The 6 Books I Read In June 2022 | Deep Questions With Cal Newport

00:00:00.000 | Alright, well, it's our first podcast in July, so I think we should talk about the books

00:00:06.080 | I read last month, the books I read in June 2022.

00:00:13.160 | As long-time listeners know, my goal is to read five books per month, which I do by making

00:00:18.240 | reading a default activity, by not using my phone for distraction, and by scheduling reading

00:00:24.640 | blocks on occasion into my actual time-blocked work schedule.

00:00:29.960 | So Jesse, I actually, for the first time, did not read five books.

00:00:33.560 | I read six in June.

00:00:35.280 | That's what I'm talking about.

00:00:36.640 | Well, because we had to deal with a week of COVID, so you can't do stuff, right?

00:00:42.080 | You can't go and do other things outside of the house, so I read an extra book.

00:00:46.120 | While you were doing the RAR?

00:00:47.120 | While I was doing the RAR.

00:00:48.120 | I didn't RAR with COVID.

00:00:49.120 | I probably should have.

00:00:50.120 | You use it as an excuse, right?

00:00:51.120 | You're like, "Oh man, technically I have COVID, so like really..."

00:00:56.120 | You could have done the RAR.

00:00:57.320 | I need to eat.

00:00:58.320 | I need to eat whatever.

00:00:59.320 | David Goggins would have told you to do the RAR.

00:01:02.320 | Yeah.

00:01:03.320 | David Goggins would have wrote.

00:01:04.320 | No, no.

00:01:05.320 | You use it as an excuse.

00:01:06.320 | I think we're leaving that phase, by the way, where people care and feel bad for you.

00:01:10.800 | So you leave that phase, like, "I got to eat like crap.

00:01:13.400 | I can't exercise."

00:01:14.680 | Now you can.

00:01:15.680 | You know it's just stuff you get on the RAR.

00:01:18.160 | No, actually what I did...

00:01:20.640 | This wasn't during COVID, it was more recently.

00:01:21.840 | I did this five day, like kind of intense daily free weight routine.

00:01:29.400 | At your house?

00:01:31.680 | Yeah.

00:01:32.680 | But that was after COVID.

00:01:33.880 | All right.

00:01:34.880 | Anyways, six books I read in June 2022.

00:01:39.160 | The order here is arbitrary.

00:01:40.680 | Number one, Ball Four by Jim...

00:01:45.160 | I think it's Booten.

00:01:46.160 | I think I'm saying that right.

00:01:47.520 | You've heard of Ball Four?

00:01:48.520 | Yeah, I have.

00:01:49.520 | The baseball book?

00:01:50.520 | Yeah.

00:01:51.520 | It's a baseball book.

00:01:52.520 | It was written in the early 70s about a pitcher, Jim Booten, who was a Yankee.

00:01:58.000 | I mean, he was really good for the Yankees and then sort of became a journeyman for a

00:02:01.840 | while.

00:02:02.840 | Anyways, it was a book about a year in the life and it's actually written diary format.

00:02:05.960 | And it's famous because it was the first book about baseball that pulled back the curtain

00:02:10.800 | on what life was actually like for these professional athletes.

00:02:12.960 | I mean, it gets into the amphetamines they would take and the carousing with women and

00:02:18.760 | the drinking.

00:02:20.400 | I think this was the book that first revealed, kind of broke the myth of Mickey Mantle, the

00:02:24.960 | fact that he hit a home run while drunk.

00:02:27.520 | And so it pulled back the curtain and it was sort of a big controversy, but it's really

00:02:30.520 | influential book for a lot of people because it was the first, this is what sports is really

00:02:34.980 | like.

00:02:36.640 | I read it for a book group.

00:02:37.640 | I'm in a book group, Jesse.

00:02:40.080 | Not something I would normally think to do given how much of my life professionally I

00:02:43.320 | spend reading and writing, but it's a sports book only book group.

00:02:49.480 | And I read sports books as a way to relax because they're completely unrelated to what

00:02:55.600 | I write about normally.

00:02:57.440 | So I figured that'd be a good book group to join.

00:02:59.960 | So you guys meet once a month?

00:03:01.520 | I mean, last night was our first meeting, so I've only done it once.

00:03:05.840 | The book was ball four?

00:03:06.840 | Ball four.

00:03:07.840 | Yeah.

00:03:08.840 | So I'm officially in a book group.

00:03:10.480 | The style is interesting in ball four.

00:03:13.000 | It's diary.

00:03:14.000 | I mean, day every day, March 17th, April 28th.

00:03:18.020 | And he would take notes during the day and then talk into a tape recorder at night.

00:03:21.640 | And then it got edited.

00:03:22.640 | He had a kind of a ghost writer and they would edit it, but it's almost impressionistic,

00:03:28.520 | right?

00:03:29.520 | I mean, if you read now a sort of sports autobiography, it'll follow through time, but there's plot

00:03:35.560 | lines it's following and it's written in a way that's a little bit more coherent.

00:03:39.240 | This is more impressionistic.

00:03:41.680 | This happened, here's an observation.

00:03:43.860 | You will come back to plot lines, but not in a very structured way.

00:03:47.200 | I mean, it's almost like early modernism, cubism and art being moved over to narrative

00:03:53.480 | nonfiction.

00:03:54.480 | It's the Mademoiselle, the Dabin Young of sports book.

00:03:58.260 | It's just impressionistic and it's 500 pages of just doom and this and this happened and

00:04:02.600 | that happened.

00:04:03.600 | And over time it's very effective.

00:04:05.540 | You get a very layered understanding of life as a player without any carefully constructed

00:04:11.240 | narratives without carefully constructed structured chapters.

00:04:14.400 | So there's some sort of interesting experimental thing going on.

00:04:16.520 | I haven't seen a lot of that in books since.

00:04:18.480 | Who was the manager then?

00:04:20.440 | So this follows the, I think the 69 season where he spent a year at an expansion team.

00:04:27.200 | It was the Seattle pilot, which then became the Brewers.

00:04:31.360 | Got it.

00:04:32.760 | So it was interesting.

00:04:34.760 | All right.

00:04:35.760 | Other interesting book I read, Take the Gun, Leave the Cannoli by Mark Seal.

00:04:43.440 | It's a account of the filming of the first Godfather.

00:04:47.080 | So that's a, it's a quote from the first Godfather.

00:04:49.440 | Mark Seal, I think is a Vanity Fair reporter.

00:04:52.240 | And I was going to California.

00:04:54.160 | I was going to wine country, Francis Ford Coppola, you know, has vineyards up there.

00:04:58.720 | And so it felt appropriate to read a book about the making of the Godfather.

00:05:02.320 | So it was interesting.

00:05:03.320 | And it gets into Rob Evans and Mark Puzo and, and, and, you know, how the movie came together.

00:05:09.200 | And those are kind of interesting books to read.

00:05:10.600 | Yeah.

00:05:11.600 | And it's the 50th anniversary too, right?

00:05:13.600 | Yeah.

00:05:14.600 | Oh, interesting.

00:05:15.600 | And this is an older book, but my timing was good then.

00:05:16.600 | Yeah.

00:05:17.600 | The 50th anniversary is like a couple of months ago.

00:05:20.600 | Yeah.

00:05:21.600 | So Puzo went through this whole thing about the record for paperback rights.

00:05:26.160 | So Puzo got, I think 500,000 for the paperback rights to the Godfather would set the record.

00:05:37.280 | And because Stephen King got 400,000 for Carrie kind of around the same time.

00:05:42.080 | So that was, that was the sort of records back then for rights was like four or $500,000.

00:05:46.040 | And that was back when paperback rights were something you sold separately.

00:05:49.600 | And that's where you made all your money no longer today.

00:05:52.640 | All right.

00:05:54.120 | Then I read every tool is a hammer by Adam Savage, former myth busters.

00:06:00.200 | It's his memoir, an interesting memoir.

00:06:02.080 | He'll work in advice about workshops and making with the story of his own life and his personal

00:06:09.480 | philosophy.

00:06:11.600 | Adam Savage, his critical connection to this show we do here is that he has the cave, which

00:06:19.320 | is this really cool warehouse in the mission district of San Francisco, which is his personal

00:06:23.640 | workshop.

00:06:24.640 | And it's this a cool, amazing space he goes to.

00:06:27.360 | And part of the inspiration for the deep work HQ was that he, he has this, this was his

00:06:32.120 | dream to have a dedicated space that what he does is builds things.

00:06:35.320 | And it's this huge, cool workshop.

00:06:38.040 | Just like we have a dedicated space to come and record and in theory think.

00:06:41.320 | And so I liked the cave.

00:06:43.640 | I like his videos on tested.com.

00:06:46.040 | Interesting guy.

00:06:47.040 | Did it talk about the cave in the book?

00:06:48.560 | Yeah.

00:06:49.560 | And he started his first cave was like in a basement of a rental house.

00:06:52.600 | And then after myth busters was doing really well and he made, made money is when he leased

00:06:57.120 | out, leased out this space.

00:06:59.800 | It's interesting there.

00:07:00.800 | I think they're having crime problems in the neighborhood.

00:07:03.360 | Like they don't, they don't nearly as much anymore.

00:07:07.100 | Have cameraman come film in there.

00:07:08.600 | He'll self film himself in there, which he was doing during COVID during the, like the

00:07:11.960 | lockdowns, but then he kept doing it even though now it's obviously not COVID concerns

00:07:16.000 | because he does lots of videos with other people in other places.

00:07:19.200 | And I heard him say somewhere that it's because the cars are getting broken into so he can

00:07:23.320 | walk to the cave from his house.

00:07:26.120 | So he can go there and film himself.

00:07:27.720 | But when a crew would come just like clockwork, their cars are getting broken into.

00:07:31.640 | So there's a lot of self filming happening.

00:07:33.720 | There you go.

00:07:34.720 | A little bit of, uh, Adam Savage trivia right there, but it was a good book.

00:07:40.440 | He talked, I mean, it's, you'll learn about glue, but also learn about, you know, his

00:07:47.680 | time at ILM and his struggles.

00:07:50.560 | I mean, so it's like, I think it's a really creative book.

00:07:52.480 | I enjoyed it.

00:07:53.480 | All right.

00:07:54.480 | So next I read Cod by Mark Kurlansky.

00:07:58.880 | I like Kurlansky.

00:07:59.880 | There was a period in the, this would have been the early two thousands where these books

00:08:03.080 | were really big, where you would take one topic, uh, Kurlansky wrote Cod and then he

00:08:07.440 | wrote salt, but there was like a book about pencils that was really big at this time.

00:08:11.000 | And you take one topic and you go deep on that topic.

00:08:13.720 | And in going deep on that topic, you learn a lot about history.

00:08:17.060 | And Cod was one of the first books to do that.

00:08:19.120 | I, I, I, when I lived in new England, I read this and salt.

00:08:22.080 | I love those books.

00:08:23.080 | So it's the history of Cod and Cod fishing, but you learn the history of Europe and colonial

00:08:27.920 | America and all of these different things, um, beautifully written and he mixes it with

00:08:33.680 | recipes, but historical recipes.

00:08:37.600 | Like here's a recipe for preparing Cod from 1727 and it's all mixed together.

00:08:41.960 | It's a, it's a really nice, uh, innovative, beautifully constructed book.

00:08:45.680 | So it was a reread?

00:08:47.520 | That I think I probably read at some point.

00:08:49.120 | Yeah.

00:08:50.120 | Back in new England, 10, 15 years ago.

00:08:51.360 | Have you tried any of the recipes?

00:08:53.480 | Well they're historic recipes.

00:08:54.720 | So we have cooked Cod though.

00:08:56.400 | Cod's good.

00:08:57.400 | Uh, then I read, cause this is my weird compulsion.

00:09:00.960 | I don't know why I read these books, but I keep reading these types of books.

00:09:07.200 | Uh, another Bill Carter book, desperate networks.

00:09:11.880 | So Bill Carter is, you know, New York times TV reporter, desperate networks.

00:09:15.600 | It's just a book about like a five year period after NBC's must see TV lineup was, you know,

00:09:22.360 | friends and Seinfeld had all kind of disappeared and how NBC fell and ABC and CBS made their

00:09:28.360 | move.

00:09:29.360 | So ABC got lost in desperate housewives and CB CBS got CSI.

00:09:35.240 | It just, that's it.

00:09:36.480 | Like Bill Carter just writes these books every so often years, he'll like take a period of

00:09:41.480 | time and write about it.

00:09:42.480 | So the last one I wrote, read by him and talked about on the show is late shift about what

00:09:46.480 | happened after Johnny Carson retired.

00:09:48.520 | I don't know why I'm so interested in these books about the inside baseball of network

00:09:52.600 | television, but I find them relaxing and interesting.

00:09:56.720 | Basically just comes down to ratings and that just gets more advertisers, right?

00:10:00.120 | Is that how it's determined?

00:10:01.120 | Yeah.

00:10:02.120 | And, and, well, but how these shows come together, it's all kind of guesswork.

00:10:05.520 | I, I, so I'll tell you the, the anecdote I've extracted from this book, that's going to

00:10:08.880 | make it into slow productivity.

00:10:12.040 | I'll preview this anecdote now because I'm always reading, looking towards anecdotes.

00:10:17.160 | They talk about CBS was really struggling and I think it was less moonves who took over.

00:10:25.600 | I might have that wrong.

00:10:26.600 | I'll go back and I listened to it, but I have to buy the book to get the quotes out of it.

00:10:31.560 | And he was upset that the offices were emptying.

00:10:35.640 | There'll be three o'clock on a Friday and the office would be half full and he's a people

00:10:40.800 | aren't taking at the CBS headquarters there in in Manhattan where I've been, because I've

00:10:47.120 | done some CBS stuff.

00:10:49.280 | People aren't here.

00:10:50.280 | We need energy.

00:10:51.280 | He's like, NBC was number one.

00:10:52.800 | They probably had a lot of energy.

00:10:53.800 | So everyone has to be in the office.

00:10:54.960 | You can't leave till after five.

00:10:57.240 | And if you step back, you say, yeah, under him, CBS did rock it up to be much more successful.

00:11:03.200 | Why I think it's an interesting anecdote though, is as Bill Carter gets into exactly what happened,

00:11:07.520 | why did CBS become more successful because all of the executives and ad people and HR

00:11:12.880 | people are in the office till five?

00:11:14.080 | No, it was because of CSI.

00:11:17.520 | And when you hear the story of CSI and Bill Carter, it's actually the story of a, of someone

00:11:22.020 | spending a lot of time thinking through and polishing this concept.

00:11:26.200 | And it's a slow productivity parable.

00:11:29.120 | Less moonves thought was important for success is that everyone was busier and more visibly

00:11:33.200 | active.

00:11:34.200 | And in the end, what actually saved the company was something that was very slow and creative.

00:11:37.920 | And there's this story of this, this television writer who had, had, had a, had gone up in

00:11:44.280 | his career and had fallen and had gotten obsessed with this idea and slowly developed something

00:11:49.960 | of such value that it saved an entire network.

00:11:52.480 | So I'm going to pull that together in the book.

00:11:54.480 | You'll see when the book finally comes out into a cool reversal anecdote about, you know,

00:11:58.960 | less moonves didn't save the company by making everyone more busy, but instead it was this

00:12:03.120 | guy whose name I forgot, but we'll obviously learn, um, slowing down and, and, and inhabiting

00:12:10.560 | this idea that ended up actually making the difference.

00:12:14.080 | So there's a little proto idea that by the time it comes into my book will be quite polished.

00:12:17.880 | So that, that alone made it worth reading that book.

00:12:19.720 | I think a final thing I read, it was June summer.

00:12:25.000 | I love to read adventure books and thrillers.

00:12:27.360 | I read David Morrell's first blood.

00:12:32.160 | So first blood it's known now is the first Rambo movie.

00:12:36.800 | So John Rambo is the, this is the book that introduced John Rambo, but people don't remember

00:12:43.200 | properly the lineage of Rambo.

00:12:47.680 | So first blood is this, this book about political polarization post Vietnam.

00:12:55.640 | And it's, uh, it was used to be taught in colleges a lot.

00:12:59.200 | And it's, it's really the plot of the book is that John Rambo, former green Beret, who

00:13:03.960 | had been, had this traumatic experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and is now sort

00:13:09.680 | of a drifter, just sort of walking through across the countryside has a run in with the,

00:13:15.440 | the straight lay police sheriff in this small town.

00:13:18.440 | And I think it's in the, I forgot where it is in the movie at specific Northwest.

00:13:21.840 | I think this is like Virginia or something.

00:13:24.120 | And he snaps and, uh, he snaps the PTSD snaps.

00:13:28.880 | He kills one of the police officers flees into the woods.

00:13:30.960 | The police come after him.

00:13:32.720 | Long story short, he basically kills everyone, but the chief and then the national guard

00:13:37.760 | comes back and it says back and forth.

00:13:39.200 | But the way David Morrell wrote the book is alternating viewpoints, Rambo police chief,

00:13:43.920 | Rambo police chief.

00:13:44.920 | And he was very clear that there's no clear hero or anti-hero.

00:13:48.720 | It's not, this is the good guy.

00:13:49.720 | This is the bad guy.

00:13:50.720 | The whole point of the book was the ambiguity.

00:13:54.200 | To kind of understand the police chief and the he's, he's been divorced and the issues

00:13:58.760 | he's having his life.

00:13:59.760 | And you understand Rambo and the PTSD, and you're not even sure who's the good guy, who's

00:14:03.600 | the bad guy.

00:14:04.600 | And that was the whole point of the book, because that's the weird ambivalence of the post Vietnam

00:14:07.680 | era polarization.

00:14:09.520 | It was this messy time where it was unclear who was right and who was wrong.

00:14:12.600 | And so it's actually like a really interesting book and they made it into the movie first

00:14:15.960 | blood, the first Rambo movie starring Sylvester Stallone.

00:14:18.900 | And the movie is not like you think about with Rambo.

00:14:22.760 | I mean, it's a, it's shot like today we would see it more like an indie film.

00:14:26.720 | It's in the early seventies and it's a small movie.

00:14:31.240 | I did invent some very important tropes that this is one of the very first sort of had

00:14:36.160 | some of the very first tropes that action movies of the eighties would then pull from,

00:14:39.600 | but it's not a, it's not a recognizable shoot them up action movie.

00:14:44.840 | So it's, it's, it's like a small movie.

00:14:46.960 | I rewatched it.

00:14:47.960 | I've had some, some guys that we do a movie club.

00:14:51.000 | We rewatched it not too long ago.

00:14:54.120 | Then after that was very successful, they did Rambo two and by Rambo two now, Sylvester

00:15:00.560 | Stallone has biceps roughly the size of a cantaloupe and he's holding M sixties under

00:15:06.160 | both arms and has the red bandana and he goes back to Vietnam and he's, you know, the body

00:15:10.600 | counts pile up.

00:15:11.600 | It became the cliched sort of this weird over the top Reagan era rah, rah, rah movie.

00:15:16.280 | But first blood was not that.

00:15:17.760 | And the first blood movie was not that.

00:15:19.280 | So I went back and read the original novel.

00:15:21.520 | Um, that's pretty good.

00:15:24.440 | He it's, he just kills everybody, but he's, it's, it's psychologically interesting.

00:15:29.720 | Like there's, he's broken and the police chief is at anyways, in the end they both die.

00:15:35.800 | They kill each other in the spoiler alert.

00:15:37.320 | They kill each other in the end.

00:15:38.320 | I mean, it's kind of an interesting book, but David Morrell said after the second Rambo

00:15:42.360 | movie came out, they stopped teaching the book in colleges because the second Rambo

00:15:48.400 | movie was very much associated with like rah, rah Reaganism and you know, mindless action

00:15:54.600 | and it tainted his original work and they stopped teaching it.

00:15:58.520 | So there you go.

00:16:00.080 | David Morrell first blood.

00:16:01.320 | All right.

00:16:02.320 | Those are my six.

00:16:03.320 | What was the beast of a book that you were reading like back in the springtime?

00:16:09.640 | Um, did you finish it?

00:16:12.240 | I don't know.

00:16:13.240 | I've had a, I've had a few beast recently.

00:16:15.800 | I don't know which one in the spring might've been the beastiest.

00:16:18.560 | I'd have to go back and look at our, are you still working through like a beast of a book

00:16:22.480 | right now?

00:16:23.480 | Franklin's a beast of a book.

00:16:24.960 | Yeah.

00:16:25.960 | I'm 200.

00:16:26.960 | I mean, ball four was a beast of a book just in length.

00:16:30.320 | It's not hard.

00:16:31.320 | It's not a hard read, but it's 500 pages.

00:16:33.160 | Franklin's five or 600 pages.

00:16:35.600 | And it's small.

00:16:36.600 | It is making me feel old.

00:16:39.160 | It's reading glasses small.

00:16:41.480 | You know, probably read a lot of books about Franklin, right?

00:16:43.880 | Yeah.

00:16:44.880 | I mean, I read Gordon Woods book, uh, Americanization of Ben Franklin and Gordon.

00:16:49.480 | What is great Gordon?

00:16:50.720 | What is, uh, well, brands is an academic too, but what is, um, the most academic of the

00:16:57.240 | semi-public facing writers about colonial history.

00:17:01.580 | So he's great on the philosophical context of, of the revolution, like the, the currents

00:17:08.400 | of thought going on in England and specifically like what Jefferson had read and what was

00:17:13.960 | going on, uh, the, the impacts of these various rebellions that were happening in the English

00:17:19.600 | countryside in the 18th century and how they influenced what was happening in America.

00:17:26.200 | So like, if you really want, I think what's at Brown, he's more academic brands is he's

00:17:32.360 | a distinguished professor at UT Austin, but he writes more.

00:17:38.440 | He's a beautiful writer, but he's also like McCullough or someone he, he, he's writing

00:17:42.560 | for a non-academic art audience, but that's a piece of a book that's 600 pages.

00:17:47.720 | Um, so that, that might take me a minute.

00:17:49.840 | Yeah.

00:17:50.840 | I'm reading four books concurrently right now.

00:17:51.840 | I just, I'm jumping between things.

00:17:53.920 | I'm finding things I like.

00:17:55.080 | I'm just, I'm just all over the place right now.

00:17:57.040 | Any audio?

00:17:58.040 | Yeah.

00:17:59.040 | Um, what am I listening to an audio?

00:18:01.040 | Ooh, golden eye.

00:18:03.640 | It's a book.

00:18:04.640 | It was, it's free on audible right now.

00:18:06.360 | So if you have audible, it's free right now.

00:18:09.280 | And it's the story of the house that Ian Fleming built in Jamaica when he turned 40.

00:18:18.160 | And it's where he wrote all the James Bond novels.

00:18:20.160 | So it's, it's a Jamaican history.

00:18:22.120 | Like what was going on in Jamaica.

00:18:24.000 | It's the colonial relationship between Britain, Jamaica, who was living there, all these different

00:18:28.920 | my, uh, lesser aristocrats and others, and Ian Fleming coming there and building this

00:18:36.520 | house and, and where he, he wrote all of his books.

00:18:40.540 | And so I'm enjoying that.

00:18:42.880 | Here, I'll just give the quick bullet.

00:18:44.400 | I always say I'm always pattern, pattern matching, interesting bullet points.

00:18:47.640 | The interesting bullet points is one.

00:18:49.800 | So after the war, so, you know, Fleming served, uh, with intelligence during the war.

00:18:55.120 | This was, if you want to look up, uh, British privilege after the war, he went to get a

00:19:00.160 | job at, at a paper and he was going to be the foreign reporter for some paper run by

00:19:06.800 | Lord someone, someone he's like, here's the thing.

00:19:08.680 | I need three months off a year to go to Jamaica and Lord so-and-so was like, good show old

00:19:15.480 | chop.

00:19:16.480 | That's fine.

00:19:17.480 | You can take three months off a year so you can go to Jamaica.

00:19:18.680 | That seems reasonable.

00:19:19.820 | So then he goes and builds this house.

00:19:21.200 | So he'd visited Jamaica in the war.

00:19:23.180 | And so he goes and builds this house in Jamaica and just partying is partying at this house.

00:19:28.860 | It's not very nice.

00:19:29.860 | I mean, it's a beautiful overlook in the water, but the house it's, it's, uh, there's no windows.

00:19:33.700 | It's just Louvers.

00:19:34.700 | So it's like full of bugs at night and the bathroom doesn't really work, but you know,

00:19:37.260 | he's just partying and womanizing.

00:19:38.660 | So he builds it when he's 40, he's just out there drinking and womanizing and then gets

00:19:45.180 | his mistress pregnant when he's 43.

00:19:48.940 | Now he's all freaking out.

00:19:49.940 | He's like, I can't be a dad.

00:19:51.980 | I can't raise a kid or whatever.

00:19:53.340 | I don't know.

00:19:54.340 | He's all freaking out.

00:19:55.340 | So she's like, look, you need to distract yourself.

00:19:57.740 | Um, yeah, you can't just be carousing womanizing.

00:20:00.820 | Why don't you write like while you're out here?

00:20:04.140 | And so at 43, he's out there at Jamaica freaking out about having a kid and writes casino Roy,

00:20:09.180 | casino Royale.

00:20:10.180 | Wow.

00:20:11.180 | And he gets it down to a science where he can write these, he, the, he writes one novel

00:20:15.620 | per annual Jamaica visit.

00:20:17.900 | So in three months, one novel right in the morning and again in the afternoon, overlooking

00:20:23.700 | the water with the swim in between.

00:20:25.700 | Yeah, he's got it figured out.

00:20:28.980 | The downside is he smoked 80 cigarettes a day, which if you do the math is constant,

00:20:35.420 | it has to, you have to light one with the other.

00:20:38.040 | So a spoiler alert, Ian Fleming did not live to a ripe old age, dead at 57, but he did

00:20:44.900 | some damage.

00:20:45.900 | Anyway, so I'm listening to that.

00:20:47.180 | So, so more, more on that when we report on the July books.

00:20:50.140 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:20:53.500 | (upbeat music)

The 6 Books I Read In June 2022 | Deep Questions With Cal Newport

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