No Stupid Questions

I recently read... I cannot even tell you why. Oh because I just found it in a used bookstore at The Good Earth.

Did you read The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck?

She grew up largely in China, but she's a white woman from suburban Philadelphia really, and she wrote about my cultural tradition...

was made into an Academy Award-winning film where of course largely the cast was white, none of this would play well I think in 2020 and I think that's largely good.

So that book was published in like the 1930s or something?

Tuesdays with Maury, the book by Mitch Album had a famous living funeral.

Tuesdays with Maury, the book by Mitch Album had a famous living funeral.

I don't know if you've read Michael Easter's book, The Comfort Crisis.

He's a writer and a professor of journalism at UNLV. And he wrote this book, The Comfort Crisis, Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self.

And I thought it was an incredible book, but the reason I thought of it when you were describing your students, one of the things he talks about in the book is annually he tries to do what's called a Masogi.

And he doesn't just talk about exercise or physically, he also talks about that we are too emotionally comfortable or we don't get bored anymore. And boredom is actually like a sign to go do some things, right, pay attention to these emotions.

But I thought it was an amazing book because I wonder if your students have this comfort crisis where they're afraid to actually fail.

There is another book on this topic of merit and meritocracy. This one was written by one of the professors I took a course with at Harvard named Michael Sandel. It was called Justice.

And so this is, I think, his latest book came out in 2020, The Tyranny of Merit. What's become of the common good?

Let me just say that neither of these titles make it seem at all like they have a bias. I'm just kidding. Meritocracy, trap. The Tyranny of Merit. You don't have to guess. Right. I mean, it's interesting to have one of the most eminent professors at one of the most eminent universities in the world talk about The Tyranny of Merit, because oftentimes merit has been the hero.

I remember reading Unbroken. Did you read the? Is it Lauren Hillenbrand?

That is correct. I didn't read Unbroken. I know it's supposed to be amazing.

It's really good.

Mike notes that the teaching is part of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which makes it sound as if it appears in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible.

The language is actually from Mosiah chapter 18 of the Book of Mormon.

A lot of her research is cited in this New York Times bestselling book, The Anxious Generation by NYU professor John Haidt.

So this thesis that John Haidt advances in The Anxious Generation is that the young people today, think Gen Z essentially, like they grew up in a completely different environment than he grew up in, than I grew up in, than our parents grew up in. And the big change is social media, this technological invention.

The book, The Anxious Generation, says that increases in social media have led to increases in anxiety.

Most notably beginning with Freud, of course, in his classic work, The Interpretation of Dreams, which he wrote just at the dawn of the 20th century.

For Freud, dreams were a matter of wish fulfillment.

What I have been occupied since writing Grit, and certainly for the last few years in earnest, is a second book and a second line of work, and it is on the power of the situation.

It does.

It is easier and it has a subtitle.

The one-word title is easier and the subtitle is A Better Way to Be Your Best.

Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs The Exclusive Biography said that this idea applied, quote, whether he was getting a license plate that let him use handicapped parking or building products that people said weren't possible.

Kurt Anderson has written a couple really good books on this topic. One is called Evil Geniuses and the other was called Fantasy Land.

Rick Rubin, the legendary music producer, wrote a book called The Creative Act, A Way of Being. He talks so much about how creativity will flow through us if we just give ourselves space to observe without having to pay attention to a specific thing.

I think It can be pretty scary.

And I think there are books like Chaos where you're like, that sounds good. I really should learn about Newtonian mechanics or whatever. And then people read the first three paragraphs and then that's it.

or will my almost daily rewatching of friends and rereading of Harry Potter hinder my ability to form, quote, normal relationships in the long run?

Not unless they're talking about Pride and Prejudice, which I do actually like to talk about and watch and read a lot.

The BBC version in particular, Colin Firth at his extraordinary peak.

I am reading here about a popular book, a commercial book called Attached the New Science of Adult Attachment and how it can help you find and keep love.

This came out in 2010 by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller.

I have a feeling this is the book that helped kickstart the reckoning about how adult styles of attachment feed into our romantic relationships.

but one of my favorite books is called The Art of Learning by one of the greatest chess masters ever.

Oh Josh Wade'skin

Yes

Yeah even if you don't play chess it's kind of fun to listen to people talk about so fun to learn from

we loved it right we should recommend it to like everyone

It's so good he basically goes through and just says hey I'm one of the best in the world at chess but it's not about chess it's that I know how to learn