Nadia Asparouhova, author of "Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading," joins me for a fascinating exploration of why some ideas go viral while others—often the most important ones—resist transmission entirely.
We dive into antimemes, Curtis Yarvin's journey from being canceled to becoming mainstream, St. Paul as history's ultimate memetic engineer, and why "Don't Mess with Texas" became a masterpiece of viral messaging. Plus her current research on advanced meditation techniques, internet dynamics, and much more.
This was a very enlightening conversation. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
— Jim
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Highlights
The Dynamics of Supermemes
“Super memes are this other sort of strange third phenomenon that have the qualities of both, where they are both highly consequential but also highly transmissible. The characteristics around them are that they appeal to our personal values somehow. They're kind of non-specific in a way, but also perceived to be super high impact. So things like the climate crisis, existential risk from AI, fear of—yeah, just sort of fear of the unknown or fear of the future… now that we're kind of organized more around culture wars, we have lots of different super memes that people can sort of pledge their allegiance to in the same way they might pledge their allegiance to a war. And so you have lots of these different competing talent ecosystems and competitions for mindshare.
So one example I talk about is nuclear energy and how for a really long time it was absolutely taboo to even consider whether it might be good to develop it. And it took decades to sort of flip the opinion on that. Now I think we're in a phase where—I mean, even Germany has announced their support for nuclear energy. So we're in a very different place now. It's not really that anything changed, it's just that our opinions towards it changed.”
Meme Inoculations
“…So I don't know what the equivalent of Ozempic for meme inoculation would be, but I think this is sort of the battle around social media, right, is you have on the one hand, people saying, "Well, we should create policies to hold social platforms responsible as the sort of arbiters of how information spreads. These are the places that are where we're getting most of our information. And if they just had better content moderation policies, then our information wouldn't be harming people." And that's sort of one way of looking at it. But it's a little bit—some people would say a little bit draconian or it's just—it's also just an impossible task, like no one can come up with the perfect content moderation policy that solves all problems. And so there's the policy question, then there's the personal responsibility question of do I just choose to turn off my notifications and not—exercise a little bit more skepticism when ideas come my way? Yeah, that works in practice, but it's a little—it's hard to enforce that among everyone to do. 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? I don't know.”
Virality and Antimemes
“I think the state of the conversation right now is mostly about sort of memes and going viral, which is maybe step one way to think about how ideas spread. But we have sort of the existence proof now of there are plenty of people with ideas that are really compelling and important that they don't want to go viral. And that's a new kind of behavior where suddenly it's like, "Oh, you're actually purposely keeping this idea to yourself or to a smaller group." And so that starts to complicate this idea of virality. And so we have to think a little bit about 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 regardless?
If everyone's just sort of keeping their ideas to themselves in group chats and stuff, how do we continue to contribute to the civil public discourse and ensure that good ideas are making their way back out and they're not just sort of being gatekept by some sort of intellectual elite?”
The Power of Jhana Meditation
“…And so about a year ago, I stumbled into this Twitter subculture of people that were obsessed with this style of advanced meditation that engenders strange, intensely altered states in your mind that are comparable to psychedelics and have similar potential mental health benefits as psychedelics. But it's all through meditation. But a different style of meditation than I think your standard, sort of mindfulness, stress reduction type meditation. And so I had pitched this piece to a magazine where I was going to go interview a bunch of these people about their experiences. And then I went one of the retreats as just research—no background in meditation, not my world at all, historically speaking. And came out of it being like, "Oh my gosh, this is actually really strange and fascinating and the hype is real and why aren't we talking about it?" So I've been spending the last year trying to understand what are these sorts of states and what are their potential benefits to people's mental health and how do they work mechanistically.”
Reading List
Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading; by Nadia Asparouhova
Virus of the Mind; by Richard Brodie
There Is No Antimemetics Division; by qntm
Steal This Book; by Abbie Hoffman
Collective Illusions; by Todd Rose
How to Change Your Mind; by Michael Pollan
Thank You for Smoking; by Christopher Buckley
Last Chance to See; by Douglas Adams
🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, hello, everyone. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. My guest today, Nadia Asparouhova. I have been looking forward to this, Nadia, for a 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 Dawkinsian sense, not the Girardian sense. And when I read it, I was literally hooked. And you have a new book, "Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading," which we're going to talk a lot about. Welcome.
Nadia Asparouhova: Thanks for having me.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So I read that your first introduction to the idea of antimemetics was in 2021, when a former colleague of yours was sharing thoughts about, "Hey, could we engineer a memetic project that really, rather than just letting it naturally go out into the wild, could we engineer it so the memes either go viral or don't go viral?" I might be getting that wrong, but—
Nadia Asparouhova: That sounds about right.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Okay, but tell me about that conversation and why it drove you to—I went down this rabbit hole in a very serious way, and you did, too, so we share that. But tell me, what was your drive to go, "Oh, I really have to know and write about this"?
Nadia Asparouhova: I think it was really a sign of the times, even just having my colleague reach out to me around that time. So yeah, that was 2021. This was, you know, depths of COVID. And I think the Internet was in a really weird place at this time, to say the least. You had a lot of really inflamed tensions and conversations that were happening on public feeds for a variety of reasons, but I think also exacerbated by the pandemic and people just being really pent up. And that was forcing a lot of these conversations that previously could take place in public further down into more private and semi-private spaces. So more people were using group chats to kind of workshop their ideas because they felt like they couldn't talk about it in public.
Nadia Asparouhova: Newsletters were taking off as a sort of more semi-private place to share your long-form unfiltered ideas. And I think that was probably the impetus for why my colleague had reached out because everyone's just sort of thinking about this thing around: yeah, ideas are not spreading the way that they were in the last five-ish years and something has changed. And so in the course of that conversation, he recommended this book that he had found called "There Is No Antimemetics Division." And that book had just come out, great book. And that book is a horror sci-fi kind of book. So it's not a nonfiction book, but really good. And the author of that book had coined this term called antimemes.
Nadia Asparouhova: And it originally came from this collaborative fiction wiki community called SCP Foundation, where people post these wiki-style entries of paranormal entities that they've just sort of made up. And one of these users, who goes by the name qntm, had posted one in the late 2000s, so well before everything weird that was happening on the Internet. But this entity was something that he called an antimeme, where you could look at the entity, you could engage with it, you could write down all the details about it, and as soon as you went away, somehow all these details just sort of evaporate from your mind. And so this idea expanded into an entire fictional universe of its own, which he then encapsulated in this book called "There Is No Antimemetics Division" where there is a task force that is trying to fight antimemes.
Nadia Asparouhova: But of course they can't remember that they fought them. And so it's this really wonderful study of collective forgetting. And yeah, what does it mean to sort of engage with ideas that you can't really hold on to? And so I read that book again sort of in dark depths of COVID where everything was just sort of scary and weird on the Internet. I had just been working at Substack. So seeing also just sort of how newsletters were taking over as this new content medium, and also just getting a front row seat to a lot of the culture wars and battles that were happening. A lot of that was centered around Substack at the time. And so yeah, it just sort of felt like, "Okay, now I have vocabulary to describe this set of phenomena that are happening around me."
Nadia Asparouhova: But it's still a sci-fi book, and I wanted to create some sort of nonfiction treatment of that as well. And so yeah, kind of just started scribbling down ideas about antimemes in the real world. And that big pile of notes eventually turned into this book.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That's fantastic. Were you already familiar with the Girardian sense of mimetic desire and transference?
Nadia Asparouhova: Yeah, I think a lot of people were also talking about that around the time because it was descriptively useful at the time to explain why is everything sort of devolving into tribalism and frankly, just sort of lack of civility. And yeah, so Girard's theory of mimetic desire, talking about how we don't have our own innate desires, but we are unconsciously or subconsciously aspiring to be like something else. And so our desires reflect the model that we are aspiring to be. I felt sort of dissatisfied, I think, with the Girardian way of seeing the world.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It's very apocalyptic, too.
Nadia Asparouhova: Yeah, it's kind of like, where do you take this? To its logical end, it's like, "Okay, so we just sort of devolve into mimetic rivalry for the rest of our lives, and that's the end of it." And he does have this saving mechanism that he talks about—the scapegoat—and how when things get too crazy and too rivalrous and people are fighting too much over scarce resources, they kind of point to a third thing, the scapegoat, and they pin all of their anger and desires and stuff onto the scapegoat. And that helps bring a community together, because at least people say, "Well, at least we're not like the scapegoat," and it bonds them together.
Nadia Asparouhova: But I felt like that was still pretty limiting, even for the world that we're in today, because Girard didn't live to see what was happening today on the Internet. And I think some of his assumptions are operating on the idea of there being more of a shared public narrative or a shared sense of context among people. But right now, I think the problem is that we're fragmenting into lots of smaller contexts. And so being a scapegoat can sometimes be a really good thing, right? It turns someone into a martyr, right? And then it helps cement the identities of these smaller tribes, and then they become even more polarized against each other. And so the idea of one unifying scapegoat that brings them together was just—it felt like it wasn't really the answer.
Nadia Asparouhova: And so yeah, I think I found more answers by thinking about antimemes and sort of 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.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. And you use the example of Curtis Yarvin, right, who wrote Unqualified Reservations. He had some—what we might call a little bit outside the Overton window ideas. For example, democracy doesn't work! On my honeymoon. This is 1982. He was a British—you know, aristo. And I stayed at his house in Ireland. And I was very offended because it was all, "democracy doesn't work." And I'm like, "Well, wait, wait a second." And so there's a picture of me in the bedroom they gave us because I thought the guy was a fascist. And he wasn't fascist. He was a monarchist more than anything else. But in a similar fashion, Yarvin maybe had some of those more controversial ideas.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And basically you lay out what happened, right? He became a scapegoat. He was invited to a conference, a software conference, got disinvited because of his views on race and intelligence, etc. That immediately made me think of Charles Murray, who I'm sure you're familiar with, who was such an academic. He didn't kind of think, "Huh, I wonder if I write this deeply academic book filled with academic word salads. I wonder if it might be a problem if I call out people by their racial group. Nah, that's not gonna be a problem."
Nadia Asparouhova: Go ahead and publish. I think he's still canceled, as far as I can tell.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But take us through what happened with Yarvin, because I think it's a good example of your thesis of somebody who was definitely espousing ideas that were antimemetic, at least at the time, his becoming a scapegoat by being canceled and being disinvited. But then something else happened. The Streisand effect happened suddenly. "Who is this guy? Why are people saying, don't read it?" It's like one of my ideas about if I really do—I think it was Abbie Hoffman or one of the Yippies wrote a book called "Steal This Book." I want to write a book that says, "Under no circumstances read this book." But if you could expand on that a little bit, because I think it fits nicely with the idea.
Nadia Asparouhova: Yeah. So I think Curtis's writing was also the product of good timing. So he was or is a software engineer who had been working on this project that was fairly obscure and hard for most people to parse, but it was around sort of creating this separate operating system where people could sort of exist in their own independent version of the web from the bottom up. And he'd spent a long time sort of toiling on this. And around the same time, he also started writing a blog called Unqualified Reservations, where he was just sort of talking about his views of the world, his own political theory. And this actually started before—I keep saying sort of things started getting weird. I'm sure history will give a name to that period, but it was before things started getting a little weird on the Internet.
Nadia Asparouhova: And so the blog existed. The blog was popular among certain crowds, but it had definitely not hit any sort of mainstream thing. He was just sort of random Internet blogger, right? And so he wanted to speak at this software conference in the late 2000s and teens, and someone had discovered his writings and that some of his views were, let's say, controversial and not the kinds of things that you want to be supporting on stage. And so they removed him as a speaker. And this was sort of his cancellation moment. And from that point, it seems like he was never going to hit the mainstream, right? But it gave him a little bit of this flashiness to people that were kind of curious, "Why can't he speak at the conference?"
Nadia Asparouhova: And so everyone started rushing to his blog to see, "What did he write that was so bad?" And along the way, the remarks that he was specifically canceled for, as far as I can tell, were actually not really the point of the blog. The blog was actually much more about political theory. And yeah, Curtis is a monarchist, and so questioning whether democracy is as good and useful as we think it is. And this happened to be right around the same time as the 2016 presidential election. And so I think a lot of people were just feeling very—"We're living in this unprecedented time. How did this happen?"
Nadia Asparouhova: And looking for some sort of working explanation of why is the world the way it is right now? And Curtis's blog kind of provided that answer. And so a lot of people, even though he was still canceled and people were not really allowed to say his name in public, people were reading his blog. They were thinking about his ideas and talking about them, but only in very small, trusted contexts. I stumbled into it by accident because I ended up giving a talk at a conference associated with his software project, had no idea what the background was. And again, it was one of these things that happened where a friend is just sort of like, "Hey, do you know who this guy is?" And shares his work. And I go, "Oh, this is interesting." And then you kind of—once you see it, then you start having all these little conversations in private with people about his writing.
Nadia Asparouhova: And I had no idea that so many people around me had been also reading his work and not talking about it. And from there, it starts to sort of bubble up. And now I think he has completed the full arc of going from obscure to canceled to mainstream to now. Scott Alexander had a piece where he said, "Moldbug sold out." That was Curtis's pseudonym. So he calls him a sellout. And so he's really done the full arc. But he went from being—you can't say his name in public to you can say his name in these small settings to now he's being associated with a few small scenes. So definitely a lot of people in tech were talking about his work.
Nadia Asparouhova: But there was this sort of Dimes Square phenomenon during the pandemic that was this New York sort of intellectual scene, I guess, that had sort of brought Curtis's ideas into the fold. And then from there, it bubbled up into he did an appearance on Tucker Carlson. So then he's a little bit more mainstream. Then he got the New York Times profile, and then now he's a sellout, right? So yeah, you can see how ideas can go from being super isolated, can't talk about it at all, really heavy taboo to—once you start forming these little clumps of allies, it can—yeah, sort of all those little clumps can come together and push someone into the mainstream.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. And what fascinates me there is a couple of things. The first is you have these multiple, really dense networks, but they're not connected to each other, right? And if you want something to go viral, you've got to figure out a way to get these disparate networks to connect and start talking to one another. The author, Howard Bloom had a great analogy for this where he talks about you can take five pounds of salt, put it in a big beaker, boil the water till the salt is no longer visible, right? And so if the beaker is sitting on my desk here and you walked in, you would see what you would think was just a beaker of clear water.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And then he says, but if you take one salt molecule and drop it into the water, all of it coalesces and adheres and it's this huge block of salt. And I always liked that metaphor because the connection here is sometimes a lot of people—I just had Todd Rose on, he's currently on this week's [Infinite Loops]. He wrote "Collective Illusions" where you can have people who widely share a privately held belief, but they don't think anyone else believes it. And so they keep their mouth shut, they self-censor until somebody comes and says it publicly. And that's that single molecule of salt being dropped in the water. And suddenly you see, "Oh my God, there are a lot of people who not only know about this, but are open to the ideas."
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And one of the things I recall you mentioning was that it kind of takes—before the redemptive arc, right? Where you can either call them a sellout or now getting the New York Times profile treatment. But before that arc, it's really an interesting thing because publicly nobody is going to refer to him, right? There's high signaling costs there. "What? You like that guy?" And then suddenly you are perceived as no longer a member of the in-group. So publicly people won't talk about it, but they will talk about it privately. Which brings in your idea of the Internet being a crazy place during the pandemic, people retreating to smaller groups, which interestingly enough was the way it started. I'm old, so I had one of the original CompuServe accounts and they called them SIGs, special interest groups.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And that's all it was. They were SIGs. And you would gain entry by showing your bona fides and they were all over the place. But each was very small and you very rarely saw any cross-pollination between the various SIGs. Me being a glutton for punishment, I joined quite a few of them. I was in my twenties and really interested in that sort of stuff. But it really fit in here because what happened was sort of the same thing you had. I would go from one SIG to another and not intentionally, by the way, and talk about something that seemed controversial to me. But I was kind of like, "I would be interested to see what people think about this." And then there was an event where all of a sudden all of these disparate SIGs, right? One on philosophy, one was on nation states, a third was on the international economy, etc. And it kind of coalesced. But that's kind of that infers a guerrilla-style information war. Talk a little bit about that phase.
Nadia Asparouhova: I say, were you the information guerrilla warrior, in that case, sowing the discord across everything?
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, I'm a huge believer in the holy fool or the court jester, kind of the outsider who gets to speak truth without losing his or her head. And I wasn't worried about—I did not see myself that way at the time, by the way. But it fits, right? If you're trying to keep something to be not talked about, in other words, antimemetic, right? You can do hard tactics—make it illegal, make it socially completely turn you into a pariah. Or do soft tactics—gentle dissuasion. Be like Leo Strauss, the way he writes about heterodox ideas and all of that. And it made me think of this Alexander Pope when I was reading this section, getting ready to talk to you. So Alexander Pope wrote the following.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And I thought that this was kind of a perfect illustration of the guerrilla tactic. Alexander Pope, for those who don't know, was a famous author. And here's what he wrote kind of right around enlightenment period, right? So: "All nature is but art unknown to thee. All chance, direction which thou canst not see, all discord, harmony not understood, all"—and then he put a weasel word in here because he didn't want to get burned at the stake—"All partial evil, universal good. And in spite of pride, in erring reason's spite, one truth is clear: Whatever is, is right."
Nadia Asparouhova: Okay, that's a daring statement to make.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: At that time your head explodes if you are one of his contemporaries, right? Because he put "partial evil" in there to weasel his way out. Because this would get you burned at the stake, right? And of course we had Voltaire with his character Pangloss. "All is right, the best of all possible worlds," etc. But the idea that a lot of this phase here is in a guerrilla phase. You also include a helpful diagram which looks at high versus low impact memes and antimemes. And you've got the super memes on the upper right, high impact, very viral. Things like wars, climate change, etc. You've got the antimemes on the left, which is not highly viral. Things like taboos, uncomfortable truths, they're going to have a low transfer rate.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: How do you move something that currently fits in that category, the upper left hand antimemes with low transfer rates? How do you switch them over to the other side into super memes?
Nadia Asparouhova: I think it's probably possible to engineer some antimemes into super memes, but I think some of them might just structurally resist that kind of characterization. So I think ideas are to some extent memetic, antimemetic, etc., by their nature. So the matrix that you're referencing, I'm sort of looking at how transmissible an idea is, so how easily it spreads, but then also looking at how consequential it is, right? And there are some ideas that will spread very easily because they're just not that consequential. And that's what I sort of think of as the bucket of memes. Memes in aggregate can have huge social impact because they spread so easily. They can kind of just rip through a network.
Nadia Asparouhova: But if you think about each individual meme that you're sharing, often you'll send a link or a funny meme or something to someone and you'll forget you've sent it. All these sort of social norms that are mimetic, like shaking someone's hand or greeting them, these don't take up that much headspace. So there's no way to really turn something that's small into a super meme. For example, the class of super memes that I talked about are—well, let's start with antimemes. So antimemes are different from memes in that they don't spread because they are perceived to be so highly consequential. So we kind of hold onto them and we guard them because we're afraid that if we share it out loud, then there's going to be big consequences either for ourselves or for the rest of our networks.
Nadia Asparouhova: And so yeah, this is where taboos come into play, right? Everyone knows what the truth is, but no one wants to say it out loud because you might have personal consequences for yourself. It could also just totally upend your life as you know it, and so you kind of hold onto it. Super memes are this other sort of strange third phenomenon that have the qualities of both, where they are both highly consequential but also highly transmissible. And so yeah, some of the examples I use are things that tend to have a little bit of a doomsday quality to them. The characteristics around them are that they appeal to our personal values somehow. They're kind of non-specific in a way, but also perceived to be super high impact.
Nadia Asparouhova: So things like the climate crisis, existential risk from AI, fear of—yeah, just sort of fear of the unknown or fear of the future. And you can—and today, I think historically war sort of served that function as a unifying super meme for people to rally around. And today we have, in sort of—now that we're kind of organized more around culture wars, we have lots of different super memes that people can sort of pledge their allegiance to in the same way they might pledge their allegiance to a war. And so you have lots of these different competing talent ecosystems and competitions for mindshare. I don't think every antimeme can become a super meme, but they might be able to sort of glom onto an existing ecosystem.
Nadia Asparouhova: So one example I talk about is nuclear energy and how for a really long time it was absolutely taboo to even consider whether it might be good to develop it. And it took decades to sort of flip the opinion on that. Now I think we're in a phase where—I mean, even Germany has announced their support for nuclear energy. So we're in a very different place now. It's not really that anything changed, it's just that our opinions towards it changed. And I think having that sort of latch into maybe the climate crisis as a super meme helps heighten the urgency and the desire to sort of maybe revisit it or something.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, you have—as a matter of fact, that is something that we're very interested in. And we actually gave a fellowship to a guy by the name of Mark Nelson to have a conference in Germany that was pro-nuclear.
Nadia Asparouhova: Oh, that's awesome.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And apparently it went very well. Kind of like that salt molecule and suddenly you see all of the salt that's actually there. It turned out that the most vocal people who opposed any kind of nuclear solution, or as he would rebrand it, elemental energy, were just the loudest voices, right? That's another thing. You often note that one of the reasons for polarization is it's 5% on each side and they will never stop yapping and they use great propaganda techniques, repetition, repetition, and you kind of lose sight of "wait a minute, why were we against this in the first place?" And then you kind of do your homework and you see.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And if you compare disasters like the scale of disasters caused by coal as an example, which Germany was burning because their power needs were not being met, versus nuclear, rationally, you should be willing to at least consider it. You don't have to be in favor of it, but it should be at least something that's on the table as an option. And you have kind of a memeplex where you say it kind of goes from ideas or an ideology that gain a community and then the community itself kind of forms an agenda. But then it needs capital, right? And I guess that was us with Mark for the idea of the conference in Germany. But I kind of think those are all necessary but not sufficient. Before we started to formally record, I told you that we're really interested in workflows that could have super high R-naughts for spreadability and virality of memes. Because memes can also be marketing ideas. They can be a variety of things.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And if you understand, you got to start looking at social diffusion models, right? And mimetic fitness tests, the narrative resonance, is it an emotional payload or moral foundation? Because if you're attempting to get one idea to spread, you don't want to have a meme where there's a huge emotional payload for a completely non-emotional topic that you're trying to get. But also the idea of compression, right? I'm fascinated by compression because why do we have maxims? We have maxims because these were ideas that kept being repeated down through time, right? You often see "eat what your grandmother ate and you'll be fine." But compression is really important because if you've got a really clean moral or other impulse—liberty, fairness, etc.—the one that's going to win is the mimetic load that is super highly compressed so that it can become kind of like a jingle in somebody's mind or a catchphrase or a protest chant. "We must, we must," and they make use of repetition.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Looking at it through this lens, they seem highly engineered, even though they probably weren't at least originally, right? And all of that kind of goes into the—if you are trying to break through a crowded feed, the ones that are visually and verbally the most distinct, right? "Don't mess with Texas." There's a really funny story how that came about. It was iterative.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So it was anti-littering campaign for Texas because Texans used to be slobs. And because it's so big, right? They'd be driving along in their truck and they'd finish their McDonald's and just throw it out the window. And so they hired an ad firm to try to get people to stop doing that, right? And so all of the attempts were the ones where they lectured them and all that—zero virality. Nobody paid attention. It's like, "whatever." And then the guy who finally figured it out heard a phrase—Texans refer to litter and other garbage as "mess." A mess. And he's like, "Oh, wait a minute," because I can link that to Texans—you know the old joke, Texan who went to Harvard doesn't know which to mention first. Texans are very proud to be, for the most part, to be from Texas. And so he's like, "How about 'Don't mess with Texas'?" And suddenly it just exploded. It turned into bumper stickers. They didn't realize that his underlying message was don't litter. But that became a secondary effect. The rate of litter plunged as the bumper stickers and people saying it. George W. Bush used it as one of his slogans, "Don't mess with Texas." But it was one of those mind worms that just got drilled in there. And so I think if you think about it that way, you can kind of take more of an engineering view toward trying to design a meme that is going to really spread, right? The after effects go—
Nadia Asparouhova: And I think it's not just how you sort of phrase a message goes hand in hand with thinking about the network that it's situated in too, as well, right? So a lot of these campaigns that were engineered for sort of national prominence or spread. The Texas one is a really good example where that message only really worked for the Texas quote-unquote network specifically, right? It wouldn't have worked in a different state. And I think now if we think about the networks where we want a message to spread, it's a little bit harder to reach. Sort of the public narrative is so fragmented and there isn't really just one place you can blast it anymore and kind of let it take off. You have these kind of smaller enclaves, smaller private communities.
Nadia Asparouhova: And so it's thinking about how do you get it to spread in this 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 raise the message to a place of sort of more public national prominence. But yeah, it feels like a slightly different strategy or approach today that's required just because people are much more gravitated towards their dense networks than they are to having allegiance to some sort of broader public narrative.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I was having a conversation with my friend Rory Sutherland, who wrote the book about alchemy. He's a marketing guru and he sort of just let it slip that really, Christianity was a subsidiary religion of Judaism. And we were on a podcast and we just started kind of joking about it. And then I kind of thought, "Hey, what if we looked at Paul of Tarsus, St. Paul as the ultimate memetic engineer?" And so I started going down that road. Judaism is the parent brand. Christianity is the ultra-viral spinoff brand that got to be viral because it removed all the friction that Judaism had. Judaism probably didn't spread because it had huge barriers to entry. You had to be born of a Jewish mother, you had to be circumcised, you had to have a special diet. There were lots of rules, right?
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And Paul came in and was like, "No, no, no. All you need is faith in Christ. That's what you need." So he created a huge, total addressable market, whereas Judaism just didn't have that, right? His little spinoff, he forked Judaism basically, and was like, "Hey, doesn't matter what your earlier gods were. We don't care. Doesn't matter where you're from, we don't care. We don't care what tribe or tribal religion or identity that you embrace or what sect you are. Christ is—you just follow Christ. Hey, you're a member. Come on in." And then as I continued down the road, it was like he leveraged existing infrastructures, right? So temples are expensive and if you're a proto-religion and you want temples, that's going to take you ten years, right?
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So when he was busy spreading the message of Christianity mimetically, he just went right to the existing synagogues because he had a captured audience of people who are already devout and maybe open to persuasion, right? "Hey, that sounds kind of nice. Kind of like, I don't have to do all this other stuff and I can still be a holy guy. Yeah, I like what you're selling me here, Paul." And so by using the synagogues, he had an installed base where he could go to. And then he standardized the API layer by writing in Greek, which was the lingua franca of the Roman Empire. And then he also took advantage of things like the fact that he was a Roman citizen.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Generally speaking, if you are not a Roman citizen and you're living in the Roman Empire, kind of dangerous to be espousing a new religion. But if you're a Roman citizen, you have the right to due process. You have all of these things, right? And so when you start going down this rabbit hole, you can see that some of the world's biggest religions are really great examples of mimetic manipulation. And I'm going to try to figure something out. Maybe I'll do, I don't know, a Twitter thread on how Paul was the ultimate memer.
Nadia Asparouhova: Yes, I think that's—yeah, there's definitely some truth to that.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But I also think that you need probably humor. I think humor—Mark Twain said, "Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand." And Billy Wilder had a great line which was, "If you're going to tell the truth, you better be funny or they'll kill you." And that brings us to kind of the idea of the truth tellers. The court jester, the holy fool in Russian history, the guy who could say, "Hey Emperor, you are buck naked, man." And he could do it because he was an outcast, not really part of the in-circle, etc. And along comes the Enlightenment and—the world before the Enlightenment, right, was ruled by religion. And all of the answers were to whatever question you had because God did it or God wants it that way, right?
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so then the Enlightenment comes along and says "actually," and we had all of those things where Galileo, "nevertheless, it moves," etc., and they break through. And do you see the ability, given our very fractal world of today. Do you—to change track for a minute? But are the Beatles possible anymore? By that I mean a group that everybody knows who they are, a certain generation knows every lyric that they have. I don't—in our existing world, I don't know that works anymore.
Nadia Asparouhova: Probably not. At least not right now. I don't know about "anymore." Maybe we'll have some swing in a different direction that I can't see right now. But in the current world it seems less—I mean, we still have iconic musicians. If we're going to take the question literally, Taylor Swift might be like a Beatles level of fame today. But I think maybe the question—maybe the answer is less about can we have it or is it possible? But more of is it the thing that we should even—most people should even aspire to anymore? Because I think maybe for 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."
Nadia Asparouhova: And now it's entirely possible to have whatever fame means to you or be famous within certain smaller networks and without having to go all the way, right? And that was kind of the lesson of first wave of social media, of just having the thousand true fans. And it doesn't matter so much whether everyone is talking about you. It matters whether the people that you respect or the people that you want to pay attention to your stuff are listening to you.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I think that what was interesting from my point of view as I started looking historically at this stuff and trying to find examples of both Girardian mimetic with an "i," right? And Dawkins meme with an "e." And man, you see it everywhere. So, for example, Babylonia in ancient Mesopotamia—Babylonia was not always the top dog there, right? As a matter of fact, they were one of the lesser city states. And it actually was because their God, Marduk was a puny God, he was a regional storm God, essentially. 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."
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so they created a brand new myth for him, and they had him slay the primordial sea dragon and split it in half, throwing half up in the air, creating the heavens, and throw the other half down, creating the earth. And presto changeo, Babylonia becomes the top dog in the Mesopotamian power structure. These memes can be weapons of mass destruction and/or creation, right? 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 noted for its wanting to get along. I mean, and then of course, the example of Paul, what else can you do? And what other ideas can spread this way?
Nadia Asparouhova: I think one of the arguments I make in the book is that you can tell history of memes throughout—yeah, I mean, even stretching as far back as ancient history, but throughout all of that, I think the story of antimemes has also been there present and just sort of lurking in the background, right? So there's a role for antimemes in religion. There's a role for antimemes in ancient civilizations. And you mentioned a little bit of that truth teller role of the idea of "emperor has no clothes," right? And there's always been a role like that. I think throughout history there's always been sacred, taboo type knowledge that society is collectively suppressing.
Nadia Asparouhova: And I think one of the roles of religious figures or religious leaders can be to help shepherd some of that sacred knowledge into the light. So if you think about confessional booths where you might be holding onto some deep dark thing about yourself that you don't even want to talk to your family about or your friends, but you will go to a confessional booth and talk to a priest about it. And we've sort of created that formal structure for you to take this thing that is antimemetic to yourself. It's a really interesting idea. It's something very compelling or an interesting secret or story or something that you're feeling about yourself. Something that is really taking over your mind share but that refuses to spread.
Nadia Asparouhova: And you can go to this clearly defined place and go and unload it onto someone else. Secular version of that might be a therapist. And then I think even political leaders that would use soothsayers, oracles and things like that to say something that honestly probably everyone else wanted to be able to say, but they can't say it because yeah, you either have to use humor, you have to be some sort of outsider or some figure that, where it's perceived that you don't have your own agenda. And we have these institutionally defined roles in both religious and secular contexts to kind of help bridge that gap between things that are being individually or collectively suppressed that we can't talk about. And how do we bring them into light, how do we bring them into the circulation of ideas.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And that brings in where traditionally at least institutions like the government, the church, academia, etc., served as the sifters or what's allowed into the Overton window. And what is not, what's taboo, right? And what is not. And they—institutions are not having a good run right now. If you look at trust in—and you fill in the blank, trust in the government, trust in the military, trust in banks, trust in science, trust in all of these things—they're literally collapsing and do you think that is one of the consequences of this splintering, this creation of a more fractal—the world used to be log normal in my estimation, right? That's why you had mass production, right? If you do a typical bell curve, 68.5% are within one standard deviation of the median, right?
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so if you're a capitalist or a TV show producer, what are you going to do? You're going to try to make something that appeals to that 68.5%, right? And that is the world most of us grew up in. And yet I don't think we're in that world anymore. I think we are in a more Mandelbrot fractal normal distribution pattern. Fractal is a much narrower peak in the distribution with super long tails. And it's in the tails where all the interesting stuff is, at least according to me. But yeah, I think—yeah, go ahead.
Nadia Asparouhova: I think this is where I—now is a really good time to talk about antimemes. And maybe it's partly why people are getting more interested in them in the same way that the concept of memes, Richard Dawkins coined that term in the seventies and had been around for a while, but I don't think it really entered household name level status as a term until the Internet in the 2000s and then more in the 2010s. And so it took thirty years for anyone to even use that term, meme, and then kind of start applying it to everything in our everyday life. And then 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 long time.
Nadia Asparouhova: You can find examples of that sort of memetic behavior throughout the entirety of human civilization. And similarly with antimemes, I think the concept has existed just as long as memes. And maybe people started talking about or thinking about it in recent years, because something changed on the Internet where suddenly this idea that if an idea is good, it goes viral, that statement became tested and is no longer really quite true. And so now is a really interesting time to say, "Okay, we are in this weird destabilized world where we need a new sort of explanatory term or theory to describe this. All these different dynamics around us that memes or mimetic desire or any of these sort of related concepts just don't quite get us all the way there."
Nadia Asparouhova: And so yeah, I think that now is a really good time to start thinking about. Yeah. What else is going on and how else our ideas behaving in ways that maybe we couldn't fully see before just because everything was not quite as split apart as it is right now.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And I think that people are just more tuned in, right? To this than they were in the past because of the Internet. Because we've kind of built this global brain that is fracturing a little bit. Yeah. And people are retreating to their private walled gardens. But I also think of when we're talking about the meme clicks and memes that are designed to go viral and antimemes that are designed not to, right? Or not designed, but end up not going viral. One of the things I've thought a lot about is because as I kind of watched all these various mind viruses happening during the pandemic, specifically kind of during the lockdown, I was really shocked by how quickly places that I would have never believed would, you know, kind of immediately comply. Complied. Like for example, Australia.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love Australians and I love Australia there many times. Same with New Zealand. I would have thought Australia would have been the last place where draconian measures would be enforced. And yet they were. And it made me start kind of thinking about we should probably try to come up with a way to inoculate people against memes and mental hygiene came to the top of my thought process as I watched the meme, right? "You're going to die if you go outside, if you don't have a mask on," etc. Just take a lot of real estate in people's neural real estate available.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And that kind of led me to "I wonder if there is a way to engineer a meme to either inoculate people on the things that you don't want them to be mimetically transferring or have it go contagion," right? Have a super hard R-naught for that particular meme and you start looking at things like the brand, if you will, of the people trying to spread the meme. I always joked about the World Economic Forum. I don't know if you're familiar with them. Yeah. But I tease them relentlessly on social media because they had their "build back better" and "it's 2030, you own nothing and you're happy." And it was the most tone deaf campaign I had ever seen. It was backed by tons of money.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: There was—I mean, literally, how in the world could that fail? Well, I think if you understand memetics and how memes transfer, they were not—they were appealing already to their own in-group, basically, right? So they were appealing to traditional legacy media, right? Not what people were tuning into, right? And elitists talk about—I mean, the mistakes made were kind of legendary. The way I look at it's like "we're going to have a full week global conference on global warming and we're all going to fly our Gulfstream Fives into Davos to do that." So the true memetic engineers were able to take all of that and destroy them with just memetically, without resources, just by being funny and "what you talking about, Willis, you're crazy," right? And they conform to a lot of the stereotypes as well.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So if you were going to try to make something that currently resides as an antimeme, right? If you were going to try to design a way to turn that into a viral meme, how would you go about it?
Nadia Asparouhova: I think the question that I'm curious about just from what you said was how do we inoculate people against memes more broadly? Or if memetic warfare is sort of the de facto way of behaving and thinking right now, how do you start to inject some good memes into there or which kind of has two possible paths. There's one where you fight memes with other memes. So you say, "Okay, these memes are, let's say, not good for you, or we think they're not good for you and we're passing a judgment there. So let's put some good memes in the bloodstream and so your head will just kind of snap and you'll pay attention to those instead." That's one way to protect people against sort of bad memes or undesirable memes.
Nadia Asparouhova: And the other question is sort of how do you become more resistant to memes more generally? So that's instead of your brain sort of splitting from one meme to another and giving up that responsibility to others to sort of tell you where to turn your head. How do you sort of decide where you want to turn your own head? And I think that's a much more complicated question. And I have a whole chapter in the book where I talk about just sort of the value of our attention as—if you think about ideas spreading through a network, they spread node by node, right? And each node is just a person.
Nadia Asparouhova: And so each of us is responsible, in a sense of we are the gatekeeper for if you zoom all the way into "how is an idea spreading through a network?" Each of us is the one who says, you come across a new idea and you decide, "What do I do with this?" right? And so there is some level of, I guess, personal responsibility around when I receive a new idea, do I just sort of run in the flashiest, most exciting direction? And I think that would be kind of closer to the Girardian way of thinking about things, which, as I said earlier, I think just sort of ends up becoming a little bit of a race to the bottom, where everyone is just sort of competing for the flashiest thing to grab your attention.
Nadia Asparouhova: But also we have some ability to decide. "I'm actually just going to—when a flashy idea comes my way, maybe I can be a little bit more thoughtful about it." I think the problem is that not everyone has or wants to take that level of personal responsibility. So I actually think of this question around sort of meme inoculation as closer to a public health problem, where if we think about something like nutrition or how do you ensure that people eat healthy? It comes down to a similar kind of question where on the one hand, you could always just say, "Well, take personal responsibility for your diet." All the answers are out there. It's not that it's unknowable how to eat healthy. It's just that a lot of people choose not to do it.
Nadia Asparouhova: And then the flip side of it is, "Well, some people are just not going to do it." And there are the effects of some people choosing not to eat healthy or not even choosing for whatever reason they're not eating healthy does impact the rest of the public. So that's why it's a public health problem. So then the question becomes how you design policies that help people make the right choices without also infringing on other people's ability to choose and have the freedom to do what they want. And I actually think Ozempic is kind of an interesting twist in the story, right? If we're just looking at nutrition, where we ended up coming up with something to take a sort of take the burden of personal responsibility away, where it's not—it's no longer difficult to choose to eat healthy because you can take something that makes you not want to eat unhealthy anymore. So it's kind of this weird thing that was solved by the private markets.
Nadia Asparouhova: But in a way that is just maybe like a weird third option. So I don't know what the equivalent of Ozempic for meme inoculation would be, but I think this is sort of the battle around social media, right, is you have on the one hand, people saying, "Well, we should create policies to hold social platforms responsible as the sort of arbiters of how information spreads. These are the places that are where we're getting most of our information. And if they just had better content moderation policies, then our information wouldn't be harming people." And that's sort of one way of looking at it. But it's a little bit—some people would say a little bit draconian or it's just—it's also just an impossible task, like no one can come up with the perfect content moderation policy that solves all problems. And so there's the policy question, then there's the personal responsibility question of do I just choose to turn off my notifications and not—exercise a little bit more skepticism when ideas come my way? Yeah, that works in practice, but it's a little—it's hard to enforce that among everyone to do. 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? I don't know.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But yeah, and that's the perennial question. I firmly believe that the hard way doesn't work. I think that if you really do want kids to do drugs, tell them not to do drugs authoritatively. There's—Chris Buckley, wrote a funny book called "Thank You for Smoking" in which one of the characters is a lobbyist for the tobacco industry. And the opposition is passing this bill in Congress to require all cigarette makers to put a skull and crossbones on the pack. And he is gleeful because actually that's exactly what he wants, because he knows that teenagers—you need new smokers because the old ones are dying off of lung cancer and heart disease. So in the vision of his humorous book, the lobbyist wants that to happen. And so he's pretending, "You can't make us do that." Meaning meanwhile, of course, that's exactly what he wants. Make it forbidden, right? I mean, let's go back to Adam and Eve. What was forbidden? What did we have? The apple of knowledge. So if you really want to get somebody to do something, especially a young person, forbid them from doing it.
Nadia Asparouhova: Yeah, definitely.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And tell them that it's no good. But I also think that gets back to the whole idea of salience. The champion of that particular idea needs coherence and discipline, right? The message discipline of successful memes kind of self forms. Like any complex adaptive system, it emerges from the bottom. I mean, one of the definitions of a successful meme is that its creator loses control of it. But if you actually watch those memes develop, what you also see is compression. Compression, compression, right? "Okay. Boomer" being kind of a classic compression of a meme that was everywhere, right? And it didn't really start out that way. If you look at the history of it was millennials complaining about boomers, and most of it that was long. It wasn't just obvious you didn't have a signal or a handle that people could grab onto, right?
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And human OS loves to be certain, right? Even though I always argue only the madman is absolutely sure. Absolute certainty is a real, in my opinion, liability. You want to think creatively, not an advantage. And yet your average person out there wants certainty. Why do you think we always elect the politician that seems the most certain, right? That's how you get demagoguery and all of that. And it's going to be just this easy, right? And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, right? Back in the inflationary 1970s, President Ford rather foolishly put together a campaign that was WIN, which was an acronym for Whip Inflation Now. And they did buttons and they did all of these totems, right? That they hoped people would latch onto, but it didn't work because there was no authenticity feeling there. It was like, "What? How am I supposed to—how am I supposed to do that?" right?
Nadia Asparouhova: This is where the role of the truth teller can be very useful, because it's sort of—when you're locked into this mimetic warfare where it feels like everyone has an agenda. Everyone is trying to get you to believe a thing to serve their own purposes. Having this sort of strange outsider come along, the trickster, the clown, the fool, whomever. Someone who is just sort of wandering in and saying, "The emperor has no clothes." That can only come from someone that you perceive as having no agenda and being kind of an outsider, because otherwise. Yeah. Why would you believe it, right?
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, exactly. And if you try to kind of do a deep dive. I read a piece years ago that I found really interesting and kind of try to build on it. If you're trying to literally understand how to build the algorithms, right? That deliver the meme, which is the emotional load or the political load or whatever you want, and the thing that I read took four very disparate people. Andrey Kolmogorov, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, right? So Claude Shannon information theory gives you—Shannon maintains that information is novel. It's what's new, right? And so Shannon would argue that a political speech has, contains zero information because there's nothing new in it and there's no novelty to it.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But that if you're looking at it in a sense of trying to engineer a viral meme that gives you a metric, right? So is it novel or a take on something old, but in a new way that makes it—people take notice, right? In a very noisy field, which is what social media and the Internet really are, right? They're highly—trying to find the signal to noise gets harder and harder because there's more and more noise. Well, if you apply Shannon, right? And information theory, it gives you a metric for the meme, right? So is that meme going to have enough oomph, enough of that emotional payload to overcome the noise, to defeat the noise? Because the best meme in the world, if it doesn't have that oomph, you're going to fail on the Shannon metric. It's not going to break through the noise. And then Andrey came up with the shortest program of the output of a string is determines the algorithmic complexity. You got to compress it so that the mimetic fitness is kind of low compress, low complexity, right? Slogans, melodies like "don't mess with Texas," be another one, right?
Jim O'Shaughnessy: 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 go viral. And then Turing comes in, basically, he posited that humans are all universal machines. In other words, our brains can execute any computable description and during. He wouldn't care if it was a human mind, a computer or a cell, right? Anything that has a substrate that can process that information can literally help the virality of that meme. And so just like chain letters, you're too young. But back in the day.
Nadia Asparouhova: I remember chain letters…
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh you do you really remember?
Nadia Asparouhova: I do, I do, yes.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So great early example of a very effective mimetic payload, right? If you don't forward this letter, death and destruction will come your way if you do forward it. You will get rich or get some little golden box that you get to open and find out what's in.
Nadia Asparouhova: It's basically actually, maybe it's the original super meme because that's 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 if you don't pay attention to the climate crisis, if you don't pay attention to existential AI risk or whatever. And so you're just sort of like, "Well, I don't know if it's true or not, but I better pay attention because I don't want to be wrong."
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I agree. And I think that humans are emotional creatures that also think and reason. We are not thinking, reasoning creatures who also have emotions. I think we are ruled by our emotions for the most part, and a lot of us try to pretend like we're not. And I think that the king or queen of all human emotions is fear, specifically fear of novel things. That's why the COVID scare worked so well. In my opinion, it was because it was a novel danger that humans didn't know anything about. Well, they knew about pandemics and viruses, but this had a particular picture. It was concrete, it was deadly. You saw all of those viral videos that China released.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: My thesis was most of those were fake videos because they were worried about people saying, "Hey, wait a minute, why are they calling this the Wuhan virus? Why, what's in Wuhan right now?" And so, but the point is novel fear, you can really focus people's minds.
Nadia Asparouhova: The underlying mechanic in antimemes as well is that sort of fear of the consequences to yourself or to the network if you spread it. And so yeah, wanting to hold on to it because you're afraid of what the consequences might be.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But specifically, again, about your book and the idea of the antimeme, do you see this becoming a more formalized area of study? We've been talking a lot about—at least people like me are really interested in being able to build algorithmically ideas that you want to champion and get across. Well, it's going to really certainly be helpful if they are mimetically tasty and just irresistible. And so it becomes kind of an engineering problem in many respects. But then also the opposite of that is true in my opinion. I think that watching all of these disparate mind viruses take hold of people. It's not a good thing for the most part, right? And we have examples of it throughout history.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Burning witches, the Bonfire of the Vanities, with the priest who went to Florence and basically he was preaching the antimeme because during the Renaissance, right, you had the Medici, you had all this great art, you had all these amazing things going on. And then the church sent one of their killer antimemetic guys in to tell the residents of Florence, "These are vanities, you won't get into heaven. Fear, right? You won't get into heaven if you've got these vanities, you got to burn them." And that's where Tom Wolfe got that title from, "Bonfire of the Vanities" was from what they actually did in Florence. Because this guy was so persuasive. How did he persuade? Through fear, through fear of consequences, etc.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So I definitely think it would be a very good thing if we could somehow immunize people from memetic contagion, right? Because as you know, this is just getting into the common vernacular now. And the book that I showed you earlier, "Virus of the Mind"—cultural lag of adoption is a real thing, right? He wrote this in 1997. And Dawkins, as you noted, made the gene meme argument. And I think it was 1976 or 1977. And so now that we're living in this world which is no longer normally distributed, is Mandelbrot fractal distributed and you got so many of these people latching onto the idea of, "Oh, we'll just make this go viral." I think that—how would you go about setting up a system that allowed people to get essentially immune from viral memes that maybe aren't in their best interest?
Nadia Asparouhova: Yeah, I don't know. I think that's what I was saying earlier about the—there's the question of what are the right policies to—if we think about social platforms as all the ones we use as sort of the substrate in which ideas are being passed around, how do we develop good policies that—and that are constantly being adjusted? I think, I don't think, again, there's one right policy for everything, that's how do we make sure that we're sort of being good stewards of that information flow? But then there's sort of the personal responsibility level. But then I think there's also—
Nadia Asparouhova: Yeah, I think antimemes are sort of the 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 this sort of overexposed, highly mimetically charged environment for too long where people just sort of started to build these protective walls around themselves and started to sort of find more semi-private spaces in order to have these conversations, which I think was a form of trying to protect ourselves a little bit from full on memetic warfare. But yeah, I talk about the book as well. I don't think the answer is necessarily that simple either. I think people often feel like they're safe when they're in a smaller space or they're just with their trusted friends.
Nadia Asparouhova: But I don't think that the state that we're in right now is exactly like it was pre-social media either because there is this sort of reciprocal relationship now between say your group chats or your newsletters or whatever and what's going on in the quote-unquote, real world online, right? So what do people talk about in the group chats? They're talking about everything that's happening out there, right? It's not that you're completely disconnected, completely unaware of what's going on. It's not some utopian society that you built in the countryside and you're just sort of completely tuned out. Some group chats might be like that, but a lot of them are still very connected to sort of what's going on out there.
Nadia Asparouhova: And so it is sort of like having a COVID pod or something where you think that it's you and your 10 friends and "we're perfectly protected from the pandemic out there." But of course, if one of those friends just happens to talk to someone else or happens to go out in public somewhere else or socialize and you can't control perfectly what all those 10 people are doing. And someone brings a little bit of that virus back in, then it's going to spread really fast in a small group. So I think ideas—I don't think we're in some perfectly stable state where, "Okay, now everyone's hunkered down in their cozy little enclaves and we're all protected now from the outside world."
Nadia Asparouhova: I think we're going to have to continue to manage this relationship between the memes still make their way into smaller settings and then they spread really fast. They can mutate really rapidly. So ideas are actually just getting weirder and crazier, I think even faster in a strange way because we have these really small trusted environments where they can spread and be workshopped much more quickly. So yeah, I mean, I don't really know what the answer is to all of that, but at least I think one aspect of it is at least just drawing our attention to the fact that it is happening and yeah, creating some more vocabulary and just more thinking and conversation around what exactly is happening right now.
Nadia Asparouhova: Because like you said, I think the state of the conversation right now is mostly about sort of memes and going viral, which is maybe step one way to think about how ideas spread. But we have sort of the existence proof now of there are plenty of people with ideas that are really compelling and important that they don't want to go viral. And that's a new kind of behavior where suddenly it's like, "Oh, you're actually pretty purposely keeping this idea to yourself or to a smaller group." And so that starts to complicate this idea of virality. And yeah, I hope that there will be more conversation. Now we are maybe still in that super early phase of whether the right term is antimemes or something else.
Nadia Asparouhova: But I think we're just starting to recognize that what got us through the first part of the Internet is those concepts are only going to take us part of the way there in whatever phase we're in now. And so we have to think a little bit about 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 regardless? Because that's another fear that I have is if everyone's just sort of keeping their ideas to themselves in group chats and stuff, how do we continue to contribute to the civil public discourse and ensure that good ideas are making their way back out and they're not just sort of being gatekept by some sort of intellectual elite.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, the—my current guest, the podcast Todd Rose basically calls it self-silencing publicly. You're not self-silencing in your smaller group or chat or whatever, but you are self-silencing in public discourse. And you talked about policies and I think one of the challenges there is all of this is existing in a complex adaptive system and generally speaking, things emerge from the bottom of those systems, not the top, right? Back to Paul, right? How did he pull that off in an empire that was at the time one of the largest empires if not the largest empire in the known world. And yet what did it take him—400 years before the Roman emperor converted to Christianity, right? Julian the Apostate was the last of the pagan emperors.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And they got him because Paul was so successful at dismantling the multi-God structure of the Roman Empire because he was the ultimate memetic engineer. And so I don't know that it's top down that's going to be a solution here. I think that the emergence is what fascinates me. And books like yours, the more people who read them and the more people who have this conversation publicly, right? And according to Todd, the author of "Collective Illusions," he was like, "It just takes one voice, right? One voice saying, 'I really don't agree with that' or 'I really do.' If it's a controversial idea, you could either support it by saying, 'No one ever talks about that. And I kind of agree with you.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Tell me more about why you think this' or conversely, 'I really don't agree with that idea, but I am open minded. Tell me more about why you believe this.'" And I think that things like large language models, something I do all the time is I steel man every argument I disagree with and large language models are really good at doing that. And what you find often is "oh, they actually have a point." Even if you come at it, not by trying to straw man it and look at its weakest points, right? Which is often engaged in traditional debate, do the opposite. Steel man that argument and look at the most persuasive argument for that idea that you maybe even vehemently oppose and it opens your mind a little bit.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: At least in my case it has to. "Well, I can't just blanketly say that this is a bad idea because I see point A and point B, they're actually pretty good." And so at least with me, that has always led to kind of an intellectual agnosticism. In other words. I love the author, Robert Anton Wilson. And he was like, "I don't believe anything, but I have many strong suspicions." Basically the idea that all models are wrong, but some are very useful if you can maintain that kind of flexibility around ideas. What you can do is, as soon as that idea stops serving you for whatever purpose, you can find a better one, right? Or get rid of it. At least if it's no longer helping. But the—
Jim O'Shaughnessy: The other thing about you that you're fascinating as a person, right? We talked earlier about, at least in the pre, how you have synesthesia, which is the sensory inputs cross sometimes—you hear colors, taste anger, etc., etc.—and aphantasia, which is the inability to visualize things. Which, by the way, as I ask more and more people about that's much more common, I'm finding, than I would have ever guessed. But the other part about you that's really interesting is you have a unique upbringing as well. You kind of straddled Quaker pacifism, Persian German discipline, Chinese, Indonesian, Persian pragmatism. Given your background, I just thought that was so cool because you were exposed to these—these, if you will, memeplexes, right? The Quakers have their memeplex and the Persian German have their memeplex.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And did you ever, growing up and coming of age, were you encoded one of these over another or did you draw from all of them?
Nadia Asparouhova: Yeah, I think it's hard to know the counterfactual, but I think coming, having exposure, a lot of just different cultures and different—different sets of norms and ways of doing things definitely made my brain kind of be like, "Okay, there's—there are a lot of different ways to do things. And there's no—I don't have any sort of really tightly held identity, I guess." So yeah, as you alluded to, my dad is Iranian, but he grew up in Germany. My mom is Chinese Indonesian from Indonesia. And then I grew up between Pennsylvania and Indonesia. And then I went to a Quaker high school that I really enjoyed. And so yeah, I felt like we were always just this mishmash of a lot of different things.
Nadia Asparouhova: My mom was Buddhist and Catholic, and so it's just sort of got a lot of exposure to a lot of different cultures and a lot of different ways of thinking about things. But yeah, it's a little—it's a little bit different, I think, from the classic—if there is a classic immigrant experience, maybe there isn't one, but it's—I think both my parents are themselves multicultural, and then they fused together and made even more multicultural—my upbringing even more multicultural. And so it wasn't like living in America and there's the American way of doing things and then a different way of doing things at home. It was like home itself was already kind of this crazy mix. And none of my relatives really believe I'm quite part of any of their culture.
Nadia Asparouhova: And so yeah, you're just sort of—you just kind of find a way to forge your own way of seeing the world without having any sort of one stable identity system. I think to refer back to which, yeah, I think is—I enjoyed it. Again, I don't know the—I don't know how it would have been different if I'd been raised differently, but I think it was a really helpful way of just sort of seeing the world.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Do you find yourself attracted to one set of beliefs or doing things over another, or do you have—have you synthesized them in the way you live your own life?
Nadia Asparouhova: I think, I think little bits and pieces of everything. Yeah, I definitely feel, yeah, there's something to learn from every group. And I don't know that I could even necessarily separate them all out into. To one place or another.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: 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, there are all sorts of different ways to organize societies, some better than others, some just different than others. And if you have the ability to travel broadly, I think it's really good for you because it shuts down any of the jingoistic tendencies you might have as you are living in this other culture, even if you're just visiting, right? It puts the human face on. "Oh, wait a minute, that's really cool. Look at—" when I was in Bhutan, I was already a big Dao and Buddhist guy, but there were all sorts of rituals and whatnot that I wasn't in the least bit aware of that when I was there.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I was like, "Wow, that's really cool, or I didn't know that they would have done that." And it kind of gives you the origin story, if you will, of a lot of different ways of looking at the world, right? And I think that by not being doctrinaire, by not being sort of deeply ideological and being open, travel is incredibly helpful because it exposes you to very—often very legitimate ways of viewing the world. And then kind of back to humor, right? If you're trying to get ideas across, especially if they're a little bit controversial, it's—you better be funny because if you're not, people might really get angry with you. Earlier days, they might even light you up, tie you to a stake and you become a marshmallow roast fest. So what's next after this book? What are you focusing on now?
Nadia Asparouhova: Oh my gosh, that's a whole other can of worms.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But okay, well—you know what, we could have you back on, but just give us a taste. A teaser as to what—
Nadia Asparouhova: Sure, yeah. So about a year ago, I think I sort of live on the Internet, kind of just looking for the next idea that's going to take over my mind, I guess. And I don't always know where that comes from. It's not always predictable. So before this I was looking at open source software developers. Yeah, this book is very different from my first book, obviously. And so about a year ago, I stumbled into this Twitter subculture of people that were obsessed with this style of advanced meditation that engenders strange, intensely altered states in your mind that are comparable to psychedelics and have similar potential mental health benefits as psychedelics. But it's all through meditation. But a different style of meditation than I think your standard, sort of mindfulness, stress reduction type meditation.
Nadia Asparouhova: And so I had pitched this piece to a magazine where I was going to go interview a bunch of these people about their experiences. And then I went one of the retreats as just research—no background in meditation, not my world at all, historically speaking. And came out of it being like, "Oh my gosh, this is actually really strange and fascinating and the hype is real and why aren't we talking about it?" So I've been spending the last year trying to understand what are these sorts of states and what are their potential benefits to people's mental health and how do they work mechanistically. So I've been working with Meditation Lab at Harvard Mass General to develop an education program around this, which I'm pretty excited about.
Nadia Asparouhova: And then also working with the retreat company that I had initially first tried this style meditation on just to understand—what is the impact of this on people's lives and what are the different factors that can determine whether someone is or isn't able to access certain states. And it's been interesting to think of—I think a lot of meditators sort of discourage this idea of trying to see it as a skill or something that you can reliably measure your progress on or something like that. So it's been interesting to try to treat it as any other sort of skill acquisition and say, "Are there different factors that can make people more or less successful?" And yeah, how do we take it a little bit more seriously? So that has been my deep rabbit hole for the last year.
Nadia Asparouhova: If you asked me a year ago what I thought I would be doing right now, that's definitely not what I thought it would be, but it's been really fun. And yeah, working on a longer piece related to this as well, so who knows what that'll turn into.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Very cool. Have you ever been in a float tank, a sensory deprivation tank?
Nadia Asparouhova: Yes. Yeah, yeah, I've tried that a few times. It's super fascinating as well, where it's just a really simple concept.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But yeah, I had a phase where that was really my thing. And you also mentioned psychedelics. There's another one where—talk about a flip, right? When I was growing up, I never tried a psychedelic because the campaign worked on me, right? It's like, "I don't think I want to jump off a building thinking I can fly." And then "How to Change Your Mind" comes out. And I'm reading it, I'm like, "Holy shit, they lied about everything." And so it's really interesting when you see—and now you're seeing a bit of a pushback against psychedelics, which I find fascinating. But that's—
Nadia Asparouhova: Michael Pollan's book was a perfect example of making antimemetic idea memetic, right? Because he was sort of trusted, because he was a trusted journalist. He was a little bit of an outsider—not the typical person you would expect to be doing psychedelics or writing about them. And then yeah, his book, and I think it was 2017, 2018, just took the conversation from people whispering about psychedelics and psychedelic research to making it something that you could talk to anyone about.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, yeah, well, I mean, it got me to try them and it was really fascinating. What's interesting about psychedelics, I think, is that it was weird, as you think about it, in retrospectively, that Nixon, who was maybe the craziest guy to occupy the Oval Office, even given the current occupant, why he picked the least addictive drugs, right? When you look at the addictive nature of a drug, most psychedelics are really low, like psilocybin, etc. You don't do psilocybin and wake up the next day jonesing to do psilocybin again, it's like, "Oh, yeah, that was really interesting." And—but you have no desire, at least I didn't to—to do it again. But one of the things that the shaman who I did this with said to me, this was, I think, in 2018 or 2019.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I was like, "Wow, 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. So it was bubbling, but it was still—still kind of taboo. And I looked at the guy and I'm like, "I think it would be absolutely great if everyone could try this." And he smiled and he went, "Well, I think it's going to happen sooner than you think." And I went, "Why?" And he said—and he pointed at me and he goes, "Because most of my clients over the last year have been people like you." And I'm like, "And?" And he goes, "You are completely—as somebody from the sixties would say, you're a square, straight guy, man, and you're trying this." And—
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And then I thought of Terence McKenna made the prophecy way back in the sixties that marijuana would ultimately be legal. And they were like, "You're crazy, dude. Why would you ever say that?" And he was in a group of young people and everyone was smoking dope. And he goes, "Because you're looking at your future congressmen and women."
Nadia Asparouhova: Not wrong. I think there's broadly just been a shift interest in just sort of contemplative practices more broadly, right? And psychedelics is one of them. But even things like breathwork or cold plunges, all this stuff, it's sort of this awareness that, "Oh, there are different ways to view the world. The world is a lot more malleable than I think it is." And yeah, there are a lot of different ways of going about that. So it's a really interesting time to be thinking and talking about that stuff.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Totally agree. Well, this has been absolutely fascinating, Nadia, and if you are familiar with the podcast, you know that at the end, we are going to create you Empress of the world. You can't kill anyone. You can't put anyone in a reeducation camp. But what you can do is we're going to hand you a magical microphone and you can speak two things into it that is going to incept the entire population of the world. Whenever their next morning is, they're going to wake up and they're going to say, "I have just had two of the best ideas." Speaking of memes, "I have just had two of the best ideas. And unlike all the other times, I'm going to actually act on these two." What two things are you going to incept into the world's population?
Nadia Asparouhova: I just have one which is related to all of this. But yeah, just paying attention. I don't know, turning off your notifications and just trying to actually feel the world as it is. I think people will be pretty surprised by what comes into their awareness.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love that one. You got to have one more though.
Nadia Asparouhova: I don't know, maybe I'll—I'll throw in a desire to travel the world because I think there's also something there around people getting a little bit too locked into their own way of doing things and I don't know. Yeah, just go. More exposure is good to more ideas.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I like both of those. One of my favorite sci-fi writers, Douglas Adams, who when you understand that he's not a sci-fi writer and more of a philosopher, he suddenly begins to make a lot more sense. He wrote a non-fiction book called "Last Chance to See," talking about his travels and about places that were literally kind of disappearing and so who knows what wonder of the world might disappear before you get a chance to see it. So pay attention, focus and travel and while you're traveling, pay attention and focus. I love both of those people. Can get your book everywhere when—
Nadia Asparouhova: Yeah, it's the—you can buy the digital version, you can get Kindle on Amazon right now. And then the physical ones you can pre-order on Metalabel and they should be shipping very soon. Actually just got my physical copy right—
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Before or show it to us because we also—
Nadia Asparouhova: It's real.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, I love it. That's fantastic. Congratulations.
Nadia Asparouhova: Thank you.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: There's nothing quite like having a book you've written come into your hands.
Nadia Asparouhova: It's a good feeling.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: A really good feeling. Well, Nadia, thank you so much for joining me. We'll have you on again when here, more about these various types of meditation and maybe if you figure out a way to engineer some of these memes, we'll hire you as a consultant.
Nadia Asparouhova: Love it. Thanks for having me.
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