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What do we want? Why do we want the things we want? Can we best understand ourselves
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by understanding our desires? After all, the things we do are based on the things we want.
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Our relationships arise from them. Our happiness is often dependent on this. And if we are
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not careful, we can be slaves to our desires instead of the other way around. As Annie
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Dillard famously said, how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. Do we spend it
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wanting the wrong things? Should we think more about why we want what we want? Should
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we at least want to think more about it? Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen, our weekly podcast
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on economics, politics and behavioral science. Please welcome your host, Amit Barma. Welcome
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to The Scene and The Unseen. My guest today is Luke Burgess, author of the superb book
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Wanting. I learnt about the philosopher Rene Girard from this book and also about mimetic
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desire. Girard's belief that many of the things we want, we want them only because others also
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want them, which makes them seem more desirable. I learnt about the frame of thick and thin desires
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from Luke's book and I've asked my guests about the thick and thin desires so often that regular
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listeners of this show will be thoroughly familiar with it. When I invited Luke on the show, my purpose
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was not just to discuss this specific idea, but to get to know him as a person and as a thinker.
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What has his life been like? How did he evolve in that fascinating journey that took him from
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Wall Street to the food streets of Bangkok, to becoming an entrepreneur, to studying philosophy
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and theology in Italy and to the philosophy of Rene Girard? I loved this conversation. I thought
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it was rich in ideas and gave me a lot to process. I'm sure you'll enjoy it as well. But before we
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get there, let's take a quick commercial break. Hey, the music started and this sounds like a
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commercial, but it isn't. It's a plea from me to check out my latest Labour of Love, a YouTube
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show I'm co-hosting with my good friend, the brilliant Ajay Shah. We've called it Everything
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is Everything. Every week, we'll speak for about an hour on things we care about, from the profound
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to the profane, from the exalted to the everyday. We range widely across subjects and we bring
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multiple frames with which we try to understand the world. Please join us on our journey and
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please support us by subscribing to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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The show is called Everything is Everything. Please do check it out. Luke, welcome to the
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scene and the unseen. Thank you, Amit. Good to be with you. I just read your recent post on
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podcasting and even one you wrote before that a few weeks back. And I agreed with everything you
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said, but I also got worried because I thought, okay, you're maybe going to think that, you know,
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this is kind of futile. And just to sum up for my listeners, I mean, I'll link your piece from the
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show notes and all of that. But to sum up for my listeners, you kind of spoke about how the form
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of podcasting can be a constraint because it forces people into these grooves, whether it's
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speaking a particular podcasty voice, they ask, you know, a set of preset questions, they don't
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digress and go with the flow and all of that. And all the, you know, six or seven points that
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you laid out, I agreed with completely. And I think while to some extent, having a longer form
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podcast, like seven hours, eight hours, does kind of go past that. You can never get close to real
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conversation because, you know, Borges once said that a good map of the world would have to be as
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big as the world itself. And it would immediately be out of date, obviously, because the world keeps
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changing. So it's a similar thing that, you know, I've often had an actual conversation at a party,
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you're, you know, just a bunch of us sitting around late night. And I've thought, my God,
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what a great conversation. I wish this was recorded. But it's never quite that way. So yeah,
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and you'd mentioned that you were interested in trying out a longer format. So well, here we are.
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Thank you for coming. Well, I'm very excited to be here. This is my first time doing anything
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nearly this long. And I am excited, partly for the reasons that I mentioned in that post that
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you're referencing, because I'm interested to see I do feel like this is allowing us to have
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a different kind of conversation already than I usually have on podcasts. And we're only in the
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first five minutes, you know, because we have the freedom to take this divergence and talk about
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podcasts. We know we're not constrained to try to fit in all of the important things that we want to
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talk about into 45 minutes or 60 minutes or something like that. So yeah, I appreciate that
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that that you understood what I was the start, I was trying to make a start of just thinking about
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the form of the podcast. And my wife warned me not to post that. She said, Well, Luke, there's
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gonna be a lot of people with podcasts that are gonna read that. I said, you know, I'm just
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starting a conversation because the whole reason that I wrote that in the first place was because
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I had tweeted something about conversations that I have at my house, dinner conversations in my
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backyard that are not recorded when nobody's thinking about it. We just have these wonderful,
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beautiful, long meandering conversations. And I've never quite been able to replicate that in a
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podcast. And I was taken aback when a wonderful, great podcast host said, Well, the conversations
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that I have in my podcast are actually better than the ones that I have in real life. And that
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really kind of shocked me. I was like, I have to think about this one for a minute because it's,
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you know, I agree with you on that. Like, I think like we can only there's only we have constraints,
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we have certain constraints here, you know, but that I think it was good food for thought.
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And I'm very excited to dive in and just see what happens today.
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Yeah. And you know, the point about form is when I keep making and even in, you know, your posts
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in your book, you've quoted this famous line by Churchill about how first we shape the buildings
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and then the building shape us. And I think that also happens in terms of whatever, you know,
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creative form we choose. Like if you're doing a five minute podcast, for example, a five minute
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interview, you don't even need to know anything about the other guy. If you're doing say a one
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hour conversation, you can really ask cookie cutter kind of stuff. And maybe you have to
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read the book, but you don't really have to read anything else. But what I found is that and I
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started doing 15 minute episodes. What I found over the years is that just getting longer and
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longer allows you to sink into a space where all your soundbites kind of go out of the window.
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I mean, I've always thought that, you know, if I want to listen to person X expert X on subject
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Y, I can just go on YouTube, I can do a search, there'll be 50 talks, there'll be 10 panel
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discussions, the et cetera, et cetera. But to really get to know a person is, you know,
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what I crave. And while I agree with you, overall, there is one way in which a podcast
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conversation can achieve something that actual conversation can't. And I realized this where
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in the last few years, whenever I've recorded with a friend that I've known for a long time,
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10 years, 15 years, 20 years, I've known them for a while. And I'll find that in the podcast,
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because I'm digging deep into those areas, I'm asking about their childhood, I'm asking about
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their parents, I'm taking them to places they possibly haven't gone, I get to know them much
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better. Because in the course of everyday conversation, a lot of conversations, you know,
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you don't enter those vulnerable areas where you, you know, talk about the stuff that makes you sad
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or the stuff that you don't like about yourself and so on. And if you kind of proceed down those
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lines in a in a free flowing conversation, like a podcast episode often does, I find that that's
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kind of useful because a lot of conversations in the real world tend to, you know, get in a familiar
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groove, there'll be friends with whom you just talk about sports and stock markets or whatever,
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and so on. And I think it's sometimes kind of useful to intentionally try and go beyond that stuff.
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I think that's right. There's a sense in which not knowing somebody and speaking to somebody
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for the first time, especially when you only have an hour, doesn't allow for the kind of rich
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conversations, because they don't know enough about me to even know what to ask. So, you know,
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they leave all kinds of stuff on the table. And they know that I wrote a book, and it's usually
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enough time to cover like one concept in the book, right? It's like, and sometimes I leave and I'm
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like, you know what, there's all kinds of, if you would have asked me what to ask me, I could have
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like helped you, like, you know, we could have dived into some interesting parts of my life,
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and that would have led in. But those things don't happen. You're right, though, I just recorded my
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first podcast with one of my wife's best childhood friends. She was at our wedding,
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and we know each other fairly well. She knows all kinds of things about me. And anytime that we've
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ever been together, we just kind of talk about, you know, I don't know what it's like to be
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a parent in life. And she and I had this podcast where she engaged me in a completely different
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way than she and I have ever had a conversation before. And it did exactly what you were saying,
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like here we were talking about, like politics, we, you know, Lauren, I've never talked about
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politics before. But she she just felt like she had the freedom to just engage me about sort of
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like any topic. And that so I think you're right about that. So we with all of these things,
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there are trade offs. And, you know, one of the one of the things I was trying to get people to
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think about are, what are the trade offs of the form? And, you know, we shouldn't take the form
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for granted and just assume that we know what it is. And this is I like Marshall McLuhan a lot,
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the the media theorist who is very popular in the 60s and 70s. And he makes this really important
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point that, you know, once we've been doing something for long enough for using a technology
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long enough, there's actually you know, we forget that it even exists. And there's in some sense,
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right, according to like Eric Schmidt from Google, you know, that's a tremendous thing that we forget
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that it even exists, just kind of operating in the background the whole time. But McLuhan would say,
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well, there's also a real danger in that, because we're not kind of reflecting on the first
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principles and thinking about how the form has already changed us. And we take it for granted
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without actually reflecting on it. And that's just one of the things that I try to do when it
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comes to forms in general. I think it just this is a broad principle that applies to a lot of
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different areas in life. Yeah. And I think, you know, within the creator economy itself,
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there are kind of so many examples of being trapped by form, like I keep talking about how,
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you know, you look at all the conventional forms in the creator economy, they all evolve because
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of constraints of the past that no longer exist, you know, your three minute pop song is the way
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it is, because that's how much would fit on a disc at the turn of the century, your 40 minute
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album became a tradition, because an LP could hold, you know, 40 minutes of music, and so on
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and so forth. A book is a particular number of pages in a particular size, you know, within a
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band, because that's, you know, the grammage of the paper and how much you can bind and all of
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that. And all of these forms are, you know, we need to rethink them. And, you know, get past
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those kind of limitations. So it's something I've also been thinking about deeply, because even
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today, most creators don't really do that, you know, and I wonder if you faced that in the sense
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that, you know, when I grew up, like I'm in my late 40s, when I grew up, it was always kind of
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understood that the pinnacle of your achievement is represented by having a book out there,
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intellectual achievement, you've written a book, you're an author, etc, etc. And it's only in the
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last couple of years that I've been coming to realize that that's not exactly true, you know,
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it's great to have a book out there, there are benefits, but a book is a form, you could also do
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a podcast, you could also, for example, do what you do, write a newsletter, like for someone wanting
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to learn about mimetic desire, as someone who's both read your book and all your newsletter pieces,
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I'd argue that the newsletter has way more depth and whatever, and they're different forms, and
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they're kind of doing different things. So do you also, like, what are your thoughts, therefore,
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on the hierarchy of forms and all the different things that we do to sort of talk about what we
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want to talk about? Yeah, well, there's also economic constraints to forms too, which is a
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really important constraint. I've actually thought about launching a podcast, and I said, if I do it,
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I want to invite the person here to West Michigan, where I live, overnight, we're going to get dinner,
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we're going to get to know each other, and then we're going to record the next day, we're going
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to record outside on the water, like casual, I'm going to try to recreate the feeling of being around
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a campfire. And I got a quote on this, and it was well over $5,000 US dollars per episode. And I was
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like, well, that's not going to work, right? I thought that that would get at recreating the
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kind of thing that I wanted. So clearly, there's tons of economic constraints to the stuff too.
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I wouldn't be able to put out nearly as much content. So I think that forms, there's an
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interplay and a dance between forms. And the example you use of a book and a newsletter is
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a good one. I realized pretty early on that a book is a form, especially a traditionally published
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book, with it falls in a very narrow band, especially a book like mine, which is written
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with a major trade publisher for a broad audience. There's only so much that I can cover just,
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you know, I only have a word count that I have to adhere to. But also, I can't take digressions.
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I mean, I footnoted the heck out of that book, I hope somebody noticed. It's a fairly heavily
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footnoted book, some of the footnotes run, you know, a page. But I realized that in order for
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me to have the kinds of conversations that I really wanted to have, it would not take me all
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the way. So six months before the book even came out, I launched a sub stack. And the newsletter
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was a place for me to play experiment and dive deeper into the points in the book. And I thought,
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well, just based on the things that didn't make it into the book, because a word count, I've got
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three years of newsletters that I could write here, right? I mean, some of them just copying
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and pasting the things that that I'd literally wrote that my editor cut. Those are 2000 word
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newsletters right there. I have a year of those. So you know, this is kind of easy. And then I'll
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be able to just start a dialogue and start a conversation. And here I am. I mean, almost three
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years later now, almost coming up two and a half years, I've been writing that. And it's been a
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wonderful experience, because that's a different form. And it has its own limitations. But it's
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allowed me I mean, I think of it as allowing me to get a ton of mileage out of the book,
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to finish the discussion that I wanted to have in the book. And a book is also kind of a one way
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conversation in some sense. I mean, I write a reader reads it, I talked to very few of my readers,
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right? I mean, point less than point 1% of my readers actually get to tell me their thoughts
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about the topic of my book. Sometimes I have the privilege of having a podcast conversation
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with somebody like you. But this is few and far between. Most of the readers I will never know,
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I will never talk to. And this the newsletter is a form where people can respond. And you know,
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it feels like more of a real time conversation. And I hold monthly zoom calls for most of my
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readers. And I'm interested in playing with those kinds of things. So you know, I do plan
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to write another book. And I kind of always want to push the limits of what's possible as an author,
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as a thinker. And frankly, I mean, it's extremely generative to hear what people have to say
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in the different perspectives that they've given me. And I've now come to wish that I had launched
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my newsletter back when I was starting to write the book. You know, the fear of that as any agent
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or editor would say, well, you have to be careful with that, because then nothing seems fresh when
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the book actually comes out. But I think that the benefits outweigh that risk, because of the
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of the generative nature of the conversation that happens and being able to test out ideas
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and figure out what resonates and what doesn't. That is really exciting. So I think as we
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enter into this, and it's why I appreciate what you've done so much with this changing taking
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this risk with this podcast, and playing with these things and seeing how different forms relate
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to one another and can amplify one another is really very ripe and fascinating territory,
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in my opinion. So I'm staying right now about two hours from Bombay at a friend's farmhouse. And
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it's like, you know, surrounded by nature, there's a forest just a little bit beyond me. And my friend
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has this beautiful garden with this kind of thick African grass. And I like to go out there and just
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walk barefoot on it, especially in the morning if there's dew. And it just feels incredible.
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And today I was taking a walk and I kept thinking while walking that my mind's constantly busy,
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right? So I'm thinking of stuff. And then I'll go back to the experience and I'll be like, yeah,
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I'm really enjoying this and it feels so nice. And for a few moments, I'll focus on the feeling of,
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you know, being on the grass. But then again, my monkey brain takes over and I'm somewhere else,
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right? Oh, I got to, you know, I'm having this recording today, or Oh, I've got to finish that
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book or blah, blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera. And this is this constant struggle to stay in the
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moment and to stay engaged with the world is something that you've spoken about, especially
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in an interview of yours, you've spoken about how when you were a kid and your mother and your
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grandmother were artists, and you were so full of wonder, you'd go in and you'd see all the things
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they're doing, and you'd see the artifacts and you were full of wonder. But by the time you got
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to school, and you got to college, that sense of wonder was kind of gone. And I think that happens
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to all of us. And that happened to me as well. And I'm sure it's happened to all the listeners,
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that to a large degree, it goes away. And I want to ask a little bit about that, that process of
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realizing that you've lost something, and then the intentionality in getting it back in you and
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finding it again, how does one do that? And, and I know that that's probably a journey that kind of
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takes many, many years. So tell me a little bit about, you know, what's that journey been for you
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like to find that wonder again? Because I think most people don't even do enough self-reflection
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to realize that they've lost something. What was it like for you? When we are young, we don't often
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self-reflect, we just, you know, bulldoze our way through life. Tell me a little bit about you in
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that respect. Just last night, I had a friend tell me that he fell asleep holding his son's hand as
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his son fell asleep. And it was a five minute experience. But he described this feeling of
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being completely present and filled with wonder at just the sheer joy of falling asleep, holding
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your child's hand, you know, baby's hand, and then realized that he had been pulled out of all of
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these worries and anxieties that he's had. You know, just last night, we had this conversation,
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we were talking about this very thing. It's beautiful. And I have a baby on the way. So I
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look forward to being able to experience that. I think babies are little portals into wonder
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that draw us out of ourself. My experience of realizing that I had lost something.
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The scary thing is not being able to realize that you've lost something.
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I feel lucky that I had the sense of loss. It's an important feeling to have,
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like a sense of shame can actually serve a really healthy function, right? Even though
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people tend to sort of we live in a culture where, you know, nobody should feel ashamed
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about anything or feeling a sense of loss or nostalgia for something is important. It's just
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a signal that tells us something about ourselves. And we have to evaluate it. And for me, it was
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things like in my late 20s, after having worked in corporate finance and
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hustled really hard and startup culture that found a few companies. For me, to give you one example,
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it felt like walking into a beautiful cathedral. One that I knew intellectually was a marvel of
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architecture and was beautiful. And feeling nothing and checking my watch and pulling out
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my phone while I was in the inside. And knowing that 10 years ago, I would have had my neck
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craned up at the ceiling looking at it. And that startled me. And I realized that, you know, that
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should not really be something that gets old because I can't remember the last time right now
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that I've walked in some beautiful, you know, European cathedral or something like that.
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And the lack of appreciation hit me, really hit me. And I just started wondering what has been
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going on that's made me lose that. And there's kind of something about utilitarianism and just
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sort of how the entrepreneurial grind is just so caught up with what's practical, what makes money
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as quickly as possible. And wonder is, you know, something that can be enjoyed for its own sake.
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I mean, wonder is the beginning of all philosophy, really. And, you know, it leads to the search for
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truth that, you know, may not have any immediate sort of utilitarian purpose. And I just realized
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that I needed more of those kinds of things in my life. Like play is another great example of that,
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right? Like playing for the sake of playing alone. It's almost the definition of play,
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right? These kind of infinite games that don't have this immediate purpose. I had just somehow
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in the course of my 20s had went from being this kid who was full of wonder and imagination
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to just needing to, you know, accomplish certain discrete concrete tasks. And, you know, the loss
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of beauty, right? The loss of appreciation is probably the number one thing that disturbed me.
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And I'm an acolyte of a philosopher named Dietrich von Hildebrand, who has a fascinating
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theory of ethics. And it's certainly compatible with something like virtue ethics, but I think
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it's fairly profound because it says that there are values in the world that are objective values,
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you know, like some things are just truly beautiful. And they are due in justice,
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a certain kind of response from the human person, right? Like intellectually, and like a fully
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developed person even, you know, should be able to respond with the whole self, you know,
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like even emotionally, even he would say the effective sphere should respond to those values.
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And if we don't respond to those values, there could be a lot of reasons why, right? Something's
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kind of off in our ability to respond to those values. And that's kind of the philosophical
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framework that made me realize that for whatever reason, I didn't have the capability to respond.
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It's almost like I wanted to, but I couldn't. Like, Luke, you want to be moved by this,
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but you can't be. This idea can apply to all kinds of things in life, right? Everything from
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like relationships to things that we see to, you know, stories that we hear. And that led me to
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step back from the kind of utilitarian grind stuff and be really intentional, took a sabbatical about
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doing things that I would say felt, I mean, I'll put it like this, they felt like wasting time
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sometimes, right? Like things like I sort of forced myself to do things that didn't, you know,
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I wasn't able to put like some monetary value on, you know, reading, you know, great books,
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like old books that I'd never read before. And it took me a long time of doing that. And it did sort
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of nurse me back to sort of a healthier relationship with reality, where I was able
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to appreciate reality for what it is to be able to see things again. This reminds me of the very
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title of this podcast, The Seen and the Unseen. I started seeing things that I hadn't seen before,
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and I placed value on them just for being the things that they are. I mean, it's amazing. I mean,
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since the pandemic started, I've become like a massive birdwatcher. It's inconceivable that I
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would have been able to do that, or would have been interested in doing that when I was in my
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20s, and in my early 40s now. So these things have added a richness to my life that I wouldn't have
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had. But I did have to make a break from that mindset that valued things based on either
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how subjectively satisfying they were to me, or how valued they were by other people. And that's
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where mimesis comes in. Or the things that served some immediate purpose that I had, such as
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one of the dangers—this is the last point that I'll make about this—one of the dangers of
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writing a book about a specific topic is that for the duration of your writing that book,
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pretty much the only other books that are of interest to you are things that relate directly
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to your being able to write your book. So you kind of have to do it, right? I mean, there's
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only so much we can read, and so much information that we can hold in our minds. And that's fine,
#
because all of the books then become utilities for writing your book. And there could be
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wonderful things out there, wonderful podcasts to listen to, and conversations to have.
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But I don't have time to have them, because I have this thing that I have to do, right? So
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over the last 18 months, I've enjoyed not having to do that, because I haven't been
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writing a book. And it's reminded me of the limitations and the constraints of having
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this kind of utility being the number one driver in my life.
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Yeah, I mean, I love that process that you've described of finding that sense of wonder again,
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and being able to look at things and kind of be moved by them. And I think one of the
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biggest pains of our modern life, if not the biggest pain, is the fact that so much of what
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we do, we are taught has to be goal-directed. So right from the time we are kids, you're studying
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for a particular exam. In India, especially, it's like a classic treadmill where you go to IIT,
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and then you do your engineering, you do your MBA, you work in a big bank, you become a vice
#
president. It's like a treadmill that has just kind of been out there, where people are doing
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goal-directed things one after the other. And maybe if you're incredibly fortunate,
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you kind of grow up in a sort of a space where leisure time is also valued. It's okay to do
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nothing. It's good to get bored. There doesn't have to be a purpose to everything. Tell me a
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little bit about your childhood. What was that like? Because there's already the sense that
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your mom and grandmother are artists, like you said. Where did you grow up? What was life
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like? How did you spend your time? Give me a sense of that.
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I grew up in West Michigan, not too far from the shore of Lake Michigan on the west side of the
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state. It's where I am now, actually. I'm right on the shore, the eastern shore of Lake Michigan,
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about 30 minutes west of Grand Rapids, Michigan, here in the US. And Michigan is a very unique
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state, surrounded by these great, some of the biggest lakes in the world.
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Because it's a bit cut off from states, we have Canada sort of to the north and the east.
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It's got a very unique culture. And so that's where I grew up, as an only child. My mother,
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as you said, was an artist. Her mom is an artist. They do everything from bronze sculpture to glass
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work to freelance illustrations for magazines. My grandmother is actually quite well known,
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at least here in the Midwest. She makes a lot of the really huge, beautiful sculptures that you see
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in a lot of the Catholic churches around here. And my dad was a veteran of the US Army. And then
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he was a professional skydiver for 10 years, who sort of got a real job when he had me and became a
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truck driver. So big long haul semi trucks. But I think as an only child, and they both
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let me, they really, like, they actually didn't put me in a lot of stuff as a kid. Like I wasn't
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sort of like, I didn't, I wasn't like being shuttled to and from like five different, you know,
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practices, you know, from piano to sports to another sport, you know, that's very common here
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in the US, right? Like, it's just like kids are involved in like eight different things at one
#
time. I really wasn't. I mean, I had my things I did, I did play the piano, I did always play
#
usually one sport. But for the most part, I felt like I had a ton of free time, like a ton of time
#
to like play and like entertain myself and like find kids in the neighborhood. So, you know,
#
growing up was a time of wonder and exploration for me. And my wife has commented sometimes like
#
how she kind of like marvels at how comfortable I am being alone. And like, you know, just,
#
I am very, very happy, you know, to just like not have any calls in the calendar,
#
not have any meetings, I can entertain myself for five days straight, no problem at all,
#
you know, and I think it really stems from probably from being an only child and being
#
in an environment where I was never really pressured to do to do anything that I wasn't kind of
#
excited to engage in. Of course, you know, other than going to school, which I wasn't always excited
#
to do every morning. But, you know, for the most part, that was kind of the environment that I
#
grew up in. And of course, I hated it. And I complained like everybody else, I couldn't wait
#
to get out of West Michigan. Looking back on it, though, it was a wonderful sort of very, very
#
nurturing childhood where I was able to let my imagination wander. And my parents always
#
supported my strange kind of curiosities. That was my in my neither one of my parents were were,
#
it's funny, like neither one of them is would call themselves an intellectual.
#
So, you know, when I sort of took this interest in from from a relatively young age, I took an
#
interest in ideas and specifically in sort of philosophy. They were kind of surprised and you
#
know, it's not something that they really, you know, were able to like engage with me much about
#
or talk to me about. But I think that my taking an interest in those things actually was a natural
#
result from my sort of the freedom and the leisure that I had to just look up at the sky
#
and to walk around and ask big questions. Right. Like one of my favorite books is written by a guy
#
named Joseph Pieper. It's called Leisure is the Basis of Culture. And, you know, among other things
#
sort of makes the point that, you know, having leisure time and being able to wonder is, is first
#
of all, the basis of all philosophy, it naturally leads to asking questions that you want to try to
#
answer and explore. And it's also really the basis of culture. So somehow, I was born into wonder
#
in a very natural way. And I'm grateful for that. And, you know, it was when I kind of, you know,
#
the grass is always greener. I rebelled against childhood that I felt was very insular
#
for all of the, you know, the great things about growing up in Grand Rapids. It did feel like I
#
wasn't exposed to different kinds of people and different kinds of ideas. And I just couldn't wait
#
to leave. So I went to New York and then I got on the hypermimetic track that led me to Wall Street
#
and led me sort of down a path for the majority of my 20s. And did not really fully appreciate
#
what I had until much later in life. And then, you know, it's funny, here I am back here,
#
moved back here for part of the year when I was 40 years old for the first time. And it's kind of
#
knowing home for the very first time. You know, in the words of Chesterton, I truly feel like I'm
#
learning my own home for the very first time and bringing back a lot of nostalgia and has made me
#
reflect a lot of my own childhood. And part of the reason that we moved back here is because we have
#
a baby on the way. And I would like my daughter to be able to grow up in a place where it's
#
quiet here. It's very quiet. You know, we live near a lake and to be able to explore, you know,
#
the wonders of the water and the lake and all of those things. So, you know, it's funny how that
#
works, how sometimes it's only in hindsight that we kind of realize the beauty and the freedom
#
that we had to do some things that are very easily lost as we grow into adulthood.
#
When you said that it's like rediscovering home all over again,
#
does that also then automatically mean rediscovering yourself all over again?
#
Yes, because a self is always connected to some kind of a home, you know, in some way.
#
I don't think that a sense of home can ever really be disconnected from a sense of self.
#
And, you know, you've earlier described your childhood in different newsletters,
#
in different ways. At one point, you spoke about how in school you were convinced there
#
wasn't a single person in the school worthy of imitation. So you, you know, became a bit of a
#
rebel where you would react against everything you couldn't help yourself.
#
I want to ask you a question you often ask others, but I want to ask it to begin with,
#
not about the current point in time, but that point in time when you look back at
#
the young Luke, you know, what were your top five models of desire? Like who were the people you
#
looked up to? What were you influenced by? And how were you, how were you being shaped?
#
I had some that were very important models of desire for me, which became overshadowed
#
or overpowered by others. So my grandmother is one who is this artist that I described
#
a few minutes ago, a wonderful artist walking into her art studio in Traverse City, Michigan.
#
It's basically a big barn that she and my grandfather bought in the 70s and converted
#
into a huge art studio with trinkets and old artwork and beautiful things all around it.
#
It looks like chaos, but it's the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen in my life as a kid,
#
filled me with wonder. She was a complete model for me of somebody who crafted an artistic life
#
kind of against all odds. She's got a very long story, but just wonderful, like, like made me
#
identify myself along with my mom, of course, as an artist, like from a very young age,
#
there was a model of desire to be an artist and it affected my identity. So I thought of myself
#
as an artist or as a creator. And I realized that not everybody has that. Today it's trendy,
#
we talk about the creator economy, but I mean, in the 80s and the 90s, when I was growing up,
#
nobody talked like that. And nobody thought of themselves as creator, it would have been very
#
weird. We just didn't talk like that. But I did have a sense that I had some kind of vocation to
#
create. Now I didn't know what that looked like. And I think that my life as an entrepreneur was
#
probably in some way me exercising some of that creativity, sometimes in good ways, sometimes in,
#
you know, banal ways. But even as an entrepreneur, I think of myself as an artist.
#
Within, you know, you sort of tend to always discount the people that are closest to you
#
and the value sometimes that they have to offer, right? Like no profit is welcome in his own town
#
kind of a mindset. And so I was always looking for models that were outside of my town.
#
And I found most of them on TV. I think the I ended up in New York City, I left, went to college in
#
New York City, I insisted on it. My parents told me, Luke, if you stay in Michigan, we'll help pay
#
for your college education. If you leave Michigan, you're gonna have to take on that responsibility
#
yourself. I didn't even think twice. I said, Nope, I've got to get out of here. I've got to go to New
#
York City. And that was probably due to the influences that I saw on MTV, all the cool music
#
videos that I had watched and had adopted the kind of street smart person as a model of desire. And
#
I realized, like, what's cool is to be street smart, not to be academic smart. And I mean,
#
I got this idea in my head when I was like, probably in eighth grade. And it actually made
#
me look at my entire school life as really lame, and not something like worthy of it wasn't even
#
worth desiring to do well in school, because it was not cool. So I really wanted to acquire
#
those practical street smarts. And I think there's merit. And I mean, I think it whatever we mean by
#
street smarts, I mean, there is something there like being able to practically, you know, sort of
#
have intuitions and senses about people and things. And there's something to that. But
#
mine was was pretty misguided. And that's really what led me to New York. And along with the kind
#
of idea, if I can make it in New York, I can make it everywhere. And, you know, as soon as I got
#
there, I adopted the first models that I adopted in New York, I actually went to New York expecting to
#
be a doctor. And within, I think, one month of being in New York City, I changed to business
#
within one month, because I had such a flimsy idea of being a doctor, I think I wanted to be a doctor.
#
I don't know, maybe I watched a lot of ER and George Clooney was out when I was a kid or something
#
like that. And I had this idea that it was this kind of like sexy profession and that I'd be helping
#
people but it was a super, super artificial construction of what the profession was.
#
And then I saw the the Wall Street professional as powerful as stable as being able to retire young
#
and I adopted that model very quickly. So, you know, as there was a couple of more, I don't know
#
if I could, I don't know what my top five would have been. But the point is, these models were
#
very interchangeable for me and fluid for me. And the model of my grandmother, for instance,
#
which was an extraordinarily positive model, and it still is to this day, I plan to go up and
#
visit her in a couple of weeks here, I had forgot about that. I sort of forgot about the wonder
#
that was instilled in me just at merely thinking about stepping foot in that art studio and
#
how she encouraged me to, you know, from the time I was born, she actually encouraged me to be a
#
writer. And I'd forgot about that model of desire in my life, because I got covered up with others
#
that were kind of, you know, in my, the way that I describe it in my book, sort of like thinner,
#
more superficial models that that sort of had the appearance of being more important to me at the
#
time. So in some sense, I think the memory is really important because it's so fleeting and
#
volatile, especially today, there's so many distractions. But the memory is an important
#
piece of helping us remember who we are and what has shaped us, right? Like going back to our
#
earliest days, not all of those memories are good, not all of the models in our life are good.
#
But it's an important thing to be able to do. And at some point, the exercise of coming back
#
to myself later in life, really, in my late 20s, was a process of understanding my life in a
#
holistic sense, right? Like, we have these ideas of change is like, you know, it happens in a moment,
#
you know, like the frog changes into a prince, like snap our fingers, and it just happens,
#
or vice versa. Change is far more mysterious than that. And often happens in these subtle moments.
#
And, you know, people ask me all the time, like, well, how did this happen? One of this,
#
you know, what was the moment? You know, I could give you some soundbite answers, but they wouldn't
#
do justice to the actual process. And you know that, you know, like, when we when we actually
#
look back, it's these whole series of things, right? And you try to find what was the catalyst
#
for all of these things happening? You know, wasn't me walking into that beautiful cathedral,
#
I know that was part of it. But it also wasn't the whole thing, right? There were people that
#
I met along the way. But for sure, the process of taking the time to honor my past and where I came
#
from, and the beautiful moments of my childhood and not losing that to the, you know, quote,
#
urgent problems of today was critical and helped pull me out of my preoccupation with
#
the things that seemed so important to me at 29 years old, writing a company,
#
when looking back, they were just kind of silly. You know, when I kind of look back on my youth,
#
it becomes obvious to me that most of us are opaque to ourselves, you know, it's only in
#
hindsight, 20 years past, 30 years past, we can look back and we can see ourselves for what we
#
were. And equally to a very poignant degree, because that's not, that's often not something
#
we can do anything about the people around us. So people we love the most are also opaque to us
#
in the sense that they get ossified into a particular role that they are playing, you know,
#
so you always in your mind think of your say your mom as one thing, your dad as one thing.
#
I remember I did this great episode with Natasha Badwar, who's a fantastic writer here in India.
#
And she spoke about how when she and her boyfriend who she was going to marry,
#
they introduced each other's parents to, they introduced their parents to each other.
#
And when Natasha met her would be spouse's parents, she realized that they were completely
#
different from the way he had described them. It's like he was describing to completely different
#
people. And the same thing happened when he met her parents. And what had happened there was
#
that these parents are flesh and blood people who evolve, who change, who become different things.
#
But in their kid's eye, they are just at one thing, you know, they are a particular kind of
#
mother, a particular kind of father, they're kind of ossified there. Perhaps even your relationship
#
is ossified in a particular way. And this is poignant to me, because long after my parents
#
passing, when I look back on their old photographs, when I see them as when I see them in their 20s,
#
when I see them as being much younger than I am, I kind of realized that, that I never really knew
#
them at all. I related to them in a particular kind of way, that she's my mother and she's my
#
father. But they are individuals who are vulnerable in different ways, who are struggling in different
#
ways, who are fighting, who are angry, who are sometimes bad people, sometimes good people,
#
you know, but essentially, we are all kind of fucked up human beings. And that's true of
#
everyone. So tell me a little bit about, you know, how the relationships in your life have
#
changed that way. And I only ask this because you've done so much self reflection and all your
#
writing that, you know, that I feel that I can ask this, you know, you've written about
#
your dad having Alzheimer's. And I think of my dad having Parkinson's and going through a similar
#
kind of phase where you have to just completely relate differently and train yourself to
#
relate differently and all of that. So tell me a little bit about how that's happened. And then
#
how do you look at relationships? Like another thing that I've come to do in recent times is not
#
take relationships for granted, especially take friendships for granted where they can get into
#
a groove, but try to be a bit more intentional, try to stay in touch, try to think about them and
#
not just, you know, use them in an instrumental way to fill up your life. Yeah. So how have
#
relationships, you know, how have I come to view these relationships in my life over the years?
#
Man, there's so much to talk about. I have really struggled with the kind of, you know, Dunbar's
#
number thing. And, you know, I've been thinking about that a lot and, you know, it's been very
#
humbling reminders of my own weaknesses as I've overextended myself thinking that I can nurture
#
these extremely strong relationships with way more people than I'm actually capable of.
#
And there's a particular illusion of, you know, as a writer, public person of any kind, like,
#
you know, you have this idea, like, I was going to like totally have all these conversations.
#
It's simply not possible, you know, and, you know, I've completely burned myself out trying to do that.
#
And it's like, you know, what do you prioritize, right? Who do you prioritize? And there is kind
#
of, you know, this ordo amoris, to use a very classical term, an order of love.
#
You think of it as like concentric circles of love and prioritization, right? I have certain
#
things that are simply priorities for me that have just made themselves very apparent, right?
#
I mean, obvious example would be my immediate family, right? Like my father. I am an only child.
#
I'm really all that he's got, right? If I don't take care of him, nobody will. And, you know,
#
these relationships, and that's manifested itself to me, and I've always been very close
#
with both of my parents. My mom passed away a couple of years ago. But, you know, as my father
#
in particular has, there's something so like concrete and incarnational about the nature of
#
how our relationship has changed as his dementia has increased over the last seven to eight years,
#
really, and sort of was diagnosed as full-fledged Alzheimer's about three and a half years ago,
#
that I don't know how else to say it other than that it sort of called to me in this powerful
#
way and sort of like demanded a certain response from me to take care of him. I know that children
#
do the same thing, and I would say that my life right now is mostly consumed by the kinds of
#
relationships that I have a responsibility, or I feel a responsibility, right? Injustice to care
#
for these people, my wife, my dad, my immediate family, soon my child, and then people that I've
#
kind of pledged my commitment to, right? These are my closest friends, right? One of whom
#
is kind of in a position where he just needs a lot of support that takes up all of my time,
#
right? I mean, between, there's probably seven or eight of these relationships in my life.
#
And that's kind of, you know, in this, you know, call it the kind of the first circle or whatever.
#
And then there's other relationships that kind of fall outside of that. I mean,
#
there's certainly friends that I want to see, some friends I see once a year,
#
some friends I see every five years, right? I mean, it doesn't mean I love the other ones
#
any less, just the way that life is. I guess that as I've got older, I've just maybe some of my
#
idealism has faded away. And the realism of life has presented itself to me in a way that makes me
#
think a bit differently about these relationships, in that I have limitations, I can only do so much.
#
And, you know, life somehow has, like, made it easy for me to prioritize my time and my energy,
#
right? And it's actually, and I mean that in the best possible sense, in that I think that because
#
so many relationships are abstract, like, you know, kind of these parasocial relationships that
#
we have online, how do you know, right? Like, how do you know, like, should I invest,
#
how much time and energy should I invest in carrying on this conversation about the,
#
some Gerardian explanation of this thing that happened in the news,
#
when I have a friend calling me in the middle of the night who needs help, right? And who needs to
#
talk. So it's made me feel less guilt about, you know, not being able to respond to every query,
#
and not, you know, necessarily keeping up with friends as much as I would like to. And, you know,
#
true friends, I think as we grow older and we mature, they have a lot of grace, and they
#
realize that, and we become more patient with each other because we realize how our lives are.
#
So, you know, these relationships have evolved in ways that I would have never imagined
#
because of circumstances of life, where people move, you know, geographic location of people,
#
I've lived out of the, I lived in Europe for a while, I lost touch with some of my US friends,
#
I come back, people get sick, people get married, people get divorced, people have kids,
#
all of these life events changes the nature of a relationship a bit. I mean, they should.
#
And some, there's something, there's some sense of freedom in allowing the, in letting go of what
#
I think these relationships should be like, frequency of communication, style of communication,
#
and kind of letting go and letting them evolve in these unexpected and often very beautiful ways
#
that I never would have imagined. You know, my dad's a great example. I mean, I,
#
some of the best parts of my week are going into the memory care unit of the home that he lives in.
#
And I sit there for an hour and there's a guy that comes in every week.
#
I think the guy is like some kind of a hidden saint and he just, he sets up a, he sets up with
#
his guitar and his little amplifier and he just plays all of these old songs that everybody living
#
there just loves, right? I mean, he plays Elvis and Beach Boys and you know, the sound quality is
#
pretty bad. You know, it's, they serve this really kind of food that doesn't taste very good.
#
And I just sit there with my dad and a bunch of these other people between probably anywhere
#
between 70 and a hundred years old. And we listen to that music and it's the best part of my whole
#
week or month whenever I, we were able to do that. Would I have ever been able to imagine that that's
#
what my relationship with my dad would be like, and that we would just sit there and not talking
#
to each other for an hour, but still somehow, you know, sharing this loving moment together
#
just by sitting side by side? No, never, never would have imagined that. But like just letting
#
myself accept that and realize that that's the relationship that we're in now has been
#
tremendously good and healthy. And in some analogous way, a lot of the other relationships in my life
#
kind of have played out like that, where I don't feel the need to control the dynamic the way that
#
I may have earlier in my life. Let's digress a bit and talk about, you know, memory once where,
#
you know, memory often tends to be sharp at the edges and fate sometimes in the middle. I don't
#
know how it is with your dad, but with my dad, I remember at one point he would remember what
#
happened yesterday clearly, and he would remember what happened when he was 10 years old, but he'd
#
forget stuff in between. And he once sat me down and asked me to describe the years when I went to
#
school to him because he had absolutely no memory of my growing up. So he said, tell me a little
#
bit about that. What was that like? And I noticed that in many ways, he sort of changed as a person,
#
as a memory started to go. In his case, he was an angry, volatile man. So he mellowed, but I guess
#
in the case of different people, whatever they stood out for, whatever characteristics they had,
#
they would kind of in a certain way disappear. And I'm just thinking aloud here, but I'm wondering,
#
you know, you've often sort of alluded to the fact that what are we if not a sum total of our
#
desires. And therefore we need to think about our desires and we'll talk about them much more later.
#
But I'm just wondering that what are we if not our memories that when memory goes, what is left like
#
in a thought experiment, for example, if all your memories were to suddenly vanish right now,
#
what would be left and how would it be, Luke?
#
This brings up really classical, you know, sort of philosophical questions of substance and accidents
#
and continuity. Certainly memory is deeply connected to our sense of self, deeply connected to our
#
sense of identity. And my dad's behavior and sort of sense of himself has changed dramatically
#
over the last five years as this has happened. You know, one of the funniest things was,
#
a few years ago, my mom fell and broke her hip and was in the hospital. And I rushed home from
#
Washington, D.C. I got in the house. My dad already had pretty bad dementia at this time.
#
My mom was a smoker. And my dad, I walk into the kitchen and my dad was sitting at the kitchen
#
counter. He didn't know my mom. I mean, it sounds it sounds sort of tragic, but it's also somewhat
#
funny. He was sitting at the kitchen counter and chain smoking my mom's pack of cigarettes
#
that she had left on the kitchen counter. And my dad hadn't smoked in 20 years.
#
And he's just I mean, I got there and there was only like three left in the pack. Right.
#
And he's just sitting there. And I'm like, Dad, what are you doing? I was like,
#
you got to put that down. And he was like, what do you mean? And he goes, you know,
#
I'm just just having a smoke. And I was like, Dad, you haven't smoked in 20 years. He's like,
#
what do you mean? And I was like, those are mom's cigarettes, dad. And I was like, put those down.
#
And then for the whole rest of the week, he kept checking his shirt pocket asking me where his
#
cigarettes were. And, you know, in that short period of time in his his identity had turned
#
into being a smoker again. It was like, it was like, wow, I was like, I wonder what like his his
#
core sense of self over the next week was that, hey, I'm a smoker, and I need to know where my
#
cigarettes are. And I had to tell him, Dad, you're not a smoker. And then he would say,
#
really, I'm not. And, and we would just have that discussion. And then it took him a couple
#
of weeks, and then he forgot and he never thought about it again. Right. So all of these momentary
#
things can happen that profoundly affect our sense of self in the moment, right? This is very,
#
this is a real temptation, right? Where I, you know, I do something that I'm not proud of
#
yesterday. And it consumes me and my whole sense of self is like, I'm a piece of shit,
#
right? Because I did it begins to take on my whole identity, you know, and it's kind of like,
#
you know, my dad just like, you know, because our memories are short. So one of the important parts
#
of memory is remembering the good and remembering kind of, you know, who we are in our own sense of
#
dignity and stuff like that, or else we can become totally overwhelmed with these things that get
#
amplified that are not the sum total of who we are. So the memory can work in good ways and bad
#
ways. Obviously, memories of past trauma, you know, not, not really good, you know, for some
#
people that to stir up at the wrong times, right? So it clearly is deeply important to a sense of
#
self and the continuity of the self. And that's why people that have experienced memory loss
#
can be volatile, they can change quite dramatically over the course of even a year. However,
#
you know, there's still a self there. And there's still a person there with
#
all of the dignity that belongs to personhood memory or not. And I actually, to the contrary,
#
I've been shocked at how my dad is basically still my dad, even with the loss of almost all of his
#
memory. There's there's something there that is profoundly Lee Burgess. And, and he now maybe that
#
will change. But, you know, and I have the memory of who he was. So in a sense, there's a real social
#
aspect here, too, is the way that you were describing with your father having to help him
#
remember your childhood, I have to do this all the time, too. And, you know, helping other people
#
remember who they are is not something that applies just to people that have dementia and
#
Alzheimer's. This is a role that we all sometimes have to play. I have to do this for my students.
#
When they have one bad day or one bad week, and they I have to remember remind them of who they
#
are, right? And that that's not who they are. That's not the sum total of who they are, right?
#
Life is long, there's a lot of things that happen. So, you know, if I was to lose my memory
#
tomorrow, today, I would certainly some things would change in my sense of self and my identity,
#
but my wife would know exactly, you know, would have all of those memories, the people that are
#
closest to me would, I don't know, maybe they would build some, you know, AI for me or something like
#
that, who knows what life will look like in 10 years. But I, I don't, I would not say that that
#
would result in the loss of, you know, who I am, or my personhood in any way. And, you know,
#
everything can be taken away from us, but there's still a person there.
#
And I think, in my opinion, the big problem that we face is identifying, like a person with certain
#
qualities, some of which, you know, are, I mean, philosophical language are accidents, but like,
#
if they don't exist, that doesn't mean that the substance, I'm talking in very philosophical
#
terms here, but like, the person is still there, right? Memory or no memory, and is the same person
#
at the level of substance, right? That has always been there. Even if they don't appear that way,
#
even if they don't sound the same way, there is the continuity of life there in a really beautiful
#
way and honoring that, right? And that's why sometimes, you know, we do look at pictures,
#
and we, you know, we look at the whole thing. And that's really, really important, because if we
#
don't understand that holistic view of personhood, then we can very quickly move to a place where
#
it's like, well, all right, this person has lost their memory, then maybe they don't deserve to
#
live or something like that, right? Like what, you know, what dignity is there in that? Well,
#
I can tell you from firsthand experience, there's great dignity in that, in the process of care,
#
and in life. And I think we have to develop a more robust understanding of like, what makes
#
a person a person. It's not just their ability to articulate themselves well in a podcast. It's not
#
that they can remember things well, or even be able to necessarily articulate who they are
#
in words, right? I know some people with a very strong sense of self,
#
your typical West Michigan, you know, construction worker that does seem to have a more stable
#
sense of identity than most people that I know would have a very difficult time articulating
#
and labeling themselves in any kind of way. So then that, that the point that I'm trying to make
#
there is that the, our identity and our sense of self is something that transcends even our
#
memory, our ability to communicate it. It's something much more profound.
#
Yeah. And I love that. I love that sense of how, you know, your father is what he is,
#
but the fact that you are with him and you bring your memories to the table makes him more of that
#
or more of himself. Like I'm reminded of this great poem by Vijay Shishadri about a mountain
#
at the end of the universe. And the point of it, and I'm sure I'll paraphrase it really badly,
#
but the point of it being that at the end of the universe is a mountain, but is it a big mountain
#
or a small mountain? Is it even a mountain? How do you know it's the only thing there?
#
So, you know, so I guess that also indicates how profoundly other people kind of come into the
#
shaping of ourselves. Like if one of your dad's old friends from school was to meet him, he might
#
also feel that, huh, that's, you know, Lieberge is right there and he would relate his own memories
#
to that and bring them to play. But he'd see something totally different from what you see,
#
but, you know, maybe it's the same essential thing somewhere there.
#
I was just going to, just to drive that point home, I mean, the social nature of who we are,
#
the social nature of personhood is something that I believe very strongly in, that my sense of self
#
is in some sense constituted by my relationships, right? I'm always in relationships with people,
#
with reality, with the world. So in some sense, my dad is in relationship with me and that
#
relationship is somehow constitutive of who he is, right? He's still always a father. We just had
#
Father's Day, right? So still always a father, whether he remembers it or not, and sometimes
#
he thinks that I'm his brother, right? But it doesn't matter, regardless of what he thinks,
#
he's my father. So there's like, the reality is what the reality is, regardless of that kind of
#
subjective kind of sense of it. I want to double click on what you said a while back,
#
you used this phrase about remembering the good, and in a sense about being kind to yourself,
#
and so on and so forth. And I want to sort of speak about, you know, tell me about how
#
hard that effort is for you, because earlier when talking about the childhood, you used
#
first the term loss and then the term shame. And they seem to me to be fundamentally different,
#
because loss is what happens to you, but shame would come about because of what you did to others,
#
right? And then they kind of stay with you. And then you have to make those choices that,
#
do I let this define me? Even if this is whatever I'm ashamed about is an expression of a part of me,
#
there's a lot else in me. What do I privilege? What do I focus on? And where I'm kind of like,
#
when I asked that hypothetical question to myself just now, when I was thinking aloud that without
#
my memories, what am I? Like that my answer for myself was whatever it is, it's not very pleasant,
#
because, you know, I felt myself being reduced to something animalistic without all of those,
#
you know, without all of the things that culture gives you, and also without all of those things
#
that you rationally choose for yourself as a system of values and so on. But just leaving
#
that aside, just that intentionality of kind of, you know, constructing the self in the sense,
#
at one level of becoming comfortable in your own skin, and at another level of actually
#
learning to love yourself, you know, what has, you know, what, what has that process been like for you?
#
So there would be a superficial way, I guess, of learning to love yourself,
#
which is to only remember the things that you like about yourself and all of the good things,
#
and just forget about the rest. And, you know, this could be one pathway to, you know, walking
#
around feeling less shame, for instance. That's not the best way. I think the best way is to
#
actually come to grips with reality and to see the whole and to know that we all have pasts,
#
and we've all probably done things that we're not proud of. And to see those things, and then
#
to realize that they're also a part of us, but they don't define the totality of us.
#
And, you know, that's where we can actually become whole, is by remembering even those
#
things and being able to face them, right, and to come out the other side.
#
The, that process is really hard. I think it's a profoundly spiritual process. One of the things
#
that I marvel at, I wrote a book about, inspired by René Girard, which is basically about rivalry,
#
the way that, you know, imitation often leads to rivalry and conflict and violence and scapegoating
#
and blaming others and transferring blame to other people. And it's always amazing to me
#
that the people that like to talk about René Girard the most, there's a lot of all of these
#
discussions and there's almost no confession. There's almost no confession of having done any
#
of these things oneself. There's just pointing out how other people, scapegoat people, and how
#
other people are in these silly rivalries. And, you know, it's just so easy with everything
#
going on in the world. And there's very little confession. And there's something really powerful
#
about the act of confessing something to yourself, to admitting something, and also to other people.
#
I think that, you know, sometimes I wonder, right, like if some, kind of almost hard to imagine,
#
right, like if some like well-known, you know, leader was to like make like a really heartfelt,
#
humble public confession, right, like how, what would that do, right? Like would that have some
#
kind of like positive mimetic effect on other people? It's almost like it's because it's crazy
#
how hard it actually is to imagine that. Anyways, this is just something that I notice. I mean,
#
you know, very few people you'll ever see on Twitter kind of do that, operate in that
#
realm, and at least who seem genuine. And there is something, I think, that our wounds and our
#
pasts can be redeemed, but only by embracing reality, right? So I'm not an advocate of,
#
you know, trying to, we're talking about the memory here of pretending that things didn't
#
happen or didn't exist. You know, of course, there's all kinds of things in history. This
#
is why we remember some of the horrible things that happened in history, right, because it's
#
important that we remember and not pretend like they didn't happen. And then the same thing,
#
obviously, applies to our personal lives. As I think about my life now, I feel like
#
it's really, it's really important to make space for people to be able to have these kinds of
#
conversations, because they just seem to be increasingly rare. I just don't see them a lot.
#
And part of why I've written, I've actually felt the responsibility to be vulnerable in my writing
#
and to not stay kind of talking about ideas on an intellectual level, but to make them personal.
#
I mean, I view this as part of my work, to give other people permission to be able to do the same
#
thing. You know, it's okay. And, you know, I do this with students all the time, right? You know,
#
they're struggling. I struggle with everything that they're probably struggling with,
#
maybe with the exception of social media, because I didn't have it when I was in high school.
#
I barely missed it. I barely missed it. You're very lucky people would have taken
#
screenshots of what you wrote back then, and they'd be putting it up now.
#
Exactly. So it's just absolutely amazing when I,
#
if I ask, you know, a question, like, in class, that tries to prompt some vulnerability from my
#
students, right? Like, you know, how many are struggling with social media, for instance,
#
right? You won't get a lot of hands that go up. But if I share for 15 minutes, my own struggles,
#
my own story, it's like opens a total floodgate in the class that I can't even stop the discussion,
#
right? So I think there's something powerful about being able to do that. And then, you know,
#
coming to grips with where we're at, you know, meeting each other where we're at,
#
and that can lead to progress. I think that's very evocative in the sense that so many men,
#
especially, are trapped in these notions of masculinity, and you're not supposed to share
#
your emotions and so on. And it can become a kind of a burden where you don't even realize
#
it's a burden, you don't even realize it's a, and the flip side of it, which I'm not so worried
#
about, but the flip side of it is that sometimes showing vulnerability can even become a form of
#
exhibitionism, especially when it's on social media, and you're kind of portraying a kind of
#
virtue. And that can, you know, lead to the wrong kind of memetic desire. But at the same time,
#
like I have a story for you where I'd done an episode with a chap called Nikhil Taneja called
#
The Loneliness of the Indian Male, Indian Man. This was a short while after an episode called
#
The Loneliness of the Indian Woman. And this one was talking about how young men in India,
#
and I guess everywhere, get trapped in these sort of narratives of masculinity where they are the
#
provider, they don't show emotion and all of that. And he told me about an incident very similar to
#
what you're talking about in the classroom, where he was in a class with a bunch of people, and he
#
said that, you know, all of us are stories, not have stories, but all of us are stories. So I want
#
someone to tell me about the story that they are, tell me something about your life. And the first
#
person, you know, stood up and said something very routine and nothing much there. And the second
#
person, if I remember this correctly, was a gay person who said that every day when I go home from
#
college, and he was very flamboyantly dressed and all of that. And he said, every day when I go home
#
from college, I stop at the petrol pump and I go to the toilet and I change into normal clothes,
#
and only then do I go home, because I am not allowed to be who I am at home. I'm a different
#
person there. And of course, everyone teared up. And then as Nikhil says, the floodgates just
#
opened, everybody kind of opens up. And what that does is that when you get there, you are just
#
relating to everybody else differently suddenly as real human beings and not as whatever stereotype
#
you might have had in your head. And that kind of moved me a lot. Yeah, as I was listening to you,
#
I have a, I'm going to respond to that. I have a huge deer that just walked up to my window. Wow.
#
That's why I just picked up my phone and took a picture. She is probably three feet away from me
#
right now on the other side of my laptop. There is a sense in which it can be a form
#
of exhibitionism for sure. And I think this is a really important point to make. There was an
#
article that just came out, man, I think it might have been in the New York Times or something like
#
that. And it said it's become really trendy for American men in online dating apps to say that
#
they go to therapy. It's been, it's like the coolest thing that you can say as an American man.
#
And all of a sudden in the last two years, like everybody's doing it, saying I go to therapy,
#
and the author actually said, is this like some kind of thing, like virtue signaling thing that's
#
basically just replaced saying that you're religious or something like that. I think there's
#
probably some truth to that. And that to me seems like a form of exhibitionist vulnerability or
#
some way. I doubt that all of these things are true. Maybe everybody's going to therapy. I doubt
#
that that's true, but whatever. I mean, either way, even if you are, it's not necessarily
#
something that you need to like signal as the number one label in your profile or something
#
like that. That story that you just told is incredibly powerful. I think it speaks to this
#
power of opening the door to other people's through empathy. And I believe that narrative
#
psychology is incredibly powerful. It's one of the things that I use as much as I can,
#
storytelling. Stories are how we understand and make meaning in the world. And I always go back
#
to story because the instinct for people, especially young people and my students,
#
they only want to give me the LinkedIn resume stuff to describe or to share who they are.
#
This is where I'm from. This is the sports team that I root for. This is where I interned last
#
summer. This is my job, whatever. And I always say, well, tell me a story. And because a single
#
story about yourself and not just any story, but a particular kind of story will help me get to know
#
you personally better than any kind of data ever would because you can share most of the data that
#
people give us are not unique to them. If it's a company that they work at, they work at Google,
#
find tens of thousands of other people that work at Google. But a story is always,
#
in some sense, every story is unique and unrepeatable. It happened at a certain
#
time and place in history under unique circumstances. And that's one of the reasons
#
that it's so powerful. And I'm very fond of asking a particular kind of story,
#
which I call fulfillment stories. And I usually ask, tell me about a time in your life when
#
you did something that you're really proud of that was extremely engaging for you. You lost
#
track of time. You felt a tremendous sense of satisfaction when you did it, maybe even a sense
#
of joy. And it was such an accomplishment that you remember it even to this day. And I say, go back
#
as far as you can in your life. I don't care. You could have been a kid. You could have been last
#
year. But tell me one of those stories. And it doesn't need to be something that I think is
#
important, just something that was important to you. It doesn't have to be some huge worldly
#
accomplishment. It could be like making your grandmother's recipe or something like that.
#
And people light up when I ask them to tell me those stories. First of all, because they've
#
mostly never been asked. And you could work in the same company for 10 years. And most people
#
will not have a single colleague that knows one of those fulfillment stories, not a single one.
#
They might know their prior employers. They kind of might know what they're like at the happy hours.
#
But they wouldn't be able to say, this is what really makes Amit fully engaged and light up.
#
Or this is the time in his life when he was really, really, will never forget.
#
Very few of us know those stories about other people. And this has become a really, really
#
important tool for me to connect with other people, especially with my students,
#
and cuts through some of the bullshit that we think other people want to hear, we think is
#
important and is not actually. And I think contributes to this problem of making people
#
feel disintegrated, where we have these like discrete data points about ourselves that are
#
not necessarily connected by any kind of a narrative. And it's why the narrative is so
#
important. Because as we remember some of these stories about our own lives, we start with one,
#
and one becomes two and two becomes three. And hopefully we have more than three.
#
If we have dozens of these things, the more we recall these things about ourselves, and the more
#
we understand them about other people, the more the kind of full picture and narrative emerges.
#
And this is connected with our discussion about memory as well. And I think this is one antidote
#
for the reduction of the person to just what they said on Twitter last week or whatever.
#
And it could, I think, might help us cure and to be able to see
#
the full person better than we can right now. I teach an online writing course and I often
#
recommend to my writing students that they do daily journaling. And the idea for that just being
#
that by writing every day, even if it's a little bit, even if it's a couple of hundred words,
#
by writing every day, you're not just trying to understand the world a little bit better,
#
but you're also shaping yourself. You know, a you who writes every day for five years is
#
very different from the you who doesn't write every day for five years. And I'm wondering,
#
as you were talking, I was wondering if, A, this process of storytelling does that for the people
#
themselves, that it deepens their sense of themselves as well, because I'm guessing that
#
some of the answers that you would have got are things that the person may not have thought about
#
for years, but you suddenly sit back and, oh, okay, when was I really proud? And then you
#
come up with this story and then another story comes to your mind and you're deepening your
#
sense of self. And have you seen that play out? And in your own case, does it change you? Because
#
I'm just guessing that it must be emotionally incredibly affecting to sort of be the catalyst
#
of this and to listen to all of these stories and perhaps even to take part in the exercise yourself.
#
Hmm. The it's one thing to know something or recall something internally that only you know,
#
that you've never communicated to another human being before. It's another thing to try to
#
communicate it. And communicating these ineffable experiences that are so meaningful can be
#
incredibly difficult. But it's there, it's still valuable to try to attempt to, because the process
#
of doing that itself activates something about the experience. First of all, it makes it present.
#
There's something, you know, that it now lives in the relationship between you and the other person.
#
They now know something about it, which helps them understand you. They can help draw new things out
#
of that experience just in the single act of communication. They might ask questions that
#
are obvious questions that you just forgot to communicate about that experience. And that helps
#
draw. Oh, I forgot about that. That helps draw out even more. So it's a generative process,
#
the active communication. We have, you know, we really need to do that. And putting language on
#
things is important. You know, it obviously we know that like being able to name emotions is
#
incredibly effective. But the same thing is even true of our narratives and our experiences.
#
Being able to share those stories in language helps, helps remember them, helps, quite frankly,
#
like make meaning of them and probably even helps shape those experiences a little bit.
#
And, you know, in the process of writing my book, I had to put pen to paper and share,
#
you know, a story about the blow up of one of my companies. And the first time I've ever written
#
that, you know, I've told that story to other people. But the act of writing it made me recall
#
new aspects of it, made it present to me in a new way. Now it sort of like lives out there in the
#
world, you know, and that's kind of a scary thing, you know, and I've been able to have conversations
#
with other people about it. So never discount the act of communication itself as something generative
#
and, you know, the ability of sort of language. You know, when we speak, you know, our words
#
actually affect reality. They're really, really important, right? You know, that old saying,
#
like sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me. It's kind of bullshit,
#
right? Like, and our words are really incredibly powerful and we need to be, you know, we should
#
think about the kinds of language that we use to describe things, to describe people, to describe
#
our own experiences, because our language can end up shaping our reality, right? And, you know,
#
that can be because we have some bad meme about ourselves, like, you know, I'm not good at this
#
or that, whatever. Maybe that's just not true. Maybe it's just the language has completely shaped
#
our self perception or something like that. So yeah, you know, it's been a good experience for me
#
to, and I always start that exercise by sharing one of my own. And I always, the first story that
#
I usually share with my students is they expect me because they know some things about me before
#
they start taking my class. They expect me to share, like I had this exit in my company or,
#
you know, whatever, it's this impressive thing that I did. And I've got a lot of different
#
stories that I share, but like one of the ones that I always go back to is I, in my fifth grade
#
science class, I was given a project to invent something, you know, practical that could be used
#
in daily life. And I went home and was up all night. I think it was the first all nighter that
#
I ever pulled in my life. Diagramming and drawing on, I made what, you know, on a big poster,
#
I was essentially putting together like a PowerPoint presentation, but I wasn't using
#
PowerPoint, on a big poster about how I would invent a machine that would peel oranges in five
#
seconds or less because I hated peeling oranges and I was really bad at it and I could never quite
#
peel them the way that I wanted. And I invented this idea of an orange peeling machine. I thought
#
really hard about it and I had this really good idea and I diagrammed out how it would work.
#
And then I brought it into class the next day and I shared it with my classmates and they were
#
totally blown away. They couldn't believe that I had put that much work into it. I got an A,
#
my teacher. I mean, I think the average amount of time that students spent on this project was
#
probably like an hour and I spent like 14. It was literally up all night. And then I had to ask
#
myself like, why? Like, why did that homework assignment engage me like that when pretty much
#
none of the other ones did? Seems to me like an important thing to know about myself, right? Like,
#
if I can figure out what it was about that kind of silly little assignment that activated me,
#
I mean, what was it? You know, was it just because like I had a good dinner that night and had more
#
energy than usual or something like that? No, there was something deep that spoke to me deep
#
at my core about, you know, creating something, bringing some new value into the world, something
#
practical gave me the chance to exercise my artistic abilities because I busted out all my
#
mom's art supplies and in her little studio and like went to town on this thing. And I was
#
able to exercise all of my gifts and talents in that single thing. It was like,
#
finally, somebody's given me the chance to just like, show them, you know, this ability that I
#
have. And I did. And then that was it. I never built the thing. Nobody's ever seen it. Nobody's
#
ever used it. But I tell my students that story because that was one of those times that I was
#
fully engaged and I know that it's important. And then when I tell them that it's they sort of
#
realize, oh, you know, like Professor Burgess was telling the story from his fifth grade science
#
class and they go from like, you know, oh, you know, won the state championship in, you know,
#
in football or something like that. And all of a sudden they start making connections and thinking
#
about things that were meaningful in their lives that transcended our normal definitions of,
#
quote, achievement. And, you know, just in a very superficial way, and you'll forgive me for being
#
superficial, but from the little bit that I know from your biography so far, it would seem that,
#
you know, the answer to that why can come in two ways. One is that there is an artistic side of
#
you from your grandmother and your mother and so on, and you want to be a creator and you want to
#
create things. And the other is looking at what you've done later in life as an entrepreneur and
#
so on. You say, okay, here's a problem solver and he's solving a particular problem. How do
#
you peel an orange? And perhaps that's something that seems to cut through everything you do,
#
which is that you're studying something from first principles. You're trying to get to the
#
root of it. But anyway, I'm just being kind of glib here. You know, these data points can't come
#
close to anywhere near the truth. But if one were to, you know, take the 18-year-old you or
#
the 20-year-old you and ask that same question, that what is your story per se? Like, who are you?
#
What is the story that kind of brings you here? Not in terms of events or whatever, but who am I
#
and what am I doing and what do I want to do? What would it have been at that time? Because
#
one of the great tragedies of youth is that you have so many options before you that you must
#
necessarily close down one by one, right? You choose one path or the other and there is a
#
stickiness to the path. Then you're along that path. On the one hand, you can go to business school.
#
On the other hand, you can, you know, go to film school or you can become an apprentice to work
#
up into somewhere or whatever. You know, there are 50 different directions that you could possibly
#
have gone in, but you choose one and then you sort of imprison yourself in that form for a while.
#
And of course, later you manage to break out of it and all of those things. But tell me a little
#
bit about what that journey was like. Like, what's your self-image? Like, what are you thinking of
#
yourself as? What do you want to do in the world? You mentioned that you go to New York City, but
#
hey, you don't want to be a doctor, which is what you landed up there for. Business seems like a
#
good, business seems like an obvious mimetic desire in a sense, but you're also obviously
#
good at the stuff that you're doing. It's not just that you're interested or you're attracted.
#
So take me through, you know, that phase of the younger you and what those years were like.
#
Yeah, I don't know what the younger me, the 18 year old me would have said if asked the question
#
of, you know, sharing one of these fulfillment stories. Probably not the one that I just told
#
you. It probably would have been something very different. It probably would have been
#
something relatively superficial. Probably would have been related to sports.
#
Yeah. So there was this idea of getting on tracks that can, you know, you accept a certain form
#
and you have an idea of what the outcome will be like college, right? You know, we start college,
#
we have this idea in our mind of what it means to graduate and what we're going to be like,
#
and whatever that idea is, it's never quite the truth. You know, we're just projecting into the
#
future and, you know, imagining things. And I like to think of life as being full of rites of passage.
#
And we're sort of always, I mean, it's healthy to always sort of be in the process of undertaking
#
a rite of passage. And, you know, rite of passage has three parts. It has the kind of
#
act of separation of some form. And then it has the process of transformation.
#
And then it has the final act is the act of reincorporation.
#
You know, so an example of that would be going to college, you know, sort of separating from
#
my family and my hometown. And then the process of being in college, you know, some process of
#
transformation, and then an act of reincorporation, meaning, you know, if something,
#
you know, happened that led to me becoming a different kind of person during those four years,
#
the end of that rite is, you know, supposedly graduation, and then I'm kind of reincorporated
#
into my family and into society is just kind of professional. And, you know, I'm an adult,
#
I wasn't quite I mean, we say that 18 is adulthood, but it seems to be getting a little later. And,
#
you know, sometimes I wonder if we're sort of like, our society here, I mean, I'd really be
#
interested in hearing like what kinds of rites of passage, you know, like the Indian male has,
#
and just like in India, like what what exists there, some are good, and some are bad, right?
#
There was such a thing as like, healthy rites of passages and unhealthy rites of passage.
#
But at least here, they we seem to be sort of like losing them, or they certainly don't seem
#
to be as effective, right? Like college doesn't seem to work as a rite of passage in the sense
#
that it's often just like a four year party. And, you know, you're 22. And you sort of feel
#
kind of like you did at 18. But you've just like drank a lot more. And, you know, you've like
#
made it through another four years of school. So my, so I think that I became, I sort of realized
#
there was some kind of super level of superficiality about some of these
#
rites of passage that I had accepted as really important. You know, being a student, you know,
#
getting into a good college. And by the way, I didn't get into a good college. I mean, I got into
#
it's not a bad college, but I didn't get into the colleges that I wanted to. And I got into
#
a small university in downtown Manhattan called Pace. But as soon as I got in, I was looking to
#
transfer into another one. And that in itself kind of served this kind of rite of passage.
#
And anytime that we embark on a rite of passage, it's always because we believe that some like
#
metaphysical change will happen if we complete it, right? So the case of college, right? Like
#
we imagine ourselves as being like a different being almost by the time that we're done than
#
when we started. And then we finish and then we don't feel like we're this different being.
#
And then we become a little bit disillusioned. And, you know, we have all these sort of grandiose
#
ideas of like what things are going to be like when we complete these rites. And I think there's a
#
lot of sort of reasons that these things are not. And I think there's truth to that. I mean,
#
I do think that, you know, there are really important kind of processes that a human can go
#
through. I think becoming a parent is one of them. But they sort of are effective to greater or
#
lesser degrees based on kind of how much the person going through the process is intentional
#
or like fully immerses themselves and leans into the experience of the process itself
#
and of being transformed. And I was kind of kind of half-assing it, I guess, through these things,
#
maybe because I didn't believe in the power of these passages to do anything. I thought they
#
were bullshit. I was just kind of going through the motions and not feeling like
#
I was being challenged. And in some sense, later in life, so first of all, you know, I thought
#
Wall Street would challenge me. And then I just realized through sheer force of the will, yep,
#
I can work really, really hard. Yep. Like, it's almost like I had to prove to myself that I could
#
work 90 hours a week. It's like, I didn't, you know, and then once I did it, I was like, yep,
#
you could do that. Now what? You know, same thing with kind of the startup entrepreneurial world.
#
You know, I sort of imagined that, you know, it would sort of like lead to this, I don't know,
#
kind of like metamorphosis of, you know, kind of like a complete like Steve Jobs style kind of,
#
you know, transformation. And there are rites of passage in the startup world, but, you know,
#
they also leave a lot to be desired. You know, there's kind of a cargo cult aspect to them.
#
It's like, you just kind of do all these things and say all the right things. And I just felt like
#
I was caught up in these processes that were not affecting interior change, if that makes sense.
#
So like the changes were kind of happening at an external level, like anybody looking from the
#
outside would see change, but on the inside, I felt the same, if this makes sense. And then I
#
began to be like really fascinated by this question, like, you know, somehow I'm doing
#
these things, but I don't actually feel different on the inside. And this kind of led me to identify
#
the problem as a very spiritual problem. You know, that there's a large part of life is unseen
#
and interior and kind of happens in the hiddenness of our own hearts. And at a certain point in my
#
mid-twenties, I kind of took that process seriously, right? I took like the interior life
#
seriously. It's when I began to meditate, I began to pray, I began to become much more spiritual.
#
And it was kind of the, it was truly the antidote to the kind of the externalization of everything,
#
the externalization of all action, which I think men are particularly susceptible to. We tend to
#
externalize all of our feelings and actions, you know, like I'm sad, I'll go for a run,
#
like all those things. I was just manifesting it in different ways, right? Like, you know, I desire
#
all these things, you know, maybe if I just like, you know, crush it on Wall Street for a few years,
#
like that'll solve my problems. But I realized that there's kind of this interior battle that
#
I needed to fight. And my, the biggest shift in my life, the single biggest shift was in my late
#
twenties, realizing that the most important things that were happening and actions that I could take
#
were in this kind of interior life that nobody would ever know about for a while.
#
But they were things that I wanted to work on, you know, like, just like understanding myself,
#
coming to grips with the mistakes that I've made, the relationships in my life, investing in those
#
things. This hidden life, which is the first time that I actually felt like the movement,
#
the kind of like change that I was hoping to see through all of the external hoops that I was
#
jumping through, I began to actually feel like something had taken hold and like something was
#
seriously, substantially changing in me, rather than just externally changing in me.
#
And that's kind of a long-winded way. And I can dive into any of those things at a deeper level.
#
But I have this intuition that our, at least the culture that I live in,
#
is starting to almost disbelieve in change, like in true substantial change. Like, you know,
#
people don't change, we sort of glibly throw around that phrase, right? You know, you see like,
#
you know, Kanye West, all of a sudden, like undergoes this kind of drastic transformation
#
of his personality. And it's like, well, that can't possibly be real. Maybe it's mental illness or
#
something like that. And like, if you just think about the way that we look at people, it's really
#
hard to, if we haven't experienced a powerful transformation ourselves, we don't believe that
#
anybody else has to. And I have, I mean, a dramatic one. And I'm trying my best to kind
#
of articulate some of what that has been like for me. But it's really this difference between
#
the external kind of like, LARPing, live-action role-playing things that we sometimes do to
#
ameliorate, like a place that we don't want to be in, versus being in it, being present to it,
#
and taking these interior actions. We think that action is external only. But I tell you,
#
I can take interior action. Like, I can go take some intentional action on an interior level.
#
If I'm in my room alone for an hour, then that interior action can do more to affect the next
#
month of my life than anything that I can do exterially, any workout that I can do,
#
any conversation that I can have. I came to believe in the power of the interior life and
#
in the interior actions. And that has made a huge difference for me.
#
Can you give an example of an interior action of the sort that you can do on
#
your own and that can shape what happens next?
#
The first example that comes to mind would be an example of, I think that prayer is essentially
#
a series of interior actions. It's like movements, including some movements of the will.
#
So in meditation or in prayer, an example of that would be not just sort of like letting
#
thoughts pass over me. Here I am. I'm taking an hour. I'm just going to sit here quietly and
#
just sort of think about my past week, let the conversations I've had, the relationships that
#
I've been in just kind of flow over me, recall them to mind, and then let them go. That's one
#
part of it. But part of it might be, okay, something has come up for me, and I've realized that I have
#
not been present to my wife this last week. So in that hour of meditation, I realized that I was
#
so caught up in these things that I need to have done for that week. I was running around,
#
and when she was talking to me, I was not fully listening, and I have that realization there.
#
There is an act of the will that I can take in that moment where I can resolve, sort of at the
#
core of my being, to behave or to act differently in the future and to remember and to not forget,
#
so that that hour of meditation that I was doing doesn't just become this kind of self-indulgent
#
thing but actually leads to change. Because I make an interior act of love and recognition,
#
and I have seen that that actually carries into the next week of my life.
#
Admitting these things, and my will can move even then, even though if you're looking at me
#
from the outside, you wouldn't know that it's moving, but I can feel my will and my sense of
#
purpose actually moving. That's kind of a different form of meditation where I'm actually
#
engaging myself. It can be very easy to forget. Those acts of the will, sometimes they don't last,
#
but certainly they've resulted in dramatic changes in my life over many, many years because that
#
becomes a constant practice. Doing it one time is probably not going to lead to that kind of
#
sustained process of transformation. But for me, it's kind of like an integral part of the
#
way that I pray. These interior acts of love, interior acts of hope. If I'm feeling particularly
#
not hopeful on a day, these interior acts actually end up affecting what I do in the world.
#
I don't think that it just happens magically. I think it happens in those hidden moments that
#
people don't know about, where I'm actually able to make a resolution.
#
I know it's not like an easy life hack. It's really hard. It requires just literally taking
#
the time and also feeling sometimes like it doesn't make a difference. But I can tell you
#
after 15 years that it's made a profound difference. You mentioned, you spoke earlier
#
about the possibility and the power of change. I often think that two things can be simultaneously
#
true. One is that we change in profound ways through our lives, especially if you're self-reflecting
#
people and so on and so forth. I feel like I'm a completely different person from what I was
#
25 years ago. But at the same time, you look at some people and they seem exactly the same.
#
Even for those who change a lot, there is a core somewhere, something fundamental,
#
something essential that remains what there is. I'll ask you to double click on those years where
#
you were first in New York and then you became an investment banker in Hong Kong for a while,
#
then you come back, then you're part of the startup world for a few years and so on and so forth.
#
During those times where you're jumping different kinds of external hoops,
#
perhaps trying to conform to different kinds of expectations, both from others and from yourself,
#
what is that essential look within you? Where is the sense of this quiet? Is it
#
only from the fact that you don't have any time to nurture that interior life or is it something that
#
you could not have defined then? It is just an unease. At one point in your chat with Shane
#
Parrish, you spoke about how when you shifted from New York to Hong Kong, one reason for that
#
was you wanted to see Asia. I'm curious about that also. Why did you want to see Asia? What's
#
happening there within you that is keeping you restless? The move to Asia, part of it was just
#
opportunistic because this was back in 2005 and I believe I was at the front end of taking advantage
#
of a lot of economic growth, particularly in China because I was based in Hong Kong and I did a lot
#
of work in China. So there's that. I'll own that. But then there was part of it that this is really
#
going to force me out of my comfort zone. I recently had a podcast conversation with Paul
#
Millard who wrote a great book called The Pathless Path. He and I were talking about travel as a bit
#
breaking us out of the forms that we're used to as kind of an anti-mimetic act.
#
And Paul said something that I resonate with deeply. He was in Taiwan. He was in Taiwan and he was like,
#
I don't know the language. I don't know anybody's expectations of me. Totally different culture.
#
Being in that culture for a while, I just started thinking about different things. It afforded me a
#
sense of freedom because I didn't know what the hell was going on. It was totally foreign to me.
#
I had a very, very similar experience. I was just so dislocated in a different world that it opened
#
up creativity. It opened up some creative processes in me because I was no longer constrained by
#
certain things like expectations. So that was an important part of it. Part of it was also
#
mimetic just because somebody who I thought was incredibly smart had kind of moved to Asia before
#
me. Definitely an influence on me for sure. That was a digression on the Asia thing.
#
What was the original question that you asked me?
#
I'm trying to come to grips with the unease that you felt during this time. You're jumping
#
through these external hopes. You're conforming to people's expectations and your own expectations
#
of what you have to do in this place. I guess in a place like Hong Kong, you mentioned how a lot
#
of what you were doing there as an investment banker was actually beyond your pay grade. You
#
were sort of doing a lot of stuff which more senior people would have been doing. One thing
#
that I know happens in Asia is that if you're an American, if you're a white-skinned American,
#
you just get treated differently as if you're at a different plane. That can get to your head
#
and make you arrogant and all of that. I see you in that stereotypical sort of you've been in
#
New York in private equity and you're now an investment banker in Hong Kong.
#
You are doing things way beyond your pay grade. Everything is going incredibly
#
great and yet there is an unease. How did you define that unease for yourself? What about
#
that situation made you feel that you don't belong there? For so many people, that would
#
pretty much be your dream path. I was not happy at all during that time period.
#
I was spending a lot of time alone because they were, as you said, punching way above my weight.
#
I was being put on planes, business class and being sent to different cities where
#
I'd just be in a hotel room alone for like a week by myself. I had a lot of time to think
#
and sometimes I think in my case, I can tend to just work really, really hard to forget about
#
things that I don't want to deal with or to prove myself that I can accomplish something.
#
But I've just done the whole willing myself to just be the one that can work really hard
#
or the hardest. It just took me a while to get that out of my system. I started noticing
#
things about myself. What did I do when I really wanted to engage? It was never
#
thinking about finance. It was never thinking about the deals. It was always having conversations
#
or striking up relationships with people. I remember, never forget, they sent me to Bangkok
#
for a week. Every second that I could get, I would walk down, there's many super cool streets
#
in Bangkok that are filled with street food vendors. Nothing gave me greater joy than
#
walking down the street. I would stop at every single street food vendor. I probably knew a
#
dozen words in Thai and I would do my best to strike up a conversation. I would point to the
#
different foods. I would ask them for the names of the different foods in Thai. I would try to
#
remember and every day I would go back. I would try to learn the names of a few more foods. I
#
would try to carry on a conversation with the vendors. I would eat a bunch of the foods.
#
Nothing gave me more joy than just that engagement. I went back and I started writing
#
a short story. I started writing a screenplay and it was going to be based off of this kid
#
who was in Bangkok, this American who was in this miserable job that he hated.
#
Things like that just started to really prick my conscience. I was like, Luke, all you want to do
#
is write and you want to tell stories and you want to make sense of this. It was just a huge
#
wake-up call for me. If I didn't want to get fired, I'd just have to go grind out another
#
spreadsheet. I would do that. I just couldn't wait to get back to exploring and having these
#
conversations. There was a core to your point. You said, we change but there's always this core
#
that is the same. That was me. I feel like that was exactly who I am today. When I go,
#
my wife and I like to travel a lot. Love nothing more than to go to a farmer's market and to learn
#
as much as possible and to buy some foods and to try to cook this new dish. That was a foreshadow
#
of the real me that I was just burying under all of this stuff and similar experiences in
#
the startup world when I had left Hong Kong. There was this inciting moment for me of when I
#
inciting, not exciting, but inciting moment where I had a business partner in the U.S. who was
#
getting a company off the ground that we'd started. We talked about starting for a very long time.
#
I just got my bonus. I just got put on this totally miserable deal that was going to bump
#
my workload past what I felt like was my breaking point. Luckily, I had it in me to call it quits.
#
I just noticed those things. By the way, I was just told some things that you'll
#
never work on Wall Street again if you leave the street. You've only been here a year,
#
not even a year. You'll never work here again. All of these things that were really not great
#
things to say to a young kid in the industry. I remember that they were signals to me that
#
proved to me that I was right, that this is not the path that I want to be on. If this is the
#
kind of culture that they've created where they will try to incite fear in a person who is
#
pursuing something like a creative path that's important to them, these are not the kind of
#
people that I want to work for anyway. Luckily, that incitement of fear did not work. In my startup
#
days, I also, in one of the companies that I started, was an e-commerce company. It was
#
really just accepting online orders and fulfilling orders and building out a big warehouse from
#
scratch. When I looked back on it, it was kind of a crazy thing to do. I started with an empty
#
warehouse and learned fulfillment logistics from the ground up and just built this fulfillment
#
system. I got it to a point where the company was running relatively well. Orders would come in,
#
they would get shipped out. I never gave much thought to the kind of company that I was starting
#
when I started it. I just kind of started the company that I felt was the best opportunity
#
at the time. I never gave much thought to the opportunities, the pathways that it would create
#
for me to exercise the things that gave me the most kind of joy and the things that would allow
#
me to exercise my gifts of talents. I found myself even building that company, all of the
#
moments that were the most fulfilling to me were the times when I would organize team lunches and
#
engage with my employees and my partners on a personal level. Those were all of the things
#
that I look forward to the most, the best parts of my day. Optimizing my fulfillment process and
#
gaining some efficiencies was cool, but some people really are motivated by doing that stuff
#
and good for them. Those are the kind of people that I want to work with, but it was never
#
sustained satisfaction to me to do that. It was, again, very similar to the street food thing in
#
Bangkok. It was like, all right, Luke, you've built a company that basically by design is built
#
for you to never have any interactions face to face with any of your customers. I really crave
#
that and I was trying to find those relationships in other ways within my company and in the
#
community. We used to have these relatively extravagant, long, two-hour Friday lunches
#
and have these really long conversations with my key team members. A really good podcast,
#
almost. These really engaging conversations that transcended anything having to do with work.
#
If there was one rule, it was kind of like we're not going to talk about work. That, again,
#
was a glimpse of something that is really important to me to be able to talk about
#
things that I think are meaningful. It was a signal. I think this goes back to earlier
#
in the conversation, we were talking about those fulfillment stories as signs and then finding
#
patterns. This is the essential thing. What are the patterns in my life? There's some
#
clear patterns where I need to be able to exercise artistic creativity in some ways.
#
I need to be able to communicate the things that I'm learning. It's just how I'm motivated.
#
Some people can read a book and be really satisfied with the knowledge that they gain from that.
#
I'm only satisfied if I can find a way to communicate that to other people. It's just
#
something I've learned about myself over the years. It doesn't mean that one is better than
#
the other. It just means that that's just the way that I'm wired. This is where I find fulfillment.
#
So I had the pattern recognition to see that. Some people helped me see that because often we
#
are opaque to ourselves and we can't see the patterns in our own lives. It takes other people
#
to see the patterns for us, friends, spouse, family. I had some people that helped me do
#
that as well as I was beginning that process. Wonderful. Let's take a quick commercial break
#
now and we'll come back on the other side and continue our conversation. Sounds good.
#
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just a willingness to work hard and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
#
details soon. Just to sort of finish off, you know, that part of the personal narrative that
#
brings you to this point where you're paying more attention to your interior life as it were,
#
tell me a little bit about the habit of writing because you mentioned earlier that your grandmother
#
used to say when you were a kid, oh, you're going to be a writer and so on. And you also mentioned
#
how your first impulse when, you know, you were in Bangkok and those things happened was to try and
#
make a story out of it or a screenplay out of it. And by the way, Bangkok is my favorite food city
#
in the world. I just, I just absolutely love it. But mine too. Yeah. So tell me a little bit about
#
your writing. Like since when were you writing? Did you want to be a serious writer at some point?
#
It's funny how much of this stuff is, you know, is innate. I still wonder this question sometimes.
#
I started writing stories before I could write and I would just ask my mom to narrate them for me. So
#
I would draw little figures in scenes on a piece of paper and I would tell my mom what is happening
#
and then she would kind of like write a sentence underneath. I mean, she's, I must have been,
#
I mean, I wasn't old enough to write. I don't know. I was probably like,
#
I don't know, four years old or something like that when I was doing that. So,
#
you know, maybe that was, there was something there. And then when I was, when I was in high
#
school, I spent most of my class time trying to write song lyrics, even though I played the piano,
#
but I didn't really have that much musical talent. Again, just like wanting to create
#
something and express myself and some of the struggles that I was going through,
#
I was trying to express in that form. And that was not the right form for me,
#
specifically trying to write rap music. That was, I certainly chose the wrong form and I never
#
actually did anything with that. That was just me being medically influenced.
#
And then I just continued to come back over the years to trying to write both short stories
#
and screenplays. And I mean, I have a small portfolio of these things that I've frankly,
#
I've just never quite finished any of them, but I've made like really good starts on a few of them.
#
And I mean, I think nonfiction is a lot easier to write than fiction. And maybe I will, you know,
#
it's just, it's definitely something that has been nagging at me for a while. So it's always
#
been a part of my life. I've never really been that big of a journaler, oddly, you know, I've
#
probably because it just took me a while. I thought there was like a right way to journal,
#
which kind of an unhealthy way to think about it. You know, I don't think there's a right way to
#
journal, you know, it's just, so like mine has just kind of come in the form of like,
#
it's more like note taking, you know, just like you could almost think of it like bullet points
#
and little things. And that's what works for me. So writing has been a constant in my life in
#
various forms, always. And I have always been such a perfectionist that I was scared to publish
#
anything at all. And it's also why I didn't complete anything, you know, I just sort of like
#
realized that it's, you know, you know, it's, I would stare at a piece of paper and really worry
#
for a very long time about the first sentence and oh, if the first sentence is right, then
#
the second sentence will come naturally. And then the third sentence and, and it's, it took me a
#
while to kind of break out of those that unhealthy perfectionism that prevented me from really
#
putting together a holistic work, which, you know, is a book. I think one of the best parts
#
about writing and publishing your stuff on a regular basis in public is that, you know,
#
you just sort of like learn to let go and it's actually not as important as you think it is.
#
And, you know, you just put it out there and it's sort of this, this process of breaking some of
#
those loops of perfectionism. I mean, nothing that you can't really write a newsletter every week
#
and, you know, you only have so much time to dedicate to it, right? So it's actually been
#
a really good exercise for me. And then, you know, when I, writing a book is a very, very
#
particular thing to do. I mean, there's a lot of books that probably shouldn't be books or would
#
work just as well as articles. And the hardest part about knowing when to write a book is just like,
#
is this an article? Is this like a really long article that I could publish somewhere? Or does
#
this actually need to be a 75,000 word book? And, you know, that was a big thing that I had to
#
contend with. And then I realized, yeah, like this is, this stuff does not lend itself well to being
#
summarized in an article at all. You know what I mean? Like it's why it drives me crazy when,
#
you know, people want like, you know, sound bites and bullet points from it. So,
#
you know, I embarked on that process and, you know, today I would say that is probably one of
#
my fulfillment stories. You know, it's been an, it's been an incredibly good thing to have done.
#
But I think that writing is how I think, you know, it's actually how I figure out what in
#
the hell I'm trying to say about something. And that's the same, that's true for short form,
#
and it's also true for long form. My literary agent, Jim Levine, has given me a lot of great
#
advice. And he said, Luke, you're, when I started writing, he said, Luke, there are three manuscripts
#
that you're going to write before this book is published. The first manuscript is you just trying
#
to figure out what in the hell it is that you're trying to say. And it's just for you. He goes,
#
the second manuscript is for your editor. And that will be you having, you know, somewhat like
#
clarified what it is that you're trying to say and got it in a form that's intelligible to somebody
#
else beside yourself. And that's the, that first person is your editor. Then the third manuscript
#
is for your reader. And that's when you actually put the focus on the reader. So it sort of moves
#
from self to reader in that process through the editor. And it turned out to be totally accurate.
#
And even writing, whether it's a tweet or whether it's a newsletter that I publish on a weekly basis
#
is usually me trying to think through things and think out loud. And I realize where I stand on
#
things or it's not even meant to be finished. You know, like sometimes people mistake a newsletter
#
or even a single tweet as like, this is a statement that, you know, this is like what
#
this person thinks about this thing. It's like, no, this is just a thought that I'm putting out
#
there. I want to know if anybody else has had similar thoughts, right? This is kind of like
#
my podcast reflection. Like, I don't know. Like usually we're like, sometimes we think we're the
#
only person in the world that's ever thought these things. And then you put, you publish something
#
and you realize that, no, other people have been thinking about this stuff too. And there's, it's
#
really satisfying to just engage those people in conversation, but there are always, this is
#
always a process and nothing is ever finished, including a book. You know, a book for me is,
#
in one sense is not, it's just the beginning of a conversation and it's packaged and put on shelves
#
as if it's this finished product. It has a front cover. It has a back cover. It has an appendix,
#
but in my mind, it's not finished. It's just kind of like one part of a bigger project.
#
So lots here that I relate to. One of my friends keeps saying that perfection is the enemy of
#
production. And I keep telling my writing students that, you know, every time you do something,
#
there's a trade-off between getting it done and getting it right. And you have to get it done,
#
you know, especially when it comes to a first draft, you just have to get it done. And the
#
only way to get it right is really to get it done again and again and again, like your, you know,
#
like your agent told you. And you know, Joan Didion once said, I don't know what I think until
#
I write it down. And that's exactly something that I found in my own work as well. That if
#
you want to think through something, the best way to do it is just to sit down and write and,
#
you know, keep going. It's also resonant to me when you spoke about how the book is not a finished
#
product. It never is. Like, you know, U2 recently came out with this album, Songs of Surrender,
#
where they've taken a bunch of their old songs and they've done new versions of those. And
#
they're just fooling around basically. And that plays to something that so many musicians complain
#
about, that the vagaries of the music business force them to be ossified in a particular period
#
of time, where, you know, you might have played a particular song where the streets have no name
#
in a particular way, once upon a time, but hey, 30 years have passed. You think about it differently,
#
it does different things to you, you know, and yet fans will still think of that or, you know,
#
how Radiohead hates performing creep because, you know, it's an early song. It's a great song. It's,
#
you know, it hit my youthful angst as well, but it's early. They've done so much great work after
#
I want to ask you a question doubling down on that bit about writing and thinking and adding the third
#
element to it, which is teaching, right? You know, Gurvinder Bhogal, one of the past guests on my
#
show had this great Twitter thread recently, a link from the show notes. And one of the things
#
that he talks about there is he reproduces a pyramid of learning and talks about how deep
#
your learning can be in the, the shallowest way of learning something as you're in class,
#
people are talking and you know, you're getting the lesson that way slightly deeper as you actually
#
read it and so on and so forth down the line till, you know, writing is pretty high up there
#
and teaching is the absolute highest. So tell me about your experiences as a teacher and how
#
that shaped you. What has it been like? I only started formally teaching about five years ago
#
and I never thought of myself as a teacher. I just joined a university, was invited in as
#
entrepreneur in residence and teaching wasn't really part of the deal. You know, the idea was
#
that I'd just come in and kick the tires and suggest some cool projects to launch that would
#
benefit the university and the students and was sort of invited to co-teach a class. And you know,
#
I've done a lot of public speaking. I'd done public speaking for 10 years. So like I, it's
#
really funny. Like I, my, my method of teaching was to go up there and just like deliver, like
#
to perform and deliver a keynote speech for an hour, you know, and I'm pretty good at that.
#
I can go entertain a classroom. I mean, it's much more terrifying to talk to a classroom of
#
18 year olds than it is to go into a corporation and talk to professionals. But I did that. You
#
know, I went up there and performed for 90 minutes and gave my keynote speech. And then I was like,
#
oh shit, well, I've got to do this like 15 more times for the rest of the semester. I've only got
#
the one keynote. I can't, I got, I'm going to have to come up with something else here. I might
#
actually have to teach. And I, it's been very satisfying for me to learn. I mean, I just,
#
I have to continually learn. I'm continually learned to write, hopefully improving and teaching
#
as I was on a very steep learning curve for teaching. And I have very good teachers that I,
#
that I co-teach with. Now I have my own class, but I've learned a lot from them.
#
And there is, you know, learning to stand before and with, I think is the key thing with
#
the students. And I am a figure of authority. I do have knowledge that they don't maybe have,
#
and I have experience, but there is an element of standing with them shoulder to shoulder and
#
exploring a topic together and allowing them to be part of the process. And I just happen to be
#
with them more as a, as a kind of a chaperone on the, on the journey almost, right? It's kind
#
of like if you're on a ship together, you know, I mean, I've been on these waters before I can
#
help steer us, you know, if the waters get rough, like I'll, I, I know, I know what to do,
#
but it's become much more of an immersive experience for me. And I really enjoy that.
#
We're, we're, we're in dialogue and you know, I've learned when students have a question,
#
I don't have the answer to, I say, I don't know. Like, why don't we all go investigate
#
this and have a conversation about it next week? Whereas my instinct, or if I'm, you know, given a
#
keynote talk and it's Q&A time, my instinct is like, well, I've got to have an answer.
#
And it's just been tremendously freeing to know that I'm sort of part of this
#
journey of exploration. And I learn things from my students every day.
#
I just taught a class on AI and ethics was part of the class. It wasn't the whole class.
#
And, you know, I have students that know more about generative AI than I do. And, you know,
#
they, we, they give presentations in class. I engage them. I ask them questions. Maybe they
#
haven't thought about, but it's, it's a journey of learning and certainly has helped me understand
#
concepts better. So it's one thing to write a book. It's another thing to stand up in front
#
of a class of, I teach mostly freshmen, so 18 to 19 year old students, and to try to explain
#
these concepts to them. And, you know, I've had a lot of practice and I get a little bit better each
#
time, but I continue in the conversations that I engage in with them. I always do a post-mortem
#
after every time that I teach. It's the most important thing that I do. I go straight back
#
to my office and spend 15 minutes making sure that I remember what happened. This fell flat.
#
This worked. This was the best question that was asked all day, all of those things, right?
#
And it's a continual process of learning for me and figuring out what I think and also understanding
#
these concepts better. So, you know, probably the thing that I'm looking forward to the most
#
when it comes to writing my next book is that I'm already starting to teach some of those concepts
#
in class and learning as I go. So it's less of a process of, you know, me having things inside me
#
that I want to say and opening myself up to the things being drawn out of me in conversation with
#
other people. So I'm very dialogical, you know, in terms of entering into dialogue and relationships
#
with others is where all of this stuff happens. So it's been important for me. I don't know if I had
#
that many great models of teachers when I was a kid that, and I don't know
#
if that was because I was so disengaged the best teacher in the world may have not been able to
#
get my attention or if, you know, it was just, I don't know, I'm not quite sure. But I have,
#
I think we live in a world today where we have access to more great teachers than ever before.
#
I mean, I can pull up YouTube and see tremendous teaching happening,
#
even if it's not two-way, given the limits of what it is, right? It can be incredibly powerful.
#
And just learning from all of these different models of what a good education is has been
#
fruitful for me for sure. I think in certain ways, there's been more dramatic change in the
#
last 20 years than in any 20-year period in history, arguably. And how different are the
#
freshmen you teach from the freshmen of your time, from when you were a freshman? Because I would
#
imagine that just the forms in which they spend their time, you know, where a lot of the time
#
they'll be scrolling or swiping left and right and so on and so forth, you know, that can have an
#
impact on the way that they think, that can shape their thinking. You might well have access to all
#
the knowledge ever produced, but as Jonathan Haidt once pointed out, everybody is really
#
consuming content produced in the last three days. And that's one way of looking at it. Another way
#
of looking at it through the frame of mimetic desires is that that's also changed drastically
#
in the sense that, you know, there are so many more proximate models you can look up to because
#
of social media, whether it's Instagram or Facebook or whatever, and that also plays a part.
#
But at the same time, for a young person who wants to, the world is really their oyster now,
#
because everything is available to them, including the best teachers in the world,
#
the best minds in the world, the means of production are accessible to them. Like earlier
#
when you were speaking about your dream podcast and you wanted to fly people down and, you know,
#
shoot outdoors and all that. I mean, actually, if you think about it, the one real cost that you
#
cannot do anything about is the flights, you know, the flights in and out, but the rest of it,
#
you could really make do, you know, you could learn a little bit of amateur production.
#
You have world class cameras, world class sound. I mean, the two of us are sitting in our rooms
#
recording a podcast with great sound like 30 years ago, we wouldn't have been able to do this.
#
But leaving that aside, that's a tangential point. But just in terms of the young, because it's,
#
I mean, this sounds like, you know, an old man question, oh, in my time, it used to be like that,
#
kids these days are so and so. But at the same time, just the texture of life is so incredibly
#
different, that I'm coming to grips with how it would be to be young today.
#
I can't answer that. It's hard to answer the question because of the pandemic. And so the kids
#
these last two and a half years are, are for the most part really have been disengaged. You know,
#
I just think they just, you know, a year or more of having to endure these classes on zoom,
#
suck some life out of them. And I'm noticing a difference just this last semester, almost a bit
#
of a comeback, right? It's like the spirit is kind of coming back. But man, there was a couple of
#
years that were rough. But let me just go back before the pandemic. Even then, I feel like I,
#
what I notice is like the students, it's almost as if they know that the form is a bit stagnant.
#
It's like they know it is. And they're looking for deeper engagement, and they're finding that
#
deeper engagement all over the place. You know, they, they, they're finding it on their favorite
#
podcasts. So I mean, it's amazing how much we talk about podcasts in the classroom, right? It's like,
#
they're finding it online, they're finding it in all different kinds of places. And that's,
#
that's, they're, they're rightfully looking to be engaged at a deeper level in the classroom.
#
So they're sitting in, most of them are sitting in a classroom that looks exactly like the one
#
that I sat in when I was in college 20 years ago. Like, you know, the way that a classroom is
#
structured and looks doesn't look that much different than it did in the 1970s, to be honest.
#
I mean, there might be what we had overhead projectors with those little transparent sheets
#
with the markers, you know, I'm sure you remember those, like now maybe they have some fancier
#
technology, but it's not that much different. I mean, this is not like zero to one stuff, man.
#
This is like totally n plus one stuff. And I think the students see the decadence in that they see
#
the stagnation in that they know, and they're, they want more. And they're, they're actually
#
inspiring me to think differently about forms. So my view on education is we need to think
#
differently about the forms completely. I mean, I think that higher education is honestly needs to
#
be thinking like 20 years ahead on this stuff and needs to be adapting a lot faster than we are.
#
I think one, you know, one way to think about, so what is education? I mean, they can get the
#
best content in the world out there from a variety of places. You've got generative AI,
#
you know, all these things are making sort of instantaneous knowledge available to them at
#
their fingertips. The one thing that they don't have that I do feel that where I can add tremendous
#
value for them is in showing them different forms and experiences that often in a very concrete
#
nature where they're actually doing things and they're, they're learning by doing, they're
#
learning from experiences, they're learning to reflect on those experiences. So it's kind of the
#
I do, we do, you do model. And it's very much project based learning, right? Instead of just
#
consuming content. I don't think, you know, one of the things that drives me crazy with educational
#
kind of reform and ideas is like, we don't need new programs and we don't need new content. We
#
don't need new content. Like it's like, oh, we just need to design this course that with this fresh
#
new content. No, like I think we have more content than we even know what to do with. What we can do
#
is give students different experiences than what they're used to. So to give you one example of
#
something that I'm trying to do, you know, I teach very young students, I designed a course for high
#
school students to introduce them to basically what does it mean to be an entrepreneur? What is
#
the entrepreneurial mindset and spirit? What is that? And I don't mean start a company. I just mean,
#
what does it mean to sort of like think of yourself as the entrepreneur of your own life, right? Like
#
find creative ways to solve problems, add value to the world. It's going to benefit you no matter
#
what you do in life. You don't have to start a company at all. And I challenge them to, most of
#
them have never cooked before. I happen to love to cook. And one of their challenges and lessons,
#
I give them a very, very small budget and I ask them to make a meal for somebody using that very
#
small budget and they have to do everything. They have to maybe interview the person and find out
#
what they like, what's their dream meal, what are their allergies, restrictions, and they create the
#
whole thing from the whole experience, right? The experience matters. So it's not just going
#
and buying the meal, the goods under budget, and then cooking it, hopefully not burning it,
#
making it taste good, and then serving it to the people. I force them to think about everything
#
from, well, what's the room? Where are you going to eat it in? Like what's the ambiance? You're
#
going to have candles, you're going to have music. Like I want you to create an experience with this
#
budget that blows somebody away, makes somebody incredibly happy, and will hopefully lead to some
#
great personal connection and conversation. If you never cooked for your mom before,
#
do it. Do it for a birthday or just do it on a random day because my class falls on just whenever
#
it falls. Or do it for a friend. Do it for somebody. You can make it for a homeless person.
#
They get to choose and they get to design this experience. And then, first of all,
#
they're doing something good for somebody else, but they're learning more than they could ever
#
learn about what it means to think like an entrepreneur than any kind of content that
#
I could teach them. And this is something that AI, at least right now, cannot reproduce that. A
#
podcast or YouTube video cannot reproduce that. I walk them through this whole thing. I tell them
#
about how my wife and I kind of do this for each other. And that results in a kind of learning
#
that's experiential learning that, as far as I know, is the single biggest thing that an educator
#
can do in the world today. Fabulous. I'm also curious to know about your sort of intellectual
#
journey getting to the place that you eventually landed up at. Take me a bit through that. What
#
kind of books were you reading when you were young? How was that evolving? And then when that journey
#
began, where you kind of left the startup world and so on, and you started engaging with this.
#
At one point, I believe you went to Italy to spend three years and to sort of,
#
as part of that journey. Tell me a bit about that. What drew you there? What were you looking for?
#
And how did the intellectual landscape inside your head evolve during that period?
#
When I was young, I read the stuff that you're assigned in school. Didn't find it that engaging
#
would often kind of blow off those assignments. And then once I got into college, I flipped into
#
all my reading needs to be geared towards helping me in my career. So I just devoured books on
#
finance, books on economics, all fascinating stuff. My undergrad degree is in finance from NYU
#
and I found it very interesting and dove deeply into it, different schools of economic thought.
#
And then somewhere in my mid-20s, I had this kind of craving for fiction and for storytelling.
#
This is around the time when I really started writing more for things that fed my imagination
#
and especially things that were a bit less intellectual in nature. So in a weird way,
#
everything was over-intellectualized for me. And my journey was one of
#
firing up my imagination again. And that largely came by reading classic works of fiction that I
#
had not taken seriously in high school. And that means Shakespeare,
#
actually reading these plays for the very first time. Because it wasn't assigned to me and it
#
didn't feel like work, it just felt like something that I wanted to do on my own.
#
And I saw the value in it and I saw that I was learning more about human nature,
#
even business, by reading the stuff. And then something clicked inside of me and I was like,
#
well, equally as much truth, if not more, can be found in a great novel than in the best work of
#
non-fiction that I can find at Barnes and Nobles, which a lot of them are total shit anyway.
#
And I was just drinking at the well of classical wisdom. And I kind of adopted this kind of
#
don't read books that are less than 25 years old mentality. And I was like, I've got one life to
#
live and there's like, I should probably start with like these 500 books, right? That like,
#
you know, sort of formed this kind of canon. I was like, at least want to do that. I want to
#
read the Bible. I've never really read it. Like, you know, maybe important to like understand
#
something that shapes so much of our history. I was like around 25 when I started thinking
#
those things, right? Because everything I was reading, consuming was published within a year.
#
And I was like, I feel like I'm really missing out on something. So started diving in to
#
a lot of fiction. And then I had a love of philosophy through, I had some friends that were
#
kind of amateur philosophers. And they were just some of the more interesting people that I knew
#
at that point, because maybe it was just because they were talking to me about things other than
#
startup life. Maybe that's why they were interesting. I don't know. But they, I began to,
#
I guess, be envious of their classical education. And I felt like, you know, there's some,
#
I want to like learn a little bit more about first principles and metaphysics. And I think
#
this will just help me understand the world a little bit more, because I couldn't find anything
#
that was giving me like a holistic view of the world. And I was lacking first principles. And
#
for some reason, I just, I sort of realized that, that I needed to just take a huge step back
#
and find something that would help me be a heuristic for understanding the rest.
#
And I didn't quite have a, I didn't have a metaphysical view of the really of the world
#
at that time. One friend recommended that I enroll in a class, a distance learning class
#
at a small little university in Ohio. I never actually went there, never stepped foot on campus.
#
They sent me CDs in the mail, and I listened to the CDs and read a little binder of notes.
#
And that class is called Philosophy of the Human Person. It totally changed my life. You know,
#
it was basically philosophical anthropology, right? It just looked at what do we mean by the
#
word person? What is a person? How is a person different than an animal? What are the different
#
attributes of a human person? All those things. It was an entire semester just on that question.
#
And I realized that was kind of a very foundational question for me to answer. And
#
that class forced me to do a lot of introspection and made me fall completely in love with
#
philosophy. The instructor is a guy named John Henry Crosby. He comes from the School of
#
Phenomenology. So a lot of the way that he entered into these big questions about what it means to
#
be human were just from a phenomenological standpoint, right? He would look at sort of
#
certain moral questions and be like, why do we have a revulsion to a person that commits this act?
#
What is it about us that makes that something? What is true about the human person? We went
#
through the whole semester like this. He never actually defined the term human person kind of
#
by intention, right? Because he didn't want to engage in kind of a reductionistic kind of
#
philosophy. It was a phenomenological approach. We just looked at all these different situations
#
and ended up gaining this deeper understanding of myself. So not just on an intellectual level,
#
like, yeah, I can kind of speak a little bit. I understand where the word person comes from,
#
comes from this Latin word persona, which initially referred to the masks that different people wore
#
in theater. But it became very personal to me. And I think if philosophy becomes something that
#
actually helps you understand yourself and the world around you better, you fall in love with it.
#
And that led me, I felt that course led to me enrolling in three more courses in that same
#
distance learning program. Eventually led to me getting my hands in every philosophy and theology
#
book that I could. I think the two things are related. I think philosophy naturally opens
#
itself up to asking certain metaphysical questions. It's hard to limit yourself to those questions
#
without at least talking about the idea of God or something like that or just basic metaphysics.
#
So philosophy led me to theology, which was what I studied in Italy. I was in Italy for three years
#
studying philosophy and theology at a pontifical university there,
#
seriously considering becoming a Catholic priest during that period. I was in discernment. I lived
#
with 250 other guys while I was there who were all in that process of discernment. That's something
#
that's a whole part of my life that there's a lot that I could say about that because it's a very
#
strange experience to be in your 30s and to live in what's essentially a dorm with 249 other guys
#
with a shared bathroom at the end of the hall drinking deeply at the well of ancient ideas
#
and then being able to go to school every day down in Piazza Navona and then to be able to walk up
#
the hill every day and to be able to sit down and have an hour and a half lunch with other men and
#
to be able to talk about the ideas. I was able to do that for three years for breakfast, lunch,
#
and dinner. It's not only learning. I was actually talking about these things with my classmates.
#
The most informative three years of my life because of that and that view of the world
#
that I got from that process of education and not just education but formation. I use the word
#
formation meaning that living arrangement and that experience of being in that environment.
#
This is why I say that the experience is such a critical part of education because it wouldn't
#
have been the same if I hadn't been able to talk about those things in that way
#
and devote myself completely. I wasn't working. That was the only thing that I did
#
was critical. Then when I left and moved back to the States,
#
I felt like I was able to integrate all of these things into a more holistic view
#
and answer things like, well, what is business? What is work? I started asking all of these
#
really fundamental questions. Why do humans work? Things like this that if you would have asked me
#
when I was in my early 20s starting a company, I would have said, well, I work so that I can
#
make enough money so that I can do what I want to do and so that I can retire. I don't know if I
#
would have had much more than that for you. This journey took me to a place where I was able to go
#
back and answer a lot of those early questions that I had with this deeper kind of metaphysical
#
and worldview where I actually saw value and dignity in things where I wasn't able to see
#
it before. That's a life-changing experience. What are the fundamental things you changed
#
your mind about after that three-year experience?
#
Hmm. Changed my mind about. Let's see.
#
I would say that I changed my mind about the
#
way that growth happens and the way that education and true learning happens.
#
I like to think of myself as an autodidact. I'm very independent, a very independent learner.
#
I don't really like people to assign me books. I like to just kind of move through on my own
#
and form my own pathway. But living in community taught me that learning is an incredibly social
#
activity and that it can only go so far on your own. My illusions of independence,
#
I let go of those illusions and I began to see really the importance of the dialogue
#
and the community. It's why I seek it out any chance that I can get.
#
Frankly, I won't go through the whole idea on this podcast, but I really think adults
#
are craving communities where they can learn, truly. It's one thing to listen to a great podcast,
#
but it's another thing to actually be part of a community where you can dive deeper into these
#
ideas and talk through them. That's how we learn. The importance of community as a school of
#
education would be one big thing. It was during those three years that I sort of lost, well,
#
maybe I was already losing it, but it probably completely sort of killed my view of a good day
#
or a valuable day as getting a lot done. I kind of adopted a very Italian way of life
#
with long lunches and long dinners and learned the importance of rest and leisure in the process of
#
learning. It's a bit counterintuitive, but we have to be able to read a book and then just sit there
#
for an entire day without reading anymore, just kind of letting it sink in. I learned that.
#
All of my education there was in Italian, by the way. I got there in June and then I had a
#
three-month crash course in Italian. I didn't know a word of Italian before I got there.
#
Then by the end of the summer, I was thrust into graduate classes in theology, all in Italian,
#
including oral exams in Italian that I managed to pass. There was something really
#
that was a humbling experience. I definitely was not able to communicate myself as well as I wanted.
#
I was in an incredibly diverse international group of students there from all over the world,
#
Africa, Asia. Americans were certainly in the minority. It kind of probably broke me from a bit
#
of US-centricism, seeing everything through this one view. Probably the most beautiful
#
part about being there was just seeing how all these people in these very different cultures
#
exercised their own ways of ideas about what education is and the way that they
#
lived there. I was in a Catholic seminary while I was there, so a lot of my classmates were
#
Catholic in the incredibly different ways that they lived out their experience of the faith.
#
It was very, very different than the Americanized version of that. It gave me a more universal
#
mindset and rekindled my desire to just talk to as many people in different parts of the world
#
as I can. I did this in my thirties and I just realized that at least I have to constantly be
#
going out beyond where I'm comfortable. When I stop doing that, I'm pretty unhappy.
#
One of the good fortunes of being in India for most of us is that it's very common for an Indian
#
to be multilingual and to be able to speak four or five languages and at least to be good in one or
#
two. What I've often noticed is that I am a different person in English than I am in Hindi
#
and so on and so forth. I'm really curious about this experience of yours of learning Italian as
#
an adult. In Italian, were you a different person and did the unfamiliarity with the language make
#
you think in a different way in the language? Were you always like when you were at your classes
#
and you're being taught complicated things? I guess the initial process of learning a new language
#
is that you're always translating back and forth, but I'm guessing if you spend three years there
#
and you're having a lot of dialogue and all that, that kind of changes. Do you think differently
#
when you start thinking straight away in Italian? What was that whole experience like?
#
Yeah, it's a much more poetic language and experience and begins to actually shape your
#
mindset a bit. I once had a friend of mine say that he really appreciates, he's a professional
#
comedian, so he said this kind of as a joke, but basically said, I always like to have
#
doctors who do not speak English as their first language because they always just have to get
#
right to the point and they can't beat around the bush. They just tell me exactly what's wrong
#
because they don't always have the language to put these things in flowery euphemisms that
#
you only know when you have a certain proficiency in a language. That was kind of me in Italian,
#
definitely for the first year or two. I would just have to say things in a very direct way,
#
get it out any way that I could and just make the most important point first, which forced a
#
honesty, also a frustration that I feel bad this person doesn't understand the nuance that I'm
#
trying to share about this point. I do have some nuance there, but I have no idea how to
#
communicate it to this person. It's a very humbling experience and probably the most
#
challenging part and beautiful part of my time in struggles with Italian was
#
every week for the majority of a couple of years, I would go to a home north of Rome for men
#
that were sick. Most of them had HIV or AIDS and didn't have family and didn't have a place to
#
live and they were in a home where they were being cared for near the end of life.
#
And they were suffering and I would go and they would try to engage me in these really deep,
#
profound conversations. And I was at a point with my Italian where I could understand everything
#
that they were saying to me. So I can watch movies in Italian, you can speak to me in Italian,
#
for the most part. And I pick up all of the central points and they would just pour their
#
hearts out to me. And then I would just feel completely inadequate to respond to them.
#
I could only respond in these very simple ways. And that, for one, taught me that just being
#
there and listening and they knew that I understood was in itself tremendously valuable. And then
#
sometimes it saved me from the temptation to always have to have this,
#
to find all the right words to say. Because not only did I not have the right words,
#
I didn't even have the wrong words. And taught me that sometimes less is more.
#
In every language, there's all kinds of wonderful expressions that you don't have in your own
#
language. And you sort of learn them and they shine a light on some different aspect of reality.
#
Like Wittgenstein said, sometimes your world is only as big as the language and the words
#
that you have. And in Italian, they have all kinds of beautiful phrases, a lot of times relating to
#
food and wine, which is great, that little piffy things that summarize life. And I've been able
#
to assimilate some of those and kind of opens your eyes to new things. But it's very challenging
#
to learn a language when you're in your thirties. I was never one of those people. My wife is
#
phenomenal at learning languages. She's way better at Italian than I am. I'm not. So I really had to
#
struggle through it. I think that it has been a, it's opened up new kind of like pathways in the
#
way that I think about things. And probably the most important way is this. It's not necessarily
#
the Italian language, but it's the Italian kind of culture and sort of like way of speaking and
#
explaining things is not that linear. It's sort of take like this very meandering path
#
to kind of say something. And sometimes as an American, my instinct is like,
#
we'll get to the point. Like, what are you trying to say? But there's kind of a beautiful kind of
#
like art to the like Italian conversation where you do sort of like say something in this more
#
poetic way or take a while to get to where you're going. And that has been something that I've,
#
I think I've learned from that. English can tend to be very direct and that sort of Italian,
#
and I'm not quite sure exactly how that's worked its way into my life, but I know that I've had
#
many a two hour long lunches in Italy that meandered and they're very different kinds of
#
conversations in Italian or back and forth between English and Italian, very different
#
kinds of conversations than I've ever had in English. And the fact that all languages have
#
such an essentially different character makes me wonder about the kind of work that's produced in
#
them or the kind of thinking that they enable. For example, you know, German is supposed to be such,
#
you know, such a systematic, again, a dry language where, you know, which is precise,
#
which is to the point. And one of my friends who studied law in Germany said the two went together
#
so well that, you know, the German love for order and rigor went so well with the teaching of law
#
and it kind of made you just think much better in that direction. And similarly, you'll have
#
languages like Japanese and Korean, which are so much more minimal and, you know, again,
#
spare to the point. Whereas there are some languages, like the way you describe Italian,
#
I think Punjabi and Urdu would qualify for that. Their expression is strict. They're like,
#
all the colors are there, you know, they're Van Gogh languages in a sense. And I wonder if that
#
then affects the discourse in that language and the way people think and the things that they
#
think about. Like, one clip question that I'm no longer going to, that I'm no doubt going to
#
get slammed on for asking is, you know, what does it mean that Hindi doesn't have a semicolon?
#
You know, because there are so many kind of implications of that. But given that you've
#
studied philosophy quite seriously and given that even if in translation you've read works
#
that were originally in German or Italian or French, all of these different languages,
#
is there a sense that the language could have made a difference or, you know, I mean,
#
we can't establish the direct causality, of course, but are there any trends you see?
#
Yes. By the way, that's fascinating. So it does not have a semicolon.
#
Yeah. They've got their own punctuation marks, so there is an equivalent of a full stop,
#
but there isn't a semicolon. And I find that when you're, you know, deep in a certain kind of
#
nuanced or whatever, sometimes you need the semicolon. You know, I don't use it in my public
#
facing work so much, but sometimes you need a semicolon when you're thinking through your
#
ideas and, you know, the way you place parallel thoughts together.
#
That's fascinating because, you know, I don't think of the semicolon as the language. I think
#
of it as grammar, but it is worked into the way that the language is expressed and the way that
#
people write. Wow. I'm going to have to think about that one for a while. To give you an example,
#
I can read the thinker that inspired my work over the last few years. And my book is a French
#
social theorist named René Girard. He wrote most of his books, he wrote in French. And I,
#
I mean, I don't really speak French and I can read French sort of because I know Spanish and
#
Italian. So French kind of comes naturally, but of the three, it's by far my worst.
#
And here I am like diving deep into this French thinker and all of his primary work is in French.
#
So not, not ideal. So I felt this real like imposter syndrome about that. And I can read
#
French and make sense of it, but I definitely miss nuance and stuff like that. And I mean,
#
from what I can tell, I mean, the work is a lot better in French. Like these books are like really,
#
really hard to read in English. And then, you know, I realize, well, part of the reason they're hard
#
to read is just because there are things that are simply lost in translation. You know, there's a
#
word that I touch on in my book. In French, you know, the word is me connoissance, me connoissance.
#
Connoissance meaning the word is for knowing and may is kind of the, the negation of that. So it's
#
this word that in some sense means like miss knowing, you know, and there's just really not
#
a word for that in English, but it's like, it forms a central part of everything that he's
#
talking about, right? Like, you know, how sort of our kind of mimetic desires cause us to
#
misapprehend and miss know something that we think that we know, and that we become sure that we know,
#
and, you know, learning what the word really meant in French, like completely blew up.
#
It's translated like in a bunch of different ways, depending on who the translator is,
#
it's like five different ways that you can translate that word, just like opened my mind
#
to like, wow, I bet there's been, there's like a lot of things in French, works in French that
#
talk about this that I, I'm limited really to the English sources, you know, and that's a huge
#
limitation. So yeah, it's, it is, I wish that I knew how to like, easily read five or six other
#
languages, because I would, I think that I would probably do that a lot more often. I have a
#
colleague that I work with who's Swiss, and he's always sharing these, like the most fascinating
#
articles and like news and stories with me. And I'm like, where do you come up with this stuff?
#
I've never seen anything like he's like, because I, I read like the Swiss newspapers and like,
#
I, he speaks a lot of different languages. And he's like, they're just like, there's just stuff in
#
those other languages that, you know, it's where I get all my interesting stuff from basically.
#
It's like, I just take it into the English world and I put it on LinkedIn. Nobody's ever seen
#
it before, you know, it just, it just really speaks to the kind of the limitations and how much
#
bigger our world can become as we be, as you know, we understand, you know, different language that
#
has been used to understand the world. Yeah, I'm probably too old to learn as many languages as I
#
like to at this point. Yeah. And it's, it's, it's, it's an interesting kind of disjuncture as well,
#
that, you know, the Wittgensteinian point that the universe is really too big for language to
#
describe, but you know, different languages just capture different aspects of it. And then there's
#
so much that, you know, is therefore lost to us. Amit, let me, can I ask you a question on books
#
and reading? So my, my wife asked me this question and I said, I don't know the answer. Let me,
#
I told her I'm going on this podcast. My, it seems like anybody in India who has read my book would
#
have had to have read it in English, right? Cause it hasn't been translated. So, you know, and
#
sometimes I wonder like, you know, is that, is there anything lost there? Would it be, would more
#
people be able to read it if it was translated into the language? Is that, so is that, is that
#
common that like a, a book like mine would just be available in English or why, why are books,
#
at least from what I understand, like most American authors don't have books that are translated
#
into any other language. So can you just tell me a little bit about that? I'm genuinely curious.
#
Yeah, I'll give a multi-part answer to that. Part one is that India has a very large English-speaking
#
elite, people like me for whom English is their first language. So therefore I only read in
#
English. I know Hindi and Bengali and stuff, but I only actually read in English, which I'm not
#
happy about. I wish I had cultivated my facility in those other languages as well. So there are,
#
there's a large English-speaking elite which will read only in English. And then there's a much
#
larger layer of people who have learned English as a functional language, but don't really do
#
serious reading in it. So they are probably not going to be reading you. The biggest tragedy of
#
our languages is that not enough great books get translated from English to those languages. Some
#
do, but not enough. And therefore there's a limitation there in the discourse as well.
#
Now a book like Wanting is, I think one of those books, which if it was translated,
#
it would do very well because it's dealing with fundamentally universal ideas. What the book does
#
for me is it introduces that frame of thick and thin desires. It flicks a switch, and once that
#
switch is flicked, you're never going back. So obviously an Indian kid in a small town somewhere
#
who's reading it in Marathi or Gujarati is going to relate to the world in a different way than
#
somebody reading it in, say, Texas or Arkansas. But I think it's going to flick that switch.
#
So if you can get it done, I would say that it's one of those books which I feel would travel well
#
because it's about fundamental ideas. Well, I'm glad I asked. So that is good
#
encouragement for me to actually push to see if that can get done and not accept,
#
oh, the English is fine as an answer. So thank you for that.
#
It'll be quite awesome if there are Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi copies of your
#
book around, and it'll be fun to see how they translate it as well.
#
Thank you. I will see what I can do.
#
Right. So getting back to your personal journey and finally taking you towards Jira and wanting,
#
you trained for three years to be a Catholic priest. Why did you want to be a Catholic priest,
#
and why did you change your mind, and what happened after that?
#
I, well, the most fundamental answer is that I felt called to enter the seminary in prayer.
#
I mean, I felt a clear, you know, if prayer is a relationship and a dialogue and not just me
#
talking to myself, and I do feel that tug of a personal dialogue that this is not just me,
#
then I felt the prompting to go on this journey. And seminary formation is a rite of passage that
#
is normally meant to result in ordination to the priesthood. That's the normal outcome.
#
That's what you think going in is that, well, this will probably be the outcome if I finish.
#
It was not for me. I'm married with a baby on the way. So in some sense, the rite of passage
#
didn't work in a superficial sense. I'm going back to the rite of passage thing because I'm
#
thinking about this a lot, and it's one of the ways that I understand my journey.
#
I think this is fundamental principle to understand much of what life is about, right? There's
#
a future state, and there's a state we're in, and then there's a journey where we think we're
#
going to move from one state to the other. So in my case, at that point in my life,
#
it was the priesthood, and it was the calling for sure, and it was because I also viewed it
#
as the greatest good imaginable really was holiness, like profound holiness, right?
#
So this would be like Mother Teresa, like to become a saint, right? This is the greatest
#
ideal in life, and different cultures and different religions have their own version of that,
#
right? I think holiness would be one way to kind of describe it on a universal level,
#
and I realized, well, this is more important to me than anything else, right? Maybe this is kind of
#
the goal of my life, and I sort of define holiness as one who's able to sort of
#
give and receive love completely, and that the priesthood seemed to me at that time in my life
#
to kind of be the highest ideal of that, is like the highest form of self-sacrificial love,
#
and appealed to this kind of idea of a heroic sacrifice, and self-gift, and donation,
#
and serving other people, and being able to devote myself completely to my spiritual
#
journey and my spiritual growth. Celibacy comes with the Catholic priesthood, right?
#
It's a radical, radical thing, and with that comes really the opportunity, the ability to
#
devote yourself completely to that form of life, right? Kind of like becoming a monk.
#
And in the process of that formation, I sort of realized that I learned things there that were
#
critical for me to learn, and the process of transformation that happened, it was not the one
#
that I expected, but it's exactly the one that I needed, resulted in kind of a different call
#
at the end, I would say, that that ideal that I had is I still have it, by the way.
#
So that is not... I still really believe the goal of my life is to give myself completely in service
#
and to be one who is capable of tremendous love, and for me, that's the journey of holiness.
#
But the priesthood is just one way for a Catholic to be on that journey. It's not the only way.
#
My instinct is always to kind of go with the most radical form of something imaginable, right? It's
#
shocking I didn't try to become a Trappist monk or something like that, because that's kind of
#
my disposition. It's like if I'm going to do something, man, I'm just going to go
#
absolutely all the way. And it was actually a form of maturation for me to realize that that
#
was just kind of my entry point in. And as I began to grow and actually mature and sort of
#
deepen my understanding of what the spiritual journey is all about, I gained some more,
#
I would call it spiritual freedom and sort of realized that my place is kind of right where
#
I'm at right now. And that's where I feel called, where I feel most engaged, where I feel
#
like I'm able to sort of integrate all of these things and be most who I am.
#
So it's just funny. We do understand ourselves often only in looking back. And I don't see that
#
rite of passage as a failure in any way. I just see it as it just resulted in a form of
#
kind of transformation that is manifesting itself in a very different way than I imagined it would,
#
right? And I wouldn't be who I am without it. And that's like the beautiful thing as we look
#
back on these things that we've done. At one point, I was like, you know, did I waste those
#
three years, right? Because like, you know, I didn't actually become a priest, didn't become
#
who I was expecting I would be. But that's, you know, that nothing could be further from the truth.
#
It was a period of, I mean, I would have nothing to say if I hadn't underwent. It was a five-year
#
journey for me, actually, if I hadn't underwent that process. And one of the greatest lessons
#
for me was that I have expectations of what the journey of life should be like, or what I think
#
it will be like, or like, what is the best pathway for me to be on in order to achieve X, Y, and Z
#
goal. And life has just constantly, continually proved to me to be much more dynamic than that,
#
to be full of surprises, to amaze me, to cultivate wonder in me the more that I open myself up to it.
#
And anytime that I have too strictly confined myself or articulated to myself a certain kind
#
of path or mission, I'm always kind of surprised by it. So I've kind of learned to let go of those
#
ideas and sort of be in a place where I can be available if that makes sense, right? Like,
#
not really necessarily knowing what comes next, which kind of goes against some conventional
#
wisdom. You need to know exactly what your mission is, be able to clearly define it.
#
There are some senses of the contours of what that looks like, but it's always been a mistake
#
for me when I have too specific of an idea of what it is, if that makes sense.
#
So take me through your journey after that. You've described how even if it wasn't a right
#
of passage in the conventional sense, it was a right of passage in a different way in that it
#
was a clarifying moment and it kind of brought you forward in this direction. So what happens next?
#
How do you decide then what you're going to do with your life? Is it in your mind then that you're
#
going to be a man of ideas and you're going to try and figure stuff out and then teach it as soon
#
as you figure it out? Or are you going to get back into the business world? How do things span out
#
after that? The thing is that I didn't necessarily need to know and I didn't know, but I knew that I
#
was a different person. I knew that I was an integrated person in a way that I never was
#
before I embarked on that. So I didn't set out to write a book, but no idea that I would write a
#
book. I set out to basically be in the world as this new person and pay attention to opportunities,
#
to pay attention to relationships in my life, to pay attention to places where I could respond
#
generously to the things that were before me to create new things. So I'm very much an entrepreneur.
#
So a couple of those things have been creating new ventures, things I haven't talked a lot about,
#
but that are incredibly fulfilling to me that I'm working on behind the scenes.
#
So creating new entrepreneurial things. I had no idea that that would mean writing a book. It just
#
happened and it happened in a very sort of fortuitous way. I knew that part of it was
#
communicating the journey and that there was a lot of other people that would benefit from hearing
#
about what it's like to kind of step away from an unfulfilling life in your late 20s and to embark
#
on this kind of radical process. Not everybody will do what I did, but I think everybody
#
were all in various stages of some kind of a process of becoming and that people would
#
benefit from that. So I did know that it meant communicating in some way. I just didn't know
#
exactly what way. I had no idea that it would be, René Girard would be one of the vehicles that I
#
used to do that. So I think, you know, knowing certain things at a very high level, but not
#
knowing the specific forms that they would take. And I'm very comfortable being in that place,
#
right? I mean, I'm like, I think earlier in my life, I needed to really know exactly what things
#
were going to look like. Now, in kind of midlife, I feel like this tremendous like childlike excitement,
#
like not necessarily knowing exactly five years from now, you know, I could be running a company,
#
I could be writing a book, and I'd say that they're equally likely things. There's probably like
#
four or five other things, or I could, maybe a full-time dad. Like I really like this, the
#
kind of openness to kind of where the spirit is leading me. And that is, that's kind of,
#
I find a lot of joy in that. And this gets back to the whole mimetic track thing,
#
where, and that doesn't mean just kind of like going wherever the wind blows.
#
That's not at all what I mean by that. I mean, having a sense of who you are, or who I am,
#
and to the extent that I know when there's an opportunity for me to engage in something
#
that is going to be important, and not confining myself to any one particular idea of what my life
#
has to look like. So take me through, you know, I'm going to ask about your journey to reading and
#
discovering and being influenced by Rene Girard now, but I also want to know about the other
#
frames that you used before this to explain the world. Like what often happens when we are young
#
is the world is complicated, we have to tell ourselves simple stories about it to make sense
#
of it, and we are looking for frames. And one danger often is that, you know, the first frame
#
we'll find that seems to explain everything, we get seduced by it, and then maybe, you know, used
#
that one hammer for every nail, and then life happens, and we realize that things are nuanced,
#
and we add more ways of looking to it, and so on and so forth. So on your journey towards Rene
#
Girard and what I find this incredibly powerful frame of thick and thin desires, you know,
#
tell me about your evolution in terms of the way you thought about the world and the way you made
#
sense of the world. The reason that Girard was so earth shattering to me is, and let's just stay
#
with the desire part, because there's so many different mental models that I had that were
#
that evolved and that were shattered throughout my life, you know, dozens. And, you know, sort of
#
like metaphysical views of the world, things related to trust, things related to, you know,
#
I've written about this one, like there was a time in my life when I was in high school that
#
I had a view in the world that, you know, it's me against everybody, right, and that pretty much
#
everybody's out for themselves, and that's just the way that the world is, and like anything that
#
I'm going to do, I have to do myself, and sort of like created this extremely independent kind of
#
like view of like my own development and including my own desires, right. So it was, it really worked
#
against me in the sense that I adopted, you know, what Girard refers to and what I call in the book
#
the romantic lie, that, you know, desires are, you know, are totally, there's no connection between
#
our desires, there's no order to them, there's no hierarchy of desires. I create my own desires,
#
what I want is, you know, de facto good because I want it and that therefore must be, you know,
#
something worthy of pursuit. I had this idea, which is very common for a long time, right, and
#
the, probably one of the fundamental realizations of my life was that all of my desires are
#
meaningful in the sense that I can learn from them, but they're not all equal and they don't
#
all lead to the same places and that they have to be discerned and that some are better than others,
#
quite frankly, that there's a, there's just a hierarchy to desires. I think that's an
#
uncomfortable thing. I don't like to think that, like, I mean, it's, I mean, with that statement
#
comes the realization that some of the things that I want are not good and it's like really,
#
nobody thinks, like nobody likes to think about that, right. Like some of the things that I want
#
right now, today, I actually are the result of probably some insecurities that I have or something
#
like that. Like, so an example of this would be, you know, as a young entrepreneur, like, wanting
#
to be, have an article written about me or something like that, right. That desire is a desire
#
for something that I guess, you know, every human being wants to be recognized and seen.
#
So there's always like, you know, desires are not like good or bad, right. There's not just like the
#
strict like Manichaean kind of like evaluation of them. There's always like something in there
#
that's true. But then there's other things in there that are, if I spend all of my time sort
#
of like desiring that and organizing my entire life around that, well, I'm not focusing on the
#
things that are important. Like actually, like the relationships in my life, like creating
#
this, the company that I really want to create, everything becomes kind of like
#
warped around this one desire that I have, which can be incredibly selfish.
#
And as I really went through this process of looking at my desires, I saw the social nature
#
of them, right. I saw, I broke this model of my, of kind of my own autonomous independence. Maybe
#
some of that was because I was an only child. And I saw like how profoundly I'm embedded in
#
a world and how profoundly I'm embedded in relationships with other people. People that
#
I've met, people that I haven't met. And even that, you know, people that I haven't even met
#
and ideas have profoundly shaped my life and the kind of goals that I've set for myself and the
#
things that I want. And that realization led me to sort of a view of the world that is much,
#
that is much more focused on relationships. I would say that a relational model of the world,
#
it drives a lot of my thinking, right. Where our desires are sort of formed in and through
#
relationships. Relationships heal us in ways that a reading a book could never heal us or help us
#
to grow and develop. You know, you look at even within a single family, right. There's always a
#
system in a family, right. There's a system of relationships. And you know, sometimes you
#
only realize that when you've become part of another family, you know, or you marry into a
#
family or you see your friend's family, sometimes you go 18 years, the first 18 years of our life
#
without actually understanding the family system that we're in and the relationships that we're in.
#
So sort of seeing this more kind of connected view of human nature was a massive shift for me.
#
It helped me understand everything from like religion or like the value of church community,
#
for instance, right. Like, you know, maybe this journey that I'm on, the spiritual journey that
#
I'm on is not like a solo endeavor, right. It's not like some solo free climb up the side of a
#
mountain. It's something that I'm actually on with other people, right. Both other people that have
#
come before me and other people that are around me now. And there's something kind of communal
#
and very social about that. And if I try to do it alone, I mean, first of all, it's lonely. And
#
second of all, I'm not going to have access to the kind of wisdom that I would have if I did this
#
with other people. So immersing myself into the kind of stream, both of tradition, of other cultures,
#
of other people, of relationships, understanding those, leaning into them, the messiness of human
#
nature has been probably the single biggest shift for me. And this idea of the messiness of human
#
nature, I mean, it's something that just really isn't talked about a whole lot in the business
#
world, for instance. Running a company, most of the issues that you encounter are profoundly
#
human issues, profoundly human. You have people that have families, that have relationships,
#
that come into the office every day with different kind of in emotional states.
#
And understanding all of these things that are sort of happening even in my life as an
#
entrepreneur, as being profoundly about human relationships and connections, completely,
#
completely shifted my view of what it's all about in the first place. And has allowed me to see that
#
even in a situation where there's been, for instance, one of the company that I closed down,
#
probably no greater human value was created in closing down that company or no other thing
#
that I've ever created, including financially successful things, has ever led to more human
#
value creation in terms of relationships that were forged than in that particular thing.
#
So learning to see that as an opportunity rather than justice, than merely a failure,
#
changed my life. And it goes back to some Viktor Frankl stuff in Man's Search for Meaning
#
and being able to go through life, seeing why certain things, even the smallest interactions,
#
can actually be profoundly meaningful. There's this saying about where you stand depends on
#
where you sit. And when I think of mimetic desire and how everything is intersubjunctive, as you say,
#
and depends on relations with people, you could say that where you stand depends on where you sit
#
and who you sit with. Tell me a bit more about what Girard meant to you. Was it this one sort of
#
blast of realization when you come across the frame or did you have to read a lot of him to
#
really internalize the concept of mimetic desire and figure it out? And tell me a bit about what
#
that process was like and how that took you to the point where you decided that, hey, this is
#
earth-shattering and important enough for me to actually write a book about.
#
It didn't come to me all at once. It came to me little by little. Girard himself said that he had
#
this singular, dense insight that the nature of human desire was mimetic, meaning it's imitative,
#
that we're social creatures and that our desires are formed through mimesis. He himself said that
#
he had this singular, dense insight sitting on a train in Pennsylvania and he spent the rest of
#
his life trying to work it out. In some ways, maybe that singular, dense insight was communicated
#
to me, but it took me a very long time to fully understand it. So when I learned this idea of
#
mimetic desire, it did help me with that realization of the kind of interconnectedness. Girard uses the
#
term, he says, we're not individuals, we're inter-divisuals. And this idea of individualism
#
and the modern idea of the self is a cause of a lot of problems. And if we thought of ourselves
#
as inter-divisuals, it's been a whole branch of psychology. Now it's been founded called
#
inter-divisual psychology, really inspired by René Girard's work, where a single person comes
#
to see a therapist or a psychologist and the psychologist cannot really fully understand
#
anything that they're talking about with understanding the other people in their life
#
and the way that those dynamics work. So I saw at an intellectual level the way that
#
mimetic desire had played out in my life in good ways and in not so good ways. I have had many
#
positive role models and then it also sort of sidetracked me and took me trying to achieve
#
things that I ultimately didn't care about to impress people that didn't love me. So I had the
#
intellectual insight, then it became profoundly personal to me. And then I think that I began to
#
see how it sort of played out in culture and sort of, you know, I spent probably five years
#
reading everything I could get my hands on from Girard. I attended several and every year there's
#
an annual meetup of international Girard scholars that meet in a city and sort of
#
present, you know, papers on these very academic topics. And I started to see that
#
so many of, so much of what's happening in the world, right, from like whether it's geopolitical
#
rivalries to scapegoating, kind of like the political polarization that we have here in the U.S.,
#
kind of division of the world into good and evil. This was probably 2017 to 2019. I started to see
#
how Girard had some explanatory power to sort of add a layer to these discussions that, you know,
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and to add a depth to the conversation that really wasn't happening, at least in public.
#
And that's when the idea for the book started to brew for me a bit because I started to view
#
it as a responsibility to write something. So while it helped me understand my own life a little
#
bit better, while it helped me make some meaning, you know, it's something that I realized would
#
help other people on a personal level, but also might just help us engage and have better
#
discussions about some of what's going on rather than just labeling people. If we realize that we're
#
inter-divisuals and that, you know, sometimes the people that we view as our enemies are our enemies
#
because, at least Girard would say, because maybe we have something really substantial in common with
#
them. Maybe that's what is inspiring kind of our frustration with them in the first place.
#
All of these things seemed like incredibly important things to talk about, even though
#
they're not popular because they don't, you know, these are not the kinds of viewpoints that
#
necessarily get a lot of engagement because they require serious thinking and introspection.
#
And I think it's lacking. So part of me was like, well, this might be totally crazy to write a book
#
like this that actually requires self-examination. It's probably like from a marketing standpoint,
#
it's probably a really bad idea to write something that would actually like require something that's
#
actually incredibly challenging to do. But I began to view it as a responsibility. I knew it was
#
important to tell a bit of my story to try to make this as real as possible because I'd felt that
#
conversations about Girard were way too abstract and way too intellectual and that people were not
#
able to relate this to their own lives the way that I was to mine. So that was a big goal that
#
I had. And I think when something begins to feel like a responsibility, it sort of changes
#
everything. It's one thing to just do something because it's nice to do or you want to. It's
#
another thing when it actually feels like, I think I might have to do this because if I don't,
#
I may have like left something on the table that I really regret not having done.
#
You know, and that's when I decide because it's a massive undertaking to try to write anything
#
that long. And that's when I decided I needed to do it. Yeah, and I'm glad you did because I hadn't
#
heard of Girard until I read Wanting. So, you know, in that sense, it's a service to whoever's read
#
the book. I think to most people who've read the book wouldn't have heard of Girard either.
#
And I was affected by it because I think the fundamental questions that it forced me to ask
#
myself are questions that everyone should ask themselves, you know, that what do you want and
#
why do you want what you want? You know, those fundamental things because as you point out,
#
as Girard points out that, you know, when we speak about wanting the things we want, we don't do it
#
out of instinct. You know, we take models, we imitate the wanting of others, as I say. And
#
to me, it's a deeply consequential question because it's, you know, so many of the tracks
#
that we fall into in our lives, we just fall into almost by default, by inertia. We don't even think
#
about it. We don't even think about why we want what we want. So a lot of young people in India
#
will just resume that, okay, you know, this is the kind of education I do at this point. I get
#
married, then I have kids and your whole life just proceeds along that. And you don't really
#
question any of that. The thing is, the complicated part is that, you know, even when you start
#
thinking along those lines, sometimes it becomes incredibly difficult to disentangle the thin and
#
thick desires as it were. You know, I've asked a question about thin and thick desires to a number
#
of my guests on the show. And one of them, Pratap Bhanu Mehta said that, look, a lot of what you
#
think of as thin desires are actually arising from the thick desire for, say, validation,
#
right? For the entrepreneur you mentioned who wants an article written about him. And wanting
#
an article written about him is a thin desire. But wanting the validation of the people around you
#
could be classified as a thick desire. Similarly, when you, similarly, when anybody wants to write
#
anything, you know, if I want to write a book, I could want to write it because a, the thin desire
#
of, you know, having my published book out there and going to my book launch and appearing as a
#
guest on podcasts and so on and so forth, or the thick desire of just loving the act of writing.
#
So does that disentanglement give you a problem? Like when you look at your own desires,
#
is it sometimes hard to classify and categorize because so much of what we do is a mystery to
#
even us? Well, desire is a mystery. Like that's, you know, right? It is fundamentally a mystery.
#
And what I have tried to do is introduce people to the mystery. I just wrote a newsletter on
#
mystagogy, right? And the role of the mystagog, right, is to, is one who introduces other people
#
to a mystery. And sometimes, you know, I think that's the most important job of a mentor or an
#
author is just the introduction, you know, leading one to the threshold of something that they can
#
then go explore, right? Which is their own desires or the mystery and nature of desire.
#
So I do fully think it's a big mistake to have too clean of a separation between thick and thin
#
desires. They are, you know, there's no kind of metaphysical purity in this world, I guess,
#
is one view that I have. So I think that they're always kind of entangled. And I really believe
#
that, right? I mean, if there's, I mean, in my kind of theological vision, there's only one being
#
that has pure desire, which would be God. And, you know, in that case, you wouldn't say that God
#
desires anything at all, right? So he's perfectly happy in himself or something. So, you know,
#
desire is kind of a very human mystery. It is never completely pure. It's never thick or thin.
#
But I think that it's very helpful to at least have that framework of thick and thin, because
#
all that what it's really doing, what that framework is really doing is just helping us
#
see qualitative differences in desires, right? This is a main point is that there are qualitative
#
differences in desires, and they're not all the same. And that, you know, some are fleeting and
#
mimetic and unimportant or selfish and arise from the wrong motivations. And others do sort of speak
#
to some depths or some real need or are driven mostly by charity. And these things can become
#
entangled along the way. I mean, one of the fundamental points that Gerard makes is that
#
even some of the best, most pure, good desires, like, let's say, like, just a real desire to kind
#
of, you fall in love, right? And, you know, this is like really motivating a desire to pursue another
#
person. Even these desires, which, let's just call it, let's just assume for the sake of argument,
#
that there's some thick desire there for, you know, to start a family, right? To, you know,
#
to create a family, to, you know, to give and receive love within that family and all of those
#
things. And even these thick desires can, Gerard would say, can become hijacked by the thin desires.
#
And all of a sudden, the little things become, you know, they take over. I mean, it's very common,
#
actually, for people that are in romantic relationships to become rivals to each other.
#
It's incredibly common, right? And like all these thin desires, right? To like see, you know,
#
who can, who has the best career path and who's making the most progress and all these things can
#
creep in and choke that initial desire. So his very point is that the mimesis often, if we're not
#
careful, often ends up hijacking even the thickest desires and vice versa, right? There can be some,
#
we have to be careful in labeling anything too early, especially vice versa. I mean,
#
there can be things that can start out at what maybe seems like something that seems like a thin
#
desire, which can be a pathway to something that is a thin desire. I mean, sorry, a thick desire.
#
So an example for that could be writing. You know, you know, I want to write, I just want to
#
get something published. That's all I care about. Never been published. I want to get something
#
published in an online journal somewhere. And that's it. That's my motivation. That could lead,
#
that could be, that could lead to somebody who actually ends up becoming a writer who is more
#
intrinsically motivated to write, produce good things and ends up. So it could be that thin desire
#
is the start down a path, right? And the idea here is that there's an evolution of these things.
#
And most of us are not very good at discerning whether desires are thick and thin in the first
#
place. We have to be careful about that. So there is, I think you're bringing up a really important
#
point. And it's one of the big questions that I'm asking is there's this process of discernment
#
that is a skill that can be learned where we begin to discern and make sense of our desires.
#
And since we get to be, we can look at them with better eyes and we get, we have some pattern
#
recognition and we, we can, we can, I believe, learn to understand them at a deeper level.
#
Whereas kids, we just typically accept them at face value. You know, I want something that's
#
worth pursuing. And as we grow into adults, we can examine them a little bit more closely.
#
And that's really what, that's really all that I'm trying to do. And there are roughly things
#
that I think we can, you know, I like to tell the story about there's things that I have in my life
#
that are thin desires that I have no intention of cutting out, that perhaps are somewhat thin
#
desires, but they're attached to thick desires in some way, you know, and a stereotypical example
#
would be like, I like to, I like to go to a certain place and watch football games with my friends.
#
And partly I like to go there because I like the quality of the TVs and the beers that they have
#
on tap and all these things that are maybe thin desires. But in fact, there's a thick desire
#
that's attached to that. And that's actually, this is where we can all kind of agree to get together.
#
We have a lot of fun there. We have great conversations and the two things kind of go
#
hand in hand. Yeah. And it's interesting that you mentioned kind of love because more and more,
#
I think, you know, it's, it's interesting that we place love on a pedestal and we look at lust in,
#
especially in more conservative countries in an almost contemptuous way. You're not supposed to
#
talk about it, but I actually think that I respect lust a lot because it is always honest. It is
#
always what it is, perhaps because it's not even a desire, but an instinct in some ways,
#
whereas love is complicated. Love is often a cover for other things. Maybe it's an evolutionary
#
adaptation to make other thick desires like starting a family or lust itself, you know,
#
manifest. So I think love is in this extremely gray area, but lust is always respectable because it
#
is what it is. It's straightforward. There you go. So, and that discernment bit kind of worries me
#
because, you know, after a point, I think it might just break down because the human capacity for
#
self delusion is also an evolved mechanism. You know, we do things and we're not aware of why we
#
do them, but we rationalize and we build stories around them and so on and so forth. And I think
#
that complicates the issue of, you know, discernment of what is thin and what is thick. But having said
#
that, that's not even a quibble because on the whole, the frame is incredibly useful just for,
#
you know, making sort of self examination happen. How did it, you know, how did it change your life
#
in terms of are there thin desires that you let go and are there deeper realizations you came to
#
about what your thick desires might be? Like how would you, you know, how would you describe
#
your thick desires now? And are any of them new to you or did you always know all along?
#
Yeah, I mean, it's a very personal question. I think there's, you know, probably a lot of
#
the most important ones are not things that I would probably even share. And there's something
#
that's really intimate about this. And, you know, that's where I think every person needs
#
to kind of like think seriously because there's different layers of the iceberg and some of that
#
iceberg is underwater, right? And some of it's incredibly personal. I mean, some of them relate
#
to cultivating relationships in my family, for instance, right? Certainly a thick desire,
#
right? Related to parenthood and being a husband, which kind of take precedence over some of, let's
#
call it like my art, right? Also these, you know, these sort of these things are not,
#
it's always, you have to be always a little careful that we don't always view everything
#
in life as being in competition with everything else. This whole idea of the work-life balance
#
and everything like that. It's sort of something, I sort of feel myself moving to a place where
#
that's disintegrating a little bit. Where I, you know, stop to like, I'm stopping separating my
#
days into like when I'm working and when I'm not working. There is definitely a, I think, a very
#
easy way to begin the process of discernment, which you rightfully say is tricky in that we
#
are full of self-delusion. And like how much are we just trying to like fit a narrative on the
#
things that we've already decided to do. But I do think that very few people that I know actually
#
do any kind of examination of conscience and questioning of motives. And just the mere process
#
of asking these questions at the end of a day, noting the different desires that bubbled up to
#
the surface and which ones remain and which ones go away is in itself a really, really powerful
#
exercise to do. Because I can't remember like what I had for dinner like three days ago,
#
let alone what I wanted throughout the course of that day. I mean, I really can't. Our memories
#
are pretty fleeting. But the process of keeping these things in conscious awareness gives us some
#
continuity of kind of where we're at in life and what it is that might be sort of secretly motivating
#
us to do certain things. For instance, for a while, I had this desire that I wanted to
#
move back to Italy or live anywhere other than the US. And it was something that I wasn't even
#
aware of. I mean, I didn't actually even know that that's something that I wanted to do.
#
But it was animating a lot of my decision-making around relationships that I might want to be in,
#
or it's causing me like that to make any commitments, things like that.
#
And this is a very concrete example. And when I realized that I was not wanting to commit to
#
anything here or in certain cities or places, because I sort of secretly had this desire to
#
get away and to move back to Italy and to be there, I realized like, well, why do I want to
#
move back to Italy? What is that all about? And do I want to do it now? And I started to question
#
those motives a little bit. And I realized, well, first of all, I have a lot of nostalgia about
#
Italy. And that's nice to be able to think about it, but it doesn't necessarily mean that I need
#
to move back right now. And I've got a lot of responsibilities. Life has kind of come at me,
#
and I have family responsibilities. And these things are sort of like really important to me
#
right now. And maybe I need to kind of be where my feet are. Maybe that's really important for me to
#
be here. And I discerned just by asking some questions about my motivations for moving back
#
that that was a thinner desire relative to the relationships and the people that were
#
coming into my life. It's a very kind of practical example. And it allowed me to sort of plant my
#
feet in the ground and sort of be present right there and opened up all kinds of opportunities
#
that I didn't even know that I was secretly closing the door to because I didn't think that
#
I was going to be around too much longer. So I think that these kinds of things happen all the
#
time where we're not aware of these unconscious things that are motivating our behavior and our
#
decision-making process. And sometimes externalizing these things is really important rather than just
#
assuming that we know. Because we are pretty self-delusional creatures, but we're especially
#
self-delusional when we keep everything inside and when we don't communicate anything to other
#
people. We don't write it down. That's why I do think that communicating, journaling, all these
#
things are important because at least then we force ourselves to look at what it is that we think,
#
what it is that we desire, and to be able to not take it for granted, to be able to ask some
#
the right questions, the deeper questions, and to kind of refine our thinking on these things that
#
could potentially be extremely consequential decisions in our lives. And before we do that,
#
we need to actually take some time to sit with it and make sure that we understand why it is that
#
we're making decisions that we are. You've written a lot about external mediators and
#
internal mediators, or the terms you use, celebristan and freshmanistan. And I'd like
#
you to elaborate a bit on these terms and also talk about how modern times have shifted the
#
balance between them and therefore in some ways altered the mechanism of mimetic desire slightly,
#
in the sense that modern technology, I think, expands freshmanistan a bit. It's always in your
#
face, it's always so on and so forth. So tell me a little bit more about these because I found it
#
really useful as a way to think about why I want the things I want. Yeah, this requires a very,
#
very short overview just to define a couple of terms, right, what I mean by freshmanistan
#
and celebristan. So René Girard said that we are affected by people who model desires to us,
#
which she also calls mediators of desire. In other words, a mediator is someone who kind of
#
stands between us and some object and affects or influences how we see that object and how we desire
#
it. And there are two major kinds of models in our worlds. The first kind, which used to be the most
#
common kind of model, and I say used to be because this is a really important distinction,
#
are external models of desire. So these are people that stand outside of our world in some way,
#
who mediate desires to us from some different place. They could be fictional,
#
like fictional characters can actually be models of desire for us, or historical figures,
#
people that, you know, admirable people in a nation's history, right, or in a family.
#
I have, you know, I have great, great grandparents that are in some ways considered models of desire,
#
right, that people like immigrants that came to this country a long time ago, and they're external
#
mediators of desire because I can't come into contact with them, right. Or celebrities would
#
be another example of this, right, people who just kind of live in a different world that I'll
#
likely never meet, right. So, you know, I had these in sports growing up. I have authors that
#
are kind of this kind of model for me. Cormac McCarthy, you know, who just passed away,
#
fantastic writer. He'll always be an external model of desire for me as a writer and communicator.
#
An important point with these external models is that, you know, we can never,
#
we can never become their rival, right. There's just no possibility of kind of a
#
one-to-one interaction. Like maybe I can imitate them, but they're not imitating me back,
#
right. They might not even know that I exist, right. There's a lack of awareness. So,
#
it's not two-way. It's not two-way imitation. I nickname this world of external mediators
#
the world of celebristan. I just think it's easy shorthand to remember that there's some kind of
#
a gap that separates us from celebrities, you know. And that's used to be the majority of
#
people's models of desire. The other kind of model is the model that's inside of our world.
#
So, these are people that we may know. They might be in our own family. They might be our friends.
#
They might be in our school. They might be in our social network. They're somehow in our world,
#
right. We come into contact with them. It's equally likely that they can imitate us as we
#
imitate them. We're just in a different kind of relationship. They're kind of existentially
#
in the same plane as we are. You know, they're living there. We can become aware of each other.
#
And these are called internal models of desire. And I nicknamed this world fresh manistan
#
because the best example I could think of would be being a freshman in high school or college,
#
right. Or anywhere you're in the first year of something and you have a lot in common
#
and everybody can kind of look to everybody else. Everybody kind of affects everybody else
#
in some way. The metaphor that I like to use for fresh manistan is people standing on the same
#
trampoline. And if you've ever stood on a trampoline, like one person moves and force
#
is exerted and it has to affect the other person, right. It's the definition of fresh manistan.
#
Celebristan is different. You're not on the same trampoline. So, movement of one doesn't affect
#
the movement of the other. So, this fresh manistan is the world that I think we spend most of our
#
time in today. And social media is one of the main reasons why. Social media has kind of
#
existentially put us all into the same head of a pin in some sense, right. People in different
#
parts of the world, we're all kind of playing in the same space. We have profiles that look the same.
#
It's shortened the distance between people. And we can interact in ways that we couldn't
#
interact with before. We just have more awareness of how many models there are out there, right.
#
You can have a teenager now who may have went to a small little school that had 200 students in it.
#
Their universe of models of desire would mostly be limited to those 200 students and maybe the
#
people they saw on TV. With social media now, they have literally hundreds of millions of
#
potential models that they can choose from or that are kind of invading their consciousness
#
and their minds and their imaginations every single day, right. A young girl can see another
#
girl on Instagram who lives on the other side of the world who's modeling a desire for a certain
#
lifestyle or to have a certain sort of outfit or whatever or to be in a certain relationship.
#
And we're deeply affected by those. So, my hypothesis is that social media has turned
#
the whole world into one giant fresh manistan. It happens on Twitter all the time where it would
#
have been completely inconceivable 20 years ago for some world leader to actually engage in a debate
#
with somebody that tweets at them or something like that. And now these kind of tiny interactions
#
happen all of the time and we all seem to be far more interconnected and kind of distracted by
#
what everybody else is doing. And I think it was the fundamental nature of relationships has
#
changed and it's affecting us from the perspective of mimesis and made it harder to know like who are
#
the models affecting me and who's not a model affecting me. It's very difficult to tell when
#
we're just on social media and we're not even thinking critically about these things. If you
#
immerse yourself in social media, chances are that you've adopted certain, or there's certain
#
people that you pay attention to. Maybe not just intellectually, but may in some sense be affecting
#
what we want at some deeper level. And that's probably happening to most people without them
#
even knowing that it's happening. So, with all the, a lot of talk is around the way that these
#
platforms have addictive properties on a neurological level. They operate kind of like
#
slot machines. They release dopamine when we get new notifications. All that stuff is true.
#
But the point that I'm trying to make is that I think this is also affecting us
#
on the level of desires and can even lead to the formation of thick desires. Some people can
#
be turned into overnight activists largely as a result of social media for things that maybe
#
the thought had never crossed their mind. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. I'm just saying we're
#
just now able to be affected in profound ways by the desires of other people given
#
the framework of social media that we're all living in. One of my friends, Suresh Rai, who's
#
been a guest on my show as well, told me something. We had an argument about four or five years ago
#
and I disagreed with him then, but I think he may have a point now. And his point was that people
#
living in, say, the year 180, 2000 years ago or whatever, were possibly much happier than people
#
living today. And I instantly mocked that because I was like, what are you talking about? We have
#
air conditioning, we have cars, we have modern life, we have long lives. How could they possibly
#
be happier? But at least in one sense, whatever mimetic desires you had 2000 years ago were at
#
least within reach or easily achievable. While today, because of social media, Instagram,
#
et cetera, et cetera, we end up comparing our real lives with other people's projected lives
#
and the projected lives of just everybody else. And there is no way we can compete.
#
You know, those mimetic desires are mostly bound to be unfulfilled desires. And as people have
#
pointed out, that's perhaps even led to a spate of mental health issues, especially among teenage
#
girls over the last 10 years since Facebook and Twitter and Instagram really took off.
#
So what is your sense of that? Because these social media platforms, therefore, are machineries of
#
desire in one sense, machineries of desire projection. And that makes it incredibly hard.
#
And not everyone would be self-aware enough to think about thick and thin desires and solve it
#
out, but in a sense that, you know, underscores the urgency of more of us, you know, thinking
#
about this stuff and just the difficulty of navigating modern life for someone who's young
#
today. Yeah. I mean, the U.S. Surgeon General, this came out and declared teenage mental health
#
a national crisis. And I think it's largely due to social media. One way to think about what's
#
happening is that we can become totally drained when we're exposed to all of these unfulfilled
#
desires. I mean, quite literally millions of them, right? Because it actually does tug at our desires
#
in some way. And that just keeps happening, I don't know, a thousand times a day. Like,
#
we'd sort of desire this thing, and then we realize it's out of reach. Or, you know,
#
we don't have the money to spend to buy this thing or, you know, that lifestyle. We're just
#
exposed to so many of them. It's almost like, if you think of it like a battery, right? I mean,
#
like each one of these little tugs is like a zap on the energy of the battery. And after 500 of
#
these on a daily basis, right, the battery's just dead. There's just nothing left in the battery.
#
And it's exhausting. I mean, it leads to depression. It's almost, I mean, one of the ways
#
you can define depression, it's a very complex phenomenon. But most people that are depressed
#
indicate a lack of desire to do anything, right? They just sort of like, often like don't want to
#
get into bed. Nothing excites them. They can't want for anything, right? It feels good to want
#
something, right? I mean, it feels really good to desire, right? And part of that could be almost
#
be explained by like an overstimulation of desire to the point where it dies. And we can understand
#
this, but look at like, you can look at like caffeine or something like that, right? I mean,
#
like ingesting nonstop caffeine can learn to serious dysfunction of the adrenal glands and
#
ends up, you know, not stimulating you at all because you just had too much of it.
#
I think we can understand desire a bit like this, right? Just like exposed to a million thin desires
#
on a daily basis. We have not developed as a species probably, the sort of like, you know,
#
inner machinery to be able to even deal with this, right? Like our minds, we just can't deal with it.
#
We don't have any self-restraint. You can't really expect a 13, 14-year-old to be able to,
#
you know, to have to go through that discernment, to be able to know, you know,
#
this is really affecting me negatively. It's overwhelming and it's way too much.
#
And there's not really an easy solution for that. I mean, you believe me, I'm thinking about it as
#
I begin to have children. And I do think on the, you know, the example of somebody that lived in
#
the second century or something like that. I don't know. I'm always deeply skeptical of saying,
#
like, things were better in the past than they are today. My instinct is to say, well,
#
it's probably not true. But what I will say is, you know, they didn't, they didn't know,
#
they had no concept of like, you know, what they didn't have, right? I mean,
#
they weren't miserable because they didn't have air conditioning. Nobody had air conditioning,
#
right? They weren't miserable because they didn't have like a three Michelin star restaurant,
#
you know, to eat at or something like that. I mean, like food, plenty of good food to eat,
#
right? And like, there's, I think like, you know, happiness is often very relative,
#
very relative, you know, and that's one of the things that this new paradigm that we're in,
#
where, you know, mimesis is been hypercharged due to things like social media, we're being
#
exposed to more than we can simply handle. And it's like, you know, another, another analogy
#
would be something like, you know, radiation or something like that. I mean, you know, it can only,
#
you know, you just can't be exposed to it constantly. It's just going to have really bad
#
effects. And I think the number one symptom is a loss of desire. So ironically, not more desire,
#
but actually a loss of desire, which manifests itself as like ennui or depression, or just a
#
feeling like things are hopeless, because it's like, well, nothing that I can do, we were sort
#
of designed to fulfill our desires, you know, like, we're kind of like wired for the fulfillment of
#
desire. And the message that this exposure sends to people is that there is no such thing as the
#
fulfillment of desire. Because how could you possibly fulfill a billion?
#
I also found it fascinating to read in your book about mimetic rivalries,
#
which, you know, influence behavior. And you pointed out that, you know, one of them might
#
even have been responsible for your going to Hong Kong. And, and mimetic double binds,
#
which you referred to earlier, where, you know, even a couple can get trapped in a mimetic
#
competition without even realizing it while thinking all the while that they love each other,
#
they're good for each other, but they could be, you know, trapped in this vicious game. Tell me
#
a little bit more about those things, because I think most people, you know, most people would
#
have seen it happen to themselves at some point in time, but they won't even be aware of it.
#
So the, the mimetic, the double bind is this is kind of a technical term for where there's
#
double mediation, where you have two people that are internal mediators of desire to one another,
#
right? They're, they're inside of each other's worlds. This is very typical in a workplace,
#
right? Where you have, you know, some people can't admit this, but there's often like one
#
other person in the workplace who they're looking at as some barometer of success, or they're just
#
paying attention to that person. And they might not know that that person is also paying attention
#
to them too, if they're, if they have enough in common, right? Because the people, oddly enough,
#
the people that we pay the most attention to, and the people that we're most susceptible to
#
becoming obsessed with at some level in an unhealthy, disordered way, are the people that
#
we have most in common with, right? That easy way to think about this would be, you ask people who
#
they're more envious of, like some billionaire Jeff Bezos or something like that, or the person
#
who works in their office who makes 10% more than they do and drives a slightly nicer car.
#
The answer for pretty much everybody is going to be the second person, right? Because it's just much
#
easier to compare yourself to that person than it is to Jeff Bezos. He's Celebristan, the other
#
person's Freshmanistan. So this goes back to what we were talking about before. So the, and only the
#
second situation can lead to this thing called the double bind, where both people are aware of each
#
other. And we like to be imitated, but not too much. And we're threatened by imitation. So isn't
#
that funny? Like we're sort of like flattered by a little bit of imitation, but we're threatened
#
by too much. And Gerard says that that's what leads to rivalry. When there, he basically calls
#
it a crisis of difference. If we don't feel differentiated enough from another person,
#
it threatens us. It threatens our sense of self. So one way to understand this would be we do need
#
to, we don't like it when somebody is too similar to us, right? When somebody sort of encroaches on
#
our sense of self. And Gerard said, this is why almost every culture in the world has a myth
#
that involves twins fighting. He says the twins symbolize sameness. And the sameness is created
#
through mimesis and is exacerbated by mimesis. And we always sort of fight against it.
#
So it very often happens that, you know, two people that are very close to each other,
#
even spouses, partners, can enter into this kind of mimetic double bind relationship because they
#
do have so much in common. You know, Quinta's classic example, right, would be like a husband
#
and wife where, you know, they both have careers and wife comes home one day and so she got this
#
big raise and immediately the husband, without even knowing it, is somehow insecure and flips
#
into kind of the mode where he immediately needs to talk about, you know, the next raise that he's
#
going to get and always needs to be one step ahead. And I know it sounds crazy that, you know, people
#
that are in a loving relationship could actually be fierce competitors to one another because they
#
have so much in common, right? And it happens with friends. And a lot of this stuff is unspoken
#
because it's highly uncomfortable to speak about. But it's important to at least acknowledge that,
#
you know, we tend to be susceptible to taking people that have a lot in common with us
#
and as rivals, right? And, you know, Gerard would say that rivalry is one of the most pervasive
#
things in the world that nobody ever likes to talk about, right? The only time we talk about
#
rivalry is often in professional sports or in politics, but almost never in personal lives,
#
right? Almost never in a workplace, for instance, do people like to talk too much about rivalry
#
because it's uncomfortable? And there's a lot of ways that people deal with this uncomfortability.
#
A classic way would be you work in an industry and you have some rivals in that industry
#
and the pressure of the competition is too much, then you just, you can't just go to another
#
company in the industry. You just have to leave the industry entirely, right? And by leaving the
#
industry entirely, in some sense, you're no longer competing for the same things. So it basically
#
takes the people that used to be rivals and puts them in a, they're not in celebrity stand,
#
but they're now external models of desire because you no longer care about the things
#
that they cared about. So it's kind of a way of separation and can be actually really healthy
#
to do that, right? When things become like obsessive, it can be like a good step to take,
#
but being aware that people sort of engage in these acts of differentiation,
#
often for mimetic reasons, is one of the points that I try to highlight in wanting.
#
Yeah, and you're right that rivalries can be very difficult to talk about because
#
at the end of the day, when you talk about a rivalry that you feel for with someone,
#
you're confessing your own inadequacy in a way and which person kind of likes to do that.
#
I also found another example of this kind of rivalry, which you spoke about fascinating,
#
which is like the handshake that you go and you shake someone's hand and they don't seem
#
enthusiastic perhaps because at that moment they've spotted someone over your shoulder.
#
So you get a cold handshake and then you respond by mimicking that and you respond with a defensive
#
posture and it can lead to a vicious circle where both people think, hey, the other guy doesn't
#
like me, what the fuck? Yeah, and that actually creates a new reality. That's what's fascinating
#
about that situation. So you could totally misread and misapprehend what was happening
#
and project all kinds of things onto that person. This goes back to that méconnaissance, that
#
phrase, misknowing. You think you know that this person just shunned you or just kind of
#
gave you the cold shoulder, but in fact, they weren't. They just were distracted because they
#
had got a text on their phone and they're preoccupied because a family member's in the
#
hospital. They didn't mean to slight you in any way, but once we think that, this happens
#
with email all the time, you get an email and it seems a little bit harsh or passive aggressive
#
and you're like, what the fuck? Then you send an email back and it actually creates the very
#
reality that did not exist, but you are bringing into being by the very way that you're responding
#
to it. So it's the same thing with a handshake and then all of a sudden what was just in your
#
imagination becomes real because you respond to that person by sliding them back in some way.
#
Then they all of a sudden, now they notice. Before it was a total accident, total accident,
#
and now you respond in a way and they notice and they're like, what the fuck? Then they respond
#
back and if everything goes unsaid, this just leads to kind of an escalation tit for tat
#
that actually brings into reality the very rivalry that at first you were projecting,
#
but now through your actions, you've made something serious.
#
Fascinating. And a positive example of this is probably how two people could accidentally
#
fall in love where one person thinks that the other one is interested in him and actually
#
that's not the case, but then they fall in love and they show their emotions and the other one
#
falls in love back because, hey, who doesn't like attention? And that could lead to a positive
#
feedback loop, though you also have an excellent newsletter post on how it sometimes pays off if
#
you play hard to get, though your advice at the end is don't play hard to get, play easy to get.
#
Yeah. Well, I think this happens all the time in romance. Romance is a hotbed field of mimesis
#
and mimetic desire and rivalry. It's why so many good stories and films involve some form
#
of romance. It's like a screenwriting advice or story writing advice 101, like have a romantic
#
relationship because we can all relate to this stuff. Shakespeare is a master at this. Like
#
Two Gentlemen of Verona could go on and on. There is very often two suitors that are reinforcing
#
one another's desire for the same woman or something like that. But yeah, we create these
#
things all of the time and hard to get is an interesting phenomenon. I would say do play
#
hard to get if you want to increase the right person's desire for you. It's an incredibly
#
powerful tactic. It's a nice short-term temporary measure, but it's ultimately a bit of a facade
#
that has the potential to bring into being this reality that didn't exist that you're going to
#
have to eventually work out later. I think the reason that playing hard to get works is because
#
desire is in some way correlated with obstacles. This is a fascinating part of human nature
#
that our desire for something tends to be correlated with how difficult it is to get.
#
We don't feel quite the same sense of satisfaction when an achievement is easy,
#
when it comes to us as a gift. We like to have known that we've worked hard and we value the
#
thing based on the difficulty and on the obstacle. This is part of the whole theory behind playing
#
hard to get. Now, that's not always true. Some of the best things in my life fell into my lap.
#
This is very Kantian ethic where the value is correlated to the difficulty. It's not always
#
true, but something to be aware of. There are people who literally place obstacles in their
#
own way because of this. People who will make things harder than they have to be just because
#
it gives them a sense of accomplishment when they can achieve it. Some people that are
#
self-destructive do this. They'll go knowing that they need to run five miles or compete in
#
a half marathon. The next day, they'll go out and get wasted the night before or something like
#
that. This happens in subtle ways all the time. One of your essays ends with you saying something
#
to the effect of being hard to get is easy, but being easy to get is hard. I imagine it would be
#
hard because if you play easy to get in any particular context, you make yourself vulnerable
#
and open to being hurt and all of that and maybe open to not being valued enough because you were
#
too easy. It's just a complicated mess. Maybe thinking about these things too hard is unhealthy
#
too. We tend to overthink these things and can lead to a bit of schizophrenia in the sense of
#
sometimes we can act, we can enter into relationships with a certain level of
#
naturalness. If everybody's just playing the medic games all the time, it's a pretty
#
miserable way to live. I think my approach is always to be straightforward and it feels
#
dreadfully calculating to think about how should I come across and should I be hard to get or
#
easy to get or so on and so forth. Expand a bit on how ideologies, especially fueled by social media,
#
are taking us to the extremes where we have an extremely polarized discourse. Most of the time
#
we are not talking to each other, we are talking past each other because typically you go online,
#
you find your ideological tribe of choice, whichever it is, and then I guess mimesis kicks in
#
and you want to raise your status more and more. There are perhaps mimetic rivalries happening
#
there as well and all of it makes a discourse much harsher. Everybody's outdoing themselves
#
and shitting on the other side, never engaging with arguments, attacking people on their own
#
side for failing purity tests and eventually also the other phenomenon that Ashira talks about and
#
you talk about a lot in wanting, which is scapegoating, leading to cancel culture,
#
online mobs coming down on you. Just the enormous ugliness of all of this and your frame helps us
#
understand why all of this is happening and social media is perhaps turbocharging it.
#
At the same time, as a public intellectual, you have no option but to be on social media and,
#
in a sense, be exposed to all of this and see it play out. What are your thoughts on that?
#
What I see is concerning because of the incentives and the incentive structure and,
#
in a way, social media is set up to reward certain kinds of highly mimetic behavior.
#
I think some of the best actors, the best players at that game that are able to drive massive amount
#
of engagement, they know exactly what they're doing. I mean, some of them have read my book.
#
Some of them are intimately familiar with René Girard and, in some sense, they've learned to hack
#
the mimetic algorithm in a sense. There are some people that I don't think are very serious thinkers,
#
but what they are highly skilled at is knowing they're opportunistic and that they know how to
#
pick the right battles at the right time and then use the most extreme rhetoric and language
#
to get the most engagement in the shortest amount of time possible. Quite frankly,
#
they're rewarded for it. Now, by making a good scapegoat, they're rewarded for it.
#
Trump's whole presidency was making scapegoats. It's part of why
#
one of the first things that he would do is find a good nickname for people, run that stuck. It
#
makes it memeable. It's able to draw a bunch of people to rally around that.
#
This is generally a general principle. Taking the other side's position, reducing it to some
#
kind of absurd strawman thing, giving it a label, and then telling everybody that it's threatening
#
their existence. This is a model that I think is pathetic and I think it's ripping the fabric of
#
our culture apart and it's being rewarded. I'm out there just walking around. I'm trying my best
#
with a lamp saying, let's really pay attention to what's happening. There seems to be safety
#
and the security of the tribe because people are doing this thing. I've just seen it in the last
#
eight years in ways that I've never seen it before where people are forcing other people to pick
#
a side in very powerful ways. You're either for us or against us and if you're not for us,
#
then you're a traitor and you called all of the worst things in the book. Nobody likes that.
#
It's much safer to say nothing or just to get in line. I'm just seeing this being used as a tactic
#
and it's basically just mimesis amplified and it's turned a lot of social media into a scapegoating
#
machine. I don't know if there's a technical solution to that problem. In other words,
#
I don't think there's something that social media can do to prevent that from happening
#
because it's really happening just because of some very fundamentally human instinctual things.
#
It's not safe to be alone. There's safety in crowds. There's anonymity in crowds,
#
all of those things. We're seeing these things appealing to very base instincts right now
#
and my hope is that we can, and it's difficult not to get sucked into it,
#
very difficult. My hope is that at least the mimetic mechanisms behind it start to be recognized
#
for what they are and that we see a pattern and a structure. I actually have hope that in some
#
levels it's happening. I feel like some of the worst parts of cancel culture, I've heard good
#
arguments for why cancel culture is beneficial to punish bad behavior. I know all of those
#
arguments, but at its worst, it's bad. I've seen people's reputations and lives get completely
#
ruined that can't get jobs for what are minor subjective infractions. At its worst, cancel
#
culture, I think the veil has been lifted a little bit on that. My sense is that some people are
#
starting to see, well, there's a pattern to this. There's a pattern and it doesn't feel quite as
#
powerful as it felt like even four or five years ago. It feels like people are starting to realize
#
what it is. I'd like to think that that's what's happening. That's what it feels like to me,
#
at least. I think as we begin to extend some of this awareness to other domains,
#
I'd like to be able to have conversations about first principles. We never have conversations
#
about first principles in politics, really, but I'd like people to get called out for some of this
#
stuff. At least if they're called out, they have to defend it and we can't all just pretend that
#
this is normal behavior. I actually agree about the optimism. I do think that the peak moment
#
that moral panic is passing. Let's hope that's true. I'll also pick on your phrase where you
#
spoke about appealing to baser instincts. I do think that there are design choices that have
#
exacerbated this, which were made to increase engagement, but ended up in this way. For example,
#
very famously the Facebook like button or the Twitter retweet, which increase the desire for
#
validation and therefore perhaps amplified mimesis. There are, I think, also ways of
#
amping that down a bit. For example, just as a social media platform, Reddit has a very different
#
kind of user interface and design and is much less toxic. You're not going to get attacked or
#
canceled or mobbed most of the time if you happen to say something politically incorrect there.
#
So maybe there's hope there. My penultimate question for you, I have tons to talk about,
#
but we've already spoken for more than four hours, so I'll just urge all my listeners to
#
read your book if they haven't already. But my penultimate question for you is
#
that how do you view your task as a public intellectual in the sense that you have the book,
#
you have the newsletter, you come on podcasts, you have a presence on Twitter,
#
but that brings with it a variety of problems. For example, in one of your newsletters, you
#
spoke about how you went to Tarquinia once and there you were sitting reading a book of Habermas
#
and a gentleman named David came to you and at that point you wrote, quote,
#
It was a moment I most dread when someone in a public place starts offering unsolicited opinions
#
about things I'm fully immersed in, but it's the price I pay for reading anything serious
#
in a public space. And that's basically Twitter, right? So what are the obstacles you face
#
in your task as a public intellectual? And I understand and respect the fact that
#
you consider it your duty to get these ideas out there, to talk about these ideas.
#
You're playing a long game, but what is that whole experience like?
#
Man, I mean, that was one of my very first newsletters. I mean, that must have been from
#
like 2019 or early 2020. That's a long time ago, but I remember that particular experience in
#
Tarquinia like it was yesterday. That is what all of Twitter does feel like. Yeah, I've gotten
#
pretty good at it. I never read book reviews and I don't read replies anymore for certain
#
questions. I think one thing is to never set oneself up as a model, right? I mean, I don't
#
ever want anybody to really sort of like see my behavior as a model or anything like that,
#
right? I'm just a dude who's trying to think through questions that have affected my life
#
profoundly. There's a certain level at which I'm thinking seriously right now about exactly what
#
my relationship to social media should be. I try to engage it differently. There are certain
#
assumptions about how you're supposed to use a certain platform. Like Twitter is for these
#
things, right? You write these intellectual threads and engage in this debate and it's
#
the public town square. I think a lot of that stuff is bullshit. I don't think it's a public
#
town square really. I've experimented with just using it in anti-mimetic ways. From various times
#
I've just been like, I'm just going to share my emotional state today and just see if that,
#
right? Things like that and just seeing what the effect of those things are because we're
#
going to have to use it in some kind of a different way for us to not continue down the path that we're
#
headed down. As I write another book right now or get started on it, I'm wondering whether I need
#
to disengage from it, right? I feel pulled in too many different directions. The question of
#
boundaries is going to be important. I think each of us has to ask, where can we actually...
#
What lends itself best to us sharing the things that are most beneficial to share with the world
#
or what parts of ourselves... What's going to allow us to be most authentically kind of ourselves and
#
to share those things with the world? For me, it's usually been longer form material, right? Like a
#
book or my essays tend to be on the longer side and it's kind of the opposite of Twitter.
#
There's this tremendous pressure actually. I had hired a consultant recently for an educational
#
program I'm designing. These are highly paid people and there's multiple people I've talked
#
to have said the same thing. They're like, listen, nobody reads long form anything anymore. You have
#
to do any kind of serious content that you put out there. It's got to be in 10 to 30 second clips.
#
You more than anybody understands, feels my pain on this because you are not doing that.
#
But they mean they're adamant. Like, listen, nobody reads books anymore. Nobody can listen
#
to a conversation that's over one hour. I call bullshit on all that. You're just conforming
#
yourself to what you think humans... First of all, I have more hope in humans. I think that
#
we're capable of... It's just like a lot of students that I have. They're capable of far
#
more than they think that they are that other adults maybe think that they are.
#
It just needs to be kind of like given. You trust them with a ton of responsibility
#
and they take it up. They take up the challenge. I feel like we're treating a lot of adults like
#
babies. Really? An adult can't handle more than a 30 second video or I can't write something that's
#
more than 500 words. I'm not going to do that because it'll make me miserable, first of all,
#
and it doesn't do justice to what I want to communicate right now. I think at a certain
#
level it comes down to understanding who you are and what you want to communicate,
#
being clear about it, resisting some of these sort of mimetic temptations when they come our way and
#
they do every single day, and occupying the place in the world that only you can. Based on your
#
experience on mine and every single person who's listening to this podcast has something to
#
contribute to a discussion and to the world that a lot of the sort of mimetic conformity and
#
pressures will pound it right out of you if you let it. I think knowing what you stand for and
#
knowing who you are and where you come from and what you, that voice, that word that you need to
#
speak, don't let them do that. You've got to be able to do it and it can feel vulnerable and it
#
involves taking a risk, but I want to live in a world where we're not forced to communicate
#
in certain forms. That's why I wrote the thing on the podcast. That's why I'm kind of very
#
skeptical and stepping back and saying we should re-examine everything from the form that Twitter
#
takes to the form that you know podcasts take, all these things that we take for granted.
#
Like are they somehow reducing our ability as humans to have the kinds of conversations
#
and to do the kinds of things that we need to do together in order to make any kind of progress?
#
Yeah and obviously I couldn't agree with you more about this misconception that people have,
#
which is just a lie but it's an understandable lie in the sense that people do not have
#
short attention spans and we all contain multitudes so there'll be times where I have
#
a short attention span and I'm scrolling up and down but there are times where I really
#
want to immerse myself and I think most people crave that depth because nobody gives it to them.
#
Everybody's a mile wide and an inch deep so anywhere they get depth from is great.
#
The other thing that I like to point out is that I'd rather have a hundred thousand people listen
#
to an episode of mine than 20 million people watch a YouTube video I put out because a YouTube video
#
may get an average of 15 or 20 seconds of engagement whereas here my average session
#
time is like 40 minutes and people will listen across multiple sessions and what is important
#
and marketers and advertisers should realize this is not the absolute number but the level of
#
engagement. The level of engagement is what matters. All of those millions of five second
#
views make no difference to the world but a handful of people just deeply engaging with
#
something like your book for example or your essays can you know make a big difference.
#
A new penultimate question because it just popped up because you mentioned that you're
#
working on a book. Something you want to talk about now or you want to just
#
not talk about it too much right away? I can't say too much but I will say that the theme
#
is deeply germane to a lot of what you and I have talked about here.
#
Probably wouldn't come as a surprise to anybody who is familiar with my work or who reads
#
anti-mimetic but I'm fascinated by the relationship between individuals and groups
#
and the way that people are in groups without losing themselves and being subsumed into the
#
group so maintaining their individuality their personhood because communities and groups are
#
important and powerful things right but how do we enter into healthy relationships with communities
#
without losing ourselves right and when do those relationships become disordered where people just
#
become completely swallowed up and lose themselves and then deeply bound up in that question is the
#
question of identity and change and you know how and why people change and is the change merely
#
is the change merely extrinsic and mimetic or is the change substantial and what do I mean by that
#
I mean you think of like the fashionability of ideas right you know if somebody reads you know
#
bronze age pervert and decides that all of a sudden they want to go start working out every day
#
that's not the kind of change that's interesting to me right that's kind of this kind of very like
#
mimetic reactionary change you're changing along with everybody else
#
who does that or you're sort of changing according to some kind of external principle
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I'm interested in you know how people that are parts of groups undergo changes that are in some
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sense not they don't map on a one-to-one with the group yet allow the group to cohere and have some
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sense of shared identity while also allowing individuals to develop right so all of these
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questions I'm not giving away too much by saying that but I would say that it's it gets at mimesis
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it gets at anti-mimetic a bit but it's more about the development of individuals and groups and I
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think that's critical right because we're all part of groups some groups we stay in some groups we
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leave how do we know the difference between you know healthy associations and unhealthy
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I think this goes down to explain everything from the rise of some like of nationalism in many places
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to very tribal think in the way that associations are forming on twitter you got biology's network
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state thing or like are we all just going to form these like little digital kind of groups that you
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know all these questions really fascinate me and I think there's first principles at the very heart
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of them so all I'll say is that the book is is going to be exploring all of those threads
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fascinating I can't wait to read it and my final question meanwhile for me and my listeners I'd
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like you to recommend books or music or movies that bring you joy that mean a lot to you and
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you'd just love to share it with everyone so books that I alternate between non-fiction and fiction
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and that works for me so I am I'm working my way right now through some
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I started rereading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy just last night because he passed away
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recently and I've always kind of got one one sort of like classic book that I'm working my way through
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right now I'm going back and reading Aesop's Fables so one of these days I'm just going to
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publish a list on it I'm going to publish a list in my newsletter of like all the all the things
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like my top like 100 reading lists and all the things that I'm reading right now but I'm totally
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crazy because I read like eight books at the same time like Mclare has no idea what I'm doing and
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or how I do it but I just get like I bounce around depending on the mood that I'm in so let me just
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turn around right now I have nobody can see this but I'm turning around to look at my library
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on my desk right now I'm reading a book called The Crisis of Political Imagination by Glenn Tinder
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book was written in the 60s talks a lot about how technology is destroying our imaginations
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our ability to actually like have new ideas and I it's fascinating to read any book that was written
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in the 60s about this question it seems more relevant than anything that I've read in the
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past three years right so sort of like reaching outside you know the the New York Times bestseller
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list is usually usually a good idea for me so I'll I'll have to share a list at some point
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and then we I am working my way let's see movies of inspiration and hope there's a
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tremendous film called The Hidden Life which I would recommend to anybody it gets at some of
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what we were talking about today about how some of the most important moments in life happen
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inside of us Rene Girard's biographer in fact Cynthia Haven said you know this guy like lived
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a fairly un-extraordinary life from the outside so it's like very hard to write a biography about
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somebody like that it's not like this riveting you know story of a life but all of these really
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interesting moments happen sort of like in his mind right and inside of him and in his heart
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The Hidden Life is a bit about that but it also led to you know very heroic action
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during World War II so but it also shows that a lot of the models you know and I'll just I'll
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finish with this a lot of the models are the most important models in my life and probably in the
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world are hidden in the sense that they're not part of the public consciousness you know we
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talk about like who are the big models influencing behavior I don't even know if we know that
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necessarily I mean we can name some of the the celebristan ones but I think that the most
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important ones are always going to be people maybe that are in our communities are in our
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own families that can have this profound effects and inspire hope and other people through these
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these small things so I gravitate towards those kinds of those kinds of films or movies
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Patterson is another film that I really love and the what was I going to say the these kinds of
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stories need to be shared they really need to be shared and I think the world needs more hope
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right so it's it's been uh it's what I dedicated my book to dedicated my book to my wife and then
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to hope and you know the the end of all of this discussion on desire is like what what is desire
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if not the hope of something to be fulfilled so you know a lot of the things that I'm hopefully
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it hopefully it shines through a little bit of my work but um is is to to drink from those things
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that give me some hope and optimism you know it's very easy to be pessimist right now it's super
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easy you can make a lot of money doing it you can get a lot of engagement doing it by just saying
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that the world's going to fall apart but people have been doing that for a very long time I mean
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ever since the start of recorded history right the world's always about to fall apart um so I
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you know I'm always on the lookout for positive models of desire things worthy of imitation and
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things that will kind of spur me on and give me hope for the journey that's a wonderful note to
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end on Luke thank you thank you so much for your time I really enjoyed this conversation
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you too Ahmed thanks so much for having me
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if you enjoyed listening to the show share it with everyone you feel might be interested
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enter the show notes enter rabbit holes at will and do go to your nearest bookstore online or
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offline and by wanting by Luke Burgess you can follow Luke on twitter at Luke Burgess one word
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you can follow me at amit varma a m i t b a r m a you can browse past episodes of the scene
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