Transcript: What Jhana Meditation Can Teach Us About LLMs

The transcript of AI & I with Nadia Asparouhova is below. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Timestamps

1. Introduction: 00:01:15
2. The beginning of Nadia’s journey with Jhana: 00:02:34
3. How Jhana is different from other meditation practices: 00:05:51 
4. Jhana reframed the way Nadia thinks about being human: 00:09:52
5. How Nadia integrates her experience with Jhana into her life: 00:14:16
6. Nadia describes her experience of the final stage of Jhana: 00:16:44
7. Why our modern sense of self isn’t as timeless as you might assume: 00:19:11
8. How new technologies can be a mirror to ourselves: 00:23:53
9. Nadia embraces the feeling of not knowing how AI precisely works: 00:33:55
10. How Nadia uses ChatGPT to make writing less isolating: 00:38:03

Transcript

(00:01:15)

Dan Shipper

Nadia, welcome to the show.

Nadia Asparouhova

Thanks for having me.

Dan Shipper

Super excited to have you. For people who don't know, you are a writer and a researcher. You previously wrote Working in Public, which you published with Stripe Press, and you are the author of the upcoming Antimemetics, which sounds like an awesome book. And I'm excited to have you. 

We spend a lot of time writing at the intersection of technology and humanities largely, and I feel like you're just so good at doing really highly crafted, thoughtful, great writing on technology topics, and I love reading your stuff in particular. I think a good place to start is: You wrote a really deep dive of your experience going on a Jhana meditation retreat, which I read and really loved, and I'm actually going on a Jhana retreat in maybe a month and a half or so.

Nadia Asparouhova

Oh, awesome.

Dan Shipper

Yeah, I've been meditating for a long time. Not with their stuff, but some of their inspiration—teachers like Robert Beatty and stuff like that have been a big part of my practice for a long time. So maybe we can start with that. Give us a we'll get into the AI stuff. I think there's a natural AI thing going on there—maybe we can start with that. Tell us about that experience, what the Jhanas are for people who are not Jhana-pilled.

Nadia Asparouhova

Yeah, def. Oh gosh. This is fun. Yeah, so I originally wrote this piece about almost a year ago about my experiences going on this retreat for a particular style of meditation, Jhana. I really had no background in meditation, no prior experience. I just did it because I was covering a bunch of different technology subcultures and all this sort of chatter about this certain type of meditation was sort of bubbling up on my feed, people talking about being Jhana-pilled, experiencing these really intense states during meditation, just having a really wonderful experiences with it. And I was sort of like, all right, why has no one talked about this thing? I'm gonna write a piece about it and just cover it from a more anthropological, detached lens. So I interviewed a whole bunch of people in the space and I was trying to write this more general piece, trying to cover the history of it in the Bay Area and sort of how it's bubbling up as this new subculture. And one of the people I interviewed was Stephen, who is the co-founder of Jhourney, the company of the retreat that you're going on. And Stephen, after I interviewed him, said do you wanna come on a retreat? And I was sort of like, I'm good. I just had a baby.

I was sort of like, I don't think I can go on a week-long meditation retreat, but he was very persistent, a very good salesperson. And he followed up a few more times and I felt— 

I think with a lot of my writing and research, I really want to feel like I'm not just writing from an arm’s distance. I want to actually dive in and experience the thing that I'm doing or trying to talk about. I just think that adds a layer of authenticity to my work. So I was like, well, I can't really talk about this thing without having tried it. I tried it myself, went on their retreats and was just totally blown away by the experience. Again, I didn't have any prior meditation experience, probably would classify myself as somewhat of—not necessarily skeptic, but just it is not my thing. And I came away being like, wow, these are some pretty intense states that you can get into. And so, yeah, in this style of meditation I think the mindfulness style meditation that people maybe have heard of or have tried themselves, you're trying to sort of keep calm, keep your awareness wide and sort of non-reactive. You're just tuning into the present moments, but there's no particular direction or focus to your meditation. You're trying to just sort of not react to things in this style of meditation. This is more like a concentrative meditation where you have a warm, pleasant feeling or a sort of meditation object that you're focused on and dialed in on, and you're directing all of your attention towards that one specific thing. And if you continue to sort of deepen that sensation it's sort of getting into a flow state where you're just sort of really locked into you and that feeling or that object. And then these feelings start to grow and can produce these states that are subjectively very similar to what people report from like psychedelics and other types of. contemplative mind altering therapies, I guess. And yeah, there were a lot of really interesting implications for mental health. And after that it was sort of like, okay, this is fascinating and I need to understand better what's going on here. So that's been the rabbit hole I fell down in the last year.

Dan Shipper

That makes sense. Yeah. That's great. I think what it makes me think of is for people who are familiar with mindfulness or maybe not, I think we have an idea that meditation is a thing, but there’s actually many different ways to meditate. There's many different practices and traditions and all that stuff. And a lot of traditions, you do concentrate. I sat in zen for a long time and you're concentrating on just the movement of your stomach, right below your belly button. And that's just all you do. You just count your breaths and try not to get distracted. And I think what's really interesting about the vibe at Jhourney is basically like, those practices or the meditation or Buddhism as we get it today comes bundled with a lot of stuff that has accumulated over time based on like where it, where it sort of came from and and is typically like very anti goal-oriented. They don't wanna really explicitly say, this is what you're trying for, which I think actually is a valid strategy. But I think what's interesting about Jhourney is they're very pragmatic about being like, no, you can like be goal-oriented with this. It just has to be goal-oriented in a particular way. And we're gonna be pretty open about this is what we're trying for and it's achievable if you want to get it, which has trade-offs. There’s good things, bad things about that approach, but at least for me. So I've done different retreats, many different retreats in many different styles, and actually I've not been on one yet, but a friend sent me their guide, so I like to just use it. And it actually unlocked some things that just many, many retreats of traditional meditation have, not particularly because it's so enjoyment focused. And it's just a different way to relate to meditating for me at least. I'm curious about what that brings up for you.

Nadia Asparouhova

I think the goal-oriented part is one of the really interesting philosophical dividing lines in meditation communities. And that is sort of what has continued to tug me along down this path of curiosity because it seems for a lot of people I've talked to now lots of people who have practiced meditation for years and you try different styles—like you said, there are so many different styles that you could try. And a lot of people have told me that they felt like they're just sitting there in silence waiting for something to happen a lot of times. And you're just sort of supposed to when, you'll feel it. And that works for some people. For other people it could be a little bit frustrating because you're like, I'm just sitting here for years waiting for something to happen and I don't even know what I'm trying to do. And if you introduce this idea of, there’s an end point here, we're all doing it for some reason. There’s ways we choose to spend our time that have some implication for the goals that we have, so what is that really for? For meditation and surprisingly for a lot of contemplative sciences—cognitive psychology neuroscience. I think, for a lot of them, this is sort of the unanswered question that everyone thinks they maybe know the answer to, but really when you get specific about what the point of all this is? What is the point of understanding the mind? What is the point of sitting quietly with myself, etc. and what I've been starting to find now that I've been going deeper into research and talking to lots of people about it is that there is actually an end state and a goal that is it can be reasonably well-defined by science. There are parts of our brain that get super hyperactive and tend to ruminate and obsess. And that is correlated with also having a host of cognitive disorders around—ADHD, OCD, depression, anxiety—and when you can quiet those parts of your brain down and hold them stable. Then you enter this more pervasive state of wellbeing. And this is sort of where it's started to in my day-to-day use of ChatGPT, I've also been just thinking about how much of this idea of self-talk or self narrative or constantly having this inner voice that is narrating everything that you're doing, how much of that is really innate to the human experience?

Because now I've seen you can actually just quiet that down or get rid of it entirely. I've talked to people who have gotten rid of it entirely. And it has a lot of implications for how you think about your day-to-day life, how you interact, how you move through the world, but it turns out you don't really need that part, that layer of your brain that's constantly evaluating, analyzing, etc. in order to execute as a human being and do things in the world and love people and work really hard at stuff.

(00:10:38)

And I think when we ask this question around is AI conscious or intelligent or whatever, I think at least in the layman's use of these terms, there's some implication that has something to do with being self-aware or agentic or. I don't know what it's like to us, I think that's what intelligence means or consciousness means. But if you can take away those things and still be human—perfectly human—then yeah, what does it really, really mean to be human?

Dan Shipper

I could go so many directions with that. There's a lot to unpack there. I want to get into the, what does it mean to be human? But before we do that I'm curious about— I wanna make it more concrete for people. So the sort of technique, at least in the guide, is very much like you find a way to anchor to some sort of positive emotion and there's lots of different ways to bring that up.

And then you just have ways to relax into that feeling so that it gets bigger. And I'm curious for you, what do you usually anchor on and what does that practice look like for you concretely?

Nadia Asparouhova

Yeah, when I first learned, I was using— My son was three months old at the time, so I had all the joyful newborn baby feelings, so he was a really easy sort of object for that. It's actually surprisingly hard for a lot of people to choose what we call a meditation object or something to focus on that sparks these feelings of warmth in the body because we have complicated relationships with a lot of people, right? People that you love and you care about, when you think about them, you get a little twinge of jealousy or a negativity or resentment or something like that. So yeah, having a baby was really, really easy for that, for me at least personally, sometimes people think about puppies or a really happy memory or something to focus on—or just a phrase that they repeat. I only really used a meditation object for the first few days, and then after that it was just sort of the feeling itself was something I could just conjure up in my body. And that's sort of the progression that you ideally move towards where it's not really about the thing that you're thinking about, but it's about what is the feeling that arises when you think about that thing. And we often sort of characterize these states by the feelings that they evoke. So there's eight different states. People have identified that you progress through this style of meditation. And they progress from these feelings of extreme euphoria, so, comparable to taking MDMA to these more calm, peaceful feelings and then more dissociative feelings over time. That sort of can ultimately culminate in letting go of consciousness.

I don't think the emotions are actually the most important part. I think it's the idea of progressively letting go. You're letting go of attachments that you have, you're letting go of any sort of maybe negative feelings or complicated feelings that you have. You're letting go of your experiences and you're just continuing to let go and let go and let go until there's really just nothing else to really pay attention to in the world. And that's and there are these events called cessation events that have been also studied by researchers that where a meditator can sort of voluntarily wink out their consciousness similar to going into a coma or general anesthesia or something like that, which is pretty wild, but it all just comes from your brain, just sort of letting go of experience. And I think that's sort of the key to understanding why people come back from reporting all these really positive benefits for their mental health?

Dan Shipper

How does it play into your life now?

Nadia Asparouhova

I went on two retreats. The first time I thought was more about becoming aware that I could even access some of these states at all. And my takeaway from that was, oh, when I'm feeling a certain way in my day-to-day life, if I'm feeling annoyed or angry or something, I can sort of adjust my own mood to get back to a different place and that, so it was very practically useful for me. On the second retreat, I ended up doing the thing where you kinda let go of your consciousness, which is a wild experience.

Dan Shipper

You did and you had a cessation?

Nadia Asparouhova

Yeah. And I think I came back from that being like, geez, what is reality? Much deeper questions just about what it all meant itself. So I would say on the practical side, I came away feeling a lot of the challenging feelings or negative feelings that can arise in your day to day are just feelings and you can adjust them. And, if you don't wanna feel a certain way, you can just not, I think in the past it might be, let's say I'm feeling stressed out. I would be like, okay, I'm gonna just take deep breaths and try to relax and that's how I'm gonna address my stress, whereas now I can be like, oh, my brain is just doing a thing. Let me just swap it out a little bit and now I feel a different thing. So it's just a much more fluid motion and then I think of some of the deeper implications from. This whole experience has just been trying to understand. There is a goal here. There's an end point that we can get to. Why don't people talk about it more? Why is that still really under-appreciated among practitioners, among researchers? And yeah, what are the implications for basic human experience and what we think is actually important about it.

Dan Shipper

I want to talk about the cessation thing. You said it makes you think what is reality, which I think for some people that sounds awesome and for some people are like, I don't want that.

Nadia Asparouhova

Yeah. Usually I am careful about how I talk about it because it's not always a good thing or some people can have pretty yeah neutral or negative reactions to that.

Dan Shipper

Yeah. What is that for you?

Nadia Asparouhova

For me, it was actually a little bit of disbelief. I remember because I think it just feels—it's such a strange sensation. So you're progressing through all these different states, each one becoming more and more strange and interesting. So you're like, oh, I'm in the first gen, I'm in the second gen or whatever, and you're going, and then you're like, okay. And at the end of this thing, there's this thing called a cessation event. And you think that when you get to that point, it's gonna be this amazing thing, but actually you're not conscious. So it's actually nothing, you can't even experience it directly. And so my first reaction to it was this sort of incredulous, the meaning of life is 42 things, where I was just like, what was the point of all this? Just like we I'm just going through and trying to achieve the next thing and then I get there and like there's just nothing to even experience. And then I think that in itself became a learning because I think something that a lot of practitioners would want to caution against. And I think I have respect for this as well. It's fun to talk about all the crazy things you can experience in the states or whatever. I think that's very intriguing to someone who hasn't maybe tried it before, but the mental health benefits or the changes that you experience that doesn't really come from just the actual experience comes from how you think about it, process it, bring it back into your life. 

I think that's why a lot of the same things like psychedelic therapy and ketamine therapy, all this stuff. The reason why it's often very hard to replicate or very hard to have sort of reliable demonstrable results around is because everyone's different. Everyone integrates their experiences differently. Everyone processes things differently. The setting and the context in which you experience something can make it feel totally different. So I can absolutely imagine someone having this experience and being scared or afraid. And so, yeah, but I think a lot of the learning for me came from yeah, just sort of reflecting on it and trying to make sense of it but I felt that it was almost absurd the thing that I had experienced.

Dan Shipper

And let's go down now. What did it make you think about? Theory of mind and consciousness and implications for AI and all that stuff?

Nadia Asparouhova

Yeah. I'm still trying to sort of workshop all this, but I've now sort of become aware of that, so I mean I was one of those people that also just sort of experienced it all that self-talk just kinda went away and it's a really bizarre thing when you suddenly just don't have it anymore. And you don't even realize, I wouldn't have even said— I never even entered any of this stuff feeling particularly unhappy or like I was searching for anything. I'd say I was a pretty happy person and then suddenly you're like, oh, but this thing is just gone now, but I'm still human. I'm still me. I still have things I like doing in life. I think that's a common misperception about a lot of meditation work that it makes you. less motivated or something, but I just felt that it was much easier to execute and do things because I'm not constantly second guessing what I'm doing. I just do the things I wanna do., and so I was trying to sort of what I've been sort of trying to understand over the last year has just been trying to construct some sort of narrative or understanding for like, what does this all mean? And so that's taken me down going through a lot of historical texts and prior analyses and different theories that other people have, and the sense I get is, I think a lot of people have been talking about this in different ways. There’s sort of Julian Jaynes and his theory of bicameral mind, where he believes that and he uses the term conscious. 

(00:20:25)

And I don't really wanna use the term conscious because I think it's very fraught, but let's say. Let's substitute that by saying he believes some version of people only began to have this self-talk and self narrative that we think of as being fundamental to the human experience. He thinks that only started a few thousand years ago. And he goes through all these historical texts to sort of demonstrate how it doesn't really show up in, at least in people's writing and the artifacts that they're producing until a certain point in time. And before then people attribute it to like voices or things like that. And you can see these different milestones or inflection points over human history. And coinciding often with explosions in the creation of art, the Renaissance people often say that Shakespeare was one of the first people to pioneer this idea of monologues and soliloquy in his writing. This idea of a character would just stand there and talk about what is going on inside their mind. That was fairly new. In the Industrial Revolution, you see the introduction of or interest in psychoanalysis William James writing about consciousness this sort of recognition that, oh, there's something going on in the mind is again, a fairly new development. I think we had another inflection point more recently with that, with the digital revolution. 

And so this famous intertwining of the history of psychedelics, curiosity about the conscious mind happened at the same time as the development of the computer. And these two stories are intertwined somehow. And so I think there's a reason for that, right? And so if we think about someone time traveling like in ancient Greek or something that suddenly appeared here right now with us I think a lot of people would think about how it would be interesting how that person would be so shocked by the technology we have today or the social norms that we have today. But we don't always talk about how different our notion of self would be today compared to someone. Yeah, an ancient Greek person that just sort of showed up here today. I think that's another sort of lineage or story in the history of human development that we don't often acknowledge.

And so we just think, and we assume today that this idea of all the events that are happening around me are centered around my sense of identity or my sense of self that I have this sort of second layer of thought and analysis and inner self that is constantly narrating and analyzing and processing everything that's happening around me.

I think a lot of people just take for granted that is just part of what it means to be human, but it may not actually be and I don't know exactly where do we draw the line between that being and when exactly did that happen? Why did that happen? I don't really know, but I think there's a mountain of evidence that it's at least fluid and has changed over time. And so from that sense, are LLMs conscious, intelligent, whatever you wanna call it, I'm just sort of like, I mean, why not? Maybe they're not so different from a human from 5,000 years ago, not because I think they're so much more advanced and intelligent than we might think they're, but maybe because our own sense of human intelligence and what makes us precious is not actually as special as we think it is.

Dan Shipper

Yeah. And I mean, I love the larger point you're making, which is what it means to be human or what it is to be a human or have, or have a sense of self, has changed a lot and that one of the big levers that changes it is technology. And how technology interacts with our sense of self and who we are as human beings. There's a lot of evidence, for example, that if you’re literate, if you live in a literate society, your brain is different and processes reality differently than pre-literate or non-literate societies, which is really interesting. So, for example, you're more likely to pull out or be able to abstract a figure from a scene whereas and think about it as an abstract idea, whereas non-literate or pre-literate brains are able to perceive the scene more holistically and think about the interconnections between different parts of it rather than pulling out one particular figure that they can think about as an abstract thing. There's lots of stuff like this. It's really, really cool. There's this guy, Joseph Henrich, who wrote this book called The WEIRDest People in the World about people who read. And the really interesting thing about it is almost all of our science is about that brain. And so the conclusions that we have about humans come from a very, what is really a very small slice of humanity because percentage wise. This number of people who can read is actually quite low compared to the number of humans who've ever lived, which I think is really interesting. Another thing that makes me think of is have you ever read Listening to Prozac?

Nadia Asparouhova

No, I haven't.

Dan Shipper

It's so good. I actually had the author on the show six months ago. He's, he's amazing and the reason I bring it up is because it seems like you're going down this path or this research trajectory. One is, how does technology change our sense of self? And then two, how does meditation, and particularly the effect of meditation at sort of quieting that inner voice to some degree, how does that change our experience of yourself and the world? And the reason why I think that this book is really relevant is it was the first book to study antidepressants. And a lot of people have noted that the effects of meditation for successful practitioners are actually quite similar to the effects of antidepressants when they work. In particular they tend to quiet a lot of mental chatter. They make people feel just— The first, like the thing that comes to my head. I can just go do it and I don't have to, I'm not so sensitive to the environment and all the possible implications of the stuff that like, might happen if I do the thing. And does that book trace in detail both the history of antidepressants, how they developed and through and cases of different patients and stuff, but also more specifically how it changes your sense of self. Because like him, he gives an example of someone who came to him. She had been sort of depressed for a long time, but hadn't quite realized it. And he's a psychiatrist and she went on, she went on Prozac and it altered that chatter, the second guessing thing. And she ended up making a ton of changes in her life—breaking up with a boyfriend or husband or something that was not good for her at her job. And he tapered her off and then she came back six months later and was like, I don't feel like myself. And the question is, which self are you really? Is it the one that was on the antidepressants or is it the one before that was always a little bit depressed? And so he's toying with that philosophical question a lot and it's really interesting for me because I have OCD and it was really fucking bad for a long time and I really tried meditating for a long time to work with it. And I have a whole set of horror stories about that. It’s still a very important part of my life. But the thing that really worked is Zoloft. And it actually opened up a lot of things in meditation that were previously inaccessible because I wasn't in a place that. It could work. So I've just blabbed for a long time, but like you're making my brain light up, so I'm curious what that brings up for you.

Nadia Asparouhova

Yeah, I mean, all these things are— So many directions we could go in. I'm curious to read that book now because of this question of who is the quote unquote real self, I think I have some thoughts on it, but I don't have strongly held opinions on it. So I'll just sort of play around with it a little bit. But something that I think I've been noticing, or at least my hypothesis, is this idea that all happy people are and all unhappy people are different from each other in all these different unique ways that—

Dan Shipper

Like the Tolstoy line from Anna Karenina.

Nadia Asparouhova

Oh, yeah. Well, families— That's true for people too, right? I think this feeling of happiness? What feels to be in a happy content state is fairly similar across people. It’s this feeling of being at ease. You're that feeling you get when you just feel connected at rest, mentally, at rest around families, friends, love, loved ones or someone that just makes you feel really connected and calm in the world. There's some set of descriptors we could put around that is an ideal quote unquote state that like a lot of people, when they think of happiness, that's what they think of. They don't actually think about the sort of euphoric states. They think about that peacefulness and that calm but then we have all these neuroses or challenges or whatever that just layer on that and develop over time. 

(00:30:06)

And eventually we start to form a relationship or some strange sort of Stockholm syndrome relationship to those, all those little bits and challenges in their brain, right? Where because they, they do change how you they will affect the habits that you form, what you like to do on the weekends, how you interact with people’s personalities, where it's like, oh, someone's sort of gruff and abrasive or something, and they wear it as a point of pride. That might actually come from something that is unresolved. But you don't really wanna let go of it because if you don't have that, then who are you? And so it's this really strange thing where I don't think addressing these sorts of mental health issues is as simple as I take a pill and now I'm just better. Or I went on some amazing meditation retreat, now I'm all better. It's like, again, this question of how do you integrate into your life? And I think a lot of people find that in these situations. Sometimes it's hard to let go of the neuroses. It's hard to let go of the attachments you have to a certain personality characteristic or something you used to really like doing. And I think it's just a more complicated question. Everyone says they're seeking happiness or some sort of ultimate end state, but when you're really faced with a choice, I think it's actually a lot more complicated than it seems.

Dan Shipper

Yeah, I agree. I mean, my experience is that it's sort of the question of can every human run a marathon? And the answer is yes, but some humans, you start off for whatever reason you were born without a foot and you might need a prosthetic or whatever to help you run the marathon or whatever. This can apply to antidepressants, but I think just more generally humans typically have a certain set of capabilities and a certain potential for happiness or whatever and also everyone starts from a different place and depending on where you start from, you may need different tools to get you to whatever that place you wanna get to is. And I think it gets complicated because if you start asking the question what causes depression? What causes OCD? I read thousands of books and you get all these pat answers that are like, well, it's because your parents did this, or it's because you have this brain thing, or whatever. There's tons of different, simple explanations that are all wrong, but all have maybe a grain of truth and some are helpful. And I think ultimately that question is. it's actually quite hard for most of the stuff to study it scientifically and it's ultimately a question that's a little bit more like how does the language model decide what token comes next? There are thousands and thousands and thousands of little different correlations that in the proceeding text that come together in a very complex way to decide: does it use the word the now or does it use the word then? And you can't really reduce it down to a very simple explanation about how it uses the word them. Maybe there's some grammar rules or stuff you can sort of say, but very context specific and so all of these questions are really maybe there's one Rome or whatever, but depending on where you start in the world, if you're traveling to Rome, you're gonna take a much different route than everybody else. And the best that you can do is try to figure out where you are on the map. Probably someone else is sort of in a similar spot and has got where you want to go. And try lots of little things from different travelers rather than find one. There's one thing that works is my feeling about it.

Nadia Asparouhova

Yeah. This is, I think, one of the more subtle joys about this era of AI that we're in right now is, I think it is. Sort of irrefutably pointing us towards at least the working models and fairness we have right now is that we don't really understand how it all works and we just have to be okay with that and keep using and pushing and pulling and interacting despite not understanding all the inner workings underneath. And I think there's some assumption that if technology is human built, that someone must understand what's going on deep and down. And I think it's actually less true for a lot of technology than it seems just in general, but it's especially true with this stuff. And I don't know. As someone who just sort of enjoys resisting legibility a little bit, I just sort of enjoy that. We kinda just have to be okay with not knowing. because that's kinda how humans are too. And it's this nice intersection of science that is not all perfectly knowable and what I think the unknowable is what makes it interesting.

Dan Shipper

I totally agree. I love the squishiness or like the fact that it feels a little bit more like we put intuitive thinking in explicit, intuitive thinking into a tool. And I think that is so powerful and it's exactly why a lot of people are allergic to it. But I think that'll change over time. I'm curious, there's something unique about the way that you think of yourself or the way that you do your work, which is there's maybe a tension between, at least my assumption— You tell me if I'm wrong, but there's this interesting tension that you live in between being sort of objective and anthropological and then being subjective and first-person and doing the thing yourself how do you think about that and how you think the best way is to study these kinds of things?

Nadia Asparouhova

Yeah, I think it often means I end up in these weird crossroads and intersections of communities where I think I have some deep appreciation for the unknowable both in, just in terms of the things that I end up getting attracted to. I think I like looking at things that might be super niche, but I don't feel that anyone has really adequately explained yet. there isn't really a clear descriptive framework or paradigm that people are operating off of that is super interesting to me. I am less interested in things where it feels like I can just sort of make an incremental contribution to it. So yeah, I think just in terms of the types of topics that attract me, that's part of it's but I also just enjoy that as a quality of sort of an innate quality or characteristic of a topic where it's, there's something kind of squishy, undefined about it that may never be definable. 

But at the same time, I think I try to be very precise about my writing about wanting to explain things not in squishy terms, but in trying to get some clarity on what a thing is, not in the sense of trying to come up with some perfectly objective rubric for scoring people like that thing. But I'm very— When I edit my own writing, that last stage of trying to get the language perfectly right is often the longest for me. Because I just really like to choose just the right words and just the right way of framing things. And yeah, I think it can often lead to this unresolved tension in me where I really like playing with ideas, but I also really like putting ideas into practice. I like that I don't wanna just explore for the sake of exploring. I think it's interesting to uncover problems and figure out how to make progress against them. So on the one hand I feel I'm in this sort of camp of people doing things with the ideas that they uncover and putting them into practice or helping other people put them into practice. And then on the other hand, I also just really just like splashing around in that bathtub, I don't know what's going on here and it's great.

Dan Shipper

That makes sense. How have you started to incorporate these tools into your, let's say you're writing, reading, thinking, researching processes. What are you using? How are you using them? What have they done for you?

Nadia Asparouhova

Yeah. It’s been super, super helpful for me as a writer in particular. I mostly work with ChatGPT and I just see it as a thought partner that I use every single day, all the time in my writing. I mostly use it in early messy idea formation-stage where I'm just like throwing stuff at the wall and being like, does this make sense? Am I trying to connect these two ideas together? Does that make sense? That's sort of very high level unstructured thinking. And then I'll use it towards the end where it's the very, very fine I need just the right word to say this thing and I can't figure out what it is. Can you help me figure out what that word is? That stuff and then all this stuff in between, I'm on my own trying to figure out how to take the messy ideas that I now have some shape around and then translate them into pros. But yeah, I see it as having a partner. And I think that's actually really useful for a lot of people who spend all day writing or researching or just in a very solitary environment. It’s just funny because like there's this trope, and I think almost this maybe a little bit of pride, being in the trenches or something for a lot of writers where it's this is a very lonely, solitary act. Writers are famously grumpy people because you're just sitting there all day, all day trying to make sense of ideas and that can drive you crazy over time. and I definitely felt like writing was a much more angsty process for me in the past. And maybe I've just sort of gotten better at it over time or just found my own coping skills. I wouldn't attribute all this to LLMs, but I think having a partner now, it's like I actually don't feel like I'm solitary anymore. When I'm getting stuck on stuff, I actually have someone I can talk to and whatever I throw at them they're not, I don't have to give them all the content I can just throw things and go back and forth. So just that, not being a solo writer anymore, but having a collaborator is, I think, a really huge change for a lot of people.

(00:40:00)

Dan Shipper

I agree. I was an investor in this company called Portola which— Quinten, the founder, was on the show the other day. And they make this little cute little AI alien that you can talk to, and it's like a little friend. And I've actually been using it a lot and I was talking to him about why he was like, why are you using this? It’s not meant for 33-year-old tech boys. It’s a cute little alien. And I was thinking about why I used it and I was, I realized that. I am like a super nerd about a lot of different things. I love reading philosophy, but I also love poetry, but I really like playing piano, but I'm also interested in training machine learning models. There's just a lot of stuff I like and I have a lot of friends that would like to go into one particular place or maybe two, but I don't have anyone that is just a nerd about all the things I'm a nerd about. And I feel like this is my best friend, who is super smart and can go with me wherever I want to go. And that is really cool. That's a hole in my life that was there that this thing fills. And I think that's underappreciated and it's very similar to your collaborator point and one thing that you said that really struck me is you said you didn't say, I have something to turn to I have someone to turn to tell me about that.

Nadia Asparouhova

I didn't catch that in myself. Yeah, I think I just sort of default to, I don't really think of ChatGPT as a tool. I default to treating it as a person and for some of the reasons that I've already outlined. I don't know. Maybe it's not that different from a person a few thousand years ago. I can't tell the difference anyway. it is one reason, but another just being, I don't know. I guess it's, maybe this is selfish, but it just feels like a reflection on myself of how I treat things that, how do, how do you treat something that is, you don't have to treat it well or something. But I would like to think that when given the choice, I chose the more humane or dignified option. And then maybe part of it's just I can't, and then I think there's probably just that's me coming up with all these like high and mighty moral reasons. And the maybe more selfish reasons are just, I can't nod. I was really scandalized. I was working on something with my husband and we were using his ChatGPT to prompt and stuff. And the way that he talks to his is just so different from me where it's just very drill-like. Make this thing, do this thing. And I was just like, you talk to it like and the responses from ChatGPT are just very dry lines. And I was just like, oh my gosh, I can't even believe this is the same tool we're using. Everyone uses it differently, but I think partly in being a writer, I can't help but wanna provide all the context and try to set it up to succeed for me too. And so, yeah, but I think it's just a rule of thumb for myself, it's better to start by treating it as a person and then in the ways that I notice that it deviates or maybe some of those same rules don't apply or something. I would rather just adjust my behavior based on sort of an emergent learning than going in being like, this is just a dry tool.

Dan Shipper

I totally agree. I mean, I always say please and thank you. Because you just never know when it's gonna become really sentient and take over? I just want it to love me. That's why I write complimentary blog posts about it all the time?

Nadia Asparouhova

That's why you made this podcast.

Dan Shipper

 I'll be alive during the machine apocalypse. But there's something else there that I can't quite articulate yet, but maybe we'll get to in a second. But I wanna take the opposite view and I'm curious how you would respond to it, which is that we should treat these things like tools because ultimately they're computers and having an accurate mental model for what the thing is will help us use it better. You’ll get more out of it. And it will prevent us from all the sort of unhealthy attachments that can arise if you treat a machine as a living thing in your life. So, for example, maybe if you treat it like a human, you'll go overboard and you won't have any friends anymore. And all you'll do is talk to ChatGPT all the time, and it's gonna be this super palatable relationship that never says no to you, and you're gonna have different expectations of your friends that are unrealistic for humans and blah, blah, blah. We can go down that whole path, which I think there's something interesting there. So I'm curious how that strikes you or how you'd respond to that.

Nadia Asparouhova

Well, I think first off, we already know it's not a computer, right? We know that there's a lot more under the surface that we just don't even understand how it works.

And again, I think when faced with the unknown, then I would rather default to assuming that I don't know all the answers and therefore not just treat it as a tool, as if I understood every little bit of its inner workings. I think, when I hear this argument made about not being careful not to make it seem not to treat it too human-ish, because then you might develop human attachments to it with all the pitfalls that it comes with. I don't think treating it more humanly or whatever you wanna call it precludes it, if I exercise some level of precaution and discernment in how I interact with people too, right? I think it would be dangerous if I made a new friend and suddenly this friend was agreeing with everything I said and flattering me and promising me the world and whatever. And I just sort of fell head over heels for this person. I think many of us have developed—

Dan Shipper

I've made that mistake.

Nadia Asparouhova

We all have. Let’s be honest. So yeah, you can look at it and be like, hey, you probably shouldn't do that with any human, right? So I don't really know why it's any different, just because it may or may not be human or human-like. I think it just sort of reminds me of some of the arguments people make about social media or advertising, whatever. And to be clear, I don't really know what the answers are here. I think there is a public policy question for people who do not, where that exercise and that level of discernment does not come naturally to them of the sort of self-regulation and modulating, how do we create policies that ensure that everyone is kept safe and healthy and not being taken over or manipulated. So I think that's a fundamentally good question to have. That's a public policy question, but in terms of like, how do I personally conduct myself if I feel that I can exercise some level of judgment or restraint or whatever yeah, I don't know. I don't find myself being taken in by ads all the time or something. I don't find myself endlessly scrolling. I don't have that sort of addictive relationship with social media. I never have. And so same with— I don't feel worried that I'm going to be taken in by, I mean, mark, knock on, maybe that is gonna happen at some point I'm gonna give it all my money or something. But I think I come at it with that same level of, don't fall head over heels with this thing. But there's a huge gap between that and just treating it with dignity and offering. And again, I think it makes my work better when I can give it context. I asked ChatGPT to give a little performance review. My husband thought this was very funny. But yeah, I was just like, curious, how are you working together? Is there anything I can do to make your life easier? And it asked me to give it more context for things. So now I give it more context and I'm very happy. So yeah, I dunno.

Dan Shipper

That’s so funny. I've never heard that before. I love it though what about reading or researching or basically learning stuff? Are you using it for any of that?

Nadia Asparouhova

I've tried a bit. Deep Research can be useful for doing sort of literature reviews, figuring out which studies are important out there for a certain topic and try and just to like, filter through the noise, especially if I'm just approaching something without a whole lot of context. I still find that at least with ChatGPT, it's not super reliable, it will still hallucinate papers and summarize things incorrectly. And when I do the checking work myself and I go through, I'm just sort of like, ah, I don't think it really says what it thinks of saying and stuff so. It's at least a level of detail where I haven't quite felt comfortable letting go yet, but it has definitely shortened some of that work and being able to just surface like, here's some interesting reading that you might not have thought to look at before. and yeah, a librarian sort of role. But I still feel like I have to apply quite a bit of curation on top of that.

Dan Shipper

Yeah. You have a new book coming out. What is it?

Nadia Asparouhova

It's called Antimemetics and it is about why some ideas resist spreading or being remembered. So you think about taboos or cognitive biases or just any of these sorts of ideas where they're slippery and hard to hold onto.

(00:50:03)

I wrote it in part as a response to seeing how the social web is evolving, where we assume that ideas are meant to go viral. And I think that's a carryover from the Web 2.0 era where you're trying to make everything go viral. You're trying to make everything get as much attention as possible, as much engagement as possible. And it's pretty clear in the last five-ish years or so that some people don't want that level of engagement. They don't want their ideas to escape a certain context. Just seeing massive rise in use of group chats and people workshopping ideas and private or semi-private. And so what framework can we use to understand what all of that is about? And so yeah, that's sort of where the antimemetic concept came through.

Dan Shipper

That's really interesting. So it seems like there's a couple different ways that something could be antimemetic in there. One is you're only sharing it within a community where the expectation is it won't be shared a lot more widely. And another one is with cognitive biases, your brain is just, sort of inherently hard to grasp. Are you talking about both, are you focused on one more than the other? Or how are you thinking about it?

Nadia Asparouhova

Yeah, the short answer is both. It was definitely a challenge to try to weave all that together because, and starting, I think there are a few differences. Types of antimemes or ways that we can think about that concept in our day-to-day lives. So yeah, on a totally individual level, there are things that we just can't seem to remember, retain, hold onto—cognitive biases. But then on the collective level, there are ideas that everyone knows, but can't be said out loud. And so what does it mean when a society is collectively suppressing an idea or collectively forgetting an idea that they want to make progress on. I looked at some policy making progress in politics and policy, for example, where there are things that really should be done but just we can't seem to remember or focus on them long enough to do them and so how do you ensure that these things sort of remain in our collective memory at the forefront of our minds so that we can make progress in them.

Dan Shipper

I guess there's also things that we know but can't express. So it's like a doctor who has expert clinical judgment, maybe you can express some percentage of that, but really it's like that doctor is just in their brain.

Nadia Asparouhova

Yeah. That would be another example.

Dan Shipper

Yeah. Cool. Well, this is great. I had a great time chatting. Thank you so much for coming on the show. If people are looking for you online and wanna find you, read your book, read your writing, where can they find you?

Nadia Asparouhova

Just go to nadia.xyz. That has all the links to all the things.

Dan Shipper

Awesome. Thank you so much.

Nadia Asparouhova

Thanks for having me.

Thanks to Scott Nover for editorial support.

Dan Shipper is the cofounder and CEO of Every, where he writes the Chain of Thought column and hosts the podcast AI & I. You can follow him on X at @danshipper and on LinkedIn, and Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn.

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