Episode
16 Books That Shaped Us
- Podcast
- Geopolitical Cousins
- Published
- Jul 6, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 5454
- Processing state
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Summary
It's the Book Episode !!! Marko and Jacob turn their usual geopolitical sparring into a book draft: eight titles each, no rules, no rankings, just the texts that actually built their analytical muscle <3 The cousin picks span philosophy, fiction, psychology, and history. Machiavelli's The Prince opens the list, followed by texts on Marxism, biography, social psychology, and intelligence tradecraft. Marko favors frameworks that discipline thinking; Jshap leans on fiction and history to capture how humans behave. Tune in to hear more :) -- Timestamps: (00:00) - Welcome and Reading Habit (01:06) - Heat Talk and Air Conditioning (03:34) - Book Draft Setup (04:54) - Machiavelli The Prince (16:20) - Talmud and Contrarian Thinking (23:14) - Marx Das Kapital (43:33) - Analyst Biases Primer (46:15) - Framework Over Rolodex (50:03) - Weber Versus Marx (53:53) - Power And Human Nature (01:02:47) - Realism And Institutions (01:12:48) - Haunting Endings And Paradigms -- Referenced in the Show: The Prince — Niccolò Machiavelli (Marko Papic) The Talmud — Jewish corpus of rabbinic commentary, no single author (Jacob Shapiro) Das Kapital (Capital) — Karl Marx (Marko Papic) All the King's Men — Robert Penn Warren (Jacob Shapiro) The Person and the Situation — Lee Ross & Richard Nisbett (Marko Papic) Psychology of Intelligence Analysis — Richards J. Heuer Jr. (Jacob Shapiro) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism — Max Weber (Marko Papic) Master of the Senate (The Years of Lyndon Johnson series) — Robert Caro (Jacob Shapiro) Lord of the Flies — William Golding (Marko Papic) Politics Among Nations — Hans Morgenthau (Jacob Shapiro) The Tragedy of Great Power Politics — John Mearsheimer (Marko Papic) The Search for Modern China — Jonathan Spence (Jacob Shapiro) Why Nations…