Are Books Today's New Social Currency?

When was the last time someone said something to you that you struggled to stop thinking about? Not a tweet. Not a hot take. Not a podcast playing in the background while sorting laundry. I mean a real sentence, spoken by a real person, in a real room, that landed somewhere deep and stayed there.

For me, that sentence usually starts the same way. ‘I just read this book.’ And what happens next is almost always the best part of my week.

I have been a freelancer since 1993, which means I have spent more than three decades building a life on the strength of conversations that go somewhere real.

Long before anyone called it networking, I was showing up at civic breakfasts and after-hours gatherings in Chicago, pressing the flesh, learning names, and doing the one thing no algorithm has ever been able to replicate: being genuinely curious about another human being.

Books taught me how to do that. And now, through a global community called Great Books and Great Minds, I am betting everything on the idea that they can teach a whole lot of other people too.

For many of us we are living through paradoxical times that should bother all of us more than ever. We have never been more lonely.

The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic in 2023. Research consistently finds that meaningful social connection matters to human health as much as diet and exercise, and its absence is as dangerous as smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day. Meanwhile, we carry devices that give us instant access to billions of people and messages. Oftentimes we find ourselves arguing with strangers and watching them eat food. Something has gone sideways.

Great Books and Great Minds is my answer to that. Not a book club in the genteel, finger-sandwiches-at-the-library sense. A community built on the premise that the deepest human connections are still forged the old-fashioned way, through shared ideas, honest disagreement, and the kind of slow, patient dialogue that a 280-character limit was specifically designed to make impossible. Books are the raw material. Community is the product.

My Father’s Red Chair

I learned this early, from a man who never gave a talk about it. My father was a university administrator at The Ohio State University who doubled as a voracious reader. As a kid I would recall him settling into his favorite red lounge chair, filling the room with jazz and blues, and reading into the wee hours of the morning. He was not performing intellectualism but practicing it, quietly, night after night, in a way that left an indelible mark on a kid watching from the doorway.

What I absorbed from those nights was not his reading list but his presence. The understanding that books were not homework or decoration, they were a tool for reaching higher ground. Whether you wanted to run a company, raise children with wisdom, navigate a city that did not particularly have you in mind, or simply understand why people behave the way they do, serious reading gave you leverage that nothing else could replicate. My father did not say this out loud. He demonstrated it, page after page, year after year, in that red chair.

That insight became the engine of Great Books and Great Minds. Not a curated algorithm. Not a personalized recommendation engine. A human community gathered around the shared work of reading seriously and talking honestly about what they found. Warren Buffett described it perfectly when he held up a stack of annual reports and said knowledge builds like compound interest. It is in this vein where I believe that community exists to accelerate that compounding, together.

Book Chat at Kiln: Where the Real Thing Happens

I work out of a co-working space in Fort Collins called Kiln. A few months back, last November to be specific, I started a small gathering there with Josh Kaufman, who you may know as the bestselling author of The Personal MBA. We called it Book Chat. Instead of overthinking it, we just opened a door and said, come talk about what you are reading.

Book Chat is not a traditional book group, and I want to be precise about that distinction because it matters. A traditional book group assigns one book, sets a deadline, and then watches half the members show up having fallen down on reading the assigned chapters and feeling guilty about it. The conversation gets stuck at the level of plot summary and whether the protagonist was likable. It is fine, as far as it goes, but it does not go very far.

Book Chat works differently. There is no assigned reading. No homework. No guilt. Each person shows up with whatever they are currently reading, or recently finished, or listened to on audiobook during their morning commute. Yes, audiobooks count. The only requirement is that you actually engaged with the material and have something honest to say about it.

What happens in that room is something I was not fully prepared for, even after thirty years of building conversation-based community. People bring wildly different books. Business strategy sitting next to ancient philosophy sitting next to narrative nonfiction sitting next to a novel someone grabbed at the airport and could not put down.

And because nobody is reacting to the same text, the conversation becomes genuinely comparative. Why does this book argue the opposite of what yours argues? What does your author know that mine seems to have missed? How does the world you have been living inside for the last two weeks rub up against the world someone else has been inhabiting?

This constant state of friction that’s productive, curious, good-humored, is exactly what I have been trying to generate for years. And Josh brings something particular to it. He is not just a bestselling author. He is a person who thinks seriously about how people learn, how businesses actually work, and how ideas get stress-tested against reality. When he responds to a book someone brings in, you feel the weight of genuine engagement. It raises the bar in the room, and everyone seems to rise to meet it.

We have been doing this since November and I keep showing up surprised. The conversations that come out of Book Chat are raw in the best sense of that word. Attendees are not performing but sharing what actually moved them, confused them, challenged them, or quietly rearranged something they thought they already understood. A book someone read on grief opens a conversation about estrangement. A business book about decision-making opens a conversation about fear. A history book opens a conversation about right now. Every session goes somewhere nobody planned.

That is how you know you are having the real conversation. The planned ones are performances whereas the ones that go somewhere unexpected are the ones where something actually happens.

Why Books Do What Screens Cannot

People ask me why I still anchor so much of what I do around books when any piece of information is a voice command away. Here is the honest answer: because books do things that information alone cannot do.

A book demands your whole attention for an extended period and gives you a coherent world in return. Books have their own logic, their own stakes, their own people who want things and fail at things and occasionally achieve something worth admiring. When you finish it, you carry that world with you for days, sometimes years. It becomes part of your mental furniture.

And then you meet someone else who has read it. What happens in that moment is not a transaction but rather a recognition. Two people who have inhabited the same world, under different life circumstances and with different histories, suddenly have the raw material for a real exchange. Not small talk. Not status signaling. Something grounded in something specific and shared.

Books build empathy at a neurological level. By way of example, reading literary fiction activates the same regions of the brain that engage when we try to understand what another person is thinking and feeling. It is empathy training, literally. Every time you inhabit a perspective different from your own, every time you follow a character through a moral dilemma you would never personally face, you expand the range of human experience you can understand from the inside.

This also teaches you to ask better questions. A rigorous book takes a problem seriously, turns it over, examines it from multiple angles, and often arrives at a conclusion that is provisional and honest about its own limits. Living with that kind of thinking, across hundreds of books, teaches you to approach the world the same way. And people who ask good questions are magnetic in conversation. They are the ones everyone wants to keep talking to.

Books are also the most democratic form of mentorship available. You cannot get a meeting with Marcus Aurelius or Maya Angelou or Lao Tzu. But you can read them. You can spend an afternoon in sustained, intimate conversation with the sharpest mind that ever worked on a problem you are currently wrestling with.

Great Books and Great Minds is built on that democratizing fact. The wisdom of the greatest thinkers in human history is available to everyone with a library card. The community helps people find that wisdom and then talk through what they’ve discovered.

Reading as Social Infrastructure

Human relationships are the most valuable asset any person, organization, or community can build. They are also the most neglected, especially in an era that has decided efficiency is the highest virtue.

Books are social infrastructure. A community built around serious reading is a community that has invested in the raw material of trust, understanding, and shared purpose. When people read together and talk honestly about what they read, they are building the kind of relational foundation that makes everything else more possible and more durable.

Research on social capital consistently shows that people with rich, diverse social networks live longer, earn more, recover from setbacks faster, and report higher levels of life satisfaction. Those networks do not build themselves. They require repeated, meaningful interaction over time. And the interactions that create the deepest bonds are built around shared meaning-making, not shared transactions.

Book Chat at Kiln is a small-scale proof of that. A handful of people, no assigned reading, no agenda, no membership fee. Just the willingness to show up with something you have been thinking about and the trust that the room will hold it. And week after week, it does. The conversations that have come out of that room since November have been some of the most honest, intimate, and genuinely useful exchanges I have had in years. Not because we planned them that way. Because the books gave us permission to go there.

The Five Practices Worth Keeping

The question I hear most often is not why read. Most people already know the answer to that. The question is how, given everything else life is demanding.

Read what genuinely interests you. This sounds obvious but it is violated constantly. People slog through books they think they should finish because they started them or because someone important recommended them. Life is short. Reading time is precious. So I implore you to ditch books that are not earning your attention and find books that are. The only reading habit that sustains is one built on real curiosity.

Commit publicly. Tell people what you are reading. Write about it. Join a community. Social accountability is a legitimate motivation tool. Use it without shame. This is partly why Book Chat works. Knowing you are going to walk into a room and talk about what you read is a surprisingly effective reason to actually read it.

Carry a book everywhere. Every spare moment, the line at the coffeehouse, the wait at the doctor, the commute, is a reading opportunity. Those moments add up to hours. Those hours add up to books. Those books add up to a transformed interior life.

Read across categories. The most interesting readers are not the ones who have read everything in one genre. They are the ones who read philosophy and biography and history and science and fiction and let those different ways of thinking rub against each other.

That friction is where original thinking comes from. It is also what makes Book Chat worth attending. When Josh brings a book on learning systems and someone else brings a novel about loss, the conversation between those two things is usually the best part.

Talk about what you read. This is the most important practice and the most commonly skipped. Reading without conversation is like cooking a meal and eating it alone in the dark. The meal nourishes you, but the full experience, the sharing, the comparison, the argument about whether the seasoning was right, is what makes it memorable. Great Books and Great Minds exist to give you the table. Book Chat at Kiln is one version of that table. You need to find yours.

The World We Are Building, One Book at a Time

Here is what I believe, not as a theory but as a lived conviction: the antidote to digital hollowness is not less technology but more depth. More sustained engagement. More willingness to sit with a complex idea long enough to actually understand it. Books are the most reliable path to all of that I have ever found.

Great Books and Great Minds is a bet on that belief. A bet that there are enough people in the world hungry for real conversation, real community, and real intellectual engagement to build something durable around that hunger.

Book Chat at Kiln is the local proof of concept. Every Tuesday, a small group of people with different lives and different books and different questions walks into a room together. Nobody performs. Nobody summarizes for a grade. People just say what they actually think about what they have been reading, and something real happens as a result.

My father read in a red chair. Warren Buffett said knowledge compounds. Oprah called books her escape and her launch pad. I have spent thirty-plus years as a freelancer with living proof that what you know and who you know are not separate variables but the same variable. And both come from the same source: the sustained, humble, joyful discipline of reading seriously and talking honestly about what you find.

---

Here at Great Books, Great Minds, we create intimate circles, high-energy literary salons, and author conversations that spark connection and ignite transformative dialogue.

Our movement now includes 10,367 followers and 4,447 subscribers across all 50 states and 94 countries who remain thirsty for the power of a great book.

There are no Substack paywalls here. Everything remains open because the heart of this work is community, conversation, and shared discovery.

If these gatherings, essays, and exchanges enrich your life, I invite you to join us as a free subscriber or as a paid supporter ($6.00/month or $60.00/yr). Paid support helps me offer small writer fees to contributing voices like Marc Friedman whose work deepens the conversations we hold.

Your presence matters. Your support keeps this space alive. And your generosity, even a bit of coffeehouse love for a dirty chai, helps us continue exploring together, page by page.