I read a lot. I think there are some really poor books at the airport, I really do. For me, I like more of a practical application book. I like a book like Mark Cuban’s Sport of Business. I Like it because it gets me fired up. I like it because it’s a real story from a real guy, just saying it like it is and it’s easy reading. It’s not so analytical and things like that. So that’s the book I like.

I love that you asked that question that way because it really puts it in a different perspective. It’s like not what your favorite book is, it’s what you’ve given as a gift, which I thought about a little bit this morning. And it’s so clear. I have an immediate answer, and then, I had to think why did I do that. But I think, when I was younger, and still to this day, I sometimes gift a book of poetry by Adriane Rich called A Dream of Common Language , which was a book she wrote in the late ‘70s. And she’s a poet that – I was trying to think why was that book so important to me. And it’s really funny. When I read Cheryl Strayed’s Wild that was one of the books that was most important to her that she had as she hiked the Pacific Rim. Tim Ferriss: That’s right. I totally forgot about that. Liz Lambert: Yeah. I gift a lot Slouching Towards Bethlehem , a book by Joan Didion, which is a collection of essays that I love that book so much. It is a lot about the kind of writing Joan Didion is doing. And those essays are both of the time. There’s one that’s about John Wayne, about California. But there’s also this collection of personal essays she does. One is called On Keeping a Notebook that I go back to again and again, and I share a lot. Tim Ferriss: On Keeping a Notebook

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 named one of them already. Fooled by Randomness . Almost everyone in my office is forced to read that. I’ve definitely given that away. Boy, that’s a tricky one because just like I said, I can’t remember books very well. But certainly probably No. 1 on a business side of things. On the other side, I tend to give away what I would call vintage art books. So, it’s not a book people can buy, I’m sorry to say, but occasionally I’ll be at a used book store and I’ll find some of these great old art books. I buy a few of them and then when I want to thank someone for something, I send them that.