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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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Dustin Moskovitz American internet entrepreneur
I’m an Audible guy, so I never give a physical book to people, but something that’s come up a lot lately is this book, The Road Back to You , which is about the Enneagram. And I’ll just say up front, it’s written by a former preacher, and he’s got some religious tones. And that doesn’t really appeal to me, but I just found the descriptions of the Enneagram types to be just really spot on, especially the one of my type, type five. And yeah, it felt like reading my diary. And I’ve recommended it to a few other people who had similar experiences. And I had read a bunch about Enneagram before, and it was like, “Oh, this sort of fits. It sort of doesn’t.” And then, this one really spoke to me,
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 10 August 2023 source ↗
Reid Hoffman Co-founder of LinkedIn; partner at Greylock Partners
Obvious I give out my own books fairly often: The Startup View , The Alliance . Recently I’ve been giving out another book of friend of mine, Joshua Cooper Ramos, The Seventh Sense .
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 1 June 2018 source ↗
Chris Dixon American tech entrepreneur, investor
I really like history and I particularly like the era of the Victorian industrial age of like 1850 to 1920 or something. It’s an amazing period where you, I think of it as a period. We had like a hundred Elon Musks. So you had Westinghouse and Edison and Ford and the Wright brothers and Bell and just goes on and on. And you had that period where just the number of incredible inventions during that period. This was in that 50-year period. I mean, the airplane, the car, the photograph, the light bulb, for God’s sake, this amazing book called Empires of Light . It’s the battle between Westinghouse and Edison. It’s really fascinating. It was enterprise sales. They invent the light bulb. Westinghouse has AC, Edison has DC. And just went town to town, selling them and like “Use my system.” And there was this awesome moment at the end. The coup de grâce was Westinghouse built, because the key benefit of AC is it goes farther without losing power. He built this giant plant up at Niagara Falls and then turned the lights on in Buffalo. And it was like this magic act. They all like, like borrowed tons of money. And the other thing that’s cool about them is they were all engineers. It reminds me a lot — and they all started off in the telegraph business, which at the time was sort of the internet of that era. So that was cool. There’s another book. I’m sorry, I have crypto on my brain. I can’t help it. There’s a book I really like called [
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 28 October 2021 source ↗
Shep Gordon American talent manager and film producer
Joseph Campbell many years ago. A couple of the Dalai Lama books. Most recently, Norman Lear’s book.
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 6 June 2018 source ↗

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