Ep. 1407: Lindsay Crouse Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

My guest today is Lindsay Crouse. Lindsay is a writer, journalist, and former New York Times editor whose work explores ambition, endurance, sports, and knowing when to walk away. The topic is her book The Case for Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting Out. In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss: Quitting as a strategic decision rather than failure Perseverance, rest, burnout, and knowing when to stop Sunk costs, opportunity costs, risk, and taking losses Relationships, commitment, and the choice to stay or leave Career transitions, legacy, and personal reinvention Jump in! --- I'm MICHAEL COVEL, the host of TREND FOLLOWING RADIO, and I'm proud to have delivered 10+ million podcast listens since 2012. Investments, economics, psychology, politics, decision-making, human behavior, entrepreneurship and trend following are all passionately explored and debated on my show. To start? I'd like to give you a great piece of advice you can use in your life and trading journey… cut your losses! You will find much more about that philosophy here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/trend/ You can watch a free video here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/video/ Can't get enough of this episode? You can choose from my thousand plus episodes here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/podcast My social media platforms: Twitter: @covel https://twitter.com/covel Facebook: @trendfollowing https://www.facebook.com/trendfollowing/ LinkedIn: @covel https://linkedin.com/in/covel/ Instagram: @mikecovel https://www.instagram.com/mikecovel/ Hope you enjoy my never-ending podcast conversation!

• 0:00Speaker 00

  My guest today is Lindsay Kraus. And when I first heard about Lindsay's book, it was an immediate yes. Before I even opened a page, the title of her book, "The Case for Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting Out." Now, look, that doesn't exactly say trading, and her book is not exactly about trading. But with that title, you already know that whether you're into trading, investing, or something else, just looking at life and how quitting has the potential benefits in our lives, then you're all in. You're ready to dig in. You're ready to get

• 0:44Speaker 00

  a piece of education that can possibly help you. And that's what we're all looking for. Without any further delay, let's jump right into my guest today, Lindsay Kraus.

• 1:09Speaker 00

  I have written eight books. They are all about quitting, but not the kind of quitting that you're talking about. But actually, it is the kind of quitting you're talking about because the investment books that I've written are all about having a stop loss, which is a form of quitting. It's a form of saying, "I'm not willing to take this much more risk. I've lost this amount of money. I'm going to quit." But here's the funny thing. Most people in the buy and hold American world, or Europe, or whatever, they actually don't have an investment strategy that has quitting in it. So I just wanted to share that with you, that that was essentially, when I saw your title, I was like, "Okay, I don't know exactly where she's gonna go, but I kind of have a feeling I know where she's gonna go." So I was like, "We can make a fun conversation in this area." Why don't you share with me

• 1:54Speaker 00

  the word? Because it's an interesting word. It's a word that most people would probably feel bad about. I don't feel bad about it at all. How did you come at that word, quitting?

• 2:05Speaker 01

  I think I came at it via this lifelong value that I've had, which is around endurance, or perseverance, or keeping going. The idea of wanting to do more and go harder, that's really been a guiding purpose for a lot of my life, and my career, and my athletic career. I'm a distance runner. And I was at the New York Times for 15 years. And most of my work there, it explored questions around how to keep going, how to go harder, how to do more. Like, those are questions that I had for myself. That's what most people, at least in my, or at least that read me and share my values, that's the question that we have, is like, how can we do more? And so I was an endurance athlete, and I guess you could also say kind of a hopeless driver. And so that made sense to want to ask those questions and want to have those values. And for me, it did accomplish

• 2:50Speaker 01

  great things, like things that I thought I would never really be able to do. I'm really interested in women's sports. In my reporting there, it helped reform the industry. I was able to help elevate women Olympians' voices to bring them maternity rights to pregnant athletes sponsored by Nike. I commissioned the Times' only Academy Award-winning film, which was also on women's sports. I mean, this really came from perseverance, doing more, going harder, trying to do things that hadn't really been done. But that approach definitely required a lot of grinding, and it also meant that a lot of my work was self-assigned. And I think for me, that approach, it started to catch up to me because I was only looking at how to work in one way. And I was starting to feel tired, and worse for me, I think it stopped working. I wound up getting exhausted. And at some point, I realized a few years ago,

• 3:35Speaker 01

  I wasn't really doing the same work that made me feel energized, let alone kind of proud of anymore. And so instead of continuing to try to explore new ways to continue, I guess, for this book, I decided to ask the opposite question, which it sounds like you came to a lot earlier than I did, which was, when and why might it actually be better to stop? For me, it was trying to redefine this term of quitting that I think a lot of these sort of strivers hold, like, the definition that we hold for a lot of our lives, which is that it's giving up in this bad way, when actually, there's a lot of things that we accumulate, and even behaviors that we accumulate over the course of our life, and decisions that we make, even when we're children, but certainly in our 20s, that, I mean, it sounds like you were dealing with this yourself when you decided to move to Asia, is to let go of some of those decisions and decide like,

• 4:20Speaker 01

  "Okay, well, maybe my 20-year-old self wanted this, but what do I want when I'm 30 or 40 or onward?" So it was trying to reframe that word for myself to actually think of it more as a decision, as opposed to what I think I and others might do as we embrace perseverance.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  Why did you choose the word, though? How did the word to put that into the title? What was the driver of the word?

• 4:43Speaker 01

  That word itself, quitting, or quit, it makes us very uncomfortable. It's, I think, much more than words, analogous words like giving up, or give up, or stop, or leave. I think those words have a little bit more agency in them. Quit sounds like taking something, and it sounds like a very negative action. And I think it can start that way, but I think we need to get more comfortable with quitting in order to live better.

• 5:09Speaker 00

  Let me keep you at the endurance part for a second. I played baseball into college. I was a baseball catcher. So it was a lot of quick action-type stuff. I was pretty fast. I had a girlfriend in my 20s where she was running 12, 15 miles a day out in LA. I went on some runs with her, maybe in my life, seven, eight miles. That's probably my max out as a pretty big guy. But I used to watch her, and I used to always think to myself, "Are you gonna burn out with this?" Is there an... Because I knew what she was addicted to. I knew what was driving her. I could feel it. I could feel it, and I wasn't criticizing it, but I was like, we would always get in these philosophical disagreements where she didn't seem to... It was literally just the addiction drive, and she wasn't necessarily thinking

• 5:53Speaker 00

  multiple steps down on the playing field.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  Two things there. So take distance running. And actually, another word I think sometimes gets mixed up with quitting is the word rest. We often don't take it enough. And we look at rest as a reward for our hard work, or something that the person ahead of us does after they beat us. At least, I've certainly thought that way. And rest is actually really essential. A lot of people, when they're younger, it takes a while for that, if they don't necessarily have a healthy relationship with rest, that will catch up with them, whether it's an injury, obviously. I write about it in the book, many athletes that have had to quit their sport with a ton of talent because they weren't resting in the right way. And then it was actually resting or quitting. Obviously, they thought about it as quitting because they did have to give up. But that rest or quitting itself helped ultimately catapult them

• 6:40Speaker 01

  way ahead of their expectations and improve their performance. But also, just looking at, if you just are constantly on this wheel, and I think the treadmill is a perfect analogy here, like, a literal analogy, because that's one way that we run, is just sort of like to be stuck in place. You can lose your momentum. You can lose your enjoyment, and you can stop improving. And then it's like, what you loved about that sport, that sort of self-exploration, you lose it. And I think often, what you really love about it, to begin with, is this idea of that connection between your mind and your body. I think it can really sound cliche, but I've really enjoyed pushing my limits in both directions. And you can't get better at running unless you explore or toughen up your mind.

• 7:19Speaker 00

  Are you currently a free agent, so to speak? Are you currently working for yourself?

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  That was something that I was catching as I was going through your book, especially even just the chapter titles. I start to think to myself, "This is being written with someone who has the corporate background, a corporate background that a lot of people probably would envy, as someone who's not held a job since age 19, working in Circus City's warehouse hauling TVs. I don't know anything about the corporate world." It's interesting because when I look at what you've put together, there's two worlds. There's the entrepreneurial guy like me sitting here saying, "Oh, this stuff is like, boom, I get all this immediately. You take it in, it's reinforcement." And then I think over here on the corporate side, especially now with AI

• 8:09Speaker 00

  hanging over everybody's head, it's a different animal. I had an investment author guest on the other day, and we were having a similar conversation about this, this aspect of where maybe somebody's been inside the system, they get outside the system, they write something really interesting, like you have, but who is it most interesting to?

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Who is this book, or who are these questions most interesting to?

• 8:30Speaker 00

  The whole area that you've gone, where is it most interesting to? I think it's tougher. It's probably tougher for people that are in an environment where they don't have a chance to control their next step to take advantage of the wisdom that you're putting in here.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. But I also think, and this was the case for me, that the choices that we have and the situations that we're in, and the amount of control that we have changes as our lives change. And I don't think that we take the time to register that enough to think, "Okay, these environments may have worked for me at one stage in my life. What about now? What choices do I have now that I didn't have when I was in my 20s?" If you look at me, myself, when I started this job, or even like when I moved to New York with no job when I was 22...

• 9:16Speaker 00

  You said, "Starting this job", you mean, writing for the New York Times?

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Exactly. Working at the Times, I started as an assistant. I was broke. I was in my twenties. I was single. My life was really different. I was living in like an illegal tenement somewhere in the middle of Manhattan where more mice than roommates and a lot of beach of those. And I needed certain things. I needed a stable salary. I needed, in some ways, to establish myself professionally, obviously. In that case, you have a certain set of priorities. You mentioned that this book might be applicable to people that have a little bit of an entrepreneurial drive to them. A lot of my best work at the Times was self-assigned. For me, I needed to take a bigger swing at some point and was trying frankly to get up the courage to do that. And I think to quit, it requires a lot of courage and also a lot of self-analysis to,

• 10:01Speaker 01

  again, you don't just want to quit and figure it out and like throw yourself back further than you were. You want to leave wisely and make sure you're going to be okay. But I think you have to really do a lot of analysis.

• 10:12Speaker 00

  You know, that's not necessarily easy to pull off. Sometimes you just have to jump.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  No, not at all.

• 10:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. But you also have to think about, if money is the question, have you run those numbers? Are you willing to make certain trade-offs around your lifestyle, et cetera? And I think if you feel like you need to invest in yourself, a temporary loss on a paycheck is actually worth sort of the expansion of opportunity and also maybe that kind of reset that comes with a change in what you're doing and maybe a little bit more happiness. It's all about cost benefit, which you, as a financial expert, are going to understand. But I don't think that the average person makes, runs those kind of cost benefit analyses in their lives nearly enough. I mean, we're busy to begin with, but also we don't want to.

• 10:56Speaker 00

  Let me take you to something because it's, it's in your work. I used to say to myself, and I said it for a long time, I got an MBA, not really sure why, but there's only two things that I really thought, and I said this from my twenties onward, there's only two things I took from it that really resonated with me that I had not been exposed to. And that was the definition of a sunk cost and an opportunity cost, which is essentially what you and I are talking about right now. When you talk about that financial jargon that most people might not understand, I still look at a sunk cost and I'm amazed, in my 50s, I'm amazed at how many people still are never exposed to the idea of a sunk cost. They spend the money, the money's gone, they can't get it back, but you've got to make it work because I spent the money.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Yep. It's not just money, right? It's effort. It's the idea that a decision is extremely uncomfortable for a lot of us, right? And especially a decision when we're trading something that we know for something that we don't. And all of this comes down to risk. And people just aren't trained to make calculated risk assessments in a way that actually benefits us, I think. We're really trained to, again, keep our head down, stay the course, be patient, trust that it will all work out. And often it does. But if you know that you want something more, the longer that you wait, there's a trade-off there as well. The biggest opportunity that we have is time and it doesn't get easier to leave. It doesn't get easier to stop with time. Sunk cost makes it harder. The only thing that happens is that you just get older and that you've stayed longer and it's harder

• 12:25Speaker 01

  to leave. And I really think it's more comfortable for a lot of us to just keep bumping that decision down the road. And then this whole idea of I can't leave, it becomes more true. But that doesn't mean that staying is good.

• 12:37Speaker 00

  Let me share a quick story with you and get you to comment since you have a big sports background. I don't want to name him. He'll probably kill me, but you know, it's easy to figure out. Anyways, my nephew just finished four years at UVA. He was on the football team, a six foot, 175 pound defensive back, white guy, very rare in the ACC. He's super fast. Okay. So he's one of these guys that just has got amazing, crazy speed. So anyways, he was there for four years, really didn't get any playing time. And, you know, he got his degree from UVA and that's a good thing. So he's now he's going to look at the job market. You know, still thinking, well, I got a fifth year. I can play a fifth year. Then he gets a call out of the blue and his father's texting me and we're like,

• 13:15Speaker 00

  what? Who wants him? Well, Louisiana State wants him. LSU wants him. Why does LSU want him? So I'm like texting my nephew, like, get your ass to LSU right now. And he's like, oh man, I just did four years. I didn't get any playing time, you know, da, da, da, da, da. You know, so it's trying to frame it to him like, look, as your uncle, I can't tell you, you're going to get any playing time at LSU when you're going to play with a bunch of guys that are going to be in the NFL. I'm not promising you that. However, you go to LSU for one year that you have left because of this opportunity cost for one, but just also this kind of asymmetric thing that could happen that if you don't

• 13:59Speaker 00

  do, you're not going to get this shot again. And I'm sure, I'm sure with you working for the Times in New York City, the amount of times you've seen people presented with an opportunity like that, for example, perhaps life-changing, and some people grab it and some people don't. My nephew ended up grabbing it. So he's down there suffering in the heat at Baton Rouge right now. We'll see what happens. But, you know, Lane Kiffin's first year. But speak to this idea of opportunity presenting itself and people perhaps quitting before they ever start.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  That's the flip side of this argument, right? That is not taking the risk. That is being, I think, a little timid and lacking courage. And I think that's what a lot of us are really fighting against when we resist quitting something that we're already in. It's like taking that impulse, that quitting before you already start impulse. In many cases, we don't want to do and applying it like broadly across the broad swath of our lives and pushing through every setback, even when intuitively we know it's time to stop. Like we've given it everything we can. For your nephew, that makes a lot of sense. I took a huge pay cut to come to the Times. Not a huge pay cut because I wasn't making that much to begin with, but then I started making even less to come to the Times.

• 15:07Speaker 00

  But it was the opportunity. It was the unknown opportunity.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Totally. And I was starting over as an assistant. I felt way too old. There was like a kind of a two-year cap on those jobs where it was like up or out. In some ways, this felt idiotic. And I think to a lot of my friends, it didn't necessarily make sense either. We were living in kind of this like hyper competitive, like climb the ladder, do not question necessarily where it's going, but keep climbing and get ahead and stay ahead. And I think it does take a lot of risk to make again, a decision to do something a little bit different. And in that way, it's almost passively climbing the ladder to something and telling yourself that it's going somewhere. If your nephew had just graduated from UVA and done the standard.

• 15:47Speaker 00

  Got a job, come to New York City. Yeah. And all that kind of stuff.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  There's something really cool about that, right? There's nothing wrong with it, but doing this, like taking that fifth year, like diving into this place that's totally foreign. And he's going to come away with experiences that are really rich and different. And you can't get that back. So I think that's absolutely the right choice.

• 16:04Speaker 00

  Every banker that he would have gone to work around in the city, all of them would say, hold on, you had an opportunity to go to LSU to play your fifth year and you didn't do it?

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Well, also you have to think about what, having that, it's not like you do it to put it on your resume per se, but think about what if he does, there's a natural endpoint to that job, right? It's like taking a gap year or something when you're in high school. Like you may feel like you got to go to college right away, but you don't get that time back and you don't usually regret it in hindsight. I actually, I regret not having done a few more random things when I was that young that I had opportunities to do. But I was just so eager to feel like I'd launched and was starting on some ladder. And so I think taking a little bit more risk in that time and just thinking about the intrinsic value of the experiences that you're going to get and how they might make you different and more individual, especially over the course of the rest of your hopefully long life. It's very smart.

• 16:55Speaker 00

  Since we're talking some athletics and we're also talking on the intellectual side, and you've been in both worlds, this is an interesting one for me as I get older. Of course, I still work out like crazy. I love all that kind of stuff. I'm not competing in a sport, but I do see, and I've got some friends that are exceptional endurance athletes, one in particular who's just off the charts. He just did Everest. We all want achievement, right? We all want achievement. But I think as we get older, I think one thing they don't tell you when you're younger is that you might find more satisfaction as time goes on. If your achievement is something that you can share with other people, for example, a piece of writing. Whereas I think some of the sports achievements are amazing, just

• 17:40Speaker 00

  as an outsider looking at them, but it's not necessarily something you can share with other people. It's a personal thing.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Another word for what you're talking about here is legacy, because legacy is about what you leave to others from yourself. And maybe when you're younger, it makes sense to be a little bit more self-oriented. You're absorbing the legacies of others. You're still learning. You're trying to forge your values and figure out what you're about. But I think at some point, and I think midlife is ideally a good time to be doing this deliberately, because if you don't do it deliberately, it's going to happen anyway. Your legacy is going to be forged. It just might not be what you want it to be. If you don't start making some serious decisions about what you want that legacy to be and what you want to leave others, it's probably not going to be exactly what you want. And that's exactly right to start thinking about switching from sort of this inward, what can I build from

• 18:30Speaker 01

  myself to what can I do for other people as well? Whether it's the people I know immediately around me, where I think often that's actually under-valued these days in our culture. Maybe you have a partner, maybe you have children, like that is a legacy that is right there waiting for you to invest in. Our culture isn't valuing that the way that we maybe historically did and probably should go back to. But then there's also the broader people around you, whether that's your actual community, your actual city, the people that you know, your friends, obviously, and your broader family, your workplace, or it's in a slightly different way, because I think this relationship isn't always giving us what we want. But our followers, like our online community, it's amazing to be able to connect with so many more people than that we would have been able to in the past. But these

• 19:14Speaker 01

  days, you can leave a legacy to those people as well. And that's a fascinating and sometimes a really beautiful thing.

• 19:20Speaker 00

  Let me share a small conversation with my sister and we were exchanging some kind of a video meme about some kind of crazy dating situation or something. It was just funny, came across and it was typical psychotic stuff we see on social media these days. As a mother of three, when she saw this, she said to me, there is no more natural progression of life. People see online and only try to replicate that. Nothing is organic. The only way life is organic is if the kids get off social media, which is a whole different issue. I'm defining, okay, we got working for the man here, entrepreneurship here, but then you've also got this whole generation over here, Gen Alpha, Gen Z. They only know what our generations are feeding them in terms of digital content. And some part of

• 20:04Speaker 00

  your life was outside the internet. Half of my life was outside the internet. What happens to people today? How do they start to understand something like the idea, the case for quitting? When their whole world is just inside this matrix?

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Obviously, the answer there is to try to get off your phone as much as possible. Right? It comes down again to legacy. It's this idea of who are you trying to leave a legacy to? And also, if you're a younger kid, whose legacy do you want to absorb? And if you're thinking about kind of trust, trust the people that you know much more than what you're seeing online, especially these days when there is so much, so much that's fake on the internet. I think the only thing that's really true is the people that we know, hopefully. And I think as a parent, I have two young kids. I can already see this attraction they have. These phones are addictive.

• 20:52Speaker 00

  The phone is influencing them more than you are.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Yes, thankfully not yet, because I'm able to literally take it out of their hands still. But I have a real apprehension around like when they're teenagers and you can't do that. Also, if you do that, you are excluding them from what's only going to become more and more of a key part of people's lives. And I don't know that that's necessarily a great thing either. So actually, I think in that way, it comes back to a lot of these themes that I've been grappling, which is that often the answer isn't just this blunt binary. I must become a quitter or I must be someone who is perseverant. It's understanding a way to moderate these impulses and apply them to the right moments. And I think our phones are exactly the same thing.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  Our phones in our online lives, there are some really enriching parts of the internet. Right? Like our lives are better in many ways for having it. We're more connected. We have more access to information and we shouldn't forget that. But we do need to be able to turn these things off as well. And I think that's exactly what we need to be doing when it comes to impulses around perseverance and knowing when to stop. So our culture doesn't encourage moderation to anything, but that's on us to learn how to moderate for ourselves. Or we're never going to live the lives that we truly want to.

• 22:08Speaker 00

  I thought about one of the controversial aspects to the case for quitting would be relationships.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I thought about that a lot as well.

• 22:17Speaker 00

  I'm Gen X. I think you're millennial and I'm sure like me, you are seeing all kinds of chaos in the relationship land. Right? I don't want to use the word guilty, but I've definitely experienced my share of it. There's great reasons for, and you just lay this out, in relationships, it could be the man or it could be the woman to quit, to stop, to walk away. However, there are plenty of instances where the perseverance side of it should take place and maybe it's not. What has been your thought process diving into this ideas of quitting and perseverance? When you start to look at the relationship landscape today, which I don't think anyone can say is pretty.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  That is a really important question. And the example that I wound up using in the book was an example of a guy who just fled into decisions in his life and didn't really take ownership of his choices. And in fact, he probably never should have gotten married in the first place to his first wife. He'd always just kind of reacted to problems that were around him. And I think for him, staying or sliding was actually a form of comfort. And there's nothing wrong with that. But as he got older, he started to feel really restless. And I remember in talking to him, he talked about quitting and staying in relationship to this idea of time, which I found very compelling.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  It was this idea that if he had stayed, he would have only just gotten older in this relationship that never really had what he wanted in the first place. It was this idea of having, like really talking about long-term goals, really having shared values, like really having what a lot of us would consider to be true love. I think he just never really had that. He just got married and it's very easy to sign a paper and just get married. Notably, he did do the work of trying to create the relationship that I think many people would call healthy with his wife. But they never had the foundation of that to begin with. And so ultimately he decided to divorce. It was a huge risk. It wasn't actually as difficult as a lot of us might consider divorce to be,

• 24:21Speaker 01

  because they didn't have a lot of the shared investments that you might hope that two people that are married might have. And then he was on his own and able to really think about what do I want? And go through a lot of the things that he should have done when he was younger and not really ready to do that. And then wound up creating the family and the relationship that he did want. And I think the easy way to look at that scenario is to say, oh, he was not perseverant. He was not a good husband. And actually, that might be true. But I think if you're in a relationship, shouldn't you be in one where you're enthusiastically? And maybe not necessarily passionately, because I think passion can come and go, but where you're really bought in. I think you owe that to yourself and I also think you owe that to your partner. And if you've never really had that, you shouldn't get married in the first place.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  But you also should give yourself the opportunity to experience that in your life. That's what marriage is. Again, it's making these decisions before you enter into these binding agreements. Marriage is complicated because it is a vow for forever. But when it comes to relationships, you should always be asking yourself constantly, like, am I still in this? And in asking that question, often the answer is going to be yes. By asking that question at all and recognizing that staying is a decision too. By reframing staying as a decision, you're reframing your investment in your relationship. And I think that's a wonderful thing that we don't do enough.

• 25:40Speaker 00

  My grandparents got to over 50 years. My parents are currently, I don't know, approaching 60 years of marriage. These things aren't going to happen again. I think myself as Gen X, like one foot on either side of what's happening in this society of ours. The interesting thing that's happened now is that perhaps at different times, Western culture, a couple might persevere and might work through things. But today, with so much choice, the quitting becomes quite easy. So if there is some conflict or if there is some disagreement, instead of thinking, well, that's a really good person.

• 26:22Speaker 00

  We should work through this and there'll be something stronger on the backside. Many people today look at it and say, well, hold on, there's a bunch of other people over here that look pretty hot and sexy to me. And so I might exercise my power of choice. That feels like the essence of what social media has done to culture is unlimited choice. And I don't know how unlimited choice plays out in the decades ahead. My gut level instinct says not good.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  I completely agree with you there. People are not options. These are people. When you do pick someone and you do decide that you want to get married, you need to make sure you have the real kind of foundation so that when things do get hard and you do need to decide do I want to stay or leave, that you're deciding to reinvest in that foundation that you have already in your relationship and that you're not just thinking of this person, that the idea of comparing this person, that you have this relationship and ideally this love, obviously love grows and changes over time. But that you have that, and so that's almost inconceivable that like a face on your phone could somehow be comparable in an appealing way.

• 27:27Speaker 00

  But to many people it is.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think that's a good thing, obviously. It makes sense that we want to pursue choices, that we want limitless opportunity. But ultimately, that's not what makes us happy or satisfied. You can start by exploring your options. That's the smart way to then decide who or what you want to actually commit to. But commitment is the second part of that equation. You explore and then you commit.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  We don't have life extension yet.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  That's the whole thing. It's that our lives are limited and they will be enriched by committing to somebody. And again, it comes down to having that foundation of love and ideally a mutual set of values and goals and an intertwined life. You don't want to let that go ideally, but you have to build that first. You have to build something worth committing to. That's where sometimes people struggle.

• 28:14Speaker 00

  We've kept things a little bit general where people can take what we're talking about and apply it to men or women. But why don't you make the case, I would assume most of my audience is primarily men or a large portion of men. How do women look at the idea of quitting differently than men from your perspective? What lesson can men take away from listening to you talk about quitting from a female perspective?

• 28:40Speaker 01

  I have a chapter in the book about what lessons women can learn about quitting from a male perspective, where I think that men actually are often savvy quitters and that I think women are taught to finish. I use the example of a marathon, the Boston Marathon, where I was watching it back in 2018 and it was terrible weather. And I was just watching it and just intuitively, I knew, I think just from being a distance runner myself, I was like, oh, women are going to finish this race at higher rates than men and looked at it and it was correct. And then the data plays out over and over again in a marathon. The worse the conditions are, the more likely women are to finish. But this is also just true generally. But that doesn't mean that women are faster. It means that they finish. Yeah, like women are still standing at the end, no matter how hard it gets. But I started to wonder, is that wise?

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Like where does that get us in the broad course of our lives? If we're just always grinding through, like in the marathon, there's a finish line, but in life we can grind forever. And I think women do quit on ourselves. Women can learn from men in that way, which is that sometimes we should privilege ourselves, if only to succeed a little bit more and maybe also be happy. The flip side is true to your point. Men could learn to persevere a little bit more than women. If you look at the data there, a woman who is going through a tough time at work, she's more likely to put her head down and stay. A man is more likely to call it and leave and be considered a flight risk and maybe get a promotion or just get a raise somewhere else. In leisure time, men are more likely to take that leisure time at home. I don't think they think of that as quitting.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  I think of they think about that as like what we were talking about at the beginning of this conversation, which is rest, where they recharge and invest in what matters, which is maybe work. And then they do better in the workplace. But again, I think the flip side can be true where men could probably learn to persevere a little bit more like women. If you look at the data there, like women live longer than men. Women are graduating from college and other schools like more than men. And I think that is because they're willing to put their head down. And grind and men will often say, oh, if this isn't going well, I'm going to stop and find something else. And I think that both genders or both sexes couldn't learn from each other in that way.

• 30:43Speaker 00

  Having been in Vietnam for over a decade and a tremendous number of female friends, platonic business, whatnot, the ethos of Vietnamese women in particular, not taking anything away from men, but the ethos of Vietnamese women, everyone here knows that they are just endurance. Everyone knows it's just, they are not going to stop. Even when you start to look at some of the modern economic success in Vietnam, the first billionaire in Vietnam was a lady that created an airline called Viajet. First billionaire was the lady. I find Asia quite fascinating. Like from a legacy standpoint, sure, a lot of men at very top positions, doing big things and all that kind of stuff. But you know, it's

• 31:27Speaker 00

  not uncommon to see women in really powerful positions in Vietnam. It's not something I necessarily experienced in America. I mean, look, okay, in your situation, you were with New York Times, powerful position and whatnot. But I just find what I've experienced here really interesting. And my ability to get into very deep conversations with Vietnamese women about any topic, English, often their second language, is tremendous. Whereas large numbers of very accomplished, for example, expats in Vietnam, they might not be willing to go there. There's more ego in play. There's more this, there's more that. And I just love the idea of the, anybody who is open and ready to go take it on and just go, always

• 32:11Speaker 00

  gets my heart in terms of just friendship, business, whatnot. Actually, you know, I've got people that work for me, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, some people I've never met in person. But you know, consistent strivers, as long as I'm there, they're going to be there. I love that kind of stuff.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Well, what do you make of that? Do you think that's a cultural thing? Do you think it's partly just the people that you're meeting in like the stage of life that you're at compared to when you were in, although it sounds like you're comparing them to expats in Vietnam as well?

• 32:39Speaker 00

  A place like Vietnam in particular, if you think back, okay, not but 50 years ago, a tremendous loss of life, millions of people, millions of men. And so I think during those times, you probably had women having to assume roles. That kind of creates this robustness in society that's slightly different than in the West.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  That makes a lot of sense. People in Russia talk about that as well. After World War II, when so many men were lost, that women really had to step in. That's fascinating, actually, to think about Vietnam itself.

• 33:13Speaker 00

  You would never expect, especially as a Gen X guy who grew up with all the Vietnam movies, you would never expect to show up here and have this, no one say a bad word to you and embrace you. It never would have played out the same if the roles were reversed in America. There's no way. We would be jerks. But their forgiveness level is off the hook. And that's endearing, just to share. But let me take you to something that I'm curious about. New York Times, for probably half of America, is a controversial subject. For half of America, they probably think, hey, that's the newspaper of record. Now that you're not working for New York Times, how do you look back on the experience? You realize that a good portion of the population is going to be like, and their portion is going to be like, oh, how do you think about that?

• 33:57Speaker 01

  Honestly, I have total respect for the New York Times in some ways, even just from learning about how other media operations work. As I have departed, my respect for the Times has only grown more. When it comes to rigor and just accuracy and truth, which isn't such a question right now, I don't see how you can do better than the Times. It's not to say that other places aren't also doing as good a job, but I think it's the gold standard for truth and accuracy and fairness in reporting. And that, again, for me, has only grown in departing and just seeing what else is out there. When you do work for a place for a long time, you just assume, oh, this is the standard, this is how everything is. And yeah, again, I couldn't be a bigger apostle in terms of if you wanted

• 34:41Speaker 01

  to hold up a gold standard for truth and reporting, I think it's the Times.

• 34:44Speaker 00

  From a political standpoint, people are going to have their opinions. For what I find interesting is a guy who put his first website up in October of 1996, a political science major jumping into trading topics. So there was a unique timing there. My first website's got really nice traction, a blog before blogs, that kind of thing. And for me, I always just looked at this, I was like, wow. I couldn't imagine AI, but I kept saying to myself, wow, if the ability for an individual, and of course, you look at people like Rogan and whatnot right now with these megaphones, but the ability for an individual to reach people, a single individual to reach people. And look, I'm never competing with the New

• 35:25Speaker 00

  York Times, but in many ways, they're not doing what I'm doing either. I find that a fascinating part of all this. I think into the future, and I say to myself, will the large legacy groups, whether it's New York Times or Fox News or whatever, will these be able to compete with individuals who are unencumbered, that are willing to share a point of view? I mean, you're doing that now.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  That's what's so exciting about this current media landscape is that I think there's room and there has to be room. And I think it's great that there's room for both. I think that you need that established legacy publication that maybe won't take risks in the way that, I don't know, you might, right? Because why not? What do you have to lose? The Times has a lot to lose. It has everything to lose. It has its entire integrity and reputation to lose.

• 36:13Speaker 00

  You have that too. I have that too.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. But we can take more risks, you or I now, in terms of how we want to tell a story, in terms of who we reach out to. We have more freedom. And that's an exciting thing. And that's something that I was definitely ready for. And at the Times, it's definitely constantly exploring and expanding and trying new, new storytelling methods. A half of it is video now. You wouldn't have said that two years ago. That, to me, is a really interesting evolution of that media platform and who they're trying to take on as competition, like CNN, for example, I don't think in the past would have been any, like even in the crosshairs. And now I think the Times is ascendant in sort of like the video storytelling era. That's all really interesting. In terms of like actually having a point of view to

• 36:59Speaker 01

  the reporting or the content, for lack of a better word, that you're putting out, I think an individual has a lot of opportunity to have. And like also knowing your audience, an individual has an opportunity to do that too, that when you're the Times and you're trying to appeal to everyone to a certain degree, like that is their Times' audience is everyone who has a phone. You and I don't have that same pressure. We can know our audiences and have a direct relationship with them in a way that I don't think you can when you're working for a media boogeyman.

• 37:26Speaker 00

  We've covered a lot of different topics today. People are going to have to dig in and read the book. But let me take you to maybe a larger philosophical question about the construction of the book and a topic or two that maybe we've not brought up that you feel is super, super important in terms of what people can take away in a positive manner from the case for quitting. Is there anything that I've not brought up today that you really think is important beyond people going to read the book?

• 37:57Speaker 01

  I really think that the takeaway from this book in a way that, for myself, I found really convincing is that I think I really used to find the idea of quitting to be kind of analogous to failure, or this idea that I wasn't trying hard enough, or that it was like an easy way out. As you were saying, we can quit before we start. We can give up too early. If we quit on a bad day, that's probably not going to get us anywhere better. We want to quit in a really strategic and thoughtful way. But when we do that, it can be a courageous first step to something better than what we have. That's often the other reason why we want to quit. In all of our heroic perseverance, we're not really willing to admit that to ourselves. Sometimes we do need to pivot.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  Sometimes we do need a rest. Quitting will get us that. And I think it will also, again, as so many examples in the book showed, it's a chance to go further than we would have gone if we just stayed the course. Taking that risk is often the only way to get to something better. And I really hope that people can take that away and find ways to apply it to their own lives. And you usually know what that place is, whether it's work or a relationship or a very closely held goal. Sometimes you really do need to stop.

• 39:08Speaker 00

  I had a friend, he's in New York City, he's around 85 now, famous trader, his name's Larry Height. And he's a really funny guy, super successful, very well known. And he'd come on my podcast so many times, probably more than anybody. And he had a friend named Harry. So Larry would tell these stories of his friend Harry in his twenties in New York City and dating. It was all about quitting, or as they might say, taking a loss. And so Harry's dating strategy was to approach on the street, 10 beautiful women in New York City and say, hey, my name's Harry, can I take you to coffee? Nine out of 10 would say, go away, right? One of the 10 would say yes. When he got 10 of those ones,

• 39:51Speaker 00

  one of those 10s would ultimately, something else might happen. It's such a fascinating topic because quitting is terribly important, but the perseverance is terribly important. In the middle of this conversation, I'm sitting here watching, it's the yin and the yang, right? You're stuck with both of them.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  In a culture that is obsessed with perseverance, a lot of us don't lack that quality. It's understanding the yang, it's understanding the flip side of that, which is that perseverance can work against us. And we need to recognize when that is, and recognize that when that's happening, quitting is actually the better option. It's just not something that a lot of us do intuitively, or well, or even value doing. And that's what we need to change about ourselves.

• 40:31Speaker 00

  You need to create a blog post or do a podcast interview where you list every derivation, every derivative of quitting. So you do quitting, taking a loss, because they're all in the same headspace, right?

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Ah, that's what you were talking about in the beginning, then. For you, quitting is taking a loss.

• 40:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. For example, I had Annie Duke on this podcast a lot, poker player, and just that same kind of mindset, taking a loss. Daniel Kahneman, you know, he got the Nobel Prize for essentially figuring these things out. There's a famous meme that I use in some of my trading presentations. Here you have the scissors on the front cover. It's a stack of cards, and on the top card it says losses, and there's a butcher cleaver cutting through the middle of the losses, right? Very similar to your cover here.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  That's actually so smart. What you just said is that quitting is often taking a loss, but that loss is temporary. And often you need a loss in order to have a gain, right? A loss does not mean it's the loss that you're going to regret for forever. But I think getting comfortable with loss, and again, the inherent risk there is the only way to get what you want. Otherwise, you're just going to live a life that's a little timid, right? And tell yourself that in pushing forward and persevering, you're being heroic and doing the brave thing. But actually, you're just scared of that loss.

• 41:48Speaker 00

  I'll stop talking here in a second, but there's a trader here. Paul Tudor Jones, well-known guy, very successful over the last 40-plus years. And I think there was a story early in his career where he took, I don't know, 10, 12 losses on a particular market, a particular trade that he was trying to get into, 10 or 12 losses in a row, to finally get to a winning trade, right? You're coming at the material in a slightly different way. And I was curious, I did search your book for the term invest or investment, and you didn't use it the way that I'm talking about, but you used the word invest a lot, over three dozen times.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting.

• 42:27Speaker 00

  But you did not use it the way I'm talking about, which is fascinating.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  What you're talking about, like that dichotomy of investing and loss is what this is all about. But it's not just about money. It's about something that I think a lot of us value even more than money, or at least a reader like me would value more than money. It's this idea of effort and true value. Money is just one expression of value, but there are many things that a lot of us value more than money, and that's what we're scared of losing.

• 42:52Speaker 00

  For example, if you looked at me right now, and if I was sitting here and I was 250 pounds, really heavy, and I'm sitting here telling you, yeah, I don't ever exercise, I don't do anything, you could reframe it to be like, hey, you should take the loss on the bad health, you know, so it's just reframing the way this thought process works. And you know, the sad thing about all this, it's just not discussed when we're kids. It's not discussed.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  And kids are taught to fear loss, obviously. If something gets taken away, that's sad. That makes sense for kids to fear losing things. But when you're older, that's when you need to rethink some of those values. And that's, I think, what a lot of us don't do enough. We keep those four-year-old, and those 10-year-old, or those 18-year-old values, and apply them to the rest of our lives, and get stuck in a lot of the decisions that we make from those values when they're not really working for us anymore necessarily.

• 43:41Speaker 00

  The book, The Case for Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting Out. Again, I just like the language because it's language that I've never used. Maybe I'll swipe it for a blog post. It's language that I've never used, but it's language that I could use. It's in my same headspace, so.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Likewise, and now I'm going to start using taking a loss.

• 43:59Speaker 00

  I think absolutely, some of these trading analogies would work perfect with some audiences, yeah, for sure. Lindsay, where can we send people? The book, Amazon, all that kind of fun stuff. Is there a website you want to send people to? Social media?

• 44:11Speaker 01

  I'm on Instagram. Yeah, I think for now, that's all fine. I'll probably build something up later, but first I'm going to take a rest.

• 44:17Speaker 00

  Hey, Lindsay, cool stuff. I appreciate it.

• 44:19Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me. It was wonderful to chat.

• 44:26Speaker 00

  I see a time when those awake will understand how to make money in up, down, and surprise markets. Whether a new trader or experienced, college student or financial advisor, protecting against a crash, or just trying to make a lot of money, trend following offers everyone an answer in uncertain times. To get started immediately, send me an email, [email protected]. I will send you the right trend following steps to take, along with my free video. But if you want to buy and hold, trust the government and trust Wall Street, this is absolutely not for you.