Humanmaxxing: Nadia Asparouhova (7/10)

Humanmaxxing: Nadia Asparouhova (7/10)

AI discourse, flourishing, and flow state

Sublime

Oct 03, 2026

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Welcome to Humanmaxxing, an interview series on thriving in the age of machines.

New episodes drop weekly. You can watch full conversation with Nadia on

YouTube

and listen on

Spotify

or

Apple Podcasts

. Committed wordcels can find the edited transcript below.

Pssst, we partnered with

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meeting notetaker we LOVE and use every day) to sponsor this series and record each conversation. You can chat directly with Nadia’s conversation

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, pull out takeaways, and follow whatever thread interests you. If you want to try Granola unlimited, use code

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Nadia Asparouhova

is a writer and researcher who has spent her career in service of the question: ‘what’s happening here?’ across various parts of the internet. She’s worked at Substack, Protocol Labs, and Github, and has written extensively on Silicon Valley Culture; the importance of ideas and institutions; consciousness, attention, meditation, and more. Her most recent book,

Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading

is probably the book I reference most in casual conversations.

In this conversation, we get into the parts of AI that almost no one is talking about. What happens to the public commons when our most transformative conversations are happening privately with machines? Why is a culture built around measurement and progress so bad at producing human flourishing? If AI removes the work that once put us into flow, what happens to our brains? We also talk about San Francisco’s new nihilism, the emptiness of viral X articles, jhanas, and the part of her creative process she refuses to let AI touch: “the poetic, numinous part of me. The part that touches God.”

Enjoy ;)

Sari

ALEX DOBRENKO

: I read recently in one of your Substack notes that you don’t feel like people are asking good questions about AI. This is one of the central tensions of this series. Tell me more about this sentiment.

NADIA ASPAROUHOVA

:

I’d love to flip it back to you first — I almost didn’t agree to do this. I’ve pushed off a lot of those requests because it feels like any interesting thoughts I have are also everyone else’s interesting thoughts too. But I wanted to challenge myself, to see if I could come up with something interesting to say about AI rather than avoid it. What have you found boring or repetitive about the discourse?

AD

:

Well, it seems very definitive and very charged. People have really strong opinions. Like a lot of online discourse, it’s hard to have any nuance. There’s a lot of purity culture involved. If you admit to using AI as a writer, you’re shamed out of existence. There’s not a lot of nuance, and because everyone’s also talking about it, it’s also a hyperobject — everyone feels like they need to say something interesting.

NA

:

The note you’re referring to is me responding to something

Venkatesh Rao

had said, that AI discourse is kind of boring. His critique was that everyone’s having these private, transformative experiences with AI, but it’s kind of like talking about your dreams, or a psychedelic trip. It’s just not that interesting to hear about. And the kernel there is that people are not entirely noticing how shattered our public commons are. Everyone’s having a transformed experience and shouting it out loud, but no one is really listening or absorbing what’s happening to others.

And that reveals something fundamentally wrong with this structure of how knowledge is being formed right now, or how new insights are collectively being created. For example, the prevalence of “articles” on X right now. They really bug me. They get a ton of engagement, by the numbers. People pass them around, they get a lot of likes. But no one seems to remember them beyond a day or two. I’m not even sure anyone’s reading them. Maybe they’re just tapping like and moving on. A piece that is long-form, even if it’s written by AI, requires a reader to go deep and grapple with it. There’s engagement, likes and shares, but no one is retaining the information.

It says to me that the public commons, where you’re forming your own insight, sharing it with the crowd, the crowd is chewing on it, digesting it, changing how they think, that entire system is non-existent. We’re moving toward a further atomization of the knowledge commons.

It’s even more private now than when I published Antimemetics just a year ago, right before this explosion of AI. I was navigating the tension between highly public online social spaces and the “group chat-ification” of more private spaces online. Now we’re one step further into atomization, where the locus has shifted from public, semi-private discourse to either group chats or the one-on-one conversations people are having with LLMs.

If you shape the models, you shape the public discourse.

AD

:

That’s so funny that you brought up the X articles. I’ve had such a strong reaction to them. I either hate them, they need satirizing. Or think I should go viral too. If this piece can go viral, maybe I can too, with some super earnest thing that wins the lottery.

Part of me is still running on an old operating system about going viral, about having something blow up — even though most of me isn’t interested in that at all. That’s always my big question with any of this — can I change?

The other interesting thing about that frame is that publishing online is also weirdly a backdoor into shaping the public realm, because everybody is using AI.

NA

:

Oh my gosh, it’s like an ouroboros. If you shape the models, you shape the public discourse. I’m in a bit of a watching-and-waiting mode. It feels like being in wartime — I’m suspending my previously held notions of how things worked. And wartime can go on for a really long time. This isn’t a couple of months, or a year. I was talking to a friend about this — both of us in our thirties, thinking, this could end up just being what the rest of our careers look like, if this goes on for another ten years. This temporary wartime state might just be it. So we might as well get used to it.

No one seems to know what’s going on. Chaos is the norm, maybe. But isn’t that always the case? Did life make sense a decade ago? Would people have been this panicked about the rise of the consumer internet, or should they have been? I think we’re living in an interesting time, but I’m trying to check if it’s as unprecedented as people say.

I’m less interested in the super high-stakes AI discourse, like: will we even be around in five years? I’m more interested in what it’s going to change about how we live and work. Maybe something is missing that’s not quite as mundane as business and financial opportunities. But it may also not be on the other extreme, existential end. It’s important to remember that you can’t know a lot of these things until you’ve lived them and done them for a bit.

I think we’re living in an interesting time, but I’m trying to check if it’s as unprecedented as people say.

AD

:

What else have you been thinking about, other than this?

NA

:

Some of my interests right now have been colored by moving. I moved back to the Bay last fall. I was in San Francisco for a long time, then during COVID I went to Miami for a few years, then LA, then back to San Francisco. I was away for four or five years.

San Francisco is really different from the rest of the world, but it’s this petri dish for how culture is changing, and the ways in which the world can be shaped by technology. The prevalent mood here has been nihilism. People feel their relationship to work is much more transactional, that it’s much more about making money. My understanding of Bay Area history is that it’s this has always been a very positive sum kind of place, and now it feels like it’s a more zero sum and people are a lot more self preservationist. And so I think there’s questions around why that is happening.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be fulfilled in life, given the constraints and conditions we’re in right now. It’s a timeless question, but especially for people in San Francisco, it doesn’t benefit from innovation. Even if we tap into endless economic abundance, people don’t feel happy. It’s something you can feel: whether an individual or a society is making progress is a slightly distinct question from whether someone is thriving or flourishing in that environment.

I’ve also been thinking about this movement away from a measurement-oriented culture, one that even precedes tech, something that was widely held in management consulting, finance, and other places. You see this in conversations about taste and judgment. AI can do all the other stuff, but you kind of need a human to give its own taste or judgment on that little piece that everyone has personally experienced.

Even if we tap into endless economic abundance, people don’t feel happy. It’s something you can feel: whether an individual or a society is making progress is a slightly distinct question from whether someone is thriving or flourishing in that environment.

AD

:

What’s the running water of flourishing? What are the toilets of flourishing?

NA

:

That’s a great question. Is creativity a toilet of flourishing, or is it more like the byproduct of something else? I haven’t answered this myself, but I want to know if we even have the right to creative self-expression, or whether that’s a weird byproduct of the transition to a more industrial society. I don’t know if people were always motivated by an intrinsic need for self-expression. There is this rebellious part of me that wants to ask, how important is self-expression to human flourishing?

Something underdiscussed in this era is the loss of flow state. Flow state is almost mechanical, for me. It makes my brain feel good, it feels good when we’re in flow state for long periods in a day, and most people don’t get to have it every day. Even though I don’t need to exercise, since my life doesn’t require hard manual labor, I still go to the gym. It’s good for my mind and body, and maybe flow state is another version of that for the mind.

So that’s the question. Do we need to find flow state in our lives to keep our brains going? Can we toss out the self-expression part, while keeping flow state?

Do we need to find flow state in our lives to keep our brains going? Can we toss out the self-expression part, while keeping flow state?

AD

:

Can you describe flow state?

NA

:

For me, it’s writing, and the feeling of everything else dropping away. You’re very locked into a single task and not really self-aware. Time passes very quickly. I feel energized by the end of the day. I can spend ten hours in that state and exit refreshed.

I used to spend probably ninety percent of my day in flow state. Now, with kids and different types of work — not writing — it’s like zero to ten percent of my days. That seems bad. I miss it.

AD

:

Kids are a flow-state bummer for sure. Something I’ve been thinking about: I wonder if flourishing is an antimemetic topic. The minute you talk about it, it stops being known.

NA

:

Something tricky about flourishing is how much of it feels like knowledge gained through lived experience rather than something you can apply after reading a paper. I don’t know why that is! I think that’s why we keep reinventing the same thing every generation.

What is the good life? It’s not that interesting of a question. We know what it feels like. It feels good to spend time with your friends and family rather than scrolling on Twitter. But if we’ve known the answer for centuries, why can’t we implement it? If there’s something we do differently with this generation of flourishing discourse, I hope it’s that we figure out how to actually implement it for more people, rather than just asking the same existential questions again.

AD

:

Can we talk about Jhanas? Give us a Jhanas 101. What is it, and where are you with it?

NA

:

Sure. The jhanas are a series of deep, concentrated states accessible through meditation. In theory, you can maybe get there through other methods too — breathwork, or psychedelics, maybe. Some of these states feel like extreme bliss and euphoria comparable to MDMA, some feel like deep equanimity, comparable to maybe ketamine. Really intense altered states. I stumbled onto this a few years ago on Twitter. People were talking about accessing states like being on MDMA just by thinking with their mind. I was writing a piece about it, and went on a retreat to try and learn them myself. I was gobsmacked by some of the experiences, even though I didn’t have a meditation background. I was surprised that I’d had access to these states in my brain the whole time, living for thirty-something years, and I just didn’t know it was there.

I worked for a few years with a meditation retreat company and an academic lab to try and understand these things better. I don’t meditate deeply, maybe once a month if I feel my brain getting nudged out of place. But I did experience semi-permanent, lasting effects. Some of it rewrote my brain in really good ways. I definitely recommend it.

AD

:

It sounds a lot like how we were talking about AI. This magical thing no one understands, but when someone describes it, you’re both like, what?

NA

:

Yeah, totally. I wrote a

blog post

about it because I was going around trying to find even just a plain description and basic instructions about it. I couldn’t find anything. I put no theory into the piece, just did a plain-speak version of it, and a lot of people appreciated it. I don’t think you can teach these things with theory. It reminds me of the early days of the SaaS era, where studying computer science is very different from sitting down and deciding to spin up a new software application. There’s a time and place for both, but it would be sad if all we had was computer science and theory, and no one was building things.

AD

:

And not to tie too much of a bow around it, but I feel like that’s also happening with AI. Everyone is talking about it, but I’m not sure how it’s changing their work.

NA

:

A lot of what is happening is going on in private. People are using it, and it’s changing things in their thought process, their work process. But you don’t really see how it’s changing their lives.

AD

:

What’s something you don’t let AI touch in your process at all?

NA

:

The poetic, numinous part of me. The part that touches God. I don’t always know how to draw the line between what that is or isn’t, but I can feel it. I don’t let AI touch that part.

Thanks again to

Granola

for making this series possible. You can chat with the full conversation

here

and use code SUBLIME to get 3 months free

here

.

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