Luke Burgis on Mimetic Desire, Catholicism, and the Age of Social Contagion

20:07Tyler Cowen:My wife sometimes talks of wanting to live in the smaller towns nearby, which we're not going to do because we're slated for a third-tier city in Mexico. But we're not going to do that either. Now, I sometimes think of Italy, northern Italy, as a place where there are different dimensions for mimetic desire. That is, more people dress the same. There are fewer status dimensions, maybe less room for eccentrics compared to America. Do you think that's true, or do you think I'm off base? And Paris is a bit like this also. There's a certain notion of what kind of shoes an Italian man should wear. And they wear them, and they're amazing, and actually more affordable than here.

20:43Tyler Cowen:But there's a sameness to some things. I don't think the sameness is a bad thing. I think the sameness is very charming. The sprazzatura of an Italian man, the way that an Italian man dresses, something I've never been able to pull off in my life. And for those that don't know what that sprazzatura means, it means you put tremendous care into putting on an outfit that looks like you didn't think about it at all. and somehow it comes together and looks amazing. Even that seems highly mimetic to me, right? The idea of Sprezzatura, right? I love Naples. Naples is maybe my second favorite city in Italy.

21:11Tyler Cowen:It's my second favorite too. Maybe it's my favorite. That and Genoa, to me, are the two undiscovered, less discovered gems. It makes sense why we get along. Yes. And nobody goes to Naples either. It's too dirty. It's endless. I've heard all the excuses. It's become somewhat more popular though. Yeah. There have been some New York Times articles. The food has drawn some people, I think. My test for whether or not I'll get along with somebody is their reactions to Naples after they've been there. That's my number one test. To the Northern Italian question, there's a great book on Italy if you haven't read it.

21:39It's called The Italians by Luigi Barzini. Barzini, yeah. Barzini in the 60s. It's just a fantastic book. And I think that the North has a little bit less of the kind of animated kind of Italian gestures and spectacle that you get in the South. It's a little more reserved. And I would say that because of that, it's less mimetic than the South. because I think that that kind of disposition to kind of that flamboyant way of being is the more mimetic thing about the South, about Naples.

22:07Tyler Cowen:Speaking of Barzini, what do you think of his hypothesis that the face an Italian will show you in terms of level of cheeriness depends on how your status is perceived? They think they're somewhat of a sad people, right? But they seem happy to outsiders because they put on that face for the higher status outsiders. I wouldn't disagree with Barzini on Italian culture. So I'm not going to disagree with him on that. He knows Italians much better than I do. I think that the face in Italy is maybe it's kind of like the smile in Thai. There's a thousand different smiles and they all mean something different.

22:38And Italians are incredibly good at reading the face and facial expressions. But I think they have a different standard for foreigners like me than they do for each other.

22:45Tyler Cowen:How is Italian Catholicism different? Depends on what part of Italy you're in. Say Genoa, whatever part you know best. I think that having spent a few weeks there very recently and went to mass quite a few times, I was there during Holy Week, it is aesthetically very different. You typically will walk into a very old church that has no heating or AC, has absolutely terrible acoustics, and you'll find people wandering in and out kind of like you would in an Orthodox church. It's kind of like walking around. I would say that it's relatively low liturgy compared to what you see. I mean, a lot of the revival in Catholicism here in the U.S.

23:25are sort of like high liturgy things. So I actually found it to be somewhat difficult. I couldn't even hear the priest most of the time because the sound system is really bad. So I think that the liturgy is really the kind of test for me about like everything else that's going on. And that's sort of the sacramental life. The first thing I notice about any Catholic church is how many times they offer confession. I look at it right away and I can tell you 10 other things about that same church and predict it with a very high degree.

23:50Tyler Cowen:And what does that tell you? Let's say they offer confession frequently. What do you then infer? I infer that it's thriving. And, you know, one could say, well, they offer confession frequently because they just have a lot of people there that believe in the sacrament of confession. I think it's quite the opposite. I mean, it turns out from every priest that I've talked to that if you offer confession frequently, maybe a few times a week or daily, the lines just start to form. So it's actually quite the opposite. So you'll have a lot of priests that just start offering it more. so that streams are confessions available by appointment only on Saturdays versus confession before every mass.

24:22That is the number one signal for me and then how often they have adoration. And this is Catholic inside baseball here. But it is kind of like politics. Like if I know your position on gun control, I can, with a high degree of accuracy, predict your position on 10 other things, clustered things.

24:37Tyler Cowen:Why is it that at least in formal terms, Italy has become so non-religious? I get that underneath the cultural structure may be quite Catholic still, but the number of people who go to church or who profess, say, a belief in the Trinity seems fairly low. How did that happen? It seems like they're almost tired of their Catholicism. You know, they've had it for so long. It almost seems like cultural Judaism to me. It's maybe like the familiarity breeds contempt. I don't know, but that's the sense that I get. And there's all kinds of politics in Italy. I think Mussolini had something to do with it.

25:11sort of the Christian Democrats. I think that it was such a part of their identity for so long. It wasn't handed down by the last few generations. And there's just a sense in which it has become cultural. So I met many Italians on this last trip that would make the sign of the cross, you know, if they heard an ambulance drive by or they walked by an image of the Madonna on a street corner or something like that. But they probably haven't been to mass in years. This has become very cultural. I don't know why, but I think that they're tired.

25:37Tyler Cowen:What was it like living next to Vatican City? Well, speaking of this, I was mortified when one day I had to walk directly by St. Peter's very often just to get home up on the Janiculum Hill. And I walked by Peter's one day, St. Peter's, and I didn't look at it. I didn't think about it. And then I was mortified and I realized it was too late to go back because I had to be somewhere. So, you know, Rome can be a very difficult place to live as a person of faith. When I got there, somebody said, you know, Rome will either strengthen your faith or lose it as a Catholic. Because you will see kind of the dark underbelly of everything.

26:09You will see a lot of worldliness. And you will either come out of it with kind of a more supernatural vision of what the church is, or you will come out of it with your tail between your legs, really worried about things. For me, it was really not one of those two extremes. It was like I sort of came out of it not that much different than when I went in. It was probably the three most formative years of my life when I lived next to the Vatican because it was an incredibly strange situation. I was a 31-year-old man who had owned my own house in Las Vegas and suddenly lived in what was essentially a dormitory with 250 other men, most of them younger than me.

26:42The typical age for a seminarian is 20, 25 probably, with a shared bathroom on every floor. And I mean, talk about a relative mimetic environment. We share so much in common. So I would also say because of that, it was one of the funniest places that I've ever been, because one of the ways that you learn to live in a situation like that is through comedy.

27:01Tyler Cowen:Why didn't you become a priest? John Henry Newman said that one should never tell the story of their conversion or their vocational discernment between tea and dessert. It's just too complex of a question. The easy answer that I'll give you, it's not a cop-out, is that I carefully discerned for a number of years that it was not what I felt like I was being called to do. And I'll tell you one of the little parts of that story that helped me realize that. I was studying theology at a pontifical university in Rome, right in Piazza Navona. I was on my way to a fundamental theology class in my second year in Rome, and I was having nagging doubts.

27:39Something felt a little bit off in my discernment process. And it turned out that there was a Matthew Lunn, who was a Pixar animator. He played an instrumental role in the development of the first Toy Story. He was a storyboard guy, so he worked with all these guys at Pixar. He happened to be in Rome giving a master class on storytelling that day. and the venue, this is a very typical Italian story. The venue you're supposed to give the workshop at in Rome did not allow him in due to some kind of bureaucratic maintenance of the building. It's very Italian already. It's incredibly Italian. And he had to find an emergency place to hold his workshop and he held it at my pontifical university.

28:19I don't know this backstory there, but he was there and I saw a sign, Matthew on Pixar, storytelling masterclass. and it was like not cheap. All these Italians pay to go. And I talked my way in and I skipped class and I went to the storytelling class that day. And I was so lit up by that class that I realized that there was something in me that craved this kind of like creative, artistic, aesthetic thing. And I think it ruined theology for me for the rest of the year. So aesthetics trumped theology? You know, von Balthasar wrote a whole aesthetic treatise, right? The theological aesthetics. So theology and aesthetics go hand in hand, really.

28:56He understood the whole story of the incarnation like the acts of a play. So I think that I'm very much kind of a von Valtasar Catholic in the sense that I do see a lot of the goodness and beauty and aesthetic characteristics of the church as related to truth. And it's one of the ways that we can come to the truth is through beauty.

29:14Tyler Cowen:And aesthetically, what is it in Christianity that's most important to you personally? So if it were me, I'm not Christian, but I might say Box B Minor Mass, or maybe Monteverdi's Vespers, right? What would you say? Aesthetically, it is the liturgy. It is a beautifully celebrated Catholic mass. I'm not sort of one of these pre-Vatican II guys where I think that the Latin mass is the only real mass. I do think that is incredibly beautiful though. And I go to it every once in a while because I think it's very beautiful. I think that it was, I actually sort of came back to my faith through that practice.

29:48So it's not one particular thing or piece of artwork for me. It is the beauty of the ritual. and we've lost ritual in the world today in many cases. And seeing the reverence, seeing a church full of people shoulder to shoulder on their knees in itself is beautiful to me. I remember sort of just seeing everybody drop to their knees for the first time when I went back to mass after not having gone in a very long time. And I remember being struck by, that's not something I would see anywhere else in the world.

30:16Tyler Cowen:If I speak to people who are Ethiopian Christians or maybe Egyptian Coptic Christians, possibly Armenian Christians, they will communicate a sense that somehow they're in tune with an earlier, more fundamental Christianity than what we have in many other places. Does that argument carry any weight with you? Are you tempted by that or no? A little bit. I don't think that it's true, but I'm very attracted to orthodoxy, right, to the liturgy. I mean, it is incredibly beautiful. You know, even the divider that they have where the priest consecrates the Eucharist behind a wall, there's a sense of mystery and transcendence to that that I really like.

30:52I think the world could use more sense of mystery and more otherness. And I think one of the things that worries me a lot about the church today is that the church has become highly mimetic with the world. So you have priests and influencers on TikTok performing skits and things like that. I think it's incredibly unhelpful because there needs to be a level of otherworldliness, alterity, that I think the Eastern Orthodox liturgy preserves in a way even better than the new mass, the Novus Ordo does.

31:20Tyler Cowen:Do we need Protestantism in America to keep print culture front and center? Isn't Catholic culture in some ways too visual or too theatrical? And the Protestant impulse is very good for broader society because print is a more thoughtful medium. I love my Protestant brothers and sisters, so I don't want them to go away. I might want them all to become Catholic. But I think that many, many great things have come out of this tension. Generally, good things do come out of tension. yes, you know, that the church is sort of oral, right, to a more of an extent than Protestantism is. But I think, you know, it's interesting now because we're entering a world in which, and I'm a big fan of Marshall McLuhan, but it seems to me like the kind of traditional forms of written word, even traditional essays, that is changing incredibly fast in the world that we're entering.

32:06AI is just going to change the form of that. So I don't know where that goes.

32:09Tyler Cowen:Now, you and Ross Toth, you both self-identify as Catholics. He's been on this podcast several times. We've talked about religious issues. If you had to pin down exactly where your religious vision of Catholicism differs from his in as fundamental a manner as possible, how would you describe that? He might take more of a rationalist approach than I do. And I sort of believe in a, you know, faith and reason, as John Paul II said, are like two wings by which one rises to the contemplation of the truth. It goes back for me. I mentioned aesthetics and beauty. So it's the witness of the saints that initially attracted to me.

32:41It was the beauty. It was the tradition, the continuity of the church and the world through such a long time, reading the lives of the saints as a witness, for me, that has always been the first step, not trying to think my way to it. And I think, you know, Augustine had this beautiful phrase of faith-seeking understandings. What I'm not saying is that we should not seek, because the church has a wonderful intellectual tradition, but I think that if we try to explain it to people, I'm kind of less of an apologetics guy, maybe, right? I think like the best chance that I have to help somebody see what I see in the church is not to try to convince them of the argument of why Christianity is true, which is the only good reason to be Christian, in my opinion.

33:28It's to take them to Rome and show them and bring them inside a beautiful church to witness a beautiful mass, to drink a lot of good wine and have conversations late into the night about the good, the true, and the beautiful. And that, to me, is kind of the more circuitous route. Maybe it's not the fastest route, but I would say it's kind of more of an aesthetic approach.

33:49Tyler Cowen:If the world today is enchanted, or we should think of it as enchanted, what are the most literal manifestations of that? Of course, it would be the world itself, but specific things. Are there miracles happening commonly, or how do you think about specific events within that framework? I wouldn't be surprised if there's a Marian apparition in my lifetime, like a big one. I don't know if it'll be Our Lady of Guadalupe, but I think that sometimes the enchantment requires that people need to be open to enchantment to see it. And there are enchanting things going on all around us. And the world is not necessarily becoming more enchanted.

34:22It's us that are perceiving and noticing the things to be enchanted by. And that's why I say, like, I just have a sense that maybe there will be some kind of a openness to things that seem supernatural. I think maybe, I don't know nearly enough about this. I know, speaking of Ross, I know that he's fascinated by the question of sort of UFOs. Sure, UAPs, yeah. But it seems as if even this discourse that we're in right now kind of points to a desire for some kind of extraterrestrial, supernatural, enchanted things. We're really trying to find them and we're having a hard time.

34:56Tyler Cowen:J.D. Vance said he thought they were demons. I don't agree with that, but I don't find it crazy. I don't find it crazy either as one who believes in demons. That's a better explanation than others that I've heard. Do you think he and maybe you have a Manichean approach to Christianity, if demons are relevant? Well, demons are fundamental to Christianity. I mean, the Gospels are full of stories of Jesus driving out demons, right? The Gerasene demoniac is the most famous example of that. You know, he says, we are legion. And this is the quintessential gospel story where the demonic always has an element of contagion because the entire herd is sort of infected by this demon and is driven off into the sea.

35:34So there's nothing Manichean about that to me, living in a world where demons are real, where evil is real and exorcisms are real. I mean, I've known my fair share of exorcists and they seem to be on the rise by the way, from what the data shows. And most of it's anecdotal. I don't know how rigorously they're actually tracked. I mean, I think they are by the church, but that is not public data. But anecdotally, it seems like they're on the rise. You know, Manichean is kind of, there's good and then there's evil and we have to purify. Just admitting a world that might have the demonic element in it, there's nothing Manichean about that.

36:03Tyler Cowen:If you think of Shiite Islam, which sometimes is compared a bit to Catholicism, relative to Sunni Islam at least, do you feel any affinity to that approach? Obviously, it's missing the Trinity and Jesus and many other fundamental things from your point of view, but is there any kinship? I don't know enough about Shiite Islam. What would be one thing that might be similar to Catholicism about it? The world being enchanted, things and truths being hidden, and the multiplication of intermediaries as a way to get to those truths seem to me much more Catholic, if I had to say, and Sunni Islam seems much more Protestant with an emphasis on the Quran itself.

36:43Given what you've just shared, I probably would be if I learned more about it. It seems to share some elements. The idea that there are truths that are hidden is something I would like to just drill down on just for a second. Because, you know, in Catholicism, it's that the truth has basically been revealed fully, right, in the person of Jesus Christ. And the alternative to that is Gnosticism, which is generally the idea that there's always some hidden truth, right? It's like Scientology. There's always this one more thing. If you just learn this next thing, then that's the pathway to salvation.

37:13as more and more knowledge. And very interestingly, when I read the parable of the lost sheep in the Gospels, where Jesus tells a story of a shepherd that has 100 sheep, one of them goes missing, is lost, he leaves the 99 to go find it and brings it back. There is a Gnostic Gospel of Thomas version of that same parable. And in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, the sheep is not a sinner that Jesus finds. The one lost sheep was the smartest sheep. And when Jesus finds the one, He does not bring him back to the flock. He pats him on the head and praises him for not being like all of the other sheep, for being smart enough to forge his own way and to leave the herd and the crowd and all of the other dumb sheep.

37:56Now, that is the Gnostic interpretation, just to be clear. But I find it very, very interesting and very indicative of the times that we live in today, where I think people would be more attracted to the Gnostic interpretation than the traditional one.

38:09Tyler Cowen:The revelation of Jesus, again, within a Christian framework, it's not fully transparent. There's four Gospels. They have some differences, if only of emphasis. There was a period where there's an Avignon Papacy. You can count on the Church to interpret, but there's a claim that there's two Popes who's like the real Pope, which is the real Church. One way or another, people had to make up their minds. Isn't there room again for hiddenness in that framework, even if you adhere to a Catholic perspective as fully as you might try to? Yes. And one of the, I guess, exciting things about the faith and being Catholic is the adventure of navigating a spiritual life and a religious life that ultimately is your own.

38:50And one kind of part of the tradition that I always find interesting as kind of like personal divine revelation to individuals, this goes to the heart of the question, the hidden. And so Sister Faustina is a very famous Polish saint. And she was a nun. She died in her 20s, lived in a convent, barely left her whole life. And then when she died, there were just diaries and diaries filled with personal conversations that she claimed to have with Jesus. And this is where the Divine Mercy, the famous painting, she said that Jesus actually showed her how he would like to be depicted in the painting to show the world his Divine Mercy.

39:24So that's an example of this personal revelation, which the church has probed and decided that it's worthy of sharing and belief. So the hiddenness is certainly there.

39:33Tyler Cowen:On the political right these days, why do you think there's now so much mimetic anti-Semitism? It seems to have come from nowhere. Maybe that's an incorrect impression. But haven't you been shocked by how much there is and how open it's become? I've been totally shocked by it. And what happened? Scandalized by it. I don't know. I hate to think that it's always been there. There's two ways I think that one could explain it. It's either always been there and something has happened that makes people show their true colors. And I hope that that version of the story is not true. The other version of the story, which I think imputes less culpability to people, is that there is some crazy mimetic thing happening right now.

40:09And it's cool to be edgy or something like that and to say things. And you've got Nick Fuentes, and I think he's incredibly influential, especially to a younger generation. And that it is a mimetic thing that hopefully people will snap out of once it's been exposed for what it really is.

40:24Tyler Cowen:The Luke Burgess production function. What did you learn in your Wall Street years? How much I hate working on Wall Street. I learned that efficient markets theory is BS. All of the things that I learned in a very good undergraduate business school did not actually seem to be used in the day-to-day. And maybe it was because I was a lowly analyst at an investment bank and if I had worked at a hedge fund, I would have been enthralled by seeking alpha. No, unfortunately, I didn't get to do that as an analyst who just put together pitch decks and built financial models in Excel. I learned I needed to be able to, I wanted to take risks and I couldn't wait to take those risks.

41:03So I did not spend very long on Wall Street. It was less than two years that I actually worked on Wall Street and I left and started my first company.

41:09Tyler Cowen:What did you learn starting those businesses in Italy? Well, I never started a business in Italy. I was in Italy. But you ran them from Italy? No, no, no. I was in Italy as a seminarian. Okay. So I ended up walking away from a company in my late 20s to take some time off and that eventually led me to enter the seminary as I was on the pathway to becoming a priest. I did organize my life so that I was on a board while I was there. I didn't let go completely, but I let go of all of the operational stuff. And it was still a little distracting for me as I was trying to study philosophy and theology and then would get reports about something super technical going on, you know, a few thousand miles away back home.

41:51But I slowed down a lot in Italy and I think I imbibed. It kind of got me out of, you know, being an entrepreneur is incredibly difficult because nobody ever tells you to stop and there's always something else to do. So it sort of helped me bring some balance back into my life.

42:03Tyler Cowen:Is there a book that the current Luke would recommend to the 23-year-old Luke that he would have hated, but you still think he should have been reading? Jungshul Han, The Burnout Society. I would have hated that book as a 23-year-old. I remember having an older investment banker come speak to me when I was a senior and tell me that I was gung-ho. I was saying, you know, if I can come work at Goldman Sachs, I'll work 80-hour weeks, I'll sleep in the office. and he really walked me back from all of that language and he was like young man that's really not what you want to do you know that's not really the best approach here and I thought he was really lame I thought you know this guy just doesn't he's not going to make it he wasn't that old he's probably he just he'd been doing it for a few years and I thought that he was just not ambitious enough so the burnout society would have been a struggle for me what part of Silicon Valley if any do you secretly admire more than perhaps your audience expects from you I really admire people getting together to build things, usually without sorting by things like political preference.

43:08I mean, the thing that I love about Silicon Valley is solving real problems in the world with the best people you can find working in small teams together, which the church did more of this, should do more building maybe and less kind of like talking about the ethics of AI, like to actually try to build things, right? Experiment with things. I think the church probably needs a workshop in Rome to actually start building things. You can speak much more intelligently about it. I admire so many things about Silicon Valley. I miss the energy of it. I mean, DC is very different energy. It has created a culture.

43:41There's some parts of it that I think can be dangerous, but San Francisco is still the most important city in the world, particularly because of the AI boom, because it's never been replicated anywhere else. And I think there's a reason for that.

43:52Tyler Cowen:Why do you remain personally so tied to the state of Michigan? Well, I spend my summers in Michigan most of my summers. I think it's the greatest state in the country. I mean, it has a lake that looks like an ocean when you're standing on it. There's something about the Midwest that I'll never be able to take it out of me, even having lived in big cities. My dad was a truck driver. My mom was a grade school art teacher and artist. And there's kind of an earthiness and it was great growing up there. I hated it at the time, but now I think about how wonderful it was to have to go through the four seasons every year.

44:24Tyler Cowen:And where'd you grow up exactly in Michigan? Grand Rapids, Michigan, on the west side of the state. You know, scraping the ice off of the windshield at 7 o 'clock in the morning on my way to school. All of those things, I think, formed some character. So I love it. I mean, I love the grittiness. I love Detroit. I'm a little partial to the west side of Michigan just because that's where I'm from. I've suffered as a Detroit Lions fan my entire life. And I think that the Upper Peninsula is one of the hidden gems in the entire world. I mean, I don't know if you've ever been to the UP. It's wonderful.

44:55But it's just wonderful.

44:56Tyler Cowen:Highly underrated. It's highly underrated. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I try not to talk about Michigan too much because northern Michigan, like the Traverse City area, is getting written up in the New York Times, which I hate to see anytime I see it because it is wonderful. Prices are totally out of control. So I should probably just stop talking about all the wonderful things about Michigan. Now, your own Clooney Institute, do you think of it as closer to a monastery, a salon, a talent network, a way of organizing a Christian counter-elite, all of those? Or how's the way you would present what it is or what it does?

45:28I would think of it as trying to build a talent network and forming a kind of artist colony and workshop for people that have a religious sense or sensibility, that are kind of open to the transcendent, that are smart, that care about serious ideas, and that want to build real things in the world, that really care about the vector of innovation. So it's not just building, but it's like a step back, what should we be building? And trying to find as many of those people as possible in the world. So it's got a couple of different functions. One of them is it's sort of trying to operate as a bat signal, putting things out into the world that bring the right people out of the woodwork.

46:05And that's certainly happening. And then there's a part of it where I want to work with people that are able to work at the intersection of what I call Athens, Jerusalem and Silicon Valley. And we don't have to silo those things. So I think that Silicon Valley, for instance, would be healthier if it actually wasn't as allergic to religious thinking, for instance. I think religious thinking could do Silicon Valley a lot of good. And I'm betting that if we can begin to find that network and invest in that talent network, that 10 or 20 years from now, it will be building some of the most important things in the world.

46:37And I don't just mean companies, I mean cultural things, aesthetic things, workshops, things that will produce new forms of community, maybe even a model for a new institution. And the reason that I'm so struck by the story of the original Clooney is that it was a entirely new kind of institution in its day, even legally speaking, right? I mean, its original charter, the guy that gave all of the money renounced his right to have anything to do with the way that it operated. It formed a network of over 1 ,200 Cluniac monasteries. And I'm struck, my imagination is struck by, well, what does that look like today if we can have sort of networked workshops of people that are all sort of drawing inspiration and talking about ideas that are open to the religious sense?

47:23Tyler Cowen:The original Cluny was also a pioneer of accounting techniques. Is that correct? I know that a Franciscan invented double entry accounting. I know that, but he wasn't associated with Clooney. There were all kinds of innovations. I mean, architectural innovations, agricultural, winemaking innovations. It was the largest church in the world for 300 years. The most important institution in Europe, in my opinion. It was the center of innovation in Europe out of the liturgical renewal that it instituted and it welcomed people in. So monasteries, the Benedictine tradition has always been known for hospitality.

47:55So no matter who you are, if you're sick, if you're poor, if you're traveling, if you're a pilgrim, you could knock on the door and you would be let in and you could stay for a day or two or longer and then you would be sent on your way. And Clooney actually popularized the Camino de Santiago. They're the first ones that would send people on the Camino de Santiago. I could go on and on about all the things that Clooney did, but the people that came into contact with it, it was worldly in the sense that it interacted with politicians, with builders, with the Romanesque, the Masons in Italy. It was incredibly worldly in that it opened its door to all of those people and interacted with them and then somehow shaped them.

48:34And is there a lay version of that? I'm obviously not trying to build a monastery. I'm not a monk, but I'm inspired by the way that it existed in the world as a sign of something completely different.

48:44Tyler Cowen:Before the last two questions, just another plug for your book. The title is The One and the 99, Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion. Last two questions. First, I'm sure you've been following the case of Ben Sasse as of late. How do you think you will deal with your pending death? I hope I can deal with it as good as he has dealt with his. It's interesting because there's, you know, Brian Johnson is in the Live Forever campaign. He's speaking at a conference that I'm hosting this summer and directly following him as a Benedictine monk who part of the Benedictine tradition is literally meditating on your death every single day.

49:22And there's the momentum ori, the tradition of keeping a skull on your desk, which I do. I learned that when I was in seminary, and I have a little, it's not a macabre-looking school, it's actually from Mexico, so it's incredibly painted with all these bright colors. But it is on my desk, it's about this big. But meditating on it and actually going through it are two different things. And I suppose that my hope is, I draw a lot of inspiration from Ben Sasse, that, you know, in C.S. Lewis's words, you know, one should die before they die, die a series of small deaths to our ego. And I've certainly had to do that several times in my life, and I'm sure they won't be the last.

49:57I mean, I think that's really the key. I can't tell you how much I admire him. I can't remember anybody that has died in public since John Paul II, who really died a slow death in public over many years. Unfortunately, Ben Sasse would probably be much faster. And there's a Catholic tradition of actually praying for a good death. It's just St. Joseph, right? So I hope. Final question. What will you do next?

50:46experimenting with new forms. And I don't think it's unrelated to the kind of artistic project, but I feel a really strong desire to do that. I hope that Clooney is a place where I can do that out of. So I often think of, I am one artist in the colony that is Clooney, and maybe whatever art that I create, whether it's a novel, a book, or whether it's a gallery or some kind of experience or something like that, it will just be a manifestation of what I hope Clooney will help other people do. And I want to open a restaurant, but I probably won't do that for another 30 years until I can afford to lose a lot of money.

51:24Tyler Cowen:That's in the U.S. or in Italy? Probably in Italy. Luke Burgess, thank you very much. Thanks for having me, Tyler. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm at Tyler Cowen, and the show is at Cowen Convos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.