Books I’ve Loved — Maria Popova and Tyler Cowen (#436)

Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers of all different types—from startup founders and investors to chess champions to Olympic athletes. This episode, however, is an experiment and part of a shorter series I’m doing called “Books I’ve Loved.” I’ve invited some amazing past guests, close friends, and new faces to share their favorite books—the books that have influenced them, changed them, and transformed them for the better. I hope you pick up one or two new mentors—in the form of books—from this new series and apply the lessons in your own life.

Maria Popova (@brainpicker) is a reader and a writer who writes about what she reads on Brain Pickings, which is included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive of culturally valuable materials. She is the author of Figuring, the editor of A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, and the creator and host of The Universe in Verse, an annual charitable celebration of science through poetry at the interdisciplinary cultural center Pioneer Works in Brooklyn.

Tyler Cowen (@tylercowen) has a personal moonshot: to teach economics to more people than anyone else in the history of the world—and he might just succeed. In addition to his regular teaching at George Mason University, Tyler has blogged every day at Marginal Revolution for almost 17 years, helping to make it one of the most widely read economics blogs in the world. Tyler cocreated Marginal Revolution University, a free online economics education platform that’s reached millions. He is also a bestselling author of more than a dozen books, a regular Bloomberg columnist, and host of the popular Conversations with Tyler podcast.

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You can find the transcript of this episode here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

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SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

• Connect with Maria Popova:

Brain Pickings | Twitter | Instagram

• Letter to a Hostage by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• Love and Saint Augustine by Hannah Arendt
• A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin
• Connect with Tyler Cowen:

Marginal Revolution | Conversations with Tyler | Twitter

• Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
• Timeless Flight: The Definitive Biography of The Byrds by Johnny Rogan
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career by Scott Young

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