Luke Burgis | Layer Zero

In my opinion, this is a great time to start something. If you can't, people are running scared and people are memetically memetically following them to the hills. And for those that stay, you have an opportunity to build some really cool stuff.

Welcome to Layer Zero. Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the Ethereum community. Crypto is built by code, but it's composed by people, and each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell. Cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it, and Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code, because Ethereum is people all the way down, and always has been. Today on Layer Zero, I'm talking with Luke Burgess, who is the author of the book Wanting, a story about mimetic desire. And there is nothing more related to the concept of Layer Zero than the topic of mimetic desire. We had Luke Burgess on the show, the Monday podcast with me and Ryan about a year ago. And mimetic desire just broke our brains because it's so foundational to how society operates. Basically, in a in a sentence, mimetic desire is if somebody else wants something, you want that thing because they want it. And this is just so deeply rooted into our DNA, how we develop as children, how we develop as babies, that it is just part of everything. It's part of the market cycle, it's part of the business cycle, it's a part of monetary policy, it's about like investments and where people try choose to uh put their energies. Uh and so Luke and I kind of have like a second a second episode to the first episode we did with him a year ago, but this one a little bit more free flowing, a little bit more out there, uh, and a little bit more layer zero. So I hope you guys enjoy this fantastic episode, all about mimetic desire with Luke Burgess. Right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. What's up, Luke? How's it going?

What's up, David? Good man.

Good, good, good. Yeah, uh we were just uh swapping stories about how we're both in empty places that we are new to.

Yeah, I'm in a huge empty basement with a couple of bunk beds that we got at our lake house for when kids visit. And uh yeah, it's it's if you saw the whole room, it's pretty pathetic. So for anybody watching, I I don't actually live like this. We're just in a crazy movement process right now.

Yeah, I'm in the same boat. There's a reason why my camera is facing a wall instead of the empty, empty room behind me. Um with a little more

More echo than usual.

Yeah, certainly. Uh for Bankless listeners that uh didn't listen to your episode that we did with you about a year ago,

can you kind of just like speed run listeners with like who Luke Burgess is and and why people pay attention to you?

Well, I don't know why they pay attention to me, but I can definitely tell you why. Um

I worked on Wall Street for a little while, uh left when I was 23 and started eventually four companies in my 20s, um, some successful, some not so successful, and walked away when I was 29 to

kind of delve into the humanities more. Um walked away for five years. I lived in Italy for a few years, studied philosophy and theology,

um, trying to kind of figure out what I wanted to do the rest of my life. This led me into understanding a thinker named Renee Girard.

Who rocked my world, helped me understand everything from

kind of the crazy life journey that I was on, why I had made certain choices in my life to even understanding financial markets and the startup world, which I was a part of.

And his fundamental insight is something called memetic desire, meaning that human desire is fundamentally imitative. That's what memetic means. And that this is something that usually happens uh unconsciously or subconsciously and drives men most of our decision making, in fact, while we imagine ourselves usually to be these very independent agents and actors, but we're constantly being influenced through a social process.

Says that desire is fundamentally

a social uh process. So

I wrote a book about it called Wanting. Uh I am the entrepreneur in residence at the Sioka Center for Principled Entrepreneurship in Washington, D.C. I teach a bit. I have my hands in a lot of things. I have a stealth startup project on the side. Um I dabble a little bit in crypto.

Um, I've had my eye on it for sure, but uh nothing probably like most of your listeners.

Yeah, and for the listeners that uh did listen to the podcast, it was it was really well timed because it was right before NFTs got really crazy and they were definitely heating up, but the the peak of the NFT mania was like perhaps one to three months after we did our podcast. And I remember uh like reading your book and then doing the podcast with you and post-learning about Mimetic Desire and the ways that you taught us, it felt like going through and seeing like the being able to see the matrix, right? Like seeing the ones and zeros fly by the world rather than being uh oblivious to them. And especially as NFTs got really, really big and watching the meta of the NFT uh phenomenon like shift because people hop from NFTs to NFTs to NFTs, and everybody was uh everyone that listened to the podcast with you felt very.

Uh tuned into why human behavior was doing all of this thing. Like, oh, first we like the anime PFP NFTs, but oh no, now we're doing the doodles. Like, oh no, wait, now we've moved on to like goblins or whatever. Uh, and like everyone that listened to your podcast was able to like explain the movement of the NFT market cycles via this concept of mimetic desire. So after after we did our podcast with you, like did you uh what what did you pay attention to in the crypto world and and just like kind of speed run us through uh what what you like observed post uh doing our podcast?

Yeah, you know, it's there's something almost dangerous about knowing too much about a force like memetic desire. Um

so I was paying attention to this weird like meta thing that happened where everybody started to talk about memetic desire in the crypto and NFT world. Um it was it's the irony is that the book in our podcast, thanks to you guys, um, led to all of this mimesis and mimetic desire to talk about mimetic desire and this weird meta thing happening. It's kind of like David Foster Wallace. Uh

Sort of talks about how irony crept into advertising.

You know, he talks about this very famous Pepsi commercial in 1987 where it it made fun of how mimetic everybody in the commercial was.

And, you know, it had like a guy have a loudspeaker and pop open a can of Pepsi in a truck on the beach, and all these people run like sheep towards him, and ah, and you can hear them drinking Pepsi and stuff. And he said that was like some pivotal moment where the viewer.

became like aware of how like ridiculously mimetic we all can be sometimes.

But the danger in that is like you laugh at the commercial

and you're like, well look at them, right? And then you are almost more susceptible to all of the subconscious stuff that's going on. Right. And I mentioned that.

Because that's kind of, I feel like what happened with NFTs. Like we were all aware

of one of these social mechanisms and forces that was driving some of this behavior, even made fun of it, made fun of ourselves,

uh, and other people mostly.

Um

yet

it just keeped going and when we were fueling it. And,

you know, it's almost it it made me think like, well, there's something like unescapably enticing here, because you always think that, you know, the next thing, there's something special, there's something unique about it.

And

sure, there's objective differences, right, from a technical standpoint, from an aesthetic standpoint.

But, you know, Girard says that's precisely the romantic lie,

and that we constantly want to downplay

the role of mimesis in our our own decision making, right? But even though we see it in other people's. And then I think,

you know, there's been sort of a phase transition. Like in the beginning of any

bubble, and I'll just call it a bubble.

Um

there's

you know the the the actors

um

are often making decisions for less memetic reasons than people that come a little bit later in the game.

You know, because they I don't know, they get that more on the line.

Um, you know, it seems a little riskier, there's nobody else involved, and I think at a certain point you have more and more people entering a market for,

I would say, stronger memetic reasons who may have not done a whole lot of homework.

Um, who may not, you know, really know what they're doing. And it changes the entire dynamic, and I think can lead to some amount of rivalry. I'd love your perspective on this, some amount of rivalry between the people that, you know, have been in it longer and and tend to understand a bit more of a technology or a movement, and the people that sort of

rush in at the end, who some of them actually may have done really well. Some of the people that came in later.

And that can lead to all kinds of like weird things from envy and stuff like that from other people.

So I think looking at

the the kind of social emotional dynamic in any market

is fascinating to me. And and I I use the word like rivalry because this is a core part of Girard's theory, right? He says like memetic desire

very naturally leads to conflict in human relationships. So I just wonder if some of the memetic desire

led to