Listen to the chapter here!
Paul:
You have to watch out for things that are modern, that may disrupt something, you know, a natural process. Don't take any advice on writing. I think that's my writing advice.
There's an inverse relationship between popularity at first and length of time it lasts. I guess your haters follow your work more closely than the people who actually like you, so it takes a lot more energy to hate someone. How would you tell if a society is like healthy or not?
Check the suicide rates.
Neil:
Hey everybody, this is Neil Pasricha and welcome or welcome back to chapter 145, 45, 45 of 3Books. You are listening to the world's only podcast by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. We have an incredible 3Booker community, coast to coast, overseas, all over the world, reading your voicemails from 1-833-READALOT, your letters that you send in, which I love, which I think of as the real pride of the show, honestly.
And we talk with interesting people around the world about which 3Books most changed their lives, speaking to people like Nick Sweetman, who was our guest in chapter 144, David Sedaris, who was our guest in chapter 18, which we just recently released, and James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces, who we also just released as a classic chapter, Every New Moon, Every Full Moon from 2018 to 2040, 333 chapters. This is a joy and a pleasure and a treat. I feel super lucky to be here, to be talking to all of you.
So we always talk about one of our values, and then we read a letter, and then we talk about our guest, who, by the way, today it's a fascinating gentleman named Lindyman, Lindyman. His real name is Paul Skallas, but he goes by Lindyman online to his 129,144 followers as of right now, where he applies this heuristic of the Lindy effect, popularized by Nassim Taleb's 2012 book, Anti-Fragile. The longer something's been popular, the longer it's gonna stay popular.
That length of life to this point is one heuristic to see how long something's gonna last. The longest Broadway musical is probably gonna last longer than the one that just opened, and on and on it goes. The Lindyman has popularized this ancient wisdom being applied to kind of modern scenarios.
More on him in just a second. So, like I said, we always start with the value, and so the value I wanna talk about for chapter 145 is you have the right to dip, the right to skip, and the right to quit. I think so many of us, when it comes to reading, we're taught with the sort of, you know, industrial revolution-invented education system that you must start a book, read it from front to back, and then finish it.
If you are assigned The Great Gatsby in 10th grade, or Lord of the Flies in 10th grade, or Hamlet in 10th grade, those were the three books I was assigned, you gotta read them all. And you might even analyze them chapter by chapter with discussion groups or book reports. And so you kind of are taught to read that way.
However, if you plumb the deep archives of your mind for how you flip through picture books when you were a young lad or lassie, you know, you just flip through picture books. Sometimes you ate the picture books. Sometimes you started at the back or read them upside down.
And the book was an extension of your curiosity. You certainly felt comfortable, I think, to dip into them, to skip past certain parts, and quit certain parts. So many people over the seven years now I've been running three books have said to me, I have a problem quitting books, or I can't quit, or I, you know, I have a thing in my head or my mind that tells me I have to read the whole book.
We gotta drop that. We gotta drop that baggage. Because the problem is when you get stuck in a book that is suddenly uninteresting or becomes uninteresting to you, you let it sort of sit and fossilify and atrophy on your bedside table.
And that book becomes a brick that blocks all future books, right? Like you can't get another book into your system until this one's gone. And so that's why I think that we as readers, in order to read better, in order to read, you know, more just in general, we have to remember we have the right to dip, the right to skip, the right to quit.
Like Lindyman's three books were a 44-page pamphlet of aphorisms, which were wonderful to skip through and dip through. Then a gigantic 423-page book, Anti-Fragile by Nassim Taleb. You can kind of predict that one coming.
And then I won't reveal it right now, but like then a 1,200-page book. The 1,200-page book was interesting. Very.
I have lots of folded pages, lots of highlight pages, but to think that I read that cover to cover would be very false. I read the table of contents. Then I read the index.
Then I jumped through some sections I was interested in. Then I kind of started from the beginning again. And that was a wonderful way to eat that.
I'm not gonna eat a slice of pizza from the tip to the crust every time. Sometimes I go for that bite of green olive and pepperoni hanging on the side, you know what I mean? So you gotta follow your interest.
That is a better way to read. It helps you read more, helps you read better, and helps you not judge yourself when you quit a book. It's fine to quit a book.
You're not quitting it. You're just making space for the gem that follows. All right?
Let's remember that. That's the value for chapter 145. Now the letter.
So many good letters coming in these days. If you have a thought on the show, please leave it as a review on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, or a comment on YouTube. I read them all.
I read one at the start of every single show. Like this one. From Meredith Frasier.
I have a daughter, Gracie, she writes, who is a senior in high school. Man, for the past decade, you've been a huge part of our life, unbeknownst to you. After we moved from Kentucky to Florida 11 years ago, I took a job as a program manager at a nonprofit.
I worked with after-school programs. I brought STEM into low-income areas. I always talked about the importance of embracing failure as part of a STEM education.
So much of science and engineering is figuring out ways something doesn't work before you have success. At the same time, I was starting a professional library of books that educational professionals could use to embrace failure, but also find wonder in every day. Needless to say, your books were part of that collection.
I started with the Book of Awesome, then I started speaking at educational after-school conferences, and I always mentioned your books, and I soon downloaded the app of Awesome on my phone. My daughter and I would check the app religiously every day on the way to school. We were sad when it went away.
We decided to start our own list, and now, a decade later, our list of awesome things has been stored on three iterations of cell phones and now contains hundreds of awesome things, most of them rooted in a specific moment in time. That list is truly one of my most prized possessions. As a graduation gift, I am making my daughter a book from her own awesome things and adding some pictures with the memories.
I would also love to give her a signed copy of the Book of Awesome, as it has had such a huge impact on how we both see the world every day. Thank you for being part of our lives for over a decade. From Meredith Fraser, F-R-A-Y-S-U-R-E, who said I could read her letter on the air, and of course, when I read people's letters or their comments or their letters or their reviews, I do always mail them a signed book to say thanks.
So, no worries, the signed Book of Awesome is on the way as a graduation present. Side note, the app of Awesome was super fun. Bonneville Labs in Australia reached out to me.
They were fans of 1000awesomethings.com, and they made the app for free. And kudos to them for making a free app that popped up with a new awesome thing every day. For the next four generations of iPhones, they just updated it for free and kept it going.
But then eventually, apps need maintenance and time and effort, and it just faded away. And I didn't... I knew a lot of people liked the app and were using it, but I wasn't in a position at that time to spend a big amount of money and make a big app, especially because I had the blog, the books, the calendars, I was like, there's lots of ways to get these.
Lots of them are free to get these awesome things. And even today now, 16 years later, oh my gosh, is it 16 years? 17 years now.
After starting 1000awesomethings in 2008, I still, to this day, write a brand new awesome thing every single day. And I email it out to a loyal legion of global fans. I post them on Facebook still, facebook.com slash neilpassariccia. I post them on Instagram, slash neilpassariccia is my Instagram story every day. So if you want my awesome thing, it's still going out to something like a couple hundred thousand people every single night. I do worry about running out.
I mean, like 17 years now, it's a lot. Plus the books and the calendars and everything. But somehow, like always, people keep sending them to me.
When people do, I credit them with their name. I think I'm writing probably 75, 80% myself still. Then 20, 25% are coming from people around the world.
So it's been a joy that I've been able to do this. And my list of awesome things is also a prized possession. Keep your list of awesome things sacred and close.
Well, one guy that keeps lots of lists is of course, Mr. Lindyman, L-I-N-D-Y-M-A-N. In the 2012 book, Anti-Fragile by Nassim Taleb, Mr. Taleb, a statistician and scholar, created something called the Lindy effect. He said, 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 in our fridge, or the milk in our fridge. But for the non-perishable, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy. For example, a play that has run on Broadway for five years will likely stick around for five more.
And he says in Anti-Fragile, the robustness of an item is proportional to its life. Well, Paul Skallas, a Chicago born technology lawyer, really latched on to the popularity of this heuristic and came to apply it to a broad range of things, including health. He's like, don't use mouthwash, it kills good and bad bacteria and actually creates higher cancer rates.
But floss, poking stuff out of your teeth has been around for thousands of years. So this heuristic is a really helpful way to look at the world. And I have subscribed to the Lindy newsletter.
He writes two to three long form pieces every week. You'll hear in the interview him explain how exactly he does this, which I find interesting of itself. Focus and time is kind of the shorthand.
And he applies this heuristic to so many different ways. He applies it to cities, to urban planning. He applies it to dating.
He applies it to medical trends, health trends, health influencers. And his original thinking really knows no bounds. I was fascinated to read a New York Times profile of Paul Skallas, who goes by Lindyman, which has the title The Lindy Way of Living.
And it was a very popular New York Times profile, so I reached out to him and Paul very kindly agreed to be on the show. He gave me three very good, very interesting, formative books. We talk about them at length, along with a lot of other unique and interesting ideas, like what's happening in the world on about 12 different levels.
He's a big, dynamic, confident, outspoken, and gregarious mind that reminds me of Tim Urban, our guest in chapter 22 of the show. So if you like to have your brain stretched like taffy and provoked with unusual and interesting thoughts, this is the chapter for you. Please enjoy chapter 145 with the one and only Lindyman.
Let's flip the page and get into it now. You've tweeted 16 times in the last 24 hours, by my count.
Paul:
Did I? Yeah.
Neil:
Yeah, 129,144 followers. And the last one I grabbed before I came downstairs to record with you is, you tweeted, not worried, it'll grow back.
Paul:
That's a, somebody said they're going to eat my liver because I criticized some architecture and I said, it'll just grow back, right?
Neil:
But yeah, I like that you engage with your haters. This is like a new trend. You know, Bryan Johnson's always like tweet at replying his haters with like, you know, a mean spirited comeback, not mean spirited, but like, he kind of fights fire with fire.
Paul:
I guess your haters follow your work more closely than the people who actually like you. So it takes a lot more energy to hate someone.
Neil:
Oh, that's interesting. And then at 11, 10 AM this morning, you tweeted, the end result of 15 years of identity politics in all caps and DEI is raising white consciousness in America, period. Enter, enter. Congrats.
Paul:
Yeah. I mean, it's, that's what it looks like to me, what happened with a lot of the, that Trump just rolled into office with Elon Musk. And it's.
And Bezos. And the sort of white working class wave, he kind of, you know, and then also some Latin wave. And it just seems like the reaction to the woke movement was this other group of people, people who are, you know, mostly race blind recently were kind of the ones who were the odd man out of all this, like pushing this, this certain political agenda.
You know, I don't think the woke movement is like necessary evil or like, how do you define woke movement? I would say just like a preferential treatment to people who are maybe not part of the majority population trying to help out certain groups, but yeah. But in the end result, I think this other group sort of became said, well, we're the one grouping sort of excluded or perceived that way.
So all of a sudden now we're going to look around and, you know, essentially that's what Elon Musk has been tweeting about the last six months or a year.
Neil:
You, you're saying that all those people that he was surrounded by when he's inaugurated, and we're speaking on January 21st, 2025. And so his inauguration was literally yesterday.
Paul:
Right.
Neil:
You know, Elon Biden's last day was, I guess the day before. So that's, that's the context for your tweets. But you're saying like everyone in the front row is all white, white consciousness.
Paul:
Yeah, no, I just think it brought, he brought up this, this group that, you know, may, may not have been as racially conscious maybe 20, 30 years ago, but is, is now. And yeah, it's a reaction to a cultural trend that's been going on for a while. That's unexpected.
I think unexpected things you have to watch out for, especially when you're pushing, pushing certain agendas.
Neil:
Yeah. Yeah. And that's why I love your thoughts.
Cause they kind of zig and zag. Cause then yesterday at around lunchtime, this is around when we're speaking. So I'm going to get to your 24 hour timeline here.
You tweeted. I thought this was interesting. You tweet.
And by the way, 125,000 people have, have, have liked your share of this thing or viewed it. You said Biden's presidency felt intense, very Roman empire esque opens the border completely. For four years, let's an ally commit atrocities and genocide finances, a small country's military against a huge neighbor prices on homes and food double in a span of 18 months, confusion over succession and late last minute replacement.
Paul:
Yeah. I mean, it felt like something you'd read like a Roman empire emperor happens 2000 years ago. Just these massive changes that foreign policy with, you know, utilizing allies with middle Eastern sort of, sort of exterminationist war going on that, that seems to not be in line with Geneva conventions or anything.
And you're talking about, you're talking about Gaza and then, and then this like major serious war in Ukraine and Russia where, you know, hundreds of thousands of people are dying. And then at home you have, yeah, these prices, prices are doubling for homes. Coffee's $8.
I'm not saying it's his fault or he kind of engineered all this, but I'm just saying it's, it felt like a very historic times. And it felt like the United States wasn't just a nation. We were really like an empire and things were happening.
And yeah, it just, it just felt like very serious to me and I, it's kind of an underrated presidency. And I think it ended with Biden doing all these like pardons, especially proactive pardons, where nobody, you know, did anything wrong, but he's still parting them. So nobody can prosecute them like Fauci or his family.
Just felt like an odd non-normal presidency.
Neil:
Yeah. That's funny that you mentioned that because the tweet I was, the last year I was going to quote, you had tweeted at 12:17 PM yesterday. The presidential pardon is fascinating.
It's a holdover from the English monarchy, but the founders explicitly gave to the president. No other democratic leader has this type of discretion. There's no congressional veto of it.
It's interesting seeing Biden really flex it like no other president before has, it will play a bigger role in the future as politics get more divided, constant jailing and setting free political opponents. And of course you tweeted that before today, you know, Donald Trump just freed all the, all the January 6th insurrectionists via presidential pardon. Like the last thing the other guy does is pardon.
The first thing the new guy does is pardon.
Paul:
Yeah. It's, and it's, it's kind of an, it's kind of a serious kind of power. Like there's other, other countries have their presidents have parting power, but there's checks and balances.
I have to go through their Senate or they have to go through the judicial arena or they can't give out proactive pardons. But the American president has this almost King like power where it hasn't been seriously used. I mean, I think it was used with Nixon.
I think Gerald Ford was Nixon. I think generally some presidents pardon their friends after the administration or some tokens. But now I think it's in play as more of a, kind of like a serious executive maneuver that we haven't seen before.
And as politics get more divided, it's going to become, it's become, it might become weird. Like we might, somebody might go to jail and then somebody get pardons four years later and then thousands of people, this might happen to.
Neil:
Right. And we've seen that in history over time. Someone gets exiled, then somebody brings them back and Nelson Mandela goes to jail and then he is free.
You know, Malcolm X or Martin Luther King. We've seen this over and over. But what you do is you point out that Biden has pardoned over 8,000 people.
And the next closest president is like 2000 or sub.
Paul:
Yeah.
Neil:
You, as you always do so wonderfully, and this is your name, Lindy man, put it in a longterm historical context with the British monarchy or, you know, a Russ or Roman empire.
And that longterm historical contextualization is, we're going to come back to that over and over again. And with your three books, which I'm very excited to dive into, I've read all three of them to the extent I could pattern language.
Paul:
That's a big one.
Neil:
This is 1187 pages, but I did my best. And so I love the books you've chosen. I can't wait to talk about them.
And interestingly, you know, Paul slash Lindy man, I'm going to, I'm going to stick with Lindy man. I'm going to stick with Lindy man. The way I met you, as I think a lot of people did probably is, is your, is your June 17th, 2021 big feature profile in the New York times, which was called the Lindy way of living.
And so I thought I'd just, before we get into your three quotes about reading that I picked out, then your three formative books, I thought I might just read back to some paragraphs from that feature. And just to see if now with the benefit of another thousand days, another three and a half years since then, if these things still reflect your current beliefs, Also, maybe they misquoted you back then, you know, back then. So the sub headline is a technology lawyer named Paul Scalas argues.
We should be gleaning more wisdom from antiquity. I guess you're 40. Now, if you're 36, then yeah.
Did you do a 40th birthday?
Paul:
No, I, I think birthdays are best when they're like, when you're really young and when you're really old, it's like a bathtub distribution. And in the middle, like, we'll just, we'll just get to the, you know, when we really appreciate it, then we can celebrate it.
Neil:
That is a great line. And then you say he's an evangelist for wisdom derived from the distant past. Like say, skip the mouthwash. And then they quote you.
Everyone tells you to do it. Your breath is clean. It feels like the right thing.
Said Scalas during a zoom call from Deville, France, where he moved from New York last fall to write out the pandemic. And then you read about higher cancer rates for people who use it, how it destroys good and bad bacteria. And you go, you're right.
There was no mouthwash back then.
Paul:
Yeah. So some advancements like for bad breath actually can harm, you know, destroy all like the good and bad bacteria in your, in your mouth. And it's something I don't use.
And I'm not against modern medicine. I think there's great advancements. Brushing your teeth and toothpaste is great.
It's just, you have to watch out for things that are modern that may disrupt something, you know, natural process.
Neil:
So, so mouthwash is not Lindy.
Paul:
Right.
Neil:
I can say.
Right. But, but we can say that like floss is Lindy.
Paul:
Right.
Neil:
Flossing is probably an extension of like sticking your fingers in your teeth or a stick in your teeth.
Paul:
Right.
Neil:
Toothpicks are very Lindy.
Paul:
Yes.
Neil:
Yeah. But toothpaste or fluoride.
Paul:
Right.
Neil:
But, but I'll tell you straight up, Paul, I had burning mouth syndrome last year for six months. I went to multiple doctors and dentists at the end of it all.
Turns out I was allergic to an ingredient in Sensodyne toothpaste.
Paul:
Oh, okay. I think when you do a Lindy like analysis, you also, you know, how, how old is toothpaste now where it's over a little bit over a hundred years. And generally we're not seeing any like problems from it.
Or we, you know, like with cigarettes, you know, that came and went in the 20th century. Although nicotine seems to always come back now with like Zen patches or Zen.
Neil:
David Chappelle was on SNL doing a 17 minute monologue two days ago, smoking cigarettes. So it's not like it's gone, but to your point, we know what it does. We, and, and, and, you know, there's a heuristic here at play, which is the longer something's lasted, the longer it's likely to last in the future.
Paul:
Right.
Neil:
And that is, as you've helped popularize and Nassim Taleb has helped coin. And of course the famous thing, it was the comedians back at Lindy's diner in the sixties helped create.
There's this Lindy effect at play, right?
Paul:
It's a great heuristic for examining things that have been around. You know, if you want to be super safe, don't eat food that's less than 500 years old or liquids less than a thousand years old.
Neil:
No more whey protein.
Paul:
Like, yeah, probably the pathways matter too. Like you have these people taking supplements all the time where it's this like mega dose of this distilled ingredient that you're, you know, we'd never really had. Uh, and I think, I think they've done, you know, studies on B-12 supplementation and leads to like lung cancer in certain people.
So, I mean, you're not saying that.
Neil:
Johnson, uh, Bryan Johnson famously went rapamycin for five years and told all his supporters to do it and then went off of it saying, Oh my gosh, after five years of analysis, I realized that dramatically lowers longevity.
Paul:
Yeah. I mean, he just kind of looks at our study and then if the study says it's beneficial, he just takes it and put it in his pro protocol. But I don't think he's actually looking at, you know, he, we don't have studies on a lot of the stuff that he's doing for longterm use, you know, which is, you know, so it could be good, you know, in the studies for like the year or two that they tested it.
But, um, over the lifetime of a person that's, they don't have studies for that yet. So I think what he does is kind of, he mixes in a lot of like Lindy applicable, like exercise every day, try to get to a hunter gather type movement, um, which is very important, which most people don't have, or don't get into a day. I think he eats mostly vegetarian.
Um, I think he, so you think he does, he tries to get enough sleep, doesn't eat right before bed, which, because digestion, he only eats from eight to 11 am. Right. So digestion interrupts, uh, good sleep.
All of these are like pretty good, uh, Lindy tested ways. And then he'll just like take out his blood plasma and replace it with like, I forgot when you play some, some, some, some substance. I thought it was his son's blood.
No, he did that too, but he actually replaced all his plasma with some other substance. I can't, uh, I can't remember the name of it, but I mean, he'll just do things that are little. Um, and I think he, I think it's going to, his protocol is going to get crazier in the future.
I think you might start like replacing organs. Um, but generally, so I think he's mixing in a lot of, I said, it's not really a health movement. It's a longevity movement.
And there's two different things, which is you're taking an, you're taking risks that nobody else has, nobody else has done before. And you kind of have to kind of have to watch out for that because, um, you know, body's a complex system. Um, we already have, uh, foods and type of movement patterns that we know are healthy.
But if you want to really extend lifespan to 120, 140, or never die, you're going to have to take, um, extreme measures that come with a side effects that, uh, we don't know what's going to happen.
Neil:
and it's amazing your commentary on the health industry and the health influence industry, because it's a really, uh, giant bulb, this thing. And most of our faces every day, like I can't go on YouTube without it starting with a diet.
[Paul]
It's everywhere.
Neil:
Ozempic's on the front. Ozempic's on the front page of every single thing. You know, the opening joke at the golden globes, like last week is that welcome to the nation's largest gathering of Ozempic.
We know things that are popular with celebrity and with wealth filters down. It always has. So like, we're seeing it everywhere.
It's the number one drug in the world. Right. Um, and in fact, and in fact, I wasn't sure when to bring this up, but I may as well.
Now it's also your commentary on, uh, from March 9th, 24, where you wrote the unbearable sadness of the health influence. I love the title. I love the title.
Um, that was the one that Luigi, um, the alleged assassin of the United health CEO DMG about, right. That was, uh, yeah, I want to open up the Luigi conversation. I have some notes written to provoke you to, or I can hear your perspective on above.
Well, my, I was just going to read the DM actually. So, cause you wrote a piece about this on GQ. Of course began one of the most emailed articles on GQ.
Interestingly, you announced it on Twitter. I thought in an interesting way, you said I've written up for GQ, but no link provided.
[Paul]
Yeah.
Neil:
So I had to, I had to go Google it. You know, you made me do like an extra second of work and you said, you got this DM. Here's the DM from Luigi that you published to you.
And by the way, Luigi, for those that don't know, no, no, no reason anyone should, he only followed like a handful of people. Like he didn't follow that many people. He followed like Tim Urban.
He followed like, you know, health influencers, some of them, he was a ripped guy. Um, and he also paid for your newsletter as I do. I think you have a really wonderfully interesting, unique thinking newsletter.
It's wonderful. I recommend people. I know you probably have thousands and thousands of subscribers.
He was a paid subscriber of your newsletter.
[Paul]
Yeah. Yeah. He was, he was following me paying for the newsletter, all of it.
Neil:
And he actually, he actually commented on Bryan Johnson to you. It baffles me so much that anyone could possibly follow Bryan Johnson. The dude just asterisk looks asterisk eerie period.
Next paragraph. I'm a fairly rational, non-superstitious person. But even when I look at the guy, it's immediately obvious.
He's a literal vampire period, pale gaunt avoids the sun dead. Look in his eyes feasts on the blood of his own son, new paragraph, last paragraph. How can you be obsessed with health and longevity, but literally avoid the source of all life slash energy on earth in brackets, the sun question mark.
[Paul]
Yeah, I think that's a common kind of response I got from that article or what people have. Um, I think sort of Bryan Johnson's is the leading sort of longevity, uh,
Neil:
but you didn't reply.
[Paul]
No.
Cause I think he called himself, he said, I'm fairly rational. And he said, yes, I'm fair, which is, I don't know. It's one of those red flags you hear, like maybe you're on a date with a girl and she says, I'm a rational person.
And then like the next two years is going to be a bad time for you.
Neil:
So why is that? Why is it? I don't know. I don't know.
[Paul]
It's just, it's just, I think if you're, if you tell yourself that you're, if you tell somebody you're rational, you might not be, uh, it's just a weird, it's just an odd way. It's like, it's like screaming something. It's just, I am calm.
Yeah, I'm calm. So it's just like, Oh, you're not rational. Cause you just have to tell me that.
Yeah. It's just, you rational people don't, don't really say that.
Neil:
What percent of your DMS do you reply to?
[Paul]
Probably like half, half of them are.
Neil:
Okay. It wasn't like he ghosted him, but, but then when you, when, you know, December 10th, 2024 comes out, your phone's blowing up because it comes out that he follows you.
[Paul]
Right.
Neil:
And he's just been arrested. I mean, I'm assuming that's a pretty complex suite of emotions.
[Paul]
Yeah. I mean, it's, um, I was, that's like a weird, that was a really weird day. Cause it's like, does this guy have like a bag, my tweets like in his, in his bag or something?
Like, is how crazy is this going to get? Cause the story blew up so much. It wasn't just a normal story.
[Neil]
Well, Tim Urban tweeted, Tim Urban tweeted, um, just, um, he tweeted just on that first. And then the second tweet, his second tweet was very much not the point of my book.
[Paul]
Right.
[Neil]
Cause, cause he had, that guy had said he loved Tim Urban's book. Tim Urban, our past guest in chapter 22. I guess you must've felt like some part of your work was an inspiration.
But like to, to this guy who's done this really kind of outlandish act, you know?
[Paul]
So yeah, I think he was just into, I think it was young. He's like 26 or 24. Um, so I, you know, he's in this online world of like piecing together and he was like, uh, Ivy league student.
So very smart.
[Neil]
Yeah. He went to two degrees from Penn.
[Paul]
And, um, so I think he's just into this, into the wellness and, um, into, uh, questioning certain things of modern life. And, you know, um, so he's into a lot of social science writers, a lot of people who are also, um, into that world. Um, but there's nothing I've written that sort of would, would, I don't know, lead someone to do anything like this.
I found it very strange. Cause I'm very much a pretty vanilla, especially when you consider what else is going on in X, especially now, you know?
[Neil]
Yeah. I do. Interestingly, like to me, it was interesting because before they caught him and identified him, you had written an email newsletter that I got, like I subscribed to.
And it was about the rise of assassinate, you know, you had pointed out, cause you always do. You couch it in, you couch it in antiquity. You're saying historically the elites and the aristocrats have always feared for their own safety.
You're like, you had said, this is why Zuckerberg pays 32 million and a has eight security guys. And he's learning MMA. Like, you know, when you're worth $200 billion and you're wearing a $905,000 watch to announce no more censorship on your platforms, you know, you are well aware that you have, there's a, Yeah.
[Paul]
A bit of a dynamic here. You know what I'm saying? Yeah.
And especially in America, which is this exception, which is elite send their kids, you know, they go there, they walk the streets of Manhattan, LA, you know, go to colleges, college campuses, you're safe. Like nobody's going to kidnap you. Uh, rich people don't really live behind these gates like they do in other countries.
Um, which is, you know, you gotta worry about, I mean, Kim Kardashian got basically kidnapped in Paris and got robbed in a hotel room. And you generally don't see that in America. And for a lot of reasons.
Number one, America's got very strong kidnapping laws, like you're going to go at least, you know, prison for at least 20 to life for any type of kidnapping, which is a big deal. Yeah. And regular people in America don't necessarily hate people who are rich.
Like it's it's like they achieve the American dream. And nobody's nobody's it's just not in like the character of the country to to sort of like there's a lot of rhetoric, but just on the street, there's not a lot of people, you know, like a South American country of like kidnapping or assassination business leaders. Yeah, there is for some presidents.
And we saw with Trump recently or Reagan or but but not with just like general political opponents or CEOs. So it's this exception in America, which, you know, it's this thing that might fall because it's not really Lindy, right? It's not really, you know, the rich and powerful.
[Neil]
Well, they're starting to release all these reports saying, you know, and I feel bad for these people, but they're saying like, you know, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's got broken into while they're at the game. Joe Burrell's house got broken into while he was at the game. Right.
It's like you're starting to see Elon Musk, like everyone's doubling their security. Obviously, the CEO was assassinated.
[Paul]
So I think with Zuckerberg, it's like he's like a real student of history. He's upset. He really reads a lot about Roman times.
And and to the point was, I think he might be the guy that says, look, I know this. This has happened throughout history. I have lots of security.
I travel in a convoy. I train MMA literally for self-defense, not because I want to be a better person or I need help with exercise. He literally could, you know, could be a practical measure.
So so he might he might see it as just and that's why he's doing all this in a way. So, yeah, there could be could be a wave coming. America stops being an exception.
You never really know. I mean, I think America is an interesting place.
[Neil]
So do you plan to move back? I guess you do still live there.
[Paul]
I know I still live there. Yeah, it's great.
[Neil]
And is your background is your background American look generationally or no?
[Paul]
My parents come from Greece. So your parents are Greek.
[Neil]
OK. Yeah. So and my parents are India and Nairobi, Kenya.
But my mom from Kenya is Indian.
[Paul]
Right.
[Neil]
A generation above, you know, before the partition.
Can I go back to the article?
[Paul]
Absolutely.
[Neil]
OK.
No breakfast, he said. Breakfast was a note. This is the New York Times article.
Breakfast was unknown in early history. Rome, Byzantium, ancient Greece. Breakfast wasn't really a thing.
Paul Skallas has written about the anti breakfast positions of Plutarch and Thomas Aquinas.
[Paul]
Yeah. You know, breakfast, like this huge breakfast of cereals and what we think is more of like a creation of like 150 years of marketing. Generally, you had a little bit of food and then you go and work throughout the day and then you'd then you'd have your first meal around lunch or a you know, you get the benefits of fasting.
[Neil]
So I think you do this. You're a you're a. Yeah.
I just 16, eight person or whatever.
[Paul]
Yeah. I just generally have a cup of coffee. But the croissants here are so good that it's sometimes it's hard to resist.
[Neil]
Well, you know, it's funny. I said this to my wife, Leslie, who has been a co-host on the show a bunch of times and to my barista. Her name is Nicole Bersafi.
And both of them said that can't be true. And Nicole said she said she's from Lebanon. She's she's she's I'm Arab.
The Byzantine Empire always a breakfast. Aren't we part of antiquity to say my family goes back 11 on thousands of years, the imperialist nations that, quote unquote, influenced the way we didn't have any say over my culture to modern day. Breakfast is always in part of it.
They have little pieces of fruit, tomatoes, cut up some cheese, a little bit of bread, a little bit of tea or Turkish coffee. She's 29. She's a coffee shop or she's a writer.
My wife is like, can you ask him, like, which parts of history you take from and which ones you don't? Because, of course, yeah, you can also say you can do you know. So how do you.
[Paul]
Yeah, it's it's not really like a scientific thing. I mostly focus on the Greco Roman world, southern Europe. That's not to say that people didn't eat bread, you know, something in the morning, but generally it was pretty light and it wasn't this full meal.
[Neil]
Certainly it wasn't Fruit Loops.
[Paul]
Yeah. Or, you know, this big spread.
So, yeah, it's not something it's not something that just comes up like a meal like today is.
[Neil]
So that's the hard part of your job is you have to kind of pick, you know, because I heard you say, I don't advocate bloodletting. But of course, I've seen you write and say donating blood is actually really good for you. So it's kind of like there's lessons from the past, but you also have to be quite the interpretation of them is the is is challenging or it's like the only like it works.
[Paul]
But the problem is that's the only thing they knew that works. So they would just do that with everyone and then they would hope the placebo effect would kind of the problem with ancient medicine is, you know, they didn't have it was all about prevention and was, you know, if you got really seriously injured, you're in trouble. So the goal is to just, you know, treat food as medicine, treat exercise as medicine and just stay away from kind of really bad results.
But in a way, that's the philosophy we should have today, which is you shouldn't go to the hospital unless you seriously need to or something really bad happens because you're going to all of a sudden you're going to get on pharmaceuticals, you're going to get dependent on things and, you know, bad things can kind of happen in clusters. So even just that concept of preventative medicine is foreign to us today.
[Neil]
Yeah, I mean, it's not it's not the model we treat, we treat, we treat, we treat ailments, right? Like we've paid officers when we're sick, we should be paying them when we're healthy.
[Paul]
Yeah, that's true.
[Neil]
You know, two more paragraphs, because this is going to relate directly to everything else. Here's the next quote. Mr. Scalise is proponent for a lifestyle based on a relatively obscure theory called the Lindy Effect, from which he's derived his Twitter handle, Lindyman, his sub stack, the Lindy newsletter, his podcast, Lindy Talk, which I don't think you're doing anymore, and this practical philosophy of health, exercise, diet, and consumer choice. The Lindy Effect can be traced to a 1964 article in the New Republic called Lindy's Law by historian Albert Goldman, who describes the bald-headed, cigar-chomping know-it-alls who foregather every night at Lindy's, the diner on Broadway known for its cheesecake. And they postulated that since comedians have an exhaustible supply of good material, since they don't have forever comedy, therefore the life expectancy of a television comedian is proportional to the total amount of their exposure on TV, on the medium. They've been on forever, they can keep being on forever.
If they've only got one five-minute set on Carson, you know, we don't know if they could do it again. That's the principle, right? So, you know, Jerry Seinfeld, 70, he just played two sold-out shows here in Toronto at Scotiabank, you know, that's where like the Raptors play, you know, and he's 70.
So, and he's been doing this since Carson. So like this guy, he's, you know, this is a long-term comedian, whereas if you go on the Netflix comedy thing, like all these people are, you know, all these people are new.
[Paul]
His show is probably a better example, which is, you know, his show's still being played while so many other shows have just gone away, you know, and you still have these. And it crosses generations, which is another big thing with the Lindy effect. It has to, there has to be churn, generational churn, and it has to cross into it, which is why somebody asked me, is Bitcoin Lindy?
It's just, we haven't, hasn't really existed long enough for more, you know, generations to come after, which is how we get all of this, like these ancient literature, these old books, they were just handed over from person to person each generation. And, you know, somebody said, okay, this is valuable. And then next generation said, this is valuable.
And so there's some quality there that makes it timeless. But that takes, you know, a lot of time and we're kind of being assaulted by tons of media and works now. So it's going to be not a many things survive.
So you can kind of trick yourself into thinking that there's a lot of kind of Lindy works happening right now. And, you know, for the future generations won't care about any of this, really, it's happening right now.
[Neil]
Well, I, I relate to this because I, my first book got popular in 2010. So I developed a hundred thousand person following on Facebook. Those people have grown up with me, but they're now I can see from the messages and so on.
They're in the older generation. And then I have less followers on Instagram where I have 35,000 followers. Cause I, that generation doesn't cross with me as much.
And then on Tiktok, like I got like one, I got like three, I don't even have Tiktok up because I can see generationally that each of these social media medium has lasted precisely one generation, precisely one generation. Whereas YouTube, maybe you could argue is actually Lindy, you know,
[Paul]
YouTube has replaced television as, as actually the kind of homepage of the internet. And there's also a funny thing happening, which is a lot of old web pages are being deleted. So if you go to these old Wikipedia pages a lot of, there's a lot of dead links.
If you go to these articles from blogs, like they don't exist anymore.
[Neil]
That's why they're all looking to the way back machine.
[Paul]
Yeah. So like there's, yeah, people, people think, okay, we have the way back that's going to preserve it, but that's not really how that's not really how things work. How things work is one person, you know, give something to another person and that person sees value.
And then that person hands it over and, you know, it goes through people. It's just not really like frozen into like a website, you know, the library of Alexandria burned down, but the is, we didn't really lose anything there because everything that was valuable, w
[Neil]
What year, what can you give us some context for those of us who aren't as, I think that was just like a, is this the Roman empire like 2000 years ago?
[Paul]
Yeah.
[Neil]
This is this a little bit before that was to have said to have contained at that time, all known written rights.
[Paul]
But, but the thing is, it's not like, it's not like everything was there. Things are scattered around the ancient world. There were copies everywhere.
You know, this was just one place that held a large number of those works. So did we really lose anything? I don't know.
Things were already being copied everywhere. And they went through the, you know, the Byzantium, they went through the Arab conquest and people sort of took Aristotle. They took Plato.
They took all these classics that we have stories like the Odyssey and kept copying them and transmitting them. So if they're truly valuable people, people preserve them, people hand them over, they make multiple copies.
[Neil]
Yeah. Okay. Generational churn has been introduced as a concept of importance for the rest of our conversation, which means something must survive across generations.
Hence the definition of a book being a classic, for example, which is why that phrase modern classic should not really exist. Right. Because you can't just label Roald Dahl a modern classic until he's lasted, you know, my parents and my kids kind of thing, you know.
[Paul]
It's also a, like, I think I spoke to Nassim Taleb about this, actually the most, there's an inverse relationship between popularity at first and, and length of time at last. So it's something that's very, very popular. Like a lot of sports biographies are very popular, you know, popular, or your social science book of the year is very popular.
It sells millions of copies. Those things don't actually tend to last. He told me that things that mostly last have, are kind of like a medium to low medium popularity that just consistently books get bought at that, at that sort of lower level, where it's just, you have to break through the first filter.
It has to be somewhat popular, can't be completely obscure. And it just sort of has to kind of, kind of continue at this, at this certain kind of lower level pace, rather than the whole, when we sold 20 million copies, cause this was the topic of the day and then nobody reads this anymore. So.
[Neil]
That's interesting. Like the longest running show on Broadway right now is Wicked, which has been there 20 years. Well, I've been to New York five or 10 times in the 20 years. I don't remember hearing about it at first, but now of course it's everywhere and likely will, I'm sure now with the movie, they'd be on Broadway kind of another 20 years.
Right. But when it started, it was probably like the U2 play Spider-Man was like the biggest thing headline. Okay.
You have three quotes on reading. I'm not going to, I normally would ask you for your comment on them, but I really want to get into your three most formative books. I'm just going to read them from August 12th, 2024.
You wrote a famous newsletter on your Lindy newsletter called don't give up on reading just yet. But you said up until recently, everyone read novels, men, women, it didn't matter. You then quote a Nielsen statistic saying that now men only make up 20% of the audience for literary fiction.
And you write men have mostly left books behind and gravitated towards podcasts, YouTube channels, or Twitter. This is a common pattern occurring, not only the decline of literary fiction for men, but also activities getting more gendered like poetry and horse riding.
[Paul]
Yeah. Um, I mean, you can kind of see that, uh, when you walk into a bookstore, it's very female coded, like the books are, um, representative of the readers, which is mostly, um, women. So there's lots of, uh, fiction geared toward women.
Um, a lot of, um, certain books around spirituality. Uh, I don't know what you want to say, but it's very obvious when you walk into them that the readership of books and, you know, it brings up really to digress here. A lot of women are actually doing things that men used to do, like write poetry, like men used to write poetry.
Women kind of do that. A lot of women love horse riding. Men used to love horse riding.
[Neil]
It's been taken over. Actually, you argued that it was almost all men and now it's almost all women.
[Paul]
Yeah.
[Neil]
So there's a little bit of a shift. I think women, you show some graphs, you show some, you know, you, you're always quoting something.
[Paul]
Yeah. So it's funny. A lot of women are taking over a lot of things that we consider maybe older aristocratic male culture.
And a lot of, um, men are kind of into, um, you know, specialized YouTube videos, uh, for their interests, right? Like you just nerd out on some like really specific interest that you have, you know, building a ship or house or whatever you want, whatever it is. Um, and, um, and so things are a little bit more gendered now, which I think is Lindy.
Like you always had like a different, um, traditions between women and men. So I don't think that's a big issue, but I do think book reading, especially, uh, by men is, is going to decline even more in the future. And I think, um, they're going online to find, uh, to find their, you know, stimulate to get stimulated by ideas or, or their interests.
[Neil]
Yeah. It was interesting with gender because of course I've always thought, at least for the last five plus years that we live in like a post-gender society. Like that's been my view.
Uh, that's how I've seen people in my extended family that identify as non-binary or identify as a trans or, or kind of neither gender. And, um, and then, you know, yesterday in Trump's inauguration, he said, again, in 2025, there were only two genders in America, men and women. And I'm like, what the hell?
Like, isn't that we already moved past. So I, I do wonder about your thoughts in gender in particular as a thing, you know, being, being Lindy or not, because I guess maybe I'm living in Toronto, Canada. Like I don't our bathrooms don't say men and women on them.
And they haven't in years, you know, like no urinal.
[Paul]
Oh, really? And I didn't know that.
[Neil]
Yeah. They say, they say like what's inside or they say like all welcome. And like, we don't have gendered, at least I don't from my vantage point, I don't usually see gendered bathrooms anymore.
[Paul]
You know, I assume all the time. Wow. Um, okay.
Uh, I thought, although I do, although I think do see a few unisex bathrooms, but, um, I generally think, Oh, look, a restaurant will have our restaurant.
[Neil]
We'll have like all these things. And then they just have like a row of eight bathrooms, but the bathrooms all have their own door. You know, you go to, you go to othership, which is like the sauna pop, really popular sauna, cold plunge place, or some in New York, or some in Toronto, it's like a co-ed change room.
And of course there's little stalls where you go behind a curtain for your private parts, but everyone's taking off their clothes together, putting them on their clothes. It's just like, again, I don't mean to say this, but I've always thought like, we're kind of moving past the gender binary. We had a look, they may not on the show, you know, a low wrote a really famous book called beyond the gender binary.
Uh, they were our guests in chapter one of six. So I just feel like the everything is also kind of old, you know, like kind of, I guess it's Lindy to your point, but then if you read beyond the gender binary by a look, they might not, they argue that the gender splitting was actually kind of a colonial thing that when they went and took over another country like India, you need to stamp people's ID cards. And so they kind of forced people into this male or female archetype.
But before you had blue long haired flute playing gods that were not, you know, specifically a male or female. So they argue that the gender binary is actually new.
[Paul]
No, I don't, I don't, I don't think that, I mean, I think, I think gender and sort of, uh, as a concept has been pretty Lindy it's been around a while. I think it's also harder. I think you're seeing a lot of resistance to that here, uh, because there's an attempt to and make sort of take, take gender away.
Um, yeah, I don't know. I, I, I tend to see there's a lot of differences, differences between men and women. And I think trying to shoehorn everybody into one thing is actually causing a lot of problems.
Um, for example, like mass employment in a way, I think it's obviously, um, uh, it's actually probably a good thing for the most part, but I think putting men and women both in this sort of employment, uh, box where they're doing exactly the same thing may actually be the thing that's hurting like people, you know, forming relationships, having children in the future. Um, I think like, well, what kind of jobs are you thinking about anything involving, you know, what I call just regular, maybe white collar employment, which is, um, you know, you're putting people, they're trying to mix gender roles and work. No, I think it's actually making it harder to like raise a family, um, raise, you know, spend time with your children, uh, having, having, because I think when you look at the elite, what are the elite do?
I think a lot, a lot of the elite actually have a stay at home partner. And then the one person goes to work or, you know, that's considered kind of, um, a luxury right now. And I think that's, that's for that reason is because it does kind of, uh, kind of mess up with certain roles that, you know, kind of, uh, we've kind of evolved into not saying women have never worked.
Women have always worked, but in sort of more of like ad hoc ways. Whereas I think modern employment is a bit like a prison, which is, or a school that, um, and you're competing with other people and you're trying to reach a certain level. And I think it takes a lot out of, you know, I think employment is one of the central concepts of our time that we don't discuss enough because I think it takes a lot of energy to build a real career.
And then, then to find a mate who also is at your level and then who supposedly you're supposed to love and then also raise a family. And, um, I think it just takes a lot of energy and effort to do all those things. Um, and I think it's kind of causing a little bit of problems, especially if the, if the government isn't coming to help, I almost think that the government could somehow help by instituting some UBI, maybe just for women, knowing that they are, you know, uh, also, you know, carrying a child and are, um, you know, historically, you know, being more involved in raising them.
Um, so I think there's, there's, there's some gender realities.
[Neil]
You're married, right? You're married and no kids.
[Paul]
Yes.
[Neil]
So if you're living in Canada, like I have a lot of friends in New York where you live and I know you're from Chicago and you have a kid, I don't know if it's six weeks or 12 weeks, but it's something like that. Or you get time off or, or as Canada it's 52 weeks paid.
[Paul]
Right.
[Neil]
Right. And I'm not calling it UBI, but we have institutionalized in our government for a very long time that if you have a baby, you have one year paid time off with your job guarantee at the end of that. It seems like we're prioritized, you know, it seems like that's not an over priority.
[Paul]
That's not enough
[Neil]
I agree. I agree completely with that.
[Paul]
I generally think you need to restructure society to make it easier to sort of raise a family financially and time. I think modern parenting in a way doesn't resemble classical parenting.
[Neil]
Oh, interesting.
[Paul]
So actually what you're getting modern parenting resembles or something completely different. And like classical parenting may resemble modern pet ownership. I think people like pets because you can still go on vacation and have a pet.
You can still live your life and have a pet. It's a very casual thing to have a pet. Obviously you take care of it and people enjoy having it.
And I've noticed people now have not just one dog, they have two dogs. We're entering like a two dog society.
[Neil]
Modern parenting resembles pet ownership.
[Paul]
Classical parenting resembles classical, right? I think classical parenting is a little bit more laid back, a little bit more, you know, kids playing on the streets, coming in at night, a lot of hands off kind of. Whereas modern parenting is very, you know, hands on driving your kids everywhere.
You're essentially a chauffeur. You have to be with them all the time. And there's a lot of, you know, there's stress and competition, a lot of peer pressure with also making sure everyone's in 12 activities.
Yeah. They, they don't fall off the conveyor belt. Like you don't want to fall off the, you don't want to fall off the race, especially in America where like, you know, there's both the carrot and stick, right?
The carrot is very successful. You can become a millionaire, you can be rich, but the carrot is if you fall social classes, like you enter a really bad place. You don't want to be kind of poor in America.
Like it becomes a very first world, a very third world, very fast. So I just think there's a lot of, there's a lot of pressure. There's a lot of new kind of ways we think about parenting.
Cause if you think about like a hundred, even a hundred years ago, where just, you know, kids were walking around maybe 50 years ago, even like my childhood, I remember just kind of going out and not coming in until later in the day and without supervision. So I think a lot's changed. There's a lot of things around raising children and that makes it a decision that's it's a lot more serious than it used to be.
It just used to be a pattern that people would do. And now it's not.
[Neil]
So our guest in chapter 127 was Lenore Skenazy, also dubbed America's worst mom by the today show for letting her nine-year-old son ride the subway by himself in New York city, author of free range parenting, that book, the movement, which is one of the four core tenets proposed by Jonathan Haidt in his number one nonfiction book of the year is our guest in chapter 103 called the anxious generation. So there's some movement back towards the son of Lindy concept, but you said structural changes.
Is that what you're talking about? Like more free range as unless, and is there anything else that you'd insert into that? Like I came out, I came out with the Matt leave comment.
So is there anything else structurally that you see that society could benefit from, from the parenting perspective by making more Lindy?
[Paul]
I'll be a safer society. Probably like allowing more free range allowing. But, but it's, I think it's so we're so in, in this world we're in, I think we're really in a new world where I think parenting is, is like a, it's like a race.
There's a lot of peer pressure and you're seeing it with, you know, less people going, going that route. So if we just enter like historically, where we would be, where it was just as a regular pattern of life, that'd be easier, but it's hard to do when the environment has changed.
[Neil]
Yeah, totally. It's interesting too. Cause my family just came back from a beach vacation.
I'm very privileged to be able to say, and on the beach, there's like, you know, annual beach soccer game just happening in the like little resort. And one of the guys is way better than everybody else. Like by a mile, like I couldn't get the ball.
I couldn't even get close to getting the ball off them anytime. And I was like, what do you, what do you do? He's like, I play in the, in the premier.
Like I said, what do you mean? He said, well, I'm in Chelsea. So what, what, what, what team?
He said, well, I'm, I'm the under whatever, seventeens. I said, well, how many is there? He said, oh, there's seven levels of league below the top league, starting from under, I want to say like six or eight or something like super young.
And I said, what's the percent chance you make it, you know? And he said, cause he's four levels back. He said, you know, like less than 5%.
And this special, like I said, there's seven levels. Well, we have the same thing in Canada with hockey, you know, like there's a forced pressurization to these and Nassim Talib has talked about a lot, these very finite spots at these prestigious schools, where if you don't get a ticket to the right private school or the right high school or the right college, then you're not going up into the right channel. So it's forcing a lot of specialization.
A lot of kids are in a lot of programs from a very young age.
[Paul]
Yeah. I think it's historically unprecedented at this level of competition and structure and organization, but yeah.
[Neil]
Yeah. Okay, cool. Well, listen, listeners now, you know, this deep into the conversation, we haven't even gotten to your books yet.
Listeners now can see why I consider you to be one of the most original thinkers over time. I don't agree with everything you say, nor should I, nor will I, and nor do I think everybody listening well. And this is why it's fun to talk to you because original thinking in this 3 billion people logging into meta everyday society is the hardest thing to come by.
Is there an order that you can point at these three that I can introduce them? Which would you like to talk about first, either in your life or in the chronology of the show?
[Paul]
We can talk about Publius Syrus first, his little aphorisms.
[Neil]
Yeah. Yeah. Great.
Oh, thanks for saying aphorisms because I've been saying aphorisms in my head. Okay. Okay.
So let's get into your three most formative books with Lindy man. I'm very excited. I read these books.
I actually really like all of them. The very first one, and I'll take a minute to introduce it to our guests. Those listening, I want you to picture like you're holding it in a bookstore.
So I'm holding up a very thin, like 44 page book called the moral sayings of Publius Syrus S Y R U S translated by Darius Lyman. So Sirius also known as Publius Sirius lived from 85 BCE to 43 BC and Antioch, which is present day Turkey. He was a slave turned into a playwright.
This plays are apparently lost to history, maybe in the library. I don't know. But what remains are these crystallized distillations, the aphorisms of 1,087 pithy one-liners starting from number one as men, we are all equal in the presence of death all the way up to number 1,087 man's life is short.
Therefore an honorable death is his immortality. And again, it's like a 44 page book. It looks like a pamphlet, but the vastness in here is like, you can't read not even a full page before stopping.
Like it's, it's a vastness deep as an ocean. The cover is a thick purple ribbon across the bottom that says his name Publius Sirius and a white ribbon on top of it says a Roman slave. There's a painting of a man in a gold robe with a long beard beside a man with a white turban and a red and gray tunic both standing while a third man sits on a stone behind them.
There's a small town visible in the in the distance. Publius' moral sayings defy categorization. Are they stoic?
Are they Epicurean? Are they skeptic? Are they cynic?
All we know is that they are witty and wise and the former slave term playwright, he transcends doctrine and eventually ultimately embraces humanism. File this one under 430.042 for languages slash Germanic languages. Probably not a good Dewey decimal.
Lindy man, please tell us about your relationship with the moral sayings of Publius Sirius translated by Darius Lyman.
[Paul]
Yeah, it's a wisdom distilled. One sentence, you know, a few sentences maybe per line. And it's actually takes a while to read because you stop and you think about it.
And if you lived a long enough life, you can recognize how right he is on many of them, right? You've seen it yourself, right? And he's articulating something maybe you've you know, but you've never really seen written out.
And I just I just love I love this format. It's thousands of years old. You see it pop up in ancient literature all the time, which is here's one or two sentences of life.
It's real. And we're moving on to the next one. And it's it's I mean, it's a joy.
And I think it really for me, especially in a land, you know, in a world of like lower, really lower attention span and, you know, surrounded by lots of media, lots of video, it's kind of it makes reading fun again, because you're really getting.
[Neil]
It's like Twitter.
[Paul]
Yeah. Yeah. And in a way, that's why I think a lot of Twitter so addicting because it is this it's just maxims.
And there's all this like there's this long literature of these of these the Ten Commandments is the first listicle. Right. And but there's way more than that.
People just focus on the ten. There's like a whole body of literature. There's like the French French moralists.
[Neil]
Yeah. Yeah. This is why I was going to say orient us because I've heard you talk about aphorisms often.
I don't know how you came across Publius Serious. Like, I mean, this guy's stuff is still getting printed two thousand years later. I'm ashamed to say I never heard of the guy.
You know, I never heard of the guy. So was it Nassim Taleb's writing? Was it like?
[Paul]
Yeah, it was Nassim Taleb mentioned it, I think, a long time ago and then he was reading it. And then but he's he actually published his own aphorisms, his own book.
[Neil]
Head of Procrastinates.
[Paul]
Yeah. Which is which is just as you know, which is really good. I like it, too.
But there's this long literature of a lot of like Nietzsche did it a lot of like Oscar Wilde, a lot of authors write a lot of treatises and then they and then they enter the world of, you know, aphorisms and maxims. And and it's really it's really a pleasure to read because it's such distilled wisdom and it hits hard and and you can tell, you know, it's lasted. It's so simple.
Right. He sent these like just a few sentences and that, you know, been filtered throughout time. So I kind of recommend I read a few.
[Neil]
Yeah, good. Well, just let me give people a taste of this and you can comment on these. Number two, I already mentioned number one, as men, we are all equal in the presence of death.
Number two, the evil you do unto others, you may expect in return.
[Paul]
No.
[Neil]
Number four, to dispute a drunkard is to debate an empty house. Number 18, do not find your happiness in another's sorrow. Number 19, an angry lover tells himself many lies.
[Paul]
Love it. All true.
[Neil]
He has a lot of confusing ones, too.
I mean, number 144, society in shipwreck is comfort to all.
[Paul]
I mean, I don't get people have like a lot of comfort and complaining, right, about how bad things are.
[Neil]
Oh, that's what he's saying. Number 155, a god can hardly disturb a man truly happy.
[Paul]
Yeah, I've seen it. I don't think I'm one of those, but I've seen other people.
[Neil]
I get pulled by the vicissitudes, by the news, by the you know, I get angry about this. I get I've been down by that. But truly, you know, it kind of sort of slaps you into into like clear thinking.
You're like a god can hardly disturb. Well, if I was really happy, I wouldn't be bothered by all that by anything. You know, there is no need to 16.
There is no need of spurs when the horse is running away.
[Paul]
That's that's a one. Yeah, that's a good one. I can't I can't decide what he's saying with that one.
[Neil]
Well, I think he's saying, you know, it's kind of Tim Ferriss's adage that like who he who speaks less at the end of the negotiation wins. Like, if you if you're trying to negotiate for a mattress, and it's $1,000, and you're like 900, and the guy's, I don't know, see what I can do. Okay.
And then you're asking for more. Like, I think that's what I got from it. It's like, you already won.
Like, you don't need to spur the horse. It's already leaving. It's already running away.
I don't know. Maybe I misread that. I guess that's part of the problem with these things slash good thing is that they take your mind down whichever path your mind wants to go.
You know, how about this one to 18? Give you give me your thoughts. Speed itself is slow.
When cupidity awaits cupidly like Cupid, Cupid arrow, like I'm assuming speed itself is slow and cupidity awaits like falling in love makes time stop.
[Paul]
Yeah, that could be it. I'd have to sit back and think about that one. That's that's an interesting one.
[Neil]
So it goes on and on, you know, number 360. It is a weak mind that cannot bear the possession of riches.
[Paul]
Yeah, it's that's that famous. Some of these sayings actually pop up in multiple other places. Like it takes a better man to handle wealth than the handle poverty.
[Neil]
Right.
[Paul]
Right.
[Neil]
Right.
[Paul]
That's like the one that pops up all the time. And then once you start getting some success, you realize how true it is. So you're like, oh, I can batten down the hatches.
I can like we humans are almost like pretty good with scarcity. But like all of a sudden I have options. Oh, I have temptation.
That's actually actually is kind of difficult to handle a little bit.
[Neil]
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Listen to this one, 385. And that's kind of converse of that one, I think, but maybe not. Poverty needs little semicolon avarice everything.
[Paul]
Yeah, I think we're we don't really have like a way to satiate like our greed, right? There's no there's no there's no top. There's no ceiling for greed.
There's no ceiling for more like as a human, you sort of just keep going if you want. There's no satisfaction. Right.
So.
[Neil]
Yeah, that's kind of like the Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut adage that they were at a party for a billionaire on Shelter Island. Kurt Vonnegut said to Joseph Heller, you've written the greatest work of literature of the 20th century. This guy is a hedge fund manager who made more money than you have your whole life last year.
How do you feel about that? And Joseph Heller said, well, I have something he'll never have. Enough.
[Paul]
Right.
[Neil]
There you go. So you mentioned there's a lot of people like, you know, through the work of like Tim Ferriss, really, his podcast that came out in 2014. He's the first person that brought onto my radar this sort of big three Stoic philosophers, Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius.
And then I kind of bought and read through, you know, meditations, letters from a Stoic, the art of living. But you and others like NNT, Nassim Taleb, Brian Holliday, who was our guest in chapter 38, others have really gone down this pathway. I wondered if you might give us a little bit of a starter, either reading list or, you know, people we should check out.
Like, what's your mental map of the greatest thinkers throughout history? Because you seem to be coming at it from an interesting perspective and one that is not affiliated with a particular religion. So I'm curious how you think about who you read from the past, how you how you filter that, and if you can kind of orient us to your thinking.
[Paul]
Yeah, there's a lot, especially if you, you know, you could sign up for the Loeb Classical Library, I think, and you'll... LOEB. Yeah, LOEB.
And you'll just get access to thousands of works of classical antiquity. And there's all these kind of obscure authors, and then there's well-known ones, like the Stoics, very popular, very good. A lot of great lessons about how to handle fortune, how to handle luck, going against you and going with you, how to not having it affect you.
I mean, that's, I mean, that's a great...
[Neil]
So you're talking about Marcus Aurelius.
[Paul]
Yeah.
[Neil]
Marcus Aurelius. Any others?
[Paul]
There's others like, you know, there's a guy named Theophrastus, T-H-E-O-P-H-R-A-S-T-U-S. And he was a student of Aristotle, and he wrote these, he wrote a great book called Characters about all these types of people you meet in day-to-day life, like a liar, someone who, somebody who tries to flatter, all these descriptions of these, these like maybe 30 or 40 archetypes that are still used today. So, you know, that's, that's also a great way of...
[Neil]
This guy's like 2000 years old as well.
[Paul]
Yeah, he's 2000 years old, but these characters are all modern that he's, he's like, he's like portraying. So there's, there's people like that. There's people like Plutarch who write, you know, history and he's, and he's sort of, he, he takes these historical figures and then he compares them.
So there's, there's, there's a lot of material out there and you can kind of go into it as much as you want. Then you can go farther into, you know, history and you go into like the French, you know, there's like, there's like these French from the 17th, 16th century, also aphoris, like La Bruyere, La Rochefoucauld.
[Neil]
Do you say aphorers, A-P-H-O-R-E-R-S, the people that are making their writing into aphorisms?
[Paul]
Yeah. And, and they're like, they're, they're excellent as well. Then you have the Germans like a hundred years later with...
[Neil]
Sorry, one second, before we get to the Germans, what was going on in France, 16th, 17th century? Is this, is this the...
[Paul]
Just the richest country in the world has had the most talent.
Oh, this is the beginning of the enlightenment and the... You see that a lot, which is, we have the works from the Greeks when Greece was, you know, really successful, advanced country in the world. Right.
And then it went to Rome and then we have all these like great literature from Rome. And then we go to France because France was the richest country in the world at that time when they were writing. And then Germany, which is also became rich.
So in a way like... England probably, Shakespeare. Like Shakespeare.
That's when England was kind of becoming...
[Neil]
Chaucer
[Paul]
Yeah. So in a way, well...
[Neil]
Follow the richest country to find the...
So you're saying Elon Musk from the vantage point of 200 to 500 years as the richest human in the richest country, his tweets will one day be crystallized and distilled down to like a hundred pithy phrases.
[Paul]
I don't know if he will, but I think there's something to be said about talent goes to where the money is, the opportunity is, where the action is. And, you know, I use the example of priests, like throughout the last 500,000 years, Catholic priests were scientists of the day. And like, if you Google Catholic priest scientists, you'll come up with your Wikipedia page of all these inventions they came up right with, because that was a very prestigious job.
And people sent their firstborn sons to become priests. It was like a very high status position. You had a lot of power and a lot of time to also study on your own.
And today, though, in a post-religious age... Often they were the only people that read. Right.
That too. You know, in a society. And now we're living in a post-religious age.
So the amount of talent going into the priesthood, probably of all religions, too. It's not just about Catholic priests, but Islam and Hinduism, because religion is relatively low status now, you have that talent going into business, law, you know, wherever, right? Academia.
So that's where you're getting a lot more output.
[Neil]
Influencers, right?
[Paul]
Yeah.
[Neil]
YouTubers.
I mean, like, you know. So a friend told me, a friend just told me, my son doesn't want to be a doctor. It doesn't make enough money.
Like, I literally heard that phrase the other day. It doesn't make enough money. I said, what are you talking about?
Doctors are the most paid job in society. Like, I'm Indian. Like, are you kidding me?
Like, doctor's number one, you know? And he's like, no, no. He just asked me how much, just like a 16-year-old kid.
He asked me how much all these jobs paid and it turns out all the business people were way higher, you know? So he wants to be a business person.
[Paul]
Doctors have a really good high status. That's a good Lindy profession that I think actually hasn't been, like, we all kind of respect doctors, right? Still, like, it's not, it's kind of, it's kind of stayed steady.
It'll probably stay steady for a while. People talk about what, what positions will AI replace, but I think doctors are always going to be here, you know?
[Neil]
Well, my dad was born in Tarantaran, which is a village outside of Amritsar in India, and a poor family in 1944. And I asked him, dad, you know, I was born in Oshawa, Ontario in 1979 here. I said, why'd you become a teacher?
Because all, all our Indian friends are, the dad's a doc, the dad's a doctor in every single family, except you. And you know what he told me? When I grew up where I grew up, doctors and teachers got paid the same.
Oh, interesting. Education was on par with health as a, as a, as a, you know.
[Paul]
Like a professor, right?
[Neil]
Yeah. Well, no, just, just education. Like, you know, when you see the starting salary for teachers in like, you know, Arkansas is $28,000.
And you kind of wonder what's going on with the education system. You can sort of see, like, we've devalued it over the longterm as. Teachers?
An important, yeah, teachers.
[Paul]
Yeah. Interesting question. I wonder if teachers, that's interesting.
I always consider teachers to be middle status throughout, like not necessarily the highest.
[Neil]
Well, they are in terms of, they all have, you know, two degrees, you know, uh, from colleges and they are teaching our kids and they're loved by their communities, but they're not paid anywhere commensurate to the value in society that they provide, which is, you know, Warren Buffett has famously said, like, I could have become a kindergarten teacher, but I was just a guy that looked at books and said, this company is not worth as much as people think.
Like that was, that was worth more in society, but being a kindergarten teacher could arguably be just as important, you know? So Aristotle was a teacher. Plato was a teacher.
[Paul]
They started in an academy, right? They were like, they were like alternative teachers, right? They were kind of, we're starting our own school here.
[Neil]
Kind of like the singularity university vibe.
[Paul]
A little bit.
[Neil]
Yeah.
Okay. So, um, we've got your thought on some of the moral sayings. Um, I wanted to get your, you know, some of the thoughts in this book are around death and dying.
You know, it's literally the first aphorism. Um, you wrote an article November 6th, 2023 for your popular newsletter, which I've met that recommended a few times. And the title is soon you will legally choose when you pass away.
You show, and I was shocked to read this as partly why I liked your work so much. I'm like, what? Canada had over 10,000 people who died by euthanasia in 2021, 10 times higher than the U S and far higher than any country in the world.
And I know as a Canadian, I do hear old people in my family and my friends in their eighties and nineties openly. I've had conversations about assisted dying and them talking about it openly. And we've had conversations.
I just didn't realize we were the world leader in this area. And you, and you're now saying, not only are you the world leader Canada, but you think everyone's going to choose when they die in the next couple of generations.
[Paul]
Yeah. I don't think it's unprecedented. I think it's assisted died.
Dying's always been around as a kind of a gray area that people, you know, the doctor would kind of tell the family and then, you know, a decision would be made that, you know, life isn't worth living, you know, there'd be this, and then they would kind of end it in some humane way, you know, with painkillers. But now it's actually an explicit, it's taking like a, it's funny, it's like, it's a transformation of kind of a gray area norm into an explicit right. And a lot of times society doesn't know what to do when you turn something into an explicit kind of right.
And it sort of takes us into another, takes us into another society where we're like, do you want to choose to die? I mean, you can. And there's like a host, you know, you have to go through a panel.
You can say you're depressed. So it is really like kind of like a, a newer thing.
[Neil]
Sorry to throw this, sorry to throw this in there in a slightly dark way, but we also have higher than ever suicide rates than we've had is over 70 years since the, since it's kind of around the war. So who is assisted? And then there's also like taking it, you're doing it yourself that are both higher, higher than ever.
And conversely, we have the longevity move. We have the longevity movement with literally selling t-shirts saying hashtag don't die. So there's this new bifurcation coming, it seems between choice of death and never dying both in opposition to what I grew up with, which was, you just naturally die eventually.
[Paul]
Right. And I also think it's a health of society that it's a good, like, how would you tell if a society is like healthy or not? Well, check the suicide rates, because in my opinion, it's maybe not a wealth thing.
You can kind of live well and happy without much wealth. But if people are, you know, killing themselves or going to assisted suicide places, it could be a symptom for a society that's a little sick.
[Neil]
I don't know. But Dr. Gabor Mate called, and he was our guest in chapter 115. He calls our current society a toxic culture, and he uses suicide rates as one example.
He also uses addiction rates as another example.
[Paul]
I definitely think it's a place you don't want to go down the ladder. And I think it's not a nice world if you are not. And I think that's why there's this really work stress in the air.
There's this hustle culture in the air, especially in places in, you know, North America, where, you know, there's a tension because you don't want to slide down the ladder, because if you slide down the ladder, bad things are happening and it's hard to kind of come back up again. So I think there's a lot going on while we celebrate winners. I also, you know, I travel a lot and I notice what's the biggest insult you can call someone in your country.
In America, it's you're a loser. But that's not the biggest insult in, like, the United Kingdom. It's something along the lines of, like, you're not funny or you're not like, you know, you can't get along.
Or in France, something like you're not civilized. But like in America, it's like you're a loser, right? You lost.
What did I lose? This game we're all playing, you know? So we have winners.
So what happens to the losers? They're in a bad psychological state.
[Neil]
So I think there's a lot. Even the Trump inauguration and the Jimmy Carter funeral, the article said Trump only sits beside Obama because he thinks Obama was a winner and all the other past presidents, no one else won two terms. He only sits beside Obama.
I was like, what? Like, but to your point, this is like the loser winner economy.
[Paul]
Yeah, I think generally.
[Neil]
And I think you're making a broader point about what's what's considered negative in society gives you a glimpse into what's valued.
[Paul]
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think Trump is a great example of someone who considers himself a winner and that there's losers and he's not one of them and he wants to be around other winners.
That's why he's almost he's almost like this grandfather figure in America at this point, almost like this ethos of the nation, whether you like it or not.
[Neil]
Expansionism is Lindy.
[Paul]
Yeah, absolutely. And I think we're seeing that now. I mean, we're back to borders changing with Ukraine and Russia.
I think you're seeing movements happening in Israel and Palestine.
[Neil]
And I think Syria had a regime change and even China with Taiwan, the Uighur Muslim population, like I mean, just when you see it, there's societies or Taiwan or Hong Kong, like, you know, there's and I'm not a geopolitical guy. I'm just saying from a distance, Trump saying I want Greenland, Panama and Canada does not seem out of context from a Lindy perspective.
[Paul]
It's actually a very normal early 20th century, 19th century American view of, you know, we're expanding territory. It's just we've decided to become to freeze borders after 1945. But, you know, you can't I don't know if you can really do that to a natural system that that changes and things change.
And I think we're we're in a moment of change again.
[Neil]
So how do you decide where to go? Because, you know, you're living in France right now. The article in 2021 also quotes you living in a part of France.
You write confidently and with detail about a lot of countries that you presumably have lived in. Like I've seen you writing about Istanbul. I've seen you writing about.
So what do you what's a healthy city to you?
[Paul]
Well, I have a lot of followers. So when I go to a city, I like hang out with have a meet up. So we talk.
And so that helps with knowing just the city that I'm in and what's going on with the day to day people and not just sort of the tourist sites. So that always helps.
[Neil]
And your wife is just cool with being like, let's just live wherever, wherever.
[Paul]
No, we live in New York, but, you know, we're on.
[Neil]
OK, OK.
[Paul]
We travel.
Yeah. Yeah. Or sometimes I just travel just because I have to write an article, right.
Or about a place or, you know, see a place. So it's not. Yeah, it's if it's if you're making money from it, you get a lot more respect.
Right. If it's if you're just sort of traveling. I don't know.
I think women kind of, you know, she's like, are we are we, you know, is this a business or is this you're just doing this for pleasure? No, it's just, you know, you get more respect once you turn things into one of my favorite online writers right now is Thomas Pao.
[Neil]
He's actually a dream guest for the show. He writes the substack or newsletter called Uncharted Territories. And he first gained popularity at the beginning of the pandemic when he wrote the first ever long form graph filled research based article on medium dot com about why this thing is going to go big.
And he was right about everything. But he also travels all around the world writing from the perspective of different cultures. It's almost like a bit of a parlor trick to actually see what's happening anywhere.
You almost have to be outside of it.
[Paul]
Yeah. I mean, it's it's very tempting to just mediate reality through a computer screen. And I think generally that's what a lot of what we're seeing is.
And it's all but it creates like a weird feedback loop, which is, you know, because the online world isn't necessarily reality. It's like a version of it, especially with like Twitter and X. You're getting like some exaggerated view of things.
So you kind of do have to go to places and at least like walk around and talk to people a little bit. Ideally, you'd live there, but you only have one life and you can't you can't really do everything you want to do. But you definitely don't want to mediate reality through a computer screen, I think.
[Neil]
I think that's that's a really interesting point. Because you're huge on X, but you don't really have like Instagram, TikTok following some people are, you know, Dr. Becky is all on Instagram, but not other things. Some people are just big on YouTube.
Some people are Nassim Taleb, arguably. I know he's got probably a hundred thousand or something followers, but originally it was through his books. So you see people kind of confirming the medium is the message as well.
Like, it's nice for you to say that because you have a vantage point through Twitter, but of course, Twitter is. Well, that's that's Twitter. Twitter itself has become itself a bit of a black mirror, you know?
[Paul]
Oh, yeah. I mean, but it's it's a way to communicate with people. I'm just not very good at video or I tried podcasts for a while, but it's actually hard to like email people you like and then you get rejected.
You're like, oh, I'd really like to talk to you. It's it's a it's actually takes a lot of work.
[Neil]
That's why you stopped the podcast, the pitching part.
[Paul]
Yeah, it's I think it's you have these lists of guests and you can get some of them and then other ones you can't. So you have to go to others. It's I don't know.
I just rather just write and it's like, yeah, it's it's enjoyable and I feel it gets the good stuff out. But podcasting is great if you can get like what you have, your situation, you have a good guest on. So it's so ideal.
[Neil]
Well, one of our dream guests is the author of your second most formative book, and that, of course, is the one and only heretofore, multiple time mentioned already, author of one of my formative books, which is The Black Swan. He wrote your formative book, Antifragile, Things That Gain From Disorder. I am holding a thick, beat up, well read, well loved, but never in big doses because I can only it's so dense.
I read like three pages and like I put it down. This is the one and only antifragile. It's got a giant ripped piece of paper separating the left and the right sides of the book.
On the on the left, it's white with antifra written in like a 96 point black caps, aerial narrow. On the right, it's orange with agile written in a 96 point white caps, aerial narrow subtitle underneath Things That Gain From Disorder. And also on the cover, it says New York Times bestseller, author of The Black Swan and an incredible Wall Street Journal blurb that says startling, richly crammed with insights, stories, fine phrases and intriguing asides.
I will have to read it again and again, which isn't even as glowing as the HBR blurb, Harvard Business Review from the inside cover, which says you will learn more about more things from this book and be challenged in more ways than by any other book you have read this year. Trust me on this. But this is, this is massive in terms of its scope and its scale and its intellectual ferocity.
Published in November 27th, 2012 by the actual Random House, by the way, the imprint of Random House Publishing, a division of at the time Random House LLC before they bought Penguin. MNT, as he's called, Nassim Nicholas Taleb was born in Lebanon in 1960 and is a mathematical statistician who got an MBA from Wharton in 1983 before working as a hedge fund manager and derivatives trader before getting his PhD 15 years later at the University of one of your favorite cities in the world, Paris. He also wrote Fool by Randomness in 2001, The Black Swan 2007, one of my own formative books, as I mentioned, and The Bed of Procrustes, which I have not read in 2010.
Today, I think he lives in New York. You would know as a professor at NYU, he's listed as a professor at NYU and he basically stands uncertainty on its head, making it a desirable, even necessary, just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, many things in life benefit from disorder, volatility, and turmoil. Those things are, of course, anti-fragile.
Follow this wonder 155.2 philosophy and psychology slash differential and development psychology. Lindy, man, please tell us about your relationship with the one and only anti-fragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
[Paul]
Yeah, a formative book that I read years and years ago that it's when I first encountered the concept of Lindy, which is related to anti-fragile, which is the more disorder, certain things get stronger. There's a level above resilience. And we should be a resilient survives disorder.
Anti-fragile gets stronger and stronger and gets more powerful over time, which kind of kind of an interesting topic because you don't really, you don't really think of things that get stronger. When they encounter a lot of chaos, you think of things get my head. It's just resilience, but actually things that grow is a fascinating kind of idea.
And like any complex system, you know, I think like you mentioned bones or stressing your heart, you know, things can actually get stronger and better. And then there's the realm of the non-biological, which is ideas, traditions, works of art actually gain more prominence over time. The more that they're sort of attacked, the more they're filtered.
And so there must be something fundamental in these things that have survived. Not everything, you know, there's a reason why certain things kind of survive and that in the longer they survive, there's less survivorship bias too. So like you should really appreciate things that have been around for a long time.
There's some locked in adaptive value there that happens. So it gets you out of neomania, especially it's easy, especially in America to think every new technology is going to change the way we live. Or if it does change the way we live, that's a good thing.
Again, you know, and there's a trade-off. It got me thinking to trade-offs too, which is, you know, the car is great for going long distances, but if you build your society around the car, then you're going to be sedentary, which leads to all these health issues. So these, there's a lot of trade-offs that happen with, you know, new technology.
Some of them are good, like windows, windows on houses allow us to see, you know, beautiful trees, beautiful nature. So in a way not all technology is bad.
[Neil]
They do kill, they do also kill nature quite a bit.
[Paul]
That's true. They could do that as well.
[Neil]
I mean, I just, you know, the glass condos are putting up in Toronto are surrounded by birds.
[Paul]
The problem with those are you're only looking at other condos, which is not like, you're not looking at these like fractal natural shapes. Um, definitely that's why a lot of modern places kind of look depressing is if they're surrounded by other modern places. But if they're actually, if you see, if you read like dwell magazine, they're always have like a picture of this, like really ultra modern house and like a forest or like woodland surrounded by trees, all these nice soothing shapes.
Right.
[Neil]
But then you see, it's only good if others don't join you.
[Paul]
Right. Um, but then you see them all bunched up together. Uh, and it's just like, oh, no, nothing here has, has a shape.
Right. And, you know, we got rid of our ornate architecture in the past, which, you know, made these buildings look beautiful. Um, you can, you can, you can only replace that with kind of a nature.
That's what windows do. But if you, if you surround ourselves with other windows, that doesn't work.
[Neil]
So, um, And the other argument I've heard thrown into this is like, you know, Nassim Taleb writes about, you know, the pyramids being anti-fragile versus, you know, I don't mean to use it, but like the twin towers or the CN tower, or, you know, the empire state building, because it's lasted 2,500 years, it's more likely to last the next 2,500, if there's a big natural disaster.
[Paul]
Yeah, absolutely. It's sort of, uh, these pyramids are, uh, ancient people talked about how old the pyramids were and, you know, they'll probably survive all of us. Right.
I mean, so that's true as well. Um, certain traditions last for a reason, uh, getting rid of them. You don't know, uh, what's going to happen if you get rid of them.
I think, uh, we're seeing some of that a little bit, uh, like, like which ones I think generally like getting rid of all religion, even, even kind of leads, leads a void where people try to find religion and other things. Um, and you're kind of, you know, coming up with like these little deities and, uh, which can cause disorder and sort of, um, I think they call it Chesterson, Chesterson's fence, which is if you, there's a fence there for a reason, taking it down, we don't really know why, uh, what would happen if we take it down. Um, so yeah, we got to be careful with some, some, um, kind of destruction of tradition.
Um, the other thing he talks about a scale, which is great, like things don't just scale, they transform. So I'll use the example of books, books were used to have, used to be these manuscripts with these beautiful pictures and, um, it's interesting type of, you know, these pictures on it and the handwriting was kind of interesting. And then the printing press came in and the printing press can, you know, uh, copy text, copy words or letters.
Um, but it can't copy the actual pictures or the, or the artisan artisanal kind of, um, type of handwriting. So we kind of read books that are all texts now without a lot of pictures. That's normal.
Whereas perhaps books should be a little bit more ornamental. They should have a little bit more pictures, be a little bit more fun to read, maybe not as much as like a comic book, but, um, so we kind of just lose in that scale, um, a little, little art, like we see with like, uh, houses to, uh, houses kind of look the same architecture looks the same because they're built kind of, um, to be made to look like each other. So getting away from kind of local, getting away from, um, kind of artisanal type of living gets us to, you know, everybody's having the same fast food, everybody's dressing the same.
So, um, yeah, there's, there's a little, there's a little worrisome about all of us being connected because that's where diversity kind of dies. Like if you travel around the world, everybody kind of looks the same, is dressed the same, like the baseball hat you can see from America to China and the world a hundred, 200 years ago had all these different types of hats and they're all gone. And just the baseball hats, one of the last ones left.
So it's all these like interesting concepts of like connectivity and scale that he talks about.
[Neil]
It's a big book. It's a dense book. It's kind of a book I've had on my bedside table for like five years.
And like, I read like 10 pages of it. And I'm like, I feel like I've eaten like the richest slice of pie for dessert. You know, it's like so many ideas in this book that it's so dense, but he writes in such an accessible tone.
I mean, like the very first, you know, once you get through the first 30 pages of intro notes, the very first paragraph in the entire book is you are in the post office about to send a gift, a package full of champagne glasses to a cousin in central Siberia. But that's the opening sentence. Like he gets here, like, as the package can be damaged during transportation, you would stamp fragile breakable or handle with care on it in red.
Now, what is the exact opposite of such a situation? The exact opposite of fragile, you know, like he's like, it's accessible, but then he gets into the big ideas. So the very last paragraph of this book, which comes on page 423, there's about a hundred pages of notes after this.
So if you, if you're looking at the book, the last paragraph is like, not near the end of the pages. It's like, you know, there's a lot left after that, but the very last paragraph he writes, and I'd like to get your comment on this. The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking.
If you like variations, remember that food would not have a taste. If it weren't for hunger results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness convictions without uncertainty and an ethical life isn't so when stripped of personal risks.
[Paul]
Yeah. I mean, I call, I call that kind of the payoff space, which is, I think we're kind of, if you're in employment, you've got most people, majority are just want a very stable life. And, but I think in general, there's a lot more depth to life.
Once you enter like the world of like taking risks, starting a business or, or even like approaching a girl that you like, or, um, you know, fasting and then eating or, you know, putting your body at risk.
[Neil]
That's another thing he talks about. He talks about that a lot. Page 243, he, the subject line is, and two failures.
If it's Wednesday, I must be vegan.
[Paul]
Yeah.
[Neil]
That's the point. Well, the point there is as deprivation as a stressor.
[Paul]
That's based on the Greek Orthodox diet, which is like, I don't know, a few thousand thousand years old of Wednesday and Friday you're vegan. And then 30 days before Christmas and 30 days before Easter, you're vegan. Uh, and then throughout the year, the rest of the year, there's some days, which is cyclical, like, like, uh, dieting instead of eating the same thing every day, you're, you're, you're, you know, you're doing a variation and your body's adapting to it.
And it's adapting to the stressors or to the, you know, it's getting stronger, getting weaker and then getting stronger. So, um, that's built into a lot of ancestral diets as well.
[Neil]
Do you do this?
[Paul]
Yeah, I do it too.
[Neil]
So you're vegan two days a week.
[Paul]
Yep.
[Neil]
And, uh, everything else is normal. You just are vegan. No, no meat products or by-products as he puts it, even butter.
He says that even butter. I might, I might, I might have some butter, but yeah, but no, no, I'm not, I'm not pegging you down on it. I'm just curious about this because that means to me in my head, I think, okay, that means eat local is Lindy eat organic is Lindy.
Like eat the foods that were ripening around the time of the year that made sense for them to ripen. And in the winter, you are a little bit skinnier and you eat a little bit less and maybe you have less kills or less meat, you know, like I'm detecting some long-term bias towards, as he says, deprivation is a stressor and you want to stress your body a bit because then it gets stronger. So, you know, you're going on the record of saying this, he's writing about it.
Brian Johnson's in this. I'm looking at myself. I eat from morning till night.
[Paul]
I don't do this at all, but you're making me think about it. Yeah. It's also what we eat too.
Sometimes like with meat, we're eating a lot of muscle and we're not eating the loins, the offal, the intestines. We're not eating the bone marrow. There's a lot of stuff we don't actually eat anymore that we ate a lot more of in the past because meat is so, the actual muscle is so delicious and readily available.
There's a lot, there's also a lot going on with diet.
[Neil]
So you recommend things like bone marrow and things like offal. I think offal is that like intestines.
[Paul]
Yeah. Even like the head.
[Neil]
What's that? Haggis.
[Paul]
Yeah.
[Neil]
You eat haggis.
[Paul]
Brains. Sometimes you can eat a little, like, I mean, there's a whole, it just goes out of fashion.
[Neil]
It's called, um, yeah, I was at a Spanish bar in Toronto called Bar Raval and I ordered something without realizing it was, you know, uh, I think it's not called head cheese. Is it? Yeah.
Yeah. I thought it was cheese. It says has the word cheese in it.
You know what I mean?
[Paul]
Um, so there's also what we're eating now is also, it goes through like fats too. Give us some Lindy diet tips. I mean, that's, that's really what, uh, that those are it.
I follow variation. I tried to not eat meat all the time.
[Neil]
I assume processed stuff is out
[Paul]
I try to avoid seed oils. Uh, that's, that's relatively new. Again, that hasn't been tested much with food and liquids. Probably the easiest Lindy thing to do is just if it's not, if it's really new thing full of artificial preservatives, don't, don't eat it.
You know, what's the problem with seed oils increases inflammation. Uh, it's, it's sort of industrial engineered, uh, where they take these seed oil is out. Yeah.
And it's just kind of like a newer process. Uh, canola is actually what the biggest product from, from, from Canada. Uh, it's just became, it's called that's right.
And it's very cheap. So restaurants and companies kind of just put it into other products and cook with it, uh, instead of olive oil or, you know, uh, or, or with beef. Um, so, or butter or ghee.
So yeah, it's just, it came, I think it became popular in the seventies for most people and now it's in everything. And there's some theories that it's, uh, it's related to heart attacks, cardiovascular issues, whether it is or isn't, you can just avoid it and not take the risk, you know, you can't eat at restaurants anymore. Yeah.
[Neil]
You're, you'd have to ask the waiter, although, excuse me, are you, uh, are you frying these French fries and avocado oil?
[Paul]
Although some places are now sweet green. And I think what's what's there's another popular fast food place that is going to start offering seed oil free meals.
[Neil]
So you're in favor of this because it's more Lindy because of course the seed oils are new.
[Paul]
Yeah.
[Neil]
You're in favor of the guy saying, get rid of high fructose corn syrup from the Coca-Cola.
[Paul]
Yeah.
[Neil]
I mean, hard to do this in practice, especially with cost. I mean, the, I was at the store the other day, Luke, uh, raspberries are four 99. The organic ones are 12 99.
It's like, what the hell? Like, yeah. Three times the price.
I mean, we, we sort of, again, no sprays that are new and bad for you.
[Paul]
It's, it's easier to eat. Yeah. Non-Lindy cheaper.
It's actually a real effort to live your life. And it's, but the highest richest people are kind of, I feel like are doing that. And like, there's like a big health movement at the top.
Uh, they can access it, but a lot of people probably can't, or they don't have the willpower, especially if you're working some job you don't want to do or, you know, family chef. Yeah. And it's just, it takes a lot of effort, but if you have that mindset, it'd be that kind of Lindy mindset of like, well, I'm just not going to engage with this.
[Neil]
If it's not, you know, 500 years old that I do notice that, you know, they show all these health exec execs at the Trump inauguration yesterday, you know, Jeff Bezos is 61. Like he's 61. Mark Zuckerberg is 40.
These guys both look 20 years younger than their age. Like Zuckerberg looks like he's 20. Brian Johnson is like the strength of an 18 year old.
Like there's this, you've pointed out that idolizing youthfulness is very Lindy.
[Paul]
No, I think idolizing youthfulness is, is actually a kind of a newer thing, especially in America.
[Neil]
Okay. I thought, Oh, I thought you've said that that's like a historical thing. People have always wanted to be younger.
I think, no, I think it's a longevity being the, being the obsession.
[Paul]
I think, I think it's, I think it's I think in America, we don't, people don't want to get old. I think it's like a really youthful kind of, it's actually not, there's no, there's no respect that comes with being older. You don't have this, it's not a really traditional society.
And I think you're just seen as like unattractive and old. And that's why you've all these celebrities and all these, not even just celebrities, regular kind of people kind of getting Botox getting on testosterone, taking whatever it takes to sort of look youthful and dressing youthful.
[Neil]
So that reminds me of my very favorite quote in your third and final book, which is called a pattern language by Christopher Alexander, Sarah Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein. This is a complete masterwork took a decade in the making by them with a whole team of people. It published finally January 1st, 1977.
Talk about a pub date, first day of the new year by Oxford university press. This is no joke. It's a butter yellow cover on a thick, gigantic, like 1159 page hardcover.
I don't even know what I paid for this, probably like 50 bucks. It's got the thinnest paper ever. And it says a pattern language.
The name of this book is completely misleading. It's really how to design. It's like Sim City in 1977.
It's like how to design a town 50 years ago, how, how far apart should everybody live? How tall should everybody's fence be? How high should everybody's windows be?
Why should nothing be more than four stories? Why should old people live next to young people? Why should, and it's not just that it's culturally, why should there be an arcade?
Why should there be a billiards hall? Why should there be a, a legion? Why, what are these things do?
Why should there be a night scene? Why is this good? It's a, I can see why this is formative to you.
It is like a dense proof. The guy got the first ever PhD in architecture from Harvard ever. And then he taught architecture at the university of California and Berkeley.
And then at the end of his life in the seventies, he wrote like this definitive masterwork on how everything should be designed. Okay. It is an incredible, incredible book that I am going to be flipping through the rest of my life.
It's you follow this one or seven to 0.1 for arts slash architecture slash theory and instruction. Lindy man, tell us about your relationship with a pattern language, towns, buildings, construction by Christopher Alexander et al.
[Paul]
Yeah. It's just like you mentioned, it's someone takes architecture, community towns from the ground up in excruciating detail. But it's not a, it's not a bad read.
Like there's pictures, the way he divides each section is very readable. You know, and he utilizes a lot of, some of it is his preferences, but he has an interesting star system, which is if there's a certain number of stars, there's an ancient precedent, or at least a historical precedent for what he's talking about. And so you can actually go, okay, I want the most Lindy um, uh, patterns for designing from windows to the living room, to the bedroom, to the street, to how the building should look, to how the town should run.
So you can go to like the four stars and then like he, but then he also adds his opinion at like the first or second star, which is why he thinks, you know, um, we should, we should do this pattern while we should put this door here. And you know, we should put the bathroom here.
[Neil]
Um, it's got a bit of a, like, uh, that book with the red kettle on the front, the art of design. It's got one of those, like a vibe of like, I just, I'm at the end of my life. I got the most education to stop with anyone.
I've read everything there is to know, and here's how it should be done.
[Paul]
Yeah. And it's, I mean, this book is, this book is part of, uh, being an architect. Um, people read this it's, it's, it's in schools.
It's not, it's not completely alternative. Um, it's mainstream, but it is, it is, but it is it like, if you want a guide for designing a home, a community, a street, um, I mean, there it is with, with, uh, he discusses the historical precedents. Uh, and to me, it's just, it's just, you know, there's like, so there's some concepts that like never occurred to me, like light on two sides, right?
If you have an apartment or a home with windows on one side, it creates a cave like feeling. But if you have a window, uh, on, you know, another, another wall, you have two windows, uh, all of a sudden you feel like you're outside and it completely changes, um, how you feel in that room. And you'll gravitate to being in that room more than the room that just has windows on one side.
And like, you'll, you know, it's just, he's right. Like there's, I'm gravitating toward this specific spot of the house more. Um, so there's all these like concepts that, uh, are intuitive, but you never really see explained.
Um, and some things I disagree with a lot, but a lot, it just kind of opens your mind on how, uh, design, how you function in a space and how things should be designed. Like, I think he, he dislikes, uh, courtyards that are enclosed because it feels like, and like, and then he'll say like, nobody actually hangs out in these courtyards that are enclosed because he feels like everybody's watching you. And like people, people need a little bit more privacy or something.
And you're like, and then you'd like, look out at courtyards are enclosed and you'll see, you won't see a lot of people out there hanging out. And you're like, and that may be it. Like he could be right on that.
So he is, I don't know. It's like a great guide to, um, to design.
[Neil]
Well, absolutely. And it gets right into the culture and you're right. He kind of writes like, you know, I didn't really notice this, but like short paragraphs, lots of pictures, quote, a bit of research quote, quote, a little study.
You know, it's very readable. Um, the thing that brought me into this book, it was a quote you had said about anti-fragile, which is around age mixing, you know, a principle 40 in this book is called old people everywhere. Like it's not written in a pretentious language.
It's literally the chapter of title is old people everywhere. And on page two 16, he writes when elderly communities are too isolated or too large, they damage young and old alike. The young and other parts of town have no chance to benefit from older company.
And the old people are far too isolated goes on. Contemporary society shunts old people. And the more shunted they are, the deeper, the rift between old and young, the segregation of old causes the same rift inside each individual life.
As old people pass into old age communities, their ties with their own past become unacknowledged lost and broken. Their youth is no longer alive in their old age. They become dissociated.
Their lives get cut in two.
[Paul]
Yeah. That's, that's a powerful quote. He's right.
[Neil]
Yeah. And you know, like Leslie and I were just talking earlier today about, Oh, I wish I had my mom in, you know, like I realized, you know, one generation ago, like my parents would be living with me right now to the, to this day, I'm 45. My dad's once in a while will say like, why don't you guys just move in with us?
Like I got, I'm married with kids in a downtown Toronto setting. They live in the suburbs. He's 80 and he still suggests, you know, maybe we should live together.
Um, and he mentions that the house near them was recently purchased and like 15 people moved in, you know what I mean? Like, it's making a comeback, you know, you know. Um, but I quoted this, this passage from this book this morning, we were talking about how my mom over here's a quote from the same page.
She's quoting a 1945 book by Yale university press called the role of agent in primitive society. He says frequently the very young and the very old have been left together at home while the able-bodied have gone forth to earn the living. These oldsters in their wisdom and experience have protected and instructed the little ones while the children have acted as the eyes, ears, hands, and feet of their feeble old friends.
[Paul]
Oh, that's a great quote. That's right. The thing is also there's, there's like a month.
It's the same for you.
[Neil]
It's, it's, um, you got an OPA somewhere in the back.
[Paul]
It's a modern person. Sometimes we want more space, right? Or we want more privacy or we're okay with a little bit more alienation in the West.
So there is, there is a transformation that happens. I think when you're, when you're in a society, um, that what, what is your preference for, for privacy and space? Right.
[Neil]
Well, you know, you've been an active proponent of something I call never retire. I wrote a book in 2016 right behind me called the happiest equation. There's a whole chapter in there.
I call never retire. You've been a proponent of this. Um, and of course, one of the most fascinating graphs, I don't know if you've seen this is a table throughout the 20th century that shows the percentage of people over 65 who choose to voluntarily retire.
And it goes from like 9% in like the late 1800s to like 95% in like the two thousands, because in the fifties insurance companies marketed retirement as a thing you earn for a lifetime of hard work. And they create sunshine state, you know, Arizona, Florida kind of retirement communities completely annexing and cutting off old from young. Now we have an upwardly mobile society where the busiest day on the airlines is Thanksgiving because everyone's going home to see their parents.
Do they no longer even live near?
[Paul]
Yeah. I mean, modern cities now are generally playgrounds for the young before they move to the suburbs and sort of the wealthy. And so like, that's just accelerating over time here in New York or DC or Boston.
Um, you'll see families here and there, but a lot, a lot of the times you'll just see, you know, generally younger people until living there until they kind of, uh, rotate toward the suburbs. So that is an issue where we're kind of always around young people. Then you're around families and suburbs, then you're retiring around people, your age.
So you're always just in this category of people, your own age, your entire time. And there's like less mixing.
[Neil]
Well, this is the problem with colleges. You know, Leslie was experiencing some anxiety in college. She called her parents and they said, volunteer for an old folks home or a kindergarten classroom.
She did that. And she found her anxiety dissolved. She had to puncture the college bubble as a way to increase her mental health.
You know, um, I have a couple more things to ask you about this, about this incredible book. Uh, you're from Chicago, right? Like everyone, a lot of people listening and maybe taking that Chicago boat tour, you know, with the, all the architecture, the tallest buildings, you can see other bill.
It's an incredible tour. If you haven't done it, you know, I highly recommend it. And I thought I saw your tweet yesterday about, you know, someone who lives in New York saying, I love Roosevelt Island, you know, and I was just thinking I'm page 115 and I live in Toronto.
We're number one on the crane index. Like we are getting more skyscrapers built here than anywhere. And page one 15 says there is abundant evidence to show high buildings make people crazy.
And they go on and on high buildings have no genuine advantage except in speculative gains for banks and landowners. They are not cheaper. They do not help create open space.
They destroy the townscape. They destroy social life. They promote crime.
They make it life difficult for children. They are expensive to maintain. They wreck open space near them.
They damage light, they damage air, they damage view. And apart from all this empirical evidence shows they actually damage people's minds and feelings. And the book prescribes a mandatory four story limit for any development of any city.
[Paul]
Yeah. I mean, I agree a little bit with that. I mean, you're a walk around Manhattan.
You don't really feel cozy. I mean, it's kind of feel like daunting, like you're like, like an insect.
[Neil]
Unlike Paris, which is probably the best.
[Paul]
You take lower, you know, maybe nine, I don't know, four seems pretty low, but maybe nine stories. And then you just create these clusters of density and just recreate this neighborhood, just keep it going. And that way you never have to sort of bunch people into like, you know, these skyscraper type places because you just always, you know, you're kind of copying kind of neighborhood density, you know, as much as it shows that we live in.
[Neil]
It shows that we live in tribes of 7,000, you know, Robin Dunbar, who was our guest last year on the show, way back in chapter 132, he says, you know, it's always in multiples of, of, of three, you have three closest friends and you've got 15 shoulders to cry on friends that goes up to one 50 kind of two way relationship friends, 500 acquaintances. And then he multiplies up 5,000, the number of faces you can remember 15,000 number of group. So he shows that we have a cognitive limit for living like this.
And in fact, there was an urban planning report just published in the Toronto star. As I, as I talked to you today saying new study shows, Ontario does not need bigger cities. It just needs more cities.
I thought it was a really interesting way of putting it. And lastly, I just got back from Mexico city where no buildings are tall because they built the whole city on a lake. So everything's going down a couple inches every year.
They can't build up. It will just, you know, it's this water underneath it, you know? So I thought this was fascinating.
It's so the opposite of what's happening to my city and most cities right now, everything's becoming a Shanghai.
[Paul]
Right. I think it's just easier to build these gigantic towers.
[Neil]
But people don't prefer living there. I don't think so.
[Paul]
I mean, where do people go on vacation? Like that's where people prefer to live. Like, and in a way, you know, these, these cities in Europe or these small towns, you should, that's, I think that's where people, we should be recreating, but you know, any cities doing it right, right now.
Well, I think most in Europe are great to be in because they're built before, you know, modern times when they could build at such high density or, or they have all these, like, this very ornate, pleasant places to live. And it was taken with these, you know, these traditions. So I think, yeah, I think there's a reason why, but I don't think we can build them again.
I think we have a trouble building new cities or new neighborhoods. So it's one of the problems with kind of modern life is the places that are really nice are expensive. It's very hard for us to create like new places that are enjoyable and beautiful.
[Neil]
Yeah. And maybe that's why the density here is skyrocketing where I live because it isn't as much like those, you know, like people are drawn to, we've got hiking trails, we've got lakes, we've got 2 million lakes. We've got more lakes in Canada than any other country in the world combined, you know?
So, you know, people are drawn to the place where there's a cottage, you have the opportunity for a lake house, you have a place you can relax by the beach, you know, like that's that mentality that Canada has, you know, a hundred square kilometers per person, right? Just if you do the math. So, you know, arguably it makes it more desirable, but interesting dynamics at play.
Of course, you can't say the things I'm saying, because you get labeled like a NIMBY who doesn't like density.
[Paul]
Yeah. The problem with the, is that the YIMBYs is that all density is good and, you know, there's no, there's no discretion for style or for how a human can live, right? It's just shove as many people in there as possible.
And there's, yeah, that's, that's what their argument is, right? So, but nope, there's, there's other considerations here if you want to do this correctly, but I think it's, it's very difficult to do it correctly.
[Neil]
So you've taken us through a over 2000 year old book of aphorisms from a slave term in the Roman empire, a guy who quotes all this stuff in his writing over time and longevity who popularized the Lindy effect and a pattern language, which is also a 50 year old book drawing upon thousands of years of history and research. There's a real connection here between the stuff you read. It's almost counterintuitive considering how prominent you are on Twitter.
Why is it counterintuitive? But to me, it's like, I would picture someone like that, just like being in a library all day.
[Paul]
Oh, I think it's nice. I think there's lots of ways to get information quickly now. So you don't necessarily need it.
I mean, I've read this, thankfully.
[Neil]
Like Twitter's not Lindy.
[Paul]
Yeah.
But I think, I think the style of writing is, and I think text in a way is, I think text in a way is easier to remember than video and even probably audio. Although I think audio can compete with text pretty well, but I think really text hits hard. Text somehow can get people to remember things from years ago in a way that other forms of media cannot, especially in that sentence style.
[Neil]
Completely agree. Completely agree. And text is easier to remember than video. This is a show that espouses books.
We have detailed 10 page long shows for every single show. We have all the quotes pulled out. We have all the things mentioned pulled out.
We have like, I write a blog post for everyone. Like I believe in the long-termification of text.
[Paul]
I also came of age before social media. So I read a lot more. So I read all these stuff before I kind of became locked into the, this world we're in now where we're actually reading is harder to do because there's so many options and also there's life.
So there's an advantage to, to being a little older, not too old, but just being a little older in, I think today.
[Neil]
We're the last generation that will know life before the internet. And weirdly, you know, you said before I got locked in and I, if I could as a friend say, you know, for now, because you know, you did, you did tweet pretty recently that reading is dead books. You actually said that they said books, books, books are dead, you know, until we get to the other side of this, the other side, what's the other side.
[Paul]
I mean, I don't know what the other side is, but it's, I don't think it's a sustainable. I don't think everybody on these few apps just spending all their days scrolling on infinite scroll. I mean, I think this is, I don't think this is a good way to you know, structure society and certain people owning the algorithm and can put that into your face.
[Neil]
I think there's going to be read books.
[Paul]
No, I do. But I think it's going to take, it's going to take another shift to, to get us back to more, to more literacy. I think there's we're going through a, through another time right now, but I think books and literacy are going to come back in another form.
[Neil]
Do you think we're going through an illiterate, a moment of illiteracy?
[Paul]
I think we're going through real transformation and how, you know, we can consume and live. And I think we're going to think in a way we're going to get off of these, like somehow we're going to get off of these and we're going to go back to kind of like where we were a hundred years ago, but with some, with technology, I don't know what it's going to look like, but yeah.
[Neil]
This is partly why I'm so drawn to your work is that you get to this amazing place of looking really far in the back mirror and then you get to a place of trying to apply it to the front mirror and you both do it and are smart enough to say, and I don't know, you know what I mean? Yeah. I don't like, don't use mouthwash.
I'm good with floss. And as for all the other stuff, I don't know.
[Paul]
It's important. Like a lot of people say, I don't know. Right.
Yeah. Everyone has an answer, but a lot of times you don't know.
[Neil]
So, Hey, listen, this guy wrote a thousand, you know, 1,159 page book. You are similarly um, productive. Like, like I subscribed to your newsletter.
You are writing a gigantic long form researched with images. Yeah. Piece.
[Paul]
That's important too.
[Neil]
Images are important. You're doing that like two or three times a week. Yeah.
Yeah. How are you doing this? How are you writing so heavily?
And so frequently long form journalism, like you are writing, like if it was a newspaper, you're writing like a long feature two or three times a week.
[Paul]
It's four to five hours of directed creative work every day, no days off. And, um, you kind of follow what stimulates you. And then you kind of like use a pattern, which is you go back, you go forward and you, you know, and then you go back to the present.
And, um, the good thing is we have all this kind of media around us. So people enjoy, you know, as an image with text or video with text, so you can just kind of put that in there, um, to, to help support your argument. Um, but generally it's just, um, I think when you have like an angle, you just follow that angle.
Uh, and you just, that's what I do. So, but it's, it's interesting. It's interesting to me.
And I just followed that interesting kind of, uh, route.
[Neil]
Okay. I'm going to close this conversation. This very stimulating conversation with Lindy man, Paul Scalas, but some fast money round questions to help close us off hardcover, paperback, audio, or e paperback.
How do you organize your books on your bookshelf? Random. What's your favorite bookstore living or dead?
[Paul]
Oh, favorite bookstore. Um, what's that? What's that place in New York.
So nice.
[Neil]
The strand strand or Ben McNally strand.
[Paul]
I like strand. Yeah.
[Neil]
Yeah. What's your book lending policy?
[Paul]
Uh, my book lending policy. That's I try not to, uh, give some, as far as like the interest in the person or is like the time. Yeah.
Yeah. Either I try to match the person's personality with where they, what they're asking for with, sometimes I get DMs of like, Hey, what do you think I should be reading? And then I asked him like, what are you into?
So I just try to match interest with, um, with something I've read before that I know is good.
[Neil]
You are a successful writer. I know you brandish the label technology lawyer. However, what I see as someone who is living a flaneur lifestyle in multiple cities around the world with an incredibly quick to distill acute trend spotting and trend articulation through this heuristic of the Lindy effect.
I'm like, you're right. Like you're a writer. That's how I, you know, no offense to the technology lawyer side, but I see you as like a very prominent writer and you're selling your writing.
That's a, that's a very important point. You actually sell your writing. You cannot read Paul Scalas for free.
You can read Paul Scalas on Twitter for free, but all your articles are never for free anywhere. You have to pay. And I followed you for a long time before I started paying you, right?
Like I was like, I have to know how this ends, you know? And it's like, how much does it cost? Like, is it like $5 a month or something?
So you have to have to make a choice about how much you're going to charge. Presumably you have hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people who pay you. And therefore that provides a salary, which therefore provides an income.
So I guess I'm wondering what your writing advice is.
[Paul]
Oh God. I don't know. I mean, don't take any advice on writing.
I think that's my writing advice, honestly, because I never, I never approached anybody with advice on writing. And I think, I think you just develop your own style and you live and die with that style and anything else just makes your writing into something else. Um, but I consume, but I consume, um, to create.
So I'm always, if I've wanted a piece of advice, it's, it's always be sensitive to see what excites you when you're just browsing the newspapers, the blogs, the tweets, the books, just be sensitive to what, uh, cause then that's what your audience is going to like. Cause eventually once you become a real, once you have an audience, uh, the pathway is this is interesting to me. And I, and the side effect is the audience will find it interesting.
So it all goes through what you think is interesting. And I think, I think if you get, try to get funny with, I think this is what my audience will like. You break that, you break that connection and something goes wrong or will go wrong in the future.
Once you, once you think you can outsmart, once you think like, Oh, I think the audience would love this, even though I don't like this. So yeah, I guess that's, that's the only advice, but it's writing style. I don't, I don't know.
[Neil]
Paul Skallas, Lindyman. Uh, I am one of the 129,000 people who follow and look forward to your original thoughts on applying the Lindy effect heuristic to our complicated, overwhelming cacophony of noise that we call today's civilization is a real treat and pleasure to hear your thinking out loud through the lens of my heuristic, which is three most formative books, and always be sensitive to what excites you take lessons from the past and apply them to today for guidance. It is a real honor and pleasure to have you on three books. Thank you so much for doing this and for the generous gifts of so much of your time and your class.
I really, really appreciate it.
[Paul]
It's pleasure speaking to you. It was a great conversation. Thank you so much.
[Neil]
Hey everybody. It's just me, just Neil again, hanging back in my basement, my wires and my microphone. I'm in my office this time.
I don't record video for it. I don't know. I don't know.
You know, I oscillate between video and non-video. We did video for Nick Sweetman in chapter 144. I'm like, that was a banger job, right?
Like we did documentary with time lapses and all this footage, but it also took us a month of work to do it. And kudos to incredible editors and videographers and filmmakers along the way, but they also cost a lot of money to do all that too. So I actually really respect the podcasters who are going full video because now that I've gone down to like LA and hung out with Rich Roll and I see is like 22 cameras set up and a six full-time editors and this, you know, four people working on Instagram reels and all this stuff.
I'm like, dude, this is a lot of work. I mean, it's kind of like a TV show, right? So I oscillate between them.
Well, this is an interesting conversation. Don't you think? What'd you think of Lindy man?
What'd you think of Paul Skallas? You know, he hasn't really done a lot of podcasts, but I find him so intriguing and his perspective is it's hard to discern between what to take from history, but some of the interesting thoughts. I like the last advice, always be sensitive to what excites you, right?
Or how about this quote, talent goes where the money is, or is quote, it's very tempting to mediate reality through a computer screen. This point really took me a while, but as he was talking, the longer something survives, the less the survivorship bias. So basically you have the tendency amongst things that last to over inflate their propensity to be strong or successful things, but the longer it's lasted, then you, it's not just survivorship.
Now it's like legitimacy. Now it's like quality. And now it's like stood the test of time, which is more than just kind of being biased towards something that's lasted over a short time.
That's an interesting one. I like his quote here. I do four to five hours of directive creative work every day.
You know what, for all the creators out there, all the writers, there it is. There's the secret sauce. I do four to five hours of directed creative work every day.
This guy is, yes, he's been on Twitter a lot. Like I quoted like the 16 tweets in less than four hours. But if you look at the timelines, it was clear that he was like on Twitter deeply, like a couple hours one day, and then off it for like 22 hours.
And then like on Twitter deeply for like a couple hours another day and then off it deeply. And it's clear to me that he's also using Twitter as his writing aid. It is his Evernote.
It is his Scrivener file. He is constantly attaching tweets and things he sees to old strings from a year ago, two years ago, three years ago. And when the strings get long enough for this intriguing note-taking process, he then writes it up into an article.
And then of course does more research along the way. So you get these really detailed combinations of writing and images, tweets and graphs and research all folded in together that naturally appeals to the way that people's brains want to consume information. It made the point that he said kind of interesting to me where he I think people remember text better than they remember video.
Maybe because text has experienced more generational churn. That other phrase he talked about that only true generational churn creates powerful indie things. TikTok has not experienced generational churn yet.
Snapchat maybe never will. Certainly MySpace and Friendster didn't. And ICQ.
I was on MySpace and Friendster and ICQ when I was 18 and 19 and 20 on the internet. Those were my social media. And those are the ways I talked to my friends.
I literally used ICQ all the time in first year university. But there is no generational churn. Now no one uses it.
So what has that and what doesn't? What a cool lens to filter stuff through. Makes me feel happy for flossing.
And thank you so much to Paul Lindemann-Scalis for adding three more books to our top 1,000. Oh yes, I am talking about number 577, The Moral Sayings of Plubeus Serus. I cannot recommend this pamphlet book enough.
It stood 2,000 years for a reason. Then number 576, Anti-Fragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I have been backpocketing The Black Swan as one of my three most formative books, maybe to do in the last ever chapter or something.
Because The Black Swan taught me that life works best when you make small bets on lots of things. Make a small bet on a podcast and a newsletter and a speaking career and a blog post and writing a book. Well, one of those things hopefully will work.
It will experience the Black Swan effect. I got A Black Swan with the popularity of The Book of Awesome in 2010 and arguably again in 2016 with The Happiness Equation. Have my other eight books sold nearly as well as those two?
Not even close. But for The Book of Awesome, somebody at TEDxToronto asked me to do a TEDxToronto talk. Then somebody at TED.com put it on their website. At the same time, 6,000 copies were printed in Canada and Heather Reisman, the CEO of Indigo made it a Heather's pick, which sold 90,000 hardcovers in three months at her stores. So I cannot control the confluence of extrinsic factors that affect my behavior and the results of the things I do. However, I can make myself ripe for exposure to them by doing lots of little things and placing lots of small bets.
That's the principle of The Black Swan. So then Antifragile comes along. I bought it.
It sat on my bedside table a long time. Like I said, it's very nutritively dense. It's like one of these intellectually overstimulating books.
You can see that it's from a genius, almost ADHD, genius-y type of brain. But now with Lindyman's Prompting, I revisited the book and read longer and thicker and deeper sections in depth and it continues to blow me away. It's such a good way to think about life.
How do you create post-traumatic growth in your life? How do you make yourself susceptible to small shocks purposely? Because those small shocks, small tears and small failures actually open you up to stronger living like the once a week or twice a week vegan fasting principle.
So it's interesting how big this book really plays a role in my life and obviously a lot of other people's as it's still selling a lot of copies 13 years later. And then finally, his third most important book is probably one I would wager that almost none of you have heard of. I don't say that with any dismissiveness, more just like who's reading a 1300 page hardcover Oxford University Press book about architecture from the 70s.
Yet that book is also offering a very long-term lens by which and how we live. It's an incredible book reflecting back to what's working and what's not in our culture. It's amazing as all three books are.
Thank you so much to Lindyman for joining us on Three Books and thank you to all of you for listening. Did you make it past the three second pause? If so, I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast.
This is one of three clubs we have for Three Books listeners, including the Cover to Cover Club and the Secret Club. Let's kick off the end of the podcast club, the after party of the show, as we always do by going to the phones. Here we go.
[Diego]
Hi, Neil. Happy New Year. My name is Diego.
I'm calling from Yokohama, Japan where I've lived for 20 years. Sorry, I'm kind of walking and talking. I just finished listening to your talk with David Sedaris.
Yeah, his choice of Tobias Wolff was amazing. I've read a couple of his collections and actually when I finished one, I was so impressed by it that I found his email address and I sent him an email saying thanks for writing the book and he replied back and I have an email that I'll always cherish. Anyway, if you want three formative books, On the Road by Kerouac.
I don't know if it stands up today, but it got me into reading. The second one, Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway. It's about a 90 page novella.
I think I've read it about four times. It just made me feel good about being able to read a Nobel Prize winner when I didn't have much confidence as a reader. And the last one, Knut Hampson's Mysteries, which is a book I picked up at a second-hand bookshop in Sydney where I'm from.
And it's like a David Lynch movie. It was written in the late 1800s, I believe, and yeah, I just read very contemporary and highly recommend it if you haven't read it. Anyway, it's getting late over here in Japan.
It's cold. And just thanks for all your podcasts. They're all great.
Cheers. Thank you.
[Neil]
Wow. Thank you so much to Diego from Sydney by way of Japan. That's an incredible life you're living, you know, over in Sydney and featuring Steve Toltz over there and featuring, you know, Dr. Ching-Li over in Japan, some of our past guests on the show. Um, you know what? I love that you can email authors. This is something we talked about with Dave Barry back in chapter nine, that authors are the most accessible celebrity in the world.
Like they're like, like you can't email a movie star. You can't email a musician, but you can email an author and there's a 50% chance they'll write you back. Like that's amazing.
Tobias Wolfe, by the way, is a dream guest for the show. I've approached him a couple of times and he's not written back. Tobias, if you're listening, come on three books.
It'd be a pleasure to talk to you. And I love your stuff as well. Um, I love that on the road got you into reading.
That's that's that, that right away is the definition of a formative book, right? Like it kind of gets you into reading. And, uh, I don't know if you've listened to chapter 94 with Dan the tailor, but if you haven't Daniel Torgeman, we talk about on the road, it's one of his three most formative books, old man and the sea.
I also felt that way, that exact same way of like, wow, I can read like a smart person book. Um, that was first proposed to us as a formative book in chapter 24 with Jonathan field. When interestingly, he read it or owned it in its original published capacity, which is not a 90 page novella, which is amazing, but it was like a feature short story in life magazine.
So like life magazine, which was, I guess like a hundred pages or whatever. I like a 20 page insert in it of that whole book. Imagine reading a whole book in the middle of a magazine.
Like it's just, it just speaks to like what magazines used to do. I think magazines, by the way, are very Lindy. Don't you think like, I think so there's a magazine store that's open till midnight in downtown Toronto.
And they've recently moved, uh, from the main floor to the second floor because of, uh, exploding rents. And I just love the fact that you can still survive these days. I'll be it on the second floor of retail now as a magazine store, like all they sell is magazines.
But I read an article, an interview with, you know, Bill Gates back in the early nineties. And he said, I go to magazine stores because inevitably they're deep subject matter experts on a topic. I know nothing about, but picking up a magazine on like woodworking or birdwatching or stereo filiac that, you know, people are obsessed with stereos, or I just learned so much about a topic in detail.
And it's a wonderful way to explore my curiosity because magazines still offer that yet are now combined with the increasingly value curation. You know what I mean? Like in an era of infinite choice, the value of curation skyrockets that sort of doubly makes them important.
And I think there's a lot more stuff you can do with like size and format and print. I love spacing magazine, which is sideways. I love inner interview magazine, which is super tall.
I love what magazines are doing as they constantly reinvent themselves. And I like to have one magazine subscription per year just to support the form and the medium. Don't want it to distract from my book reading.
So I usually just have one for a while. I was getting bust magazine after chapter four with Sarah Ramsey. And of course, you know, interviewing Debbie Stoller way back in chapter 20, who was the editor of bus magazine.
Then I was getting the Atlantic for a while. Then I was getting the New Yorker for a while. And now I'm open.
I need a new magazine. Does anyone subscribe to a paper magazine that you recommend? Give me a call at 1-833-READALOT.
And by the way, Diego, the last book that you recommended was one I've never heard of. It's called Mysteries, as you said, by Knut Hampson, H-A-M-S-U-N. On Goodreads it says, in a Norwegian coastal town, society's carefully woven threads begin to unravel when an unsettling stranger named Johan arrives.
With an often brutal insight into human nature, Nagel draws out the town's folk, exposing their darkest instincts and suppressed desires. Okay, this sounds interesting. It was published in 1892.
1892. It's Lindy, people. It's Lindy.
It made it through 100 years and still getting word of mouth recommendations through generational transfer. It's working. It's very Lindy.
But thank you so much, Diego. And hey, if you're listening to this right now, you made it. You're a part of our inner sanctum, our inner circle.
No one gets here that isn't part of this love fest, right? I love you. I love you.
I love you. I really appreciate you, your time, your energy, your ears. I love your notes, your messages.
Please give me a call. There's no... You can't do it wrong.
If you do, just call back again and try again. I'm not going to embarrass anybody. 1-833-READALOT, R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T.
It should work from everywhere in the world. Leave me one of your formative books or a dream guest or a reflection or something you agreed with or disagree with from one of the chapters. I love hearing from you.
It's my greatest joy. Thank you so much for calling me. Now, we've already done a letter.
I guess we could do another one. It's getting a little self-indulgent here. Let's go to the word of the chapter.
And for this chapter's word, let's of course go back to Lindy Man himself.
[Paul]
Aphorers Like La Brière, La Rochefoucauld.
[Neil]
Yes, indeed. The word is Aphorers. Aphorers? A-P-H-O-R-E-R-S.
Is that a real word? Aphorist. Okay.
Well, Vocabulary.com seems to think Aphorist is the word. A-P-H-O-R-I-S-T. Which means someone who formulates aphorisms or who repeats aphorisms.
Okay. What about you, Miriam Webster? Aphorism.
Well, you got aphorism over there. A-P-H-O-R-I-S-M. There's no reason if aphorism is a word and an aphorist is a word that an aphor shouldn't be.
Maybe he meant aphorist, but whatever. We'll go with the word that he invented. I like that word.
What is an aphorism, by the way? It is a concise statement of a principle or it is a terse formulation of a truth or a sentiment. For example, a high-minded aphorism might be, let us value the quality of life, not the quantity.
Or this is the third definition, which is kind of interesting. It's also an ingeniously terse style of an expression. For example, aphoristic language.
A quote mentioned is, there are dazzling chapters packed with perfectly chosen anecdotes pithy with aphorism. Okay. Well, that one's getting to the sort of like pithy nature of it or the ingeniously terse style of it, which for sure, Masim Taleb writes in.
For sure, Lindyman writes in. For sure, Publius Serus writes in. Where did it come from?
Actually, interestingly, the word aphorism comes from Lindyman's own heritage. That would be the Greek physician Hippocrates. Hippocrates, often considered the father of modern medicine, created the word aphorismos, which is a Greek ancestor of aphorism, entitling a book outlining his principles on the diagnosis and treatments of disease.
Okay. When you open that book, Hippocrates' book, very Lindy, he writes in the book's introduction. Here's the first sentence.
You heard some of it before. Ready? Here it is.
It's an aphorism. Ready? Life is short, art long, occasion sudden and dangerous, experience deceitful, judgment difficult.
Like that's the whole sentence. Life is short, art long, occasion sudden and dangerous, experience deceitful, judgment difficult, like declaring six things to be specifically one way. That is aphoristic.
You are an aphorer, Hippocrates and Lindyman. Now says here, English speakers originally use the term mainly in the realm of the physical sciences, but they eventually broadened it to cover principles and other fields. Look, you could call this wisdom.
You could call it one liners. You could call it like life's little instruction book. But I think Lindyman's point is that to filter signal from noise these days, we have to have techniques.
One of my techniques is the limiting of three formative books, a thousand formative books, total 333 chapters. That kind of guarantees me good ones because I'm asking interesting people which three books most changed their life. So that's a way I'm trying to use a filter to kind of pump signal over noise.
And aphorisms sort of do the same. They are quick and distilled morsels of wisdom meant to provide hyperlinks for lack of better words into vast sums of human knowledge in a quick way. You're thinking quick.
That wasn't quick. It was two hours together. This is different, man.
It's pleasure too. We're hanging out in the parks. We're walking down the street together.
We're in basement gyms together. I'm with you on your flight and you're walking in your kitchen while you do the dishes and you're with me. It's been a pleasure as always.
Thank you so much for hanging out with me on chapter 145 of free books. And until next time, remember that you are what you eat and you are what you read. Keep turning that page, everybody.
And I'll talk to you soon. Bye.