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Books podcasts were talking about in May 2025
In May 2025, podcasts explored themes of human agency, historical quests, and scientific analysis. On Stuff You Should Know, hosts detailed the search for legend and science, citing Shiva Dhakal's collection Folk Tales of Sherpa and Yeti alongside Reinhold Messner's My Quest for the Yeti. The hosts also highlighted Bryan Sykes's The Seven Daughters of Eve for its introduction of mitochondrial DNA analysis to the public. On Modern Wisdom, Scott Barry Kaufman spoke about personal agency while referencing his own book Rise Above, and cited Jean Twenge's analysis of youth cultural shifts in her book Generations. Meanwhile, on The Ben & Marc Show, a speaker cited Samuel Arbesman's The Half-Life of Facts to illustrate how factual knowledge decays over time. Critical takes on biography and history emerged elsewhere: Bill Burr on the Monday Morning Podcast questioned the source material behind an editor's pick biography on Tiger Woods by Lawrence J. Londino, while a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience noted that his family appears in a popular book detailing searches for Spanish gold.
Stuff You Should Know
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Folk Tales of Sherpa and Yeti
Discussed“Um there's a there was someone named um Shiva Dal that collected a bunch of these stories in a book called Folktales of Sherpa and Yeti and all of them kind of figured the same way which was uh whether it's a story called the annihilation of the Yeti.”
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My Quest for the Yeti
Discussed“Uh people like Reinhold Messner and uh one Sir Edmund Hillary both searched for evidence of the Yeti while they were hiking. Uh and Messner even wrote a book called My Quest for the Yeti: Confronting the Himalayas's Deepest Mystery, right?”
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The Seven Daughters of Eve
Discussed“Sykes is like a a a leading expert on um analyzing mitochondrial DNA. Wrote the book The Seven Daughters of Eve, which kind of introduced the world to genetic analysis through M MTDNA.”
The Ben & Marc Show
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The Half-Life of Facts
Discussed“There's a great book uh this guy wrote called the half-life of facts.”
Monday Morning Podcast
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Tiger Woods
Discussed“look at this editor's pick. The secret history of Tiger Woods. Said the death of his father set a battle raging inside the world's greatest golfer. Dish. Dish. How the [ __ ] do you know? Why? Cuz you talked to his gardener. Is that the closest you could get to him? And now you're going to write 400 pages”
Modern Wisdom
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Rise Above
Discussed“But if if I gave only that message then there'd be no point in write writing the book rise above um because we also have an agency as you said to compensate to do what we need to not you know what what's it going to do to help you to say oh I have the genes for shortness I'm”
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Building Community Among Adults of Different Generations
Discussed“But there seems to have been a cultural shift among youth where um and Gene Twangi has has done a great analysis of this in her book generations. prior generation.”
The Joe Rogan Experience
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Pioneers of Old Monocacy
Discussed“Like if you were to look up if you were to go to some bookstore, there's there's a popular one called The Sons of Coronado. And it's like this legacy of people looking for Spanish gold. Somewhere in there, my family will will be in there.”
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Exploration Fawcett
Discussed“I was reading uh yesterday I was reading uh uh exploration faucet. Have you ever read this before? Listen to the audio book. It it's his Percy Percy Faucets personal diary.”
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
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Fast Like a Girl
Discussed“I've watched a lot of Dr. Mindy's interviews and docu and and I've read her book and you know the power behind fasting in itself.”
Breaking Points
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The Book of Frank Herbert
Discussed“A good book, a good novel to think of this all through is the is the book June I think which offers a really interesting prism. On the one hand, you have hyper advanced technologies accompanying effectively a quasi feudal political order and you know we always presume that technological advance will go hand in hand with you know social”
StarTalk Radio
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Flatland
Discussed“I happen to have a copy right here on my desk. Oh. Oh, really? That's great. Yeah, I've got one over on the shelf over here. So this is this is a very classic book where um the author had you imagine a world that's just two-dimensional.”
Lex Fridman Podcast
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The War in the West - A New History
Discussed“In volume one of the war in the west, your book series on World War II, you write, "The Second World War witnessed the deaths of more than 60 million people from over 60 different countries.”
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Munich
Discussed“from a historian's point of view or even a novelist point of view in the case of Robert Harris writing his book about these negotiations which I don't know if you've read it but it's really it's terrifically good”
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KL
Discussed“There's a book you've recommended, KL. Yes, it's just called KL. It's about the the whole concentration camp system.”
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know
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Nuclear Choices
Discussed“Um let's also shout out Nuclear Choices for the 21st century, a citizen's guide. Uh that's written by Richard Wolfson.”
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A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ
Discussed“Thinking things like Canacle for Liowitz, The Day After Tomorrow. Uh hey, you hit us to your favorites.”
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The Day After Tomorrow
Discussed“Thinking things like Canacle for Liowitz, The Day After Tomorrow. Uh hey, you hit us to your favorites.”
Honestly with Bari Weiss
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Original Sin
Discussed“Um, it's coming out, this news, um, the day before Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's book, Original Sin, which is broadly, uh, reparage about the cover up of Joe Biden's mental condition when he was president of the United States. I wondered if you wanted to comment on all of that and what you think about the president's health, whether”
The Ezra Klein Show
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The Disengaged Teen
Discussed“Her latest book co-authored with Jenny Anderson is The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better.”
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Democracy and Education
Discussed“So the first one is democracy and education by John Dwey which is over 100 years old and we are now seeing through lots of great neuroscience that his observations around the teaching and learning experience and what makes for a good teaching and learning experience were right.”
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The Wheelwright's Shop
Discussed“So there's a book my grandpa gave me uh uh the wheelright shop by George Strut uh is written in the 1920s by a guy whose family had been building wooden wheels in England for 200 years and like the specifics of it is just beautiful.”
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Experiences in Visual Thinking
Discussed“Um and then um there's another one uh experiences and visual thinking. It's like kind of a hippie like you know 70s but it is really brilliant at helping exercise the other parts of your brain that analyze problems like drawing and using your fing like it's it's I think does it a necessary part of rebuilding you know parts”
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Random House Book of Poetry for Children
Discussed“Um the other thing, uh you know, I've got a 3 and 1/ half-year-old son at home and he's like we cloned his father. He's like a really smart, gifted little mechanic and and um fun, but he also really loves poetry and um any of the children's poetry anthologies from uh Jack Pletki and uh just that reading and”
