Luke Burgis | Layer Zero

Humans are mimetic creatures that crave their respective desires. But how do these desires work when paired with crypto? Luke Burgis explains. Luke is the author of, “Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life.” Mimetic desire is a part of everything. After this interview, you’ll start to see it everywhere. Where does the apex of mimetic desire lead? Is it good or bad for society? How did learning about mimetic desire impact Luke’s life? Hear the answers to these questions and much more in the episode. ------ 📣 METAMASK | The Easiest Buy in Crypto https://bankless.cc/buy ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALED ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across 🏦 ROCKET POOL | DECENTRALIZED ETH STAKING https://bankless.cc/RocketPool 👻 AAVE V3 | LEND & BORROW CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/aave ⚡️ MAKER DAO | THE DAI STABLECOIN https://bankless.cc/MakerDAO 🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 3:43 Luke’s Background 7:40 Crypto & Mimetic Desire 15:40 The Leverage Component 20:32 Manias and Mimesis 24:50 Defining Mimetic Desire 31:13 Eyes 37:16 Trajectory of Mimetic Desire 46:47 Consequences of Mimetic Desire 55:55 How Luke Has Personally Changed 1:00:20 Desires 1:08:00 Good or Bad For Society? ------ Resources: Luke Burgis on Twitter https://twitter.com/lukeburgis Luke Burgis’s Website https://lukeburgis.com/ Wanting by Luke https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1250262488/ Luke’s First Bankless Appearance https://youtu.be/5cln_TL-bGI Manias and Mimesis Essay https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3469465 ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  In my opinion, this is a great time to start something if you can. People are running scared and people are memetically following them to the hills. And for those that stay, you have an opportunity to build some really cool stuff.

• 0:13David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Layer Zero. Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the Ethereum community. Crypto is built by code, but is composed by people. And each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell. Cyberpunk understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it. And Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code because Ethereum is people all the way down and always has been. Today on Layer Zero, I'm talking with Luke Burgess, who is the author of the book Wanting, a story about memetic desire. And there is nothing more related to the concept of Layer Zero than the topic of memetic desire. We had Luke Burgess on the show, the Monday podcast with me and Ryan, about a year ago. And memetic desire just broke our brains because it's so foundational to how society operates.

• 0:58David Hoffman?

  Basically, in a sentence, memetic desire is if somebody else wants something, you want that thing because they want it. And this is just so deeply rooted into our DNA, how we develop as children, how we develop as babies, that it is just part of everything. It's part of the market cycle, it's part of the business cycle, it's a part of monetary policy, it's about like investments and where people try to choose to put their energies. And so Luke and I kind of have like a second episode to the first episode we did with him a year ago, but this one a little bit more free flowing, a little bit more out there, and a little bit more Layer Zero. So I hope you guys enjoy this fantastic episode all about Mimetic desire with Luke Burgis,

• 1:41David Hoffman?

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• 2:25David Hoffman?

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• 3:10David Hoffman?

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• 3:55David Hoffman?

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• 4:08David Hoffman?

  What's up Luke? How's it going?

• 4:09Speaker 00

  What's up David? Good man.

• 4:10David Hoffman?

  Good, good, good. Yeah, we were just swapping stories about how we're both in empty places that we are new to.

• 4:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm in a huge empty basement with a couple of bunk beds that we got at our lake house for when kids visit. And yeah, it's, if you saw the whole room, it's pretty pathetic. So for anybody watching, I don't actually live like this. We're just in a crazy moving process right now.

• 4:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I'm in the same boat. There's a reason why my camera is facing a wall instead of the empty, empty room behind me.

• 4:37Speaker 00

  A little more echo than usual.

• 4:39David Hoffman?

  Certainly. For Big List listeners that didn't listen to your episode that we did with you about a year ago, can you kind of just like speed run listeners with like who Luke Burgis is and why people pay attention to you?

• 4:54Speaker 00

  Well, I don't know why they pay attention to me, but I can tell you who I am. I worked on Wall Street for a little while, left when I was 23 and started eventually four companies in my twenties. Some successful, some not so successful and walked away when I was 29 to kind of delve into the humanities more. Walked away for five years. I lived in Italy for a few years, studied philosophy and theology. Trying to kind of figure out what I wanted to do the rest of my life. This led me into understanding a thinker named Rene Girard, who rocked my world, helped me understand everything from kind of the crazy life journey that I was on, why I'd made certain choices in my life, to even understanding financial markets and the startup world, which I was a part of.

• 5:39Speaker 00

  And his fundamental insight is something called Mimetic desire, meaning that human desire is fundamentally imitative. That's what memetic means and that this is something that usually happens unconsciously or subconsciously and drives most of our decision-making, in fact, while we imagine ourselves usually to be these very independent agents and actors, but we're constantly being influenced through a social process. Says that desire is fundamentally a social process. So I wrote a book about it called Wanting. I am the entrepreneur in residence at the Sioka Center for Principal Entrepreneurship in Washington DC.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  I teach a bit. I have my hands in a lot of things. I have a stealth startup project on the side. I dabble a little bit in crypto. I've had my eye on it for sure, but nothing probably like most of your listeners.

• 6:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and for the listeners that did listen to the podcast, it was really well timed, because it was right before NFTs got really crazy. And they were definitely heating up, but the peak of the NFT mania was like perhaps one to three months after we did our podcast. And I remember like reading your book and then doing the podcast with you and post, learning about Mimetic desire and the ways that you taught us, it felt like going through and seeing like the being able to see the matrix, right? Like seeing the ones and zeros fly by the world rather than being oblivious to them. And especially as NFTs got really, really big and watching the meta of the NFT phenomenon like shift, because people hop from NFTs to

• 7:21David Hoffman?

  NFTs to NFTs. And everybody was, everyone that listened to the podcast with you felt very tuned in to why human behavior was doing all of this thing like, oh, first we like the anime PFP NFTs, but oh, no, now, now we're doing the doodles like, oh, no, wait, now we've moved on to like goblins or whatever. And like, everyone that listened to your podcast was able to like, explain the movement of the NFT market cycles via this concept of Mimetic desire. So after, after we did our podcast with you, like, did you, what did you pay attention to in the crypto world? And, and just like, can you speed run us through what you like observed post doing our podcast?

• 8:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, it's, there's something almost dangerous about knowing too much about a force like Mimetic desire. So I was paying attention to this weird like meta thing that happened where everybody started to talk about Mimetic desire in the crypto and NFT world. It was, it's the irony is that the book in our podcast, thanks to you guys, led to all of this mimesis and the medic desire to talk about medic desire and this weird meta thing happening. It's kind of like David Foster Wallace, sort of talks about how irony crept into advertising. You know, he talks about this very famous Pepsi commercial in 1987, where it made fun of how memetic everybody in the commercial was. And, you know, it had like a guy have a loudspeaker

• 8:46Speaker 00

  and pop open a can of Pepsi in a truck on the beach and all these people run like sheep towards him and ah, and you can hear them drinking Pepsi and stuff. And he said that was like some pivotal moment where the viewer became like aware of how like ridiculously memetic we all can be sometimes. But the danger in that is like you laugh at the commercial and you're like, well, look at them. Right. And then you are almost more susceptible to all of the subconscious stuff that's going on. Right. And I mentioned that because it's kind of, I feel like what happened with NFTs. Like, we were all aware of one of these social mechanisms and forces that was driving some of this behavior.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  Even made fun of it, made fun of ourselves and other people mostly. Yet it just kept going and when we were feeling it and, you know, it's almost, it made me think like, well, there's something like unescapably enticing here. Cause you always think that, you know, the next thing, there's something special, there's something unique about it. And sure, there's objective differences, right? From a technical standpoint, from an aesthetic standpoint. But, you know, Gerard says that's precisely the romantic lie in that we constantly want to downplay the, the role of mimesis in our, our own decision-making, right?

• 10:09Speaker 00

  But even though we see it in other people's, then I think, you know, there's been sort of a phase transition. Like in the beginning of any bubble, and I'll just call it a bubble. There's, you know, the, the, the actors

• 10:25Speaker 00

  are often making decisions for less memetic reasons than people that come a little bit later in the game. You know, because they, I don't know, they've got more on the line.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  You know, it seems a little riskier, there's nobody else involved. And I think at a certain point, you have more and more people entering a market for, I would say stronger memetic reasons who may have not done a whole lot of homework. Who may not, you know, really know what they're doing. And it changes the entire dynamic and I think can lead to some amount of rivalry. I'd love your perspective on this, some amount of rivalry between the people that, you know, have been in it longer and, and tend to understand a bit more of a technology or a movement. And the people that sort of rush in at the end, who some of them actually may have done really well. Some of the people that came in later. And that can lead to all kinds of like weird things from envy and stuff like that from other people.

• 11:22Speaker 00

  So I think looking at. The the kind of social emotional dynamic in any market is fascinating to me. And I I use the word like rivalry because this is a core part of Dr. Art's theory, right? He says like Mimetic desire very naturally leads to conflict in human relationships. So I just wonder if some of the Mimetic desire led to, you know, whatever founders splitting up, you know, people losing friends, relationships, whatever. I mean, I I suspect that that happened, even though I didn't hear about most of it.

• 11:53David Hoffman?

  Sure, I do want to at some point um take the time to actually define Mimetic desire, but we'll we'll skip that for now and come back to it. Um, I so part of the listeners is just gonna have to uh assume that we're assuming some knowledge here, but we'll we'll define it at some point in time. The we recently did a podcast with this guy, Van Spencer, who uh talked about that. We were recapping the 2020 to 2021 bull market i- in the crypto industry. And he he uh contrasted the two two phases of the markets. The first half of the market was the high conviction rally. Uh, the second half of the market was the low conviction rally. Uh, and he separated these things in that the first part of the market was uh driven by this brand new use case

• 12:36David Hoffman?

  with very strong fundamentals that everyone could get behind that. And we could all get behind it. We all had consensus that there was something real here. And this is talking about DeFi yield farming in late 2020. Uh, and that was a high conviction rally because investors, individuals, hobbyists, like builders, everyone was shared it in their belief that this thing was real and that drove this high conviction rally. And then the second half of the bull market was the low conviction rally. And that was things like the metaverse, NFTs, gameFi, things that were very, very new to the crypto industry that everyone had identified had a lot of potential. Uh, but there was still not strong fundamentals there. And the way that I see this uh being a manifestation of the whole concept of Mimetic desire

• 13:22David Hoffman?

  is that the loop on the on the bull market got faster and faster and faster. And we saw this in the 2017 ICO era where The ICO like meta era was like people would spin up an ICO, people would put money into it. The token would release, the token would go up in price, people would sell and they'd be on to the next ICO to do that over and over and over again. And the loops got faster and faster and faster because people were understanding the meta quicker and quicker and quicker. They were seeing where people were going. And they're like, okay, this is the game that we're playing. You put your money in, you get the tokens out. And when the tokens pump and then you buy into the next ICO. And like we saw the same thing with NFTs where some NFTs did very, very well at the start of this low conviction rally.

• 14:05David Hoffman?

  And that created the meta. And it's like, oh, okay, we're like the humans of the crypto industry are they're throwing money, they're depositing money into NFTs and then the NFTs are going up and then they're making a bunch of money. And then they're trying to find the next NFTs. And so builders, like bull market builders were optimizing their products for this sort of behavior. And so rather than building in the bear market, which created the high conviction rally because it was real fundamental projects. Builders in the bull market started to build for the meta. And so people, they were saying, okay, I'm going to make this NFT project because that's what everyone's doing right now.

• 14:44David Hoffman?

  Everyone's hot on NFTs. So I'm going to make this, do the thing that is the easiest way to me to generate a bunch of deposits on these, like on my NFT platform, right? And so I'm going to sell these NFTs as fast as I can. And then because that was the game, the NFT speculators would come in and then they'd buy the NFTs. And then those NFTs would go up and then that would grab a bunch of attention and then the meta would shift. And like the way that I, the reason why I call it the loop is going faster and faster is because the meta got faster and faster and faster. The memetics got faster and faster and faster, stronger and stronger. And at some point, it got too fast. It got too unsustainable and it reached a peak and that was the peak of the low conviction bull market, which was like the fireworks, right? Like the loop was going super, super fast.

• 15:28David Hoffman?

  And all the energy was just could not keep up with the space and that was the peak of the market. So how does that land with you and your interpretation of Mimetic desire?

• 15:37Speaker 00

  I mean, it lands well. It's, I think it's exactly right. And I think the role of leverage is something that's really important when we're talking about Mimetic desire and markets in general. Cause there's a kind of like, when is enough enough? And I feel like a lot of people never ask themselves, like, what were they in it for? Right. What's their end game? What's their time horizon? And there's kind of a keeping up, I hate to use the phrase keeping up with the Joneses, but there is kind of a a keeping up aspect to the cycles, to the loops. And feeling like you might get left behind, there's an element of FOMO to it for sure. But leverage is important because I don't think a lot of people understand how leveraged the markets are, especially the crypto markets.

• 16:20Speaker 00

  And I think that's what's precipitating part of the decline as we're speaking right now. It's pretty bad. Um, even on this particular day with Bitcoin. So, you know, if somebody else buys a stock, I'll just use an equity just because it's simple. And it appreciates by 20%. Well, there's one way that I can actually keep up with that person and actually do better than that person. It's not by buying the stock because they're already ahead of me by 20%. But what I can do is use more leverage than they did. And that's a way for me to catch up and actually get ahead.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  And that's part of the, I think, psychology that comes into play in any market. I think it came into play with NFTs and with crypto a bit. It's, you know, the basic concept of sort of a gambler like double or nothing and, you know, trying to win the money back. And I know people personally that were leveraging up to try to keep up with some abstract like ideal of what kinds of returns they were supposed to have because they were hearing about, you know, what was happening with other people. And it, there was not a lot grounding it in, in reality. So I think the, and you know, leverage has the function of revealing huge differences when the shit hits the fan, right?

• 17:47Speaker 00

  You know, sort of amplifies differences and, and it's also part of, part of what's happening now. So I would say that that's absolutely right. The cycles have to get faster and faster, the more they're driven by mimesis. And it's the same thing in the startup world with like financing young companies. I'll never forget like some of the wisest advice that an investor ever gave to me when I was looking for funding for one of my first companies was, Luke, don't try to create a flash valuation. That's not what we want. It's not ultimately what you want. And by flash valuation, he meant, you know, just, there are ways to. Structure, the story that you're telling and the amount of money that you raise to pump up

• 18:30Speaker 00

  the value in your next round as high as possible. But should you be optimizing for that? No, right? I decided the answer was no. And I was going to try to build something more long term. And you made the excellent point that when the incentives are kind of wrong like that, the product itself actually changes and it's optimized for all of the wrong things. And I'll tell you, it's a huge temptation, like even when building a company to optimize for the highest valuation, but like, who cares about that in the long run? If we're just playing, you know, games with abstract valuations. And I think that's part of what happened.

• 19:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there's a quote that I heard recently is that any venture capitalist that their exit plan was a market bubble, like that is not a good exit plan. That's not a sustainable one at all. And I think the other variable that goes into how these markets get like wrapped up in this accelerating loop of memetics is that like the winners, you know, peacock their winnings and then they hide their losses, right? And so traders in the crypto space, they only talk about their 100Xs and they don't talk about their down 90%, right? And so it creates this illusion of if you're not getting 100X,

• 19:55David Hoffman?

  you're falling behind. And so at this social layer, it really is attractive because and you think it makes it appear that like getting 100X is easier than it actually is. It's actually accessible to you and getting 100X is actually normal. And so you just have to participate in the market and wait your turn. And one day you will get your 100X. And then on those assumptions, it generates poor incentives, right? It generates a desire to pull leverage. Like, I don't know how I'm going to get 100X without like going leverage to the tits, which then also self perpetuates that at a market structure level, too.

• 20:33Speaker 00

  A hundred percent. I did a Zoom event for my Substack with Bern Hobart, who's a brilliant financial analyst, and he wrote a paper called Manias and Mimesis, where he looks at the history of financial bubbles and he makes a pretty strong case, and using Rene Girard, who my book's about, and he makes a pretty strong case that some of what's going on now, sure, there's some different elements, but you know, there are basic characteristics of bubbles. And, you know, he says, one of the characteristics of a late bubble is you have a bunch of people that are imitating a model that they don't fully understand. And the models, to your point, are obscuring or hiding the true nature of their gains, for instance, right?

• 21:17Speaker 00

  Everything's curated. It's like Instagram. Everything's curated, right? People only see what you want them to see. So it's a dangerous game, psychological game to play, when people are imitating other people on a surface level, but not understanding that the real substantial decisions and ways that they probably arrived at where they're at. So, yeah, I mean, it just creates a really, really vicious cycle. And there's, you know, sometimes I struggle to know whether transparency in markets is a, in terms of like how individuals are doing, is like a good thing or a bad thing, right? Like what's like prudent discretionary disclosure?

• 22:02Speaker 00

  And, you know, there's certainly like a culture now that's been built up around being very transparent about that. And I think that probably is part of what's fueled some of the mimesis over the last couple of years.

• 22:13David Hoffman?

  Go into that a little bit more. Transparency on disclosures on what? Are we talking about like VC firms being disclosing what they're invested in?

• 22:23Speaker 00

  No, no, no. I mean, I mean, I like transparency in markets. I'm talking about personal performance, right? Like, it's like, it's like something that everybody talks about all the time now, right? Like how, how well you've done, how your portfolio is doing. We just have a way to sort of share that information unlike ever before. Like, it used to be something that, you know, people, people just spoke about in a different way, right? We've got like sort of the humble brag culture now. And that, I think, is the thing that is fueling a bit of what's going on. I'm all for transparency in markets. That's not what I'm talking about.

• 22:54David Hoffman?

  Ah, okay. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Right. I remember there was this.

• 23:00David Hoffman?

  This TikTok video, TikTok investor video that went around, it's like this Zoomer kid was talking about how he bought this mansion using like a not a lot amount of capital. And he put that like $40,000 into U S T to get 20% and then 20% was gonna like finance his mansion. Uh, and so like, I don't think he actually did it. I think he just made the content because that was his brand, right? Like he was, that was like, I don't think he actually, he was like a 24 year old kid that bought this like $7 million mansion. And he was paying for his down payments via this 20% yield from Terra. Uh, and but like, whether or not he did it or not is beside the story. He was like broadcasting it on TikTok out to the masses.

• 23:39David Hoffman?

  Right? And so this one guy with this one bit of content was like, you know, showing like, hey Zoomers, if you just have $40,000, you can turn into, you can turn that into a mansion. If you just know this one cool new trick, also follow me on TikTok and here's like an ad that I'm gonna deliver to you. And so like the, the web to like, uh, one to many broadcasting, uh, paradigm is probably just like adding jet fuel to like Mimetic desire.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  Totally, totally. Yep. Yeah, I see it myself. And you know, there, I have a whole section in my book that talks about shielding ourselves from, you know, exposure to some of that stuff, right? It's just not healthy, right? We, we, we take it in and it affects us more than we think. And the more that we think we're inoculated to it, the less we probably are. And I talk a lot about that. But, um, yeah, no, I completely agree. And you know, Terra U S T, it's, I don't know, I, we could probably talk. Part of memetic theory is the theory of scapegoating. So we could probably speculate on whether Del Quan is gonna become a, a great scapegoat for a lot of people.

• 24:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, I do want to get to scapegoating. Let's say, let's take a moment and I think listeners have definitely gotten a grasp of what Mimetic desire is. But let's take a moment and actually define it in like, in, in, with an actual definition. But I want to start with, uh, the emojis that you use because if you can distill a concept down to emojis, that's how you know you've like reached the base layer of how to explain something. And so the emojis that I've seen you use, uh, to explain Mimetic desire are the eyeballs emojis, uh, and the balloon. Except there's two sets of eyeballs emojis. So it goes one set of eyeball emojis, looking at the next set of eyeball emojis. And that second set of eyeball emojis is looking at the balloon. Can you explain?

• 25:18Speaker 00

  That's my yet.

• 25:19David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Can you, well, can you explain like how that explains my desire and also what Mimetic desire actually is?

• 25:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a great leadway. So that I actually minted that baby. So the Mimetic desire is choosing an object,

• 25:39Speaker 00

  not because of any inherent qualities in the object itself, but due to some third person who's interested in it or who desires it and who endows it with a special kind of value. And that's Mimetic desire. So we're in essence imitating the desires of another person or another group. We sort of adopt them or catch them by contagion. And the eyes are the best symbol of this, you know, like from the minute a baby leaves the womb, studies have shown this, they're paying attention to what the mother is looking at. And if the mother's eyes are transfixed with some object, the baby is instantly

• 26:21Speaker 00

  interested in that object after a certain number of days at least. So we're all we're all still like that. That's what we don't realize, right? We're all still very much like that. And sometimes, you know, the the desire for something isn't mediated by physical eyeballs, but now we have technology that mediates desires for us. The reason that I chose the balloon with the two pairs of eyes, one looking at the other,

• 26:48Speaker 00

  is because the balloon, this red balloon, represents a relatively insignificant thing. It's just a red balloon. It doesn't really have much value at all. But the right person looking at and also the balloon can like float away and be gone in a second. Right. And this is kind of the nature of Mimetic desire. So you have one set of eyeballs looking at the balloon. And then the second set of eyeballs looking at the first set of eyeballs, which are looking at the balloon. And that second person, the second set of eyes

• 27:21Speaker 00

  desires the balloon because of the first person who desires the balloon. And that immediately leads those two people into a kind of rivalry because that second person now has somebody who's sought first and who's in front of them and creates this weird sort of memetic situation. But the balloon can just disappear in a second. And the first person can start paying attention to another thing or another person. And we can swap the balloon out with an infinite array of objects, an infinite array of ideas. And the second person, the second set of eyes, because their desire is not for the balloon,

• 28:01Speaker 00

  their desire is for whatever the mediator wants. That's what they're looking at. They're a layer removed from the balloon. So as Gerard calls these models of desire, mediators of desire. So as that person begins to take an interest in something else, so does the so does the second person. And there are some people that I think go through much of their lives with very powerful mediators of desire in their life. Could be an older brother, it could be a friend, it could be somebody that we admire, who are constantly mediating the desires for for other things. Could be silly things, they could be big things like where to go to college, they could be like what Dow to join, whatever,

• 28:43Speaker 00

  right? The point is that there's this sort of triangular relationship between two people and something.

• 28:51David Hoffman?

  And people that are on crypto Twitter, it probably is not lost on them that this is more or less how crypto Twitter works, where there are certain influencers out there that are known to have to be alpha, and then they have a bunch of followers because the followers are the second set of eyeballs. They're the eyeballs that are paying attention to the individual who is branded as being somebody who has the alpha, right? And so this is why like Dgen Spartan has a bunch of followers on crypto Twitter and why he gets a bunch of engagement because everyone thinks that he, that whatever he's looking at is the thing that's going to go up in price, which actually sometimes turns it into a self fulfilling prophecy. And so this, this, it's so salient and behavior in crypto

• 29:36David Hoffman?

  and that it's, it's, it's so easy to like, once you understand Mimetic desire to like explain almost everything in the world of crypto. Yeah. Did you ever, did you ever thought on that?

• 29:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. And it goes so far beyond crypto. Because I mean, I think all the time about The sort of cult of experts that we have. And I just had this conversation last week. It was about, I won't name any names, but it was like, oh, this, this person on Twitter is so smart. Like, you gotta follow this person. And it's like, well, how do we know he's smart? Well, I just heard that he's really smart. So it's like, you know, it's like, like the, the, the way that reputations are built, like also happen in this very memetic way. And it's like, well, has anybody actually met this person? Well, where's he getting his tweets from? And, you know, whatever. So I think like, people can build reputations in a highly memetic way.

• 30:26Speaker 00

  In other words, they can manufacture clout, expertise, alpha, whatever. If the first handful of people are modeling, the right people are modeling that desire in, in the right way. I've always had this dream of writing a, like a, a movie, a script or a book about somebody that does that like, like really well. Right? He just says, I'm gonna, I'm gonna like manufacture this image of myself and make the world believe that I'm a saint. And it, I just need, I just need the first five people to believe that I'm working miracles. And then pretty soon, everybody will have forgot who I am in the first place.

• 31:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the, the parable of the emperor wearing no clothes definitely comes to mind, certainly. The other, the other thing that you said while you were defining Mimetic, Mimetic desire is the baby paying attention to their mom. And if the mom is looking at something, well, the baby knows where to look. And I can't remember where I learned this fact, but most animals don't have whites of their eyes. Like most animal eyes, especially predators and also, and prey, they don't have white eyes. They have black eyes. And the, the whites of human eyeballs was actually developed as like a communication protocol between humans. Because if it's the whites of the eyeballs that actually communicate data, communicate where your attention actually is.

• 31:52David Hoffman?

  And so as humans were going from small tribes of like five to 50, there, and then as they

• 32:00David Hoffman?

  Scaled out beyond fifty or in tribes trying to coordinate. People, the humans that had white eyeballs were able to communicate without words. They were able to like see others' intentions, seeing and see. And because we were becoming a collaborative society, that information that was being passed while it was disclosing private information about the internal thoughts of that human, because we were becoming a more collaborative society, that was on average, good information to pass. And so like you actually lose a little bit of your privacy by the whites of your eyes, because people can see what you're paying attention to. People can see what you're looking at. They can interpret what's going on in your brain. But it developed and stuck around as a gene,

• 32:45David Hoffman?

  because on net, on net, it was a good thing for the tribe as a whole to be collaborative and to illustrate and allow for that data to pass around the tribe. So whenever you talk about like the, literally the eyeballs, I'm thinking like literally the first ever communication protocol that humans ever developed.

• 33:02Speaker 00

  Wow. Well, maybe that's actually a good reason to wear sunglasses at night.

• 33:06David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 33:06Speaker 00

  I've never heard this one before. Best reason I've ever heard. Yeah, you know, and it's just like, we're freaky good at noticing those signals of communication with the eyes. I mean, just think about being in a crowded bar and a man or woman just needs to cast a half second glance in the right direction and people notice, right? You know, maybe she was looking at me, whatever. So, yeah, it's absolutely insane. I could tell a lot of stories about, you know, Gerard has this whole story about how there was basically a scapegoating mob that, you know, through, through the looks of their eyes were instigating each other on. And they began, the person they were scapegoating, his eyes ended up taking like changing color and turning into the eyes of a demon,

• 33:51Speaker 00

  because they were literally transfigured because of the, so the eyes play a huge role in Gerard's own, own work.

• 34:00Speaker 00

  We reinforce the desires of other people based on what we're paying attention to. So the eyes are just a proxy for what somebody is interested in or what they're paying attention to. So I guess as we disincarnate a little bit as a world, you know, what'll take the place of the eyes? I don't know if there's anything that will, you know, quite, quite do it as well as the eyeballs did.

• 34:26David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah, I don't know where the quote is from, but there's a quote that the eyes are the window into the soul. All right, like it's the thing that you cannot hide, unless you're wearing sunglasses, of course.

• 34:38Speaker 00

  Right, Proust actually talks about eyes a lot, so Marcel Proust. If you read his works, they're not easy to read. You know, very, very often, he talks about what characters in the novel are looking at and how that inflames passions or desires in other characters. And René Girard said that, you know, Proust was like a master of desire because he understood that this memetic nature of desire and not a lot of other authors do.

• 35:08David Hoffman?

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• 35:53David Hoffman?

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• 36:36David Hoffman?

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• 37:20David Hoffman?

  no extension required, which gives the Brave Wallet an extra level of security versus other wallets. With the Brave Wallet, you can buy, store, send, and swap your crypto assets, and you can even manage your NFTs and connect to other wallets and DeFi apps, all from the security of the best privacy browser on the market. Whether you're new to crypto or a seasoned pro, it's time to switch to the Brave Wallet. Download Brave at brave.com/banklist and click the Wallet icon to get started. I want to pick your brain on how you think the history of memetic desire in the human species is, what the trajectory looks like. Because I alluded to it earlier with Web2, we have this memetic desire, like on steroids, right? Like, one influencer with a million followers

• 38:02David Hoffman?

  can tell a million people with one single post what they are paying attention to. Whereas like, if we go back to 1500s or pre-internet, or you know, 1,000 years ago, whenever, the like, loop of memetic desire would be extremely slow. I'm going to go ahead and guess that like, fashion trends... 500 plus years ago, we're slower than they are now. And as soon as we like inject web two, like social media protocols, platforms, like the speed of Mimetic desire can go faster and faster and faster. And so as I was alluding to, like the bear, the culmination of a bull market as like this loop that's going faster and faster and faster. Does this like, do you see this like acceleration of a magic desire?

• 38:46David Hoffman?

  And are you concerned about what happens when that loop is just too unsustainable? And are we there yet? Or like, where are we on that whole trajectory? Do you have any thoughts on this?

• 38:57Speaker 00

  It's almost as if we have, yeah, our desire, our desires need outlets. And we seem to be getting better at better at manufacturing desires. You know, marketers, product managers are really good at generating desires. But they have to, those desires have to have some place to go. And that's so in an expanding economy, for instance, right? I mean, the economy is not a fixed pie. It's not a zero sum game. Ideally, we're growing the economy, creating new value, creating new opportunities. When that's happening, the beauty of it is that there's, there's almost like always like another, another thing, right?

• 39:43Speaker 00

  Another place for desires to go. Peter Thiel, I think his number one concern has been like, so we're now in the situation where we have to keep growing the economy. Well, what happens if it stops growing? And memetic desires have to sort of think about it this way. Turn inward and then we begin competing for the same, for the same things. So a free market has this natural mechanism of like directing Mimetic desire to creative endeavors and projects and entrepreneurship and people starting things. It just has this natural way of diffusing Mimetic desire would be one way to think about it. So what's going to happen if we don't have an economy that, that lends itself well to

• 40:28Speaker 00

  people trying new things and having, you know, the freedom to fail and having some cushion? Like what happens then? So I am concerned is the short answer to your question. I think we, we need healthy outlets for Mimetic desire.

• 40:44Speaker 00

  But on the flip side, like, we can, on a personal level, we can do things so that we don't, we don't need that. So I, I see sort of two sides to the coin. I don't have any real, you know, I don't have policy answers or anything like that. I sort of just try to think, think to myself like, well, what, what can I do with me and my family? But I think on a, on a general level, you know, we've, we've pumped it for so long that it's kind of like the general sort of inflation money printing thing that we're seeing in our economy. Like, that's basically what we've been doing. We've been printing memetic desires and eventually something's got to break, something's going to give.

• 41:24David Hoffman?

  Right, right. So as the economic pie grows, there are more destinations for, there are more objects for us to pay attention to and even though the loop of memetic desires going faster, at least there's an outlet for people to deposit their energy into. And that can turn into fundamentals, but then as the economic pie contracts, more people stop paying attention to like the margins and, and more people start paying attention towards the center. Right? Like the, and there's less innovation and so we have to probably look more towards fundamentals at like what is real. And all of a sudden, the things, the fundamentals of the world have a lot more eyeballs on them, therefore becomes highly competitive. Am I, am I tracking here?

• 42:06Speaker 00

  You're totally tracking, right? There's like, there's a convergence of attention on certain things. And I would say that that's already happening on like a political level. Cause like, we're sort of have like really boring politics, not a lot of new ideas. So politics is ahead of the economy in a sense, right? Like it stopped generating any new interesting ideas a long time ago. And what has happened? Well, there's been a convergence on like three issues, like moral issues. And that's like all we talk about, right? And like that's, there's something that seems not healthy about that. And I think something similar to that is going to play out in, in the economy. It was just gonna, you're gonna see an increase of conflict

• 42:50Speaker 00

  as people become concerned fighting over whatever, the same spaces, the same jobs. There's going to be less entrepreneurship. There's going to be less people. I mean, there's simple economics too, right? There's not going to be as much money to go around to go start new things. But also we're going to end up. Losing sight of the opportunity to create. And I think that's already happening, right? I see people running for the hills. In my opinion, this is a great time to start something if you can. People are running scared and people are memetically, memetically following them to the hills. And for those that stay, you have an opportunity to build some really cool stuff.

• 43:26David Hoffman?

  Right. This, it seems to map on to just general market cycles really, really well. As in, we have times of growth and we have times of contraction. And Mimetic desire plays like a leading role in that. As in, like, if everyone's looking outwards, then we have innovation, we have development, we have entrepreneurs building stuff. And then once, once Mimetic desire turns inwards, then we create a recession. And so, but it also seems that like Mimetic desire is the leading indicator of this. As in, because it's kind of a self fulfilling prophecy, it might actually determine what is. I mean, I guess like you can't get away from stuff like the Fed raising interest rates. But also the Fed will raise interest rates as a response to too much investment on the periphery. Right?

• 44:11David Hoffman?

  If the Mimetic desire is in like weird monkey JPEGs and that's not going to put food on the table. The Fed is like, okay, well, the like, people are paying attention to crazy stuff too much. So let's raise interest rates to get them to pay attention to like the more fundamentals of the world. Any thoughts on that?

• 44:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I, I, I think that that's, that's a great way to explain it. You know, people have money, um, because we've been printing money. And they, where are they going to put it, right? I mean, people don't want it sitting in a bank account. It's got to go somewhere, um, that it at least has the possibility of some kind of a return. So yes, people began to deploy it in more peripheral, peripheral places. And there's sort of a natural process that has to play out. Some of that deployment of capital results in really cool things that get built. And a lot of it just simply gets washed out. And that's just part of the way that the market works. But I think part of what a contraction is and what the Fed does when it raises interest rates.

• 45:13Speaker 00

  It, it almost is like a, a refocusing on fundamental things. You know, you see like A16Z is like talking a lot about infrastructure and let's build and all this stuff right now. And like, That there's probably something good and healthy about that and a reason why it why it needs to happen. But in the meantime, there's there obviously there are wonderful things about. Well, there's not wonderful things about both phases because the second one is very painful. But there are a lot of positive things that come out of that experimentation that we're able to do. When we have extra cash to play with, extra capital to play with. Yeah.

• 45:50David Hoffman?

  Right, right, right.

• 45:54David Hoffman?

  There's the there's the quote that some people some people don't like this quote, but I'm gonna say it anyways. There's like good times may or like bad times make good men, good men make good times, good times make weak men. And then weak men make bad times. And again, it seems to like a map on to.

• 46:12David Hoffman?

  People build and so then people look outwards at to the frontier and they build stuff on the frontier. But too much of that put like there's too far of a supply chain between the fundamentals and the frontier. And if people are building too far out to the frontier, that supply chain gets stretched. And so then people get called back to towards the center. And then when people go back towards the center, that's hard times because we have to. Split the foundation amongst a wider part of society because the frontier got contracted. And then this like cycle goes forward and forward and forward. I'm wondering.

• 46:46David Hoffman?

  The whole like Mimetic desire thing very much feels like breaking the fourth wall. Like you're not supposed to break the fourth wall like you're we're all supposed to be just like part of this memetic. Thing and just let it like wash over us. But like, have you have you thought about like what happens when people? Enough people understand Mimetic desire and start acting on that assumption on and on that understanding of meta desire. And like if too many people understand that there's this fourth wall that we're all seeing. How does that shift? Like, how does that shift people's attention? Have you thought about this?

• 47:21Speaker 00

  Well, I have, and Gerard has thought about it too, and it was very apocalyptic in some of the things that he said. And we know it's kind of like, well, you know, there's not as much. The name of his magnum opus is Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, okay? And what are some of the things hidden? Well, the memetic nature of desire and the violence that it often leads to. So I don't know how to answer this question without transitioning a little bit to the conflict and violence and scapegoating stuff, because it's a huge part of the answer, right?

• 47:55Speaker 00

  So we would say one of the consequences of Mimetic desire that humanity has been mostly unconscious of for the majority of its history is when Mimetic desire leads to memetic violence. So that is when people get together and through a kind of memetic contagion, blame somebody else for a problem and scapegoat that person. They'd expel them from the community. In times past, they would kill them, they would lynch them, whatever. Just horrible, horrible things that have been done to scapegoats throughout humanity. And Gerard says that the process that leads to somebody becoming a scapegoat is a memetic process.

• 48:39Speaker 00

  Like, how else can you explain how it's all minus one against one? Like, everybody except one person begins to turn on one. Like, he says that people don't arrive at the conviction that that person is guilty on their own. They arrive at that conviction through a memetic process. And they arrive at the desire to punish also through a memetic process. So the root of scapegoating violence is mimesis. It's Mimetic desire. Few things are more memetic than anger, than aggression.

• 49:16Speaker 00

  Right, um, like you see it in a baseball game, uh, you know, as soon as one person rushes rushes the pitcher and the second guy, it comes out of the dugout, the third, fourth and fifth come out and then the rest stream out. And you don't want to be the only guy left on the bench that didn't go out there because then you're going to be the one with the problem. So, right, you didn't, you didn't help your team. You're, you're the new scapegoat, right? So that's to me is a very simple illustration of how this sometimes works. And Gerard says that it's, it's usually we've done this without really knowing what we're doing. But now we tend to know that we do this. And Gerard said that that's actually kind of dangerous that we know that we do it. And this is a kind of little tricky

• 50:01Speaker 00

  to understand, but the scapegoat mechanism, as horrible as it was, he says, was like humanities, it was a social innovation that kept violence from spreading because, you know, we think people could identify a person, expel the person, and they would create this little temporary peace in a form of catharsis. And then, you know, people could go, go back on doing whatever they were doing. So it actually had like a, it was a release valve. So it had a utilitarian function. And, you know, he says, this is kind of the root of a lot of ancient religions. I mean, there's a, they sacrificed in order to bring peace. So that they didn't just all turn on each other. They had to sacrifice somebody and it gave them this illusion of peace. Now we sort of know that we do that, right? Like,

• 50:46Speaker 00

  like with cancel culture, like, we sort of know there's not the unanimity that there was before. Like, it's not like unanimous, like, we all agree on this. We're very divided about it. And we also can see that it's happening. And we can call it out. So we're, we're, this is a weird way to say it, but we're deprived of the, of the usefulness of the scapegoat mechanism. It doesn't work anymore, the way that it used to. So just as you described how the cycles of Mimetic desire are speeding up faster and faster, so too are the cycles of scapegoating violence, because they, they don't last very long. Cancel somebody online and the catharsis or whatever that that produced doesn't really

• 51:28Speaker 00

  work the way that it would have, I don't know, you know, 50 years ago or something, doesn't. So we were constantly, we're in this accelerating train. And Gerard says, we, we either have to renounce. Our, our memetic tendency to do this, or it's just gonna lead to bigger and bigger scapegoats, which is a pretty scary thought.

• 51:52David Hoffman?

  Right. And there's always so many parallels to money and finance, which I guess it makes sense because ultimately money and finance are properties that exhibit out of the brain. And so like the, when you say like the, the process of catharsis just gets weaker and weaker, the more we do it and the faster we do it, like my mind goes to the Federal Reserve, printing a bunch of money and then it prints more money and then it prints more money. But then the newer money doesn't have the same impact as the older money. And so they have to keep on printing more money and that creates hyperinflation, which is like a, it's like a great, like having a hyperinflationary event is terrible. Like everything like capital gets destroyed, like people go hungry. Everything gets like completely, the, the slate gets wiped clean.

• 52:35David Hoffman?

  And also, yeah, I'm glad you brought up how this is part of religion. Like also a part of religion was the concept of like jubilees, where like we just like wipe the slate clean. We just like start over, things break. Like some, some more, and societies had like regular jubilees, like every 10 to 20 years, because they knew that they needed to like wipe the slate clean every now and then. There's too much pent up underbrush. And so we needed to like burn the underbrush to make sure that we didn't like burn down the whole forest. And if we're, if we're saying that like we're in this phase where like fiat currencies are getting hyperinflationary. I mean, we're seeing this right now in the markets today. And then also like other fiat currencies of the world are, have already been hyperinflationary,

• 53:19David Hoffman?

  like Argentine peso, Venezuelan bolivar. The Japanese yen is like at the precipice of becoming hyperinflationary. At the same time, we're getting like this, the, this fight over like, like cancel culture is rearing its head. The Democrats and Republicans are fighting over like two or three things. Like it all seems to be very much tied together. And so it seems to be like this general society, societal. Uh, like crescendo up until like a big crash. Uh, and that then there's this concept of like the fourth turning, which I don't know if you're, if you're familiar with, but it's like in, in the crypto space where like, no one really knows how or why or what event is going to trigger it, but everyone feels like there's like a jubilee

• 54:03David Hoffman?

  coming where it's going to be painful and then we're going to wipe this state clean and then we're going to pick up again from anew and then the cycle will continue.

• 54:10Speaker 00

  Hmm. Yeah, it does feel that way, doesn't it? It feels that way and, and more than just crypto in general. Um, I think people have this really foreboding sense, which there's an element of reflexivity to all this too, right? It's like when we begin to feel that way, like we sort of bring it into reality, like with a market crash, for instance. Yeah, and you know, the jubilee is a great example. We need those. They're really important. And, uh, I think the, as the, the role of formal organized religion in society is really going away, it's, or certainly it's very diminished. Uh, I actually think that we need rituals, that we need those, like what's going to substitute

• 54:54Speaker 00

  for that jubilee where, you know, debts were cleared, you know, slaves were freed, all, all, all kinds of stuff. We really need to do that because that was a release valve. So what's, what are we going to substitute? I'm, I am a religious person still, so, but my, my question to the culture is, you know, what, what are we going to do with, without those sort of forms of, of ritual, um, of remembrance? It's actually one of the most important things that religion does is it helps people remember things, right? It's like, you know, every single, uh, if you're a Christian, for instance, like every single week, you know, you're forced to remember the scapegoating violence, right? And like what happened and the fact that you're a part of it.

• 55:34Speaker 00

  So when we don't remember as, as a culture or in our individual lives, we, we just tend to accelerate the same cycles that we're part of if we forget. So the, the, in, you know, Plato calls that anamnesis, that read, that, that remembering is important and, you know, how are we going to do that? So I, I, I just think that that's, that's the big question for me.

• 55:57David Hoffman?

  So how does, since you have shattered the fourth wall for yourself and for everyone that has read your book and listened to your podcasts, how have you changed your behavior as a result of your Mimetic desire fourth wall being shattered? Like, what do you do differently now to help, I don't know, like stave away the negative effects of amnesia from your own person?

• 56:20Speaker 00

  I take my personal Jubilee Festival Retreat every year, which means, you know, me basically locking myself away in a monastery in Italy for five days. Now, you know, not everybody's going to do that or can do that, but for me, it's a reset. It's a total reset. And it feels like a lot of my entangled desires and entangled relationships, this all seemed to come to light to me. And I always leave that retreat week that I have, knowing what I need to do, you know, for the next year. I mean, Bill Gates has a think week that he does every year. This is like my desire week. It's a week where I actually try not to think at all. I just, I just am totally silent. No devices, nothing, just

• 57:04Speaker 00

  total silence. I mean, sometimes I go crazy after the third day, but by the fourth and fifth day, things bubble up to the surface for me, like desires I had that I didn't even realize that I had. And then I see some of my silly, what I call thin desires, like highly memetic desires, just become like apparent to me. They reveal themselves for what they are and they look kind of fucking stupid sometimes. And I, yeah, and I just, I just, I see them as ridiculous as they are. Like, you know, I have open conversations like with, you know, I'm able to call myself and you have to like be able to call it out when you see it, especially in yourself, you know. So, you know, there are times with

• 57:46Speaker 00

  my, in my relationships, whether it's business partners, my wife, my family, whatever it is, where I, I'm just aware that I'm behaving in a memetic way, or like my, my instinct is to like, you know, I don't know, send the snarky email right back to somebody or something like that. And I'm like, I'm not going to do that. So adopting these sort of anti-memetic behaviors, which starts with recognizing when you're being memetic. And it's the same thing with like some of my market behavior. I wouldn't have made a very good trader. When I worked on Wall Street, I was on the investment banking side, but I'm a like, I just have like strong memetic instincts and I wouldn't have probably made a very good trader. Because I would have been, I would have reacted really strongly to what's going on and what other people around me were doing and saying.

• 58:31Speaker 00

  And I know that about myself. So so much of this just comes down to self-awareness, right? And I am able to take like build in little anti-memetic tripwires into my into my life, right? That prevent me from from doing that. It's interesting that, you know, it's built into the stock market, right? Stock market falls like seven percent on a day. It's almost like we have built in tripwires for memetic desires spiraling out of control. You know, so like what, how do we, how do we do that in our, in our own lives? Right? How do, how do we put the sort of the, the stop sells on stuff? And, um, you know, it's going to be very different for everybody.

• 59:06David Hoffman?

  Certainly, yeah. And it feels very much like mindfulness meditation. Uh, where are you alone when you go out to your retreats? Is it just you?

• 59:13Speaker 00

  Totally. Yeah.

• 59:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah. No cell phone?

• 59:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, no cell phone. Nope.

• 59:17David Hoffman?

  Computer?

• 59:18Speaker 00

  Nope. Nothing.

• 59:19David Hoffman?

  Nothing connected to their outside world, which probably makes sense because.

• 59:23Speaker 00

  I used to, I used to do it with, with, with a, a, a group of guys, right? A bunch of other guys that are with me, but we didn't talk at all, right? If we wanted to go on a hike together, it was silent and we'd have to slip a piece of paper under the door. To be like, hey, you know, like meet me on this hike and it would be a silent hike. We wouldn't talk and we would eat together, but you know, we wouldn't, all, all you would hear, it's a super weird experience. Or like the clanking of spoons against the soup bowl and stuff. So yeah, total, totally alone. I mean, and for me, that's part of, that's part of it. And yeah, I mean, I, I, I do think that spending is, and I try to do it every day too, right? Like, you know, when I wake up, take a half hour, half hour before I go to bed. I don't think there's any substitute for that space, right? Making that space.

• 1:00:02Speaker 00

  Um, the temptation is to try to like, I don't know, to try to build things or to sort of like hack Mimetic desire. But I've, I've never found that that stuff really, really works very well. Um, cause all of those things just give me like another outlet to, to exercise it. If that makes sense.

• 1:00:28David Hoffman?

  Hmm. Mm hmm. Um, the, uh, I was thinking while you were talking about that, um, uh, like.

• 1:00:37David Hoffman?

  Buddhism, being a Buddhist, Buddhism? Is that what that is?

• 1:00:40Speaker 00

  Buddhism, yeah.

• 1:00:41David Hoffman?

  Buddhism, thank you. It's like trying to be the, get the absence of desire, right? And so I think they were probably tapping into the pitfalls of Mimetic desire without actually being able to name it, right? Like if you can remove yourself from desire, you can remove yourself from the tricks of desire. And so like, there's something like religion doesn't really have a much of a science behind it, but they get the gist of things really, really well. And so like, you don't need to like, write into code E equals mc squared to like, start to behave, to codify the desires of just humans and consciousness. Religion kind of gets it, even without putting it into, into scientific terms.

• 1:01:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean Buddhism does that. And I think that Stoicism, which is a pretty popular movement right now, has a similar spirit, right? In terms of, you know, desire being a source of suffering, or most desire being something that we need to sort of, you know, neutralize. That's not my position at all, because I, I've found like, I want to desire more, actually. Like, like I want to desire like, the things, I want to desire certain things more, and I want to desire other things less. That's the way that I think about it, right? Like, I want to, you know, desire to be with my dad more, right? So it's, it's a strange thing to, to want to sort of like, do away with it, or to view desire as a negative thing, because Mimetic desire can also be tremendously positive.

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  So like, one of the tactics, to go back to your last question, is surrounding myself with people who want things that I want to want. Like, we normally think of our friends and, you know, people and our spouse or whatever, as, you know, we often don't think a lot about what they want. But if Mimetic desire is real, then what they want is going to dramatically influence what we want. So just being really intentional about, you know, the kinds of people that I'm around. Like, I told myself for years that I didn't want to work so much on the weekends. And, you know, no matter what I did, I couldn't stop doing it. And it wasn't until I met a couple of people, including my wife, who don't have that problem,

• 1:02:46Speaker 00

  that I was, you know, I was able to, my, my desire changed, right? But it was almost like I couldn't change my desire on my own, just by thinking about it or telling myself what I wanted. I actually needed to be affected in some real way by other people.

• 1:03:00David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah, I think maybe, let me know if you agree with this or not, but it's, you, what you just said to me is, you are trying to harness and get control over the inputs to your own Mimetic desire. So rather than having it be like some random Instagram post or somebody that you saw on the street, you want to control your own inputs as to the, what influences your own Mimetic desire. So you want your wife to influence your memetic desires. You want your kids to influence your memetic desires. And absence of those things, you just want to desire the things that you truly want to desire, which is, in my mind, like the absence of Mimetic desire. And so I think the trick is be in control of your inputs of Mimetic desire, and then also make sure that you also understand what you, what you truly

• 1:03:45David Hoffman?

  want yourself in isolation, rather than from like the rest of this massive amounts of noise from society as input.

• 1:03:54Speaker 00

  Totally, yeah. Controlling inputs is really important. You know, it's funny, we're talking because just, just a couple of days ago, I had my team call all of the people that I follow on Twitter down from like 20,000 to 30, you know, and that was part of like, is it possible for me to use Twitter in a less memetic way, right, to make it more anti-memetic and to be very intentional? And I literally started tweeting out every single person I'm re-following, why I'm re-following them. Because I was like, if I don't know why, then I probably shouldn't be following them. And so that's, that's a way, that's my way of being super intentional about the inputs. And then also that I'm creating a gap between stimulus and response.

• 1:04:37Speaker 00

  Brené Brown talks about this a little bit, like, like the three second, like she says early in her life, you know, there was no gap between stimulus and response, right? It's like, something happens, I immediately respond with, you know, drinking or whatever, right? So like, as we go through the course of a typical day, like, I think one, one skill that I have learned, or at least gotten a lot better at than I was in my, in my twenties, is I just have a gap between the stimulus and the response. Like, even when the inputs, I can't always control the inputs, right? I mean, I go out to some like crazy conference or something like that. I can't control all the inputs. But I do have sort of a gap of... Between the stimulus and the response where I can choose, I can be intentional.

• 1:05:20Speaker 00

  You know, I can put my, my sort of mark of my self-possession on, on whatever the choice is and own it. Rather than just complaining that, you know, I'm, I have to do all the stuff that I don't want to do. There's an element of taking ownership for, for your own desires. A lot of people don't think of desires that way, right? We think that we just, we want what we want and we don't realize that, well, some things that we want, we have more authorship and ownership over than other things, right? Some things we didn't choose, we just went that. Classic example would be like a, a kid who follows this path to go to school and becomes something, some career path that they hate. And they realize that at no step along the way, did they ever consciously choose that? It was just a desire that they just never questioned, it was just given to them.

• 1:06:04Speaker 00

  Whatever friends, family, they just disinductinated and they never stopped and questioned it. So the basic process is just examining your desires and then taking steps to actually own them.

• 1:06:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think probably a way to test whether something is, because there's the meme of, of highly materialistic society, a highly consumer society is just like, buy that thing, Instagram ad, buy that thing, Instagram ad, buy that thing, buy that thing on Amazon. It can get to you literally in the next eight hours, so just buy that thing. And I think if it was, if you bought that thing, under the influence, under the influence of Mimetic desire, you would receive that box, you would have that dopamine from the box, you would open that thing, you would use it one time and then you would put it down and never use it again. And it would never bring joy to your life ever again. That you were under the influence of Mimetic desire. If it was actually something that was you, you would receive that item.

• 1:06:56David Hoffman?

  And then every single day you would engage with that item and it would spark joy for you every single day on a reoccurring basis, over and over and over again. That I think is the symptoms of you being in control of your desires and actually being attuned to your own desires in a, in a good fashion. How do you like that?

• 1:07:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's the origin, the origin of that could still be Mimetic desire. I just bought, I wish I, I wish I had it here with me so I could hold it up. I just bought a real piece of artwork. And the the reason that I took an interest in it was because the desire for it was modeled to me by somebody that I think has a really good eye for art and brought it to my attention. And I ended up buying it, right? And it was, but it was me like recognizing, not an impulse, like went back like three days later. It was me recognizing that, oh, like I definitely, you know, want it because of this reason. But I I eventually sort of like made it, made it my own and I find a great deal of satisfaction. So it's not, it's not either or is the, is the only point that I'm trying to make, right?

• 1:08:01Speaker 00

  It's not like there are certain desires that are anti-mimetic and other desires that are mimetic. Things can start out as mimetic. We live in a mimetic world where social creatures were influenced by all kinds of people. But I can make things my own to a greater or lesser degree.

• 1:08:16David Hoffman?

  Luke, mimetic desire, good for society, bad for society, or neutral?

• 1:08:24Speaker 00

  Good, good for society. You know, Gerard would say that mimetic desire is what makes us human, that animals don't, don't really have mimetic desire. They engage in mimetic behavior, like with play, for instance. But they don't have mimetic desire and mimetic desire represents like the human longing to know other people, to like, to understand what other people want, to transcend ourselves. And without mimetic desire, we wouldn't be human. And I've always found that really powerful. I, I think some people misunderstand what I'm saying and, you know, we're talking about mimetic desire and it can come across as, as a negative thing. I spent the whole second half of the book really talking about how it can be a positive thing.

• 1:09:10Speaker 00

  Maybe some people just didn't get there, but I, so I think, I think it's a positive. I think it's a, I think it's a tremendously positive thing. It just needs to be, it needs to be harnessed in an intentional way. And the, the analogy that I like to use is like, if we didn't have a medic desire, we wouldn't do anything, you know? We would just, wouldn't, we wouldn't be very interesting. But it's like gravity, right? Like. Gravity is a force that works on us, works on our bodies. And if we don't exercise, it eventually wreaks havoc on our bodies. Right? We'll start when we're older, we'll have knee problems, we'll have spine problems because there's a force that's constantly being exerted on us. And mimesis, Mimetic desire is the same way.

• 1:09:54Speaker 00

  We can learn to develop certain muscles in response to it and it can actually help us. And, and help, help us, you know, lead the kind of lives that we want to lead. I mean, because there's no escaping, there's not a, so, you know, the decision is what are we going to, what are we going to do in this memetic world that we live in?

• 1:10:12David Hoffman?

  All right. Luke, thank you so much for coming on Layer Zero.

• 1:10:16Speaker 00

  Thanks, David, man. I really enjoyed the conversation.

• 1:10:18David Hoffman?

  Cheers. Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcast and community as a Bankless Premium subscriber to get the most out of your Bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks and exclusive content and even the Bankless token for airdrops, raffles and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the Bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a Bankless Premium subscriber today. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders, Ask Me Anythings and weekly rollups where we summarize the week in crypto and other

• 1:11:03David Hoffman?

  fantastic content. Thanks, everyone, for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless Nation.