What's up everyone? This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew.

Welcome back to Founders Journal, my personal audio diary where I give you the business builder,

the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business,

a team, or a new product. Today I am talking about something called memetic theory,

why it is essential to understand and how it impacts the choices that you make every single day.

Let's hop into it.

Memetic theory sounds fancy, but all it means is that when people around you want something or

do something, you want it or do it too. Human beings at our core are copycats.

You see, the theory was created by this guy, René Gerard, and it was popularized most recently

by Peter Till, who is huge in the startup in tech world. René Gerard was a French historian and

philosopher who wrote 30 books and he finished his career teaching at Stanford. That's how Peter

Till met him. Peter, who is the co-founder of PayPal, Palantir, and Founders Fund. He was also

the first outside investor in Facebook. He was a student of Gerard when he was an undergrad at

Stanford, and he actually spoke at Gerard's memorial service after he passed away in 2015.

So beyond this basic definition of all of us being copycats,

Gerard's theory goes on to say that everything, all of our behaviors, every decision we make in life,

all of them are imitative. Only by observing others, do we learn and know what to desire.

And as I think about it intuitively, it makes sense, right? We all need shortcuts in life.

It's what allows us to navigate this ever-changing world without being overwhelmed by making

millions of decisions per day. Think about if we had to make every decision from scratch,

and then every decision we've already made, we had to make that decision again today.

We wouldn't be able to function in society. We don't question every day why we're brushing our teeth

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