What, How, and Why We're Reading

Transcript

[Music] welcome to web 3 with A6 and Z our show about building the next generation of the internet sonal here back again and Robert and I decided to do an episode on what we're reading here at A6 andz crypto since our team just released our annual summer reading list you can find the latest and past list Linked In the show notes and on A6 andz crypto.com we thought it would be fun to do a hallway sty chat among the editorial team and so also asked editors Steph Zin and Tim Sullivan to join us as well whether you're working or vacationing hopefully there's something in this special summer holiday episode that Sparks interest for you too by the way we have new show art

as well in the conversation that follows we not only discuss books that we and others here are reading including books that come up on our list every time but also talk about why Audi books modes of reading genres talk about pseudonymous authors to Royal authors to Shakespeare to religion science fiction and much much more but we begin by briefly talking about the list itself the first voice you'll hear is Roberts followed by stephs me and then Tim by the way every person on our team who submits a book first says I know this isn't good for the list and I go no no no it is great for the list yeah like

it doesn't have to be a crypto book it doesn't have to be an entrepreneurship book it just has to be a book that you liked yeah I mean there is not a lot of postering people recommend books that are of any age it's not like here's the latest book on this or like here's something that's coming out this year that I'm excited about there's like Classics on there we have John Steinbach um but also newer newer Publications Annie Jacobson's nuclear war they're kind of like all over the place and I think that's really refreshing honestly I do think that like it encourages more people to contribute as well like once I saw the first reading list I was like oh I can contribute but I mean I haven't contributed this time but once I saw the first reading list I was like oh I can

contribute books like I'm allowed to talk about what I like here instead of you know something that I think I should have read yeah I figured I would just ask you all what are you reading well what if we're not reading well that's highly possible too we're too busy working to read and I'm just kidding it's a trick question some of you guys are new parents so that can also eat into reading time I'm an old parent so I'm reading I'm reading ishiguro when we were orphans that's kazuo ishiguro right yep he wrote remains never let me go this is nominally about England's greatest detective self-proclaimed greatest

detective I think set in the 30s and 4S and the language is very formal so I'm reading it in very short chunks is it is it actually good I don't mean to like take myself not sophisticated but I find formal writing very annoying I mean you have to be in the mood to read the very formal sentences and the reflections it's much more formal than I think even like Remains of the Day which you know centers on a butler so it has a certain formality to it it's less formal than like never let me go so it's definitely something you have to be in the mood for and of course he's an unreliable narrator but it's fascinating to kind of watch how the story unfolds it's the second time I've read it so I know the

narrator is full of crap and so it's interesting to see how that's developed over the course of the novel where you realize the author is fooling you as you read through it the second time my favorite unreliable narrator books by far are Talented Mr Ripley what's her name Patricia highworth hi Smith hi Smith did you watch the Netflix series oh no I didn't know I saw the movie wait there's a series there's a new series on Netflix uh it's called Ripley and it is fantastic shot black and white and the cinematography is absolutely outstanding I was actually reading a book when my wife was watching it and I was like I'm not going to pay attention to this yeah and then I could not move my eyes off the screen I was so entranced so wait

why is it black and white so they're going for like a vintage feel there's so many textures and like interesting shots and I think well if you watch it you'll see like Caravaggio the Renaissance painter is like a big part of it and he does a lot of stuff with Shadow work I think like the Italian word is chiosco I I don't know I don't say that again empasis was wrong on that but it was kiaro skuro okay there you go thank you I didn't know that was way how to pronounce it either I've never known how to pronounce that word so anyway I think they you know I think they went with this sort of like black and white to highlight the nature of Good and Evil you know dark and light and also as a call back to Caravaggio

and that word that I can't pronounce that's kind of brilliant I mean in the last reading list I'm sorry in the last what we're watching because we did include TV shows when we did our list I put Perry Mason oh so the new one yes the new one that the one that um so dark Robert Downey Jr's production company produced and I read every single one of the Perry Mason books as a kid because my grandfather immigrated to Uganda to find work and got kicked out by IDM in the 70s and when he went to London I guess for some reason the Perry Mason books were popular so Perry Mason hard covers were in my house growing up and so like I decided to read every single Perry Mason book but anyway I watched

both seasons of that series and it was exquisitely well done and the thing you said about lighting Robert comes to mind for that yeah by the way the last ishiguro book I read was Clara and the sun which um I have read he intended as a children's book and his daughter told him that he was going to really mess up young children if this was a children's book those are the best children's books though honestly the ones that are for adults not even for adults that are just like so dark kind of messed up you need children to have like a little bit of backbone I think some of the children stories that are really meant for adults are like one of my favorite genre and

one that comes to mind is harun and the Sea of Stories by Salon rushy one of my all time favorite books yeah have you guys all read it sounds like you have stuff yeah it wasn't just heru he wrote a couple of those it's like Luca and the fire of that's right that's right the fire of Life fire of life and I felt like some of his stories that were actually like sort of meant for children were some of his best writing they're so magical and beautiful I love them I agree I have not read Luca and the fire of life but I highly recommend everyone read her rud and the Sea of Stories because it's kind of relevant to our work actually it's like about storytelling which I hate that word cuz marketers use it in a very cheesy way but about stories as streams and if you

think about the world we live in with like Twitter feeds and narratives coming out from everywhere it's like waves of stories coming together and like threads tying and it's just very magical for sure Midnight's Children was extraordinarily magical I remember reading it on a train and when I reached the halfway point and I don't know if it's okay to give a spoiler after 25 plus years it should be but um there is a magical moment in the middle of the book where the narrator their family history is switched on you and it's really surprising there's also the enchantress of Florence was one that I forgot about oh that was like a kids book by him I don't know if it was meant to be a kids book but it was another one of those sort of like lighter that felt

kind of like a fairy tale almost in the way that it was told I don't know how this meets with your children's book should be dark so they grow a spine death for light and beautiful I you're like yeah they should have to like marinate in Grim's fairy tales cuz those things are twisted I mean the originals are dark they are super dark the OG it was dark I mean more like light and sort of narrative style it's not this sort of like overwrought language it's easy to read that's what I mean yeah I do recall it being pretty dark still what would you guys have on your you don't have to list them but if you had to like just off the top of your head think of a book that would make that top 10 of all time Midnight's Children I would put in my

top 10 of all time ever books read in my life for sure that's huge I don't know I don't really do top 10 lists of movies or books or anything I I feel like I don't want to limit myself yeah yeah I haven't listed it anywhere but like just off the top of my head like to Kill a Mockingbird would be on that list yeah I mean that's classic I think one of my favorite books is actually one that I'm thinking about revisiting now and it is the Endurance by Alfred Lancing oh so good yeah it's about shackleton's voyage atast 800 boat um yep yeah they called it his

last ship in the headlines it was a ship that he like died on Called Quest not even the quest a quest and they found that recently I think off the shore of Canada or something but I think it's a good reason to visit the endurance I didn't realize that was one of your favorites by the way it is on our list speaking of reading list our CSX reading list or was it founder Summit but one of our events we made that as one of the books on the list we added it as a book for inspiration for company Builders it's phenomenal yeah definitely holds up it's kind of a riveting story I think people praise Shackleton for his leadership style even though he seems to be like pretty unlucky in terms of boats like they're all sinking he's dying on boats so maybe not a good example in

terms of how to like conduct yourself on a boat or like have a successful boat that doesn't sink probably not the best but I think people looked to his leadership style because he kind of got through this rallied everybody without losing any people that were on the ship including one who had to have a leg amputated who was the stowaway by the way who they just like discovered on board Midway across the Atlantic so you've read this too Robert oh God yeah this is definitely an all-time favorite for me and by the way one of like my absolute favorite pieces of wisdom from shackleton's leadership style is like the way he pick people to be on his crew he would meet with somebody who applied to be like the ship's meteorologist and like the person

has no background in meteorology but they can sing well and they have a funny nose and so for Shackleton like that was it you just needed the espri deor above anything else and if he got along with you he was like you're in now of course they were Shipwrecked for very long time I don't know if that's the best way to pick people but like it's a strategy and one that I find entertaining I don't remember what his life was like leading up to the endurance there was some sort of like failure misadventure there but I forget what it was do you remember yes he had gone on an expedition and he got within spitting distance of the South Pole and then they could have forged on and like people would have died but instead of

doing that instead of like claiming the title and you know being world famous or whatever they decided that they were going to do right by their people and uh and turn back so he was sort of his white way he's like I've got to do this again and um you know Captain Ahab like intensity going on there m dicki and I'm going to add that to my list now I've kind of resisted it because I thought it was one of those cheesy books that people always recommend I was just like oh gosh is this going to be like another one of those inspirational stories you it's like how many times can you read that story but you guys are making me want to read it I was reading the Wiki page for the book after having read it and like the last line it was like that

the guy Alfred Lansing wrote it in my hometown which I thought was such a random fact on the Wikipedia page yeah that is random yeah like this small little place in Long Island my town is a square mile speaking of New England yeah that was on my top 10 but speaking of New England nautical history there is also a very popular book that also became a movie but it's about the Essex which is the boat that Mobi dick was based on and that one is pretty unput downable it feels very like Poppy and Light in the heart of the sea Nathan filb wow I did not know you guys were into this nautical genre but so interesting some of that it's not about the boats it's more about like the adventure aspect and

I haven't actually read this book I don't know if anyone at the call is but nautical history kind of made our reading list too in the wager by David Gran oh people love that book I've heard it was very good David Gran the author of The Wager he's probably the best adventure writer I'd say nonfiction adventure writer today didn't he write killers of the flower Moon he did which was just made into a movie with Leo and Martin Scorsese some say it was a good film allegedly so I haven't seen it David Grant by the way to tie it back to uh endurance wrote a great piece for the New Yorker it's about a guy who is retracing the steps of an Antarctic Explorer he makes reference to Shackleton in it it's a very short Nolla that they made out of the feature

article but it's just stunningly good like everything he writes is Great Lost City of Z I've been wanting to ask you Robert kind of a turn here but just in terms of very popular books or books of all time last year when we had dinner with our publisher for read write own with Chris and our agent and and US Chris asked you at the table like what's one of the best books you've read in a while and you said Benjamin lauts I don't know if I pronounced it the right way when we cease to understand the world and I just want to know from you like why was that book so interesting because it seems like it's sort of in the Zeitgeist I mean whatever that Ze guys is defined to be but like why what is it about that book yeah I'm totally obsessed with this book I'm just sort of

like addicted to reading non-fiction like I feel like there's knowledge out there that should be in here in my head and so I ravenously devour non-fiction as much as possible and so when people asked me what my favorite book was honestly all the non-fiction books I had read in the past year I was like I wouldn't recommend them I just wanted to know more about whatever topic it was about and the thing that really stood out was labatut slim volume when we cease to understand the world which is just all these vignettes these stories about tortured genius scientists from like the early 20th century you know like verer Heisenberg and Alexander Groen de the mathematician and he

dramatizes their story and he explains their insights their sort of Eureka moments but explains like who they were as people and what they were going through and I think it's just absolutely incredible poetic emotionally moving writing and something I said that night that this is like a really underexplored genre sort of non-fiction but inflected with fiction like it's not true but most of it's true like Kurt vonet has this famous quote which is um I'm gon to butcher it but it's like journalism is noise fiction is Melody something of that nature and when you do

break the bounds a little bit and you're explicit about it I think you can really deliver just a tremendously like moving piece of writing I honestly think that's actually true of all non-fiction frankly because I think non-fiction is fiction but I think you're saying maybe if people give themselves more permission to play with that and stop pretending which they kind of already are to be blunt maybe we could see more interesting Works cuz I was going to say I don't think that genre is underexplored it feels like we see a lot of stories about perur Geniuses and their psychology so when you said that I was like huh really I think it's the way he plays with the he starts off like I read it after Robert's recommendation and it starts I got a lot of converts on this one you did you got Chris you got

Tim me soon yeah keep going the first story he tells is he Cleaves very close to the truth he said he changes one detail in the story but by the end of the book He's just making stuff up about the inner life of I think he ends with schinger yeah and he is making up what is happening or imagining what he's going through and he does it very artfully over the course of the book with a different scientist so you feel like you're getting you know there's some scientific truth that you're getting there and then by the end of it though he's really slipping into the Fantastic or into the imaginative in a way that I don't think you see that often I do agree that all non-fiction is

lies it's constructed Choice yes exactly it's what you choose to leave out you're trying to tell a coherent story and coherent stories don't exist except in our imaginations so there are rules There are rules I don't know Robert it's like Tim said you're picking some thing even the experts you pick to quote like yes there may be some rules but I almost feel like people should just ditch the conceit Al together let's just make [ __ ] up I'm not saying make [ __ ] up but let's just be honest about what's really happening yeah you could have a biblography like let's not be crazy yeah yeah I guess you can have the sources but even the way people select what to include and exclude in that is an art of editing right like you always making choices I was just going to say as a

former journalist this kind of goes to something that's always bugged me which is this sort of like belief that you can have this view from nowhere this sort of like objective stance yeah and not to the exclusion of anything else but I think it's valuable to have people who have skin in the game who are presenting evidence in favor of whatever position they have oh this is very much my point of view and thesis on media this is why believe in op EDS and instead of having third party voices you should have a first-party voice but have them rigorously edited so you hold them to a bar or run other viewpoints alongside but I very strongly agree with this skin in the game is a more honest incentive it was interesting what you said about

that a lot of the non-fiction books you read you read for information so you wouldn't really recommend them and it's actually funny because I think that's how a lot of people listen to podcast these days like the info density of insights is what you get out of so for me I have the exact opposite which is why would I read a book for information when I can just fast forward through something else read an article read a primary source article hear something I actually have completely almost stopped picking up non-fiction books for this reason like I don't find them to be information dense enough in fact what you said about Benjamin labout's book is more interesting which is info entertainment like you're getting information about the scientists and entertainment and that to me is a much more interesting genre oh I still go to non-fiction books because that's how I

was trained to gather information he learn in grad school to break books like if I need to read something for information I'm not like reading every word carefully you know I might start with the index the bibliography read the intro read the conclusion and then blast through the rest of it so I can get the main point of what they're talking about but that's just like there's nothing pleasurable about that that's just like searching for information well was actually what Chris said at the offsite when we had that session on people sharing their techniques and mental models for learning to just pick the chapters that are interesting you and Skip everything else like that's a perfectly fine way to read a book you don't have to read it linearly I mean that's kind of what you're describing to some extent it's a different kind of break in the book it's

not methodical but it is following your interestingness I have sort of an adaptation of Chris's method which is I still really can't break away from the linear trajectory of a book but like 90% of my book consumption now is in audiobook form and what I'll do is I will set the speed really high and then if I get into something that's interesting okay let's slow it down a bit or rewind a bit and relisten you know at a slower pace and I'll I'll do that for a lot of books now and it it helps me tear through a lot I don't know how much I'm retaining or absorbing but that's my strategy I'm so glad you brought up audiobooks so who who of us is reading audiobooks these days and by

the way do you guys even agree with the phrase some people argue that you should not say reading audiobooks you should say listening and to me I am finding I reading audiobooks but anyway are any of you guys listening to audiobooks any favorites or any thoughts on the on the medium I read audio books Let's be clear I feel strongly about this I too read audiobooks here's my thoughts on audiobooks and you mentioned this before like I'm a parent of a small child so I took like a little bit of a break from Reading because it didn't really feel like it fit into my life and I didn't know like how if I'm holding a baby like how do I hold a book and how do I read in this way and and I felt like the best way for me to get back into reading that

was most effective was like having it on multiple media so especially if I'm really invested in a book like I'll have three copies of it one on audiobook one on my phone and then one in a hard copy depending on my mood you have to like really fit it around your life so you're a multimodal reader on one book I do because you got to fit it into your life and you have to be realistic about that Steph what is the last book you read on the multimodal way like what was the last book that was so tremendous you had to read it in three different ways it's like there's a combination right so one is I really like it and two is I want to read it really fast so one I really liked it babbled which is also on our reading list oh yeah my wife she read

that a few months ago two I have to read it fast which is everything I never told you and only because I'm reading it for a book club and I had a deadline so I had to like really just jam it in what's Babble about Babel is sort of like students attending a magical Academy it's really hard to boil down but it did have a lot of elements of sort of like Jonathan strange and Mr norl by Susanna Clark in that it was sort of like dense and academic in places dark Academia right I think that's the genre is it translation too is it about translation it's about translation and the magic of it was an incredible book I love fantasy and I specifically love fantasy that has like a little bit of historical fiction in it there's like magical realism fun

historical facts I don't know so I definitely recommend men Babble and I consumed it in many different ways that is amazing and I love what you said about fitting it around your life and finding a way of doing that because it's actually a luxury of our lifetime as in this age we live in I don't want to be a lofty about it but it truly is remarkable when you think about the history of books that at one point books were not accessible to everybody until the Advent of the printing press and then that changed the what was written and things were shared and and created new genres and now you're talking about reading books in like three different modes because it's the way you're trying to fit it into your life like that's freaking incredible right if I'm waiting for my daughter to fall asleep I'll just

pop in my headphones yep yep yeah you got to be flexible yeah a lot of people talk about and this is an obvious point but we have to make it because it is such an important point to acknowledge that the Advent of airpods was massive for accelerating adoption of both audiobooks and podcast you know you can just pop in earphones without being wired to something and you can move around freely and be handsfree and I just don't think we can underestimate that so it's worth quickly acknowledging that that technology played a key role in this acceleration too it's a great point the one thing I I dislike about it is like a favorite pastime is judging people based on what they're reading or like you know being like Oh you're reading that that's so cool and you you just don't get that with audiobooks you

know you don't know what people are doing I used to do that with guys I dated like you go to their place you see their shelf and you're like nope nope this is not going to make the second date mm- what was the book that made you do that what was the book that was like no way second date oh my God I can't believe you're asking me that I have one in mind I have one in mind I have one too so mine was Da Vinci Cod yeah that's bad oh my really like fine read it Pulpit give it away but like it should not be your favorite book in the pride of place of like that's the best book I ever read that's so funny you asked that no one has ever asked me that question what's yours it's catcher in the Ry ooh

spicy is it because you don't want to date someone who has I call this Holden Cofield wannabe complex hcw complex yeah you don't want to dat cop want to no- I literally have my high school copy of cater and the Ry right back there on the top of my bookshelf and that's why Steph and you are incompatible yeah we're kicking you off this now I know we we can't talk to you anymore it's funny because catcher in the Ry has like very sentimental value to me my dad gave me a copy of Catcher in the Rye when I was 10 years old which is too young to read Catcher in the Rye I have like a little note from him and it's a hard copy so like I have it on my bookshelf I wouldn't date me for sure okay that's different though I also say that as I'm

getting older I am starting to like withhold judgment over people's reading choices a lot more because I feel like there should be something in your life and I feel very strongly about this is that something should be like a little treat you know whatever you like whatever interest you want to follow I feel like that's fine whatever you're reading is fine have some pleasure in your life you were so right and it's funny because I was going to tease Robert for being judgmental but then I heard my myself judging on both the example that you asked me about Da Vinci Code and then now Catcher in The Rise so I held back but I'm really glad you said what you just said it's contradictory like I think the instinct is still there for sure but I'm trying to train myself out of it and we all do have guilty

pleasures that you would never admit to people like what are your guyses come on embarrass yourself on there we have guilty pleasures we would never admit to people so talk about them on this podcast yeah that makes total sense let me tell you about this for work I'll just go on the record and say that I I'm to admit that I whipped Through The Da Vinci Code and multiple sequels like at the time that they came out they are page ter I read it too I myself am deeply involved in the Sarah J moss Universe I don't even think that's a guilty pleasure it's just fun have some enjoyment just like strike guilty from it yeah I've been very much a fanatic about Sarah J moss and going back to the topic of the reading list if you go back like s years people will see her books

show up and I feel very proud of that because is at that time she was not a New York time bestselling author right now she's been dominating the New York time bestselling list for a very long time but a lot of her early books people could not get through because they're a bit of a slog to get into the World building and the university builds so it took a lot of like fanatic fandom word of mouth and fans over time saying no no you have to do I did this a lot of our friends here at A6 and Z that I also were converts after I was like No just get through book one of this series and you will like it and love it and so to me she has that magic she also by the way cuz I had never heard this word

until the publisher dinner December is like an icon of the Romany genre oh you know like romantic fantasy which that term is new like that was kind of remarkable to me because I've always read romantic SE books I did not know that was a genre but I think that's a great guilty pleasure that's a pleasure to be proud of I feel like it's exploded this genre there's so many more options it's great yeah but I wonder if it's a sign of something bigger like you have to wonder if the popularity of fantasy is not only happening because of cultural craving for religion and like people don't have like a certain mythology anymore in their lives like you might get from religion a craving because of increased loneliness a

craving for connection more World building I mean I hate to make it all serious but one does have to wonder why this is happening now I don't know if you guys have any theories so we just had our offsite in London we all were just there we had our startup accelerator in London and so the team all went over there and um in anticipation of this I started rereading Lord of the Rings oh yeah so I'm like kneee in in tlen right now and you know the thing that drove him was he was upset that his home the UK that the myths that were developed after the Angles and the Saxon Germanic tribes invaded England they had a good stretch of hundreds of years there but then the

Normans invaded in like the year 1000 and basically wiped out the local culture and that oral tradition of myth didn't survive and so what he wanted to do was basically think what would that have been what would those myths have been and he wanted to resurrect that and so his like language building was this exploration of there's this you know god-shaped hole here of a lack of anglo-saxon myth and I'm going to fill it I had no idea that was the origin of those books and I could bring something up back from the start of this conversation Grim's fairy tales and fun fact because I was looking into all this but apparently Grim was a famous linguist and he

developed a law about like how language changes over time and this deeply impacted tolken and made him become a linguist and philologist and whatever I mean he invented his own language yes based on Grim's law this was like The Awakening thing for him that made him kind of discover his life's work that's wow anyway I'm like deep in tolken right now so yeah are you actually enjoying it though for real so so deeply like okay like here's the thing about it and this is like another aspect of him trying to recreate Anglo-Saxon myth is the language is all derived from Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Saxon is a very vigorous simple tongue whereas like French and Latin are very complicated and intricate

what are some good examples of um you know like going on a trip versus a voyage it's all very like simple simple words and so it's so easy to digest and it's very fairy tale like did you read it as a kid by the way because you're rereading this now right oh God yeah I mean hardcore my fifth grade teacher called me bobit so that's I've read tol I think probably literally dozens of times since I was a kid same I was surprised on my reread of The Hobbit that there were so many songs there are lot songs of songs they're not great songs either they're just okay songs they're okay but I went to a record store in Seattle recently with my

husband where we found like a collection of tolken reading the poems he didn't perform the songs they hired people to do that but the record came out in like the 60s and it is really wonderful we actually like use it as a soundtrack for this game we're playing called the one ring it is the Lord of the Rings RP P G that I actually recommended on our last reading list yeah because last time we included games too yeah we included games last time I did recommend this RPG it is very fun there are some limitations like the Lore Master who's our kind of dungeon master won't let us use Dynamite which I feel is unfair because there were fireworks but it is overall a really fun way to like engage with Lord of the Rings in a new format

you know I was wondering about that cuz like you know at Bilbo's birthday party they shoot off all these crazy fireworks and I'm like why do these not appear later when they're like you know slaughtering each other in the death Fields yeah is gandf like gatekeeping these fireworks just for fun like I think he might be Dam that Gandalf in his gatekeeping ways also just why if you know the person who was celebrating their birthday was traumatized by a dragon earlier in their life would you launch a dragon firework over the tent at his birthday party when he's old and could have a heart attack and die you know the thing I love about Gandalf is he's exactly that kind of person in the books but in the movies they they make him

gentler but he's like kind of a saucy man in the book he was still kind of hard in the movies I mean run you fools the reason I asked you guys so first of all I did not realize that all of you guys were super tolken knites so I love the Lord of the Rings universe and as a child I did read the tolken books but I tried rereading them after the movies came out as an adult and could not get into them and I would go so far as to put them in my list of that rare case where movies are better than books and so for me Lord of the Rings is in that genre and I want to know from you guys before everyone attacks me for that I'm gonna like deflect this for a minute do you guys have any other books that fit

into that category where the movie was better than the book or the TV show was better than the book it's a great question yeah I love this question I mean I guess Perry Mason I would have to add to this list too cuz that show was phenomenal compared to the books you know people have told me otherwise and I have no basis to say this because I didn't read the books obviously everybody watched Game of Thrones and if you didn't where were you but I had so many friends who were like you have to read the books the books are so good and I was like I am not devoting that much of my life to something like the show is so good there's no way that it's like 10x better than than the show the books were great before the show came out and then for those of us who

were like waiting for these books to come like some of us waited years he kind of does this thing with the second to last book that he published that thing that fantasy authors do when you're waiting for a book which I hate Sarah Moss did this by the way too in the original Throne of Glass series where they give you the other version of a set of characters while you're waiting for the main characters and it's like not only are you freaking waiting to give me the book I want you're now telling me the other stories I don't care about and even though yes you're really good at it and it is compelling I'm still angry at you and so I kind of agree with you I think the end I would go for the movies over the books on that one too same I didn't love the show The

Witcher and I didn't love the books The Witcher although I know people are very passionate about them but I found them very difficult to read but I love the game The Witcher so that's another one of those situations where like it translates better to certain media than others by the way I have not played the game The Last of Us but people argue that the show of that is as good or on par with the game because the game they say is more intense and that the show has like more of a nice human feel-good element to it for Last of Us I don't know if you play the game or watch the show this is an extremely controversial topic and I won't comment oh I didn't realize it's heated yeah do you have any books Tim that are better than the

movies are better than you're such a book person I feel like you feel like it would be sacriligious to admit this but there has to be something where no I admit it I also don't have any guilty pleasures I'm not guilty about anything you just own Pleasures absolutely they're mine I own them no he's just busy reading the intros and conclusions of books moving on bibliographies all day that's me I was trying to think of books where I think the movie is better or TV is better I will keep thinking the expanse on our team Aaron loves that TV show The keep recommending it he's such a Sci-Fi buff he is you know who else is a Sci-Fi buff is hate our compliance

officer you know when you deal in compliance all day long you got to have a little escapism I think that's the uh that's the bottom line fun thing about our offsites is finding out like the Sci-Fi Club I mean Aon told me about Kate once I found out about Kate I connected Britney to Kate so that they could talk I was like you two should talk to each other she reads so much her Instagram is literally all like her giving a score like one out of 10 on every book she reads and I got really annoyed at her once cuz cuz I'm like why did you say that book was like higher score when you told me you didn't like it you're giving yourself like ratings inflation like what are you doing they are inflated I I've never seen her write anything under a seven but I think

that's awesome like she like I loved it I loved it all well I was just like Britney you said you didn't like it that much and she actually gave a very good answer which was you know it wasn't for me but it was the kind of book that I thought others would actually read and I was like oh well that makes sense like it wasn't so bad that you wouldn't recommend it to anybody it's like uber stars like your Uber ranking is between 4.8 and five that's the scale that's a real thing that actually happens you know one thing I'll say so we started publishing these what we're reading book lists years ago and it was because we are such a reading culture and we talk about that a lot and it's interesting because people are always wanting to know what Mark hr's reading people write

up articles based on it when he tweet storms it you know Ben has a point of view like I won't you know read any business books except he wrote really good ones that are not like other business books and then you have like the one Business book he recommends to everybody which is Andy Grove's books high output management yeah exactly and there is like this culture what I find fascinating having you know seen and produced these lists for years is which books keep coming back over and over and over again and I'm trying to think of the ones that keep showing up do you remember because we always put it in the intro like which ones are kind of always coming up I've seen tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow repeat itself across a couple lists y that was very much at the Zeitgeist you know a couple

years ago by the way I have an unpopular opinion on that which is I tried to read it read a few chapters and I just could not get into it I and I I considered myself like a gamer if I had to pick a subculture to identify with as like a kid I was probably a gamer but I found the references just to be so over the top I was like like you're laying it on way too thick yeah I haven't been able to read it either and I don't know why I'm going to try it again I'm going to try it again too because so many people have recommended it and different people keep recommending it are there anything else well on this list one book that's come up a number of times is unreasonable Hospitality yeah what is that I have

never heard of it I thought it was going to be a Danny Meyer book but it's by the guy who founded the restaurant group that has The Nomad and 11 Madison Park Restaurant groups and I think it's about how to be unreasonably hospitable if I had to guess having read the copy but I have not read the book yeah willara I don't know if I'm saying that sounds right yeah you're just like frothing at the mouth while holding a bunch of plates in your hand serving food so fast I can see it sold much better than his other book unreasonable hostility wait is that real or you're joking okay good like a book one more book or collection of books that has

frequently appeared is um Emily St John Mandel she's written a number of books and she seems to be a perennial on these lists I think I've been one of the people that's recommended her a lot you did yeah station 11 I think you recommended yeah but I think I've kind of gone back on that because now I feel like anti- reccommendation yeah I'm kind of take it back I mean look this is a case where the show was better than the book yes okay we've got one and Patrick Som was the showrunner and it was excellent and that's why I went and read the book I also saw that first so maybe that influenced that I read glass hotel and then I read her last book that is like the transition World building across the two books Sea of Tranquility Sea of Tranquility yes exactly and then

the glass hotel is the other one yes that came before and I think actually now it's funny this happened but it's in a weird way I wrote about this in the last list that I love the Sea of Tranquility now having had some distance from it I think I found that to be too contrived and now it's made me feel irritated at the previous books so I'm retracting those recommendations wow what an arc 've been on yeah I know very very crazy her work is wonderful in general but I think I've moved past it personally like the protagonist in a good novel you can evolve and and totally change I guess that's true she has these weird things that she's like obsessed with like have you noticed all of her characters are into shipping what's up with that like does she like the shipping industry there's always a

lot about the shipping industry in all of her books tell us more about why one would like the shipping industry sonel well I am obsessed with containerships and shipping but you guys are the ones that read the most on the shipping industry so you guys should tell us more you're the one who picked all those books on shipping and and ocean Fairing and navigation which to bring it back you know the origins of venture capital is the whaling industry so that's right it's not totally tangential yeah the word carry apparently came from how much you could carry like the portion of the whale because you were participating apparently that's a folklore behind that term shipping is fascinating so Emily St John mandal wants to incorporate it who's who's to blame her I enjoyed

station 11 I do think that some of the preoccupations really come through station 11 had a lot of stuff about Shakespeare in it and one of the themes that I thought was actually really interesting that kind of came out of that one for me was like and this might be a total tangent but what does like literature about pandemics look like after the pandemic and I think it's interesting that she already like kind of brought in Shakespeare because a lot of Shakespeare's plays like obviously the plague various plagues were like a big part of life at the time and something that they had to live with like theaters were closed because of them it was like something that everybody had to deal with on a day-to-day basis like we had to deal with covid but it doesn't really appear explicitly in any of the plays

like nobody wants to read about a pandemic while a pandemic is happening so what does literature about pandemics look like now that was like a fun thing to think about was it written before Co yeah okay years before like three four years before at least I think what's she writing about now I need a a heads up on what's coming yeah what is the next disaster she's like it's a meteor yeah it's really interesting you brought that up Steph because one of the things that stood out about the show and the book but especially in the show was what art forms endure after a disaster and it is super interesting that Shakespeare is the one thing that endures and that gives people hope in the darkness like there is something really special about that okay so one conspiracy theory I recently indul was the you know

Shakespeare didn't author his own Works conspiracy not true well come on it's fun though we'll humor you yeah so I was a huge Shakespeare buff and have acted in a lot of Shakespearean plays I like him I like his work think it's good bold bold position Robert yeah right can you believe it I like Shakespeare too but contrarian I was getting into Fernando pooa who was like the Portuguese James Jo basically he's like their leading modernist literary light and he was obsessed with this theory that you know Shakespeare was a fabricated identity assumed by other people he was like deep deep deep in this and um so anyway

that's how I fell down that rabbit hole why do you think that people care so much okay so I think it comes down to like one aspect of this is that it comes down to could somebody with such a not High status background that he could pen such influential works and be who he was be Shakespeare could you have that intellectual heft and weight and all that if you come from a lower background and you know so it's a class thing but then you know what's fun about the conspiracy theories is it devolves into all this sort of like puzzle solving riddle solving chasing down details and I like Crossroad puzzles I like Puzzles

they're fun you like Dan Brown H I read digital Fortress like that's how how much I was into Dan Brown I'm ashamed to admit that don't be ashamed you know on the Shakespeare thing I find it really fascinating because nobody questions a musical genius that comes from a less educated less higher socioeconomic background and yet they do when it comes to a literary person as if writing can only be in the hands of a few when it's like a universal skill in many ways obviously literacy is not Universal but like the ability to speak articulate share a story can be so I find that really interesting I love that analogy I think that's exactly right and I wonder about that and the other thing that I find

really interesting this is connected to crypto is this idea that when there's an anonymous person or a pseudonymous person it's almost always defaulted that the identity may not be one person but a collective like Satoshi Nakamoto and Shakespeare was not really one person but a collective like one of the most popular genres and writers for adolescents and twins is Rick Riordan and the Percy Jackson series and every kid I know who's a teenager and Below loves and reads those and that's not only him there are ghost writers that help build that universe so it's not unheard of that that can happen so I don't know like I I wonder like what is it like that as if like genius can't

really come from one person or I just find it so fascinating well specifically I mean I think there's like a certain amount of co-writing that happens with plays specifically with Shakespeare's plays because you know authors have certain copies of their own lines some things are changed while it happens like there is an amount where it's like not just him it is sort of like a collaboration as well and I wonder if that kind of opened up the doors to this too but I know there's probably a bunch of people looking into it or who have looked well it's funny you of all people say that having worked at GitHub because what you're basically describing is like a commit you know like submitting it back in like it's like kind of a GitHub for plays like it's true authors take a fork that they might mark up their own copy

they put it back into the canonical like check it back in someone else makes a modification and it's like these things are meant to be living systems you almost wonder what writing plays would have been like in the age of GitHub or such yeah I mean folks have used GitHub to try out a variety of use cases for like writing documents and that kind of stuff and doing more collaborative work that's not necessarily revolving on code seeing everything from like legal documents to recipes and all kinds of stuff but with Shakespeare specifically like I think you know we have this sort of canonical first folio that's what we look to as like what the plays are it's sort of our source I don't completely know like how they were collected like

was somebody transcribing the play was there like one version of it that was written based on all of like everybody's texts like they weren't meant to be read they were meant to be performed so it's difficult to tell Steven blat has written greenat for sure knows lots of books about this it is funny when you shift mediums you know like Shakespeare to Steph's point was meant to be performed and acted and yet we often teach it in the classroom as like go home and read this play and it's like I don't understand what they're saying like the language is weird it all sounds like my voice in my head and um it's unfortunate that that's the way it gets taught yeah you miss the jokes you there's so much that comes out in

performance yeah it's like written in niic pentameter so a lot of the lines and delivery depend on this Rhythm and if you hear it out of rhythm it's a little bit harder to understand I think once you have like body language and intonations and like the dynamicism of someone like speaking on stage I think it's so much easier to figure out what's happening even though you know this language can be super incomprehensible it's actually amazing too how it is so lyrical that you can remember it if you memorize any passages like I think I must have memorized this passage in high school and I still remember the out out life has but a poor player walking and striding his hour upon the stage is either Hamlet or mccb that's what I remember but I don't remember which one oh it is MC Beth yeah yeah by the way

where tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow comes from that other book that's the monologue tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow until there is no more oh my God it just came back to me the next podcast will just be a reenactment of MC Beth from from like our general memory of how it goes what happens I'll just be watching ing my hands a lot that's all I remember from that play speaking of I recently found out that the leader of the Shakespeare troop I was in in college you were in a shape hold on stop stop stop we can't we we can't get into this point you were in a shap I'm outing way too many things this is some really good Robert facts you can't just like skim over that part but okay finish your question turns out she became the chief Storyteller of sleep no more which is pretty cool I

just learned that like the other day so that's kind of co co which is based on MC Beth I will say just one more thing before we move on which has been a common theme here um is I mentioned pooa the Portuguese writer and so you were talking about how in crypto you have this like pseudonymous Creator which has this allore to it one thing that's interesting about pooa was he went the opposite direction which is he created what he called heteronyms he basically invented all of these different personalities and voices kind of like Shakespeare did with all of his characters but he played them out in like newspapers and he would like have them write in editorials to newspapers he invented like entire backstories for

these people they'd have them argue with each other I love that and there is a crypto connection Beyond Nakamoto and pseudonymous identity because one of the most exciting and interesting things about nfts is the ability to think about different identities like you don't have to just have one person like you can be many different people if you wanted to and not in the negative sense of like a cibil but in the positive sense of like if you're in One gaming world you could be one character and if you're in another gaming world you could also have another character associated with your overall parent identity but you could play out multiple identities if you wanted which I think is such an interesting thing in general absolutely what else do we want to talk about back

to audiobooks so it's interesting because when I first started getting into audiobooks I found them to be very boring and I would just tune out like what would happen is I would be in it and then I would just keep losing my spot in my head so I'd have to keep going back and I just finally gave up and I was like okay maybe podcasts are more interesed in me because a conversation is happening I don't know what's happened in the last year I suddenly am more addicted to audiobooks than any other genre podcasts written books all of it and I'm loving it and I have one of these Amazon Prime premium memberships on Audible where you can pick a lot of books and you get the monthly credit but you also get a lot lot of books that are available under premium where they hire actors to read

Classics and the two that I loved in particular are Pride and Prejudice read by rosan Pike and she does every character as a voice and for those of you who've seen the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice which is frankly maybe even better than the book this Audi book of it read by Rosman Pike is phenomenal like you're immersed into this world of all these characters and she does every voice with its own unique imprint no other sound effects so it's remarkable I've also been doing this with Anna kinina where Maggie Gyllenhaal is a narrator and now she does not do different voices in fact she uses the same two voices to do two characters and alternating dialogue but her voice is so soothing and so interesting and it just

brings a subtle story to life and Robert I tried putting in on speed and you can't cuz it actually ruins the voice you can't do Maggie Gyllenhaal's voice on fast forward but what I'm finding with both of these Audi books is there are books I've read I mean anacin and I probably read in high school and didn't fully get but hearing them and reading them by listening to them I am paying far better attention to the language and the details than I ever would had I just read it and I've read Pride and Prejudice a million times but there's things I notice in the words that I would never have listened to and I don't know if that's happening with you guys but that's been very new and interesting to me in happening with audiobooks I completely agree and you can hear hear

the inflection differently as well I think especially with books that were written you know centuries ago like when the language is slightly different it's a little bit harder to just like come off the page in a way that somebody would say it having an actor read it can probably help you understand a lot more for sure I've been reading and listening to I've been having like a multimedia experience with this Audi book maybe that's what we call it I've been reading Bram Stoker's Dracula but it's narrated by Alan [ __ ] and he's excellent obviously such a good actor too is it on Audible I'm reading it on Audible listening to an on Audible I think there's something about 19th century literature in particular that a lot of it was written to be read aloud that's a way that you shared with the people

around you that lends itself to listening rather than reading gosh that's a really good point I forgot that that was the case I mean I was thinking of that being true for radio and like radio place but you're talking about just people sitting around at night without television they would take turns reading to each other or together which I think is a very beautiful thing that people only unfortunately do with their kids these days but I think more adults like couples friends groups of people should read out loud to each other I think there's something very magical about that as well so my wife and I have been like before we go to sleep we've been making our way through eh gb's the story of Art and we'll each read like we'll alternate like I'll read two pages one night she'll read two pages the next

night and then after that we'll we'll listen to an audio book to fall asleep that's sort of like our nightly regime that's really special one thing I did want to mention in this vein is graphic novels and one of the best graphic novels I read in the last year was Christen Rod's book called seek you a journey through American loneliness my friend Eugene recommended it to me and it's one of the most interesting treatments of the topic just as a combination of personal history and history and the way it brings together all these threads and it's like distilled into one graphic novel I used to read a lot of graphic novels I haven't dipped into that in a while it's been a long time but I'll I want to

check that one out what's nice about it is that it is a medium that you cannot translate to I mean you could translate it to audiobook but it would be a completely different thing you're so right it can't be translated to audiobooks it is so inherent to the medium in which it's you know created Robert I've been dying to ask you since you and I have actually not talked about this yet but one of the first audio books I read that made me fall in love with audio books again well two of them one was Trevor Noah born of crime it's just so phenomenally done and read out loud and he does voices and personality in a very organic natural way but the other was spare oh Prince Harry and I loved it and I'm gonna make my case for it because people make fun of me for

loving that book so much I only read this book so that I would have conversation material with you so because it's the only thing I would talk about for a long time but you've never told me what you actually thought because did you read it or did you hear it I heard it okay good because his voice is call reading and I agree I read the book that way too and who is the name of the ghost writer who helped him he's really talented I forgot his name yeah J.R minger he wrote The Tender bar that was sort of his like autobiography he wrote open Andre ay's biography and shoe dog with Phil Knight the uh CEO and founder of Nike and by the way shoe dog is a book that has come up nearly every year on our list since we started this

franchise it always comes up as the entrepreneurial book it's always on the list it's like probably the most Lindy of all the books on that list I will say I avoided that book for a long time because when I was at Fortune you know business people would always say oh shoe dog it's such a great book and I was like if this business person is recommending a book to me I am not going to read it yeah it's an anti-erotic exactly and uh I was dead wrong on that one that book is really really great and reading it convinced me that I should read spare even though I have absolutely zero interest in the royal family sorry apologies to the king but well I found that book captivating even if you're not interested in the royal family so did you actually like it tell me truthfully

look the writing is incredible and the fact that I had zero interest in the subject matter and honestly kind of maybe slightly disdainful toward the subject matter going into it and the fact that I made my way all the way through it and yeah I found it totally engaging and extremely well written and spoken to yeah Harry's credit yeah he's a natural our editor who edited Reed write own was also I mean you edited Reed write own but like you know our publisher editor Ben Greenberg he was the editor on that book yes he was yeah and he mentioned it at our dinner and I was like oh I didn't read it because I just thought it'd be like one of these gossipy books but actually when he recommended it over that dinner I read it over break and I was hooked beyond

belief it was actually beautiful heartwrenching storytelling about family and family Dynamics regardless of who you are you actually Come Away with more empathy for the king and Prince William than than dismay you feel like you understand everyone's points of view you feel deep empathy for a person who hasn't chosen this life and this idea that your whole purpose is service like to serve communities and causes like that was very beautiful and inspiring to me and frankly made me motivated so for me that was like a very beautiful outcome of the book but I do want to make the case to others that I think this book is fascinating because one

could argue that spare is really about what happens when a startup bumps up against an old traditional industry and I know this is going to seem a little over rot and stretched but go with me for a second bring us there son yes I am making a case because I strongly believe that that story so much of the conflict is about a traditional institution trying to preserve it values which is a fair and good motive you understand it and then another group I.E Megan and Harry bring about certain change and their frustration with the way things are done and The Clash that happens and I'm very angry and bitter at how Paparazzi can extractives like that

doesn't feel like media and investigation to me that's like the worst kind of Gossip the other argument I'll make for listeners of the podcast especially for this group of people that love the idea of quote going Direct I.E you know cutting out media and just telling your story directly it is kind of empowering and Powerful that Harry can finally tell his story directly yes it is intermediated through a publisher but it is going direct he's not going through the Royal rotor to do this like dance that they've been doing for a decade so that's my argument I think it's very much worth reading I think it's completely phenomenal and I could not put it down I.E stop listening to it I think it's one of the best books I've read in a really long time honest to God that's great thanks for indulging me

about it while reading it I did have a gnawing sense of what's being left out I do think it's very powerful to go direct I just had this gwing sense of I wonder about the other perspectives here that being said like we were talking about earlier I do appreciate somebody coming out with their view on something and being open about it and saying you know this is where I stand I want the first draft of spare that is the question Stu did you put it on the list I need to add it one thing that you guys said earlier you said that someone recommending made you not want to read it you were saying how everyone recommending like shoe dog on our reading list made you not want to read it do you guys have other kind of anti-er istics like that for things you

won't read like besides you know it's on this guy you don't like dating bookshelf or whatever oh I I trust everything on our reading list by the way I highly recommend what our people promote yes I would read everything it's it's those other business people who don't know what they're talking about okay okay ours are the good kind which I agree with actually they're not like those cheesy kind any anti-is discs on your guys's like picking books that you will not read these books if so and so this isn't fair to our reading list but I do not enjoy books about habit building and about biohacking I feel like these books are mostly geared toward people who have I don't want to say this in a derogatory way but like pretty simple lives so like people without kids like people without

different complexities in their lives that they have to manage and how do you build habits when you're juggling literal chaos often doesn't apply to most people I think you haven't read enough of these books okay maybe I am like simplifying and I just recited the back cover of one of these that was Robert throwing a dagger at you Steph and trying to like literally throwing some fighting words your way if you read a few of these productivity books all that chaos will dissipate and melt away your life will be just a glorious easy ride from here on out so true but yeah I in general I feel like I've built some habits and not on purpose not deliberately ever probably it's always been kind of like happy accidents when

they're good habits so I don't know how much this genre has helped me in this way well speaking of what Robert said about what the people want and the market pools it's not an accident that Atomic habits has been like at the top of the New York time bestseller list for like ever yes so one has to wonder what's going on there I read it I liked it I recommend it have you formed any new habits as result I just think like we're born into this world without anything like we have nothing to go on no user manual like I don't know how this works up here like in my head what's going on in there who knows like that stuff's crazy so yeah to I don't know learn a little bit about how I'm

just sort of this like behavioral machine that responds to pleasure and avoids punishment is interesting I don't know I feel like I'm happiest when I'm on an app absolute tangent like when I am on Wikipedia at 11:30 p.m. and I'm just starting something and I know it's going to take hours and I am Googling like what kind of foliage was on jewelry in the 19th century Laurel Oak acorns lots of this kind of thing um and that is when I'm like following weird tendrils in my head like going into rabbit holes late at night and if someone will write a book about that

I'll read it speaking of someone writing a book like that have you ever seen the account depths of Wikipedia M oh yes yes yeah oh you would love it yeah because she I think it's a she surfaces all kinds of cool weird articles but what you're describing is actually going down a rabbit hole for something you are curious about that you're trying to just find out and then you chase it and she's just finding random cool articles on Wikipedia yeah no I think curiosity is Magic I totally agree with that Tim do you have any anti-her istics I tend to put off reading books that my wife recommends to me oh she better not be listening into this podcast ouch what has she recommended sorry Wendy she everything she

recommends I end up reading it and it's really good but it just goes to the bottom of my pile let's just say you're dividing and conquering you're like splitting up the book territory yeah exactly that is a really good way of putting it yeah I think that's a great perspective he's already read it why would I need to and invariably anything I read recommend to her goes to the bottom of her pile so there you go at least it's mutual yeah there are genres I don't I don't read a lot of business books I don't read a lot of self-help productivity books I actually think your idea of not reading Wendy's books is not the bad one I mean not I'm not speaking about whether it's good or not for your marriage but just as a book recommendation engine collaborative filtering which is the early model for

recommendation systems I.E reading based on what your friends are reading is like the worst model of reading recommendations because I do not care my Clos friends are reading I'm much more interested in what people who have shared interests are reading or whose curiosity similar to mine are reading so I actually think not picking things that people very close to you is a very good heris for picking so I think that's very logical and rational Tim yeah thank you we've been married for almost 35 years so I don't think it's damaged the longevity of the marriage and I do eventually read them and again they're always good so I don't know why I haven't you know updated based on experience Robert do you have an anti-is I do have a heuristic which is when I start getting the same recommendation whether it's a TV show movie or a book

from totally disperate you know nodes in my social network like people who have nothing in common with one another at least I think have nothing in common and they all start mentioning the same thing around the same time then it vaults to the top of my list I'm like I got to check that out that's funny because that one actually annoys me when that happens this will surprise no one I hate when groups of smart people all start talking about the same thing and I get very bored by that like I get annoyed that so many smart people in Tech all talk about the same books at the same time I'm just like please I don't want to read the same thing as all of you but I do agree with you that that's a good signal by the way objectively it's just annoying to me when people are flocking together

reading the same thing this is actually how I found Sarah J MOS though where it was like suddenly everybody from all walks of life was like have you read this have you read this and then all of the conversations we have like invariably devolve into these frantic conversations about these books yeah that felt like a really good signal it felt really energizing yeah yeah by the way speaking of Sarah M are you reading C of thron and Roses Crescent City Throne of Glass what series are you reading I'm moving on to Throne of Glass now I just finished all of the court of thorns of there's more books coming in court of thron and Roses obviously but she does a cool intersection actually like a crossover World building between the end of court of thron of roses and Crescent City but Throne of Glass is the

one that I had to tell people you have to get through the first book to get the real energy because by book two it like really picks up and one of my all-time favorite characters of all literature shows up in book two so nice you'll see it and it's like so good I don't have an anti-her istic but I will just say very simply that I don't read Oprah's Book picks and Booker Prize winners so I'm equally elitist and un elitist in that I will not also read Booker Prize winners I find them very contrived and I don't know I find Oprah's Book picks just nice but not interesting enough so one person whose picks I always trust though is Tyler Cohen and anytime he puts a book pick like fiction in particular I will almost always pick up and I I never go wrong with his picks like he recommended

Dominique Stone's ties to me like the short Nolla that was so good he's the one who convinced me to read Alena fante's neopolitan quartet which would definitely make the top of 10 all time but I thought it was just like books about female friendship which that's a good reason but that for me wasn't interesting enough but it turns out to be like so so interesting as a story a backdrop against like fascist politics in Naples Italy and like a country coming of age and it's so phenomenally well written and good and beautiful I mean Tim you're rereading them aren't you yeah Tim didn't you recommend them on a recent book list actually uh yes I have read and I think it's also like you could have no interest in female

friendships I do but you could have no interest in the backdrop of fascist Italy and it's just you want to keep turning the page to read the prow in Translation no less they're really just beautifully written yeah and I would say because this is something that's very rare but most books feel derivative I feel like every book is a version of some book I've read before I would say the two most non-derivative books I've ever read and in the last decade would be Elena fante's neopolitan quartet that's just so original and fresh and also chichin l or l chichin the three body problem Trilogy nothing about it feels derivative all three books a lot of people stop at the first book and I

just want to make sure you have to read all three books to really get it all time great I am so happy that it is now a TV show because I've been telling people to read that book series for so long and now like I know I know they're going to watch the show it gives people a way to access this story that I'm just like has so profoundly like influenced the way I think about the world what do you love about it oh man where to start honestly I got the feeling from that trilogy the same feeling that I used to get when I read science fiction as a child and which I have never recaptured except for that trilogy that's exactly the feeling yeah I've never been able to put my finger on it to this day but I think you nailed it that might be you

feel your mind being expanded and stretched in a way that feels very difficult to recapture in adulthood you're right I think that capture is exactly what's so interesting about it and it grapples with so many interesting ideas I'll read in like sort of obsessive bursts about certain subjects and one thing that I'm kind of interested in right now is this idea of defeatism and like what that does to people this factors heavily into the book series and there's a whole like technology developed to fight defeatism but I'm reading The Splendid in the vial right now and you know people don't recall this or think about it today but like when the Battle of Britain was being waged like Britain had

very slim odds the prevailing WI and consensus was that they were going to get steamrolled by the LT Waffa and Churchill had to like contend with this defeatism everywhere and he would not have it he was just like Victory is the only option and then I think about this today in the context of AI too like this whole like Doomer Trend it's so defe it comes from this defe place that sort of like grates against my my soul and so it's interesting to read about how other times grappled with with this idea and manag to get ahead of it there's also a cultural sense to this I do agree on the cultural swings of the book what I found very fascinating besides the science

fiction and the technology and you're right they developed that technology for defeatism because the inevitability of aliens coming for you and waiting for eons to counter that future you feel trapped and yet can you do something but there are three ideas that really stuck to me as so fascinating in that book one was the idea that aliens could not lie at least at first oh yeah and that humans were the only ones that can lie and that was one Edge that humans had over Ai and aliens and artificial intelligences it's so like core to Being Human you know it goes back to like the Odyssey with Ulisses like lying to the Cyclops you know or penelopy with her suitors and adicus exactly and then like similarly there is another thing about how the solution like there's a fourth

Banfi book by B Shu the Redemption of time that was approved by chich chinlu as being like the canonical for the series but it's not by him but that book tells his story The Character who's on the alien ship but what's really fascinating is that he sends these stories that are decoded ways of defeating the aliens in book three and that was also really remarkable to me and and by the way coming from suishin Leu who's writing from China which has a vast censorship regime uh it g adds so many layers of complexity and meta Nuance that are just so delicious totally I mean longtime listeners of the A6 andz podcast the show that I built and grew before I recorded an episode on

live streaming and it talks about how a lot of Youth in China were using expression with Emojis and bananas and other things as ways to get around sensors and it's true that's a very great point because it's like they were fighting the aliens and they had this coded language to the stories but the third is something that I think a lot of readers of Science Fiction will appreciate which is I don't remember who said that quote about the goal of the science fiction writer is not to predict the automobile but the traffic jam I've completely mangled it but the point was like the social implications and consequences of technology and what's great about the three body problem Trilogy is that he does this really interesting showing of what happens to gender and Society like men becoming more masculine and and men becoming more

feminite and all this cool stuff like in waves of culture that I've never seen in any science fiction I so totally agree right that was so cool what does it say about us today that like K-pop boy bands and Timothy shalam are our our like idols and icons oh I've had this very much rant about Timothy shalam like why is that the icon now of like hero man what happened to Sean connory and his super hairy chest Steph you scrunched your face up just in reference to the super hairy chest yeah come on yeah he talks about like masculine IR and feminine eras and like how people's

physiology will change with respect to whatever is the Prevail and it kind of goes back to defeatism too and sort of like whether you're born in a time where it's rugged and rough and like it's all about survival or whether it's complacent and like you're resigned to something and anyway it's all about the yin and the Yang too it goes back to deism because it also goes to like a hope because the other idea there is like this Cleo Dynamics idea of like history and time at extremely large scales cuz the story is told at an extremely large scale in fact many millions of years not even hundreds of years and so the other idea there is that sometimes the things that happen on a world stage if you look at it only in a narrow lens you may feel very differently about it than if you look at

it in like Global like long scales to I want to add one more point on three body problem before we pivot go to town go go go which is um my wife and I recently had a child and um we would refer in the early stages of his life to uh the periods when he was awake as a chaotic era and periods when asleep as a stable era so want to throw that in there okay I'll say one last thing on three body problem and then I promise we can put a pin on this the other idea that's fascinating is the concept of a wall faer that comes up in book to yes and the idea I mean not to drastically simplify it but that a person's job is to like kind of face a wall and come up with unique ideas to solve a problem I

did this tweet storm that draws a parallel to wall facers and Innovation and companies like can you actually have Innovation happen in this model of a wall facer and why that doesn't work and what does work about it because it ties to R&D but I think that idea in book two is also very interesting Stephen Tim have we either made you want to read the books or not want to read the books after hearing us Jam about that for a bit I read the first book and chose not to continue and I did not three body problem just the first body problem yeah but two of my kids read all three books and love the trilogy and so you know that speaks to it going to the bottom of my pile apparently and I will eventually read them like I said great

heuristic by the way speaking of the trilogy Tim when you say you read the first book it's funny because one of my heuristics or kind of tests for people is whether they like the second book or the third book more and Robert I'm going to ask you this question because to me it's the equivalent of when you ask people who love Star Wars did you like Empire Strikes Back better or return to the Jedi it tells you so much about a person Empire Strikes Back every time see I knew you would say that but for me it's return to the Jedi Empire Strikes Back two towers and Lord of the Rings and Dark Forest in three body problem those are the only right answers I can't speak to Dark Forest but for the other two you can't have other answers so that's the thing literary people will

always pick the middle of the story as they should Empire Strikes Back is the right answer so you say same with dark Forest everyone will pick it but I really realize about myself that I like to think I'm literary but my tastes are very low brow because my favorite is definitely return to the Jedi and I also loved Jet's end in the series ending the Ewoks were cute I'll give you that they were very cute or cloying I mean take your pick I I like return to the Jedi better St I have someone in my Camp I thought I was the only one because Empire Strikes Back is superior storytelling and same with dark Forest but the ending the way they wrap everything up in duts end in the trilogy just too good to not love we could do a whole podcast just on that one series by

the way we could by the way this is so much fun I feel this is the best of us it's like we're bringing all of our our true energy should we talk about genres are there any that come to mind for each of you like is there a go-to genre for you or a genre that you will never touch I mean go- to I read tons of fantasy I read tons of Science Fiction I like police procedurals you do I love police procedurals the darker the better I spy novels those are all like things I read just like one after another any favorite spy authors that's a really popular genre among many oh uh I really like ol steinhauer who's an American who lives in the Czech Republic now maybe but he writes across 20th century spy novels

they're super fun I love fantasy I like Gothic horror specifically anything with like creaky staircases someone buried behind a wall like all of this stuff I'm very excited about not surprising that you're rereading Dracula right now Dracula is one of my favorite novels for sure Mary Shel Frankenstein is one of mine but I don't think of that as Gothic I think it's like technically romantic literature so as mentioned before I'm kind of obsessed and addicted to non-fiction like I just consume it at fast speeds all day long you mentioned Mark Andre and like a lot of people read his books the books that he WR recommends I feel like I'm constantly playing catchup with all his

recommendations in fact I wonder if he's just like dos attacking us all with all these recommendations cuz how can one man actually embibe all that information I often will use him as my oneman book recommender system I will literally just be like Mark I need a book on X can you make a recommendation and like two minutes later I'll get like three good books from him it's like Mark will always have a great suggestion for some particular topic it's true he's very good at that so so beyond non-fiction I will say that I Savor a certain type of literature that and I alluded to this earlier that involves puzzles so like look I like James Joyce I like uh Thomas Pinchin I like Vladimir Nabokov I like

people who lay traps and hints and clues and the reading of a text becomes sort of like a game and itself where you're trying to interpret it at a sort of like at one level there's like the plot but then at a higher level there's like all the weird symbolism and conflicting things going on the different ways you could interpret the text I like that kind of stuff I don't think it's productive but it's fun I'm gonna say I feel like people shouldn't be productive like when we talk about all the books about productivity hacks it's like there should be parts of our lives that are little treats and we get to you know just enjoy them for the sake of enjoying them and having them to ourselves so I don't think there should be any shame

not doing something productive for sure I like that totally agree yeah I totally agree too I would say that the puzzle books you describe they feel like too much work to me and I want books that I don't have to work to read which is why I also like Tim and Steph absolutely love fantasy as a genre and even sci-fi can feel like a lot of work so sci-fi I'm very selective about because I don't want to be only intellectually stretched sometimes I just want to read a good escape book I don't have a genre I won't read but I think the genre that I'm surprised that I'm reading more and more in the last 5 years is bios and Memoirs and I never thought I would like that I used to think stories about people were so boring as a kid growing up and now I

find these inner Minds whether written by the person autobiographically or written about them really well done and in detail to be just an addictive genre for me and particularly in audio books because there's something more compelling about them in audio there's a reason so many bestsellers are are Memoirs and biographies yeah I already mentioned Trevor Noah's book I don't even know him as a comedian or his political views or anything about him but that Memoir was excellent It's like very addictive have you guys all read it nope no yeah I just think you won't be able to put it down it's just so well done and gripping and interesting I like bios that are also stories of a place they way to hear a history of a place through the lens of a single character

that makes it concrete and I also love that about fiction like that's what I loved about the fron quartet and Steph you mentioned earlier that you like historical some of the fantasy that has a bit of a historical flare I think that's very similar I have a question what are books that you've read and enjoyed that weren't recommended to you that you just like found and started reading like were I had brought with me on a trip and I was in an airport and spent a lot of time in what actually ended up being a

pretty well stocked bookstore and I picked up a book called American mermaid which I really enjoyed it was nominally about a woman who wrote a book called American mermaid and then it gets optioned for a movie and she has to go off to Hollywood to figure out how her book is going to be turned into a movie and things go arai but it also has kind of a metal layer of maybe the mermaid she wrote comes alive but I really enjoyed it was great so one thing I like a pastime of mine that I really enjoy is when I I rent a place like on Airbnb or whatever go to the Bookshelf check it out and then like whatever's there I

pick something and that becomes my book for the week and I've had some good winners come out of that including recently I was down in Miami and the place had a coffee table book that was all of the first Pages the front pages of the New York Times from like the start of the publication and to read about history in the firsthand account at the time is wild like I was reading about like you know Commodore Matthew Perry opening up Japan and like the way they told news stories it was not the most important information first it's like you bumped into your neighbor and they were like here's what happened to me today first this happened then that

happened and then like eight paragraphs in it says something important and you're like well why did you bury the lead there it's like because they had no concept of a lead it's just like some person writing from beginning to end what happened so that's a long-winded answer but that's one thing I like to do and one gem that came to me by that method that is so cool and interesting Jeff answer your own question I'm curious for your answer to that one of them and this is not really like a book that nobody knows about but it was Slade house by David Mitchell who actually wrote CL right and um MH and Bone clocks oh bone clocks she's they known for but Slade house I thought of it because we mentioned Gothic novels and it's a little bit like a Gothic novel it goes

through like a history of people who've been ins snared by these nefarious creatures in a house so more specifically it's about some people throughout history or throughout time throughout decades that were kind of ins snared by these like twin vampires and I like greatly enjoyed it like I read the paper back copy and then I listened to the audio book with my husband when we were on a long trip and it was fall there's like orange leaves on the trees that were falling on the car and we were listening to this like Moody audio book and it was very pleasant that's a Vibe son I want to hear your answer to this question I was thinking about my answer and I realized that I do pick up surprising gems all the time in bookstores and I'm not into poetry at all but weirdly the ones that

I pick up that are surprising gems are poetry and one of the ones that I remember from about a decade ago was reading love and index which is a set of poems that were just very moving and so weirdly all my surprising gems are poems so Tim I want to ask you too as somebody who has edited so many books and who has authored several books himself how does that change your relationship with reading I'm hardened to hear that you continue to be an active Avid Reader how does that change the way you approach a hobby that's an interesting question I think when I was very actively editing or publishing then it's hard to read the kind of book that

you're editing without wanting to edit it I think that's something a lot of writers and editors go through you know when you first start editing and you're you know proofreading menus at restaurants and you can't help yourself but try to remove myself from how I would do this and try to respect the choices that were made when you're reading the book and then I I don't read a lot of the kind of books I used to edit I did really serious non-fiction economic sociology politics and I tend not to read those kinds of books in my spare time I don't know I don't have an aversion to them but I just don't approach them anymore it's funny that you mentioned that Tim because I found with magazine editing I felt way less joy in Reading magazines and I used to

love reading magazines like Vanity Fair and and once I started working one all the magic of that went away but now I treat substacks or newsletters like magazines like pleasurable Sunday reads and one of my favorites for sure is air mail which is actually not on substack but it's co-founded by the OG Vanity Fair not the Tina brown but the greaten Carter era that's like my favorite Vanity Fair and I love that I get to scratch that itch with air mail we didn't talk about newsletter that's maybe beyond the scope of this episode but if you guys did want to quickly add any newsletter or things that you like reading it is what we're reading web 3 weekly by a16z crypto that too is my favorite newsletter well let's wrap up maybe as a

way to wrap up let's do a quick round robin of what's on your list to read next that you haven't read yet that you're excited to read I think I will pick up so I really like James rebanks Shepherd's life you wrote about the life of a Shepherd in the UK it's a memoir is book that I read a few years ago in really liked and I have his follow-up pastoral song which is I think more of the same but I'm not really sure I'm just there for the the writing and the Pastoral this where in England is he I was just in the Cals which is partly why I was so into tlen yeah no he's North but I could not tell you exactly where but not in the Cals okay well sheep are cool they're very nice oh I don't like sheep at all I saw a lot of sheep when I

was there anti- sheep weird dead eyes yeah yeah they're scared all the time of everything well what about goats they've got those weird rectangular pupils like what's going on there that's that's not okay goats are nature's clowns sheep are just bad oh my God that's so funny that's so cute so I just started Lee bardugo The Familiar which is like fantasy I'm enjoying it I'm like on the third chapter I'm like at the beginning like in the same spot I literally just finishing this last night I love her books and my favorite by far is a six of crows do ologies yeah and anyway that's like so funny yeah I just started it but I'm also looking forward to there's a

book coming out in July L Grossman's Sprite sword he's the author of The Magicians that trilogy it's supposed to be a very meaty book but the reviews seem promising so I'm excited for that one oh it's set in King Arthur's Court too fun okay so I just got a book called I think it's the road to reality is the title and um it's by a famous mathematician Roger Penrose and it's basically like he lays out the laws of the universe in a way that presumably you can understand it's a thick book but it's sort of a crash course on like everything you need to know to understand the universe it's very math heavy apparently but I've got a friend who recently spent a year basically going through this book and then like learning in his own syllabus you know

each chapter kind of like going on YouTube and watching lessons so anyway he's given me this whole thing I'm going to do it for a period of time he just got a tattoo of like farad electromagnetism laws on his forearm so I mean if you're going to tattoo yourself over a book I feel like that's a pretty good testimonial right very cool is it cool is it though yeah this was such a blast you guys and what a fun team to be able to jam with this about this was very fun yeah thanks everybody for chatting this has been great thanks it was super fun I had an awesome time guys thanks team thanks everyone

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