The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - July 19, 2024


Tales of a Tsundoku Bibliophile - My Six Latest Book Purchases (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_697)

Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
Eric J. Johnson Charles Darwin E. A. Edward Newton James Clark Maxwell Charles Babbage Steven Pinker Bernard Lewis John Hershauer Alice Johnson Nassim Taleb Glenn Ross Tzondoku Klimt
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Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

142.7

Word count

1,390

Sentence count

111

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

What do you do when you have hundreds of books that you've yet to read? Well, buy more, of course! Today, I went to a used bookstore in Southern California and bought six new books!

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hi everybody, this is Gad Saad. As some of you know, I am an avid book collector.
00:00:07.860 I have hundreds and hundreds of books in my personal library, many of which I've yet to read,
00:00:15.060 which causes me great angst. So what do I do when I have hundreds of books that I've yet to read?
00:00:22.000 Well, buy more books to read. There's actually a Japanese term that I recently became aware of
00:00:29.700 Let me just read it here for you.
00:00:32.380 Tzonduku. This is from the Wikipedia entry.
00:00:36.740 Tzondoku is the phenomenon of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one's home without reading them.
00:00:43.480 The term is also used to refer to books ready for reading later when they are on a bookshelf.
00:00:49.360 The term originated in the Meiji era as Japanese slang.
00:00:54.000 It combines elements of the terms tzodunoku, to pile things up, ready for later, and leave, and dokusho, reading books.
00:01:03.240 There are suggestions to use the word in the English language and include it in dictionaries like the Collins Dictionary.
00:01:09.140 The American author and bibliophile E. A. Edward Newton commented on a similar state in 1921.
00:01:20.060 In his 2007 book, The Black Swan, Nassim Talib, who's a friend of mine, coined the term anti-library,
00:01:29.040 which has been compared with tzodunoku.
00:01:33.260 So there you have it. I'm certainly one who has been collecting books for many, many years.
00:01:40.460 There's nothing more that I love than to go to a used bookstore and find those rare jewels.
00:01:46.500 So today, the weather was not very sunny, at least in the morning, in Southern California.
00:01:53.680 And so my family and I went to a bookstore that has used books for sale at unbelievable prices.
00:02:03.480 There's nothing more magical than to find incredible books at giveaway prices.
00:02:09.420 So I'm going to go through the six that I got here and maybe mention one or two things about each.
00:02:14.540 All right, here we go. So are you ready?
00:02:16.500 So here's the first one.
00:02:19.460 The Elements of Choice, Why the Way We Decide Matters by Eric J. Johnson.
00:02:26.860 I know Eric's work well.
00:02:28.700 Number one, he's worked with my former doctoral supervisor, the cognitive psychologist, Jay Russo.
00:02:37.420 Eric is one of the leading decision theorists, certainly very influential in my own training.
00:02:44.800 His PhD was in 1980, so he's about 14 years my senior.
00:02:52.580 So he's a very, very prolific professor, great author in terms of academic work.
00:03:02.920 One of his book, one of his earlier books, The Adaptive Decision Maker, co-authored with Bettman and Payne.
00:03:11.900 So it's Bettman, Payne, and Johnson.
00:03:14.020 I can't remember the order of the authors.
00:03:15.600 It's an amazing book that talks about how decision makers will apply different decision rules in a way whereby they weigh the cost of applying a decision rule versus the accuracy of that decision rule.
00:03:34.500 It's a book that I have used in my behavioral decision theory courses or psychology of decision making courses at typically the MSc and PhD level.
00:03:47.180 So first book that I got, by the way, this book, which just came out in 2021, I got it $2, $2.
00:03:55.280 All right, number one.
00:03:57.860 Now this one I'm almost certain I have at home, but I'm currently not in Montreal, so I couldn't remember if I had it, but it was $1.
00:04:08.000 Look at this beauty.
00:04:09.680 Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now, The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, $1.
00:04:15.640 So I just got Eric J. Johnson, unbelievable book on decision making.
00:04:22.220 I mean, a lot of this stuff is right out of, you know, my academic work, so I'm not sure how much bang for the buck I'm going to get, but it's still worth having that book.
00:04:31.840 And then this book, which I'm almost certain I now have a duplicate of, but at $1, it was a no-brainer other than the fact that I've got to carry these books back to Montreal.
00:04:40.860 And my wife warned me that we don't have much room in our luggage, although, God willing, hopefully we shall never leave Southern California.
00:04:49.680 Who knows?
00:04:50.460 So that's number two.
00:04:52.360 Oh, look at this beauty.
00:04:53.820 You ready?
00:04:54.580 This book, I think it's also $1.
00:04:58.520 The Middle East, A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years by Bernard Lewis, who is the preeminent historian, real, hardcore academic historian.
00:05:09.680 Of course, I'm very familiar with this book, but I've never read it cover to cover, and so looking forward to delving into this beauty.
00:05:18.860 So, so far, one book for $2, two other books for $1.
00:05:23.120 All right, now this one, I reference it, if memory serves me right, in The Parasitic Mind, where I talk about self-flagellation and, you know, the West's sense of shame and guilt and self-loathing and self-flagellation.
00:05:40.680 So, this book by a French intellectual, The Tyranny of Guilt, an essay on Western masochism.
00:05:49.580 So, very relevant to my work in The Parasitic Mind.
00:05:54.080 Unbelievable.
00:05:54.900 Now, this book was the most expensive one at $5.
00:05:58.220 Now, I already had access to this book, and I can't remember if I had boarded from like a university library or I had access electronically to it, but now I have my own personal copy.
00:06:15.120 The Tyranny of Guilt, $5, oh my goodness, you ready?
00:06:22.660 You ready for this?
00:06:24.240 $1, The Spirit of Inquiry.
00:06:28.500 Look at who is here.
00:06:29.940 Look at this beautiful guy.
00:06:32.220 Charles Darwin, The Spirit of Inquiry, How One Extraordinary Society Shaped Modern Science.
00:06:39.060 I've been actually meaning to buy this book.
00:06:41.400 So, let me just read you the back, what it says.
00:06:43.380 This is from Oxford University Press.
00:06:46.180 Darwin's letters from the Beagle were first read out publicly at its meetings.
00:06:50.440 Audiences came to hear the rising stars of science.
00:06:53.580 John Herschel on light moving through crystals.
00:06:56.260 Charles Babbage on calculus.
00:06:58.600 James Clerk Maxwell first addressed it at the age of 22.
00:07:03.060 Alice Johnson had to speak on the similarities between chicks and dinosaurs as a guest in 1883, for it was long before women could be admitted. 0.73
00:07:11.340 The Cambridge Philosophical Society founded in 1819 boasts an extraordinary history.
00:07:19.200 Its membership included many of the greatest scientists of the 19th and early 20th century.
00:07:24.700 Its story represents in microcosm the rapid changes in science and society of the past 200 years in Britain and beyond.
00:07:32.100 And then finally, The Intelligence Trap, Why Smart People Make Dumb Decisions.
00:07:46.320 I wasn't aware of this book, but boy, does it resonate with me.
00:07:50.580 Because, of course, when I talk about the parasitic mind, I explain that all of these parasitic ideas originate from university professors.
00:08:01.120 And so, otherwise, educated, supposedly intelligent people can come up with truly some of the wackiest ideas like postmodernism and cultural relativism and identity politics and so on and so forth.
00:08:14.920 Biophobia, social constructivism.
00:08:17.200 So, those are the six books.
00:08:18.460 That's another, I think it was also $1.
00:08:20.540 So, six unbelievable books.
00:08:22.540 Like, look at this.
00:08:23.760 If I only, this will probably, I don't know, this will take me many months to read these.
00:08:27.680 Look at these six books.
00:08:28.640 Look at these beauties. 0.99
00:08:29.260 Six books for $12.
00:08:31.940 If I go for a latte with my wife, it will cost us that much money.
00:08:37.680 Imagine the amount of new knowledge I will possess when I get around to reading these books along with the 7,000 other books that I have to read.
00:08:50.440 Remember, there is nothing more beautiful than intellectual enrichment.
00:08:56.540 Read, read, read.
00:08:58.240 It's a path to self-growth.
00:09:00.160 It's a path to knowledge.
00:09:01.340 It's a way to keep your mind sharp.
00:09:04.980 It truly is the maxim that knowledge is power.
00:09:08.880 My kids were telling me I was explaining something to them and they each looked at me in their own way and said, how do you come up with all this stuff?
00:09:16.300 How do you know all this?
00:09:17.120 Well, because I read all the time.
00:09:18.780 I was just sitting at the pool reading a book, Lady in Gold, the book about the portrait of Adele Blach Bauer by Klimt and how it was a big fight after it was stolen by the Nazis to get it repatriated and so on.
00:09:36.060 So read, read, read, read.
00:09:37.860 Even when I'm sitting here in beautiful Southern California, I'm obsessed with collecting books.
00:09:42.700 Hope you're having a great day.
00:09:43.700 Talk to you soon.
00:09:44.280 Cheers.