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Tim Ferriss: books for building, prioritizing and getting through hard times
Ferriss's latest listener Q&A worked as a reading list.
- Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Terkel is what he's reading now. It collects firsthand vignettes, including people who "did better than ever during the worst of times." He counts it as "upside time" because it keeps showing "how good people are at surviving, recovering, and then thriving" .
- Casey Neistat's older videos are for anyone who wants to stop collecting ideas and start building. Ferriss says Neistat explains well why you should keep shipping on a regular cadence, which builds a bias toward action .
- The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch and The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker are his alternatives to his own 4-Hour Workweek on defining work and cutting the rest. He calls these "evergreen topics that are going to increase in importance" with AI .
- The 4-Hour Chef: he singles out its roughly 80-page section on accelerated learning as the book's most important part, because it builds confidence that you can adapt .
- Crucial Conversations and The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership are his picks on relationships. He says the second "gets to the point quickly and offers you tools" .
- Awareness by Anthony de Mello is a book he has "gifted more than a hundred times" and read 15 to 20 times himself .
Packy McCormick: the bubble canon
In his Not Boring essay "Of Miracles and Moats," which he writes partly "as an investor" , McCormick lists frameworks behind his argument about boom-and-bust cycles. They are Carlota Perez's Technological Surge Cycle, Edward Chancellor's Capital Cycle, and a "whole excellent book" by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber "in praise of bubbles and their role in ending stagnation" . He also tells readers to read an excerpt from Bill Gates's 1995 book The Road Ahead, which argued that cheap bandwidth would unlock new uses. His verdict: "He was totally right, and not even right enough" . Book · Excerpt
Bill Gurley: Kai-Fu Lee's Fortune interview
Gurley said he enjoyed Lee's Fortune interview. Hearing how AI is perceived "from inside China from someone that knows a lot about global business" is "super valuable," he said, and "it's ok to disagree or dismiss his POV, but the knowledge is useful no matter what" . Lee says the interview takes on three misconceptions: that Chinese open models can't make money, that China competes as one unified bloc, and that export controls will hold back Chinese AI. It also covers the ideas in his new book, AI Native . Video
Jessica Livingston: Tyler Shultz's story
With Elizabeth Holmes back in the news, Livingston said "we should recalibrate" by hearing from the original Theranos whistleblower, Tyler Shultz . Video
Balaji Srinivasan: Albion's Seed
In a talk on the open-source network state, Balaji recommended Albion's Seed. The transcript renders the title as "Albian Seed," which presumably refers to David Hackett Fischer's book. His reasoning: builders need "political history for building communities in the same way you need to learn monetary history for building currencies." He says the book shows how past communities formed, how they varied and which ones succeeded. If you don't have time for the whole book, he suggests reading Scott Alexander's review instead . Video
Shorter picks
- Sarah Guo shared "more from Walter" (an apparent reference to Fractile's @goodwin_ml) on "how to build chips that push the frontier forward, rather than just try to second-source the elephant" . She posted it alongside praise for Fractile's plan to stack DRAM directly on top of the processor .
- Jason Lemkin quoted Guille Florvs's breakdown of Doug Leone's three-question investment filter . He said the "one of the 20" question is "the right forcing function." For seed deals, he suggested asking whether the CEO is among the best 20 you've met in the last 24 months . Breakdown
- Elon Musk posted "Try Grok @Bot" and linked to Greg Isenberg's post . Isenberg calls his video walkthrough of a Grok Bot setup "the best setup i've EVER seen." The setup runs Claude Code for engineering and Paper for design . Musk has an obvious stake in Grok. Video
- To move from being an intellectual collector to building, Ferriss recommends older videos by Casey Neistat, whose explanations of consistently shipping—daily, weekly, or monthly—support a bias toward action.
- For AI-era prioritization, he points to the defining-and-elimination ideas in The 4-Hour Workweek (while saying readers need not read it) and offers The 80/20 Principle by Richard Kosh and The Effective Executive by Peter Ducker as alternatives; he calls these evergreen topics that will become more important.
- For optimism during hard times, Ferriss recommends his current read, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Turkal. He values its firsthand accounts for showing people surviving, recovering, and thriving through hardship.
- Ferriss calls the roughly 80-page accelerated-learning section of his The 4-Hour Chef the book’s most important section, saying its learning toolkit builds confidence in adapting; he adds that readers do not have to buy the book.
- In a discussion of getting unstuck and turning intentions into behavior, he points to Atomic Habits, noting its popularity and congratulating its author, James.
- Ferriss directs viewers to his free TED Talk on fear-setting at tim.blog/ted, highlighting the written exercise of mapping the cost of inaction over one-, three-, and ten-year horizons to make change compelling.
- For relationship guidance, he recommends Crucial Conversations and The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, describing the latter as relevant to relationships and as offering practical tools.
- For research on sauna use in the context of Alzheimer’s prevention, Ferriss points viewers to Dr. Rhonda Patrick’s coverage and cautions that hotter is not better.
- Ferriss urges listeners to check out Awareness by Anthony Dlo, saying he has probably gifted it more than 100 times and read it 15–20 times himself.
Patrick O’Shaughnessy recommends his conversation with Ro co-founder and CEO Zach Reitano, published as an Invest Like the Best episode, with links on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. He says Reitano rarely does long conversations, making it enjoyable to discuss how Ro grew from a $250M run rate to over $3B in four years with about a third fewer people, as well as developments in healthcare; he also calls Reitano’s answer to the closing question amazing. The conversation covers the U.S. healthcare system, Ro’s refounding, GLP-1s, and marketing.
Patrick O’Shaughnessy recommends his video conversation with Ro co-founder and CEO Zach Reitano; he says Reitano rarely does long conversations, highlights their detailed discussion of Ro and healthcare, and calls Reitano’s closing answer amazing. Watch the conversation
Patrick O’Shaughnessy recommends his video conversation with Ro co-founder and CEO Zach Reitano, saying it covers what it took to grow Ro and broader healthcare topics. He calls Reitano’s closing answer about his father “amazing” and later “beautiful”; its takeaway is to never leave love for people unspoken. Watch the conversation.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy recommended his video conversation with Zach Reitano, Ro's co-founder and CEO, calling it a rare long conversation with details about Ro's growth and healthcare, and praising Reitano's answer to the closing question. Watch on X.
- Jason Lemkin promoted a free “AI Sales Agents” guide at SaaStr.ai alongside a page with more information about “our AI agents.”
- He amplified a Molly O’Shea post featuring a video about Mercor CEO Brendan Foody’s demanding routine, including working until 10 p.m. six days a week and Sundays from home, and endorsed its work-hard message: he says similar schedules among his top-performing portfolio CEOs compound and that AI lets them build and ship more.
- Packy McCormick, writing from an investor perspective, calls a book by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber “excellent,” praising its account of bubbles’ role in ending stagnation; the post links to the Amazon listing.
- McCormick also urges readers to read Bill Gates’s The Road Ahead excerpt, saying Gates’s case about internet bandwidth opening up new uses was right—and still understated what followed; excerpt.
Balaji recommended a book transcribed as Albian Seed for learning political history relevant to building communities, comparing it to learning monetary history to build currencies; he said it explains how past communities formed, varied, and succeeded. For those unable to read the full book, he recommended Scott Alexander’s review instead.
Jason Lemkin promoted a new The Agents episode with @miadia, linking to it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/7w4Em1JQkYE?si=ReysmvgVseDd1bhc . The teaser highlights the hosts canceling Canva because their agents never used it, $100K+ sponsor renewal rates moving from the 20s to the 70s, 10K co-selling a six-figure deal with Wix’s Base44, two agents deciding Amelia was the bottleneck after 100 rounds, and Muse ordering $138 of flowers on its own.
Patrick O’Shaughnessy shared his conversation with Ro co-founder and CEO Zach Reitano, inviting readers to watch; they discuss Ro’s growth and turnaround, healthcare, and other topics. O’Shaughnessy said Reitano rarely does long conversations and that he enjoyed discussing the details of Ro’s growth and healthcare developments. Watch the conversation.
Bill Gurley said he enjoyed Kai-Fu Lee’s Fortune interview about AI in China, calling its inside-China perspective valuable even for people who disagree with Lee; he cited Lee’s global-business knowledge as a reason the perspective is useful. The interview covers three misconceptions about Chinese AI and ideas behind Lee’s book AI Native. Watch the interview.
Jason Lemkin shared a new The Agents episode with @miadia and linked to the YouTube video. He highlighted agent-related examples: they canceled Canva because their agents never used it; renewal rates for $100K+ sponsors rose from the 20s to the 70s; 10K co-sold a six-figure deal with Wix's Base44; two agents decided after 100 rounds that Amelia was the bottleneck; and Muse ordered $138 of flowers on its own.
Sarah Guo (@saranormous) recommended a YouTube video with more from Walter on building chips that push the frontier forward rather than merely “second-source the elephant.” She shared it while praising Fractile’s plan to stack DRAM directly on processors to meet frontier AI models’ memory-bandwidth needs.
The interview guest recommends his wife’s YouTube channel Huge If True as something to watch after finishing Invest Like the Best, praising her as “the best journalist on the internet.” He says her work explains ideas about a better future, and that helping people understand something new can change the future.
Garry Tan urged followers to attend an Acts 17 event with @hubermanlab the following week . The linked event description promises good food, drink, and music alongside a conversation about living beyond money, fame, power, happiness, health, or wholeness . Register: Luma .
Jason Lemkin shared the new SaaStr article “Our Agents Never Picked Canva: 10 Learnings on Agent Pricing, Getting Picked, and Security,” connected to “The Agents” with Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt: read the article. His highlighted takeaways are that agents pick once and stop looking, and that vendors should charge for real agents rather than features.
Aravind Srinivas highlighted Perplexity’s research on red-teaming its SPACE VM sandbox, linking to the announcement for the report “Escaping SPACE, Part II”. His takeaways were that red-team prompts should explicitly target breaking host–guest isolation; non-cyber models did better than cyber-specialized models at finding exploits (he compared GPT 5.6 Sol with GPT 5.6 Sol Cyber); SPACE resisted isolation exploits, while a DNS-spoofing network bypass was found and addressed. He also said Perplexity’s platform is open-source and that the company wants to share findings with the agent-sandbox and security communities.
Aravind Srinivas credited @dylan522p’s blog post describing coding agents as a new kind of computer as the inspiration for the name “Perplexity Computer”—a signal of the idea’s influence, though not an explicit reading recommendation.
Jason Lemkin endorsed the “20 investments in my life” criterion in Guille Florvs’s post about Doug Leone’s investment approach, calling it an interesting, useful forcing function he should add to his process. For seed investing, he suggested adapting it to ask whether the CEO is among the best 20 he has met in the last 24 months. Guille’s post links to the full breakdown, “The Doug Leone Playbook”.
Elon Musk said “Try Grok” and linked to Greg Isenberg’s post . In that post, Isenberg calls a YouTube video “the best setup” he has seen and presents it as a full guide to copying a Grok bot orchestration setup, using Claude Code for engineering and Paper for design . Video: https://youtu.be/1cWZ7Ekff6E?si=YkcMxxhffksv48LX .