"One of the reasons for polarization is it's like 5% on each side and they will never stop yapping. There are plenty of people with ideas that are really compelling and important that they don't want t..."

"Well, hello everyone. It's Jim Oanaughy with yet another infinite loops. My guest today, Nadia Asparova. I have been looking forward to this Nadia for a long, long time because as we were chatting bef..."

"So I read that your first introduction to the idea of anti-mimetics was in 2021 when a former colleague of yours uh was sharing thoughts about hey could we engineer a mimedic uh project that really ra..."

"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. And that was forcing a lot of th..."

"book. So um it's not a non-fiction book but really really good. Um and the author of that book had coined this term uh called anti memes and uh it originally came from this collaborative fiction wiki ..."

"study of um uh collective forgetting and um yeah what does it mean to sort of like engage with ideas that you can't really hold on to um and so I read that that book again sort of in dark depths of CO..."

"familiar with the uh, Gerardian sense of mimemetic desire and transference? Yeah, I think um a lot of people were also talking about that around the time because it was I think it was descriptively us..."

"resources, they kind of point to a third thing, the scapegoat, and they pin all of their anger and desires and stuff onto onto the scapegoat. And that helps bring a community together because at least..."

"of provided that answer. 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 uh people were reading his blog, they were um you k..."

"uh uh Scott Alexander had a a piece where he said um mold bug sold out. That that was his Curtis's pseudonym. So he you know he calls him a sellout. And so he's really done the full arc but he went fr..."

"someone into the mainstream. Yeah. Um and what fascinates me there is a couple of things. Uh the first is you have these multiple really dense networks, but they're not connected to each other, right?..."

"because it it is uh it it the connection here is sometimes a lot of people I just had Todd Rose on he's currently on uh this week's he wrote collective illusions where where you can have people who wi..."

"it's really an interesting thing because publicly nobody is going to refer to him, right? There's high signaling costs there like what you you like that guy and then suddenly you are perceived as no l..."

"because what happened was sort of the same thing. You had I would go from one SIG to another and not intentionally by the way and talk about something that seemed controversial to me, but I was kind o..."

"discord across everything. Well, I'm I'm I I I'm a huge believer in the holy fool or the court jester. Um kind of the outsider who gets to speak truth without losing his or her head. Um and I wasn't w..."

"daring statement to make at that time. your head explodes if you are one of his contemporaries, right? Because you know he put partial evil in there to weasel his way out because this is like this wou..."

"spread so easily. They can kind of just rip through a network. But if you think about like each individual meme that you're sharing, um you often, you know, you'll send a link or a funny meme or somet..."

"sort of pledge their allegiance to in the same way they might pledge their allegiance to to a war. Um and so you have lots of these different competing talent ecosystems and um competitions for mind s..."

"place 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 wer..."

"understand, you got to start looking at social diffusion models, right? And mimemetic fitness tests, the narrative resonance. Is it an emotional payload or moral foundation? You know, because if you'r..."

"the if if you are trying to break through a crowded feed, the the ones that are visually and verbally the most distinct, right? The like don't mess with Texas. There's a really funny story how that ca..."

"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. Um when I think go I think it's it's not just um ..."

"national prominence. Um yeah, it feels like a slightly different uh strategy or approach today. Uh that's required just because people are having uh yeah are much more gravitated towards their their d..."

"addressable market. Whereas Judaism just didn't have that, right? He has a little spin-off. He forked Judaism basically and and was like, "Hey, doesn't matter what your earlier gods were. We don't car..."

"selling me here, Paul. And so by using the synagogues, he had an installed base where he could go to. And then he standardized the API API layer by writing in Greek, which was the lingua franco of the..."

"say, "Hey, emperor, you are buck naked, man." And he could do it because he was an outcast, you know, not really part of the in circle, etc. And you know, along comes the Enlightenment and uhoh, like ..."

"iconic musicians if we're going to, you know, take the question literally. like Taylor Swift might be like a Beatles level of fame today. Um, but it's I think maybe the question maybe the answer is le..."

"this way? I think one of the arguments I make in the book is that, you know, you can tell a a history of memes throughout, yeah, I mean, even stretching as far back as ancient history. Um, but through..."

"them into the the circulation of ideas? And that brings in where traditionally at least institutions like the government, the church, uh, academia, uh, etc. served as the the sifters or what's allowed..."

"ahead. And it is where I uh now is a really good time to talk about anti memes and maybe it's partly why people are getting more interested in them. Um in the same way that the concept of memes, you k..."

"retreating to their private walled gardens. Um, but I also think of like uh, you know, when we're talking about the meme clicks and and memes that are designed to go viral and and anti-memes that are ..."

"start like looking at things like, you know, the the the brand, if you will, of the people trying to spread the meme. I always joked about the World Economic Forum. I don't know if you're familiar wit..."

"if you were going try to design a way to turn that into a viral meme. How would you go about it? I think the the question that um I'm curious about just from what what you said was uh you know, how do..."

"sort of meme inoculation as um closer to a public health problem where we think about something like um nutrition or how do you ensure that people eat healthy? uh there's you know it comes down to som..."

"at nutrition, um where we ended up coming up with something to take a sort of take the burden of personal responsibility away where it's not it's no longer difficult to choose to eat healthy because y..."

"yeah, and like that's the perennial question. Uh like I I firmly believe that um you know, the hard way doesn't work. Um, I think that, um, you know, if you really do want kids to do drugs, tell them ..."

"back to the whole idea of salience. uh you know the champion of that particular idea needs coherence and discipline right the message discipline of successful memes like it sort of self-forms like a a..."

"the most certain, right? That's how you get demag, you know, demagoguery and all of that. And you know, it's going to be just this easy, right? And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, right? Uh ..."

"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 uh try to build on it. If you're trying to like literally understand how to bu..."

"harder and harder because there's more and more noise. Well, if you apply uh apply Shannon, right, and information theory, it gives you a metric for the meme, right? So, is that meme going to have eno..."

"out what's in it. That's basically actually maybe it's the original super meme because uh that's that's um you know that that fear that sort of doomsday fear of if you don't pay attention to this supe..."

"might be. But specifically again about about your book and and the uh idea of the anti-me um do do you see this becoming a more formalized area of study and like like we've been talking a lot about at..."

"distributed is mantle brought factal distributed and you've got so many of these people latching on to the idea of oh we'll just make this go viral I think that how how how would you go about uh setti..."

"right now is exactly like it was preocial media either. Um because there is this sort of reciprocal relationship now between say you know your group chats or your newsletters or whatever um and what's..."

"between um you know the means still make their way into smaller settings and then they spread really fast. They can mutate really rapidly. Um, so ideas are actually just getting weirder and crazier, I..."

"there 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 uncov..."

"emergence is what fascinates me. um and and books like yours, the more people who read them and the more people who have this conversation publicly, right? Um and you know, uh according to Todd, the a..."

"agnostic agnosticism. 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. Basically the idea that you know al..."

"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 didn't have any so..."

"Um without having any sort of like one stable identity system, I think to to refer back to, which um yeah, I think is I I I I enjoyed it. Again, I don't know the the I don't know how it would have bee..."

"next uh a after this book? What are you what are you focusing on now? Oh my gosh, that's a whole other can of worms, but Okay. Well, you know what? Uh, we could we could have you back on, but just giv..."

"with um a meditation lab at um Harvard Mass General to uh develop an education um program around this which I'm pretty excited about. Um and then also working with the retreat company that I'd initial..."

"what that'll turn into. Very cool. Have you ever been in a lily tank, a sensory deprivation tank? Yes. Yeah. Um yeah, I've tried that a few times. It's super fascinating as well where it's just a real..."

"that stuff. Totally agree. Well, this has been absolutely fascinating, Nadia. And if you are familiar with the podcast, you know that at the end we are going to create you empress of the world. Uh you..."