Yeah. At work every year, I kind of give my line cooks and my management team books as gifts around the holidays. So This is Water by David Foster Wallace is one I commonly give because it’s so short and the message is so perfect in my opinion. So I’ve given that a lot. And then for cookbooks, I got to say, the Marcella Hazan Essentials is just, I adore that woman. I adore her simple approach. It is like, she’s the OG of Italian grandma cooking. And so those are the two books.

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.

I think a lot of them will probably be in the cooking space. Definitely On Food and Cooking . I’ve gifted that a lot. My career starts with that book in many ways. There wouldn’t be any of this modern cooking movement without Harold’s book, I don’t think. There certainly wouldn’t be modernist cuisine that played a big role in my career without that book. So I’ve gifted that a lot because I think it’s relevant and I think for a certain type of individual, it’s the kind of book that every time you open it up, you see something. You’re like, “I didn’t even know that was there; that’s super cool.” And you read something and go, “The world is way more interesting than I thought.” I think I’ve gifted Michel Bras’s Essential Cuisine quite a bit, although it’s hard to do now because I think it’s out of print in English and quite expensive. The other book I found myself gifting a lot lately is an out-of-print book on thermodynamics called The Second Law . It was written by an Oxford physical chemistry professor named P.W. Atkins. That book is just a phenomenal, casual, infographic-laden read on how the world works from an energy perspective. I found that so incredibly useful in trying to understand how to do something, how to make something work, whether something’s even possible. It’s frequently my bullshit detector. When somebody’s trying to convince me some technology or some idea has merit, I very quickly come back to just sketching out the kind of thing I did for that email, where it’s like, let me just see – with knowing nothing about the subject, if I can just sketch out the basic ideas of how much energy is going to be involved or consumed or if I assume limitless capacities, does this make any sense ever? So many things sound good, but just don’t pass muster as soon as you start looking at the world that way. You’re like, “Well, that’s clearly just a waste of everybody’s time and we should just stop and go do this thing over here,” which at least you’re not having to invent new physics or violate the laws of physics to go do it.

I have reasons for each of those books and certainly The Invisible Man in this moment of the Black Lives Matter protests and the continuing racial reckoning. Invisible Man really taught me to not see through anybody ever. But the book I give right now in this time of so much despair is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning , where he really looks at people in the Holocaust and asks himself, why did some just sort of crumple up and die and others stayed resilient and strong? And that at the end of the day, no one can take our dignity away from us. And so I think that we have to be reminded right now that, between stimulus and response, there is a choice. And we’re in that moment. And I have seen myself personally so often that in the darkest times we can find our best selves and that’s our opportunity right now. And so I think for this moment, Tim, Man’s Search for Meaning should be required reading for all of us.

So, I recently bought the FINIS, F-I-N-I-S, swim paddles. They somewhat magically lengthen out my freestyle stroke. And when I combined them with some fins, I use the ones Cressi, C-R-E-S-S-I, I feel sometimes like I’m almost flying through the water.

So Tim, I wear the SUBPAC Wearable Physical Sound System while I commute on the subway to my office. And sometimes I wear it while I work at my desk. You strap the system to your back and chest, and it lets you feel the vibration of music through your whole body.