I have a lot of books. I enjoy reading them, but I don't think I'm doing it right. And I know that sounds so ridiculous. Like I know how to read the words on the page, but I feel like if you've written posts and made videos about reading effectively and efficiently, I'm confident that there's a way I can do it better.

So do you read on physical book or Kindle or what's your jam? To be honest, I a lot of times get the ebook and then I, but I sometimes really prefer the physical book, but I could do both. I'm not like wedded to one or the other, but I am not good at audio books, despite being great at podcasts.

I don't know. I feel like whenever I'm listening to an audio book, sometimes I get distracted and then I realize, Oh, I missed the last five minutes. And if I try to not be distracted and I just like lie in bed to listen, then I find that, you know, I might fall asleep or something.

Yeah, sure. I know. I know what you mean. I guess another question I would ask, and maybe you can answer like what your listeners would be thinking about this is like, why do you want to read more effectively? Like what's, what's the point? Retention. You know, I read a lot of things and I learned these fascinating things, especially when I'm reading books that people I'm interviewing have written.

I want to remember those things, not just for five minutes, you know, not just for the day. I want to process them. And then, you know, to the extent they're a way to read, I don't know, faster or more efficiently like that, there's kind of like efficiently, maybe effectively it's like effectively I retain the information efficiently.

It just happens faster. Yeah, sure. Um, have you come across building a second brain? So I'm, I'm going back and forth with Tiago, uh, who will come on the show a little later this year. Amazing. Yeah. That's the, I mean, I took his course in like 2019, 2020, something like that.

And that introduced me to a lot of ideas around, um, kind of, uh, retention of staff and taking information and doing useful things with it. Um, it's a fairly expensive course, but the book covers all of the things and the book is like, you know, the price of a book it's, it's recently come out, but broadly, I think the easy hack, uh, we're all about hacks here for remembering stuff is to, um, basically use readwise.

I have yet to find an app that is better than readwise at, at this, uh, which if you're highlighting things on Kindle, it automatically files them. It also has like an app where you can literally scan the text of a book as you're reading it. If you want a thing and it will OCR recognize the characters and we'll recognize what book it's from and we'll just categorize it automatically.

And then just by virtue of reading that email every day of like five highlights, five things that have resonated enough with you for you to want to highlight that I have, I found that to be genuinely the single biggest thing that has changed the game in terms of my retention of ideas.

And people were like, Oh, you know, when you're on podcasts, how are you able to cite all these sources and these books and quotes and stuff? I want to say, cause I look at the readwise email once in a while and it just kind of resurfaces the quotes. Um, that's like, I think the basic level that does most of the good stuff to make sure I got that.

If you scan the page of a physical book, look, I mean, Apple now has this live text, right? You can just copy and paste the text, but this actually knows what book it is and we'll actually store that information also. I think so. I think there may be an intermediate step where like it connects to your Amazon account and it therefore knows what book you own.

Um, and sometimes you have to like type in the name of the title or something, but like, yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty magical when it works. Um, there is an intermediate step when that particular thing doesn't work. Okay. Um, so that would be how I'd do the whole retention thing broadly.

I mean, the actual way of retaining anything is to find a way to use that information in your day-to-day life, maybe to create a piece of content or something or other based around that. So if a book really, really resonates with me, I've got loads of highlights for it.

I will try and write a book summary or write like a tweet thread summary of a book or make a video about the book or interview the author of the book and talk to them about the book, just some kind of output that creates this tangible thing, which is a reason to actually, um, bother retaining the stuff because it's all well and good saying that like, Oh, like I have this all the time.

Like, Oh, I really want to like remember what's in this book, but if I'm not creating anything from it, it's, it's going to be hard beyond looking at my readwise email every day. Um, so for me it's, it's easy cause I do videos about books and that helps me, helps me remember a lot of the things, uh, readwise also synchronizes to notion.

And so I've got a notion page that has literally everything I've ever highlighted in my life on Kindle or Instapaper or reader or pocket or any other app I've used to read books or read articles. And so if I ever need ideas for videos, I'll just look through my highlights and be like, cool.

That's a cool idea. That's from that book. All right, cool. Let's piece things together and turn it into a video. Yeah. Nick Gray was on the show a couple of weeks ago, uh, and talked about friends newsletters. So I'd say if you need a way to take the interesting content you're consuming, I can promise you that it's most people, at least I do from your newsletter, find interesting, Oh, here's this app I checked out, here's this book I read, here's this thing I found.

And so he proposed that everyone start a friends newsletter. That's just, you know, send your emails, friends, an email, whether it's weekly, monthly, quarterly. And I feel like that would be a great place to put this stuff and reinforce it, uh, which will help you remember it. So nice.

There's, there's one tip from that episode.