The Daily Stoic - Paul Skallas on the Lindy Effect and Standing the Test of Time | 'Normal' is the Enemy

Episode Date: July 7, 2021

Ryan reads today’s daily meditation and talks to Paul Skallas about the Lindy Effect, why certain works stand the test of time and how to replicate them, how to order your life according to the Lindy Effect, and more.Paul Skallas is a technology lawyer and an author of many books including Life & The Lindy Effect. Skallas is an original thinker who tries to use the most robust ideas from human history to make sense of the challenges and opportunities in daily life.The Jordan Harbinger Show is one of the most interesting podcasts on the web, with guests like Kobe Bryant, Mark Manson, Eric Schmidt, and more. Listen to one of Ryan's episodes right now (1, 2), and subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show today.DECKED truck bed tool boxes and cargo van storage systems revolutionize organization with a heavy-duty in-vehicle storage system featuring slide out toolboxes. DECKED makes organizing, accessing, protecting, and securing everything you need so much easier. Get your DECKED Drawer System at Decked.com/STOIC and get free shipping.LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. Athletic Greens is a custom formulation of 75 vitamins, minerals, and other whole-food sourced ingredients that make it easier for you to maintain nutrition in just a single scoop. Visit athleticgreens.com/stoic to get a FREE year supply of Liquid Vitamin D + 5 FREE Travel Packs with subscription. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookFollow Paul Skallas: Homepage, TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

Hey there listeners! While we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduke Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Kodopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy from the ground to heat in cool homes,

or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together, they discuss their entire journey from day one, and all the skills they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges and how to lead through uncertainty. So, if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wondery app. Normal is the enemy. We've heard people say it, you've said it.

We're all hoping, hoping for things to go back to normal. Of course this is absurd, not just because normal doesn't exist, but if it did, then isn't normal to blame for what happened? It was our normal life that set up the conditions for the pandemic that made us so vulnerable and unprepared for something like it to happen. Musoneus Rufus, whose story I tell in lives of the Stoics, knew a thing or two about pining for normal. After all, he was unjustly exiled four times, including ones to a desolate island off the coast of Greece.

While he languished there, missing his old life, hating his provincial existence, he stopped to remind himself and his fellow exiles that when we were home, we did not enjoy the whole earth, nor did we have contact with all men. Normal was a mirage, he was saying, because when he could do things, he missed. Most of the time, he chose not to. Just as 90% of New York City never actually took the time to enjoy the cities and amenities while they were open, even before the pandemic.

Just as your normal life was mostly filled with obligation, with busyness, killing time, complaining. Besides Musoneus pointed something else out too, did he not still have access to sun, water, and air? Could he not still do good? Could he not still study philosophy? Could he not still find a way to be happy even in exile? Of course he could.

And in fact, stripped of distraction and unlimited options, he might even be able to do this better than before. And so it goes for us. Normal does not exist. If it does, it should be something that coming out of this pandemic, we actively try to avoid.

Instead, we should try to be creating a new normal, a new world, one built around what we have learned over the last year. And as you go back out into the world, vaccinated, chasin, wiser for what you've experienced, you must create a better life. You should be preserving the things you learned that you tried over the last year. You should be making changes based on what you experienced. You should be stronger and more prepared for things to change again, because they will. Normal does not exist, and believing that it does is the enemy. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I like a lot of people first heard about the Lindy effect in Nassim Talib's work, and

I remember looking it up and reading the Wikipedia page, and then I remember being in New York City and seeing Lindy's restaurant and being like, oh man, this is so cool. And I've always loved stuff that's been around a long time. My favorite restaurant in Los Angeles is a toss up between the original pantry cafe and Clifton's cafeteria, both downtown. I love the Los Angeles Athletic Club, which is second oldest athletic club in the country. I love old stuff. If you read my book, Perennial Cellar, you know, this is essentially the premise. Like, what makes something classic? What makes it endure? What makes it stand the test of time? And that's what I try to do with my books.

I, you know, we're actually coming up this year on my anniversary of my, the 10-year anniversary of my first book, Trust Me I'm Lying, which I thought had to be this thing that you get out to the market right now or it won't be relevant. And, you know, here it is still selling and selling. The obstacle is the way, still selling and selling now, six, seven years since it's come

out. I'm interested in things that endure. Robert Green's book, The Forty-A-Los of Power, I think will still be read a hundred years from now. I love stuff that stands the test of time. That's what draws me to stoicism, of course, that you can read the thoughts of Marcus Arelius and 2 in 2000 years later. There still feels like he wrote him yesterday.

It feels like you could have written them. It feels like you are Marcus Aurelius because he, by tapping into something so specific and personally, actually, and of the moment, he actually managed to create something timeless. So I was fascinated to read a New York Times profile a couple months ago called the Lindi way of living by Ezra Marcus Actually, I myself was the subject of a New York Times profile Maybe 2014 16 which seems like an eternity ago Alexandra Alter wrote about it right as ego and daily stoke were coming out Some of the stuff in the profile is aged well some of it hasn't

I remember joking. I probably a huge mistake. But she was like, why stosism? Isn't aren't you just doing this to get rich? And I said, look, I'm a good marketer. If I was doing something to get rich, don't you think I'd be selling cryptocurrencies or something? Like I said, you know, if you're a good marketer, you could sell anything. Why would I pick an obscure school of ancient philosophy? And of course, you pounced on that and, you know, if you're a good marketer, you can sell anything. Why would I pick an obscure school of ancient philosophy? And of course, she pounced on that and, you know, the quote in the piece is something like, if you're a good marketer, you can sell anything. And that's why Ryan chose Stoicism, which again, the exact opposite of what I'm

trying to say, trend pieces try to do this. They're not so much highlighting the trends, usually as they are making fun of it. But hey, here I am five years later still standing. So I guess that goes a little bit to what I'm talking about today, the piece I saw, the Lindy way of living, is about a technology lawyer named Paul Scalis, who's tried to design his life. And this is what he talks about in his sub-stack newsletter

and his Twitter account, about the Lindy effect, like how we gain wisdom from ancient things or at least things that have stood the test of time. He's a technology lawyer and he ironically uses technology to popularize some of these ideas. He has a sub-stack, which you can check out. It's called the Lindy Newsletter. He has a podcast, Lindy Talk. You can follow him on Twitter at Paul Scalis. And you skalis.sks.substack.com. Believe me, I'm a big supporter and believer in newsletters, so I love seeing people that

are doing newsletters. Well, anyways, here is my interview with Paul Scalis about the Lindi Effect, standing the test of time, what to do, what not to do, according to the Lindi Effect, what the Lindi life looks like. I think it's a good interview. I had a lot of fun talking with them and I'm looking forward to the book that will inevitably come out of this New York Times piece. And if you want to read more about the Lindy effect as well, check out the scene Talib's books, anti-fragile, the Black Swan, the Bed of Procrestes, which I'm pretty sure would carry a couple of those at the painted porch bookstore. Pretty Lindy business, if I must say so myself, I'm talking to you from our 140 year

old brick building on Main Street in Bastard, Texas, which has been a store of some kind for many, many decades, survived pandemics and wars and crises and depressions and pandemics, I got to get back to work. So I will cut off this intro right here. Here's my interview with Paul Scalis about the Lindy Effect. I'm very familiar with the Lindy Effect. I find it fascinating, but to people who are not familiar, just as I'm asked to define stoicism all the time, give me a working definition

of the Linde Effect. Sure. It's a probabilistic, heuristic, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, or art, or styles, or a technology, scientific theories. That's sort of the basic definition of the Lindy effect. And you're sort of what you write about and talk about sort of how you apply the Lindy effect is although obviously we also have to be careful in the naturalistic fallacy, but your argument is kind of like, if it's been around for a while, you can trust it more

than some brand new thing, which may be based on bad science or bad information, or maybe a fad, or may just not have any staying power. Right. Yeah. So I kind of, I play around with it. I use it a lot for it's basically a hedge against modernity and you know we're constantly getting bombarded by novelty all the time which is you know great because you know it's always nice to have options and choice and you know I'd rather have too much novelty than maybe too little right. It's like you'd rather have too many lawyers in a system than not enough when you need help in a way.

But I think there are domains where it is pretty valuable, as far as architecture, diet, health, psychology, is another good one, ways to live, sort of systems that have been around for a long time. I don't really utilize it in medicine at all, but maybe preventative measures. It's actually a good tool. And also in art and music and books. So there's a lot of, yeah, there's a lot of domains I sort of utilize it in, and it's a fun frame that I think people can, you know, I think I gained a little bit of a following because I think it allows people to actually look around their life and their environment too, and the environment that, you know, radically changed, right, in the 20th century, and then

changed again, I would say in the mid 2000s, with the advent of social media and the destruction of the media monoculture, right? Like, I don't know if you would have had this podcast in 1997, right? That would have been, right. So I think there's been two waves of large changes. We've sort of gone through.

And this can serve, the ceris that can serve as a way to kind of just give you a hedge before you undertake, you drink something, you follow a fat diet, you follow some new age advice, you follow some psychology paper that doesn't get replicated. So I think it's a useful tool. And the hedge is basically against the predilection,

which is increasingly common in modern society, the arrogance of like, we have invented something totally new that changes everything. And the reality is, most of it either, it doesn't actually change anything, or it changes something that was there for a reason, and there's going to be consequences for this change. Yeah, yeah.

Change, especially when it's rapid, it can have kind of effects that we don't foresee. People always say, oh, the car replaced the horse, and it's true. But 50,000 people die in a car accident every year. We accept that. We built a society around car culture, right? Where a lot of places in America, you can't even go for a walk, or you can't even...

Right, and then you go to your apartment. You go to Europe, it's not designed around the car, and you're like, oh, this is amazing. Yeah, Europe exists as like an open-air museum now for people to go and just walk around because it's like nice to like be around. So you can have that here, you know, but we went through this tremendous, I would say, very fast change into a car-centric world very quickly in the 20th century. I don't know if we're going back to more of a European design,

although you do see there's seen some sort of sustainable urbanism online now, you think people sort of want to sort of walk around. So that's one example. Other examples are various diets that sort of like veganism or paleo. There's some big ones that don't seem to have historical and ascetic. And then you see certain dangers. You see certain kidney problems with only eating protein every day. You see people having to supplement with B12 if you're a vegan. And then you see reports that excessive B12 intake is linked

to a lung cancer. So whenever you're messing with a system, especially with rapid change, there's going to be effects and maybe the effects aren't visible right now, maybe the effects aren't visible tomorrow, but there's going to be changes. Well, what I love about the Lindi effect, you've talked about how you sort of first discovered it through Nassim Taleb, but what I love is that the Lindy effect is not only really old, but it's named after a restaurant that still exists that's like 90 years old. No, the restaurant shut down I think. It closed during the pandemic. Like two years ago it was still open. So it's like,

it's closed during the pandemic. Let's see if Lindy's is still open. I've never been there. That would be terrible news. Uh, it happens. Restaurant restaurant is a hard business, right? It says Lindy's was two different deli and restaurant change in Manhattan. The first was operated from 1921 to 1969. 1979. It trademarked it, opened new restaurants, the last of which closed, in February, 2018. Well, this is just devastating news. There you go. What do we do?

We should just cancel the episode. The Linde effect has been disproven, although maybe the point is that what is exactly the middle period between it opened and it closed, that's when it peaked and it's been the dead man walking for, you know, 30, 40 years. Yeah, I like, like, you, you, you did a book on stoicism, right? So, and that literature is thousands of years old. And, you know, the, the ancients didn't have access to maybe like our knowledge of physics, but they hadn't access to our

knowledge of human nature. That's what they study. That's what they thought about. They wrote about. And then, you know, these writings, which work, by the way, this sort of having more upside-down side, negative visualization, these great stoic techniques work today, because we're still the same human, right? Human nature doesn't really change and you know we should expect that literature to keep lasting for another couple thousand years and so there's like a deeper lindy effect of been been really you know is this business that opened in like 196 1970 gonna last maybe but we have there's like another aspect of literature and human nature, and then you look at psychology papers, there's like weird stuff going on there. I don't

know if you realize, like you said, there's like it doesn't replicate, or the people they test on don't represent, you know, society, there's something called key hacking, which I won't get into, but there's some solid, you know, Lindy, uh, Sure. Lessons we can take, and sure as you know. Well, no, that's been the interesting thing, uh,

you know, someone, everyone's well, someone will comment on sort of like, how well my books have done, or, you know, like, that I like sort of brought, you know, like, oh, your books are so great. I see them everywhere, whatever. And I always try to remind them that I have a really unfair advantage,

which is that I didn't invent anything from scratch. If I'd sat down and I was writing the obstacles away or you go to the enemy or still this is a key, and I was coming up with a philosophy from scratch, this would require genius to some level, right? You'd create a genius to create something new, which is like the hardest thing to do. I was simply reimagining and we explaining

and popularizing a thing that has resonated with people for not even 2,000 years, but going back to like the year 400 BC. So going on 2,500 years, this has been tested over and over and over again and endured. The chances of it disappearing tomorrow are relatively slim. This is also the same. Why is Star Wars work? It's because Star Wars is based on the heroes' journey, which is sort of lindified to the ultimate degree. This is the myth that one of the founding myths of all of sort of Western civilization, I think the idea is you wanna tap into something that goes way, way back.

It's just safer and more likely to resonate with people. Yeah, it's also, think of how many transfers of people that these books had to go through generation after generation who also found it valuable and crucially they survived, right? The people who did read these works and implement them. So, it's been, you know, right, time tested and useful. It's also, I'm skeptical of everything in the 20th century though. So you mentioned Star Wars because I do find that the 20th century was a closed system. Like there was only

a few movies you could watch, there's only a few television stations, you had to buy a CD, cost $20. Everything was sort of top down and you know even decades, right? Even decades had their own style, their own trends and it seems like we're entering like a system now where the mainstream is either stuck or the mainstream just seems different than when I remember it in the 90s, whereas you have the huge now ecosystem on the internet, this bottom up, millions of songs on SoundCloud, lots of influencers, and it seems more real than what's happening above the board. I guess, but the Lindy fact sort of hypothetically doesn't discriminate

between something that lasts for five years between something that lasts for five years and something that lasts for 50 years and something that lasts for 5,000 years, right? The Lindi Effect is simply saying, like basically what's in motion tends to stay in motion for as long as it's been in motion. You know, whatever, however you would actually translate that. So I guess the question is,

like you look at something like Star Wars, is Star Wars going to be relevant 200 years from now? Maybe, maybe not. But like, if you're George Lucas, you had a longer run than I think, I think Star Wars beat Smokey in the Bandit or something, you know, opening weekend. Like, it certainly had a longer run than just about anything that came out when it came out because it did tap into something a tad more sustainable than like Star Wars is not still watch today because of its cutting edge special effects. People are taking their grandkids to go see the original star or we want to show their grandkids the original star wars because something has transcended the era that it came out that still resonates you know 50 years later. But here's

another example rock and roll right the number one popular genre of meat growing up with rock music and it's basically dead right now. If you look at sales from sort of that classic rock era, they're finally kind of going down a little bit. You're getting less and less newer generations of people kind of listening to, you know, Growing up a Led Zeppelin, I guess, which was always sort of kind of tradition growing up as a young man in America, right? And then, so I wonder if that's sort of gonna keep going or is that gonna peter out over time? Because like I said, in the 20th century, I don't think we had a lot of options.

Like there was a gloat, you know, there was a monoculture that you engaged with and if there's no other place to go, so. That's, yeah, that makes sense. Have you read the classroom in book, but what if we're wrong? Yeah, place to go, so. That's, yeah, that makes sense. Have you read the classroom and book, but what if we're wrong? Yeah, I read it, Chris. Yeah, he's like, you know,

who was the biggest musician in the world in like 1910? It was like John Philip Sousa or something. Mark and, right. Yeah, and now sort of all that's left of that entire period is a tiny echo. Although that's one of my favorite parts in meditations. Marcus really sort of over and over again is like, who's ever heard of Vespacian or who still remembers the famous names from Hadrian's Court or whatever.

And I remember I did a daily stoic email about this not that long ago because like you, I was fascinated by Spotify and I was I was like I was listening to like best of the 90s rock or something and I was alive during the 90s when that rock was popular so right I was I knew most of the songs but every once in a while like a song would come on that I'd never heard before and I'd look it up and be like oh this was a number one hit and you know 1996 and I just like never heard it before, which is pretty unusual. But then if I went to the 80s and I listened to the same playlist, you know, it'd be, let's say, 20, 30% more, like big hits that I'd never heard of.

Then 70, 60, as you start to go back, this is exactly what Marcus really talks talks about is that very quickly, the names and references and bands of enormously popular things start to become much more mysterious and unknown. And so, there is this thing about the lindy effect that's seductive where you're like, I want to make something that lasts forever. But I mean, John Phil Absuza doesn't give a shit that lasts forever. But I mean, like John Philip Suza doesn't give a shit that he's dead. You know, like that his music's not, sorry, John Philip Suza doesn't give a shit that people aren't listening to his music anymore. He's dead.

Yeah. I think everybody when you sort of write a book, I mean, you wrote some books, right? So I took that back your mind, right? Like, hey, I want it to be read in a few decades, at least, or at least I don't want it to just be some internet, you know, clickbait thing. Like, I think almost every, I think that was a, in million books, get published every year now, and it's just this overflow and information. And who knows what's going to last? Because now there's just everything, right? But I think that was a common sentiment, like, and who knows what comes out of the 20th century? Right now, I think maybe the Beatles might be the, really the only band, people maybe consider what rock and roll is. I believe in the book, Klosserman said, like, if they were teaching a class about rock and roll in the year 3000,

you know, they probably pick somebody like Chuck Berry and be like, this is the... That struck me so wrong. Like, this not even like the worst guess. Like, there's no way he's, uh, that struck me as very strange. I could see Elvis, um, but, but uh, yeah, I've read something else recently that was like, you know, in a thousand years, like, the Beatles songs will be Lola Bies, and no one will remember that somebody wrote them. Check that was an interesting take too. Yeah, I agree that Chuck Berry thing was a weird take

because even in the 90s, I didn't really, he wasn't really, you know, well, no, and like other musicians maybe talk about him and saying, oh, they liked him, but it wasn't like he was sort of this into rock culture in a way that maybe the Beatles or Led Zeppelin or some of these big like Rolling Stones or even Bob Dylan were sort of, like there was this, there was this story, right? We're all part of the story and then each generation from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s.

And that's all gone, right? So that tradition's all gone. And we're moving into sort of a new way of listening to music or finding music, which is difficult. Actually, I think getting more into like a localist circle now and like creating your own immediate environment can be very important. We've got a quick message from one of our sponsors here and then we'll get right back to the show.

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So, like, a lot of the books that we consider to be classics of the 20th century, like the great Gatsby, I think is a brilliant novel. I think, eventually, it might have been rediscovered on its own. But like, one of the reasons the Great Gatsby is popular is that the US government bought millions of copies of it and distributed it to the troops during World War II. And a bunch of the classic sort of novels that became popular from the early part of the 20th century were because that was just like one of the titles in the list of paperbacks that the government decided was like, okay, to give away to the troops for entertainment to read as they

were like waiting to invade Normandy. So it's like, I guess I see an argument where Chuck Berry threw some set of freak instances is elevated above someone who's actually much more popular now or that you might guess. But I think to me, the meta lesson is that history doesn't care about you and doesn't care about what you've done or how popular you are, what people thought of you. The sands of time sort of toss things around and it all comes out as it comes out and there's not that much that you can really do

to influence it one way or another. To me, that's the message of, Ozzy Mandis, the poem. It's like, he uses the biggest king in the world and now it's like, there's two legs left and nobody knows all the things that he did. Right, and any attempt really by a top-down entity, but I think when we're talking about the Lindy effect, we're also talking about it being transmitted organically

in bottom off by like regular people or you know by this is good. And not. Yeah, and the 20th century was weird right you had CIA funding for certain modern art movements because they wanted to counteract the Soviets or something. There's a lot of weird stuff going on there. But and there's also an architecture movements which are unprecedented, right? This is era of complete smoothness, these sort of square kind of places without details, without our nation, which you know, never, you never really saw this, everything sort of had a frack of quality to it, and ancestral building traditions. And all of a sudden, it's like, no, we're going to try these new architectural styles.

And a lot of them don't, they leave you alienated. And the problem with architecture is you can't just tear them down and fix them. They're these monuments to the time. If you were to watch in DC, you see all these brutalist buildings, which kind of look really off in a way. But yeah, there's an aliveness to things that are sort of Lindy certified, right? Like, even like Seneca or Cicero,

whenever they talk about loss of version, or negative advice, or the paradox of progress and Lucretius, or even ASAP's fables have stuff that's still pretty relevant. Well, I was writing about this for daily stuff recently, where there's a reference in Marcus, a realist to the country mouse and the town mouse, which is an ASAP's fable.

You know, they both go visit each other and they find the other ones. You know, the city is very stressful, the country is very boring. But what struck me about it is like, how old ASAP's fables would have been to Marcus Aurelius. You know, you have the most powerful man

in the world referencing this fable, assuming everyone will get the reference or, you know, not really, because he's, I guess, not writing for publication, but that, you know, today it's translated and you either get the reference or you don't. But just the idea that we don't really know when ASAP was alive, but these fables were already certified by hundreds of years of experience by the time they're being referenced. It's realizing what's that idea

that like Cleopatra lives closer to our time than the building and the pyramids. Yeah, some of this stuff was so old back then if that always like catches me by surprise. Yeah, it's even, you know, a lot of those guys were actually copying older stuff. Like I think there's this person called a hikar of ninova who a sap took some stories from

Even older than a sap and then and then that gets transmitted to um Baybria Fabrius who's a Roman kind of does he stories like like a sap and then La Fontaine La Breaire we go through the French tradition, so called moral sciences, that's sort of what philosophy kind of was in a way, a lot about a practical advice, you know, useful advice, not so much abstract concepts all the time. And then you see sort of, it flowed even today, right? So, you know, it's funny, like you, you, you kind of, there was a stoic wave you were part of. I don't think you were the only one. It was sort of this, this, this wave,

it was stoicism, you know, became a thing in America. And like, recently we had fasting come in. And it reminded me how like America cuts off tradition, right? It like, when you're in America, and you're sort of forward thinking, you're all about problem solving, but history is not really a part of it. And tradition doesn't really come along, but then we reintroduce tradition, like piece by piece, a little bit, back into America, right?

And so you'll see these waves of, or even good food, like food is so good now. Remember, like food in America wasn't that good. You go to the grocery store, there be cans, and people with foreigners would say, oh, American food sucks. And then you had the whole foods revolution, right? And there's this emphasis on kind of eating better stuff.

And now that's even going further, we're talking about the meat, how's the meat that we're eating should be grass fed, right? So that's just tradition, though. So we're just sort of reintroducing tradition piece by piece in America and finding out what work. Yeah, there's a line, I forget where I heard it. They probably still stole it from someone else too. It's that tradition, traditions aren't answer to a problem we don't remember. Right. And that most of these traditions were developed for a reason, could have been a bad reason, but it was developed in response to something that used to be commonplace or used to trouble people and they were like,

this will address that and that's why we do it that way. It's not like there's not no reason that we do it the way that we do. There's a reason. Again, it might not be a good reason, but there you go. Yeah, and especially in certain domains, like I said, I don't, bloodletting, I'm not talking about bloodletting for all your problems, right? Even though giving blood does have a lot of benefit, I do it sometimes, but there's certain domains where, you know, we've made incredible kind of leaps and bounds, but there's other ones where I think, you know,

like everybody's going to a therapist, and I think that's great, but they didn't really have therapists back then. So what did we have? Maybe we had friends. Oh, but people have less friends now. We had there was like priests and stuff, but we're living in a post religious age now. Sometimes there's a substitution that goes in place as well as our society tries to sort

of address certain issues. Yeah, that's interesting. I was talking about this with Kate Fagan, the journalist, and we were talking about how there's always a certain amount of toxic energy that manifests itself in the form of say like bigotry or repression or persecution, probably the oldest recipient of this is the Jews, right? But that there's this toxic energy that just gets channeled in different directions, right? It's part of the human sort of, not maybe not the individual human makeup, but it's what happens when groups of humans get together is that we pick others and sort of persecute them

or make them the bear the brunt of, that we sort of scapegoat them so on so forth. But that oftentimes, I like the idea of substitutions that we just substitute different things as an outlet for certain passions or needs, as you're saying, it maybe priests becomes a therapist or the lack of friends, creates the need for someone to confide in someone and thus therapists or therapy sort of enters

to fill that breach. Yeah, and I also think it gets weirder though, because you know, people are taking Adderall to go to work. It's not just coffee anymore, which is pretty blendy compliant, or tea, which is really deep-lindy. We know that's not gonna really mess with you, but now we're getting started on sort of some hardcore chemistry changes to our bodies to started on sort of some hardcore chemistry changes

to our bodies to adapt to sort of work, to compete other people and sort of these jobs that we're in, which instead of a huge part of question. You're saying instead of just questioning like why do I need to take the drug to instead of not going to work, we take the drug that makes us go to work. Yeah, and also to go to work, some people need it to function, but you know that when you enter into some of these organizations, people are taking it to get ahead. And also the work way more efficient, there's a real competition, especially in America, to win these jobs that are highly competitive. And we're not, these aren't tested, right?

These aren't sort of long-term, these long-term, of fetamine, like it reminds me of the smoking, right? Which was huge in the 20th century, but only started in like 1905, really, as far as the cigarette, right? Yeah. The cigarette, this really elegant product,

this et with this package, and you take a little bit every day, and it's addictive, and it's really cool. It's still really cool in my opinion, but even I don't smoke, but it kind of wrecked a lot of people on society, and then we had this thing where people kind of stopped doing it, and there was help concerns. And then the government started

banning it in the indoor smoking. I remember that was the early 2000s. It was like this wave all across the world and away. And smoking rates are a lot lower than they were in the 70s, right, or the 60s where they started peaking. And so, in a way, the cigarette came, people in that century tested it. They were tested on the cigarette. Many didn't do well, right? Many didn't survive.

And now you're seeing a lot of people kind of stay away from that. And I think we're seeing that again with stuff like infetimines, but also testosterone replacement therapies going mainstream, like all types of kind of transhumanist procedures. We can even go to the environment, which is we're genetically modifying mosquitoes.

Who knows what's going to happen. So what do you think of psychedelics? Right? Because psychedelics on the one hand are very old. And on the other hand, this idea of like using them a lot and using them to solve your psychological issues or as a form of therapy seems relatively new or at least relatively without precedent. I'm always very lear, Silicon Valley seems to

not have a lot of self-awareness as far as pushing us to do things culturally, technologically, that strike me as very different than how things have always been done without ever questioning what foundations it's shaking or what part of the brain chemistry it's messing with. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, like I think microdosing is crazy.

I mean, I think you're just sort of that's completely unprecedented, which is taking tiny amounts of psychedelics every day. Yeah. I think, I think, if you're going to go that route, maybe just doing it, you know, once, and then, or twice, or just spacing it out, and I think, you had the same issue with cigarettes, which, which it became a daily thing, and it wrecked people. And I think once you start daily consumption and your body, I think you're going to see radical changes when you start on going chronic damage or chronic harm versus once in a while which smoking a cigar every once in a while or pipe is probably better than just smoking cigarettes. So I do see the value in psychedelics.

I think that's interesting. I think there is some of a precedent for it. But I think, you know, microdosing is, it puts reminds me of cigarettes. I'm okay. Yeah, and I'm always, I'm very leery anytime someone tells me they have a medical or like a sort of like a single solution to a complicated pervasive longstanding issue, right? So you're like, oh, this cures PTSD

or oh, this cures whatever or I think this is more common. Oh, this psychedelic gave me enlightenment, right? Like this thing that human beings have been seeking out, mostly through a lot of hard work and fasting and study and research and exploration and travel, you know, getting to enlightenment. This thing that took, that's always been very hard and few have ever retained the idea that ingesting some leaf or mushroom with a shaman in Brazil is going to get you

everything you want with none of the consequences. That strikes me as not just naive, but historically not worked out well in similar scenarios. Yeah, I mean, it's reductionist, right? So, I'm skeptical of anybody who doesn't address the environment that you're in. And if anybody's ever had a bad boss, and life knows that you cope with other things, and you don't engage with sort of the elephant in the room, which is the environment you're in, or you've lived in sort of, I remember living in a,

in an apartment with like, low ceilings and a basement. I was like sad all the time. Yeah, you live in a shitty place, right? Yeah. So there's no, there's no like, yeah, I think Silicon Valley tries, engages in a reduction as a view of take this thing, virtual reality, right? That's something they always talk about. And it's like, I've always noticed that when my environment has improved, I improve as well. And that's sort of what to sort of focus on,

more of a holistic view of health, then do a drug or do this technology. Yeah, and I think that's sort of more of a lindy way of looking at health is looking at your environment. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here and then we'll get right back to the show, Stay Tune. What do you think of the sort of omniscientitude towards technology or certain changes

where it's not that they're necessarily anti-it, but that they're intentional and deliberate about what they allow into the community. It's sort of the question of like, does this make the community better, yes or no, as opposed to this makes things easier? You know what I mean? Is that kind of how you think about the things

that you integrate into your life? I think of it more as like an individual though, because I'm not part of an Amish community. And I don't think a lot of people are, especially in America as part of a, I mean, that's sort of, you know, for good or for worse, right, we live in an individualized society. Like, we're not property of our family.

We're not, you know, when you look at these small villages as these really nice, ideal places, but they don't see the, the feuds, they don't see the, you know, when people in the village hate you, maybe your life sucks and they could really hurt you. And your reputation means a lot versus going into a city where things are a little bit more anonymous or a town. So I think the homage live in a way that's different

than I think most Americans live. I think that their critique of technology is interesting. I think we all need a kind of critique it a little bit. Like I opened up TikTok recently and I was like, wow, this is some real, this is like TV and steroids. Like you're gonna get people addicted to this. Like they're gonna, this is like a new level of social media.

It makes like Twitter look like reading a book, right? So I was kind of shocked by like, and like the algorithm is aggressive and it could really hone in on what sort of preferences you want. So I really felt when I was looking at TikTok, like this is something new and maybe not, maybe I don't really need this in my life right now. So yeah, I think generally,

I have a skepticism of new technology of how it could influence me and influence my mood. And is this, you know, am I using this technology or is it using me? I love that question. That to me, that's the question I try to ask. And I think most of the time you realize, like, oh, you're the product here. Like it's using you and selling you to advertisers or whatever. And that's why it's free. Right. But also, hey, I'm getting a lot of value from sort of, I know who to follow on Twitter. It's not this, you know, terrible politics driven, you know driven drama where people are yelling at Trump or something or for Trump.

And you're getting caught up in some weird culture war. You can use these platforms a little bit if you're good with knowing how to follow and have it use it for you as well. And also use it as a creative expression. But yeah, ultimately that's sort of the, you know, is it using me or am I using it? And I think that's one of the, and how to create your own media environment.

It's sort of these two big pressing questions that people sort of have because look, you work a job, you know, you have your weekends, and then you have to exercise, you have to eat dinner, you have a few hours left, you know, in the day. hours left in the day and I don't want to engage with something that's poisonous. I might days off of work. But you're on Twitter, right? You don't find it to be poisonous?

No, no. I like it. Obviously, I don't. It's good to take breaks and it's not always good to be on it, but I don't follow people, I try not to follow people who are poisonous or at least do it with humor, and not be just messed up. You saw this with the Trumpiers,

I mean, you saw it reach a crazy, you would look at the New York Times from page and it was wild, you're on reach a crazy league. You would look at the New York Times from page and it was wild. You're on Twitter, it was wild. And Trump would try to shock you. And it was this weird game between Democrats and Republicans. And I don't use it for that. I think I use it for talking about some ideas,

my concepts, which I think are more interesting. Yeah, that's something I think I use it for, you know, talking about some ideas, my concepts, which I think are more interesting. Yeah, that's something I think about too. Obviously as a writer, I love books. That's the medium that I communicate with. I think that's what, there's a reason I always tell people, like books are actually a great piece of technology. A hardcover book is, or a physical book

is a great piece of technology. That's why it's always, that's why it's existed more or less in this form for so long. I like to point out like when you watch a sci-fi movie or something in our space movie, like they have all these doors that automatically, these complicated technologically advanced doors. And then now that we live in the future, like doors are still made of wood with a handle and a key. Because like a door is a regular door accomplishes like 98% of what most people need in most scenarios. And I think books sort of do that as a great piece of technology. But you also, as a creator, kind of have to have this humility of going like not everyone finds books to be the best piece of technology.

And that's also a reason possibly to use the technology, right? Like so for Daily Stoke, we put out stuff on Instagram, we put out stuff on TikTok, we put out stuff on YouTube. But I try to make sure always that my frame of reference for viewing and thinking about the world remains, you know, we're doing this podcast, but my frame of reference remains long-form content in the form of writing. And I've just found a lot of journalists, I think, have had their brains broken by Twitter. They think now in 140 and 280 characters, and that's not a lindy way of approaching the

world. So, yeah, so books are amazing. They can change your life. They change my life, and I've never had my life changed by a movie or song. So I find that that medium to be special because it even gets deeper I've noticed. I'll read a book I really like, and I'll really like

the author, but if I read a book I really like and I'll really like the author, but if I read a book and I don't like it, sometimes I'll not like reading in a way in general and I have to take some time off, right? So it's special, when it hits right, man, there's nothing, there's nothing like a book or text to really shake you up and you walk outside and you have just have a different lens. And I just never felt that with any other media. It's so weird that that would be true, given that there'd be no evolutionary,

like the book, let's say the first sort of oral story that we have reference updates back to 5,000 years. That's, I think Gilgamesh is like the first sort of story we see written down or whatever, say 5,000 years, that's too short for evolution. And yet it really is true that sort of books just hit us in a special place. It's pretty magical and inexplicable. Yeah, I think we're finding out that like civilizations also weigh older than we think. And I was reading James C. Scott against the grain last year.

And he really talked about how there was like older civilizations than like war or a rook. And the reason they came up with literacy at some point was for taxing and contracts. And these plagues would come in and destroy the city, and then they would have to start over again. So, you know, we don't really know how old civilization is, I think. But going back to your point about journalists, yeah, they're chasing clicks, they're chasing

eyeballs. They're not trying to, they're like in a trend. Like the trend of the day, they're not trying to build an idea, they're not trying to build something like a sustainable, or they're not trying to build an idea, they're not trying to build something like a sustainable or or they're not engaging with interesting ideas, they're just sort of yeah, I mean this is trash, right? Usually, I mean It's kind of interesting because you could use it to exemplify

some things right like Like Anthony Bourdain committed suicide a few years ago, right? And that was news. And when you read Ovid, he talks about how bad a breakup is for a guy. And how maybe it doesn't hurt as much for a woman. And there could be an asymmetry in human nature there where a guy really feels a breakup more than a woman. So, you know. No, I wanna go back to this journalism thing, but I was thinking about your point about civilization

being old. I was telling my four and a half year old about cave paintings, you know, that, you know, going back tens of thousands of years, we have these cave paintings, we are looking at some of them online. And then we were in Big Ben National Park a couple of weeks ago and we were on this walk.

And he found a cave paint. We were walking and there's by the hot springs, there's this hot springs you can go to on the Rio Grande River. And there was a sign. So it's a famous landmark, but there was a cave painting. And we're looking at this sort of etching done in the side of this cliff. famous landmark, but there was a cave painting and we're looking at this sort of etching done

in the side of this cliff. It could be 300 years old, it could be 5,000 years old, they didn't, I don't remember them saying. But just one of the things I love about my profession, let's not say I'm a writer, let's say I'm an artist, I'm just sort of creating a thing that doesn't need to exist, but people purchase it because it provides value for them in some way, the sort of more expansive definition of art. There's something beautiful and haunting and humbling and also inspiring about this idea that's like people have been doing this for thousands of years.

Just like people have been having this exact conversation we're having and thousands of years. Just like people have been having this exact conversation we're having for thousands of years that we're doing it remotely and it's being recorded, of course, is not Lindy, but like this is what Socrates is doing, you know, just kicking shit around. Yeah, even when you read, they talk about the good old days too.

They ancient people even had their own ancient times, which they look fondly back on. Like we're talking about right now too. So in a sense, we're part of some fractal situation here that's reoccurring throughout history. And you know what else is cool about history? It's also, we weren't alone, by the way. We're starting to see that there's lots of other human-like species like Neanderthals,

dinosaurs, and just way more diversity in type of human-like creatures that also could do painting. And there was this large diversity in the past that we lived with, these multiple types of people. We're alone right now for the first time in maybe 30,000 years when the Neanderthals died out. When I look at genetic testing or genetic modification or CRISPR, or any of these crazy technologies coming out. And I look at like Instagram and people really obsessive modifying themselves. Sometimes I wonder if we're going back to deep history and people are going to try to differentiate themselves from other humans in a way. But I don't know.

Yeah, yeah, there's a, I forget what civilization is, but there's some like 5,000 or 10,000-year-old tablet that's basically like kids these days suck, you know? And they're not as good as kids these days. And you're just like, oh yeah, we've been struggling with a lot of this for a very long time. And I think your point goes back to what we're talking about earlier, which is that there's this sort of energy

evolutionarily, or what have you, of like differentiating yourself or doing this, that probably does go to our deep history, just now we have more means of doing it, or it's accelerated or amplified by technology that we have. Yeah, and I think how to live with technology is sort of gonna be like the great debate, right?

So, yeah, here we are geographically separate, but we have this infrastructure we can talk and are we building like a new kind of localism here where you sort of identify with people in a tribe that you choose to identify with, sort of online, more than maybe that you have to live around geographically, because we are kind of localist biased, I think. Like, we do want to group. So at some point, and like, through technology, we're still clustering, too, in different ways. So I think, you know, and then the rise of a remote work too is interesting. Now you can maybe kind of choose where to live, like where do you want to live now? Like you let a lot of people may have a choice now.

And so you might see some, you know, like a bottom-up movement of people who are living either rural or in towns or maybe they want to stand a city. But I think technology giving us a choice is going to, before you had to move to a city to work, it's gonna be interesting. I think some patterns are gonna come out of that. Yeah, someone just, while we're talking, someone just sent me a New York Times piece

and the title is Books or Forever, best sellers are fleeting, which I think is a good way of describing what we're talking about, which is that the individual things can change, but sort of overall theme of things that work are always there. Yeah, and I think there is some correlation with the best sellers not lasting after after 10 years as far as say. I think Natsun Telib told me that where he was saying something about how best sellers have a huge drop off.

But you know, and there's like, if you look at sales or certain books, you will see it like a continuous sales over the years at a low level, but it's pretty consistent. And that could be an indication that it might sort of become Lindy at some point, and I call it like, which are Lindy bets

in the 20th century, right? And that's a game you can play, like what do you think we can survive, right? And best sellers kind of have a huge drop off, whereas some medium type sales books, they do well over time. Well, I wrote a book a few years ago called Perennial Cellar about the publishing industry,

which is, there's this interesting fact, which is that actually when you look at the New York Times best seller list, Perennial sellers are deliberately excluded, right? So a book that sells 10,000 copies in one week will appear on the list. And forever be a New York Times best seller. But a book that sells a thousand copies a year, or sorry, a thousand copies a week for a year,

will probably never hit the list. And then a book that sells a thousand copies a week for 30 years, will also never appear on the list, despite selling, you know, eventually hundreds and hundreds of thousands of copies. So it's pretty insane how actually the things that are the most perennial are obscured from our view. We don't actually understand how persuasive or pervasive and sustained they are

because we're always hearing the new things. There's no media incentive to go like, old thing that was popular is still roughly the same level of popular it's been for a long time. It's only the new thing. And I think that's funny both of you and I, this is what I want to talk to you about, both that you and I were subjects of New York Times profiles. The vast majority of New York Times trend pieces are about things that, you know, the trend is actually a fat, it disappears. But that like, we're being profiled as if we're the inventors of something, when in reality, we're tapping into a force that's existed for a long time.

Yeah, absolutely. I didn't invent this, you know, and I don't, you know, this has been around for a long time. And, you know, it's just, look, it takes talent to sort of, I think, post or write and get some traction. I think there's a certain sense of, you've got to have something to say, integrate it with your life, kind of figure it out. But the things we talk about maybe aren't, you know,

are definitely just part of a long stream of history that sort of gets reintroduced, you know, periodically. And like what you're saying about the New York Times by seller, like, yeah, the Oscar should probably be 10 years late. gets reintroduced, you know, periodically. And like we were saying about the New York Times by seller, like, yeah, the Oscar should probably be 10 years delayed for best picture, right? Like what's the best picture of 2011? Like what's held up in a way? Like that's what, you know, going into perennial mindset instead of just the novelty mindset's interesting. Yeah, it's fascinating. And yeah, I've got to imagine if you did,

where are they now on most, like my piece in the New York Times, I think it was 2016, you know, where were the people who were published, you know, a week before, the week before, the week before, maybe the week after, where are they now? It was probably, you could probably make good money just betting against the people and it's probably better than even odds that I would disappear shortly after the profile as opposed to be selling

more books and have a bigger sort of audience now than I did then, right? Because often what qualifies someone to be in the news or to be profiled is their novelty, not their likelihood of standing the test of time. Yeah, that's interesting. If you were to, I guess we're entering the age of big data, which you could probably actually do a research report on all the trend pieces in the New York Times,

and see, you know, and look at outcomes for the last like 30 years. And yeah, I would bet to say that it'd be rare to see people still kind of, at least at an upswing, or at least consistent with what they were doing before. But yeah, we'll get you to New York Times novelty, even though what we're talking about as something

about consistency in a way. Yeah. Yeah. So what's the last thing I want to talk to you about, you sort of talk about the idea of like a Lindy life, right? Like what are the components of a Lindy life? Maybe we start with a Lindy walk, but if one was trying to design a life based on some of these more tried and tested practices, what do you think that looks like?

Yeah, well it depends if you're, you know, also if you're an employee, right, and you've got to be somewhere for a certain amount of time, right, and that sort of, you have to think about that, right, and a lot of things you're forced to sort of sit in a chair for, you know, 10 hours or eight hours. I don't know how the Lindy that is to sort of be in this posture, right, versus staying up, walking around, or even laying around. And I think people got a taste of some quasi-freedom with the work from home experiment for the last year and a half, and you're seeing some resistance to that, because people can take a walk at their lunch break,

or they can sort of engage with different postures. So yeah, I always try to keep in mind that, people work for a living, and whenever you're talking about a framework for looking at life, that's sort of important to realize that you don't have a choice with a lot of your life, but a lengthy life, it would probably like you know food and drink that's that's old right and

that's less you know at least 500 years old you don't need to be experimenting with any newness that but if you are I would say don't make your chronic? Like don't drink a die coke every day. We don't know, right? What's going to happen? I would yeah, Lindy walks. I take a lot of walk. I try to do 20,000 steps a day. I try to engage with this. So let's go back. Let's talk about the walk. So 20,000 steps. I think a lot of people measure their walks in distance. But what about time? Like how much time are you walking a day? It's probably like two hours. That's beautiful. I mean, so you're carving out a good chunk of your day

to be outside and to be on the move. I mean, that's how I write. Like I don't know how you write, but I write when I'm walking and then I, you know, that's where this, like if we talk about psychedelics, I almost feel like it's almost like a minor, it's like a creativity hack that's almost as equal to psychedelics, which is just walking around

and just have all these ideas that come at you. And then I sit down, I just really connect them and I edit them, but the walking around is where 90% of my writing or insights or thoughts of where my production comes from. And obviously you feel good too, and I like it as well. But it's almost like a creative endeavor just to sort of take a walk.

Yeah, I mean, for me, I find that getting up and moving is one of the most productive things that I do, running or exercise as well, to go back to your point about psychedelics. I've yet to hear a single thing ever articulated to me that someone gained from psychedelics that isn't in basically every philosophy book ever written or in some levels just like basic common sense or healthy, well-adjusted personness. I feel like it goes up. I'm optimized already.

I mean, we come optimized already. Even, I would say we don't need psychedelics. You don't need these substances. I would say, you know, even coffee, which, you know, I like, I drink in the morning, but with the right amount of, you know, excitement for your day or for what you're doing, you would really need these things, like the environment would provide stimulation, right? And the environment to me is what living with green space, walking a lot of this stuff is also hard to do,

which is not have a bad boss, right? Which could ruin your life. Sure. So there's like some stuff in your control and not. And maybe you have to change your environment too to get to that. But yeah, I mean, it's not, you know, ceiling height I wrote about, which ceiling height went down after we introduced air conditioning into the United States because we wanted sort of a smaller space, the conserve energy.

But, you know, classically ceiling height has always been 11, 12 feet, and has always been important. And you realize, yeah, I think better when the ceiling's a little high. I can feel the space above my head more than actually feel the space around me, horizontally, in a way. So, I mean, there's subtle things you can do as well.

Yeah, so you go on the walk, what other things you try to do in the course of your day? I always try to exercise. I mean, I don't think, I think that we're made to exercise. That doesn't mean bodybuilding or something like some sort of reductionist exercises, but full body workout, either a run, a sport, or from doing a lift, do something that involves the whole body. Not a whole lot, but something to keep active. Relationships, friendships are really important.

They're kind of rare these days. So if you have friends hanging out with them, like I said, they didn't have their like I said, I think they didn't have their respect then, but I think they just had friends they would talk to. So I think that's a big part of my day as well. And personally right now, I don't have a schedule and I don't have a ball. So my quality of life has really increased since leaving that kind of job domain. Like, I don't, do you remember having a job? Like, you remember that world?

Yeah, you've been out of it for a while. I basically haven't had a salary since 2015, maybe. So it's starting to fade from memory what the idea of like having to answer to another person would look like and yeah you realize it's very not natural. Right like I actually noticed the first album of many big artists have a song about what it feels to work for a living like M&M, Kanye West, DC, DC, I think Boston, it goes across genres. There's always a song about working for a living.

And then after that first album, you never hear about them talk about it. I always love like first rap albums that are talking about like money and bling and cars and it's like, these are just what you imagine these things are like because you don't, you're recording this before you had a deal or what are you talking about flying private? You've never even been, you never even admitted first class what you're talking about.

But I think that's a good point. It's something that artists I think mess up, right? Which is, there's a reason that a lot of trained writers, like people who went to, like, Iowa's writer workshop or whatever, all their books, the main character of their novel is like a writer who lives in New York City who's miserable at home, right? Like, they never actually capture anything that human beings, real human beings are going through because they don't live a life that's anything close to what the vast majority of the perspective audience is like.

And so I think that is, that's a weird thing where as a creator, you have to make sure that you are living a life that tethers you to reality so that your work can remain tethered to reality as people consume it over time. Like, I think one of the reasons Seinfeld's enders, for instance, is like its friends living in New York City hating their jobs, you know, like, the shows that tap into some common part of the human experience, again, have a, I think, a more lindy aspect

than something that's rooted in, I don't a more lindy aspect than something that's rooted in, I don't know, something that's not rooted in that. You know, it's also a stressor, too, as long as stressors are good for the most part, you know, there's good stressors and there's bad stressors. Sometimes having a day job, but that isn't super-honorous. Give, you know, it's a filter, like, I can't spend my time with, you know, some academic theoretical thing that doesn't apply to anybody. I kind of have to, I've only a few hours less than a day.

I have common concerns. So I kind of have to hone in my writing. And you see that in history. You see Kafka, you see Spinoza. You see it, like this long tradition of Catholic priest scientists in the Middle Ages, who had a job, like they're a priest, but then they had time, the research, and write on the side.

And the job itself, connect as a filter in a way that keeps you grounded. No, that's right. I think the reason my works of philosophy have reached millions more people than most professional philosophers is that when I sat down to write the obstacles the way and the Daily Stoke, my premise was 99% of people not only are not interested in philosophy, they don't believe that philosophy can do anything for them. So I'm gonna write these books from the perspective

of being a solution to their problems, as opposed to an interesting academic exploration of an intellectual idea, right? And we were talking about philosophy earlier, like philosophy as theoretical abstract, interesting concepts, that's actually a relatively new invention for 2,000 years or 1,500 years. Philosophy was self-help. Philosophy was moral science as you to use your term earlier, and that's why it was much more popular in the ancient world than it is today. Nobody can pronounce the names that most people think about when they think about philosophy

these days. And most Harvard professors aren't doing anything in philosophy that's accessible or usable by your average person. So no wonder it's not relevant. Yeah, I mean, I think the media environment exposed a lot of academics, right? We kind of expected them to be this really eloquent, erudite, studying the subject matter, all of a sudden Twitter comes along and all these platforms, okay, it's an open system now, right?

Everything's flat. Let's see your talent. And it's really some of the worst content is by you know people who study this for a living And then you people like you right who do this while living or an integrated into life And it's just more it's more meaningful and people attract to it and it's yeah You're seeing the value of sort of someone who's living in the world trying to apply this versus someone who spends all their time, right, studying it, learning it, writing about it, and it's complete, and it just doesn't, doesn't make an impact, and it's in this weird bubble that, that, you know, I don't know,

nobody really liked, nobody wants to go into, or it's not attractive. And that's the last thing I thought we'd talk about, because I knew you have a sub-stack newsletter. Sometimes people get, they go, oh, you're making money from philosophy and I go, you know, college professors are paid too. They're just subsidized by the government and subsidized by, you know, unforgivable loans that they did. Unforgivable loans in bankrupts. Like, this is crazier than Bezos or any gates or whatever, evil capitalist you

want to pay. They're getting paid off of literally slavery. Yeah, no, it's like the my books cost $15,000. It costs $15,000 a quarter to go to this private university that the philosophers are teaching at. But what I think is interesting is the idea of like, okay, this is an interesting person who has interesting ideas, in your case, selling those ideas directly to people, which is for hundreds of years,

how philosophy, what it was paid directly to the philosopher who taught classes or wrote essays or gave speeches. It was a transactional business, but not in a gross sense, but it was just like a one-to-one connection often. And it strikes me that that's what I'm doing but also what you're doing with your sub stack if you want to sort of talk to people about what you do and why you like that medium. Yeah, it's a great medium. I really, you know, I like it's weekly, it's two posts a week. We cover, you know, all ideas and modernity, we mix it up with, you know, some ancient texts. I have a podcast where I interview people as well, sometimes different, sometimes they are academics, but mostly practitioners or scientists, everything from science to philosophy

to just living in a new age with novelty all around us and exploring, you know, refinement, exploring, uh, uh, Lindy and also exploring what living, you know, life working for, living too, which, which I think, um, you know, being consistent every day isn't easy. So, uh, I like it. I like the newsletter. It's, it's, it's not a book, so, or it book, but it's not a tweet either, which is kind of disposable. There's a little bit of rigorous research and analysis that's required of it. But I like it.

It's fun, I think, if people want to learn more about the Lindy Effect or my writings, you can sign up at PaulScalus.substack.com. And are you going to do a book? Yeah, yeah, I'm doing a book. I don't know what happened to you after they did an article on you, but I got an agent called, agents calling me up. And so we're starting on one right now. So yeah.

Congratulations. I'd already done my books when the profile came, but yeah, no, I know that process very well. I wish you all the best. Don't let the bastards grind you down. And remember, as we were saying, their focus is always on the newest titles, but the best books are the ones that transcend the moment they come out and offer something they come out and offer something that lasts. I always shoot to try to make something that could be placed on the nonfiction classics table at the front of a bookstore. Not something that just came out.

So that's why people care about it. I mean, you're still here, right? We're still here talking. So I hope, I hope we're doing something right. Yeah, hope and I hope when your book comes out we can we can do this again. Great great looking forward to it. Thanks Ryan. Yeah of course. Thanks for listening. We just crossed more than 50 million downloads with the Daily Stoke podcast. Thanks to you. Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Please share it with your friends. Send an episode you liked. If you liked today's episode, send it to someone you know. We're always

trying to reach more people and we appreciate it. Thank you for helping us keep the lights on here at Daily Stoic. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.