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One of the reasons for polarization is it's like 5% on each side and they will never stop yapping.
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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.
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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.
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There's always been a role like that, I think, throughout history.
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There's always been sacred taboo type knowledge that's society is collectively suppressing.
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We can tell a history of memes stretching as far back as ancient history, but throughout all of that, I think, the story of anti-memes has also been there, present, and just sort of lurking in the background, right? Well, hello everyone.
0:49
It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops.
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My guest today, Nadia Asparouhova.
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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 Brodie, and it's all about memes in the Dawkins sense, not the Giradian sense.
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And when I read it, I was like literally hooked.
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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.
1:32
So, I read that your first introduction to the idea of anti-memetics was in 2021 when a former colleague of yours was sharing thoughts about, "Hey, could we engineer a memetic project that really, rather than just letting it naturally go out into the wild, could we could we engineer it so the memes either go viral or don't go viral?
1:59
I might be getting that wrong.
2:02
But Yep, that sounds about right.
2:03
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.
2:13
So we share that, but tell me what was what was your drive to go, oh, I really have to know and write about this.
2:23
I think it was really a a sign of the times even just having my colleague reach out to me around that time.
2:26
Um so yeah, that was 2021.
2:28
This was, you know, depths of COVID um and I think the internet was in a really weird place at this time uh to say the least, but um 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 um exacerbated by the pandemic and people just being really pent up.
2:49
And that was forcing a lot of these conversations that previously could take place in public um further down into more private and semi-private spaces.
2:58
So um more people were using group chats to kind of workshop their ideas because they felt like they couldn't talk about it in public.
3:04
Um uh newsletters were taking off as uh a sort of more semi-private place to share your long-form unfiltered ideas.
3:14
And uh and I think that was probably the impetus for why my colleague had reached out and you know, everyone's just sort of thinking about this thing around um yeah, like ideas are not spreading the way that they were in the last five-ish years and something has changed.
3:26
Um and so in the course of that conversation, he recommended this book that he had found called There Is No Antimemetics Division.
3:34
Um and that book is just a great book.
3:38
And that book is a horror sci-fi kind of book, so um it's not a non-fiction book, but really, really good.
3:43
Um and the author of that book had coined this term uh called antimemes.
3:49
And uh it originally came from this collaborative fiction wiki community called SCP Foundation where people post these wiki wiki style entries of paranormal entities that they just sort of made up and this one of these users who goes by the name Quantum he had posted one in the late 2000 so you know well before
4:11
everything weird that was happening on the internet but this entity was something that he called an anti-meme 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
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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 just you know really wonderful study of um collective forgetting and yeah what does it mean to sort of like engage with ideas that you can't really hold on to.
4:53
And so I read that 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 cultural wars and battles that were happening a lot of that was centered around Substack at the time.
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And so yeah it just sort of felt like okay now I have a vocabulary to you know describe this the set of phenomena that are happening around me that it's still you know it's it's a sci-fi book and I wanted to create some sort of non-fiction 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.
5:42
Were you already familiar with the uh, Girardian sense of memetic desire and transference?
5:50
Yeah, I think um, 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 um, and frankly just sort of
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lack of civility uh, and uh, yeah, so you know, Girard's theory of memetic desire talking about how we don't have our own innate desires, but we are um, unconsciously or subconsciously aspiring to be like something else. Um, and so
6:16
Um, and so our desires reflect the the model that we are aspiring to be.
6:21
Um, I felt sort of dissatisfied, I think, with uh, the the way Girard has seen the world and It's very apocalyptic, too, so.
6:32
Yeah, it's kind of like where where do you take this to the end, you know, to its logical end?
6:34
It's like, okay, so we just sort of devolve into a memetic rivalry for the rest of our lives and that's the end of it.
6:41
Um, and he does have this, you know, um, saving mechanism that he talks about, the scapegoats, and um, how when, you know, things get too crazy and too rivalrous and people are um, uh, fighting too much over scarce resources, they kind of point to a third
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thing, the scapegoat, and they pin all of their anger, anxieties, and stuff onto 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
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And um, and it it bonds them together, but I felt like that was still pretty limiting even for the world that we're in today um, cuz, you know, Girard didn't live to see what was happening today on the internet.
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Um, and I think some his assumptions are operating on the idea of like, you know, there being more of a shared public narrative or a shared shared sense of context among people.
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Um, 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?
7:33
It it it's turn someone into a martyr, right?
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And then it's um, so it helps cement the identities of these smaller tribes, and then they, you know, become even more polarized against each other.
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Uh 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.
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Um and so, yeah, that's I think I found more answers by thinking about antinomies, 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.
8:06
Yeah, and you use the example of Curtis Yarvin, right?
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Who wrote Unqualified Reservations.
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He had some, uh what we might call a little bit outside the Overton window ideas.
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For example, democracy doesn't work.
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I I once met kind of a what I described him There's a on my honeymoon, this is 1982.
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He was a British no you know, aristo, uh and I stayed at his house in uh in Ireland, and I was very offended because like it was all, you know, you democracy doesn't work, and I'm like, well, wait wait wait a second.
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And so there's a picture of me in the bedroom they gave us like this.
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Because I thought the guy was a fascist.
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And, you know, he was basically he wasn't fascist, he was a monarchist more than anything else.
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Uh but in in a similar fashion, uh Yarvin maybe had some of those more controversial ideas, and basically you lay out what happened, right? He became a scapegoat.
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Uh he was invited to a conference, uh a software conference, uh got disinvited because of his views on race and intelligence, etc.
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That immediately made me think of Charles Murray, who I'm sure you're familiar with.
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Who was such an academic, he didn't kind of think, "Huh, I wonder if I write this deeply academic book and filled in academic uh you know, word salads.
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I wonder if it might be a problem if I call out people by their racial group.
9:46
Nah, that's not going to be a problem. Go ahead and publish.
9:48
I think he's he's still canceling for all I care.
9:52
But but take us through what happened with Yarvin.
9:55
I cuz I I think it's a good I example of your thesis of somebody who was definitely espousing ideas that were anti-memetic at least at the time.
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Uh his becoming a scapegoat by being canceled and being disinvited, but then something else happened.
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The Streisand effect happened.
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Suddenly like, who is this guy?
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Why are people saying don't read it?
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It's like one of my ideas about if I I really do I think it was Abby Hoffman or one of the Yippies wrote a book called Steal This Book.
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I I I want to write a book that says, "Under no circumstances read this book."
10:39
But if you could expand on that here a little bit because I I think it fits nicely with the idea. Yeah.
10:45
Um So I think Curtis's writing was also the product of good timing.
10:49
So he was or is a software engineer who had been working on this project that was fairly obscure and hard to for most people to parse.
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Um but it was around sort of creating this separate operating system where people could sort of um exist in their own independent version of the web from from the bottom up.
11:12
Um and he spent a long time sort of dwelling 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.
11:24
And this actually started before I keep saying sort of like things started getting weird.
11:31
I'm sure um 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 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.
11:44
It was sort of just random internet blogger, right?
11:46
Um and so he wanted to speak at this software conference in the late late 2010s and someone had discovered his his writings and that some of his views were uh let's say controversial and not the kinds of things that you want to be supporting on stage and and so they removed him as a speaker and this was this was sort of his cancellation moment and and and from from that point it seems sort of like he was never going to hit the mainstream, right?
12:16
And but it gave him a little bit of this flashiness to to people that were kind of curious like, you know, why can't he speak at the conference?
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And so everyone started rushing to his blog to see like what did he write that was so bad?
12:26
And along the way you know, the the remarks that he was specifically canceled for as far as I can tell were actually, you know, sort of this like uh they were they were not really at the point of the blog.
12:39
The blog was actually much more about, you know, political theory and yeah, Curtis is a monarchist and so questioning whether democracy is good 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 um you know, like we're living in this unprecedented time, how did this happen?
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And looking for some sort of working explanation of why is the world the way it is right now?
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And Curtis's blog kind of provided that answer.
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Um and so a lot of people even though he was still canceled and people were not really allowed to say his name in public um people were reading his blog, they were you know, thinking about his ideas and talking about them, but only in very small trusted contexts.
13:23
Um I I stumbled into it by accident because I ended up um uh giving a talk at a conference um associated with this software project.
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I had no idea what the background was.
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And again, it was one of these things that happened where a friend is just sort of like, "Hey, do you know who this this guy is?"
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And you know, shares his work and I go, "Oh, this is interesting."
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And then you kind of once you see it, then you start having all these little conversations in private with people about his his writing.
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And I had no idea that you know, so many people around me had been also reading his work and not talking about it.
13:54
Um, and from there you it starts to sort of like bubble up.
13:56
And now now I think he has completed the full arc of going from obscure to cancel to mainstream to now uh uh Scott Alexander had a a piece where he said um Moldbug sold out.
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That that was his Curtis's pseudonym.
14:11
So he you know, he calls him a sellout.
14:13
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 the few small scenes.
14:22
So definitely a lot of people in tech were talking about his work.
14:26
Um, but there was the sort of um Dime Square phenomenon during the pandemic.
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Uh there was this New York sort of um intellectual scene, I guess, that's uh had sort of brought Curtis's ideas into the fold.
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And then from there it bubbled up into um he did an appearance on Tucker Carlson.
14:42
So then he's a little bit more mainstream.
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Then he did got the New York Times profile.
14:46
And then and then now he's the sellout, right?
14:48
So um yeah, you can see how ideas can go from being you know, super isolated, can't talk about it at all, really heavy taboo to once you start forming little clumps of allies, uh it can yeah, sort of all those little clumps can come together and and push someone into the mainstream.
15:04
Yeah, um and what fascinates me there is a couple of things.
15:07
Uh the first is you have these multiple really dense networks, but they're not connected to each other, right?
15:14
And if you 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.
15:27
The author Howard Bloom had a great analogy for this where he talks about, you know, you can take 5 lb of salt, put it in a big beaker, boil the water till the salt is no longer visible, right?
15:40
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.
15:48
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.
15:59
And I always liked that metaphor because it it is it it the connection here is sometimes a lot of people I just had Todd Rose on.
16:13
He's currently on this week's he wrote collective illusions.
16:16
Where where you can have people who widely share a privately held belief, but they don't think anyone else believes it.
16:24
And so, they keep their mouths shut, they self-censor until somebody comes and says it publicly.
16:32
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.
16:45
And and one of the things I recall you mentioning was that it kind of takes before the redemptive arc, right?
16:57
Where where you can either call him a sellout or now getting a 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?
17:11
There's high signaling costs there. Like, what? You you like that guy?"
17:18
And then suddenly you are perceived as no longer a member of the in-group.
17:23
Um 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.
17:41
I'm old, so I had one of the original uh CompuServe accounts.
17:47
So they called them SIGs, special interest groups. And that's all it was.
17:52
They were SIGs, and you would gain entry by, you know, showing your bonafides.
17:58
And like they were all over the place, but each was very small, and you very rarely saw any cross-pollination uh between the various SIGs.
18:08
Me being a glutton for punishment, I joined a quite a few of them.
18:12
Um 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.
18:22
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."
18:33
And then there was an event where like all of a sudden all of these disparate SIGs, right?
18:41
Like on philosophy one of them was, one was on nation states, a third was on the international economy, etc.
18:49
Um and it kind of coalesced.
18:49
But that's kind of that uh that infers a guerrilla-style information war.
18:56
Talk a little bit about that phase.
19:00
I'm going to say were were you the information guerrilla warrior in that case?
19:05
Sowing the discord across the internet.
19:08
Well, I'm I'm I I I'm a huge believer in the holy fool or the court jester.
19:13
Um kind of the outsider who gets to speak truth without losing his or her head.
19:18
Um and I wasn't worried about I did not see myself that way at the time by the way. But it fits, right?
19:26
Like if you're trying to keep something to be not talked about I in other words anti-memetic, right?
19:33
Uh you can do hard tactics, make it illegal, make it um 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.
19:59
So Alexander Pope wrote the following and I thought I thought that this was kind of a perfect illustration of the guerrilla tactic.
20:08
Uh Alexander Pope for those who don't know was a famous author.
20:10
Um and here's what he wrote kind of little right around the Enlightenment period, right?
20:20
So all nature is but art unknown to thee.
20:23
All chance direction which thou cannot see.
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All discord harmony not understood.
20:30
All and then he put a weasel word in here cuz he didn't want to get burned at the stake.
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All partial evil universal good.
20:42
And in spite of pride in erring's reason's spite one truth is clear whatever is is right. Okay.
20:52
That's a daring statement to make on that side.
20:55
Your head explodes if you are one of his contemporaries, right?
20:57
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?
21:08
And of course, we had Voltaire with his character Pangloss, all is right in the best of all possible worlds, etc.
21:17
But, the the idea that a lot of this phase here is in kind of a guerrilla phase.
21:26
You also include a helpful diagram, which looks at high versus low impact memes and anti-memes.
21:35
And you've got the super memes on the upper right, high impact, very viral, you know, things like wars, climate change, etc.
21:44
You've got the anti-memes on the left, which is not highly viral, things like taboos, uncomfortable truths.
21:50
They're going to have a low transfer rate.
21:55
How 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?
22:09
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 um that kind of characterization.
22:18
So, I think, you know, ideas are to some extent memetic, anti-memetic, etc. by their nature.
22:26
So, with 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?
22:35
And there's some ideas that will spread very very easily because they're just not that consequential.
22:42
And those are that's what I I sort of think of it as the bucket of memes.
22:46
Memes in aggregate can have um you know, huge social impact because they spread so easily, they can kind of just rip through a network.
22:52
But if you think about like 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 even sent it.
23:03
Um all these sort of social norms that are mimetic like shaking someone's hand or greeting them.
23:07
Um these are they don't take up that much head space.
23:09
Um so there's no way to really turn something that's small into a supermeme for example.
23:15
Um Uh the the class of supermeme that I talk about are well let's start with the antimemes.
23:21
So antimemes are um different from memes in that they don't spread because they are perceived to be so highly consequential.
23:28
So we kind of hold on to them or we discard 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.
23:37
Um and so yeah this is where um to boost come into the play, right?
23:41
Like everyone knows what the truth is but no one wants to say it out loud because you might have personal consequences for yourself.
23:45
Um it could also just totally upend your life as you know it and so you kind of hold on to it.
23:51
Um supermemes are this other sort of strange third phenomenon phenomenon that have the qualities of both where um they are both highly consequential but also highly transmissible.
24:00
Um and so yeah some of the examples I use are um things that have tend to have a little bit of like a doomsday quality to them or um uh the characteristics around them are uh that they you know they appeal to our our personal values somehow they um they're kind of non-specific in a way but also perceived to be super high impact.
24:21
Um so things like the climate crisis um existential risks from from AI um uh fear of uh yeah just sort of like fear fear of the unknown the future.
24:31
Um and you can and today I I I think historically war sort of served that function as a unifying supermeme for people to rally around.
24:40
Um and today we have uh in in sort of now that we're we're kind of um organized more around culture wars we have lots of different supermemes that are um uh that people can sort of pledge their allegiance to in the same way they you pledge their allegiance to to a war Um and so you have lots of these different competing talent ecosystems and competitions for mind share.
25:02
I don't think every anti-meme can become a supermeme, but they might be able to sort of glom onto an existing ecosystem.
25:11
So, one example I talk about is nuclear energy and how for a really long time it was you know absolutely taboo to to even consider whether it might be good to develop it.
25:24
And it took decades to sort of you know flip the opinion on that and now I think we're in this a phase where I mean even Germany has announced their support for nuclear energy.
25:35
So, uh uh we're in a very different place now.
25:39
It's not really that anything changed, it's just that our opinions towards it changed.
25:43
And I think having that sort of latch into maybe like the climate crisis as a supermeme helps heighten the the urgency and the desire to sort of maybe revisit it or something.
25:55
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 to have a conference in Germany that was pro-nuclear. Oh, that's awesome.
26:12
And uh and apparently it went very well.
26:15
Kind of like that salt salt molecule and suddenly you see all of the salt that's actually there.
26:20
It turned out that the most vocal people who opposed any kind of nuclear solution or as he would rebrand it elemental energy were just the loudest voices, right?
26:36
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 and you kind of lose sight of what Wait a minute.
26:57
Why Why Why were we against this in the first place?
27:01
And then you kind of do your homework and you see and if you compare disasters like the scale of disasters caused by coal as an example, uh which Germany was burning because their power needs were not being met, uh versus uh nuclear, like rationally, you should be willing to at least consider it.
27:24
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.
27:29
And you And you have kind of a memeplex where you you say, you know, it kind of goes from ideas or an ideology that that gain a community, and then the community itself kind of forms an agenda, but then it needs capital, right?
27:45
And I guess that was us with Mark um for the idea of the conference in Germany.
27:54
But I kind of think those are all necessary but not sufficient.
27:59
Like before we started to formally record, I told you that we're really really interesting interested in workflows that could um have super high R naughts for uh spreadability and virality of memes because memes can also be met you know, marketing met uh ideas.
28:19
They can be a variety of things.
28:21
And if you understand, you got to start looking at social diffusion models, right?
28:26
And memetic fitness tests.
28:29
The narrative resonance, is it an emotional payload or moral foundation?
28:34
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 uh to get, but also the the idea of compression, right?
28:50
I'm fascinated by compression because like why do we have maxims?
28:56
We have maxims because these were ideas that kept being repeated down through time, right?
29:02
You you often see the people eat what your grandmother ate and you'll be fine, right?
29:09
Um but compression is really really important because if you've got a really clean moral or other impulse, you know, liberty, fairness, etc.
29:23
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 a protest chant.
29:40
We must, we must, you know, and they make use of repetition.
29:48
Looking at it through this lens, they seem highly engineered even though they probably weren't or at least originally, right?
29:56
And all of that kind of goes into the if if you are trying to break through a crowded feed, the the ones that are visually and verbally the most distinct, right?
30:06
The like don't mess with Texas.
30:11
There's a really funny story how that came about. It was iterative.
30:15
It was So, it was an anti-littering campaign in for Texas because Texans used to be slobs and because it's such so big, right?
30:27
Like they'd be driving along in their truck and they'd finish their McDonald's and just throw it out the window.
30:35
And so they hired an ad firm to try to get people to stop doing that, right?
30:41
And and so they all of the attempts were, you know, the ones where they lectured them and all that, zero. Zero virality.
30:49
Like nobody paid it, you know, it's like, whatever, whatever.
30:51
And then the guy who finally figured it out heard uh a phrase like, clean up that mess.
31:01
Texans refer to litter and other garbage as mess, a mess.
31:08
And he's like, ooh, wait a minute.
31:11
Because I can link that to Texans na- you know, you know the old joke, Texan who went to Harvard doesn't know which to mention first.
31:18
Uh Texans are very proud to be for the for the most part to be from Texas.
31:24
And so he's like, how about don't mess with Texas?
31:31
And suddenly it just exploded.
31:31
It turned into bumper stickers.
31:34
They didn't realize that his underlying message was don't litter.
31:39
But that became a secondary effect.
31:41
The rate of litter plunged as the the uh bumper stickers and people saying it Bu- George Bush Ge- W George W Bush used it as one of his slogans, don't mess with Texas.
31:55
But it was one of those mind worms, right?
32:00
The that that just got drilled in there.
32:04
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.
32:21
Um and then when I think it's Go.
32:23
I think it's it's not just um 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?
32:31
So, a lot of these um campaigns that are were engineered for or sort of like national problems or spread the Texas one is a really good example where you know it's that that message only really worked for the Texas quote unquote network specifically, right?
32:46
It wouldn't have worked in a a different state.
32:49
And I think now if we think about our the networks that we where we want a message to spread, we don't it's it's a little bit harder to reach sort of you know the public narrative is so fragmented and we don't there isn't really just one place you can blast it anymore and kind of let it take off.
33:03
anymore and kind of let it take off. Um 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
33:17
and raise the message to a place of sort of more public national prominence but yeah it feels like it's a slightly different strategy or approach today that's required just because people are having are much more gravitated towards their their dense networks than they are towards the having allegiance to some sort of like broader public narrative. I I was having a conversation with my
33:37
I I was having a conversation with my friend Rory Sutherland who wrote the book about alchemy. He's a marketing guru.
33:47
And he sort of just let it slip that really that Christianity was a a subsidiary religion of Judaism.
33:56
And we were on a podcast and and we just started kind of joking about it.
34:01
And then I kind of thought hey what if we looked at Paul of Tarsus, you know Saint Paul, right?
34:09
As the ultimate memetic engineer.
34:12
And and so I started going down that road, you know Judaism is the parent brand, Christianity is the ultra ultra viral spin-off brand that got to be viral because it removed all the friction that Judaism had.
34:28
Judaism probably didn't spread because like it had huge barriers to entry.
34:31
You had to have be born of a Jewish mother, you had to be circumcised, you had to have a special diet.
34:38
There were lots of rules, right?
34:40
And and Paul came in and was like, "No. No, no, no, no, no.
34:43
All you need is faith in Christ. That's what you need."
34:48
So so he created a huge total addressable market, whereas Judaism just didn't have that, right?
34:55
His little spin-off, he forked Judaism, basically.
35:00
And and was like, "Hey, doesn't matter what your earlier gods were? We don't care.
35:05
Doesn't matter where you're from? We don't care.
35:07
We don't care what tribe or tribal religion or identity that you embrace or what sex you are?
35:13
Christ is You just follow Christ. Hey, you're a member. Come on in."
35:20
And and then as I continued down the road, it was like he leveraged existing infrastructures, right?
35:27
So in like temples are expensive.
35:31
And if you're if you want to be a proto-religion and you want temples, that's going to take you like 10 years, right?
35:36
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?
35:52
Hey, that sounds kind of nice.
35:54
Kind of like I don't have to do all this other stuff and I can still be a holy guy?
35:59
Yeah, I I I like what you're selling me here, Paul.
36:01
And so by using the synagogues, he had a installed base where he could go to.
36:09
And then he standardized the API API layer by writing in Greek, which was the lingua franca of the Roman Empire.
36:20
And then he also took advantage of things like the fact that he was a Roman citizen.
36:25
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.
36:33
But, if you're a Roman citizen, you have the right to due process, you have all of these things, right?
36:40
And so, like this we when when you start going down this rabbit hole, you can see that some of the like world's biggest religions are really great examples of memetic uh manipulation.
36:55
And like I'm going to try to figure something out.
36:59
I'm maybe I'll do I don't know a Twitter thread on how Paul was the the ultimate memer. Um Yes.
37:06
I think that's Yeah, there's definitely some truth to that.
37:10
But, I also think that you need probably humor.
37:12
I think humor Mark Twain said, "Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand."
37:19
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."
37:25
And and that brings us to kind of the idea of the truth tellers, the court jester, the holy fool in uh Russian uh history.
37:33
You know, the guy who could say, "Hey, emperor, you are buck naked, man."
37:39
And he could do it because he was an outcast, yeah, you know, not really part of the in circle, etc.
37:47
And you know, along comes the Enlightenment, and uh-oh, like the world before the Enlightenment, right, was ruled by religion.
37:54
And all of the answers were to whatever question you had because God did it or God wants it that way, right?
38:02
And so, then the Enlightenment comes along and says, "Actually," and you know, we had all of those things where Galileo, "Nevertheless, it moves," etc. , etc. And they break through.
38:17
And do you see the ability, given our very fractal world of today.
38:23
Do you do you like Can it to to change track for a minute, but are the Beatles possible anymore?
38:36
Um By that I mean a group that everybody knows who they are.
38:41
A certain generation knows every lyric that they have.
38:44
I like I don't in our existing world, I don't know that that works anymore. Probably not. At least not right now.
38:51
I don't know about anymore.
38:53
Maybe we'll have some swing in a different direction that I can't see right now, but in the current world it seems um less.
39:02
I mean, we still have iconic musicians that are going to you know take the question literally like Taylor Swift might be a like a Beatles level of fame today.
39:09
Um 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 cuz I think maybe for at least 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.
39:31
And now it's entirely possible to have whatever fame means to you or um be famous within you know certain smaller networks um and without having to go all the way, right?
39:45
Um and that was kind of the lesson of uh first wave of social media of just having the the thousand true fans.
39:51
Don't um yeah, it doesn't it doesn't matter so much whether everyone is talking about you.
39:56
It matters whether the people that you respect or the people that you want to um pay attention to your stuff or are listening to you.
40:05
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 uh examples of both Girardian mimetic with an I, right?
40:16
And Dawkins meme with an E.
40:21
Um and man, like you see it everywhere.
40:24
So for example, Babylonia in ancient Mesopotamia, like Babylonia was not always the top dog there. Right?
40:32
Like as a matter of fact, they were one of the lesser city-states.
40:34
And it actually was because their god, uh Marduk, was a puny god.
40:40
He was a regional storm god, you know, essentially.
40:46
And so they put their heads together and they're like, "You know, if we make Marduk the top god, then we will be the top city by just extension."
40:55
And so they created a brand new myth for him.
41:00
And they had him slay uh the uh primordial uh 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.
41:15
And presto chango, Babylonia becomes the top dog in the Mesopotamian uh power structure.
41:23
Like these memes are are like can be weapons of mass destruction and or creation, right?
41:34
Like if if you 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.
41:54
I mean, what And then of course the example of Paul. What else can you do?
41:58
And what other ideas can spread this way?
42:02
One of the arguments I'm making in the book is that, you know, you can tell a history of memes throughout Yeah, I mean, you know, stretching as far back as ancient history.
42:11
Um but throughout all of that I think the story of antinomians has also been there, present, and just sort of lurking in the background, right?
42:18
So, there's a role for antinomians in religion, there's a role for antinomians in ancient civilizations, and you know, we you mentioned a little bit of that that truth-teller role where um uh the idea of, you know, sort of emperor has no clothes, right?
42:32
And there's there's always been a role like that, I think, throughout history.
42:35
There's always been um sacred taboo type knowledge that uh society is collectively suppressing, and we the I think one of the roles of um religious figures or religious leaders can be to help shepherd some of that secret knowledge into the light.
42:51
Um so, if you think about uh confessional booths where um you know, you might be holding on to some 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 the priest about it.
43:05
And we've sort of created that formal structure for you to take this thing that is antimedic to yourself.
43:11
Um you know, it's an it's a really interesting idea, it's something very very compelling or an interesting, you know, secret or story or something that you're feeling about yourself.
43:19
Something that you're is really taking up your mind share about that um it refuses to spread.
43:23
Um and you can go to this, you know, clearly defined place and uh and go and uh unload it onto someone else.
43:29
Um secular version of that might be a therapist.
43:34
Um and then I think even, you know, political leaders uh that would use soothsayers or oracles and things like that to um say something that honestly probably everyone else wanted to be able to say, but they can't say it because, yeah, you 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.
43:51
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.
44:03
Uh and how do we how do we bring them to light?
44:05
How do you bring them into the the circulation of ideas?
44:09
And that brings in where traditionally at least institutions like the government, the church, academia, etc.
44:18
served as the the sifters or what's allowed into the Overton window and and what is not. What's taboo, right? And and what is not.
44:32
And the institutions are not having a good run right now.
44:38
Like if you look at trust in and you fill in the blank.
44:43
Trust in the government, trust in the military, trust in banks, trust in science, trust in all of these things.
44:51
Like they're literally collapsing.
44:54
And 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?
45:05
That's why you had mass production, right?
45:07
If you do a a typical bell curve, 68.
45:12
5% are within one standard deviation of the median, right?
45:21
And so if you're capitalist or a TV show producer, what are you going to do?
45:27
You're going to try to make something that appeals to that 68. 5%, right?
45:34
And that is the world most of us grew up in.
45:37
And and yet I don't think we're in that world anymore.
45:40
I think we are in a more Mandelbrot fractal normal distribution pattern.
45:45
Fractal is a much narrower peak in the distribution with super long tails.
45:55
And it's in the tails where all the interesting stuff is, at least according to me.
46:00
But Yeah, I think Yeah, go ahead.
46:02
I think it's where I 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 they've been around for a while, but I don't think it really entered, you know, household name level status as a term until the the internet and and the yeah, 2000s.
46:25
And then yeah, more like the 2010s and so, you know, it took 30 years for for anyone to even use the term meme and then kind of start applying it to everything in our everyday life.
46:34
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.
46:43
long time. You can find examples of that sort of memetic behavior throughout, you know, the entirety of human civilization and similarly with the anti-meme or they think, you know, the concept has existed just as long as memes and maybe people
46:56
started talking about or thinking about it in, you know, 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 is no longer really quite true. And so
47:12
And so now is a really interesting time to say, "Okay, we are in this weirdly stabilized world where uh we need a new sort of explanatory term or theory to describe this this all these different dynamics around us that memes or the memetic desire or any of these sort of related concepts just don't quite get us all the way there.
47:34
And so yeah, I think that now now is a a really good time to start thinking about them, yeah, what else is going on and how else are ideas behaving in ways that maybe we couldn't fully see before just because um everything was not quite as split apart as it is right now.
47:50
And I and I think that people are just more tuned in, right, to this than they 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?
48:02
And people are retreating to their private walled gardens.
48:07
Um, but I also think of like uh, you know, when we're talking about the memeplex and and memes that are designed to go viral and and anti-memes that are designed not to, right?
48:17
Or not designed, but end up not going viral.
48:23
It One of the things I've thought a lot about is because as I kind of watched all these various mind viruses happening during, um, the pandemic and specifically kind of during the lockdown.
48:37
I was really shocked by how quickly places that I would have never believed would, you know, kind of immediately comply complied.
48:48
Like, for example, uh, Australia.
48:50
I love Australians and I love Australia. Been there many times. Same with New Zealand.
48:54
I would have thought Australia would have been the last place where draconian measures would be enforced. And yet, they were.
49:04
And and it made me start kind of thinking about we should probably try to come up with a way to inoculate people against memes.
49:14
And, uh, you know, kind of mental hygiene came to the top of my thought process as I watched like the meme, right?
49:26
You're going to die if you go outside, if you don't have a mask on, etc.
49:29
Uh, just like take a lot of uh, real estate in people's neural real estate, uh, available.
49:42
And that meant that kind of led me to like hmm, I wonder if there is a way to engineer uh a meme to either inoculate people on the things that you don't want them to be um memetically transferring uh or you know, have it go contagion, right?
50:06
Have a super high R naught for that particular meme.
50:11
And you start like looking at things like you know, the the the brand, if you will, of the people trying to spread the meme.
50:21
I always joked about the World Economic Forum.
50:23
I don't know if you're familiar with them. Yeah.
50:27
Uh but I like I teased them relentlessly on social media because, you know, they had their build back better and and, you know, they it's not it's 2030, uh you own nothing and you're happy.
50:40
And like it was the most tone-deaf campaign I had ever seen.
50:45
It was backed by tons of money.
50:50
There was I mean, literally, how in the world could that fail?
50:54
Well, I think if you understand memetics and how memes transfer, they they were not they were appealing already to their own in-group, basically, right?
51:03
So, they were appealing to traditional legacy media, right?
51:08
Not what people were tuning into, right?
51:11
And and uh elitists talk about I mean, they the mistakes made were are kind of legendary, the way I look at it.
51:19
It's like, "We're going to have a full week global conference on on global warming."
51:28
And we're all going to fly our Gulfstream fives into Davos to do that.
51:34
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 you talking about, Willis? You're crazy." Right?
51:50
And they conform to a lot of the stereotypes as well.
51:55
So, like if you were going to try to make something that currently resides in as an anti-meme, right?
52:01
If you were going to try to design a way to turn that into a viral meme, how would you go about it?
52:13
I think the the question that um I'm curious about just from what what you said was uh you know, how do we inoculate people against memes more broadly or if if memetic warfare is sort of the the factor way of behaving and thinking right now, how do you start to inject some good memes into there or um which kind of has two two possible paths.
52:34
Like there's there's one where you fight memes with other memes.
52:36
So, you say, "Okay, these memes are let's say not good for you or we think they're not good for you."
52:42
And um we're passing a judgment there.
52:43
Um so, let's you know, put some good memes in the bloodstream and so, you'll just your head will just kind of snap and you'll pay attention to those instead.
52:50
Um that's one way to protect people against sort of like bad memes or undesirable memes.
52:55
Um and the other question is sort of how do you become more resistant to memes more generally.
53:01
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 uh tell you where to turn your head, uh how do you sort of decide where you want to turn your own head.
53:15
Um and I think that's a much more complicated question.
53:19
Um and I uh I have a whole whole chapter in the book where I talk about just sort of the value of um our attention as you know, if you think about ideas spreading through a network, they spread node by node, right?
53:32
And each node is just the person.
53:34
And so, each of us is responsible in the sense of we are we are the gatekeeper or if you zoom all the way into like you know, how is an idea spreading through a Each of us is the one who says you come across a new idea and you decide, what do I do with this, right?
53:46
And so there is some level of, I guess, um personal responsibility around when I receive the 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 the
53:58
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 a race to the bottom where you just sort of um everyone is just sort of competing to for the the flashiest thing to grab your attention. Um but also we have some
54:11
Um but also we have some ability to decide, I'm actually just going to, you know, when when the flashy idea comes my way, maybe I can be a little bit more thoughtful about it.
54:23
Um I think the problem is that, you know, not everyone has or wants to take that level of of personal responsibility.
54:28
So I actually think of this question around sort of meme inoculation as um closer to a a public health problem where we think about something like we um nutrition or how do you ensure that people eat healthy.
54:39
Uh there's you know, it comes down to similar kind of question where on the one hand you could always just say, well, take, you know, take personal responsibility for your diet.
54:49
Um you know, all the answers are out there.
54:51
It's not that, you know, it's not that it's unknowable how to eat healthy.
54:54
It's just that a lot of people choose not to do it.
54:56
Um and then the the flip side of it is, well, some people are just not going to do it and they're, you know, um the effects of some people choosing not to eat healthy or not even choosing for whatever reason they're not eating healthy, um those impact the rest of the public.
55:11
So that's why it's a public health problem.
55:12
So then the question becomes, how do you design policies that um help people uh make the right choices without also infringing on other people's um ability to choose and have, you know, the freedom to do what they want.
55:23
Um and I actually think of that thing as kind of a interesting twist in the story, right?
55:29
If we're if we're just looking at a nutrition, um where we ended up coming up with something to take a sort of take away the burden of personal responsibility away where it's it's no longer difficult to choose to eat healthy because you can take something that makes you not want to eat healthy anymore.
55:46
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.
55:56
So, I don't I don't know what the equivalent of like Ozempic for um meme inoculation would be, but uh I think this is sort of the battle around social media, right?
56:02
Is you have on the one hand people saying, "Well, I you know, we should create policies to hold um social platforms responsible as the sort of arbiters of how information spreads."
56:12
Um these are the places that are where we're getting most of our information and um if they just had better content moderation policies, then uh you know, our our information wouldn't uh be harming people.
56:23
And that's sort of, you know, one way of looking at it is a little bit um uh some people would say a little bit draconian or it's just, you know, it's also just an impossible task.
56:31
Like no one can come up with the perfect content moderation policy that solves all problems.
56:36
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, uh exercise a little bit more skepticism when ideas come my way.
56:49
Yeah, that works in practice, but it's a little, you know, it's hard to enforce that among everyone to do.
56:52
And so, yeah, what is that option where somehow people don't even people can exercise personal responsibility without having to think about it too much.
57:01
I don't know, but Yeah, and uh like that's the perennial question.
57:07
Uh like I I firmly believe that um you know, the hard way doesn't work.
57:12
Um I think that um you know, if you really do want kids to do drugs, tell them not to do drugs authoritatively.
57:23
Uh you know, there's Chris Buckley wrote a funny book called Thank You for Smoking in which he's a he one of the characters is a lobbyist for the tobacco industry and the the 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.
57:54
Because he knows that teenagers, you know, you need new smokers cuz the old ones are dying off of lung cancer and heart disease.
58:02
So, you know, in in the vision of the in of his humorous book, the lobbyist wants that to happen and so he's pretending, "You can't make us do that."
58:14
Meaning meanwhile, of course, that's exactly what he wants.
58:17
Make it forbidden, right?
58:19
I mean, let's go back to Adam and Eve. What was forbidden?
58:21
What do we the apple of knowledge?
58:24
So, if if you really really want to get somebody to do something, especially a young person, forbid them from doing it. Uh Yeah.
58:34
And and and tell them that it's no good.
58:37
But I also think that gets back to the whole idea of salience.
58:41
Uh you know, the champion of that particular idea needs coherence and discipline, right?
58:46
The message discipline of successful memes, like it kind of self-forms like any complex adaptive system.
58:55
It emerges from the bottom.
58:57
I mean, one of the definitions of a successful meme is that its creator loses control of it.
59:02
But if you actually watch those memes develop, what you also see is compression, compression, compression, right?
59:11
Okay, boomer being kind of a classic compression of a meme that was everywhere, right?
59:19
And it didn't really start out that way.
59:22
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 obvious.
59:30
You didn't have a signal or a handle that people could grab on to, right?
59:36
And and human OS loves to be certain, right?
59:39
Even though I always argue like only the madman is absolutely sure.
59:47
Absolute certainty is a real, in my opinion, liability if you want to think creatively.
59:51
Not not an advantage and yet your average person out there wants certainty.
59:58
Why do you think they always elect the politician that seems the most certain, right?
1:00:02
That's how you get demagoguery you know, demagoguery and all of that and you know, it's going to be just this easy, right?
1:00:08
And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, right?
1:00:14
Uh back in the inflationary 1970s uh President Ford rather foolishly put together a campaign that was WIN, which was an acronym for Whip Inflation Now.
1:00:28
And you know, they did buttons and they did all of these totems, right?
1:00:30
That they hoped people would latch on to.
1:00:33
But it it didn't work because there was no authenticity feeling there. It was like, what?
1:00:41
Wha- How am I supposed to How am I supposed to do that, right?
1:00:44
supposed to do that, right? So the role of the uh the truth teller can be very useful because it's sort of, you know, when you're when you're locked into this memetic warfare where it feels like everyone has an agenda, everyone is trying to get you to believe a thing or to serve their own purposes, um having
1:01:00
this sort of, you know, strange outsider come along, the the trickster, the clown, the fool, whatever, uh someone who is just sort of wandering in and saying the emperor has no clothes, um that can only come from someone that you perceive as having no agenda and being kind of an outsider cuz otherwise, yeah, why why would you believe it, right? Yeah, exactly. And you know, if you try Yeah, exactly.
1:01:18
And you know, if you try to kind of do a deep dive, I I read a piece uh years ago that I found really interesting and kind of try to build on it.
1:01:28
If you're trying to like literally understand how to build the algorithms, right?
1:01:32
That deliver the the meme, which is the emotional load or the political load or whatever you want.
1:01:41
Like and and the thing that I read took four very disparate people.
1:01:48
Andre Kolmogorov, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, right?
1:01:54
So, Claude Shannon information theory gives you Shannon maintains that information is novel. It's what's new, right?
1:02:04
And so, Shannon would argue that a political speech has contains zero information because there's nothing new in it and there's no novelty to it.
1:02:12
And but that if you're looking at it in a sense of trying to engineer a viral meme, that gives you a metric, right?
1:02:24
So, is it novel or a take on something old but in a new way that makes it people take notice, right?
1:02:33
In a very noisy field, which is what social media and the internet really are, right?
1:02:38
They're highly this trying to find the signal to noise gets harder and harder and harder cuz there's more and more noise.
1:02:45
Well, if you plan apply Shannon, right?
1:02:47
And information theory, it gives you a metric for the meme, right?
1:02:51
So, is that meme going to have enough oomph, enough of that emotional payload to overcome the noise, to defeat the noise?
1:03:01
Because you can have the best meme in the world if it doesn't have that oomph.
1:03:05
You're not going you're going to fail on the Shannon metric.
1:03:08
It's not going to break through the noise.
1:03:10
And then Andre came up with like the shortest program of the output of a string is determines the algorithmic complexity.
1:03:22
You got to compress it so that the memetic fitness is kind of low compressed low complexity, right? Slogans, melodies.
1:03:30
Like don't mess with Texas be another one, right?
1:03:34
And then Kurt Gödel 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.
1:03:50
And then Turing comes in basically he he posited that humans are all universal machines.
1:03:57
In other words, our brains can execute any computable description.
1:04:00
And he he To Turing, he didn't wouldn't care if it was a human mind, computer, or a cell, right?
1:04:10
Anything that has a substrate that can process that information can literally help the virality of that meme.
1:04:19
And so, you know, just like chain letters, you're too young.
1:04:22
But back in the day Oh, you Do you really remember chain letters? I do. Yes.
1:04:31
So, great early example of a very effective memetic payload, right?
1:04:35
If If you don't forward this letter, you know, death and destruction will come your way.
1:04:44
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.
1:04:51
actually maybe it's the original super meme because that's that's you know, that that fear that sort of doomsday fear of if you don't pay attention to this super meme, then something terrible is going to happen in the future.
1:05:02
If you don't pay attention to the climate crisis, if you don't pay attention to the existential AI risk or whatever.
1:05:08
And so you're just sort of like, well, I don't know if it's It's or not, but I better I better pay attention cuz I don't want to be wrong. I agree.
1:05:13
And, you know, I think that humans are emotional creatures that also think and reason.
1:05:19
We are not thinking reasoning creatures who also have emotions.
1:05:23
I think we are ruled by our emotions for the most part, and a lot of us try to pretend like we're not.
1:05:28
And I think that the king or queen of all human emotions is fear.
1:05:35
Specifically fear of novel things.
1:05:39
That's why the COVID scare works so well in my opinion.
1:05:44
It was because it was a novel danger that humans didn't know anything about.
1:05:50
Well, they they knew about pandemics and viruses, but this had a particular picture. It was concrete. It was deadly.
1:06:00
You saw all of those uh viral videos that China released.
1:06:03
My thesis was most of those were fake videos because they were worried about people saying, "Hey, wait a minute.
1:06:10
Why are they calling this the Wuhan virus?
1:06:12
Why why what's what's in Wuhan right now?"
1:06:15
Um and and so, but the point is novel fear, you can really focus people's minds.
1:06:24
And and so Sorry, the um the underlying mechanic in anti-memes as well is that sort of fear of the consequences to yourself or to another worker if you spread it, and so um yeah, wanting to hold on to it because you're afraid and or what the consequences might be.
1:06:41
But specifically again about about your book and and the idea of the anti-meme, um do do do you see this becoming a more formalized area of study?
1:06:52
And like like we've been talking a lot about at least people like me are really interested in being able to build uh algorithmically I ideas that you want to champion and get across, well, it's going to really certainly be helpful if they are memetically tasty and like just irresistible.
1:07:17
And so it becomes kind of an engineering problem in many respects, but then also the opposite of that is true in my opinion.
1:07:23
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?
1:07:32
Like and we have examples of it throughout history, burning witches, you know, the bonfire of the vanities, uh you know, with the priest who went to Florence and and basically he he he was preaching the anti-meme because during the Renaissance, right?
1:07:49
You had the Medici, you had all this great art, you had all these amazing things going on, and then the church came sent one of their killer anti-memetic guys in uh to, you know, tell the residents of Florence the these are vanities.
1:08:04
You won't get into heaven, fear, right?
1:08:06
You won't get into heaven if you've got these vanities, you got to burn them.
1:08:11
And that 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.
1:08:24
Through fear of consequences, etc.
1:08:24
So I definitely think it would be a very good thing if we could somehow immunize people from memetic contagion, right?
1:08:37
Because as you know, like this is just getting into the common vernacular now.
1:08:43
And the book that I showed you earlier, Viruses of the Mind, you know, cultural leg of adoption is a real thing, right? He wrote this in 1997.
1:08:56
And Dawkins, as you noted, uh made the gene meme uh argument and I think it was 1976 or 1977.
1:09:06
And so now that we're living in this world which is no longer normally distributed is Mandelbrot fractal distributed and you've got so many of these people latching onto the idea of oh we'll just make this go viral.
1:09:21
I think that how how how 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.
1:09:37
Yeah, I don't I don't know.
1:09:37
I think that's what I was saying earlier about the you know, there's the question of what like what are the right policies to uh uh if we think about you know, social platforms as all the ones we use as as sort of the substrate in which ideas are being passed around.
1:09:52
How do we you know, uh uh develop good policies that um and that are constantly being adjusted, I think.
1:10:02
I don't think again there's one right policy for everything, but um how do we make sure that we're sort of being good stewards of that that information flow.
1:10:10
Uh but then there's sort of the personal responsibility level but then I think there's also yeah, I think I think it seems there'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 the sort of overexposed highly
1:10:29
memetic leech charged for too long where people just sort of started to build these protective walls around themselves and started to sort of um yeah, 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 memetic warfare but yeah, I talk about it in the book as well. I don't think that's
1:10:50
I don't think that's I don't think the answer is necessarily that simple either.
1:10:53
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 the the state that we're in right now is exactly like it was pre-social media era because there is this sort of reciprocal relationship now between say, you know, your group chats or newsletters or whatever and what's going on in the quote-unquote real world and online, right?
1:11:15
So, you know, what do you what do people talk about in the group chats?
1:11:19
They're talking about everything that's happening out there, right?
1:11:20
It's not that you're completely disconnected, completely unaware of what's going on.
1:11:25
It's not um some, you know, utopian society that you build in the countryside and you're just sort of completely tuned out.
1:11:30
Um some group chats might be like that, but but a lot of them are still very connected to sort of what's going on out there.
1:11:37
Um and so, you know, it's it is sort of like having a COVID pod or something where you think that it's you and your 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
1:11:53
else or or happens to go out in public somewhere else or, you know, um socialize and you know, you can't control perfectly what all those 10 people are doing and someone brings a little bit of that virus back in, then uh you know, it's going to spread really, really fast in a small group. So, um I think ideas
1:12:06
So, um I think ideas I don't think we're in some perfectly stable state where we're okay, now, you know, everyone's hunkered down in their cozy little enclaves and we're all protected out in the outside world.
1:12:15
I think we're going to have to continue to manage this relationship between um you know, the memes still make their way into smaller settings and then they spread really fast.
1:12:23
They can mutate really rapidly.
1:12:25
Um 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 workshopped much more quickly.
1:12:36
Um so, yeah, I mean, I don't really know what the answer is to all of that.
1:12:40
that. Um uh but at least I think one aspect of this is at least just drawing your attention to the fact that it is happening and um and yeah, creating some more vocabulary and just more thinking and conversation around what exactly is happening right now because like you
1:12:54
said I think the 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
1:13:09
that are really compelling and important that they don't want to go viral and that's a new kind of behavior where somebody's like oh you you are actually purposely keeping this idea to yourself or to a smaller group um and so that sort of complicates this idea of virality and um and yeah I hope that
1:13:23
there will be more conversation now um we are maybe still in that super super early phase of whether the right term is anti-memes or something else but I think we're just starting to recognize that what got us through the first part of the internet is uh those concepts are
1:13:38
only going to take us part of the way there uh in whatever whatever phase we're in now um 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 and bring them into the public dialogue
1:13:52
regardless um cuz I think that's another fear that I have is if everyone's just sort of keeping their ideas to themselves in you know group chats and stuff um you know how how do we continue to contribute to the civil public discourse and ensure that um good ideas are making
1:14:08
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 uh publicly um you're not self-silencing in your smaller group or chat or whatever but you are self-silencing in
1:14:29
public discourse and you you you talked about policies and I think one of the challenges there is uh you the like all of this is existing in a complex adaptive system and and generally speaking things emerge the bottom of those systems, not the top. Right? Back to Paul, right? Like, how Right? Back to Paul, right?
1:14:51
Like, how did he pull that off in an empire that was like the at the time one of the largest empires, if not the largest empire, in the known world?
1:15:07
And yet, what did it take him?
1:15:07
400 years before the Roman emperor converted to Christianity? Right?
1:15:13
Like, Julian the Apostate was the last of the pagan emperors, and they got they got he got good.
1:15:20
Because Paul was so successful at dismantling the multi-god structure of the Roman Empire, because he was the ultimate memetic engineer.
1:15:32
And so, I don't know that it's like top-down that's going to be a solution here.
1:15:38
I think that the emergence is what fascinates me.
1:15:43
Um, and and books like yours, the more people who read them, and the more people who have these conversation publicly, right?
1:15:51
Um, and, you know, uh according to Todd, the author of Collective Illusions, he was like, it just takes one voice. Right?
1:16:00
One voice saying, "You know, um I really don't agree with that."
1:16:05
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.
1:16:14
And I kind of agree with you.
1:16:16
Tell me more about why you think this."
1:16:19
Or conversely, "You know, I I really don't agree with that idea, but I'm open-minded.
1:16:25
Tell Tell me more about why you like believe this."
1:16:30
And I think that things like um large language models.
1:16:33
So, something I do all the time is I steel man every argument I disagree with.
1:16:41
Um, and large language models are really good at doing that.
1:16:44
And what you find often is, "Oh, they actually have a point."
1:16:52
Even Even if you if you come at it not by trying to straw man it and look at its weakest points, right?
1:16:58
Which is often engaged in in traditional debate. Do the opposite.
1:17:04
Strong steel man that argument and look at the most persuasive uh argument uh for that uh idea that you maybe even vehemently oppose.
1:17:20
And it opens your mind a little bit at least that in my case it has.
1:17:22
To well, uh you know, I can't just blanketly say that this is a bad idea because I see, you know, point A and point B they're they're actually pretty good.
1:17:34
And so at least with me that has always led to kind of a intellectual agnosticism agnosticism.
1:17:43
In other words, um I I love the uh author Robert Anton Wilson and he was like, "I don't believe anything, but I have many many strong suspicions."
1:17:55
Basically the idea that, you know, all models are wrong, but some are very useful.
1:17:59
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?
1:18:10
Or or get rid of it at least if if it's no longer helping.
1:18:14
But, you know, the the other thing about you that you're fascinating as a person, right?
1:18:22
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, etc.
1:18:33
Um, and uh a fantasi, which is the inability to visualize things.
1:18:38
Which, by the way, as I ask more and more people about that, that's much more common Absolutely.
1:18:45
than I would have ever ever guessed.
1:18:48
But, the other part about you that's really interesting is, you know, you have a unique upbringing as well.
1:18:51
You kind of straddled Quaker pacifism, Persian-German discipline, Chinese-Indonesian pragmatism.
1:18:57
Like, given your background, I just thought that was so cool.
1:19:03
Because you were exposed to these these, if you will, meme plexes, right?
1:19:08
Uh the Quakers have their meme plex and the Persian-German have their meme plex and did you ever, like, growing up and and coming of age, did did were you encoded on one of these over another or did you draw from all of all of them?
1:19:30
Yeah, I think um it's hard to know the counterfactual, but um I think coming having exposure to a lot of just different cultures and different um different sets of norms and ways of doing things definitely um made my brain kind of be like, okay, there's there are a lot of different ways to do things and, you know, there's no I don't have any sort of like really tightly held identity, I guess.
1:19:50
Um so, yeah, as as you alluded to, my um my dad is Iranian, but he grew up in Germany.
1:19:56
Um my mom is um Chinese-Indonesian from Indonesia.
1:19:58
Um and then I grew up between Pennsylvania and Indonesia.
1:20:01
Um and then yeah, I went to a Quaker high school that I really enjoyed.
1:20:06
And so, yeah, I felt like we were always just this mish mishmash of a lot of different things.
1:20:12
Uh my mom was Buddhist and Catholic, and so it's just sort of um uh got a lot of exposure to a lot of different cultures and a lot of different ways of thinking about things, but um yeah, it's a little it's a little bit different, I think, from the classic like, if there is a classic immigrant experience, maybe there wasn't one, but
1:20:31
um it's, you know, I think both my parents are themselves multicultural and then they fused together and made even more multi- my my upbringing even more multicultural and so it wasn't like, you know, living in America and there was 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
1:20:48
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 Uh, 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 um, without having any sort of like one stable identity system I think to to refer back to which um, yeah, I think it's I I I I enjoyed it.
1:21:08
Again, I don't know the the I don't know how it would have been different if I'd been raised differently, but um, I think it was a really helpful way of just sort of seeing the world.
1:21:18
Do do you find yourself um, attracted to one um, set of beliefs or doing things over another or do you have you like synthesized them in the way you live your own life?
1:21:34
Yeah, I think I think little bits and pieces of everything.
1:21:36
Um, yeah, I definitely feel um, yeah, there's there's something to learn from from every group that that I I don't know that I could even necessarily separate them all out into to one place or or another.
1:21:50
Yeah, I 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.
1:22:01
There are all sorts of different ways to organize societies, some better than others.
1:22:06
Uh, some just different than others.
1:22:09
And if you have the ability to travel broadly um, I think it's really really good for you because it it uh, shuts down any of the jingoistic tendencies you might have as as you are living in this other culture, even if you're just visiting, right?
1:22:31
It it puts the human face on, oh, wait a minute, that's really cool.
1:22:36
Look at like um, you know, uh, when I was in Bhutan, uh, I was already a big, uh, Tao and Buddhist, uh, guy, but like there were all sorts of rituals and 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.
1:23:00
It kind of gives you the the origin story, if you will, of a lot of different ways of looking at the world, right?
1:23:08
And and I think that by not being doctrinaire, by not being, uh, you know, sort of deeply ideological, um, and it being open, uh, travel is incredibly helpful, because it exposes you to very other, often very legitimate ways of viewing the world.
1:23:31
Um, and then kind of back to humor, right?
1:23:34
Like if you're trying to get ideas across, especially if they're a little bit controversial, it's you better be funny, because uh, if you're not, people might, uh, really, really, uh, get angry with you.
1:23:48
They Earlier days, they might even light you up.
1:23:51
Uh, tie you to a stick and uh, you become a a marshmallow roast fest. Um, so, what's next?
1:24:02
Uh, after this book, what do you what are you focusing on now?
1:24:07
Oh my gosh, that's a whole other can of worms, but Okay, well, you know what?
1:24:10
Uh, we can we could have you back on, but just give us a taste, a tea a teaser as to what you're Sure.
1:24:19
Um, yeah, so about a year ago, I so I I think I I sort of live on the internet kind of just um, you know, looking for the next idea that's going to take over my mind, I guess.
1:24:32
Um, and uh, I don't always know where that comes from.
1:24:34
It's not always predictable.
1:24:35
Um, so before this I was looking at, you know, open source software developers.
1:24:40
Um, yeah, this this book is very different from my first book, I see.
1:24:42
Um, and so about a year ago, I stumbled into this Twitter subculture of people that were obsessed with this um, style of advanced meditation that um, it uh, engenders strange um, intensely altered states in your mind um, that are comparable to psychedelics and have similar uh, potential mental health benefits as as psychedelics, but it's all through meditation.
1:25:08
Um, but a different style of meditation than I think your standard sort of like mindfulness stress reduction type of meditation.
1:25:13
Um, and so I uh, pitched this piece to a magazine where I was going to go, you know, uh, interview a bunch of these people about their experiences and then I went on one of the retreats as just research.
1:25:24
No background in meditation, not my world at all, historically speaking.
1:25:30
Um, 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?
1:25:36
Um, so I've been spending the last year trying to understand, you know, what what are these sorts of states and um, uh, what are their potential benefits to people's mental health and um, how do they work mechanistically?
1:25:48
So I've been working with um, uh, meditation lab at um, Harvard Mass General to uh, develop an education um, program around this, which I'm pretty excited about.
1:25:59
excited about. Um, and then also working with the retreat company that I initially um, uh, first tried this style of meditation on um, just to understand, you know, how what is the impact of this on people's lives and um, what are the different factors that can
1:26:16
uh, determine whether someone is or isn't able to access certain states and 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 skill or something that you can you know, reliably measure your your progress on or something like that. So
1:26:35
So it's it's been interesting to try to try to treat it as any other sort of skill acquisition and say, you know, are there different factors that can make you more or less successful and and yeah, how do we take a little bit more seriously?
1:26:47
So that has been my deep rabbit hole for the last year.
1:26:50
I if you asked me a year ago what I thought I'd 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.
1:27:02
So who knows what that'll turn into. Very cool.
1:27:05
Have you ever been in a lily tank, a sensory deprivation tank? Yes. Yeah.
1:27:11
Yeah, I've tried that a few times.
1:27:11
It's super fascinating as well or something.
1:27:15
It's a really simple concept.
1:27:16
Yeah, I I had a phase where that was really my thing.
1:27:19
And you also mentioned psychedelics.
1:27:23
There's another one where talk about a flip, right?
1:27:27
Like when I was growing up, I never tried a psychedelic because like a campaign worked on me, right?
1:27:31
It was like, I don't think I want to jump off a building thinking I can fly.
1:27:37
And then, you know, you've got how to change your mind comes out and I'm reading it and I'm like, holy they lied about everything.
1:27:49
And 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 that's a Michael Pollan's book was a perfect example of making an anti-memetic idea a memetic, right?
1:28:05
Because he was sort of trusted because he was a trusted journalist.
1:28:08
He was a little bit of an outside not the typical person you would expect to be doing psychedelics or writing about them.
1:28:12
And then yeah, his book in I think it was 2017, 2018 just took the conversation from people whispering about psychedelics and psychedelic research to make me it something that you could talk to anyone about. So, yeah.
1:28:24
Well, I mean it got me to try them and uh you know, it was really fascinating.
1:28:30
What's interesting about psychedelics I think is that it was weird as you think about it in retro retrospectively that Nixon, who was maybe the craziest guy to occupy the Oval Office, even given the current occupant, um why he picked like the least addictive drugs. Right?
1:28:52
When you look at the addictive nature of a drug, like most psychedelics are really, really low, like psilocybin etc.
1:28:59
You don't do psilocybin and wake up the next day jonesing to do psilocybin again.
1:29:04
It's like, oh yeah, that was really interesting and but it you you have no desire, at least I didn't, to to do it again.
1:29:14
But one of the things that the shaman who I did this with said to me, this was this was I think in 2018 or 2019, um I was like, wow, I I I think everyone in the world should and this is just as MAPS is getting the Johns Hopkins tests on MDMA to reduce PTSD in our veterans etc.
1:29:39
So, it was bubbling, but it was still kind of taboo.
1:29:43
Um and and I looked at the guy and I'm like, I think it would be absolutely great if everyone could try this and and he smiled and and he went, well, I think it's going to happen sooner than you think. And I went, why?
1:29:56
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.
1:30:04
And he goes, "You are completely as as somebody from the '60s would say, you're a square straight guy, man, and and you're trying this?"
1:30:15
And and you know, then I thought of like, I think it was Terence McKenna made the prophecy way back in the '60s that marijuana would ultimately be legal.
1:30:26
And they were like, "You're crazy, dude.
1:30:29
Why would you ever say that?"
1:30:31
And he was in a group of young people.
1:30:33
And everyone was smoking dope.
1:30:35
And he goes, "Because you're looking at your future congressmen and women." No, Ron.
1:30:45
I think there's probably just been a shift in interest and sort of contemplative practices more broadly, right?
1:30:51
And psychedelics is one of them, but and even things like breath work or cold plunges, like all this stuff that's sort of this awareness that, "Oh, there are different ways to view the world.
1:31:01
The world is a lot more malleable than I think it is."
1:31:03
And yeah, there are a lot of a lot of different ways of going about that.
1:31:06
So, it's a really interesting time to be thinking and talking about that stuff. Totally agree.
1:31:10
Well, this has been absolutely fascinating, Nadia.
1:31:13
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.
1:31:23
You can't put anyone in a reeducation camp.
1:31:25
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.
1:31:37
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 memes.
1:31:46
I have just had two of the best ideas, and unlike all the other times, I'm going to actually act on these two."
1:31:56
What two things are you going to incept into the world's population?
1:32:01
I'd just have one, which is I'm related to all of this, but um yeah, just paying attention. I don't know.
1:32:06
Um turning off your notifications and uh just trying to actually feel the world as it is.
1:32:14
I think people would be pretty surprised by what what comes into their arena. I love that one.
1:32:19
You got to have one more though. Um I don't know.
1:32:26
Maybe I'll I'll I'll throw in a tra travel desire to travel the world because I think there's also something there about uh uh people getting a little bit too locked into their their own way of doing things and I don't know.
1:32:40
Yeah, just go more exposure is good to uh more ideas. I like both of those.
1:32:46
Um one of my favorite uh 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.
1:32:57
He wrote a non-fiction book called Last Chance to See uh talking about his travels and about places that were literally kind of disappearing.
1:33:08
And so uh who knows what wonder of the world might disappear if you before you get a chance to see it.
1:33:17
So, pay attention, focus, and travel, and while you're traveling, pay attention and focus. I love both of those.
1:33:24
People can get your book everywhere when?
1:33:30
Yeah, um it's uh the you you can buy the digital version.
1:33:33
You can get Kindle on Amazon right now, and then the physical ones you can pre-order on Metal Label.
1:33:39
Um and they should be shipping very soon.
1:33:41
I actually just got my physical copy right before I went to because we we also released it in the It exists. So Oh, I love it. That's fantastic. Congratulations. you.
1:33:51
Um there's nothing quite like uh having a book you've written come into your hands.
1:33:56
It's uh It's a good feeling.
1:33:58
A really, really good feeling.
1:33:58
Well, Nadia, thank you so much for joining me.
1:34:02
We'll have you on again when hear more about uh these various types of meditation.
1:34:07
And maybe if you figure out like a way to engineer some of these memes, we'll hire you as a consultant. Love it. Thanks for having me on.