Erik Michielsen: Where did your passion for reading originate?

Hammans Stallings: When I was in summer camp, I was a kid, I would read during our kind of required, hour long, kind of time out. So, I think reading for escape was kind of an early -- an early thing that -- that I had. I'd say later on I realized that reading was a way to get in the minds of people who I weren’t necessarily going to be around. So, I think about, say, a great theorist or an academic or a great writer. I can't necessarily have a conversation with them. They've got to be alive, they need to be nearby. The field that they are expert in may not be big enough for me to sort of participate in it in an active, but through a book or through written word, you can have a conversation and learn a lot about something. Maybe it's not a conversation so much as it is you can follow their thought process. And so, that in itself is kind of exciting to me, but um, I’m very curious about learning new fields and increasingly, you know, a lot of the most common things and so, you end up kind of reading the periphery or in areas that -- there's probably not very many people in the world who are really thinking about. And so, reading is a way to kind of traverse the distance problem.