The Books I Read in February

00:00:05.000 | Alright, so speaking of Deep Living and Productivity, this is the first show that we are recording

00:00:12.000 | in March of 2022. So, as is our tradition, I wanted to do a segment in which I go through

00:00:20.000 | the books I read during the previous month. So, the books I read in February 2022.

00:00:28.000 | As long-time listeners of the show know, I typically aim to read five books per month.

00:00:33.000 | I count books in the month in which I finish them.

00:00:37.000 | So, you have to break that symmetry somehow. That is how I break it.

00:00:40.000 | I'll say, Jesse, this was a weird reading month for me. I have some unusual choices.

00:00:47.000 | It was an unusual month and I was grabbing stuff kind of randomly. So, you'll see, as will the listeners here.

00:00:53.000 | Alright, so let's start with the first book I read in the month. I just grabbed this out of a little free library

00:00:59.000 | here in Tacoma Park and read it in a day or two. It was not a long book.

00:01:02.000 | It was called Living with a Seal by Jesse Itzler. It is a book where Jesse Itzler, who is an entrepreneur,

00:01:11.000 | among other things, I think he worked with like NetJets or one of these jet leasing. Do you know him?

00:01:17.000 | I've read the book, yeah.

00:01:18.000 | You've read the book, okay. So, anyways, he hired who turns out to be David Goggins,

00:01:23.000 | though it's not revealed in the book, to live with him for a month and make him do these terrible intense workouts.

00:01:29.000 | And so, it was interesting. I was interested. I find Goggins to be an interesting character, so I read the book.

00:01:35.000 | I will say, and I don't know how to say this without, this is going to sound a little bit snobbish,

00:01:39.000 | but I'm not that used to this style of ultra accessible nonfiction.

00:01:47.000 | So, there's this style of ultra accessible nonfiction where the chapters are three or four pages long

00:01:54.000 | and it moves at a really fast rate and it's, I don't want to say it's superficial,

00:02:00.000 | but it's just we did this and that and this and it's very compulsively readable.

00:02:04.000 | And I think this book sold really well. And what I realized, and again, there's no way to talk about this

00:02:08.000 | without sounding like a super snob, is that there's a whole genre of nonfiction that's made to be very accessible,

00:02:14.000 | very short chapters. It moves really fast. It's sort of the opposite, I guess, of some of the nonfiction worlds

00:02:22.000 | in which I swim. And so, that was an interesting part about reading this book, was saying,

00:02:27.000 | oh, there is this sort of bubblegum nonfiction world out there. And I think it's good.

00:02:34.000 | That's what I was exposed to. It was an interesting book. All right. Another book I read was Susan Casey's

00:02:41.000 | latest, Voices in the Ocean. So, Susan Casey wrote The Devil's Teeth, which I really like.

00:02:51.000 | This is a book about the, what do they call it, the Faroe or Farallon Islands off of San Francisco.

00:02:56.000 | Anyways, it's one of the great white shark hot spots in the world.

00:03:01.000 | It's just surrounded by great white sharks. They're attracted by the seals, and there's researchers out there

00:03:06.000 | who study them. And she went out there, and it's about the sharks and about the research.

00:03:09.000 | That was great. She wrote The Wave, which I really like, which is about large waves.

00:03:14.000 | But half of the book is her following Laird Hamilton to do big wave surfing. That's another fantastic book.

00:03:19.000 | Anyway, she has this style where what she does is goes on adventures. She meets interesting people

00:03:25.000 | and goes and does interesting things and uses that as the narrative spine for writing about a topic

00:03:30.000 | like great white sharks or large waves. So this was about dolphins. Voices in the Ocean is about dolphins.

00:03:36.000 | And so she goes on various adventures. She goes to travel to see various places where dolphins

00:03:42.000 | are being held in captivity. She goes to the Solomon Islands where there is a dolphin trading going on,

00:03:48.000 | and it's a little bit shady. She likes to put herself in the semi-danger as part of these books.

00:03:53.000 | She goes to that Japanese city featured in the documentary The Cove, where they push these dolphins

00:03:59.000 | into this cove, and they slaughter them, and she goes there. So it was an interesting book.

00:04:05.000 | Now, I'll tell you the reason why I actually read this book, and so this was a bit of a disappointment,

00:04:10.000 | is I'm interested in Susan's story herself. So Susan was a very successful magazine editor.

00:04:20.000 | So she went and she took over, I believe, Outside Magazine and really helped their reinvention

00:04:27.000 | back when they were starting to win all those national book awards. This is the Krakauer era

00:04:32.000 | of Outside Magazine. And then Oprah tapped her to run the Oprah Magazine. Oh, the Oprah Magazine,

00:04:38.000 | and that did really well under her tutelage. So she had a very intense corporate job running these magazines,

00:04:45.000 | and then she would write these books sort of in parallel, and it reminded me of myself trying to write books

00:04:49.000 | while doing these other things I do. And what happened to Susan is she burnt out at some point,

00:04:54.000 | said, "Enough of this. Step down from those running-the-magazine-type positions and move to Maui,"

00:05:00.000 | and lives there at least half the year and spends a lot of time swimming in the ocean.

00:05:07.000 | She's really into the ocean with dolphins or this or that. I thought that story was going to be in this book

00:05:11.000 | because I know this book was connected to her making that change, but I think she made the change

00:05:16.000 | after she finished the book. So unfortunately, I did not get in the book those insider stories

00:05:21.000 | of the overworked author shifting to a deeper, simpler life, but I enjoyed the book nonetheless.

00:05:29.000 | Then this was just random. I grabbed this from my library of Mice and Men, Steinbeck.

00:05:36.000 | I just realized, I don't know if I've ever read Steinbeck or haven't read Steinbeck since high school,

00:05:41.000 | and I saw the book in my library. It was a copy from the '60s, and so I grabbed it and read it.

00:05:46.000 | It was quite interesting. This, by the way, is an argument for having a library.

00:05:51.000 | I know there is a minimalist movement out there surrounding books that says, "Come on, don't hold on the books.

00:05:57.000 | Why are you holding on the books? It's clutter. You're never going to read them."

00:06:00.000 | I actually go old school. I have a large library spread over many rooms and many bookshelves

00:06:06.000 | and actually many buildings. I have a library here at the HQ and multiple rooms full of books at my house.

00:06:13.000 | I like the idea of having—I go to my shelves and I pull books off and I read them, and I think this is an example.

00:06:18.000 | I grabbed Steinbeck off the shelf and I hadn't read it yet, and I did.

00:06:22.000 | I would say usually at least two of the five books I read each month are grabbed serendipitously from my personal library.

00:06:31.000 | I like the idea that my kids are growing up just surrounded by books.

00:06:35.000 | Of Meissenmann, it was good. It was good. It's interesting because it's old enough that the style—

00:06:45.000 | there was so much formal innovation in fiction that took off not long after that earlier period of Steinbeck

00:06:54.000 | that it seems almost old-fashioned, right? That it's largely third-person perspective,

00:07:02.000 | just observing on the characters, establishing characterization almost entirely through dialogue and action.

00:07:08.000 | And it just feels like, "Oh, this is just old-fashioned, old-school style for novels,"

00:07:15.000 | but Steinbeck is very good at the style and it sticks with you.

00:07:19.000 | He does very interesting characterization through dialogue and action, and when it's over, it sticks with you.

00:07:26.000 | So it's interesting. So there's no formal flash in it.

00:07:29.000 | All of the modernist stuff that followed and then the postmodernist stuff that followed that in terms of formal innovation,

00:07:35.000 | it has none of that, right? I mean, Faulkner started doing his modernist stuff so quickly after this period,

00:07:43.000 | and then you get the postmodernist doing their stuff with fiction after this, and you get Pynchon and all these other writers

00:07:50.000 | that all took off after mid-century. So it was old-fashioned, but it was—you heard it here first.

00:07:57.000 | Steinbeck is a good writer. There you go.

00:08:01.000 | All right. Then I read a book by Boyd Vardy called Cathedral of the Wild.

00:08:09.000 | So Boyd was actually a guest on Tim Ferriss' show, and that's actually what brought this book to my attention.

00:08:16.000 | So that worked. He was on the show, and I bought his memoir. So that worked out well.

00:08:20.000 | Did you hear that episode, Jesse, the lion tracking?

00:08:24.000 | Yeah.

00:08:25.000 | Yeah, right? It's an interesting guy, right?

00:08:27.000 | I've listened to all of his episodes for the most part.

00:08:29.000 | Right. So I listened to Boyd on Ferriss and then said, "I got to get this guy's memoir."

00:08:35.000 | And crazy. You might like this book, Jesse, because I've been watching this series Yellowstone on Paramount+ or wherever it is,

00:08:46.000 | and it's the story of this ranch family or this or that. And I was thinking, "Forget that.

00:08:51.000 | Someone needs to make a series about the Vardy family's life." It's this crazy story.

00:08:56.000 | So their South African and his grandparents, I believe, bought this land that was considered worthless in eastern South Africa.

00:09:07.000 | It had been overgrazed, and so you couldn't really farm on it anymore.

00:09:11.000 | And they basically created one of the first wildlife preserves that was set up around sustainable safari.

00:09:21.000 | And they figured out how to do that, how to rejuvenate the land so that animals could come back to it,

00:09:27.000 | and you could have a diverse ecosystem of animals, and then support it by doing ecotourism.

00:09:32.000 | So people could come and do what they call photo safari, where then you could—

00:09:36.000 | tourists would pay a lot of money to come take pictures of these animals, and that helps fund the recovery of the land.

00:09:41.000 | But their story is crazy. I mean, this is a story where he has stories of getting attacked by a crocodile.

00:09:49.000 | The crocodile trying to pull him in, and he was just lucky enough that his foot was in the crocodile's mouth,

00:09:56.000 | and he hit inside the crocodile's mouth whatever valve they breathe through.

00:10:01.000 | And as a reflex, the crocodile spit it back out. There's black mambas crawling over his body.

00:10:08.000 | Him and his dad are sitting there. No one can move, because if you get bit by the mamba, you're dead in 30 minutes.

00:10:14.000 | Crawling across their bodies, like looking at them, and then crawling away.

00:10:19.000 | Nelson Mandela, this is where he came after being released from prison on Robbins Island.

00:10:27.000 | This was the reserve he came to to recharge and reflect, and they have all of these stories of being there with Mandela on their preserve,

00:10:37.000 | watching as he's figuring out how to bring South Africa back together.

00:10:43.000 | There's stories about them desperately trying to get a radio phone going,

00:10:46.000 | because there was a brief revolution attempt by right-wing elements in South Africa that was happening, and he was at their preserve.

00:10:53.000 | All of this happens at the same place. Crazy stories like, Jesse, you probably heard on the Ferris podcast about the flying adventures.

00:11:02.000 | They would fly these bush planes around, and the stork that crashed through the windshield of the plane,

00:11:09.000 | and the pilot had a stork head and neck sticking out of his head.

00:11:14.000 | It went into his head, and so the pilot passes out. The dad takes over the plane.

00:11:20.000 | The pilot finally comes through, pulls the stork beak out of his head, passes out again.

00:11:25.000 | The mom is in the back reading the checklist for them to land.

00:11:28.000 | They're covered in gore and feathers. The windshield's broken open. They land the plane.

00:11:33.000 | They're flying to the commercial airport, and they land, and they go on and get on their commercial flight.

00:11:39.000 | Yeah, walk down the aisle.

00:11:41.000 | So anyways, I thought it was great. I actually read it. We were on vacation down in Florida,

00:11:45.000 | and we were going to some wildlife preserves and stuff like that, so I was reading it down there.

00:11:49.000 | But it's just, I've never heard, or I've rarely heard a more interesting memoir.

00:11:54.000 | If someone does not own the rights, the film rights or the series rights to this life, get on it,

00:12:01.000 | I think it would be a fantastic show, and he's a really interesting guy.

00:12:04.000 | I mean, you heard the Ferris interview. Have you ever been more jealousy-induced than the opening of that interview

00:12:11.000 | where Tim asked Boyd Vardy, "All right, so where are you right now?"

00:12:15.000 | And he's like, "Okay, I'm in this cabana on our property, and I'm looking out the window at a bau-bau tree,

00:12:22.000 | and there's a cheetah in the tree, and I can see elephants walking by the river,

00:12:27.000 | down by the river below," or something like that. I was like, "Okay, that guy wins."

00:12:31.000 | He's got a good voice too. I bet you his audio book is good.

00:12:34.000 | Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. Maybe I should have listened to it.

00:12:39.000 | I looked up their place, by the way. I think the dollar is relatively strong against the rand,

00:12:47.000 | and so I thought it would be crazy expensive. I mean, if you look at it now, it's super luxury now,

00:12:52.000 | like really nice, beautifully appointed, but you can rent your own villa,

00:12:59.000 | and it's like $1,000-something US dollars a night, which, that's a lot of money,

00:13:06.000 | but not a lot of money for being in a luxury... I mean, the villa I was looking at has like a dock almost.

00:13:16.000 | It comes out of it. It comes out of the villa, and it's up above a riverbank,

00:13:23.000 | and there's a bathtub at the end of it. So you can take a bath in the bathtub,

00:13:26.000 | and the elephants walk by in the river right below it.

00:13:30.000 | That in Miami would be like $10,000 a day.

00:13:32.000 | Yeah, yeah, exactly. Because I was in Florida, I was like, oh, yeah, $1,000 a day would be like entry stakes

00:13:38.000 | for like a reasonable resort. So maybe we'll do that for episode 200.

00:13:44.000 | We're going to go to Void Vardy's Safari down in South Africa.

00:13:51.000 | I don't know how many South African fans we have, but maybe we could gather a crew.

00:13:57.000 | You can see the headlines now. Minor podcaster from D.C. killed by black mamba

00:14:06.000 | trying to take a bath near elephants. That would be the headline.

00:14:11.000 | All right, that's four. What was my fifth book?

00:14:13.000 | Oh, and then I also read a techno-criticism book by Jacob Ward that just came out that's called The Loop.

00:14:21.000 | These are just the type of topics I keep up on in my semi-academic role when I comment on and think and write about tech and culture.

00:14:32.000 | Jacob Ward wrote this book called The Loop. Jacob Ward's a science writer, technology writer,

00:14:37.000 | that focuses on the ways that artificial intelligence can create these feedback loops with the human brain,

00:14:45.000 | especially the natural biases and heuristics that the human brain already uses,

00:14:49.000 | the type of things that you see Danny Kahneman talk about, for example.

00:14:53.000 | Kahneman shows up a lot in this book.

00:14:55.000 | And Ward's argument or concern is that we have these biases and heuristics that we use to sort of simplify how we think about the world,

00:15:03.000 | and those can get stuck in a feedback loop with AI, which exploits them.

00:15:07.000 | And then that feeds back to the AI, which feeds back into those biases,

00:15:12.000 | and then the AI itself can actually push human behavior into ways that are actually pretty distant

00:15:18.000 | from how we might actually want to live or what we actually value.

00:15:21.000 | So he's worried about these tight feedback loops between the human subconscious bias and artificial intelligence.

00:15:28.000 | And so that's, it's always a, look, all these topics are interesting.

00:15:31.000 | I thought it was an interesting book.

00:15:33.000 | I don't know that there was a knockout blow of an argument in this particular one,

00:15:36.000 | but I'm glad that people are looking at these, looking at these issues.

00:15:40.000 | AI is definitely, definitely on my radar.

00:15:45.000 | I'm not quite sure exactly how I think about it yet, but good book.

00:15:49.000 | All right, so those are my five.

00:15:51.000 | You know, Jesse, someone asked me, they said, "When you do your books,

00:15:55.000 | we'd like to hear something that Jesse's reading too, so I'm putting you on the spot,

00:15:58.000 | but I know you're doing an interesting reading project right now.

00:16:00.000 | Maybe you'd want to share what the project is you're working on with the Wars

00:16:04.000 | and maybe mention one of the books you read recently."

00:16:06.000 | You mean Neil Stephenson?

00:16:08.000 | Weren't you doing a project where you were reading, like trying to read a book from every major,

00:16:12.000 | about every major war?

00:16:14.000 | Oh, no, that wasn't me.

00:16:16.000 | That wasn't you. Who was doing that?

00:16:18.000 | Maybe one of your students.

00:16:19.000 | Maybe one of my students.

00:16:20.000 | I was thinking about starting to get into some of the, you know, the World War II and World War I,

00:16:25.000 | and you mentioned the one book about--

00:16:26.000 | Maybe that's the conversation we had.

00:16:27.000 | Yeah.

00:16:28.000 | Okay.

00:16:29.000 | I haven't started that yet.

00:16:30.000 | I've been kind of reading a bunch of Neil Stephenson stuff, and then I'm also reading a book

00:16:34.000 | on John Thompson, the former--

00:16:36.000 | Sure.

00:16:37.000 | He went to Carroll High School.

00:16:38.000 | That's cool.

00:16:39.000 | And then I'm reading a book.

00:16:42.000 | I bounce around a lot like you do, too.

00:16:44.000 | Yeah.

00:16:45.000 | I picked up the Sisson book from last week, so I've dived into some of that.

00:16:49.000 | The Primal Blueprint?

00:16:50.000 | Yeah.

00:16:51.000 | Yeah.

00:16:52.000 | Yeah.

00:16:53.000 | And then there's a book that I found on Amazon just about how people, like in Congress,

00:16:56.000 | like fought all the time back in the day, like maliciously fought.

00:17:00.000 | Yeah, we talked about that.

00:17:01.000 | So I'm like diving into that.

00:17:02.000 | Yeah, we always think things are worse, but--

00:17:03.000 | It was bad back then.

00:17:04.000 | They got killed.

00:17:05.000 | They got killed.

00:17:06.000 | And like that cane beating was really serious that happened to lead up to the Civil War.

00:17:09.000 | Yeah.

00:17:10.000 | It took that guy two years to recover.

00:17:11.000 | Yeah.

00:17:12.000 | You just beat him with a cane.

00:17:13.000 | The interesting thing about Stephenson is--Neil Stephenson's books is he--I'm listening to

00:17:20.000 | one on audio, reading one, and then have another on hard copy, but the one on audio is before

00:17:27.000 | the one that I'm reading, and their characters, some of the characters carry over.

00:17:30.000 | So what are the two?

00:17:32.000 | Reamde and then the Fall.

00:17:35.000 | Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:17:37.000 | So Reamde was first, I think.

00:17:39.000 | Yeah.

00:17:40.000 | And it must be because Zul is older in the Fall.

00:17:42.000 | Which one--

00:17:43.000 | And then Fall's when Dodge dies.

00:17:44.000 | Which one has--so the Fall, is this the one where there's a--it's like a heaven-type world,

00:17:49.000 | but it's virtual?

00:17:50.000 | The Fall is Dodge dies, and they're trying to save his brain.

00:17:57.000 | By the way, spoiler alert.

00:17:59.000 | They try to save his brain.

00:18:00.000 | Yeah.

00:18:01.000 | So I'm kind of in that part where--and then there was that fake nuclear thing.

00:18:05.000 | And they can upload people's--is this the right book where they can upload people's into the

00:18:10.000 | virtual world or something like this?

00:18:11.000 | Probably.

00:18:12.000 | It's probably getting to that point, because I'm only 25% in.

00:18:15.000 | Yeah.

00:18:16.000 | The last Stephenson book I read was Seven Eves.

00:18:18.000 | I'm reading that, too.

00:18:19.000 | That's a cool book.

00:18:20.000 | Yeah.

00:18:21.000 | That's a fun book.

00:18:22.000 | I read that on vacation.

00:18:23.000 | The moon blows up, and a hard rain is supposed to come.

00:18:24.000 | The moon blows up, and the world gets destroyed, and yeah, it's interesting.

00:18:28.000 | Here's the thing about You'll See When You Get to the End of It is I love the Stephenson,

00:18:32.000 | you know, let's work through the details.

00:18:34.000 | Like, he has that Andy Weir instinct of, like, let's work through some details, but then

00:18:37.000 | he also has, like, the Ursula K.

00:18:41.000 | Gwynn instinct of I really care about people and characters in a way that, like, Andy Weir,

00:18:45.000 | you know, does not.

00:18:47.000 | And so he has that mix of really interesting characters, but he takes his time and unfolds

00:18:51.000 | the story, and it's interesting and captivating.

00:18:53.000 | Then you'll see when you get towards the end of the book, it's like he ran out of time.

00:18:57.000 | He's like, and then it was like a lot of years later, and this was going on, and surprise,

00:19:02.000 | and a couple spoilers, and we're out.

00:19:04.000 | So it's this, I think, really interesting unfolding story.

00:19:12.000 | And I like the Neil deGrasse Tyson character.

00:19:15.000 | You know, the scientist that goes up in the space.

00:19:18.000 | It was based off of Neil.

00:19:20.000 | Oh, yeah, that makes sense.

00:19:21.000 | Yeah.

00:19:22.000 | I just finished No Crash, too, like a couple weeks ago.

00:19:25.000 | Man, that's the life.

00:19:26.000 | I mean, I know it's hard.

00:19:28.000 | We talked about Brandon Sanderson last week, but creating fiction and not literary fiction,

00:19:35.000 | because I think that is when you're doing literary fiction.

00:19:37.000 | I think so brutal because it's so fickle, and it's so like you're trying to create art.

00:19:43.000 | And like, if it doesn't go right, it's just brutal, and the whole thing can disappear.

00:19:46.000 | And but if you're Stevenson, you know what you're about.

00:19:50.000 | It's not like I have to get the National Book Award for this, and the or like the Booker

00:19:54.000 | Prize, or people are going to think I'm dumb, my career falls apart.

00:19:57.000 | And it's like, no, I'm going to I know the type of thing I write, and I can experiment.

00:20:01.000 | It's interesting, and my fans love it, you know.

00:20:03.000 | And then just he lives in Seattle and has this cool house by the water, and they just sit

00:20:08.000 | and write these interesting, cool books with a fan base that likes them.

00:20:11.000 | And that's the main thing you do.

00:20:13.000 | That's the dream, I think.

00:20:15.000 | He comes up with so much stuff.

00:20:16.000 | I like that guy.

00:20:17.000 | I mean, he I was reading the Wikipedia thing on Snow Crash, and he had a code for like

00:20:21.000 | two years to like get it all right in his head for me.

00:20:24.000 | He could write the book.

00:20:25.000 | That's the man.

00:20:26.000 | That'd be the dream.

00:20:27.000 | Live somewhere cool.

00:20:28.000 | Stevenson needs a cooler place to live, though.

00:20:30.000 | He has like a traditional house in like a suburb of Seattle.

00:20:32.000 | He needs like a compound somewhere.

00:20:34.000 | But live somewhere cool and think really deeply about one idea, and then compose these books,

00:20:41.000 | and they come out on your schedule.

00:20:42.000 | And he's such a curmudgeon.

00:20:43.000 | Like he he he book tours reluctantly, and not that long, and then goes back to write.

00:20:50.000 | I mean, I know he did some stuff with Blue Origin and Magic Leap.

00:20:53.000 | Like he's done some consulting stuff.

00:20:55.000 | But Sanderson, Martin, all these all these guys, Andy Weir.

00:21:00.000 | It's kind of cool to like reading the fiction, then you're walking around in real life reality,

00:21:04.000 | and you just think certain things because you have this fiction in your mind.

00:21:07.000 | Like the other day when you're like, oh, something bad's going to happen.

00:21:09.000 | I was like, oh, hard rain in the back of my mind.

00:21:12.000 | Yeah.

00:21:13.000 | Jesse's prepping for the hard rain.

00:21:15.000 | I don't know if it's worth prepping for.

00:21:17.000 | It seems like you didn't have a lot of options there.

00:21:19.000 | Like you could have gone in the space where, spoiler alert, things don't go well.

00:21:23.000 | Or there's the people who buried themselves underground.

00:21:27.000 | Yeah.

00:21:28.000 | Yeah.

00:21:29.000 | All right.

00:21:30.000 | Well, anyways, those are those are the books.

00:21:32.000 | Those are my books for February and a couple from Jesse as well.

00:21:36.000 | So keep reading and we'll check in next month with the five books I read in March.

00:21:42.000 | By the way, I'm about two down right now.

00:21:44.000 | So I have three books to go in March.

00:21:46.000 | I mean, almost two.

00:21:47.000 | I'm almost done with the second.

00:21:48.000 | So we got three books to go.

00:21:49.000 | I'm also reading a really big, long book that I don't know how to count this

00:21:53.000 | because I'm not going to finish it in a month.

00:21:54.000 | It's 800 pages long and hard.

00:21:57.000 | But what I'm thinking I'm going to do is in addition to the five books I report,

00:22:00.000 | I'm going to start reporting progress on this big book.

00:22:02.000 | That's a good idea.

00:22:03.000 | Because it's broken up.

00:22:04.000 | Because you've talked about it several times.

00:22:05.000 | Yeah.

00:22:06.000 | And it's broken up into eight smaller books inside of it.

00:22:07.000 | So I might just I won't count it as one of my books, but I'll say I read, you know,

00:22:12.000 | books two through three of this big book this month because I have to get going in it.

00:22:16.000 | I just I got to get that momentum going.

00:22:18.000 | The other thing about books in general that you mentioned to me offline was how one of your editors said that you don't read enough.

00:22:25.000 | I found that amazing.

00:22:26.000 | I think your audience might want to hear that story.

00:22:28.000 | Well, enough literature, enough literature.

00:22:31.000 | Now, granted, this is someone with a graduate degree in literature from a very good school.

00:22:36.000 | He correctly points out I don't let's put it this way.

00:22:40.000 | I do not think that he has recently read Jesse Itzler's Living with a Seal.

00:22:44.000 | So I think he thinks I need to read more literature.

00:22:46.000 | And he's right.

00:22:47.000 | I need if I'm going to be I'm doing thinking and commentary and cultural discussion to have that common cultural heritage of really smart people in our literary heritage.

00:22:57.000 | I need that to be better.

00:22:58.000 | So this big, long book I'm reading is a classic.

00:23:01.000 | I need to read.

00:23:02.000 | I've read a fair amount of the classics, but I want to make that more a part of my regular routines.

00:23:07.000 | I'll report back on that success, but I want to read more classics.

00:23:10.000 | So more on that.

00:23:12.000 | More on that soon.

00:23:13.000 | Nice.

00:23:14.000 | Thanks.

00:23:15.000 | [Music.]

The Books I Read in February | 2022

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