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Books podcasts were talking about in December 2023
During December 2023, podcast hosts and guests explored several notable books across various programs, focusing on human behavior, decision-making, science, and personal development. On Freakonomics Radio, the host discussed K. Bannan and her book 'Eve', praising the text for covering extensive ground and anticipating a strong audience response. Decision-making and internal struggles emerged as a central theme in an episode of No Stupid Questions, where Mike and Angela examined multiple works. Mike mentioned Barry Schwartz's 'The Paradox of Choice' when discussing analysis paralysis, while Angela referenced Will Smith's memoir titled 'Will' to illustrate a story about early career decisions. Additionally, Mike brought up Sylvia Plath's 'The Bell Jar' to read a passage connecting internal struggles to the same theme. Science and the physical world drew attention on People I (Mostly) Admire, where host Steve Levitt spoke with Helen Czerski about her work. Levitt highlighted an example from Czerski's 'Storm in a Teacup' regarding how physics determines whether an egg is raw or boiled, and discussed his initial skepticism before reading her ocean physics book, 'The Blue Machine'. Parenting and emotional regulation featured on The Daily Stoic, with Ryan Holiday discussing Dr. Becky Kennedy's parenting book, 'Good Inside', noting that he and his wife found its concepts applicable to themselves. Finally, SmartLess concluded an episode by highlighting Arnold Schwarzenegger's book 'Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life'.
Freakonomics Radio
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Directory of Officers, Faculty, Students, Departments
Discussed“Well, few people cover more ground than K. Bannan and her book 'Eve', so I suspect our email inbox will be quite busy. I'm eager to hear what you think, whether you're an expert in the subject matter or just someone like me who isn't very familiar with the topic but loves to think about new ideas.”
Speaker 570. Is Gynecology the Best Innovation Ever? | Freakonomics Radio 2023-12-28 Listen at 43:20 -
Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
Discussed“His books include Liars Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short, Flash Boys, and now, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon.”
No Stupid Questions
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The Paradox of Choice
Discussed“I would guess Barry Schwartz. You know, that would be such a good guess.”
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Will
Discussed“He tells the story in his memoir of being a very young Will Smith — a certain deal has come his way.”
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Pain, Parties, Work
Discussed“It's from The Bell Jar.”
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The Emperor's New Drugs
Discussed“I mean, here's the example he gave in, I'm reading his book right now, about how therapists can better understand and create response expectancies. So he tells the story of not liking spicy food.”
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The Joy Luck Club
Discussed“I mean, at the policy level, at the identity level, like here's an example of somebody who overcame their low SAT score, but it just kind of underscores the inanity of all this. Like, The Joy Luck Club?”
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The Hundred Secret Senses
Discussed“My book club, we read The Hundred Secret Senses. Oh wait, is that a novel?”
People I (Mostly) Admire
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Storm in a Teacup
Discussed“It's not exactly a life-changing insight, but one example that you gave in your book 'Storm in a Teacup' that really sticks with me is how to use physics to figure out whether an egg is raw or whether it's been boiled.”
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Blue Machine
Discussed“So a lot of what we’re talking about is coming from your new book; it's called 'The Blue Machine,' and I have to say, when I heard that you were going to write a book about the physics of the ocean, I was skeptical.”
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Every Man for Himself and God Against All
Discussed“Reading his recent memoir entitled 'Every Man for Himself and God Against All,' one can't help but think that Werner Herzog himself isn't so different.”
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Werner Herzog - Of Walking in Ice
Discussed“And of course, my first book, 'Walking in Ice,' when I traveled on foot from Munich to Paris, writing has been all the time equally tied to filmmaking.”
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Twilight World
Discussed“Then another one of your books that has had a tremendous impact on me, I think about it all the time, it's called 'The Twilight World.' Could you talk a bit about Hero Onoda's story and how you came to know him?”
The Daily Stoic
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GOOD INSIDE
Discussed“You know, it's obviously a parenting book, but I got to say something that affected me the most in it, and my wife and I noticed that we need it perhaps more than our kids. It strikes me as a very Stoic concept.”
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Show Your Work!
Discussed“I was saying to you in that interview that, hey Ryan, you know I've just started writing my first book, any tips? You gave some really good advice.”
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Designing Your Life
Discussed“The most helpful exercise I've ever found for this is something called The Odyssey Plan from the book Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and another guy who are Stanford professors. Basically, the idea is that you imagine your life three to five years in the future if you continued down your current path, and you write out what that”
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The War of Art
Discussed“No, it’s actually a really great illustration of what Steven Pressfield calls the resistance, right?”
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The Harder They Fall
Discussed“Some people say, yeah, no, I agree. Have you read The Harder They Fall?”
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The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
Discussed“Did he ever have you watched The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz? Did you ever hear him talk about this?”
SmartLess
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Be Useful
Discussed“Thank you for taking the time to talk to us and for all your success, including your amazing book, Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life.”
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Private
Discussed“I just—my dream is to have like a book—a coffee table book of people's unused acceptance speech!”
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Caging Skies
Discussed“My mother read this book called Caging Skies and she pitched it to me, she said, you should make this into a movie. And the way she pitched the story to me, I found so funny and I thought this is fantastic!”
Lex Fridman Podcast
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The ultimate book of boxing lists
Discussed“You wrote in the book that your father had a big influence on your life. What lessons have you learned about life from your father?”
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The Fabric of Reality
Discussed“I think it’s referenced in David Deutsch’s "The Fabric of Reality," where essentially, you know, the farmer feeds the chicken daily, and the chicken grows fat and happy.”
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Dark matter and the dinosaurs
Discussed“In my book, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, I talk about the many different ways. There's eight or nine that we deduce not just the existence of dark matter but how much is there.”
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WARPED PASSAGES
Discussed“I mean, one of the really interesting pieces of physics we did that I talk about in my first book, "Warped Passages," is finding out that there can be a higher dimension, but only locally do you think there's a gravity of a lower dimension.”
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Knocking on heaven's door
Discussed“And I think that's just good advice for everything, to try to find like why it is the way it is. I talk about effective theory in my second book, "Knocking on Heaven's Door," a lot.”
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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Fight Club: A Novel
Discussed“This is what I was thinking, this is what it reminded me of, this is Sax's personal Vietnam, this is oh yeah, it's a great scene, great scene, love that that's a great scene from Fight Club, that's Meatloaf, right?”
The Jordan Harbinger Show
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The Man in the Brown Suit
Discussed“And it also sort of shows, since it's so fragile, how fragile our economies really are because I've heard the expression 'data is the new oil,' but I think you say in the book, 'The pumps and pipes are all powered by semiconductors.'”
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The general's son
Discussed“There was a story that I mentioned in my book, 'The General's Son,' that my mother told me many times.”
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Injustice
Discussed“And as a matter of fact, in my other book, Injustice, I mentioned this.”
Modern Wisdom
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Models
Discussed“The definition of neediness comes from Mark Manson's first book, 'Models', which is like an ethical pickup artistry guide. Neediness occurs when you place a higher priority on what others think of you than on what you think of yourself.”
Pod Save America
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A Taste for Poison
Discussed“I remember early in the year I was talking about how I was reading that book 'Risin' Kill First' about the early days of Israel and the Mossad, too! It gets up to like 2012! But once it got morally ambivalent, I got out!”
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How Democracies Die
Discussed“And I don't think we need to send mail out copies of how democracies die by those two professors. I don't, I don't think, I don't think we can get people to read how democracies die. Yeah, I don't know that, I don't know that mailing copies is a good idea.”
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History of Little Nine Partners
Discussed“But, I've been reading The Nine by Chuck Colman. It's a recent book that's out and it's very good.”
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Extremely Hardcore
Discussed“And to help us sound smart for once, we are joined by Zoe Schiffer; she is the managing editor at Platformer, an excellent site, and the co-author of the forthcoming book 'Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter.' You can pre-order it today, I imagine, right?”
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Hannibal
Discussed“Here's the truth: has anybody ever heard of Hannibal Lector? He was a nice fellow.”
The Ben & Marc Show
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Their Jihad... Not My Jihad!
Discussed“The young man who wrote about it called his book 'My Jihad,' describing how he realized his true struggle was with himself.”
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The Holy Grail of Investing
Discussed“It's my third in the financial area, one that I think you guys would appreciate; this one is called 'The Holy Grail of Investing.'”
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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Galveston Diet
Discussed“I took everything I learned and developed a program for my patients, which became the Galveston Diet.”
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New Menopause
Discussed“That's called 'The New Menopause,' and you can pre-order that wherever you get your books.”
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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The Night Before Christmas
Discussed“This Christmas, join Hallow's Christmas prayer challenge, Advent with C.S. Lewis, for the 25 days leading up to Christmas.”
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Misery
Discussed“My first book report was on Stephen King's 'Misery' when I was in kindergarten, and I read really early on.”
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Age of fable
Discussed“I would carry around Bullfinch's Mythology with me all the time or giant stacks of X-Men comic books or the complete works of Shakespeare and just read voraciously.”
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Doom
Discussed“So I was reviewing your book, 'Doom', this morning, and I've been wanting to talk to you about it for a long time.”
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Confessions
Discussed“The Book of Revelation, for example, are in part attempts to structure our apprehension of what you would call the eternal apocalypse and to also help us determine practically and politically how that might be at least staved off, although perhaps even managed more comprehensively.”
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American Prometheus
Discussed“I should be clear: I haven't watched the movie, but I read the book American Prometheus.”
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The Coddling of the American Mind
Discussed“Because, you know, Jonathan Haidt wrote The Coddling of the American Mind.”
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The Federalist Papers
Discussed“We require them to learn about the Federalist Papers, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and all that great stuff.”
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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The Jordan Rules
Discussed“I say, hey man, I actually appreciate your input, but I barely read, like you're laughing, I'm dead serious; I haven't read a book since ninth grade. The last book I read was in ninth grade, the story about the unauthorized story about Phil; that was the last time I read a book.”
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Glucose Revolution
Discussed“There's a really good book out there called Glucose Revolution; it's very well written. You can read it in like three to four hours about how to manage your glucose curve.”
StarTalk Radio
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Turning Oil Into Salt Energy Independence Through Fuel Choice
Discussed“There’s a book I read called Turning Oil into Salt, and I forgot the two authors—co-authors of that—where that made a fascinating point.”
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The Emperor of All Maladies
Discussed“So today we're tackling the very serious topic, the emperor of all maladies: cancer.”
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Cosmic Queries
Discussed“No, no, no, the lazy answer is our second StarTalk book published with National Geographic called Cosmic Queries, which has an entire section on how astronomers find distances to things in the universe, and it was called the distance ladder.”
Behind the Bastards
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The radium girls
Discussed“It is laid out in gripping detail by author Kate Moore in her book, The Radium Girls. I was like, why do I know that?”
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A drink with Shane MacGowan
Discussed“You've never read the book 'A Drink with Shane MacGowan'? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.”
The Rubin Report
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The Great Mental Models, Volume 1
Discussed“I wasn’t introduced to Chesterton's Fence until, I don’t know, 2016 or even later. Chesterton's Fence is a profoundly important principle.”
Huberman Lab
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The 48 Laws of Power (Special Power Edition)
Discussed“Robert Greene is an author who has written more than five bestselling books, including The 48 Laws of Power, The Laws of Human Nature, and Mastery.”
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The Laws of Human Nature
Discussed“Robert Greene is an author who has written more than five bestselling books, including The 48 Laws of Power, The Laws of Human Nature, and Mastery.”
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Mastery
Discussed“Robert Greene is an author who has written more than five bestselling books, including The 48 Laws of Power, The Laws of Human Nature, and Mastery.”
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Longitude
Discussed“I taught it for four years, and one of the books was 'Longitude,' which is a wonderful story about the discovery of timekeeping devices.”
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Principles of Neural Science, Fifth Edition
Discussed“One book I’ll leave as a mystery, not to be mysterious, but because it's a science book; I'll just tell you that it’s 'Principles of Neuroscience.'”
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Five Minds for the Future
Discussed“When you're very young, they direct you towards intellectual and mental pursuits as well, and there's a book I recommend for everybody—it's Howard Gardner's 'Five Frames of Mind.'”
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The 33 Strategies of War
Discussed“This notion you referred to, 'death ground,' is an important tactic from my book, '33 Strategies of War,' which is about strategic thinking inspired by Sun Tzu.”
