Shownotes Transcript
Oh, by the way, before we get into this episode, I would love to tell you a little bit about Life Notes. Now, Life Notes is a weekly-ish email that I send completely for free to my subscribers, and it contains my notes from life. So notes from books that I've read, podcasts I'm listening to, conversations I'm having, and experiences I'm having in work and in life. And around once a week, I write these up and share them in an email with my subscribers. So if you would like to get an email from me that contains the stuff that I'm learning, almost in real time as I'm learning it, you might like to subscribe. There is a link down in the show notes or in the video description.
Yeah, one of the things that I found the speed listening really helps with is just reducing the cost of a book. So I was at this philanthropy retreat thing over the weekend where people were talking about AI and biosecurity and pandemic prevention and like, how do we avert nuclear war? And I just found myself being like, I have no idea what anyone is talking about here.
And so in conversations with people, I was like, what's like the one or two books you'd recommend to kind of get up to speed on what the hell's going on with nuclear, for example. And this chap who I spoke to who works in policy was like, you know, there's this really good book called The Bomb, which came out recently that charts the history of nuclear war from the 1960s onwards.
You should try that out. And I was like, all right, cool. And immediately just opened up Amazon on my phone, bought it on Audible. I saw it was a 12 hour read. I was like, cool, I can get through this in about three hours. Yeah, something like that. And I started listening to it on the drive home and already like, you know, two or so hours into it, like listening at about 2.5x speed because there was a lot of names and stuff. And I'm not overly familiar with how the US government works. So it's like, you know, let's slow it down a bit.
I now feel like, oh my God, like I now have so much context on the nuclear thing, which I had zero on, like other than studying the Cuban Missile Crisis and like history when I was 15. Beyond that, I knew nothing about any of this. And it's like, oh, it turns out there's all this like drama between the Air Force and the Navy and the Army and the Marines, all the stuff around nuclear, like stuff with the Kremlin and the hotline. It's some really cool shit. And if that had been recommended to me as a book and I would have seen how dense it is, just like, I'm never gonna, I wouldn't have read Brandon Sanderson because I've seen how big the fricking Way of Kings is.
But as an audiobook, as an audiobook at like a speed multiple, it only costs me about three hours of time where I'm driving or at the gym to be able to actually ingest a lot of information about nuclear.
And maybe I can't recite the names of like, oh, in 1963, this was the person who was the head of the Department of State or whatever. But I don't really need to because what I care about is getting the gist and a general understanding of the topic. Yep. The story and the plot. Plus, it's asynchronous time, right? To read a book, you need to not drive, not work out, not cook. You're sitting at a desk. You know, even reading while you're on the train or in an Uber is difficult. But if I'm listening, you know,
I finished my Zoom call. Like here's how my day goes, right? I wake up in the morning, AirPods go in, I start listening. I brush my teeth, I'm listening. I'm cooking breakfast, I'm listening. I take them out when I'm eating breakfast with my teammates. And then if I have five minutes between a Zoom call and where I'm in, I'll listen.
And then I finished the Zoom call. I'm going to head over here. Cool. I start listening. I get in the Uber. I like might pick up a phone call or two. The second the phone call ends, I go back to listening. My AirPods just don't leave my ears. And then I only stopped listening. I texted you, hey, I'm downstairs, but I can do things and listen at the same time. And when you show up downstairs, I stopped listening. And so all that dead time in the day, typically it's like three to four hours. I'm listening to a book, but I'm listening at 3x speed.
Nice. Lovely life. Now, that thing that you just said, I imagine there are some people listening to this thinking, oh my fucking God, that sounds incredible. And just as many probably thinking, oh my fucking God, that sounds like the worst thing in the world. This guy's a psychopath. I mean, most people do the same thing, but with music.
right? So let's take Hamilton, for example. I eat biographies for breakfast. I'm obsessed, right? Like I literally wrote a rap album about the life of Arnold Schwarzenegger after I listened to Hamilton for the first time. Hamilton, the musical, it's about two hours, 40 minutes long. It is the best biography of Hamilton, in my opinion, right? It's dramatized, but like you
You can't take away from the beat and the lyrics and everything else. When you listen to music, it's exactly like listening to a book, especially if you pay attention to the lyrics. By the way, one really cool thing is if you start listening to a lot of audio books, you will notice and remember all the lyrics from all the songs you listen to. Most people who I am friends with, you know, they listen to the beat or the melody and they don't necessarily recall or understand the lyrics. They need to look at the lyrics on their phone to really intake them. For me, like both happened because I've trained that part of my brain.
But if you already do this for music, why do you do it with music? Because it enriches your life. It makes you happy. Well, Brandon Sanderson's, you know, The Way of Kings enriches my life. I'm sorry, even more than music. And so again, it doesn't matter if it's fantasy or fiction or philosophy or sci-fi. I listen because it makes me happy. It's beautiful. It's enjoyable. I'm living inside this world. And the joy that you get from a book, if you read a book,
is so much deeper than the joy you get from watching a movie or watching a TV series. And so I don't watch TV. I don't watch movies. I just consume books, but I do it with my ears.