Second Thought

How Our Culture Became ‘Cult-Like’

Second Thought

Show Notes

According to Luke Burgis, our biggest social problem isn’t loneliness or polarization or the decline of trust in institutions. Our problem is that most of us don’t even really understand ourselves.

We dress dress alike, flock to the same restaurants, and chase the same goals not because we’re adjusting our behavior to fit in, but because the people around us have fundamentally transformed our inner desires and flattened our personalities

That’s the subject of Burgis’s new book, The One and the Ninety-Nine, which explores how to build a “solid self” in a world of mimetic desire, social contagion, and intoxicating group dynamics. In this episode, Suzy Weiss and Dan Ahdoot cover all of this with him, plus Knicks mania, Cacio e Pepe, voice notes, and the unwritten rules of “dude-on-dude” phone calls. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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