Afford Anything - Everyone Wants a Piece of You. Here's How to Stay Whole -- with Luke Burgis

Episode Date: August 22, 2026

#743: Everyone talks about a loneliness epidemic — but Luke Burgis argues the opposite problem is just as real: we now have so much easy, frictionless community that we never have to develop a solid sense of who we actually are. Luke Burgis is a professor of business at The Catholic University of America and the founder of the Cluny Institute, and the bestselling author of Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life. He returns to the show to talk about his new book, The One and the Ninety-Nine. In this episode, we discuss: Why having too much easy community can be just as damaging as having none at all How to tell whether your beliefs are actually yours — or something you inherited without ever examining it Why cutting people off has quietly become the default response to conflict How to stop shrinking yourself just to keep other people comfortable The zero-tolerance rule Luke enforces at his own company to kill passive-aggressiveness before it starts How Luke actually decides who to trust, hire, and build relationships with What an existential crisis at 29 — and five humbling years training for the priesthood — taught a successful entrepreneur about identity This episode is for anyone who feels the pull between fitting in and standing out — in your family, your workplace, or your online life. Luke offers a way to build an identity solid enough to hold up under pressure, without giving up on real community. ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS Note: Timestamps may vary slightly depending on dynamic ad placements. (7:42) Two competing drives wired into every human being (10:11) Why group pressure breaks some people and not others (17:39) Why cutting people off replaced working through conflict (19:39) The real number of close friends you actually need (26:51) Where your beliefs actually came from (32:00) You're not responsible for how someone else feels (36:09) The zero-tolerance workplace rule against passive-aggressiveness (41:22) How to actually tell who you can trust (53:33) The existential crisis that sent an entrepreneur toward the seminary (55:39) The humbling lesson hidden in a vending machine 🔗 RESOURCES MENTIONED 👉 This free 10-day workbook helps you trace your money habits back to whether they're actually yours — starting with your own money mindset — https://affordanything.com/fiire 👉 Luke's website (books, newsletter, and more) — https://lukeburgis.com 👉 Luke's new book, The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion — https://www.amazon.com/One-Ninety-Nine-Forging-Identity-Contagion/dp/1250373034 👉 Paul Graham's essay "Cities and Ambition," on how the place you live shapes what you want — https://paulgraham.com/cities.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Here's the thing. As humans, we are trapped between these two drives because we want to be known as a distinct person. We want to be individuals, but we also want to feel like we belong. And there's an inherent tension between these two things because many communities demand tribalism. They demand over-identification, group-think. And so in order to resolve this tension, many of us, all of us, develop a form of a pseudo-self. It's the version of ourselves where we renegotiate ourselves. every time we walk into a room. And that's exhausting and it never sets. It never ends. And so today's guest, Luke Burgess, is here to talk about this, about that tension between being an individual and belonging to a group. He has a really interesting thesis. He believes that we don't have a shortage of community.

We actually have too much community. But it's not deeply embedded community. It's these tech communities, these online communities, where the barriers to entry are very low, but so are the barriers to exit. And because of that, we never have to deal with any difficulties or challenges. If we don't like something, we can just leave, which means we don't learn conflict resolution. And so the friction's been stripped away, but the friction was the very thing that formed us in the first place. So we dive into all of this in today's episode. Welcome to the Afford Anything podcast, the show that knows you can afford

anything, not everything, which means it's a show all about making choices. I'm your host, Paula Pant. I trained in economic reporting at Columbia. Today's guest, Luke Burgess, has been a guest on this show before. He was a guest in episode 335, which aired in 2021, where he talked about this concept of copy-paste goals. So in that first interview, we talked about how humans are the greatest imitators on the planet, and we don't simply copy how others dress or speak. We actually copy what other people want. We copy other people's goals. And he joins us again today to talk about an extension of that idea. Today he talks about how we can stay inside of groups while also maintaining a strong sense of self.

Luke briefly worked on Wall Street and then co-founded four companies in his 20s, including a vending machine company that sold healthy food. After that, he spent five years in seminary and then went on to write his first book, Wanting, followed by his latest book, The One and the 99. If part of your road to financial independence is figuring out the social piece, the community piece, the what do I really want versus what do I just think I want piece. This interview, as well as the first one that we did with Luke, both interviews that we've done with Luke, are going to be very insightful. Here he is, Luke Burgess. Luke, thank you for joining us.

Paul, really good to be back with you. What browser tabs are open on your browser right now? Well, given that I have a book launching, first of all, I have like 75. My wife is mortified at how many browser tabs I keep open because I just forget to close them. Right now, there's a blog post by Tim Ferriss that he published recently on nonfiction book sales, which is fascinating because he makes the case that AI is devouring prescriptive nonfiction. Because you can just ask the AI, what should I do? And it can summarize my book and tell you. So fascinating blog post by Tim Ferriss.

A lot of stuff on the New York Knicks having this conversation right after they won championship. I have like eight email accounts. So I have a browser tab open for each of my email accounts. Wow. I know. Pretty brutal. And then a bunch of random AI tools that I'm using for research.

Lots of Google Maps as I'm navigating New York City this week, trying to make sure I know how much time I need to get to different places. So lots of logistical things and Amtrak tabs and things like that. Oh, nice. Why did I ask you that question? This is a question that is a favorite of my friend Tyler Cowen, who is brilliant and he loves to get people off of their scripts so they can't just kind of go into the normal things that they say. Right. And that is one of the questions that he likes to use in interviews with people to just kind of find out who they really are and just sort of get them. You can't perform or rehearse that answer. Your browser tabs are probably changing all of the time and you have to actually stop and just be in the moment and think about what you're

actually doing that day, what you've been looking at. And it's sort of like it gets you out of the abstractions too, right? It's very easy to talk about things in an abstract way. But your browser tabs are a really good indication of what you're actually paying attention to in any given day. Right. Previously, you were on the show, and you talked about memetic desire, which can you briefly define what that is for people who didn't hear the first interview? Yeah, so memetic desire is a term that came from the French thinker, René Girard. He realized that human beings are the best imitators in the world.

We learn through imitation is how we learn language and culture. But his insight was that we don't just learn how to imitate external things like cultural norms and dress and speech. We actually imitate the very desires of other people. Like we want what other people want. He said man is the creature that doesn't know what to want. So he looks to other people to show him. So once our basic needs are met, we're not thirsty, we're not hungry, we're not cold, we have biological mechanisms that tell us which objects we need for those basic needs,

but we don't have signpost for the world of kind of abstract wants and desires like careers, relationships, and we sort of need what he calls models of desire for that. So we look to other people who point to us at various things, and he said that that is memetic desire. So memetic is a fancy word for imitation. So it means that the very nature of desire itself is imitative. And there's not a one-to-one line between me and the object. There's always a model that is showing me why to want something.

But very importantly, he didn't call it imitative desire. He could have just said it's imitative desire. He called it memetic desire to imply that it's subconscious. It's not something that we know that we're doing, right? Children are proud imitators. I have a two-and-a-half-year-old toddler. And she's very, very proud when she can imitate something that I do. But isn't it interesting?

Like, adults are not proud imitators. Like being called an imitator is one of the worst things that most of us can be called. We want to be innovators. So Gerard says we don't become less imitative. It just goes underground. And we are memetic in ways that we don't fully understand. And this leads us to pursue various goals that we think that we've chosen ourselves, but may have been mediated to us very strongly by other people.

I have a friend who refers to this as copy paste goals. He points out that we see this a lot online, the proliferation of travel bucket list goals. You want to go to 100 countries or you want to go work from Medellin for six months. Those goals seem to flourish in online communities. They seem to spread. There's like a virality to the goals almost. Yeah. And the interesting thing, though, is that we normally don't admit that we're copying and pasting.

We somehow, from the point that we initially see something online, for instance, to the decision that we make to actually choose it as our goal, somewhere in that space between, we have internalized the idea that the goal or the desire is completely our own and that it's completely mine. And we somehow forget the social process that led up to it. I won't go too deep into this because this is what we talked about the last time you were on the show. But you join us today to talk about a related but slightly different topic, which is that we also find a place for ourselves inside of communities. But that being inside of a community can sometimes shield us from a stronger sense of self. Can you explain the thesis? Sure. The thesis is that all human beings have two fundamental drives. and they exist simultaneously.

So we have the drive to be individuated, right? The drive to differentiate ourselves, to be known as Paula and Luke, as who we are. Like, nobody likes to just be a number and a crowd, to be an instantiation of a type. We want to be known for our specificity. So we all have a drive to individuate and differentiate ourselves, and yet we have a simultaneous drive to belong.

You know, we're tribal. Humans have always been tribal. It provides a lot of goods and benefits, right? Safety, sense of meaning and belonging. So we have a drive for communion and differentiation at the same time. And that seems a little bit paradoxical, right? We want to be part of a community, but we don't want to lose ourselves within it or be dissolved into it to the point where we're just a member of it. And we're an interchangeable number, where if we stop showing up, nobody will even notice that we're gone. It's hard to find communities like that anymore. We want to actually contribute our unique gifts and talents to that community. So there's a fundamental tension in human life where we want to be in a community or a group, but not completely of it to the point where we lose our distinctiveness. So what I'm talking about here is not like individualism. I'm talking about how can we differentiate ourselves in healthy ways in the groups and communities that we're a part of so that we can be in them and be in communion and relationship with other people in thicker, deeper ways.

Because it's easy to be in community when there's a high degree of conformity. Right. Right. Where we all just kind of say the thing that we want everybody to hear. we've all kind of been in a community where it's like on the surface it seems like everybody is getting along and everybody's having fun but everybody's just following the same scripts and there's not any kind of real depth there because it's not a community that can actually tolerate the evolution of the people within it the process of differentiation that people

go through and the healthiest communities are the kinds of communities that I would say are made up of solid selves. We have sort of different layers of our self, our self understanding. There's the pseudo-self, which is kind of the level of the self that is constantly negotiating itself in real time, right, either to fit in to be liked, to keep anxiety low in a particular community, whether that's your family or your workplace, right? It's always managing anxiety by negotiating. And the solid self is the self that is a deeper layer. of the self that isn't constantly adapting every time that it walks into a room, which is an exhausting thing to do, by the way. Communities that are made up of solid selves is my thesis,

are healthier communities. And to the extent that there are not many communities around today that encourage the development of a solid self, I think many communities actually incentivize the pseudo-self, especially online communities. We then have to figure out what can we do to sort of develop our solid self so that we can be part of or form ourselves the kinds of communities that are made up of people that actually feel like they can stand on their own two feet. Right. And I just want to take a moment to define because when you talk about community, family is a community, your workplace is a community, your neighborhood is a community, any community groups or faith groups that you belong to. So these are all distinct communities,

plus online groups, internet communities, I mean, so we, each of us exist in a multitude of various communities. Yes. Yeah. And maybe because I'm an only child, this was particularly difficult for me, right? Because there were a lot of communities that wanted to sort of make claims on me, and there still are. And it's interesting, like, to the extent with which we identify as a member of a community, It seems as if communities want or expect almost an over-identification these days, right? It's like the workplace, we're like a family.

We're all like a family. And it's like if you're going to work here, you have to be all in all the time. And I started to notice that. I think that kind of language started to become popular in like the late 2000s. And it always kind of worried me a little bit as I was making my way through the world. and I'm like, well, I'm still trying to figure out to what extent I want to be part of this community in Las Vegas and my church community and this friend group and the online sort of community world was absolutely exploding. As I move between these very different kinds of communities, I'm looking for kind of a thread line because they're very different. I have the startup world.

I had my church. I had friend groups. I had my family back in the Midwest. And these are all very different. And I think at that particular time in my life, I wanted to, I didn't want to have to kind of adapt myself completely or over-adapt in order to kind of move between them in a way where I could fit in. And I think what I was searching for was kind of a way of being that allowed me a consistency. developing that involved me, like, understanding the ways in which I could be part of something without identifying with it too much, if that makes sense.

Right. And when a community entirely tries to claim identity, and you're right, I think online communities in particular seem to have a high degree of thought police enforcement, perhaps because it's It's not, by definition, it's not embodied. And so the strict expression of thought is all they have in order to claim their people. But when you belong to a multitude of different communities, there is that give and take where belonging to one community means that you're a little less of a different one. And I'll use an example for my own life.

My family is very Nepalese, but for me to belong to pretty much any other community in the United States, that means I have to be a little bit more Americanized. And so there is that kind of push and pull, a little bit of a tug of war in how you balance belonging to a multitude of communities. Yeah. I think you make a very good point about online communities where they're disembodied. Right. where everything is at the level of ideas. I've just noticed, even over the last 10 years, people try to situate themselves and situate other people based on, I don't know, like Twitter threads and debates and, like, the way that

people speak online, that form of situating, I think, like, situating is kind of a very interesting concept, right? Like, we always want to, like, situate other people when we meet them. I think it's a temptation that we have. and it doesn't allow us to really be present to them and to just meet them. So I think the embodied sort of forms of community are the ones that I'm doubling down on because they're the only forms of community where we can sort of be surprised and encounter unexpected people that are not pre-filtered for us, right, through the algorithms.

And that's what's really dangerous about the online world is that we are sort of sorted very quickly into abstract communities linked by usually just like ideas or interests. And that is a very different bond than shared experience, for instance, or having endorsed something together or living in the same city. It's a much thinner bond. It's sort of a bond at the level of the intellect and interests and politics or whatever it is and not at the level of shared experience. Right. Do you think that's why this kind of purity culture comes about in which you increasingly online communities demand that you must think like us?

Yeah. I mean, purity culture is easy online because the barriers to enter or leave online communities are very, very low. You don't like the group chat. You just sign off of it or you block somebody or you kick them out. And unlike my neighborhood, my life and I are part of a neighborhood, moms and dad's group with people that have kids about our age. We all live within 10 blocks of each other. I can't turn it off and on. I just have to be there and I have to show up. One of the things that technology is done is removing all friction from relationships and from our relationship with very, communities so that it's too easy to join and it's too easy to leave. When there's conflict,

we're not really incentivized to reconcile it. We just go find a new one. And that kind of loss of friction and tension leads to a self that never actually has to form into a solid self because we can flee. There's a trend right now called emotional cutoff. An emotional cutoff is basically the minute that things start to get a little bit difficult, the easiest way to deal with it is to just cut off the group, cut off the other person so that you don't actually have to deal with the emotions. My wife and I exchange words and I storm out and go work on the yard because that's easier than actually sitting there and deal with it. And we do this all of the time with people. We just, we block, we can shut them out. And I think there's many instances where

distance and separation can be good. Obviously, in examples of extramples of extreme. toxicity abuse, things like that. And we made it so easy to switch that it is actually affecting our society at the level of the human person. Like we're not developing the kind of inner machinery that we need to exist in community for longer periods of time. Right. Do you think living in large cities that density also does that? Because when it comes to friend groups, IRL friend groups. If there's conflict, it's so, I don't want to say easy, but there is such an abundance of alternate social groups to go hang out with that sometimes you might just go meet different people rather than solve conflict in this other group. Well, one of the, so we're having this conversation in New York City. It's, I think, my favorite city in the world. I love it, but it's so big. Right. And as you probably know, like living in a city this big, you can sort of become.

anonymous. It's so easy to just walk down the street. There's so many people that you can just take the individual person for granted a little bit. And if you leave, you probably won't be missed by the vast majority of the city. So yeah, I do think it's easier. I mean, there's so many different things and it's so easy to switch. But the point is we often shuffle between different groups of people in a very unintentional way and doing it with intentionality. Like Robin Dunbar, most people know Dunbar's number of 150 people, which is the maximum number of relationships that one can have.

But what he actually said was that it's seven, eight, or nine people, like a smaller micro-community that is the thing that you need to intentionally build in order to find real meaning and purpose. How many people have sort of intentionally picked the five people that you surround yourself with or five, six, or seven. That is not something that we do very intentionally. And by the way, those people might come from five, six, or seven different groups, but you can add sort of a layer underneath that by investing in those relationships. And relationships take real work. If we don't experience tension, it's probably a bad sign. It's almost like we don't have a lack of community

today. People talk about that. We have a lack of community, lack of community. I think that we have almost an overabundance of community that is too comfortable, like online communities, for instance. It's almost too good of a fit so that we don't actually have to, or we don't know how to exist in the tension and do the hard work of forming relationships that last over time. People don't have friends anymore. Very few, especially men, like have very, very few friends because it takes work. And I can always kick the can down the road and say, I'm really busy in this season of my life. I'll focus on friends in five years, like once I get through, this period, it's always a bad idea to do that. Like, the time is right now. A lot of the people

who are listening to this are either remote workers or they are early retirees or they are aspiring early retirees. And when any of those things happen, or their stay-at-home parents, right? And when any of those things happen, you lose workplace friendships. And to your point, many people don't have friendships anymore. And a lot of people who do, their friendships exist through physical embodied work spaces. And those are becoming more and more rare. What should people who are listening to this who don't go to an office for any of the reasons I just described? What should they be taking away from these conversations around community?

Well, work served a really important social, which it stopped serving in the last half century. You used to get a job and you would plan on being there for decades and your closest friends would probably be your co-workers. And there was a certain amount of built instability. So people, for better or worse, would form their sense of self and their identity based on the company that they worked out for decades and decades. It does not serve that social function anymore.

or the function of meaning and purpose that it used to. And it very importantly acted as an mediating institution in our society. So we've lost a lot of the intermediary institutions. So between myself and kind of the state, there's very few things in between. So I would say if you don't have a work environment that is able to provide a place where you can have engaging discussions with people about things that are happening in the world. You have to find that somewhere. And maybe, I don't know what the future of work looks like. There's a lot of rhetoric about job replacement and single person, billion dollar companies and people just sort of

doing everything by themselves. And to me, that sounds like a relatively lonely world. For me, like one of the best things about work and being an entrepreneur are the people that I get to work with, right? One of the best things about writing a book is the people that I get to meet like you, like through writing the book. It seems lonely, but let's take it at face value and say that maybe we are entering a future where work no longer serves the social function that it used to. Let's take that for granted. Then we have to find other mediating institutions that will take the place of work. I'm kind of excited by the idea of, and I think this was probably happening. I know what's happening in my hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Sort of a comeback of the

social clubs, like the hunting club, the jazz club, the running clubs, the weird, wacky clubs for people with niche interests. Right. My city has like over a hundred of those. They're being set up in like the old churches and there's some generous people that are giving space and people are raising their hand and saying, I'm interested in this thing. I'm going to go ahead and put up a bat signal. Who else is interested in this thing? And it forms really good friendship. So I don't know if that's the answer, but we certainly need intermediary institutions that will play the role that work used to play wherever you are. I do think it's pretty important that you have some embodied ones. And I don't want to discount the importance of the online world because I've met really, really good people.

I have really good friends that I've met online, but it has to be paired with some embodied things, and that just takes effort. Right. The best online communities that I've been in are ones where the initial relationship forms online, and then it progresses to meeting in person. But without that progression, then what are we doing here? That's my fundamental criteria for technology, right? It's like, is it oriented toward the real? Is it orienting me back to the real world or not? Like the early Twitter, which I was a heavy user of back before there was even an app. It was like it actually worked through text messages. Yeah. And it was always oriented towards in-person meetups.

Like you would be in a place and you would put out there to everybody that followed you, hey, I'm in Town Square in Las Vegas. Does anybody want to watch a movie tonight? I'll be hanging out for the next hour and a half. And sure enough, three or four people would come by. Wow. That literally would happen. And that was really exciting and life-giving.

So I'm like, is there a way that we can use these online communities to actually orient us, or at least be moving in a direction of like embodied relationships? Wow. It's unimaginable to think of saying something like that on Twitter now. That could be dangerous now. I don't know. Maybe there was like an innocence to it back then, right? I never heard about anything bad happening, but I had nothing but good experiences.

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People thought denim on denim was peak fashion. Inline skates were everywhere. And two out of three women rocked, the Rachel. While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when WestJet welcomes you on board. Here's to Westjetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. I'm going to go back to our previous conversation around solid self because many people kind of leads to the question of sort of what is the self. Like many people form a sense of self through the communities they belong to.

And yet simultaneously there does have to be that that individuation, that differentiation, the principles that you yourself hold absent of what you are told to hold. Can you talk through the concepts around that? Yeah. So a lot of my thinking on the differentiation of self and the way that the self is formed comes from a family psychologist named Murray Bowen who was active in pretty much the 50s, 60s. and 70s at Georgetown. And he was the first family psychologist that applied systems thinking to the family. In other words, if somebody came to him looking for support, he would say, I can't help you by treating you as an individual. I have to understand the family system that you're part of. And they would map out the whole family on a sheet of paper, right? The nuclear family,

but then the extended family. And then they would one by one start to look at, the individual relationships, the strength of the relationships, the nature of the relationship in the family. Because let's face it, the family is the first place where we begin to develop a sense of self. We individuate from our parents. But Bowen went deeper than that. And he said, where we either learn the skill of differentiation or we don't before we go out into the real world. And by the time people are 18, they have a sense of self that is a sense of self that is more or less differentiated from their family. And that is the self that they take out into the world.

And those that have a more highly differentiated self are able to be in or go into communities and exist as more of a solid self without getting dissolved into them. And his basic explanation of how this plays out in the nuclear family, he would say that every family is is kind of an emotional unit you know and we don't always realize that right it's not easy to separate my emotions from the emotions of the people that are closest to me it's easy to just catch them by contagion and assume that they're mine and it happens all the time right when we're growing up if and i see it because i'm a new father right now right it's like if i have a two and a half-year-old and a five-month-old, and if they're both screaming and unhappy and throwing things

against the wall, my anxiety goes up, my wife's anxiety goes up, and we are far more likely to be short with one another in that moment because we have caught the emotional anxiety by contagion. So we kind of catch emotions by contagion all of the time, and Bowen would say part of differentiation is learning how to separate my emotions from the emotions of my parents. and my siblings and people that are close to me. And that doesn't mean that we don't love them. It just, it actually, if we are able to own our own emotions and to not be part of the kind of social, emotional contagion that happens in a family, we can be in the family in a healthier

way. And like what happens when I come back to myself when the anxiety is spreading through the family unit? Well, if I'm grounded, all of a sudden, everybody else finds it much easier to calm down. So it happens at the level of emotion. and it also happens at the level of ideas. If we are rewarded by our parents from a very young age for only supporting a particular political party or sports team

or the idea that we need to become a doctor because both of our parents were doctors, when that starts at such a young age, we're not mature enough to sort of like understand the extent to which those things have been. given to us. And they're bound up with emotions, by the way, right? Because if I go to med school and my dad wanted me to go to med school, he's happy with me. And it makes all of our conversations easier. Right. Right. So the beliefs and the ideas get married to emotions. And that makes

them kind of this entangled mess. And Bowen would say separating emotions from beliefs and understanding the origin of your beliefs, where you got them from. Did you work your way to them through more of a rational objective analysis, or are they bound up with kind of the way that you've emotionally regulated yourself, your nervous system throughout your life? And he said, this is very difficult to unlearn. But when we examine the origin of our beliefs and their relationship to emotions or the way that we maybe felt in our family when we express certain opinions, we can begin to take steps of differentiation. And it's never too late. It's never too late to start doing that. It's not like if it didn't happen, it didn't really happen very much

in my family. But if we realize that we can go back and sort of take steps to begin making our emotions, our beliefs, our convictions, our own, and that's the hallmark of a solid self. But what happens when other people regard that differentiation as a threat? like the very people that have a stake in it right exactly yeah well i think you're not responsible for how the other person feels if you're oriented towards you know what is truly good and true rather than trying to make sure that the other person does not feel hurt or angry or wounded or anxious that is an exhausting way to live that is exactly how the pseudo self gets formed in Bowen's opinion. Like we're constantly engaging in a social calculus before we speak or before

we take an action where it's sort of this highly reflexive way of being where it's like, what would this person think? What would that person think? How will this affect my reputation as an author? And that is not coming from a place of conviction. It's coming from a place of calculus, being willing to disappoint people by pursuing things that you believe are true and good is something that people really need to learn how to do. And it takes courage, right? I mean, the courage to be disliked, which is another good book because it does take courage. It's not something that's easy to do.

Right. To what extent should disappointing someone or being disliked, how do we differentiate signal from noise, because to a certain extent, there is informative value to a certain degree of, we'll say, feedback that you're getting from others. To a certain extent, there is informative value. But then to another extent, sometimes it's other people are expressing their own dysregulation and they're taking it out on you. How do we differentiate that signal from that noise?

Yeah, I mean, it starts with thinking about how is the other person incentivized. person love me, this person care about my good or are they incentivized by other things, right, whether their own job security, their own economic situation. Why are they giving me this feedback? What place is it actually coming from? Is it a really good criteria? It's usually not too hard. I think people, you know, that old saying, right, like people only listen to people that they believe that they actually like love them or something like that. Like truly take things to heart if they feel like they're being loved or it's coming from a place of love. So I think that is always one place to start. And then like at what what level is, I mean, the feedback is

important, but there's many different kinds of feedback. One kind of feedback is a really important one. It's like, you really hurt me by your behavior. That's very different than like feedback on I don't think you should put this in your book or something like that. Right, right. And what I say feedback in this context, most people, as we kind of previously discussed, most people don't give direct feedback anymore. We live in a conflict avoidance society. And so often the feedback, quote unquote, the feedback that you get is not through verbally. It's through action. It's through being shadow banned from the group chat. It's through not getting invited out. When you notice that everybody yell, all your cousins are going to this thing.

Passive aggressive. Yeah, exactly. And you see. start to look at that and say, all right, what is it? Oh, is it because I expressed this particular viewpoint that they disagree with? And that's the reason they're shutting me out. Yeah, I mean, it is tricky. I mean, the social skills required to live in our society where I think there's less of a willingness to be direct than there was before. It's incredibly high, right? And people often communicate things in passive-aggressive ways. But often the ideas that we form are, are very often wrong. You know what I mean?

Like we project and have this fantasy in our minds about why this person hasn't got back to us or something like that. And one lesson I've learned is I always start by giving it the most charitable possible explanation, right? They're busy just like I am. They probably didn't even see my message or something like that. But then I think people are so conflict-divoidant that they let this eat away at them. And like one of the rules in the organization that I run is that we have, we try to have

zero tolerance for passive aggressiveness. I don't know many companies that have actually explicitly articulated this, but with us, it's actually very explicit. We talk about it on like day one of a new hire, right? Like if you sense, right, that anybody is being passive aggressive to you and not just giving you good direct feedback, please call it out. Like in this organization, it's actually okay to just ask the question. And if I or we ever, ever, sense that, we'll also just ask you like, hey, what's up? That emails or that text seemed like this and just kind of like cut through the BS. And that, that has truly been, like when it's articulated like that, it gives other people the permission to actually say something if they're sensing that too.

It's incredibly like freeing peaceful thing to do. Yeah. Like you won't be fired for asking the question. We have zero tolerance for it in this organization. Oh, that's fantastic. And to that extent, And again, going back to our conversation about the workplace, especially smaller workplaces can be very innovative. And you can learn a lot about good behavior, good communication. The workplace in the best case scenario is almost a training ground for being a better person when it's done well. Again, I want to link this back to the people who are listening who either aren't in work. workplaces like that, or aren't in workplaces at all because they're retired, or they work for themselves, or they're full-time caretakers, when we lose that opportunity to use the workplace as a behavioral training ground, how do we model this for other people in the way that you've modeled it for your company? Part of it, I guess, is like, how do we define work, right? Yeah.

What is the nature of work? I mean, we can work broadly defined. could be the work of being a caretaker, which I'm also a caretaker for my dad. I think that we have to, without forms of like traditional workplaces anymore and the rapidly changing nature of work, partly due to AI, I think we will probably need to deepen our understanding of what work is and recover the social dimension of work again and look for ways to collaborate with other people on things and even if the work that we're doing with them is non-traditional work. When I started to become a caregiver for my dad as an only child, I was completely alone. And I guess being the entrepreneur that I am, I realized all of the serious

gaps in the system, right? And the lack of resources that I had for caregiving for my dad, I realized that it is truly work. It is a lot of work. Yeah. And I thought, well, maybe I can actually bring something to this and find other people. And the internet was great for this, by the way. Like find other people who are interested in working with me to make it easier to share resources and to do caregiving for somebody living with dementia. Because I myself, I don't work in a big company.

I haven't since I was 23 years. old. I mean, it's been two decades since I worked in the kind of like formative company. You learn soft skills and hard skills. So I have had to find it in other places and be very intentional. And that four years ago now, when I kind of set out to bring other people into my work of caregiving, because I noticed, I realized there's a lot of other people that have that's that thing. That is turned into a very, very strong community for me. And I would bet that everybody out there could find some form of work that they have to do, some responsibility that they have in their life, whether it's being a parent, caretaking, or just community-related things,

and invite other people to work with you or volunteer to work with other people on their projects. I think we're going to have to get creative if we want to find the social dimension of work again. And it's a dimension that people don't think about, right? I think there's three dimensions of work. The objective dimension, everybody knows it. It's what you're doing. There's this subjective dimension, which is the way that the work changes you. Different kinds of work change the subject, change the worker in different ways.

And then there's the social dimension. And the subjective and the social dimension are the parts that we don't really hear about. Right. And they're the parts that you miss the most when work stops. Yes. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales,

using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Part of experiencing the social dimension of any type of quote-unquote work, and by that, I mean, any project that you are undertaking. Part of the social dimension involves choosing the right people. You told a story from when you were planning an estate sale in which you chose someone specifically because her website looked like it hadn't been updated since 1995.

And you read that as information that she wasn't actively trying to sell you something. And that assuming that she was still in business, she would actually just be helpful rather than salesy. But of course, I mean, you can interpret an old website. That also might be a signal that the person just doesn't have their... Doesn't care. They're not diligent. Yeah, exactly. Lack of diligence, lack of just having their act together, right?

There are a lot of different ways to read that. So how do you find those good people? Yeah, I guess I do have a lot of non-traditional ways to screen people, right? Like Tyler Cowan's question is one. I'm always kind of biased towards the antimimetic markers that people have. Like, what are the things that they're doing that really let their uniqueness or identity shine through? In what ways are they not giving me the expected answer? I'm always looking for those things, right?

So even when I do job interviews, I will never, anybody without getting a meal with them, right? It's like a super high context environment where, you know, it's harder to eat when I'm, I take a long time to eat. I lived in Italy for three years, so I know, I know how to have a three hour long, fronzo lunch. It's a high context environment where I can, I can learn things about people. The internet's made that harder, right? It's like, without that sort of embodied things, it's hired people over Zoom. So I do kind of look for the weirdness. And in the case of that estate sale plan, or war, I was right. I'm not always right.

Like finding high context things that allow you to see how people are when they let their guard down are really, really important. And you can only get so far online. So there's the people that we choose for sure. And it's very important to choose intentionally. Often we just kind of accept passively the situations and workplaces that, we get put in sometimes by just circumstances are of our control, right? And we don't choose with intention. We don't choose with intention, even the city that we want to live in. I mean, it's like one of the most important decisions that you'll ever make is the city and the

community that you're a part of. I don't know if you ever read this essay by Paul Graham called Cities and Ambition. Right. About how the city that you live in determines the type of ambitions that you have. It's almost another form of meatic desire. It is a form of merit desire. It is a Yeah. If you live in Cambridge, Massachusetts for long enough, you probably wish that you were a little bit smarter because it's where Harvard and MIT are. And so on and so forth. We could do this with this. It's a fun exercise. And it's one who's lived in six or seven major cities around the world. How have my ambitions changed a little bit by being in those cities? In each one. Can we go through Las Vegas? Because you and I both lived in Las Vegas. I was there 2015 to 2020. You were there much earlier. What, 2008 to 2011-ish. What did you learn to want by living in Vegas? There are different parts of Vegas. It's New Vegas and there's Old Vegas. I live in Henderson, Nevada.

You can learn to want dopamine hits and ambition and to sort of and to want money because, you know, Vegas is driven by money. And, you know, which parties you can get into and everything. It's not why I moved there, by the way. I moved there for tax reasons, and the rent was a lot lower than it was in California where I moved from. But I existed in a very interesting little community in Vegas with Tony Shea, the former CEO, Zappos. Zappos was this quirky community, and they eventually started, kind of took over downtown Las Vegas and formed the downtown project, which I know, you know, well, we talked about this before we went on the air. So that formed me in Vegas. It's part of Vegas that people don't know, right?

Right. And it formed me to want to Tony's philosophy, quite frankly, formed me and made me want to be a little weirder than I was, right? That was one of the things that he would say, right, one of the Zappos interview questions. Right. Like, what's weird about you? They were just straight up ask people. And I'd be like, I don't know, I'm pretty but plain steak and potatoes kind of guy from Michigan, right? I was like, I wish I was a little bit weirder. So Tony gave me that ambition for sure. And then they did a

very good job at collisions, right? They would always say, like, what is your return on collision? So they would, they put a bunch of people together in downtown Las Vegas and tried to just have people collide in kind of unexpected ways. And with the idea that new businesses, new ideas would emerge from these unexpected encounters in unexpected collisions. I think that the idea was really right. I think there might have been some problems with the execution of that. Maybe a little too much alcohol involved or something. But it's like the idea, I think, was really right. So it made me really, it formed that ambition in me to show up in unexpected places. And to this day, I tend to get really bored when I go to events or conferences or whatever. And I know everybody who's going to be. there before I even show up, right? I can predict it, right? Just by the title of it, right? It's going to be the same kind of characters. I love environments where I can go in and have unexpected

encounters. Those would be coming incredibly rare in our world. Did you ever encounter a llama while you were there? Did you get spit in the face by a llama? I did not get spit in the face by a llama, but I definitely encountered a llama. I've got a lot of Vegas Zappo stories, believe me. I asked that because I was also around that same community a little bit after you and and Tony Shea in the Downtown Project. I learned a lot about customer service through being around that and the prioritization of the customer above all else. But Tony had all of these events and there were always llamas walking around. I definitely got spit in the face by a llama a couple of times. He also, Tony, purchased parcels of land that from an aerial view actually are shaped like a llama.

So it was a whole thing. I also, yeah, I did not know that actually. Yeah. That is wild. That is really crazy. It was unintentional at first. And then they realized that if you like look at it from an aerial perspective, it was starting to take the shape of the llama. And then they just went for it.

And they just like, we might as well. We got a good thing going here. Exactly. Yeah. So he invested 300 million into downtown. Vegas. Then he died without a will and without an estate plan. And so now, yeah. Very tragic. I will say I also was very inspired by the emphasis on customer service. Yeah. Zappos model delivering happiness. Customer service was everything that they were about. You could call them and ask the customer service

rep. They were shoe company, right, those that don't know Zappos. You could call them and ask to order a pizza and the customer service rep would just take care of it for you. So it was like always going above and beyond. So they invested a lot in that. And I was running an e-commerce company in Vegas at the same time, right down the street from Zappos. That's how Tony and I got to be such good friends. I was like, I'm going to invest in my customer service and it's going to take care of all the problems. So, I mean, I invested like heavily in customer service. The problem was I didn't have nearly as much capital as Zappos had. So I'm this young company that has my customer service reps on the phone for an hour with a single customer and everything like that. And I was like, man, it's a really good idea in

theory. It's incredibly difficult to execute. Right. Exactly. But we got to this by talking about how the city that you live in impacts the desires that you have. Which is not, I live in Washington, D.C. now. So I should probably think a lot more about that. I've thought about that. On D.C., what is it? And I think probably it's proximity to power. Realizing that is, really important to be aware of in DC you get invitations to things all the time. Just by physical location, I'm proximate to power. But I think the danger is, like, at what point does that spill over to your actual mindset, right?

To what extent does it go beyond the place? So you move out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and you still can never lose the idea that you wish that you were just a little bit smarter and you live the rest of your life constantly feeling like it's just the next book it's the next degree it's whatever to what extent i would never want to move out of washington dc and like have that be in me so i think i'm particularly mindful of it or i don't think that i'm above that temptation but being aware of whatever it is your your city your community is mediating to you and rewarding and rewarding and terms of status, in terms of what makes you cool in that community, what makes you accepted,

being aware of that so that you can just have a beat in between when it hits you and affects you and how you respond to it. If you just have a beat in between, you can just respond in a more intentional way. You mentioned that you ran an e-commerce company. In addition to that, you, well, you owned vending machines and then later you ended up stalking vending machines, rather unexpectedly. How do you maintain a strong sense of self when not only your work identity changed, your location changed,

even the context around the ways in which you interacted with vending machines changed, when everything in your environment changes so drastically, how do you maintain that strong self? The first company that I started before the e-commerce company was a healthy vending machine company. back in 2005. Our idea was as simple as it sounds.

We took healthy products, put them in vending machines, and branded them really well. Nobody had done that, shockingly. They could only find snickers and fridolays or whatever. And we put pita chips and granola bars and healthy snacks and vending machines. It was the unsexiest business imaginable, right? I had friends starting really cool tech companies in San Francisco, and my partner and I were in L.A., literally trying to to learn the vending machine business from the ground up. And we were 23 years old. And we went to the National Vending Machine Expo our first year. And we were like, yeah, we're the youngest people here by

at least 35 or 40 years. And people are like, what are you doing? Like, I don't know if we can ever break into this industry. But it was kind of our anti-mimetic startup idea. We were like, we're going to bet on food distribution. And we would always call it food distribution, not vending and just made it sound a little bit better. That does sound fancier. Yeah. But we did make most of our, we eventually, the company took a long time to take off. It eventually did.

And we made our money through being a distributor of all of the food and snacks that went into the vending machines. We took a margin on. But in the early days, before we had a nationwide network of vending machine operators that would run our network, even international, we had we just had five machines. in L.A. And I literally would go around and stock up myself and just ask myself what I was doing with my life. I just quit a job as an investment banker to do that and like loan through my bonus. Fast forward. That company, we spun off an e-commerce site and I started four companies

in my 20s. But when I was 29 years old, I just had an existential crisis. I was asking myself questions. I was very unhappy. I was doing well on paper. I could probably have not worked again if I didn't want to. I ended up stepping away, taking some time off, and over the course of two years, I discerned a religious vocation, a religious life. And I thought that I might become a monk or a priest. And I ended up starting the process of trying to figure that out.

I was like, I'm going to take a year, and I'm actually going to enter a seminary, and just take some time to see if this is maybe where I'm being led. and I entered seminary, which is a very, very strange thing for a 30-year-old man to do because I went from owning my own house in a nice car to living in what was essentially a dorm. I was one of the older guys there with a shared bathroom on my floor. I mean, talk about like shaking up your identity, right? Right.

And like the people that were there with me were all there. They all had their own crazy stories about why they had got there, right? And I was like, wow, these are my classmates now for the next however many years. We're in this together. That was incredibly jarring for me. The most formative period of my life has been five years there. And the story that I think you're referring to is, you know, in the first year, you get there and you're told that you're going to be assigned a house job, which is basically unpaid work that you are going to do for the seminary. It could mean like gardening.

It could mean like printing booklets that are. used for the liturgy's something. And we were all kind of like waiting with bated breath to find out what our house job is going to be. They were delivered to us on a little slip of paper in our cubbyhole mailboxes one morning. And, you know, as background here, nobody at the seminary knew that the nature of my first business, that I was involved in the vending machine business anyway. They knew that I was a successful entrepreneur. I didn't, I didn't like list out exactly what companies and businesses that I was in. So there's no way of knowing that. I got my slip of paper out of my cubby hole. It said, you are in charge of the campus sort of like bar and vending machine

area. And one of your jobs will be to make sure that the vending machines are fully stopped, right? This job was given to me. And the next week, I found myself like late one night on my knees, putting junk food, by the way, into this vending machine. Like, what in the world? Like, how did I got you? You have a sense of humor. How did I get here? This is crazy.

I think I cried. And then I burst out laughing. And I realized what I need to do right now in order to grow is to own this job that I've been giving and be the best damn vending machine stocker. the world has ever known. And because unlike the first time, like, I didn't choose it. I was given this child by somebody else. I could probably grow a lot in humility and I can't think of much better ways to do that than stocking this vending machine right now. It's funny because in accepting that and sort of accepting the ways in which I was being formed in that community and resisting the temptation

to flee it and leave because I wanted too many times, right? I wanted too many, many times, but I knew deep down that I needed to stick it out and needed to spend an adequate amount of time there. I mean, maybe to go all the way and become a priest, or at the very least, I needed to be there. And I had burned my ships behind me very intentionally when I went in, to make sure that it wasn't too easy for me to leave. Like, I made it incredibly difficult at myself to leave. I ended up being in there for five years, but being in that community and committing to it for a certain period of time. My initial commitment was one year, and then I kept making one year commitments until finally I had the clarity that I needed that. You know, that was not going to be my lifelong vocation.

But sometimes we are, I think, called to places or put in situations that for a reason. Right. You know, we have to attend to the reality in front of us. it's our parents or a friend or something unexpected. And I knew that I needed to attend to that and that by attending to that responsibility that I had to be faithful to my commitments and even to my assignments in my house chap, as ridiculous as I thought it was. Like there was something in there for me to learn. And it did more than any other thing form a solid self. Thank you, Luke. What are three key takeaways that we got from this

conversation. Key takeaway number one. You don't have a community problem. You have a comfort problem. Everyone says we're lonely and we're short on community, but Luke flips that. He says we have more community than ever. We have group chats, discord servers, subreddits. We have these niche online groups. And the problem is that all of it fits way too well because joining takes a click, leaving takes a click, so you never have to sit through a hard conversation. Online there's trolling, but there aren't hard conversations. And those are the things that really build a person. If none of your relationships ever have friction, that's actually a warning sign. If we don't experience tension, it's probably a bad sign. It's almost like we don't have a lack of

community today. People talk about that. We have a lack of community, lack of community. I think that we have almost an overabundance of community that is too comfortable, like online communities, for instance. It's almost too good of a fit so that we don't actually have to or we don't know how to exist in the tension and do the hard work of forming relationships that last over time. That was the first key takeaway. Key takeaway number two. Your job pays you in more than just money. Work pays you in three ways. there's the objective way that work pays you, your compensation, there's the subjective way

that work pays you. It's the way that your work changes you, ideally for the better. And then there's the social dimension, the people. And so a lot of us, when we plan to retire or to quit a job, we plan around how we're going to deal with the objective dimension, the paycheck, but when we retire early or go remote or go solo or even just take a, brief sabbatical or step out to be a full-time caretaker, we think about replacing the income, but we often get blindsided by the rest of it, by the social dimension, as well as by the subjective that personal growth dimension. And one thing that Luke points out is that the future that everybody is so excited about, the one-person company, the AI leveraged solopreneur, that's a future where

you've optimized the people out of your work entirely. And that's a future where you've optimized the people out of your work entirely. And that can be very isolating. There's a lot of rhetoric about job replacement and single person, billion dollar companies and people just sort of doing everything by themselves. And to me, that sounds like a relatively lonely world. For me, like one of the best things about work and being an entrepreneur are the people that I get to work with, right? One of the best things about writing a book is the people that I get to meet like you, like through writing the book. That is the second key takeaway. Finally, key takeaway number three,

the thing you didn't choose is often the thing that forms you. At 29, Luke walks away from four companies and enters seminary, and he burns the ships on purpose, so leaving would be hard. First year, everyone gets assigned an unpaid house job on a slip of paper that's in their mailbox, and nobody knows that he used to run a vending machine. business, and he opens up his slip of paper, and he's in charge of stalking the vending machines. It's this reminder that the thing you didn't choose is often the thing that forms you. This job was given to me, and the next week I found myself, like, late one night on my knees,

putting junk food, by the way, into this vending machine. Like, what in the world? Like, how did I got you have a sense of humor? How did I get here? this is crazy. I think I cried and then I like burst out laughing. And I realize what I need to do right now in order to grow is to own this job that I've been giving and be the best damn vending machine stalker the world has ever known. So those are three key takeaways from this conversation with Luke Burgess. Thank you for being part of the afforder community. If you

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