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An Existentialist Meme Artist And An Ergodicity Interested Author Walk Into A Bar: Dylan O'Sullivan Meets Luca Dellanna on JUST PRESS RECORD

cancer diagnosis, death-talk, and yet - it's incredibly uplifting and inspiring!

Author

Matt Zeigler
December 18, 2024

Dylan O’Sullivan is “famous,” at least to me and his 80,000+ social media followers, for sharing quotes from Dostoyevsky, miscellaneous existential philosophers, and Norm MacDonald. If you could create a Venn diagram of things flickering in and out of my consciousness over the course of the day, it would, perhaps disturbingly, overlap with exactly the flavor of stuff he’s serving up. I knew I had to get him into one of these conversations.

Now, one of Dylan’s favorite thinkers and tinkerers is Nassim Taleb. We all know that appreciation comes with some baggage. But, if you can reflect on his stuff without getting into the cantankerous weeds, there are so many philosophical angles to explore, not the least of which include the term ergodicity.

Luca Dellanna wrote an entire book on the topic of ergodicity. That was my gateway introduction to his work a few years back. Luca takes half the book to even start to approach the definition, and not because he’s slow or lazy or avoidant, but because he’s a writer of greatly fascinating and fascinated nuance. He immediately earned my respect. I started consuming all of his other work as well, because—flavors.

There’s a relationship I’ve often wondered about between these two words. 

Existentialism, which looks at the world from an individual perspective, and ergodicity, which gives us a way to understand why nothing in life is truly average because the paths our journeys hurl us down are random in real time and then perfectly obvious in hind sight.

And who else better to get together than an existentialism obsessed professional editor and an ergodicity exploring professor and author?

Just Press Record was born for this.

We talked about everything from Luca’s experience with a cancer diagnosis to Dylan’s strategies for editing fiction and non-fiction authors with some of the surprisingly same structural tools.

We got into childhood friendships that do and don’t survive into adulthood.

We questioned the importance of deriving lessons from successes and failures relative to the work we feel called to do.

I’m not saying you’ll definitely pull 3 New Year’s Resolutions out of this episode, but I think I just did.