All right, Jesse, we like to talk about each month. The books I read the last month, long time listeners know my goal is to read five books per month. So we're in February now. So we will talk about the five books I read in January, 2023. The first one was called sitting by the mini bay, my life and building model docks by Dwayne Johnson.

It's a surprising twist, surprising turn by him. It has over 50 pages of photos. He's shirtless in most of them. Interesting. He builds his mock docs shirtless. So there you go. Now what did I read? All right, let's go through this quickly. Book number one, a thousand brains by Jeff Hawkins.

So this is a new theory about how the cortex helps create human consciousness and intelligence. Jeff Hopkins is a former tech executive who put all of his fortune into trying to figure out how the brain works and then build intelligent machines using this research. This is his latest book with his latest findings.

If if ever there's like Reese terminator style character who comes back from the future to prevent Skynet from going online, it's probably looking for Jeff Hawkins. Let's be honest about that. All right. I also read the nineties by Chuck Klosterman. So Klosterman writes these books where I don't know if you've ever seen a Klosterman book, but he's been doing these more recently.

Like the nineties is just looking at the nineties and it's just all these different smart cultural critiques about different aspects of the nineties, which is when you and I were kids. It was good. Yeah. I've heard it was really good on tape. I read the physical version. I enjoyed it.

I mean, it helps. So I grew up then, but actually I might lend it to you. I think you would like it. Any examples? I mean, I think the music stuff is interesting. Yeah. I mean, I was really deep on really what was happening behind the scenes with grunge and these musicians and the whole selling out culture that Gen X had created and how that clashed against the commercial imperatives of music.

I actually learned a lot about like Kurt Cobain, for example. Interesting. It doesn't make me think of, I don't look back after I read this book and say, man, I wish I could go back to the nineties. It's an interesting time and it's interesting to think about, but it doesn't make me want to go back.

I'm like, I'm going to find out that you're the 70 show. So when we were growing up in the nineties, there's a show called the 70 show, which was a sitcom about life in the seventies. Yeah. Well now we're 30 years, 20 or 30 years out of the nineties.

They're doing a new show called the 90 show. Yeah. Cause when we were growing up in the nineties, the seventies was as far from us as the nineties are far from people who are kids today. So our childhood is now going to be the target of the nostalgic retrospective show.

It was a good time to be a New York Yankee fan if you're, yeah, late nineties. Yeah. All right. Uh, then I read a quite a good thriller, actually. Robin Cook's very first thriller coma in the 1970s, straight up one of the first medical thrillers. So him and Crichton were both working on this, but, uh, cook was, I believe he got to the punch first and it's, you know, it's creepy as hell.

Like in the end there's coma patients, they're being put into comas surreptitiously. So they could harvest their organs, not the spoiler alert. Um, really well written. The interesting thing about it, unlike some modern thrillers is it's, I don't know, the last third before you get to any actual, I am being chased like any, I mean, the first two thirds of the book is really this new resident sort of starting to unravel the conspiracy and, and doing investigations.

And the main stakes are, you know, her supervisors at the hospital are mad at her or that if she's not at round, she might get in trouble. So it's, and yet it still works. Uh, nowadays a modern thriller, it's, you know, the second page, the shark is being shot at you from the cannon and you have to kill it with a laser sword.

You know, it gets right into it. So different time, but great book. When you read thrillers, you breeze through them. Um, I'm not, I'm not a fast reader. My wife is a fast reader. When she reads novels, she's like, I'm just, because I read a lot of nonfiction and write a lot of nonfiction.

It's hard for me to speed up. So I'm the guy reading that's thinking, okay, well, interesting. They referenced the computer mainframe in chapter two, and they noted that it was using hexadecimal and now we're in chapter four. And I'm wondering, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm reading these thrillers like I'm studying Proust, which is probably not the fastest way to do it.

When you say you're not fast, are you really fast? I don't read these books very fast. I'm not, I'm not a speed reader or not. I'm not even like a fast reader. I go too slow because I'm, my mind always wants to understand everything and fit everything into, into I'm going to what Jeff Hawkins at a thousand brains would call reference frames.

My brain, that book helped me understand my own brain. I have like an overactive reference frame system. Everything I encounter has to be fit into these frames and I'm incredibly unhappy until it is. So I can't read things fast. I can't have loose ends. I need to, okay, here's this person, here's the building, here's the rooms in the building.

Like it's very useful when it comes time to solve math proofs or write things, but it, I can't, I'm just physically uncomfortable. If it doesn't bother my wife at all, if she's like, Oh, I don't remember if like, Oh, who's this guy? Was he dead? Or, you know, I'm like, no, no, I need to know like exactly his, like, who did he connect to?

How is this house laid out? So I can't read fast. I mean, you're right. Maybe it's fast compared to depends on the relative. One more quick question about this. When you read a 10 page New York article, how long does it usually take you? A while. If I read like a standard, because you know, I always try to read at least one article from the magazine each week when it comes out.

Half an hour. Yeah. Okay. Like I'll read it in the morning sometimes for the kids get up and it will take the whole time and sometimes I'll have to come back to it. Yeah. Because I'm like every, because, but I'll come away and be able to tell you everything that happened at New Yorker article, some of the stylistic choices of the author, you know and I pulled out like two second order theories that we could potentially talk about on the show.

So it's like a very cognitively involved process for me when I'm reading. I'm a machine for turning text into a connected internally consistent theories and ideas. Like that's what I am. I've been like bred in a lab to do that. All right. Next. This is not really a, these aren't, neither of these are really books, but I just read them back to back because one influenced the other.

I read this over Martin Luther King weekend was a Thoreau's on civil disobedience. And then Martin Luther King's letter from a Birmingham jail, the latter of course inspired by and pulling from the former. So I thought it'd be interesting to read those, read those back to back MLKs I think is much better than Thoreau's.

I mean, I get Thoreau's at the time there. I mean, obviously it was an innovative thought. Gandhi pulled from an MLK pulled from it but doesn't age as well. And in part because he created a world that's been more normalized. So it doesn't seem as, as retroactive, but it's, you know I'm not going to pay my tax until my friend comes like three hours later and pays for me to get out of my small jail in the town where I'm related to everybody.

It just feels very different. An MLK as a rhetor, rhetorician is so good. Just his ability to make an argument and to inject a sort of a humanity into it. Yet it's still just rock solid. This clicks to this, this sort of inevitable logic with emotion. I mean, just absolute once in a century type ability.

So you read these back to back and Thoreau, I mean, I love Thoreau. Thoreau is very influential to me, but you see the, the person who's really throwing the 105 mile per hour fastballs MLK there. Not Thoreau. And then the last was well, I don't know how many people are going to follow me up on this recommendation.

The Feynman lectures on computation. There's a book form collection of a series of lectures that Richard Feynman gave at Caltech about computation. And I pulled from it before for various classes I taught, but I read that right at the beginning of January because I didn't teach last semester. I was on leave.

And then before that was summer. So I hadn't been in a classroom since May, 2020, and I wanted to get back in the mood. So I was like, all right, I'm going to read Feynman's lectures on computation, just to get back in the computer science, the pedagogical Feynman's a physicist, not a computer scientist.

And he just, so he comes at these things like with really originality and new takes. I just thought it would put me back in the mood of, you know, Hey, let's explain things to people in useful ways. It was pretty good. Like 50% of the stuff I really loved reading about 20%, I'd know it so well, I teach it and the fields advanced as Feynman wrote it.

I'm like, this is like a worst version of it. And then the other, whatever percent is left was really just physics stuff. I didn't care about the stupid reversible circuit stuff. It's like, I don't need to hear any more about reversible circuits, but like his information theory and coding theory chapter is fantastic.

So there you go. I don't know how many people will take me up on that last recommendation, but the Feynman lectures on computation doesn't move as fast as coma by Robin cook. It's not the similar genre, but I enjoyed it.