The Books Cal Newport Read in April 2022

00:00:00.000 | All right. Well, speaking of books, Jesse, this is the first episode that will air in

00:00:06.640 | April, right? We're recording it. I mean, in May. Yeah. Yeah. We're recording it in

00:00:10.440 | April, but it'll be the first one that we, uh, release in May. And what's our tradition

00:00:15.200 | is the first episode that we either record or release in each month. I, I discussed the

00:00:19.120 | five books I read in the month before, and though it's only the 28th, I have, as is my

00:00:24.480 | habit long since finished my five books for April. So I figure we can, we can talk about

00:00:29.200 | them now in our standard, what I read segment. All right. So in April of 2022, the first

00:00:38.960 | book I read, and we talked about this on the show was the seven story mountain by Thomas

00:00:42.840 | Merton. So you remember, this is the story. It came out in 1948. It was a memoir of Thomas

00:00:50.200 | Merton who had grown up with his artist father, traveling throughout Europe, ended up in the

00:00:56.600 | States, ended up at Columbia, was sort of a intellectual writer, started teaching English

00:01:04.040 | literature classes and dropped everything and became a Trappist monk at the Garden of

00:01:09.160 | Gethsemane Trappist monastery in Kentucky. And the Trappists, if you don't know, are

00:01:13.360 | pretty, pretty, um, far on the aesthetic, no, ascetic end. You know, we're going to,

00:01:21.340 | we're not out there in the community also having jobs and we're not Jesuits that are

00:01:26.140 | also astronomers. It's like, no, we're chopping wood and waking up four times in the middle

00:01:30.720 | of the night to say prayers. So it was about that transition. It's very influential. It's

00:01:36.520 | very influential because it, it, it came out during this post-war doldrums period where

00:01:40.800 | people were adrift and moving to suburbs and getting boring jobs. And so this book of reinvention

00:01:47.640 | and focusing on depth and values in a radical way. And this is a clear example of my notion

00:01:54.240 | of the deep life in action really struck a chord. So I figured I needed to read it because

00:01:58.360 | so much more that's recent is informed by it, whether the author's note or not. Uh,

00:02:03.280 | we talked about it before because I tried to read it on Kindle and I was like, nah,

00:02:06.680 | this book can't be read on Kindle. Uh, I need a hardcover. But instead of just like a normal

00:02:11.120 | person buying a hardcover, I went back and bought a first edition, first printing from

00:02:15.040 | 1948 of the book. I think it really mattered. I think it really helped. I think it really

00:02:19.760 | changed my experience of reading the book. Um, and it's a long one. It's 400 something

00:02:24.480 | pages and in the original hardcover, which are wide pages. And they didn't mess around

00:02:30.120 | with this sort of business book you buy in the airport in the 2000 and twenties, you

00:02:34.760 | know, double spaced lines and giant fonts. They didn't mess around with that back in

00:02:38.920 | the forties, you know, people had time. So the lines are, the lines are small. So it

00:02:44.240 | took me a while to read. Um, but I'm really glad I did. I'm really glad I did. I know

00:02:48.880 | more about Catholic practice now than I ever have before. So I, I recommend it. It is the,

00:02:53.880 | it's a foundational book that so many more self-transformation books, all of the big

00:02:59.000 | self-transformation books that fall in the 20th centuries were informed by seven story

00:03:02.240 | mountain and he's a good writer. All right. So speaking about writing, I then went on

00:03:08.100 | to read Anne Lamott's bird by bird. I had never read that. No, I had read the other

00:03:15.000 | famous writing instruction books. So bird by bird, if you don't know, is Anne Lamott's

00:03:19.120 | book about writing. It's a book about writing now, because as you might expect, I've internalized

00:03:27.120 | a patriarchy. I had read Stephen King's book on writing on writing, probably because

00:03:32.960 | of the, the male gendered gaze was more comfortable for me than the, the, the female gaze or what

00:03:38.200 | have you. But for whatever reason, I had never read bird by bird, but it is right up there

00:03:42.360 | with Stephen King's on writing as one of the two most famous nonfiction books about

00:03:47.240 | writing from the last, whatever, three or four decades. I like Anne Lamott. I mean,

00:03:56.040 | I like her writing. I like her as a person, just her, excuse me, like just her approach

00:04:01.120 | to life. She lives and she's had an interesting, difficult life. And she, I always go deep

00:04:08.320 | stalker mode on, on the houses of writers. And so she bought this cool piece of land

00:04:15.320 | in Northern California that was kind of run down and they slowly converted it over time

00:04:19.960 | into this like Oasis. I love that type of stuff. The book is good. It's focused on fiction

00:04:26.640 | writing and I'll say the main thing I came away with other than Anne Lamott is a great

00:04:31.160 | writer. And the main thing I came away with is fiction writing, I think attracts more

00:04:42.400 | aspiring writers than nonfiction because on paper becoming a success seems easier. And

00:04:50.320 | what I mean by that is when you read bird by bird or you read Stephen King's book and

00:04:56.240 | you read about novel writing, the only real activity you do is sit down at a computer

00:05:00.900 | and write. And so it's all about that, like just sitting down there and writing and overcoming

00:05:06.040 | the psychological fears. So in theory, if you've never written anything before, you

00:05:12.040 | have all of the tools and things you need to potentially write a great novel. You just

00:05:16.920 | have to sit down there and write. Where nonfiction, excuse me, seems more scary, right? It's

00:05:22.320 | like I got to get a book deal first. You don't write nonfiction before you get the book.

00:05:25.600 | I got to go actually talk to people. I got to do interviews. So it seems harder. But

00:05:32.300 | the reality is when you read something like bird by bird, it's like, oh my God, fiction

00:05:35.020 | is so much harder. Like, yeah, yeah, you can just get going, but man, it's just you and

00:05:40.300 | the screen and you have to just craft out of nowhere these characters and narratives

00:05:44.740 | that reveal the human experience and do so with perfect craft because any deviation from

00:05:50.220 | perfect craft is going to ring out. Where in nonfiction, I don't know, you just have

00:05:54.660 | to be competent. I have something to read about. I did research on it. If I just do

00:05:59.940 | the work to do the research and I know how to write in a way that's not going to annoy

00:06:02.700 | people like you can be in the game. So I think this is the allure of National Novel Writing

00:06:08.900 | Month and fiction writing and bird by bird is like, maybe if I just sit there at the

00:06:12.180 | keyboard of mice and men is going to come out. But I think it's way harder. So I'm

00:06:19.300 | glad I'm not a fiction writer. That just seems like it's impossible. It's like trying to

00:06:24.380 | be a screenwriter. Everyone's like, I bet I could do that because I know movies. I movie

00:06:29.040 | seems straightforward and it's impossible. It's impossible to actually like, right, because

00:06:33.980 | everyone can do it, but to do it well, it's like near impossible. So it's a good book.

00:06:37.860 | Makes me glad I'm a nonfiction writer and to all you aspiring writers out there. Nonfiction

00:06:41.720 | is actually way, it's way easier in my opinion to like be a working writer than in fiction.

00:06:46.540 | All right. Then I went on and read some fiction because April had some good weather and good

00:06:52.500 | weather. I like to have fun books to read. So I went and read the Carl Sagan novel contact,

00:07:02.340 | which actually I really enjoyed. So it was a premise of the book was it focused on someone

00:07:07.420 | at SETI, S-E-T-I, search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And Carl Sagan works through

00:07:13.460 | what would happen if we actually did get a signal from an alien civilization. And the

00:07:19.660 | parts I like the best actually is he works through the science of how that would work.

00:07:25.540 | You know, like, okay, it would be a signal on this frequency that corresponds to the

00:07:34.160 | emission frequency of hydrogen. And there would be pulses corresponding to the prime

00:07:42.100 | numbers because that'd be really universal. And then they're using various modulation

00:07:47.260 | screens to encode information into those, into those symbols. And so anyways, I thought

00:07:52.900 | that was real interesting. So I really loved the part where he got in whenever he would

00:07:55.740 | get into the science of like how alien communication would work and, and how we would track it

00:08:00.380 | down. I love those parts, but there was pretty good characters as well. I mean, it was a

00:08:03.940 | good book and I love when scientists write books and they're good. The only nerd comment

00:08:10.700 | I need to make, my apologies to the Sagan estate, actually no apologies, it's not his

00:08:14.740 | fault. It just is a demonstration of how things have changed. So the book takes place like

00:08:21.820 | in 99. And so he gets wrong, he gets right a lot of things. He didn't get the internet

00:08:26.540 | right. So they had instead these like portable fax machines they would carry around that

00:08:31.260 | like would send messages, they would like send and receive messages through portable

00:08:34.180 | fax machines. Like he wasn't quite there on the internet, but, but you know, it was pretty

00:08:39.060 | close. But the, the, the small nerd detail that I noticed is the aliens used for one

00:08:48.540 | of the layers of encoding in their signal phase modulation. And in, in the book Sagan's

00:08:56.380 | like, Oh, we don't phase modulation is something that theoretically you could do, but it's

00:09:00.100 | not something that we use really in like human devices. Like we know about it, but it's just

00:09:05.820 | not something we're used to. Based on my understanding, phase modulation is actually now heavily used

00:09:13.100 | in wireless data protocols, like in particular in 802.11 protocols for access points, like

00:09:18.540 | phase modulations at the core of it. So that was a prediction that was gotten wrong in

00:09:23.260 | the age of wifi phase modulation as well used. So what I'm doing here, Jesse is I'm giving

00:09:28.780 | the people the information they really care about. You know, you cut past the superfluous

00:09:34.740 | and you focus in on what is it that the crowds really care about. And I look, if there's

00:09:40.500 | one thing I will say about deep questions, listeners, they are RF modulation, RF modulation

00:09:47.860 | fans. Yeah. You got us primed up for your comments about Jurassic Park a couple months

00:09:52.060 | ago. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Forget, forget any mistake I said about Jurassic Park,

00:09:57.540 | the overlooking the importance of phase modulation. I mean, let me get going about QAM constellation

00:10:06.020 | encoding. This all came from, by the way, so again, no one cares about this. I'm mainly

00:10:11.100 | a theoretician, but I do theory. I used to do theory about problems that were motivated

00:10:15.800 | by wireless networks. So for my postdoc, for my two years as a postdoc at MIT, I'd left

00:10:21.220 | the theory group and I went up to the network and mobile systems group and learned a lot

00:10:27.420 | about how wireless network technology actually works. So there you go. It finally paid off

00:10:33.780 | in allowing me to do an awesome, cool critique of Carl Sagan. I don't want to say that makes

00:10:39.700 | this book a garbage book, but you know, you're going to get modulation wrong. I mean, I don't

00:10:46.300 | know guys, I don't know what we're doing here. All right. Then I went on and read a book

00:10:50.540 | I found in a little free library at the field where my oldest son was playing little league

00:10:55.660 | called blue latitudes. So this is Tony Horwitz. I'm a big Tony Horwitz booster. He died a

00:11:05.580 | few years ago, like at the age of 60, just tragic, just like heart attack, just boom

00:11:10.060 | streets of DC, you know, fickle finger of fate, which was really tragic. Fascinating

00:11:15.900 | guy. Talk about a writing power couple, by the way. So he married Geraldine Brooks, the

00:11:21.420 | novelist. When he married her, he had a Pulitzer. From his war correspondent reporting, and

00:11:32.060 | then not long after they got married, she got a Pulitzer for one of her novels. I don't

00:11:37.620 | know if it was March or The Crossing. So it's a it's a dual Pulitzer couple, a nonfiction

00:11:43.660 | writer and a novelist. But anyways, I mean, the book is probably his most famous book

00:11:49.300 | is Confederates in the Attic, which is a fantastic book, the first Horwitz book I wrote. But

00:11:53.060 | he does these. These are like nonfiction travelogue type books and blue latitudes. He was tracing

00:11:57.580 | Captain Cook's journeys through the Pacific of the 18th century. And so he's going all

00:12:01.740 | over like remote Pacific islands and all the way up to the Aleutian Islands in Alaska.

00:12:06.340 | And he's really good at this travel writing because he's a Pulitzer Prize winning war

00:12:10.780 | correspondent. So he knows how to go to these remote, interesting places and insert himself

00:12:18.180 | into interesting situations and find interesting people. He's he's he's twitchy and high energy

00:12:23.860 | and is just constantly trying to find places to go and people to meet. And and he's a good.

00:12:28.780 | So it's it's interesting. He does interesting things. And so in this book, he's doing interesting

00:12:33.700 | things. He's on these islands you've never heard of meeting these characters who he who

00:12:38.500 | capture so interestingly, like the the life on these islands and the impact of colonialism,

00:12:44.340 | etc. written beautifully and just interleaving with the story of Captain Cook. Great book,

00:12:50.580 | but long. It's another 450 pager. So it took me a while. It took me a while. So I had to

00:12:56.660 | 450 pagers this month. So I was surprised by how long that took. The final book I read.

00:13:02.700 | It's a bit of an odd one. This is a deep pole. Uncle Petros and gold blocks conjecture. As

00:13:12.740 | a long process by which I came to this book. It is a novel written by a mathematician,

00:13:19.700 | a Greek mathematician named Apostolos Doxias. So between this and Sagan, as you can see,

00:13:25.860 | I'm on a kick of scientists writing books about their field. And the book is about it's

00:13:32.060 | like a young boy and his uncle and his uncle was like this super math prodigy who became

00:13:38.180 | obsessed with trying to solve gold box conjecture. Which was at the time one of the three big

00:13:44.940 | famous number theory conjectures that hadn't been solved. So the Riemann hypothesis, Fermat's

00:13:49.300 | last theorem and the gold block conjecture. Fermat's has since been proven by Andrew Wiles.

00:13:57.140 | Was the Riemann solved? Can you look that up, Jesse? The Riemann hypothesis. I have

00:14:02.540 | this vague memory of this R-E-I-M-A-N-N. I have this vague memory of this, this eccentric

00:14:11.540 | mathematician George or Goreg or something solved it and didn't even show up. But I might

00:14:17.780 | be thinking about something different. So you have to fact check me on that. Anyways,

00:14:21.180 | Wikipedia says many consider it to be the most important unsolved problem in pure mathematics

00:14:26.460 | in the first paragraph. So what did he, oh, look up, I think he solved Poincare's conjecture.

00:14:47.260 | Maybe that's what he solved. The guy I'm thinking about. So Jesse's going to fact

00:14:54.140 | check that. Yeah. Maybe that's what it was. Originally conjectured by Henry Poincare in

00:15:01.660 | 1904, the theorem conserves spaces that locally look like ordinary three-dimensional space.

00:15:06.540 | Yeah. Was it solved? Attempts to resolve the conjecture drove much progress in the field

00:15:12.700 | of geometric topology during the 20th century. So a guy whose name started with G who solved

00:15:17.500 | it? I'll keep on looking. Yeah. Anyways, the point be there was something famous solved

00:15:23.380 | and the guy was this weird eccentric, I think it was Russian. And he didn't even show up

00:15:27.500 | for, I think he got to give him like a Fields Medal or something. He didn't even show up.

00:15:30.980 | But anyways, this book was sort of about a character like this. So it's a math prodigy

00:15:37.180 | who became obsessed with solving this conjecture. And basically his life fell apart because

00:15:41.420 | of that. And it is from the perspective of his son who kind of uncovers this. And so

00:15:49.700 | it's cool. It's a short book. I wouldn't say there's a lot of sophisticated plot in it.

00:15:55.460 | There's like long periods of just exposition of like, let me just tell you, let me just

00:15:58.580 | summarize my uncle's story. And it kind of just tells the story, but it's really cool

00:16:01.780 | because he puts in a lot of famous figures from logic and number theory and analysis.

00:16:07.620 | So Turing plays a role. Kurt Gödel shows up in the book. He's hanging out with Rajanaman

00:16:17.460 | Hardy at Cambridge. And so it's cool. It's like all these mathematical cameos, not much

00:16:22.780 | really happens, but I love to see specialists in their fields, write fiction about their

00:16:27.980 | fields because I want to do that one day. So maybe that's why I was reading Sagan and

00:16:33.300 | Uncle Petros.

00:16:34.300 | You should have used your French accent.

00:16:37.140 | Yeah. The proper pronunciation is Henry Honkai is how, if you're going to be sophisticated.

00:16:46.620 | You're saying, you're like, that's good. I remember when the guy from Russia saw the

00:16:51.860 | hungry, hungry conjecture. Yeah, that was, that was good. So do we figure out, is that

00:16:58.860 | the thing you solved?

00:17:00.420 | I was reading through the Wikipedia. Wikipedia is unbelievable. Yeah. This one guy tried

00:17:06.260 | to solve in the thirties, but then it was retracted. Bunch of other guys tried in the

00:17:10.340 | fifties and sixties.

00:17:11.340 | Well, I'm sure there's some nerd listening. He's a bigger nerd to me. He will write in

00:17:15.740 | and please do.

00:17:16.740 | An exposition of attempts to prove this conjecture can be found in the book.

00:17:21.420 | Because I'm thinking about.

00:17:22.420 | Care's Prize by George Fizo Spiro.

00:17:26.220 | Because this is what I'm, all right, someone has to write in. There's someone who solved

00:17:30.900 | something hard in the last 10 years, maybe the last 15 years. And his name was George

00:17:35.060 | and he's Russian and he's eccentric. It's not the Ryman hypothesis. It's not, it doesn't

00:17:39.180 | sound like it's the Poncari conjecture. So, all right, someone has to write in and set

00:17:45.500 | us straight.

00:17:46.500 | I got a quick question. So before you would say that you read two chapters a day before

00:17:52.300 | you bumped up to five books a month, right? So what do you think you read? Like four chapters

00:17:58.700 | a day now?

00:17:59.900 | It's uneven. Yeah. So, I mean, part of what happens is you just, when you, you take advantage

00:18:06.860 | of quiet time to like go nuts. Like once you're in the habit of reading, you're looking for

00:18:11.820 | times to kind of go nuts and read. And so some days you don't get that much time in.

00:18:17.140 | You just have your standard times you read. And other days you're like, Ooh, I have, you

00:18:20.700 | know, an half hour. Like the, the kids are with my wife and they're coming home and they

00:18:25.980 | won't be home for a half hour or something. And if it's your default activity, you just,

00:18:30.660 | you lean into it. Like, great. I can really, and once you get into the books and I talked

00:18:34.940 | about this in the podcast last week, that once you're no longer are using your phone

00:18:41.380 | as a default source of distraction. And conversely, you've gotten really into like the books you're

00:18:47.820 | reading and the idea of reading books. Your mind is used to that. You begin to crave it.

00:18:52.580 | It's great. Like, this is what, this is what I want. Like everything slows down. The leisure

00:18:57.580 | is deeper. Your brain gets quiet. Your thoughts get clear. I just really am more and more

00:19:05.940 | of an advocate of this is, this is the medicine people need right now.

00:19:09.980 | Were any of the five audio books? None of those five are audio books. None of

00:19:13.980 | those five are audio books. I'm listening to the, the first book from the expanse series,

00:19:21.900 | sci-fi series. I was listening. I'm listening to that on audio, but it's long. It's a 40

00:19:25.300 | minute book. So I was listening to that off and on throughout. And then I'm also listening

00:19:30.140 | to the Steve Martin's professional memoir, born standing up.

00:19:34.020 | I just finished that actually. Yeah. I mean, I'd read it obviously was influential

00:19:37.100 | in my work, but I read it in 2007 or something. So I don't remember so much. I don't remember.

00:19:43.940 | So I'm enjoying that. I'm almost done with that as well. I'm actually, so I have three

00:19:49.820 | books I'm reading simultaneously right now and I'm pretty close on all three. So like

00:19:54.560 | I'm, once we cross over the May boundary, I'm probably going to be three books in, you

00:20:01.540 | know, by the first week of May. Cause I just kind of, I have a bunch going in parallel

00:20:06.820 | right now. I actually miscounted. So I was on, we were on a little trip to the beach

00:20:10.620 | when I finished the fifth book and I thought it was my fourth. So I had like a lot of other

00:20:14.140 | stuff going. And so then, so then I spread out. It's like, well, let me make progress

00:20:18.900 | in a lot of books so that I can finish them all. So I'm just off schedule now. So like

00:20:22.780 | I'm finishing stuff like halfway through a month and kind of starting the new stuff.

00:20:25.780 | It's just my readings not scheduled with the start of the month basically.

00:20:29.020 | [Music]

The Books Cal Newport Read in April 2022 | Deep Questions Podcast

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