All right. Well, speaking of books, Jesse, this is the first episode that will air in April, right? We're recording it. I mean, in May. Yeah. Yeah. We're recording it in April, but it'll be the first one that we, uh, release in May. And what's our tradition is the first episode that we either record or release in each month.

I, I discussed the five books I read in the month before, and though it's only the 28th, I have, as is my habit long since finished my five books for April. So I figure we can, we can talk about them now in our standard, what I read segment. All right.

So in April of 2022, the first book I read, and we talked about this on the show was the seven story mountain by Thomas Merton. So you remember, this is the story. It came out in 1948. It was a memoir of Thomas Merton who had grown up with his artist father, traveling throughout Europe, ended up in the States, ended up at Columbia, was sort of a intellectual writer, started teaching English literature classes and dropped everything and became a Trappist monk at the Garden of Gethsemane Trappist monastery in Kentucky.

And the Trappists, if you don't know, are pretty, pretty, um, far on the aesthetic, no, ascetic end. You know, we're going to, we're not out there in the community also having jobs and we're not Jesuits that are also astronomers. It's like, no, we're chopping wood and waking up four times in the middle of the night to say prayers.

So it was about that transition. It's very influential. It's very influential because it, it, it came out during this post-war doldrums period where people were adrift and moving to suburbs and getting boring jobs. And so this book of reinvention and focusing on depth and values in a radical way.

And this is a clear example of my notion of the deep life in action really struck a chord. So I figured I needed to read it because so much more that's recent is informed by it, whether the author's note or not. Uh, we talked about it before because I tried to read it on Kindle and I was like, nah, this book can't be read on Kindle.

Uh, I need a hardcover. But instead of just like a normal person buying a hardcover, I went back and bought a first edition, first printing from 1948 of the book. I think it really mattered. I think it really helped. I think it really changed my experience of reading the book.

Um, and it's a long one. It's 400 something pages and in the original hardcover, which are wide pages. And they didn't mess around with this sort of business book you buy in the airport in the 2000 and twenties, you know, double spaced lines and giant fonts. They didn't mess around with that back in the forties, you know, people had time.

So the lines are, the lines are small. So it took me a while to read. Um, but I'm really glad I did. I'm really glad I did. I know more about Catholic practice now than I ever have before. So I, I recommend it. It is the, it's a foundational book that so many more self-transformation books, all of the big self-transformation books that fall in the 20th centuries were informed by seven story mountain and he's a good writer.

All right. So speaking about writing, I then went on to read Anne Lamott's bird by bird. I had never read that. No, I had read the other famous writing instruction books. So bird by bird, if you don't know, is Anne Lamott's book about writing. It's a book about writing now, because as you might expect, I've internalized a patriarchy.

I had read Stephen King's book on writing on writing, probably because of the, the male gendered gaze was more comfortable for me than the, the, the female gaze or what have you. But for whatever reason, I had never read bird by bird, but it is right up there with Stephen King's on writing as one of the two most famous nonfiction books about writing from the last, whatever, three or four decades.

I like Anne Lamott. I mean, I like her writing. I like her as a person, just her, excuse me, like just her approach to life. She lives and she's had an interesting, difficult life. And she, I always go deep stalker mode on, on the houses of writers. And so she bought this cool piece of land in Northern California that was kind of run down and they slowly converted it over time into this like Oasis.

I love that type of stuff. The book is good. It's focused on fiction writing and I'll say the main thing I came away with other than Anne Lamott is a great writer. And the main thing I came away with is fiction writing, I think attracts more aspiring writers than nonfiction because on paper becoming a success seems easier.

And what I mean by that is when you read bird by bird or you read Stephen King's book and you read about novel writing, the only real activity you do is sit down at a computer and write. And so it's all about that, like just sitting down there and writing and overcoming the psychological fears.

So in theory, if you've never written anything before, you have all of the tools and things you need to potentially write a great novel. You just have to sit down there and write. Where nonfiction, excuse me, seems more scary, right? It's like I got to get a book deal first.

You don't write nonfiction before you get the book. I got to go actually talk to people. I got to do interviews. So it seems harder. But the reality is when you read something like bird by bird, it's like, oh my God, fiction is so much harder. Like, yeah, yeah, you can just get going, but man, it's just you and the screen and you have to just craft out of nowhere these characters and narratives that reveal the human experience and do so with perfect craft because any deviation from perfect craft is going to ring out.

Where in nonfiction, I don't know, you just have to be competent. I have something to read about. I did research on it. If I just do the work to do the research and I know how to write in a way that's not going to annoy people like you can be in the game.

So I think this is the allure of National Novel Writing Month and fiction writing and bird by bird is like, maybe if I just sit there at the keyboard of mice and men is going to come out. But I think it's way harder. So I'm glad I'm not a fiction writer.

That just seems like it's impossible. It's like trying to be a screenwriter. Everyone's like, I bet I could do that because I know movies. I movie seems straightforward and it's impossible. It's impossible to actually like, right, because everyone can do it, but to do it well, it's like near impossible.

So it's a good book. Makes me glad I'm a nonfiction writer and to all you aspiring writers out there. Nonfiction is actually way, it's way easier in my opinion to like be a working writer than in fiction. All right. Then I went on and read some fiction because April had some good weather and good weather.

I like to have fun books to read. So I went and read the Carl Sagan novel contact, which actually I really enjoyed. So it was a premise of the book was it focused on someone at SETI, S-E-T-I, search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And Carl Sagan works through what would happen if we actually did get a signal from an alien civilization.

And the parts I like the best actually is he works through the science of how that would work. You know, like, okay, it would be a signal on this frequency that corresponds to the emission frequency of hydrogen. And there would be pulses corresponding to the prime numbers because that'd be really universal.

And then they're using various modulation screens to encode information into those, into those symbols. And so anyways, I thought that was real interesting. So I really loved the part where he got in whenever he would get into the science of like how alien communication would work and, and how we would track it down.

I love those parts, but there was pretty good characters as well. I mean, it was a good book and I love when scientists write books and they're good. The only nerd comment I need to make, my apologies to the Sagan estate, actually no apologies, it's not his fault. It just is a demonstration of how things have changed.

So the book takes place like in 99. And so he gets wrong, he gets right a lot of things. He didn't get the internet right. So they had instead these like portable fax machines they would carry around that like would send messages, they would like send and receive messages through portable fax machines.

Like he wasn't quite there on the internet, but, but you know, it was pretty close. But the, the, the small nerd detail that I noticed is the aliens used for one of the layers of encoding in their signal phase modulation. And in, in the book Sagan's like, Oh, we don't phase modulation is something that theoretically you could do, but it's not something that we use really in like human devices.

Like we know about it, but it's just not something we're used to. Based on my understanding, phase modulation is actually now heavily used in wireless data protocols, like in particular in 802.11 protocols for access points, like phase modulations at the core of it. So that was a prediction that was gotten wrong in the age of wifi phase modulation as well used.

So what I'm doing here, Jesse is I'm giving the people the information they really care about. You know, you cut past the superfluous and you focus in on what is it that the crowds really care about. And I look, if there's one thing I will say about deep questions, listeners, they are RF modulation, RF modulation fans.

Yeah. You got us primed up for your comments about Jurassic Park a couple months ago. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Forget, forget any mistake I said about Jurassic Park, the overlooking the importance of phase modulation. I mean, let me get going about QAM constellation encoding. This all came from, by the way, so again, no one cares about this.

I'm mainly a theoretician, but I do theory. I used to do theory about problems that were motivated by wireless networks. So for my postdoc, for my two years as a postdoc at MIT, I'd left the theory group and I went up to the network and mobile systems group and learned a lot about how wireless network technology actually works.

So there you go. It finally paid off in allowing me to do an awesome, cool critique of Carl Sagan. I don't want to say that makes this book a garbage book, but you know, you're going to get modulation wrong. I mean, I don't know guys, I don't know what we're doing here.

All right. Then I went on and read a book I found in a little free library at the field where my oldest son was playing little league called blue latitudes. So this is Tony Horwitz. I'm a big Tony Horwitz booster. He died a few years ago, like at the age of 60, just tragic, just like heart attack, just boom streets of DC, you know, fickle finger of fate, which was really tragic.

Fascinating guy. Talk about a writing power couple, by the way. So he married Geraldine Brooks, the novelist. When he married her, he had a Pulitzer. From his war correspondent reporting, and then not long after they got married, she got a Pulitzer for one of her novels. I don't know if it was March or The Crossing.

So it's a it's a dual Pulitzer couple, a nonfiction writer and a novelist. But anyways, I mean, the book is probably his most famous book is Confederates in the Attic, which is a fantastic book, the first Horwitz book I wrote. But he does these. These are like nonfiction travelogue type books and blue latitudes.

He was tracing Captain Cook's journeys through the Pacific of the 18th century. And so he's going all over like remote Pacific islands and all the way up to the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. And he's really good at this travel writing because he's a Pulitzer Prize winning war correspondent. So he knows how to go to these remote, interesting places and insert himself into interesting situations and find interesting people.

He's he's he's twitchy and high energy and is just constantly trying to find places to go and people to meet. And and he's a good. So it's it's interesting. He does interesting things. And so in this book, he's doing interesting things. He's on these islands you've never heard of meeting these characters who he who capture so interestingly, like the the life on these islands and the impact of colonialism, etc.

written beautifully and just interleaving with the story of Captain Cook. Great book, but long. It's another 450 pager. So it took me a while. It took me a while. So I had to 450 pagers this month. So I was surprised by how long that took. The final book I read.

It's a bit of an odd one. This is a deep pole. Uncle Petros and gold blocks conjecture. As a long process by which I came to this book. It is a novel written by a mathematician, a Greek mathematician named Apostolos Doxias. So between this and Sagan, as you can see, I'm on a kick of scientists writing books about their field.

And the book is about it's like a young boy and his uncle and his uncle was like this super math prodigy who became obsessed with trying to solve gold box conjecture. Which was at the time one of the three big famous number theory conjectures that hadn't been solved. So the Riemann hypothesis, Fermat's last theorem and the gold block conjecture.

Fermat's has since been proven by Andrew Wiles. Was the Riemann solved? Can you look that up, Jesse? The Riemann hypothesis. I have this vague memory of this R-E-I-M-A-N-N. I have this vague memory of this, this eccentric mathematician George or Goreg or something solved it and didn't even show up.

But I might be thinking about something different. So you have to fact check me on that. Anyways, Wikipedia says many consider it to be the most important unsolved problem in pure mathematics in the first paragraph. So what did he, oh, look up, I think he solved Poincare's conjecture. Maybe that's what he solved.

The guy I'm thinking about. So Jesse's going to fact check that. Yeah. Maybe that's what it was. Originally conjectured by Henry Poincare in 1904, the theorem conserves spaces that locally look like ordinary three-dimensional space. Yeah. Was it solved? Attempts to resolve the conjecture drove much progress in the field of geometric topology during the 20th century.

So a guy whose name started with G who solved it? I'll keep on looking. Yeah. Anyways, the point be there was something famous solved and the guy was this weird eccentric, I think it was Russian. And he didn't even show up for, I think he got to give him like a Fields Medal or something.

He didn't even show up. But anyways, this book was sort of about a character like this. So it's a math prodigy who became obsessed with solving this conjecture. And basically his life fell apart because of that. And it is from the perspective of his son who kind of uncovers this.

And so it's cool. It's a short book. I wouldn't say there's a lot of sophisticated plot in it. There's like long periods of just exposition of like, let me just tell you, let me just summarize my uncle's story. And it kind of just tells the story, but it's really cool because he puts in a lot of famous figures from logic and number theory and analysis.

So Turing plays a role. Kurt Gödel shows up in the book. He's hanging out with Rajanaman Hardy at Cambridge. And so it's cool. It's like all these mathematical cameos, not much really happens, but I love to see specialists in their fields, write fiction about their fields because I want to do that one day.

So maybe that's why I was reading Sagan and Uncle Petros. You should have used your French accent. Yeah. The proper pronunciation is Henry Honkai is how, if you're going to be sophisticated. You're saying, you're like, that's good. I remember when the guy from Russia saw the hungry, hungry conjecture.

Yeah, that was, that was good. So do we figure out, is that the thing you solved? I was reading through the Wikipedia. Wikipedia is unbelievable. Yeah. This one guy tried to solve in the thirties, but then it was retracted. Bunch of other guys tried in the fifties and sixties.

Well, I'm sure there's some nerd listening. He's a bigger nerd to me. He will write in and please do. An exposition of attempts to prove this conjecture can be found in the book. Because I'm thinking about. Care's Prize by George Fizo Spiro. Because this is what I'm, all right, someone has to write in.

There's someone who solved something hard in the last 10 years, maybe the last 15 years. And his name was George and he's Russian and he's eccentric. It's not the Ryman hypothesis. It's not, it doesn't sound like it's the Poncari conjecture. So, all right, someone has to write in and set us straight.

I got a quick question. So before you would say that you read two chapters a day before you bumped up to five books a month, right? So what do you think you read? Like four chapters a day now? It's uneven. Yeah. So, I mean, part of what happens is you just, when you, you take advantage of quiet time to like go nuts.

Like once you're in the habit of reading, you're looking for times to kind of go nuts and read. And so some days you don't get that much time in. You just have your standard times you read. And other days you're like, Ooh, I have, you know, an half hour.

Like the, the kids are with my wife and they're coming home and they won't be home for a half hour or something. And if it's your default activity, you just, you lean into it. Like, great. I can really, and once you get into the books and I talked about this in the podcast last week, that once you're no longer are using your phone as a default source of distraction.

And conversely, you've gotten really into like the books you're reading and the idea of reading books. Your mind is used to that. You begin to crave it. It's great. Like, this is what, this is what I want. Like everything slows down. The leisure is deeper. Your brain gets quiet.

Your thoughts get clear. I just really am more and more of an advocate of this is, this is the medicine people need right now. Were any of the five audio books? None of those five are audio books. None of those five are audio books. I'm listening to the, the first book from the expanse series, sci-fi series.

I was listening. I'm listening to that on audio, but it's long. It's a 40 minute book. So I was listening to that off and on throughout. And then I'm also listening to the Steve Martin's professional memoir, born standing up. I just finished that actually. Yeah. I mean, I'd read it obviously was influential in my work, but I read it in 2007 or something.

So I don't remember so much. I don't remember. So I'm enjoying that. I'm almost done with that as well. I'm actually, so I have three books I'm reading simultaneously right now and I'm pretty close on all three. So like I'm, once we cross over the May boundary, I'm probably going to be three books in, you know, by the first week of May.

Cause I just kind of, I have a bunch going in parallel right now. I actually miscounted. So I was on, we were on a little trip to the beach when I finished the fifth book and I thought it was my fourth. So I had like a lot of other stuff going.

And so then, so then I spread out. It's like, well, let me make progress in a lot of books so that I can finish them all. So I'm just off schedule now. So like I'm finishing stuff like halfway through a month and kind of starting the new stuff. It's just my readings not scheduled with the start of the month basically.