for the Germans to transport weapons across the country.

Yeah.

Because then your country basically becomes a target, right? Like a bombarded target. And he didn't want to endanger the population. And there was no way out. He killed himself.

Yeah. So, and when you were growing up then, so people would just recognize your parents on the street then?

Oh my God, absolutely. And my parents were paranoid about it. And ever since then, I feel really sorry for all famous people. It's terrible.

Yeah. And then especially—

I mean, you get a reservation more easily, but that's literally where it stops.

So many times. I mean, you just take on extra risk too by being someone of note.

Yeah, they were very, very much kind of visible in the system. And but I also think that because of that, they kind of left them alone because, you know, they weren't doing direct harm. It was all just quote unquote comedy. Yeah, very interesting. I think everything I do in my adult life, It basically comes from these inspirations in a way that I'm still exploring.

Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Brex. I spend all of my time inside of the world's most ambitious companies making rockets, semiconductors, robots. Very often the business is struggling and then all of a sudden things click and take off. Then the company's expenses spin outta control. They either have to clamp down, start counting pennies, Or cross their fingers, hope for the best that the quarter or the year comes out okay. Brex was built to handle exactly these situations. It helps you move fast, spend smarter at the same time. They've got credit cards, banking, expense management all in one place. They've got AI technology looking over everything, taking care of tasks for you. No more chasing down receipts. We use Brex at Core Memory. It has been a godsend and given me back so much time. Giants like Anthropic Zoom use Brex as well, and so do tens of thousands of startups. You should use Brex, and you can find out exactly how to do that by going to brex.com/corememory. So you get in, I mean, you've had, like you mentioned, this varied career. Um, and when I was researching—

Varied up to a point, and then I started Intersect 10 years ago and I haven't slept since, and it's just been that one thing. But yeah, before that it was crazy.

Yeah, well, I mean, that was kind of, there was a quote that I found somewhere in here about, about, um, You know, maybe I'm fast forwarding to this. Sure, go for it. You, you wrote, um, you wrote, I went on Twitter in 2018 because I had nothing. I had lost everything.

Yeah.

And I thought, okay, I woke up one day and I thought, I don't care. One thing I have is myself. And, and this is all leading up to, I believe, your move to the US around this time. So what happened? Why, why did you wake up in 2018 and have nothing?

I basically had a major life cataclysm in January 2015 because of a domestic violence incident that blew up my whole family, and I lost everything. I left basically with a suitcase. I got stuck in England at the time. I was doing very badly. I lost a lot of my friends and family members, and I basically restarted my whole life, put it back together. I had complete PTSD for a year, so I didn't have thoughts. And that was great because I could read any scientific book I wanted. My brain— I'm serious, my brain had no resistance. It was like an empty bucket, and I was just like shoveling coding and biology and whatever I could find into it. It was great. It was actually a very interesting time.

Meaning you had no thought, you had no—

No, I had no thoughts at all for 9 months.

Okay.

It was amazing in some weird way.

Your brain just shut down.

It just shut down completely. And so I just fed it like crazy. I was like, it will come back online at some point. It's like rebooting. And it did. And eventually it came back and I became a completely different person. So that was very interesting. And then basically the past 10 years, I put my life back together. At first I was working in like babysitting, catering, really customer service, basic, basic jobs, which actually are super useful now as a founder. Like I can train my customer service team because I literally have done that job. I did it when I was like poor. poor, traumatized immigrant in London. And then in 2016, I had the realization of what I had to do. I didn't want to be a founder beforehand. I just wanted to work at a place that is like Interintellect, and it didn't exist. And I was like, oh no, I have to become a startup founder. So I sat down, read a bunch of things about it, like, what is a startup? What are startup founders? And then basically, like, 2 days later, I registered a company. I also was reading this article. There was a New Yorker interview that Sam Altman gave in, I think, October 2016. And I was like, wow, this is how you make a real difference in the world. It's startups. It's not a production company. It's not a think tank.

That was the Y Combinator story.

Yes. And it was very funny because the first time I ever came to America when I was 35, Sam was my first meeting because I was like, you have to meet me because you changed my life with this weird article, with this weird interview. And that's why it's so important to always give interviews. You never know who's going to read it.

How'd you get in touch with him?

I called, DM'd him on X. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you met him here in the Bay Area? Yeah.

And he was still at YC and I brought him Far from the Tree by Andrew Solomon, which is one of the best books on changing the life of younger people or beginners. And then a 1.5, 2-year period started when I got a job in London working as a night editor on finance news. So I would go to work at 10:30 in the evening and finish at 6:30 in the morning. I would sleep a few hours and then I built Interns app for 1.5 years, first as the app and then as the platform for the community and hosting. And then slowly but surely it gained traction. I went on Twitter or X, as you mentioned. I was like, well, I don't have anything anymore. I used to have a status and famous parents and nice clothes. And now I'm sitting in this bedsit basically in London. And I have a suitcase and another suitcase for my books. Let's see what I'm made of. And after this experimentation, a couple of visits here, when I got to sit down with people and ask for guidance, I realized, okay, this is how Interntech is going to be. And then I just started raising money and kicked it off. And then 5 minutes later, the pandemic started.

Yeah, I mean, you talk about how quickly it happened, right? And that you were amazed that that this was possible. There is still this funny thing about Silicon Valley where—

Yeah.

I mean, you're reaching out to Sam as a total stranger.

Yeah.

I've always found this the whole time I've been reporting. It feels different to other industries.

Completely different.

Where, like, I don't know, maybe it happens. I'm not sure, like, a big pharma CEO or like, you know, the head of Exxon is just taking random meetings from people who reach out very often. I'm not sure why tech still is that way as it's gotten bigger and has a shape that's a little more similar to these other industries, but it still seems to exist.

I really believe in that. I mean, of course, tech is a very imperfect industry. It has people with various different incentives. And when we say tech, you can use it as a kind of Rorschach test where anybody can confirm their previous biases and think whatever they want. But I find that A lot of things that we say about America in any era is only really true about a specific part of the country. You know, there was a time in the 20th century when people equated New York City with starting from zero, right? When all the immigrants went to New York and you could move into, I don't know, tenements, and then one generation later get a law degree. There was a time when, you know, Hollywood was the American dream and people used becoming a star, a kind of metaphor for the American journey. I do think that that's Silicon Valley today. You don't— I always say that things that used to stop dates for me, you know, bring in investment and business for me in Silicon Valley.

Yeah.

Because here it's like, oh yeah, she's a little bit weird. That's really good. We've been looking for somebody weird. There's money in this. And I just deeply value it. I think for all bizarre people, you need a place where that's somehow a competitive advantage. And right now that's Silicon Valley. And people are like, I invest in, I mean, I'm sure you do that too. Like we are looking for the well-adjusted insanity that contributes to society and the future.

I looked for that in my stories.

Tell me.

I've never become an investor type.

Really?

No. I mean, I was, you know, I was a journalist.

Well, you can't for ethical reasons.

Definitely. I definitely couldn't when I was at the New York Times or Bloomberg. And then it's probably like a little bit of a grayer area now just because, well, I could do whatever I want, I suppose. But yeah, I just try never to get anywhere near investing in anything I'm going to write about. And so—

That's clever.

I write about a lot of stuff, so it's limiting, but it's sad. It's the thing I know the most about.

And I— Yeah, that's true.

And I have, I have I don't think it's absurd to claim a proven knack at identifying some folks who are going to do pretty well. So it could have been useful.

I invest in aerospace because I wanted to become an expert in something as an angel investor that has nothing to do with my day job.

I saw that. I saw you were in Airship Ventures, I think, or what? They're in Los Angeles, aren't they? Making—

There are a couple of really cool things there.

Yeah. Yeah. Making an airship. Aerospace is probably like the worst place you could invest.

It's like highest risk. You know, I think the chances for me to become a great angel investor are like not impossible, but down the line. So now I'm just following my heart. Okay, so let's see what happens.

Okay, so you're in London, you start reaching out, people like this weird person.

Yeah.

And then you're coming.

Not everybody, of course, but enough people. But you're—

and this is 2016-ish, and you're pitching this idea of creating this discourse, this intellectual boost to things. In my experience, the tech— if I'm trying to raise money for a documentary or something that's like more in the arts world or that comes with this intellectual trappings, it's much easier for me to do it in New York than it is in Silicon Valley, where—

Yeah.

You go to the people and you're like, well, you know, you'll be lucky to get your money back on this documentary. That's sort of the goal, is to end up with a really nice film Yeah. Get your money back and then we'll have some fun. You could go to premiere, you could see your name and you'll have made this art.

Yeah.

You know, and I find Silicon Valley people have a very hard time wrapping their head around why that would be of any value. So when, but when I look at your investors, I mean, people like Balaji and some other folks, these are very much, you know, full-on, full-on tech figures in this world. So yeah, I mean, did you find, obviously you found people were, were into this unconventional unconventional idea that doesn't immediately have the look of a hockey stick growth SaaS company or something like that.

Yeah. I mean, first of all, in 2016 and 2017, basically into 2018, so 2 and a half years or 2 years, I was doing just my own research and experimentation. So I did a pretty big private research on text messaging, on Twitter valence. Like, I relied a lot on what Spotify was doing with music and how to understand from lyrics and cadence the sentiment of different songs. And I thought that I could do that on language. And nobody really was doing this at the time. I was invited to give talks at X, or at the time it was called Twitter, in London. It was a new area. Everybody was focusing on blocking. at the time. So this was the era when the New York Times and the kind of established media branch in the US was very convinced that the internet is helplessly toxic and harmful. And the best thing we can do for people is to build walls and give them shields that they can switch on anytime they want. Nobody trusted that, I don't know, Twitter would itself build these tools or Instagram later on built their tools as well. And so I always wanted to do something positive because coming from academia and coming from cinema, I know that if the setting is right, people will have very, very fruitful conversations with each other and they will do deep association. Like on Interintellect, we have so many marriages, babies, books co-written, people moving to each other. So clearly setting leads to good conversations at scale, and then that leads to real change in people. And so I had a lot of domain knowledge. And by the time I realized that this was going to be something, something like Interintellect, which was mid-2019, I wrote a viral essay that just went crazy. I put on a waiting list on the internet and it just went crazy. And I was like, okay, so this is what people want. It was counterintuitive to me because I'm Eastern European, so I really wanted to do an app. And suffer, and this was fun. So I was like, I can't do something as a job that is fun for me. How am I going to suffer every day? And so I had you know I had to like resolve that internally, and then I started reaching out. So I had a lot of proof of concept, and I started just running it for free myself a lot a lot a lot a lot. And by the time my two rounds came, I was. Basically doing the only such company that is surviving and thriving and growing and where the core idea never went away.

Okay. Okay.

But Balaji wants me to— he wanted me to turn it into a DAO. And for a while, every single text message that I exchanged with Balaji was like, hey, how are you? You should turn Interntact into a DAO. Okay. Hey, how are you? Have you considered turning Interntact into a DAO? And I was like, is this a bot? Have you built a bot? I love Balaji. We are going to— we are collaborating Collaborating over the summer with the Network School. But obviously a lot of my investors have a lot of ideas of what we should be doing, and I hope that I will have the scope to be able to try a lot of these ideas.

Okay. He used to hate me.

Really? Why? Clubhouse incident?

No, I used to make fun of him on X because I think I said that his tweets were like, I forget what I said, something about sort of deranged fortune cookies. He would put out these.

He's so smart.

These, these. Yeah, yeah. He definitely is on some things. He would put out these, you know, just his big proclamations and everything.

And then he's the prophet, you know.

Then he made fun of me for having a female name, and then he blocked me.

Very mature.

But then he's come back the last year. He's he's just he sent me a DM.

Only Taleb blocked me. I feel left out.

Yeah, yeah. He's he's a big blocker, I think. But then Balaji reached out. He says he was like just a couple weeks ago. He said you're doing great stuff.

We should have him on the podcast.

That'd be interesting.

Um, and okay, like couples therapy, you could have Esther Perel mediating, trying to resolve this thing.

I imagine he probably doesn't even know why he didn't like me originally. Um, yeah. All right, pod friends, I am here to tell you about SendCutSend. They are a manufacturing Phenomenon. Whether you're working on your own car or you're a giant automotive company, a rocket maker, if you need metal cut, machined, or bent, you're going to SendCutSend. They'll do it for you right, and they will do it for you fast. Go to sendcutsend.com/corememory for a 15% discount on whatever you're trying to make. We love SendCutSend. Go visit them. Today. Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna change directions on you a little bit. I wanted to set the stage, but then—

Thank you for being interested in my, uh, childhood.

No, a lot. I, I really want to talk.

I think it's really weird and interesting, but I don't, you know, I'm like, are people interested? And then you are, so that's great.

No, no, I'm into it. But then, but then I just wanted to explore some ideas with you. Um, and so I just want to kind of bring people up to speed, give a little flavor to where you're coming from. Um, What would you say, like, given your interest? Okay. Given your journey. Yeah. And, and the role that X played in it, and then also your fascination with conversation.

Yeah.

And dialogue. How would you rate X in this moment in time in 2026 and its value to our world?

I had a lot of conversations about this with my friends and also in the Internet's Back Discord. A lot of people are extremely mad at Elon. And they find that X, Twitter, is no longer the same. I really like it. I feel like criticizing X is a little bit like criticizing New York City. It's still the best place. Yeah, maybe this one theater closed or whatever subway line is now directed in a different direction. It's still unparalleled. My worry, actually, because you read up this quote by me where A 30, 40-year-old woman who used to have a life and now she lost it and she's building a new life. In 2018, you could go on X, on Twitter and rebuild. It was a very meritocratic system. If you were interesting and you had something to say, you were hardworking and people saw that you were consistent and not super unstable or not beyond the pale, at least you could get a job, you could find your spouse, you could Interintellect in many ways was born out of Twitter communities. We just expanded it and gave it a different format. I'm not sure you could do that anymore. Almost all my intellectual life these days that is not interintellect related is in group chats. I think if you're a young person, maybe the way of winning today or entering is to get into a group chat. But even that is just like 200 people. The chances of being discovered there, or going viral. There's just like much, a much harder journey. I think that—

Why is it harder now on X?

Because the algorithm works differently. Because a lot of people left or they are inactive. I'm not saying that if you're hyper talented at responding and getting in touch with people, you can still win. But I don't think that it is at the scale as it was for like my generation entering tech.

So you had to A place where you could show off is probably not the right word, but show what you could do, get a little bit of attention, and fast forward your life to some degree.

Yeah, like in the French cafe where you could hang out with Sartre and whatever. And if you said nice things in the cigarette smoke, then they would publish you or something. Twitter was really like that in the glory period when I was using it for this purpose. I think today that's probably Discords. Which I know less about because I run our own, but I spend less time on other Discords. But it's in group chats. And to get into a group chat, I mean, it's already a gated thing. You can't just fight your way in.

Yeah. You brought up Elon. How do you feel about Elon?

I have to say, okay, I'm just sharing this because this is a public platform, and why would I not share something really embarrassing about myself? I am a complete sucker.

Are you about to tell me you have one of his children?

If I do, I don't know about it. So well done, Elon. I didn't notice. I, as a linguist, I'm completely obsessed with men with good syntax. And Elon has an amazing syntax. Like, his use of the English language is just superb. Obviously, it's a proxy for high intelligence and analytical skills, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm a little bit forgiving. Clearly, he's doing some things that I don't agree with or I don't understand or that seem very kind of knee-jerk reactions to things. I'm also not, you know, in the business of encouraging fascism to take over social media. So maybe he should be more careful there, Elon, if you're listening. But his syntax is to die for. Like, we have to give this to the guy.

You're not wrong. You're refreshing my memory now. I remember when I was working on the book and I was always struck by his writing style. I was struck by his emails. They're very efficient. He's very, he hardly ever makes a error of punctuation. He actually gets really upset if somebody is writing to him, does make one.

His subclauses, A+. Yeah, yeah. Consistently.

He does have— he's got a very distinctive way of communicating and clearly takes pride in his writing when he writes those big master plans and all these things.

It's a mathematical skill proxy. So if you listen to— I love watching interviews with great mathematicians, even sometimes their English is not extremely developed, like they have a limited vocabulary, but their syntax is so strong because it's a mathematical skill that they will come across as really proficient English speakers. And so when Elon speaks, I feel the kind of numerical areas in my brain flare up because it's like the formula is perfect. And I really, as a private pleasure, I really enjoy that.

So in, I think it was 2024, you wrote about You wrote about this, this difference between the conservatives and the liberals, this view of, of, um, the, the liberals think the past was sort of bad and we want to head to a more glorious future. The conservatives—

The public nostalgics.

Yeah. Yeah. And the conservatives want to hold on to, to what was, and times used to be better, and how this had transitioned to this world where it's kind of like the autists versus— what was, what's the second group you Oh, I don't know if I remember.

That was a 2 by 2.

The public nostalgics.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, and—

Yeah, yeah. And the argument was that a group that's, or a dichotomy, a division line that's maybe more important right now in America than left and right is whether you're a public nostalgic or not.

And it's kind of like, do you think the, how do you feel about the future and tech and where we're heading? So I think that was from 2024 essay.

Yes.

Is this still something I was hoping to get into this, if it's still top of mind to you?

Yes, it was. The conservatives were saying that the future— sorry, the conservatives were saying that the past was good. The public nostalgics were saying that the future will be bad. And then the autist culture was saying that the future will be good. And the wokes were saying that the past was bad. That was the 2 by 2. Now I remember.

Yeah.

That was kind of shocking to me when I started coming to America a lot. And now I'm in the process of relocating and, you know, being based here primarily. I did not expect this much public nostalgia in America as I do. I remember going to these East Coast conversations where extremely healthy, wealthy, well-educated people who are clearly winners of the liberal world order, They went to school, they figured out even if they had student loans, they have paid them back. They have great jobs, a MacBook, an Apple Watch, a Tesla, whatever serves them. And they were extremely negative about the future and without being positive about the past. And I just felt that that's kind of shocking. I started being curious about the intellectual honesty of it. whether they can really think this or this is something with which you gain followers or get tenure. I'm still not fully sure. I find it very strange. Maybe this is a first world problem that you get to be bummed out about the future. If you come from an up and coming country, all the good things for you are in the future, so you better work for it. It's definitely the most shocking thing to me about American culture. Types of philosophies that Europeans have long abandoned, like first-generation Frankfurt School critical theory, are flourishing here. And people expect to read books written in 1948 as a trauma reaction to a massive unprecedented defeat and destruction in the Second World War and trying to live on. In that, in the aftermath, they are used in a flourishing America to try to interpret today's world. And it's just, it doesn't work. That was not why it was written. So, like, it's shocking.

I mean, I'm really into this idea and for a bunch of reasons. I guess as a journalist, you are supposed to be somewhat cynical or skeptical by nature, you know? And I have all those bits and pieces. I get, either celebrated or bagged on for being, you know, generally optimistic, though, in my, in my coverage. I've always been like an optimist at heart. It's just sort of where I'm at. I get fascinated by the people who are pushing things forward in interesting ways. I get, I get, I just am into people who are passionate about whatever they're working on. I don't really place a ton of judgment. Like when we made the movie on Bryan Johnson or whatever it was, I was really less concerned about whether what he was doing, um, made a ton of sense or not. I was just more into this person who had just gone all in on this, this big idea and, and was so— I, I like living in other people's universes for bits of time and, and just seeing how, how that works. And so I'm always battling with this a little bit. Um, the— I cover Neuralink a lot and it's, it's, it's a pretty good example where, um, I think the average person, at least that I run into, defaults to like, Elon's evil. Putting a chip in someone's brain is for sure evil. Elon putting a chip in someone's brain is like the, you know, the height of evil. But then I hang out with these patients, you know, and you can, you can see this technology. Yeah.

I'm bullish and all that. Just put the chip in.

So, I mean, but, you know, like, like, The general public is definitely not. They definitely are not bullish about AI or any of really the titans of this industry. And so I was very curious about like, yeah, where your head was at on this. I mean, isn't— is some of this justified because these people have proven themselves to be just like everyone before them, greedy and power hungry and controlling on things and And AI does obviously seem frightening in many ways, even by their own descriptions and admission. But I feel like this is a major— this is at this particular moment in time, we— my sense is that the United States is mostly very anti-tech.

And we happen to be living in a moment where it's the most awesome it's ever been. Yeah.

And alien intelligence coming to life in the midst of all this. So yeah, I was kind of curious where you think people are at.

That's so interesting. And I find myself having become even more of an optimist running Interintellect in ways that I didn't think I would ever be. I mean, obviously I'm Eastern European, but I come from a very proactive family that, you know, where I saw my parents every Sunday sit together with their film crew and just like build something and then go and shoot it, and then it would be on everybody's TV. So I come from that level of thought, creativity, immediate action. Let's see what happens. Let's iterate. But I started Interintellect in a very tech-negative moment when the AI question was not so much to the forefront in the public eye. It was within EA circles, obviously, and the rationalist circles and some other university departments. But as I mentioned, I would've been pushed to build shields and blocking algorithms and stuff like that at the time. That was what other female founders at the time were raising money for. And I kept doing Intersect and I was like, I'm sorry to say, but I think the press is wrong. I don't want to be big-headed about it, obviously, but I'm seeing this with my own eyes and I see that this is not how toxicity happens or is amplified. And I'm just building my own systems and it's working. And maybe I'm blind, but like, I'm sitting here all day and looking at these things and it is working. And now I've been sitting and doing it, you know, for 7 years in the same format and it is working. And it detached me greatly from like hype opinion of the moment. So that's kind of my personal framing about whatever to believe, you know, fearmongering coming from the press. I do think that with regard to tech optimism, I'm always unsure whether that's a very loud minority who has kind of luditism as an instinct to things, or that's really a widespread problem. I think anti-data center campaigning is widening the problem into local communities in America and messing with local governance, or is possibly messing with it. I really hope that we will have more stories like what you are doing, where here's this person, they had an idea, they were insane enough to actually execute on this, and now it's working and the world is better. Maybe not coming from Elon. He has a whole app, a gigantic aura to work with that is very positive for some people, very negative. But what about all these people here in Silicon Valley who just wake up every morning, go to work, and builds the future, literally. Like, you come here and you feel like you're 15 years ahead.

On the data center stuff, you think that's misguided, this pushback?

It's clearly an ambivalent area and you have to be very careful about it. But demonizing trying to give America a competitive edge in a multipolar world, I don't think that's long-term good for America.

I do wonder what people want us to make at all anymore. I mean, if we don't have factories—

Brooklyn Farmers Market and community dancing.

Yeah. Yeah.

If you listen to that.

So it'll be, I guess it'll be very interesting what would happen to the country if we can't, we're not allowed to do anything.

I mean, I'm the bridge between the humanities and academia in many ways and the tech world. And I get the prejudices of both sides. both sides. And I have to say that maybe the most optimistic thing I'm doing with my life is making tech more cultured and just feeding people Goethe and Hume and the arts and history and econ all day on the platform. And they come back for more. And a lot of people make money hosting these. It is working and it's actually much harder to bring the humanities people on board. I think tech, because exactly what you mentioned, that people can come here and make their fortune. There's an inherent openness because Silicon Valley wants to win. They're like, whatever you're giving me that will make me smarter, faster, stronger, more empathetic, like more aware of like what people want, they will take it. And I'm practical in this way. I mean, I think this is why I had to leave Europe.

Okay. Okay. I'm gonna ask a very, I'm gonna ask a long-winded question. I'll try to—

Is it an essay?

Go for it. So, yeah, my general working theory is that, um, call it since, I don't know, pick 1982, kind of like the arrival of Apple and Microsoft. We have been dominated by this world where, where the engineers have become the most powerful, wealthiest, influential figures. And, and so clearly you have different generations where JP Morgan, the bankers dominate things, different groups dominate. We happen to be in the one where the engineers have taken over. And not to generalize grossly across all these people, but I've interviewed many of them. There is a pretty good common bond of wanting things to go efficiently, to shape the world in this. They all were really Star Trek fans. They have this vision of where they want the future to go. Everything in our life from Uber, DoorDash, all these things. I mean, you see the world operating more and more efficiently in this image. It takes me back sometimes to Don Quixote, which was one of my favorite books. And there's like an argument you could make where Sancho Panza kind of represents this very capitalist, time is money type attitude that had taken over society. And Don Quixote—

Make it make sense.

Yes. Like very rational. And Don Quixote represents this figure lost in time who's trying to restore some of the magic and the uncertainty and the sparkle. of the world. There's a book called The Reenchantment of the World that gets into some of these ideas. And so, yeah, you know, and then I, I've spent all this time, I will shut up in a second. I spent all this time interviewing these, um, AI leaders of our time, the people actually developing the models. They too are not only from this engineering class, but are, are autists in many cases. In many cases, they are extremely mathematical.

Yeah.

Um, often child prodigies or doing these math Olympiads. I'm not talking about just good at math. I'm talking about—

The best in the world.

The best. Yeah. And so you could make this argument like Sancho, where the world is tilted so far this one way to this engineered mathematical clinical model, and we're just heading there even faster and more directly. And all the things that you really care about, plays and poetry and novels, And all this more artistic ways of thinking just give way and get lost in all this. And the people who really have the power, I know you're saying they do care about this, but maybe writ large don't. Yeah, I don't know.

I always, I like to joke that I'm bringing the decadence to the table. So, you know, an internet hackathon is the last thing you will do on that day. It's in the evening. You can put your feet up and have a glass of wine and you're not rushing anywhere. And that's kind of the, the relaxation level at which good insights and connections happen. And I'm very proud to do that. I think, you know, the best things in life kind of make no sense. They have no fixed timeline. Sure, there's a more efficient way of getting the core information out of The Brothers Karamazov, but do you really want to do that? Or do you want to enjoy the time it takes for you to go through that journey? A little bit like when you visit a city, Sure, you can bingo card your way around Paris, or you can just go there for a week, make sure that you see the important things. But the point is the time spent and that you will be a new person by the end of it. And so I always felt that if I want to bring this respect towards our elders, which is culture, right? It's a type of respect towards our elders into technology. Which by the way, I greatly respect. I mean, I live and work in this industry because I think this is the best industry to work in. But if I want to open them and loosen them to be able to just admit curiosity about the classics, about the great mysteries of the human psyche or how language is not just formulaic, it has musicality to it. And humans do, I don't know, phatic communication and endear each other and put each other in the mood. Then it's kind of my responsibility to bring that. I'm very grateful and excited when tech people want to work with me. I mean, 60% of Interintellect is engineers. A lot of people are there. They are reading very heavy books. They are extremely approaching everything with intellectual humility, amazing conversationalists, truly grateful to be able to be in the presence of the elders in that sense. But it's my responsibility. So I've never been one to sit around like, oh, maybe something will fall into my lap. I think that's like immigrant power. I'm like, you know, I have to preach the gospel and show the work. So, you know, I always said that Interact works because every event is good. Not all of them are great. Obviously greatness is a different distribution, but you know that whatever you click on, it's going to be really good quality. And so people can just like drop in and they will have a great experience. It's like, I don't know, great short-form journalists, like David Brooks, right? Like not every David Brooks is life-changing, but you kind of know when you click on his thing that is going to be a certain level and a certain format. And I think in times of uncertainty when we have literally no blueprint, even if you're super familiar with classic literature, classical literature and history, you don't really know how to deal with AI. then it's joint conversation. Group inquiry is what is going to put you into a more relaxed attitude. Like, okay, no individual perhaps understands what's going on, and no amount of reading autobiographies of warlords of the past will enlighten you about it. But you can trust the community in this, the human community. that there are people working on the big things. They are also curious, in some sense lost. You know something I don't, I know something you don't. You can create a group of 10 people that everybody will bring completely unique knowledge to the table. And I see as my job the creation of these spaces where the 10 people are actually interested and willing to come. And then throughout a very inefficient amount of time, say 90 minutes or 2 hours, they are happy to actually share their ideas and listen to each other.

So one way to look at LLMs is that we've mathematically solved language. Does that take some of the romance out of language for you?

I love using LLMs. I use them a lot. We have great debates. I have learned stuff from them about language and how they use language. I see human language as a very physical So it's a very temperature, vibes, resonation-based affair. Language is something that shortens distance. I can tell you, Ashlee, careful, and I don't have to actually go there and stop you from by accident stepping off a cliff, right? I shorten the distance. Some people take up space with their speech. Some people narrow it, get closer. We hurt and endear each other with words. It creates a sensation on your skin, in your resonation, in your ears. And I don't think LLMs, even if they become physically embodied, I don't think that they will be able to feel that. And so it's never mutual. And from, I mean, this is theater, right? Like when you're enthralled by a play in the auditorium, that's a physical sensation. You're aligning neurally with other people and you Your biochemistry changes in the moment responding to the language. And so I think that I'm exploring AI products. I think everybody working with language is building something right now, and that's amazing, and we all should. But nothing will replace physical proximity, and language is physical proximity.

Do you think— how do you— do you have a sense? Do you think the LLMs, when I use them now, I mean, they still very much lack this soul and character. to the writing. I mean, I assume they will get much better, but I don't know. Maybe there's some sort of limitation. What's your—

How do you use them? What do you use them for?

All kinds of things. I will use them for research on stories, for if I have a guest coming on the podcast. Extremely helpful if I'm writing a long story in something like biotech and I need a refresher on how induced pluripotent stem cells work or, you know, something like that where, yeah, I'm not using their language, but I'm definitely borrowing a little bit just from— it's much quicker to get back up to speed. Excuse me. Um, I created agents to, to be editors for my, my work. I have the luxury of being able to put entire books into the LLMs. And so, um, they can train on a lot of my writing. And, and if you're honest with them, I think I try to tell them my foibles and, and to watch out for those, you know.

Don't let me do that.

Well, because I, you know, now since starting my own company, I don't have like a team of editors, and, and, but I do have 20 years of them reprimanding me for certain things. And so, um, so I could put that in. So a bunch of things like that, um, all kinds of stuff like at home and everything. But it's, it's on the writing where Claude is actually quite good at now. It keeps getting better and better of writing things that are like, not grossly bland. And, but I don't see any of that sparkle. I can tell it doesn't have, it doesn't have the feel of a great writer or anything like that. And I still am not convinced it will as such. But I had Sam and Greg here. And, you know, if I talk to Dario, I think they're 100% convinced.

Yeah.

It will in short order. Like when you talked about Elon syntax, you know, it's like, oh my God.

Yeah.

But like, yeah, is it gonna—

Man with good syntax, that's like unparalleled. It's really interesting. So I sometimes try with Claude to imitate my writing style. Like I have a lot of essays and stuff. I haven't yet written a book in English. It's coming. But you know, there's some kind of textual data and it never works. Like I can't get Claude to write a full intro into like Salon listing, even though that's like 3 paragraphs. Because it will just be a little bit off, and I would feel like oh, I would be embarrassed if people thought that I wrote this. Right. So like using that adjective—that's like way over the top. But one thing that I felt like I had a recent experience when I was like oh my god wow! That was with the new opus where I wrote a piece on my Substack American Innocence called Radical Common Sense. This is something I'm very very interested in philosophically, and you know as I work with a lot of authors, I'm seeing that some of them have an ambition to create a radical common sense driven book or idea and some don't care. And so I was exploring this idea and kind of ended up back at Aristotle and it was very interesting and I used Claude to proofread it. So I'm a very big typo maker and I will put a typo into a one letter word, no problem, give it to me. And so I was like, Claude, please, Just clean this up. Don't change it. Just tell me what I messed up. And then it gives me like a 2-kilometer-long list. But then after it was done and I published it, I was like, okay, Claude, translate this into Hungarian. Just like, I don't know, I was just curious. And it was like 4:00 AM. I had been just writing and publishing it. I was just like, whatever, let's do it. And it gives me back this text, like an attached doc that I had to download saying, okay, so I went and translated it into Hungarian, but I was trying to match how you would use the Hungarian language. And so it'd make it a little bit erudite and some big words, but not super douchebaggy. I was like, okay, thanks for thinking there about me. That's relaxing and comforting. And then it gave me this text without ever hearing or reading me in Hungarian ever that really felt like I, as if I had written it, but then it was edited by a really good editor. And they were maybe Maybe in a 5-page document, there were, let's say, 6 instances where I would've changed the language because it was a bit archaic or too slangy. Hungarian is a very small language, so they just don't have enough stuff on the internet to train with. But it was astonishingly good. I was like, if I was a— when I was teaching at university in Budapest, if a student had submitted this, I would've thought that this is a 70-year-old great journalist cosplaying in some kind of a Drew Barrymore move, trying to fit into this classroom. It was very good and then edited well. So I was— that was— I had like a physical reaction when I opened the text, like, oh my God, in Hungarian, this is a really big deal.

Yeah. So it's okay. But I mean, you're so in the literature and—

You have a tough audience for it. I asked it like, how do you talk to me? Like, how do you see my language? And it gives some very interesting feedback. Yeah.

And this excites you or this frightens you?

I only ever get frightened of LLMs when I consider the privacy implications. I feed everything I eat into ChatGPT to calculate my calories, which maybe it's unhealthy. And please, if you're listening and you are concerned for me, find me on X and I'm open to suggestions. But like, you know, it knows how much cottage cheese I had at like 10 AM on a Wednesday. Is that good? Where does that go? I think that's the stuff that is not yet ironed out. And we are very much ahead and rushing ahead in how much we trust these systems. And we haven't had those big fallouts yet in society that all the other communication systems had to solve through intense political scrutiny.

I always immediately default to going all in on everything.

Yeah, me too.

It's got my DNA already. It's got like all of my tax records. It's got every— I'm already fucked.

Yeah. You're like, whatever, let's see what happens. Yeah, I'm like that too. And cottage cheese because I'm Eastern European, so I love sour cream and cottage cheese.

I just want to know what it can do. Since starting this company, I have paid way more attention to the metrics around things like how many people are watching our YouTube videos for how long and looking at YouTube Shorts and Instagram and TikTok and all these things that I really didn't have to pay that much attention to before. I would just make them and then, yeah, it was up to Bloomberg or whoever to, yeah, see if they were successful or how the metrics were. And what I have—

I mean, you're doing amazingly. It's huge.

That's very kind of you. Um, the, the depressing thing that I discovered, yeah, is that we're definitely not heading towards a time where people are spending more time, um, thinking about things for reading books, watching long movies, watching—

Just wait, Ashlee. Just wait. I'm here. Convince me. Convince me. Convince me.

Yeah. I mean, everything I see is quite alarming. You know, we spend all this effort making these, these documentaries and the, you know, if people don't stay for the first 30 seconds of the video, YouTube just obliterates it with the algorithm and you're out. So if I want to do some— if we want to do— our team is a lot of quite renowned documentary filmmakers and we like to do artsy different— we don't like the episodes to be the same all the time. We like to express ourselves. And the algorithm is brutal on you. You need to immediately tell somebody exactly what this episode is about. Yeah. And just keep on moving.

Oh, for narrative movies, that's such a terrible— like, that's terrible news, right? I mean, you— nothing— like, where is a good screenplay, right?

No. Well, so this is it. It's the thick— the deeper I've had to be in it as a result of running a business, the more alarming it all is. I see my kids Um, one of them's a big reader, the other one's not. I see for the younger one, I don't think people, Gen Z, these kids, they barely, uh, honestly, sorry, I sound like an old person, but they, they don't read books. We are old. Yeah. They don't, they don't, they, I, I, I feel like book, I, I write books. I think books are like dying.

I'm also about to write a book, so I think a lot about this. I've noticed that a lot of times people have a dip in culture about something, and then we proclaim that that thing is forever. When I was younger, the narrative was that we are going to be just Super Size Me country, and everybody will be eating 7 burgers a day, and we will all die at age 45 because our brains will explode with all the fake meat that we stuffed into it. And I'm not really seeing that happening. I don't know about you. Let's see what happens. I think that there is a time and place for what I call seated knowledge or seated dinner. There is a time for eating, standing up from the fridge directly, and that's also great. And I want people to have that in their lives because otherwise it would be very hard to manage modern life. And then there's also a time when you sit down and actually want to have a conversation with somebody and want to hear what's up with them and what they're working on. A book is a longer encounter. We are clearly constantly trying to find the time for it. But at the time when a new TV series comes out on Netflix, and if it's good, people will literally sit down and watch it for 17 hours. I'm not really easy to convince that people don't have sustained attention. So I'm curious how in the arms race between the creators and the audience, which has been, I'm pretty sure Hammer was like, you know, depressing over the campfire that people are not really listening these days about the part about the women, only battles. They only want the battles. Okay guys, let's like skip Clytemnestra and we just like go right to the head, head bashing. You know, we are constantly trying to find a place for culture. As a culture maker, I think it's my responsibility. So instead of you know moping about and being like, oh, people are not reading a la la la. You know, I was also a generation millennials. We were supposed to murder culture. You're welcome, by the way. And you know, just me bringing up that we also built Airbnb is not always helpful. So I'm curious how Gen Z will get the seated knowledge. Because that's just a necessary component of human life. Like, you will get it from somewhere. And I wanna see where they go. There are a lot of Gen Zers on Intro Internet. I gave a talk here in SF a couple of days ago. It was fully sold out, mostly with Gen Z people. I'm doing a festival in 2 days here in San Francisco again. 70% of signups are young people.

Yeah.

So clearly there is some kind of hunger. For long form, for sustained attention, for longer journeys, whether that's a computer game or a really long TV series, or I don't know, reading War and Peace.

Having this like outsider's view on the United States. Yeah. Along those lines, I mean, do you think we're on the—

No Pop-Tarts. No Pop-Tarts. That's if I tweet that I am having a Pop-Tart, I was kidnapped. I'm in North Korea right now. That's my one rule. No Pop-Tarts.

Do you think we are— you write sometimes about complacency, about the luxury of, like we talked about earlier, getting to complain about the future.

Yeah, it's just so great. You want a world so peaceful that people can be complaining.

So that part, I think, is good. But you have this other element going on where there is this major backlash against AI in the tech world. And we saw, you know, maybe this thing, Sam Altman. Yeah. Had his Molotov cocktail thrown at his house and a bullet.

And people published the photo of his house, which was completely shocking to me.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, one could suspect that's the beginning of a bigger backlash that has more oomph to it. You've lived through a country and a part of the world that has gone through these sorts of things. What do you kind of like expect the next few years to happen? Do you think Gen Z, maybe it's not Gen Z, do you think some portion of the population actually has the energy to express themselves on their techno fears? Or do you think we're all too complacent and things are going to just move along quite smoothly?

So one of the positive things that I'm seeing is social media for younger people becomes very old coded. So in my work, I speak to a lot of authors and sometimes some of them investigate these questions. And I don't know, like Pamela Pavlicek, who investigates internet-native emotions and how human emotions are changing by being online, by texting with people. She has 3 daughters who are, I think, late teens, and they don't use social media. For them, Instagram is millennial, and millennials for them is old. That's like 40-year-old grandmas, the same way as Gen Z wouldn't go on Facebook.

Yeah.

So there is this healthy rebellion from every new generation against whatever was happening to the generation beforehand. Maybe blatant anti-AI sentiments that spread on social media and the emotional contagion will become outdated that way. I'm a very big proponent of taking responsibility for what is your responsibility. For me, that's bringing culture into tech and winning more people over to seated knowledge and the life of the mind. For AI builders, it's to explain to the public clearly what they are doing, what the social benefits are. If they are anticipating major labour market disruptions and needs for retraining, For vast segments of the population. Well, we hope we won't have a world war where we can just channel young men into the horrors of war, which is what happened during the last big retraining in this country. So they better think ahead. Everybody knows how much money these people have, which is, I think, good. They're building something very important and that's how the market responds. But then do your social duty. Not everybody is responsible for everything, but they are definitely responsible in how their completely unprecedented creation will meet the world.

Yeah, I don't think they're very good at that for the reasons I talked about before.

Well, let's teach them then. I mean, there's no— but I always, I think my mantra, and this is the same for helping people to learn how to read books and bringing them this kind of togetherness that comes with the seated knowledge is what is the alternative? In almost all cases, the alternative is terrible. So we might as well do the job.

I think this is what I was getting at a little bit in my long-winded question is that like in this, when I made that New York versus Silicon Valley comparison and this engineering mindset, I think it's hard to sometimes get these people interested in things that they cannot quantify and immediately attach an exponential to. And so—

Look, I brought some, a 2,000-page-long book the first time I met him. So, you know, there is something everybody can do.

Sam's actually—

I know, I know.

Like, well, and like Patrick Collison. Yes. I mean, I see people on Twitter saying they just caught him in a bookstore with like Jane Austen's entire collection. But when I say—

Iman also, Amjad, like a lot of great founders are absolutely pro-culture and they take it very seriously.

But, you know, if I go and I'm like, I want to make a documentary on Frances Arnold, she's an undercover Nobel Prize-winning scientist, and you may or may not get your money back. It won't even be that much money. It'll be like $2 million. It'll be like, oh, well, why would I do that? Interesting.

Well, I heard about these things called nonprofits. I heard that that's very good for culture.

Yeah. Yes, yes, yeah, yeah. I just—

yeah, I mean, I think you're probing at an interesting question. I don't know how much time you want to spend on But clearly, Europe has a very different way of financing culture. And a lot of it goes through the government and especially in bigger European countries, local government, right? So if you're a German, you can apply to your own Bundes. Say you live in Bavaria and you want to shoot a movie in Bavaria. There's an actual parliament that you can go into and get tens or hundreds of thousands of euros if you win whatever tender there and shoot your movie there. And then you can co-produce it with somebody from Saxony and and combine your money with them. In America, obviously, private philanthropy is a really, really, really big part of cultural production and output. I think a lot of culture is not profitable, and that's great. You can argue and build a symposium discussing why people are less willing to pay for culture. Well, because good cultural producers, artists, writers, are doing kind of unpriceable amounts of talented work. It would be impossible. You don't want to go to a symphony, I don't know, and pay $5,000 for a 2-hour concert. But if you really calculated it per person, that's how much everybody should be paying because you're listening to maybe the best violinist in the world. And so we need bigger institutions, cultural institutions that have financial stability that is at least in a delayed relationship with the market, if not completely cut off from it. And I hope that people like Patrick, Sam, et cetera, et cetera, will actually stabilize these institutions, pull a lot of capital there, and invest in the long-term future. I think one good thing that the tech industry is learning from AI, and this is completely underdiscussed, is that it gives us long-term thinking. Like when I was younger and I first entered into technology, nobody was thinking long-term. I mean, this is the Alex Karp mantra. Everybody was just like next gambling app or whatever. Then entered the EA, entered the rationalist movements into building AI. And suddenly you have people who are reading Derek Parfit and trying to fix what happens in 300 years. I'm also building Interintellect to be kind of the Royal Society of the Arts and exist for hundreds of years. that is patient capital. I think, you know, all of us here in Silicon Valley, we are working on building these long-lasting cultural institutions. So nobody cares how much money your documentary makes. They see it as an objective public good that it should exist. And they have plenty of other ways of making money.

You're way more optimistic on this part than I am. I don't think you should leave New York for Silicon Valley. I don't think Silicon Valley Is, is, is mine is, is that open to the arts? I mean, this is, this is not Florence for a number of reasons, but if you go look at San Jose and San Francisco during the last 30 years of all these billionaires coming to life, you'll notice that the opera houses and theaters are not, are not exceptionally different.

Let's give them this as homework. Guys, get to work.

I'm keeping an eye on time. When I was researching you, and yes, I do kind of like use, you know, I do my own thing and then I—

What did Claude say about me?

Well, Claude really wanted me—

I wanna see if it says the same. By the way, most people who end up now in Interintelligents in the community tier, they come from ChatGPT. Yeah. So thank you, ChatGPT, for recommending us. I really, really appreciate it. You're making us some good business.

They kept pushing me. You must have written an essay about Tom Stoppard's Arcadia or something.

Oh yeah, I adore that play. Okay.

kept pushing me there. I remember reading that as a teenager, and I remember going to see it in New York. I adore Tom Stoppard deeply. I'm at this like stage of my life where I read so much as a young person.

Yeah.

Like everything, but I can't remember like almost any of it now. It's really quite depressing. And I remember loving Arcadia. All I remember from it was this like mix of time lines through history of these people in this house inhabiting sort of like the same world from different perspectives. But why is Arcadia, why do you love it so much? People should read it.

Okay. First of all, yeah, people should watch it.

I think there's a new production right now.

You should see it in the theater, but obviously that's not available for everybody. If you live in London and you're listening to us, you can go to the National Theatre and watch the, not the original 1993 production, but 1994. And you can see the production book and they can take care of you at the archives very beautifully. Arcadia is one of the funniest things I've ever read. I first read it on a double-decker in London. I was sitting upstairs and I was laughing so much and weeping on the book, tears of laughter, that one other person sitting there came up to me and was like, what are you reading? I want to read this It's true. It was like a Harry and Sally situation just with laughter. I was like, yeah, this is Archidia, you should read it. It also happened to me with a Ferenc Molnar play, Play at the Castle. I was hysterically laughing similarly. I really, really love comedies. Archidia is a play investigating the scientific concept of probability and predetermination. It came out of an epiphany that Tom Stoppard, who had a a lot of private inclinations toward science and mathematics. He was reading James Gleick's 1988, '87 book Chaos and became super interested in this. I'm good friends now with James Gleick, and he's still the biggest Arcadia fan. And it's just so amazing for him that both Mike Leigh's 1993 movie Naked and Arcadia, same year, were inspired by the book Chaos.

That's cool. Yeah, it's a big book.

Yeah. And it's pop sci book, and it created 2 classics inadvertently and indirectly. So Archidia opens in the early 1800s. So we are at the time of Lord Byron and Goethe. Women are not really wearing corsets right now, and that leads to all sorts of private life complications because this obstacle is removed. And it's like a country house, and everybody's a little drunk all day because they start drinking wine in the morning. And there are like picturesque sceneries outside with lambs and whatever. So things happen. And in the kind of cavalcade of it, we sometimes switch to current era, which at the time was 1993, to the lives of literary researchers investigating that period. So you start this very exciting journey jumping back and forth between the researched and the researchers. where, you know, you just burn a letter and change history, right? And constantly, like in A.S. Byatt's masterpiece novel Possession, they are investigating written relics that are incredibly vulnerable, even in a country house where they keep rigorously the library. And it's hilarious. There is a young mathematical genius girl modeled on Ada Lovelace, There's Lord Byron who has a crush on too many people at the house, and the too many is n plus anything. It's phenomenal. It's very funny. It is a perfect exploration of literary theory and the ridiculousness of it, if I may, and mathematical invention and how difficult it was to invent at the time when compute was not there. There's a famous sentence in the play where they're asking how come the girl came up with this algorithm, but she couldn't finish it. And the scientist character in the 1993 plotline says, you cannot open a door until there is a house. And it gives you this certainty about why certain timelines in scientific invention were as they were. You needed precedents and previous inventions to enable future inventions. It's a very deep and beautiful play, ultimately about love.

I love that. Thank you. Tom Stoppard and Kurt Vonnegut, they hit me at sort of the same age, and I just love their— the mix of, like, humor and—

Vonnegut.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, they—

I love him too. Yeah.

Their writing style.

Physicist also. A physicist turned into novelist.

Yeah. And just super clean and not overriding and just very funny and to the point and satirical. And yeah, Stoppard, for a while I read everything. He was— I just love him. Yeah. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is one of my favorite movies too. It's amazing.

Also mathematical, right? It starts with the toss of the coin and it's just the first 200 lines of the play Just head, head, head, head. And then the guy turns into the stage and says, there is an art in the building up of suspense. So good.

So good. And Stoppard was Czech, right? At least a little bit.

He didn't know. He was a Jewish refugee. The parents did the unthinkable and put him on a boat to save his life during the Holocaust. And he grew up more British than the British. And, you know, in his work, there is this very interesting, exciting tension that he's the outsider. Yeah, he's the outsider.

Yeah. Okay. This has been amazing. I'll leave you with just like one last question then. Okay. Sure. You're thinking about— you're thinking about—

You're thinking that I'm too optimistic. I love it.

No, no, no, no, I don't actually. I mean, bits of it, but not real large. So you're You're thinking of moving possibly from New York to Silicon Valley.

Yeah.

And there's not, there isn't a bit of, if I go to New York or Los Angeles, I do like that it's not tech all the time. You can dip in and dip out. It can be oppressive here, but what would you be seeking if you were to move here over New York? Just being right in the thick of it all.

I would make tech more cultural.

Okay. I mean, I feel like we should do this.

I think so. I have a very concrete plan how to do this. Optimistic, but also very pragmatic. I'm very pragmatic.

Are you still doing movie stuff?

The last piece I wrote was 10 years ago. I adopted a novel into play.

Well, I mean, we're trying to make documentaries and scripts and stuff. I would love to help. I really, really miss it.

And actually one of the, I mean, I'm sure you know that as well running Core Memory. I mean, internet kind of eats my entire life, right? And it's even a challenge to write an essay, but I really miss it. And I think a little bit of social pressure would tilt the question toward more writing.

Do you know who Emma Goldman is?

The writer at NY Times?

No, no, no, no, no.

Well, that's Emma Goldberg. You mean the ancient social socialist.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah. Anarchist socialist.

Yeah, yeah. She's— I just wrote an essay on, uh, Ragtime, um, the book, and she's a main character in it.

Okay. We have a screenplay on—

About her?

Yeah. Which I would like to—

And you want somebody who was born in a socialist country and has a very specific opinion about that to take a look?

I'd be happy to.

Happy to.

Yeah. Um, she's one of my favorite figures in history. Um, sorry, Emma Goldberg, NY Times journalist.

We love you.

Quite a bit.

I don't think it's because you said— you worked at NY Times and I was like, sure that what he means, it cannot be Emma Goldman, but it is. Ashlee Vance, everybody.

Um, Anna, thank you so much for coming. Thank you so much. And, uh, yeah, well, if you move out here, hopefully we'll, we'll see you, see you more.

We'll celebrate.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you. The Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me, Ashlee Vance, and/or Kiley Robinson, or both It is produced by me and David Mickelson. Our theme song is by James Mercer and John Sortland, and the show is edited always by the John Sortland. Thank you so much to Brex and Send Cut Send for all your support, and thank you most of all to everybody for listening or watching. We love you. Please leave us a like.

And subscribe.

A like, a review, a subscribe, all those tremendous things. Thank you, and we'll see you again.