Books Mentioned in This Podcast
The expression of emotions in man and animals
Buy on AmazonIt really reminds me of — have you ever read Charles Darwin's "Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals"?
Episode: 147. Is Your Gut a Second Brain? | People I (Mostly) Admire
The better angels of our nature
Buy on AmazonI believe, yeah, there's no doubt, and my colleague Steve Pinker has now written several books convincingly arguing, at least convincingly, I think, that on most parameters, the world is getting better.
Episode: Turning Work into Play (Update) | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Federalist Papers
Buy on AmazonGo back to the Federalist Papers, and you'll see the argument that these constituencies around the country are going to have so-called competing local jealousies.
Episode: 146. Is There a Fair Way to Divide Us? | People I (Mostly) Admire
Hamlet
Buy on AmazonOne of the attorneys in the case actually used the analogy: a drunken monkey can eventually type Hamlet, there's this kind of old saw about how randomly typing you'll eventually type Hamlet, but why should we outsource our redistricting to a drunken monkey?
Episode: 146. Is There a Fair Way to Divide Us? | People I (Mostly) Admire
A Brief History of Time
Buy on AmazonIt makes me think maybe I could go read A Brief History of Time, and maybe if Neil were sitting next to me, I'd actually understand A Brief History of Time!
Episode: 145. Neil deGrasse Tyson Is Still Starstruck | People I (Mostly) Admire
Livewired
Buy on AmazonIf you want to learn more about David Eagleman's ideas, I really enjoyed a couple of his mini books, like Livewired, which talks about his brain research, and Some 40 Tales from the Afterlives, his book of speculative fiction. So this is the point in the show where we take a listener question, and I welcome my producer, Morgan.
Episode: 144. Feeling Sound and Hearing Color | People I (Mostly) Admire
King Henry V
Buy on AmazonWell, first of all, it's not true that nobody had ever heard of me, because I wrote a biography of John Stuart Mill a few years ago—last time I checked, at least 17 people had read it, so that's very rude of you.
Episode: 143. Why Are Boys and Men in Trouble? | People I (Mostly) Admire
Dream hoarders
Buy on AmazonA great example would be the book you wrote before, which is called Dream Hoarders, which is about how the upper middle class is moving away from the rest of society.
Episode: 143. Why Are Boys and Men in Trouble? | People I (Mostly) Admire
King Henry V
Buy on AmazonIt will probably surprise listeners because you're so focused on data and solving practical problems that back in 2007, you wrote a biography of John Stuart Mill, a big thick book that runs to more than 600 pages.
Episode: 143. Why Are Boys and Men in Trouble? | People I (Mostly) Admire
On Liberty
Buy on AmazonJohn Stuart Mill is a liberal philosopher from 19th century in the UK and he's probably most famous for his 1859 essay On Liberty.
Episode: 143. Why Are Boys and Men in Trouble? | People I (Mostly) Admire
Little men
Buy on AmazonI want to honor that, and what's really interesting about this is that, you know how when you write a book, by the time you finish the book and it's out there, you're sick of it?
Episode: 143. Why Are Boys and Men in Trouble? | People I (Mostly) Admire
Why Nations Fail
Buy on AmazonYou give fascinating examples in the book 'Why Nations Fail,' like there was this guy named William Lee who invented something called a stocking frame that dramatically sped up the rate at which people could knit, and one would expect this guy would get a hero's welcome. But you tell the story in the book that it was quite the opposite.
Episode: Nobel Laureate Daron Acemoglu on Economics, Politics, and Power (REPLAY) | People I (Mostly) Admire
Why Nations Fail
Buy on AmazonLiving in the United States in the 21st century, it seems normal, almost inevitable, that there's rule of law, that there are property rights, that there's democracy, but looking back over human history—and I hadn't really fully understood this till I read 'Why Nations Fail'—not only are all of these pretty rare, but the set of circumstances that led to rule of law and property rights and democracy taking hold first in England and then spreading actually seems somewhat miraculous: that at some point early on an autocrat didn't stop the whole process, derail it, and go back to this central control of all the assets.
Episode: Nobel Laureate Daron Acemoglu on Economics, Politics, and Power (REPLAY) | People I (Mostly) Admire
Power and Progress
Buy on AmazonIf you want more of Daron Acemoglu’s thinking, my two favorite books of his are the ones we talked about today: 'Why Nations Fail' and his most recent book, 'Power and Progress.' And next week, we are back with a brand new episode featuring Richard Reeves; his research into the struggles of boys and men is stunning, sobering, and extremely important.
Episode: Nobel Laureate Daron Acemoglu on Economics, Politics, and Power (REPLAY) | People I (Mostly) Admire
Why Nations Fail
Buy on AmazonIf you want more of Daron Acemoglu’s thinking, my two favorite books of his are the ones we talked about today: 'Why Nations Fail' and his most recent book, 'Power and Progress.' And next week, we are back with a brand new episode featuring Richard Reeves; his research into the struggles of boys and men is stunning, sobering, and extremely important.
Episode: Nobel Laureate Daron Acemoglu on Economics, Politics, and Power (REPLAY) | People I (Mostly) Admire
Moby Dick
Buy on AmazonHe started reciting Moby Dick; the opening to Moby Dick was really striking.
Episode: 141. The Language of the Universe | People I (Mostly) Admire
Breath
Buy on AmazonLet's turn to your more recent book; it's called Breath.
Episode: 140. How to Breathe Better | People I (Mostly) Admire
Breath
Buy on AmazonIn two weeks, we're back with a brand new episode featuring author James Nestor. He's written two absolutely fascinating books; they're called Deep and Breath.
Episode: 139. How PETA Made Radical Ideas Mainstream | People I (Mostly) Admire
A la recherche du temps perdu
Buy on AmazonAnd it reminds me of—I’m not going to ask if you've read it, but have you at least pretended to read Marcel Proust's 'Remembrance of Things Past'?
Episode: UPDATE: Sendhil Mullainathan Thinks Messing Around Is the Best Use of Your Time | People I...
Scarcity
Buy on AmazonYou wrote a book, and I know it must have been almost a decade ago, and the book was called 'Scarcity,' and I loved the book.
Episode: UPDATE: Sendhil Mullainathan Thinks Messing Around Is the Best Use of Your Time | People I...
Subtract
Buy on AmazonI give an example: there's this great book by Leidy Klotz; it's called 'Subtract.' It just came out; it's awesome!
Episode: UPDATE: Sendhil Mullainathan Thinks Messing Around Is the Best Use of Your Time | People I...
The Selfish Gene
Buy on AmazonRichard Dawkins is both a distinguished scholar of zoology and evolutionary biology and a remarkably successful popularizer of scientific ideas through his bestselling books, including The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion.
Episode: 137. Richard Dawkins on God, Genes, and Murderous Baby Cuckoos | People I (Mostly) Admire
The God Delusion
Buy on AmazonRichard Dawkins is both a distinguished scholar of zoology and evolutionary biology and a remarkably successful popularizer of scientific ideas through his bestselling books, including The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion.
Episode: 137. Richard Dawkins on God, Genes, and Murderous Baby Cuckoos | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Selfish Gene
Buy on AmazonIn 2017, the Royal Society, the United Kingdom's Academy of Sciences, conducted a public poll asking readers to name the most influential science book of all time. The winner was The Selfish Gene.
Episode: 137. Richard Dawkins on God, Genes, and Murderous Baby Cuckoos | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Selfish Gene
Buy on AmazonI have to start with a confession: before last week, I'd never read your book, The Selfish Gene. I have now, and I was quite shocked at how eye-opening the book was for me.
Episode: 137. Richard Dawkins on God, Genes, and Murderous Baby Cuckoos | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Selfish Gene
Buy on AmazonOne of the most striking chapters in The Selfish Gene is chapter 11 on memes, and I've often heard people say, 'Oh, Richard Dawkins created the term meme,' but I always honestly thought of memes as being somewhat trivial because now they're very much associated with internet fads.
Episode: 137. Richard Dawkins on God, Genes, and Murderous Baby Cuckoos | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Selfish Gene
Buy on AmazonIn the concluding chapter of the first edition of The Selfish Gene, I cast around for another example of a replicator. I wasn't then aware of computer viruses; otherwise, I might have chosen the computer virus as my analogy.
Episode: 137. Richard Dawkins on God, Genes, and Murderous Baby Cuckoos | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Selfish Gene
Buy on AmazonAbout the same time you were writing The Selfish Gene, Gary Becker was writing a book on the economics of the family, and a lot of the same trade-offs are in place.
Episode: 137. Richard Dawkins on God, Genes, and Murderous Baby Cuckoos | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Selfish Gene
Buy on AmazonSo you talk in The Selfish Gene about the quantity of children and the trade-off between more offspring and higher investment and so better outcomes per child.
Episode: 137. Richard Dawkins on God, Genes, and Murderous Baby Cuckoos | People I (Mostly) Admire
The God Delusion
Buy on AmazonThis is, in some sense, leading to talking to you about the reactions you've gotten when you've argued against religion in books like The God Delusion.
Episode: 137. Richard Dawkins on God, Genes, and Murderous Baby Cuckoos | People I (Mostly) Admire
The God Delusion
Buy on AmazonIt seems, as one reads The God Delusion or your other books and writings on the topic, it's really difficult or even impossible to argue with you.
Episode: 137. Richard Dawkins on God, Genes, and Murderous Baby Cuckoos | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Selfish Gene
Buy on AmazonNext week we're back with a brand new episode featuring evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins; his books 'The Selfish Gene' and 'The God Delusion' are two of the most influential popular science books of all time.
Episode: UPDATE: What It Takes to Know Everything | People I (Mostly) Admire
The God Delusion
Buy on AmazonNext week we're back with a brand new episode featuring evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins; his books 'The Selfish Gene' and 'The God Delusion' are two of the most influential popular science books of all time.
Episode: UPDATE: What It Takes to Know Everything | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Selfish Gene
Buy on AmazonThe math has supported that for a very long time, but evolutionary biologists are still resistant to it, mostly because many of them grew up reading Richard Dawkins as a teenager, and they feel like their mission in their intellectual life is to rediscover that buzz, and this is the way to do it in birds. So Richard Dawkins is an extremely famous evolutionary biologist who wrote 'The Selfish Gene,' who I think would represent the hardcore adaptation team, the team that you, Richard, are not on, correct?
Episode: 136. The World’s Most Controversial Ornithologist | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Selfish Gene
Buy on AmazonIn two weeks, we have an exciting new episode featuring Richard Dawkins, famed author of 'The Selfish Gene' and 'The God Delusion,' amongst others. His name frequently emerges in our discussions, including today’s episode, and I've yearned to meet him for quite some time, which will finally happen in two weeks!
Episode: 136. The World’s Most Controversial Ornithologist | People I (Mostly) Admire
The God Delusion
Buy on AmazonIn two weeks, we have an exciting new episode featuring Richard Dawkins, famed author of 'The Selfish Gene' and 'The God Delusion,' amongst others. His name frequently emerges in our discussions, including today’s episode, and I've yearned to meet him for quite some time, which will finally happen in two weeks!
Episode: 136. The World’s Most Controversial Ornithologist | People I (Mostly) Admire
Counter clockwise
Buy on AmazonIf you blame, you certainly should learn how to forgive, but as I talk about in the mindful body, if you understand it obviates the necessity for blame, and if you don't blame, then you don't need to forgive.
Episode: 133. Pay Attention! (Your Body Will Thank You) | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on AmazonHe's the author of The Fault in Our Stars, which began as a novel for young adults and ended up a cultural phenomenon.
Episode: UPDATE: John Green’s Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire
Looking for Alaska
Buy on AmazonCan you take me back to your first book? It's called Looking for Alaska.
Episode: UPDATE: John Green’s Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on AmazonSo you said it wasn't your dream to write bestsellers, but then you made the mistake of writing The Fault in Our Stars, which turned out to be one of the biggest books of all time.
Episode: UPDATE: John Green’s Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on AmazonHey, so I went back and reread The Fault in Our Stars last week; I had read it many years ago.
Episode: UPDATE: John Green’s Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on AmazonYou've been cranking out books every year, every other year, and then after The Fault in Our Stars, there was a five-year gap before your next book, Turtles All the Way Down.
Episode: UPDATE: John Green’s Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire
Turtles All the Way Down
Buy on AmazonYou've been cranking out books every year, every other year, and then after The Fault in Our Stars, there was a five-year gap before your next book, Turtles All the Way Down.
Episode: UPDATE: John Green’s Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on AmazonSo one of the storylines in The Fault in Our Stars is this author who hates his readers. Did you feel a lot of pressure not to be that author?
Episode: UPDATE: John Green’s Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on AmazonBut by the time I wrote The Fault in Our Stars, I was conscious of the fact that I was going to be read into that novel because I'd been friends with a young person who died of cancer, because I'd worked closely as a chaplain with young people who were dying.
Episode: UPDATE: John Green’s Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on AmazonI thought that would be sort of a funny joke; I mean, I imagined that The Fault in Our Stars was going to be my least successful novel commercially, and so I imagined that as kind of a joke for the people who were really familiar with me who would get a lot of the sort of subtle references between Van Houten and myself.
Episode: UPDATE: John Green’s Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on AmazonI didn't, of course, imagine that I was going to be inundated with this level of fan mail and this amount of, you know, people asking me what happens after the end of the book, which is what the main character in The Fault in Our Stars wants to know from the author.
Episode: UPDATE: John Green’s Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on AmazonAnd so there was this strange meta experience as a result of writing The Fault in Our Stars.
Episode: UPDATE: John Green’s Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on AmazonAnd there is this real meta experience where sometimes a sick kid will ask me what happens after the end of The Fault in Our Stars, and I'll have to say, like Peter Van Houten, I also don't know.
Episode: UPDATE: John Green’s Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on AmazonSo, after I wrote The Fault in Our Stars, I spent over a year working on a desert island novel, a novel where six young people were stranded on a desert island.
Episode: UPDATE: John Green’s Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire
Between Two Kingdoms
Buy on AmazonHer amazing memoir, Between Two Kingdoms, tells the story of her battle with cancer as well as the challenges of returning to everyday life after years of being in and out of the hospital.
Episode: 132. Suleika Jaouad’s Survival Mechanisms | People I (Mostly) Admire
Between Two Kingdoms
Buy on AmazonYou've shared your story in various forms: first in a blog, then in a series of New York Times columns entitled Life Interrupted, and eventually in a bestselling book called Between Two Kingdoms. There's also, of course, the Academy Award-nominated documentary American Symphony.
Episode: 132. Suleika Jaouad’s Survival Mechanisms | People I (Mostly) Admire
Between Two Kingdoms
Buy on AmazonSo, my first exposure to you was Between Two Kingdoms.
Episode: 132. Suleika Jaouad’s Survival Mechanisms | People I (Mostly) Admire
Between Two Kingdoms
Buy on AmazonI'm not generally an emotional or empathetic person, but I cried over and over while reading your book, Between Two Kingdoms.
Episode: 132. Suleika Jaouad’s Survival Mechanisms | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on AmazonHave you read The Fault in Our Stars?
Episode: 132. Suleika Jaouad’s Survival Mechanisms | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on AmazonIt was during that time that I got my hands on a copy of The Fault in Our Stars, and I think I read it about half a dozen times.
Episode: 132. Suleika Jaouad’s Survival Mechanisms | People I (Mostly) Admire
Between Two Kingdoms
Buy on AmazonIf you liked the episode, I suspect you will love her book, Between Two Kingdoms, and the documentary about her and Jon Batiste entitled American Symphony, which is available on Netflix.
Episode: 132. Suleika Jaouad’s Survival Mechanisms | People I (Mostly) Admire
Fighting fire
Buy on AmazonSo you wrote a memoir about your years as a firefighter called Fighting Fire, and you tell one incredibly powerful story after another about your experiences. Do you have your own personal favorite story from that book?
Episode: 131. Getting Old, Adventurously | People I (Mostly) Admire
The gutsy girl
Buy on AmazonNow, that can get toxic for sure, but later I wrote a book about instilling bravery in girls because it was becoming really clear to me when I looked around that women defaulted to fear and that women were really missing out on something important. So the book you're talking about now is The Gutsy Girl.
Episode: 131. Getting Old, Adventurously | People I (Mostly) Admire
Lost cat
Buy on AmazonYou wrote a book about, of all things, your cat running away; it's called Lost Cat, and I have to say, being just totally honest, in a million years I never would have read that book if I didn't know I was going to talk to you today.
Episode: 131. Getting Old, Adventurously | People I (Mostly) Admire
Tough Broad
Buy on AmazonYour most recent book is called Tough Broad, and one thing I like about your books is they're also different from one another, but this one starts with an observation which I think is 100% true but almost never talked about, which is that our society is incredibly dismissive of older women.
Episode: 131. Getting Old, Adventurously | People I (Mostly) Admire
Extended Mind
Buy on AmazonI did read Annie Murphy Paul’s book, The Extended Mind, and she talks about awe in there. It turns out awe is really good for us and is really easily triggered by going outside.
Episode: 131. Getting Old, Adventurously | People I (Mostly) Admire
Between Two Kingdoms
Buy on AmazonWe're back with a brand new episode featuring Suad Jwad. Her incredible book, Between Two Kingdoms, documents her battle with cancer, and she's also the subject of the recent documentary film American Symphony.
Episode: 131. Getting Old, Adventurously | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Night Before Christmas
Buy on AmazonBut there are things in this book that do not look high octane at all because I understood how important it was for people just to get outside.
Episode: UPDATE: What It’s Like to Be Steve Levitt’s Daughters | People I (Mostly) Admire
Road to Freedom
Buy on AmazonThat's precisely the set of ideas that I address in my new book, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society.
Episode: 130. Is Our Concept of Freedom All Wrong? | People I (Mostly) Admire
Globalization and its discontents
Buy on AmazonOne of the things I found most interesting when I read Globalization and Its Discontents, which was your first book for a popular audience, is that I've known a lot of economists and almost every one of them sits in their office reflecting on the world in their head.
Episode: 130. Is Our Concept of Freedom All Wrong? | People I (Mostly) Admire
Road to Freedom
Buy on AmazonSo, let's talk about your most recent work; you've got a new book out called The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society.
Episode: 130. Is Our Concept of Freedom All Wrong? | People I (Mostly) Admire
Freakonomics
Buy on AmazonA lot of the content from the Hartley podcast was used in a rather snarky article that the magazine published titled, 'Why Freakonomics Failed to Transform Economics.'
Episode: 129. How to Fix Medical Research | People I (Mostly) Admire
Freakonomics
Buy on AmazonThe main argument the article makes is that Freakonomics is a failure because it didn't change economics, but that premise is so absurd that I wasn't sure it deserved rebutting because Freakonomics is a book written for a popular audience.
Episode: 129. How to Fix Medical Research | People I (Mostly) Admire
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Buy on AmazonHe proved he could connect with a popular audience as well; his 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow was a blockbuster bestseller.
Episode: EXTRA: Remembering Daniel Kahneman | People I (Mostly) Admire
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Buy on AmazonSo, it's been roughly a decade since Thinking, Fast and Slow was published, and even though that book turned out to be a massive bestseller, I still can't believe you wrote another book.
Episode: EXTRA: Remembering Daniel Kahneman | People I (Mostly) Admire
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Buy on AmazonOh, I mean, Thinking, Fast and Slow was such an experience that after that, I had forgotten everything that was not in the book, so I really needed a new thing, and Noise was quite new.
Episode: EXTRA: Remembering Daniel Kahneman | People I (Mostly) Admire
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Buy on AmazonI think because of books like Thinking, Fast and Slow, you've managed to convince laypeople that behavioral economics is the most powerful tool one has ever encountered.
Episode: EXTRA: Remembering Daniel Kahneman | People I (Mostly) Admire
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Buy on AmazonI understand why you wrote Thinking, Fast and Slow, because that was an unbelievable tome that really collected so much knowledge into one place that might have been hard for people to find otherwise.
Episode: EXTRA: Remembering Daniel Kahneman | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Selfish Gene
Buy on AmazonYou can even turn things upside down a little bit in the same spirit that Dawkins did with selfish genes. They talked about genes having a kind of agency and reproducing, sometimes even at the expense of the larger organism.
Episode: 128. Are Our Tools Becoming Part of Us? | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Power of Habit
Buy on AmazonMy guest today, Charles Duhigg, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of blockbuster bestsellers including 'The Power of Habit.'
Episode: 126. How to Have Great Conversations | People I (Mostly) Admire
How to Win Friends and Influence People
Buy on AmazonDale Carnegie was really good at winning friends and influencing people, and Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus write books about how to golf.
Episode: 126. How to Have Great Conversations | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Power of Habit
Buy on AmazonI could talk with you all day about 'Super Communicators,' but I'm also curious about the other things you've done, like your first book, 'The Power of Habit,' which came out in 2012 and was an unbelievable success.
Episode: 126. How to Have Great Conversations | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Power of Habit
Buy on AmazonI wanted to lose weight and had this basic question, which motivates this book, too: 'If I’m so smart and successful, why am I 20 pounds overweight, and why can't I get myself to run in the morning?'
Episode: 126. How to Have Great Conversations | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Power of Habit
Buy on AmazonThe core idea in 'The Power of Habit' is quite simple: there's something called a habit loop, and understanding that loop helps people devise strategies to break bad habits and build good ones.
Episode: 126. How to Have Great Conversations | People I (Mostly) Admire
Smarter Faster Better
Buy on AmazonCharles Duhigg has one more big book we haven’t yet discussed, titled 'Smarter Faster Better'; it tackles productivity and uses great storytelling to convey its points.
Episode: 126. How to Have Great Conversations | People I (Mostly) Admire
Smarter Faster Better
Buy on AmazonBut then, in your book, you share the real story behind 'Frozen,' and I couldn't believe the difficult path the creators experienced to create what 'Frozen' eventually became.
Episode: 126. How to Have Great Conversations | People I (Mostly) Admire
Little Women
Buy on AmazonOne of the directors was the first female director in Disney’s history, and they’d share stories such as, 'My favorite book as a kid was “Little Women.”
Episode: 126. How to Have Great Conversations | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Power of Habit
Buy on AmazonHe's a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, the author of the blockbuster bestseller The Power of Habit, and he's back now with a new book on the science behind having better conversations.
Episode: 125. Is Gynecology the Best Innovation Ever? | People I (Mostly) Admire
Why Nations Fail
Buy on AmazonMy guest today, Daron Acemoglu, is a professor of Economics at MIT and co-author of a number of influential books written for a popular audience, including "Why Nations Fail" and "Power and Progress."
Episode: 124. Daron Acemoglu on Economics, Politics, and Power | People I (Mostly) Admire
Why Nations Fail
Buy on AmazonOkay, so back in 2012, you and James Robinson published a book called "Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty."
Episode: 124. Daron Acemoglu on Economics, Politics, and Power | People I (Mostly) Admire
Why Nations Fail
Buy on AmazonYou give fascinating examples in the book "Why Nations Fail," like there was this guy named William Lee who invented something called a stocking frame that dramatically sped up the rate at which people could knit, and one would expect this guy would get a hero's welcome, but you tell the story in the book that it was quite the opposite.
Episode: 124. Daron Acemoglu on Economics, Politics, and Power | People I (Mostly) Admire
Why Nations Fail
Buy on AmazonThat's what triggered the "Why Nations Fail" book, which you have so kindly explained in such a masterly way, and that's also what motivated my more recent book "Power and Progress."
Episode: 124. Daron Acemoglu on Economics, Politics, and Power | People I (Mostly) Admire
Power and Progress
Buy on AmazonThat's what triggered the "Why Nations Fail" book, which you have so kindly explained in such a masterly way, and that's also what motivated my more recent book "Power and Progress."
Episode: 124. Daron Acemoglu on Economics, Politics, and Power | People I (Mostly) Admire
Power and Progress
Buy on AmazonAnother point that you make really forcefully in your book is the importance of property rights.
Episode: 124. Daron Acemoglu on Economics, Politics, and Power | People I (Mostly) Admire
Why Nations Fail
Buy on AmazonBut looking back over human history, and I hadn't really fully understood this until I read "Why Nations Fail," not only are all of these pretty rare, but the set of circumstances that led to rule of law and property rights and democracy taking hold first in England and then spreading actually seems somewhat miraculous, that at some point early on an autocrat didn't stop the whole process dead and go back to this central control of all the assets.
Episode: 124. Daron Acemoglu on Economics, Politics, and Power | People I (Mostly) Admire
Power and Progress
Buy on AmazonI want to talk about your most recent book; it's co-authored with Simon Johnson and it's called "Power and Progress," it came out in May of 2023.
Episode: 124. Daron Acemoglu on Economics, Politics, and Power | People I (Mostly) Admire
Power and Progress
Buy on AmazonYou have a lot of examples in the book of technologies which create a lot of good, but almost all of that good is gobbled up by a set of elites, and it leaves the rest of society no better off.
Episode: 124. Daron Acemoglu on Economics, Politics, and Power | People I (Mostly) Admire
Power and Progress
Buy on AmazonThe example that Simon and I give quite centrally in the book is Henry Ford's factories, which were at the forefront of automation.
Episode: 124. Daron Acemoglu on Economics, Politics, and Power | People I (Mostly) Admire
Power and Progress
Buy on AmazonIf you want more of Daron Acemoglu's thinking, my two favorite books of his are the ones we talked about today: "Why Nations Fail" and his most recent book, "Power and Progress."
Episode: 124. Daron Acemoglu on Economics, Politics, and Power | People I (Mostly) Admire
Range
Buy on AmazonHe's written some great books like Range and The Sports Gene, and he went from a master's degree in environmental sciences to working for Sports Illustrated.
Episode: 123. Walt Hickey Wants to Track Your Eyeballs | People I (Mostly) Admire
Be Useful
Buy on AmazonI remember Ted Turner would always say, 'Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise.' In my book, I say, 'You know, advertise, sell, sell, sell.'
Episode: 122. Arnold Schwarzenegger Has Some Advice for You | People I (Mostly) Admire
Be Useful
Buy on AmazonSo rule number two of your new book is 'Never Think Small,' and I'm holding your book and looking at it right now. I love how you start that chapter; it says, 'By the end of 1987, I'd killed 283 people, more than anyone else in Hollywood during that time, by far.'
Episode: 122. Arnold Schwarzenegger Has Some Advice for You | People I (Mostly) Admire
Be Useful
Buy on AmazonThat's why I said in my book, 'Don't listen to the naysayers,' because I realized very quickly anytime you have a vision that is very much out there, people say, 'This is impossible; this can't be done.'
Episode: 122. Arnold Schwarzenegger Has Some Advice for You | People I (Mostly) Admire
Storm in a Teacup
Buy on AmazonIt'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.
Episode: 121. Exploring Physics, from Eggshells to Oceans | People I (Mostly) Admire
Blue Machine
Buy on AmazonSo 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.
Episode: 121. Exploring Physics, from Eggshells to Oceans | People I (Mostly) Admire
Storm in a Teacup
Buy on AmazonHer first book about everyday physics is called 'Storm in a Teacup,' and her most recent book about the physics of the ocean is called 'The Blue Machine.'
Episode: 121. Exploring Physics, from Eggshells to Oceans | People I (Mostly) Admire
Blue Machine
Buy on AmazonHer first book about everyday physics is called 'Storm in a Teacup,' and her most recent book about the physics of the ocean is called 'The Blue Machine.'
Episode: 121. Exploring Physics, from Eggshells to Oceans | People I (Mostly) Admire
Every Man for Himself and God Against All
Buy on AmazonReading 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.
Episode: 120. Werner Herzog Thinks His Films Are a Distraction | People I (Mostly) Admire
Every Man for Himself and God Against All
Buy on AmazonSo Werner, you've had a truly remarkable life, and you tell your story in a new memoir entitled 'Every Man for Himself and God Against All.'
Episode: 120. Werner Herzog Thinks His Films Are a Distraction | People I (Mostly) Admire
Winnie-the-Pooh
Buy on AmazonIn one case, one of the packages contained a book, and it was Winnie the Pooh.
Episode: 120. Werner Herzog Thinks His Films Are a Distraction | People I (Mostly) Admire
Werner Herzog - Of Walking in Ice
Buy on AmazonAnd 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.
Episode: 120. Werner Herzog Thinks His Films Are a Distraction | People I (Mostly) Admire
Twilight World
Buy on AmazonThen 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?
Episode: 120. Werner Herzog Thinks His Films Are a Distraction | People I (Mostly) Admire
Freakonomics
Buy on AmazonMy own experience with movies is somewhat like what you're describing; they made a documentary about our book for economics, and it played in theaters.
Episode: 120. Werner Herzog Thinks His Films Are a Distraction | People I (Mostly) Admire
Worlds I See
Buy on AmazonOne 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.
Episode: 118. “My God, This Is a Transformative Power” | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Signal and the Noise
Buy on AmazonHe's also the author of the bestselling book "The Signal and the Noise."
Episode: 117. Nate Silver Says We're Bad at Making Predictions | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Signal and the Noise
Buy on AmazonSo I want to go back to the book you wrote; it's called "The Signal and the Noise."
Episode: 117. Nate Silver Says We're Bad at Making Predictions | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Signal and the Noise
Buy on AmazonThe second best thing you can do to learn about analyzing data, short of doing it yourself, is to read what Nate Silver has to say, either in his outstanding book "The Signal and the Noise" or in his new Substack entitled "Silver Bulletin."
Episode: 117. Nate Silver Says We're Bad at Making Predictions | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Signal and the Noise
Buy on AmazonWe're back with a brand new episode featuring data scientist Nate Silver. She’s the founder of the website 538 and the author of the bestselling book The Signal and the Noise.
Episode: 116. Abraham Verghese Thinks Medicine Can Do Better | People I (Mostly) Admire
Realms of the human unconscious
Buy on AmazonI had just read a book by Stanislav Grof, the world’s leading LSD researcher at Hopkins, whose research was being shut down after the backlash against the psychedelic 60s. His book was about the therapeutic use of LSD, called Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research.
Episode: 115. The Future of Therapy Is Psychedelic | People I (Mostly) Admire
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Buy on AmazonFadis was his name; is that in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? Exactly!
Episode: 115. The Future of Therapy Is Psychedelic | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Perfection Trap
Buy on AmazonLots of people call themselves perfectionists and wear that label as a badge of honor, but the research done by Thomas and others, which he describes in his brand-new book, The Perfection Trap, tells a very different story.
Episode: Is Perfectionism Ruining Your Life? | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 114
The Perfection Trap
Buy on AmazonIt’s interesting because you point in your book, The Perfection Trap, towards parents as being an important contributor to the growth of perfectionism.
Episode: Is Perfectionism Ruining Your Life? | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 114
The Perfection Trap
Buy on AmazonI don’t mention capitalism once in the book. You dance around it; you indict our system, but you just don’t use the word capitalism.
Episode: Is Perfectionism Ruining Your Life? | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 114
The Perfection Trap
Buy on AmazonWhat I'm communicating in the book, particularly in the final chapter, is that we need to move away from this fixation on growth at all costs.
Episode: Is Perfectionism Ruining Your Life? | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 114
The Perfection Trap
Buy on AmazonIf you're intrigued by our conversation, Thomas's latest book is titled 'The Perfection Trap.'
Episode: Is Perfectionism Ruining Your Life? | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 114
Extraterrestrial
Buy on AmazonYour last two books, 'Extraterrestrial' and 'Interstellar,' and what's interesting is the tone of those books is very different than your tone now; they're very measured; they're very scientific.
Episode: Avi Loeb: Do We Have Evidence of Alien Life? | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 113
The Black Poets
Buy on AmazonBut yo, somebody sent me a book, and I ended up getting this book called The Black Poets, and it changed my life. The first poem I read by Etheridge Knight was called 'For Freckle Face Gerald'—it had a line in it that says 16 years hadn't done a good job on his voice—and it talked about how the 160 okay ends up in prison and ends up being raped, and I'm reading this poem, and it's people that are dealing with this in the prison that I'm locked up in right.
Episode: Reginald Dwayne Betts: Reading Dostoevsky Behind Bars | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 112
Sonnets
Buy on AmazonSo what we did at X is we had this image of a monkey on a pedestal, and the story was: imagine you’re trying to train a monkey to recite Shakespeare's sonnets while standing on a pedestal; what do you work on first? The monkey training or the pedestal?
Episode: Can a Moonshot Approach to Mental Health Work? | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 111
How to Say Goodbye
Buy on AmazonBut the main reason I wanted to talk to her today is that she has produced a stunningly touching book called How to Say Goodbye.
Episode: Wendy MacNaughton: Drawing From Life (and Death) | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 110
How to Say Goodbye
Buy on AmazonIt's a book of illustrations and prose, and it's called How to Say Goodbye. How do you describe that book?
Episode: Wendy MacNaughton: Drawing From Life (and Death) | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 110
How to Say Goodbye
Buy on AmazonGoing back to your book, How to Say Goodbye, so I have to admit the first time I opened it, I was in a completely wrong frame of mind. I was under a little bit of deadline pressure; I was in a work mode, okay?
Episode: Wendy MacNaughton: Drawing From Life (and Death) | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 110
How to Say Goodbye
Buy on AmazonAnd the irony of this book, I think it's kind of funny. It's called How to Say Goodbye, and I'd grab it off the shelf and be like, 'Oh, it's going to tell me how to do this thing.'
Episode: Wendy MacNaughton: Drawing From Life (and Death) | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 110
Think Like a Freak
Buy on AmazonIt's interesting because in the book that Stephen Dubner and I wrote called Think Like a Freak, we talk about the business context. One of the things we say is nobody ever in a business context says, 'I don't know.'
Episode: Wendy MacNaughton: Drawing From Life (and Death) | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 110
How to Say Goodbye
Buy on AmazonAnd if you're interested, check out Wendy's book 'How to Say Goodbye'; it really is very special—a book I will always cherish.
Episode: Wendy MacNaughton: Drawing From Life (and Death) | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 110
Power in Numbers
Buy on AmazonYou need to know the history of math; you need to understand that, you know, part of my book, 'Power in Numbers: The Rebel Women of Mathematics,' was really to highlight that women have also contributed.
Episode: Bringing Data to Life | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 107
Power in Numbers
Buy on AmazonI also feel like we spend so much time in high school on math that was relevant in the 1960s to people like Katherine Johnson, who you write about in your book, 'Power in Numbers: The Rebel Women of Mathematics', that isn't very relevant anymore.
Episode: Bringing Data to Life | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 107
Moby Dick
Buy on AmazonI'm getting there. I wrote an academic paper actually about the mathematics in Moby Dick, and that came out in 2021.
Episode: The Joy of Math With Sarah Hart | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 104
Creative Act
Buy on AmazonHis new book is entitled The Creative Act: A Way of Being, and it's not at all the book you might expect from someone in the music industry. It's a book about...
Episode: Rick Rubin on How to Make Something Great | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 103
Creative Act
Buy on AmazonBut before we get into the book, I'm hoping he'll explain to me how a white college student in the early 1980s became foundational to the development of hip-hop.
Episode: Rick Rubin on How to Make Something Great | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 103
Creative Act
Buy on AmazonI have to confess I know very little about the music industry, and it never would have occurred to me to invite you on the show, but as we were brainstorming potential guests, someone in the meeting noted that Rick Rubin's got a new book out, and he's legendary.
Episode: Rick Rubin on How to Make Something Great | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 103
Creative Act
Buy on AmazonI picked up a copy of your book knowing literally nothing about it, and I was honestly shocked.
Episode: Rick Rubin on How to Make Something Great | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 103
Creative Act
Buy on AmazonThis book isn't a memoir or an expose; it's a book of philosophy, a meditation, and it spoke deeply to me from the very first pages.
Episode: Rick Rubin on How to Make Something Great | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 103
Creative Act
Buy on AmazonI gotta say, I rarely have been so surprised by a book in such a positive way.
Episode: Rick Rubin on How to Make Something Great | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 103
Creative Act
Buy on AmazonBefore we talk about the book, can I ask you an embarrassing question?
Episode: Rick Rubin on How to Make Something Great | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 103
Creative Act
Buy on AmazonThe big part of what the book's about is that the artist's work is to live in the world in a way where you notice the things that no one else notices.
Episode: Rick Rubin on How to Make Something Great | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 103
Creative Act
Buy on AmazonReading your book, I suddenly stopped in my tracks.
Episode: Rick Rubin on How to Make Something Great | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 103
Creative Act
Buy on AmazonBut somewhere towards the end of your book, I broke out in this big smile, and I thought, 'Maybe I am an artist.'
Episode: Rick Rubin on How to Make Something Great | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 103
Creative Act
Buy on AmazonYou have an interesting point in the book about being like a spectator to your own failures.
Episode: Rick Rubin on How to Make Something Great | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 103
Creative Act
Buy on AmazonThere was a lot in Rick Rubin's book that spoke to me.
Episode: Rick Rubin on How to Make Something Great | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 103
Creative Act
Buy on AmazonBut if there's one big message, one that I would love for you to carry away, it's something early in the book.
Episode: Rick Rubin on How to Make Something Great | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 103
Outlive
Buy on AmazonIt has taken him seven years to collect and organize his insights into his first book. It's called 'Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity.'
Episode: Peter Attia: Adding 10 Healthy Years to Your Life | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 102
Outlive
Buy on AmazonBut as we talked, you were hesitant to relive those old stories, and I didn't understand why until I read your new book, just published.
Episode: Peter Attia: Adding 10 Healthy Years to Your Life | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 102
Outlive
Buy on AmazonIt's called 'Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity,' and reading the book, I realized that you have changed more in the last ten years than just about anyone else I know. I now understand why the last time you came on the show, you didn't want to talk about the old Peter.
Episode: Peter Attia: Adding 10 Healthy Years to Your Life | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 102
Outlive
Buy on AmazonWhen it comes to chronic diseases, when you look at chronic conditions—type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease—that playbook doesn't seem to work very well. All it does is slightly extend life but with a reduction in quality of life and given that this book, 'Outlive,' is about longevity, and longevity is only half about length of life, we have to be just as concerned with quality of life.
Episode: Peter Attia: Adding 10 Healthy Years to Your Life | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 102
Outlive
Buy on AmazonIn the book, I use this example, Steve: if I said to you we're going to institute a new policy which is we're going to tell people that it's okay to smoke until their risk of lung cancer reaches five percent, but then we're going to tell people to stop smoking, I think everyone would look at me and say that's a dumb idea.
Episode: Peter Attia: Adding 10 Healthy Years to Your Life | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 102
Outlive
Buy on AmazonOne kind of study that you report on in the book that I wouldn't have thought would be very useful, but you draw real insights from, are studies of people who live to be 100. So looking ex post at the people who live a really long time, what is it that we learn from those studies?
Episode: Peter Attia: Adding 10 Healthy Years to Your Life | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 102
Outlive
Buy on AmazonI've known Peter for a decade, but until I read the book, I had no idea he had suffered physical and sexual abuse as a child. No idea about his lifelong struggles with emotional health.
Episode: Peter Attia: Adding 10 Healthy Years to Your Life | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 102
Outlive
Buy on AmazonIt was shocking for me to read, and I can imagine it's not easy for him to talk about this topic, but I found what he wrote in the book so moving, so important, that I at least want to bring up the topic.
Episode: Peter Attia: Adding 10 Healthy Years to Your Life | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 102
Outlive
Buy on AmazonIf you find it compelling, I strongly recommend his book; it's called Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity.
Episode: Peter Attia: Adding 10 Healthy Years to Your Life | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 102
Creative Act
Buy on AmazonHe has a new book out about the creative process, and it's one of the strangest things I've ever read. I remember when I started the whole endeavor about eight years ago; meeting with publishers, I explained how I envisioned the book, and all of them said, 'Yeah, but you’re going to tell stories about Johnny Cash and you're going to discuss Jay-Z.'
Episode: Peter Attia: Adding 10 Healthy Years to Your Life | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 102
Enlightenment now
Buy on AmazonHere is a clip from our very first episode with psychologist Stephen Pinker, and you just asked him to describe his book, Enlightenment.
Episode: 100 People I (Mostly) Admire | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 101
Freakonomics
Buy on AmazonSo anyway, this night of the World Series game, sleeping on the couch in your house and I was up pretty late for the game and then I couldn't sleep because I wasn't feeling well; I just stayed up all night and I wrote a version of what's the opening, the intro, the prelude of Freakonomics.
Episode: 100 People I (Mostly) Admire | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 101
James Watson & Francis Crick
Buy on AmazonSo a really disruptive paper, like Watson and Crick's seminal work that showed that DNA was in the form of a double helix, is really disruptive because all the models people proposed before them suddenly become irrelevant, and nobody will cite those papers anymore—so that's really disruptive research.
Episode: Chicago's Renegade Sheriff Wants to Fix Law Enforcement | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 100
Your inner fish
Buy on AmazonHe's made breakthrough fossil discoveries, like finding the missing link between fish and land animals, now known as Tiktaalik, and is a leading popularizer of science through his best-selling books, Your Inner Fish, The Universe Within, and Some Assembly Required.
Episode: Searching for Our Aquatic Ancestors | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 98
The universe within
Buy on AmazonHe's made breakthrough fossil discoveries, like finding the missing link between fish and land animals, now known as Tiktaalik, and is a leading popularizer of science through his best-selling books, Your Inner Fish, The Universe Within, and Some Assembly Required.
Episode: Searching for Our Aquatic Ancestors | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 98
Some Assembly Required
Buy on AmazonHe's made breakthrough fossil discoveries, like finding the missing link between fish and land animals, now known as Tiktaalik, and is a leading popularizer of science through his best-selling books, Your Inner Fish, The Universe Within, and Some Assembly Required.
Episode: Searching for Our Aquatic Ancestors | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 98
Your inner fish
Buy on AmazonSo reading your books was actually the first time that I ever understood what was wrong about that logic.
Episode: Searching for Our Aquatic Ancestors | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 98
Your inner fish
Buy on AmazonIf you want to learn more about Neil Shubin’s research, check out his popular books, especially 'Your Inner Fish.'
Episode: Searching for Our Aquatic Ancestors | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 98
Animal species and evolution
Buy on AmazonAnd Mayr was one of the architects of this, so he was just like a god — and I ran into him once in the hallway, and I was reading his great tome Animal Species and Evolution, which is an 800-page book on how new species form, which was very influential in the field.
Episode: Searching for Our Aquatic Ancestors | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 98
Finding the Mother Tree
Buy on AmazonIf you want to learn more about how Suzanne Simard took on the flawed conventional wisdom of forestry, check out her fascinating book entitled Finding the Mother Tree.
Episode: How Smart Is a Forest? | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 97
The Joy of X
Buy on AmazonYou tell a story in one of your books, called The Joy of X, about a time when your second grader asked you for help on a multiplication problem.
Episode: Steven Strogatz Thinks You Don't Know What Math Is | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 96
Freakonomics
Buy on AmazonI think you're selling yourself short on how much you participate, especially in the first book Freakonomics because we talked through a lot of that before I would write—sometimes in person, sometimes on the phone—and I always took a lot of notes.
Episode: The One Thing Stephen Dubner Hasn't Quit | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 95
Freakonomics
Buy on AmazonThis was like the beginning of our starting to write Freakonomics in your office.
Episode: The One Thing Stephen Dubner Hasn't Quit | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 95
Freakonomics
Buy on AmazonSo anyway, this night of the World Series game, sleeping on the couch in your house, and I was up pretty late for the game, and then I couldn't sleep because I wasn't feeling well; I just stayed up all night, and I wrote a version of what's the opening, the intro, the prelude of Freakonomics.
Episode: The One Thing Stephen Dubner Hasn't Quit | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 95
Freakonomics
Buy on AmazonMy single favorite story about us is what happened when it came time to negotiate how we'd split the payments over Freakonomics because we had gotten this big advance to write a book together, but we'd never actually talked about who would get what share.
Episode: The One Thing Stephen Dubner Hasn't Quit | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 95
Freakonomics
Buy on AmazonBecause we got offered a bunch of money to write the book that would become Freakonomics, right?
Episode: The One Thing Stephen Dubner Hasn't Quit | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 95
Freakonomics
Buy on AmazonAnd by that I mean Freakonomics was by Stephen Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and by putting us out of alphabetical order, it was like I was a star, and you were the hired hand.
Episode: The One Thing Stephen Dubner Hasn't Quit | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 95
Freakonomics
Buy on AmazonYou want to swallow a lot of pride to write Freakonomics!
Episode: The One Thing Stephen Dubner Hasn't Quit | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 95
Freakonomics
Buy on AmazonNot for the cash, because honestly, even though the deal for Freakonomics was relatively large for book deals, my half wasn't that much larger than the contracts I was already getting for other books, so it wasn't really that.
Episode: The One Thing Stephen Dubner Hasn't Quit | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 95
Freakonomics
Buy on AmazonI don't think I'm making this up; I think I remember that the publisher even initially insisted that your name had to be in a smaller typeface—you know, on the cover of Freakonomics.
Episode: The One Thing Stephen Dubner Hasn't Quit | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 95
Freakonomics
Buy on AmazonLove it, and this conversation with Stephen Dubner, after this short break, they'll return to talk about what would have happened if they'd never written Freakonomics.
Episode: The One Thing Stephen Dubner Hasn't Quit | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 95
Freakonomics
Buy on AmazonHave you ever gone back and read just chunks of Freakonomics or Super Freakonomics?
Episode: The One Thing Stephen Dubner Hasn't Quit | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 95
Freakonomics
Buy on AmazonObviously, our two lives would look really different if we'd never written Freakonomics.
Episode: The One Thing Stephen Dubner Hasn't Quit | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 95
Freakonomics
Buy on AmazonWell, I don't know about that, but for me, the biggest thing that Freakonomics did is that it opened up options outside of academics, and honestly, much to my surprise, a lot of those activities were a lot more fun than academics.
Episode: The One Thing Stephen Dubner Hasn't Quit | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 95
Freakonomics
Buy on AmazonAlright, so let me ask you this, had you not written Freakonomics, do you think you would have won a Nobel Prize by now for the body of academic research you've done?
Episode: The One Thing Stephen Dubner Hasn't Quit | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 95
Freakonomics
Buy on AmazonSo I did think through all this, but when it worked with Freakonomics, it was just like, it wasn't so much joy like, 'Oh my God, this is great for me.'
Episode: The One Thing Stephen Dubner Hasn't Quit | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 95
Freakonomics
Buy on AmazonWhen Freakonomics happened, my biggest priority in life was having a family and raising a family and hopefully trying to live in New York City.
Episode: The One Thing Stephen Dubner Hasn't Quit | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 95
Essays in positive economics
Buy on AmazonWhen you look at Friedman's work on say the 53 positive economics book, he says economists must rely on evidence gleaned from the experiments that happen to occur.
Episode: The Price of Doing Business With John List | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 94
Economics, an introductory analysis
Buy on AmazonThe first book I used was in 1985. It was by Samuelson and Nordhaus.
Episode: The Price of Doing Business With John List | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 94
The economics of discrimination
Buy on AmazonOn the one hand is what Gary Becker wrote about in his dissertation in 1957, which is people just get satisfaction out of hurting another person in a different group—that's one kind of theory.
Episode: The Price of Doing Business With John List | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 94
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Buy on AmazonHaving spent time around Danny Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate in behavioral economics, I once asked him how he could spend his life studying decision-making while being terrible at it.
Episode: Annie Duke Thinks You Should Quit | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 93
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on AmazonHe's the author of The Fault in Our Stars, which began as a novel for young adults and ended up a cultural phenomenon.
Episode: John Green's Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 92
The Anthropocene Reviewed
Buy on AmazonI've secretly been a fan of John Green for a while, but when I stumbled onto his latest book, The Anthropocene Reviewed, I was shocked to discover that it was non-fiction, actually meant for adults.
Episode: John Green's Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 92
Looking for Alaska
Buy on AmazonCan you take me back to your first book? It's called Looking for Alaska.
Episode: John Green's Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 92
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on AmazonSo you said it wasn't your dream to write bestsellers, but then you made the mistake of writing The Fault in Our Stars, which turned out to be one of the biggest books of all time: Time Magazine's fiction book of 2012.
Episode: John Green's Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 92
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on AmazonHey, I went back and re-read The Fault in Our Stars last week. I had read it many years ago; my oldest girls were young teens when it came out, and I used to read lots of young adult novels to have something to talk about.
Episode: John Green's Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 92
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on AmazonYou've been cranking out books every year, every other year, and then after The Fault in Our Stars, there was a five-year gap before your next book, Turtles All the Way Down.
Episode: John Green's Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 92
Turtles All the Way Down
Buy on AmazonYou've been cranking out books every year, every other year, and then after The Fault in Our Stars, there was a five-year gap before your next book, Turtles All the Way Down.
Episode: John Green's Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 92
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on AmazonSo one of the storylines in The Fault in Our Stars is this [____] author who hates his readers. Did you feel a lot of pressure not to be that [____] author?
Episode: John Green's Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 92
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on AmazonI mean, I imagined that The Fault in Our Stars was going to be my least successful novel commercially, and so I imagined that kind of as a joke for the people who were really familiar with me and would get a lot of the subtle references between Manhattan and myself.
Episode: John Green's Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 92
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on AmazonI didn't, of course, imagine that I was going to be inundated with this level of fan mail and this amount of people asking me what happens after the end of the book, which is what the main character in The Fault in Our Stars wants to know from the author.
Episode: John Green's Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 92
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on AmazonThere was this strange, meta experience as a result of writing The Fault in Our Stars.
Episode: John Green's Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 92
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on AmazonThere is this real, meta experience where sometimes a sick kid will ask me what happens after the end of The Fault in Our Stars, and I'll have to say, like Peter Van Houten, 'I also don't know.'
Episode: John Green's Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 92
The Anthropocene Reviewed
Buy on AmazonSo I moved to Germany recently and was in a German bookstore that had a tiny section of books in English: one shelf, maybe 30 total, and one of them was The Anthropocene Reviewed, your latest book released in 2021.
Episode: John Green's Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 92
The Anthropocene Reviewed
Buy on AmazonI must have been living under a rock for the last year because I had been completely unaware of the book's existence despite the fact that it was a New York Times bestseller.
Episode: John Green's Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 92
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on AmazonAfter I wrote 'The Fault in Our Stars,' I spent over a year working on a desert island novel, where these six young people were stranded on a desert island.
Episode: John Green's Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 92
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on AmazonI remember highlighting those six words and control-xing and putting them in a new Word document, and that became 'The Fault in Our Stars.'
Episode: John Green's Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 92
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on AmazonI mean, there have been so many after 'The Fault in Our Stars.'
Episode: John Green's Reluctant Rocket Ship Ride | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 92
The Soul of an Octopus
Buy on AmazonYeah, among many other books, she wrote one called The Soul of the Octopus. Yeah, and it describes a deep bond, a love affair really, that she shared with a particular octopus.
Episode: Jane Goodall Changed the Way We See Animals. She’s Not Done | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 91
The Book of Hope
Buy on AmazonSo your latest book is entitled The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times. And if I'm counting correctly, it's your fifth book that has the word 'hope' in the title, and you've got a podcast called Jane Goodall Hope Cast.
Episode: Jane Goodall Changed the Way We See Animals. She’s Not Done | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 91
The Fault in Our Stars
Buy on AmazonIn two weeks, we’ll be back with John Green; he’s the author of The Fault in Our Stars and a YouTube sensation. I was just distraught; I was like, ‘I can’t believe I wasted a year of my life.’ There was nothing; there was nothing that could be saved except there was this one sentence.
Episode: Jane Goodall Changed the Way We See Animals. She’s Not Done | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 91
Animal Liberation
Buy on AmazonI personally know at least a dozen people who became vegetarian after they read his book, Animal Liberation.
Episode: Peter Singer Isn’t a Saint, But He’s Better Than Steve Levitt | People I (Mostly) Admire | Ep 90
The Wealth of Nations
Buy on AmazonAdam Smith's book, The Wealth of Nations, laid out what's called the Invisible Hand Theory, which is the idea that in a market setting, if every individual pursues their own self-interest, the market equilibrium is one that has many amazing characteristics.
Episode: Peter Singer Isn’t a Saint, But He’s Better Than Steve Levitt | People I (Mostly) Admire | Ep 90
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Buy on AmazonYou're referring to the Adam Smith of The Wealth of Nations, but there's also the Adam Smith of The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Episode: Peter Singer Isn’t a Saint, But He’s Better Than Steve Levitt | People I (Mostly) Admire | Ep 90
Animal Liberation
Buy on AmazonI was recently rereading the latest edition of your book, Animal Liberation, which was from 2015, and in the preface, you note the fact that meat consumption in the US, which had been rising for decades, suddenly fell every year from 2008 to 2015.
Episode: Peter Singer Isn’t a Saint, But He’s Better Than Steve Levitt | People I (Mostly) Admire | Ep 90
Animal Liberation
Buy on AmazonI probably know at least a dozen people who became vegetarian after they read his book, Animal Liberation, and the effective altruism movement is in large part the consequence of his early writings on the topic.
Episode: Peter Singer Isn’t a Saint, But He’s Better Than Steve Levitt | People I (Mostly) Admire | Ep 90
The Wealth of Nations
Buy on AmazonIt really crashes headlong into this view in economics which I've been so indoctrinated into with so many years in the field and Adam Smith's book, The Wealth of Nations.
Episode: Peter Singer Isn’t a Saint, But He’s Better Than Steve Levitt | People I (Mostly) Admire | Ep 90
The Wealth of Nations
Buy on AmazonYou're referring to the Adam Smith of The Wealth of Nations, but there's also the Adam Smith of The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Episode: Peter Singer Isn’t a Saint, But He’s Better Than Steve Levitt | People I (Mostly) Admire | Ep 90
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Buy on AmazonYou're referring to the Adam Smith of The Wealth of Nations, but there's also the Adam Smith of The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Episode: Peter Singer Isn’t a Saint, But He’s Better Than Steve Levitt | People I (Mostly) Admire | Ep 90
Animal Liberation
Buy on AmazonAnd I was recently rereading the latest edition of your book, Animal Liberation, which was from 2015.
Episode: Peter Singer Isn’t a Saint, But He’s Better Than Steve Levitt | People I (Mostly) Admire | Ep 90
Animal Liberation
Buy on AmazonThere are now significantly more animals in factory farms than there were when Animal Liberation was first published in 1975, and despite the fact that there's been some progress in some countries and certainly much greater awareness of the issues of factory farming and of speciesism, the suffering inflicted on animals from the point of view of how much suffering humans do inflict on animals, the world is a lot worse than it was in 1975.
Episode: Peter Singer Isn’t a Saint, But He’s Better Than Steve Levitt | People I (Mostly) Admire | Ep 90
The Premonition
Buy on AmazonShe's one of the heroes in Michael Lewis's book on the pandemic called 'The Premonition', but her work on COVID is just the tip of the iceberg.
Episode: A Cross Between Sherlock Holmes and Indiana Jones | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 89
The Premonition
Buy on AmazonSomething implicit in Michael Lewis's book 'The Premonition' confuses me, but he and I never had a chance to talk about it.
Episode: A Cross Between Sherlock Holmes and Indiana Jones | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 89
The Premonition
Buy on AmazonThen the writer Michael Lewis made you one of the heroes of his best-selling book 'The Premonition' about the COVID crisis.
Episode: A Cross Between Sherlock Holmes and Indiana Jones | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 89
Freakonomics
Buy on AmazonLike Michael Lewis wrote about you a long time ago, Stephen Dubner profiled me in a New York Times piece, and it fundamentally changed my life. Publishers came asking me to write a popular book, which ended up being Freakonomics, which Dubner and I wrote together.
Episode: A Cross Between Sherlock Holmes and Indiana Jones | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 89
The Great Bridge
Buy on Amazonbut I was bullheaded and persevering, and after being turned down hundreds, literally hundreds of times, was able to make this film with the help of, as always, lots of really important and talented people, including David McCullough, who written a book that I'd read about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge called The Great Bridge, and I've just devoured it and sent to my partners, 'Let's make a film on this,' and they looked at me like I was crazy.
Episode: Ken Burns on Heroism, Horror, and History | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 88
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Buy on AmazonHenry Ford was certain that the Jews were responsible for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln; he bought a newspaper, and he printed over many editions the protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is the worst anti-Semitic tract—a hoax written in Russia.
Episode: Ken Burns on Heroism, Horror, and History | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 88
The Premonition
Buy on AmazonCharity was one of the few heroes in Michael Lewis's book on COVID-19 called 'The Premonition.'
Episode: Ken Burns on Heroism, Horror, and History | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 88
Doing Good Better
Buy on AmazonSo Will, do you remember how I came to blurb your book, Doing Good Better?
Episode: A Million-Year View on Morality | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 86
Doing Good Better
Buy on AmazonThat's my second book, but it's for academics, so it's never going to get read quite as widely as Doing Good Better.
Episode: A Million-Year View on Morality | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 86
Le capital au XXIe siècle
Buy on AmazonHere's another question that was absolutely easy for me, but that I'm guessing might have been hard for you: which French economist, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, claims that increasing wealth inequality is a feature of capitalism and suggests steeply progressive capital taxes and a cap on the possible total wealth of a person in order to get the capital distribution back to a normal level?
Episode: What It Takes to Know Everything | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 85
De ansatte
Buy on AmazonOh okay, there was a group of people, mostly people who finished in the top 10 to 20, who did a little crowdsourced spreadsheet to see who got which of all the questions on the test, and for that sample I think a majority of the questions had 10 or 11 of us getting it correct, but the two that I had that nobody else in that group had were the Danish author Olga Ravn, who was a finalist for the International Booker recently with her novel 'The Employees,' and you knew that from your flashcards?
Episode: What It Takes to Know Everything | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 85
Sapiens
Buy on AmazonMy guest today is Yuval Noah Harari, author of the blockbuster book Sapiens, which tells the entire history of our species in under 450 pages.
Episode: Yuval Noah Harari Thinks Life Is Meaningless and Amazing | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 84
The catcher in the rye, J.D. Salinger
Buy on AmazonIt ends up being that I’m going to write the 7 millionth essay about Catcher in the Rye. The world doesn't need another essay on Catcher in the Rye; the world needs kids who can pick a topic they like and then teach us about it!
Episode: Is This the Future of High School? | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 82
The catcher in the rye, J.D. Salinger
Buy on AmazonThe world doesn't need another essay on Catcher in the Rye; the world needs kids who can pick a topic they like and then teach us about it! I've always wondered why that's the case; probably because the system believes that's how they can evaluate whether someone has read Catcher in the Rye.
Episode: Is This the Future of High School? | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 82
The catcher in the rye, J.D. Salinger
Buy on AmazonBut as we know, that's not the case either; you could probably go get the cliff notes and write an even better essay about Catcher in the Rye than if you were to actually just sit and enjoy the book.
Episode: Is This the Future of High School? | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 82
The Catcher in the Rye
Buy on AmazonIt might be reflected in some of your writing, but it doesn't have to be; you should write an op-ed in your local paper, post a blog, or answer a Quora post thoughtfully—like, not only is it legitimate in some ways, it's more legitimate than the 9 millionth essay on The Catcher in the Rye!
Episode: Is This the Future of High School? | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 82
Contact
Buy on AmazonIf you've read the book "Contact" written by Carl Sagan or seen the movie, Jill was the inspiration for the hero played in the movie by Jodie Foster.
Episode: Why Bother Searching for Aliens? | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 81
Contact
Buy on AmazonAfter this short break, they'll return to talk about Jill's role in Carl Sagan's story, "Contact."
Episode: Why Bother Searching for Aliens? | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 81
Contact
Buy on AmazonBack in the 1970s, the famous novel where Carl Sagan wrote was called "Contact," in which the heroine was essentially a fictionalized version of you.
Episode: Why Bother Searching for Aliens? | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 81
Contact
Buy on AmazonI had mentioned this to Carl and given him a copy of that report many years before he wrote "Contact," and it turns out that I'm pretty prototypical of the female profile that came out of that report, and so I think that's what really drives home the truth.
Episode: Why Bother Searching for Aliens? | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 81
Contact
Buy on AmazonYes, Carl and I were colleagues; we worked together, but I think probably more than just knowing me, he was aware of what women who succeeded in male-dominated fields were usually like, and that book was made into the blockbuster movie "Contact" starring Jodie Foster playing you.
Episode: Why Bother Searching for Aliens? | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 81
Superfreakonomics
Buy on AmazonStephen Dubner and I wrote about solar geoengineering in our book SuperFreakonomics back in 2009, and we were strong supporters.
Episode: Solar Geoengineering Would Be Radical. It Might Also Be Necessary. | People I (Mostly) Admire | 79
Superfreakonomics
Buy on AmazonAnd yet, when you and I spoke a few years ago, you mentioned that you believed SuperFreakonomics had set back the field of geoengineering by five years and slowed down progress and research.
Episode: Solar Geoengineering Would Be Radical. It Might Also Be Necessary. | People I (Mostly) Admire | 79
Superfreakonomics
Buy on AmazonTo be honest, I've looked back at that section of SuperFreakonomics in the past five or ten years, and in preparation for our conversation, I reread it, and I have to admit that what you just criticized was true: it was somewhat starry-eyed and overly optimistic regarding what we could achieve.
Episode: Solar Geoengineering Would Be Radical. It Might Also Be Necessary. | People I (Mostly) Admire | 79
An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power
Buy on AmazonReflecting on Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, many points addressed consumers and what they needed to do differently.
Episode: Solar Geoengineering Would Be Radical. It Might Also Be Necessary. | People I (Mostly) Admire | 79
Imaginable
Buy on AmazonShe's also the author of three books on the topic, the most recent of which is called 'Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything,' even things that seem impossible today.
Episode: Is Gaming Good for You? | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 76
Alone Together
Buy on AmazonYou know, Sherry Turkle went and wrote a book about that idea, 'Alone Together.' Maybe you should write 'Alone Alone.'
Episode: Is Gaming Good for You? | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 76
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Buy on AmazonHe analyzed Thomas Piketty's work on Capital and Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, discovering an alarming decrease in the number of highlighted lines towards the conclusion of these texts.
Episode: Self-Help for Data Nerds | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 75
Woke Racism
Buy on AmazonAfter this short break, they’ll return to talk about John's book 'Woke Racism.' So our listener, I know, wrote us an email about the high gas prices we’re currently seeing as a result of Russia’s war with Ukraine.
Episode: John McWhorter: How Anti-Racism Is Leaving Black People in the Lurch | People I (Mostly) Admire | 72
Woke Racism
Buy on AmazonYour book entitled 'Woke Racism' was published last year, and the subtitle of that book is 'How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.' So how about we start with you defining the group, ideology, or way of thinking that you're reacting to in your book—the thing that you characterize as a new religion?
Episode: John McWhorter: How Anti-Racism Is Leaving Black People in the Lurch | People I (Mostly) Admire | 72
Woke Racism
Buy on AmazonSo 'Woke Racism' was not a book meant to just complain about the woke; it's not a book that Tucker Carlson would have written. What I was writing was that black people are being hurt by people who call themselves helping us and that we need to start being able to tell the difference.
Episode: John McWhorter: How Anti-Racism Is Leaving Black People in the Lurch | People I (Mostly) Admire | 72
Woke Racism
Buy on AmazonYou know what that woman is? That’s who I wrote 'Woke Racism' for; that is exactly what I mean. That is somebody whose heart is very much in the right place, but she’s so afraid of being called the dirtiest name other than pedophile in our current cultural vocabulary that she’s basically hamstrung.
Episode: John McWhorter: How Anti-Racism Is Leaving Black People in the Lurch | People I (Mostly) Admire | 72
Woke Racism
Buy on AmazonSo towards the end of your book 'Woke Racism,' you suggest a few ideas that you believe would actually make a positive impact on black America, and I want to talk about one in particular which is about teaching kids to read using phonics. I'm not a specialist in education, but I know just enough to know that teaching kids how to read by sounding out the words is more effective, especially with kids from homes that don't have many books in them, than teaching them how to read through a more holistic process where you teach them to recognize the outer contours of the words and surround the kids with content-rich material and give them a little bit of social justice ideology along the lines of teaching empathy in educational schools.
Episode: John McWhorter: How Anti-Racism Is Leaving Black People in the Lurch | People I (Mostly) Admire | 72
Freakonomics
Buy on AmazonAnd we should say that you wrote about this in the original Freakonomics book, correct? We did, so it started out just as academic research.
Episode: You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Experiment | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 70
What to expect when you're expecting
Buy on AmazonI'm not sure whether you know that book, but roughly every first-time parent I know has three copies of it; one that they bought for themselves and two that were gifted to them by friends. And I suspect your book will be gifted much less frequently than 'What to Expect When You’re Expecting,' given people's discomfort with death.
Episode: Does Death Have to Be a Death Sentence? | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 69
Superfreakonomics
Buy on AmazonAnd a prediction that I made that I wish hadn't been true but turned out to be quite true was Stephen Dubner in the book Super Freakonomics. We suggested that because of private incentives, the attempts to rein in carbon emissions just weren't going to work, and we predicted that the globe would struggle to control our emissions of greenhouse gases, and many people were angry at us.
Episode: Does Death Have to Be a Death Sentence? | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 69
The Soul of an Octopus
Buy on AmazonHer best-known book is The Soul of an Octopus, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2015.
Episode: “No One Can Resist a Jolly, Happy Pig.” | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 68
Quest for the tree kangaroo
Buy on AmazonI had committed to do two books; one was Quest for the Tree Kangaroo, and the other was my memoir, The Good Pig, that I wrote to honor Christopher Hogwood.
Episode: “No One Can Resist a Jolly, Happy Pig.” | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 68
The Soul of an Octopus
Buy on AmazonBut of all your books, the one about octopuses, called The Soul of an Octopus, seems to be the one that really captured people’s imaginations.
Episode: “No One Can Resist a Jolly, Happy Pig.” | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 68
A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age
Buy on AmazonHe's got over 200 scientific publications, written a popular book entitled 'A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age,' and won a bundle of teaching awards.
Episode: The Professor Who Said “No” to Tenure | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 66
Jump
Buy on AmazonOn this podcast, I put a huge emphasis on data analysis; in your book, you do not talk much about using data as a source of your insights. It seems to me your success has been more instinctual, that you just have a knack for seeing where the future is going and taking your companies in the right direction; is that a fair assessment? No, I think data is an incredibly important part of it because you have to have information that feeds what that vision should be.
Episode: How Larry Miller Went from Prison Valedictorian to Nike Executive | People I (Mostly) Admire | Ep 64
Liar's Poker
Buy on AmazonI read Liar's Poker, Michael Lewis's first book, just after I graduated college.
Episode: Michael Lewis' The Premonition: The Only Covid-19 Book Worth Reading | People I (Mostly) Admire | 63
Liar's Poker
Buy on AmazonI was doing a job I hated, management consulting, and when I read Liar's Poker, my immediate reaction was that I would give anything to be at Solomon Brothers with 30 years of hindsight.
Episode: Michael Lewis' The Premonition: The Only Covid-19 Book Worth Reading | People I (Mostly) Admire | 63
Liar's Poker
Buy on AmazonI recently went back and reread your book Liar's Poker; 30 years must have passed since I first read it, and I have to say it has aged amazingly well.
Episode: Michael Lewis' The Premonition: The Only Covid-19 Book Worth Reading | People I (Mostly) Admire | 63
Liar's Poker
Buy on AmazonThe other thing that shocked me rereading Liar's Poker is exactly what you just said.
Episode: Michael Lewis' The Premonition: The Only Covid-19 Book Worth Reading | People I (Mostly) Admire | 63
Liar's Poker
Buy on AmazonLet's go back to Liar's Poker, because another thing that struck me looking back was just how awful the people in the book behaved.
Episode: Michael Lewis' The Premonition: The Only Covid-19 Book Worth Reading | People I (Mostly) Admire | 63
Rebel in the ranks
Buy on AmazonYou've written a book called Rebel in the Ranks, which is about Martin Luther; could you just paint a picture of Martin Luther, this figure who so profoundly influenced the path of humanity? Was he an obvious person to trigger the Reformation?
Episode: How Does Historian Brad Gregory Make a Boring Topic So Mind-Blowing? | People I (Mostly) Admire | 62
The unintended Reformation
Buy on AmazonI'm now embarked on a project that's going to take me several years, I'm sure, and it makes Unintended Reformation look like a micro-history.
Episode: How Does Historian Brad Gregory Make a Boring Topic So Mind-Blowing? | People I (Mostly) Admire | 62
The Difference
Buy on AmazonThere's an old book called 'The Difference,' which explores what makes the best teams for judgment. It shows that teams comprised of people with different views outperform teams of experts.
Episode: Was Austan Goolsbee’s First Visit to the Oval Office Almost His Last?| People I (Mostly) Admire | 61
Plant Hunter
Buy on AmazonProfessor Cassandra Quave, an ethnobotanist at Emory University, tells her story in an amazing new memoir entitled The Plant Hunter. Her right leg was amputated when she was three years old, and a subsequent staph infection nearly killed her.
Episode: Cassandra Quave Thinks the Way Antibiotics Are Developed Might Kill Us | People I (Mostly) Admire 60
Plant Hunter
Buy on AmazonI've never really taken it very seriously until I started reading your book, The Plant Hunter. Do you have the facts about how many people die each year because of drug-resistant bugs and what the projections are for, say, the year 2050?
Episode: Cassandra Quave Thinks the Way Antibiotics Are Developed Might Kill Us | People I (Mostly) Admire 60
Plant Hunter
Buy on AmazonReading your amazing book, The Plant Hunter, it seems like you've embraced a radically different vision for finding new antibiotics than most of your colleagues. Tell us about that approach.
Episode: Cassandra Quave Thinks the Way Antibiotics Are Developed Might Kill Us | People I (Mostly) Admire 60
Range
Buy on AmazonThat's Sal Khan, the founder of the hugely popular education non-profit Khan Academy. Here's David Epstein, the author of Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.
Episode: Who Gives the Worst Advice? | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 59
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Buy on AmazonIf you're implying that we've been too persuasive—even books like Thinking, Fast and Slow, which is Danny's popular book, have managed to convince laypeople that behavioral economics is the most powerful tool one has ever encountered.
Episode: Why Is Richard Thaler Such a ****ing Optimist? | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 58
Measure What Matter
Buy on AmazonIn addition, his New York Times number one bestseller, called "Measure What Matters," popularized the management approach known as Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs.
Episode: What Makes John Doerr Think He Can Save the Planet? | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 57
Career and Family
Buy on AmazonClaudia has pulled this research together into a brand new book entitled "Career and Family: Women's Century-Long Journey Towards Equity."
Episode: Claudia Goldin: "What’s 'Greedy Work' and Why Is It a Problem?" | People I (Mostly) Admire | Ep 56
Collapse
Buy on AmazonMy guest today, Jared Diamond, has written some of the best-selling popular science books of all time, including "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and "Collapse."
Episode: Jared Diamond on the Downfall of Civilizations — and His Optimism for Ours | Episode 55
Collapse
Buy on AmazonSo many listeners know your books like "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and "Collapse," which are massive bestsellers.
Episode: Jared Diamond on the Downfall of Civilizations — and His Optimism for Ours | Episode 55
Freakonomics
Buy on AmazonAfter "Freakonomics" came out and we had some success in terms of publishing, there was a historian that I knew, and I was at a seminar he was at, and clearly within my earshot, he grumbled that he would never want a wide audience to read his scholarship, with clearly a reference to the fact that I had somehow degraded myself by writing for a popular audience with "Freakonomics."
Episode: Jared Diamond on the Downfall of Civilizations — and His Optimism for Ours | Episode 55
Collapse
Buy on AmazonI think I've read all your books, and my single favorite passage is when you write about the Norse Greenland settlement, and I found that part of your book in "Collapse" so remarkable because the mistakes that the settlers in North Greenland made were so preposterous, but somehow they were incredibly familiar as well.
Episode: Jared Diamond on the Downfall of Civilizations — and His Optimism for Ours | Episode 55
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Buy on AmazonIf you read Kahneman with System One and System Two, it's very clear that you want to use your System Two, your deliberative reasoning thinking, to decide your diet before you go to the supermarket rather than just impulse buying random things that come in front of you because you always shop hungry or something like that.
Episode: Max Tegmark on Why Superhuman Artificial Intelligence Won’t be Our Slave | Episode 52
Our Mathematical Universe
Buy on AmazonIn the meantime, if you want to learn more about Max's worldview, check out his book titled 'Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality.' This is a guy who definitely does not think small.
Episode: Max Tegmark on Why Treating Humanity Like a Child Will Save Us All | People I (Mostly) Admire | 51
Economic Gangsters
Buy on AmazonIf you enjoyed what you heard from Ted Miguel today, check out his book titled "Economic Gangsters," which he co-authored with another one of my favorite economists, Ray Fisman.
Episode: Edward Miguel on Collecting Economic Data by Canoe and Correlating Conflict with Rainfall | Ep 50
The Emperor's New Mind
Buy on AmazonHis book—I don't know if it's the same book we both read, *The Emperor's New Mind*? Yes, exactly, that's the book that blew my mind as a teenager. By that point, I already liked math, but he talked about these things called Turing machines, which are theoretical computers.
Episode: 49. Mathematician Sarah Hart on Why Numbers are Music to Our Ears | People I (Mostly) Admire
The Selfish Gene
Buy on AmazonThe reception was overwhelmingly positive, and Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, wrote one of the most effusive prefaces I've ever seen for a later edition of the book, which must have felt gratifying.
Episode: Robert Axelrod: Why Being Nice, Forgiving, and Provokable are the Best Strategies for Life | Ep 47
Subtract
Buy on AmazonLeidy summarizes his research ideas in a new book called "Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less."
Episode: Leidy Klotz on Why the Best Solutions Involve Less— Not More | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 45
Subtract
Buy on AmazonNow, being totally honest, when I first saw Leidy's book, I dismissed it as schlock—one of the hundreds of mediocre pop science books published every year.
Episode: Leidy Klotz on Why the Best Solutions Involve Less— Not More | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 45
Subtract
Buy on AmazonBut my friend Sandal Mullainathan, who you might remember from two previous episodes of this podcast, said, "No, Leidy's book is different.
Episode: Leidy Klotz on Why the Best Solutions Involve Less— Not More | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 45
Subtract
Buy on AmazonSo I gave" Subtract" a second chance and I realized, yes, there actually is something here.
Episode: Leidy Klotz on Why the Best Solutions Involve Less— Not More | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 45
Subtract
Buy on AmazonNow, you've written a book called "Subtract" and you've done a ton of academic research on the topic.
Episode: Leidy Klotz on Why the Best Solutions Involve Less— Not More | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 45
Subtract
Buy on AmazonI tell the story in the book, but he was basically sitting there thinking about how to lighten the drivetrain and then he's like, "What if I just take the whole thing away?"
Episode: Leidy Klotz on Why the Best Solutions Involve Less— Not More | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 45
Subtract
Buy on AmazonI also dislike many of the other examples in his book, but I give Leidy credit for good taste in this discussion.
Episode: Leidy Klotz on Why the Best Solutions Involve Less— Not More | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 45
Subtract
Buy on AmazonThe one I use in my book is actually less lofty; it's more just about my own house.
Episode: Leidy Klotz on Why the Best Solutions Involve Less— Not More | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 45
Subtract
Buy on AmazonIn a subtle way, the message I took away from your book is that don't let the fact that everybody else is additive trick you into being additive too.
Episode: Leidy Klotz on Why the Best Solutions Involve Less— Not More | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 45
Subtract
Buy on AmazonOne of the examples I use in the book is San Francisco's Embarcadero Freeway.
Episode: Leidy Klotz on Why the Best Solutions Involve Less— Not More | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 45
Triumph of the City
Buy on AmazonHe's the author of the best-selling book, Triumph of the City, and now he's back with a new book co-authored with David Cutler called Survival of the City.
Episode: Edward Glaeser Explains Why Some Cities Thrive While Others Fade Away| People I (Mostly) Admire | 44
Triumph of the City
Buy on AmazonSo back in 2008, Ed, you wrote a book called Triumph of the City, and now, 13 years later, you've got a new book called Survival of the City.
Episode: Edward Glaeser Explains Why Some Cities Thrive While Others Fade Away| People I (Mostly) Admire | 44
Survival of the City
Buy on AmazonSo back in 2008, Ed, you wrote a book called Triumph of the City, and now, 13 years later, you've got a new book called Survival of the City.
Episode: Edward Glaeser Explains Why Some Cities Thrive While Others Fade Away| People I (Mostly) Admire | 44
Triumph of the City
Buy on AmazonI wandered around before writing Triumph in Detroit for a while and the sort of eerily empty moonscape—there are just not any people.
Episode: Edward Glaeser Explains Why Some Cities Thrive While Others Fade Away| People I (Mostly) Admire | 44
Triumph of the City
Buy on AmazonIt sure feels like a conflict; it was very hard when I started working on Triumph 15 years ago. You remember that you've got to tell stories with narrative because we just purge it in our economic papers.
Episode: Edward Glaeser Explains Why Some Cities Thrive While Others Fade Away| People I (Mostly) Admire | 44
Survival of the City
Buy on AmazonSomething I was really struck by in Survival of the City was when it came time for you and your co-author David Cutler to offer your advice to policymakers on what we should be doing to build thriving cities. You emphasize that the solutions are complex, not simple, and almost no book says that because no policymaker wants to hear that the solutions are complex.
Episode: Edward Glaeser Explains Why Some Cities Thrive While Others Fade Away| People I (Mostly) Admire | 44
Freakonomics
Buy on AmazonI've kept an eye on his progress since then and, wow, even I've been amazed at what he's done, more or less single-handedly bringing Freakonomics-style approaches into the mainstream of medicine.
Episode: Dr. Bapu Jena on Why Freakonomics Is the Best Medicine | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 41
Scarcity
Buy on AmazonIn this week's episode, I pick up in the middle of our conversation, where I tell Sendhil about my first reaction to hearing that he had written a book entitled Scarcity.
Episode: Sendhil Mullainathan Explains How to Generate an Idea a Minute | People I (Mostly) Admire | Ep 38
Scarcity
Buy on AmazonOne of the things I found so unbelievable about that book was its title, Scarcity.
Episode: Sendhil Mullainathan Explains How to Generate an Idea a Minute | People I (Mostly) Admire | Ep 38
Scarcity
Buy on AmazonIf two episodes of Sendhil weren't enough for you, check out his new app; it's called Peak, P-I-Q-U-E, or his book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much.
Episode: Sendhil Mullainathan Explains How to Generate an Idea a Minute | People I (Mostly) Admire | Ep 38
A Brief History of Time
Buy on AmazonHave I ever told you the story of the Stephen Hawking book A Brief History of Time? No, so this is a book where you see it on everybody's shelf, but nobody's actually read this book, right?
Episode: Sendhil Mullainathan Thinks Messing Around Is the Best Use of Your Time | Episode 37
The Nation City
Buy on AmazonBut I was eager to talk with Rahm because I just finished reading his fascinating book, 'The Nation City: Why Mayors Are Now Running the World.' It's full of deep insights, and that's no surprise since he has a reputation for being one of the smartest people in politics.
Episode: How Rahm Emanuel Would Run the World | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 36
A tree grows in Brooklyn
Buy on AmazonStephen, I've been thinking about a conversation we had about A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. You said you loved that book, but you couldn't remember a single thing about it.
Episode: How Rahm Emanuel Would Run the World | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 36
Range
Buy on AmazonHis second book, Range, discusses the benefits of being a generalist in a world overrun with specialists.
Episode: David Epstein Knows Something About Almost Everything | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 35
Range
Buy on AmazonI hadn't really thought about this; even when I read your book, it's not like necessarily we've made a mistake as a society.
Episode: David Epstein Knows Something About Almost Everything | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 35
Range
Buy on AmazonTo give an example of that short-term long-term trade-off, a study came out too recently for me to get it into my book.
Episode: David Epstein Knows Something About Almost Everything | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 35
Range
Buy on AmazonWhat I took from your book was that there are a lot of forces, parental and societal, that push people towards being quite specialized in what they do.
Episode: David Epstein Knows Something About Almost Everything | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 35
Outliers
Buy on AmazonThe Sports Gene was popularized by Gladwell in his book Outliers.
Episode: David Epstein Knows Something About Almost Everything | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 35
The Tipping Point
Buy on AmazonThis was back in 2006, when Malcolm argued in The Tipping Point that innovative policing was the reason crime went down in the 1990s.
Episode: David Epstein Knows Something About Almost Everything | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 35
Grit
Buy on AmazonIn 2016, you wrote a book called Grit that really touched a nerve in society. It became a mega bestseller.
Episode: Angela Duckworth Explains How to Manage Your Goal Hierarchy | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 32
Grit
Buy on AmazonI sat down at the table with them, and as the camera started to roll, there was a stack of index cards in front of him that his producer had prepared with questions about my book. He asked me the first question, and I answered it okay, but then he took that stack of index cards and pushed them aside.
Episode: Angela Duckworth Explains How to Manage Your Goal Hierarchy | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 32
Grit
Buy on AmazonWhen I wrote Grit, I thought to myself, well, I guess I'll just try to explain without jargon things that psychological scientists would be able to appreciate with jargon. But I have to say it was the most intellectually challenging thing I had done because I had to put things together without the artifice of jargon.
Episode: Angela Duckworth Explains How to Manage Your Goal Hierarchy | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 32
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Buy on AmazonThey know that industrial farms are not pretty places and they are not big fans of slaughterhouses, and yet most consumers think about food systems one way—this concept from Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Episode: Bruce Friedrich Thinks There’s a Better Way to Eat Meat | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 29
Drug Use for Grown-Ups
Buy on AmazonIn his new book, "Drug Use for Grown-Ups," he argues for a radical overhaul of drug policy.
Episode: Professor Carl Hart Argues All Drugs Should Be Legal — Can He Convince Steve? | Episode 28
Drug Use for Grown-Ups
Buy on AmazonI've read your book, "Drug Use for Grown-Ups," which is an excellent book, and you really advocate for a lot of drugs that many people are against.
Episode: Professor Carl Hart Argues All Drugs Should Be Legal — Can He Convince Steve? | Episode 28
Drug Use for Grown-Ups
Buy on AmazonIn your book, you mentioned that you use heroin, and there must have been a hundred headlines about Columbia professor admits to heroin; did it surprise you how the reporting went about that issue?
Episode: Professor Carl Hart Argues All Drugs Should Be Legal — Can He Convince Steve? | Episode 28
Drug Use for Grown-Ups
Buy on AmazonYeah, so in chapter four of the book, The Brain chapter, I ask the reader to pay attention to the language that's used; oftentimes, researchers use language like 'drug users' brains have atrophied or you see this decrease in volume., Yet they only took a measure of the person's brain at one moment in time, and so they can't say anything about a change, but oftentimes they do, and that's a clear violation of what they can actually say with their current methods.
Episode: Professor Carl Hart Argues All Drugs Should Be Legal — Can He Convince Steve? | Episode 28
Autobiography
Buy on AmazonBecause I read your first book, which is called "High Price," and you were the nerdiest lab rat that ever existed; I would have never imagined you emerging as an advocate.
Episode: Professor Carl Hart Argues All Drugs Should Be Legal — Can He Convince Steve? | Episode 28
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Buy on AmazonHe has also proven he can connect with a popular audience; his 2011 book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, was a blockbuster bestseller.
Episode: Daniel Kahneman on Why Our Judgment is Flawed — and What to Do About It | Episode 27
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Buy on AmazonIt's been roughly a decade since Thinking, Fast and Slow was published, and even though that book turned out to be a massive bestseller, I still can't believe you wrote another book because I remember the last one practically killed you, right?
Episode: Daniel Kahneman on Why Our Judgment is Flawed — and What to Do About It | Episode 27
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Buy on AmazonOh, I mean, Thinking, Fast and Slow was such an experience that after that, I had forgotten everything that was not in the book, so I really needed a new thing and Noise was quite new.
Episode: Daniel Kahneman on Why Our Judgment is Flawed — and What to Do About It | Episode 27
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Buy on AmazonSo, you know, there's come to be a tremendous focus on using behavioral economics to create behavior change, to get either yourself to do something you don't want to do or get someone else to do something they don't want to do, whether it's the UK Nudge Unit or Angela Duckworth and Katie Milkman with their behavior change for good.
Episode: Daniel Kahneman on Why Our Judgment is Flawed — and What to Do About It | Episode 27
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Buy on AmazonI think because of books like Thinking, Fast and Slow, you've managed to convince laypeople that behavioral economics is the most powerful tool one has ever encountered.
Episode: Daniel Kahneman on Why Our Judgment is Flawed — and What to Do About It | Episode 27
Memory Superpowers!
Buy on AmazonI want to learn how to remember things better, and I feel incredibly lucky to have the chance to sit down with four-time USA Memory Tournament champion Nelson Dellis, who has authored the books Memory Superpowers and Remember It.
Episode: Memory Champion Nelson Dellis Helps Steve Train His Brain | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 26
Waking Up
Buy on AmazonI'd love to talk about your book, 'Waking Up.' I'm going to say something that I literally have never said about any book, and that is that I think 'Waking Up' is important.
Episode: Sam Harris: “Spirituality Is a Loaded Term.” | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 25
Life Undercover
Buy on AmazonAmaryllis Fox spent nearly a decade working as a CIA operative, recounting her experiences in the bestselling book, Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA.
Episode: Amaryllis Fox: “What Does This New Version of Mutually Assured Destruction Look Like?”| Episode 24
Life Undercover
Buy on AmazonIt's so clear from how you talk and the way you describe yourself that you are very attuned to the pain of others, whether it's the suffering of the Burmese people or the deep shock and pain you felt over 9/11, which you describe in your book.
Episode: Amaryllis Fox: “What Does This New Version of Mutually Assured Destruction Look Like?”| Episode 24
Life Undercover
Buy on AmazonIt's called Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA, and that doesn't really strike me as a typical recipe for success as a CIA operative, being extremely empathetic, or am I wrong about that?
Episode: Amaryllis Fox: “What Does This New Version of Mutually Assured Destruction Look Like?”| Episode 24
Life Undercover
Buy on AmazonA second thing that I found really surprising about your book was the suggestion that a lot of terror groups have close to—or within reach of—some kind of nuclear capabilities.
Episode: Amaryllis Fox: “What Does This New Version of Mutually Assured Destruction Look Like?”| Episode 24
Life Undercover
Buy on AmazonI think I read in the book about leaving on the last day and what my mentor had told me, which was like, 'When you leave, however much you think you did good work here and you have relationships and you did something important and you got these exceptional performance awards and la-di-da, when you leave, it’s like getting out of a swimming pool—the water will close in behind you, and no one will ever be able to see that you were here.'
Episode: Amaryllis Fox: “What Does This New Version of Mutually Assured Destruction Look Like?”| Episode 24
Life Undercover
Buy on AmazonI think you don't explicitly talk about it in the book, but there's such a brutality somehow associated with the career path you were on this year: you give up everything from your past, you spend all day masquerading as something you're not, and when you leave, as you described, you're gone and it disappears.
Episode: Amaryllis Fox: “What Does This New Version of Mutually Assured Destruction Look Like?”| Episode 24
Life Undercover
Buy on AmazonA lot of young women read this book and reach out to me, and I think that on a personal level, if I were just their friend or their mom, there’s not a lot of personal happiness to be had on the simple deep personal level doing this work.
Episode: Amaryllis Fox: “What Does This New Version of Mutually Assured Destruction Look Like?”| Episode 24
More guns, less crime
Buy on AmazonLott ended up writing a book called More Guns, Less Crime; it was quite a big seller and he received a lot of praise in certain circles for it. He became a sort of hero of the NRA crowd.
Episode: John Donohue: “I’m Frequently Called a Treasonous Enemy of the Constitution.” | Episode 20
Freakonomics
Buy on AmazonYears later, when you and I wrote about it in Freakonomics, where we had the time and space to really describe our hypothesis and approach, we didn't get any of the negative feedback we initially received.
Episode: John Donohue: “I’m Frequently Called a Treasonous Enemy of the Constitution.” | Episode 20
Business Efficiency For Dummies
Buy on AmazonAt the time, if you Googled 'business efficiency consultant,' I was like the only search result, which led to me being offered to write 'Business Efficiency for Dummies.'
Episode: Marina Nitze: “If You Googled ‘Business Efficiency Consultant,’ I Was the Only Result.” | Episode 19
Behave
Buy on AmazonHe wrote a book called 'Behave,' and I would say it's the most thorough and thoughtful, enlightening scientific book I've ever read about violence.
Episode: Robert Sapolsky: “I Don’t Think We Have Any Free Will Whatsoever.” | People I (Mostly) Admire | 18
Narratives from the crib
Buy on AmazonEven before that, as a precocious two-year-old, her nighttime ramblings while lying alone in bed were so remarkable that they were tape-recorded and analyzed, resulting in a book called 'Narratives from the Crib,' which is still in print today more than 30 years later, now with an introduction written by Emily Oster herself.
Episode: Emily Oster: “I Am a Woman Who Is Prominently Discussing Vaginas.” | People I (Mostly) Admire | 17
Expecting better
Buy on AmazonAnd so you decided, in the midst of all your academic success, but still young and untenured, to do something that many people would perceive as crazy: you decided to write a book for a non-academic audience on pregnancy, even though you’re an economist. That book, of course, was called 'Expecting Better.'
Episode: Emily Oster: “I Am a Woman Who Is Prominently Discussing Vaginas.” | People I (Mostly) Admire | 17
Cribsheet
Buy on AmazonSo 'Cribsheet,' which is your second book about child-rearing, is very much in the same spirit as 'Expecting Better,' but in many ways, I think it’s harder to write because the data are not nearly as extensive or as conclusive on child-rearing as they are on pregnancy. So how did you deal with that?
Episode: Emily Oster: “I Am a Woman Who Is Prominently Discussing Vaginas.” | People I (Mostly) Admire | 17
Sleights of mind
Buy on AmazonThere were, I don't know, 250 kids in this hall, and they had all been assigned to read a book called 'Slight of Mind,' which is a book on the neuroscience of magic. I did my show, and afterwards they were asking great questions, and one after the next, I realized we don't know the answers to these questions.
Episode: Joshua Jay: “Humans Are So, So Easy to Fool.” | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 16
The undercover economist
Buy on AmazonHis first book, The Undercover Economist, came out over 15 years ago, and it's still the first book I recommend to anyone who asks me for advice about what to read.
Episode: Tim Harford: “If You Can Make Sure You’re Not An Idiot, You’ve Done Well.” | Episode 15
Freakonomics
Buy on AmazonActually, it's interesting because Freakonomics is a book that doesn't make that mistake. Freakonomics, right from the start, is a book that says, 'Hey, let me tell you something really interesting about the world using this data.'
Episode: Tim Harford: “If You Can Make Sure You’re Not An Idiot, You’ve Done Well.” | Episode 15
The evolution of cooperation
Buy on AmazonSo from a game theory perspective, I was always a fan of Robert Axelrod's work around the evolution of cooperation. He was a political scientist.
Episode: Yul Kwon: “Don’t Try to Change Yourself All at Once.” | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 13
Pachinko
Buy on AmazonWell, of late, one of the novels that I'm very proud of is Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, which I assure you many people you know have read and loved.
Episode: Suzanne Gluck: “I’m a Person Who Can Convince Other People to Do Things” | Episode 10
The Yellow House
Buy on AmazonThis year at the National Book Awards, I was very excited because I had to duck and run between tables because Sarah Broom, who wrote the memoir The Yellow House, was up for a National Book Award as was my other client, Julia Phillips, who wrote Disappearing Earth, which she was up for fiction.
Episode: Suzanne Gluck: “I’m a Person Who Can Convince Other People to Do Things” | Episode 10
Disappearing Earth
Buy on AmazonThis year at the National Book Awards, I was very excited because I had to duck and run between tables because Sarah Broom, who wrote the memoir The Yellow House, was up for a National Book Award as was my other client, Julia Phillips, who wrote Disappearing Earth, which she was up for fiction.
Episode: Suzanne Gluck: “I’m a Person Who Can Convince Other People to Do Things” | Episode 10
She Said
Buy on AmazonI think that for anybody who has daughters, you should make them read 'She Said,' which is Watergate for girls; it's the New York Times reporters writing about breaking the Harvey Weinstein story and the reluctance of women to come forward.
Episode: Suzanne Gluck: “I’m a Person Who Can Convince Other People to Do Things” | Episode 10
Freakonomics
Buy on AmazonSo then we talked, and I have to say it took all of your persuasive powers not even to make a book like Freakonomics happen, but even to get Dubner and me to talk on the phone because I would say that we left that New York Times piece not particularly cordial because again I was super anti-social at the time and didn't really want to be written about.
Episode: Suzanne Gluck: “I’m a Person Who Can Convince Other People to Do Things” | Episode 10
Cooking for Geeks
Buy on AmazonPlease, I couldn't have a conversation with you without talking about cooking because you've written probably the craziest, in a good way, cookbook of all time. I actually have to make a confession; I picked up your book, and it was delivered to my office, and the only time I've ever hated you, Nathan, was when I decided that I would carry your cookbook home.
Episode: Nathan Myhrvold: “I Am Interested in Lots of Things, and That’s Actually a Bad Strategy.”| Episode 6
Superfreakonomics
Buy on AmazonWe had just written SuperFreakonomics; Stephen Dubner and I, our second book, and we had worked with a bunch of environmentalists on global warming. We had this chapter where we talked about global warming, and I think it was a thoughtful and honest chapter.
Episode: Nathan Myhrvold: “I Am Interested in Lots of Things, and That’s Actually a Bad Strategy.”| Episode 6
Brainiac
Buy on AmazonYeah, there seems to be, and I don't think I knew this until I wrote Brainiac and interviewed dozens of people like this, that there is such a type that just seems to be like this from the womb.
Episode: Ken Jennings on How a Midlife Crisis Led Him to Jeopardy! | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 4
Maphead
Buy on AmazonI wrote a book called Maphead about people with weird geographic quirks and hobbies, and one thing I found while writing the book is that I see the world through a very geographic lens that many people do not share, but other people with weird geography fixations do.
Episode: Ken Jennings on How a Midlife Crisis Led Him to Jeopardy! | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 4
The Better Angels of Our Nature
Buy on AmazonI think a great example comes from another one of your books called 'The Better Angels of Our Nature,' which argues that violence has greatly decreased over time, and that doesn't strike me as being a very funny topic. But your synopsis of the Old Testament in that book made me laugh so hard that I could barely breathe.
Episode: Steven Pinker: “I Manage My Controversy Portfolio Carefully” | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 1