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Books podcasts were talking about in September 2021
During September 2021, various podcasts explored foundational philosophical works, literature, and educational texts. On the Lex Fridman Podcast, guest Sean Kelly discussed Jean-Paul Sartre's major work Being and Nothingness, referencing its insights into human behavior through the example of a waiter. Lex Fridman also engaged with the literary works of Hermann Hesse, specifically mentioning Siddhartha and Steppenwolf, and discussed All Things Shining, a book Kelly co-authored with Hubert Dreyfus that reads Western classics to find meaning in a secular age. Later in the month, Fridman spoke with Jo Boaler about her book Limitless Mind, which explores how individuals overcome preconceived limitations regarding mathematical thinking. On SmartLess, guest Jon Stewart referenced the classic fable The Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen to illustrate how those in positions of power frequently manipulate public narratives. Additional discussions on the Lex Fridman Podcast featured Lee Smolin's recent book concerning quantum gravity, introduced by Jeffrey Shainline, as well as Travis Oliphant highlighting Ludwig Von Mises's historical writings on the economic calculation problem within the socialist commonwealth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
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Being and Nothingness
Discussed“He gives this in in his big book being in nothingness and he says um so waiters play played”
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Siddhartha
Discussed“but there's more of uh like with siddhartha there's more almost like a buddhist”
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Siddhartha by Herman Hesse Illustrated Edition
Discussed“and for him uh i'm starting to forget steppenwolf i think is uh humor”
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All Things Shining
Discussed“you wrote with him the book titled all things shining reading the western classics to find meaning in a secular age first can you maybe speak about who that man was what you learned from him”
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Limitless Mind
Discussed“In my limitless mind book i interviewed quite a few people who'd been told they couldn't do math sometimes by parents sometimes by teachers and fortunately they had got other ideas at some point in their life and realized there was this whole world of mathematical thinking that was open to them”
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Einstein's Unfinished Revolution
Discussed“Now he primarily works on um quantum gravity loop quantum gravity other approaches to um unifying quantum mechanics with general relativity as you can read about in his most recent book I believe and he's been on your show as well so but I I want to introduce this idea of cosmological natural selection because I think that is one”
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Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth
Discussed“I found a lot of writings i really loved I found some things that i really loved and i learned from that it was writings from people like von mises he wrote a pre-order paper in 1920 that still should be read more than it is It's got I mean it was the economic calculation problem of the socialist commonwealth”
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Guide to NumPy
Discussed“so i wrote a book and i said i'm going to write a book and i'm going to charge for it It was called guide to numpy and so ultimately numpy became documentation driven development because i basically wrote the book and made sure the stuff worked to the book would work”
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Parallel Distributed Processing
Discussed“the following is a conversation with jay mcclelland a cognitive scientist at stanford and one of the seminal figures in the history of artificial intelligence and specifically neural networks having written the parallel distributed processing book with david rommelhart who co-authored the backpropagation paper with jeff hinton in their collaborations they've paved the way for many of the ideas at”
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Cognitive Psychology
Discussed“cognitive psychology had just become a field there was a book published in 67 called cognitive psychology um and the author said that you know the study of the nervous system was only of peripheral interest it wasn't going to tell us anything about the mind”
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Euclid's Elements
Discussed“but euclid's elements were the the kind of the touch point of a of a coherent document that sort of laid out this idea of an actual formal system within which these objects were characterized and the um the system of uh inference that um allowed new truths to be derived from others was sort of like established as a”
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The Art of Computer Programming
Discussed“don is a legendary computer scientist touring award winner father of algorithm analysis author of the art of computer programming creator of tech that led to late tech and one of the kindest and most fascinating human beings i've ever got a chance to talk to”
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Steve Allen Music Book
Discussed“yo and jack benny i mean steve allen wrote this book about humor and it was the most boring book but he was one of my idols but but uh yeah it's called the funny men or something like that”
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Puzzle Box
Discussed“in fact in volume 2 i've got a cryptogram a message in cypher and in order to decipher it you're going to have to have to break an rsa key which is larger than people know how to break”
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Surreal Numbers
Discussed“and and i i changed the name to surreal numbers that so this book is now published as surreal number and um and you know we figured out we'd always wonder what what what would he like to have an affair in a hotel room”
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On Beyond Zebra!
Discussed“there's a book by dr seuss called on beyond zebra and he gave a name to that”
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The Cat in the Hat
Discussed“wait are you talking about cat in the hat”
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The Man from St. Petersburg
Discussed“and the new insight i've gotten him actually in that way was i i was reading uh what what book was i reading now recently it was it was by ken follett and it was called the man from saint petersburg”
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Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
Discussed“um i wrote a book about people suggesting people take a break from their social media to see what happens and maybe even it was actually the title of the book was just the arguments to delete your account”
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Who Owns the Future?
Discussed“so there's this thing called data dignity that i've been studying for a long time i wrote a book about an earlier version of it called who owns the future”
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Nightfall
Discussed“i thought that was a curious kind of thought that reminds me of that uh old isaac asimov story where the cl you know there's this planet where they finally get to see what's in the sky once in a while”
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How
Discussed“how and why wonder books um how am i on the book of electricity and how i won the book of giant brains and robots”
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Wonder
Discussed“how and why wonder books um how am i on the book of electricity and how i won the book of giant brains and robots”
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Robots
Discussed“um how am i on the book of electricity and how i won the book of giant brains and robots”
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Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines
Discussed“and so marvin minsky very well known in ai but also a fantastic mathematician uh in his book finite and infinite machines from the mid 60s which is a beautiful beautiful mathematical book”
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Is one million dollars enough?
Discussed“in fact i'm halfway through a i think it'll be about a 480 page book um titled the working title is not even wrong”
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Perceptrons
Discussed“uh i i should have asked marvin why he he and seymour pappet came down so hard on neural networks in 1968 in their book perceptrons”
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I, Robot
Discussed“and now let me leave you with the three laws of robotics from isaac asimov”
SmartLess
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Sir John Gielgud Reads the Emperor's New Clothes
Discussed“I was raised on the ethos of The Emperor's New Clothes, right? That was the fable.”
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The Central Park Five
Discussed“I have to admit the team, my oldest daughter Sarah Burns, and her husband David McMahon, and I, we made 'The Central Park Five' and 'Jackie Robinson'.”
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The Wright Brothers
Discussed“I got nominated twice for Brooklyn Bridge, which was one hour and for Statue of Liberty, which was one hour, and we didn't win, which was fine.”
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The War
Discussed“Listen, the war is really good, uh, um, Vietnam is really, really good too, um, and I do want to watch jazz and country music too, they're all really great.”
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The History of the Stasi
Discussed“So you know what, and right, and Fred, sorry, we talked about this because then I read that book on the Stasi. I read one that you told me about, and then I told you about one.”
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The Last Black Unicorn
Discussed“This person then published... won an Emmy Award for her hosting of Saturday Night Live. She published a memoir called The Last Black Unicorn.”
Monday Morning Podcast
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Waylon
Discussed“Oh, they'll write their life story in their 30s? I have an autobiography coming out—you’re 36!”
Huberman Lab
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Summary and Analysis: Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson's Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body
Discussed“What am I about to read you is from an excellent book that I recommend, if any of you are interested in neuroscience and things like meditation and default mode networks and things of that sort, the book is called, "Altered Traits." Science reveals how meditation changes your mind, brain and body and no, I'm not going to try and”