Public Nostalgia Versus Future Optimism

We’ve heard a lot of moonshot ideas on this podcast, but this week’s guest may have the most impossible one yet: making tech more cultured.

In this episode, Ashlee sat down with Anna Gát, a Hungarian philosopher, playwright, and founder of Interintellect, a platform for hosting intellectual conversations online. She calls herself “the bridge” between the humanities, academia, and the tech world, which in practice means getting engineers to read Goethe.

Gát grew up on a TV set in communist Hungary. Her parents made the country’s biggest shows in an era when there was one channel available on Saturdays. In 2015, a family crisis left her starting over in London with two suitcases, one of them for books. She rebuilt her life on Twitter, DM’d Sam Altman, and got him as her first meeting on her first trip to America.

Before Interintellect, Gát did just about every wordcel job you can do: playwright, screenwriter, script doctor. She holds graduate degrees in philosophical aesthetics and linguistics, currently splits her time between SF and NYC. The company that would become Interintellect began in London in 2016 as an AI tool for helping “humans have categorically better conversations.” On the side, she angel invests in aerospace.

The two get into why X was once the French café that could publish you and is now a place you can’t get discovered from, why the East Coast’s healthiest, wealthiest people are so convinced the future is doomed, and the duty AI builders have to explain themselves. Gát also admits, on the record, that she’s a sucker for Elon Musk’s syntax. Ashlee tries to convince her that kids don’t read books anymore. She tries to convince him Silicon Valley should fund symphonies.

IN THIS EPISODE

Interintellect — https://www.interintellect.com

The Hope Axis — https://twitter.com/TheHopeAxis

Anna on X — https://x.com/TheAnnaGat

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 — Intro

2:56 — The science of dialogue

6:34 — Growing up famous in communist Hungary

13:06 — Nobody saw 1989 coming

16:43 — Losing everything in 2015

20:57 — Silicon Valley as the new Ellis Island

28:38 — Balaji's DAO campaign33:42 — Elon's syntax

39:18 — Why does America hate tech?

46:25 — Engineers took over the world

53:20 — Have LLMs solved language?

1:01:29 — Are books dying?

1:06:51 — No Pop-Tarts

1:10:46 — Who funds culture?

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