David speaks with Thatcher Wine, a creative entrepreneur, writer and book curator. He is the Founder & CEO of Juniper Books, a company that creates custom book collections and designs special book sets. He is the author of The Twelve Monotasks: Do One Thing at a Time to Do Everything Better that provides a clear and accessible plan for life in the 21st century and also the coauthor of For the Love of Books: Designing and Curating a Home Library.
They talked about:
🌍 The role of books in shaping society
✨ The enduring legacy of books
🏛️ The power of curation
📖 The lost art of sitting with books
💻 How technology is reshaping our connection to books
❤️ Why physical books matter
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📹 Watch on Youtube:
📄 Show notes:
[00:00] Introduction
[03:09] Books are timeless
[04:57] How knowledge is shared through time
[09:13] What makes a book special
[13:45] Books are more than just words
[17:29] The lost art of sitting with a book
[21:58] How reading rewires our brain
[27:14] How books helped Thatcher through tough times
[31:04] Why attention is the ultimate superpower
[34:14] Does convenience cost us connection?
[38:29] The importance of tangible books
🗣 Mentioned in the show:
Alice in Wonderland | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_in_Wonderland_(2010_film)
Jeff Bezos | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos
Cicero | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicero
Julius Caesar | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar
Socrates | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates
Van Gogh | https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/art-and-stories/art/vincent-van-gogh
Juniper Books | https://juniperbooks.com/
TED Talk | https://www.ted.com/about
Gutenberg Printing Press | https://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/omeka/exhibits/show/mcdonald/incunabula/gutenberg/
The White Album by Joan Didion | https://amzn.to/3PqLb8Q
Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf | https://amzn.to/40asBH6
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë | https://amzn.to/4h65ZhF
The Wheel of Time | https://amzn.to/4gKW8y6
Lord of the Rings | https://amzn.to/3W9W034
Jane Austen | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Austen
The Squid and the Whale | https://amzn.to/4j4Xu8q
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger | https://amzn.to/4fPFThK
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegu | https://amzn.to/3DIMmhc
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles | https://amzn.to/4h435Ko
Atomic Habits by James Clear | https://amzn.to/4j0rUZD
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker | https://amzn.to/3DO6b71
Young Babylon | https://amzn.to/4abvcVy
👤 Connect with Thatcher:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thatcherwine/
Website: https://www.thatcherwine.com/about
👨🏾💻 About David Elikwu:
David Elikwu FRSA is a serial entrepreneur, strategist, and writer. David is the founder of The Knowledge, a platform helping people think deeper and work smarter.
🐣 Twitter: @Delikwu / @itstheknowledge
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📜 Full transcript:
Thatcher Wine: The rush to digitize everything definitely has its downsides. And I think people don't realize, you know, what they're missing until it's almost gone. There's a microcosm of that that's happened with books over the past 20 years. And all my friends in tech were like, why are you bothering with printed books? Didn't you get the memo? Like, there's not going to be any need for them, you're going to be able to download them. But I never believed that. Because I remembered back in my childhood, how important it was to me like, look up at the bookshelf and, you know, decide to go pick something, you know, explore something, take a book on.
This week I'm sharing part of my conversation with Thatcher Wine, who is an entrepreneur, a writer, and a professional book curator. He's probably better known as the founder and CEO of Juniper Books, which is a company specializing in creating custom curated libraries and also designing special edition books.
Now Thatcher has helped to put together The home library is for our celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow, Shonda Rhimes. He's also written two amazing books, the 12 Monotasks, which centers around productivity and the relationship that we have with the tasks in our lives and the work that we do, and also for the love of books, which has an amazing cover by the way, but that book is about the relationship that we have with books and how to curate better home libraries.
So, in this conversation, you're going to hear us talking about books, but in a way I think that is far more substantial than that might sound on the surface. We talk about the history of books, the role that they've had both within society and also in shaping society and in shaping the relationship that we have with knowledge. And this idea that the act of curating books is something incredibly powerful, specifically curating physical books, and it shapes the knowledge that gets passed on, it shapes the way that we interact with knowledge. There are so many facets and angles of the relationship that we have with books and the roles that books play in our lives.
We talk about the lost art of sitting with books. We talk about how technology is reshaping the connection that we have with books and this specific role that books can play at certain foundational moments in our lives, whether early in our lives, whether it's during hard times, whether it's in particular circumstances that books can play to give us meaning. And this distinction between physical books and books in other formats that creating a physical instantiation of knowledge. It's not just about the book, but there's so many additional layers that get wrapped in this token in this thing.
So I'm not going to say too much about it. You're going to hear us explaining in far more detail.
You're going to hear Thatcher talking about this in much clearer way, I really enjoyed this.
So, you can get the full show notes, the transcript, and read my newsletter at theknowledge.io. And you can find Thatcher online on Instagram @ThatcherWine. His personal website is thatcherwine.com. And if you love this episode, please do share it with a friend. And don't forget to leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts because it helps us tremendously to improve the podcast, to know what you love, to do more of it, and to find other listeners just like you.
David Elikwu: So one question that I thought. would be a good place to start is Wikipedia. First of all, it's always a great honor to have a Wikipedia page. I would assume, but your Wikipedia page lists you as a bibliophile. And first of all, I just love that word. It's a word that I don't often see used or used to reference people. It's quite a specific word.
I'm interested to know what that means to you, and also, I mean, it's been used in other contexts in reference to you in, like, newspaper coverage and things like that. But I, I just wonder what that term means to you.
Thatcher Wine: So, at the most basic level, I mean, it's basically a lover of books. And the reason we don't hear it so much these days is probably because there, unfortunately, are fewer and fewer people that, you know, read and read voraciously and really love the printed book. I'd say now, you know, there's been definitely an uptick in the past couple of years. More and more people are reading.
And, you know, over my 23 year career of having a company called Juniper Books, where I'm the founder and CEO. I've tried to bring back a love of books. And one of the ways I've done that, tried to do it, is like by making physical book compelling and interesting to have in your home. Because you've got to compete for people's attention, right? So everybody's watching YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and, you know, you got to give them an alternative. And I think books are an amazing alternative and that's why I'm a bibliophile and why I, I don't think I necessarily need, you know, everybody in the world to be a bibliophile, but I think everybody should read a little bit every week.
It's just a really good habit, really helps, you know, calm your mind, learn about the world, develop empathy, understand, you know, stories. And so, yeah, I take that as a compliment to be called a bibliophile.
David Elikwu: Sure. I think there is a lot to unpack just even in what you've said just now, which I want to get into. I, I think probably the best place to start is to, you know, let's turn back the wheel of time a bit and go back to Gutenberg and talk about like the, the origin of the printed book and kind of look through things from that lens and see how things have evolved over time, I think it could be easy to say for me to start with, it feels like we're at a unique moment right now where people are losing faith in the longevity of books. People are losing their love for books. You very frequently, more and more, you would come across people that will say, I haven't read a book in 10 years. I haven't read a book since I left university I left high school. And maybe there's some tangents of that where you could then connect that to AI. You could then connect that to technology. You could connect that to a lot of other trends in society, more people living alone, the busier that we get, et cetera, et cetera.
But it is interesting, there's a tension between that because that could be perfectly valid and we can get to that. But also I think we've been at this point historically multiple times. You know, I dare say in 2001, when you first started Juniper Books, people would have said the exact same thing. People said the same thing to Jeff Bezos when he was starting Amazon. And even far before that, not long after we first got books, people would have said the very same thing.
So I think, yeah, let's go back and maybe if you could talk a little bit about where books come from and this, this idea of this thing, this token that seems precious in some way, and then we can kind of work forwards from there.
Thatcher Wine: Yeah, I mean, the book is a relatively new invention, right? And it's not as new as AI, but 500 years of, of having the printed book. It's relatively recent in human history. And before that, you know, when there was written communications, everything had to be hand copied, right? So if you go back a few thousand years, and especially, you know, most people are familiar with like, the classical era, Greek and Roman classics. The books that survive to this day from that era, from the Romans and the Greeks, you know, had to be hand copied. And they were generally hand copied like in a monastery, a scriptorium. And they had to be re copied, you know, every 100 years or 200 years or otherwise the paper disintegrated and the, the ink disappeared.
And that is just amazing to think of historically. Like the fact that we have all these great classics from, you know, Cicero to Julius Caesar and we know about these people and Socrates. You know, it was because people did this amazing amount of focused, detailed work. You know, generally in a monastery. And there was a, you know, it was a duty. There wasn't necessarily a labor of love, but probably for some of them it was. And then, you know, you enter this era in the 1400s where Gutenberg invents the printing press and, you know, things all of a sudden, you can have the same copy of, you know, the same book, essentially the same amount of knowledge, information that's disseminated, not just one person at a time. One copy of a book at a time. But you know, all of a sudden, you know, kind of one to many. And then if you just look at the history over the past 500 years since then, there's a really a proliferation of that, like the speed, the velocity at which knowledge is transferred is just, you know, intensifying more and more every single day. And with AI, it's like, we're not even the ones creating the knowledge, right? Some computer is creating it and then, you know, sending it out and that's where you get possibly disinformation, misinformation, conspiracy theories, everything. It's just like that's why you see these things popping up.
And those things, you know, it's all related because those things become tools that help us, you know, supposedly get more done, although I dispute that. And they also, the flip side of that is the distractions. So, that we rely on them maybe as a crutch. We think they're helping us get more done, but they're really distracting us. And they're taking us away from, you know, how people lived a few hundred and a few thousand years ago, which was really, you know, being in the moment, doing one thing at a time, because there was no alternative. And even when they, somebody was copying a book in a monastery, in the 1300s, that was all they were doing with their focused attention. They weren't, you know, listening to their Spotify playlist, and, you know, responding to texts and interruptions. I mean, they had their own version of it, but it wasn't nearly as intense as it is today.
David Elikwu: Yeah, exactly. I think this is, this is the kind of thing that I get excited about, personally. Just thinking about the history of some of these things, because I think
it is incredibly easy to get caught up in abstractions. And, you know, that's a word I use quite frequently, but I think, you know, very often when we think of today's world, we fail to appreciate the number of abstractions that we're kind of interfacing with reality through, and it can be easy to take a very modern lens and use that to look at everything without fully appreciating that many of the ways in which we interface with the world today are kind of modern luxuries or, you know, they've been fundamentally changed by just the nature of our modern world itself. And even going back to some of what you were saying, the idea that only a few hundred years ago. It was almost impossible for a piece of knowledge to exist in more than one place at once, apart from it just being vocal, or shared by word of mouth. The fact that, you know, the physical instantiation of something, these things only existed in one place at one time. And either you would have to travel vast distances to go and see a thing and to learn about a thing. Or if you were a king or someone like that, you could have that person come to you, or you could have something, brought to you that you could look at. But if something happened to a particular script, or something that had been written on a journey or something like that, and it's gone, it's lost. That's, that's it.
And that's particularly why I find it incredible, you know, when we talk about. Let's say the Bible or certain historical documents where at some point in time we say, Oh, we found this old piece from that's written in Greek or written in Aramaic or something like that. The reason it's specifically meaningful is because most of the things from that point in time, if you have the document on which something was written, that is significant. It actually means something. It's not quite the same as finding a book in an old house, right? Where this could have been the 13th thousandth print of Alice in Wonderland or something like that, even though that might, might have some significance today, but it carried even more significance then.
And I think this thought takes me in two directions. One, which connects to something you mentioned in your TED talk. This idea that the books that we choose to print, even today, they mean something, and the idea that the books that we keep tell a story. What was resonating with me from what you talked about, and you can elaborate on it a bit more, is this idea that physical books contain lore. What makes a book special, what makes a book meaningful is the fact that we've chosen to print it, we've chosen to make the story manifest. It's a, it's a physical thing you can hold in your hands. And the act of creating that it's like a token. It then interacts with the world. So you might remember where you read this particular book and where you were in time. And as you read it, you might remember the sensation when you got to a particular point in the book where there was this many pages left and you were holding the thicker side in this hand, and maybe you want to train or something like that, there is a ton of meaning that then can transcend the story itself that can exist because you have this physical copy of it.
And what I made me think of is something that I was talking with someone about on Twitter. I think it was earlier this week, this idea that, I think someone shared a piece of AI art and it was like, a video that brought to life some of Van Gogh's paintings. And they were like, you know, look how cool this is, look how meaningful this is. You know, can you imagine people still loving the basic paintings that we have a few hundred years from now? And I was like, but hold on. I don't think you even see what you're doing here. Like, I don't think you understand. The only reason this video is significant is because it's Van Gogh's painting. Like, there is lore that's baked into this thing. That's what makes the video cool, is because you're bringing to life something that exists as a physical manifestation, and a part of me thinks that as cool as it might be to have AI art and AI stuff, and we can debate, you know, the usefulness of those things, I don't know if we ever get to the same level of meaning without the law, the physical, when you think about what, what makes a book meaningful, what makes a painting meaningful, some of it is in the eye of the beholder. It's about what you interpret and what you feel when you look at the thing, when you interact with the thing. But a big part of it is also from the author's side and knowing what Van Gogh went through and knowing where he was at a particular point in his life. Oh, he painted this at this stage. He'd just done this. He was going to do that. And, and these are the things that give the art meaning.
So yeah, I'd love to hear how that resonates with you and how that might connect to, you know, some of what you talked about in your TED talk as well.
Thatcher Wine: Yeah, I mean, there's so many interesting, you know, overlapping, thoughts with, you know, some of my work and my philosophy about books and just, you know, where we are in this present moment and in the modern world. We're at this juncture where, and we've been here, you know, for a few decades, but it's intensifying like, where, I think it's a good thing that books take up space.
When things take up space in our homes, in our lives, our minds, when they, you know, maybe cost money when they require some effort and some initiative to create and to think about. And those forces kind of are on one side, like the traditional way of just like going through life and accumulating knowledge and possessions and moving and, you know, things like that. And then there's like the very digital, abstract, counter argument to that. Which is like, it'd be better if everything was virtual from whatever currency to e books to information that can just be created in a second, downloaded in a second. You don't have to like, think about it. A lot of it's free supposedly.
And I think, like, those two forces are gonna battle it out for a while. And most people don't realize, because the argument's been made, you know, by the big tech companies especially, you know, it'd be better if you can just put everything in the cloud. And it's lightweight, it's low cost, you don't have to think about it, you don't have to, like, retain the information if you can just go get it anytime you want. And I think, that's a real challenge. I think it's as a potential like rewire our brains, which I think it already has done to a certain extent. And that there's a real value that like the world that's been created over the past 500 years, starting with the invention of the printed book, going through, you know, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, all sorts of social changes, which I think are mostly for the better and, but there's a lot of forces battling it out to kind of, go back to the old way, but maybe there's some confusion about, you know, what's good and what's bad about the old way that things were done.
But you know, I think there's a lot of, as a book collector and somebody who, you know, builds libraries for people and encourages people to read more and to have the things that they love in their homes. And to a certain extent, like, in their social media, right? We make a physical product at Juniper Books, like, with the book sets where, like, if you love The Wheel of Time or you love Lord of the Rings or you love Jane Austen, like, put those books behind you in your zoom background and put them in your social media profile.
So there's, like, a little bit of a hybrid strategy, I think, where you can participate in the modern world. I don't advocate against that. I think we all have to do that. But you can, you know, think a little bit more deeply about things that matter. And, you know, have some appreciation for kind of how we built the society and the structure that we have today that, you know, enables some other possibilities for technological improvements and stuff. But don't necessarily just jump all, go all in on all of them just because they're new and shiny.
David Elikwu: I'd love to talk a bit more about the, the idea of space. You mentioned that the book takes up space, but I think another part that connects to that is also the effort. And there's this idea that books now, part of the reason that you might hear people say they don't want to read, or they don't really read that much is because it feels effortful and we've kind of, being able to condense information, you know, we talked about the history of information and you had to travel so far to look at something. You had to copy it out by hand. That was a tremendous amount of effort. Then you go from there to, Oh, you could print a book and you could have multiple copies of that book. And all you have to do is sit down for a few hours and you can read a book and that's fantastic. And then we've gone from there to actually now it's digital. It's a blog and now it's not even a blog. It's actually just a podcast or an audio summary that you can listen to in 15 minutes while walking your dog. And so we've kind of abstracted this, this knowledge a tremendous amount.
And now, in fact, you're actually just listening to a TikTok for 15 seconds in your AirPods and you get the gist of what the book was about or something like that. And so people will say that, wow, reading feels arduous and even for me, you know, I love books. There's some books here in my background, but taking the time to read a physical book, I was trying to read the, The White Album by Joan Didion earlier this week. And I was finding, you know, sometimes I have to stand up and sometimes I have to sit down, you know, change modes a few times because actually just sitting still for a few hours can be difficult. And I would love to maybe hear some of your thoughts on that. And in particular, as regards, and I think this is where sometimes you get some debate or people have different thoughts, different formats. And there are some people that think there is some superiority to having physical versus digital versus audio. And I know that even in just what you've said now, you've talked a little bit about why physical books might be useful and better in some way. I have some a mix of thoughts on this. I'd love to hear your thoughts first and I'll come back, but I would say, in my mind, I imagine it almost as a pendulum. It's probably like a downwards U shape where I would say, first you have physical books as probably the best resource for a number of reasons. One, because, like we mentioned before, the physical instantiation of the book. Becomes like a, an artifact that creates new meaning because of the way it interacts with the world. So like you mentioned, it interacts with, it's on your shelf. It's something that people can see. It's not just the story that exists, but the physical instantiation of it creates additional meaning in the world around you. It's something you can give to someone. It becomes a gift. It becomes, you know, it can develop meaning in loads of different ways. Memories, et cetera, et cetera. Then I probably say that the worst is in my personal opinion, maybe eBooks, even though I read loads, and I can tell you about why I buy eBooks for myself in particular. But yeah, I would say it's hard to connect reading the digital version of the book to any external instantiation. Really that is just about the text. You just get the thing itself. You get the words, they come from the page into your head. And that's pretty much all that exists for the most part. And then for me personally, I would say audio kind of actually is, is a step up from that, but it's still probably below a physical book. And the reason, at least for me is because you can recreate some of that physical instantiation, because I walk around a lot, so I will read while I'm walking. And so I was even thinking as I was reading this physical copy of The White Album, I might also, I tried to look and see if there was an audio book, there wasn't. But I do like to listen to the audio and walk. And I remember very specifically exactly where I was, where I was listening to Wuthering Heights. I was on, you know, this particular road. I remember the time of year because I knew what the sunlight looked like when it was hitting these trees. I know all of those things. And that reminds me of this one word, they say, Oh, you perishing monkey. And that was such a funny phrase from the book. And I remember that book because I remember, you know, it connects to all these things in my mind. And I think very similarly, I can connect other books that I've read to other places that I've been in the same way.
It's not quite as physical as having a physical book, but at least it's not, I could not tell you, I could barely tell you where I was when I read various eBooks. I kind of remember because maybe I'm holding my phone or I'm holding my Kindle, but it's not quite the same. So I'd love to hear, yeah, like your thoughts, because I know people differ on those things.
Thatcher Wine: Yeah, no, I think I completely agree with your hierarchy. And I'll just make a few extra points. I mean, I do think that, there's a difference between information like, whether you need it for work or, you just want to know something about Winston Churchill or whatever it may be and you want to either read an e book or listen to a book about it.
And then versus like the experience of reading a printed book. It's just about so much more than the information, the words on the page. and there's a great book called Proust and the Squid. I think Marianne Wolfe is the author. Where it talks about how like the printed book, the invention of the printed book like, rewired our brains. And how the whole experience of reading a printed book when we read on paper, you know, we are creating the visuals in our mind and the connections between the characters and the distances between the places and we're, you know, making a mental map. And printed books and to a certain extent, audio books, you can do that. But I think studies have generally shown, like people's retention levels are pretty much mirror like what you said about the hierarchy. You know, printed books are the best people remember the most, the audio books are next, and then the eBooks. So if you think about eBooks as just being kind of like short term information consumption, audiobooks being, you know, I love audiobooks personally, because I'm the same way like, if I'm going on a drive or can't fall asleep or, you know, just want to listen to something to relax. because I'm worried I might fall asleep if I have a printed book in my hands. You know, that's, it's a great way to absorb the information.
I think there's like a certain amount of that mental mapping. And a lot of it depends on the narrator, to be honest. And the cadence of the book and the, you know, the genre. But, you know, the things that the printed book do for us just go far beyond, like, information and entertainment like Marianne Wolf says in the book, like, they have the potential to rewire our brains, help us, like, develop new neural connections and you know, all the things that you mentioned about, like, remembering the printed book, Where you were when you read the book? Who gave it to you?
So, you know, printed books, I would definitely, you know, put at the top of the pyramid, you know, as, as you did as well that they have this ability, it's not just about information and entertainment that you gain from them that you could get from an ebook or a website or blog or, they're a little bit better than audio books. So they'll, I love audio books too. And you know, I think they're about not just what's in the books, but the experience of reading them. And like you said, you know, I remember where I was when I bought a book who gave it to me. Especially if there's like a note in there, an inscription, a bookmark from the store, a boarding pass or something, you know, that you used as a bookmark, when you were traveling with the book.
And all those things are like really important in our lives and kind of help to just cement the experience of reading that book and the information in it and how maybe how you felt about it, too And how you felt about your life or a relationship your work at the time like I'll have these memories come back all the time, you know when I see a book on the shelf or I pick it up and I reread it I'm like, oh, you know I was working at this company and I didn't like my boss and I was dating this girl and it didn't work out and, you know all these different things.
And I think, you don't get that from an e-book, right? Studies have shown that you don't remember either what's in the book or, where you were when you downloaded it. What device, you know? I had an iPhone 8 when I downloaded, you know, this audio book. I mean, that doesn't happen the same way. And I think we should, you know, appreciate and celebrate that. We shouldn't think that that's, like, a burden. I completely recognize that it is a ton of work to read a book and it takes a lot of time. And I talk in my TED talk about how, you know, when you're standing in front of a wall of books and, you know, people can see the video, you can see I've got a few dozen books behind me. Each one of these books took, let's say, three years on average to write. Ton of work. So like, just looking behind me, that's like, a hundred years of work, it's amazing. And then it's also a lot of work to think that, like, each of those books, if I just sat down and read it from cover to cover, I probably wouldn't do that but, who has the attention span to do that, or the time to do it these days? But, you know, if you did it, let's say it would take 12 hours. Some of these are cookbooks, because I'm working on something as my next book that's about a restaurant my parents owned in New York City. So, that's a lot of my research library right now. But novels, you know, you don't have to be a fast reader.
Let's say it takes you three weeks to like, just read a little bit every day to finish it. It's a lot of work and you can only do kind of so many in a year, so many in a lifetime. So I think people, you know, like you were saying, given the options of like, doing something really fast that has instant gratification and a little dopamine hit. And maybe you get some information, given the alternative like, reading a book or, you know, writing a book and spend the next three years working on that. Those are tough choices, but I think they're good choices and I think they're really good for our brains.
And I think again, going back to what I was saying earlier, I mean, I think it's like how we made all the improvements that we've made to the world we live in, really came from being able to do the work and it's not going to be done for us by chat GPT.
David Elikwu: I think I've heard you mentioned that your favorite book is The Catcher in the Rye. Has your favorite book changed at various points in your life or were there various points at which a certain book might have resonated more than another?
And part of the reason I asked that, so let's tie a few bits of your personal lore together here. You know, growing up around the Quilted Giraffe, perhaps there's some bits there and I know you're talking about, you know, some of the research that you're doing now. I'd love to know if maybe earlier in your life, there are particular books that you found resonated with you, or you know, growing up in that atmosphere, if there was anything in particular that stood out. And then also capturing the vibe, where does that come from? Why? And then also there's a particular time in, in your life, you know, first of all building Juniper Books. I think I'll ask you separately and I'd love to know a bit more about that journey. But I think there's a particular point where you'd gone through some stuff with your relationship. You'd had a divorce, you'd, you'd had cancer at a point. You come back and you kind of have to rebuild the business. And I think there's a specific thing there about working on a business that's about books and caring deeply about books. And I wonder if there's any book in particular that had some meaning or resonance with you at that point in time that might be different for someone else who maybe like, books but that they're not actively working on them. So yeah, I know I know that's a lot to ask but I would love to hear some of your thoughts on that
Thatcher Wine: I guess the reason I always say The Catcher in the Rye my favorite book is because it was the first book that really inspired me to be a reader. And also kind of gave me an insight into what it was like to be a writer. And to have a certain like a voice in the main character of Holden Caulfield and I identified with the character I grew up in New York City. You know, and I kind of had those moments of like, wandering around New York and you know being somewhat disassociated from my, my parents. As most people who grew up in you know, big city might be. So it was just so eye opening. So I think like even though, you know, if you looked at like, my whatever 50 years of reading 40 years of reading history or something like, you know, there'd be little blips where I was like go off on a tangent and a deep dive into, like, Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite authors. And, you know, maybe if you asked me at that period I'd say, like, yeah, sure, you know, Cat's Cradle is my favorite novel of that time. But then it would always come back to Catcher in the Rye, just because of that, like, you know, having it set me on the path of being a reader.
In the TED Talk I gave, I was holding a copy, like, eighth grade copy of Catcher in the Rye, beat up paperback. And I think just the juxtaposition of like, that book and its sentimental value and the memories it brings back versus kind of what I do today with all these like, you know, libraries of leather bound books and, you know, books and fancy covers and stuff is kind of interesting. Like that, you know, yes, it's amazing to have a two story library with a thousand books that you can read, and the luxury of time and a chair and a fireplace, you know, to sit down and read them. But like, it doesn't take that. Like, it really could just take one book, paperback book that you're reading on the bus in the 8th grade to change your life. And that, that was true for me.
And I think, as far as like the, you know, very difficult experiences that I went through, seven years ago I had cancer, Non Hodgkin's lymphoma. Went through pretty hardcore chemo. At the same time, you know. I was going through some other issues trying to like, keep the business going while I was fighting cancer and then soon afterwards ended up getting divorced. Super stressful time. I don't wish any of those things, you know, on anybody. And I had to go through those three things plus a couple others kind of within a three year period. Definitely, you know, the chemo wasn't great for my like the attention span like people get chemo brain, just like kind of foggy memory, but I, I definitely tried to keep reading when I could.
I remember A Gentleman in Moscow was one of my favorite books at that time Amor Towles. And I think just the like, isolation and the physical, emotional, psychological challenges that people have You know, the character in that book goes through, like I could really identify with what I was going through at that time, even though it was a different setting, obviously I wasn't in Moscow. Maybe I felt like I was.
Yeah, and then, you know, a lot of the thinking thought process that I went through at that time, because on the other side of cancer, I was like, I don't feel, I can't get the same things done, I don't have the attention span. to, you know, sit there and read. I don't have the time. I need to, you know, be a good parent, work on my business, things like that. And that's when I started developing this philosophy around monotasking and how to do one thing at a time to do everything better. And I looked back kind of at, you know, pre cancer and like, how was I productive? How was it, when was I happy?
And, you know, thought of like 12 things that I generally did every day. And how could I like codify giving my full attention to those things, everything from reading to walking, thinking, creating. How could I sort of practice being a more focused person and a more productive person by just doing the things that I love to do every day, not thinking of them as work, not thinking of them as like, I'm going to train to be productive. It's just more like, I'm going to get better sleep. I'm going to like, eat without looking at my phone. These things are like, kind of contradictory to what, you know, people do in the modern world. You go to a restaurant, anybody who's by themselves, like, is generally looking at their phone because you don't want to be bored. God forbid anybody's, like, bored. And doing nothing in this world. Like, everybody wants to, like, be doing something. I don't think that's generally good for our brains, first of all. I also don't think it's good for our ability to pay attention when we need to pay attention, right? We think like we'll just be able to snap back into like, oh you know my partner or my kids or you know some work situation needs with my full attention I'll be able to pay attention to it like it doesn't really work that way if you've been watching tiktok all day, it's you know everyone's like, oh i can't you know sit still pay attention. It's like, well maybe if you didn't watch tiktok all day like, and you actually did things for longer than 15 seconds then you know you develop that muscle that you need to deal with a difficult situation or persist through a physical challenge like cancer or an emotional, you know, relationship challenge.
And I think that's part of the difficulty of the world we live in today that people don't kind of realize the connection between those two things. And then we do need to train more for using those muscles when we need them to be able to call upon them. And, you know, I think in that period when I was writing the book about monotasking, I was doing a lot of reading about healthy habits and wellness and, you know, everything from Atomic Habits to Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.
All those books were kind of like, pivotal nuggets of information. Would I say any of those are my favorite book? No, but they're all kind of important in that time period for learning, making changes, personal growth, but then I probably put all those down and then reread Catcher in the Rye.
David Elikwu: I also happen to love catcher in the rye and, but funnily enough, okay, so I was trying to think as you were saying, why do I love catcher in the rye? I guess perhaps quite similar to you, but it also may be very different because I never lived in New York I've visited a few times, but I think perhaps I just read it at a similarly formative stage of life where you're also quite young and you're kind of coming into your own and getting some independence and you're reading about a character that's also, you know, wrestling with a lot of those themes and they might be very different from you and in loads of different ways, you know, different country, different, you know, so many differences.
I think reading about a young character with such a powerful voice, I think that voice in particular stood out to me because I don't, I don't think I've read a lot of young characters, at least at the time, where it felt so uniquely that the character themselves had a voice as opposed to the writer had a voice and I praise and respect the writer because of the book that they wrote, as opposed to this character feels alive and visceral in some way.
And funnily enough, one of my favorite books when people ask me now is actually, it's not the Catcher in the Rye, but it's a book called Young Babylon. But when people ask me what that's about, and most people have never heard of it, and there's a good reason why, but I usually say it's, it's like a Chinese Holden Caulfield. So it's a, it's a book about someone growing up and coming of age, but actually instead of in New York, they are growing up in industrial China you know, they're 17, they're having to go work in a saccharine factory, but they're going through a lot of the similar stages of life that, you know, finding some young love that figuring out how work is going to go for them and funny enough, you know, at that time I read that when I was working in corporate law and I was very early in my career in that respect. And I was, you know, navigating a lot of similar themes for my own life. And also I've been to China. I'd worked in China, et cetera. So there are a lot of reasons why there's some spiritual connection there for me, but it's interesting because that's a book I read as an ebook. And sometimes I think, and I almost wish I read that as a physical book, that particular one, because I could then connect it to more things in my life.
And I wonder, and maybe this is the question that I'll lead it to is, do you think that, especially as the world becomes more and more digital, do you think that there's a potential that we'll lose anything by having in many various ways, like physical tokens of things, like a physical thing that exists in the world that I can point to and use to relive some, some memories of a time that I had and a place that I was and the things that I experienced, not just from the story itself, like you were pointing out, just by virtue of having this physical copy of this, this thing. And I wonder, you know, when you look at a lot of the themes, you know, I write notes by hand. I've got my, my notebook here. And most people these days, they don't. Maybe they use Apple notes at the most, if they make any notes at all. And they just type some notes on their phone. People barely even do that. You know, people that are reading things on Kindle, they might not be writing things inside their books. I don't really do that, but you know, people just talk about, I just make some highlights, but you never even go back and revisit those highlights. And there's a sense in which, because of the convenience of our day to day lives now, and I guess the extent to which we commodify a lot of these experiences into just things that we do as opposed to things that we experienced. I just wonder how much more of the, the depth of that meaning we might lose in a world where however long from now, even more like already now, most books sold are eBooks, that that's already a reality. But I think the phone has been wonderful and magical in that it's consolidated a bunch of other previous things that we used to have.
You used to have an mp3 player and a notebook and a calendar and a radio, and now you just have one thing. You used to have a camera, now you just have, you know, you carry the one thing. Right now, people are even talking about, you won't even have a phone. You're going to have a pair of glasses or you're going to have this little headset thing. And so actually you're not going to touch it much. You're not going to go to the supermarket and buy food. You're going to order it online. It's going to arrive at your house you know, loads of these things that, I think have some meaning that the tangible realities that we, of the world that we interact with, a lot of those more and more will disappear.
And I just wonder what your, your thought is on that when we, when we lose some of that meaning. And maybe this will then tie even into some of the reasons why you founded Juniper Books.
Thatcher Wine: Yeah, I mean, I'm a big believer, you know, in things that have a physical presence in our lives from books to anything really, just look around your home and just, you know, recognize that like, it's, it's nice to have a desk, and a bookcase, and you know, windows, like, these things, you know, we take them for granted at a certain point, but they all, there's a physical, spatial relationship we have with them, and maybe if we chose, you know, to buy them or to design them into our houses or build them or whatever, like, it has even more meaning.
And yeah, I think like the rush to digitize everything definitely has its downsides. And I think people don't realize, you know, what they're missing until it's almost gone. And I think that's, there's a microcosm of that that's happened with books over the past 20 years. Um, when I started Juniper Books, you know, all my friends, I was in the tech business before this. I had an online customer service company that didn't work out. And all my friends in tech were like, why are you bothering with printed books? Didn't you get the memo? Like, there's not going to be any need for them, right? You're going to be able to download them. And so why would anybody take up space in their home with printed books? Same information. You can get it. You know, you can get a million books, put it on your device, and take it on vacation. But I never believed that. Because I remembered back in my childhood, how important it was to me like, look up at the bookshelf and, you know, decide to go, pick something, you know, explore something, take a book on, you know, Chinese medicine off the shelf, or go into the library, who, I don't know how many of your listeners remember going like the library and looking through the card catalog for something like the physical act of discovering something and maybe the library had it, maybe they didn't, maybe you had to wait for them to call it, you know, in transferred from another library. Or, you know, I remember being in college and going into the stacks and going down the aisles in the library, going to look for a book on, you know, Napoleon and more, whatever, you know, his invasion of Russia or something, and then discovering other books that I didn't even notice in the card catalog. But I was like, yeah, I definitely want to check this out too. And I think we're, you don't, nobody has that experience really anymore. Yeah, you can go on Amazon. It says customers like this, also like this, or browse that, or bop that. A lot of that's being kind of, you know, ruined by advertising and, you know, sponsored information to put in front of you now that they know so much about us. Is it really related or is it just, you know, being sold to the highest bidder to get your attention at the right moment? You might discover something you might not, but it doesn't quite have the same effect of like physically seeing it, opening it and being like, yeah, this is it. I didn't even know this existed and I want this.
So, you know, we went through a period in like the mid 2010s where I think books started to make a comeback. And it was really two fold. I think people realized they loved the physical object, maybe three fold. And that that object actually had some use in let's say the Zoom, Instagram economy. You know, you could signal to others who had like minded interests that you also loved, you know, fill in the blank. Jane Austen, or a genre like sci fi or dystopian fiction or something. And you could, you know, especially in the pandemic, like, connect with other people around the world who had a similar interest.
And there's some extent of, like, you can go on Reddit and, you know, different groups and, like, Facebook groups or whatever and, like, belong to this and have a discussion about a book. But it's not quite the same as, like, physically seeing it and be like, Oh, I love your collection of, you know, I've never seen it in German, whatever. And bonding over that and having a common language that people who maybe are introverts, you know, could talk to each other using.
The other thing that happened is that there started to be an explosion of really good writing and storytelling and like, there's a shift to kind of that's happened in the past few years of people writing in these genres like sci fi, romance, there's a new one, you know, romanticy, a combination of romance and fantasy, that's just like exploded. And I think there's this like real hunger for stories that are, you know, engaging, that keep your interest, that really make you want to read. And they're different, like, I mean, there's still like popularity of the classics, like Hemingway and Charles Dickens and stuff, but it's not quite the same like sort of fever that people have when they like pick up something and they don't can't put it down, they don't want it to end, they're like starving for the next book. Then they want the movie to come out and the show, and they want to talk to their friends all the time, and they want the merchandise. So there's been like a real change in the book world since I started, where I friends now same friends, you know, 20 years ago. We're like, why are you doing this now? They're like, how did you know that books would be popular? I'm like, well, you know, they've been popular for 500 years. Like I wasn't that worried about it.
So they think, I'm a genius for being in the book business. But you know, it's nice to see that that's come full circle and that, that there's hope that maybe that would happen with other things.
One of the things I was thinking while you were asking the question is like, people talk about, you know, going to Mars and journey takes, you know, years and like one of the problems is astronauts just going to want to like eat food out of a tube? There's like the utilitarian, you know, get the high nutrition and hydration you need to get there versus like the experience of eating. And like, one of the things that makes us human is our ability to taste and to make choices and to have the experience of sitting down together. And I think that's a similar thing to like an ebook. It's like, I mean, the ebook is like, getting food out of a tube versus, you know, sitting down to a meal, which is more equivalent to like reading a printed book.
At the end of the day, you'll get the whatever you were looking for out of it, but it's just not really the same thing. The same holistic experience.
David Elikwu: Thank you so much for tuning in. Please do stay tuned for more. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe. It really helps the podcast and follow me on Twitter feel free to shoot me any thoughts. See you next time
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