I like to read books because they go far deeper on subjects than almost any other media. Even a good documentary is generally written under the assumption that the person watching knows nothing about the subject, so spends most of its time teaching the basics. “Tribe of Mentors” by Tim Ferris doesn’t do that. It instead gets a huge number of different answers to the same small list of questions and while no one goes as deep into the answers as they would in a complete book it is its own type of depth.

What Tim Ferris did in “Tribe of Mentors” is pick a long list of successful people and then sent them all the same short list of questions like “What Book have you Given away the most” and “If you had a billboard that everyone drove by every day what would you put on it.” Each person’s answers to all of those questions are between five and ten minutes, and so you get a lot of answers to those questions.

This was enjoyable to listen too. Each time a new section started, I had no idea who he would be talking too. Sometimes it was someone who I had never heard of, other times it was someone I might expect, and on a couple of occasions it was someone I follow that I completely didn’t expect. That was even more fun and hearing the different answers to the same question gave you an interesting insight on how different people see the world.

All that said, this was also a bit frustrating to listen to. There is, as you would guess, no through-line or consensus on much of anything except for Viktor Frankl, who eventually wrote a book every successful person reads. More frustrating when someone says something that really catches your attention and makes you want more it moves on usually to another person in a completely different field of expertise.

I think this is a splendid book to pick up as a primer. If you’re looking for people to pay attention to and follow, book recommendations or want to know what type of headphones to buy then this is a great place to start. There are more than a few people here who wrote books that I love, teach philosophies I try to follow, and I am certain that many of the others could be just as important to me if I paid more attention to them. But a lot of the advice is contradictory. The most common contradictions between interviewees was on what to tell a young person who is entering the real world which really covered the gambit from work harder than anyone else to make sure your work life balance is balanced and find a job and stay at it and don’t be afraid to change paths. But that isn’t a bad thing. It’s nuanced telling you that there are different ways of seeing almost anything, except it seems reading “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor E. Frankl. That seems to achieve about as close to consensus as you can find.