The Books I Read in January

00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC]

00:00:05.000 | Now, this is the first recording session that we have done in the month of February.

00:00:10.000 | We're doing this, I don't know what today is, February 4th, maybe?

00:00:13.000 | February 5th, something like that?

00:00:15.000 | So you know what that means, if it's the first session in a new month,

00:00:19.000 | we should take some time to talk about the books I read in the preceding month.

00:00:25.000 | We're trying to make that a habit here on the show.

00:00:29.000 | So I thought we would start things off today talking about the five books I read in January 2022.

00:00:39.000 | Quick background on that, I usually aim to read around five books a month,

00:00:44.000 | and the two things I do to accomplish this goal is,

00:00:47.000 | one, I make reading more of a default activity,

00:00:50.000 | so instead of looking at a phone or a tablet for random online distraction,

00:00:55.000 | I make looking at a book my default activity.

00:00:58.000 | And two, I read a wide variety of books of different styles, different genres,

00:01:04.000 | different levels of difficulty so that it doesn't become tedious or doesn't become too much of a chore.

00:01:09.000 | I don't care what format, audio, Kindle, hardcover, whatever, just keep reading.

00:01:16.000 | I also believe in not overthinking what you read.

00:01:19.000 | Just reading a lot of interesting stuff is better than having some sort of carefully curated list

00:01:23.000 | with which you're trying to impress people.

00:01:26.000 | All right, so let's get into it. The books I read in January 2022.

00:01:31.000 | So those who have followed this segment in previous months know I've been on a kick recently

00:01:38.000 | of reading books that have to do with the entertainment industry.

00:01:41.000 | I'm not sure why. I just like that genre.

00:01:45.000 | I did some cinema books. I've done some biographies of directors.

00:01:51.000 | My entry in this in the sequence of books for January was Will Smith's new biography,

00:01:59.000 | which is titled Will, which I actually quite enjoyed.

00:02:04.000 | Now, Will is co-authored, Will Smith co-authored it with Mark Manson,

00:02:11.000 | who you might know as the author of the subtle art of not giving an F word, that book,

00:02:19.000 | which sold, and I'm using the official terms here, Jesse, all the copies.

00:02:24.000 | That's what I have here. I have here on my official notes.

00:02:27.000 | It sold, that book sold an absurd number of copies. I'm talking like 18 million copies.

00:02:32.000 | It's a it's a crazily successful book. So he co-authored.

00:02:36.000 | So Will Smith, I think, liked the subtle art and asked Mark to co-author Will with him.

00:02:43.000 | You know, the way I learned about this is Mark told me it's a pretty small world.

00:02:47.000 | Jesse, you could probably imagine this to be the case.

00:02:49.000 | There's only so many of us that are sort of in our 30s or now late 30s now who write pragmatic,

00:02:57.000 | non-pragmatic nonfiction books for major publishers.

00:02:59.000 | There's like a there's a group of us and we all kind of know each other.

00:03:02.000 | Right. Because we're all like the same age. We all sort of write the same thing.

00:03:06.000 | So Mark is in that group. Ryan Holiday is in that group.

00:03:08.000 | Tim Ferris is in that group. James Clear is in that group. I'm in that group.

00:03:13.000 | So we all know each other. So a few years ago, Mark was giving a talk.

00:03:18.000 | He was doing a lecture tour. He was giving a talk here in the D.C. area, actually kind of near to where I live.

00:03:23.000 | Near here, he was in Silver Spring was the talk at the Fillmore, which is near Tacoma Park.

00:03:28.000 | So I was like, well, just come hang out like before your talk.

00:03:30.000 | Well, so he came and we, you know, wander the streets of Tacoma Park and just talked as as one does.

00:03:36.000 | And I remember him telling me, he's like, here's what I'm working on now.

00:03:40.000 | A biography with Will Smith. I was like, well, that's crazy. That's interesting.

00:03:44.000 | Not at all what I thought you were going to say. And it sounded awesome.

00:03:48.000 | He's like, yeah, Will's method was he would be like, hey, Mark, I'm going somewhere cool.

00:03:55.000 | Do you want to just come with me? And he would just bring them and they could just chat when they had downtime.

00:04:00.000 | I thought that was the coolest thing. I was like, all right, go for it.

00:04:04.000 | And the book is good. It's good. I sent Mark a note about this.

00:04:09.000 | It's really hard to write these memoirs because you have to you have to capture like a unique voice.

00:04:14.000 | And you need to be psychologically self-reflective and yet also capture how did the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air become a show?

00:04:21.000 | And I thought it did it really well. I'm actually surprised this book has not gotten more critical love.

00:04:27.000 | So I sent Mark a note and said, I think you did a great job. This is a hard book to write.

00:04:30.000 | I couldn't have done this. And so I really enjoyed it. Would be my.

00:04:35.000 | That'd be my analysis. Have I told you my Will Smith story?

00:04:38.000 | No, I want to hear it. All right. So I was in my first year, maybe my second year of graduate school at MIT,

00:04:45.000 | and I just published How to Win at College and How to Be a Straight A Student.

00:04:50.000 | And I got contacted by Will's people. And maybe it was Jaden at the time.

00:04:57.000 | One of his kids was, you know, of the age where you care about grades like junior high or something.

00:05:04.000 | And they're like, can you come down to Miami and like just talk with Will about how to study and how to do whatever?

00:05:11.000 | And do you play golf? I remember like you want to come down the golf course.

00:05:15.000 | And for various reasons, it didn't work out. But I remember you play golf.

00:05:18.000 | I don't play golf. And I told him I was like, I cannot go to a golf course with Will Smith.

00:05:22.000 | When I literally I would be holding this would be the scene. Right.

00:05:27.000 | So Will Smith would walk in superhero shape, you know, like everyone's just happy to see him there.

00:05:33.000 | He's incredibly competitive. So he's probably been at that point getting one on one golf training.

00:05:38.000 | He's going to gamble with you. Yeah. Let's let's gamble with me. I'm going to walk out there.

00:05:43.000 | He's like, I'm glad you're here, Cal. And then he's going to say, I don't mean to interrupt, but you're holding the golf club upside down.

00:05:50.000 | That's not a handle. That's the face of the golf club. You're supposed to hit it with point two.

00:05:56.000 | I think our business here is done. And that's how that would have played out. That would not have been good.

00:05:59.000 | That would not have been good. But I like his I like that attitude, though, of like, OK, you have a problem.

00:06:06.000 | Like, I want to help my kid with studying. Nice situation to be like, all right.

00:06:10.000 | So who's the guy who's like top at study strategies right now? Let's get him down here.

00:06:15.000 | And I don't know if Will Smith had anything to do with like that could have been his people.

00:06:19.000 | He might have just told someone like, can you find someone to come talk to me? And they will.

00:06:22.000 | So did you go down there? I didn't go down there because of golf or because you're busy with other stuff?

00:06:27.000 | Yeah. Yeah. I mean, also, like, I don't want on one tutor, you know? Yeah.

00:06:34.000 | Like, you know, I get it. I don't fault. I don't fault people for trying to get the best.

00:06:39.000 | Best for their kids, but like, it just felt weird to me. I was like, I don't know, man.

00:06:43.000 | I'm like a doctoral student here at MIT trying to do whatever I don't.

00:06:48.000 | And I'm not good at one on one tutoring. That's not my thing. You know me.

00:06:51.000 | If I'm not in front of a microphone, I'm weird and antisocial. That's not true.

00:06:55.000 | Yeah. Anyways, that did not make it to the book. So I flipped to that.

00:06:59.000 | I didn't see that in the book. And so I threw it out. No, but it was a good book. I really enjoyed Will.

00:07:05.000 | You know, he that gets a driven guy. It's just a driven guy.

00:07:08.000 | All those people make it that level are so driven. It's insane. The thing about that personifies Will Smith that I learned in that book is.

00:07:17.000 | He hired a Monopoly coach at some point just because they played Monopoly a fair amount.

00:07:22.000 | And he's like, I want to be the best at Monopoly and hired a professional Monopoly player, which exists.

00:07:29.000 | The tournament player to drill him until he could, like, for sure dominate his family when playing Monopoly.

00:07:39.000 | I think that tells you everything you need to know right about why he was the biggest superstar in the world.

00:07:42.000 | It's just there was a driven mentality of like, let's get after it. Like, I don't want to lose, you know, which I all of these guys and women that are at the top of their field the same way.

00:07:53.000 | Like, if I'm going to play Monopoly, I'm going to win.

00:07:55.000 | Yeah, they're extremely competitive business athletes.

00:07:59.000 | Yeah. All right. So I like that book. Then I read, I should say, good audio book, too.

00:08:03.000 | They do clips and audio like his songs. We was talking about his songs.

00:08:08.000 | I think they play the audio of the songs. It's actually it's well produced audio book.

00:08:12.000 | All right. So I actually did two books in January that had to do with the entertainment industry.

00:08:17.000 | The other one was The Late Shift, which was a book that came out just in the 2000s or the 90s about the battle between Jay Leno and David Letterman to see who was going to get The Tonight Show after Johnny Carson retired.

00:08:35.000 | And the reason why it was actually the show, our show that motivated me, I was like, I actually would be interested to find out more about this world of late night TV and how these how these top performers crafted these shows and tried to build audiences.

00:08:50.000 | And that was actually my inspiration. Interesting book there.

00:08:54.000 | What I learned is Dave Letterman was a huge broadcasting talent. Right.

00:08:59.000 | So his show was incredibly original and he was pushing the medium. He was very much understood the medium of visual television and would do things with the camera and take it different places and had a very distinctive voice.

00:09:11.000 | So he was a huge talent. Jay Leno didn't have that talent so much.

00:09:16.000 | But what Jay would do was the monologue and that was his whole thing. We're going to the jokes in the monologue are going to be top notch and topical and it's going to be longer than than Letterman's monologue by far is going to be longer than Carson's monologue was.

00:09:32.000 | And he was all about the monologue. And that in the end sort of won the late night war. The people just let me just turn over and see like really funny jokes about what's going on in the news.

00:09:42.000 | I was a huge Letterman fan, huge Letterman fan in the 90s. We me and my friends got tickets. We went out to the Ed Sullivan Theater. I've seen him perform back when he was doing the show.

00:09:51.000 | But, you know, it was like smart, weird, wry, eccentric humor, beautifully done. And the end what won that late night war was just I want like a really good Clinton joke, you know, and so it's but it was fascinating, fascinating book.

00:10:07.000 | And the other thing I learned from that is like it's incredibly hard to to run a late night show just to to not come across as weird on camera, like to be someone who can be on screen like that for 90 minutes and the audience stays with you.

00:10:21.000 | It's just really hard to do. And so if you're one of the few people who could do it, they would just dump truck money at your house.

00:10:28.000 | There was a lot of money involved in this was crazy. Leno was getting seven million and that jumped up. Letterman was in the teens per year, 15 plus million dollars per year in the 90s because no one could do this.

00:10:40.000 | People tried and it was a debacle. But like if you could, you got all the money basically.

00:10:46.000 | Are they around equally wealthy?

00:10:49.000 | Yeah, they're just they're just super rich. Yeah, yeah. They both just got really wealthy. All right. Moving away from books about the entertainment industry. I read this book, which we've talked about on the show now multiple times the last few weeks, how to take smart notes.

00:11:06.000 | So this was this was the book about Zettelkasten note taking. And I mean, I think I don't know if this is true, but I think it was one of the books that helped bring the details of this method to an English speaking audience.

00:11:19.000 | So the author is drawing from research that was done in Germany where they were studying the productivity of the sociologist Lumen who used this Zettelkasten method to great effect and had this incredibly productive academic career.

00:11:34.000 | And this team from the University of Berlin was trying to study how is he so productive? And they're like, oh, is this note taking system?

00:11:40.000 | So this was kind of a German thing and how to take smart notes brought the concept over to English speaking audiences.

00:11:50.000 | This book took a long route to get to me. Actually, one of my readers sent it to me at some point early in the pandemic.

00:11:58.000 | Georgetown was pretty good. They shut down for a long time. Long story short, Georgetown shut down for a long time.

00:12:05.000 | So I don't know how long this book someone at some point someone put it in my office with a big stack of mail. But I was gone for a year.

00:12:11.000 | They shut down more than a year. I mean, they shut down in March of 2020. And I was back in my office in the fall of 21, like five months ago.

00:12:21.000 | And so there's a whole stack of mail and this was in there. So it might have been in my office for a year and the whole thing got water damage.

00:12:28.000 | There had been a flood. And so but I rescued from the stack this book that some reader had sent me. And it's really cool. It's always interesting.

00:12:36.000 | So if you're interested in the Zettelkasten stuff we're talking about, that's the book. That's the book. It's short. It gets into it.

00:12:41.000 | It's incredibly optimistic. It has this Lumen philosophy of if you have your system right, writing becomes effortless.

00:12:48.000 | Listeners know I don't quite buy that. But it is the right introduction, I believe, into that type of note-taking.

00:12:54.000 | All right, moving on now. Then I read The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything.

00:13:03.000 | So this was a nonfiction book that basically surveyed for a popular audience Jesuit theology and tried to extract lessons from the different parts of Jesuit theology that would be applicable to a large crowd, including large secular crowd.

00:13:25.000 | I'm at a Jesuit university. I figured I should know more about Ignatian spirituality. So I read The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything.

00:13:33.000 | So it's really advice-y. It'll be, OK, here is something that we Jesuits do, but here's why this is important, and here's why, whether you're a Catholic or not or religious or not, you should think about doing these type of things in your life.

00:13:45.000 | That's the general format of this book. It was pretty good. It was long, but it was good. It was good to get a nice survey and history of the Jesuit order.

00:13:57.000 | You also got a pretty good insight biographically into what it's like to join a monastic order, what that process is like, what life is like as a Jesuit, what that's actually like.

00:14:09.000 | And the author, Father Donovan, gets into it. Here's what it's like. Here's the hard parts. Here's why I did it. Here's how old I was. Kind of interesting.

00:14:18.000 | You and Ferris kind of had a religious conversation when you were on his podcast yesterday or two days ago.

00:14:25.000 | Yeah, yeah, we got into it. Yeah. We were joking about it before because we had a similar conversation with Lex Fridman that for some reason, for the tech podcast crowd, I've become the sounding board for thinking through the role of religion in your life.

00:14:38.000 | It's an interesting role, maybe because I'm one of the few commentators in that space that will just talk religion straight up and just treat it as something to think about and look through its advantages.

00:14:51.000 | I mean, there was such a powerful, not to digress, but there was such a powerful impact on that space caused by the new atheist in the 2000s that has really boxed in religion, especially if you're a Silicon Valley type, to an untouchable thing.

00:15:08.000 | And that box is only now, I think, starting to dissolve. People are taking tentative steps, people who are hardcore tech or whatever.

00:15:16.000 | Let me just think a little bit more about religion. But for a while, it was the new atheists, Dawkins and Dennett and Harris, had just packaged that up and it was sort of intellectually unavailable.

00:15:29.000 | It's interesting to see it come back. Honestly, I think it was probably Jordan Peterson that his rise and fall and rise again or whatever, I think had a big impact on shaking loose the new atheist grip on religion in certain types of circles.

00:15:48.000 | That's my best guess. And I think what we forget about the new atheist is that they were a reaction in large part to the Bush era.

00:15:57.000 | So for the younger people listening, they might not have this background, but like new atheism in 2003, when you're writing this type of stuff, like new atheism, you had two really strong motivating factors.

00:16:12.000 | The 9/11 attack. So this was this big, strong, motivating factor, especially for people like Harris about religious fundamentalism just leads to terrible things. Why do we tolerate it?

00:16:23.000 | And you had the sort of elite liberal reaction to George W. and the evangelicals that helped him get elected.

00:16:32.000 | And so it was like very counter, it was countercultural back then, like you were pushing back against this, especially when he got reelected in 2004.

00:16:39.000 | A lot of people felt like, oh man, there's this religious majority and I'm rejecting that. Like religion's no good or whatever.

00:16:47.000 | So there was a countercultural feel to it. And then the cultural whole flipped. Everything flipped.

00:16:51.000 | And now to be religious is, you know, now you're in the cultural minority and have very little cultural leverage.

00:17:00.000 | And I think it's in that environment that that box around religion starting to open up a little bit.

00:17:05.000 | So I don't know why I'm the person people are asking about this. Talk to Father Donovan.

00:17:10.000 | That's the guy you should talk about. I don't know why people ask me, but I just think it's interesting that like it's a conversation now that Ferris is interested.

00:17:18.000 | Basically, I felt like he was saying, I can't be religious, but maybe I should be religious.

00:17:23.000 | I think he was just looking for your advice on certain things on how to, as you would term it, live a deep life and be fulfilled, to be quite honest.

00:17:31.000 | Because I mean, I've listened to every single one of his podcasts and I think he's, you know, he's got a lot of organized, but I think he's trying to figure some stuff out too.

00:17:38.000 | And you have a lot of organized and you can bounce the ideas off him. I think you just wanted to, you're well read, obviously.

00:17:43.000 | So yeah, yeah. So anyways, that was interesting. That's interesting. So that's a trend to keep an eye on is the, maybe this is all just cyclical.

00:17:52.000 | Things like religion come and go, come and go. And in cycles, you have flips in the cultural mainstream.

00:17:58.000 | All right. Final book from January 2022 was called Giants. I don't have the subtitle here, but Giants is a dual biography of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.

00:18:12.000 | And so it contrasts their life and of course, in the end, they then become intertwined. Their lives actually collided during the Civil War presidency of Lincoln.

00:18:24.000 | This is a book, so this was written by John Stoffer at Harvard. And I don't know why I haven't read it yet.

00:18:32.000 | So I'm a big Lincolnophile. I read a lot of Lincoln. This is a signed copy of the book that I've had since it came out in earlier in the 2000s.

00:18:40.000 | Because when we were in Cambridge, when I was at MIT, my wife worked with John Stoffer's wife at a history education focused nonprofit.

00:18:51.000 | So John was always doing events and was kind of intertwined in that world. We babysat for his kids and stuff like that.

00:18:59.000 | And so when this book came out, we went through the book release. I have a signed copy from him. Big Lincoln fan. Never read the book until now.

00:19:06.000 | I don't know why. It's fantastic. It's really good. I mean, it's very hard for scholars sometimes to be able to write in a way that is accessible.

00:19:15.000 | I thought it was very accessible, but very smart. I know it won some awards and rightly so.

00:19:20.000 | So basically, I guess I'm glad that I finally got around to reading Giants. I think it's a really good profile of that age, that period leading up to the Civil War,

00:19:30.000 | and that contrast between Douglas coming out of slavery and trying to define himself and make his way in what he faced,

00:19:37.000 | and then Lincoln coming out of the rural frontier poverty and how their views evolved over time.

00:19:45.000 | It was really well handled in a very readable way. So thumbs up to Giants. Thumbs up to Giants as well.

00:19:52.000 | There you go, Jesse. Those are my five books. Let's see. It's November 4th or 5th?

00:19:58.000 | Fourth.

00:19:59.000 | Fourth. OK. I'm almost done with my second book of February.

00:20:02.000 | I was just going to ask you that. I was like, how many have you done in February?

00:20:06.000 | I'm almost done with my second. Well, I have a beast of a book I'm working on. I started it back in January, 600 pages.

00:20:12.000 | And I'll talk about it when we get there. But I'm just working on that a bit at a time. So I'm front loading a little bit.

00:20:19.000 | I don't know if I'm going to finish it in February or not, though. It's a beast. It's 600 pages, but 600 pages of dense writing.

00:20:26.000 | I'm taking my time with it because I really like this book. So I'm kind of front loading some other reading to see if I can't get this done in February,

00:20:33.000 | I'll get it done in March. But and I have a trip going to Florida in a little bit.

00:20:37.000 | So that'll give me some good reading time, too. So I feel good about February. I'm on track.

00:20:42.000 | Less days.

00:20:44.000 | That's true, though. Less days. Yeah. Yeah. You got you got to get after it.

00:20:49.000 | Yeah.

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The Books I Read in January | 2022

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