The Wordcel Queen Of Silicon Valley — EP 89 Anna Gát

Ashlee Vance (0:00)

This week's episode is a little bit different. We're doing a intellectual deep dive into technology and society, and we're doing it with Anna Gát. She is the founder of Interintellect. It's a platform for having deep, thoughtful, meaningful conversations. Anna has developed a type of system over the years for having dialogues that are hopefully fruitful and that help people add some intellectual texture to their lives. As such, we go through the tech industry, why people hate it, why people hate AI. Is this a good thing? Is this a bad thing? Is it warranted or not? We get into Elon Musk's writing style. We get into one of my favorite topics, which is engineers taking over the world and what this means for society. All kinds of juicy topics and Anna has big thoughts on them all. She is Hungarian by birth and writer and screenwriter, by training and intellectual. In her mid-30s, she basically changed her whole life to go chase after this Interintellect idea due to some personal tragedy and drama in her life, which we get into a bit in the show.

She's just a cool cat who has a big following online and among intellectual circles in Silicon Valley and beyond. And so you're going to enjoy this discussion. I am Ashlee Vance. This is Core Memory. Here we go.

First of all, Anna, thank you so much for being here.

Anna Gát (2:02)

Thank you so much for having me.

Ashlee Vance (2:03)

It's a treat. I have all these friends that tell me I should be interviewing you. Really? Oh, thank you, friends. Yeah, I got lots of messages as well. Really? Yes. Wow.

And so you're usually in New York, but you're doing some kind of a couple of weeks in the Bay.

Anna Gát (2:19)

That's correct.

Ashlee Vance (2:20)

Yeah.

Anna Gát (2:20)

I'm actually on the fence about this a little bit because I'm based in New York. I've been living there for two years. Because if you're a European Jew, that's where you have to start. There are rules. That's like level zero.

And now I'm thinking, maybe I should come here.

Ashlee Vance (2:35)

This was going to be one of my questions.

Anna Gát (2:38)

I'm feeling a strong pull and I'm emotionally conflicted about it. Because this is so far away from home. Every time I walk around in San Francisco, I'm feeling like I have a lot of friends here. My investors are here. A lot of people I work with are here. But I might as well be in New Zealand in terms of cultural proximity to where I'm from. I'm Central European. I'm technically from the Shire of Europe. If the Shire was something that commits horrible mistakes in wars and gets invaded all the time.

We have like two hills and two rivers, one of which we don't like.

So that's my geographical backdrop. I'm Hungarian. So here I'm like Ellis in Wonderland.

Ashlee Vance (3:18)

You guys have everything.

Anna Gát (3:19)

It's amazing.

Ashlee Vance (3:20)

All right. Let's get into that in a second. Just briefly before we do that, I intro'd you, but I was curious. I mean, how do you, you have an unusual life. How do you describe what you do?

Anna Gát (3:34)

Wow. It depends who's asking, right? I usually say that I'm a philosopher and a technologist.

And if somebody's like, what's that?

Ashlee Vance (3:43)

We don't understand.

Anna Gát (3:44)

You lost us like five words ago. Then I say that my background is in philosophy and languages and I run a technology startup.

Ashlee Vance (3:54)

Yeah. Okay.

And obviously, you get a lot of attention for these salons, the art of conversation and all of that. I mean, that's part of this. And bringing this intellectual discourse to technology, is that fair?

Anna Gát (4:10)

Yes. I mean, it was always my goal to build something where other people can run events that are not poisoned by politics, that are not just about networking. They don't have a clear goal. That's the European side of me.

And yeah, I run Interintellect. Anybody can host their own literary salons, workshops, book clubs there. It's going really well. We do very beginner level stuff for young people. And we also now have the biggest publishers and the biggest thinkers, writers using our platform proactively.

Ashlee Vance (4:41)

And you like guide people on how to make these successful.

Anna Gát (4:46)

So I don't know how long I should go back.

Ashlee Vance (4:50)

I'm interested in your ideas. But anyway, now I just go.

Anna Gát (4:54)

I mean, you're a host as well. So I think we are colleagues in the suns. So my background is in languages and philosophy. But my career since my late teens used to be in film and drama. So I wrote plays, I worked with screenwriters and wrote screenplays as well. It was like European art house level stuff. But I also worked on more, the bigger budget stuff as a script doctor. Around 15 years ago, I started becoming very interested in the science of dialogue. I started researching neuro linguistics, like what happens in the brain when two people are talking.