Bill Gates

Co-founder of Microsoft; co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Recorded said elsewhere, not written here
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.

TIME interview, 2017 source ↗

Others on this question

View all 82 →
Jason Portnoy Investor; early finance executive at PayPal and Palantir
That’s Love Warrior , the one I talked about earlier by
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 16 June 2022 source ↗
Terry Real Family therapist and author
I’m a big fan of Jim Gilligan’s book Violence . It’s not an easy read.
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 10 May 2025 source ↗
Eric Cressey Strength and conditioning coach; co-founder of Cressey Sports Performance
All right, I'm going to give you two, because they're kind of categories to it. I'd say the first one underneath this health and human performance realm, Diagnosis and Treatment of Movement Impairment Syndromes. It's a Shirley Sahrmann book that I think is landmark. I mean it's decades old, super impactful. Kind of reads like stereo instructions, so you're going to go through a page at a time. But Sahrmann is still a practicing physical therapist at Wash U in St. Louis.
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 3 June 2023 source ↗
David Maisel American film producer
The book I recommend to people the most is Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. But I’m not sure that’s —
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 8 June 2023 source ↗

More from Bill Gates

View profile →
Question What counsel would you give your twenty-year-old self — and what should they ignore? Time & hindsight
My last piece of advice is the one I could have used the most. It took me a long time to learn. And it is this: You are not a slacker if you cut yourself some slack. When I was your age, I didn't believe in vacations. I didn't believe in weekends. I pushed everyone around me to work very long hours. In the early days of Microsoft, my office overlooked the parking lot—and I would keep track of who was leaving early and staying late. But as I got older—and especially once I became a father—I realized there is more to life than work. Don't wait as long as I did to learn this lesson.
Recorded Northern Arizona University Commencement, Gates Notes, 13 May 2023 source ↗
Question What fills you with the most pride? Identity & self
Microsoft was at the center of the personal computer revolution, and particularly the creation of a software market where you went out to lots of companies, and encouraged them to write software for different applications, mundane applications, wild applications. That idea that you would encourage people to be creative, and build software, and there would be a whole industry around that.
Recorded Academy of Achievement interview, Seattle, Washington, 17 March 2010 source ↗

More on taste & recommendation

Also answered this

Reid Hoffman, Tony Fadell, Andrew Ng, Satya Nadella, Whitney Wolfe Herd, David Maisel

Search the directory for somebody in particular.

Explore further

Report this answer