This question, I’m going to sound like a scientist here but one of the books that I’ve given out a lot is called The Craft of Scientific Writing . It’s certainly something that I’m working on but when I’ve gifted books, it’s often been either to a colleague or definitely new, up and coming people in the discipline of science. The way you write scientifically is obviously different from other writing. If you want to write scientifically but in a compelling way for individuals to try and translate the science into the lay public, for example, that’s really what I try to do with The One Minute Workout is boil the science down, write it in a compelling and accessible manner. Certainly I’ve had tremendous assistance from a colleague, Christopher Shogen who is just a tremendous writer. And we know we are on the right spot where I was happy from the scientific message, and Chris was happy with the writing, or at least the readability or the accessibility of the writing style. That’s a real challenge, of course. It’s an art as much as it is a science. So, a book like The Craft of Scientific Writing helps provide some tips there because if you’re a scientist coming up, you’re constantly writing. You’re writing grants, you’re writing papers and you want to convince people with the point that you’re making. You don’t want to bore them and you want to do it in a compelling manner. Tim Ferriss:

One of our board members gave me this book called The Infinite Game , and it’s the original infinite game book. There’s some follow ons from it about how to implement the infinite game, so I forget the original author.

The book that I have gifted the most often, you would not expect this of me, but it’s called Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World .

Oh, yes. In fact, it’s funny, because I’ve just sent a couple of friends a pair of novels, and one of the novels I’ve sent to a dozen people, and it will seem like a random choice to you, but it’s one of these books that, it’s just a miracle of a book. It’s called The Long Ships , and it’s by a Scandinavian historian. It’s a novel by a Scandinavian historian who only wrote one novel. I think his name is Frans Bengtsson, and he was a Viking historian, and he packed everything he knew about the Vikings into this wonderful comic novel. At the end of it, you feel like you were a Viking for 400 pages. It’s a piece of history that he just brings to life in this story. I hand that out all the time, partly because it is just an incredible pleasurable reading experience, and partly just to illustrate a point that you never know where great books are going to come from. There are lots of examples of people, even very late in life, a book just pops out of them, and it was their one book. The other book, my pandemic reading gift I’ve been giving to people, because it’s a perfect pandemic novel, is Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow , and it’s about a Russian aristocrat who, during the Revolution, he’s the kind of guy who was supposed to be shot, but because of certain qualities, he isn’t shot. Instead, they lock him up in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow, and he doesn’t leave for the next 50 years. So you were stuck inside this place, and it’s Eloise for Grownups , and just beautifully done, but it makes you, in this moment, it makes you see the possibilities of resourcefulness in a confined space. There are a bunch of books that I give to people, but those are the two that I’ve just recently, in the last week, sent to people.