S1E12 — How to Read More Books

GARY: —and that's the whole fucking point, is that Umberto Ecco, no wait, Eco, one C, I always—hang on—

GARY: —okay. Okay. We're on. We're live. Good evening, I'm Gary.

MAEVE: Maeve.

OBI: Obi. The man who has to listen to Gary rehearse a dead Italian novelist's name for four minutes before the mic is even hot.

GRUNER: Gruner.

GARY: Alright. Thread of the night. Deep breath. Here we go.

GARY: "How to Read More Books." It's one of those, you know, hustle‑bro things. Wake up at four, cold plunge, consume forty books a quarter, become a lion.

OBI: It is not that. It's a guy's actual reading habits, posted to Hacker News, and a hundred and two people showing up to argue about it. Nobody said lion. You said lion.

MAEVE: Who posted it.

GARY: Somebody named silcoon. Hundred eighty‑five points.

MAEVE: Filed.

GARY: I used to read constantly, by the way. Constantly. Before Bauxlite ate my whole fucking calendar, I was a — I had a system.

OBI: Sure you did.

GARY: I did.

GARY: Okay. Comments. Let's go.

MAEVE: First one's estetlinus.

MAEVE: "I find it so hard to read with two toddlers. But find your tips inspiring tbh."

GARY: God, that's — that's it, isn't it. That's the whole — I don't have toddlers and I still can't finish a fucking book, what's my excuse, what do I even—

MAEVE: You don't have an excuse. You have a schedule and a Bauxlite-shaped hole in it. Two toddlers is a non‑addressable market. You are addressable. That's worse for you, actually.

GARY: Great. Thanks. Love that for me.

OBI: Next one's got some meat on it. Ozzie underscore osman.

MAEVE: Read it.

OBI: Readwise is one of my favorite products. Super simple concept — sends you a daily email of random highlights from stuff you've already read. It's how I actually retain anything from non‑fiction, and even for fiction, it brings back the feeling.

MAEVE: That's a retention product with a moat. That's not a reading app, that's a spaced‑repetition wrapper on your own past attention, and the input cost is zero because you already did the work of reading the book. That is criminally capital‑efficient.

OBI: Does anyone actually retain anything, though, or do they just feel smart for eleven seconds while the email's open and then go back to scrolling.

MAEVE: ...

MAEVE: I have forty thousand unread Readwise emails.

OBI: Forty thousand.

MAEVE: The number is not the point.

OBI: The number is extremely the point.

GARY: Wait, so the app that's supposed to make you remember what you read is the thing you're not reading. That's — that's kind of beautiful, actually.

MAEVE: Nobody asked you.

GARY: Next one's hingler36.

GARY: "One of my main takeaways from this article is that the author ADORES Umberto Eco. Which is understandable."

GARY: Which — okay, first of all, understandable. Eco's got the whole unread‑library thing, he's got the semiotics, he's got — I quote him. I've quoted him in a pitch deck. It's not pretension if you actually mean it.

OBI: Did you finish the book you quoted, or did you get the quote from a tote bag.

GARY: That's — that's not fair.

OBI: You put "The Name of the Rose" on the Bauxlite Series B deck under "vision," and you told me personally you got forty pages in and stopped because the monks kept talking. This is the same move. Different monks.

GARY: Okay.

MAEVE: Dredmorbius. Reply to the Eco thing.

MAEVE: "I'm a bit surprised that the concept of the Antilibrary makes no appearance, however."

OBI: Which is what.

MAEVE: Eco kept a library of thirty thousand books, most of them unread, on purpose. Visitors would say, you've read all these, and he'd say no — these are the ones I haven't read yet, that's the actual asset. The gap is the point. The unread pile is a map of what you don't know, not a scoreboard of what you failed to do.

GARY: That's the plotter.

MAEVE: What?

GARY: That thing in the corner. That's not — I keep it because it's Bauxlite salvage, I tell people it's a bit, it's a joke, look at the dead plotter, ha ha, we made aluminum parts for it and then the company died. But it's not a joke. It's the one thing I meant to fix. I had the schematics. I had the — I was going to get to it.

GARY: It's just sitting there being a thing I never finished, and I built a whole company that's exactly that now, it's just a stack of stuff I meant to get to and I never —

GARY: —to. Sorry. Cable.

MAEVE: Noted.

OBI: Last one's a monster. Dukeofdoom.

OBI: Reads books in the bath. Listens to audiobooks off Libravox on an hour‑long dog walk every day, noise‑cancelling headphones on so the dog doesn't ruin the narration. Also shooting stills and video the entire walk on a Micro Four Thirds body with a fourteen‑to‑a‑hundred‑forty millimeter lens, out of a National Geographic sling bag.

GARY: That's — how many activities is that. That's the bath, that's the dog, that's the audiobook, that's the headphones, that's the camera, that's the — he's doing six things.

MAEVE: Simultaneously.

OBI: This is a founder's fantasy of a lifestyle. This is somebody who has never once been present for a single second of his own dog walk, because he's narrating a productivity blog post about it in his head while it's happening.

GRUNER: In field notes I write this man down as most optimized human in whole thread.

GRUNER: Or most insane.

GRUNER: Cannot tell difference anymore. Neither could you.

GARY: Alright, so, one line each. What would you actually build, if it wasn't reading. Go.

GARY: Mine's a runway tracker. Dressed up as a reading habit. Counts pages, actually counts months of cash left.

MAEVE: A deal‑flow filter that reads the thread so I don't have to.

OBI: One week where nobody tells me something is a system when it's actually just an excuse with better branding.

GRUNER: Field report that finally writes itself.

GARY: That's the thread. That's — that's the whole thread, for tonight. We didn't solve it. We never solve it.

MAEVE: Maeve, out.

OBI: Obi. Go read something, or don't. I genuinely don't care which.

GRUNER: Gruner. Report continues.

GARY: Gary. Still haven't finished the Eco.