(upbeat music) - All right, the next question is about your reading habits and a lot of people are interested in that sort of thing. And this has a twist, so we'll hear what it says. - Hi Cal, this is Emily and I'm a grad student in molecular biology. I have a problem with reading that I've never heard you discuss.

I read obsessively and I have since I was a child. I enjoy this, but if I'm not careful, it harms the rest of my life. I don't sleep enough, I neglect responsibilities, I even miss work. Even if I manage to put a book down halfway through, thoughts of it can distract me for hours.

In order to focus on finishing my PhD, I've seriously restricted my reading for pleasure. This year, the majority of my reading has been either books I've read before or books that I find a bit dull, which allows me to stop reading when appropriate. On rare occasions, I'll take a Saturday to devour something new, but mostly I see this restriction as temporary but necessary.

Your usual advice of carving out time for reading every day sounds dangerous for me. So I'm curious if you have any tips or alternate approaches to manage my experience. Thanks. - Well, Emily, it's a good question. Just as a brief aside before I get to your question, when we were having like a little bit of a delay just there getting the call to work, it was reminding me, Jesse, of last week, the avalanche of technical errors that the listener did not realize was occurring.

- That was funny. I made a list and I told several people about it like over the weekend, it was funny. - Yeah, Jesse made a list because thing after thing, we record these live, thing after thing was going wrong and it was so many things going wrong that Jesse started writing them down.

But like, let's see if I had this straight. I was like asking you, so at some point, I was asking you about Blinkist, one of our sponsors, and you were trying to log in the Blinkist and- - That was so funny. So you're asking me what Blinks I read and you're like, log in to Blinkist and tell me what you see on the homepage.

So I go to Blinkist.com, but it's like, enter your login information. So I like, 'cause I logged in on another computer. So I had to like go to my password document, look that up. But then as soon as that's happening, like this laptop isn't great. Sometimes like the browser's crashed, it crashed.

You're still asking me, I'm trying to like play it off. I like seeing- - And by the way, the browser is needed for playing the calls so like the browser crashing now has like a big implication because now he can't play more calls. So yeah, and I'm talking to him at this time.

- Yeah, so I'm trying to like play it off, tell you what Blinkist I was reading. Like I was trying to think about the one that I was reading, but I'm entering this so I could get it in. - Yeah, and then at some point you're stuck in a captcha, right?

- Yeah, oh yeah, I forgot about that. - Vertical rivers. - So I get in there like, yeah, identify 10 vertical rivers. I was telling my buddy who does like online stuff and he's like, I had the same thing that day. - So all this is going on. He has to get the next question queued up.

He's trying to talk to me on camera and he has to identify vertical rivers from a large picture of, a large array of images of vertical rivers. So anyways, that's why we pay you $250,000 a month because this is, that's why you get all that sweet, sweet athletic greens money because it's a hard job.

- And then when we came in, you were kind of in a rush, but I couldn't do anything because the mouse had died. - The mouse died and the soundboard broke. Remember the soundboard was giving static, like just a loud, large, loud static. And yeah, man, that was not our day.

So we're doing pretty well. All we had was like one delayed call so far. So we're doing pretty well. All right, Emily, let's get to your question though. It's completely fine. What you're describing is completely fine. You're finding the types of books you're reading lead to compulsive reading. So you're doing less so that you can focus on other things.

That's fine. Don't read every day if it's creating that compulsion. And I think you've already landed on three solutions. One, titrating your reading to the situation. So you're up to your ears and working on a dissertation. So maybe you're reading less stuff that's unrelated to the dissertation. That's fine.

Two, have a reading day. So if you like to do compulsive reading where you dive into something, you're like, yeah, I look forward to Saturdays and I go somewhere cool, like a coffee shop to start. And then I go hiking and read and I can devour a whole book and it's part of a really enriching, meaningful ritual.

I think that's great. And then three, be careful about your book selection. Right? Because reading is reading, reading is good. It's your mind having to engage with complex thought structures. So yeah, read the boringer books. If it's novels that really catch your attention, then like, okay, I'm going to read a long history of World War I or something like that.

So that you can still maybe have some of this exercise, but to be very careful about what you choose, I think is fine. This is much more minor than what you're talking about, but I do not like, for example, apocalyptic fiction. My brain gets too into it and gets concerned.

It presses anxiety buttons or this or that. I don't like that. So I just don't read those type of books. I don't read, I'm not going to read World War Z. I don't want to read apocalyptic tales of, you know, the earth becoming uninhabitable and everyone died. Maybe it's just hitting a little bit too close to home these days.

So I avoid those types of books. Julie was really pushing on me like, oh, you should read Station Eleven. I was like, I can't read Station Eleven right now. I can't read a book about a viral pandemic that kills most of the people on earth. Like, I don't want to read that right now.

Just like with the stuff going on in Europe right now, I'm not going to read, you know, On the Beach, Neville shoots On the Beach, for example. Although it's kind of a cool book. Have you heard of that book, Jesse? - No. - There's a nuclear war and it follows, there's a crew on a submarine.

So like, they're alive, obviously, because they were underwater in a submarine. And they're like going around trying to find, they end up in Australia, 'cause like the whole world's been destroyed. And they kind of end up in Australia because the nuclear winter cloud hasn't come there, but they know the nuclear winter cloud is on its way.

And it's like, they're trying to just find civilization. I found the beginning of Seveneves too apocalyptic. I was like, oh, I had to get through that pretty quickly. I don't like that whole, the hard rain is coming. And I'll tell you the flaw in that, plot flaw is it was symbolic, but they had this orchestra playing in like Canterbury Cathedral as the hard rain was about to come.

Like, we're gonna play this concert and we're just gonna die as we play it. So like, we go out like celebrating humanity's greatest art as the hard rain comes. I don't buy it. They're all gonna be with their families, right? I don't think they're gonna be like, sorry, family.

Like, I'm gonna spend my last time like rehearsing and playing in an orchestra with people. So I thought that was a flaw. But anyways, the point is Emily, I can't read apocalyptic fiction and it's small, but I don't read it. So read the stuff that's working for you right now.

Titrate, absolutely. Have a reading day. All of that's good. You're working on dissertation. You don't have to worry about your brain not getting worked out right now, right? It's like when you're training for a marathon, it's okay to let your Peloton habit go lax for a while. You're getting enough of that.

So do not think of my daily reading or this many books a month as gospel you have to follow. Build the thing that makes sense for you. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)