In this conversation, Luke Burgis reflects on the hidden emotional costs of entrepreneurial success, emphasizing the loneliness that accompanies high net‑worth milestones and the pervasive influence of mimetic desire. He distinguishes between jealousy (a healthy desire to emulate a role model) and envy (a destructive wish to prevent others from having what they possess), arguing that the latter fuels internal conflict within startups and leads to failed ventures. Burgis describes how entrepreneurs often seek expensive mastermind groups as safe spaces to discuss these taboo feelings. He also critiques the education system and early‑career advice that push students into mimetic career paths, such as chasing internships simply because peers do. The dialogue highlights two categories of desire mediators: distant role models and close‑proximity internal influencers (family, colleagues, fellow podcasters), noting that the latter are rarely acknowledged despite their strong impact. Throughout, Burgis offers mentorship advice to younger entrepreneurs to recognize and break the cycle of mimetic envy, encouraging forward‑looking focus rather than constant comparison.
Chapters
Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance.
There are vanishingly few happy entrepreneurs. Right? And I mean, it. It's taken me a while to get to that point. It's a lot easier when you're happy. But, I mean, I remember the first time I. I sat down and I go, I just raised a bunch of money and looked at. I go, holy shit. Like, my net worth just crossed $10 million. And you're like, wow, that's awesome. By the way, guys, you can't believe anything you see on the Internet. The Internet thinks I'm a billionaire, and that is so far from reality. But I'm remarkably comfortable compared to where I was 10 years ago, and I'm freaking grateful for that. But I sat there, I'm like, who am I going to tell? And the bottom line is, you're surrounded by people with mimetic desire. And there's another name. Maybe not for it directly, but it's mostly envy and greed. I'm not gonna go bragging about this. Right? Of course, here I am talking about on the show because, I don't know. I believe in full transparency, but at the time, I'm like, all right, who do I share this with? How do I do that? So there's a loneliness that comes with financial success. There's loneliness that comes with being at the top. And they didn't teach me any of that in business school at all. And that's the hard stuff. So what you find is entrepreneurs. They'll kind of band together, and we go to these stupidly expensive masterminds, just because if it's super expensive, it means that the other people in the room are probably at a similar level of success, and it might be a safe place to talk about stuff that no one in your family would understand, none of your friends from college would understand. So, yeah, that loneliness is built in, and no one ever says anything about it. What's your recommendation? I mean, you talk with freshmen in college all the time. You've been there as much as I have. How do you deal with that?
Yeah, you know, I think that envy is the. Is a taboo subject to talk about, and that's why you never hear anybody talk about the word. You know, Girard famously said the reason that everybody talks about sex today is because nobody wants to talk about their envy. You know, and I think there's probably a little bit of truth to that. Right? You know, these secret desires that we have to bury that are underground. I think there's a difference between jealousy and envy. And one of the ways That I think about it is like this, right? Jealousy could be a positive thing in the sense that Dave has something that I want. It's this good thing, this relationship. I should want that. That's an example of healthy mimetic desire. But the envy, sort of my definition of envy is not wanting somebody else to have something good that they have. So it's not about me just wanting to share in some good. It's about me not wanting somebody else to have something. That's one way. I think I. I draw a distinction between the two. So many entrepreneurs that I know spend so much time. And not just entrepreneurs, we just happen to be entrepreneurs. But I think this applies to anybody. I mean, I'm also. I have one foot in academia, so I'm at a university. And this is as bad inside the education system as it probably worse than it is among entrepreneurs. And the constant looking to what other people are doing or saying or wanting or achieving is just the fastest way to be miserable, for one thing, but also the fastest way to miss opportunities because we're just constantly looking to our right and our left rather than forward or up. And it's destroyed more companies than I know. I mean, people think like, a lot of companies don't make it because of competition from the outside. I think that I literally know more companies that have failed due to internal collapse because there was just internal problems that people couldn't solve. Co founders couldn't get along. There was jealousy. And that is something that I really encourage the handful of younger entrepreneurs that I mentor and my students to understand. You know what, you know, they'll come to me, for instance, their, you know, freshman year with high, high, high anxiety about what internship they're going to have that summer. And I'm just like, so where did you get the idea that you need an internship?
You know, that was the mimetic desire classical example. Like, I know I won it because I was told I had to, right?
Yeah. And, you know, my heart kind of goes out to him. Right. And it's like, you know, and I try to say, you know, if you. If you continue to look at what everybody else is telling you that you should be doing this summer, you're. There's really no end to that game. You'll be doing it when you're 40. You're just going to find more ingenious ways to play the same game. So you're going to have to learn right now. It's never too early to learn how to not play that game. And in recognize the see because there's two different kinds of models. And Gerard talks about this. There are the kinds that are far away from us that sort of, like, we typically refer to them as role models. They're kind of in a different sphere. We don't really. They're not close to us. We don't come into contact with them. But then there are the people influencing our desires that are very close to us. They could be in our family, they could be our. In our company. You know, they could be, you know, whatever, fellow podcasters or something. Right. And we're just. We're usually less likely to acknowledge the second kind, which, you know, Gerard calls internal mediators of desire, because they're inside of our world, and we don't like to acknowledge the internal influence that they have on us.
