The Perfect Summary Podcast

A farmyard revolution promises equality for every animal, then slides, one small rewritten rule at a time, into the tyranny it set out to end.

A gentle prince returns to Russia and tests whether pure goodness can survive money, pride and obsessive love.

Harvard negotiation professor Robert Mnookin uses Churchill, Mandela, IBM and bitter family fights to show when to make a deal with an enemy and when to refuse.

Sam Harris argues that even kind white lies cost more than they save, and that simply telling the truth makes life simpler and relationships deeper.

The Python community's opinionated field guide to setting up, writing, reading and shipping great code.

Jon Kabat-Zinn's gentle classic on mindfulness: how to stop living on autopilot and pay attention to the only moment you have, on the cushion and at the kitchen sink.

A beaten Darrow crosses the Solar System to find allies while his rival Lysander reaches for a crown.

David Lifton's fifteen-year investigation argues that President Kennedy's body was secretly altered between Dallas and Bethesda to hide shots fired from the front.

Ten years after the revolution, Darrow's army is besieged on Mercury, the Republic's Senate is torn apart and Mars is overrun in the saga's darkest book.

Mel Robbins argues that high-fiving your own reflection every morning can quiet self-criticism and teach you to back yourself the way you back everyone else.

Ten years after the revolution, its hero, its victims and its exiles discover what freedom really costs.

Darrow, a Red miner remade as a Gold, turns his enemies on each other and carries his secret rebellion from Mars into a war across the solar system.

Broken by a year in the dark, a slave-born revolutionary rises again to lead a solar-system-wide war against the tyrants who rule it in the finale of the Red Rising trilogy.

A Dead Sea Scrolls scholar argues Christianity began as a mushroom-eating fertility cult, and pays for it with his career.

A teenage miner on Mars is remade as one of the ruling Golds to bring down the empire that hanged his wife.

A journalist plugs his own nose for ten days to show why breathing slowly and through the nose may be one of the most overlooked foundations of health.

Charles Eisenstein argues that our debt-and-interest money system manufactures scarcity and separation, and sketches a gift-based, ecological economy to replace it.

C.S. Lewis closes his Space Trilogy on Earth, where a sinister scientific institute, a fraying young marriage and a sleeping Merlin collide in a battle for England's soul.

Tim Ferriss uses cooking as a training ground for meta-learning, a system for picking up any skill far faster than the conventional route allows.

How the Comanches built a horseback empire on the southern plains, and how Quanah Parker, son of a captive white mother, led them through its violent fall.

Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel argues that our faith in meritocracy has made winners arrogant, made everyone else feel humiliated, and fuelled the populist backlash, and that humility and respect for work are the way back.

Dane Ortlund draws on Jesus's own self-description and the Puritans to argue that Christ's deepest heart toward weary sinners and sufferers is tender, eager, unwavering love.

Psychiatrist Paul Conti argues that trauma spreads like a hidden disease through people, families and whole societies, and that knowledge, compassion and community can treat it and even prevent it.

Richard Feynman's last book of memories moves from a childhood of questions and a doomed love story to his investigation of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

C.S. Lewis sends Elwin Ransom to an unfallen Venus, where a new Eve faces a tempter and the fate of a world rests on one reluctant man.

An orthodontist and an evolutionary biologist argue that modern life is shrinking our jaws, crowding our teeth and narrowing our airways, and that parents can do something about it early.

Steven Pressfield names the inner enemy that keeps us from our real work, Resistance, and shows how to beat it by turning pro and showing up every day.

A science journalist and a neuroscientist sort the hype from the hard evidence to show how meditation can lastingly change who we are.

Greg Koukl's friendly playbook for talking about Christian convictions by asking good questions, spotting weak arguments, and leaving a 'stone in someone's shoe' instead of starting a fight.

A Nobel physicist's mischievous, curious, sometimes profound life stories, from cracking safes at Los Alamos to drumming samba in Brazil, ending with a famous warning against fooling yourself.