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.

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

Unfortunately, I don’t. My wife now reads fiction. I don’t have the time to read fiction. My wife reads the fiction and summarizes it to me, but I wish at one point I’ll have time again to read fiction. It is a luxury I cannot afford right now.

The people I most often give books to are children, and the book I love giving is Rivka Galchen’s Rat Rule 79. Technically a book written for children, but a book that will delight readers of all ages.

This was a co-educational school, with many progressive features. The emphasis was on fostering curiosity rather than competitive excellence, and any kind of interest in examination performance and grades was severely discouraged. ("She is quite a serious thinker," I remember one of my teachers telling me about a fellow student, "even though her grades are very good.") Since I was, I have to confess, a reasonably good student, I had to do my best to efface that stigma.

And yet, despite the high moral and ethical quality of social commiseration, political dedication and a deep commitment to equity, there was something rather disturbing about standard leftwing politics of that time: in particular, its scepticism of process-oriented political thinking, including democratic procedures that permit pluralism. The major institutions of democracy got no more credit than what could be portioned out to what was seen as "bourgeois democracy," on the deficiencies of which the critics were most vocal. The power of money in many democratic practices was rightly identified, but the alternatives – including the terrible abuses of non-oppositional politics – did not receive serious critical scrutiny.