Hello and welcome to The Upgrade, the podcast of a team at LifeHacker, where we help you improve your life one week at a time.

I'm Alice Bradley, editor-in-chief of LifeHacker,

and today joining me is LifeHacker's staff writer Sam Blum.

Hey, Sam.

Hey, Alice.

Jordan is away this week, taking some well-deserved time off,

but he will be back very soon.

Meanwhile, Sam is filling in to help us tackle this week's topic,

which is something neither of us seem to have tackled in quite a long time.

Yes, this week we're learning how to embrace being a beginner again, as well as why we should do so with writer Tom Vanderbilt.

It's the purest form of this Buddhist concept of beginner's mind, really being able to look at the world again with fresh eyes the

way a child might. And I just found that had such a strangely refreshing sort of renewing

quality. Tom is a journalist and contributing editor at Wired UK and Art Forum, as well as a

columnist for Slate Magazine. He's also the best-selling author of several books, including You May Also Like, Taste in an Age of Endless Choice, Traffic, Why We Drive the Way We Do, and what it says about us, and Survival City, Adventures among the Ruins of Atomic America.

Tom's latest book is called Beginners, the Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning,

which is what he joined us to talk about this week.

And, you know, he's got a lot of subtitles in all of his books.

I just want to shout out, Sam, what a good job you did of reading all of those.

Thank you.

Yeah, parentheticals are pretty hard for me sometimes, but...

You did it.

Luckily, I'm not a beginner at reading, so this was less challenging.

...