Monthly round-up · All months
Books podcasts were talking about in April 2026
During April 2026, several prominent podcasts featured discussions and recommendations covering a diverse array of historical, economic, and literary works. On The Joe Rogan Experience, Ari Shaffir discussed Mike Caro's Book of Poker Tells to illustrate a specific poker tell he utilized during a World Series event. Meanwhile, Ben Felix appeared on The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett to recommend Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital by Carlota Perez, using it to analyze historical cycles of technological revolutions and financial capital. The Ezra Klein Show hosted multiple guests who shared influential reads. Ezra Klein mentioned Brink Lindsey's The Permanent Problem while exploring ideas adjacent to abundance. Mark Dunkelman recommended Lizabeth Cohen's Making a New Deal, Yoni Appelbaum's Stuck to address geographic and socioeconomic mobility issues, and Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert to trace the arc of western dam building. Additionally, Derek Thompson recommended C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity for its analysis of morality and mentioned Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children among a list of books he reread. These discussions highlighted how historical perspectives, economic cycles, and human behavior continue to resonate across various contemporary podcast conversations.
The Joe Rogan Experience
-
Caro's Book of Poker Tells
Recommended“The best my favorite book is this guy Mike Caro. It's a book called Mike Caro's Book of Poker Tells.”
-
Cobalt Red
Discussed“And uh that is cobalt red. The blood of the Congo powers our lives.”
-
The Holy Quran
Discussed“So, in the Holy Quran, it mentions that uh you know, if the Muslims were to do what they was going to do, that they would have many wells.”
-
Secret City
Discussed“Kerchik refers repeatedly to memos and notes from the Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee's papers, including summaries by reporter Scott Armstrong and Ted Gup. These papers are held in institutional archives and have been referenced in other discussions of Secret City.”
-
The Coming Wave
Recommended“He wrote this book, The Coming Wave. He uh he was one of the people who created Google's Deep Mind, right? And The Coming Wave is just a wonderful breakdown of historic examples of new technology completely transforming humanity.”
-
Encountering the Book of Isaiah (Encountering Biblical Studies)
Discussed“Inside the scrolls they found the Book of Isaiah. It was a thousand years older than the oldest version of the Book of Isaiah that we had ever found and it's identical verbatim to the Book of Isaiah that is currently in the Bible.”
-
A House of Cards
Recommended“I think House of Cards is probably really close to what the government's actually like. Go back and watch that show again.”
-
A People's Guide to Los Angeles
Discussed“And she dealt with it with Ibogaine and has come to the conclusion that her great gift to give to the world out there is to write this book called A Christian's Guide to Psychedelics.”
-
The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth
Discussed“And then there's also the sacred mushroom in the cross, the John Marco Allegro book, where he where he was one of the ordained ministers that was his task was to decode the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
-
Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital
Recommended“There's a great book by an economist named Carlota Perez. The book is Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital. And she documents this exact cycle throughout history”
-
Bombing to Win
Discussed“I wanted to understand how we lost the Vietnam War and this became the origins of bombing to win which is your book I have here in front of me. That's bombing to win in 1985.”
How I Write
-
Far Tortuga
Discussed“Peter Mat's brilliant book, Far Tartuga, is in Ptois, you know, most of it.”
-
Help, Thanks, Wow
Discussed“I have the book help thanks wow here.”
-
A Confederacy of Dunces
Discussed“Maybe it's um Ignatius J. Riley in a confederacy of Dun Dunes who has nothing nothing in common with me, but I recognize him as a really dear messed up human like the rest of us.”
-
Imperfect Birds
Discussed“I've had a couple of books with a with the word bird in them imperfect birds and bird by bird”
-
Still Life at Eighty
Discussed“Abigail Thomas, who's written a book on memoir and and another book, Still Life at 80, she gave me a few of these great prompts.”
-
Kindness Is Caring, Friendship Is Sharing
Discussed“This is a book of mine that just came out, Kindness is Caring, Friendship is Sharing, which I wrote with Trumbull Rotary Club, and they're an organization that tries to make the world a kinder, gentler place.”
-
Sweet Dreams Ahead Time for Bed
Discussed“This is uh some Sorry, this is Sweet Dreams Ahead, Time for Bed. And it is helping kids slow down.”
-
Sometimes Apart, Always in My Heart
Discussed“This is Sometimes Apart, Always in My Heart, helping military families send love from far away. And I wrote this with a nonprofit called United Through Reading.”
-
There's No Place Like Space! All About Our Solar System
Discussed“There's No Place Like Space all about our solar system. And it opens up pretty fast.”
-
The Cat in the Hat
Discussed“Well, for those of you out there that might have picked up on this, those last two lines were in the original Cat in the Hat book.”
-
Is a Camel a Mammal?
Discussed“Random House developed the Cat in the Hat's Learning Library and the first two books they asked me to do was Is a Camel a Mammal and Fine Feathered Friends.”
-
Fine Feathered Friends
Discussed“Random House developed the Cat in the Hat's Learning Library and the first two books they asked me to do was Is a Camel a Mammal and Fine Feathered Friends.”
-
Night
Discussed“I think that there's a moment in Night by Elie Wiesel, which is obviously about a completely different subject, but the Holocaust.”
-
Goodnight Moon 60th Anniversary Edition
Discussed“They're reading Goodnight Moon. They were reading Very Hungry Caterpillar. It was wonderful.”
-
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
Discussed“They're reading Goodnight Moon. They were reading Very Hungry Caterpillar. It was wonderful.”
-
Oh, the Places You'll Go!
Discussed“I have a book that's a runaway bestseller called Oh, Baby, the Places You'll Go. And it was the only time I heard from Dr. Seuss's widow, Audrey Geisel, and she called me herself.”
-
Horton Hears a Who!
Discussed“I went and wrote Horton Hears a Who and Horton Hatches the Egg and Yertle the Turtle and Thidwick the Moose and I read them all.”
-
Horton Hatches the Egg
Discussed“I went and wrote Horton Hears a Who and Horton Hatches the Egg and Yertle the Turtle and Thidwick the Moose and I read them all.”
-
Yertle the Turtle
Discussed“I went and wrote Horton Hears a Who and Horton Hatches the Egg and Yertle the Turtle and Thidwick the Moose and I read them all.”
-
Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories
Discussed“I went and wrote Horton Hears a Who and Horton Hatches the Egg and Yertle the Turtle and Thidwick the Moose and I read them all.”
-
Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose
Discussed“I went and wrote Horton Hears a Who and Horton Hatches the Egg and Yertle the Turtle and Thidwick the Moose and I read them all.”
The Ezra Klein Show
-
The Permanent Problem
Recommended“I mean, Brink Lindsay in his sort of abundance adjacent new book, The Permanent Problem, is is circling some of these ideas.”
-
Making a New Deal
Recommended“So uh the first book I always recommend to anyone is Liz Cohen's Making a New Deal, which I think is the greatest pure book of history that I've ever read.”
-
Stuck
Recommended“The second book which I hope people will pick up is uh yoni apple bomb stuck which gets to a lot of these issues explicitly in the realm of housing talks about how a lack of geographic mobility for many of the reasons that we have here has really been the hindrance to socioeconomic mobility.”
-
Cadillac Desert
Recommended“But there's a book by uh Mark Reeseman called Cadillac Desert which essentially traces the same arc uh with a guy named Floyd Dominy running the Bureau of Reclamation and building dams all across the West.”
-
Mere Christianity
Recommended“My three books number one weird choice maybe for reformed Jew but Mere Christianity by CS Lewis in the first 30 pages in particular is probably the most interesting analysis of the concept of morality that I've ever read.”
-
The Emperor's Children
Recommended“Um, The Emperor's Children by Cla Massud, The Interestings by Me Witzer, and The Secret History by Donna Tart.”
-
The Interestings
Recommended“Um, The Emperor's Children by Cla Massud, The Interestings by Me Witzer, and The Secret History by Donna Tart.”
-
How Buildings Learn
Discussed“It is very, very long, and along the way brand has been writing these very beautiful, unusual books, not just the whole Earth Catalog, but "How Buildings Learn" in 1994, which I love.”
-
Maintenance of Everything
Discussed“And then most recently, this book "The Maintenance of Everything, Part One", which explores something many of us would rather avoid the constant and almost spiritually important work of fixing our cars, of doing home repairs, of caring for each other.”
-
L'Encyclopédie
Discussed“But the one I was looking at was Diderot’s "Encyclopédie," which had diagrams, basically, of all the trades and crafts of the 18th century actually worked.”
-
The Encyclopædia Britannica
Discussed“they came up with their own encyclopedia called the "Encyclopedia Britannica," which went from strength to strength for 100 years.”
-
The Perfectionists
Recommended“I recommend a book by Simon Winchester called "The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World."”
-
World Eaters
Recommended“The second one is "World Eaters" by Catherine Bracy which is marketed as this deeply anti-vax book, but I actually think is written by a tech insider and a much more nuanced approach to the incentives that venture capital sets up.”
-
Taxation: the People's Business
Discussed“This is from Andrew Mellon’s 1924 book "Taxation: the People’s Business." He writes the fairness of taxing more lightly income from wages, salaries or from investments is beyond question.”
-
The Age of Extraction
Recommended“The first book is "The Age of Extraction" by Tim Wu. This is a fantastic book that talks about how many of our companies that used to do a lot of good for the world are now, rather than producing wealth, they are doing wealth extraction”
-
Wars of Ambition
Recommended“And I think it’s pretty essential reading for a lot of the stuff we were just talking about a second book, Afshon Ostovar has a recent book called "Wars of Ambition," which is a really sweeping history of American Iranian competition across the entire Middle East, and it’s pretty much as timely as you can get in terms of really”
-
The Second Emancipation
Recommended“And then for the last book, I really went back and forth, but I think I’m going to go with Howard French’s recent book called "The Second Emancipation." It’s a biography of Kwame Nkrumah and Ghanaian independence, and it has nothing to do with Israel-Palestine or the Middle East, but it’s just a fascinating story about decolonization and the frustrations”
-
Mayors in the Middle
Recommended“The first book is by Diana Greenwald, "Mayors in the Middle," which is really about the indirect Israeli control of Palestinian territories. And she does that in a brilliant way, in a way that kind of brings home why it is a one state reality.”
-
Israel: What Went Wrong?
Recommended“The second book is by Omer Bartov. Omer has a New book. It’s called "Israel: What Went Wrong?" It’s coming out this month. I happened to read the galleys before it came out, and it’s very powerful kind of interpretation of what happened in Israel, a country that was essentially, in part built to protect Jews globally and in fact”
-
Tomorrow Is Yesterday
Recommended“The third book is by Hussein Agha, Robert Malley. "Tomorrow is Yesterday." These are two seasoned analysts. Robert Malley, of course, served in the US government for many years on israel-palestine as well as on Iran. And I had advised the Palestinian delegation they had written together in the past. But this book is a powerful book, really about looking”
-
A World Safe for Democracy
Recommended“The best scholar who's written on this is a guy named John Ikenberry at Princeton. And I think the book is called A World Safe for Democracy. And encapsulates what is this thing, the rules-based international order, the liberal international order that the US created.”
-
The Irony of American History
Recommended“The second is a book by Reinhold Niebuhr called The Irony of American History. And it's really all about the great danger when you are powerful of believing you are virtuous and believing that you know, might is right.”
-
The Twilight War
Recommended“The Twilight War by David Christ. Um, the subtitle is The Secret History of America's 30-year conflict with Iran. So it's obviously a little bit outdated, but David Christ is a Pentagon historian and he writes about the tanker war period”
-
American hostages in Iran : the conduct of a crisis
Recommended“another one I would recommend is an even older book that was done of the hostage crisis. Um, edited by Warren Christopher who of course served in many senior positions and um really just talked through all of the diplomats, the military officials and the bankers who were played a really important role in in helping end what was also”
The Daily Stoic
-
A Guide to the Good Life
Discussed“I read I think William Irvine, that book, that was like the first book that I read and it was really about just intense the good life? The guy to the good life...”
-
Go Gentle
Recommended“She has a new book called Go Gentle.”
-
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse Fifth Anniversary Limited Edition
Recommended“Have you read uh The Boy, the Fox, the Horse, and the Mole? It's this little children's fable.”
-
What to Make of a Life
Discussed“And I actually I said, I have a copy of the galley of his new book on my desk, which I didn't bring on this trip cuz I didn't have room in my suitcase, but I I need to read it cuz I'm about to interview him.”
-
In Love and War
Discussed“I first of all sat down and read and I read his book uh which he wrote in alternating chapters with his wife uh called in love and war...”
-
The Guns of August
Discussed“And and then, uh, she ends up writing this book, The Guns of August. And one of my favorite little stories in there is about how, you know, the series of sort of chances.”
Huberman Lab
-
Mechanisms of Memory
Discussed“In fact, there is a beautiful review that was published in the journal Neuron, Cell Press journal, excellent journal, called Mechanisms of Memory Under Stress. And I just want to read to you the first opening paragraph of this review.”
-
Photographic Memory
Discussed“The title of this paper is photographic memory, the effects of our volitional photo taking on memory for visual and auditory aspects of an experience.”
Modern Wisdom
-
Cyropaedia
Discussed“Somebody brings up the example of Cyrus the Great, the great king of Persia who founded the Persian Empire. Um Xenophon says, doesn't he that Cyrus made all these arrangements before his death that he wanted to be buried in this way and this should happen and so forth after he was um after he was gone. And of course”
-
On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life
Recommended“But it a friend of mine a few months in recommended that I read this book by Nietzsche. One of his early books that and I'd read some Nietzsche before. It's called On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life.”
-
Separation
Discussed“And another book like this is big like this called separation, where he studied cultures all over the world.”
-
Attachment
Recommended“He wrote a big book like this called attachment, which I recommend everyone who has a baby to read.”
Interesting Times
-
Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the ROMANS
Discussed“Let’s read the book of Romans together. In Romans 1, where Paul’s essentially laying out the catechetical argument for the structure of Christianity against a Jewish messianic, hopeful backdrop.”
-
They Flew
Discussed“Also plenty of secondary miracles, healings and so on. Where does that fit into the reasons for historical skepticism? ... to take a different example, the Yale historian Carlos Eire wrote a book recently called "They Flew" It’s a book about accounts of levitating Saints in the 16th and 17th century.”
-
Can We Trust the Gospels?
Discussed“One of the people you’ve debated in your many debates is a scholar and writer named Peter Williams, who wrote a book called, "Can We Trust the Gospels?"”
