Alright, so speaking of Deep Living and Productivity, this is the first show that we are recording in March of 2022. So, as is our tradition, I wanted to do a segment in which I go through the books I read during the previous month. So, the books I read in February 2022.

As long-time listeners of the show know, I typically aim to read five books per month. I count books in the month in which I finish them. So, you have to break that symmetry somehow. That is how I break it. I'll say, Jesse, this was a weird reading month for me.

I have some unusual choices. It was an unusual month and I was grabbing stuff kind of randomly. So, you'll see, as will the listeners here. Alright, so let's start with the first book I read in the month. I just grabbed this out of a little free library here in Tacoma Park and read it in a day or two.

It was not a long book. It was called Living with a Seal by Jesse Itzler. It is a book where Jesse Itzler, who is an entrepreneur, among other things, I think he worked with like NetJets or one of these jet leasing. Do you know him? I've read the book, yeah.

You've read the book, okay. So, anyways, he hired who turns out to be David Goggins, though it's not revealed in the book, to live with him for a month and make him do these terrible intense workouts. And so, it was interesting. I was interested. I find Goggins to be an interesting character, so I read the book.

I will say, and I don't know how to say this without, this is going to sound a little bit snobbish, but I'm not that used to this style of ultra accessible nonfiction. So, there's this style of ultra accessible nonfiction where the chapters are three or four pages long and it moves at a really fast rate and it's, I don't want to say it's superficial, but it's just we did this and that and this and it's very compulsively readable.

And I think this book sold really well. And what I realized, and again, there's no way to talk about this without sounding like a super snob, is that there's a whole genre of nonfiction that's made to be very accessible, very short chapters. It moves really fast. It's sort of the opposite, I guess, of some of the nonfiction worlds in which I swim.

And so, that was an interesting part about reading this book, was saying, oh, there is this sort of bubblegum nonfiction world out there. And I think it's good. That's what I was exposed to. It was an interesting book. All right. Another book I read was Susan Casey's latest, Voices in the Ocean.

So, Susan Casey wrote The Devil's Teeth, which I really like. This is a book about the, what do they call it, the Faroe or Farallon Islands off of San Francisco. Anyways, it's one of the great white shark hot spots in the world. It's just surrounded by great white sharks.

They're attracted by the seals, and there's researchers out there who study them. And she went out there, and it's about the sharks and about the research. That was great. She wrote The Wave, which I really like, which is about large waves. But half of the book is her following Laird Hamilton to do big wave surfing.

That's another fantastic book. Anyway, she has this style where what she does is goes on adventures. She meets interesting people and goes and does interesting things and uses that as the narrative spine for writing about a topic like great white sharks or large waves. So this was about dolphins.

Voices in the Ocean is about dolphins. And so she goes on various adventures. She goes to travel to see various places where dolphins are being held in captivity. She goes to the Solomon Islands where there is a dolphin trading going on, and it's a little bit shady. She likes to put herself in the semi-danger as part of these books.

She goes to that Japanese city featured in the documentary The Cove, where they push these dolphins into this cove, and they slaughter them, and she goes there. So it was an interesting book. Now, I'll tell you the reason why I actually read this book, and so this was a bit of a disappointment, is I'm interested in Susan's story herself.

So Susan was a very successful magazine editor. So she went and she took over, I believe, Outside Magazine and really helped their reinvention back when they were starting to win all those national book awards. This is the Krakauer era of Outside Magazine. And then Oprah tapped her to run the Oprah Magazine.

Oh, the Oprah Magazine, and that did really well under her tutelage. So she had a very intense corporate job running these magazines, and then she would write these books sort of in parallel, and it reminded me of myself trying to write books while doing these other things I do.

And what happened to Susan is she burnt out at some point, said, "Enough of this. Step down from those running-the-magazine-type positions and move to Maui," and lives there at least half the year and spends a lot of time swimming in the ocean. She's really into the ocean with dolphins or this or that.

I thought that story was going to be in this book because I know this book was connected to her making that change, but I think she made the change after she finished the book. So unfortunately, I did not get in the book those insider stories of the overworked author shifting to a deeper, simpler life, but I enjoyed the book nonetheless.

Then this was just random. I grabbed this from my library of Mice and Men, Steinbeck. I just realized, I don't know if I've ever read Steinbeck or haven't read Steinbeck since high school, and I saw the book in my library. It was a copy from the '60s, and so I grabbed it and read it.

It was quite interesting. This, by the way, is an argument for having a library. I know there is a minimalist movement out there surrounding books that says, "Come on, don't hold on the books. Why are you holding on the books? It's clutter. You're never going to read them." I actually go old school.

I have a large library spread over many rooms and many bookshelves and actually many buildings. I have a library here at the HQ and multiple rooms full of books at my house. I like the idea of having—I go to my shelves and I pull books off and I read them, and I think this is an example.

I grabbed Steinbeck off the shelf and I hadn't read it yet, and I did. I would say usually at least two of the five books I read each month are grabbed serendipitously from my personal library. I like the idea that my kids are growing up just surrounded by books.

Of Meissenmann, it was good. It was good. It's interesting because it's old enough that the style— there was so much formal innovation in fiction that took off not long after that earlier period of Steinbeck that it seems almost old-fashioned, right? That it's largely third-person perspective, just observing on the characters, establishing characterization almost entirely through dialogue and action.

And it just feels like, "Oh, this is just old-fashioned, old-school style for novels," but Steinbeck is very good at the style and it sticks with you. He does very interesting characterization through dialogue and action, and when it's over, it sticks with you. So it's interesting. So there's no formal flash in it.

All of the modernist stuff that followed and then the postmodernist stuff that followed that in terms of formal innovation, it has none of that, right? I mean, Faulkner started doing his modernist stuff so quickly after this period, and then you get the postmodernist doing their stuff with fiction after this, and you get Pynchon and all these other writers that all took off after mid-century.

So it was old-fashioned, but it was—you heard it here first. Steinbeck is a good writer. There you go. All right. Then I read a book by Boyd Vardy called Cathedral of the Wild. So Boyd was actually a guest on Tim Ferriss' show, and that's actually what brought this book to my attention.

So that worked. He was on the show, and I bought his memoir. So that worked out well. Did you hear that episode, Jesse, the lion tracking? Yeah. Yeah, right? It's an interesting guy, right? I've listened to all of his episodes for the most part. Right. So I listened to Boyd on Ferriss and then said, "I got to get this guy's memoir." And crazy.

You might like this book, Jesse, because I've been watching this series Yellowstone on Paramount+ or wherever it is, and it's the story of this ranch family or this or that. And I was thinking, "Forget that. Someone needs to make a series about the Vardy family's life." It's this crazy story.

So their South African and his grandparents, I believe, bought this land that was considered worthless in eastern South Africa. It had been overgrazed, and so you couldn't really farm on it anymore. And they basically created one of the first wildlife preserves that was set up around sustainable safari. And they figured out how to do that, how to rejuvenate the land so that animals could come back to it, and you could have a diverse ecosystem of animals, and then support it by doing ecotourism.

So people could come and do what they call photo safari, where then you could— tourists would pay a lot of money to come take pictures of these animals, and that helps fund the recovery of the land. But their story is crazy. I mean, this is a story where he has stories of getting attacked by a crocodile.

The crocodile trying to pull him in, and he was just lucky enough that his foot was in the crocodile's mouth, and he hit inside the crocodile's mouth whatever valve they breathe through. And as a reflex, the crocodile spit it back out. There's black mambas crawling over his body. Him and his dad are sitting there.

No one can move, because if you get bit by the mamba, you're dead in 30 minutes. Crawling across their bodies, like looking at them, and then crawling away. Nelson Mandela, this is where he came after being released from prison on Robbins Island. This was the reserve he came to to recharge and reflect, and they have all of these stories of being there with Mandela on their preserve, watching as he's figuring out how to bring South Africa back together.

There's stories about them desperately trying to get a radio phone going, because there was a brief revolution attempt by right-wing elements in South Africa that was happening, and he was at their preserve. All of this happens at the same place. Crazy stories like, Jesse, you probably heard on the Ferris podcast about the flying adventures.

They would fly these bush planes around, and the stork that crashed through the windshield of the plane, and the pilot had a stork head and neck sticking out of his head. It went into his head, and so the pilot passes out. The dad takes over the plane. The pilot finally comes through, pulls the stork beak out of his head, passes out again.

The mom is in the back reading the checklist for them to land. They're covered in gore and feathers. The windshield's broken open. They land the plane. They're flying to the commercial airport, and they land, and they go on and get on their commercial flight. Yeah, walk down the aisle.

So anyways, I thought it was great. I actually read it. We were on vacation down in Florida, and we were going to some wildlife preserves and stuff like that, so I was reading it down there. But it's just, I've never heard, or I've rarely heard a more interesting memoir.

If someone does not own the rights, the film rights or the series rights to this life, get on it, I think it would be a fantastic show, and he's a really interesting guy. I mean, you heard the Ferris interview. Have you ever been more jealousy-induced than the opening of that interview where Tim asked Boyd Vardy, "All right, so where are you right now?" And he's like, "Okay, I'm in this cabana on our property, and I'm looking out the window at a bau-bau tree, and there's a cheetah in the tree, and I can see elephants walking by the river, down by the river below," or something like that.

I was like, "Okay, that guy wins." He's got a good voice too. I bet you his audio book is good. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. Maybe I should have listened to it. I looked up their place, by the way. I think the dollar is relatively strong against the rand, and so I thought it would be crazy expensive.

I mean, if you look at it now, it's super luxury now, like really nice, beautifully appointed, but you can rent your own villa, and it's like $1,000-something US dollars a night, which, that's a lot of money, but not a lot of money for being in a luxury... I mean, the villa I was looking at has like a dock almost.

It comes out of it. It comes out of the villa, and it's up above a riverbank, and there's a bathtub at the end of it. So you can take a bath in the bathtub, and the elephants walk by in the river right below it. That in Miami would be like $10,000 a day.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Because I was in Florida, I was like, oh, yeah, $1,000 a day would be like entry stakes for like a reasonable resort. So maybe we'll do that for episode 200. We're going to go to Void Vardy's Safari down in South Africa. I don't know how many South African fans we have, but maybe we could gather a crew.

You can see the headlines now. Minor podcaster from D.C. killed by black mamba trying to take a bath near elephants. That would be the headline. All right, that's four. What was my fifth book? Oh, and then I also read a techno-criticism book by Jacob Ward that just came out that's called The Loop.

These are just the type of topics I keep up on in my semi-academic role when I comment on and think and write about tech and culture. Jacob Ward wrote this book called The Loop. Jacob Ward's a science writer, technology writer, that focuses on the ways that artificial intelligence can create these feedback loops with the human brain, especially the natural biases and heuristics that the human brain already uses, the type of things that you see Danny Kahneman talk about, for example.

Kahneman shows up a lot in this book. And Ward's argument or concern is that we have these biases and heuristics that we use to sort of simplify how we think about the world, and those can get stuck in a feedback loop with AI, which exploits them. And then that feeds back to the AI, which feeds back into those biases, and then the AI itself can actually push human behavior into ways that are actually pretty distant from how we might actually want to live or what we actually value.

So he's worried about these tight feedback loops between the human subconscious bias and artificial intelligence. And so that's, it's always a, look, all these topics are interesting. I thought it was an interesting book. I don't know that there was a knockout blow of an argument in this particular one, but I'm glad that people are looking at these, looking at these issues.

AI is definitely, definitely on my radar. I'm not quite sure exactly how I think about it yet, but good book. All right, so those are my five. You know, Jesse, someone asked me, they said, "When you do your books, we'd like to hear something that Jesse's reading too, so I'm putting you on the spot, but I know you're doing an interesting reading project right now.

Maybe you'd want to share what the project is you're working on with the Wars and maybe mention one of the books you read recently." You mean Neil Stephenson? Weren't you doing a project where you were reading, like trying to read a book from every major, about every major war?

Oh, no, that wasn't me. That wasn't you. Who was doing that? Maybe one of your students. Maybe one of my students. I was thinking about starting to get into some of the, you know, the World War II and World War I, and you mentioned the one book about-- Maybe that's the conversation we had.

Yeah. Okay. I haven't started that yet. I've been kind of reading a bunch of Neil Stephenson stuff, and then I'm also reading a book on John Thompson, the former-- Sure. He went to Carroll High School. That's cool. And then I'm reading a book. I bounce around a lot like you do, too.

Yeah. I picked up the Sisson book from last week, so I've dived into some of that. The Primal Blueprint? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then there's a book that I found on Amazon just about how people, like in Congress, like fought all the time back in the day, like maliciously fought.

Yeah, we talked about that. So I'm like diving into that. Yeah, we always think things are worse, but-- It was bad back then. They got killed. They got killed. And like that cane beating was really serious that happened to lead up to the Civil War. Yeah. It took that guy two years to recover.

Yeah. You just beat him with a cane. The interesting thing about Stephenson is--Neil Stephenson's books is he--I'm listening to one on audio, reading one, and then have another on hard copy, but the one on audio is before the one that I'm reading, and their characters, some of the characters carry over.

So what are the two? Reamde and then the Fall. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Reamde was first, I think. Yeah. And it must be because Zul is older in the Fall. Which one-- And then Fall's when Dodge dies. Which one has--so the Fall, is this the one where there's a--it's like a heaven-type world, but it's virtual?

The Fall is Dodge dies, and they're trying to save his brain. By the way, spoiler alert. They try to save his brain. Yeah. So I'm kind of in that part where--and then there was that fake nuclear thing. And they can upload people's--is this the right book where they can upload people's into the virtual world or something like this?

Probably. It's probably getting to that point, because I'm only 25% in. Yeah. The last Stephenson book I read was Seven Eves. I'm reading that, too. That's a cool book. Yeah. That's a fun book. I read that on vacation. The moon blows up, and a hard rain is supposed to come.

The moon blows up, and the world gets destroyed, and yeah, it's interesting. Here's the thing about You'll See When You Get to the End of It is I love the Stephenson, you know, let's work through the details. Like, he has that Andy Weir instinct of, like, let's work through some details, but then he also has, like, the Ursula K.

Gwynn instinct of I really care about people and characters in a way that, like, Andy Weir, you know, does not. And so he has that mix of really interesting characters, but he takes his time and unfolds the story, and it's interesting and captivating. Then you'll see when you get towards the end of the book, it's like he ran out of time.

He's like, and then it was like a lot of years later, and this was going on, and surprise, and a couple spoilers, and we're out. So it's this, I think, really interesting unfolding story. And I like the Neil deGrasse Tyson character. You know, the scientist that goes up in the space.

It was based off of Neil. Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. I just finished No Crash, too, like a couple weeks ago. Man, that's the life. I mean, I know it's hard. We talked about Brandon Sanderson last week, but creating fiction and not literary fiction, because I think that is when you're doing literary fiction.

I think so brutal because it's so fickle, and it's so like you're trying to create art. And like, if it doesn't go right, it's just brutal, and the whole thing can disappear. And but if you're Stevenson, you know what you're about. It's not like I have to get the National Book Award for this, and the or like the Booker Prize, or people are going to think I'm dumb, my career falls apart.

And it's like, no, I'm going to I know the type of thing I write, and I can experiment. It's interesting, and my fans love it, you know. And then just he lives in Seattle and has this cool house by the water, and they just sit and write these interesting, cool books with a fan base that likes them.

And that's the main thing you do. That's the dream, I think. He comes up with so much stuff. I like that guy. I mean, he I was reading the Wikipedia thing on Snow Crash, and he had a code for like two years to like get it all right in his head for me.

He could write the book. That's the man. That'd be the dream. Live somewhere cool. Stevenson needs a cooler place to live, though. He has like a traditional house in like a suburb of Seattle. He needs like a compound somewhere. But live somewhere cool and think really deeply about one idea, and then compose these books, and they come out on your schedule.

And he's such a curmudgeon. Like he he he book tours reluctantly, and not that long, and then goes back to write. I mean, I know he did some stuff with Blue Origin and Magic Leap. Like he's done some consulting stuff. But Sanderson, Martin, all these all these guys, Andy Weir.

It's kind of cool to like reading the fiction, then you're walking around in real life reality, and you just think certain things because you have this fiction in your mind. Like the other day when you're like, oh, something bad's going to happen. I was like, oh, hard rain in the back of my mind.

Yeah. Jesse's prepping for the hard rain. I don't know if it's worth prepping for. It seems like you didn't have a lot of options there. Like you could have gone in the space where, spoiler alert, things don't go well. Or there's the people who buried themselves underground. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Well, anyways, those are those are the books. Those are my books for February and a couple from Jesse as well. So keep reading and we'll check in next month with the five books I read in March. By the way, I'm about two down right now. So I have three books to go in March.

I mean, almost two. I'm almost done with the second. So we got three books to go. I'm also reading a really big, long book that I don't know how to count this because I'm not going to finish it in a month. It's 800 pages long and hard. But what I'm thinking I'm going to do is in addition to the five books I report, I'm going to start reporting progress on this big book.

That's a good idea. Because it's broken up. Because you've talked about it several times. Yeah. And it's broken up into eight smaller books inside of it. So I might just I won't count it as one of my books, but I'll say I read, you know, books two through three of this big book this month because I have to get going in it.

I just I got to get that momentum going. The other thing about books in general that you mentioned to me offline was how one of your editors said that you don't read enough. I found that amazing. I think your audience might want to hear that story. Well, enough literature, enough literature.

Now, granted, this is someone with a graduate degree in literature from a very good school. He correctly points out I don't let's put it this way. I do not think that he has recently read Jesse Itzler's Living with a Seal. So I think he thinks I need to read more literature.

And he's right. I need if I'm going to be I'm doing thinking and commentary and cultural discussion to have that common cultural heritage of really smart people in our literary heritage. I need that to be better. So this big, long book I'm reading is a classic. I need to read.

I've read a fair amount of the classics, but I want to make that more a part of my regular routines. I'll report back on that success, but I want to read more classics. So more on that. More on that soon. Nice. Thanks.