43. JOEL MILLER: Books Make Us Better

Episode Transcript

Note: Transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. Please refer to the episode audio or video for exact quotes.

[00:00:00] Joel: Not only can these ideas live in a way that we can understand them, but they can live through time. And that’s one of the greatest things about a book is that it perpetuates ideas across time.

[00:00:11] Michael: Hi, I am Michael Hyatt.

[00:00:12] Megan: And I’m Megan Hyatt Miller,

[00:00:14] Michael: and you’re listening to The Double Win Show.

[00:00:16] Megan: Today we are thrilled to talk with Joel j Miller, also my husband, about how books have literally built the world we live in, and there’s some great application in this conversation for those of us who are thinking about what role reading.

[00:00:32] Plays in our leadership, our personal development, and where do physical books fit in with that? So you’re gonna wanna pay attention to this conversation

[00:00:39] Michael: and I thought I would just tell you a little bit about him ’cause I’m the proud father-in-law. But Joel and I, believe it or not, have worked together for over 25 years.

[00:00:47] He was my first editor. He stuck with me all these years and edited my stuff and turned it into better pros. That I could have done on my own. The book he’s just finished and the book that we’re excited about and wanna talk to him about is called The Idea Machine, how Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future.

[00:01:07] Joel is a former vice president and publisher at Thomas Nelson. So I had the privilege of moving him from Oregon where he was living at the time, to Nashville, Tennessee to be part of our publishing company. He’s been the chief content officer at Full Focus for what a decade,

[00:01:20] Megan: Megan? More than that, I think at this point, but yes.

[00:01:23] Michael: Yeah, a long time. But he runs the show when it comes to content. He’s also runs a Substack newsletter called Miller’s Book Review, and you can just go to miller’s book review.com and subscribe to it. But you’ll be introduced to some fascinating books because the only ones that Joel reviews are ones that are, that stand out, that are extraordinary, but he’s obsessed with literature.

[00:01:45] Big ideas lives in Franklin, Tennessee with his family of whom. Megan has his better half and he has five kids. So with that, let’s talk.

[00:01:58] Joel, welcome to the show.

[00:02:00] Joel: Thanks for having

[00:02:00] Michael: me.

[00:02:01] Megan: Oh my gosh.

[00:02:01] Michael: We are pumped to have you and I’m super pumped to talk about this topic.

[00:02:05] Joel: Me too. I love this thing. I’ve been working on it for years and years and years, so I, I’m really enjoying this part of the process of getting to share it now.

[00:02:13] Michael: So, Joe, you mentioned it that you’ve been working on this for several years.

[00:02:16] Mm-hmm. But I wanna hear about the process.

[00:02:18] Joel: The agony part of it or just the fun part of it?

[00:02:20] Michael: Well, I know the fun parts only occurred since you turned it in. But yeah. So what was the agony part of it? I know you took several years.

[00:02:28] Joel: I’ve been working on this project actually for more than 10 years, and basically I had a, a book project that I thought was a winning idea.

[00:02:37] I thought it was a slam dunk. I took it to a bunch of publishers through my agent, and I got a bunch of nos, and so I worked on it some more and sent it back out again and got a bunch more nos. But in all of those nos, there were two very promising notes from a couple of editors who said, we’d really like to hear more about this idea.

[00:02:57] And the, this happened to be about the history of books. And I thought I could absolutely flesh this part out, this part of the proposal, I could flesh that out into a full book, and it won’t take me that long. I know everything there is to know about it. Ha ha ha. I got started and 10 years later I finished.

[00:03:14] Megan: I mean, that is just a life story right there.

[00:03:17] Michael: That’s clear back when you had it here.

[00:03:18] Joel: I know. Not very much, but

[00:03:19] Michael: yeah. One of the things you say in the book is that the book is maybe mankind’s greatest technological achievement. Yeah. So why do you think we overlook it as a technology?

[00:03:33] Joel: The idea machine is the, is a history of books, but it’s not just a history of books.

[00:03:38] It is a very particular kind of history. It’s an analysis of the book as an information technology, and what I argue in the book is that. All of the kinds of developments that we’ve had as a civilization have been dependent on the book, and we don’t recognize this, and we don’t even recognize the book as an information technology because they’re just so boring and ubiquitous.

[00:04:02] They’re everywhere. You walk into an airport, you go into, you know, somebody’s house, there’s just books everywhere. I mean, I got thousands of ’em behind me. We just have books everywhere in our lives, and so they’re not that interesting to us as a thing. Maybe we go to them for their content and we love them for their content, but we don’t think about the fact that the format itself and what the book represents and how it came to be is so instrumental in shaping our culture.

[00:04:29] Megan: That’s fascinating. I think this is important for our community in particular because. We have a community of readers. If you’re listening, you may think, well, I don’t read physical books and I wanna come to that Joel in, in a little bit. But this is a community of people who read because, you know, as the old saying goes, readers are leaders, and leaders are readers.

[00:04:50] Right? And, and I think that, uh, our people as people who care about growth and achievement and, you know, human potential care, a lot about reading. So. What did it look like for people who cared about achievement before there were books and what has it made possible with the advent of books?

[00:05:08] Joel: It’s a little tricky to answer that in that we’ve had books as a, a part of our cultural toolkit for, you know, a few thousand years.

[00:05:18] But the mass availability of books is a very recent phenomenon. You know, we sort of think of like the printing press as coming around, and that’d be like the 1450s and all of a sudden books become more ubiquitous because printing makes books just much more accessible. And that’s true. But it wasn’t until steam powered presses in the industrial revolution that we actually began to get books.

[00:05:43] That just are everywhere, like bazillions of them, and it takes bazillions of books in order for them to become ubiquitous enough that the average person can afford them and can use them for personal growth and all kinds of different. Types of literature for personal growth. So really I would say that kind of use of books is really only about 150 years old.

[00:06:04] Well, that’s interesting.

[00:06:06] Megan: If you think about too, in the nineties, right? Books became available on Amazon and then I don’t know when that really peaked in terms of, you know, what we think of today where, you know, you can have a book on your doorstep by the time you get home from work, from Amazon, right? Or even this afternoon if you, if you wanted it.

[00:06:22] And then audio books. To the point of accessibility, yes. Those two things all by themselves have dramatically changed how accessible books are and where we can access them and listen to them in a way that in human history has never occurred before. It wasn’t like people were, you know, taking a scroll into the bathhouse and like, you know, catching up on their reading while they were, you know, in a Roman bathhouse somewhere.

[00:06:47] More than likely

[00:06:48] Joel: that kind of thing could happen, but it didn’t happen often ’cause the average person was not literate. Literacy in the historical sense is, you know, like a very recent phenomenon that we would have mass literacy, and that’s in part because of. Mass books. Like if you didn’t have the ability to read, you wouldn’t have the need to and you wouldn’t ever do it.

[00:07:07] And so those two trends kind of go together. But you know, the internet. Has made all of this available now, whereas before, you would’ve been limited by what was in your local bookstore and you probably didn’t even have a local bookstore. It was popular in the nineties to beat up on Barnes and Noble, uh, because they were busy putting out independent bookstores out of business.

[00:07:29] But that was really only true in large metropolitan cities in like suburbs or small cities out in the hinterlands. Barnes and Noble was like a refuge for people. It was the only bookstore they had.

[00:07:40] Michael: If you look back over history, and correct me if I’m wrong, and I totally get that, there’s a huge gap between the invention of the praying press and then mass production of those books.

[00:07:51] Mm-hmm. But still, even prior to mass production books were shaping movements and civilizations. Of that? Or am I wrong? In other words, is my percept you’re hundred percent right? My perception is that the foundation of every social movement. Almost just qualified, almost every social movement there is a book at the foundation.

[00:08:12] Joel: There’s a lot of truth to that. This gets back into kind of the, the deep like archive of the, of what the book is and what it can be and why it, it has the effect that it’s had on our culture. ’cause it’s not just that a bunch of books are available to the average person and they can grab one and read it and, you know, learn something about their future or, or how they might conduct themselves in the future or something like that.

[00:08:33] That’s all good, but that’s not actually the real power of books. The real power of books is so much more true to like the basic early history of it, which is that for the first time ever, people were able to write and formulate crystal clear ideas. If you think about what happens before writing, everything has to be communicated orally, and you only pick up the gist or remember the gist of what somebody says.

[00:08:58] And the gist is not enough for when you need some particular formulation of an idea, and you cannot have an idea that scales without a particular formulation of it that everybody can return to and look at. So if you look at. Jewish history as just one example of this. You’ve got the famous scene when Josiah has become the king and the temple is a mess.

[00:09:22] And so he’s got his guys out there fixing the temple and the high priest comes and he finds this book that they haven’t seen and, and God knows how long. Turns out it’s a part of Deuteronomy and the book is read in front of the people. The people repent and a whole, like a whole new social movement happens because of the reading of that book.

[00:09:40] And the same thing happens again later on. When Ezra brings back a bunch of Israelites from captivity in Babylon. When they all come back, he reads from the law again, and a whole new change in that culture can happen, but only because everybody has recourse to the same book, to the same words, and the same formulation.

[00:10:01] Without that, it’s just every man for himself.

[00:10:03] Michael: What’s really interesting, you and I come from a publishing background. We spent most of our careers in the book publishing.

[00:10:08] Joel: Yeah.

[00:10:08] Michael: Industry. But how did that shape your research, your interest? What you were looking for, what you found, et cetera.

[00:10:15] Joel: Well, when I got started in publishing, I just kind of fell into it.

[00:10:19] There’s a, a guy in publishing, uh, bill Erdman who ran Mann’s Publishing, who used to say that somebody would fall with their butt in the butter, meaning they fell in a good situation. That was kind of me, how I ended up, where I ended up in publishing, but I didn’t know anything. I knew how to be an editor, and I kinda learned that in the process of doing it, and I learned how to be a publisher in the process of doing it also.

[00:10:42] But one of the things that helped me was I went back and I started reading the memoirs of publishers and editors and learning kind of how to think like a publisher or an editor based on those books. But the more I read. The history of publishing, the more that took me to the history of the book itself, and that’s what set me off on it.

[00:11:01] Once I started to see just how fascinating this history of the book itself was, I was hooked. I couldn’t stop thinking about it or couldn’t stop reading about it.

[00:11:10] Michael: Okay. I want to ask, if you could do this for us, could you give us sort of the arc of publishing, you know, where did it start, where did it go to and where are we now?

[00:11:22] Just a history of it so we can fully appreciate it.

[00:11:25] Joel: In the earliest, earliest, earliest days, publishing was an oral phenomenon. It would be people like Bards or poets or whatever who would present an idea in a public presentation. It wasn’t even a, wasn’t even connected to a book or a text. Writing comes about, not because those guys need some way of capturing their thoughts, but because accountants need some way of keeping track of records.

[00:11:49] So the invention of writing is mostly attributable to accountants needing to figure out, you know, how much grain the king sent to so-and-so, or who owed what to whom. And out of that writing developed, and as writing developed, people began to just capture more and more ideas. On in those days, it would’ve been clay tablets or possibly papyrus scrolls, things like that.

[00:12:12] Those ideas were captured and the idea of publishing would’ve been to take that stuff, depending on if it was worthy to be heard by an audience and reading it to them. And so in the early Roman period or the Greek period, you know, there were things like public recitations of books. That’s how a book was published.

[00:12:32] A guy wrote something and he would go present it to an audience. There was no big wide audience for books and nobody was publishing books and the way that we think, because there was no. Literate populace. There was some people that were literate and they might ask, Hey, could I get a copy of that? And they would have a, a scribe or a slave even like transcribe that for them and they would have a copy.

[00:12:53] But that’s literally how you got copies of books back then. You went to a slave or a Freedman who was a scribe and they would like write it out for you and at one at a time. And that kind of one at a time publishing was happening. Literally until the printing press. So over the course of the ancient period and then to into the Middle Ages, publishing basically meant copying manuscripts and it was a one-off thing and very slow in the course of the history of the Middle Ages.

[00:13:21] If you look at a bar chart, you know, you’ve got just this tiny ripple of new books being produced, and then you hit the 1450s with Gutenberg and it’s like it shoots right up. And that’s because it took that long. For mass production of books to actually happen. But then you get into the steam powered printing presses, and then it’s a totally different ball game because printing a book one sheet at a time is how the Gutenberg press worked.

[00:13:48] It worked that way, really all the way until steam powered presses when they began to. Put them on what are called rotary presses and all that mechanization meant that they could produce thousands of books in an hour as opposed to just like one over the course of a day or something like that. And that meant that you could actually have a true, what we would think of beginning a publishing industry with like.

[00:14:11] Real publishers who are taking ownership of real IP and sending them into stores and all of that kind of stuff. And so that’s a fairly modern phenomenon. And the world that you and I stepped into you earlier than me, but when we got into publishing, we were on maybe even the down slope of that because the peak of that was really in the seventies, eighties, and nineties.

[00:14:35] Mm-hmm. And then it began to fragment and kind of struggle. As that began to happen, we get this because of the internet. We get all kinds of other modes of publishing, all kinds of other modes of distributing ideas, and that really starts to change the way publishing works to where we’re in the environment we are now, where it’s very decentralized.

[00:14:54] Megan: Joel, I wanna go back to something that you were talking about earlier where you were talking about the fact that the book made it possible to take an idea and perhaps ignite a whole social movement because it was possible for a group of people or large group of people to be aligned around an idea that was consistently communicated.

[00:15:15] Mm-hmm. To a whole bunch of people. One of the things that I find. Fascinating about the application of this book and this idea of books as technologies is you talk a lot about. In order for us to communicate well as leaders, as people who have ideas, as people who wanna do things in the world. You know, even if you’re not technically a leader, but you wanna have an important impact in some way, is the need to make the things that are, are in us and in our own brains, both explicit meaning like.

[00:15:48] They’re outside of us in a way other people can observe and specific, like clear mm-hmm. Uh, in their communication. Can you talk about that for a minute? Because I think one, this is something as a coach, when I’m coaching CEOs or business owners, I find this comes up a lot because they’re frustrated with their.

[00:16:05] For example, very practically with delegation. Mm-hmm. You know, it’s like, why can’t people ever do what I want them to do? And it’s, the answer is usually like, well, because you’re not actually communicating what you wanna do. You have an idea of it, but it’s not out there. But then I think more broadly, just communication in general and in terms of getting people on the same page about things, being able to move people to action in a meaningful way, you know, for something good.

[00:16:27] This is a very relevant idea. Kind in your way of thinking. So talk to us about that.

[00:16:32] Joel: This is a core concept in the book itself. So the Idea machine is 16 chapters and it follows the book from the earliest development all the way up to ai. And all along the way I try to point out how that dynamic that you just described is in play, that the book helps take.

[00:16:51] Ideas that start in the mind of an author as just kind of a gooey, fuzzy idea. And in the course of writing, it forces them to get clear on it. It forces them to get specific about it and develop it in a way that actually becomes useful. And then the. Publishing process. The book itself then enables it to be accessible to other people, so it can be fully expressed in a format that other people have access to.

[00:17:20] Without those two things, you really don’t have communication. You have maybe some kind of fuzzy idea or maybe even some crystal clear idea, but it’s just stuck in your head. You need some way of, of taking it from fuzzy to clear, and then from, you know, centered within you to. Public and to go from private to public and from vague to specific is kind of the, the challenge of communication.

[00:17:47] Everybody, all of us face some version of that in every version of our jobs. But books are an example, like a very hardcore example of how that happens in a format that can then. Live beyond the moment because you know, Saint Augustine did that with his confessions and we can read it now 1500 years later.

[00:18:07] And that’s astonishing to think of. So not only can these ideas live in a way that we can understand them, but they can live through time. And that’s one of the greatest things about a book is that it perpetuates ideas across time.

[00:18:26] Michael: I really do think that. Writing and reading do make you more clear? A hundred percent. You know, we get a lot of podcast pitches, people that wanna come on the show as a guest, I get ’em home probably two or three every day now. And it’s so interesting. I have a basic screening device that I use and first of all, 1% or less of those make their way through.

[00:18:50] Mm-hmm. ’cause we have such a long list of guests that we wanna interview and are proactive about that, but occasionally you get pitched something. But the screen for me is, does the person who’s getting pitched or is pitching, have they written a book? Mm-hmm. Now, that could seem like a really arbitrary kind of artificial thing because there’s obviously, you don’t have to be an author to be somebody who matters or somebody who’s making an incredible impact in the world.

[00:19:16] I use it as a proxy for clear thinking.

[00:19:19] Joel: A book forces you to get clear. It forces you to develop an argument. It forces you to develop a line of thought that other people can follow. And without that, you’re kind of left with a grab bag of ideas that are probably cool. They’re great, but they’re not in a system that can be used or explained or anything like that.

[00:19:37] Megan: It’s funny because that has no relationship to how passionate someone is about the thing that mm-hmm. Is their idea. I can think of so many examples of talking to people and, and my, within myself, where I’ve been really fired up about something that mattered deeply to me and for very good reasons. I.

[00:19:54] When I started talking about it, it was like kind of word salad. You know, as we say, sometimes with our, our teenagers, you know, they start talking about stuff and it’s like word salad, like, what are you even talking about? You’re talking in, in circles and it’s hard work to get clear. Joel, you know this intimately because you’ve been, uh, helping me with this, but I’ve been working on a new.

[00:20:12] Training that I’m gonna be doing for our community. And it’s, I’ve been working on it for about six weeks, maybe longer. And I mean, every day I’m working on that thing and I have a, an external coach that I’m working on it with, and he and I are going back and forth voice noting each other, you know, three to five times a day of, okay, I’m gonna do this, what do you think of this?

[00:20:29] Okay. No, it’s like this, do it differently. And it, it’s just really hard work to take something that I thought. I already knew at the beginning. Mm-hmm. Like, I, like I would’ve said, I have an idea for a thing and I’m gonna go talk about it with people like I, I might even have some expertise around it. But being able to communicate that in a way that truly is clear, I don’t think we appreciate how, how challenging that is.

[00:20:52] Nor do we give it enough time and effort on our part to do our best communicating. And that really limits our impact and our ability to persuade people or move people to action, which I don’t care what kind of job you have, that’s probably. A core thing, even if it’s just wanting your boss to give you a raise, you know?

[00:21:08] But Absolutely. But for most of us, there’s all kinds of things even beyond that.

[00:21:11] Joel: That’s why even something as simple as a pitch within an organization, it ought to be a memo. You should go to the discipline, do go through the discipline of writing it out, whatever it, even if it’s just talking points.

[00:21:22] Because otherwise, what happens is you might mistake your own passion and high feeling. For having thought it out. And then what you’ll find out is you’re 30 seconds into the presentation and you actually don’t know how any of this stuff fits together. And you’re just hoping that people will pick it up on vibes and they can’t because whatever’s in your head is limited by however thick the bone of your skull is.

[00:21:44] It’s, it can’t go past that. And the only way it can go past that is through your mouth or eyes through reading. And that means that you have to formulate this stuff in a way. That is accessible to people, and that means you gotta put it in written communication in some form.

[00:21:59] Michael: It’s funny, I, I coach also, like Megan does, and I have so many leaders that get frustrated that they can’t get buy-in from their team.

[00:22:08] Mm-hmm. Or in situations where they’re in a corporate environment or even a ministry environment, they can’t get buy-in from their board. Right. Or they can’t get buy-in from their boss. 99 times out of a hundred, it’s because they have no idea what they’re asking for, right? I mean, it’s just sort of a vague thing and people aren’t gonna sign up for the vague thing until there’s more clarity around it.

[00:22:31] And it’s amazing how when you get more clear and I couldn’t agree with you more, write it out, you know, make the case, argue the point. I don’t expect people to reach your mind. They can’t reach your mind. They can’t do

[00:22:43] Joel: it even if they want to. You know, I think this is true for leaders that they have a lot of personal charisma and people want to follow them, but.

[00:22:52] That’s not enough. You really do have to go to the discipline of getting these ideas clear for yourself so that they can be clear to other people. Otherwise, you really are just like cooking off vibes and it’s just not enough cooking off vibes.

[00:23:05] Michael: Clarity sells too.

[00:23:06] Joel: Yeah, a hundred percent.

[00:23:07] Michael: You know, because I think they’re, you know, there are a lot of people looking for direction.

[00:23:10] They’re looking for, could be as simple as they need direction on how to cook some food item. Mm-hmm. Or maybe that they need, you know, direction on how to handle this situation at work. Whatever it is. But they want clarity. And when they get clarity, then all of a sudden bingo, you know, they’re, they’re on the path to resolving that issue or getting the help or making the thing or whatever it is.

[00:23:32] And that’s, that’s where books are enormously. Valuable. Have you always been a Booker file?

[00:23:38] Joel: Uh, yeah. Not to the extent that I probably have developed over time, but I grew up in a house full of books. My dad was an English teacher, my mom, you know, loved mysteries and espionage thrillers and stuff like that.

[00:23:51] And so there was just a billion books in our house and I, I just grew up around them and I’ve resorted to them from my own entertainment from a young age. But like going to the library was a fun thing for me, you know, as a kid. But the older I got and then the more professionally attuned I got to books, the more interesting it became to me.

[00:24:08] So I, I think the path was always there, but I have. I have cut off all other possibilities at this point. You know, like that is the only path available to me at this

[00:24:18] Megan: point. I can confirm that and say that, um, the Amazon man or woman, and there are many people that come to our house on a regular basis, are very often delivering books, and I would say on average Joel gets five to 10 books a week.

[00:24:34] Do you think that’s true?

[00:24:35] Joel: Yeah, during certain seasons or if, like, when I’m working on a project in particular. Yep.

[00:24:40] Megan: And our kitchen table is usually about halfway covered with books. ’cause those, as Joel would say, each stack represents like an idea or like a, a contingent train of thought component of an idea that like, it’s all related.

[00:24:52] And you know, the kids know like, don’t mess up the piles because if you mess up the piles, you mess up the brain. You know, like, ask dad and he’ll move them. Yeah. Okay. I wanna, I wanna shift gears a little bit and I wanna talk about. Reading books in our daily life for a minute, because obviously we’re married.

[00:25:08] I watch you read books all the time. You for the most part, read physical books. Mm-hmm. We are a company that loves analog technology and loves the value of, for example. The focus that comes from using a physical planner versus like an app, for example, for productivity. Um, we’ve stood by that for a long time and really, really believe that.

[00:25:31] That’s helpful. I wanna just like take a second and tell you, you know, this already, Joel, but Dad, you don’t know this. I wanna tell you about this experiment that I’m doing on myself, and I want you to tell me your thoughts on it. So I have not read a physical book. Like I, I listen to books on Audible all the time.

[00:25:48] Mm-hmm. I listen to podcasts and stuff like that, but I, I mostly never read physical books. Like I have a lot of books. I will use them to jog my interest or thinking about what I might wanna go listen to. But sitting down and reading a book, like probably has not happened with any regularity in over a decade.

[00:26:06] Mm-hmm. Almost exclusively audio books. And lately I have been thinking to myself, I don’t know that I like the trade off of that. I mean, for some things yes. Like, you know, I’m, listen, I was listening last week to a book about investing and it’s like. It’s really more conceptual. It’s not technical, like I just, I just kinda wanna get the big idea and move on.

[00:26:22] Right? So like I did listen to that, but then there’s some other deeper work that I’m doing for our work at Full Focus research related stuff, and I can’t remember anything. Yeah. Like I can’t synthesize it and put it back together. I feel like when it’s in that audio format, and that’s becoming frustrating to me.

[00:26:39] And so I thought, okay, I’m gonna do this experiment on myself where I’m just gonna read. Physical books, anything that like matters that, that I’m not, it’s not entertainment. It’s not just something I’m trying to like kind of get the big idea and move on. I’m really gonna read a physical book and so a couple things that I’ve found so far.

[00:26:55] Number one, when do I do that? And I know that sounds like a silly thing to say, but when you’ve been listening to audio books, when do you do it? Is any time. So anytime you’re in the car, right when I’m getting ready. I mean, good grief, I could put a speaker in the shower and listen while I’m in the shower, you know, anytime I’m anywhere doing anything else, cooking, dinner, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:27:14] I could listen to an audio book as long as I wasn’t trying to talk to other people. Right, right. So the real question of when do I read a physical book and then I had to come to terms with the fact that I was gonna read way slower than I could listen. That was like jarring, like, oh my gosh, like I’ve been reading for an hour and I’ve only read like 30 pages, or I don’t know what it was, you know, but like, it’s a very different experience of consuming information to do it in that context.

[00:27:41] And I’m, I’m kind of struggling with that. Like there are things I like about that. I like making notes in the margins ’cause it helps me connect the dots for things I’m writing, but it’s also very frustrating to me. So is there a case to be made for reading physical books? And if so. What is it and how do we do it?

[00:27:57] ’cause I mean, literally, I’m not sure I know how to do it after spending a decade of listening.

[00:28:01] Joel: Let me take that in a few different ways. The first one is, I would point to behind me, this bookcase behind me.

[00:28:09] Megan: Yes.

[00:28:09] Joel: I mean, well, like when we think about an analog book, we think, oh, it’s like an analog book. I mean, it’s a physical thing.

[00:28:15] We don’t think about things like user interface or things that we would think about with apps, for instance, but. This is like one of the greatest user interfaces ever created If you’re just listening, which is great, by the way, if you’re just listening, what you’re missing is I’m pointing to my bookcase behind me, which is an entire wall, and that is like the greatest user interface of all time, because that, that’s a screen that’s the size of a whole wall, and I have access to, by looking at those spines, whole lines of argument.

[00:28:47] I have access to whole trains of thought just by looking at the spines of those books. I don’t even have to be close enough. All I have to do is be close enough to kind of recognize them. I don’t even have to be able to pull them off the shelf to have that, the ability to do that. And so like as an external part of my mind, which is what a bookcase is, a book itself is this, it is an externalization of your own brain.

[00:29:09] It’s like extra scaffolding for your brain. I have access to. Tons of extra ideas just by looking at the spines of those books, which if I were limited to thumbnails on my phone or thumbnails on a, on a Kindle, I wouldn’t have access to because I would have to like manually thumb through like that entire archive of stuff on, on my phone or on my Kindle.

[00:29:33] Megan: Joel, is that valuable if you’re not a writer?

[00:29:36] Joel: Yeah, a hundred percent. If you’re thinking about any like, and we’re all in knowledge work in one form or another, you know, like if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re probably in some form of knowledge work, and that means that you are frankly handicapped by the kind of knowledge you could have access to, but don’t if you’re not surrounded by physical books.

[00:29:56] Because physical books actually prompt thinking, just by virtue of being able to see them. And so if you had like if you’ve just even thumbed through, call it 50 different books and you had ’em on a shelf around you, you would have access to those ideas just by looking at them. ’cause they would prompt memories that would be useful to you.

[00:30:16] But let’s talk about your own situation here on like time and how do I get good at this again and that kind of thing. I think it’s just a practice thing because some books I read very slowly, other books I read very quickly. Some books you find that. You can kind of get started reading and realize this book doesn’t warrant the kind of deep, super engagement.

[00:30:39] I can probably get through it actually in a couple of hours. If I just kind of read quickly and and do a cursory read of it, you’ll still get all the goodness out of it that was there for you, because that’s all you were gonna get out of it anyway, but you didn’t have to invest two weeks to read it at the same time.

[00:30:53] You’ll find there are books that do require you to really be in it. And you may write tons of notes in it and all of that. And that goes back to this user interface thing. A page just like you know, the screen on your phone, that’s a user interface or an app screen, that’s a user interface. A page is a user interface.

[00:31:12] And there’s useful things about that, the margin, how you find different pages, the notes you make in those margins, and how they link back to other things. You can think about marginal notes and things that say like, check page 57, like that’s a hyperlink in the book. Back to another idea. In that book, an index is like a bunch of hyperlinks to a bunch of ideas in a book.

[00:31:33] Once you kind of get mastery of the physical shape of the book, again, what you find is. It is an amazingly efficient tool for communicating ideas, for accessing those ideas again, and I think part of what we’ve done is we’ve just de-skilled ourself in reading and we just need to re-skill ourself in reading so that we are taking, maybe it’s just 30 minutes to an hour a day, like 30 minutes at the top, 30 minutes at the bottom, and just.

[00:31:59] Spending time in the book itself, and what happens is those skills will come back to you. The ability to speed up or the ability to be more discerning in what needs to be read closely or what doesn’t, all of that just kind of happens with practice.

[00:32:12] Megan: What do you do about the frustration that it’s slow? So I’m just narrating my own experience here.

[00:32:20] Maybe. Yeah, maybe others of you are better than me in this, but this is what I’m thinking. I’m thinking to myself. In the two weeks that I’ve spent working on this book, you know, in the margins of my life, because I can’t do it in all the margins of my life. It’s much more limited. It’s gonna take me forever to read this book, you know, instead of reading 20 or 50 books this year, maybe I’ll only really have time for focused reading like that of 10 or or 12 or 15 books.

[00:32:48] And that means over the course of my lifetime, I’m gonna read a lot less books because there’s a real. Capacity lit. I, for example, I can’t listen to ’em at two x speed, you know? Right. I have to read at whatever, whatever my natural reading speed is, and maybe I can read a little quick or whatever. How do you deal with the opportunity cost of reading physical books?

[00:33:06] Like how do you offset the loss of opportunity in terms of scale of ideas? You can be exposed to? Compared with the depth of what you get from reading in at a human speed as opposed to a mechanized speed?

[00:33:20] Joel: Well, for one thing, I don’t think I would limit myself to one format only. Yeah. Because I would say, for instance, that supplementing an audio book with a physical book enables you to get the benefits of both.

[00:33:32] So there’s a book right now that I’m reading that I’m, I’m having a very critical argument with this book. It’s kind of popular. A lot of people are talking about it, and I’ve started reading it all right? When I started reading it, I realized I’m gonna disagree with almost everything in this book. And so I was started off listening to it actually in the car line, picking up Naomi, and I got home from picking up Naomi, and I grabbed my physical copy and I, I started underlining and making notes.

[00:33:58] I’ve kept listening to the book, but every time I come back to it, I make all these notes in the book. And so I think you can kind of multi format. Your way through some of this stuff. I don’t think you have to be completely dedicated to one format or another. The other thing I would say is that it kind of depends on what you’re trying to get out of that book.

[00:34:16] If you don’t need to retain it or you don’t need to have access to the kind of level of precision that you’re talking about. Let’s say the book is more for entertainment, then by all means just listen to the audio book. That’s no problem. And go ahead and give yourself the permission to do that. And if you’re gonna be listening for, or reading for like these kind of like hard takeaways and you wanna walk away with a really synthesized version of what this author is saying, then I would go ahead and I would read physical.

[00:34:44] I would just give myself time in the day to do it and take the pressure off myself that I somehow have to finish by a certain time. I would just, you know, like give myself the permission to read the book for what it is.

[00:34:54] Michael: You know, I, I read mostly eBooks and I know the advantages of analog. Mm-hmm. You know, I know that it’s physically more in your face.

[00:35:04] It’s easy to forget books when you read ’em on an ebook, but I like the portability of eBooks. Sure.

[00:35:11] Joel: Yeah. And

[00:35:11] Michael: I can remember back, this was like right after Kendall came out, well, it was probably several years after Kendall came out, but Gail and I went to Africa. She’s a reader and she literally had one suitcase that was nothing but books.

[00:35:24] Yeah. Meanwhile, I had a Kindle and I had 10 x, maybe 20 x the number of books on my Kindle that she had. But I don’t know. I, I like Megan. I struggle with this too. And part of it is, you know, this maybe me being, uh, jaded as a book publisher. You know, there are so many books that should have been essays. A hundred percent.

[00:35:46] So true. So many of those, even I’ve heard you say this before, should have been probably short articles

[00:35:53] Joel: or a blog. There’s a statement by Al Regnery whose father was the publisher, Henry Regnery and Al Ary. I was involved in Regnery Publishing, I’m pretty sure, but he was also a magazine publisher and he was kind of famous for saying that most books should be magazine articles and most magazine articles shouldn’t even be written.

[00:36:13] Just to address the ebook thing real quick. I think portability is awesome and there’s just trade-offs. You can listen to a ton of audiobooks and all this interstitial time that we have driving here, doing chores, whatever. That’s awesome. But there are trade-offs. You’re not gonna be able to get the level of deep engagement that you get from a physical book.

[00:36:30] And the ebook is awesome ’cause you have portability and you can like, you know, you can have like a thousand, 2000, 3000, I don’t know how many you can have on a Kindle. Ultimately I’ve got like. 500 books on my Kindle, but I also know I never go back to ’em and I don’t read them or look at them or benefit from them in the same way I do physical books because I, I’ve even forget that they’re there.

[00:36:48] They’re invisible to me. So there’s just trade-offs.

[00:36:52] Megan: You know, Joel, one of the things that I’ve been thinking a lot about is, again, as you well know, is the idea of human limitations. Mm-hmm. And I think I’m probably in a season of my life where I’m bumping up against this a lot and it’s creating a lot of friction for me.

[00:37:04] And I’m also asking myself the question like, what might actually be good? Within our human limitations that we, we consider to be a bug, but is actually a feature. Sure. And so I’m thinking about things like our native capacity, our native speed, you know, even just like walking. Walking happens at a certain speed kind of throughout all time.

[00:37:26] And there’s something really good about that, like going faster than that is. There’s negatives and there’s real benefits of just, you know, walking at a human, human speed. And I think about reading at a human speed and consuming ideas at a human speed. And I think the friction for me is I don’t like the idea that I’m not gonna be able to potentially consume as many books.

[00:37:47] Um, now I know what you said about format and all that, so it makes some of that mood, however. There is a reality. If I’m gonna read important books deeply that I wanna be shaped by, and that’s really what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about things that are kind of ancillary to that, but books that I want to shape me.

[00:38:05] If I’m going to read them deeply, I’m going to read fewer of them. I’m going to be shaped by fewer ideas. And I think that’s helpful to just say, like, to be honest about it, and then to have to come to grips with like, there’s a sense of like almost greed that I contend with in myself that like I want more, yeah, I wanna read deeply, but I also wanna do that at scale.

[00:38:26] And it’s like, well, you get to choose. You’re gonna get to choose at some level. Yeah. Between those two things,

[00:38:32] Joel: the math is just not working for you regardless, because Right. There’s like half a million books that get published every year, you know? I mean, I don’t know what the exact number is, but it’s pretty close to that.

[00:38:40] And that that’s an absurdly large number, and that’s every year, how many books you can read in a year. Let’s say you’re a pretty ambitious reader and you read 50 books a year. I mean, that’s totally doable, even for somebody who’s as busy as you, 50 books a year. 500,000 books a year. You’re gonna read a few thousand books and then you’re gonna die.

[00:39:02] And like that’s all you get. Yeah. And that’s okay. Like, that’s just like, that’s the math. That’s all there is.

[00:39:09] Megan: So will there be books in heaven, Joel? That’s the question.

[00:39:12] Joel: Well, Jorge Borges, he imagined like, heaven is a paradise is kind of like an A library. So maybe, maybe we just get to keep, we’re gonna.

[00:39:30] Michael: I would be remiss if I didn’t bring in the topic of ai. Mm-hmm. We were talking about books, but you have this in the book and I ran into it separately from that earlier this week. I think I may have pinged you about it, but Socrates was very skeptical of writing anything down because he felt like would atrophy our memory.

[00:39:51] Joel: Yes.

[00:39:52] Michael: And I, I hear this argument all the time with the AI technology, we’re gonna lose the ability to think. And I can remember when the first, uh, Hewlett Packard calculators came out. People were saying, we’re gonna lose the ability to do math, and they weren’t wrong. But what we gained from that, you know, was something extraordinary.

[00:40:10] But how do you see the interplay of AI in books in the future?

[00:40:16] Joel: Oh my gosh. So this is a big open question, and it’s one that’s I, I deal with in the idea machine going all the way back to Socrates and then looking all the way into the, into the. I don’t go into the future, future, but I do talk about AI because the truth is AI is actually an extension of the book, and if you look at the history of library science, the internet and all of that, AI like just comes right outta that.

[00:40:41] The internet comes right out of that. Mm-hmm. They’re all intimately related to each other. If you’re one of these people that sees AI as somehow like against literary culture or against the book, you’ve kind of maybe haven’t heard the story because they’re like friends. They’ve been together from the very beginning.

[00:40:57] Humans have this need to create metadata to get access to the data that they create, and we create tons of data. We always have, like going back to the beginning of time, humans have been creating information. And it’s hard to access it. And so humans have created metadata and various searching methods and all that kind of stuff.

[00:41:16] And at every stage of humans trying to figure out some new way of managing data better, like writing. Or AI today. There are people that come along the way and say, ah, that’s terrible. And Socrates was one of the first and one of the most famous because he has at least one major dialogue of Plato’s, the ris, where he comes right out and talks about how terrible books are.

[00:41:43] You can kind of go back to him as like the original Luddite on, on information technology. But he was wrong. And not only was he wrong, he was a hypocrite. If you actually look at his own practice, which is recorded in these other books, you can see that Socrates used books. He talked about how he used books, he talked about how he benefited from books and so on.

[00:42:03] And Plato of course did, and Plato published those dialogues. So the idea that books are are writing is somehow gonna damage our own cognitive abilities. Like I get it. I get why his Socrates says that it’s right there in the argument. However, it’s wrong, and we’ve got now 2300 years or so of proof that he was incorrect about that.

[00:42:24] And I’m pretty sure that’s how AI will work out. You know, we’ve got this long trend of information technologies. The book is kind of the foundation of it. AI comes out of it, and I believe that over time we’ll just find humane ways of using AI that reinforce the things that we hope to get from it. And so I don’t think that kind of like anti positioning is gonna help anybody.

[00:42:46] Also, you can’t win that argument because no one individual controls any of this. This is an emergent phenomenon that comes out of like a marketplace dynamic, and no one human controls that. Even if they have regulatory power, they can’t control it. They’ll just maybe manipulate it in some way. So there’s no way for us to control this.

[00:43:06] What we really can do is figure out how to use it well for ourselves, and then hopefully model that for other people.

[00:43:11] Michael: Joel, you may have read this, but I’m now seeing a lot of authors. Who in the publication of their book are also publishing a custom GPT that’s been trained by their book, so that readers can query against the book.

[00:43:25] So it’s like you get the package or you get a link in the book to get it or whatever. But I think that’s kind of a neat idea too, because like any technology, it leverages human strength. That’s fascinating.

[00:43:37] Joel: Yeah, I had not seen that. You know, I know that when I listen to an audio book, I notice that there’s now a feature in my audible that asks, that allows me to query the book.

[00:43:45] So I, they’ve obviously plugged an LLM of some kind into the Audible app that allows me to, you know, query the book. That makes tons of sense to me, because that’s actually one of the original ideas behind. AI LLMs. The original idea behind them was that we needed some way of getting beyond the passiveness of a page where a book could actually serve information to us, and search engines were a part of that plan.

[00:44:12] That goes all the way back to like Tim Burners Lee, when he was talking about the web and he was, you know, kind of describing the invention of the web. He talked about the ability to have. Automatic processing of data and serving us data coming out of that. This goes all the way back even further to essays written by a guy named Van Devar Bush in the 1930s and forties where he described having a machine.

[00:44:35] He called it the mimics that could sit, that would be a desk. In his version, it was all analog. Fed by microfiche. But the idea is that it could actually do data processing on the backside while you weren’t even there. It would, it would put together data for you and then serve it up to you. So this desire for humans to have machines give us the data that we need to work has been around as long as humans can imagine it.

[00:44:59] Mm-hmm. And. In this case that’s like literally over a hundred years. ’cause it wasn’t even Vannevar Busch. There was a guy before him named Paul Otlet, who was a Belgian librarian who had cooked up this idea of basically creating the idea that you could have all the data of the world. Available in card files and you could call up some central office and they could serve it up to you.

[00:45:21] And then eventually somebody created the internet, which was what that was. And so the need for this has been around forever and we’re finally actually experiencing the fruit of it. And of course it’s uneven and lumpy and it doesn’t work great all the time and there’s all these concerns, but it’s kind of magical and we should kind of appreciate it for what it is and then make it work better, not just like beat up on it.

[00:45:44] That’s good.

[00:45:45] Megan: Okay, last question, Joel. I know we’re, we’re about out of time, but I wanna know with regard to ai, what’s the dark side though with regard to ideas or writing in particular?

[00:45:55] Joel: Michael mentioned this with math and calculators. We talked about this with leaving, uh, physical books and moving to audio books.

[00:46:02] There can be a de-skilling and critical thinking is a skill, and if people de-skill their critical abilities or never develop them, that could be a real problem for sure. I mean, I think. This is not a political statement. This is just a reflection of our own political climate. We don’t live at a time where people are critically engaging that much on ideas.

[00:46:23] It just feels very reactionary on both sides. Mm-hmm. And I think some of that is that there’s just no patience for critical thinking or critical evaluation, and we should hold onto that as tightly as we can. And so we should be using AI to help us with that, not to replace that. ’cause if we lose that, that’s a problem for sure.

[00:46:42] Michael: Mm-hmm. If you could design a double win reading habit for mere mortals, not to Joel Millers Yeah. Who walk amongst us, but for mere mortals, what would that look like on maybe a daily or a weekly or a seasonal basis?

[00:46:56] Joel: Well, I would say you, it should be daily. You’ll never pick up a habit unless it’s, unless it is daily.

[00:47:02] At least that should be the intent. And I think I would just say everybody should read. I mean, at least 30 minutes a day. Better an hour, and the best way to do it is to just take, say 30 minutes at the top of the day and 30 minutes at the bottom of the day. You can move through a lot of pages with an hour a day, and it’s just like with exercise, the minute you start getting momentum and start feeling the difference, the more self inspiring it is and the more self-motivating it is.

[00:47:30] And so if you just kind of like treat it like it’s a chore and you only do it a little bit every day, you’ll never get anywhere. It’ll be like. Convincing yourself to exercise and then you basically, you go lift some barbells like four times in a morning and then quit. You’ll never develop the habit. You really need to expose yourself to enough books over a period of time that you develop a love for it, and it’s not that hard if you do it.

[00:47:54] At 30 minutes to an hour a day. Just give yourself some time at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day. And one other thing to remember about reading is it’s kind of an interstitial thing. For whatever reason, reading is not a main thing for almost any of us, unless that’s your job somehow.

[00:48:09] And it really isn’t anybody’s job, although that would be a great job. But because it’s not, if you have a book with you, just think about it this way, like whatever you go bounce to social media. Try to bounce to a book instead, or some other thing like that, something that diverts your time in a, in a period where you’re not otherwise occupied.

[00:48:28] Allow a book to be part of your, your range of options in that moment. And I would say pick something that just interests you. So never read a book ’cause you’re supposed to. Read books ’cause they delight. You read books because they’re entertaining to you read books because you’re, you get something out of it that you really like.

[00:48:45] Alan Jacobs is a professor at Baylor. He talks about reading by whim. Just follow your whims if something looks good to you, if something looks cool, great. Read that. Don’t take somebody else’s recommendation as something like you have to read it and then do it.

[00:48:59] Michael: Would you agree, agree with the advice that not every book has to be finished?

[00:49:03] Joel: Oh, never. If you’re into a book a little ways and that author hasn’t done the job of securing your attention, feel free to put it away. That may be a deficiency in you, like I’m open to admitting that like I have never finished a dust of Yefsky novel. I’m happy to admit that that’s a deficiency in me.

[00:49:19] And someday I’ll be a man enough to finish a Do Eski novel, but I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna beat myself up about it. At the same time, I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna like soldier through something that’s gonna prevent me from reading other things that are more enjoyable or more useful to me right now. So, if a book doesn’t work for you, fine, it doesn’t work for you.

[00:49:37] Just like people. Not every person works for you. It’s the same thing. Just like go on to something else. I love it.

[00:49:43] Megan: Yes. Okay. Joel, on that note mm-hmm. We’re gonna transition to the three questions that we ask all of our guests. And the first one is, what’s your biggest obstacle in getting the double win right now in this season?

[00:49:56] Uh, and by that I mean winning at work and succeeding at life.

[00:49:59] Joel: Well, books, sometimes you won’t be surprised to know actually can be a bit of an obstacle for me in that they can contribute to kind of a distractibility for me. And so. If I have a lot of things going on and yet I feel the pressure to finish reading a book and review it, for instance, or, or I just am obsessed with a particular book and I gotta finish it, like I just feel compelled to finish it.

[00:50:26] That can come at the expense of my family in a way that is not helpful. And so I like, one of the biggest obstacles in getting the double win for me is just me not able to like, you know, get myself guardrails.

[00:50:38] Michael: Second question, how do you personally know? You achieved the double win

[00:50:42] Joel: being on the background of this podcast since the day it was started and having heard the answers of so many other people and all the conversations that we’ve had about it, the kind of default answer.

[00:50:53] Peace, and I kind of agree with that answer. That’s just that simple. I feel settled. I feel at peace. I feel contented when I’m there. I don’t feel harried. So I would say tranquility is kind of how I know personally. If I feel tranquil, I’m there.

[00:51:11] Megan: Okay. Lastly, what is one ritual or routine that you rely on to get the double win?

[00:51:17] Joel: And it can be reading. It can’t be, can’t be. Well the answer to that, the alternative answer to that would be walking. I find that walking is a tremendous way to A, get physical exercise. B, be outside. And that goes in any weather. I mean, walking in any weather is worth it, even in the rain sometimes. And it’s just allows your mind to be free and you can kind of free associate and your brain will come back recharged and ready to think about new things and.

[00:51:46] It’s awesome. Walking is like a superpower. I don’t know why more people don’t just take it up. It’s like the easiest thing to do. I mean, you got all the equipment you need, you just like open your door and go,

[00:51:55] Megan: you know, I’m sitting here right now and I’m looking out my window and it’s a beautiful day and I’m like.

[00:52:01] Soon as I’m done with this podcast, I’m gonna go walk around the block. ’cause I just, I just feel the need to move and I love that you can do it like slowly and I don’t know, it just feels so human.

[00:52:12] Michael: Joel, thanks so much for joining us today and sharing some of your wisdom with us. I have a feeling about this book, and I’ve told you that from the moment I heard the idea.

[00:52:21] Mm-hmm. I just have a feeling about this, that this is a good moment for this book and I wish you every success. Thank you. I hope you hit the New York Times Beth Sellers list. I know that’s not your criteria for success. I just, I just hope that it explodes.

[00:52:35] Joel: Yeah. Thank you so much. I think you’re right. I think it’s, uh, it’s a great moment for this idea, the Idea Machine, because we’re at a time where as a culture, we’re concerned about ai, we’re concerned about all these different cultural trends, and the history of the book actually addresses all of them.

[00:53:02] Michael: Okay guys. The book is called The I Idea Machine, how Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future. Megan, what did you think about that interview? And of course, it was your husband, so

[00:53:13] Megan: it was so fun. I mean, you know, I, I have not read the book yet. I can’t wait to read it, but I have lived through the entire writing of the book and I’ve talked to Joel about it over the last decade plus as he’s been in process for this.

[00:53:27] And I think the thing I love about Joel is that he sees the world from a contrarian novel point of view. You know, he just doesn’t see things the way most people do, and consequently. It opens my eyes, and I hope it has been the same for you listening. It opens my eyes to a different way of seeing the world and thinking about the very real circumstances and challenges of our lives, and so I think there’s some great takeaways like I, I love how he said.

[00:53:55] Just read 30 minutes a day. Like, you know, Joel is so good at, like, don’t make it harder than it needs to be. He’s a, he’s a simplifier by nature, and I think that makes it feel doable. Um, it makes me wanna keep leaning into my own reading habit to reestablishing that. Even though it’s easier to do something else, that there’s a lot to be gained by using not just the information in the book, but the technology of the book itself to aid in my own intellectual and personal development.

[00:54:25] Michael: You know, it’s really interesting. As you know, I was fishing this last week in Montana with a group of 19 other guys, and one of the guys that I found the most fascinating was Kerry Newh. Yeah. The reason is that Carrie, I love him, reads so much and he had so much to contribute, not in a showy or flashy way, but he would say, oh, that reminded me of this, you know, the, the delusion of crowds or something.

[00:54:53] And he would cite that book or he would cite some other book. And man, I was taking so many notes on books that I needed to read. But I do think that one benefit, and I’ve cer certainly seen this in Joel, is when you lead, read a lot. You have a lot to contribute. You know, if your life is about service and contribution, this gives you the raw fodder that you can contribute to other people’s lives, and frankly, from a selfish standpoint, it makes you more interesting.

[00:55:19] Megan: So true. Well, I was newly inspired again, and I just wanna encourage everybody to go pre-order the book. And also, uh, and we didn’t really talk about this in the interview, but Joel has a Substack newsletter called Miller’s Book Review. It’s miller’s book review.com, where he reviews books every week on his newsletter, in his newsletter.

[00:55:39] And it is fantastic. I mean, it’s just everything you just enjoyed about that interview you get on a weekly basis. And that’s a great way to kind of keep up with him. Get in his brain even more, and it’s an interesting brain to be in.

[00:55:50] Michael: Again, guys, the book is The Idea Machine. How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future really encourage you to read this.

[00:55:57] I think it’ll give you not only the history of books and their impact on civilization, but just to see the, the arc of history and to see that. It’s really moving towards something. I don’t know what that something is, but, uh, books have been a large part of that in shaping us, in shaping the cultures that we live in and hopefully shaping the future.

[00:56:18] So until next time, get the double win.