← The Art of Manliness
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- [00:00]
Brett McKay
One of the things I've learned after running AOM for nearly two decades is that the fun part is creating, writing articles, recording podcasts, designing products, things like that. The less fun part is all the operational stuff that comes with selling those products online. And that's one reason we've used Shopify for the AOM Store. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US. It handles all the stuff you don't want to spend your day worrying about. Inventory, payments, analytics, shipping, returns, all all in one place. What I like is that it scales with you. Whether you're selling your first product or managing an established store, Shopify gives you the tools to keep things running smoothly. They've even built in AI tools that can help with product descriptions, page headlines and product photography. Plus, as a customer, you've probably seen that Purple Shop pay button. There's a reason why it's everywhere. It makes checkout incredibly easy, which means fewer abandoned carts and more completed sales. It's time to turn those what ifs into reality with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.commanliness that's shopify.commanliness that'S
- [01:01]
Sponsor Announcer
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- [01:25]
Brett McKay
Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AOM podcast which since 2008 has featured conversations with the world's best authors, thinkers and leaders that glean their edifying life improving insights without the fluff and filler. The A podcast is just one part of the McKay mission to help individuals practice timeless virtues through thought, word and deed. Also, be sure to explore our articles and artofmanlies.com Read the deeper dives we do in our substack newsletter@dyingbreed.net and turn our content into real world action by joining the Strenuous Life program@strenuouslife.com now on to the show.
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Brad
We all want two things that can seem at odds with each other to
- [02:08]
Brett McKay
be our own person and to belong. We want to stand apart from the crowd, but we also want to be connected to it. When that balance gets out of whack, we either lose ourselves in tribalism or drift into isolation My guest today says many of the problems in modern life stem from our inability to hold these
- [02:23]
Brad
two impulses in tension.
- [02:24]
Brett McKay
His name is Luke Burgess and he's the Author of the One and the 99 Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion. Today on the show, Luke explains how becoming a true individual can give you
- [02:34]
Brad
the strength to be part of a community.
- [02:35]
Brett McKay
We discuss the difference between a solid
- [02:37]
Brad
self and a pseudo self, and what
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Brett McKay
role families and rites of passage can
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Brad
play in moving us toward one or
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Brett McKay
the other, why modern politics feels like
- [02:43]
Brad
a dysfunctional family, the dangers of performative religion, and much more.
- [02:47]
Brett McKay
After the show's over, check out our show notes @awim is solidself.
- [03:01]
Brad
All right, Luke Burgess, welcome back to the show.
- [03:03]
Luke Burgess
Hey Brad, good to be with you again, man.
- [03:05]
Brad
So you got a new book out called the 1 in the 99 Forging identity in the Age of Social Contagion. And this book is about how to have a strong sense of self while still being deeply rooted or connected in groups. Problem is there's a tension between those two things. And it seems like your book is trying to address the problems that that tension is causing in society and with individuals. What were you seeing in the broader culture that gave you this hunch that, you know, this tension between self and group might be causing some of the problems we're having?
- [03:45]
Luke Burgess
I noticed what felt like people in general, including some people that I know very well, getting both more selfish and more tribal at the same time, which is sounds paradoxical, but there seemed to be some kind of schizophrenic thing going on between what I would call individualism and collectivism. Either a weird mesh between them or a wild swing back and forth between the two. I had people that I knew would just go off grid and renounce society altogether. And then other people would just become really radicalized and extreme in ways that were pretty awful alarming to me. I remember reading Tocqueville at the time in Democracy in America, and he said the science of association is the mother science and everything flows from that. And I started wondering, man, is there something going on in America, at least with our ability to associate well and to form bonds with groups without getting completely lost inside of them or without becoming a loner and becoming completely alone. Like we hear about the loneliness problem all the time, but at the same time you have people that have really clung to various groups identities, whether it's online Personas or political identities or whatever. And in what seemed to me to be a cult like way, you know, One of the books that was really formative for me in writing this one was Eric Hoffer, who wrote the True Believer. And he said, you know, people often join mass movements because they're fleeing an unwanted self. And that's why I sort of focused on the self in this book. Like, is there something going on with the way that we understand our own identity ourself that is causing something to be a little wonky in the way that we relate to various groups? And there were just a lot of things that I saw along the way. You know, I would notice that a lot of the conferences and events that I would get invites to, like, feature the same people. And there was, like, litmus tests for who could go. There's a lot of, like, homogeneity there. I noticed there's, like, a lot of emotional cutoff going on. There's children that are, like, cutting off their parents and never talking to them again. At an institutional level, there seems to be decay. People don't seem to exist inside institutions anymore in a serious way. They just kind of use them and go through the motions. So there's something going on there. And I don't write books because I have the answers. I set out writing a book because I want to explore something that I think I put my finger on and try to understand that a little bit better.
- [06:12]
Brad
So your title of the book, the 1 in the 99, this is taken from Jesus's Parable of the Lost Sheep. You're looking at this parable through a different lens, though. How is the way you're looking at it for this book different from the way we talk about it in Sunday school?
- [06:28]
Luke Burgess
Well, for those that don't know the parable, it's in two of the four gospels in the Bible. The Gospel of Luke, of course, is my favorite. And, you know, Jesus tells the parable of a shepherd who has a hundred sheep. One of the sheep is lost. And he asked the question, you know, which one of you having a hundred sheep and losing one, would not go in search of the one and find it and then bring it back to the flock? And it's. You know, the traditional interpretation is that the lost sheep is, you know, the lone sinner, and that God always goes after the sinner. You know, the love of God, searching for what is lost. And I understand the theological meaning, but it always left me kind of wanting on a practical level. You know, like, it's kind of hard to apply that parable to life and community. So I started to wonder if it had something important to say, just about human relationships and the way that we're in relationship to various groups. And then I read, I guess, the nerd that I am, I was doing kind of a research project, and I was reading the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. The Gnostic Gospels are gospels that is apocryphal, did not make it into the canon of the church, but always for some reason. And in this one, I thought it was really interesting because it was, like, very modern. In that particular Gospel, when Jesus finds the lost sheep, the lost sheep is not a sinner. It's not even lost. He pats the sheep on the head and basically praises it for not being like anybody else and says, oh, you know, you're smarter than all of these other sheep. You're the only one that understands what I'm really saying and singles the sheep out as the special one because he's smarter, right? He's got the highest iq. And I was like, man, this is really indicative of the time that we live in where, like, the one is glorified. Certainly in Silicon Valley and in other places, everybody just, like, wants to be different. And I was like, that's the complete opposite, actually, of the. Of the version of the parable that made it into the canonical gospels. So I was like, there's. There is something here in this parable that I want to explore from, like, a sociological level. I want to get inside the head of the lost sheep and kind of step back from the traditional interpretations that I've heard and ask basic questions like, you know, why did the sheep leave? What if we don't assume that it was lost, Maybe it left intentionally? What happened to it while it wandered? It seems like that's the definition of a rite of passage, a separation from a group and a liminal state and then a reintegration with the group. Did it come back, change? You know, we don't hear any of that. You know, we don't hear about a different sheep coming back. But certainly when we go on journeys, when we are separated, things happen to us. And usually we come back different from when we left, when we travel. And that is the lens through which I wanted to write the book. I mean, I am a Christian, but I stepped back from everything that I knew about it. And I just said, maybe just on a human level, this has something really important to say to us today.
- [09:15]
Brad
I'm curious. I haven't read the book of Thomas, but in that version of the parable, does the sheep that wanders off because, you know, he's different, does he come Back to the group.
- [09:24]
Luke Burgess
No, he's, you know, in the gnostic tradition, he kind of ascends to another, like, level of the hierarchy, which allows him special access to the teachings of Jesus, and he's closer to him, and he never really fully comes back, which is also really, really interesting. It's kind of a status thing.
- [09:42]
Brad
That's interesting. It's very Nietzschean almost.
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Luke Burgess
Yeah.
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Brett McKay
So, I mean, I think these two
- [09:46]
Brad
parables, like the different interpretations, like the one in the canonical gospels, it's about the group. You know, we want to be part of the group, but in this Thomas version is like the individualistic version. And I think what your book is trying to do, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, is kind of synthesize, like, let's. Let's see how we can do both in a way that feels affirming and good.
- [10:06]
Luke Burgess
Absolutely. The premise is, you know, human beings have two fundamental drives that exist simultaneously, and they're both good. And one of them is. Is the drive to. To be known as individuals. It's the drive to differentiate ourselves. Nobody that I know really likes to just be treated as a number, as part of a crowd or a group. It's dehumanizing. Right. We want to be known as Brett and Luke and known for our distinctive distinctiveness. Right. And gifts and talents. And the other drive that we have is to be in communion with others and to seek community. I mean, we've been tribal for all of recorded history for a reason. You know, it provides safety. It provides camaraderie and solidarity. And the point is, those two drives should exist in harmony. And actually, it's our inability to sit in the tension between those two simultaneous drives and desires that is actually what's causing the problem. Because we go to one extreme or the other, because we think that when we experience a tension between the two things when we're part of a group, for instance, and we feel like they're rubbing us the wrong way, or maybe we're a little out of step with the way that the group is moving. We think that something is wrong either with us or the group. And in fact, it probably means that it's incredibly healthy way to be in communion with the. With the group, if you can find a way to work through that. So the point is actually that it's the fleeing from the tension, or what Hoffer called, like the unwanted self because we don't want to lean into that. That is actually what's causing the problems, is the inability to deal with that itself.
- [11:38]
Brad
Well, let's talk about these ideas in detail. Let's talk about this idea of the individual. Use the word self to describe the individual. There are many definitions of what a self is. When you're talking about a self, what do you mean by that?
- [11:53]
Luke Burgess
The closest thing to what I mean by the self is what people used to call the soul A long time ago in the Middle Ages it was commonly used, which is, you know, the deepest identity, this incommunicable selfhood of the human person that was in relationship to the world with God. If you're a believer that is distinct and yet is part of the world, the one and the many. This is one of the classical problems of philosophy. You know, why is there one thing and many things that have some relationship between the two? It's fundamentally what the book is about. And then, you know, the word self began to be popularized around the time of the birth of the novel, when we would read stories about other people who were protagonists and we would imagine ourselves as protagonists and the self became used. And today we often use the word identity. And identity, I think, is the thinnest of all of them. You know, we can apply labels online. I think identity lacks the depth of either of the. The previous two. And which is funny because my book is called Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion. Because I think, you know, my publisher probably wouldn't have liked me to put the word soul in the title of a book. That's fundamentally what I mean by self. And in the book I draw pretty heavily on a thinker named Murray Bowen, who also had a more functional, developmental understanding of the self, where, you know, our self understanding of ourselves as an individual is formed through a social process over time where we begin to distinguish our ideas, our beliefs, our emotions from those of the people around us. Or we don't, or we don't learn that and we become what he refers to as more of a pseudo self. And that functional understanding of the self that I draw on from Bowen, I think is complementary with the kind of deeper understanding of the soul, which is more of an ontological understanding. So there's both this kind of functional process oriented understanding of how we develop more of an understanding of who we are and how we're distinct and separate from other people, paired with more of the ontological understanding, which doesn't necessarily rely on anything, right. So which gives people their dignity even if they don't remember who they are. Like my dad, who has Alzheimer's. So I think the two understandings of the self in my Mind have to go hand in hand.
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Brad
Yeah.
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Brett McKay
With that point about how identity is sort of the idea of the self. Today, the thing about identity, like you said, it's very thin because oftentimes when we shape ourself around an identity, going to Aristotle, Aristotle would say a lot of what we think about identity, those are accidental traits of us. So it's like our sex, our race, our nationality, like we just happen to be male, living in the United States or whatever. But it doesn't really get to the
- [14:39]
Brad
core of what makes you you.
- [14:41]
Luke Burgess
Exactly. Yeah. I mean, it's funny. I mean, the book opens giveaway the prologue. I was driving in Ireland. I was driving behind an ambulance that had my dad in it going to the hospital. And I noticed all of these sheep in the pastures that had basically like, neon symbols, like squares, circles, numbers spray painted on their fur. And I'd never seen anything like that before in my life. I only learned later that that was to, you know, the different owners, sheep would have them graze in the pasture together, and that the symbols that were spray painted on them in this psychedelic way were to identify whose was whose. And that was actually the origin of this book. And I thought to myself, you know, what do I have invisibly spray painted on me? What kinds of, like, identity markers have people put on me and labeled me something, you know, due to things I say online or what they've heard about me or whatever? And those are all accidental and very, very few of the people that actually even know me personally. So there's kind of an element of personalism I think, that I'm trying to get at throughout the entire book, because as you said, I mean, the accidents can come and go and, like, what is enduring underneath, like, what is the substance and essence of a person, which is what I'm concerned about.
- [15:58]
Brad
You mentioned this idea of a pseudo self. Tell us more about that.
- [16:02]
Luke Burgess
You know, Bowen said that the pseudo self is the level of the self, kind of a thinner surface level of ourself that is constantly up for negotiation in real time in the different environments that we find ourselves in. And that can be. It's. First of all, it's exhausting to have to negotiate a version of yourself all the time when you're in different environments. You know, you go to work and you feel like you have to be one person, and you can sort of very easily be talked into something that you might be a little uncomfortable with to kind of just go along. And he differentiates that from a deeper level of the self, which he refers to as the solid self, which is the. Not the version of ourself, but the level of ourself which is not up for the real time negotiations. The level of self where we act with intentionality, we reflect. It doesn't mean that it doesn't change, but it means that the change is intentional. We actually understand where our beliefs come from rather than adopting them through kind of a process of contagion. So he would. He would go so far as to say that the pseudo self is a borrowed self. It's the easy self, not the self that we actually have to work hard to develop through things like courage, through things like being uncomfortable by saying something that we believe is true, which could disrupt the emotional equilibrium of our workplace or even our family. And, like, this is very common, you know. Bowen was a family system psychologist, so all of his work was grounded in the family. And it's just very common in families to have a family unit where there's a kind of like, emotional togetherness that nobody wants to disrupt at all. Right. Because it causes anxiety. And he says it's often where we learn to be a pseudo self is when we're part of a family or we grow up in a family where people are kind of fused emotionally into one another and people have not learned to separate their emotions and beliefs and ideas from that of the other members of the family. And if we don't learn how to differentiate ourselves and develop a solid self, as he says in the family, we'll take the pseudo self out with us into the world.
- [18:12]
Brad
Yeah, I love Bowen Family Systems Theory. We did a whole podcast about it a while back ago. It was episode number 1010 for those who want to check it out. But, yeah, that idea of our family of origin can develop either a solid self or a pseudo self, but often a pseudo pseudo self. And we use that pseudo self just to manage the tension within a family. I think an example that I like of that is, let's say dad is really grumpy all the time. And so the kids pick up on like, well, I gotta act this certain way or say these certain things, so I don't upset dad even more. Everyone's kind of walking on eggshells to manage dad's anger. And that's like, pseudo self because it's not what you want to do, and it's making things worse. If you're a solid self, you would be able to still be connected to dad, but be able to tell them, you know, hey, this is a problem, or, dad, I still need this. You wouldn't hold back from your needs because dad's upset, essentially.
- [19:09]
Luke Burgess
Exactly. And I mean, and the pseudo self provides temporary relief because if dad's grumpy, you say the thing or you do what you got to do and you get through the day, and it's temporarily relieving, but long term damaging. And one of the bad ways to sort of deal with anxiety in the family system is cut off because emotional cutoff is easy. You know, go lock yourself in your room or don't talk to people. It's very easy to do that and very easy to feel like a solid self when you do that or, you know, to feel mature. But that's actually, like, not the goal. The goal of the solid self is to be able to be connected to other people without losing yourself or fusing yourself into a system. I mean, a healthy marriage should be made up of two solid selves, not two people that have just sort of become fused into one another and lose their sort of individuality. That's not the goal. So the goal is actually to be in communion. And that's the point of the book. It's like actually how to be in communion with other people. It's why it's called the 1 and the 99. Not the 1 or the 99.
- [20:13]
Brad
Yeah. And you can apply this idea of being a self but still connected to things outside the family, you know, just in how we interact with each other in terms of our politics. You know, it's very tribal these days. People are, you know, they decide who their friends are based on politics. So even if you had this friend that you were good friends with in high school, you have all these memories and they take a political position or they support a party or a candidate that you don't like. It's like instant cutoff. And in Bowen, family systems theory is like, that's not healthy. You're letting your pseudo self dictate the terms of this relationship.
- [20:48]
Luke Burgess
Yeah, I've seen more cutoff for reasons of ideology, at least in my lifetime. And Bowen would say that that kind of behavior is symptomatic of somebody who is operating at the level of the pseudo self. Absolutely. Yeah.
- [21:03]
Brett McKay
Well, let's talk about how do we
- [21:04]
Brad
develop this sense of solid self? What do we do to. To do that? Because I think for the most part, our sense of self, we develop it through osmosis. We just kind of. Well, you know, here's what we do in my family, and then I pick up this stuff on the Internet. Here's how I interact at work. We really don't think about you kind of resting control of developing our sense of self. Using agency to develop ourself. So how do we do it?
- [21:29]
Luke Burgess
I mean, the first thing is just to become aware that this dynamic exists. That we're very susceptible to kind of emotional fusion. Especially in our families or in our closest relationships. That this emotional fusion happens all the time. And if you look closely, you'll probably see it. It's kind of like mimesis or mimetic desire. You know, like, once you're just aware that this happens, you can usually see it. And the idea is just to gain some level of. Kind of, like objectivity about what's happening. Just be able to name things coolly. Without getting emotionally involved right away. To be able to step back and see when we feel kind of that pull. So just, I think, creating some, I would say, emotional and spiritual distance. From the systems that we are most in. And sometimes, you know, that takes. Sometimes it takes trauma to do that. But I mean, hopefully that's not what it takes. So that's one of the reasons why I'm writing, writing about it, just to bring it to conscious awareness. There's two very specific things that I think are really, really important that I've written pretty extensively about. The first one is learning to understand why things are important to you. And responding to what has value in and of itself. As opposed to what has value because it's socially valuable. Or the things that have value because they're subjectively satisfying. So these things that have value in themselves kind of pull us out of the gravitational pull of our own needs and pleasures towards things that deserve a response from us. And that is, you know, both in the aesthetic plane. You know, if somebody sort of walked into, I don't know, beautiful, beautiful church in Europe, I don't know, Sagrada Familia. And they were not able to feel any kind of response to it whatsoever. And they just turned around and walked out. You know, we would think, like, there's something maybe off with that. Like maybe they've lost the ability to be able to appreciate what is actually here. This thing is somehow worthy of a response in and of itself. And in the moral sphere, there are things that are worthy of admiration. You know, heroic sacrifices that people have made. Because the thing was good in and of itself. And not because they got anything out of it. So learning that, and this is called value response. Being able to respond to things because they are good in and of themselves. Is basically the way that we transcend ourself and interact with the world. And paradoxically, it's how we develop more of a sense of self because we get out of ourselves and respond to what's real in the world.
- [23:57]
Brad
This idea of this value response. CS Lewis talks about this in Abolition of Man. Like, that's the whole premise of that book. He started off arguing against this idea that beauty is subjective. And he's saying, no, there's actually, you know, this higher order. He calls it the dao, that it exists out there in objective reality, and we respond to that. So when we see a beautiful work of art or we see a beautiful part of nature, like, something in us stirs. And he says, well, there's a reason why it stirs you, because, like, that is good and you have to train yourself. I think he says that's what education is all about, is like training the soul so that you respond to the good, the beautiful, the true.
- [24:40]
Luke Burgess
I think training is a great word because that ability, like a muscle, can atrophy. So that in front of something that is true or good or beautiful, we don't feel moved, right? So there's even an effective dimension to this. We don't feel anything. Because if we don't train it and if we're only responding to things that are subjectively satisfying all the time, we can even lose the ability to respond appropriately to reality, to be mortified and to be in awe and wonder. Like, right. To be able to respond to bad things appropriately and good things. Right. It works both ways. The other really important sort of thing about developing a solid self is that we need rites of passage to do it. And, you know, we live in a society where many of them have disappeared. I think they've migrated online. And digital rites of passage are maybe a little bit thinner. A rite of passage, by definition, is a process of differentiation for a person. You know, they separate in some way. They go through a liminal phase where they are changed or transformed, and then they ideally reintegrate in some way with another group of people. And it's in that middle stage that the differentiation, or what, you know, I and Bowen are referring to as a solid self actually happen. So there are some things that we need to do alone in order for certain types of growth to actually occur.
- [25:55]
Brett McKay
We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors. It's summertime, so I'm firing up the
- [26:00]
Brad
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- [26:01]
Brett McKay
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Brad
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Brett McKay
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- [28:31]
Brad
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Brett McKay
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Brad
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Brett McKay
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Brad
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Brett McKay
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Brad
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Brett McKay
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Brad
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Brett McKay
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Brad
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Brett McKay
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Brad
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- [30:40]
Brett McKay
So it's I N D E dashed.com podcast terms and conditions apply. Need the right hire fast. This is a job for Indeed.
- [30:50]
Brad
Sponsored jobs. And now back to the show. Yeah, I want to. Let's flesh out some of this more in detail. This idea of training, we'll say training the soul so you have appropriate value responses to things that are good and also to things that are bad. I think, man, that's something I've noticed online. We're like training ourselves to respond to bad things in a not appropriate way. I mean, if you go on. I got off X because like what ended up happening a couple years ago, my feed was just filled with just. I mean, it was basically like snuff films, essentially people getting shot or just fights, really brutal fights. And I'm like, this is not good. I'm cankering my soul looking at this stuff. You have the section about education and like really taking your education seriously and not in terms of how we typically think of education, where you go to school and you learn math, but it's education in a deeper sense. And you use one of my favorite writers as an example of creating an education for a solid self.
- [31:50]
Brett McKay
It's Louis Lamour.
- [31:52]
Brad
What can we learn from Louis Lamour about an education for a solid self?
- [31:57]
Luke Burgess
Yeah, so Louis, many of your listeners may know him, he dropped out of traditional school at 15, which in his day was not that radical. And he set sail for Singapore. He traveled the world, he devoured books. And he kind of embodied an older vision of education that the Greeks had paideia, which is the formation of the whole person. This is like the anti credentialing version of education. And you know, more believed that education should provide the tools for a widening and deepening of life, to live with better awareness, be able to live with awareness. And when I hear him, read him say that, I'm like, he's basically kind of talking about gaining the ability for appropriate value response, like training ourselves to be able to see what is worthy of our attention in the first place. And that to me is like really the number one goal of education, especially today. Like we have a limited amount of time on this earth. Maybe Brian Johnson would disagree with that. But I think my time is limited and I have a very finite amount of things that I can pay attention to. I cannot care about everything. And one of the goals of education is to form us, to be able to have the perception to know what is worthy of our time and attention. And I think he really embodied that, that element of formation.
- [33:16]
Brad
Yeah. I'd encourage people to read his book, Education of a Wandering man, if they haven't already. It's a quick read, but it's incredibly inspiring. And you can see how he approached his self development and his education. And what's interesting, like, he carried that with him through the rest of his life. You know, he'd read widely, he would read the great books, but he'd also read just, you know, random histories of New Mexico that were written by obscure authors. And I had this email conversation with Louis Lamour son, Beau Lamour. I was asking him about Louis schedule, and he actually sent me scans of Louisiana Weekly to do lists, and they're really interesting. I'm going to do an article about it, you know, later on on the Art of Manliness.
- [33:53]
Brett McKay
But it was a. It was. You could see this guy, like, he
- [33:55]
Brad
still had this thirst for knowledge and developing himself, even in his, his 60s and his 70s. Like this one I'm looking at right now. On his to do list was number 27 for the week review, Self Defense, French, Spanish, Chinese.
- [34:12]
Brett McKay
And it was just like, I loved
- [34:13]
Brad
how he included reviewing Self Defense and
- [34:16]
Brett McKay
learning French, Spanish, Chinese on the same plane.
- [34:19]
Luke Burgess
That's awesome. I did not know that you were a fan. Here I am thinking I discovered this unknown thinker, and little did I know that the art of manliness had already covered.
- [34:28]
Brad
Louis Lamour embodies the art of manliness.
- [34:31]
Luke Burgess
Yes.
- [34:31]
Brad
And in this idea of education, you talk about these two stances we can take towards it. One is the vice of curiositas, and the other is the virtue of studiositas. What is the difference between the two?
- [34:42]
Luke Burgess
Basically, the disordered desire for knowledge without a concern for where it's leading or the value that it has in itself. It's like knowledge as possession. As if, you know, the more we know, like, the better we are. Like, if I can regurgitate all of the insights that I heard on podcasts for the last month, and I'm somehow a more enlightened being or something like that. And you know, the person that coined the word curiositas, he may have not coined it, but at least he used it in this sense, was Augustine, or Augustine of Hippo, who, you know, was basically writing about his thirst for knowledge in his former way of life. He was gnostic and he sort of equated, you know, knowing things. It gave him a sense of pride, actually. And he said you know, where was it actually leading me? So a great example of curiositas is like something that you don't need to know and in fact like knowing it could, could be harmful to you. So you know, seeing a car accident or a body on the side of the road, this is actually the example that Augustine himself uses. You crane your neck to try to find out what's going on. This doesn't actually affect your life at all. I mean it's kind of a disordered curiosity to just know things. Kind of a morbid novel thing that we just want to know. Like people can get into the occult for all kinds of reasons having to do with curiositas. The difference is studiositas, something that Aquinas talked about. And this is like the ordered desire for knowledge, like it's knowledge that we desire because it is connected in somehow to the ends of life, the true, the good and the beautiful, the development of our vocation, of our, you know, our relationships, our marriage, relationship with God, or even just on a practical level, a PhD student who's studying a cure for some disease, Studiositas would be the things that are leading him to that end. And curiositas would be kind of the unhealthy things like scrolling his Twitter feed at 2am that are keeping him from actually moving down that path. And we live in a world obviously where social media, curiositas is like one of the fundamental diseases of our age. It's just easier than it's ever been.
- [36:47]
Brad
Yeah. One of the rubrics I use on whether I should like spend time with something is. And it's, it's kind of pragmatic, but I think it's, it gets this bigger idea. Sort of an overarching philosophy for myself is like, how will this improve my life on a Tuesday afternoon? So it's those moments just like everyday life. Like how is this going to help me make better decisions as a husband, as a father? How will this enrich my life when I'm stuck in traffic, you know, picking up the kids, will spending time on Twitter, will this help me navigate life on those Monday and Tuesday afternoons? And if I'm honest with myself, most of the stuff you see on social media, it doesn't do that. But again, that sounds pragmatic. But when I'm thinking about what improves my life on a Tuesday, it's not just practical self developmental stuff or decision making stuff, but includes, you know, beauty, something that's just good and edifying. Those things also allow me to exist day to day in A better way, too, in a way. You know, most of that stuff online doesn't. Yeah.
- [37:52]
Luke Burgess
I mean, if you asked me right now, and unfortunately, I'm still on X and Twitter, like, what's something that you learned, Luke, over the last week that has actually improved your life? I couldn't name anything, you know. You know, the last thing I learned about was, like, what Alexander Wang is up to at Meta, developing a new AI model. And it's like, how much can I actually, first of all, I can't even keep up with what's going on with AI, and it doesn't actually improve my life whatsoever to know about the drama at Meta over the last year.
- [38:18]
Brad
So I think the idea there with education is take control of it. Like, exercise your agency, and you can decide what stuff comes into you and doesn't come into you. I want to talk more about this
- [38:29]
Brett McKay
idea of rite of passage, because we've
- [38:31]
Brad
talked a lot about that on aom. We used to have built in rites of passage in our culture. They seem to go away, and you talk about how they've kind of morphed to something online.
- [38:42]
Brett McKay
What would a rite of passage look
- [38:44]
Brad
like in the 21st century? Because I had a lot of letters from guys who are like, I want
- [38:48]
Brett McKay
to do a rite of passage.
- [38:49]
Brad
Never had that. Or, I want to do this for my son. I can't give that to him. We've had other podcast guests talk about rites of passage. When you're thinking about rites of passage, what does that look like?
- [38:59]
Luke Burgess
You know, it's tough. I think a lot rites of passage develop organically, and it can be difficult or maybe even a little bit dangerous to try to engineer them. You know, typical ones would look like a hunter for young boys, like their first kill of an animal or kind of like the unsupervised summer, you know, so. Which I had growing up, you know, and, like. So part of it, I guess, as a parent, and I'm the parent of two, Two daughters under the age of three right now is, you know, does involve a kind of letting go and kind of that being in that scary space where you kind of trust your children to go off and have adventures that can be kind of dangerous. And it's how they learn and how they grow, I guess, on an individual level. I've hiked the Camino de Santiago. I think it's a pretty. Pretty awesome one because, you know, it's embodied. It's. It's physical. You meet people along the way. I think it's like the definition of a Great rite of passage. Now, I realize not Everybody can take 35 days off of work to do that, which is how long it takes to hike all the way across Spain on foot. And it shouldn't also be like the only one, you know, that's. That's probably one of the more commonly known ones because there was a movie made about it. But what can we do in our normal rhythms of our life to have these rites of passage? I mean, honestly, I think rites of passage are also connected with ritual. Like if you have a day of the week, the Sabbath, whatever that means to you, those can also be a type of it just in the weekly rhythm of life, because it involves kind of like disconnecting, like separating from the normal workflow. And like, as we lose little things like that, I think we lose the ability to form the solid selves, which often happens in the moments where we're able to have some separation and some distance. So I think that there's the big ones, there's kind of the big life changing ones where we set out on journey, and then there's the ones that we can try to integrate more into our weekly, monthly and yearly rituals.
- [40:54]
Brad
One of the interesting things I've noticed about the way people in the 21st century approach rites of passage, they always talk about it in a very individual way.
- [41:02]
Brett McKay
You know, they talk about the journey
- [41:03]
Brad
part, the separation, being in a liminal state. But they don't talk as much about the fact that you're separating yourself from the community for a little bit so that eventually you can reintegrate into the community as a new self and the community recognizes you as this new self. And I think a lot of people,
- [41:21]
Brett McKay
they're hyper individualistic and they think, well,
- [41:23]
Brad
I can just have this like, individual thing. I can just do this thing on my own.
- [41:27]
Brett McKay
And you can have transformative experiences doing
- [41:29]
Brad
something on your own.
- [41:30]
Sponsor Announcer
But.
- [41:31]
Brett McKay
But what makes a rite of passage
- [41:33]
Brad
more powerful is when you don't just feel different, but you have a community recognize, yeah, you're different now, you're a
- [41:39]
Brett McKay
different person, you've got new status.
- [41:41]
Brad
And we recognize that.
- [41:42]
Brett McKay
It's like joining the military.
- [41:44]
Brad
You know, you get your head shaved, you get new clothes, go through the crucible experience at boot camp, and then
- [41:50]
Brett McKay
even on a national level, even regular
- [41:52]
Brad
citizens recognize you've got a different status.
- [41:56]
Brett McKay
And that's hard to duplicate on the more personal level. But I think if you're looking to
- [42:00]
Brad
find a more solid self, then like,
- [42:03]
Brett McKay
paradoxically, you need other people to recognize
- [42:06]
Brad
your rite of passage, your transformation at least you. You need your family to recognize it. Or better is multiple families, but even better is a whole community. And that's hard to get these days.
- [42:16]
Luke Burgess
Absolutely. I mean, a rite of passage is kind of defined with and by a community. And, you know, I noticed there's some new company called Sky Cave Retreats that basically does darkness retreats for people, and many of them are teens. Or you basically go into a cave or you put on a mask and you're in total darkness for anywhere between 12 and I don't know what the longest is, but then you come out of it and they literally market it as a rite of passage. But what's missing at the end and people kind of take off the mask is like, you know, what is the relationship to like other groups and communities? Right. So it's. Some of them do seem relatively individualistic. And, you know, I. I entered seminary formation when I was in my late 20s and that sometimes I think about it, I was like, that was a massive rite of passage in my life to enter seminary and leave behind the life that I knew. But it was a rite of passage because it was something that I did like with a community. Right. It was like a well defined thing that I did. I didn't invent it. I don't think a rite of passage is something that I can just sort of like invent and call it a rite of passage. It needs to be something that I sort of co discern and do with other people, even if there are aspects of it that I do alone. It's a relational thing.
- [43:28]
Brad
Yeah, I'd say that tension between self and group, you need both to have both. The group requires selves and then a self requires a group. So you know that you're a self. The trick is figuring out how to be a solid self instead of a pseudo self as you interact with this group. And I think healthy groups would help individuals become solid selves so that they can make the group better. Because pseudo cells don't make the group better.
- [43:55]
Luke Burgess
Absolutely. And that's, I think, one of the litmus tests, kind of the Occam's razor for discerning the spirit of a group or evaluating a group is like, to what extent is this institution or this community or this group forming solid selves? And to what extent does it seem like there's a level of coercion or expected conformity that can incentivize the formation of a pseudo self? And actually evaluating groups on that criteria and not just like the power that they have or the money that they have can be an incredibly powerful way to kind of cut through some of the noise. Because what people claim and the values that they list on their website is very different than the spirit that actually animates it.
- [44:37]
Brad
Yeah. And something you talk about too, throughout the book is this idea of becoming a solid self. You know, setting yourself apart while still being connected to the group. That often requires courage to do that. Because you might belong to a group that means a lot to you, you have relationships that mean a lot to you, but you might have to say something that's going to be uncomfortable, or you might have to go against what the group has to say or what they're doing. How do you develop that courage to act in those moments where you have to be a solid self? I got to say, the uncomfortable thing, there might be consequences for me and I might rock the boat. How do you develop that courage to do that? Because I think everyone's had those moments, whether it's at work or in their family. And the easiest thing is to fall into pseudo self, or I'll just kind of go along with what everyone's doing because I don't rock the boat. How do you develop that courage to be a solid self? Yeah.
- [45:34]
Luke Burgess
Well, there's a great book, and I think AOM has actually hosted the author of this book called the Mystery of Courage.
- [45:39]
Brad
Oh, yeah, we just had him on like, not too long ago.
- [45:41]
Luke Burgess
And courage is. Is mysterious. And, you know, one of the points that he makes, like, we spent a lot of time talking about it, thinking about it, abstracted from it, and, you know, we usually equate it with like, physical courage. And, you know, we all like to think that we have it until. Until we're like tested in battle. And then you can have one person who's like courageous in war, who goes home as a total coward in his own family. So it is a very mysterious thing. And I would say that we should sort of reframe courage and think about it more as kind of a daily existential act. And the author that I draw on in the 1 in the 99 the most is a 20th century theologian named Paul Tillich, who wrote a book called the Courage to Be. And he just sort of refers to an existential courage to affirm the goodness of existence, the goodness of the things in our life, really on a daily basis, to actually choose to exercise the courage just to say yes. And he distinguishes a couple different forms of courage. And he says we need to exercise the courage to be a part. The courage to be a part of something bigger than ourselves, which often involves sacrifices. You know, hopefully not the sacrifice of what is most essential to us, though, but, you know, some sacrifices. And then there's simultaneously the courage to be, he says, as oneself, which I take to mean, like, to be a solid self. And he writes, I quote, the courage to be is essentially always the courage to be as a part and the courage to be as oneself in interdependence. You know, you don't get to have one without the other. And, you know, thinking of courage on this relational level and thinking of bringing courage into relationships in order to develop stronger relationships, whether it's with your wife or in your workplace or with your family or just with a friend, having the courage to have a difficult conversation, to speak the truth, to show up somewhere when you really don't want to. Sometimes just showing up itself is an act of courage. So I think we really need to step back and reframe courage as something that is a little bit more mundane or quotidian than we typically think about it when it only gets associated with soldiers.
- [47:53]
Sponsor Announcer
Yeah.
- [47:54]
Brad
That idea of having the courage to be a part of a group and courage to be you, that's.
- [47:58]
Brett McKay
That's Murray Bowen.
- [47:59]
Brad
It's like living in that tension between self and group. And I. I mean, I can see this on a mundane level, like, you know, a church congregation, you might belong to a church congregation. And like most church congregations, there's gonna be a lot of people there that just rub you the wrong way, and they're just annoying, and they don't do things the way. They just say things that are just like, why'd you say that? And the easy thing to do is you're like, I'm just going to just back off. I'm going to walk away. And maybe you need to do that eventually. But I think it is an act of courage. Like, okay, yeah, this place is not great, but I'm going to have the courage, like, to hang in there and be a part of this while still simultaneously being a self and trying to be like, hey, let's do things this way, because it might be better. You got to have the courage to do both.
- [48:45]
Luke Burgess
Yeah. You know, I'm fascinated with monasticism for many reasons, and one of them is kind of the vow of stability that a monk would take. And not to get too kind of inside baseball here, but there's kind of a debate. I'm Catholic, and there's a debate in the Catholic Church. It used to be that you would go to the parish that was within Your geographical boundaries, just like you would go to a public school. And now people basically just go anywhere. They go to the one where they like the liturgy, they like the people, the church shop, the priest. It's the church shopping. Right. So we just live in a world of church shopping. And I often wonder, and this applies to a bunch of different aspects of life, not just churches. And there's kind of a big debate over, you know, which system is better. But I think there, there is something to stability. Just be like, you know what? I'm going to show up here and I'm going to make a commitment to be here, and I'm not just going to cut and run. The first time that, you know, the priest gives a homily I don't like or I encounter somebody that rubs me the wrong way. There's something about stability that I think we've lost. And I'm not suggesting that, you know, you'd be stable in bad situations or. But, you know, I don't know, we can just cut and run so easy. And I think when we lose all friction for leaving, like, I think, like, a total loss of friction is probably generally a bad thing in society.
- [49:56]
Brad
Yeah. And this whole idea of, like, you know, people cutting off from groups easily, it's contributing to the, like, you know, the instability and this sense that nothing works anymore that people complain about all the time. Right. Because, like, everyone's like, all these institutions we. We have, they don't work anymore. Well, it's because, like, everyone's just cutting and running, like there's no one sticking it out for the long haul, even when things suck to make it better. And so it just enters a death spiral and things get worse and worse and worse.
- [50:23]
Luke Burgess
Absolutely.
- [50:23]
Brad
Yeah. Well, I mean, let's talk more about this idea. So we talked about the self developing a solid sense of self. It's about knowing that there's this sense of self and figuring out, like, what is you, what's actually yours, and what's the stuff that you've kind of picked up through osmosis, being intentional about your education and educating yourself, soul, your soul self, and then thinking about rites of passage, big and small. Let's talk about this group idea. You, you know, beginning of our conversation, you talked about how you're seeing an increase in tribalism in our culture, in our politics, in our faith, even in fandom. You know, people get really mean when it comes to, like, the things that they're fans of, whether it's pop stars or sports teams. And Murray Bowen would say well, what you're seeing is just group anxiety. Like, people are anxious about these differences. They don't know how to deal with them. And I think one of the cases you're making, this lack of forming individuals with a solid sense of self is contributing to that. Let's talk about political life. How are you seeing this lack of solid selves in the broader culture? How is that contributing to making political life seem shrill and unbearable? And by politics, I don't necessarily mean just partisan politics, but it could mean we can use Aristotle's idea of politics as just institutions that we belong to.
- [51:46]
Luke Burgess
Yeah, I mean, one of the primary distinctions that Bowen makes is, you know, a sort of emotional fusion and somebody who's a pseudo self or is kind of emotionally fused in with the family system. They have no objectivity whatsoever, and they just react emotionally. You know, they walk in the home and a kid walks in the home and mom or dad or both are upset, and he immediately gets kind of like sucked into that without just being able to say, I'm actually not upset by that. And obviously he says this. What happens in the family is just a little microcosm of what can happen in a culture if people are undifferentiated. And I think we have a crisis of undifferentiation where people have not been able to develop a solid sense of self. What does that mean? It just means that we have a political climate and a culture that is very emotionally reactive. People just react. It's like the normalization of moral outrage that you see online all the time. It's like a symptom of the pseudo self. Right. Like it's kind of undifferentiation where you go online and you immediately catch by contagion this kind of emotional energy in the air, and you can't separate it from your actual ideas. It's just made politics seem like a highly dysfunctional family. So, you know, that's. That's definitely one area I don't think that we've really come to grips with the way that technology is accelerating, that there's just been a complete loss of objectivity in the political sphere. And I think, like, the emotional cutoff, which is one of the things that Bowen says is one of the bad ways to kind of deal with a difference of opinion is emotional cutoff. And we see that all the time. I mean, just like forming little tribal groups with people that are exactly like you is a form of emotional cutoff so that you don't have to actually engage or deal with anything. And there's all these books written on how to find your tribe. And I think like, it's super easy today to find your tribe. And it's actually like not the hard thing. The hard thing is like how to exist within a tribe without losing yourself within it. And in a certain sense, I don't think we don't have enough community. I think we might have too many forms of community and be too comfortable in those little micro communities where we've lost the ability to even see when we are following scripts that have been given to us in order to feel a sense of solidarity with other people that reinforce what we believe. I mean, that has just entered the political sphere. The mimesis is incredibly strong in politics right now. And one of the biggest problems, I would say, is that we've lost intermediary institutions. So it's like what's left between me and the group chats that I'm on and the state, there's almost nothing in between except maybe my church. Many people don't have that. We've lost kind of the intermediary associations that used to provide a buffer. And when people sort of get disconnected with their close relationships, everyday life and community, and they start paying more attention to things that are happening really long ways away that are upstream, distracted from them, that's a sign that something has gone wrong. And I see that happening a lot where people are really concerned with kind of like national level discussions while neglecting things that are a little bit closer to them. And I think that technology has played a huge role in the loss of these intermediary institutions. And you know, Robert Nisbet wrote a great book called the Quest for community in the 50s and he talks about what this loss has done. And one of the things I've tried to do is say, man, he wrote that book way before, like the Internet was popular. Like how. How is the quest for community and the loss of those intermediate institutions affecting our life today?
- [55:26]
Brad
Yeah, I love that book. The quest for community and intermediate institutions used to be things like, you know,
- [55:32]
Brett McKay
the Freemasons, the Elks Lodge and church congregations where you'd rub shoulders with people who weren't exactly like you.
- [55:40]
Brad
And politics wasn't the focus.
- [55:42]
Brett McKay
You know, they were nominally neutral spaces
- [55:45]
Brad
for doing and talking about other things.
- [55:48]
Brett McKay
But not many of those kinds of institutions are still around. Obviously there's still churches, but a lot of them have become partisan, politically aligned.
- [55:56]
Brad
And surveyors, sociologists have shown that's resulting in fewer people going to church because people are turned off by politics in church. We Had a guy on the podcast, it's a political philosopher named Robert Talese, and he wrote a book called Overdoing Democracy. And his whole thesis was that by making politics everything and not having spaces
- [56:20]
Brett McKay
that aren't political, we're actually hurting the political process.
- [56:24]
Brad
Because everything about our lives becomes tinged with this hyper partisan stuff.
- [56:29]
Brett McKay
Like, like paradoxically, we need non political
- [56:33]
Brad
spaces so we can learn the skills and relationships we need to take part in the political process.
- [56:38]
Luke Burgess
Yeah, I mean, one way to think about it is like, what is the first form of contact that we have with other people? Like what is the thing driving our meeting or encountering them in the first place? If it's always politics, like that's a problem. It's one of the reasons I think sports is pretty important. Like, it's easy to make fun of people that just become like totally crazy fans and if their team loses, it ruins their week. But sports is really important because I'm a huge Detroit Lions fan and you know, you show up and what you have in common is that you are a fan of that sports team and the first thing that you know about the guy standing next to you at the game is not his politics. And like, what are the other things that are like that? It's why I like the jazz club. It's why I like the things that bring people together for some shared appreciation of an object that is not political in nature. We really have a shortage of those things in our culture.
- [57:29]
Brad
Something you've talked about recently, I've noticed in your writing is, you know, religion. Religion can be a source of development of solid selves because we can learn that appropriate value response, you know, responding the transcendent. But you make the case in this book and your other writing that the online pseudo self haunted world we live in, that's infecting in religion in a lot of ways. How are you seeing that?
- [57:52]
Luke Burgess
Yeah, I mean, I worry that, you know, there's been talk about some vibe shift and I just worry that it's a thinner version of, of religion. I don't necessarily know that we should be measuring the interest in religion by like engagement. When, you know, a priest does like a dancing TikTok video, man, I just don't know if that's really how we should be measuring the interest in it. And there's something memetic about it where like the religious communities are sort of like mimicking the things that kind of like work in the world to try to keep up or something like that.
- [58:26]
Sponsor Announcer
Like that.
- [58:26]
Luke Burgess
And I, I, I, I, I Just don't think that that's the right path. And I think it generally leads to kind of a performative piety or I think making religion something performative is really, really dangerous. And, you know, we just live in this world that's mediated by screens. And it's like if we do something that other people can't see, it doesn't exist. And then there's a way that in religious, and I'm a religious person, we always have narratives that we can tell ourselves, like, well, I'm evangelizing, right. By, by going and doing this thing and showing, you know, this video of me doing this thing, I'm actually just evangelizing. Well, like, when does that cross the line to becoming performative and engagement driven? So I think we're. I hesitate to talk about this stuff, but I just think we're walking a relatively dangerous line when religion migrates to the digital sphere because you're dealing with something that I believe is very sacred and there's so much of it that cannot be externalized. And if we identify with only what we see and the externals, it can just. It, it, it risks thinning out the actual substance of what we're doing.
- [59:31]
Brad
Yeah, I agree. Something I've noticed is kind of the rise of these, like, online apologists from different denominations. And they do these debates. It doesn't matter the denomination. Like, they all seem like the same kind of personality.
- [59:44]
Brett McKay
And it's a personality.
- [59:45]
Brad
It just, just bothers me.
- [59:47]
Brett McKay
And also it's couched as this intelligent debate.
- [59:49]
Brad
But what it really is, it's just
- [59:51]
Brett McKay
like this status contest. It's not productive.
- [59:53]
Brad
I don't know, something about the whole thing feels gross.
- [59:56]
Luke Burgess
Well, you know what's really interesting to me? I mean, you're, you know, art of manliness. Right. And a lot of the people I notice that do kind of the aggressive apologetics are like the bearded, cigar smoking, kind of like version of a man. It's just kind of interesting that there's a certain kind of personality. And I don't know if it's necessarily, necessarily good to like equate that like to masculinity, like this very specific way of being religious.
- [60:19]
Brad
Yeah, no, I don't like the whole idea. If you got to own people, I got to own you. I don't like that.
- [60:23]
Luke Burgess
Right, right.
- [60:24]
Brad
One last thing, and you kind of mentioned it earlier, but this idea of the monastery, what it can teach us about a group that can develop a solid sense of self. What can we learn from monasteries?
- [60:34]
Luke Burgess
There's so much I wouldn't expect anybody to read the Rule of Benedict, but I have. And to sum it up, the thing that strikes me about the Rule of Benedict is that it's a rule of life that's been in use for 1500 years now to help monks live together in a stable community for their entire lives, from the time they enter until the time that they die, usually buried on the grounds. And it's a rule of life, right? It's not an operating manual. It's not a procedural manual for, like, what to do when these things happen. It has to do with the relationships between the monks that live in the monastery and how to handle disagreements, how to handle the reception of new monks. And it's all oriented towards building virtue. It's oriented towards charity and towards growth and holiness. Now, I don't think that a CEO necessarily has to have those goals in their company or something like that, but very rarely, when do we actually see kind of like, things that deal with the quality of relationships and not necessarily just, here's how to deal with this operational thing when something goes wrong, like, almost never. So it's a rule of life, and humility is what makes the whole thing work, because you have to accept that, you know, all of the monks in the monastery are submitting to this shared rule. And the rule is actually even more important than the abbot. Even the abbot himself has to submit to the rule so that nobody can become like the cult figure. So the rule requires humility and obedience to follow. And it leads to. I mean, it's been around a very long time. And I'm going to go with the Lindy thing here. I mean, there's probably something really, really powerful to a rule of life that has been used for over 1500 years in community. And the whole thing is based on humility. And there's little, fascinating little tidbits in the Rule of Benedict, you know, things that you wouldn't expect is written by St. Benedict of Nursia. And he says when a new monk wants to be admitted, you know, leave him outside of the walls of the monastery for a few days to test his resolve and to see if he really wants to come in and then just let him in. Not all the way, but just let him in. But don't admit him to the dining hall or the sleeping quarters. And, you know, you wouldn't expect to read that kind of thing from. From a saint, but that's in there because he sort of believed in. There is a rite of passage even to enter and a kind of testing of desire that needs to take place. And then there's other strange things, like always have the youngest monk present at an important decision of the monastery. The abbot should always ask the youngest monk what he's thinking about a decision because, you know, the spirit can work just as well through the youngest as through the oldest. It's filled with these kind of counterintuitive things that, you know, you don't necessarily see see in the world, but they have to do with an understanding of the human person that is beautiful, that that allows the one to live in community and in deep communion with the 99. So as I wrote, I got to the end of the book and I was like, what can I turn to to suggest something that we might be able to look to to help build the kinds of communities that form solid selves. And I could not find anything than encouraging people to look at, at least look at the Rule of Benedict and think seriously about how to adapt some of its rules to your life or your organization.
- [63:54]
Brad
Well, Luke Burgess has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
- [63:58]
Luke Burgess
Hey, thanks so much, Brad. It's always, always a pleasure. Luke Burgess.com is my website and you should be able to find the book and the audiobook anywhere that books are sold.
- [64:06]
Brad
Fantastic. Well, Luke Burgess, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
- [64:09]
Luke Burgess
Thanks so much, Brett.
- [64:10]
Brett McKay
My guest today was Luke Burgess.
- [64:12]
Brad
He's the author of the book the
- [64:13]
Brett McKay
1 and the 99. It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, lukeburges.com also check out our show notes at AOM is solidself where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AWIM podcast. If you haven't done so already. I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review. Novel podcast or Spotify helps out a lot, and if you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who thinks of
- [64:44]
Brad
something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support.
- [64:47]
Brett McKay
Until Next Time's Brett McKay. Remind us how to listen to the AM podcast, but put what you've heard into.
- [65:11]
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