YouSaid · the spoken record

Luke Burgis

lines on the record: 144
first: 2022-05-31
most recent: 2022-05-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“That 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 like modeled this desire that I wouldn't have thought I wouldn't have thought to pursue, but has ultimately made me look higher, made me look at expanded my universe of desires, that would be something that's incredibly fulfilling to me.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in doing that, I reflected a lot and kind of, you know, 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. And 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, the way that I loved. I mean, I think that ultimately that's the only measure for me is the sort of the level of charity that I show. I mean, not just within my family, but to others. That's ultimately, I know it's related to that. And maybe that sounds too vague, you know, because it's not always measurable.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 it would be stupid for me to think that it's not probably going to change again. It's changed many, many times. Unfortunately, I've attended some funerals over the last couple of years. more than I ever have in my life. And I've listened to, I've read obituaries, I've listened to eulogies. I've given a eulogy.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the body is another fascinating point because that's what the physical is important. Sometimes our bodies tell us things, right? Our bodies tell us stories. And that's another layer. And sometimes even intellectual choices and things 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 risky decision. 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, the whole body, yes, right? A really important point.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's just a layered approach. I sometimes like to call it layered thinking Know there's the rational layer, there's the tacit layer, and there might be other layers, and they're all important, you know, and we can't just make the decision based on any one layer, frankly. And certainly the top layer. We all have to sort of understand 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.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Before I did it, and I only know them because I did it. So there's sort of like these emergent knowledge, frankly, that 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?”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That there was something more to those kinds of 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. I mean, it comes down to call it what you want. 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 then you're long 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 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 have been totally different than what I thought that they would have been.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Way that I did. There's a whole other 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.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 with marriage also comes, you know, commitment. I mean, I guess I think some of the traditional decision-making criteria that we use and having just got married last summer, so it's been a little bit more than six months now, this is very real for me, I made a commitment, 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've went like this. All right, the decision didn't quite pan out.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not like you're thinking of marriage as this abstract thing, but like marriage is actually to like a flesh and blood human. So that's one thing. And I don't think that we can go about that kind of a decision through like a very sort of X's and No sort of analysis like we're designing a company strategy. I just think 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,”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To have happy people. And in my mind, he sort of made happiness 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, well, first of all, let's just say there's the idea of marriage in the abstract. 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, it depends on who, right? You could marry like, right?”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say to that because, like, the only thing that would have satisfied him was if I could somehow prove to him that he would be happier. Now, happiness was kind of the driving sort of thing with Zappos, right? Their whole theme for their company was delivering happiness. His whole motivation for building the company culture and starting the downtown.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Downtown Vegas, right off of Fremont Street, and a very popular little underground bar there called the downtown. 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 have sort of a shift in my thinking. I'd taken a spiritual turn in my life. And I think Tony was really intrigued by that. Because, I mean, in my mind, he was somebody that was really searching for something he couldn't find. And we started talking about marriage. And I asked him if he was ever going to get married. And yeah, his approach was basically in a very empirical one. It was like, well, I need like evidence, right? I need evidence that I will be happier married than not married. And I didn't really know.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tony and I became pretty good friends. two thousand seven, eight. And this was right around the time he was starting his downtown project in downtown Vegas. So 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”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. I found a way to get into Bungalow 8 and I was very proud of myself. But why? I mean, were the drinks better? I mean, was that, I mean, I don't know. It's just like, it's just a funny thing. We're just very attracted to those because everybody else wanted to be there. Yeah.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess I'd better go find another one, right? Because I'm not worthy of this. I think it comes down with thinking of ourselves as unworthy of things, to humans generally thinking of themselves as unworthy of good. And I think this is more common than we think. But from a Gerardian perspective, 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, velvet rope, I walk by, I went to college in New York City, I have a lot of experience with this. I walk by, I see the velvet rope, it looks hard to get into. I want to get in. Back when I went to college, it was bungalowing.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their positive rivalries. I give one example in the book between Lamborghini and Ferrari. 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 mistake because some of the greatest things in life are 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's like, what she fell in love with me? I don't know why, but, you know.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because of mimetic desire, they make them seem more worthy of pursuit because our models become our obstacles. Is a really important part of what Gerard 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. You know, 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.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And sometimes it's good to opt out. But I think it's harder if you're on a track 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 reach the pinnacle. So the question becomes like, do I hold out until I achieve the pinnacle? You may never, you know, 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, 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.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, they're not. And in fact, you know, you've had people. Become suicidal from losing a star. And chefs work their whole lives and can form everything about their restaurant from the menu to the look and the feel everything is conformed to what the inspectors want to see. So, I think that's absolutely right. 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. So opting out of a negative system of desire without having to first win I think is important to do. Now this isn't sour grapes. I think it's important to like understand that it's not just sour grapes. Like sometimes the grapes are actually sour.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 I asked him, well, how did that make you feel? And he just said, I laughed about it. And I will say, man seemed incredibly at peace with himself.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ah, 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, used the sky 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. He didn't have the loss aversion that we had because he'd already achieved the three stars. In other words, it's like, hey, I did this thing. I achieved what I said I was going to achieve. I've maintained my three stars for ten years. Now I can opt out. You 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.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going to benefit anybody. The most important thing I think we can do is 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 is simply finding a model and putting a positive model and putting the positive model close to them or being the positive model ourselves and seeing if that affects the behavior. It doesn't always, but it's worth a try to see if that happens. And I've sort of learned that. Like my go-to is always, well, there needs to be a new model of desire in this particular place. Let's see if that has a positive effect. And then we'll go from there.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, you determine what other people want. We have freedom of choice, but we are social and we do influence one another deeply. 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. I don't think we see it as clearly when it comes to what our friends and what our colleagues want. And I think oftentimes if there's somebody in our organization, let's say, who seems to want the, let's say want the wrong things, say want something that's not aligned with mission or is consumed by some kind of a rivalry, just something that's just destructive. It's just a net net. It's just not going to make anybody.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To my sub stack. They're paying attention to everything that I say 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, that's what they're going to see and maybe to want. So all of us are to other people. I promise you that you're a model of desire to somebody that you don't even know. that you're a model of desire for at this point probably. I say that to everybody listening. Some you know and some you don't know, but the point is the same, you know, that we affect each other deeply. And, you know, I say in the very last sort of lesson that I leave off with in my book is, you know, live as if you have a responsibility for what other people want. And that doesn't mean that”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We should, and it hits home for me in a real way because one of the 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. 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.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 with 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.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What system we opt into? And that's where things get tricky with dominance hierarchies is that they're very liquid because the models can change. We can just adopt a new model. And the scary thing is, and Gerard says this, he says the scary thing about memetic desire is that if we adopt a model of desire, 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.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we all sort of have that kind of hierarchy of desire and 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. Like most of us have a Michelin star system. And we can change the Michelin system just depending on like.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A few entrepreneurs that are competing fiercely to grow their businesses. And one of them is hyper successful. Another one 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 sort of dad out there and I'm going to model what it means to be a great father and a great husband or something like that. It can just quickly slide into some like ridiculous different hierarchy that's the constant, it's basically the same thing, right? It's just taken on like a different form.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People to adopt new models instantaneously. We're constantly juggling the hierarchies that we want to be a part of, or the hierarchies by which we measure ourselves. So let me give you one example of this. You could have”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In most of the animal kingdom, it's the same way, 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 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, there's people that have made tens of millions of dollars in crypto in the last couple of years, right? 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 know that there are huge disparities between poor and wealthy that don't change overnight. But especially with social media and the ability”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is memory, right? It reminds us why we And rituals 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, 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, 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 next tomorrow or next year. I've decided to...”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, part of the reason I like that so much, so what desires start, discipline continues, and ritual cement. Is that right Yeah, because desires need More than desires in order to really grow and develop and mean anything, right? I mean, if we all just did what we want, first of all, it'd be total chaos, right? Like there's an objective, there's the intellect, right, plays a role here. Sort of what I was describing, right? Like 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 in too. So 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.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've started to invite other people into these now, and I just realize 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, they have the desired outcome. Do 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.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. On an annual level, on a monthly level, and on a weekly level, the rituals 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, it affects me negatively. But when I'm able to sort of step away from things and gain perspective, it helps me a lot. You know, I've typically built in a silent retreat 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.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ritual is key. I think where ritual creatures and Rituals, I think we have a lot of rituals in our world, but I think we've lost a lot too, especially rituals around 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 gargatchuan 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 and that I'm a pretty spiritual person. I'm a practicing cast.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, that that flywheel had created in my life. I won't want, I live in Washington, D.C., 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 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.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It actually increases my desire to work for the afternoon. It's kind of like going for a great lunchtime jog or something like that. And that if this affects, if I do this consistently Monday through Friday and then stopping at five, eating dinner with my wife Claire, that affects the way that the rest of the night goes so that we're not eating at 9 o'clock. And now, like I said, I want to stop at 5 o'clock. The key word here is I want to. 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 are 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.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. The break is really important. Sometimes I'll actually just go sit in a in a church 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, my phone's off, can't get a hold of me during that half hour. It's only a half an hour. The other half hour, I eat lunch. So it's an hour break. That half hour of silence completely resets me, but more than resets me.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The quality time that I need first thing in the morning to read and to meditate, to do those things. For a run. And then that naturally leads me into sort of the way that my entire work week flows. It 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.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 a negative flywheel of desire than it is with the positive flywheel of desire because the positive one is often just a mirror of the negative one. So I can think of one for me that's time management. the way that sort of my week works. And our example of cooking dinner and taking a break is definitely a part of that. Positive desire for me starts with positive time management at least. Starts with me going to bed at a decent hour and not staying up until one in the morning, watching something stupid. That's not going to improve my life. Getting up early, spending.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And where the last desire kind of feeds back into the first one, okay? So 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. I know what they are for me in different domains. I know what they are for me when it comes to exercise. I know what they are for me when it comes to like going down bad spirals of like frustration when I see things on social media. I mean, 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, you know, where you sort of like go down to like go to a dark place, right? 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 the”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. This is just obvious. flywheel of desire. Five, six, seven steps”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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 are 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. And I think it's important to actually sort of keep a desired journal in a sense, right? 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.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of desire works. When you begin to desire something in a positive, it's kind of like an exercise or fitness, right? You actually want to do it. It's not hard anymore. You desire it. And if you're not able to do it, you feel it. You feel the pain.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT