Everyone Wants a Piece of You. Here's How to Stay Whole -- with Luke Burgis

22 Aug 2026 · 1 h 7 min · 27 chapters

Ask about this episode

Ask anything about it. ChatGPT or Claude reads this page and answers with the times it was said.

Connect VO and ask about every podcast you hear, including the moments you saved. Add to ChatGPT · Add to Claude

In short

How to stay individuated while belonging to communities; why “pseudo-self” formation happens; and how online communities reduce friction, conflict resolution, and emotional growth.

Guest backgrounds

Luke Burgis is a former Wall Street worker who co-founded four companies in his 20s (including a healthy-food vending machine company). He spent five years in seminary, then wrote Wanting and The One and the 99. He previously discussed “mimetic desire” and “copy-paste goals” on Afford Anything (episode 335).

Key claims

Humans have two simultaneous drives: to individuate (be distinct) and to belong (be tribal). Many communities demand over-identification, producing a pseudo-self that constantly renegotiates identity to fit in. Online communities intensify this by making entry/exit easy, stripping friction needed to form a “solid self.” Purity culture and “emotional cutoff” are easier online because people can block, kick, or leave instead of reconciling.

Notable examples

“Thought police” in online groups; emotional cutoff in relationships (storming out, blocking); work as a social training ground; embodied community examples like neighborhood groups and social clubs; using in-person high-context settings (e.g., shared meals) to screen collaborators.

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Chapters

Tap a time to open that second in VO

The Tension Between Individuality and Belonging

0:00 to 0:44

Explore the inherent tension between wanting to be an individual and the need to belong to a community.

“As humans, we are trapped between these two drives because we want to be known as a distinct person.”

Luke Burgess and His Background

1:26 to 2:50

Learn about Luke Burgess's background and previous appearances on the podcast.

“means it's a show all about making choices.”

Understanding Browser Tabs as a Reflection of Self

2:50 to 4:50

Luke discusses the significance of browser tabs as a way to understand personal interests.

“What browser tabs are open on your browser right now?”

Defining Mimetic Desire

4:50 to 8:08

Luke explains the concept of mimetic desire and its implications for personal goals.

“Previously, you were on the show and you talked about mimetic desire, which can you briefly define what that is for people who didn't hear the first interview?”

The Dual Drives of Individuality and Belonging

8:08 to 12:11

Explore the dual drives of individuality and belonging, and how to balance them within communities.

“But you join us today to talk about a related but slightly different topic, which is that we also find a place for ourselves inside of communities.”

Navigating Community Expectations

12:11 to 14:00

Discussing the challenges of community over-identification and the need for a solid self.

“So these are all distinct communities, plus online groups, internet communities.”

Navigating Identity in Communities

14:00 to 18:07

Explore the challenges of balancing identity in multiple communities.

“And I think what I was searching for was kind of a way of being that allowed me a consistency.”

The Impact of Technology on Relationships

18:07 to 21:39

Understand how technology affects our ability to maintain meaningful relationships.

“When there's conflict, we're not really incentivized to reconcile it.”

The Role of Work in Social Connections

21:39 to 24:27

Discuss the decline of work as a means of forming social bonds and community.

“Very few, especially men, have very, very few friends because it takes work.”

Reviving Social Clubs and Community Spaces

24:27 to 27:08

Learn about the resurgence of social clubs as a way to foster friendships.

“future where work no longer serves the social function that it used to.”
Show all 27 chapters

Reviving Social Clubs and Community Spaces

28:36 to 29:48

Learn about the resurgence of social clubs as a way to foster friendships.

“It's a nice time to just hit reset before things get busy in the fall.”

Reviving Social Clubs and Community Spaces

29:54 to 30:56

Learn about the resurgence of social clubs as a way to foster friendships.

“Now available in Canada and the UK, too.”

Understanding Solid Self and Differentiation

31:14 to 36:42

Explore the concept of self-differentiation based on family dynamics.

“I want to go back to our previous conversation around solid self, because many people kind of leads to the question of sort of what is the self?”

Navigating Feedback and Social Dynamics

36:42 to 42:01

Learn to distinguish between constructive feedback and social noise.

“But what happens when other people regard that differentiation as a threat?”

The Evolving Nature of Work

42:01 to 46:57

Explore how the definition of work is changing and its social dimensions.

“We have zero tolerance for it in this organization.”

The Evolving Nature of Work

47:56 to 48:20

Explore how the definition of work is changing and its social dimensions.

“If you're watching or listening in an app, the same Earnhouse link is in the description or show notes, so tap it directly.”

Choosing the Right People in Work

49:49 to 56:01

Discuss strategies for selecting the right people in work and projects.

“and by that I mean any project that you are undertaking, Part of the social dimension involves choosing the right people.”

Zappos and the Importance of Customer Service

56:01 to 58:02

Learn about the significance of prioritizing customer service from Zappos' model.

“I ask that because I was also around that same community a little bit after you and Tony Hsieh and the Downtown Project.”

The Influence of Your Environment on Identity

58:03 to 59:29

Explore how your physical location shapes desires and your self-perception.

“But we got to this by talking about how the city that you live in impacts the desires that you have.”

The Evolution of Work Identity

59:30 to 1:00:15

Discuss the challenges of maintaining self-identity amidst changing work contexts.

“Being aware of that so that you can just have a beat in between when it hits you and affects you and how you respond to it.”

From Entrepreneur to Seminary

1:00:16 to 1:02:52

Discover the transformative journey of stepping away from entrepreneurship to explore a religious vocation.

“We took healthy products, put them in vending machines and branded them really well.”

Lessons from Humble Beginnings

1:02:53 to 1:06:36

Learn how unexpected roles can offer profound personal growth and humility.

“I was one of the older guys there with a shared bathroom on my floor.”

The Impact of Commitment

1:06:37 to 1:06:58

Understand how commitment to community shapes personal identity.

“And I knew that I needed to attend to that.”

Key Takeaway: Community and Comfort

1:06:59 to 1:08:18

Explore the paradox of community in the digital age and the challenge of genuine connection.

“What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation?”

Key Takeaway: Beyond Monetary Value of Work

1:08:19 to 1:09:44

Learn how work offers more than just financial compensation, including social growth.

“Key takeaway number two, your job pays you in more than just money.”

Key Takeaway: Embracing the Unchosen

1:09:45 to 1:10:00

Reflect on how unchosen paths can lead to meaningful personal development.

“are the people that I get to work with, right?”

The Unexpected Lessons of Vending Machine Duty

1:10:00 to 1:11:16

Learn how an unexpected job assignment led to personal growth and humor.

“The thing you didn't choose is often the thing that forms you.”
Hear the part that matters, and keep it.Open this episode in VO. Double tap your headphones to save a moment as you listen.
Get VO free

Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:00Here's the thing. As humans, we are trapped between these two drives because we want to be known as a distinct person. We want to be individuals, but we also want to feel like we belong. And there's an inherent tension between these two things because many communities demand tribalism. They demand over-identification, groupthink. And so in order to resolve this tension, many of us, all of us develop a form of a pseudo self. It's the version of ourselves where we renegotiate ourself every time we walk into a room. And that's exhausting and it never sets. It never ends. And so today's guest, Luke Burgess, is here to talk about this, about that tension between being an individual and belonging to a group.

0:47He has a really interesting thesis. He believes that we don't have a shortage of community. We actually have too much community, but it's not deeply embedded community. It's these tech communities, these online communities where the barriers to entry are very low, but so are the barriers to exit. And because of that, we never have to deal with any difficulties or challenges. If we don't like something, we can just leave, which means we don't learn conflict resolution. And so the friction's been stripped away, but the friction was the very thing that formed us in the first place. So we dive into all of this in today's episode.

1:21Welcome to the Afford Anything podcast, the show that knows you can afford anything, not everything, which means it's a show all about making choices. I'm your host, Paula Pant. I trained in economic reporting at Columbia. Today's guest, Luke Burgess, has been a guest on this show before. He was a guest in episode 335, which aired in 2021, where he talked about this concept of copy-paste goals. So in that first interview, we talked about how humans are the greatest imitators on the planet, and we don't simply copy how others dress or speak. We actually copy what other people want. We copy other people's goals.

1:58And he joins us again today to talk about an extension of that idea. Today, he talks about how we can stay inside of groups while also maintaining a strong sense of self. Luke briefly worked on Wall Street and then co-founded four companies in his 20s, including a vending machine company that sold healthy food. After that, he spent five years in seminary and then went on to write his first book, Wanting, followed by his latest book, The One and the 99. If part of your road to financial independence is figuring out the social piece, the community piece, The what do I really want versus what do I just think I want piece.

2:39This interview, as well as the first one that we did with Luke, both interviews that we've done with Luke are going to be very insightful. Here he is, Luke Burgess. Luke, thank you for joining us. Paula, really good to be back with you. What browser tabs are open on your browser right now? Well, given that I have a book launching, first of all, I have like 75. My wife is mortified at how many browser tabs I keep open because I just forget to close them. Right now, there's a blog post by Tim Ferriss that he published recently on nonfiction book sales, which is fascinating because he makes the case that AI is devouring prescriptive nonfiction.

3:21You can just ask the AI, what should I do? And it can summarize my book and tell you. So fascinating blog post by Tim Ferriss. a lot of stuff on the New York Knicks having this conversation right after they won the championship. I have like eight email accounts. So I have a browser tab open for each of my email accounts. I know, pretty brutal. And then a bunch of random AI tools that I'm using for research. Lots of Google Maps as I'm navigating New York City this week, trying to make sure I know how much time I need to get to different places. So lots of logistical things and Amtrak tabs and things like that.

4:02Oh, nice. Why did I ask you that question? This is a question that is a favorite of my friend, Tyler Cowen, who is brilliant and he loves to get people off of their scripts. So they can't just kind of go into the normal things that they say. And that is one of the questions that he likes to use in interviews with people to just kind of find out who they really are and just sort of get them. You can't perform or rehearse that answer. Your browser tabs are probably changing all the time and you have to actually stop and just be in the moment and think about what you're actually doing that day, what you've been looking at.

4:42And it's sort of like gets you out of the abstractions too, right? It's very easy to talk about things in an abstract way, but your browser tabs are a really good indication of what you're actually paying attention to in any given day. Right. Previously, you were on the show and you talked about mimetic desire, which can you briefly define what that is for people who didn't hear the first interview? Yeah. So mimetic desire is a term that came from the French thinker, René Girard. He realized that human beings are the best imitators in the world. We learn through imitation is how we learn language and culture.

5:18But his insight was that we don't just learn how to imitate external things like cultural norms and dress and speech. We actually imitate the very desires of other people. We want what other people want. He said, man is the creature that doesn't know what to want. So he looks to other people to show him. So once our basic needs are met, we're not thirsty, we're not hungry, we're not cold. We have biological mechanisms that tell us which objects we need for those basic needs, but we don't have signposts for the world of kind of abstract wants and desires like careers, relationships. And we sort of need what he calls models of desire for that.

6:02So we look to other people who point to us at various things. And he said that that is mimetic desire. So mimetic is a fancy word for imitation. So it means that the very nature of desire itself is imitative. And there's not a one-to-one line between me and the object. There's always a model that is showing me why to want something. But very importantly, he didn't call it imitative desire. He could have just said, it's imitative desire. He called it memetic desire to imply that it's subconscious. It's not something that we know that we're doing. Children are proud imitators. I have a two-and-a-half year old toddler, and she's very, very proud when she can imitate something that I do.

6:41But isn't it interesting? Adults are not proud imitators. Being called an imitator is one of the worst things that most of us can be called. We want to be innovators. So Gerard says we don't become less imitative. It just goes underground. And we are mimetic in ways that we don't fully understand. And this leads us to pursue various goals that we think that we've chosen ourselves but may have been mediated to us very strongly by other people. I have a friend who refers to this as copy-paste goals. He points out that we see this a lot online, the proliferation of travel bucket list goals. You want to go to 100 countries or you want to go work from Medellin for six months.

7:25Those goals seem to flourish in online communities. They seem to spread. There's like a virality to the goals almost. Yeah. And the interesting thing, though, is that we normally don't admit that we're copying and pasting. We somehow, from the point that we initially see something online, for instance, to the decision that we make to actually choose it as our goal, somewhere in that space between, we have internalized the idea that the goal or the desire is completely our own and that it's completely mine. And we somehow forget the social process that led up to it. I won't go too deep into this because this is what we talked about the last time you were on the show.

8:08But you join us today to talk about a related but slightly different topic, which is that we also find a place for ourselves inside of communities. But that being inside of a community can sometimes shield us from a stronger sense of self. Can you explain the thesis? Sure. Sure. The thesis is that all human beings have two fundamental drives, and they exist simultaneously. So we have the drive to be individuated, right? The drive to differentiate ourselves, to be known as Paula and Luke, as who we are. Nobody likes to just be a number in a crowd, to be an instantiation of a type. We want to be known for our specificity.

8:57So we all have a drive to individuate and differentiate ourselves. And yet we have a simultaneous drive to belong. You know, we're tribal. Humans have always been tribal. Provides a lot of goods and benefits, right? Safety, sense of meaning and belonging. So we have a drive for communion and differentiation. at the same time. And that seems a little bit paradoxical, right? We want to be part of a community, but we don't want to lose ourselves within it or be dissolved into it to the point where we're just a member of it and we're an interchangeable member, where if we stop showing up, nobody will even notice that we're gone.

9:41It's hard to find communities like that anymore. We want to actually contribute our unique gifts and talents to that community. So there's a fundamental tension in human life where we want to be in a community or a group, but not completely of it to the point where we lose our distinctiveness. So what I'm talking about here is not like individualism. I'm talking about how can we differentiate ourselves in healthy ways in the groups and communities that we're a part of so that we can be in them and be in communion and relationship with other people in thicker, deeper ways. because it's easy to be in community when there's a high degree of conformity.

10:28Right. Right. Where we all just kind of say the thing that we want everybody to hear. We've all kind of been in a community where it's like on the surface, it seems like everybody is getting along and everybody's having fun. But everybody's just following the same scripts and there's not any kind of real depth there because it's not a community that can actually tolerate the evolution of the people within it, the process of differentiation that people go through. And the healthiest communities are the kinds of communities that I would say are made up of solid selves. We have different layers of our self-understanding.

11:05There's the pseudo-self, which is the level of the self that is constantly negotiating itself in real time, either to fit in, to be liked, to keep anxiety low in a particular community, whether that's your family or your workplace, right? It's always managing anxiety by negotiating. And the solid self is the self that is a deeper layer of the self that isn't constantly adapting every time that it walks into a room, which is an exhausting thing to do, by the way. Communities that are made up of solid selves is my thesis, are healthier communities. And to the extent that there are not many communities around today that encourage the development of a solid self.

11:48I think many communities actually incentivize the pseudo self, especially online communities. We then have to figure out what can we do to sort of develop our solid self so that we can be part of or form ourselves the kinds of communities that are made up of people that actually feel like they can stand on their own two feet. Right. And I just want to take a moment to define, because when you talk about community, Family is a community, your workplace is a community, your neighborhood is a community, any community groups or faith groups that you belong to. So these are all distinct communities, plus online groups, internet communities.

12:30I mean, so we, each of us exist in a multitude of various communities. yes yeah and maybe because i'm an only child this was particularly difficult for me right because there were a lot of communities that wanted to sort of make claims on me and there still are and it's it's interesting like to the extent with which we identify as a member of a community it's it seems as if communities want or expect almost an over-identification these days, right? It's like the workplace, we're like a family. We're all like a family. And it's like, if you're going to work here, you have to be all in all the time.

13:13And I started to notice that. I think that kind of language started to become popular in the late 2000s. And it always kind of worried me a little bit as I was making my way through the world. And I'm like, well, I'm still trying to figure out to what extent I want to be part of this community in Las Vegas and my church community and this friend group and the online sort of community world was absolutely exploding. As I move between these very different kinds of communities, I'm looking for kind of a thread line because they're very different. I have the startup world. I had my church. I had friend groups.

13:48I had my family back in the Midwest, and these are all very different. And I think at that particular time in my life, I wanted to, I didn't want to have to kind of adapt myself completely or over-adapt in order to kind of move between them in a way where I could fit in. And I think what I was searching for was kind of a way of being that allowed me a consistency. Developing that involved me understanding the ways in which I could be part of something without identifying with it too much, if that makes sense. Right. And when a community entirely tries to claim identity, and you're right, I think online communities in particular seem to have a high degree of thought police enforcement, perhaps because by definition it's not embodied.

14:49And so the strict expression of thought is all they have in order to claim their people. But when you belong to a multitude of different communities, there is that give and take where belonging to one community means that you're a little less of a different one. I'll use an example from my own life. my family is very Nepalese, but for me to belong to pretty much any other community in the United States, that means I have to be a little bit more Americanized. And so there is that kind of push and pull, a little bit of a tug of war in how you balance belonging to a multitude of communities. Yeah.

15:34I think you make a very good point about online communities where they're disembodied, Right. Where everything is at the level of ideas. I've just noticed even over the last 10 years, people try to situate themselves and situate other people based on, I don't know, like Twitter threads and debates and like the way that people speak online. that form of situating. I think like situating is kind of a very interesting concept, right? Like we always want to like situate other people when we meet them. I think it's a temptation that we have and it doesn't allow us to really be present to them and to just meet them.

16:13So I think the embodied sort of forms of community are the ones that I'm doubling down on because they're the only forms of community where we can sort of be surprised and encounter unexpected people that are not pre-filtered for us through the algorithms. And that's what's really dangerous about the online world is that we are sort of sorted very quickly into abstract communities linked by usually just ideas or interests. And that is a very different bond than shared experience, for instance, or having endured something together or living in the same city. It's a much thinner bond, sort of a bond at the level of the intellect and interests and politics or whatever it is, and not at the level of shared experience.

17:07Right. Do you think that's why this kind of purity culture comes about, in which increasingly online communities demand that you must think like us? Yeah. I mean, purity culture is easy online because the barriers to enter or leave online communities are very, very low. You don't like the group chat, you just sign off of it or you block somebody or you kick them out. And unlike my neighborhood, my life and I are part of a neighborhood moms and dads group with people that have kids about our age. We all live within 10 blocks of each other. I can't turn it off and on. I just have to be there and I have to show up.

17:53one of the things that technology has done is it is removing all friction from relationships and from our relationship with various communities so that it's too easy to join and it's too easy to leave. When there's conflict, we're not really incentivized to reconcile it. We just go find a new one. And that kind of loss of friction and tension leads to a self that never actually has to form into a solid self because we can flee. There's a trend right now called emotional cutoff. An emotional cutoff is basically the minute that things start to get a little bit difficult, the easiest way to deal with it is to just cut off the group, cut off the other person so that you don't actually have to deal with the emotions.

18:42My wife and I exchange words and I storm out and go work on the yard because that's easier than actually sitting there and deal with And we do this all of the time with people. We block, we can shut them out. And I think there's many instances where distance and separation can be good. Obviously, in examples of extreme toxicity, abuse, things like that. And we made it so easy to switch that it is actually affecting our society at the level of the human person. We're not developing the kind of inner machinery that we need to exist in community for longer periods of time. Right. Do you think living in large cities that density also does that?

19:23Because when it comes to friend groups, IRL friend groups, if there's conflict, it's so, I don't want to say easy, but there is such an abundance of alternate social groups to go hang out with that sometimes you might just go meet different people rather than solve conflict in this other group. Well, one of the, so we're having this conversation in New York city. I think my favorite city in the world. I love it, but it's so big. And as you probably know, like living in a city this big, you can sort of become anonymous. It's so easy to just walk down the street. There's so many people that you can just take the individual person for granted a little bit.

20:05And if you leave, you probably won't be missed by the vast majority of the city. so yeah i do think it's easier i mean there's so many different things and and it's so easy to switch but the point is we often shuffle between different groups of people in a very unintentional way and doing it with intentionality like robin dunbar most people know dunbar's number of 150 people which is the maximum number of relationships that one can have But what he actually said was that it's seven, eight, or nine people, like a smaller micro community. That is the thing that you need to intentionally build in order to find real meaning and purpose.

20:49How many people have sort of intentionally picked the five people that you surround yourself with? Right. Or five, six, or seven. That is not something that we do very intentionally. And by the way, those people might come from five, six, or seven different groups. But you can add a sort of a layer underneath that by investing in those relationships and relationships take real work. If we don't experience tension, it's probably a bad sign. It's almost like we don't have a lack of community today. People talk about that. We have a lack of community, lack of community. I think that we have almost an overabundance of community that is too comfortable, like online communities, for instance.

21:29It's almost too good of a fit so that we don't actually have to or we don't know how to exist in the tension and do the hard work of forming relationships that last over time. People don't have friends anymore. Very few, especially men, have very, very few friends because it takes work. And I can always kick the can down the road and say, I'm really busy in this season of my life. I'll focus on friends in five years. Once I get through this period, it's always a bad idea to do that. The time is right now. A lot of the people who are listening to this are either remote workers or they are early retirees or they are aspiring early retirees.

22:11And when any of those things happen or their stay at home parents, right? And when any of those things happen, you lose workplace friendships. And to your point, many people don't have friendships anymore. And a lot of people who do, their friendships exist through physical embodied workspaces, and those are becoming more and more rare. What should people who are listening to this, who don't go to an office for any of the reasons I just described, what should they be taking away from these conversations around community? Well, work served a really important social function, which it stopped serving in the last half century.

22:56You used to get a job and you would plan on being there for decades and your closest friends would probably be your coworkers. And there was a certain amount of built-in stability. So people, for better or worse, would form their sense of self and their identity based on the company that they worked at for decades. and decades. But it does not serve that social function anymore, the function of meaning and purpose that it used to. And very importantly, it acted as a mediating institution in our society. So we've lost a lot of the intermediary institutions. So between myself and kind of the state, there's very few things in between.

23:41So I would say, if you don't have a work environment that is able to provide a place where you can have engaging discussions with people about things that are happening in the world. You have to find that somewhere. And maybe, I don't know what the future of work looks like. There's a lot of rhetoric about job replacement and single person billion dollar companies and people just sort of doing everything by themselves. And to me, that sounds like a relatively lonely world. For me, like one of the best things about work and being an entrepreneur are the people that I get to work with, right? One of the best things about writing a book is the people that I get to meet like you, like through writing the book.

24:26It seems lonely, but let's take it at face value and say that maybe we are entering a future where work no longer serves the social function that it used to. Let's take that for granted. then we have to find other mediating institutions that will take the place of work. I'm kind of excited by the idea of, and I think this was probably happening, I know it's happening in my hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan, sort of a comeback of the social clubs, like the hunting club, the jazz club, the running clubs, the weird wacky clubs for people with niche interests. Right. My city has like over a hundred of those.

25:07They're being set up in like the old churches and there's some generous people that are giving space and people are raising their hand and saying, I'm interested in this thing. I'm going to go ahead and put up a bat signal. Who else is interested in this thing? And it forms really good friendships. So I don't know if that's the answer, but we certainly need intermediary institutions that will play the role that work used to play wherever you are. I do think it's pretty important that you have some embodied ones. And I don't want to discount the importance of the online world because I've met really, really good people.

25:44I have really good friends that I've met online, but it has to be paired with some embodied things. And that just takes effort. Right. The best online communities that I've been in are ones where the initial relationship forms online and then it progresses to meeting in person. But without that progression, then what are we doing here? That's my fundamental criteria for technology, right? Is it oriented toward the real? Is it orienting me back to the real world or not? Like the early Twitter, which I was a heavy user of back before there was even an app. It was like it actually worked through text messages.

26:20Yeah. And it was always oriented towards in-person meetups. You would be in a place and you would put out there to everybody that followed you, hey, I'm in Town Square in Las Vegas. Does anybody want to watch a movie tonight? I'll be hanging out for the next hour and a half. And sure enough, three or four people would come by. Wow. I mean, that literally would happen. And that was really exciting and life-giving. so I'm like is there a way that we can use these online communities to actually orient us or at least be moving in a direction of like embodied relationships wow it's unimaginable to think of saying something like that on twitter now that could be dangerous now but I mean I don't know maybe there's like an innocence to it back then right I never heard about anything bad happening but I had nothing but good experiences

27:14We all have a money story, like a relationship with money that has followed us throughout our life and that's changed as our relationship with money has changed. When I was in my 20s, I had a story that was really dominated by scarcity and anxiety. And as I've gotten older, I've had to work through a lot of that scarcity mindset, that money story, because Monarch is this dashboard that you can use for a big picture concept of all of your finances. You see your income and expenses, yes, but it's more than just budgeting. Budgeting is backwards looking. This is like, let's set goals. Let's map out big purchases.

27:47Let's see if we're on track. Let's make adjustments. Through Monarch, you can look at your net worth. You can ask Monarch's AI assistant anything about your finances. You can use Monarch's weekly AI recap to catch spending spikes before they become a problem. They've got really easy to read diagrams so you can visualize how your money is flowing. I recently sat with a friend and got him set up on Monarch. He's someone who's in his late 40s and not very well prepared for retirement. And I help him set everything up. And once he saw all of his numbers in a dashboard for the first time, I can see him blown away.

Read the full transcript

28:20It was this command center. So write your own money story with Monarch. Use code afford at monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just$50. That's 50 % off your first year at monarch.com with code AFFORD, A-F-F-O-R-D. August is kind of like the Sunday of summer. It's a nice time to just hit reset before things get busy in the fall. Believe it or not, cool weather is right around the corner. And if you need to refresh your wardrobe for the fall, Quince specializes in high-quality essentials, Premium Mongolian cashmere sweaters, ultra soft organic cotton, pieces that are beautifully tailored, built to last.

29:02Everything at Quince is priced 50 % to 80 % less than similar brands. So they work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middleman, which means you're paying for high quality, not for brand markup. There's a silk dress from Quince. It's a summertime dress. So I wear it in the summer and I keep a cashmere cardigan, you know, the kind with the front buttons. I keep that tied around my neck so that that way if I need to pull a cardigan over me, like if I enter the air conditioning or something, I've got one. That combination silk dress with cashmere cardigan, that's one of my staples. For interviews, I'm often wearing pants from Quince.

29:36They've got really comfortable professional pants, as well as one of their silk camisoles and blazers. They've got a really good selection of blazers. Very well-priced for the quality. So upgrade your everyday. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com slash Paula. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. That's quince.com slash Paula, P-A-U-L-A. In business, there's no room for guesswork. Every shipment matters. Every deadline counts. When you're trying to keep operations running smoothly, the last thing you need is uncertainty.

30:15That's why reliability is at the core of USPS Ground Advantage. From the moment your package is first scanned in, it moves through a secure nationwide network, aiding in a timely and accurate delivery. You get near real-time tracking so you can keep up with your shipments. And with affordable, upfront pricing, there are no hidden fees or surprise surcharges to throw off your cost sheets. It all adds up to predictable deliveries you can depend on. Because knowing your logistics are handled lets you focus on everything else. Your customers, your team, and the future you're building. Visit usps.com slash ground advantage to start shipping with confidence.

31:02USPS Ground Advantage. We mean business.

31:14I want to go back to our previous conversation around solid self, because many people kind of leads to the question of sort of what is the self? Like many people form a sense of self through the communities they belong to. And yet simultaneously, there does have to be that that individuation, that differentiation, the principles that you yourself hold absent of what you are told to hold. Can you talk through the concepts around that? Yeah. So a lot of my thinking on the differentiation of self and the way that the self is formed comes from a family psychologist named Murray Bowen, who was active in pretty much the 50s, 60s, and 70s at Georgetown.

32:01And he was the first family psychologist that applied systems thinking to the family. In other words, if somebody came to him looking for support, he would say, I can't help you by treating you as an individual. I have to understand the family system that you're part of. And they would map out the whole family on a sheet of paper, right? the nuclear family, but then the extended family. And then they would one by one start to look at the individual relationships, the strength of the relationships, the nature of the relationship in the family. Because let's face it, the family is the first place where we begin to develop a sense of self.

32:42We individuate from our parents. But Bowen went deeper than that. And he said, where we either learn the skill of differentiation or we don't before we go out into the real world and by the time people are 18 they have a sense of self that is more or less differentiated from their family and that is the self that they take out into the world and those that have a more highly differentiated self are able to be in or go into communities and exist as more of a solid self without getting dissolved into them. And his basic explanation of how this plays out in the nuclear family, he would say that every family is kind of an emotional unit.

33:34And we don't always realize that, right? It's not easy to separate my emotions from the emotions of the people that are closest to me. It's easy to just catch them by contagion and assume that they're mine. And it happens all the time, right? When we're growing up, if, and I see it because I'm a new father right now, right? It's like if I have a two and a half year old and a five month old, and if they're both screaming and unhappy and throwing things against the wall, My anxiety goes up. My wife's anxiety goes up. And we are far more likely to be short with one another in that moment because we have caught the emotional anxiety by contagion.

34:17So we kind of catch emotions by contagion all of the time. And Bowen would say part of differentiation is learning how to separate my emotions from the emotions of my parents and my siblings and the people that are close to me. And that doesn't mean that we don't love them. It just, it actually, if we are able to own our own emotions and to not be part of the kind of social emotional contagion that happens in a family, we can be in the family in a healthier way. And like what happens when I come back to myself, when the anxiety is spreading through the family unit? Well, if I'm grounded, all of a sudden everybody else finds it much easier to calm down.

34:56So it happens at the level of emotions and it also happens at the level of ideas. If we are rewarded by our parents from a very young age for only supporting a particular political party or sports team or the idea that we need to become a doctor because both of our parents were doctors, when that starts at such a young age, we're not mature enough to sort of like understand the extent to which those things have been given to us. And they're bound up with emotions, by the way, right? Because if I go to med school and my dad wanted me to go to med school, he's happy with me. And it makes all of our conversations easier, right?

35:41So the beliefs and the ideas get married to emotions. And that makes them kind of this entangled mess. And Bowen would say separating emotions from beliefs and understanding the origin of your beliefs, where you got them from. Did you work your way to them through more of a rational objective analysis, or are they bound up with kind of the way that you've emotionally regulated yourself, your nervous system throughout your life? And he said, this is very difficult to unlearn. But when we examine the origin of our beliefs and their relationship to emotions or the way that we maybe felt in our family when we express certain opinions, we can begin to take steps of differentiation.

36:25And it's never too late. It's never too late to start doing that. It's not like if it didn't happen. It didn't really happen very much in my family. But if we realize that, we can go back and sort of take steps to begin making our emotions, our beliefs, our convictions our own. And that's the hallmark of a solid self. But what happens when other people regard that differentiation as a threat? Like the very people that have a stake in it, right? Exactly. Well, I think you're not responsible for how the other person feels. If you're oriented towards what is truly good and true, rather than trying to make sure that the other person does not feel hurt or angry or wounded or anxious, that is an exhausting way to live.

37:17That is exactly how the pseudo self gets formed in Bowen's opinion. Like we're constantly engaging in a social calculus before we speak or before we take an action where it's sort of this highly reflexive way of being where it's like, what would this person think? What would that person think? How will this affect my reputation as an author? and that is not coming from a place of conviction it's coming from a place of calculus being willing to disappoint people by pursuing things that you believe are true and good is something that people really need to learn how to do and it takes courage right i mean the courage to be disliked which is another good book because it does take courage it's not something And that's easy to do.

38:05To what extent should disappointing someone or being disliked, how do we differentiate signal from noise? Because to a certain extent, there is informative value to a certain degree of, we'll say, feedback that you're getting from others. To a certain extent, there is informative value. But then to another extent, sometimes it's other people are expressing their own dysregulation and they're taking it out on you. How do we differentiate that signal from that noise? Yeah, I mean, it starts with thinking about how is the other person incentivized? Does this person love me? Does this person care about my good?

38:46Or are they incentivized by other things, right? Whether their own job security, their own economic situation. Why are they giving me this feedback? What place is it actually coming from? is a really good criteria it's usually not too hard i think people you know that old saying right like people only listen to people that they believe that they actually like love them or something like that like truly take things to heart if they feel like that they're being loved or it's coming from a place of love so i think that is always one place to start and then like at what what level is i mean the feedback is important but there's many different kinds of feedback.

39:24One kind of feedback is a really important one. It's like, you really hurt me by your behavior. That's very different than like feedback on, I don't think you should put this in your book or something like that. Right, right. And when I say feedback in this context, most people, as we kind of previously discussed, most people don't give direct feedback anymore. We live in a conflict avoidance society. And so often the feedback, quote unquote, the feedback that you get is not through verbally, it's through action. It's through being shadow banned from the group chat. It's through not getting invited out when you notice that everybody else, all your cousins are going to this thing.

40:06Passive aggressive. Yeah, exactly. And you start to look at that and say, all right, what is it? Oh, is it because I expressed this particular viewpoint that they disagree with. And that's the reason they're shutting me out. Yeah. I mean, it is tricky. I mean, the social skills required to live in our society where I think there's less of a willingness to be direct than there was before are incredibly high, right? And people often communicate things in passive aggressive ways, but often the ideas that we form are very often wrong you know what i mean like we we project and have this fantasy in our minds about why this person hasn't got back to us or something like that and one lesson i've learned is i always start by giving it the most charitable possible explanation right they're busy just like i am they probably didn't even see my message or something like that but then i think people are so conflict avoidant that they let this eat away at them and like one of the rules in the organization that I run is that we try to have zero tolerance for passive aggressiveness.

41:12I don't know many companies that have actually explicitly articulated this, but with us, it's actually very explicit. We talk about it on day one of a new hire. If you sense that anybody is being passive aggressive to you and not just giving you good direct feedback, please call it out. Like in this organization, it's actually okay to just ask the question. And if I or we ever sense that, we'll also just ask you like, hey, what's up? That emails or that text seemed like this and just kind of like cut through the BS. And that has truly been like when it's articulated like that, it gives other people the permission to actually say something if they're sensing that too.

41:56It's incredibly like freeing, peaceful thing to do. You won't be fired for asking the question. We have zero tolerance for it in this organization. Oh, that's fantastic. And to that extent, again, going back to our conversation about the workplace, especially smaller workplaces can be very innovative and you can learn a lot about good behavior, good communication. The workplace in the best case scenario is almost a training ground for being a better person when it's done well. Again, I want to link this back to the people who are listening who either aren't in workplaces like that or aren't in workplaces at all because they're retired or they work for themselves or they're full-time caretakers.

42:49When we lose that opportunity to use the workplace as a behavioral training ground, how do we model this for other people in the way that you've modeled it for your company? Part of it, I guess, is how do we define work? What is the nature of work? I mean, we can work broadly defined could be the work of being a caretaker, which I'm also a caretaker for my dad. I think that we have to, without forms of traditional workplaces anymore and the rapidly changing nature of work, partly due to AI, I think we will probably need to deepen our understanding of what work is and recover the social dimension of work again and look for ways to collaborate with other people on things.

43:39And even if the work that we're doing with them is non-traditional work. When I started to become a caregiver for my dad as an only child, I was completely alone. And I guess being the entrepreneur that I am, I realized all of the serious gaps in the system, right? And the lack of resources that I had for caregiving for my dad, I realized that it is truly work. It is a lot of work. And I thought, well, maybe I can actually bring something to this and find other people. And the internet was great for this, by the way, like find other people who are interested in working with me to make it easier to share resources and to do caregiving for somebody living with dementia.

44:28Because I myself, I don't work in a big company. I haven't since I was 23 years old, right? I mean, it's been two decades since I worked in the kind of like formative company. You learn soft skills and hard skills. So I have had to find it in other places and be very intentional. And that four years ago now, when I kind of set out to bring other people into my work of caregiving, because I noticed, I realized there's a lot of other people that have that thing, that has turned into a very, very strong community for me. And I would bet that everybody out there could find some form of work that they have to do, some responsibility that they have in their life, whether it's being a parent, caretaking, or just community-related things, and invite other people to work with you or volunteer to work with other people on their projects.

45:23I think we're going to have to get creative if we want to find the social dimension of work again. And it's a dimension that people don't think about, right? I think there's three dimensions of work. The objective dimension, everybody knows it, it's what you're doing. There's the subjective dimension, which is the way that the work changes you, right? Different kinds of work change the subject, change the worker in different ways. And then there's the social dimension. And the subjective and the social dimension are the parts that we don't really hear about. Right. And they're the parts that you miss the most when work stops.

45:59Yes.

46:05In business, there's no room for guesswork. Every shipment matters. Every deadline counts. When you're trying to keep operations running smoothly, the last thing you need is uncertainty. That's why reliability is at the core of USPS Ground Advantage. From the moment your package is first scanned in, it moves through a secure nationwide network, aiding in a timely and accurate delivery. You get near real-time tracking so you can keep up with your shipments. And with affordable, upfront pricing, there are no hidden fees or surprise surcharges to throw off your cost sheets. It all adds up to predictable deliveries you can depend on.

46:46Because knowing your logistics are handled lets you focus on everything else. Your customers, your team, and the future you're building. Visit usps.com slash ground advantage to start shipping with confidence. USPS Ground Advantage. We mean business. So if you have a few spare minutes and you'd like the chance to earn a little extra money, there's really one question that matters. Is the reward worth your time? That's where Earnhouse comes in. This episode is sponsored by Earnhouse. It's free to join and connects you with paid survey opportunities. Before you choose a survey, you can see the estimated time and dollar reward upfront.

47:31Instead of guessing, you can evaluate the trade-off before you start and find the right survey that makes sense for you. If you qualify and complete the survey, you can earn rewards redeemable for cash or choose from 100 plus digital gift cards. This isn't an income strategy. It's simply another option for spare time you already have. Go to earnhouse.com slash Paula right now and create your free account. If you're watching or listening in an app, the same Earnhouse link is in the description or show notes, so tap it directly. Again, earnhouse.com slash Paula. Go take a look, see what opportunities are available to qualify for, and start earning today.

48:13That's E-A-R-N-H-A-U-S dot com slash Paula. We all have a money story, like a relationship with money that has followed us throughout our life and that's changed as our relationship with money has changed. When I was in my 20s, I had a story that was really dominated by scarcity and anxiety. And as I've gotten older, I've had to work through a lot of that scarcity mindset, that money story, because Monarch is this dashboard that you can use for a big picture concept of all of your finances. You see your income and expenses, yes, but it's more than just budgeting. Budgeting is backwards looking.

48:49This is like, let's set goals. Let's map out big purchases. Let's see if we're on track. Let's make adjustments. Through Monarch, you can look at your net worth. You can ask Monarch's AI assistant anything about your finances. You can use Monarch's weekly AI recap to catch spending spikes before they become a problem. They've got really easy to read diagrams so you can visualize how your money is flowing. I recently sat with a friend and got him set up on Monarch. He's someone who's in his late 40s and not very well prepared for retirement. And I help him set everything up. And once he saw all of his numbers in a dashboard for the first time, I can see him blown away.

49:26It was this command center. So write your own money story with Monarch. Use code afford at monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just$50. That's 50 % off your first year at monarch.com with code afford, A-F-F-O-R-D.

49:48Part of experiencing the social dimension of any type of quote-unquote work, and by that I mean any project that you are undertaking, Part of the social dimension involves choosing the right people. You told a story from when you were planning an estate sale in which you chose someone specifically because her website looked like it hadn't been updated since 1995. And you read that as information that she wasn't actively trying to sell you something and that assuming that she was still in business, she would actually just be helpful rather than salesy. But of course, I mean, you can interpret an old website.

50:34That also might be a signal that the person just doesn't have their care. They're not diligent. Exactly. Lack of diligence, lack of just having their act together. Right. There are a lot of different ways to read that. So how do you find those good people? Yeah, I guess I do have a lot of like non-traditional ways to screen people, right? Like Tyler Cowen's question is one. I'm always kind of biased towards the anti-mimetic markers that people have. Like what are the things that they're doing that really let their uniqueness or identity shine through? In what ways are they not giving me the expected answer?

51:10I'm always looking for those things, right? So even when I do job interviews, I will never hire anybody without getting a meal with them. It's like a super high context environment where it's harder to eat when I take a long time to eat. I lived in Italy for three years, so I know how to have a three hour long Pranzo lunch. It's a high context environment where I can learn things about people. Internet's made that harder, right? It's like without that sort of embodied things, it's hired people over Zoom. So I do kind of look for the weirdness. And in the case of that estate sale plan or war, I was right.

51:46I'm not always right. Like finding high context things that allow you to see how people are when they let their guard down are really, really important. And you can only get so far online. line. And so there's the people that we choose for sure. And it's very important to choose intentionally. Often we just kind of accept passively the situations and workplaces that we get put in sometimes by just circumstances out of our control, right? And we don't choose with intention. We don't choose with intention, even the city that we want to live in. I mean, it's like one of the most important decisions that you'll ever make is the city and the community that you're a part of.

52:32I don't know if you ever read this essay by Paul Graham called Cities and Ambition. Right. About how the city that you live in determines the type of ambitions that you have. It's almost another form of medic desire. It is. It is a form of medic desire, right? If you live in Cambridge, Massachusetts for long enough, you probably wish that you were a little bit smarter because it's where Harvard and MIT are and so on and so forth. We could do this with this. It's a fun exercise. And it's one who's lived in six or seven major cities around the world. How have my ambitions changed a little bit by being in those cities.

53:01In each one. Can we go through Las Vegas? Because you and I both lived in Las Vegas. I was there 2015 to 2020. You were there much earlier, what, 2018? 2008 to 2011-ish. What did you learn to want by living in Vegas? There are different parts of Vegas. There's New Vegas and there's Old Vegas. I live in Henderson, Nevada. But you can learn to want dopamine hits and ambition and to want money because Vegas is driven by money and which parties you can get into and everything. It's not why I moved there, by the way. I moved there for tax reasons, and the rent was a lot lower than it was in California where I moved from.

53:48But I existed in a very interesting little community in Vegas with Tony Hsieh, the former CEO of Zappos. Zappos was this quirky community and they eventually started, kind of took over downtown Las Vegas and formed the Downtown Project, which I know you know well. We talked about this before we went on the air. So that formed me in Vegas. It's part of Vegas that people don't know, right? Right. Right. And it formed me to want to Tony's philosophy, quite frankly, formed me and made me want to be a little weirder than I was. Right. That was one of the things that he would say, or it's one of the Zappos interview questions.

54:31Right. Like, what's weird about you? They would just straight up ask people. And I'd be like, I don't know, I'm pretty, but plain steak and potatoes kind of guy from Michigan. Right. And I was like, I wish I was a little bit weirder. Right. So Tony gave me that ambition for sure. And then they did a very good job at collisions, right? They would always say like, what is your return on collision? So they would, they put a bunch of people together in downtown Las Vegas and tried to just have people collide in kind of unexpected ways. And with the idea that new businesses, new ideas would emerge from these unexpected encounters and unexpected collisions.

55:07I think that the idea was really right. I think there might've been some problems with the execution of that, maybe a little too much alcohol involved or something, but, but it's like the idea I think was really right. So it made me really, I, it formed that ambition in me to show up in unexpected places. And I, to this day, I tend to get really bored when I go to events or conferences or whatever. And I know everybody who's going to be there before I even show up, right? I can predict it, right? Just by the title of it, right? It's going to be the same kind of characters. I love environments where I can go in and have unexpected encounters.

55:47Those are becoming incredibly rare in our world. Did you ever encounter a llama while you were there? Did you get spit in the face by a llama? I did not get spit in the face by a llama, but I definitely encountered a llama. I've got a lot of Vegas Zappos stories, believe me. I ask that because I was also around that same community a little bit after you and Tony Hsieh and the Downtown Project. I learned a lot about customer service through being around that and the prioritization of the customer above all else. But Tony had all of these events and there were always llamas walking around. I definitely got spit in the face by a llama a couple of times.

56:31He also, Tony, purchased parcels of land that from an aerial view actually are shaped like a llama. So it was a whole thing. I also, yeah, I did not know that actually. That is wild. That is really crazy. It was unintentional at first. And then they realized that if you like, look at it from an aerial perspective, it was starting to take the shape of a llama. And then they just went for it. And they were just like, we might as well, Oh, we got a good thing going here. Exactly. Yeah. So he invested 300 million into downtown Vegas. Yes. Then he died without a will and without an estate plan. And so now, yeah.

57:06Very tragic. I will say I also was very inspired by the emphasis on customer service. Yeah. Zappos model, delivering happiness. Customer service was everything that they were about. You could call them and ask the customer service rep. They're a shoe company, right? Right. Those that don't know Zappos. You could call them and ask to order a pizza and the customer service rep would just take care of it for you. So it was like always going above and beyond. So they invested a lot in that. And I was running an e-commerce company in Vegas at the same time, right down the street from Zappos. That's how Tony and I got to be such good friends.

57:37I was like, I'm going to invest in my customer service and it's going to take care of all the problems. So I mean, I invested like heavily in customer service. The problem was I didn't have nearly as much capital as Zappos had. So I'm this young company that has my customer service reps on the phone for an hour with a single customer and everything like that. And I was like, man, it's a really good idea in theory. It's incredibly difficult to execute. Right. Exactly. But we got to this by talking about how the city that you live in impacts the desires that you have. Which is not. I live in Washington, D.C.

58:13now. So I should probably think a lot more about that. I've thought about that. In D.C., what is it? And I think probably it's proximity to power. Realizing that is really important to be aware. In D.C., you get invitations to things all the time. Just by physical location, I'm proximate to power. But I think the danger is, at what point does that spill over to your actual mindset? To what extent does it go beyond the place? so you move out of cambridge massachusetts and you still can never lose the idea that you wish that you were just a little bit smarter and you live the rest of your life constantly feeling like it's just the next book it's the next degree it's whatever to what extent i would never want to move out of washington dc and like have that be in me so i think i'm particularly mindful of it I don't think that I'm above that temptation, but being aware of whatever it is your city, your community is mediating to you and rewarding in terms of status, in terms of what makes you cool in that community, what makes you accepted.

59:30Being aware of that so that you can just have a beat in between when it hits you and affects you and how you respond to it. If you just have a beat in between, you can just respond in a more intentional way. You mentioned that you ran an e-commerce company. In addition to that, you, well, you owned vending machines and then later you ended up stocking vending machines rather unexpectedly. How do you maintain a strong sense of self when not only your work identity changed, your location changed, even the context around the ways in which you interacted with vending machines changed? when everything in your environment changes so drastically, how do you maintain that strong self?

1:00:15The first company that I started before the e-commerce company was a healthy vending machine company back in 2005. Our idea was as simple as it sounds. We took healthy products, put them in vending machines and branded them really well. Nobody had done that, shockingly. They could only find Snickers and Frito-Lays or whatever. And we put pita chips and granola bars and healthy snacks and vending machines. It was the unsexiest business imaginable, right? I had friends starting really cool tech companies in San Francisco and my partner and I were in LA, literally trying to learn the vending machine business from the ground up.

1:00:54And we were 23 years old and we went to the National Vending Machine Expo our first year. And we were like, yeah, we're the youngest people here by at least 35 or 40 years. And people were like, What are you doing? I don't know if we can ever break into this industry, but it was kind of our anti-memetic startup idea. We were like, we're going to bet on food distribution. And we would always call it food distribution, not vending. It just made it sound a little bit better, right? That does sound fancier. Yeah. But we did make most of our – the company took a long time to take off. It eventually did, and we made our money through being a distributor of all of the food and snacks that went into the vending machines we took a margin on.

1:01:37But in the early days, before we had a nationwide network of any machine operators that would run our network, even international, we just had five machines in LA. And I literally would go around and stock on myself and just ask myself what I was doing with my life. I just quit a job as an investment banker to do that and loan through my bonus. fast forward that company we spun off an e-commerce site and i i started four companies in my 20s but when i was 29 years old i i just had an existential crisis i was asking myself questions i was very unhappy i was doing well on paper i could probably have not worked again if i didn't want to i ended up stepping away taking some time off and over the course of two years i i discerned a religious vocation, a religious life.

1:02:32And I thought that I might become a monk or a priest. And I ended up starting the process of trying to figure that out. I was like, I'm going to take a year and I'm actually going to enter a seminary and just take some time to see if this is maybe where I'm being led. And I entered seminary, which is a very, very strange thing for a 30-year-old man to do because I went from owning my own house and a nice car to living in what was essentially a dorm. I was one of the older guys there with a shared bathroom on my floor. I mean, talk about like shaking up your identity, right? And like the people that were there with me were all there, they all had their own crazy stories about why they had got there, right?

1:03:16And I was like, wow, these are my classmates now for the next however many years. We're in this together. That was incredibly jarring for me. The most formative period of my life has been five years there. And the story that I think you're referring to is, you know, in the first year, you get there and you're told that you're going to be assigned a house job, which is basically unpaid work that you are going to do for the seminary. It could mean like a gardening. It could mean like printing booklets that are used for the liturgies, something. And we were all kind of like waiting with bated breath to find out what our house job is going to be.

1:03:54They were delivered to us on a little slip of paper in our cubbyhole mailboxes one morning. And, you know, as background here, nobody at the seminary knew that the nature of my first business, that I was involved in the vending machine business anyway. They knew that I was a successful entrepreneur. I didn't like list out exactly what companies and businesses that I was in. So there's no way of knowing that. I got my slip of paper out of my cubbyhole. It said, you are in charge of the campus sort of like bar and vending machine area. And one of your jobs will be to make sure that the vending machines are fully stopped, right?

1:04:35This job was given to me. And the next week I found myself like late one night on my knees, putting junk food, by the way, into this vending machine. Like what in the world? Like, how did I got you have a sense of humor? how did I get here this is crazy I think I cried and then I then I like burst out laughing and I realized what I need to do right now in order to grow is to own this job that I've been given and be the best damn vending machine stalker the world has ever known and because unlike the first time. I didn't choose it. I was given this job by somebody else. I could probably grow a lot in humility and I can't think of much better ways to do that than stalking this vending machine right now.

1:05:29It's funny because in accepting that and sort of accepting the ways in which I was being formed in that community and resisting the temptation to flee it and leave, because I wanted to many times, right? I wanted to many, many times, but I knew deep down that I needed to stick it out. I needed to spend an adequate amount of time there. I mean, maybe to go all the way and become a priest, or at the very least, I needed to be there. And I had burned my ships behind me very intentionally when I went in to make sure that it wasn't too easy for me to leave. I made it incredibly difficult of myself to leave.

1:06:07I ended up being in there for five years. but being in that community and committing to it for a certain period of time my initial commitment was one year and then I kept making one year commitments until finally I had the clarity that I needed that you know that was not going to be my lifelong vocation but sometimes we are I think called to places or put in situations that for a reason right you know we have to attend to the reality in front of us. Maybe it's our parents or a friend or something unexpected. And I knew that I needed to attend to that. And that by attending to that responsibility that I had to be faithful to my commitments and even to my assignments in my house job, as ridiculous as I thought it was, there was something in there for me to learn.

1:06:57And it did more than any other thing, form a solid self.

1:07:06Thank you, Luke. What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Key takeaway number one, you don't have a community problem. You have a comfort problem. Everyone says we're lonely and we're short on community, but Luke flips that. He says we have more community than ever. We have group chats, discord servers, subreddits. We have these niche online groups. And the problem is that all of it fits way too well because joining takes a click, leaving takes a click. So you never have to sit through a hard conversation. Online there's trolling, but there aren't hard conversations. And those are the things that really build a person.

1:07:47If none of your relationships ever have friction, that's actually a warning sign. If we don't experience tension, it's probably a bad sign. It's almost like we don't have a lack of community today. People talk about that. We have a lack of community, lack of community. I think that we have almost an overabundance of community that is too comfortable, like online communities, for instance. It's almost too good of a fit so that we don't actually have to, or we don't know how to exist in the tension and do the hard work of forming relationships that last over time. That was the first key takeaway.

1:08:21Key takeaway number two, your job pays you in more than just money. Work pays you in three ways. There's the objective way that work pays you, your compensation. There's the subjective way that work pays you. It's the way that your work changes you, ideally for the better. And then there's the social dimension, the people. And so So a lot of us, when we plan to retire or to quit a job, we plan around how we're going to deal with the objective dimension, the paycheck. But when we retire early or go remote or go solo, or even just take a brief sabbatical or step out to be a full-time caretaker, we think about replacing the income, but we often get blindsided by the rest of it, by the social dimension, as well as by the subjective, that personal growth dimension.

1:09:14And one thing that Luke points out is that the future that everybody is so excited about, the one person company, the AI leveraged solopreneur, that's a future where you've optimized the people out of your work entirely. And that can be very isolating. There's a lot of rhetoric about job replacement and single person billion dollar companies and people just sort of doing everything by themselves. And to me, that sounds like a relatively lonely world. For me, like one of the best things about work and being an entrepreneur are the people that I get to work with, right? One of the best things about writing a book is the people that I get to meet like you, like through writing the book.

1:09:56That is the second key takeaway. Finally, key takeaway number three, The thing you didn't choose is often the thing that forms you. At 29, Luke walks away from four companies and enters seminary, and he burns the ships on purpose so leaving would be hard. First year, everyone gets assigned an unpaid house job on a slip of paper that's in their mailbox, and nobody knows that he used to run a vending machine business, and he opens up his slip of paper and he's in charge of stalking the vending machines. It's this reminder that the thing you didn't choose is often the thing that forms you. This job was given to me and the next week I found myself like late one night on my knees putting junk food, by the way, into this vending machine.

1:10:49Like what in the world? Like how did I got you have a sense of humor? how did I get here? This is crazy. I think I cried and then I burst out laughing. And I realized what I need to do right now in order to grow is to own this job that I've been giving and be the best damn vending machine stalker the world has ever known. So those are three key takeaways from this conversation with Luke Burgess. Thank you for being part of the Afforder community. If you enjoyed today's episode, please do three things. First, share it with friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, share it with people who buy things from vending machines, share this with all the people in your life, because that's the most important way you spread the message of being thoughtful and intentional about your life.

1:11:41Number two, please open your favorite podcast playing app and hit the follow button so that you don't miss any of our amazing upcoming episodes. Also go to YouTube, youtube.com slash afford anything, subscribe to the show on YouTube, hit the notification bell, leave us a comment. We love our YouTube fans. So thank you for joining us on YouTube as well. Number three, if you enjoyed this episode, download this free workbook that we offer as a gift to you where you can think through, it's a fill outable interactive workbook, fill in the blanks on these questions that invite you to reflect on your relationship with the five pillars of building wealth.

1:12:27So financial psychology, increasing your income, investing, real estate, entrepreneurship. It's this interactive fill in the blank workbook. It's totally free. Download it at affordanything.com slash F-I-I-R-E. That's affordanything.com slash F-I-I-R-E. F-I-I-R-E. Thank you so much for being part of this community. My name is Paula Pant. This is the Afford Anything podcast, and I'll meet you in the next episode.

From the publisher

#743: Everyone talks about a loneliness epidemic — but Luke Burgis argues the opposite problem is just as real: we now have so much easy, frictionless community that we never have to develop a solid sense of who we actually are.

Luke Burgis is a professor of business at The Catholic University of America and the founder of the Cluny Institute, and the bestselling author of Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life. He returns to the show to talk about his new book, The One and the Ninety-Nine.

In this episode, we discuss:

Why having too much easy community can be just as damaging as having none at all

How to tell whether your beliefs are actually yours — or something you inherited without ever examining it

Why cutting people off has quietly become the default response to conflict

How to stop shrinking yourself just to keep other people comfortable

The zero-tolerance rule Luke enforces at his own company to kill passive-aggressiveness before it starts

How Luke actually decides who to trust, hire, and build relationships with

What an existential crisis at 29 — and five humbling years training for the priesthood — taught a successful entrepreneur about identity

This episode is for anyone who feels the pull between fitting in and standing out — in your family, your workplace, or your online life. Luke offers a way to build an identity solid enough to hold up under pressure, without giving up on real community.

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS

Note: Timestamps may vary slightly depending on dynamic ad placements.

(7:42) Two competing drives wired into every human being

(10:11) Why group pressure breaks some people and not others

(17:39) Why cutting people off replaced working through conflict

(19:39) The real number of close friends you actually need

(26:51) Where your beliefs actually came from

(32:00) You're not responsible for how someone else feels

(36:09) The zero-tolerance workplace rule against passive-aggressiveness

(41:22) How to actually tell who you can trust

(53:33) The existential crisis that sent an entrepreneur toward the seminary

(55:39) The humbling lesson hidden in a vending machine

🔗 RESOURCES MENTIONED

👉 This free 10-day workbook helps you trace your money habits back to whether they're actually yours — starting with your own money mindset — https://affordanything.com/fiire

👉 Luke's website (books, newsletter, and more) — https://lukeburgis.com

👉 Luke's new book, The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion — https://www.amazon.com/One-Ninety-Nine-Forging-Identity-Contagion/dp/1250373034

👉 Paul Graham's essay "Cities and Ambition," on how the place you live shapes what you want — https://paulgraham.com/cities.html

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

More from Afford Anything | Get Smarter With Money

All 334 episodes
Everyone Wants a Piece of You. Here's How to Stay Whole -- with Luke BurgisAfford Anything | Get Smarter With Money · 1 h 7 min
Listen in VO