The Pomp Podcast - #796 Why Memes Rule The World w/ Luke Burgis

Episode Date: January 24, 2022

Luke Burgis is the Author of "Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life" and writes the "Anti-Memetic" Newsletter. In this conversation, we dive deep into Memetics and how it control our lives in more ways than we may think. We discuss how memetic desires affect our investments through meme stocks, memes in politics and celebrity culture, and what you should do when you recognize that you're in a situation where you could be adversely affected through said memetic desires. ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp ======================= Circle is a global financial technology firm that enables businesses of all sizes to harness the power of stablecoins and public blockchains for payments, commerce and financial applications worldwide. Circle is also a principal developer of USD Coin (USDC), the fastest growing, fully reserved and regulated dollar stablecoin in the world. The free Circle Account and suite of platform API services bridge the gap between traditional payments and crypto for trading, DeFi, and NFT marketplaces. Create seamless, user-friendly, mainstream customer experiences with crypto-native infrastructure under the hood with Circle. Learn more at circle.com.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now, let's kick this thing off. Luke Burgess is the author of Wanting, The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life. I really enjoyed reading this book, and Luke is fantastic to speak to. In this conversation, we talk about everything from mimetics to financial markets, how that affects investor behavior and what you should do when you recognize that you're in a situation where you could be adversely affected. I really enjoyed this conversation with Luke, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

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Circle Yield is over collateralized and fully secured with Bitcoin Collateral to protect your funds. This also makes it a great fit for crypto institutions who want to diversify their treasuries and reduce risks while staying all on chain. You get your choice of terms from one to 12 months in a fixed rate that's higher than what you'll get at a bank or in many fixed income markets. Visit Circle.com slash Pomp to book a meeting with one of their experts. Again, Circle.com slash Pomp and book a meeting with one of their experts. Big fan of Circle, and I think you will be as well. All right, let's get in this episode. I hope you guys enjoyed this one. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests

on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Luke, how are you? Hey, what's up, Pomp? I'm good, man. How are you? I'm fantastic. I was saying right before we got you on here, I've been looking forward to this conversation because I feel like the entire idea of the book is ultimately one

of the least discussed but most important aspects of people's lives, right? Like if you ask somebody, you know, what are the important concepts in your life? Nobody immediately is like memes, right? Nobody's like memetic desire, but it's pretty important. So maybe let's start first with the idea of memetic desire and kind of where your interest came from. It's like, how did you come across this? Why did you think it was important? And why are you so personally interested in it? Yeah. I mean, it's been the most important like mental model of my life. And I came across it because my life was a total mess. And this was the mental model that helped me make sense of it when I was in my mid twenties. So we should probably start by

disambiguating, um, two words. Okay. So you have memetics, which is basically the study of memes. Okay. Um, and we all know what memes are at this point, um, with our experience over the last couple of years. So, uh, you know, memes are cultural units of information that replicate. Okay. And they want to replicate themselves as closely as possible in meme theory, which was really founded by Richard Dawkins. The way that memes spread is not very well understood. Okay. it's kind of mysterious. It's not mysterious in mimetic theory. Okay. That's what mimetic theory is all about. It's the engine by which memes spread. So mimetic theory, think of the word mime. Okay. Meme is a noun to mime is a verb. Okay. That implies action. When you mime something,

you ape something, Shakespeare's word for imitation, you're actually doing something. So mimetic theory is how memes spread. I mean, think about it. You have meme stocks, Clover Health is a meme stock. There's not a lot of mimesis happening in that stock right now. So you can be a meme, but the meme doesn't necessarily go anywhere or it doesn't spread. So memetic theory is all about why memes spread, how memes spread. Most importantly, how desire spreads, okay? And this is a social phenomenon.

And memetic theory is about why we catch the desires that we do, how we give our desires to other people because desire is contagious. And the consequences of living in a world where desires are contagious, desire is a social phenomenon. It's not something that I generate myself. And I think understanding how our desires are generated, where they come from, how they change is really important. Like Elon Musk is the greatest generator of mimetic desire in the world. You know, why? So that's kind of the idea behind my work is trying to understand how desire is generated how it moves through society all right i got a lot of questions i feel like i talked to you for like 17 hours so let's start we're gonna get through as much as

we can first is the entire idea of desire is contagious is that just hardwired into humans is that something that got put on steroids because now we're interconnected via digital technologies like it is there like a historical you know kind of version of desire being contagious and then the internet just proliferated that? How do you think about that in terms of their relationship with technology? So this whole idea of mimetic desire came from a French thinker named René Girard. Peter Thiel is probably his most famous student. And Girard would say it's hardwired into humans, right? It's just part of who we are by nature. We can never totally get rid of it. And if you think you're going to totally extinguish mimetic desire from your life, that's kind of

foolish. It'll probably just make you more mimetic, okay? And fan the flames of it. So it's hardwired into human nature and it's been around forever. I do think we've entered now a memetic era. I think that social media has ushered in a memetic era. I don't know the effect of the blockchain on that. That's a whole another interesting rabbit hole we could go down. But yes, so I think it's probably just accelerated in recent years. But it's part of how we've always been. And in fact, Rene Girard, as he was looking into the role of mimetic desire in history, went back thousands of years and saw the pattern playing out. He first recognized it in literature. He just studied classic literature and realized that every great character in literature has a

model of desire. Now, they don't just get out of bed and start wanting the woman or wanting to pursue a goal. There's always a model. And if you can find the hidden model, you've kind of put your finger on what's really driving a character. OK, so he saw it in literature and then he started looking at real life and he started seeing it everywhere. He went way back. He looked at the way that mimetic desire is played out in Christianity, the way that it's played out in wars. And so it's a social phenomenon. Understanding how it's changing the world we live in right now is a really fascinating question. So when you start to think about where desire comes from, right, which is part of the first step before you get the contagious

aspect. Is that mostly driven internally or externally? Like, are we told what to desire or do we have some innate desire for something and then therefore it spreads? Like, how do you think about internal versus external as a driver for desire? I think most people believe that desire is a hundred percent internal, right? That it's just something that we generate from within ourselves. And Gerard would say that that's what he calls the romantic lie. That's the lie that we tell ourselves, because we like to think of ourselves as being totally in control of our own desires. The whole idea behind mimetic theory is that it's more external than we would like to believe, right? Whether it's entirely external is another question, right? That's kind

of a debatable question. But I would say that most things, most desires have more external forces than we realize. So my opinion is that, you know, some people say, well, everything's mimetic, Okay. Like mimesis is what explains the rise of Bitcoin. Okay. Or nothing's mimetic. I think the truth is in the middle. I think that mimesis, mimetic desire falls on a spectrum and you can have two people that are doing the exact same thing. Let's say buying Bitcoin. One of them could be doing it for extremely mimetic reasons. They may just be following the trend, doing it because their cool friends are doing it. And you could have other people that are doing it for not very mimetic reasons because they understand. They've done the research. They want to hedge

against inflation. They understand the future of digital currencies in this new world that we're living in. And I would say they're driven less by mimesis. Doesn't mean that there'd be no mimesis in their desire to own Bitcoin, but maybe a lot less than somebody else. So I think the easiest way to think about this is on a spectrum. And so let's talk about specifically kind of uh memes desire and financial markets when you think of the intersection of those things um it's unclear to me if we can really unpack it and as you're kind of talking about and okay this is memetic activity this is not but how do you think about the impact on the financial markets are we seeing more and more of the like memetic driven action uh in financial markets than we

ever have before or you know i always joke like is berkshire hathaway a meme stock we just never called it that before, you know, before the kind of GameStop, et cetera, kind of phenomenon. How do you think about the historical examples of financial assets and then today? I think meme stocks have always been around. We just didn't have a name for them, right? Like a meme to me is just a way to consolidate and simplify a bunch of information in a little memorable phrase that represents a lot of things to a lot of different people. So I think they've always been around. Now, the question is, is there some way to measure mimesis in the markets? That's a really important question. I think when analysts say that psychology has gotten into the market,

what they're really saying is that mimetic desire has gotten into the market and things have become a little untethered, in my opinion. Can we measure mimesis? I mean, I think that right now we probably have more ways to do that than ever. I haven't quite landed on what it is yet, but one of the nice things about digital on-chain currencies is that we have visible ledger so we have more visibility into what's happening than we have in the stock market, for instance. So I would think that there's probably a way for some brilliant analytic people out there to come up with some way to sort of measure the memetic sentiment in the market. When there's a parabolic rise in an asset, like what's going on there? We know there's

mimesis going on and that people are imitating other people, whether it's on the upside or on the downside. But I think that there's probably some way to get a little more granular and understand the extent to which mimesis is driving asset prices. And that's something I'm sort of actively working on behind the scenes. I don't know if we'll ever be able to come up with like, you know, the equivalent of a Sharpe ratio or something like that to measure, you know, mimesis. But I think it's worth trying. I think it'd be valuable for a lot of people just as an indicator of what's going on, right? What's driving things behind the scene. When Tesla had the parabolic rise back in early 2020, I talk about this a little bit in the book,

the number one Google search, it was being auto-filled during the parabolic rise was, should I buy? And Google was auto-filling Tesla. Now that talk about an accelerator of Mises, right? That's what Google was doing in that situation. So technology in a way has both accelerated the Mises and the net desire and just diffused it throughout the whole world. When you think about Bitcoin itself, is Bitcoin the ultimate meme? like has Bitcoin risen to the hall of fame of memes and built a trillion dollar asset off the back of a kind of a medic desire? The hall of fame of memes, man. I like that. I think so. I mean, I don't, I can't come up with a better one off the top of my head. And, you know, part of that,

I think is Satoshi, you know, he's like, he's the, the ideal kind of mythological figure that we can project all kinds of things onto. You know, there's in many ways, there's, there's a religious element to all of this because of that. And because of kind of, you know, the way that people talk about their belief in it. So I do think that it is definitely in the hall of fame of memes. And I think that's probably, I mean, it's not a good thing or a bad thing. It's just, it is what it is. But I think that when, you know, Bitcoin is, in my opinion, it's in its early life, right? It's in $800 billion asset class, it could become a $10 or $15 trillion asset class. So I think the question I like to ask is at what point does the meme become less important and does it start behaving a little bit more like like a traditional asset class when it's matured?

So right now, I think it's in the Hall of Fame of memes. I think it would probably be good for Bitcoin if it became less of a meme in the future once it's a little more mature. And when you think about these financial assets and memes, you mentioned religion. And I jokingly yesterday, as I was preparing for this, I tweeted actually, and I said, the decline of religion mirrors the rise of meme assets or meme stocks. And not so much in like, yes, people are, you know, leaving religion to go to the meme stocks, but it does feel like there has been a replacement with memetic desire for what used to be religion, right? The studies show that people are much less religious, especially younger people today than they used to be.

What's driving that or how do you look at, you know, maybe religion and mimetic desire and then like other things that might be replacing it today? I think I think that's right. I mean, I think that they are negative, negatively correlated. Mimetic desire is not a negative thing. Let's be clear about that from the beginning. I think it operates in a positive way in forming a sense of community. You have people with a shared desire. I'm Catholic. So I'm a pretty religious guy. And I can tell you that the mimetic desire works in forming the community in the church. It always has. I think about the Italian immigrants that were coming over here, like that mimetic desire, that mimesis for that shared object of desire and for that community was a tremendously positive thing. I think that's happening a bit in this move to digital finance. You have these communities forming, you have DAOs, you have Discord channels, and it is in some sense filling a need for a sense of community with like-minded people that, quite frankly, the major religions, at least here in the United States, have not done a very good job at.

That community aspect of them is lacking. I say that from firsthand experience. So I think people are filling that need in other ways. I think that all human beings are just fundamentally religious, whether you, that doesn't mean that you're part of, that you go to church. It just, I think that we're religious beings by nature and that that has to manifest itself in some way through some kind of search for transcendence. I think a lot of people are finding it in Bitcoin and in crypto in general. Joe, Joe, what questions do you guys have around memetic desire? Thanks for coming on, Luke.

Appreciate you being here. Thanks for having me, guys. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. So my question would just be around, like, obviously people are always going to desire things in my opinion, but how do they consciously think about these and transform the way that they, they end up desiring things rather than imitating people like having critical thinking skills and desiring things on their own? Well, so, so when we notice, when we have an awareness that, that, you know, we're in a mimetic environment or that we ourselves are behaving in a highly mimetic way, what do we, what do we do about that? And there's really no substitute for doing, you know, really hard work of seeing this in yourself. And I promise you, it's a lot easier to see in the external world, like all the memetic idiots running around out there than it is to realize that sometimes we are that memetic idiot.

OK, in early 2020, I was I did some really stupid shit. OK, I got caught up in the mimesis of the markets and in the worst, darkest days of the pandemic. I thought that it was a good idea to basically try to day trade the markets. I was getting in and out of like highly volatile stocks. And, you know, that's the stupidest thing that I could have possibly done at that particular moment. And what you what you should probably do in a situation like that, where there was a lot of fear driven mimetic desire on the downside and a lot of uncertainty is just to sit back and learn as much as you possibly can. Right. It's a call to just learn and wait. It's proven if you're ever caught in a literal riptide in the ocean, the worst possible thing that you can do is to try to resist and swim against it and get out of it because you're going to tire yourself out and drown. You just actually need to be still and try to remain calm. It'll take you way out in the water, but at least you would have preserved some of your energy. and eventually, and if you wait long enough, it will usually spit you out. And I think when we're caught up in this mimetic environment and frenzy, don't do what I did. I learned some hard lessons

in early 2020, you know, wait, learn, pay attention. And when the time is right, you'll know, hopefully, and you'll be able to sort of enter in a less mimetic state. Luke, when you think about mimetic desire, how do you recognize that, right? So a lot of people do subconsciously where they're not really understanding that, Hey, I really want this. I'm desiring this thing because of someone else. So how do they kind of get out of that fold and recognize it? Yeah. You know, I think questioning our motivations, you know, constantly, and it just takes radical, radical honesty. So for me it's, it comes with thinking about the, the people that are influencing some of my decision-making. All right. So

and that comes with a certain sense of humility and that I am that I don't I consider myself a pretty mimetic person and I've just because I've been paying attention to this for at least 10 years now I'm more aware of it there's kind of no substitute from just practice and and knowing your your triggers so the one of the things that people don't understand about memes and the way that memes spread is that with a meme the carrier is not important right so that the meme doesn't care who the carrier is. It's kind of like COVID. It doesn't care who the carrier is. Like if Elon Musk has COVID, you know, he doesn't sneeze and spread it to all of his Twitter followers. But that's kind of the way that mimetic desire works, right? It's like that. And realizing, you know,

the people that influence me and the things that I want, whether it's on Twitter, more importantly, in my own life, I learned to identify certain signals, right? So if I ever want to go do something. And I recognize that the desire to do that thing is being driven by some, I don't know, false sense of, or some sense of insecurity or some pride or some desire to one-up somebody or simply to share whatever I'm doing on social media. I just, I simply check myself. And I, sometimes I realize after the fact that I did something for all the wrong reasons. When it comes to investing, again, I think it comes down with developing a certain kind of disposition of patience and of kind of sober waiting and recognizing when we're being extremely emotional because emotion is often a driver of mimetic desire. Luke, when you start to think about kind of studying this stuff, is it possible to either one, I'll use the word weaponize it, like in terms of can you actually understand memetic desire enough to then be able to implement it, whether you're on a marketing team, whether you're creating some sort of meme or a political campaign or something like that?

And then two is, are you able to understand it enough through study that when you see it, you can actually kind of sidestep it or avoid it? Like, is there an offensive and defensive kind of component to this once you actually understand how this stuff works? Yeah, I mean, for better or worse, I think that there is. I do think that it can be, you can manipulate people through mimetic desire. I mean, I've had hundreds, maybe thousands of conversations since June when Wanting came out with people that are interested in doing exactly this, from marketing people to people that run political campaigns. And, you know, it can be weaponized and it can be highly effective. I mean, one way to weaponize mimetic desire is to forge identity among people by creating a really powerful scapegoat, like some some enemy on the other side that makes people, you know, cohere and band together with a shared hatred for some singular objects or some singular person. I mean, we all know that's happening in politics and some people are are being very intentional about it.

I think you can do that by accident. Some people are like mimetic geniuses by accident. I think as there's a growing awareness of how these mechanisms work, people can actually weaponize it. And that's part of why I'm doing what I'm doing. I mean, it's part of why I wrote the book, because I think that if we're not aware of what's happening, mimetic desire tends to move in negative directions. I mean, it's the natural kind of foundation of rivalries.

Sometimes we don't even know that we're in. It creates scapegoats. I think it's behind cancel culture. And I'm trying to bring awareness of this so that we can at least be aware of it and begin to gain some freedom and some agency to not be controlled by these things when we see people moving in and hurts. So that's I mean, ultimately, my book is about freedom. I don't know if I even use that word a whole lot, but that's that's what it's about, because if I didn't think it was possible, then I don't know why the hell we're having a conversation. Yeah. One of the other pieces to this is how does demographics play into it, right? Whether it's in the United States or internationally or also age, like going back to the Berkshire Hathaway, the reason why I kind of joke about it is older people, just historically and in somewhat of a generalized way, they tend to have grown up in a time where the mainstream media, et cetera, told them like, hey, this is the way to invest. Warren Buffett is the best, right? And so if you think about Berkshire Hathaway, you've got a leader, the people literally call themselves like value investors or Buffett disciples. And, you know, there's kind of a religious aspect. I joke that they go on Mecca to Omaha every year. Right. And they sit and they listen to him preach and they got the whole thing. Now, is that just that time period of people who grew up investing?

Then they were told by all of the forces around them, this is the meme to pay attention to. and now people that are younger are getting told no there's another meme to pay attention to whether it's bitcoin or some other asset and so like the media ends up being a large driving force of like the dissemination of information and really shaping that and ultimately what i think this gets at is like is the meme the message right like is that ultimately what this all boils down to is the meme is the message and if you can understand where that's coming from then you can understand society i do think that both age and demographics play play a role and in kind of like our natural disposition in relation to mimesis. You know, teenagers are kind of like

famously mimetic. I know I was, you know, you have like, you know, the Warren Buffett kind of fan club, Beyonce is the same thing, right? With the hive. And, and, you know, as, as people get older, they usually become a little less mimetically driven as they know themselves better. Yeah. I'm from Michigan too. And I, there's something to kind of like the old Michigander like autoworker you know you put a dude in a room full of like highly mimetic people who are are you know have a bunch of opinions and just kind of like sits there tranquil at peace it sort of like seems like unaffected by by everything going on around them and um it's kind of like huh like there's like something and there's like something to that like why why are some people

like less kind of like swayed or feel less of a need for consensus or to be in agreement with other people. I think agreeability and disagreeability, which Jordan Peterson talks about a lot, is a big part of this. I think highly agreeable people tend to be like more mimetic people. So part of this, I think, is baked into personality. But a large part of it, I think is learned. And I think we can grow and mature and just know ourselves better to recognize these signals and know when we're being more or less memetic. But yes, I think the meme is the message, but I think McLuhan is right. I think the medium is still the message. And what that means in terms of memetic desire and memetic theory is that the carrier, the person is far more

important than the meme itself. So that's just to say that the people spreading the memes are the driver of the contagion. So Elon Musk gets behind a meme, it changes instantly, changes everything. So paying attention to the people that have the power to generate and shape mimetic desire is one of the keys, I think, to realizing it's kind of a leading indicator of where we're going as culture, in my opinion. My last question for you is, Is Elon Musk the ultimate meme lord? Is Elon just the goat when it comes to creating memes, disseminating memes, and ultimately driving an entire global population to kind of follow the memetic desire that he puts out into the world? You know, it's either Elon or it's Trump. I don't know where they come up with these things. I mean, I don't know if like Elon has a team of people helping him out with these things or he's just that brilliant. And you can just get on his phone and tweet stuff out.

But yes, I think that he is. And I think that he's very intentional about doing it. And, you know, I think there are a lot of lessons to be learned in that. I'd put the Steakums guy, whoever runs that, the Steakums Twitter handle, right up there with that, because he's one of the first people that realized you could take a frozen meat company and using the power of memes, you could actually make it cool and funny and interesting. And I don't know how many frozen steaks that dude has sold, but he's got to be underpaid

based on how well he's harnessed power means. Completely agree. I read Scott Adams' book, Win Bigly. And one of the takeaways from that book that's just like seared in my brain was during the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton's team had done everything a politician would do.

They had run the study groups, the focus groups, they'd looked at all the data, they had tested a bunch of different campaign slogans, et cetera, and they ultimately came up with the one that they went with. The way the story is told is that, uh, somebody said to, uh, uh, the candidate Trump at the time and said, Hey, we need a slogan. And he sat there and thought for a second.

And then he just said, make America great again. And it was just like, you know, some people have an innate ability to do that. And then obviously, uh, it depends on whether they listen to the people around them to do the studies, the focus groups, et cetera, or they just understand it. And I think your point about whether it's Elon, whether it's president Trump, uh, we could go down a list of a ton of people like this. Uh, they just understand it, right? There's an intuition to it, which is both impressive, but also scary at the same time that people can have that much of power.

I think I think some people do have like this innate ability. And with Trump, the nicknames, right, like the nicknames. And from what I hear, he came up with most of them himself. You know, I can't come up with nicknames that good, man. So I that it's actually impressive to be able to come up with good nicknames and sort of capture something that's meanable about a person as nasty as it can be sometimes. But yes, I think that more and more, you know, people are being intentional about this. And some people just have the ability and some people don't. I mean, I don't I think it's more of an art than a science. Let me put it that way. So for those didn't hear the beginning, Luke is the author of Wanting the Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life.

It's fantastic. I highly, highly suggest people go in and get the book. Luke, maybe just give us kind of the 30 seconds. Like, what's the pitch? What do people get that they can take away from from reading this? And you can learn why the world seems to be going crazy right now based on, you know, mimetic desire and the crisis that everybody imitating everybody else without knowing who the right models are is creating in the world. And you can learn more about why you want the things that you want and you can decide to pivot if you if you discern that some of those influences that you were unaware of when they come to light. And I hope that by the end of the book, some of them will have come to light. Right. You know, you can just make more intentional decisions about choosing the desires that you really want to invest your time and effort and heart in and pursue. Because there's nothing worse than looking back 10 years from now and realizing that you were chasing a desire that was ultimately going to leave you unfulfilled.

So that's that's my pitch for the book. I think that's a great pitch. Awesome, man. Listen, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate anyone who doesn't follow you on Twitter. They're missing out. So go follow, uh, Luke on Twitter, make sure you buy the book and, uh, and also subscribe to the newsletter here and, uh, just keep it up, man. You're doing a great job. I'm learning a ton from you. So I appreciate it.

Appreciate it. We're going to make it. Peace. We're all going to make it. All time sign off. That was hilarious. You think he's into crypto at all?