The Pomp Podcast - #989 David Perell & Johnathan Bi on Understanding Modern Memetics From René Girard

Starting point is 00:00:00 what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano most of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast simply the best podcast out there now let's kick this thing off in this conversation i talked to jonathan by and david perel we spent a lot of time unpacking renee gerard his ideas and how they relate to society today david and jonathan have done a ton of work on gerard and those ideas and i really enjoyed listening to a bunch of the work that they've done In this conversation, we try to unpack some of the ideas and why it's important to you and your life. I really hope that you enjoyed this conversation as I did.

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Starting point is 00:03:51 of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Jonathan, David, how are you guys? What's up? How are you? Doing well. All right, here's where I want to start. David, let's start with you. You wrote a piece on Peter Thiel and religion a couple years ago. And I think that's really where you first intersected with Rene Girard and a lot of his ideas. Explain a little bit like that piece and

Starting point is 00:04:16 How did you come to cross these ideas and Gerard himself? Yeah, so I think that one of the things that really surprised me was so I grew up Jewish and just from a really, really young age, I was just like these ideas are nonsense for the Hebrew school, Judaic school, and it was even bar mitzvah. And through college, I really doubted the validity of any religious ideas whatsoever, you know, pro rationality, all these sorts of things. And then I was really into actually really feeling like I wasn't going to be able to contribute because I didn't have the STEM education, all this sort of nonsense. And I came across Peter Thiel's ideas. they're really interesting to me from an investment perspective, but more from just a

Starting point is 00:05:02 philosophy of life standpoint, mainly the idea of look up, not around, you know, this idea of don't be so influenced by what your peers are doing. I've been copying other people so much in terms of thinking through what I wanted out of life. And once I found Peter, it became not just a way of thinking about investing, but a way of thinking about, about many different facets of my life. But as I began to study his ideas, I realized that they came from Gerard and then even deeper came from the Bible. And that was like, sort of like, what are those quake ideas for me where my world was turned upside down? I was like, okay, what's going on here? Something about my understanding of the world is fundamentally flawed. So when you start to think about this,

Starting point is 00:05:44 Jonathan, what brought you to Gerard? Like, why is this such a fascinating person and set of ideas? Well, very much like David, I think I grew up in a very rationalistic worldview as well. You know, I was trained in STEM, excuse me, mathematics growing up and began my college career studying CS. And I think what Girard does is show us the fundamental limitations, if you will, of rationality. And he doesn't treat us as rational utility maximizing creatures, but rather these spirited animals.

Starting point is 00:06:16 What matters most to us aren't sort of optimizing for the amount of cheap goods we can get at a dollar store, but more so, you know, relativistic comparison and the social goods, such as glory or prestige or recognition. And I think it's that more accurate model of human nature that really drew me in, that helped me unravel myself through some of the mimetic webs I was tangled in, and eventually ends up helping one navigate in the business world and the world in general as well. So Jonathan, when you think about Girard and these ideas, if you had to describe to a five-year-old, hey, here's the basics of his viewpoint of the world, how would you describe that? Yeah, I think the psychology is probably most relevant for this audience, although there's also the history and the theology. The TLDR is that, you know, there's really two reasons that we desire things. One, he calls physical desire, and that's a desire for the object itself. And that's the reason that people are going to give you when you ask them, why do you want to date this person? Why do you want to buy this car? Oh, you know, she's very nice and smart. Or, you know, this car has all these gas mileage. And then there's the other strand of desire is metaphysical desire. And that's a desire to be. It's what those objects say about us. And Gerard's fundamental insight is that often when we try to convince others and even ourselves that we are motivated by the objects themselves, what we really want is to acquire the object because it says something about us that we really like, more often than not, because it's associated with someone very prestigious. yeah one of the things i would add here is that if you look at you know three and four year olds and they're just playing around in a room there'll be a bunch of toys toys all over the place and

Starting point is 00:08:05 one of the kids will pick up a toy and dangle it and say this is the coolest toy and then all of a sudden the other kids in the room will want that toy not because there was anything that was intrinsically way better about that toy but the fact that a bunch of other people want it and that story is a really good gateway into Gerard's philosophy and the nature of desire itself. Yeah. And maybe a few more examples here. You know, one is, you know, we're building a company right now in private markets. And as you probably know, Anthony, in private markets, the best way to sort of sell your product or a common way, at least, is to create demand and scarcity for it. Right. One of my friends, they run like VC firms and the founders that they most want to get into

Starting point is 00:08:49 are always the one that say oh you know we're pretty tight on this round you know but but you know send us a term sheet we might be able to slide you in um because they're creating this sort of uh external hypothetical desire for them for them to imitate and you see this in dating as well right yeah you know an unattractive uh or an interesting prospect once you know that oh damn you know brad pitt used to date her or someone or something like that a very when a very competitive model comes along and also shows his desire for the mate, then suddenly that prospect can gain a new allure of interestingness. How do these ideas kind of intersect with business and entrepreneurship? Like both of you, I know, are very interested in that industry and spend most

Starting point is 00:09:35 of your time thinking about kind of building businesses, participating in them. What were your takeaways after kind of doing this huge deep dive on Gerard? David, I'll let you go first because I have a pretty long spiel here. So yeah, for me, I've thought a lot about prestige, you know, so when I got my first job, I was working at this fancy New York advertising agency. And it was like, Oh, my goodness, this is incredible. And what I think is something that you always want to be thinking about is how much of what I'm doing is influenced by prestige, what's cool, what's going to basically get Auntie Sue to say, wow, David, you're up to some really cool things at Thanksgiving every year. And studying Girard forced me to investigate a lot

Starting point is 00:10:21 of my choices. And now I spend my time basically in education and online education, which is like one of my deep passions. And I still think it's very underestimated in terms of how important and transformative it's going to be. And I think that if I cared as much about prestige now as I did five years ago, I would be working maybe in Web3 or something more prestigious than running a writing school. And a lot of people make fun of online courses. But fundamentally, I think a lot of the reason that I've been able to persist in a state where rite of passage is just small is because I've seen how much prestige influences people's careers. I've studied different companies and I've seen how, you know, they're in the garage. It's not very, it's not very cool. It's

Starting point is 00:11:10 now become cooler. But back then it was like, oh, what are we doing with our lives? But like, you keep on marching on, keep on moving forward for what you believe in. And I think, look, I'm not saying that once you know memetic theory, you stop being memetic. That's not my point at all. But it at least gives you a sense of awareness of just how socially determined a lot of your choices were. And slowly but surely, you can crawl away from that social determinism. Yeah, it's fascinating to kind of think of it from that perspective. Jonathan, what about you? Yeah, as always, I'm going to give the more theoretical and boring answer. And I think we have to start off with understanding sort of this Copernican shift that Girard introduces

Starting point is 00:11:50 in political economy. So unlike the traditional model of what we think motivates actors in capitalism, in industry, and, you know, Smith, you know, it's a sort of like desire for more goods or a fundamental self-interest. Girard says, you know, capitalistic actors, they're certainly not motivated by these altruistic goals of trying to save the world. They're not even motivated by sort of raw money and goods. What they're really motivated is the same desires that motivated the conquistadors and the warriors and the aristocracy of old, one line that he had in his last book was, you know, it's of little wonder that as soon as warriors and heroes went out of style, the European aristocracy soon found itself so at home in the domains

Starting point is 00:12:31 of business. And so, you know, what he means here, and I think David had a really interesting comment about this, about how many of his friends who were criminals in high school ended up being successful entrepreneurs. Gerard's point here is that when you deal with people, and this relates to the first point we said about the children and why they desire the toy, you should not deal with them as if they were rational agents with clear goals or goods that they're trying to achieve, but trying to almost be like a psychologist in trying to understand what social goods that they're trying to achieve. You know, I gave you one example already of how, you know, often investment decisions in private markets aren't really driven by the underlying fundamentals, but this sort of scarcity that sort of the most skilled operators are able to create. But perhaps another example I can give you is one of my friends runs a very successful buyout firm. And most of the time, it's not the economics that get the deal over the line.

Starting point is 00:13:34 He has to play psychologist, right? He has to understand what the founder is worried about or how relativistically these terms compare with this model that this other founder is competing against. And so it's managing those expectations and fundamentally treating humans not as rational agents. I think that's what's been probably most insightful for me. It's really interesting to kind of think about this idea of maybe I'll call it the recipient, the person who is susceptible to these forces. Uh, is it possible to be the person on offense? Like rather than being the one that all of these forces are playing on to you, are there people who have mastered them to the point that they actually use them, uh, to get what

Starting point is 00:14:19 they want or use them to create a business or, or a product? You gave an example of kind of fundraising, but like, is that what Ferrari does, for example, or some of these other brands, they're basically taking these ideas, whether they realize it or not. And that's, what's ultimately driving the value. Yeah, and I'm curious to hear what David's answer here, but I'll do a first pass. I think Ferrari is a great example here because they have such an acute awareness of how the people who own their cars, independently of the cars, the car itself, matters incredibly importantly to these brands, right? That's why Ferrari has like a war on influencers. They don't want people that they consider are not of a certain status to own their cars. If you want to buy the Le Ferrari, you know, you have to have all these different different Ferrari cars there. So I think they have a very acute awareness of the importance of association and the people who are associated with your product just beyond the product itself.

Starting point is 00:15:17 And the other example I'll give here, and this is one that Gerard often comes to, is in romantic life, in dating. And he says narcissism is such a common strategy for both men and women to make them successful in dating because narcissism fundamentally shows a very strong desire for yourself. and through mimesis other people are forced to sort of copy that desire and the idea goes something like you know if this person is so confident in themselves then they must know something uh you know or the converse you know if even he does not believe who he is and who he stands for then why should i maybe you know maybe there's something there's something lacking there so there's definitely people and uh who have uh used this to their advantage uh maybe without understanding the theory behind it. In the lecture series that we just recorded,

Starting point is 00:16:06 Jonathan gives a really good example of Michael Jordan and the whole Jordan brand. You know, if you go back to 1900 and you look at the advertisements, they're generally about the product. Oh, this soap will smell good. It'll clean your hands well. Or this basketball, It won't deflate very fast. And what happens beginning with the Mad Men era, post-World War II, mass media, is advertising shifts to associations. And if you think of Jordan shoes, they're not talking about the weight of the shoe, how much faster you're going to be able to run, how many more minutes you're going to be able to play on the court. They just say, be like Mike. Be like Mike is the most Girardian, memetic advertising slogan, because you're just hanging somebody who becomes a memetic model that a bunch of other people can imitate. And then you're using that model to sell your shoes. And that's why it's so effective.

Starting point is 00:17:11 I used to wear Jordan shoes. I had the Steph Curry's, all that stuff because of the model. it's absolutely fascinating uh to kind of analyze how history played out because of some of this um i don't know if either one of you watched uh the trilogy on netflix uh of kanye west um and they've got a bunch of uh content and uh i think david you it looks like you watched it and jonathan you didn't but uh for those that didn't watch it uh he pretty much like early 20s has a guy follow him around and he's created documentary. And this is not when, you know, social media is cool. Documentaries are cool. Like any of that stuff. And in the footage, uh, I took away three things. One was, uh, to Jonathan's point earlier about confidence, he knows he's going to be

Starting point is 00:18:01 successful and anyone who questions it, he basically is just done with them. Right. So there's this like inherent confidence, uh, bordering on narcissism and arrogance and like, you know, all the, all the downsides of that level of confidence, but, but for sure that's there. The second thing is, uh, the amount of peer pressure that he did not succumb to when you walk in at 22, you're a producer, you want to be a rapper and you've got somebody following you, the video camera. And they're like, dude, what is this? And he's like, we're making a documentary. And they're like, no, you're not like, no, one's going to watch that, but he continued to do it. And then the third thing I think is as he recorded the content,

Starting point is 00:18:45 as they did this and everything, he almost had this kind of bifurcation or move away from the confidence at some level. And so there was a guy who filmed with him for a decade and then they lost touch for like six or seven, eight years, whatever it was. And then they got back together and then they create the documentary and like here we go but in the trilogy they have like day by day for literally 10 12 years and then they kind of like cut to like b-roll for half a decade and then they come you know they try to tell a story then they come back and so in some ways it feels like that really followed like his life journey as well and in hearing you guys talk it's like the cameraman was a proxy for confidence and like on the rise before kind of kanye lost his

Starting point is 00:19:32 way and then came back was literally was the cameraman with him or not, right? Like, it sounds like it's fitting a lot of these same ideas that John is talking about. One of the things that is almost like poetic about Kanye, at least as a non-mimetic figure, is that Kanye, the name, there's a line in that documentary that it is a mix of Ethiopian and French, and it actually means the only one. The only one, as if he's sort of not imitating other people. Now, there's a lot about Kanye that is memetic, but at the same time, there is a lot about him that is singular, that is distinct. And I don't know, it'd just be really interesting to use that as an entry point into trying to figure out what are the memetic parts of Kanye and what are the parts where he's

Starting point is 00:20:21 really singular and one of a kind. Yeah, and maybe one thing I'll add here is a warning, because a popular misconception, I think, of Girard's ideas is that mimesis can only lead us to converge to the group. And so the idea goes that, you know, surely if I break away from the group, if I carve my own path, then I will be authentic, then I will be an individual. And I think a lot of our artists today, and certainly our academics, and maybe Kanye, I don't know too him too well, is susceptible of this. They simply do what the crowd does not, as a complete sort of 180. And Girard calls that a form of a negative mimesis. And actually, the logic is very similar. In the same ways that metaphysical desire, sort of mimesis, wants to get the objects associated

Starting point is 00:21:08 with people who we think are very prestigious, mimesis also leads us to try to stay away from objects associated with people who we think are not prestigious at all, right? We both want to wear the brands of the shoes that the cool kids are wearing in high school, but also make damn sure that we don't wear the brands of the social outcasts in high school. And so there's the whole set of phenomenon, especially in the modern West, that so heavily emphasizes originality, that is a breaking away from the group for the group's sake, that is just as determined by the group and just as mimetic. So I think we should be careful of looking at Kanye and say, oh, he's doing all these things that differently and immediately conclude that he's sort of somehow

Starting point is 00:21:51 independent from the group. I'm not saying he's not independent from the group, but I just don't know him that well. Talk to me about the lecture series that you all recorded. It's a seven part series. I've started watching. I haven't had time yet to finish, but it's fantastic. What was the general idea here to go ahead and record this? Yeah. So, you know, it really just came out of a passion project that I pursued in college, essentially. You know, I was fascinated with Gerard's ideas. His ideas weren't being taught in the academy, certainly not in philosophy departments. So I had to read all of his books in canon by myself. And I had a few roommates who were also interested. And so that was quite fun. And so on the side, while I was pursuing my

Starting point is 00:22:36 CS in philosophy degree, I basically tried to see if I could re-summarize and reconstruct Gerard's argument. And the output of that was this lecture series and another sort of book-length manuscript that I'm still in the process of working on. So it was really out of, you know, just out of pure interest. And I often found the best way to understand these authors is to reconstruct them. And so that was the major driving force for me. I was like, you know, I just want to really understand what this guy has to say. And we actually had planned these lecture series to be filmed right when i graduated i had everything done and finished but then covet hit although david was very uh very persistent as he often is he got some funding he said you know

Starting point is 00:23:19 jonathan i'll do all the post work the the the the pre-work and i'll do all the marketing so all you have to do is come out and and to this beautiful hotel in austin and give these lectures over three days so that's what we did i love it for me there's a there's a bigger thing here um philosophy can be really boring to learn and it can just be all just riddled with jargon and complex and when i was studying gerard it was really tricky to try to make sense of what he's trying to say gerard isn't super careful in how he thinks a lot of his books such as battling to the end are these dialogues. And I found that having conversations about Gerard was the best way for me to understand his ideas. And I would go on YouTube, I try to listen to podcasts. And so

Starting point is 00:24:16 much of the philosophy, the liberal arts content on the internet is either very academic and dry, or really high level and just the summary. And I looked at that and I've said, hey, we need really good, accessible, but comprehensive introductions to important philosophical ideas that don't dumb down the ideas that they're sharing, but still make them exciting and allow people to understand them. And that's what we tried to do here. And then for me, Gerard's ideas were so transformative, so life-changing that it just feels like this needed to exist. It's like, I don't know, dare I say like you're called to do something. I don't think it was quite that much. And I think that there was a lot of circumstance where Jonathan and I were just like living in the

Starting point is 00:25:07 same building in Austin, which made this a lot easier. But I think that all those factors converged to make us say, hey, this is going to be worth a lot of work. Where did you guys film this. The, the room is awesome. Oh my goodness. Boy, is that a story? We looked for so many rooms and we, okay. So yeah, keep this photo on the screen. So we looked for so many rooms. We ended up filming at the Commodore Perry estate in, in Austin. And we found this, this, this one suite that we really liked and credit to Jonathan, that bookshelf was actually had a lot of little trinkets and was about a third of the way full with books. And Jonathan was like, nope, let's fill it up let's sort of change the room and and do everything that we flew in a professional

Starting point is 00:25:53 videographer who was fantastic and we were then there for four or five days um just you know on weekends and stuff like that we we we did the filming it is um uh it sets the scene i think is the uh the way that i thought about it when i uh when i saw it um let me ask you guys one last The reason that we did that, at least for me, is I think that, and maybe I'm being, maybe this is negative mimesis, but I think that the internet has become so casual. And, you know, if you think of people's home studios, you know, it's all very casual, people wearing t-shirts and kids running in the background. And we wanted something that aesthetically screamed, hey, these ideas are really serious. I mean, we talk a lot about Gerard's ideas on the apocalypse. And we wanted to show, hey, this is well-produced.

Starting point is 00:26:46 We put in a lot of work into this and something that would immediately just be jarring. And so that's why we came up with that aesthetic, at least on my end. Jonathan, I don't know. I mean, on my end, you know, it's just, it's quite a regular aesthetic. All my professors showed up in three-piece suits and, you know, we had that type of library setting. So for me, it was just a mere continuation of like, how do we recreate, you know, the environment I'm already somewhat familiar to in the academy. Yeah, there is a importance of seriousness, right? I think that Catherine Boyle from Andreessen Horowitz, she recently wrote something about it. And there's a time and a place for it, obviously. But these ideas are pretty powerful. My last question for you guys is, what is the one thing that you've changed in your life that has been most meaningful after doing a deep dive on Gerard and his ideas?

Starting point is 00:27:43 Because there's something that you can point to and say, I did not do this, or I did do this, and I don't do it anymore, once you understood these ideas. David, you want to go first? Yeah, for me, it's really thinking carefully about the structures of different social relationships. A lot of Gerard's work is rooted in envy and how conflict emerges from sameness and when two people who are very alike are chasing the same thing. And when you run a company, you want to make sure that everybody is responsible for specific things and that there's not a lot of overlap that could lead to memetic envy and competition. in your personal relationships you want to think through how do you reduce that envy reduce that sameness and like try to just build a culture of support but then know that like there is going to be an inherent competition and to just know that that's going to be in sort of the underbelly of

Starting point is 00:28:49 your life and be aware of it that can really help it's changed my views on marriage and dating quite a bit but fundamentally it all comes down to this idea of people working on different things moving towards different goals and then deeply so i work with a rabbi every week and we've been deep in the cain and abel story trying to figure out in those lines what do they have to say about envy and violence and reciprocity how little acts of violence can spiral out of control all that is in that story. And I think that Gerard helped me appreciate Cain and Abel. And that Cain and Abel story is probably my favorite story in the world in terms of how much it has taught me about what true human psychology is. That's beyond the limits of what we can explain with reason.

Starting point is 00:29:45 Yeah. For me, it was more about, it's a very similar question, basically readjusting my my social relations. But it was more about owning up to the things that I thought I needed to disavow. And more specifically, what I mean by that is, you know, growing up in today's like self-help culture, you always hear this, you know, the subtle art of not giving a fuck, right? Or like, or, you know, just be yourself or just, you know, just don't care what other people think. And I think Gerard showed me the extent to which we are social intersubjective creatures. And that that is never a solution. This don't care about what other people think. That never works. And what you end up with is you end up wanting to portray yourself. You end up caring that other

Starting point is 00:30:32 people think about you as someone who doesn't care what they think about you. I don't know if that communicated properly. But the idea is like, if you just try to be an individual, you're going to be caught up in that sort of negative mimesis that we talked about. And so for me, it was owning up to the fact that I needed social support. I needed social recognition for these lectures. You know, I'm owning up to the fact that there's a large degree of self-promotion here, that I want these things to be viewed. And Girard actually said, you know, don't trust any authors who say that they don't care if their work is read. They're either counting for apocalypse or posterity for revenge. And Girard also says that also don't trust the people who advertise that they really

Starting point is 00:31:16 don't care what other people think about them, because those people are probably the one who care the most and are trying to hide it. So for me, it was really about being aware of how deeply and inevitably my social environments affected me and then designing that social environment. For example, one of the reasons I had moved to Austin was, you know, I know I had one really good friend in David and I didn't really need any other friends because I was just working and then reading the whole time. And so, however, if David wasn't there, and I was just in that work environment, I know that my desire for philosophy would go down as well. And so it's about, excuse me, it's about being really aware of how your social environment affects you, and then designing the right social environment for what you want to achieve.

Starting point is 00:31:59 Yeah. Awareness. It goes hand in hand with seriousness, right? You have to be aware to be serious to some degree, which ends up being a – I think a lot about – a lot of folks just exist. they just go through the motions etc it takes work to be aware uh it takes work to be serious um and uh it's not common nor is it uh something that comes easy so i think that the uh the work that you guys are doing is fantastic i appreciate it you're gonna steal a bunch of hours of my life uh having me consume it um where do you uh put some headphones on the baby and get her to learn Gerard too yeah trust me we uh we recently did a little happy feet introduction the penguins that dance and that was a game changer uh so Gerard it will will be on the docket maybe in a couple years um where can we send folks to uh to go and and consume this probably um the first first

Starting point is 00:33:03 lecture so I can happy to send the link either on on this chat that you can blast out right now or uh later on but but um jonathan at limbo on youtube or gerardlectures.com and if you go to gerardlectures.com we will just send you an email as we publish every single lecture awesome i uh i'm super excited my last question for both of you is one of our sponsors is eight sleep what is your sleep schedule having to put something like this together you mentioned it took four or five days of filming but the planning process had you know was definitely insane uh even just it sounds like finding the location was hard what does we actually have some good stories here when it comes to sleep so first of all jonathan and i are both serial nappers so it is 11 53 in the morning i

Starting point is 00:33:52 napped right before this so that i would be on and i sleep on an eight sleep every night and so i have that automatically set. And then what I always do with my eight sleep is I turn on negative four degrees about 30 minutes before I'm going to nap. And honestly, I, I, I really liked that product because it allows me to have, have my good naps, which I need every single day. And I know Jonathan does too. Like we turned off the lights and everything have halfway through the day while recording these lectures. Yeah. Uh, you know, I got, I got the, uh, I got the aura ring here. so I'm a big sleep fanatic as well. Anthony, I don't know if you're going to lose money

Starting point is 00:34:28 for me saying this, but I actually use Uler, which is a competitor to Eight Sleep, but I would have probably bought Eight Sleep, here's me making your money back, if I didn't have a queen mattress already. Although now I know that they have this sort of cover system. But for me, it really is a life changer because I sleep super hot

Starting point is 00:34:46 and I was waking up through the middle of the night and my Uler, my sort of cooling system, really helps me there. There's actually a really fun story about the uh it's also a gerardian story as well about the filming of these lectures so these lectures uh each one they cut they're cut it down to about two hours each but they take like four to four hours to film so we had to get through 30 hours of filming and we had three days to do it and you know i i don't sleep that well so i was super anxious in each day and i went to

Starting point is 00:35:18 bed at 12 and I just found myself waking up at five. And so, you know, obviously when you're sleep deprived, you're not on your A game intellectually. And so I had to sleep, like I had to nap every like two hours to make sure I was like on my A game. I was like a Navy SEAL or something. And the most funny story was on day three, it was because of all the stress and the sleep deprivation. I had these like terrible stomach cramps. And I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to film on on day three uh which would have been terrible because you know the hotel had rented the you know the room out and on day four so we would have to have had to you know take out all the supplies and we could get more funding and a little bit of a nightmare and so i wake up

Starting point is 00:36:02 it's like 6 a.m i'm just like curled up in a ball because the pain and then i just put on michael jordan uh game six against i think it was the utah jazz and i put on my jordan 12s and i just repeating to myself, flu game, flu game, flu game, which I suppose is a, is an example of mimesis working in the right direction. But eventually I managed to, I managed to pull through it all. But if you notice me in tremendous pain in the last two lectures, that's, that's what that is. I, I, I love understanding like, Hey, here's what I can do to psychologically manipulate myself into a place that I need to be. That's awesome. All right. Both of you. I appreciate it very much. This was a lot of fun. I highly suggest anyone who hasn't go check out

Starting point is 00:36:50 the lectures. I'll be finishing them hopefully in the next week or so. And thank you guys for your time. All right. See you guys later. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to pompscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry. It's a three-week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into that three-week time period. Go to pompscryptocourse.com to learn more and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.

The Pomp Podcast - #989 David Perell & Johnathan Bi on Understanding Modern Memetics From René Girard

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