A Man Who Reads Books for a Living
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Because you're addicted to HN now and HN didn't exist by then?
I guess so, particularly the "getting started" problem - I don't even like to think about setting up a project or dev environment.
That's a strong burnout indicator/symptom (or maybe you just don't enjoy it anymore), not necessarily something age related.
In fact plenty of people seem to fill their days with more work as they get older, where their younger selves would have chosen to do as little as possible.
The other thing you gain is time contraction - a year now feels like a month when I was younger, so it's easier to plan long term and follow through on projects.
But I too am very interested in the perspective from closer to 80! I suspect, if I'm lucky enough to make it there, I'll consider present me the same kind of fool as I now consider younger me.
By the time you hit 40, you've accumulated ~20 years of adult-life habits. For a lot of people, that lifestyle is very sedentary, missing most dietary recommendations (insufficient fiber intake, oversufficient saturated fat intake), poor sleep, frequent emotional stress etc.
As a young adult, you've spent most of your life being very active, sleeping ~10 hours a night (as a child), having plenty of downtime and playtime etc. It's why you can party hard, study hard and sleep a little; you're starting fresh.
The good news is that some of these habits are massive levers; biological age can drift decades (worst-to-best).
Do you have any good readings to recommend on this topic?
The NHANES study[1] is another one that showed huge jumps in slowed aging with proportionally (to calories) increased fiber consumption.
There's a lot of these. I recommend Dr Michael Greger for a lot of them summarized. He's very biased towards whole food plant based diet (a type of vegan diet), but he references and cites every statement he makes and is generally a very good communicator.
There is a YouTube channel called Viva Longevity! that invites research authors and generally presents longevity/health information in a way that is very thorough and sincere.
0. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... 1. https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/10/4/400
A large contributor towards leaning towards plants (or awareness thereof) was probably Michael Pollan with his "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." tagline:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Defense_of_Food
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Pollan#In_Defense_of_F...
Where he could once hold an entire system and its details in his head (almost an essential skill in the 80s/90s), he could only instead focus on smaller pieces at a time. Any new tooling or approaches that came along, he was fascinated to hear about them, but no longer felt able to pick them up. He could still solve algorithmic problems and debug "in the small", but it was like he had to do math on a Post-it note where once he had a huge sheet of paper.
you power through it, you get invested - but you know that nothing will ever come out of it and in no way can you recommend it
maybe it's true - but it doesn't happen
I'm thinking things like Da Vinci Code, 50 shades, Twilight, neither of which (the books) are particularly good or tasteful or whatever, but they were very popular, appealing to people who normally don't read books.
I dropped of a book to this guy that I had just finished called "The Hotel on the Roof of the World," and he later told me that they optioned the author. Unfortunately the film never got made, but if you read it you'll see it has the bones of a really nice film.
It didn't last forever. The last time I saw him was one of those wild random coincidences. I was visiting Cannes during the festival (as a tourist) and ran into him on the Croisette. We went for coffee and he told me that he had become a television producer.
There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line in the summer because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work, and then they would resign.
-- Mark Twain
https://howlongtoread.com/books/323872/Train-Dreams
Two days per book full time means one every 16 hours. Enough to read the full Foundation Trilogy with one hour to rest between books.
On a side note, I'm ashamed to share that I tested my reading speed, and while it was 264 WPM, my reading comprehension was 50%. That's why I read slower, and frequently re-read.
https://swiftread.com/reading-speed-test
Out of spite I tried to measure my Spanish reading, 520 WPM and 100% comprehension. Very unfair since it's my native language and I can glance and skip instead of reading every word.
Edited to add: hm. I just got 67%. I guess my college degree is a waste. Should have gone the humanities route instead.
Makes you wonder what else you're missing.
Oops.
I scored 100% at 500+ WPM for a couple non-fiction samples which felt like my usual reading speed if I’m not reading carefully. I read books at 200-300 WPM.
Hard to judge that based on just five questions though.
Edited to add: we must have followed different links though, mine only had three questions obviously.
Mine was a paragraph about small loans to poor populations, and had five questions.
Reading fast means you can take in more info per unit of time. It can be a useful ability, if tedious at times.
But almost all of the shot film was accidentally damaged beyond repair by the Soviet lab — they were using specially imported Kodak film stock that apparently the lab was unfamiliar with — and Tarkovsky had to go back to the Soviet film board and negotiate more money to reshoot the film.
Tarkovsky had been unhappy with the film as he shot it, and during these months of downtime, he repeatedly workshopped the script together with the Strugatskys. Long story short, Arkady Strugatsky proposed that Tarkovsky strip down the story; he wrote a treatment that reduced the entire film to a bare-bones, more philosophical story with nameless characters and very few overt sci-fi elements. Tarkovsky essentially wrote everything around that new core, much of it apparently also written during the second shoot.
I recommend the book "The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue", by Johnson and Petrie, which has a whole chapter on Stalker and the difficulties of making that film.
In my opinion, Roadside Picnic is a masterpiece, and I would have loved to see a faithful adaptation of it. Stalker, as it ended up, is not really an adaptation of it.
Paramount optioned the novel while Mario Puzo was still writing it. They heard about an early 60-page draft of the book from a literary scout. Mario Puzo was deep in gambling debt and took the option deal because he was desperate for cash. There's a chance Puzo couldn't have finished the book without the deal, because he got a $12,500 advance and would get another $80k if the movie got made.
Paramount announced the option deal in March 1967, two years before the book was published. After it was published they put the movie into production.
Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola are the credited screenwriters for the movie. Puzo wrote drafts, Coppola revised them. It was Coppola's idea to start the movie with the line "I believe in America", to highlight what he felt was one of the story's core themes. In the book that scene happens a few chapters in.
So yeah, the book was kinda pulpy and schlocky. But it may never have been published without Hollywood backing. And its author was also half-responsible for turning it into a near-universally acclaimed, Oscar-winning screenplay.
The movie does not miss anything about the difficulties of communication because that is not what the movie is about: it is about motherhood/parenthood, love, grief.
The archetype in blockbuster cinema has to be Spielberg's 'Jaws'. I'd also give 'Barry Lyndon' a huge commendation.
Those who contend that 'Starship Troopers' is a better adaptation than the book simply don't understand Heinlein or his aims. A fantastic movie and a darkly cynical piece of social commentary on jingoistic nationalism and 'bootcamp' movies as seen through the lense of a highschool ensemble. The book, however, represents a weightier piece of analysis in its own right and provides some fascinating insights into fascism, civil and civic duty, and the role of the individual in the machine.
I could also go into a long and varied debate about Michael Crichton and Stephen King properties which span both sides of this fence, but that's for another post I feel!
Standalone (and keeping the "this whole thing is a propaganda movie" thing in the back of your head), Starship Troopers is a great film. But it's not a good book adaptation.
One of my favorites as a teen, and it holds up reasonably well for me decades later. I didn't see it as insights into fascism so much as a meditation into what it would take to keep a global, and later interstellar, society functioning. Yes, there was emphasis on duty, but not to an excess (ISTM), and not a surprise considering Heinlein's U.S. Naval Academy background and subsequent service.
Plenty of great books would make terrible movies for this reason, and plenty of pretty terrible books can actually make good movies.
(I am forever salty about Max Payne, Prince of Persia, Assassin's Creed, etc. Max Payne could've worked with 1/10th of its budget (no CGI or famous actors necessary).
There is a reason most underlying film stories are so short, or feel tenuously connected from major scene to scene. There just isn't room to express much complexity through imagery and dialogue in 120ish minutes, unless you are also overtly narrating or exposition dumping. And a core rule of modern fiction is "show, don't tell" no matter the medium.
Only a few percent of your judgements are ever tested (by surviving being optioned, produced and released) and, of the ones that are, at best you only get a small sampling of false positives over a sea of potential false negatives. I imagine he's incredibly interested in the fate of any titles he didn't recommend which end up being produced (perhaps by another studio). Having filled a similar role in a different industry with similar high-stakes 'unknowables', I thought a lot about this. It was pretty obvious what practically mattered was how much my output "felt right" to downstream decision-makers vs actually being right.
While my stakeholders were quite happy with my work, actually targeting such ephemeral and uncorrelated feedback felt unproductive and dumb. Eventually, I settled on making the evaluation process fully transparent and consistent. I ensured all objective criteria were documented and each subjective judgement had clear confidence intervals. This was more challenging than it sounds. In the end, it was still hard to know if I was really improving year to year. For that, I still had to rely on my own, mostly subjective, self-assessment but at least I had some objective tracking data to calibrate on. That at least helped me feel like I was executing with diligence and integrity. It also increased my confidence no one else in the industry was doing it any better.
There aren't a lot of professional careers which require skill and years of experience yet are flooded with so many false positives, false negatives, and "we'll never even knows". Domains where playing at a world-class level only takes being right 5% of the time - are just hard to reason about. It can feel like a sadistic casino where 97% of blackjack hands have no clear winner, yet sometimes hitting on 20 is the optimal call. But other times standing on 12 is the best strategy. But it's not entirely random. There are real signals. It's just hard to identify which are real, which are red noise and which are just mapped backward.
With so many false positives and false negatives it's easy to end up chasing black swans (random outlier events). Or to just settle for trying to please your boss, whose own track record is probably closer to astrology than strategy. My best meta-takeaway is to focus on thoroughly mapping the decision space, carefully track and map all the signals, even build a taxonomy of signal types if you can. Then relentlessly optimize the decision making process over the actual outcomes. Why? Because in such 'wicked' domains, sometimes the wrong decision process can still score winning results. And other times, an optimal decision process can yield a string of losses. Your job depends on figuring which is which before it's obvious to other expert players.
As for the book reader in the TFA, I suspect a lot of his value isn't in his a binary "go / no go" call. It's accurately mapping the strengths and weaknesses of a particular title and suggesting where to place it in the studio's current decision matrix. And, on a good day, maybe spotting non-obvious ways the property could be developed.
Outdoor billboards are often priced based on raw traffic count. Imagine using a cheap license plate reader to sample traffic looking for enough identity data to map back to actual consumer behavior. Even if you can only do it for a few days and only a fraction of percent of your samples correlate to partial data, given high enough stakes and noise - just adding that as a correction overlay on your existing shitty model can yield a winning edge. In the land of illusions, any ground truth can be gold.
If it later turns out the material was not adaptable in the way you thought, I'd imagine that is not just a binary miss, since the reader, producer, writer and executives can discuss and try to see where their judgement failed and what went wrong. I get that the hard feedback is sparse, but it doesn't have to be researche-grade measurements as much as it has to be good judgement, constant reality checks, even if just from proxies, and good taste. I'd be curious if this sounds close to what you were doing.
PS: there's this Dalton + Michael YC advice for startups which seems relevant: when outcomes are highly uncertain, you can't judge the result-only whether you acted logically, ethically and treated people well along the way.. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgcdvIj5I-k)
Yes, there were definitely aspects of teasing out how much a poor outcome was related to the initial call and how much was in the execution. The execution breaks down into the early definition and scoping, which can be part of the initial decision, and then all the downstream decisions.
Assessing all this is inevitably clouded by confounding factors like unforeseeable external factors and even human variability. That's pretty easy if a film you green-lit hits screens the week the COVID shutdown happens but in my domain post mortems more often came down to non-binary judgements like the degree to which an unlikely outcome was unforeseeable. In my post mortems I focused a lot on how well I modeled and surfaced the more relevant risks. Unlike an IPO prospectus, just listing all the possibilities isn't enough. The value is in identifying and surfacing the factors below "obvious" but above "very unlikely", then plugging them into scenarios and playing them forward.
To my company's credit, it wasn't uncommon that during a detailed, often painful, post mortem of a horrendous failure, my work would be singled out for being outstanding. Why? Because I'd surfaced and appropriately weighed the risks, including the ones that sank the project. When the calls weren't obvious (and many aren't), my job was to ensure the stakeholders had situational awareness, including relevant risk factors. As I got better at modeling the intractably 'wicked' nature of my role, I included fewer "Go / No Go" calls and more provisional judgements like "If we choose Go, we're betting we can execute a combination of these factors better than their median probability and that the following less-likely externalities won't occur."
Conversely, I found it frustrating that in the celebratory review of one especially huge win, which I'd endorsed with as big a "Go" as I'd ever give, my esteemed stakeholders failed to notice that my "Go" was right but for the wrong reasons. My private self-assessment was quite brutal because the excellent outcome wasn't due to an unforeseeably rare "Golden Goose" (the opposite of a Black Swan). It was a less likely factor that ended up being critical for reasons I'd seen and assessed but weighed incorrectly. The silver-lining was this was one of those rare times that exactly how I'd blown the eval of that factor was discernible. It ended up being one of the single most instructive events of my career because in parsing how I'd failed, I uncovered a process error which significantly leveled up my skills. It's like finding a math mistake wasn't a calculation error but an error in the formula or, in coding, a mythical compiler bug.
It's ironic the legendary 'big win' I was probably most known for was actually one of my biggest preventable errors. Once I'd had time to really study it, I did an internal talk on the whole episode, labeling it as my best-ever 'teachable moment.' I've heard the video of that talk is still regularly shown.
This person could read for pleasure if they set the time for it. When I was coding all day, I didn't have the will to code for hobby at home, so maybe they had the time but not the drive.
Like I say, the man in the article must have to read some horrible books. What happens when there is a book which is horribly written, but which might make a good film. I think that is a genuine scenario.
The retirement plan of sitting at a cafe with a book is more for when I’ve already done all the other things. I wouldn’t say it’s my ultimate life dream or anything.
What surprises me is that he only reads about 50 more books a year than I do, and he does it full time.
He’d be reading nearly 6/week, which is ~every day.
Sounds like one book per bank day, mon-fri, like many work schedules out there :) Would make sense considering the context too, doesn't sound like too much or too little.
"Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life" is a lie.
I occasionally watch a woodworking YouTube channel. The creator tells people if they start woodworking as a job they'll have to find a new hobby.
An LLM may be able to synthesise results well each time, but there will be quite a difference between a synopsis written by an LLM and someone whose job it is to write synopses of books.
Huge difference in quality, and considering the clientele, they are willing to pay for that quality.
Being an LLM that "knows a bit of everything" doesn't necessarily give you access to know the audience expectations in this sort of environment. They are layers of fashion and social context which almost intrinsically embodied as a fringe of temporal currency and connection, not necessarily available in any training corpus.
An LLM could be stuck in some imposter/savant moat here, always making last year's references or possibly over or under selling the current expectation.
Not for him though, he loves it.