#989 David Perell & Johnathan Bi on Understanding Modern Memetics From René Girard

In this episode, I speak to David Perell & Johnathan Bi. They have recently released a new multi-episode discussion on the work of philosopher René Girard. This is a fascinating conversation around memetics and how the affect everything in our lives. ======================= Bullish is a powerful new exchange for digital assets that offers deep liquidity, automated market making, and industry-leading security. Combining the innovations of DeFi with the regulated environment of traditional finance, Bullish empowers users to trade with certainty and earn passively at scale across variable market conditions, in an environment backed by multibillion-dollar liquidity contributions from the Bullish Treasury. Visit bullish.com/pomp today to learn more. Note: Bullish is licensed by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission. Virtual assets and related products are high risk. Consult your investment advisor and trade responsibly. Bullish is available in select locations only and not to U. S persons. Visit bullish.com/legal for important information and risk warnings. ======================= Unstoppable Domains launched an awesome feature to level-up your U-D Profile: Badges! They translate wallet activity into achievements so celebrating, re-living, and sharing your crypto story has never been easier. Before, these stories were buried in transaction logs, making them difficult to find, read, and understand. But since U-D Badges are awarded based on your wallet activity, they’re a super fun, easy way to build on-chain reputation just by doing what you do, like supporting N-F-T projects, collecting domains, or holding cryptos. UD owners can activate badges from their account profile page right now. Haven’t minted an NFT domain yet? Go to http://UnstoppableDomains.com right now to own your name, starting as low as five dollars. ======================= The Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. Go to https://www.eightsleep.com/Pomp to check out the Pod Pro Cover and save $150 at checkout. Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, and the UK. =======================

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. In this conversation, I talked to Jonathan Bai and David Perel. We spent a lot of time unpacking Rene Girard, his ideas, and how they relate to society today. David and Jonathan have done a ton of work on Girard and those ideas, and I really enjoyed listening to a bunch of the work that they've done. In this conversation, we try to unpack some of the ideas and why it's important to you and your life. I really hope that you enjoyed this conversation, as I did. Before we get into this episode, though, I first want to talk to our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Bullish. Bullish has reinvented the digital asset

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• 1:28Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Before, these stories were buried in transaction logs that were hard to read, making them difficult to find and understand as well. But since unstoppable domain badges are awarded based on your wallet activity, they're a super fun, easy way to build on-chain reputation just by doing what you do, like supporting NFT projects, collecting domains, or holding crypto. Unstoppable domain owners can activate badges from their account profile page right now. If you haven't minted an NFT domain yet, go to unstoppabledomains.com right now to own your name, starting as low as $5. Again, head over to unstoppabledomains.com right now to get started. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep is the single best product that I have purchased over the last three years. It completely changed my life. I'm not joking. Pay attention.

• 2:57Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:33Speaker 01

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

• 3:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Jonathan, David, how are you guys?

• 3:58Speaker 02

  What's up?

• 3:58Anthony Pompliano?

  How are you?

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Doing well.

• 4:00Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, here's where I want to start. David, let's start with you. You wrote a piece on Peter Thiel and religion a couple of years ago. And I think that's really where you first intersected with Rene Girard and a lot of his ideas. Explain a little bit like that piece and how did you have come to cross these ideas and Girard himself?

• 4:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think that one of the things that really surprised me was, so I grew up Jewish and just from a really, really young age, I was just like, these ideas are nonsense for the Hebrew school, Judaic school, and it was even bar mitzvah. And through college, I really doubted the validity of any religious ideas whatsoever, you know, pro rationality, all these sorts of things. And then I was really into, actually really feeling like I wasn't going to be able to contribute because I didn't have this STEM education, all this sort of nonsense. And I came across Peter Thiel's ideas. They're really interesting to me from an investment perspective, but more from just a philosophy of life standpoint, mainly the idea of look up, not around.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  You know, this idea of don't be so influenced by what your peers are doing. I've been copying other people so much in terms of thinking through what I wanted out of life. And once I found Peter, it became not just a way of thinking about investing, but a way of thinking about, about many different facets of my life. But as I began to study his ideas, I realized that they came from Gerard and then even deeper came from the Bible. And that was like, sort of like, what are those quake ideas for me where my world was turned upside down? I was like, okay, what's going on here? Something about my understanding of the world is fundamentally flawed.

• 5:42Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you start to think about this, Jonathan, what brought you to Gerard? Like, why is this such a fascinating person and set of ideas?

• 5:51Speaker 03

  Well, very much like David, I think I grew up in a very rationalistic worldview as well. You know, I was trained in STEM, excuse me, mathematics growing up and began my college career studying CS. And I think what Gerard does is show us the fundamental limitations, if you will, of rationality. And he doesn't treat us as rational utility maximizing creatures, but rather these spirited animals. What matters most to us aren't sort of optimizing for the amount of cheap goods we can get at a dollar store, but more so, you know, relativistic comparison and the social goods such as glory or prestige or recognition. And I think it's that more accurate model of human nature that really drew me in, that helped me.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  Unravel myself through some of the memetic webs I was tangled in and eventually, you know, ends up helping one navigate in the business world and in the world in general as well.

• 6:49Anthony Pompliano?

  So Jonathan, when you think about Gerard and these ideas, like if you had to describe to a five-year-old, right, hey, here's the basics of his viewpoint of the world, like, how would you describe that?

• 6:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the psychology is probably most relevant for this audience, although there's also the history and the theology. The TLDR is that, you know, we, there's really two reasons that we desire things. One, he calls physical desire, and that's a desire for the object itself. And that's the reason that people are going to give you when you ask them, why do you want to date this person? Why do you want to buy this car? Oh, you know, she's very nice and smart, or, you know, this car has all these gas mileage. And then there's the other strand of desire is metaphysical desire, and that's a desire to be. It's what those objects say about us. And Gerard's fundamental insight is that often when we try to convince others and even ourselves that we are motivated by the objects themselves, what we really want is to acquire

• 7:44Speaker 03

  the object because it says something about us that we really like, more often than not because it's associated with someone very prestigious.

• 7:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  One of the things I would add here is that if you look at, you know, three and four-year-olds and they're just playing around in a room, there'll be a bunch of toys, toys all over the place. And one of the kids will pick up a toy and dangle it and say, this is the coolest toy. And then all of a sudden, the other kids in the room will want that toy, not because there is anything that was intrinsically way better about that toy, but the fact that a bunch of other people want it. And that story is a really good gateway into Gerard's philosophy and the nature of desire itself.

• 8:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, and maybe a few more examples here. You know, one is, you know, we're building a company right now in private markets, and as you probably know, Anthony, in private markets, the best way to sort of sell your product, or a common way at least, is to create demand and scarcity for it, right? One of my friends, they run like VC Firms and the founders that they most want to get into are always the one that say, "Oh, you know, we're pretty tight on this round, you know, but, but, you know, send us a term sheet, we might be able to slide you in." Because they're creating this sort of external hypothetical desire for them to imitate. And you see this in dating as well, right? You know, an unattractive or uninteresting prospect. Once you know that, "Oh, damn, you know,

• 9:11Speaker 03

  Brad Pitt used to date her," or someone like that. A very competitive model comes along and also shows his desire for the mate. Then suddenly that prospect can gain a new allure of interestingness.

• 9:24Anthony Pompliano?

  How do these ideas kind of intersect with business and entrepreneurship? Like, both of you, I know, are very interested in that industry and spend most of your time thinking about kind of building businesses, participating in them. What were your takeaways after kind of doing this huge deep dive on Gerard?

• 9:44Speaker 03

  David, I'll let you go first because I have a pretty long spiel here, so.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, for me, I've thought a lot about prestige, you know. So when I got my first job, I was working at this fancy New York advertising agency. And it was like, "Oh, my goodness, this is incredible." And what I think is something that you always want to be thinking about is how much of what I'm doing is influenced by prestige. What's cool, what's going to basically get Auntie Sue to say, "Wow, David, you're up to some really cool things at Thanksgiving every year." And studying Gerard forced me to investigate a lot of my choices. And now I spend my time basically in education, online education, which is like one of my deep passions.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  And I still think it's very underestimated in terms of how important and transformative it's going to be. And I think that if I cared as much about prestige now as I did five years ago. I would be working maybe in Web 3 or something more prestigious than running a writing school. And a lot of people, you know, make fun of online courses. But fundamentally, I think a lot of the reason that I've been able to persist in a state where, you know, write a passage is just small is because I've seen how much prestige influences people's careers. I've studied different companies. I've seen how, you know, they're in the garage. It's not very, it's not very cool. It's now become cooler. But back then, it was like,

• 11:12Speaker 02

  oh, what are we doing with our lives? But like, you keep on marching on, keep on moving forward for what you believe in. And I think, look, I'm not saying that once you know memetic theory, you stop being memetic. That's not my point at all. But it at least gives you a sense of awareness of just how socially determined a lot of your choices were. And slowly but surely, you can crawl away from that social determinism.

• 11:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's fascinating to kind of think of it from that perspective. Jonathan, what about you?

• 11:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, as always, I'm gonna give the more theoretical and boring answer. And I think we have to start off with understanding sort of this Copernican shift that Gerard introduces in political economy. So unlike the traditional model of what we think motivates actors in capitalism, in industry, and you know, Smith, you know, it's a sort of like desire for more goods, or a fundamental self-interest. Gerard says, you know, capitalistic actors, they're certainly not motivated by these altruistic goals of trying to save the world. They're not even motivated by sort of raw money and goods. What they're really motivated is the same desires that motivated the conquistadors and the warriors and the aristocracy of

• 12:20Speaker 03

  old. One line that he had in his last book was, you know, it's a little wonder that as soon as warriors and heroes went out of style, the European aristocracy soon found itself so at home in the domains of business. And so, you know,

• 12:35Speaker 03

  What he means here, and I think David had a really interesting comment about this, about how many of his friends who were criminals in high school ended up being successful entrepreneurs. Gerard's point here is that when you deal with people, and this relates to the first point we said about the children and why they desire the toy, you should not deal with them as if they were rational agents with clear,

• 13:01Speaker 03

  goals or goods that they're trying to achieve, but trying to almost be like a psychologist in trying to understand what social goods they're trying to achieve. You know, I gave you one example already of how, you know, often investment decisions in private markets aren't really driven by the underlying fundamentals, but this sort of scarcity that the most skilled operators are able to create. But perhaps another example I can give you is one of my friends runs a very successful buyout firm, and most of the time, it's not the economics that get the deal over the line. He has to play psychologist, right? He has to understand what the founder is worried about, or how relativistically these terms compare with this model that this other founder is

• 13:46Speaker 03

  competing against. And so it's managing those expectations and fundamentally treating humans not as rational agents. I think that's what's been probably most insightful for me.

• 13:57Anthony Pompliano?

  It's really interesting to kind of think about this idea of, maybe I'll call it the recipient, the person who is susceptible to these forces. Is it possible to be the person on offense? Like, rather than being the one that all of these forces are playing on to you, are there people who have mastered them to the point that they actually use them to get what they want, or use them to create a business or a product? You gave an example of kind of fundraising, but like, is that what Ferrari does, for example, or some of these other brands? They're basically taking these ideas, whether they realize it or not, and that's what's ultimately driving the value?

• 14:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I'm curious to hear what David's answer here, but I'll do a first pass. I think Ferrari is a great example here, because they have such an acute awareness of how The people who own their cars independently of the cars, of the car itself matters incredibly importantly to these brands, right? That's why Ferrari has like a war on influencers, that they don't want people that they consider are not of a certain status to own their cars. If you want to buy the LeFerrari, you know, you have to have all these different Ferrari cars there. So I think they have a, you know, very acute awareness of the importance of association. The people who are associated with your product just beyond the product itself.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  And the other example I'll give here, and this is one that Gerard often comes to, is in romantic life, in dating. And he says narcissism is such a common strategy for both men and women to make them successful in dating. Because narcissism fundamentally shows a very strong desire for yourself. And through mises, other people are forced to sort of copy that desire. And the idea goes something like, you know, if this person is so confident in themselves, then they must know something. You know, or the converse, you know, if even he does not believe who he is and who he stands for, then why should I? Maybe, you know, maybe there's something lacking there. So there's definitely people who have used this to their advantage, maybe without understanding the theory behind it.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  David? In the lecture series that we just recorded, Jonathan gives a really good example of Michael Jordan and the whole Jordan brand. You know, if you go back to 1900 and you look at the advertisements, they're generally about the product. Oh, this soap will smell good, it'll clean your hands well. Or this basketball, it won't deflate very fast. And what happens, beginning with the Mad Men era, post-World War II, mass media, is advertising shifts to associations. And if you think of Jordan shoes, they're not talking about the weight of the shoe, how much faster you're going to be able to run,

• 16:46Speaker 02

  how many more minutes you're going to be able to play on the court. They just say, be like Mike.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  Be Like Mike is the most Gerardian mimetic advertising slogan because you're just hanging somebody who becomes a mimetic model that a bunch of other people can imitate. And then you're using that model to sell your shoes. And that's why it's so effective. I used to wear Jordan shoes. I had the Steph Currys, all that stuff because of the model.

• 17:19Anthony Pompliano?

  It's absolutely fascinating to kind of analyze how history played out because of some of this. I don't know if either one of you watched the trilogy on Netflix of Kanye West. And they've got a bunch of content. And I think David, it looks like you watched it and Jonathan, you didn't. But for those that didn't watch it, he pretty much like early twenties, has a guy following him around. And he's creating a documentary. And this is not when, you know, social media is cool, documentaries are cool, like any of that stuff. And in the footage, I took away three things. One was to Jonathan's point earlier about confidence. He knows he's going to be successful. And anyone who questions it,

• 18:04Anthony Pompliano?

  he basically is just done with them. Right? So there's this like inherent confidence bordering on narcissism and arrogance and like, you know, all the, all the downsides of that level of confidence. But, but for sure, that's there. The second thing is the amount of peer pressure that he did not succumb to. When you walk in at 22, you're a producer, you want to be a rapper, and you've got somebody following you with a video camera, and they're like, dude, what is this? And he's like, we're making a documentary. And they're like, no, you're not like, no one's gonna watch that. But he continued to do it. And then the third thing, I think, is as he

• 18:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Recorded the content as they did this and everything. He almost had this kind of bifurcation or move away from the confidence at some level. And so there was a guy who filmed with him for a decade. And then they lost touch for like six or seven, eight years, whatever it was. And then they got back together and then they created the documentary and like, here we go. But in the trilogy, they have like day by day for literally 10, 12 years. And then they kind of like cut to like B roll for half a decade. And then they come, you know, they try to tell a story and then they come back. And so in some ways it feels like that really followed like his life journey as well. And in hearing you guys talk, it's like the cameraman was a proxy for confidence.

• 19:29Anthony Pompliano?

  And like on the rise before kind of Kanye lost his way and then came back. Uh, was literally was the cameraman with them or not. Right? Like, like it sounds like it's fitting a lot of these same ideas that John is talking about.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  One of the things that is almost like poetic about Kanye, at least as a non memetic figure, is that Kanye, the name, there's a line in that documentary that it is a mix of Ethiopian and French. And it actually means the only one, the only one, as if he's sort of not imitating other people. Now there's a lot about Kanye that is memetic, but at the same time, there is a lot about him that is singular, that is distinct. And I don't know, it'd just be really interesting to use that as a, as an entry point into trying to figure out what are the memetic parts of Kanye? And what are the parts where he's really singular and one of a kind?

• 20:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. And maybe one thing I'll add here is a, is a warning. Because a popular misconception, I think of Gerard's ideas is that mimesis can only lend us, lead us to converge to a group. And so the idea goes that, uh, you know, surely if I break away from the group, if I carve my own path, then I will be authentic, then I will be an individual. And I think a lot of our artists today, and certainly our academics, and maybe Kanye, I don't know too well, is susceptible of this. They simply do what the, The crowd does not as a complete sort of 180. And Gerard calls that a form of a negative mimesis. And actually, the logic is very similar. In the same ways that metaphysical desire, sort of mimesis,

• 21:06Speaker 03

  wants to get the objects associated with people who we think are very prestigious. Mimesis also leads us to try to stay away from objects associated with people who we think are not prestigious at all, right? We both want to wear the brands of the shoes that the cool kids are wearing in high school, but also make damn sure that we don't wear the brands of the social outcasts in high school. And so there's the whole set of phenomenon, especially in the modern West, that so heavily emphasizes originality. That is a breaking away from the group for the group's sake. That is just as determined by the group and just as memetic. So I think we should be careful of looking at Kanye and say, oh, he's doing all these things differently and immediately conclude

• 21:51Speaker 03

  that he's sort of somehow independent from the group. I'm not saying he's not independent from the group, but I just don't know him that well.

• 21:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Talk to me about the lecture series that you all recorded. It's a seven-part series. I've started watching. I haven't had time yet to finish, but it is fantastic. What was the general idea to go ahead and record this?

• 22:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, you know, it really just came out of a passion project that I pursued in college, essentially. You know, I was fascinated with Gerard's ideas. His ideas weren't being taught in the academy, certainly not in philosophy departments. So I had to read all of his books in canon by myself. And I had a few roommates who were also interested, and so that was quite fun. And so on the side, while I was pursuing my CS and philosophy degree, I basically tried to see if I could resummarize and reconstruct Gerard's argument. And the output of that was this lecture series and another sort of book-length manuscript that I'm still in the process of working on. So it was really out of, you know, just out of pure interest.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  And I often found the best way to understand these authors is to reconstruct them. And so that was the major driving force for me. I was like, You know, I just want to really understand what this guy has to say. And we actually had planned these lecture series to be filmed right when I graduated. I had everything done and finished, but then COVID hit. Although David was very, very persistent, as he often is. He got some funding. He said, Jonathan, I'll do all the post work, the pre work and I'll do all the marketing. So all you have to do is come out and to this beautiful hotel in Austin and give these lectures over three days. So that's what we did.

• 23:30Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  For me, there's a, there's a bigger thing here.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  Philosophy can be really boring to learn and it can just be all just riddled with jargon and complex. And when I was studying Gerard, it was really tricky to try to make sense of what he's trying to say. Gerard isn't super careful in how he thinks. A lot of his books, such as battling to the end, are these dialogues. And I found that having conversations about Gerard was the best way for me to understand his ideas. And I would go on YouTube. I try to listen to podcasts and so much of the philosophy, the liberal arts content on the internet

• 24:20Speaker 02

  is either very academic and dry or really high level and just a summary. And I looked at that and I've said, hey, we need really good accessible, but comprehensive introductions to important philosophical ideas that don't dumb down the ideas that they're sharing, but still make them exciting and allow people to understand them. And that's what we tried to do here. And then for me, Gerard's ideas were so transformative, so life changing, that it just feels like this needed to exist. It's like, I don't know, dare I say like you're called to do something. I don't think it was quite that much.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  And I think that there was a lot of circumstance where Jonathan and I were just like living in the same building in Austin, which made this a lot easier. But I think that all those factors converge to make us say, hey, this is going to be worth a lot of work.

• 25:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Where did you guys film this? The, the room is awesome. Yeah.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  Oh, my goodness. Boy, is that a story. We looked for so many rooms and we, okay. So, yeah, keep this photo on the screen. So, we looked for so many rooms. We ended up filming it at the Commodore Perry Estate in, in Austin. And we found this, this, this one suite that we really liked. And credit to Jonathan, that bookshelf was actually had a lot of little trinkets and was about a third of the way full with books. And Jonathan was like, nope, let's fill it up. Let's sort of change the room and, and do everything. Then we flew in a professional videographer who was fantastic. And we were then there for four or five days. Just, you know, on weekends and stuff like that, we, we, we did the filming.

• 26:05Anthony Pompliano?

  It is, um, uh, it sets the scene, I think, is the, uh, the, the way that I thought about it when I, uh, when I saw it. Um, let me ask you guys one last question.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  The reason that we did that, the reason that we did that, at least for me, is I think that, and maybe I'm being, maybe this is negative mimesis, but I think that the internet has become so casual. And, you know, if you think of people's home studios, you know, it's all very casual. People wearing T-shirts and kids running in the background. And we wanted something that aesthetically screamed, hey, these ideas are really serious. I mean, we talked a lot about Gerard's ideas on the apocalypse and we wanted to show, hey, this is well-produced. We put in a lot of work into this and something that would immediately just be jarring. And so that's why we came up with, with that aesthetic, at least on my end. Jonathan, I don't know.

• 26:55Speaker 03

  I mean, on my end, you know, it's just, it's quite a regular aesthetic. All, all my professors showed up in, in three-piece suits and, you know, we, we have that type of library setting. So for me, it was just a, a mere continuation of like, how do we recreate, you know, uh, the environment I'm already somewhat familiar to in the academy.

• 27:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. It, um, uh, there, there is a importance of seriousness, right? I think that, um, Catherine Boyle from Andreessen Horowitz, uh, she recently wrote something about it. Um, and, uh, there's a time and a place for it, obviously, uh, but these ideas are, are pretty powerful. Um, my last question for you guys is, what is the one thing that you've changed in your life that has been most meaningful? After doing a deep dive on Gerard and his ideas, because there's something that you can point to and say, I did not do this, or I did do this and I don't do it anymore, once you understood these ideas.

• 27:51Speaker 03

  David, you want to go first?

• 27:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, for me, it's really thinking carefully about the structures of different social relationships. A lot of Gerard's work is rooted in envy and how conflict emerges from sameness and when two people who are very alike are chasing the same thing. And when you run a company, you want to make sure that everybody is responsible for specific things and that there's not a lot of overlap that could lead to memetic envy and competition. In your personal relationships, you want to think through, how do you reduce that envy, reduce that sameness?

• 28:38Speaker 02

  And like, try to just build a culture of support, but then know that like, there is going to be an inherent competition and to just know that that's going to be in sort of the underbelly of your life and be aware of it, that can really help. It's changed my views on marriage and dating quite a bit, but fundamentally, it all comes down to this idea of people working on different things, moving towards different goals, and then deeply, so I work with a rabbi every week, and we've been deep in the Cain and Abel story, trying to figure out, in those lines, what do they have to say about envy and violence and reciprocity, how little acts of violence can spiral out of control?

• 29:22Speaker 02

  All that is in that story. And I think that Gerard helped me appreciate Cain and Abel, and that Cain and Abel story is probably my favorite story in the world, in terms of how much it has taught me about what true human psychology is, that's beyond the limits of what we can explain with reason.

• 29:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, for me,

• 29:48Speaker 03

  It was more about, it's a very similar question, basically readjusting my social relations. But it was more about owning up to the things that I thought I needed to disavow. And more specifically, what I mean by that is, you know, growing up in today's like self-help culture, you always hear this, you know, the subtle art of not giving a fuck, right? Or like, or, you know, just be yourself, or just, you know, just don't care what other people think. And I think Gerard showed me the extent to which we are social, intersubjective creatures, and that that is never a solution. This don't care about what other people think, that never works. And what you end up with is you end up wanting to portray yourself,

• 30:31Speaker 03

  you end up caring that other people think about you as someone who doesn't care what they think about you. I don't know if that communicated properly. But the idea is like, if you just try to be an individual, you're gonna be caught up in that sort of negative mimesis that we talked about. And so for me, it was, you know, owning up to the fact that I needed social support. I needed social recognition. For these lectures, you know, I'm owning up to the fact that there's a large degree of self-promotion here, that I want these things to be viewed. And Gerard actually said, you know, "Don't trust any authors who say that they don't care if their work is read. They're either counting for apocalypse or posterity for revenge." And Gerard also says that, also, "Don't trust the people who advertise

• 31:16Speaker 03

  that they really don't care what other people think about them." Because those people are probably the one who care the most and are trying to hide it. So for me, it was really about being aware of how deeply, inevitably, my social environments affected me, and then designing that social environment. For example, one of the reasons I had moved to Austin was, you know, I know I had one really good friend in David, and I didn't really need any other friends because I was just working and then reading the whole time. And so, however, if David wasn't there, and I was just in that work environment, I know that my desire for philosophy would go down as well. And so it's about, excuse me, it's about being really aware of how your social environment affects you, and then designing the right social environment for what you want to achieve.

• 32:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 32:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Awareness goes hand in hand with seriousness, right, of you have to be aware to be serious to some degree, which ends up being a, I think, a lot about, a lot of folks just exist. They just go through the motions, etc. Takes work to be aware. It takes work to be serious. And it's not common, nor is it something that comes easy. So I think that the work that you guys are doing is fantastic. I appreciate it. You're going to steal a bunch of hours of my life, having me consume it.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  Can you put some headphones on the baby and get her to learn Gerard, too?

• 32:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, trust me, we recently did a little Happy Feet introduction, The Penguins That Dance, and that was a game changer. So Gerard will be on the docket maybe in a couple of years. Where can we send folks to go and consume this?

• 33:01Speaker 03

  Probably the first lecture. So I can happy to send the link either on this chat that you can blast out right now or later on.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  Jonathan@Limbo on YouTube or Gerardlectures.com. And if you go to Gerardlectures.com, we will just send you an email as we publish every single lecture.

• 33:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. I'm super excited. My last question for both of you is one of our sponsors is Eight Sleep. What is your sleep schedule? Having to put something like this together, you mentioned it took four or five days of filming, but the planning process was definitely insane. Even just, it sounds like finding the location was hard.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  We actually have some good stories here when it comes to sleep. So first of all, Jonathan and I are both serial nappers. So it is 11:53 in the morning. I napped right before this so that I would be on. And I sleep on an eight sleeper every night. And so I have that automatically set. And then what I always do with my eight sleeper is I turn on negative four degrees about 30 minutes before I'm going to nap. And honestly, I really like that product because it allows me to have my good naps, which I need every single day. And I know Jonathan does, too. Like, we turned off the lights and everything halfway through the day while recording these lectures.

• 34:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, I got, I got the, I got the Oura ring here, some of the big sleep fanatic as well. Anthony, I don't know if you're gonna lose money for me saying this, but I actually use Ullr, which is a competitor to Eight Sleep, but I would have probably bought Eight Sleep. Here's me making your money back. If I had like a, if I didn't have a queen mattress already, although now I know that they have this sort of like cover system. But for me, it really is a life changer because I, I sleep super hot and I was waking up in the middle of night. And my Ullr, my sort of cooling system really helps me there. There's actually a really fun story about the, it's also a Girardian story as well. All right. About the filming of these lectures. So these lectures, each one, they're cut it down to about two hours each,

• 35:04Speaker 03

  but they take like four to, four hours to film. So we had to get through 30 hours of filming and we had three days to do it. And, you know, I, I don't sleep that well, so I was super anxious in each day. And I went to bed at 12 and I just found myself waking up at 5:00. And so, you know, obviously when you're sleep deprived, you're not on your A-game intellectually. And so I had to sleep, like I had to nap every like two hours to make sure I was like on my A-game. I was like a Navy SEAL or something. And the, the, the most funny story was on day three, it was because of all the stress and the sleep deprivation, I had these like terrible stomach, stomach cramps. And, and I wasn't sure if I were, if I was gonna be able to film on, on day three,

• 35:49Speaker 03

  which would have been terrible because, you know, the hotel had rented, you know, the room out on day four. So we would have to, had to, you know, take out all the supplies and we had to get more funding and it was a bit of a nightmare. And so I wake up, it's like 6:00 AM, I'm just like curled up in a ball because of the pain. And then I just put on Michael Jordan, game six against, I think it was the Utah Jazz. And I put on my Jordan 12s and I just repeated to myself, flu game, flu game, flu game. You know, which I suppose is a, is an example of mimesis working in the right direction. But eventually I, I managed to, I managed to pull through it all. But if you notice me in tremendous pain in the last two lectures, that's, that's what that is.

• 36:32Anthony Pompliano?

  I love understanding like, hey, here's what I can do to psychologically manipulate myself into a place that I need to be. That's awesome. All right. Both of you, I appreciate it very much. This was, this was a lot of fun. I highly suggest anyone who hasn't, go check out the lectures. I'll be finishing them hopefully in the next week or so. And thank you guys for your time.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  Thank you. Thanks, Paul.

• 36:57Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. See you guys later. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to pompscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry. It's a three-week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into that three-week time period. Go to pompscryptocourse.com to learn more and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.