Why Do Founders Love René Girard? - Johnathan Bi

Jonathan Bi is a startup founder, philosopher and mathematician. René Girard is one of the most popular philosophers in Silicon Valley. Why is it that an obscure French polymath from the 1900's would become one of the most influential and cited thinkers amongst founders, CEOs and leaders in high-growth companies? Expect to learn how Girard believes that mimetic desire drives almost all of our behaviour, why breaking out from the group to do your own thing doesn't mean you're an individual, how having sex can end up not being for the enjoyment of sex, why Peter Thiel and so many others love Girard's work, how understanding Girard can improve your daily life and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 20% discount on Diet Smoke’s legal THC Gummies at https://www.dietsmoke.com/ (use code: MW20) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Watch Jonathan's Girard lecture series here - https://youtu.be/5Qu6vBebwwg Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #renégirard #mimetictheory #peterthiel - 00:00 Intro 01:32 Who is René Girard? 08:26 Divergence From the Group 18:18 What Drew Jonathan to Girard 28:06 Is Mimesis Falsifiable? 31:01 Accepting Human Fallibility 38:02 Applying Girardian Theory in Life 44:00 What Do You Want To Want? 52:39 Girard on Pride & Arrogance 1:07:18 Main Takeaways from Girard 1:08:45 Where to Find Jonathan - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  There was a military theorist, John Boyd, and he said something like, great fighter pilots use their superior judgment to make sure they never have to get into situations to use their superior force. And I think the same is true for understanding memetic theory. It doesn't give you the ability to just snap your fingers and not be social creatures, but it does give you the foresight to see bad situations coming and potentially avoid it.

• 0:22Chris Williamson?

  Jonathan B., welcome to the show.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me, Chris. Excited to be on.

• 0:26Chris Williamson?

  So the first time that we met was through David Perel, actually, and we went out for dinner. Now, David is a man who has two modes of culinary experience, and he either goes Chick-fil-A or fighting hobos outside of a food truck, or he goes the most expensive steak restaurant in town. I've noticed this since spending time with him, that he's got, he's very sort of barbelly when it comes to what he wants to do with food. But thankfully, we went to the, we went to the nice steak restaurant.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, although I wouldn't mind fighting for a taco next time with you when I'm in Austin, so.

• 1:03Chris Williamson?

  David, David's oddly experienced at that, which is

• 1:06Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:07Chris Williamson?

  concerned. But yeah, he took

• 1:08Speaker 00

  Incredible, given how small and strony he is.

• 1:10Chris Williamson?

  That's true. Look, he's, he's got a new girlfriend that's like training him up or something, making him eat like a surplus of calories. He once took me for lunch at some French place on Congress, and I was in flip flops and a pair of shorts, and it was just wags and like little tiny model dogs. But anyway, anyway, enough about David Perel. Are you trained in Rene Girard, the philosopher? Have you got some sort of like Girardian accreditation?

• 1:39Speaker 00

  Perhaps I have the most Girardian of accreditations, which is, you know, being self-taught. Girard himself was trained in history in Indiana University, and before that, he was an archivist in France. But, you know, he neither made any contributions to, you know, being a librarian or history. And the avenues that he did make significant contributions to, in, you know, in anthropology, in theology, in psychology, he was all self-taught. So I suppose that's a nice way of saying no.

• 2:10Chris Williamson?

  But followed in his footsteps, did it the right way.

• 2:12Speaker 00

  Yes. I was trained in continental philosophy. And however, Girard is not read at all in the academy, unless in literary criticism. And so I was sort of introduced to Gerard as a sophomore and I had to read the Girardian Canon, so to speak, myself, with a couple of friends, of course. That's what always makes the journey fun.

• 2:35Chris Williamson?

  Who is he and what's the core insight of his work?

• 2:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, so he recently passed away in 2015, but his life is probably not as interesting as his key insights are. And I would say that his most fundamental insight is we don't often desire things for the things themselves, but for what the things say about us. And the way he makes this argument is to delineate two types of desire: physical desire, which is directed at the object, and metaphysical desire, which is directed at what the object says about me. Let me give you some quick examples. Take any activity, really, and we can see both strands of desire at work in different circumstance. If I desire to have sex, for example, it could

• 3:22Speaker 00

  be for pleasure, it could be for intimacy, experiences in the moment, and that would be for physical desire, a desire for experience. But I can also desire to have sex for what having sex with a certain type of person says about me. And this is how, as you would know from being in nightlife, how a lot of people do live their lives. They're not really in it for the pleasure, they're in it because they want to be someone. And that's the psychology of the Casanova, or the Don Juan, or the Coquette. And this sort of insight expands across all of our decisions. We could take on a job because of what the job says about us, but we could also take on the job because we actually like the activity in and of itself.

• 4:05Speaker 00

  And so that is Gerard's core insight, that there's two different strands of desire. And the dominant strand, metaphysical desire, is actually not aimed at the object itself, but what the object says about me. It's a desire to be, rather than a desire to experience.

• 4:21Chris Williamson?

  Is this different to signaling, or how does this relate to signaling?

• 4:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's interesting because it's almost signaling to oneself in some sense. Right? Because it's, you know, the person who's motivated by metaphysical desire, even if no one sees you, you know, having sex with a really beautiful woman, you are still rewarded by that. Whereas when we commonly think about signaling, the reward is always external. Now, just let me elaborate a bit more on this concept of metaphysical desire because I think we need to draw that implications a bit more. When we ask Gerard, when we poke him really hard and say, well, what do we really want to be? Right? What is this desire to be really aimed at? Gerard thinks we all desire to exist in great measure. So perhaps not unlike Nietzsche's will to power, Gerard identifies a key human motivational force

• 5:10Speaker 00

  as this unrelenting drive to establish ourselves, to be greater than life, even in seemingly non-prideful and ordinary individuals. Gerard thinks we want to establish our being to be the most real, like a social reality, social reality, like being seen and being recognized, to be long-lasting and permanent, right? The denial of death and wanting to leave a legacy. And also the last one is exert power in our social world. Now Gerard thinks that this type of being is terribly elusive and we can never achieve it. So he's very pessimistic on the human condition, that we're just pushed by this drive that we can never fully satisfy. And for this, for him, this is what it means to live in original sin.

• 5:53Speaker 00

  Now, the last point that I'll make, I know I've been rambling on for a long time, is how do we satisfy this drive? And that's where mimesis comes into play. We satisfy this drive, this desire to be, to exist in great measure, by obtaining objects associated with models who we already conceive of as existing in great measure, be it a celebrity, be it a slightly more established coworker, be it attractive man or woman. We look for models around in the world to tell us what we should want, what is the core of our identity. And I think this is no, in no other places is this better established than in celebrity advertisement. And the one line that I think that always gives it away for me

• 6:37Speaker 00

  is Jordan's sneakers taglines, "Be like Mike." The advertisements of basketball sneakers tell you nothing about the physical qualities of the basketball sneakers, the bounce, the lightness, the grip, or even the price. But it's promising you something you want all the more, being Be Like Mike. And so that is Gerard's sort of core psychological system, from which all of his social anthropological and eschatological insights eventually flow from.

• 7:03Chris Williamson?

  Gerard should have been a nightclub promoter. He would have crushed it in the nightlife game. So here's an interesting example that I like to use. You decide not to go on a night out with a bunch of your friends. Your friends go on the night out, they wake up the next morning, they're hungover, but a little bit later on, once they've got their pizza order out of the way, you give someone a ring or you give them a text and you say, "Hey, man, how was last night?" So many times, the first thing that someone will reply with will be, "Dude, it was awesome. There were so many girls there last night." You go, "Hang on, I asked how the night was. I didn't ask who the other consumers of the thing that you were consuming were."

• 7:42Speaker 00

  Right.

• 7:43Chris Williamson?

  So people that buy an iPhone mostly don't buy an iPhone because David Beckham also has an iPhone. They buy an iPhone for the core competence that the product gives them. It's got a camera and it can make calls and it's got good battery life and stuff like that.

• 7:55Speaker 00

  I can't be so sure about that. I mean, and think about all the cases of people selling their livers for an iPhone. I imagine they're not doing a rational analysis, saying, "Oh, my liver is worth for, you know, the camera, all this stuff." I do think the iPhone is actually a great example of, or actually, you and I might purchase it for physical desire, right? But I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I think for a lot of people, it is a sort of status symbol. It is a sort of metaphor.

• 8:20Chris Williamson?

  I would agree as a status symbol. You're probably right there, but certainly when you compare it to a nightclub event, you're like, the core feature of the product that is going on a night out is the other consumers of the product. You can go on a night out to the same event, week on week, the DJ could play the same set, the sound and the lights could be exactly the same, the drinks prices could be the same, the service could be the same. But if you change the other people that go and consume that product because they are such a big influence on your night, and it's not just some sort of woo, ephemeral, like status signaling thing, they actually impact your night in a physical way. Like if there's loads of guys that are aggressive and dancing in the club, like that actually changes your experience. It's not totally woo, but...

• 9:06Chris Williamson?

  It is the most important thing about nightlife are the other people that consume that product. And it's so interesting to see that because you go, well, hang on, what does this mean from a product design perspective? It means that actually what I need to do is create a product, not that's the best, but that attracts people that other people want to be around. So for a lot of nightclubs, that means getting girls in. If you bring girls in, girls don't have a problem with more girls, but both girls and guys have a problem with more guys.

• 9:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, totally. Well, first thing I'll say is I think we should be extremely comfortable thinking about the context of Gerard within romance and dating, because it's romance and dating where he goes to his canonical examples as well. And I think perhaps a reason he goes there is that we traditionally think that in romance and dating, that's where our physical urges are the strongest, right? We could be as strong or motivated with sex. But even in this domain, Gerard shows, if you'll excuse a pun, that our desires are helplessly penetrated by the desires of others, right? Even in such a domain, it's dominated by a physical, strong desire. We can be hopelessly mediated by other people. Just think about our other sort of less strongly physical domains, political intuitions,

• 10:18Speaker 00

  philosophical opinions, and all the rest. The other thing I'll say is, and I read a pretty interesting book called A Very Important Person, I think you'll really enjoy it.

• 10:26Chris Williamson?

  Oh, by Ashley Myers?

• 10:27Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 10:28Chris Williamson?

  She's been on the show. Yeah, she was great.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  You know what? I actually, I actually know that because I think I went from the show to the book. And that's exactly what the book says, right? The way that you get guys to spend is you get more women there. You add the gaze of the woman that sort of enable the men to be more competitive with each other and drive bottle service.

• 10:46Chris Williamson?

  What you see in nightclubs specifically, we didn't do this. So we ran events that were high volume, low cost. We were putting 1,000 to 2,000, 18 to 21 year olds in. So it wasn't about bottles and shows, although we've dabbled in a little bit of that. And obviously I've been to my fair share of events like that. What you'll see in nightclubs, and anyone can go and check this out, if you're in a city like Miami or New York that has big bottle shows type events, look at the way that they position the most expensive tables in. The club that always within seeing distance of each other.

• 11:19Speaker 00

  Right.

• 11:19Chris Williamson?

  Reason being that you want to have one table start to dick measure with the other. They want to order a medium sized show to begin with, probably, probably a little bit bigger than they anticipated. Cause they want a little bit of that conspicuous consumption going on. But then another table is like, yo, fuck that dude, get the Amex out. Let's, let's, let's wipe those guys under the table. And then you have this game back and forth. So in a couple of venues, they'll be opposite each other. Like the most antagonistic way that you could position people, but they're always going to be able to see each other. Because you want to create that competition.

• 11:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And let me pull this even a bit further in the theory, because we're all, I think we're all giving examples, good examples of instances where mimesis and metaphysical desire makes us converge. But the other, and I think people commonly misunderstand this in Gerard, the opposite is true as well. Metaphysical desire can also enable us to diverge from the group. Because it's almost the same extension of the same logic, right? The logic of metaphysical desire that I just said was do we want to acquire objects associated with models? With a heightened degree of being. Well, the inverse logic is true as well. We also want to distance ourselves away from objects associated with models with a deficiency of being.

• 12:34Speaker 00

  I mean, a trite way to say this is we want to wear the same brands of the sneakers as the cool kids in high school. But also want to make damn sure that we don't wear the same brands as the, as the not cool kids. Right. As a social outcast in high school. And so mimesis can equally lead us to diverge as it leads us to converge. And I think a great example here I'll, I'll give you is this, rather, I was in college and I had an acquaintance from freshman year. And he was very concerned with distributive justice, so think progressive economics. And, and I thought, you know, what a kind guy, he's always caring about the poor. And, you know, I got to know him a lot better. And this acquaintance confessed to me that in sophomore year, that he was actually very motivated by the hatred of his richer peers.

• 13:19Speaker 00

  Rather than the direct caring of, of the, of the, of the, of the poor. In fact, he grew up in a, he was a middle class and grew up in an upper middle class, sort of, you know. School district and it was out of that resentment that he basically just flipped the logic of the people that he resented on its head and and you know what's really funny with these types is he's now in investment banking right because he didn't have a problem with making a lot of money at all in fact the reason he loathed it so much was because he wanted it so much but there were people sort of stopping him there and so um the reason I thought this was important highlight is because I think our societies are very

• 14:00Speaker 00

  conscious of conformity as being inauthentic right as being determined by the group but there's a form of divergence from the group out of this resentment that I see proliferating in society today that is just as inauthentic and just as determined by the group no less than pure conformity and so mimesis and metaphysical desire really entrap us in every direction we go and this romantic line that Gerard thinks we're all in is that we have this authentic core of the self with these social layers added on and all we have to do is peel back these social layers but Gerard says not so fast you're confusing originality and difference for authenticity but that is not so and I just want to make sure that we highlight that as well.

• 14:44Chris Williamson?

  Is that the positive and negative mimesis is that how that's labeled?

• 14:49Speaker 00

  Yes precisely so there's a positive phase of mimesis where you're converging to the model and then there's a negative phase of mimesis where you want to diverge from the model.

• 14:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah it's um it's strange when you think about what the real motivations are for the things that you do how much how much is it that I'm believing the things that I believe or wanting the things that I want because other people want them or because other people that I don't like want them like how much am I pushing away from stuff I don't want to be like and how much am I going towards things that I do there's a Eric Weinstein calls it reflexive heterodoxy that whatever the mainstream narrative is whatever's opposite to that must be true because always the mainstream is lying and you go well. That's just as low resolution, like that's no more sophisticated. It's still a one and a zero.

• 15:40Chris Williamson?

  The only difference is you chose the zero instead of the one.

• 15:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Or another way to put it, the way I thought about it is one and negative one, right? You want to be not correlated, you want to be zero. You want to be like not correlated with the group. But instead you're just sort of flipping everything on its head. And my point is, and I think what you're saying is agreeing with this, in society, we can easily identify conformity as being inauthentic, as being determined by the group. But people are just starting to gain a sort of awareness of why a sort of carving one's own path and having a bold breaking away from the group can be just as fraught and inauthentic.

• 16:18Chris Williamson?

  Going back to the dating example, one of the common pieces of advice for people when they're creating their Tinder profile is to have photos with other women or other men. If you're a girl with other guys, if you're a guy with other girls, that shows that you are somebody that is already around the time. You don't want to choose like the worst looking friends that you've got, right? You're going to choose what look like high value friends.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you know, I don't think Gerard would have much more to say than the ground that we've already covered, right? We want to show people we consider to have a higher degree of being as already desiring us. And you know, this is the logic behind why, you know, more attractive and seemingly successful people are used behind advertisements, right?

• 17:07Chris Williamson?

  There's also a funny sort of cascading effect that you see. Someone that isn't a particularly good looking guy in celebrity culture will start to go out with some girl who is super hot. And everyone will go, hang on a second, what's he doing with her? That's a little bit strange. If they break up, his next three girlfriends are always absolute smoking hot winners. It's okay, why is that? Well, it's like, well, that person must have noticed something about this guy that nobody else was able to see. And then there's sort of this like memetic echo that goes over time because super high status girl number one, and then two and three and four.

• 17:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think you're really hitting at the intuition of the world and the very strange world that Gerard is leading us towards. It's not a world where we use reason, or even we use our own experience to really diligence things, to see the true essence of things, but it's a world of associations, right? That we make decisions through associations. And that, I think, is a trite and reductionist, but I think accurate intuition of what world we're stepping into.

• 18:16Chris Williamson?

  What drew you to Gerard? You've dedicated a lot of time to thinking and learning about one guy.

• 18:21Speaker 00

  You know, I grew up as a STEM science person, and I think a problem with the intellectual current of today is that we're underappreciating the social dimensions of the self. And this is an argument that you're going to hear from the left and the right, by the way. Maybe this will help. Plato had a conception of the soul as being consisting of three parts, right? There's appetite, we've discussed, desire for sex, for food, pleasure. There's reason, that we know very well. And then there's spirit, right?

• 19:05Speaker 00

  The soul, the part of the soul that desires social goods, honor, glory, fame. And if I, even if this concept is not reflective of the most sophisticated academic positions of the day, I think the popular cultural current conceives of humans completely removed of the spirited part of the soul. It conceives of humans as rational, utility-maximizing machines. And I think, you know, how many times have you heard this said in Silicon Valley? You know, "We're but robots trying to maximize happy chemicals squirting in our brains." Or take how GDP is important as a measure, almost like the ultimate measure of a country's sort of accomplishment, right? Because GDP is fundamentally that.

• 19:50Speaker 00

  It's the ability to quantify our appetite.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  And what I think Gerard does is Gerard's psychology really spells out the third, and you know, from my perspective, hidden part of human nature, and that's the social, spirited part. So put it another way, Gerard reveals the logic of our illogical part of ourselves, or he rationalizes our irrationalities. And this has devastating consequences, not just about how we ought to live our lives, but even in geopolitical events. An example that I gave you, and I gave in the first lecture where your listeners are more than welcome to listen to, it's out today, is China. Now, in the late, in the 90s and certainly

• 20:37Speaker 00

  in the 2000s, the dominant view of the West was that the economic liberalization of China would be welcomed by the world. And the long and short of the argument would be, you know, China's rise would also make the West richer through cheaper goods, and that people would be happy with this rise. Now, you can fundamentally see that the assumption here is that we are rational, utility-maximizing creatures. If we get three Oreos for $3, you know, we're less happy than if we get four Oreos for $3. But Gerard went against the public opinion. In 2007, this was the height of sino-American optimism, he went against the crowd, and he

• 21:16Speaker 00

  said that China's rise, that even if China did make the West richer, which is what ended up happening, as relativistic social creatures concerned more for social standing, the closing of the gap is what both parties will focus on. The Chinese will not be happy, be much happier that they are closer to Americans. Instead, the fact that they are closer makes them more envious. And the same is true for the West, that the fact that they are absolutely richer matters very little to a drop in relativistic comparison. And so it's this fundamentally different, alien, but I think more revealing lens of viewing humans, not as rational agents, but as social spirited creatures, is why Gerard was so pulled me in.

• 22:02Chris Williamson?

  Was that a big shock, given that you were coming from a STEM background?

• 22:06Speaker 00

  Oh, it was a tremendous shock, but it was also why it was, you know, really interesting. I feel like if I, you know, had grown up with that intuition in mind, then all of this would be obvious. And it kind of seems obvious to me now, right, after studying him for so long. But, uh, yeah, it was a tremendous shock. And, um, you know, Girard really is, and I can't emphasize this enough, attacking the fundamental pillars of the modern West. Because think about what the answer to the question, where does normative authority, where do we gain assurance of our values? Girard's answer is, the dominant force is through by looking at other people. But what does the modern West say? There's two answers. One, speaking in very broad strokes here, is the Enlightenment, reason.

• 22:51Speaker 00

  We use reason to figure that out. The other, again, very broadly here, Romanticism, that there's a core of authenticity. But as we already discussed, both Girard subsumes under the power of the social part of ourselves, that we are fundamentally social creatures. We are like co-vibrating violin strings. And this, uh, you know, we probably don't have time to talk about this, but the political implications are just tremendous and really, really earth-shattering for the modern West.

• 23:21Chris Williamson?

  How does understanding Girard make life better, then?

• 23:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the first thing I'll say is Girard is going to be very unsatisfying if you're looking for him to give you prescriptive answers. The real prescriptive answer that he tells you is to withdraw, to leave the world behind. In his later book, he would hold Holderlin, a 19th century German poet, who literally, pun intended, hold himself up in a tower for the last decades of his life, as the example of Par excellence. Now, I've obviously have not been satisfied with that response. I'm not held up in a tower. And so I thought a lot about the implications of his theory and how out we live, given that. And I had a few sort of broad-stroke answers here. The first answer I'll give is...

• 24:08Speaker 00

  Just the mere fact of gaining awareness of the social dimension of ourselves and the logic of mimesis is tremendously helpful. It's not helpful that it will stop making you be memetic right away, but it will give you the foresight to avoid bad situations, because you can see them coming from a mile away. And the analogy I like to use is, you know, there was a military theorist, John Boyd, and he said something like, I don't have to paraphrase, that great fighter pilots use their superior judgment to make sure they never have to get into situations to use their superior force. And I think the same is true for understanding memetic theory. It doesn't give you the ability to just snap your fingers and not be social creatures,

• 24:49Speaker 00

  but it does give you the foresight to see bad situations coming and potentially avoid it. So that's the first thing I'll say. Just rational understanding is tremendously helpful. The second thing I'll say is that these two separate desires, physical desire, right, the desire for the object, activity in itself, the desire for experience, metaphysical desire, desire for being. For Gerard, this metaphysical desire, I'm sorry, this physical desire will not always be in good, right? You can be gluttonous and that can ruin you. But this metaphysical desire is almost always bad. That'll just lead you from one wild goose hunt to the next. And so one immediate and quite a simple conclusion there is, well, let's find activities where I like in and of itself, right?

• 25:33Speaker 00

  And for me, this was switching from, and again, both degrees, but switching from CS to philosophy. And I think it's helpful for our listeners to conceive of these two desires as really fighting for real estate. And so the more you push one, or the more that a physical desire is there, the less you have to draw on for metaphysical desire. And so for me, switching to an activity, philosophy, that was much more interesting to me. It meant that I didn't have to pull on the motivational forces of social prestige and social affirmation as much. So that's the second way.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  The third is, you know, one can decrease metaphysical desire directly. And I think there's two ways to do that. And remember, metaphysical desire is simply a very prideful drive, right? Wanting to be greater than life. And I think of two ways to do that. One is failure. If you have ever just failed so hard in an activity that you feel your entire ego and self is shattered, anyone who's gone through something like that knows that there's an, you know, opportunity to be more humble and let go of pride. But I think the inverse is true as well. It's to achieve the thing that you always wanted to do and see it as deeply lacking, right? This, uh, this, the way out is through, so to speak. Almost a form of personal accelerationism.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  And the last thing I'll probably say is,

• 27:01Speaker 00

  if you think that you can escape from mimesis, from wanting recognition, then you really haven't realized how deeply this drive is embedded into the human nature. That you would fundamentally be, uh, irreconizable without it. It's like asking, you know, what would a human look like if they didn't breathe? Right? It's just, it's just constitutive of what a human is. And so what I would warn people, um, and this is what I also was trying to get at with negative imitation, uh, negative mimesis, is that don't try to be a loner. The solution isn't to escape from all forms of social construction,

• 27:40Speaker 00

  but to find a type of social construction that, from a sober perspective, influences and directs you to the type of desires that you actually want. Practically speaking, uh, it's, you know, finding a bunch of friends who also like to do philosophy with you, or whatever your sort of passion is. Um, and so those are the things that I would, uh, that I would say, like, how, what are the immediate things that we can do from this theory?

• 28:07Chris Williamson?

  Is mimesis falsifiable? This seems a little bit to me like you do the thing that everybody else does, that's mimesis. You do the thing opposite to everybody else does, that's negative mimesis. It seems to me a little bit like Gerard might have been a bit sort of sneaky with his unfalsifiable theory here.

• 28:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a great question, but the first thing I'll say is not every act is mediated by the group, right? Again, you can pursue sex for pleasure itself, not because of what it says about you or not because of any sort of social force. So there's a large swath of activity that is neither positive nor negative mimesis, right? So we don't have to, in other words, we don't have to label everything as positive and negative mimesis. But I think you bring up a very interesting and broader point, which is what is the nature of proof in Gerard? And I think when you get to these philosophical theories, as you do Hegel or maybe Nietzsche,

• 29:09Speaker 00

  I think the only form of proof that is available, perhaps, I might walk back on that statement, but I think the only, or the strongest form of proof available is introspection, right? What Gerard is saying here is he's giving you almost a literary argument. You know, "I'm gonna write these 20 books about human nature and you go read them, but just humor me when you read them. Just pretend that they're true and apply them to your life and see whether it's revealing or not." And through that process, the real force of proof comes from revelation, right? It becomes revelatory, that it's able to explain phenomena and direct you in ways that actually end up working.

• 29:54Speaker 00

  That's the first thing I'll say. And that's where the power of Gerard really came from, me and how I got convinced, was introspection. But in terms of mimesis, there actually has been empirical work done on this. I'm blanking on the name of the scientist. But there was studies of babies and they showed how, you know, babies started imitating the facial features of humans, of other adults, ever since, you know, 25 minutes old.

• 30:27Speaker 00

  And there's, you know, I think in the late 20th century, there was a big boom in neuroscience with mirror neurons. And some Girardians have used that as the biological basis of mimesis. So there are sort of those empirical routes that one can take. And I think, you know, if I dedicated my life to studying this, that I really should take. But for me, at least, to answer the question of why Girard was worth engaging, for me, the sort of introspection was more than enough for me to continue engaging.

• 30:58Chris Williamson?

  It seems like Girard's view of human nature is not

• 31:06Chris Williamson?

  not as vulnerable or fallible. It seems like we're incredibly fallible in his eyes.

• 31:14Speaker 00

  Oh, terribly so.

• 31:15Chris Williamson?

  I would say. But talk to me, you've read his work, it's been hugely influential on you. It's taken you from being this sort of super rational STEM person to a slightly less rational, but perhaps a little bit more rounded philosophy person. How do you feel enlightened or fulfilled by a theory which kind of points the finger at you and says how easily fallible you are?

• 31:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's a great question.

• 31:45Speaker 00

  And I can give two answers. One is, how has that changed my view to society? And the other is, how has it changed my view to myself? And I'll answer the first one first, because I think it's more interesting.

• 32:05Speaker 00

  What Gerard is doing here is he's giving us a theodicy. As you can see, and as we already covered in the brief 30, 40 minutes, he thinks that humans, to your point, are deeply fallible, so much so that he's giving us a psychology of original sin, what it means to be fallen creatures, right? This idea that we're motivated by an unrelenting drive that we can never satisfy, that we're not even aware of, that we say we want to be an investment banker, but we really don't want that, we want something else? That's a terrible, terrible thing, right? And it only gets worse and worse. There's so many different social pathologies, like, or psychological social pathologies, like masochism and bipolarity, that Gerard identifies as not just contingent,

• 32:49Speaker 00

  not as accidental, but as always existing in human nature. Gerard rejects this modern second analytical approach to label certain diseases as discreet things. You know, you're schizophrenic or you're not, you're bipolar or you're not. Instead, he sees all of human nature as one of, on a degree of pathology, that we're all masochistic, we're all bipolar. Now, I would actually argue, and this might be, but it might be weird, but hear me out, that this is quite a liberating and hopeful way to view society. And the reason is, let me give you, let me give you an example. So Gerard's argument for why, you know, alienation and fetishization, you know, these are two concepts that Marxist thinkers are very concerned with.

• 33:32Speaker 00

  His Gerard's argument is that both of these things are not due to the structure of capital, but due to the structure of human nature. And I think it's very easy to see, right? What is fetishization? It's a desire for the object more than what the object can give us. Well, that's just metaphysical desire, right? And what is alienation? It's alienating the best qualities of ourselves into an object, reasoning, once we get close to that object, we will attain it. Again, that's just metaphysical desire. And so Gerard would say, to Marxists, for example... That, you know, you're right in identifying that alienation and fetishization exist in contemporary capitalism. And you're even right that they're channeled through capitalism.

• 34:14Speaker 00

  But you'd be deluded in thinking that they're caused by capitalism. Their roots are much deeper in fundamental human condition. And that is what happened when people tried to liberate themselves from capitalism, right? The alienation from the process of labor in British coal mines became the alienation from the Soviet factories. And so, what Gerard is doing here is giving a fundamentally fallen picture of human nature that sees many social pathologies as natural to the human condition. But then, I know, Chris, the question in your mind must be, why is Jonathan saying that this is a good thing? Why is it helping him reconcile it with the world?

• 34:57Speaker 00

  It allows us to see the world and say, this is all that humans can be, and allows us to affirm it. Let me give you the opposite sort of argument here. You know, I heard this one, you know, progressive newspaper line about sort of Asians being very upset that their names were mispronounced. And, you know, obviously, I, you know, as an immigrant myself, I've had those experiences, and it doesn't feel good. But what I found really odd about that argument is that people can't really make certain sounds after the critical stage of language acquisition of seven, right?

• 35:38Speaker 00

  So what they're upset about, that, you know, Europeans or people who grew up in European languages can't pronounce certain Chinese sounds, like my name Yingjie is actually very hard to pronounce, like people have really tremendous trouble. They say ji instead of jie. So I'm a, you know, I've been through this. But what I found really odd about this progressive article is they're really complaining about something that really can't be changed. Right, because critical language acquisitions have, you know, ends at age seven. So you really, there's no possible world where people do pronounce all of Asian names perfectly correctly.

• 36:17Speaker 00

  And I think what is underlying a lot of contemporary progressivism today is overly optimistic view of human nature. Right, and Girard would attribute this view to Rousseau, that this sort of perfected state of nature that society corrupts. Now, whereas, does that make sense?

• 36:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 36:38Speaker 00

  So it's the, the original sin as gives us a lowered expectation of what we can expect from ourselves and society to make our existing society actually affirmable by reason. So that we don't go and look at the first sign of alienation or fetishization or impression and inequality and say, we gotta tear the whole system down. And I think that's a common intuition, a common critical intuition into contemporary society.

• 37:04Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so the fact that fundamentally in Girard's theory, he sees humans as fallible creatures kind of fall. And he gets into theology a little bit later in his career as well. And I imagine that he's drawn some quite nice lines between his psychology and his theology work. The fact that he's got that is like a meta-comment around the fact that humans are, his view of human nature is fallible and the solution to our fallibility is first to recognize the fact that we are fallible. So the red pill that he's shoving down everybody's throats is like, it's the thing that they need to actually be able to understand in order for them to be able to see. But I guess the, I just, I just hoped that it would be more hopeful, you know?

• 37:47Chris Williamson?

  Like being told that I'm ruthlessly at the mercy of the high status people in my society and I'm either going to positively go toward what they want or negatively go away from whatever the opposite of those people are, what they want. How have you, talk to me about you, practical, applicable ways that you operate in your life in a Girardian sense?

• 38:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, so maybe let me make just one more comment about this sort of social theodicy that we've been talking about. The first thing I'll say is Girard thinks that human nature is fundamentally fallen, so there's a limit to the goodness of a society that we can build. But certainly, that does not mean that we should just stomach all forms of badness. Certainly, that does not mean we look at slavery and we say, "Oh, there's oppression everywhere, you know, let's move on, let's affirm that." That is not the case. I think what Girard is doing is more negative. He's saying, "If you take a perfectible view of human nature, no society that you're going to design is really going to live up to that, and you're going to end in this critical loophole

• 38:55Speaker 00

  where you're just going to start critiquing everything and think that is sufficient for the impetus of change." Well, that is not so. But I just wanted to clarify that, that this sort of argument is not also an argument for complacency, but just placing a fundamental limit on how good a human society can be. In terms of your other question, I think this is probably my fault. I probably exaggerated the determinism that Girard attributes to humanity. I think maybe, this is going to be reductive, but I think hopefully illuminating, the one-liner

• 39:30Speaker 00

  here is, we have agency in choosing our social circumstance, but not necessarily how we will behave in those social circumstances, if that makes sense.

• 39:45Chris Williamson?

  Does this go back to the John Boyd example about the fact that you can foresee things? Okay, so the argument here is that mimesis and our desire to be like the people that are successful and push away from the people that aren't, these are very difficult for us to deprogram, if possible at all. One of the choices that we have is to retreat to a cabin in the woods and completely fuck off. Another solution is for us to stack the deck in our favor with the foresight that memetic desire is going to come through, and the way that we stack the deck is to be around people that we genuinely want ourselves to be like. Is that right?

• 40:26Speaker 00

  Kind of, kind of, um, so, yes, it's fundamentally, the conclusion of Gerard is one must design one's social environment, right?

• 40:37Chris Williamson?

  How?

• 40:38Speaker 00

  In one way, yeah, so, so, one way, and this is not necessarily social, again, I'll emphasize, is do what you like, physical desire. Because again, physical and metaphorical desire are competing interests, right? Take the example of Joseph Campbell, hero of a thousand faces. He, uh, basically left his PhD program at Columbia, I, I think, and he just went into the woods and had read for ten years. Now, he was only able to do that without any social validation, because he loved the activity in and of itself. And for me and Gerard, for a period at least, that was how I felt about Gerard. I wasn't thinking about going on these podcasts or, or, or working on a book-length project, but it was, it was so helpful and illuminating and fun for me to wrestle with Gerard into

• 41:21Speaker 00

  the mud, um, that, that I, I would be fine with little social affirmation. And I think, I think you see this with dating as well, right? I mean, some people, they clearly want partners so that other people can see them with them. And that's where they derive most of the value. Trophy wives or husbands are the most extreme example of this. But if you find someone that you genuinely love hanging out in and of itself, and this goes the same for friendships, then, then you can diminish the amount you have to lean on, uh, those memetic impulses.

• 41:53Chris Williamson?

  What about desires that we have, physical desires, that aren't adaptive or are malignant or shouldn't be there, that need that memetic sense to curb some of them? So let's say that somebody likes stealing, they love the thrill of, um, robbing other stores. The memetic impulse that they have from other people who say, maybe you shouldn't do that, that's a good influence, that's tamping down a physical desire that somebody has, which actually needs restricting. And in that way, the mimesis is something that they shouldn't try and avoid, but something that they should actually try and lean into.

• 42:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, Gerard doesn't bring these punitive or corrective examples up a lot. And frankly, I haven't thought a lot about them. But I think that would be, that would be a good solution. In fact, the sort of closest thing that I thought about, given the example that you gave, was actually about how to educate my future children. And it's very hard for people to love knowledge in and of itself. You know, some people eventually get there. But in order to do so, you're gonna have to do a lot of training, right? To get there, and that training is often not enjoyable at all. So I think this memetic desire to be can be that impulse, that drive, to get you over that hump, so those physical desires can come in.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  And that's very close to your example here, right? The memetic forces acting as a crutch, if you will, before those physical desires come in. And another good example here is, Chris, as I'm sure you know, is working out or weightlifting or any form of sports. It's quite unsatisfying for the first few months when you're doing a sport because you're not very good at it. But if you have a desire to be, if you want to be like Ronaldo or Messi or LeBron James, that then that can get you over the hump. Again, this is us creatively interpreting Gerard, which I'm all fan of. But Gerard himself is very clear that even in these instances, metaphysical desire is still fundamentally bad because it's still fundamentally motivated by a lie. But that's not to say it can have very important and positive consequences.

• 43:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's strange to think about what are the impacts that you get from other people that pull you along in a good way? So for instance, going to the gym, a lot of people might go to the gym because of the way that it makes them look to other people. Now, the byproduct of them going to the gym and them looking good to other people, they're gonna be healthier, they're gonna live longer, they're gonna have higher bone density and muscle mass and the myriad of things that you get out of exercise. But... That is, I guess that that's just a fluke. That's a fluke that the metaphysical desire of the signal that going to the gym and the sort of body that you get happens to align with something which is physically good for yourself.

• 44:40Speaker 00

  Line.

• 44:41Chris Williamson?

  And I would guess the sort of race to the bottom and the way that groups of people tend to converge on stuff, a lot of the time, the metaphysical desire that emerges as a collective isn't necessarily what's optimal for the individual on their own. There's a blog post called "What Do You Want to Want?" by Kyle Leish and Rhoda, and I must quote it once a week to people, right?

• 45:05Speaker 00

  I have to read it, yeah.

• 45:06Chris Williamson?

  And he asks the question, "What do you want to want?" Now, that's a really interesting question. Not "What do you want?", "What do you want to want?", what are the desires that you want yourself to have? And it's the same as the, is it Aristotle or Seneca or someone that says, "If a man knows not where he sails, no wind is favorable."

• 45:26Speaker 00

  Hmm, right.

• 45:28Chris Williamson?

  And the problem that you have is you can't turn the wind off, right? There's always going to be wind and there's always going to be destinations, but if you're not careful, if you don't look at your desires, if you don't assess where you are and genuinely what you want to want from life, you can end up in a place not only that you didn't mean to get to, but that you don't even want to be.

• 45:48Speaker 00

  Yes, and so, that's all great, and I think you're hitting on core Girardian intuitions. And the landscape where he discusses this is actually in the political culture of the day. So, the long story short is that in pagan society, he thinks that there was memetic pressures to kill victims, and in contemporary society, there's memetic pressure to protect victims. Now, Gerard would say that today, someone who's trying to protect victims out of mimesis is fundamentally better than someone converging to a worse form of mimesis, trying to kill victims. But it's still mimesis nonetheless.

• 46:28Speaker 00

  And maybe to project it into your example that you gave, we can say that maybe a good outcome is if metaphysical desire overlays with physical desire. However, insofar as you are pushed by metaphysical desire, I would wager that you are not fully your own man or woman. Because if the... As you say, the winds slightly tilt another way. And instead of, you know, working out, it's, I don't know, jumping off a cliff or something like that. Then you will be equally leaned towards that. So to your point, the success is trivial or accidental. Now, another problem that comes with this approach of being motivated by metaphysical desire,

• 47:11Speaker 00

  even if it's to a direction that you want, is twofold. One, you may overdo the thing, right? Think about, you know, bodybuilders injecting, you know, if you don't do it for health, you're doing it for to show off. And you can easily go above and beyond what health dictates and actually harm your health, as you well know. And the other thing, and this is, I think, why Gerard thinks it's fundamentally bad, is it's very tiring to be motivated by that force. And I think anyone who's been motivated by such a social force can discuss that or can relate to this, that when you lose, it's a sort of existential despair. And when you win, it's not sort of an overabundant, overflowing, everlasting joy,

• 47:55Speaker 00

  but almost a sense of relief. And so we may say that it's better for metaphysical desire to be directed at good things and to align your physical desire. There's still fundamental problems with being motivated by it, or at the very least, it too much.

• 48:09Chris Williamson?

  In that same blog post, What Do You Want to Want? He talks about how other people's heads is a terrible place for your self-worth to live. That a lot of the time, when people do things now, they're not doing them for the joy of themselves. They're doing them for what it says about them. They're doing it for the tweets that are then subsequently going to come or the likes or the comments on an Instagram page. And it is incredibly fragile when you think about the fact that you could do something, not because you want to do it, but because you think other people will like the fact that you've done it. That does basically put your entire sense of self-worth and fulfillment and direction in life in the hands of other people. Now, I had a discussion with Michael Malice, my mate,

• 48:52Chris Williamson?

  and he said he believes that a large proportion of the population fundamentally doesn't have agency or a personality and that these people are better off trying to model people that have been successful because if they were left to their own devices, they would get things wrong. He has a very, even less hopeful view, I think, of human nature than Gerard does. But his point is...

• 49:21Chris Williamson?

  As far as he's concerned, a lot of people are idiots, and therefore, they would fuck up if you left them on their own. What they need to do is to actually model off people that do know what they're doing, because that's going to have this trickle-down effect of at least making the people at the bottom a little bit less shit.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, um, this is, I think, if I may reframe our conversation as any annoying analytical philosopher does, we've discussed before, how can metaphysical desire, even though ultimately bad, be good for the individual, right? That it can, you know, push us to work out and get us over the hump, where physical desire can take over. But now, I think what you're asking is, but how can it be good for society? And this is a question that Gerard himself really has to wrestle with, because Gerard, despite being a Christian, believes in human evolution. And so there must be a functional value-

• 50:13Chris Williamson?

  It's got to be adaptive.

• 50:14Speaker 00

  For metaphysical desire. What is that functional value? Gerard basically thinks, or rather, I think, I read into Gerard that

• 50:25Speaker 00

  metaphysical desire and mimesis help us organize in very, very large groups. Have you ever read Sapiens by any chance?

• 50:34Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 50:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, so in it, right, it describes a competition between Homo erectus and Neanderthal, to us, Homo sapiens. And I think one of the big differences, I may butcher this, is that erectus and Homo sapiens, I'm sorry, erectus and Neanderthal, can only organize up to a certain limit, right? Uh, this is, I don't know if it's Dunbar's number, but there's a fundamental limit. Whereas humanity is able to, we're still 7 billion people, and we're still somewhat successfully organized. What is that? Gerard's answer here is that we are not special as creatures because of our ability to gain access to truth. Animals do this all the time, echolocation, magnetic fields. We are special because we can believe in lies,

• 51:20Speaker 00

  insofar as we look around and see other people believing in lies as well. Now, the less provocative way of saying that is we can use mimesis to spin up helpful fictions. The Greek gods, fiat money, cryptocurrencies, to organize massive amounts of society and to sort of structure society beyond Dunbar's number. It's our ability to believe in lies and follow the herd that is what got humanity here today. And one more thing that I would like to point your readers to, excellent book written by the professor I studied with called Rousseau's Theodicy. And Rousseau identifies a very similar drive, like metaphysical desire and mimesis, he called

• 52:02Speaker 00

  it amour prop, the desire for self-esteem, for social recognition. And to quote him, I'm gonna paraphrase, "To this we must attribute all of our rapists, all of our criminals, all of the worst of humanity, but also our entrepreneurs, our artists, and our great generals. To this drive, all of humanity, what makes humanity interesting, we must attribute." And that is really how core mimesis and metaphysical desire is, that it can be amazing for societies, that it could be greatly helpful of individuals, but Gerard thinks it is ultimately suffocating for the person who is motivated by it.

• 52:38Chris Williamson?

  One of the first times, I think, I ever heard Gerard be spoken about was Peter Thiel. So I recently went and facilitated a conversation with him a couple of weeks ago, which was very nice, he was very lovely, we had a good chat. But I wonder why it is that so many people in positions of power hold Gerard in high regard. He's like the sort of hot new girl philosopher of Silicon Valley at the moment.

• 53:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's true. And I think, you know, the first thing I'll say is that there's probably a form of memetic, memetic theory going on here that, and this is certainly how I got into memetic theory, is wanting to be like Peter, right? And obviously, I had other role models growing up, you know, George Soros, Ray Dalio, these people who are able to combine, you know, very interesting ways of thinking with worldly action, but Peter was definitely up there. And I definitely got into Gerard in the very beginning through Peter. And I think that's true for probably most people you see of wanting to be like him.

• 53:48Speaker 00

  Now, this is quite interesting, a phenomenon, I would say, because, you know, any other theory, to say that

• 53:57Speaker 00

  You like it just because other people like it is a negative to that theory. Oh, you know, you you you just like David Graeber because other people like David Graeber. But one is hard to say the same about memetic theory because that's exactly what memetic theory predicts, right? Because i- if you're saying like, look, memetic theory really has very little value. Then you're like, well, why do people like it? Oh, because other people like it. Then you're like, well, then it does have a lot of value.

• 54:22Chris Williamson?

  Fucking unfalsifiable, man. I told you this earlier on.

• 54:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Now, the the the other thing that I'll say here is, I I think we shouldn't shy away from such a genealogy. For example, that, you know, I I got into a thing because of mediation. As we've discussed already with education, with working out, many of the times we we do get into a thing not knowing what the physical experience is, right? And it's almost a tautology, because how can you know what the thing is before you get into it? Now, I think what's important is whether you whether you're still mediated by that, right? Going forward, or or like me, you know, you just gained a love for the the subject itself. But I think there's another answer beyond this. And I think we'd be giving Peter too much credit if we say, you know, it's it's just Peter.

• 55:10Speaker 00

  Now, my answer isn't going to take the shape of saying there's something important and crucial about memetic theory, which I think there is, that makes people successful. Instead, I think that there is a confounding variable that leads people both to both to success and memetic theory. Does the shape of my answer before I actually give it make make sense? That it's not the method gives us something. It's that something leads people who are already predisposed to success to memetic theory. And I think the answer there is arrogance and pride and delusion. Now, I'm gonna have to give you two arguments here, why I think that's necessary for for worldly success or helpful for worldly success. And the other is, you know, why people like that are attracted to Gerard. I'll give the second one first, it's easier to give.

• 55:55Speaker 00

  As we mentioned, this desire to be, metaphysical desire, is a yearning to exist in great measure. I think then that Gerard's psychology is incredibly limited. And what it describes really, really well is the psychology of the prideful person. Think about it, what are Gerard's canonical examples? Clausewitz, Holderlin, Napoleon, Don Quixote, right? The Casanova's and the Coquet's of the world, people who are really, really prideful. And the type of psychology that Gerard describes, you know, envy at the slightest tremor, and existential despair as, you know, you glance at your friend and he's doing slightly better than you. Well, some of us may share that to a degree.

• 56:36Speaker 00

  It's only the people who are extremely prideful who sort of really experience that. So Gerard is really giving us the psychology of pride here. And I think people who are naturally prideful and arrogant, such as myself, when I came to Gerard, we naturally gravitate towards this theory because it explains us so well. You know, Nietzsche tells us that, you know, the philosophies we choose to write, far beyond an objective capture of human nature, is actually a deeply subjective confession of who we actually are. Well, I will add to that, then so must be the philosophies we choose to read, right? We naturally gravitate towards the types of psychology and phenomenological experience that conforms to our own.

• 57:19Speaker 00

  And so I think people who are prideful and arrogant are more attracted to Gerard because that he describes a psychology of pride. Now, I have to proceed on my second prong of my argument for why I think, because I've drawn the link with pride to memetic theory, now I have to draw the link between pride and worldly success. And I think the way I'm going to do this is by drawing an example, or let me give you a few examples of why I think pride, arrogance, delusion are not necessary, certainly helpful for worldly success. Think about what you would have said if you were Yilan's friend

• 58:01Speaker 00

  and he told you he wanted to not only, you know, change the way that cars were powered, but also send a rocket to Mars. Right, think about what you'd have said to Peter and Joe when they were starting Palantir. And this is what people said, "You're gonna sell government, you're gonna sell the CIA software? That's ridiculous." Right, and you know, this is not only true for worldly action in industry, but also for philosophy. You know, so I've been told, you know, Adorno and Horkheimer, the founders of the Frankfurt School, you know, tremendous influence on the political left, were extremely arrogant, you know, believing in themselves in their 30s to have cognized, um, sort of, you know, the lot, fundamental logic of philosophy, or something like that.

• 58:43Speaker 00

  And in my own life, you know, I would consider myself, you know, somewhat successful, and again, all the most important moves, right, I was a middling student in China, going to a public school in Canada, and I wanted to get in Ivy League. I wanted to study CS as an international kid, and I wanted a full ride. And I was delusional, and people thought that I was delusional. The same thing with Gerard. You know, as a 20-year-old, you're gonna tell me you're gonna read all of Gerard's canon by yourself, and you're gonna create a lecture series, and you're gonna title, you have the arrogance to title your book, "Completing Gerard" as your, as your first book? What ridiculous arrogance is that? You know, we'll, we'll see whether this ends up being a laughing stock or not, but the

• 59:23Speaker 00

  point is, it's almost in the nature of success to conceive of oneself as greater than one currently is, to be prideful, to be arrogant, to be delusional. And I think we can find philosophical grounding for this argument in one of my favorite essays, Nietzsche's "Uses and Abuses of History for Life." In it, he argues, "The fundamental place of action in, in the world comes from a place of untruth. A delusion in one's ability, and a delusion in how important achieving that thing is gonna make me feel, and a delusion in the importance of that thing to the world. We need to be deluded to have that extra boost to carry it forward." And I think once framed in this light, this actually ties back very nicely to what we discussed about metaphysical desire.

• 1:00:09Speaker 00

  If you're just in there to lift... To be healthy, but I'm lifting because the nature of my existence is dependent on it. Then I'm probably gonna beat you because I'm just gonna be so much more motivated. Now Gerard thinks that I'm gonna have a worse life than you, but that, but we're not talking about good or bad lives. We're talking about worldly success here, right? So that is the shape of my argument, that there's a layer of mimesis, mostly through Peter, that brings people into Girardian theory and people stay there because it captures the psychology of pride, which is also what I think to be unnecessary, if not deeply helpful, psychology for worldly success.

• 1:00:47Chris Williamson?

  Well, pride and arrogance are one hell of a fuel source to drive you forward.

• 1:00:52Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 1:00:53Chris Williamson?

  And you're right that the interesting thing about imposter syndrome is that a lot of the time it's justified, especially when you're trailblazing. This was what Seth Godin said. He's like, look, if you've never done a thing before, imposter syndrome isn't some maladaptive psychological trait. It's a realistic positioning of your capacities and the challenges that you're coming up against.

• 1:01:17Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:01:17Chris Williamson?

  Now, the problem is if you continue to disprove it in the real world and then it persists. That's imposter adaptation, which is a malignant version of it. But imposter syndrome is just you knowing what you've done before and then looking at the challenge in front of you and going, I haven't done that. I don't really know. So what you're saying is that arrogance, pride, sort of a self-belief deceit, all of this, what it does is it enables to people, people to think above and beyond what their capacities are now.

• 1:01:49Speaker 00

  In the current moment.

• 1:01:50Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  Precisely. And again, right, this can go terribly, terribly wrong. And for each Elon, we can point to, you know, 100 Elizabeth Holmes.

• 1:01:59Chris Williamson?

  Selection, whatever is survivorship bias.

• 1:02:01Speaker 00

  Survivorship bias, right. So I'm not making the argument that, you know, all you have to do is be delusional and prideful. You obviously have to be very, very skilled to eventually justify that delusion. But I think the argument I'm making is that, you know, that specific forms of delusion, of untruth, of a refusal to meet with reality in the moment is deeply, deeply, you know, helpful for worldly activity.

• 1:02:24Chris Williamson?

  Well, it seems to be that way. You know, you see or hear these guys speak and I think this is as well, one of the reasons why when people hear, you know, George Soros or Bill Gates or these, you know, people that have become incredibly wealthy or powerful, when they hear them speak, there is a little bit of a suspicion that they're part of some reptilian race or a new world order that's trying to take over everything because it seems quite detached, right? Remember that these people have selected for the top 1% of the top 1% of the top 1% of pretty much everything that you need to get yourself there. In fact, cool story, one of my friends in Austin works for a recruitment company recruiting high-powered executives for startups,

• 1:03:05Chris Williamson?

  right? So this guy has access to the hitters of the hitters for the biggest companies and the fastest growing startups in the world. And he was telling me that he was able to go into the files that they had and go back to see a bunch of executives that are now at huge companies and read their files from five or 10 years ago. So the way that they do their interviews is they sit down for between five and 10 hours and they just talk. There's a framework that they follow, but it's not qualifications and stuff. It's personality. It's attributes. It's traits, right? And I was like, okay, so tell me what it's like. Could you go back and see that the people that are super successful now were going

• 1:03:47Chris Williamson?

  to be super successful? So that's interesting. Yes, you can. The people that get to, you don't get onto this list without being some sort of beast, but the people that were the absolute best stood out way before, in a five-hour or 10-hour conversation, they already stood out amongst a sea of incredibly competent people as being superbly competent. So he said he went back and looked at Tim Cook that they'd had, now the CEO of Apple, and the first word on Tim Cook's report was stood. The first word was stood. Susanna Wasdicky that looks after YouTube, rock star, was the first word on that. And he's like, this isn't how most peoples were written. So you were able to see that the hitters of the

• 1:04:30Chris Williamson?

  hitters were already going to do it. They stood out in the space of five hours.

• 1:04:35Speaker 00

  And how does this tie back to our current conversation? You're saying that their arrogance, pride, even at that moment, was somewhat justified? Or like, it's not justified by their current achievement, but by their clear potential?

• 1:04:50Chris Williamson?

  Yes, precisely. Like, most people that go into a job interview, they're trying to play themselves up. But I don't know whether even the most competent person would come out with rock star or stud written on their interview notes. But you have to exude a degree of self-belief and confidence. And the other thing is that everybody else knows that they need to play up their skills, too. So this person is having to pitch themselves above and beyond not only where they're at, not only where everybody else is at, but even higher than that again. And this isn't saying that Tim Cook went and lied during his interview, but just the fact that he was able to... And these people that are interviewing him, they're trained at picking out shysters, right?

• 1:05:34Chris Williamson?

  They're trained at picking out people that are selling snake oil. And they didn't find any. And then Tim Cook goes on to be the CEO of Apple. And then Susanna goes on to go and look after YouTube.

• 1:05:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. The one thing I'd be curious to go back and see, of all the ones that started with stud and rock star, what were the false negatives? But that's a separate thing. I think, maybe to give your listeners another Girardian insight here, Girard is very interested in why narcissism is such a great mating strategy, in both men and women. In men, it's been more obvious, but in women, it's the... Girard conceives it as a coquette, or the fundamental woman seducer. What worries the man, it's the danhuan. And Girard's analysis is quite interesting. For most of us, our metaphysical desires are pointed outwards.

• 1:06:29Speaker 00

  We want to be Tim Cook, we want to be... We want to run YouTube. But for the narcissist, Girard describes them as their desires pointing inwards, as a desire for themselves, of who they already are, that they're already full. And mimesis comes into play, because you then imitate that desire. And so the way to translate that into plain language is, if I'm confident in myself, then you're going to be like... What does he know about himself? Right? It's kind of like that example with the guy and the hot woman. What do the hot women know? Instead, here, it's one person. What does he know about himself? Why is he so confident? And so I think, again, it's these revelatory insights in one logical framework that slowly

• 1:07:13Speaker 00

  converts you, rather than any empirical proof.

• 1:07:17Chris Williamson?

  What's the main thing that people should take away from today?

• 1:07:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. Maybe if not the key thing of memetic theory, a key thread underlying all of our discussions today, and why, I imagine, as a listener, it might be so unsatisfying, is that we live, if Gerard is correct, in a deeply ambivalent world. We live in a world where this fundamental motivational force can bring civilizations and an entire species into prosperity and glory, where it can bring you to new heights, but it's also something that can pull you down, make you existentially frustrated, that can direct you. And so maybe the one thing to take away is that there's no real simple answers here.

• 1:08:16Speaker 00

  And unlike Gerard, I don't think this metaphysical desire is something we always must renounce. It's something, I think, much more similar to what you're saying, that I'm actually experimenting and playing around with. Maybe the last thing I'll leave us with, then, is that we live in a world of very difficult trade-offs, and life is about fundamentally understanding the parameters and navigating those trade-offs.

• 1:08:44Chris Williamson?

  Jonathan B., ladies and gentlemen, you've got a new lecture series out that is on Gerard. Where can people get that?

• 1:08:50Speaker 00

  On my website. Let's conclude it in the show notes. We're going to release one episode every, let's say, five to seven weeks. First episode is out already. We would love to hear what people think about.

• 1:09:03Chris Williamson?

  That's going to be linked in the show notes below. Jonathan, I appreciate you, man. And next time that we're out in Austin, we'll have a fight with a hobo and get some tacos and stuff done.

• 1:09:11Speaker 02

  Awesome. Thanks, Chris. Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:09:22Speaker 03

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• 1:09:33Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:09:37Speaker 02

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:09:38Speaker 03

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