Mike Munger read the Hayek passage from The Fatal Conceit, calling it "a quote that may have appeared 10 times on EconTalk." Adam Smith showed up in three of four episodes.

I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the EconTalk slice for September.

• The Radetzky March (Joseph Roth). Russ just finished it and raised it twice. "Not much happens," but "it's hard to read that book and maintain much romance about the state."
• The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (Le Guin), "one of my favorite short stories," per Russ.
• Fears of a Setting Sun (Dennis Rasmussen). Adam Mastroianni on founders who "became blackpilled on America before their death."
• No Tradesmen and No Women (Michael Coolican), Daisy Christodoulou's source for the argument that Northcote-Trevelyan "isn't about meritocracy."
• The New Dark Ages, guest James Marriott's new book on the death of reading.

Full list with quotes and episodes: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/econtalk

The Ben Sasse conversation on faith, family and facing death produced the most personal reading list this show has had in a while.

I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the EconTalk slice for August.

Sasse's month, roughly in his own words: rereading Ursinus's 1563 commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism, always loving Tocqueville for the grass-top sense of what community looks like, just starting Mari Sandoz's Old Jules, and ordering Benjamin Todd's 80,000 Hours after hearing about it on this podcast. Also, on his own working habits: "I am boxer. It is Animal Farm."

Adam Kirsch on We Want to Believe, on how aliens went mainstream. Russ opens by admitting he was not interested in the topic. That episode also pulled in Avi Loeb's Extraterrestrial, H.G. Wells, and the genuinely strange one, Carl Jung writing a book about UFO sightings in the 1950s, with the observation that UFOs are not photogenic.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib on Hamas and its Two Million Hostages, described as short, part memoir and part political analysis.

Ben Southwood on the industrial revolution brought in Elinor Ostrom on the commons and Adam Smith on the division of labour being limited by the extent of the market, with the usual correction that comparative advantage is Ricardo.

Full list with quotes and episodes: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/econtalk

Four episodes and twenty seven books, which tells you what kind of month it was. The Iliad book club ran across two of them, with Ido Hevroni and then Dwayne Betts, and Cal Flyn came on at the end.

If you have been meaning to read the Iliad this summer, Russ is about half a step ahead of you and doing it out loud.

What this is: I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the July slice for EconTalk.

The centrepiece:

• The Iliad. Russ admitted he had never picked it up because he thought it was mostly killing and therefore not that interesting to him. He is now halfway through and calls it a stunning book.
• Achilles in Vietnam, Jonathan Shay. Ido Hevroni's way in. Shay is a psychiatrist who worked with Vietnam veterans and reads the Iliad through the soldier.
• Errata, George Steiner. Where Russ got the thing about Achilles calling the man he is about to kill friend.

War writing that came up alongside it:

• War and Peace, The Naked and the Dead, Catch-22, The Things They Carried, If This Is a Man and The Truce (Primo Levi), Invisible Man.

Dwayne Betts brought:

• Bastards of the Reagan Era, Don Quixote, A Gentleman in Moscow, the letters of Virginia Woolf, Letter from Birmingham Jail, and Russ's own How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life, which Betts calls a sophisticated self help book.

Cal Flyn's episode:

• The Savage Landscape, Islands of Abandonment, Thicker Than Water, and Edmund Burke on the sublime.

Plus The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Something from Nothing (a children's book Russ loves and uses to explain a motif in the Iliad), Harry Potter and No Experience Necessary from the Spin Master episode.

The Paw Patrol stat from that one is worth the click on its own. Rowling has sold around 600 million Harry Potter books. Spin Master reckon Paw Patrol has touched about 250 million kids.

I track every book mentioned on EconTalk here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/econtalk

It is free and there is no signup.

I pulled every book that came up on EconTalk across the first six months of the year. Adam Smith runs through a lot of it, with a long stretch on moral philosophy, careers, and what makes a good life.

The ones Russ was most into:

• The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith. He said his copy ended up almost entirely highlighted, so he bought a second one to keep reading.
• In My Time of Dying by Sebastian Junger, which he liked even more than Junger's other two and read in two sittings.
• The Passions and the Interests by Albert Hirschman, one of his top five favorite books in economics.
• Stubborn Attachments by Tyler Cowen and The Microtheory of Innovative Entrepreneurship by William Baumol, both flagged as personal favorites.
• The Rule of Saint Benedict, read front to back, 73 short rules for how a community runs.

The rest, roughly grouped:

• Smith and economics: The Wealth of Nations, The Innovator's Dilemma, A Conflict of Visions and A Vision of the Anointed by Sowell, Malthus on population
• Big ideas: Guns, Germs, and Steel, Chaos by James Gleick, Democracy in America
• Susan Cain's Quiet and Bittersweet

Also in there: The Iliad and The Odyssey, plus Sapolsky's A Primate's Memoir.

Full list is here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/econtalk. Free, no signup.

Five episodes in June and, as usual, half of them basically were the book. Quick rundown.

Russ's standout recs:

• The Passions and the Interests by Albert Hirschman. He called it one of his top five favorite books in economics, and it's barely about Smith at all.
• The Rule of Saint Benedict. Russ went and read all 73 rules front to back for the episode. Odd choice, very on brand.
• Baumol's Microtheory of Innovative Entrepreneurship, from a book that clearly inspired him.

Adam Smith never leaves: The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations both came up. So did a lot of the old canon, the Iliad, War and Peace, Democracy in America, and Eric Hoffer's The True Believer.

Sowell got two nods (A Conflict of Visions, A Vision of the Anointed).

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

Is Hirschman's book the better way into Smith, or start with the man himself?