The Ezra Klein Show

The first thing I read in this was a long time ago, and I've read it a couple times since, which is Brian Kaplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter, where he takes apart this idea that everyone's rational and talks about the implications for our political system.

The most recent version of it I read was a colleague here at Harvard, Joe Heinrich's book called The WEIRDest People in the World, that tries to understand why people in the West really are quite different and, in his terms, weird compared to others.

The third book I'd say is a more recent book by Mary Ann Frank called The Cult of the Constitution, which emphasizes ways in which we tend to fetishize certain kinds of constitutional rights instead of stepping back and thinking more purposively about what the constitution is really for.

I would highly recommend people read The Heart Principle by Helen Wong. If you read her first novel, it's really good. It's sadder and intimate. It's about grief and burnout and also really hot. It's great and it's very relaxing for this moment of time we're in.

And nonfiction, I loved Let's Get Physical by Daniel Friedman. It's a history of women in fitness and women in America and the sort of overlapping cultural ways in which society polices women bodies and women try to take ownership of their bodies. And it's so fun and some really interesting anecdotes.

but it's called The Great Shift, Encountering God in the Biblical Era. It's by a guy named James Kugel.

He focuses on the reactions of the people around the prophets, noting how voices were taken as religious inspiration.

The first is Norman Fisher's book called When You Greet Me, I Bow, Notes and Reflections from a Life in Zen.

And I have to mention, there's a book that got me on this path, which a lot of people who have any sort of past as a geek or a current as a geek might have heard about, which is James Gleick's Chaos, Making a New Science. It is 1987.

In this book, I wanted to challenge the metaphor of the computer and point out that, no, actually the brain evolved in particular settings, you know, mostly outside.

they argue in the book that a lot of what we consider to be built in heuristics and biases that are inevitable that come along with having a human brain only show themselves when we're using the brain alone

I write in the book about keeping what's known as an interceptive journal.

There's this computer programmer named Steve Grand, and he wrote a book called Creation, which is partly about artificial intelligence, but I guess partly about artificial life.

I'm a big fan of George Saunders' first collection, Civil Warland in Bad Decline.

I recently read this novel called On Fragile Waves, Lily Yu. It is a kind of magic realist novel about a family of Afghan refugees who are seeking asylum in Australia.

The first political book I ever received was 9-11 by Noam Chomsky. My older brother gave it to me just a little bit after 9-11, and I read it, and I reread it, and I argued with people over it.

And this really turns to your recent book, Founding God's Nation, which is about the book of Exodus.

You wrote a book called Leading a Worthy Life. So tell me what a worthy life is.

He's also the author of several books, including the 2015 bestseller, Superforecasting, The Art and Science of Prediction, co-authored with Dan Gardner.

that story we used in the Superforecasting book later was the story of John F. Kennedy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.