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

“Yes, and this is why people don't understand mythology, because there are truths in mythology, even if it didn't happen. These are stories that humans have told to reflect some deep fundamental truths of human nature. And sure, some God didn't fall out of the sky and go chase somebody down. But there's some truths there. It's like Ken Kessie said, it's true even if it didn't happen, right? He's describing some things, right? There are stories that I could tell. It's like, well, that's true, even if it didn't happen because it says something that's actually like really true about this person. And it opens up our world. It opens up our minds when we start to view everything as having the ability of revealing some truth to me, even if it's fiction. And I go into philosophers that I don't necessarily agree with most of the things that they say. I have a lot of qualms with Heidegger, if anybody is listening.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's kind of like the discovery of the lost city of Troy. Everybody was trying to find Troy through only sort of scientific reasoning. And the guy that actually found Troy read Homer and he went into reading Homer under the assumption that maybe some of the things that are in this work will point me to finding the lost city of Troy. Within two years, he found it. And his map was Homer, was the Iliad and the Odyssey. So he thought that there was truth in there, even if it wasn't scientific truth or if it could have been truth disguised, but he went into it looking for answers and he found them. And Gerard did the same thing.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Into something that had been overlooked about human nature for a very long time. And he came to this insight through reading Shakespeare, through reading a lot of the French classical literature, not only French. He read a lot of Russian literature, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. And he realized that he saw this reflected in the literature. And that's important to note, right? Literature, fiction even, is written by people and these people leave clues about human nature embedded in the literature, even if it's fiction. So reading fiction and mining it for truths about human nature is what Gerard did. And I think it's because he viewed fiction that way. Like his starting point was like, oh, I can discover fascinating truths in this fiction. I don't think he would have ever seen what he saw if he hadn't set out with that realization.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rene Gerard was a French academic who moved to the US shortly after World War two, started out at Indiana University, and his PhD was essentially in history and moved around in the US. And he seems like a guy who was struggling with his vocation. He wasn't entirely happy just teaching in this narrow domain. So he began to really branch out. He was really an autodidect. I mean, he started to read everything way outside of his area of expertise, anthropology. He read sacred scriptures. He read sociology and literature. And it was in teaching, sort of getting dragged in, roped in to teaching a class on European literature that he had his first really big insight.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For getting to the next level and understanding in internal politics. So identifying them through a different type of conversation than most people are usually willing to have. I think that's probably the number one thing I would say.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It comes from trust, right? When people feel like they're in a context of a trusting relationship, they'll say all kinds of things, right? It's like speaking to a therapist. I think there are ways to recreate that within organizational environments where there's confidentiality, where there's trust, anonymity maybe, where people can begin to tell the truth about how certain people have a non-linear effect on the culture and the dynamics of the organization, right? So this is a very nonlinear domain. People are not all the same. Obviously, like a big figure, a CEO with a larger than life personality will have an outsize effect. I promise you that in most places there's very junior people that do too. And the people that revolve around them, they sort of become the mediator.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You need to really embed yourself in a relationship or in an organization and cut through the bullshit because the bullshit is always going to obscure the power of the mediator. I use the word mediator and model interchangeably. You have to cut through it. And that means getting people when they're vulnerable, hearing them explain their motivations for doing something or pursuing some path and then hearing all of the things that they didn't say. People are usually very protective of their sort of deeper motivations and deeper desires and sort of gloss over these things. But there are sort of, I think, ways to draw those things out.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Time that you read it. Then I started to realize well, there are like yagos in every corporation too. There are like yagos in most schools. There are these people that are powerful mediators to other people. And if you can identify who those people are and how they're operating, you've just identified sort of one of the root causes of problems or just one of sort of the root players in this system. And identifying those mediators is sort of really key.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yago is this mediator to everybody in the story, right? Between Othello and Desdemona, he's the one pulling the strings. He's intentionally doing it. He's the middleman. He's the mediator. And in almost all of Shakespeare, if you go back and read it, and I read it in high school, I read it in college, and I didn't, I was bored. It wasn't until I came back and read it in my adult life with sort of a new lens that I began to see all these fascinating things play out. And I was like, okay, so I didn't realize that Yago is this mediator who's pulling the strings and making people want different things. And he's basically, you got everybody wrapped around his finger in this story. And two gentlemen of Verona, same thing. Pretty much any Shakespeare play has these really powerful mediators and their influence is hidden. You don't really understand it the first time.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are many. I think Shakespeare is the best, and I never really understood. I mean, it almost seems cliche to say, but I never understood the importance until I saw the way that the characters in Shakespeare Respond to models of desire. So in Othello.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People are affected, how people change. I've learned more about that through literature, frankly, than I have from most business books. And that's why it's such a powerful thing to explore because it's about human nature and what else is business than a way of humans interacting, right? It's human nature manifesting itself in the real world.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Partly because of celebrated early. And I've had, right? So I've learned that through experience. And I've had the full gamut. I mean, I've been very lucky, right? I've had people in my life that I've worked with and been partners with for well over a decade now where there's just this really high degree of trust. And then I've had other situations where at least at an earlier point in my life I would have trusted somebody completely and then very unexpectedly they did something that was extremely surprising. So with that comes a certain sobriety about human nature. You know, I think like a lot of my work has been just delving deep into human nature. It's a really big shortcut for people because there are certain things that just don't change. You know, seeing the full range of possibilities of what people are capable of.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I've had the full spectrum. To the point where I often say nothing surprises me anymore. I'm not a skeptic or a cynic. I'm one of the kind of person that waits until the deal is closed before I celebrate.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, when they go together, I think that's a really important point. When they go together, that's a powerful tool for decision making. And sometimes when one or the other is missing, something feels a little bit off.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Little bit off. And he'll notice. I don't know if he'd even be able to explain to me how he notices, but he knows because he's internalized that knowledge.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's probably a series of things. Call it a gut feeling. I just have that. And I have the same thing for mistrust, right? And I think that this kind of tacit knowledge, inarticulate knowledge is undervalued in our society. It's undervalued because we always want to be able to like explain the science and give the hard reasons for it. But a lot of life doesn't work like that. I get on a I take public transportation, I get on a plane. You know, and I have to operate with a certain level of trust that the pilot's not drunk when I get on the plane, you know. And if I notice that just something is a little bit off, it sends up some kind of a red flag for me. I have friends that are in special forces and it's like amazing hanging out with them because, you know, when they walk down the street, I mean, it's just crazy walking on the street. They could notice something a block away. It could just be a guy who's just walking, is walk as a...”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This comes into play with so many things, right? It's like one of my favorite sort of fables is like somebody asked the millipede how he walks and he says, well, first I move this leg wait, no, wait. First I move this leg and then I move, wait a second. Then I move this. And he just becomes paralyzed and curls up in a ball, right? His tacit knowledge on how to walk. We know more than we're able to explain that we know. And I call this inarticulate knowledge, knowledge that I'm not able to articulate to somebody. And I have inarticulate knowledge about a lot of things, including other people. I could have tacit knowledge of why I trust somebody that I couldn't explain to you. If you ask me to give you specific things, I wouldn't be able to point to that, oh, there's that one time when we were hanging out together because it's probably not any one particular.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Intuition is an important word. Tacit knowledge is really important concept in my life. Michael Polyani is a philosopher that I like a lot and he speaks about tacit knowledge. So these are things that we know that we can't necessarily explain how or why we know them. An example of tacit knowledge could be, you know, Shane, if I asked you how to ride a bike, I assume you know how to ride a bike, but if I asked you to explain it, it would probably be in relatively vague terms. You probably wouldn't get into the physics of how it works and the mechanics of how it works. And if you wrote it down step by step and an alien came down and read what you'd written, he probably have no idea how in the hell they'll ride a bicycle because you learn to do that such a long time ago. There's muscle memory. It's like it's really hard for Tiger Woods to explain his golf swing to anybody else.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, and just I think finding people that are able to just like share vulnerabilities be real about some of our struggles over these last couple of years. Those are the people that I've managed to bond with the most rather than just get on Zoom calls every week and just act like we're all good. We haven't all been all good all of the time. And so I think I've particularly appreciated people that are able to have those kinds of conversations which are especially needed in the corporate world, right? And there's not a lot of space for them. They happen underground. They happen when people go out for beers. But I think those are the ones that I've leaned into more.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you're just like, okay, all right, we can't go any further than that, right? We're just going to have to wait maybe next year. Things will be different. But right now, I shut down. Okay. There's like a sign blocking that road. We have to take a different road. Can't force somebody necessarily into that. Communication. You can model it, which I think is one of the most important things to do, but you can't really force it to happen. So I would say that's the number one factor. And then everybody's, you know, has had different coping mechanisms. I watch more Netflix than I think I'll watch for the remainder of my life.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To barbecue in the backyard. It's really an act of courtesy to clearly define boundaries and rules, right? Like if I'm coming into your house and think of this as a metaphor for a lot of things in life, okay, even a business. If I'm a guest in your house, it actually causes me a lot less anxiety to like know where we stand, what you want to do, how you think about this. And, you know, we should have had those conversations way before I showed up at the front door. So open and honest communication is really important. And I found some people are just willing to have those conversations. And it's easy. And other people aren't. And I noticed like that there are some people that I would sort of, I knew that having certain conversations was going, just we just couldn't go there, right? There are some relationships where you hit a point where there's a block, okay?”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know if I know the answer. I've thought a lot about it. I think one of the big things is open and honest communication, right? The people that I feel like I can communicate with openly and honestly are the ones that I feel really comfortable investing in in those relationships. And I mean, I can't think of another more consequential time to have open and honest conversations, little things like getting together at our house or at another person's house.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or something like that. But I think if you're going to enter into a very consequential business relationship with somebody, whether they're a client or a partner, a lot of money on the line, jobs on the line, I think it's appropriate to test that. And I think some ways to do that, I don't think it's appropriate to lie, but I think you can speaking a hard truth is one of my favorite ways to do that. Speaking a hard truth right up front and just seeing what it does, right? Like seeing what happens. You know, sometimes, you know, you can tell based on the reaction, like, well, if that, if I'm not able to speak truthfully to this person, hard to imagine that we'd be able to have a healthy four or five year relationship.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think time will always test them. I think time will test them naturally. But sometimes we don't have time. Sometimes we can't wait a year through the ups and downs to see how other people will respond. COVID, great example of time revealing some truths about relationships for me. You know, the way that some people sort of just reacted to it and sort of I lost touch with some people and other people I developed a closer relationship with. But we don't always have these sort of outside things that are the great sort of wedge things that reveal truths about relationships. So I do think that there are ways to appropriately test relationships. It depends on the kind of relationship, right? I think they're like unethical ways to test a relationship, right? Like putting somebody under, you know, severe stress, right? The way that they would do in a special ops boot camp.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As many people listening will know it can feel not a whole lot different than a marriage. And I think there are ways to test relationships in the same way that we can test our desires like my desire to leave my job.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think relationships is a great example. I was married last summer and my wife and I were together for quite a while before we got married. And I think this is sort of true with any relationship is you sort of need to be with a person, at least somebody you're considering marrying in both of those periods, right? You know, through when times are really good and when times are really bad. I think that's kind of a really good test of a relationship, right? And then, you know, sort of find that fertile soil of sort of like peace where things are not totally wild in either direction, where you start to make a decision, right? About whether you want to spend the rest of your lives together. And I don't know if that just applies to marriage. I think that can apply to business deals, business, serious business decisions. Few decisions are more important than who you're going to become a business partner with.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally miserable. I had like a week of this where I was in that place. And then I had clarity about what I wanted to do. So I think so some of the emotional factors that were involved, like, oh gosh, this managing director just asked me to pull an all-nighter and I'm pissed off. And I make the decision in the middle of the night that I'm going to leave and go start this company. Probably not wise. You know, hey, I just got a bonus, just more money than I've ever seen in my life. And I'm going to decide to stay another year because that felt really good. I wasn't in either place. I was sort of in the middle place. And that gave me the personal confidence that I needed to know that I was more likely making the right decision about something that was an authentic desire that I had.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Big life changing decision when we're in a period of desolation or like deep deep anxiety I think we're just more liable to make the wrong decision for the wrong reasons when we're in that place conversely I think it's a little dangerous to make a big life-changing decision when we're in a moment of extreme consolation right where like everything's great like we're we're riding this high and you do things that maybe you shouldn't be doing it's kind of like I lived in Vegas for years so you're riding a hot streak at the table you may not be thinking clearly one of the best places is kind of just in this in between sort of moment of sort of neutrality and peace where you could feel like you could go either way right it's like really fertile ground for decision making because you're sort of not too far on either side I came to that place where I wasn't like”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Else it just sort of at some point it becomes too late, almost like a person with an addiction. So the pressure was building and I realized that I had sort of a window of, I don't know, call it existential or spiritual freedom with which I could still do something. And I didn't want to lose the freedom. I think there are always circumstances that are involved too. And oftentimes with decision making, the circumstances, the soil in which decisions are made is a really critical and overlooked factor. So yes, I had Sean calling me and emailing me and sort of kicking me ass like, hey, now's the time if we don't do this, somebody else will. But I think what really did it for me was a moment of clarity in my process of discernment. So, you know, I think that it's never good to make a serious.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was both it was a slow building pressure. And sometimes I think that slow building pressure, if you don't recognize it and if you don't do anything about it, can actually lead to some sort of a tipping point that stops feeling like pressure and just sort of makes you dead inside. Like you almost forget the pressure, if that makes sense. Like we sort of have a window of opportunity to recognize that internal pressure and do something about it.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Buying talismans of success like watches. And every time I would do it, you know, they hit, the dopamine hit would last like two days. And then it would go away. And I wanted to look a little deeper.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First, to tell you, I'm like a pretty miserable person to be around. I need that. So even while I was working in finance, I was super weird. Like I was going home at night and reading classic literature and studying philosophy. And I started to recognize that, ah, there's some part of me that needs to be nourished that I'm not nourishing. So realizing that I didn't feel free and I didn't feel like I was able to exercise my gifts, frankly, was a big part of why I felt like I would never be happy no matter how much money I made. I ended up running into the same problem as an entrepreneur, having started a successful company. But I think that I had enough models of unhappiness around me that I was able to recognize unhappy marriages sort of constantly.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quite a while, you know, and then I can figure out the next thing that I want to do, but everybody went in that way. But then I saw guys that had been in for 10 or 15 years that seemed like they never had enough. It was never enough. And I didn't really want to be like that. I sort of realized that it's kind of a slippery slope. Like when is enough enough? And this is way before I had ever heard the word memetic desire, which is what my book's about. So I just intuitively like sort of understood that there was some force that was going to continue to manufacture desires that I would misinterpret as needs and probably keep me stuck in this cycle. And why wasn't I happy? I mean, I think ultimately I wasn't able to exercise my creativity in the way that I wanted to. I mean, it turns out that if I don't have a creative outlet, you know, my wife would be the”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, there's been studies that have shown that once you make over, God, geez, I think it used to be $85,000, that there's no sort of increase in happiness after that. The number's got to be higher now with inflation. I think that study came out six or seven years ago at least. But I was making over that. And first year out of school, and I didn't realize the extent to which I was sort of chasing some idea of success that I hadn't really spent a lot of time actually thinking about. And part of that was I thought that that track was the quickest route to financial security, to lifelong financial security. And like, you know, many of my colleagues, I thought to myself, well, I just need to do this for five to seven years, go the normal track. And, you know, if I'm smart, if I don't squander at all, I will have enough money to be set.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Started, and I didn't know how things were going to go, but that ride back from Hong Kong to Los Angeles was a very lonely and quiet ride from me. I don't think I watched a movie. I didn't listen to any music. I just sat there and stared out the window and just sort of wondered what in the hell I just did.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That we're going to put this stuff in vending machines and scale it. And I made my best case for why this was actually a massive market. He was supportive, but he sort of said, Luke, I want you to understand that if you do this, if you leave this soon, it'd been less than a year. You'll never work in investment banking again. You won't work in corporate finance because nobody will really trust you anymore, right? Like once you've sort of got that bug, I think he was right. But it's kind of a jarring thing to hear at that stage in your career. You know, it's like, all right, I'm 23 years old. And if I say yes to this opportunity, it sounds like I'm closing the door to another one. Is that really what I want to do? But ultimately made the decision to go to LA and moved into a small little apartment on Coenga in the 101, a little Hollywood apartment with a garage that was just big enough to house an inventory.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Asked a few of the senior people if I could meet with them and walked into one particular managing director's office and this guy was really eccentric. He wore socks around the office and he kicked his shoes off and put his feet up on the desk with the socks and looked at me and was like, Luke, hey, you owe me a beer. I said, I owe you a beer. And I said, why? He said, just because let's go get a beer. So we went out and got a beer. And I told Steve, hey, I don't know how to tell you this. Like I've really enjoyed my time here, but I'm leaving. And he said, what are you going to do? And I said, well, I'm going to go start a company in California. He said, oh, you're going to Silicon Valley. You're going to go the startup route. And I said, yeah. And he will tell me about it. And I fumbled around. Yeah, I'm getting into the distribution business. Well, what kind of distribution food? Well, how are you going to distribute it? And finally, there was no way around it. I had to just tell them.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think so, but I'm not sure. And I said, I need more than that. Do you got anything else? And he said, well, there is one other really good reason. And that's the location is actually the perfect location for our business because it just so happens most of the large distributors for the kind of products that we want to sell in our machines are all in the area. They're all in Southern California. So we can order from any of them have the products in our warehouse that practically the next day shipping costs will be low. It will just streamline our business. And I said, all right, all right. So you get those are two good reasons. That's enough. So I moved to LA to start what was fit fuel, what became fit fuel. But it was nerve-wracking to be pretty alone in Hong Kong. The next day after I got my bonus,”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Off. That was the business. So here I am in my office in Hong Kong, you know, contemplating whether I should go move to LA to start what is essentially a vending machine company, right? I just never wanted to talk about it that way. So I just say like, oh, I'm going into the food distribution business or something like that. And I'm like, well, you know, here I am. I got to move halfway around the world. I really don't want to go to LA. I've never even been to LA before. My business partner is asking me to come to LA and I said, you know, Sean, I don't know if I moved to LA just because you're dating a girl there. I was like, are you going to marry this girl? He's like,”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Business that we've always talked about, you know, you don't seem entirely happy. I know this, you're never going to be satisfied until you find out if this works or not. And the business was quite simple. I mean, it was a healthy vending machine company is the business that we had in mind, right? It was just to put the healthy version, the healthy alternative of everything that you normally find in a vending machine into the machines. Brand them in a really cool way. The name was Fit Fuel. put LCD screens into them so we could display health facts, nutrition information, sell ads eventually, get people's attention as they walked by, kind of state-of-the-art machines, and they'd be healthy. Everything in them would be healthy. So, you know, the plan was to put these in schools and airports and any place where it was hard to find healthy food. And at the time, you know, that was a pretty novel idea, right? I mean, that sort of the health food craze was taking.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was putting together pitch books, one for a Thai petrochemicals company. I was the sort of the senior analyst on the deal. And I went there and presented it to the senior management of the company myself. I don't even remember why. I mean, maybe it's because the managing director was out sick or got called away and they didn't want to cancel the meeting. So I was doing crazy things. I mean, anybody works in finance knows that this is not normal. So it was a good gig. I was making a lot of money. But I was totally miserable. And, you know, I've always had the desire to start something. And my cousin and I had been kicking around an idea for a business ever since we were in college. I went to NYU. He went to Columbia. I was a year ahead of him. So he just graduated and moved out to LA for a girl and started to call me and email me and say, you know, Luke, why don't we start this?”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I made the move, got on a plane, and went to Hong Kong, didn't know a soul there other than the guy that recruited me to come out, and was working in investment banking and sort of like what was a dream role. I mean, they treated me as a junior guy more like I was a VP. I was doing crazy things. I hope this doesn't get anybody at Citigroup in trouble, but I was like going to do due diligence on Chinese coal mines by myself, sending me down an underground mines. Like, hey, make sure this company has the assets they say they have. Well, it looks like a mine to me. I don't know.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I arrived in Hong Kong through purely mimetic forces in my life that had brought me to a great undergrad business school at NYU Stern and went the investment banking route without having really paused and given it a lot of thought as to why I was doing that. That's really the route I wanted to go on, what that career track looked like. After I graduated, I worked for a private equity company in New York City. But I worked on a deal and I got an offer to go work in Hong Kong in investment banking for Citigroup out of their Hong Kong office. And at the time, it's weird to go from private equity to investment banking. But I realized that, first of all, I wanted to be in Asia. There was a lot of very exciting things going on in China at the time. I thought it'd give me a good chance to kind of be in China at the very beginning of what we now see was a total boom.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Desire is a positive thing. It's one of the things that makes us human. I think of desire like the parable of the two wolves, right? You know, we all have these two wolves inside of us that are kind of at war. And you need to sort of find out which one of those wolves to starve and which one of those wolves to feed. And it's not always easy to tell which one is which when it comes to the things that we want, when it comes to our desires. I actually believe that we should feed those enduring desires and that those enduring desires do ultimately sort of see us through the hard times.”
2022-05-31 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT