1KHO 828: Think of Leisure as a Skill | Luke Burgis, The One and the Ninety-Nine

**Ginny Yurich** (0:00)
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Welcome to The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich. I'm a founder of 1000 Hours Outside. I've been so excited about this because I've been a fan of this author for such a long time. I read his book called Wanting. It's about mimetic desire, which is a phrase I didn't even really know about. Why do we want so much? It's a really interesting topic, so it's called Wanting, the Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life. I've been a fan for a long time, but Luke has a brand new book coming out. It'll be out the day you hear this podcast called The One and the Ninety-Nine, Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion. What a topic. Luke, welcome.

**Luke Burgis** (1:53)
Oh my gosh, Ginny, I'm so glad to be here. I'm a new father of a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter and a four-and-a-half-month-old daughter.
This is like, I'm here to learn, too. I'm looking forward to talking to you about all these things.

**Ginny Yurich** (2:07)
This book is really interesting. You kick it off with, okay, there's a couple of things that are really interesting about the book. It's got some parts that are different, and when you read a lot of books, you're like most books are the same. How could someone have a little bit of twist on writing a book, but you have almost like this memoir piece of your parents, that is sprinkled throughout, so there's that story. I thought that was a really interesting way to write a book, and you have these probes. Each chapter kicks off with these probes, where the first one is a QR code and it says, don't go to this thing.
So, I don't know if you would talk about, where do those ideas come from to like, do it a little different?

**Luke Burgis** (2:52)
Oh, well, I think a book should be an experience, right? It's like more than just the words on the page and the content, like the form of the book should be the kind of experience that actually communicates something beyond the words of what you want the reader to take away. So that's what I tried to do. So with the probes, I got that idea from the media theorist, Marshall McLuhan, who said, I don't like to write essays, I like to probe. And a probe is something that just dislocates or disjoints you. It's kind of weird and it gets you asking questions like, what? Wait a second, right? It's like something that's a little, kind of takes you out of it and makes you think for a second. So when I do a probe, like, do not scan this QR code. I'm literally sort of subjecting you to a form of social contagion by the author, right? And of course, everybody scans the QR code. So the book is like filled with these. And thank God, I have like a publisher and an editor that let me do these weird and crazy things like that. And then, I didn't think that I could write a book about this topic without being pretty vulnerable. And it was far more vulnerable than I was in my first book, Wanting.
Because I'm part of that, I guess they call it the sandwich generation, where I'm in my 40s and I didn't have my first child until I was after 40 There's reasons for that. Studying for the priesthood for seven years pushes back the timeline a little bit.