22: Nadia Asparouhova - Ideas that Infect

Speaker A: Welcome to Dialectic, episode 22 with Nadia Asparova. Nadia is a writer, researcher, and something of an internet sociologist. Nadia recently published her latest book, Anti-Memetics, where she details the last near decade of the internet, how public and private spaces have evolved, and critically, why some ideas, unlike memes, resist spreading rather than spreading virally. Much of our conversation is focused on the ideas in this book, but we also talked about Nadia's other writing. Including her incredible blog and newsletter, as well as a bit about her first book, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, which was published by Stripe Press under her prior name, Nadia Egbal.

Nadia also previously worked at Substack, Protocol Labs, and GitHub, and has worked as a researcher in multiple contexts supported by a number of organizations. My favorite thing about Nadia is that she seems simultaneously deeply interested in ideas and ultimately focus on how they can produce action in the world. We talk about that and much more, and we return, as Nadia does in her book, to the notion that attention is upstream of all of our ideas and all of our action. Thanks for listening to Dialectic, and if you enjoy it, please share it with a friend.

Here's Nadia. Nadia Asparova, welcome. Speaker B: Thank you. Speaker A: I'm really glad to be here with you. You— it's a kind of a recurring theme with this podcast, but you You have a lot of, you contain multitudes. There's lots of different ideas. We're not going to scratch all of them today, but hopefully we'll get into a lot of them. And I think that starts actually with ideas. There's a line in The New Yorker, uh, review of your recent book, Antimemetics, where he says, she is interested in ideas that cost something.

And I thought that was an interesting place to start. I think you've spent your creative life, professional life, in many ways circling ideas and thinking about ideas. And while I think you put more weight into ideas than most, even when we first met, like, you're always coming back to this premise of like, how can we actually use ideas to impact things and change things and solve problems? I think in the intro to the book, you even, you kind of reflect on this. You say, a book about ideas, it was just so abstract, so navel-gazy, so self-indulgent.

I was, to be honest, somewhat disgusted with myself. I wanted to do things that felt real, tangible, and grounded in actual happenings in the world. And yet my intuition, in my sense, is that you found the right balance and yet you actually love ideas. And so I guess my first question would be, why do you love ideas? Or at the very least, why do you think they matter so much for people who are very interested in living in and acting in and participating in the world, not just observing it? Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker A: I'm really glad to be here with you. You— it's a kind of a recurring theme with this podcast, but you You have a lot of, you contain multitudes. There's lots of different ideas. We're not going to scratch all of them today, but hopefully we'll get into a lot of them. And I think that starts actually with ideas. There's a line in The New Yorker, uh, review of your recent book, Antimemetics, where he says, she is interested in ideas that cost something. And I thought that was an interesting place to start.

I think you've spent your creative life, professional life, in many ways circling ideas and thinking about ideas. And while I think you put more weight into ideas than most, even when we first met, like, you're always coming back to this premise of like, how can we actually use ideas to impact things and change things and solve problems? I think in the intro to the book, you even, you kind of reflect on this. You say, a book about ideas, it was just so abstract, so navel-gazy, so self-indulgent. I was, to be honest, somewhat disgusted with myself.

I wanted to do things that felt real, tangible, and grounded in actual happenings in the world. And yet my intuition, in my sense, is that you found the right balance and yet you actually love ideas. And so I guess my first question would be, why do you love ideas? Or at the very least, why do you think they matter so much for people who are very interested in living in and acting in and participating in the world, not just observing it? Speaker B: Yeah, I think, um, some of my, what's the term, self-hatingness or something about ideas comes a little bit just from being straddling a bunch of different worlds.

and sort of, you know, in tech world, I think we tend to err more on the side of action, and academia kind of errs more on the side of ideas. And so I'm sort of seeing different parts of it where, at least in tech, sometimes I feel like ideas are weirdly underappreciated, even though they're what fuels everything that people do. So Tanner Greer, one of my favorite writers, wrote a piece about the Silicon Valley canon and sort of you know, what is the underlying ideology that fuels people in Silicon Valley?

And he talks about this marriage of ideas and of action. And so people are constantly searching for new ideas to uncover, and then they all— but they also want to put them into action. Right. And I think culturally in tech, people talk a lot about the builder side of things, and that's sort of what brings people together. But it's sort of like, you know, what are you building and why? And if you really zoom out and look at it, you see that like, you know, tech people are building all sorts of things and they don't really limit themselves to just software or hardware or whatever.

It's just like looking for things. It's— there's, there's some feeling of like uncovering a prize when you find an idea that like no one else has found that's kind of niche. And then you kind of parade it around at the dinner parties and like tell people about it, this little nugget that you found in a book or something. And I really love that about tech. I think that's what attracted me to tech culture in the first place. And so it feels like a strange place where I get to be someone that uncovers ideas and tries to shepherd them into a place of action.

But sometimes, yeah, there's a little bit of self-consciousness, I think, around everyone talks about building, and there's a little bit of dismissiveness sometimes around ideas as a more explicit part of what someone does for a living. Or, yeah, um, so yeah, but I think, I think they're really important because it's, you know, it's— if you're just about actions, then you're kind of just, you know, firing a gun. But the ideas part is what is pointing you in the right direction. Speaker B: Yeah, I think, um, some of my, what's the term, self-hatingness or something about ideas comes a little bit just from being straddling a bunch of different worlds.

and sort of, you know, in tech world, I think we tend to err more on the side of action, and academia kind of errs more on the side of ideas. And so I'm sort of seeing different parts of it where, at least in tech, sometimes I feel like ideas are weirdly underappreciated, even though they're what fuels everything that people do. So Tanner Greer, one of my favorite writers, wrote a piece about the Silicon Valley canon and sort of you know, what is the underlying ideology that fuels people in Silicon Valley?

And he talks about this marriage of ideas and of action. And so people are constantly searching for new ideas to uncover, and then they all— but they also want to put them into action. Right. And I think culturally in tech, people talk a lot about the builder side of things, and that's sort of what brings people together. But it's sort of like, you know, what are you building and why? And if you really zoom out and look at it, you see that like, you know, tech people are building all sorts of things and they don't really limit themselves to just software or hardware or whatever.

It's just like looking for things. It's— there's, there's some feeling of like uncovering a prize when you find an idea that like no one else has found that's kind of niche. And then you kind of parade it around at the dinner parties and like tell people about it, this little nugget that you found in a book or something. And I really love that about tech. I think that's what attracted me to tech culture in the first place. And so it feels like a strange place where I get to be someone that uncovers ideas and tries to shepherd them into a place of action.

But sometimes, yeah, there's a little bit of self-consciousness, I think, around everyone talks about building, and there's a little bit of dismissiveness sometimes around ideas as a more explicit part of what someone does for a living. Or, yeah, um, so yeah, but I think, I think they're really important because it's, you know, it's— if you're just about actions, then you're kind of just, you know, firing a gun. But the ideas part is what is pointing you in the right direction. Speaker A: I like that answer a lot. I think I'm a pretty big believer that logic and facts rarely scale in the way that stories do.

And I, I was thinking about this a lot as I was reading and just prepping for this. Like, I'd be curious if you have a view on how stories and ideas sit next to each other and like what the potential differences are. Are they the same? Are stories a type of idea? Because I think this is to piggyback off your last question. Silicon Valley is also a place that like very much at times maybe seems to underrate it, but like, I think is very involved in and cares a lot about stories.

Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, I guess my first reaction to that would be stories are a, um, like a vessel for, or marketing, a marketing gimmick for ideas or something. Right. Um, it's, they're meant to transmit something. So you have parables, fables, folk stories, right there. They're a story that is ostensibly about something that seems very, very quaint, but like is actually trying to teach some underlying moral or something like that. Right. And I think Yes, stories are a way to take an idea and make them more palatable. And that's the really— I think that's the really hard part.

And that's to me the really fun part too, is when you can see an idea and you think, okay, like, I know, I know what I'm trying to transmit, but what's the best way to try to get it across? And choosing just the right language, just the right characters to frame that is, yeah, I think the hardest part. Speaker A: We're definitely going to talk more about how ideas are spread. First, I think you have— I think it's in the book. I don't know, maybe in another piece you talk about like the biodiversity of ideas, specifically in the context of philanthropy.

But I think it's like a pretty interesting premise. We see this, as you know, like certainly in startups and innovation, like lots of different funding sources, lots of different people coming at it from different angles. There's one example where you're talking about Peter Frumpkin and instrumental versus expressive giving. And then you talk about Ursula Le Guin. You say Le Guin's story resonates because for most people anyway, it doesn't just feel right to outsource our judgment to a game of numbers. And it's like, Certainly adjacent to the, some of the effective altruism criticisms, but I'm curious why it's important to have a personal connection to the ideas that we care about in that sort of like, I don't mean to overfocus on this specific example, but the expressive giving side of that kind of equation.

It seems to me that one of the main ways you're coming at all of this is, is very much seeking almost like a taste in ideas that is very personal and connected and not necessarily only subjective, but like isn't just this sort of hyper-rational, whatever, choose your favorite EA or seeing like a state or whatever. Speaker A: We're definitely going to talk more about how ideas are spread. First, I think you have— I think it's in the book. I don't know, maybe in another piece you talk about like the biodiversity of ideas, specifically in the context of philanthropy.

But I think it's like a pretty interesting premise. We see this, as you know, like certainly in startups and innovation, like lots of different funding sources, lots of different people coming at it from different angles. There's one example where you're talking about Peter Frumpkin and instrumental versus expressive giving. And then you talk about Ursula Le Guin. You say Le Guin's story resonates because for most people anyway, it doesn't just feel right to outsource our judgment to a game of numbers. And it's like, Certainly adjacent to the, some of the effective altruism criticisms, but I'm curious why it's important to have a personal connection to the ideas that we care about in that sort of like, I don't mean to overfocus on this specific example, but the expressive giving side of that kind of equation.

It seems to me that one of the main ways you're coming at all of this is, is very much seeking almost like a taste in ideas that is very personal and connected and not necessarily only subjective, but like isn't just this sort of hyper-rational, whatever, choose your favorite EA or seeing like a state or whatever. Speaker B: Yeah, I think I try to take a page just from how things work in biology too. And so, you know, when ecosystems evolve, they don't evolve at this top-down systems level. There's no, you know, great designer of trying to make a biological ecosystem more efficient, right?

It's like, each species or each actor that is involved in the ecosystem is just trying to do what makes sense for them, right? And then through this sort of mingling of all these different competing motives, behaviors, whatever, then you kind of reach this sort of stasis where you can kind of zoom out and say like, okay, this is what the system is. And I think that's true for people too. I don't see why we should be any different. And so, you know, a lot of people have ideas about how they want a system to be engineered or how they think people should be talking to each other or whatever.

But I don't see any examples of how that has really worked out in the long run. You can sort of try to guide people in one direction or the other, but I think it always comes from being, you are just yet another actor in the ecosystem, right? So yeah, I think I take a very pluralistic approach to philanthropy, to the exchange of ideas, to just sort of like, I think it could be conflated with libertarianism, but it's really, really not in the sense of, It's not about everyone doing what's best for them and then screw everyone else.

Speaker A: Right, right, right. Speaker B: Not to be overly reductive about libertarian views, but it's not really about overemphasizing the importance of the individual. It's about considering the individual in the context of an ecosystem and saying what is best for the system is actually each person sort of pursuing their own thing. And then from there, some ideas will win, some ideas will lose. And, you know, then we can kind of zoom out and say, what does the system look like and what else do we need? Speaker A: Totally. Yeah, that you, you articulate that frame really well in a piece where you're talking about sort of like what the real ideology of technology is.

And it's not this libertarian thing. It's actually this like very individual ambition path into collectivism, which I think is cool. I think the other thing that's, that comes up there is just like the overhang of stuff like EA and, and I don't mean to overly criticize it or even be too specific about it, but it is sort of this notion that there are like a correct set of ideas, which is— which goes back to part of your answer. It's— yeah, it's, it's a funny tension, like, and I think that theme really runs through a lot of the book.

I want to talk a lot more about ideas, but I think it's probably worth setting the stage for how you think about what happened to the internet in the last 10 years. And I think they're like my, my interpretation of Antimemetics is that there's like a lot of different books in there. But I think one of them is definitely just this sort of like sociology on what happened when the internet went from this very public place to a more complex place. And so I want to talk a little bit about that before we go back to the idea stuff.

There's one, one line you say, find enough people who share your views, no matter how extreme or far-fetched, and they will form your, your new reality, which I think is like a good frame for like so much of it, of what has happened. And then later, I think it's in his or their review of Applied Divinity Studies, uh, review of Antimemetics, they talk about sort of this teal 2010s-ish fear of globalization, and they point out that maybe what you're pointing at is a more modern warning around Balkanization. And then they go on to say, I used to write stuff, not on this blog, but personally, in a hope to meet new people and attract friends.

'Can you imagine how barbaric? Now I have group chats run by super connector moderators. Can you imagine I used to just give people unfiltered access to my thoughts? The new dark era already feels normal.' And so I think some people probably are very familiar with this, other people less so. I think it would be helpful just to get us like, have you set the stage around what the topography, like how it has shifted? There's the Yancey kind of like Dark Forest Collective idea. There's the Maggie Appleton Cozy Web frame of this, the different versions of it, but like, We went from a very global village town square to something new.

Can you give a brief frame on how you think that's changed? Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, I think it's something that a lot of people have probably felt, even if they, you know, even if we haven't really talked about it explicitly. I think the more explicit conversation is kind of just starting to enter the discourse, but I kind of stumbled into thinking about it when I was working on my first book and during a prior period of my life where I was looking a lot at open source software developers. And, um, they're— I think they're kind of a nice foil through which to sort of understand how things changed.

And so, you know, you had at the end of the mid— let's say like mid to late 2000s, um, a lot of excitement about this idea of people collaborating on the internet who didn't know each other and like, what can they produce, right? And so you talk about like the power, the wisdom of the crowds and crowdsourcing and Wikipedia and Open source software was another one of these things where it's like, oh, there are just these developers who are collaborating with each other from around the world and producing software that anyone can use and consume freely.

Like, what a great idea. And this came at the same time that we were talking about globalization and is this the end of history? Because clearly democracy has won as the ideal form of government, fall of communism. So I think there's just a lot of hope and optimism that's just the power of getting good people together in a room to talk about stuff exposes us to new ideas. And that's a really good thing. And then we all kind of know, you know, what happened after that. So we started building infrastructure around this, right?

So you have this sort of Web 2.0 era where, you know, we're taking that seed of an idea and then really canonizing it into, into these social platforms. And everyone is sharing their ideas on, you know, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, whatever. And then it starts to get just, you know, for a time, let's say in the mid-2010s, it feels really good. And again, we're still really excited about this, you know, unchecked spread of ideas. And then things start to get like a little bit weird in the second half of the 2010s.

And I still— we don't even have a name for that era yet. I feel like that's how new it is. You know, we talk about it as the culture wars or cancel culture. Something strange started to happen where people started getting really angry at each other because they're just too exposed to too many ideas. Speaker A: And there's an overall feeling of collapse. Speaker B: Yes. Speaker A: I think it's like the defining— I don't know if that's what you would call it, but that's definitely what happened. Speaker B: Yeah, definitely like the context collapse, right?

Where anything that you're sharing online is suddenly escaping context and you can get piled on by people you don't even know. And that can have real life consequences now for people's, you know, professional, personal reputations. And then I think we just kind of got to a point where it was like, you know, people need to protect themselves somehow. It was getting to be too much. And this was also around the time that COVID happened, 2020. And so there's this thing that started to happen where people started going deeper and deeper into their own, like, burrowing down underground because they just couldn't handle what was going on.

Speaker A: Get into the bunker. Speaker B: Yes. And this was partly aided by actual technology as well, because, yeah, like, you know, we couldn't even send, you know, group messages until I think, like, yeah, like mid-2010s-ish or something. Like, even that technology had not even been invented, right? You could only text people one-on-one. Now you can text groups. And so having some of this actual infrastructure and it made it possible for people to self-organize in smaller groups on the internet. Speaker A: Well, and particularly in, I think maybe you could text a group of 10, but the sort of like Discord idea or even the Telegram or WhatsApp group of 100 people was totally not a thing.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, people needed like these tools, right? Which I think is kind of funny to think about a time where we literally like didn't even have the tools or technology to self-organize in small groups online. But then, yeah, having that and then slowly people start gravitating towards that as a way to sort of, yeah, get away from the loud noise. And then I think it's interesting because when, you know, whenever like a new social platform came out in the golden years of like Web 2.0, it was always this like really exciting, flashy thing.

But group chats were kind of this like very slow burn. Yeah. I mean, only just now are we starting to see some media pieces being published about like the phenomenon of group chats. We've all been using them for years now, but like no one's really talking about it. They're not visible, right? It's, yeah, very unusual for the way any sort of, like, new thing pops up on the internet to have it be something we, like, don't even talk about for years. Yeah. And we're just kind of doing. And yeah, so I think that's sort of, like, how we got to this point now.

One of the arguments I make in the book is that I think a lot of people think this is a good thing. That's okay, you know, this loud, noisy world out there, and then now we have our little group chats over here and our more private spaces. We're good, right? I don't think the story should just end there. I think, um, and I talk about in the book some examples of ways in which being more isolated and, you know, just sort of only talking to the same 10 people you know is, uh, can also be dangerous.

And not just in the sense of you're not being exposed to new ideas, but more that we all are still interacting with the world out there, right? Like, most people are not completely cutting themselves off from the sort of rush of ideas that are on super public feeds. And so you get these sort of like idea contagions that make their way into your group chats and then suddenly they mutate and evolve in these crazy ways. So yeah, we can talk about that more later too. But yeah, I think the— I don't think the story is as simple as just, you know, first there was super public, now we're private and it's over.

I think we're in this more hybrid-like state where we have to talk about, you know, what happens when— how do these— having these two different spaces actually shape each other? Speaker A: Totally. I think it's also just a really good reminder. One thing that kept coming up as I was reading is just like, we're, we're in a very young version of whatever this digital life is. And like, it's not that young anymore, but in the grand scheme of like human society and sociology, it's really young. And I think like, it's easy to think about these things as sort of like, oh, we've, we've reached how it's going to be.

And it's, it's clear that that's not the case. There's one thread on the, on the sort of like cancel culture idea that I thought was really interesting in the book. You're talking about Girard and the historical way kind of like humanity would deal with sacrifice as a way to move out of memetics. You say, it would not be far-fetched to say that we've been embroiled in a prolonged and escalating memetic conflict since the end of the Cold War, but the proliferation of memetic tribes strained the core assumptions underpinning Girard's framework, as a context collapse made it impossible for any one scapegoat, no matter how big, to fully resolve the conflicts between tribes.

And I thought this line was amazing. One tribe's scapegoat was another's hero, and the act of scapegoating or being scapegoated even became itself a memetic model to aspire to, which I think is like such a great encapsulation of what that collapse felt like. It's almost like there's this meta-scapegoating dynamic running over the top of things. Do you have a sense of like why living in a world that was so connected and that memes could travel so fast produced this type of outcome? What is it about living effectively in like meme world that creates that kind of collapse?

Is it just too much noise and not enough signal, or is it something else? Speaker B: Yeah, it's probably a lot of things. Um, but I think part of it is a function of just being— your attention being overwhelmed, right? Attention is a finite resource. We cannot create infinite amounts of attention, but the way that we make our attention more efficient is to pay less attention to more things. And so it becomes like a much shallower engagement with a lot of stuff. It's just a lot faster to receive an idea and sort of reflexively pass it on.

Right. And you're sort of like fueling the fire for this thing that you may not even really care about or have a relationship to. And so if you think of us as this, like, you know, giant machine of people that are all just sort of like grabbing a thing and passing along, grabbing a thing and passing along and not really looking at it, I think it's almost like the quality control went down or something. And so, yeah, I think of each of us is like a node in whatever network we're involved with in terms of like how ideas spread.

And for an idea to spread through a network, it has to encounter each node, and each node decides, do I hold it? Do I pass it on? Do I destroy it? Whatever. So we're all— every one of us is a gatekeeper for whatever, every single idea that comes across us. And all the gatekeepers got kind of lazy, right? Understandably so, because there's just too much stuff to, you know, just the amount of information that everyone's being inundated with. Speaker A: And it's fun to spread a meme. Speaker B: It's fun.

It feels really good, right? Feels really good and you often don't think about it or you just, yeah, it's so easy to just share a link or whatever. And so yeah, I think that's then in aggregate when you zoom back out to, you know, again, we're sort of like zooming in on what is best for each individual person and then you're kind of just doing what's best for you and you zoom out and say, what has the system turned into? And the system has turned into just, yeah, sort of mindless sharing, resharing and yeah.

Speaker A: Totally. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: The filter bar dropped. You talk about in this modern or this emerging like whatever, again, whatever you want to call it, dark forest internet or subculture internet or whatever it is, almost like staged bottom-up sourcing of new things. And I guess what I mean by that would be people coordinating without it being obvious that they're coordinating. A couple of lines from you on this. You say, in a memetically charged environment, it's safer to frame ideas as independent, uncoordinated opinions rather than as part of an organized movement, closer to a mafia or guerrilla-style information warfare than a public advocacy group.

Trying to make their tribe appear bigger and more threatening would only put a target on its back. It's more effective to weaponize individualism. There's a Tiago Forte quote where he puts this way more explicitly. The key to Twitter is joining an informal cabal of mutually retweeting people with aligned agendas. Then you all interact with each other as a kind of performance art, but you can't ask or apply formally. It's all implicit, like collusion around price fixing. Kind of a cynical view, but I guess it's like, it's sort of like we're still in the Times Square now, but most people are secretly in a mafia of some kind.

You talk about a maybe less cynical frame of this is just like the memetic Galápagos, which is, I think is cool. I was wondering about, this feels incredibly apt to Twitter. Like I like to joke Twitter is a gladiator arena. In that frame, like it totally makes sense to not go at it alone. How much of this frame is specific to Twitter and like that kind of corner of the world versus true about how the entire public internet is behaving today? You and I have both spent a lot of our lives and a lot of our relationships on Twitter for over a decade.

And so I'm curious how Twitter-centric this view is, or if you think it's like basically how everything is now. Speaker B: I think it's true for looking at how— I have to be overly coarse about it— but just sort of like how power moves. Um, so sure, a lot of people are not in group chats of relevance or whatever, but as we've been seeing with some of the recent pieces that have come out about group chats, it's— it seems to be true not just for, you know, like tech people on Twitter or something, but it's true for politicians, it's true for celebrities.

And yeah, it's also true for maybe some of our circles on Twitter. But, and I actually don't even think this behavior is super new, right? I mean, it's like, it's just the classic boys club, cigar club, whatever. Right. Speaker A: We actually became briefly naive. It's almost like, right, right, right. Speaker B: Like our expectations were just totally off. I think it's always been a little bit like this. And there's something about a group chat that seems more exciting to people because it's like, oh, it's been, you know, codified somehow on the internet.

But like, it's not really that it's, it's so, yeah, so new or different. Um, maybe the difference is just the speed at which people are talking in group chats versus getting together once a week to smoke cigars in a back room. And so there's much more of this like real-time relationship between what's happening in a group chat and what's happening in public. But yeah, I think, I think it's relevant to anyone who's paying— if someone who is consuming or paying attention to what's happening on, you know, their social platform of choice, I think there's always this deeper story of, you know, it may not always be apparent to someone consuming information who is affiliated with whom.

And when they see two people talk about a similar idea or support each other, and they might think, oh wow, that means multiple people support this idea, it might also just mean they already know each other and they're supporting each other, right? And so yeah, it's useful to like know that and be aware of that. Speaker A: Yes. Yeah, another, another frame on this would just be like, if something's happening in a public square or public venue you should probably be like a little bit wary of it being just like one independent actor.

Speaker B: Random, right? Yeah. And maybe that's the update that people need to have of like, it used to be that maybe if someone's making an official announcement or something, you think, oh, this is like an official polished thing. And, but that's kind of true for like all public interactions, no matter how, even like just stupidest random reply on Twitter. It's like a lot of these have just been like very, very workshopped on the backend. Yes. Speaker A: There's one last kind of foothold that I think is useful to set up a lot of the rest of the conversation, which is around legibility and illegibility.

You have this frame around flash floods that I thought was really interesting around like what the 2010s internet started to do. You say even the most charged topics— climate change, gun control, Israel-Palestine— can only sustain themselves on sugary bursts of memetic spread for so long. While these examples are thought of as hot political topics, when we consider how they've evolved over long timelines, it's remarkable how little progress gets made. Despite their ability to attract short-term attention, it's not so much these ideas refuse to spread, but that the fire burns itself out quickly.

We are throwing twigs and leaves into the kiln when what we really need are a few big logs. And so you're starting to point at this notion that like maybe massive memetic spread or legible— instant legibility isn't so helpful. You want to talk about kind of both illegibility around people and ideas. And there's a few quotes I wanted to read kind of back to back because I kind of saw these connect. You say the in-group is whomever affiliates with the in-group, and it might contain people from many different in-groups. Quote, this part of Twitter is, you know, this part of Twitter.

If none of this makes any sense, that's the point. And then a separate section, how do creators preserve optionality? How do they maintain separation between themselves and their ideas and avoid being consumed by demand? One approach is to resist definition entirely, which seems like the obvious answer, but is actually hard to pull off well. And then you say the patient zero of seeing like a state was Venkatesh Rao, who published an essay about the book called A Big Little Idea Called Legibility in 2010. Rao focused on Scott's notion of legibility, or the process of simplifying complex systems, which can make them easier to manage but also distort them in undesirable ways.

Legibility caught on as a buzzword in tech, especially among those like Rao who took pride in being illegible. And then one final quote just to give it all to you. You were talking about Curtis Yarvin. Uh, there was actually an interview I thought was interesting. You're talking to Dwarkesh about how there's actually some of this in like prophets or even like historically influential people where they have an illegibility that allows anyone to come take their ideas and like try them on for themselves. You're talking about Curtis. You say, back in 2016, not everyone who disapproved of Yarvin was concerned with his views on democracy and monarchy.

In fact, many people were unaware of his core thesis at all. Not that they could be blamed. Yarvin's writing style is notoriously circuitous, making it difficult to untangle what he's really trying to say. I realize that's a lot of different ideas there, but— and this, I think, is largely a seed for anti-memetics. But why is— why is this type of illegibility an important tactic for people who actually want to get their ideas out there in the modern world? Speaker B: Yeah, it's not the only— it's, I think as you point out, it's, it's sort of, there's sort of a tension between legibility and illegibility.

And if you're too illegible, then just no one pays attention to you. And if you're too legible, then your ideas can feel kind of watered down or overly obvious. And so I think, I think of it more as this sort of like sliding scale between, you know, when, when do I need, when do I want people to sort of dig a little bit deeper? And in some ways, I think withholding a little bit or making it a little bit hard to understand or uncover can, intrigue people more and make them want to dig in more.

It's bait. Yeah, it's bait. It's bait. Curtis is, I think, maybe a master of this, probably not intentionally, but just because his writing style is so— Speaker A: You don't think it's that intentional? Speaker B: I think he is just, he is who he is. I say this with love, but he just can't help himself and is very, very verbose, both in speaking and writing. But it means that then you kind of start to dig and pore over all the little sentences. What did this sentence mean? What did that sentence mean?

I think the Bible is probably one of those classic examples of this, right? Where there's so many different ways to interpret it that have given rise to entire religions. It's because, you know, yeah, different people have translated in different ways. Some parts of it are ambiguous, but like that creates more intrigue for people to just kind of dig in and try to understand. And I think there's some concern that, you know, do people even have the attention span to be doing this today? Probably less so than before, but I don't think it's, died or gone away entirely.

I think people are still kind of hungry for, yeah, just something that challenges them a little bit and makes them, makes them work for it a little bit. Speaker A: Hmm. Hmm. Okay. A lot on ideas to pull apart and a lot related to the book and how you think about the different shapes of ideas at a super high level. And this was probably a little esoteric, so forgive me, but do you think is more accurate to say that ideas are created discovered or assembled? Um, and maybe as a bailout, if that's not right, the right way to think about it, are we at the very least, are we recycling and like reassembling them or are we actually finding or creating new ideas?

Speaker B: I was going to say none of the above. Speaker A: Okay, cool. Speaker B: I'm trying to figure out what the right word is. I think we're just infected by ideas. Um, so I. Yeah, I subscribe to some sort of like microbiome version of understanding ideas and how their influence on us. And I think ideas have their own entire ecosystem and world that they play around in. And we are just the hosts that they kind of live in. And when you get infected by an idea, then the idea needs to express itself and it's speaking through you in a way.

But I, I think we have very little agency around which ideas take hold of us and obsess us. I think it's maybe a little bit different from the dynamics around, you know, how do you choose which ideas to spread or not spread? But when someone's really infected by an idea, they are just gonna like go out and, yeah, and spread it. So yeah, I think ideas are kind of just lying around waiting to be picked up all the time. Like there's a lot of, like, you know, there's a lot of dead knowledge is sort of how I think of it.

There's a lot of, you know, there's so many books out there and there's so many things that are unread. So many pieces that are just sort of like lying strewn about, and sometimes someone just picks it up and it clicks in just the right way, and then they go off and they are spreading it. You mentioned Venkatash and his essay on legibility, which came after he read Seeing Like a State, and that was sort of a spontaneous discovery for him. Like, he helped meme Seeing Like a State into becoming a popular book in tech, but he just kind of randomly picked it up because his wife had it assigned from her master's program.

There's no real reason why it had to be that book versus another book, right? There's so many books like that that, you know, someone has not just sort of like picked up, reframed in just the right way, and then spread it through a system. So yeah, I find it sort of reassuring to think of it as we're just sort of governed by these ideas. And, you know, whatever comes through me— and what I feel like, I can really feel it when there's something that I just like have to talk about and have to do.

And so then I don't You know, I'm not the kind of person that's going to make a list of like 200 ideas and be like, which ones should I work on today? Or which ones seem the most interesting based on this matrix of, you know, the things I value and care about most. I just think you can like feel it when you care about something. And if you haven't found something that you really, really feel, then just go keep doing stuff until it like hits you. Speaker A: Yeah, it is.

It's funny how in a, in a world where we debate how much is determined, ideas feel like one of the least determined things of just like there's so many examples of, yeah, maybe a certain technology or an area, a domain to look in, or even a company. Like some of these things can often show up all at once. But you also hear so many stories like the, the seeing like a state story, which is just like, nope, just pure randomness, which is, which I think is kind of optimistic. One, one quick thing on this around if ideas do infect us and they are kind of something else, there's been this criticism that I think if my read of the book is correct, you, you would disagree with this criticism from Ted Gioia, pardon my mispronunciation, as well as like W.

David Marks, this sort of like death of new culture kind of frame that comes out of a lot of the mainstream internet of the 2010s. This idea that we're like at the end of culture, kind of like the end of history. And so I, my sense is that you disagree with that. Is, is it a mechanistic problem? Like what makes you so confident that they're actually are so many more examples of the, the unturned book or whatever it might be. Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, maybe it's just like cope for me, um, because I don't want that to be true, so I'm trying to find a way that's not true.

But yeah, I, I, I really hope that we can come up with a more optimistic view on the future because that would just be sad otherwise. My vague sort of thesis on this is that, again, if we think about sort of like living knowledge versus dead knowledge, and, you know, living knowledge is the stuff that is actively in circulation being talked about, dead knowledge is kind of just waiting in the wings. We have, like, an infinite amount of dead knowledge. Even if we, even if we stop creating anything new right now and just try to process everything that's ever been created in history, like, there's just an infinite amount of stuff that we could spawn entire movements and trends and whatever off of.

So I don't think there's any shortage of stuff. The question is just sort of like, where is people's attention being trained? Speaker A: And which maybe would be that, like, Marx would, that would be the criticism is that we're actually returning to the same kind of like mainstream culture and over and over again. Speaker B: Yeah, it's because You know, it's a, maybe it's a, you know, a market that needs a little bit of guiding hand intervention to just sort of nudge people looking at the right things because we're just so rat-like at this point that we're just like looping on the same pieces of stupid living knowledge over and over again.

So that's one sort of perspective I have of just, you know, it's there if you want it, but for some reason people aren't looking at it. So how do you get people to start looking at other things? But then, yeah, I think the other part of it is that I think it's entirely possible that we are actually consuming tons of great culture right now, and we're just so completely fattened by it or something that, like, we don't even appreciate it anymore. So it's like, you know, having this big table of pastries or something.

I think of sort of like Marie Antoinette times or something. It's all the cakes and the pastries and the foods and whatever. And we're just like, oh God, it's like another pastry. Like, I don't want this. Speaker A: Yeah, we've lost our taste. Speaker B: Yeah, I think like it's, it's maybe it's because if you think about, I mean, so like a common critique is that movies are terrible now, and they are kind of terrible now. And you know, you can look at all the data if you just look at movies and say like, yes, tons of them are remakes and sequels now.

But if you kind of zoom in and say, okay, where are good stories being told in sort of like a visual format? Um, a lot of it just moved to TV shows, right? There's like the quality of TV shows now today is like so much better than it was when I was growing up. It was just, you know, sitcoms and not much else. So, you know, amazing stories are still being told. They just got repackaged into a different format. But then somehow I think people just can't appreciate it because you watch an amazing new TV show like every week.

It's just like there's so much glut around. Speaker A: You don't think about it ever again. Speaker B: Yeah. And then, you know, yeah, it's— and so, you know, yeah, it's— I think it's still there. Maybe it's just that, yeah, we just have too much good culture or something and we can't see it. Speaker A: Totally. Okay. That's a great setup for talking about antimemetics, which is the theme of the book, as much as I think the book is about a whole bunch of other things. It's a really empowering idea, in part I think because it is an antidote for what you just described, which is like ideas that actually have to linger more.

Two quick quotes. One, in this kind of really empowering metaphor you have around the memetic city and the antimemetic city. You say, "Antimemetics are just as old as memetics, but they've only become perceptible as people seek refuge from memetic overload, an overwhelming barrage of ideas replicating, peaking and dying at the speed of light. Memes too predate the internet but became more visible after social media sped up their rate of transmission. An ant crawling across a floorboard is less noticeable than a fly zipping through the air." Which I think actually is a really great way of explaining too the way that Both memes and anti-memes actually got like totally blown out and warped in the internet land.

And then I love this example you give of taboos where you say taboos have no moral valence. They are not innately naughty or bad. And conversely, taboos that become widely accepted are not necessarily good or right. A society that allows its longstanding taboo on racism to erupt into genocide is mechanistically indistinguishable from a society that allows its long-standing long-standing concerns about the ethics of slavery to erupt into a concerted push towards abolition. Because every taboo, regardless of its content, is an existential threat to the network, we must be careful about what we permit to enter its bloodstream.

Hopefully that gives people a pretty good idea. If you want, maybe it would be helpful to give like a kind of brief primer just on how you think about the definition of anti-memes. Speaker B: Yeah, so brief definition of anti-memes: anti-memes are ideas that are self-censoring. So that's in opposition to to memes, which are ideas that are self-propagating in the Richard Dawkins sense. So a meme wants to spread, wants to jump from person to person. An anti-meme, for some reason, even though you do find it interesting and compelling in the moment, for some reason you're suppressing and holding onto it.

And the just sort of TL;DR reason for that might be that this anti-meme is perceived as being highly consequential, either for you personally if you spread it, for a network, if, you know, you might harm your own network if you go around talking about ideas that are a little bit too controversial or taboo or whatever. Um, and so you're kind of like holding onto it. Speaker A: Is there a, like a Marshall McLuhan Medium is the Message-esque thing here where it's actually impossible to separate how an idea spreads from the idea?

Is there an intrinsic shape to anti-memetic ideas, or is it actually totally situational all the time. Speaker B: Yeah, I think I lean much more towards the feeling that it's consequent— it's, um, dependent on the network and on the carrier that, you know, the person that is receiving it and choosing to spread it or not. I think the innate qualities of an idea are maybe one piece of it. Certainly the way that you choose to present the same idea to different, different sets of people can change the way in that it's spread, even if you're fundamentally transmitting the same thing.

So I don't think it's— I don't think it factors in zero amounts. But I think if we take the idea that anti-memes are often suppressed because they're consequential, then the second part of that sentence is, okay, consequential to whom? Is it consequential to me? So cognitive biases being an example of anti-memes, where it's like, if I acknowledge that this thing is true about myself, then, you know, it would just destroy my entire life. So I'm just going to keep pushing it down, pushing it down. If I share this taboo, that if I say this thing out loud that no one is saying out loud, is that going to make me look bad?

Is that going to have devastating effects on my group of friends? You know, like infohazards or ideas that you maybe shouldn't share because they can harm a society. So yeah, I think these two things are fundamentally intertwined. Speaker A: Do you think there are— would it be right to think that there are two, basically two types of anti-memes? In that they are the, as you said, the kind that either we don't want to see or relate to or fully sink into with for ourselves and those that we don't want to share.

And obviously there's some overlap there, but not always. Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I think broadly, I think about them as, are they being suppressed on an individual level or on a collective level? And there's obviously some relationship between those two things, but not always. Not always. Yeah. They're kind of two different categories. Speaker A: You, you talk about immunity, really cool metaphor, but broadly around like almost thinking about these ideas as viral spread. And one of the main premises is that we have varying levels of immunity to, to different types of ideas over time.

There's an idea in the book where you talk about the early spread of ideas in the context of like comparing group chats to like small rural, rural American towns that are like first exposed to ideas with cable television. And they have like really low immunity because they've just like never been exposed to that level of information. You might even think about all of us when the internet really rose to prominence, like similar. It was like, oh my gosh. As we talked about, like, we're now in late stage information blast. And it seems that we're becoming almost like numb, an immunity that is so overwhelmed that it's like, yeah, just like turn off everything or nonreceptive.

Why don't all ideas become antimemetic eventually in this type of information environment? It's kind of like the TV show example. It's just like, yeah, every TV show is good, and like, I don't think about it for very long. Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think immunity is just one piece of what defines something as anti-memetic, or just in the sense of, okay, when someone receives an idea, does it bounce right off of them, or is it something that is really gripping and they pay a lot of attention to it, but then they don't spread it?

And I talk about a couple of those different vectors in the book, but Yeah, I would say someone is immune to an idea, it's not necessarily— that would probably make it not really antimemetic. It would just sort of make it more inconsequential, right? Because you receive this idea and you're sort of just unimpressed by it, or you just think like, it's not— yeah, it's— this is of no relevance to me. I don't think about it very much at all. It's just like, you know, versus maybe like transmission rate or something where it's like, okay, I'm receiving, I'm thinking about it, it's actively infected my body, but then Do I choose to actually spread it on to someone else or not?

So yeah, I think it's like a slightly different behavior to, uh, to feel like I'm just sort of immune and I don't care about a lot of things. That puts it more in this like dormant category I talk about where it's just sort of, yeah, not that interesting to me. Speaker A: And the critical idea of an anti-meme is that it actually is consequential. Yes. Got it. On the other end of that quadrant you talk about, and I can link to, you have super memes. Which are these sort of like, you describe them as this like black hole of absorption and attention.

And you specifically talk about like a specific kind of, or maybe the majority of supermemes that have this like, they trap us in a state of permacrisis that never fully escalates or resolves and thus becomes like black hole-like. You say fixating on the next crisis is a recipe for perpetual distraction. And then also if we pledge our attention to every supermeme that comes our way, we will lose ourselves in the process. What prevents super memes from just like literally taking over all mindshare? Like if they really are this, and I think increasingly it feels that they are gaining more and more mindshare.

I don't know if that's a symptom of the internet or something else around our discernment or whatever, but it seems that at the very least the current incentives of media and how information flow works wants just like all attention to go to a few super memes. Speaker B: I think it's totally possible. It's a little scary to think about. I mean, I guess maybe on the flip side, the argument I make about super memes is that there's always, just like memes, anti-memes, whatever, there's always been a super meme that's, you know, governs people's minds.

So it's almost as if, like, we just need something really, really big to dedicate our lives to, right? And so historically, it was war of some sort where everyone is just expected to drop everything you're doing and just give yourself to this great cause. And then they became more like culture wars after the Cold War where we kind of there's, yeah, the battle of ideas. And there have been many waves and iterations of culture wars well before the ones that, you know, we've had more recently. And then, yeah, maybe so supermemes are still— there's always something where it's like, you know, I just, I crave something bigger than myself.

I crave something that I want to lay down my, my own identity and my own life for and my own resources for. So they're probably just a feature that needs to exist. I think what's different about today is that it's not— we don't all agree on what the supermeme is. And so, yeah, it used to be— let's say if it's like a war, then, you know, everyone knows that they are giving themselves to the war. Now it's like, oh, you care about the climate crisis, I care about population decline, whatever.

I think people generally don't have enough space in their heads to really truly give themselves to many super memes at once, because by definition they're sort of totalizing in that way. I'd have to think about that more. But, um, but yeah, I think, I think they will always exist, but it's, it's sort of like we have this open-air market now of super memes versus in the past, maybe there was just like one that we would rally around. Speaker A: Yes. You kind of talk about this urge to break out of the cycle and shift the conversation from ideas to action as a way to maybe get out of the super meme vortex.

You also say that throughout human history, societies have instinctively recognized that the most challenging ideas often hold the greatest significance. I think is a really good, like, encapsulation of why the anti-meme idea is interesting and maybe some of the tension there. One, one thing I was wondering about in this context, especially around how do we, how do we have ideas to produce action outside of the super meme vortex, is it almost a case for more narrow ideas? I guess my view would be like trying harder to care more about ideas that lead to action that are more narrow or whatever, like, is a little bit of hard advice, whereas Is there something intrinsic about anti-memes that makes them more likely to produce action?

Like, like what makes an idea likely to be upstream of actual action in the world or problem solving? Speaker B: Hmm. It's, I mean, when I think about it, I can think about ideas that turn into actions across memes, supermemes, and anti-memes. Um, and so it's like they almost become they, yeah, they do that all in their own different ways, right? Like, we have plenty of examples of how memetics have driven people to do all sorts of crazy things. Whereas with, yeah, maybe it's just the shape of each one is a little bit different.

Yeah, memetics are again, just sort of, I think, unthinking, kind of like firing the gun and deal with the consequences later. So there's just not a lot of maybe like contemplation involved. Speaker A: Action's almost intrinsically linked to even receiving the idea at all. Speaker B: Yes, like they're very, very closely tied to actions. Whereas with anti-memes, it might take a really, really long time to unearth whatever this, you know, individually or collectively suppressed idea is. But once it's unearthed, then it's like things start to move really, really quickly, but they move maybe more deliberately because it's sort of, it's something that had been suppressed for so long that it's perceived as highly, highly valuable when you get like one piece of anti-meme versus like 1,000 memes.

And then super memes are kind of, have this risk of being trapped in a rumination kind of loop where you're just sort of like thinking and thinking about the inevitable. I talk about how Super Memes often have, like, an apocalyptic or vague quality to them where you're just sort of like, okay, 30 years from now the world is going to implode, but, you know, there's no real— so I think, like, in the concept of just, you know, the importance of action as a way to sort of break that loop when I was talking about Super Memes, it's mostly because Super Memes can just turn into rumination because there is no fixed endpoint.

And if you really force yourself to say, okay, well, what are the really concrete steps I can take here? That can help sort of like ease the part of your brain that is just sort of like going in circles. Speaker A: Yeah, maybe that's the making it narrower part. Yeah, yeah. Speaker B: I think for a supermeme, it's really helpful to concretize. Speaker A: One maybe tangential piece to this would be vibes, which you also talk about, and like, I don't know if it's a third thing, and like there's some memetic aspects of it and some anti-memetic aspects of it.

You compare it to like the Mitch Hedberg Bigfoot, like, oh, Bigfoot's actually just blurry. Like, that's why. You also say vibes are like the sun, which is like you could feel them, but you can't really pin them down. Like, you can't look at them. Are vibes even like ideas? Are they a different thing? Are they like kind of like super mean-esque in that they can just be looked at in a bunch of different ways? Speaker B: I think it's a little bit like when we were talking earlier on about, um, the relationship between stories and ideas.

And so maybe vibes are more in the story camp of, um, they're the, the package that enables a certain idea to spread, right? And so it's, um, yeah, you're taking something mimetic and you're just trying to spread an idea without it being able to be sort of exploited, I guess, in a sense. Speaker A: Yeah, you make a great point about that. Vibes, you said something along the lines of like, they're some of the most important things we have, like most sacred even, and like, they're almost like coated in this shell of protection because if you could exploit happiness or whatever.

Speaker B: Or love or community, yeah. Yeah. Speaker A: And again, the thread guys on Twitter are posting. Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. It's that sort of resounding theme again of like, I think vibes is a very like trendy term now, but you know, we've had a version of vibes for everything. Yeah. Yeah. Like how do you define love is still not really answerable over thousands of years. Speaker A: But totally. Yeah. Maybe there's some kind of frame here that says vibes and stories and maybe even what you're calling super memes are all kind of containers for other ideas or more small ideas or more narrow ideas.

Yeah. Or delivery mechanisms for them. Yeah. You briefly brought it up earlier, but I think what's really compelling about the book, as you talk about how ideas show up and how they spread, and particularly against the backdrop of what we were talking about earlier of how the internet is shaped, is like a plea to return to the comments and actually participate. There's a paragraph I really liked that I almost kind of felt like a thesis statement of the book. Where you say a fragmented public narrative doesn't require us to retreat indefinitely into our fortresses.

If anything, it is an invitation to engage more deeply with the causes we care about most. What seems like scattered noise at first is actually a patchwork of dense networks. Within the context of these smaller networks, it is easier, not harder, to make progress on interesting ideas. We can island hop the memetic Galápagos. We can scale our capabilities as a network. And you also kind of talked about the temptation to retreat, which I think is like, uh, if for no other reason than exhaustion, like I think a pretty reasonable thing for people to feel.

And I think a lot of people are still feeling. There's a couple of fragments of ideas on that. One is just like, we can't hunker down indefinitely in the cozy web. You say, if our attention is truly ours to spend as we wish, there should be nothing wrong with retreat, but retreating from the chaos only protects ourselves. It is akin to fleeing to gated communities or to the suburbs to avoid the dangers of cities, burying ourselves in the comfort of local community while avoiding the hard work of getting things done at civilizational scale.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the divestment of all members from public spaces destroys the integrity of those spaces. And then there was one last bit that I really thought was interesting. It's Jenny Odell's Doing Nothing book. Standing apart in Odell's eyes is a commitment to live in permanent refusal even when actively participating in public spaces. But I find it exhausting to imagine standing in permanently defiant position, hands on hips, feet apart. How can I learn to act decisively from a place of ease and confidence rather than bracing against a constant perceived tension?

And my sense is that as much as this is a call to arms, you're also tapping into— like, that last bit is pointing at something a little different than just like donning the metal armor. It's a little bit more open and generative and like ready to participate. I'm curious what that demeanor, to the extent you've done it, and I think you are certainly participating in the public internet and you just wrote a book, like the extent you are doing that, what does that feel like? Speaker B: It feels, yeah, I think, I think you captured it quite well.

I know the times in which it has felt not that way has felt much more, um, more defensive and more just, like, insecure, I think, where you're kind of assuming a hostile environment or you're assuming that, yeah, bad things will come your way if you speak out loud. And I think that's sort of the— why I feel somewhat unsatisfied by calls for, like, attention activism and stuff, because it's sort of assuming that you're in a hostile environment versus, like, the Tai Chi sort of feeling of, you know, how do I learn how to redirect this energy and move it in ways that feel more positive.

So I think, I think, I think that's partly why when I try to look at any of this stuff, it's trying to just understand like what is going on. And eventually I might kind of, you know, weigh that against my own values and say, you know, like, what is, what is my thesis here? But especially like with, with this book, for example, like I really didn't want it to be a book about how Web 2.0 is bad and social platforms are bad and we made all these mistakes and, you know, what do we, what do we do about it?

That to me feels like being very defensive and very tightly held. And instead I wanted to say, okay, what is happening right now? And can we just start to maybe start from a more descriptive model of just observing all these different behaviors? And then from there, let's say, okay, now that we have a little bit more vocabulary, a little bit more of a framework, what do we actually want to do with this? What do we think is important? And I think that's kind of a style that has followed me around in a lot of the writing that I do of, let's just start by getting, taking a look at it, everybody calm down.

And then, and then we can kind of decide from there. But yeah, and I think that's true for, yeah, relationships and interacting with people in general. It's just sort of when you're sort of assuming the worst of someone else, it's like, yes, you're coming in it already with this idea of like what you think is going to happen versus trying to be a little bit more open and just sort of— yeah, it just, it can make a really huge difference. Totally. Speaker A: Yeah, it's like a scared dog. Yes, expecting to get kicked.

But totally, totally. And there's something really empowering there, which is like goes back to the beginning of the conversation, which is we're really new to the internet. Okay, we made a bunch of mistakes, but like, are we going to give up on this like amazing public square for idea generation and sharing and creating movement, like all these different types of things? And I think that's kind of how a lot of people feel. So I really appreciate your— like that other demeanor feels so much more— the tai chi metaphor is really good.

I want to talk more about how individuals can actually impact the spread of ideas. There are two kind of core frames you use that you talk about in the book. The first of which I really love is like the truth teller or the tip of the spear. I'll read a bit from you first. A truth teller is an individual to whom we assign the burden of bringing our shared fears, doubts, and taboos to light. Truth tellers are to anti-memes what Girardian scapegoats are to memetic behavior. In the memetic city, a society that is overwhelmed by memetic rivalry resolves its tensions by blaming an individual who serves as a hapless stand-in for their pent-up anger, frustration, and violence.

In the anti-mimetic city, a society that is overwhelmed by suppression, unable to express its full range of desires or acknowledge hard truths that are nonetheless necessary to keep growing and evolving, resolves these tensions through the role of a truth teller. In both cases, the individual, wittingly or not, is a substitute for the group's desires. Rather than representing their own, which I thought was like really, really, really cool. There is— it feels like the key idea here is that, is that like selflessness or not even necessarily explicit selflessness so much as like not being like not having an agenda for yourself.

You say the truth teller is the opposite of the shameless shill. Like, can you Talk about that, like, tension, I guess I'm pointing out, like, are they inherently selfless? Is it just about not having an agenda? Like, what enables these people to speak so effectively to represent the group? Speaker B: I think it's about standing apart from the network a little bit and not having, not having skin in the game, maybe. So it's not necessarily that they're selfless, and a lot of truth tellers can be seen as sort of selfish in a sense where they're sort of like, I'm just going to say a thing out loud and whatever, see what happens.

But yeah, in contrast to maybe like the shameless shill who is sort of trying to get attention all the time by saying the most extreme thing possible, they have a relationship to this network. They're, they're the, to their audience, right? They, they are trying to get points. They're trying to gain status, reputation, whatever. And so that's why they keep just escalating what they're saying. The truth teller sort of says, I don't even know what this network is. You know, I'm just sort of wandering in here. Yeah, just pure chaos, injecting a little bit of chaos network and everyone.

And but I think because they are— have no prior attachments or relationships, they could be perceived as more trustworthy because someone says, well, you know, why would someone say that if it weren't— if, if they— yeah, if they have no other relationship to the network. Speaker A: So you say they will happily shout an uncomfortable truth into a crowded room, then twirl off while everyone else hashes it out. It's like, I imagine like lobbing a grenade. Yes. Do you think it's important for them to have any accountability? Or is part of what enables this, as you say, like the lack of really caring what happens to that community at all?

Speaker B: Yeah, I can probably, if I sat and thought about it, it's always a little dangerous to say no accountability is good. I'm sure there are counterexamples, but my first instinct at least is that it's good not to try to tamp them down. Um, you know, if, because, you know, if you go too far in the other direction, then you're just kind of like a crazy person shouting, right, right, you know, things about— it's, it's, uh, you think about the people standing on the street corners talking about sort of the inevitable collapse of society and whatever.

And so, you know, everyone just tunes that person out. So if, so there's— if, if it's that far in that direction, I think people, the, the network will already sort of like self-check against whether that's interesting. It has to be just a little bit of truthiness enough that it's— Speaker B: Yeah, I can probably, if I sat and thought about it, it's always a little dangerous to say no accountability is good. I'm sure there are counterexamples, but my first instinct at least is that it's good not to try to tamp them down.

Um, you know, if, because, you know, if you go too far in the other direction, then you're just kind of like a crazy person shouting, right, right, you know, things about— it's, it's, uh, you think about the people standing on the street corners talking about sort of the inevitable collapse of society and whatever. And so, you know, everyone just tunes that person out. So if, so there's— if, if it's that far in that direction, I think people, the, the network will already sort of like self-check against whether that's interesting. It has to be just a little bit of truthiness enough that it's— Speaker A: there's some credibility.

Yeah. Speaker B: And there's something there They're— and again, with this idea of, you know, ideas are infecting us, or we're not even necessarily in control of what we're sharing or not sharing, they're uncovering something that— an idea that is already familiar to that group of people that is already— is just being suppressed, right? Yeah. So, like, the go-to example I used here was just the kid saying that, you know, the emperor has no clothes, right? It's like everyone already knew the emperor had no clothes. They just needed someone who had no other relationship to say it.

But you can't say something that's completely random. Speaker A: It's such a great point. You talk about this more in the context of companies, or at least smaller groups, where like they'll bring in this interesting person, as you call them, whether it's an academic or kind of a person who's a writer or a Substacker or something. There's another paragraph that felt very like Bill Campbell-esque. You say, because they have the unusual visibility across the organization, they could observe and express the hidden collective desires that others cannot. Very much the emperor's no clothes.

The executive because they would be a tyrant, the middle manager because they would risk losing their team, the entry-level contributor because they would endanger their job. While interesting persons may run projects on their own, their true impact is not always measurable through the company goals and performance reviews. The real purpose of an interesting person is to shepherd anti-mimetic knowledge into light. I and many people I know have served this role inside of organizations. One friend ruefully told me his job was to be a hood ornament, soothing the nerves of executives and offering candid and witty insights.

By the end of my tenure at one company I worked at, my formal job, Taidio, title was simply Nadia. Speaker B: Is it lonely being Nadia? Yeah, I think like less so maybe over time, but I think anyone who's in a role where you are always kind of the person standing apart a little bit, um, I think earlier in my career it started to feel like, am I just really disagreeable? Um, you know, I got a lot of advice on maybe trying to figure out how to fit in more. And so And I think, you know, I wouldn't say I'm the most agreeable person, so it's like maybe there's room for improvement there.

But, but I think over time I've come to see that, oh, this is actually a— this is itself a defined role. You kind of just need to be okay with being that person that is, yeah, standing apart. And, um, and then it— I think it brings me a lot of, yeah, clarity and fulfillment. Speaker A: So do you have a sense of how this shape can like if we have this sort of what is a truth teller inside of a company and then like the extreme example of just like the guy on the sidewalk or like the guy on Twitter just saying crazy, like out there, but interesting stuff.

Like, is there a frame for how we should think about how these people could show up in more parts of society and networks in like different orders of magnitude of groups? Speaker B: Where do you feel that we need more of it? Speaker A: This maybe is going to where we're going to go, but like one frame here would be inside of an effective altruism, inside of what you call an ideal machine or inside of an institution or inside of a, I don't know, like a local, more local version of an online community inside of the Dark Forest Collective.

Like my sense is I'm almost about, maybe I have this wrong, but like I'm almost imagining like the very, very defined group and the truth teller inside of that. And then just like the, public speaker, but it actually feels like, at least in how you describe it, so much of the importance here is like, it's the person who can bring clarity to some subgroup, but that subgroup could vary in, in the end pretty dramatically. Speaker B: Where do you feel that we need more of it? Speaker A: This maybe is going to where we're going to go, but like one frame here would be inside of an effective altruism, inside of what you call an ideal machine or inside of an institution or inside of a, I don't know, like a local, more local version of an online community inside of the Dark Forest Collective.

Like my sense is I'm almost about, maybe I have this wrong, but like I'm almost imagining like the very, very defined group and the truth teller inside of that. And then just like the, public speaker, but it actually feels like, at least in how you describe it, so much of the importance here is like, it's the person who can bring clarity to some subgroup, but that subgroup could vary in, in the end pretty dramatically. Speaker B: I think there's probably informally a lot of communities end up having a role of someone who is the, you know, tell it like it is person that is sort of respected.

If you think about like the village elder or something like that, where they'll just come in and drop their wisdom and, you know, whatever. Um, which is probably a little bit different from a truth teller in the sense of, I think a truth teller again has fewer, doesn't necessarily have a clear relationship to the network and has this more like eruptive quality of there's something that is being suppressed here and I'm gonna dig it out, lob it at you, throw it in the face versus someone that is people, a leader that people maybe go to, to say things.

So, I don't know that every community always needs one or needs to have it all the time. I think also the truth-teller role can be very transient where it's like, I talk about like Greta as an example of this with her UN speech and, you know, Greta continues to exist, but Greta is, her speech was sort of this like just rupture in that moment of time that then set off a lot of other conversations. But if she just kept doing that over and over again, at some point it starts to get difficult.

Speaker A: Yeah, she isn't really that anymore, to your point. Speaker B: Yeah, she's kind of evolved into more of like a stable character, right? But, but I think it's a little bit of a destabilizing mechanic to sort of speak the truth on something. Speaker A: Yeah, on that note, you have this reference to Lewis Hyde's book on tricksters, which feels like the right kind of— like, there's a part where you're kind of lamenting, like, where these things go, both in the context of our ability to tolerate cringe and, like, how much that allows this, but also the, like, moral ambiguity part of it.

You say, um, the erasure of trickster figures or the unthinking confusion of them with the devil This maybe is Hyde, or the unthinking confusion of them with the devil only serves to push the ambiguities of life into the background. We may well hope our actions carry no moral ambiguity, but pretending that is the case when it isn't does not lead to greater clarity, clarity about right and wrong. It more likely leads to unconscious cruelty masked by inflated righteousness. Very cancel culture-y. Like, it's a little bit like the last question, but to the extent you think there are levers for it?

Like, are there, are there ways we can actively use cultural norms or like adjust the Overton window to tolerate more of this type of speaking from truth tellers? Like, or are we— is one potential failure case of a society or of a subculture that we like create environments where these people can't say anything or they can't be heard? Speaker B: I worry about that and I don't, I don't have a great answer to it. Um, I think we were in a it was harder to see where truth tellers would fit in maybe, yeah, 3 to 5 years ago.

Um, because it really— I think that, that quote from Hyde points to this, you know, this, yeah, the, the sort of like culture of cruelty and this, you know, where you're just sort of not seeing and thinking like that, that really— that was what we were just right in and coming out of. Now it feels like things are changing a little bit, and maybe we are rebalancing again to a place where people can speak their mind. And so, you know, maybe that'll, that'll just continue. But, um, I, I think it's just— I don't have great answers here, but I really hope that we don't forget that there's an important role to be had for people that can just sort of remind us of what direction we're going in and shake things up a little bit.

Yeah, yeah. Speaker B: I worry about that and I don't, I don't have a great answer to it. Um, I think we were in a it was harder to see where truth tellers would fit in maybe, yeah, 3 to 5 years ago. Um, because it really— I think that, that quote from Hyde points to this, you know, this, yeah, the, the sort of like culture of cruelty and this, you know, where you're just sort of not seeing and thinking like that, that really— that was what we were just right in and coming out of.

Now it feels like things are changing a little bit, and maybe we are rebalancing again to a place where people can speak their mind. And so, you know, maybe that'll, that'll just continue. But, um, I, I think it's just— I don't have great answers here, but I really hope that we don't forget that there's an important role to be had for people that can just sort of remind us of what direction we're going in and shake things up a little bit. Yeah, yeah. Speaker A: I think there's also— having the, having the mental model is helpful even in looking at a person or someone saying something and trying to decipher, are they a shameless shill or they have some ulterior motive, or are they actually just trying to— yeah, it's— I think that's really important.

The other archetype, I guess you describe as the champion. Another Jarvan reference. You say somewhere the first line of Unqualified Reservation reads, the other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology. Which is very, very Curtis Yarvin, but I think points at some of this. You also give examples of, we talked about Venkatesh Rao, seeing like a state kind of thing, or Nick Camerata and Jonas, that are a little more like first follower-y. If truth tellers are like this detached sort of non-self-interested observer, it seems like champions are sitting somewhere between like cult leader and first follower.

Is that the right way to think about it? Like, can they exist anywhere on that spectrum? Like, is Jarvan coming up with an ideology in his garage, in theory, and the person who just gets really excited about something that is overlooked? Are those both champions? Speaker B: I think, yeah, champion is probably closer to a first follower in the sense. Um, yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't think of Curtis as a champion. Because it was sort of the people that took his ideas and then ran with it. I'm not sure who the champion was for Curtis's ideas, and maybe that framework doesn't apply to his particular situation, but I think of champions as people that are sort of pounding the pavement, right?

They're the boots on the ground, right? They're the, you know, the apostles or something where it's okay, like, I am now infected by this idea and I'm gonna go like run off. And yeah, actually that makes me think, like, with truth tellers, I don't really think of them as being deeply infected with an idea. They're kind of just like spurting out. They're almost attached. Yeah. It just like passes through them. That's, they're more like the prophet, right? Yes. Um, yes. But then the champion is the one that like, it hits them and then they're now they're really infected for a long period of time and they're going to go off kind of running, running around and trying to make a thing happen.

Right. Um, and they will do that no matter how persecuted they are. All the, you know, a good champion will just like whatever, whatever they face. They chew the arrows. Yeah. Just like, I got this guy. So. Um, yeah. Speaker A: There's a, there's another idea that kind of circling some of this, which is the role, and it's certainly relevant in the Champions premise, which is like, how important is the individual? Or like the great man of history. There's one excerpt you, you say, in a highly scaled and distributed marketplace of ideas, which issues we make progress on, the historic moments that come to define our story as a civilization, depends almost entirely on the quality of our champions.

Tell me who your champions are, and I will tell you who you are. And so, it's almost like we have, and this maybe gets at where we're, the next thing we're going to talk about, but like, there are these ideas that you almost describe as infecting someone. Then there is the champion who you clearly in that language describe as like pretty fundamentally paramount to the way the world goes. And then there's also a broader thing around institutions and idea machines and all that kind of stuff. Is the, is it, is the right frame, I guess, to think about it is almost like it is the great men of history, but the great men of history are infected by like these crazy ideas or like, how, yeah, how do you think about the individual's role and, and how much weight that the sort of great champion has on things?

Speaker B: I've always thought of it a little bit more as great, great prophet, uh, theory and Maybe now after everything I just said, it's great apostle theory or something like that. I don't know quite how specific to be about it, but in contrast, at least to sort of great founder theory where it's this idea, or great man theory where you're, someone is impressing their views on the world. I see it more as you are just a vessel for some ideas really infected you, but it's infected you so hard that you're just like going to town and spreading it.

So I think the individual is important in the, in terms of of where it situates in the network of an individual is capable of having this level of discernment and nuance that the collective simply is not. Right. And that's why these two things work really well in parallel, but, or in some sort of symbiosis with each other. But the role of the individual is very important in the sense of how does it contribute to the greater collective. But then when you look at sort of like where do ideas come from and why is this person so obsessed with this particular thing, I really don't ascribe a whole lot to someone's maybe like active choice around that.

Speaker A: I think it's just their genius or whatever. Speaker B: Yeah, it's just kind of like, oh, because you see ideas come from just like the craziest places. Like, I mean, when you look at stories of, you know, how is some new creative idea or invention or innovation, like it's often from really random things. It's often from someone being able to synthesize two different ideas or two different fields and say like, oh, what if we cross over this thing with the other thing? But it doesn't— yeah, like, they can just come from anywhere, and then suddenly someone's just kind of like off to the races with it.

And I've experienced this myself with my own work, where sometimes I'm like, I don't know why. I like— the things I think I've poured the most effort into, I really couldn't tell you. I could have never predicted that I would have cared so much about this or that idea, but it just like— it just gets lodged into your brain and then off you go. Speaker A: But ideas also need a vessel. Yes. Yeah, yeah. I think about— you hear It's like so often in music, there's like the, um, it's the, in that Get Back documentary, Paul McCartney's just like randomly strumming on his bass and then like the song comes out of nowhere.

You see it happen. There's a, uh, this guy Benjamin Lavatut who wrote When We Cease to Understand the World. It's a kind of crazy novel about, or novel historian thing. Anyway, he, he has this line where he's talking about writing and he's like, even in the case of fiction, he's like, it's like, it's less like creating something. It's more like picking up flowers off the ground. Oh, I love that. Like there's— but you see that pattern everywhere across ideation. I think your frame on it is really, really right. That brings us to the last thing I mentioned, which is how do these go bigger than the individual?

And I think there's— it seems to me that there are kind of like two ways to think about this. There's the like historical view and then there's the like, what is the modern internet native version of it look like? And you've written plenty about institutions. I want to read a couple of things on that quickly. Social institutions, whether media, academia, or the political machine, are the bottlenecks through which all ideological demands must eventually pass. To truly change culture, one must master control of these institutions. We've certainly seen technology internalize a lot of that recently.

On that note, it's also the right time for tech to transition to a cultural institution building phase after several years spent recoiling from public backlash. Which signaled its maturity and inevitable expansion beyond its humble roots as a niche industry. For those who ask, why would anyone do this if there's no financial ROI? Tech's place in the world has shifted dramatically. Building an idea machine is about influence, not financial returns. Where do institutions, as we traditionally think of them, play a role in the modern kind of like internet native, dark foresty, lots of big broadcasting individuals like it's, it's pretty easy to model a world where like there are very explicit gatekeepers and set distribution patterns and foundations that are the Davos elite or whatever.

Maybe the answer is, is, is where we're going, which is you need new shapes like the idea machines you talk about. But like in the traditional sense, I'm curious how you think about the role institutions still play. Speaker B: I think they just look— well, there's a few different levels of this. The one to the, um, the first quote that you had mentioned. Whether we like it or not, our world is still governed by a lot of institutions that are old and have been around for a long time. As much as I think there's a lot of interest in creating new institutions, but we also have to respect the ones that currently exist.

And yeah, I think DC politics is just like the most perfect encapsulation of this, where it's like it— people often liken it to playing a game of chess because like you have just a finite set of players, you have a finite chessboard, And the fun is in figuring out like, how do you exactly, you know, place each of these pieces in order to get the outcome that you want? But there's no sense of, you can't expand the chessboard, you can't add more players. And I think that's very foreign to a lot of people in tech where they're just used to like, let's just have abundance and yeah, just keep making the universe bigger.

And it's like, no, no, no, you gotta play, you gotta play this game. Speaker A: Literally people, everyone there is people who like exited some other game. Speaker B: Yes. Right. Um, so I think in the sense of, you know, how, if we're talking about like a political machine, like how do you know, how do you take your ideas and turn them into policy? Like you you have to play that game and you have to play with these existing institutions. And I think that's where culture wars get so fiery because there's just, you know, more and more and more ideas that are, especially if we have more and more super memes and, you know, so much competition for like things that we all need to funnel into this like very, very narrow channel to, if you want to turn into action, there's only so many policy items that could be reviewed in a session, you know.

And so that's a different, maybe one way of thinking about institutions. But then I think informally, institutions are still changing and evolving, and maybe some of that requires expanding our idea of, like, what an institution even is. And so, um, yeah, and that piece that you referenced about where I talk about idea machines and sort of trying to diagram out, okay, maybe something is not literal organization or something, or an agency, or, you know, very specific institution, but sort of what is the ecosystem surrounding how an idea turns into action.

And it involves, you know, there's like a community that is generating new ideas. And then from there, you might start to see an agenda form and you have funders that come in that are funding this agenda. And then maybe a couple of different support organizations form. And then from there, they're creating outcomes. And so it's much more sprawling and kind of decentralized than, you know, let me just go to the Bureau of whatever and file my reports. Speaker A: So— or even the Ford Foundation or even— Speaker B: yeah, yeah.

Any sort of like in the context of philanthropy, like it's not just one like like grant-making organization, but it's sort of this sea of ideas that people are kind of swimming around in and then might be funded in different ways but are all kind of pointing towards a similar outcome. So I think that in itself is— if we loosen our definition a little bit of what an institution is, like, that is an institution of some sort, because it's, it's these grooves and pathways that are sort of well-worn and being worn over and over again.

There's a just a pattern of expected behaviors and like a known way of doing things, and that in itself is a kind of institution. Even if it doesn't look like a, yeah, a single organization. Speaker A: Yeah, I think you do a great, you do a great job of describing a template in Idea Machines too that is just like very internet native, not necessarily like technology native, but just like very attuned to how the world actually works today. I think part of that, my sense is, is that it's rooted in ideology.

Whereas some of these other things are like more the container first. Maybe I'm stretching. I guess one reading of the book, or maybe one of the dominant reading book readings of the book that I had is that you have anti-memes as a source of like really important, interesting ideas that are like underexposed. Various ways that those can be, a light can be shined on them, whether it be a truth teller or a champion carrying it, or just like new context for it to be exposed. And that those basically become the ideologies that we can start to build new idea machines around or ideologies around.

Do you think that that is, and I realize you wrote the idea machine thing a few years prior, but like, is that roughly the pattern you kind of, the book admittedly is like a little bit more individual focused and like how we all personally can relate to this stuff. But is that kind of the flow of how you see the future of— in the piece you talk about like, what does it look like to have way more effective altruisms? Or what does it look like to have a way wider set of like very ideologically centric active organizations doing stuff in the world?

Am I, am I trying to combine too many different things? Is that kind of a pattern? Yeah, I see it. Speaker B: I'll take it. Um, yeah, I think maybe, uh, even if we think about supermemes again and sort of like how we went from having a single supermeme like war to now there's like a competing marketplace of them, right? A nice thing about supermemes is that they are really good at marshaling talent, money, and turning themselves into ecosystems, right? So a meme is something, you know, small, digestible that you kind of like zips right through you and you keep passing around, spreads very quickly.

A supermeme is something that is like large and consequential and spreads very easily. And so it's, it's, it becomes this, yeah, black hole of just sort of like sucking in all the mindshare around it, which can be a bad thing if you don't like that particular supermeme. But like, if that's just kind of the way the world works, I think that that goes a little bit with this idea of, you know, what if we had lots of different idea machines, lots of different ideology-centric kind of like ecosystems where people are now pulling in resources, they're actively discussing ideas and forming agendas out of them, they're creating organizations out of them.

That's kind of the blueprint for how I think a lot of these supermemes have also started to organize. Speaker A: You talk about the piece is somewhat repetitive maybe, but I think for people who are hearing some of this, like Can you distinguish, maybe you have like movements and communities and maybe even super memes or memeplexes, like there's a bunch of stuff around here that's like big, hazy, important things. And then you, I think in your piece, you describe a much more directed, highly active mechanistic form in the idea machine.

Granted, it can take a lot of different forms and certain things have, have, are better at, I don't know, you give example at the time of like the network state being like really strong in ideology and having less of the Things to Carry It. But to a person listening to this, it's just like, it sounds like a movement. Can you talk about like how you imagine this stuff having a more robust shape that actually produces outcomes unlike other movements or super memes that kind of get lost in the, the fuzziness?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think, and maybe some of this just comes out how people want to define things. Um, but I think— Speaker A: Yeah, I'm less interested in the definitions and more interested in like, ultimately what I think you do a really good job of articulating, even if the language can be fuzzy, is like, How do we actually get to more stuff happening from ideas, to go back to the beginning of the conversation? Speaker B: Yeah, I, I think in my goal with the Idea Machines piece was to just sort of like diagram out a schematic of like, here, here is the ideal path of how we get from just an idea and turning into an ideology, um, and like all the different pieces it needs to move through to get to real concrete outcomes in the world.

Yeah, I think movements can movements have a little bit more vibey feel. And again, I think like it's, there's no reason why it can't necessarily be a schematic of a movement as well. But when I think about movements, I think a little bit more about like the zeitgeist or a moment in time or a trend. And there are a lot of movements that fail to go anywhere because they were highly memetic at the moment and they kind of like die down. And why does that happen? Part of it, which is I think what I'm trying to sort of answer in that piece is because they sort of fail to, maybe they got stuck on the idea side of things and they just kind of fail to get to the point of of, all right, we need to have, like, we need to organize, right?

We need to have specific champions who are taking these ideas upon themselves and translating them into, like, very specific things we can do. I think, like, lack of an agenda is what kills a lot of movements and communities. Otherwise, you're just kind of sitting around talking, but, like, what is your actual— what are you actually proposing to change? Yes, I see this failure happen a lot with movements. If you can't even articulate what your agenda is, then how can you expect anyone to fund it, or how can you expect to move towards yeah, more concretized change.

So you could probably draw a line somewhere down the middle of that schematic and say like, okay, this, this part is like the idea phase or something. And then, then the other side is maybe the like action phase and like, how do you get from one side of that to the other? Speaker A: There's a part of that piece where you talk about the appeal to at least some of the bigger versions of this, like EA, to like, what if they were more multi-denominational? And it made me wonder like, so much of this, at least in the kind of like larger scale, is a lot like religion, or at least at the very least, there's probably a lot to learn from religion.

I guess the one counter there would be that maybe religions have less explicit agendas, at least at the super high level. But I'd be curious how much of that is like the original memes that, by the way, package in lots of maybe more anti-matic ideas in inside of them. I'd be curious how you think about the Lindiness of religion in terms of its structure and shape informing all these other ideas that we want to kind of move forward in the world. Speaker B: Yeah, everything goes back to religion, right? Everything is a religion.

Um, um, yeah, actually when I was doing my research around open source developers, I did a, I made a podcast with a friend because we, we, that was a mini series that was specifically focused on the relationship between open source communities and religions because we, I mean, for you meet a lot of open source developers that are very, very Christian and, and I think And I think part of why that is, is because they're sort of informed by the same sort of feelings and values and norms around how to conduct themselves in a religious context are the same as, you know, I'm building a community online or I'm managing community, I'm sharing software with people in the world.

So yeah, I think you find religion in the funniest places, but yeah, I think this is probably not so much different. It's just people dynamics all the way down. Speaker A: Is you wrote about it probably more a few years ago and it was a little bit more relevant, but to what extent do you think we actually need more new forms or mechanisms, meaning like new corporation forms like the 501 shift to LLCs or like stuff like DAOs? Like I think there was a lot of excitement at the time. I think the crypto stuff can be super ideological, but like in some sense you could read a lot of this and be like, oh, actually it's it's not so much about the form at all.

It's about the abstract form around getting to an agenda. But like, it goes back to the thing we were talking about at the beginning around group chats, like new mechanisms actually enabled a lot of this stuff. Do you think we're being held back by mechanistic reasons, or is there still like a lot more room to run in terms of what you can do here? Speaker B: I think the search for new mechanisms is a little bit of a trap. Um, I used to be more excited about those things and I realized it was a trap.

Now I'm less excited about them. Certainly, yeah, like in the case of group chats, like we needed to be able to message multiple people at a time. That's like a just pure technological thing that had to happen in order to enable new behavior. So I don't think it's, you know, zero. I don't think it's like sometimes a new form really is warranted. But if maybe if we try mapping that onto the idea machine schematic, it's, I think it's too much on the side of action and not enough with an underlying ideology, right?

So if there's some deep underlying need that really drives like something, Or yeah, maybe some of these are just happy accidents. I don't really know. Maybe there was no ideology driving the formation of original group chat app software and messaging apps and things like that. But I think sometimes people come in with this idea of, like, if I can just create a new legal entity or something, then, like, everything will be fixed. And all of crypto. Yeah, all of crypto. Yeah, I just, I haven't really seen many examples of that really bearing out.

So, you know, I don't think it's never true, but I think probably if you want to think about like where to allocate our mindshare, like it's maybe an overallocation there. Speaker A: Are there either emergent idea machines that you think are particularly credible or interesting, or on the other side, ideologies and movements that you would really like to see more structure be added to? Speaker B: I don't play favorites. Speaker A: Okay, we'll take it. I want to talk about an idea that runs through the middle of the book, and I think clearly runs through so much of your work broadly, and maybe like your moral worldview, which is attention.

I mentioned Jenny O'Dell earlier in that book, How to Do Nothing. I think it's a quote from her. She says, more and more actors appeared in my reality. After birds, there were trees, then different kinds of trees, then the bugs that lived in them. These had all been here before, yet they had been invisible to me in my previous renderings of my reality. A tawi will never simply be a bird to me again, even if I wanted it to be. And then a few quotes from you that kind of stacked up to me in an interesting way.

I want to talk about us as magical wizards of attention, capable of waving a wand and transforming our worlds in astonishing ways. That seems a lot more fun to me than playing slots at the casino. Our attention is not meant to be commandeered by others, but it is also not ours to hoard. Near the very end of the book, you say Robert Moses wasn't a superhuman. He just paid attention to things that others did not. And then finally, attention is how we carve out our personal realities. It is the breathing valve of our consciousness.

Using only our minds, we can make the world as beautiful or as ugly as we wish. How have you attuned yourself to the kinds of ideas that you want to see in the world? Speaker B: Um, you mean intentionally? Sort of. I'm not sure. Speaker A: Yeah, I guess maybe that's the root of the question. Speaker B: Yeah, like I said before, I don't think— I'm not attuning myself to specific ideas in the sense of, I like, I like to be surprised. I have no idea what I'm gonna be doing like 5 years, and that's kind of fun to me.

Yeah, but maybe it's around sort of setting myself up to be able to notice or be surprised. Yeah, I think a lot of people don't realize how much they're cutting themselves off from just serendipity and opportunity. And yeah, people talk a lot with careers about, you know, making your own luck or making your own serendipity. And it starts to sound a little bit like an aphorism or warmed-over career advice. But I think there's something— I think people just don't take it seriously enough, or they think they know what it means.

And so then they kind of dismiss it, but they don't really, really know what it means to just be very open and receptive to whatever comes your way. And part of that is about eliminating unnecessary distractions, right? Like, and I don't— it doesn't have to be in this sort of ascetic way or, you know, self-depriving sort of way. I think it's just sort of when I look at— there's a lot of, you know, content you could consume, or, you know, just choosing which notifications you let through or which emails you pay attention to or whatever.

And you kind of look and you're just like, is this really, really worth me spending time on, or would I rather just keep my brain clear? And it's just like, it's not that hard to just turn them off or push them away or whatever if you just— like, there's no real reason to. I think we still get stuck in this. Again, it's, it's, you know, everyone talks about attention, and yet I just think— I still don't think we're taking it seriously enough. So sometimes I say things, or it sounds— they sound overly obvious, but like I really just don't— like, if people were doing it, then we wouldn't have to keep talking about it.

But yeah, I think like this, as much as I can kind of keep my mind like in a relatively like blank slate or just keep maintaining my own resources around attention, then I— then it can be allocated to like surprising and interesting things instead of spending that budget on things that are just a waste of time. And I think a lot of why people make not great choices with their attention is just fatigue. And you get stuck in this loop of fatigue. And this is true for a lot of healthy choices, right?

It's true for eating well, it's true for exercising. When you're just tired and you're stressed out and you, you know, yeah, stress eating is a thing, right? You're not doing it because you actually think that potato chips are better, but it's just like you're in a state of fatigue and you're mentally weak. Speaker A: Yes, you're mentally weak. Or physically weak or whatever it might be. Speaker B: And so, you know, how do I just set myself up for success to not have that? And if you can get yourself back to a baseline where you're not fatigued, then it actually becomes much easier to just make the right choices.

But I do also, I mean, that being said, I feel like we still talk about attention as kind of a, it's kind of a slog to talk about. You know, it's like you should really be paying attention. You should really be putting down your phone. And like, it's not, It's the same as being told you should really eat vegetables and stuff. You know, it's just, it's very, it's not a great way to, it's, yeah, like who wants to do the boring responsible? A little paternalistic. Yeah, requires a lot of willpower.

And so I think part of it is that we don't talk enough about the amazing things that can come as a product of great attention. So, you know, looking at people who are super fit can be a really great motivator to wanna work out or something, right? People who feel really, really good when they eat healthy, like, then you want to feel good. And I think we haven't really looked very much at sort of what is the end goal of all this attention where it's like, oh cool, I'm paying— I'm in the present moment.

Like, what does that even mean? And it's kind of what I was— I wanted to push a little bit more in the book of it's not just about there's some baseline reality that everyone else is tuned into and you're kind of checked out of and you can come back up to this place. It's This is like an entirely uncharted territory that you can just create whatever you want. And that's, that's exciting. And if you are excited by that, then the prerequisite to do that is getting your attention into the, into sort of like the right place.

Speaker A: It's, it's above the baseline. Yeah. That's a, that's a really important. I also have to admit, like, the notion that we have less agency over our, over which ideas take us. Is actually really motivating to have more agency over where you choose to give your attention. Yeah. Like, if you treat them as, like, infectious, it's like, oh wow, like, I'm hooking up my brain to the— to whatever Twitter thinks right now, or whatever. Yeah. That is maybe still a little more on the paternalism side or whatever, or the fear side, but like, I do think it's empowering, which is like, it's sort of like, oh, I could discover something really great or really not great, and like, I get to choose what— whether I go to the health food store or the junk food store, but I don't have choice otherwise.

And like, that is— makes it a little more— that helps you maybe internalize the stakes. Speaker B: Yeah, right. I think people are not aware of what the stakes really are. Mm-hmm. Speaker A: You've written extensively about the jhanas. You say the jhanas offer a rare glimpse into the extent to which our minds construct the world around us, maybe getting at what you were just talking about over like all of the ways that attention can go above the baseline. Can you talk about how the jhanas experience, particularly in studying it now, has made you realize that attention is not something you have, but something that you are?

Speaker B: Yeah, just a little bit of context on it. So yeah, I kind of stumbled into, again, you know, I like being surprised by whichever ideas overtake me. And last year I was writing a piece about a subculture of people that are— that were practicing this form of meditation are called— that, that put you into these states called the jhanas, or these jhanic states. And they are— it's, it's not really like mindfulness meditation where you just sort of like calm and relaxed. These are intensely altered psychedelic-like meditative states that people were getting into, which were often explicitly compared to psychedelics, but you're experiencing them without Just using your mind.

Just using your mind, right? Which sounded so fantastic and strange to me that I had to go explore it. And then as part of my research for that, I tried it and then was, and had previously sort of, I had no relationship to meditation and was just sort of curious trying it out and was very surprised by what I experienced. And now sort of just trying to understand like, what is this thing and how does it impact our minds? Speaker B: Yeah, just a little bit of context on it. So yeah, I kind of stumbled into, again, you know, I like being surprised by whichever ideas overtake me.

And last year I was writing a piece about a subculture of people that are— that were practicing this form of meditation are called— that, that put you into these states called the jhanas, or these jhanic states. And they are— it's, it's not really like mindfulness meditation where you just sort of like calm and relaxed. These are intensely altered psychedelic-like meditative states that people were getting into, which were often explicitly compared to psychedelics, but you're experiencing them without Just using your mind. Just using your mind, right? Which sounded so fantastic and strange to me that I had to go explore it.

And then as part of my research for that, I tried it and then was, and had previously sort of, I had no relationship to meditation and was just sort of curious trying it out and was very surprised by what I experienced. And now sort of just trying to understand like, what is this thing and how does it impact our minds? Speaker A: Nick Camerata, we talked about earlier, an early champion, at least in kind of your part of the world. Speaker B: Yeah, I think he was kind of the patient zero for spreading it to outside of, outside of these sort of like Dharma meditation communities, but spreading into like a broader set of people who are more casual like myself.

I think there's— so at least within the context of contemplative practices and sciences, I think something that is compelling about meditation versus other things like psychedelics, for example, is that you're doing it to yourself, right? So with psychedelics, it's like, yes, of course, if you take enough acid or shrooms or whatever, like something interesting is going to happen to your brain. Like, you know, it's very deterministic and people are sort of unsurprised by that, but they kind of feel like, oh, you know, it's like drinking. Like, you know, I put myself— I took some substance that put me into this state and now it's— I sort of— yeah, I didn't really have any role to play in that.

Speaker A: Or I would even argue maybe like going to Tokyo, Yeah, like you're going to have a crazy perspective-altering experience that's really new. But then when you come back, like most people's experience of those types of things is actually you kind of regress back to where you were. Speaker B: Yes. Yeah, that's actually a great example. I mean, there's so many things like that actually in really small ways. Like if you're unable to, you know, or you want to focus better on a work thing that you're doing, you put on a certain type of music, right?

Like, and so it's always this sense of like something else is helping me get there and there's very little of you involved there. And a thing that people are often surprised by with this style of meditation is they're like, I did that to myself. And that means I was actually experiencing it in a way that felt much more like I was an active player in this, right? So like, I am, the fact that I am experiencing something psychedelic right now, it was like, I put myself into that, right? Speaker A: It makes it more real.

Speaker B: It makes it way more real, yeah. It's not just that it wears off and goes away. And then that starts to translate into other ways of, of understanding your relationship to the world where it's like, okay, I'm feeling sad right now or frustrated. And it's kind of amazing that we— many people, just myself included in the past, like, you just can't take for granted, okay, I'm feeling sad, there's not a whole lot I can do to feel better. Maybe I will cope by, you know, eating ice cream or watching TV or something like that, and those things make me feel a little better.

But there's no sense of like, oh, I can actually just move around my mind a little bit and feel something differently, right? And so I think it just opens up this whole thing of like, oh, how can I change my relationship to everyone around me, everything I interact with, where if I don't want to feel a certain way about something, you can actually just not feel that way if you want to. And yeah, move around the little levers in your mind. Speaker A: So tension is crazy. Yeah. There's one, I think it's at the end of your incredible— I'll link the How to Do Jonas post.

The first time I read it, I literally within 15 minutes, I think, I'm pretty sure got to the first jhana, which I think is credit to your descriptive ability. But it's really, you also do a really just amazing job of being personal, direct, clear, not like there's nothing woo-woo about it. Like it's just very, it's almost sociological in a way that's really cool. But in that piece you say, I don't think the jhanas made me happy. But their biggest impact was enabling me to realize how happy I already was. I just had to direct my attention towards this fact, then update how I thought of myself.

Now I embrace and see the joy in life's moments, big and small, much more easily than before. A lot of what you were just talking about beyond try the jhanas, which might be good advice. Do you have any other advice for people to help them realize their own happiness, or at least just be more attuned to their experience and their feelings? Speaker B: I think it's maybe just an openness again, and to willingness to sort of reframe any situation you're in where there, now I sort of try this out when I'm in, it's going to the DMV or you're stuck in like traffic or something.

And it's like, how can I make this the most joyous moment possible? And I actually find that it's often quite possible to make it like this, like really happy experience. And that's, kind of silly when you think about, like, how can driving in traffic be fun and enjoyable? But, like, it's possible. But I think you have to have this sort of, like, openness and receptiveness to the idea that, you know, your brain, like, wants to go down these grooves again, right? And so it says, oh, you're in traffic. This sucks.

Like, you know, I know how to behave here. Speaker A: My brain knows to be mad or sad. Yes. Speaker B: Execute the I am mad critical. And then you just kind of barrel down that. And it's It's, you know, I think one of the things I realized since kind of starting to explore this stuff is just how much we socially reinforce this in each other too. And in ourselves. Yeah. Speaker A: Yeah. I'm going to feel this way. Or it even relates to like, um, I'm always late. Yeah. Oh, now I'm going to keep always being late.

Like we take on this. It's really cool how much the through line between, uh, attention here in this context maps so well to the anti-meme stuff. Which is basically, if I'm, if I'm not overreaching here, it is saying like, it is training ourselves and our attention to not just like let things flow to the default path over and over and over again. This idea, it's getting stuck somewhere. It's not, it's like getting lodged. Similarly, our emotions, our feelings, it's just like the ball's gonna trickle how it will, or I can intervene with attention.

Yeah, definitely. Speaker B: Yeah. And I think it's, And I think that's, this is where I really wanted to drive home that like, it's not when we talk about the buying and selling of attention online and things like that, like it's often just like, oh, you know, this person owns my attention now, this person will own my attention or something like that. But you can own your own attention, but you can also like do cool things with it and you can make crazy experiences. Speaker A: Not hoard it, as you say.

Speaker B: Yeah, not just hoard it. Um, yeah. Speaker A: I like that a lot. I want to talk briefly about your writing and your work. You just wrote your second book, or maybe third. Speaker A: Not hoard it, as you say. Speaker B: Yeah, not just hoard it. Um, yeah. Speaker A: I like that a lot. I want to talk briefly about your writing and your work. You just wrote your second book, or maybe third. Speaker B: I don't know if I call it the first book. Speaker A: Um, you have this, uh, I think it's at the very beginning of the book, you have this like kind of like what this experience, experience came out of.

You say like so many messy drafts before they become finished products, the ideas move faster than I could keep up. I was slipping and sliding all over the place, writing down more and more examples that I came across. And cramming them into a big brain dump doc called md, which perched itself mockingly in the top left corner of my desktop for years. Whenever I had some downtime between projects, I would try to refine the doc. Each time I would get frustrated by its unwieldiness and set it aside again. You go on to talk about the, the journey and the motivation to do something that really felt true to you, but like What is the actual process or feeling of going from— I'm someone who's written a fair amount and like the idea of writing a book seems completely impossible.

And the slipping and sliding feels really right of just like, I'm lost in this. There's so many interesting ideas. Like, what does it feel like to eventually like summit that hill and start to compress it into something that you feel like you can hold? Speaker B: A huge relief. Yeah. Um, I mean, yeah, I've written a lot of things now and With every big thing I write, there's always a point where I'm just like, I'm certain it's not gonna happen. It's just like, this is— Speaker B: A huge relief. Yeah.

Um, I mean, yeah, I've written a lot of things now and With every big thing I write, there's always a point where I'm just like, I'm certain it's not gonna happen. It's just like, this is— Speaker A: I'm screwed. This is game over. Speaker B: This is the worst thing I've ever written. Yeah. And then you just gotta push through it. Yeah, I think fewer expectations is helpful for me. Writing the second book has been— was way less painful to write than the first book. Maybe also 'cause it was, you know, not— the first book was kind of more directly a product of a lot of research I've been doing.

And this one was kind of more of a, maybe more adjacent or spans across a lot of things that I'm interested in. But I think also part of it was just like not having, not trying to like carry the weight of like, it's just writing, like, you know, zoom out, it's okay. Speaker A: Like, you know, so I think, yeah. You also mentioned you told almost no one about this. Yeah. Wrote, I would assume the first book, a few more people knew about. Speaker B: Yeah, I'm not the most talkative about my work in general day to day.

So yeah, my friends like to make fun of me for that. I definitely— more people were aware of the first one than the second one. And in both cases, I didn't even know I was writing a book. I think it was just sort of like, I need to get this thing into some form so it stops bothering me. And then it gets longer and longer. And then you're like, well, I guess it's turning into one. So, and then, you know, it flips a little bit. But yeah, I don't talk very much outside of maybe more like formalized context, but I don't.

I don't talk very much about the work I'm doing in my day-to-day life. Speaker A: That makes it easier. Speaker B: Yeah, I think there's a little bit of just like, I like having a wall, frankly. Like, I mean, if you spend all day thinking about something, I think this is true for most people with like their jobs or their work, right? Like I am constantly thinking about it. Like, you know, even when I sleep and I wake up and it's just like there's like this running loop, but I need to have a place where I don't think about it.

And so if you're, you know, if you're someone where your job is just like meetings all day, like you don't really want to be doing more meeting-like things when you're not working. And for me, it's like, if I spend all day just thinking about ideas, like, I like having a space where I can kind of be turned off and not have to just be sort of off duty a little bit. I also, like, I think a lot of inspiration that I get and ideas come from just observing other people. And so I don't like so much having, if someone is, if I'm talking about my own stuff, that means I don't get to hear about what other people are talking about.

And I like collecting bits of things from people. So I much, much, much prefer to be listening to other people talk about themselves and the other way around. Speaker A: I'm sorry to put you through this. This is okay. Uh, you have a great old blog post on the virtues of being basic that rhymes with some of that too. Just like turn your brain off. Still rings true. There's a sense here of like this very much being a personal journey. You referenced Jane Jacobs and I think one other woman about like their style of is very much coming from this like place of personal observation rather than Jane didn't have the criteria or whatever she needed— she was supposed to have to do what she did.

And yet she just kind of like went and looked around and it turned out she saw a lot. There's a, there's a part of this where you say you're talking about just like the frustration and, and maybe working on another book that felt less true or less personal. You say that creative self-expression is the only way we will continue to make our mark as humans in times of uncertainty. And it doesn't come from doing what you think will sell to other people. It comes from wanting to express something deep in your soul.

And then The New Yorker review said this about you. What makes this conceptual muddle appealing rather than a source of irritation or confusion is that she's quite clearly working all this out as she goes along. The book never feels like a vector for the reproduction of some prefabricated case. It has the texture of thought or of a group chat, which I don't— I would hope you do. I see as an incredible compliment and very much rings true. Yeah. What did, what did writing this particular book do for you or, or how did it change you?

Speaker B: In some ways it felt, and you know, to get back to the beginning of this conversation, you talk about sort of the self-consciousness I have around writing about ideas where the first book that I wrote was about open source software. It was a very concrete thing. It was an allegory for other things, but it was also, you know, it was very much rooted in like a specific thing. This one was by comparison, it felt very abstract. And so I think deciding to even do it felt a little like, am I really gonna spend like months and months just writing about, thinking about ideas?

Like, geez, like this is why I didn't tell people I was writing this book, you know? But I think forcing myself to do it because I clearly, whether I liked it or not, I had just been thinking about it for years at that point. Speaker A: You don't get to choose, back to the— Speaker B: You don't get to choose, yeah. And it was like, well, if I need to exorcise myself of this demon, like I gotta just grapple with it. And so it stops mocking me. And so I think that it felt good to take a leap on something that where I'm like, "I honestly have no idea if anyone's gonna care about this or whatever, but I just feel like I need to do it.

And I'm just gonna stand behind that and do that." So I always feel good when I force myself to do something like that with writing. And I find that the writing that I do because I think someone else is gonna like it is often much less satisfying than the ones where— because, you know, even if no one pays attention to something that you wrote for yourself, at least you know that you did it for yourself. Um, but I actually also weirdly find that, like, I mean, same with the Idea Machines piece where it was like also felt very abstract.

Yeah, like, is anyone really gonna care about this? Um, and it was really well received. And I think like, yeah, it's sometimes you just really gotta trust your intuition on and not listen. But, but like, that, that reflex in itself I think is one of the hardest things for creative people to do in general. And It's why you often, like, you don't see people with really long careers in creative work because, you know, they start getting ideas around what they should be doing or other people are kind of whispering in their ear about it.

They get— and it's very, very hard to keep doing interesting original things for a long period of time. I struggle with it constantly. So for me, it's a, yeah, good, good exercise, good practice to just keep trying to do that even when it's hard. Yeah. Speaker A: And there are levels to it too, which is like like maybe you're like, oh, I'm doing this for me, kind of. But I've also— I need it to be commercial enough. And it's like there's always like a way to go deeper. Also, I think the really, really great stuff tends to be not really for anyone else.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's really true. You've— Speaker A: when we first met, you talked about like the many eras of Nadia. You've done a lot of different things, clearly directed by the ideas that seize you. Just to name a few, I mean, like obviously all the open source stuff. You went and worked at Substack super early on, very much kind of seeing where we were going around the stuff we talked about in terms of the internet and the, and like cozier parts of the internet. There was a whole, and seems to still writing about it, this whole thing around tech philanthropy and the values of Silicon Valley.

Some great pieces there. Obviously all of the antimemetic stuff. You're still very actively working on consciousness, consciousness research, which we barely even talked about. And by the way, a lot of these things are happening simultaneously. What patterns have you seen, if any? And then like, what has stayed the same across all these different eras in terms of just like themes across? I don't know. Yeah. Stayed the same for you in terms of how you work, in terms of your attention. Yeah. Patterns either in the substance or patterns in like the shape of them.

I, my, I, I'm trying not to be too overbearing on it, but like there are clearly through lines even where they're They aren't obvious. Great. Maybe you can tell me. Speaker B: Yeah, I think, well, at least in the shape of things that attract me, it needs to be something that doesn't need to be— but the thing, the things that I kind of flock to are an idea that I feel no one is really paying attention to yet. Well, not no one, but it has to be, uh, just, just the right amount of people, right?

Yeah. Um, yeah, I think maybe we mentioned this when we first talked But David Lang has a piece about scene building and, you know, what, what, what causes a scene to take off versus not. And you can't have zero people paying attention to it because it's just like, it's not going to go anywhere. Speaker B: Yeah, I think, well, at least in the shape of things that attract me, it needs to be something that doesn't need to be— but the thing, the things that I kind of flock to are an idea that I feel no one is really paying attention to yet.

Well, not no one, but it has to be, uh, just, just the right amount of people, right? Yeah. Um, yeah, I think maybe we mentioned this when we first talked But David Lang has a piece about scene building and, you know, what, what, what causes a scene to take off versus not. And you can't have zero people paying attention to it because it's just like, it's not going to go anywhere. Speaker A: But you have the same with The Champion, by the way. The Champion can't— it's— which makes it more first follower-y.

It's like, yeah, it's actually kindling, right? Yeah. Speaker B: Which also speaks to, I think, my skepticism around this idea of like great man theory or great fun. It's like you can't really pull something out of thin air. There has to be like just enough people paying attention to it. And so, you know, trying to sort of spot something where it's like just enough interest, but it hasn't really, really taken off yet. And so I think like, yeah, the timing of a thing matters to me. And when it feels like something that hasn't, that is so obviously true to the people that are close to it, but then no one else seems aware of it and it has a lot of potential for impact.

That is always very exciting to me. Yeah, here's the water. Yeah, yeah. Like with, Yeah, talking to open source developers where it's like, oh, everyone thinks that open source software is built as this big, super participatory community. And then I'm talking to these developers who say, no, that's often not true. And our lives, their lives are really different from whatever else. There's a discrepancy here and it's like, I want to build some kind of bridge between it. I do think I gravitate a lot to that sort of like translatory bridge building type writing.

And yeah, I think a thing people often say is something like, oh, it's that's, you know, I read this piece and it gave me words for a thing that I didn't know how to express before. And I feel like that's kind of my sweet spot of stuff, whether I like that to be true or not. But I think that's kind of where I end up. But then I think, yeah, the actual eras are all like pretty different. I don't know how to tie them all together. And I think I almost try not to think about them too much.

Speaker A: Yeah, I guess that's probably right. But my sense is, I don't know, I've interviewed like 20, You're, you're the 22nd person I've interviewed with very little, like, I'm going to do these explicit themes across the different guests. And like, it just, they just keep stacking in terms of patterns and connection. And I talked to Yancey a couple of weeks ago and like, obviously there's connection, but like, I do find that overwhelmingly, if, if what you're saying is true about the ways that ideas seize us, it's very much not isolated or random.

And so like they're kind of creeping up at, up at you or at us in like ways that aren't always legible. But I think over time you can like look back at an era or a life or whatever and see it's, it's, it's not that shocking. Like the dots start to connect. I have a few final questions as we turn the corner across a bunch of different ideas. A meta question about maybe the anti-medic stuff in the book. Are— is some of this trying to like engineer or coordinate our way against human nature?

Like, put another way, like, it seems like Moloch is really strong and you have a lot of seeming hope, or at least you're conjuring hope that we can overcome this, that we can be better in part or largely due to ideas. What do you see or what do you hope for that would make that true? Speaker B: This might be me trying to, yeah, hedge a bit, I guess. But I think this is where I tried to make the foundation of the book really focus on descriptive observations and saying, whether we like it or not, here is what I think is happening.

Right. What we do with that is kind of up to us. Like, if you ask me point blank, I would say we— it's— we should not try to re-engineer human nature. That's just ill-advised sort of effort. Um, we talked about this with attention, right, where it's like you can't force someone to pay attention when there's nothing interesting to pay attention to, right? But yeah, on the flip side, it doesn't mean that we have to be totally defeatist about like— and I think that was that's what I was sort of reacting against in the sort of popularity of Girard and mimetic desire and the idea that we're just sort of like overwhelmed by this sort of mimetic behavior in a lot of ways right now.

There's something defeatist about that to me, where it's just sort of like, oh, okay, like we're just gonna constantly be aping other models of, you know, people who we want to be or things that we aspire to be like. And, you know, we're just gonna be like mindlessly passing things around because that's the way the monkey brain works. That's just things like, yeah, yeah, that's so uninspiring to me. So I want to at least probe a little and say, like, are there other ways of thinking about this that are, um, not so, not so obvious?

But, but I would, yeah, maybe stop short at saying, like, we shouldn't— we should again sort of, like, tai chi, work with our human nature, and not try to just completely come up with a new way of doing things that, um, that no one actually wants to do. Speaker B: This might be me trying to, yeah, hedge a bit, I guess. But I think this is where I tried to make the foundation of the book really focus on descriptive observations and saying, whether we like it or not, here is what I think is happening.

Right. What we do with that is kind of up to us. Like, if you ask me point blank, I would say we— it's— we should not try to re-engineer human nature. That's just ill-advised sort of effort. Um, we talked about this with attention, right, where it's like you can't force someone to pay attention when there's nothing interesting to pay attention to, right? But yeah, on the flip side, it doesn't mean that we have to be totally defeatist about like— and I think that was that's what I was sort of reacting against in the sort of popularity of Girard and mimetic desire and the idea that we're just sort of like overwhelmed by this sort of mimetic behavior in a lot of ways right now.

There's something defeatist about that to me, where it's just sort of like, oh, okay, like we're just gonna constantly be aping other models of, you know, people who we want to be or things that we aspire to be like. And, you know, we're just gonna be like mindlessly passing things around because that's the way the monkey brain works. That's just things like, yeah, yeah, that's so uninspiring to me. So I want to at least probe a little and say, like, are there other ways of thinking about this that are, um, not so, not so obvious?

But, but I would, yeah, maybe stop short at saying, like, we shouldn't— we should again sort of, like, tai chi, work with our human nature, and not try to just completely come up with a new way of doing things that, um, that no one actually wants to do. Speaker A: But yeah, you have a line in some writing about Urbit, to the extent that software is both an art and an ideology, Urbit was a full-stack expression of what a compartmentalized world would look like if every group chat became a fortress or a mafia.

Software as an art and an ideology is a really interesting framing that I'm sure ties back a lot to working in public. But yeah, what, what do you mean by that? Speaker B: I think, um, well, not all software, but I think software is underappreciated as an art form in itself. And you see a lot of people who've created interesting software because it is just expressing something they really want to say and they're expressing it with code, right? And so it's maybe a more functional or interactive art form. But yeah, I think that's probably true for a lot of different— I think maybe this is a little Pollyanna-ish or something, but it's like art is everywhere to be found everywhere, right?

And so many, like, you know, there's was the line about everything around you was created by someone else. Like every single little thing around you is something that was someone's like life passion to try to make it happen. Yeah, we're just surrounded by it. I was talking to a restaurant owner or entrepreneur who's, you know, started a bunch of different restaurant businesses recently. And he was talking about how each of these restaurants represented a different era in his own life of, you know, you could see the one where he was really into like coworking and the one where he was kind of feeling lost, and this one where he wanted to create a gathering space for his family.

And, and, um, and I never thought about, like, I've never thought about restaurant ownership as something that could be artistic. But how could it not be? Speaker A: How could it not be? Speaker B: Right? Like, because you're spending so much time on this thing. So, um, yeah, I think software is probably no different than that. Speaker A: You, I think, briefly alluded to it vaguely. You've written explicitly that your, uh, first book about open source was actually an allegory about democracy. What's your most surprising belief about democracy? Or at the very least, what the most kind of key or central learning you have for the rest of us about it is?

Speaker B: And I'm just gonna paraphrase the apocryphal quote from Churchill, but I think it still works. Um, that would, that would be a less exciting thing to say some years ago, but maybe that's the thing that needs to be said now. I think we are now in a place where people can be openly disaffected by feeling that democracy doesn't work. And I think this is again tying to this defeatist sort of attitude about memetic behavior, which is sort of like, well, you know, none of it worked, we're screwed. And I think it still works.

We just have to, you know, it doesn't mean being totally hands-off either. It means kind of getting in the arena yourself and, um, participating in it. And yeah, it feels like a very old-school thing to say, you know, like, let's talk about our civic duties and stuff. Um, but yeah, I don't know, I still think there's just so much left to discover and uncover about it that we haven't even tried or tested. Speaker A: So you have written about the value of space. Sometimes I— it feels like I can't think in here.

Because, and I think you even alluded to this in the footnote, that here is some amalgamation of San Francisco and Twitter and whatever. This was also written in, I think, late August 2019. Because people are constantly asking me to externalize my thoughts all the time. I'm not ready to externalize everything I think about. Sometimes it takes years for me to articulate what I'm trying to say. You left San Francisco and you probably had more space in general in a lot of ways. Although now with, with a baby, I lost space too.

Yeah. How has, how has having at least a certain kind of space or distance changed or enabled you to think and write? Speaker A: So you have written about the value of space. Sometimes I— it feels like I can't think in here. Because, and I think you even alluded to this in the footnote, that here is some amalgamation of San Francisco and Twitter and whatever. This was also written in, I think, late August 2019. Because people are constantly asking me to externalize my thoughts all the time. I'm not ready to externalize everything I think about.

Sometimes it takes years for me to articulate what I'm trying to say. You left San Francisco and you probably had more space in general in a lot of ways. Although now with, with a baby, I lost space too. Yeah. How has, how has having at least a certain kind of space or distance changed or enabled you to think and write? Speaker B: It's the best. It's funny. Yes. We are recording this in San Francisco. So, you know, I certainly, I like coming back to San Francisco and on paper it feels like I should be here, right?

It's like the most relevant place to my work. Um, all my friends are here. I spent, yeah, I think close to 11 years in San Francisco. So I definitely, you know, put in my time here, but it feels, yeah, just a little close, too close to the rail, I think, in the same way of like, I really, yeah, I don't, I don't like having to, every, everything I do, every small interaction, everywhere I go, having to like talk about myself or my ideas or like, I like doing it in containers where it's like, okay, I know I'm going to be talking about it here, but I think I just need the, yeah, I need the space to collect all the little pieces of things I'm observing.

You know, I'm constantly writing down notes of stuff that I observe, and sometimes they start to form into little balls of ideas that start to snowball. That's how this book happened for sure. And I think I just, I need a space to be more embodied too. Like, I feel like our, now we live in Los Angeles and yeah, just having a day-to-day with my family where the most important thing in the evenings is not going to another, you know, happy hour dinner or whatever. It's like I get to sit and watch my kid eat and play with him, and that feels really, really good.

I think a long time ago I wrote something about how thinking about this sort of ideas type work as similar to sort of doing any sort of like physical activity or a professional athlete or something where it's like you have recovery time, right? And like you have very intense sprints and then you have recovery time. And I don't enjoy just sort of constantly mindlessly consuming information. Like, I need to process, and a lot of that processing happens in really, you know, the, the shower thought kind of thing, right? Or for me, it's, you know, waking up in the middle of night and just having flashes of inspiration and stuff.

But you need the downtime, you need the, the recovery time just to sort of process ideas. And so, yeah, I think it's, it's possible to do that in San Francisco, but it's just harder. And so it's, it's really nice to be somewhere where I can have a little bit of that that space and distance, and then I can choose to come into the fray like this week in San Francisco and enjoy it. Speaker A: Well, I think you've been an effective truth teller for a while, and you were doing so from San Francisco for a while too.

But I can't help but think or imagine that that distance has enabled you to be so lucid and clear and thoughtful in the way you're observing what's happening today, which is cool. You mentioned family. You've talked about being like less afraid to take risks since starting a family. It's like very clarifying in terms of what, you know, knowing what really matters, calming. How have your boys, I guess one's a man, but how have your boys changed you? Speaker B: Me, my husband, and my son. Oh gosh. I think there's something really valuable having a stable place to work from.

That's, yeah, that it makes, 'cause you know, why are people afraid to take risks? They're afraid of the consequences or, Sometimes those are material consequences. That's kind of a different question. But in terms of social consequences of like, I'm afraid of looking silly or whatever, and I'm afraid no one's going to care. And with writing, I found that I am less afraid to take risks when I think about it of like, what are the intrinsic benefits to me? I enjoyed clarifying these ideas. I enjoyed working through the process. I feel a lot better now, and I'm going to share it.

And hopefully people like it. If not, I did it for me. Right. And just having that framing of my writing has been really helpful. And then I think family is another version of this where, like, at the end of the day, like, you know, I get to come home to the two people who really love me and that I love. And like, that's— it doesn't really matter sometimes what's happening out in the world because it just feels really good to come home to that. So yeah, and in that sense, it just makes you a lot less fearful.

Like, at least my kid likes me. Like, I don't know, knock on wood, it stays that way. Speaker A: You've written about gentleman scientists and being funded by patronage and patronage broadly. You say patronage isn't a free lunch either, but there's an important lesson here about building fewer but deeper relationships. I think more people should adopt a patronage mindset beyond the context of online creators. Taking care of people in your life who matter is important. How have you been cared for? Speaker B: Have I been cared for? Gosh, yeah. Friends, family, people are just sort of not just there to catch you when you fall, but who also don't care whether you're falling or not in the sense of, you know, I think you have to form friendships and relationships that are not just centered around sort of like professional pursuits or interests.

People where if you became nobody the next day, like they don't care. They don't wanna even, you know, I have friends where it's like, I don't talk about work at all. And I find that really refreshing. So there's some feeling, some underlying theme there, I think, around just stability or building a foundation where I think being cared for can kind of— it feels really nice when someone says like, I'm here for you. And people who are invested in you just because they think they like you, you know, and there's no real reason why.

It doesn't matter who you turn into or not. And I think it's not a transaction. Yeah, yeah. And I think these often come out in friendships that last over long, long periods of time because you're evolving through multiple eras of each other. And sometimes it's just like, I don't even know why this person is still one of my closest friends. There's no transactional reason for it. It's just because we've spent so much time together. And so, yeah, when I think about caring for other people too, it's like I want to support people where I just love them and the way they see the world and who they are and like whatever it is, I want to just be unconditionally supportive of that.

Speaker A: My last question, it's a quote from you and then a question. But to the right champion, even the most labyrinthine system feels like an invitation to create something extraordinary. Everyone has at least one system for which this is true, which means that all of us have the potential to champion an anti-mimetic idea more deeply. You will know it when looking at the problem makes your heart expand with possibilities rather than shrink away when instead of feeling overwhelmed, you feel a spark of curiosity. The world, after all, is more than just what we inherit.

It's what we choose to notice, nurture, and build. Everything around us, for worse, yes, but also for the better, is made up of where we direct our attention. We learn to channel it wisely. We can decide what type of future we want to see. I know I've asked around the question a few times. And you are good at hedging, but where do you think your optimism comes from? Speaker B: I think it is, yeah, again, just like an openness to possibility. I just think that's a really, at least for me, it has served me well as a posture to operate from in the world across, yeah, across relationships, family, everything, and work.

And if you always believe there's something else out there, if you always believe that your reality is malleable and you know, you're never stuck in any one situation forever, then like, how could you not be optimistic about what's possible? It gets you like, it gets me excited to get out of bed because there's always something new to discover. If I had nothing, if I felt I just knew what all the answers were, I knew who all the people were in my life and exactly how they operated, I knew what all the best ideas were and whatever, you just come in there with this sort of like arrogance and self-overconfidence, then it's like, well, yeah, you just really get stuck in these rigid ways of being.

But like, I love that I don't know anything and I never feel like I know anything. I can only talk about, like, you know, maybe what I observe or something. But yeah, I just— being super, super open to the possibilities is, I think, a nice way to operate. Speaker A: I hope we can all have some more of that. This has been wonderful. Speaker B: Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me.