What Mull is.

The mind atrophies when it stops being asked to work. That’s the whole observation. The tools that work most of the time — search, recommendation, AI synthesis — make most of our cognitive transactions easier than they used to be. The cost of that ease, paid silently, is that the muscles which used to do the work go soft.

Mull is a daily ritual designed to put one specific muscle back to work, every morning, in under an hour, alongside a community of people doing the same thing across every timezone.

The ritual.

At 7:00 am your local time, you receive a prompt. Most days it pairs two thinkers who never met (Hannah Arendt × Byung-Chul Han, Marcus Aurelius × Anne Carson, Simone Weil × David Foster Wallace) and asks you a question their conversation would surface.

You have one hour to write your reaction. Three minutes if you only have three. Forty-five if it’s a good morning. The window closes at 8:00 am sharp. No edits after submission.

At 8:00 am, an AI companion drops a four-paragraph essay on the same prompt — what the machine made of it. You read your version. You read the machine’s. You see where you converged and where you didn’t.

That’s it. Daily streak. Public profile. No social graph, no algorithm, no notifications outside the daily prompt.

Why we built this.

Because the panic about cognitive atrophy under AI is real and growing — Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon published research on it in 2025, the New York Times and Atlantic ran cover stories, every knowledge worker we know feels it — but no one has built the consumer product to do something about it.

Mull is the version of that product we wanted to use ourselves.

Who runs it.

Mull is built and maintained by NEMOMOT, an independent publishing imprint. Our weekly Letter explores the same questions Mull asks daily.

The AI companion essays are generated by AUTEUR, our in-house book-drafting engine. Mull is its first daily proof-of-life.

How it stays free.

Mull is free during early access. Sometime after we cross 1,000 daily mullers, a paid tier will launch with extras (private leagues with friends, full streak history, your auto-compiled portfolio as a public Substack). Until then: free, no ads, no tracking beyond aggregate usage, no data sold.

If you want to support the work earlier than that, the simplest way is to read and share the weekly Letter.