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Mark Bittman

American journalist, food writer

Recorded said elsewhere, not written here
I buy a one-off; I see a book someone will like and I buy that. I have bought Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott for a number of people who’ve told me they were struggling with writing, because I think it’s a really great writing book and it’s a good read anyway.

Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 19 June 2018 source ↗

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Chip Conley American hotelier and writer
Well, other than Man’s Search For Meaning , which is probably my number one gift, recently, the last couple years there’s a book called The 100-Year Life . The 100-Year Life , written by a couple Brits, and it sort of says, “Imagine the future where the average person lives to 100. How is that going to change on a personal and societal basis?” It’s a really interesting, observational book. The Happiness Curve , which we talked about earlier. The U-curve of happiness is what we call it. The name of the book is by Jonathan Rauch, it’s called The Happiness Curve . That’s become a favorite to gift. I also love Danny Meyer the restaurateur. He’s got one of the best books on hospitality ever written, which is called Setting the Table .
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 24 June 2019 source ↗
Chris Dixon American tech entrepreneur, investor
I really like history and I particularly like the era of the Victorian industrial age of like 1850 to 1920 or something. It’s an amazing period where you, I think of it as a period. We had like a hundred Elon Musks. So you had Westinghouse and Edison and Ford and the Wright brothers and Bell and just goes on and on. And you had that period where just the number of incredible inventions during that period. This was in that 50-year period. I mean, the airplane, the car, the photograph, the light bulb, for God’s sake, this amazing book called Empires of Light . It’s the battle between Westinghouse and Edison. It’s really fascinating. It was enterprise sales. They invent the light bulb. Westinghouse has AC, Edison has DC. And just went town to town, selling them and like “Use my system.” And there was this awesome moment at the end. The coup de grâce was Westinghouse built, because the key benefit of AC is it goes farther without losing power. He built this giant plant up at Niagara Falls and then turned the lights on in Buffalo. And it was like this magic act. They all like, like borrowed tons of money. And the other thing that’s cool about them is they were all engineers. It reminds me a lot — and they all started off in the telegraph business, which at the time was sort of the internet of that era. So that was cool. There’s another book. I’m sorry, I have crypto on my brain. I can’t help it. There’s a book I really like called [
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 28 October 2021 source ↗
Rich Barton American businessman
Yeah, I am not your typical person probably sitting in this seat and that I, maybe I am, I am not a nonfiction, business book, sorry Tim.
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 19 April 2025 source ↗
Nick Thompson Chief executive of The Atlantic; former editor in chief of Wired
Oh, that I can answer. So, each of the last two years I’ve given one book to a bunch of people. And this year, it’s a book by Robert Wright called Why Buddhism is True . And it’s a story about mindfulness and about the science of Buddhism and the current neuroscienc, about how our minds work, making the argument that the things people have said about mindfulness, meditation, and the way it changes your capacity to empathize with other people and to break out of the tribalism that we’re all locked into, the things that Buddhism has said about that turn out to be scientifically correct. And here’s a story about why. Wonderful book. Robert Wright is one of the smartest writers I’ve ever read. His book Nonzero is among my five favorite books of all time. So, that book came out recently, and I gave that to my closest friend and my family. The year before, I gave a book by Larissa MacFarquhar called Strangers Drowning which is a story about people who make extraordinary moral choices like the choice to adopt 23 children and bring them into your lives, who just make crazy choices and why they make those choices. And Larissa is one of the smartest writers at the New Yorker. Everything she writes is absolutely brilliant, and the book is brilliant to get into ten discreet chapters about people who make choices like that. So, I gave Larissa’s book last year and Robert Wright’s book this year. Tim Ferriss: Thank you.
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 26 June 2018 source ↗

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