The Tim Ferriss Show - #436: Books I've Loved — Maria Popova and Tyler Cowen

Starting point is 00:00:00 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed the perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Books I've Loved on The Tim Ferriss show is exclusively brought to you by audible there couldn't be a better sponsor for this series my dear listeners and readers i have used audible

Starting point is 00:00:33 for so many years as long as i can remember i love it audible has the largest selection of audiobooks on the planet i listen when i'm taking walks i I listen while I'm cooking. I listen whenever I can. And if you're looking for a place to start, I can recommend three of my favorites. The first is The Tao of Seneca by Seneca. If you want to hear my favorite letters of all time, touches on stoic philosophy, calmness under duress, etc. The next is The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, G-A-I-M-A-N, one of my favorites. Even if you're a nonfiction purist, this is the fiction book that you need to listen to. Neil also has perhaps the most calming voice of all time. And third, Greg McKeown's Essentialism, subtitle, The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. This is one of my favorite books of the past few years.

Starting point is 00:01:25 Combines very well with the 80-20 principle, but more on Audible. Every month, Audible members get one credit for any audiobook on the site, plus a choice of multiple Audible originals from a rotating selection. They also get access to daily news digests from the likes of the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, as well as guided meditation programs. And here are some other amazing audible features, and I use a bunch of these. You can download titles and listen offline, anytime, anywhere. I use this feature even when I could get access. I'll put my phone on, say, airplane mode, because I don't want to get bothered with notifications when I'm taking a walk to clear my head, and you can listen to titles offline in a case like that, or on a plane or whatever. Obviously,

Starting point is 00:02:08 I'm not flying much these days. The app is free and can be installed on all smartphones and tablets. You can listen across devices without losing your spot. And WhisperSync is another feature I use quite a lot. I love reading my Kindle in bed, for instance, then picking up at the same exact spot where I left off when I go walking and listening the love reading my Kindle in bed, for instance, then picking up at the same exact spot where I left off when I go walking and listening the next day. Kindle and audio versions can be synced up automatically. It's just amazing. And if you can't decide what to listen to, don't sweat it. You don't have to rush. You can keep your credits for up to a year and use them, for instance, to binge on a whole series, if you like. Audible offers just about everything.

Starting point is 00:02:44 Podcasts, guided wellness programs, theatrical performances, A, if you like. Audible offers just about everything. Podcasts, guided wellness programs, theatrical performances, A-list comedy, and Audible originals you won't find anywhere else. And right now, Audible is offering you guys, that's Tim Ferriss Show listeners, a free audiobook with a 30-day trial membership. And again, my list, if you want to check them out, The Tao of Seneca, The Graveyard Book, Essentialism. Those are just three. There's so many good ones out there. Just go to audible.com slash Tim

Starting point is 00:03:12 and browse the unmatched selection of audio programs. Then download your free title and start listening. It's that easy. So check it out. Go to audible.com slash Tim or text Tim, T-I-M, to 500-500 to get started today. Check it out, audible.com slash Tim. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of

Starting point is 00:03:37 The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is usually my job to sit down with world-class performers of all different types, startup founders, investors, chess champions, Olympic athletes, you name it, to tease out the habits that you can apply in your own lives. This episode, however, is an experiment and part of a short form series that I'm doing simply called Books I've Loved. I've invited some amazing past guests, close friends, and new faces to share their favorite books, describe their favorite books, the books that have influenced them, changed them, transformed them for the better. And I hope you pick up one or two new mentors in the form of books from this new series and apply the lessons in your own life. I had a lot of fun putting this together, inviting these people to participate and have learned so, so much myself. I hope that is also the case for you.

Starting point is 00:04:25 Please enjoy. My name is Maria Popova and I am a reader and a writer. And for 13 years now, I've been writing about what I read, what I think about, what I aspire toward on a website called Brain Pickings. I also spent eight years on a labor of love that became the book A Velocity of Being, Letters to a Young Reader, which is a collection of illustrated letters to kids about the power and the joy of reading, how it shapes who we become, with contributions by 121 of the most interesting people of our time, Jane Goodall, Yo-Yo Ma, Neil Gaiman, Richard Branson, and also a lovely letter from Tim, with all proceeds from the book benefiting the New York Public Library system. And I wrote a very thick, very yellow book called Figuring, which looks at our human search for truth, for meaning, for self-actualization, for love, through the lives of several historical figures spanning four centuries, beginning with the

Starting point is 00:05:41 astronomer Johannes Kepler, who revolutionized our understanding of the universe with his laws of planetary motion, and ending with the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson, who catalyzed the modern environmental movement. And that is also how I read and what I read, across disciplines, across eras, across sensibilities. And that is the lens with which I've chosen the three books I'm about to recommend. They're also books wonderful in large part for being underappreciated, books of quiet revolution that have kind of coursed beneath the surface of mainstream attention and awareness. The first book is a tiny, tiny gem of a book called Letter from a Hostage by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,

Starting point is 00:06:37 the author of The Little Prince, which is, of course, one of the most beloved, I hesitate to say children's books of all time, because I consider it really a work of philosophy and deep, deep psychological insight. In fact, I reread it about once a year, every year, and each time I find in it new revelations of meaning, new existential remedies, really, for whatever it is I'm struggling with in my own life at that particular moment. Saint-Exupéry was a commercial pilot before World War II, and once the war broke out, he served as a pilot for the French military running reconnaissance missions.

Starting point is 00:07:22 At one point, he became a prisoner of war after his plane crashed over the Sahara Desert. Letter to a Hostage is his slim memoir recounting that experience, reflecting on its deeper significance, an experience that informed and inspired the little prince, but also opened up these enormous questions of what does it mean to live? What is the wellspring of our humanity? How do we keep our noblest impulses alive in the midst of death and destruction and divisiveness? He is an incredibly poetic writer, and this is just an incredibly soulful, humanistic book, but also incredibly lucid and helpful. Helpful in a very practical sense that trickles down from the philosophical and the poetic, the practical sense of how do we live these human lives? How do we live meaningfully and honorably

Starting point is 00:08:27 and purposefully despite the foibles and the imperfections of the world and of our own hearts? The second book is one that shines a sideways gleam on perhaps the most elemental of these questions. It's called Love in St. Augustine by Hannah Arendt, and it's an improbable and deeply insightful inquiry into the life of the heart by one of the most incisive intellects who ever lived and one of the greatest political thinkers our civilization has produced. It is her first book-length manuscript and the last to be published in English. It was posthumously discovered amongst her papers by two women, a political scientist and a philosopher who were doing research on her. For half a century after Arendt wrote this this as her doctoral thesis in Germany in 1929,

Starting point is 00:09:30 she obsessively revised and annotated the manuscript, and for the remainder of her life, she honed her core philosophical ideas against Augustine's whetstone, contemplating the troublesome disconnect between philosophy and politics, particularly moral philosophy and politics, as evidenced by the rise of totalitarian regimes, which of course she later explored in her just shockingly relevant book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. And all the while in Love and St. Augustine, she contemplates the nature of love and how to live with our fundamental fear of its loss. Here's just a tiny passage from it. She writes, Fearlessness is what love seeks. Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future. Hence, the only valid tense is the present, the now.

Starting point is 00:10:47 It was from Augustine that Arendt borrowed the phrase amor mundi, love of the world, which would become a defining feature of her philosophy and her core political concern, which was, why do we succumb to and why do we normalize evil? The question at the heart of her now iconic book, The Banality of Evil, Arendt identified as the root of tyranny, the act of making other human beings irrelevant. Again and again, she returned to Augustine for the antidote, love. My final and crowning pick is a kind of unifying force for the questions raised by the other two books. It's a book by the astrophysicist Jenna Levin, who became a real-life friend after I first encountered her through her beautiful writing.

Starting point is 00:11:36 And the book is called A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines. And perhaps it's best described as a as a mathematical historical novel how's that for usb specificity but but just aside any label really only loosely captures this uncommonly original intellectually storing soulful poetic book drawing on the real lives of two great geniuses to whom we owe much of what we take for granted today, including my ability to record this and your ability to listen to its digital echoes across the space-time fabric of ones and zeros. The great computing pioneer Alan Turing and the great mathematician and logician Kurt Gödel. It's a book that looks at their lives to unpeel the core of their genius

Starting point is 00:12:35 and also of their tragedy and to look at how the two intertwine to give us these remarkable people of just immense impact. And out of their lives arise these larger universal questions about the nature of genius, the relationship between our suffering and our achievement, and the search for truth beyond logic. The book belongs to that very, very rare species of incredibly poetic books by working scientists, by an author who happens to be one of the world's foremost, probably the foremost expert on black holes, but is also a writer of deeply poetic prose and a thinker of deeply poetic thoughts. It's a slim book, and I read it long before I knew Jana in person, and it really shaped the way I think about what literature can be. It is extremely form-bending, genre-bending. There is no analog, no book I can say it is like. And it has really informed the way I think and I write, and in a great sense that I've only recognized in hindsight,

Starting point is 00:13:54 it really informed how I wrote Figuring. Hello, I'm Tyler Cowen. I'm an economist at George Mason University and the Mercatus Center. I'm a blogger at Marginal Revolution and the host of a podcast called Conversations with Tyler. People sometimes don't believe me when I talk about how many books pass through the house. If I'm not traveling, it's quite ordinary if I go through five or ten books a day and which parts of them I've read, you can debate. Maybe it washes out to be reading two or three books a day. Some good nights, you get to read five whole books, right? But the important thing is to be ruthless with the books that are not good. Just stop reading, put them down, usually throw them

Starting point is 00:14:41 away. Don't give them away. You could be doing harm to people if you give them away. And my philosophy of reading is that no one reads quickly. So someone once asked me, well, how long did it take you to read that book? And I said, 57 years. I'm 57 years old. So the way you read well is just by reading a lot and by reading a lot your whole life. And then when you go to read actual books, you're like, I know that, I know that, I know that. And you keep on going and you read much more quickly. And that's really the way to read a lot. There are these compounding returns to being obsessed with or they're just pages of terminology. And it's like, well, you might still give the book a chance, but you start turning the pages more rapidly, and you're just waiting for some bit of meat. You're like out there desperate, giving the author still a chance. And then at some point you're like, no, sorry, zap,

Starting point is 00:15:38 throw it in the trash, on to the next one. Most books are not half great and half horrible. And you should look at a few different parts of the book. But especially these days, an author should be able to signal by putting some good stuff up front, right? Because people are less patient than they used to be. A 19th century book, you need to give it more time. It may not get good until chapter three. But these days, my goodness, you can tell so much sometimes just from the font of a book. Like there are books with bad font management books, and you're like, oh my God, it's that font again. And you just throw it out.

Starting point is 00:16:10 You don't have to read it at all. A lot of books come to the home. So I get many review copies. On a weekday, I'll probably average getting five to 10 review copies. Probably I'm buying on average two books a day. Those have a much higher chance. There are then books people give me, all sorts of things. So books from my library that I'm rereading.

Starting point is 00:16:32 There's really just a heavy flow and you have to deal with it somehow. The best reading is focused reading when you're trying to solve some kind of problem. So if I'm doing one of my own podcasts with a guest, and then I'll read or reread everything the guest has written, typically it's a reread because I have on guests I like. And if I like them, I've already read a lot of their stuff, right? So you're rereading with an eye toward what is actually interesting about this person. And you'll learn much more that way than if you just randomly pick up books. So I advocate reading books in clusters. The author can be the clustering factor.

Starting point is 00:17:06 It can be the topic. It can be the historical period. But you really get into a person's mind if you reread everything they've done within the span of a few weeks or months and then watch them on YouTube and just try to think about and write out notes. What am I going to ask them?

Starting point is 00:17:21 One of the very best ways to read is to have your own podcast. You want to start with a problem or question when you're reading. And again, you want to read books together in groups. And you want one of the early books to make the whole thing real or emotionally vivid to you. If you travel to a place, that will do it automatically. But if you're not traveling, you want the book to do it. So your early book choice is quite important. And then many areas. So take the case of ancient Egypt, as you mentioned. I don't know what's the best book on ancient Egypt, but I know there's enough uncertainty about what went on in ancient Egypt that there's probably not a clearly well-defined,

Starting point is 00:18:01 here's the best book on ancient Egypt. So you want to read 10 or 20 of them and do a kind of cross-sectional mental econometrics and see which pieces start fitting together and take it from that. So in so many areas, it's a mistake. Oh, what's the best book on X? Rather, you're looking for some kind of portfolio of books on X. My first recommendation would be fiction. Reading fiction is important to understand the cross-sectional variation in humanity, to understand how difficult generalizations can be, to just get a sense of how social pieces fit together, and to get a sense of different historical errors. Plus, reading fiction is often just plain flat out fun. So I think my fiction read I found the most

Starting point is 00:18:46 rewarding was Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, which comes in multiple volumes. It's a very long read. I'd say about a third of it is quite boring, but the peaks are just amazing. And it's also hilarious. And it's about how inner monologues work and why expectation matters and what disappointment feels like and what is jealousy like and what's it mean to be a kind of total failure in a social world or to climb and reach higher levels of status. So I think that's just a thrilling, remarkable set of volumes. Some of the very best parts came early. So the first two volumes are incredible. The last volume is incredible. What comes in between is more uneven, but you always

Starting point is 00:19:25 feel he's going to come back to the main storylines you care about. And even the bad parts, they're not that bad, but it could have been edited down a bit, right? Let's be honest. The second book I'll recommend is a book on management, except it's not really books about management at all. It's something else. Let me explain. While I'm against most books on management, the worst way to learn management is to read a book on management. I recommend to people, read a book on something you know about. So if you're a football fan, read about Vince Lombardi or read Jerry Kramer's Instant Replay. My favorite book on management is a book about the classic rock group, The Birds, B-Y-R-D-S. It's by Johnny Rogan. It's called Timeless Flight. It's hundreds of

Starting point is 00:20:05 pages about how the birds split up and couldn't work together. And it's brilliant. It helps you understand small groups. I work in small groups a lot. I'm not saying you should read that book. You need to know about the birds for the book to make sense. Pick an area you know really well and read a book about actual substantive events that in no way has management in the title and is not in the management section of the bookshelf. And then maybe you'll start learning something about management. Very often the books that are vivid to me are books I've read recently or in the last year. And a book, I think it was very, very famous in its time, one of the best sellers of its century, but people have stopped reading it. And that is Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's

Starting point is 00:20:46 Cabin, which is a book about migration, a book about travel, a book about race, obviously a book about slavery, a book about America in the middle of the 19th century. It has vivid characters. The issues maybe for a while seemed obsolete, but they're highly, highly relevant today. It just leads a kind of humanity on virtually every page and communicates what the suffering is like of being in a tragic situation and how there are some structural features of America that tend to breed those kinds of tragedies. Slavery in that day, often migration issues today. So I would say go back and read it. There's a reason why it was one of the two or three bestselling books of the 19th century. Those people were not stupider than

Starting point is 00:21:30 we were. It's a somewhat different context. It's a bit long, but once you pick it up, you're immediately in the book and the way you would be engrossed in, say, a popular novel. And indeed, it was a popular novel in its time. I would say if you're looking to read memoirs, don't necessarily follow other people's recommendations. Focus on reading memoirs in areas you know something about. And then just Google to online lists, what are the best memoirs in that area? And read a bunch of those. And then here's the other next thing you should do. Every area you don't give a damn about, you probably should read at least one book in because the very best book in that area is superb and you're not going to know what it is.

Starting point is 00:22:10 So if tennis is something you don't know anything about, well, read Andre Agassi's memoir. That's a wonderful book. You don't have to know or care about tennis and just go through other areas, gardening, dogs, turtles, whatever. Find the best book on dogs and read it. And the less you like dogs, actually, the better that book is going to be because you are not sick of the topic. Here's a book I read last night. It's by Scott H. Young. It's called Ultra Learning.

Starting point is 00:22:34 The subtitle is Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career. I'm all for all those things. How did I get this book? I met Scott. I had lunch with Scott. He gave me a copy of his book. I'm all for all those things. How did I get this book? I met Scott. I had lunch with Scott. He gave me a copy of his book.

Starting point is 00:22:52 It's actually not a bad filter to read the books of people you meet because them getting to meet you is itself a kind of filter. And if they get through that filter, then maybe their book is interesting too because you have structures set up to match people to you based on shared interests. So I care a great deal about the topic. I had a lot of fun with Scott. And I learned Scott is this guy who learned a whole bunch of languages on his own in just a few months' time. And he just kind of mastered them. And he teaches you his secrets on how to learn things quickly. And that's been an obsession of mine since I was a kid. So this is a book very much after my own heart. If you're a knowledge worker,

Starting point is 00:23:25 you want to be better, earn more, advance your career. You can't just sit back and be complacent. You need to be thinking every day, in a sense, every minute, how am I training myself to get better? You're much more like an athlete or a concert pianist or a chess player than you might think. And the people who do really well, they're just always self-training. So how you should self-train depends on your job. One way I self-train is just by doing like my own podcast, Conversations with Tyler. I try to figure out like what's the code to what a famous person has done or achieved and how does it all hang together. And then I talk to them about it. And I know I'm going to be talking to them about it. So I can't just screw it up. Like that's the ultimate test. You can't say, you know, to Martina Navratilova, oh, here's what you really did in tennis. And she'll tell you you're full of it. So that's like an immediate

Starting point is 00:24:14 reality test. Another method I use for training is just to keep on writing, always be writing. Don't care if it never sees the light of day and write out points of view that are not your own. It's just practice for thinking. Writing is thinking. If your writing isn't clear, probably your thinking isn't clear. So just always be thinking like, I'm an athlete. I'm like some version of, you know, sub in your famous athlete. What do they do to train? What am I doing to train now? And if they're ahead of you, like, you know, catch up. People don't read enough. I think as a society, we're under-investing in reading. People feel compelled to finish books they've started.

Starting point is 00:24:54 That's just a tax on your reading. Why would you do that to yourself? Imagine a world where any restaurant you tried, you had to keep on going there, you know, for days or weeks. You'd hardly ever go out to eat uh take reading seriously develop a passion for it and view it as part of your practice as a knowledge worker to get ahead but along the way having fun doing so hey guys this is tim again just a few more things before you take off number Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a

Starting point is 00:25:32 little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com.

Starting point is 00:26:10 That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out. And just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

The Tim Ferriss Show - #436: Books I've Loved — Maria Popova and Tyler Cowen

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.