How Not To Go Insane: Chloé Valdary on leaving Twitter, the new Puritanism, and the virtues of reading aloud.
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Hi, it's Megan with laryngitis. Really quick note about this episode. As many of you know, the regularly scheduled podcast was disrupted about a month ago after I lost my home in the Los Angeles wildfires. I've been doing audio dispatches about that event and will continue to do so. But now I am going to pick up from where we left off with the guest interviews. Obviously, a lot has happened in the last month. I

I think we might have a new president. I'm not sure. I've been a little distracted. But the episodes for the next couple of weeks are going to be interviews I recorded back in December. So if you are already tired of the news cycle and political talk, this is the podcast for you. Obviously, I cannot speak, but I will let the introduction speak for itself. And here is...

an interview. Enjoy. I am hopeful that what will come out of this is a return to civics and a return to civic dialogue and a return to civic discourse, which cannot happen on Twitter, by the way. That's the other thing I said in my piece. So that I am hopeful for because I think people are hungry for it. And so, yeah, I do think these are momentous times we're living through.

Welcome to the Unspeakable Podcast. I'm your host, Megan Delm. I have been having a lot of conversations lately about, for lack of a better way of putting it, how not to go insane. How not to go insane amid the onslaught of information, misinformation, entertainment, quasi-entertainment, people just generally putting nonsense out into the atmosphere, and

And my guest is, I think, one of the most thoughtful, sane and generous people out there to talk about this kind of thing. She is Chloe Valdry. Chloe was here in May of 2021, in the first year of the podcast, talking about DEI training at

and the philosophy behind a lot of it. She has developed her own approach to DEI training, a framework called the theory of enchantment, which has to do with thinking about art as a way of uniting us. Um, so she's an entrepreneur as well as, um, a writer and, uh,

just general person thinking about stuff in the world. I wanted to check in with Chloe to find out what she's thinking about these days, including her decision to quit Twitter or X, where she was very active for a long time and had a lot of followers. So this was no small thing. Uh, we recorded this in mid December, uh,

And she also talks about this question of whether the political moment we're entering into or arguably have been in is part of a larger civilizational turning. She grew up in a religious household that was focused on end times. So she has a lot of thoughts about that. And it's just a really great conversation. If you're not yet a paying subscriber, you're going to hear part of it.

If you want to hear the rest, which I think you will become a paying subscriber at megandalm.substack.com or just go to theunspeakablepodcast.com. And if you do that, you get my writing as well as a lot of live streams with the guests. There's a lot of stuff you get if you join the listener community, which I hope you do. In the meantime, here's my conversation with Chloe Valdrye.

Chloe Valdry, welcome back to The Unspeakable. Thank you, Megan. It's so good to be back. I'm so excited to talk to you.

You're one of my earlier guests. I think you were on the first year, so it's probably been four years now. I'm always so curious to hear what you're up to. You're one of the more interesting people out there in the quote unquote heterodox space. I don't know how you feel about that word, so maybe we can touch on that. But like I said in the introduction, you're an entrepreneur. You

You're a writer, you have a sub stack, you had a podcast. You do a lot of thinking about a lot of things. So maybe we'll just start here really general. What are you thinking about these days? What have you been sort of writing about or stewing about? Yeah.

Yeah, I've been. So, as you know, I deleted my Twitter and I had a very strong following on Twitter. I had about 110,000 followers and I deleted it in October of this year, maybe November. And

Since deleting my Twitter, I've had a lot of space to return to long form writing, which I forgot about the joys of long form writing. You forgot that you could write more than however many words? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I forgot that my relationship to writing didn't need to be this like very quip, like, you know, ping ping sort of orientation. So I have a sub stack and I've been...

committed to the discipline of writing a weekly article or essay, which feels really good. And so that's what I've been doing. So last week I posted or published an essay about my decision to delete my Twitter. This week, actually, what came out today is a whole essay on Luigi and the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO. So thinking about a lot of different things as always, but concentrating it

through the discipline of long-form writing, of weekly long-form writing, and seeing that as a creative outlet, experiencing that as a creative outlet. Still very much doing Theory of Enchantment, my company that provides what some would describe as an alternative to DEI as a framework. So still very much promoting that and working with different clients to

But more specifically, I think what is different for me is

uh now as opposed to this time last year is i'm focused a lot on uh what's known as psychosomatic work so when it comes to conversations about how we can be in right relationship with the full complexity of who we are and various people from different cultures etc not just memorizing a bunch of facts or definitions but really getting very clear about how our own bodies get into

hypertension or contract when we experience difference or perceived or real threat and learning to track the body, doing diaphragmatic breath work, things to like really calm down our nervous system. So those are a few things I'm excited about.

I don't think diaphragmatic breath work is big on Substack. So you may have cornered the market there. Well, this is a great conversation to be having this time of year. We're recording this on December 16th, but this conversation will probably post around the first of the year. So I think this is great. I feel like a lot of people are really starting to

I mean, this sounds like such a cliche, but I think it's sort of really true now. They're starting to rethink their online time and start to prioritize in-person interactions, getting together with friends in real life, even talking on the phone as opposed to texting. So let's start with the Twitter thing, because I also have been struggling with Twitter. It seems very different.

than it was even a year ago or six months ago. However, it is still sort of like the quote unquote marketplace of ideas for a lot of people in media. And you had a big, you had a lot of followers. Like how many followers did you have? I had roughly 110,000 followers would fluctuate around that number. Yeah. And so you just deleted them. It's not like you paused your account. Like you actually just deleted

Okay, was that difficult? Did you have to like, did you have to like get really drunk and do it? No, I'm just kidding. Did you have to, how did you bring yourself to rip the bandaid off and why? Honestly, I feel like subconsciously I've been thinking about doing it for a while, maybe like all of, you know, 2024. And the reason why I deleted it was it just became...

like a mild form of addiction for me. I would just like be bored and go on Twitter to look for influencers whose opinions I didn't like and then put together a easy retort to their opinions.

So there are tweets and then try to attract more Twitter followers from that. I don't know. There's something about the ability to be with your own boredom and allow that to turn into something really creative and something really thoughtful. And that just wasn't happening if I was sort of exercising my boredom on Twitter. So there's that. And there's also just the fact that the algorithm seems to be

Composed in such a way or constructed in such a way that like deep thought, which requires time and space and an incentive structure that isn't really.

geared towards retweets necessarily. I found that impossible really on Twitter. And I wrote about this in my sub stack, I would produce really great content for Twitter. I produce top shelf content for Twitter, like really thoughtful, really compassionate, really Buddhist-like content for Twitter. But

There's only so much impact I can make in an ecosystem like that because I wanted other people to show up on Twitter in that way. But the incentive structure isn't there for that to be possible, really. And so ultimately, it was a place that I didn't want to be in, so I deleted it.

So, so if you were you doing like tweet threads, I mean, you have to, were you doing like sort of several at once? So you're basically writing an essay sort of thing and in several different tweets. Was that what you were doing? Actually, no. So I actually had Twitter premium. So I had the full, I had the full capacity to, and, and after Elon,

implemented Twitter Premium, I noticed that long form tweets didn't have the same, for some reason, they didn't have the same resonance. I don't know if you remember before he implemented that, you could still produce long form tweets if you had a blue check.

And you didn't have to pay to get a blue check. It was just like they looked you up to see if you were an influencer and then they gave you a blue check. And for all of the subjectivity that inevitably goes in that process, it's very different from, oh, you get a blue check if you can pay for it. So that alone changed the dynamics of it.

So now to answer your question, I wasn't even, it wasn't even a tweet thread. I was producing long form content in one tweet, but it still just felt sickening. I don't know if that's like, it started to feel sleazy to be on Twitter. Yeah. So are you, were you getting like the sort of red pilled, uh, manosphere guys? Because I'm still on Twitter and I'm,

And I engage with a lot of that content. So I think these are, some of these are, I mean, some of these are bot accounts, I'm sure, but then some of them are kind of like, you know, B grade manosphere influencers. And a lot of them are sort of overseas influencers.

I don't know, it's kind of like a big mix of, yeah, like the guys who say, you know, who just, it's engagement farming. Like they'll say really outrageous sort of misogynist things under the guise of like sort of, you know, pushing back against feminism and being pronatalist or something. Like it's kind of like a lot of stuff going on. But I'm fascinated by that stuff. And so I click on it. And so then I just see more and more of it. Were you getting that kind of stuff?

I was only getting that when I was trolling Andrew Tate.

There was a phase in my life where maybe about three months where I was trolling him. And so I would go look on his feed and see what he was posting and see if I could, you know, again, put together a nice little rejoinder in response to whatever he was saying. But then I just, at some point I stopped doing that and I stopped seeing that sort of stuff in my feed. And I know that it's curated in part according to, you know, what you look for and what,

what your attention remains on. Right. So if, if my attention is geared towards that, then of course they'll show me more of it in my feed. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think about Elon's influence on Twitter? Like how much of this, the changes to the platform do you attribute to his influence?

You know, that's a good question. I have no objective response to that question. Like, I truly don't know. I did see someone say that they thought that Elon was addicted to Twitter, and I think that's probably true. And that alone is unsettling. Because if you are addicted to a platform that is...

structure to make you believe that the validity of your opinions is based upon how many likes, retweets, engagement, etc. that you get, then, and you have all the money and power and resources that Elon Musk has, um,

then you create a very narcissistic society. And what is narcissism? Narcissism is not selfishness. Narcissism is the absence of a self. It's like hungry ghost vibes. It's like you are so unfulfilled, so perpetually unfulfilled.

That you just keep feeding, you just keep consuming this thing in order to try to fill the gaping hole at the void of your soul that will never be filled. Now, I'm not saying that all of that applies to Elon Musk, but it does beg the question if he is in fact addicted to Twitter, and it seems like he is.

Do you think Donald Trump is addicted to Twitter? I don't know. Is he on Twitter? Well, yeah. I mean, he tweets crazy things at all hours of the night. I mean, he always has. It's a big part of the way he communicates with the American people.

I don't think I knew that. I think I stopped paying attention to Donald Trump's presence on Twitter after he got banned from Twitter the first time. So when Elon, I guess, reinstated him, I wasn't like I was no longer paying attention at that point. So I don't know. I'm sure there's an argument. Wow, that's...

Yeah. So that's so interesting that, so narcissism is the absence of a self. I mean, that I was just having a conversation with somebody last night about what is narcissism. It is the, is it, I mean, has time magazine made it the word of the year? They should have like, you know, starting 10 years ago and just made it the word every single year. But yeah. Yeah. So, okay. Cause it does feel like an extreme,

extremely um unhealthy place twitter and yet it doesn't it's sort of like where do you it's we're all kind of like you know this is a prison of our own making people who are in this kind of why does it feel like a prison why does it feel inescapable because again when i deleted my twitter i felt very it's like such a breath of relief honestly

Right. Well, um, I guess there's this idea that if you don't tweet your stuff, no one's going to read it. Like, okay, so you're writing long, longer form on Substack now. Do you feel compelled to tweet your, well, I mean, do you feel compelled to let everybody know about your Substack posts on Twitter?

No, well, I can't because I don't have Twitter. Right. But do you feel like, oh, no, I should be letting people know that I wrote this? There are like tiny moments where I feel it, but very rarely. Also, the value of Substack in my mind is so much higher because number one, you can actually make money on Substack. Like, that's the other thing. I was giving people my free time. Yeah.

And on some side, I can make money also putting out quality content, probably putting out better content because again, the amount of time and space required to think through and produce a weekly long form piece just is of a higher caliber, I think, at least for me. And so while I might feel the nudge occasionally, the nudge is tempered by the fact that

Over time, I've been seeing my paying subscribers grow, right? Like I can, I can handle the nudge if I, if I'm able to see that. Right, right, right. Although, and I should say, we'll get off the Twitter subject in a moment for listeners who are like, I don't want to talk about Twitter for an hour, but I do actually, um, I think that this is really relevant to the kind of shift that we're, that we're feeling in terms of people's, uh,

attention spans and wanting to get away from this trap that we've all laid for ourselves. But just out of curiosity, people are getting paid for tweeting though. Can you explain how this works? Like the engagement farming thing? Yeah. What is that? I actually can't explain how it works because I don't know how it works and I have a little resentment.

about this because I paid for Twitter Premium and for the longest time, I was trying to set up a system whereby I could get

you know, sort of like a Patreon style subscription fee from my followers. And it was always I always got the response like, oh, this application is still pending or whatever. And of course, I don't know what that means. I don't know why it's still pending. I don't understand like anything that's happening. And so I have heard from folks such as yourself that people have been able to make money from Twitter.

But I've never seen that. And so I would ask others if they could answer that question because I truly don't know. Do you know people who make money from Twitter?

Well, I feel like I see people saying they do. Like, I feel like there are certain, like, high, you know, sort of very journalists who are very active on Twitter. I feel like I've seen them say that they are getting paid for it, but I don't know. And maybe I'm sort of misremembering and maybe I'm kind of like projecting that.

my professional envy onto them or something like there's a whole bunch of things going on, but I do think that there, I mean, these, these kinds of accounts that are just basically, you know, Nick Fuentes, you know,

you know tweeting something like like your body my choice which is obviously a you know he's shit posting right um i don't know if somebody like him for instance is getting paid and that's why they continue to do this i mean i do think that there's a lot of people just purposely putting out garbage that's going to get eyeballs because that's sort of like how they make a living at this point

Yeah. Or some semblance of a living. I don't personally know anyone who's actually made money from Twitter, which is... Okay. Interesting. Okay. It's sort of like OnlyFans for the mind or something. Yeah. Okay, so... That's the perfect comparison. Yes, or for the OnlyFans for ugly people or something. Okay, so...

All right. So tell me more about what you're writing on your Substack. I know you wrote, we're recording today on the 16th, you wrote a piece about Luigi Mangione, who's the young man who has now been arrested for shooting Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO. That was a really interesting piece. Can you sort of tell us what you were getting out there? Yeah. So I'm really proud of this piece.

I start by talking about our Puritan heritage and specifically the Puritans' sort of self-hatred and depraved perception of the body and how what has emerged from this very Calvinistic

uh conception of the body and just to put this into perspective you know it was the puritans who created for all intents and purposes the united states of america um that's an overstatement but just go with it and the theology that they came with um was full of beliefs that the human being is fundamentally um ugly hideous depraved

evil and the only thing that we can count on is salvation in the next life. And oh, by the way, salvation is predetermined. So you can't earn salvation. God has already decided whether or not you're saved, but you can look for signs superstitiously. You can look for signs to prove that you are saved.

And one of those signs is success in business. So these two things form, in many ways, the foundation of our society. Signs of eternal salvation can be seen if you are successful in business and the human body is fundamentally evil and disgusting. And so I talk about that as the context in which people are

giving their opinions about whether or not it's okay for people to feel the way that they are feeling in response to Luigi's alleged murder of the CEO. And I talk about how this is the very fact that we are opining on whether or not it's okay to feel certain feelings is an extension of that Puritan perspective on the body.

You've been listening to a premium episode of The Unspeakable Podcast. To hear the rest of the conversation, become a paying subscriber at megandalm.substack.com or theunspeakablepodcast.com. Hope to see you over there. Thanks.