Freakonomics Radio

Hey, a book before a movie. Yeah, the book. Yeah, the book. Sorry. Michael Lewis. Right. Yep.

It is episode 63 of people I mostly admire and it's called the only Cove in 19 book worth reading

This book does not accurately portray my experience at the White House.

a professional liar

if you just shut the F up and listen, you might learn something.

Wall Street establishment idiot

I read Jane Mayer's book Dark Money on the Koch brothers who have invested heavily for years in building for profit companies and nonprofit organizations and infrastructure on the right.

Fundamentally my book The Skeptical Environmentalist was really a result of my own personal journey.

I read an interview with an American economist called Julian Simon back in Wired Magazine in 1997 and he said, listen you think everything's getting worse with the environment but actually most things are getting better.

But he said one thing that really stuck with me, he said go check the data.

So I decided yeah okay I'm gonna check his data, I'm gonna you know get some of my smartest students together, we're gonna have a fun half year and prove him wrong.

That was the start of my point of saying well we should compare different priorities and of course I thought somebody else must have made this prioritization list, somebody else must have looked at that and nobody had.

You know how Sandberg says in her book, if you ask for a raise, don't go into your boss and say, hey, I need a raise. Say, actually one of my superiors, you know, your boss's boss told me I should come and ask you for a raise.

And Sheryl Sandberg is asking me to ask you for a raise.

I sent her my first book, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists.

For starters, there's the title that Grazer has given the book he just published, A Curious Mind.

So I've done that with probably a thousand people, and the book itself is in some ways a synthesis of these over 30 years of meetings that I had.

A man called Stuart Brand who taught me how to think honestly. He was the first publisher and creator of the Whole Earth Catalog which I read in high school. And the message of that kind of hippie Bible was you can invent your life to do whatever you want and that you don't need to ask permission.

In a chapter entitled June 2nd, 1910, a Harvard student commits suicide. The narrator is Quentin Compson, who also appears as a character in Absalom, Absalom. Name this classic in American literature penned by William Faulkner.

Dennis Rasmussen has published a book called The Infidel and the Professor. The subtitle is David Hume, Adam Smith and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought.

She's a cultural historian and the author of Bananas, An American History.

The banana first gained popularity around the time people were just starting to learn about germs and food hygiene.

I found some very interesting menus for very fancy occasions that might have Bananas on the menu.

You take a peeled banana, you put mustard on it, you wrap it in a slice of ham and then you bake it in a cream sauce.

I've tried it on two husbands and neither of them could eat it. They thought that was just nasty.

Last year, Van Bevel and his fellow psychologist Dominic Packer published a book called The Power of Us, harnessing our shared identities to improve performance, increase cooperation, and promote social harmony.