Well, outside of our cookbooks and Setting the Table , which is the most gift I give because someone’s got to give it, I love marketing. I just love marketing because marketing is understanding the other person. Marketing is a dialogue. It’s a lot like hospitality. And I love Seth Godin’s books. And I would say that I’ve given many of his books, but probably the one that I’ve given the most is This Is Marketing . And it comes down to one simple express — He’s just so brilliant at getting to the essence of what something really is. And he thinks marketing is when you can convey that people like us do things like this. And that sounds so simple, and yet it’s so deep actually. He understands that people want to feel — I believe that the biggest longing people have is to belong. And so great marketing actually doesn’t just sell you something. It makes you feel like you belong to a tribe. So anyway, long answer to your question, but that would be the one.

Lately, I’ve liked there’s a woman named Bronnie Ware. She wrote a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying . And she was a hospice nurse who had spent time with people in the last 90 days of their life. And she would learn like what their regrets were. Or, sometimes, she’d learn what their happiness was. So, there was an example of this woman who was from a super rich family, and she decided to marry an artist. And the family excommunicated her. And she’s like 32 years old. She gets cancer, and she dies. And she hasn’t heard from her family in years. And her mom comes to her, at the end, and says, to be honest, I was just jealous. You were living life on your own terms. And I’ve got all of these obligations. I don’t even like my life that much. And I was just kind of pissed off that you could go marry some artist and be this happy. And I realized how wrong I was. But this woman who is dying says I have no regrets. I got to be with the person I wanted to be with. And I would have loved to have lived longer, but nobody knows how much time they’re going to have. At least I got to have the time that I got the way I wanted to have it, the best I knew how. And then, they would have another person who the opposite was true. They would be dying, and they’d say, “Promise me, Bronnie, that you will not live life according to other people’s thinking because I lived my whole life trying to please other people.” “And if I could have it over again, I wouldn’t do that.” And so, she does a great job of having the example of the person who did it well with no regrets, and the person who is like fuck, I’m dead now, and if I could do it over again, I’d do it different. And so, it’s motivating to say, gosh, how am I measuring up against those five things? And so, I like that book because it kind of takes people out of the here and now and kind of forces you to confront a broader set of issues. Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I think that, for me, in the last few years, I’ve had a lot of friends pass away in the last two years or so, including Terry Laughlin, rest in peace, who is in this book just a few weeks ago. And I found it really, in an odd way, reaffirming to familiarize myself with death and grief and grieving in almost a preemptive way. One of my favorite people, I’m sure you’ve spent time with him, Matt Mullenweg, incredible entrepreneur, but first and foremost, just a beautiful human being, and he lost his father in a very unexpected way. And he recommended On Grief and Grieving to me. And I think it’s a very useful exercise to familiarize yourself with the details of death and people passing. Mike Maples: And I learned a lot of this from Julie who is the love of my life and puts up with me. And she’s helped all of these people who have had cancer. And so, as a result, she ends up seeing a lot of people pass. And I think more than anybody, she taught me that, in the last bit of time you have, all of the shit falls away. All of the expectations, all of the external stuff. And so, you just hope that when that time comes, you’re like I did the best I could. I did it the way I could. And so, that’s why I find that book helpful. It’s not because I’m preoccupied with dying. I hope I live a long time. But it’s like when the time comes, I want to say I did it my way. I did the best I could. I honored the gift. So, that’s a good book. And there’s business books, too, but we’ll do that some other time.

The book I recommend to people the most is Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. But I’m not sure that’s —

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.

The films that influenced me were so disparate that there’s almost no pattern. Stanley Kubrick was an influence because I loved 2001: A Space Odyssey. and the more I learned about him and his methodology the more I realized what a rigorous intellectual exercise filmmaking was for him, and I was inspired by that.

There was. The critical moment for me was in the 11th grade. My biology teacher, Mr. McKenzie, decided that what our school needed was a theater arts program and we didn’t have it. There was wrestling, basketball, football, it was a very jock oriented school and there was no theater program whatsoever. So we started a theater program from scratch. We bootstrapped it. He taught it, and I think he might have done it for nothing. We had to build the props and the scenery and the costumes and do everything ourselves. We had to turn the stage into a proper working stage. It took a year, but we started putting on our own productions. I think that was really a pivotal moment. My biology teacher was our muse at that time. And I think the fact that we were having to do everything, that it wasn’t handed to us, may have created a kind of a work ethic that paid off then in independent film production because it’s the same thing. You know, you’re finding scraps and bits and pieces, and putting it all together and putting on a show. And it’s that sense of being able to create some moment of glory, some showmanship — out of nothing, out of baling wire — that is maybe a lesson that was learned there as a result of this man who just decided to have a theater arts program.