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LinkedIn presents.

I'm Rufus Griskin and this is the next big

idea. Today, are we forgetting how to read?

It has become clear to me, watching by three

sons navigate the world, that the way they absorb

information is very different from the way

I did, maybe the way you did growing up.

Video, they would say, without hesitation,

is simply a better mode of communication.

Writing is old-fashioned, it's outmoded. They're

not alone. Many of my friends report that they do

not read as much as they used to. Instead of opening

up a novel, they turn to Netflix in the evenings.

Indeed, some friends have told me, and these

are bright folks engaged in the world of ideas,

that they can't remember the last time they finished a book.

What has happened to us? Is reading going the way

of the hammer Dulsomer? And if so, is that okay?

I am honestly torn on this question. On the one

hand, I think whenever technology has changed

communication, we have resisted that change.

Socrates thought the written word was a potentially

catastrophic threat to critical thinking.

Of course, non-digital natives like me feel

nostalgia for the good old days, but my kids have

a point. Video is a great medium for communicating

complex ideas and sharing appreciation for the

sublime. Who's to say "breaking bad" isn't today's

"war and peace"? And for my kids, it's not

just a medium they consume, it's a language,

one in which they're fluent. They shoot and

edit video with ease. Who knows, maybe digital

communication will prove to be more useful to them than the written word.

On the other hand, I don't rule out the possibility that my kids are lazy,

Philistines, whose minds are turning into

applesauce. I fear at times that they and we

are losing what my guests today, Marianne

Wolfe, calls cognitive Patience. Marianne,

who is the world's pre-eminent expert on reading,

says deep reading is critical to our capacity

to sit with ideas, digest them, work through them,

and respond thoughtfully. We think, after all,

in words. So more time with words, it

seems, should help us think more clearly.

Marianne is a professor at UCLA and the author of

several books, including "Pruced in the Squid,"

"The Story and Science of the Reading

Brain," and most recently "Reader Come Home,

The Reading Brain in a Digital World."

The point she makes in those books is this.

Reading is not natural. It isn't in our genes. To

read, we have to repurpose neural circuits that

evolved to do other things. And this unnaturalness

makes reading fragile, vulnerable, difficult.

We may take reading for granted, treat it

like a birthright, but it's not. It's a skill.

And like any skill, you use it or lose it.

This, by the way, is not hypothetical.

Research suggests our collective ability

to read slowly, critically, to read deeply,

as Marianne puts it, has already begun to deteriorate.

What will we lose if we allow it to degrade

any further? Well, as Marianne sees it, a great

deal. Like our ability to think analytically and

generate new ideas, the entwined arts of Patience

and empathy, even our democracy may be at risk.

Luckily, though, Marianne believes we can

find our way back to the kind of deep reading

that's been so vital to our species for so long.

[Music]

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[Music]

Marianne Wolf, welcome to the Next Big Idea Podcast.

What a pleasure roof was to be with you. For

all kinds of reasons, I look forward to this

conversation and the directions you are going to guide us in.

I am so happy to be talking with you today.

I have been deep in your last two books,

"Pruced in the Squid," "The Story and Science of the Reading Brain,"

and your latest reader come home, "The Reading Brain in the Digital World."

And your books are both a powerful argument for the importance of reading

and an expression of the joy of writing and

reading because they're beautifully written.

Let's make a case at the opening here for

the urgency of this topic in this moment.

I mean, I'm sure there are people thinking, "Oh,

reading." That sort of is not the most exciting topic.

But it is so critical. I feel this personally. I

have three boys who seem to believe that reading

is a backup system if the power goes out.

But you have persuaded me through your books

that this is important not just for our

children, but for the future of democracy,

for our nation, for our species. And I've witnessed

firsthand raising three sons that were in this

extraordinary moment where the ways that we learn,

the ways that we communicate, the ways that we

ingest information are fundamentally changing.

And why does this matter? Because reading,

I've learned from reading your books, is a kind

of cultural innovation that we've adopted in the

last several thousand years that has rewired our

brains. And if we are deprioritizing reading right

now, and there's evidence that we are, this

means the brains of future generations are

effectively being wired differently and maybe not

for the better. Do you see this as an important

moment, as a hinge moment? Oh, absolutely. And here

is what I will do to talk to your sons and mine.

For them to understand and appreciate the digital

screen world is a wonderful tool that is necessary

for their existence. At the same time, they

don't understand what that is potentially

disrupting or diminishing from what are the benefits of the other medium.

So I am asking all of us in this hinge moment

to understand what each medium does to change

our brain. And here we come back to your initial

point, literacy changes the circuit of the brain

of an individual, which collectively changes

the way that society thinks, which over time

changes the way that society works, which eventually

over time changes our species and how our species

thinks, acts, and behaves to one another. So

the question of whether reading is important is

eclipsed by the question of how will the human

species learn to preserve its best processes.

of thinking as it expands and elaborates

that very circuit with new processes.

I believe the first line of the first chapter of

"Pruced in the Squid" is we were never born to

read. You go on to say, "Human beings invented

reading only a few thousand years ago." And with

this invention, we rearranged the very organization

of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we

were able to think, which altered the intellectual

evolution of our species. So it's an argument

that I had never really seen assembled in this

way. Because I think we all know that like,

evolutions happens over hundreds of thousands of

years, millions of years, not a few thousand years.

So language comes naturally to a child who's

born into a family. But the ability to read,

we all know as parents, does not just happen by

itself. So your argument, as I understand it,

is that this actually requires a really deeply

intensive, immersive process of studying and

training over the course of a decade or more to

become expert readers. And in the process of doing

that, we're rewiring our brains. And this

process, which began some 6,000 years ago,

really came to fruition a couple thousand years ago

with the Greek alphabet, which had some advantages,

seems to have been an enormous benefit to our

species in terms of the kind of thinking and

communication it made possible. Do you want to

talk a little bit about, I mean, I had no idea.

that the 26th letter alphabet was itself

a kind of open system that all of a sudden

made it possible for all the spoken languages to be written down.

It's an enormous intellectual epiphany to be

able to transcribe any language with characters.

and keep it as an historical memory that would be

democratically available. We could now preserve

and didn't have to rediscover the wheel generation

after generation by carrying on through oral

language the traditions and the body of knowledge.

So we could have this body or corpus preserved,

and that became a platform for going beyond it.

We tend to think of reading as a singular activity,

but in fact, there are many levels or degrees

of depth, you might say, of reading. Can you tell

us about deep reading and the miraculous beauty

of what happens in the brain when we read deeply?

Yes, you know, Rufus, I'm so glad you asked that

question. It all comes back to the fact that when

we learn to read, we make this most basic circuit

that connects visual and linguistic areas with

cognitive areas and then affective areas as we

elaborate over time. But we can either develop

that circuit and elaborate it with everything

that we read. Alberto Mungal always talks about

the geometric progression that happens in reading

from one book, preparing ourselves to read more

deeply another. Well, the brain actually does

that with neuronal networks of connectivity.

that connect more and more cognitively

sophisticated processes to that very basic circuit.

Over time, we begin to connect all that

we know, the background knowledge, and use

analogical reasoning to compare it to whatever

new text, our new information we're getting.

And there's a kind of frontal lobe dance, if

you will, that's going on between what we know

and what we're encountering. But that's just the

beginning because in that dance, the background

knowledge is happening and feeding the center. But

we're using it for really important, sophisticated

processes. And I say this to your sons, to my

sons, to society. We are using inference. We are

using deduction and induction with that, if you

will, that exchange of what we know and what we're

learning. We're making inferences. Is this true?

Or is this misinformation, or worst of all,

these days, disinformation, we have the ability

through these deep reading processes to add our

own background knowledge, our inference, our

deductions, our inductions to make a critical

analysis of what is written. There may be little

more important for a democracy than to have truly

critical analytic citizens. So when we citizens

of a society read something, do we deploy.

those very important deep reading processes

that give us the ability to discern the truth

and attempt to understand the thoughts and

feelings of others? And you know this, Rufus,

but this wonderful interview that former President Barack Obama had.

One of my favorite novelists, Marilyn Robinson,

he had an interview with her in which he said,

I consider you, I think he used the term,

"ambassadore of empathy." And what she said was,

the tendency towards seeing others as enemies

and not to read so that we understand others,

but the tendency to see others as enemies

is the greatest threat to democracy today.

I was so moved by the quote you have in the

book from Barack Obama, in his conversation with

Marilyn Robinson, in which he talks

about what he learned about being a citizen

from novels. Obama said, "It has to do with empathy.

It has to do with being comfortable with the

notion that the world is complicated and full

of grace, but there's still truth to be found,

and that you have to strive for that and work

for that, and the notion that it's possible to

connect with someone else, even though they're

very different from you." So I do think that this

is something that people can debate the relative

merits of different genres, of different mediums

of communication, but it does feel like novels in

particular are extraordinary empathy exercises,

more so than maybe any other medium. I can't

agree with you more. And I say that from the

standpoint of someone who like your sons and

like so many in our society, I truly love film,

but the novel gives us a chance to pause

in the moment where the film, the screen,

is always rushing us along into the next

thought, the next feeling, the next scene,

but the novel like few other mediums.

It allows us to pause in the midst of that

character's feelings and to experience

and identify it like few other experiences.

It is this incredible kind of rigorous workout

in, as we were saying, the ability to get inside

the head of another human, and that Barack

Obama and you and I and many others think is

critical to democracy around some level, right?

Is that we're able to really inhabit to the

extent that we can, the thoughts and minds and

experiences of other people. Getting back to deep

reading, you quote a few times Marcel Proust who

calls reading that fertile miracle of communication,

affected in solitude. Our wisdom begins where that of the author leaves off.

This notion that it's a duet, it's a dance, and

that this is how reading is maybe different from a

film, maybe different from some of these other

mediums of communication, in that because it is a

somewhat low fidelity medium, because not everything

is contained in the words, there is room and

space to react and fill in the blanks and push

back and have a kind of dialogue with that which

we read. You were just putting your thumbprint,

your intellectual thumbprint, Rufus,

on the heart of what Proust was really trying

to tell us. Very few people understand what he

really got the heart of, which is Proust was

saying, we leave the wisdom of the author behind

to discover our own. That's the heart of it all.

And you know, as much as I love film and as much

as I'm on the digital screen out of both intentionality

and you know, there's efficiency, I do not

enter and pause in that sanctuary. I think even

the word pause, we go there, we stop, we think,

we take the measure of ourselves along with the

measure of that author's words and we are changed.

That doesn't happen as easily in other genres. To

read this way, it seems to be that it's important

to give ourselves permission to go slowly. Quickly,

perhaps, when we're excited, I love this notion

that you talk about it, "Talo Calvino's use

of that" and expression, "Testino Lente."

Hurry slowly, right? When we get in this, as

I'm speaking to you now, I've got a goosebumps,

I've got a goosebumps because this, when we get

in these transported moments of reading deeply,

we're rushing excitedly to the next sentence and

then slowing down and rolling it over and reading

it again. And it's, I think of how people used

to type with typewriters when writing the spaces

between the lines so you could go back and write

in between the lines. And I thought you have to

read slowly enough so there is space between the lines for you to think.

Beautiful. When I was in the 1980s, when I was

in high school, my parents put me in a speed

reading class. They thought this would be good

for me, right? And where they would train you and

force you to read at these incredible speeds.

And it was kind of interesting because you would

actually find that you could skim very quickly.

But I later had to unlearn the habit because I

realized like, wait a second, what is the objective

here? Is the objective to get the gist of the

information? Or are you trying to fully absorb and

interact with it? Are you trying to let the words

base to let them marinate? And so I mean, obviously

you need to have texts that's worthy of that kind

of treatment. But I think that part of what I see

as a sort of beautiful thrust of your argument

is that this particular kind of reading is also

a kind of thinking and a form of learning that

is really critical to developing human beings

who can think critically and empathetically.

And we need this for our society. We want

this for our children, but more than that,

we need it as a species to be able to think this

way. And there's evidence that our ability to do

this is eroding. Is that accurate? Yes, is

unfortunately one of the things I would tell your sons,

as I've told mine, the largest meta analysis that's

ever been done has been a compilation of over 50

studies in which from the year 2000 to the year

2017, in which they simply looked at any study that

had a comparison of the same story or text in

the two mediums, print and screen, and then ask

comprehension questions that got out. Did the

person understand this, the plot, the sequence of

details, etc. And the results showed incredibly

that print was truly superior for that kind of

comprehension. But Akerman in Israel then looked

at what these young adults thought themselves

about what was better for them. And they would

say, Oh, we know we did better on the screen,

because we can read faster. And you see, there

is this unquestioned assumption that speed,

I think David Yulin said this, that speed is

illumination, when speed is actually often skipping to the

gist of the information, which is all we need

in a lot of things that we do, like email,

you know, we don't need to have every word.

But if it is anything that is worth its real.

use of deep reading, what we have done is

absolutely skipped beauty. We have skipped

the elaboration, the historical elaboration of

arguments that led to this particular viewpoint.

We have skipped the details that might even in some novels portray the very.

resolution of the mystery the whole work had been

building towards. And there are works in which

there are pauses that if you miss them, you've

missed that the protagonist just, you know, in one

book, one short story, I'll never forget, if

you missed this one ellipsis, just an ellipsis,

you don't know that this villain has impregnated

the heroine. An ellipsis, you missed an ellipsis.

You can't speed read that short story. But

it is the fact that we are living in such

an over networked, speeded society and

culture. And I'm absolutely part of it.

Yes, yes. We all are. We can't remember

where we left that heart of reading, that

interiority, that sanctuary. We know it's in there because we learned it.

Yes. But we in neuroscience, you have this this

platitude, use it or lose it. We lose our way.

We lose our way back. And that's why my book

was called Reader Come Home. So many people even

tell me when reading enough to know why it's got

that title. But it's the home that I don't want

people to forget their way back to. How did Marianne

find her way back home when she too lost her way?

That story right after the break.

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[Music]

David Uland, who you just quoted. Yes.

Had another wonderful quote in your book. He

said, "To read, we need a certain kind of silence

that seems increasingly elusive in our over network society."

And it's not contemplation we desire, but an odd

kind of distraction. Distraction masquerading

as being in the know. And he goes on to say,

"Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of

distraction." I really get quote so loud. Isn't

that wonderful? But I feel this. It's a radical

act. It feels like to read a long book start

to finish. It feels wildly anachronistic and

an active resistance perhaps. And do you know

what my sons wanted the title of my book to be?

I'm dying to know. I'm dying to know. TLDR. Clearly,

we both have colorful conversations with our

children at the dinner table on this topic of

reading. We also have to say to be fair that we're

all struggling now, right? In this digital age,

with having this kind of silence that David

Uland talks about, the certain kind of silence

we need, the cognitive Patience is another term

you use, right? The cognitive Patience to do

this kind of deep reading we're talking about.

And you had your own experience, didn't you?

And you went back to read one of your favorite

authors, Herman Hesse. Yes. In the Herman Hesse, I

knew everything. I knew it was one of my favorite

books. I wasn't going to be surprised. So I

could really just enter it, I thought. Instead,

it was almost paralyzing my cerebral cortex to try

to get the rhythm of his prose, which is dense,

its labyrinthine, it's sometimes nauseatingly

circuitous. And I couldn't read it. I was so upset

with myself. And I said in the book, I said, why

in the world did anybody ever give him the Nobel

Prize for literature? Right, right. You didn't

like it. You thought, well, maybe I was wrong.

I didn't really like it. And here it had been

one of my favorite books. The moral, however,

was I discovered I couldn't immerse myself. I

couldn't, when I'm telling people to find their

way back home, I was lost in my own digital

bleed over from the dominant reading mode,

which is get the information fast, efficiently,

and move on. And you can't do that with some

novel, some novels, you can't find. I do that on

an airplane with a Kindle, nothing against that.

It's a relaxation of the mind. But for the

immersive quality, in which we really do enter

others, and we enter other thoughts and feelings

that can elicit our own, we have to have this

Patience that I myself have lost, regained.

I had to discipline myself for two weeks and

20 minutes a day. And then finally, I came to

the point where it was like coming back home. I

rediscovered myself. But Rufus, you have to keep

disciplining yourself. I have found that if I

book into my day with really an effort to enter

even a paragraph or a page of theology or spiritual

or philosophical reading, but something that

demands nothing but my Patience, nothing but my

thinking. And I began that day and it reminds

me of how, and I really mean this, what a little

ant we human beings are. You know, we're going to

spend the rest of our day thinking how important

we are and how important all the things we have to

do are and we rush with them. And we're distracted

constantly. And then we come back and we do something,

we think, Oh, this is marvelous. Aren't we great?

Ha. We really need to come to that place where

we're not the center of the world, but rather we

see the world and we try on humbly other viewpoints,

humbly entering sometimes even the spiritual

domain in which we feel glimpses of the transcendent,

glimpses of what it is to think about the highest

thoughts. But it requires absolute

slowing down and leaving the world behind.

I think of it almost as a form of meditation. Oh,

it is. But it's more interesting than meditation.

Well, you know, the great irony is that we're

reading more than ever right now. I think you say

50,000 to 100,000 words per day, which is almost

like the length of a book, right? That's an

extraordinary amount of reading, but it's mostly

not deep reading, right? It's a different kind of

reading. Very little of it is. And that's a piece

of what happened to deep reading right there.

Because all of us are so bombarded by

information are so easily distracted by the

thousand profiteers who are trying to take our

distraction and and earn something from it or use

it because of all of that. We can't

help but use skimming. And then we miss it.

Talo Calvinos plea to us to realize that, you

know, the true author is doing everything they can

to find the most perfect expression for their

best thought. Well, we miss all of that. And then

the publishers, they realize, well, we can't

read that much deeply so that things get shorter,

less dense. And I don't mean just novels. I mean,

even our scientific articles are becoming shorter,

less devoted to the historical argumentation.

And then the authors who need to be published

are changing how they write. And then what happens?

And this is going full circle back to what you

call that hinge moment. We change. We're reading

what we're given. And it has changed because of how

we learn to read with all that information. So the

defense strategy and the novelty reflects that we

have. And this sense of being overwhelmed,

which pushes us to use these familiar silos of

information that just confirm our original bias.

Therefore, we don't take perspectives of others.

We end up impoverished shallow readers. And that's the danger.

I'm now going to take on the role, Marianne,

of being a devil's advocate here and engaging

you in a bit of debate because although we clearly

are capable of finishing each other's sentences.

but I think it's fascinating to go back to this

moment when Socrates was telling Plato that the

transition from the oral to written language

threatens critical thought. It threatens a culture

of dialogue that is critical for us to be able

to think clearly. Socrates mercilessly attacked

those who, quote, "think like papyrus roles being

neither able to answer your questions nor to ask

themselves." You write, Socrates did not fear

reading. He feared superfluity of knowledge and

its corollary superficial understanding, which

is amazing because that's exactly what we fear

today. There's too much information. We're

concerned about superficial understanding.

So I can't help but raise the question, will

we always feel a sense of nostalgia and loss

when our modes of communication change? No.

So my real argument is that it is not a binary

print versus screen. And so I ask all of us, do not

ever think about either or but rather what is best

for the purpose of what you're reading.

And there are individual differences,

there are developmental differences, but I will

ask everyone until we have still more knowledge

about how to have our generation steeped in both,

I plea for all of us to consider how to preserve

that deep reading brain in the next generation

so that it can be used across mediums and with

intentionality so that we don't end up really,

you're individually being a video culture.

And I love some of the research on what it's

doing for high hand coordination, for speed of

decision making, all that's fine. But what is it

doing for true comprehension, for those deep reading.

critical analytic processes, show me that data.

And I can show you at least till this point

that it is going to demand that until we know

better how to have the system redress its own

weaknesses, and that is going on, until we know

how to do that, build deep reading brains with

print for 10 years, 12 years, and then have our

teachers learn how to help transfer those deep

reading skills to hybrid or digital screens and

really be consciously aware that we are building a

bilettorate brain until I know differently.

That's how I want to preserve as we expand.

So okay, we should all be building bilettorate

brains, but don't feel bad if you prefer podcasts

to magazines or audiobooks to print. There's

a spoken word renaissance going on right now.

I'm coming up, Marianne and I discuss why that's a good thing.

Hey folks, quick update from Next Big Idea Club

headquarters. We recently launched a new podcast

with our friends at LinkedIn. It's called the

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brilliant colleague, he of the Malefluis baritone,

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living from thought leaders like Greg McEwen,

Jonah Burger, Jesse Hemple, and Adam Copnick.

It's really a wonderful show to listen, follow

the Next Big Idea Daily, wherever you get your podcasts.

So there are a few areas of hopefulness that I

see when I look out into the world. One of them

actually is the world of podcasting. I see podcasting

culture as really quite reminiscent of this.

socratic courtyard. We had a wonderful conversation

with Annie Murphy-Paul who wrote a great book

called The Extended Mind, which he cited fascinating

research by Hugo Mercier and Dan Spurber,

showing that when we think individually,

we have these cognitive blind spots,

got confirmation bias, and so on, where we basically

were very good at convincing ourselves of what

we want to believe when we are thinking in

isolation. But we're much better at being

critical thinkers when interacting with others.

And so when we think in groups, we are much less

susceptible to these kinds of biases. So this

push-pull of people having dialogue and listening

to others, I think there are probably quite a

few people, maybe some listeners now, for whom.

podcasts have replaced some amount of reading. And

I would argue that that's not necessarily a bad

thing because I think the podcast may be resuscitating

some of the healthy elements of Socrates' courtyard.

I can't agree with you more, and I love the

analogy. And I think it's also so exciting and

hopeful to think that we are making these

various courtyards available to people.

I would, however, not I don't want to use the

word pushback, but I will use the term differ

because I do differ from the idea that podcasts

is an am... it can be an amplification of what was

written, but you see the act of writing itself

is so generative. And so that is... that's what

what I love about writing at its best. And that's

what Tony Morris has said. Word work is sublime,

it is generative. I think there is something

extraordinary miraculous. This inexpressible drive

we have to use written language to propel our own

thoughts. And I will say that is irreplaceable by

any other genre, but that doesn't mean it can't

be complemented by podcasts. I think podcasts

will not, in my mind, replace either the writing

or the reading of books that give us pause.

in a very particular way. One other argument I

would put forward is that the power of the human

voice is extraordinary. And it's easy to forget

that these modes of communication that we see as

sacrosancts were always based on the technologies

available at a given moment in time. So if audio

recordings had been available several thousand

years ago, that might have been chosen as a

superior. And one of my favorite conversations

we've had on the show is with John Calapinto author,

This is the Voice. And he writes and speaks

lyrically about the power of the human voice,

which he calls molecular lasagna. Delivering is

that wonderful. Delivering all these layers of

meaning and communication in parallel. And so talking

with you, Marianne, your writing is beautiful,

but in some sense, your speech to me is even more

beautiful. You have such varied levels of emphasis.

If you were writing in text, what you're saying

right now, we'd need like 10 different levels of

italics or bold thought to express all these sort

of levels of emphaticness. We can feel the warmth

and generosity of your attention through your

voice. So I, you know, I think that though,

audio is worse, I think, for retention. And it's

it makes it makes rereading harder. And I think

rereading is an important part of this deep reading

experience. I do think feel like there are extra

layers of communication that are powerful

and that maybe your sons would agree with.

Oh, I have never heard the term molecular lasagna,

but I will savor it. And I certainly wouldn't

have come up with lasagna, but he's absolutely

correct. There is this auditory architecture

to how we use our words. And when we think about

the beginnings of language in the human being,

the first aspect of language is music. The first

thing that I almost gasped over was when my six

week old baby at this, I just happened to have a

video right there taping David. And he was going,

he was grasping music in in our exchange.

He was grasping what we call linguistics,

prosody. But what it is, is the melodic contour

that the voice gives language. And I haven't read

this is your voice. I really want to, but I

couldn't agree more that there are special gifts.

that we might call the affordances of the voice,

as well as the affordances of print or the screen.

Yes, I love that. Well, now that I've exercised all of my devil's advocacy,

I want to confess, Marianne, that I completely

agree with you in terms of the importance of

building biliterate brains in ourselves and our

children and preserving deep reading so important.

Thank you so much Marianne for your time today.

It's just been delightful to talk with you.

It was truly a joy. It was a fertile miracle of

communication. Yes, it was, even though it was

not in text format, I'd rather that.

And that's our show. To learn more about Marianne's work, visit her website,

mariannewolf.com. A quick note before I go, really

a confession. When I was reading Marianne's book,

Reader Come Home, it occurred to me that she might

see what we do here at the next big idea club

as part of the problem. We, like you, don't have

time to read as many books as we would like to.

So we partner with the worlds of leading

nonfiction authors to create 10 to 15 minute

audio and text summaries of their books. This

at first blush feels at odds with a slow,

methodical, trance-like reading that Marianne

is all about. But the more I thought about it,

the more I came to realize that the work we do

isn't antithetical to deep reading. It's really

a compliment to it. More than four million

books are published every year, four million,

deciding what to read can be as hard as finding time to read.

That's where the next big idea club comes in.

We're a collection of readers, journalists,

former book editors, and we look far and wide to

identify the very best new books from the best

writers in the world. And then every day in our

next big idea app, we deliver the five key insights

from a brand new book in 10 to 15 minutes

of audio and text directly from the author.

If it moves you by the book, go deeper. If

not, tune in tomorrow for the next new book.

Tell me what you think of this mission. Does it resonate

for you? You can reach me at rufus@nextbigideaclub.com.

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The Next Big Idea. Today's episode was produced by Caleb Bissinger,

sound designed by Mike Tota. The team

at LinkedIn are ambassadors of empathy.

I'm your host Rufus Griskam. See you next week.