Hey everybody and welcome to the Friday wrap-up on the streamlined solopreneur, a short episode where I talk about three things.
What's on my mind this week, recommended reading and recommended media.
This is the show that helps you automate your business so you can take time off worry-free.
And hopefully this curation will help you think more about your systems and your time.
I'm your host, Joe Casabona, and here's what's on my mind for June 5th, 2026.
First, what's the point of summarizing everything?
I wrote about this back in December.
I called it my AI manifesto.
But recently I've gotten pitched on a number of services that claim to let you read more with summaries,
which isn't true for a bunch of reasons.
I mean, first of all, the amount of words that you read is,
is going to be the same, right?
Like just if I read 10, 100 word summaries or a 1,000 word passage that is not reading more.
But that's not what they mean, and I know that, right?
The real problem is that reading summaries isn't the same as reading source.
And I'll put it to you this way.
Every day, as I record this, it's the last day of school.
So every day for the past 10 months, I have asked my kids, how was school?
And what I will generally get is what you could generously call a summary.
They would tell me things they remember best, like we played, and I ate lunch, and I had library.
And while I get these short reports daily, I don't really understand.
what a day in the life of my third grader is like or what a day in the life of my kindergartner is like.
I don't get that until I go to the parent-teacher conference where I actually get the full picture
and context of what my kids' school life actually looks like.
So that is the summary from my children, the things that they remember the most,
versus the actual curriculum and how my kids behave in school from the primary source, their teacher.
With some or easy, you get a peek.
Like I just said, you don't get the full story.
And I think you do a great disservice to yourself when you do not read the full text of something.
When you don't watch the full video.
It shows that you don't care to take the time to fully learn.
consume or enjoy something.
And I'll put it to you a different way, right?
Think about the difference between reading a summary of a movie and watching the movie.
Sure, you know what happens, but you lose the experience.
And this is the experience of how you react to something emotionally and consume it as it's
happening and wonder what's going to happen.
But you also lose the shared experience, right?
No one is going to be like, oh, you read the summary of Breaking Bad?
Let's talk about it.
They're going to be like, watch Breaking Bad.
I picked Breaking Bad because in my youth I read the summary of what happened in Breaking Bad.
And I will never say that I've watched Breaking Bad.
So, yes, you know what happens, but you lose the experience, you lose the emotional impact.
You don't get insights or comparisons that you can use in your.
life. This is why we consume stories, right? Because they give us something more than just
knowing the facts of what happened. Right. And sometimes this is fine. If I can't stay up late
enough to watch the full Yankee game, I will watch the highlights. I'll get the score.
Because all I care in that situation is what happened. I'll watch the highlights for a cool place,
right? But
the emotional impact
of watching it live is way,
way better.
And I know what you're thinking, right? I kind of
just alluded to this.
Yes, consume the primary source for certain things.
But what about podcasts or
business books where there's a lot of fluff?
And I get that.
And I would say that you should opt to
skip over parts
rather than summarize the entire work.
I include chapter markers in most of my podcast episodes for that reason,
because you might not be interested in my thoughts on summarizing.
You might not care about Ben Sasse or Lou Gehrig.
And so you can skip around to the parts that matter to you,
listen to those full segments, and get the full context.
If there's a chapter in a book that feels like it's getting long, I skim it.
I did this a lot with the creative act.
I liked most of the book, but some parts just weren't for me.
And so I skimmed.
I got, you know, I did what I could to get what Rick Rubin was saying.
But I moved on to the chapters that mattered to me.
That doesn't work in a fiction book, but like in business books or self-help books or whatever,
it probably does work.
And if you find yourself doing that a lot, the content probably isn't worth consuming.
And if it's not worth consuming, then a summary isn't worth it either.
I tried using the blinkist service for a while.
You know what I remember from the blinks, the 15 minutes or less summaries that I listened to?
Almost nothing.
Honest to God, I can't even tell you what the last blink I listened to,
was because you're not engaged in the content. You are just listening to someone give you the
main points which are not reinforced by stories, which are not reinforced by evidence. And that doesn't
stick. I know a lot of people turn to this summarization thing because there's not enough time
to do everything they want. There's not enough time to read all the books they want,
watch all the movies they want. We are in a golden
an age of television.
But unlike Neo from the Matrix, just downloading the information doesn't mean we know
the information.
It doesn't mean we understand the topic.
And I would rather spend two weeks reading one thing and having it stick than read 14
summaries that I'm going to forget.
Let me know what you think about this.
I'd love to hear it.
I've talked to people who are like, oh, I summarize everything now.
And I'm like, so you don't, you know, there's a Bo Burnham quote, because this is the other thing, right?
Like summaries remove important contexts and supporting arguments and stories that the original creator clearly thought were important, right?
I mentioned this.
But more importantly, summaries rob us of the ability to form our own opinion of the work.
And that makes me think of a Bo Burnham joke, right?
He says, I don't want to get political.
I only know my ideas of other people's ideas.
And this is what's happening.
Especially if you're using a large language model to summarize stuff for you,
you are getting the primary information through the lens of a word calculator.
I would rather read one primary source than 14 summaries.
So again, let me know what you think over at streamlinedfeedback.com.
I'd love to hear your thoughts.
I feel very strongly about this.
When you summarize everything, you become a tourist in your own life.
You don't experience anything anymore.
You just read about the experiences.
All right.
Moving on. To recommended reading. Speaking of experiences. My recommended reading for this week is from the dispatch. It's called Ben Sass is teaching us how to die and live well. And this is a heavy read for a few reasons. Ben Sass is a relatively young man. He's in his 50s. He has teenagers and he's dying of cancer. I think he has five different types of cancer. I think he has five different types of
answer. And he's doing it in public, which good for him. I mean, the strength and character
he's showing is incredible, in my opinion. But my recommendation of this piece also feels a little
bit charged. And I don't think it should feel charged. But Ben Sass was a Republican senator.
He also spoke out against Donald Trump, despite being a member of the same party, and he weathered the personal attacks he faced from the president for it.
His Christianity guides everything he does.
And so, if any of that bothers you, that's fine.
But I think this is worth reading for a bunch of reasons.
the way that Ben Sass has handled his public life is deeply admirable to me.
He's facing death with poise and grace.
Way more poise and grace than I think, you know, I don't, I fancy myself as not a coward,
and I feel like this would make me a coward.
and Ben Sass is being very brave.
It also seems like he's always said what he believed was right,
despite the ramifications.
I don't know him personally,
but he seems very guided by principles.
And I think that he would attribute a lot of that to his faith.
And this is something that we're seeing alarmingly little of in public servants.
In this piece, he also talks about what really matters a lot, right?
Spending our time wisely, something I have dedicated my career to at this point.
And being present with our families, especially if you have young kids.
He says, you know, at one point the interviewer asked him, like, who should.
run for public office. And he said, if you have small kids, you shouldn't. It takes away so much time from
them. I've designed my business to maximize time with my family. As I record this week,
it's the last week of school. And I have barely been in the office because I've been at the school
doing fun extra, like, you know, end of the year activities with my kids, field days. And, and,
And my oldest has like a fake auction where they spend the money they earned for good behavior
or whatever.
And it was so much fun.
I'm taking a half day today because they have a half day and we're going to go to lunch
and do a bunch of fun stuff to celebrate the end of school in the beginning of summer.
I've designed my business to maximize time with my family.
And this is something I learned from my father who would leave for work at 5.8.
so that he got into his job near the city, New York City, by 7 a.m.
So that he could leave at 3 and be home for dinner with all of us.
Or go to our games, our plays, whatever extracurricular activities we had, he was there.
There were four of us.
And my parents seemed to be at all of the things that we did.
And the big reason I want to share this is because I think it's easy to think you'll always have more time.
I'll just do this thing for my business and I'll spend, you know, I'll go to the next game.
Or you're at the playground checking your email or trying to steal some work while you're playing a board game with your kids.
I have been guilty of that and I try really hard not to do it anymore.
And when my kids see me on my phone, they know that they can take it out of my hand without getting in trouble and hide it when I am supposed to be spending time with them.
So I think it's easy to think you'll always have more time.
But among other things in this piece, Ben Sass is reminding us and showing us to take advantage of what time.
we have now.
All right, let's move over to recommended media.
I really thought about just doing like a really happy,
you know, like that news, like, recency effect thing.
But this week, we also celebrated Lou Gehrig Day across baseball,
a day to raise awareness and money for research to help put an end to ALS,
known as Lou Gehrig's disease.
And, you know, it's like a really terrible disease that, like, it basically paralyzes your body from what I understand.
And so for this week's recommended media, I want to share his luckiest man speech.
In his last public appearance, he gives what I, what I believe, is one of the most famous sports speeches ever, if not just one of the most famous, let's say American speeches ever.
It's short. I think the video I share is like a minute and change. The entire speech wasn't recorded.
But sticking with this week's apparent theme, Gary shows us that it's not how much time you have on this earth, but it's how you spend that time.
And he was diagnosed in his 30s. And he considered himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.
forgetting to play a game for a living.
And, you know, nearly 100 years after he was born,
we still remember and listen to this speech every year.
All right.
Well, that's it for this pretty heavy version.
Or, yeah, a pretty heavy version of the Friday wrap-up.
But I think there was a lot of really important things in here.
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should. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, I hope you find some space in your weekend.