“Why I’m Starting This Podcast”

I want to start with a question.

How much time do you spend on your phone every day?

Scrolling through short videos, tapping through notifications, clicking one thing after another. Sometimes it’s just for fun, just to unwind — and that’s fine. But let me ask you this: out of everything you scrolled through last month, was there a single video that genuinely changed the way you think about something?

Probably hard to remember.

I scroll too. But I’ve come to realize something — short-form content is fast food. It feels satisfying in the moment, but it leaves nothing behind. It gives you stimulation, entertainment, distraction. What it doesn’t give you is something I keep coming back to: real thinking.

Real thinking takes time. It requires you to follow someone’s argument for a long stretch — long enough that you start to push back, start to engage, start to form your own view. That process, in my experience, only happens through reading.

This podcast is called “Let’s Read Together.”

I’ll read books — mostly in English — and share what I find genuinely important, in a way that’s conversational and honest. Not a summary service. More like talking through a book with a friend who’s already read it.

One thing I want to be upfront about: a lot of the books I read don’t have good translations in Chinese, or if they do, the translated versions are often abridged, or key ideas get lost in translation, sometimes for editorial reasons, sometimes just because translation is hard. Readers end up with something that’s a shadow of the original.

So my goal is to go straight to the source — read the original — and share what the book is actually saying.

Sometimes it’ll be dense nonfiction. Sometimes it might be a novel, something lighter, just a good story worth talking about. No fixed format. I’ll follow what’s interesting.

The first book I’ve chosen is The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff.

Published in 2019, it remains one of the most important books written about the digital world we live in. It answers a question that’s more relevant than ever: why are all these “free” apps actually not free at all?

Have you ever mentioned something to a friend — just in passing — and then seen an ad for it minutes later? Have you ever felt like your phone somehow knows what you’re thinking before you’ve even searched for it?

That’s not a coincidence. There’s a complete commercial logic behind it. And this book takes that logic apart, piece by piece.

Most of us have had a vague sense that something is going on. But there’s a big difference between a vague sense and actually understanding it. That gap is exactly what this book fills.

One last thing before we begin.

I’m not starting this podcast because I think reading makes you a better person, or because I want to convince you to give up short videos.

I’m starting it because I believe that what real reading gives you — something no algorithm can replicate — is your own thinking.

In a world where more and more platforms want to think for you, choose for you, decide for you — the ability to sit with a book and follow an argument to its conclusion is, I think, worth something.

That’s enough from me. Let’s get into it.

This is Let’s Read Together. I’m Allen. Next episode, we dive into The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

Last modified on 2026-06-01