Luke Burgis: Mimetic Desire, Bitcoin, Breakups, Criticisms of René Girard, & Re-reading The Gospels

Luke Burgis is an author, entrepreneur, and builder.

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Show Notes (Click Any Timestamp To Play On YouTube)

0:00 – Auxoro Podcast Introduction

1:14 – Luke Burgis Introduction

3:51 – Source of Relief after Zappos Deal Cancellation

9:11 – The Sense of Relief

13:00 – Fighting against the Unwanted Circumstances

15:06 – Auxoro Podcast Promo

17:55 – Did the study of Mimetic Desire coincide with Luke's step away from the Startup World?

20:57 – Did the Feedback had any effect on the Decision?

26:02 – Being Realistic about Things

29:06 – What is Mimetic Desire?

32:16 – Why did Luke Write the Book Mimetic Desire?

35:52 – Influencing the Desire of other People

41:57 – The Contagious Desires

42:19 – Negative Side of Mimetic Desire

44:30 – How did Luke Burgis find Inspiration for the Content?

47:07 – Bringing better models of Desire in Life

50:44 – Perennial and Fashionable Ideas

52:26 – Mimetic Desire and The Recent Rise of Crypto Currencies

55:36 – The future of Bitcoin

59:07 – Mimetic Desire and The Flywheel Effect in Stock Market

1:02:44 – Insight into Mimetic Desire

1:05:26 – Mimetic Desire with Dating

1:08:33 – Surface Level Interaction and Decision making

1:11:58 – The Stoning Effect

1:13:32 – Generating New Desires

1:16:50 – Most Common Criticisms of Mimetic Desire

1:20:16 – Dopamine’s Effect on one’s Desire

1:22:00 – Girard’s Theory of Mimetic Desire

1:27:34 – What brought Luke Burgis back into the Catholic Church?

1:30:27 – Going back to Catholicism

1:31:57 – How did Luke start his Intellectual Catholic Journey?

1:34:25 – Luke’s Favorite Criticism about Rene Girard

1:37:29 – Constructive Criticism about Girard’s Theory

1:39:40 – Mimetic Desire and its Effect on Human Evolution

1:43:47 – Humans lacking Fixed Dominance Hierarchy

1:47:06 – The Connection between Mimetic Desire and Love

1:51:14 – Brett Weinstein’s thoughts about the Growth-Driven Society

1:53:34 – Wealth and Money are not the same

1:56:36 – Luke’s Book “Wanting to Increase your Wealth of Knowledge”

1:57:03 – How to Purchase Luke’s Book and Luke’s Contact Info

1:58:11 – Outro

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Transcript Text

Luke (1s):

One of the beautiful things about being an entrepreneur or just thinking like one is like you you're, you're literally like creating new things in the world and creating new desires. And one of the reasons I'm a little bit, it's not that I think there's anything wrong with market research, but one of the reasons we have to like temper our fascination with market research is that it only measures like what already exists. If you would have put out market research or done a study. I don't know when podcasts came out like, you know, 15 years ago or something like that and ask people if they wanted to listen to a two hour long audio conversation, I think very many would have said, no

Zach (51s):

Guys, welcome to another episode of the <inaudible> podcast. And if you're listening to this or seeing this on YouTube than you are on the public feed, this means you don't have access to the full video versions of the <inaudible> podcast and you aren't getting bonus episodes of my other podcast, the ox on topics like Bruce Lee, Bitcoin, the COVID lab leak and more in exchange for your hard earned or inherited money. We take both no discrimination here. You'll get two bonus episodes per month of the ox, which ends up being three plus hours of premium podcast content. The full video version of every episode of the Zuora podcast. So you don't have to watch a thumbnail on YouTube subscriber, only solo episodes, raw notes and research bonus writings, access to all premium archived episodes and more become a premium member today by going to Zuora dot super cast.tech.

Zach (1m 46s):

So you don't have to hear any more of these annoying ass pitches now or in the middle of an episode. And trust me, they only get more annoying pitches are for bitches. Go to <inaudible> dot tech today to support quality content from independent creators. Lincoln also be found in the episode notes. I love you guys enjoy the show. This time I sit down with Luke Burgess. Luke is a builder and author and an educator. He wrote the book wanting the power of mimetic desire in everyday life. And it would not be an exaggeration to say that this book changed the way I think about everything I've ever wanted. Everything I want and everything I will want.

Zach (2m 28s):

If you are interested in why we want the things we want Luke's book, and this conversation are for you. If you want also go ahead and sign up for Luke's newsletter, mimetic, Mondays. That is memetic Mondays here. He gives you a mimetic idea and anti-medic response and a quote from another thinker. Here's a little preview sample from last Monday, July 19th. I'm a medic Monday. Luke wrote about taking a break from the creativity of others and he writes, quote, take a creative fast. If you're going to embark on a creative project of any kind, writing a song, a book, a paper, making a product, take a creative fast for at least a week, preferably longer before starting for at least a week before you begin, look at no other competitive products, no other writing, no other models.

Zach (3m 19s):

The more we obsessive really check ourselves against models. Even if our intent is to differentiate ourselves from them, the more we end up shaping our pursuit in the long run, taking a creative fast means some spiritual distance from models. It doesn't mean that your work won't be influenced by models, but if you do it right, you'll gain the space. You need to interact with them without them being on top of you and to quote now, and this episode, Luke and I get into why he felt relieved when a deal worth millions of dollars with Zappos fell through the foundations of why we want what we want the influence of memetic desire on cryptocurrency and breakups.

Zach (4m 1s):

You know, that feeling when you think you're over someone for good, and then you see a photo of them on Instagram with someone else, and all the doubts starts rushing back into your mind, should I've left this person? Why did they leave me? What is she doing with this slightly worse looking version of me? No way this dude gets her off with that bulge, you know, those feelings. Yeah. That has a lot to do with mimetic desire. And also we get into why you should go back and read the gospels of the Catholic church, how love <inaudible> interact and more without further ado, please enjoy this deep dive with one of the most forefront thinkers of mimetic desire on the planet, Luke

2 (4m 43s):

Urges. All right,

Zach (4m 46s):

Luke, thank you for joining me today on the podcast. I really do appreciate it. Hey, Zach, going to be with you, man. So I'm in the middle of reading your book now wanting, and you describe a period of time in your life where you are a startup founder, and you have a deal that you're working on closing with the founder of Zappos, Tony Shea. And it sounds like it's an extremely hectic and also beautiful, crazy time in your life. And there's a moment where the deal doesn't go through and you describe it as this relief that this, you wouldn't expect it from someone that had just been through that process where they're startup founder, they're trying to get their company acquired.

Zach (5m 36s):

One of the biggest companies in the world in the space offers to, or you think they're about to make an offer to acquire your company and the deal falls apart. And you describe a sense of relief in the book. What was the source of that sense of relief? And what did you learn from it? I had

Luke (5m 55s):

No idea what the source was at the, it took me years to finally understand that it wasn't until an encounter with the thought of Rene Girard and understanding mimetic desire until I was really able to make sense of that at the time, you know, I was devastated briefly and then this feeling of relief kind of washed over me and I'd realized that I'd been driven by some kind of a mysterious, like hidden force that had been driving me to pursue all kinds of things for like where I wanted to go to college. And then I, I got to college and then I wanted to transfer and then I wanted to work on wall street and then I wanted to become an entrepreneur and started several different companies in the span of five years.

Luke (6m 38s):

And I just always felt like there was, there was kind of like no end to it. I was very unsatisfied. And I think that the feeling of the deal falling through was a, was a relief and a sense of freedom that I had somehow been freed from the chains of like unhealthy in the medic desire, right? Like constantly finding like new models of desire that were causing me to pursue something. And then once I got it, I would just kind of like throw it away and move on to the next thing. And I realized that if I had the deal actually gone through with Tony, then that cycle would have continued. And I'm not quite sure where it would have ended.

Luke (7m 19s):

I would have joined a company where I was kind of like an outsider. I wasn't really that great of a culture fit for Zappos. I would've continued to like try to conform myself to fit some mold, but I wasn't really that comfortable. And so in a way that, you know, the, the deal falling through is a blessing in disguise, like many things in life are that we initially like consider, you know, tragedies or, or disillusioning things. They like wake us up and cause us to step back and ask questions that we were like too busy to ask. And that's what that experience did for me. And it sort of freed me from like the, the constant, I mean, who knows I could still be there today and be totally miserable, like basically working for Jeff pesos.

Luke (8m 2s):

You know what I mean? Like who knows, who knows where that would have ended. Right. So, so I think we, we often like only understand our lives, like when we're years later sometimes like looking back and then we find the meaning in those circumstances.

Zach (8m 13s):

Yeah. It's a great way to start the book because you lead, you lead the reader in one direction, and then all of a sudden you're describing this sense of relief that doesn't seem to align with the buildup of inexperienced, like almost having your, your startup acquired. And I was trying to think of anything that I could compare it to in my own life. I've never been an inside man in the startup VC culture, but I have spent 15 years of my life trying to become a professional baseball player and starting to play in middle school and then eventually playing in college and ending up not having that because of a combination of circumstances.

Zach (8m 58s):

And I did feel this weird sense of relief when I came to the conclusion that my baseball career was over. It was definitely a relief mixed with devastation, mixed with confusion mixed with God knows what, but there definitely was a decent amount of relief in there. And I think it just came from the sense of letting go. Like, like I had this thing in my life that I'd worked 15 years towards that. I dedicated four to eight hours a day, depending on the day with practice lifting and all this stuff. And while I gained so much from it, I realized there were all these things in my life that I could now do that I didn't have time to do and letting go of that goal seed in a weird way.

Zach (9m 47s):

Like it was like a destruction and relief at the same time. It's hard to describe it. And from what you write about that, that moment in the book where you find out the, the deal falls through that, that that's probably the closest thing I had in my life that could compare to that in any way.

Luke (10m 5s):

Yeah. I mean, I think the example of, of an, of an athlete having some door close is a really good one. I had a similar experience with baseball. I don't think I've made it nearly as far as you did, but there's like a general principle there. And it's like, if you have like three different paths that you could take in life and you're having a real hard time, like figuring out like where to go and then like two of the doors like closed for you. Like, like out of your control, like two of the doors just closed. It's kind of like a signal like, oh, okay. Like my decision making just got a lot easier. I'm going to go through the one door that's open. So like a lot of times, like things just happen that are like outside of our control. And we can like kick against the goad and like question it, but it's like, maybe, maybe I should just like, listen and like take this and pivot.

Luke (10m 53s):

And that's kind of what happened for me. Right. I, I realized that I was given an opportunity, right? Like sometimes we can see these things as threats or as these bad things that happened to us, but they're also, you can just look at the other side of it and it's like an, it's an opportunity to do something else and look in a place where we may have not been looking. And I don't know what, what the pivot was for you, but for me, one of the opportunities was I basically was like, you know what? That door is closed and it's not going to open back up again, probably. So maybe I'll just use this as an opportunity to take a few months off and take a vacation, do some traveling, take like a mini sabbatical, immerse myself, like read a bunch of books that I've, I've been wanting to read for a long time travel to some places I've really wanted to go and just kind of like relax.

Luke (11m 41s):

So I kind of like gave myself as a gift and it's been like the gift that keeps that that's kept on giving. That was a long time ago at this point. Right. So, you know, I, I didn't, I didn't realize it at the time. Right. But it, it, it was definitely one of the best things that's happened to me.

Zach (11m 54s):

For me. I was fortunate enough to become disillusioned with baseball while I was still playing towards the end of my career. So the last half season I was coming off of a couple of surgeries and I had this period where I was basically sitting around on my couch in the off-campus baseball house, down in Richmond, Virginia, and thinking about what I wanted to do. And I was super bored because I couldn't do anything in practice. I was going to class on a, on a grad school schedule, which is all night classes. It's, it's, it's not very demanding. And so I was filling my time with researching music artists and calling music artists and talking to them and writing articles about them.

Zach (12m 42s):

And, and that eventually led to podcasting because I, there was a bridge where I, I was publishing articles, and then I realized I should be recording these conversations and then started by speaking with music artists. And so for me, the pivot was a combination of boredom. And then once I was healthy, showing up to compete, which is something that I've always wanted to do, not being nearly as good as I was because of a couple elbow surgeries where I just knew my body was not going to react. And so I felt myself not being excited towards the end of showing up to a baseball field and competing. I still loved hanging around all of my friends and hanging out before practice putting in the work.

Zach (13m 22s):

Like I genuinely enjoy the drilling aspect of baseball, but then competing. I had a couple experiences where I was warming up in the bullpen and did not feel any excitement whatsoever. Like I didn't the fact that I didn't feel any uncertainty about what could happen. This could go totally wrong, or you could go totally. Right. I just didn't feel any surge of anything. My emotions were just like flat lines. That was to me a signal that it was time to move on from baseball.

Luke (13m 52s):

So you were a pitcher that's, it's kind of a scary, weird feeling. I mean, I dunno, I think most people don't really pay attention to their emotions, especially men, you know what I mean? Like to like know, to like, be able to even recognize that is like a huge, like a huge step in itself. And I recognize the same thing. It was like, why am I like not excited to go into my office? Like I, I had, because the, you know, these feelings, the writing was on the wall long before the deal fell apart. I talk about that in the book. Like I had already started to sort of lose passion and I felt kind of like dead inside. Like I wasn't excited. And I was like, something's wrong with that? Because I actually have a growing company.

Luke (14m 32s):

I'm my own boss. I have like all of the things that I wanted just a few years ago yet. I just feel like flat lined. And I don't know what's up with that, but I was so hanging onto this sort of like sense of identity or something like that and driven by mimetic desire. So strongly at that point where I wasn't able to like freely kind of like, let go and do something about the problem myself. Like I wasn't able to make the change myself. And I think like paying attention to when that's happening and then ask, like, why is it happening? And on an emotional level is really important. I mean, it was different in that situation for me and for you, because we were dealing with, you know, in my case, a company, in your case, a sport and possibly a career, you know, it'd be different if I like, you know, if I woke up next to my wife someday and it was like, I don't feel, I don't feel anything.

Luke (15m 24s):

I don't feel like I love this person anymore. Then that's a different situation. Then it's like, well, I'm going to fight through that. Right. And I'm going to, you know, I made a commitment and you know, love is not always about the feelings, but when it happens in, in these kinds of a situation, I do think it's a little bit different. And then there's like a choice to make. It's like, do I fight through this and come and come out on the other side and like regained the excitement? Or is it actually the sign of something that's like true and real that I need to pay attention to. And that's kinda, that's the tricky part. So for me, it was the deal that actually gave me the, the signal that I wasn't able to figure out on my own. If that makes sense.

Zach (15m 60s):

Hey guys, I mentioned there would be annoying interruptions on the public feed and here it is, I'm playing around. I don't actually want this to be annoying. I want this to be an enjoyable break from the episode to give you a taste of what you're missing on <inaudible> premium. Here's a sneak preview of a clip behind the paywall where my brothers and I talk about the legacy of a Vici. I could see someone like a Vici being really easily swayed to continue to do the show. Maybe his friends were even guilt tripping them into it, or they're trying to make things. Yeah. They're trying to make things seem better than they actually are with like, where are you throwing financial?

Zach (16m 41s):

Where were they financially compensated? Were they rewarded by making him go morals?

3 (16m 48s):

All people that work for him, or he probably had his friends just like, come on the tour. I'm sure they were all making money with them. But a lot of his friends worked with them. Yeah. But yeah, the whole thing, I mean, that was just really sad. I'm sure that happens all the time. Cause he, he asked that he was literally asking them to stop and saying he had like mental health issues and he had like pancreatitis to like me, I think. And he just in a documentary, they just showed his friends, keep saying like, no, no, keep going. Cause they, they were just all pushing him to keep performing. And that could've led to him like dying too, which is, yeah.

Zach (17m 21s):

If you're making a say, let's say you're making a hundred K show and your friends, your, when you go to, when you go to managers, when you talk about people that are handling your travel, whatever it is, your friends are making thousands of dollars a show off of you and that they don't have the best intentions. You may bring medical problems or things to their attention. And you're like, and they're like, oh, like you're throwing up blood. It's not that big of a deal. A it's probably just like a stomach ache or something with the pancreatitis. And then you go on for longer and longer and longer. And then you end up in the hospital or with really bad health problems.

3 (18m 1s):

Well, I think that's a danger from people around you making a percentage of whatever you make. Like they're not working for themselves. They're working like the more money that person, that celebrity makes, the more money they make. So they're just going to push that for it. Unless they're, I mean, even family sometimes like screws, you like a gain. People had that story about his brother, but like yeah. Besides your family, for the most part, everyone's probably just going to push you to make more and more money. So they make more,

Zach (18m 27s):

Thank you for listening to the preview, go to <inaudible> dot tech to gain access to two bonus episodes per month. Like the one you just heard, the full video version of the Adora podcasts and more it's $5 and 25 cents per month when you sign up for the year now back to the episode. Yeah, it does make sense. Did your study of mimetic desire and realization of memetic desire in your own life, did that coincide with you being willing to step away from the startup world? Because a lot of people will continue to work at something that they are become disillusioned by.

Zach (19m 12s):

So they're there in that emotionally flatline state. And I imagine there are people that continue to do work and startup world or any industry, even in sports. There are guys that hang on long past the excitement of showing up to the field because of some sense of I should be doing this or I've put in the work 10 years prior. So I need to keep going. Was it that study of a medic desire that allowed you to, was it the experience that allowed you to realign yourself? What do you think led up to you? Being able to make choices that were long-term fulfilling after the startup deal fell apart?

Luke (19m 52s):

I mean, there's a really important distinction to make there. Like I have the greatest respect for like a PR like a great athlete who, you know, might lose some passion for the game for a while and then, and then push us through and it's just like becomes the best and just shows up. Right? Like, you know, most of life is like showing up. Right. I use the case of like, you know, emotion and in like a marriage, right. I mean, clear situation, right. Where you don't just like cut and run because you, you know, you don't feel certain things. In my particular case though, I had like the luxury, I was at a point in my life where I knew that I think we there's times in life that are like pivotal moments.

Luke (20m 32s):

And I knew that it was a time for me to step, step back and just at least take stock. Like I hadn't like committed. Right. I, I hadn't like made a commitment to that company. Like this is the, this is the one, like I've committed to my shareholders, committed to my employees. Like I hadn't done that. So actually that allowed me to feel like I didn't have this like sense of responsibility to like teammates or it was my company. And I was like, I don't want to live the rest of my life, like miserable and, and, and continuing to do this. So like, I feel like I have a responsibility to figure out what's going on right now so that, you know, the, the next thing that I do, I don't leave after a couple of years, that's actually really an irresponsible.

Luke (21m 15s):

If I, if I do that, it wasn't necessarily my understanding of mimetic desire that led me to take that little sabbatical because I didn't really know. I'd never even heard the word and the term and medic desire. At that point, it was more like a gut check. It was a gut feeling that led me to, to step away for a while. And I mean, I eventually like went back in, right. I mean, I now, you know, back in the startup world and I teach entrepreneurship, but it was kind of like, sometimes you have to step, you have to like step out of the cave and in order to like go, go back into it and, and see things that you didn't see before. And that, that was a really important process for me.

Zach (21m 51s):

It's a tough and a weird decision to make. And I can speak from the, the athlete side of it, where I definitely had part of me that was questioning, do I need to work harder? Because I have the utmost respect for guys that have their career minor leaguers or semipro baseball players that maybe get a shot at the major leagues when they're 37 or something like that. He ended up having a five-year major league career. So part of me was definitely questioning, okay, do I just need to buckle down and work harder and basically work myself back into the excitement of baseball and there's no manual for that sort of stuff.

Zach (22m 35s):

So it depends on each specific person, but, but I came to the conclusion that it just felt right. I, I don't know how to describe it. And maybe you had a similar experience where you kind of like step back and you were listening to a bunch of different people, say a bunch of different things and you had to make the decision. Okay. Do I just work myself back into the excitement of wanting to do this company or do I step away or what do I do? And for me it was, I thought about making a living off of my body and knowing all the joys, but also darkness that comes with that. And for me, I just wasn't willing to do that. Other guys are, and they stick with it for, you know, 10, 15, 20 years.

Zach (23m 17s):

Was there any sort of, was there a part of the decision making process or types of feedback you were taking in seeking out certain people that helped you decide whether to try to work yourself back into the excitement and in that specific area of your life, or step away from that specific company, which you ultimately did?

Luke (23m 41s):

Yeah, no doubt. I mean, there were really important mentors in my life at the time and you know, which is, I'm a huge proponent of mentorship and having mentors in your life because we often can't see things about ourselves in our lives because we're too close to ourselves. And like, we need other people that are willing to be super honest with us. So good friends that are willing to tell the truth. Like there are very few people that are willing to tell you the truth about anything. Like one of the eye-opening things about writing a book is like, you send it out to 10 people and I'm like, oh, it's this great? Like, like the shittiest, like roughest draft. And it's like, no, it's not like they know it's like, it's hard to find like one person that was like willing to tell me the truth. So that, that was really important.

Luke (24m 22s):

Another little exercise that I did. I mean, and it sounds to me like you looking back now, like you're happy with the decision that you made to step away. Right. And then I wasn't hindsight to one of the little exercises that I did is actually a great book that has this tactic in it called design in your life written by a couple of professors at Stanford. And I sort of used, I did something from, from their kind of guide book, although I hadn't read it, I just kind of came up with this on my own. And I kind of like did the exercise of imagining like three very different paths that I could take in life. One would be, I continue the, I continue entrepreneurship. One would be like, I like go become an academic.

Luke (25m 6s):

And the other one is like, I just do something like radically different, make music and write and travel the world and like get married in the next couple of years. Right? Like there's like three totally different paths. And then sitting with those and like projecting myself three, four or five years out in the future and taking a day and sitting with each one of those options, like over a three-day period. It's like today I'm a startup entrepreneur. And, you know, and I sit with that and then like the next day it's like today I'm pursuing some hobbies that I have that I really like. And I'm going to imagine my life as if I were just doing that. And then the next day, it's the third option doing that is almost like a way to, to kind of project yourself into the future and like, understand you gained some insight into like what your life might be like and how that might feel.

Luke (25m 55s):

I mean, our imaginations are powerful things. So that that's, that was a way for me to, to gain some real insight into like, look, if I, if I go down the road of that, that I'm currently on. And, and, you know, let's say the Zappos steel does go through, let's say they come back and they changed their minds. I realized very clearly that I wouldn't be happy there. It was, it was very apparent to me that I wouldn't be happy and I needed to make a pivot. So I think that's like one helpful thing that I've continued to do that throughout my life. It's just a basic, like tool of discernment is sitting with those things, thinking about how will that life make me feel three or four or five years in the future. And there are some things that reveal themselves to be like pretty superficial really, really quickly when you do that exercise, right?

Luke (26m 39s):

Like imagining yourselves, like on a bus, getting shipped around to like various little cities, you know, playing minor league baseball or something like that. And then imagine yourself doing that for 10 years. And then you just have to ask like, well, what would that prevent me from doing? Like, what's the opportunity cost of living that kind of a life.

Zach (26m 56s):

I liked that because it demands activity from your imagination. So you have to be able to project yourself five, 10 years forward on a path, and there may not be a set path or a super clear path. So you kind of have to take parts from your imagination and fill in what you imagine it to be. And then you also need a dose of realism. It sounds like for that to be effective, because I could also imagine myself sitting on a bus for 10 years in the minor leagues, or I could tell myself that I'm going to make it in four or five and I'm going to be flying around on jets five years, 10 years from now. And so I liked that I've done that in small ways and I, and I've never done it purposely before, but looking back, I can see some periods of my life and especially the, the transition from being a baseball player to not being a baseball player where thinking about things in the future and being realistic about it definitely helped me feel fulfilled in the decisions I was making.

Luke (28m 3s):

Yeah. You know, I wonder there's, there's kind of a variation of that exercise, which is like, you can kind of project out three different versions of each path, you know, and then like, kind of do like the weighted probability of each one, right? Like want to make it to the major leagues while the probability of that is like 1% or less or something. And you're right. You have to have like a lot of honesty with yourself or be talking to somebody who does, and then you kind of, so, so each path can have like various like gradations of it. Yeah. So, I mean, honesty is, I think really, really key, but there's something to be said, like one of the beautiful parts of life is like, you know, we, we, we don't know, we don't see the path and we wake up every day and like wonderful things can happen.

Luke (28m 45s):

And there's something to be said about hope and, and pursuing a dream. That's a really great thing. It's just a matter of knowing what we want to commit ourselves to. So I know you, haven't got to the end of the book yet, but one of the, the, the last chapter in the book is kind of like, you know, you, you find your single greatest desire and then you begin to kind of prioritize them. And in all of the other ones kind of fall, fall into place underneath it. And identifying what that single greatest desire is, is like, that's like, what life is the work of life, right? It's like, you don't know the purpose of life. Let's define the purpose. And, and that, that involves like, if, if you do discern, if you do find that that is the single greatest desire, then you can do some crazy things.

Luke (29m 27s):

And I, I, you know, I'm, I'm a, I'm a fan of people that do crazy things and percent that's how like people change the world. It's a matter of discernment.

Zach (29m 35s):

Yeah. I like how the book is also a buildup of the different levels of mimetic desire and the ways that we go through it individually. And as a society, I just got to the scapegoat mechanism. And so I'm excited to, to go through that whole section of the book for someone who has no idea what mimetic desire is, and they've never heard that term before, how would you describe why we want, what we want? What, what is it that mimetic desire is from you studying it so long, studying Rene Girard and the father of a medic desire? Why would you say we want what we want?

Luke (30m 15s):

So mimetic desire is a phrase coined by the French thinker, Rene, Gerard, who sort of identified the fundamental structure of human desire as mimetic, meaning imitative that humans, the vast majority of our desires come from imitating other people's desires because we're social creatures. So we unconsciously catch desires by contagion, pretty much from the moment that we're born. You know, like we are, our parents are models of desire for us, powerful models of desire. And then as we, we reach, you know, adolescents, we have friends. And so Gerard's finding was that desire is, is generated and shaped through these relationships in this, through this social process.

Luke (31m 1s):

And he said, the idea that our desires just like arise spontaneously within us, you called that the romantic lie, right? It's this, this romantic notion that we have is like hyper individualist people, hyper rational people. We kind of like believe that, that, that myth and, and it's denying the social nature of desire. So the medic desire is, is, is wanting what other people want because they want it. So it's the idea that when somebody else wants something, especially if it's the right person, like a person that, you know, for whatever reason we respect, we admire, we think that they have some special insight that we don't have and into what's desirable, if, when they begin to want something, it immediately like imbues that, that thing that they want with some kind of like a special power over us.

Luke (31m 55s):

My fiance, Claire, when, when I started writing the book, she was like, this happens to me like all the time when I walk into like a consignment or like a cool, like old clothing store with my friend, Molly who works on, on like Hollywood films. She's like the person that buys the clothes for the actors and actresses. And Claire's like, I walk into the store and there's like a thousand outfits and it's like overwhelming, but I always like tend to gravitate towards like the one or two or three that Molly thinks are just the best and the most desirable. And they like take on this. Like all of a sudden they're the most important ones, you know, in, in the store because Molly is like a model of desire for her. And I see that in my own life, like all, all the time for like where I wanted to go to college, to like the kind of career that I wanted to, when I look back on it, there were, there were models for me, for all of those things.

Luke (32m 44s):

Even, even while I kind of told myself, like I had all these objective reasons for why I wanted to work on wall street. For instance, it turns out that all of the reasons that I told myself, like how much it pays and the career track and everything were just kind of like lies that I told myself to cover up for the fact that the real reason I wanted to work on wall street when I graduated was because I was surrounded by a bunch of other people that did. And they affected me dramatically.

Zach (33m 10s):

I definitely started questioning my own desires right away, as soon as I understood what my medic desire was from the introduction in the book and the whole story with the deal falling apart with Zappos, I started to think about all the things that I convinced myself, all the desires that I convinced myself that spontaneously arose in my own life that, you know, I'm not susceptible to wanting something just because someone else wants it, just because I've seen it on a commercial or just because this is something that other people want in the podcasting space. And then I started to think about all of the things that fall into that and question my own, still questioning actively questioning my own desires now.

Zach (34m 2s):

And in a weird way, my medic desire is the best sales point for the book, because as someone who's studied it for so long, I have to imagine that you would have asked yourself, do I really want to write this book? And do I need to write this book? Or do I just want to write it because other people are writing books and other people that want to say things do so in book form. And I was like, well, he must have really wanted to write this book because I imagine that was a part of the lead-up to the book is, do I even want to write this book in the first place?

Luke (34m 33s):

Totally. Yeah. Well, I mean, the, the truth is I think it's, I think there's both. I mean, I think that mimetic desire was involved in why I wrote the book and then there have been endless jokes about this, by the way, because I wrote a book about mimetic desire and like, you know, the only way that people will read it probably is through mimetic desire. Right. So it's like, I wrote a book about it, but I also have to like generate it in a positive sense. Right. So, I mean, we should be totally clear, like the medic desires, not like a negative thing, the medic desires neutral. It just, it just is what it is. And we probably need more positive mimetic desire in the world. Right. For like empathy and being able to have conversations with people that have different viewpoints than us.

Luke (35m 13s):

So it's just a neutral thing. It can be used in positive or negative ways for me, the, you know, one of the reasons I, I, I felt like I really needed to write the book was because I couldn't find a good intro to Gerard. And I was like, you know, I feel like this, this thinking is really important. And a lot of people could benefit from it. But when people would ask me like, well, what do I start with? I was really struggling to, to recommend any of the books because charge is not to read, you know, he's a French academic. He, he like, he's mind. Meltingly weird in his writing style, if you, when you, when you dive in, you'll know what I mean. And I digested it for such a long time and I, and I felt like I could communicate it clearly. And believe me, if the book was out there, I wouldn't have written it.

Luke (35m 53s):

I mean, I, it was like sometimes with creative projects, like, you just feel like I have to do this thing. And I'm worried that if I don't do it, like nobody else will. And then it's like a shit. Maybe I'm like one of the only people that can do this, because, you know, Gerard wrote in the early sixties. And for some reason, nobody's, nobody's written a book that's that's, that seems accessible. Why is that? Well, maybe it's just because he's just been in the academy and like, they're just not able to like, not write academic ease, you know, they just don't have the ability to do that. And I do think that's true. So it's not like it's one or the other, right. There's like, there's probably some, a medic desire involved in terms of like me wanting to be an author and to reach people. And then there's, I think there's some good reasons also why I wrote the book.

Luke (36m 36s):

So it's not one or the other, I think like most, most of our motives as humans are relatively mixed. Right. But it's just a matter of questioning them and examining them.

Zach (36m 46s):

That's a good point. Mimetic desire. Mommy says there's not a, a moral standing to it. It's, it's not positive or negative. You, you describe it as a force in the book that is present, whether we want to realize it or not. And we can create models for ourselves that harness desire and mimetic desire for long-term fulfillment, or we have terrible models and maybe we're not self-aware. And we have experiences where mimetic desire has actually been part of us making very bad decisions. And it's weird and mind blowing at the same time to recognize that there's, there's a F there's not just desire.

Zach (37m 30s):

There's a reason why and how that desire comes into play. And, and it's this force that goes back and forth and we can have, we're all making touch points constantly with the decisions that we make by wanting something. And by vocalizing that one desire, and by fulfilling it with action, where a signal kind of these nodes walking around the earth, signaling our desires to other people, and that combines into the overall force of the medic desire. So you can actually influence the outcomes and influence other people's decisions by simply having better desires or desires that are more fulfilling.

Luke (38m 10s):

Yeah. Yeah. And there are certain cases where, you know, like not having a medic desire is, is, is almost like a, a pathology. Let me give you an example. Like I had a friend who visited Calcutta and spend some time at mother Teresa's house there with the missionaries of charity where they, they care for extremely destitute, sick, poor people. And my friend had, was with a group of people and there were a few of them and they watched people like bathing and washing the feet and caring for these, these dying people in the last days of their life. She goes, there was, I guess there was some particular member of the group she was referring to, but she was like, if you, if you witness that sort of like a desire to reach out to another human being and you see the love and you see the compassion and, and you're like not moved to, to like, you know, you're, you're like not, you don't catch some positive desire right.

Luke (39m 10s):

For that, like then, like, something's wrong with you, right? Like you, you want it, you want to have mimetic desire in that circumstance. And, you know, she reflected on it. And she's like, you know, part of the problem with like, being like super depressed or, or experiencing like on we or, or something like that is like, you kind of like lose the, you lose desire and you lose the ability to, to, to kind of like desire, which is actually a really miserable place to be in. You know? So I thought that was kind of a beautiful, beautiful example of like how sometimes it's actually good to be in the medic. Yeah.

Zach (39m 47s):

I, the past couple of days I had, what I would have thought would be an extremely overall negative experience, which is renewing my passport. I I'm actually flying out of the country on Friday. And I realized that my passport was not valid about a week before,

Luke (40m 9s):

Dude. You just reminded me that I have to renew mine. I'm glad you caught it.

Zach (40m 12s):

Yeah. Yeah. I was calling the passport agency and just constantly refreshing the page to get the passport. And my girlfriend was as well, cause she's over in the Netherlands where I'm traveling. So we were both trying to get appointments and no luck, no luck getting appointments actually managed to get one about two weeks after my flight, but nothing before the flight on Friday. And I ended up being, becoming more grateful somehow and becoming more, just wanting to be a better person through the experience because I went through the woe is me thing. And I, and I was feeling so sorry for myself.

Zach (40m 56s):

And then I joined all these passport groups on Facebook where people that were going through the same exact thing as me were actively gifting away appointments that they couldn't use, or maybe it was in a city that was too far away and everyone in this group. So over 2000 people in the group that I joined were just like in it to help other people get appointments and also help themselves get appointments. And I ended up driving up to Vermont because of a review that someone had left in the group where they said, you know, they're taking walk-ins, you don't need an appointment. Drove back yesterday, got a passport. And I've left a long review in the group this morning.

Zach (41m 39s):

And I was just like, wow. I, I want to the fact that like, I'm seeing all these other people want to help people. I don't leave review. Like I've never like left. I might've left three comments on things in my life, or just like a summary of my experience after the fact, I just haven't done that for better or worse. And then I got back into the group, let this long review, describe my experience in Vermont for anyone else that was able to make it up there. Now that I'm thinking about it, the other people wanting to help other people in the group and wanting to get other people appointments. And then everyone trying to like work together being, oh, I have one in Houston. Like I can't use it. Everyone needs if next Friday, oh, I just went to this place.

Zach (42m 21s):

They have openings here. Walk-ins now like that, that whole experience made me want to help other people. And a lot of it was because I was seeing everyone else doing the same thing. It's not like, I'm this wonderful person. I was like spending so much time in this group the whole day being like, wow, all these people are in a terrible situation and can't get a passport and now everyone's being so nice. So that's making me also want to be kind to other people.

Luke (42m 50s):

Yeah. It's contagious, you know, desires are contagious. And that's one of the big takeaways from me coming into contact with Gerard. There's a lot of truth to that old saying where it's like, you sort of like become like the five people that you're closest to. Right? You, you end up becoming very similar because that's just the nature of desire. Right. It's very contagious. I think there's even studies that like your incomes tend to be about the same and stuff like that. Yeah. You know, I, I think that's, that's like a beautiful story. And one of the one thing I, I thought it was really important for me to try to do in the book is emphasize that mimetic desire is not bad traditionally. And, and people that write about Gerard, but he's kind of dark, it's kind of dark. Right. And he talks a lot more about like the negative side of a medic desire.

Luke (43m 31s):

Like it can cause people to be in like these endless cycles of, of just kind of like frustration. It leads to rivalry very often. It can lead to conflict between people who want the same things, because, you know, it's kind of a natural step to if you're catching your desires and adopting the desires of other people, then you use in this kind of like never-ending game competing for the same things that they want. And I didn't think that the positive aspects are talked about enough. So I, and I tell stories about how I sort of like had an unexp, unexpected experience of somebody showing me extreme empathy that like instantly changed a relationship because when people do that for us, we want to do it back for them.

Luke (44m 13s):

And it's not, that's kind of sounds very similar to like what you experienced in the group, right. It's like crazy. Like how you it's like, I almost, can't not do this just because of like the, you know, the, the, the people in the community that I'm a part of. And that's why it's so important, I guess, to be intentional about the communities that we're part of and the people that we surround ourselves with. So when I was in the startup world, I realized that I wanted certain things that were not, you know, like not typical of, of entrepreneurs to want. Like I had this deep desire to like study, read philosophy, study philosophy, and to do some other things. And I wasn't like finding a model for that among like my, my peers. It was just like, you work 85 hours a week and you learn to code and that's all you do.

Luke (44m 57s):

And I was like, well, I don't know if that's really what I want. So I kind of had to be intentional about finding other people, surrounding myself with other people that were outside of that world in order to sort of like, it's hard to want something when like you don't have any help. And when the, nobody around nobody else around you is also like pursuing the same things. So I was pretty intentional about, about finding some people in my life that were able to help me pursue those kinds of goals that were different.

Zach (45m 24s):

How were you able to find those models from either books or content or people for desires that were outside of the startup world for desires that you decided for yourself? I wanted to surround myself with people that think more like this, and they're providing a model outside of what I'm currently experiencing right now. What are the best ways which you did that? How did you run into those people? How did you meet those people? And if there are any specific examples of people that had a deep impact on your decision.

Luke (46m 2s):

Yeah. It's kind of a two-fold process. Like one of them is you need to just put yourself in positions where you do have an opportunity to, to meet those kinds of people. So it's kind of like, you know, if somebody like is looking to be in a, in a romantic relationship and they just sit in their house all day and then they wonder why they never meet anybody. It's like, well, maybe you should just go, like, I don't know, like put your, put yourself in a position, right. To like, be, be surprised and have serendipity work for you. You never know what can happen. Just like, go stand on the sidewalk or something like that. Like, you know, you never know what can happen. So, yeah. So, so for me, it was like getting outside. Like if I, if I only stayed in the circles that I was running, if I only hung out in the places where, you know, with my fellow kind of startup founders, I never would have done that.

Luke (46m 49s):

So I started putting myself in different situations. I started going to church at the time. That was, that was one place. Right. I met some great people. I joined like some, some book clubs. I did things that were kind of like non-traditional right. For, for my peers to do. And that just like opened up the doors for me to let, just like meet people. I sort of intentionally sought a few people out. Some people that I wanted to be mentors I've had like shocking success in my life. I don't think it's due to like anything special to me. I just think it's just because I just do it by like writing cold emails to people and like asking for help. Like, I think most people I tell my students this all time, like you would be shocked, like how much people want to help you.

Luke (47m 34s):

Like, if you think like, you know, I don't know, Adam Grant is like super cool author and guy like just write him. And it, chances are, you'll get a response back. And that's how I met Tony Shea. Actually I sent Tony Shay called email and the two of us became like really good friends after a few years. I've just found time and time again in my life. Like if you just put it out there, like, what's the worst that can happen. They say, no, you don't hear back. Yeah. What's you know?

Zach (48m 0s):

Yeah. So, so you were able to meet other people and bring in better models of desire into your life by intentionally going to places or, or putting yourself in a situation where you would meet more people that were white, what you want it to become. And then also cold emailing people like Tony Shay, that, that, that allowed you to be in a situation where you could actually meet face to face with those who you admired in some way for their desires.

Luke (48m 33s):

Yeah. I think it's really important just, just for like growth, you know, developmental growth to always expose yourself, you know, put yourself in a position where you're exposed to two different kinds of people. I live in like Washington DC. And it's like, you know, it's funny, like how, how much, like people can just kind of insulate themselves in this, these like tiny little like political bubbles, you know? So I would say like, this idea applies to like a lot of different areas of life. You know, if you're like a Democrat, you don't have a single Republican friend, like you should do something about that. Right? Like you need to like put yourself in a position where you're exposed to people with different ideas. So, yeah. I mean, that's just been a really important part of my life. And it's something that I've always tried to be really, really intentional about is I think we all have a tendency to just kind of retreat to whatever's most comfortable in the startup world.

Luke (49m 22s):

It's, it's a very sort of like tight ecosystem, especially in Silicon valley. And when you're in it, you just kind of like do the same things that everybody else does go to the same places. And I think it takes like swimming upstream a little bit. Right. And not doing what comes easiest, opens up all kinds of possibilities in life.

Zach (49m 41s):

Yeah. It seems like I DHEAS and ideologies have a weird interplay and a fascinating interplay with memetic desire and not just politics, Democrat, Republican, even things like, for example, I'll just say cold brew, coffee versus hot coffee. There are people that want to have the cold brew coffee ideology, I believe in cold-brew coffee. And then I'm also going to look for ways to make decisions that align myself with that ideology. And you have a desire to want to be seen as someone who loves cold brew coffee and drinks it and does all this stuff.

Zach (50m 26s):

And so the ideology of cold-brew becomes a desire to be associated with that ideology. And then your actions can become influenced by the ideology and their good and bad parts of that. There, there are people and ideologies that are great to be a part of. And you might look to them in order to align your actions with you may, you may look to certain ideologies and say, you know, this makes sense. I've studied this. This is something I want to be a part of. And then you have the other side where people may just see that that ideology has, it's like the trendy thing to think this right now. So I'm going to do things that will associate me with cold brew coffee rather than actually just like taking the time to think about it.

Zach (51m 12s):

And, you know, do I really want to be a part of this? Or there's some things I'm not going to make myself with Holden to Colburn coffee. There's some things that I love about it. And there's some things that I love about hot coffee, and I'm going to mix those two with tea, and then I'm going to, you know, take a little bit from each and I'm not necessarily going to define myself by any one type of thinking in general.

Luke (51m 37s):

Yeah, totally. I mean, ideas, some ideas are perennial and don't change, but many ideas are like, just like fashions. They become fashionable. And then they go out of fashion, like in a certain year, in a certain decade, sometimes even in a certain century, you know, like Freud, like was like super popular and his ideas were fashionable. And now they're like really out of fashion, it's kind of like blahzay, like, oh, Freud. Like we know a lot of that spend is credited. So, you know, we have to be really careful. Like we don't think of, cause I basically what I'm saying is that things like ideas and fascia, these things could be mimetic too and heavily driven by mimetic desire and peoples people wanting to identify as a, as a certain kind of person that we have to be super careful.

Luke (52m 27s):

I'm fascinated at the relationship between what we want and, and the effect that, that has on knowledge. In other words, like what's, what are the epistemological like implications of mimetic desire? It seems to me like when people really want something to be true, they only start looking for evidence or seen evidence that supports what they want. So I think there's some weird, I haven't quite figured it all out yet, but I definitely think that there's, we can't divorce the will from the, from the, the mind, in other words, like our reason from our will, the two things are connected and they affect one another. And I think this probably helps explain like things like conspiracy theories, you know, you just, it's sort of like you start seeing the world, like according to what you want and what you desire.

Luke (53m 16s):

And I think mommy says totally comes into play there. Yeah.

Zach (53m 20s):

One of the most fashionable ideas right now, and fashionable institutions, whether you agree with it or not is Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general. And Rene Girard said that the most mimetic of all capitalistic institutions is the stock market. And so traditionally people have kept cash and they've kept savings, or they've also invested in stocks and both of those things can be made more so the government can print more money. You can come up with any, come up with any idea you want and try to get someone to invest in it. There's no limit to the amount of startups you can create.

Zach (54m 1s):

But Bitcoin is interesting because there's only a certain amount of Bitcoins that will ever be in existence. And there are other types of cryptocurrencies that work like that, where there's a fixed model and the coin can become worth more. But the actual, the way that Bitcoin works is structured more in a way than, than cash or the stock market. Have you thought about mimetic desire and the, the recent rise of cryptocurrencies within the last decade and how those play off each other?

Luke (54m 35s):

Yeah, you know, I think if Rene, Girard were alive today died in twin 2015, he'd probably say that the most memetic institution is not the stock market. It's the cryptocurrency market. I think, I think he would probably update his, his line there. So yeah, I think that crypto in general is, is like hyper mimetic. And I mean, I, I follow it not as closely as I'd like to, but I have given some thought to that. And I mean, at the risk of like a pissing off every Bitcoin and Bitcoin maximalist out there, I think that there are some positive aspects to the cap on the number of Bitcoins that can never be mined and will ever and will ever exist.

Luke (55m 20s):

Because I think that the way that we print money right now through central banks is super problematic. And so I'm all for that. I will say this though, from the standpoint of mimetic theory, it seems that the fixed quantity would exacerbate in the medic rivalry because there's only, there's only a fixed amount. So like in a sense, one of the things that capitalism does and, and, and being able to create more money does, is it kind of like diffuses mimetic desire? If that makes sense, because you can print more. So I think Bitcoin, maybe I'm not necessarily making this prediction, but there might come a time when there's like some serious like Bitcoin wars going on because there's a fixed amount and it certainly drives the value up and up and up.

Luke (56m 11s):

And I guess that's maybe, you know, the, as the value of Bitcoin rises, that will be just an indication of the mimetic desire for the scarce resource. But I wonder what happens when I'm not quite sure I'd have to think about that one for about a year and get back to you. But that's my, that's my initial thought.

Zach (56m 30s):

No, yeah, it's, it's, I'm not sure where I stand on it either in terms of the way that it affects desire and what I think's going to happen in the future. I have invested a small percentage of my net worth into Bitcoin, but I don't know what's going to happen. And the way that your book has introduced mimetic desire and the concept of a medic desire into my knowledge base is making me think more and more about, okay, there are things that people desire and everything kind of gets supercharged for better or worse with scarcity.

Zach (57m 11s):

So if you, if I want to start a podcast, I am influenced by other podcasters and my space and probably the ones that are more like me. So smaller to mid tier podcasters are having more of an influence on my thinking. Then the celebrities like you talk about in the book like Joe, Rogan's not really having an effect on like the day-to-day of how I'm feeling, but if I see another podcast or that has a similar audience size, that's maybe doing an episode a week more than me, or is doing research in a different way. That might cause me to be like, wait, am I, am I doing it the right way? But I CA there's no limit to the amount of podcasts that can be in existence right now.

Zach (57m 55s):

So someone can always create another podcast. And so it's not really a scarce resource, but something like Bitcoin where people seem like they th th the interest in Bitcoin has spiked recently, and the supply is fixed at the certain amount. It's exciting and scary to think about what may happen in the future.

Luke (58m 20s):

Yeah, I agree. And I think that the, that the cap on the number of Bitcoins is its most important feature. I think it's why other, other currencies are kind of following in step with that. So yeah. And, and, you know, they're, they're going to become harder and harder to mine. And I think that that scarcity is driving a lot of the medic desire for Bitcoin. So, you know, one of the, the, the important points here and, you know, the, the people that are actually the earliest adopters of, of, of my book are basically are, who are seeing the biggest connections basically so far are people that are in like the, in the investment community.

Luke (59m 2s):

I didn't actually see that coming. I wasn't sure, but it, it's definitely a people that, that think seriously about investments because they're like, you know, the objective and fundamental analysis, like the kind they always try to do on CNBC, like tried and trying to explain the rise or fall of an asset, like based on its cashflow and like basic fundamental metrics only gets you so far. Right? It's like, they're like scratching their heads, like trying to explain like the crazy spike in Tesla in, in 2019 and 2020 and dislike you, if you don't understand that mommy's, this is real then, like, you'd just never be able to kind of understand that these, these movements on the upside and on the downside.

Luke (59m 47s):

So I think it's just, it's, it's, it's a, it's a mental model, which when paired with other mental models and ways of seeing the world, like ads is really important missing piece. And I think it's most apparent in, in investments and in the markets,

Zach (1h 0m 1s):

You mentioned the flywheel effect that Jim Collins talks about with business, and you apply that to mimetic desire. And the basic fundamentals of the concept is that you, you can apply momentum and business. And then depending on what sort of facet you're working on, if you, if you keep pushing that flywheel, you keep pushing that aspect of the business and the business in general. Eventually it'll get to a point where momentum takes over and you don't have to push as hard to make the wheel spin and eventually momentum takes over. And so it's this whole kind of feedback of force and action and momentum and mimetic desire, and the flywheel effect come together in an interesting way in the stock market, because you can see the momentum of decision-making in real time with stock prices and how, when it gets to a certain level that the price of the stock combined with the conversations people are having online and the, just like the trendiness of the stock as well.

Zach (1h 1m 12s):

In real time, the more people start to talk about it, the more people desire it, there comes this point where the momentum seems to push a stock well above what the actual worth of the company may be. And once it gets to a certain point, it seems like the, you know, the rational investor argument no longer applies. You're not, you're not dealing with something rational. You're dealing with thousands and possibly millions of people making a decision based off of what other people want or what other people may be investing in or, or seeing certain things happen online. And so it, it, it is a, it's a fascinating mix of all those things kind of coming together, the flywheel, the, the memetic desire and the stock market.

Luke (1h 2m 1s):

Yeah. I mean, you get stocks that, I mean, the narratives are so important to, to the stock market. And, you know, there was a narrative that was, that was spreading, like in the wall street bet, sub Reddit and stuff that a lot of people didn't know about until after the stock took off. And then you get, you know, the more people start talking about a stock, the more people desire to buy it. And that just, you know, fuel this crazy situation earlier this year, as you know, so it's almost like mimesis, like fuels mimesis. And I don't know if you're on clubhouse or not, but I, I saw the same thing happening with what the app, there were a bunch of people all got onto clubhouse, like around the same time as they kind of like open things up super late, last year, early that early this year.

Luke (1h 2m 44s):

And there were like people on clubhouse, all just talking about clubhouse. And it was like this like crazy rides. It seemed like everybody, all of a sudden, I just look on it and it's like, well, everybody I know is now on clubhouse has happened in like three weeks. Everybody was talking about it to the point where I was like, this is ridiculous. Like we're on clubhouse talking about clubhouse, like, yeah. Then, and then it just seemed to totally drop off. Like, I haven't, I haven't used it in three months. So it was like this, like, it was like a stock to me, like a stock that has like this meteoric rise that everybody's talking about. And, and then, you know, the momentum started to like swing in the other direction and people started to abandon it even faster than they, than they joined in some cases.

Luke (1h 3m 25s):

So I don't know what the future is of that app. I got nothing against it, but I just have noticed a lot of a medic desire. Right. For, for, you know, various social media platforms. And, and it's like a key piece of why they take off or why they don't.

Zach (1h 3m 39s):

Yeah. I fell into the same thing with clubhouse. I had heard a bunch of people talking about it online. I kind of felt this force pushing me into clubhouse because of the connection with creators. Whereas like, if you're a creator, you know, everyone's everyone else's on clubhouse, creativity's happening on clubhouse. It seems like everything around me was pushing me into clubhouse. And then one of my favorite comedians, tin Dylan started talking about it on his podcast, the Tim Dylan show. And he was saying how he was going into rooms with Eric Weinstein and all these other startup founders and just like making jokes, but also having real, real conversations as well. And I was like, all right.

Zach (1h 4m 19s):

If, if Tim Dylan is starting a room with Eric Weinstein or, or he like Elon Musk, they're the three moderators in a room. Like I have to get on this app just to see what's going on. And I was on him for a little bit. And then like you, my fascination with app and my time on the app declined rapidly to where I haven't used it in three or four months as well. And so I, I definitely felt the, the momentum of other people gathering me and polling on me into the app where I felt this force of everyone flocking to it got on it, saw some interesting discussions, heard some interesting things and then kind of came out as quickly as it came into my life.

Luke (1h 5m 6s):

And Gerard sort of had his initial insight into mimetic desire through, through reading classic literature. And he made this comment. He was like, you know, in Balzac or some of these great, like French novels, he was like, when like a fashionable kind of like high society woman in one of these novels is abandoned by one lover. Like she's abandoned by all of them very quickly at the same time, it's almost like, you know, the, the, the, the first one loses interest. And then everybody else like follows in line, like falls right behind and losing interest. And it was kind of like that. I, I thought of that in laugh when I thought of clubhouse. And it's like, well, like if Eric Feinstein's not on clubhouse, then I have less reason.

Luke (1h 5m 46s):

Like, as people as, as, as like you leave and other people leave it like fuels the mimetic abandonment in a certain sense. Right. Cause like we're all models to one another. And, and, you know, these things like move in waves. So like, we're all, we're like a, like a flock of starlings in a sense, like, everybody's kind of like looking at what everybody else is doing and, and it's super reflexive and that's, what's so fascinating about my medic desire. You know, sometimes it just takes like a couple of the right people to adopt something or a couple of the right people to abandon something. And, you know, it always affects more than just them.

Zach (1h 6m 20s):

Yeah. The mimetic desire with dating is fascinating. And you mentioned the Victorian lovers, where if, if, if someone stops chasing a woman, then the other guys may stop chasing a woman or the, or lover as well. And looking back on my own dating experiences and experiences going out in groups of guys, I definitely have noticed, and I can only speak from the, the woman towards the, the men interests. But I have noticed that guys, some of my friends who may not have had interest from women walking into the bar, because a woman approaches them that is seen as attractive or desirable by the other women in the bar that causes more women to be interested in that guy.

Zach (1h 7m 12s):

And I haven't really seen that returned in the same way from men to women. I don't see for me, at least I haven't seen a lot of guys surrounding a single woman in a bar and have had that piqued my interest. If I don't find her attractive, if I find her attractive, I will approach her or I'll make plans to approach her regardless. But for women to men, it seems like other attractive women becoming interested in men, piques the interest of other women in a way that isn't the same from the other direction.

Luke (1h 7m 52s):

That's an interesting perspective. I mean, I think I see that too one area that it's definitely shown up in my life and Gerard talks about the same thing as like, if you break up with, with somebody and you know, and then two weeks later, like you see that person with somebody who's, who's in seeming seeming like they're really happy and having a great time that can like somehow like change, totally change the perception of, of, of the person, right. This other person just thinks they're th they're the, the most beautiful, greatest, greatest person in the world. You can start to like second guess yourself. Right. And it doesn't necessarily even matter who the person is. Right. They've just become like a new model and can like draw us back to people sometimes.

Luke (1h 8m 36s):

So almost everybody that I've talked to has had some kind of experience of that. Right. I mean, you got guys going in the other direction, which is a little bit different than the situation at the bar. Right. But I think that we're definitely sort of care about what other people desire. And I think that definitely affects our perception of people. Like I remember, like in, in, in high school there was like one girl that I was like, considering like asking to like the prom or something like that. But it was like, like, why isn't anybody else asked her to prom? Like, you know what I mean? Like it's, I mean, I feel, I feel terrible thinking that, but like, that's what was going through, you know, my little 17 year old head. So I was like, huh, like, I don't want to be like the only one, like, isn't there, like, doesn't she have some other interest or something like that.

Luke (1h 9m 20s):

And like, I, you know, I didn't know about my medic desire at the time, but I suspect that that was probably coming into my decision-making a little bit.

Zach (1h 9m 27s):

Yeah. At the bar it's different because it's more of a surface level, a surface level interaction. And from the guy's perspective, if I see a woman as attractive, I want to approach her because she's attractive and other guys going up to her, it doesn't necessarily switch my decision-making process. Or if I find out something else about her, like she has a really good job for whatever reason as a guy, I don't really take that into account until after the initial meeting, the, the attractiveness is the most important thing to me in that moment. Whereas women seem, they care more deeply about the connection and status and the initial meetings. So them seeing other women approach a guy or finding out that he has a really good job has more of a sway for that, that surface level bar meeting interaction.

Zach (1h 10m 15s):

But I have had the experience where I break up with someone or they break up with me and then I'm checking their social media and I have to stop myself because it's, it's affecting my well-being and it's affecting my decision-making because, you know, I see she went out somewhere or she started dating someone new and I have to stop myself and remind myself that this, the only reason I, I broke up with this person for this reason, or this person broke up with me and that still applies just because I see them with someone else, shouldn't make that reason void, that, that, that reason still exists.

Zach (1h 10m 59s):

Totally. Yeah.

Luke (1h 10m 59s):

And we can begin to project all kinds of things back into the past that, that, that are not true. Based on our mimetic desire. Our memory is like a very fickle thing, you know, and we can like easily distort reality. Like I had, I had the exact same situation where I made a decision that I knew it was, there was the right decision. It was the decision that I'm, that I had to make and had to end a relationship. Like we weren't, we weren't moving towards marriage. And then I ended the relationship. I went off, I lived in Italy for a while and, you know, and I'm, I'm living in Italy and I'm like scrolling through things and just becoming like inflamed again with this desire. And I'm like, this is unhealthy. Like, I can't know.

Luke (1h 11m 41s):

I can't know anything that, that what she's up to right now. Like I'm not ready for that, you know, because I, I know I am 100% confident that I made the right decision back then, but now I'm doubting myself and it's, and it's, it's due to, it's basically due to medic desire at this point in my life, I, I had, I was familiar with it and being able to just like separate those two things gave me the perspective that I needed. And I was like, what's, what's really going on here. Right. Like my, my will is being effected through seeing these models of desire. And, and I did what I had to do, right. To create some distance there. So yeah. I mean, that's, that's an easy way.

Luke (1h 12m 21s):

I mean, this, this plays out with all kinds of things like jobs and careers too very often happens that like, if you have a bunch of people that are working in the same company or the same industry, and they're all kind of miserable, it just takes like one person to leave. And I'm pretty soon like a second and a third will follow. Right. It's like, so I like, wait, why companies are always like, worried about somebody jumping ship. Because the real thing that they're worried about is like other people getting the same idea, because they kind of know that that's the way that it works.

Zach (1h 12m 52s):

Yeah. You, you talk about the, the stoning effect in the book. And the same thing applies on social media where the person who throws the first stone is creating that model of desire. And then the second person follows and then a third person throws and follows the second person and the F the, the fourth, fifth, everything after that is effortless. We've basically been where our desires are kind of these, these stones for, for better or worse, where we, we cast the stone. And the hardest thing to do is to cast a stone for something you want when no one else has, because you're kind of looking around and thinking, no one else is doing this. Should I be doing this right now?

Zach (1h 13m 33s):

And then all of a sudden, someone else sees it in my join in, and then, you know, the, the eighth person who did it, maybe not, maybe isn't even sure why they did it. They just did it because seven people also did it on Facebook or seven people left their job or decided to do something else.

Luke (1h 13m 50s):

Totally. I mean, I imagine, I mean, who was the first person to ever put out an episode of a podcast? Imagine what that must have been like. Yeah. I don't even know. I don't even know who that was, but like, imagine that, you know, like imagine how easy it is now, right? Like that must have been kind of a weird and scary thing to do to be like the very first person, even the second. And the third I should, I should look into that. I wonder, I wonder who that was and when it was, but yeah. I mean, we just take it for granted, right? Like we've been doing this so long. We just take a lot of things in life for granted. And we don't realize like how hard that first stone is, no matter what we're talking about,

Zach (1h 14m 26s):

Go through all this work to record a conversation, you have to get the equipment to do it. You do some research, you prepare some questions and topics, and then you have to release it out into the ether, not even on a platform like apple or Spotify, because they, if you're the first person to do it, they don't have a set podcast and platform. Yet you release some sort of audio file on a website or something and hope that people share it, or maybe you email it out. And then you have to have the thought that people are willing to listen to an unfettered conversation for 30 minutes or three hours, however long you record it. And that precedent doesn't yet exist.

Zach (1h 15m 9s):

And we know now in 2021, that people are definitely interested in listening to three hour long conversations. If it's on something they like, or they find it fascinating. But if you're the first person to do that, you almost have to have this bit of ego in you that says someone is going to find this interesting. And they're going to listen to it, even though this hasn't happened yet. And, and there's no model for it. So the, the first person, definitely the first person to put out some podcasts, definitely had some, some balls to say the least to, you know, to put in the work and then release it in whatever form that they did. This

Luke (1h 15m 47s):

Is one of the reasons why I, one of the many hats that I wear is that I teach in introduction to entrepreneurship for undergrads, mostly freshmen. And one of the beautiful things about being an entrepreneur, or just thinking like one is like, you you're, you're literally like creating new things in the world and creating new desires. And one of the reasons I'm a little bit, it's not that I think there's anything wrong with market research, but one of the reasons we have to like temper our fascination with market research is that it only measures like what already exists. If you would have put out market research or done a study. I don't know when podcasts came out like, you know, 15 years ago or something like that and ask people if they wanted to listen to a two hour long audio conversation.

Luke (1h 16m 31s):

I think very many would have said, no, I don't have time for that. I don't want to do that. And it wouldn't have been a reliable indicator. Okay. Like, so if you just would have liked done that, like, people don't necessarily know what they want, first of all, you know, like, unless the, unless like something has been given to them, right? Like you, you create some new thing, let's call it like a podcasting medium. You put it out there into the world and it helps people discover like some new thing. And then they realize that they do want it. So it's, it's kind of like, you have to like take the first step and go out there and you can't necessarily count on, you know, you're literally generating new desires in a sense that people didn't even realize they had or whatever want to do.

Luke (1h 17m 11s):

And that's like scary, but also like kind of cool that, you know, we can do that for good things. We can do that for, for bad things. And that's kind of the responsibility that any creator has, you know, a musician who poo, who puts out a song that like breaks all genres. It's, it's, it's totally different kind of like album or something. And, and, you know, maybe there'll be creating an entirely new genre that like 50 years from now, right. People will be like, this is rock and roll or something like that. And I think that's one of the coolest things about being any kind of creator

Zach (1h 17m 44s):

I wanted to get into a few of the most common criticisms of medic desire. Cause I think it would be good to, to bring up some of these things. And it'll also be helpful to me as I'm going through the book, because any criticism with a good response helps you formulate an argument or a better understanding of the topic. And one of the most common criticisms of mimetic desire, the theory of mimetic desire is one that you just mentioned with marketing. And that came up at a few points where I searched mimetic desire, criticisms against it. And a lot of people ask the question, you know, how is mimetic desire different than marketing?

Zach (1h 18m 28s):

Isn't it just like a fancy term for market research or getting people to want something. So for someone who thought in that vein, how would you describe to them the difference between marketing and the theory and understanding of mimetic desire?

Luke (1h 18m 48s):

I would say that there there's truth to that, you know, that argument, but it marketing is, is only one manifestation of mimetic desire. One very specific manifestation of a medic desire. And, you know, we've been talking on this podcast about like relationships and the stock market, things that, that are not really marketing, right? Like romance and, you know, career choices and the decisions to move forward, playing a sport. And in the way that mimetic desire can affect some of those things. And, you know, those are not marketing things. So I think like, like marketing is just one, one very specific aspect of, of mimetic desire and mimetic desire.

Luke (1h 19m 31s):

Sometimes just naming something or having like words to describe what's going on is important. I think like once people are like here mimetic desire and understand what it is, they're like, oh, well, yeah. You know, I just, I just didn't have like the, the words to describe it. So that's one point. And I would say, like, not everything has been medic desire. So I think there are like medic desire, like maximalists out there that like, like it can only see the word through the world, through mommy, SIS, and like everything's with medic desire. And I don't believe that. And I think there are certain marketing tactics that don't work through a medic desire. Many. Do you know? I mean, you, you notice like a lot of times the way that that advertisers try to sell things is not by describing the thing itself.

Luke (1h 20m 14s):

It's by showing you, you know, some celebrity or beautiful woman drinking the Cola or whatever. Right. So that's that, that's my medic desire a little bit or appealing to some sense of identity or status. I'd also argue that that's that's mimetic desire too, but then there are, there are other tactics that just sort of like are like appeal to like dopamine hits, right? Like I think like a lot of that's built into the way that social media is designed, right? Like things that like trigger certain responses, like the little red notification button. So that's not necessarily a medic desire. I mean, that's just like triggering some response.

Luke (1h 20m 54s):

That's like deep seated in our physiology. So I, again, I mean, I think it's important that I think like medic desire operates on a spectrum. You know, some things are, are, are, are infused with more of it and some things with less and some things have nothing to do with mimetic desire at all. Yeah.

Zach (1h 21m 10s):

That's an interesting distinction that there are processes that involve dopamine that keep you using something or that keep you on a certain app that aren't tied to. What other people want. It's that you're getting this hit from getting a notification on Instagram. I know, I know what it feels like to post a podcast or post something on Instagram. And then you see all these notifications and you want to stay on the app until they start to fade away. And I, and I'm not on the app because I know that other people also want Instagram or they also want to listen to the podcast. I'm just getting these hits of this heart popping up and I'm thinking, oh, this, this is good.

Zach (1h 21m 52s):

And that makes me want to stay on the even longer.

Luke (1h 21m 56s):

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's, that's, that's a powerful drug that has a lot to do with it. You know, it's not, I don't know if it's only on the mid sort of the material level that like, it gives us dopamine hits, you know, there's also like some aspect of like affirmation, you know, which feels, it feels really good. You know, like the little, the little hearts popping up again, like people like what I posted. Yeah. There's, I mean, there's a lot of w w we're incredibly complex creatures, you know, but I think the medic desire is, is a good mental model. And I think we could talk about there's, there's, there's several, I think, important criticisms, I'm a medic desire, but that one, I think I would just say like, ask yourself, like, can you seem a medic desire somewhere in, in, in marketing and it, you know, it doesn't mean that that's the only thing that it's about.

Luke (1h 22m 40s):

But I mean, I think certainly the fact that models have, have been such a part of the industry for such a long time. It says something about their implicit understanding of the way that mimetic desire works.

Zach (1h 22m 54s):

There's another criticism, that's more of a criticism of Gerard than it is mimetic desire that came up a few times. And it's that Gerard is a practicing Roman Catholic, if I'm correct. And I was raised Catholic, I went to Catholic high school. And so for me, I know how much of Catholicism relies on blind faith and relies on believing in the mystery. And there's also sometimes a, at least for me, when I was learning about the Bible and going through school, there was this sense of questioning is, is no one specifically told me that asking questions was bad, but there was certain things that people just seemed perturbed by, or seem pissed off.

Zach (1h 23m 48s):

If you were to ask a question about something in a story in the Bible or ask, you know, why do we do this? Or why would we go to confession? We're not actually offered solutions to our problems, what we're told to say 10 hail Mary's and 10, our fathers and things like that. And as a, as a Roman Catholic, I don't, I don't know if it's a criticism against Harari, but for me, I'm definitely, I definitely have trouble now that I'm looking back on. I wouldn't say I'm a Catholic now. I would say I'm more in line as an atheist. I definitely have trouble or seem almost surprised by Gerard's questioning of his, a generation of mimetic desire seems to come from there's a, there's a missing space in what people want, and there's a gap in desire and we don't yet have a full explanation for it.

Zach (1h 24m 43s):

I'm a medic desire seems like a way and a theory that he had to fill that gap, but in Catholicism, so much of the gap in what we see is chalked up to it's the mystery of God, or you have to have faith. So for me, I'm wondering, you know, what you think about Gerard's theory of the medic desire as an offering to fill our understanding and deepening our understanding when in Roman Catholicism, that is not always the case and in my experiencing like deepening, your understanding can actually go against your faith.

Luke (1h 25m 17s):

So Gerard was Roman Catholic, and that's actually one of the reasons why I think he never made it outside or never became more well-known because that, like a lot of academics held that against him and didn't take him seriously because of that. So I think we, you know, I think it's important to like take people's ideas as, as the, the ideas themselves and not make it an ad hominem argument against the person, you know? And that's one of the things I'm trying to, I'm trying to help him out a little bit here with the book. The irony is that I'm also Catholic that's, that's the funny part. So my experience was, was, it is interesting in that I think I experienced some of what you experienced and then like almost like many people do.

Luke (1h 25m 59s):

I went away to college and just totally left it behind. And then I came back to it later in life with more of a, a more mature understanding of it and sort of realized like the place, the interplay between faith and reason and, and, you know, some of the most brilliant scientists like the guy that basically proposed the big bang theory, Catholic, there's been many great scientific minds that also managed to be, you know, to, to, to, to be able to combine that with a mature understanding of faith. I think what Gerard has done, and there are a theological perspe aspects to the work, like the scapegoat mechanism, right? So he's, I think he's done a great service, actually.

Luke (1h 26m 42s):

I think you can appreciate Gerard without being a religious person at all, because he's, he's describing a human phenomenon. So I think you can appreciate anybody can appreciate the thinking at that level. And I hope people don't hold his religion against them, but because he was writing for it for everybody at the same time, if you, if you do, if you are interested in some of the theological applications of his thought there they're there. And I think he made connections and sort of like deepened the relationship between faith and reason, in a sense, I mean, as Gerard actually said that his discovery of, of <inaudible> actually is what led him back to the church, because it, it like filled in some like missing pieces for him.

Luke (1h 27m 27s):

Like he was able to understand, like, what is sin? Well, maybe it's just like deviated desire or something like that. So, I mean, if you're, if for people that are interested in theological aspects, they're there. So I think you can read the medic theory and Gerard at like a bunch of different levels. You read it at like, just, here's a phenomenon in the world. You can connect it to, to perennial philosophy, you can connect it to theology. And that's why I always say like, for people that are interested in learning more about it, it's like, well, what are you interested in? Like, if you're interested in like the theology of sacrifice, then there's a lot in Gerard about that. And I'd recommend reading a book like violence in the sacred. If you have no interest in, in, in that, then there are really good insights about literature, like read his book to see desire in the novel.

Luke (1h 28m 14s):

So that's one of the reasons why I liked Gerard is like, there are a bunch of different layers to him and you kind of peel them back like an onion. And I think you just have to take the ideas on their own terms and you can go as deep as you want to go.

Zach (1h 28m 28s):

What brought you back to the Catholic church? Because I'm interested. Cause I was in the same boat where I went to Catholic high school. I was raised Catholic and then I went to college and basically it was like, you know, screw this shit. I'm going to do whatever I want and I don't want to feel guilty about it. And so I wasn't thinking about the church at all. And then within the past couple of years, I'm still an atheist, but I recognize this, the important sense of community that religion and the Catholic church in general provides, especially for people that may not be in an area like I am in Brooklyn, where I have tons of options to, to join communities, someone in the Midwest may, that's where they see their friends.

Zach (1h 29m 12s):

They go to church once a week. So I recognize that the benefits of, and the structure and the sense of community that religion can bring for you, what was it that brought you back to Catholicism?

Luke (1h 29m 24s):

The main things. I think that I saw a few, I had a few people in my life. This goes back to the beginning of our conversation that just kind of like showed up in my life without me seeking them out. One was a lawyer and one was a priest. I just kind of like ran into these, these guys. And I would say that they're both incredibly well, incredibly virtuous would be one way to say it, but I would dare say like, they struck me as being like, holy, if that makes sense. Right? Like, like they had like this real, like always cheerful, just like extreme, extremely charitable, good at what they did. So like the lawyer was a fantastic lawyer, but he, but he was also just, he was a practicing Catholic and I was like, oh, that kinda like messed me up a little bit.

Luke (1h 30m 6s):

I'm like, huh. Right. Like, so there's like nothing more powerful than a powerful, like model of desire. And I'm like, ah, I would love to have, so that, that was, that was one thing. And then I think I hadn't been exposed to the rigor of, of the Catholic intellectual tradition when I was in high school. I'd never heard that. And I dismissed it, I think a little, a little too easy. And then later in life, I went back and, and you know, I mean there's a 2000 year old, very, very rich intellectual tradition. And I probably just wasn't ready for it when I was in high school. But then later I met these people, I dove into it. I was able to make sense of it a lot, a lot more. I mean, this is a long journey for me, right. It wasn't like I read one.

Luke (1h 30m 47s):

It's not like I read one book and all of a sudden everything made sense, but I gave it a chance as an adult. And I was like, well, let me, you know, there's some, some very smart people that have been Catholics over the years and I I'm, I'm gonna read them. And I also realized like I'm a voracious reader. And I got to a point in my late twenties where I was like, I could tell you more about what, like Tim Ferriss has written than I could tell you about the gospels. And I was like, it seems a little off. And I was like, I think I should go back and read the gospels.

Zach (1h 31m 21s):

It might've been just a poor time for me to be a Catholic, which is, you know, as a teenager, you, I, I wasn't really that interested in learning things outside of baseball. When I was a teenager, I wasn't interested in seeing ideas at face value. There are a lot of other hormones and adolescent, the anxieties that are running through you. So I was a, I was in the thickness of Catholicism when I wasn't really interested in learning about things and not on a deep level. And I didn't start becoming more interested in learning about things as a practice of curiosity until probably my early mid twenties, where I was like, what do I actually want to learn about?

Zach (1h 32m 5s):

And so I am open to learning more about Catholicism and religion in general, even if I don't become a practicing Catholic or I don't ever practice a religion again, I think it would be good to go back through things now and read what I read in high school. I was supposed to read in high school. I think critically about that. I never did. And there are a few things that are definitely on my list to go back through and read the Bible, being one of them, just like going back through specific stories and asking myself, what can I take from this? Even if I'm not going to practice it, totally

Luke (1h 32m 42s):

Do go back and read anything. Then don't try to read from, from the beginning to the end, that's brutal process. Believe me, I've tried. You, you won't make it through numbers for sure.

Zach (1h 32m 51s):

How did you start? How did you start your intellectual Catholic journey? When you said you got back to kind of the intellectual side of Catholicism, what for you, what was the starting point of that books or podcasts? Anything?

Luke (1h 33m 5s):

It was, it was definitely not podcasts. They weren't very popular at the time. It was, it was just a lot, a lot of books. I don't know if I could tell you the first few. I, I don't, I don't know if it was that clear, but, and also reading the gospels for sure. And then I started just showing back up at mass, like feeling pretty uncomfortable, but just like showing up. And it's funny, like you actually, I learned a lot just from that, right. Just from like going back as an adult and then trying to understand the liturgy itself. Yeah. I think it's important for like anybody, whether, you know, you're going to, if you're not religious at all, there's something to be said about having religious literacy period. You know, our culture doesn't have it.

Luke (1h 33m 46s):

Like I read the New York times and I'm like, their, their level of religious literacy is like at a fifth grade level. Usually like when I read things, it's like, you don't really understand it. Like I hate reading articles about the Catholic church. So I'm like, you know, you can't like, you don't have to be Catholic in order to just be an intelligent, thoughtful adult that knows enough about the religion to be able to speak about it intelligently. And I think that's like a duty that I have, like I should know about like the basic, like history of like the Protestant reformation and like why it happened and some basic things about other religions too. I think it's something that is, you know, as part of should be part of like, like people's basic like intellectual formation, right.

Luke (1h 34m 29s):

Even if you don't wanna go all the way. Yeah.

Zach (1h 34m 32s):

I've read some people like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris that have incredible intellectual litter or religious literacy that argue against religion and against things like Catholicism. And to be fair, if I'm going to read people that are religiously literate and arguing against religion, I should also make some things in, from people who are incredibly religiously, religiously, literally that is, that is a tongue twister religiously, literally literally literate, literate. Yeah. Religiously literate and using that power to argue why religion more may be a good thing.

Zach (1h 35m 15s):

Where are you for religion? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. Is there a favorite criticism that you like addressing about Gerard or mimetic desire? Something that comes up often that maybe you haven't even had a chance to think through fully yet, but it's something that people often bring up to criticize my medic design.

Luke (1h 35m 36s):

Hm. That's a great question. Two of the two things that I've heard people say about wanting actually are like, it's, well, this is obvious. And also this doesn't apply to me and the both of those always make me laugh. Cause it's, like I say, in the introduction to the book that you might think that this is obvious and you're definitely going to think it doesn't apply to you just read to that. So those are two criticisms that I've heard. I think in a more of a general one is a criticism that, you know, it's just too, it's a theory of everything, right? It's like, that's a real sweeping theory that tries to do too much, right? Like it's like tries to explain the, the, the, the root of sacrifice and, and, and, and try to tries to explain why religions have tended to, to live violence and religion are, are often connected that which has to do with sacrifice.

Luke (1h 36m 30s):

And the scapegoat mechanism tries to explain, you know, the, the fundamental mechanism behind all human desire. And I think that's a fair criticism. And I think like the way that I would respond to that is, well, maybe Gerard didn't get everything. Right. Like, I think that he, he definitely got some things, right. He may have got everything right, but you don't have to, you don't have to buy all of it in order to appreciate Manassas and appreciate parts of what he's putting his finger on. Something that I think is definitely true. So the, you know, this goes back to our discussion about like the religious aspects and Gerar being Catholic and the theological stuff like that might be hard to accept like chapter four of the book.

Luke (1h 37m 12s):

I think you're reading right now is about, is about that. And kind of like the rebel, the, the regulatory aspect of the crucifixion of Jesus and stuff. So I would say that that's, that's a fair criticism. He was a very big thinker and had a huge idea that he thought explained a lot of the world around him. But you, you don't have to, you don't have to wrap your mind around the whole thing in order to admit the truth that are in it. And that's, this is like a general point that I think is important for all, for everybody. If you disagree with someone or something, you should be able to admit a part of what they're saying. That might be true. Now, this is true for like political opponents.

Luke (1h 37m 54s):

It's true. You know, this could be true in discussions between somebody who's religious and somebody, not somebody who's not, when you can sort of see something like, okay, so what are they saying? That is true. If you could identify that there's almost something true in, in, in, in almost, I mean, I don't like Nietzsche as a philosopher, but I think he had some true things that he said, I just think you got a lot wrong, but like, I'm able to see, okay, this is true. And I'd appreciate that without, you know, without necessarily like writing them off or something, Gerard

Zach (1h 38m 24s):

Passed away in 2015 and formulated most of his theory before the technological boom. It sounds like. And so maybe if he were alive today, some of the criticisms that people are offering, he might say, yeah, I, that is valid. Or you should be thinking about things differently now because of the way that our lives are more different. And he just like anyone who comes up with anything, whether it's a theory or invention or app, or a way of thinking, they're limited to the information that's available at the time. And so if you're going to, you may be offering a criticism that that person may also think to be true.

Zach (1h 39m 7s):

They just, aren't living in the world that you live in and you can use the things that you agree with and build upon it with the technology and information we have available now.

Luke (1h 39m 19s):

Yeah. At the same time, you could almost say that social media really emerged after Gerard had kind of finished his career. He was alive and, and, and, you know, in 2008, 2009, when things really started to take off, but he was very old in a way though. I feel like social media has actually validated a lot of the things that he was talking about. Right. And like showed like the power of <inaudible>. Right. So it works both ways.

Zach (1h 39m 46s):

Yeah. I'm guessing he, wasn't an active participant on, on Twitter or Instagram in the last decade of his life, where you see like spending the last bits of his energy, getting in Twitter battles with someone about mimetic desire. Thank God.

Luke (1h 39m 59s):

No, I, I did hear that he was like a voracious reader of the newspapers and current events and like, loved, like he was analog, man. You just get the paper, newspaper and read and was fascinated by current events. And would, it would like to see the way that like Manisa SMA medic rivalries kind of played out and geopolitics and, and, and the economy. But unfortunately, like those are probably just conversations that he had with his wife and his kids and his close friends. And they haven't been documented in the Twitter sphere or anywhere else for us to, to see what he had to say about that stuff.

Zach (1h 40m 33s):

Have you thought much about the medic desire and its its effect on evolution and kind of how it allowed humans to evolve, to want the things that have brought to where we have today? I, I was listening to an interesting conversation between Lex Friedman, Dan schmuck, Tim Berger, the founder of the consilience project. And they were talking about how our hardware is selected for software so that our genes have been the same for so long. But one of the reasons why humans have been able to evolve is because we have loose software, we can grow our cultural understanding or our societal understanding.

Zach (1h 41m 18s):

We figure out what's socially acceptable. What's not socially acceptable. And we can keep evolving with the same genes we've had for the last 50,000 years, more or less and mimetic desire, dance, Moncton burger argues is a part of our, a big part of our evolution where we can change our software based on desires that are being spread in society. What do you think about the relationship between evolution and mimetic desire and is mimetic desire kind of like this thing that we needed as the first stage in our evolution that you could see maybe evolving into mimetic desire 2.0, like something different now that we've gone through the technological evolution and a lot of ways we're combining for technology, but combining with technology,

Luke (1h 42m 13s):

Man, I've had like a dozen people tell me, I have to listen to that podcast with Lex. I need to listen to it. They're like, dude, he's talking about mimetic desire and glad Lex is interested. Yeah. And so Gerard has a whole chapter in his book, things hidden from since the foundation of the world where he talks about the relationship between the medic desire and evolution, he talks about the process of what he calls hominization and, and how mimetic desire was probably sort of present at the birth of what we now know as homo sapiens and, and is what sort of separated us from, from our ancestors kind of like the, the birth of desire desires, kind of a uniquely human trait, like animals have instincts.

Luke (1h 42m 55s):

They don't tend to like converge on like abstract desires, like, like we do. So it's, it's, it's actually, there's a very complex, but I think it definitely played a role drought also talks about, and is in one of his later books, last books called evolution and conversion. So if anybody's interested in that topic, I would recommend reading those, but certainly played a huge role and not just with medic desire itself, but Gerard talks a lot about, well, mimetic desire is why we have culture. I mean, culture is formed through imitation and, you know, we wouldn't be able to build a culture if it weren't for mimetic desire, but he also talks about the role of violence in human societies and how we sort of like invented a social technology at like the Dawn of man.

Luke (1h 43m 42s):

Think about the beginning of 2001, a space Odyssey where, you know, you've got like the, the, the, the, the one ape sort of like realizes that the bone could be used as a weapon and kills another one because they were, they had been caught in a medic rivalry over scarce resources, little pool of water, and he kills the other one. And it's kind of like this sacrificial thing that ends up forming the basis of culture. So Gerard says that like the scapegoat mechanism, like humans sacrificing either another human or an animal or whatever is the foundation of, of human culture. And they says like, there's a founding murder at like the, at the beginning of human culture.

Luke (1h 44m 23s):

And it's actually like one of the things that has separated us from the animals. So that is a rabbit hole that we, I don't think we have time to go to go down, but, but, but, so it's more than just mimetic desire, right? It's like, it's conflict, it's the scapegoat mechanism. And those things continue to be perpetual.

Zach (1h 44m 41s):

Yeah. It is uniquely human and those things that allowed us to evolve like the scapegoat mechanism and are a part of any culture's evolution going back to hundreds of thousands of years ago, that looks like it's a human thing. You don't see a lot of animals doing these ritualistic sacrifices or caring about on a deep level. What other animals? One, it seems like it's the, the majority of it is instinctual. And so it's, I went down the rabbit hole of, of grizzly bear attacks recently.

Zach (1h 45m 24s):

And my girlfriend actually had an encounter with a bear while she was hiking. Nothing, nothing happened, thank God, no charge or anything. But then I started to go down, you know, what, what does it look like when a grizzly bear charges someone or does a false charge? And, and it wasn't a grizzly bear. I think it was a black bear that my girlfriend saw. And they're these like instinctual responses and grizzly bears where you see kind of like the deadness and its eyes on an up close video where it's not thinking about what it wants, or it's not thinking about the fact that other Grizzlies attack humans is the reason why I'm also going to attack a human or charged human, or I'm going to do it three times instead of twice.

Zach (1h 46m 8s):

And my cup is here or something like that. It, it seems like it's just like this world of this world that we've removed ourselves from, with technology and also mimetic desire, a big part of why we were, we're able to develop that technology, but like this whole world of nature and instincts is still out there and it still drives a huge part of the world that, that most people aren't an active part about. So it's, it's, it's wild to think about.

Luke (1h 46m 36s):

Yeah. And another interesting aspect, you know, in ways that were different, like animals all have a dominance hierarchy and with humans, right? I mean a dominance hierarchy that plays itself out with, you know, the physicality of the animal and the aggression and stuff like that. And they, sometimes they have to fight, but with, with humans, right where so much of the world is abstract and we have so many like different forms of expression, basically what Gerard would say, this is my interpretation and translation of Gerard. I don't think he ever specifically talked about it in this way, but we don't have a fixed, fixed, dominant dominance hierarchy the way that animals do. Like once it's established as kind of fixed humans, because of medic desire, because we can take different people as models as we move in and out of environments, we have like fluid and dynamic, like dominance hierarchies that, that come and go that are constituted through like mimetic desire and the medic rivalries.

Luke (1h 47m 34s):

And they, and they change all the time. They're not fixed. So there's like really fascinating implications here, if you're interested in, in evolution and, and Y you know, Manisa is a peculiar peculiar, literally I should just not even try to say that word, man. Yeah.

4 (1h 47m 52s):

I'm getting talked over trying to say really hard words here. Yeah.

Luke (1h 47m 55s):

But it is a uniquely human characteristic,

Zach (1h 47m 58s):

For sure. Yeah. So I, I wanted to end up on the, the connection of mimetic desire and love that you had a tweet recently where you said a lot of conversations about Gerard got bogged down and heady intellectual ism, everyone trying to signal that they're smarter than the other listeners or even their interlocutor. And it's shocking how easily the role of love the most memetic thing of all is lost. And so listeners can tell me, you know, how, how much of a good job I've done by China seem smart. Let me know if I seem smart in the comments, how do you see mimetic desire and love interplay?

Zach (1h 48m 41s):

What does mimetic desire look like when it mixes with love? What, what, what are, what is my medic desire at its best and loving relationships or loving interactions? How, how does it come together with love to spread loving interactions in society? Which I would argue are going to be a very important part in why we stay around. If we do stay around for a very long time, I would, I would argue that love has to be a huge part of that. What, what do you see when you look at love and mimetic desire and think about how those two come together

Luke (1h 49m 16s):

Love is the highest manifestation of desire. It's kind of like the end goal of desire. I mean, love is in a way you could almost say that love is just another word for desire. We do what we want, or we do what we love. You can almost think of addiction like that. Like if you're, if you're like addicted to a certain kind of drug, in one sense, you could say that like, you, you, you love that or you at one point you just, you just loved it in a certain sense, more than you love the alternative. So I think there's a deep between desire and love and in a human relationship, love is mimetic. When we are deeply loved, we, we tend to open ourselves up and, and, and love others and vice versa.

Luke (1h 50m 2s):

So love love is like, we, you know, I've been stressing this whole podcast that, you know, memetic desire. It can be a very positive thing. And in a relationship between, you know, between two partners between a married couple love is memetic and at its best that that we want the love that we have with another person to be fueled by mommy says, and the most positive sense of the word, almost like, like outdoing one another and love. That's something that that's where my medic desire, like never will, will not have like a, like a bad ending, right. It's kind of like an infinite loop of, of, of medic love. And I look at just little ways that, like, I, I incorporate that into my life with my fiance soon to be wife in three weeks.

Luke (1h 50m 47s):

You know, we cook each other like dinner, usually, you know, a couple of nights a week. And it's kind of like a medic, you know, game of love that we have with each other. And, you know, we, we look at like other little things that we can do to incorporate that. And one way to, to think of it as like taking that calcium, that first stone of love, you know, as we talked about earlier is also mimetic. So rather than the instinctual response to you're unkind to me or say an unkind word, so I respond back, that's our instinctual response. Like when we get a passive aggressive email or something like that, we want to respond in kind, but like flipping that cycle, it's almost like flipping a switch and love, love to me means making a self gift means like making a gift of myself.

Luke (1h 51m 31s):

And I think if we did that, right, I know Lex Friedman is super interested in that. He talks about love all the time. And I think if we, if we did that and we found a way to encourage and incentivize that, then that could become a medic. And I think we have to figure that out as a, as a species. Because if, if we, when one of the things I was thinking when I made that tweet is like, we can talk about this stuff all day long, but I'm interested in behaviors and change behaviors and not just the intellectual discussion, because unless there are changed behaviors and unless mimetic desire is used as a force for good, then we're in trouble.

Zach (1h 52m 8s):

Definitely check out the conversation with Lex and Dan schmuck, Tim Berger, and check out the one with Bret Weinstein that he just had. If you're interested in, in love and kind of like its its application, which mimetic desire sounds like it's going to be a huge part of the practical application for love, but Weinstein talks about the fourth frontier and how everything up to this point with, after the technological boom has been focused on growth. And so most things are, are profit driven, growth driven, and, and we want to grow, but our society also on growth and that if we are to get past this point, if we're going to continue to evolve as a species bread, argues that we need to get to a point where we want to grow, but we don't rely on growth that, that profit isn't the underlying function of society that, that we care about beauty compassion and having purpose.

Zach (1h 53m 12s):

And even if we're not growing, we won't compromise that in order to continue, continue that capitalistic growth trajectory, not that all capitalism bad is bad or anything like that, just that like we were at a point where everything is so growth driven and, and if something's not growing, then there's a problem. And that has to be the focus. And so mimetic desire and love seem like it has to be part of that fourth frontier if we ever do get to it where people are doing loving acts and sending signals across the planet, that love is something that I care about and I want it and I want to act this way towards other people.

Zach (1h 53m 56s):

And I care about things like beauty and long-term fulfillment and acting in a loving way towards people. And that is something I value. And if enough people do that, then that kind of flips the momentum to where maybe people are willing to not grow in order to like grow financially in order to grow lovingly where, where there's a point we can get to where we don't necessarily rely on the constant growth of society.

Luke (1h 54m 29s):

I agree. And, you know, I think there's, I think Peter teal would sort of argue, and this is the, that a lot of people are arguing that like, unless our, unless we just continue to grow at a certain rate, then we're in trouble because without growth, like everybody will just like turn on each other basically. And we'll just be competing for scarce resources. So we have to constantly be creating. So there's like this engine that we have to keep fueling. And I think that it's, it's, it's fine to do that, but I don't think we should be reliant on that. Like totally, totally reliant on it because then we could have become a slave to a certain kind of a system. So I think we, we do have to find a better way. I mean, one way to think about it is like, what's the difference between wealth and money?

Luke (1h 55m 10s):

You know, they're not the same thing, even though people equate them. Like, if I, you know, if I have, like, for me personally, if I have a loving family and a home and safety, like I am wealthy, like that's, that's, that's my wealth. Like the only reason that I, I, I see like more and more and more is probably due to mimetic desire. Like the one healthy kind of a medic desire. Like why do I need a certain amount of money in my bank account? So I, you know, we're going to have to like flip, flip some kind of a, there's gotta be a flipping and it's gonna have to happen at some point or we're, we're going to continue a, this kind of like never ending like infinite game. And like, when are we going to be like, happy and want what we have in a sense, like wanting what we have is probably the way that I would put it.

Luke (1h 55m 56s):

And there are certain things that we have that we don't desire and we need to learn how to desire.

Zach (1h 56m 2s):

That's a good point, wealth and money. Aren't the same thing. And I don't want to have a lot of money, but I, but I feel wealthy and a lot of aspects of my life. And because I feel wealthy with things like freedom and family and friends and podcasting, being able to talk to people like yourself that makes me want to act more lovingly towards other people, because I feel that there are many areas in my life that are bountiful in ways that aren't the numbers in my bank account. That me feeling wealthy makes me want to act better towards other people.

Luke (1h 56m 41s):

Absolutely. And you could have all the money in the world and be in the middle of Antarctica and you would, you know, it wouldn't matter because there'd be nothing to buy. Right. And you know, you could have no money. And ha I mean, basically I just think like people, people need to understand that money is not what you want, what you want is wealth. And when I say wealth, I don't mean monetary wealth. I mean, the, the, the things that you really most deeply want. And if, if you're able to separate the two, I think you gain some perspective on the role of money, right? Money is just kind of a way to exchange things. Sometimes it can, it can, it can help us attain things that we need, but it's not the measure of, it's not the measure of, of real wealth.

Luke (1h 57m 25s):

So I hope, I hope more people kind of have the perspective that you do.

Zach (1h 57m 29s):

Well, that's a perspective that is definitely not perfect. I found myself fluctuating in and out of thinking that, you know, my life is shittier than it actually is to feeling overwhelmingly grateful. And a lot of people go through that same thing. And, and, and speaking of wealth and money, you should spend some of your money on Luke's book wanting to increase your wealth of knowledge. And so where can people find the book? Where can they follow you? You also have a newsletter of a medic Mondays that I'm subscribed to. So, so where can everyone, where can people get the book and where can they follow your work?

Luke (1h 58m 9s):

Oh, thanks man. You can buy the book anywhere you like to buy books. So hopefully your local bookstore has it. Otherwise. There's always online. Amazon, Luke burgess.com. So I publish a little newsletter every Monday, and I have a sub stack as well called anti-medic where a lot of stuff that didn't make it into the book, not because it's not important. It's just, I had a word count. I publish on my sub stack and I'm gonna over the next couple of years, I'm going to try to connect the topics in the book with things going on in the world and, and really try to try to make it as relatable as possible. Thank

Zach (1h 58m 42s):

You for your time, Luke. I really appreciate it. I gained a lot of insight and hopefully I can convert that insight into wisdom for future decision-making from this discussion. And I hope listeners feel the same as well, and go check out the book and sign up for the newsletter as well. And thank you again. I really do appreciate your time. Thanks doc. I really enjoyed it. Thank you guys for listening to another episode, you can go to <inaudible> dot super cast at tech today to gain access to two bonus episodes per month of the ox podcast on topics like Bruce Lee, COVID lab leak, Bitcoin and more. You'll also get four video versions of the Zuora podcasts available.

Zach (1h 59m 24s):

Nowhere else go to <inaudible> dot tech today to become a premium subscriber. The next time.

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