Listen to the chapter here!
[Nick Sweetman]
Well, what it shows you is in not that much time when you sort of think on a geological scale. I think it, I think in the book it's like it's about 200 years and every city on earth would be gone without a trace. That is, that is exciting to me.
That makes me feel like, that makes me feel like all the trees were cutting down, all the like animals were making go extinct, all the waterways were poisoning with industry and transportation will bounce back, you know. All these, all these things that we've done to damage what was there before us are not irreversible, are not, are not like this death of things. It's just sort of like reorganizing of things, a reshuffling of certain things.
[Neil Pasricha]
A reorganizing of things, a reshuffling of things. Welcome to the eighth annual best of chapter of three books. We have done this.
On the winter solstice every single year since 2018 and that was the kind and beautiful and lovely Nick Sweetman, one of Toronto's best known muralists. One of the best things we did this year on three books was partner with Nick to turn a 750 square foot piece of brutalist concrete into a living and breathing mural of 16 local and native species of birds here in downtown Toronto. Welcome everybody.
Welcome. I'm glad you're here. I don't know if you're out for a walk with your dog or just soaking in some cold fresh air in the morning.
Maybe you're down in a hotel gym driving a truck on a long highway. Thank you for being here. Thank you for coming back and hanging out with me on the best of.
A little way we can keep each other company over the winter break and in 2025, 2026 and beyond. So I think this is a moment for reflection, for honoring kind of things that have passed, things that we're thinking about. And I thought we'd open with that soundscape of Nick talking about the larger timescale, how everything would just be taken over.
He was of course referring to the book, The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. That was one of three books he added to the top 1000, including Harold and the Purple Crown by Crockett Johnson and number 580. The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham and number 579.
And The World Without Us, as I mentioned by Alan Weisman at number 578. That was on the first full moon of the year in January. And in February, we sat down with the interesting, informative Lindy man, a guy by the name of Paul Skallas, who believes deeply in this concept, kind of like Nick's first book, of time, of the Lindy effect, that the longer something has been popular, the longer something has lasted, the more likely it will be to last in the future.
Let's jump into the conversation with Lindyman, Paul Skallas now.
[Lindyman]
Right. And I also think it's a health of society that it's a good, like, how would you tell if a society is like healthy or not check the suicide rates? Because in my opinion, it's maybe not a wealth thing.
You can kind of live well and happy without much wealth. But if people are, you know, killing themselves or going to assisted suicide places, it could be a symptom for a society. That's a little sick.
[Neil Pasricha]
You actually say that is that books, books, books are dead, you know, until we get to the other side of this.
[Lindyman]
The other side. What's the other side? I mean, I don't know what the other side is, but it's I don't think it's sustainable.
I don't think everybody on these few apps just spending all their day scrolling and scroll. I mean, I think this is a good way to, you know, structure society and certain people owning the algorithm and can put that we can go into it.
[Neil Pasricha]
I think, yeah. Can you read you can still read books?
[Lindyman]
No, I do. But I think it's going to take it's going to take another shift to to get us back to more to more literacy. I think there's going to we're going through another time right now.
But I think books and literacy are going to come back in another form.
[Neil Pasricha]
Do you think we're going through an illiterate moment of illiteracy?
[Lindyman]
I think we're going through real transformation and how, you know, we can consume and live. And I think we're going to. I think in a way we're going to get off of these somehow we're going to get off of these and we're going to go back to kind of like where we were a hundred years ago, but with with technology, I don't know what's going to look like.
But yeah.
[Neil Pasricha]
Thank you so much to the interesting and informative and always engaging Lindyman. By the way, I really do recommend his newsletter, which you can check out online. Paul Skallas, Lindyman gave us three more books for our top 1000, including number 577, The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, S-Y-R-U-S, a book of aphorisms translated by Darius Lyman.
OK, which, by the way, love I love book of aphorisms. Don't you love books of aphorisms? I'm working on one right now.
I kind of put out like a list of birthday aphorisms every year on my birthday. When I was growing up, one of my favorite books was Life's Little Instruction Book. You remember that like kind of note card sized book with just like, you know, over tip the breakfast waitress, right?
All we say, thank you. It's things like that. But it's like a whole bunch of life advice in a sentence.
I love books like that. And The Moral Sayings of Publius counts as one of those. Number 576, Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Number 575, A Pattern Language by a whole bunch of people. Christopher Alexandra, I say et al. It's got like seven authors on it, which is purportedly about architecture.
But as you go into our conversation there, it's really just about how to design like a village, a city, and it gets into things and problems about ageism and how you have older people and younger people interacting, living together, how we get to know ourselves and our communities better. Speaking of getting to know ourselves better, there is perhaps nobody better educated from a sexual perspective to tell us about our bodies than the incredible Emily Nagoski. On the third full moon of the year, we joined her virtually.
Emily is the author of three New York Times bestselling books such as Come As You Are, Burnout, and Come Together, and has a number of popular TED talks as well. She's been a sex educator for 30 years. And this snippet is all about masturbation.
She's going to talk about how pleasure is the measure. She actually talks about that a lot on our episode, our own chapter together. But here she's just going to talk a little bit about masturbation.
Good refresher and reminder for those of us who could use it or those of us raising kids who want to be able to talk about our kids about masturbation. Over to you, Emily. I wondered if you could give us your Emily-isms on masturbation for men and women or male-identifying, female-identifying advice, tips, tricks, how to do it better.
[Neil Pasricha]
What do you got?
[Emily Nagoski]
I'm in favor of it because it's the most efficient way to learn about your body. I recognize that it's not for everyone. And if it's not for you, if psychologically you don't feel good about it, you are under no obligation to do it.
I do really recommend if you don't feel comfortable touching your own genitals, you can touch a whole bunch of other parts of your body. And I would love for everyone to explore what the sensations of their body feel like so that they can recognize those sensations when they're experiencing them with a partner. Our peripheral nervous systems are wired to let us experience so many different kinds of sensations.
There's light touch, which is just like over the surface. There's deep touch, which is pressure moving the muscles around. There's the stretch of our tendons and muscles deep inside our body.
There's vibration. We have specific nerve endings that are good at vibration. We have nerve endings that are good at detecting when a touch is staying still and other nerve endings that are good at detecting when a touch is moving.
So explore all the different kinds of sensations that all the different parts of your body are capable of experiencing. One of the things that boys do that is a disservice to what masturbation can be is that they feel like they have to hide it and get it over with quick. So it's like 30 seconds in the shower, as opposed to really exploring what the pleasure of their body feels like and allowing pleasure to grow and expand and hit the pause button on the trajectory toward orgasm.
Just allow pleasure to grow and be in your body and feel what that pleasure feels like all over. Same goes for people who don't have penises. Allow your body to experience pleasure whether or not you pursue orgasm.
Orgasm is 100% optional. The goal, from my point of view, of masturbation is to learn what pleasure feels like in your body.
[Neil Pasricha]
I know it was a bit of a left field conversation there, just jumping right into masturbation. But you know what I love about talking to sex educators on the show? We have had a number of them over the year, from Rebecca, the sex educator, to now Emily.
And, you know, it's just that they reduce the stigma around sex in general. And it's something that I aspire to do on three books, to reduce the stigma to a whole bunch of topics. We talk about neurodiversity versus neurodivergence on the show.
Emily has been really open about her kind of recent adult diagnosis of a form of autism. And so we talk about that. We talk about ADHD, we talk about old OK Cupid, but we talk about a lot with Emily Nagoski.
It was one of the most popular chapters of the year, for good reason. And now we're going to jump over, you know, you know, so we were outside with Nick Sweetman, kind of at the bird wall. Then we were inside a little bit.
Now we're going to go back outside. Oh, actually, before we do, sorry, I got to tell you Emily's three most formative books. They are What to Do When Your Mom or Dad Says Clean Your Room by Joy Berry, The Hite Report by Cher Hite, H-I-T-E.
Interesting, fascinating book. And Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams. If you only know Douglas Adams through Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Last Chance to See is like this nonfiction book he wrote about all these animals right on the precipice of extinction, where he gets like a magazine assignment to fly around the world and like report on all them, which he does through his like Douglas Adams lens.
So really interesting, like long out of print book, but just a really nice gem that Emily unearthed for me. And now we are going to go back outside. You know, one thing I really like to try to do on three books is alternate between people that are maybe famous and well-known and people that are not famous, well-known who have just as interesting, if not more interesting stories to tell, such as Nikesha the dog walker, a woman who I've seen walking around the neighborhood for a number of years.
And I finally said, you know what? What if we just hung out for a couple hours? And I opened up my tape recorder, i.e. iPhone recorder, and we just talked. And it was a really beautiful way to spend some time. And I did that partly because I know a lot of you listen to the show when you're outside or when you're on a walk. We're going to go back outside and hang out with Nikesha the dog walker now.
[Neil Pasricha]
How many dogs you got? Five, and I'm going to pick up a sixth one. You're walking five dogs now.
What's your max? How many dogs can you walk at once? I've walked like eight.
Can I ask how much people pay per dog?
[Nickisha]
So right now I charge $22.
[Neil Pasricha]
$22 what per dog? Per what? It's for an hour.
Oh, you walk them for an hour. That's actually a good deal.
[Nickisha]
By the time I pick up the dogs.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah. It's about an hour. And you have to drop, it might even be longer.
You have to be very thoughtful about your route. I noticed you dip and dive through all these different alleys.
[Nickisha]
Well, usually I only came this way because I'm walking with you, but I usually go that way.
[Neil Pasricha]
Oh, OK. You like hanging out with me.
[Nickisha]
Well, no, that's not it.
[Emily Nagoski]
I'm having a conversation with you, so...
[Neil Pasricha]
OK, let's be one thing clear. You don't latch on to me.
[Nickisha]
You're a lovely person.
[Neil Pasricha]
Oh, thank you. OK, thank you. Thank you, Nickisha, the dog walker.
And is it N-I-C-K-I-S-H-A? And for November, yes. OK, and you prefer Nick or Nikesha?
[Nickisha]
Either or worse.
[Neil Pasricha]
Either or worse?
[Nickisha]
No, either or worse.
[Neil Pasricha]
Oh, OK, OK, OK.
[Nickisha]
Nick or Nikesha. I don't know, I just never really...
[Neil Pasricha]
When you grew up, did people call you Nickisha or Nick? They called me Nikesha. So N-I-C-K-I-S-H-A.
Yes. And what's your... Do you go by any other names or is that your full name?
Whatever you want to share. I have a last name, but Nikesha is my full name. OK, so Nikesha, the dog walker, we're OK with that?
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah. And could you describe what you're wearing and how you look, however you would like to? You can use pronouns, you can use clothing, but just it's a podcast.
So, you know, people can't see you.
[Nickisha]
I am wearing some bright blue leggings.
[Nickisha]
Also a bright blue hoodie.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, I love the bright blue, bright blue double feature.
[Nickisha]
Light blue sneakers. What kind?
[Neil Pasricha]
Dog walker?
[Nickisha]
These are A6.
[Neil Pasricha]
OK, A6 dog walker approved.
[Neil Pasricha]
You probably walk more miles, more kilometers than anybody in the whole city.
[Nickisha]
I walk about 20 kilometers a day.
[Neil Pasricha]
Oh, I love Nickisha. I could just listen to her all day. That conversation goes on a long time and it kind of brings up a lot of questions inside myself.
You know, first of all, dog walking in general, a great way to get 20 kilometers of walking a day and be close to animals who, you know, research shows being near animals and pets does make us happy. I was talking to my friend Augustino about this and he said, yeah, fixing bikes is my retirement plan. And then I saw an article that was viral in the New York Times recently that says fixing typewriters.
This person's like dedicated their retirement plan to fixing typewriters. Of course, by nature of retirement, we're talking about not retiring here. We're talking about the four S's.
This is a topic I wrote about in the happiness equation. We we don't actually want to do nothing like humans don't want that. We want social fulfillment.
We want the structure of needing to get out of the bed, out of bed and do something. We want the stimulation of learning something new. We want the story of being part of something bigger than ourselves.
So for me, for you, for all of us, like what will that be? And I think as AI kind of drums up and we hear like lots of threats about losing our jobs and so on, you know, what can we do that's human, that's around community? I think loneliness is going to be a really big scourge in society.
It already is. But even more so, a big reason why I do this show is to create community in my own life. And I know a big reason why a lot of you listen is for the same reason.
We feel together here and that's special. And I love that. And so thinking about that for you, if you want the whole conversation about, you know, how much a dog walker makes and how she structures her time.
And those are all interesting bits and pieces that come out of that conversation as well. So Nickisha, thank you for adding two more books to our top 1000. One was an asterisk, so we didn't add that.
But we got The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom. Mitch Albom, of course, was our guest back in chapter 15 of the show. I flew down to Detroit for that one.
Still remember that great, fun, fast day. And The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. And we ended up talking more a little bit about Daniel Steele, but those two books kind of came out of the chat.
Now we are going to stay outside. And Leslie is going to join us. She joined us for a couple chapters this year.
My lovely wife, Leslie, always kind of stimulates and invigorates the conversation. All the way back to Kat and Nat, we deal with Leslie, Kristen Tuff, Brené Brown. You know, I always love to have her to join us when she can.
She's back to teaching this year, I should say. She's back to teaching for the first time since we had our little kids. And I feel bad because I was away for a big chunk of September and early October.
I was giving talks over in Europe, and then I was doing a bunch of podcasts over in Kenya and seeing my mom's home country. Kind of, I feel like, half Kenyan myself. And it was a great trip, but it was a long trip.
And right when I got back, of course, I was home for like three days, and I had to go to Texas for like another talk. Leslie walked headfirst into, bang, into one of our big kind of open IKEA kitchen cabinets. One of those ones that like opens like a garage door.
It hit her right in the center of her head. She went down hard. And I'm talking to you now in December, and she's still recovering from it.
You know, it really was a seismic hit. And it's funny, right? Because somebody could be playing football and get a huge head bonk and not have a concussion.
And somebody could walk into a cupboard and get one. It's kind of a not predictable. The unpredictability of it, I think, is what we're learning.
It's partly what causes and amplifies that. So we've been okay. But this conversation was recorded before that with Ginny Yurich.
Y-U-R-I-C-H. And Ginny drove all the way up to Toronto from Michigan, where she lives. She is a homeschooling mother of five.
And she is the leader of this incredible movement called 1,000 Hours Outside. Well, you do the math, right? What's 1,000 hours divided by 365 days a year?
It works out to just under three hours a day. So it doesn't sound like a lot, but kids these days get 7% of their days outside. Multiply that by seven days a week.
That means it takes a kid typically a whole week to get half a day outside. Ginny's proposing a radical reshifting of this ratio, getting us outside more. We know being outside is good for everything.
It's good for everything. It's good for our eyes. It's good for our skin.
It's good for our bone structure. We talk a lot about these things in the show. And it just gets us off of screens.
You know, we're on screens more than we sleep now. We're on screens more than we sleep now, which means that for a lot of people, the majority of their waking life experience is in the digital realm. So Ginny is the mother of this movement.
She works very closely with her amazing partner, Josh. She drove all the way up here. We started the walk of this chat, like with my wires and my recorders, at Nick Sweetman's Birdwall, where the January full moon was recorded.
And we walk all around and around. Let's turn it over to Ginny Juric now.
[Ginny Yurich]
So what if homeschooling is mainly modeling? And that's sort of the direction that he's going with this, is that if you're growing as a person. So I would think about my own kids, like they're nervous to talk to the librarian.
And I thought, well, am I putting myself in any situation where I'm nervous? So I started to say yes to a lot more things that I normally would say, absolutely not. I don't want to do that.
I'm super nervous.
[Neil Pasricha]
Like what?
[Ginny Yurich]
Like, well, even this morning, I'm like doing my nebulizer before I drove over here. And then I had a parallel park. And I had to try and figure out how to drive out of the parking lot.
And I'm like, these are things that I'm actually not very good at. I mean, that's, you know, or speaking at different events or writing a book. I mean, I was a math teacher.
Math teachers don't write books. You know, so I said, I say, thank you so much. I say yes to so much more because of that one section of that one book.
And so the story with the T-shirts is that we order these thousand dollars of T-shirts. Kids help pick. They're in this little meeting.
They're pretty young, like 10 and under. Yeah, it was. It was a fair amount of T-shirts and they all sold.
And so what happens then is when they all sold, then we just reinvested that money and we got more T-shirts. And the guy that we ordered from, his name's Paul. He's this older man that lives in our area.
He's fantastic, super nice. And he would always get me T-shirts real quick if I messed up. I would send people, you know, they're helping me package.
We're sending the 2T. It was supposed to be a 3T. We sent the wrong color.
There's all these issues. And he would always be resupplying me with T-shirts really quick. And then eventually it got longer and longer and longer.
And I'm not getting the T-shirts as quick as I used to. And finally I said, well, Paul, what's going on? And in front of my kids, he said, when you started ordering T-shirts, it was right in the middle of COVID.
In Michigan, everything was really shut down. He said, everything shut down. All the schools, I was making shirts for sports and all these things.
And he said, it all stopped and your business kept mine afloat. And I was like, that was really life-changing for all of us. Because you learn that when you step out and do hard things, new things, even if it's not the most wild thing in your dreams, it will intersect with the lives of other people in ways that you never can anticipate or know.
[Neil Pasricha]
Oh, I love that story. Ginny, you're just talking about how, you know, you don't really know how your life is going to intersect with others and how that thought can be a little bit of a North star for all of us, especially in times when moments and times get dark. You know, this is my eighth Best Of.
That means since 2018, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, I mean, it's eight years recording this show. And this is one of the top 0.5% of podcasts in the world because, you know, there's some rankers and people always pitching me stuff that sort of cite this ranking algorithm. But the other hand, there's 5 million podcasts in the world.
There's 5 million podcasts in the world. So that means there's 25,000 podcasts of this size or above. If you do the math on that.
And I'll tell you, sometimes the path is really well lit. You get feedback. You kind of hear that you're doing well.
You kind of sense it in yourself. Like you go, I got to do this. I got to talk with this person.
And sometimes the path gets dark. It does get dark sometimes where you're like pitching, pitching, pitching people that are saying no, you're trying to do some research and you can't find the books and you have to travel and it's interrupting your family and you're working on edits until late on a Friday night. And it just does get dark sometimes.
And then you get a story or a message like the way she did from the teacher guy. And it illuminates the path again. And it reminds you that you don't know how your life intersects with others.
I don't know how my life intersects with yours. And why don't you let me know anytime you feel like it. Give me a call.
1-833-READALOT. That is the phone number of the podcast. 1-833-R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T.
When you look at a phone, R-E-A-D-A-L-O will be obvious. The T, I just put that supplementary on the end so that it made a phrase. READALOT.
It's kind of cool to kind of grab that number. And you can call that from anywhere in the world. It was really wonderful talking to Ginny.
Ginny gave us three more books to add to our top 1,000, including number 569, Learning All the Time by John Holt. 568, Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto. And 567, Balanced and Barefoot by Angela Hanscom.
I don't homeschool my kids, but I really admire the homeschooling movement. And these books are really informative. I read all three of them.
I thought they were great. They really kind of dismantle the education system, for lack of better words. And they're written largely by educators to actually remind us that kids can sort of learn when they're left alone and when they're presented with sort of the basics.
And in some ways, it's better than a rigid and studious environment. So something I'm always trying to think about, you know, free play, stay outside till the lights come down. If you want to support Ginny's work more, check out 1,000 Hours Outside online.
It's that across all the handles. She's got millions of followers across, you know, Instagram and Facebook and all of that. And her most recent book, which came out in 2025, is called Homeschooling with the subtitle, You're Doing It Right Just By Doing It.
And there are principles in there for all of us. OK, now we've been hanging out in Toronto a little bit. So why don't we go somewhere new?
We're going to fly all the way down to San Diego. I had a talk there on a Saturday morning. So I had a whole Friday down there before the talk.
And of course, you know me, what do I want to do when I have a full empty day? The answer is go birdwatching, go birdwatching. There's birds everywhere in the world and they're different where you go.
So I grabbed my, you know, I grabbed my binoculars. I've always packed with my binoculars now. I went down to Torrey Pines.
You've probably heard of the famous golf course. But of course, it's a natural park as well. I'm walking around Torrey Pines, all these bluffs, all these, you know, the common ravens flying around.
There was peregrine falcon nests up there. California scrub jays I saw. And then, you know, I'm kind of done after lunch.
I'm a birder, but I'm also like, not one of these people that can just go birding morning till night, back to back to back. I've learned that the hard way where I sign up to hang out with somebody for the whole day. And I'm like, yeah, this is fun.
But I get a little, you know, antsy by the end of it. And so I kind of keep walking up the street, walking the street, kind of get my steps in. I end up in this sandy town called Del Mar, Del Mar, California.
You've probably heard of it. I hadn't really heard of it. And there's a bookstore that looks new called Camino Books.
And I walk in, it's like a hobbit hole. It's like a rounded entrance, like in a stone wall, right near the shore, like right near the ocean shore. And I walk in and I'm immediately confronted with like, this beautiful, picturesque bookstore.
What did James Daunt tell us last year? A great bookstore has lots of poles and columns and like, you know, interesting corners and cracks and crevices, right? That's what makes a good bookstore because that's, a bookstore is nookish.
People like nooks, you know? They like to kind of lean up against the window, find an interesting little stool. And that bookstore, Camino Books, was really like that.
I go to the back, you know, I asked for a charger because my phone's now dead. This happens to me a lot. That's why I usually travel with a charger.
And this guy, this really kind of, you know, kind, smiling guy with glasses and sort of a Hawaiian shirt. He's like, well, what kind of tariff should I charge you for charging your phone? He was joking because of course, at the time, the whole Trump tariff fiasco was like erupting.
And we ended up, a great connection. I ended up pulling up the recorder and I had a conversation with him. So this is a live conversation in Camino Bookstore with Neil Young, my home country musician, Neil Young from Canada, playing in the background, not the actual Neil Young, but it was on the speaker system there.
And so far, most of our chats have been around like a theme. I'm just picking out like a bit or a piece, you know, to kind of, if you don't have time for the full two or three hour conversation, you can listen to this. But this one, we're going to get to all three of John's books.
John is married to Alison. They have been booksellers for multiple decades. And this is their new store.
I want to say final store, but who knows? They just sold off their diesel bookstore chain to a larger company. And so they started this little Camino Bookstore instead.
Let's jump in to John now talking about some of the principles he lives his life by through his three most formative books. Here we go. He's found, he's pulled off the board book.
[Neil Pasricha]
He's found his own book like a needle in a haystack. He's holding The Story of Ferdinand by Monroe Leaf, a big square red book with a black drawing of a bull on the front, published in 1936.
[Neil Pasricha]
This is the 17th printing of the board book. Once upon a time in Spain, there was a little bull and his name was Ferdinand. All the other little bulls he lived with would run and jump and butt their heads together, but not Ferdinand.
[John]
That's right. So he's a dreamer. He doesn't really want to be a fighter.
He doesn't really want to have that kind of position in the world. And he's a beautiful guy. How old were you when you read it?
Was this Pennsylvania days? Probably Kansas, I would think. Wonder years.
Maybe Pennsylvania. Three to ten. Yeah, somewhere in there.
And I had that little Ferdinand stuffed animal. I mean, I could hold it in my hand, so it must have been not very big. So it was red, even though this is black and white, and has always been black and white.
It was a red bull with black ears. All of it velvet. Because the cover's red, even though the bull potentially is not.
It was a similar kind of red like that, and black ears. And so what about it? Warm hearted and gnarly.
A bull who's a dreamer. You know what I'm saying?
[Neil Pasricha]
A bull who's a dreamer. Would you describe yourself as a bull who's a dreamer? Yeah, I would today.
At age 67. My friend Susan Cain is in her 50s. She wrote the book Quiet and the book Bittersweet.
And I interviewed her before the pandemic at the 92nd Street Y. We didn't release the conversation until after the pandemic, because we were waiting for Bittersweet to come out. And Bittersweet kept getting delayed a year, about five years.
Worth the wait, though. That was brutal. As Oprah agrees.
Anyway, one of Susan Cain's most formative books is Ferdinand.
[John]
Oh really? That's funny. Like on one hand, my sister said, you're so much more social than I am.
And I said, I'm so much more social than I am. Right? Because I am kind of an introverted person.
But then at the same time, I've just, I realized I'm too much outside myself. Like I just turn myself inside out. So that's when earlier you said, do you always talk like this?
Yeah, that's just the way it is. Say that sentence again.
[Neil Pasricha]
I'm so much more social than I am. I'm so much more social than I am.
[Neil Pasricha]
Because you're, because Susan... I'm really a social, that much more social. So Susan wrote the book about introverts, Quiet.
This is her first recalled most formative book.
[John]
Yeah.
[Neil Pasricha]
So we've got that in common. Do you want to know her second?
[John]
Yeah.
[Neil Pasricha]
I wonder if it's the same as yours. Is yours Colette? No.
[John]
No, but it could have been. But no, no.
[Neil Pasricha]
Do you have a second book in the wonder years?
[John]
Second book in, yes.
What was it called though? I know exactly what it's about. I can see the cover.
Yeah. It's wow. Secret treasure.
It's called, and it was a kid's book. And it's about the kids in Sweden who got the gold of Sweden out before the Nazis could get it underneath them on sleds and took it down into fjords and loaded it on ships. So it's a true-ish story, but told from a little kid's point of view, you know?
And so you're sledding down, getting the gold onto the ships before the Nazis get it. I mean, so both of these are anti-fascist books. Not that I was conscious of that at the time.
[Neil Pasricha]
I understand why secret treasure is anti-fascist. Stealing the gold before the Nazis could steal it from you. It's got James Bond-esque type imagery.
[Neil Pasricha]
But how is Ferdinand anti-fascist?
[John]
Because it was all leading up into the first world war. Up to the Spanish Civil War, which was the test of Hitler and Mussolini joining Franco in suppressing the democratic government of Spain.
[Neil Pasricha]
So this book being written in 1936, when was the Spanish Civil War? 36, 7, 8, 9. Wow.
And that was in existence. So when we talk about Trump and in the US, not to bring it back to this, but tag-teaming with other dictators to suppress local populations is echoed throughout history, something that you've seen. For example, El Salvador's president or Russia's president to take a chunk of the Ukraine.
You might argue that these are tag-teaming behaviors. Autocracy Inc., as Ann Applebaum would say.
[John]
Yeah, all that seems real. In fact, the other book I would say that influenced me later in life that Alison recommended is that of Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, which is set in the Spanish Civil War. He volunteered.
He gets shot in the neck after a year. So what's the name of the book? Homage to Catalonia.
Can you spell that? H-O-M-A-G-E. Homage or homage.
[Neil Pasricha]
Homage, okay. Homage to? To Catalonia.
Catalonia by George Orwell. Yeah. And that was read during the wonder years.
[John]
That was written, no, this was read later in my 20s. But that war never ended in a way, right? That sort of balance between democracy and fascism has been bouncing back and forth ever since.
Okay, okay. So he goes and volunteers in Spain, and then he gets assigned to an anarchist regiment. He being George Orwell?
Yeah, George Orwell and his wife. And so they both go, as a lot of people did, like Hemingway did, and volunteered to fight against Franco, who had taken over the country. And then he gets shot in the neck and then comes back.
And out of that is what comes 1984, Animal Farm, as he said himself. So that's where he got his true global on the ground political understanding of the forces of mid-century global culture, the attempts of power to subvert democracy. Oh my gosh.
[Neil Pasricha]
So 44 years ago at age 23, when you're working at a bookstore in Berkeley, and you read Homage to- Catalonia. By George Orwell, this as the third of your formative books.
[John]
None of them were intentional reading in that sense. They were just great books, great reads. But it took root.
What took root? Those ideas, those liberatory ideas, just as far as war as oppression, which it always is, war as destruction, as it always is. Power over others used and abused is bad.
You know, it's pretty simple stuff, right? And everybody kind of knows it. They just don't see it necessarily sometimes.
So we all have to keep looking. Stay awake.
[Neil Pasricha]
Thank you so much to John and Allison. There's a lot in there. War as oppression is bad.
War as destruction is bad. Power over others used and abused is bad. Stay awake.
Indeed. Three more books for our top 1,000, including Snow Treasure by Marie McSwigan, Homage to Catalonia or Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, the foundational book to Animal Farm in 1984. I did not know that.
Very interesting story there. And added by Allison at the last second was Heidi by Joanna Spirey. She said, this is John's partner, they had been together for 30 plus years, but they recently got married, that she loved the idea of, you know, living on the side of a mountain by the water.
And now she's doing it. Isn't that amazing how books can really influence us that way? There was a lot there.
Now, look, we're going to jump now from Del Mar, California to Ottawa, Canada, where we are going to talk and hang out with Jean Chrétien. So if you are from Canada, this is a pretty special deal. I mean, this guy's kind of like the grandfather of Canada.
He was our prime minister for 10 years from 1993 to 2003. He left office with the highest approval ratings of any prime minister ever in Canadian history. I mean, they only started measuring in the 1950s.
So there could have been a really popular guy in the first half of the 20th century. But yeah, for the last 67 years, this guy is number one. He's our biggest leader.
He doesn't, you know, hold back. He calls a spade a spade. And shout out to Dave Boiré, our amazing podcast editor.
And Sarah Chappell, who works with me, really helped me on the podcast a lot this year. And she's gone off to law school. So we miss you, Sarah, if you're listening to this.
But they worked together and put together this really banger opening of the show. So I don't know. I kind of just wanted to give you a tease now.
It kind of gives you a treat about some of what Mr. Chrétien had to say. Here we go. Let's run the intro now.
[John Chrétien]
A lot of people will say that I stole their ideas. If you don't want me to steal your ideas, shut up. Don't tell me do this and do that and complain because I've done it.
You can have a referendum on anything. You can have a referendum tomorrow on is the moon square. But what will be the effect of the referendum?
And it's not just a tool for blackmail. When I was in politics to be called a liar was the worst insult you could have. And you know what I'd say?
They said in the first term of Trump, he lied 14,000 times.
[Neil Pasricha]
And we're familiar with your liberal convention speech in January where you said.
[John Chrétien]
From one old guy to another old guy. Stop this nonsense.
[Neil Pasricha]
Today, if you sat down and had a beer with him today.
[John Chrétien]
Some are going to be the same thing, but he will not enjoy it. Or he will ignore me. I've never seen an ego that big.
Frankly, Canada should be the 51st state. OK, it really should. Perhaps we're living the end of the American empire.
Destroying what took 80 years to build since the war. And I'm proud of our value. And we became the envy of the world.
I want to die standing.
[Neil Pasricha]
That was just a little taste of the treat that was that entire conversation with the honorable, the right honorable Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. A real treat and pleasure. Big thank you to his chief of staff, Bruce.
And to my grandfather-in-law, Bob Wright, who worked on one of Chrétien's campaigns long ago and was able to originally form the first connection I had with Mr. Chrétien. By the way, connecting with Jean Chrétien is really special because you know, I don't think he emails. So I was like calling him.
And of course, I was nervous to call him. But the guy is like on fire on the phone. You know, he uses a phone the way like somebody with itchy thumbs used to use a BlackBerry.
So I call, leave a message. He calls back right away. Hello, it's Jean Chrétien.
Call me back, please. You know, that's what he says. And then I call him back.
He's like, hello, who is this? Yeah, what do you need? OK, sounds good.
Bye. And we had like three conversations leading up to like me flying to Ottawa to do this. And no conversation was longer than about 15 seconds.
So I was a little bit nervous going up there. I was like, is this going to work? You know, but put on a suit because I noticed in other interview when he was in the suit and the interviewer wasn't, he kind of like sort of elbowed the guy in the ribs and was like, hey, why don't you put on a suit?
I was like, I got to dress up for this. So I think it was officially my first podcast episode interview of all time wearing a suit, which was nice to establish that I would wear a suit for I would wear a suit for certain people if they demanded it. Now, you know, on the Top 1000, we don't have any books for Jean Chrétien, which is funny because he did give us The Old Man and the Sea and he did give us The Little Prince.
But because those were picked by other people, we've just added asterisks. So he's the conversation is memorialized properly on the Top 1000, but just through the asterisk. OK, that kind of makes up for the fact that the next chapter we did, chapter 151 with Penn and Kim Holderness, we got six books because I asked each of them to give us three.
Leslie joined us on this chat. Penn and Kim joined us from Durham, Raleigh area in North Carolina, where they live. If you don't know the Holderness family, check them out online.
They've got millions and millions of followers on YouTube. Well-deserved. They write these hilarious, funny sketches about what it's like living with ADHD, what it's like living with somebody with ADHD, about, you know, where is my phone?
They had this funny like Frozen parody about losing your cell phone. My first introduction to them was not in their famous Christmas jammies video, which got parodied by SNL like 10 plus years ago, but actually at the beginning of the pandemic when they had this really funny viral video about the Hamilton mask up parody. It's like, I'm not giving away my mask.
I am not giving away my mask. But of course, Penn's a great singer. And so Penn and Kim joined us.
It was a great conversation. Let's jump into a snip of that now.
[Neil Pasricha]
And so my question for both of you is, how do you balance your relationships with your in-laws?
[Kim Holderness]
Oh, well, not to be a huge downer, Penn's dad passed away two years ago, and his mom is at the end stages of Alzheimer's. So I have to say, I feel very jealous of people who have in-laws that are still because they were the perfect mother-in-law. I won the lottery because we had to live with them while we were waiting for our house to close when we moved from New York City to here and we had Lola as a baby.
And his dad made breakfast every morning and his mother was like, can I please do your laundry? It would just be so wonderful if I could do your laundry for you. And I'm like, I will give you this gift and I will let you do my laundry.
They were very, very dreamy. My mom and my stepdad have just moved to town to be closer to us last year. So Penn, how's that going?
[Penn Holderness]
That's great. No, it's awesome. They're terrific.
So the thing that I've learned with in-laws is you should come into every event with a sense of love and excitement. And as the person coming in from the outside, you have this kind of gift of being able to be the, hey, what's going on, guys, kind of guy and not have to deal with any of the other stuff that comes with being a family. And then just read the room, I think is what I've learned, is I've got to read the room and follow her lead or his lead.
[Kim Holderness]
Yeah. I think that Penn is kind of like the dancing monkey. You can just kind of wind him up.
And he is so good in a room. He makes everybody laugh. So to that end, I think that there are people in my family that enjoy being around him more than me.
So he actually is great. It's wonderful.
[Penn Holderness]
Well, thank you. But I also know, to me, there should probably be a book on this somewhere. I don't know if I'm the one to write it.
But as someone coming into a family, yeah, you don't get some of the inside jokes and you may not have the same relationships with these people, but you also are this wonderful, clean slate that you can bring into a situation. And I think if you tap into that, you can learn so much about everybody else there. And I think that there's some real positives to being an in-law.
[Kim Holderness]
Yeah. And I think we've also learned, I can talk crap about my family, but he can't talk crap about my family.
[Penn Holderness]
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we learned that early on. Yeah.
She can be like, oh, my God, blankety, blank, and blank, blank, blank, blank, and I'm like, oh, yeah. I can't even say, oh, yeah, I totally noticed that.
[Neil Pasricha]
Okay, that might've been a bit of a random clip, but I picked it out because I've often thought about my relationship with my in-laws. I had two goes at it, right? Because I was married when I was 26 and Clint and Kathy became my in-laws and I really loved them and they were kind and earnest and they had their little dog, Toby.
And we'd go for walks and I'd bake with my wife's mother and we'd go there for the holidays. And I just love the feeling of becoming someone's son-in-law and of them becoming my parents-in-law. And then, of course, when we got divorced a few years later, you know, it was one of the saddest, there's a lot of emotions and you can't evaluate somebody else's divorce from a distance.
They're so complex. The complexity, I don't wish it upon anybody, the complexity and sadness and overwhelm of the amount of emotions is just a lot. I remember looking back at it now, one of the strongest emotions I felt was just like, oh my gosh, these people who are my mother-in-law, my father-in-law are just normal people now.
I have no connection to them at all. It's not like they're former mother and father-in-law. You just sort of lose that tether.
And of course, relationships are dynamic and you can carry them forward. But in this case, you know, my heart was very broken after losing my marriage and losing my wife. And, you know, it wasn't my choice really, you know, to lose the marriage.
And I was too heartbroken to really continue a relationship with her parents or her sister, who I also loved and her brother-in-law, which is my brother-in-law, who I also loved. And now that I've entered into a relationship with Leslie and we've been married a long time now, we have these four beautiful boys now. And I got to know her parents, you know, her parents, sadly, they split up.
And so I'm managing a mother-in-law and father-in-law relationship that was together when I started with Leslie and now is no longer together. And I think about that. How do you show up as a great son-in-law?
How do you show up as a great person? And I'm not perfect at it. And it's different, of course, than your own parents who you probably, at least for me, you know, I let my guard down a bit more with my own parents.
But then as a result, they get more of my, you know, I'm more likely to sort of snap at my own parents, right? Like, that's a bad thing. But anyway, I like that clip because Penn was an inspiring role model to me in terms of how he shows up with his in-laws.
And I thought that was a really nice way how he put it. So six books, like I said, we got Quiet by Susan Cain, Dune by Frank Herbert, which, by the way, I just finished reading and I loved. Took me only nine months after recording that conversation to finally finish reading it.
Educated by Tara Westover, Seven Eves by Neil Stephenson, and BossyPants by Tina Fey. Right? Do we get all of them?
I think that's all of them. That's not just five? Do we get another asterisk?
Oh, my gosh. Was there an asterisk in here too? I got to check my asterisk notifications.
Yes, there was. It was number 1,000. How could I forget?
Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein, also picked by Leslie, who was there in the interview. That was the first book that kicked off our top 1,000. And now with Penn and Kim's five books, we are all the way down to number 559.
Near the halfway point. Near the halfway point. Taking a while to get there, but we're getting there.
That's why I like long lists, right? This bit by bit, you're scratching your claw your way. I like a thousand awesome things.
I like the thousand formative books. I like that. I like the long list.
I'm a fan of the long list. So now our next guest is the one and only Robin Sloan. I think he's our first novelist of the year.
We've had a lot of novelists on the show, right? We've had Judy Blume. You can count her as a novelist for sure.
We've had Mohsen Hamed, Jonathan Franzen, and George Saunders. Great to get these big, vast minds that can put together a whole book. David Mitchell back in Chapter 58.
And Robin's so different. I was totally enamored and blown away by his novel, Moonbound. It was a suggestion by Michael Bungay Stanier, author of The Coaching Habit.
I was like, enraptured by this book. So I reached out to Robin. He can't do the podcast.
Why? He's busy manufacturing olive oil. No, I mean, really.
He and his wife produce this olive oil, which is delicious. I use it as a present. They don't ship to me in Canada.
So I use it as a gift. I send people these like, you know, olive oil tin canisters of fat gold. That's what it's called.
Fat gold. And I've become an olive oil splasher. I've been like splashing on everything.
Olive oil's good for you. Go for it. He's been making olive oil, manufacturer.
He's a printer. We talk about a lot of things. Let's jump into a little snippet of the conversation exploring AI.
We got to do it. Everybody's talking about AI. Here's Robin Sloan on AI.
Where are you today on the ethical side of AI?
[Robin Sloan]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the ethical question, it's like the ethical questions. There's many of them overlapping.
For me, especially given my interests, and these are interests that predate, you know, all of this AI stuff, they have to do with the commons, with the things that, you know, artistic and cultural creations that people share. And, I mean, I think you're right to connect myths to that. Because, like, what is a book of, like, Dallaire's Book of Greek Myths if not this, you know, this genius couple who went digging in the shared toy box of humanity, you know, picked up some of the greats, some of the classics, and said, oh, we want to play with these toys.
And then they did. And they, you know, retold those stories. But, of course, every retelling brings something new.
So, in a way, they are also, they're carrying them forward to, like, new generations, literally, you know, to me. And, you know, now I've become someone who also is in different ways and in different, you know, different pieces of work, a myth reteller. And, you know, I'm playing with toys myself.
So, deep interest. And I think that connects very, very directly to one of the huge questions, and really the central question of my essay, and that, you know, the big, is it okay? You know, is this even, like, permissible?
Is this something we can contemplate? And it has to do with the fact that every one of these large language models, regardless of the particular technology behind them, you know, the kind of the math and the code underpinning them, regardless of the status of the organization that has put them together, regardless of the cost, you know, at which they're offered to the world, they share one thing in common, which is that they are trained, you know, grown.
I think, I really think that, like, the analogy of growth, almost organic growth, like a rose bush growing on a trellis is really not only, you know, kind of artful and appealing, but actually very technically accurate. When they do that growing, the sunlight they're responding to, the force that's guiding that shape, is that commons. It's this incredible shared body of work.
Of course, it's not only the Greek myths and not only, you know, books and stories and poems. It's, like, weird webpages about, like, you know, agricultural equipment and, you know, stock markets and people's posts about, you know, how they fixed their power outlets in their house and everything else. I mean, it's actually a basically unfathomable amount of text and writing and human expression.
But the point is, it is human expression. It's this huge shared cultural commons. You call it everything.
Call it everything. Yeah, I mean, it's not, that's, you know, it's, like, everything asterisk. Because, of course, there's actually a lot and a lot of really important stuff that's not online and never has been.
By the way, the AI companies are, like, working really hard to get their hands on it now and to digitize it because that's, like, it's almost their fossil fuel. And I think that's another analogy that's both kind of appealing and also technically correct. There's this resource that was built up over time.
And the only way to kind of amass it was with the passing of time. And now they're tapping into the energy, the latent energy sort of stored in there. So, anyways, that's just all to say.
That's a big windup to say I think anybody, particularly folks who feel kind of invested in the idea of, like, the public domain, a cultural commons, you know, the shared, you know, sort of written inheritance of humanity ought to kind of consider how these things are being used and say, like, I mean, is that, do we agree as people invested in the commons that that's, like, an okay use of this material to kind of fold it into these machines which then are able to do really impressive and valuable tasks and then charge people for those tasks? I think reasonable people can answer yes, it's totally fine. I'm kind of on, like, you know, as you as you quoted from the essay, I'm kind of on, like, it depends.
It depends what the output is. It might be okay. In other cases, I think it's quite offensive, actually.
[Neil Pasricha]
Thank you so much to the wise and giant-minded Robin Sloan for giving us three more bucks for our top 1,000, including the Book of Greek Myths by Ingrid and Edgar Parin D'Aulaire D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths, which you talk about. Number 558, number 557, Player of Games by Iain Banks.
And number 556, The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. Robin joined us virtually, as did Carl Honoré. So Carl Honoré also wrote one of my favorite books.
Actually, I want to say of this year, of really the past decade, I bumped into the book In Praise of Slowness kind of right when I needed it. I was actually combing the bookshelves of my in-laws, we were just talking about my in-laws' basement, and there was this old book from like 20 years ago, like In Praise of Slowness. But the book reads as a really prescient, if that's the right word, current take on how we need to slow down.
Some of the most fascinating chapters are the history of our relationship with time and how people used to, like, break clocks in the town squares because they didn't want to be ruled by, like, the fiendish clock over our lives. And now we've gotten to the point where we open our eyes, and right when we open our eyes, we're looking at the time. Right before we close our eyes, we're looking at the time.
Like, we are ruled by the clock. And not just ruled by the clock, we're ruled by speed, of course. How do we slow down?
We talk about that a lot with Carl Honoré, and I'm going to actually play you a clip about something that was really inspiring to me because here I am, you know, reading to my kids at night, and it's harder and harder with my older kids, right? My oldest son, I finished reading The Lord of the Rings. I'm proud to tell you that I finished reading that to him.
He's 11. I think we started it, though, when he was about 9 or 10. Like, it took me over a year, and some nights we just read, like, one page.
It was like, am I ever going to finish this? It's a hard book to read aloud, and it took a long time. So in my head, I was like, oh, I'm kind of fading out of, like, reading to my kids, and that makes sense.
They're getting older. But then in jumps Carl, and here's the clip I wanted to play for you now.
[Carl Honoré]
I mean, reading was a central part of parenting, family life for us. I mean, it started off not quite right because, of course, the whole spark for my moving into thinking about slowing down was when I caught myself speed reading Snow White to my son, right? You know, that was when I, you know, my version was so fast, it only had three dwarves.
It was not a good look, and I realized then when I caught myself flirting with buying a book called The One Minute Bedtime Story, so Snow White in 60 Seconds, I thought, this is insane, right? I'm racing through my life instead of living it. I've forgotten the lessons of my own childhood, right?
Because I think we all have that, or those of us who are lucky enough to have had books read to us as kids have that folk memory of that sacred, magical moment when a parent sits down with a kid, and the world around you just vanishes, and you're in that bubble together, and you're telling stories. You're doing the most eternal, simple human thing together. You are telling a story, and you're sharing words, and you're cuddling, and you're reacting together.
You're happy, you're sad, all that stuff, right? This is so much of child development runs through stories and reading, I think. And that's something, I mean, that's something we're kind of sacrificing on the altar of the iPad and AI now.
But it was something that once I slowed myself down, stopped speed reading Snow White, you know, reading was a huge part of our family life. And so all four of us, I've got two kids now, both in their 20s, both very, very avid readers of books. We're always sharing in our family group chat book recommendations.
We share books. We give books back and forth, books for Christmas. And I've read books out aloud to my, I read when my daughter was, you know, 21.
I read Animal Farm by Orwell out loud, and Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck out loud. And of course, my daughter could read it herself, but that wasn't the point. The point was being together, the human voice, sharing the story in a different way.
And I just, it's just a kind of magic. We've occasionally, you know, read bits of plays together, you know, not so much that, but more reading stories. So yeah, I think that that's something that when any, I mean, I think pretty much across the board, if you look at people who consider themselves to be experts in what could work well for kids and parenting, reading is usually on the top five list of things to do, right?
Get children reading on their own and reading with them, start reading with them and then make sure you cultivate the habit.
[Neil Pasricha]
Thank you so much to Mr. Carl Honoré for giving us a couple more books for our top 1000, including The Quiet American by Graham Greene, Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee, which by the way, was an asterisk because of course, Wagner Mura also picked that. By the way, if you haven't seen Wagner Mura's new movie, go see it. It's called The Secret Agent.
And he's really stunning in this flick. It takes place under the sort of increasingly totalitarian regime of Brazil and I think the seventies and Leslie and I caught that at TIFF this year, Toronto International Film Festival. It's a great movie.
The Secret Agent. I hope he gets nominated for best actor for that. He definitely deserves it.
And lastly, Slowness by Milan Kundera, K-U-N-D-E-R-A. I probably mispronounced Milan's name, which was a really head trippy kind of novel, by the way. If you want a book on slowness, I don't recommend Milan Kundera's book.
I recommend Carl's book, In Praise of Slowness. Carl is the fastest talking slow guy I know, I would say. Carl also gave me a tip for a sleeping pill, by the way.
After we kept in touch after the podcast, I had a bunch of long range travel coming up. Overnight flights to Budapest and then another overnight flight from Amsterdam to Nairobi. Back to back and I was like, you know, I really need to sleep because I'm going to be popping up and kind of working right away.
And he's like, Zopilcone, ask your doctor for Zopilcone. I'm not a doctor. Neopasricha?
Not a doctor. Ah, but I will say I went to my doctor. I asked for this prescription.
I took half a pill and it worked. So that was my tip from Carl. Again, I'm not a doctor.
Do what you like on sleeping pills. I'm not going to go on the record and recommend one, but it worked for me. Z-O-P-L-I-C-O-N-E.
Now, why did I need to take a sleeping pill? Because I flew overnight after giving a speech to 5,000 people at the Amsterdam Business Forum. I got to open for Simon Sinek.
It was kind of a cool life highlight from a speaking perspective. You know, Simon Sinek, of course, you know, author of Start With Why. I did ask him to come on the podcast and, you know, he said no, which is cool.
You can't win them all, people. You got to take a lot of swings. And these days in podcasting, you got to take a lot more swings than you used to because it's not that people are bored of the format.
It's just that people are now aware that it takes a long time to... I'm asking for a lot. I'm asking you to think about your formative books in advance.
Submit them to me. A lot of people feel the need to reread them, right? So I don't tell them to reread them.
And I always say, don't, you don't have to. But I get why he said no is all I'm saying. But you know who said yes?
Peter Kimani. I flew to Nairobi. I'm staying at this nice hotel, but it's like barricaded, right?
Like there's dogs sniffing your Uber before you get in. There's like big giant cement poles that come down to like let your Uber come up to the ramp. I mean, there's a lot of security there.
And then I'm like, okay, I got to go to Peter Kimani's house. Well, I don't know his address. I mean, I'm in Nairobi and I don't know his address.
So I'm texting him that before he's like, meet me at this gas station. I will be paying a guy on a motorcycle to escort you from the gas station to my house. And I was kind of puzzled.
I was like, why is he doing this? But I realize it's because he's in a gated community and there's guards out front and there may not be numbers on the addresses, but you know, I had to get the Uber driver to follow the motorcyclist, the Boda driver, Boda motorcycle, through the kind of concrete barbed wire fence into a gated community. Well, it's not gated the way you would think of like, you know, tech billionaires living in mansions behind closed doors.
It's more just like, you know, if you could afford whatever it is, $30,000, $50,000 for a plot of land and to build a building, you know, you got to keep it safe. And so they even had guard dogs there. I mean, guard dogs, like the kind of dogs that like you let out at night because they keep your house safe.
And then I walk into his house and it's just beautiful. It's a really stunning home. He's raising two young boys there with his beautiful and lovely wife, Anne.
She took the day off to like cook this extravagant lunch. I'm still dreaming about the homemade pea soup, fresh peas, ground with stock, chicken stock, but it's not chicken stock from a can. It's chicken stock from the chickens that they killed that they, you know, like chickens, you know, chickens from chickens.
The curries, there's these stewed greens I kept eating in Kenya that they were unlike any, you know, collard greens or stewed spinach that I'd had before. And even the greens were just a different vegetable. So I had this great, great meal.
And though he sat outside in this outdoor gazebo, you could hear like pie crows in the background. I'm a big fan of Peter's novel, Dance of the Jakaranda, which was made one of the New York Times 100 best notable books of the year. He was also asked by NPR to write a poem for the inauguration of Barack Obama, who, of course, was born in North Kenya.
And so we were connected through Boniface Mwangi, who was our guest in the early aughts in the early hundreds on this show. I don't think that's how you say aughts, right? But I sit down with Peter.
We have a great conversation and there's a lot to talk about here, but he does talk a lot about colonialism. It's a, it's a press, it's a, it's a fresh topic over in Africa, of course, you know, 55 countries, 1.5 billion people. And I think 54 countries were taken over by a European superpower some point in the 1800s, whether that was, you know, Belgium or England or France or, or, or whomever.
I think the only country that successfully fought back was Ethiopia. When the Italians came, you know, the, in this little sort of private meeting that they had in the 1800s, like split up Africa with a ruler and a pencil, Italy got Ethiopia. And the Ethiopian surrounded them and killed them all and fought off the colonialist oppressors.
It's like this really famous battle that people still talk about. Imagine talking about a battle like 150, 175 years ago. That's what happened in Ethiopia.
But Kenya was not the same. Kenya was taken over by the British, of course. The railroad penetrated the country.
It's one of the themes of, of Peter's book, Dance of the Jakaranda. And he talks a lot about the three Cs of colonialism. So this is going to be a little bit of a stitched together clip.
But I think the gist of it is going to pop out for you. Here is Peter Kamani, the novelist, talking about the three Cs of colonialism.
[PK]
So the colonialists understood that, you know, the, the, the ideology when they came to Africa was triple C, Christianity, commerce, and civilization. These are, they're connected. So Christianity was how the early missionaries, and they were sponsored by church organizations, by the way, the, the, the greater Livingstone, David Livingstone, Dr. David Livingstone, the Scottish explorer, was sponsored by the church mission society, church missionary society. John's Peak, they were all affiliated with church. Remember, the contact between East Africa and other, other parts of the world was a lot more advanced. The Portuguese were here 500 years earlier, in 1490s.
Yeah. You had the Chinese explorers in East Africa. And this has been proven by archaeology.
So you've got the Arab, you've got Indian sailors. So East Africa had contact with the rest of the world for such a long time until late 1890s, when the Brits start making inroads into the interior, because you didn't have any way of accessing the interior other than walking or riding, riding a horse or a donkey. So it's only when they started now making inroads into the interior that, you know, slave trade, game trophies, the trade between Arab traders and indigenous communities, and of course, the rise of the Swahili on the coast from the interactions between Arabs and Africans.
But I wanted us to stick to the triple C's because we had, for many, many years, Islamic civilizations on the coast. The Zanzibar, you go all the way to the East African coastline, Somalia, you had established Islamic civilizations. But Christians are arriving to preach something different.
So when they start making the inroads into the interior, this was also connected with now connecting the dots and, you know, having this PowerPoint presentation, this is how we're going to market our product, is that it is preaching about values of Christ and values of another faith as a counterpoint to Islam. Because the traders, the Arab traders, were also Muslims who are trading with, you know, human cargo. So Christianity is presented as a panacea.
So this is how we are connecting the dots. So the larger Western world no longer accepts slave trade as a viable business. So they say, you preach unto them the gospel of Christ.
And so Christianity is a fast front. The second one, and they're saying, let's do legitimate business. Stop enslaving your brethren.
So following, you know, hot on heels of this, we have the missionaries, explorers, early travelers, who are writing about what have you found? What's the climate there like? What are the business opportunities?
So early missionaries are coming around the same time as explorers. So you're preaching the gospel. You've got some intel about these communities.
And so when you look at now what follows, the abinges of this enterprise, the Imperial British East Africa Company, a company registered and licensed by the Queen, Her Majesty, the Queen of England.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, it says it on the logo.
[PK]
And when you go to Nairobi, by the way, that building, there is a building on Moy Avenue, IBE Imperial British East Africa Company.
[Neil Pasricha]
And what's the third? So you call it civilization?
[PK]
So civilization.
[Neil Pasricha]
So the metaphysical part of it?
[PK]
Yes, yes. We come from Europe. We are civilized people.
My point is the three threads were connected and they were choreographed.
[Neil Pasricha]
All right. Somehow, here we are at the end in December. Three books from Peter Kimani, including number 553, Weep Not, Child, by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, T-H-I-O-N-G apostrophe O.
Number 552, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, A-C-H-E-B-E, which I'm still working my way through. It's a great book. And number 551, The Hardy Boys Series by Franklin W.
Dixon. Okay. I go back to my hotel in Nairobi.
I get a text from Perlexy, P-E-R-L-E-X-Y, who is Boniface Mwangi's driver, co-conspirator, helping to head up his 2027 Kenyan presidential campaign with the tagline, Love and Courage, running for president of the country, which is really super cool and amazing and impressive. And I get this text saying, we got another podcast for you. We think you're going to love it.
And I'm like, when? Where? Who is it?
And they're like, now, I'm coming to pick you up. And I'm like, you know, when in Rome? When in Nairobi?
You go where your guests suggest. So I grabbed my backpack and my wires and my microphones, and I don't know where I'm going. And I don't know who I'm interviewing.
And on the way there, they tell me that, you know, Bonnie believes that the best bookstore in Kenya is this place called Nuria Books. I check it out online. Immediately, it is.
It's like, you know, like a super highly ranked popular bookstore right in the CBD in the central business district of Nairobi. So I go upstairs through this plaza. Bonnie is like high-fiving and chatting with everybody.
Everybody knows him. He's like super recognizable. He's famous.
He's an activist. He's got two million followers on Twitter for a reason. He's like outing injustices.
That's like what he does, you know? And we go to the bookstore. I get to meet Bule.
B-U-L-L-E, Bulle. He says like bullet without the T. And he is a Kenyan-born man of Somalian descent raised largely by his now 101-year-old camel-herding grandmother.
And we have a conversation, of course, about books and about reading. It's kind of where the source of this podcast began. Ultimate purpose of the show.
Get us all into reading. Hard to do. I go through ups and downs too.
You know what? I just finished Dune. I'll be honest with you.
I'm reading Calvin and Hobbes now. A few pages before bed. No book guilt, no book shame.
But I'm like, I don't know if I have the appetite for another big book right away. We go through ups and downs. Some days I read nothing.
Some days I read like a lot. And this show is meant to provoke and push you a little bit further into the power of reading. Let's jump in to the conversation with Bulle the bookseller now.
Any wisdom from her that you remember or can share?
[Bulle]
What I've learned from her a lot is, and she used to tell us when we were young, is silence is golden. So she used to tell us to open our ears, our eyes, and try to remain silent. So she used to have, and remember, she never went to school as well.
Even my mom, my grandfather, my grandmother. So she used to tell us that everywhere you go, try and open your eyes, your ears, but keep your mouth shut. So if you can't keep your mouth shut, but try and reduce it.
So use your eyes and ears more than your mouth. So that's why you have one and the rest are two. And the rest are two.
And she used to say that there's a reason why the ears are open, the eyes are open, and the mouth can be opened and closed. Yeah, so...
[Neil Pasricha]
The ears are open, the eyes are open, and the mouth... The nostrils are open. The nostrils are open, but the mouth can close.
[Bulle]
Can open and can close. Right. So you have the choice to say something good or remain silent.
So she used to tell us in our own mother tongue, which is Somali, that silence is golden.
[Neil Pasricha]
What's the Somali phrase?
[Bulle]
Af da bolan, a closed mouth, wa dahab. A closed mouth is gold. Af da bolan.
Af means mouth. Da bolan means a closed one. Yes.
And dahab means gold. Wow. I love this.
[Neil Pasricha]
So... Like, this is beautiful. A closed mouth is gold.
[Bulle]
Wow. So she used to tell us that.
[Neil Pasricha]
Thank you so much to Bule, the bookseller, for giving us two more books to add to our top 1000, including number 550, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy, and number 549, Why Nations Fail by Darren Acemoglu. What an inspiring story about a one man's journey into the world of bookselling. He does it so well.
I mean, accepting crypto. He asked me afterwards, by the way, connected with James Daunt. And this is going to be an interesting story.
I emailed James Daunt. I'm like, hey, would you like to talk to Bulle, the bookseller in Nairobi, Kenya? And James Dauntt, president, largest bookseller in the world, CEO of 700 Barnes and Nobles, 300 Waterstones, nine Daunt books.
He's like, absolutely. They end up having a conversation. A note from Bulle afterwards saying that was so inspiring.
And he helped me a lot with my goal of like, you know, lifting up African authors and getting the diaspora of Africa around the world and the communities of people around the world kind of to hear more African stories. Cool. How cool is that?
That's something that we did. That's something we did on three books. That's something that we did.
It's something that you did. You know, spreading stories. Like, I like his point that, you know, the only thing that lasts, even the strongest civilizations of all time, is like what we know of them through the written word, right?
Write it down. The only difference between writers and everybody else is writers write it down. Write it down.
You're thinking about something, write it down. You have a note you want to tell somebody, write it down. Put it in print.
Drop it in the mail. Write an email if you have to. Just put it out there.
This year I've tried my best to put it out there. In addition to the chapters that we just talked about, we took snippets of throughout the full moon. I also, if you go back through the feed, released a new book called Canada is Awesome.
I put that out on Canada Day. So if you go back through the feed, I put it out as a free audiobook. I put it out as a free PDF, as a free HTML, and I'm selling at cost copies of that book over on Amazon.
It's published through Kindle Direct Publishing. So it could be a color hardcover or a paperback black and white. If you want to check out reasons why I love Canada, why you might love Canada, why you might want to hang out here or move here, check it out.
Canada is Awesome. I also did Neil's Beach Reads. I put together this like special kind of bookmark episode on like a bunch of books to read at the beach.
So you can check that out online as well. And I also re-released a number of classics. So in between all the full moons this year, I re-released Conversations.
I took out the opening and the closing because I just wanted it to be the chat with people like David Sedaris, Tim Urban, James Fry, Angie Thomas, Mark Manson, Michael Harris, Sarah Ramsey, Jerry Howarth, Robin the Bartender, Jen Egg, Eldra Cox and Eldra Corona, and of course, Malcolm Gladwell. So re-releasing some of our favorite chapters from the past here. Can you believe we're ending into our ninth year together?
Nine years of pilgrimage, a 22-year-long pilgrimage all the way up to 2040. Thank you for joining me on the Best Of. I hope you have a wonderful 2026.
It has been a joy sharing 2025 with you. And in case nobody else out there tells you this, thank you. Thank you for being here.
Thank you for being you. You are loved. You are valued.
I'm grateful for your presence and your company. And until next time, remember, you are what you eat and you are what you read. Keep turning the page, everybody.
And I'll talk to you soon. Take care.