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

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.

Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.

Recorded April 30th, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:05:08 - On overapplying mimetic theory

00:06:35 - On AI and social contagion

00:07:53 - On declining Anthropic's invitation

00:09:36 - On the widening gap between men and women

00:12:25 - On anti-mimetic postures, jazz, and porn

00:16:46 - On Genoa, Naples, and societal escape fantasies

00:18:31 - On Italian Catholicism

00:26:59 - On not becoming a priest

00:29:13 - On beauty, enchantment, and the Gnostic sheep

00:40:22 - On what Wall Street taught him

00:43:50 - On Michigan

00:45:12 - On the Cluny Institute

00:48:41 - On dealing with death and what else is next

00:51:21 - Outro

Image credit: Kirth Bobb