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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I mean, the smell of the foods helps a little bit. It's not purely memetic, right? It's probably a physiological response that I have to that. But I get up and I go and we do it together. And if I didn't have her modeling that desire for me, I don't think that I would have it. I think it's pretty fair to say that I wouldn't because I've been doing the same thing for 15 years and it took Claire for me to break what I would say was a pretty bad habit of me, like eating dinner sometimes at my desk. And, you know, and now we reinforce that in one another. You know, we reinforce that. We're now, there's been times where now I've been the one to initiate it because it's so, it's just part of, it's been ingrained in me now for a while. Now I want to do it. And that's the beauty of how this flywheel.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'm really bad at shutting it down for the night, always have been. I've been an entrepreneur, sort of my own boss since I was 23, and I don't work normal hours. And when I get on one, when I get in the zone, I can work until 9, 10, or later. And Claire just doesn't come from that kind of mindset. She never had that lifestyle. And food's always been a really important part of her life. You know, grew up having meals with the family every night. And in fact, that she made that her career path. She got a master's in food studies. And now works for a food company, but loves to cook. And when we started dating, and especially since we've been married, five o'clock, six o'clock rolls around. And, you know, she'll head and start prepping dinner. And that's a positive enough of a model for me that.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There has to be a greater good. I believe there has to be a greater good in order to stop an unwanted behavior. If there's not a greater good than the unwanted behavior just becomes a complete elephant in the room, I can't do this thing. I can't do this thing. I can't do this thing. And the more you start thinking about that, it just becomes bigger and bigger and bigger. Whether it's a temptation, just whatever it is. Whereas, and you're actually looking at the very thing that you don't want to do and it looms larger and larger in your mind. Whereas if there's a greater good, you've, in a sense, turned away from the unwanted path or behavior or whatever it is. And you're spending more time focused on the greater good. And if you think of the greater good in terms of models of desire, I think it works the same way. So, you know, you can replace. It's not enough to just sort of get rid of.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Different things, and that's sort of what allowed me to sort of change. So like optimizing for balance and the ability to develop healthy relationships in my life became a lot more important. But the goal changed in the first place because I expanded my universe of models. I looked outside of the world that I was in. Outside of it, I found different models that wanted different things that I thought were healthier things, things that I decided were ultimately going to fulfill me more. And it's not that I never optimize for profit or I mean, I want financial success and security. It's just that it's not the only optimizing for those things, right? Now it's just one piece of a bigger puzzle. It's something that I take into account, but it's not the most important thing.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“relationship that I'm in. And we don't talk a lot about that. It's usually about, well, here's how to achieve your goals, not enough about, well, how do we choose the goals that we're going to set in the first place? For the first couple of years, more than that, a few years of my post-college life, I had different goals in college. I was optimizing solely for financial success. And why was I optimizing for financial success? Well, because everybody around me was optimizing for financial success. What's the best job to get out of school? Would you go work on Wall Street because bonuses are high? Everything I was doing was optimizing for that. So my desires were completely around that. The change for me happened when I identified different models who were optimizing”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and they're sort of shortcuts in a way. There's a lot of, I think, embedded wisdom in the world that acts as a shortcut so we don't have to figure everything out from scratch every day when we wake up in the morning. And good positive systems of desire do that for us. We don't have to wake up every single morning and decide what it is that we're going to want or what's the most important thing to want. And again, that's why identifying the thick desires is important. Something else that you said is really important though, and this is goals and how we can evaluate our goals in this way. I think a lot of this depends on what we're optimizing for. And we have to acknowledge that many times our goals themselves are the product of memetic desires. The reasons why I choose the goals that I choose are the very product of a memorandum.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Somebody who models a great family life, whatever. Usually we can come up with those off the top of our heads. The negative ones are a little bit harder to name because it makes us uncomfortable.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the work is. Bringing it to light and being able to name it. I mean, being able to name things is a lot more important than we realize. It's important to be able to name emotions. It's important to be able to name our desires. Most of us can even name our desires. We just sort of vaguely want things. And the more accurately we can name sort of desires. I mean, Wittgenstein said, like, our universe is basically as big as our language, right? Like we don't have a word. We can't name something. We sort of don't really know that it's there. We don't know that it exists. We certainly don't have any power over it. So naming our desires is critical. And naming models is critical. Both the negative models and the positive models. And I would bet that it's a lot easier for most people listening to name your positive models of desire, right? Could be Warren Buffett as an investor. It could be”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About certain things, right? And that's why I think getting together with them and probing really important questions and holding each other accountable is important. And frankly, I wouldn't do it on my own unless I'd surrounded myself by those people that also desire the same thing that I do. And we reinforce each other's desires. So desires are reinforced. And there are some desires that we want reinforced, like that one for me. There are other desires that I don't want reinforced. And it's just important to know the difference between the two. But in general, I absolutely think that choosing in an intentional way the people that were closest to is the most important thing that we can do to affect what we want. You know, something that you said, I think this is a critical point. So much of this is unconscious, subconscious, preconscious.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mimetic tendencies is domain dependent to a certain extent. I don't like group exercise classes, right? I'm like a rugged individualist when it comes to the way that I like to work out. But my wife loves them and sort of needs them. And it really is the way to help her develop a positive habit of getting to the gym, right? Going to spin classes and going to CrossFit and stuff like that. Not for me. But there are other areas of my life where I need sort of like positive mimesis. When it comes to things like reading and stuff like that and certain groups of people that I get together with and like talk about ideas, incredibly positively memetic for me because they're constantly like pushing me to think deeper.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it's absolutely true. I talked to James Clear about this, and he's got a section in Atomic Identifies this as one of the most powerful ways to change your habits and affect your habits. I think it's why group exercise classes are really important for some people. You know, so much of this is personal, though. Some people need more positive memetic influence in some domains more than others. So I think that our level of”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One that I'm sure will never exercising that is insatiable. In other words, like I can never do it to the point of satiation. That's one way to determine, I think, a thick desire is are you ever able to satiate it? If you can't satiate it, there's probably something, a really, really deep well there that you can just continue to go down.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We can work on it suffered a lot during COVID, right? Just knowing people at a fairly superficial level on screens. And those are thick desires. But I mean, those are, I would say, universal, in my opinion, thick desires. But I think that each person has their own. I do think this can become highly personal. And identifying those is really hard work, right? And can take a really long time. You know, I've identified, for instance, that one of my thick desires is to communicate and to write, right? And to communicate things that I think are important truths and just sort of sit at this intersection of these sort of different life experiences that I've had and to try to put them together and communicate them. I mean, there's nothing more satisfying to me than to be able to do those kinds of things.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If human nature is an unknowable X, then this might not make a lot of sense. But if human nature is knowable and we can agree that it's better to be a temperant person than to not be a temperate person, right? Like a person that has the ability to moderate their desires. So when it comes to alcohol, for instance, that's like I think of it as a muscle, right? I have the ability to do this thing. If I don't have the ability to do that thing, then it will cause me pain eventually. And I go back to some of these classic examples because they're the things that will never disappoint when developed. I've never had a single person tell me that they've developed some of these classical virtues and are worse because of it. But I think the desire to know and be known is one of the most important ones.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But after that, this desire that every child has to be known, to be known and loved by their parents and to develop healthy relationships with other people and deep friendships, certainly a thick desire that I think everybody has classic virtues. I think there's a reason why human beings for thousands of years have identified basic virtues as desirable, right? As things that contribute to human happiness, right? Aristotle's kind of what is happiness that's to lead the good life and what is the good life. It's to achieve excellence in these areas and, you know, various virtues to develop, right? Which is, I guess, I come from a place where human nature is not an unknowable X.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have a desire for deep human relationships, to know and to be known by others is fundamental. And I'm speaking of the things that come after our hardwired biological needs, right? I mean, we're born thirsty and hungry and stuff like that right away.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you need to sort of find out which one of those wolves to starve and which one of those wolves to feed. And it's not always easy to tell which one is which when it comes to the things that we want, when it comes to our desires. So I actually believe that we should feed those enduring desires and that those enduring desires do ultimately sort of see us through the hard times.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“begins to act as a bit of a hermeneutic for what to say yes to what to say no to you know when we we've identified a kind of like lifelong desire let's say that that a person has where you actually want the desire to grow and get stronger. You want to reinforce that desire, you know, to leave a certain kind of a legacy in the world. And that's an incredibly good thing. One thing I really want to make clear is that desire is just what it is. We're desiring creatures, right? I'm not really a stoic in the sense that I think that in general, sort of like the two, I think of desire, like the parable of the two wolves, right? You know, we all have these two wolves inside of us that are kind of at war, the wolves representing desire.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that desire is a positive thing. It's one of the things that makes us human. And that desire sort of oriented and channeled in the right way is exactly what pushes people to endure. You know, the desire for freedom has led many people to do heroic things, right, to sort of fight for their country and to, you know, to liberate others from tyranny and oppression. It's that those are, I would call that a pretty perennial desire, though. So I think there are root desires. There are some things that I usually call thick desires in opposition to thin desires, which are the more sort of memetic ones that can change on a dime. And I think cultivating those is important. And finding out what those enduring thicker desires are.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you're the first person I'm talking to. Take it or leave it, right? You're going to get the best terms. Well, you know, I'm not really comfortable unless I see a second or a third investor come to the table. Classic example, I think, of this, where it brings an added level of validity to what we want or what we think. We rationalize it, right? And we say that, well, it's like a totally rational thing, right? Where, oh, they're just stress testing my assumptions and things like that. But I just don't think that's the case, right? I mean, look at Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes, right? That wasn't the case with that. You know, she essentially used memetic desire and could point to models of like powerful models of people that had invested in her company to draw in other models. Now, I don't know how she got the first one, but the first.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wasn't that how a lot of fundraising works in the investment community? Everybody's terrified to want the wrong thing. I think you're really hitting the nail on the head. We want our desires to be validated. And if you've ever wanted something or someone and have a hard time finding anybody else that wants it, you begin to doubt yourself. We like competition in almost a twisted way, right? I don't think competition is a bad thing, but we almost use the competition for something to validate its worthiness. And, you know, when this comes to people, that's not a good thing. In the business world, I see it all the time, right? You know, I'm trying to raise money for my company and the first investor in, objectively speaking on paper, this all makes sense to me. Ask me, well, you know, who else is interested? Who else is competing for the deal?”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rest of my life with wouldn't be fair to her to stay with her. So end a relationship. And a couple of months later, some really athletic wealthy, successful guy who just thinks that she's the greatest thing in the world. And you start second guessing yourself like, well, geez, what have I done? Right. Like, what have I, maybe I made like a huge mistake. Whereas until I saw that, that thought never crossed my mind. Well, what's the difference? Now I have some model or mediator of desire that I didn't have before.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, suggest hire one of your girlfriends to be an actor and act like she's the sexiest guy in the room, essentially, right? But it actually, it works because it's a way to hack memetic desire. There's other ways to do that too, right? I mean, I think it's really unethical. I mean, they talk in that book about if there's somebody that you really want to talk to, sort of go talk to their friend instead, right? And then like stir up a bunch of insecurity and stuff like that. But all of these things, if you notice, they have to do with the mediator. There's always a mediator. And this is the crux of Gerard's theory is that these mediators of desire determine attraction and desire for objects and people way more than we ever imagined. And another way to see this is in a breakup. Make a decision, hey, this isn't working. This is not the person that I want to spend their time.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and one of the very specific tactics that they talk about in that book, it's got a specific name, and I can't remember what it was, but it's essentially the idea of the wingman. It's the idea of if you really, really want to affect the desires of somebody. Let's just say that you're a guy you find a girlfriend and bring her into a bar or into some setting, but people there, other women there might not necessarily know that she's a friend. And she seems to be really interested in everything that you say, really seems to be into you, really seems to desire you, that will instantly sort of affect the way that the guy is perceived by the other women in the room. And in that book, they have ways to sort of like hack attraction. And that's one of the ways to hack it. I mean, they go so far as to...”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, what's the guy's name who wrote that The Art of the Pickup? I forget. This book came out probably 15 years ago, but it's about that sort of secret community of pickup artists that lived in the Hollywood Hills.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and we really don't until you walk in somebody else's shoes. And how often we project so many things in life and project things onto other people without having any clue as to what's going on in their life. And that's one of the great dangers of social media for sure, is that we project happiness onto other people who may not be happy at all.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sort of straddles the line between an external and an internal mediator of desire, where they're really kind of an external mediator of desire. There's really not a strong possibility of you ever coming into contact with them or competing with them for the same spouses or anything like that or the same houses, whatever. It's really powerful. And, you know, Instagram and TikTok have allowed them to do this, making millions of people feel like they're more of that internal mediator of desire. You can DM them. That's powerful, right? Because the internal ones are always the ones that were more, I don't know if obsessed is the right word, but they exert a far greater force in us because they feel like they're more similar to us. We can relate to them a little bit better.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Influencing us the most. But here's the thing with social media, with modern technology, that line between the external models of desire and internal is all but gone because it's almost as if everybody can be an internal model of desire now. There are people on Twitter and social media that I've never met before that I feel like I know way better than I do, right? That I can say they feel like internal mediators of desire. And that's just something to be aware of where it's almost like a game to be played. I think a lot of celebrities do it intentionally. I think it's one of the most powerful things that they can do. And in my conversation that I had with Peter Thiel when I talked to him for this book, he sort of mentioned this himself and said it's really powerful when a celebrity”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would be the people in our community, the people that we work with. And it's why traditionally we think of a lot of the greatest conflicts in the world, like world wars and things. Historically, there's been more internal violence than there has been external violence. You know, genocides within countries, for instance. Most murders between people that know each other are inside families. This is kind of a really, I think, important point to understand because the internal models of desire affect us differently than the external models of desire. They're a lot harder to recognize and to name, frankly, because one, they're too close to us for comfort. Two, we normally don't like to identify them because we like to think of ourselves as independent. We don't like to think that the people close to us are probably the ones.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“External models of desire are those that are outside of our world, that we have no possibility of coming into contact with, whether because they live on the other side of the world, at least in an age before social media, or because their historical figures, or they just live in a different sphere, their external to our world. And that means that there's no possibility of us encountering them or competing with them. The other kind of model is an internal model of desire. And an internal model is inside of our world, right? They're the people that we have the possibility of coming into contact with traditionally that would be the people in our family.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Identity is absolutely mimetic. We're relational creatures, highly relational. And our identity is really formed in and through relationships. I don't form my identity on my own. My identity can really only be understood in relationship to the family that I came from, the friends that I have, my marriage to my wife, the relationships that I have. So I believe that identity itself is a highly relational thing that can only be understood that way. And given that we're social and that we're relational and that mimesis is rampant, of course mimesis and mimetic desire plays into our very identity. Here's an important, I think, distinction to make. There are really two major types of models of desire in the world, and this comes from Renee Girard himself. He says that we have external models of desire.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whether they're just getting paid to do that. And we know through anecdotal evidence that some of the people modeling lifestyles like van life are actually really miserable and depressed doing that. But they don't look like it, right? So they're modeling a desire that may not be the one that they actually have. It's taken the desires from around the world and essentially shrunken them down and put them onto the head of a pin, which we're all standing on if we're on social media. At least if we're big scrollers on social media and we don't have any boundaries. Desires are now we have billions of models of desire rather than a handful. And I just don't think that we've really come to grips yet with what that has done to humanity.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I asked my students to name their top five models of desire, the top five people that are influencing them. I really encourage them to be honest, and I'll get answers like this particular Instagram or TikTok influencer in Asia. I live in Washington, D.C. Think about that. I mean, yes, my dad, if I ask my dad what his top five models of desire were when he was their age, they'd all be people that lived in his hometown. They'd be people that he went to high school with that, you know, maybe played on the varsity team when he didn't quite yet. They'd all be very familiar people. So what social media has done from a psychological perspective has taken The desires from around the world, which people are modeling to other people in very curated ways, by the way, it's hard to know whether they even want some of the things that they're modeling.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Self reflection or self accusation involved in pursuing that lifestyle. And this is a, I don't want to go off on a tangent, but Seinfeld is very similar to this. I know this sounds totally unrelated, but the reason that Seinfeld is genius and the reason that it works is that he's talking about these real things that like we can relate to these truths about human nature, but in sort of such an absurd way that it doesn't cause the viewer to see themselves in the actual craziness of what's happening, right? Like, so it works because there's not any kind of like self-reflection. And I think there's a similar principle at work there. It has to do with the space between us and the model. And that's why luxury brain. Has to work really hard. It always maintaining a bit of otherworldliness from the readers.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That there's like what I describe in the book is the difference between celebristan and freshmanistan. So there's a big enough gap where it's like it's almost as if you're reading about celebrities, but they're not celebrities. These are just people that live a certain lifestyle. And that has a really powerful effect. I think it's way more powerful than if he was too close to comfort to our own lifestyles, right? If he's too close for comfort, then we sort of enter into the uncanny valley of marketing for a luxury good. It's the uncanny valley of like, oh, well, you know, this guy makes a little bit more money than I do. And he's got this kind of a watch, but I could never aspire to that because that's weird, right? Because then it seems like I'm competing with this guy. Whereas brule has created an entire brand that's so almost otherworldly. There's no”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of the readers of Monocle, and I'm just using this as an example because I think it's a powerful one. So basically, what I'm saying is that I would probably follow this. A lot of those readers are not even close to living that kind of a lifestyle. You might think that they are, but that's like the magic of it, right? That's why it works. There's a far enough gap.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Staying true to this kind of brand consistency where you're sort of modeling an aspirational lifestyle to people that never seems to really change, right? It's not as volatile as it probably is for the people that are actually trying to live that life style, right? With their ups and downs and relationship problems, you make it seem like the most important thing you have to worry about is what facial creams that you use before you get on a flight to Europe or something. And I think one of the reasons that it works is that there's a really large gap between the kinds of things that he's modeling and I think his average readers. So the really interesting thing is that”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fly on this transcontinental flight. Well, it's really important to take care of your skin. And they'll show like a guy who's got the perfect size bag with all the perfect size things in it. And that kind of marketing is incredibly powerful, right? Like he's made himself into a memetic model for a certain kind of lifestyle. And he's such a powerful model that he's managed to build an entire media company out of that by recruiting other people that sort of fall into the same sort of flavor and type of model that he is. So if that's the case that you want to build.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gotcha, gotcha. I am sure that some of our listeners will be familiar with Monocle. Tyler Broule is sort of this lifestyle writer. He wrote a piece called The Fast Lane in the Financial Times for a few years. And then he left and started his own lifestyle media company. And their flagship magazine now is called The Monocle. And it's got its own radio program too. And he sort of, I don't, I wouldn't say that he invented it, but I've heard the term aspirational marketing used to describe what he does. The monocle has become a bit of a joke because you'd see jet studying lifestyles. You know, everybody's really good looking. You'll see like a typical article would be like you have to.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Started making country music. There would be, people would follow him there. So it goes beyond the lifestyle because he himself is the model of desire. And people desire the desire. So when Kanye's desire changes, the desires of those who look to him seriously as a model also change. So for me, that goes a little bit deeper than the lifestyle to the person. Because long after Kanye is gone, there could be somebody else that comes along that models that particular kind of lifestyle as well or better than him. But the people that really sort of take him as their model, they look to him. If he wants something totally different, they will follow. And that's the power of a model of desire.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Modeling a lifestyle, but I think he's modeling even more than a lifestyle, he's modeling a desire. And here's an easy way to think about that. Kanye is more than a role model, so a role model just models a role. They could model a lifestyle or a certain kind of behavior, but a role model is different than a model of desire. I can't think of a politician off the top of my head that is a role model for me because I don't desire the role to be a politician. So there's no, they're not modeling a role to me. Period. But they could be modeling a desire. And the way that Kanye, I think, models a desire is this. If he totally changed his lifestyle, if he switched and started modeling a completely different kind of lifestyle, different fashion, different beliefs, moved to a different country.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So this happens a lot. And there's the hindsight bias where the stories we tell ourselves about why we made the decisions that we did very, very often leave out a model of desire or a model of that behavior. Because I don't know, because maybe it's an affront to our independence, to our rationality, to our authority of being an independent decision maker. We don't necessarily as humans like to acknowledge the influence of a model of desire on us.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Objects that we're interested in change along with them because it was never the object that was the important thing in the first place. It's the model that was the important thing. So one area where people miss this all the time. And here I'll tell you a personal story. So I actually lied to you when I told you the story about why I left investment banking. There was an important piece there that I left out. Somebody that I really respected that I worked with left a few months before I did to go start his own company. I don't know how much that affected my desire to leave or my willingness to commit. But certainly it was a factor. I mean, the fact that I remember says something and I have to wonder, you know, if he hadn't modeled the possibility to me, if he hadn't modeled that desire and then done it, would I have done it or not, right?”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Calls metaphysical desire, and it's a desire that goes way beyond any form of object. And it's where somebody basically desires to another person, not what they have. It's a desire for desire. I just saw an article, I think it was in the Wall Street Journal about like Kanye, how like there's like a bunch of people. He's got his own fashion line out now. And there are a bunch of people that are dressing like Kanye. But that's just for the things, right? I mean, it's clearly not, that's not where the desire ends, right? The desire is much deeper than that. And it's really a desire for being a certain kind of person, right? It goes down to the level of identity. And that's where when somebody has taken another person as a model, when the model changes their interest in or desire for Something”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things are the easy things to see, right? Why people buy things. And Gerard calls that kind of memetic desire acquisitive desire. We're acquiring things or objects in the world that I come from watches are the most obvious example in any nice airport or first class or business lounge in the world in any airport that I've ever seen. There are like a dozen brands that are modeled in the magazines and you see those same dozen watches or brands on the wrists of a certain kind of man usually. The object is just a tool, right? And that's why objects can be swapped out so easily, right? Gerard said that the harder form of memetic desire to understand is what”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's only a couple other ones that I can think of, but Gerard was a real interdisciplinary thinker, and he began to have dialogues with people in different fields and then uncover the extent to which memetic desire is a fundamental part of human behavior, a fundamental part of how organizations operate. that sort of formed this idea of memetic desire formed the basis of his theory, which is called the memetic theory of desire and the memetic theory of human behavior.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sort of fiction and writers that are not accurately portraying human nature sort of lean into this romantic lie. The reason why Shakespeare is so compelling and why he seemed to sort of sense this deep truce about human nature Shakespeare had never read Gerard, right? But maybe he had a tacit knowledge about memetic desire is because desire is shown to be very memetic in a great writer like Shakespeare. always seems to write in characters that are models of desire for other characters. There seem to be mediators who mediate the value of an object or of a person to somebody else. So Gerard had this insight from reading literature and then spent the next 40 years of his life exploring the world. He was one of the most interdisciplinary thinkers that we've seen in a long time.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Convince ourselves that there's a one, there's a straight line between us and the objects of our desire. And Gerard calls that the romantic lie. He said that's a romanticized way of thinking about human desire, right? Like love at first sight, it's a very sort of romantic ideal. And he said, Julius Caesar, I came, I saw, I conquered the romantic lie. And Gerard says, A lot of writers are very romantic, right? 50 shades of gray. I have never read 50 shades of gray, but I had a girlfriend of mine show me a passage in it. And it was the romantic lie. It was like this desire is sort of stirred up in a heartbeat simply by laying eyes on somebody, right? Gerard said a lot of...”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“While humans almost always convince themselves that the choice of an object is due solely to the objective qualities of the object itself, this could be a pair of shoes, this could be a job, this could be a romantic interest.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Likes philosophy. But I go into him with an openness to receiving some truths and there are truths, right? There are a lot of them. And that's just been a mindset shift for me approaching everything as an opportunity to learn. So Gerard did this. And what he saw reflected first in the literature and then all over in the world around him and in history, in politics and social life is mimetic desire. And you asked, so what is mimetic desire? Memetic desire means that a person's choice of an object is not determined by the object itself. is fundamentally or at least mostly determined by a third person or a third party, which is a mediator or model of desire. So there's always sort of a hidden third party to the transaction that helps determine the choice of the object.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT