There is one in particular. It’s called Atlas Shrugged , which is my favorite book.

Yeah, well, I love poetry and it’s almost cliche now to say this because so many people like his work, but I think David Whyte’s work is just beautiful and is a wonderful kind of entry point to poetry. I’m also a big Wendell Berry fan. He’s written a lot about farming and the natural world. And I’ve never met him, but I’m a huge Wendell Berry fan. I’ll sometimes give Wendell Berry books as gifts. The book that I think is perhaps, at least to me, the most beautiful book of all is Longitude by Dava Sobel about the history of the discovery of timekeeping at-ocean, which is not a trivial problem to solve. And it’s just a beautiful story of how scientists, or in this case a particular scientist, merged the quest for a technology with a scientific problem with adventure, and going out on boats and risking one’s life for the sake of science is something that resonates with me a bit. And it’s a beautiful, short book, and it’s very accessible to anybody, whether or not you have a background in science or not, and she’s absolutely a wonderful writer. And so that’s the one I gift most often.

Yes. There are three books that I’ll mention. The first one that I’ve gifted the most is called Complexity by Mitchell Waldrop, which is about the rise of the Santa Fe Institute. Even when you were talking with Haidt, I think he mentioned certain things are complex adaptive systems. They’re very hard to predict, they’re very hard to analyze, they’re very hard to understand. That’s what Santa Fe’s all about. That book introduced me to network effects. When I get to go there, I usually go a couple times a year and Mike Mauboussin’s there and Josh Wolfe’s there from Lockton. I just love the learning of things I don’t know, and just pushing my brain to go farther than I would with the normal stuff I consume. It’s beautifully written. Great writer, Mr. Waldrop. There’s a book that I happen to have right here. This book, Mr. China is fantastic. He went to China in the mid ’90s and started a fund to privatize a bunch of industries. He’s from London and got his head handed to him and survived enough to write a humorous story about it. But holy shit.

I read Stephen Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature a few years ago and got to talk to him about it after, which was a lot of fun. I reviewed it for my blog, Gates Notes, because I wanted other people to read it, love it, and hopefully learn from it the way I did. It's probably my favorite book and the one I recommend most often.