Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Luke Burgis left Wall Street after two years, founded a few successful companies in his twenties, then walked away to spend three years in a Roman seminary on the path to the priesthood. He now runs the Cluny Institute and teaches at Catholic University. His book Wanting made René Girard legible to a general audience; the new one, The One and the Ninety-Nine, takes mimetic theory into the dynamics of self and crowd in an age of social contagion.

He joined Tyler to discuss whether the age of pessimism is ending, why the Anglo world in particular seems so unhappy, whether Dostoevsky or Thomas Mann better diagnoses modernity, the kind of reader his own book would ruin, why he thinks AI will make social contagion weaker, what put him off consulting with Anthropic on Claude’s constitution, what effective altruism misses, why men and women are drifting apart, what he’d fund in every American city, the case for reintroducing friction, whether a Gnostic reading of the lost sheep explains our moment, what Rod Dreher gets right about withdrawal, why Genoa is Italy’s most underrated city, what confession times reveal about a church, why Italians seem tired of their Catholicism, why he didn’t become a priest, where he differs from Ross Douthat, why exorcists appear to be on the rise, the sudden mimetic antisemitism on the right, the book his 23-year-old self would have hated, what he secretly admires about Silicon Valley, why Michigan never left him, what the original Cluny can teach a modern talent network, how he hopes to face his own death, what he’ll do next, and more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: I’m not saying you’ll ever do it, but what does your escape fantasy look like? One of mine is I’ll go live in a third-tier city in Mexico. I’m not going to do it, but sometimes I think about it. Cost of living would be very low. The food would be amazing. I could improve my Spanish.

BURGIS: It is moving to Genoa with my family, making my US income, living in Italy. I love Italy. I love the food. I love the people. I love the culture. I feel lighter while I’m there. I laugh more. We eat dinner later. I love everything about it. It would probably be living in Italy for the most part, or at least making that my home base, brushing up on my Italian, working less.

COWEN: Why Genoa? It’s a wonderful city. It’s still medieval, right, in a funny way?

BURGIS: It’s medieval. I think it’s the most underrated city in Italy.

COWEN: In Italy, I mean, yes. I agree. Yes.

BURGIS: I think it’s the most underrated city. You agree.

COWEN: I took my wife there. She was stunned. “How come no one goes to Genoa?” She was telling me.

BURGIS: It’s close to Cinque Terre. It’s this city that’s elevated. It has a fascinating history. It was still a very functional port city. It was really the most important city in Italy, arguably the world, during when Spain was a great power. It’s very cosmopolitan. It reminds me of Marseille a little bit. It’s vertical, breathtaking views. The people there, they’re not very touristy. The Italians there seem indifferent to you as a tourist.

It just feels very, very homey. It’s so close to a lot of other great things in Italy. You can get to Torino relatively easily. That whole area up there, Bra, where the Slow Food movement originated, you’re just in striking distance from everything. Nobody I know that goes to Italy goes to Genoa. I plead with them. I’m like, “Please, just go to Genoa.”

COWEN: I am the exception. 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. I sometimes think of Northern Italy as a place where there were fewer 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? Paris is a bit like this also. There’s a certain notion of what kind of shoes an Italian man should wear. They wear them, and they’re amazing, and actually more affordable than here. There’s a sameness to some things.

Recommended, and do note Luke’s new book The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in an Age of Social Contagion.

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