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Desire: Why You Want The Things You Want with Luke Burgis

Lace Gilger
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In this episode we bring on polymath Luke Burgis to discuss the fundamental question of DESIRE - why do you want the things you want in life?

Luke Arthur Burgis is an author, professor of business, founder, and CEO of multiple startups responsible for millions of dollars in value creation. His unique perspective on business stems from diverse experiences: working on Wall Street; creating numerous technology, lifestyle, and consumer brands; living in multiple countries; and combining his business education at NYU Stern with studies in philosophy and the humanities in Rome. Burgis is currently the Director of Programs at the Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship at The Catholic University of America. His recent book Wanting provides a toolkit to untethering ourselves from unfulfilling desires

  • Desire is one of the most mysterious forces in the world, and we don't understand exactly how it works.

  • Desire is intertwined with ACTION. We act because we desire something in teh future that we don't have.

  • All human desire is "memetic" - what does that mean?

    • It's different than the typical understanding

  • All desire is memetic - it's imitative - it's based on what OTHER's want.

  • "Man is the creature who doesn't know what he wants, so he looks to others to find what he wants."

  • Desire is different than your needs. It's the thing we want once our basic survival instincts have been met.

  • Imitation is the basis for education.

  • Memesis is a hidden, subconscious, form of imitation.

  • Most adults are embarrassed by imitation, most people want to be "authentic" and "innovators" and not copy others.

  • The formula for many people's success has started with imitation.

  • Innovation comes out of imitation.

  • It makes you really uncomfortable as an adult when people imitate you too closely.

  • You can openly imitate people who are in very distant social circles.

  • "External mediator" vs "Internal mediator" of desires

  • The "Laws of Desire" that we can understand.

  • We are greatly helped by understand WHY we want the things we want.

  • Desire is a lot like the force of gravity. That's a great mental model to understand or explain desire really effectively.

  • We want imitate those who have a quality of being that WE LACK. "Metaphysical desire" - all desire is a desire to BE a certain way - for a certain state of "being."

    • We can swap out the THINGS all day long, underneath those desires is a deep desire for being.

    • Models come in and out of our lives that we aspire to be like ins ome way.

  • Take an inventory of your life and who your role models are.

    • Ask yourself WHY they are your role models.

    • Who are your role models that you're imitating and why?

  • Who are the the POSITIVE role models in your life? Who are the NEGATIVE role models in your life?

  • We have to take more time for silence.

  • We often get caught in "systems of desire" where people compete for silly accolades and totems that they really don't care about.

    • Does giving up these "systems of desire" and "status games" make you lose your edge?

  • Sour Grapes: How do you drop out of "status games" without being considered a quitter or loser?

  • Talk to someone who has played the status game until they are 70 years old, who has a billion dollars, and see what their mindset is.

  • Create boundaries, space, and distance between yourself and unhealthy models.

  • It's hard to get a different perspective when you're immersed in the fishbowl with everyone else.

  • What does the ideal day look like for you, once you've removed all constraints?

    • What do you want to be worried about?

    • What do you not want to be worried about?

  • Rivalry: We don't fight over our differences, we fight over wanting the same thing.

  • We are all in many ways acting like Freshmen in highschool

  • The concept of "negative imitation" - it's still taking the other person as a model of desire.

  • Most people who are negative imitating never realize how much they are imitating the other person.

  • "We become like our enemies."

  • When we have a mimetic rival, we actually become MORE like them over time, even if we are doing the opposite of them.

  • First comes awareness, then we move towards renunciation.

  • Future authoring.. if you take that desire to its logical end.. is it good or bad?

  • When it comes to fitness and nutrition, we already know these principles - and yet it applies to mental work as well.

  • You want to develop an "anti memetic" machinery in your psyche - it requires training the mind and training the will - and it's training that is HARD to do.

  • We move from awareness to renunciation - what does that journey look like?

  • The flywheel of desire.. how you can create self sustaining momentum that turns itself.

    • Break businesses down to "flywheels" for each major bucket (customer acquisition, profitability, etc) and understand the component parts or steps that go into that.

    • Draw it out like a circle with arrows.

  • Create positive feedback loops for your habits and desires.

  • You can't just wake up tomorrow morning and want anything.

  • When we've detoxed from the noise, our minds really open up.

  • Homework:

    • Ask yourself: What's the single most important thing that I can do right now to set myself up to want to do the things that I want to do tomorrow morning?

    • Consider taking a retreat alone with yourself.

Thank you so much for listening!

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:04] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet, bringing the world’s top experts right to you. Introducing your hosts, Matt Bodnar and Austin Fabel.

[00:00:17] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet, with more than 5 million downloads and listeners in over 100 countries. In this episode, we bring on polymath Luke Burgis to discuss the fundamental question of desire. Why do you want the things you want?

Are you a fan of the show, and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our email list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How to Create Time For What Matters Most in Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting, and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you're on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word smarter. That's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222.

In our previous episode, we brought on innovation expert Sunil Gupta to discuss how you can make yourself and your ideas more backable. Now, for our interview with Luke. Luke Burgis is an author, professor of business, founder and CEO of multiple startups responsible for millions of dollars in value creation. His unique perspective on business stems from diverse experiences, working on Wall Street, creating technology, lifestyle, and consumer brands, living in multiple countries, and combining his business education at NYU Stern with his studies in philosophy and humanities in Rome. He's currently the Director of Programs at the Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship at the Catholic University of America. His recent book, Wanting, provides a toolkit to untethering ourselves from unfulfilled desire.

Luke, welcome to the Science of Success.

[00:02:13] LB: Hey, Matt. Thanks for having me on the show.

[00:02:14] MB: Well, I'm super excited to have you on today and dig into this topic, which is so interesting to me. Let's start with the macro picture, and we'll drill in from there. Tell me a little bit about desire. What is it, and how does it shape our lives?

[00:02:30] LB: Desire is probably one of the most mysterious forces in the world, and we don't understand entirely how it works. Desire is really the driving force behind everything that we do. When desire dies, we don't have any hope to do anything. There's no action. So desire is very much tied with action. We act because we desire something in the future that we don't currently have. But how desire really works, the mechanisms, the operating system behind desire is something that very few people understand. But very few people have even asked the question, have even wondered to themselves, why do I want the things that we want?

The topic of my book, and something that's fascinated me for many, many years, is that very question. A thinker named Rene Girard inspired me seven or eight years ago to really dive into understanding my own desires and what was driving me and my path. He proposed a model of desire that was different than any that I'd ever heard before and he called it mimetic desire. He said that all human desire is mimetic. Now, what does that mean? To say that desire is mimetic is to say that it's different than the way that most of us maybe implicitly think of desire. Meaning that it's autonomous and independent and authentically our own. Authentic, the root of that word is just author, authorship, that we're the author of her own desire.

Girard said, “No. In fact, human desire, which is different than needs, desire is kind of apart from needs. It's the things that we want, when there's no instinctual or biological basis for wanting that thing. That all desire is mimetic, meaning imitative. That we look to other people to know what is worth wanting and what to pursue.” Girard said, “Man is the creature who doesn't know what to want, so he looks to other people to pursue things.” Animals are not like this. Animals operate on instinct. But humans are very different, and we have a lot more things to desire. Our universe of desire is practically infinite when it comes to partners and careers and paths and even brands that we choose. So Girard just opened up a whole new world for me and helped me understand myself a lot better.

[00:04:47] MB: That's such a fascinating takeaway, and the term mimetic desire can seem sort of esoteric or confusing. But I think really bring it back to that conception that it's ultimately imitative. It's something “that man is a creature who doesn't know what he wants.” It’s so fascinating, and I can totally see why you were so interested in digging into that topic.

[00:05:09] LB: Yeah, absolutely. So desire, again, it is very mysterious, and there's a lot of nuance here when it comes to mimetic desire. I should just say the word is a word that many people have never heard before, including me, until I read Rene Girard. It’s fancy but it's really just a way of saying imitation and it comes from the Greek. There's a reason that Girard didn't use the word imitation. He didn't call it imitative desire. I think it's important to call that out and understand why. So imitation is a good thing. It's the way that human beings learn language. We learn culture. We learn all kinds of things through imitation. It’s the basis of education.

Mimesis is a little bit different. It's sort of a hidden secret, usually that subconscious form of imitation. Girard said that this is typically the way that desire works. So when we're kids, many of us had role models. Mine was, I guess, George Clooney [inaudible 00:06:07]. I thought for sure I was going to go to medical school, until I actually got to college and realized that I hated being a doctor. But I had role models that I would openly acknowledge and imitate. But as we get older, something funny happens, and most adults are kind of embarrassed by imitation. At least in the world that I come from, which is the world of entrepreneurship and startups, imitation is kind of a dirty word. Everybody wants to be an innovator.

Girard, he said it's called mimetic desire. It’s the term that he gave for this kind of desire because it's typically invisible and hidden, and we don't know that we’re doing it.

[00:06:41] MB: That’s a really key distinction, and this notion that it's lurking just below the conscious and the subconscious, and the understanding that a lot of times we certainly at a conscious level are, I love the word, embarrassed by the thought of imitation or copying others or whatever. Yet this extremely powerful force lurking beneath our conscious awareness is really having a tremendous impact on our behavior.

[00:07:07] LB: Absolutely. We have this idea of innovation and imitation being two totally separate things. But in fact, the lines are very blurred with those. So part of, I think, the formula for many, many people's success, in my experience, has been getting their start as really good imitators. I mean, the masters learned to paint like this in the Renaissance. Innovation often comes out of imitation. Kind of we imitate somebody that we aspire to be, we put that through our own personal filter, and it comes out of that as innovation or as something a little bit unique. So I like to think of imitation in a positive sense, and mimetic desire should not just be thought of as a negative thing at all. There's a process of becoming more aware of it and being more intentional about the kind of models that we choose to imitate so that we can actually understand who we've chosen as a model and see them as kind of a pathway to becoming ourselves or becoming who we are or actually innovating great things.

[00:08:09] MB: One of my favorite books on this whole broader topic is Mastery by Robert Greene, and it touches on that same notion of the masters and the great Renaissance painters and so forth, having some sort of relationship where they copied, they studied, and then they reached this phase that he calls the creative active, where they become more bold and start to become true innovators. I thought you made a really important distinction there, which is this notion that imitation and innovation are not opposites. They're really two sides of the same coin.

[00:08:38] LB: Exactly. But imitation is a funny thing with people. I studied Elizabeth Holmes, who's the former CEO of Theranos, which is a biotech company that got itself into a lot of trouble through fraud. But the reason I was interested in her is that she famously imitated Steve Jobs very openly. She wore black turtlenecks, and adopted a lot of his rituals and customs as a CEO, and was very open about that. But if you were an employee at Theranos, imagine. I think everybody can relate to this. Imagine if somebody started walking around their offices wearing black turtlenecks and speaking the way that she spoke. That would have made her extremely uncomfortable. It makes all of us really uncomfortable. As adults, when people are imitating us a little bit too closely, like when they give the same gifts that we give, we don't like that. We don't like that at all.

Part of the way to understand this distinction between the kind of imitation that is uncomfortable for us or ticks us off or the kind that we're more open to is the distinction between people that are far away from us that we have no possibility into coming into contact with. So this would be Michael Jordan or Elon Musk for me. I really live in a different social sphere than I do, and I can imitate them openly, and they'll probably never even know it. That’s very different than if I have somebody in my office or somebody who's a peer. Imitation, in Girard’s view, this mimetic desire or mimesis, often leads people into these really, really uncomfortable rivalries. So that he calls this the difference between an external mediator of desire or an internal mediator of desire.

For Elizabeth Holmes, Steve Jobs was basically an external mediator of desire, so that was safe. But if somebody within Theranos, we've heard stories of this, would begin to come a little too close to her, that would cause serious problems.

[00:10:38] MB: So fascinating. Bad Blood’s obviously a fantastic read that goes into some of the nuances of that. But before we dig too much into rivalry, which definitely I want to touch on, I want to come back and unpack a little bit more the operating system of desire. Tell me more about how we can really understand that.

[00:10:57] LB: Yeah, the operating system of desire. When I say that, I simply – I don't mean to imply that it's mechanistic in any way. But to say that there are laws of desire that we can understand, and we're greatly helped by understanding the way that we come to want the things that we want. I like to think of mimetic desire less like an operating system and more like a force. The equivalent force in physics would be gravity. So gravity is this force that attracts us to certain things, and it's a function of the size or the mass and the proximity.

Now, mimetic desire is basically the equivalent force to gravity. It's the psychological force by which a person is attracted to certain people or certain things. In a way, it's also kind of a function of mass and proximity, just the way that gravity is. So that is kind of the operating system. But, for me, it's a little bit easier to think about it as a force. There are certain people that come into our lives, and we even have a word for that. We call that gravitas, right? There are certain people that come into our lives that we can begin to almost orbit around them for some mysterious reason. I think that mimetic desire is one mental model to understand why that can happen. It’s because, for whatever reason, I have taken that person as a model to help me understand what to want. It’s usually because I secretly view that person as having some quality of being that I lack. I usually never admit that. But whether I think that they're happier than I am, it's like if I just – If they want this thing, then I want it too because they seem to have something that I lack.

Girard calls this metaphysical desire, and he says that all desire, at the end of the day, is a desire for being. It's a desire to sort of be a certain way so that the things that we actually pursue, that we can swap out the things all day long, and swap out the things for the rest of our life. But he says, usually, underneath this desire to want, to live in a certain place because somebody else does, or to have a certain kind of car because somebody else does is usually some deep desire for being. Models come in and out of our lives that we aspire to be like in some way. If we didn't, we never would have adopted them as a model in the first place.

[00:13:35] MB: Such an interesting concept the notion that we imitate others because they have a quality of being that we lack. That really resonated with me. I think it's so interesting to see and understand those people that you think about. I'll use your example. Why do I want to be like Elon Musk, right? Or why would I want to model him? What is the quality of being that he has that I'm trying to get? It's a really thought-provoking question.

[00:14:00] LB: Yeah. I also often think that I want to be more like Elon Musk. Elon Musk has said publicly. I was in a clubhouse with him a month or two ago, and he was on the stage, and he actually addressed the question. He said, “You know, a lot of people say that they would love to have my lifestyle. But I promise you, you probably don't.” We ascribe qualities to other people that they do not have. This is why the Egyptians basically worship cats. They ascribe some quality of being to them. I think it has to do with the fact that they don't seem needy. They don't seem to have the pains of desire that we have.

We ascribe qualities to even animals, but oftentimes people that don't actually – We don't know that person's life but we project onto them all kinds of things that we think we want, that we think that they have, and they very quickly become models for us.

[00:14:52] MB: So how do we start to really peer into ourselves and understand and become more aware of these undercurrents of desire that are moving underneath the surface?

[00:15:04] LB: The first step is really taking some time to think seriously about who our models have been throughout our life. One way to do that is really kind of taking an inventory of your life and your history, which many people, frankly, have never done. I always ask people, especially as part of my hiring process. I ask people to often dig back into their past, to tell me stories of times in their life when they were engaged in various activities, especially times when they were doing something that was deeply fulfilling to them. I ask them that question because I think that's really indicative of a person's essence and how they're wired, and I want to know those things.

People are always very confused about like why I care about something that they didn't fit their sixth or seventh grade. But it's really important to me because that's a clue to some kind of pattern of desire or design. There’s a process through which we can go back through our lives and begin to think about who your models were from as early as you can remember, how they've changed, how they've evolved, and get up to the present, and think very seriously about who they are today. Most people have simply never named them. They've never even thought about this before, and I think it's a really powerful exercise to name both the positive ones that we would traditionally have called role models and the negative ones. These are like the people that you sort of can't help but follow on social media because you just need to see what they say or what they're doing. They might be people in some way that they could be a rival to you. It's like somebody who can't stop unfollowing, somebody that they broke up with or who broke up with them. Those are examples of negative models, so understanding both the positive and the negative.

I really do believe that we have to take more time for silence in our culture, in our society. I mean, one of the reasons most people don't understand their own mimetic desires or don't understand the mimetic systems that they're caught up in. I interviewed a French chef in the book who had been caught up in the Michelin star system, which I would call a system of desire, sort of wanting certain things, meaning Michelin stars for his restaurant. He'd forgotten why in the hell he became a chef in the first place. Part of the reason that I think many of us are caught in these systems of desire, whether it's in a family or the education system or some system within our industry, where people are competing for these silly accolades and totems that they don't really care about. If you give them a couple of whiskies and you have a real conversation with them, they're like, “Yeah, I don't care about this.”

Taking silence like from this a hustle culture that we're in is really the only way to be able to understand desire at a deeper level. If you're able to do that, if you're able to take that intentional time, really think about why you came to want the things that you did in the first place. My hope and certainly one of my goals in writing this book is to give people a mental model for understanding desire in terms of mimesis.

[00:17:58] MB: One thing that I'm curious about that really touches on this idea of getting trapped in a system of desire, realizing maybe it's not what you want or what you should be competing for, do you think that – Or I'd be curious what your perspective would be for somebody whose response to that as well, “I don't want to give up my edge. I don't want to lose my edge by getting out of that system.”

[00:18:23] LB: My response to that would be where does that ever end because there is no end, really. There's no end to that. I thought the same thing when I was an entrepreneur. So in Silicon Valley, I'd started a couple of companies and was very much caught up in a system of desire that caused me to pursue accolades and certain venture capitalist and entrepreneur status games, which are rampant in that world. I'd become miserable with my own company and even like going into my office every day, and this is the company that I had found. It’s a super strange sensation to feel that. This is around the time when I was introduced to Girard and began to dig a little bit deeper into these questions.

It really took something happening to me to really kind of shake me out of that funk, that constant striving of like I don't want to lose my edge. What will happen to me if I am not up at 5:00 AM every day and staying up until midnight? What will happen to me? Will I fall behind? Will I get behind? I would have continued down that path and probably just run myself straight into the ground. I had really just something that I would have never asked for brought on myself, which is really a blown up business deal, which put my company under extreme stress. I talk about that story specifically in the book. It had to do with a business deal with Tony Hsieh that didn't quite work out the way that I wanted it to.

It forced me to take some time away, and I realized that all of those fears that I had about getting behind or losing my edge were unfounded. I mean, in fact, the time that I was away allowed me to understand who the hell I was for the first time and to be able to do the introspection necessary to understand what it was that I wanted to do next, rather than just constantly just trying to come up for breaths whenever I could. It gave me the time to sink down and be more intentional about the next steps in my life. So I would just caution everybody to believe in the reality of that feeling that you have when you think that you would get behind by taking that time.

[00:20:38] MB: A corollary of that that I'm very curious about is I think I can understand how to do the work of figuring out why a certain person is your role model or why you want that quality of being that they have, but dropping out of these bigger sort of status games that we get ourselves into. I'd be curious to hear your perspective more around how to psychologically, subconsciously, etc. pull yourself out of some of those things that it's so easy to get wrapped into.

[00:21:10] LB: Yeah. Dropping out of the status games is a really interesting question. There's the idea of sour grapes, which I think is powerful in a lot of people's minds, that Aesop's fable of sour grapes that if you drop out in some way, you're calling the good grapes sour. I don't think that that's necessarily always true. I mean, sometimes grapes are sour and sometimes they're not. The key is knowing the difference. One of the ways to do that, I don't think it's possible to do it unless you, first of all, begin to see some of the fantasy involved in that, right? You talk to somebody who has been playing the game until they're 70 or 75 years old, and I have, and who has a billion dollars. I know a couple people like this who are still experiencing that same sense of kind of never satisfied striving and, frankly, aren't happy.

It kind of takes that I think to pierce the veil a little bit from that underlying belief that we all have, that we need X amount of money, or we need a certain number of clients or accolades, or to be in the front page of the New York Times or whatever. So that's part of it because I think the journey is hard to take if you have bought fully into this belief of that metaphysical desire of like getting this thing that this person has will make you happy or successful or whatever. You'll probably never think of yourself as successful, and that's one of the paradoxes of entrepreneurship is that I know a lot of successful entrepreneurs. I know probably a dozen entrepreneurs that have founded billion dollar companies and I know them pretty well. None of them really think of themselves as having achieved anywhere near what they want to achieve. Some of them are pretty unhappy.

We know we saw the case of Tony Hsieh, who was a good, good friend of mine, who was clearly just in a lot of pain. Part of it, the next step, is, really, I think creating some space for yourself, creating boundaries with unhealthy models. So if you are – I'm using the example of Silicon Valley here because that's the world that I came from. I think a lot of people are doing what I'm about to describe, and that's creating some space and some distance. I think it's very hard to even begin to have a different mindset when you're completely immersed in the fishbowl with everybody else. Really hard to do that. I think it’s part of the reason. There are complex or many reasons why people are like moving to different places but creating some physical space. I mean, literally going into the desert, going to the mountains, whatever you need to do to create that space.

Obviously, today, there's physical space but there's also technological space. There's existential space, so we're all kind of thrust into the same fishbowl on social media. It’s hard to get away. You could move to the middle of Montana and still feel like you're every bit as immersed in that culture. So taking some steps to create some boundaries there to give yourself some time. Maybe for you, you start with a few days or a week. For me, I started with a few months. So it's going to be different for everybody. I don't think that there's a formula but I do think that it's important to create space. When I say space, I really mean social and existential space to do that work and then maybe finding some new models, like some healthier models that transcend that framework that you used to have that exists outside of that.

A lot of people are not willing to sort of look outside of their own industry, their own sort of peer group for models. But some of the coolest stuff that's happened has been from people taking somebody outside of their kind of domain or world as some model. I mean, Rene Girard himself did that. He was a history professor who ended up becoming a mentor and professor to Peter Thiel and that kind of a relationship and Peter Thiel to Rene Girard, right? That kind of like interdisciplinary relationship, which transcended the little world that either of them have. One as an academic and the other as an entrepreneur resulted in some really cool kind of mashups and generative thought happening.

[00:25:12] MB: So interesting. This is a theme that I feel like there's a lot of insights you can really pull out of, even just that question, coming back to what you said earlier, of trying to figure out when you change the lens from just asking why do I want XYZ life goal to what is the quality of being that I want from having achieved XYZ life goal. It really shifts the focus dramatically in terms of trying to figure out what you're really seeking, what you're really looking for.

[00:25:43] LB: Yeah. I think it's a great way to put it. What is the quality of being that I want is a very different question than what do I want to achieve. What do I actually want my life to look like? One of the exercises I actually encourage my friends, and I try to do this for myself, is what does the ideal sort of day look like for you, assuming that you've removed all constraints. Like what do you want to be worried about? What don't you want to be worried about? That's a question that's more on the level of being than on things and on accomplishments. We sort of remove that, so we don't even have to work, right? Like what would you just want to be doing?

Not a lot of people really take the time to do that. As we get older, we have this beautiful ability to be intentional and to ask those kinds of questions. I mean, babies are the most imitative creatures in the world. They imitate all the time and they can't really help it. It's just the way that they learn and develop, and there's been fascinating research that's been done on that. But then we get to a certain point in our development, whether it's probably around the time that we are adolescents, and we're in high school. We are imitating probably every bit as much as those infants are imitating who, by the way, are such powerful imitators. That the way that they cry the moment they leave the womb is a reflection of the tonality of their mother's voice in the final trimester of pregnancy. They're already imitating when they're in the womb.

I mean, it just shows you how pervasive and how deep seated this behavior is in human beings, and it doesn't just go away when we reach a certain age. I mean, sure, we have agency and intentionality but we're often imitating ferociously. When we're in high school, we're trying to differentiate ourselves from other people. For a lot of people, this can continue into middle age and even into old age. If they don't sort of take a step back and ask in an intentional way what it is they want, why they pursued the things that they pursued, this kind of take it for granted. Sadly, some people find themselves, when they're in their 40s or 50s, for the very first time taking that step back. Then maybe they've spent 15 or 20 years of their life going down a road that may have been a little more dominated by mimetic desire than they would have liked.

[00:27:59] MB: I want to come back to the – We've touched on this a little bit but some of the concept of some of the negative models, rivalry and how that all fits together and ties into this as well.

[00:28:13] LB: Sure. So the rivalry part of all of this is really – It’s a fundamental part of mimetic theory. Rene Girard formed a theory of mimetic desire, which starts with the idea that humans imitate other humans, and then he plays out the consequences of that. The consequences of that are complex and fascinating. He goes from mimetic desire, all the way to the formation of culture and the route of violence. So it's a complex theory. The heart of it is mimetic desire, so it's the most important concept in mimetic theory to understand. Girard views the root of human violence. It's a highly contrarian sort of view that the root of human violence is, in fact, mimetic desire. That people don't fight over their differences, as we commonly assumed. But they fight because through mimetic desire, they come to want the same things.

I mean, think about it. If desire is mimetic, it's very logical. We come to desire the same thing that another person wants. Now, that could be a superficial thing like a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a job. Or it could be something a little more abstract like power, political parties fighting for power. They're in a mimetic rivalry for power. They both want the same thing. In fact, the more that the other side wants it, the more that they want it. That’s kind of what a mimetic rivalry is all about. Girard said that mimetic desire, when it is not noticed, when it's unrecognized sort of very naturally, this natural progression, leads people into rivalry.

Now, this can really only happen in that circumstance of an internal mediator of desire. So an external mediator of desire like me and Elon Musk, we can't really become rivals. There's no way that Elon Musk cares about competing with me. Much as I compete with him, I'm probably not going to get his attention, unless I happen to build $100 billion company over the next 10 years or something like that. Then maybe we've went from being external mediators to being internal ones because now we're kind of in the same world. But Girard says that this phenomenon of rivalry happens in that circumstance of internal mediation. It's what I call in the book the world of Freshmanistan. It's kind of the world that a freshman in high school or college lives in, where everybody's in close proximity to everybody else.

When two people take each other as models of desire, they sort of enter into this – Girard calls it a double bind. They're constantly looking into each other for objects to want, and the more that their rival wants something, the more that they want it too. Or there's this funny phenomenon of rejecting whatever the rival wants in order to sort of differentiate yourself. We can probably crack some hipster jokes about that. There's a funny thing Gucci Mane had in his biography. It tells the story about how there were sort of like a rival rap group in his town that said – They had a song called – I think it was called White Tee, right? In their white tees. He put out a song named Black Tees, just to be different. He was like, “I'm going to make a better song, and it's going to say that I'm robbing in my black tee, rather than my white tee.” So there's this – That’s called drag calls, that negative imitation. But it stems from the fact it's still imitation. It’s just negative imitation. It’s still taking the other person as a model of desire but imitating them negatively, instead of positively.

[00:31:55] MB: We're jumping all the way from high level philosophy to the subconscious inner workings of desire to Gucci Mane. I love that.

[00:32:03] LB: Hey, that's what you'll find in the book.

[00:32:06] MB: But seriously, that concept of negative imitation is so interesting, which it's almost a very – It reminds me of the Zen sort of concept of duality that it's essentially the same thing. It's just the other side, right? You're still modeling yourself after someone. You're just a negative reflection of them, instead of a mirror.

[00:32:25] LB: Totally. Most people that are negatively imitating, they never think of it as imitation. They only think of it in terms of the difference and how different they are than the other side or the other person when, in fact, they're more alike than different. They perhaps are imitating the other person or the other side fiercely. They're just choosing different objects. But they wouldn't even be involved in the pursuit in the first place if they didn't care so much what their rival wanted. That is a really, really important thing to understand. We become like our enemies.

I think I don't really know who's the first person to say this. But somebody said, “Choose your enemies wisely because you become like them.” When we have a mimetic rival and when we're kind of caught up in this game with somebody that we've taken as a model of desire, we become more like them, not more different. Even if on a superficial level, we can say, “He's wearing a white tee. I'm wearing a black tee,” or, “This party does this and our party does that,” we are, in fact, imitating each other at some deep level. It just happens to manifest itself with superficial differences that we can point to.

[00:33:48] MB: I'm sure it harkens back to some of the ideas we've talked about, but how do we start to disengage from that double bind?

[00:33:56] LB: The disengagement starts with recognition because at the end of the day, there is an element, and this is an old-fashioned word that some people associate with the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages. Not actually dark. That's another story. The word is renunciation at some level. There are certain desires that we have to renounce, and we can't renounce that which we're not aware of. So there's a connection between awareness and renunciation, just having the ability to recognize that some desires are bad and some desires are good. Not everybody believes that. I do believe that. I know that there are some desires that I have, which have taken to the end will lead me to misery.

You can do a simple future authoring exercise with your desires, which is a powerful exercise to do. I want a few glasses of wine tonight to relax. Well, what will happen if I do that every single night? I have this desire. But if I take that to the end, what does that desire become? Well, it could become that I decimate my internal organs, and I'm miserable, and I can't work well. So I have a fundamental belief that there are good desires and that there are bad desires. Some desires that I have I've not really intentionally chosen, but they might lead me to a place that I don't want to go. When I recognize that I desire something that is ultimately not good for me or good for other people, there's just no other way to deal with that, other than transforming it through some form of renunciation, through denying myself and doing that hard work.

People know this when it comes to fitness. They know this when it comes to nutrition. But most people are not aware of that same principle applies to other things like rivalry. I'm caught up in this rivalry with this other person. I'm going to deny myself kind of the little short term pleasure that I get from looking at their Instagram or their Twitter. Or I hate watching this show or whatever it is. You know what? As funny as it is to say it, that's actually a little painful to do that because we want to do it. We desire it. That recognition is not an easy one. But once we have it, we simply – Desire has to do with the will, and the will does what it wants. When we recognize that the will wants something that might not be good for us, we've got to kind of do that work of going into the desert for a little while.

[00:36:30] MB: I love the analogy of fitness and nutrition. It's so concrete and much easier to understand. Yet when we move into the realm of our mental game, it's often a lot more nebulous and harder to really think about are you putting in the reps, are you doing the work because if you're not, then you're not going to get the same results.

[00:36:49] LB: Yeah. I kind of talk about this in terms of developing muscles, that developing some kind of machinery in our guts. It’s kind of an emotional machinery. It's an anti-mimetic machinery, which doesn't come natural for a lot of us. I do believe we have to train our will, just like we have to train our bodies. We have to resist this urge to be reactionary, and that requires training that is no different and equally, if not more difficult, than getting into really good shape or running a marathon.

Part of what I've tried to do in the book is give people some tactics and some tips to be able to begin training themselves. It’s not a quick fix. It's a long-term process. But eventually, it's meant to lead to a certain level of freedom from some of the more destructive manifestations of mimetic desire and rivalry. But I think you're right. We see it very easily when it comes to fitness and nutrition because we – Those effects are very immediate. We wake up the next morning after we've had too much to drink or we smoked a cigarette or whatever, and we feel it. These more subtle effects from mimetic desire and these hyper mimetic tracks that we can find ourselves on are not – We don't have quite as loud of signals, so it's a little bit harder work to do.

[00:38:09] MB: So the path from we start with awareness, we move ultimately towards renunciation, you've touched on a couple of these different tools. Tell me about some of the strategies and methodologies as we walk that journey.

[00:38:25] LB: Sure. One of them, after you've gotten past these kind of initial stages, there's awareness. There's a certain level of renunciation. There's just no way around it. There's creating the space that we talked about. One of the simple tactics, I'll just share one with you. I mean, there are many of them but a simple tactic. A lot of this, by the way, I'm not making this stuff up, right? This comes from ancient wisdom, everything from monastic wisdom, Eastern philosophy. Some of this stuff is spiritual and probably sounds that way because it is.

Think of having a flywheel of desire, like flywheel. So Jim Collins talks about flywheels with businesses in his book. Amazon has a flywheel, and that's basically like what's one thing that happens in this business that almost inevitably leads to the next thing. Like this thing happens. Amazon expands their inventory to carry a million products. You're inevitably going to have a lot more customers, which then leads to X, Y, and Z. So trace that, and then when you get to the end of the flywheel, the last step should really lead back to the first step, and what you get is the creation of momentum. You get to a certain point where that flywheel just starts to turn itself. It's really important to do that for a business, to think of the operational flywheel of a business, your flywheel, the profitability, your flywheel to customer acquisition, and to be able to know what the steps in that flywheel are. But it's also important to do the same thing for flywheels of desire, both in a business and in our personal lives. The two kind of go hand in hand, but just understanding that desire also works like this.

So there are certain decisions that I can make right now that will make it – For instance, eating a massive bowl of pasta for lunch right now. That will make it harder for me to go for a run later this afternoon. It's a beautiful day in Washington, DC as we're talking right now, and I really want to go for a run. So I'm not going to eat that huge bowl of pasta, which is leftover from last night, because I will know that it will make it less likely for me to want to go for a run. It's not that I physically can’t. It's that I just won't want to. I think just becoming aware of the flywheels of desire that operate in our lives are really, really important. Map them out and be intentional, like what's important for you to do in the first 30 minutes of the day to make it more likely for you to want to be able to do something else later in the day.

Fitness is an easier example. I have a desire to be fit. I stick to a workout schedule. Because I'm sticking with that workout schedule, it makes me want to eat healthier to fuel my workouts because I know that if I'm not eating healthy, I'm not going to want to work out. Because I want to eat healthier so that I feel better while I'm working out, I don't want to drink. I don't want to go to the beer garden every Saturday. I have less desire to do that unhealthy thing, and it all kind of fuels back into this desire that I have to feel good, to go for great runs, and to work out, to feel better. I've set myself up. So like, one, it's like a virtuous cycle. That desire that I have and that little foretaste I get of how good it feels to kind of be in that cycle makes me desire the negative things even less.

You can take this and really kind of transpose this to your own life for whatever it is that you want to do. Whether it's your business, your career, your fitness, your relationship, really think intentionally about what that flywheel looks like and understand that you can't just wake up tomorrow morning and want whatever you want or want anything. What you're going to want tomorrow is going to be a reflection of what you do today, between the time you stop listening to this podcast and the time that you go to bed. So the more intentionality we have about what those flywheels look like, the more we understand how doing one thing leads us to want or not want to do the next thing is really important.

[00:42:17] MB: Such a great insight. The notion of creating these flywheels or positive feedback loops, where good habits build on good habits, and you start to really transform yourself and your perception of yourself and really your identity over time can be really transformational.

[00:42:33] LB: Yeah. I would encourage everybody to actually – So it's not so nebulous to actually just take a piece of paper and to draw it out, like a circle with arrows. Here's the way that this thing works in my life. Maybe you start out with a negative one. You know what those are, if you have the negative cycles, the negative loops that you're caught in. Then you just do the same thing for the positive stuff.

[00:42:55] MB: So that may dovetail well into my next question, which was if – I mean, we've talked about some really fascinating things today. If there was one action item or one step for somebody who's listening to this conversation to take as soon as they're done listening to start to put this into practice, what would that action step be?

[00:43:12] LB: There's a few. I think think about – To make it really concrete and really real, ask yourself, what's the single most important thing that I can do right now to set myself up to want to do the things that I want to do tomorrow morning? You miss something that you can do in 15 minutes after you finish listening to us talk right here. Thinking intentionally about what do you want tomorrow and already beginning to construct a flywheel in your life that is going to help you want to do those things when you wake up in the morning. So it could mean just simple things. It could mean going to bed at a decent time so that you're not tired, and you don't want to fall back asleep tomorrow morning or whatever. That's kind of on a superficial level.

You take that a step further and think seriously about, well, what's going to give you the inspiration that you need with positive models of desire. Maybe you need to engage with somebody that you really admire between now and the end of the day. Maybe you've lost heart or you need some encouragement or whatever it is. Maybe you need to be inspired. There’s no shortage of YouTube videos out there. Watch Al Pacino’s halftime speech from any given Sunday, if you need some motivation. Just putting yourself in a position in thinking of desire as somewhat path-dependent. Your day tomorrow is going to be affected by the decisions that you make for the rest of the day and thinking about what that flywheel looks like.

[00:44:44] MB: Great piece of advice. Broadly, I think the recommendation of getting some stillness, sometime away some, as you put time in the desert, to really step back from your life, whether that's 10 minutes, 15 minutes, an hour. That perspective is tremendously valuable in helping to really understand what's going on, why do you want the things you want, and are they healthy or useful things to be wanting.

[00:45:09] LB: Yeah. I do that in my daily life. I carve out time in the morning and I carve out time in the evening, before I go to bed to do something that I call an examination of conscience, where I go through a list of questions and I ask myself a checklist. I mean, things that are important to me in my life, from my personal development to my relationships. But on a – That’s kind of at the micro level. That's at the daily level. I would encourage everybody, it’s something that I've been doing now for almost 10 years, to think about actually taking retreats every year, with the exception of last year because of the pandemic. It was the first year in a long time that I haven't taken one, but I typically take a minimum of three days of silence. Whether sometimes I'll just go to a cabin somewhere in the mountains, I'll go to the beach, and I'll be totally alone.

When I lived in Italy for a few years, I used to – A lot of the monasteries there will just let you stay there, and they'll host you. I used to do them there. Actually, if you have the luxury of being able to do that, and I think I wish that everybody did, I wish this was part of a corporate wellness package that employers would actually give you paid time off at a beautiful retreat center. I know a few of them. There's one just outside of Austin that I really liked a lot called Laity Lodge. Take that time. So like on a micro daily level, I do it. But I do it at least once a year, usually, and it's like a reset. It gives me time to – I take some books with me. It doesn't mean that you can't read but it does mean no phone. Silence doesn't just mean no talking. It means like totally unplugged.

The first couple of nights after the silence sets in, it's so powerful that you start having crazy dreams. I mean, this just shows you that the science backs this up, right? When we detox from the noise, like our minds just start doing things it didn't do before. I have that experience every time I go on these silent retreats, by the way, because I try to make them five days if I can. Usually around the third day, like the crazy dreams just start. It’s just a symptom of being inundated with noise, being totally bombarded. To a certain extent, I feel like we almost need a couple of days before we even like get into the real detox and the really good stuff.

So I would encourage everybody. If this sounds like something that would be a respite and an oasis for you, think about carving aside a minimum of three days. If anybody after this podcast is looking for recommendations on how to do that or where to do that, you can reach out to me. Maybe we can put something in the podcast notes because it's one of my strongest recommendations, and the people that I've encouraged to do this have always thanked me for it.

[00:47:40] MB: Luke, where can people contact you, find out more about you and the book and all of your work online?

[00:47:47] LB: So you can visit my website at lukeburgis.com. I have a sub stack called Anti-Mimetic that I started a few months ago, where you can get a bit more that's not in the book. There were a good 55,000 words that didn't make it into Wanting, but I'm also using that Anti-Mimetic sub stack to engage with current events, to give people the mimetic perspective on all of those, and most importantly to continue to share very practical tactics that one can take to begin developing some of that anti-mimetic machinery and muscles that will help you just have more freedom from some of the mimetic contagion that’s around us on a daily basis.

[00:48:28] MB: Well, Luke, this has been really insightful, fascinating conversation, and some really, really thought-provoking concepts around why we want what we want.

[00:48:38] LB: Well, thanks so much for having me, Matt. I hope it was helpful.

[00:48:40] MB: Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all this wisdom.

[00:48:44] LB: You're very welcome. Love the show. Thank you.

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