Alright, well, like we do each month, I like to talk about the books I read in the previous month. As long-time listeners know, my goal is to try to read at least five books a month, and I do this by just regularly putting aside time to read. I read in the morning, I often will put aside time in the evening to read.

If I have extra time during lunch, I'll read. Occasionally, I'll time block blocks to read if I'm getting close to finishing a book. It's just a little bit of effort put into freeing up time to look at the pages of a book and a commitment to not instead dedicating that time to your phone.

It's surprising how many pages you can actually get through. Alright, so Jesse, I want to go through the five books I read in November of 2022. This is in, I guess that's the order I finish these. Alright, number one, Life is Hard, How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way by Kieran Setia.

Kieran wrote Midlife, which I loved, and I talk about a lot in my book, Digital Minimalism. He's a philosopher at MIT. So Life is Hard is he's pulling from big ideas from philosophy to help you get through life against the backdrop of the fact that life is hard and hard things are going to happen.

So obviously, it's a popular subject. It seems sometimes like the only consistent answer we get to this seems to be stoicism. Kieran is drawing much more widely from the world of philosophy to try to help provide answers about how to get through life. Really good book, some really strong ideas.

I think the earlier chapters, which drew from experience from the disability community to give insight into how to deal with loss or bad things happening, I thought was really particularly strong. It was a philosophical stance to life in which you don't focus on what has been taken away from you, but instead focusing on what is possible or what you can do.

And there's this whole philosophical backdrop to this about most things you're not going to get time to do anyway. So it's not actually rational to focus on, well, now I've lost, you know, this has been taken on my life and I can't do this one thing. Well, there's a thousand things you're not going to get to.

Focus on the things you can and how you can actually build a life of real meaning around loss. I thought that was really good. My main critique of this book is throughout there's these somewhat heavy handed injections of I don't know what else to call this other than wokeness, I suppose, that take you out of the book.

There's these sections where it seems more like Kieran is writing to a suddenly narrowing his audience, the fellow academics and just saying, don't yell at me, don't yell at me, don't yell at me. And I think the book would have been perhaps more broad and timeless, perhaps without those interjections.

It really did feel like an editor at some point said, someone might get mad about this one, I get mad about this. And you had to go back and add these self-defensive sections and I don't know, I think it hurt the timelessness of the book a little bit. All right.

Book number two, Superintelligent Paths, Dangers and Strategies by the philosopher Nick Bostrom. So this book's a 2016, maybe 2017, really popular among the tech set, the techno libertarian set who's concerned about artificial intelligence. Basically Bostrom, who has the center at Oxford, it looks at threats to humanity's future with a very straight face, very systematically goes through all of these scenarios of how superintelligent AI, the various ways it might essentially take over the world and potentially convert the world into a fuel source as it sort of takes over the whole galaxy to try to fuel its computation.

So it's like all abstract, all mind experiments, but like, let's think through as superintelligence arises, artificial intelligence, all the different things that could happen, all the ways it could unfold. Spoiler alert, most of them are bad for humanity. So I don't know, it's an interesting book because he's taking this issue very seriously.

I mean, when I'm reading this book, I keep alternating between perceiving it as bracing and perceiving it as absurd. And I bounce back and forth, which I think is the mark of a provocative book. This caught the attention of a lot of tech types, caught the attention of Bill Gates, Elon Musk.

I'm thinking of various people who blurbed this book and said, we should be worried about this. So it's interesting. I think what it also reveals is this strong belief among these type of particular brand of thinkers who are concerned about AI and think we should start preparing now to deal with these threats is they have this certain determinism for the future of humanity that's really rooted in this idea that like, of course, we need to get to a place where we expand beyond Earth and harness more of the resources of the galaxy of the solar system and beyond.

And it's this sort of sci-fi type of extra planetary future vision for humanity. And they're really, I think it's just kind of baked into the thinking, I think, of a lot of these thinkers is like, this is where we're heading. So when you pick this up, reading the AI prognosticators, it makes sense.

Something like Elon Musk and how he thinks about Mars suddenly makes a lot more sense. Like, oh, this is a very common mindset. We're going to leave Earth and we need to build Dyson spheres around the sun. And how much energy is available in the solar system and how a million years from now can we harness all of that?

So the reason why like the Nick Bostroms of the world are so concerned about AI becoming a super intelligence is that they think that will stop us from this vision of expanding throughout the universe. And B, but maybe if we're really careful, it could help accelerate that. So it's that undercurrent is something that I would say most people don't think about.

But in this particular circle, it is just assumed that, yeah, this is the whole ball game is 20,000 years from now, we better have be harnessing 80% of the energy from the sun as we become a multi-solar system species. So along those same lines, I read Life 3.0, Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark at MIT.

I found this book to be much more energetic, interesting than Bostroms book. Bostroms is very ontological. It's like very clearly break down these different possibilities and go through them. Tegmark has a lot of energy, a lot of originality in his thinking. Tegmark, he's a physicist at MIT, but he's like very broad.

He touches on a bunch of different topics. And so you get a lot of this. It was a much more enjoyable read, in my opinion. But he's all over the, it's like, let's talk about AI. Let's talk about, let's get terms right. But let's also let's talk about like all these different ways that we might harness energy from the universe.

And let's talk, like he bounces around to all these ideas. He's a smart guy. He's a creative thinker. He is also much more, he's much more clear about this in Bostrom, but he's just like Bostrom is very much aligned with a course, a course, a course, the whole point of humanity is to leave the planet and expand throughout the solar system and beyond.

And it's just taken as a granted that that's what the whole ball game is about. It's a more eclectic book than Bostrom was more fun booked in Bostrom. And but I enjoyed it. I enjoyed that. Tegmark is an interesting guy. He is the guy, by the way, that's responsible for all of those quotes you see from famous scientists and engineer types who are saying, I'm worried about AI.

So Bill Gates, Hawking, Stephen Hawking, and Elon Musk, all three of their quotes about we should be worried about AI. That's all Tegmark's doing. He is the one who organized this big conference in Puerto Rico where he brought all these people together and really kicked off this idea of we have to start thinking now about the future of AI before we actually get to a place where it's dangerous.

And so he's really the cultural orchestra conductor of this big names in tech and science expressing concern about AI. Tegmark is a huge initiator of that movement. In Gears, I also read Sacred Nature, Restoring Our Ancient Bond with the Natural World by Karen Armstrong. I'm a huge fan of Armstrong.

I think she's one of the most interesting and talented religious historians writing today. The main value in Sacred Nature is a short book that will very quickly bring you into the Armstrong philosophy, which she's developed over multiple books now about the nature of religion, pre-enlightenment being something that is based on action and ritual and activity, that insight is gained through doing.

It's not gained in a linguistic sense. It's not gained by just studying a text or deciding in the abstract whether or not to assent to a creed or not. Religion insights were often experiential. By doing these things, you over time directly experience, lived experience, the inside of the religion.

Until you're actually doing all the different things, you're not getting insight. You can't evaluate a religion and decide to follow it or not or if it's true or not just based off of reading its books. This is this key Armstrong insight. Her best book on this is The Case for God.

Sacred Nature is short, but you get a really good sampling of her thinking. As an actual proposal for rethinking our relationship with nature, I don't know, it's a combination of this incredibly insightful breakdown of the way that various spiritual traditions saw an energy infused throughout all of nature. It's very fascinating how the Abrahamic religion moved away from that.

By citing their religion in particular time in history, that actually changed the relationship with nature, made it more instrumental and less infused with the divine. All that is fascinating. It's kind of grafted on with a sort of very middle of the road, standard sort of climate change polemic that there's no insight there.

And therefore, we should care more about climate change. It's like that part almost feels tacked on to what is otherwise incredibly insightful religious scholarship. Last book, my favorite actually of the five, Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino. Fantastic book. It's basically just him talking about his experience with the cinema in the seventies, which was a influential period for him as a kid.

The exposure he had to cinema in the seventies, each of the chapters is built around a particular movie, but it goes all over the place. Each chapter is sort of anchored with a particular movie. So they'll be talking about bullet or they'll be talking about deliverance, but then it goes all over the place.

Why I love this book is because it's so original in its tone and approach. So this captures in prose, essentially the essence of Quentin Tarantino, right? So it's divergent, it's obsessed with pop culture. It has a foundation and deep intellectual confidence, and it bounces around between, he knows all these movies, he knows these directors, he's connecting them in interesting ways.

He's jumping from this, this, and back to this. He's not trying to show off. And yet he just is, there's like a profound intellect behind a critique, but he's not trying to prove that he's smart. So it's like watching a good Tarantino movie, but in the written form. And there's so little innovation that happens these days, I think, in idea nonfiction.

I mean, there's so much sameness in tone. And it's a bunch of people like my age who are putting on their sort of deep professor voice and trying to, I'm so smart and let me be very careful and resigned or whatever. And then Tarantino comes in and it's just like a fire hose.

It's like, boom, it's energy and divergent and he's brilliant, but he doesn't care. He's all over the place and you come away having learned a lot. So it's one of the most original works just in terms of tone and delivery of idea nonfiction I've read in a long time.

So whether you're a movie geek or not, I enjoy cinema speculation. One learning though, if you get it on audio like I did, Tarantino reads the first chapter and it's great. You're like, oh, here we go. We got eight hours of him, it's because his voice matches the content.

It switches to a third party narrator for the second chapter. So a little bit of being switched. So be prepared for the narrator's fine. I bet Tarantino should have read the whole thing. But he's a busy guy. All right, Jesse, those are my five books from November. With the life is hard, when you were talking about the ending there, it kind of reminded me when you're talking about caveats with Sam Harris last week.

Yeah, there was a little bit of that. Because I mean, well, also just he's pulling from these philosophers over 200 to 300 year period. So it's, it's very, um, timeless and broad, but then half the chapters in the end, it's like, uh, and where this all should lead you is to like very narrow, like whatever, basically like, um, 2022 elite academic thinking on political issues, like whatever that current, very contemporary thought is that all just leads you to there.

And that felt tacked on, you know, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, they didn't know about postmodern influence critical theories, five years from now, the trends in academia are going to be different. So that's, what's going to make it seem less timely. Like he obviously was writing this at home during the pandemic, post George Floyd.

And like, this was really influencing him. And he was thinking about people reading this and how they're going to react. But even like five years from now, I think where it gets specific and contemporary is going to feel dated, which is fine. If you're writing a book that is contemporary and founded in a particular moment, but this is a book about timeless timelessness philosophies that covered all sorts of different periods, all sorts of different, uh, innovations and political thought, all sorts of different, um, uh, intellectual, uh, favorite ideas of the time and all these philosophies that were all these different things were going on.

And so that's, maybe that's just me, but I just felt like this book, you didn't have to cap. Yeah. It was caveat. Um, cause you were talking to Sam about that and I'm not going to talk to Sam about that. I think it's, I think you got to trust the reader.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, if you need to prove to a certain subset, like I'm with your tribe, wear a shirt with a slogan. But, uh, when you try to put too many caveats into your writing, it doesn't work. It, it, I think it reduces the impact. Trust your reader.

The readers can add the caveats. They can apply it to the, whatever moment they're reading it in and draw those, draw those insights. And, and so when you, when you add these caveats to either avoid being yelled at or to signal you're on a particular team, regardless of what that team is, I always think that diminishes the value of nonfiction writing.

Trust the reader. The reader knows what they care about. They're sophisticated. They will take your ideas and adapt them and apply them to their own lives and to their own situations, the causes they care about them. They'll stress test them against these other things going on. So if your book is not particularly about these issues to graph the issues on, it doesn't end up making it better.

It doesn't end up, I mean, maybe it does protect you from, I don't know, some nasty tweet, but no one really cares. That's the reality is like, no one really cares about you. And this is what I've decided. No one cares about me. No one really is following it that closely.

People see what you read, right? It's just something in here that's useful to me and they move on with their life. So yeah, but I did talk about that with Harris on the podcast, my philosophy of caveats. And we've talked about on the show before, but how caveating, well, this advice might not apply here.

It's very relevant to one-on-one conversation where it's just reasonable and polite, but doesn't work well when it's one to many. When you're doing one to many broadcasting information, then you got to let the recipients add the caveat. So it's two different modes of communication.