“Every time you buy a book you’re preserving a part of our civilization.”
A conversation with Aun Abdi, host of the “Book Talk Today” podcast
Whenever I speak with Aun Abdi or listen to an episode of his podcast, I finish the conversation determined to read more books. That means Aun, who hosts the weekly “Book Talk Today” podcast, is doing his job. In addition to interviewing authors on his show, Aun also created the One Minute Book Review community on Instagram,1 where he’s approaching 150,000 followers, and publishes a digital magazine.
Since Aun and I first spoke for an episode of Book Talk Today in July 2020,2 we’ve caught up every few months to talk about what we’re reading, writing, and creating (or attempting to create). The conversation below, which begins in the middle of a discussion about content and information overload, is from a June 2021 podcast that runs close to two and a half hours.3 Needless to say, the excerpts below have been condensed significantly and edited for clarity.
AUN: I’ve been very strict over the past month to two months—before I started fasting for Ramadan—[about] consuming content. I haven’t listened to a podcast [since] before I fasted. I don’t really listen to anything anymore, apart from audiobooks. No radio or music or anything like that.
What I’ve found is there is a level of quietness that you get from really trying to understand why you’re doing things. If you’re constantly consuming information, whether it be from podcasts, music, news, articles, YouTube videos—you’re just consuming noise. You’re not really taking much in. It’s a distraction from what you actually need to do.
The difficulty that I have is, obviously, I create content. I put stuff on social media. I’ve been tracking on my iPhone about how [much time] I spend, and now it’s only an average of maybe 25 minutes on Instagram a day, which I’m really, really proud of. As someone who has at this point 140,000 followers, you probably think I spend the whole day on it. But my goal is not to be an Instagram influencer, so why should I spend all my time on Instagram?
ADAM: It would be interesting for people to hear some specifics about what you’ve done over the last few months to get that sense of mental quietness. You mentioned not really listening to podcasts. I know it is theoretically possible not to always have a list of 100 podcasts waiting to be consumed. But just because it’s theoretically possible doesn’t mean I’m actually going to let myself do that.
AUN: I did this through a framework of learning. Everything I do is through that framework: What value am I getting? What learnings am I getting?
For this one in particular, I thought to myself, I’m listening to podcasts, and it might be an hour and a half or two hours a day. What are these podcasts taking away from me? Could I use that [time] to listen to an audiobook? Could I use that to perhaps just read a normal book, instead of just half-listening to a podcast?
I’ve found my medium for learning. I’ve found it. I shouldn’t have to keep on looking. The benefit that I get from reading, whether they be audiobooks or physical books, outweighs any other form of medium. Articles, news, podcasts—I’ve tried it. I’ve done it. Books supersede it for me. So why don’t I double down on the thing that I know works for me?
ADAM: There is no hack to reading, other than reading. If you want the benefits of it, then you just have to sit down and do it and prioritize it. And it’s a constant struggle. My thing is, I will read book reviews until the end of time. I will read end-of-the-year book lists and make lists of books that I want to read. I will do that forever, unless I catch myself and stop and just start reading one of those books. At the end of the day, it all takes the place of reading.
AUN: It’s been a massive revelation for me in the last couple of months. I knew I liked reading. I knew that I dedicate a lot of time to it, and I share that information. But it’s [at] a stage where it’s gone from liking to—that’s my identity now. When I have five minutes, it’s not, I go to my phone. It’s, I pick up Will Storr’s new book and read a couple of pages.4
ADAM: I used to have this idea that all I need to do is eliminate the stuff that I don’t really care about, and then focus on the things that I [do] care about. What I’ve had to come to terms with is that I also have to eliminate things I care about. You have to give up stuff that you like and enjoy and get value from. It’s not just giving up the stuff you don’t care about.
AUN: It might even give you value. Watching a YouTube tutorial on how to code—you will learn something. But you won’t learn as much as if you did it. Just because something is beneficial and it’s giving you value—and this is the really difficult thing—even if you find value in it, and you enjoy it, you still have to get rid of it. And that’s so difficult.
ADAM: If we think about what the world is going to be like 500 years or 1,500 years from now, who knows what, if anything, that we’re talking about, writing, reading will be remembered. That can sound really depressing to people, but I find it incredibly liberating to think about the world that way. It’s a helpful mental exercise for putting the little, meaningless stuff that we stress out about so much in perspective.
AUN: [In Violet Moller’s The Map of Knowledge, Moller] talks about how knowledge gets transferred.5 It’s a really, really good book. [In one part,] she was talking about the library of Alexandria. They accumulated all that information. It became the center of scholarly research. Everyone wanted to travel there to learn. Then it became abandoned. It was made of papyrus paper, and it basically just wilt[ed] into dust.
Now, there’s fragments. They’ve built a library on top of it, but that’s more symbolic. Back then people thought, Oh, this is going to be around forever, and people are going to read these scrolls for thousands of years to come. There’s nothing left of them. It’s just dust. It’s all dust. I think about that all the time.
ADAM: There’s so much we don’t know. There are so many stories that haven’t been told. There is a lot to be said for questioning the narratives that we, as individuals or as societies, have. Not just because of who was writing the history, but also what—by pure fortune, or misfortune, or happenstance—happened to be saved, and what did not.
AUN: I always think about that in the sense of context. History isn’t just memory. When you read a history book, it’s not, That happened, that happened, that happened, in a sequential view. Because whoever’s writing that account of history—there might be three accounts, and they might all be different.
That’s why I love history. Understanding your roots as an individual gives context to how you act in the present. It gives you a place. It gives you a reason. It gives you a motive to understand that it’s finite. Everything that you do is finite—the pain, the joy, everything.
Throughout history, there’ve been individuals who’ve been lauded as—and they even claimed to be—divine leaders, where they’ve been given divine power to lead. No one remembers them.
ADAM: That would be a helpful lesson for some of our aspiring autocrats today to consider.
AUN: I think about the Qin dynasty in China. When I visited China, I went to Xianyang, and I went to go see the Terracotta Army. Amazing. You go there, and you’re like, This is history. There is no way of getting around seeing thousands upon thousands of individually marked Terracotta warriors, based on real individuals. They molded it for the actual army. Each one’s inscribed with their own personalized hand marks. Thousands, buried underground, in order, untouched. There’s no getting around the fact that that’s history.
But then, that emperor didn’t want to have any recollection of history prior to him, or to know what came before him. So he made all the people who made those go into a mound and then shut it off, so they all got buried alive. And he had the practice of drinking mercury because he thought it was good for him, so he then died of mercury poisoning. And there’s thousands of stories like that through history.
There have been scrolls that have been written on for thousands of years that date back to ancient Egypt that are still surviving today. However, if the internet goes down, what happens to all that information [online]? It doesn’t last. It just vanishes. But there’s blocks of stone that have been carved for thousands and thousands of years and still remain.
I think every time you buy a book you’re preserving a part of our civilization because you’re basically saying, This existed. Buying a hard copy is like, Stamp. This happened for our civilization. And we can keep on moving forward.
I just love to have [books] around me. You see them, and you feel them. There’s knowledge inside them, and you can feel that. I don’t know what it is, but similar to when you walk into a bookshop, you feel that. You can feel the information around you. You can feel the history around you.
To hear our full 145-minute conversation—and more than 40 additional interviews Aun has taped with authors and creators—search for “Book Talk Today” on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Get in touch with Aun (@aun.abdi) and join the One Minute Book Review community (@oneminutebookreview) on Instagram.
https://www.instagram.com/oneminutebookreview
“Book Talk Today,” episode #5 (published July 29, 2020). Check out our conversation on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
“Book Talk Today,” episode #40 (published August 18, 2021). Check out our conversation on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.