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Books podcasts were talking about in August 2026
August 2026 conversations on popular shows highlighted foundational works across linguistics, psychology, and personal history. On The Joe Rogan Experience, Joe Rogan recommended Daniel Everett's Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes to listeners interested in Amazonian life and language, while later in the month Jesse Michels brought up Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End during a discussion on alien contact and telepathy. On How I Write, Matt Haig reflected on A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh, describing it as an unexpected yet profound source of personal comfort and resilience during a difficult youth. The Ezra Klein Show featured Annie Lowrey sharing several selections, including Will Blythe's To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever and Judith Butler's influential text Gender Trouble. On The Daily Stoic, Ryan Holiday praised Steven Pressfield's latest novel, The Arcadian. Closing out the month on The Ezra Klein Show, Helen Toner recommended Cliff Stoll's cyber-security classic The Cuckoo's Egg as part of her final reading suggestions.
The Megyn Kelly Show
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The Making of DSM-III®
Discussed“these men on the stand, uh you know, that the three Commonwealth experts who are men who do refer to the DSM where there's one paragraph about postpartum.”
Modern Wisdom
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The Command of the Air
Discussed“since World War I starts with Julio Duh Haye he wrote a book command in the air mostly has to do with air power there's been a hope with either economic blockades or air power that air power or blockades without a ground force could incite a popular revolt to topple the government”
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Israel Lobby and Us Foreign Policy
Discussed“This is in the Israel lobby. John Mirshimer and Steve Walt's book, they lay it out. Um, and it's fun fundamentally, it's a very simple story, which is that although anybody can give money to elections, it's a it's a free and open process.”
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Stoner
Discussed“You put me on to Stoner. That was a wonderful book. It is a wonderful book.”
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Biohacker's Handbook
Discussed“Teimu Arena was it that wrote the Biohackers Handbook. It's his coffee table book. I've still got my house in Newcastle.”
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The Art of Resilience
Discussed“I read The Art of Resilience by Ross Edgely, and I watched uh Resurfaced, which is a Amazon Prime documentary about Andy Murray's hip replacement. All of these were suggested by friends who'd been through other horrendous injuries and come back from it.”
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The Red Rising Series Collection 5 Books Set by Pierce Brown (Red Rising, Golden Son, Morning Star, Iron Gold, Dark Age)
Recommended“your Pokedad started reading Red Rising after seeing recommendations from multiple sources, yours included. Can you do an episode just on this or does that exist already? Uh, Red Rising, I think I might be the biggest front end of the funnel drug dealer for people getting into Red Rising, except for the author, maybe because it's the top of”
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Dungeon Crawler Carl
Recommended“Dungeon Crawler Call is very different to Red Rising, but as compelling, and I am so I'm so addicted to this series. So, if you've read Red Rising or you couldn't get into it or whatever and you need a different fantasy series, Dungeon Crawler Carl will rip your face off. It is It should come with a warning label.”
The Daily Stoic
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Secrets of Shaolin Temple Boxing
Discussed“But the beginning I made my first movie called the Shaolin temple. Yeah, that is a big hit in Ming and China in the whole Asia make me career changed become actor.”
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A Man at Arms
Discussed“I it was very obvious to me that he's the same that that he's a reincarnation of the character from A Man at Arms.”
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The Virtues of War
Discussed“But the first he was in he was in Tides of War and he was in the Virtues of War.”
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The Legend of Bagger Vance
Discussed“And then I realized as as I'm working on this, I flash back to The Legend of Bagger Vance, the book, not the movie.”
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The Arcadian
Recommended“his new novel, The Arcadian, which is incredible.”
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Hitler's Willing Executioners
Discussed“I mean right maybe you personally but you can't just say there are people that I mean that book Hitler's Willing executioners you know it's it's about your neighbors”
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A Journey through Texas
Discussed“like there's this story that Robert Carro tells in in his book on Lyndon Johnson where uh one of the first sort of foreign leaders that Johnson entertains”
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Nomadland
Discussed“Have you read Nomad Land? I haven't. I've heard of it. I haven't read it. She talks about that. That's the That's the dark side of the company town”
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Your Fellow Americans
Recommended“She has this really great new book called Your Fellow Americans. More pumped on the country than ever before, which sounds odd to most people.”
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Spying on the South
Recommended“Tony Horowitz wrote another book where he recreates the journey. It's his last book and it's called Spying on the South. Also amazing. So take that. Thank you.”
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The Warmth of Other Suns
Recommended“Have you read The Warmth of Other Sons about the Great Migration? Have not.”
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How to Hide an Empire
Recommended“Have you read How to Hide an Empire? No. Okay. It's a history of the greater United States.”
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Boxing Inside the Box
Discussed“And that really reminds me of like in chapter two of inside the box I read about Pixar's three pitches rule where they force directors to pitch three ideas because they found otherwise they just get so attached to their first idea and it usually wasn't their best idea.”
The Joe Rogan Experience
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The Kingdom of Speech
Discussed“So the the author Tom Wolf um the last book he wrote was called Kingdom of Speech.”
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Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle
Recommended“Um this one Daniel Everett don't sleep there are snakes. The life and language in the Amazon jungle.”
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Language
Recommended“Um this one Daniel Everett don't sleep there are snakes. The life and language in the Amazon jungle.”
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What Is Real?
Discussed“There's a great book called What is Real by a guy named Adam Becker about all of this where Einstein was saying the quantum stuff is too spooky as they call it spooky action at a distance.”
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Life Itself
Discussed“So in 1973 I believe Francis Crick who discovered the double helical structure of DNA uh wrote a paper and then he followed it up with a book in 1981 called life itself and it's all about how DNA in a 100 million years it's too short of a period of time for it to have formed on Earth.”
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Childhood's End
Recommended“There's a great book by the great Arthur C. Clark called Childhood's End.He talks about um aliens sort of incepting the world through telepathic children.”
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Lenny Bruce
Discussed“Ladies and gentlemen, Chris just gifted me, ladies and gentlemen, Lenny Bruce, which is a”
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The Lives of John Lennon
Discussed“And then he goes on to write the book The Lives of John Lennon, which after he's dead, kind of explodes a lot of what was going on personally, whether it's true or not.”
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Less Than Zero
Discussed“Less Than Zero was a cool movie, but it's not the book.”
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The Rules of Attraction
Discussed“Rules of Attraction is a great movie, and that's he said that was the closest thing he that anybody had gotten to.”
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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The Innovator's Dilemma
Discussed“So, you know, I think back through the history of technological breakthroughs and I think about I mean you can look at different industries and one of my favorite books on this subject is the innovator's dilemma.”
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The Dip
Discussed“but but part of it links to one of the books you wrote, which is called The Dip. We're talking about delusion here and how to know if you're delusional or if you're just going through the dip.”
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This Is Marketing
Discussed“I mean, I was saying to you when you arrived that when I started my career as a marketeteer, which is, you know, that website that failed turned into a marketing business essentially and then I and then people everybody gives you this book when you get into marketing, which is your book, this is marketing, and they use your”
How I Write
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The Midnight Library
Discussed“Matt Hag sold more than 10 million copies of his book, The Midnight Library.”
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The Humans
Discussed“I mean, with a novel I write called The Humans, I think I deleted 40, it was a small novel to start with. It was about 80,000 words.”
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The Possession of Mr. Cave
Discussed“I mean I wrote a book my third book which you won't have read no one has read. It's called the possession of Mr. Cave. It's like the most depressing book I think anyone's ever written. Everyone dies in it. There's literally no hope. I would recommend no one to read this book.”
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The Polar Express
Discussed“You've got Polar Express. Yeah. You've got a lot of magic trains in children's books. So, that was one of the things that led me towards the train. Cuz that's the way things happen in the Polar Express. I love that book.”
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Winnie the Pooh (Winnie-the-Pooh)
Recommended“Winnie the Pooh is a book I loved as a child and then I loved again when I was 24 years old having a breakdown at my parents house... I think it's the ultimate self-help book that's ever been written.”
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The Epic of Gilgamesh
Discussed“And I know we both, all of us love the epic of Gilgamesh. But this is one of the many reasons why I love the epic because it really talks makes us think about failure, defeat.”
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There Are Rivers in the Sky
Discussed“So, this is from There Rivers in the Sky. You know, you say the inspiration for this book came with a small idea. A raindrop that landed on my palm one day while I was walking by the river temps.”
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The Elements of Eloquence
Discussed“And now what I want to do is go through like 10 or 11 this from your book Elements of Eloquence.”
The Ezra Klein Show
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To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever
Recommended“It is called to hate like this is to be happy forever by Will Bllythe.”
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Gender Trouble
Recommended“And then my third hobby horse book, which I think people talk about this book all the time, but I feel like a lot of people have never actually read it, is Gender Trouble by Judith Butler.”
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The Cuckoo's Egg
Recommended“The real book is called The Cuckoo's Egg. It's from 1989. It's about one of the first big hacks that that happened. written by the astronomer who was working at Lawrence National Lab and noticed 75 cents discrepancy in his computing bill.”
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Grand New Party
Discussed“It's worth noting here for people who don't know, you and your former co-blogger Ryhan had written a book called Grand New Party.”
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De Gaulle
Recommended“Uh I will recommend uh Julian Jackson's biography of Charles de Gaulle [snorts] on general principles.”
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The MANIAC
Recommended“Ooh, um so I think the first one is really relevant to this conversation, which is uh Ben Yemin Labatut's The Maniac, um which includes a sort of lightly fictionalized biography of John von Neumann, the story of AlphaGo.”
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The Technology Trap
Recommended“My second book is The Technology Trap from Carl Benedikt Frey, which I think is very much about how people's attitudes towards technology and automation depend on to what extent the benefits, the economic growth, is shared”
Huberman Lab
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What Emotions Really Are
Discussed“Paul Griffith's philosopher wrote a book some years ago, I think 97 or so, what emotions really are, uh, where he first kind of made the claim that, well, they don't really exist”
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The Neuroscience of Emotion
Discussed“And so David Anderson and I did that in our book a decade ago or so now the neuroscience of emotion where we listed some features of emotions that helps to answer the question”
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The Variations of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume 1
Discussed“Some are further apart and the simplest dimension which is one that Charles Darwin already mentioned in his book the expression of the emotion in man and animals he called it principle of antithesis is veilance which is approach or avoid pleasant or unpleasant this basic veilance dimension.”
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Descartes' Error
Discussed“If you have no emotions as we know from Antonio Damasio's original work in his book Daycart's error uh which he put out just as I was starting as a posttock in Iowa 1994”
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The Book of Human Emotions
Recommended“There's a great book uh Tiffany Watts Smith has a book I think it's called the book of human emotions which is basically like a little uh dictionary an entry from a toz of all the different emotion words in different languages”
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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The Devils
Discussed“He did that in a book called The Devils or The Possessed, and in many of his other books as well, not least in Notes from Underground.”
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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The Vision of the Anointed
Discussed“It's right out of the vision of the anointed which was a book Thomas Soul wrote 30 years ago where intellectuals throughout history have thought that if they're maximally empowered then they can engineer society in a more benevolent direction.”
Interesting Times
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The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Discussed“And I there's a line in um CS Lewis's Narnia books to the effect that this is, you know, in the same zone as Dracula and Dorian Gray and and all the others that um you're trying to either offer an alternative to or not, right?”
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Notes on Being a Man
Discussed“So take us back in time in your own life, because your book about this subject is partially analysis and prescription, but a lot of it is personal story and memoir.”
Lex Fridman Podcast
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Rethinking Decentralization in Developing Countries
Discussed“there was the book, Countries and Peoples. Someone gave it to him as a gift. My father read through it, and he realized that it was perfect for me”
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The People's Network
Discussed“there was the book, Countries and Peoples. Someone gave it to him as a gift. My father read through it, and he realized that it was perfect for me”
