The Five Books Cal Newport Read In February 2023

00:00:00.000 | All right, final segment, the five books I read in February 2023.

00:00:04.880 | As long time listeners know, I try to read five books a month and I report on what those

00:00:09.800 | books are here on the podcast.

00:00:11.920 | All right, so what did I read in February?

00:00:15.120 | Number one, The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick.

00:00:21.680 | This was roughly speaking a popular history of the Royal Society in London.

00:00:28.440 | More generally speaking, it was a book about the rise of the Enlightenment scientific mindset.

00:00:36.560 | Dolnick makes this point, but a lot of other authors make this point as well.

00:00:39.580 | Isaac Newton was at a turning point.

00:00:41.680 | Isaac Newton was born and came up in a world that was connected more to Greek thought and

00:00:46.000 | mythological thought.

00:00:48.040 | And by the time he died, we were in a world that had a more empirical mathematical approach

00:00:53.880 | to understanding the world.

00:00:55.680 | I love these type of histories.

00:00:56.920 | It's a very readable book, short chapters, it moves pretty quick.

00:01:01.160 | Not as deep as some other histories I've read on this, but had a lot of good information.

00:01:05.000 | So a lot of London in this episode.

00:01:08.040 | Yeah.

00:01:09.040 | Two questions from London.

00:01:10.040 | Two questions from London, a book about London.

00:01:14.160 | You know why?

00:01:15.160 | It's because I am, that article we talked about last week in the Financial Times, obviously

00:01:19.640 | that's a London based publication.

00:01:21.400 | So like last week I was killing it in the UK.

00:01:24.160 | This podcast, number one technology podcast in the UK, like number 30 overall podcast

00:01:31.760 | in the UK.

00:01:33.160 | Deep Work at Amazon UK was ranked like 60.

00:01:38.600 | That's so good.

00:01:39.600 | Right?

00:01:40.600 | So we've been killing it in the UK.

00:01:41.600 | So as you can see, we're pushing all of our content to be UK centric.

00:01:44.680 | There's a lot of good golf courses around London.

00:01:46.720 | That's true.

00:01:47.720 | We need a podcast out of there.

00:01:50.840 | All right.

00:01:51.840 | I also read Wandering Home by Bill McKibben.

00:01:53.560 | I read that years and years ago, but I had a copy of my library.

00:01:57.040 | So I went back and read it and loved it.

00:01:59.200 | Very nostalgic.

00:02:00.200 | I really remember reading that book in grad school.

00:02:03.640 | Bill McKibben, who I really like, I interviewed him for a New Yorker piece a couple of years

00:02:07.120 | ago.

00:02:08.120 | He wrote this cool book where he walked from his house in Ripton, Vermont, which is sort

00:02:14.000 | of one Valley over from Lake Champlain in Western Vermont to his house in the Adirondacks.

00:02:21.140 | So the McKibben story is that he quit the New Yorker and moved to a cabin.

00:02:27.640 | It was really like a rundown house.

00:02:29.720 | Him and his wife, Susan Halperin, who's an excellent journalist, they moved to this house

00:02:35.360 | in the Adirondacks.

00:02:36.640 | And then once they had their kid, they realized kids need a school to go to.

00:02:40.360 | So they moved across Lake Champlain to Ripton, Vermont, which I actually visited there last

00:02:44.080 | summer.

00:02:45.080 | It's one south of Lincoln.

00:02:47.600 | It's these cool green mountain towns that are up at elevation and really quaint.

00:02:52.760 | He walked from Ripton to the old house, the Adirondacks.

00:02:57.840 | He had someone row him across Lake Champlain.

00:03:02.160 | And in doing so, he visited all these places and talked a lot about the type of things

00:03:07.320 | he writes about in Deep Economy.

00:03:12.080 | Sustainable commercial endeavor, etc.

00:03:16.240 | It was a really cool book, really nostalgic.

00:03:18.760 | Makes you want to just move to Vermont and drink Otter Creek beer and hang out at Middlebury.

00:03:25.360 | Another book I read, you'd appreciate this one, Jesse, America's Game by Michael McCambridge,

00:03:29.520 | the history of the NFL.

00:03:31.920 | The long book.

00:03:33.920 | I read it for, I'm in a dad book group that only reads sports books.

00:03:38.340 | It's a lot of like journalists and stuff that we just don't want to read anything that's

00:03:43.520 | too close to our work.

00:03:45.720 | Everything is too close to home, so we read sports books.

00:03:47.520 | I like that.

00:03:49.600 | I know a lot about the history of the NFL now, at least up until 2005, when this book

00:03:55.280 | came out.

00:03:56.280 | In the early days, like back during Lombardi, the Canadian Football League was a big, it

00:04:01.760 | was definitely competitive.

00:04:03.060 | People would go over there and-

00:04:04.720 | Not mentioned at all in this book.

00:04:06.280 | Really?

00:04:07.280 | Yeah.

00:04:08.280 | That's an interesting oversight.

00:04:09.280 | Matt Dogg had his historian on earlier in the week and they were actually talking about

00:04:12.000 | that because somebody died.

00:04:13.520 | Michael McCambridge, man, you missed the big storyline here.

00:04:19.200 | I also read The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell.

00:04:25.400 | The philosopher, mathematician Bertrand Russell wrote this book.

00:04:29.360 | This would have been in like 19, I think it's like 1919 or something like that, maybe 1930,

00:04:34.760 | somewhere in that period, maybe a little later than that.

00:04:37.840 | I might be messing it up.

00:04:38.840 | I mean, he died in the, he died remarkably late.

00:04:41.880 | He lived a long time.

00:04:43.720 | I'm going to say the 1930s.

00:04:44.720 | Anyways, there's a really nice new edition of this book that I found at Barnes and Noble.

00:04:49.680 | And so I was like, okay, I got to read this.

00:04:51.240 | It's like a kind of like a self-help book, but written before people wrote self-help

00:04:55.960 | books and written by an eminent philosopher and mathematician.

00:04:59.200 | And it's him trying to deconstruct and understand the sources of human happiness, as well as

00:05:04.320 | the things that pull away from human happiness and trying to lay out some sort of program

00:05:07.920 | for how you can maximize it in your life.

00:05:10.760 | This is what philosophers used to do.

00:05:13.480 | This is why I really dislike this tendency we have for, especially the very online types

00:05:18.280 | to be very dismissive about, well, their self-help.

00:05:22.680 | They're a guru where you have to like throw this disclaimer at the front of everything

00:05:26.280 | you write.

00:05:27.280 | We're like, ah, I'm no guru.

00:05:28.280 | I'm not.

00:05:29.280 | In fact, I'm, I'm terrible.

00:05:30.280 | And, and I'm, I'm, I can barely walk and I'm not giving any advice.

00:05:33.960 | And you really think people are going to applaud, like there's all these gurus who are, you

00:05:37.200 | know, preying on people.

00:05:38.280 | But look, it used to be professional thinkers and philosophers were like, this is one of

00:05:41.360 | the things I want to do is try to think through big questions from life and take my swing.

00:05:46.680 | So good for Russell for doing it.

00:05:48.180 | Very readable.

00:05:49.400 | There's some anachronisms in it, but actually otherwise reads as a pretty modern book.

00:05:53.120 | A lot of similar concepts to the deep life stuff that you talk about.

00:05:56.400 | There's some, yeah, yeah.

00:05:57.400 | I mean, I get like getting outside and just that stuff, but also a lot of psychological

00:06:00.920 | stuff like jealousy and pride and trying to understand.

00:06:05.520 | It's interesting.

00:06:06.520 | And so it's kind of mental healthy, a lot of it, the habits of mind that can really

00:06:12.360 | pull you down.

00:06:13.360 | I mean, it actually reads pretty relevant, but it is an issue of mine.

00:06:16.040 | Is this like, I'm not impressed by people who have to put these long disclaimers about

00:06:21.440 | like, I'm not a guru.

00:06:23.240 | Who's going to tell you exactly how to live your life.

00:06:25.120 | I mean, where are these gurus who are trying to tell people exactly how to live their life?

00:06:29.520 | I think smart people should take swings at here's a big question.

00:06:33.880 | Let me take a swing at like how you might answer it.

00:06:36.440 | People are smart.

00:06:37.760 | They will adapt it to their own circumstances.

00:06:39.920 | They will discount the obvious caveats, you know, this weird whatever it is, negative

00:06:49.440 | reaction that sort of very online elite types have to trying to be instructive or like to

00:06:55.880 | tackle big questions.

00:06:57.000 | I don't think it's I don't think it's healthy.

00:06:58.680 | It's similar in sports.

00:06:59.680 | How they always say, oh, the naysayers say, yeah, X, Y, Z.

00:07:03.280 | I think in online culture, it's very safe to be a naysayer because you'd be applauded

00:07:06.960 | for your world weary critiques.

00:07:08.440 | People are like, oh, that's a good, I didn't see that angle of critique and there's no

00:07:12.200 | real risk.

00:07:13.200 | Yeah, being a little bit too critical.

00:07:14.680 | I like, well, you know, sophisticated people are critical, but you're really opening yourself

00:07:19.120 | up.

00:07:20.120 | If you say, this is my thoughts about this or like, this is my philosophy for how you

00:07:25.000 | should do something.

00:07:26.000 | I mean, I think it's, you know, it's why I've sold a lot of books is because I'm not online.

00:07:29.520 | So I don't care.

00:07:30.760 | It's like, look, I think this is interesting.

00:07:32.760 | I loved reading this stuff.

00:07:33.760 | I love books like Bertrand Russell's Conquest of Happiness.

00:07:36.400 | Like let's just get after it.

00:07:37.840 | And I don't care.

00:07:39.360 | So I guess more books for me if everyone else is afraid of it.

00:07:41.920 | A lot of smart people who could be writing really interesting, cool, reflective books

00:07:45.360 | aren't because they don't want to get yelled at on Twitter.

00:07:47.240 | So hey, more books for us.

00:07:51.120 | Final book I read part of us kind of a holdover from Thriller December Rising Sun by Michael

00:07:56.760 | Crichton.

00:07:57.760 | I'm sure I read that at some point when I was a kid, but I found the paperback in a

00:08:03.480 | newspaper back.

00:08:04.480 | And so I read it well constructed sort of murder mystery thriller.

00:08:09.200 | It's two detectives.

00:08:10.200 | They made a movie about this with Sean Connery and God, who was the other person?

00:08:16.040 | Was it Wesley Snipes?

00:08:17.040 | I think it was.

00:08:18.040 | I saw that movie like 30 years ago.

00:08:19.320 | Yeah.

00:08:20.320 | I have to go back and watch the movie.

00:08:21.320 | I mean, essentially there it's, it's a detective thriller, right?

00:08:25.760 | These are detectives and they're trying to figure out a murder.

00:08:28.000 | And then there's some like Crichton high tech stuff.

00:08:30.280 | The thing I, I didn't really realize this about Crichton until more recently.

00:08:34.640 | He got really reactionary.

00:08:37.200 | This was like a pretty like reactionary kind of anti-Japanese book.

00:08:41.040 | Oh, really?

00:08:42.040 | Yeah.

00:08:43.040 | Like, he was very worried, clearly very worried about the economic influence of at the then,

00:08:48.800 | I guess, Japan had this massive like outsized economic influence.

00:08:53.120 | Not very nice to Japanese people.

00:08:54.960 | I'm thinking about disclosure.

00:08:55.960 | I'm thinking about state of fear.

00:08:57.520 | I was like, Oh, he kind of became curmudgeonly his nineties.

00:09:01.920 | So it's, it's, it is pretty reactionary.

00:09:05.680 | He just works this stuff into his book, but but still a good murder, good murder mystery.

00:09:11.600 | But it's interesting layer.

00:09:13.560 | Any of these books, audio?

00:09:16.320 | I'm sure they're all, no, none of these were audio.

00:09:18.280 | So you read them all?

00:09:19.280 | I read them all.

00:09:20.280 | Yeah.

00:09:21.280 | Yeah.

00:09:22.280 | I read a lot of audio books recently.

00:09:22.780 | [outro music plays]

The Five Books Cal Newport Read In February 2023

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