![[22-Nadia_Asparouhova.jpg]] *Dialectic Episode 22: Nadia Asparouhova - Ideas that Infect - is available on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/3Fgobxg2kLm3gqLjkSlOU5?si=04f43e70e45b453b), [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/22-nadia-asparouhova-ideas-that-infect/id1780282402?i=1000715579660), and [YouTube](https://youtu.be/MXBz7ercHh4?si=IikAYoqhexEQH3-C), and all podcast platforms.* <iframe style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/3Fgobxg2kLm3gqLjkSlOU5?utm_source=generator" width="100%" height="152" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" loading="lazy"></iframe> <iframe allow="autoplay *; encrypted-media *; fullscreen *; clipboard-write" frameborder="0" height="175" style="width:100%;max-width:660px;overflow:hidden;border-radius:10px;" sandbox="allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-storage-access-by-user-activation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation" src="https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/22-nadia-asparouhova-ideas-that-infect/id1780282402?i=1000715579660"></iframe> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MXBz7ercHh4?si=yy3y0EOBXMdnODAa" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> # Description Nadia Asparouhova ([Website](https://nadia.xyz/), [X](https://x.com/nayafia), [Substack](https://nayafia.substack.com/?r=8rxu&utm_campaign=subscribe-page-share-screen&utm_medium=web)) is a writer and researcher who has spent much of her career in service of the question: 'what's happening here?' across various parts of the internet. Nadia recently published her newest book, *[Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading](https://darkforest.metalabel.com/antimemetics?variantId=1)*. She explores why consequential ideas, unlike memes and supermemes, fail to spread. She also recounts the last several years of online public and private life and how we're all less naive than we were in previous eras of the internet. Critically, she suggests a path toward poking our heads out of group chats and silos to engage in publicly discussing or promoting the ideas that matter most. Her first book, *[Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software](https://press.stripe.com/working-in-public)*, was published by Stripe Press. Nadia also worked at Substack, Protocol Labs, and Github, and has written extensively on Silicon Valley Culture; the importance of ideas and institutions; consciousness, attention, and meditation; and more. Nadia's self-described sweet spot is when people respond to her writing by saying,"I read this piece and it gave me words for a thing that I didn't know how to express before." I can attest that is true, both for *Antimemetics* and for much of her other thinking. And as much as she writes about ideas, I admire how focused she is on how they might produce action. Nadia believes that important ideas *infect* us, and the reasonable response to that is to be tremendously thoughtful about our attention. I hope this conversation inspires you to put great care into where your attention goes. # Timestamps - 1:31: Why Ideas Matter - 9:33: The Last 10 Years of the Internet and Attention Collapse - 17:07: How The Internet Caused Attention Collapse - 19:59: Private Coordination in Public Spaces - 24:01: Legibility and Illegibility as a Tactic - 28:28: Ideas Are Not Created Nor Discovered; They Infect Us - 35:17: Defining Antimemes - 42:00: Ideological Black Holes: Supermemes - 49:13: Engaging in the Public Square vs. Opting Out - 54:16: Truth Tellers who Can Bring Anti-Memetic Ideas to Light - 1:05:06: Champions, or the Great Apostle Theory - 1:10:57: Institutions, Ideologies, and Movements - 1:24:51: Attention - 1:31:30: Jhanas - 1:38:42: Writing a Book - 1:46:19: Connecting the Dots in Reverse - 1:50:29: Lightning Round: Fighting (or Working With) Human Nature, Software as Passion Project, Democracy, Space Away from the Center of Things # Links & References - [Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading - Nadia Asparouhova](https://darkforest.metalabel.com/antimemetics?variantId=1) - [The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paıdeía of the American Tech Elite - Tanner Greer](https://scholars-stage.org/the-silicon-valley-canon-on-the-paideia-of-the-american-tech-elite/) - [Peter Frumkin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Frumkin) - [Curtis Yarvin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin) - [Nadia Asparouhova - Tech Elites, Democracy, Open Source, & Philanthropy - Dwarkesh Podcast](https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/nadia-asparouhova) - [Effective Altruism](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/) - [Rewriting the Californian Ideology - American Affairs Journal - Nadia Asparouhova](https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2025/05/rewriting-the-californian-ideology/) - [The dark forest theory of the internet - Yancey Strickler](https://www.ystrickler.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet/) - [The Dark Forest and the Cozy Web - Maggie Appleton](https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web/) - [The End of History? - Francis Fukuyama](https://pages.ucsd.edu/~bslantchev/courses/pdf/Fukuyama%20-%20End%20of%20History.pdf) - [The group chats that changed America \| Semafor](https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america) - [René Girard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Girard) - [Seeing Like a State - James C. Scott](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20186.Seeing_Like_a_State) - [Venkatesh Rao](https://venkateshrao.com/) - [Title Unavailable \| Site Unreachable](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility/) - [The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene) - [Supermemes, Antimemes, and more quadrant](https://x.com/liangsays/status/1928675973144121836) - [Mitch Hedberg - The Reason We Can't Find Big Foot](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax0MGlIVjiY) - [How to Do Nothing - Jenny Odell](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42771901-how-to-do-nothing) - [Bill Campbell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Campbell_(business_executive)) - [Greta Thunberg](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greta_Thunberg) - [Trickster Makes This World - Lewis Hyde](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56450.Trickster_Makes_This_World) - [Unqualified Reservations, Vol. 01 - Curtis Yarvin](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/193539945-unqualified-reservations-vol-01) - [Nick Cammarata](https://x.com/nickcammarata) - [‎The Beatles: Get Back (2021)](https://letterboxd.com/film/the-beatles-get-back/) - [When We Cease to Understand the World - Benjamín Labatut ](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62069739-when-we-cease-to-understand-the-world) - [Idea machines - Nadia Asparouhova](https://nadia.xyz/idea-machines) - [The Network State](https://thenetworkstate.com/) - [The tyranny of ideas - Nadia Asparouhova](https://nadia.xyz/ideas) - [How to do the jhanas - Nadia Asparouhova](https://nadia.xyz/jhanas) - [Being basic as a virtue - Nadia Asparouhova](https://nadia.xyz/basic) - [Why Good Ideas Die Quietly and Bad Ideas Go Viral | The New Yorker](https://archive.is/lPJ3o) - [Working in Public - Nadia Asparouhova](https://press.stripe.com/working-in-public) - [Silicon Valley’s Civil War - Tablet Magazine - Nadia Asparouhova](https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/silicon-valley-civil-war) - [Meditations On Moloch - Slate Star Codex](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/) # Transcript *Transcription is created and edited for clarity by AI.* **Jackson:** Nadia Asparouhova, welcome. **Nadia:** Thank you. **Jackson:** I'm really glad to be here with you. It's a recurring theme with this podcast, but you contain multitudes. There are lots of different ideas. We're not going to get to all of them today, but hopefully, we'll get into a lot of them. ## [00:01:31] Why Ideas Matter **Jackson:** And I think that starts with ideas. There's a line in the New Yorker review of your recent book, Antimemetics, where the reviewer says she is interested in ideas that cost something. I thought that was an interesting place to start. You've spent your creative and professional life circling and thinking about ideas. While you put more weight into ideas than most, always coming back to the premise of how we can actually use ideas to impact things, change things, and solve problems. the intro to the book, you 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 is that you found the right balance and you actually love ideas. So, my first question is: Why do you love ideas? Or, at the very least, why do you think they matter so much for people who are interested in living in, acting in, and participating in the world, not just observing it? **Nadia:** I think some of my self-hatingness around ideas comes from straddling a bunch of different worlds. In the tech world, we tend to err more on the side of action, and academia errs more on the side of ideas. In tech, I sometimes feel like ideas are weirdly underappreciated, even though they're what fuels everything that people do. Tanner Greer, one of my favorite writers, wrote a piece about the Silicon Valley canon and the underlying ideology that fuels people there. He talks about this marriage of ideas and of action. People are constantly searching for new ideas to uncover, but they also want to put them into action. Culturally, in tech, people talk a lot about the builder side of things, and that's what brings people together. But the question is, what are you building and why? If you really zoom out, you see that tech people are building all sorts of things and don't really limit themselves to just software or hardware. There's a feeling of uncovering a prize when you find a niche idea that no one else has found. Then you parade it around at dinner parties and tell people about this little nugget you found in a book. I really love that about tech. That's what attracted me to tech culture in the first place. It feels like a strange place where I get to be someone who uncovers ideas and tries to shepherd them into a place of action. But sometimes, there's a little bit of self-consciousness. 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. But they're really important. If you're just about actions, you're just firing a gun. The ideas part is what is pointing you in the right direction. **Jackson:** I like that answer a lot. I'm a pretty big believer that logic and facts rarely scale in the way that stories do. I was thinking about this a lot as I was prepping for this. I'd be curious if you have a view on how stories and ideas sit next to each other and what the potential differences are. Are they the same? Are stories a type of idea? Silicon Valley is also a place that at times may seem to underrate stories, but is very involved in and cares a lot about them. **Nadia:** My first reaction to that would be that stories are a vessel for ideas, or a marketing gimmick for them. They're meant to transmit something. You have parables, fables, folk stories. They're a story that is ostensibly about something that seems very quaint, but is actually trying to teach some underlying moral. Stories are a way to take an idea and make it more palatable. That's the really hard part, and to me, the really fun part too. When you can see an idea, you know what you're trying to transmit, but you have to figure out the best way to get it across. Choosing just the right language and the right characters to frame that is the hardest part. **Jackson:** We're definitely going to talk more about how ideas are spread. You talk about the biodiversity of ideas, specifically in the context of philanthropy, but it's a pretty interesting premise. We see this, as you note, in startups and innovation: 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 Guin's story resonates because for most people, it doesn't just feel right to outsource our judgment to a game of numbers. This is certainly adjacent to some of the effective altruism criticisms. I'm curious why it's important to have a personal connection to the ideas that we care about—the expressive giving side of that equation. It seems to me that one of the main ways you're coming at all of this is seeking a taste in ideas that is very personal and connected, and not necessarily only subjective. It isn't just this sort of hyper-rational approach you see with effective altruism. **Nadia:** I try to take a page from how things work in biology. When ecosystems evolve, they don't evolve at a top-down, systems level. There's no great designer trying to make a biological ecosystem more efficient. Each species or actor involved in the ecosystem is just trying to do what makes sense for them. Through the mingling of all these different competing motives and behaviors, you reach a stasis where you can zoom out and say, "This is what the system is." That's true for people, too. I don't see why we should be any different. 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, but I don't see any examples of how that has really worked out in the long run. You can try to guide people in one direction or the other, but it always comes from being just another actor in the ecosystem. I take a very pluralistic approach to philanthropy and to the exchange of ideas. It could be conflated with libertarianism, but it's really not. It's not about everyone doing what's best for them and then screwing everyone else. It's not about overemphasizing the importance of the individual. It's about considering the individual in the context of an ecosystem. What is best for the system is actually each person pursuing their own thing. From there, some ideas will win and some ideas will lose. Then we can zoom out and say, "What does the system look like, and what else do we need?" **Jackson:** You articulate that frame really well in a piece where you're talking about what the real ideology of technology is. It's not this libertarian thing; it's actually this very individual ambition path into collectivism. The other thing that comes up there is the overhang of EA. There is this notion that there are a correct set of ideas. It's a funny tension, and that theme really runs through a lot of the book. ## [00:09:33] The Last 10 Years of the Internet and Attention Collapse **Jackson:** I want to talk a lot more about ideas, but it's worth setting the stage for how you think about what happened to the internet in the last 10 years. My interpretation of \*Antimemetics\* is that there are a lot of different books in there, but one of them is a sociology on what happened when the internet went from this very public place to a more complex place. I want to talk about that before we go back to the ideas. There's one line you say: "Find enough people who share your views, no matter how extreme or far-fetched, and they will form your new reality." That is a good frame for so much of what has happened. In the \*Applied Divinity Studies\* review of \*Antimemetics\*, they talk about this Thiel 2010s fear of globalization. They point out that what you're pointing at is a more modern warning around Balkanization. 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." Some people are very familiar with this, others less so. It would be helpful to have you set the stage around the topography and how it has shifted. **There's the Nadia:** dark forest collective idea and the Maggie Appleton cozy web frame. There are different versions of it, but we went from a very global village town square to something new. Can you give brief frame on how you think that's changed? **Nadia:** It's something that a lot of people have probably felt, even if we haven't talked about it explicitly. The more explicit conversation is just starting to enter the discourse. I stumbled into thinking about it when I was working on my first book, during a prior period of my life where I was looking at open source software developers. They're a nice foil through which to understand how things changed. In the mid to late 2000s, there was a lot of excitement about people collaborating on the Internet who didn't know each other and what they could produce. You had the wisdom of the crowds, crowdsourcing, and Wikipedia. Open source software was another one of these things, where developers collaborated with each other from around the world, producing software that anyone could use and consume freely. This came at the same time that we were talking about globalization and the end of history, because democracy had won as the ideal form of government. There was a lot of hope and optimism. 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. We all know what happened after that. We started building infrastructure around this. You have the Web 2.0 era, where we're taking that seed of an idea and canonizing it into these social platforms. Everyone is sharing their ideas on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. For a time in the mid-2010s, it feels really good, and we're still really excited about this unchecked spread of ideas. Then things start to get a little bit weird in the second half of the 2010s. We don't even have a name for that era yet; that's how new it is. 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 were too exposed to too many ideas. **Jackson:** There's an overall feeling of collapse. That's definitely what happened. **Nadia:** The context collapse. Anything that you're sharing online is escaping context and you can get piled on by people you don't even know. That can have real-life consequences for people's professional and personal reputations. We got to a point where people needed to protect themselves. It was getting to be too much. This was also around the time that COVID happened in 2020. People started going deeper and deeper, burrowing down underground because they couldn't handle what was going on. **Jackson:** Get into the bunker. **Nadia:** This was partly aided by actual technology. We couldn't even send group messages until the mid-2010s. Even that technology had not been invented. You could only text people one-on-one. Now you can text groups. Having this infrastructure made it possible for people to self-organize in smaller groups on the internet. **Jackson:** You could text a group of ten, but the Discord idea, or the Telegram or WhatsApp group of 100 people, was not a thing. **Nadia:** People needed these tools. It's funny to think about a time when we didn't even have the tools or technology to self-organize in small groups online. Then, people slowly started grabbing towards that as a way to get away from the loud noise. It's interesting because whenever a new social platform came out in the golden years of Web 2.0, it was this really exciting, flashy thing, but group chats were a very slow burn. Only now are we starting to see media pieces being published about the phenomenon of group chats. We've all been using them for years, but no one is really talking about it. They're not visible. It's very unusual for a new thing on the internet to be something we don't even talk about for years and are just doing. One of the arguments I make in the book is that a lot of people think this is a good thing: There's this loud, noisy world out there, and now we have our little group chats and our more private spaces. We're good. I don't think the story should just end there. I talk about in the book some examples of ways in which being more isolated and only talking to the same 10 people can also be dangerous. Not just in the sense that you're not being exposed to new ideas, but more that we all are still interacting with the world out there. Most people are not completely cutting themselves off from the rush of ideas on super-public feeds. You get these idea contagions that make their way into your group chats, and then suddenly they mutate and evolve in these crazy ways. I don't think the story is as simple as: first there was super-public, now we're private, and it's over. We're in a more hybrid state where we have to talk about how having these two different spaces actually shape each other. **Jackson:** It's a really good reminder. One thing that kept coming up as I was reading is that we're in a very young version of this digital life. It's not that young anymore, but in the grand scheme of human society and sociology, it's really young. It's easy to think about these things as though we've reached how it's going to be, and it's clear that's not the case. ## [00:17:07] How The Internet Caused Attention Collapse **Jackson:** There's one thread on the cancel culture idea that I thought was really interesting. In the book, you talk about Girard and the historical way 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 mimetic 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. 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. That is such a great encapsulation what that collapse felt like. There's this meta-scapegoating dynamic running over the top of things. Do you have a sense of why living in a world that was so connected, memes could travel so fast, produced this outcome? What is it about living effectively in a meme world that creates that kind of collapse? Is it just too much noise and not enough signal, or is it something else? **Nadia:** It's probably a lot of things, but part of it is a function of your attention being overwhelmed. Attention is a finite resource; we cannot create infinite amounts of it. The way we make our attention more efficient is to pay less attention to more things, so it becomes a much shallower engagement with a lot of stuff. It's a lot faster to receive an idea and reflexively pass it on. You're fueling the fire for something you may not even really care about or have a relationship to. If you think of us as this giant machine of people grabbing things and passing them along without really looking at them, the quality control went down. I think of each of us as a node in whatever network we're involved with in terms of how ideas spread. For an idea to spread through a network, it has to encounter each node, and each node decides whether to hold it, pass it on, or destroy it. Every one of us is a gatekeeper for every single idea that comes across us, and all the gatekeepers got lazy. Understandably so, because of the amount of information everyone's being inundated with. **Jackson:** And it's fun to spread a meme. **Nadia:** It's fun. It feels really good. You often don't think about it because it's so easy to just share a link. In aggregate, when you zoom back out, we're zooming in on what is best for each individual person. You're just doing what's best for you. Then you zoom out and ask, what has the system turned into? The system has turned into mindless sharing and resharing. **Jackson:** The filter bar dropped. ## [00:19:59] Private Coordination in Public Spaces **Jackson:** talk about in this modern or emerging internet—whether you call it the dark forest internet or the subculture internet. By that, I mean people coordinating without it being obvious that they're coordinating. 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 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 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.” It's a cynical view, but it’s like we're still in Times Square, and most people are secretly in a mafia of some kind. You offer a less cynical frame, calling it the "memetic Galapagos," which I think is cool. This feels incredibly apt for Twitter. I like to joke that Twitter is a gladiator arena, and in that frame, it makes sense not to go at it alone. How much of this frame is specific to Twitter and that 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 built many of our relationships on Twitter for over a decade. I'm curious how Twitter-centric this view is, or if you think it's how everything is now, at **Nadia:** I think it's true for looking at how power moves. A lot of people are not in relevant group chats, but as we've seen with recent pieces about them, this behavior seems to be true not just for tech people on Twitter, but also for politicians and celebrities. It's also true for some of our circles on Twitter. I think it's don't think this behavior is new. It's just the classic boys' club, the cigar club. **Jackson:** It's almost like we actually became briefly naive. **Nadia:** Our expectations are just totally off. I think it's always been a little bit like this. There's something about a group chat that seems more exciting to people because it's been codified somehow on the internet, but it's not really that new or different. 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. There's a much more real-time relationship between what's happening in a group chat and what's happening in public. It's relevant to anyone who is consuming or paying attention to what's happening on their social platform of choice. There's always this deeper story, and it may not always be apparent to someone consuming information who is affiliated with whom. When they see two people talk about a similar idea or support each other, they might think that multiple people support this idea. It might also just mean they already know each other and they're supporting each other. It's useful to know that and be aware of that. **Jackson:** If something's happening in a public square or public venue, you should probably be a little bit wary of it being just one independent actor. **Nadia:** Random, right. Maybe that's the update that people need to have. It used to be that if someone's making an official announcement, you think it's an official, polished thing. But that's true for all public interactions, no matter how stupid the random reply. A lot of these have been very, very workshopped on the back end. **Jackson:** There's ## [00:24:01] Legibility and Illegibility as a Tactic **Jackson:** one last foothold that is useful to set up the rest of the conversation, which is around legibility and illegibility. You have a frame around flash floods that I thought was interesting, regarding 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 that 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." You're pointing to the notion that massive memetic spread or instant legibility isn't so helpful. You talk about the illegibility of both people and ideas, and there are a few quotes I want to read back-to-back that I see as connected. You say, "The in-group is whomever affiliates with the in-group, and it might contain people from many different in-groups... This part of Twitter is this part of Twitter. If none of this makes any sense, that's the point." In a separate section, you ask, "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." you identify the "patient zero" of \*Seeing Like a State\* as Venkatesh Rao, who published an essay about the book in "A Big Little Idea Called Legibility." 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. One final quote. You were talking about Curtis Yarvin with this quality exists in prophets or historically influential people—they have an illegibility that allows anyone to take their ideas and try them on. Talking about Curtis, you say, "Back in 2016, not everyone who 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, and I think this is largely a seed for anti-mimetics. Why is this type of illegibility an important tactic for people who want to get their ideas out there in the modern world? **Nadia:** As you point out, there's a tension between legibility and illegibility. If you're too illegible, no one pays attention to you. If you're too legible, your ideas can feel watered down or overly obvious. I think of it as a sliding scale of when I want people to dig a little bit deeper. Withholding a little bit or making it a little hard to understand can intrigue people more and make them want to dig in. It's bait. Curtis is maybe a master of this, probably not intentionally, but because his writing style is so… **Jackson:** You don't think it's that intentional? **Nadia:** I think he is who he is. I say this with love, but he just can't help himself. He's very verbose, both in speaking and in writing. It means that you start to dig and pore over all the little sentences. What did this sentence mean? What did that sentence mean? The Bible is a classic example of this. There are so many different ways to interpret it that have given rise to entire religions. Different people have translated it in different ways, and some parts of it are ambiguous, but it creates more intrigue for people to dig in and try to understand. There is some concern that people don't have the attention span for this today—probably less so than before. But I don't think it's died or gone away entirely. People are still hungry for something that challenges them and makes them work for it a little bit. **Jackson:** Okay, there are a ## [00:28:28] Ideas Are Not Created Nor Discovered; They Infect Us **Jackson:** lot of ideas to pull apart there, and a lot related to the book and how you think about the different shapes of ideas. At a super high level—and forgive me, this is a little esoteric—do you think it is more accurate to say that ideas are created, discovered, or assembled? If that's not the right way to think about it, are we at the very least recycling and reassembling them? Or are we actually finding or creating new ideas? **Nadia:** I was going to say none of the above. **Jackson:** Okay, cool. **Nadia:** I think we're just infected by ideas. I subscribe to a microbiome version of understanding ideas and their influence on us. Ideas have their own entire ecosystem and world they play around in, and we are just the hosts they live in. When you get infected by an idea, it needs to express itself and is speaking through you in a way. We have very little agency around which ideas take hold of us and obsess us. This is a little different from the dynamics around how you choose which ideas to spread. When someone's really infected by an idea, they're just going to go out and spread it. Ideas are just lying around, waiting to be picked up all the time. There's a lot of dead knowledge, which is how I think of it. There are so many books out there, so many things that are unread, and so many pieces just lying strewn about. Sometimes, someone just picks it up, it clicks in just the right way, and then they go off and spread it. You mentioned Venkatesh and his essay on legibility, which came after he read \*Seeing Like a State\*. That was a spontaneous discovery for him. He helped \*Seeing Like a State\* become a popular book in tech, but he just randomly picked it up because his wife had it assigned for her master's program. There's no real reason why it had to be that book versus another. There are so many books like that which someone hasn't picked up, reframed in just the right way, and then spread through a system. I find it reassuring to think we're just governed by these ideas and whatever comes through me. I can really feel it when there's something I just have to talk about and have to do. I'm not the kind of person who makes a list of 200 ideas and asks, "Which one should I work on today?" or "Which one seems the most interesting based on this matrix of the things I value and care about most?" I just think you can feel it when you care about something. If you haven't found something you really feel, then just keep doing stuff until it hits you. **Jackson:** It's funny how in a world where we debate how much is determined, feel like one of the least determined things. There are so many examples. A certain technology, an area, a domain to look in, or even a company—some of these things can often show up all at once. But you also hear so many stories like the \*Seeing Like a State\* one, which is just pure randomness. I think that's kind of optimistic. One quick thing on this: If ideas do infect us and are something else, there's a criticism that, if my read of your book is correct, you would disagree with. It's a criticism from Ted Gioia, as well as David Marks, this "death of new culture" frame that came out of the mainstream internet of the 2010s. This is the idea that we're at the end of culture, kind of like the end of history. My sense is that you disagree with that. so confident that there are so many more examples of the unturned book or whatever it might be? ones. **Nadia:** Maybe that's just my hope, because I don't want that to be true. I really hope we can come up with a more optimistic view of the future, because that would just be sad otherwise. My thesis on this is that if we think about living knowledge versus dead knowledge—living knowledge is the stuff that is actively in circulation being talked about, and dead knowledge is just waiting in the wings—we have an infinite amount of dead knowledge. Even if we stopped creating anything new right now and just tried to process everything that's ever been created in history, there's an infinite amount of stuff we could spawn movements and trends off of. I don't think there's any shortage of stuff. The question is just, where is people's attention being trained? **Jackson:** And the criticism would be that we're actually just returning to the same mainstream culture over and over again. **Nadia:** Maybe it's a market that needs a little bit of a guiding hand, an intervention to nudge people toward looking at the right things. We're so rat-like at this point that we're looping on the same pieces of stupid living knowledge over and over again. That's one perspective I have. 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? The other part of it is that it's entirely possible consuming tons of great culture right now and are just so completely fattened by it that we don't even appreciate it anymore. It's like having a big table of pastries. I think of Marie Antoinette's time—all the cakes and the pastries and the foods. We're just like, "Oh, God, it's another pastry. I don't want this." **Jackson:** We've lost our taste. **Nadia:** A common critique is that movies are terrible now, and they are. You can look at all the data and see that tons of them are remakes and sequels. But if you zoom in and ask where good stories are being told in a visual format, a lot of it just moved to TV shows. The quality of TV shows today is so much better than it was when I was growing up. It was just sitcoms and not much else. Amazing stories are still being told; they just got repackaged into a different format. But people can't appreciate it because you watch an amazing new TV show every week. There's so much glut. **Jackson:** You don't think about it ever again. **Nadia:** It's still there. Maybe we just have too much good culture and we can't see it. ## [00:35:17] Defining Antimemes **Jackson:** That's a great setup for talking about antimimetics, the theme of the book. It's a really empowering idea, in part because it is an antidote for what you just described: ideas that have to linger more. In the empowering metaphor you have around the mimetic city and the antimimetic city, you say, "Antimimetics are 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." You also note, "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." That's a great way of explaining how both memes and antimemes were blown out and warped by the internet. I also love the example you give of taboos. You say they have no moral valence: "They are not innately or bad. And conversely, taboos that become widely accepted are not necessarily good or right." You continue: "A society that allows its long-standing taboo on racism to erupt into genocide is mechanistically indistinguishable from a society that allows its 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." might be helpful to give a brief primer on how you define **Nadia:** Antimemes are ideas that are self-censoring. This is in opposition to memes, which are ideas that are self-propagating in the Richard Dawkins sense. A meme wants to spread and jump from person to person. An antimeme, even though you find it interesting and compelling in the moment, is something you suppress and hold onto. The reason is that the antimeme is perceived as being highly consequential. You might harm your own network if you go around talking about ideas that are too controversial or taboo, so you hold onto it. **Jackson:** Is there a Marshall McLuhan, "the medium is the message"-esque quality here? Is it impossible to separate how an idea spreads from the idea Is there an intrinsic shape to antimemetic ideas, or is it totally situational—about the **Nadia:** I lean much more towards the feeling that it's dependent on the network and the carrier—the person receiving it and choosing to spread it or not. The innate qualities of an idea are one piece of it. The way you choose to present the same idea to different sets of people can change the way it's spread, even if you're fundamentally transmitting the same thing. If we take the idea that antimemes are often suppressed because they're consequential, then the second part of that sentence is, consequential to whom? It's consequential to me. Cognitive biases are an example of antimemes. If I acknowledge that this thing is true about myself, it would destroy my entire life, so I'm going to keep pushing it down. If I share a taboo, 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? Infohazards are ideas that you maybe shouldn't share because they can harm a society. These two things are fundamentally intertwined. **Jackson:** Would it be right to think that there are basically two types of antimemes? As you said, the kind that we don't want to see or fully sink in for ourselves, and those that we don't want to share. Obviously, there's some overlap there, but not always. **Nadia:** Broadly, I think about them as being suppressed on an individual level or on a collective level. There's some relationship between those two things. **Jackson:** But not always. **Nadia:** Not always. They're two different categories. **Jackson:** You talk about immunity, thinking about these ideas as viral spread. One of the main premises is that we have varying levels of immunity to different types of ideas over time. There's an idea in the book where you talk about the early spread of ideas comparing it to small, rural American towns first exposed to ideas with cable television. They have really low immunity because they've never been exposed to that level of information. You might even think about all of us when the internet rose to prominence. We're now in late-stage information blast, and it seems that we're becoming numb. Our immunity is so overwhelmed that we either turn everything off or become non-receptive. Why don't all ideas become antimemetic eventually in this type of information environment? It's like the TV show example: every TV show is good, and I don't think about it for very long. **Nadia:** Immunity is just one piece of what defines something as anti-memetic. When someone receives an idea, does it bounce right off of them, or is it really gripping and they pay a lot of attention to it, but then they don't spread it. I talk about a couple of those different vectors in the book. If someone is immune to an idea, that would probably make it not anti-memetic. It would just make it more inconsequential. You receive this idea and are just unimpressed by it, or you think it is of no relevance to you. You don't think about it very much at all. Versus transmission rate, where I'm receiving an idea, thinking about it—it's actively infected my body—but then I choose whether to actually spread it on to someone else. It's a slightly different behavior to feel immune and not care about a lot of things. That puts it more in this dormant category I talk about, where it's not that interesting to me. **Jackson:** And the critical idea of an anti-meme is that it actually is consequential. **Nadia:** Yes, got it. ## [00:42:00] Ideological Black Holes: Supermemes **Jackson:** On the other end of that quadrant we talked about, you have super memes, which you describe as this black hole of absorption and attention. You specifically talk about a specific kind, or maybe the majority of super memes, that trap us in a state of permacrisis that never fully escalates or resolves and thus becomes a black hole. You say, "Fixating on the next crisis is a recipe perpetual distraction." And also, "If we pledge our attention to every super meme that comes our way, we will lose ourselves in the process." from literally taking over all mindshare? It increasingly 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, but it seems the current incentives of media and how information flow works want all attention to go to a few super memes. **Nadia:** I think it's totally possible and it's a little scary. On the flip side, the argument I make about super-memes is that there has always been a super-meme that governs people's minds. We just need something really, really big to dedicate our lives to. Historically, it was war of some sort, where everyone was expected to drop everything and give themselves to this group cause. Then they became more like culture wars after the Cold War—the battle of ideas. There have been many waves and iterations of culture wars well before the ones we've had more recently. There's always something where I crave something bigger than myself. I crave something that I want to lay down my own identity and my own life and resources for. So they're probably just a feature that needs to exist. I think what's different about today is that we don't all agree on what the super-meme is. It used to be that if there was a war, everyone knew they were giving themselves to the war. Now, you might care about the climate crisis, and I care about population decline. I think people generally don't have enough space in their heads to truly give themselves to many super-memes at once, because by definition, they're totalizing in that way. I think they will always exist. But we have this open-air market now of super-memes, versus in the past when there was just one that we would rally around. **Jackson:** You talk about this urge to break out of the cycle and shift the conversation from ideas to action as a way to 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. This is a really good encapsulation of why the anti-meme idea is interesting and the tension there. I was wondering, in this context, how do we have ideas that produce action outside of the super-meme vortex? a case for more narrow ideas? Trying harder to care more about narrow ideas that lead to action is hard advice. Is there something intrinsic about anti-memes that makes them more likely to produce action? the world of problem-solving, what makes an idea likely to be upstream of actual action? **Nadia:** I can think of ideas that turn into actions across memes, super-memes, and anti-memes. They all do that in their own different ways. We have plenty of examples of how memetics have driven people to do all sorts of crazy things. Maybe the shape of each one is just a little bit different. Memetics are, again, unthinking—like firing the gun and dealing with the consequences later. There's just not a lot of contemplation involved. **Jackson:** Action is almost intrinsically linked to even receiving the idea at all. **Nadia:** They're very, very closely tied to actions. With anti-memes, it might take a really, really long time to unearth an individually or collectively suppressed idea. But once it's unearthed, things start to move really, really quickly. They move more deliberately because it's something that had been suppressed for so long that it's perceived as highly, highly valuable when you get one piece of an anti-meme versus a thousand memes. Super-memes have this risk of being trapped in a rumination loop where you're just thinking about the inevitable. I talk about how super-memes often have an apocalyptic and where you're just thinking that 30 years from now, the world is going to implode. The importance of action is a way to break that loop. Super-memes can turn into rumination because there is no fixed endpoint. If you force yourself to identify the concrete steps you can take, that can help ease the part of your brain that is going in circles. **Jackson:** That's the "making it narrower" part. **Nadia:** For a super-meme, it's really helpful to concretize. **Jackson:** A tangential piece to this would be vibes, which you also talk about. I don't know if it's a third thing; there are some mimetic aspects and some anti-mimetic aspects to it. You compare it to the Mitch Hedberg Bigfoot joke: Bigfoot is just blurry. You also say vibes are like the sun: you can feel them, but you can't really pin them down. You can't look at them. Are vibes even ideas? Are they a different thing? Are they super-meme-esque in that they can be looked at in a bunch of different ways? **Nadia:** It's like the relationship between stories and ideas we were talking about earlier. Maybe vibes are more in the 'story' camp—the package that enables a certain idea to spread. You're taking something mimetic and trying to spread an idea without it being exploited. **Jackson:** You said something along the lines of vibes being some of the most important and most sacred things we have. They're almost coated in this shell of protection, because if you could exploit happiness, love, or community—again, the thread guys on Twitter are posting. **Nadia:** It's that resounding theme again. Vibes is a very trendy term now, but we've had a version of vibes for everything. How do you define love? It is still not really answerable over thousands of years. **Jackson:** Maybe there's a frame here that says vibes, stories, and even what you're calling super-memes are all containers for other, smaller, or more narrow ideas. **Jackson:** Or delivery mechanisms for them. ## [00:49:13] Engaging in the Public Square vs. Opting Out **Jackson:** You briefly brought it up earlier, but what's compelling about the book is how you talk about ideas showing up and spreading. Particularly against the backdrop of how the internet is shaped, it's a plea to return to the comments and actually participate. There's a paragraph I really liked that 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 Galapagos. We can scale our capabilities as a network. You also talked about the temptation to retreat, which, if for no other reason than exhaustion, is a pretty reasonable thing for people to feel. A lot of people are still feeling that. You say we can't hunker down indefinitely in the cozy web. 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 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. There was one last bit that I thought was interesting regarding Jenny Odell's \*Doing Nothing\* book. You note that standing apart, in Odell's eyes, is a commitment to live in permanent refusal, even when actively participating in public spaces. But you find it exhausting to imagine standing in a permanently defiant position, hands on hips, feet apart. You ask, "How can I learn to act decisively from a place of ease and confidence rather than bracing against a constant perceived tension?" My sense is that as much as this is a call to arms, that last bit is pointing at something different than just donning the metal armor. It's more open, generative, and ready to participate. You are certainly participating in the public internet; you just wrote a book. To the extent you are doing that, what does that feel like? **Nadia:** think you captured it quite well. I know the times it has felt much more defensive and insecure, where you're assuming a hostile environment or that bad things will come your way if you speak out loud. That's why I feel somewhat unsatisfied by calls for attention and activism, because it's assuming that you're in a hostile environment, versus the Tai Chi feeling of learning how to redirect this energy and move it in ways that feel more positive. That's partly why when I look at any of this, I try to understand what is going on. Eventually, I might weigh that against my own values and say, "What is my thesis here?" With this book, for example, I really didn't want it to be a book about how Web 2.0 is bad, social platforms are bad, we made all these mistakes, and what do we do about it. That to me feels very defensive and tightly held. Instead, I wanted to say, "What is happening right now?" and start from a more descriptive model of observing all these different behaviors. Then from there, now that we have a little more vocabulary and a framework, what do we want to do with this? What do we think is important? That's a style that has followed me in a lot of the writing that I do: Let's start by taking a look at it. Everybody calm down, and then we can decide from there. That's true for relationships and interacting with people in general. When you're assuming the worst of someone else, you're coming in with an idea of what you think is going to happen, versus trying to be more open. It can make a huge difference. **Jackson:** Totally. It's like a scared dog. **Nadia:** Yes. Expecting to get kicked. **Jackson:** Totally. And there's something really empowering there, which goes back to the beginning of the conversation. We're really new to the internet. We made a bunch of mistakes, but are we going to give up on this amazing public square for idea generation, sharing, and creating movements? I think that's how a lot of people feel. I really appreciate that other demeanor. The Tai Chi metaphor is really good. ## [00:54:16] Truth Tellers who Can Bring Anti-Memetic Ideas to Light **Jackson:** I want to talk more about how individuals can impact the spread of ideas. You have two core frames in the book. The first, which I really love, is 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-memetic 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." That was really cool. It feels like the key idea here is selflessness—or not even explicit selflessness, so much as not having an agenda for yourself. You say the truth teller is the opposite of the shameless shill. Can you talk about that tension? Are they inherently selfless? Is it just about not having an agenda? What enables these people to speak so effectively to represent the group? **Nadia:** I think it's about standing apart from the network and not having skin in the game. It's not necessarily that they're selfless. A lot of truth tellers can be seen as selfish, in a sense, where they're just going to say a thing out loud and see what happens. In contrast to the shameless shill, who is trying to get attention by saying the most extreme thing possible, they have a relationship to their audience. They are trying to get points, gain status, reputation—whatever. That's why they can keep escalating what they're saying. The truth teller says, "I don't even know what this network is. I'm just wandering in here." It's pure chaos, injecting a little bit of chaos into the network. But because they have no prior attachments or relationships, they can be perceived as more trustworthy. Someone might say, "Why would they say that if they have no other relationship to the network?" **Jackson:** You say they will happily shout an uncomfortable truth into a crowded room, then twirl off while everyone else hashes it out. I imagine lobbing a grenade. **Nadia:** Yes. **Jackson:** Do you think it's important for them to have any accountability? Or is part of what enables this, as you say, the lack of caring what happens to that community at all? **Nadia:** Yeah, it's also dangerous to say no accountability is good. I'm sure there are counterexamples, but my first instinct is that good not to tamp them down. If you go too far in the other direction, then you're just a crazy person shouting. You think about the people standing on street corners talking about the inevitable collapse of society. Everyone just tunes that person out. If it's that far in that direction, the network will already self-check against whether it's interesting. It has to have just enough truthiness that there's some credibility and something there. With this idea that ideas are infecting us and we're not necessarily in control of what we're sharing, they're uncovering an idea that is already familiar to that group of people but is just being suppressed. The go-to example is the kid saying the emperor has no clothes. Everyone already knew the emperor had no clothes; they just needed someone who had no other relationship to the situation to say it. You can't say something that's completely random. **Jackson:** That's such a great point. You talk about this more in the context of companies or smaller groups, where they'll bring in this "interesting person," as you call them—whether it's an academic, a writer, or a Substacker. There's another paragraph that felt very Bill Campbell-esque. You say, "Because they have the unusual visibility across the organization, they can observe and express the hidden collective desires that others cannot." This is very much the "emperor has no clothes" scenario. "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-memetic 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 title was simply Nadia." Is it lonely being Nadia? **Nadia:** Less so over time. But anyone who's in a role where you are always the person standing apart a little bit... Earlier in my career, it started to feel like, "Am I just really disagreeable?" I got a lot of advice about trying to fit in more. I wouldn't say I'm the most agreeable person, so maybe there's room for improvement there. But over time, I've come to see that this is itself a defined role. You just need to be okay with being that person that is standing apart. It brings me a lot of clarity and fulfillment. **Jackson:** We have the truth-teller inside a company, and then we have the extreme example of the person on the sidewalk or on Twitter saying crazy but interesting things. Is there a framework for how we should think about how these people could show up in more parts of society and in networks of different magnitudes? **Nadia:** Where do you feel that we need more of it? **Jackson:** One frame here would be inside of effective altruism, inside of what you call an ideal machine, an institution, or a more local version of an online community like the Dark Forest Collective. My sense is that I'm imagining the very, very defined group and the truth-teller inside of that, and then the public speaker. But in how you describe it, so much of the importance here is the person who can bring clarity to some subgroup. That subgroup could vary pretty dramatically. **Nadia:** Informally, a lot of communities end up having a role for someone who is the respected "tell it like it is" person. If you think about the village elder, they'll just come in and drop their wisdom. This is probably a little bit different from a truth-teller. A truth-teller doesn't necessarily have a clear relationship to the network and has this more eruptive quality. There's something that is being suppressed, and they're going to dig it out, lob it at you, and throw it in your face—versus a leader that people go to to say things. I don't know that every community always needs one or needs to have it all the time. The truth-teller role can be very transient. I talk about Greta as an example of this with her UN speech. Greta continues to exist, but her speech was a 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 lose its power. **Jackson:** She isn't really that anymore. **Nadia:** She's evolved into more of a stable character. But it's a destabilizing mechanic to speak the truth on something. **Jackson:** On that note, you have this reference to Lewis Hyde's book on tricksters. You lament where these things go, both in the context of our ability to tolerate cringe and the moral ambiguity part of it. Hyde says, “The erasure of trickster figures 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 about right and wrong. It more likely leads to unconscious cruelty masked by inflated righteousness.” This feels very connected to cancel culture. Are there ways we can actively use cultural norms or adjust the Overton window to tolerate more of this type of speaking from truth-tellers? Or is one potential failure case of a society or a subculture that we create environments where these people can't say anything or can't be heard? **Nadia:** I worry about that, and I don't have a great answer to it. It was harder to see where truth-tellers would fit in three to five years ago. That quote from Hyde points to this culture of cruelty, which was what we were 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. Maybe that will just continue. 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 remind us of what direction we're going in and shake things up a little bit. **Jackson:** Having the mental model is helpful when looking at a person and trying to decipher if they are a shameless shill, have some ulterior motive, or are actually just trying to tell the truth. I think that's really important. ## [01:05:06] Champions, or the Great Apostle Theory **Jackson:** The other archetype you describe is the champion. It's another Yarvin reference. You say somewhere the first line of \*Unqualified Reservations\* reads, "The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology," which is very Curtis Yarvin, but it points at some of this. You also give examples—we talked about Venkatesh Rao and \*Seeing Like a State\*, or Nick Cammarata and jhanas being a little more like first followers. If truth-tellers are this detached, non-self-interested observer, it seems champions are sitting somewhere between cult leader and first follower. Is that the right way to think about it? Can they exist anywhere on that spectrum? Are Yarvin 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? **Nadia:** A champion is probably closer to a first follower. I wouldn't think of Curtis as a champion because it was 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. I think of champions as people pounding the pavement. They're the boots on the ground, the apostles or something. They are infected by an idea and run off with it. That makes me think about truth-tellers. I don't really think of them as being deeply infected with an idea. It just passes through them. They're more like the prophet. But the champion is the one that it hits, and now they're really infected for a long period of time. They're going to go off running around and trying to make a thing happen. A good champion will do that no matter how persecuted they are or whatever they face. **Jackson:** There's another idea circling some of this, which is relevant in the Champions premise: how important is the individual or the 'great man of history'? There's one excerpt 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." There are these ideas that you almost describe as infecting someone. Then there is the champion, who you clearly describe as fundamentally paramount to the way the world goes. And then there's also a broader thing around institutions and idea machines. It is almost like it is the 'great man of history,' but the great men of history are infected by these crazy ideas. How do you think about the individual's role and how much weight the great champion has on things? **Nadia:** I've always thought of it a little bit more as Great Prophet theory, and maybe now it's Great Apostle theory. In contrast to Great Founder Theory or Great Man Theory, where someone is impressing their views on the world, I see it more as you are just a vessel for an idea that has really infected you. It's infected you so hard that you're just going to town and spreading it. The individual is important because an individual is capable of having a level of discernment and nuance that the collective simply is not. That's why these two things work really well in parallel or in some sort of symbiosis with each other. The role of the individual is very important in how it contributes to the greater collective. But when you look at where ideas come from and why a person is so obsessed with a particular thing, I really don't ascribe a whole lot to someone's active choice around that. **Jackson:** Not their genius. **Nadia:** Yeah. You see ideas come from the craziest places. When you look at stories of how a new creative idea or invention or innovation comes about, 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, "What if we cross over this thing with the other thing?" They can just come from anywhere, and then suddenly someone's off to the races with it. I've experienced this myself with my own work. I could have never predicted that I would have cared so much about this or that idea, but it just gets lodged into your brain and then off you go. **Jackson:** But ideas also need a vessel. **Nadia:** Yes. **Jackson:** You hear it so often in music. In that \*Get Back\* documentary, Paul McCartney is just randomly strumming on his bass, and then the song comes out of nowhere. You see it happen. There's this guy, Benjamin Labatut, who wrote \*When We Cease to Understand the World\*. He has this line where he's talking about writing, and even in the case of fiction, he says it's less like creating something and more like picking up flowers off the ground. You see that pattern everywhere across ideation. I think your frame on it is really right. ## [01:10:57] Institutions, Ideologies, and Movements **Jackson:** That brings us to the last thing I mentioned: how do these ideas go bigger than the individual? There seem to be two ways to think about this. There's the historical view, and then there's what the modern, internet-native version of it looks like. You've written plenty about institutions, and 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 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, internet-native, dark-foresty world with lots of big, broadcasting individuals? It's pretty easy to model a world where there are very explicit gatekeepers, set distribution patterns, and foundations—or the Davos elite or whatever. Maybe the answer is where we're going: you need new shapes, like the idea machines you talk about. But in the traditional sense, I'm curious how you think about the role institutions still play. **Nadia:** There are a few different levels to this. Regarding the first quote you mentioned, whether we like it or not, our world is still governed by a lot of old institutions that have been around for a long time. There's a lot of interest in creating new institutions, but we also have to respect the ones that currently exist. D.C. politics is the most perfect encapsulation of this. People often liken it to playing a game of chess because you have a finite set of players and a finite chessboard. The fun is in figuring out how to exactly place each of these pieces to get the outcome you want. But you can't expand the chessboard, and you can't add more players. That's very foreign to a lot of people in tech who are just used to having abundance and making the universe bigger. But in politics, you have to play this game. **Jackson:** Literally, everyone there is people who exited some other game. **Nadia:** If we're talking about a political machine, how do you take your ideas and turn them into policy? You have to play that game, and you have to play with these existing institutions. That's where culture wars get so fiery. There are more and more ideas, especially with more super-memes and so much competition, that we all need to funnel into this very narrow channel. If you want to turn something into action, there are only so many policy items that can be reviewed in a session. That's one way of thinking about institutions. But informally, institutions are still changing and evolving, which requires expanding our idea of what an institution even is. In that piece you referenced, I talk about idea machines and try to diagram the ecosystem surrounding how an idea turns into action. It's not necessarily a literal organization, an agency, or a very specific institution. It involves a community that generates new ideas. From there, an agenda might form, and funders come in to fund this agenda. Then a couple of different support organizations form, and from there, they create outcomes. It's much more sprawling and decentralized than just going to the Bureau of Whatever. **Jackson:** Or even the Ford Foundation. **Nadia:** Yes. In the context of philanthropy, it's not just one grant-making organization. It is this sea of ideas that people are swimming in, which might be funded in different ways, but are all pointing towards a similar outcome. If we loosen our definition of what an institution is, that in itself is an institution of some sort. It's these grooves and pathways that are well-worn and being worn over and over again. There's a pattern of expected behaviors and a known way of doing things. That in itself is a kind of institution, even if it doesn't look like a single organization. **Jackson:** You do a great job of describing a template in "Idea Machines" that is very internet-native—not necessarily technology-native, but very attuned to how the world actually works today. My sense is that it's rooted in ideology, whereas some of these other things are the container first. One of my dominant readings of the book is that you have anti-memes as a source of important, interesting ideas that are underexposed. A light can be shined on them in various ways: a truth-teller, a champion carrying it, or a new context for its exposure. Those then become the ideologies that we can build new idea machines around. I realize you wrote the "Idea Machines" piece a few years prior and the book is more individually focused. But is that roughly the pattern you see? In the piece, you talk about what it would look like to have many more Effective Altruisms or a wider set of very ideologically-centric, active organizations doing stuff in the world. Am I combining too many different things, or is that the pattern? **Nadia:** If we think about super memes again, we went from having a single super meme, like war, to now a competing marketplace of them. A nice thing about super memes is that they are really good at marshaling talent and money and turning themselves into ecosystems. A meme is something small and digestible that spreads very quickly. A super meme is large, consequential, and spreads very easily. It becomes this black hole, sucking in all the mindshare around it. That’s just the way the world works. This goes with the idea of having lots of different idea machines—lots of different ideology-centric ecosystems where people are pulling in resources. They're actively discussing ideas and forming agendas out of them. They're creating organizations out of them. That's the blueprint for how I think a lot of these super memes have started to organize. **Jackson:** Can you distinguish between these concepts? You have movements, communities, and maybe even super memes or memeplexes. There's a bunch of big, hazy, important things around here. In your piece, you describe a much more directed, highly active, mechanistic form in the idea machine. You give the example of the network state being really strong in ideology and having less of the things to carry it. To a person listening, this just sounds like a movement. How do you imagine this having a more robust shape that actually produces outcomes, unlike other movements or super memes that get lost in the fuzziness? **Nadia:** Maybe some of this just comes down to how people want to define things. **Jackson:** I'm less interested in the definitions and more interested in how we get more stuff happening from ideas. **Nadia:** My goal with the "Idea Machines" piece was to diagram a schematic of the ideal path from an idea to an ideology, including all the different pieces it needs to move through to get to real, concrete outcomes in the world. Movements have a more "vibey" feel. There's no reason it can't be a schematic of a movement as well, but when I think about movements, I think more about the zeitgeist, a moment in time, or a trend. A lot of movements fail to go anywhere because they are highly memetic in the moment and then die down. What I'm trying to answer in that piece is why that happens. They get stuck on the idea side of things and fail to get to the point of organizing. We need to have specific champions who take these ideas and translate them into very specific things we can do. A lack of an agenda is what kills a lot of movements and communities. You're sitting around talking, but what do you actually propose to change? I see this failure happen a lot with movements. If you can't articulate your agenda, how can you expect anyone to fund it or move towards concretized change? You could probably draw a line down the middle of that schematic and say one part is the idea phase and the other side is the action phase. How do you get from one side of that to the other? **Jackson:** There's a part of that piece where you talk about the appeal of the bigger versions of this, like EA, being more multi-denominational, and it made me wonder. On a larger scale, so much of this is a lot like religion. There's probably a lot to learn from it. The one counter would be that maybe religions have less explicit agendas, at least at the super-high level. I'd be curious how you think about the lindiness of religion. As the original memes that package in lots of more anti-memetic ideas, how does its structure and shape inform all these other ideas that we want to move forward in the world? **Nadia:** Everything goes back to religion. Everything is a religion. When I was doing research on open-source developers, I made a podcast mini-series with a friend focused on the relationship between open-source communities and religions. You meet a lot of open-source developers that are very, very Christian. Part of why that is, is because they're informed by the same feelings, values, and norms. The way they conduct themselves in a religious context is the same as when they are building an online community, managing a community, or sharing software with the world. You find religion in the funniest places. This is probably not so much different. It's just people dynamics all the way down. **Jackson:** You wrote about this a few years ago when it was more relevant, but to what extent do you think we need more new forms or mechanisms? I’m thinking of new corporation forms, like the shift from 501[c][3]s to LLCs, or things like DAOs. There was a lot of excitement at the time, and the crypto discussion can be super ideological. In some sense, you could read a lot of this and conclude it's not so much about the form at all; it's about the abstract structure around getting to an agenda. But this goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning with group chats—new mechanisms actually enabled a lot of that. Do you think we're being held back by mechanistic reasons, or is there still a lot more room to run in terms of what you can do here? **Nadia:** I think the search for new mechanisms is a bit of a trap. I used to be more excited about those things, and then I realized it was a trap. Now I'm less excited about them. In the case of group chats, we needed to be able to message multiple people at a time. That's a pure technological thing that had to happen to enable new behavior, so I don't think the impact is zero. Sometimes a new form really is warranted. But if we try mapping that onto the idea machine schematic, I think it's too much on the side of action and not enough on an underlying ideology. If there is a deep, underlying need that drives something, that’s different. Or maybe sometimes they're just happy accidents. Perhaps there was no ideology driving the formation of the original group chat and messaging apps. But sometimes people come in with this idea that if they can just create a new legal entity, then everything will be fixed. I haven't seen many examples of that bearing out. I don't think it's never true, but if you want to think about where to allocate our mindshare, it's maybe an overallocation there. **Jackson:** 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 added to? **Nadia:** I don't play favorites. **Jackson:** ## [01:24:51] Attention **Jackson:**  I want to talk about an idea that runs through the middle of the book and clearly runs through so much of your work and your moral worldview: attention. I mentioned Jenny Odell earlier. In her book, \*How to Do Nothing\*, 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 towhee will never simply be a bird to me again, even if I wanted it to be.” And then there are a few quotes from you that stacked up in an interesting way. You say, “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.” Then, “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 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? **Nadia:** You mean intentionally? **Jackson:** I'm not sure. I guess that's the root of the question. **Nadia:** I'm not attuning myself to specific ideas because I like to be surprised. I have no idea what I'm going to be doing in five years, and that's kind of fun to me. It's about setting myself up to be able to notice or be surprised. A lot of people don't realize how much they're cutting themselves off from serendipity and opportunity. People talk a lot about making your own luck or serendipity in careers. It starts to sound like an aphorism or warmed-over career advice, but people don't take it seriously enough. They think they know what it means, so they dismiss it, but they don't really know what it means to be very open and receptive to whatever comes your way. Part of that is about eliminating unnecessary distractions, and it doesn't have to be in an aesthetic or self-depriving way. When I look at all the content you could consume, or I'm choosing which notifications to let through or which emails to pay attention to, I ask myself, "Is this really worth my time, or would I rather just keep my brain clear?" It’s not that hard to just turn them off or push them away. We still get stuck in this. Everyone talks about attention, yet I still don't think we're taking it seriously enough. Sometimes I say things that sound overly obvious, but if people were actually doing it, we wouldn't have to keep talking about it. As much as I can keep my mind a relatively blank slate and maintain my own resources around attention, it can then be allocated to surprising and interesting things instead of spending that budget on things that are a waste of time. I think a lot of why people make poor choices with their attention is just fatigue, and you get stuck in this loop. This is true for a lot of healthy choices, like eating well or exercising. When you're tired and stressed out, stress eating is a thing. You're not doing it because you think potato chips are better, but because you're in a state of fatigue and you're mentally and physically weak. So, how do I set myself up for success to not have that? If you can get yourself back to a baseline where you're not fatigued, it becomes much easier to make the right choices. That being said, we still talk about attention as if it's a slog. It's like being told you should really be paying attention or you should really be putting down your phone. It’s not fun. It's the same as being told you should eat vegetables instead. Who wants to do the boring, responsible thing? **Jackson:** A little paternalistic. **Nadia:** It requires a lot of willpower. We don't talk enough about the amazing things that can come as a product of great attention. Looking at people who are super fit can be a great motivator to want to work out. Or, when people feel really good when they eat healthy, you want to feel good, too. We haven't looked very much at what the end goal of all this attention is. It's not just about being in the present moment. It's not about a baseline reality that everyone else is tuned into and you're checked out of. This is an entirely uncharted territory where you can create whatever you want, and that's exciting. If you are excited by that, the prerequisite is getting your attention into the right place. **Jackson:** It's above the baseline. **Nadia:** Yeah. **Jackson:** That's a really important distinction. **Jackson:** I also have to admit, the notion that we have less agency over which ideas take us is actually really motivating to have more agency over where you choose to give your attention. If you treat them as infectious, you're hooking your brain up to whatever Twitter thinks right now. That is maybe still a little more on the paternalism or fear side, but I do think it's empowering. I could discover something really great or really not great. I get to choose whether I go to the health food store or the junk food store, but I don't have a choice otherwise. That helps you internalize the stakes. **Nadia:** People are not aware of what the stakes really are. ## [01:31:30] Jhanas **Jackson:** You've written extensively about the jhanas. You say they offer a rare glimpse into the extent to which our minds construct the world around us, getting at what you were just talking about—all the ways that attention can go above the baseline. Can you talk about how the jhana experience, particularly in studying it now, has made you realize that attention is not something you have, but something that you are? **Nadia:** I like being surprised by whichever ideas overtake me. Last year, I was writing a piece about a subculture of people practicing a form of meditation that puts you into these states called the jhanas, or jhanic states. It's not like mindfulness meditation where you're just 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 just using your mind, which sounded so fantastic and strange to me that I had to go explore it. As part of my research for that, I tried it. I had no previous relationship to meditation and was just curious, so I was very surprised by what I experienced. Now I'm just trying to understand what this thing is and how it impacts our minds. **Jackson:** And Nick Cammarata, who we talked about earlier, was an early champion, at least in your part of the world. **Nadia:** He was the patient zero for spreading it outside of these dharma meditation communities to a broader set of people who are more casual, like myself. Within the context of contemplative practices and sciences, something compelling about meditation versus other things, like psychedelics, is that you're doing it to yourself. With psychedelics, if you take enough acid or shrooms, something interesting is going to happen to your brain. It's very deterministic, and people are unsurprised by that. They feel like it's like drinking—I took some substance that put me into this state, and I didn't really have a role to play in it. **Jackson:** Or I would even argue it's like going to Tokyo. You're going to have a crazy, perspective-altering experience that's really new, but when you come back, most people's experience is that you regress back to where you were. **Nadia:** Yes, that's a great example. There are so many things like that in small ways. If you want to focus better on a work thing you're doing, you put on a certain type of music. It's always a sense that something else is helping me get there, and there's very little of you involved. A thing people are often surprised by with this style of meditation is they realize, "I did that to myself." That means I was experiencing it in a way that felt much more like I was an active player. The fact that I am experiencing something psychedelic right now—I put myself into that. **Jackson:** It makes it more real. **Nadia:** It makes it way more real. It's not just that it wears off and goes away. That starts to translate into other ways of understanding your relationship to the world. For example, I'm feeling sad or frustrated. It's amazing that many people, myself included in the past, just 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 eating ice cream or watching TV, and those things make me feel a little better. But there's no sense of, "Oh, I can actually just move around my mind a little bit and feel something differently." It opens up this whole thing of, "How can I change my relationship to everyone around me and everything I interact with?" If you don't want to feel a certain way about something, you can actually just not feel that way if you want to. You can move around the little levers in your mind. **Jackson:** Attention is crazy. At the end of your incredible "How to do the jhanas" post, which I'll link to... The first time I read it, within 15 minutes, I'm pretty sure I got to the first Jhana, which is a credit to your descriptive ability. You do an amazing job of being personal, direct, and clear. There's nothing woo-woo about it. It's almost sociological in a way that's really cool. 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 just be more attuned to their experience and their feelings? **Nadia:** I think it's an openness and a willingness to reframe any situation you're in. I try this out when I'm at the DMV or stuck in traffic, and I ask, "How can I make this the most joyous moment possible?" I find that it's often quite possible to make it a really happy experience. That's silly when you think about it—how can driving in traffic be fun and enjoyable? But it's possible. You have to have an openness and be receptive to the idea that your brain wants to go down these grooves again. It says, "Oh, you're in traffic. This sucks." **Jackson:** "I know how to behave here. My brain knows to be mad or sad." **Nadia:** Yes. Execute the "I am mad" protocol. Then you just barrel down that path. I've realized since exploring this stuff how much we socially reinforce this in each other and in ourselves. **Jackson:** It's like thinking, "I'm going to feel this way." Or it relates to saying, "I'm always late." We take that on, and then it's, "Now I'm going to keep being late." It's cool how the through-line for attention in this context maps so well to the anti-meme stuff. It's about training our attention not to let things flow to the default path over and over again. An idea gets stuck somewhere; it gets lodged. Similarly, our emotions and feelings will trickle how they will, or I can intervene with attention. **Nadia:** This is where I really want to drive home that when we talk about the buying and selling of attention online, it's often framed as, "This person owns my attention now" or "This person will own my attention." But you can own your own attention. You can also do cool things with it and make crazy experiences. **Jackson:** Not hoard it, as you say. **Nadia:** Not just hoard it. **Jackson:** I like that a lot. ## [01:38:42] Writing a Book **Jackson:** I want to talk about your writing and your work. You just wrote your second book—or maybe third, I'm not sure how you qualify it. At the very beginning of the book, you describe where the experience came from. You say, "like so many messy drafts before they become finished products, the ideas moved 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 'antimemetics-notes.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 journey and the motivation to do something that felt true to you. As someone who's written a fair amount, the idea of writing a book seems completely impossible. That "slipping and sliding" feels really right—the sense of being lost in so many interesting ideas. What does it feel like to eventually summit that hill and start to compress it into something that you feel like you can hold? **Nadia:** A huge relief. I've written a lot of things now, and with every big thing I write, there's always a point where I'm certain it's not going to happen. I'm screwed. This is the worst thing I've ever written. And then you just gotta push through it. I think fewer expectations is helpful for me. Writing the second book was way less painful than the first book. Maybe also because the first book was more directly a product of a lot of research I'd been doing, and this one was more adjacent or spans across a lot of things that I'm interested in. But part of it was also just not trying to carry the weight of it. It's just writing. Zoom out. It's okay. **Jackson:** You also mentioned you told almost no one about this. I would assume a few more people knew about the first book. **Nadia:** I'm not the most talkative about my work in general, day to day. My friends like to make fun of me for that. More people were aware of the first one than the second one. In both cases, I didn't even know I was writing a book. I needed to get this thing into some form so it would stop bothering me. Then it gets longer and longer, and you think, "Well, I guess it's turning into one." Then it flips a little bit. I don't talk very much about the work I'm doing in my day-to-day life, outside of more formalized contexts. **Jackson:** That makes it easier? **Nadia:** I like having a wall, frankly. If you spend all day thinking about something—and I think this is true for most people with their jobs or their work—I am constantly thinking about it, even when I sleep. I wake up, and there's this running loop, but I need to have a place where I don't think about it. If your job is meetings all day, you don't really want to be doing more meeting-like things when you're not working. For me, if I spend all day just thinking about ideas, I like having a space where I can be turned off and be off-duty a little bit. A lot of the inspiration and ideas I get come from just observing other people. If I'm talking about my own stuff, that means I don't get to hear 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 than the other way around. **Jackson:** I'm sorry to put you through this. **Nadia:** This is okay. **Jackson:** You have a great old blog post on the virtues of being basic that rhymes with some of that, too: just turn your brain off. **Nadia:** Still rings true. **Jackson:** There's a sense here of this very much being a personal journey. You referenced Jane Jacobs and her style, which is very much coming from a place of personal observation. Jane didn't have the criteria she was supposed to have to do what she did, and yet she just went and looked around and it turned out she saw a lot. You talk about the frustration of 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." 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." I see that as an incredible compliment, and it very much rings true. What did writing this particular book do for you? Or how did it change you? **Nadia:** To get back to the beginning of this conversation, you mentioned the self-consciousness I have around writing about ideas. The first book that I wrote was about open source software. It was a very concrete thing and an allegory for other things, but it was very much rooted in a specific thing. This one, by comparison, felt very abstract. Deciding to even do it felt a little like, "Am I really going to spend months and months just writing about and thinking about ideas?" This is why I didn't tell people I was writing this book. I had to force myself to do it because I had clearly been thinking about it for years. **Jackson:** You don't get to choose. **Nadia:** You don't get to choose. If I need to exercise myself of this demon, I have to grapple with it so it stops mocking me. It felt good to take a leap on something where I honestly had no idea if anyone was going to care about it, but I just felt like I needed to do it and I was just going to stand behind that. I always feel good when I force myself to do something like that with writing. I find that the writing I do because I think someone else is going to like it is often much less satisfying. Even if no one pays attention to something that you wrote for yourself, at least you know that you did it for yourself. I also weirdly find that--same with the "Idea Machines" piece. It also felt very abstract, and I wondered if anyone was really going to care about it, but it was really well received. Sometimes you just really have to trust your intuition. That reflex in itself is one of the hardest things for creative people to do in general. It's why you often don't see people with really long careers in creative work. They start getting ideas around what they should be doing or other people are whispering in their ear about it. It's very, very hard to keep doing interesting, original things for a long period of time. I struggle with it constantly. For me, it's a good exercise and good practice to just keep trying to do that, even when it's hard. **Jackson:** There are levels to it, too. You might think, "I'm doing this for me, but it needs to be commercial enough." There's always a way to go deeper. I also think the really, really great stuff tends to be not for anyone else. **Nadia:** I think that's really true. ## [01:46:19] Connecting the Dots in Reverse **Jackson:** When we first met, you talked about 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, there's all the open source stuff. You went and worked at Substack early on, you were seeing where we were going with the cozier parts of the internet. There was the whole thing around tech philanthropy, and the values of Silicon Valley—some great pieces there. Then there's all of the antimemetic stuff you're still actively working on and consciousness research, which we barely even talked about. A lot of these things are happening simultaneously. What patterns have you seen? What has stayed the same for you across these different eras in terms of how you work or your attention patterns, either in the substance or in the shape of them? There are clearly through lines, even where they aren't obvious. **Nadia:** Great, maybe you can tell me! In the shape of things that attract me, the things I flock to are ideas that I feel no one is really paying attention to yet. Well, not no one. It has to be just the right amount of people. David Lang has a piece about scene building and what causes a scene to take off versus not. You can't have zero people paying attention to it because it's not going to go anywhere. **Jackson:** Same with the champion. The champion can't, which makes it more a first follower. It's actually kindling. **Nadia:** Which also speaks to my skepticism around this idea of great man theory. You can't really pull something out of thin air. There has to be just enough people paying attention to it. I try to spot something where there's just enough interest, but it hasn't really, really taken off yet. The timing of a thing matters to me. When it feels like something is so obviously true to the people that are close to it, but no one else seems aware of it and it has a lot of potential for impact, that is always very exciting. **Jackson:** Here's the water. **Nadia:** Talking to open source developers, for example. Everyone thinks that open source software is built as this big, super-participatory community. Then I'm talking to these developers who say that's often not true, and their daily lives are really different from what everyone else thinks. There's a discrepancy here, and I want to build a bridge. I do gravitate a lot to that transitory, bridge-building type of writing. A thing people often say is, "I read this piece and it gave me words for a thing that I didn't know how to express before." That's my sweet spot, whether I like that to be true or not. That's kind of where I end up. But the actual eras are all pretty different. I don't know how to tie them all together, and I almost try not to think about them too much. **Jackson:** My sense is—and I've interviewed 22 people—that the patterns and connections just keep stacking. I talked to Yancey a couple of weeks ago, and there's a connection. I find that overwhelmingly, if what you're saying is true about the ways that ideas seize us, it's very much not isolated or random. They're creeping up on us in ways that aren't always legible, but over time you can look back at an era or a life and see it's not that shocking. The dots start to connect. ## [01:50:29] Lighting Round: Fighting (or Working With) Human Nature, Software as Passion Project, Democracy, Space Away from the Center of Things **Jackson:** I have a few final questions. A meta question about the anti-mimetic stuff in the book: Is some of this trying to engineer or coordinate our way against human nature? Put another way, it seems like Moloch is really strong, and you have a lot of hope that we can overcome this—that we can be better, due to ideas. do you see or hope for that would make that true? **Nadia:** I tried to make the foundation of the book focus on descriptive observations, saying, "Whether we like it or not, here is what I think is happening." What we do with that is up to us. If you ask me point blank, I would say we should not try to re-engineer human nature. That's just an ill-advised effort. We talked about this with attention: You can't force someone to pay attention when there's nothing interesting to pay attention to. On the flip side, it doesn't mean we have to be totally defeatist. I was reacting against the popularity of Girard and mimetic desire—the idea that we're overwhelmed by mimetic behavior. There's something defeatist about that to me, where we're just going to constantly be aping other models of people we want to be or things we aspire to. We're just going to be mindlessly passing things around because that's the way the monkey brain works. That's just so uninspiring to me. I want to at least probe and say, "Are there other ways of thinking about this that are not so obvious?" But I would stop short at saying we should—like tai chi—work with our human nature and not try to come up with a new way of doing things that no one actually wants to do. **Jackson:** You have a line in your writing about Urbit: "To the extent that software is both an art and an ideology, Urbit was a full stack expression of what 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 to working in public. What do you mean by that? **Nadia:** Not all software, but I think software is underappreciated as an art form in itself. You see a lot of people who have created interesting software because they are expressing something they really want to say, and they're expressing it with code. It's a more functional or interactive art form. I think this is true for many different fields. Maybe this is a little pollannish, but art is everywhere. There's the line that everything around you was created by someone else. Every single little thing around you is something that was someone's life passion to make happen. **Jackson:** Museum of passion projects. **Nadia:** Yeah, we're just surrounded by it. I was talking to a restaurant entrepreneur who's 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. You could see the one where he was really into co-working, the one where he was feeling lost, and this one where he wanted to create a gathering space for his family. I had never thought about restaurant ownership as something that could be artistic. **Jackson:** How could it not be? **Nadia:** How could it not be? You're spending so much time on this thing. **Jackson:** It's a mirror. **Nadia:** I think software is probably no different. **Jackson:** You briefly alluded to it. You've written explicitly that your first book about open source was actually an allegory for democracy. What's your most surprising belief about democracy? Or what is the most central learning you have for the rest of us about it? **Nadia:** I'll paraphrase an apocryphal quote from Churchill, but I think it still works. That would have been a less exciting thing to say some years ago, but maybe that's the thing that needs to be said now. We are now in a place where people can be openly disaffected, feeling that democracy doesn't work. This ties to a defeatist attitude about mimetic behavior, where people think, "None of it worked. We're screwed." But I think it still works. It doesn't mean being totally hands-off; it means getting in the arena yourself and participating in it. It feels like a very old-school thing to say, talking about our civic duties. But I still think there's so much left to discover and uncover about it that we haven't even tried or tested. **Jackson:** You have written about the value of space. In a footnote from late August 2019, you alluded to "here" being some amalgamation of San Francisco and Twitter. Sometimes I feel like I can't think because people are constantly asking me to externalize my thoughts. 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 probably had more space in a lot of ways—although now with a baby, probably less space too. How has having a certain kind of space or distance changed or enabled you to think and write? **Nadia:** It's the best. We are recording this in San Francisco. I like coming back to San Francisco, and on paper, it feels like I should be here. It's the most relevant place for my work, and all my friends are here. I spent close to 11 years in San Francisco, so I put in my time here. But it feels a little too close to the rail. I don't like having to talk about myself or my ideas in every small interaction, everywhere I go. I prefer doing it in containers where I know I'm going to be talking about it. I need the space to collect all the little pieces of things I'm observing. I'm constantly writing down notes of what I observe, and sometimes they start to form into little balls of ideas that start to snowball. That's how this book happened. I also need a space to be more embodied. We live in Los Angeles now, and I have a day-to-day with my family where the most important thing in the evenings is not going to another happy hour. **Jackson:** Or debates. **Nadia:** I get to sit and watch my kid eat and play with him, and that feels really, really good. A long time ago, I wrote about thinking of ideas-type work as being similar to a physical activity or a professional athlete, where you have recovery time. You have very intense sprints, and then you have recovery time. I don't enjoy constantly, mindlessly consuming information; I need to process. A lot of that processing happens in the shower-thought kind of way. For me, it's waking up in the middle of the night and having flashes of inspiration. You need the downtime—the recovery time—to process ideas. It's possible to do that in San Francisco, but it's just harder. It's really nice to be somewhere I can have that space and distance, and then choose to come into the fray, like this week in San Francisco, and enjoy it. **Jackson:** 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 that distance has enabled you to be so lucid, clear, and thoughtful in the way you're observing what's happening today. It's cool. You mentioned family. You've talked about being less afraid to take risks since starting a family. It's very clarifying in terms of knowing what really matters. Calming. How have your boys--I guess one's a man--changed you? **Nadia:** You mean my husband and my son? (laughs). There's something really valuable about having a stable place to work from. People are afraid to take risks because they're afraid of the consequences. Sometimes those are material consequences, but then there are social consequences, like being afraid of looking silly or that no one will care. With writing, I've found I am less afraid to take risks when I think about the intrinsic benefits to me. I enjoyed clarifying these ideas and working through the process. I feel a lot better now, so I'm going to share it. Hopefully, people like it. If not, I did it for me. Having that framing with my writing has been really helpful. Family is another version of this. At the end of the day, I get to come home to two people who really love me and that I love. It doesn't really matter what's happening out in the world because it just feels really good to come home to that. In that sense, it makes you a lot less fearful. Like, at least my kid likes me. Knock on wood it stays that way. **Jackson:** You've written about being by patronage. 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? **Nadia:** I’ve been cared for by friends and family. They are people who are not just there to catch you when you fall, but who also don't care whether you're falling or not. You have to form friendships and relationships that are not just centered around professional pursuits or interests. They are people who wouldn't care if you became nobody the next day. I have friends with whom I don't talk about work at all, and I find that really refreshing. There's an underlying theme there around stability or building a foundation. It feels really nice when someone says, "I'm here for you." These are people who are invested in you just because they like you. It doesn't matter who you turn into. These friendships often last over long periods of time because you're evolving through multiple eras of each other. Sometimes I don't even know why a 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. When I think about caring for other people, I want to support people I love for the way they see the world and who they are. Whatever it is, I want to be unconditionally supportive of that. **Jackson:** My last question is 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 antimemetic 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. If we learn to channel it wisely, we can decide what type of future we want to see." I've asked around this question a few times, and you are good at hedging, but where do you think your optimism comes from? **Nadia:** I think it is an openness to possibility. At least for me, it has served me well as a posture to operate from in the world—across relationships, family, everything, and work. If you always believe there's something else out there, if you always believe that your reality is malleable and you're never stuck in any one situation forever, then how could you not be optimistic about what's possible? It gets me excited to get out of bed because there's always something new to discover. If I felt I knew all the answers, knew who all the people were in my life and exactly how they operated, and knew what all the best ideas were, you just come in with this arrogance and overconfidence. Then you get really stuck in these rigid ways of being. I love that I don't know anything. I never feel like I know anything. I can only talk about what I observe. Being super open to the possibilities is a nice way to operate. **Jackson:** I hope we can all have some more of that. This has been wonderful. Thank you. **Nadia:** Thanks for having me.