Bankless - Luke Burgis | Layer Zero

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

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

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

And this is just so deeply rooted into our DNA, how we develop as children, how we develop as babies, that it is just part of everything. It's part of the market cycle. It's part of the business cycle. It's a part of monetary policy. It's about investments and where people choose to put their energies. And so Luke and I kind of have a second episode to the first episode we did with him a year ago. But this one, a little bit more free flowing, a little bit more out there and a little bit more layer zero.

So I hope you guys enjoy this fantastic episode all about Metic Desire with Luke Burgess, right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. AVE is the leading decentralized liquidity protocol. And now AVEV-V-3 is here. AVEV-3 has powerful new features to enable you to get the most out of D-Fi, including isolation mode, which allows for many more markets to be launched with more exotic collateral types. And also efficiency mode, which allows for a higher loan-to-value ratios. And of course, portals, allowing users to port their AVE position across all of the networks that AVE operates on,

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What's up, David? Good, man. Good, good, good. Yeah. We were just swapping stories about how we're both in M. places that we are new to. Yeah, I mean, a huge empty basement with a couple of bunk beds that we got at our lakehouse for when kids visit. And yeah, if you saw the whole room, it's pretty pathetic. So for anybody watching, I don't actually live like this. We're just in a crazy moving process right now. Yeah, I'm in the same boat. There's a reason why my camera is facing a wall instead of the empty room behind me. A little more echo than usual. Yeah, certainly. For big list listeners that didn't listen to your episode that we did with you about a year ago, can you kind of just like speed run,

listeners with like who Luke Burgess is and why people pay attention to you? I don't know why they pay attention to me, but I can tell you who I. I worked on Wall Street for a little while, left when I was 23 and started eventually four companies in my 20s, some successful, some not so successful, and walked away when I was 29 to kind of delve into the humanities more. Walked away for five years. I lived in Italy for a few years, studied philosophy and theology, trying to kind of figure out what I wanted to do the rest of my life. This led me into understanding. a thinker named Renee Gerard who rocked my world, helped me understand everything from kind of the crazy life journey that I was on, why I had made certain choices in my life,

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

D.C. I teach a bit. I have my hands in a lot of things. I have a stuff. I have a step. startup project on the side. I dabble a little bit in crypto. I've had my eye on it for sure, but nothing probably like most of your listeners. Yeah. And for the listeners that did listen to the podcast, it was really well-timed because it was right before NFTs got really crazy. And they were definitely heating up. But the peak of the NFT mania was like perhaps one to three months after we did our podcast. And I remember reading your book and then doing the podcast with you and post learning about Mimetic Desire and the ways that you taught us, it felt like going through and being able to see the Matrix, right? Like seeing the ones and zeros fly by the world rather

than being oblivious to them. And especially as NFTs got really, really big and watching the meta of the NFT phenomenon like shift, because people hop from NFTs to NFTs to NFTs. And everyone that listened to the podcast with you felt very tuned in to why human behavior was doing all of this thing. Like, oh, first we like the anime PFP's, but oh, now we're doing the doodles. Like, oh, no, wait, now we've moved on to like goblins or whatever. And, like, everyone that listened to your podcast was able to, like, explain the movement of the NFT market cycles via this concept of memetic desire. So after we did our podcast with you, like, what did you pay attention to in the crypto world? And just, like, can you speed run us through what you, like,

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

speaker and pop open a can of Pepsi and a truck on the beach and all these people run like sheep towards him and ah, and you can hear them drinking Pepsi and stuff. And he said that was like some pivotal moment where the viewer became like aware of how like ridiculously memetic we all can be, sometimes. But the danger in that is like you laugh at the commercial and you're like, we'll look at them, right? And then you are almost more susceptible to all of the subconscious stuff that's going on. Right. And I mentioned that because it's kind of, I feel like what happened with NFTs. Like we were all aware of one of these social mechanisms and forces that was driving some of this behavior, even made fun of it, made fun of ourselves and other people mostly. Yet, It just kept going and when we were fueling it. And, you know, it's almost, it made me think like, well, there's something like unescapably enticing me here. Because you always think that, you know, the next thing, there's something special. There's something unique about it.

And sure, there's objective differences, right, from a technical standpoint, from an aesthetic standpoint. But, you know, Gerard says that's precisely the romantic lie and that we constantly want to downplay. the role of mimesis and our own decision making, right, even though we see it in other people's. And then I think, you know, there's been sort of a phase transition, like in the beginning of any bubble, and I'll just call it a bubble, the actors are often making decisions for less memetic reasons than people that come a little bit later in the game, you know, because they, I don't know, they think that more on the line, you know, it seems a little riskier. There's nobody else involved.

And I think at a certain point, you have more and more people entering a market for, I would say, stronger memetic reasons who may have not done a whole lot of homework, who may not, you know, really know what they're doing. And it changes the entire dynamic and I think can lead to some amount of rivalry. I'd love your perspective on this. Some amount of rivalry between the people that, you know, have been in it longer and tend to understand a bit more of a technology or a movement. and the people that sort of rush in at the end, who some of them actually may have done really well, some of the people that came in later. And that can lead to all kinds of weird things from envy and stuff like that from other people. So I think looking at the kind of social, emotional dynamic in any market is fascinating to me.

And I use the word like rivalry because this is a core part of Gerard's theory. He says like memetic desire very naturally leads to conflict. human relationships. So I just wonder if some of the memetic desire led to, you know, whatever, founders splitting up, you know, people losing friends, relationships, whatever. I mean, I suspect that that happened, even though I didn't hear about most of it. Sure. I do want to at some point take the time to actually define memetic desire, but we'll skip that for now and come back to it. We're assuming some knowledge here, but we'll define it at some point in time. We recently did a podcast with this guy, Van Spencer. We were recapping the 2020 to 2021 bull market

in the crypto industry. And he contrasted the two phases of the markets. The first half of the market was the high conviction rally. And the second half of the market was the low conviction rally. And he separated these things in that the first part of the market was driven by this brand new use case with very strong fundamentals that everyone could get behind. And we could all get behind it. We all had consensus that there was something real here. And this is talking about defy yield farming in late 2020. And that was a high conviction rally because investors, individuals, hobbyists, like builders, everyone was shared in their belief that this thing was real, and that drove this high conviction rally. And then the second half of the bull market was the

low conviction rally, and that was things like the Metaverse, NFTs, GameFi, things that were very, very new to the crypto industry that everyone had identified had a lot of potential, but there was still not strong fundamentals there. And the way that I see this being a manifestation of the whole concept of mimetic desire is that the loop on the bull market got faster and faster and faster. And we saw this in the 2017 ICO era where the ICO like meta era was like people would spin up an ICO, people would put money into it, the token would release, the token would go up in price, people would sell and they'd be on to the next ICO to do that over and over and over again. And the loops got faster and faster and faster because people were understanding the meta quicker and quicker and

quicker. They were seeing where people were going and they're like, okay, this is the game that we're playing. You put your money in, you get the tokens out and when the tokens pump and then you buy into the next ICO. And like we saw the same thing with NFTs where some NFTs did very, very well at the start of this low conviction rally. And that created the meta. It's like, oh, okay, where like the humans of the crypto industry are, they're throwing money, they're depositing money into NFTs. And then the NFTs are going up and then they're making a bunch of money. And then they're trying to find the next NFTs. And so builders, like, market builders were optimizing their products for this sort of behavior. And so rather than building in the bear market, which created the high conviction rally because it was real fundamental projects,

builders in the bull market started to build for the meta. And so people, they were saying, okay, I'm going to make this NFT project because that's what everyone's doing right now. Everyone's hot on NFTs. So I'm going to do the thing that is the easiest way to me to generate a bunch of deposits on my NFT platform, right? And so I'm going to sell these NFTs as fast as I can. And then because that was the game, the NFT speculators would come in and then they buy the NFTs. And then the NFTs would go up. And then that would grab a bunch of attention and then the meta would shift. And like the reason why I call it, the loop is going faster and faster and faster and faster. The medics got faster and faster and faster stronger and stronger. And at some point, it got too fast. It got too unsustainable. And it reached a peak.

and that was the peak of the low-conviction bull market, which was like the fireworks, right? Like the loop was going super, super fast, and all the energy could not keep up with the space, and that was the peak of the market. So how does that land with you and your interpretation of Mimetic Desire? I mean, it lands well. I think it's exactly right. And I think the role of leverage is something that's really important when we're talking about memetic desire and markets in general.

Because there's a kind of, like, when is enough enough? And I feel like a lot of people never asked themselves, like, what were they in it for? right what's their end game what's their time horizon and there's kind of a keeping up i hate to use the phrase keeping up with the joneses but there is kind of a keeping up aspect to the cycles to the loops and feeling like you might get left behind there's an element of fomo to it for sure but leverage is important because i don't think a lot of people understand how leverage the markets are especially the crypto markets and i think that's what's precipitating part of the decline as we're speaking right now. It's pretty bad even on this particular day with Bitcoin. So, you know,

if somebody else buys a stock, I'll just use an equity just because it's simple, and it appreciates by 20 percent, well, there's one way that I can actually keep up with that person and actually do better than that person. It's not by buying the stock because they're already ahead of me by 20 percent. But what I can do is use more leverage than they did. And that's a way for me to catch up and actually get ahead. And that's part of the, I think, psychology that comes into play in any market. I think it came into play with NFTs and with crypto a bit. It's the basic concept of sort of a gambler like double or nothing and trying to win the money back. And I know people personally that were leveraging up to try to keep up with some abstract, like, ideal of what kinds of returns they were supposed to have because they were hearing about, you know, what was happening with other people. And there was not a lot grounding it in reality. So I think the, you know, leverage has the function of revealing huge differences when the shit hits the fan, right? You know, sort of amplifies differences. And it's also part of what's

happening now. So I would say that that's absolutely right. The cycles have to get faster and faster, the more they're driven by Mimesis. And it's the same thing in the startup world with financing young companies. I'll never forget, like, some of the wisest advice that an investor ever gave to me when I was looking for funding for one of my first companies was, Luke, don't try to create a flash valuation. That's not what we want. It's not ultimately what you want. And by flash valuation, he meant, you know, just there are ways to structure the story that you're telling and the amount of money that you raise to pump up the value in your next round as high as possible. But should you be optimizing for that? No. I decided the answer was no and I was going

to try to build something more long term. And you made the excellent point that when the incentives are kind of wrong like that, the product itself actually changes. And it's optimized for all of the wrong things. And I'll tell you, it's a huge temptation. Like even when building a company to optimize for the highest valuation. But like, who cares about that in the long run if we're just playing, you know, games with abstract valuations? And I think that's part of what happened. Yeah. There's a quote that I heard recently is that any venture capitalists that their exit plan was a market bubble. Like, that is not a good exit plan. That's not a sustainable one at all. And I think the other variable that goes into how these

markets get like wrapped up in this accelerating loop of memetics is that like the winners peacock their winnings and then they hide their losses right and so traders in the crypto space they only talk about their 100 xs and they don't talk about their down 90 percent right and so it creates this illusion of if you're not getting 100 x you're falling behind and so at this social layer it really is attractive and you think it makes it appear that like getting 100 x is easier than it actually is it's actually accessible to you and getting 100x is actually normal. And so you just have to participate in the market and wait your turn. And one day you will get your 100x.

And then on those assumptions, it generates poor incentives, right? It generates desire to pull leverage. I don't know how I'm going to get 100x without like going leverage to the tits, which then also self-perpetuates that at a market structure level, too. 100%. I did a Zoom event for my substack with Byrne Hobart, who's a brilliant financial analyst. And he wrote a paper called Manias and Mamesis, where he looks at the history of financial bubbles and using René Jarre, who my book's about. And he makes a pretty strong case that some of what's going on now, sure, there's some different elements, but there are basic characteristics of bubbles.

And, you know, he says one of the characteristics of a late bubble is you have a bunch of people that are imitating a model that they don't fully understand. And the models, to your point, are obscuring or hiding the true nature of their gains, for instance, right? Everything's curated. It's like Instagram. Everything's curated, right? People only see what you want them to see. So it's a dangerous game, psychological game to play when people are imitating other people on a surface level, but not understanding the real substantial decisions and ways that they probably arrived at where they're at. So, yeah, I mean, it just creates a really, really vicious cycle. And, you know, sometimes I struggle to know whether transparency in markets is a, in terms of like how individuals are doing is like a good thing or a bad thing, right? Like what's like prudent discretionary disclosure? And, you know, there's certainly like a culture now that's been built up around being very transparent about that. And I think that probably is part of what's fueled some of the Mimesis over less.

couple years. Go into that a little bit more. Transparency on disclosures on what. Are we talking about VC firms being disclosing what they're invested in? No, no, no. I mean, I like transparency in markets. I'm talking about personal performance, right? Like, it's like something that everybody talks about all the time. Right. Like how well you've done, how your portfolio is doing. We just have a way to sort of share that information unlike ever before. Like, it used to be something that, you know, people just spoke about in a different way, right? We've got like sort of the humble brag culture now. And that, I think, the thing that is fueling a bit of what's going on. Right, right, right.

I'm all for transparency and markets. That's not what I'm talking about. Okay. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Right. I remember there was this TikTok video, TikTok investor video that went around this. Like this Zoomer kid was talking about how he bought this mansion using like a not a lot

amount of capital. And he put that like $40,000 into UST to get 20%. And the 20% was going to like finance his mansion. And so like I don't think he actually did it. I think he just made the content because that. was his brand, right? Like, it was like a 24-year-old kid that bought this like $7 million mansion and he was paying for his down payments via this 20% yield from Terra. But like, whether or not he did or not is beside the story, he was like broadcasting it on TikTok

out to the masses. Right. Right. And so this one guy with this one bit of content was like, you know, showing like, hey, zoomers, if you just have $40,000, you can turn that into a mansion. If you just know this one cool new trick, also follow me on TikTok and here's like an ad that I'm going to deliver to you. And so like, the web to like one to many broadcasting paradigm is probably just like adding jet fuel to like memetic desire. Totally. Totally. Yep. Yeah, I see it myself. And, you know, I have a whole section in my book that talks about shielding ourselves from, you know, exposure to some of that stuff, right? It's just not healthy, right? We take it in and it affects

us more than we think. And the more that we think we're inoculated to it, the less we probably are. I talk a lot about that. But yeah, I know I completely agree. And, you know, Tara, UST, it's, I don't know, we could probably talk. Part of memetic theory is a theory of scapegoating. So we could probably speculate on whether Doquan is going to become a great scapegoat for a lot of people. Yeah, yeah, I do want to get to scapegoating. Let's take a moment.

And I think listeners have definitely gotten a graph for what my magic desire is. But let's take a moment and actually define it with an actual definition. But I want to start with the emojis that you use, because if you can distill a concept down to emojis, that's how you know you've, like, reached the base. slayer of how to explain something. And so the emojis that I've seen you use to explain Mimetic Desire are the eyeballs emojis and the balloon, except there's two sets of eyeballs emojis. So it goes one set of eyeball emojis looking at the next set of eyeball emojis and that second set of eyeball emojis is looking at the balloon. Can you explain? Dude, that's my yet.

Yeah. Can you explain how that explains Mucatic Desire and also what Mimic Desire actually is? Yeah, that's a great lead way. So I actually minted that baby. So, um, The memetic desire is choosing an object, not because of any inherent qualities in the object itself, but due to some third person who's interested in it or who desires it and who endows it with a special kind of value. And that's memetic desire. So we're in essence imitating the desires of another person or another group. we sort of adopt them or catch them by contagion. And the eyes are the best symbol of this. You know, like from the minute a baby leaves the womb, studies have shown this,

they're paying attention to what the mother is looking at. And if the mother's eyes are transfixed with some object, the baby is instantly interested in that object, after a certain number of days, at least. So we're all still like that. That's what we don't realize, right? We're all still very much like that. And sometimes, you know, the desire for something isn't mediated by physical eyeballs,

but now we have technology that mediates desires for us. The reason that I chose the balloon with the two pairs of eyes, one looking at the other, is because the balloon, this red balloon represents a relatively insignificant thing. It's just a red balloon. it doesn't really have much value at all. And also the balloon can float away and be gone in a second, right? And this is kind of the nature of memetic desire. So you have one set of eyeballs looking at the balloon,

and then the second set of eyeballs looking at the first set of eyeballs, which are looking at the balloon. And that second person, the second set of eyes, desires the balloon because of the first person who desires the balloon. And that immediately leads those two people into a kind of rioting. because that second person now has somebody who's sought first and who's in front of them and creates this weird sort of memetic situation. But the balloon can just disappear in a second.

And the first person can start paying attention to another thing or another person. And we can swap the balloon out with an infinite array of objects, an infinite array of ideas. And the second person, the second set of eyes, because their desire, is not for the balloon. Their desire is for whatever the mediator wants. That's what they're looking at. They're a layer removed from the balloon. Gerard calls these models of desire, mediators of desire. So as that person begins to take an interest in something else, so does the second person. And there's some people that I think go through much of their lives with very powerful mediators of desire in their life. Could be an older brother. It could be a friend. It could be somebody that we admire.

who are constantly mediating the desires for other things. Could be silly things. They could be big things like where to go to college. They could be like what doubt adjoin, whatever, right? The point is that there's this sort of triangular relationship between two people and something. And people that are on crypto Twitter, if probably is not lost on them, that this is more or less how crypto Twitter works, where there are certain influencers out there that are known to have to be alpha. and then they have a bunch of followers

because the followers are the second set of eyeballs. They're the eyeballs that are paying attention to the individual who is branded as being somebody who has the alpha, right? And so this is why D-Gen Spartan has a bunch of followers on crypto-twit and why he gets a bunch of engagement

because everyone thinks that whatever he's looking at is the thing that's going to go up in price, which actually sometimes turns it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's so salient and behavior in crypto and it's so easy to Like once you understand me, make desire to like explain almost everything in the world of crypto.

Do you ever thought on that? Yeah. And it goes so far beyond crypto because, I mean, I think all the time about the sort of cult of experts that we have. And I just had this conversation last week. It was about, I won't name any names, but it was like, oh, this person on Twitter is so smart. Like you got to follow this person.

And it's like, how do we know he's smart? Well, I just heard that he's really smart. So it's like, you know, it's like the way that reputations are built. built, like, also happen in this very memetic way. And it's like, well, does anybody actually met this person well? Where's he getting his tweets from and, you know, whatever? So I think, like, people can build reputations in a highly memetic way. In other words, they can manufacture clout, expertise, alpha, whatever. If the first handful of people are modeling, the right people, are modeling that desire in the right way. I've always had this dream of writing like a movie, a script,

or a book about somebody that does that, like, really well, right? He just says, I'm going to, like, manufacture this image of myself and make the world believe that I'm a saint. And I just need the first five people to believe that I'm working miracles. And then pretty soon, everybody will have forgot who I am in the first place. Yeah, the parable of the emperor wearing no clothes definitely comes to mind, certainly. The other thing that you said while you were defining memetic desire is the baby paying attention to their mom. And if the mom is looking at something, will the baby knows where to look. And I can't remember where I learned this fact, but most animals don't have whites of their eyes. Like most animal eyes, especially predators and prey, they don't have

white eyes. They have black eyes. And the whites of human eyeballs was actually developed as like a communication protocol between humans. Oh, that's fascinating. Because it's the whites of the eyeballs that actually communicate data, communicate where your attention actually is. And so as humans were going from small tribes of like five to 50. And then as they scaled out beyond 50, in tribes trying to coordinate the humans that had white eyeballs were able to communicate without words. They were able to like see others' intentions, seeing. And because we were becoming a collaborative society, that information that was being passed while it was disclosing private information about the internal thoughts of that human, because we were becoming a more collaborative society, that was

on average good information to pass. And so, like, you actually lose a little bit of your privacy by the whites of your eyes because people can see what you're paying attention to. People can see what you're looking at. They can interpret what's going on in your brain. But it developed and stuck around as a gene because on net, it was a good thing for the tribe as a whole to be collaborative and to illustrate and allow for that data to pass around the tribe. So whenever you talk about, like, literally the eyeballs, I'm thinking like literally the first ever communication. protocol that humans ever developed. Well, maybe that's actually a good reason to wear sunglasses at night, you know, I never heard this one. The best reason I've ever heard. Yeah, you know,

and it's just like we're freaky good at noticing those signals of communication with the eyes. I mean, just think about being in a crowded bar and a man or woman just needs to cast a half-second glance in the right direction. And people notice, right, you know, maybe she's looking at me, I don't know, whatever. So, yeah, it's absolutely insane. I can tell a lot of stories about, you know, Gerard has this whole story about how there was basically a scapegoating mob that, you know, through the looks of their eyes were instigating each other on and they began, the person they were scapegoating, his eyes ended up taking, like, changing color and turning into the eyes of a demon because they were literally transfigured because

of the, so the eyes play a huge role in Gerard's own work. And we reinforce the desires of other people based on what we're paying attention to. So the eyes are just a proxy for what somebody is interested in or what they're paying attention to. So I guess as we disincarnate a little bit as a world, you know, what will take the place of the eyes? I don't know if there's anything that will, you know, quite do it as well as the eyeballs did. Right. Yeah. I don't know where the quote is from, but there's the quote that the eyes are the window into the soul, right? Like it's the thing that you cannot hide unless you're wearing sunglasses, of course. Right. Proof, actually talks about eyes a lot. So Marcel Proust, if you read his works, they're not easy to read.

You know, very, very often, he talks about what characters in the novel are looking at and how that inflames passions or desires in other characters. And René Girard said that, you know, Proust was like a master of desire because he understood this memetic nature of desire and not a lot of other authors do. Rocket Pool is your friendly, decentralized Ethereum staking protocol. You can stake your eth with Rocket Pool and get our ETH in return, allowing you to stake your ETH and use it in Defy at the same time. You can get 4% on your ETH by taking it with Rocket Pool,

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desire would be extremely slow. I'm going to go ahead and guess that, like, fashion trends 500-plus years ago were slower than they are now. And as soon as we, like, inject Web2, like, social media platforms, like the speed of momentic desire can go faster and faster and faster. And so as I was alluding to like the culmination of a bull market as like this loop that's going faster and faster and faster, does this like, do you see this like acceleration of a magic desire? And are you concerned about what happens when that loop is just too unsustainable? And are we there yet? Or like, where are we on that whole trajectory? Do you have any thoughts on this? It's almost as if our desires need outlets. And we seem to be getting better at better at manufacturing

desires. You know, marketers, product managers are really good at generating desires, but those desires have to have some place to go. So in an expanding economy, for instance, right? I mean, the economy is not a fixed pie. It's not a zero-sum game. Ideally, we're growing the economy, creating new value, creating new opportunities. When that's happening, the beauty of it is that There's almost like always like another thing, right? Another place for desires to go. Peter Thiel, I think his number one concern has been like, so we're now in the situation where we have to keep growing the economy.

Well, what happens if it stops growing and memetic desires have to sort of think about it this way, turn inward and then we begin competing for the same things. So a free market has this natural mechanism of like directing memetic. Mimetic desire to creative endeavors and projects and entrepreneurship and people starting things. It just has this natural way of diffusing Mimetic desire would be one way to think about it. So what's going to happen if we don't have an economy that lends itself well to people trying new things and having the freedom to fail and having some cushion? Like, what happens then?

So I am concerned, is the short answer to your question. I think we need healthy outlets for Mimetic desire. But on the flip side, like on a personal level, we can do things so that we don't need that. So I see sort of two sides to the coin. I don't have any real, you know, policy answers or anything like that. I sort of just try to think to myself, like, what can I do with me and my family? But I think on a general level, you know, we pumped it for so long that it's kind of like the general sort of inflation, money printing thing that we're seeing in our economy.

Like that's basically what we've been doing. We've been printing memetic desires. and eventually something's got to break, something's going to give. Right, right. So as the economic pie grows, there are more objects for us to pay attention to. And even though the loop of mimetic desire is growing faster, at least there's an outlet for people to deposit their energy into, and that can turn into fundamentals. But then as the economic pie contracts, more people stop paying attention to, like, the margins and more people start paying attention towards the center. Right.

Like there's less innovation. And so we have to probably look more towards fundamentals at like what is real. And all of a sudden, the fundamentals of the world have a lot more eyeballs on them, therefore becomes highly competitive. Right. Am I tracking here? You're totally tracking, right? There's a convergence of attention on certain things. And I would say that that's already happening on like a political level because like we're sort of have like really boring politics, not a lot of new ideas.

So politics is ahead of the economy. in a sense, right? Like it stopped generating any new, interesting ideas a long time ago. And what has happened? Well, there's been a convergence on like three issues, like moral issues. And that's like all we talk about, right? And there's something that seems not healthy about that. And I think something similar to that is going to play out in the economy. You're going to see an increase of conflict as people become concerned fighting over whatever the same spaces, the same jobs. There's going to be less entrepreneurship. There's going to be less people. I mean, there's simple economics, too, right? There's not going to be as much money to go around to go start new things. But also,

we're going to end up losing sight of the opportunity to create. And I think that's already happening, right? I see people running for the hills. In my opinion, this is a great time to start something if you can. People are running scared and people are memetically following them to the hills. And for those that stay, you have an opportunity to build some really cool stuff. Right. It seems to map on to just general market cycles really, really well, as in we have times of growth and we have times of contraction. And memetic desire plays like a leading role in that as in like if everyone's looking outwards, then we have innovation, we have development, we have entrepreneurs building stuff. And then once mimetic desire turns inwards, then we create a recession. But it also seems that like mimetic desire is the leading indicator of this as in because it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. it might actually determine what is, I mean, I guess like you can't get away from stuff like the Fed raising interest rates, but also the Fed will raise interest rates as a response to too much investment on the periphery. Right. If the Mimatic desire is in like weird monkey JPEGs and that's not going to put food on the table, the Fed is like, okay, people are paying attention to crazy stuff too much.

So let's raise interest rates to get them to pay attention to like the more fundamentals of the world. Any thoughts on that? Yeah. I think that that's a great way to explain it. You know, people have money, because we've been printing money, and where are they going to put it, right? I mean, people don't want it sitting in a bank account. It's got to go somewhere, or at least has the possibility of some kind of a return. So, yes, people begin to deploy it in more peripheral places.

And there's sort of a natural process that has to play out. Some of that deployment of capital results and really cool things that get built, and a lot of it just simply gets washed out. And that's just part of the way that the market works. But I think part of what a contraction is and what the Fed does when it raises interest rates, it almost is like a refocusing on fundamental things. You know, you see like A16Z is like talking a lot about infrastructure and let's build and all this stuff right now. And like there's probably something good and healthy about that and a reason why it needs to happen. But in the meantime, obviously there are wonderful things about, well, there's not one.

wonderful things about both phases because the second one is very painful. But there are a lot of positive things that come out of that experimentation that we're able to do when we have extra cash to play with, extra capital to play with. Right. Right. Right. There's the quote, some people don't like this quote, but I'm going to say it anyways. There's like bad times make good men, good men make good times, good times make weak men and then weak men make bad times. And again, it seems to like a map on to people build. And so then people look outwards at to the frontier. And, and they build stuff on the frontier. But too much of that put, like,

there's too far of a supply chain between the fundamentals and the frontier. And if people are building too far out to the frontier, that supply chain gets stretched. And so then people get called back towards the center. And then when people go back towards the center, that's hard times because we have to split the foundation amongst a wider part of society

because the frontier got contracted. And then this cycle goes forward and forward and forward. I'm wondering, the whole, like, memetic desire thing, very much feels like breaking the fourth wall. Like, you're not supposed to break the fourth wall. We're all supposed to be just like part of this memetic thing and just let it like wash over us. But like, have you thought about like what happens when people, enough people understand memetic desire and start acting on that assumption and on that understanding of medic desire?

And like if too many people understand that there's this fourth wall that we're all seeing, how does that shift? Like, how does that shift people's attention? Have you thought about this? Well, I have, and, you know, Gerard has thought about it too, and it was very apocalyptic in some of the things that he said. And, you know, it's kind of like, well, you know, there's not as much, the name of his magnum opus is things hidden since the foundation of the world, okay? And what are some of the things hidden?

Well, the memetic nature of desire and the violence that it often leads to. So I don't know how to answer this question without transitioning a little bit to the conflict and violence and scapegoating stuff because it's a huge part of the answer, right? Let's do it. Let's do it. So we would say one of the consequences of memetic desire that humanity has been mostly unconscious of for the majority of its history is when memetic desire leads to memetic violence. So that is when people get together and through a kind of memetic contagion, blame somebody else for a problem.

and scapegoat that person. They'd expel them from the community. In times past, they would kill them, they would lynch them, whatever. Just horrible, horrible things that have been done to scapegoats throughout humanity. And Gerard says that the process that leads to somebody becoming a scapegoat is a memetic process. Like, how else can you explain how it's all minus one against one? Like, everybody except one person begins to turn on one. Like, he says that people don't arrive.

at the conviction that that person is guilty on their own, they arrive at that conviction through a memetic process, and they arrive at the desire to punish also through a mnematic process. So the root of scapegoating violence is mamesis. It's a memetic desire. Few things are more mimetic than anger, than aggression, right? Like you see it in a baseball game, you know, as soon as one person rushes the pitcher, and the second guy, it comes out of the dugout, the third, fourth, and fifth come out, and then the rest stream out. And you don't want to be the only guy left on the bench that didn't go out there.

Because then you're going to be the one with the problem. You're the new scapegoat. You didn't help your team. You're the new scapegoat, right? So that's to me as a very simple illustration of how this sometimes works. And Gerard says that it's usually we've done this without really knowing what we're doing. But now we tend to know that we do this. And Gerard said that that's actually kind of dangerous that we know that we do it.

And this is a kind of little tricky to understand. But the scapegoat mechanism, as horrible as it was, he says, was like humanities, it was a social innovation that kept violence from spreading. Because, you know, people could identify a person, expel the person, and they would create this little temporary piece in a form of catharsis. And then, you know, people could go back on doing whatever they were doing. So it actually had like a release valve. It was a release valve. So it had a utilitarian function. And, you know, he says this is kind of the root of a lot of ancient religions.

I mean, they sacrificed in order to bring peace so that they didn't just all turn on each other. They had to sacrifice somebody and it gave them the solution of peace. Now we sort of know that we do that, right? Like with cancel culture, like we sort of know there's not the unanimity that there was before. Like, it's not like a unanimous, like we all agree on this. We're very divided about it. And we also can see that it's happening and we can call it out. So this is a weird way to say it, but we're deprived of the usefulness of the scapegoat mechanism.

It doesn't work anymore the way that it used to. So just as you described how the cycles of memetic desire are speeding up faster and faster, so too are the cycles of scapegoating violence because they don't last very long. Cancel somebody online and the catharsis or whatever that that produced. doesn't really work the way that it would have, I don't know, 50 years ago or something. So we're constantly, we're in this accelerating train. And Gerard says, we either have to renounce our memetic tendency to do this, or it's just going to lead to bigger and bigger scapegoats, which is a pretty scary thought. Right. And there's always so many parallels to money and finance, which I guess it makes sense because ultimately money and finance,

are properties that exhibit out of the brain. And so, like, when you say, like, the process of catharsis just gets weaker and weaker, the more we do it and the faster we do it, like, my mind goes to the Federal Reserve, printing a bunch of money, and then it prints more money, and then it prints more money. But then the newer money doesn't have the same impact as the older money. And so they have to keep on printing more money, and that creates hyperinflation, which is like a, it's like a great, like having a hyperinflationary event is terrible. Like, everything, like capital gets destroyed. Like, people go hungry. Everything gets like, completely the slate gets wiped clean. And also, I'm glad you brought up how this is part of

religion. Like, also part of religion is the concept of, like, jubilees where, like, we just, like, wipe the slate clean. We just, like, start over. Things break. Like, some societies had, like, regular jubilees, like, every 10 to 20 years because they knew that they needed to, like, wipe the slate clean every now and then. There's too much pent up underbrush. And so we needed to, like, burn the underbrush to make sure that we didn't, like, burn down the whole forest. And if we're saying that we're in this phase where like fiat currencies are getting hyperinflationary, I mean, we're seeing this right now in the markets today. And then also like other fiat currencies of the world have already been hyperinflationary, like Argentine peso, Venezuela Boulevard, the Japanese yen is like at the precipice of becoming hyperinflationary. At the same time, we're getting like this fight over like cancel culture is rearing its head. The Democrats and Republicans are fighting over like two or three things. It all seems to be very much tied together. And so it seems to be like this general societal, like, crescendo up until, like, a big crash.

And then there's this concept of, like, the fourth turning, which I don't know if you're familiar with, but it's like in the crypto space where, like, no one really knows how or why or what event is going to trigger it. But everyone feels like there's like a jubilee coming where it's going to be painful and then we're going to wipe this slate clean. And then we're going to pick up again from anew. And then the cycle will continue. Yeah, it does feel that way, doesn't it? It feels that way in more than just crypto in general. I think people have this really foreboding sense, which there's an element of reflexivity to all this too, right? It's like when we begin to feel that way, like we sort of bring it into reality, like with a market crash, for instance.

Yeah. And, you know, the Jubilee is a great example. We need those. They're really important. And I think as the role of formal organized religion in society is really going away, it's certainly it's very diminished. I actually think that we need rituals, that we need those. Like what's going to substitute for that Jubilee, where, you know, deaths were cleared, you know, slaves were free, all kinds of stuff.

We really need to do that because that was a release valve. So what are we going to substitute? I'm in a religious person still. So, but my question to the culture is, you know, what are we going to do without those sort of forms of ritual of remembrance? It's actually one of the most important things. things that religion does is it helps people remember things, right? It's like, you know, if you're a Christian, for instance, like every single week, you know, you're forced to remember the scapegoating violence, right? And like what happened and the fact that you're a part of it. So when we don't

remember as a culture or in our individual lives, we just tend to accelerate the same cycles that we're part of if we forget. So that, you know, Plato calls that an amnesis, that remembering is important. How are we going to do that? So I just think that that's the big question for me. So how does, since you have shattered the fourth wall for yourself and for everyone that has read your book and listened to your podcast, how have you changed your behavior as a result of your memetic desire, fourth wall being shattered? Like, what do you do differently now to help, I don't know, like stave away the negative effects of Mimesis from your own person? I take my personal Jubilee festival retreat every year, which means, you know, me basically locking myself away in a monastery in Italy for five days. Now, you know, not everybody's going to do that or can do that. But for me, it's a reset.

It's a total reset. And it feels like a lot of my entangled desires and entangled relationships, this all seem to come to light to me. And I always leave that retreat week that I have, knowing what I need to do, you know, for the next year. I mean, Bill Gates has a think week that he does every year. This is like my desire week. It's a week for, I actually try not to think at all. I just am totally silent.

No device is nothing. to total silence. I mean, sometimes I go crazy after the third day, but by the fourth and fifth day, things bubble up to the surface for me, like desires I had that I didn't even realize that I had, and then I see some of my silly, what I call thin desires, like highly memetic desires, just become, like, apparent to me. They reveal themselves for what they are, and they look kind of fucking stupid sometimes. Yeah, and I just, I see them as ridiculous as they are. Like, you know, I have open conversations, like with, you know, I'm able to call myself and you have to, like be able to call it out when you see it, especially in yourself. You know, so, you know,

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

on and what other people around me were doing and saying. And, you know, I know that about myself. So so much this just comes down to self-awareness, right? And I'm able to take like build in little anti-mimetic tripwires into my life, right, that prevent me from doing that. It's interesting that, you know, it's built into the stock market, right? Stock market falls like 7% on a day. It's almost like we have built-in trip wires for memetic desires by early out of control. Interesting. You know, so like how do we do that in our own lives, like how do we put the sort of the stop cells on stuff? And, you know, it's going to be very different for everybody. Certainly, yeah. And it feels very much like mindfulness meditation. Are you alone when you go out to your retreats? Is it just you?

Totally. Yeah. Yeah. No. cell phone? No cell phone. No. Computer? Nope. Nothing. Nothing connected to their outside world, which probably makes sense. No, I used to do it with a group of guys, right? A bunch of other guys that were with me, but we didn't talk at all, right? If we wanted to go on a hike together, it was silent and we'd have to slip a piece of paper under the door to be like, hey, you know, like meet me on this hike. And it would be a silent hike. We wouldn't talk. And we would eat together, but, you know, as you would hear, it's a super weird experience or like the clanking of spoons against the soup bowl and stuff. So yeah, totally alone. And for me, that's part of it. And

Yeah, I mean, I do think that I try to do it every day too, right? Like, you know, when I wake up, take a half hour, half hour before I go to bed. I don't think there's any substitute for that space, right, making that space. The temptation is to try to build things or to sort of like hack mimetic desire. But I've never found that that stuff really works very well. because all of those things just give me like another outlet to exercise it, if that makes sense. I was thinking while you were talking about that, like Buddhism, being a Buddhist is like trying to get the absence of desire, right? And so I think they were probably tapping into the pitfalls of memetic desire without actually being able to name it, right?

Like if you can remove yourself from desire, you can remove yourself from the tricks of desire. And so like there's something like religion doesn't really have. much of a science behind it, but they get the gist of things really, really well. And so, like, you don't need to, like, write into code E equals MC square to codify the desires of just humans and consciousness. Religion kind of gets it, even without putting it into scientific terms. Yeah. I mean, Buddhism does that. And I think that stoicism, which is a pretty popular movement right now, has a similar spirit, right, in terms of, you know, desire being a source of suffering or most desire being something that we need to sort of, you know, neutralize.

That's not my position at all because I've found, like, I want to desire more, actually. Like, I want to desire certain things more and I want to desire other things less. That's the way that I think about it, right? Like, I want to, you know, desire to be with my dad more, right? So it's a strange thing to want to sort of, like, do away with it or to view desire as a negative thing. Because memetic desire can also be tremendously positive. Right. So, like, one of the tactics to go back.

to your last question is surrounding myself with people who want things that I want to want. Right. Like we normally think of our friends and our spouse or whatever as, you know, we often don't think a lot about what they want. But if memetic desire is real, then what they want is going to dramatically influence what we want. So just being really intentional about, you know, the kinds of people that I'm around. Like I told myself for years that I didn't want to work so much on the weekends.

And, you know, no matter what I did, I couldn't stop doing it. And it wasn't until I met a couple of people, including my wife, who don't have that problem, that I was able to, my desire changed, right? But it was almost like I couldn't change my desire on my own just by thinking about it or telling myself what I wanted. I actually needed to be affected in some real way by other people. Right. Yeah.

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

sure that you also understand what you truly want yourself in isolation rather than from like the rest of this massive amounts of noise from society as input do you agree with that totally yeah controlling inputs is really important you know it's funny we're talking because just a couple of days ago I have my team call all of the people that I follow on Twitter down from like 20,000 to 30 you know and that was part of like is it possible for me to use Twitter in a less memetic way right to make it more antimimetic and to be very intentional and I literally started tweeting out every single person I'm re-following why I'm refollowing them. Because I was like, if I don't know why, then I probably shouldn't be following them. Interesting. So that's my way

of being super intentional about the inputs. And then also, I'm creating a gap between stimulus and response. So Brne Brown talks about this a little bit. Like the three second, like she says earlier in her life, you know, there was no gap between stimulus and response, right? It's like something happens, I immediately respond with, you know, drinking or whatever, right? So, like, as we go through the course of a typical day, like, I think one skill that I have learned or at least gotten a lot better at than I was in my 20s is I just have a gap between the stimulus and the response. Like, even when the inputs, I can't always control the inputs, right? I mean, I go out to some, like, crazy conference or something like that. I can't control all the inputs. But I do have sort

of a gap between the stimulus and the response where I can choose, I can be intentional, you know, can put my sort of mark of my self-possession on whatever the choice is and own it, rather than just complaining that, you know, I have to do all the stuff that I don't want to do. There's an element of taking ownership for your own desires. A lot of people don't think of desires that way, right? We think that we just, we want what we want and we don't realize that, well, some things that we want, we have more authorship and ownership over than other things, right? Some things we didn't choose.

We just want that classic example would be like a kid who follows this path to go to school and become something, some career path that they hate, and they realize that at no step along the way, did they ever consciously choose them? It was just a desire that they just never questioned. It was just given to them, whatever, friends, family. It was indoctrinated into them. Disinductinated, and they never stopped and questioned it. So the basic process is just examining your desires and then taking steps to actually own them. Yeah, I think probably a way to test whether something is, because there's the meme of highly materialistic society, a highly consumer society is just like, buy that thing. Instagram ad, buy that thing.

Buy that thing on Amazon. It can get to you literally in the next eight hours. So just buy that thing. And I think if you bought that thing under the influence of medic desire, you would receive that box, you would have that dopamine from the box, you would open that thing, you would use it one time, and then you would put it down and never use it again and it would never bring joy to your life ever again. That you were under the influence of the medical desire.

If it was actually something that was you, you would receive that item, and then every single day you would engage with that item and it would spark joy for you every single day on a reoccurring basis over and over and over again. That, I think, is the symptoms of you being in control of your desires and actually being attuned to your own desires in a good fashion. How do you like that? And do you agree with that? Yeah, and the origin of that could still be memomatic desire. I just bought, I wish I had it here with me so I could hold it up. I just bought a real piece of artwork. And the reason that I took an interest in it was because the desire for it was modeled to me by somebody that I think has a

really good eye for art and brought it to my attention. And I ended up buying, right? But it was me like recognizing, not an impulse, like went back like three days later. It was me recognizing that, oh, like, definitely, you know, want it because of this reason. But I eventually sort of like made it my own and I find a great deal of satisfaction. So it's not either or is the only point that I'm trying to make, right? It's not like there are certain desires that are anti-mimimetic and other desires that are memetic. Things can start out as memetic. We live in a memetic world where social creatures. We're influenced by all kinds of people. But I can make things my own to a greater or lesser degree. Luke, memetic desire, good for society, bad for society, or neutral? Good, good for society.

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

thing. Maybe some people just didn't get there. So I think it's a positive. I think it's a tremendously positive thing. It just needs to be, it needs to be harnessed in an intentional way. And the analogy that I like to use is, like, we didn't have a memory. desire, we wouldn't do anything. You know, we would just, we wouldn't be very interesting.

But it's like gravity, right? Like, gravity is a force that works on us, works on our bodies. And if we don't exercise, it eventually wreaks havoc on our bodies, right? We'll start, when we're older, we'll have knee problems, we'll have spine problems, because there's a force that's constantly being exerted on us. And memesis, memetic desire is the same way. We can learn to develop certain muscles. in response to it and it can actually help us and help us, you know, lead the kind of lives

that we want to lead. I mean, because there's no escaping. So, you know, the decision is what are we going to do in this memetic world that we live in. Luke, thank you so much for coming on Layer Zero. Thanks, David, man. I really enjoy the conversation. Cheers.