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SK Steven Kotler On The Knowledge Project (Shane Parrish)

“If you want to think better, you have to start by reading more. … People ask me how I got my career, how I did anything, and I will flat out tell you I outread the motherfuckers. I realized very early on I wasn't the brightest guy, but I was willing to read three or four or five times the amount as anybody else was willing to read.”

The Knowledge Project (Shane Parrish) · Ideas & Essays · October 2026

“If you want to think better, you have to start by reading more. … People ask me how I got my career, how I did anything, and I will flat out tell you I outread the motherfuckers. I realized very early on I wasn't the brightest guy, but I was willing to read three or four or five times the amount as anybody else was willing to read.” — Steven Kotler, The Knowledge Project (Shane Parrish)

Context

Asked whether people can be taught to think better, Kotler said he now spends most of his reading time on textbooks, because almost nobody else reads them. He then worked out the return on reading a book: six or seven hours of your time for years of the author's research.

Transcript

The Knowledge Project (Shane Parrish) Around 40:47 into the episode
Speaker 4

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Shane Parrish

Can you teach people to think better?

Steven Kotler

If you want to think better, you have to start by reading more. Like the, you want to think better, read more. First, first thing. People ask me how I got my career, how I did anything, and I will flat out tell you I outread the motherfuckers. I just, I realized very early on, I wasn't the brightest guy. I wasn't, you know, the best at all that stuff, but I was willing to read three or four or five times the amount as anybody else was willing to read. So I…

Shane Parrish

Two ideas that dovetail into this that I want to hear you maybe respond to. One is: I have a concept called the learning loop. And it's you have an experience, you take that experience, you compress it. So you reflect on it. So you have an experience, you reflect on it, you create a compression…

Steven Kotler

One, I think it's a medium is the message kind of thing. So I think you will get with this kind of thing better stories, better the human side. I like there's a lot of advantages because those things even get compressed in books for a lot of reasons. So I think the podcast is really, there's…

Shane Parrish

but this is why you're the perfect person to talk to with your journal. Like, how do you pull out the best information from people?

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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