Yes. There are three books that I’ll mention. The first one that I’ve gifted the most is called Complexity by Mitchell Waldrop, which is about the rise of the Santa Fe Institute. Even when you were talking with Haidt, I think he mentioned certain things are complex adaptive systems. They’re very hard to predict, they’re very hard to analyze, they’re very hard to understand. That’s what Santa Fe’s all about. That book introduced me to network effects. When I get to go there, I usually go a couple times a year and Mike Mauboussin’s there and Josh Wolfe’s there from Lockton. I just love the learning of things I don’t know, and just pushing my brain to go farther than I would with the normal stuff I consume. It’s beautifully written. Great writer, Mr. Waldrop. There’s a book that I happen to have right here. This book, Mr. China is fantastic. He went to China in the mid ’90s and started a fund to privatize a bunch of industries. He’s from London and got his head handed to him and survived enough to write a humorous story about it. But holy shit.

Ever since adolescence, [my elder sister Anna] has been an enthusiastic admirer of the great Swedish writer, the Nobel Laureate Selma Lagerlöf, and she infected me so much with her enthusiasm that I decided to become a writer and describe Italian saga "à la Lagerlöf". But things were to take a different turn.

I regularly give books to other people, and up until recently, the book that I have most regularly gifted is Sheryl Sandberg’s book Option B because it’s closely related to the work that I do, and Sheryl is the most inspiring woman that I know. I really respect her. She’s on my executive council. I love her book Option B on healing and building a new future. I feel very spoiled that Sheryl wrote the forward to my own book, which is called A Second Chance . So, now, the book that I’m gifting even more than Option B is my own book, A Second Chance .

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.