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I read a book for all of the content strategists and copywriters out there who are working on big thorny websites. It’s called Content Design by Sarah Richards, and it’s fucking awesome. Um that book was like a hundred 20 pages, and I went through it in like two hours, and it was just relentlessly entertaining. It was the kind of typesetting that made me just slap my head and think, why aren’t I doing this? Which I never get. Um, that book was just fucking amazing. Um that’s the first one I wanted to mention. I’ve been going through a handful of art books lately that are weird. I have not found any good business books that aren’t a million dollar consulting value-based fees or The personal NBA lately. Um Kai, do you like business books?

Yeah. So for me, and I learned this from I think it was you. Basically, if you can get like one valuable thing out of a business book, it probably paid for the book. Assuming you bought the book. I check a lot of books out of the library because I’m lucky to live right by a gigantic library. But yeah, there’s a lot to that, that notion that like if you can get one good thing, that’s still valuable. I think it’s interesting to hear you say like I read the first two chapters because for me, I actually I go to if it’s a nonfiction book, I go to the table of contents. And like cherry-pick the most important points, and then I’m done with it. Ah, yeah, that’s a good strategy. Especially because if it’s a business book. I think I hate business books because almost all of them can be distilled to at best a medium post. And it usually began as a medium post. and then got fleshed out into a book that’s literally just a fever dream retelling of the feet Medium post. You know, at worst, it’s like three bullet points or two sentences. And you’ve got to find the two sentences, right? I read a book that I’m going to subtweet that could literally be six questions in two sentences. And that’s valuable. I got a lot out of that. But it was a fucking 200-page book. What? I don’t need to read. I don’t need to spend. I read about a page a minute. I don’t need to spend Three and a half hours reading a 200-page book and not really get a whole lot out of it. And that’s the thing. Like, I need I so care mad about this because there are so many books that are just Not filler. They’re just expanded and distended expressions of the core idea.

Right, right. Yeah. And I get why that is, right? The reason people write books is to Play off like they’re a cool, established, published author. Like, that’s a large part of why people write books. And I’m guilty of this, right? Like, when sometimes I put out books and There’s not filler in them, but I’m putting out a book so that I can have a book out. And that’s not really quite The thing. So I I’m very hesitant to Like, strongly endorse a lot of books. I rather like endorse the points within the books and to say, here’s how you analyze the book, right? Here’s how you get the things that matter a lot out of the book. And that’s not again, it’s not to say the book is bad. The system is bad that encourages people to put out books that could benefit by being maybe 150 to 199 pages shorter. And I hope with my books, the goal, the ultimate goal, is to make there be as little filler and expanded out content as humanly possible. It should all be valuable for somebody. Every word of it should be valuable for somebody. With that in mind, Content Design was a fucking awesome book that I read lately. I read a really good book on interviewing people by Steve Portigal lately. That’s not necessarily new, but it’s still really interesting and excellent. What have you been? I’m going to keep pulling out books that I’ve been reading lately while I ask you this question so you can go off on it.

I read an excellent book from Amber Case called Calm Technology. She identifies, here’s a good positioning for you: cyborg anthropologist. Right. That is great. But she also coined this term calm technology, I think, or like expanded on substantially, called calm technology, which are basically like. non-intrusive, non-black hat patterns for user experience design. And it is, God, the book we need and deserve right now. Just like getting devices out of our lives so that technology can like help and assist us without being like too heavy handed, you know? And that always that always kind of threw me that that was like I don’t know, just like a thing that technology aspires to, right? Like the goal is to be glued to the thing as much as humanly possible, or so a UX designer will tell you, right? That’s a big thing. And then there’s one I read the first of a four-volume he calls it an essay, which lol, but it’s uh It’s literally like a 2,800-page essay, if so, called The Nature of Order. By Christopher Alexander. And I talk about Christopher Alexander a lot in my first book, Cadence and Slang. He’s an architect from Berkeley who now lives in England who Coined the term a pattern language and comes up with various design patterns to exist in various houses. And I think this is kind of a natural a consequence of him growing older and people growing more wrongheaded about design and architecture. But he kind of believes that he he rejects modernism very thoroughly and believes that there’s significant benefit to old time established building methods that have existed for thousands of years. The nature of order is a little pitched and new wagey, but if you kind of view it from a detached perspective and try not to be like overly persuaded by it, it’s really fascinating. And I’m just kind of deliberately going to go through a book every like year or two so that I don’t like, you know, huff a 2800 page book in one go ‘cause that can be a bit Bit much, but I went through the first volume of it and it was pretty cool. So I recommend that

Um, let’s keep doing one a piece. Uh, I my favorite cookbook of the past five years is The Food Lab by Jake Henji Lopez Alt. He runs the Sirius Eats Food Lab blog. And it’s basically We did a bunch of science to figure out and a lot of trial and error to figure out the absolute best poached egg. And here’s all the reasoning for it. Yeah, it’s fucking great. It’s like Cook’s Illustrated, but way more accessible and way less granular. That’s provided a lot of helpful insight for me in my kitchen. And it helped me soup eat a turkey for Thanksgiving last year, which was very helpful. Yeah, strong recommendation. Good, good. Are you a comic book fan? Um, graphic novels more than comic books. I know you’re a huge comic book fan.

If you are suspicious about the technology called Bitcoin. I have a terrific book for you. A journalism professor at, I think, Columbia or something, somewhere in New York. Nada named no, it’s not Columbia. I’m looking at the guy’s name, and his name last name is literally Golumbia, G-O-L. He wrote a book called The Politics of Bitcoin, Software as Right-Wing Extremism. And it’s exactly what it says on the tin. And I dined out on it like a steak. And it’s like 75 pages long. It’s super short. It’s really great. Wow, four bucks on the Kindle. Four bucks on the Kindle.

Gardening. I had no idea how to grow vegetables in my backyard. And I asked a couple people who are like really big on this stuff. I’m like. I just got a raised bed in my backyard, and a hippie gave me all the soil, and I have no idea what to do with it. Where do I begin? And they all told they they all steered me like unanimously to this book called Square Foot Gardening. And it’s again what it says on the tin. It is how to divide up your raised bed into square foot plots. and garden. And I’ve m I’ve grown about thirty five pounds of tomatoes, about one pound of about one pound of basil, about eight ounces of oregano. Several dozen bell peppers, um two cantaloupes, uh a couple eggplants. Um Enough, right? A fair amount of a lot of arugula, like a fucking lot. This is year one of your garden. This is year one. We’re in month five of my garden. Wow. We started late. So, um, yeah, uh, that hippie gave me really good soil. And Mel Bartholomew, the guy who runs this book, uh, wrote this book, ain’t fucking around. Fantastic book. Extremely excessively well written. He’s clearly a lucid teacher. And if you just like entertainingly well-written books that are very conversational. and pulled off well. Like I can maybe two dozen in my life that I can even cite that. This one is terrific. It’s great.

I got one last one. We’re to just keep on the socialist shit. Zeniptufekchi, she is a Researcher at the University of North Carolina, my alma mater, my grad school alma mater, at least. And she wrote a book called Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. And it talks. in depth about how social media can help and hinder protest movements, which is catnip right now, right? Like It’s a very good time to be thinking about that. And she ranges from like the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, where she grew up, to Arab Springs stuff in 2011, I believe, 12, something like that. to Occupy, to um the current resistance. And um all of it is super, super interesting. She talks a lot about the software constraints of it and um and how governments react and other institutions. And it’s definitely worth taking a look at, regardless of your political leanings, because there’s a lot of like deep product insights that I think are really fascinating.

And that’s it. That should give you some reading for a minute. By the next episode, ideally, every listener has read all of these books.