Two brothers talk through the BEST non-fiction books about science, evolution, culture, history, complexity science, nature, cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence.
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Part 2 of our American Nations deep dive and this is where the book really opens up. We pick up right after independence and just keep going, all the way through the Civil War, the closing of the frontier, and straight into why the map still looks like this today. Turns out the Revolutionary War wasn't really thirteen colonies teaming up against Britain, it was eleven different cultures with…
America isn't one culture, it's eleven. In this episode, we dig into Colin Woodard's American Nations (with a heavy assist from Scott Alexander's Slate Star Codex review of David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed) to trace how six distinct colonial cultures, Spanish El Norte, French New France, the Puritan Yankeedom, the Cavalier Tidewater, the Dutch New Netherland, the Quaker Midlands, the Deep…
Homer's The Odyssey, broken down book by book, and why Christopher Nolan calls it the "ur-text" of everything he's ever filmed. We get into the cultural programming of ancient man: guest friendship, homecoming, hubris, rank versus virtue, and what it actually meant to "be a man" in Dark Age Greece. Plus the Cyclops, the Sirens, the underworld, Achilles' brutal reversal on glory, the contest of the…
This episode, we crack open Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, the 1971 organizing manual that has been studied by everyone from Tea Party activists to Hillary Clinton, and argued over ever since. Alinsky opens the book by crediting Lucifer as the very first radical, frames himself as the answer to Machiavelli's The Prince, and then lays out a worldview where power is the only currency and…
The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom by James Burnham (1943). a book about a book about five other books. Burnham picks six political philosophers (Machiavelli, Mosca, Sorel, Pareto, Michels, and himself) who all tried the same thing: study politics like a science. no ideology. no shoulds. just what actually happens when humans organize themselves. what we cover: why every revolution just…
In Part 2 of our coverage of Henry Kissinger's World Order, Andrew and JD turn the Eye of Sauron east, tracing how Japan, India, and China each entered (or were dragged into) the modern international order, and what that history means for how they behave on the world stage today. From Commodore Perry's gunboat diplomacy and Kautilya's ancient blueprint for global domination, to Mao's Cultural…
Everyone is talking about the world order right now. China, Russia, Iran, Nato, Ukraine. but if you don't know where the "world order" came from, you're just watching the news without a map. This episode is a map! World Order by Henry Kissinger (2014): In this episode, we break down Kissinger's sweeping history of how nations have sought stability and power from the 1600s to today, chapter by…
Southern Italy is poorer than northern Italy because the Catholic Church never conquered it. And that's not a hot take, that's what the data says. Part 2 of our deep dive into how the Western church's marriage bans accidentally created modern psychology, and why understanding WEIRD culture matters for everything from trade to testosterone to trust. Not "quirky." Not "unique." Statistically,…
Why do people in the modern West think the way they do, and why does it feel so different from almost everyone else in history? In this episode of Books Brothers, we dive into The Weirdest People in the World by Joseph Henrich, a bold and data driven exploration of how culture reshaped psychology in Western Europe, and how that psychological shift helped give rise to modern states, markets,…
Episode 16: The Medici by Paul Strathern** In this episode, we explore one of the most influential families in European history. Paul Strathern’s The Medici gives an inside look at the rise of a banking dynasty that shaped the Renaissance, shifted the balance of power in Italy, and helped lay foundations for the modern world. We walk through the political chaos of medieval Italy, the forged…
