Luke Burgess
Managing Partner, Fourth Wall Ventures · 1 appearance on the record.
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Luke Burgis is the author of Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, which applies René Girard's mimetic theory to business and decision-making. He is a multi-time founder and heads Fourth Wall Ventures, an incubator and investment firm focused on human ecology.
31statements → 2claims → 0claims resolved → 3.71/5average certainty → 2.13/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 2said about them ↓
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2 assertions · 1 opinion · 28 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 2 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Luke argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
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Everything Luke Burgess said on the Knowledge Project that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Luke Burgis: Desires are driven by third-party models, not objects themselves
“Mimetic desire means that a person's choice of an object is not determined by the object itself, But is fundamentally, or at least mostly determined by a third person or a third party, which is a mediator or model of desire. So there's always sort of a hidden …”
Burgis: Luxury brands must maintain distance between models and consumers
“It has to do with the space between us and the model. And that's why a luxury brand has to work really hard at always maintaining a bit of other worldliness from the readers.”
Burgis: Curating your close circle is the most powerful way to shape desires
“I absolutely think that choosing in an intentional way the people that we're closest to is the most important thing that we can do to affect what we want.”
Burgis: Positive role modeling beats top-down reorgs for fixing misaligned behavior
“The most important thing I think we can do is rather than try to solve the problem through some kind of a top-down system or reorg or something like that, or, you know, implementing new rules and policies. Is simply finding a model and putting a positive model…”
Burgis: Mimetic desire inevitably transforms role models into rivals
“Because the models that we choose, de facto, they just naturally lead us into some form of rivalry, if you think about it. You know, if I take another person as a model and begin to want what he wants I'm looking to him constantly as my model of desire to kind…”
Burgis: Leaving investment banking early permanently closes doors in corporate finance
“If you leave this soon, you know, I, it'd been less than a year. You'll never work in investment banking again. You know, you won't work in corporate finance because nobody will really trust you anymore. Right. Like once you've sort of got that bug, I think he…”
Burgis: Unaddressed internal pressure leads to emotional numbness and inaction
“Sometimes I think with that slow building pressure, if you don't recognize it, and if you don't do anything about it, can actually lead to some sort of a tipping point that stops feeling like pressure and just sort of makes you dead inside. Like you almost for…”
Burgis: Major life decisions should be made from emotional neutrality
“I think that it's never good to make a serious, big life-changing decision when we're in a period of desolation or like deep Deep anxiety. I think we're just more liable to make the wrong decision for the wrong reasons when we're in that place. Conversely, I t…”
Burgis: Test business partners early by speaking a hard truth
“Speaking a hard truth right up front and just seeing what it does, right? Like seeing what happens, you know, sometimes, you know, you can tell based on the reaction, like, well, if that, if I'm not able to speak truthfully to this person, hard to imagine that…”
Burgis: Tacit knowledge is undervalued due to demands for explicit explanations
“And I think that this kind of tacit knowledge and articulate knowledge is undervalued in our society. It's undervalued because, you know, we always want to be able to like explain the science and Give the hard reasons for it.”
Burgis: Hidden corporate 'Iagos' dictate office politics and organizational problems
“And I started to realize, well, there are like Iagos in every corporation too. They're like Iagos in most schools. There are these people that are powerful mediators to other people. And if you can identify who those people are and how they're operating you've…”
Burgis: Junior Employees Often Wield Outsized Influence Over Office Politics
“Obviously, like a big figure you know, a CEO with a larger than life personality will have an outsized effect, right? But I promise you that in most places, there's very junior people that do too. And the people that revolve around them, they sort of become th…”
Burgis: Fiction Contains Embedded Truths About Human Nature
“Literature fiction even is written by people and these people leave clues about human nature embedded in the literature, even if it's fiction. So reading fiction and mining it for truths about human nature is what Gerard did.”
Burgis: Followers change their desires whenever their mimetic model shifts interests
“When somebody has taken another person as a model, when the model changes their interest in, or desire for something, our The objects that we're interested in change along with them, because it was never the object that was the important thing in the first pla…”
Burgis: People omit mimetic influences from life decisions to preserve perceived rationality
“There's the hindsight bias where the stories we tell ourselves about why we made the decisions that we did very, very often. Leave out a model of desire or a model of that behavior, because I don't know, because maybe it's an affront to our independence, to ou…”
Burgis: Role models demonstrate behaviors, while models of desire dictate wants
“A role model just models a role. They could model a lifestyle or a certain kind of behavior. But a role model is different than a model of desire to there, I can't think of a politician off the top of my head that is a role model for me because I don't desire …”
Burgis: Social media exposes people to billions of models of desire
“It's taken the desires from around the world and essentially shrunken them down and put them onto the head of a pin, which we're all standing on. If we're on social media, at least if we're big scrollers on social media and we don't have any boundaries The des…”
Burgis: Elizabeth Holmes used early high-profile investors to drive mimetic fundraising
“You know, she essentially used mimetic desire and could point to models of like powerful models of people that had invested in her company to draw in other models.”
Burgis: Identifying thick desires provides a decision framework for choices
“There are some things that I usually call thick desires in opposition to thin desires, which are the more sort of mimetic ones that can change on a dime. And I think cultivating those is important and finding out what those enduring Thicker desires are begins …”
Burgis: Inability to satiate a desire indicates a thick desire
“That's one way to determine, I think, a thick desire is are you ever able to satiate it? If you can't satiate it, there's probably something really, really deep well there that you can just continue to go down.”
Burgis: Susceptibility to mimetic influence varies significantly by domain
“Some people are need more positive mimetic influence in some domains more than others. So I think that our level of mimetic tendencies is domain dependent to a certain extent.”
Burgis: People easily identify positive role models but struggle to name negative ones
“Naming our desires is critical and naming models is critical, both the negative models and the positive models. And I would bet that it's a lot easier for most people listening to name your positive models of desire, right? It could be Warren Buffett as an inv…”
The other half of the tape: Luke Burgess's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 2 episodes on the Knowledge Project. every mention, with the transcript →
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2022 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire | May 31, 2022 | 1h 41m |