#796 Why Memes Rule The World w/ Luke Burgis

Luke Burgis is the Author of "Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life" and writes the "Anti-Memetic" Newsletter. In this conversation, we dive deep into Memetics and how it control our lives in more ways than we may think. We discuss how memetic desires affect our investments through meme stocks, memes in politics and celebrity culture, and what you should do when you recognize that you're in a situation where you could be adversely affected through said memetic desires. ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp ======================= Circle is a global financial technology firm that enables businesses of all sizes to harness the power of stablecoins and public blockchains for payments, commerce and financial applications worldwide. Circle is also a principal developer of USD Coin (USDC), the fastest growing, fully reserved and regulated dollar stablecoin in the world. The free Circle Account and suite of platform API services bridge the gap between traditional payments and crypto for trading, DeFi, and NFT marketplaces. Create seamless, user-friendly, mainstream customer experiences with crypto-native infrastructure under the hood with Circle. Learn more at circle.com.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Luke Burgess is the author of Wanting: The Power of Memetic Desire in Everyday Life. I really enjoyed reading this book and Luke is fantastic to speak to. In this conversation, we talk about everything from memetics to financial markets, how that affects investor behavior, and what you should do when you recognize that you're in a situation where you could be adversely affected. I really enjoyed this conversation with Luke and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is BlockFi. BlockFi provides financial products for crypto investors. Those products

• 0:44Anthony Pompliano?

  include a high-yield interest account, a US dollar loan product against your crypto collateral, and a no-fee cryptocurrency trading product. BlockFi also just released a brand-new Bitcoin Rewards credit card. It's a normal credit card that when you swipe it, you get Bitcoin back, rather than cash back or airline miles. I'm an investor in the business and I'm a very happy user. The BlockFi Bitcoin Rewards credit card is absolutely amazing. To start earning today, go visit blockfi.com/pomp. Again, blockfi.com/pomp. I've got the credit card, I love it, I think you will too. Blockfi.com/pomp. Next up is Choice. It's time to stop paying capital gains taxes on your Bitcoin and Choice is here to help. Choice is rebuilding the way Bitcoiners approach retirement by making

• 1:26Anthony Pompliano?

  it possible to invest in Bitcoin and 19 other digital assets inside your IRA. Right now, every time you make a trade, you have to pay capital gains taxes that can be as high as 37%. Choice enables you to trade real Bitcoin, other cryptos, and stocks without having to pay a dime in capital gains. The best part? They just released an iOS app so you can open an account in less than 10 minutes and take control of your future from the palm of your hand. Join me and the 20,000 other Bitcoiners who have started their tax-efficient stack and open your Choice account today. Search "stack sats" in the App Store or visit choiceapp.io/pomp. Again, search "stack sats" in the App Store or visit choiceapp.io/pomp. And one more thing, if you want to hold your private keys, Choice

• 2:11Anthony Pompliano?

  lets you do that too. Start stacking tax-efficient satoshis today and visit choiceapp.io/pomp.

• 2:17Anthony Pompliano?

  I/O slash POM. Last but not least are my friends over at Circle. If you manage corporate or institutional funds, you're probably looking for ways to access opportunities in crypto. You see the growth and momentum and you want exposure. But a lot of institutions don't know how or aren't comfortable with the risks of Bitcoin or DeFi. Now there's a new investment that's built specifically to help institutions get into digital assets. It's called Circle Yield. It's a blockchain-based investment built with USDC, the leading dollar digital currency. Circle Yield is over collateralized and fully secured with Bitcoin collateral to protect your funds. This also makes it a great fit for crypto institutions who want to diversify their treasuries and reduce risks while staying all on chain. You get your choice of terms from

• 3:02Anthony Pompliano?

  one to 12 months in a fixed rate that's higher than what you'll get at a bank or in many fixed income markets. Visit circle.com/pomp to book a meeting with one of their experts. Again, circle.com/pomp and book a meeting with one of their experts. Big fan of Circle and I think you will be as well. All right, let's get into this episode. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs POM Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of POM Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by POM or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Luke, how are you?

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Hey, what's up, POM? I'm good, man. How are you?

• 3:48Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm fantastic. I was saying right before we got you on here, I've been looking forward to this conversation because I feel like the entire idea of the book is ultimately one of the least discussed but most important aspects of people's lives, right? Like if you ask somebody, you know, what are the important concepts in your life? Nobody immediately is like memes, right? Nobody is like memetic desire, but it's pretty important. So maybe let's start first with the idea of memetic desire and kind of where your interest came from. It's like, wow, how did you come across this? Why did you think it was important? And why are you so personally interested in it?

• 4:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's been the most important like mental model of my life. And I came across it because my life was totally And this was the mental model that helped me make sense of it when I was in my mid twenties. So we should probably start by disambiguating two words, okay? So you have memetics, which is basically the study of memes, okay? And we all know what memes are at this point with our experience over the last couple of years. So, you know, memes are cultural units of information that replicate, okay? And they want to replicate themselves as closely as possible. In meme theory, which was really founded by Richard Dawkins, the way that memes spread is not very well understood, okay? It's kind of mysterious.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  It's not mysterious in memetic theory, okay? That's what memetic theory is all about. It's the engine by which memes spread. So memetic theory, think of the word mime, okay? Meme is a noun, to mime is a verb, okay? That implies action. When you mime something, you ape something, Shakespeare's word for imitation. You're actually doing something. So memetic theory is how memes spread. I mean, think about it, you have meme stocks, Clover Health is a meme stock. There's not a lot of mimesis happening in that stock right now. So you can, you can be a meme, but the meme doesn't necessarily go anywhere or it doesn't spread. So memetic theory is all about why memes spread, how memes spread.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Most importantly, how desire spreads, okay? And this is a social phenomenon. And memetic theory is about why we catch the desires that we do, how we give our desires to other people, because desire is contagious. And the consequences of living in a world where desires are contagious. Desire is a, a social phenomenon. It's not something that I, you know, generate myself. And I think understanding how our desires are generated, where they come from, how they change is really important. Like Elon Musk is the greatest generator of memetic desire in the world. You know, why? So that's, that's kind of the idea behind my work is trying to understand how desire. Is generated how it moves through society.

• 6:33Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, I got a lot of questions. I feel I talked to you for like 17 hours. So let's start. We're gonna get through as much of this as we can. First is the entire idea of desire is contagious. Is that just hardwired into humans? Is that something that got put on steroids? Because now we're interconnected via digital technologies like i- is there like a historical, you know, kind of version of desire being contagious and then the internet just, you know, proliferated that? How do you think about that in terms of their relationship with technology?

• 7:03Speaker 02

  So this whole idea of memetic desire came from a French thinker named Rene Girard. Okay, Peter Thiel is probably his most famous student and Girard would say it's hardwired into humans. Right? It's just part of who we are by nature. We can never totally get rid of it. And if you think you're going to totally, you know, extinguish memetic desire from your life, that's just kind of foolish. It'll probably just make you more memetic, okay? And fan the flames of it. So it's hardwired in into human nature and it's been around forever. I do think we've entered now a memetic era. I think that social media has ushered in a memetic era. I don't know, you know, the effect of the blockchain on that. That's a whole another interesting rabbit hole

• 7:45Speaker 02

  we could go down. But yes, so I think it's probably just accelerated in recent years. And but it's part of how we've always been. And in fact, Rene Girard, as he was looking into the role of memetic desire in history, went back thousands of years and saw the pattern playing out. He first recognized it in literature. He just studied classic literature and realized that every great character in literature has a model of desire. Now, they don't just get out of bed and start wanting the woman or wanting to pursue a goal. There's always a model. And if you can find the hidden model, you've kind of put your finger on what's really driving a character. Okay, so he saw it in literature and then he started looking at real life and he started seeing it everywhere.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  He went way back. He looked at, you know, the way that memetic desire is played out in Christianity, the way that it's played out in wars. And so it's a social phenomenon, understanding how it's changing the world we live in right now. Is a really fascinating question.

• 8:40Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you start to think about where desire comes from, right, which is part of the first step before you get the contagious aspect, is that mostly driven internally or externally? Like, are we told what to desire? Or do we have some innate desire for something and then therefore it spreads? Like, how do you think about internal versus external as a driver for desire?

• 9:04Speaker 02

  I think most people believe that desire is 100% internal, right? That it's just something that we generate from within ourselves. And Gerard would say that that's what he calls the romantic lie. That's the lie that we tell ourselves because we like to think of ourselves as being totally in control of our own desires. The whole idea behind the Metic theory is that it's more external than we would like to believe. Right? Whether it's entirely external is another question, right? That's kind of a debatable question, but I would say that most things, most desires have more external forces than than we realize. So my opinion is that, you know, some people say, well, everything's Metic. Okay, like mimesis is what explains the rise of Bitcoin. Okay. Or nothing's Metic.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  I think the truth is in the middle. I think that mimesis, Metic desire falls on a spectrum. And you can have two people that are doing the exact same thing. Let's say buying Bitcoin. One of them could be doing it for extremely Metic reasons. They may just be following the trend, doing it because, you know, their their cool friends are doing it. And you could have other people that are doing it for not very Metic reasons because they they understand, they've done the research, they they they want to hedge against inflation. They they understand the future of of digital currencies in this new world that we're living in. And I would say they're driven less by mimesis. Doesn't mean that there'd be no mimesis in their desire to own Bitcoin, but maybe a lot less than somebody else. So I think the easiest way to think about this is on a spectrum.

• 10:33Anthony Pompliano?

  And so let's talk about specifically kind of memes, desire and financial markets. When you think of the intersection of those things, it's unclear to me if we can really unpack it and as you're kind of talking about and, okay, this is. Memetic activity, this is not, but how do you think about the impact on the financial markets? Are we seeing more and more of the like memetic driven action in financial markets than we ever have before? Or, you know, I always joke like, is Berkshire Hathaway a meme stock? We just never called it that before, you know, before the kind of GameStop, et cetera, kind of phenomenon. Like, how do you think about the historical examples of financial assets and then today?

• 11:13Speaker 02

  I think meme stocks have always been around, we just didn't have a name for them, right? I mean, like a meme to me is just a way to consolidate and simplify a bunch of information in a little memorable phrase that represents a lot of things to a lot of different people. So I think they've always been around. Now, the question is, is there some way to measure mimesis in the markets? That's a really important question. I think when analysts say that psychology has gotten into the market, what they're really saying is that memetic desire has gotten into the market and things have become a little untethered, in my opinion. Can we measure mimesis? I mean, I think that right now, we probably have more ways to do that than ever. I haven't quite landed on what it is yet, but one of the nice things about digital on-chain currencies

• 11:58Speaker 02

  is that we have visible ledger, so we can, we have more visibility into what's happening than we have in the stock market, for instance. So I would think that there's probably a way for some brilliant analytic people out there to come up with some way to sort of measure the memetic sentiment in the market. When there's a parabolic rise in an asset, like what's going on there? We know there's mimesis going on and that people are imitating other people, whether it's on the upside or on the downside. But I think that there's probably some way to get a little more granular and understand the extent to which mimesis is driving asset prices. And that's something I'm sort of actively working on behind the scenes. I don't know if we'll ever be able to come up with like, you know,

• 12:41Speaker 02

  the equivalent of a, you know, a Sharpe ratio or something like that to measure, you know, mimesis. But I think it's worth trying. I think it'd be valuable for a lot of people, just as an indicator of what's going on, right? What's driving things behind the scene? When Tesla had the parabolic rise back in early 2020, I talk about this a little bit in the book. The number one Google search, it was being auto-filled during the parabolic rise was, "Should I buy?", and Google was auto-filling Tesla. Now, that talk about an accelerator of mimesis, right? That's, that's what Google was doing in that situation. So technology in a way has both accelerated mimesis and memetic desire and just Just diffused it throughout the whole world.

• 13:20Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about Bitcoin itself, is Bitcoin the ultimate meme? Like, has Bitcoin risen to the Hall of Fame of memes and built a trillion dollar asset off the back of a kind of a memetic desire?

• 13:31Speaker 02

  The Hall of Fame of memes, man, I like that. I think so. I mean, I don't, I can't come up with a better one off the top of my head. And, you know, part of that, I think, is Satoshi. You know, he's like, he's the ideal kind of mythological figure that we can project all kinds of things onto. You know, there's, in many ways, there's, there's a religious element to all of this because of that. Because of kind of, you know, the way that people talk about their belief in it. So I do think that it is, is definitely in the Hall of Fame of memes. And I think that's probably, I mean, it's not a good thing or a bad thing. It just, it is what it is. But I think that when, you know, Bitcoin is, in my opinion, it's in its early life.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  It's in eight hundred billion dollar asset class, it could become a ten or fifteen trillion dollar asset class. So, by the end, the question I like to ask is at what point does the meme become less important? And does it start behaving a little bit more like, like a traditional asset class when it's matured? So right now, I think it's in the Hall of Fame of memes. I think it would probably be good for Bitcoin if it became less of a meme in the future, once it's a little more mature.

• 14:39Anthony Pompliano?

  And when you think about these financial assets and memes, you mentioned religion. And I jokingly yesterday, as I was preparing for this, I tweeted actually, and I said, "The decline of religion mirrors the rise of meme assets or meme stocks." And not so much in like, yes, people are, you know, leaving religion to go to the meme stocks. But it does feel like there has been a replacement with memetic desire for what used to be religion, right? The studies show that people are much less religious, especially younger people today than they used to be. What's driving that? Or how do you look at, you know, maybe religion and memetic desire? And then like other things that might be replacing it today?

• 15:21Speaker 02

  I think, I think that's right. I mean, I think that they are negatively correlated. Memetic desire is not a negative thing, like it's. Be clear about that from the beginning. I think it operates in a positive way in forming a sense of community, right? You have people with a shared desire. I'm Catholic, okay? So I'm a pretty, you know, religious guy. And I can tell you that the memetic desire works in forming the community in the church. It always has. Um, you know, I think about like my, you know, the Italian immigrants that were coming over here. Like that, that memetic desire, that mimesis for, for that shared object of desire and that for that community was a tremendously positive thing. I think that's happening a bit in, in this move to digital finance. You have these communities forming, you have DAOs, you have Discord channels.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  And it is in some sense, um, filling a need for a sense of community with like-minded people that quite frankly, um, the major religions, um, at least here in the United States, have not done a very good job at. Um, that community aspect of them is lacking. I, I say that from firsthand experience. So I think people are, are, are filling that need in other ways. I think that all human beings are, are just fundamentally religious, whether you, that doesn't mean that you're part of, uh, that you go to church. It just, I think that we're religious beings by nature and that that has to manifest itself in some way. Um, through some kind of search for transcendence. I think a lot of people are finding it, uh, in Bitcoin and in crypto in general.

• 16:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Joe, Joe, what questions do you guys have, uh, around memetic desire? Thanks for coming on, Luke. Appreciate you being here.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me, guys.

• 16:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course. Yeah. So my question would just be around like, obviously people are always going to desire things in my opinion. But how do they consciously think about these and transform the way that they, they end up desiring things? Rather than imitating people, like having critical thinking skills and desiring things on their own?

• 17:03Speaker 02

  Well, I, so, so when we notice, when we have an awareness that, that, you know, we're in a memetic environment or that we ourselves are behaving in a highly memetic way, what do we, what do we do about that? And there's really no substitute for doing, you know, really hard work of seeing this in yourself. And I promise you, it's a lot easier to see, uh, in the external world, uh, like all the, you know, memetic idiots running around out there than it is to realize that sometimes we are that memetic idiot. Okay? Um, uh, in early 2020, uh, I was, I did some really stupid shit. Okay? I got caught up in the mimesis of, of the markets and, and the worst. Darkest days of the pandemic, I thought that it was a good idea to basically try to day trade the markets. Okay, I was getting in and out of like highly volatile stocks.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  And you know, that's the stupidest thing that I could have possibly done at that particular moment. And what you what you should probably do in a situation like that, where there was a lot of fear driven memetic desire on the downside and a lot of uncertainty is just to sit back and learn as much as you possibly can. Right. It's a call to just learn and and wait. It was proven if you're ever caught in a literal riptide in the ocean. The worst possible thing that you can do is to try to resist and swim against it and get out of it because you're going to tire yourself out and drown. You just actually need to be still and try to remain calm. It'll take you way out in the water, but at least you would have preserved some of your energy and eventually, and if you wait long enough,

• 18:32Speaker 02

  it will usually spit you out. And I think when we're caught up in this memetic environment and frenzy, don't do what I did. I I learned some hard lessons in early 2020, you know, wait, learn, pay attention. And when the time is right, you'll you'll you'll know, hopefully, and you'll be able to sort of enter in a less memetic state.

• 18:53Speaker 03

  Luke, when you think about memetic desire, how do you recognize that? Right? So a lot of people do it subconsciously where they're not really understanding that, hey, I really want this. I'm desiring this thing because of someone else. So how do they kind of get out of that fold and recognize it?

• 19:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, I think questioning our motivations constantly and it just takes radical, radical honesty. So for me, it's it comes with thinking about the the people that are influencing some of my decision making. All right, so and that comes with a certain sense of humility and that I am that I don't. I consider myself a pretty memetic person and I've just because I've been paying attention to this for at least 10 years now. I'm more aware of it. There's kind of no substitute from just practice and and knowing your your triggers. So the one of the things that people don't understand about memes and the way that memes. spread is that with a meme, the carrier is not important, right?

• 19:52Speaker 02

  So that the meme doesn't care who the carrier is. It's kind of like COVID. Doesn't care who the carrier is. Like if Elon Musk has COVID, you know, he doesn't sneeze and spread it to all of his Twitter followers. But that's kind of the way that memetic desire works, right? It's it's like that. And realizing, you know, the people that influenced me and the things that I want, whether it's on Twitter, more importantly, in my own life. I learned to I learned to identify certain signals, right? So if I ever want to go do something.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  And I recognize that the desire to do that thing is being driven by some, I don't know, false sense of or some sense of insecurity or some pride or some desire to one up somebody. Or or simply to share whatever I'm doing on social media, I just I simply check myself. And I sometimes I realize after the fact that I did something for all the wrong reasons. When it comes to investing, again, I think it comes down with developing a certain kind of disposition of patience and of kind of sober waiting and recognizing when we're being extremely emotional, because emotion is often a driver of memetic desire.

• 21:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Luke, when you start to think about kind of studying this stuff, is it possible to either one, I'll use the word weaponize it? Like in terms of can you actually understand memetic desire enough to then be able to implement it? Whether you're on a marketing team, whether you're creating some sort of meme or a political campaign or something like that. And then two is, are you able to understand it enough through study? That when you see it, you can actually kind of sidestep it or avoid it? Like, is there an offensive and defensive kind of component to this? Once you actually understand how this stuff works?

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, for better or worse, I think that there is, right? I do think that it can be, you can manipulate people through memetic desire. I mean, I've had hundreds, maybe thousands of conversations since June when Wanton came out with people that are interested in doing exactly that, from marketing people to people that run political campaigns. And, you know, it can be. Be weaponized and it can be highly effective. I mean, one way to weaponize memetic desire is to forge identity among people by creating a really powerful scapegoat, like some, some enemy on the other side that makes people, you know, cohere and, and, and band together with a shared hatred for some singular objects or some singular person. I mean, we all know that's happening in politics and some

• 22:22Speaker 02

  people are, are being very intentional about it. I think you can do that by accident. Some people are like memetic geniuses by accident. I think, I think as, as there's a growing awareness of how these mechanisms work, people can actually weaponize it. And, you know, that's part of why I'm doing what I'm doing. I mean, and as far as why I wrote the book, because I, I think that if we're not aware of what's happening, memetic desire tends to move in negative directions. I mean, it's, it's the natural kind of foundation of, of rivalries. Sometimes we don't even know that we're in. It creates scapegoats. I think it's behind cancel culture. And I'm trying to bring awareness of this so that we can at least be aware of it and, and begin to gain some

• 23:04Speaker 02

  freedom and some agency to, to not be controlled by, by these things when we see people moving and, and hurts. So that's, I mean, ultimately, my book is about freedom. Even, I don't know if I even use that word a whole lot, but that's, that's what it's about. Because if I didn't think it was possible, then I, I don't know why the hell we're having a conversation.

• 23:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. One of the other pieces to this is, uh, how does demographics play into it, right? Whether it's in the United States, uh, or internationally, or also age, like the, going back to the Berkshire Hathaway, the reason why I kind of joke about it is older people, uh, just historically, and somewhat of a generalized way, uh, they tend to have grown up in a time where the mainstream media, et cetera, told them like, hey, this is the way to invest. Warren Buffett is the best, right? And so if you think about Berkshire Hathaway, you've got a leader, the people literally call themselves like value investors or Buffett disciples. And, and you know, there's kind of a religious aspect. Uh, I joke that they go on Mecca to Omaha every year, right? And they sit and they listen to him preach and they got the

• 24:05Anthony Pompliano?

  All the whole thing. Now, is that just that time period of people who grew up investing? Then they were told by all of the forces around them, this is the meme to pay attention to. And now people that are younger are getting told, no, there's another meme to pay attention to, whether it's Bitcoin or some other asset. And so like the media ends up being a large driving force of like the dissemination of information and really shaping that. And ultimately, what I think this gets at is like, is the meme the message? Right? Like, is that ultimately what this all boils down to is the meme is the message? And if you can understand where that's coming from, then you can understand society?

• 24:39Speaker 02

  I do think that both age and demographics play a role in kind of like our natural disposition in relation to mimesis. You know, teenagers are kind of like famously memetic. I know I was. You know, you have like, you know, the Warren Buffett kind of fan club, Beyonce is the same thing, right? With the hive. And, and you know, as, as people get older, they usually become a little less memetically driven as they know themselves better. Yeah, I'm from Michigan too. And I, there's something to kind of like the old Michigander, like autoworker. You know, you put a dude in a room full of like highly memetic people who are, are, you know, have a bunch of opinions and just kind of like sits there tranquil at peace.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  It's sort of like, seems like unaffected by, by everything going on around them. And it's kind of like, huh, like, there's like something in, there's like something to that. Like, why, why are some people like less kind of like swayed or feel less of a need for consensus or to be in agreement with other people? I think agreeability and disagreeability, which Jordan Peterson talks about a lot, is a big part of this. I think highly agreeable people tend to be like more, more memetic people. So part of this, I think, is baked into personality, but a large part of it, I think, is, is learned. And I think we can grow and mature and just know ourselves better to recognize these signals and know when we're being more, more or less memetic.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  But yes, I think the meme is the message, but I think, I think McLuhan is right. I think the medium is still the message and what that means in terms of memetic desire and Theory is that that the carrier, the the person is is far more important than the meme itself. So, you know, and that's just to say that that the people spreading the memes are are the driver of of the of the contagion. So Elon Musk gets behind a meme, it changes instantly, changes everything. So paying attention to the people that that have the power to generate and shape memetic desire is one of the keys, I think, to realizing. Um, it's kind of a leading indicator of where we're going as a culture, in my opinion.

• 26:48Anthony Pompliano?

  My last question for you is, uh, is Elon Musk the ultimate meme lord? Is Elon just the goat when it comes to creating memes, disseminating memes? And ultimately driving an entire global population to kind of follow uh the memetic desire that he puts out into the world?

• 27:06Speaker 02

  You know, it's either Elon or it's Trump. I don't know where where are these things, where they come up with these things. I mean, I don't know if like Elon has a team of people helping him out with these things, or he's just that brilliant. You can just get on his phone and tweet stuff out. Um, but I, yes, I I think that he is, and I think that he's very intentional about doing it. And, you know, I think there are a lot of lessons to be to be learned in that. Um, I put the Steakhouse guy, whoever runs that the Steakhouse Twitter handle, right, right up there with that. Because he's one of the first people that realized you could take a frozen meat company. And using the power of memes, you could actually make it cool and funny and interesting. And I don't know how many frozen steaks that dude has sold, but he's got to be underpaid, uh, based on how well he's harnessed power memes.

• 27:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Completely agree. Uh, I read Scott Adams' book, uh, Win Bigly. And one of the takeaways from that book that's just like seared in my brain was, uh, during the 2016 presidential election. Hillary Clinton's team had done everything a politician would do. They had run the study groups, the focus groups, they'd looked at all the data. They had, uh, tested a bunch of different, uh, campaign slogans, et cetera. And they ultimately came up with, uh, the one that that they went with. The way the story is told is that, uh, somebody said to, uh, uh, the candidate Trump at the time and said, hey, we need a slogan. And he sat there and thought for a second, and then he just said, make America great again. And it was. It's just like, you know, some people have an innate ability to do that.

• 28:28Anthony Pompliano?

  And then obviously, uh, it depends on whether they listen to the people around them to do the studies, the focus groups, et cetera, or they just understand it. And I think your point about whether it's Elon, whether it's President Trump, uh, we could go down a list of a ton of people like this, uh, they just understand it, right? There's an intuition to it, uh, which is, uh, both, um, uh, impressive, but also scary at the same time that people can have that much of, uh, of power.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  I, I think, I think some people do have like this innate ability and with Trump, the nicknames, right? Like the, the nicknames, and from what I hear, he came up with most of them himself. Um, you know, I can't come up with nicknames that good, man. So I, I, uh, I, it's, it's actually impressive, um, to be able to come up with, with good nicknames and sort of capture something that's memeable about a person, as nasty as it can be sometimes. But yes, I, I think that more and more, you know, people are being intentional about this and, um, some people just have the ability and some people don't. I mean, I don't, I think it's more of an art than a science, let me put it that way.

• 29:21Anthony Pompliano?

  So for those, uh, uh, didn't hear the beginning, Luke is the author of Wanting, The Power of Memetic Desire in Everyday Life. Uh, it's fantastic. I highly, highly suggest people go and, uh, and get the book. Luke, maybe just give us kind of the 30 seconds, like what's the pitch? What, what do people get, uh, that they can take away from, uh, from reading this?

• 29:38Speaker 02

  And you can learn why the world seems to be going crazy right now, based on, you know, memetic desire and the crisis that everybody imitating everybody else without knowing who the, the right models are, is creating in the world. Uh, and you can learn more about why you want the things that you want. And you can decide, you know, to pivot if you, if you discern that some of those influences, uh, you, that you were unaware of, that when they come to light. And I hope that by the end of the book, some of them will have come to light. Um, you know, you can just make more intentional decisions, um, about choosing the desires that you really want to invest your time and effort and, and harden and pursue. Because there's nothing worse than looking back 10 years from now and realizing that you were chasing a desire that was ultimately going to lead you unfulfilled. So that's, that's my pitch for the book.

• 30:18Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that's a great pitch. Awesome, man. Listen, thank you so much for joining us. I, uh, I really appreciate anyone who doesn't follow, uh, you on Twitter. They're missing out. So go follow, uh, Luke on Twitter. Make sure you buy the book and, uh, and also subscribe to the newsletter here. And, uh, just keep it up, man. You're doing a great job.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  Thanks so much, guys.

• 30:36Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm learning a ton from you, so I appreciate it.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  Appreciate it. We're gonna make it. Peace.

• 30:39Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, bye. We're all gonna make it. All time sign off.

• 30:45Anthony Pompliano?

  You think he's into crypto at all?