Nadia Asparouhova on antiemetics: why good ideas resist spreading and how obscurantism is information warfare

uh yeah thanks for joining can you give us I'm surprised that Delian didn't join by the way because pava was about to have his he was about to have this you first do not send Delan the link he will just bomb interview he does have the link don't let him know that he can use the link because he good he's a great hype man uh anyway would you mind just a brief introduction and and and give us a little uh high level of the book sure um I'm Nadia uh writer and research um I just published this new book called antiemetics why um ideas resist spreading and it's about this idea of anti-memes which are self-censoring ideas so um ideas that we find really interesting and compelling in the moment but for whatever reason they kind of resist um sharing or being remembered um so I think we usually think that if an idea is good or interesting or compelling it's going to find a way to share be shared or or spread on its own um but there's this whole other class of ideas uh so things like taboos forbidden ideas stuff we don't really talk about in public um cognitive biases so stuff that um we are sort of like blind spots about ourselves that we don't really realize um all this kind of forms this class of ideas that are anti-emetic and don't spread super easily even though they're um interesting important ideas so that's what I want to write about how much of mimetics is just actually compressing the idea down I was thinking about how Lulu's going direct Manifesto has this really pithy phrase going direct founder mode same thing with the network State kind of two words that really hits versus uh Leopold Ashen brener wrote a fantastic essay about AI called it situational awareness we don't see people using situational awareness as a meme to talk about acceleration and where the future of AI is going is it just a packaging problem or is there something about the ideas itself that creates an anti-mimetic property yeah I think some of it is a packaging problem um like ideas themselves have these inate qualities that are memetic or antiemetic some of it is just about like how the person receiving them or receiving it is um like how do they interact with that idea so you can think of certain ideas that are spread really really easily in certain networks but not in others um conspiracy theories are a good example of this uh so yeah I think it's it's a mix of both it's partly about the idea it's partly about the person that is like sharing it or receiving it sure Jordy um well one I want to make this segment like the most beautiful ad for your book so I'd like to go like through a number a number of the of the ideas um I did want to uh a book had been going viral and I got a copy of it I wanted to get kind of your highle take on it it's funny there there was uh this was maybe released in 2021 there is no anti Medics division it sort of went viral a little bit last year but then it is no longer like for sale or I guess you can buy it or the paperbacks or trading is is that the on eBay right now yeah so I have one I should probably you know just sell it and buy like 20 C keep holding keep holding sitting on something but it's I just thought the great irony of like you know they were they maybe going after like you know something similar to what you've been researching it but but the but then it's not even available anymore so it's like not not not uh do you have any sort of like uh I'm curious like and more more broadly like uh in researching this like what what's the full breadth of what you were kind of like looking at right because I imagine you were researching and and finding like for bidden PDFs and books in a bunch of different areas right of like this sort of esoteric knowledge that uh Humanity ignores for some reason yeah U for I'll give a a big uh plug for Quantum who wrote there is no antimemetics Division and um he actually coined the term antiem like back in the day and it originates from this fiction uh like horror sci-fi kind of online Wiki um and so yeah he published that book and I think 2021 um it's a horror science fiction book and it's about uh antimemes as this sort of like anthropomorphized creatures that are kind of like these black holes they destroy everything they touch they consume everything that comes in contact with them but for whatever reason we can't seem to remember that we've interacted with them and so there's this intelligence unit um that is trying to fight anti-memes but like can't even remember that they're doing it hence the title there is no antimic division super cool book um highly recommend it and all of his writing honestly and that was the first book I read back in 2021 that kind of kicked off my interest in the topic I had never heard of the concept of anti memes before this um and uh yeah I was reading that book kind of like depths of covid uh yeah 2021 sad dark times but like also you know kind of everyone was doing stuff in like group chats and they were doing stuff um like Clubhouse was a thing and i' had been working at substack and so I was thinking a lot just kind of about like how does this concept apply to the real world and um like where antines show up in in the rest of our life so it was definitely direct inspiration for this book um but yeah I wanted just kind of like non-fiction treatment of of the concepts totally it was not practical in any way it was just sort of like you said a sci-fi horror exploration of it um can you talk about yeah can you talk about like I feel like we're in such a weird time like our generation was sort of like not born on the internet but we sort of like gained Consciousness on the internet and the internet is something that just like circulates ideas both like fact and fiction like extremely rapidly and so in many ways like conspiracy theories and these like sort of forbidden potentially truths or maybe it's fiction you know you don't know there sort of like I feel like I've grown up in a world where I don't you know like yeah the only conspir like the only conspiracy theory I believe is that there are just like many many many many conspiracies going on all sorts of things at all times right so can you talk about like um yeah I think like what what can people take away maybe from your book in terms of how to just like process uh information online when you don't know if something is completely false or an idea that or something that's factual or maybe it's an idea that's sort of just antimimetic and it doesn't want to be known or it doesn't want to be identified as as truth yeah um I thought about that a lot while I was writing this um just because I think there's a lot of Doom and Gloom about kind of like where the internet is right now or like social media didn't turn out to be what we expected and I really didn't want to write that kind of kind of a book um and because it is partly about this transition from you know once upon a time it was you could post whatever you wanted on Twitter and you weren't worried about like getting you know trolled cancelled attacked whatever um and a lot of people I think part of why we kind of withdrew to group chats and these more private spaces is because we kind of just you know wanted to tune tune out all of that um but I really wanted to show that it's not that one is replacing the other it's not like oh you know Twitter or whatever is over and we're just going to all like go back into our little caves only talk to our friends but like both these things actually feed off of each other and uh you know all the things that get Workshop in the group chats kind of make their way back out into public channels and vice versa um and I think like there's there are things about that they're are good and bad um maybe to your point just about yeah not being able to even tell what's real anymore but uh like group chats aren't really like a safe haven from whatever is happening in in public channels because they end up uh kind of like becoming these super incubators for crazy ideas and so ideas can get even crazier and even weirder when they're being workshopped by like a small group of people um and so in some ways they're kind of like mutating and making ideas even even crazier um but yeah I mean not to be like overly defe about it but I think it is also kind of like your reality is what you make of it um and like where we decide to direct our attention what we decide to focus on that is what your reality becomes and so maybe that's a little bit scary or destabilizing to people to feel like they can't tell what's real anymore but I also think if you just can find ways to harness your attention and focus on the things you actually care about then life is not really so bad so yeah and like you you compared like you know what's happening in sort of the the Town Square like something like X and then what's happening in group chats right like oftentimes like we're in this world where there's sort of this like fiction appearing on the timeline and then the truth is like racing through group chats and on a long enough time Horizon they intersect right CU like they almost like an idea uh can be like put out there and maybe people agree with it in the moment but then eventually sort of what's happening in the sort of like private group chats like actually does Start Spreading and sort of like breaking containment um and in in many ways it feels like that's happening faster than ever right yeah I I wanted to ask a question about uh kind of like practicality here I think a lot of Founders and business folks think about can they align their company or their mission or their vision of the future along with a meme or condense it down obviously the the going direct thing has been a great encapsulation of like what Lulu does and it's helped her business as opposed to in addition to helped people that have adopted that strategy um is it possible to do the opposite to take an attack on you and somehow twist it into an anti-meme so that uh the idea that is hurtful to you or your business or whatever becomes harder to discuss interesting interesting um yes definitely uh yeah I do talk in the book about uh this idea of like obscurantism um which Nick Bost coin but uh the idea of like can you make things boring or can you kind of hide them um as a way of sort of suppressing them so if you think about like suppressing ideas people often think about like putting a hard uh like a hard lock on it so that you know make it forbid and make it password protected whatever but that often makes people more excited to figure out like what is actually going on under there um but if you make really really boring and really uninteresting and like or just like really difficult to parse people kind of just lose interest and wander away and that's definitely a that would be like an anti-mimetic information Warfare tactic I guess I've seen this where um I've seen people chirping at each other on X and I've noticed that whoever puts up the longer piece of content usually ends the conversation so you post you know I like SpaceX and then I quote tweet you and you're like SpaceX is terrible but then if you quote Tweet back with something that's just like an say I be like H I'm tired I'm I'm out and and you kind of win by defa and I've also seen the I've also seen these attempts to take uh you know a legitimate attack vector and then and then wrap it in political extremism on the left or the right and so if you're being attacked by someone you can say oh well like that's an idea from forchan or that's an idea that's from The Communist Manifesto so we should disregard it and and put it in the Forbidden category even if it's a legitimate criticism of whatever's going on and so I don't know it's it's a fascinating topic can you can you talk about some of the differences between anti-mimetic ideas and anti-commercial ideas and anti-commercial I would uh put something like intermittent fasting in that bucket where oh yeah nobody makes money if people eat less right like like it's sort of this idea that like there's there's whole conspiracies around intermittent fasting which is like big breakfast was like came in and they're like you got to eat a big breakfast and like there's a bunch of people that benefit from like the big breakfast you know uh uh you know complex uh and then if you start going around and saying like hey you know you can just have coffee or water and like just eat lunch like it's hard to monetize that right it's not like I can be like hey don't eat food and also like you know pay me to like teach you how to not eat food and and some people have done that but like I feel like there's maybe a line between ideas that are antimimetic and like just don't spread for one reason and then stuff that's maybe like slightly more obvious but it's just like not spreading because there's no like sort of economic or commercial interest that's like trying to spread a certain idea yeah that's super interesting I actually thought about that yet um yeah I think like there's still plenty of ideas that can spread mimetically even without sort of like a commercial engine behind them so yeah fism aphorisms things like that uh but you're right that uh having especially I think in like the realm of like health related things I'm just thinking about like a lot of chronic health issues and stuff like that where people kind of have to like bumble around and like find their own answers to things and it's partly even if they're like you know chronic health issues that tons of people are facing and dealing with there's no like clear answer to them and I think sometimes when the answer is something that can't be yeah uh monetized or or sold then it's it it uh if we think of it as just like another engine for driving the spread of information if that engine is missing then um something kind of Might languish and and not reach everyone that it should so yeah that's super interesting how do you think about uh elon's positioning with xai around the sort of like truth seeking AI like is it possible that a you know properly trained llm could be more inclined to spread ideas that that are sort of anti-mimetic within humans yet like the machine is just like you ask it a question it's like well obviously like this is like you know what you're dealing with whereas a human would tell you uh you know you know some other you know answer that that uh maybe was like more correct in some ways H I think it could be really useful for uh like ideas that are antimimetic on an individual level like I know some people will use AIS for this where it's like tell me based on the conversations we've been having like tell me something about myself that I don't know or I don't realize and maybe just having someone that can just tell you straight up what the answer to that is versus your friends who might kind of not be super honest um that could be useful I still think it's like really hard to spread things that are like taboos or forbidden ideas um through a network so even if one person really believes it and and yeah is is totally bought into an idea like how do you get it to actually spread from person to person and um yeah it's a little bit harder to think about like how that that takes place well I'm super excited for the book congratulations yeah we should do what like once we get a full copy here and it's like actually ordering we'd love we'll we'll do a deep dive on it and uh we're going to try to yeah we'll have you back on and we'll we'll help the audience figure out how to make money how tos the theme of going spread what's really going to get the book uh you oh my competitor no one's ever heard of them now all of a sudden no one can remember them they just disappeared from the internet because we put anti-s to work in capitalism uh fantastic having you thanks so much for coming on the show and congratulations two Time author now fantastic incredible uh we're going uh the opposite direction we're going straight into the uh the AIS SDR Scandal that's going on we're going back revisiting 11x you you might have heard about it earlier this this week uh 11x there was a tech crunch article said that maybe the uh ARR Figures were inflated maybe they were using um uh customer logos who had churned and they hadn't been removed from the from the website quickly enough we have the uh the founder of rocks on um who is here to tell us all about sdrs AI SDR technology agents and uh a whole lot more but I'll let him introduce himself