#138 Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire
02:11:32 Share

Desire is a positive thing. It's one of the things that makes us human. I think of desire like the parable of the two wolves, right? We all have these two wolves inside of us that are kind of at war, and you need to sort of find out which one of those wolves to starve and which one of those wolves to feed. And it's not always easy to tell which one is which when it comes to the things that we want, when it comes to our desires.

I actually believe that we should feed those enduring desires and that those enduring desires do ultimately sort of see us through the hard times. Welcome to the Knowledge Project Podcast. I'm your host, Shane Parrish.

The goal of this show is to master the best of what other people have already figured out so that you can unlock your potential. To that end, I sit down with people at the top of their game to uncover what they've learned along the way. Every episode is packed with timeless ideas and insights that you can use in life and business.

If you're listening to this, you're missing out. If you'd like special member-only episodes accessed before anyone else, transcripts, and other member-only content, you can join at fs.blog.com. Check out the show notes for a link. Today I'm talking with Luke Burgess.

Luke has founded and led four companies from e-commerce to food distribution and consumer products. He's the managing partner of Fourth Wall Ventures, which invests in people and companies contributing to a healthy human ecology.

Luke studied finance, philosophy, and theology, and he's the author of the book Wanting, The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life. And that's what we're here to talk about. This podcast is a deep dive into mimetic desire, the core theory of Rene Girard, and its implications. Now, if the name Rene Girard sounds familiar, that could be because Girard has influenced the likes of Peter Thiel and Chamath Palihapitiya.

Girard's memetic theory rests on the assumption that all of our behaviors are imitative. This is both helpful and destructive. For instance, when it comes to learning, imitation is a fast track to getting to a decent level. We have no idea what we're doing, so we imitate others. Think of how you learn to play music. You must imitate before you can create. When it comes to wanting things, however, it can lead to envy, jealousy, and violence.

Imitation leads us to desire things we don't want, buy things we don't need, and in the process, forgo things that are far more meaningful and valuable. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. It's time to listen and learn.

The IKEA Business Network is now open for small businesses and entrepreneurs. Join for free today to get access to interior design services to help you make the most of your workspace, employee well-being benefits to help you and your people grow, and amazing discounts on travel, insurance, and IKEA purchases, deliveries, and more. Take your small business to the next level when you sign up for the IKEA Business Network for free today by searching IKEA Business Network.

A lot of people feel trapped in jobs. They feel something is missing, but don't easily find the courage to leave. You left an investment banking job in Hong Kong and came back and started a very unsexy company out of Hollywood, perhaps the memetic capital of the world. Let's start with that story.

Yeah, I arrived in Hong Kong through purely mimetic forces in my life that had brought me to a great undergrad business school at NYU Stern and went the investment banking route without having really paused and given it a lot of thought as to why I was doing that. That's really the route I wanted to go on, what that career track looked like. After I graduated, I worked for a private equity company.

in New York City. But I worked on a deal and I got an offer to go work in Hong Kong in investment banking for Citigroup out of their Hong Kong office. And at the time, it's weird to go from private equity to investment banking. But I realized that, first of all, I wanted to be in Asia. There was a lot of very exciting things going on in China at the time. I thought it'd give me a good chance to kind of be in China at the very beginning of what we now see was a total boom.

So I made the move, got on a plane and went to Hong Kong. Didn't know a soul there other than the guy that recruited me to come out and was working in investment banking and sort of like what was a dream role. I mean, they treated me as a junior guy, more like I was a VP. I was doing crazy things. I hope this doesn't get anybody at Citigroup in trouble, but I was like going to do due diligence on Chinese coal mines by myself. You know, they're sending me down in underground mines like, hey, make sure this company has the assets they say they have.

Well, it looks like mine to me, you know, I don't know. And, you know, and I was putting together pitch books, you know, one for a Thai petrochemicals company. I was the sort of the senior analyst on the deal. And I went there and presented it to the senior management of the company myself. I don't even remember why. I mean, maybe it's because the

The managing director was out sick or got called away and they didn't want to cancel the meeting. So I was doing crazy things. I mean, anybody who works in finance knows that this is not normal. So it was a good gig. I was making a lot of money, but I was totally miserable. And, you know, I've always had the...

the desire to start something. And my cousin and I had been kicking around an idea for a business ever since we were in college. I went to NYU. He went to Columbia. I was a year ahead of him. So he just graduated and moved out to LA for a girl and started to call me and email me and say, Luke,

Why don't we start that business that we've always talked about? You don't seem entirely happy. I know this. You're never going to be satisfied until you find out if this works or not. And the business was quite simple. I mean, it was a healthy vending machine company is the business that we had in mind. It was just to put the healthy version, the healthy alternative of everything that you normally find in a vending machine into the machines. Brand them in a really cool way. The name was FitFuel.

Put LCD screens into them so we could display health facts, nutrition information, sell ads eventually, get people's attention as they walked by, kind of state-of-the-art machines, and

And they'd be healthy. Everything in them would be healthy. So the plan was to put these in schools and airports and any place where it was hard to find healthy food. And at the time, that was a pretty novel idea. I mean, that sort of the health food craze was taking off. That was the business. So here I am in my office in Hong Kong, contemplating whether I should go move to LA to start what is essentially a vending machine company. Right.

Right. I just never wanted to talk about it that way. So I just say like, oh, I'm going into the food distribution business or something like that. And I'm like, well, you know, here I am. I got to move halfway around the world. I really don't want to go to L.A. I've never even been to L.A. before. And my business partner is asking me to come to L.A. And I said, you know, Sean, I don't know if I've moved to L.A.,

Just because you're dating a girl there. I was like, are you going to marry this girl? He's like, I think so, but I'm not sure. And I said, I need more than that. Do you got anything else? And he said, well, there is one other really good reason.

And that's the location is actually the perfect location for our business because it just so happens most of the large distributors for the kind of products that we want to sell in our machines are all in the area. They're all in Southern California.

So, you know, we can order from any of them, have the products in our warehouse that practically the next day shipping costs will be low. It will just streamline our business. And I said, all right, all right. So you get, those are two good reasons. That's enough. You know, so I moved to LA to, to, to start fit what was fit fuel, what became fit fuel, you know, but it was, it was nerve wracking to be pretty alone in Hong Kong and

The next day after I got my bonus, I asked a few of the senior people if I could meet with them.

Walked into one particular managing director's office and this guy was really eccentric. He wore socks around the office and he kicked his shoes off and put his feet up on the desk with the socks and looked at me and was like, "Luke, hey, you owe me a beer." I said, "I owe you a beer." And I said, "Why?" He said, "Just because. Let's go get a beer."

So we went out and got a beer and I told Steve, hey, I don't know how to tell you this. Like, I've really enjoyed my time here, but I'm leaving.

And he said, "What are you going to do?" And I said, "Well, I'm going to go start a company in California." He said, "Oh, you're going to Silicon Valley. You're going to go the startup route." And I said, "Yeah." And he said, "Well, tell me about it." And I fumbled around. "Yeah, I'm getting into the distribution business." "Well, what kind of distribution?" "Food." "Well, how are you going to distribute it?" And finally, there was no way around it. I had to just tell him that we're going to put this stuff in vending machines and scale it. And I made my best case for why this was actually a massive market.

He was supportive, but he sort of said, Luke, I want you to understand that if you do this, if you leave this soon, it had been less than a year, you'll never work in investment banking again. You won't work in corporate finance because-

nobody will really trust you anymore, right? Like once you've sort of got that bug, I think he was right. But it's kind of a jarring thing to hear at that stage in your career. You know, it's like, all right, I'm 23 years old. And if I say yes to this opportunity, it sounds like I'm closing the door to another one. Is that really what I want to do? But ultimately made the decision to go to LA and, you know, moved into a small little apartment on Coanga in the 101, a little Hollywood apartment with a garage that was just big enough to house some inventory and

and we got started and I didn't know how things were going to go, but you know, that, that ride back from Hong Kong to Los Angeles was a very lonely and quiet ride for me. I don't think I watched a movie. I didn't listen to any music. I just sat there and, you know, stared out the window and just sort of wondered what in the hell I just did. Wow. There's four things I want to follow up on there. And in no particular order, but,

Uh, one of the things that you said was money. You were making a lot of money, but you were miserable. Can you go deeper on that? Yeah. Um, you know, there's been studies that have shown that once you make over, I got, geez, I think it used to be 85,000, you know, that there's no sort of increase in happiness after that. The number has got to be higher now with inflation. I think that study came out six or seven years ago at least, but I was making over that. And I first year out of school and, and,

I didn't realize the extent to which I was sort of chasing some idea of success that I hadn't really spent a lot of time actually thinking about. And part of that was I thought that that track was the quickest route to financial security, to lifelong financial security. And like, you know, many of my colleagues, I thought to myself, well, I just need to do this for five to seven years.

go the normal track. And, you know, if I'm smart, if I don't squander at all, I will have enough money to be set for quite a while, you know, and then I can figure out the next thing that I want to do. But everybody went in that way. But then I saw guys that had been in for 10 or 15 years that seemed like they never had enough. It was never enough. And I didn't really want to be like that. I sort of realized that it's kind of a slippery slope, like when is enough enough?

And this is way before I had ever heard the word mimetic desire, which is what my book's about. So I just intuitively like sort of understood that there was some force

that was going to continue to manufacture desires that I would misinterpret as needs and probably keep me stuck in this cycle. And why wasn't I happy? Well, I mean, I think ultimately I wasn't able to exercise my creativity in the way that I wanted to. I mean, it turns out that if I don't have a creative outlet, you know, my wife would be the first to tell you I'm like a pretty miserable person to be around.

I need that. So even while I was working in finance, I was, I mean, super weird. Like I was going home at night and reading classic literature and studying philosophy. And I started to recognize that, ah, there's some part of me that needs to be nourished that I'm not, that I'm not nourishing. So,

And realizing that I didn't feel free and I didn't feel like I was able to exercise my gifts, frankly, was a big part of why I felt like I would never be happy no matter how much money I made. I ended up running into the same problem as an entrepreneur, having started a successful company. But I think that I had enough models of unhappiness around me

that I was able to recognize unhappy marriages, sort of, you know, constantly buying talismans of success, like watches that, and I, every time I would do it, you know, the, they hit the dopamine hit would last like two days and then it would go away. And, you know, I, I wanted to look a little deeper. We're going to talk at length, sort of about mimetic desire and the models, both positive and negative before we sort of like dive into that part of the conversation. Yeah.

You did something that a lot of people talk about, but don't really have the courage to do. You left a job, right? Like I used to work with a lot of people who, who had the same thing, you know, I'm only here for five years. Then I'm going to get out, going to make some money, going to get some skills. Then I'm going to go do what I really want to do. It's like you're, you're borrowing time almost from yourself and,

But was there a moment that that changed for you? Was there something that crystallized that I just have to leave? Or was it this slow sort of like building pressure? It was both. It was a slow building pressure.

And sometimes I think with that slow building pressure, if you don't recognize it and if you don't do anything about it, it can actually lead to some sort of a tipping point that stops feeling like pressure and just sort of makes you dead inside. Like you almost forget the pressure, if that makes sense. Like we sort of have a window of opportunity to recognize that internal pressure and do something about it or else it just sort of, at some point it becomes too late, almost like a person with an addiction. Yeah.

So the pressure was building and I realized that I had sort of a window of, I don't know, call it existential or spiritual freedom with which I could still do something. And I didn't want to lose the freedom. I think there are always circumstances that are involved too. And oftentimes with decision-making, the circumstances, the soil in which decisions are made is a really critical and overlooked factor.

So, yes, I had Sean calling me and emailing me and sort of kicking me in the ass. Like, hey, now's the time. If we don't do this, somebody else will.

But I think what really did it for me was a moment of clarity in my process of discernment. So, you know, I think that it's never good to make a serious, big, life-changing decision when we're in a period of desolation or like deep, deep anxiety. I think we're just more liable to make the wrong decision for the wrong reasons when we're in that place.

Conversely, I think it's a little dangerous to make a big life-changing decision when we're in a moment of extreme consolation, right? We're like, everything's great. Like we're riding this high and you do things that maybe you shouldn't be doing. It's kind of like I lived in Vegas for years. So you're riding a hot streak at the table. You may not be thinking clearly.

One of the best places is kind of just in this in-between sort of moment of sort of neutrality and peace where you could feel like you could go either way, right? It's like really fertile ground for decision-making because you're sort of not too far on either side. I came to that place where I wasn't like totally miserable. I had like a week of this where I was in that place and then I had clarity about what I wanted to do.

So I think, so some of the emotional factors that were involved, like, oh gosh, this managing director just asked me to pull an all-nighter and I'm pissed off. And I make the decision in the middle of the night that I'm going to leave and go start this company. Probably not wise. You know, hey, I just got a bonus, which is more money than I've ever seen in my life. And I'm going to decide to stay another year because that felt really good.

I wasn't in either place. I was sort of in the middle place. And that gave me the personal confidence that I needed to know that I was more likely making the right decision about something that was an authentic desire that I had.

Talk to me a little bit more about that soil in terms of decision-making and how it manifests itself in other decisions that you've made. Well, I think relationships is a great example. You know, I was married last summer and my wife and I were together for quite a while before we got married. And I think this is sort of true with any relationship is you sort of, you know,

need to be with a person, at least somebody you're considering marrying in both of those periods, right? You know, through when times are really good and when times are really bad. I think that's kind of a really good test of a relationship, right? And then, you know, sort of find that fertile soil of sort of like peace where things are not totally wild in either direction, where you start to make a decision, right? About whether you want to spend the rest of your lives together.

And I don't know if that just applies to marriage. I think that can apply to business deals, serious business decisions. Few decisions are more important than who you're going to become a business partner with. As many people listening will know, it can feel not a whole lot different than a marriage. And I think there are ways to test relationships in the same way that we can test our desires, like my desire to leave my job.

Do you think that we should intentionally test them or do you think time just tests them? I think time will always test them. I think time will test them naturally, but sometimes we don't have time. Sometimes, you know, we can't wait a year through the ups and downs to see how other people will respond. You know, COVID, a great example of time revealing some truths about relationships for me, you know, the way that some people sort of, um,

just reacted to it and sort of I lost touch with some people and other people I developed a closer relationship with. But we don't always have these sort of outside things that are the great sort of wedge things that reveal truths about relationships. So I do think that there are ways to appropriately test

relationships. It depends on the kind of relationship, right? I think there are like unethical ways to test a relationship, right? Like putting somebody under, you know, severe stress, right? The way that, you know, they would do in a special ops bootcamp or something like that.

But I think if you're going to enter into a very consequential business relationship with somebody, whether they're a client or a partner, a lot of money on the line, jobs on the line, I think it's appropriate to test that. And I think some ways to do that, I don't think it's appropriate to lie, but I think you can, speaking a hard truth is one of my favorite ways to do that.

Speaking a hard truth right up front and just seeing what it does, right? Like seeing what happens. Sometimes you can tell based on the reaction like, well, if I'm not able to speak truthfully to this person, hard to imagine that we'd be able to have a healthy four or five year relationship.

So something you said that was really interesting to me, and I think a lot of people had the same experience, but I'm curious as to what led to your experience and what lessons or conclusions you've taken from it is that during COVID, you got closer to some people and other people who you might've thought you were going to get closer to, you got farther away from. Why is that? I don't know if I know the answer. I've thought a lot about it. I think one of the big things is that

open and honest communication, right? The people that I feel like I can communicate with openly and honestly are the ones that I feel really comfortable investing in, in those relationships. And I mean, I can't imagine, I can't think of another more consequential time to have open and honest conversations.

little things like getting together at our house or at another person's house to barbecue in the backyard. It's really a act of courtesy to clearly define boundaries and rules, right? Like if I'm coming into your house,

And think of this as a metaphor for a lot of things in life, okay, even a business. If I'm a guest in your house, it actually causes me a lot less anxiety to like know where we stand, what you want to do, how you think about this. And, you know, we should have had those conversations way before I showed up at the front door.

So open and honest communication is really important. And I found some people are just willing to have those conversations and it's easy and other people aren't. And I noticed like that there are some people that I would sort of, I knew that

having certain conversations was going just, we just couldn't go there. Right. There's some, there are some relationships where you, you hit a point where there's a block. Okay. And you're just like, okay, all right. We can't, we can't go any further than that. Right. We're just going to have to wait. Maybe next year things will be different. But right now I shut down. Okay. There's like a, a sign blocking that road. We have to take a different road.

Can't force somebody necessarily into that more open and honest communication. You can model it, which I think is one of the most important things to do, but you can't really force it to happen. So I would say that's the number one factor. You know, and then everybody's, you know, has had different coping mechanisms. I watch more Netflix than I think I'll watch for the remainder of my life. You know?

And just, I think finding people that are able to just share vulnerabilities, be real about some of our struggles over these last couple of years. Those are the people that I've managed to bond with the most. Rather than just get on Zoom calls every week and just act like we're all good. We haven't all been all good all of the time. And

So I think I've particularly appreciated people that are able to have those kinds of conversations, which are especially needed in the corporate world. And there's not a lot of space for them. They happen underground. They happen when people go out for beers. But I think those are the ones that I've leaned into more.

I think high uncertainty makes trust more important, not less important. And so when I think of that question, what comes to my mind is like the people that you can have those conversations with, you trust more because you trust that you can have that conversation and it's not going to affect your relationship more.

And during the first part of COVID, there was a massive amount of uncertainty. So not only did you get to witness people under stress, you get to see how they think, but you also the proxy for your test was whether your trust, sorry, was whether you could talk to them.

openly and honestly, whether it's even something as simple as like, have you done a rapid test before coming over? Or here's what I'm comfortable with because like you're exposed to me and I'm exposed to you. And having those conversations, I noticed a lot of people were really hesitant to sort of do that. And I think that that's like your intuition telling you something about the relationship.

Intuition is an important word. Tacit knowledge is a really important concept in my life. Michael Pugliani is a philosopher that I like a lot, and he speaks about tacit knowledge. So these are things that we know that we can't necessarily explain how or why we know them.

an example of tacit knowledge could be, you know, Shane, if I asked you how, how to ride a bike, um, I assume you know how to ride a bike, but if I asked you to explain it, it would probably be in relatively vague terms. You probably wouldn't get into the physics of how it works and, and the mechanics of how it works. And if you wrote it down step by step,

and an alien came down and read what you'd written, he'd probably have no idea how in the hell to ride a bicycle. Because you learned to do that such a long time ago. There's muscle memory. It's really hard for Tiger Woods to explain his golf swing to anybody else. And this comes into play

with so many things. One of my favorite sort of fables is somebody asked the millipede how he walks and he says, "Well, first I move this leg and then I move, wait a second, no, then I move this." And he just becomes paralyzed and curls up in a ball, his tacit knowledge on how to walk.

We know more than we're able to explain that we know. And I call this inarticulate knowledge, knowledge that I'm not able to articulate to somebody. And I have inarticulate knowledge about a lot of things, including other people. I could have tacit knowledge of why I trust somebody that I couldn't explain to you.

If you asked me to give you specific things, I wouldn't be able to point to that, oh, there's that one time when we were hanging out together, because it's probably not any one particular thing. It's probably a series of things. Call it a gut feeling. I just have that. And I have the same thing for mistrust, right? And I think that this kind of tacit knowledge, inarticulate knowledge is undervalued in our society, right?

It's undervalued because, you know, we always want to be able to like explain the science and give the, give the, the, the hard reasons for it. But a lot of life doesn't work like that. You know, like I get on a, I take public transportation, I get on a plane, you know, and I have to operate with a certain level of trust that the pilot's not drunk when I get on the plane, you know? And, and if I noticed that just something is a little bit off, you know,

it sends up some kind of a, of a red flag for me. I have friends that are in, in special forces and it's like amazing hanging out with them because you know, when they walk down the street, I mean, it's just crazy walking on the street. They could notice something a block away. It could just be a guy who's just walking. His walk is a little bit off and you know, he'll notice. I don't know. I don't know if he'd even be able to explain to me how he notices, but he knows because he's internalized that knowledge.

He knows what the pattern of something different looks like, and he's recognizing that pattern. I think to your point, we all have that in some ways and in some domains. And it's important in decision making. I don't think it's the only thing, but a lot of people just dismiss it outright, whereas I...

I think if we look at chess, right, like Herbert Simon did this study on chess grandmasters. And one of the things that he found was like their intuition comes up with the move within a couple seconds. And then they spend the rest of the move like validating. Is that the right move? Is what I'm seeing correct? Am I putting myself in a bad position? And then if any of those things happen. So it's like you're incorporating both this very rational thinking

component as well as this very intuitive component. Yeah, when they go together, I think that's a really important point. When they go together, that's a powerful tool for decision making. And sometimes when one or the other is missing, something feels a little bit off. Do you think we have better intuition when the knowledge is earned versus borrowed? Absolutely. Absolutely.

So based on that, then does your intuition around trust come from the fact that you've been let down and also had high trust situations? Like you've had this high variability of people in the past so that you're better able to recognize it or has everything in your background, like your life just been mostly trustworthy? No, I've had the full spectrum, you know, to the point where I often say nothing surprises me anymore.

I'm not a skeptic or a cynic. I'm the kind of person that waits until the deal is closed before I celebrate, partly because I've celebrated early. So I've learned that through experience, and I've had the full gamut. I mean, I've been very lucky. I've had people in my life that I've worked with and been partners with for well over a decade now.

where there's just this really high degree of trust. And then I've had other situations where, at least at an earlier point in my life, I would have trusted somebody completely. And then very unexpectedly, they did something that was extremely surprising. So with that comes a certain sobriety about human nature. I think like a lot of my work is

Um, has been just delving deep into human nature. It's sort of, it's a really big shortcut for people because there are certain things that just don't change. Um, you know, seeing the full range of possibilities of what people are capable of, um, how people are affected, how people change, um,

I've learned more about that through literature, frankly, than I have from most business books. And that's why it's such a powerful thing to explore because it's about human nature and what else is business than a way of humans interacting. It's human nature manifesting itself in the real world. Are there particular books in literature that you would recommend that give you

like this classic enduring lens into human nature if you're open to seeing it? There are many. I think Shakespeare's the best. And I never really understood. I mean, it almost seems cliched to say, but I never understood the importance until I saw the way that the characters in Shakespeare respond to models of desire. So in Othello,

Iago is this mediator to everybody in the story, right? Between Othello and Desdemona, he's the one pulling the strings. He's intentionally doing it. He's the middleman. He's the mediator. And in almost all of Shakespeare, if you go back and read it, and I read it in high school, I read it in college, and I was bored.

It wasn't until I came back and read it in my adult life with sort of a new lens that I began to see all these fascinating things play out. And I was like, okay, so I didn't realize that Yago is this mediator who's pulling the strings and making people want different things. And he's basically got everybody wrapped around his finger in this story.

And Two Gentlemen of Verona, same thing. Pretty much any Shakespeare play has these really powerful mediators and their influence is hidden. You don't really understand it the first time that you read it. And I started to realize, well, there are like Yagos in every corporation too. There are like Yagos in most schools. There are these people that are powerful mediators to other people.

And if you can identify who those people are and how they're operating, you've just identified sort of one of the root causes of problems or just one of sort of the root players in this system.

And identifying those mediators is sort of really key. Oh, you can't say that because that gets me to asking you how to identify them. Oh, no, I've ruined the question. So maybe a better way to word this question is how would you teach somebody to identify these mediators of desire? You need to really embed yourself in a relationship or in an organization and cut down

through the bullshit because the bullshit is always going to obscure the power of the mediator. I use the word mediator and model interchangeably. You have to cut through it. And that means getting people when they're vulnerable, hearing them explain their motivations for doing something or pursuing some path, and then hearing all of the things that they didn't say

People are usually very protective of their sort of deeper motivations and deeper desires and sort of gloss over these things. But there are sort of, I think, ways to draw those things out. I mean, it comes from trust, right? When people feel like they're in a context of a trusting relationship, they'll say all kinds of things, right? It's like speaking to a therapist.

I think there are ways to recreate that within organizational environments where, you know, people where there's confidentiality, where there's trust, anonymity, maybe where people can begin to tell the truth about, you know, how certain people.

have a nonlinear effect on the culture and in the dynamics of the organization, right? So this is a very nonlinear domain. People are not all the same. Obviously, like a big figure, you know, a CEO with a larger than life personality, you

will have an outsize effect, right? But I promise you that in most places there's very junior people that do too. And the people that revolve around them, they sort of become the mediators for getting to the next level and understanding internal politics. So identifying them through a different type of conversation than most people are usually willing to have

I think that's probably the number one thing that I would say. Before we move on to sort of like, we've been talking in 45 minutes now almost, and we haven't even hit some of the questions, the key questions around your book. I love that. I hope that's a good sign. Totally different direction. I want to come back. Did your friend marry the girl?

He did. He did. Happily married now. So I first came across Rene Girard's ideas when I was learning more about Peter Thiel. And once you see Girard's core idea, you can't really unsee it. So who is Rene Girard and what is memetic desire? Rene Girard was a French academic who moved to the U.S.,

Shortly after World War II, started out at Indiana University, and his PhD was essentially in history and moved around in the U.S. And he seems like a guy who was struggling with his vocation. He wasn't entirely happy just teaching in this narrow domain.

So he began to really branch out. He's really an autodidact. I mean, he started to read everything way outside of his area of expertise. Anthropology, he read sacred scriptures, he read sociology and literature.

And it was in teaching, sort of getting dragged in, roped in to teaching a class on European literature, that he had his first really big insight into something that had been overlooked about human nature for a very long time. And

he came to this insight through reading Shakespeare, through reading a lot of the French classical literature. And not only French, he read a lot of Russian literature, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. And he realized that he saw this reflected in the literature. And that's important to note, right? Because literature, fiction even, is written by people.

And these people leave clues about human nature embedded in the literature, even if it's fiction. So reading fiction and mining it for truths about human nature is what Girard did. And I think it's because he viewed fiction that way. Like his starting point was like, oh, I can discover fascinating truths in this fiction. I don't think he would have ever seen what he saw if he hadn't set out with that realization.

It's kind of like the discovery of the lost city of Troy. Okay. Everybody was trying to find Troy and,

through only sort of scientific sort of reasoning. And the guy that actually found Troy read Homer and he went into reading Homer under the assumption that maybe some of the things that are in this work will point me to finding the lost city of Troy. And within two years, he found it. And his map was Homer.

was the Iliad and the Odyssey. So he thought that there was truth in there, even if it wasn't scientific truth, or if it could have been truth disguised, but he went into it looking for answers and he found them and Girard did the same thing. I think of that as sort of like useful versus accurate, right? Yeah. So the idea was totally useful, but we dismiss it because it's not 100% accurate. So we just ignore it.

Well, Homer, he's not accurate, so he's probably not useful. And it should be the other way around, right? The true test of an idea is, is this useful? And under what circumstances is it useful? And the more circumstances, the better. Yes. And this is why people don't understand mythology, because there are truths in mythology, even if it didn't happen.

These are stories that humans have told to reflect some deep fundamental truths of human nature. And sure, some God didn't fall out of the sky and go chase somebody down. But there's some truths there. It's like Ken Kesey said, it's true even if it didn't happen. He's describing some things. There are stories that I could tell. It's like, well, that's true even if it didn't happen because it says something that's actually really true about this person.

And it opens up our world. It opens up our minds when we start to view everything as having the ability of revealing some truth to me, even if it's fiction. And I go into philosophers that I don't necessarily agree with most of the things that they say.

I have a lot of qualms with Heidegger, if anybody is listening, likes philosophy. But I go into him with an openness to receiving some truths, and there are truths, right? There are a lot of them. And that's just been a mindset shift for me. Approaching everything is an opportunity to learn. So Girard did this, and what he saw reflected first in the literature, right?

And then all over in the world around him and in history, in politics and social life is mimetic desire. And you ask, so what is mimetic desire? Mimetic desire means that a person's choice of an object is not determined by the object itself, but is fundamentally, or at least mostly determined by a third person or a third party or

which is a mediator or model of desire. So there's always sort of a hidden third party to the transaction that helps determine the choice of the object. While humans almost always convince themselves that the choice of an object is due solely to the objective qualities of the object itself.

This could be a pair of shoes. This could be a job. This could be a romantic interest. We convince ourselves that there's a straight line between us and the objects of our desire. And Girard calls that the romantic lie. He said that's a romanticized way of thinking about human desire, right? Like love at first sight. It's a very sort of romantic ideal.

And he said, Julius Caesar, I came, I saw, I conquered the romantic lie. And Gerard says,

A lot of writers are very romantic, right? Fifty Shades of Grey. I've never read Fifty Shades of Grey, but I had a girlfriend of mine show me a passage in it, and it was the romantic lie. It was like this desire is sort of stirred up in a heartbeat simply by laying eyes on somebody, right? I mean, Gerard said a lot of –

Poor sort of fiction and writers that are not accurately portraying human nature sort of lean into this romantic lie. The reason why Shakespeare is so compelling and why he seemed to sort of sense this deep truce about human nature, Shakespeare had never read Girard, right? But maybe he had a tacit knowledge about mimetic desire is because desire is shown to be very mimetic in a great writer like Shakespeare, right?

He always seems to write in characters that are models of desire for other characters. There seem to be mediators who mediate the value of an object or of a person to somebody else. So Girard had this insight from reading literature and then spent the next 40 years of his life

exploring the world. He was one of the most interdisciplinary thinkers that we've seen in a long time. There's only a couple other ones that I can think of, but Gerard was a real interdisciplinary thinker. And he began to have dialogues with people in different fields and then uncover the extent to which mimetic desire is a fundamental part of human behavior, a fundamental part of how organizations operate.

And that sort of formed this idea of mimetic desire formed the basis of his theory, which is called the mimetic theory of desire and the mimetic theory of human behavior. So some obvious examples of this are like shoes and Rolex and cars. What are some non-obvious examples of how this affects us? Things are the easy things to see, right? Why people buy things, right?

And Girard calls that kind of mimetic desire, acquisitive desire. You know, we're acquiring things or objects that

In the world that I come from, watches are the most obvious example. In any nice airport or first class or business lounge in the world, in any airport that I've ever seen, there are like a dozen brands that are modeled in the magazines. And you see those same dozen watches or brands on the wrists of a certain kind of man usually.

the object is just a tool, right? And that's why objects can be swapped out so easily, right? Girard said that the harder form of mimetic desire to understand is what he calls metaphysical desire. And it's a desire that goes way beyond any form of object. And it's where somebody basically desires the desire of another person, not what they have, okay? So it's a desire for desire,

I just saw an article in the, I think it was in the wall street journal about like Kanye, how like there's like a bunch of people, he's got his own fashion line out now. And there are a bunch of people that are, that are dressing like Kanye, but that's just for the, the, the things, right? I mean, it's clearly not, that's not where the desire ends, right? The desire is much deeper than that. And it's really a desire for, it's a desire to, to be a certain kind of person, right? It goes down to the level of identity, right?

And that's where when somebody has taken another person as a model, when the model changes their interest in or desire for something, are the objects that we're interested in change along with them? Because it was never the object that was the important thing in the first place. It's the model that was the important thing. So one area where people miss this all the time.

And here I'll tell you a personal story. So I actually lied to you when I told you the story about why I left investment banking. There was an important piece there that I left out. Somebody that I really respected that I worked with left a few months before I did to go start his own company.

I don't know how much that affected my desire to leave or my willingness to commit, but certainly it was a factor. I mean, the fact that I remember says something.

And I have to wonder, you know, if he hadn't modeled the possibility to me, if he hadn't modeled that desire and then done it, would I have done it or not? Right. So this happens a lot. And, you know, there's the hindsight bias where the stories we tell ourselves about why we made the decisions that we did very, very often leave out a model of

desire or a model of that behavior because I don't know because maybe it's some it's an affront to our independence to our rationality to our authority of being an independent decision-maker we don't necessarily as humans like to acknowledge the influence of a model of desire on us is it fair to say with Kanye and the clothing line that you know he's not selling clothes he's selling a lifestyle

And I want to be like Kanye, even just a small part of Kanye. So I'm going to mimic him. Or is there, is it deeper than that? And I don't see it. He's modeling a lifestyle, but I think he's modeling even more than a lifestyle. He's modeling a desire. And here's an, here's an easy way to think about that. Kanye is more than a role model. So a role model just models a role. They could model a lifestyle or a certain kind of behavior that,

but a role model is different than a model of desire. I can't think of a politician off the top of my head that is a role model for me because I don't desire the role to be a politician. So there's no, they're not modeling a role to me, period. But they could be modeling a desire. And the way that Kanye, I think, models a desire is this. If he totally changed his lifestyle,

If he switched and started modeling a completely different kind of lifestyle, different fashion, different beliefs, moved to a different country and started making country music, people would follow him there.

So it goes beyond the lifestyle because he himself is the model of desire and people desire the desire. So when Kanye's desire changes, the desires of those who look to him seriously as a model also change. So for me, that goes a little bit deeper than the lifestyle to the person.

Because long after Kanye is gone, there could be somebody else that comes along that models that particular kind of lifestyle as well or better than him.

But the people that really sort of take him as their model, they look to him. If he wants something totally different, they will follow. And that's the power of a model of desire. I think that's really interesting. I think one way to approach this is how would you go about creating a luxury brand, knowing what you know now about models of desire from scratch?

Well, one of my favorite examples of a luxury brand is Monocle magazine. You familiar with that? Tyler Brule.

No, man. I get like the community newspaper. That's all I read. Gotcha. Gotcha. I am sure that some of our listeners will be familiar with Monocle. Tyler Brule is sort of this lifestyle writer. He wrote a piece called The Fast Lane in the Financial Times for a few years. And then he left and started his own lifestyle media company.

And their flagship magazine now is called the Monocle. And it's got its own radio program too. And he sort of,

I wouldn't say that he invented it, but I've heard the term aspirational marketing used to describe what he does. The monocle has become a bit of a joke because you'd see jet-setting lifestyles. Everybody's really good looking. You'll see a typical article would be like,

You have to fly on this transcontinental flight. Well, it's really important to take care of your skin. And they'll show like a guy who's got like the perfect size bag with all the perfect size things in it. And that kind of

marketing is incredibly powerful, right? Like he, he's made himself into a, into a memetic model for a certain kind of lifestyle. And he's such a powerful model that he's managed to build an entire media company out of that by recruiting, um, other people that sort of fall into the same sort of flavor and type of model that, that he is. So, you know, get, if, if that's the kind of luxury brand that you want to build, um,

Staying true to this kind of brand consistency where you're sort of modeling an aspirational lifestyle to people that never seems to really change. It's not as volatile as it probably is for the people that are actually trying to live that lifestyle with their ups and downs and relationship problems.

you know, you make it seem like, you know, the most important thing you have to worry about is what facial creams that you use before you get on a flight to Europe or something. And I think one of the reasons that it works is that there's a really large gap between the kinds of things that he's modeling and I think his average readers. So the really interesting thing is that

a lot of the readers of Monocle, and I'm just using this as an example because I think it's a powerful one. So basically what I'm saying is that I would probably, I would probably follow this. A lot of those readers are, are, are not even close to living that kind of a lifestyle. You, you might think that they are, but that's, that's like the magic of it, right? That's, that's why it works. There's a far enough gap between,

That there's like it's it's what I described in the book as the difference between celebrity and freshmanistan So there's there's a big enough gap where it's like it's almost as if you're reading about celebrities, but they're not celebrities These are just people that live a certain lifestyle and that has a really powerful effect I think it's way more powerful than if he was too close to comfort to our own lifestyles, right?

If he's too close for comfort, then we sort of enter into the uncanny valley of marketing for a luxury good. It's the uncanny valley of like, oh, well, you know, this guy makes a little bit more money than I do and he's got this kind of a watch, but I could never aspire to that.

Because that's weird, right? Because then it seems like I'm competing with this guy. Whereas Brulee has created an entire brand that's so almost otherworldly. There's no self-reflection or self-accusation

involved in pursuing that lifestyle. And this is a, I don't want to go off on a tangent, but Seinfeld is very similar to this. I know this sounds totally unrelated, but the reason that Seinfeld is genius and the reason that it works is that

He's talking about these real things that we can relate to, these truths about human nature, but in sort of such an absurd way that it doesn't cause the viewer to see themselves in the actual craziness of what's happening. So it works because there's not any kind of self-reflection.

And I think there's, there's a similar principle at work there. It has to do with the space between us and the model. And that's why a luxury brand has to work really hard at always maintaining a bit of other worldliness from the readers. How has social media impacted all of this? Like it used to be that like, you know, we lived in a world where what you knew and what you saw was like your street, you know, a little bit more in your community, but

Um, but you, you know, if somebody got a new car on your street, it was like a big event and, and, you know, you saw it, but it didn't happen frequently. And now you, you open up Instagram or Tik TOK and, you know, people are on vacations all the time. They're flying around the world. They're taking pictures in front of cars that aren't there. So you don't even know it. You have access to everybody who has, um,

more resources than you do. And they're always living this lifestyle that like, to your point, there's a huge gap between where you're at and what you're seeing. How does that affect us? I asked my students to name their top five models of desire, the top five people that are influencing them. And I really encourage them to be honest and

And I'll get answers like this particular Instagram or TikTok influencer in Asia. I live in Washington, D.C. Think about that. I mean, yes, my dad, if I asked my dad what his top five models of desire were when he was their age, they'd all be people that lived in his hometown. You know, there'd be people that he went to high school with that, you know, maybe played on the varsity team when he when he didn't quite yet. They'd all be very familiar people. So what social media has done is

from a psychological perspective, has taken the desires from around the world, which people are modeling to other people in very curated ways, by the way. It's hard to know whether they even want some of the things that they're modeling or whether they're just getting paid to do that. And we know through anecdotal evidence that some of the people modeling lifestyles like van life,

are actually really miserable and depressed doing that. But they don't look like it, right? So they're modeling a desire that may not be the one that they actually have. It's taken the desires from around the world and essentially shrunken them down and put them onto the head of a pin, which we're all standing on if we're on social media. At least if we're big scrollers on social media and we don't have any boundaries, we're

Now we have billions of models of desire rather than a handful. And I just don't think that we've really come to grips yet with what that has done to humanity. One of the differences that strikes me from our current models of desire from your fathers per se is that

It's not people you know now. It's people you have no exposure to in the real world. You don't know what their character's like. You don't know how ethical they are. So do you think that that affects who we are and our identity of ourself too? And maybe the real underlying question is, does our thinking and identity also become somewhat mimetic? Identity is absolutely mimetic. We're relational creatures, highly relational.

And our identity is really formed in and through relationships. I don't form my identity on my own. My identity can really only be understood in relationship to the family that I came from, the friends that I have, my marriage to my wife, the relationships that I have. So I believe that identity itself is a highly relational thing that can only be understood that way.

And given that we're social and that we're relational and that mimesis is rampant, of course mimesis and mimetic desire plays into our very identity. Here's an important, I think, distinction to make. There are really two major types of models of desire in the world. And this comes from Rene Girard himself. He says that we have external models of desire and

And external models of desire are those that are outside of our world that we have no possibility of coming into contact with, whether because they live on the other side of the world, at least in an age before social media, or because they're historical figures.

or they just live in a different sphere. They're external to our world. And that means that there's no possibility of us encountering them or competing with them. The other kind of model is an internal model of desire. And an internal model is inside of our world, right? They're the people that we have the possibility of coming into contact with. Traditionally, that would be the people in our family. That would be the people in our community, the people that we work with

you know and it's why you know traditionally you know we we think of a lot of the the greatest conflicts in the world like world wars and things uh historically there's been more more internal violence than there has been external violence um

You know, genocides within countries, for instance. Most murders between people that know each other, okay, are inside families. So this is kind of a really, I think, important point to understand because the internal models of desire affect us differently than the external models of desire. They're a lot harder to recognize and to name, frankly, because one, they're too close to us for comfort, right?

Two, we normally don't like to identify them because we like to think of ourselves as independent. We don't like to think that the people close to us are probably the ones influencing us the most. But here's the thing. With social media, with modern technology, that line between the external models of desire and internal is all but gone because it's almost as if

everybody can be an internal model of desire. Now there are people on Twitter and social media that I've never met before that I feel like I know way better than I do. Right. That I can say are, are they feel like internal mediators of desire. Um, and that's just something to be aware of where, um, it's almost like a, like a game to be played. I think a lot of celebrities do it intentionally. I think it's one of the most powerful things that they can do. And I, um,

My conversation that I had with Peter Thiel when I talked to him for this book, he sort of mentioned this himself and said, it's really powerful when a celebrity sort of straddles the line between an external and an internal mediator of desire.

where they're really kind of an external mediator of desire. There's really not a strong possibility of you ever coming into contact with them or competing with them, you know, for the same spouses or anything like that, or the same houses, whatever. Yet,

It's really powerful. And, you know, Instagram and Tik TOK have, have allowed them to do this, making millions of people feel like they're more of that internal mediator of desire. You can DM them. That's, that's,

powerful, right? Because the internal ones are always the ones that were more, I don't know if obsessed is the right word, but they absurd us a far greater force on us because they feel like they're more similar to us. We can relate to them a little bit better. And we see glimpses into their private lives, right? So we feel like we're

In a way, seeing a friend write these Instagram stories where they're at a party and they're showing you what's going on, you almost feel like you know them in a way that you don't have any idea about them. Yeah, and we really don't until you walk in somebody else's shoes. And how often...

And we project so many things in life and project things onto other people without having any clue as to what's going on in their life. And that's one of the great dangers of social media for sure is that we project happiness onto other people who may not be happy at all.

How can mimetic desire help us understand why we're attracted to certain people more than others? Like don't pickup artists sort of like effectively exploit this or a hacker human desire? Yeah. What's the guy's name who wrote that? The art of the pickup. I forget. This book came out probably 15 years ago, but it's about that sort of secret community of pickup artists that lived in the Hollywood Hills. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the very specific,

tactics that they talk about in that book. It's got a specific name and I can't remember what it was, but it's essentially the idea of the wingman. It's the idea of if you really, really want to affect the desires of somebody, let's just say that you're a guy, you find a girlfriend and

And bring her into a bar or into some setting, but people there, other, other women there might not necessarily know that she's a friend. Um, and you know, she, she seems to be really interested in everything that you say really seems to be into you really seems to desire you, um, that will instantly sort of affect the way that the guy is perceived.

by the other women in the room. And in that book, they have ways to sort of like hack attraction. And that's one of the ways to hack it. I mean, they go so far as to basically suggest hire one of your girlfriends to like be an actor and act like you're the sexiest guy in the room, essentially, right? But it actually, it works because it's a way to hack mimetic desire.

And there's other ways to do that too, right? I mean, I think it's really unethical. I mean, they talk in that book about if there's somebody that you really want to talk to, sort of go talk to their friend instead, right? And then like stir up a bunch of insecurity and stuff like that. But all of these things, if you notice, they have to do with the mediator.

There's always a mediator. And this is the crux of Girard's theory, is that these mediators of desire determine attraction and desire for objects and people way more than we ever imagined. And another way to see this is in a breakup. Make a decision, hey, this isn't working. This is not the person that I want to spend the rest of my life with. It wouldn't be fair to her to stay with her. So end a relationship.

And a couple of months later, some really athletic, wealthy, successful guy who just thinks that she's the greatest thing in the world. And you start second guessing yourself like, geez, what have I done? Maybe I made a huge mistake. Whereas until I saw that, that thought never crossed my mind. Well, what's the difference? Now I have some model or mediator of desire that I didn't have before. It's

Two thoughts that sort of come to mind from that is one of which is do we need somebody else to want what we have in a way to validate it? And if that is sort of the case, then is the core of this that we're all afraid of wanting the wrong things. So wanting other people's things sort of like has this first pass filter where it's like, well, somebody else wants it. So then I have to want it and I'm not making a decision. And if I'm wrong, I'm not wrong alone, at least.

Wasn't that how a lot of fundraising works in the investment community? Everybody's terrified to want the wrong thing. I think you're really hitting the nail on the head. We want our desires to be validated. And if you've ever wanted something or someone and have a hard time finding anybody else that wants it, you begin to doubt yourself. We like competition.

in an almost a twisted way, right? I don't think the competition is a bad thing, but we almost use the competition for something to validate its worthiness. And, you know, when this comes to people, that's, that's not, not a good thing in the business world. I see it all the time, right? You know, I'm trying to raise money for my company and the first investor in objectively speaking on paper, this all makes sense to me.

Ask me, well, who else is interested? Who else is competing for the deal? Well, you're the first person I'm talking to. Take it or leave it, right? You're going to get the best terms. Well, I'm not really comfortable unless I see a second or a third investor come to the table. Classic example, I think, of this, where it brings an added level of validity to the

What we want or what we think. I think it has, I think it's, we rationalize it, right? And we say that, well, this is, it's like a totally rational thing, right? Where, oh, they're just stress testing my assumptions and things like that. But I just don't think that's the case, right? I mean, look at Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes, right? That wasn't the case with that.

You know, she essentially used mimetic desire and could point to models of like powerful models of people that had invested in her company to draw in other models. Now, I don't know how she got the first one, but, you know, the first domino is the most important one. So it works. It works on the way up and it works on the way down, as we see in her case.

Do you think there's positives to wanting things even if the things we want won't really fulfill us? Aren't our desires predictors of what we'll do and what we'll endure to get what we really want? So doesn't this whole human instinct towards mimetic desire really push us further to get off our butt, to do more, to persevere? I think that desire is a positive thing. It's one of the things that makes us human.

And that desire sort of oriented and channeled in the right way is exactly what pushes people to endure.

The desire for freedom has led many people to do heroic things, to fight for their country and to liberate others from tyranny and oppression. I would call that a pretty perennial desire, though. I think there are root desires. There are some things that I usually call thick desires.

in opposition to thin desires, which are the more sort of mimetic ones that can change on a dime. And I think cultivating those...

is important and finding out what those enduring thicker desires are begins to act as a bit of a hermeneutic for what to say yes to, what to say no to. You know, when we've identified the kind of like lifelong desire, let's say, that a person has where you actually want the desire to grow and get stronger. You want to reinforce that desire and

you know, to leave a certain kind of a legacy in the world. And that's an incredibly good thing. So one thing I really want to make clear is that desire is just, it is what it is. We're desiring creatures, right? I'm not really a stoic in the sense that I think that in general,

uh sort of like you like the two i think of desire like the the parable of the of the two wolves right you know we all have these two wolves inside of us that are kind of at war um the wolves representing desires and you know you need to sort of um find out which one of those wolves to starve and which one of those wolves to feed and it's not always easy to tell which one is which when it comes to the things that we want when it comes to our desires

So I actually believe that we should feed those enduring desires and that those enduring desires do ultimately sort of see us through the hard times. Talk to me a little bit more about those thick, you call them thick desires, but let's sort of like think of them as enduring human desires. What are we born with desiring in a sense? Like what's in our nature?

versus what's created after that from culture, our environment, and everything else? We have a desire for deep human relationships to know and to be known by others.

is, is fundamental. And I'm, and I'm speaking of the things that come after our hardwired biological needs, right? I mean, we're born thirsty and hungry and stuff like that right away. So, but, but after that, um, you know, this desire that every child has, right. To be, to be known, right. To be known and loved by their parents and, and, and to develop healthy relationships with, with other people and, and deep friendships, right. Um,

Certainly a thick desire that I think everybody has, right? You know, classic virtues. I think there's a reason why human beings for thousands of years have identified basic virtues as desirable, right? As things that contribute to human happiness, right? Aristotle's kind of, what is happiness? It's to lead the good life. And what is the good life?

It's to achieve excellence in these areas and various virtues to develop, right? Which is, I guess, if I come from a place where human nature is not an unknowable X, if human nature is an unknowable X, then this might not make a lot of sense. But if human nature is knowable,

And, you know, we can agree that it's better to be a temperate person than to not be a temperate person, right? Like a person that has the ability to moderate their desires. So when it comes to alcohol, for instance, right? You know, that's like I think of it as a muscle, right? I have the ability to do this thing. If I don't have the ability to do that thing, right?

then it will cause me pain eventually. And I go back to some of these classic examples because they're the things that will never disappoint when developed. I've never had a single person tell me that they've developed some of these classical virtues and are worse because of it.

But I think the desire to know and be known is one of the most important ones. You know, that's something, you know, we can work on. I suffered a lot during COVID, right? Just knowing people at a fairly superficial level on screens. And those are thick desires. But I mean, those are, I would say, universal, in my opinion, thick desires. But I think that each person has their own. I do think this can become highly personal.

And identifying those is really hard work, right? And can take a really long time. You know, I've identified, for instance, that one of my thick desires is to communicate and to write, right? And to communicate things that I think are important truths and to sort of sit at this intersection of these sort of different life experiences that I've had and to try to put them together and communicate them. I mean, there's nothing more satisfying to me

than to be able to do those kinds of things. And it's one that I'm sure that will never disappoint. Exercising that is insatiable. In other words, like I can never do it to the point of satiation. That's one way to determine, I think, a thick desire is are you ever able to satiate it? If you can't satiate it, there's probably something, a really, really deep well there that you can just continue to go down.

desires happen through both the external and internal or unconscious. And

our unconscious controls us in a way that we're unaware of, but just the nature of our unconscious, but we can use our conscious mind to construct an environment, right? So like one of the things that I've experienced is that you adopt sort of the habits and thinking of the people you're closest to. And this again, like this is at the subconscious level. And one implication of this is that you want to be very careful about who you spend a lot of time with,

But if we take that just a little bit deeper, you get to really interesting sort of insights, which is you can effectively choose your habits and choose some of your thinking by choosing who you hang around. And you want the default behavior of the group or people around.

You know, because it can override your individual desired behavior. So you can choose the model by choosing the people whose default behavior is your desired behavior. There are more implications, but how are you responding to that in your head?

Well, I think it's absolutely true. I talked to James Clear about this, and he's got a section in Atomic Habits where he identifies this as one of the most powerful ways to change your habits and affect your habits. I think that's why group exercise classes are really important for some people. So much of this is personal, though. Some people need more positive mimetic influence in

some domains more than others. So I think that our level of mimetic tendencies is domain dependent to a certain extent. I

don't like group exercise classes, right? I'm like a rugged individualist when it comes to the way that I like to work out. But my wife loves them and sort of needs them. And it really is the way to help her develop a positive habit of getting to the gym, right? Going to spin classes and going to CrossFit and stuff like that. Not for me. But there are other areas of my life where I need sort of like positive mimesis. You know, when it comes to

When it comes to things like reading and stuff like that and certain groups of people that I get together with and talk about ideas. Incredibly positively mimetic for me because they're constantly pushing me to think differently.

deeper about certain things, right? And that's why I think like getting together with them and probing really important questions and holding each other accountable is important. And frankly, I wouldn't do it on my own unless I'd surrounded myself by those people that also desire the same thing that I do. And we reinforce each other's desires. So desires are reinforced. And there are some desires that we want reinforced, like that one for me.

There are other desires that I don't want reinforced. And it's just important to know the difference between the two. But in general, I absolutely think that choosing in an intentional way the people that we're closest to is the most important thing that we can do to affect what we want. Something that you said, I think this is a critical point. So much of this is unconscious, subconscious, preconscious.

And the work is bringing it to light and being able to name it. I mean, being able to name things is a lot more important than we realize. It's important to be able to name emotions, um,

It's important to be able to name our desires. Most of us can't even name our desires. We just sort of vaguely want things. And the more accurately we can name sort of desires, I mean, Wittgenstein said like our universe is basically as big as our language, right? Like we don't have a word. We can't name something. We sort of don't, we don't really know that it's there. We don't know that it exists. We certainly don't have any power over it.

So naming our desires is critical and naming models is critical, both the negative models and the positive models. And I would bet that it's a lot easier

for most people listening to name your positive models of desire, right? It could be Warren Buffett as an investor. It could be somebody who models a great family life, whatever. Usually we can come up with those off the top of our heads. The negative ones are a little bit harder to name because it makes us uncomfortable. It strikes me that you can

identify your negative models, but just things that aren't moving you closer to your goals, your actual goals, right? Like if you can identify and name those sort of core goals. The other thought that I had there

and this could be completely wrong, was as you were talking about sort of like work to name it and label it, which is super important, what you're really talking about is recognizing and sort of reflecting a little bit. But then you take this and you do something with it in the moment, right? So in the moment, you have this discipline around it or you have this energy around it where you can choose to do something that your subconscious will later respond to. So you can automatically choose future behaviors, right?

before you need them by creating these sort of like rituals, by shaping your environment, by shaping who you hang around and who you think about, you can sort of like choose your future self. Yes. And they, they, they're sort of shortcuts in a way. There's a lot of, I think, embedded wisdom in the world that acts as a shortcut. So we don't have to figure everything out from scratch every day when we wake up in the morning and good positive systems of desire, um,

do that for us where we don't have to wake up every single morning and decide what it is that we're going to want or what's the most important thing to want. And again, that's why identifying the thick desires is important. Something else that you said is really important though. And this is, you know, goals and you know, how we can evaluate our goals in this way. I think a lot of this depends on what we're optimizing for and how,

We have to acknowledge that many times our goals themselves are the product of mimetic desires. The reasons why I choose the goals that I choose are the very product of a mimetic relationship that I'm in. And we don't talk a lot about that. It's usually about, well, here's how to achieve your goals and not enough about, well, how do we choose the goals that we're going to set in the first place? For the first time,

Couple of years more than that a few years of my post college life I would I had different goals in college. I was optimizing solely for financial success right and why was I optimizing for financial success well because everybody around me was optimizing for financial success and

What's the best job to get out of school? Would you go work on wall street? Cause bonuses are high. Everything I was doing was optimizing for that. So my desires were, were completely around that. The change for me happened when I, I identified different models who were optimizing for,

for different things. And that's sort of what allowed me to sort of change. So like optimizing for balance and the ability to develop healthy relationships in my life became a lot more important. But the goal changed in the first place because I expanded my universe of models. I looked outside of the world that I was in. Outside of it, I found different models that wanted different things.

that I thought were healthier things, things that I decided were ultimately going to fulfill me more. And it's not that I never optimize for profit or finance. I mean, I want financial success and security. It's just that it's not the, it's not I'm only optimizing for those things, right? Now it's just one piece of a bigger puzzle. It's something that I take into account, but it's not the most important thing.

It seems to me with habits that it's a lot easier to replace a bad habit with a good habit. We all think that we have willpower and we can just stop our bad habits, but I don't tend to believe that that's the case personally. It sounds like what you're saying is it's also the same with these models of success, replacing models that we're following. You want to replace a bad model with a good model. There has to be a greater good. I believe there has to be a greater good model.

in order to stop an unwanted behavior. If there's not a greater good, then the unwanted behavior just becomes a complete elephant in the room. I can't do this thing. I can't do this thing. I can't do this thing. And the more you start thinking about that, it just becomes bigger and bigger and bigger.

whether it's a temptation, just whatever it is. Whereas, and you're actually looking at the very thing that you don't want to do and it looms larger and larger in your mind. Whereas if there's a greater good, you've in a sense, you know, turned away from the unwanted path or behavior or whatever it is. And you're spending more time focused on the greater good. And if you think of the greater good as in terms of models of desire,

I think it works the same way. So, you know, you can, you can replace, it's not enough to just sort of get rid of the negative ones. There has to be a one that's more powerful in the positive sense to replace it. You have a good example around this with Claire, your wife and dinner. Can you share that with us? Yeah. I'm really bad at shutting it down for the night. Always have been, you know, I've been,

uh, an entrepreneur, sort of my own boss since I was 23 and I don't work normal hours. And, you know, when I get on one, when I get in the zone, um, I can work until nine, 10 or later. And, you know, Claire just doesn't come from that kind of mindset. She never had that lifestyle and food's always been a really important part of her life. You know, grew up having meals with, with the family every night. Um,

And in fact that she made that her career path, she got a master's in food studies and, and now works for a food company, but, but loves to cook. And, and,

When we started dating, and especially since we've been married, five o'clock, six o'clock rolls around and she'll head and start prepping dinner. And that's a positive enough of a model for me that, I mean, the smell of the foods helps a little bit. It's not purely mimetic, right? It's probably a physiological response that I have to that. But

I get up and I go and we do it together. And if I didn't have her modeling that desire for me, I don't think that I would have it. I think it's pretty fair to say that I wouldn't because I've been doing the same thing for 15 years and it took Claire.

For me to break what I would say was a pretty bad habit of me, like eating dinner sometimes at my desk. And, you know, and now we reinforce that in one another. You know, we reinforce that. We're now there's been times where now I've been the one to initiate it because it's so it's just part of it's been ingrained in me now for a while. Now I want to do it. And that's that's the beauty of.

of how this flywheel of desire works. When you begin to desire something in a positive, it's kind of like exercise or fitness, right? You actually want to do it and it's not hard anymore. You desire it and if you're not able to do it, you feel it, you feel the pain. Go deeper on that flywheel of desire. We have ways to set up our lives for success when it comes to desires. So desires are path-dependent.

And one desire can bring us, if we follow that desire, will bring us to a place where we're in a different position than we were when we started. It's kind of like evaluating past decisions, right?

I know you do this and this is part of the decision-making journal where you look back at the state of mind that you were in when you made a past decision. It's not the one that you're probably in today. So it's really important to sort of understand where you were at and why you did that. The same is true with your desires, you know, and I think it's important to actually sort of keep a desire journal in a sense, right? Like

If you're sort of keeping track of what you want on a daily basis and you see the way that your desires change throughout the course of a year or more or throughout the course of a decade, that's

You remember, you don't forget. Oh, I really wanted to explore that thing. Sometimes we forget things that we really wanted because we didn't, I don't know, life chokes them off, chokes off what might be positive desires all the time. And we forget it could just be a book that you really wanted to read and then you just forgot about it. So I think this is really important. So the flywheel of desire is understanding the way that your desires have a cumulative effect and

and how one desire leads naturally to another desire. Now, the easiest place, in my opinion, to see this is with basic wellness stuff. There are certain desires that I can feed tonight that will make it far more likely that I'm going to want to wake up tomorrow morning and have a very healthy breakfast and go work out.

So if I feel like shit tomorrow morning because I go out and pound five beers with one of my buddies tonight, I am not going to want to work out. Like we all know this, okay? This is just obvious. But if you actually map out a flywheel of desire, five, six, seven steps,

You'll and where the last desire kind of feeds back into the first one. Okay. So like whatever your goal is, you design a flywheel that makes it increasingly likely that you're going to want to do the next step in the flywheel. And this is highly personal. You know, I know what they are for me in different domains. I know what they are for me when it comes to exercise, you know,

I know what they are for me when it comes to going down bad spirals of frustration when I see things on social media. It works in the positive way and in the negative way. So this is just like catching yourself at the beginning stages of a negative spiral, where you sort of go to a dark place when you start reading things and hearing things.

But if you recognize that at the beginning and you catch it, that's a negative flywheel of desire. And when you think about these flywheels, you always have to know what the negative side is in order to know what the positive side is. That's the way that they work. So if you map these out, sometimes it's actually easier to start with the negative flywheel of desire than it is with the positive flywheel.

uh, flywheel of desire because the positive one is often just a mirror of, of the negative one. So, uh, I can think of one for me that's, um, you know, time, time management, you know, the way that I sort of my, my week works and our, our example of cooking dinner and taking a break is, is definitely a part of that. Positive desire for me starts with,

Um, positive time management at least starts with me going to bed at a decent hour and not, not staying up until one in the morning, watching something stupid. That's not going to improve my life. Um, getting up early, um, spending the quality time that I need first thing in the morning to read, um, and to meditate, um, to do those things, um, go for a run, um,

And then that naturally leads me into sort of the way that my entire work week flows and makes it more likely that I'm going to want to sit down and focus starting at 8 or 8.30, whether it's writing or whatever I have to do. If I haven't done that,

It starts sort of a negative spiral where I spend most of my morning thinking about when I'm going to work out, when I'm going to find time to read, when I'm going to find time to meditate. It just permeates my entire workday if I don't do it first. I usually take a break around lunchtime.

Um, the break is really important. Um, so sometimes I, I'll actually, um, just go sit in a, in a church near, near where I'm at and just spend a half hour just sitting there in the dark. I'm usually the only one there.

And that is a flywheel effect because the silence, just the total unplugging from everything, from social media, I don't, my phone's off, can't get ahold of me during that half hour. It's only a half an hour. The rest, the other half hour I eat lunch. Okay. So it's an hour break. That half hour of silence completely resets me, but more than resets me, it, it actually increases my desire to work for the afternoon. It's kind of like going for like a great, like lunchtime jog or something like that.

And that, that, if this affects, if I, if I do this, um, consistently Monday through Friday and then stopping at five, eating dinner with my wife, Claire, um, that affects the way that the rest of the night goes so that we're not eating at nine o'clock. And now I, like I said, I want to stop at five o'clock. The key word here is I want to, okay. Um,

For the first month of doing it, I didn't want to. I forced myself to do it. Now I desire it. It's funny how that works. You know, like sometimes we don't know what we want, right? We have to sort of orient ourselves in a direction that we objectively or intellectually know is good for us, but that we don't want. Like I don't want the things that are good for me. So sometimes I just have to do it and I eventually want it. It's kind of how virtues work.

And that sets up my entire week. The positive flywheel is by Friday, I don't want to spend my whole weekend working the way that I would if I didn't have that balance that I'd created in my, that that flywheel had created in my life. I won't want, I live in Washington, DC. We've got wonderful museums. They're all free. And now it's become sort of a habit of ours to go explore the city every

when we're in town on the weekends, right? And that's part of that positive flywheel of desire. That's what we want to do. You know, that's been constructed not just as they are habits, but habits are closely related to our desires because the habits that we're most likely to develop are the ones that we want to continue to develop.

effectively you want to do the things that you want to do when you don't want to do them. I have never heard that before, but I like that a lot. And I think what you're talking about really is if we eliminate the word habits and discipline and all this stuff, what it sounds like is the counterbalance to human nature is sort of ritual. Ritual is key. I think we're, we're ritual creatures and we,

And rituals, I think we all, we have a lot of rituals in our world, but I think we've lost a lot too.

especially rituals around like timekeeping. I think that was a big problem with the pandemic. I don't know about you or other listeners, but there was a time when my flywheel wasn't working so well during the pandemic, the one that I just described. And one day started to blend into the next day. And one week started to blend into the next week and one month into the next month. And that lasted for about six months for me.

And then I got the flywheel restarted again, which just took a gargantuan amount of effort, frankly. And it was painful. Just like it is if you haven't worked out for six months to go for a run. So I'm an outlier in at least the world of Silicon Valley in that I'm a pretty spiritual person. I'm a practicing Catholic. And I mean, obviously, rituals is a huge part of my life because of that.

And I think there's the lesson that I've learned in those rituals. I mean, like even throughout the course of the year, right? There are different seasons. That...

on a on a on an annual level on a monthly level and on a weekly level the rituals um matter a lot in terms of the way that i perceive time and my level of happiness when the time is all sort of blending together um it affects me negatively when i'm able to sort of step step away from things and gain perspective it helps me a lot you know i've typically built in a silent retreat um

into almost every year of my life for the last 10 years, totally unplugged for at least five days, someplace remote. And that's a ritual. That's one of the most important rituals. I've started to invite other people into these now. And I just realized how positive of an experience it is. And part of what that does is just gain

perspective on my life. It's usually the time of the year when I test my desires, I sort of reorient them. I take stock of, hey, did the things that I pursued, did they have the desired outcome? Did they make me feel the way that I thought they would? I go back and revisit decisions that I made at the start of the year. And that's probably one of the more important rituals that I've instituted in my life. But I think that the daily ones are equally as important.

Do you think it's fair to say what desire starts, discipline continues, and rituals cement? Yes. Part of the reason I like that so much. So what desires start, discipline continues, and rituals cement. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, because desires need...

more than desires in order to really grow and develop and mean anything. If we all just did what we want, first of all, it'd be total chaos. There's an objective. The intellect plays a role here. It's what I was describing. I know that this thing is good, even though I don't want it yet. I intellectually know that it's good, even though I don't want it

So that's really important. And that's where discipline comes into. So like, like think of, I think of when you said that I thought of a stool with three legs, you know, the desire alone is not enough. The stool cannot stand unless there's the discipline and unless there's the ritual. And one of the things that ritual represents for me is memory is, is, is memory, right? It reminds us

why we were doing the things that we're doing or why we wanted the things that we wanted and ritual is important for

cultural memory, organizational memory. It's important in our personal lives too, right? Like ritual is sort of a way of recalling some decision that we made in the past, right? And we call it to mind. And if we don't have those rituals, history can repeat itself in a negative way, right? We can just continue to make the same mistakes over and over. So a positive ritual, I mean, there are negative rituals too. There are like unhealthy rituals that people have in their lives, right?

But a positive ritual reinforces the desire and the discipline that we've decided is one that we want to nurture because we've decided that, hey, that's a thick desire. This is an enduring desire that I don't have to worry about disappointing me tomorrow or next year. I've decided to reinforce it through discipline.

And I think we naturally develop rituals. I don't even know how intentional we need to be. I mean, a lot of rituals develop in a relatively natural way that really form the third leg of that stool. Thanks for riffing on that. I find that really interesting to sort of think about. And it sort of like ties a couple of the concepts we've talked today about together in a neat package, which I think is sort of beautiful in its simplicity. Yeah.

Thank you. I think happiness is sort of like being satisfied with what you have, but often it's

We don't seem satisfied with what we have. And part of that is probably relates to this mimetic desire that we have for other things and goals that are on our own. And I think part of it is also we have a biological sort of instinct towards hierarchy. And part of that hierarchy is status symbols, whether it's sort of mates or goods in terms of shoes or cars or

How do you think about that? I don't think that happiness comes primarily from being happy with what we have, but being happy with who we are. I know people that are very, for the most part, are happy with what they have, but not happy with who they are. And I think the two things...

go hand in hand. If we're saying happy with what you have in the sense that you don't need more and you're not constantly dissatisfied with what you have, whether it's material things or with a spouse, you're just content with what you have and you learn to want what you have in a deeper way. That's a really important thing. I think learning to want what you have

is one way to say it. I think the greatest cause of unhappiness that I've seen are people that simply do not want to be who they are. The second part of your question was the last part, dominance hierarchies. Animals have a relatively stable dominance hierarchy. For the most part, once it's established, it's just there.

I just went to the Smithsonian Zoo in DC and we saw the lowland gorillas and there's like the silverback. There's like three of the other sort of like sub adult males, I forget their name. And then there's the females and it just doesn't change, right? I mean, like once that troop is established, it's just there. And in most of the animal kingdom, it's the same way. It doesn't change. With humans, it's not like that. So Gerard sort of realized that

We have a, I'll call it a liquid, um,

sort of given we sort of live in a liquid modernity. We have a liquid dominance hierarchy for the most part where it can really change, right? Depending on, you know, somebody could, I mean, there's people that have made tens of millions of dollars in crypto in the last couple of years, right? And change is the dominance hierarchy, right? It doesn't have anything to do with physical strength. So we're talking about status and the different things that contribute to status, wealth being one of them,

Physical traits, popularity, celebrity, things like that. But just due to the nature of human status, it can change practically overnight sometimes. I mean, I know that there are huge disparities between poor and wealthy that don't change overnight. But especially with social media and the ability of people to adopt new models instantaneously,

Um, we're constantly, we're constantly juggling the hierarchies that we want to be a part of or the hierarchies by which we measure ourselves. Okay. So let me give you like one example of this. Um, you could have, um, a few entrepreneurs that are competing fiercely, um, to grow their businesses, right?

And, you know, one of them is hyper successful. Another one, you know, has to shut down. And that entrepreneur who shut down his company, well, he could start another company or he could choose to opt out of the hierarchy of building a unicorn company. And he could choose a different hierarchy overnight.

And he could say, well, now I'm a family man and now I'm going to be the best like sort of dad out there. And I'm going to model what it means to be, you know, great father and a great husband or something like that. And, you know, it can just quickly, quickly slide into some like ridiculous, like different hierarchy. That's the constant. It's basically the same thing, right? It's just taken on like a different form. So that's, we all sort of have,

that kind of hierarchy of desire that we can move in and out of them really quickly. I have a whole chapter in my book about a chef that opted out of the Michelin star system. He basically told Michelin not to rate his restaurant anymore because it was making him miserable. And I realized in reading that story that we all kind of have a Michelin star system. Most of us have a Michelin star system.

And we can change the Michelin system just depending on like, you know, what system we opt into. And, and that's where things get tricky with dominance hierarchies is that they're very liquid because they, they, the models can change. Okay. We can just adopt a new model. And the scary thing is, and Gerard says this, he says the scary thing about mimetic desire is that if we adopt a model of desire, um,

we begin to pursue the things that our model is pursuing. Our model wants this kind of a lifestyle. We pursue that kind of a lifestyle. Let's say that we achieve that lifestyle and then we're sort of like equalized with that model and we're still not entirely happy.

Well, then what a human being does in Gerard's view is we assume that we chose the wrong model in the first place. Well, I'm not entirely happy yet. And I don't know what's going on. I must have just picked the wrong model. So what do we do? We just go pick a new one. And unfortunately, there's just, there's simply no shortage of models. They're basically infinite. And he uses this haunting line near the end of one of his books. I can't remember which one.

And he says, you know, man is like a creature that starts lifting over all of the rocks on earth, looking for the one thing he really wants and comes to find or comes to decide in his mind that the one thing that he wants must be under the only rock that's too heavy for him to lift. So it's almost a fixation, right?

with, or our ability to convince ourselves that what we want is the one thing that we can't have, which is basically a form of masochism, if you think about it. Totally. There's just so many thoughts that I have there in terms of like obstacles. And then we almost need obstacles in our way to get what we want. We need that sort of pursuit. And

the other thing that came to mind is, is sort of coming back to models for desire. If other people are models for desire for us, then we're models of desire for other people. And if we see ourselves as models for desire for other people, it makes us an exemplar. And if it makes us an exemplar, do we behave better just by recognizing that we are that model for other people, just as they are to us? We should. And it hits home for me in a real way because one of the, uh,

many hats that I wear is as a college professor, I teach a class called, it's basically an introduction to business. And I realized that I'm not just doing a knowledge transfer or an information transfer from my mind to my students. I am a model of desire for the students. Now they're watching me very closely to see what I'm doing and what I want even now.

And with that recognition that I'm more than just a person who's transferring information to them, that I'm a model of desire. And every teacher, I think, is in some way comes a ton of responsibility on my part, a ton of responsibility. I mean, my students subscribe to my sub stack. They're paying attention to everything that I say.

Um, and the things that I want. Right. And it's like, Hey, professor Burgess, like, you know, just the only thing he seems to care about is like making a killing in Bitcoin. I mean, they, that's, that's what they're going to, to, uh, you know, to, to, to see and, and, and maybe to want. So, um, you know, all of us are to other people. Um, I promise you that you're a model of desire to somebody that, you know, you don't even know that you're a model of desire for at this point, probably. I say that to everybody listening, um,

Some you know and some you don't know, but the point is the same, that we affect each other deeply. And I say in the very last sort of lesson that I leave off with in my book is live as if you have a responsibility for what other people want. And that doesn't mean that you determine what other people want. We have freedom of choice.

But we are social and we do influence one another deeply. You know, we are our brother's keeper to an extent, right? And we can't shirk the responsibility that we have. I mean, I think every parent knows that this is true when it comes to what their children want. We don't, I don't think we see it as clearly when it comes to what our friends and what our colleagues want. And, you know, I think oftentimes if there's somebody in our organization, let's say, and

who seems to want the, let's say, want the wrong things. Like let's say want something that's not aligned with mission or is consumed by some kind of a rivalry, just something that's just destructive. You know, it's just a net net. It's just not going to make anybody, not going to benefit anybody. The most important thing I think we can do

Rather than try to solve the problem through some kind of a top-down system or reorg or something like that or implementing new rules and policies, it's simply finding a positive model and putting the positive model close to them.

Or being the positive model ourself and seeing if that affects the behavior. It doesn't always, you know, but it's worth a try to see if that happens. And I've sort of learned that like my, my go-to is always, well, there needs to be a new model of desire in this particular place. Let's see if that, if that has a positive effect. Yeah.

And then we'll go from there.

But you also would feel the loss of it a lot more than the gain of getting it in the first place because loss aversion has to come in. So if we think of humans as biologically instinctive or all animals have this biological instinct towards hierarchy, the loss of that hierarchy, loss of our position in that is

So whether we're picking our own hierarchy or choosing one, or if it's like a work structure, like a demotion would be felt a lot more than a promotion. How do you think that impacts us? Yeah, it's extremely difficult. And I would argue that the chef, Sebastian Bra, who is the chef owner of a restaurant called Le Souquet in France, he's this guy that opted out. I would say that it was...

easier for him to opt out than it is for most of us to opt out of unhealthy systems of desire that we might be caught in. And I think it was easier for him actually. I don't think that his, he didn't have the loss aversion that we have because he'd already achieved the three stars. You know, in other words, it's like, Hey, I did this thing. I achieved what I said I was going to reach achieve. I've maintained my three stars for 10 years and,

Now I can opt out. He got a ton of positive PR for it. That's another story. And it actually benefited him. So it may not be the best use case because he didn't lose much business. There wasn't a lot of pain or sacrifices. There was uncertainty associated with it. I don't think he knew what was going to happen.

But it turned out that he was able to laugh about it. He didn't have the Michelin stars for that year. And the joke was kind of on him because Michelin came back the following year and said, oh, by the way, we decided it's not up to you. And we're going to put you back in the Michelin guide. And now you have two stars instead of three. And, you know, I asked him, well, how did that make you feel? And he just said, I laughed about it. And I will say, this man seemed incredibly at peace with himself.

But he laughed about it in part probably because he opted out. But I bet you if you look at the body, like if you look at the sample size of three stars that have gone to two or one, I bet you they're not laughing about it. No, they're not. And in fact, you've had people –

become suicidal from losing a star. And chefs work their whole lives and conform everything about their restaurant, from the menu to the look and feel, everything is conformed to what the inspectors want to see. So I think that's absolutely right. Because there was freedom in that. He made that choice. And if he hadn't made the choice, I think it would have been incredibly painful. Yeah.

So opting out of a negative system of desire without having to first win, I think is important to do. Now this doesn't, this isn't sour grapes. I think it's important to like understand that it's, it's not just sour grapes. Like sometimes the grapes are actually sour, you know, and, and, and sometimes it's, it's good to opt out, but I think it's harder if you're like on a track of,

And you change that track before you've achieved the pinnacle. And let's just be clear. I mean, three Michelin stars is the pinnacle in France for a chef. It's harder to do that before you've reached the pinnacle. So the question becomes like, do I hold out until I achieve the pinnacle? You may never. I don't know, win the Olympic medal or whatever it is, or decide that in the long term, now is the time for me to take this pivot. I know it's going to come with sacrifice and

But the good that I see in this pivot and in this different kind of life and desire that I'm going to choose to pursue, I think is ultimately in the long term going to lead to greater satisfaction than even if I pursue, let's call it the gold medal for the next 10 years. Even if I got it, even if I achieved it, I still feel confident that this path will have led to more satisfaction.

So I want to come back to something you said about being semi-masochistic. And why is it that we all seek out these obstacles? Does that make our accomplishments seem better to us or more worth pursuing? Because of mimetic desire, they make them seem more worthy of pursuit. Because our models become our obstacles. This is a really important part of what Girard was trying to say. His theory was not just a theory for why humans want what they want.

which is, according to him, mimetic desire, that mimesis explains why humans want most of the things that they want. It was also a theory of conflict. It was a theory of human conflict and violence, if you take it far enough, because the models that we choose de facto, they just naturally lead us into some form of rivalry, if you think about it.

If I take another person as a model and begin to want what he wants, I'm looking to him constantly as my model of desire to kind of measure myself, compare myself. And it will just naturally lead to me sort of taking him as a rival. I think there are positive rivalries. I give one example in the book between Lamborghini and Ferrari. It could have become negative.

But I think oftentimes we become fixated with our models and our models become obstacles. And like I said, if something is too easy to achieve, we start to doubt its value. And I think that's a big, it's a big mistake because some of the greatest things in life

are, are, are total, total gifts, right? I mean, falling in love, right? I mean, it's not necessarily like the girl that was the hardest one to get is not necessarily the best one.

Sometimes, you know, something just like some beautiful spontaneous thing sort of happens and, you know, it was like, what? She fell in love with me. I don't know why, but you know, like, I guess I'd better go find another one. Right. Cause I'm not worthy of this. You know, we, I think it comes down with what to think thinking of ourselves as unworthy of things to, to humans generally thinking of themselves as unworthy of good. And I think this is more, more common than we think. But from a Girardian perspective, we,

We like our obstacles. We're almost obstacle addicts because the obstacles determine the worth. You know, it's like the velvet rope in front of a nightclub is not there to keep people from getting out of line. It's there to keep people, sorry, it's there to make people want to get in line, you know? Um,

Um, you know, velvet rope make, um, I walk by, I went to college in New York city. Um, you know, so I, I've a lot of experience with this. I walk by, I see the velvet rope. It looks hard to get into. I want to get it, you know, back when I went to college, it was bungalow eight, man. And, and it's like, that was the hardest place to get into. That's the only place that I wanted to get into. And I'll be damned if I, I found a way to get into bungalow eight and I was very proud of myself, but why? I mean, it's,

were the drinks better? I mean, was it, I mean, I don't know. It's just like, it's just a funny thing where we're just very attracted to this because everybody else wanted to be there. Yeah. Well, the Zappos guy, what's his name? Tony, Tony Shea. You had a conversation with Tony Shea and asked him if he was ever going to get married. He basically asked you if you could prove to him that he would be happier if he got married. Can you walk me through that conversation and why it's haunted you for years? Tony and I became pretty good friends. Um,

back in 2007, eight, nine. And this is right around the time he was starting his downtown project in downtown Vegas. So I, I'd relocated my company to Vegas. He was right down the street from me. Zappos is right down the street from my headquarters. And we were spending a lot of time together and we were downtown Vegas, right off of Fremont street and a very popular little underground bar there called the downtown. And, and,

late at night and having a conversation about life. And I think this is around the time when I had begun to sort of, um, have sort of a shift in my thinking. I'd sort of, I've, I'd taken a spiritual turn in my life. And I think Tony was really intrigued by that. Cause I, I mean, in my mind, he was somebody that was really searching for, for something he couldn't find. And we started talking about marriage and, and I asked him if he was ever going to get married. And, um,

Yeah, his approach was basically a very empirical one. It was like, well, I need evidence. I need evidence that I will be happier married than not married. And I didn't really know what to say to that because the only thing that would have satisfied him was if I could somehow prove to him that he'd be happier. Now, happiness was kind of the driving force

sort of thing with Zappos, right? Their, their whole theme for their company was delivering happiness. His whole motivation for the building the company culture and starting the downtown project was, uh, to have happy people. And in my mind, he'd sort of made happiness into a, into a science. And to a certain extent, it can be measured, right? It's something that can be measured, right? But when it comes certain things like marriage, um,

Well, first of all, let's just say there's the idea of marriage in the abstract. Okay. And I think there are certain scientific studies that can show like

on the whole married people generally seem to express higher life satisfaction. But then there's like the marriage to a very specific person. And I think I remember saying, well, like Tony, like, I don't know what depends on who, right. And you could marry like, right. And like, this is not, it's not like you're thinking of marriage as this abstract thing, but like marriage is like actually to like a flesh and blood human. Um, so that's, that's one thing. And, um,

And I don't think that we can go about that kind of a decision through like a very sort of X's and O's sort of analysis, like, you know, we're designing, you know, a company strategy. I just think it's...

It's much more complex than that. Much more complex. I think tacit knowledge comes into play. Things like trust and mistrust, all of the things we were talking about at the beginning of this phone call. And like an amount of discernment comes into play. You know, spending time with that person through different ups and downs, right? And all of those things. And the fact is, you know,

you know, sadly he was never married and sadly he's passed away. But I don't think that he ever, if that was his criteria, he never would have been able to, right? Because there are just certain things in life where that sort of narrow understanding of reason and empirical evidence will never get us all the way. It would just sort of never get us to the point we need to be at. And, you know, with marriage also comes, you know, commitment. I mean, I guess, yeah,

I think some of the traditional decision-making criteria that we use and I have, having just got married in, in last summer. So it's been a little bit more than six months now. This is very real for me. I have, I made a commitment, you know,

And I can't sort of take out my sort of decision book at this point and be like, well, I sort of thought things would go like this and they went like this. All right. That wasn't the decision didn't quite pan out the way that I did. There's a whole nother aspect to this kind of the three stool thing that we talked about earlier. There was the desire.

That was the fruit of years of real reflection. There was tacit knowledge. There were objective criteria that came into play, clearly objective criteria that came into play. But then there's discipline. These are the daily things that we do that help cultivate and nurture our relationship. There's the rituals. And then there's simply the commitment that I made. And

You know, it was, it's sort of that conversation really haunted me because it was very much, I didn't really have kind of the view that I have now at the time. So it sort of caught me off guard and I've spent years trying to figure out why it haunted me so much. And I think it was because it was long before I was married. I think it was because I knew that there was something there.

there was something more to those kinds of like life commitments and decisions that we make that I would never be able to reduce to something that I could put on a plate and prove. And I mean, it comes down to call it what you want. Okay. Call it, you know, belief, faith, sort of like stepping out and making a commitment without necessarily knowing what the outcome is going to be. But really like leaning into it in good faith and,

And then you're along for this beautiful sort of journey of emergent possibilities and learning things and deepening your knowledge of another person and being known in a way that in deeper way than you've ever been known before. So the point I'm trying to make there is that the fruits and the benefits were

have been totally different than what I thought that they would have been before I did it. And I only know them because I did it. So there's sort of like these emergent, there's emergent knowledge, frankly, that relied on a decision. So, I mean, how often is that the case where we have to make one decision in order to learn the next thing or to even learn the benefits of that thing?

That's beautiful. I mean, it's sort of, it sparks so many ideas in my head, not only like not everything can be proved and the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. And so like, but you also have in my head going on is like Apple versus Google, right? Where Apple takes this very aesthetic, you can't prove that it's better. You can't prove the fact that there's symmetry in the motherboard in my iMac makes a better product.

And whereas Google takes a more analytical, purely analytical view, which is like which shade of blue gets the most clicks. And I think these things sort of like merge and you have to, they're on a continuum, obviously. I don't know if it's definitely either or, but I do think that there's some choices in life where you want to be sort of

maybe less rational about the evidence and more emotional where you're making relationship choices based on things that you feel more so than reasoning. Not to say that you shouldn't reason,

but that the weight of that decision might, the balance on where you are on that spectrum might change. Yeah. And that's just a layered approach. I sometimes like to call it layered thinking, you know, there's the rational layer, there's the tacit layer and there, there might be other layers and they're all important, you know, and we can't just make the decision based on, on any one layer, frankly and certainly the top layer. So I think we all have to sort of understand like what's our, our,

This is different than first and second and third order thinking. This is layered thinking. I think we have to understand like what's our top layer? What's our second layer? And maybe one of the better definitions of tacit knowledge would be when you call this wisdom, like embedded wisdom, when all of the layers just sort of become one and a person almost instantaneously is able to sort of see something. Yeah.

The conversation I have with Diana Chapman, we talk about this and through a different lens and instead of layers, she calls it the whole body. Yes. Which is when your IQ, your EQ and your BQ all align into the same direction. And then when that happens, you have a whole body. Yes. And I thought that was a really powerful way to think of it. And in the way that you're approaching it, sort of like when you're rational and your tacit knowledge line up in the same direction, then that is a form of a whole body. Yes. To you.

Yeah.

do things to us physically. And those are other little signs that go into a decision-making process that often, you know, we just overlook and we just misattribute to something we ate for breakfast or something like that. But oftentimes when we're faced with a, like a life-changing decision, it could be changing jobs. It could be making some sort of radical, um,

you know, risky decision, those, that kind of anxiety or whatever, very often manifests itself in physical ways. So when you said that, it just struck me as a really important and often overlooked, you know, the whole body. Yes. Right. A really important point.

I want to end with a question you've probably been asked a million times, but we often ask on the show, which is what is success for you? I am still figuring that out. You know, I wish that I could say that I had a clearly defined sort of vision of success. But the reason I don't is because it's changed so many times already. So I would be it would be stupid for me to think that it's not probably going to change again. It's changed many, many times.

Fortunately, I've attended some funerals over the last couple of years, more than I ever have in my life. I've read obituaries, I've listened to eulogies, I've given a eulogy. And in doing that, I've reflected a lot in what I would want people to say about me. So I think that's one of the things that has really brought this to light.

I certainly don't want it to be listing off my resume and the boards that I was on and the companies that I started. I don't think that, I don't know, I might hopefully have got 60 years left. I don't think that people will care or remember some of the little companies I started when I left finance. But really kind of the legacy that I left.

you know, the way that I loved. I mean, I think that ultimately that's the only measure for me is, is the sort of the, the level of, of, of charity that I show. I mean, not just within my family, but, but, but to others. That's, that's ultimately, I know it's related to that. And maybe that sounds too vague, you know, cause it's not always measurable.

But I think that, you know, I hope the number of people that I've been able to, that will be able to look back and say, you know, whether it's my students that I have now or people in my life, hey,

Luke Burgess affected my desires in a positive way or modeled this desire that I wouldn't have thought to pursue, but it made me look higher, made me look at expanded my universe of desires. That would be something that's incredibly fulfilling to me. Beautiful, man. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks, Shane, man. It's really good to be with you. Thank you. The Knowledge Project is produced by the team at Farnham Street.

I'd love to get your advice on how to make this the most valuable podcast you listen to. Email me at shane at fs.blog. You can learn more about the show and find past episodes at fs.blog slash podcast. To get a transcript of this episode, go to fs.blog slash tribe or check out the show notes. Can you do me a small favor? Go online right now and share this episode with one friend who you think would love it. Thanks for listening and learning with us. Till next time.