A Bet on American Intellectual Life—and Beyond
A Conversation with Anna Gát on the Reading Crisis and Creating Spaces for Serious Dialog to Flourish
When The Idea Machine came out last fall, Anna Gát invited me to Manhattan for an Interintellect salon to discuss it. Anna’s the founder and CEO of the company, which provides a platform for people to host online and in-person gatherings. A small room with big questions about a topic I’d given more than a decade of my life to? Of course I went!
In a time when we tend to imagine our society lumbering into the New Dark Ages as legions of drooling doomscrollers, unable to read anything more complex than YA novels and Instagram tiles, Anna’s making a bet the other way. And she’s got actual skin in the game.
Her business, which she founded in 2019, depends on curious people sharing and discussing art, literature, philosophy, history, science, psychology, innovation and current affairs. She’s obsessed with the future of reading, how technology and the humanities relate, and how to nurture intellectual pursuits and interpersonal connection.
Anna hails from Budapest and now lives in New York, having spent stints in France, London, Brussels, and Lisbon along the way. Before Interintellect, she worked as a screenwriter, playwright, translator, editor, and journalist. Along with her work for Interintellect, she hosts The Hope Axis podcast and publishes her newsletter American Innocence here on Substack.
I wanted to talk to her about reading, conversation, the role of technology in art and discourse, and an immigrant’s perspective on intellectual life in America.
You left Budapest for London at thirty, lived in several countries, and eventually landed here in the great United States. What kept making you start over and what did you find in America that makes you want to stay?
Are you asking about my Odyssey?! I have been in a long courtship with America ever since I was a teenager! I was born in Budapest, went to high school in France, completed two postgraduate degrees back home while working as a screenwriter, journalist, lecturer, and music manager.
I like to build things, what can I say? I cofounded a big women’s rights platform in Hungary, participated in various European film festivals—e.g., Berlin—with my screenplays, and won a scholarship in London where I did my third degree in theater writing at Goldsmiths and staged my plays. Tragically, by the time I left Budapest for this scholarship, the Orbán takeover was being really felt in daily life: the media was closing down, the jobs were disappearing, and everybody was leaving. Several of my friends in the film world died by suicide. I knew my departure would be for good.
While in London, a lot of things happened. A personal life crisis meant that in 2015 I lost even the little scaffolding I had left after my immigration, and so I had to rebuild my entire life from scratch. This took a while. During this time, my thinking completely changed, my pain threshold widened like crazy, and I realized my domain knowledge in dialogue-writing, organization building, and linguistics could help me build something substantial that could help other societies avoid the collapse of public discourse I had witnessed in Hungary.
I wanted to build something long-lasting that could help people speak and think more freely, and by now I knew I was strong enough to do so. I knew there is no external authority that builds the world for us—it is up to us; we are all we have. And we have work to do.
After years of research and prototyping, Interintellect—an organization devoted to improving public conversation—was born. I raised my initial funding and started looking for a more affordable temporary base away from Brexit-anxious London. I relocated to Brussels, a well-connected French-speaking hub where I had a lot of old friends, to build the foundations until it would become clear whether I was meant to build the company in the U.S. or Europe. But almost the day after my arrival in Brussels, the COVID lockdowns started, and so I really had some focused time by myself! One and a half years.
It became increasingly clear from our company metrics that the strongest demand for Interintellect was in America. In the process of figuring out the right structure and the way forward, I also spent a year in startup-friendly Lisbon, and when I got my extraordinary ability O-1 visa faster than I expected, I relocated to New York.
I ended up coming in a moment of professional upheaval and a sudden personal bereavement. It was not always easy—I wrote about this period in multiple essays, e.g., “Grieving in America,” and also how it finally clicked for me in, e.g., “My Jewish Culture.”
Last month I received my green card and the certainty that I can stay in the best country for people like me: America. For the first time since those daydreaming Budapest years, I feel settled in a way that doesn’t seem to diminish my cravings, curiosities, and ambitions. My weirdness. I am very happy.
I’m homeschooling my sixteen-year-old son Jonah this coming year am looking to build an integrated curriculum. Your early schooling in Budapest taught cultural history as one connected story—Shakespeare alongside exploration, Victorian novels alongside industrialization, Greek plays alongside war. What did that way of reading give you? And how does that compare to your later education?
The funny thing about my education is how much of it was really self-driven, even though on the surface so “classical,” so Mitteleuropa. I started teaching myself things and reading books well before school. I often wonder what makes a child look up at the bookshelves and think, “I’m going to pick things from here.” That is what I did—whatever compelled me?
In school, I was a “rebel reader”: I somehow thought in terms of markets, as if the compulsory readings were just an option, up to me to pick which I liked, and otherwise read whatever I wanted. I must have been crazy annoying, sitting in class, with some not-advised book open on my knees day after day. I ended up reading some of the mandatory classics only much later, while during my school years I went through the parts of literature that really interested me: adventure, sci-fi, history, midcentury existentialist Weltschmerz, you name it.
Occasionally, I would acquire incredible literature teachers—Dr. Ferenc Vasbányai and Valéria Eszes introduced me to some of the most important texts of my life during middle school and early high school. I still think about them often. My Eleven Sentence Essays (of which my old Substack consisted) are directly derived from a Vasbányai exercise from when I was fourteen. Eszes still makes me discover poetry through her Instagram account. These people are true educators, the best people teenagers can have in their lives.
At university, I had the pleasure of studying with Hungary’s greatest living playwright and one of our best novelists, György Spiró. I was also taught by a leading Shakespeare translator, the recently passed Ádám Nádasdy. But for me at least it has always been about what I liked, what attracted me, and much less about the status of the teacher or the material. (I think that intellectually I am strangely status-blind which leads to some eclectic preferences. It is only knowledge that I respect deeply.)
My takeaway has been—and I know this is a popular thought—that it’s the love of reading and curiosity that has to be encouraged and amplified in the young. Once you want to know and have the self-confidence to seek, you will always seek out things to know and find them. You need to be allowed to discover this cognitive autonomy.
One thing I appreciate about your work: It exudes optimism. It’s there in your podcast name, hope. Pull that into the conversation about the reading crisis. I’m thinking, for instance, of your essay “The Sovereign Reader.” What do the people announcing a postliterate future of helpless doomscrollers get wrong, and what part of their diagnosis do they get right?
Thanks so much! I believe only in active hope, to be clear. Sitting and waiting—or as Peter Thiel would put it, indefinite optimism—I have no patience for. The world is how we build it, and the people who build the world are no better than you or me, so what really is our excuse? I think this is a good rule of thumb to live by, whether your active hope in a specific moment is deep preparation, the support of others, or accomplishing a great external act yourself. There is always a ton to do!
As for reading itself, I think people underestimate how little most people in the past actually read, and underestimate how much people today do: we read not just books but online articles, emails, texts, threads, etc., all day. So thinking that we live in a post-alphabet world to me sounds quite off.
When it comes to reading philosophy, literature, and the classics, that’s another question. As the economy changes and how social status and wealth are created changes, short-term thinking can lead young people away from the heavier books. My creed is that you should “always read the text”: being an autonomous adult in the world, with your own mind and opinions, requires you to have firsthand experiences with at least some of the foundational texts of our politics and culture.
I know this is not so simple to carve out time for today, but we all have a responsibility to try and to help each other, the best way for which is seeking out communities where these curiosities can be amplified and shared. In New York, the public library network is a free intellectual Canaan we can all partake in—while the online ecosystem provides unprecedented amounts of cultural treasures just a click away wherever you live.
And for those who think people have lost their sitzfleisch (their ability to sit for a long time and focus): just consider how much you’re sitting and focusing already! Changing your object of focus sometimes, especially if it leads to new friendships and shared discoveries the way it does on Interintellect, is much easier than you think.
There’s the big canon—however squishy it is at the margins—and all our little canons, our personal favorites. Keeping both gives us room to follow our whims and abandon books we dislike. I endorse. But how do we distinguish an honest judgment of personal taste from stalling out midstream in a demanding book? What’s your personal rule on that?
It is important to bear in mind that when it comes to taste we really only have personal opinion. There are many self-appointed and state-appointed gatekeepers, revered traditions, people whose job title suggests they know what’s up, people who are themselves artists and so we think they have better, more expert taste for other artists, etc. And yet, there are no real objective measures for what makes an artwork great, for anyone. Ever.
We have impression (how a piece of art feels in the moment, how beautiful or formally interesting we find it), intuition (how true we feel its message is, what other truths it reminds us of), what Jauss would call horizon of expectations (how we compare the work to past works and norms we have encountered), and context knowledge (what we know about a particular work at hand before we immerse ourselves in it). What we walk away thinking about a work of art we have just encountered will be a combination of these four things.
A canon is the accumulated such opinions of many independent people across often a vast span of time. We praise Hamlet not just because it is good—in that primal, first impression, intuitive sense—but because it is so good that innumerable people across centuries have independently come to the same conclusion that it is a masterpiece. Canons in this sense are basically statistical. The opinions of many, including the right gatekeepers and curriculum-makers, elevate you into it, and then subsequent generations of opinions keep you there. No small feat! When something is called a “classic,” that is worth being taken seriously.
A few years ago, a blogger asked his X followers what makes Shakespeare so great because he didn’t get it. I responded,
I think this is helpful for understanding how cultural canonization—I wrote one of my dissertations on this—is always a kind of matrix of such various considerations. We test art against multiple expectations and qualifications both personally and as a culture.
Having run a cultural institution for intellectual conversations for so many years, both hosting these conversations and just attending countless salons online and offline in our spaces, I am more confident than ever in advising people to trust their own taste. Across tens of thousands of such conversations, I have never met a person who didn’t have an innate capacity for good taste.
Taste is not something we copy or learn from others, but something we are all born with and must learn to feed and amplify in both ourselves and others. A great way to improve one’s own taste is not just filling our brains with the art of others, but by creating things ourselves as well, seeing the whole process from the inside. If you write yourself, even if only privately, you will understand books better—you don’t have to be a Pulitzer-winning author to have this power.
And so a “canon” is never fixed and it is never a monologue. It is the legacy and tradition that aggregate the opinions of other people on the one side, and your own impressions, intuitions, and judgements on the other, always interacting, always—when done well—influencing one another. In 2026, a well-timed blogpost, podcast episode, or Letterboxd review can rediscover a “lost” work of art for the entire global community. We are all stewards of the canon. The canon is us.
You read across Hungarian, French, and English, and you’ve worked as a translator. Do you have one personal canon, or does each language contain a different library—and perhaps a slightly different version of you? Is there a Hungarian Anna and a Manhattan Anna?
I would love to say I contain multitudes, and that there are all these different Annas. But I constantly have to realize my taste is very much “mine” wherever I may roam. I definitely have “eras”—the books I fell in love with as a teenager might be very different from what hits me hard today. I sometimes watch or read something and wish I had encountered it at a younger age. Other times, I come across something that I know I would not have been able to appreciate earlier, because I had to gain self-knowledge and life experience first. But the larger themes are always the same—more languages simply give you more color, more to choose from.
The physicist Michael Nielsen thinks we only have one question all our lives—everybody chases their one personal question in everything they do or create. That is definitely true about my own quests to understand human behavior, morality, relation, purpose, and redemption, the things that interest me the most.
Learning foreign languages enough to be able to read literature is a great gift you can give yourself even in the AI translation era. The fact that I can read “Hajnali részegség” in Hungarian (there is no good translation), which is perhaps the greatest poem ever written in the Hungarian language; Rilke’s heavenly “Und meine Seele ist ein Weib vor dir” in German (again, there is no good translation), the almost diabolically wise “Dans la solitude des champs de coton” in French (also untranslatable), or “Listen. Put on Morning” in English is just a great, great blessing, which fills me with awe and gratitude for this little glimpse into the brilliance of my species that is available to me.
Is there a Hungarian or French book that helped shape you but that you’ve found almost impossible to share with English-speaking friends because the translation misses something, or because the surrounding culture doesn’t travel with it? What gets lost?
Apart from some of the things I mention above? When I lived in France, I was introduced to the Marcel Pagnol universe—a kind of bucolic idyll, books and movies—that is beautiful and wistful. Manon des sources (Manon of the Spring) might sound familiar to some of your readers. It’s a kind of tonic for the soul.
A lot of music, definitely. Louise Attaque’s song with the super funny, pun-filled lyrics, “Léa.” The culturally tongue-in-cheek songs of Vincent Delerm, especially “Tes Parents” (ha!). All the rap and hip hop, too. I was in high school there, so you can imagine. We sat around and watched La Cité de la peur, which is basically the French Naked Gun. It’s two hours of puns! Untranslatable both linguistically and culturally.
When it comes to Hungarian, a culture I am vastly more familiar with of course, I never stop pestering my friends to read our great novels: Magda Szabó’s Abigail and The Fawn; Szerb’s Journey by Moonlight (the Rix translation!); Kertész’s heart-shattering, symphonic Kaddish for an Unborn Child; and his sucker-punch of a novel Fatelessness for which he won the Nobel (again look for the new translations). Maybe even Esterházy’s Celestial Harmonies if you’re up for it.
I am less of a Krasznahorkai fan—he is somehow too Scandinavian for me. I respect him but I don’t much relate to it personally. But György Konrád’s The Case Worker is superb; the same darkness but it’s more alive. Thanks to the Frankfurt Book Fair and the German publishing industry in general, a lot of Hungarian novels now have excellent translations.
Our poetry is much less accessible in English. I mentioned Kosztolányi’s poem “Hajnali részegség” above, but Illyés, László Nagy, Attila József . . . The French are just so much better at translating our poets. And the contemporaries: Varró’s fantastic children’s poetry, the confessions of Krisztina Tóth and Anna Szabó T., dear János Térey—who left us way too early—with his political satire verse play Protokoll. Genius. These will be gems to discover once there are good enough translations.
Coming from a tiny, unique language, it is both a source of sadness for me to be understood so little—for my culture’s works of beauty to be often so hard to share—and a source of a kind of mischievous pride, as if over a secret. I can probably run out into the street anywhere in America—except for New York—swear like a sailor for twenty minutes in Hungarian, and no one would understand a word. It could be a form of therapy.
Your sovereign reader still depends on other people—friends, critics, librarians, booksellers, book clubs (and even nonpeople like algorithms and LLMs)—to find the next book. Who or what has earned the most influence over your own reading life, and how has that changed over time?
In “The Sovereign Reader” I talk about building a cultural “map,” a mental system of orientation for yourself, over time—this in fact is the greatest asset one can have when building a personal culture. Just like in a big city, knowing where you are without having to ask is a guarantee of happy independence.
Ever since I was little, I’ve loved referencing—associations, understanding how different items of knowledge relate to each other. How one word connects to others via etymological roots. How one writer inspired another. Why two works of art appearing at the same time coincidentally might suggest some shared source worth investigating.
Luckily, my Hungarian education was very chronological, and so in many different classes one would learn what happened in various fields in a given era: in literature class we would, I don’t know, discuss Baroque poems, philosophy, theology; in physics class what Torricelli was up to; while our history teacher would guide us through the battles and revolutions of the 1600s. This perhaps old-fashioned model of instruction forever instilled in me a respect for simultaneity, contemporaries, sceniuses, and Zeitgeist.
It’s never too late to start: Grab a book about the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution or the Roaring Twenties, and start building your mental map. Once you have the foundations—any—you can start adding things to it as you go along, and just like a cab driver has the whole city modelled in his mind, you will soon have most of culture, at least as a shape, but enough to orient you.
As for finding what to read next, like most people I combine various methods. I live quite close to a Barnes & Noble, and I often just pop in to browse. I check the big literary magazines and the leading newspapers online daily. Substack, Twitter, and group chats also give me good pointers. Interintellect salons are a key source: I read for upcoming salons, host “book therapy” recommendation parties, and scroll our community Discord. Most of my friends love reading and so there is also the informal sacred duty of pushing one’s new favorite book on anybody who’s paying attention.
Plays, screenwriting—you spent a dozen years writing dialogue between imaginary people before building a company nurturing dialogue between real ones. What does a playwright understand about conversation that the rest of us might miss?
David Mamet, in his great book on drama Three Uses of the Knife, writes that every scene in a play has to be able to answer three questions:
Who wants what from whom?
What happens if they don’t get it?
Why now?
In film-writing, a key rule is that every scene has to either advance the plot or reveal character. (If it doesn’t, it will be cut.) Indirectly, revealing character of course also advances the plot in that it helps the audience understand and accept later choices made by that character.
Using Aristotelian as well as far more recent rulebooks, dialogue-writing tightly concentrates a lot of knowledge about personality, incentives, desires, and subtext that a novel can treat as loosely as it pleases. While watching the TV series Mad Men, which contains some of the finest dialogue-writing from the past one hundred years, I always marvel at how this series feels like reading Proust, that it is the same kind of depth, layeredness, and sad wisdom. But of course, a scene in Mad Men is distilled to maximum information density, a constraint that famously never troubled Proust.
And so dialogue-writers have a kind of algorithmic, essential understanding of human conversation which I found very useful when I first started researching psycholinguistics, social media, and language AI for Interintellect. I was trying to find a way to use my knowledge in a way that with the right science and technology could turn into a real-world utility, a product, a company, to make a real difference for human conversations in the world. After some years of this initial research Interintellect started, and to this day we have never had a toxic or disruptive incident on the platform. It’s been seven years now. So something must have been set up well.
As I understand it, the first version of Interintellect was an AI-mediated chat app for conflict management. When that technology proved premature, you turned some of its principles into an approach for human gatherings. What did that change of direction teach you about broken conversations, online and off? And a related question: How much of good disagreement comes down to the people in the room, and how much to the way the room is arranged? In other words, is bad discourse a people problem or a design problem?
It was a long process that led to what Interintellect is today, the intellectual salon platform where anybody with a good idea can host conversations online or offline, ticketed or for free. And who knows, maybe in the future it will change some more!
As early as 2014, I started experimenting with various formats and researching what kind of practical product could create the greatest positive impact. I was very excited about the AI language breakthrough, and between 2016–2018 built various prototypes with whatever was available at the moment and made discoveries about how conflicts escalate in language. Gottman’s mathematical research of couples therapy, which Esther Perel later also independently arrived at, was also very helpful. These are great duplicable models for something that feels random or ephemeral in real life.
After learning a lot, in 2019 I decided to switch to a less technical solution. This was both because the AI simply wasn’t there yet and I was eager to launch in the real world, and because I noticed very promising signs of how softer, nontechnical methods can also build spaces where conversations remain open, friendly, and constructive.
This was a contrarian move: everything at the time was about blocking, fear, and self-protection. The media was very wary of online exchange and saw it as a great danger. “Social impact” investors were pouring money into online “anti-toxicity” startups. But I decided to try and put aside these excessive forms of caution and went at it in the most permissive way possible: a handful of simple rules, a paid, real-name, real-face structure, and a strong community tier, but nothing else.
Now, many years later, we find this bet to have paid off. Indeed it is possible, at scale, to help people conduct conversations on any challenging or contested topic, and if the norms are set up right, the experience of the participants will be consistently positive. Starting nontechnically is a strange thing for a startup to do, but this is what we did—and then added technical elements gradually, based on our real life learnings.
In “If Machines Could Talk,” you describe human conversation as musical: it has rhythm, silence, bodily presence, and so on. Now that Interintellect is experimenting with AI again, what would an AI have to learn about that “music” if it were going to help people think together rather than keep individuals happily—or unhappily—alone with a machine?
AI is the great technological invention of our times, which going forward is going to be more and more embedded into every part of our lives. It is essential that AI is motivated to not divide people but encourage gathering and exchange, a democratic, civic, social lifestyle. If AI will be present everywhere, then it has to want to also be present but not obtrusive in our lives spent together.
At the individual level, the great problem with AI as an interlocutor is that it has no innate sense of time. We humans understand every event on a timescale; our conversations, our relationships, ourselves. Humans are the embodiment of consciousness with a limited timescope, be that our daily schedules or our general mortality.
AI still has difficulties with the simplest forms of human time—earlier GPT and Claude models sometimes didn’t know what year it was, let alone day. To this day, my Fable sometimes tries to send me to bed at 3 p.m. because it gets confused what time it is. But real conversation, just like music, is an act unfolding in time—speed, pauses, silences carry enormous meaning. Time is both the structuring factor of speech and an act of communication.
I wish LLMs had allegro non molto when the situation requires. Molto vivace! I wish they had a sense of when you are thinking or need a moment. Playwrights and film editors have of course always understood that the real human meaning is in the silence.
Our experiences with LLMs will always be imperfect until they have figured out how to “tango” with us, how to play with the rhythm.
You chose America, which gives you a different vantage from those of us who simply emigrated through the birth canal. What do native-born Americans fail to notice about our own intellectual culture—both what’s broken and what’s better than we think?
Today, most of the American discourse centers around grievances. The left thinks America is broken beyond help. The right thinks America is broken almost beyond help (and they can help). I agree with neither take.
The word that comes to mind when considering America is always potential. It is overwhelming and sometimes scary, but the fact is in America you really can just do things. There is enough space, capital, and people so that whatever you have on your mind, if you try hard, you will eventually somehow succeed. This really doesn’t exist anywhere else, not like this.
And so I think this “unscripted,” always entrepreneurial, and uncertain structure so familiar from Tocqueville determines also how intellectualism is done here. There exist simultaneously a celebration of success and a demand that the succeeding person must never act too superior to others. There is a great emphasis here on a success that elevates others too. I like it.
If you want a guiding and confining tradition, America is not an ideal place for you. If you want to build something from nothing—a career, a community, a movement—it very well may be. To Europeans, this scrappy way of thinking and learning might not seem “fancy” enough, but there is a great power to all beginnings. And, ultimately, you want to live in a place where status goes to those who try and not to those who resist change or seek rents.
On The Hope Axis, you ask guests what will be obvious to everyone in 2030 that is already obvious to them. Let me turn the question on you: What will be obvious to all of us in 2030 that is already obvious to Anna Gát?
I will just say that by 2030 we—people in the knowledge industries—will be doing work very, very differently. And what a “workday” means to us will have greatly changed. Just like during previous industrial revolutions, the changing concept of work will affect many aspects of society. One should prepare oneself.
Final question. You can invite any three authors—living or dead—for a long meal. Neither time nor language is an obstacle. Who do you invite, and what does the conversation sound like?
This is hard because a lot of great authors were or are quite insufferable in person. There is a reason one has to become an author! Normal people don’t spend all their time writing in solitude. We writers, I am sorry, are strange, and more or less antisocial people. Even I, running Interintellect, like to spend most of my time alone.
I am thinking: Who would be an entertaining person to have around, not just someone who wrote good books . . . So, okay, I would invite multiple people assuming some would cancel.
First, Tom Wolfe, Quincy Jones, or Gertrude Stein to bring us the celebrity gossip. I want to know whether Zelda Fitzgerald was really that witty and if Marlon Brando was really that good in bed. Let’s see if one of them accepts—these gossipy social butterflies are the hardest to book!
Then I would invite someone like Thomas Mann to tell us about discipline. I am in awe of these prolific men and women of letters. How did they write so much? We have a lot to learn from them. Sitzfleisch!
Thirdly, I would invite 1990 Camille Paglia, right when Sexual Personae came out, to talk to us about her interdisciplinary research into myth, art, and history; how to open one’s mind to the past and the future simultaneously; how to think as fearlessly and as unconstrainedly as she did.
But should she be unavailable? It was to my great sadness that I could never meet Derek Parfit in person before he passed—I heard he was a very, very strange person too. Also a genius. It would be to our benefit if he could join us and teach us a little bit about morality. If, that is, he accepts. We could all learn a lot.
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