Modern Wisdom - #479 - Johnathan Bi - Why Do Founders Love René Girard?

Episode Date: May 28, 2022

Johnathan Bi is a startup founder, philosopher and mathematician. René Girard is one of the most popular philosophers in Silicon Valley. Why is it that an obscure French polymath from the 1900's would become one of the most influential and cited thinkers amongst founders, CEOs and leaders in high-growth companies?  Expect to learn how Girard believes that mimetic desire drives almost all of our behaviour, why breaking out from the group to do your own thing doesn't mean you're an individual, how having sex can end up not being for the enjoyment of sex, why Peter Thiel and so many others love Girard's work, how understanding Girard can improve your daily life and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 20% discount on Diet Smoke’s legal THC Gummies at https://www.dietsmoke.com/ (use code: MW20) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Watch Jonathan's Girard lecture series here - https://youtu.be/5Qu6vBebwwg Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's happening, people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Jonathan B. He's a startup founder, philosopher, and a mathematician. René Girard is one of the most popular philosophers in Silicon Valley. Why is it that an obscure French polymath from the 1900s would become one of the most influential and cited thinkers amongst founders, CEOs, and leaders in high-growth companies? Thankfully, Jonathan has dedicated the last half-decade to studying his work. Expect to learn how Gerard believes that mimetic desire drives almost all of our behavior, why breaking out from the group to do your own thing doesn't mean that you're an individual, how having sex can end up being not for the enjoyment of sex, why Peter Thiel and so many others love Gerard's work,

how understanding Gerard can improve your daily life, and much more. It's an interesting thing to consider how one man can be so influential and whether his theory about mimesis and about mimetic desire actually explains about why he's so popular in the first place. Don't forget, if you are listening, there is a free copy of the Modern Wisdom reading list waiting for you on the other side of the internet. All that you have to do is go to chriswillx.com slash books. It's 100 books that you should read before you die, the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever found, and it'll subscribe you to my 3-Minute Monday newsletter as well. Go to chriswillx.com slash books to download your copy for free right now. That's chriswillx.com slash books.

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Thanks for having me, Chris. Excited to be on. So the first time that we met was through David Perel, actually, and we went out for dinner. Now, David is a man who has two modes of culinary experience, and he either goes Chick-fil-A or fighting hobos outside of a food truck or he goes the most expensive steak restaurant in town i've noticed this since spending time with him right he's got he's very sort of barbelly when it comes to what he wants to do with food uh but thankfully we went to the we went to the next nice steak restaurant yeah although i wouldn't mind uh fighting for a taco uh next time with you when i'm in austin so david david's oddly uh experienced at that which is right uh can say but yeah it's incredible given how small and

strong he is that's true he's he's got a new girlfriend that's like training him up or something making him eat like a surplus of calories uh he once took me for lunch at some french place on congress and i was in flip-flops and a pair of shorts. And it was just wags and like little tiny model dogs. But anyway, anyway, enough about David Perel. Are you trained in Rene Girard, the philosopher? Have you got some sort of like Girardian accreditation? Perhaps I have the most Girardian of accreditations,

which is being self-taught. Girard himself was trained in history in Indiana University, and before that he was an archivist in France. But he neither made any contributions to being a librarian or history. And the avenues that he did make significant contributions to in anthropology, in theology, in psychology. He was all self-taught. So I suppose that's a nice way of saying no. But followed in his footsteps. Did it the right way.

Yes. I was trained in continental philosophy. However, Girard is not read at all in the academy, unless in literary criticism. And so I was sort of introduced to Girard as a sophomore, and I had to read the Girardian canon, so to speak, myself, with a couple of friends, of course. That's what always makes the journey fun. Who is he, and what's the core insight of his work? Yeah, so he recently passed away in 2015, but his life is probably not as interesting as his key insights are.

And I would say that his most fundamental insight is we don't often desire things for the things themselves, but for what the things say about us. is to delineate two types of desire, physical desire, which is directed at the object, and metaphysical desire, which is directed at what the object says about me. Let me give you some quick examples. You know, take any activity, really, and we can see both strands of desire at work in different circumstances. If I desire to have sex, for example, it could be for pleasure, it could be for intimacy, experiences in the moment, and that would be for physical desire, a desire for experience. But I can also desire to have sex for what having sex with a certain type of person says about me, right? And this is how, as you would know from, you know, being in nightlife, how a lot of people

do live their lives, right? They're not really in it for the pleasure. They're in it because they want to be someone. And that's the psychology of the Casanova or the Don Juan or the Coquette. And this sort of insight expands across all of our decisions. We could take on a job because of what the job says about us, but we could also take on the job because we actually like the activity in and of itself. And so that is Girard's core insight, that there's two different strands of desire. And the dominant strand, metaphysical desire, is actually not aimed at the object itself, but what the object says about me. It's a desire to be rather than a desire to experience. Now, go ahead. Is this different to signaling,

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

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

is how do we satisfy this drive? And that's where mimesis comes into play. We satisfy this drive, this desire to be, to exist in great measure by obtaining objects associated with models who we already conceive of as existing in great measure, be it a celebrity, be it a slightly more established co-worker be it attractive man or woman we look for models around the world to tell us what we should want what is in the core of our identity and i think this is no uh in no other place is this better established than in celebrity advertisement and the one line that i think that always gives it away for me is jordan sneakers taglines be like mike Mike. The advertisements of

basketball sneakers tell you nothing about the physical qualities of the basketball sneakers, the bounce, the lightness, the grip, or even the price. But it's promising you something you want all the more, being Be Like Mike. And so that is Gerard's sort of core psychological system from which all of his social anthropological and eschatological insights eventually flow from. Gerard should have been a nightclub promoter. He would have crushed it in the nightlife game. So here's an interesting example that I like to use. You decide not to go on a night out with a bunch of your friends. Your friends go on the night out, they wake up the next morning, they're hungover, but a little bit later later on once they've got their pizza order out of the way you give someone a ring

or you give them a text and you say hey man how was last night so many times the first thing that someone will reply with will be dude it was awesome there was so many girls there last night you go hang on i asked how the night was i didn't ask who the other consumers of the thing that you were consuming were. So people that buy an iPhone mostly don't buy an iPhone because David Beckham also has an iPhone. They buy an iPhone for the core competence that the product gives them. It's got a camera, and it can make calls, and it's got good battery life, and stuff like that. I couldn't be so sure about that. I mean, think about all the cases of people selling their livers for an iPhone. I imagine they're not doing a rational analysis saying oh my liver is worth for you know the

camera all this stuff i do think the iphone is actually a great example of or actually you and i might purchase it for physical desire right but i'm sorry to interrupt you but i think for a lot of people it is a sort of status symbol it is a sort of i would. It is a sort of metaphor. I would agree as a status symbol. You're probably right there. But certainly when you compare it to a nightclub event, you're like, the core feature of the product that is going on a night out is the other consumers of the product.

You can go on a night out to the same event week on week. The DJ could play the same set. The sound and the lights could be exactly the same. The drinks prices could be the same. The service could play the same set the sound and the lights could be exactly the same the drinks prices could be the same the service could be the same but if you change the other people that go and consume that product because they are such a big influence on your night and it's not just some sort of woo ephemeral like uh status signally thing they actually impact your night in a physical way like if there's loads of guys that are aggressive and dancing in the club like that actually changes your experience it's not

totally totally woo but it is the most important thing about nightlife are the other people that consume that product and it's so interesting to see that because you go well hang on what does this mean from a product design perspective it means that actually what i need to do is create a product not that's the best but that attracts people that other people want to be around so for a lot of nightclubs that means getting girls in if you bring girls in girls don't have a problem with more girls but both girls and guys have a problem with more guys yeah yeah totally well first thing i'll say is i think we should be extremely comfortable thinking about the context of Gerard within romance and dating because it's romance and dating where he goes to his canonical examples as well.

And I think perhaps a reason he goes there is that we traditionally think that in romance and dating, that's where our physical urges are the strongest, right? What could be a strong motivator for sex? But even in this domain, Gerard shows, if you'll excuse a pun, that our desires are helplessly penetrated by the desires of others. Even in such a domain that's dominated by a physical strong desire, we can be hopelessly mediated by other people. Just think about our other sort of less strongly physical domains, political intuitions, philosophical opinions, and all the rest. The other thing I'll say is, and I read a pretty interesting book called A Very Important Person. I think you'll really enjoy it. It's an- Oh, by Ashley Mears?

Yes. She's been on the show. Yeah, she was great. You know what? I actually know that because I think I went from the show to the book. And that's exactly what the book says, right? The way that you get guys to spend is you get more women there. You add the gaze of the woman that um sort of enable the men to be more competitive with each other and drive bottle service what you see in nightclubs specifically we didn't do this so we ran events that were high volume low cost we were we were putting a thousand to two thousand eighteen to twenty one year olds in so it wasn't about bottles and shows although we've dabbled in a little bit of that and obviously i've been to my fair share of events like that what you'll see in nightclubs

and anyone can go and check this out if you're in a city like miami or new york that has big bottle shows type events look at the way that they position the most expensive tables in the club they're always within uh seeing distance of each. Reason being that you want to have one table start to dick measure with the other. They want to order a medium-sized show to begin with. Probably a little bit bigger than they anticipated because they want a little bit of that conspicuous consumption going on.

But then another table's like, yo, fuck that. Dude, get the Amex out. Let's wipe those guys under the table. And then you have this game back and forth so in a couple of venues they'll be opposite each other like the most antagonistic way that you could position people but they're always going to be able to see each other because you want to create that competition yeah yeah and let me uh pull us even a bit further

in the theory because we're all i think think we're all giving examples, good examples of instances where mimesis and metaphysical desire makes us converge. But the other, and I think people commonly misunderstand this in Girard, the opposite is true as well. Metaphysical desire can also enable us to diverge from the group because it's almost the same extension of the same logic, right? The logic of metaphysical desire that I just said was do we want to acquire objects associated with models with a heightened degree of being? Well, the inverse logic is true as well. We also want to distance ourselves away from objects associated with models with a deficiency of being. I mean, a trite way to say this is we want to wear the same brands of the sneakers as the cool kids in high school, but also want to make damn sure that we don't wear the same brands as the not cool kids, right, as the social outcasts in high school. And so mimesis can equally lead us to diverge as it leads us to converge. And I think a

great example here I'll give you is this. I was in college and I had an acquaintance in freshman year, and he was very concerned with distributive justice, so to think progressive economics. And I thought, you know, what a kind guy. He's always caring about the poor. And, you know, I got to know him a lot better. And this acquaintance confessed to me that in sophomore year that he was actually very motivated by the hatred of his richer peers rather than the direct caring of the poor. In fact, he grew up in a, he was a middle class and grew up in an upper middle class sort of, you know, school district. And it was out of that resentment that he basically just flipped the logic of the people

that he resented on its head. And, you know, what's really funny with these types is he's now in investment banking, right? Because he didn't have a problem with making a lot of money at all. In fact, the reason he loathed it so much was because he wanted it so much, but there were people sort of stopping him there. And so the reason I thought this was an important highlight is because I think our societies are very conscious of conformity as being inauthentic, right, as being determined by the group. But there's a form of divergence from the group out of this resentment that I see proliferating in society today that is just as

inauthentic and just as determined by the group, no less than pure conformity. And so mimesis and metaphysical desire really entrap us in every direction we go. And this romantic line that Girard thinks we're all in is that we have this authentic core of the self with these social layers added on. And all we have to do is peel back these social layers. But Girard says not so fast. You're confusing originality and difference for authenticity. but that is not so i just want to make sure that we highlight that as well is that the positive and negative mimesis is that how that's labeled precisely so there's a positive phase of mimesis where you're converging to the model and then there's a negative phase of mimesis where you want to

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

you chose the zero instead of the one yeah yeah or another way to put it the way i thought about it is one and negative one right you want to be not correlated you want to be zero you want to be like not correlated to the group but instead you're just sort of flipping everything uh on its head and my point is and i think what you're saying is agreeing with this, in society, we can easily identify conformity as being inauthentic, as being determined by the group. But people are just starting to gain a sort of awareness of why sort of carving one's own path and have a bold breaking away from the group can be just as fraught and inauthentic. is a fraught and an authentic going back to the dating example one of the common pieces of advice for people when they're creating their tinder profile is to have photos with other women or other men right if you're a girl with other guys if you're a guy with other girls because that shows that you are somebody that is already around that i need to you don't want to choose like the worst

looking friends that you've got right you're going to choose what look like high value friends yeah um and you know i i don't think gerard would have much more to say than the ground that we've already covered right we want to show uh people we consider to have a higher degree of being as already desiring desiring us um and you And this is the logic behind why more attractive and seemingly successful people are used behind advertisements. There's also a funny sort of cascading effect that you see. Someone that isn't a particularly good-looking guy in celebrity culture will start to go out with some girl who is super hot, and everyone will go, hang on a second what's

he doing with her that's a little bit strange if they break up his next three girlfriends are always absolute smoking hot winners it's okay what what why is that well it's like well that person must have noticed something about this guy that nobody else was able to see yeah there's sort of this like mimetic echo that goes over time, because super high status girl number one, and then two and three and four. Yeah, and I think you're really hitting at the intuition of the world, and the very strange world that Gerard is leading us towards. It's not a world where we use reason, or even we use our own experience

to really diligence things, to see the true essence of things. But it's a world of associations, right? That we make decisions through associations. And that, I think, is a trite and reductionist, but I think accurate intuition of what world we're stepping into. What drew you to Gerard? You've dedicated a lot of time to thinking and learning about one guy. You know, I grew up as a STEM science person. And I think a problem with the intellectual current of today is that we're underappreciating the social dimensions of the self. And this is an argument that you're going to hear from the left and the right, by the way. Maybe this will help.

Plato had a conception of the soul as being consisting of three parts, right? There's appetite, we've discussed desire for sex, for food, pleasure. There's reason that we know very well. And then there's spirit. Right. The soul, the part of the soul that desires social goods, honor, glory, fame. sophisticated academic positions of the day, I think the popular cultural current conceives of humans completely removed of the spirited part of the soul. It conceives of humans as rational utility maximizing machines. And I think, you know, how many times have you heard this said in Silicon Valley? You know, we're about robots trying to maximize happy chemicals squirting in our brains. Or take how GDP is important as a measure, almost like the ultimate measure of a country's sort of accomplishment.

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

Now, in the late – in the 90s and certainly in the 2000s, the dominant view of the West was that the economic liberalization of China would be welcomed by the world. And the long short of the argument would be, you know, China's rise would also make the West richer through cheaper goods and that people would be happy with this rise. Now, you can fundamentally see that the assumption here is that we are rational, utility-maximizing creatures. see that the assumption here is that we are rational, utility-maximizing creatures. If we get three Oreos for $3, we're less happy than if we get four Oreos for $3. But Girard went against the public opinion. In 2007, this was the height of Sino-American optimism. He went against the crowd and he said that even if China did make the West richer,

which is what ended up happening, as relativistic social creatures concern more for social standing, the closing of the gap is what both parties will focus on. The Chinese will not be much happier that they are closer to Americans. Instead, the fact that they are closer

makes them more envious. And the same is true for the West, that the fact that they are absolutely richer matters very little to a drop in relativistic comparison. And so it's this fundamentally different alien, but I think more revealing lens of viewing humans as rational agents, but as social spirited creatures is why Gerard was so pulled me in in was that a big shock given that you were coming from a stem background oh it was a tremendous shock but it was also why it was uh you know really interesting I feel like if I you know had grown up with that intuition in mind then all this would be obvious and it kind of seems obvious to me now, right, after studying him for so long. But yeah,

it was a tremendous shock. And, you know, Girard really is, and I can't emphasize this enough, attacking the fundamental pillars of the modern West. Because think about what the answer to the question, where does normative authority, where do we gain assurance of our values? Girard's answer is the dominant force is through by looking at other people. But what does the modern West say? There's two answers. One, speaking in very broad strokes here, is the enlightenment, reason. We use reason to figure that out. The other, again, very broadly here, romanticism, that there's a core of authenticity.

But as we've already discussed, both Girard subsumes under the power of the social part of ourselves, that we are fundamentally social creatures. We are like co-vibrating violin strings. And this, and we probably don't have time to talk about this, but the political implications are just tremendous and really earth-shattering for the modern West. How does understanding Girard make life better, then? Yeah, so the first thing I'll say is, Girard is going to be very unsatisfying

if you're looking for him to give you prescriptive answers. The real prescriptive answer that he tells you is to withdraw, to leave the world behind. In his later book, he would hold Holderlin, a 19th century German poet, who literally, pun intended, hold himself up in a tower for the last decades of his life, as the example par excellence. Now, I've obviously, I have not been satisfied with that response. I'm not holed up in a tower. And so I thought a lot about the implications of his theory and how we live given that.

And I have a few sort of broad stroke answers here. The first answer I'll give is just the mere fact of gaining awareness of the social dimension of ourselves and the logic of mimesis is tremendously helpful. It's not helpful that it will stop making you be memetic right away, but it will give you the foresight to avoid bad situations because you can see them coming from a mile away. And the analogy I like to use is there was a military theorist, John Boyd, and he said something like, I don't have to paraphrase, that great fighter pilots use their superior judgment to make sure they never have to get into situations to use their superior force. And I think the same is true for understanding mimetic theory. It doesn't give you the ability to just snap your fingers and not be social creatures, but it does give you the foresight to see bad situations coming and potentially avoid it. So that's the first thing I'll say. Just rational understanding is tremendously helpful. The second thing I'll say is that these two separate desires, physical desire, right, the desire for the object activity in itself, the desire for experience, metaphysical desire, desire for being. For Girard, this metaphysical desire – I'm sorry, this physical desire while not always being good, right, you can be gluttonous and that can ruin you.

But this metaphysical desire is almost always bad. That it will just lead you from one wild goose hunt to the next. And so one immediate and quite simple conclusion there is, well, let's find activities where I like in and of itself. And for me, this was switching from, and again, both degrees, but switching from CS to philosophy. And I think it's helpful for our listeners to conceive of these two desires as really fighting for real estate. And so the more you push one, or the more that the physical desire is there, the less you have to draw on for metaphysical desire. And so for me, switching to an activity philosophy, that was much more interesting to me.

It meant that I didn't have to pull on the motivational forces of social prestige and social affirmation as much. So that's the second way. The third is, you know, one can decrease metaphysical desire directly. And I think there's two ways to do that. And remember, metaphysical desire is simply a very prideful drive, right? A wanting to be greater than life. And I think the two ways to do that, one is failure. If you have ever just failed

so hard in activity that you feel your entire ego and self is shattered, anyone who's gone through something like that knows that there's an opportunity to be more humble and let go of pride.

But I think the inverse is true as well, is to achieve the thing that you always wanted to do and see it as deeply lacking, right? This, the way out is through, so to speak, almost a form of personal accelerationism. And the last thing I'll probably say is, if you think that you can escape from mimesis, from wanting recognition, then you really haven't realized how deeply this drive is embedded into the human nature. That you would fundamentally be irrecognizable without it. It's like asking, you know, what would a human look like if they didn't breathe, right? It's just constitutive of what a human is. And so what I would warn people, and this is what I also was

trying to get at with negative imitation, negative mimesis, is that don't try to be a loner. The solution isn't to escape from all forms of social construction, but to find a type of social construction that, from a sober perspective, influences and directs you to the type of desires that you actually want. Practically speaking, it's, you know, finding a bunch of friends who also like to do philosophy with you, or whatever your sort of passion is. And so those are the things that I would say, like, what are the immediate things that we can do from this theory is mimesis falsifiable this seems a little bit to me like you do the thing that everybody else does that's mimesis you do the thing opposite to everybody else does that's negative mimesis that it seems to me a little bit like

gerard might have been a bit sort of sneaky with his unfalsifiable theory here yeah well that's a great question but the first thing i'll say is not every act is mediated by the group right again you can pursue sex for pleasure itself, not because of what it says about you or not because of any sort of social force. So there's a large swath of activity that is neither positive nor negative mimesis. So we don't have to – in other words, we don't have to label everything as positive and negative mimesis. But I think you bring up a very interesting and broader point, which is what is the nature of proof in Girard? And I think when you get to these philosophical theories as you do Hegel or maybe Nietzsche, I think the only form of proof that is available perhaps – I might walk back on that statement. But I think the only – or the strongest form of proof available is introspection, right?

Try to – what Girard is saying here is he's giving you almost a literary argument. I'm going to write these 20 books about human nature, and you go read them. But just humor me when you read them. Just pretend that they're true. And apply them to your life and see whether it's revealing or not. see whether it's revealing or not. And through that process, the real force of proof comes from revelation, right? It becomes revelatory. That it's able to explain phenomena and direct you in ways that actually end up working. That's the first thing I'll say. And that's where the power of really came from me and how I got convinced was introspection. But in terms of

mimesis, there actually has been empirical work done on this. I'm blanking on the name of the scientists, but there was studies of babies and they showed how, you know, babies started imitating the facial features of humans, of other adults ever since, you know, 25 minutes old. And there's, you know, I think in the late 20th century, there was a big boom in neuroscience with mirror neurons. And some Girardians have used that as the biological basis of mimesis. So there are sort of those empirical routes that one can take. And I think, you know, if I dedicated my life to studying this, that I really should take. But for me, at least to answer the question of why Girard was worth engaging for me, the sort of introspection

was more than enough for me to continue engaging. It seems like Girard's view of human nature is engaging. It seems like Gerard's view of human nature is not as vulnerable or fallible. It seems like we're incredibly fallible in his eyes. Oh, terribly so. I would say. But talk to me, you've read his work, it's been hugely influential on you, it's taken you from being this sort of super rational STEM person to a slightly less rational but perhaps a little bit more rounded philosophy person. How do you feel enlightened or fulfilled by a theory which kind of points the finger at you and says how easily fallible you are? Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I can give two answers. One is, how has that changed my view to society?

And the other is, how has it changed my view to myself? And I'll answer the first one first because I think it's more interesting. because I think it's more interesting. What Girard is doing here is he's giving us a theodicy. As you can see, and as we already covered in the brief 30, 40 minutes, he thinks that humans, to your point, are deeply fallible, so much so that he's giving us a psychology of original sin,

what it means to be fallen creatures, right? This idea that we're motivated by an unrelenting drive that we can never satisfy, that we're not even aware of, that we say we want to be an investment banker, but we really don't want that, we want something else. That's a terrible, terrible thing, right? And it only gets worse and worse. There's so many different social pathologies, like, many different social pathologies, or psychological social pathologies, like masochism and bipolarity, that Girard identifies as not just contingent, not as accidental, but as always existing in human nature. Girard rejects this modern psychoanalytical approach to label certain diseases as discrete things. You're schizophrenic

or you're not. You're bipolar or you're not. Instead, he sees all of human nature as one of, on a degree of pathology, that we're all masochistic, we're all bipolar. Now, I would actually argue, and this might be weird, but hear me out, that this is quite a liberating and hopeful way to view society. And the reason is, let me give you an example. So Gerard's argument for why alienation and fetishization, these are two concepts that Marxist thinkers are very concerned with. Gerard's argument is that both of these things are not due to the structure of capital, but due to the structure of human nature. And I think it's very easy to see, right? What is fetishization? It's a desire for the object more than what the object can give us.

Well, that's just metaphysical desire, right? And what is alienation? It's alienating the best qualities of ourselves into an object, reasoning once we get close to that object, we will attain it. Again, that's just metaphysical desire. And so Girard would say to a Marxist, for example, that, you know, you're right in identifying that alienation and fetishization exist in contemporary capitalism. And you're even right that they're channeled through capitalism, but you'd be deluded in thinking that they're caused by capitalism. Their roots are much deeper in fundamental human condition. And that is what happened when people try to liberate themselves from capitalism, right? The alienation from the process of labor in British coal mines became the alienation from the Soviet factories.

And so what Girard is doing here is giving a fundamentally fallen picture of human nature that sees many social pathologies as natural to the human condition. But then, I know, Chris, the question in your mind must be, why is Jonathan saying that this is a good thing? Why is it helping him reconcile it with the world? It allows us to see the world and say, this is all that humans can be and allows us to affirm it. Let me give you the opposite sort of argument here. You know, I heard this one, you know, progressive newspaper line about sort of Asians being very upset that their names were mispronounced. And, you know, obviously I, And obviously, as an immigrant myself,

I've had those experiences, and it doesn't feel good. But what I found really odd about that argument is that people can't really make certain sounds after the critical stage of language acquisition of 7. So what they're upset about, that Europeans or people who grew up in European languages can't pronounce certain Chinese sounds, like my name, Yingjie, is actually very hard to pronounce. People have really tremendous trouble. They say Ji instead of Jie.

So I've been through this. But what I found really odd about this progressive article is they're really complaining about something that really can't be changed, right? Because critical language acquisitions end at age seven. So there's no possible world where people do pronounce all of Asian names perfectly correctly. And I think what is underlying a lot of contemporary progressivism today is an overly optimistic view of human nature. And Girard would attribute this view to Rousseau, this sort of perfected state of nature that society corrupts. Now, whereas – does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

So it's the original sin as it gives us a lowered expectation of what we can expect from ourselves in society to make our existing society actually affirmable by reason. So that we don't go and look at the first sign of alienation or fetishization or impression of inequality and say, we've got to tear the whole system down. And I think that's a common intuition, a common critical intuition into contemporary society. Okay, so the fact that fundamentally in Girard's theory he sees humans as fallible creatures, kind of fallen. He gets into theology a little bit later in his career as well, and I imagine that he's drawn some quite nice lines between his psychology and his theology work. quite nice lines between his psychology and his theology work the fact that he's got that is like a meta comment around the fact that humans are his view of human nature is fallible and the solution to our fallibility is first to recognize the fact that we are fallible so the red pill that he's shoving down everybody's throats is like it's the thing that they need to

actually be able to understand in order for them to be able to see the i guess the i just i just hoped that it would be more hopeful you know like being told that i'm ruthlessly at the mercy of the high status people in my society and i'm either going to positively go toward what they want or negatively go away from whatever the opposite of those people are what they want it how have you talked to me about you practical applicable ways that you operate in your life in a gerardian sense yeah so um maybe let me make just one more comment about this sort of social theodicy that that we been talking about um the first thing i'll say is Girard thinks that human nature is fundamentally fallen, so there's a limit to the goodness of a society that we can build. But certainly that does not mean

that we should just stomach all forms of badness. Certainly that does not mean we look at slavery and we say, oh, there's oppression everywhere. Let's move on. Let's affirm that. That is not the case. I think what Girard is doing is more negative. He's saying, if you take a perfectible view of human nature, no society that you're going to design is really going to live up to that. And you're going to end in this critical loophole where you're just going to start critiquing everything and think that is sufficient

for the impetus of change. Well, that is not so. But I just wanted to clarify that, that this sort of argument is not also an argument for complacency, but just placing a fundamental limit on how good human society can be. In terms of your other question, I think this is probably my fault. I probably exaggerated the determinism of uh that gerard attributes to humanity um i think maybe the this is going to be reductive but i think hopefully illuminating the one-liner here is um we have agency in choosing our social circumstance but not necessarily how we will behave in those social circumstances if that makes sense does this go back to the john boyd example about the fact that you can foresee things okay so the argument here is that mimesis and our desire to be like the people that are successful and push away from the people that aren't these are very difficult

for us to deprogram if possible at all one of the choices that we have is to retreat to a cabin in the woods and and completely fuck off right another solution is for us to stack the deck in our favor with the foresight that mimetic desire is going to come through and the way that we stack the deck is to be around people that we genuinely want ourselves to be like is that right kind of kind of um so yes it's it's fundamentally the the conclusion of gerard is one must design one's social environment right um how in one way yeah so so one way and this is not to say social. Again, I'll emphasize. It's do what you like, physical desire.

Because again, physical and metaphysical desire are competing interests, right? Take the example of Joseph Campbell, hero of a thousand faces. He basically left his PhD program at Columbia, I think, and he just went into the woods and had read for 10 years. Now, he was only able to do that without any social validation because he loved the activity in and of itself. And for me and Gerard, for a period at least, that was how I felt about Gerard. I wasn't thinking about going on these podcasts or working on a book-length project. But it was so helpful and illuminating and fun for me to wrestle with Gerard into the mud that I would be fine with little social affirmation. And I think you see this with dating as well, right? I mean, some

people, they clearly want partners so that other people can see them with them. And that's where they derive most of the value. Trophy wives or hubs are the most extreme example of this. But if you find someone that you genuinely love hanging out in and of itself, and this goes the same for friendships, then you can diminish the amount you have to lean on those mimetic impulses. What about desires that we have, physical desires, that aren't adaptive or are malignant or shouldn't be there that need that mimetic sense to curb some of them so let's say that somebody likes stealing they love the thrill of robbing other stores the mimetic impulse that they have from other people who say maybe you shouldn't do that

that's a good influence that's tamping down a physical desire that somebody has which actually needs restricting and in that way the mimesis is something that they shouldn't try and avoid, but something that they should actually try and lean into. Yeah, yeah. Gerard doesn't bring these punitive or corrective examples up a lot. And frankly, I haven't thought a lot about them. But I think that would be a good solution. In fact, the sort of closest thing that I thought about, given the example that you gave, was actually about how to educate my future children. And, you know, it's very hard for people to love knowledge in and of itself. You know, some people eventually get there, but in order to do so, you're going to have to do

a lot of training, right, to get there. And that training is often not enjoyable at all. So I think this mimetic desire to be can be that impulse, that drive to get you over you will, before those physical desires come in. And another good example here is, Chris, as I'm sure you know, is working out or weightlifting or any form of sports. It's quite unsatisfying for the first few months when you're doing a sport because you're not very good at it. But if you have a desire to be, if you want to be like Ronaldo or Messi or, you know, LeBron James, the man can get you over the hump. Again, this is us creatively interpreting Gerard, which I'm all a fan of, but Gerard himself is very clear that even in these instances,

metaphysical desire is still fundamentally bad because it's still fundamentally motivated by a lie. But that's not to say it can have very important and positive consequences. Yeah, it's strange to think about what are the impacts that you get from other people that pull you along in a good way. So for instance, going to the gym, a lot of people might go to the gym because of the way that it makes them look to other people. Now the byproduct of them going to the gym and then looking good to other people, they're going to be healthier, they're going to live longer longer they're going to have higher bone density and muscle mass and the myriad of things that you get out of

exercise but that is i guess that that's just a fluke that's a fluke that the metaphysical desire of the signal that going to the gym and the sort of body that you get happens to align with something which is physically good for yourself and i would guess the sort of uh race to the bottom and the way that groups of people tend to converge on stuff a lot of the time the metaphysical desire that emerges as a collective isn't necessarily what's optimal for the individual on their own there's a a blog post called what do you want to want by kyle eschenroda and i must i must quote it once a week to people right and he had to read it yeah he asks the question what do you want to want now that's a really interesting question not what do you want what do you want to want what are the

desires that you want yourself to have and it's the same as the is it aristotle or seneca or someone that says uh if a man knows not where he sails no wind is favorable right and the problem that you have is you can't turn the wind off right there's always going to be wind and there's always going to be destinations but if you're not careful if you don't look at your desires if you don't assess where you are and genuinely what you want to want from life you can end up in a place not only that you don't assess where you are and genuinely what you want to want from life, you can end up in a place not only that you didn't mean to get to, but that you don't even want to be. Yes, and so that's all great, and I think you're hitting on core Girardian intuitions, and the landscape where he discusses this is actually in the political culture of the day. So the long story

short is that in pagan society, he thinks that there was mimetic pressures to kill victims. And in contemporary society, there's mimetic pressure to protect victims. Now, Girard would say that today, someone who's trying to protect victims out of mimesis is fundamentally better than someone converging to a worse form of mimesis trying to kill victims out of mimesis is fundamentally better than someone converging to a worse form of mimesis trying to kill victims. But it's still mimesis nonetheless. And maybe to project it into your example that you gave, we can say that maybe a good outcome is if metaphysical desire overlays with physical desire. However, insofar as you are pushed by metaphysical desire, I would wager that you are not fully your own man or woman. Because if the, as you say,

the winds slightly tilt another way, and instead of, you know, working out, it's, I don't know, jumping off a cliff or something like that, then you will be equally lean towards that. So to your point, the success is trivial or accidental. Now, another problem that comes with this approach of being motivated by metaphysical desire, even if it's to a direction that you want, is twofold. One, you may overdo the thing, right? Think about, you know, bodybuilders injecting, you know, if you don't do it for health, you're doing it to show off, and you can easily go above and beyond what health dictates and actually harm your health, as you well know. And the other thing, and this is I think why Gerard thinks it's fundamentally bad, is it's very tiring to be motivated by that force. And I think anyone who's been motivated by such a social force can discuss that or can relate to this, that when you lose, it's a sort of existential despair.

And when you win, it's not sort of an overabundant, overflowing, everlasting joy, but almost a sense of relief. And so we may say that it's better for metaphysical desire to be directed at good things and to align your physical desire. There's still fundamental problems with being motivated by it, or at the very least, it too much. In that same blog post, What Do You Want to Want, he talks about how other people's heads is a terrible place for your self-worth to live.

That a lot of the time when people do things now, they're not doing them for the joy of themselves. They're doing them for what it says about them they're doing it for the tweets that are then subsequently going to come or the likes or the comments on an instagram page and it is incredibly fragile when you think about the fact that you could do something not because you want to do it but because you think other people will like the fact that you've done it that does basically put your entire sense of self-worth and fulfillment and direction in life in the hands of other people will like the fact that you've done it, that does basically put your entire sense of self-worth and fulfillment and direction in life in the hands of other people. Now, I had a discussion with Michael Malice, my mate, and he said he believes that a large proportion of the population

fundamentally doesn't have agency or a personality and that these people are better off trying to model people that have been successful because if they were left to their own devices they would get things wrong he has a very uh uh even less um hopeful i think of human nature than than gerard does but his point is as far as he's concerned a lot of people are idiots and therefore they would fuck up if you left them on their own what they need to do is to actually model off people that do know what they're doing because that's going to have this trickle-down effect of at least making the people at the bottom a little bit less shit yeah you know um this is i think if i may reframe our conversation as any annoying analytical philosopher does,

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

It's got to be adaptive. For metaphysical desire. What is that functional value? Girard basically thinks, or rather, I think, I read into Girard that metaphysical desire and mimesis help us organize in very, very large groups. Have you ever read Sapiens, by any chance? Yes. Yeah, so in it, right, it describes a competition between Homo erectus and Neanderthal, to us, Homo sapien. And I think one of the big differences, I may butcher this, is that erectus and Homo sapiens, I'm sorry, erectus and Neanderthal

can only organize up to a certain limit, right? This is, I don't know if it's Dunbar's number, but there's a fundamental limit. Whereas humanity is able to, we're still 7 billion people and we're still somewhat successfully organized. What is that? Girard's answer here is that we are not special as creatures because of our ability to gain access to truth. Animals do this all the time, echolocation, magnetic fields. We are special because we can believe in lies insofar as we look around and see other people believing in lies as well. Now the less provocative way of saying that is we can use mimesis to spin up helpful fictions, the Greek gods, fiat money, cryptocurrencies, to organize massive amounts of society and

to sort of structure society beyond Dunbar's number. It's our ability to believe in lies and follow the herd. That is what got humanity here today. And one more thing that I would like to point your readers to, excellent book written by the professor I studied with called Rousseau's Theodicy. And Rousseau identifies a very similar drive, like metaphysical desire and mimesis. He called it amor prop, the desire for self, for esteem, for social recognition. And to quote him, I'm going to paraphrase, to this we must attribute all of our rapists, all of our criminals, all the worst of

humanity, but also our entrepreneurs, our artists, and our great generals. To this drive, all of humanity, what makes humanity interesting, we must attribute. And that is really how core mimesis and metaphysical desire is, that it can be amazing for societies, that it could be greatly helpful of individuals, but Girard thinks it is ultimately suffocating for the person who is motivated by it. One of the first times i think i ever heard gerard be spoken about was peter teal so i recently went and facilitated a conversation with him a couple of weeks ago which was very nice he's very lovely we had a good chat um but i wonder why it is that so many people in positions of power hold gerard in high regard he's like the sort of hot new girl philosopher

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

is a negative to that theory. Oh, you know, you just like David Graeber because other people like it is uh a negative to that theory oh you know you you just like uh david graver because other people like david graver but one is hard to say the same about memetic theory because that's exactly what memetic theory predicts right because if you're saying like look memetic theory really has very little value then you're like well why do people like it oh because other people like it then you're like, then it does have a lot of value. Fucking unfalsifiable, man. I told you this earlier on. Yeah, yeah. Now, the other thing that I'll say here is I think we shouldn't shy away from such a genealogy, for example, that I got into a thing because of mediation. As we've discussed already with education, with working out, many of the times

we do get into with a thing not knowing what the physical experience is, right? And it's almost a tautology, because how can you know what the thing is before you get into it? Now, I think what's important is whether you're still mediated by that, right? Going forward, or like me, you know, you just gained a love for the subject itself. But I think there's another answer beyond this. I think we'd be giving Peter too much credit if we say it's just Peter. Now, my answer isn't going to take the shape of saying there's something important and crucial about memetic theory, which I think there is, that makes people successful. Instead, I think that there is a confounding variable

that leads people both to success and memetic theory. Does the shape of my answer, before I actually give it, make sense? It's not that memetic theory gives us something. It's that something leads people who are already predisposed to success to memetic theory. And I think the answer there is arrogance and pride and delusion. Now I'm going to have to give you two arguments here. Why I think that's necessary for worldly success or helpful for worldly success and the other is why people like that are attracted to Girard. I'll give the second one first.

It's easier to give. As we mentioned, this desire to be, metaphysical desire, is a yearning to exist in great measure. I think then that Gerard's psychology is incredibly limited. And what it describes really, really well is the psychology of the prideful person. Think about it. What are Gerard's canonical examples? Klauschwitz, Holderlin, Napoleon, Don Quixote, right? The Casanovas and the Coquettes of the world, people who are really, really prideful. And the type of psychology that Girard describes, you know, envy at the slightest

tremor and existential despair as, you know, you glance at your friend and he's doing slightly better than you. Well, some of us may share that to a degree. It's only the people who are extremely prideful who sort of really experience that. So Girard is really giving us the psychology of pride here. And I think people who are naturally prideful and arrogant, such as myself, when I came to Girard, we naturally gravitate towards this theory because it explains us so well. You know, Nietzsche tells us that, you know, the philosophies we choose to write, beyond an objective capture of human nature is actually a deeply subjective confession of who we actually are. Well, I will add to that. And so must be the philosophies we choose to read.

Right. We naturally gravitate towards the types of psychology and phenomenological experience that conforms to our own. conforms to our own. And so I think people who are prideful and arrogant are more attracted to Girard because he describes a psychology of pride. Now, I have to proceed on my second prong of my argument for why I think, because I've drawn the link with pride to mimetic theory. Now I have to draw the link between pride and worldly success. And I think the way I'm going to do this is by drawing an example. Let me give you a few examples of why I think pride, arrogance, delusion are, if not necessary, certainly helpful for worldly success. Think about what you would have said if you were Elon's friend and he told you he wanted to not only change the way that cars were powered, but also send a rocket to Mars. Think about what you would have said to Peter and Joe when they were starting Palantir.

And this is what people said. You're going to sell government, sell the CIA software? That's ridiculous. And this is not only true for worldly action in industry, but also for philosophy. You know, so I've been told, you know, Adorno and Horkheimer, the founders of the Frankfurt School, you know, tremendous influence on the political left, were extremely arrogant, you know, believing themselves in their 30s to have cognized sort of, you know, the fundamental logic of philosophy or something like that. And in my own life, you know, I would consider myself somewhat successful.

And again, all the most important moves. I was a middling student in China, going to a public school in Canada. And I wanted to get in the Ivy League. I wanted to study CS as an international kid, and I wanted a full ride. And I was delusional. And people thought that I was delusional. The same thing with Gerard. As a 20-year-old, you're going to tell me you're going to read all of Gerard's canon by yourself, and you're going to create a lecture series,

and you're going to title, you have the arrogance to title your book, Completing Gerard as your first book. What ridiculous arrogance is that? We'll see whether this ends up being a laughingstock or not. But the point is, it's almost in the nature of success to conceive of oneself as greater than one currently is, to be prideful, to be arrogant, to be delusional. And I think we can find philosophical grounding for this argument in one of my favorite essays, Nietzsche's Uses and Abuses of History for Life. In it, he argues the fundamental place of action in the world comes from a place of untruth, a delusion in one's ability, and a delusion in how important achieving that thing is going to make me feel, and a delusion in the importance of that thing to the world. We need to be deluded to have that extra boost to carry it forward. And I think once framed

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

Well, pride and arrogance are one hell of a fuel source to drive you forward. Of course. You're right. The interesting thing about imposter syndrome is that a lot of the time it's justified, especially when you're trailblazing. This is what Seth Godin said. He's like, look, if you've never done a thing before, imposter syndrome isn't some maladaptive psychological trait. It's a realistic positioning of your capacities

and the challenges that you're coming up against. Now, the problem is if you continue to disprove it in the real world and then it persists, that's imposter adaptation, which is a malignant version of it. But imposter syndrome is just you knowing what you've done before and then looking at the challenge in front of you and going, I haven't done that. I don't really know. So what you're saying is that arrogance, pride, sort of a self-belief deceit all of this what it does is it enables to people people to think above and beyond what their capacities are now in the current moment yes precisely and again right this can go terribly terribly wrong and for each elon we can point to

you know a hundred elizabeth holmes selection like that whatever is survivorship bias survivorship bias right so I'm not making the argument that you know all you have to do is be delusional and prideful You obviously have to be very very skilled to eventually justify that delusion But I think the argument I'm making is that you know that that specific forms of delusion of untruth of a refusal To meet with reality in the moment is deeply deeply You know helpful for worldly activity well it seems to be that way you know you see or hear these guys speak and i think this is as well one

of the reasons why when people hear you know george soros or bill gates or these you know people that have become incredibly wealthy or powerful when they hear them speak there is a little bit of a suspicion that they're part of some reptilian race or a new world order that's trying to take over everything because it seems quite detached right remember that these people have selected for the top one percent of the top one percent of the top one percent of pretty much everything that you need to get yourself there in fact cool story one of my friends in austin works for a recruitment company recruiting high-powered executives for startups, right? So this guy has access to the hitters of the hitters for the biggest companies and the fastest growing startups in the world. And he was telling me that he was able to go into the files that they

had and go back to see a bunch of executives that are now at huge companies and read their files from five or 10 years ago. So the way that they do their interviews is they sit down for between five and 10 hours and they just talk. There's a framework that they follow, but it's not qualifications and stuff. It's personality, it's attributes, it's traits, right? And I was like, okay, so tell me what it's's like could you go back and see that the people that are super successful now were going to be super successful so that's interesting yes you can the people that get to you don't get onto this list without being some sort of beast but the people that were the absolute best stood out way before in a five hour or 10 hour conversation they already stood out amongst

a sea of incredibly competent people as being superbly competent so he said he went back and looked at tim cook that they'd had now the ceo apple and the first word on tim cook's report was stood the first word was stood susanna was jikki that looks after youtube rockstar was the first word on that and he's like this isn't how most peoples were written so you were able to see that the hitters of the hitters were already going to do it they stood out in the space of five hours and what was how does this tie back to our current conversation you're saying that uh you're saying that their arrogance or pride even at that moment was somewhat justified or like it's not justified by their current achievement by their clear potential yes precisely like most people that go into a job interview they're trying to

play themselves up but i don't know whether even the most competent person will come out with rock star or stood written on their on their interview notes but you're going like you have to exude a degree of self-belief and and confidence and the other thing is that everybody else knows that they need to play up their skills too so this person is having to pitch themselves above and beyond not only where they're at not only where everybody else is at but even higher than that again and this isn't saying that tim cook went and lied during his interview but just the fact that he was able to and and these people that are interviewing him they're trained at picking out shysters right

they're trained at picking out people that are selling snake oil and they didn't find any and then tim cook goes on to be the ce of Apple. And then Susanna goes on to go and look after YouTube. Yeah. Yeah. The one thing I'd be curious to hear is to go back and see of all the ones that started with stud and rock star, what were the false negatives? But that's a separate, that's a separate thing. Um, I think, you know, maybe to give it, give your listeners another Girardian insight here. Um, Gir here, Girard is very interested in why narcissism is such a great mating strategy in both men and women. In men, it's a bit more obvious, but in women, Girard conceives it as a coquette, the fundamental woman seducer. Whereas for the man, it's the Don Juan.

And Girard's analysis is quite interesting. For most of us, you know, our metaphysical desires are pointed outwards. We want to be Tim Cook. We want to be, you know, we want to run YouTube. But for the narcissist, Gerard describes them as their desires pointing inwards, as a desire for themselves, of who they already are, that they're already already full and mimesis comes into play because you then imitate that desire and so the way to translate that into plain language is if I'm confident in myself and you're gonna be like what does he know about himself right it's kind of like that example with the with the guy and the hot woman well where the

hot women know and said here it's person. What does he know about himself? Why is he so confident? And so I think, again, it's these like revelatory sort of insights in one logical framework that slowly sort of converts you rather than any sort of empirical proof. What's the main thing

that people should take away from today? Yeah, maybe it's not the key thing of mimetic theory, a key thread underlying all of our discussions today and why I imagine as a listener it might be so unsatisfying is that we live, if Gerard is correct, in a deeply ambivalent world. if Gerard is correct, in a deeply ambivalent world. We live in a world where this fundamental motivational force can bring civilizations and an entire species into prosperity and glory, where it can bring you to new heights. But it's also something that can pull you down, make you existentially frustrated, that can direct you. And so maybe the one thing to take away is that there's no real simple answers here. And unlike Gerard, I don't think this metaphysical desire is something we always must renounce. It's something, I think, much more similar to what

you're saying that I'm actually experimenting and playing around with. Maybe the last thing I'll leave us with then is that we live in a world of very difficult trade-offs. And life is about fundamentally understanding the parameters and navigating those trade-offs. Jonathan B., ladies and gentlemen, you've got a new lecture series out that is on Gerard. Where can people get that? On my website. Let's include it in the show notes. We're going to release one episode every five to seven weeks. First episode is out already. We would love to hear what people think about.

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