Author Luke Burgis argues 'maxing' culture and social media are eroding individual identity — and AI may be making social contagion invisible

Speaker 2: Gold Rock says jet skis and vibe coating are a golden combo.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Anyway, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlocks seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. Our next guest is the author of The One and the 99 Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion. Ben, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Speaker 11: Hey. What's up, guys?

Speaker 2: What do you think about Jetskis? Gotta start there.

Speaker 10: We gotta start with Jetskis.

Speaker 11: As as one who spends his summer literally on Lake Michigan, I'm offended by that warning, big time.

Speaker 1: Oh, Jetskis. You love Jetskis. Need to generate

Speaker 11: some positive mimetic desire for skis. Okay.

Speaker 1: Here we

Speaker 2: go. See? Yes. I got it. I think they're still underrated relative to buy one, though.

Speaker 11: Rent them. Buying a jet ski is idiotic. Rent.

Speaker 10: Rent.

Speaker 1: Okay. $50. Wait. Wait. Wait. Why? I feel like I feel like when people say don't buy, they say don't buy the boat because the boat requires so much maintenance. Feels like the jet ski, you just pull it out of the water. It's not it's gonna dry out. It's not gonna need a million dollars in maintenance of

Speaker 2: It's your like a boat. It's like a boat.

Speaker 11: I mean, it's just what everybody it's still a relatively large piece of equipment that I don't want in my garage.

Speaker 1: I guess I guess you don't want own it because you're probably not organizing your life around jet skiing. But if you are and you're gonna be jet skiing two hundred, two hundred and fifty days a year, three hundred days a year, then you might want to own. I

Speaker 2: reckless criticism of Malibu Yeah. Is like lack of jet ski launch points. Okay. Like it's makes it makes it like it's it's good for the natural environment that there aren't, but it's tough to be

Speaker 1: You catapult from the bluffs to just be launching straight in.

Speaker 2: Anyway, more important. Let's talk about book.

Speaker 1: Give us the thesis. But first, I mean, can you explain what you mean by social contagion? What are some examples why that phrase?

Speaker 11: Yeah. Mean, well, first of all, my the book that I wrote four years ago was about memetic desire. So I want to congratulate both of you for doing more than anybody in the history of media to generate memetic desire by talking about founders and who's investing and who and the size of exits. I don't know if you

Speaker 1: Yeah. The Gong.

Speaker 11: Built your business that way, but in the Gong. So you literally are a memetic machine.

Speaker 1: I did work at Founders Fund so maybe some of it rubbed off. Who knows?

Speaker 2: Yeah. The the the, you know, people ask us like, you know, how do we book so many guests and and early on we saw a pretty extreme flywheel. Right? It's like people see someone they know or someone they like or a company they like and then it just created this really crazy flywheel. And now it's been for the last, you know, year and a half, it's been more about like managing

Speaker 1: Perpetual motion machine.

Speaker 2: That's right. Basically. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Take us through it.

Speaker 11: So this this book, mean, in Wonton, I had one job. And my job I think was to explain the ideas of this obscure French thinker in an accessible way to the world at like an eighth grade reading level. And I think I did my job. Mhmm. But it meant that I I had one thing to do and there was a lot of things that didn't make it into the book unless my publisher was you'd be very mad if I wrote a, you know, 600 page book. So I took that, all the things that didn't make it into that book and I applied some of the ideas of mimesis and mimetic desire to the family, to the education system, to technology, to politics, and to religion. Right? And one of the most interesting things about and what is social contagion you asked me? Social contagion is just the unconscious way that we catch the desires of other people, the ideas and beliefs and emotions of others, and we integrate them into our sense of self and the way that we move through the world without really realizing that we caught these things from other people. It the most important one.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Is contagion bad? Because it feels like contagious. It feels like I caught a cold or a flu. It feels like a negative negative twist on mimetic desire. Desire feels like something that could take you in a bad place but also could be good. And just this idea of of pulling something you want what someone else wants, like that can be good. Someone else wants to go to the gym, be healthy, do something like you want to do that too, that's probably fine. But contagion feels like it's memetic desire but only in the negative. Is that the way I should be thinking about it?

Speaker 11: No. No. No. I mean, I'm very clear in the book like there's there's such a thing as good contagion. Okay. There's there's things the desires that I want to catch. Right? Yeah. Like if I want to be more ambitious and take more risk, maybe I should move to Silicon Valley.

Speaker 1: Right? Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 11: So I think there's there's definitely good good contagions out there.

Speaker 2: So it's not all jazz. More, maybe you move to The Bahamas.

Speaker 11: You wanna you you move to The Bahamas. Right?

Speaker 1: Or or

Speaker 11: get Move move next Yeah. Door Yeah. Totally. So and one of the interesting things about AI or Mhmm. In in the book is I'm wondering if it's actually contributing to Contagion and Mimesis in a way that we don't fully understand. Right? Like it's did you guys see that Tim Ferriss blog about what what's happening to his non fiction books?

Speaker 1: Yes. Right? I know exactly what

Speaker 11: you're talking about. Yeah. Like he had an 80% drop in sales of his book. Yep. And it coincided with like 2022 when ChatGPT came out. And he's saying like, why would somebody read prescriptive how to non fiction when they can go to, you know, ChatGPT or a chatbot and ask, well, here's my life. Here are all the things that are going on for me. Apply like, what should I do? And by the way, like summarize Tim Ferriss' book Yeah. And make it highly personalized for me. Like, why would you read the book? Yeah. You get instantaneous, highly personalized customized advice. So I I wonder though if that is actually going to lead to a form of contagion that we don't even understand because there's something happening in in in the AI. Even the engineers don't fully understand what it's doing, and it's giving us back something that feels really personalized to us. But the inputs are obviously being drawn by what, you know, large language models and what other people are putting into it. So I wonder if it's we're entering like a pluribus, you know, the the Apple show kind of situation where the AI is actually, whilst seeming highly personalized, it's actually sort of contributing to some form of social contagion.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I feel like we are in the sort of like we're just starting to diagnose the social contagion that breeds on social media. And we're just starting to understand the effects of what seeing certain videos or political biases or even memetics just like you see a sports car and you want a sports car and that changes your perception of things. And with AI, it feels like we're in this unknown unknown period where it could it could wind up creating more of the pluribus. It also could wind up being more personal and so everyone sort of goes into their own world. There's this weird stat where, like, the I think it's like over 50% of high school students are a super fan of some creator that none of their friends know about. And so they are in this like niche Internet micro celebrity world, Nim sells, where they know everything about this one Instagram or this one TikTok or this one YouTuber's life, their repertoire, their whole catalog of work. And they talk to their friends and they're like, no, I've never heard of, you know, Markiplier or whoever is like their choice or you're you're a Doug DeMuro fan and you run into a car fan and they're like, I've never heard of Doug DeMuro because you're in this like niche world. And, but at the same time you do have this like, you know, like ideas do spread extremely quickly and we're just starting to diagnose that and with AI it's somewhat similar where, but potentially even more removed because you might be getting fed Tim Ferriss insights but it's sanitized of Tim Ferriss' name and so it feels like it's

Speaker 9: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Personalized to you but you're actually doing what everyone else who's asking the same question is. It's very hard to diagnose. It's very hard to track the actual outputs. What do you look for in the book in terms of like just level setting on like how things are going in America, the state of things, whether we're on the uptrend or downtrend on a particular category or even just like the level of mimesis. That's something that I can't really I don't have an economic factor for. I can't trace it to GDP or or incomes or anything like that.

Speaker 11: Yeah. I mean, it's it seems like the book is basically about the relationship between the self and groups in various communities, right? And to what extent can we be in something without becoming completely of it? Whether that's a political party or a city Yeah. You know. If I live in, you know, Vegas, which I did, there are certain things that I really like about living in Vegas, but there's other parts of Las Vegas that I don't want to, you know, permeate me. Sure. So it's like how how do we be part of something and take the best from it and give our best without without it completely forming us and determining everything about us. So when it comes to the state of The US, I mean, I'm finding that maybe it's because of social isolation, but I'm finding people over identifying with various communities, whether it's like, you know, national level politics. Yeah. It seems like when people don't have like a solid sense of self, which is a term that I use throughout the book, like a solid sense of self as opposed to a pseudo self that is constantly adapting to expectations and conforming as we walk into different rooms and move to different cities. It's kind of the malleable version of ourselves. It seems like, you know, to the extent that people don't have a solid sense of self, they're much more likely to be sort of liable to capture by the first group party, whatever company that comes to them and tells them how special they are. And I I, you know, I I sort of noticed this over identification. Right? That worries me quite a bit. And it's like groups want everything from us. They want complete loyalty, which, you know, like right from the very beginning. Right? It'd be like meeting a girl at the bar and like, you know, she's asking for, you know, a full commitment right in the beginning or else you don't love me kind of a thing. It's like, no. We actually need to take time to like test things and get to know each other. And it's probably not a good thing to completely identify. We we like to situate people and people like to situate us. And some people own those labels and some people are kind of repelled by those labels. So the book is kind of looking at identity and the way that we how easy it is to situate people and how we can become, you know, how can we become a little bit immune from being overly situated ourselves. And the most interesting people to me, I don't know, like a like a Taleb kind of a figure, are those people that are really difficult to situate, like, politically, that you never quite know what they're gonna say. They're the most interesting people for me to follow.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Renaissance man maxing. What do you think is the maxer culture? Because that feels like the so in in many ways, like, the worst case scenario of what you're describing where whether it's looks maxing or fitness maxing or whatever maxing you're doing, it's like everything else about the identity has to go by the wayside. And we saw this very interesting clip with Clavicular, the the popular looks maxer where they ask him about politics. And he doesn't even have a read on any politics whatsoever because it's completely irrelevant to what he actually cares about which is just looks. And it feels like there's the inverse of that which is someone who's politics maxing or left wing maxing or right wing maxing, and they don't have an opinion about anything outside of their political domain. And if you ask them about health, they would have to toe their particular party line. And that it feels like in the competitive sphere, maybe that's something that's going on with maxing. But how have you been processing that that trend of maxing?

Speaker 11: Yeah. Yeah. My my colleague and friend Jordan Castro did a whole thing on clavicular. He who you've seen on the show and Yeah.

Speaker 1: He's great.

Speaker 11: Which is worth watching. I I mean, my book is is an anti maxing book and I think maxing is evidence of exactly what I'm talking about. Because when you max anything, like what are you giving up in order to do that? Like you can't max everything. Right? Yeah. So I'm I'm pro like max ing in my marriage. I'm pro maxing love. Yeah. But apart from those things, like there's really nothing that I want to max because it turns me into an individual that I mean, what's interesting to me is that there's some people that just max one thing and then they get exhausted and then they just look for another thing to max. Yeah. And that was me throughout my twenties. Right? I was maxing on a company so hard that I didn't even and I didn't even like it. Right? Yeah. And I would get bored with it and then move on and start another one and max on that one. It's like maxing cannot be an end

Speaker 2: of I I went through this with with health. Like, there was a period of my life in college where I would I it felt like 80% of my attention and energy was just going towards being healthy. And I eventually got to the point where I was like, okay, the point of at least for me, the point of being healthy is so that I have energy to do other things and I and I can feel good day to day, hopefully live a long time. And I just went from the I I went from like 80% down to like 10%. And I probably got a little bit less healthy, but it just freed up all this energy to do other things. But the benefit of going through that maxing period is I learned like a lifetime's worth that I now still get the benefits of. That's part of what probably keeps me higher from a health standpoint than my than my previous baseline. So I would say for me it's like going through periods of obsession has been healthy, but it's like how do you how do you remove your how do you eventually figure out the time to remove yourself?

Speaker 1: So it's fun to grind, but you don't wanna get lost in the sauce.

Speaker 11: Periods of obsession is the is the keyword there. Right? Periods of obsession. I don't know if anybody's done some kind of empirical research study on this, but I would guess that a very low proportion of hardcore maxers have children. So you know what I mean? No. Know. I That's been a game changer

Speaker 1: for me. Instinctually, I I think everyone agrees with you. It makes a lot

Speaker 2: of you had to turn your book into a a Tim Ferriss style self help book that would then be summarized by an LLM, what would the output say?

Speaker 11: Well, it's not a prescriptive how to book, first of all. I believe the alternative if it were.

Speaker 2: No. But but but to me like periods of obsession Periods of not getting lost in obsession.

Speaker 1: Well, maxing and Renaissance man I

Speaker 11: mean, would it would probably tell you know, I think that we're really bad at leisure and especially like ambitious entrepreneurs and founders and I've been one for most of my life. So one of the things that it would probably tell people to do is actually think of leisure as a skill that you actually have to get good at. I suck it. I remember being on a beach in Thailand when I was starting in one of my companies and I could not rest, I could not sit still, I could not have any fun at all. So one of the things that we do at the Clooney Institute which Jordan and I run together is we quite literally offer really busy founders and people the opportunity to come on like humanities retreats and chill out for a couple of days and think about the human person and think about important questions with the promise that they're gonna go back refreshed and with a better sense of what they actually want. Might wanna max out on for a couple of days actually. Like like leisure is not a is not a popular thing to talk about in in this world, but, you know, learning to do it well has been one of the most important innovations in my life.

Speaker 1: All ties back to the jet ski. I do my best thinking on

Speaker 2: the jet ski. Yeah.

Speaker 1: You gotta be able to turn off. It is really, really hard. Where do you stand on, on digital detoxes, dumb phones, black and white screens, those sort of like dopamine, like dopamine fasting little mini techniques that people like. Sometimes they can go they can become their own their own pursuit and their own obsession. But where do you stand on all that? Like, what what is the secret to, like, unplugging, I guess?

Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean,

Speaker 11: I think you've gotta know yourself. The micro mini little tools have never worked for me because I'm I guess I'm like an all or nothing kinda guy. So I have to, like, go hike the community Santiago for thirty days to to witness any change whatsoever. Right? For better or worse.

Speaker 1: That's just

Speaker 10: like the kind of

Speaker 11: guy I am. If there's like some incremental n plus one change Yeah. That I'm making to, like, you know, I don't know, the background of my screen, it doesn't do anything for me. So, like, but to each to each his own on that

Speaker 7: stuff. Well,

Speaker 1: thank you so much for coming on the show. The book

Speaker 2: Thanks for sending

Speaker 1: is The One and the 99. Go pick it up wherever books are sold. Thank you, Ben, for coming on the show.

Speaker 2: Again soon.