The Five Books Cal Newport Read In January 2023

00:00:00.000 | All right, Jesse, we like to talk about each month.

00:00:04.280 | The books I read the last month, long time listeners know my goal is to read five books

00:00:09.160 | per month.

00:00:10.160 | So we're in February now.

00:00:11.680 | So we will talk about the five books I read in January, 2023.

00:00:19.840 | The first one was called sitting by the mini bay, my life and building model docks by Dwayne

00:00:27.080 | Johnson.

00:00:28.080 | It's a surprising twist, surprising turn by him.

00:00:32.800 | It has over 50 pages of photos.

00:00:35.320 | He's shirtless in most of them.

00:00:36.920 | Interesting.

00:00:37.920 | He builds his mock docs shirtless.

00:00:39.520 | So there you go.

00:00:42.120 | Now what did I read?

00:00:43.120 | All right, let's go through this quickly.

00:00:44.120 | Book number one, a thousand brains by Jeff Hawkins.

00:00:48.320 | So this is a new theory about how the cortex helps create human consciousness and intelligence.

00:00:55.760 | Jeff Hopkins is a former tech executive who put all of his fortune into trying to figure

00:01:00.200 | out how the brain works and then build intelligent machines using this research.

00:01:05.240 | This is his latest book with his latest findings.

00:01:08.600 | If if ever there's like Reese terminator style character who comes back from the future to

00:01:12.880 | prevent Skynet from going online, it's probably looking for Jeff Hawkins.

00:01:16.160 | Let's be honest about that.

00:01:17.520 | All right.

00:01:18.520 | I also read the nineties by Chuck Klosterman.

00:01:22.080 | So Klosterman writes these books where I don't know if you've ever seen a Klosterman book,

00:01:25.920 | but he's been doing these more recently.

00:01:27.360 | Like the nineties is just looking at the nineties and it's just all these different smart cultural

00:01:32.720 | critiques about different aspects of the nineties, which is when you and I were kids.

00:01:36.040 | It was good.

00:01:37.040 | Yeah.

00:01:38.040 | I've heard it was really good on tape.

00:01:39.720 | I read the physical version.

00:01:41.600 | I enjoyed it.

00:01:42.600 | I mean, it helps.

00:01:43.600 | So I grew up then, but actually I might lend it to you.

00:01:44.840 | I think you would like it.

00:01:45.840 | Any examples?

00:01:47.200 | I mean, I think the music stuff is interesting.

00:01:50.760 | Yeah.

00:01:51.760 | I mean, I was really deep on really what was happening behind the scenes with grunge and

00:01:56.680 | these musicians and the whole selling out culture that Gen X had created and how that

00:02:03.360 | clashed against the commercial imperatives of music.

00:02:05.680 | I actually learned a lot about like Kurt Cobain, for example.

00:02:10.320 | Interesting.

00:02:11.320 | It doesn't make me think of, I don't look back after I read this book and say, man, I

00:02:13.920 | wish I could go back to the nineties.

00:02:16.040 | It's an interesting time and it's interesting to think about, but it doesn't make me want

00:02:19.520 | to go back.

00:02:20.520 | I'm like, I'm going to find out that you're the 70 show.

00:02:23.200 | So when we were growing up in the nineties, there's a show called the 70 show, which was

00:02:26.680 | a sitcom about life in the seventies.

00:02:28.360 | Yeah.

00:02:29.360 | Well now we're 30 years, 20 or 30 years out of the nineties.

00:02:32.100 | They're doing a new show called the 90 show.

00:02:34.240 | Yeah.

00:02:35.240 | Cause when we were growing up in the nineties, the seventies was as far from us as the nineties

00:02:39.760 | are far from people who are kids today.

00:02:42.520 | So our childhood is now going to be the target of the nostalgic retrospective show.

00:02:47.800 | It was a good time to be a New York Yankee fan if you're, yeah, late nineties.

00:02:52.000 | Yeah.

00:02:53.000 | All right.

00:02:54.000 | Uh, then I read a quite a good thriller, actually.

00:02:56.440 | Robin Cook's very first thriller coma in the 1970s, straight up one of the first medical

00:03:04.600 | thrillers.

00:03:05.600 | So him and Crichton were both working on this, but, uh, cook was, I believe he got to the

00:03:09.480 | punch first and it's, you know, it's creepy as hell.

00:03:13.400 | Like in the end there's coma patients, they're being put into comas surreptitiously.

00:03:17.680 | So they could harvest their organs, not the spoiler alert.

00:03:20.520 | Um, really well written.

00:03:22.160 | The interesting thing about it, unlike some modern thrillers is it's, I don't know, the

00:03:27.640 | last third before you get to any actual, I am being chased like any, I mean, the first

00:03:34.240 | two thirds of the book is really this new resident sort of starting to unravel the conspiracy

00:03:39.080 | and, and doing investigations.

00:03:41.280 | And the main stakes are, you know, her supervisors at the hospital are mad at her or that if

00:03:46.520 | she's not at round, she might get in trouble.

00:03:48.200 | So it's, and yet it still works.

00:03:49.760 | Uh, nowadays a modern thriller, it's, you know, the second page, the shark is being

00:03:55.240 | shot at you from the cannon and you have to kill it with a laser sword.

00:03:59.080 | You know, it gets right into it.

00:04:00.280 | So different time, but great book.

00:04:01.840 | When you read thrillers, you breeze through them.

00:04:04.160 | Um, I'm not, I'm not a fast reader.

00:04:08.400 | My wife is a fast reader.

00:04:10.000 | When she reads novels, she's like, I'm just, because I read a lot of nonfiction and write

00:04:13.720 | a lot of nonfiction.

00:04:14.720 | It's hard for me to speed up.

00:04:16.160 | So I'm the guy reading that's thinking, okay, well, interesting.

00:04:19.520 | They referenced the computer mainframe in chapter two, and they noted that it was using

00:04:24.200 | hexadecimal and now we're in chapter four.

00:04:26.440 | And I'm wondering, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm reading these thrillers like I'm studying

00:04:30.520 | Proust, which is probably not the fastest way to do it.

00:04:33.720 | When you say you're not fast, are you really fast?

00:04:36.400 | I don't read these books very fast.

00:04:38.400 | I'm not, I'm not a speed reader or not.

00:04:40.560 | I'm not even like a fast reader.

00:04:41.560 | I go too slow because I'm, my mind always wants to understand everything and fit everything

00:04:45.220 | into, into I'm going to what Jeff Hawkins at a thousand brains would call reference

00:04:49.480 | frames.

00:04:50.480 | My brain, that book helped me understand my own brain.

00:04:52.440 | I have like an overactive reference frame system.

00:04:55.200 | Everything I encounter has to be fit into these frames and I'm incredibly unhappy until

00:04:58.520 | it is.

00:04:59.520 | So I can't read things fast.

00:05:00.520 | I can't have loose ends.

00:05:01.520 | I need to, okay, here's this person, here's the building, here's the rooms in the building.

00:05:04.960 | Like it's very useful when it comes time to solve math proofs or write things, but

00:05:09.560 | it, I can't, I'm just physically uncomfortable.

00:05:13.520 | If it doesn't bother my wife at all, if she's like, Oh, I don't remember if like, Oh, who's

00:05:19.240 | this guy?

00:05:20.240 | Was he dead?

00:05:21.240 | Or, you know, I'm like, no, no, I need to know like exactly his, like, who did he connect

00:05:24.320 | to?

00:05:25.320 | How is this house laid out?

00:05:26.660 | So I can't read fast.

00:05:27.660 | I mean, you're right.

00:05:29.540 | Maybe it's fast compared to depends on the relative.

00:05:33.200 | One more quick question about this.

00:05:34.620 | When you read a 10 page New York article, how long does it usually take you?

00:05:39.320 | A while.

00:05:40.320 | If I read like a standard, because you know, I always try to read at least one article

00:05:43.100 | from the magazine each week when it comes out.

00:05:46.020 | Half an hour.

00:05:47.020 | Yeah.

00:05:48.020 | Okay.

00:05:49.020 | Like I'll read it in the morning sometimes for the kids get up and it will take the whole

00:05:50.520 | time and sometimes I'll have to come back to it.

00:05:52.680 | Yeah.

00:05:53.680 | Because I'm like every, because, but I'll come away and be able to tell you everything

00:05:56.440 | that happened at New Yorker article, some of the stylistic choices of the author, you

00:06:00.240 | know and I pulled out like two second order theories that we could potentially talk about

00:06:04.320 | on the show.

00:06:05.320 | So it's like a very cognitively involved process for me when I'm reading.

00:06:10.040 | I'm a machine for turning text into a connected internally consistent theories and ideas.

00:06:16.320 | Like that's what I am.

00:06:17.320 | I've been like bred in a lab to do that.

00:06:20.080 | All right.

00:06:21.080 | Next.

00:06:22.080 | This is not really a, these aren't, neither of these are really books, but I just read

00:06:24.800 | them back to back because one influenced the other.

00:06:27.280 | I read this over Martin Luther King weekend was a Thoreau's on civil disobedience.

00:06:33.880 | And then Martin Luther King's letter from a Birmingham jail, the latter of course inspired

00:06:39.020 | by and pulling from the former.

00:06:40.320 | So I thought it'd be interesting to read those, read those back to back MLKs I think is much

00:06:45.320 | better than Thoreau's.

00:06:46.320 | I mean, I get Thoreau's at the time there.

00:06:48.200 | I mean, obviously it was an innovative thought.

00:06:50.720 | Gandhi pulled from an MLK pulled from it but doesn't age as well.

00:06:55.200 | And in part because he created a world that's been more normalized.

00:06:57.840 | So it doesn't seem as, as retroactive, but it's, you know I'm not going to pay my tax

00:07:03.880 | until my friend comes like three hours later and pays for me to get out of my small jail

00:07:08.400 | in the town where I'm related to everybody.

00:07:09.920 | It just feels very different.

00:07:11.240 | An MLK as a rhetor, rhetorician is so good.

00:07:16.720 | Just his ability to make an argument and to inject a sort of a humanity into it.

00:07:22.520 | Yet it's still just rock solid.

00:07:24.600 | This clicks to this, this sort of inevitable logic with emotion.

00:07:29.160 | I mean, just absolute once in a century type ability.

00:07:33.520 | So you read these back to back and Thoreau, I mean, I love Thoreau.

00:07:38.120 | Thoreau is very influential to me, but you see the, the person who's really throwing

00:07:42.800 | the 105 mile per hour fastballs MLK there.

00:07:46.640 | Not Thoreau.

00:07:48.920 | And then the last was well, I don't know how many people are going to follow me up on this

00:07:53.040 | recommendation.

00:07:54.040 | The Feynman lectures on computation.

00:07:56.200 | There's a book form collection of a series of lectures that Richard Feynman gave at Caltech

00:08:00.760 | about computation.

00:08:03.300 | And I pulled from it before for various classes I taught, but I read that right at the beginning

00:08:07.880 | of January because I didn't teach last semester.

00:08:09.960 | I was on leave.

00:08:11.360 | And then before that was summer.

00:08:12.360 | So I hadn't been in a classroom since May, 2020, and I wanted to get back in the mood.

00:08:16.720 | So I was like, all right, I'm going to read Feynman's lectures on computation, just to

00:08:20.720 | get back in the computer science, the pedagogical Feynman's a physicist, not a computer scientist.

00:08:25.840 | And he just, so he comes at these things like with really originality and new takes.

00:08:30.000 | I just thought it would put me back in the mood of, you know, Hey, let's explain things

00:08:34.280 | to people in useful ways.

00:08:36.000 | It was pretty good.

00:08:37.000 | Like 50% of the stuff I really loved reading about 20%, I'd know it so well, I teach it

00:08:43.400 | and the fields advanced as Feynman wrote it.

00:08:45.440 | I'm like, this is like a worst version of it.

00:08:47.240 | And then the other, whatever percent is left was really just physics stuff.

00:08:51.240 | I didn't care about the stupid reversible circuit stuff.

00:08:55.600 | It's like, I don't need to hear any more about reversible circuits, but like his information

00:08:58.320 | theory and coding theory chapter is fantastic.

00:09:01.280 | So there you go.

00:09:02.280 | I don't know how many people will take me up on that last recommendation, but the Feynman

00:09:04.520 | lectures on computation doesn't move as fast as coma by Robin cook.

00:09:11.040 | It's not the similar genre, but I enjoyed it.

00:09:13.640 | [outro music]

The Five Books Cal Newport Read In January 2023

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