Don't use mouthwash.
Why?
It's not Lindy.
At least that's what Paul Skallas, a Chicago-born technology lawyer who goes by 'Lindyman' online, says. I was fascinated to read a New York Times profile of him titled "The Lindy Way of Living," and knew I wanted to have him on 3 Books.
In the 2012 book 'Antifragile,' the statistician and scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined "the Lindy Effect." He wrote, "For the perishable, every additional day in life translates to a shorter additional life expectancy, kind of like me and you and the cheese and our fridge, or the milk and our fridge. But for the non-perishable, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy." The Lindy Effect says that the longer something has been around, the longer it will stay around.
Paul took this heuristic and with his unique and perceptive insights along with his deep reading of ancient history came to apply it to a broad range of things, including health. He doesn't use mouthwash, a relatively new invention that kills good *and* bad bacteria. But floss—poking stuff out of your teeth—has been around for thousands of years, so that can stay.
This Lindy heuristic is a useful way to navigate our noisy modern world. As reality destabilizes with spiking AI and a fracturing media landscape we can learn and apply long-range lessons from the past to help us today. I love the unique, provocative, and often challenging 'The Lindy Newsletter,' which Lindyman publishes 2-3x weekly, to help us apply the framework to topics as diverse as urban planning, dating, medical trends, drinking trends, and even whether we should listen to health influencers.
Lindyman gave me 3 very interesting and formative books. We talk about them along with the unintended consequences of 'the woke movement,' why you should eat vegan once a week, how modern employment is destroying families, and much more. If you like to have your brain stretched like taffy and provoked by unusual thoughts this is the chapter for you.
Let's flip the page to Chapter 145 now…
Chapter 145: Lindyman leverages long-lasting lessons on living a limitless life
View full transcript here
CONNECT with LINDYMAN
LINDYMAN’s 3 Books
First book (54:48)
Second book (1:23:15)
Third book (1:45:28)
WORDCLOUD OF THE CHAPTER
Quotes
"Your haters follow your work more closely than the people who actually like you." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast
"Birthdays are best when you're really young or you're really old. It's like a bathtub distribution." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast
"You don't want to be poor in America because it goes from very first world to very third world very fast." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast
"You have to watch out for things that are modern that may disrupt natural processes." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast
"Another big thing with the Lindy effect, there has to be generational churn, it has to cross into it." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast
"There’s an inverse relationship between popularity at first and length of time it lasts." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast
"Modern employment is a bit like a prison." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast
"People have a lot of comfort in complaining about how bad things are." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast
"There is no ceiling for greed." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast
"Talent goes to where the money is, where the opportunity is, where the action is." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast
"How would you tell if a society is healthy or not? Check the suicide rates." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast
"It's very tempting to just mediate reality through a computer screen." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast
"There’s a reason why certain things survive, and the longer they survive there’s less the survivorship bias, so you should really appreciate things that have been around for a longtime." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast
"Things don’t just scale, they transform." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast
"It’s very hard for us to create new places that are enjoyable and beautiful." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast
"Text is easier to remember than video." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast
"Not a lot of people say ‘I don’t know.’" — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast
"I do 4-5 hours of directed creative work every day, no days off." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast
"Follow what stimulates you." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast
"Don’t take any advice on writing. That’s my writing advice." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast
"Always be sensitive to what excites you." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast
Show Notes
‘The Bed of Procrustes’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
