Ep. 365: What Technology Wants (and How to Push Back)

25:44And I think one of the key ones for trying to avoid extractive technologies is to say, how much does this cost? If you don't have a number to answer that question, it's probably costing more over time than you want to spend. So what I'm trying to say here is you should be biased towards products that have a clear financial cost. It costs this much money for this product. The value we get from you is having a product that is good enough for you to pay for. You've paid for it. Here you go. You are safe from the shift to extractive technologies in that type of situation. If the answer to this is like, it's free or it's nominal, they got to get paid sometime.

26:22And guess what? Who's going to be doing the pain? It's going to be you. And it's going to be in ways that you don't choose and in ways that might be much worse. It's why, for example, I'm thinking about my own life. I use Scrivener for writing articles and books. What I like about Scrivener is you buy a site license. It costs a non-trivial amount of money. Then you have the software. They'll send you updates as it updates, but you've bought it. That's it. You have the site license. You can share it on a couple machines. not a monthly thing it's not free with ads another thing i like is that the to-do application things three same idea they're like yes 10 bucks for your phone what do you get you get the app went on your mac it's 30 bucks on the map you buy it it's like the old days you get a box and there's a disc in it you open the disc that's yours you own it so the value they get from you is in convincing you that this application was useful enough for you to buy they've already have their money from you once you buy it, you're much less likely for that to become extractive.

27:16All right, the third idea is to hack the technologies you have that you worry about becoming extractive. Again, this is an idea from my book, Digital Minimalism, where I talk about joining the quote, attention resistance. The idea is you take technologies where there's a value you need out of it, but they're also seriously trying to extract value from you. And you use rules and technological solutions to get your value, prevent them from getting theirs. So you transform extractive technologies back to their additive form. There's a lot of ways this could be. There's people who have to use social media, for example, for various business things who use it on their laptop and they use it with plugins that scrapes free all the content.

27:56They can't see what other people are posting. And they go on there for 20 minutes, twice a week to post stuff that they wrote in Google Docs or hire someone to do it on their behalf. It doesn't take that much time. It doesn't cost much money or someone to keep track of their comments for them. They're getting some business value out of social media. Social media is not getting their time or attention. I've seen people do this with YouTube. I want to look up how to fix my car on YouTube. I have a plugin. I do it on my computer. It gets rid of the recommendations. Now it's a library. I search for videos about fixing my car, and all that comes up is videos about fixing my car, and I find one, and I use it.

28:26It's a free library. I get value. They don't. That's the attention resistance, and there's any number of things like that you can do. Even looking for open source or indie versions of tools, I can use DuckDuckGo instead of Google. right it's an indie version of the tool they just don't have the same profit motive or the energy quite frankly to be as annoying i don't trust open ai wait there's going to be as the technology matures lower cost versions indie versions of these tools that aren't going to be as powerful as the frontier models but you don't need them to be and they're probably going to be a lot less extractive right so indie tools is another thing to do all right so let's wrap up this conversation What I'm trying to say here is that when it comes to creating a deep life in a distracted world, you have to be wary of the technology that you use.

29:13This reality is often more complicated than just saying, hey, stay away from bad tools. Only use good tools because sometimes these roles can change. Next time you despair about all the rabbit holes your smartphone has thrown you down, remember that kid on the couch having a great time with an old piece of plastic talking to his grandma. There you go, Jesse. Additive versus extractive. I wrote about this in my newsletter. So if you don't subscribe to my newsletter, calnewport.com, well, you should. It's a good example. My alternative topic, which I would have done two hours on, was me attending the Nats-A's game last night where the Nats broke a six-game winning streak with a walk-off hit by CJ Abrams in the bottom of the ninth.

29:59I was there. Now let me give you another data point. I was not there for the day game today. Nats lost 0-6. so I think, and I'm trying to explain this to my wife, I probably need to go to every home to ask him. Yeah. I mean, if they're going to get their record around, so that's what, that was what I was going to talk about. And what I was going to spend like 20 minutes on was the fact that, and only like 17 people right now will appreciate this. In the bottom of the ninth with one man on and no outs, Jacob Young bunted with two strikes and fell out. and the woman in front of us turned around and was like so what happened there and we told her and she's like is that a new rule we're like no that's an old rule and she's like so then why did he bunt with two strikes he shouldn't have he really just shouldn't have so that's going to be next week is going to be jacob young's faults in his bunting strategy um anyways we got a good rest of the show to come and got some good questions and because this is the first episode that's not the first it's our second episode of august probably we forgot to do this last week but we will go over the books I read last month.

31:04But first, because it's the most fun thing we do on the show, let's hear from a sponsor. Look, Jesse, going online without ExpressVPN is like forgetting to put yourself on mute when you're in a Zoom meeting. Do you really want your coworkers to hear you trash talking to them? True story, Jesse. I was once on a Zoom call with Jesse Skeleton. He forgot to press mute. He said some terrible things about you. I don't want to stir the waters, but all I got to do is I just got to say he had some choice words about Tufts lacrosse. And I don't want to use the black sock scandal, but he did compare it to that.

31:45So I'm just saying you don't want to be on Zoom without mute. Well, you don't want to use the Internet without a VPN. And here's the thing. You got to have a VPN. Here's what really happens here. When you connect to the internet, you send all the data in these little bundles that are called packets. And, yeah, the data itself could be secure. It could be encrypted. But the address, like where these packets are going, that has to be out in the open because the internet routers need to know, like, where to send the bundles. So what does this mean? Anyone nearby can see what sites and services you're using.

32:15If you're at a coffee shop or whatever, anyone with a radio antenna and their computer with the right piece of software can see exactly what sites and services you're using. your ISP at home. They know exactly what sites and services you're using. They can sell that data. There's a lot of internet search providers who actually do. So a VPN protects you from this. The way it works is instead of talking to a site or service directly, you talk to the VPN, you send that a secret message and say, here's who I really want to talk to. They talk to that site or service on your behalf, encrypt it, send it back.

32:43Now the guy trying to sniff your packets with the laptop nearby and the coffee shop or your ISP, all they learn is that you're talking to a VPN, privacy regained. So if you're going to use a VPN, use the one I suggest, which is ExpressVPN. It's easy to use. It works on all of your devices, and it is rated number one by top tech reviewers like CNET and The Verge. So what are you waiting for? Protect your online privacy today by visiting expressvpn.com slash deep. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com slash deep to find out how you can get up to four extra months for free. that's expressvpn.com slash deep i don't know jesse something about the phrase the guy next to you in the coffee shop is sniffing your packets feel somehow like the type of thing you don't want to be heard on a zoom when your mute's off or something like that but i agree with that it's a technical topic trust me it is all right i also want to talk about our friends at oracle here's the thing in business you can have better cheaper or faster but you only get to pick two that's a saying I invented Jesse.

33:45I don't know if you know about that, but I have a lot of insights like that. And what if you could have all three at the same time? Well, that's exactly what Cohere, Thomas, Thomas Reuters and Specialized Bikes have since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs where you can run any workload in a high availability, consistently higher performance environment, and spend less than you would with other clouds. How is it faster? OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second.

34:19How is it cheaper? OCI costs up to 50 % less for compute and 70 % less for storage and a whopping 80 % less for networking. How is it better? Test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds. This is the cloud built for AI and all of your biggest workloads I've got good news. Right now with zero commitment, you can try OCI for free. Head to oracle.com slash deep questions. That's oracle.com slash deep questions. All right, Jesse, let's do some questions of our own. First question is from Erica. I'm a computational biologist. We have systems where project leads have to update a row on a project tractor ahead of meetings.

35:04This typically consists of a status and a short description of what's completed and what's coming up. We then review this information together at the meeting. This has some positives. However, the trackers really build up and it takes a lot of time. What are your thoughts on these systems? Do you have any alternatives? All right, do we understand? I want to make sure we fully understand how this system works. Let's try to imagine this, Jesse, like if we were using it. So there's a spreadsheet and there's a project lead. So like if we were working on some project, like adding an animatronic child and a Jesse skeleton, you as the project lead would update a row in a project tracker.

35:40So I guess that's like a spreadsheet that would have a status and a short description of the work completed, but also the work coming up. So you would actually probably have to say like, I worked on this. I worked on the, like the Arduino connections today and tomorrow I'm going to work on whatever. And so you're like kind of updating, not just what you're working on, but like specifically what on that task you did and what's coming up. So here's what I think about, if I'm understanding that right, I think that's right. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So, Erica, the intent here is great. By having project tracking, you're stopping unscheduled communication that might require replies, which, of course, is the productivity poison that afflicts most of knowledge work, having to respond to unscheduled messages.

36:22Now you have to context shift constantly. You run out of energy. It's miserable and nothing gets done. Also, this type of system will succeed in making work and workloads more transparent. Who's working on what and what's going on? So it's not just this sort of informal dance of messaging and you never really know who's doing what until you bother them. The problem is you're tracking too much. I think you're picking this up in your question here. Tracking actual work accomplished, work you want to do. So getting into the granularity about the specific stuff you're doing towards a larger goal, I think that is too much friction.

36:52If that friction adds up, it becomes a choke point, and then you stop making progress altogether. I think software developers have found a better middle ground in this. when they're sort of agile systems like Scrum, they think about work in terms of, they call it features. So I guess the equivalent here for a computational biologist might be like a task, right? So a project would be too big, but a task, it might require like multiple steps, but something that you can maybe tackle in a day or so. And what they do in software development is they track who's working on what task and more importantly, what tasks need to be done, but no one's working on yet.

37:27This way you can control the workload. Stuff can be tracked without it having to be on people's plates. The way they update the statuses is they have a daily 15-minute stand-up meeting where everyone is like, go. And you're like, here's what I'm working on. Here's where I'm stuck. Here's what I need. Here's how it's going. It's 45 seconds, go. They call them standing meetings because they're trying to emphasize they're quick. They're not meant to be, how's your day? What's going on? What happened with your skeleton? It's like, go, go, go, go. It turns out that this is a very low friction way of getting people up to speed as well as figuring out who needs what from whom.

38:01I know it doesn't sound like it should take so much time to write that down, but it freezes people. Talking's easier. So they've really kind of honed this in in software development that that granularity of task and that method of updating, that's the right way to do it. So I would look for something like that. In my book, A World Without Email, which you should get, I talk in there somewhere. You'll have to find what chapter it is. I talk in there somewhere if I get an interesting research report written by a computer scientist at the University of Maryland who talks about adapting that sort of software development granularity to his research group.

38:35And he gets some ideas about why it works or how to adapt that to that world. So check that out. You're on the right track. You got too many frictions. There's too much friction going on there. Too much friction going on there. I mean, I require Jesse to narrate everything he's doing and then transcribe those narrations. And then I prefer them, if you transcribe the French and then back to English, I feel like it makes it a little bit more concise. And then what we do is we chisel that in the clay because it's a little bit more durable. And then he gives me those clay tablets once every 17 minutes.

39:05We do that, but that might be more friction than what some other people want to do. So take a page out of the software developers. All right, who we got? Next up is Hunter. Can you talk about the alternative route to a Walt Disney story where folks might get obsessed with something, but it just remains an obsession and never is a catalyst for productive action? How can folks know if a project will spur something or just indulge a dorky obsession. I mean, dorky is okay. Yeah, don't be obsessed. Like, I don't have a, when it comes to projects you're doing in your leisure time, just a sort of engineer wonder, like we talked about a few episodes ago.

39:42Don't be obsessive about it. I know that sounds like a bit of a cop-out or a tautological response, but you know when something is becoming obsessive. All I'm doing, it's getting in the way of other things. I'm staying up all night, reposing my skeletons. I mean, that one's okay. That one's okay. But if you're taking those skeletons on dates, then things are getting a little bit more obsessive. Then you got to be careful. So, you know, have schedules like, yeah, that's what I'm working on. I put aside some time when I need it. I'm really happy when I get to work on it, but, you know, I'm not disappointed when I don't.

40:17Life happens. It's like this thing you have to look forward to and you make some time to work on it when you can. It's kind of the way I think about myself with movies. I really like movies. I only have so many occasions to watch them. And there's certain times of life or year where it's like, oh, this is great. Like I have a light day coming up. I'm going to block off the afternoon. I'm working from home and I'm going to watch, you know, like whatever movie I've been waiting to watch. And it's like fun. Or my friends and I get in a rhythm of seeing some of the new movies at night. And then like a month will go by where I just really don't see anything.

40:45It's the summer. We're doing stuff with the kids. It's, you know, it's light out late. People are around and we don't see as many movies or whatever, but it's something I always enjoy. And when I get a chance to read about them, I do. And when I get a chance to watch them, I'm very happy. And occasionally there's parts of my life where I am putting aside time to like, I'm going to go read this textbook or I'm going to make a point of going to see this movie in this particular format. And sometimes I'm not. And that's great. That's really where things just sort of be. I love this thing. I do it when I can.

41:14Sometimes I put aside time. It's okay if I can't get to it. Sometimes it's been more than others. Once it starts to get obsessive, If it's causing problems, it's defeating the purpose. And that's actually what happened with Disney and his railroad. He was still running Disney Studios. All that stuff was still going on. And there'd be points where he spent a lot of time on these projects and then other points where a lot of time would go on. He couldn't really work on it. He'd hire people to work on it and then you'd check in with them and give them a little bit of a reprieve of an otherwise stressful day.

41:41He loved the project. It gave him back wonder, but it wasn't like it was taking over his life. It wasn't like he stopped his job. It wasn't like he stopped spending time with his daughters. So I don't know. I guess my answer is be cool. Just be cool. There was a lot of good positive feedback from that Engineering Wonder episode. Yeah, a lot of people do something like this. Yeah, I got a lot of messages from people who have had good experiences do that. Is that feedback an invitation for me to get into a lot of detail about the really technical Imagineering stuff I've been reading about in Disney?

42:13You think that's what they're saying? Like we want to hear about the format that was innovated based off of technology that was coming out of missile control from the Navy, how they figured out how to use sound encoding of movement patterns on one-inch tape for the Enchanted Tiki Room decoration. Because I could do a lot on that. I could do a lot on that. They use a reed decoder, so actual vibrations of reeds at different friction closes a circuit and allows them to actually transform tones on a multi-track tape. ASCAM was a very new company into actuated movement. Very interesting. I heard the Caribbean.

42:52They went to physical desk because of durability issues. All very interesting. That'll be another episode coming up. All right, who do we got? Next up is Dominic. I'm interested in your thoughts on how people should concern themselves with the folks they interact with. How should we think about the influence of our partner or housemates on our ability to pursue depth? I mean, it helps to have some people in your life, friends, for example, who are on your same wavelength in terms of how you think about like depth and ambition and pursuing projects or whatever, right? It's good to be around some people like that.

43:25You don't need everyone in your life to be that way. And probably it's good if everyone in your life is not that way because you also need people to fulfill other roles in your life. If you're in a monotype, things get weird. If everyone is the same way around you, things get weird. If no one around you is like you, things get lonely or frustrating. If everyone's like you, things get weird. My case in point is, I mean, hang out with people who've been in Silicon Valley too long. They seem innocent. Like, oh, it's like a cool gingham shirt you have on. And the next thing you know, they're talking about how they're, you know, only on Soylent green to prepare for having the chip implanted in their head so that they can have their like messianic AI-fueled singularity moment that is like coming next week for sure.

44:11Like people go weird when everyone is the same way. So you want some people to be around. I have a bunch of author friends. We talk all the time. We deal with the same issues. We have the same job. We have the same ambitions. But I don't want everyone being like that. I'd become unbearable or weird or unusual. God knows what would happen if I hung out with writers. It's not great. It's not great. So have other people in your life fill other roles, to bring other things out about you. So then what becomes the filter you're looking for about whether someone should be in your life or not? if they make your life better, if they make you better, they're good to be in your life.

44:47If they make your life worse or make you unhappy, they're not. And there's a lot of different ways that people can make your life better and make you better because there's all sorts of parts of life. So you need a lot of people around you. Make sure you have some people on your wavelength, but not too many. Things do get weird. All right, we got one more here. One more from Ryan. How do you think about the differences in relationships between your podcast, YouTube channel, and newsletter? I'm considering starting a similar offering in my niche, but I want to feel absolutely clear on what I'm trying to achieve with each platform.

45:17Ryan's forgetting one of my platforms, which is my TikTok, where I give Halloween decoration advice in the form of K-pop dances. So that one, believe it or not, I have 175 million followers. I do it without pants on too. So I don't know. I think that's a TikTok thing. That's what they told me. I don't know. I don't know if that's unusual or not, but different platforms play different roles. Okay, so how do I think about these? Podcast, I think about as a combination of more story focus because I have time, right? You have a longer engagement with someone in their ears. They're in the middle of driving to work or something like this, and you have time to lay out a story.

46:00And because I have time, I can get more detailed with advice. So we do questions or in the final parts of my deep dives, we can take time to walk through particular advice. So it's a format that breathes and it's a format that it's narrative. So story works well. Newsletter is much shorter, right? It's a much shorter format. I mean, some people write very long newsletters, but that's not my style. I usually have like one big idea, maybe one example. So I have one thing to deliver to you in this newsletter. That's my style. Oh, that's an interesting story. What's the takeaway? Oh, I see how that connects.

46:32This takeaway is something that's useful to me or it's like an idea that's useful to me. So it's much more shorter and focused. I'm also more likely to be technical. I'll do more technical stuff in the newsletter. I'll do more like let's get in the weeds AI. That's fine in the written format in a way that I think maybe plays less good. There's only so much you want to hear me talk about, you know, reinforcement learning and tuning of chain of thought type patterns of inferences. That doesn't play as well in audio. So I think about that a little bit differently. YouTube is just my podcast or stuff that comes out of my podcast for the most part.

47:06So like I think about YouTube as there's a whole potential audience for my podcast who doesn't use podcast players. They use YouTube. That's where they listen to their podcast on the YouTube app. They find out about content and people that they like, like authors on YouTube. So we really just, we move my podcast over there and like we're trying to do is like clip out the podcast and allow what we're talking about here to find people who are a little bit younger usually who don't necessarily consume content through the podcast app. So I don't think about, it's the same, there's no content there that's not on YouTube for the most part, that's not on my podcast right now.

47:42So that's just like, to me, that goes together with podcasting. It's broadcasting. And I think video is important. That's where video goes these days. That might change in the future. But I see those as being very similar. Does that match how you think about it? Yeah. It's kind of what we do, right? Do you think there'll ever be another medium? I just think there's going to be, I think the future of video is not going to be YouTube or it's not going to be YouTube in its current form. I think this is an extractive technology. Let's go back to the original deep dive discussion. YouTube executes now in a way that's sort of an extractive technology.

48:14The additive part was like, hey, it's easy to upload video. It's free. It's free to watch. And there's like a lot of really interesting stuff here, a lot of innovation. The extractive part is now it's algorithms are pushing you. They want you to get stuck in these rabbit holes of just following content that just like vaguely keeps you engaged. That makes them more money, but that doesn't necessarily make the experience better. So I think video dominates audio historically. We love visual input. We like it more than audio input. Radio is awesome. TV ate its lunch, even though it's more expensive, less convenient.

48:44And when it first came out, it was like a really small black and white screen you could barely see. Didn't matter. That's what we want. I'd rather do that than listen. We want to see people. So this is why, you know, one of the reasons why we've always committed to video, even if there's parts about YouTube we don't like. Video has got to be the future. And I don't know what it's going to be. Some sort of diversification of streaming so that like, in addition to you have like indie streaming, that might be it. Like a Netflix type experience that you curate, it's episodes and carousels, pretty high production quality, and you're curating and it's stuff you really, really like and is made from independent creators.

49:18And so instead of it's Netflix spending$8 million to produce a show. It might be someone who spent$100 ,000 to produce a show, but the economics work out and it's not a recommendation-based environment. It's more like a Netflix subscription - service with, you know, you find your niches. I don't like, I don't think the hopping around from random video clips that are only connected through algorithms, that's not the optimal way to do video. I think people like the idea of coherence. There's something about the parts of the linear model that I think are good. Not the ads, not the, I have to watch the show when it comes on, but something about, oh, I like this channel.

49:54And there's like content on this channel, there's shows on this channel, and some of them I know and look forward to, and other shows I learn about because they're on this channel, and I like their point of view. That's a pretty good model. And right now we don't have it. Right now it's just, you're going to jump from this to something completely unrelated to something else completely unrelated. There's a lot of context shifting a lot of it makes it hard to be loyal towards a particular like brand or just style creation so i don't think youtube as it is is a great fit for what people want it's what their lizard brain wants to produce a lot of money but i think there's going to be a future of independent video that's going to be huge and i want to make sure that we are ready for it because i have a lot of pants list halloween decoration tiktok videos that we got to get to the masses we got to get those spread all right do we have a call this week we do all right let's hear this hi Cal my name is Jonathan I'm a cardiology resident based in London and I'm about to start PhD which I think will mark a significant shift in the way that I go about my work on a day-to-day basis I followed your work for many years and I wondered if you had any advice for someone who was going from a very reactive busy environment to an academic setting how I could develop systems to better manage my time and how I could shift my mode of thinking from the hospital into academia.

51:12Thank you. All right, here's what I think is going to happen. I don't know what subject you're studying as a doctoral student, but almost certainly what you're going to find is that being a cardiology resident is so much harder than being a doctoral student that you're going to worry that something is wrong and you're going to invent work to try to make your life worse. That is the number one thing I am afraid of for you. It is not hard to be a doctoral student in the same way that it's hard to be a resident. It's hard in other ways, right? It's hard in the sense of you have to produce like original thought.

51:46And if you can't, you're out of luck. It's hard in the sense that you can't just hard work your way to success. It's hard in the sense that it might not go well, or you might turn out you don't like it. It's a very rarefied, weird, specific, eccentric type of thing to do. And for some people, it just doesn't fit. And for some people, they love the idea, but it's just not the way their brain works. So they don't have the right preparation for it. It's a, it could be very hit or miss, but it's not hard in the sense of I'm on like hour 16 of a shift doing really difficult life and death work. And I have an eight hour shift coming up next.

52:17It's going to seem easy and you're going to feel like you should be doing more work and that's okay. Take a breather. What you were just doing was, was more physically demanding, was probably more mentally exhausting. That's okay. Do your courses do well. They're easy. They want you to do well in the doctoral program. Focus on research. Work with the best advisor you can. Work backwards always from the question of how do I get from here to producing stuff that matters that people cite. That's all that matters. Get into the process of research. Love it. Master topics. Be around people doing research.

52:47Be around really good researchers. Build up your affinity for it. And also just enjoy your free time. Like you better get in pretty good shape. You have a lot of time. I got in good shape as a doctoral student. You better have a hobby you get really good at. You have a lot of time. Don't waste that opportunity. So don't, I mean, that's my main worry. Don't fear if it feels too easy compared to what you were just doing. That's how it's supposed to feel if you came from doing something like being a resident. You'll be okay and enjoy it. All right, well, we want to get into the books I read last month, but before we get to that final segment, we'll do something even more exciting.

53:19Let's hear from a sponsor. Jesse, let me tell you something that I'm not very good at. I think you'll agree, the process of hiring people. i'm not sure do you remember how i hired you i do yeah true story i dressed up i was outside of motor cat here in tacoma park dressed up like a police detective saw jesse walking by that sir there was a larceny grand larceny third degree heard in this restaurant we need a question we set up a little room up here see what you saw we're trying to piece together what happened so you know jesse came up a little nervous right he's like okay i'm not in trouble like no no we just want to we want to just uh see what you saw we're trying to we're trying to collaborate collaborate eight different stories here, brought Jesse up, came up here to the HQ.

54:00And he was like, why are there so many Halloween decorations up here? And I was like, welcome to the rest of your life. Chain that door. Jesse's never left these offices. Now that's one way to hire. I don't recommend it. What I do recommend is using Indeed. When it comes to hiring, this is something I just thought of. Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job posts seen by other job sites, you need to use Indeed's sponsored jobs to help you stand out and hire fast. This really works. They have data that shows that their sponsored job posts have 45 % more applicants than the non-sponsored jobs.

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56:51All right, Jesse, the order of our business next is really smooth. The order of our next business is our final segment. I nailed that. You did. I did. That was just, that was smooth broadcasting. I know Howard Stern is retiring, right? I didn't hear that. I just heard that. And I don't want to make you nervous, But after that last transition, they might be coming to me to take that job. He works for series with Mad Dog. That's right. And he's paid a ton of money. I'm going to say this, and I don't want to speak out of turn, and maybe I'm exaggerating, but I would guess Howard Stern makes more money than we do.

57:27His show is more profitable than ours, if I had to guess. All right. So I like to – first episode of every month or second episode because I forgot. I like to talk about the books I read in the past month. I have my list here. My goal is always to read five books. Helps keep me on track with keeping my mind sharp in this increasingly distracted world. Talked about before, my strategy is just to mix in books. You just sound fascinating, go random, go weird. Hard books, easy books, cool books, weird books. I don't care. Reading's good. All right, here are the books I read in July 2025. These were essentially all read during my trip up north.

58:04the first book and i don't know you know what joker gave this one to me but the first book i read was la story by bill plunkett i don't know where i got that book jesse that was a birthday gift from jesse i i knew very little about shoya otani i think i'd basically been blacklisting the dodgers ever since they beat us in the nlds whenever that was like 2014 so i didn't know the story. Like I did not know the details. Turns out, and this is a spoiler alert, Shoyotane is good at baseball. This is one of the things I learned from that book. The next book I read, I talked about this in one of my newsletters.

58:41So you may have heard it, heard me talk about it was Disney's Land by Richard Snow. And it's a book just about Disneyland because I went to Disneyland in June. I was like, I want to read about it. Then I read Ingenious, the new biography of Benjamin Franklin written by Richard Munson. It focuses more on his science. That's kind of interesting. That we often, the scientific achievements of Franklin get short shrift, but it's actually pretty interesting. I like that book. Then I listened to an audio, Original Sin. I think that was Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson wrote that. This is about Joe Biden and his cognitive decline and what people did or did not know.

59:20Not like a happy fun book, that's the way I'd review it. But interesting, things did not go well. Again, spoiler alert, that story did not end up well for Joe Biden. Finally, read the book Wall by Hugh Howey. One of my sons was reading it and he read it and liked it and he recommended it to me. And I liked it. It's a originally, I would say self-published book, but that's not even right. It was, he was just like, I guess it was, he was publishing parts of it on Kindle Direct, but not all at once. and it's just a dystopian book in the future and there's people living in a giant silo in the ground after some sort of disaster and they have all these weird sort of like rules and rituals and you don't know much about it and then sort of mysteries unveil and you learn more about what's really going on it's like a great i think it's like a fantastic kind of like andy weir a little bit turned down hard sci-fi they don't get that much into the details of science like he would very plot driven, very plot focused, which makes sense because he's writing this in dispatches.

1:00:24And the plot just rolls. You're like, I want to know what happens next. This world is interesting. I want to know about it. And it's a great story. I heard the Hugh Howey story originally wasn't quite accurate. I heard it as this was like this project he had. That's how he became a writer. All right. It turns out he had published many books. He had written a bunch of novels and was self-publishing pieces of this as just like a project to help mourn the death of his dog. It just was in that mood. But it just hit a vein. Like something about this is right. And the series, you know, Random House bought it.

1:00:57Is it related to the Apple show? Silo? Silo is based off of it. Okay. Yeah. So Silo is based off of these books. So it became a big premium TV show on Apple. And the books sold all the copies. And so it became very successful. But he was. I didn't know that piece. He had written a bunch of books before then. Did you watch the Apple show? I'm going to. I'm going to watch with my son who read it. But it was my 12-year-old doesn't like these books. He likes World War II nonfiction. Who knows why? But my 10-year-old loves sci-fi. So I'm going to watch with him. But I figure he read the whole series.

1:01:31I only read the first one. But I should probably check out the show. I guess if he read the book, I guess I shouldn't be too worried about the show. But I'll check it out. Just to be a lot of like beheadings in the first opening or something like that. So I'll check that out. So there you go. whoa i'm gonna read the second one shift i haven't got to it but i'm gonna i'm gonna get to it it's on my list it's all plot it's just good plot just hey that's a cool world the plot moves you want to know what happens characters are fine you like care about the plot sometimes when you're on vacation that's the type of book you need all right speaking of vacation i think that's all the time we have for today but we might speak on a vacation we might be doing a something special next week right yeah so you might notice the next week's episode might be a little bit different because both Jesse and I are away at the same time at a skeleton convention.

1:02:21We might do something different. So stay tuned for that just for one episode, then we'll be back into our fall season. I call it a season and sound more official, Jesse, but we just do these all the time. But the fall season, be excited. Special guests will be here. So until then, as always, stay deep.

1:02:46Thank you.