Katalin Karikó

Biochemist; Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 2023

Recorded said elsewhere, not written here
When I was 16 years old, I read the book from Hans Selye. Hans Selye is a Canadian scientist, but he was Hungarian so his book was translated to Hungarian. His mantra was that you have to focus on things that you can change. Many young ones are giving up because they can see that their friends or their colleagues are advancing, and it seems that they do less and somehow, they get higher salary and promoted. I told that if you notice that then you already took away your attention what you can change. Because you cannot change that.

Adam Smith, Telephone interview recorded shortly after the prize announcement, Nobel Prize Outreach, 2 October 2023 source ↗

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M. Sanjayan Conservation scientist; chief executive of Conservation International
Yeah. Tim and I have talked about this a little bit. So, for me, books are all about the moment and the emotion that I’m in and the person I’m giving it to is in. and so, I can’t tell you that there’s one book that has predominated how I give because I love books, and I love to give books. And I carry books around. Even today, I brought two books for you to autograph that I’m giving away. So, there’s an act of giving. And a book is a wonderful way to convey something to another person. Books that I’ve loved giving away, Norman McClain’s A River Runs Through It . I read that book in so many different ways, in so many pieces. It totally influenced my life in terms of fly fishing and finding magic in words and that quiet space. He also wrote that book when he was 71 years old. Kind of only the really big book he wrote. It was at 71. And you think about all of this sort of bullshit about creative genius being in the young and all of that. As you get older, you start appreciating it. If Norman could do it at 71, maybe I could do it not quite at 71 yet. Another book I really liked, a more recent book, is Stanley McChrystal’s Team of Teams . Completely different reason. Just a really clever, smart book about how to organize businesses and enterprises for today’s world. And he takes this experiential army in Afghanistan and brings it over to sort of your life or my life and makes it kind of relevant and meaningful. I found it very influential. I’ve given away quite a few copies of James Nester’s book, The Deep, which you might have read, right. You’ve read his book.
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 4 February 2018 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 ↗
Mike Novogratz American businessman
There’s one book that I’ve given 40 copies away probably. And it’s called Reminiscence of a Stock Operator. And for anyone who wants to be a trader or an investor, this is the Bible. It was written in 1932 by a guy who was, at that time, maybe the world’s greatest speculator. Jesse Livermore is the fictional character. And what’s crazy about it is you can read it today in 2020, and it literally is still the Bible. And so every great trader annotates it, tears pages out of it. I used to be able to tell when people would come to interview to work and they’d say, “I really, all I care about is trading.” And I was like, “Well, tell me two books you’ve read about trading.” “Oh, I haven’t read any books.” And I was like, “Okay, here’s a book. Go read it and come back when you’ve read it. But you’re not getting a job, because you lied. Because you lied to me because you really didn’t care that much about trading if you’ve never read a book on it.” But that’s the book. And there’s a terrible anecdote or afterword to it is that two years after he wrote the book, the guy committed suicide because he just couldn’t take the — he lost his fortune yet again. But he put every rule that you need to — you know, the discipline side of it is all in that book. And it’s a quick read; you can read it in three hours.
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 8 August 2020 source ↗
Alice Little Irish-American sex worker and YouTuber
Definitely. I would say the top three books that I tend to give as gifts, the first one would be a book that’s written by Dennis Hoff called The Art of the Pimp . It, literally, talks about his journey, how he ended up getting the Bunny Ranch, and a lot of the intimate details in relationship to sex in Nevada. For anybody that’s interested in what I do, wanting to learn a little bit more about the industry, that is always the first book I give is this is kind of your handbook, as it were, to the world of legal sex in Nevada. The second book that I give out most frequently is to my co-workers. It would be The 48 Laws of Power . A lot of the ladies haven’t had the opportunity or haven’t been exposed to that book. And so, I think that it’s a great tool to get into the hands of women and get that positive thinking going, that energy that that book really tends to encapsulate. And the third book is kind of an interesting one. It’s a book called Memoirs of a Geisha . It speaks as to the life of a woman who ended up being a geisha in Japan during the World War II era who was kind of purchased from her family and unwillingly brought into this very foreign world that could not be any more different than what her life was like. The reason why I tend to recommend this book for other people is that there’s this incredibly beautiful, humanistic element in the way that she describes. The author uses language that is very, very rich and colorful. And it sits you into that time and place where you smell the fish in front of you. You hear the sound of the shamisen that she’s playing. You can really immerse yourself into that world and kind of get a sense of what things were like, at that time.
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 3 February 2018 source ↗

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Question What is the biggest professional obstacle you have faced? Craft & work
Adam, if you know about 10 years ago, I was here in October because I was kicked out, from Penn, was forced to retire. Then my husband supported me and said that, you know, when finally visited in Germany and found that maybe BioNTech is the right place, then he said "Just try it and I will make sure that you don't regret." Looking back in my life he supported that I would go, and for nine years I commuted to BioNTech in Germany. I did all these experiments actually, with my own hands, I was 58 years old, I was still culturing plasmids and feeding cells, so it is very unlikely.
Recorded Adam Smith, Telephone interview recorded shortly after the prize announcement, October 2023, Nobel Prize Outreach, 1 October 2023 source ↗

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