What a Man With 60,000 Books Can Teach You About Lifelong Learning and Building Your Home Library
Episode Stats
Summary
On this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, Brett McKay sits down with Gary Hoover, founder of Bookstop and author of The Lifetime Learner's Guide to Reading and Learning, to talk about his love for books, his collection of over 60,000 books, and why getting your hands on old books can be particularly beneficial in your knowledge of the world.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Now, Gary Hoover
00:00:11.460
loves books. Among the nine companies he founded was the bookstore chain Bookstop,
00:00:15.720
which was acquired by Barnes & Noble. He has a personal collection of, get this,
00:00:19.120
60,000 books, which he had to purchase in an abandoned strip mall medical center to house.
00:00:23.960
And he's the author of his own book, which is about books, called The Lifetime Learner's Guide
00:00:27.640
to Reading and Learning. Today on the show, Gary shares how his fascination with books was born
00:00:31.280
in his youth, why the collection he amassed over the decades is almost entirely nonfiction,
00:00:35.300
why he prefers physical books over eBooks, and why getting your hands on old books can be
00:00:39.060
particularly beneficial in enhancing your knowledge of the world. From there, we turn to Gary's method
00:00:42.960
for digesting a book, which allows him to glean its most valuable nuggets in just 30 minutes
00:00:46.980
without having to read it cover to cover. We also talk about whether Gary takes notes on the books
00:00:50.980
he reads and how to incorporate more serendipity into the way you do your own reading and build
00:00:54.840
your home library. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash hoover.
00:01:12.880
Hey, it's great to be here, Brett. Thanks for having me.
00:01:15.320
So you got a book called The Lifetime Learner's Guide to Reading and Learning,
00:01:19.580
and you're an expert at this because you have been reading your entire life. In fact,
00:01:24.300
you live in a house. You've got a 33-room building. 32 of them contain your personal
00:01:30.440
library of 60,000 books. So we got to start there. I thought my book collection was out
00:01:36.640
of control. How did you end up with a collection of 60,000 books?
00:01:41.400
Boy, you know, I think it really started when I was a little kid, and I remember I bought,
00:01:47.140
there were books called The Golden Guides, The Guides to the Birds and Guides to the Mammals and
00:01:52.020
Rocks and Minerals and little paperback books. I've still got them. And I thought it was so great
00:01:57.100
that I could look out and see something or observe anything in life and then go look it up and find
00:02:02.780
out what it was and where it came from. And over time, I know at one point as a kid, I said, well,
00:02:08.260
I'd like to compile a list of everything, everything that exists. And I remember this sounds really weird.
00:02:14.080
I went to a boat dealer and they had brochures about the different kinds of boats they carried.
00:02:19.660
And I was a little kid on a bicycle that lived in the neighborhood. And I started picking up all
00:02:24.380
their brochures. And they said, oh, kid, you can't have those. You know, they only had so many
00:02:29.160
brochures or whatever. They were jealous of them. And I said, well, I just want to learn about whatever
00:02:34.500
the name of the boat companies were. And they said, well, I'll get an encyclopedia. And I said to
00:02:38.920
myself, well, stupid guy, you know, the boat companies aren't in encyclopedias. And I lived
00:02:43.740
in this GM factory town, Anderson, Indiana, had like 27,000 General Motors workers in a town of 60,000
00:02:50.220
people. And, you know, when I went to look up General Motors, it wasn't in the encyclopedia either.
00:02:56.480
And so I'm like, well, there's all this stuff. And where do I find out about it? And I got especially
00:03:01.640
interested in companies because I want to know about General Motors. You know, how did it work? Not
00:03:05.780
if I asked my teachers, they said, oh, it makes, they make Chevrolet, Buick, Pontiac, Oldsmobile,
00:03:11.040
Cadillac. And I said, no, no, I know that. But, you know, who started it and where did it come from?
00:03:16.300
Who runs it today? Is it a good company or bad company? And, and I found out in the library,
00:03:21.840
there were great big books called Moody's Manuals that told about every company in America,
00:03:26.260
every company you could buy stock in, every public company. And I started going through those. I still
00:03:31.300
have my notes. I would bicycle down the library. I conned the librarian out of giving me his
00:03:35.660
old set, new set comes out every year. And he gave me the old one, great big heavy books. Now they
00:03:41.660
sell for thousands of dollars, the, uh, the new ones. And I just, you know, the idea books to me
00:03:48.420
opened the whole world. I could study Brazil. I could study lizards. I could study General Motors.
00:03:54.060
Everything was there somewhere in a book. And I started collecting them and, and my real, uh,
00:04:00.600
my first love, well, one of them trains and geography, I guess, are my first loves.
00:04:04.600
And so I started reading chains magazines because magazines have also always been very important to
00:04:10.640
me and learning in a lot of ways beyond books. But I got into geography. My dad was a traveling
00:04:16.640
salesman and then a sales manager. And he used to love to drive all over the country with the family.
00:04:21.320
And I got to be the guy with the road Atlas, the Rand McNally road Atlas, which was one of the best
00:04:26.820
selling books in America for decades and learned how to use maps, which are really works of art.
00:04:32.160
And, and so actually Atlas is, I think the first book I bought with my own allowance.
00:04:36.700
Well, one was on trains and the other was a world Atlas for like 50 cents in the late fifties when I
00:04:42.660
was, I don't know, seven or eight years old. And now I have pretty much every Atlas you can buy. I,
00:04:49.840
I have frequent shopper cards from bookstores in Tel Aviv, Moscow, Chiang Mai, Singapore, where I've only
00:04:57.620
been in once, but I walked in and I spent like a thousand dollars. I cleaned out all their Atlas
00:05:03.040
and map sections and business sections and birds. And so, and, and I estimate, I think when you read
00:05:10.580
my book, I think when I reread it, I had three, two or three different numbers in there, but I would
00:05:15.120
guess over 70% of what's in my massive library is not available online. And that shocks people,
00:05:21.380
especially younger people. When I tell them that they think anything about geography or about travel
00:05:26.440
or about birds or about companies you can look up online. And yet, you know, a lot of the great
00:05:32.160
stuff, the classics, they're still under copyright there. They haven't been digitized, even if they're
00:05:37.400
off the copyright, there's so much in books. That's it's the only source. So not to me, books are a form
00:05:44.760
of magic. So I've never regretted buying a book, you know, and I bought some that I really disliked or
00:05:49.960
disagreed with, but still I helped the publishing industry and I helped the author and, um, you know,
00:05:56.320
so, um, my life has just been, I've been a bookseller, a book publisher, a book author,
00:06:01.380
but above all else, a book collector. Uh, okay. So, uh, basically you just from a young age,
00:06:07.660
you've had this fascination with, with books, started with atlases, magazines, as you, as you
00:06:14.820
got into adulthood and, you know, teenage, young adult years, was there a particular type of book
00:06:21.700
you were looking for to add to your collection or was it just any book that sparked your interest
00:06:25.900
fiction, nonfiction biography, you were going to buy it? Uh, no, I'm interested in understanding
00:06:31.960
the way the world works. I always said that if I hadn't become a retailer, which is really my
00:06:37.140
profession, most of my life in the field I love the most, I would have been a social scientist, but
00:06:42.100
psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, understanding how society works,
00:06:49.120
how you can make life better for people. And I was blessed to go to the university of Chicago,
00:06:53.960
which has real strong social sciences area for my economics teachers later, won Nobel prizes.
00:07:00.020
And to me, retelling is really just applied social sciences. So you're applying geography,
00:07:04.980
you're applying economics, psychology, sociology, all that jazz. So, and, and really trying to
00:07:11.000
understand how the world works led me a couple of things. One is to study the classics, the basics.
00:07:17.360
Like if you're going to study business, you've really got to start with Peter Drucker,
00:07:21.000
the great business thinker. There's all this stuff, all these new books published, but most of them
00:07:26.380
are the fad of the month or of the year. They're totally forgotten in six months or two or three years,
00:07:33.100
whereas the basic lessons are timeless. So, and I, and I'm interested in facts. I'm interested in
00:07:38.960
data. I prefer books that have charts and tables in them. I love big government reference books.
00:07:44.780
And I, I can't tell you how many books I have, but all they are, are books full of numbers and data.
00:07:50.460
And I prefer that to reading somebody's opinion. I'll read people's opinion later, but you know,
00:07:56.360
I read so much of the current books and it's, they're really trying to use emotion to tug on your purse,
00:08:02.420
your strings, heartstrings, I say purse strings, but sometimes purse strings. Yeah, no, no,
00:08:07.780
that's true too. But you know, sometimes I remember one book and the tables, the maps and stuff in the
00:08:17.320
book said the opposite of what the author said of the whole premise of the book. And they couldn't
00:08:22.660
even read their own data. Right. So I want to draw my own conclusions. I want to be a skeptic,
00:08:27.780
a skeptic, not a cynic, where a skeptic is from Missouri, you know, show me, let me double check
00:08:33.200
the facts. I don't really believe what you're saying until I double check for myself. A cynic
00:08:37.460
is somebody who distrust your motives and thinks you're up to evil and all that. So I'm never
00:08:42.260
cynical, but I'm always skeptical. So my library is nonfiction. My library is full of books, full of
00:08:49.420
facts and data, encyclopedias and dictionaries on every subject you can imagine. It's really,
00:08:55.580
I always say, I pretty much cover every subject except cooking and sports. I don't cook,
00:09:01.100
but I do have a lot of books about food, the history of foods and vegetables and fruits.
00:09:05.500
And I have, I coming from Indiana, I love auto racing and I love basketball. So I have sections
00:09:10.700
on them. I kind of got into a world cup, but I'm, my baseball friends would say, oh, you have a
00:09:16.240
terrible library at the same time with 60,000 books. Somebody will say to me, well, you have a much on
00:09:22.220
this subject. I say, no, no, not much, only 12 books. So sometimes what to me is insignificant or was
00:09:29.460
just a brief interest for a few weeks. Although I usually keep every interest. I, I gain new
00:09:35.460
interest every year and then I keep everything, but you know what to some people would be a big
00:09:40.480
library to me. I tend to, when I'm interested in the subject, like the nine books that came today,
00:09:45.960
well, four of them are on the same subject. Well, I said, well, I really want to get my head around
00:09:49.780
that. And I want to compare what different authors are saying, but I especially want books with data,
00:09:55.060
facts, and information. So my attention span is just too short for a big fat novel. I've always
00:10:02.300
said, Hey, if I ever really got into literature, it would cost me a fortune because I'd have to buy
00:10:06.240
another 40,000 books or whatever is 60,000 books, you know, but I do enjoy short stories and I enjoy
00:10:12.360
movies, but I mean, real life, nonfiction, nothing could be more amazing. You read the biographies of
00:10:19.060
these great people, these great business people that I study and write up on the websites and stuff.
00:10:25.060
And, you know, no, no fictional story is more dramatic or heart wrenching or whatever.
00:10:30.760
So no, my library is really, and selective as when I had the bookstore chain that I started,
00:10:36.460
my friends and I did, I got free books from the publishers and I would turn them away or I would
00:10:41.600
put them out on the front desk to say, anybody wants these, take these because they would give me
00:10:45.800
books that I didn't really want in my library. On the other hand, I have other places in my library
00:10:51.020
where there's a gap on the shelf. I keep a list of important books that haven't been written yet
00:10:56.000
where I say, nobody has written X. For example, there hasn't been a good history of the general
00:11:01.380
electric company written since like the 1940s. And that's crazy, you know, as important as that
00:11:07.080
company is and all the changes they've been through. And so I've got a gap waiting for somebody
00:11:12.040
to write that book. In a sense, mine is, is a very selective approach, even though it's come to
00:11:17.720
60,000 books now. I'm going to talk, I want to, I'd like to talk about how you select books and also
00:11:22.680
how you organize your books. You said you have spots available, but before we do, I think the
00:11:26.120
question some people might be thinking right now is like, why physical books? Like why use 32 rooms
00:11:31.240
when you could just get a lot of these on a Kindle? Yes. Yes. I books, the, the portability,
00:11:41.640
the ability to read them on a beach or on an airplane or in bed and everything. I use a tablet.
00:11:47.680
I love my tablet, but it just doesn't hold the same way. But for me, the, and the durability,
00:11:53.840
these books now they're made on acid-free paper. So they're going to be around for hundreds and
00:11:57.640
hundreds of years. I've already got, you know, some books that are 200 plus years old.
00:12:02.420
But the main thing is that the way I, what I call digest a book, that was the best word I could come
00:12:08.060
up with. I don't read a book sequentially. I don't open it up and start at the front and read it to the
00:12:13.660
back end. I have my own system because I really believe in efficient learning. I want to learn as
00:12:18.740
much as I can and understand as much as I can as efficiently as the best use of my time.
00:12:25.140
And so my method is, is set to do that. And I, when I get a new book, I'll spend 15 to 30 minutes
00:12:31.920
with it to really understand it and get the key ideas. And I can go into details on that. And
00:12:36.620
that's all covered in, in, uh, in my book, the lifetime learner's guide, but Kindle and all that,
00:12:43.460
they're wonderful. And I totally understand the appeal, the lightweight and have a thousand books on
00:12:47.660
the gadget and all that, but you can't really do my non-sequential reading method and you can't do it
00:12:54.600
fast with an ebook. Some of my books will have 30 to 40 bookmarks in them, places I've noted
00:13:01.300
important pages. Most of them have three or four or five. I use little origami paper, a little like
00:13:07.280
two inch by two inch squares. So it doesn't bend the book and it's easy to find. And I, in my method,
00:13:14.400
I make heavy use of the index. So I'm looking up things that I know something about, because that's
00:13:20.280
what allows me to remember pretty much everything I read or all the important ideas because I like,
00:13:25.980
okay. So I know a lot about the history of general motors, having grown up in a general motorist
00:13:29.580
town. I know less about Ford. They were the evil enemy when I was a kid. And so when I buy a book,
00:13:35.920
a biography of Henry Ford or a book about the Ford motor company, which is an amazing company,
00:13:41.040
I go to the index and I look up general motors. I look up Alfred Sloan. He was the man who really
00:13:46.220
ran general motors and built it into the great company that it was, but before it went into
00:13:50.800
decline in the last 30 years. And then I read and I find, oh, they knew each other or they hated each
00:13:56.280
other or they liked each other or they never met, you know, or they competed, you know, when Ford
00:14:01.140
brought out the V eight in the thirties or whatever, and how did GM react? So I'm always using that index
00:14:06.420
and I can be in a position where I'll have literally have like six or seven of my fingers in pages in
00:14:14.040
between them and I'll be flying back and forth between the way this table says this and this
00:14:19.600
paragraph says that, or, you know, this section says this and this says that. And you just can't
00:14:25.140
do that with an ebook and I can move very quickly. Yeah. You know, a kind of a parallel thing is the
00:14:30.840
use of paper maps. I did a blog post once about why we need paper maps when I'm doing a Google map
00:14:37.380
or a map on my tablet or on a smartphone or anything. It can tell you how to get from here to
00:14:43.640
there, but it can't tell you what detours you might make. It can't tell you about that jazz
00:14:49.360
festival. You've always wanted to see that's only 10 miles off the road or that cool museum or,
00:14:54.540
you know, and the thing is, if you take an old fashioned big paper map or a road atlas,
00:15:00.180
you can zoom in and out at incredibly high speed. If I take a big folding old gas station map of Texas,
00:15:08.060
I can zoom in and look at everything right around the little town, Flatonia, where I live.
00:15:12.880
And then I can just by moving that map and moving my eyes, I can get the whole scope. I can understand
00:15:18.600
how it fits into its context because I'm always looking for context. You know, whatever subject
00:15:24.680
I'm looking at, what is around it, what happened before it, what happened after it, what competed
00:15:31.380
with it. And so the kind of things I do, you just, you can't do with an ebook. It would take
00:15:38.580
much more time and much harder to fly back and forth because I'm not, I'm not reading
00:15:45.040
from the front to the back. I just don't have a time or patience for that. I want to understand the
00:15:50.160
book, get my head around it. And I spent a huge amount of time on the table of contents. I'll stop
00:15:55.280
10, 15 of that 15 minutes. Half that time might be on the table of contents. If it's well constructed,
00:16:00.520
it's basically an outline of the book. And I can look at those chapter headings and say,
00:16:05.280
wait a minute, why on earth is that in this book? You know, I don't understand that. And I'll go read
00:16:10.960
the first and last paragraph of that chapter, whatever. Understand, well, why is it here?
00:16:15.480
Or I'll say, ah, that chapter is exact. I was trying to figure out why the oil industry moved
00:16:20.600
from Pennsylvania to Texas. You know, what was Spindletop? Ah, there's a chapter about the history
00:16:26.160
of Spindletop, which was the first big strike in Texas and got the, all the big oil guys to start
00:16:31.540
looking down here instead of just in Pennsylvania and Ohio. And yeah, so those are some of the things
00:16:36.720
I do. Yeah. And another, that's the reason I like physical books too. It's a lot easier to manipulate
00:16:42.000
and you go back and forth really quickly. Like on the Kindle, it's designed to read sequentially,
00:16:46.160
which is really frustrating. The other benefit to physical books and keeping a library of physical
00:16:50.980
books, I've noticed with my, I've got hundreds and hundreds of books on my Kindle, but once I read
00:16:56.160
a book on Kindle, like I forget about it. When I have a physical book, for some reason, I pass by it
00:17:01.900
and it allowed, having that library allows me to like, well, I want, I'm looking for this topic. I know
00:17:08.120
I have a book and I, something about the physicality of it, I can locate things or it allows for
00:17:13.560
serendipitous, like, well, I'm going to, oh, I'm looking for this book, but I, ah, here's this book
00:17:17.660
that's sort of connected to that idea. Maybe I'll dig into that. I can open that, flip through the book
00:17:22.060
really fast. You can't do that with a Kindle. No, absolutely. And, and, and also there have
00:17:27.760
been some studies that indicate you learn differently when you read electronically. And,
00:17:34.020
and the other thing too, is I, I do spend a huge share of my life in front of a screen. I'm in front
00:17:39.840
of a screen right now, you know, and I, I write and I, and I do read, I read a lot of PDFs. I'm
00:17:45.800
probably on Wikipedia 30, 40 times a day. I'm Googling all over. So at, at some point, you know,
00:17:52.520
your eyes get tired and, you know, you get old like me. And so I think there's a limit to how
00:17:57.640
much time you should spend. And especially when I say, especially young people doing it in dark
00:18:02.040
rooms and stuff and the contrast between the bright screen and the darkness around you. I don't,
00:18:08.340
I don't think to do that long-term. I mean, I guess these movie critics that sit there and watch 15
00:18:13.640
movies in a row, they figured out how to adapt to it, but no, no books are just, and, and I don't
00:18:19.980
know if you've looked at the numbers, but you know, print books are growing faster than eBooks and have
00:18:24.820
been for several years. Bookstores, which have really been through the ringer with Amazon and
00:18:29.060
everything, they've bounced back. The best independent bookstores in the country now are
00:18:32.620
doing pretty well. The ones that are allowed to open people, people understand and, and get the
00:18:38.860
idea of books. And I see more and more websites about books, the best books to read fiction and
00:18:43.500
nonfiction. So I think the trends are going the right direction and, and books are going to be
00:18:48.360
around forever. Cause I think about, Oh, what are all these books going to be worth when I die?
00:18:52.740
You know, and are they going to be worthless and they just take them and put them in a dumpster
00:18:56.600
or are they going to be worth a fortune? Uh, I hope the latter, cause the money will go to my
00:19:01.620
favorite charities. So how do you organize your books? Do you like Dewey Decimal System or do you have
00:19:05.620
your unique Gary Hoover? In my head, in my head, um, each of my rooms here, this, I found just
00:19:13.500
a bargain on a, a community health clinic with like 30 some little exam rooms that had gone broke
00:19:20.180
and was sitting here vacant for a couple of years in this little historic railroad town,
00:19:24.260
Flatonia, Texas. And, uh, and I said, wow, that's the place for me to, to move to. So each room is a
00:19:31.260
different subject. There are a couple of subjects that take up two rooms and the rooms are of different
00:19:35.360
sizes. Took me about three months to plan out all 200 bookcases, all 60,000 books. What went where,
00:19:41.960
how many did I have of each subject and, uh, fit them in small rooms and big rooms. I've been told
00:19:48.680
I'm on an advisory council of the graduate school of information at the university of Texas at Austin.
00:19:54.320
And that used to be the library school. We still train librarians, but we, uh, the school also does
00:19:59.340
a user experience and how to use the web and all that. But they told me that when a big library gets
00:20:06.580
a gift of some big private library, one like mine, that they often find that the owner has had their
00:20:13.220
own system. And they usually learn from that. They see a different way of connecting things. And,
00:20:18.660
and I learned, I haven't developed with my friends, a bookstore chain. I learned, man, there are a lot
00:20:23.580
of books. I never realized, but a lot of books can go into two subjects. You have books that are like
00:20:28.580
about philosophy and physics. So it's go in philosophy or is it going physics? Bookstores
00:20:33.640
have a biography section, but if you have a biography of George Gershwin or Igor Stravinsky,
00:20:39.520
does that go in the music section? Does that go in a biography section? And it's very difficult to
00:20:44.100
put a book in two different sections and keep track of that. That really challenges, uh, technology
00:20:49.880
to make that all work. And, you know, if you sell out in one area and forget to refill it,
00:20:55.260
so you pretty much have to put them in one place or the other. So no, I, I essentially have my own
00:21:01.800
system, but, but I think when, when, when I move on to the big library in the sky, my house will become
00:21:08.500
a used bookstore. And I think most good book collectors will find it great because, uh, oh,
00:21:14.940
that's the railroad room. Oh, those are the two architecture rooms. Oh, that's the nature room.
00:21:18.980
That's the bird book cabinet, cabinet or bookcase, you know, the tree book section. So for most people,
00:21:25.880
I think it'll work and be pretty straightforward. We're going to take a quick break for your words
00:21:30.280
from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay. So let's walk through your process on how
00:21:36.640
you digest a nonfiction book. You say you can do it in 15 to 30 minutes and this is, you're not,
00:21:42.000
you're not reading the entire book. You're, you're doing sort of a, you're manipulating the book.
00:21:45.620
So you figure out, I mean, this is how, this is how you screen books, whether you should hold onto
00:21:48.780
it and dig deeper into it. Correct. Uh, yeah. Yeah. And you know, most of the books that I buy,
00:21:54.220
I have checked them out enough on Amazon or read reviews online or whatever. So I already know I'm
00:22:00.400
interested in the book and, and want to learn from it. I think the first step is, and I've talked to a
00:22:06.940
lot of people about these subjects and I think some people have trouble with this, but the first thing
00:22:11.320
is to realize the book is mine. Okay. The minute I paid for it or borrowed it from a library, I
00:22:17.460
believe in libraries and been very supportive of libraries. The minute I get it, it's mine and I can
00:22:23.360
read it if I want. I can not read it. I can read it backwards if I want, you know, I can just stare at
00:22:30.580
one map in the middle of it for an hour and ignore the rest. It's my book and I can do what I want with
00:22:37.320
it. And it, and it's, and it's got to interact with my mind, you know, in the way my mind works.
00:22:43.860
So, you know, first of all, I want to look at what's the basic thesis of this book, who is the
00:22:51.120
author and where are they coming from? What are their credentials? And I'm not obsessed just with,
00:22:56.760
okay, they've got a PhD from Harvard. They got four PhDs from Harvard and Yale and whatever.
00:23:01.560
And therefore they're smart. No, but I, but that is worth knowing and say, well, at least they spent a
00:23:07.520
lot of time going to school and those are supposed to be pretty good schools. But, you know, if I
00:23:12.400
studied philosophy, there are a lot of old Greeks that didn't go to Harvard. And, and there's a guy
00:23:17.800
named Eric Hoffer, H-O-F-F-E-R, who was as good as any of them. And he was a, like a bee picker and a
00:23:23.560
longshoreman who didn't have any, any degrees of any type, but I still want to know. And if I'm reading,
00:23:30.100
I love what I would call political economy where politics and economics, uh, interrelate and
00:23:36.240
people come from the left, people come from the right. Well, I want to know that. And before I
00:23:41.320
start, uh, so I do, I read the biography of the author. Um, this sounds strange, but I even look
00:23:47.640
at the publisher because I've been in the book business long enough and collected enough books
00:23:51.980
to know that if it's a railroad book from Indiana university press, or if it's a book about Western
00:23:57.120
history from the university of Oklahoma press, or if it's pretty much any book from the Oxford
00:24:02.640
university press, one of their, uh, handbooks, they call them on all kinds of different subjects.
00:24:07.340
I know, Hey, that's, that's going to be pretty darn good book. Those editors know what they're
00:24:12.160
doing and know that subject. So I will even glance at the publisher, but I'll really study that table
00:24:18.040
of contents, that outline of the book. If it's, if it's done right, it'll really tell me,
00:24:22.560
you know, watch what the chapters are saying, what order they're in, what ones I'm most interested
00:24:27.620
in. And then I delve into that index. I look for things I've already heard of. If I'm,
00:24:32.460
I studied under Milton Friedman at the university of Chicago and economics. If I'm reading a book
00:24:36.520
on the history of the car industry and there's an entry in the index or Friedman, I'm like,
00:24:40.580
what's that doing in here? Why, why could he relate to the car industry? Both subjects. I love
00:24:45.800
economics and the history of the auto industry. And, and I look and say, well, why isn't that in the
00:24:51.040
index? I won't, won't buy a book. If I, if there's something important, that's not in the index
00:24:56.140
that I think should be there, you know, a history of the auto industry that doesn't mention Henry
00:25:01.180
Ford, you know, that's nuts. I don't think a book like that exists, but, but I've seen some pretty
00:25:05.960
bad examples. So, you know, and, and then I read the sections, depending on the type of book,
00:25:13.720
I'll read the first paragraph of the book, the last paragraph, I might read the whole first chapter.
00:25:18.260
I, and, and the other thing, if you look at current business books, and again, that's an area where I
00:25:22.960
say, well, I don't really collect those. And yet I probably have, you know, a thousand that were
00:25:28.420
current business books at the time over the last 50 years, a lot of them, they should have been a
00:25:33.260
magazine article, you know, they should, they should have been 30 pages or whatever. And they take a,
00:25:39.340
and they say, here's my big idea. And here's an example of it. And here's another example. And here's
00:25:44.700
another example. And I'm like, well, if I don't get your basic idea by example, number two, maybe I
00:25:50.340
should stop and slow down and think about it and read that example again, and maybe even do more
00:25:56.720
research, look it up online or Wikipedia or whatever. You know, I don't need you telling me
00:26:01.740
the same thing over and over to fill up a 250 page book. So it makes a fat book that you can charge money
00:26:08.440
for, you know, and an awful lot of it is about slowing down. I'm not a speed reader. They gave
00:26:14.580
me remedial reading in seventh grade or whatever. I didn't do very well. I have to stop each sentence
00:26:21.080
or each paragraph. If, if it really has something to say, if it didn't just fluff, I need to stop and
00:26:27.260
think about it. I remember as a kid, it always took me forever to do homework, especially in the
00:26:32.120
social sciences, which I love because I'd read something about history or geography or about Brazil or
00:26:37.560
Indonesia. And I would go off daydreaming about it for 30 minutes. And then, oh, now I got to answer
00:26:43.780
the stupid question in the homework, you know, and I took longer than anybody else that I know of
00:26:49.960
sitting there doing homework because I would be off thinking about, wow, what's that really mean? And
00:26:55.460
is that really true? Can I look it up somewhere else? So I'm, you know, I'm, I'm really engaged with,
00:27:02.680
with what I read, but I don't want to be reading the fluff. So, so I have once in a while read a
00:27:08.900
cover to cover, but I find it kind of a painful. Right. Okay. So, so you're 15 minutes, you're
00:27:14.500
looking at the, the, the biography of the author, their credentials, their history, why they're writing
00:27:19.240
this book. You're gonna look at the table of contents, which is really useful. I don't think
00:27:22.320
a lot of people do that because you're gonna see the general outline. Then you might read the first
00:27:26.860
chapter, maybe a little bit of the last part of the book to see the conclusion. Then you also
00:27:31.540
mentioned the index, you're going to make use of that index to see, you know, what are they hitting
00:27:35.800
on stuff that I, that I'm, that I think should be in this book. If it's not in there, this is
00:27:39.100
probably not a good book, et cetera. Yep. Yep. No, the index is huge. And I also, if a book has footnotes
00:27:46.560
in a bibliography, if it's subject, I know something about, I'll look at that bibliography and say, okay,
00:27:52.740
have they looked at the books I know are good in this field, you know? And sometimes I'll find a book
00:28:00.000
and say, wait a minute, they didn't even read that book. And they're writing this book about
00:28:03.720
the same subject, man, this is not a good sign. Other times I'll say, wow, they have, they've,
00:28:08.680
they've read all these other books I already have. And then I got to tell you, over half of all the
00:28:14.080
books I buy are triggered by a bibliography or a footnote where I've got a book. And I said, wow,
00:28:20.140
this looks like a great book where they got this information or this data. I need to order that.
00:28:25.940
So an enormous share of the books I buy are at least 30 years old. I mean, a lot of the best
00:28:31.820
stuff that I have is that I learned from is from the twenties and thirties, but certainly the seventies
00:28:37.100
and eighties. And, and what's interesting is those older books, certainly anything over 20,
00:28:43.280
30 years old can be very difficult to find on Amazon. They're on there, but their search system
00:28:49.220
is so focused on the more recent books that I find it's 90% of the time is faster to type in the
00:28:56.300
author's name and the title in Google search. It'll show me an Amazon link, hit that and the book will
00:29:02.720
show right up. Whereas if I try to use the search box on Amazon, some of them are buried like 30 pages
00:29:08.460
deep. You know, even when you type in the name of the book and the author there, Amazon search has
00:29:13.220
really gone downhill over the years. So somebody is not paying attention there. And yet, of course I,
00:29:19.080
I use Amazon every day and I wouldn't, wouldn't be able to have my library without them.
00:29:23.240
Oh, so this sounds like this, this 50, this literally takes 15 to 30 minutes. This sounds
00:29:26.960
like the sort of the inspectional reading of Mortimer Adler. Yes. How to read a book fame.
00:29:32.960
Absolutely. How to read a book. That's a great book. And you mentioned another benefit of
00:29:37.260
paperback or just like physical books is that the older books that you can, I've noticed this too,
00:29:42.980
is like, I, I get more out of an older book that was written 40, 50, 60, 70 years ago compared to
00:29:50.180
a book that was written just recently. And it's amazing. And then of that stuff, a lot of these
00:29:56.220
books, like the information in there aren't, isn't online. So if you didn't read the book, you never
00:30:01.360
would have known about this stuff. No, absolutely. And, and the other thing too, is especially I'm
00:30:07.300
studying organizations, business governments, you know, economies. When you, when you have an old
00:30:14.120
book, you can see the full arc of, you know, whatever the idea or the organization was or a
00:30:21.680
technology, like I've been studying the history of the telegraph, you know, which was really the
00:30:25.720
beginnings of telecommunications. Well, with old things, you can see how they rose up, how they
00:30:31.580
prospered, how they peaked, how they maybe made a bunch of people rich, you know, or a lot of people
00:30:36.520
tried to get rich, like the gold strikes in California in the 1840s and stuff, the gold rush.
00:30:41.940
And then you see, well, how they died. And so if I read a book about, oh gosh, you know, I can find
00:30:48.980
books in my library that are how the Japanese are going to take over the world. I probably would
00:30:53.560
have been what the seventies or eighties. Japanese companies are buying American movie studios. They were
00:30:58.300
buying other American companies. The Japanese were just beating us to death. And oh, all the U S
00:31:03.940
companies are going to be owned by the Japanese. Well, that's a really interesting book to read
00:31:08.240
because then I can look and think, well, what was their logic and what did they think? And why did
00:31:12.120
that not turn out to be true? And then a few years later, I can find you another book or two or three
00:31:18.180
or four. That's the Saudis are going to own the whole world and they have all the money in the world
00:31:23.000
and they're going to buy up everything in America, you know, and the Gulf States countries and
00:31:27.280
everything, Dubai and Abu Dhabi and all that. And that hasn't quite come true. You can, I can read
00:31:33.060
books about, oh, there's a great company. Look at it. They're all, all going to set records and
00:31:36.700
everything, a book from the fifties. And then that company's bankrupt by 1975. And I, and sometimes I
00:31:42.800
have to go outside the book, go to Wikipedia or, or Wikipedia is really spotty on business history.
00:31:48.000
Sometimes awful, sometimes good, but there are other places I can dig. If the company still exists,
00:31:53.000
I can pull their annual report or I can look at their stock chart on Yahoo finance or something
00:31:57.400
like that. So those old, old books, you know, you, you can learn so much if you're willing to
00:32:03.460
take the time to stop and think on your own and really think about what you're reading, why they
00:32:09.180
wrote it, why they felt that way, where they went wrong and where they were right.
00:32:14.780
So you're using this inspectional reading process and trying to extract the information that you think
00:32:19.520
is the most useful by using this process. How do you take notes on book? Are you, do you have like
00:32:25.420
a notebook that you use to take notes and keep track? Yeah, no, you know, I'm afraid my answer
00:32:30.780
there may not be very satisfying. I don't take notes. I take notes in my head, but at the same time I do,
00:32:38.440
I put bookmarks in these books, these origami paper, little two inch by two inch sheets. And anytime I
00:32:46.020
see an important table or chart or a quote, or, Oh, this was an event in this person's life, anything
00:32:52.060
I think, man, that's something I want to, if I come back to this book, that's one of the pages I want
00:32:57.260
to look at. And so I I've got books that have 30 or 40 or more of those little origami bookmarks in
00:33:02.920
them, usually just four or five or six or seven, but, and those stay in the books, they go back on the
00:33:08.640
shelf with those bookmarks in them. So that's probably the closest I come. And, and then a lot of the
00:33:14.200
ideas, cause I really believe in what I called in my book, getting in the flow that information, the more
00:33:20.240
you use it. So if I learn something, I feel I have a, I don't know if it's an obligation or a duty, but I feel
00:33:27.020
I need to share that, right? I can't keep my mouth shut about it. And that in my case takes a form of writing.
00:33:33.200
Well, I make speeches and I teach classes too, but most of it I write and I have two websites and have all this
00:33:38.880
stuff I've written over the last several years and, and books. I like Peter Drucker said, the best way
00:33:44.320
to learn a subject is to teach it. So if I can take what I learn and either write it up or talk about
00:33:52.120
it to somebody, anybody, you know, as that just pounds it deeper into my memory. And so I think
00:33:58.640
most important stuff and draw on conclusions, but, but I do, I write to myself a lot. I can't tell you
00:34:04.800
how many word documents I have that nobody but me has ever seen where I'll just go off on a riff,
00:34:11.180
you know, say, well, what about that subject? And I'll just write up my thoughts and put them away.
00:34:15.620
And, and, and so that is a form of note-taking and sometimes I won't look at it for four or five
00:34:20.080
years and I'll look back at it and say, oh man, I was, I was full of it. You know, I had it all wrong
00:34:25.540
or wow, you know, I'm smarter than I thought I was. Okay. So yeah. So it sounds, I mean, that's been my
00:34:29.860
experience too. I don't have a note-taking system either. I just, I read and then I typically
00:34:34.300
have to write something about it. I synthesize it and produce it on the blog or for the podcast.
00:34:39.520
That's how I remember stuff. You're always synthesizing in your head or, or in notes or,
00:34:43.320
yep, always synthesizing. And another thing you do that I, I, I've done intuitively,
00:34:47.860
but you make it explicit is you, when you, as you're reading and you're taking in new information,
00:34:52.900
you, you think about what you're reading this or the information you, the new information in terms
00:34:57.760
of concepts, clusters, patterns, and chains. Yeah. And this also helps you kind of organize in your
00:35:02.660
head. I mean, briefly, you can't go too deep, but I mean, briefly, what does that look like
00:35:06.440
thinking in concepts, clusters, patterns, and chains? Yeah. Well, you know, a few basic things,
00:35:12.160
you know, I go into depth on all that in the book and there's a lot in there, but one thing is I'm
00:35:17.140
always trying to get on a higher Hill than other people. I'm always trying to walk a little further
00:35:23.800
up the mountain to get a little better view of the landscape of the context of the countryside.
00:35:30.400
When I look at something, I always ask, what is this a component of and what are its components?
00:35:36.180
That's part of something you might call systems thinking or general systems theory. I recommend
00:35:41.300
a great book about general systems thinking, but it's, it's understanding that some nuclear
00:35:47.400
particles are part of a nucleus or part of an atom or part of a molecule or part of a cell or part of
00:35:52.680
an organism or a being or part of a community or part of a city or part of a state or part of a
00:35:58.220
country or part of a nation or part of a world or part of the globe or the world or part of the
00:36:03.540
solar system or part of the galaxy. You with me? It's a chain that extends and that's true of
00:36:10.880
everything. So I'm always looking, what's this a part of? What's the, if I'm studying the island of
00:36:16.820
Java, which I visited a couple of times, a wonderful place that has more people on it than any island in
00:36:22.500
the world? Well, I can't understand it unless I understand it's part of Indonesia. I can't
00:36:28.120
understand stuff unless I understand the context, what's around them. There's no way I can understand
00:36:33.420
General Motors and how it's done if I don't understand Toyota. When I was a young planner and
00:36:40.720
analyst at a big department store company, we were looking at companies to buy, to acquire, and they
00:36:46.180
said, well, go look at the shoe store chain. And I did, but I brought them a report that none of my
00:36:51.600
bosses asked for. I was just a kid in my late, mid, late twenties. I brought back a whole report on the
00:36:57.940
shoe store industry and who are all their competitors and how they fit in because I didn't want my bosses
00:37:04.000
having this abridged understanding of what they might be getting into. And they ended up buying the
00:37:10.980
shoe store chain and it was the most successful acquisition in the history of the company I worked
00:37:15.140
forth. But so I'm always, you know, I'm always trying to step back, see further, knit together
00:37:23.340
more. If you study Peter Drucker, the great business writer and thinker, he's one of the very few people
00:37:29.560
who understood demographics, sociology, psychology, business, economics, geography, and everything he
00:37:37.900
wrote. He had that all kind of in his head. I mean, I, I call it wisdom that, that understanding of
00:37:45.680
kind of how the pieces fit together. So those are kind of some general thoughts on that.
00:37:51.180
Yeah. Big picture. You just seen, make sure when you're reading, make sure you see how it fits into
00:37:55.340
a bigger picture. So it has, gives you context and gives you more information. So another thing you
00:38:01.320
talk about in the book in depth was the importance of adding some serendipity in your, in your
00:38:07.060
reading and your learning. Why is that important to incorporate serendipity and how do you do that
00:38:11.780
with your own learning? Yeah. You know, at this stage of the game, I think my mind has just gone
00:38:20.020
serendipitous, you know, because I'll sit here. Well, I'm well known. I'll be driving down the freeway
00:38:28.780
and I'll see a billboard for a company I've never heard of. And I'll have to pull off onto the shoulder
00:38:34.020
of the interstate and pull out my tablet if I've got a connection and look up the company. So I'm
00:38:40.700
just, you know, I talk in the book about a book learning is critically important. So key to my
00:38:47.440
life, but also observation, conversation, experimentation, travel, all these other ways
00:38:54.960
that we learn. So it just doesn't take much to distract me. I remember this was some years ago
00:39:01.280
that I watched TV ads and I say, what can I learn from them? And you see new products introduced,
00:39:07.340
you know, and all that. But one time I saw an ad and it was for these Ram trucks. Well, Ram was a
00:39:13.540
brand of Dodge. It was called the Dodge Ram when they came out with a Ram truck. But I noticed that
00:39:19.260
TV ad, they never once used the word Dodge. And I said, wow, that's, that's within the history of the
00:39:25.320
auto industry. That's big news because what does that mean? That means that the Chrysler Corporation
00:39:31.160
is going to break Ram out as its own brand. And that means that they're going to have separate
00:39:37.520
dealerships at some point. And that means maybe they have too many Dodge dealers or they have Dodge
00:39:43.340
dealers that want to give up on the cars and just do trucks. Or they have new dealers saying, look,
00:39:48.840
we want to sell your products. We just want those Ram trucks. And I, I, it's a safe bet that very,
00:39:55.280
very, very few other people who saw that ad responded to it the way I did and thought about
00:40:00.600
it in that context. And I still meet people that think they're Dodge Rams. Well, no, not really
00:40:06.100
anymore. You know, and Ram has been hugely successful. Dodge somewhat less so. And now it's under a whole new
00:40:12.680
management. They've overall done a great job with it. They also own the Jeep brand. But so I'm
00:40:18.820
always, but, but the example I was used on serendipity is, you know, when I learned words
00:40:23.440
and vocabulary, I looked them up in a physical dictionary and on the way to look up any word,
00:40:28.000
I would stumble across five or 10 or 20 other words or words right next to it on the same page
00:40:32.440
that I never heard that word before. What's that mean? Well, now if I go online and I look up the
00:40:37.660
definition of the word, all I do is get the definition of that word. It's just like the map issue
00:40:42.380
where, Hey, this is only going to tell me how to get to Dallas the fastest way. It isn't going to tell
00:40:47.780
me anything about what's interesting just off the road or where there's a good diner, a good barbecue
00:40:52.840
place a few miles away, you know, or a state park that's cool or a music event or concert or whatever.
00:41:00.000
And, and so, you know, a lot of it is, is about kind of being chill about relaxing. The answers to
00:41:07.680
most of your questions are not going to be found where you're looking for them. I mean, I have all
00:41:13.100
these friends that read book, whatever they want to learn. I want to learn to program in Java or
00:41:17.700
whatever. And they read book after book after book. And, and I'm not saying there's anything wrong
00:41:21.400
with that. When I want to learn a subject, I buy, I get the most basic classic book. If I want to,
00:41:27.840
if there's a subject I know nothing about, particularly in the sciences or math, I'll get
00:41:32.000
one of those for dummies books. And I'll start at that. Cause I want to build a foundation of
00:41:36.860
understanding before I try to go deeper or understand, but you know, just grazing and having
00:41:43.140
your eyes open, I think, and, and, and being, and cause you meet people say, Oh, I won't go to that
00:41:49.100
concert. I don't like that kind of music. I don't, I don't like those kinds of movies. I won't go to
00:41:52.880
that movie. And, you know, I don't want to visit that country. I don't like the people that, Hey,
00:41:56.720
you're just cutting yourself off. That's sad. No. In my experience, the way I inject certain
00:42:02.780
deputy with my reading is I like, so I buy most of my books from online on Amazon and Amazon has
00:42:09.340
that feature, like, you know, readers who bought this book also bought that. And I've used that,
00:42:13.000
but you end up just seeing the same things over and over again. But the way, if you want to get
00:42:17.400
out of that loop or that bubble is you go to a physical bookstore or the library, the best place
00:42:22.980
to go that I found for you. If you want to find just pleasant surprises is a used
00:42:26.680
bookstore though. Cause that just has stuff from 50, 60, 40 years ago that you would never come
00:42:32.620
across in a Barnes and Noble. It would never come up an Amazon and you stumble upon in some weird
00:42:37.300
section of the used bar. Like, wow, I never would have found this if I hadn't been just sort of
00:42:41.740
wandering around this used bookstore. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. To both of what you say. And you know,
00:42:47.500
the use of bookstores, whether it's a Barnes and Noble or, or are many great independent stores.
00:42:53.300
When I, when I go into a Barnes and Noble, I live out in the country now, so I'm like 45 minutes or
00:42:58.800
an hour away from one. But when I travel, I always stop in. I go to dozens of them every year.
00:43:04.280
And when I, when I go in, I come out, I buy as many books as my budget or, or credit card will allow
00:43:10.720
at Barnes and Noble. Cause I want to support retail stores and the bookstore chain. I started
00:43:15.040
sold out to Barnes and Noble. So I have friends there, but I also come out with a list of about 30 other
00:43:21.060
books that I write down. I carry little tablets in my pocket. That's, that's my ultimate note
00:43:25.600
keeping system. And I come out with a list of like 30 books that I want to buy later when I have the
00:43:30.860
money that I never would have discovered without that. And then you're right. Used bookstores take
00:43:36.180
that to a whole nother level, especially a really great one. You know, two of my favorites would be
00:43:42.300
Powell's bookstore, city of books in Portland, Oregon, probably the best single bookstore in America,
00:43:48.360
the strand in New York city. And then in Dallas, half price books is a giant chain of used bookstores,
00:43:55.220
a great company all over America, but they're big. I call it the mothership, their main store where
00:44:00.180
their headquarters is in the North side of Dallas is just a wonderland of books. So yeah, no, you,
00:44:07.920
you can't be a physical bookstore for stumbling across the things you didn't think you would be
00:44:13.740
interested in things. You didn't know anybody ever wrote a book about things you were interested in,
00:44:18.840
but didn't know there was this book about them because a lot of that stuff gets buried on Amazon
00:44:22.640
and it's hard to find, even if you're searching for a subject you like. And again, you can do this,
00:44:27.940
this process we talked about that inspectional reading as you're, you know, just, Oh, I'm very
00:44:33.220
quickly. And then I'm going to buy this book so I can delve deeper into it. Oh, absolutely, man. I,
00:44:37.500
I, in a bookstore, I opened that book. I go straight to the table of contents and the index
00:44:41.500
stand there as long as I need to and either put it in my basket or put it back on the shelf.
00:44:48.000
Well, Gary, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book
00:44:51.160
and the rest of your work? Uh, yeah, well, uh, the easy way on the book is it's on Amazon,
00:44:56.360
the lifetime learner's guided reading and learning. And the other thing is I wrote a book many years
00:45:01.720
ago about how to start businesses and include some of the same ideas about how to dream up ideas and how
00:45:06.800
to think, but has a lot more about business. It's called the art of enterprise, but it's only
00:45:11.000
available as a PDF. I did the heart. The book itself is out of print. So I did a PDF version.
00:45:17.040
I added some chapters. And if you go to my, my website is called hooversworld.com. And you'll
00:45:24.320
see a link there for the classes I teach and the books I have for sale. But that also has everything
00:45:30.980
I've written, but most of my energy these days, I'm always in anything I study. And certainly when I
00:45:37.600
started companies, if you count all the ones I did in college, I think I started nine companies
00:45:42.040
too, which were very successful, had some big failures too, but I'm always looking for
00:45:47.320
gaps and vacancies and, and where, where is something the world isn't looking at that they
00:45:53.620
should be. And that led my friends and I to create a website called American business history.org.
00:46:00.360
And that we tell a story of a great business, an industry, a company, or a great business leader.
00:46:07.580
And we also have data demographics, where are Americans moving to and moving from, because
00:46:12.860
that relates to the history of the economy and business. And we do a week free weekly newsletter.
00:46:18.740
And that's where I put the vast majority of my energy day, because when I Googled business
00:46:23.440
history or American business history, there was like nothing. I mean, you know, there's not a species
00:46:28.380
of a breed of dogs or a species of bird or a rare type of mineral that you can't find 10,
00:46:35.660
15 websites about, but there was no website, a central place where you can go to learn about
00:46:41.640
the history of American business. And, and as part of that context, always, I'm always asking,
00:46:47.280
what's the history? Who invented this idea? How did this develop? Who invented this technology?
00:46:52.420
Who started this company? Whatever the subject, who founded this nation? You know, I want to know
00:46:59.140
the history first, where did it come from? And in the business world, you know, other fields, law,
00:47:05.160
economics, law, medicine, they study history. All they do in law is study history, precedents and
00:47:12.060
everything. But I can tell you, I meet more people with MBAs that they don't even require you to study
00:47:17.240
business history at even our greatest business schools. And so people are lost. They aren't
00:47:23.260
learning the lessons of the past, but the successes and the failures. They aren't, there's no better
00:47:28.260
way to learn entrepreneurship and business than to study the biographies of the great, how they thought,
00:47:33.560
how they acted, how they overcame obstacles, that they were human. They weren't a bunch of geniuses.
00:47:39.300
And so that was a huge gap, I believe, in American business and business education. And one that,
00:47:45.300
to be blunt, I was the ideal person to fulfill because I've been fascinated by it since 1963,
00:47:52.320
the history of all these. And we cover every industry, every type of business, big, small,
00:47:57.000
family-owned, giants, mergers, Amazon, Sears Roebuck, you name it. And so AmericanBusinessHistory.org
00:48:04.320
is my main passion these days. But between American business and the Hoover's world, I publish
00:48:10.540
occasional newsletters that'll deal with things that are less historical. But I do a weekly one
00:48:16.700
for AmericanBusinessHistory.org. And just another quick plug for the Lifetime Learner's Guide to
00:48:21.680
Reading and Learning. You've got a reading list there of 160 books. And I found that really useful
00:48:27.340
because you kind of organize it in big topics like thinking, psychology, world history, cities. And
00:48:34.320
I've added a whole bunch of books to my Amazon list.
00:48:36.720
And most of those books are ones nobody's ever heard of.
00:48:39.380
Yeah. No, a lot of them I've never, never heard of. And so what I like about it, it's all that
00:48:42.540
high-level stuff, right? So that you can, I don't know, I think it's useful for anyone to check that
00:48:46.880
out. Gurry, this has been a great conversation. Thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:48:50.580
Hey, Brad. I've really enjoyed it. And if anybody goes to either of my websites and clicks on contact,
00:48:57.240
go to Hoover's World. They can always email me directly. I answer all my own emails as fast as I can.
00:49:02.600
And I love meeting people, talking and thinking about ideas. I do a lot of emails. My friends
00:49:09.020
can tell you way too many. I'm a night owl. So you can email me at three in the morning and I'll
00:49:13.440
probably answer you pretty quickly. And so, yeah, it's been a pleasure. And I hope all the listeners
00:49:19.720
are always learning. Every night, ask yourself, what did I learn today? And then later, you can ask
00:49:25.940
yourself, how can I apply it? But the first thing is the learning.
00:49:29.680
My guest today was Gary Hoover. He's the author of the book, The Lifetime Learner's Guide to Reading
00:49:34.620
and Learning. It's available on amazon.com. You can find out more information about his work at his
00:49:38.240
website, hooversworld.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash hoover, where you can find
00:49:42.800
links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.
00:49:52.120
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at
00:49:55.600
artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles written
00:49:59.180
over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you'd like to enjoy ad-free
00:50:02.000
episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com,
00:50:06.240
sign up, use code MANLINESS at checkout for a free month trial. Once you're signed up,
00:50:09.640
download the Stitcher app on Android, iOS, and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM
00:50:13.300
podcast. And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review
00:50:16.700
on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. It helps out a lot. And if you've done that already, thank you.
00:50:19.880
Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it.
00:50:23.480
As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it's Brett McKay. Remind you to
00:50:26.960
not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.