All right, final segment, the five books I read in February 2023. As long time listeners know, I try to read five books a month and I report on what those books are here on the podcast. All right, so what did I read in February? Number one, The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick.

This was roughly speaking a popular history of the Royal Society in London. More generally speaking, it was a book about the rise of the Enlightenment scientific mindset. Dolnick makes this point, but a lot of other authors make this point as well. Isaac Newton was at a turning point. Isaac Newton was born and came up in a world that was connected more to Greek thought and mythological thought.

And by the time he died, we were in a world that had a more empirical mathematical approach to understanding the world. I love these type of histories. It's a very readable book, short chapters, it moves pretty quick. Not as deep as some other histories I've read on this, but had a lot of good information.

So a lot of London in this episode. Yeah. Two questions from London. Two questions from London, a book about London. You know why? It's because I am, that article we talked about last week in the Financial Times, obviously that's a London based publication. So like last week I was killing it in the UK.

This podcast, number one technology podcast in the UK, like number 30 overall podcast in the UK. Deep Work at Amazon UK was ranked like 60. That's so good. Right? So we've been killing it in the UK. So as you can see, we're pushing all of our content to be UK centric.

There's a lot of good golf courses around London. That's true. We need a podcast out of there. All right. I also read Wandering Home by Bill McKibben. I read that years and years ago, but I had a copy of my library. So I went back and read it and loved it.

Very nostalgic. I really remember reading that book in grad school. Bill McKibben, who I really like, I interviewed him for a New Yorker piece a couple of years ago. He wrote this cool book where he walked from his house in Ripton, Vermont, which is sort of one Valley over from Lake Champlain in Western Vermont to his house in the Adirondacks.

So the McKibben story is that he quit the New Yorker and moved to a cabin. It was really like a rundown house. Him and his wife, Susan Halperin, who's an excellent journalist, they moved to this house in the Adirondacks. And then once they had their kid, they realized kids need a school to go to.

So they moved across Lake Champlain to Ripton, Vermont, which I actually visited there last summer. It's one south of Lincoln. It's these cool green mountain towns that are up at elevation and really quaint. He walked from Ripton to the old house, the Adirondacks. He had someone row him across Lake Champlain.

And in doing so, he visited all these places and talked a lot about the type of things he writes about in Deep Economy. Sustainable commercial endeavor, etc. It was a really cool book, really nostalgic. Makes you want to just move to Vermont and drink Otter Creek beer and hang out at Middlebury.

Another book I read, you'd appreciate this one, Jesse, America's Game by Michael McCambridge, the history of the NFL. The long book. I read it for, I'm in a dad book group that only reads sports books. It's a lot of like journalists and stuff that we just don't want to read anything that's too close to our work.

Everything is too close to home, so we read sports books. I like that. I know a lot about the history of the NFL now, at least up until 2005, when this book came out. In the early days, like back during Lombardi, the Canadian Football League was a big, it was definitely competitive.

People would go over there and- Not mentioned at all in this book. Really? Yeah. That's an interesting oversight. Matt Dogg had his historian on earlier in the week and they were actually talking about that because somebody died. Michael McCambridge, man, you missed the big storyline here. I also read The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell.

The philosopher, mathematician Bertrand Russell wrote this book. This would have been in like 19, I think it's like 1919 or something like that, maybe 1930, somewhere in that period, maybe a little later than that. I might be messing it up. I mean, he died in the, he died remarkably late.

He lived a long time. I'm going to say the 1930s. Anyways, there's a really nice new edition of this book that I found at Barnes and Noble. And so I was like, okay, I got to read this. It's like a kind of like a self-help book, but written before people wrote self-help books and written by an eminent philosopher and mathematician.

And it's him trying to deconstruct and understand the sources of human happiness, as well as the things that pull away from human happiness and trying to lay out some sort of program for how you can maximize it in your life. This is what philosophers used to do. This is why I really dislike this tendency we have for, especially the very online types to be very dismissive about, well, their self-help.

They're a guru where you have to like throw this disclaimer at the front of everything you write. We're like, ah, I'm no guru. I'm not. In fact, I'm, I'm terrible. And, and I'm, I'm, I can barely walk and I'm not giving any advice. And you really think people are going to applaud, like there's all these gurus who are, you know, preying on people.

But look, it used to be professional thinkers and philosophers were like, this is one of the things I want to do is try to think through big questions from life and take my swing. So good for Russell for doing it. Very readable. There's some anachronisms in it, but actually otherwise reads as a pretty modern book.

A lot of similar concepts to the deep life stuff that you talk about. There's some, yeah, yeah. I mean, I get like getting outside and just that stuff, but also a lot of psychological stuff like jealousy and pride and trying to understand. It's interesting. And so it's kind of mental healthy, a lot of it, the habits of mind that can really pull you down.

I mean, it actually reads pretty relevant, but it is an issue of mine. Is this like, I'm not impressed by people who have to put these long disclaimers about like, I'm not a guru. Who's going to tell you exactly how to live your life. I mean, where are these gurus who are trying to tell people exactly how to live their life?

I think smart people should take swings at here's a big question. Let me take a swing at like how you might answer it. People are smart. They will adapt it to their own circumstances. They will discount the obvious caveats, you know, this weird whatever it is, negative reaction that sort of very online elite types have to trying to be instructive or like to tackle big questions.

I don't think it's I don't think it's healthy. It's similar in sports. How they always say, oh, the naysayers say, yeah, X, Y, Z. I think in online culture, it's very safe to be a naysayer because you'd be applauded for your world weary critiques. People are like, oh, that's a good, I didn't see that angle of critique and there's no real risk.

Yeah, being a little bit too critical. I like, well, you know, sophisticated people are critical, but you're really opening yourself up. If you say, this is my thoughts about this or like, this is my philosophy for how you should do something. I mean, I think it's, you know, it's why I've sold a lot of books is because I'm not online.

So I don't care. It's like, look, I think this is interesting. I loved reading this stuff. I love books like Bertrand Russell's Conquest of Happiness. Like let's just get after it. And I don't care. So I guess more books for me if everyone else is afraid of it. A lot of smart people who could be writing really interesting, cool, reflective books aren't because they don't want to get yelled at on Twitter.

So hey, more books for us. Final book I read part of us kind of a holdover from Thriller December Rising Sun by Michael Crichton. I'm sure I read that at some point when I was a kid, but I found the paperback in a newspaper back. And so I read it well constructed sort of murder mystery thriller.

It's two detectives. They made a movie about this with Sean Connery and God, who was the other person? Was it Wesley Snipes? I think it was. I saw that movie like 30 years ago. Yeah. I have to go back and watch the movie. I mean, essentially there it's, it's a detective thriller, right?

These are detectives and they're trying to figure out a murder. And then there's some like Crichton high tech stuff. The thing I, I didn't really realize this about Crichton until more recently. He got really reactionary. This was like a pretty like reactionary kind of anti-Japanese book. Oh, really? Yeah.

Like, he was very worried, clearly very worried about the economic influence of at the then, I guess, Japan had this massive like outsized economic influence. Not very nice to Japanese people. I'm thinking about disclosure. I'm thinking about state of fear. I was like, Oh, he kind of became curmudgeonly his nineties.

So it's, it's, it is pretty reactionary. He just works this stuff into his book, but but still a good murder, good murder mystery. But it's interesting layer. Any of these books, audio? I'm sure they're all, no, none of these were audio. So you read them all? I read them all.

Yeah. Yeah. I read a lot of audio books recently.