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Books podcasts were talking about in November 2023
Throughout November 2023, podcast hosts and guests explored a diverse range of books touching on escapism, human psychology, and societal structures. Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang briefly mentioned the book "Merrily We Roll Along" by Stephen Sondheim. On On Purpose with Jay Shetty, guest Emma Grede shared her youth reading habits as escapism, mentioning Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now" and Neale Donald Walsch's "Conversations with God." No Stupid Questions featured Angela discussing Gabrielle Hamilton's book "Blood, Bones, and Butter" in the context of culinary challenges. The Daily Stoic included a discussion where a guest referenced Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Thomas A. Pyszczynski's book "The Worm at the Core" in relation to Terror Management Theory and human mortality awareness. Freakonomics Radio featured Ed Glazer discussing Mancur Olson's "The Rise and Decline of Nations" to illustrate how insiders manipulate systems. The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett featured the host praising James Hoffmann's aesthetically pleasing book "The World Atlas of Coffee." Lastly, The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast included Ambassador Robert O'Brien citing Tom Clancy's "The Bear and the Dragon" while addressing geopolitical tensions between Russia and China.
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
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Merrily We Roll Along
Discussed“I forgot who wrote the book!”
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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The Power of Now
Discussed“Again, it was a means of escapism, and so I started reading things like, you know, The Power of Now, or like all the things like Conversations with God.”
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Conversations with God Neale Donald Walsch 4 Books Collection Set - Awaken the Species
Discussed“Again, it was a means of escapism, and so I started reading things like, you know, The Power of Now, or like all the things like Conversations with God.”
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Hidden Potential
Discussed“So this is page 26 for anyone who's listening or watching right now, page 26 of Hidden Potential.”
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Steal like an artist
Discussed“As Austin Kleon discusses in another book, 'Steal Like an Artist,' I found that very insightful.”
No Stupid Questions
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Blood, Bones, & Butter
Discussed“I am dying to ask you a question that has actually been simmering as I read through like essays that you've published in The Times and of course I read Blood, Bones, and Butter.”
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Smuggler's Cove
Discussed“And Eli Finkel, he has this one diagram in his like magnum opus on how our expectations about marriage have changed over time and he calls it 'Mount Maslow.' And there's quite literally a picture of a mountain!”
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The Giver
Discussed“Have you ever read The Giver? I just read it last year. Okay, it's probably the book I've read more than any other book.”
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Words on the Move
Discussed“There is this linguist, John McWhorter, he wrote a book, Words on the Move: Why English Won't and Can't Sit Still, and he talked about the very fact that words just change and dictionaries sort of set in our minds that language is going to be precise forever, and this is just what this word means, or this is how”
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The Principles of Psychology
Discussed“In the first half of the show, Angela says that 19th century psychologist William James wrote something along the lines of, "Happiness is when your expectations meet your reality." She was thinking of a formula for self-esteem that James outlined in his book The Principles of Psychology.”
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What Are People For?
Discussed“Then Mike mentioned the line between loneliness and solitude by novelist and poet Wendell Berry. The line actually came from an article by author and poet Maria Popova, in which she was citing Berry's 1990 collection of essays, "What Are People For."”
The Daily Stoic
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The Worm at the Core
Discussed“And I don't know if this is pertinent or not, but 'The Worm at the Core' by Ernest Becker about Terror Management Theory helped me a little bit with in this area because it's sort of about how humans—like we're—I mean, we're the only mammal, that animal, that knows it's going to die.”
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Brotherhood Of The Grape
Discussed“Yeah, and then the other writer that I'm slightly more fanboyish about than Didion is John Fante. I just read 'Brotherhood of the Grapes.' It's about Roseville?”
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Ask the Dust
Discussed“No, I'm going to read 'Ask the Dust.' I have that in the story; it's one of the great novels of all time. Uh, crazy story which we should talk about; he has a bunch, maybe '1933 was a Bad Year,' 'The Road to Los Angeles.'”
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1933 was a Bad Year
Discussed“Uh, crazy story which we should talk about; he has a bunch, maybe '1933 was a Bad Year,' 'The Road to Los Angeles.' He has a couple of books about his journey; he's seen as an LA writer, but he's from Colorado, and so it's just a weird snapshot to have the Italian-American experience from Colorado to LA, then Northern”
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The Road to Los Angeles
Discussed“Uh, crazy story which we should talk about; he has a bunch, maybe '1933 was a Bad Year,' 'The Road to Los Angeles.' He has a couple of books about his journey; he's seen as an LA writer, but he's from Colorado, and so it's just a weird snapshot to have the Italian-American experience from Colorado to LA, then Northern”
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Full of Life
Discussed“Um, his short stories are good; um, he wrote this book—'Full of Life,' um which was his most popular book; it wasn't a popular book, but it gets turned into a big movie that basically pays for everything. He once—so basically what happens is once 'Ask the Dust' is destroyed, he is sort of heartbroken and then just becomes a”
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Dreams from Bunker Hill
Discussed“And then after—this is way nerdier than people listen to—but after, after Bukowski rediscovers 'Ask the Dust' as Fante is dying of diabetes, they’re like chopping off his limbs as blind; he dictates to his wife the sequel of 'Dreams from Bunker Hill.' How's that, 'cause that's done; it's not done writing out; he told his wife the novel while”
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The White Album
Discussed“And I mean, it reminds me of, in kind of a tangential way, but you know the passage in Didion's The White Album where she’s with, uh, Jim Morrison? Yeah, you know, and you know how she writes about it. It’s, she goes to the recording session, they’re waiting for Jim Morrison, he shows up, he doesn’t talk to anybody,”
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It Can't Happen Here
Discussed“Right, the best way I understood Trump was Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here. And I feel like your book actually, which comes, which is basically the generation right after that book, like you’re talking about, no longer does the fascist movement look like Mussolini or Hitler. It’s figured out how to dress better; it’s figured out how to co-opt”
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The Greek Way
Discussed“Think about two years later, on the night that Martin Luther King was shot, Bobby Kennedy—who was a Philistine for most of his life—began to read the Greeks and read 'The Greek Way.' I have the book in the bookstore, by Edith what? Edith Wharton.”
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On Immunity
Discussed“Thereâs a great book, 'Immunity' by Eula Biss, and it was the first time I began to understand immunity is not about you; itâs about participation. She articulated that while she was writing it, especially during her pregnancy in the 2010s, and it was the first time I understood immunity is about how participation and how we come together to”
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The Wasteland
Discussed“There’s a book titled 'The Wasteland' about Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, which came out recently, analyzing the deterioration of Ezra Pound's mind as he fell into anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Anti-Semitism may be the oldest virus; it infects different Romans and emperors at various times, different leaders at different times.”
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Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays
Discussed“I teach 'Shooting an Elephant' today by George Orwell. I love 'Homage to Catalonia,' but there are parts of it where he talks about what it was like as a colonial administrator, knowing colonialism was wrong. It’s a lot like Thompson—he was caught up in enforcing it, and it shows how it destroys him as a way to argue against”
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Homage to Catalonia
Discussed“I love 'Homage to Catalonia,' but there are parts of it where he talks about what it was like as a colonial administrator, knowing colonialism was wrong. It’s a lot like Thompson—he was caught up in enforcing it, and it shows how it destroys him as a way to argue against it. Thompson does a very good job at illustrating”
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Stories I Tell Myself
Discussed“His son wrote a great book called 'Stories I Tell Myself,' which tries to encapsulate Thompson's struggle. I attempted to conclude with Nixon leaving, but the years after were really tough because they reflect our current understanding of alcoholism, coupled with how Thompson would take Dexedrine. There was a price to be paid later, and his son writes about getting”
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The Daily Dad
Discussed“Yes, um, yeah, when I was doing The Daily Dad, I went to my publisher with it maybe four or five years ago.”
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Gates of Fire
Discussed“And then I have on my wall, I have the last page from the typewritten manuscript of Gates of Fire signed by the author. Yeah, I have a bunch of those little totems too, myself.”
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A Farewell to Arms
Discussed“Take, for instance, the opening of "A Farewell to Arms" where he describes the dust on the trees that summer. It resonates throughout the story and comes back at the end; that's a poetic genius that AI simply cannot replicate.”
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Deliver Me from Nowhere
Discussed“Are you at, like, I love this book, I've been raving about it. Um, deliver me from nowhere, about Bruce Springsteen making Nebraska.”
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The Right Stuff
Discussed“So yeah, have you read Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff? Yeah.”
Freakonomics Radio
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The Rise and Decline of Nations
Discussed“And so this sort of massive harming of the young, and in some sense this is a larger phenomenon that's related to the things Mancur Olson wrote about 40 years ago in 'The Rise and Decline of Nations' in which, in a stable society, insiders basically figure out how to rig the game for themselves.”
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Two and Twenty
Discussed“Thanks to him as well as to Sain Kajura, whose book is called '2 and 20: How the Masters of Private Equity Always Win.'”
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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The World Atlas of Coffee
Discussed“These books are just absolutely beautiful! Thank you very much! Have you just done two of them, or are there more?”
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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The Bear and the Dragon (Jack Ryan Novels)
Discussed“I told that to the Russians, and Tom Clancy wrote a book about it years ago called "The Bear and the Dragon" or something along those lines. The Chinese are coming for that land, and they're doing it very cleverly.”
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Never Give an Inch
Discussed“I had to sit down, and Mike Pompeo wrote about this in his book, and I'll mention it because Secretary Pompeo mentioned it. He said, 'Listen, you got carte blanche.'”
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Atlas Shrugged
Discussed“I've just been rereading Atlas Shrugged, which I do oddly enough about every 15 years, and I figured out one of the core problems with her doctrine; it might be the core problem.”
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When China rules the world
Discussed“Actually, I'm reading a book called 'When China Rules the World' written in 2009.”
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The Abolition of Man
Discussed“In two books—'The Abolition of Man' and 'That Hideous Strength'—he spelled that out and made the point that if that happens, it is not going to liberate human beings; in fact, it's going to abolish them.”
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Much Ado About Nothing
Discussed“We've always been skeptical about the idea that random processes can increase information as distinct from variation, so I have huge problems with this, which is why I wrote a book about it recently.”
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... Trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen
Discussed“One of the books that I read as a youngster was Viktor Frankl's famous book, 'From Death Camp to Existentialism.' Now, I didn't know too much about existentialism, and I still don't, but I do know that he survived that by focusing on the love he had for his wife and the love he had for his family.”
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Faust
Discussed“If you look at the conditions of life, especially when things are not going well for you, you could easily proclaim, like the antinatalists do, that life is so bloody miserable in its essence that it would be better if it didn't exist at all. That's Mephistopheles, by the way, in Goethe's Faust.”
The Rubin Report
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The Big Sort
Discussed“It's not being, what was the book called, 'The Big Sort,' a while ago?”
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Eichmann in Jerusalem
Discussed“The banality of evil, remember Hannah Arendt?”
Modern Wisdom
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Religion and the Creation of Race and Ethnicity
Discussed“We have the religion of gender. We have the religion of race.And you know, all these things have just stepped into this void, and they're all dogmatic things where they have their founding texts.”
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The Girl from the Fiction Department
Discussed“You mentioned George Orwell; The Telegraph recently spoke about his bi—his wife's biography or autobiography.Oh, there's a new biography of Sonia Orwell?”
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The Bench
Discussed“I mean, I read Meghan Markle's book, 'The Bench', and that's worse.”
People I (Mostly) Admire
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Worlds I See
Discussed“One of the many things I loved about a book that you just wrote, entitled The Worlds I See, is how beautifully you lead the reader through your field's many dead ends and struggles, which is unusual. So often we hear only about the triumphs, the AlphaZeros, the ChatGPTs, not the many, many failures.”
StarTalk Radio
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Jim Fixx's second book of running
Discussed“There was a guy named Jim Fixx, who was a big running enthusiast; he was interviewed everywhere and wrote a bestseller, then dropped dead of a heart attack!”
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How the Universe Got Its Spots
Discussed“Editor-in-chief of the Pioneer Works podcast, author of 'How the Universe Got Its Spots,' one of my favorites.”
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Black Hole Survival Guide
Discussed“Editor-in-chief of the Pioneer Works podcast, author of 'How the Universe Got Its Spots,' one of my favorites. 'Black Hole Survival Guide.'”
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Black hole blues
Discussed“And also one of my favorites, 'Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space.'”
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The glass universe
Discussed“They died in poverty, penurious, and a book highlighting their care—Dava Sobel focused on this, right? Called 'The Glass Universe'?”
The Jordan Harbinger Show
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Conversations on Love
Discussed“Perel takes half a decade to get something in a book, and what have you gotten from me, Jordan? Maybe we could start with that.”
Behind the Bastards
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The Last King of Scotland
Discussed“He wrote in his book, which was one of the major sources for Last King of Scotland, quote: 'Amin's bizarre behavior derives partly from his tribal background; like many other warrior societies, the Caka—Amin's tribe—are known to have practiced blood rituals on slain enemies.'”
