Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading (Nadia Asparouhova, Writer & Researcher)

If you think about an idea spreading through a network, there's lots of different nodes. People are nodes, so each of us is a node in our network. And so you might receive an idea and you are currently infected with the idea, but you're not expressing it or showing symptoms to other people. So that's the sweet spot where antimemetic ideas can live. When someone has become really infected by an idea, they need to express it by all means necessary, right? And I think that's kind of a beautiful thing. I want to step aside and just let that person go to town with whatever is in their heads.

I loved also the notion of the super meme as something you should actually be quite wary of because it is something so absorbing that it will suck so much of your attention if you let it.

I see it in my group chats and stuff. I'm sure you do too, where it's like some new seed of a thing is starting to work its way in and then suddenly it's taking over and then that's like all people are talking about. And so I think it's worth at least recognizing the shape of the thing to say, do I actually care about this thing or is it just shaped in a way that is very alluring to me?

Hey, I'm Mario, and this is The Generalist Podcast. You might've heard the saying, the future's already here, it's just not evenly distributed. I created this show to bring you conversations with founders, investors, and thinkers who see unusual pockets of the future before the rest of the world. Today, I'm speaking with Nadia Asparouhova, a writer and researcher, about her new book, Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist spreading. It's an excellent, thoughtful analysis of how new ideas are born, why some go viral and others fade into obscurity. And as you'll hear, Nadia possesses a rare gift for translating the dynamics underpinning our digital world. In our conversation, we discuss a number of different topics, including: One, the epidemiology of ideas, how virus-like transmission models explain why some consequential concepts remain hidden. 2, how digital spaces have evolved from public forums to cloistered group chats, creating environments where ideas mutate rapidly and unpredictably. And 3, the surprising value of being cringey: why our fear of embarrassment blocks intellectual biodiversity. As someone who's been quietly fascinated with many of the concepts Nadia explores, from Memory palaces to the mechanics of idea transmission, this conversation gave me an entirely new vocabulary for understanding how information moves through our networked, hyperconnected world. This podcast is new, so if you enjoy this episode, please consider subscribing and joining us for future conversations. Now, here's my discussion with Nadia Asparova. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. What do companies like OpenAI, Cursor, Perplexity, Webflow, Plaid, and Vercel all have in common. They use WorkOS to power enterprise features like single sign-on, directory sync, and multi-factor authentication. WorkOS is set apart by its modern APIs and SDKs for seamless enterprise integrations. Plus, it's free to get started. Whether you're a scrappy startup or rapidly scaling, WorkOS has the solutions you need to secure enterprise deals. Future-proof your authentication stack with the identity layer best suited to meet the evolving demands of enterprise environments. Find out how at workos.com. This episode is brought to you by Brex. Fred Adler, the influential venture capitalist of the 1970s, was known for displaying decorative pillows in his office that featured a signature business philosophy: corporate happiness is positive cash flow. In today's post-SERP environment, Adler's wisdom feels particularly relevant as founders need to make every dollar work harder. That's exactly what Brex delivers. Their modern finance platform was built specifically for startups like yours and designed to help extend your runway when capital efficiency matters most. With Brex, you get global corporate cards with up to 20x higher credit limits and no personal guarantee required. Their banking solution has no minimums and no transaction fees while letting you earn high yield from day one with same-day liquidity. Best of all, Brex knows you were born to build, not juggle spreadsheets and finance tools. Their AI-powered platform brings cards, banking, expense management, and travel all in one place. It's simple, scalable, and designed to get you back to what you do best.

More than 30,000 companies, including 1 in 3 US venture-backed startups, trust Brex to help make every dollar count toward their mission. Join them at brex.com/mario. Nadia, it is so lovely to have you here today. I've been really excited to talk about your new book. Thanks for having me. Uh, I would say that my favorite sorts of people are often kind of difficult to describe. And so I think I could describe you maybe as a writer or a technologist, or a researcher, but for folks who maybe, you know, aren't familiar with your writing about open source and protocols, like, how would you describe what it is that you do?

I think you stole all the nouns that I was going to use, but— Okay, great.

I'm glad.

Yeah, I usually say that I'm a writer and a researcher. I kind of just like poking around on things that are interesting to me. I tend to look for things that are still sort of an undefined topic, something that's just emerging, something lacking a descriptive framework. That has definitely taken me down a lot of different rabbit holes, generally interested in some things that have sort of an anthropological component to them, trying to understand how people work. But yeah, I'd say pretty wide-ranging set of interests.

I definitely, I wouldn't have known to sort of apply the anthropological lens, but I definitely see that now having read your work.

And yeah, you don't need me to say this, but I think you just like have such a talent for analyzing the dynamics of technology, the internet, how they sort of intersect with people and creating like really valuable language around that. And I think that's something you do so well in this book, which is Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading.

And so, yeah, I just wanted to say that I really loved the book and would certainly recommend people reading it.

Thank you.

You know, there's a lot of things that I'm excited to delve into from the book today. Uh, I found myself digitally highlighting it very often just because you talk about a lot of things that I've been maybe weirdly obsessed with for a long period of time, uh, you know, memory palaces, uh, the, the wall facers of 3-body problem, all of these sorts of things. Uh, but to really just, you know, start from, from scratch, everyone will have experienced a meme, but in the sort of Dawkins-esque sense, what, what is a meme?

In the sort of Richard Dawkins sense, a meme is, let's call it like a cultural unit of transmission. I think something to point out about Dawkins' work is he is really just talking about the object itself, the cultural object itself, less about sort of like why they spread around or anything like that, but just looking at the thing that is sort of like taking hold in us and making its way around in the world.

And we see this obviously, you know, Very visibly on the internet, but it's something that obviously predates the internet as well.

Yes, definitely. Um, yeah, I mean, if you, if you really think about it, um, a lot of cultural norms, traditions, things like that, they pass memetically, right? Like even the concept of, um, giving someone a handshake or saying hello, like these are all some, a version of a meme in some shape or form. I think, um, the rise of the internet and social media and stuff, um, just sort of accelerated the Um, they just made memes a lot more visible in the world, but the concept of a meme has been around basically forever, I think.

Yes. Um, I can imagine, you know, not having read the book, what an anti-meme might be, but to put like more precise words around it, like how should people think of that? Uh, especially because, you know, uh, I, it's not a word I had ever heard of before, before, you know, you and I chatted.

Yeah. So first off, credit goes not to me, but to Quantum, who is a science fiction author who wrote this book called There Is No Antimemetics Division. It's a horror science fiction book about antimemes as these sort of supernatural creatures that are stalking around on the Earth. I'll explain that plot in just a moment, but to get directly to the answer of what is an antimeme, an antimeme is a self-censoring idea. So it's an idea that resists being remembered, resists being spread. So if you think about taboos or cognitive biases, these are things that are important ideas, but somehow we just can't seem to retain our memory of them. We can't seem to engage with them for long periods of time. And so in Quantum's imagined fiction universe, these are actual paranormal entities, and there's a division of people that are trying to take down the anti-memes, but they can't remember interacting with them. So they keep failing and forgetting, and hence the title of the book, There Is No Anti-Meme. Medics Division because they don't even remember that they're part of this division. So yeah, I read this book when it came out in 2021 and was just super captivated by the idea. It came about during, I think, sort of like darker times in COVID where sort of things were getting a little bit weird on the internet and you noticed people starting to gravitate towards group chats. And I was starting to feel like, okay, there are actually some ideas out there that are not spreading through public channels anymore. They're being pushed down. And so In reading the book, I was sort of thinking about how does this concept of anti-memes apply to what I'm seeing on the internet today? And so yeah, I think I just sort of, it's continued to captivate me for the last few years and I started collecting ideas of what are anti-memes in real life? I tried looking for just a more nonfiction discussion or discourse on what anti-memes are, but most of this has come from this sort of science fiction, um, you know, wiki, wiki community. Uh, so I felt like, okay, you know, someone's got to do a nonfiction treatment of anti-memes. So I'm going to be that person.

Yeah. Uh, I mean, one, as a meta point, I love that pipeline of, of, you know, odd sci-fi to, to, you know, intelligent nonfiction work. Uh, I had never heard of Quantum's work, but I found myself so, yeah, fascinated by the core concepts that you talk about in your, in your book. Um, and there's one creature in particular that sort of gets called out as a creature that almost sucks out the memory of everyone that sort of encounters it. Is that, am I recalling that roughly right? It was such an interesting idea.

That was the original. Um, so this, this wiki that, that, um, the book was sort of built on top of, uh, they catalog all sorts of different paranormal entities. And, uh, it's this whole concept of fiction wiki was new to me and kind of fascinating where people just sort of make fictional entries about concepts and that in itself forms the basis of another universe. And so Quantum, his real name is Sam Hughes, and so he had published the first paranormal entity that was this antimeme in, I think, like the late 2000s or something. It's a long time ago, but he had published this entry saying there's this entity where people can interact with it just fine. They can have an engaging conversation with this paranormal entity, and then afterwards they just have no memory of what happened. You can question them about it. They get kind of confused and disoriented. They don't know what they've been doing for the last hour or whatever. And so that was the original kernel of the idea.

You give so many interesting examples of anti-memes in the book, but one of the ones that I found sort of maybe easiest for someone to first grasp is like the concept of daylight savings time. I don't know if that's one that you like to use, but yeah, to the extent that you want to an example around it, I think that might be really interesting.

Yeah, that's kind of one of my favorite examples because I definitely feel the pain twice a year. I think a lot of other people do. Daylight saving time is something that the majority of Americans at least want to abolish. There has been legislation put through Congress several times. Each time it kind of dies before it makes it all the way through. And so we want to get rid of daylight saving time, and yet for some reason we get all up in arms about it every time we change our clocks, and a couple days later we just forget about it and no progress gets made. Uh, so it's, it's a sort of, you know, sillier example, but it's, it's, it is sort of absurd that we keep doing this strange practice where we change our clocks, even though we don't really want to be doing it. Most people don't want to be doing it, but we can't seem to hold onto the idea long enough to make progress to make it go away.

Yeah, it's a perfect example. It's so, it is literally, I think everyone can resonate with that. And I actually had always assumed that it was something that farmers were in favor of Which in the book you're like, actually, that's, that part's not even true.

No one wants it.

Yeah. Um, anyway, the interesting parts, um, you know, sort of leading into the book is that you have a rather unusual mind when it comes to visualizing things and remembering things. Um, and it made me sort of, yeah, curious, uh, to, to, to sort of understand how that played a role in bringing you to this set of ideas.

Yeah. Um, so I, I opened the book by talking about my own, uh, terrible memory, which I have only recently discovered the extent to which it is terrible. And so, uh, I have both, uh, aphantasia where I just, I can't visualize anything inside my head, but a lot of people who have aphantasia also have, uh, exceptionally poor episodic memory. So if I'm, I mean, I really just don't remember anything that's happened to me, Frank. Wow. Um, I didn't realize that was unusual. I, um, I, I, you know, I kind of thought when people talk about stories from their past life, they're kind of embellishing them or they're making them up or something. I didn't realize that people actually they can relive past events. And yeah, I kind of just stumbled into this by accident a couple, maybe like, yeah, a year or two ago. And it was a little bit surprising and a little bit sad, to be honest, where you're just like, oh gosh, I didn't realize that everyone else is acting from these contexts where they have these memories that I just don't have any access to. But then upon reflection, I was trying to think about, okay, How is it possible I've been living my life even though I don't really have depression?

Yeah, you're seeming to get around okay.

Yeah, life has been okay regardless. And I realized, okay, well, I have this journaling habit, which I thought that's a thing that people do. They journal, right? That's a totally normal practice. But I really, really kept very detailed accounts of a lot of things that have happened in my life. I think of it as sort of like an external brain that I have. And I, yeah, I think that has sort of served as a, you know, prosthetic or like external version of my memory, um, to that I can use to like refer back to things. But yeah, I think when thinking about sort of like anti-memes or sometimes when I talk about people, they kind of have a little bit of resistance to it of like, you know, oh, is that really a thing? Or, you know, I can't really think of examples of it. Of course you can't because you can't remember anything.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's true. Um, but yeah, I think I bring up my own example of just, you know, I don't remember a lot of things in my life and I think I'm maybe more receptive to idea of anti-memes because I'm just sort of like, yeah, apparently all these things happened to me and I just don't even remember that they were there. So, um, yeah.

There, there's, um, if people haven't seen it, there's this like classic meme that went around showing sort of like how people visualize things in their mind. Yeah, the apple, right? I— and you're, you're a 5 maybe, which is like nothing. Um, yeah, but I was a sort of a 4 on that spectrum of like You know, I'm mesmerized that people see it truly in high fidelity. I sort of see a rough grayscale. So I'm, I'm,

yeah,

I'm closer to you.

Yeah. I've met a lot of people now. I mean, it's only, I think in the last few years someone has, you know, put a name to it and identified it. And so there's now all these people going, oh my gosh, wait, other people are visualizing things and I'm not.

Yes.

Uh, it also was so interesting to me that you are, uh, synesthetic.

Which is like one of the most fascinating, you know, things possible to happen to a brain, which, uh, if people aren't familiar with it, like maybe you can tell, tell them how you perceive the world.

Yeah. Uh, synesthesia is just sort of like a cross-wiring of your senses and it can go in a lot of different directions. Um, so for some people, um, like one of the most common ones is when you see numbers or words, you associate them with colors. Um, sometimes people have that for sounds. ideas can conjure up specific concepts. So there's a lot of different ways that people experience synesthesia. It's kind of hard for me to reflect on. Yeah. And because it's again, just something that's sort of the way I just sort of like think about things. And so sometimes I'll kind of like pause and be like, oh, it is interesting that every time I mention this name or this concept or whatever, this, you know, image comes up and I didn't really think about why that is, or maybe that's unusual. But yeah, I think for a lot of people that have any sort of these strange little brain quirks. Um, and I suspect they're actually probably more common than they seem, but a lot of people like me are just, until someone actually points it out to you and goes, oh, that's weird.

Like, that's pretty unusual.

Why are you doing it that way? Then, you know, otherwise you're, you're just sort of, you know, living your life, uh, thinking about, yeah, things in, in unusual ways. Um, but yeah, I think it's, it's, uh, it's kind of fun too, 'cause it's, everything is just kind of this big blank canvas and I can kind of just draw lots of weird connections between things however I want to is, is, so I find it kind of liberating, I think. But

yeah, no one, only until someone's like, the number 2 has a flavor to you that you're like, yeah, yes, this is unusual. Yeah. I, I couldn't, I can't help myself but ask, uh, if you have ever read about, uh, Solomon Sharashevsky as a case study.

I, uh, I hadn't until recently and yeah, I was just like, oh my gosh, that's a, yeah, super fascinating. Fascinating guy.

It's sort of adjacent to some of the things we're talking about here, which is, you know, a fivefold synesthete, this guy who every sense conjured up every other sense, and he couldn't, he could remember functionally everything. They couldn't find a limit to his memory such that he struggled to forget things so much that he, you know, eventually tried this, this process by which he would burn things he was trying to forget in front of him. to see if it would sort of clear, clear the mind.

But totally wild. Um, I, I sort of envy his memory, but I'm also like, oh, that would be tough if I couldn't forget anything.

Seems brutal. Yeah. And in a way that like, that is sort of part of why there, you know, are anti, why some ideas are anti-mimetic, uh, as you describe it, which is like, maybe we're trying to protect our, our cognitive load a little bit. Is that, uh, yeah. How would you sort of Explain that.

Yeah, I think, and, and actually with, um, people that have this, you know, very poor episodic memory, there's some sort of theory around, you know, there are also people who hold onto resentments less and are less, uh, affected by traumatic events and things like that because they just don't have an emotional attachment to things that happen. So it can actually be a really nice thing. Um,

if I don't remember my trauma, it can't hurt me.

Exactly.

There we go.

Yeah, I think like forgetting can be good in certain contexts. I referenced this author, Lewis Hyde, in my book who is— I referenced a different concept he was talking about, this concept of a trickster who's sort of like a truth teller for society. But he also wrote a book later in life called A Primer on Forgetting. And so he's sort of advocating for forgetting is good actually. And we make such a big deal about trying to remember everything, and actually it's nice to be able to let go of things. So yeah, and I think the kinds of things that are useful to forget are around personal grievances and resentment or anything where you're sort of not— it's not about sort of condoning something that happened to you or saying, oh, let's just forget it and move on, but about being able to let go of the emotional attachment that you might have to some of these things. I think that can really open people up to new creative directions, new ways of thinking too, because creativity is really all about being able to see things from different angles. And if you're kind of stuck in this one rigid way of saying this person did this thing, or, you know, this thing happened a very certain way, you are limiting yourself and you're not able to sort of look at it from other perspectives. So, um, yeah, I think forgetting can be a really good thing in, in that, that sort of sense. Um, I think where forgetting can be challenging is probably more in the, the collective sort of context where you need to coordinate with other people. So if you are— Mm-hmm. if you're in a relationship with someone and you're constantly forgetting their birthday, that's a problem, right?

Yes.

But also on broader societal level, if you're not bought into traditions or things that a nation is collectively remembering together or things like that, it's kind of hard to coordinate and work together if you're not all operating from the same context. So yeah, I think forgetting is, at least in my life too, I think sometimes it can be a really good thing. It can make you kind of lighter and freer. But Sometimes you actually do want to remember certain kinds of things. And yeah.

Yeah, I was talking to a CEO recently who was explaining that his brother was shocked that he travels through the world with just his phone, no sort of notebook or laptop. And he was like, I do it because it just forces ruthless prioritization. Like I forget basically everything that I don't need to do except, you know, the 3 things that really matter in a given moment. And that was sort of an interesting example of someone like, wow, you've actually structured your life around not remembering some things.

Yeah, I love that. I sort of, I think there's a lot of, um, you know, people get really into their personal, personal knowledge systems and how do I force myself to remember and surface certain kinds of notes and things like that. I have like a very low-tech approach to everything where I'm kind of like, if my brain is meant to remember it, I write everything down. I keep notes on absolutely everything. But if my brain's meant to remember it, I'll go back and search through it. Like, I don't really need to. And there's something that feels artificial to me about like, I was still, you know, I'm, I'm, some other system is filtering and curating instead of just my own brain.

I, I actually totally agree with that. Like, you know, sort of, uh, having things selectively resurface. I'm like, I actually sort of want my brain to figure out what connections it wants to make. Um, but, but anyway, to come to the idea of maybe why some ideas don't spread, we've talked about, you know, sort of the, the protection of forgetting, but also, you know, you really go through a fascinating, almost epidemiological discussion of like, here's why some ideas spread, here's why some ideas don't. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about that taxonomy.

Yeah. So yeah, if you think of ideas as viruses of a sort, I borrowed a little bit from epidemiology to think about why do some ideas spread and why don't they? Again, I think there's Right now, people kind of just assume that if an idea is good, it should go viral, or that's kind of the natural path that it takes. And it's only kind of in recent years where we see people intentionally burying ideas or intentionally only keeping them within a certain community and not wanting them to spread. And so I use, yeah, just a few different concepts from epidemiology to talk about transmission rates and immunity and whether it's symptomatic or whether you're expressing ideas. So yeah, just sort of if you think about An idea is spreading through a network. There's lots of different nodes. People are nodes, so each of us is a node in our network. And so you might receive an idea and it is sort of, you are currently infected with the idea, but you're not expressing it or showing symptoms to other people. And so that's sort of, I think, the sweet spot where antimemetic ideas can live, where it's like, oh, I have it in my brain, but somehow I'm not sharing it with other people. And so the question is, why aren't you sharing it with other people? And I think the case a lot of times with anti-memes is that they feel too consequential to spread to the rest of the network. So you're afraid of some sort of repercussions against yourself if you share it, or you're afraid of harming your network because the idea is so dangerous or consequential or just sort of radical or earthshaking that it could actually have these sort of material consequences for other people. So there is this sort of protective reflex for you as sort of like the node in the network. You're serving as sort of a gatekeeper saying like, is this idea really worth spreading or not? But just because you're not spreading it or shedding it to other people doesn't mean that it's not necessarily important. It can lie dormant in your body for a really long time. And so yeah, we just sort of play around with all those different dynamics in the book to see, yeah, how does that lead to different sorts of expressions of Yeah,

you have almost this sort of like 2 by 2 matrix at one point of transmissibility and impact. And, you know, maybe these anti-memes are not so transmissible, but they're very high impact.

Yeah. And thinking about that way actually helped me figure out some vocabulary too around, okay, we have like memes, which are, I think, generally not super consequential, but are very easily transmissible. Um, so if you think about, you know, all the sort of links or images or whatever that you're sending to your friends all day, like you kind of send it and you like forget about it. Um, it's, you know, you, you liked it, you liked it enough to pass it on reflexively, but you're not, you're not going back and like thinking about what all those links were. Uh, and a lot of, you know, even just like social norms and things like that, like a handshake, like you're not investing a lot of time into like, is this, should I be shaking someone's hand or not? You know, you just kind of like do it.

There's no social repercussion.

Yeah. Yeah. It's just the thing that you do.

Yes.

And then anti-memes are a riff on that where it's that, as I was saying, just, you know, it's a highly consequential idea. So you kind of hold tightly onto it. And that means it doesn't necessarily spread as easily. But then there's this other class of what I call super memes that are ideas that are highly transmissible and also highly consequential. And so if you think about ideas like the climate crisis or population decline or the existential risk from AI, and they all have this sort of common set of characteristics if you look at it that I think enable them to spread despite also being very consequential, where they have this sort of doomsday quality to them. Yeah. It's kind of hard to prove or disprove whether a thing is actually going to happen or when it's going to happen. And they appeal to our personal values and our personal systems, which makes us want to express them because it feels like almost like a test or an attack on your personal values. So it's this really strange combination of, yeah, an idea that is very consequential, but also something that you want to kind of shout from the rooftops. And I think that's kind of, again, has been around for a long time, but it's sort of like a newer phenomenon that we're seeing emerge. Lots of little ecosystems that are forming around these like different scenarios.

Yeah, I loved also the notion of the super meme as like something you should actually be quite wary of because it is something so sort of absorbing that it will suck so much of your attention if you let it, that you can sort of like, you know, let your life functionally slip by obsessed with this concept that maybe actually like isn't the best use of your time or isn't the best use of your talents. And I thought that was like a really interesting aspect of that part of the quadrant.

Yeah, I feel sort of conflicted about them because it is a powerful organizing tactic. I think war before we kind of got past having world wars every X number of years, but historically I think wars did a good job of this, of aligning people around a common concept. And so there is something You know, maybe like nice about that to me of everyone's in this thing together. And I think that's a very alluring feeling for a lot of people. I think we are, we naturally maybe unconsciously sort of crave that feeling of I wanna belong to something bigger than myself. So in itself, you know, maybe supermoons can be a useful organizing tactic, but I think it was useful for me to at least recognize that it's a thing because you hear about the, you know, the latest thing that I'm supposed to be worried about in the future. And it's very tempting to kind of be like, oh my gosh, I really do need to worry about this. I'm gonna spend all my time Yeah, I should devote my life to this. Yeah. And people do, right? And there's these talent ecosystems that spring up around these ideas and someone's out there working on it. But I can see how, I see it in my group chats and stuff. I'm sure you do too, where it's like some new seed of a thing is starting to work its way in and then suddenly it's taking over and then that's all people are talking about. And so I think it's worth at least recognizing the shape of the thing to say, do I actually care about this thing or is it just shaped in a way that is very alluring to me? And then I can choose whether you want to work on it or not. But

yes, also I want to give listeners a note that Nadia did a quote when she said war is good at this. Just, you know, that's a, that's a good for a video. Uh, but, but for the audio listeners, you know, memetic warlord

over here. Yeah. War is not good, but just from the physics and the shape of it is what I meant.

Yes, exactly. You mentioned a little bit, uh, about group chats and group chats are certainly kind of having a moment, uh, at the time that we're talking about it and I feel reading a lot of these, uh, these pieces about group chats, so left out. I'm like, I'm not a part of any of these important group chats. Um, but they are, I think, a really fascinating phenomenon about where social media has sort of has led us and what it means for the way that ideas are produced. Uh, so yeah, I'd love to hear how, how you sort of charted this phenomenon a little bit and, and how it's led us to the present moment.

They're not a bad thing. Um, but I think they started as sort of a response. to the overly public, highly memetically charged public feeds that we were all exposed to. And that was kind of, for a while, that was our primary way of interacting. I mean, I think back to sort of early social media days, the things I was saying back and forth to people in public, you never say these kinds of things anymore, right? So that's how you interacted. And then, yeah, group chats. I think because there was never really a hot killer app for group chats in the way that you had Facebook or something coming on the scene or Instagram. It was kind of just like, this is a messenger function that a lot of different existing social media platforms have or they offer. It was very much a utility. And once people just kind of started using it, they were using it to sort of retreat from this feeling that I can't say certain things in public because now there's just been this context collapse where anything I say, someone is going to jump in and jump on me or whatever. Yeah. And so all that more like raw and authentic conversation just started getting pushed down into, into group chats. I think this felt really good for a little bit because it was like, okay, we have our own secret little clubhouses, also like the literal clubhouse, you know, like this, this feeling of like, okay, we have our own, you know, hideouts where we can kind of talk to each other and we're away from all that craziness over there and we can kind of talk about it in here. And I think that is sort of the, the function that, that they continue to serve. Something that I think we don't think about enough is what does it mean for ideas to be pushed into these much denser, more compressed networks? It changes the way that ideas evolve and spread because we're not, it's not that everyone checked out of their public feeds and the public online social web and just went to go live off the land in some closed-off utopian society. Yes. Everyone is still using Twitter or whatever, Instagram, whatever, but that's where you're getting all these new fresh ideas and then you're taking them and you're bringing them into these closed compressed spaces. And so again, if you're returning to this idea of ideas as viruses, I compare this in the book to having a COVID pod where people thought, okay, I'm just going to hang out with 10 people and we're not going to get COVID because we're only going to hang out with each other. We're safe.

Yeah.

Everyone kind of knows how that played out if you lived through the pandemic where it's, in the end, you can't really control what those other 10 people in your pod are doing. They might be going to grocery store, they might be hanging out with other friends and not telling you about it or whatever. And so if they bring the virus into your little enclosed pod, now you've just architected a super spreader event, right? Where it's like, now you're all hanging out with each other. Yes. And so yeah, there's something similar like that that happens with ideas where you're now Bringing ideas from the outside world into these closed environments that are very high trust where everyone can iterate super, super rapidly. And I think that is partly where ideas are just starting to get kind of mutated and weird and evolving into these strange things super quickly is because they're being incubated now in these much smaller spaces.

And that's both sort of for good and bad. It's, I think you sort of argue, you know, it's You get the upside of like more intellectual biodiversity where you, you know, have these different groups sort of coming up with strange ideas that then sort of get released. And that's maybe, you know, better for the, yeah, the commons. But you also get this sort of like function of things becoming more extreme or, you know, that can lead things in a slightly different direction. Is that a passable summary of that piece of it?

Yeah, definitely. Something I try to, just a tone I was trying to strike throughout the book was like, I'm not trying to pass judgment one or the other on, it's just sort of, I think interesting things are happening from a sort of like physics perspective of how ideas are changing today. And let's try to take a look at it and understand them.

Yes, absolutely. Um, you, you sort of loop it back again to, uh, quantum in this part, I think with the idea of like inverted containment chambers. I can't remember.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so in In the book, There Is No Antimemetics Division, there's this idea of these inverted containment chambers where inside there you're safe from the antimemes in the outside world. But yeah, this is sort of, I guess, the reverse of that where, yeah, you're not actually as safe as you think you are.

Yes. One of the ideas that, or one of the questions I had was, to what extent do you think virality, super memes are contrived and concocted versus like truly organic? Like, you know, I'm thinking about this in the sense of a lot of these social platforms do have foreign actors in some capacity, or they do have, you know, even much more casual groups of people who sort of, you know, band together to, to get something to take off. Uh, yeah, like how much of, of what we end up seeing do you think is Yeah, is organic versus invented or synthetic?

I think probably a lot of it is more invented than meets the eye, especially I think with the layer of group chats as this extra vector of just sort of like, yeah, our information flows of information. We've seen some reporting about this as well. I think that that kind of points to this of, and I talk about in the book as well in sort of a more abstract sense of, if you don't know who is all in a group chat in private coordinating and talking to each other, in public they will be supporting each other's ideas. And you might think, oh, this is just sort of an organic thing where this person really likes this other person's ideas. But it might also be that they actually know each other quite well and you just aren't privy to what those relationships are in the background. I don't think that's— in some ways, I don't think any of this is different from, again, all this is rooted in some other fundamental piece of human behavior where people have been trying to orchestrate and engineer emotions and relationships to things forever. So yeah, same with the way ideas spread now where yes, there are— I think there's sort of these 2 components to whether an idea takes off and part of it has to do with maybe innate qualities or characteristics of an idea and how it is being presented to you. And the other part is who is the person receiving that and what are their interests? What are they more or less attuned to? And any information architect or meme architect or whatever is going to be thinking about how do I tailor this idea so that it spreads with just the right kind of people? But yeah, I think that's probably a story that's That's pretty old. It's just maybe gotten easier or there are more and more people that are experimenting with that now than ever before. So you're just being exposed to so many more opportunities for that to happen. But I think this is where it does become important to be aware of whether you like it or not, you are a gatekeeper for your own network. And so being more aware of when is an idea really being tailored just for me? And no one ever thinks that the idea is being tailored just for them. They always think that you're the exception.

That's interesting.

Yeah. But yeah, it's, uh, everyone is subject to that somewhere.

And the reporting that you referenced, I think is useful to sort of talk about just as I think it really concretizes some of what we're talking about here. There's a piece by Ben Smith in Semaphore where he talks about, you know, particularly with sort of tech VC circles, the rise of Signal chats, WhatsApp chats with, um, you know, folks like Marc Andreessen and Eric Torenberg and intellectuals and academics. Where they're sort of talking about these different ideas. And in, you know, some of these instances, it seems like one person is really getting into a battle with someone else. But when that gets brought out into the open, those 2 people will, you know, say actually they're great friends and they don't want to sort of like air that in public. And then there's the other version that you sort of reference, which is, you know, maybe one of those people from that, from one of those groups tweets something. expressing some idea and then lots of people might, uh, you know, champion that idea themselves without necessarily the, the bystander recognizing that, uh, if not totally coordinated, there's at least some link there that isn't necessarily visible.

Yeah. And again, I think this has always been true with, you know, backroom deals and closets. It's, and it's always just sort of, you know, it's, it's very hard to speculate on where ideas come from and I think the public Often gets these things wrong because if you just, if you don't know who knows whom and, and none of us really have complete information in that sense, then you may not appreciate all the ways in which people are always kind of supporting other people that they know in seemingly unrelated domains.

Yeah, that's, you know, uh, just the necessity of being in a society on some level.

Yes, we live in a society.

Exactly.

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you have a very sort of specific way of talking about truth tellers and champions in the books and tricksters, which you referenced sort of earlier. Uh, yeah. What are the roles of, of the truth tellers and the champions in, uh, the defense against forgetting?

Yes. Um, so some of this was actually riffing off of, um, Girard's theory of mimetic desire where So trying to take the anti— what is the anti-mimetic equivalent of some of those fundamental concepts? And so Girard talks about how we don't necessarily want things because we innately desire them, but because someone else we admire wants that thing. And so there's often competition and rivalry between people who are both competing for this same object of desire, which actually stems from someplace outside of themselves. Because they're trying to emulate someone that they like or that they want to be like. And he says the way that this gets resolved is through a scapegoat where we can pin all this rivalry, violence, anger, tension onto some other third party and say it's that person's fault. And that ends up bringing us together so that we resolve our own tensions because we can just both be angry at the other. the other entity. And I actually talk in the book why I think this is a somewhat limited concept even for today. But setting that part aside, I was thinking about, okay, what is the anti-mimetic equivalent of this? And so I think when anti-memes kind of get out of control, you don't see rivalry and competition and conflict, but you see just sort of like a collective suppression or not looking at a thing that we really need to be looking at. So maybe there's a taboo that is Really starting to affect everyone's lives and we're all just sort of looking the other way about it and not acknowledging it. And so what role, like a scapegoat, but for the anti-mimetic sort of problem, kind of helps bring that to light? And so I talk about this role of truth tellers of, simplest explanation is just the boy who said the emperor has no clothes, right? Everyone's seeing this thing happen, no one wants to say it out loud, and you have this innocent bystander who says, hey, why are we all looking at this thing and not talking about it?

Are we crazy here?

Are we all crazy here? Yeah. And so I think truth tellers, there are a lot of different versions of this. There are whistleblowers maybe in a more political context. There are priests in a religious context. We have different roles for people that are meant to shepherd difficult knowledge to light. So yeah, someone like a priest or a therapist might be helping us unearth difficult-to-recognize knowledge from ourselves. So uncomfortable truths that we don't want to face about ourselves, we can do that in the confines of this sort of private trusted space. But then someone like a whistleblower is doing that on a collective level where they're sort of shaking us out of that stasis and saying, hey, pay attention to this thing. But I think truth-tellers only take us so far where, okay, they've caught everyone's attention for a moment, We can all sort of say, yes, you're right, we should be doing something. But I think everyone has experienced some version of this where if no one actually follows up on that behavior or tries to take real action against it, we kind of just settle back into what we were before, right? So a truth teller kind of flashes, sends this flare up into the air, but it's up to what I call champions to kind of take that role and then kind of run with it. And champions are people that are well-versed in an anti-memetic system, which can often be very difficult to navigate, very difficult to look at for a long period of time. So if you think about politics or any sort of bureaucracy where it's a really complex system that is sort of designed for you not to look at it. So I talk about bureaucracies as these anti-memeplexes where— Yes. So Richard Dawkins talks about memeplexes, which are a collection of memes that Sort of, you know, act to sort of put a certain idea into the world. Um, so you think about like fashion trends, political parties, et cetera, could be thought of as memeplexes. An antimemeplex is a collection of antimemes that are designed to make you kind of just like not look at it.

Yeah.

Don't pay attention. Don't pay attention. Nothing to see here. Yeah. You know, even if you're looking directly at the system, you're just like, I don't know what's going on here. Mm-hmm. You think about like the healthcare system or the DMV or whatever, you know, it's just like very difficult to look at these things.

Yes.

Um, and so you need a champion who is, you know, willing to kind of like get down in the swamp and say, I'm going to go tease out like every little part of this. And I'm going to make sure that we don't forget these things, even when everyone else keeps forgetting, I'm going to go and like, kind of like work through the intricacies of the system. And so I think we need both the truth teller to sort of send the flare, send the signal into the air. And then you need the champion who's actually like doing this like long tail of work to, to try to make sure that actual progress gets made.

There's so many pieces of that that I think are so interesting that I want to come onto. But one of the things about truth tellers that I thought was such an interesting observation was that a lot of the time they are children or younger. You know, in the story of the emperor who has no clothes, it's the child who points that out. And you use the example also of Greta Thunberg. And the reason that's the case is because you talk about sort of the need for a truth teller to have some degree of purity of purpose. Why is that such an important piece?

I think it's, again, sort of trying to overcome this feeling of distrust we might have where we are all sort of unconsciously or not gatekeepers of our networks. And when someone's coming in and if they have an agenda, you put up a little bit of resistance. You're saying, okay, let me see, why is this person trying to tell me this thing is the case? If it's someone that is Totally on the outside, similar, I guess, to the scapegoat kind of thing in Girard's sort of model of the world. This person's totally unrelated to everything else. And if they're saying it, then like, okay, they must, they have no perceived agenda. They're not trying to make me do anything. It's just, it must be as close as we get to the truth, right?

Yeah, really interesting. And you have a few different examples of champions in the book. One of them, Nick Cammarata. I hope I'm pronouncing his name.

Yes.

Relatively closely. Uh, I thought was a really interesting one because of your connection with the topic that he talks about, the jhanas. Uh, and I, yeah, I would love for more folks to hear about it because I was, I was not familiar with it until reading your work about it. Oh, maybe 6 months ago or something like that.

Sure. Um, yeah, so I said at the beginning of this conversation that I have a, a wide range of interests and topics, and my current area of interest is around this concept of advanced meditation, which is a set of different techniques and practices that can help people access much deeper and sort of radically altered, but also potentially transformative mental states that go much beyond what you think about in mindfulness. So mindfulness might teach you to sort of stay calm or not be stressed out. And in these sorts of states that are unlocked Through advanced meditation, people are experiencing things that are closer to psychedelics, also with the potential for therapeutic benefits and improvements to their mental health. So really interesting space that is just sort of starting to take off and that for various reasons I have kind of stumbled into. And part of the reason why I did stumble into it was because of this guy, Nick, who was tweeting about it. And had had his own experiences just sort of playing around with some of these practices, ended up in some pretty interesting and remarkable states, and decided to just tell people about it on the internet. And he'd searched on Twitter and was sort of like, okay, no one else is talking about this, truly no one else, so I'm going to be that person and start talking about it. And you can imagine it's kind of a strange topic, right? So it's like you're putting some personal reputation at risk, when I first started writing about it. I ended up doing this sort of magazine piece about it a year ago. And I'm also, no relationship to meditation, just curious person kind of fell into this sort of world and then decided to write about it. I was super nervous about publishing about it because I was just sort of like, this is not my reputation at all. I don't want people to think I've fallen off the deep end. Yes. And was very pleasantly surprised that the number of people that have now reached out to me saying they've gone and tried these practices or that it really resonated with them or whatever from people I never would've expected. And a lot of people have said things like, well, it's because you seem kind of normal. And so— Yeah. Therefore, I feel less weird about trying it. But again, I think this demonstrates some of these concepts around wanting to feel like sometimes we don't share these antimemetic concepts even when they're really important or interesting to us because there's some risk to your own reputation. There's some risk of Sequentiality, right? And so, yeah, I think Nick was very much in that position and he was sort of the patient zero when I was originally trying to sort of map out the space, which is what got me interested in the first place where I was just like, there are some weird people talking about stuff on Twitter. What's going on? I just want to figure it out. Everyone I interviewed would point back to Nick and saying, oh, I saw his tweets and that got me curious. The point I make in the book is there's no reason why this thing should have taken off. And now it's been covered by mainstream press all over the place and has become much less strange to talk about than it was even a year ago. And a lot of that can be traced back to Nick kind of just being this person saying, hey, I'm going to go write about this. I'm going to talk about it. And he just did it relentlessly for months and months and months. He's still doing it. And that's kind of a role that is not just sort of a truth teller role where you do it once and then everyone goes, wow, that's crazy. And, you know, um, he, he, but he had to like really put in the work over time, um, to ensure that like it was something that people would not forget and that would just keep coming up on their feeds enough that they would get, you know, maybe annoyed and say, let me go figure out what this thing is.

I'm not up for this guy. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, that, that, that's what happened to me anyway. So.

I, I would really like to try it at some point. It's on, uh, a list of things that I'm, I'm curious about but haven't, uh, Yeah, no excuses, just haven't prioritized yet. But one of the things you mentioned about sort of like being worried about writing about this and posting about it, do you find yourself becoming less of a gatekeeper over time? Like, do you sort of lower your own activation threshold for sharing interesting ideas because you're like, well, I've done it a few times in the past and now people sort of understand that I'm an eclectic person who is intelligent and is going to be thoughtful about such things, even if it's not what you know me for.

Yeah, I think in some, not in the lowering of standards sense, but in the sense of recognizing that, oh, actually, you know, every time I've been afraid of this thing, it actually hasn't been a big deal and it's been oftentimes more positive. Like I've noticed just the weirder stuff I write about tends to be better received than whenever I try to do something more polished or something that kind of fits in more. Um, so, and it creates this, you know, positive feedback loop for me where I'm just like, okay, being weird is good.

So

I'm just gonna keep

doing that. This is what you want from me.

Um, I think if I perceived that there was something that would actually be damaging to my network or would actually be damaging to my reputation, there's still, there's still, you know, plenty of things like that where it's just, you know, I got my own taboos and things that I don't share. So, um, so I think it's still, it's still there, but maybe it's just realizing that the perceived consequences are actually not as bad as you think. And I would definitely, I mean, one thing I hope from, from people would take away from the book is like, you should definitely push yourself more on what you think that, uh, you're able to say out loud or what you're able to share with other people.

I love the dynamic that you seem to have with your writing, which is like maybe the opposite of audience capture or like productive audience capture where like people want you to do weirder stuff and you're like, okay, great. Um, rather than, you know, getting pigeonholed into something smaller and smaller, you get to, uh, you know, Uh, go off into all these interesting directions.

Yeah, that's definitely where I want to be.

You talk about 2 sort of concepts that, uh, you could, in different contexts, but very internet slang words that, uh, have a real meaning, but are not always legible to folks, vibes and cringe. Uh, maybe you can talk about how those 2, uh, sort of ideas fit into the world of antimemetics.

Sure. Um, so I, I mentioned vibes as sort of an emergent, again, vibes have probably been around forever, but, uh, we've always

had vibes,

but I still don't know what it is. And that's the point.

Yes.

Yeah. I talk about how they've become more talked about or more prominent of a concept, um, in conjunction with the rise of anti-memes. And I think in part it is this feeling of people wanting to escape the highly defined rigid sort of world of memes where it's like, you say you're a thing and it needs to be so perfectly polished and shaped for transmissibility because you're trying to optimize, you're trying to make it go viral, and it just becomes exhausting over time for people to engage with all the time. And so there's sort of this parallel version of it that's the vibes. And I mentioned this thing called VibeCamp that's a bunch of people on the internet organized a few years back and have been organizing every year where it's just sort of a festival that's celebrating the vibes, celebrating the things that you can't quite put your finger on and you can't quite define so precisely. And I think vibes are sort of interesting in that they're weirdly memetic in their own way in that it sort of serves as this thin memetic wrapper around an anti-memetic. Feeling.

Yes.

I'm trying not to keep saying the word vibes.

Yes.

But it allows it to sort of like flit around on the internet and you have some stand-in word for what the vibe is without having to more precisely define what it is. And I think this is, again, if we kind of reach back and say, okay, vibes existed even before this latest era of the internet, I think this is true for a lot of just words in our vocabulary, which are closer to vibes and they have super precise meanings. So you think about things like community or love, and these are kind of stand-in words for something. Like, it's actually really hard to describe what love really, really means. There's not a lot of consensus around it. What does it really mean to have a community? And, you know, people kind of dance around these topics for a long time. People try to engineer them from scratch. It's really hard to engineer love or community from scratch if you've ever been on a dating app or you've ever tried to, you know. Yeah. create your own community. Um, uh, these, they kind of, you kind of just create the conditions for them and they have to emerge on their own. So, um, yeah, I think vibes have this longer-standing meaning and importance that goes beyond even the way that we use it today. And then cringe. Yeah, gosh, cringe is, cringe is the worst thing. I, I hate cringe. Um, always gotta fight against cringe. Um, uh, yeah, it is incredibly cringe.

Or should we embrace it, really?

Or embrace the cringe, right? That, that's what I want people to do. And it is Painful and difficult to do it. I am definitely, you know, not saying it's not, but I think it has kind of become this sort of like self-censoring tactic in recent years where, you know, I mean, I've been around the internet long enough to remember when we didn't have cringe and everyone just like did things, right? And, um, and it's only more recently where people say, oh, that thing is cringe. And what does cringe really mean? It means you've done a thing that's kind of like, you know, other people don't like, or you've miscalculated how other people receive it, and that's kind of embarrassing for you. Uh, and I think this like fear, this gripping fear of being cringe online or being cringe in public keeps people from doing a lot of things that like, you know, the most interesting stuff comes from the edges. It comes from all the weirdness. It comes from people not thinking so much about how they will be perceived. And, uh, it's, you know, easier said than done, but I just really wish we would stop worrying so much about how we're being perceived and just, you know, throw some stuff out there and see what happens.

Yes. I mean, there's huge liberation on the other, on the other side of that, if you can convince yourself. Um, there's such a good blog post. I'm, I, maybe you've read it called, uh, The Moat of Low Status. Uh,

I think so.

It's by a writer called Sasha Chapin. And the idea is that, you know, you have to go through this moat, this, you know, horrible morass of looking like an idiot to achieve sort of anything worthwhile. But, um, I loved it as As a visual of like, yeah, there, there is no magical bridge that you can actually cross in, in any of these situations. You have to do something that probably some amount of people are going to say is really cringe, is really lame, you know, makes you look like an idiot to, to, to achieve anything. But, you know, even just to share a simple idea, uh, in the internet age is, is obviously quite fraught.

Yeah. Yeah.

With the, the concept of antimemetics, one of the things that, that came to mind for me Uh, maybe as a, a relatively new parent is how this might impact, uh, our educational system. Like what important truths might we be forgetting and how has it made you maybe as a parent think about educating, you know, your family?

Yeah, I love this. Also, congratulations on the new project. Oh, thank you. Um, yeah, definitely think about it a lot with, with parenting. Yeah, it makes me think about this. I had this hobby horse for a while that if I had infinite time in the world to explore every topic that I was interested in, I would probably spend some time on this topic, but I don't. But for a while, I was sort of thinking a lot about this idea of global knowledge versus local knowledge. And so global knowledge is, they're sort of like facts, right? So things that can be taught to you by just about anyone, and once you learn them, you can verify that they're true. You have this information, you store it in your memory bank, And global knowledge can pass pretty easily through low-context, high-scale kind of environments where you can learn 1+ 1= 2 from just about anyone because you can then reproduce it yourself and great, got it. Local knowledge is more like wisdom, life lessons, stuff that is actually pretty hard to just pass on. So if you think about any sort of important life lesson you've learned, you may have read it or been told it by so many people over and over again. And then it's only when you kind of experience it yourself that you go, oh gosh, I can't believe this thing that sounded so obvious, like everyone's been telling me and I didn't realize it until I did it.

And I still couldn't protect myself somehow.

Yes. Yes. And so this is actually a very inefficient way to transfer and pass on this kind of knowledge. I think it transfers much better in high-context, high-trust environments because you're more likely to be receptive to to advice or ways of thinking or from someone that you trust versus someone that you don't. But I think in general, we kind of like spend our entire biological lives trying to acquire all this local knowledge, this local wisdom that, and I think I'm using local maybe more like, it lives in your local environment, right? But it's not like, and then it just dies with you. And then how do you actually pass any of that stuff on? It just seems sort of like a waste that every person is born, they learn all the same life lessons about love and relationships and— working with people and all this stuff, and then it just dies with you and that's the end of it. If we are moving more and more towards low-trust environments, that risks us losing further. So how do we pass on these kinds of things that might be passed down by your grandparents or your parents or whatever? And so when I think about it in terms of parenting, yeah, I surprised myself, I think, in terms of what I thought I would care about with educating my kids versus what I actually care about now. Um, I think before my kid was born, I just sort of assumed that, you know, this, my, my child's brain is like a sponge. And so I'm just gonna like cram it with all the information I can.

Oh yeah, I totally get that.

Yeah. Like, it's like, you know,

look

at this book. Yes. It is.

Read, learn.

And, and I think like for, uh, you know, both my husband and I have like come from this context. For him it was math, for me it was reading. Um, but you know, I started reading super early. And when I was 3, and I just sort of assumed that's like when people start to read. And, you know, and I assume it's like, you know, I know that my parents had put a lot of time into helping teach me how to read. And I just thought, okay, like a kid can learn to read when they're 3 and, you know, you just have to sit with them and teach them. And similarly for my husband with math, he was doing math competitions, was very sort of like precocious in math stuff. And he had been in the mindset of just like, yeah, you can just start teaching your kid, you know, That's super early or whatever. Um, so we both came in with our own little, you know, things that we were probably good at. Yeah. But then my son was born and, uh, I just felt like he had a personality within, you know, days of him coming into this world. It was just very clear he has, he has his own way of thinking, his own way of doing things. He is very opinionated. He's, you know, wicked sense of humor. He's just like, he's very much his own person. He just came out this way.

Oh, that's so sweet.

I don't think we did anything to make him that way. You know, we encourage him, but like, he definitely came out with his own version of who he is.

Yes.

Um, and I've heard this from, you know, so many other parents where it's just like, wow, like genetics, man. Like, it really, they, they come out and they're just like, they gotta, they gotta way of being, right?

Yes.

And I think somehow it just made me feel like I'm not really sure how much anything that I or my hus— or my pa— my parents or my husband's parents did really had anything to do with the stage at which we picked up reading or math or whatever. My memory of learning how to read was I found a book on the side of the road and I just took it home and I was just flipping through the pages. And then eventually at some point it just clicked, right?

What was the book?

It was a book of animal poems, An Ark Full of Animals.

Wow.

I can still recite some of the poems from there.

That is a powerful book.

It's a great book. Great book. But I think if you flipped me and my husband around, and he may have not learned to read in that same way, I definitely would not be doing math competitions. And so it's like, to some extent, it was a reflection of something that we were already personally invested in wanting to do. And so when I think about what do I want to focus on teaching for my kids, I think I care a lot more about the local knowledge stuff because it feels like that's something where I can have just more of a positive influence in his life where stuff around just emotional regulation or something is frustrating and hard and just encouraging him to keep at it. And I think again, there's still a lot there that I just cannot influence because he has certain personality quirks or whatever, as we all do. But I think you can at least give them more practice with it and more reps just to If he encounters something frustrating 100 times and instead of letting him run away, just encouraging him to work through it, that's good practice for him. So yeah, I guess it's kind of a long-winded way of saying I don't think I've devalued the importance now of sitting and drilling him on words or numbers or whatever. And I think it's more important to just teach him this sort of meta set of skills that are actually really, really hard to pass on in a broader context, even outside of parenting. But at least I can take advantage of this sort of high-trust relationship that we have to try to impart some of that like wisdom onto him as, as, as soon as I can.

No, honestly, I think that's, uh, so thoughtful and it's actually very personally useful at this point in time as I've sort of found myself often thinking of like, all right, do I need to scheme about how this kid can read within, you know, as fast as humanly possible? But I really think what you said is so, so poignant, which is just like they come out as, as who they are and In many respects, the last thing you want to do is lead them down some path that sort of takes that, that aspect away from them. If you, if you force someone to, you know, get so invested in, in reading or whatever it is, uh, you know, maybe you risk sort of sullying a little bit of those parts of their mind that are, are just ready to run in the direction that they're, they're already primed to go in. Um, yeah, I really like that.

Yeah, they've all got something they're excited about. They just want to Encourage them in that direction.

Yeah. Yeah. In reading the book, one of the things that, that struck me was like, man, you really draw from a quite dizzying array of sources. Like you have some Leo Strauss, you have, uh, you know, weird fiction, you have, uh, China Miéville. I can't remember. I couldn't tell you how to pronounce it.

Yeah, honestly, couldn't either.

Okay, great. We're in the same boat. I always actually think it's great if someone doesn't know how to pronounce something because it just means they learned it by reading.

They read it.

Yeah. Um, what does your intellectual pipeline look like? Like, where do you find interesting ideas to the extent that you're able to actually sort of, uh, remember where they came from?

I think I'm honestly, again, just like pretty low tech about this stuff. Um, and so a lot of it just comes from the interactions I have with other people and sort of my own, my own environment. Um, I, I think. Just other people are a very underappreciated source of information, not in the instrumental sort of manipulative kind of sense, but in every conversation we have at a dinner party or something. So many conversations are not nearly as interesting as they could be. And I think someone tells you they're a doctor or something, like, oh, ask them about what is it like to work with patients and what is hospital administration like or whatever. And you can end up Unearthing all sorts of really interesting things that you otherwise might not find on the internet. And so I think a lot of the little sparks and little bits of just ideas, things that I kind of just collect them all, I put them all in my notes and they come from all sorts of different places, all the different people that I interact with. But a lot of it just comes from trying to be a curious person and trying to really, really listen when other people are talking and asking them about their life. I think most people are thrilled to talk about themselves and their life or when someone takes an interest in them. And so, yeah, so few people actually just go a couple clicks deeper just to— you never know what you might learn from your parents' family friend or something that you might have never thought twice about, but actually probably has a really interesting life that you should quiz them about. So yeah, I think that's kind of— and then I think that then it becomes a matter of sort of stringing together where these where do all these different pieces fit together or where are some parallels or commonalities between them? But yeah, I think like other people are probably my biggest source of ideas and information just in terms of that initial inspiration.

Do you write notes to yourself or sort of, I guess the word we use for that is journal every day or is it sort of something just a little haphazard?

I stopped really journaling probably in the last few years. barely journal at all anymore. Yeah, partly just became, it just takes a long time and I don't have that kind of time anymore. Yeah. And partly I think I've just sort of gotten comfortable with kind of blissfully letting go of a lot of things. But I do take a lot of scraps and notes, just keep it in my Notes app, just anything on the fly. So it's, yeah, something I'm just thinking about in the moment, flash of inspiration. I get a lot of just Right when I wake up in the morning or middle of the night, there's a lot of just like, oh, something weird happens in my brain where all the ideas kind of synthesize together. So I have definitely tapped out early drafts on things just like 4 o'clock in the morning where I just kind of wake up and I'm like, oh, I got things I gotta write down, and then I go back to sleep. But yeah, probably every day there's just something. And yeah, if I'm talking to people and they kind of mention some interesting stat or insight or book I hadn't, you know, thought about, things like that. I'm just always recording it all. I'm just like a little magpie, just putting all the twigs in the pile.

I love that. I don't know if you've ever read some of, uh, Graham Duncan's writing, The Investor. Um, he has this concept of the importance in investing to, of, of sort of protecting the climate in your own skull, which I really like. Um, and, you know, given how much you have studied Virality, memes, social media. Like, have you found yourself, uh, I don't know, immune to, to, you know, the, the vagaries, uh, that are fighting for your attention? Do you sort of put up any walls for yourself to protect the climate in your skull when you're trying to think or write deeply?

Definitely. Um, yeah, I think I have a lot of pretty strong routines. Um, for my, my work hours at least. Um, I think a lot of creative people resonate with this, but my morning hours are sacred. Um, this podcast notwithstanding, but in general, I think—

I'm so sorry.

That means it was worth doing. But, um, but yeah, generally like mornings I never ever do meetings or anything like that. That's my best time to think. Yeah. Have sort of like a little, you know, break or rest in the middle of the day. Uh, take care of any logistical stuff. Afternoons are also either a deep work session or If I have to schedule meetings, I do them in the afternoons. And I just have rules for myself of, yeah, I don't ever just mindlessly scroll. I definitely feel the pull to mindlessly scroll. It's not like I'm immune to that, but when I see it happening, I just kind of make a conscious effort to be like, break the loop, close it, go away. Make it stop.

Yeah.

Yeah. And so I think it's not any different from diet or exercise or anything like that where I mean, I, I love junk food. Like, don't get me wrong. Yeah.

I mean, it's engineered to be amazing.

Yes. Like I have, yeah, zero qualms about eating fast food or anything like that. But you know, like you do it in moderation or you don't just mindlessly reach for it. I don't keep snacks in the house just to like, you know, eat whenever I'm just feeling like I need to put something, put something in my, in my stomach. Uh, so yeah, I think, yeah, uh, keeping those sorts of habits is similarly important. Um, Yeah, I think that has gotten harder with kids for sure. So evenings and weekends are not quite that. I would say during my work hours, I spend probably 90% of my time just in a state of flow, which is really, really nice and becomes a reward in itself where it feels so good to be in that state of flow that I don't want to do anything to break it. It's truly unappealing to me, the thought of opening Twitter during my work hours. I'm just like, I don't I don't want to look at that.

It's going to shatter my focus.

Yeah. But you have dedicated time where it's like, okay, middle of the day, there is an hour there where it's like, maybe I will kind of do something else and then come back. But yeah, kids makes it harder. But I also, I think I used to be much more of a precious snowflake about, don't disturb me with my hours and stuff like that. And you just can't do that with kids now. And I'm trying to balance that with There's a lot of joy to be found in things that are surprising and not calculated. And that in itself is a kind of joy. So yeah, it's just about trying to balance both of those things, but definitely just keeping good habits and sticking to them. I don't think there's any secret to it. It's just like that's all you got to do.

Yeah. I think kids has been interesting in the sense that I used to really feel like I needed almost an hour and a half to get down to the sort of depth at which I could write well. And now I feel like, oh, you just don't have that time. So like you have to make that happen in 15 minutes and do what you can do.

It's actually fantastic. Yeah, I mean, I really used to have to like get in exactly the right mindset. One little thing was off and I was like, oh no, my day has been ruined. Now I look back, I'm like, you know, I don't have that kind of luxury. And it's actually made me a much better writer and much, much easier to focus.

Yeah, I think that's true. Yeah, you have to just snap into it. To sort of wrap up, I like to do a sort of few abstract, more philosophical questions, which you'll be familiar with from sort of like modern meditation style. But the first one is not an easy one, which is, do you believe in free will? And why do you feel the way you feel about that? I don't know why I've become so interested in asking people this, but something about it just I'm really trying to think about it for myself.

Casual question to wrap up the interview.

Yes.

Gosh, I think I probably believe in it a lot less than a lot of my peers. I think I tend to, when I try to make sense of history or the news or anything like that, I'm often looking more at systems-level explanations. So I think it's also where I don't really get bothered by doomsday scenarios where I'm just kind of like, I kind of believe any crisis that has emerged is a product of different conditions, a lot of different conditions, and when we need to address it, we'll figure it out in the moment and we don't need to overthink it. So yeah, I tend to think more in that sort of way. That being said, I think I also gravitate towards the role of individuals in being able to disrupt or change a system. So even when we talk about anti-medics, the truth teller, the champion, whatever. So I really do gravitate towards individuals. And so how are both these things true? I think when a lot of people talk about the role of individuals in changing the course of history or influencing it, they reach for something that is a great man theory or a great founder kind of theory. I don't really buy any of that, but I do think— You don't? I don't. Yeah. Or just, it doesn't resonate with me. But I think I have a version of it that is kind of like, Like a great prophet theory where I think when someone has become really infected by an idea, they need to express it by all means necessary, right? And I think that's kind of a beautiful thing and we kind of just need to like, you know, I want to step aside and just let that person go to town with whatever is in their heads. And so I think the ultimate effect is maybe similar in that I really do prize the power of the individual to change a system or change course of history. But I think it just comes from like a slightly different place where I don't know that it's their personal decision to do that. I think I have like pretty close to a literal belief that like, you know, ideas are these like viruses that infect us and we're just sort of the carriers and we're just, you know, I'm just expressing it the way you're expressing the symptoms of a cold or a flu or something. Uh, uh, so yeah, so yes, it's maybe it's, it's not quite free will, but maybe it looks the same in, in the end. Yeah.

If you haven't written about Great Profit Theory yet, you really should. That would be a great piece.

Yeah, that's a— put that on my back burner.

What's something that you wish more people would ask you about? Not even because it's particularly pragmatic to talk about or, you know, something that, you know, is top of mind, but you just really love talking about it.

It's funny because, yeah, I mean, if you ask my friends, they'll tell you that I don't like talking about anything. Oh, really?

You're the asker of questions.

Yeah, I'm the asker. I like listening to other people. I I really hate when the spotlight gets turned on me. So there's probably nothing that I'll be going around really evangelizing, but maybe that— I've been talking about kids a lot, but something that has been top of mind for me is something I do wish more people would ask about is just pregnancy and childbirth and things like that. I think people tend not to ask about these things because it's personal and sensitive and it's probably a good social instinct to have. I had this experience recently last fall where a woman came up to me at a tech conference and she said that she had read one of my newsletters and there's a brief mention of this technique called hypnobirthing, which is just sort of a style of a way to sort of prepare yourself for birth by kind of getting your brain into a good headspace. And it involves self-hypnosis, but really the point is it's just kind of getting your Your Brain in a Good Space.

Yeah.

And I'd included in a piece about hypnosis more broadly. And she had told me that she had read this. It was such a brief mention, but she didn't realize that was even a thing. And she had previously had a first birth that was very difficult and not a great experience. And then, for her second birth, she went down this whole rabbit hole that had kind of been sparked by that initial mention and learned all these new things, all these new techniques, whatever, and then ended up having a really great experience. for a second time. And so she was just sort of saying, thanks for mentioning it, and maybe you should talk about this more often. And I just never thought about it. And I never thought that's something that I would write about in sort of a more public context. But it made me think, yeah, I do wish that more people would just ask those kinds of questions because maybe you just need to hear one term and then it kind of sends you off in a direction that you might not have thought about otherwise.

Yeah, 100%. Okay, amazing. Final question. What was the last great piece of media that you consumed? Maybe it was a film, a book, anything.

I think the last, yeah, last great thing. I'm a little late to the train on this, but this TV show called Killing Eve. Oh, it's very good. Yeah. Came out a couple years ago. I just never seen, I think it's a really interesting just depiction of femininity that has this sort of nihilistic quality to it that I think is often overlooked. That's again, more essays that I would love to write about if I had the time. But I just, yeah, I'd never seen a portrayal of that before. I think the closest other piece of media I'd seen something like that in was Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette movie came out a long time ago. But similarly, I don't think it was even well-reviewed by critics, but I just saw it and I was like, I think this is really underrated. It's just sort of This is, this is my model of femininity in my head or something. And, um, so anyways, I, I'm always collecting those kinds of pieces and, uh, yeah, both of those, those kind of stuck in my brain.

Amazing. Uh, it was so much fun to, to talk about this with you, Nadia. So I'm, I'm really grateful for you taking the time and, uh, yeah, thank you so much.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

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