Nadia Asparouhova — An Antimemetic Rollercoaster

Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops. Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out. Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started. The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and how we might be able to change that.

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Thanks for joining us. Now please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops. Well, hello everyone. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. My guest today, Nadia Asparova. I have been looking forward to this, Nadia, for a long, long time, because as we were chatting before we began our discussion, I held up this book, Virus of the Mind, which came out in 1997 by a guy by the name of Richard Brody.

It's all about memes in the Dawkian sense, not the Girardian sense. And when I read it, I was like literally hooked. And you have a new book, Anti-Memetics, Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading.

which we're going to talk a lot about. Welcome. Thanks for having me. So... I read that your first introduction to the idea of antimemetics was in 2021 when a former colleague of yours was sharing thoughts about, hey, could we engineer a mimetic? project that really rather than just letting it naturally go out into the wild, could we engineer it so the memes either go viral or don't go viral? I might be getting that wrong.

but yep that sounds about right okay but so tell me about that conversation and why it drove you to like like i went down this rabbit hole in a very serious way and you did too so we share that but tell me What was your drive to go, oh, I really have to know and write about this? I think it was really a sign of the times, even just having my colleague reach out to me around that time. So yeah, that was 2021. This was, you know, depths of COVID.

And I think the internet was in a really weird place at this time, to say the least. But, you know, you had a lot of really inflamed tensions and conversations that were happening on public feeds for a variety of reasons, but I think also exacerbated by the pandemic. and people just being really pent up. And that was forcing a lot of these conversations that previously could take place in public further down into more private and semi-private spaces.

So more people were using group chats to kind of workshop their ideas because they felt like they couldn't talk about it in public. Newsletters were taking off as a sort of more semi-private place to share your long-form unfiltered ideas. And I think that was probably the end of this for why my colleague had reached out because, you know, everyone's just sort of thinking about this thing around.

Yeah, like ideas are not spreading the way that they were in the last five-ish years and something has changed. And so in the course of that conversation, he recommended this book that he had found called There Is No Antimimetics Division. Great book. Great book.

And that book is a horror sci-fi kind of book. So it's not a nonfiction book, but really, really good. And the author of that book had coined this term called anti-memes. And it originally came from this collaborative... fiction wiki community called scp foundation where people post these wiki style entries of paranormal entities that they've just sort of made up and this

one of these users who was by the name Quantum, he had posted one in the late 2000s. So, you know, well before everything weird that was happening on the internet. But this entity was something that he called an antineme, where you could look at the entity, you could engage with it, you could write down all the details about it. And as soon as you went away, somehow all these details just sort of evaporate from your mind.

And so this idea expanded into an entire fictional universe of its own, which he then encapsulated in this book called There Is No Antimemetics Division, where there is a task force that is trying to fight anti-memes, but of course they can't remember that they fought them. And so it's this... you know, really wonderful study of collective forgetting. And yeah, what does it mean to sort of like engage with ideas that you can't really hold on to? And so I read that book again, sort of in...

dark depths of COVID where everything was just sort of scary and weird on the internet. I had just been working at Substack. So seeing also just sort of how newsletters were taking over as this new content medium and also just getting a front seat to a lot of the, you know. culture wars and battles that were happening. A lot of that was centered around Substack at the time. And so, yeah, it just sort of felt like, okay, now I have vocabulary to, you know, describe this.

the set of phenomena that are happening around me, but it's still, you know, it's a sci-fi book. And I wanted to... create some sort of nonfiction treatment of that as well. And so, yeah, kind of just started scribbling down ideas about anti-memes in the real world. And that big pile of notes eventually turned into this book.

That's fantastic. Were you already familiar with the Girardian sense of mimetic desire and transference? Yeah, I think a lot of people were also talking about that around the time because it was... I think it was descriptively useful at the time to explain, you know, why it's everything sort of devolving into tribalism and frankly, just sort of lack of civility. And yeah, so.

Jared's theory of the medic desire, talking about how we don't have our own innate desires, but we are unconsciously or subconsciously aspiring to be like something else. And so our desires reflect the model that we are aspiring to be. dissatisfied I think with.

majority of us in the world. It's very apocalyptic, too. Yeah, it's kind of like, where do you take this to its logical end? It's like, okay, so we just sort of devolve into the medical rivalry for the rest of our lives, and that's the end of it. And he does have this... know saving mechanism that he talks about the scapegoats and how when you know things get

too crazy and too rivalrous and people are fighting too much over scarce resources, they kind of point to a third thing, the scapegoat, and they pin all of their anger and desires and stuff onto the scapegoat and that helps.

bring a community together because at least people say, well, at least we're not like the scapegoat and it bonds them together. But I felt like that was still pretty limiting even for the world that we're in today because, you know, Gerard didn't live to see what was happening today on the internet.

And I think some of his assumptions are operating on the idea of like, you know, there being more of a shared public narrative or a shared sense of context among people. But right now, I think the problem is that we're sort of fragmenting into lots of smaller contexts.

And so, you know, being a scapegoat can sometimes be a really good thing, right? It turns someone into a martyr, right? And then it helps cement the identities of these smaller tribes and then they, you know, become even more polarized against each other.

And so there, you know, the idea of like one unifying scapegoat that brings them together was just, it felt like it wasn't really the answer. And so, yeah, that's, I think I found more answers by thinking about anti-names and sort of, you know, how do we start suppressing and pushing things? down below the surface in order to just find some quiet sense of sanity away from our public feeds.

Yeah. And you use the example of Curtis Yarvin, right, who wrote Unqualified Reservations. He had what we might call a little bit outside the Overton window ideas.

For example, democracy doesn't work. Kind of a what I described him on my honeymoon. This is 1982. He was a British, you know, Aristo. And I. stayed at his house in ireland and i was very offended because like it was all you know democracy doesn't work and i'm like well wait wait wait a second and so there's a picture of me in the bedroom they gave us

Like this. Because I thought the guy was a fascist. And, you know, he was basically, he wasn't a fascist, he was a monarchist more than anything else. But in a similar fashion, Yarvin... maybe had some of those more controversial ideas. And basically you lay out what happened, right? He became a scapegoat. He was invited to a conference, a software conference.

got disinvited because of his views on race and intelligence, etc. That immediately made me think of Charles Murray, who I'm sure you're familiar with. who was such an academic, he didn't kind of think, huh, I wonder if I write this deeply academic book filled in academic... You know, word salads. I wonder if it might be a problem if I call out people by their racial group. Nah, that's not going to be a problem. Go ahead. I think he's still canceled. But take us through.

What happened with Yarvin? Because I think it's a good example of your thesis of somebody who was definitely... exposing ideas that were anti-memetic, at least at the time. His becoming a scapegoat by being canceled and being disinvited. But then something else happened. The Streisand effect happened.

Suddenly, like, who is this guy? Why are people saying don't read it? It's like one of my ideas about if I really do, I think it was Abby Hoffman or one of the yippies wrote a book called Steal This Book. I want to write a book that says. under no circumstances, read this book. But if you could expand on that a little bit, because I think it fits nicely with the idea. Yeah. So I think...

Curtis's writing was also the product of good timing. So he is a software engineer who had been working on this project that was fairly obscure and hard for most people to parse, but it was around sort of creating this. separate operating system where people could sort of exist in their own independent version of the web from the bottom up.

And it spent a long time sort of twirling on this. And around the same time, he also started writing a blog called Unqualified Reservations, where he was just sort of talking about his views of the world, his own political theory. And this actually started...

before I keep saying sort of like things started getting weird I'm sure history will give a name to that that period but but it was yeah before things started getting a little weird on the internet and so you know the blog existed the blog was popular among certain crowds, but it had definitely not hit any sort of mainstream thing who sort of just random internet blogger, right? And so he wanted to speak at this software conference in the late 2010s.

And someone had discovered his writings and that some of his views were, say, controversial and not the kinds of things that you want to be supporting on stage. And so they removed him as a speaker. And this was... This was sort of his cancellation moment. And from that point, it seemed sort of like he was never going to hit the mainstream, right? But it gave him a little bit of this...

flashiness to people that were kind of curious, like, you know, why can't he speak at the conference? And so everyone started rushing to his blog to see like, what did he write that was so bad? And along the way, the remarks that he was specifically counseled for, as far as I can tell, were actually sort of this like... They were not really at the point of the blog. The blog was actually much more about, you know, political theory. And yeah, Curtis is a monarchist. And so questioning whether...

Democracy is as good and useful as we think it is. And this happened to be right around the same time as the 2016 presidential election. And so I think a lot of people were just feeling very, you know, like we're living in this unprecedented time. How did this happen?

and looking for some sort of working explanation of why is the world the way it is right now. And Curtis's blog kind of provided that answer. And so a lot of people, even though he was still canceled and people were not really allowed to say his name in public. People were reading his blog. They were thinking about his ideas and talking about them, but only in very small, trusted contexts. I stumbled into it by accident because I ended up...

giving a talk at a conference associated with software projects, had no idea what the background was. And again, it was one of these things that happened where a friend was just sort of like, hey, do you know who this guy is? and you know shares his work and i go oh this is interesting and then you kind of once you see it then you start having all these little conversations in private with people about his writing and i had no idea that you know

So many people around me had been also reading his work and not talking about it. And from there, it starts to sort of like bubble up. And now I think he has completed the full arc of going from obscure to cancel to mainstream to now.

Scott Alexander had a piece where he said mold bugs sold out. That was Curtis's pseudonym. So he calls him a sellout. And so he's really done the full arc. But he went from being, you know, you can't say his name in public to you can say his name in these small settings.

to now he's being associated with a few small scenes. So definitely a lot of people in tech were talking about his work. But there was this sort of dime square phenomenon during the pandemic that was this New York sort of intellectual scene, I guess. That had sort of brought Kirkson's ideas into the fold. And then from there, it bubbled up into he did an appearance on Tucker Carlson.

So then he's a little bit more mainstream. Then he got the New York Times profile. And then now he's a sellout, right? So yeah, you can see how ideas can go from being super isolated, can't talk about at all, really heavy taboo too. Once you start forming little clumps of allies, all those little clumps can come together and push someone into the mainstream. Yeah. And what fascinates me there is a couple of things. The first is...

You have these multiple really dense networks, but they're not connected to each other, right? And if you want something to go viral, you've got to figure out a way to get these disparate networks. to connect and start talking to one another. The author Howard Bloom had a great analogy for this, where he talks about, you know, you can take five pounds of salt, put it in a big beaker.

Boil the water till the salt is no longer visible, right? And so if the beaker is sitting on my desk here and you walked in, you would see what you would think was just like a beaker of clear water. And then he says, but if you take one salt molecule and drop it into the water, all of it... coalesces and adheres and it's this huge block of salt and i always like that metaphor because the connection here

is sometimes a lot of people... I just had Todd Rose on. He's currently on this week's... He wrote Collective Illusions, where you can have people who... widely share a privately held belief, but they don't think anyone else believes it. And so they keep their mouth shut. They self-censor until somebody comes and says it publicly. And that's that.

single molecule of salt being dropped in the water. And suddenly you see, oh my God, like there are a lot of people who know, who not only know about this, but like are open to the ideas. And and one of the things I recall you mentioning was that. It kind of takes before the redemptive arc, right, where you can either call them a sellout or now getting the New York Times profile treatment.

But before that arc, it's really an interesting thing because publicly, nobody is going to refer to him, right? There's high signaling costs there. Like, what? you like that guy, and then suddenly you are perceived as no longer a member of the in-group. So publicly, people won't talk about it.

But they will talk about it privately, which brings in your idea of the internet being a crazy place during the pandemic, people retreating to smaller groups, which interestingly enough was the way it started. I'm old. So I had one of the original CompuServe accounts and they called them SIGs, special interest groups. And that's all it was. They were SIGs. And you would gain entry by, you know, showing your bona fides. And, like, they were all over the place, but each was very small.

And you very rarely saw any cross-pollinization between the various SIGs. Me being a glutton for punishment, I joined quite a few of them. You know, I was in my 20s and really interested in that sort of stuff, but it really fit in here because what happened was sort of the same thing. You had, I would go from one SIG to another, and not intentionally, by the way.

and talk about something that seemed controversial to me, but I was kind of like, I would be interested to see what people think about this. And then there was an event where, like, all of a sudden... All of these disparate SIGs, right, like on philosophy, one of them was, one was on nation states, a third was on the international economy, et cetera. And it kind of coalesced.

But that's kind of, that infers a guerrilla-style information war. Talk a little bit about that phase. I'm going to say, were you the informational guerrilla? Warrior in that case. Sowing the discord across everything. Well, I'm a huge believer in the holy fool or the court jester, kind of the outsider who gets to speak truth without losing his or her head.

And I wasn't worried about it. I did not see myself that way at the time, by the way. But it fits, right? Like, if you're trying to keep something to be not talked about, in other words, anti-memetic, right? You can do hard tactics, make it illegal, make it, you know, socially completely will turn you into a pariah or do soft tactics, you know, gentle dissuasion.

be like Leo Strauss, the way he writes about heterodox ideas and all of that. And it made me think of this Alexander Pope when I was reading this section, getting ready to talk to you. So Alexander Pope wrote the following, and I thought that this was kind of a perfect illustration of the guerrilla tactic. Alexander Pope, for those who don't know, was a famous author. And here's what he wrote kind of little right around enlightenment.

Period, right? So, all nature is but art, unknown to thee. All chance, direction, which thou cannot see. All discord, harmony. Not understood. All, and then he put a weasel word in here because he didn't want to get burned at the stake. All partial evil, universal good. And in spite of pride, in Erring's reason's spite, one truth is clear. Whatever is, is right. Okay. That's a daring statement to make at that time.

Your head explodes if you are one of his contemporaries, right? Because you know he put partial evil in there to weasel his way out. Because this is like, this would get you burned at the stake. Right. And of course, we had Voltaire with his character Pangloss, all is right to the best of all possible worlds, et cetera. But the the idea that. A lot of this phase here is in kind of a gorilla phase. You also include a helpful diagram.

which looks at high versus low impact memes and anti-memes. And you've got the super memes on the upper right, high impact, very viral, you know, things like wars, climate change, et cetera. You've got the anti-memes on the left, which is not highly viral. Things like taboos, uncomfortable truths. They're going to have a low transfer rate. How do you move?

something that currently fits in that category, the upper left hand, anti-memes with low transfer rates. How do you switch them over to the other side into super memes? I think it's... probably possible to engineer some anti-memes into super memes but i think some of them might just structurally resist that kind of characterization so i think you know ideas are to some extent mimetic, antimetic, et cetera, by their nature. So the matrix that you're referencing, I talk about.

I'm sort of looking at how transmissible an idea is, so how easily it spreads, but then also looking at how consequential it is, right? And there are some ideas that will spread very, very easily because they're just not that consequential. And that's what I sort of think of as the bucket. Memes in aggregate can have a huge social impact because they spread so easily, they can kind of just rip through a network. But if you think about each individual meme that you're sharing...

You often, you know, you'll send a link or a funny meme or something to someone and you'll forget you've been sent to it. All these sort of social norms that are mimetic, like shaking someone's hand or greeting them, they don't take up that much headspace. So there's no way to really turn something that small into a supermame, for example.

The class of super memes that I talked about are, well, let's start with the anti-memes. So anti-memes are different from memes in that they don't spread because they are perceived to be so highly consequential. So we kind of hold on to them and we guard them because we're afraid that if we... share it out loud, then there's going to be big consequences either for ourselves or for the rest of our networks.

And so, yeah, this is where taboo's coming into play, right? Like everyone knows what the truth is, but no one wants to say it out loud because you might have personal consequences for yourself. They could also just totally upend your life as you know it. And so you kind of hold on to it. Supermews are this other sort of strange phenomenon that have the qualities of both, where they are both highly consequential, but also highly transmissible.

And so, yes, some of the examples I use are things that tend to have a little bit of like a doomsday quality to them or the characteristics around them are that they, you know, they appeal to our personal values somehow. non-specific in a way, but also perceived to be super high impact. So things like the climate crisis, existential risk from AI, fear of the unknown or fear of the future.

Today, I think historically, war sort of served that function as a unifying supermute for people to rally around. And today we have, in sort of, now that we're kind of... organized more around culture wars we have lots of different super memes that are that people can sort of pledge their allegiance to in the same way they might pledge their allegiance to a war and so you have lots of these different competing talent ecosystems and competitions for mindshare.

I don't think every anti-meme can become a supermeme, but they might be able to sort of glom on to an existing ecosystem. So one example I talk about is nuclear energy and how... For a really long time, it was absolutely taboo to even consider whether it might be good to develop it. And it took decades to sort of flip the opinion on that. Now, I think we're in a phase where, I mean, even Germany has announced their support for it.

their energy. So we're in a very different place now. It's not really that anything changed. It's just that our opinions towards it changed. And I think having that sort of... latch into maybe like the climate crisis as a super meme helps heighten the urgency and the desire to sort of maybe revisit it or something.

Yeah, you have, as a matter of fact, that is something that we're very interested in. And we actually gave a fellowship to a guy by the name of Mark Nelson to have a conference in Germany that was pro-nuclear. And apparently it went very well. Kind of like that salt molecule, and suddenly you see all of the salt that's actually there. It turned out that the most vocal people who opposed any kind of nuclear solution, or as he would...

at elemental energy were just the loudest voices, right? That's another thing you often note, that one of the reasons for polarization is it's like 5%. on each side, and they will never stop yapping. And they use great propaganda techniques. repetition, repetition, repetition. And you kind of lose sight of, wait a minute, why were we against this in the first place? And then you kind of do your homework and you see, and if you compare disaster.

like the scale of disasters caused by coal, as an example, which Germany was burning because their power needs were not being met, versus nuclear, like... rationally, you should be willing to at least consider it. You don't have to be in favor of it, but it should be at least...

something that's on the table as an option. And you have kind of a memeplex where you say, you know, it kind of goes from ideas or an ideology that gain a community. And then the community itself kind of forms an agenda, but then it needs capital, right? And I guess that was us with Mark for the idea of the conference in Germany.

I kind of think those are all necessary but not sufficient. Like before we started to formally record, I told you that we are really, really interested in workflows that could... have super high R-naughts for... spreadability and virality of memes. Because memes can also be marketing ideas. They can be a variety of things. And if you understand, you've got to start looking at social diffusion models, right?

Mimetic fitness tests, the narrative resonance. Is it an emotional payload or moral foundation? You know, because if you're attempting to get one idea to spread, you don't want to have a meme. where there's a huge emotional payload for a completely non-emotional topic that you're trying to get, but also the idea of compression. Right. I'm fascinated by compression because like, why do we have maxims? We have maxims because.

These were ideas that kept being repeated down through time, right? You often see the people, eat what your grandmother ate and you'll be fine, right? But compression is really, really important because... if you've got a really clean moral or other impulse, you know, liberty, fairness, et cetera, the one that's going to win is the memetic load that is... super highly compressed so that it can become kind of like a jingle in somebody's mind or a catchphrase or, you know.

a protest chant, we must, we must, you know, and they make use of repetition. Looking at it through this lens, they seem highly engineered, even though they probably weren't, at least originally, right? And... All of that kind of goes into the, if you are trying to break through a crowded feed, the ones that are visually and verbally the most distinct, right?

Like, don't mess with Texas. There's a really funny story how that came about. It was iterative. So it was an anti-littering campaign for Texas because Texans... used to be slobs. And because it's so big, right, like they'd be driving along in their truck and they'd finish their McDonald's and just throw it out the window. And so they hired an ad firm to try to get people to see.

stop doing that. Right. And, and so they, all of the attempts were, you know, the ones where they lectured them and all that zero, zero virality, like nobody paid it. You know, it's like, whatever. Whatever. And then the guy who finally figured it out heard a phrase like, clean up that mess. Texans refer to litter and other garbage as mess, a mess.

And he's like, ooh, wait a minute, because I can link that to Texans. You know the old joke, Texan who went to Harvard doesn't know which to mention first. Texans are very proud to be, for the most part, to be from Texas. And so he's like, how about don't mess with Texas? And suddenly it just exploded. It turned into bumper stickers. They didn't realize that his underlying message was don't litter. But that became a secondary effect.

the rate of litter plunged as the bumper stickers and people saying it. George Bush, George W. Bush used it as one of his slogans, don't mess with Texas. But it was one of those mind worms, right? that just got drilled in there. And so I think if you think about it that way, you can kind of take more of an engineering view toward trying to... design a meme that is going to really spread, right? The after effects. Definitely. Go. I think it's not just the...

how you sort of phrase a message goes hand in hand with thinking about the network that it's situated in too as well, right? So a lot of these campaigns that were engineered for sort of like national prominence or spread, the Texas one is a really good example where it's...

That message only really worked for the Texas quote unquote network specifically, right? It wouldn't have worked in a different state. And I think now if we think about the networks where we want a message to spread, it's a little bit harder to reach sort of. you know, the public narrative is so fragmented in New York.

There isn't really just one place you can blast it anymore and kind of let it take off. You have these kind of smaller enclaves, smaller private communities. And so it's thinking about how do you get it to spread in this, you know, one dense network and another dense network and you're sort of seeding them.

in different places and then eventually they may all kind of glom together and and uh raise the message to a place of sort of more public national prominence but yeah it feels like a slightly different uh strategy or approach today that's required just because people are having

are much more gravitated towards their dense networks than they are to having allegiance to some sort of like broader public narrative. I was having a conversation with my friend, Rory Sutherland, who wrote the book about alchemy. He's a marketing guru. And he sort of just let it slip that really that Christianity was a subsidiary religion of Judaism. And we were on a podcast and we just started kind of joking about it. And then I kind of thought...

hey, what if we looked at Paul of Taurus, you know, St. Paul, right, as the ultimate mimetic engineer? And so I started going down that road. You know, Judaism is the parent brand. Christianity is the ultra viral spin-off brand that got to be viral because it removed all the friction.

that judaism had judaism probably didn't spread because like it had huge barriers to entry you had to be born of a jewish mother you had to be circumcised you had to have a special diet there were lots of rules right And Paul came in and was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. All you need is faith in Christ. That's what you need. So he created a huge total addressable market, whereas Judaism... just didn't have that, right? His little spinoff, he forked Judaism, basically, and was like...

Hey, doesn't matter what your earlier gods were. We don't care. Doesn't matter where you're from. We don't care. We don't care what tribe or tribal religion or identity that you embrace or what sect you are. Christ is, you just follow Christ. Hey, you're a member. Come on in. And then as I continued down the road, it was like.

He leveraged existing infrastructures, right? So, like, temples are expensive. And if you want to be a proto-religion and you want temples, that's going to take you like 10 years, right? So when he was busy spreading... the message of Christianity memetically, he just went right to the existing synagogues because he had a captured audience of people who are already devout and maybe open to persuasion, right?

hey, that sounds kind of nice. Kind of like I don't have to do all this other stuff and I can still be a holy guy. Yeah, I like what you're selling me here, Paul. And so by using the... Synagogues, he had an installed base where he could go to. And then he standardized the API layer by writing in Greek, which was the lingua franca of the Roman Empire.

And then he also took advantage of things like the fact that he was a Roman citizen. Generally speaking, if you are not a Roman citizen and you're living in the Roman Empire, Kind of dangerous to be exposing a new religion. But if you're a Roman citizen, you have the right to due process. You have all of these things, right? And so, like, this, we...

When you start going down this rabbit hole, you can see that some of the world's biggest religions are really great examples of mimetic manipulation. And, like, I'm going to try to figure something out. Maybe I'll do, I don't know, a Twitter thread on how Paul was the ultimate memer. Yeah, there's definitely some truth to that.

But I also think that you need probably humor. I think humor, Mark Twain said, against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand. And Billy Wilder had a great line, which was, if you're going to tell the truth, you better be funny or they'll kill you. And that brings us to kind of the idea of the truth tellers, the court jester, the holy fool in Russian history. You know, the guy who could say, hey, emperor, you are buck naked, man.

And he could do it because he was an outcast, you know, not really part of the in-circle, et cetera. And, you know, along comes the Enlightenment, and uh-oh. Like the world before the Enlightenment, right, was ruled by religion. And all of the answers were to whatever question you had because God did it or God wants it that way.

Right? And so then the Enlightenment comes along and says, actually, and, you know, we had all of those things where Galileo, nevertheless, it moves, et cetera, et cetera, and they break through. Do you see the ability, given our very fractal world of today, to change? track for a minute but are the beatles possible anymore by that i mean a group that everybody knows who they are a certain generation knows every lyric that they have i like i don't

In our existing world, I don't know that that works anymore. Probably not, at least not right now. I don't know about anymore. Maybe we'll have some swing in a different direction that I can't see right now, but in the current world, it seems less. I mean, we still have iconic musicians that we're going to take the question literally like Taylor Swift might be like a Beatles level of fame today. But I think maybe the question.

maybe the answer is less about can we have it or is it possible but more of is it the thing that we should even most people should even aspire to anymore because I think maybe for myself growing up it kind of felt like okay being famous means having Beatles level fame or Taylor Swift level fame or something like that and now it's entirely possible to have whatever fame means to you or be famous within you know certain smaller networks and without having to

go all the way right i mean that was kind of the lesson of first wave of social media of just having the thousands your fam don't yeah it doesn't it doesn't matter so much whether everyone is talking about you it matters whether the people that you respect or the people that you want to pay attention to your stuff or are listening to you i think that uh what what was interesting

From my point of view, as I started looking historically at this stuff and trying to find examples of both Girardian mimetic with an I, right? And Dawkins meme with an E. Man, like you see it everywhere. So for example, Babylonia in ancient Mesopotamia, like Babylonia was not always the top dog there. Right. Like, as a matter of fact, they were one of the lesser city states. And it actually was because their God, Murdoch, was a puny God. He was a regional storm God.

you know, essentially. And so they put their heads together and they're like, you know, if we make Murdoch the top god, then we will be the top city by just extension. And so they created a brand new myth. for him, and they had him slay the primordial sea dragon and split it in half, throwing half up in the air, creating the heavens, and throw the other half down, creating the earth.

Presto chango, Babylonia becomes the top dog in the Mesopotamian power structure. Like, these memes are, like, can be. weapons of mass destruction and or creation, right? Like if you can simply reframe your God from puny regional God to the God, the one above all the other gods. And suddenly you become the most powerful political power in a region not noted for its wanting to get along. I mean, and then, of course, the example of Paul.

what else can you do and what other ideas can spread this way? I think one of the arguments I make in the book is that, you know, you can tell a history of memes. Throughout, yeah, I mean, even stretching as far back as ancient history, but throughout all of that, I think the story of Antonians has also been their presence and just sort of...

lurking in the background, right? So there's a role for Antinemes in religion, there's a role for Antinemes in ancient civilizations, and you mentioned a little bit of that truth-teller role. The idea of, you know, sort of emperor has no clothes, right? And there's always been a role like that, I think, throughout history. There's always been sacred taboo type knowledge that society is collectively suppressing.

I think one of the roles of religious figures or religious leaders can be to help shepherd some of that sacred knowledge into the lights. So if you think about confessional booths where, you know, you might be holding on to some deep dark thing about yourself that you don't even want to talk to your family about or your friends, but you will go to a confessional booth and talk to a priest about it.

And we've sort of created that formal structure for you to take this thing that is intimatic to yourself. You know, it's a really interesting idea. It's something very, very compelling or an interesting secret or story or something that you're feeling about yourself. Something that is really taking over your mind, Sharaba, that refuses to spread. And you can go to this clearly defined place and go and unload it onto someone else. A secular version of that might be a therapist.

And then I think even political leaders that would use soothsayers or oracles and things like that to say something that. honestly probably everyone else wanted to be able to say but they can't say it because yeah you either have to use humor or you have to be some sort of outsider or some some figure that where it's perceived that you don't have your own agenda um and we have these you know

institutionally defined roles in both religious and secular contexts to kind of help bridge that gap between things that are being individually or collectively suppressed that we can't talk about and how do we bring them into light, how do we bring them into the circulation of ideas. And that brings in where traditionally, at least, institutions like the government, the church, academia.

et cetera, served as the sifters or what's allowed into the Overton window and what is not, what's taboo, right? And what is not. They institutions are not having a good run right now. Like if you look at trust in and you fill in the blank. Trust in the government, trust in the military, trust in banks, trust in science, trust in all of these things. Like, they're literally collapsing. And do you think that that is...

One of the consequences of this splintering, this creation of a more fractal, like the world used to be log normal in my estimation, right? That's why you had mass production, right? If you do a... Typical bell curve, 68.5% are within one standard deviation of the median, right? So if you're a capitalist or a TV show producer, what are you going to do? You're going to try to make something that appeals to that 68.5%, right?

And that is the world most of us grew up in. And yet I don't think we're in that world anymore. I think we are in a more Mandelbrot fractal normal. distribution pattern fractal is a much narrower peak in the distribution with super long tails and it's in the tails where all the interesting stuff is at least according to me but

Yeah, go ahead. And it is where now is a really good time to talk about anti-memes. And maybe it's partly why people are getting more interested in them in the same way that the concept of memes, you know. Richard Dawkins coined that term in the 70s, and it had been around for a while, but I don't think it really entered household name level status as a term until the internets in the 2000s.

um and then yeah more like the 2010s and so you know it took 30 years for for anyone to even use that term meme and then kind of start applying it to everything in our everyday life um and then you know it's not even that dawkins coined the term meme but

The concept of a meme, as we've been talking about, has existed for a really, really long time. You can find examples of that sort of mimetic behavior throughout the entirety of human civilization. And similarly, with anti-memes, I think the concept has existed just as long as memes.

And maybe people started talking about or thinking about it in recent years because something changed on the internet where suddenly this idea that... you know if an idea is good it goes viral that that statement became tested and um is no longer really quite true uh and so now is a really interesting time to say okay we are in this weird destabilized world where uh

we need a new sort of explanatory term or theory to to describe this this uh all these different dynamics around us that memes or the nematic desire or any of these sort of related concepts just don't quite get us all the way there and so yeah Now is a really good time to start thinking about what else is going on and how else are ideas behaving in ways that maybe we couldn't fully see before just because everything was not quite as split apart as it is right now.

And I think that people are just more tuned in, right, to this. than they were in the past because of the internet, because we've kind of built this global brain that is fracturing a little bit, yeah, and people are retreating to their private walled gardens. But I also think of like...

You know, when we're talking about the meme clicks and memes that are designed to go viral and anti-memes that are designed not to, right? Or not designed, but end up not going viral. One of the things I've thought a lot about... is because as I kind of watched all these various mind viruses happening during the pandemic, specifically kind of during the lockdown. I was really shocked by how quickly places that I would have never believed would kind of immediately comply.

Like, for example, Australia. I love Australians and I love Australia. Been there many times. Same with New Zealand. I would have thought Australia would have been the last place where draconian measures would be enforced. And yet they were. And it made me start kind of thinking about... we should probably try to come up with a way to inoculate people against memes. And, you know, kind of mental hygiene came to the top of my thought process.

As I watched like the meme, right? You're going to die if you go outside, if you don't have a mask on, et cetera. Just like take a lot of. real estate in people's neural real estate available. And that kind of led me to like, hmm, I wonder if there is a way to... engineer a meme to either inoculate people on the things that you don't want them to be memetically transferring, or...

you know, have it go contagion, right? Have a super horror R-naught for that particular meme. And you start, like, looking at things like, you know, the... The brand, if you will, of the people trying to spread the meme. I always joked about the World Economic Forum. I don't know if you're familiar with them. Yeah. But I like I.

tease them relentlessly on social media because, you know, they had their build back better and, you know, it's 2030, you own nothing and you're happy. And like... It was the most tone-deaf campaign I had ever seen. It was backed by tons of money. There was, I mean, literally, how in the world could that fail?

Well, I think if you understand memetics and how memes transfer, they were appealing already to their own in-group, basically, right? So they were appealing to traditional legacy media, right? Not... what people were tuning into, right? And elitists talk about... I mean, the mistakes made are kind of legendary the way I look at it. It's like, we're going to have a full week global conference on global warming.

And we're all going to fly our Gulfstream fives into Davos to do that. So the true memetic engineers were able to take all of that and like destroy them. uh, with, uh, just, just memetically without resources, just by being funny. And like, what's you talking about, Willis? You're crazy. Right. And they conform to a lot of the stereotypes as well. So, like, if you were going to try to make something that currently resides as an anti-meme...

If you were going to try to design a way to turn that into a viral meme, how would you go about it? I think the question that...

I'm curious about just from what you said was, you know, how do we inoculate people against memes more broadly? Or if memetic warfare is sort of the de facto way of... behaving and thinking right now how do you start to inject some good memes into there or which kind of has two possible paths like there's there's one where you fight memes with other memes so you say okay these memes start

let's say, not good for you, or we think they're not good for you, and we're passing a judgment there. So let's put some good memes in the bloodstream, and so your head will just kind of snap, and you'll pay attention to those instead. That's one way to protect people against sort of like...

bad memes or undesirable memes um and the other question is sort of how do you become more resistant to memes more generally so that's um instead of your brain sort of splitting from one meme to another and and you know um giving up that responsibility to others to sort of tell you where to turn your head. How do you sort of decide where you want to turn your own head? And I think that's a much more complicated question.

I have a whole chapter in the book where I talk about just sort of the value of our attention as, you know, if you think about ideas spreading through a network, they spread node by node, right? each node is just the person and so each of us is responsible in a sense of we are we are the gatekeeper for if you zoom all the way into like how is an idea spreading through a network each of us is the one who says

You come across a new idea and you decide, what do I do with this, right? And so there is some level of, I guess, personal responsibility around when I receive a new idea, do I just sort of run in the flashiest? uh most exciting direction um and i think that would be kind of closer to the girardian way of thinking about things um which as i said earlier they just sort of um

Ends up becoming a little bit of a race to the bottom where you just sort of, everyone is just sort of competing for the flashiest thing to grab your attention. But also we have some ability to decide, I'm actually just going, you know.

When a flashy idea comes my way, maybe I can be a little bit more thoughtful about it. I think the problem is that not everyone has or wants to take that level of personal responsibility. So I actually think of... this question around sort of meme inoculation as closer to a public health problem where we think about something like nutrition or how do you ensure that people eat healthy?

You know, it comes down to a similar kind of question where on the one hand, you could always just say, well, take, you know, take personal responsibility for your diet. You know, all the answers are out there. It's not that, you know, it's not that it's unknowable how to eat healthy. It's just that a lot of people choose not to do it.

And then the flip side of it is, well, some people are just not going to do it. And there are, you know, the effects of some people choosing not to eat healthy or not even choosing for whatever reason they're not eating healthy does impact the rest of.

the public. So that's why it's a public health problem. So then the question becomes, how do you design policies that help people make the right choices without also infringing on other people's ability to choose and have the freedom to do what they want? And I actually think something is kind of an interesting twist in this story, right? If we're just looking at nutrition, where we ended up coming up with something to take a sort of...

take the burden of personal responsibility away where it's no longer difficult to choose to eat healthy because you can take something that makes you not want to eat healthy anymore. So it's kind of this weird... thing that was solved by the private markets, but, uh, in a, in a way that, uh, yeah, it's just maybe like a weird third option. So I don't, I don't know what the equivalent of like as I'm like for, um, meme inoculation would be, but.

I think this is sort of the battle around social media, right? You have on the one hand people saying, well, we should create policies to hold social platforms responsible as the sort of arbiters of how information spreads. These are the places that are where we're getting most of our information. And if they just had better content moderation policies, then our information wouldn't be harming people. And that's sort of one way of looking at it. It's a little bit.

uh some people would say a little bit draconian or it's just you know it's also just an impossible task like no one can come up with the perfect content moderation policy that solves all problems um and so you know there's the policy question then there's the the personal responsibility question of do i just choose to

turn off my notifications and not, you know, exercise a little bit more skepticism when ideas come my way. Yeah, that works in practice, but it's a little, you know, it's hard to enforce that among everyone to do. And so, yeah, what is that option where somehow?

People can exercise personal responsibility without having to think about it too much. I don't know. Yeah, and that's the perennial question. I firmly believe that... you know the hard way doesn't work i think that you know if you really do want kids to do drugs tell them not to do drugs authoritatively You know, there's Chris Buckley wrote a funny book called Thank You for Smoking, in which he's a one of the characters is a lobbyist for the tobacco industry. And the opposition is.

passing this bill in Congress to require all cigarette makers to put a skull and crossbones. on the pack. And he is gleeful because actually that's exactly what he wants because he knows that teenagers, you know, you need new smokers because the old ones are dying off of lung cancer. and heart disease. So, you know, in the vision of his humorous book.

The lobbyist wants that to happen, and so he's pretending, you can't make us do that. Meanwhile, of course, that's exactly what he wants. Make it forbidden, right? I mean, let's go back to Adam and Eve. What was forbidden? What are we? The apple of knowledge. So if you really, really want to get somebody to do somebody, especially a young person, forbid them from doing it.

Yeah. And tell them that it's no good. But I also think that gets back to the whole idea of salience. You know, the champion of that particular idea needs coherence and discipline. The message discipline of successful memes, it self-forms like any complex adaptive system. It emerges from the bottom. One of the definitions of a successful meme...

is that its creator loses control of it. But if you actually watch those memes develop, what you also see is compression, compression, compression, right? Okay, boomer. being kind of a classic compression of a meme that was everywhere. Right. And it didn't really start out that way. If you look at the history of it, it was millennials complaining about boomers and most of it that was long. It wasn't just.

You didn't have a signal or a handle that people could grab onto, right? And human OS loves to be certain, right? Even though I always argue... Like only the madman is absolutely sure. Absolute certainty is a real, in my opinion, liability if you want to think creatively. Not an advantage. And yet your average person out there... Wants certainty. Why do you think you always elect the politician that seems the most certain, right? That's how you get.

you know, demagoguery and all of that. And, you know, it's going to be just this easy, right? And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, right? Back in the inflationary 1970s. President Ford rather foolishly put together a campaign that was WIN, which was an acronym for whip inflation now. And, you know, they did. and they did all of these totems, right, that they hoped people would latch on to. But it didn't work because there was no authenticity feeling there. It was like, what?

How am I supposed to do that, right? It's where the role of the truth teller can be very useful because it's sort of, you know, when you're locked into this mimetic warfare where it feels like everyone has an agenda, everyone is trying to... get you to believe a thing to serve their own purposes, having this sort of, you know, strange outsider come along, the trickster, the clown, the fool, whomever, someone who is just sort of wandering in and saying the emperor has no clothes.

that can only come from someone that you perceive as having no agenda, being kind of an outsider, because otherwise, yeah, why would you believe it, right?

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, if you try to kind of do a deep dive, I read a piece years ago that I found really interesting and kind of try to build on it. If you're trying to like literally understand. how to build the algorithms, right, that deliver the meme, which is the emotional load or the political load or whatever you want. And the thing that I read...

took four very disparate people, Andrei Kumagorov, Kurt Godel, Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, right? So Claude Shannon, information theory, gives you, Shannon maintains that Information is novel. It's what's new, right? And so Shannon would argue that a political speech contains zero information because there's nothing new in it and there's no novelty to it.

But that, if you're looking at it in a sense of trying to engineer a viral meme, that gives you a metric, right? So is it novel or a take on something old? but in a new way that makes it people take notice, right? In a very noisy field, which is what social media and the internet really are, right? they're highly, trying to find the signal to noise gets harder and harder and harder because there's more and more noise. Well, if you apply Shannon...

right, and information theory, it gives you a metric for the meme, right? So is that meme going to have enough oomph, enough of that emotional payload to overcome the noise, to defeat the noise? Because... you know, the best meme in the world, if it doesn't have that oomph, you're not, you're going to fail on the Shannon metric. It's not going to break through the noise. And then Andre came up with like the shortest program.

of the output of a string determines the algorithmic complexity. You've got to compress it so that the memetic fitness... is kind of low complexity, right? Slogans, melodies, like, don't mess with Texas, be another one, right? And then Kurt Godel basically was all about self-referencing. And if you could get a reflexive spark in your meme so that it became self-replicating, that's a way to really, really go viral. And then...

Turing comes in, basically, he posited that humans are all universal machines. In other words, our brains can execute any computable description. And he... To Turing, he wouldn't care if it was a human mind, a computer, or a cell, right? Anything that has a substrate that can process that information can literally help the virality of that meme.

And so, you know, just like chain letters, you're too young. But back in the day... I remember chain letters. Oh, do you really remember chain letters? I do. I do, yes. So, great early example. of a very effective mimetic payload, right?

If you don't forward this letter, you know, death and destruction will come your way. If you do forward it, you will get rich or get, you know, some little golden box that you get to open and find out what's in it. That's basically, actually, maybe it's the original super meme because... That's, you know, that fear, that sort of doomsday fear of.

If you don't pay attention to this superbeam, then something terrible is going to happen in the future if you don't pay attention to the climate crisis, if you don't pay attention to existential AI risk or whatever. And so you're just sort of like, well, I don't know if it's true or not, but I better pay attention because I don't want to be wrong. I agree. And I think that humans are emotional creatures that also think and reason.

We are not thinking reasoning creatures who also have emotions. I think we are ruled by our emotions for the most part, and a lot of us try to pretend like we're not. And I think that the king or queen of all human emotions is... fear, specifically fear of novel things. That's why the COVID scare works so well, in my opinion. It was because it was a novel danger.

that humans didn't know anything about. Well, they knew about pandemics and viruses, but this had a particular picture. It was concrete. It was deadly. You saw all of those viral videos that China released. My thesis was most of those were fake videos because they were worried about people saying, hey, wait a minute, why are they calling this the Wuhan? Why? What's in Wuhan right now? And so, but the point is, novel fear, you can really focus people's minds. And so...

The underlying mechanic and anti-means as well is that sort of fear of the consequences to yourself or to the network if you spread it. And so, yeah, wanting to hold on to it because you're afraid of what the consequences might be. But specifically, again, about your book and the idea of the anti-meme, do you see this becoming a more formalized area of study? And like we've been talking a lot about...

At least people like me are really interested in being able to build algorithmically ideas that you want to champion and get across. Well, it's going to really certainly be helpful if they are mimetically tasty and like just irresistible. And so it becomes kind of an engineering problem in many respects. But then also the opposite of that is true, in my opinion. I think that watching kind of all of these disparate mind viruses take hold of people

It's not a good thing for the most part, right? Like, and we have examples of it throughout history, burning witches, you know, the bonfire of the vanities, you know, with the priest who went to Florence and basically... He was preaching the anti-meme because during the Renaissance, right, you had the Medici, you had all this great art, you had all these amazing things going on. And then the church sent one of their killer anti-memetic guys in.

to, you know, tell the residents of Florence, these are vanities. You won't get into heaven, fear. Right? You won't get into heaven if you've got these vanities. You've got to burn them. And that's where Tom Wolfe got that title from, Bonfire of the Vanities. was from what they actually did in Florence because this guy was so persuasive. How did he persuade? Through fear. Through fear of consequences, etc. So I definitely think it would be a very good thing.

if we could somehow immunize people from mimetic contagion, right? Because as you know, like this is just getting into the common vernacular now. And the book that I showed you earlier, Viruses of the Mind, cultural leg of adoption is a real thing, right? He wrote this in 1997. And Dawkins, as you noted, made the gene meme argument in, I think it was 1976 or 1977. And so...

Now that we're living in this world, which is no longer normally distributed, is mental brought factual distributed, and you've got so many of these people latching on to the idea of, oh, we'll just make this go viral. I think that... How would you go about setting up a system that allowed people to get essentially immune from viral memes that maybe aren't in their best interest?

Yeah, I don't know. I think that's what I was saying earlier about the, you know, there's the question of, like, what are the right policies to... If we think about social platforms as all the ones we use as sort of a substrate in which ideas are being passed around, how do we develop good policies that...

And that are constantly being adjusted, I think. I don't think, again, there's one right policy for everything, but how do we make sure that we're sort of being good stewards of that information flow? Uh, but then there's sort of the personal responsibility level, but then I think there's also, yeah, I think, I think it's sort of the, um, natural immune response that is happening that has not been sort of.

explicitly engineered in one way or the other, but it's just sort of an emergent property of being in sort of overexposed, highly mimetically charged environment for too long where people just sort of... started to build these protective walls around themselves and started to sort of find more semi-private spaces in order to have these conversations, which I think was a form of trying to protect ourselves a little bit from...

full-on mimetic warfare. But yeah, I talk about it in the book as well. I don't think the answer is necessarily that simple either. I think people often feel like they're... safe when they're in a smaller space or they're just with their trusted friends. But I don't think that the state that we're in right now is exactly like it was pre-social media either. Because there is this sort of reciprocal relationship now between, say, your group chats or your newsletters or whatever.

and what's going on in the quote-unquote real world online, right? So what do people talk about in the group chats? They're talking about everything that's happening out there, right? It's not that you're... completely disconnected, completely unaware of what's going on. It's not some utopian society that you built in the countryside and you're just completely tuned out. Some group chats might be like that, but a lot of them are still very connected to what's going on out there.

And so, you know, it is sort of like having a COVID pod or something where you think that it's you and your 10 friends and, you know, we're perfectly protected from the pandemic out there. But of course. If one of those friends is just, you know, happens to talk to someone else or happens to go out in public somewhere else or, you know, socialize and you can't control perfectly what all those 10 people are doing and someone brings a little bit of that virus back in, then.

you know, it's going to spread really, really fast in a small group. So I think ideas... I don't think we're in some perfectly stable state where, okay, now, you know, everyone's hunkered down in their cozy little enclaves and we're all protected now from the outside world. I think we're going to have to continue to manage this relationship between.

You know, the memes still make their way into smaller settings and then they spread really fast. They can mutate really rapidly. So ideas are actually just getting weirder and crazier, I think, even faster in a strange way. because we have these really small trusted environments where they can spread and be workshop much more quickly. So, yeah, I mean, I don't really know what the answer is to all of that, but at least...

I think one aspect of it is at least just drawing our attention to the fact that it is happening and creating some more vocabulary and just more thinking and conversation around what exactly is happening right now. Because like you said, I think the state of the conversation right now is... mostly about sort of like memes and going viral which is um maybe like a step one way to think about how ideas spread but we have sort of the existence proof now of you know

There are plenty of people with ideas that are really compelling and important that they don't want to go viral. And that's a new kind of behavior where suddenly it's like, oh, you're actually purposely keeping this idea to yourself or to a smaller group. And so that starts to complicate this idea of morality.

And yeah, I hope that there will be more conversation now. We are maybe still in that super, super early phase of whether the right term is antinemes or something else. But I think we're just starting to recognize that what got us through the first part of the internet is...

those concepts are only going to take us part of the way there in whatever phase we're in now. And so we have to think a little bit about, you know, why is it that people don't always want their ideas to go viral? And how do you continue to uncover interesting ideas?

bring them into the public dialogue regardless. Um, cause that's another fear that I have is if everyone's just sort of keeping their ideas themselves and, you know, group chats and stuff, um, you know, how, how do we continue to contribute to the civil? public discourse and ensure that good ideas are making their way back out and they're not just sort of being gatekept by some sort of like intellectual elite.

Yeah. My current guest on the podcast, Todd Rose, basically calls it self-silencing publicly. You're not self-silencing in your smaller group or chat or whatever, but you are. self-silencing in public discourse. And you talked about policies. And I think one of the challenges there is like all of this is existing in a complex adaptive system.

Generally speaking, things emerge from the bottom of those systems, not the top, right? Back to Paul, right? Like, how did he pull that off in an empire that was like... at the time, one of the largest empires, if not the largest empire in the known world. And yet, what did it take him? 400 years before the Roman emperor converted to Christianity? Like, Julian the apostate was the last of the pagan emperors, and he got good because Paul was so successful at dismantling.

the multi-god structure of the Roman Empire because he was the ultimate mimetic engineer. And so I don't know that it's like top-down that's going to be a solution here. I think that... The emergence is what fascinates me. And books like yours... The more people who read them and the more people who have this conversation publicly, right? And, you know, according to Todd, the author of Collective Illusions, he was like, it just takes one voice.

Right. One voice saying, you know, I really don't agree with that. Or I really do. If it's a controversial idea, you can you could either support it by saying, you know, no one ever talks about that. And I kind of agree with you. Tell me more about why you think this. Or conversely, you know, I really don't agree with that idea, but I'm open-minded. Tell me more about why you, like, believe this.

And I think that things like large language models. So something I do all the time is I steel man every argument I disagree with. And large language models are really good at doing that. And what you find often is, oh. They actually have a point. Even if you come at it not by trying to strawman it and look at its weakest points, right, which is often engaged in a traditional debate.

Do the opposite. Strong steel man that argument and look at the most persuasive argument for that idea that you... maybe even vehemently oppose, and it opens your mind a little bit at least, in my case it has, to, well... I can't just blanketly say that this is a bad idea because I see point A and point B, they're actually pretty good. At least with me, that has always led to kind of an intellectual agnosticism. In other words, I love the author Robert Anton Wilson, and he was like...

I don't believe anything, but I have many, many strong suspicions. Basically, the idea that all models are wrong, but some are very useful. If you can maintain that kind of flexibility around ideas. what you can do is, you know, as soon as that idea stops serving you for whatever purpose, you can find a better one, right? Or get rid of it at least if it's no longer helping. But, you know...

The other thing about you that you're fascinating as a person. Right. We talked earlier about, at least in the pre, how you have synesthesia, which is the sensory inputs cross. Sometimes, you know, you hear colors, taste anger, et cetera. and ephantasia, which is the inability to visualize things, which, by the way, as I ask more and more people about that, that's much more common, I'm finding.

than I would have ever, ever guessed. But the other part about you that's really interesting is, you know, you have a unique upbringing as well. You kind of straddled Quaker pacifism, Persian-German discipline, Chinese-Indonesian pragmatism. Like, given your background, I just thought that was so cool. Because you were exposed to these, if you will, memeplexes, right? The Quakers have their memeplex and the Persian-German have their memeplex.

Did you ever, like growing up and coming of age, were you encoded on one of these over another or did you draw from all of them? Yeah, I think it's hard to know the counterfactual, but I think having switched a lot of just different cultures and different sets of norms and ways of doing things definitely made my brain kind of be like, okay, there's...

There are a lot of different ways to do things, and I don't have any sort of really tightly held identity, I guess. So yeah, as you allude to, my dad is Iranian, but he grew up in Germany. My mom is Chinese-Indonesian from Indonesia. And then I grew up between Pennsylvania and Indonesia. And then, yeah, I went to a Quaker high school that I really enjoyed. And so, yeah, I felt like we were always just this mishmash of a lot of different things. My mom was...

Buddhist and Catholic and so it's just sort of got a lot of exposure to a lot of different cultures and a lot of different ways of thinking about things but yeah it's a little bit different I think from the classic. If there is a classic immigrant experience, maybe there isn't one, but it's, you know, I think both my parents are themselves multicultural and then they pews together and made even more multicultural, my upbringing, even more multicultural. And so it wasn't like.

you know living in America and there's like the American way of doing things and then a different way of doing things at home it was like home itself was already kind of this crazy mix and you know none of my relatives really believe I'm quite part of any of their culture. So, yeah, you're just sort of like, you know, you just kind of find a way to forge your own way of seeing the world without having any sort of like one stable identity system, I think, to refer back to.

I enjoyed it. Again, I don't know how it would have been different if I'd been raised differently, but I think it was a really helpful way of just sort of seeing the world. Do you find yourself attracted to one set of beliefs or doing things over another? Or have you synthesized them in the way you live your own life?

I think I think little bits and pieces of everything. Yeah, I definitely feel there's something to learn from every group. I don't know that I could even necessarily separate them all out. to one place or another yeah i uh one of the benefits of travel which i highly encourage anyone who has the ability to do so is There are all sorts of different belief systems. There are all sorts of different ways to organize societies, some better than others, some just different than others.

If you have the ability to travel broadly, I think it's really, really good for you. Because it shuts down any of the jingoistic tendencies you might have as you are living in this other culture, even if you're just visiting, right? it puts the human face on, oh, wait a minute, that's really cool. Look at like, you know, when I was in Bhutan, I was already a big Tao and Buddhist. But, like, there were all sorts of rituals and whatnot that I wasn't in the least bit aware of.

That when I was there, I was like, wow, that's really cool. Or I didn't know that they would have done that. And it kind of gives you the origin story, if you will, of a lot of different ways of looking at the world, right? And I think that by not being doctrinaire, by not being, you know, sort of deeply ideological and being open, travel is incredibly helpful. because it exposes you to very other, often very legitimate ways of viewing the world.

Then kind of back to humor, right? Like if you're trying to get ideas across, especially if they're a little bit controversial, you better be funny. Because if you're not, people might really, really get angry with you. In earlier days, they might even light you up.

tie you to a steak and you become a marshmallow roast fest. So what's next after this book? What are you focusing on now? Oh my gosh, that's a whole other can of worms. Okay, well, you know what? We could have you back on, but just give us a taste, a teaser as to what you're... Yeah, so about a year ago, I think I sort of live on the internet, kind of just, you know, looking for the next idea that's gonna take over my mind, I guess.

And I don't always know where that comes from. It's not always predictable. So before this, I was looking at open source software developers. Yeah, this book is very different from my first book, obviously. And so about a year ago, I stumbled into this.

Twitter subculture of people that were obsessed with this style of advanced meditation that engenders strange, intensely altered... states in your mind that are comparable to psychedelics and have similar potential mental health benefits as psychedelics, but it's all through meditation. But a different style of meditation than I think your standard sort of like mindfulness, stress reduction type meditation. And so I pitched this piece to a magazine where I was going to go.

interview a bunch of these people about their experiences. And I went on one of the retreats as just research. No background in meditation, not my world at all, historically speaking. I came out of it being like, oh my gosh, this is actually really strange and fascinating and the hype is real and why aren't we talking about it?

So I've been spending the last year trying to understand what are these sorts of states and what are their potential benefits to people's mental health and how do they work mechanistically. So I've been working with

meditation lab at Harvard Mass General to develop an education program around this, which I'm pretty excited about. And then also working with the retreat company that I initially first try this style meditation on just to understand what is the impact of this on people's lives and what are the different factors that can

uh determine whether someone is or isn't able to access certain states and um it's been it's been interesting to think of i think a lot of meditators sort of discourage this idea of trying to see it as a skill or something that you can um

reliably measure your progress on or something like that. So it's been interesting to try to treat it as any other sort of skill acquisition and say, are there different factors that can... make people more or less successful and um and yeah how do we take a little bit more seriously so that has been my uh deep rabbit hole for the last year i if you asked me a year ago

what I thought I would be doing right now. That's definitely not what I thought it would be, but it's been really, really fun. And yeah, working on a longer piece related to this as well. So who knows what that'll turn into. Very cool. Have you ever been in a lily tank, a sensory deprivation tank? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I've tried that a few times. It's super fascinating as well. It's a really simple concept. Yeah. I had a phase where that was really my thing.

And you also mentioned psychedelics. There's another one where talk about a flip, right? Like when I was growing up, I never tried a psychedelic because the campaign worked on me. right? It was like, I don't think I want to jump off a building thinking I can fly. And then, you know, you've got How to Change Your Mind comes out and I'm reading it and I'm like...

holy shit, they lied about everything. And so it's really interesting when you see, and now you're seeing a bit of a pushback against psychedelics. which I find fascinating. But that's... Michael Pollan's book was a perfect example of making an anti-memetic idea of a medic, right? Because he was sort of trusted because he was a trusted journalist. He was a little bit of an outside, not the typical person you would expect to be doing psychedelics or writing about them.

And then yeah, his book, and I think it was 2017, 2018, just took the conversation from people whispering about psychedelics and psychedelic research to making it something that you could talk to anyone about. So, yeah. Well, I mean, it got me to try them and, you know, it was really fascinating. What's interesting about psychedelics, I think, is that it was weird as you think about it retrospectively.

That Nixon, who was maybe the craziest guy to occupy the Oval Office, even given the current occupant, why he picked, like, the least addictive drugs? When you look at the addictive nature of a drug, most psychedelics are really, really low, like psilocybin, etc. You don't do psilocybin and wake up the next day jonesing to do psilocybin again. It's like, oh yeah, that was really interesting.

But you have no desire, at least I didn't, to do it again. But one of the things that the shaman who I did this with said to me... This was, I think, in 2018 or 2019. I was like, wow. I think everyone in the world. And this is just as MAPS is getting the Johns Hopkins tests on MDMA to reduce PTSD in our veterans, etc. So it was bubbling, but it was still kind of taboo.

And I looked at the guy and I'm like, I think it would be absolutely great if everyone could try this. And he smiled and he went. well, I think it's going to happen sooner than you think. And I went, why? And he said, and he pointed at me and he goes, because most of my clients over the last year have been people like you. And I'm like, Ah, and he goes, you are completely, as somebody from the 60s would say, you're a square straight guy, man, and you're trying this.

And, you know, then I thought of like, I think it was Terrence McKenna made the prophecy way back in the sixties that marijuana would ultimately be legal. And they were like, you're crazy, dude. Why would you ever say that? And he. was in a group of young people and everyone was smoking dough. And he goes, because you're looking at your future congressmen and women. No, I run. I think there's probably just been a shift in interest and sort of...

contemplative practices more broadly, right? And psychedelics is one of them. But even things like breathwork or cold plunges, like all this stuff, it's sort of this awareness that, oh, there are different ways to view the world. The world is a lot more malleable than I think it is. Yeah, there are a lot of different ways of going about that. So it's a really interesting time to be thinking and talking about that stuff.

Totally agree. Well, this has been absolutely fascinating, Nadia. And if you are familiar with the podcast, you know that at the end, we are going to create you Empress of the World. You can't kill anyone. You can't put anyone in a re-education camp. But what you can do is we're going to hand you a magical microphone, and you can speak two things into it.

that is going to incept the entire population of the world. Whenever their next morning is, they're going to wake up and they're going to say, I have just had two of the best ideas, speaking of... I have just had two of the best ideas, and unlike all the other times, I'm going to actually act on these two. What two things are you going to incept into the world's population?

I just have one, which is related to all of this, but yeah, just paying attention. I don't know, turning off your notifications and just trying to actually feel the world as it is, I think. People will be pretty surprised by what comes into their arena. I love that one. You got to have one more though.

I don't know. Maybe I'll throw in a desire to travel the world because I think there's also something there around people getting a little bit too locked into their own way of doing things. I don't know. Yeah, just go. More exposure is good. More ideas.

I like both of those. One of my favorite sci-fi writers, Douglas Adams, who, when you understand that he's not a sci-fi writer and more of a philosopher, he suddenly begins to make a lot more sense. He wrote a nonfiction book. called Last Chance to See, talking about his travels and about places that were literally kind of disappearing. And so who knows what...

wonder of the world might disappear before you get a chance to see it. So pay attention, focus, and travel. And while you're traveling, pay attention and focus. I love both of those. People can get your book everywhere when? Yeah, you can buy the digital version. You can get Kindle on Amazon right now. And then the physical ones you can pre-order on MetaLabel and they should be shipping very soon.

I actually just got my physical copy right before. Oh, show it to us because we also released it. Yeah, it's real. I love it. That's fantastic. Congratulations. Thank you. There's nothing quite like having a book you've written come into your hands. It's a good feeling. A really, really good feeling. Well, Nadia, thank you so much for joining me. We'll have you on again when you hear more about...

these various types of meditation. And maybe if you figure out a way to engineer some of these memes, we'll hire you as a consultant. Love it. Thanks for having me on.