The Daily Stoic - Luke Burgis on Mimetic Desire and Getting What You Want in Life

Episode Date: June 5, 2021

On today’s episode Ryan talks to author Luke Burgis about his new book Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, the philosophy of French polymath René Girard, getting to the truth of what you should want in life, and more.Luke Burgis has co-created and led four companies in wellness, consumer products, and technology. He’s currently Entrepreneur-in-Residence and Director of Programs at the Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship where he also teaches business at The Catholic University of America. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife, Claire, and her crazy New Orleans cat Clotille.The new Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. You can add the Cover to any mattress, and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. Go to eightsleep.com/dailystoic to check out the Pod Pro Cover and save $150 at checkout.DECKED truck bed tool boxes and cargo van storage systems revolutionize organization with a heavy-duty in-vehicle storage system featuring slide out toolboxes. DECKED makes organizing, accessing, protecting, and securing everything you need so much easier. Get your DECKED Drawer System at Decked.com/STOIC and get free shipping.Talkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Talkspace lets you send and receive unlimited messages with your dedicated therapist in the Talkspace platform 24/7. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com or download the app. Make sure to use the code STOIC to get $100 off of your first month and show your support for the show.Ladder makes the process of getting life insurance quick and easy. To apply, you only need a phone or laptop and a few minutes of time. Ladder’s algorithms work quickly and you’ll find out almost immediately if you’re approved. Go to ladderlife.com/stoic to see if you’re instantly approved today.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoicFollow Luke Burgis:Homepage: https://lukeburgis.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lukeburgis/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/lukeburgis Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LukeBurgis/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music download the app today Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoke each weekday We bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics Something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage justice up to those four stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time.

Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wundery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward.

Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode, the Daily Stoic podcast. I've talked about Renas Gerard before. I talked about him in my book, Conspiracy. I don't remember exactly when I heard of Renas Gerard's theories, but they did suck me in and they're fascinating. And I think they're worth reading because they explain one of the most fundamental driving forces in the whole world, which is why do we want what we want? And what does wanting stuff make us do? Now, the Stoics talk a

lot about sort of desire and curbing desires. They don't get as much into the psychology, the sort of the societal forces, the historical forces that make people desire and crave this versus that, that suck people into conflict with each other, whether they know what the sources of that conflict actually are or not. So I was so excited that Luke Burgess reached out. He has a new book called Wanting, The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, which is I think the most accessible

and beneficial entry point into Gerard's theories. Peter Tio, who I talk about in conspiracy, is one of the sort of main proponents of Gerard's works in the world, I think a nonprofit, even that supports Gerard's works in the world, as I think a non-profit even that supports Gerard's legacy and work after Gerard died. But Peter Teo recommends Gerard's book, Things Hidden Since the Beginning of the World, which I have read, but let me tell you, it is not Marx-Relius or Seneca, it is not accessible, it is so dense. One of the densest hardest to read books that I've ever read. Luke's book, Wanting, is really, I think, a great entry point to it. I think he's

trying to do with Gerard's work, what I've tried to do with the Stoics, what my friend Russ Roberts did very well with Adam Smith and his book, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life. Anyways, I was fascinated to have this conversation shout out to Hristo, my former research assistant and now all around podcast genius who helped me set this interview up and did some prep for me. So if you if you you find that I'm more prepared than usual, you can thank Christo. Luke is a fascinating guy, not just a philosopher. He had a background in Silicon Valley.

He started a company as he talks about in the beginning and we talk about in the intro. Nearly sold that company to Tony Cheyenne's Appos. So he realized he was on a track that he didn't wanna be on and went in a very different direction in life. He's an entrepreneur in residence and director of programs at the Catholic University of America, where he also teaches business. He studied at the NYU Stern School and at the

Pontifical University in Rome, and he's the managing partner for the wall ventures, the startup incubator, and he lives in Washington, DC. He writes at lukeberges.com that's that's L-U-K-E-B-U-R-G-I-S, Luke Berges, and check out his new book, Wanting the Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life. I think this is a great interview. We really get into a bunch of topics. So here is my interview with Luke Berges on Mimetic Desire, René Gerard, and getting to the truth of what it is that you want and should want in life.

So I thought let's start with Gerard, and let's start with you sort of explaining Gerard's big theory and why it matters to people. Or should matter to people rather. Yeah, so René Jarrard is a French polymath. He was a professor at Stanford for many years, but he's one of those rare people that didn't really have a specialty. He was kind of, you know, studied history and then he got into literature, philosophy, even theology, and stumbled on a discovery about human desire that really changed his life.

And we should all be concerned with his discovery because human desire is just fundamental to who we are as human beings, it's one of the things that really differentiates us from animals. We want all different kinds of things, and it's fascinating. We can talk more about the way that desire works, and that was just fundamental of discovery. Is that desire is not the way that we normally think of it in terms of being independent and autonomous. That my desires are entirely my own. Gerard's discovery was that desire is mimetic, that is to say, we are infected by the desires of other people, desire is contagious,

for better and for worse. So desire is infectious and it's contagious because human beings are highly relational creatures, we're social, so the people around us affect what we want. And there's this very, it's very different than the way that a lot of people I think think of it. This idea that became very popular in the middle part of the last century, that existence kind of proceeds essence,

that we're born into this world, and that we decide what we want, we decide who we want to be, and we just kind of precedes essence that were born into this world and that we decide what we want, we decide who we want to be, and we just kind of fashion that. We can't do that because by the time we've already begun to desire a certain identity or certain things, we've already been exposed to what other people want and other people around us. So this idea of mimetic desire is kind of the starting point of a lot of different connections that Gerard made to our culture, to the way that people's identities are shaped, to the question of arrivalery and competition, which has impact in the way we think about economics

and markets and politics, all kinds of connections. He even went so far as to say that memetic desire is kind of the root of conflict. It's actually explains violence, which is most people don't think that the root of violence could actually be imitation, this idea that because we're imitating what other people want, we're naturally pulled into rivalries with them. And, you know, Gerard, if you take a theory far enough,

I don't really like to try to give it all in one nugget because it's so much to take in, right? That eventually leads to ways to resolve that violence through scapegoating and things like that. Well, and what's fascinating about Gerard as a philosopher is that he doesn't sort of discover this, you know, as a psychologist, as a sociologist, it's not this sort of deeply specialized academic study, it comes really, as I understand it, from his sort of deep reading of classical literature. Like, he derives Memeces from some of the great novels of history.

Yeah, isn't that how we discover a lot of great things is when we're kind of outside our domain of expertise and we can bring a different perspective to it. So that's absolutely right, Ryan. He discovered or saw a medetic desire in classic literature. And I think it's just because, you know, Gerard was a genius in the way that we don't only think of geniuses in this way, but it was almost a genius of human nature and being able to see certain aspects of humanity that nobody else could see when people over intellectualized things. So all of the popular literary critics of his day kind of missed this fundamental insight that he had by bringing his historian and anthropological lens to classic literature.

He noticed that a lot of the characters and some of the greatest novels in history, like Dostoevsky or Brothers Karamazov, the characters were highly mimetic. If you follow their arc through these stories, they never have any desires just spontaneously. We have this idea of spontaneous desire, but Gerard saw that these characters and the novels had their desires modeled to them by other characters. And that if you kind of trace that path, this is the way that the story takes shape through the way that their desires are modeled. So sometimes literature reflects back to us deep truths about life and about human nature

that we're almost too close to see in ourselves. And that's the beauty of reading fiction and reading great literature. And Gerard saw it there. And then he began to look other places. He looked around him, he looked at phenomena in the culture, he looked inside of himself and he realized that there was this fundamental deep, deep truth that he was able to spot. So if we're sort of surmising Gerard's theory and I did this pretty quickly in one of my books, I'd sort of do it as, it's not, we don't want what we want, we want what other people want, and to use the title of your book,

it's this wanting, this sort of memetic desire that is the source of a lot of misery, also a lot of conflict, but it's also just this sort of unknown, unexplored driving force through history and humanity and relationships, and that the better we sort of understand this, the more likely it is that we can get to the actual truth of things rather than just acting on, you know, what we think is the truth, but is actually this sort of memetic or filtered desire, this reflection back to us of what we think we want,

because the people around us want it or have always wanted it. Yeah, absolutely. And imitating other people's desires is not very palatable to most people. We don't really like to think of ourselves as imitators at all. That's why this is really hard to get at.

People typically understand this at an intellectual level way before they understand it at an existential level. And this is a question of identity. And Gerard would say that memetic desire ultimately is about us wanting to be a certain kind of person. We're seeking equality of being. That's why we pick the kind of models that we pick. So I was, Ryan, when you were probably We're like seeking a quality of being. That's why we pick the kind of models that we pick.

So, you know, I was, Ryan, when you were probably writing your first book, I was at an age when I was just trying to pull myself out of this deep muck of some really nasty, memetic desires. And I just didn't, I'd never heard the word. I hadn't even heard of Gerard at the time. But I just couldn't make sense of, I was a striver in many ways I still am, and hustle culture, I was a prototypical entrepreneur, I was on the hyper-mimetic track

from good undergrad, business school, the Wall Street to Silicon Valley. But I was caught in these cycles of like great passion followed by disillusionmentment and I didn't really understand Why but I was just surrounded by other people that were constantly signaling different things to me at different times for Status whether it like appear in some kind of a cool entrepreneurship magazine or make some list or Telling me about what their companies were doing and what they wanted

to do. And what I didn't know at the time is that they were greatly affecting my desires. And it was like Whiplash. Like one day I'd want one thing. And the next day I'd want another. I started a company. I lost the desire to go into my office every day.

So realizing that a lot of our dissatisfaction and our confusion and the things that we pursue may not in fact be what's going to truly lead to happiness, right? Because we haven't had the time to understand the origin of our desire. So one of the first steps in becoming a little less momentically reactive is just actually taking the time and it took me until my mid-late 20s to do this. Like, where did I get the desire to do this thing or want this thing in the first place? Like, what's the origin of that? And probing it a little bit. Because there are great models of desire. I think the Stovacs are a great example of that.

You know, they model a certain way of being in a certain kind of humanity. They certainly were my models at the time. All of my models were what I would call horizontal models. They were just basically other entrepreneurs. It's like how do you ever get out of a certain cycle when you're in that world? Yeah, I think I was just doing a video about this about what it's like to get what you want in life to accomplish something.

Your book's the best seller. You sell your company or you start a company or whatever it is, you accomplish something. And then there's always this sort of disappointment that comes when you get that. And I think part of that is because material accomplishments, external things can never sort of fix internal problems,

you know, materialism, material items never really sort of deliver what you think they're going to deliver. But I also suspect a large part of this is we realize at some fundamental level that we just got something that we didn't actually want to begin with. We only chased it because that's what you're supposed to want. That's what everyone else has said is good. And it's only after spending

years of our lives or all of our time, all of our money or whatever accomplishing it that you go, oh, I don't even, I don't even like this. You know, I just bought this sports car, but I hate, I don't care about driving. None of this is registering with me in any way, we get that sort of refractory wake up call and regret because it wasn't our desire that was drawing us towards it. It was this mimetic desire, kicked off by people and forces we never really questioned. Totally. I think we have thin desires, which are these highly mimetic desires. And when we pursue them, perhaps because there's somebody in our life that we really admire or somebody that's

had some success with a book or something like that, and we adopt this desire. It's an adopted or bar or desire. And somewhere along the way, we really convince ourselves that the desire is entirely our own. Without having actually taken the time to do the self-examination and understand those thicker desires that really do make up kind of these perennial human desires, the things that we know lead to happiness, the things like the pursuit of truth, you know, philosophy, faith, truth, philosophy, faith, meaningful work, friends, family. Those things can be mimetic too.

The desire for those things can be mimetic in a tremendously positive way. I've had great models in my life of good husbands and good fathers, and I want to be infected by the desire to be more like those men. It's a matter of distinguishing between what are the unhealthy, mimetic influences and what are the positive ones? And then be more intentional about picking models. Yeah, there was a great tweet I saw a couple months ago

that was like saying that every NBA player now wants to be a venture capitalist. And every venture capitalist seems to want to be a stoic philosopher. And the joke being, and this has been true in my experience, you meet these people who are at the top of this profession, or that profession, or seemingly accomplish all the things that you would think you would want to accomplish in life. And really, they, all they actually want is to do some other thing that they think, either it's because they chased a memetic desire and got somewhere that they have no interest

in actually being and their sort of real core purpose is this other thing that's only now are they sort of coming to terms with. Or it's this sort of moving of the goalposts where they can never want what they have. They have to want what somebody else has. And I always, this is weird to go to your point about some positive mimetic desires. One thing that reassured me and reminded me not to stray too far from my path as a writer, because you know, you do get these other opportunities, is how it doesn't matter whether I'm meeting like professional athletes or billionaires or political leaders deep down, they all seem

to want to be writers. And it's sort of going like, okay, if everyone wants what I have, why am I trying to want what they have, I should just actually enjoy this. Yeah, absolutely. Well, the irony of it is that there's always another model. You know, desire by its very nature is for something that, you know, we don't possess, really. At least in Gerard's definition. So the irony is that if you follow a model and you pursue what that model is pursuing and you get the thing, then you have to find another model because maybe you're not entirely fulfilled yet. Are you assumed that you chose the wrong model and the world is filled with

billions of them? You have to wonder what social media is doing because for me social media is just a model machine. It's just a way to find them in five seconds by opening up your phone. And there's always going to be another one. And if we don't find a way to break that cycle, it's just that constant, never satisfied, striving. And absolutely, I mean, there's an element of like wanting what we have, right?

Whether that's being a writer or whether it's your marriage or something like that. And there's a beautiful aspect of learning to desire more deeply the person or the things or the career that you already have. It's not like once you have it, you know, desire is static or you know, so there's always, you can always go deeper into it and that's certainly the case with love.

Just to your point about being a writer, right? Like other people aspire to do that. And it kind of makes you stop and say, I don't know right, I mean, I don't know about you. But I have days where I'm like, yeah, you know, I just wrote this book and what a hard life is. It's one of the hardest things I've ever done. You'd be like, well, I've got NBA players

that would like to write a book. Sure. So you can go a little bit deeper down into your writing, I think. We've got a quick message from one of our sponsors here, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. Ah, the Bahamas. What if you could live in a penthouse above the crystal clear ocean working during the

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goes like, think about how badly you would covet the things that you have if you didn't have them. And I think that that's sort of what you see in a lot of these people is that since they have what they have, they're taking it for granted, and then they're wanting all this other stuff. Instead of going, look at everything I have, look at how much this is, look at how much this is more than I could possibly need.

Look at all the ways that I have to be creative or fulfilled or have impact or make a difference with what I'm doing. Instead, they just see this sort of grasses green or well, it looks like writers are having a great time. It looks like so-and-so's are having a great time. I suspect that this is, for instance, why influencers are so popular. It just, it looks like whatever field they're an influencer is.

Like, you know, I follow like farmers who are influencers, I follow writers who are, like, you follow these people who have large social media, and what you really are just looking at is going, I think their life is better than mine. And so I want their life not my life. Yeah, and we don't know anything about their real life. You know, we just know what's being represented or projected to us.

Like I follow the guidelines. It's filtered through an algorithm. It's filtered through an algorithm, and not only the algorithm, but also filtered through what they want to show us. Totally. So let's talk about, I guess what you might call the sort of the great, the most influential acolyte or sort of evangelist of Gerard's theories, someone who we both spent some time with,

and I've liked your scene in the book about sort of that is House in Hollywood, where I've been a few times, and when I was writing my conspiracy, Peter Teo seems to be largely the reason that Gerard is, I don't want to say relevant, but has sort of the reach that he does, particularly in Silicon Valley. Yeah, I mean, I always ask people that are familiar with Mamedic theory, how they discovered it, and it depends on where you're at. If you're in Silicon Valley, I feel like nine out of ten people will say Peter Teal. It's like, or two or three degrees of separation from Peter Teal. If you're in other places, they may have discovered him through other means.

Yeah, but Peter has really made Gerard well known, and a sighted Gerard as being highly influential in forming his own thoughts. Peter was on a very hypermimetic track early in life, and he describes Gerard giving him some keys to understanding the world and some of the things that were happening during his undergrad days at Stanford where Gerard was never actually his professor, but Peter kind of found out about him and went to some lunches and things where Gerard was talking and really helped him at an existential level as well. Now, you know, for better or worse, you know, people have kind of like, usually people

have reactions to Peter. And I think he's got a brilliant mind. He's applied Gerard's insights in a particular way. He's cited Gerard in helping him understand how powerful Facebook would be. He's formed some political philosophy around Gerard. But I would point out that Gerard is rich with all kinds of insights that are seminal and can be applied in very

different ways. So I interviewed Peter for the book and we had a fantastic, fascinating conversation about Gerard. But sometimes I worry that people will read zero to one or they will see Peter's interpretation of Gerard and think that it's the only one? Yeah, it's funny. I had a joke to a friend once that perhaps like the ultimate way of proving Zerard's theory, but also trolling everyone, could be that Peter has taken this philosopher who's incredibly dense, one might argue, is completely abstract and sort of not practical. And by being a famous sort of billionaire technology investor and saying, Gerard's theories are important,

I'm a big fan, has made them mimetically relevant. Yeah, well, that's the funny thing about memetic theories that Peter himself is probably a model for thinking that memetic theory is important and cool. It's kind of a joker among Gerardians, like the people that maybe are most attracted to mimetic theory may be like just more mimetic people by nature or something like that.

And Peter has had a huge influence on that. I doubt that if he was a billionaire, people would care as much about this obscure philosopher at Stanford. I do think Gerard's thinking is very important. I'm glad that there's a Peter teal to draw more attention to his thought. One of the things that I wanted to do in the book

is just kind of broaden the audience and try to connect it a little bit more to popular culture and to relationships So that it's not just about You know, here's how I can invest and make a bunch of money in Bitcoin or framed in just certain kind of tech world Framing I think you did I mean your book in Spiracy. I don't know. I'm going out on a limb here But I'm guessing it's a limb here, but I'm guessing it's probably not the book that most people, you know, know you for sure also probably seems like it was the hardest book to write. That's just me as a reader. But I

definitely, yeah, but I mean, I think it's really, really important because you without really talking a ton about memetic theory explicitly in the book, you are getting at the way that rivalry plays out, that scapegoating plays out, and you presented a different side to Mimetic Theory than what Peter did in Zero to One. Yeah, I'm glad you wrote your book because you do make Gerard much more accessible, and as someone who is in love with the Stelix and the writing and sort of writes about philosophy

without a philosophical background, I don't think there's any way around the fact, around the truth that Gerard is not particularly good at writing for an audience or for just like coming out and saying what he means. I mean, is it a thing hidden since the foundation of the world? Is that the one I'm forgetting? I've read a couple. Is that the one where it's like presented as this fake dialogue between him and like two other unknown people? Which one is that? Yeah, that's things hidden. In fact, several of his books are in the form of dialogues,

which I think is really interesting, but yeah. Yeah, I like dialogues, but this is like, what the fuck are you doing? Just write it as you. You know, if like there is a sense of like, like just not being straightforward and accessible in Gerard that I find frustrating. Yeah, I mean, that book is very hard.

I think it's brutal to read. And I studied philosophy formally. And from what I hear, like Peter recommends that is like the starting book for Gerard. I don't know if that's Jesus like trolling people or what. I mean, I would never recommend that to most people at least, as where to start. It's extremely obscure.

I've read it like 10 times. And I still am confused by some of the stuff in it. And it is written in this weird kind of like form of a dialogue. It jumps all over the place. It's kind of like strousey and you have to read between the lines. And Gerard, I mean, let's be honest, and he's an academic and he's got a very odd kind of obscure style where he never does seem to say what he means. And I think part of that's because that was one of, that was an early book and I feel like he's like working out what he's trying to say in the process of the book or the conversation itself. Yeah, I think there's that's part of sort of French philosophy too, which is there's almost this like, well, if I just come out and say what I want people to do and how this works, then I'm not being the brilliant sort of French academic philosopher and then, you know, I don't know, the world will collapse. What I like about

this, though, is it's like, you could not reduce the equation any further, right? Like, it's, if the fraction is simplified to the smallest possible form, whereas with Gerard, there's so much that has to be simmered down to get to the actually quite insightful and important sort of conclusions that he's coming to. Like it's weird, I was thinking even, and I went through this, I read a moro book

recently as well, where like, how do you even quote one of these fake dialogue books? Like, who am I attributing this to? Is this Gerard, or is this Gerard arguing with himself? Is it all Gerard? Are these two people in this dialogue? Are they real or not? You know, it's like, what is happening? I can't even make heads or tails of it. Yeah, absolutely. It's a weird format. And it's in a sense, it's like really the opposite of the Stoics in terms of the practical applications. I mean, Gerard almost never tells anybody like what he recommends they actually do. Right. Yeah. It's like, you know, you read this

book and you've got to just kind of like figure out like what this means. It's like, what does this mean for how I live my life? I mean, it's like so different than reading like meditations by Mark's rail, yes or something like that, where you actually get practical advice. Sharar does not like that. I tried to fill that gap a little bit with wanting and like giving some recommendations, some things that I did, but at the end of the day, I mean, if you want to become a less rival or is person, for instance, and have a little bit more peace about you, the way that you do that is going

to probably look a lot different than the way that I've done it in my life. So you can't hand people like an instruction manual. There is an element of assimilating this into your own life and figuring out what this means about the way that you're in relationship with your models. Yeah, there's almost kind of a test of the theory in the books, which is like, you, Sherard has all, you know, he's a Stanford professor, he's, you know, widely perceived to be brilliant, he's got Peter Tiel advocating for him is, you know, you could argue with the ideas, have never been sort of more verified in some ways with some of this stuff that's happening in the world. And then you as a person have to go, is this nonsense or is this real? What do

I think has the individual regardless of what other people are saying? Because if you read Gerard and you go, I don't get this, but obviously it's true because Peter Teal says it's true. In a sense, you're proving Gerard, but you're also disproving Gerard and you go, I don't get this, but obviously it's true because Peter Teal says it's true. In a sense, you're proving Gerard, but you're also disproving Gerard and the validity of Gerard, it's credibility, do you know what I mean? Yeah, I think I do. I think I know what you mean. I mean, I do think we can sort of verify in ourselves if we're honest and courageous enough to do it. We can kind of verify that, yeah, like I do have memetic desires, you know. When we get into like different levels of abstraction

and we see like what's going on with so-called, like cancel culture, you know, we see what's going on with social media, then it's a little bit, you know, to the scapegoat mechanism, for instance, if we're going to draw a connection between a cancel coach, then it becomes a little bit trickier because you have to, like, there are so many different, like, steps that you have to take in memetic theory to get to the point where it all kind of comes together and you can kind of see some of the things that are happening through that lens that, you know, you can't, it's just not like a meme.

And there's like a lot of work involved in that. So to just tell somebody like, oh yeah, it's a scapegoat mechanism, right? And it's bloodshed way. They're like, well, I don't fucking know. Like maybe it could also just be like, you know, people just, you know, being bad people. So I think, I don't know, I think we're saying a very similar thing, right? Like to what extent can this be verified? I do think it can be verified at sort of the phenomenological level, the easiest in terms of our personal lives. Well, it's kind of like one of those critically acclaimed sort of art films where you have to go watch it

and it may well be that it's just a horrible overhyped movie or it may be that you have to get yourself in the right head space. You have to have some of the background, if to done some of the pre-work, and then you watch it and you're like, oh, this is a claim for a reason. And it might not be as obvious or as immediately accessible

as the latest sort of Marvel movie, but there's a brilliance to this that is even perhaps even more profound. And it's just not as easily appreciable. Yeah, I think that's right. You know, when you go into, when you can see something with a different frame, it can really open your eyes to different layers of meaning. I mean, that happened to me with the big Lebowski. I think like the first five times I watched, I was like,

oh, you shit, I keep seeing different things in this movie. It's actually funnier than I thought it was. So yeah, and I think I've tried to put the focus a little bit back on the existential level, because that's where the rubber hits the road for me. Like, how can this actually like improve our lives? And the one of the issues I see with memetic theories that you have a lot of people that just like to talk

about memetic theory, on this very intellectual and abstract level, which sort of sometimes makes me wonder if it's just kind of like this. It's become a medic in itself, almost, right? Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. Yeah, I mean, what I appreciate what you said earlier

is there's a way you take this philosophy and you use it to like either manipulate people or make a little bit more money. And there's an aspect of sort of my popularization of stoicism philosophy and you use it to like either manipulate people or make a little bit more money. And there's an aspect of sort of my popularization of stoicism that people criticize where it's like, oh, this is just, you know, philosophy for bros or something. And I think actually it's there to make you a better person. And it needs to be made accessible because in its original form, it's not quite accessible

to people. But the idea for me of a medic desire and understanding is that it helps you make better decisions and get clarity about things that you see or hear in life. So like what I found with Peter Tio and I was writing conspiracy is that people often label him as contrarian. And that this is actually incorrect, because a contrarian just does the opposite of whatever people are doing, right?

Like so, I don't know, Diodgeny's the cynic is sort of a contrarian, is just sort of acting a socially all the time. What I found to be true about Peter Teal is that on a lot of big questions, like, you know, kids should kids go to college or, you know, stuff like this. Instead of just taking it for granted and agreeing with everyone else, the sort of, of course, everyone should go to college. College is very important. This is a question we've worked out as a society.

Peter takes some sort of quiet time and sits down and he just actually figures out what he thinks. Now, it is the case that oftentimes he has sort of a heterodox or unusual take on these things, but it's not that he's reflexively rejecting what other people think. It's just he took kind of a sacred cow that everyone assumed was something you can't think about originally and came up with an original take about it.

I think that's right. I mean, you can be highly mimetic and be a contrarian. If, you know, like everybody else is like looking for the keys in the only spot where the light is, so I'm going to go look in the dark. That's probably a really good investment strategy, but not all the truths in the world are contrarian. There are some truths that are actually like perennial truths. If we think that the truth is always kind of like contrarian and like the thing that nobody else is saying, and that can lead us down some super like silly paths that I think we see a little bit in academia right now. So, like, not everything is contrarian. And you can also be like, well, Peter Teal is this contrarian. So, you know, I need to be contrarian.

And therefore, I'm just going to like to have a different take than everybody else. You end up just being supermimetic that way. It's kind of a funny thing. So I think what he does is what is positive there. Just the category of being a contrarian, we could talk about the metaphysical desire to be a contrarian. Why is that a positive thing? What he does is he takes critical distance from issues without getting caught up in everything that the crowd's saying.

And I do think that's really important to do in life, to be able to think a little bit more independently, to not be able to get sort of like caught up in that mimetic moment. I don't know if anybody else has had this experience. I live in Washington, DC, and like sometimes they'll be walking down the street, and somebody will like, accost me and like, try to sell me on something or some new bill that's going to be passed. And you can like, almost like, get swept up talking to them and like, agree with them.

And then you walk away from them, and you're like, a couple of minutes down the sidewalk, and you're like, wait a second, what in the hell was he just saying? Like, I don't agree with that at all. It's like, it's like being able to have the self possession and the critical distance when everybody else is going one way, just to actually, it's not about being contrarian,

it's just about like taking the time and creating some critical distance so you can figure out what in the heck you actually think about this thing. Yeah, this is something I talk about in my book on stillness, the idea of not getting caught up, not taking the emotional reaction, not thinking what everyone else is thinking, but really stopping, go, yeah, what are the facts here? What are my beliefs?

Why do I have those beliefs? What is this outcome likely going to be, you know, and just thinking about it independently? So I wouldn't say that Tio is a contrarian thinker. I would say the compliment is that he's an independent thinker. Now, do I often disagree with the conclusions he comes to independently? Sure. But that's sort of the point is that we should all be independently thinking and not necessarily working towards some sort of consensus. If everyone is agreeing, then it's likely that we're not doing much thinking at all. There's probably a lot of mamesis at play.

Yeah. I don't know if there really is 100% pure independent thinking, because even that, we're part of a long line of thinkers, and we're sort of whether we believe it or not. Here we are in 2021, and we build on the shoulders of giants, and we're in a stream of knowledge, right? And we're also very, very much affected, not just on the level of desire, but on the level of ideas by the people that are surrounding us, by what they're thinking. That's one of the reasons I actually think, and I try to make an intentional effort in my life to have some people around me at all times, that I know just come from a completely

like different frame of mind, right? And just like completely different presuppositions to constantly like sort of test my assumptions. And I think that's pretty healthy thing to do because like we everybody thinks they're an independent thinker. Like that's the problem. Everybody thinks they're an independent thinker, even when they're sort of caught up in the crowd. So I think like putting some structures in place in your life to prevent that illusion are really important. And I found, you know, sort of surprising and kind of inspiring about Peter, and it sounds like you had some of these experiences too when you're writing the book, is that I don't know what I thought he did all day, like what his job was, but I was surprised that it was like mostly these sort of long meals or meetings or parties. And I couldn't quite

wrap my head around it like why is this person talking to me for six hours, you know, just over a really long dinner. And then I realized, and I think Eric Weinstein said this to me, he sort of described Peter as an applied philosopher. And that sort of really as the head of this sort of, you know, fund and investment and sort of whatever all the sort of things he's responsible for. His job is just to kind of think about things and to come up with views or opinions about where the world is going or why it is the way that it is. And he gets there by having conversations, often with people that he disagrees with or doesn't have much common ground with. And he sort of gets these theories or these ideas, and then those theories become investing theses and sort of get filtered down through the organization. And then people whose job it is take much more direct action based on these ideas that he may have gotten from his dinner conversation with you about an obscure French philosopher from Stanford.

I think that's right. I think Ray Dalio is similar in that respect. These are people that spend a lot of time thinking, and that's the real value that they add. I've heard stories about Peter that he's just had a conference room at Te of time thinking and that's the real kind of value that they add. I've heard stories about Peter that, you know, he's just had a conference room at Teal Capital and he's had six or seven people around a table for five or six hours, literally just talking about some old book. Yeah.

And that's, you know, what's interesting about that, and he has Jeffersonian dinners that I think he likes to organize where you kind of mash up really interesting people in a room. Some people might be sitting next to other people that they would never come into contact with if they were self-selecting. Those are powerful experiences. And there's this relationship between action and contemplation.

I think a lot of people that are kind of caught up in the hustle culture, like I was for most of my life, it's just go-go-go all the time without an appropriate respect and understanding of the role that the contemplative life plays in action and being able to change perceptions so that when you're acting, you know why the hell you're acting and what you're moving toward. And I think not just the billionaires should spend more time thinking about ideas and Peter loves to think about and talk about ideas with other people. We should all have a desire to do that and to just spend a little bit more time nurturing that contemplative part of life and having a long dinner conversations and lunch conversations.

Because I think it kind of like magnifies our action when we do take it. Yeah, I was thinking about, as I was reading your book, you know, you open with this sort of story of Tony Shea from Zappos trying to buy your company and it doesn't end up working out. But I was, and I I recently read the Wall Street Journal piece, sort of, about his tragic and sudden demise. And it struck me just how easily one can sort of get sucked into a lifestyle, a way of life,

you know, unaddressed, sort of emotional and physical issues, it just, I saw sort of a downward spiral there that struck me as very sad, but in some ways the sort of hints of it were kind of always there. Yeah, I was sensing that, you know, in 2007 and 2008 and, you know, rest in peace, you know, Tony, Tony really, you know, he's a good soul and you know, I don't know what happened towards the end. I read the same Wall Street Journal article that I think you did. But there were certain signs of some deep unhappiness in that community at the same time that everybody was talking about how happy they were.

Yeah. Like, you know, if everybody has to go around all day, every was talking about how happy they were. If everybody has to go around all day, every day talking about how happy they are, that's weird, they're probably not very happy because truly happy people don't have to do that. So there were signs, and I don't wanna, it is the way that I open the book, so I don't wanna give you the end of the story, but there was this experience that I had

in my relationship with Tony and Zappos, outside of my control in a certain sense. This is kind of where I really began to embrace stoicism. Events that were completely outside of my control that happened that I didn't realize until months and probably even years later were kind of like the best thing that ever happened to me because I sometimes ask myself, if those events that kind of pulled me out of this,

I would say like a memetic cycle that I was in, they hadn't happened. Like, I don't know what would have happened to me. I might have been kind of sucked into some of the things that were in that article in the Wall Street Journal. I mean, it's, you know, by the grace of God, there go out. Yeah, right. No, you could have sold your company and then, you know, you become sort of enmeshed in the sort of cult of personality or you get sucked into this sort of, what seemed like a sort of a drug culture,

which strikes me as actually the sort of, you know, there's been a handful of these sort of memetic sort of spirals that Silicon Valley has sucked in. You know, so you have crypto currencies, which at the moment seems like quite a lucrative one, although there were other moments where it's crashed and cost people a lot.

There also seems to be these obsessions with these kind of weird seemingly dark rabbit holes, whether it's suddenly everyone's into polyamory or suddenly everyone's wearing these weird shoes with finger toes or suddenly everyone is flying down to South America because we all need to do Iowaska. There's this kind of like everyone's unhappy. No one wants to question how much this has to do with San Francisco

and the meaningless companies that they're creating and the sort of, the wealth that they're chasing. No one wants to question that. It actually is this sort of profound human issue that needs to be addressed with medication or questioning how relationships are. There seems to, and then because the other smart people are doing it We all have to do it and then everyone follows the leader right off the cliff

Yeah, well you are way ahead of the mimetic wave Ryan About moving to Austin. I think everybody's moving to Austin Miami right now. Yes, but never for a while or it yeah, I mean ideas can be are just kind of like fashion and these weird rabbit holes and things that people cluster around. 100%. And, you know, I think Silicon Valley and entrepreneurship culture is a great case study

in memetic desire. But, you know, all of these weird lifestyle things, most of us are spending more time on social media over the last year because of the pandemic. You need to wonder, I think this sort of put us on a hyper-memetic track, because we're not engaging in the deep human connection,

meeting up with friends, having dinners the way that we used to. Instead, we substituted this deep layer of humanity for seeing what other people are doing or tweeting or saying or writing and reacting to it. If you had asked me, do I think the world has become more or less a medical over the last year? I think it's become more memetic. And I really think that's a function of losing some of that humanity. And we've sort of resorted to a lot of these thin desires

that I think are highly contagious. What whether it's moving to a different city or having some idea that's fashionable, I think we've got to be really careful about that. What first, it seemed like there was kind of a positive element of the pandemic in that regard, in that that, hey, since nobody's doing anything, because they're legally not allowed to go do things, you know, maybe we'll compare ourselves less, we'll look inward and sort of see what makes us happy. And, you know, there's less status anxiety when there are no sort of statuses to chase. And you can't be taking pictures of yourself in a private jet or, you know, flying off the Tulum or whatever. And then maybe it seems

like a lot of this, that energy just gets sucked into conspiracy theories or economic sort of bubbles, whether it's cryptocurrencies or a game stop or the housing market. I wonder if just all these, that energy is always there and it just gets displaced or channeled depending on where it's possible for it to go.

Yeah, I think that being displaced is a really good way to describe it. We saw that with all of the sports bettors that gravitated to the stock market and then we can bet on sports anymore. So it's almost like the energy isn't created or destroyed. It just has to move somewhere else. And it flows to the point of least resistance.

I have a somewhat contrarian take on speaking of being contrarian. I'm like, what's happened with the pandemic? And I think the prevailing narrative is kind of like, well, this has helped everybody figure out what they really want and what's really important to them and prioritize. That's certainly true for many people. But I think I know an equal number of people that are actually more confused than ever about

what they want to do post-pandemic. They may have lost their job, they may be going through struggles, they see people making a bunch of money on GameStop. There's just like a lot of noise right now. So I know a lot of people that are very confused and mimetic, which kind of goes against this idea that we're all just, we've all prioritized and decluttered our lives in Red Maricondo and everything. So I don't know if that's necessarily the case.

I think that it's went both ways. And I think, you know, we should be careful and think about like, what are the desires that we had like before the pandemic and that are going to endure long after the pandemic four or five years from now. We might have a desire, some of us, to go on a little bender once we can finally go out and go to a dive bar and exchange sweat with some people or something like that. That's not going to give you any kind of lasting satisfaction or fulfillment. What about the virtues and the values, temperance, prudence, fortitude, those things that are

important at all times and that haven't acquired some kind of like mimetic or very temporary value because of the circumstances that we find ourselves in? Yeah, I mean, I think a good portion of society, and we sort of watched this sort of politically. And it's almost beyond politics at this point. But for every person who said, oh, I really realized I want to travel less. And I'm going to spend more time with my family. And I'm going to start my own business, blah, blah, blah. A huge chunk of society has just become unmoored

and untethered from reality altogether. And this is where they found themselves on the Capitol in January 6th, or they're obsessed about the hidden dangers of vaccines, or they get untethered from reality because they just spent so much time on the internet. And people are saying things. And well, if they're saying it, it must be be true and they don't really understand how to question it or think for themselves and so I would I would agree there certainly been a darkness to it as well. Yeah absolutely so I am last year was the first year in ten that I didn't have time. I try to take a silent retreat every year.

There's actually a great place just outside of Austin called Lady Lodge, by the way. It's beautiful. OK. And I try to take minimum of three days and no devices, no technology. I typically just bring a couple of books just to disconnect from everything.

It's one thing to do it on a daily basis, if you have a ritual, it's spend half hour every morning or something like that, that's fine. But I find that I need to do it on an annual basis, like kind of like a deep cleanse, you know, like deep cleanse silence. And last year was one of the first years

that I didn't do it and I felt it. I actually like really felt the effects of not being able to do that. I find that it takes like three days like before the cleanse actually even starts working. It's almost like three days of detox before I'm even in its normal state where I can begin to like, you know, dig down and understand what it is I want to do

that next year or whatever it is. And I felt it because I didn't do it last year because of the pandemic. There's really no excuse. I could have done it. It was totally distanced and everything. I just didn't. Yeah.

And I think we would all benefit from taking a few days before we throw ourselves back into what we think we wanna do post pandemic. And you can do that, you don't have to do a total fancy lodge or retreat center, anything like that. You can make your own space to do that. But I mean, I'm certainly seeing the need for that in my own life, as I've got a book coming out and you can just get own space to do that. But I mean, I'm certainly seeing the need for that in my own life.

As I've got a book coming out and you can just get caught and you know what that's like, and you can get caught in a spiral and never take the time to just to reflect. It's kind of that critical distance that we were talking about before. Well, I had Matt Berninger on the podcast. He's the lead center of the national

and we were talking about exactly what you're talking about that you can have your little routines. You can think you're pretty good with managing, having some quiet time or reflection. But it's like you go on vacation, you're like, oh, I need two weeks, it takes me a couple of days to get into the vacation. I think it was for me maybe like eight, nine months

into the pandemic, not having gone anywhere, not seeing anyone much more in the sort of reclusive writer mode that it hit me. It's like, oh no, it doesn't take a couple days for me to get into the right headspace. It takes like eight months. It was a long, long detox. And I think it is going to be interesting as stuff starts to come back online. Like, I, you know, I got invited to do something tomorrow. I got my second vaccine.

And, you know, if I'd been invited to do this thing three weeks ago, I just would have reflexively said no because it wasn't an option to do it, right? Like, per sort of how I'm thinking about things. But now that it's there and I can do it. And other, and this goes to my thesis, other people I know are going to do it. Now I have to go, but do I actually want to do it? Like, do I need to do it?

Is it worth, you know, is it, I, you know, not missed a bedtime for the kids in, in 13 months, is this what I want to break that streak over or would I actually rather do bath time, you know? And so it'll be interesting as we sort of come back online, how, how, how quickly we just revert to old behaviors. Yeah, I mean, just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should. Doesn't mean it's good for you. I mean, and it requires some serious discernment. You know, my fiance and I have had the same discussion.

I'm super resentful of her, by the way, because we signed up for the vaccine and clicked submit at the same exact time and she got, and she got hers and I haven't got mine yet. So she'll be well, you're in DC. So there it's mismanaged, you know, yeah, people people are going outside of DC trying to find out wherever they can. So she's become arrival to me. By the way, people in relationships can become arrivals to each other all the time. That's something to watch out with in a marriage or in a partnership. We don't like to think of our own partner, the people that we claim to love as rivals,

but it can happen So yeah, I mean we've had the same discussions about all the things that are you know the possibilities that will like Open up to us. I mean, I'm like I feel like I'm going off to New York City to be a freshman in college for the first time or something like that Right, it's like you just do things because you can and um, you know, I Things that you did not miss once over the last 13 months. Exactly, exactly, yeah. So, and we'll definitely need to do some good discernment. Well, so to sort of wrap up with something you touched on earlier, you talked about how you've got this book coming out

and you can sort of get wrapped up. I'm curious because to me, this is the sort of the ultimate vulnerability. How do you think about success for the book, putting the book out, even writing the book? How do you catch yourself from wanting what everyone else wants? Whether it's your editor or the sales team or the bestseller list or the market? How did you approach this book

and sort of maybe what lessons have you learned as far as like keeping this, you know, I would argue rather toxic sort of impulse from creeping in to what should be kind of a pure and, you know, I don't want a pure and sort of artistic process. Yeah, that's a great question. Because writing a book is,

this has tested me in a lot of different ways. It would be disingenuous to say that I didn't want the book to be a bestseller. I hope that it is. I think it's realizing that that's certainly not why I wrote the book. I wrote the book because it was like a baby inside of me, where if I didn't write the book to sort of communicate some of these things that have changed my life, I wouldn't have been

happy. And the timing was right. I was finishing the book after the lockdown. It gave me some time to really sit with it. And to do that process of decluttering my desires and trying to figure out what it was that that's really important to me. And ultimately, while I want the book to sell well

because I do want Gerard's ideas to reach a greater number of people, I think you'd probably say the same thing with Stoicism, of course, you want your book to sell well. It simply cannot be the motivating force that gets you out of bed every day. So, you know, writing the book, one of the things that I had to do, there's a great community of Gerard Scholler's people that have said really amazing things and unpacked Memelec theory in all kinds of ways. And within the Memelec theory community itself, strangely enough, there's like all kinds of little petty rivalries,

right? Like, you know, there's like the right and the left. In academia, there's petty rivalries? Well, the smaller the stakes, you know, the sharper the knives. The shot, yep, there's just can see these little petty rivalries about like interpreting Gerard. And I mean, I would have driven myself absolutely crazy had I not in a certain sense, like, shut out, sort of some of these more superficial desires to like make everybody happy or to like, you know, I mean, one of the worst things you can do as a writer is like, have this like self talk as you're writing about like, you know, is this going to sentence, going to piss

somebody off or like this thing that I'm saying. Just trying to communicate the truth as I understand it and as I experienced it in my life in a way that I hope ultimately will help people understand themselves and humanity at a much sort of deeper level. I mean, that's where the rubber hits the road for me. I don't really have an interest in the intellectual side of the medics theory as much as I do, actually like just helping people

to live more fulfilling lives. And for me, personally in writing the book, there's constant temptation, you know, I have a publicist and I've got digital marketing team and everything. And it's like this constant tension between doing the things that I really want to do. I talking to you as one of them. And then just getting pulled in a million different directions and having conversations

and doing things that are just the things that you're supposed to do when you write a book. And for me, it's going to be the drilling down under the surface and having the real conversations then just like the sound bites that are really important for me. I mean, ultimately, I think there's only one reason that you write a book or you do work. And that's because you want to actually like

change people's minds and change their desires for the better and help them understand themselves better. And writing it was a process, you know, for me as well, refining my desires. And when I did have those kind of mimetic desires, you know, to do certain things, or to respond to a tweet that I saw or something like that, which I do. There's this constant calling myself back to like what actually really motivates me and what's gonna bring me fulfillment five, 10, 12 years down the road.

Yeah, I found that when I was writing conspiracy, it was this weird thing. When I, if I have any regrets about that project, I knew, so, I mean, on the one hand, you know, you're writing about a billionaire who just sued a very large publication out of that business. And then runs a secretive defense company. So there's a little bit of sort of awareness there. And then on the other side, you're writing about professional journalists with a huge crudge who have a very sort of strong view about things. And when I look back at that book and I think about things that I regret, the only things I regret

are when I was conscious, when it slipped into my mind how somebody was going to read this sentence, right? So that I want to say I pulled my punches but there are places where I sort of thought I was too self-conscious really and I was thinking about what other people would want, not what I wanted to say. And so it's a tricky thing, it's kind of a paradox and when you do a creative project because on the one hand, if it was truly a creative project, you wouldn't be putting it out in the world, you'd be doing it just for yourself. It is also a business venture in some way. And you won't get to do it again if nobody reads it and why did you slave over the sentences if you don't want anyone to read them. And yet, if you allow exterior judgments to determine whether it was a success or failure, you sort of handed over your power. And so it was weird on that book too, where it sold well, you know, but it also

came out at the same time as bad blood and didn't sell anywhere near bad blood. So is it is is it a success because it's the book I wanted to write? Is it a failure because some other book sold more? You know, you you just get in this sort of difficult headspace where I think you need, this is where Gerard's stuff of like, what do you want, not what other people want? Judge yourself on that criteria, and that's all you can think about. Yeah, it's kind of that classic artist dilemma, right? Like the musician that just like makes crap music or just does

whatever he thinks, you know, the record labels won't want versus, you know, the musician or the band that makes the music that they really want to make. And, you know, they're maybe showing people, well, first of all, I mean, it's authentic to them. But rather than just merely responding to the market, there in some sense, like transcending the market and writing the book that they really wanna write or making the music that they really wanna make. And that's how we move forward as a society, right? Like we make art that's not always responsive

or sort of just be hold into sales, but we make it knowing that sometimes, there are trade-offs and in order to speak the truth, the truth doesn't always sell as well as the memes and the sound bites do. So that's kind of the perennial artist tension, right? That's where we get the idea of a sell-out from. And so I think everybody experiences that I think

it's normal, and just recognizing that tension is just kind of the first part in the process, I think. Yeah, and I think also thinking about the lifespan of the ideas. So, you know, Gerard does make these sort of dense books that are not particularly, you know, popular when they come out, but because there is a kernel of truth in them and because he does reach, you know, you know, some influential people over time, he becomes, you know, one of the, I think, more important philosophers of the second half of the 20th century. And so it's like, yeah, what are you judging yourself based on how this idea fares in the market over

one week? Or are you thinking about does, does this do its job over a long period of time, whether it's for 10 people or 10 million people, sort of expanding the view or the ruler that you're measuring with, I think also allows you to sort of get out of this sort of comparison trap, too. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I mean, I think that in the long run, I think that the truth wins out. And that's why classical, you know, classical wisdom. Even though it may not be in fashion right now, I think, you know, what you're doing with stoicism is great, because, you know, 10, 12, 15 years from now, those truths are not going anywhere

because they're truths. And I think, you know, widening your time frame is critical. Well, Luke, this was awesome. I really appreciate it. And I love the book your time frame is critical. Well Luke, this was awesome. I really appreciate it and I love the book and we'll talk soon. Thanks so much Ryan. I appreciate it man. Thanks so much for listening. If you could leave a review for the podcast, we'd really appreciate it. The reviews make a difference and of course every nice review

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