
Talking Books
Listen and hear from books. Understand more from great writers and thinkers.
Latest episodes

Jul 22, 2024 • 1h 30min
U.S. and China: Edging Toward the Brink? Roundtable with Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson, the celebrated historian who predicted Cold War II in 2018, has assembled the sharpest minds from both sides of the Bamboo Curtain for a discussion on the future of U.S.-China relations.
David Daokui Li
Andrew Erickson
Niall Ferguson
Keyu Jin
Matt Pottinger

Jul 22, 2024 • 16h 19min
Guns, Germs and Steel
Why has human history unfolded so differently across the globe? And what can it teach us about our current crisis?Jared Diamond puts the case that geography and biogeography, not race, moulded the contrasting fates of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and aboriginal Australians.

Jul 22, 2024 • 60min
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Part 4
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character is an edited collection of reminiscences by the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman. Released in 1985, covers a variety of instances in Feynman's life. The anecdotes in the book are based on recorded audio conversations that Feynman had with his close friend and drumming partner Ralph Leighton.

Jul 22, 2024 • 1h 1min
The Iconoclast - A Conversation with Peter Thiel and Andrew Sorkin
Peter Thiel has made no secret of his feelings about economic and cultural issues. Hear him discuss his vision for the future, his bets on AI and digital currencies, his thoughts on the state of America — and why he’s staying out of the 2024 U.S. presidential election (for now).

Jul 22, 2024 • 60min
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Part 3
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character is an edited collection of reminiscences by the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman. Released in 1985, covers a variety of instances in Feynman's life. The anecdotes in the book are based on recorded audio conversations that Feynman had with his close friend and drumming partner Ralph Leighton.

Jul 22, 2024 • 60min
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Part 2
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character is an edited collection of reminiscences by the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman. Released in 1985, covers a variety of instances in Feynman's life. The anecdotes in the book are based on recorded audio conversations that Feynman had with his close friend and drumming partner Ralph Leighton.

Jul 21, 2024 • 60min
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Part 1
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character is an edited collection of reminiscences by the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman. Released in 1985, covers a variety of instances in Feynman's life. The anecdotes in the book are based on recorded audio conversations that Feynman had with his close friend and drumming partner Ralph Leighton.

Jul 10, 2024 • 1h 14min
The All In Interview: The Jonathan Haidt Interview
(0:00) New format: The All-In Interview!
(0:59) Jonathan Haidt joins Jason and Friedberg: broader themes of his work, gamification and supercharged social media
(12:39) Understanding how humans are wired from an evolutionary biology perspective
(27:22) Haidt's proposals to help younger generations
(33:12) Linking themes and trends in Haidt's books with recent college protests
(48:17) Explaining traditional liberalism and conservatism
(56:55) Lightning Round: Parenting tips, Gen Z employees

Jul 8, 2024 • 10h 26min
Walter Isaacson's 'Elon Musk' Part 1
Epic feats. Epic failures. An epic story.Walter Isaacson charts Elon Musk’s journey from humble beginnings to one of the wealthiest people on the planet – but is Musk a genius or a jerk? From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of Elon Musk, the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era – a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter.When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue and charismatic fantasist.His father’s impact on his psyche would linger. He developed into a tough yet vulnerable man-child with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission, and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive.At the beginning of 2022 – after a year marked by SpaceX launching thirty-one rockets into orbit, Tesla selling a million cars, and him becoming the richest man on earth – Musk spoke ruefully about his compulsion to stir up dramas. ‘I need to shift my mindset away from being in crisis mode, which it has been for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life,’ he said.It was a wistful comment, not a New Year’s resolution. Even as he said it, he was secretly buying up shares of Twitter, the world’s ultimate playground. Over the years, whenever he was in a dark place, his mind went back to being bullied on the playground. Now he had the chance to own the playground.

Jun 29, 2024 • 7h 27min
David Brook's How To Know a Person
If you are going to care for someone, you must first understand them. If you're going to hire, marry, or befriend someone, you have to be able to see them. If you are going to work closely with someone, you have to be able to make them feel recognized and valued. As David Brooks observes, "The older I get, the more I come to the certainty that there is one skill at the center of any healthy family, company, classroom, community or nation: the ability to see each other, to know other people, to make them feel valued, heard and understood."And yet we humans don't do this well. All around us are people who feel invisible, unseen, misunderstood. In How to Know a Person, Brooks sets out to help us to do better, posing questions that are essential for all of us. If you want to know a person, what kind of attention should you cast on them? What kind of conversations should you have? What parts of a person's story should you pay attention to?
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