Last weekend, New Yorkers flooded the streets after the Knicks won the NBA championship for the first time in 53 years. Many die-hard fans in New York and those in the extended New York diaspora, tears in their eyes, said and wrote that they felt like they’d waited their entire lives for this moment.
And I was celebrating right alongside them. After being a Knicks fan for all of two minutes.
I’m not the only bandwagon fan to root for the Knicks only once it got fun. Across the city, bars have been packed with girls in orange crop tops and blue hats, scrolling their phones in front of the TV; Taylor Swift and her friends caught some strays for sporting matching Knicks T-shirts and taking up multiple courtside seats, despite not being “real fans.”
So why was everyone so quick to jump on a hype train they knew nothing about? I invited author and professor Luke Burgis to come on Second Thought and go deep on the answer to why being a fan is so intoxicating.
Burgis studies what philosopher René Girard calls “mimetic desire,” or imitation of the wants of the people around us. Burgis says that we’re all under the spell of the “desires we catch from other people and imagine are our own.” As far as the Knicks go: “It’s an emotional contagion,” he said, but beyond that, ”our culture has become cult-like.”
Maybe you’ve noticed that, more and more, everyone wears the same outfits, waits in the same frozen yogurt line, idolizes the same celebrities. And what’s worse, our uniform desires are even starting to change who we are: We used to have unique aesthetic preferences; now, everyone embraces the same “tasteslop.” We used to have our own quirks; now, as Freya India wrote in our pages, “Nobody has a personality anymore.”
“Groups are becoming homogenous,” Burgis said. “It makes people boring.”
That’s the problem he tackles in his new book, The One and the Ninety-Nine, about forming a “solid self” who can participate in group dynamics without melting into it.
“It’s easy to go with the flow,” he said. But “if you do that for too long, you’ll end up with a pseudo-self.” It’s something Burgis knows about firsthand: In his 20s, feeling unsatisfied, he sold his posh Las Vegas home, broke up with his girlfriend, and moved to Rome to join a seminary. He told me that deciding to uproot his life to find his higher purpose was one of the hardest things he’d ever done—but leaving the seminary was even harder.
Years later, when the AI company Anthropic came to him and asked him to be a spiritual adviser to their AI, helping to “make Claude good,” he said no. “They were using me,” he claims, “and using the Pope.” When an Anthropic representative came to the Pope’s encyclical, Burgis took a sharp stand: “It was a bad idea.”
His fellow Catholics told him he was neglecting his duty and tried to shame him out of his position—but Burgis wouldn’t budge. In fact, he said, being canceled is a “modern rite of passage.”
Why is our culture so fanatic, and punitive? How do you say no to the comfort of the crowd—and, perhaps more importantly, how do you discover who you really are? Watch my conversation with Burgis below, or listen wherever you get your podcasts, to learn how to find your “solid self” and break out of a culture where everything feels the same these days.
Meet the New Money Millionaires
Is AI ushering us into a brand-new gold rush?
Last week, the world got some pretty good signs that the answer is yes. Elon Musk’s SpaceX went public at a $1.77 trillion valuation, making him the world’s first trillionaire. Dario Amodei’s Anthropic (valued at $965 billion) and OpenAI ($852 billion) have also filed the paperwork to go public, and will likely do so soon.
But it’s not just the CEOs raking it in; soon, legions of people who work at or close enough to an AI company are about to make a fortune. This week, I spoke to them to find out how they’re spending their new millions.
At SpaceX, their IPO made more than 4,000 new millionaires out of current and previous employees, including mechanics, factory workers—and recent immigrants, like a welder named Juan Hernandez. So begins the great AI shopping spree.
“I definitely want a cool house,” said one researcher I spoke to, who stands to cash in this winter. “Ideally one on each coast and a pied-à-terre in Paris.” Others I spoke to want pointillist paintings, a glass sculpture, a compound, and to endow their beloved local restaurants. One, Zach Kass, became part owner in a women’s volleyball team. “I made it,” he told me. “I mean, I bought a sports team!”
As the new class of millionaires games out which causes to give to, and which over-the-top vacations to take, one reflected, “You have to have mechanisms that tie you to the mast lest the siren song drive you to your death, so to speak.” After all, “After everything is said and done, the richest people in the world are deeply addicted to shitposting on Twitter.”
What Else I’m Thinking About:
The World Cup is in full swing, which means hundreds of international tourists are arriving on North American soil. And they’re falling in love with the best of American customs, from marveling at the halls of Buc-ees to peeling open their first pack of Chick-fil-A sauce. And that’s all before the game even starts. As my colleague Arthur Brooks wrote this week, sports fandom is a science-backed way for anyone to become a happier person. Read his piece for the definitive case on why we should all be sports fanatics, and read my colleague Jillian Lederman’s argument as to why Americans should care.
If the fun of being a fan isn’t enough to sway you, maybe the money will. Because of prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, sports fans now have the chance to put their obscure sports knowledge to use, raking in thousands. Still, the rise of these platforms begs the question: Where should the betting stop? Is putting thousands on the invasion of Venezuela the same as five bucks on an early Knicks lead? We let our veteran writer Joe Nocera ditch his day job to explore the wild west of prediction markets. In his new piece, he explains why his betting was obsessive and exhilarating—and ultimately, deeply exhausting.
New York Magazine’s Simon van Zuylen-Wood called up FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who is currently chipping away at a 25-year prison sentence, to see what the disgraced wunderkind has to say about, well, everything. Bankman-Fried went on about his favorite vegan prison recipes, his Adderall regimen, and the serialized memoir he’s been working on in jail. Two years in, SBF still maintains his innocence, and blames his fraud conviction largely on a simple accounting glitch.
Today marks the official release date of Toy Story 5—the latest installment of a series that nurtured an entire generation. For many critics, the new movie is a thinly veiled commentary on how modern parents lost the plot, raising their kids with an iPad instead of a stuffed cowboy named Woody; but my colleague Liel Leibovitz saw it differently. As we head into Father’s Day weekend, don’t miss his essay on why Toy Story 5 is the ultimate ode to American dads.
Evan Gardner contributed reporting.
Just me or is it weird/annoying that TFP links to stuff behind paywalls.