So I've got my list here. And Jesse, I guess I'll get your take on these books. So as long-time listeners know, my goal is typically to read five books per month. This is possible, I find, if you just on a semi-regular basis put aside non-trivial amount of time to reading, and then as you get close to the end of a book, just get after it and say, "I'm just going to go and finish this book." So with a little bit of intention, it's often surprising how much you can read.

So I thought I would go through what I read this month, and we will get the official reaction of producer extraordinaire Jesse on each of these books and my weird reading habits. All right, so book number one I finished was a biography of Steven Spielberg called "Spielberg, A Life." This has been part of my kick of reading movie books.

So as listeners remember, from October, I read a bunch of books about movies. This picked that up. Quick technical note about how I do my reading list. There's multiple ways you can do this. The way I do it is I count the book in the month that it finishes.

You could do it the other way and count the book in the month that you start. It's the same thing as long as you're consistent about it. So Spielberg, I actually started on this book way earlier in October, but it finished earlier in November. Pretty good book. So here's my question for you, Jesse.

Here's a quiz. How much money would you guess? We talked about this already, "Jurassic Park." How much money would you guess Steven Spielberg personally made from "Jurassic Park"? We have not talked about this. Let me guess. I remember when I saw that movie. Three million? Two to four hundred million dollars.

Oh, all time? He made it himself, personally, two to four hundred million dollars. There's a little bit of debate about what comes in there, but he had, at that point, his deal was 40%. Oh, okay. 40% of gross, basically, and it was a billion dollar movie. Isn't that crazy?

Two hundred million dollars for one movie. It's good negotiating on his part. Yeah. The other thing I learned is that it is a pain, no matter how many people you can hire, no matter how much money you have, it is a pain to have many properties. That's another little tidbit I picked up.

So Spielberg had a lot of houses and a lot of apartments, and his ex-wife hated it. She felt like it fell on her. And I don't know, this is like a rich person parable about context switching. There's just overhead, right? I mean, even just the overhead of, I got to hire the right person to run this property.

So it's a ton of overhead. Maybe that's why Elon sold all his houses. That's true. So there we go. This is our very approachable advice for our listeners this week. Be wary on the number of high-priced luxury properties you maintain because of the overhead involved. This is good. We've been really approachable here.

Maybe just like two ocean properties. I don't want to be controversial, Jesse, but maybe just limit yourself to two oceanfront properties. More money, more problems. Exactly. All right. So book number two. So this was every year for Halloween. In the lead up to Halloween, my tradition is I always read some sort of book that is vaguely Halloween-y, so like a thriller that has to be sort of supernatural or Stephen King, something like this.

Longtime tradition. So I didn't finish my Halloween book till the second day of November. So it counts under November. But I went back and reread Relic. Have you heard of this one? No. Fantastic. It's fantastic. This is Lincoln Child and Douglas Preston. Preston also writes for The New Yorker.

And it is a book that came out right after Jurassic Park. So this was the big comparison. The poll quote on the cover of the paperback version of this book is "better than Jurassic Park." That's the poll quote they put on it. But Preston, if I have this right, he has a background in archaeology or paleontology, something like this.

He occasionally writes New Yorker pieces on dinosaur bones, so something like this. He used to work or had some connection with the National History Museum in New York, which is like this massive old building that's multiple city blocks long with all these sub-basements. And so the idea of this book, which is just fantastic, is that there is essentially a monster loose in the Museum of Natural History.

And it's like emerging and killing people in a brutal way. And they don't know what it is. And in the end, it's not supernatural. No spoilers. But there's actually a scientific explanation for what's going on. It has to do with this expedition that's cursed. And there's this monster. And it's this great buildup.

So it's a great setting. The Natural History Museum is just a great setting. And there's this buildup of the monster getting more and more bold until there's a giant gala event. And it just all goes crazy. And people are having their heads eaten. And it's fantastic. So I'm pro-Relic.

They made a movie on it. I didn't like the movie as much. It was a great book. Was the book better than Jurassic Park? No. So I reread Jurassic Park recently, too, because my son wanted to read it. I thought, I don't know. Is this appropriate? He's nine. So I reread it.

And it's like, OK, I think this is appropriate. Jurassic Park is cooler, right? I mean, I think Spielberg has these big ideas. And it's like interesting plot. And the plotting is really interesting. And the tech and the intersection is very interesting. Relic is a better crafted thriller. It's a beautifully crafted thriller.

It moves in just the right pace. But Jurassic Park is just cool. It's like dinosaurs. And there's this-- for some reason, a chaos mathematician is there. And people are trying to understand what's going on with the dinosaurs' breeding and the fences are down and Muldoon has a rocket launcher.

I mean, I think it's a cooler book. Though I did-- because I was bored-- was talking to my discrete mathematics class at Georgetown last week. And we were talking about chaos theory, right? Because we were talking about recurrences. And they were asking about-- let's not get technical. But are there closed form solutions to all recurrences?

And I was talking about when you get the second or third order, you get these nonlinear recurrences that are hard to predict. And that's chaos theory. And this is what Malcolm's character is in Jurassic Park, is a chaos theoretician. Book recommendation, by the way. Side note, Chaos by James Gleick.

It's a science book about the rise of chaos theory. Fantastic. So anyways, my argument to the class was there is no world in which it makes sense if you are the insurance company insuring Isla Nublar, where they're building Jurassic Park. There is no world in which it makes sense where you say, what we need is a chaos mathematician to come out here and take a look.

Have you thought about that? It makes no sense. It's just a guy who-- Vaguely speaking, yeah, chaos theory-- look, here's what chaos theory is about. There's these certain recurrent equations. So it's an equation where you put in the value from the prior time step into calculating the value for the current time step.

And if they're nonlinear, so you raise things to powers bigger than 1, they can become really unpredictable, right? So it's really if you change the input a little bit and then run it 1,000 times, your number ends up in a really weird place. And chaos theoreticians study these and find that there's these deep, beautiful structures like Lorenz attractors if you look at the derivatives or the second derivative.

And it's really interesting math. It has nothing to do with keeping large animals properly contained within electrical fences. It has nothing to do with it. I never even noticed that the chaos theory character was in there. I was just kind of more concerned with the dinosaurs. Yeah, it's Jeff Goldblum.

You know? Oh, I guess, yeah, you're right, yeah. He's a cool character. He's a cool character. But all he does-- all he does is say, "I study mathematical equations that are unpredictable." Ergo, it might be unpredictable to have dinosaurs that you bred, and they might get loose because it's hard to predict.

You don't got to fly him there. What's he looking at? What's he looking at? That's an email. I think it's a problem. But I'm sure-- we should go do this work-- but I'm sure that Michael Crichton came across chaos theory, maybe even read the James Gleick book-- I think that's from the 1980s-- and just said, "This is cool.

I got to put this in the book somehow." And he just wanted to find a place for the character. So anyways, it's a bit of a problem. Other thing I noticed is I reread Adronomous Strand. I mentioned that on the show. The science there is a lot tighter. Because I think Crichton had more time.

It was his first book under his own name. And the science gets pretty loose. It gets pretty loose in Jurassic Park. But all right, so that's book two, Relic. Book three is a digital ethics book. It's not-- it's academic, but not super academic. It was called Future Ethics. Sort of a survey.

And it was OK. It was interesting. Someone's surveying a lot of different ethics. The thing it did, a lot of which is fine, it's just not my particular jam, is a lot of just, you know, let me as the author just think through hypothetical scenarios. And to me, that's not too interesting.

But it was an impressive survey of a lot of existing theory. And it took the book I had read the month before, Moralizing Technology, which was more academic and had this really cool framework called Mediation Theory, which I talked about on the podcast, which I think Peter Paul Van Beek, who wrote this book, is on this.

Something that is a fantastic normative theory framework for digital ethics. It should get more attention. The book I read next, Future Ethics, gave a really good summary of that, which actually helped me understand it better. So for that alone, I think I enjoyed Future Ethics. - Did you incorporate in that in your New Yorker article?

- Which one are we talking about? Which New Yorker article? - The ethics one where you're talking about the digital and then you interviewed those different, you know, people. - Yeah, no, I haven't gone that far. Not really. I mean, I sort of obliquely mentioned some of these philosophical frameworks.

- Because in that article, you gave, I think, five different examples of people you talked to about their view on. - Yeah, that's a good question. So this was the, I don't know if we talked about it on the podcast, but I wrote an article about Instagram, basically. Well, kids and social media.

And the title was something like the question we're not asking about teenagers and social media, because, I mean, again, I've talked about this on the show before, but it always strikes me to the degree that the coverage of anti-social media coverage, the sort of standard media response to social media from both sides of the political spectrum, completely sidesteps the issue almost always of what should our personal relationship be to these tools?

And so there was this leak, there's this whistleblower, and she leaked some internal data from Facebook where they were interviewing teenage girls who were saying, "This technology makes me unhappy, makes me anxious, increases suicidal ideation, makes me feel bad about myself." And it was something like a third of the people they interviewed were reporting this, right?

And so that's bad. None of the coverage said, "Okay, so maybe teenagers shouldn't use it." All the coverage right now is so fixed on just, "Facebook is our political enemy. We need to control them and punish them and get them to do what we want to do," which is all fine, but also we need to have the other conversation of, "And should we maybe not use these?

Or maybe teenagers should not use these? Or maybe we should rethink our relationship to these tools?" So yeah, I wrote a piece where I was investigating that question, and I interviewed four experts. None of those experts are really philosophers, I guess, is the issue. They're more practical. This is more in the weeds, this philosophy.

But I want to try to bring some of this out of the weeds with some of my future writing. I think there's some really smart thinking going on about understanding technology from an ethical perspective. And I'm pretty convinced this mediation theory that Peter Paul Verbeek has pushed describes digital minimalism.

That digital minimalism, the philosophy in that book, is actually a real-world instantiation of that philosophy, accidentally. So I didn't know about that philosophy, but I think it is. So I'm thinking about writing an academic piece where talk about this practical theoretical dyads, where how do you take these philosophical frameworks, which are kind of complicated.

I mean, mediation theory uses late-stage Foucault, and it's not super general public-friendly. But digital minimalism takes the core ideas and makes it very general public-friendly. Maybe we should be doing more of that and be thinking, how does that actually work as an academic process? So I'm thinking about that.

All right, so then I did another hard turn. So after Future Ethics, I finished a book I had started over the summer called K, the letter K. It was subtitled as something like The History of Baseball in Five Pitches, maybe 10 pitches. But it's one chapter per pitch, fastball, curveball.

And it's a history of that pitch in the sport and kind of the influence it had on the sport. - That's cool. Can you identify all the pitches when you're watching on TV with their phone? - No. - Neither can I. - No, I'm always impressed by the announcers.

- Yeah. - Yeah. - A lot of them played for so long, I think that's part of it. Well, it's definitely part of it. - Well, I learned from this book, it's pretty subtle, right? Because, I mean, curveballs are easy, fastball is easy, but the off-speed stuff is all, you know, is it cut?

Is it a slider? Is it a change-up? I mean, I don't know. I got pretty good at Max Scherzer and Steven Strasberg's pitches because they had, you know, Strasberg's change-up was very demonstrable. It would just, the floor would open. It would just go offstage through a trap door, seemingly six inches in front of the bat.

And Scherzer had a slider that just would, like, someone had a rope and just would pull this thing as it was coming towards the hitter. And Strasberg's curveball would, like, basically be 20 feet above the player's head and then come back down again for a strike. So I could kind of register those, though we're not allowed to mention Max Scherzer's name on this podcast anymore.

I was just going to ask you about that. We're not allowed to mention his name. I think your next guest should be Steven Cohen and ask him how, you know, what his thought process were in signing him. Look, man, for $43 million a year, I'm not going to complain that Scherzer went to the Mets.

And I found out, so I have more sympathy. So for non-baseball people, the Mets are in our division. We play them all the time. But Scherzer's oldest kid, I think, is staying in school here in D.C. So it's one of the reasons he wanted to stay in the Northeast Corridor.

So now he can see his kids more. And he's getting $43 million a year. So I'm not mad at Scherzer. And I'm not mad at the Nationals. They should not be paying $43 million a year this year for Scherzer. But still, still, I mean, I still had a hard time this year seeing Bryce Harper play for the Phillies.

So it's going to take me some time. All right. All right. But that's in, this is literally insider baseball. All right. So final book was, I have it here actually, it's called Number by Tobias Danzig. This is a book written in the 1930s. Yeah. And it has a cover quote from Albert Einstein.

So like, as blurbs go, I think that's pretty impressive. Here's what, it's a cool book, but here's why I'm embarrassed. I'm going to explain to you why I'm embarrassed. So I got this book, I got it from, I got it for free from a free library. A 1954 edition of this book that first came out in 1930.

Albert Einstein quote, it's a book about a cultural history of numbers. So it's a cool book. It gets a little mathy towards the end, but it's a cool book. But I get this book and I'm thinking, this is cool. This is from the fifties, you know, and the version I have, and it's from a different time and it's really interesting.

And I'm thinking, you know, I should, I should collect like old editions of books. Like this would be a good hobby for me is get early editions of books or first editions of books. It seems like it, like it makes a lot of sense. And then this is what happened.

So the viewer at home doesn't see this. I ripped the cover off. So maybe I should not be trusted. Maybe I should not be trusted to collect rare books. This beautiful 1950 copy. I ripped the cover off by accident. So I don't know, maybe I should stick with things that are less, less damaging, but good book.

All right. So that's my report. What do you think, Jesse? So when you go into the, when you bear down and get the reading done, when you're getting to the end of a book, what does that look like? Um, I mean, are you reading for like five hours nonstop?

Like no, I'll do, yeah, I'll do like hour sessions or like 90 minute sessions and I'll put aside time, you know, like specifically to do it. Like I'll take an hour out of my day to just like go and read. Like I start getting hungry for the time or I'll decide that what the family needs tonight is reading time, which my kids love, like we're all going to read.

So yeah, it's just like, I started doing a lot more of it, but I just, I'm just about to finish my first December book and I'm honing in on the second. So I have a good, I have good head of steam. This is the recording this on the 3rd of December.

So I'm getting my first book done in the first few days. And so it feels good. One other question. Do you count sometimes audio books with these? Yeah. Spielberg was an audio book. Okay. Yeah. So every month, the five that you have one's an audio book or usually. Yeah.

So during the little league season, I was making a lot more progress because there's a lot of just sitting at fields while my son was doing practice or baseball. And then I could really get a lot of audio book time. So now it's a little harder because it's not little league season anymore, but I'm almost done with a George Lucas biography that I started right after the Spielberg biography.

And that's audio. It's like, I'll probably finish that up in my ears at some point during this month. So just for the audience, can you give like your thought process on the audio versus reading same thing or. Yeah, it's for me, it has to be a very specific type of book.

If it's a business slash biography, like if it's about business for whatever reason, or like a business type biography, like a director or a CEO and it's their life or Disney. I did a lot of the Disney stuff and I went down that rabbit hole was audio. That is very good for me to listen to.

I can't do novels. I can't do more serious nonfiction. There's like a very small number of things I can actually do in audio. So I usually stick it for like bio businessy type stuff. All right, so there you have it. All that is the, that's the November reading list.

Hopefully everyone else has their own target, whatever it is they're going for. And let's wrap this up and move on to some questions.