I started old school because reading changed my life.
It helped me see what it means to be a man of curiosity and character.
When young men in the college classes I teach began telling me that reading
great books in the company of another man was helping them find inspiration and purpose,
I knew that I had to share the shaping power of books with a wider audience.
Books introduce us to people we could never meet.
They take us on adventures we could never have imagined.
They challenge assumptions we did not know that we held.
They transmit our traditions, sharpen our thoughts, and remind us that the questions
we face today are perennial human questions about which the greatest thinkers have wandered alongside us.
During the recording of this show, I've had the privilege of sitting down with men from every imaginable background,
rock stars, entrepreneurs, priests, philosophers, and more to ask one simple and profound question.
What is the book that changed your life?
In answering this question, we've laughed together, we've cried together, we've wrestled with difficult ideas,
and we've discovered that the right book at the right moment can heal us.
It can challenge us.
It can alter the way that we live in the world.
The show has given me more opportunities and ideas for future projects than I could have ever imagined at the outset.
I'm now hard at work writing my own book about a great author who changed my life.
And the lives of thousands of students I've taught over the past 13 years.