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Eric Schmidt

American businessman and software engineer

Recorded said elsewhere, not written here
I think the one that has had the biggest impact on me and the one that I’ve given the most number of people has been [The Better Angels of Our Nature] . And [The Better Angels of Our Nature] is a 700-page book on death. And it’s written by a brilliant Harvard professor who talks at great length about death rates and the human condition. And he spends a lot of time talking about what happened 200, 300, 400, 500 years ago. And when you finish the book, which takes a long time, you conclude that the world is in a much, much better place than it has been in the past, that a thousand years ago, the average man died in a war and the average woman died in pregnancy in their 20s, and that a child born today has a very high likelihood in almost all parts of the world to live to a natural old age. That’s an extraordinary statement. And that’s why the people who run around saying, “Oh, the world’s falling apart. We’ve never had it this bad.” That’s just not true. And the data says it’s not true.

Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 11 April 2019 source ↗

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Tony Fadell Engineer and designer; led the iPod and iPhone teams at Apple, founder of Nest Labs
I regularly gift the book called In Praise of Shadows .
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 27 January 2020 source ↗
Whitney Wolfe Herd Founder and chief executive of Bumble
Yes, I have. Several different books, but two that we can talk about. Something I’ve always gifted and just kind of held close over the years is the book Shantaram . Have you read Shantaram?
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 26 June 2018 source ↗
Bob Metcalfe American engineer
There is one in particular. It’s called Atlas Shrugged , which is my favorite book.
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 7 February 2018 source ↗
Tu Youyou Pharmaceutical chemist; Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 2015
In Ge Hong's A Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies (肘后备急方), I noticed one sentence "A handful of Qinghao immersed in two liters of water, wring out the juice and drink it all" (青蒿一握, 以水二升渍, 绞取汁, 尽服之) when Qinghao was mentioned for alleviating malaria fevers. Most herbs were typically boiled in water and made into a decoction before taken by the patients. This unique way of using Qinghao gave me the idea that heating during extraction might have destroyed the active components and the high temperature might need to be avoided in order to preserve the herb's activity.
Recorded Laureate-written autobiography for Les Prix Nobel, Nobel Prize Outreach, 1 December 2015 source ↗

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