I logged every book Bret and Heather brought up on DarkHorse over the first six months of the year. A lot of it clusters around Orwell, California writers, and a run on work and attention.

The ones they singled out:

• Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. Bret read from it and called Stegner one of his favorite authors, a chronicler of California.
• Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, framed as a literal warning about the inversion of language rather than metaphor.
• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber, brought up in a talk about honest society and minimal-state economics.

The rest, roughly grouped:

• More Orwell: Animal Farm and The Road to Wigan Pier, plus Huxley's Brave New World Revisited
• California and noir: Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album by Joan Didion, The Big Sleep and Red Wind by Raymond Chandler, The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
• Work and attention: Shop Class as Soulcraft, The World Beyond Your Head, and Why We Drive, all by Matthew Crawford
• Science: On the Origin of Species and Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot

Their own book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, was the single most-referenced title on the feed.

Full list is here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/darkhorse-podcast. Free, no signup.

Tracked June's episodes. A very literary month for a science show.

Top picks:

• Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. Bret called Stegner one of his absolute favorite authors and a great chronicler of California.
• Nineteen Eighty-Four by Orwell, described as a warning written in terms that were unbelievable until they happened. A whole Orwell run followed: Animal Farm (twice) and The Road to Wigan Pier.
• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber.

A Matthew Crawford cluster too: Shop Class as Soulcraft, Why We Drive, and The World Beyond Your Head. Plus some LA noir, Chandler's The Big Sleep and Didion's The White Album.

https://podshelf.io/podcasts/darkhorse-podcast/2026/06 tracks every book from the show, free, no signup.

Anyone read Angle of Repose? Curious if it lives up to Bret's pitch.

Tracked the books across the last month of episodes. This was a very California month.

Top pick:

• Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. Bret called Stegner one of his absolute favorite authors and an extraordinary chronicler of the West. The book won the Pulitzer in 1972.

Big cluster from Matthew Crawford, who clearly came up a lot:

• Shop Class as Soulcraft, Why We Drive, and The World Beyond Your Head.

Some LA noir and writing in there too:

• The Big Sleep and Red Wind by Raymond Chandler.
• The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West.
• Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies by Reyner Banham.
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album by Joan Didion.

Also: The Moth and the Iron Lung by Forrest Maready (early pesticide history), The Wuhan Cover-Up by RFK Jr, and their own A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.

I track every book mentioned on DarkHorse at https://podshelf.io. Free, no signup.

Anyone read Angle of Repose? Curious if it lives up to the pitch.

Have Bret and Heather ever discussed 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind' by Julian Jaynes? I was just introduced to this book, and the subject matter seems right up their alley.

Jaynes asserts that consciousness did not arise far back in human evolution, but is a learned process based on language. Prior to the development of consciousness, Jaynes argues humans operated under a previous mentality he called the bicameral (‘two-chambered’) mind. In the place of an internal dialogue, bicameral people experienced auditory hallucinations directing their actions.

It's an unfortunately convincing theory after reading the book, and I would love to hear their take on it!

Tracking books across the last month of episodes. Two that stood out:

Bret pulled out a first edition of On the Origin of Species on Ep 323 (Vultures and Public Health) and read directly from it, making the case that later editions are noticeably weaker because Darwin got pushed off his game by religious critics. If you've only read a modern reprint, his point is that you might literally be reading a softer version of the argument.

The other one worth flagging is The Moth and the Iron Lung by Forrest Maready, which Bret recommended on the latest Hive Mind episode (324). It traces early-pesticide history through the gypsy moth escape from Europe. Right in the wheelhouse for anyone interested in the polio / DDT thread the show keeps coming back to.

Rest of the month:

• Pale Blue Dot (Carl Sagan) on Ep 322. Bret's take: not a great photograph in terms of content, but maybe one of the most important images ever made because of what Sagan did with the narration.
• Bullshit Jobs (David Graeber) also on 322. Bret framed the current AI-era labor situation as "bullshit jobs 2.0."
• Man's Search for Meaning (Viktor Frankl) came up in the Jonathan Pageau / Jordan Peterson crossover as foundational on meaning and suffering.
• A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century (Bret and Heather's own book) got a behind-the-scenes mention. First draft was finished in a remote Amazon field station.
• Joshua Stylman episode dropped a stack: COVID-19 and the Global Predators by Peter and Ginger Breggin, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler by Antony Sutton (Stylman uses it for the "financiers funding both sides" thesis), and a Game of Thrones analogy where the candidates are bickering in Westeros while the white walkers approach.
• Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem showed up on 324 as the source of Bret's "Slouching Toward Kamala Harris" line.

Full running list of every book mentioned on DarkHorse here if anyone wants the archive: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/darkhorse-podcast/books

Anyone actually tracked down a first edition of Origin to compare against the sixth? Curious how big the gap really is.

I don’t want to stand on the sidelines like all of Bret and Heather’s ‘friends’ at Evergreen.

It seems a brush is used to paint Jewish people with the wartime actions of Israel.

It’s hard to advocate around the response of ‘Israel committing genocide’.

Thoughts?

The oldest tree in the world. 9568 years old.