FOMO Sapiens with Patrick J. McGinnis

In this episode of FOMO Sapiens, Patrick McGinnis talks with Luke Burgis, entrepreneur-in-residence at The Catholic University of America and author of Wanting and The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion. Luke explains René Girard’s idea of mimetic desire, the observation that people want what others want, and why the rivals they measure themselves against end up shaping their choices more than they admit. He describes how his years as a young investment banker in Hong Kong taught him that you cannot be at the party without being affected by the party, and how that question grew into a book about the one (the self) and the 99 (the crowd). The conversation covers the difference between a solid self and a pseudo-self and why many old rites of passage have moved online. It also turns to how Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be applies to work and relationships. Luke closes with a question most people never ask, where they might fit in too much, and an exercise for planning how to act the next time family or friends pull them back into old patterns.
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In this episode of FOMO Sapiens, Patrick McGinnis sits down with Reid Blackman, founder of Virtue Consultants, host of the Ethical Machines podcast and author of The Ethical Nightmare Challenge: How to Avoid the Worst of AI. Reid explains why a governance playbook built for narrow AI cannot be patched for AI agents, which he defines as a large language model connected to tools and given some autonomy. He walks through the many decisions that sit between a foundation model and an end user, why a single failure can cascade through connected systems, and why responsibility is shared between the companies that build models and the companies that customize them. The conversation turns to regulation, where Reid expects courts to move faster than legislatures, and to his own worst-case scenario: a breakdown in shared reality. In the FOMO 4, he tells CEOs who have never run an AI ethics review to start by writing down what their AI ethical nightmares are.
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In this episode of FOMO Sapiens, Patrick McGinnis sits down with Craig M. Robinson, former Chief Growth Officer of Industrious, CEO of Global Corporate Services at Newmark, and President of the U.S. Region at Colliers International, to talk about the book he wrote after decades at the top of corporate America left him pre-diabetic, on Zoloft, and quietly unfulfilled. The Happiness Reboot: The Path to Reclaiming Your Joy is part memoir, part research-backed framework, and part direct challenge to the scripts most high achievers never stop to question. Craig, now an executive coach and adjunct professor at Emory's Goizueta Business School, breaks down why the pursuit of success is structurally designed to fail as a happiness strategy, what the happiest countries in the world actually have in common, and why the research says you have less than a one percent chance of being fulfilled in life if you are not fulfilled in your work.

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In this episode of FOMO Sapiens, Patrick McGinnis sits down with DJ DiDonna, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, founder of The Sabbatical Project, and author of Big Time Off: The Transformative Power of Sabbaticals and How to Take One (Simon & Schuster, July 2026). DJ spent nearly a decade researching why extended time away from work is one of the most impactful experiences a person can have, interviewing almost 250 sabbatical alumni to learn what makes the difference between a transformative break and an expensive vacation. The conversation covers the three pillars of an effective sabbatical (duration, disconnection, and experimentation), why most people take sabbaticals involuntarily after a crisis rather than by design, how companies can build sabbatical programs that pay back in retention and resilience, and why the concept of "regret insurance" might be the most honest argument for stepping away before you have to.
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In this episode of FOMO Sapiens, Patrick McGinnis sits down with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, MacArthur Fellow, National Medal of the Humanities recipient, and author of the new book The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us (Liveright, 2026), for one of the most philosophically rich conversations the show has had. Rebecca holds a Ph.D. in philosophy of science from Princeton, has taught at Yale, Columbia, NYU, Dartmouth, and Harvard, and has spent more than 40 years developing a theory she calls the mattering instinct: the universal human drive to prove to ourselves that we genuinely deserve the attention we give ourselves. Her argument is that this single instinct is the source of our species' greatest achievements and deepest atrocities, that it explains depression, tribalism, religious belief, entrepreneurship, and the need for love, and that understanding where you sit on what she calls the mattering map is one of the most clarifying things you can do for your own life.
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