All right, next question is from Sambit. I have a strange relationship with books. I buy a lot of them, but I can't read them. After the first 10 to 12 pages, I feel bored and I stop reading. I can, however, listen to long podcasts with full attention. How do I become a reader?

Well, Sambit, the key thing is you have an ambition to become a reader. So let's give that a checkmark. The second thing I want to point out here is you have inadvertently provided us, I think, a really good case study of one of the big ideas from the deep dive earlier in this episode.

You can listen to long podcasts, no problem. But you're having trouble with books. That just emphasizes in my mind the exceptional nature of book reading when it comes to all cognitive consumption activities. I mean, podcasts are complicated. It's not like you can't pay attention to something. You're able to focus on a podcast.

You're able to listen to me and what I'm saying. So it just goes to show you that there is a unique, complicated, but ultimately essential cognitive dance that happens when you're grappling with sentences written on the physical printed page. So it's a good case study that you're providing us here.

All right, so what you need to do is train. I don't want you to despair. You're not-- there's no such thing as I'm not a reader. I am a reader. There is I have trained to read or I haven't. And if you haven't, how do you fix that? You do the training.

It's just like I wouldn't say I'm not a runner because I just tried to run a 5K, having never jogged in my life, and didn't go very well. I would say I am not in shape to run a 5K. But I'm sure if I train within a few months, I could run these on a regular basis.

So I'm going to give you a training regime, Sam, that I'm going to suggest about how you become a better reader. All right, so we're going to start with books that you are excited to read. So we want to take out of the equation early on the boredom factor or the comfort with intellectual discomfort.

So this could be genre fiction. That's really exciting. You might even want to start with short stories. I recently read Ted Chiang's original short story collection of sci-fi short stories. It was excellent, right? But they're 20 pages each. They're really gripping, whatever. So it could be genre fiction or it could be nonfiction.

Maybe pragmatic nonfiction, like the type of books I write. Like, yeah, I want to read digital minimalism because I'm really motivated to spend less time on my phone. And so you're motivated. I'll read Atomic Habits or memoirs. I'll read Goggins' memoir because I want to get fired up or get some discipline.

So start with books you're excited to read. Forget about what they are right now. It's just about time on page. Number two, find a cool reading location or ritual. I talked about in the deep dive. It's going to help you here. Go into the coffee shop. 20 minutes while I finish this one cup of coffee, I'm going to the pub.

Bring in the book with me. If you go to a pub, it has to be an English-style pub. And you need to wear a scarf or an ascot. You got to use your accent. And you got to use an accent. You got to come in with an ascot, preferably a beret.

If you're going to wear a shirt, it should be striped like a French sailor. And you need to say, good day, barkeep. A pint of ale while I peruse my book by David Goggins. Talk like that. And they're like, look, this is like a member of the lost generation.

Essentially, we have Steinbeck here. All right. Then I'm going to say-- so that's the setup. Scheduled interval training. Five days a week, you're going to read 10 minutes at a time. Do that for at least two weeks, then up at the 15 minutes. Do that for at least two weeks, up at the 20 minutes.

If you're giving your mind support-- I'm excited about the book. I have an awesome accent in a bar somewhere. Everyone just thinks I'm awesome. You're fighting the secretly beautiful but kind of nerdish women because they have the glasses on. When you take off the glasses, they're actually models that are just so attracted to the fact that you're clearly a serious intellectual because you're ascot and you're reading in the pub.

You're fighting off women as you're trying to read. So you've given yourself-- you've set it all up. And now you're doing a very reasonable amount of time. 10 minutes at a time. You do it for two weeks. You can go up to 15 minutes. You're just pushing your mind's comfort actually reading beyond a few pages.

And then once you get to 40 minutes, stop upping your time. Fix that as the time you're going to read four to five days a week. And what you're going to start upping is the complexity of your books. So you get really comfortable at reading most days for 40 minutes.

And then you start upping the complexity. Slightly harder books, slightly more challenging books. And you sort of push yourself up the ladder. So maybe be a year or two of this, you can get to the point where you're ready to actually tackle classic books, really complicated books, books that require secondary sources.

I'm going to read the secondary source first. Then I'm going to read the book. I'm telling you, one year, Sambit. You're going to be a reader. You just got to train. Now, why you have to do training, more training than other people is other people just inadvertently or through whatever circumstance or through inclination or how they were raised just got more of this training already.

So they've already done the training. They grew up with a family of athletes. They ran every day. Arnold Schwarzenegger's dad in Austria made him do push-ups before he could get a meal. He had an advantage. By the time he got to the military and started bodybuilding, he was around it.

OK, you didn't have Arnold Schwarzenegger's dad making you do push-ups in the cognitive realm. So you got a little more training to do. It'll take you a year. You'll catch up. Actually, you don't want Arnold Schwarzenegger's dad. Actually, his autobiography is good. Fantastic. I listened to it, but I love that.

It's such a great autobiography. But his dad was from a generation of Austrian men who post-World War II were just depressed alcoholics, just trying to grapple with-- it's not like he was a member of the Nazi party or something, but they were all sort of complicit in what was going on.

And it just was so-- it was just a destroyed generation of men. So advantage of Arnold Schwarzenegger, extra push-ups, disadvantage, depressed alcoholic, sort of Nazi collaborator dad. So I would say you could probably just figure out a push-up routine on your own. All right, that's kind of going so far.

It is a really cool biography. You know what I like about that book is I love the fact that Schwarzenegger comes over here in weightlifting and basically becomes a millionaire before he really gets in the movies by just-- he builds-- he does these businesses other people don't want to do, like Brick Lane and stuff like this, invest money in real estate in-- not Santa Monica.

Where was he investing? Venice Beach, I think. Yeah. Yeah, investing in real estate by the beach, just doing hard work. He had a mail order business. Yeah, he built up a fortune and then was like, oh, I'm going to get in the movies. So your answer to Sambit reminded me a couple of things about location.

I went to the Library of Congress a couple of weeks ago. My friend gave me a tour, and that was pretty inspiring. Yeah. It's expired. I told Jesse I have a researcher card there, just because I like to go and work. You know where I would work when I go to the Library of Congress was not the big room with the desks that are all in a circle, but in the arts and industry library.

It's pretty cool because it has these 1920s art deco light fixtures, and it's a cool place. Yeah. I told Jesse that I got to find a way to write a book at some point soon that requires me to access the collection at the Library of Congress just so I can spend days in that massive reading room and have people bring me-- because if you're an academic, you can get a researcher card, and they'll just have this awesome collection.

And it takes them a couple hours, but you can basically get any book you want, and they'll bring them all to you in a cart to your desk, and you can work on it all day. And so I need a reason to do that. The other thing I do, thanks to you, is I put on my weekly plan every week just some of the stuff I want to get through, because I get a lot of magazines, and I have different books.

You put reading on your weekly plan. Yeah. Specific though. And then if I have a pile of New Yorkers, I'll just get through a couple of them. So you might put Thursday afternoon, I'm going to do some New Yorker reading. Yeah. So I put what I want on, and then when I do my daily plan, I just put it in there.

I'm going to read this. That's nice. You have a queue of what you want to read that week. Yeah. When you're doing daily plans-- Otherwise, I couldn't keep track of it, and I'd forget about certain things. So now I just kind of-- I like that strategy. So it's like, here's my reading queue for the week.

And when you're doing a daily plan, you're used to putting aside time for reading. But now you can actually pull something from that queue and say, this specifically is what I'm going to read. Yeah, it's been working out. Yeah. And the other thing that I do, too, is especially after going to Library of Congress and looking online and stuff, it's like, you just got to be comfortable knowing that you're never going to read everything.

There's so much stuff. And you just get through what you can, just kind of what you talk about, and it's slow. I'm surprised by how often-- I'm a big library guy. We're a personal library person, and the next question I was going to get at this, I'm surprised by how often I'll get a book.

Like, I just finished a book last night that I originally bought five years ago. But I kept it in my library. It's like, this is a book I want to read. And sometimes you have to wait till you're in the right mood. And it took five years. And I read it, and I finished it last night.

And I'm surprised by how often that-- this is why I love libraries-- how often that'll happen. Sometimes I'll buy a book, and I'm not going to read this right now, but I want to own this, and I think I'm going to read this. I think it's an important thing to have.

I get to these things. And it can take me years, but I cycle back to things. (upbeat music)