Learning in Public with Anna Gat and Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Hey everybody, the deadline to get your application in for the spring vintage of Village Global Accelerator is March 1st. Companies that have been through the accelerator have raised from some of the best venture funds in the world like a16z, Lux, Spark, Bessemer, Founders Fund, and many more. Learn more and apply at villageglobal.vc/accelerator. Hey everybody, it's Eric Torenberg, co-founder, partner of Village Global, a network-driven venture firm, and this is Venture Stories, a podcast covering topics relating to tech and business with world-leading experts. Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Village Global's Venture Stories. I'm here today joined by two very special guests, Anne-Laure Le Cunff of Nest Labs and Anna Gat of Interintellect. Uh, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having us.

By way of introduction, Anna, we were going to do the podcast just us, but you wanted to bring in Anne-Laure, who I've been a fan of for a long time. Why don't you talk about why you wanted to bring us all three together today?

First of all, we are super good friends and we never get to hang out. So this was a sneaky way of just giving ourselves an uninterrupted hour. And I think it's just, it's very difficult to kind of, you know, make that happen otherwise. And I also think that, you know, Anne-Laure is a scientist and an incredible expert on mindfulness, curiosity, and just like, okay, I have these humans and they have brains, what to do with them. And then there is myself. And I think I kind of come to often similar conclusions, but from a completely different angle. Right. I come from public discourse, how to, what to do with society, how to create spaces of conversation on the internet or offline. Where people are at their best selves and at their most brilliant and, you know, how to give the most brilliant people the loudest mics, right? And probably Anne-Laure's angle is like, who are the most brilliant people? Or how does any person discover their brilliance? And so to me, the fact that, you know, we arrive as good friends to the same campfire from the two other angles of the pitch, to me, that's just, you know, one of the miracles of this past year for me. Why not, why not explore that to a deeper degree?

Yeah. Anne-Laure, why don't you introduce the angle that you bring in and what your vision is for what you're trying to do with Nest Labs?

Yeah, first I want to say thanks to Anne-Laure for bringing us all together today. It's true that I would love for us to be able to hang out more often together. So this is an amazing opportunity to just get a really good chat. And yeah, when it comes to Nest Labs, I think Anne-Laure gave a really good introduction, and to go a little bit deeper, what I've noticed is that lots of people who are really smart, really talented, really creative are basically struggling to achieve their full potential because they experience burnout or imposter syndrome or fear of being judged. And these are the kind of things that Nest Labs is trying to help with by creating a safe space where smart people can experiment together, explore together, and learn together. So that's basically what the Nest Labs community is all about.

And both of you are building very active communities in the COVID era. What's that been like? Maybe Anne, we could start with you and you could introduce more of the type of events that you put together and then talk about what that transition has been like to full digital and how you think about how that will evolve, you know, in a post-COVID world.

Yes, when we say active communities, I think people have no idea how active it is. Like, this is like, you know, things are on fire and that's just the most amazing thing, I think, to explore. It's really interesting because I was, I mean, I don't, you know, this is one of those, oh, I pivoted my startup kind of stories that I'm sure Eric, you hear 10,000 of, you know, per day. I had a startup that I was working on and I had a very casual community on the side. And then I started noticing that first of all, the overlap between the two companies or the two initiatives was just so, you know, almost 100%. And I also started seeing that the kind of the gravitational force was more tilting it towards just the community hangout things. And I went to San Francisco a couple of times and I traveled and what I noticed was that everywhere I went, you know, when I brought up the question of, non-political multidisciplinary spaces, just 100 people materialized that I'd never met before. And they were like, yeah, here we are. And I thought, okay, so let's ask these people, like, why are you here? You know, kind of the intro question. What can I do for you? What is it that you want? What should I build that you want? And so early 2020 or late 2019, it became clear to me that this is what people want. There's a specific space missing in between the public and the private, where people want to learn and educate the public. And I believe, like, I'm one of these people who, you know, think that, you know, politics is the participants. So if there are new types of participants, there will be new types of politics. And I think in a weird way, interns started building a new way to engage with each other as, as you know, in a civic sphere. To me, that's really interesting. It also signals that public and private no longer mean what they used to mean. So I come more from that angle. And then that brought up the question, OK, so what is this space like? What— how is it constructed so it ensures this continued— the sustenance of this cultural norm that we get together and we talk about all these really elevated things and it's never going to get ugly or repetitive? How do you ensure that the community does this naturally? And it's kind of just this crazy experimentation that kind of leaves you with some conclusions about what kind of conversations people want, how public it should be, what are the norms for moderation, what are the norms in the community. And I always say, like, I'm running after my community. They do what they want to do and I run after them. Anne-Laure is like grinning because you know what I'm talking about. It's like, you don't know. You just allow people to express this deep wish. In a healthy way, and then you can go and kind of build around it.

When you wrote the blog post a couple of years ago, where niche, we just didn't know, is that where you were sort of getting at that the difference between public and private has evolved, or was that something different? Unpack those ideas a little bit.

Thank you for the question. I love that this essay is going to haunt me until I die. In a good way, in a good way. This is going to be my I Can't Get No Satisfaction that I will still be playing when I'm 65. It's really interesting. I mean, I grew up in late communist Eastern Europe and I grew up in this kind of Václav Havelian travesty situation where you have private speech in the home and then you have public speech outside. And those two things are completely different. I think anybody who has experienced really living in really unhealthy states, you will notice that this happens. So you have a truth at home that you discuss with your family or your loved ones, and then you go outside and you play this role. Right.. And some people think that this you can be doing without kind of infecting either the one or the other. And what I noticed when I was growing up and why I became a linguist and a screenwriter and an obsessive of the dialogue, which is ironic because I'm kind of giving a monologue here, but I will wrap up very quickly, was I became super, super fascinated by the difference between private and public language and whether we can align them. So we are always, you know, protected from this kind of duplicity, you know, when one pretends to be true. And I think we kind of all know what this, how this looks in the 21st century. And from this exploration came all the startups and all the projects that I've ever worked on. It's just that it was internet and I had to kind of dumb it down so much that I literally thought, okay, so how would this company look if it was post-apocalypse and there's no internet and electricity? And then you're like, okay, the greatest startups still exist. You know, Google is this guy sitting in front of a cave and you're like, hey, where does Jim live? And the guy says, well, it's like 3 caves down. And you're like, thanks. You know, and Facebook is this grandma who tells you like, Eric is out a lot these days, you know, and we saw him dancing. Or Airbnb is trying to sell you a very nice, you know, cove on the beach that people like you really liked. And I thought, okay, so what is Interact with a pen and a paper? And when I went back to this super, super basic level is when the true growth started happening to me, because that's when I became really receptive to what people wanted. Because when there's nothing built yet, then people will tell you.

Yeah. And I wanna get later into sort of how that relates to academia, but Anne-Laure, let's transition to you. How did your sort of community evolve? I know you think a lot about learning communities. I know you had to think a lot about offline and online. Online, of course. Why don't you unpack what's resonating with you?

Well, I wouldn't be able to talk about the journey of the Nest Labs community without mentioning the pandemic, because that has been a massive catalyst for where we are today. In March 2020, I did a first meetup, the only face-to-face meetup we ever had, where I sent an email to my newsletter and I was like, hey, who wants to come and hang out in my living room in London? And we had people coming. Most surprisingly, one of the attendees flew from Seattle to attend that meetup where we were like 10 people in my living room. So it was amazing to have this person flying from another country, another continent to be there. And we did that meetup and then obviously lockdown, we all know the story and it was not possible anymore to meet face to face. So we transitioned to online meetups. And for the first few months, I organized a couple of meetups every month, which I was hosting. And to me, the most amazing transition that Nest Labs has been going through is when, and I know it's the case for Anna as well, is when members started organizing their own meetups. Sometimes that I can't attend because I'm doing something else or I'm sleeping. And basically my attendance is not expected anymore. They're just hanging out together. So just this month, like we had a few dozens, like I think we're at 30 or 40 events for the month where members just pick a topic, pick a date, pick a time, they post it, we add it to the shared calendar and everyone can come and join. And we've had topics ranging from productivity, creativity, mental health, parenting, burnout, lots of different topics. Where people are not sharing their expertise because I think lots of platforms are doing this already. Instead, they're just learning in public and sharing their learning journey and inviting other members to join them on their journey. And this is really what the meetups are about. It's about saying, hey, I'm curious about this topic. I'm still pretty new. I really want to learn about it together. Do you want to join me on this journey? Do you want to come and talk about it, share our best tips, our challenges, our strategies, et cetera. So today, this is where we are. And I would love to say that I'm an amazing strategist who predicted that this is what it would look like a year after I launched the community, that that was my plan all along. But the truth is that it is absolutely not. I had absolutely no idea where this was going to go. And I think the, the only area where I can give myself a pat on the back is that I just created this space where people can experiment, can learn, can grow, can make mistakes, etc. And the members have really embraced that ethos as part of the NextLabs community. So this is where we are today. We have lots of live events every week, conversations in the online community, The part that I'm unsure about, and I really don't know at this stage, is once we get to a point where we can meet in person again, do I keep things the way they are? Do I encourage people to meet in person? This is something I'm still pretty unclear about, and I don't know. And I'll probably do the same thing I always do with the community, which is just asking them what they want.

Yeah. What's the secret to decentralizing the community such that they don't rely on sort of the central figure? Like, what can other communities learn from, from what you've done, Anne-Laure?

I am— it's no secret, I'm a big fan of no-code. So I think automating a lot of the processes. So instead of being a bottleneck where people need to go through to make things happen, there are processes in place where they can go and fill a form and it fills the calendar. And you have all of these automatic processes in places. To me, this is the magic behind scaling a community in a way that's still human. And it's at the core of Nest Labs. I have, you know, beside a little bit of CSS and a little bit of JavaScript here and there to fix some things, most of the Nest Labs community and the whole platform really, including the website, the newsletter, et cetera, is using no-code tools. I, you know, I could build an altar to Zapier for everything it's doing for me. It's like a full-time employee at Nest Labs at this point because it's doing so much. So I think just making sure that there, you don't need a human to make things happen, that things can be automated. That's one thing. The second thing that I started doing in the past couple of months, which has been immensely helpful, is documentation. It's quite interesting how we always think about documentation for products. Most good products have very solid documentation where they explain how do you do this, how to use the API, et cetera. But I haven't seen many communities building really solid documentation. So this is a process that we have at Nest Labs where anytime someone asks a question and we're like, ooh, that's actually a really good question. We're pretty sure someone else has the same question or is going to ask it. In a few months, we turn that question and the answer into a page that we add to the documentation. And this is this living, breathing document that everyone can refer to whenever they want to host an event, create a support group, or interact with other people within the community.

You, you recently hired a community architect. Can you talk about how you, how you see that role and whether you think other people should think about it in a similar way?

Yeah. So what's really interesting is that our community architect, she's called Carly, and she's absolutely amazing. Carly, if you listen to this, I love you so much. And thank you for everything you're doing for the community. She started as an Asaps member. I think first, that's very important that whoever you hire to help you manage the community part needs to be a member first and foremost, someone who has experience what life is like on the other side of the table. And she reached out to me, she gave me the most amazing presentation I've ever seen in my whole life. Um, it included videos with musicals in it and she started singing. It was absolutely beautiful. Never seen a presentation like that ever before. Never been pitched to get a job like this ever before either. And we did a, one month where she, I gave her like, you know, full freedom to experiment with whatever she wanted. And I just told her, let's see at the end of the month, like just do whatever you think is helpful for the community. And the title community architect, she actually came up with it. And I thought it was absolutely perfect because her role is not management. She's not a community manager. I'm very proud that I created a community that doesn't need a manager. That doesn't need a boss. She's not a chief community officer either. I don't need an officer. I don't need a manager. She's an architect. She's building and designing the processes that help the community run and that empower community members to make the most of the community. And to me, this is what a community architect is.

That's really fascinating. I'm curious for both of you, when you think about your respective communities, how they fit into sort of just the broader trend towards learning communities and where we see that going? Maybe Anne-Laure, you can start.

It's interesting. One of the weird things that happened to me in the past year is that I just don't really have time to look at the market that much because I have just so much to do. So I would be reluctant to, you know, come up with a PhD topic for where online communities are going. What I see, I mean, I can, I can talk a little bit about how community fits into the II, into Interintellect, because we are not primarily a community, right? We're a community-enabled business. What we do is interdisciplinary conversations that hosts can monetize. So we are basically building the platforms for the public intellectuals of the future who may come from anywhere in the world, from any academic rank or you know, level of expertise. We empower them to teach the public and first of all, figure out what the public is interested in from what they know, right? And we provide the tools for that to happen. In some sense, the audience as well, but we still, you know, we grow via the audiences of our hosts. But what is really, really interesting, I think, about how the community builds itself and kind of upholds its own methods via its own culture. Right. I love this point that it doesn't have a manager like we don't, we don't really moderate. We don't really manage the community. The community is adults and they know why they are there and who they want to speak with and what they want to do. And my job is to enable that, right, and facilitate and make it smoother and make sure that all the answers, all the answers are there where people can find them. So it's really interesting. I always find that the community for us is the backstage. Interact is a very public endeavor, so it speaks with the world. And then you have the community, which is, which is that we actually have a channel called Hosts Green Room, and that's where the hosts are. And it's, you know, it's a very private space where the hosts can complain or ask questions and share their worries and get tips from each other. We have a very strong host training program within the II, and currently hosts are training hosts. So the whole thing is becoming very decentralized from that angle as well. And other than that, I mean, we are on Discord. We moved there 1st of November, so quite recently. And we have— every host has their own channel where they're the manager and that's where they are basically building their own, their own audience. We are just about to launch our own platform with basically host portfolios. So the next weeks are going to be suddenly very busy and exciting. And where I see this, where I see this kind of maybe fitting into the wider trend is, it's just the understanding that, you know, most famous public thinkers used to be produced by academia, traditional media, and traditional publishing. And these force fields are largely, if not gone, but weakened and fragmented. Which leaves a giant, you know, free space to be taken up by those with the ambition and talent and work ethic to fill it in. And there is, I think, I'm sure Anne-Laure, you have a lot to say about this as well, but what really struck me as unexpected in the past year was that there is such a demand for this. Like people are so curious. And so incredibly motivated and loyal. And if you— if there is an amazing writer to read and an amazing new philosopher to listen to, or just somebody who will share their, you know, passion with you about a super niche part of biology, and people will flock there. I always tell my hosts, like, the niche-est the topic, the more attendees you will have. Like whenever we try to do something like AI and ethics, nobody booked. And the host is sitting there with like 2 people. And if you say something like a small village in Myanmar and their cuisine, instant sellout, like $100 tickets, 50 people book in 2 hours. I'm serious. It's just crazy. And I think that says so much about the internet and so much about like what happens when internet weirdos grow up and have money to spend because this is what happened, right? So that's kind of our audience and You know, every day they surprise me with something so awesome. I could never have come up with it myself.

I just want to come back to the idea of community-based learning, because this is something that's very close to my heart. And I was just a second ago pulling up my phone because I wanted to double-check the number and not say something wrong, but the completion rate for online courses is 5%. Which is so bad. People buy courses, which is based on their desire to better, to learn, to improve, et cetera. And then they actually don't manage to complete them. And something I've noticed in the past couple of years is that cohort-based courses and community-based courses are doing a much better job at fostering learning and actually completing whatever goal you have when it comes to learning. So this is what we're doing at NestLabs, and I've seen other people doing it in a great way. You know, I mean, Eric, on deck, right? So that's what you're doing, looking at creators like Thiago Forte, David Perel, Ali Abdaal, et cetera. All of them, if you look at the way they teach, have community at the core of their offering. And Anna, you mentioned loyalty, and I think to me there is this deep curiosity that you mentioned, there's motivation that you mentioned, but this loyalty that you talk about, you're not really loyal to a topic that you want to study, right? You're loyal to the people you're studying it with. And I really think that this is the power of online communities such as the Interintellect or Nest Labs, or if you look at Thiago Fortes community or On Deck, etc., is that every day you show up, you see fellow students, fellow curious minds, fellow people who want to learn at the same time as you do, who are going through the same challenges, who have similar questions, and where every day you feel like you're kind of like climbing this staircase of knowledge together. So to me, online learning, this is really what online communities is unlocking. It's this idea that we're not only learning in public, we're actually learning together.

And this is what university was supposed to be like, right? And then we went to university and it was not like that. Or if it was like that, then it ended and they kind of like spit you out and you're supposed to be, you know, absorbed by the private sector. And you're like, where is my intellectual fun? Am I just like, you know, pushed to read Substacks until the end of my life? And never will I have interaction in my life. I mean, I always say that the moment when the first fellow interintellect put interintellect in their Twitter bio, my life changed. Like, that was the moment I remember I was sitting in my kitchen because I always say like, I'm rebuilding the public square from my kitchen, which is true. And the first time that happened, from then on, it's been just a completely different game. And from then on, you know, I work for these people, you know, it's like, you know, because loyalty goes both ways. And then you're like, okay, so my job every day when I wake up and until I go to bed is to serve the interns actually. Community and the hosts and the audience. And it just puts everything into perspective in the sense that it's almost like public service to me. I actually, I went into technology because I felt that that's the best way in the 21st century to engage in public service. And I always considered it such. So yay, that part worked.

And talk about the future for how you see it evolving and sort of the grand vision, because the reason I originally reached out for this podcast was because, well, one, I'd been a fan for a while, but your tweet about how you see the internet intellect in hundreds of years, like the Royal Society of Arts, why don't you unpack that a bit?

This is something I'm kind of reluctant to put into pitch decks because I'm like, it just doesn't necessarily fit the short-termism of some parts of our business. I mean, You know, I think this is how I approach my job. I'm building something into existence that I intend to exist for a very long time. And I intend it to be a little bit separate from me after a while, mostly because I have extreme limitations in my talent and intellectual ability. So I, you know, at some point you just like allow it to go beyond you and for other people to add their brilliance and ideas and creativity. And strength. So I started doing in-translactions and as I was traveling, and then in 2019, these little hubs started popping up around the world and in places that I'd never been to, like we have a hub in Atlanta. I'd never been to Atlanta, you know, like stuff like that. And my plan for 2020 was to create this offline, you know, um, network of of civic and artistic and intellectual off-campus engagement. And then we kind of went online because of COVID It provided, I think, myself with this accelerated learning process that I could actually do it like 1,000 times more than I would have been able to do it offline at first. But I really want to pull it back offline. And I remember, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, actually your London meetup in March, there was this photo of all the hand sanitizers on the table. So there was wine and the hand sanitizers. And I was like, this is a new era. So probably there will be a lot of hand sanitizer in the future, hopefully. And I mean, I see this as a worldwide thing. You know, it's already happening. Interintellects are going to other courses and other communities, and they are running into other Interintellects there. And I'm hearing it more and more. People are moving to new locales in the world. They are no longer alone in the world because there are fellow Interinspects in that city. People are looking through books and articles and podcasts and like, oh, I know this person from Interinspect. I know this person from Interinspect. And, you know, this is how, this is how being an alumnus or alumna was supposed to be. And I think in a weird way, we are providing this weird kind of an end of a type of loneliness that was present in our lives before the pandemic.

It's interesting because a lot of things that are disruptive tend to be disruptive sort of, you know, not directly, but indirectly, you know, from the side or a bit orthogonal. And all of us in a few ways are not, you know, competing with like Harvard, you know, head on, but in sort of indirect or interesting ways. And so I ask as a segue to ask you, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, like in 10 years, what could you envision? Are you envisioning this as like an agency for intellectuals, full-stack services? Are you envisioning like hundreds of thousands or millions of people have gone to Intellect events? There are some decisions you probably have to make as you scale about where you want, what lane you want to own, and maybe it's all of it. How do you sort of think about your dreams for what Materialial will look like?

I like to say that I'm building a new type of media. That didn't exist before. And it's an idea that you can pull into existence in your living room or in a Zoom room or wherever you are. They are experimenting with it on Clubhouse now. So right now, as I'm here, there is the first Clubhouse Interact meetup. And, you know, I see Interact as something that will be a natural part of life for people the same way as going to the bookstore is, or going to the siesta. When you move to a new place, you will inquire about the local Interintellect and just go there. That's where you will meet people that you will have the best conversations with in the world. Some people will do it very seriously, use it for learning. Some people will do it very seriously, and we're already seeing this. So we have a couple of hosts who are doing this as a job and we are angling to, you know, allow our first host to have made, you know, $50K a year or so, so that we can say that, okay, you can actually. And you get a kind of a starter salary just hosting intern tech salons. And there will be people who will be doing it like, oh, my wife and I go to the theater on a Saturday night and we have dinner and then we go to an intern tech salon about the history of quantum physics or early Da Vinci artworks and have a great time, have a glass of wine, a little bit of cheese, and, you know, just enjoy ourselves in that kind of infinite game. And then hopefully many people in that room will be like, oh, I want to host one as well. They will realize that, oh, actually it's not a— there is this thing that our hosts talk about, which is the salon high. So if you host an intern tech salon, you get this high after. Maybe Anne-Laure as a neuroscientist, you will one day find the magic formula of what happens to people's neurons exactly. But I'm just— This is true. And then the next day you tend to be tired and you will get a text notice from Visa saying, what I did today was play video games because you're really exhausted. Yeah.

Maybe spend a couple of minutes talking about, you mentioned earlier the non-political, you know, some people might be skeptical. There's no way what, you know, one is always political, even to be apolitical is political. Like unpack how you think about the sort of post-political concept.

OK, and then I really, I will shut up afterwards because I want to pass the mic to Anne-Laure Le Cunff. But thank you for the question. It's interesting. So we are nonpolitical in the sense that we are nonpartisan in any way. We have a similar restriction on topics that TEDx have, which means that we don't do any religious, political, or marketing activity. You can talk about religion. We have a lot of religious content in that sense. You can talk about politics in general, history of politics, or, you know, political philosophy, but you can't because inter-intellectuallons don't have a goal. So they can't have an agenda where you're like, good job, let's leave. And marketing activities, obviously. So we're just trying to enjoy the majority of topics, which thankfully lay outside politics. And allow people to explore them to very serious depths. I always say to my hosts that the main job of an Interintellect host is to keep things complicated. Your job, you're there with 30 people from all over the world, all generations. For some people, it's 7:30 in the morning and they are breastfeeding. To someone else, it's 10:00 PM at night and they are just having a beer and enjoying the end of their day, right? They will come together from different languages, different religions, different strata of society. And because we're not, we don't have an agenda, we can enjoy the complexity of life and have conversations that I don't think you can have anywhere else on the internet. Where you're like, life is really complicated. So let's talk about love. Let's talk about work. Why do we work? Let's talk about why are we on earth? Let's talk about, you know, the beginnings of democracy and you can just enjoy this. Benevolent chaos that I think is the honest way of looking at life because that's how it is.

Yeah, I love that. Anne-Laure, I wanna transition back to you. Anne was talking about how she has hosts who are training hosts and you were talking about how you, I wanna double-click on your idea of community architect versus not having community manager. Do you feel like that's where communities should be going or will be going? Or talk about what you lose when you don't have a manager or an officer and how you make up for it.

I think you can put most communities on a spectrum. You have Twitter, which is completely unmoderated. You can report content that's offensive or that's spamming, but mostly it's unmoderated, right? And then you have on the other end of the spectrum, communities that are, I think, overly policed where you have an officer. And I don't think that all community management officers or managers are acting this way because it's just a title and means nothing about the way they actually work, right? But if you take the extreme idea of an officer who's policing the way people are behaving in the community and the kind of conversations they can have, you can, also creates a community that lacks depth because you're preventing people from exploring, as Anne-Laure said, complex topic. Life is complicated and you can either embrace this. I think Twitter embraces that very well. Life is really complicated. If you spend 5 minutes on Twitter, you'll be convinced of that. Or you have communities where they completely bury their head in the sand and ignore that fact and try to control everything and try to make it as smooth and as easy. To me, a really good community is a community that is both embracing the fact that yes, life is freaking complicated. Second, you can have the space where we make it a little bit easier to think. And that's it. To me, that's a good community. That's a community that is not ignoring the fact that things are complex, things are complicated, but there are tools, there are strategies, there are ways of approaching a community culture that can make it easier to think together. And that's what having a community architect or a community manager officer, because again, these are just titles and I'm not a big fan of titles in any case, but someone who is helping a community grow and its members to engage together is someone who will be very comfortable with both ends of the spectrum.

Can I just add a note to this? Because this is so, so closely resonating to something that I always kind of intuited. And now I'm like, yeah, I will just own up to this. So we have this knowledge, right?

Offline.

If you host a salon or a dinner party in your house, You know, how you will behave there will be really, you know, you probably picked up those skills when you were a child and you have a lot of experience in how to make people comfortable, how to keep the volume okay so people can hear each other, how to make sure everybody has some food and something to drink and they have somewhere to sit. And if you see that somebody is cold or just like standing there alone, you go there and help them. And I think what we're doing in a weird way is we're trying to create trying to allow people to export this knowledge into the online space, right? So because we— I mean, one of the— one of my motivations for writing the niche essay was that these old divisions no longer work, right? And one of the divisions that no longer work, you have the left-right, old-young, you know, employed-unemployed, and all the other divisions that don't mean much for a Gen Z individual, right? And one of these is the online-offline. I think we no longer want to think about offline as a completely separate space. And then you go online and it doesn't affect your life. What happens online will happen to you offline eventually. And what happens offline will get documented immediately online. Like these two things are together. So I always say to people, like, behave to an individual at an AI salon like you would in your living room. Sometimes you have strangers in your living room, right? Because your friend brings his friend and the courtesy and the care and the attention that you extend to this individual is how you will behave in a Zoom or when we do offline events again. So I think I really deeply trust our community and we kind of joke around that it's like, oh, you're an II citizen, right? You have rights and responsibilities. And I always say, like, I trust you guys. You are adults and you came here because you want to have a different experience. And my job is to get out of your way, you know, in a positive sense and of course be there. And for people to know that if there is a problem, there's the bat signal and like, you know, you will come and help. But otherwise, just, you know, you don't have to. I think, you know, a lot of, you know, a lot of communities may unfollow a little bit like office parties where, oh, we put up these little things and then people will have fun. No, that's not how fun works. Like, um, nobody, nobody will have fun at like 4:00 PM next to a photocopier just because there is like a pink garland. That's not enough. It's not about the outside. It's not about tokens that you put out. It's about, like you said, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, like ask people what they want. And then make sure that, you know, first of all, make sure that that thing can happen and also allow people space to change their minds because their community may be like, we want this. And then this happens and they are like, no, we actually hate this. And then you can't say like, but you guys said it and we already spent so much money on it. No, you're like, everything is an experiment and there is no psychological call on changing your mind or changing as a community., right? So to me, these two things would be crucial to mention. Yeah.

You mentioned sort of dissolving boundaries or divisions. You've thought a bit about that, Anna, as it relates to multidisciplinary and just sort of the advent of the generalist more broadly. Can you unpack that?

I know this is one of your favorite topics because we actually did a salon about specialists versus generalists and people were quoting your tweets. I was like, oh no, I have to read more Eric tweets now because I was just like, they're like, I have no idea. But I mean, we looked at them and now I know. So there's a book by a Stanford academic called Mira Struber called Interdisciplinary Conversations. And this lady spent 45 years researching, you know, she tried to start interdisciplinary projects in the '70s in America. And she brought together people and she had funding. She got the room, they got free coffee, like everything was in place, right? The photocopier and the gear line, everything was there. And then, you know, she would get into these situations like, oh, the Chicago School economist is sitting there with the Quaker theologians and it's a huge fight. And the theologian runs out crying and she's like, what happened? Why can't these people talk to— like, they are experts at the same things. You know, they are both willing. They are there. And then you're like, yeah, yeah, because they speak a completely different language. Right. You can't just say, you know, you come from maybe a more disagreeable culture. And then there's another person who is like, let's first wait. And what she started experimenting with, and then a lot of other thinkers took it much further down the road, is establishing the shared humanity. Because nowadays you would approach this situation saying, like, OK, so here is the Quaker theologian and here is the Chicago School economist. So who has pets? You know, or 'Who can make an awesome quesadilla? Let's do this.' And once everybody's like well-fed and showed all their cat photos, then you can get down to business because now we've kind of established that, okay, we are just humans in the room. I mean, this is what I'm experimenting with. I mean, we have a relatively well-formulated idea of moderation now, and I'm just working on a new piece to basically write it down and be like, 'Guys, try this at home.' And one of the key parts is the intros and how you kind of create the beginning into something that will just make people chill out and make people realize like they are actually there to have fun. So why not do it?

And to that end, I wanna hear from both of you. What is your hope for what someone aims to get out of an Interlect event or a community meetup? For Nest Labs, like what is the secret for making a really great, you know, of your respective meetups work well? Like what is the one takeaway you want your host to have or whoever's organizing?

It may sound counterintuitive, but to me, a great Nest Labs meetup is when people leave with more questions than they had before they joined. That's why to me, they are every time, I'm the one hosting a meetup, which only happens, last time I checked, like 5% of the time these days. I don't host that many anymore, but I always introduce the meetup by saying, hey, this is not a presentation. This is not a workshop. This is not a place where you're going to come and sit and listen and take notes and get answers. This is a place where everybody is invited to share their experiences, their challenges, their strategies. We're all going to learn from each other. And if this event is a success, you should have some answers to some of your questions, but also many more questions that you didn't even know you had before joining. Many more opportunities to explore, to learn, to go on your own journey, to research more around this topic, to connect with fellow members, to try and unpack this together. To me, this is a great meetup. When you leave and you're like, whoa, I learned so much. But also, you know, the Dunning-Kruger effect, right? You don't know what you don't know. If you leave the meetup realizing how much you don't know about this topic and how excited you are about learning more, this is a great success in my book.

I love this so much. This reminds me, I recently did the 2, 3 Me test. You know, when they send you this tube and you, in a very, you know, not very Instagram shareable moment, you just keep spitting into it for 30 minutes and then you send it by post. It's great. And I remember when I got my results and I felt like, you know, I did this because I wanted to have answers. And then it just opens up all of these questions, like, how am I 1 person English? What happened? Oh my God. And you're just up all night. This is like, I just paid money to get so many more questions than what got answered here. Um, but I love this and And I mean, I really, really love the whole infinite game theory. And we often talk about this, you know, like Interact is an infinite game. You know, winning is that people want to keep playing with you. And we have 4 pillars of hosting on Aye Aye Salon that I teach to the hosts and now hosts teach each other, which is the imperfect host. So you are not a teacher. It's not ex cathedra. You're there as a human. You know, Anne-Laure, you've seen me host live events. I spill my drink, the projector doesn't work, like something else, like Make something go wrong so people chill out and enjoy, you know, their brains without feeling like, oh, I'm on the spot or something. Then we have the stickiness as well. So, you know, create environments where people understand that if they choose to, they will see these people again. So it's worth listening to the other person, worth remembering details about them, worth opening up to them because it's not like, oh, then this person just goes down the drain and I will never see them again. We have the ritual space, which is that intern tech salons are always the same format. So like church or school, people know what to expect. It's always the same length, same parts happen. And it makes, you know, a kind of fundamental part of people relax. And that's when connections and connections between ideas can come to light because you don't have to worry about, you don't have to prep for uncertainty. At the basic level. So that's very important for me. And the fourth thing, and I'm just working on, first of all, renaming it, but also just— we are just exploring this with the hosts— is we call it anchoring. And it's very closely tied to the intro question, which is that we find that most negative associations or negative experiences in conversation, and particularly when it involves politics or worldview, And Interns Act involves worldview a lot because we talk about values, right? And taste. So we talk about morality a lot in that sense. Is that we don't leave spaces that people can fill in with potentially negative imagination. So people come in, it's their own face, it's their name. If somebody has to leave early, they will say right away. And then they introduce themselves and you know who is there and you get a kind of a vibe check and. And we find that these 4 things create a level of trust that I think, I mean, you know, when we are like, oh my God, how do these things happen at Interact Salons? Like sometimes it's incredibly cathartic and people share and create things on the spot that, you know, it's like magic. Like you're just sitting there and you don't understand how is this happening. And it happens every night or multiple times a day. And I think it comes because these 4 things are so stably there, it's almost like this super strong foundation for the building. And then you can have the biggest party in the building, right? You don't have to worry that it falls apart. And I think this is— if, you know, kind of to go back to your earlier question, Eric, I think a trend that we will see more of in the future in all sorts of fields is that people will work more on the foundations because they will understand that counterintuitively, if you want decentralized, if you want surprising, if you want diverse, you have to create foundations that are extremely fixed because that's where it can happen. That's where you can— I mean, it's much easier to have a good conversation with you guys right now that I don't have to worry that somebody will pull out the chair from under me. This part of me is completely relaxed. I'm a bit less certain about the Wi-Fi, but that's another question. And like, what is the psychological equivalent of that kind of physical stability? Because if it's not there, then you will be in, you know, you will be a little bit like squirmish and you will be listening less to the other person, stuff like that.

Yeah. That's really interesting. Maybe gearing towards closing here, you know, we've talked about certain elements that make our communities magical. We've talked about sort of the rise of learning communities. Let's talk about the business of these communities in terms of how you recommend they think about business models or just sustainability more broadly. Anne-Laure, perhaps we could start with you.

Yeah, we have a very simple model at Nest Labs. You can pay a price that is lower or a price that is higher, and it gives you access to the exact same things. So the lower price is for people who are either students or don't have a job at the moment, which is unfortunately the case a lot with the pandemic. Lots of people have lost their jobs or people who are part of, I don't know if there's a better word for it, but the global south where they don't have the same purchasing power that you may have in the US or Europe. So that's the lower price that we have. And then we have a higher price for people who are maybe more successful entrepreneurs or employees working in tech or based in Europe or in the US. And we make it very clear on the landing page that you don't get any extra benefits from getting the higher priced subscription. And it's quite interesting because so far we've been seeing 30% of people signing up for the higher priced one, even though, again, very clear, you don't get anything more. So I find it absolutely amazing that these generous people are willing to subsidize other members who may not have the means to pay for the full price of the membership. And that's it. Very simple. Everything is included. It's a recurring membership. And to me, this is a model that's like, and I would love, I'm excited to hear about the way you're thinking about it, Anna, because we have a completely different business model. To me, uh, because we're a very small team, we're only 2 people. This is also peace of mind as a solo founder. It's so simple to manage. I have a really good bird's eye view of my recurring revenue. I just know this is the number of members I have at the moment, and this is the money that is going to hit our business accounts this month. In the same way, Anne-Laure Le Cunff mentioned, how it's important to have this kind of solid base that you don't worry about. To me, in terms of business model, this is what it is. I don't have to worry about this. And my mind is free to experiment and to play with new offering, new products, et cetera, because I know that I have this stable base that is not going to move in very unpredictable ways. So So that's how the business model works at Nest Labs.

I love it. And I love your tweet when you were like, guys, you want to pay more? Okay, here is the button. It's just like the perfect fit. So for us, I mean, obviously my, you know, as being a community-enabled business, we are technically an event company, right? And while at a surface glance, you would think that we make events, in reality, we make hosts. And that's our, you know, if your startup is a factory, that's what we make, beautiful, beautiful hosts. And so our primary goal is to make hosts money, right? So for us, you know, we take a cut from, from certain types of revenues that the hosts have. And Ari, kind of to go back to your question about agency, there are elements in the making that will function a little bit like an agency, although currently that's not the main focus. And, but we are also going to be launching a very, very simple membership because we started— so people started asking about, and we're also just two people, right? And people started asking about whether they could pay to get into the forum. And for a long time, I didn't want to monetize it because I thought that if I start monetizing that, then my incentive will be to grow that part of the business as opposed to the events, which is the core of our mission. But what we see from donations is that some people feel more comfortable paying for it. And so we are like, okay, there's going to be an experimental way to do that. And then I will see. For me, I think that kind of certainty that Anne-Laure Le Cunffff mentioned about just waking up and knowing that Oh, this is default alive, is the host community and knowing that all these are all this long series in the making. People are writing books about it. People are doing salons about the books they are writing. And you kind of see, I think like 70% of all the communication I deal with all day is just salon ideas. This morning I woke up and I got this text that somebody wants to do a salon series on a halt and catch Fire, but I was so sleepy, so I looked at my phone and I was like, oh, height and Catch Fire, like Jonathan Haidt and Catch Fire. I was like, oh my God, we are so witty. And then I was, no, no, no, no, this is about a TV series. But maybe one day we will do Jonathan Haidt and Catch Fire. I think that would be hilarious.

Uh, that's a, that's a great place to, to, to wrap. I think if people enjoyed what, what they heard, uh, I highly recommend checking out both Inner Intellect and Nest Labs. I believe it's just innerintellect.com and nestlabs.com. And also, Anne and Laura are great on Twitter as well. And Laura, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. This has been a great episode.

Thanks so much for having us, Eric.

Thank you so much. Follow Anne-Laure on Twitter, she's amazing. Me, uh, depends on the day.

No, follow Anne-Laure, she's really weird on Twitter, but the best.

Twitter is like, I tend to say like everything that used to end high school dates because people thought you were really weird gets you a lot of followers. It's like the world is upside down.

Yeah, I like that framing.

Thank you so much, Eric.

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