Listen to the chapter here
[Ethan Kross]
There can be enormous power from plugging in less frequently. When I wake up with chatter at 2am, if I ask myself how am I going to feel about this tomorrow morning, I'm instantly calm.
If you really want to be mentally fit, you've got to be in nature.
To be honest, I didn't love nature. Nature was where you got mugged. But I think yourself and the guests that you have are guests who recognize the power of books to change lives, and if you're lucky, have those lives aggregate in ways that change cultures.
[Neil Pasricha]
Hey everybody, this is Neil Pasricha, and welcome, or welcome back, to Chapter 166 of 3 Books. On our show today, we've got Professor Ethan Kross. Oh my gosh, I am so excited to talk to you about Ethan.
He is a psychologist, a neuroscientist, an author, and a professor down at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for those that know it, where he directs the Emotion Self-Control Laboratory. His work focuses on emotional regulation, self-control, and the inner voice, the voice we all hear all day. My inner voice is an asshole, says Dan Harris in the fascinating epigraph to this wonderful book, Chatter.
He also wrote the book Shift, and he's got a new book in the works, which I can't say more about, but you'll get gleams of it, hints of it, when you listen to this chat. Ethan has published more than 120 academic papers in, no big deal, Science Magazine, the New England Journal of Medicine, and he's even appeared on stages at TED, South by Southwest, and the White House, hopefully knocking some sense into things over there. Ethan and I sit down and talk about why we overthink, what's happening inside our heads when we do, and the tools we can use to manage the chatter.
Let's flip the page into chapter 166 now. P.S. Stay tuned to the end of the podcast where we play The End of the Podcast Club. Play your letters, listen to your voicemails, have a word of the chapter, and have a hangout afterparty.
That will be at the end of the show, on audio only. I won't do that on YouTube. Bye.
All right. Hi, Ethan.
[Ethan Kross]
How's it going, Neil? Great to see you.
[Neil Pasricha]
Great to see you too. Nice to connect.
And I've been checking you out online. I mean, you've been busy. You just got back from like a big trip to Australia, is that right?
[Ethan Kross]
Yeah. Yeah. That was fun. It was my first time down under and oh my God, I was blown away. I don't know. Have you been down there?
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah. I've been down there once for a friend's wedding who got married on New Year's Eve in Sydney about 15 years ago. Oh, fun.
[Ethan Kross]
I got married on New Year's Eve as well, not in Sydney, in the great, great city of Atlanta. But the remarkable thing about the Australians is it was this coupling of, you know, super sharp people coupled with this just, how can I say, chillness, this just, this balance. It was not a lack of intensity, but a welcomeness.
It was really, I still think about it. It's been two weeks since I've returned. I miss the interactions.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah. That's it. You were in Brisbane, is that right?
[Ethan Kross]
Yeah. I was in Brisbane. Yeah.
[Neil Pasricha]
Okay. Right. That's amazing.
[Ethan Kross]
It's great. Great to get down there and to travel.
[Neil Pasricha]
And then I think I saw that you were also touring West Coast Colleges with your daughter, maybe.
Is that right?
[Ethan Kross]
East Coast. West Coast is coming up.
But we've just started that process, which is, you know, we're embarking on a very interesting time of life, both for my daughter and my wife and myself. Have you been through this process with kids?
[Neil Pasricha]
No, I have little kids.
I have four boys, 12, 10, 7, and 5.
[Ethan Kross]
Okay. Well, get ready. Enjoy it.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah.
[Ethan Kross]
Applying for college is this interesting experience where there's only so much control you have, and there's a whole lot of uncertainty. And I always joke that if a world leader were to call me and ask, ‘Hey, Ethan, I want you to create conditions for massive worldwide shadowback,” no problem. Strip control away from people and make it really uncertain what's going to happen.
Basically, that is a college application process. But the flip side to that is it is so much fun to tour these colleges, see them through her eyes and, you know, find some opportunities to maybe do some dad embarrassing things along the way. So I'm enjoying it.
[Neil Pasricha]
How do you, so you said it's like one of the most chatter inducing situations. You obviously wrote the book on chatter, the book I read and loved, the voice in our head, why it matters, how to harness it. So how's your chatter as you go through something like that?
I mean, you're eldest leaving the house, you're traveling around the world, you're very busy, your career has exploded, like you are, your books are, you know, everyone's talking about them. You're on, I listened to you on Mel Robbins, Andrew Huberman, Rich Roll, I mean, you couldn't be doing more work-wise, you know, at this time. How do you, how do you manage your own chatter as you go through that?
[Ethan Kross]
You know, I'm working through it just like everyone else. I do think I'm, it strikes and when it happens, I do practice what I preach, I turn to the tools I talk about, different tools work for me depending on the context. You know, with my daughter, part of the, that's one of my chatter triggers right now and it's because you love this, this being so very much pure, unadulterated and you want the best for them.
I'm always telling her like my goals for you are to be like happy and healthy and successful in that order, right? Like that's my only agenda and my daughter has goals and ambitions and you know, the world can be tough. And so seeing her manage this and doing it from a remove, not trying to intervene too much, it takes, that takes some skill and I don't know if I'm perfect at it, I don't think I am, but working on it.
[Neil Pasricha]
I'm not. I yelled at my five-year-old this morning, we were trying to get ready for school and I was like, clean up your toys, time to go, clean up your toys, time to go, clean up your toys, time to go, clean up your toys, time to go and then I just exploded and I was like, no, I'm feeling bad about that and my throat is sore and I'm apologizing and it's just like he's upset and he's crying and just, I'm like, I shouldn't, I, I, I, I'm, I should know not to do this. But of course we write self-help.
[Ethan Kross]
That's right.
[Neil Pasricha]
For ourselves, for ourselves. You're also the, you know, founder of the Emotion and Self- Control Lab at the University of Michigan. What do you guys, what's going on in the lab right now?
What's, what's the current questions that you guys are exploring?
[Ethan Kross]
Doing a lot. We're actually in a very exciting time and I'll tell you why in a minute.
In terms of some of the research projects that we're working on, two that really stand out to me are we're trying to understand the tools, the combinations of tools that people can benefit from. So if you look at psychological research over the past 30 years in this space of what we'd call self-regulation, scientific term for self-help, right? What scientists have done a pretty good job doing is carefully studying individual tools.
Mental time travel, reframing, strategic attention deployment, you name it. We study that tool under different conditions, with different populations, we look at what happens when you use it for your behavior, what's going on in your brain. We study from all these different angles.
Here's the problem. When you look at what people do in their everyday lives, they seldom use one tool. They're often using combinations of tools and we don't really have very good frameworks to predict, to prescribe combinations of tools.
If you use the analogy of physical fitness, we've carefully studied the intricacies from the biomechanical level to the subjective of how bench pressing and pull-upping and squats work individually, but we haven't looked at how those fit together and work for different people with different body types with different goals. That's a huge, huge undertaking that I'm really excited to be engaging with my students. The other one is probably something that my guess is you may have talked about this with some of your other guests, AI and self- regulation.
It's remarkable to me how quickly people have flocked to AI for help with their most significant challenges and we know very, very little about how all this is working. There's a lot of discussion right now about social media's impact on well-being. If we keep up with the way we're proceeding with respect to allowing AI to just run its course without any kind of controls, I think we're going to be in a position a decade from now that will make the social media well-being conversation look like a tiny, tiny speck of sand.
We're doing some work to contribute to that space too. Yeah. It's wild how up and down it is too.
[Neil Pasricha]
A couple weeks ago, I interviewed Dr. Martin Seligman, who's a new book out on agency, and he said to me on the podcast chat, AI is a new species. Claude and ChatGPT are the best assistants I've ever had. I talked to them six to eight hours per day, every day.
Very bullish on AI. Me personally, self-help, sharing openly with you, I've had a bit of a challenging year. Biggest thing for me was I quit cannabis this year in March after 23 years.
So I used it from age 23 to 46, half my life. Very hard to quit, measuring, tracking, had a lot of support systems, had a therapist, had a psychotherapist, had my amazing wife, had journaling, taking stuff out of my safe and taking pictures and texting it to my mom. But the thing I was going to the most was my pinned Claude doctor tree, I called him, and I did another one in ChatGPT because it was so instant, quick, regular, had the history.
And I don't know if it's the sycophanticness, but it was just so incurrent, it was warm. It was always understanding of me. And the problem was, of course, I fell off the wagon a couple of times before I quit, and it was like, it was helpful.
It was like, it understood that too, you know what I mean? But in terms of like, if Neil spent a hundred hours in therapy to quit weed, and I'm knock on wood, happy to say it's been six months now, then I would say like, 75 of those therapeutic hours were on AI for me, you know, just as a, because it was there, two in the morning, if it was there when I needed a quick question or when it was there, when I had a quick, you know?
[Ethan Kross]
And this is why it is so urgent that we begin to get in there to understand how we can optimize it.
I do not take the position that technology, whether it be social media or AI, is good or bad for us. It depends entirely on how we engage with those technologies. And the conundrum right now is we're just engaging in it, it's like a freestyle.
We have no guardrails that we're aware of. There's no socialization. Think about interacting with AI akin to interacting with other people in everyday life.
Your parents taught you, they socialized you. Here's how you talk to other people. Here's the kinds of things you talk about.
Here's like when you should be concerned, here's when you shouldn't. We don't have any of that, any of those conversations with our kids, with one another. We don't even know what questions to ask.
So tremendous opportunities exist here to get really smart about optimizing this technology. This could be a difference maker for society in terms of getting care out to folks across the globe. But it can also do some harm.
From which, you know, you asked me what we're doing.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah.
[Ethan Kross]
To me, this is like a super exciting time to be in this space of research and asking these kinds of questions.
We've actually are in the process of, we've launched a new institute here called the Institute for Mental Fitness that is, it's really a moonshot to substantially reduce global suffering, enhance human thriving. And we do it through a bunch of different channels of activity, one of which is research, where every year we're going to have nine to 12 of the top scientists in the world come together multiple times to address the most urgent questions that are out there. This is one of them.
And so these things make me happy about what I do, which is good because sometimes I'm not.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah. No, it's amazing. And I think through chatter, through shift and the stuff you're working on now, you're really at the forefront, and I've been reading a lot of books about overthinking because that's what I'm trying to write about right now and yours stand out. One of the most popular books in overthinking is called Stop Overthinking by Nick Trenton. Not to throw shade on this book, but I've gone down the rabbit hole but I don't think that's a real person. I think it's, I really don't. I mean, the person, the guy has written 103 books over the last two years and there's no record of him ever doing a podcast or a media hit or an interview.
I don't even think it's a person like I can't figure out who this guy is.
[Ethan Kross]
A hundred books. My goodness.
[Neil Pasricha]
I know. Oh my God.
[Neil Pasricha]
But I think he came up with the key word to stop overthinking that was very popular during the pandemic.
So it's been hard for me to find good quality stuff as I go through research and your stuff has really stood out really as the best, your stuff and you know, don't believe everything you think is very popular right now, Joseph Nguyen. But I'm trying to explore this. It was hilarious when my publisher came to me, of course, and asked me about overthinking because I'm like, I can't write this.
I'm an overthinker. And they're like, well, that's, that's why we need, you know, someone like you to tackle it.
You and I grew up together, like not together, but you're born January, 1980. I'm born September, 1979. So we're like three months apart. One of my first albums was also MC Hammer on tape.
You followed up with the Immaculate Collection by Madonna. I followed up with Paula Abdul. So we're very, we're very, we grew up together.
Like I kind of felt, feel a lot of kinship with you and we're out, we're out there. We're both giving talks. We're both, you know, we're on a lot of podcasts and stuff.
And so it was really exciting for me when I got your three most formative books. And you know, I'd read two of them preceding you. And the other one I did not read, but I've read other books by him.
I want to introduce each of these books to our listeners and then ask you about your relationship with them. And then I have a lot of questions for you and we're going to try to marry my list of questions with the themes from the book as best I can here. Was there one of those three that you read earliest in your life that you can recall that, maybe I'll start with that one.
[Ethan Kross]
Man's Search for Meaning was, um, uh, I read it my sophomore year.
[Neil Pasricha]
Okay. Okay. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
I'm going to, I'm going to, I want to, I want to say, okay, people listening, if you're not on YouTube, you are in the bookstore right now, you're holding Man's Search for Meaning. If you're holding my copy, it's got a light blue, like watery cover, giant white, all caps, Serif font, Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl. My copy says more than 12 million copies in print, depending where you look online, it's 16 million, it's 20 million.
This is the gigantic book of all. It is the fifth time it's been mentioned on this podcast. Not only did Jesse Finkelstein say it way back in the early chapters, but Norm McInerney of the great podcast, Terrible Thanks for Asking, picked it in chapter 91.
Edward Packard, co-founder of Choose Your Own Adventure, picked this in chapter 92. And Suzy Batiz, the founder of Poo-Pourri, picked it in chapter 123. This indeed was published in 1946.
You probably know this, Ethan, maybe not, as Ein Psychologie Erlebt das Konzentrationslager, which means a psychologist experiences the concentration camp. Then when the US edition came out, you know, 13 years later in the late 50s, the title was from Beacon Press, From Death Camp to Existentialism, eventually they settled on the title that we know it by today, Man's Search for Meaning. For those that don't know, Viktor Frankl, F-R-A-N-K-L, lived from 1905 to 1987.
He was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor. You know, he was in four concentration camps from 42 to 45, including Auschwitz. His parents, his brother, and his pregnant wife all died during the Holocaust.
What is this book about? Well, basically it is part Holocaust memoir, you know, the focus on kind of astute psychological observations of concentration camp life. But then there's this introduction to a psychological theory of logotherapy.
Frankl recounts his experience as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camp, examines how people respond to extreme deprivation, fear, and loss, and argues that people can endure extraordinary suffering only when they retain a sense of purpose. Dewey Decimal Heads, you can file this under 150.195, pre-self-help, which is 158, as psychology slash psychoanalysis slash existential and logotherapeutic psychology. Professor Ethan Kross, please tell us about your relationship with Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
[Ethan Kross]
Read this book my sophomore year, I was taking a class in religious studies, I was a religious studies minor, and the book instantly connected with me on two levels. On the first level, my grandparents were Holocaust survivors. I write about their experience in one of my books.
They had one of these kind of Spielbergian adventures is the wrong word, but tragedies associated with them. Their families were slaughtered, like right before their eyes in many cases, or for some of their relatives, and they narrowly escaped that fate. They were ghettos, hanging out in bunkers in the frozen woods like Nazis on their tails for years, ultimately escaped and moved over here, started a family.
It was a happy ending, but this was one of the first stories I could remember hearing. I would hear it a lot because every year, once a year, there'd be this kind of grassroots remembrance day event that my grandparents and a couple of other people in their neighborhood would attend, and they would just share their stories. I didn't really like going to it growing up, just full disclosure, it was right after soccer games, and I was in my equipment, and these people were crying, and I couldn't understand the broken English with their heavy accents, but the story always stuck with me.
One of the things I always wondered about was, my God, how does someone persevere through a tragedy of such epic proportions? I had that percolating in the background, the experience with my grandparents, and now here's another Holocaust survivor, and they're going to tell me about the kinds of things that I always wanted my grandparents to tell me about, but they didn't really like talking about this, because it was so painful. Then at the same time, I had just developed a love affair with psychology, found it utterly fascinating that we have the ability to reframe things with our mind.
And here you have Frankl talking really about that reframing process. He was fond of quoting Nietzsche, who said, He who has a why to live for can deal with any how.
[Neil Pasricha]
I didn't realize that was Nietzsche at first. I always thought that in my head as Frankl.
[Ethan Kross]
Fact check me on it, but I'm 99% sure, because I thought the same thing.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, but he goes back, it makes sense. He who has a why to live can withstand almost any what.
[Ethan Kross]
Any what, any how, it may be what.
What does that mean? Well, it means if you can find meaning, purpose, if you can find that North Star, that can allow you to weather through anything, and I don't use that word anything lightly, because Frankl in Man's Search for Meaning embodied that anything, right? I mean, he lived, imagine.
[Neil Pasricha]
Couldn't be anything worse than losing everyone you love.
[Ethan Kross]
And then being imprisoned and hard labor, it couldn't be anything worse.
[Neil Pasricha]
And lost his manuscript.
[Ethan Kross]
And lost his manuscript.
[Neil Pasricha]
That was a big one for a writer.
[Ethan Kross]
He was very upset about that, as we all would be. Then there was the other layer of the power of the written medium to communicate the emotional intensity of that experience, and then from that experience, use it as a tool to share insights that can help people, which when I look back, and I haven't really made this connection prior to this conversation, Neil, but that's really my strategy when I write books, is I work really hard to find stories that embody the kinds of psychological tools and techniques that we have some understanding of from work in the lab and other places, but anchoring the way those tools operate in people's lived experiences, which I think is a really powerful form for communicating.
So that's how I came into Frankl.
[Neil Pasricha]
Beautiful. Sophomore in college, had a family history, but it was a bit disconnected because you're going to these kind of events where people are all teary, but it kind of brings to the forefront right at the time your interest in psychology is burgeoning.
That's how I say that word. And so you've got this amplification here, it's happening. Now you say lots of things here, lots of paths that could go down.
One is you say, if you can find meaning, I mean, one of the biggest questions I get, is how do I know what I want to do? You have two daughters. How do I know what I want to do?
How do I find meaning? How do I find purpose? And even me at age 47, I'm suddenly a couple months older than you here, so I turned it first.
[Ethan Kross]
Happy birthday.
[Neil Pasricha]
Thank you. I still wrestle with this.
What's your coaching on finding meaning? How do people find what they're meant to do? He who has a why to live.
[Neil Pasricha]
Where do we go to get this mystical why from?
[Ethan Kross]
You know, I think it's really challenging. I'm talking not just to my daughters, but students about this all the time.
And in my experience, students, they're hungry, not just to be successful, but to find this why. I was fortunate in the coaching that I got from an early age. My dad, one of the earliest lessons I can remember him teaching me was, when you think about what you're going to do for a living, make sure you help people.
It doesn't really matter what you do, but just make sure you're helping people. And I kind of found that at the time, like other lessons that I have valued that he gave given me early on, terribly annoying. Oh my God, that is so ridiculously generic, help people.
What does that mean? Hold the door open for them, be a doctor, a real doctor, not the kind I am. We'll get into that a few later, some baggage from my grandparents, but help people.
So I had that. And then I had this experience in college where my junior year, I would be, I think it was my junior, junior, sophomore, I'd be studying in the bookstore on my college campus. And on breaks, I would just take a break and I'd go over to the psychology section.
I would just look at the psychology books and I would flip through different books. And that's what I was doing on my break. And we are old, but we're not that old.
We did have the ability to surf the internet back when we were in college. It could have been on ESPN.com or doing other stuff, right? But no, I'm flipping through psych books.
And then on Saturday nights, when we're getting ready to go to parties or bars at 12, midnight, I'm talking to my friends and I'm, hey, Dan, did you know about this phenomenon of cognitive dissonance or whatever? I fill in the blank. And my friends are looking at me like, they used to call me by my last name.
And Cross, what's wrong with you? Why are you talking about psychology? We're supposed to go have fun, meet girls.
And so it dawned on me at a relatively young age, if I'm doing these things, if I'm reading and thinking about these things in my spare time, why don't I make this my full-time job? And that set me on the path to psychology. And I've never second-guessed it.
It is deeply purpose-driven for me, what I do. Such a key question. I have this little bit in my 2016 book, The Happiness Equation, where I call it the Saturday morning test.
And the underpinning question is, what do you do when you have nothing to do? Use that as a clue to find your interests. What do you do for fun?
It's that tied in with your dad's message. And I love the kind of portrait you paint of him at the beginning of Chatter, where if I remember it correctly, he's meditating with a cigarette in his mouth, I believe.
[Ethan Kross]
Pretty much, yes.
[Neil Pasricha]
Just encouraging you to go inside. Help people. It's a really nice little directional thing.
And I'll also add to this, it changes. It changes throughout your life. What I have to be careful of is that I don't make any rash decisions.
Here I have a podcast, and I'm writing books, and I'm giving speeches. And I get totally sick of all of it sometimes. I question, why am I doing any of this stuff?
I just want to open a bookstore in my corner and not have to get on planes. The challenge there is, don't act rashly. My instinct is, if I can stay thinking like this for a week or two, then maybe it's real.
And then it dissipates. Whatever it is, it also has to stick a bit. You wouldn't have gone and done your PhD in psychology and be right.
You wouldn't have continued to do that if it dissipated. But the world is pretty granular and fast-paced now, so there is this kind of endlessly more interesting things happening, which makes it harder probably for kids these days. But maybe they'll have more interesting lives as a result.
[Neil Pasricha]
I want to ask you about psychedelics. I was looking around at AI to see if there's any overlap with Frankl and psychedelics, and there isn't really in his lifetime. But interestingly, at NYU right now, they're using psilocybin and logotherapy together for some palliative support care, like a combination of psilocybin.
I also remembered that in Chatter, you talk a little bit about LSD, or you mention it on page 120, where you talk about being flooded by powerful things. You're talking about nature. You say specifically, I'll quote you here, the neural activity associated with self-immersion decreases.
I love that phrase. The neural activity associated with self-immersion. You don't think you're so important.
Similar to how the brain responds, you're talking about nature, when people meditate or take psychedelics like LSD. Which are notorious for blurring the line between a person's sense of self and the surrounding world. Whoa, I'm very interested in this.
Where are you? Where are we right now in our understanding of awe in the broad sense, psychedelics maybe in a more granular sense? Where are you personally in your interest or exploration of psychedelics?
I'm happy to share where I'm at. And the idea of decreasing our self-immersion, or thinking of ourself as less important, and merging ourself with the surrounding world, that seems like a nice cure for overthinking to me. Because of course, overthinking has always got the assumption that what I'm thinking about or what I am is super important.
So it's a broad question. I'd love to take it in any direction, but I just want to throw that open for you and get your thoughts there. You're touching on a key mechanism that fuels overthinking, which is this tendency to immerse or zoom in on the problem.
As you say, we get so consumed by our own preoccupations that we lose sight of the bigger picture, which is where solutions to our problems often lie. When you can zoom out and see that bigger picture, like Neil, guess what? This planet will likely, might be robot inhabited, but in all likelihood, it will still be here after this problem you're dealing with fades, right?
Like your children will persevere. We lose sight of that when we just over-focus on the email, obnoxious email we got, or the fact that this client wants this. It's just so easy to lose sight of everything.
What's fascinating to me is that there's so many beautiful ways to shift our perspective. Other thinking strategies. I write a lot about these in my books, but then you have these other experiences.
Changing your setting, you talk a lot about. Changing your setting. I mean, awe.
So what is awe? There's been a lot of research. This emotion has been very well studied over the past decade or so.
Awe is an emotion we experience when we're in the presence of something vast and indescribable, something that feels bigger than us. You can find this experience in lots of places, but the world around us is a great provider, purveyor of awe triggers. Beautiful sunsets, fall foliage.
I'm a science fiction guy. I contemplate the fact that we have a vehicle on the planet Mars that we have figured out how to blast a vehicle into outer space, interplanetary travel is actually real. I am so unhandy.
I mean, I don't know how anything works from a mechanical sense. How did we even figure out how planes work, and now we've got spaceships? It's awe.
It just makes you feel smaller, and that feeling of smallness is actually adaptive when everything feels so big and heavy. So you can get that kind of expansion from the world around us. Psychedelics are, anecdotally, I've spoken to a lot of people who have reported benefiting quite a bit from them.
The experience has been is that it does blur this, like you become merged with the energy around you, and it also puts you in a state of mind that allows some individuals to reframe things more effectively, find insight into their experiences. I've never done it. I don't do research on it.
I think like so many fads in science, there was a huge, huge amount of attention a couple of years ago in psychedelics, and these are once taboo, obviously, and now mainstream science is looking at it, and now I think we've transitioned to another phase of the work, which is maybe less attention, headline-grabbing, but it's just kind of like the science you've got to do to figure out how these things work, are they safe, and so forth and so on. What'syour experience been like? Well, so I'm East Indian.
My dad's from India. My mom's from Kenya, East Indian descent. They came to Canada.
My dad's 66. My mom's 72. I was born in 79.
Immigrant mentality, hard-working mentality. Let's review the math test. Let's look for the one question you got wrong.
Go over it, over it, over it. My dad came over with no money, striving, saving, worked as a teacher, trying to invest in real estate, trying to get his real estate license, trying to always go, go, go, and I embodied that to the point where I think from age zero to 23 in my life, I lived with a lot of anxiety. I didn't call it that.
We didn't use that word. I was just a kid with a lot of headaches. I was mousy.
I was quiet. I would not participate in much. I was the water I swam in, Ethan, so I didn't know it was called that.
And then when I tried cannabis at age 23, it went away. It took me out of myself in a way that nothing else had. And so I didn't become addicted to it.
I was still very afraid of this illegal substance that you have to get from your buddy who works in the overnight shift at the grocery warehouse, meeting a guy in the parking lot on their 3 a.m. lunch break and doing a deal for $10 in this Toyota Supra. It was hard to get. Didn't always work.
But when I had some, I was like, wow, there goes all my problems. There goes my overthinking. There goes my stress.
There goes all my worries. And I could, in my mind, be more expansive, be more creative. I used it, I think, safely and productively for 17 years, once, maybe twice a week, evenings, typically weekends.
And then with the combination of the pandemic shutting everything down, us having four kids five years old and under and legalization bluntly in Canada, meaning that in my home in downtown Toronto, I had seven weed stores pop up within a few hundred meters of my house. I reversed the figure in ground and I became using it more often. And the benefits started to decrease.
The costs started to increase in terms of headaches, sleep interruption, so on. I became more moody and anxious when I wasn't using it. And it took me a long time to recognize those problems, to accept them as problems.
And it took me three years, really, to properly quit. So it was like, it gave me 17 years of really positive benefits. I really appreciated it.
And I called it a medicine. It really helped me, which alcohol never did for me. And then it tipped over.
Either my physiology changed or my usage came up or something. And then it started to become a real negative in my life to the point where I now have removed from my life this once helpful tool. And I'm now newly struggling with some of the old anxieties I had.
And so I find myself ruminating more, having it harder to get out of my head, feeling more analysis paralysis. And I've lost this tool. I've explored whether or not I should do something like a macrodose therapy of psilocybin.
I've talked to Dr. Martin Seligman about it. I've talked to one of his peers who works at Johns Hopkins. I have some severe mental illness in my family.
And who knows, I might have underlying symptoms as well. So I'm also afraid to do any of these things that people report being really transcendent and life-altering, like macrodoses of psilocybin and LSD. So while I've done microdoses of both those things, they haven't been consciousness-altering nor sometimes even perceptible.
So I'm very curious about macrodose stuff because I wonder if there could be some larger- scale self-alteration that might be beneficial to me. But I've been too afraid to explore it. And I'm kind of waiting for the science and the infrastructure and the clinics and our knowledge to go up.
And frustrated with that too because I want to live in a day and age where anybody can do anything with knowledge and with science and with support. We're not there yet, it doesn't seem like, so. Yeah, it's enormously frustrating.
[Ethan Kross]
During COVID, we saw just how quickly science can move. To do great things for the planet, mobilizing people to do research, vaccine development, et cetera. And regardless of what your position on vaccines is, the speed with which we were able to mobilize studies was just remarkable.
It was a coordinated strategic effort when you have the right resources behind you. And you just wonder if you were to take some of the most intractable problems that we currently face, like list them out, one through 10, psychological. And then come up, not with this kind of bottom-up strategy that we now are guided by, where everyone's kind of doing their own thing and some things bubble up to the top.
But let's really, really incentivize progress. What would we be able to achieve? And we just, we don't do that, which is.
It's common, though.
[Neil Pasricha]
It feels like we're living in the right era. I mean, you and I are lucky that we had no internet growing up and then we got it and that's as opposed to being living in it. But thanks for, one thing I want to ask just before we jump to your next book is how do you define overthinking?
What is overthinking to you?
[Ethan Kross]
Overthinking to me is if you have a problem, it's out there in the world is something you imagine in your head. You're motivated to work through it, but you're not making progress towards solving it.
And so you find yourself turning that same set of questions surrounding that issue over and over. The key theme is you're not making forward progress. I like to always remind people that there's nothing wrong with thinking about negative experiences.
In fact, negative emotions, negative experiences, these are good things for you. They help you in all sorts of ways that I'm happy to chat with you about. But the damaging part of this phenomenon of overthinking that we're talking about is when you just keep revving on the same idea and that has a cascading effect on lots of things that are important to us.
So in a negative direction.
[Neil Pasricha]
Well, this is the thing, and I get stuck on this too because maybe I'm overthinking, but my definition is thinking past the point of helpfulness and that's kind of what I'm playing with. Only problem is when do you know, how do you know when that is?
Because there's also introspection and sleeping on it and letting something sit with you for a while. And those are all positive things. Be introspective and taking your time and sleeping on something and really considering something and being thoughtful about it.
But I would say, Ethan, I'm not making forward progress. I'm just slowing it down here. And so I find it struggling inside myself to know when exactly the thinking I'm doing is actually unhelpfully staying still versus helpfully pausing to slow down a decision.
I find that hard to parse out.
[Ethan Kross]
Well, yeah, I'm just thinking there are a couple ways to react to that. This is a question that comes up a lot.
We don't have a overthinking blood test or app on our phone that we can use. So there's a subjective quality to it. Here are some tips that I use for myself and that I often share with folks.
So number one, the understanding that the more significant the problem is, the more time it's gonna take for the impulse to overthink it to subside. So big problems, the stakes are greater. We often think about that stuff more.
And so why is that helpful for your question? Well, the expectation that I should not be thinking about this for three or four days. Well, if this is a life-altering decision, actually, from an evolutionary point of view, it probably makes sense that you devote quite a bit of time to think about this from all the different angles to really make sure that this potentially life-altering decision is gonna be the best decision possible.
You wanna go through all the proper steps. Now, if you are overthinking about which drink to buy in a Starbucks for a day, the stakes are, I would argue, objectively much lower. And so the way of calibrating, am I overthinking or not, it needs to be linked to the nature of the problem.
That's one thing. A second thing is, it's really helpful to recognize that the vast majority of our emotional experiences, they have a time course. Like you live life, something happens, it triggers you.
And then as time goes on, the intensity of that emotion fades. The more severe, significant the experience, the trigger, the longer that emotion hangs around, right? But eventually things do get better.
Overthinking, of course, keeps them active for longer. I bring this point up because when I find myself preoccupied with something, like look, I've had some really stressful, heavy things happen. I've thought about them for months, months.
They've been hanging around for months because they were active for months. That didn't mean, however, that I was overthinking them 24 hours a day for that period. I'd think about it each day.
Sometimes that'd be productive, sometimes not. But there was an understanding that because this thing is gonna be here for a while, I'm gonna have to deal with it for a while. And that, to me, is not getting stuck in a totally unproductive spell of chatter.
If you have, God forbid, a loved one who is dealing with a life-threatening illness for months and months and months, it'd be unrealistic to think that you'd be able to wash those negative thoughts and feelings away with an afternoon of X, Y, or Z.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, there's the size of the problem. And then the second point, which I love, which is when you compare Starbucks to a major life change or something.
And then there's the, I love this, the everything has an active course. Like there's knowing that things will end or you're in a season. And that's harder and harder to do now because I feel like we're living in this flattened present.
The algorithms reward timeless content more than timely content because it can... Cooking shows will last forever on Netflix, but like Patriot Act by Hasan Minhaj is canceled even though it's a great show because it's too timely. And so things are becoming more like casino feeling.
There's this endless present. Stores are always open online. And I find that quite an exhausting way to live because it means when I go to sleep, I have to rest knowing that the world is still awake.
Whereas I used to go to sleep and look outside and be like, everyone's asleep. Oh, I have permission to go to bed. Whereas I'd always try to keep going.
I don't know. That's just a side note for me.
[Ethan Kross]
Well, I mean, there's so much we could unpack there, Neil.
So much, if you want to.
[Neil Pasricha]
Give me your reflection and we'll jump to your second book after that.
[Ethan Kross]
Yeah, well, number one, there can be enormous power from plugging in less frequently. So you may have heard that politically times are a little bit turbulent over the past couple of years in our nation.
I found myself just experiencing chatter every time I look at my phone because I like to be informed. I'd like to look at the New York Times, CNN. Whenever I check my phone, I took the apps off my phone.
So that doesn't mean I never check them. But instead of checking them 50 times a day, every time I look at my phone, I check them three times a day. We've done research on this.
We find that the degree to which people check the news during the COVID pandemic, that was the single top predictor of daily anxiety. News consumption, right? So there are ways of shaping the way you interact with the digital landscape that I think can be enormously helpful.
And that's about being strategic. And I try to really embody this in my own life. I love, love, love, love, like watching these funny, silly videos, these reels on Instagram before bed.
It like, it washes me over with positivity. I send them to my buddies and we laugh together. In bed.
I break all the rules.
[Neil Pasricha]
What are you watching?
[Ethan Kross]
You know, prank.
[Neil Pasricha]
What do you type in?
[Ethan Kross]
It just comes up on my algorithm. It knows me.
You know, prank videos and other silly things. And you know, this is, you know, it's just like, it's like the Food Channel. It's just kind of mushy positivity for the mind, kind of lulls me to bed.
But what I'm not doing and I'm very vigilant about is I am not looking at my feed before bed. I'm not looking at comments on anything before bed. So being really strategic with this can make a difference.
The other thing I would say, mental time travel into the future and past are two tools that I personally rely on a lot. These are science-based tools. Mental time travel into the future.
The way it works is, how am I going to feel about this? And then you plug in the date that works for you. If you take that out far enough, you will be surprised at how powerful this can be.
I know, for example, that when I wake up with chatter at 2 a.m., if I ask myself, how am I going to feel about this tomorrow morning? I'm instantly calm. Because the chatter is always better the next morning than it is at 2 a.m. Always, for me personally. Sometimes it's a really big issue. Something that feels heavier, it's not how am I going to feel about tomorrow because tomorrow I still got to deal with this. It's how am I going to feel about this five years from now?
Or how am I going to feel about this when I'm retired? How am I going to feel about this beyond, right? It's a very flexible tool that recalibrates your perspective.
Very small shift that can have cascading effects for how you feel. So I would just try some of those out. Watching prank videos before bed.
[Neil Pasricha]
In Canada, a very popular show is Just For Laughs Gags.
[Ethan Kross]
Oh, okay.
[Neil Pasricha]
It's a show that has no talking at all. It's just like pranks. It was originally created in French, I think, for French and English audiences.
But because it was so popular and it has no language, because it's like they set up a game, they show you how it's played and then it plays out. It's gone viral. It's like a huge viral show.
[Ethan Kross]
I'm making a note now.
[Neil Pasricha]
JFL Gags, Ethan, you're going to love the show. Okay. My 10-year-old son and I love watching it together.
And it makes you laugh so hard before bed, which is wonderful. The other thing you could do, of course, is take A Walk In The Woods. A Walk In The Woods by Bill Bryson is your second formative book.
Originally published by Doubleday in 1997, the cover is like a wooded Appalachian scene with the original cover, a big moose, a black bear, colorful yellow and green leaves, red berries. So unlike Mansard for Meaning, nobody's picked this book on our top 1,000 yet. However, A Short History of Nearly Everything, also by Bill Bryson, has been picked by Michael Bungay-Stanier, author of The Coaching Abbot, and Sean Acor, author of The Happiest of Angiopino Hymn.
Bill Bryson was born in 1951 in Des Moines, Iowa. He's an American-British author known for smart and accessible nonfiction writing, such as Notes from a Small Island and The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. He lived in England for 20 years, got back to America in 1986 by actually hiking the Appalachian Trail.
Stephen Katz is the guy who was hiking with his student for his real-life friend, Matt Angerer, I think, who was in another travel book. They didn't complete the trail. That's kind of the point.
It becomes less about conquering the trail and more about experiencing. It's about friendship. It's about connection.
Aging, maturing. This is a trail, by the way, that's 2,000 miles long. It goes from Georgia, near where you got married, towards Maine.
And you can follow this Dewey Decimal Heads under 917.4044. Listen to this, Ethan. Ethan, it's History and Geography slash North American Travel slash Northeastern United States Travel slash Appalachian Region. Tell us about your relationship with A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson.
[Ethan Kross]
Well, Neil, I was a latecomer when it came to reading for fun. I'd get all my reading done in high school and I was a good student, but it was only in college that I started just falling in love with books. And to my surprise, like, oh my god, there's such enormous variety of nourishment that you can find when you go into a bookstore.
And somehow I stumbled on this book. I don't think anyone recommended it. And, you know, Bill's way of writing, if you've never read him before.
Have you read any Bill Bryson books?
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, A Short History of Nearly Everything.
[Ethan Kross]
Okay, short history.
[Neil Pasricha]
And I really love his book, The Body.
[Ethan Kross]
That's right, that's another one. It's like a tour of the human body.
It's just, yeah. And he's so, he's witty. Very, very, very funny.
[Ethan Kross]
And that book in particular really captured friendship between two people in a way that resonated strongly. It was amusing. It also exposed me to a foreign terrain.
So I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. We did not go hiking. There was no camping where I was from.
And so now I'm learning about bears. And he was, I think it was his character who was very afraid of bears. That would be me on the trail.
I wouldn't like bears. And so I resonated there. I was learning about the Appalachian Trail.
And it also felt like this tremendous adventure. I was in college when I read that book. And even though I had found my path relatively early in college, I knew I wanted to go into psychology.
You know, there were still, there were raids, there was tests, GREs, there was girlfriends, you know, lots of stuff. And then here you had someone who just escaped for weeks into this beautiful trail. And there was something that was intoxicating about that possibility too.
Just like turning the volume down on all the noise. And so I just, I just, I just loved that book. And it was, it was, you know, it's just, it was nourishment is the best way that I describe it.
I've even heard that looking at photos, maybe I heard this from you. I think I did. Yeah.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah. You've written about this, right? This is from you.
Sorry, I'm not quoting you to you. But even looking at digital photos of the outdoors, it creates internally relaxing feelings, even though, you know, so I've, I've made our Samsung frame TV wallpaper. Good.
My kids always choose the, like, you know, the, the abstract weird ones. I was like, can you just make it nature? I always say that just make it nature, something nature.
Cause it's, I got that from your book. Yeah. Give us a case for the outdoors right now.
Like, you know, you probably know this. We're spending less time outdoors now than ever before. Um, past guests on this show, Lenore Skenazy author of free range kids and co- founder with Jonathan Haidt of the, another guest of our show, uh, the let grow movement have quoted a study that says kids are now spending 7% of their days outside, which I know you can't multiply percentages, but like 7% of daytime, seven days a week means it takes the kid a whole week to spend about half a, half a day outside. Yeah. You know, what's happening here?
Why are we becoming homebody so much? Um, you've probably seen that viral chart that's been going around the internet about how, you know, our home, our percentage of hours and time at home, like spiked in the pandemic, but then like never came back. Yeah.
You know, it just never, it didn't, it didn't come back down. We kind of just stayed at home. We've gone down a little bit year over year, but it's like, we're still at home all day.
And yet your research says the opposite can be really helpful to you when it comes to reducing mental chatter, when it comes to, you know, crack open this nut for me a little bit, make us the case for, for nature and also help us do it, actually do it. Cause like, I often know that I should go outside more than I just don't like what, there's an action problem here too.
[Ethan Kross]
Well, all right.
So the first thing you need to know is when I first came across the research touting the benefits of nature on emotional health, wellbeing, cognitive health too. I was such a skeptic. Again, I came from Brooklyn, New York.
One of our most famous books actually references nature in the title. Can you guess what that book was? I'm curious if that is a peer on your show.
[Neil Pasricha]
When you say our, what do you mean? Our who's, who's famous books?
[Ethan Kross]
Brooklynites, people from Brooklyn.
[Neil Pasricha]
Oh, oh, oh. Oh my gosh. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
[Ethan Kross]
Yes. You got it. Good job.
I'm impressed. Like a singular tree grows in Brooklyn. Like this is not that far fetched as a descriptor.
Like, you know, Brooklyn was a cement jungle. Uh, at least the part that I was, you know, familiar with, from a neighborhood called Canarsie, which, um, yeah, like you've probably been to Brooklyn recently and think this is like the coolest place in the world. All the places.
Park Slope and Greenpoint and all that stuff.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah. All those places.
[Ethan Kross]
Yeah. All those places where, where Park Slope, maybe not withstanding the other places were not so cool growing up and, you know, really very true story. I worked really hard in high school as a mediocre student, junior high, turned it around, did really well in a public high school with the express goal of leaving Brooklyn and never coming back.
I did not enjoy growing up there one bit. It was a tough area, you know, fights and muggings and burglaries. Um, not, not, not pleasant.
Um, and so nonetheless, I grew up in this space and then I'm exposed to this research. Well, if, you know, if you want to, the way I interpret it is if you really want to be mentally fit, you got to be in nature. And I, to be honest, I didn't love nature.
You know, nature was where you got mugged. Going for a walk in a park in nature was where the bad guys like hid behind the bushes. So, you know, this was like, I was on, on guard.
And then I started participating in some of this work and I, you know, saw some of the and I'm a total convert, total convert. So much so that I've changed the way I walk to work each day. I take a slightly longer route to, to ensure that I get my dosage of beautiful trees and landscapes.
Um, I have, um, we've purchased various plants for inside the house. So I get glances of, of, of some nature when I'm at my desk or in the living room, we, we had the good fortune to build a house a couple of years ago. And when we sat down with the architect, we made sure that the views like lots of windows, strategically facing woods, trees.
So, um, so that's the case for nature. Like the data there are so weird. Nature's become a luxury.
It's become a luxury, but it is available. You know, the, the next question you raised though, is like about action. This is such an important question.
How do you go from knowing to doing, um, this is perplexed scientists for years. There's some really good frameworks out there that speak to this one that I'm fond of. I write about it in, in my last book shift, um, is, is called the technical name for it is mental contrasting with implementation intentions.
It's a, it's a bit of a mouthful. Mental contrasting with implementation intentions, just kind of mental contrast. And I get it.
So you're changing what you see with implementation, implementation intention. So like, how do you actually do, how do you actually change what you see? And so it's been, it's been rebranded whoop, just like the bracelet, um, for ease.
And, uh, here's how it goes. There are four steps to it. W O O P.
And the four steps are designed to systematically address a known obstacle that undermines people's efforts to follow through with their goals. So I'll walk you through real quick. The W is the wish.
Like, let's be clear. What is our goal? Oftentimes people don't have a concrete specific goals.
Like I want to get healthier. Well, what does that actually mean? You want to lower your cholesterol?
Do you want to like reduce the amount of like abdominal fat? Like what, what is it? So be clear about what the wish is.
Once you are clear about your goal, then let's talk about outcomes. If you are successful, what does that look like? What will happen?
And the purpose of this is some people, they like, they have a goal, but they instantly just think about the challenges of difficulties. They don't give them time to actually sit with, oh my God, this might be amazing if I can accomplish this. And so thinking about the good that might come from you completing your goal, this energizes people.
It like revs them up to, to go after the goal. So that's the first outcome. The second O is the obstacle.
Now that you're motivated, you know what is at stake. And this is going to be awesome if like, make it concrete. Let's say my wish is to not yell at my kids when they fight.
The first O. That's a good one for me. Yeah.
The first O, the outcome is, all right, like my blood pressure is going to be lower. Our family dynamics are going to be stronger. I'm not going to be modeling behaviors.
Scouring my kids for life by thinking, yeah, like I'm worried about all this stuff. Right? So like there's lots of reason I should commit to this goal.
Now let's look at the obstacle. That's, what can get in the way? Well, when I hear, I have two daughters.
When I hear one of them say ugly things to the other, I have an automatic reaction. I feel like my, my artery in my neck begin to pulse. I get warm in the face because I've told them so many times we don't speak to one another that way.
Right? And it's an automatic response. And I don't know what to do.
You have a reaction to defend the one that's being attacked. This happens to me all the time. I get so mad at the attacker, but then now I'm attacking the attacker, you know?
So that's, now we've pinpointed the obstacle. Now we get to the P, the plan, but it's not any generic plan. It's an if-then plan.
If I find myself getting hot under the collar because my kids are fighting, then, and you rehearse what you're going to do in that moment, whether it be mental time travel, or step outside for five minutes and come back to it.
[Neil Pasricha]
That's what I have to do, yeah, yeah.
[Ethan Kross]
And the beauty of this is you are, you're gaming out the whole situation so that the problem people often encounter is they find themselves in a situation, they don't know what to do. They haven't thought about it. But now you're creating an automatic link between an action and a context.
This also happens to be the same thing that Navy SEALs do before every excursion or operation they go on, which I find remarkable. They sit in a room. They say, like the team that's going out there, what's my goal?
What does success look like? Now let's talk about all the ways that this is going to go sideways, obstacles. And then for every obstacle, for every if, they have a plan.
It doesn't mean they encounter every challenge, but eight out of 10 things that happen, they have rehearsed, they know what to do, and they're a successful organization. Beautiful. I love it.
Simple framework. If-then is beautiful because I know when my blood boils, when my kids, I just need to walk away. Easier said than done.
[Neil Pasricha]
It's easier said than done, but still, it's a thing. Side note, this is going to sound maybe strange to you, but a few years ago when I was yelling at my kids, I'm happy to say a lot more than I was now. Like I've gotten a lot better, a lot better.
I spoke to what I would call an uncle or one of my parents, Indian friends who calls himself an astrologer. He's studied a lot of palmistry, all this stuff. And he kind of is like one of these seer people.
He doesn't charge any money, but he talks to people. And I told him about this problem I was having. He said to me, every night before bed, make a pot of warm milk, heat it up, put inside it a little bit of butter, a little bit of yogurt, a little bit of honey, and a little bit of sugar as natural as possible.
Drink it before bed. Turmeric if you can, a little turmeric if you can, and it will calm your insides. And I was like, what are you talking about, dude?
But I'll tell you, Ethan, I think whether placebo effects or not, it worked. I love this idea. The little butter, yogurt, honey, and sugar in milk before bed, I had a mug of it, and I was like, oh, yeah, that feels good.
I really like that. And I don't know if it was made up or what, but I tell you, that side note
just worked for me. Listen, I tell people all the time, if it ain't broke and it's not doing harm, just don't fix it.
I've got a whole chapter on placebos. They are a powerful tool. Maybe there are some biochemical effects of that concoction on top of them.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, exactly. Okay, I have questions on your writing routines and how you are a writer, because I really wanted to ask you that as related to Bryson. But in the interest of time, I'm going to hold those.
Just remember that we want to talk about writing routines, and I want to shift to your third and final book, which is The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay. That's Cavalier with a K, K-A-V-A-L-I-E-R, and Clay with a C, C-L-A-Y, by Michael Chabon. I had to look it up.
He introduces himself as Chabon, C-H-A-B-O-N, originally published in 2000 by Random House. This is a Pulitzer Prize winner. First edition, kind of looks like a vintage comic book with mustard yellow, blue, black, halftone comic book artwork.
The version I have is maybe the more famous one. I believe that is the Chrysler Building in the foreground. Empire State.
Oh, God, I got the building wrong. It's the Empire State Building, obviously. Oh, my gosh.
I can't believe I said Chrysler Building with nothing up around it, because it was the tallest building around at the time in the golden heyday of comic books. Chabon was born in 1963. He is a living American novelist, essayist.
He's best known for this book. I wanted to ask you about kind of not one-hit wonders, but what do you do in your life when you have one thing supersede everything else, as maybe all of us do. You, me, Chabon.
His other books, though, include The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Telegraph Avenue, and famously turned into a movie, Wonder Boys. In 1939, in World War II, Joe Cavalier, a young Jewish artist and trained escape artist, flees Nazi-occupied Prague and arrives in Brooklyn, where he meets his cousin, Sammy Clay. Together, they create The Escapist, a superhero who becomes a sensation.
File this one Dewey Decimal Heads under 813.5 for 20th Century American Fiction. Ethan, please tell us about your relationship with the amazing adventures of Cavalier and Clay.
[Ethan Kross]
Read this book in graduate school.
It's easily my favorite piece of fiction I've ever read. It was the first time, putting aside the themes that you mentioned, some of them, it's the first time I can remember wanting to savor sentences and paragraphs that I was reading. I didn't want to finish the chapter because it was so beautifully written.
There was just this admiration for the art. And then on top of that, there were themes that just resonated so powerfully with me from Holocaust, Jewish family, central to my identity.
There was love, there was friendship and brotherhood of the highest qualities or most intensity that I've had those kinds of relationships to as many of us have had.
There were comic books. I used to collect comic books.
[Neil Pasricha]
Oh, really?
[Ethan Kross]
Oh, yeah.
[Neil Pasricha]
Oh, nice.
[Ethan Kross]
You know, you named the Marvel movie.
I eat it up right now. Oh, nice. Love that stuff.
[Neil Pasricha]
You've seen all the movies in the Marvelverse?
[Ethan Kross]
I've seen them all many times.
[Neil Pasricha]
Wow.
Yeah. And so there were all of these. There was New York.
And it was just this wonderful transportation. And, you know, you put all those pieces together and it was a wonderful, wonderful experience. I've only had one other book.
I recently read it that came close to activating that. It was a book called Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow. Have you read this one?
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, I have. Gabrielle Zevin, is that right?
[Ethan Kross]
I think so.
Which similarly is about not comic books, but video games, like a clear connection there.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah.
[Ethan Kross]
And also these growing up together, this kind of epic from childhood through adulthood, bonds that are formed.
And so I keep.
[Neil Pasricha]
The opening sentence, by the way, I reread. I read this book years ago, but the opening sentence of her book seems to me a direct riff on the opening sentence of this book.
[Ethan Kross]
It might well be. I'm assuming she was influenced by it as well. Yeah, it was just like that.
That too had such a beautiful quality to the writing. And so I keep wanting to reread it, but I have not found time to do that. I'm constantly trying to have that same experience again.
But look, it took like, oh, my God, over 20 years until Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow for me to be kind of captivated in a similar way. So I'm really grateful to Michael for giving me that gift. It was a real gift to read.
[Neil Pasricha]
It's a beautiful book. It's a long book. It's got rapturous, trapeze-like sentences.
To be able to produce something like this is mesmerizing. I agree about Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow being a bit of a sister book. I might also throw in there maybe some of David Mitchell's books.
They're a little bit more abstract, a little bit, but like Cloud Atlas, for example, or things like that kind of come to mind for me. I worry a bit about our jobs as writers. Because this book is like 650 pages.
I'm like, man, this guy would have had to go deep. And I think of myself as a writer. It's my single word that I would describe myself by.
And I feel that there's importance in the one-line bio. Like when I had a Zoom with James Clear before Atomic Habits came out, he was asking me how to sell a million books. Turns out he didn't need my advice.
But I was telling him about going to bookstores, talking to the staff, doing all this book stuff. And he was like, oh my gosh, do you think of yourself as a writer? I was like, yeah.
He's like, oh, I think of myself as a web entrepreneur. It was a different framing for himself. Maybe it's the same thing.
Maybe it's not. This was before Atomic Habits came out. And I was like, oh, the one-word bio.
But now I'm worried. I'm worried, Ethan. I worry that my chosen profession has this tripling of my lived experience.
And living my life while simultaneously trying to observe my life, while simultaneously trying to record my observations to it. I take an average of 50 photos a day on my phone. I divided my camera roll by the number of days I've had my phone.
It's 50. Some days I'm probably taking pictures of a whole PowerPoint or a concert times 100 or whatever. But I'm constantly...
[Neil Pasricha]
I worry that the nature of our jobs itself is overthinking central.
[Ethan Kross]
Oh, yeah. I mean, we're in our heads all the time, trying to make sense of how to do this really hard thing, which is string together words to inform and entertain as well at the same time.
And it's really hard to do that. Like Chatter, writing Chatter. That was really...
That was a slog. It was hard work in ways that I did not anticipate. I've always been a slow writer with articles as well.
But when you want to be precise about science, but also communicate it very clearly and also make it fun and engaging, this is not an easy thing to do. And I have such appreciation for the authorial... But I have to be careful.
My Brooklyn accent comes out on that one. You may have heard a little bit of it there. Authorial.
Yeah. This is really hard work. This is...
[Neil Pasricha]
Authorial what? Is that the phrase? Authorial what?
[Ethan Kross]
Plight. Authorial plight. Yeah.
I mean, this is not just about stringing a few things together to have a book to give out and drum up business. I mean, look, that might be a strategy for some. But I think yourself and the guests that you have are guests who recognize the power of books to change lives.
And if you're lucky, have those lives aggregate in ways that change cultures. And my goodness, that is an enormous responsibility if you have that potential. And it's hard.
It's really hard work, I think. So what about you? Do the words just fly off the fingertips for you?
[Neil Pasricha]
Well, no. And actually, the other problem that's happening right now, especially as I write this new book, is I find myself using AI.
[Ethan Kross]
Oh, yeah.
[Ethan Kross]
We could talk about that.
[Neil Pasricha]
Well, that's what I'm curious about. It's like, I don't want to use it. And I'm finding it quick for research, put a bunch of files in a project and clone.
Then I talk to it, but I'm like, this doesn't sound like... I'm like, where's the lines here on where we use AI, how we use AI, future of reading related to this? Like there's a word I heard the other day, slop grenades.
Yeah, AI slop. Did you hear about that? I mean, AI slop, I get it all the time.
How do we... What's your writing process? How does AI fit into your current writing process?
How did it used to? How is it going to? And what's the future of reading in the books?
Because there's a current conversation happening in the Zeitgeist. You've probably seen cover stories in the Atlantic and so on, the death of reading, the demise of reading. And by the way, 58% of Americans read zero books last year, American Time Use Study.
So less of us are reading books now than ever before. And we know this is true because we take the subway and we see airplanes, we're on airplanes. You remember walking down from the bathroom, everybody would be in a book.
And now maybe there's a bit of a comeback, but it's hard. I see people reading less. People understand it more as a medicinal tool.
They're like, I should, I want to, it's good for me. But it's very hard because I cannot get past the first page because I'm so used to being overstimulated. So I'd love to know writing process, AI with the writing process, and future of this grand thing that we call reading books.
Boy, we're going to have to do another show. I mean, these are such big topics. These are the kinds of things that all of, like, we're talking about my buddies who are in this space all the time.
[Ethan Kross]
So, look, I think AI is a tremendous tool. And I personally believe that it would be silly not to avail ourselves of this tool for certain things. When it comes to book writing, the way I use it is, and this is, I'm working on a book now, and so it's the first time that AI has been around for book stuff for me.
For research, it's invaluable. It also makes tons of, tons of mistakes, inferential leaps. I find that it can be helpful for, if I'm looking for certain kinds of stories pointing me in the right direction.
If I want to get smart on a new literature, being really kind of specific about what I want to get smart on. Give me, you know, the top 20 most cited papers in this space and pull from these kinds of journals and not this. I mean, wow, this is like, you know, you mentioned Marty using it six to eight hours a day.
Like, I love working with AI for these purposes. It's amazing. It can keep up.
It goes fast. I love the outputs. I have to emphasize to folks who are using AI for research though, so much of it has to be vetted because it makes such leaps in the conclusions and the way it synthesizes papers and results.
You really need to go back to the original sources because if you didn't, you would get things wrong. But in terms of like pointing me in the right direction, very, very helpful. That's really where I, out of fear, have stopped.
Like when it comes to book stuff. So I'm otherwise drafting and editing like I have otherwise. I don't know if that will always be true when it comes to using AI.
And I think people vary quite a bit in where they fall on this spectrum. I've spoken to some people who have leaned completely into AI for helping them write and edit. Others using it as an editing tool once the content is produced.
I think it's really hard having used AI in other contexts, memos, administrative work. I mean, it's so goddamn good. It's so good in terms of its ability to spit out output that once you have it, it can be hard then to get in there and edit it.
So that's how I engage with it for book stuff. We're figuring it out. We're figuring it out.
[Neil Pasricha]
Do you think books are, what's the, do your kids read books?
[Ethan Kross]
Not as much as I'd like, but yes. You know, it's, my oldest one does, my younger one less.
You know, it's interesting, Neil. Like I love reading. I love books like you.
Like having a bookstore would be, that's pretty amazing. Dream job, retirement job. We'll open one together.
[Ethan Kross]
Let's do it. We're not that far from each other.
[Neil Pasricha]
No, we could have two branches.
London, Ontario.
[Ethan Kross]
That's right.
[Neil Pasricha]
And it's funny because your parents, you know, like you got a 96. Fantastic. What'd you get wrong?
[Ethan Kross]
I feel like it resonates so strongly.
[Neil Pasricha]
But what is the future of books?
[Ethan Kross]
Like I didn't read, I didn't like reading growing up.
I read because I had to. I was skilled in my ability to read books and understand them and answer questions. But it was very intrinsic, the motivation I developed to read in college.
And so like I try to, my wife and I try to model this for our daughters. Like they see us reading and the hope is that that sparks a desire within them. But yeah, I hope they read more than they do right now.
But are they off the charts reading all the time? No.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah.
[Ethan Kross]
Do I think reading will stick around? In general, I feel like we are very good at making extreme predictions for what's going to happen. And I love the midpoint when it comes to predicting.
You know, the pendulum can swing violently from one direction to the next. You know, we heard before that like audiobooks and ebooks were going to destroy the publishing industry. That didn't happen.
There were some shifts. But I think there's going to always be a place for books. There's nothing like it.
It's complete. It's got a beginning. It's got an end.
It's heavy. It feels good in your hand. The jacket feels good.
[Neil Pasricha]
There's thought, time, editing. I'll tell you, AI is influencing my writing on this overthinking book another way, which is that I'm being much more personal. Much more personal story.
Much more acerbic and wild in my writing style, because I'm like, AI is just going to be plain Jane. And someone's going to... I know someone's going to say like, what's the summary of Neil's overthinking book in AI?
Here's the summary. But I want the experience of reading it to feel... I'm not Chez Bon, unfortunately, you know?
But I also aspire to what the great novelists can do with twists and turns. And there's an exciting randomness to their sentences. So it's influencing me this other way, which is it's making my writing more me-ish.
[Ethan Kross]
Yes.
[Neil Pasricha]
I'm less thinking like Happiest Equation. I wrote the structure of that book in Excel.
This book, I'm following more George Saunders writing advice, which is use the energy meter sentence to sentence. If it's exciting to you, go that way. If it's not, go back a sentence and go the other way.
I'm following that path.
[Ethan Kross]
I love that.
[Neil Pasricha]
So it might affect the book one other way.
And I also think, I love reading. I think in an era of infinite, the value of curation skyrockets.
[Ethan Kross]
Yes, without question.
Because AI, I had three questions deep. I'm like, what did it say a second? I'm stuck in these scrolls.
And I find it like, can you summarize what we just talked about in the last 10 questions? I'm always doing this kind of thing. And the book, it just feels concise.
I'm reading a book right now called The Circadian Code, all about circadian rhythm. And I'm like, this is the world's foremost expert. He's studying this for 30 years.
It's everything he knows with all of his research put all together. I'm feeling quite happy that I have this thing I'm carrying around my backpack and stuff. So it's a joy going with you back and forth on reading into your formative books.
[Neil Pasricha]
I got a few fast money questions to close this off, if you don't mind.
[Ethan Kross]
Let's do it.
Kind of related to what we were just talking about. Hardcover, paperback, audio, or e?
[Ethan Kross]
Hardcover.
[Neil Pasricha]
Nice.
[Ethan Kross]
Without question. And I sometimes buy the ebook, but I have a rule that if I get the ebook, I also buy the hardcover for my library to support the author.
[Neil Pasricha]
And why hardcover over paperback?
[Ethan Kross]
Um, I, uh, you know, cause, cause, you know, you may experience this. We're the same vintage cause I gotta do this thing now.
So I can see, I can see it much better.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Um, how do you organize your books on your bookshelf?
[Ethan Kross]
Oh, this is such a great question. Um, so I have, uh, I'm in my, one of my offices at work right now and I have a lot of like my psychology, nonfiction stuff behind me.
[Neil Pasricha]
I see it.
[Ethan Kross]
Yeah.
At home. Uh, I don't organize it as well as I would like. Um, uh, I have kind of some like high volume usage areas and the rest, uh, the rest is just kind of jammed in.
[Neil Pasricha]
Mm. I I'm doing decimal system over here.
[Ethan Kross]
That's very, that's, that's, that's admirable.
[Neil Pasricha]
It's also exhausting. Um,
What is your book lending policy?
[Ethan Kross]
Oh, this is such a great question.
No one's ever asked me it. I, I, I tend to be a giver with these things. And like, I, I, I'm a, I'm a real hype man when I like something like, oh, you should hear, take this, take this.
And then, and then I never get it back. And I say to my wife, like, God, I shouldn't have, I, I, where's that book I wanted for my collection? Well, this is maybe related.
[Neil Pasricha]
Uh, is there a book that you can recall giving as a gift? Uh, frequently. I mean, is there a book that you've bought more than once for somebody else?
[Ethan Kross]
Man's Search for Meaning. You know how many copies I bought about that book? I mean, like dozens because I've given so many away.
So yeah.
[Neil Pasricha]
Beautiful. And they all different covers hilariously.
[Ethan Kross]
Yes.
[Neil Pasricha]
Um,
Do you have a favorite bookstore living or dead?
[Ethan Kross]
Uh, I do.
There's a, a gem of bookstore in the town I live in. I live in Ann Arbor and there's this wonderful independent bookstore called Literati. If you were to like close your eyes and imagine the, the kind of quintessential independent bookstore, that is it.
[Neil Pasricha]
Literati is great name. Yeah. Is it, is what's the name of that sandwich place?
There's Zimmerman's. Is that it?
[Ethan Kross]
Zingerman's.
Yeah.
[Neil Pasricha]
Zingerman's. Okay.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah. I've had that before. I went to Dave Ulrich's, um, exact HR class years ago when I was working at Walmart.
[Ethan Kross]
I teach in that class, small world.
[Neil Pasricha]
Oh, you do?
[Ethan Kross]
Yeah.
[Neil Pasricha]
Oh, wait. Wonderful. I guess I was there maybe before that happened.
It was like, uh, when I was in HR at Walmart 10 years ago. Um, do you have an author that you get excited about when they release a new book?
[Ethan Kross]
Um, Chabon is one of them.
Um, I've, I've, I've, I've read several of his, um, um, uh, Michael Lewis. Uh, oh my goodness. He's, he's just, he's a master, um, master.
Kind of like Bill Bryson in a way that's like such rollicking nonfiction. I, he, he has an ability to take topics that I would think I have no desire to read about. And yeah, I just find it amazing.
Um, so I love, I love his work. Um, a lot, a lot of our peers, you know, I also, um, love reading, but those are some big ones.
[Neil Pasricha]
Great. Last question. Here we go. This show is called 3 Books.
It is the world's only podcast by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. Um, you're a hero for, for our audience. A lot of our audiences are aspiring writers.
A lot of our audience are, um, you know, eager to be published and to be publishing at the rate of what you're doing and to be, you know, you're on a speaking circuit, um, you're researching, um, whether it's related to those exact, uh, things you do or not. Can you close us off and take a moment to think about it, if you'd like, with any one hard fought piece of wisdom that you have gleaned, that you have found valuable to be applying to your success and to your life? Life, not just writing.
Yeah. Well, I said it because it's, there's a writing, you know, we're writers here on the show, but you know, you're also very successful and from the outside, you know, happy and stable father of two, uh, you know, and doing so well in your life. So is there some adage or piece of wisdom that, that you kind of recall you think about often?
[Ethan Kross]
Maybe, uh, you know, I, I, I can't tell you how much I've benefited from, um, it's going to sound so totally juvenile. This piece of advice is so simple, but, uh, you know, do good for other people. Um, help out, try to, you know, so many people I know, like they're very, just very transactional, right?
Like I'm going to do this in this case, but not in this, like go out on a limb and, and, and, and, and try to help and support that really does come back to help. Whether we're talking about science, writing, any of the areas I work in consulting, speaking, et cetera, putting that positive energy out and trying to help other people. It does in some, you know, karmically ordained way, come back to, to help in my experience.
And, and it feels good. One of the best ways to help yourself is to help other people. Um, so, so that would be the advice.
[Neil Pasricha]
It's beautiful and easy to forget these days. Um, do good, give, serve others. Uh, Dr. Ethan Cross, I love your work. I think you are on the forefront of, of this emerging issue of our time of overthinking and getting stuck in our heads and in these loops that we are all kind of experiencing right now. I cannot recommend enough, uh, Chatter and Shift. Um, if you have not read, uh, either of them, I started with Chatter is a really, really, really wonderful book.
Please pick up a copy if you don't already have it. Uh, and Ethan, thank you. Thank you so much for coming on 3 Books.
[Ethan Kross]
It's been a real joy to have this conversation with you. I really appreciate it. Been a tremendous treat and I can't wait to read your book on overthinking.
[Neil Pasricha]
Thank you so much. Oh my gosh. Hey everybody.
It's just me, just Neil again, hanging back in my basement with my backpack full of wires, listening back to the wise and wonderful Ethan Kross. So many quotes jump out to me. I like this one.
I do not take the position that technology, whether it be social media or AI is good or bad for us. It depends entirely on how we engage with those technologies. I don't know why this one hit me in the head like a hammer, but it was like, oh yeah, like we don't have to judge the technology in itself.
It's about our relationship with it. I just, it's just like a nonjudgment view that I found wonderfully Buddhist and probably more accurate than my own dystopian leanings towards AI. But yeah, pull back.
I also love looking up to Brussels sprouts recipe, right? And I use it all the time. So yeah, it's not good or bad.
It's what you do with it. All right. How about this one?
[Neil Pasricha]
I asked him about overthinking and how he defines it. And he said, the key theme is you're not making forward progress. So that's very similar to my definition, which is kind of thinking past the point of helpfulness is how I think about it myself.
But the problem is how do you notice when you're doing that? And sometimes when you ruminate on something, it can be helpful. Sleep on it.
Sleep on your problems. That means, are you thinking more about it? Are you waiting a day?
[Neil Pasricha]
Like, you know, this is where we have to parse things out. This is why I'm writing a book about overthinking, everybody. That will be my next book.
It's due at the end of this year, and I'm sweating it. I'm sweating it. I'm writing it every day.
My working title is The Overthinking Book. I might need a new title. Give me a title idea.
The top two books on the market, by the way, for overthinking, side note, in addition to Chatter, which is awesome by Ethan Kross, are Stop Overthinking by Nick Trenton, who I'm not convinced is a real person. The guy's written 100 books in the last two years, and I think it might just be an AI. Nick Trenton, if you're listening to this, please give me a call, 1-833- READ-ALOT, and let me know that I'm wrong and you are not actually a robot.
And Joseph Nguyen's book, Don't Believe Everything You Think, which is very popular and has now been published by James Clear, making it astronomically popular since James Clear is essentially a one-man publishing machine. All right. Let's get back to Ethan.
How about this one? All is an emotion we experience when we're in the presence of something vast and indescribable, something that feels bigger than us. The key theme, of course, for overthinking is that it lessens the own weight of our thoughts completely.
What you are thinking doesn't matter at all if you're staring at the stars. You don't matter at all. Earth doesn't matter at all.
Nothing matters at all. So why would the email you got from your grandma matter? You know what I mean?
Love it. Hard to do, but I love it. That's kind of why I do the bird walls.
By the way, we just kick-started the second bird wall. If you happen to be listening to this live, like in October of 2026, go on down to DuPont in Spadina, where Nick Sweetman is now painting a 1,200-square-foot mural to complement the 750-square-foot mural that he painted two years ago. By the way, if you don't know at all what I'm talking about, then I would highly recommend you listen to chapter number—don't let me get it wrong—144, featuring, of course, Nick Sweetman.
[Neil Pasricha]
All right, back to Ethan Kross. I didn't love nature. You know, nature was where you got mugged.
I think of myself as a city guy. You should have seen me camping with my first wife in 2006. I was on a plot of land that was basically a park.
You know what I mean? It's like, there's the tent behind you, the tent to your left, to your right. It was like, this is not camping.
It's not like in the woods. It's like, you're renting a plot at a hotel without the hotel. And it was me, my sister, me, my wife, and my sister and her then-boyfriend, now-husband.
And it was hilarious because my first wife, who's a lovely person, she was an expert at cooking scalloped potatoes over the fire and going for a canoe ride. I'm sure it's not called that. And so was my now-brother-in-law.
And me and my sister are both dead weight in a canoe, don't know how to start a fire, don't know how to cook anything over a fire. Camping is a future goal for me. Let's put it that way.
I would like to become a good camper. I will need help to do that. I need to.
I need help. All right. Chapter...
Not chapter. Let's do two more quotes. Woo!
W-O-O-P is Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, and Plan. Four steps designed to help people follow through on their goals. And lastly, his closing thought, one of the best ways to help yourself is to help other people.
Beautiful. All right. Now, let's add two more books to our top 1,000.
We're going to need like a double guest soon where we get six more books. As you know on the FAQ, guys, I'm starting to keep track. What's the current ratio of number of books discussed to number of guests?
As you know, by our 333 guests, 333 guests with 999 books discussed, that would be 3.000. Like, our ratio would be exactly 3.000. That's what it was after chapter one, after chapter two, after chapter three, right? That's what it was. Problem is, we have a lot of repeats, which we do not give new numbers to.
We give asterisks to on our top 1,000, as long-time listeners will know. And we also have Penn and Kim Holderness, for example, who, you know, I encouraged them to each give us 3 books, and they did. So, if you listen to chapter 151 with Leslie and I and Penn and Kim, there's six books there.
So, I'm kind of tracking towards 3.000, but I need help. That's why Desi, my lovely podcast maestro, is helping me. That will be a running total of the number of total books on the top 1,000, divided by the number of total guests we've had, okay?
Got it. Updated every chapter. Thank you, Desi, for that.
So, let's add a couple more books, including number, I'm scrolling to the bottom here, number 521, The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. See, I don't know if that was discussed first. Now I'm confused.
Maybe that's number 520. Uh-oh, uh-oh. And then number 520, uh-oh, maybe I'm getting it wrong.
That would be A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. And then we've got an asterisk on Man's Search for Meaning. We've got to get these numbers straight.
Man's Search for Meaning, which was originally mentioned way back in Vancouver, chapter 23, by Jesse Finkelstein. And then it already has three asterisks on it. It already has three asterisks on it already.
Three other guests have mentioned Man's Search for Meaning. Norm McInerney did, back in chapter 91. Edward Packard did, chapter 92.
By the way, Edward Packard and I are still in touch. He is now 95 years old. He sends me texts all the time.
Epic dude. I want to be like him. And chapter 123 with Suzy Batiz, which, when I'm pushed on what my favorite interview is of all time on 3 Books, I often say chapter 123.
There was a lot that went into that conversation, for those that listened to it. If you haven't listened to it and you're dissuaded by the length, I would just encourage you to listen to the first two minutes and then decide, because it goes like a rocket ship. And it will be the fastest three hours of your life.
It's not me. It's her. Suzy Batiz.
Okay. Man's Search for Meaning is now getting its fourth asterisk on the Top 1000. Thank you all so much for listening.
All right. Are you still here? Did you make it past the three-second pause?
If so, I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club. This is the club where I talk directly to you. You talk directly to me.
We play your voicemails. We play your messages. Let's start off, as we always do, by going to the phones.
Here we go.
[Paul — Listener]
Hi, Neil. This is Paul calling from Richmond Hill. And my most formative book would be The Apprenticeship of Dirty Kravitz by Mordecai Richler.
I think this book is formative for me because it has aspects of the person I am, the person I want to be, and also the person I don't want to be. A quick summary. This is about a person living in Montreal who is constantly reminded of the words of his grandfather, which are, a man without land is nothing.
And he really sets it upon himself to acquire some land so that he can fulfill this desire and this definition of what a man is in his grandfather's eye. What I really liked about it is his determination. He takes any job.
He works his tail off. He really hustles. I came away from the book seeing that hustle and wanting to instill it in myself, wanting to do the same thing he did.
Don't let any hours go to waste. Be efficient. Be driven for your goals.
But I also see it as a bit of a cautionary tale because he does things along the way which I definitely don't want to do to achieve my goals. So there is definitely a moral component to it where, yes, I do want to be driven, but I don't want to hurt the people I love. I don't want to sort of do things that I might regret after, even if I'm, of course, glad that I've achieved whatever I've gone after.
So that's a good one. Highly recommend it if you haven't checked it out.
[Neil Pasricha]
Thank you so much to Paul from Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada for calling in and sharing a formative book. Guys, that was a perfect voice note. Just call 1-833-READ-A-LOT, R-E-A-D-A- L-O-T.
If it doesn't go through, drop the T. Okay, I got the T just to make the phone number work, but really it's a seven-digit phone number, not eight digits. So it's 1-833-READ-A-L-O, read-a- lo.
And if it doesn't work that way, you can always email me at neil at globalhappiness.org and just attach a voice note. I sometimes get those from like Australia and New Zealand and Japan and stuff because for some reason the phone number doesn't work over there, but I'm trying to make it work. I'm paying like $35 a month for this phone number.
People are supposed to work globally. Perfect call, Paul. Just call and say one of your formative books.
And extra perfect because I love The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Oh my gosh, that is one of my favorite books. And we have no Mordecai Richler books on the top 1,000.
So The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, as mentioned by Paul, was written by Mordecai Richler, R-I-C-H-L-E-R, who has passed away. He lived from 1931 to 2001, born and died in Montreal, Quebec. I've heard that people like him and don't like him there for different reasons.
Apparently he wasn't pro-Montreal by the end of it. But this book is great. And I went to Montreal this summer with my 10-year-old for his 10-year-old birthday trip.
He picked a city and I took him for four days. When we walked down St. Urbain Street, I freaked out. I took pictures.
I was like, oh my God, St. Urbain Street. And everyone around me was like, what's the big deal? My son was like, what are you doing, Dad?
And I was like, this is St. Urbain Street. This is the street that Mordecai Richler's book takes on. And he's like, what are you talking about?
I was like, it's just the best book. And it's crazy that it was published in 1959. I love your insight, Paul.
You took a lot more away from it than I did. I love the way you've ratcheted out the lesson from that book in a real pulsing way. And kudos to you, man, for applying that to your life in such an incredible format and to draw upon that in that way.
That truly is formative. That's beautiful how you described it. I want to just push back one, not push back, to add one thing is that my favorite Mordecai Richler book is Barney's version, which I believe was his last novel, which was published in 1997.
Oh my gosh, this is the second funniest book I've ever read. And the funniest book I've ever read is A Fraction of the Whole, W-H-O-L-E, by Steve Toltz. Steve Toltz, of course, famously was our guest in Chapter 119.
Not as funny in person as he's funny on the page. I guess nobody is because you get a chance to craft your jokes, but it's still great chat. Love, Steve.
Mordecai, man, that's a guy I would love to have on the podcast if he hadn't died 25 years ago. Barney's version, Apprenticeship of Dudley Kravitz, and special shout out to Jacob Tutu and The Hooded Fang, which that book is epic. I have not read St. Urbain's Horseman. Solomon Gursky was here, which was on me for the Booker, so maybe I should read that next. For anyone that loves Mordecai Richler, let us know which Mordecai Richler book is your favorite. Also, if anyone is wanting to come on the show and talk about Mordecai Richler, we don't have any Mordecai Richler books on the Top 1000 yet, but we got 520 to go, people.
All right, now let's go over to a letter of the chapter. And for this chapter's letter, let's click a random one here. I got, man, I got a ton of letters to choose from.
Thank you for all your lovely letters. Yeah, okay. You know what?
I actually brought a letter to the basement. I'm gonna, hold on, I'm gonna dig it up. One second.
Okay, I'm back. And this chapter's letter comes from Emily Stevens from Wellington, New Zealand, and she mailed me an envelope in the mail. Guys, my address is on the 3 Books website if you want to mail me something, at the bottom of all my email lists as well.
So if you go to neil.blogspot.com for all my emails or any of my emails, I have a book club. I've got this podcast newsletter. I've got other stuff.
You know, Emily found my address and mailed me this amazing, you know those fortune teller things you made when you were a kid and you folded it into all these papers? That's what it is. Except you put your fingers in, and the four things I'm choosing from are four guests of the show.
So it says like Nora McInerney, and then it's the number three. Bishwas Agrawal, the number four. Alok Badmanan, the number two.
And Laura Markham, the number one. So I choose like Laura Markham. I open at one.
And then there's four formative books in there. All About Love, 4,000 Weeks, The Book of Est, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and I choose number like seven and I open them. Then I open the fortune, and it's like crazy, not crazy glued, it's like perfectly glued shut.
She mailed me this fortune, and it's all handwritten in tiny font. And I'm gonna read you the insides. There's like 10 different little fortunes, but I'll read you like six of them.
I discovered 3 books through ologies. Of course you did, Emily, because you are an epic super nerd, and I love you to pieces, just like I love Allie Ward, who was our guest on the show previously. Oh my gosh, I have to know what chapter it is, because I apparently am obsessive about that.
113. Then she writes, Episode one set an amazing tone. The way you and Leslie talk to each other is beautiful, encouraging, questioning, honest, searching, and kind.
I am married up. It's been especially clear to me this year, because I'm going through a very hard year. And I'll talk about that more and more, but I quit weed in March, and it's been a wild seven months.
I've had good months, bad months, a lot of new found anxiety, some new diagnoses. I'm still processing everything. So it's been a pretty rough year, and you know your marriage is strong when you go through maybe the roughest year of your life psychologically, which is what I've been going through.
And we've been together 16 years, and I've never loved Leslie more than I have this year. And she gets beautiful, more beautiful to me every day. And it's her massive heart and her kindness, her empathy and her brilliant mind.
And I honestly, I'm going to cry. So I'm going to stop, because while I'm happy to cry, but maybe I should just have her back on the show. Thank you, Neil, for the work you do and the passion for reading and books, shows and your words and actions that makes these conversations powerful and interesting.
Although I'm reading this writing in like one point font. Like how do you write? What kind of pen do you have, Emily?
I use a 0.5 millimeter VTech pen, usually in blue. Yes, that's my pen. But you got like a 0.3 millimeter thing happening here. It's pretty epic. She writes, this podcast has given me skills and examples to have better and deeper conversations with my family, friends, and strangers. Love it.
Limited choices is never an option I thought I would like, but now it's one of my favorite ways to choose. Love it. By the way, I'm writing about that and overthinking as well.
My favorite episodes are with Lenore Skenazy, Leslie, smiley face, estimation mark. We need to get a playlist on 3 Books that has all the episodes with Leslie like marked. I think we want to do that.
Alok Vaid-Menon, Norm McInerney, Vivek Murthy, Ali Ward, and Robin Dunbar. What an eclectic crew you've chosen. Epic.
By the way, seeing this, I think you chose all non-fiction authors and people. Yeah, there's no novelists on here. Whereas I'm thinking I need to have more novelists.
I'm pretty close on a couple, Itamar Vieira Jr., the Brazilian wunderkind, and Fernanda Melkor, the Mexican wunderkind. I say wunderkind because they're, I think, younger than me, but they're like Booker Price nominated authors. I'm getting close on, but it's harder and harder to get podcast guests, by the way, because signing up to chat for three hours is not as sexy as it used to be.
And if you're going to do five podcasts when your book comes out, you're probably going to do the ones that have super sexy video sets in LA, like Rich Roll and stuff. So I'm finding my way, but if you have novelists that you want on the show, please give me a call because I really would like to have more novelists. And there's more stuff here, but it's just, I can't read this all.
It's just so beautiful. I read it all myself, but I don't want to read it all in the air. So thank you so much, Emily.
You are a peach. And honestly, I get I'm going to cry, but it's like I'm talking to myself in my basement here. Like everyone's asleep.
Leslie's asleep. The kids are asleep. I fly early tomorrow morning.
I got to get up at like five. I got to race to the airport. I'm flying to Miami.
I'm then driving across the Everglades, Alligator Alley to Marco Island. I'm giving a speech to New York Life Insurance, like 2000 agents. I'm then flying to Colorado Springs.
Hopefully I make the connection. And then I speak the next morning for some other gigantic company. And then I fly home on Thursday, and then I'm racing to go up for the long weekend up north with my family, which is when I'm recording this right before Thanksgiving in Canada, which is different than American Thanksgiving.
And then the next week I go to Barcelona. I'm not saying, oh no, for me, I go to Barcelona. I'm saying I go to Barcelona for a speech.
And I only mentioned that because I'm on time changes. I'm on jet legs. I'm like racing around.
I'm trying to also validate and stay true to my family contract, which says I'm only away 40 nights per year. Really it's 36.5 because I want to do 10% of the year away. So having a really busy October, for example, means I should have, I need to have a slow November and December to make up for that, right?
So if I have like eight nights away in October, that's good for the pocketbook, but it's not good for me and my family's connection, especially not while Nick Sweetman's painting another bird wall. And my kids are like going a mile a minute and, you know, fighting and they need their dad around and I want to be around. So that means November, December, I need to go deeper with my family, right?
So anyway, I'm talking to myself as usual, but knowing that I'm talking to you, Emily, way down in Wellington, New Zealand, a city that I've been to and I love, and I love the artistic kitsch there and I love the wines there. And I love you, makes me feel less alone. So thank you so much for being with me and thank you to all of you for listening.
I'm tired. It's late. It's almost midnight.
Should we do a word of the chapter? Okay, let's do a word of the chapter. Let's go back to Ethan now.
Percolating. Yes, indeed, it is percolate. Percolate.
To slowly filter through something or for an idea or thought to gradually develop. Way back from Latin. Percolare, P-E-R-C-O-L-A-R means to strain through.
Why? Because per means through and colare, C-O-L-A-R-E means to filter, to filter through. You probably think, oh yeah, this is from like coffee, right?
No, it actually was invented 200 years before coffee percolations, way back in the 1600s. Coffee percolators didn't get known with the phrase till the 1800s. Since water percolates through soil, coffee percolates through ground and ideas percolate through our mind.
Overthinking, too much thought, so much going on in our heads, Ethan Kross was the matter, matter, master, matter, matter, matter, master? Either way, he was a matter of distillation and a master of distillation. Thank you so much for all of you for joining us and until next time, remember, you are what you eat and you are what you read.
Keep turning that page, everybody and we'll talk to you soon. Take care.