Chapter 158: Sonja Lyubomirsky helps harness happiness by honing hearty habits

Listen to the chapter here!

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

I realized a few years ago that almost all of the interventions that work to make us happier, the reason they work is they make us feel more loved by others, right, and more connected. The best thing that you could give your kids is a good marriage. If you want to feel more loved, you need to change your conversations and approach your conversations differently or have more of them, right?

And so, how to have deeper conversations, right? So, it's not just small talk. Conversations in which you really listen, where you show curiosity.

We crave to be known and seen and heard.

[Neil Pasricha]

In the world of happiness, there are writers, there are researchers, and there are legends. Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky is definitely a legend. She has been studying happiness since 1989.

Before that, she was born in Moscow in the USSR, came over to the United States where she grew up. She went to Harvard undergrad, graduated summa cum laude, i.e. top 1% of the whole class. She went on to do her PhD at Stanford, where she first got interested in the topic of human wellness, human flourishing, what actually drives us to do our best, feel our best, be our best.

The study of happiness had one researcher in it at the time, Professor Ed Diener, who has since passed away, making Sonia the longest-running, living researcher of happiness in the world today. She got into it 10 years before Martin Seligman and Michal Csikszentmihalyi even invented the concept of positive psychology. We've talked about positive psychology a ton on this show.

We're going to hear why Sonia actually does not like that term and phrase. And Sonia actually became kind of the leading researcher in this field back in 2005 for a very famous, most-cited paper about, does happiness cause success? It was reversing the existing model that most of us had in our heads.

She went on to write the 2007 book, The How of Happiness, and she is returning now for the first time in over a decade with an incredible new book that just came out called How to Feel Loved. She has an idea underpinning her work that she says, you know, most of the happiest interventions she's conducted over the last kind of 20, 30 years all lead to the idea of feeling loved. She's partnered with the University of Rochester's leading researcher on relationships, Harry Reese, and she's putting out this new book that just came out a few weeks ago.

We are going to talk about the four horsemen of marriages that could actually ruin a marriage. What are they? How do you avoid them?

What does MDMA do to our brains? What's the best advice for dating? Why small talk doesn't build relationships?

How we can make ourselves feel loved? And, of course, the single best advice to feel happier today. This, Sonia's three most formative books and much, much more in this quicker conversation of three bucks.

Let's flip the page into chapter 158 now. Hi, Sonia.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Hi, Neil. How are you?

[Neil Pasricha]

I'm doing great. It's good to see you again. I bumped into you, I think I want to say 2023 after you gave a riveting talk at Upper Camden College here in Toronto.

Yes. Just so much data and slides. It was for the alumni and the events.

And I caught wind of you coming from your own website. And then I snuck up to kind of come into the event and hear you speak. And I've been following your stuff forever.

I love the How of Happiness. I love your brand new book. You're in the middle of like, I don't want to call it a vibe shift, but you're going into new territory these days, I hear.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

You know, it's in some ways, it's very new territory. In some ways, it's not at all, because maybe I'll just say it now. Like, I've spent 28 years doing happiness interventions, you know.

So, you know, my lab pioneers sort of the testing different practices that make people happier or not. And so I realized a few years ago that almost all of the interventions that work to make us happier, the reason they work is they make us feel more loved by others, right? And more connected.

So like when I write a gratitude letter to my best friend, I feel more loved by her, right? When I do an act of kindness for a colleague or a neighbor, I feel closer to them. And so that feeling loved is really the key to happiness.

And so, yeah, so the book is called How to Feel Loved. So it's really about happiness. But I am very into this territory, writing it with a love scientist.

I actually have a TED talk coming out next week. And I have a slide that my daughter helped me make that was just something like, you know, I realized that to become a better happiness scientist, I had to become a love scientist. So, yes, that's the new territory.

[Neil Pasricha]

I love that. This conversation will drop on the exact minute of the film at the very beginning of March. So just so you know, you know, listeners will hear this.

They will know that the book is out. It'll be on in bookstores and it'll be online, of course, everywhere. But so you said to to continue your work as a happiness scientist, you had to become a love scientist.

Tell us more what that means. And I do want you to tell us about the new book. I mean, I'm excited about it.

I read it. I loved it. I thought the relationship seesaw was fascinating.

I've been talking to my wife, Leslie, about it already. I've got highlights and I've got notes and scribbles. What is How to Feel Loved?

And how does this relate to you said 20? I thought 1989 I had you pegged then, you know, in 1989 is when I started doing research on happiness.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Nineteen ninety eight is when I started doing happiness interventions, you know, randomized controlled trials. Right. So I've been doing research on happiness for thirty six years.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

And a half years. Yeah. So.

So, yeah, the idea is that the key to happiness is feeling love. So then how do we feel more love? Well, it turns out, you know, most people will report to have at least one relationship in their life that they would like to feel more loved in.

Right. They don't feel as loved as they'd like. By the way, we define love broadly so it can be a romantic partner, but it could be your mom or your child or your neighbor or your colleague or your friend.

And we can be loved. And this is sort of one of the insights that my coauthor and I had. We can be loved, but not feel loved.

Right. So so sometimes people just don't feel loved in their relationships. And so.

And then what do we do? And, you know, because most people think, well, if I want to feel more loved, say, by my adult child or by my, you know, by my friend or my partner, like I need to sort of make myself more lovable. Right.

And that's what mostly we're trying to do. We want to impress the other person that, look, look how wonderful I am, like I'm kind and I'm smart and I'm interesting. I'm funny.

You know, love me. Right. You know, or we try to get the other person to love us more.

And that's like difficult, if not impossible. Right. So and our book really has what I would call an empowering message, which is, well, first of all, if you want to feel more loved, the first step is to make the other person feel more loved first.

So we can talk about that. But it's really empowering because it's not about changing yourself. It's not about changing the other person.

It's about changing the conversation. You know, how do you approach your conversation? And when you think about a relationship as a series of conversations.

Right. So even when we're not talking, we're really kind of in conversation. And so the book is about five mindsets that you embrace before you have your next conversation with that person that you want to feel more loved by.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, you have this great model in the book. I think it's on page 77. Oh, yeah.

OK. Right. Called the Relationship Seesaw.

And C is spelled S-E-A, not right, because it's I love all the highlighting. In water. Yeah, I love it.

I'm a reader with a highlighter. And, you know, you show the picture of two hearts that are on kind of like a teeter-totter or a seesaw. Some of it submerged.

We don't show our full selves to the other person. But when we express interest in the other person through these kind of conversations, we push the seesaw down, exposing them to us.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Exactly. Yeah. So most of us are like kind of like underwater in a way, like most of ourself is hidden from view.

Right. We we tend to show only kind of the positive side or the neutral side. And so imagine the seesaw kind of underwater.

Right. That's what we call it. S-E-A seesaw.

And then when I show. So, Neil, when I'm talking to you and I show genuine curiosity in you and I say, hey, tell me, how was your morning today? And and let's say you say, well, actually, it was a little bit of a rough morning.

I say, well, why was it rough? Yeah. Tell me more like and I know you can't fake curiosity.

You have to really show real curiosity. And then you start talking. And so and then I'm listening.

I'm really listening. I'm not like just preparing my response to you. And so the idea is, as I'm like kind of pushing on the seesaw and helping lift, lift you up a little bit, right, where you are feeling safe and trusty, trust in form.

And you have the trust in me to share more of yourself. Right. And so you're kind of lifting.

I'm lifting you up a little bit by listening to you, by showing curiosity you're sharing. And then the idea is you're going to reciprocate. Yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Reciprocity is a very powerful norm or rule of social behavior. It's very hard not to. Sometimes people don't, but most people do.

And then the idea is that you will hopefully show curiosity in me and show interest. Right. And then help me open up a little bit, too, so that I'm going to share a little bit more.

But sharing, you have to do it at the good pace. Right. Not to not too fast.

Not to not too soon. Right.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah. Well, I think that it's a it's an astounding idea for you to get to this through all the work you've done. I mean, I you were famous for the 50 percent genetics, 40 percent intentional activities, 10 percent circumstances pie chart, which I know you've pulled back from a little bit.

But but, you know, you've you've really been the leader of the positive psychology movement for decades, although I hear that you don't like the phrase positive psychology.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

I don't like the term positive psychology. I like to call it well-being science or gratitude science, whatever you're studying. Yeah.

Thank you. Well, thank you for that. Yeah.

But it's all kind of it's all aligned, as I mentioned, that that the happiness interventions I did really led me to this conclusion that feeling loved, feeling connected is the key to happiness, which sounds like such a cliche. Right. But, you know, when you think about it, many powerful ideas where you distill them kind of like in a word or like several words, they sound like a cliche, you know.

But but it's but it's true. Right. Like feeling love when you think about like problems in relationships, often people are not feeling loved enough, you know.

Have you ever seen the show Couples Therapy?

[Neil Pasricha]

I haven't. No.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Yeah. It's amazing show. Right.

These are real couples in New York. And the therapist is amazing. And they're it's like they forget the cameras there and they're getting therapy, couples therapy.

And it's so fascinating because it actually makes you feel really smart because it's so obvious what the problem is. Right. They're like fighting.

And she says you never do this for me. And where he says, oh, but you said this. And it's so obvious that like at the heart of it is no matter what he says or does, she doesn't feel loved no matter what she does or she's not doing enough to make him feel loved.

And so that yeah, that was another kind of epiphany that like we had that like feeling loved is often at the root of relationship problems.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, it's unbelievable. I really I take this message to heart. I mean, I you know, my parents are getting older.

I have relied on the feeling of love from them my whole life. It's been a little harder lately. Just, you know, they're getting up there and their health is, you know, they need to take care of themselves a little bit more.

I need to take care of them a little bit more. And I sort of recognize I could see I was processing as I was reading this book, my relationship with my parents through it. And so I'm thinking, like, how do I reach out?

How do I express a rather than say, how come you don't visit or how come you don't come over here? Blah, blah, blah. How do we express interest, curiosity, what they're doing?

And I thought that mindsets, the five mindsets model is really helpful. How to feel loved. So for those of us saying just out, grab a copy.

Sonia's first new book in many years, I think 13 years and 13 years. And it builds upon, as you said, this 36 year legacy since your Ph.D. at Stanford. But before that, of course, you went to undergrad at Harvard.

You came over from Moscow at age nine and a half, I believe. And you led this really illustrious career. So of course, as we started exchanging notes about doing this conversation, I said, so Sonia, do you have a few books that have been formative to you that have shaped your own mind, your growth, your development and your work?

And I know that you're a happily married mother of four. And I am a happily married father of four. And so I saw some other kinships and connections I want to explore.

And the way to do that on this show is I ask you about formative books. I've got your three formative books here. I'm going to take our listeners on a little bit of a journey.

I'm going to picture them on a chair between us. I'm going to introduce each book as if the lister is holding it in a bookstore. And then I'm going to ask you to tell us about your relationship with it.

A story that kind of brought the book into your life, what it might be shaped or changed for you. And then I'll have a couple short jump off questions from there.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Fantastic. And by the way, I'm a big reader, so I have a ton of books that are formative. And so it was really hard.

You know, it was really hard for me to choose. I kind of like listed many, many books. And you said, OK, let's just take the top, the first three that I mentioned.

So these are great. I also wanted to correct something. I am actually happily separated.

Oh, I'm sorry. But it gives me actually lots of other life experiences now. But but we had a very, very happy marriage for 25 years and just sort of now going in different directions.

But but that's that's life. And then, yeah, so I'm happily separated.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah. Thanks for clarifying. I did try to look up your personal situation because I was piecing it together in conversations with Rich Roll and with with Dan Harris.

I was like, OK, I know she's a mom of four. I got that. I got the ages of your kids roughly because in an interview with Dan Harris five years ago, you mentioned this and with the Richie mentioned this. I was like, OK, they're probably in there.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

I love the private detective work you're doing.

[Neil Pasricha]

I just try to figure it out. But I guess I got one of the key factors wrong in my research.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

But I do actually I do talk about dating sometimes, but yeah, I don't announce it, although there's nothing it's not a secret. My kids, by the way, are 12, 14, 24 and 26. So I feel like I've had so many life experiences.

Actually, that's something that I like to talk about is sort of this idea that like I have sort of not just scientific wisdom, but kind of like life or like science based life wisdom, you know, like having been an immigrant, having had a difficult childhood, having had this really happy marriage, like being single, having four kids, all, you know, having different issues, you know, at different times. You know, so, yeah, lots of lots of different life experiences anyway.

[Neil Pasricha]

No, it's not. I mean, thank you for opening that up. I'm also in a very different context, also divorced.

I was I got divorced younger in my life and and the marriage I'm in now with Leslie is my second marriage. But divorce is something I wouldn't, you know, wish upon anybody. It must have.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Yeah. Wow. Yeah, well, everyone's different.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

So, yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

So we jump into the formative books and our lives are going to kind of collide naturally. And I'm going to kind of let that and you want to open things up, you know, please do. We also put stuff out after, but I really appreciate you being open.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

And by the way, you know, one of the mindsets I talk about in How to Feel Loved is called the sharing mindset, which is really which is what we're kind of doing right now. We're sort of opening up a little bit more than you normally do, because normally we're kind of people are like either it's either small talk or kind of medium talk or we're sort of trying to impress each other. You know, like I want you to know, think that I'm kind and funny and interesting and smart.

Right. And you probably want the same thing. But like, you know, going a little bit deeper is actually what forges that connection.

And that's a sense of feeling loved. So we're kind of demonstrating this to you.

[Neil Pasricha]

I agree.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

And by the way, right.

[Neil Pasricha]

I also felt internally deep presence when you said I have four kids and I've had the issues that they've all had. And right away I felt I felt seen because I've four boys. They're eleven, nine, seven and five right now.

And, you know, so my oldest, your youngest, kind of very close together. And if I think about it, I've got, you know, challenges with all four of them that are different degrees at the same time. And I can't even imagine what the teenagers will hold in the twenties will hold.

But it's it's dynamic. It's ever changing. And I it's challenging for sure.

And there's good days and bad days. So let's get into some of that here. Great.

Great. Your first formative book is a book you read many years ago called Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. T-A-U-B-E-S.

This book was published in 2007 by Knopf. And it's actually, interestingly enough, called The Diet Delusion over in the UK. Covers a clean, white background with the title Good Calories, Bad Calories, a piece of toast with butter in the center of it, of course, because he's he's kind of castigating against the decrying of fats.

Like he's saying fats are not the problem. Carbs are the problem. Taubes is alive.

He's born in 1956 from Rochester, New York, a city that you have research connection to as well. He was a physicist and an aerospace engineer before getting a master's in journalism, started joining Discover magazine in 1982, became a big reporter. This is the second Taubes book actually added to our show.

Gretchen Rubin, way back in chapter five, added Why We Get Fat, his 2011 book.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Yeah, which is a follow up, which is really the same book, kind of like in a shortened version that's more accessible, I think, to people. I don't want to say it's the same, but it's actually, yeah, I read that, too. So, yeah, great.

[Neil Pasricha]

That changed. I mean, Gretchen said that completely changed.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

That's funny because Gretchen is, yeah, she's a happiness scientist, too. So it's kind of interesting that she has also recommended him.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, very interesting connection. For decades, we've been taught fat is bad for us, carbohydrates better. And the key to healthy weight is eating less and exercising more.

Yet despite this advice, we have seen unprecedented epidemic of obesity and diabetes. Taubes argues that the problem lies in refined carbohydrates, white flour, easily digested starches, sugars, and that the key to good health is the kind of calories we take in, not the amount. File this book under 613.283. Very interestingly, it's technology slash medicine and health slash personal health slash dietetics slash carbohydrates. Sonia, please tell us about your relationship with Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

And I have to say, it's been so long. I mean, I was so obsessed with this book a long time ago. But I mean, there's so many things about at the time, by the way, right now, by the way, there's like a lot of talk about the importance of sort of protein, right, and sort of like paleo.

So but back then, that wasn't really the case. It was sort of all about fat is the big bad sort of culprit. And so that was that was that was eye opening.

That is really sort of carbs and refined sugars that are sort of the culprit. But it's really more than that. This book is like it took so much, I would say, intellectual courage for Gary Taubes.

I actually drove to San Diego one time to hear him give a talk to write this book because he was going against like so much of like government policy, like all these clinical trials. And and I am not even sure if I can summarize it well. This is not my field, obviously.

[Neil Pasricha]

This is no, no, no.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

But it changed how I think about food and eating. But the other thing that he said, and oh, my God, I think that the follow up, why? Why?

Why is it called why you get fat while we get fat? Why we get fat is that is also very good at this is that we just sort of assume like sort of calories in, calories out. I mean, it's so it's so kind of obvious, right?

Like, let's say to maintain my weight, I need to eat twenty five hundred calories a day. And so like if I eat more than twenty five dollars a day, I'll gain weight. If I eat fewer, I'd lose weight.

And he actually said that's wrong. And like that was like really mind blowing to me that it's not because because the causal direction sometimes goes the the opposite way. And when you think about it, like think about like when people are gaining, even when they're gaining weight, that actually most most week, if you kind of like I don't do this or maybe I used to do this like decades ago, but if you actually counted your calories, it's actually kind of incredible how close we get to balancing our calories like every day.

Like it's almost like it's too good to be true. How can we, without counting, like get that close? And the idea is that the body is actually this beautiful organism.

Like like if you overeat a little bit, you might like actually like, I don't know, walk faster like most kids will do this. Right. They'll actually run from the restaurant to the car.

It's like their body knows to work that off. And it's not thinking, oh, I need to work off another 33 calories right now. Right.

So so there's just all these things that your body is doing without you knowing it. That's actually like very wise. And so I just thought that that was like amazing because it was so mind blowing.

And the fact that he challenged like all this sort of common wisdom for like decades.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

It's like this lone person. And it really, as I said, it took a lot of intellectual courage that I would love to model myself about. You know, I started doing research on happiness in 1989.

Like only one person, Ed Diener, you know, was doing research on it. And he didn't even call it happiness, right? He called it subjective well-being.

And that was that was so I was so insecure about it. Right. It was so like it was considered such a fuzzy, unscientific thing to do.

Now, of course, the world has changed. So I guess I just thought of like Gary Taubes is as kind of a role model, like intellectual courage.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, I love that role model of intellectual courage. I actually, you know, I've heard you being referred to, of course, as the longest running happiness researcher. And you're always quick to correct and say, actually, when I started, there was one other guy.

His name was Ed Diener. I know he passed away just a few years ago, and I know he did kind of a lot of work around, you know, are married people happier than sort of single people and so on. I wonder if you might color in the picture of Ed a little bit for us, because it sounds like he was a big mentor and role model to you.

And I'm very familiar with your 2005 kind of foundational paper that you wrote with him and I believe King.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Yeah, my highest cited paper.

[Neil Pasricha]

Your highest cited paper. It says, does happiness lead to success?

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Exactly. Or does it lead to opposite causal direction?

[Neil Pasricha]

Exactly.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

And by the way, just yesterday I was on a Zoom with sort of happiness pioneers, you know, so like Marty Seligman was on it and lots of people. And so we actually talked about the people who weren't in the room. And and so Robert Biswas Diener, who's a friend of mine, was Ed's son, who was also there to kind of talk about Ed.

And so I knew Ed like, you know, we weren't super close. I mean, I didn't see him a lot, but like he's just such a first of all, just a naturally happy person. His son was just saying yesterday that he's also very playful.

And I can see that he's a very playful person. Like Robert told the story how like on an airplane once he got he got a fake Rolex watch and he left it in the bathroom of the airplane just to see what would happen. Like, would someone like bring it, you know, report it?

Would someone steal it? You know, just like for fun, because he was it was funny. Right.

I love that about him. So he's just like a very happy, naturally happy person. Because on this on this call yesterday, we're sort of talking like a happiness pioneers, people who are sort of naturally happy to begin with.

Do they get happier because they're studying and practicing these strategies? Or some people like Marty Seligman, like actually wasn't happy to begin with. And he is very open about that.

And anyway, so, yeah, so Ed was studying mostly running correlations between subjective well-being and like, you know, money, income, you know, educational level, age, you know, ethnicity, sort of all these important factors. Right. Because no one had done that before.

[Neil Pasricha]

And in my lab, this is in the eighties.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Yeah. This is the 80s, study 84. Yeah.

It was when he started.

[Neil Pasricha]

And he got interested in happiness. How? Because this is like the first researcher on the topic before positive psychology was even quote unquote, invented by Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

For context. And by the way, my, my former student, Kristen Leis, and I actually wrote this. I don't know if you were aware.

We wrote this paper year, last year we finished it. That's like the sort of this huge comprehensive paper of kind of the whole field of well-being. So if you or others are interested, it's free and online.

It's on my website.

[Neil Pasricha]

What's it called?

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

It's just called well-being and it's 250 pages. It's a hundred, well, it's 150 pages with a hundred pages of references. That's just how psychology papers are.

But it's like, if you want like a comprehensive overview of all of sort of the, the field, but I mean, there certainly were economists that were studying, you know, well-being before. And there were sort of humanistic psychologists who were studying kind of what you'd call positive psychology. It's not calling it that.

But Ed was really the first, like he founded the science of well-being. And I think he was interested in happiness a long time ago, but he was kind of dissuaded from it because there was, there were no role models. No one was studying it.

And so he was studying de-individuation for years, which is, you know, like kind of the opposite of happiness, kind of, you know, why do people become violent, you know, when they're like de-individuated anyway, but 84 is when he started and yeah, I, I started in 89. So, um, and I, but I was reading his papers, um, back then. Um, so that, that's all.

[Neil Pasricha]

It's so interesting to me because I always think of it like, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you know, Aristotle said, happiness is the meaning and purpose of life. 2,400 years ago, there's the famous declaration of independence. Yeah. Everybody gets life, liberty, and this pursuit, of course, of happiness. But it wasn't until what you're saying, 1984, Ed Diener, Zagitova-Mirsky, 1989, that this really starts to take hold in our culture as the idea that we can be happier. We should look into it.

We can kind of study it. Then in arguably 1998, but then 2000, the famous APA paper comes out, Seligman and Mike Csikszentmihalyi, um, you then, uh, tell us on our original podcast, I think it was, or maybe with Dan Harris, about how the way that the happiness research began, because we're talking about, you know, how to be bold in the field of research like Gary Taub's has been. Yeah.

And you actually would have these, these Mexican offsites where the, anybody around the world who was starting to research happiness would kind of come together and you would sort of foment a plan for studying happiness. I'm so curious about what those events look like.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Well, first of all, I want to say, so I was studying happiness from, for 10 years before the Mexican, before Marty Seligman and Mike Csikszentmihalyi, you know, decided to start this field called, you know, that they called positive psychology. And so they had others nominate. So the first meeting was in January 99.

I, and I was, I was pregnant with my first child, um, who was born in May 99, uh, who's now 26. Right. Um, and so, um, so they, they basically had people in the field nominate sort of the young people in the field who, and some of them weren't actually studying anything to do with happiness, you know, but I was, Barb Fredrickson was studying, had a new theory of positive emotion.

Um, and so we all got together, started talking about it. And then that's, that's what started the collaboration between me and Ken Sheldon and David Scotty. That's when we developed this idea of the pie chart.

And back then that was really revolutionary. Right. Cause no one had really put the research together, like sort of what, what are the most important factors in happiness?

Like now, now it just seems almost like trite, but like, you know, um, yeah, again, back then no one was doing this early work, but it's foundational work and the pie chart you're talking.

[Neil Pasricha]

So Martin Seligman, you know, uh, from the university of Pennsylvania wrote the book authentic happiness and the book flourish. Uh, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, uh, wrote the book and coined that term flow. And, um, you know, you added to this, to the study, this idea that there's a genetic set point we have with happiness.

And, you know, if you have two kids, you can kind of see that, you know, um, there's a circumstances element and then there's the intentional activities, which is kind of where this 20 plus years of research has been like, what does journaling do, what a conscious acts of kindness do, which your study on that has been, uh, one I've quoted for years. And then, but have you, are you distancing? Are you, have you distanced yourself from that pie chart or is that still something that you believe?

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

I, I, by the way, I have a paper with Ken Sheldon, which is called revisiting the pie chart, which we can easily find, um, where we basically just sort of explain what our thinking is on the pie chart. So we, we distance ourselves from the numbers and we never really believe that, that in those numbers, like the, this, this 40% or is under your control. The people just kept misinterpreting it.

And so, so now what I say is like, just think about what the determinants of happiness. There are really three buckets, right? And the first bucket is genetics.

Like we all know their genetic influence on happiness. There's not a specific candidate gene. There's probably thousands of genes, but we know those are important.

The second bucket of influences on happiness has, has to do with our life circumstances, right? Are we rich or poor? Are we married?

Where do we live? How old are we? Et cetera.

And, you know, of course, and the, the extent to which those are going to be impactful are going to depend on like how good our circumstances are, right? So, so if we're pretty comfortable, they're not going to matter that much to our happiness, but if we, if I, if we're in an abusive relationship, if we live in a war zone, right, if we live in poverty, absolutely like that, that's going to be a huge factor of our happy, in our happiness and the third bucket of influences on happiness are like, what actually we can do every day, like to affect it, right, or how we think and how we behave, how we act. And so I've devoted my career, you know, to really studying that third bucket. And it's like, what is it that we can do?

You know? So that's why we, my lab. So in 98, my lab pioneered what we call happiness interventions, right?

Which are like, they're like clinical trials, but instead of testing a medication or a vaccine, we're testing a happiness practice where randomly assigning people to like express gratitude or do something else, et cetera.

[Neil Pasricha]

And because you mentioned in circumstances, the first thing you said was, you know, I'm not rich or I'm not poor. I wondered if, is the paper you most described to the Kahneman paper from 2010 Woodrow Wilson, where he says that, you know, above a certain mean, I think at the time it was 70 something thousand dollars, you know, there's a marginal benefit to wealth that I think people put in today's numbers, like 110 or 120,000. I'm curious for your, your talk, just on, on wealth today, as it relates to happiness.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Sure. Sure. I actually, you know, I teach this class, um, every Friday on zoom that anyone can sign up for.

Um, and we actually just had a class on sort of happiness and money to kind of summarize. It's just a half hour class and it's to sort of summarize it. And, and it's a little bit nuanced, right?

But one of the, the sort of the summaries of all the tons of research, you mentioned this one paper, there's hundreds and hundreds of papers on money and happiness, uh, both from the economics field of economics and sociology, but also psychology. But one of the take home points is yes, that like money really makes you happy if it keeps you from being poor, right. If it buffers you from all those difficult challenges, you know, when you don't have much money.

So, so when you have little money, it like makes a huge difference when you, when you already are comfortable and that line can be very many places depending on where you live, right. And who you are. Um, so that's why I don't, I don't like to put a number on it.

Um, then money is still going to make you happier, but just sort of not as much, it's going to kind of flatten out a little bit, not as much as you think. Right. But incredibly, like, you know, if you, if you make 300,000 a year, compare that to someone who makes a 500 or a million a year, there's still going to be a gradient, right?

People are still happier. So that's one finding, but there's lots of other findings. It turns out that money makes you, yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah. You would agree with the sense that money does make you happier.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

It does. Absolutely. It does make you happier.

Uh, but it also depends on how you spend it. Right? So it turns out if you spend money on connection, on contribution, helping others on personal growth, learning, it's going to make you happier than if you spend your money on just like buying more stuff.

[Neil Pasricha]

So you agree with money. Then on the third point, intentional activities, which you've been studying for decades, and I, I've read your foundational work on, on acts of kindness. Like I thought that was, I thought that's what you said was the biggest thing that creates happiness.

Are you in today in 2026?

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Right, right, right. So, yes, we've done, so we mostly focus on kindness interventions and gratitude interventions. We have definitely said acts of kindness interventions are, are more, are very powerful, right?

Cause they're very concrete. Like you help you help someone else. And then we had this, I had this sort of this epiphany that the key to all these interventions is they make us feel more connected and loved.

And so, and so then we started thinking, well, maybe we should just ask people to socialize more. Okay. So we did this big study where we asked people just to act more extroverted for a week, you know, or to act more introverted for a week.

And the people who actually extroverted got a lot happier, uh, including introverts. Um, and so then we started doing more studies and just having more social interactions. And now we're studying conversations, right?

So now if I were to give you kind of my number one happiness tip, and this is very relevant to the new book, how to feel loved, because the book is really about relationships or a series of conversations and sort of, if you want to feel more loved, you need to change your conversations and approach your conversations differently or have more of them, right? So, and so how to have deeper conversations, right? So it's not just small talk, uh, conversations in which you really listen, where you show curiosity, where, where you share, you help the other person to share.

So, um, anyway, so, so that's, that's what we're studying now. So I actually think now the, now the most powerful happiness booster is sort of anything social, really, like anything that helps you connect, you know? Yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

The most powerful, the most powerful happiness booster is anything social. Yeah. Yeah.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

That's a huge statement coming from you.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

No, it is. And I, so yeah, so I have this, um, yeah, this TED talk that would have come out on February 3rd. So basically just a five minute talk, but, um, I worked, but I worked very hard on it, like those five minutes.

[Neil Pasricha]

As Mark Twain says, it's hard to make something short.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um, uh, yeah, there's this, that, that famous line, right. By Mark Twain, right.

I would have literally said, sorry, I wrote you such a long letter. If I had more time, I'd written you a short, I would have written you a shorter letter. Uh, but anyway, um, uh, but I say in that talk, you know, if I were to give you sort of my, I don't like one tip to be happier today, it would be go out and have a five, a 15 minute conversation with someone, uh, and research shows it just like people on average are so much happier after a conversation than before.

And so as a podcaster, I mean, I mean, maybe it's different when you're sort of doing it for work, but, but like, yeah, like, you know, the power of conversations, um, uh, and I also know the pain or the sadness or the loneliness.

[Neil Pasricha]

I feel like even in like, my kids go to school, my wife's off to work. I'm sitting at home, I'm preparing for this podcast. I have the morning and I'm like, immediately I feel like lower.

You know what I mean? Like the house is quiet. I hear the hum of the fridge.

I'm like, I don't know if it's just me, but I do require like a pretty high amount.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

So you're an extrovert, right, right. You're an extrovert, right, right. And I'm, I'm, I call myself, uh, uh, uh, let's see an extroverted, introvert.

Uh, and I still, I love solitude. Um, I really love solitude, but I, but I'm also very social. I love my, my, my, my, my happy places, parties.

I love going to parties. Um, partly because you can go from one conversation to another, like you're not stuck in one conversation.

[Neil Pasricha]

Um, but anyway, um, I haven't heard you say that you take Uber pool specifically for conversations with strangers.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Uh, oh, interesting.

[Neil Pasricha]

By the way, I don't think that exists anymore, but when it exists, it does here in Toronto, you always like, if it's a $17 ride, I can, I can go down to $13. I'm willing to take five minutes longer and go with three other people.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Right, right. That's funny. Yeah, no, no.

I, I've had some really great, it does not exist where I, yeah, they used to have it. And I don't know. Um, uh, not anymore.

Um, but, um, but yeah, that, well, again, I'm, I'm not as good talking to strangers. Um, although when I do talk to, you know, Nick Epley at University of Chicago has done all this research and he has a new book out or soon coming out called Undersocial, um, that like, we're not social enough, you know, that like, and he's a big proponent of talking to strangers has done all these studies showing that just talking to your person sitting next to you on a train, talking to your bus driver, talking to your barista is going to make you happier. And I do do that sometimes. I'm not as good at like, I'm not really a chit-chatter, um, um, but certainly talking to people I know, like I, I feel much happier, of course on average.

I mean, sometimes we have a horrible conversation with someone, right. Um, but on average, we're happier.

[Neil Pasricha]

And you said the number of things, one thing you could do if you want to be happier is do anything social, but I was just going to ask you just for clarification, because you mentioned Nick Epley's work at, at University of Chicago and so on, and you mentioned talking to people on trains. This is in real life. This is IRL.

Like when you say anything social, does that not include social media then?

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Well, that's a whole other conversation, but, um, I do think we actually have one study where we, where we compared all kinds of different social interactions and how in sync people felt and how much warmth they felt, how much, how connected they felt. Um, and we actually didn't find a difference between face-to-face video and phone. So anything involving voice was connecting.

And so, but I'm not saying that it's the same, because I do think there's something about in real life, breathing the same air as someone that's like really special, physical touch, smell, all of those things that happen in real life. Um, but you know, at least in some studies that show that you can, you know, from a phone call or from a video call, um, you know, I still think that face-to-face is better. Um, but yeah, I don't want to, um, throw shade onto some of these other forms of connection that actually do help people connect.

[Neil Pasricha]

I was just talking to somebody the other day about how like the voice memo kind of thing that just sort of came, crept up on us, like it came into iOS. You can, you know, my wife thinks of her voice memos with her friends as like this great joy in her life. I've started using them too.

I advocate for people that they spend two minutes a day sending one voice note to somebody they would invite to their wedding, you know, using Dunbar's number 150, you know, who would you invite to your wedding? And just state the value of the relationship, share something going on with you and seek, like ask them a question. And, um, I feel like people respond well to that.

You know, if you keep it two minutes, like if you get a 12 minute voice note, it's hard to respond, but I like your point about voice. Now we're talking about research, deep research, interesting research, counterintuitive research, and in real life lab research, maybe nobody other than you has done that better than Mr. John Gottman, John Gottman, John Gottman, for those that don't know, has been studying relationships for, um, in this lab, in this lab where he like gets people into like rooms and actually records them and he kind of comes out and, and he put out this book in 1999 called the seven principles of, for making marriage work.

Published by Harmony Books. I'm holding a revised edition. I just bought a few weeks ago.

Already in its 36th printing. And this is 2015. So it's like, this thing's flying.

It says over a million copies sold on the cover. It's a white cover. Um, pretty Seraphy, uh, font with a little bit of lime green trim.

The O in the word work at the bottom is like this, you know, this. Set of couples rings, like two gold rings. I took my ring off by the way, and put it on the book cover.

It's the exact size of my ring. And then the other ring is like tiny. It's like, you know, I guess a big person married to a small person kind of thing.

Um, beneath the rings, it says a practical guide from the country's foremost relationship expert. And then the bottom, it says John M Gottman PhD and a big 24 point aerial font and below that in a very small 12 point font, poor Nan Silver gets kind of tossed in. That would be the journalist that wrote the book with him.

What is this about? This guy, by the way, is 83 years old now. Founder and director of Gottman Institute.

He's published over 250 academic articles, over 50 books since he began quote unquote, systematically observing couples in a lab in 1970. When he was 27, um, he uses rigorous scientific procedure to observe the habits of married couples in unprecedented detail, and this is the culmination of his life work. Seven principles that guide couples on the path towards harmonious and long lasting relationships.

Dewey Decimalist can follow this one on to 306.1 for social sciences slash anthropology slash cultural institutions slash marriage. Sonia, please tell us about your relationship with the seven principles for making marriage work by John Gottman.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

So I have given out this book to couples who are getting engaged. Um, but I think anyone who has ever been in a relationship, romantic relationship, or wants to be in a romantic relationship should read this book and, you know, it is based on research, but like it just, it's very wise. Uh, it just has a really, really wise advice.

And, and some of it, like, it's kind of like what, I don't know, like the famous advice is that, that, you know, successful relationships are not just about like conflict. So like, you know, people think like, Oh, if we fight, that's bad. If we don't fight, that's good.

But it's not necessarily, that's not, that's not really the key. It's not necessarily even about communication, but it's about sort of like these very everyday moments, you know, you know, when someone's making a bid for attention, you respond to that. It's about sort of this like moments of responsiveness, which again, my new book, how to feel loved is really about that too.

It's about these conversations that you're having, whether this is about romantic relationships, but we're talking about all kinds of relationships. Like how do you respond? You, you listen, you show curiosity, you share.

Um, and, but really even more than that, but what really the memorable part that I took away is like, he, he got me and talks about these four, four horsemen of the apocalypse, four things that if you find yourself doing this in your relationship, that is not good. Right. Um, and they are contempt, criticism, stonewalling and defensiveness.

And that, yeah. And that contempt is the worst one. If you find yourself showing contempt, that is like the biggest predictor of like relationship, you know, breakup.

And I remember, I mean, it's so, it's like an example of that. Well, one example is when you find yourself rolling your eyes at someone, not necessarily that even they see it. Cause you're just like, you know what I mean?

Like just, just find yourself a moment. We probably have all done it where you just kind of roll your eyes and it's not, it's one thing to roll your eyes at like the TV screen, but to roll your eyes at this romantic, you know, someone you love and I actually, that happened to me once in a romantic relationship where I found myself rolling my eyes. I don't remember thinking, oh my God, like this is the end.

Um, now of course you can save the relationship and you can work on it. And, and, um, but I, I just remember that that lesson was like a really important lesson. You find yourself, you get, again, criticizing a lot, being defensive, you know, like, what does that mean?

Like, think about what that means. Um, so it's really relevant to my new book because in the new book, it's really more of a positive approach. It's like, it's about listening, curiosity, uh, you know, accepting someone for their flaws, showing warmth, uh, sharing, and if you find yourself not doing those things, like that's a diagnostic too, we actually found some of the early readers of our book have like broken up with their, with their after reading our book because they're like, oh my God, I realized like, because they're using it as a diagnostic. They're like, I realized that my, my girlfriend just isn't showing any curiosity in me.

So it's a little bit like Gottman, but Gottman's are more like the negative behaviors and ours are like lack of positives. Like what if she's not showing curiosity in you? What if you're not sharing and she's not sharing or he's not listening?

Doesn't mean it's not fixable by the way. Absolutely. We can work on those things, but it's a, it's a diagnostic.

We actually have a quiz we created that people can take to sort of take this diagnostic to sort of see where you are.

[Neil Pasricha]

I love that quiz. It's like howtofeellove.com. That's one great thing about the Gottman book too, is it's just really laden with quizzes.

So even, you know, first principles enhance your love maps. And I was like, what does that even mean? But of course, when you open the chapter, it's like you and your partner each fill out this survey and it's like, name two of my best friends, name two of my favorite movies, name two.

And you're sort of like, oh, well, if you score, you know, more than 10 out of 20, you know, your partner pretty well. If you score less, it's time to invest in getting to know them better. Right?

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Right. You're not listening, showing curiosity, right?

[Neil Pasricha]

You're not showing curiosity. Number two, nurture your fondness and admiration. Number three, turn toward each other instead of away.

Yeah. Um, I was going to ask you about these principles in the context of children and having, um, as, uh, because I have four kids and it's pretty rare now. And, uh, I hope it's not rare for the future because it looks like our global population is about to decline for the first time in a long time.

I wondered how you thought about these principles of relationships, both in your 25 year marriage, but also as you're dating now, um, in the context of having. Kids like, right.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

So you're drawing Gottman's principles or yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, well, I mean, absolutely. Like the very, they're very relevant. I mean, again, he talks about romantic relationships, but yeah, if you find yourself rolling your eyes at something, your kid says, or, well, they will roll when they're teenagers, they will roll their eyes at you.

So that might be, that might actually might be an exception where like, that's just like a teen thing to do. And that, that doesn't necessarily mean that your relationship is doomed.

[Neil Pasricha]

Um, but like, I was also thinking of it like more, like, how do you have time to take care and nurture and practice the relationship with your primary partner when you have the demands of children around you, you know?

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

And you're, you're asking for a friend.

[Neil Pasricha]

Um, yeah, no, I'm asking very much. So for me, no, no.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

It's in, by the way, I'm kind of in awe that you have four kids. Cause I have four kids, but they're like 12, 14 years apart, like two and two. So it was just completely different.

[Neil Pasricha]

So you think mine's harder? I think yours is harder.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

No, mine is so much easier. Right. Cause the older ones, they were like the babysitters for our younger ones.

Yeah. They were 12 and 14. Um, and then, you know, anyway, so, uh, it's really hard.

It's really, really, really, really hard. Um, maintaining passion is really, really hard. And, and again, again, I'm getting back to sort of, you know, what we talk about in our books, sort of the sharing and listening curiosity, like having the capacity, the bandwidth, you know, and, and I'm like, actually Carrie Reese, my coauthors talks about how often couples will save that connection time for like the worst time of the day, right?

They come home from work, they're tired, blah, blah, they're making dinner. They're helping their kids with homework or whatever. Finally, it's like 10 30 PM.

And now you're, the kids are in bed. You're sitting and you've done your email or whatever, and you're sitting together and like, that's your time together. And he's like, that's not good.

You know, that's like not leaving time. That's not prioritizing your marriage. And I always say, I'm not the only one who says that, like the best thing that you could give your kids is a, is a good marriage, right?

[Neil Pasricha]

It's a happy marriage. Right.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Um, because they're, they're going to benefit from that. Um, and, uh, anyway, so it's incredibly hard. So, so, but to remember like the sharing, listening, curiosity, how can you do that?

You know, you know, when can you find time to maybe it's having a date night, maybe it's like you call on the phone in the middle of the day and you're like, when you have the capacity, when you have the energy to be like, tell me, cause we all want to be seen and heard and when you say, how was your day and she says fine or okay, like how much capacity do you have to actually listen to the details of like, oh, that colleague said this thing that upset her or, you know, this, or she, you know, her, you know, whatever, she couldn't find a parking spot. Often it's like the details of the day that we really want to the other person to like care and hear about, and, and we often don't have that capacity. So sort of finding that time.

[Neil Pasricha]

I think that's so such a profound point though, which is like, and you make the point about not doing it when it's like the worst possible time, like Leslie and I have a phrase that we sometimes use, which is I'm dead to the world. And so if we get up to our bedroom and it's like the end of the night, we've put the kids to bed and like, you know, one person instinctively wants to say, Hey, what about that thing with my mom? Or what about that thing?

We just say I'm dead to the world. And it just basically means you cannot ask me about anything outside of the, outside of this room. Yeah.

And we do have a weekly date night. That is something that when we miss it for two, three weeks, we notice it. Like they're more friction does start to bubble up.

So the date night's important. And then one game that we tried to use on our date night, not always perfect, but we try to bring it up is this game called CQD. My wife, Leslie invented it.

CQD stands for compliment, question, dream. So each person is forced to, you know, come up with a compliment for each other. Then a question, which you then both answer and then a dream or a vision.

And usually on a date that just like sparks us into a conversation about one of the topics, but you know, just a couple of things that we have been trying.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

By the way, that the, I love it. By the way, there's research on compliments and how important they are and how people don't give each other enough compliments. I love that.

And then the questions like we don't ask each other enough questions again, back to Nick Eppley at Chicago. He, he has these studies that show that people think that asking deep questions is, will be uncomfortable. That the other person, it's a little bit easier with a romantic partner, but just think of everyone in your life.

The other person will like, think we're prying or being nosy, but actually on average, like we want to be asked, like we crave to be known and seen and heard. So yeah. So ask, ask real questions of each other, not just how are you?

[Neil Pasricha]

we crave to be known, ask real questions. That's great. Great.

I want to, before we jump off this book into your third and final book, I wanted to ask you about MDMA because, you've been on the record as saying, both on Rich Roll and you put out a paper saying that, you know, you think MDMA could be a valuable research tool for understanding psychological neurobiological mechanisms. I've never tried it. I'm very curious about it.

I've been, I've been told by a few friends, Hey, have you and Leslie ever tried, you know, a small dose of MDMA? My friend Mel Robbins has been public about using MDMA in her relationship and for her, you know, kind of, family therapy, couple's therapy. It seems like we're on the precipice here and you've been open about your experimentation with it and I'm very curious about it.

So I guess I'm just trying to ask you like, what questions does somebody ask before they, enter into MDMA, use for relationship purposes for, to increase connection, what have you seen from any early research and can you kind of tell us where the science is today?

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Yeah. I am a huge proponent. Actually, it's funny.

I hate to say like proponent because I want to be sort of an unbiased scientist and yet there's, there's both tons of clinical anecdotal evidence. You know, therapists have been using MDMA for decades, right? With couples kind of underground.

And one of my neighbors mentioned that he, he wrote his divorce settlement on MDMA with his ex-wife, like, which I thought was like a brilliant idea because it makes you basically what happens when you're on MDMA is that it lowers the walls, it makes you less defensive, more loving, more grateful. You see beauty in the other person. And so really, and so people, you can actually talk about hard things.

Actually, one thing that's good for a relationship is like, if you want to talk about something hard, let's say you get a job offer in another city and you want to talk about that because that maybe the other person really doesn't want to move, right? That's a really hard problem in a relationship. And then under MDMA, under the influence of MDMA, like you can talk about these, these hard topics without defensiveness, which is, which is being like, oh, you know, so that's how you feel.

[Neil Pasricha]

It lowers the fear receptors, as I understand.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

And that's why it's used for, for people who've had trauma. Like, imagine like if you've been in combat, like women who've been raped on under MDMA, they can go back into that room and they can process that experience because otherwise they can't, right, because it's so awful. And they're, they're so afraid.

And, you know, therapists will say, like, you can't totally get over something without kind of processing, integrating it. So you have to kind of go back into that room, is my understanding. And so MDMA helps you resolve trauma, address trauma.

But even without trauma, it sort of helps you just have like really honest, loving conversations. And also just like, even if there's nothing difficult to talk about, it just builds love and like warmth and, you know, yeah, towards each other.

[Neil Pasricha]

And MDMA is the same in, in your mind as molly or ecstasy, correct?

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Yeah, it's the same. So MDMA, it's just the chemical term, 3,4-methylene-dioxybethamphetamine. Um, um, into molly and ecstasy, sometimes we'll have like other things in them, but yeah, they're the same.

[Neil Pasricha]

They're the same thing. And then he suggested, uh, you know, cause right now, of course it's illegal for most of the world, right? And we're talking about, you're at the cutting edge of science.

You're at the cutting edge of research. You're speaking to researchers, you're putting up papers. So we have both that emerging world together with the fact that, you know, it's gray market, it's black market.

And people like me, you know, my fear is like, how do I know this is a good quality? Where am I getting it from? How much do I take?

What's the guide? Like we're missing that whole architecture, which, which for someone like me, I like a cautious left brain person. Like I kind of feel like I need that, but I also don't want to wait till it's potentially never legalized for my whole life.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Exactly. I mean, there are places where it's decriminalized. It's really never, no place where it's legal.

And that's always a problem, right? Like we use research grade MDMA, you know, for our studies that we obviously can't, can't touch, um, only for research. Um, you know, my, I guess my biggest, uh, advice there is, you know, there, there, there's a batch that people have, you know, they make it in a lab.

There's batches of MDMA that maybe you have friends or clinicians that have relied on the same batch. Uh, and, you know, and there's been no, uh, dangerous sort of effects. Um, you know, but there's always a danger, right?

With always danger with something that's illegal, that it's not regulated. It's not, yeah, you don't know what's, what's in it. Uh, you can also use like things like fentanyl strips to, to test for there's all kinds of testing kits one can use to make sure there's nothing in, in there, uh, that's harmful to you.

[Neil Pasricha]

Okay. So you're pushing the science forward a little bit. You're coming out as an active proponent, which sounds like, uh, makes a lot of sense based on your background there.

And we are all kind of eagerly watching this space, um, as things move ahead. Um, thank you so much for your openness there. I really appreciate it.

And I, I want to be part of the movement to sort of understanding, right? Like we're all trying to figure this out. Um, so people like you, people like, you know, Tim Ferriss, people like Rich Roll that, you know, are coming publicly and saying Rich Roll just, just talked about how he went to Mexico and did like a psilocybin experience.

He's been really public and open about that. Yeah. Kind of a surprise, you know, for a guy that's been very sober for very long, but not seeing those as, you know, challenging each other, but more just looking to the human condition.

Right, right. Now, research, science, nonfiction, scratching that left brain. This all goes together with your third and final book, which is come as you are by Emily Nagoski.

Emily, of course, was our guest on chapter 146 of this podcast. We love her. She's born in 1977.

She became a peer health educator at the university of Delaware during undergrad, which then began this 30 plus year career in sex education, including being director of wellness at Smith college. Um, this book come as you are is like, it's a phenomenal cover, right? It's a giant bright pink cover, which has a double ended zipper opens up into like a red reveal below to be blunt.

It looks like a labia and a vagina. Um, come as you are is in four words down the middle. With the subtitle in between the surprising new science that will transform your sex life.

So, uh, by the way, Emily, I don't know if you knew this is also a trained Gottman seven principles educator as a side note. Do we have some heads? You can follow this.

This somewhat reveals Melville Dewey's 1873 prudishness, but it's 613.9 for technology slash medicine slash birth control, reproductive sex, hygiene, and sexual techniques. So you tell us about your relationship with come as you are by Emily Nagoski.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Oh, such an amazing book. Um, I also give it to friends, basically anyone who has sex with women. So like if you're a man or a woman who has sex a little bit, or if you're a woman and you want to understand your sexuality better, I thought I knew a lot about female sexuality and this book, it's just so also really accessible and this idea, I guess that at the heart of the blogger style, what it's like she's written, she's writing it like blogger style.

Like, yeah, I mean, it's, it's just so easy to read. Um, yeah, so accessible. Um, I've actually gave it to a friend whose son is 17 and is starting to have sex with his girlfriend.

And I'm like, he should read this book. Like, and, you know, we don't know if he's actually going to read it. Uh, but, um, you know, as a 17 year old, but anyway, um, it's, uh, at the heart of the book is sort of this dual control sort of action model of sexuality, this idea that you, there's sort of accelerators and their brakes, you know, like what turns you on is sort of the accelerator.

And sometimes maybe your accelerator, you're really hard to turn on. And then, and then the brakes are like some people, it's like very easy to kind of turn off or not turn on, right. Cause there's lots of breaks.

The breaks could be like stress or a body image issues or things like that. Um, and, and so that, that was like so simple and almost kind of obvious, but like really helped me understand sexuality. And then the other thing that like was really kind of a game changing for me and my friends, cause we talk about this book a lot, um, is the idea that context matters.

Right. And so I'll just say it in a really simple way that often, like my friends and I will talk about like, you know, wanting to have sex with a guy and we're just sort of not turned on and we kind of blame the guy. So we're just talking about straight people and not blame like he's a bad person, but we're just like, oh, I guess we're just sort of not attracted to him enough, you know?

Um, and, and what, what Nagoski shows is that actually context really matters and that we, that the woman, well, both people can really set up like a context, like an environment where things are just going to go better. Right. That, that, that are where there's like the accelerator and that there's fewer brakes.

And so it's like, it's like, we're in part responsible for our own, like, you know, uh, arousal sort of, or being sort of turned on. It's not just like, oh, the guy's not, you know, whatever, we're not attracted enough to him. So that was actually really, seemed almost obvious, but that was like really, um, uh, a big epiphany, I think for, for my friends and I.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, absolutely. I, this book has been on my shelf for years. I, uh, interviewed Emily, um, thought it was a great book.

I love her, her knack for chapter titles. Like she, she kind of demystifies it. She has this chapter called when someone yucks your yum, which I always thought was one of the best chapter titles I've ever, uh, discussed.

I reached out to Emily, by the way. She says she's very flattered that her book is one of your three most formative and she loves and has read many times your other two formative books, by the way. Amazing.

And then she actually sent us a question for you. I really love bringing questions from past guests. So here's what she sent me.

Emily says for Sonia, I have been looking for all the effective strategies to help people let go of culturally constructed aspirational ideals and instead believe that who they truly are is someone worth being. What have you found to be the most effective ways to help people make this transition, which I feel is our shared job?

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Wow. So interesting. If I understand the question correctly.

So these culturally constructed aspirations, a lot of these are what we call extrinsic goals, right? In psychology, right? So like it's sort of money, power, beauty, sort of status, fame.

So those are the things that accomplishment and that, that we chase. And we think those are the things that like will make us happy. Um, and by the way, I still kind of chase those things too.

Like, I think we all, you know, even if we know very well that that's not the chasing that doesn't make it make us happy, but it's really like the intrinsic goals that are associated with happiness. And those are really goals having to do with connecting with others, with contributing society. You know, um, we talked about this a little bit, you know, helping others and, and, and growing as a person.

It's like that, those are really the things that the intrinsic goals are associated with happiness. Pursuing extrinsic goals are, is not associated with happiness. Right.

So sort of lots of research on that. And so I assume sort of, yeah. So the question, is that how you understand the question?

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, exactly. I, I've been looking at all the effective ways we can let people help people let go of culture, constructed aspirational ideals, instead believe who they truly are as someone worth being, because I think in a lot of her work with, with in sex, as you said, she's dealing with all the kind of, I should be like this. Or I can't do that.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Right. The should. So again, it's like, I guess the first step is awareness, right?

That, that, that there's these again, sort of beauty and sort of body image issues are big, you know, in sexuality break. Um, so beauty, fame, you know, sort of kind of outward status, success, you know, money, power, you know, popularity, like those are the things that like, yeah, pursuing them doesn't make us happy. So the awareness of that, I guess, is the first step.

And then really could, you know, focusing on those, again, those three buckets that I mentioned, connection, anything to do with other people, connecting with others, connection, contribution, anything to do with helping others, whether it's our cousin or society as a whole, um, and then personal growth. It could be learning a new skill, a new language traveling. Um, so really focusing on those three things are going to make us happier.

And I think it's, it's going to, you're going to be, yeah, your sexist life is going to improve too. I think when you're, when you're sort of happier, um, in yourself, right.

[Neil Pasricha]

It sounds, it sounds like it will. And it's something that we can all kind of invest in and work on no matter where you are in your sexual life. It's a dimension of our selves that, you know, a lot of us struggle with.

And you know, if you have kids and that's getting in the way, that's one thing. If you have, um, no kids and you're single and you're working on, you know, it's, it's, we live in a day and age where dating's more complicated, meeting people's more complicated. Uh, um, I admire that you're out there and you're dating because I have friends that are, you know, coming out of a marriage right now and they're struggling.

They're struggling with even dating. Like they're struggling to get out there again. And, you know, the act of dating is difficult and can be very rewarding.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

But well, again, like sharing, and I actually, I actually like dating and partly because I'm a social person, but it's sort of sharing curiosity and listening, right? Those are the key, uh, uh, with, with dating or any kind of relationship. Right.

So if you're doing that, but if you're just trying to impress the other person, you know, then that's not going to work. Right. Um, and so, um, yeah, I, I kind of find it as a challenge.

[Neil Pasricha]

Any rules you have for dating these days? Like any, you know, you're dating now. So what?

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Yeah. So again, I would say this is really relevant to how to feel loved is that most of us, when we meet a new person, we're trying to impress them and that's very normal, very human. I want you to think that I'm kind and interesting and funny and smart.

Um, and so in my experiences, a lot of the time, and I'm sure this happens with both genders, but since I date men, I can see this, the guy will just talk the entire time and he just talks on and on. Right. And I get it.

Like he's trying to impress me and others, you know, that, that he's smart and interesting and, but it doesn't forge a connection. Right. And I have actually have sometimes interrupted them and actually said, do you realize that in the last 45 minutes, you have not asked me a single question.

Right. Which by the way, sometimes I'm just, I can be kind of brave and saying that sometimes it just like ends the date and the guy's all huffy and that's fine. I don't want to go out with him anyway.

Um, but once in a while, like there's a story that I should have told this before one guy, when I said that, he said, Oh my God, he's like, I'm so sorry. You know, when I, um, you know, when I get nervous, I talk too much. And that was beautiful.

And then that led us to like to have a connection, uh, and to let us to have further dates. Um, and so, yeah, so it's again, feeling loved or feeling connected is sort of curiosity, genuine curiosity, listening and sharing. And when one person is talking nonstop the whole time, that's not happening.

Right. So that, that's my advice.

[Neil Pasricha]

Dealing love, genuine curiosity. I think that's a great, great line as well. So you've been very, it's a gift.

It is a gift. And you have given us the gift of your time. I want to be very respectful of your time.

I know you're back to back. I know the book's about to come out. You're in the middle of a lot of things just to close this off.

I've got three or four quick, fast money round questions that will end with a final piece of wisdom. So, so yeah. Hardcover, paperback, audio, or e what is your preferred book format?

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Uh, paperback. Uh, but I also often do, I often read them on my phone because like, it's always with me. So, you know, I kind of like those two side by side, like a paperback, like actual book, it's not too heavy.

Uh, and the ebook to read, like when I'm standing in line where I'm just sort of waiting around.

[Neil Pasricha]

You'll jump into an ebook on your phone. Wow. Interesting.

Amazing. You're able to do that. How do you organize the books on your bookshelf?

Like at home?

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Oh, good. Good question. Cause my, my, my, my husband, my ex-husband does it all alphabetically.

Um, but I do it by topic. I actually have a shelf. This is sort of my, my favorite books kind of of all time.

I have a couple of shelves like near my balcony. But then I also have a, I have all my, like, you know, I went to Harvard undergrad, I have all the, all the core classes I took, uh, the books from college, like that, those are really fun. I actually just had a friend look at them the other day.

She's like, Oh my God, I can't believe you have these books. I have all my like psychology, the happiness books, like the, the sort of like nonfiction, huge shelves of fiction and different kinds of fiction. Um, yes, it's more like, kind of like topic and genre.

[Neil Pasricha]

I love that. Yeah. Uh, do you have a, a white whale book or any book you've been chasing metaphorically in any sense, the longest, a book you've always wanted to read?

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Oh, right. And haven't really, Oh yeah, yeah. I, um, like war and peace or brothers Karamazov.

Um, you know, I just did not tackle, you know, I know Russian and so I always think, Oh, I should read them in Russian, but my Russian is not that good. So I really should just give up the idea of reading in Russian, just reading them in English. So there you go.

[Neil Pasricha]

Nice. Okay, great. And by the way, no book guilt, no book shame is one of the underpinning values of this whole show.

Um, uh, do you have a favorite bookstore living or dead?

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Oh, um, uh, good question. Um, uh, I like book soup in Los Angeles. Uh, there's like little, yeah, yeah.

There's like little stores here and there that I like. Um, but yeah, unfortunately I used to go to like the big bars and noble all the time near me. Cause it was like several stories and had like everything.

And then, then it closed down.

[Neil Pasricha]

You're in Riverside, right?

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

No, I'm in Santa Monica. So, um, yeah. So I used to, yeah, I really, I guess it was the big bars and noble cause I had like so many sex shows that you can just get lost in, uh, closed down, unfortunately.

[Neil Pasricha]

Um, but we just interviewed James Don a couple of years ago on the podcast, the CEO of Barnes and Noble, and they are opening 40 more stores this year.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

I read that. I read that. Awesome.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah. And they're getting like 400 person lineups. They're opening them back up in neighborhoods like, you know, that have, have lost their Barnes and Noble years ago.

So the number one challenge our listeners have is making time to read. Is there anything you do that helps you make time for reading?

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Yeah, yeah. I break it up into, I think you have to really be comfortable breaking it up to little chunks. I don't feel like, oh, I have to have a one, two, three hour, you know, period of time as I really, I read in small chunks.

I don't love it. I would love to have bigger chunks to read.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

And so like, I like to actually, I read when I have lunch, I read when I have like, yeah, again, little bits of time here and there, and then audio books. Of course, I'm also, I didn't mention it, but I also am a big fan of when you're driving or, you know, walking or whatever. Um, so yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

Any, any, don't be afraid to microdose.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

It exactly. Like, it doesn't matter. Like whatever helps you read.

It's some, I remember a dentist was, was asked once, like, what kind of floss is better? Is it like blah, blah, blah, this kind of floss. And he's like, it doesn't matter.

Whatever gets you to floss, just do it. And that's the same answer. Like whatever keeps you reading, just do it.

[Neil Pasricha]

I love that. Now, a final closing question. Feel free to take a big pause for this one.

It's the last question of the entire show. You are to my mind, one of the world's foremost researchers, period. And nevermind all your work on happiness and now love and then connection.

How to feel loved is an incredible book. I'm so glad it's out there, but from everything that you've learned and you've studied over your entire career, is there one piece of hard fought wisdom or advice you might share a piece of wisdom for everybody out there listening to the show to close us off?

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Hmm. I'll say give more, I mean, give more compliments or express more gratitude to each other. Like you mentioned the voice note, you know, um, today.

Write a text. It could be a text, right? Cause it's only two seconds.

Write a text or a voice note and say, I really, I'm really grateful that you're in my life. I, uh, I really love the way you dress. I love your style.

I, I really love your last presentation. You gave it work, you know, blah, blah, blah. Like it, it, it means so much, right?

Uh, like it's a five second act that can really like make someone's day. Yeah. Yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

Thank you, uh, professor Sonia Levamirsky. It's been a wonderful conversation. I really am so grateful for your incredible work and, uh, I'm I'm wishing this new book.

Well, I'll feature it in my book club as well. For those that don't get it, it's neil.blog. And do you want us to point, do you want us to point to any websites for you as well?

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

Absolutely. And the easiest one is this howtofeellove.com, right? The name of the book, howtofeellove.com.

[Neil Pasricha]

The quiz is up there. Everything's there.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

It has everything. Yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

Thank you so much for commenting on three books. Thank you.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yay.

[Neil Pasricha]

Hey everybody. It's me, just Neil again, hanging out in my basement. Listen back to the wise, witty and wonderful professor Sonja Lyubomirsky.

By the way, after the conversation was over, she flipped her screen to show me her view because I thought she was in Riverside. She's been an associate professor, assistant professor, professor, and now distinguished professor. And I think like they just gave her the whole faculty.

I mean, she's been so prominent. I was like, are you in Riverside? She's like, no, I'm in, I'm in Santa Monica.

She turned her, she turned her laptop around and I could see like the sandy beach with like these cresting waves. And I was having the conversation from behind like three foot snow banks in Toronto. I was like, okay, that was a nice, just sort of ha moment.

Um, she's a real pleasure and delight to hang out with. I really love her, like her, her way of speaking. Like she's, she's, she's like me, I guess.

She's like, I don't know if jumpy is the right, that's the right word. Like, she's like, you know, she's, she's excited to talk. And then as a result, the conversation can be like going in a lot of different directions, which is what's so fun and beautiful about great conversations, including the one we're having right now.

So many quotes jump out for me from this chat, including most people report to have at least one relationship in their life they would like to feel more loved in. How'd you think about that? You know, it's like, I have this superficial reaction to that.

I'm like, you know, I feel very loved above, but then, you know, you think about a little deeper. It's like, oh, well, you know, I wish I felt love a little bit more here. And then you realize with the relationships you saw, that's up to me.

Like I can lean in, I can ask questions. I can sort of show a curious mindset. And there's the five mindsets of course, in the book, by the way, for those that can't wait to read it, there is the sharing mindset, the listening to learn mindset, the radical curiosity mindset, the open heart mindset, and the multiplicity mindset, which is very complex and interesting, kind of remembering that people are dimensional, as Nora McInerney told us back in our chat.

Okay. How about this one? We can be loved, but not feel loved, which is an important differentiator for her new book and her new work.

She says there are three buckets to determine happiness. Another quote, genetics, life circumstances, and what we do every day, i.e. what I would call intentional activities. This is kind of where a lot of the stuff I recommend comes in.

Two minute mornings, two minute evenings, playing rose, rose, thorn, bud, getting outside for nature walks, phoning a friend, you know, singing. These are all actual interventions we can do that we know prove help. Let's all be a little bit happier.

Now how about this one? How about this one? She gets into brass tacks a little bit.

The most powerful happiness booster is anything social. I'm a pretty social person, but yeah. I can, I can relate and understand this.

Even me. I'm like, I gotta be more social. I gotta read.

One of my favorite things to do, honestly, is, uh, when I have an NNO, you know, one night a week, I have a Neil's night out one night a week, which was last night. My wife has an LNO last night. She.

You know, went from teaching at her school. She met up with a friend. They went to a sauna and cold plunge place.

They went out for salads and she came home after bedtime. She gets a night out. For me, I'll often go, you know, see a movie by myself, go for a walk by myself.

But what do I do on the walk? I have my AirPods in, I have even a backup pair because I often like drain them. And I literally just call people.

I just go through my contact list, flip it in my thumb. And then I hit call. Now, as you know, you know, two or three out of, out of every three or four people don't answer the phone, but that means one person out of three or four does.

And if you make 12 calls, I find you get three good ones. And then I've got the walk, got some exercise, got some fresh air and had three social connections. So that's my latest thing I'm up to.

Uh, how about this? If I were to give you one tip to be happier, it would be go and have a 15 minute conversation with someone. That's a repeat of what I just, what we were just talking about.

The best thing that you could give your kids is a good marriage. Yeah. And it was, I guess, a bit awkward in the beginning of the conversation when I had researched her and found that she was married with kids.

And then she said, actually, I'm recently separated. And I debated sort of editing that out, but I left it in because I think that shows vulnerability and as a result, you know, we were able to get into some honesty there and she was open about kind of dating and it did not be live, the research that she revealed, which is that the number one thing you can do for your kids is the marriage. So, you know, I didn't, you know, I didn't want to be that kind of journalist where I'm like poking at a sore spot.

And, but I really admire her courage and talking about it and being comfortable talking about it, which was, which was interesting. And so I do not wish divorce upon anybody. My divorce, of course, was when we had no kids and we just bought a house.

And so, you know, we had less stuff to sort of decouple. And even then it was very complicated and stuck with me for a really long time. And still, I feel the sort of energy of it today.

So, Sonja Lyubomirsky, thank you for your courage, your vulnerability, your research, your work, your incredible new book, How to Feel Love, but also all the books and work you've done. You know, anything you ask her, she's like, well, I have a paper about that, I have a paper about that. She has got papers about so many things.

If you go to her website, SonyaLubomirsky.com or HowToFeelLove.com, you start going into her research and it is, you could spend a lifetime even just reading the amount of research she has done. It's just really amazing. Sonya has given us three more books to add to our top 1000, including number 542, Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, T-A-U-B-E-S.

Number 541, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by Dr. John Gottman, and number 540, Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski, who was our guest just last year, and so you can go back and listen to Emily. It was nice for us to get a question from Emily for Sonya as well. Thank you so much to all of you for listening.

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 one of three clubs that we have for three books listeners. How do you get into this? You just call 1-833-READALOT.

R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T. Leave us a voicemail. Get the secret code.

You can join our cover to cover club. That's people listening to every single chapter of the show, or you can join our secret club. Again, I already gave you the tip on how to do that.

So yeah, we were in France recently and Leslie and I went there. We took our kids offshore for the first time. We went to Paris.

We went skiing. I'd never been skiing kind of in anything other than hilly Ontario. So it was a first for me.

And in this kind of small mountain village, we, you know, I would always get up super early. I was always waking up at like 5am. So what would I do?

Cause you know, we're in a room, it's dark, everybody's sleeping. Cause I would tiptoe downstairs with my pen, with my notebook. Leslie very wisely before the trip started, got me a notebook because she knows I don't want to be on screens when I wake up.

So I come downstairs to the lobby of the hotel. There's one employee working. His name is Alex.

He's the overnight manager at the hotel. And we start talking because I have like two hours with him. You know, every morning we know talking from Sonia is, is, is a great ingredient for happiness.

And I get to know this guy. I'm writing, I'm talking to him. I'm hanging out with him.

And he has a fascinating life. He tells me that, you know, he grew up in a troubled home, a broken home, abusive home. And as a kid, he kind of sprung out on his own at a very young age.

As a teenager, biked all over Europe by himself. He was homeless, you know, kind of by choice, reading, living in a tent, making sure he was safe, but also being safe kind of from the abusive situation. And how he has designed his life so that he works in the high season in French ski resorts.

Making enough money and also getting room and board to then pay for a life where he lives the other half of the year, maybe more than half the year in Tokyo, Japan. I was so interested in this guy. What a fascinating mind.

And he had big thoughts and big ideas. And of course, I of course asked him, what are your three most formative books? And we talked about these three books at length.

And then I encouraged him to call and leave a voice note. So here is Alex, the overnight manager at the ski resort place. I met in France a few weeks ago with his books.

Let's go over to the phones now.

[Alex from France]

Hi Neil, this is Alex. I'm calling from France. So when we met, you asked me about three books that have changed my life.

And here is my choice. First, let me say that all of them are from American literature. Don't ask me why.

That's probably what I read the most. Let's talk about the first one. It takes place during the great depression in America.

It's written by Tom Cromer, K-R-O-M-E-R, completely unknown guy. And the original title is Waiting for Nothing. But it has been translated in French as Les Vagabonds de la fin, literally the anger tramps, which I like better.

It's more or less similar to my second choice, a book written by a so-called Jack Black, not related to the actor, but it was an alias for a man who wanted to stay anonymous. So my second book is called You Can't Win and takes place a little before the great depression. Both are written by experienced hobo who traveled through the States to find a way, legal or not, to survive.

Stories are rough. Death is around every corner. The outside is as cold as a jail.

You got nowhere to go, nobody to trust. And there's among this chaos, a deep reflection about our primary needs and rights. One quote I always remember from the first one, Waiting for Nothing, goes something like, who on earth are you to decree who has the right or not to lie down on some grass?

The political reflections behind those two books touched me deeply because at some point in my life, I chose to be kind of homeless and travel through Europe and this two year period taught me how hard life can be when you are on your own, alone in some stranger country. Those experiences taught me the price of comfort and the luck to have friends and family to rely on. Even if I gave away my whole personal library a few years ago, those two books never left me and they are so important to me, so that's why I chose them.

The third one I want to talk about, you know it very well because it's This is Water by David Foster Wallace. To me, Wallace is the most sensitive writer ever. When I was reading The Infinite Jest especially, I was like, this man absolutely understood what it means to be a human being.

This is Water is not a fiction. It's a very short speech he gave to students and you can even find it online for free, thanks to internet. But in fact, this is no speech.

This is some humble advice given by a worried man to future adults. And the most tragic part of the story is that Wallace couldn't be strong enough to follow his own advices, his own lesson in the end. That particular book took me time to reach my heart and brain.

But since then, I read it to several friends, hoping they would find the same message of hope and empathy I took from it. That's for sure the words who made me what I am now, calm, patient and curious about the others. Well, that's all folks, as they say.

[Neil Pasricha]

Thank you so much to Alex, my new friend in France for calling in. Isn't he an amazing mind? And how interesting are those books?

I'm going to order all three of them and read them. Because of course, when you hear somebody tell you about the books that changed their life immediately, if you're like me, you're very drawn to them. You're very like, now I really want to read this.

I do think it's the ultimate question. Um, all right. So now let's jump into a letter of the chapter, as we always do.

If I read your letter, if I play your voice note, drop us a line and I will send you a book. This chapter's letter comes from someone named Gina. Hi Neil.

Happy New Year. Hope this finds you well. I hesitated to write this, but I find you are quite an open-minded person.

So here goes, and I hope you take it in the spirit of goodwill, which it was intended. Overall, I greatly enjoyed your latest chapter with Salim Amin. Such a fashioning discussion, and I 100% agree with him about many things.

Not the least of which is the sad demise of journalism. Perhaps not surprisingly, a very low trust issue for Canadians. It had to do with a statement Amin made, presented as undisputed fact about the founding of Israel.

I can't say I'm in any way an expert in Israel or the Middle East, but I believe Amin completely oversimplified the narrative here in a way that is dangerous, potentially anti-Semitic, and ironically, in a way perpetuated by many left-wing slash progressive news organizations, social media accounts, and schools. The founding of Israel is an incredibly complex, and given the 2,000, 3,000 year history of all the people in that region needs to be taken into account. And all sides need to be given.

For instance, most people don't seem to know that Palestinians were offered a two-state solution at the time of Israel's founding, and rejected the offer, and have done so repeatedly with every other such offer made over the past 80 years. Even the very history of the word Palestine is disputed. The area of the Jews lived in during biblical times was known by that same geographic term.

By the way, I don't say this as an apologist of Netanyahu, who himself is very dangerous, just as a person with many Jewish friends who are quite literally fearing for their lives right now at what is happening in the world and their scapegoating. I was very sad and dismayed to hear this in your podcast, especially at a time of runaway antisemitism, and the morphing of anti-Zionism into antisemitism. Just see Bondi Beach, the tearing down of Mezuzahs in Toronto, the massacre in Manchester, et cetera, et cetera.

Um, all the best, Chena. Wow. Okay.

So as you guys know, I love and welcome critical letters and I read them on the show in addition to complimentary letters. Critical letters in some sense are a lot more interesting because complimentary letters, though I love them and thank you for sending them and please keep doing so. It's just, you know, it would be boring if I just kept saying so-and-so loves the show, right?

So, and I always say is if you're going to write a letter, please, please write a letter and do it in the form of a review in an email to me, neil.globalhappiness.org. Uh, you can go to threebooks.co, you can find it. And it's great because this is how I learned.

This is how we learned. I didn't realize when he said that he, and I can't remember the statement off the top of my head. Of course, it was our first chapter of the year.

I'm down in Nairobi. I'm talking to Salim Amin and his dad is Mo Amin. And he was talking about how, you know, the Palestinians, uh, at the time, you know, welcomed Israel.

And he gave us new information. Actually, I didn't know that post-World War II, um, as they were looking for a place to house this disenfranchised people, um, just the victims of the most unbelievable massacre, they were looking at East Africa and that's how the conversation got started. They were looking here, he said, you know, in Tanzania and in Kenya.

And then he said, I think something along the lines of this was deemed a little too savage or wild for them. So they found Israel. And so basically I take Gina's letter in full spirit and full knowledge and awareness.

I really appreciate it, Gina. Thank you so much for your courage to share it with me. Thank you for the education.

I will also share it back with Salim and I'll take it and marry it with Salim's thoughts. And all I can do is sort of then take these thoughts and sort of stew on them, think on them, you know, hope it kind of grows my own thinking and awareness as I hope it does for you as well. Um, if you have more thoughts on the subject, although I'm wary of getting into kind of a Middle East conversation, please give me a call.

1-833-READALOT or drop me a line. I love to keep the conversation from different chapters going. Hey, I'm still getting emails about the Mormon missionaries today.

Okay. Five years later, it's helpful and healthy. And I think it's part of what we need in society is open conversations like this.

So if this can be one of many homes for it, that's wonderful. Thank you so much to Gina for the letter and for the education, for the awareness. I really appreciate that.

There's things in there I didn't know, of course, and lots more I'm sure I don't. All right. Now let's close things off with a word of the chapter.

[Sonja Lyubomirsky]

That sometimes it just like ends the date and the guy's all huffy.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yes, indeed. It is a huffy. Huffy. H-U-F-F-Y an adjective, which according to Merriam-Webster means haughty, H-A-U-G-H-T-Y comma arrogant.

Interesting. Number two definition is roused to indignation or easily offended, also known as irritated or touchy. Huh.

I like that. She was talking, of course, about dating and I could kind of, we can kind of picture that huffy huffy. Well, did you know, back in the 1590s, the English noun huff first appeared to describe a puff of wind or a swell of sudden anger, huff, puff, huff, puff.

It makes sense to describe someone who's easily offended, petulant or ill humored. In the 1670s, the adjective first appeared describing people who are puffed with pride or puffed with arrogance. In 1778, the phrase started meaning to leave in a huff, recorded or associated the word with a sudden angry departure.

There's also the 1755 event, a word huffish. I did not know that word. That's a go.

I'm gonna start using that. Hey, I'm feeling a little huffish today, uh, which means petulant. And of course the adverb huffily, huffily.

It is considered an imitative, similar word to the word puff. That is a really interesting way to describe it. A puff of air, of pride, of sudden anger combined with the suffix Y, meaning someone puffed up with arrogance, quick to take offense, likely originating from the imitative, descriptive sounds of blowing or sighing.

Oh, I'm feeling a little huffy and puffy right now. I love this conversation. I love Professor Stolop, I love hanging out with all of you.

Can you believe we started this show in 2018, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26. This is the ninth year of three books. Thank you so much.

I don't take this for granted. There are thousands of people around the world, book lovers, writers, sellers, librarians. Everybody listened to the show, hanging out and having the nerdiest chats ever about what makes people them.

What makes people them? Which books form them, shape them. And if you leave the conversation, then one book is like, Oh, I got to add to my list.

I got to add to my list. My list is too much. I have too much to read, Neil.

I'm with you. I completely with you. I have way too many books, but I want to put my mind there.

I want to put my feelings there. I want to put my life there. I'd rather go down in a pile of books than in a pile of newspapers or in a scrolling social media screen.

Thank you for making this investment in yourself. Thank you for focusing your mind on what counts, the deep work, the wisdom that we can only get from books. Now, until next time, remember that you are what you eat and you are what you read.

Keep turning that page, everybody, and I'll talk to you soon. Take care.

Listen to the chapter here!

Chapter 157: Paul Hawken junks jargon to jolt generations

Listen to the chapter here!

[Paul Hawken]

Everybody's an environmentalist because they live in an environment. You could spend 12 lifetimes saying you really wouldn't understand what's outside. We have a crisis.

It's not a climate crisis. It's a human crisis. A relationship, understanding, grief, violence, power, you know, there's a whole list there.

You know, that's the crisis. Warming is the symptom. And I just suggest that there's another way of looking at time and our passage and that can be imbued with grace and kindness and patience and understanding as to what other people are experiencing.

But it doesn't mean we have to do that.

[Neil Pasricha]

Hey everybody, this is Neil Pasricha. And welcome or welcome back to chapter 157, 7-7 of three books. Yes, this is the only podcast in the world by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians.

We are on a 22-year-long quest to uncover and discuss the 1,000 most formative books in the world. Today, like every day that we launch a new chapter, we will be talking about three, hence the name of the show, three books. Did you read a lot over the holidays?

Did you read much in January? As always on this show, there is no book guilt, no book shame. The world right now is conspiring against reading.

I was talking to somebody high up at Hudson News, you know, the airport bookstore that's in all the airports, and they were talking about how the square footage on books has shrunk to like a quarter of the size it was even 10 years ago. And I was like, well, what are you replacing it with? And she's like, candy, chips, and cell phone covers.

Cell phone covers were taken over the place you buy books before you get on the plane with accoutrements for a cell phone and candy to eat while we watch and imbibe the constant streaming of whatever it is that we're downloading before the plane. I mean, I know it's harder to read. It is harder.

That's why we have a show dedicated to the art, to the science, to the sort of push us that we all need to kind of get to reading. As Casey Neistat once said, reading a book next to a phone with TikTok is like trying to eat a kale salad next to an ice cream sundae. So reading is a challenge, but it shouldn't be a chore.

After you're done reading, you should feel stimulated, rewarded, learned on a different valence, on a different degree. That's I hope what will happen to you after you listen to this conversation with the one and only Paul Hawken, a dream guest for Three Bucks for many years, since I read his 2009 fabled commencement speech, one of those viral commencement speeches that's kind of been going around the internet forever. Back in 2009, he says, hey, you, the class of 2009, are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on Earth at a time when every living system is declining and the rate of decline is accelerating.

Basically, civilization needs a new operating system. You are the programmers and we need it within a few decades. So captivating is Paul's eminent ability to distill kind of the ancient wisdom of the Earth into like the here and now, almost like a soundbite quality.

He's 79, turns 80 this year, and he's got this compressed wisdom about him that you're going to hear, you're going to love, but just going to pause in his bio for a second and some of the learnings to interrupt the opening with what we always do, which is a letter. We always feature a letter. This chapter's letter comes from Joe B., who's talking about Jonathan Franzen, our guest last year. This is an absolutely amazing interview. I can't believe I only just saw it. I love Franzen.

He's an intimidatingly clever guy and he can be likably spiky at times. Check out his video about overrated novels as an example. But you seem to have charmed him.

The breadth and depth of his answers are wider and deeper than usual. He's so fascinating. I can't believe this video only has 14,000 views.

Good job. Also, I am English and I can confirm that Turkish delight really is disgusting. It's basically perfume-flavored jelly, not the stuff you spread on toast.

Jam that the Americans call Jell-O. Covered in chocolate. Don't listen to any vaguely negative comments, Neal, whether about you or Franzen.

This is a treat. And then he goes on and on to say, By the way, not having adverts makes a huge difference. It's a massive relief not to have to listen to them and lets us know your heart's in the right place.

Yeah, I guess my heart's in the right place. No book. No book.

No ads and books. No ads and book podcast. I mean, part of the.

I saw this viral tweet, like all caps, one sentence tweet. Like a few weeks ago, that's like books are the best because they don't have ads. And everyone was retweeting it and liking it.

It's true. Like we're so slathered and bathed in the idea that we just have to watch this slurry of things yelling at us now that we just accept that. I do not accept that.

You should not accept that. We got to find places and spaces that are ad free. I think that's important.

I like the margin alien by our guests in Chapter 138. Is it Maria Popova? And, you know, the margin alien is partly beautiful because it's like the Sesame Street model.

You donate if you like it kind of thing. George Saunders, beautiful sub stack story clubs kind of like that are guests in Chapter 75. Of course, people like Peter Atiyah and Sam Harris are in their pockets like that, just like we are.

So, you know, yeah, it's a it's it's a rare world right now. No ads, but it's something that we value. Joby, thank you so much.

As always, if you drop me a line, I would love to mail you a book of your choice to say thank you for the comment. Thank you for the letter. As always, write me a letter just by emailing me.

Neil at global happiness that or or you can leave a comment on Apple podcast or Spotify or anything like that, too. I will pick it up. Now, Mr. Paul Hawken. Like I said, he is like an elder statesman. I think my my friend Rich Roll called him. And if you haven't already done so, Paul's interviews with Rich Roll are really wonderful.

He's done a couple of them over the years. Paul wrote the wonderful book Regeneration, how to end the climate crisis in one generation. He has this big viral video where he's interviewed by Bill Maher.

And, you know, Bill Maher is like, hey, Paul, what makes your plan to end the climate crisis different? And he's like, I got not only is it different. Paul's like, I have the only one.

Like, have you ever tried to slow down the amount of carbon we release? Why don't we just why don't we reverse it? The new book that he wrote, Carbon, is a deep, dense, compressed form of ancient wisdom talking to us through the earth, through the mycelium, through the trees, through the plants.

And it will give you a sense of being alive on earth two or three hundred thousand years into our species existence. Pretty fresh. Two or three millions of years.

And I guess Homo erectus existence still pretty fresh with this grand understanding of what's happening here on our planet and how we can be more involved. Paul Hawken, he doesn't like the term environmentalist, although most people call him an environmentalist. But he says, you know, if you live in the environment, you are an environmentalist.

Don't create this bifurcation where if you label someone environmentalist, you're saying they're not, you know, a feminist or they're not something else. Don't use labels. Don't use jargon.

Big message from Paul. Don't use jargon to obfuscate, I think is his word, kind of clarity. But for sure, he is an entrepreneur.

For sure. He is an author. For sure.

He is an activist. Did you know he's born in 1946 and age 19? He was already the press coordinator for Dr. Martin Luther King during the civil rights movement. He's going to tell us a harrowing story about being kidnapped by the Ku Klux Klan. Listen, as we're going to talk about that, I mentioned carbon. I put that in my best of twenty twenty five books.

Go over to Neal blog if you want and check out my best of twenty twenty five. The top 20 books I read last year. You can sign up for my book club if you're interested.

And other books he's written that are wonderful include Drawdown, Regeneration, Blessed Unrest, The Ecology of Commerce, The Next Economy and Growing a Business. He serves on a ton of boards, a lot of environmental organizations, got six honorary doctorates, which is a lot for those that don't know. We're going to talk about how nature cooperates instead of competes, why fighting climate change may be the wrong metaphor, why the climate crisis is really a human crisis, how jargon disconnects, what decades of activism have taught Paul Hawken about being human.

This is a conversation that has stuck with me. I really think of Paul as a stage of stages. I hope you agree.

We'll warm up. So if you take if it takes five or ten minutes to kind of get into this, be patient because we warm up. It goes deeper and deeper and deeper.

He's a profound thinker. Please enjoy this conversation with the one and only Paul Hawken. Let's flip the page into chapter 157. Okay, we should be good. Hi, Paul.

[Paul Hawken]

Hi, Neil.

[Neil Pasricha]

Oh, my gosh. I have been looking forward to talking to you for, I want to say years, but it feels like almost a millennia in a way because through your work, I feel so connected to life on the highest possible scale. Your book, Carbon, the book of life, it touched me in a deep and meaningful way. I have so many quotes I've pulled out from it.

I wondered if you could tell us where you are right now because I know you live in a watershed with pileated woodpeckers.

[Paul Hawken]

Yes, I do. You don't see them often, but they're here.

[Neil Pasricha]

And you see the trees that they decimate probably more.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah, you can hear them. Mostly redwoods. Woodpeckers have no luck on redwoods because there's no insects, but every so often I come to the pine and fir, you know.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah. So you were in Cascade Creek.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah. Which is in California. Yeah, it's a watershed off Mount Temple Pass, which is to the Miwok who lived here, it's called the Sleeping Maiden before the mountain.

And if you get way back from it from a distance, it looks like a woman lying down on Earth, you know. So that's how I prefer. I mean, Temple Pass is the proper name in some ways, you know, but people don't realize what the name stands for.

[Neil Pasricha]

Wow. That is so similar because here in Ontario, there's a city called Thunder Bay, and they have something known as the Sleeping Giant. And similarly from a distance, the visage of the Sleeping Giant.

Right, right. You know. Oh, interesting, interesting connection.

I pulled a ton of quotes from Carbon. I wondered if I could just throw a few to you that I've picked out as resonant to me, and then you could offer, you know, your reflections on them or expansion if you'd like. Absolutely.

From page three, Earth's climate is not breaking down as some would have it. However, it is changing faster than humans can adapt. If human-induced greenhouse gas emissions are not curtailed, civilization will be.

[Paul Hawken]

Simple. It's like, can we just get to the point and then move on? Because I feel like there's so much rhetoric, which is sort of— it doesn't obfuscate, but it's jargonizing the situation, and jargon is a good way to actually occlude understanding as opposed to generate understanding.

[Neil Pasricha]

Wow. Yeah, beautiful. True.

Agree completely. I mean, even today as I woke up, the top story in the news is how Bill Gates is writing a, you know, a big public letter sort of saying, you know, there really isn't as much of a concern around climate change as people like him have originally suggested. And I thought, oh, this is interesting.

He's going to take the conversation and move it that way.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah, that kind of conclusion and understanding could only come and arrive at somebody who doesn't spend time outdoors, who is not a farmer, who doesn't really understand the function and extraordinary variety of pollinators, you know, what's happening to the oceans, you know, what's happening to the dead zones, what's happening to— in other words, if you don't have the scope of understanding or the experience of being, you know, for a long time in a natural world, whatever landscape that might be, and seeing the changes, having the capacity to see the changes as well, then you would look at, I think, so-called climate change.

We'll get back to that term because that's just a silly term. It's more jargon. But you see it then very much in the eyes, in the mindset that created the problem.

[Neil Pasricha]

Mm-hmm. Absolutely. You mentioned pollinators, you mentioned dead zones.

On page 44, noise is increasing exponentially worldwide, a form of uncontrolled pollution unraveling the living world. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[Paul Hawken]

It actually bespeaks that phrase. I'll go back a little bit. Sometimes if I go back and look at my books, I discovered that oftentimes the last paragraph augurs the next book, and I didn't know it.

Now, in this case, it's not the last paragraph at all, but the noise, human-created noise. The next book is about the 3.4 trillion Earthmates that are here with us, creatures. And one thing we don't understand, we didn't begin to understand it very well.

There's just a whole raft and bevy of new scientists out there doing marvelous work, but all 3.4 trillion creatures are communicating all the time. They're talking. We use the word talk.

That's our verb, but not theirs. They don't have verbs in that sense. In that sense, they do actually.

And we don't listen to it. We don't hear it. We'll hear a bird.

We'll hear a cry of a wolf or a coyote or something. We do hear sounds, but actually just a tiny, tiny fraction of the communication is occurring constantly, every second on Earth. And so, Neil, I'm writing a book and the subtitle is Leadership is Hearing All the Voices.

We don't hear all the voices at all. We don't even hear each other anymore, for goodness sakes. I mean, much less creatures and things that are speaking in, I wouldn't say language, but in ways that we cannot understand.

For example, because of Adam Askey's work at the Royal Society, and along with Toby Cures and Giuliano Ferrucci and others, we know that mycelia speak with a clicking sound, like the sun people do that, right? And so do sperm whales. It's like Morse code almost, click, click, different shades of click in packets.

That's Morse code for us. But they speak in Morse code in a way, and there's this clicking sound that occurs in packets. And then Adam Askey's work is saying, well, these packets are repeating themselves, and then they're also in sequences that repeat, which is like a sentence.

And so we know that. So the mycelia are basically connected to every hyphae, that is that root tip with the mycelia in the world. And the plants in the mycelia are communicating.

Now, how they're communicating, we don't know. But they are definitely communicating because the plant has got sugar, carbohydrates. The average plant puts about 30% of its photosynthesized sugar in its roots.

Okay, so it's legal tender. For what? For who?

For mycelia and bacteria. And the plant wants to keep bacteria there because they feed it and they change the environment. But mycelia have this ability to give it, the plant, or to really exchange with the plant, nitrogen and phosphorus, but also selenium and zinc and strange things like that.

And so every millisecond, a plant is in a transactional mode in the earth by celia. And that's communication. We have no idea.

And I'll stop here, but I'm just saying, our idea of communication and memory and all that sort of stuff depends on a central nervous system. And they don't have one. So that, for us, is kind of like, oh, they couldn't be doing this.

They couldn't be doing this. They couldn't be doing that based on what we think communication and intelligence is. We have to revisit that one in a big way.

[Neil Pasricha]

Well, that kind of reminds me of what you say on page 30. In school, we were taught that life is a competitive struggle. The word cooperation was not mentioned in science class and was seldom seen in school.

We were graded on a curve, not as a team. We were taught Darwin, not St. Francis. Plaguent insults, cattiness, hazing, and the occasional pummeling verified the classroom tutorial.

In the background was the nightly news detailing convulsions of regional wars and economic tumult. Yet, I never saw conflict in the apple trees, the creek by my house, or amongst the crows that gossiped at dusk in the pines.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah. I mean, that's the world we live in. If we actually just slow down and take a look and listen, it doesn't mean that there isn't conflict for territory.

You can think of different animals. But they're rarely in conflict on a steady state. In a sense, it's not a cultural attribute.

It's a food attribute when food is scarce. And they'll fight for it, for sure. But the living world is extraordinarily cooperative.

Cooperative, actually, is kind of a small term for what they're doing because exquisitely interactive and symbiotic is probably the better description of the living world. And I think human beings have done that, too, and do that. Human beings can be amazing.

I'm not trying to put human beings down and exalt animals or creatures. I'm just saying that that's not what we see right now, and that's not what we're taught. And so much of our education comes from the North, from the West, the European, the scientific revolution.

And we take it for granted as being the highest level of understanding and so forth. And so, in that process, we marginalize cultures who have been here 10, 20, 30, 40, 50,000 years who seem to have got it right when it comes to communication, for sure, but socialization, how they listen, how they work together, because they wouldn't be here if they hadn't. That's for darn sure.

And so there's a lot of available learning for us there which we have always looked down on from the West for a long, long time until recently. And I think that's changing. Yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

I was struck by the sentence you say, in Carbon, where 6% of the world's population today is the diaspora of our nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors in the form of what we call today our indigenous peoples across the world. I don't know why I never married those two thoughts together, but it was one of, you know, every page in this book is like, what, what, what? And you continue to do that.

I could keep going. The last one I just want to put onto you is page 185. So now we're near the end of the book.

And it was just something that, it made me think of my conversation with Jonathan Franzen, who, you know, one of his most formative books was one of the books of Narnia. And in one of the books of Narnia, there's this sort of meeting of animals that he, as a lonesome, you know, adolescent, was thought of as his, as a friendship and as kin. And then on page 185, you say, I once walked on the unseeded land of the Wampanoag, I probably said that wrong, Wampanoag near Cape Cod, following a winding, unused dirt road.

As I rounded a bend, seven animals faced each other in a circle. It appeared to be a meeting, like a council. I froze, so did they for a moment.

There was a hognose snake, a box turtle, a possum, a rabbit, a white-footed mouse, a meadow vole, and two bobwhite quail. I couldn't believe what I'd seen. I checked their tracks.

They were there. People who spend time in nature have experiences for which there is no logical explanation.

[Paul Hawken]

Right. If you spend enough time outdoors, in different environments, absolutely that will happen.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah. I find that happens all the time. I just got into birding five years ago, and I sleep with my windows open.

And I'm like, oh, why do all the squirrels kind of go up into the trees? And they're always kind of clicking at night, and there's a territorial. And I was kind of typing with chat GPT to explore this, and like, it has no idea.

It has no real understanding that they do this. And I'm like, well, I see it every day. Like, what's happening here?

And I realize so much of what's out there is just not captured in what we're trying to do with zeros and ones and data right now. And of course, birders see this all the time. Look, you were described many different ways in many different places.

Your own website, of course, says that Paul Hawken explores the connection between nature and commerce, working with leaders and CEOs in ecological regeneration. Of course, that's the title of one of your books, this wonderful website, this great resource. But then I also think most people might enter and meet you, as they do on the front page of the internet, through Wikipedia.

And the five descriptors there that immediately follow your name are, in order, environmentalist, entrepreneur, author, economist, and activist. And I thought I might just ask you to, is that how you define yourself? And how would you define those words?

Environmentalist, entrepreneur, author, economist, activist. That's how you are labeled on the central channel of Wikipedia.

[Paul Hawken]

I never look at Wikipedia, so thank you for sharing. And I don't write it, of course. I have no idea.

I think I've written about economics, for sure. The Next Economy, that was the book. That doesn't make me an economist.

So that's sort of a jump, a real leap forward. And so I think activist, yes, of course. I did direct action, both in the civil rights movement and environmental movement.

So entrepreneur, yes, I've created a business, that's true. What are the other two I'm missing?

[Neil Pasricha]

Environmentalist and author. And I wanted you to both just define environmentalist for us today.

[Paul Hawken]

I can't. That's not a word I would use. I would shed that one.

It's an ism. I would never say I'm an environmentalist. As opposed to what?

As it contrasted to. And I understand why people use that word, but it's also a word of separation.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah.

[Paul Hawken]

And isolation. All those people are environmentalists. Well, what does that mean?

Yeah. It means they don't care about children and the plight of women. I mean, there's so many social issues in terms of the rate of disease occurring in the United States due to ultra-processed foods.

And they don't care about how Pepsi, Coca-Cola at all are doing everything they can to make people addicted to non-food. Basically, it's non-food. And et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So there's so many aspects of human endeavor and human civilization that we encounter and we deal with. But everybody's an environmentalist because they live in the environment.

[Neil Pasricha]

I like that. Everyone's an environmentalist because they live in the environment. We're catching you on your 80th spin around the sun.

You mentioned the Civil Rights Movement. For those that just don't know, it's pretty astounding that, of course, at age 19, I think, in 1965, you were the press coordinator for Martin Luther King Jr. Like, you know, actually having clashes with the Ku Klux Klan, being, I think, rescued or intervened with by the FBI, if I read that properly.

[Paul Hawken]

They didn't rescue me until I was kidnapped. So, I mean, that's why.

[Neil Pasricha]

Otherwise, they would... You took photos of the Ku Klux Klan members who had kind of murdered three of the activists in the Civil Rights Movement, I believe.

[Paul Hawken]

I don't know who I photographed. What happened is after Schroeder, Cheney, and Goodman, the three civil rights workers, were tortured and killed and buried and then discovered, of course, somehow. And the FBI was all over it, you know.

And Mississippi. And John Doar, who was from the Justice Department, got an injunction against the Klan that they could no longer march with their hoods. And so the first time they didn't do that, and this is all in Meridian, Mississippi, where sort of the epicenter of all this, they were going to march without their hoods.

And somebody where I worked at the Congress of Racial Equality in New Orleans, yeah, I was a photographer, said, anybody want to go photograph this? I said, sure, you know. I'll do it.

And that's when I was quickly kidnapped, if you will, or thrown into a car and driven out of town. And what was so remarkable about that experience was that I don't know how far we got out of town before the car I was in was pulled, was, you know, just pulled off? No, I mean, a car next to it just pushed it off the road.

Pushed it off the road. And there was four guys in that car, there was three guys in mine, and they were like, you know, and I go, oh, this is getting worse. I've been kidnapped from the kidnappers.

But, you know, I just remember so distinctly the driver of the car that pushed us off the road got out, turned to the driver of the car I was in, and said, God darn it, Jimmy, I told you we couldn't do this shit no more. And I'm going, what? And they obviously knew each other.

They probably played football. They were in high school. They knew each other.

Who knows what they did together? You know, I don't even want to know. But that car was FBI, deputized or somehow, you know, and they knew.

They grew up with these Klansmen, you know what I mean? And then they took me out of the car, threw me in there, drove me back to town, and I was put in jail for disturbing the peace. But I think the cultural thing about that is how deeply embedded racism and violence was in that culture, you know, sanctified, really almost sanctioned, maybe not sanctified, but sanctioned for a long, long time.

And it just gave me another dimension of understanding, you know, what happened to the people from the Atlantic passage that came over from Western Africa and how they had been treated for hundreds and hundreds of years. And I was nothing. I was just an irritant, really.

But just that little kind of opening, you know, of seeing the cultural pathology, you know, act itself out on the highway again.

[Neil Pasricha]

Wow. What an astounding life you were living. We're flashing from today back to 19.

And of course, before age 19, you were kind enough to share three books that you read that had a disproportionate effect on your life. I've bought the books. I've tried my best to read them.

I made it through one of them. I flipped through another. But I'm kind of, like, immersing myself in these books.

I wondered if we might start. And I'll just explain the book to our listeners. Since most people will be listening to this rather than watching it, I want people to picture, you know, standing in a bookstore and you're holding this book in your hand with Paul and I kind of standing next to you.

The first one here, of course, is Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin, published in 1953 by Alfred A. Knopf Publishing. This is James Baldwin's first book, the novel he says he had to write.

I wish I had an old cover, but mine is a 2013 vintage paperback edition.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah, it's good.

[Neil Pasricha]

It has a young black boy in a white T-shirt standing against a wooden wall near a high-rise window, which I assume is supposed to be 1930s Harlem, looking sad, kind of gazing down. James Baldwin is in tall, skinny all caps on serif in white and in a diagonal black ribbon with the small caps Go Tell It on the Mountain in green cloudscape just below. James Baldwin lived from 1924 in New York City.

He died in 1987 in France at age 63. He is the novelist, essayist, playwright, and civil rights activist known for his insightful explorations of race, sexuality, and class. This is his powerful semi-autobiographical novel about faith, family, and identity taking place in 1930s Harlem and beyond.

Paul, please tell us about your relationship with Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin.

[Paul Hawken]

Well, it's one of the books I read so I didn't stop there. And it was a time when the civil rights movement was emerging. I grew up in Berkeley, California.

And so my father worked in the library and so I was, you know, Bill's kid, as they called me, in the library. But I had a free run of the library and all the different libraries at the University of California. But I really wanted to understand the civil rights movement in a deeper way.

And Baldwin was just such an extraordinary writer. And he did write about his sexuality and about what it was like. He wrote about how dysfunctional his family was too.

But to me, it was obvious that he was becoming a voice for the black community that was poetic and could turn a sentence really well. And so to me it was just like an aperture that opened up. And was I gay?

No, I wasn't a gay man. So it wasn't like identification with respect to his sexuality. But it was a reading of what happened to him because of his sexuality and because of his color.

And so he's like a twofer. He experienced an incredible amount of discrimination because of both aspects. And then also self-hate.

Because he didn't fit in at all. And I think for me, I could identify that last part. I didn't feel like I fit into this society, this culture.

I wasn't black. I wasn't gay. It doesn't matter.

What matters is that I couldn't understand what was happening at that time in the world in my city. I mean, I grew up in a very liberal city. It didn't make any difference.

I didn't understand. I was confused. And so I went to others who expressed their confusion in a way that I wanted to turn the page and read about it and understand and learn.

And so that was Go Tell It On The Mountain. And I feel like that title is so interesting. When I was thinking about talking to you, I was going, well, it's more apropos now than ever was.

We need to go tell it on the mountain. And it's such a beautiful phrase from Black Spirituals, that phrase. And we need to go tell it on the mountain because we're listening to the wrong voices completely, politically, sociologically, social media.

I mean, to me, I mean, the press, the Post, the Times, all these other things have really shut down. I mean, they do really, really good research on certain subjects. But they are conforming.

They are in fear. There are newspapers that do not want to cross Donald Trump, the president, the new proto-fascist in history. And so even then, where do you go for insight, for information, for understanding?

And we need more and more people who go tell it on the mountain.

[Neil Pasricha]

Listen to the mountain. You were in Berkeley, California. I know at 19, you've already mentioned you were in Mississippi. I know you spoke to our mutual friend, Rich Roll, who's a former guest on the show as well.

We love Rich here. You told him that you lived in Nevada City as well and that you were taken in by a family there. Was that after this book, or I'm missing a piece of the puzzle?

[Paul Hawken]

That was before. I was, my family, and go back a little bit, the reason I spent so much time outdoors is because it wasn't safe indoors in my family. Okay, it was not a safe place.

And so outdoors was safe. And so that has carried forward with me for the rest of my life. I don't feel any threat.

My uncle was a herpetologist, and he taught me how to handle snakes, including, okay, here's a rattlesnake. This is how you hold it. And okay, it makes sense.

And so I always saw the outside as sort of a sacred, as a sanctuary, and the inside as a danger zone. So somebody in Nevada City who was an accountant and worked in different companies and so forth and had a family there asked if I would come live there so that his wife and daughter would be around a male figure. Not a formidable male figure, but when he was down in the Bay Area.

So that's how I got to live in Nevada City. But then as now, I was just a voracious reader, a bit voracious reader. But it was so great to have horses and to be out there in the wild down the river and all that sort of stuff.

It was incredible.

[Neil Pasricha]

What a beautiful, and thanks for coloring that in a little bit for me because it was sort of mentioned as an aside with Reg, and I wanted to double-click on it, but it was right near the end of one of your wonderful two-hour chats with him. We talk about how you and we and us in this era need to kind of go, tell it on the mountain. You talk about your comfort and connection with the outdoors.

You are partly now, you've received six, by my count, honorary doctorates and given a number of really well-known and quite viral commencement speeches. I wanted to ask you about the state and faith you have in humanity, especially around young people. On page 53, a minor character in the book named Sister McCandles clocks on a night when nearly nobody shows up to church.

She says, The Lord ain't gonna bless no church what lets its young people get so lax. No, sir. He said, Because you ain't neither hot or cold, I'm gonna spit you out my mouth.

That's the word. You, of course, have said in your 2009 commencement speech, Civilization needs a new operating system. You are the programmers and we need it within a few decades.

You've always had a great knack for communicating across generations. You mentioned we need to go tell on the mountain. What do you say to younger generations today?

[Paul Hawken]

Well, I listen. As opposed to say, you know, or stay, or no, you know. I feel like when I was 14, 20, 30, whatever, when I was young, whatever, I didn't listen to very, very many people who wanted to tell me what I should know, what I should do.

I just didn't. I was finding out myself. I was making it up as I went along.

Now, lookit, there are people and cultures in which you really do have extraordinary elders, you know, and you do listen to them, and you do learn from them, and you do pass on cultural almost tokens, but, you know, that have originated way, way back, you know. So I felt like I was a changeling, you know, and, you know, that's an Irish, I guess, term. I don't know if it's an English word, but, you know, the idea of fairies coming in at night, you know, and taking a human child and then exchanging it for, you know, one who's elvish, and then, you know, the elvish child is the changeling, you know, and he, she grows up, and they're really confused about what they are and who they are.

And so I always felt like a changeling in that sense, you know, like my parents didn't make any sense to me as human beings, nor did my relatives, with all due respect, certainly not my brother. I had a twin sister, but, you know, so I always had this sense of, like, I really didn't belong here. And so at my age now, even more so, I don't feel like I have, you know, I can write.

I love to write. I love to share, but not in sort of a didactic, you know, post style, you know, where listen up, you know, I got something to tell you. I got something to share.

I know so much. No, no, no, no, no, no. It's really the opposite, which is, you know, trying to open up areas for the reader that invoke or evoke, really, a sense of wonder and curiosity.

And I think that, you know, I think that comes from being outside, going back to that, you know, like I was safe outside. Okay, well, but what's outside? And you can spend 12 lifetimes and you really wouldn't understand what's outside.

And so, you know, the sounds, the creatures, you know, what's in the soil, you know, all the things, they're red. Pyrocanthus, is that edible? Not really, but, you know, birds get drunk on them.

You know, I mean, just learning bit by bit by bit, you know, where I was and how it worked. And I still feel like I'm in that same modality after all this time. So, in that sense, very little has changed.

The only remarkable thing about me, I believe, is I'm intensely curious. And so, curiosity is the desire to understand, to know. And that's on all levels of, you know, life on Earth, you know, and that includes us, homo sapiens.

And that curiosity continues to this day. And it drives me. It's really behind all of the books I've written.

And those books, the sequence of them, in a sense, is a map of my mindscape and how I expanded in some ways, in many ways, you know, the scope of what it was that I was interested in.

[Neil Pasricha]

Wow, how beautiful is that? And, you know, I always think the outdoors has no ad campaign and no one telling you to do it, and there's never an interruption and your social media will tell you to go outside. I might just pause on the number of times you've talked about the outside and just to say to you, what are the ingredients of a great walk?

[Paul Hawken]

Well, the ingredients of a great walk are that you find in your way. Okay? In other words, it's not the path itself.

If there's a path, then it's rough terrain. That's very helpful. But it is that you don't know where you're going, even if you can see it on a map or a trail or you can see a mountain.

When I was in Bhutan, you know, you can see Tomahawdy. Well, I can see it from 50 miles away at 25,000 feet, snow covered. But if you look down and then look, you know, straight ahead for a while, you didn't know where it was going to take you.

You didn't know this river, this path, this trail. And so I think that a great walk is discovery and appreciation, of course, you know, and delight and just being alive. It's like, to me, it's being totally alive in your present.

You have to be present, you know, trip and fall, if you don't. And then, but being alive in terms of the sound, you know, and obviously not just the fauna, but the flora and actually even imagining since most cases, you know, you're walking where other people have walked. Sometimes it's animal trails, for sure, but sometimes it's both.

And sometimes, it's always both, actually. But some more human than not. And when you do that, then in a sense, you're in a flow of history.

You're in a flow of movement and, you know, all life is flow. You know, it's not static. It moves all the time, whether it's either a trillion molecules in every cell or the whole of the earth and everything and the land and sea.

It's always about movement and flow. So, I think when you're walking, you know, you're entering into a non-static relationship and most of our relationship with nature is static.

[Neil Pasricha]

Mm.

[Paul Hawken]

Mm. Yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

Mm-hmm. When you're walking, you're entering into a non-static relationship. Most of our relationship is static.

I like how you said rough terrain helps. Absolutely. Which I live in downtown Toronto and I cannot think of any rough terrain.

I don't have any rough terrain around me, but the idea that rough terrain helps makes a lot of sense. On page 132, Esther, who's one of my favorite characters in the book, her voice, as you said, Baldwin's writing really pops. She says, I'm going to take this quote a little out of context, but she says, I just want to go somewhere, go somewhere and have my baby and think all this out of my mind.

I want to go somewhere and get my mind straight. That's what I want you to do. And that's pretty cheap.

I guess it takes a holy man to make a girl a real whore. But just that phrase, I just want to go somewhere, go somewhere and think all this out of my mind. You know, one thing I love about your work in your speeches and in your books is that you take this cascading fall of every living system globally, as you've said, every living system globally is declining, right?

Birds, insects, animals, clean water, clean air, it's all declining. And yet you are able to, at the same time, articulate a unique form of optimism that comes from your ability to connect and see people doing such great and meaningful work. And so I just wanted to ask you how you personally metabolize that emotion that a lot of us feel of environmental despair.

You know, there's something you're doing. Is it through your lens? Is it through your vision that you're seeing so much great stuff happening?

A lot of people feel what you're feeling. I mean, one of Jonathan Franzen, not to bring him up again, but one of his formative books was called Reason in a Dark Time by Dale Jameson, why the climate movement failed, you know, in the 50 year, and he said that was formative to him because it like pushed him down that path of, okay, it's failed, now what? Like he kind of went to the next step and I wouldn't say he's an optimist, you know, but I detect a lot more glimmers of optimism from you and just wondered how you would talk to that specific emotion that a lot of people feel.

[Paul Hawken]

Well, working backwards from what you just said, I mean, I agree the climate movement has failed. No question about that. Now, let's be really careful here because the movement, okay, and it does not criticize their, you know, people and what they're doing, what they care about and their effort and their sincerity.

That's not what I'm talking about. I think as a movement, it failed because the narrative is upside down or backwards. And so facts don't change our minds, stories do.

And the story from the climate movement, you know, has been jargonized, you know, and it's really a specialty language. That very few people understand and speak. And that's why 99% of humanity is disengaged from climate.

They may be very sympathetic and they may want something to happen and they're maybe very concerned about it. But on a daily basis, what do they do? Nothing.

Now, many cases they can't, you know, they're just based, they're survival based. Okay, let's put that aside. But in most cases, you know, in the West, you know, from Europe and right across, you know, to the United States, Canada, Japan, Korea, all those places where you have a fairly robust economy, they can do things that they don't.

And they're busy, they're this, they're stressed. Going back to that quote from Esther, in a way, I just want to go somewhere. I mean, I just feel like, you know, we have to step back and how are we talking to each other?

Because, you know, if you're having surgery and the doctors are using jargon, they go, hallelujah, they don't have time to do complete sentences, right? That's what jargon's for. But if you're talking about the fate of humanity, I think we need to slow down a little bit there and tell stories, you know, and reach out and listen.

Because decarbonization, net zero, you know, all these things are just, not only are they jargon, but they're actually, in many cases, complete nonsense. Complete nonsense, you know. And you can know what the intent is of the speaker or somebody coined the term, you know, but the intent doesn't matter.

What matters is the word. And does the word make sense given where we are today? And in most cases, the jargon makes no sense whatsoever.

I mean, you even have things like direct air capture, which sounds like, oh, what a brilliant thing. We'll just take this carbon back out of the air, suck it down four parts per 10,000. We're going to separate the C from the O.

You know, here's the carbon. We'll put the O back out somewhere. We're going to liquefy the carbon, pump it in pipelines to geologic formations and put it down, you know, 5,000 feet below the surface of the Earth, you know, and bury it.

Okay. They can do that now, okay. And billions are going into it, you know.

Bill Gates was one of the investors. Now, the problem with that is ninth-grade science, which is called entropy, which is energy only goes one direction, you know. And that's the second law of thermodynamics.

I don't want to get scientists— I don't want to just speak on science, but the fact is we all know that. You know, like an ice-cold glass of lemonade is going to get warm, okay, in the room. We all know this.

And what's happening is this direct air capture is using to suck the air from, you know, four parts per 10,000 of, you know, CO2 and then separate it, you know, and then liquefy it and then pump it. And this takes energy, a lot of energy. So the greenhouse gases that we are troubling us, CO2 being foremost, but also, you know, methane and others, are the result of entropy.

That is to say, you burn coal, oil, gas, the ash is CO2, okay. So you're, in a sense, trying to use entropy to cure entropy. And that is so laughable in terms of physics.

You know, it's like any ninth grader would say, you know, when you're smoking, this is not physically possible. And yet we hear about it as being one of the ways that humankind, you know, is going to save its ass. And excuse my talking about the day, but it's just like, it's like, come on, you know.

So it goes back to the movement. So that kind of language, that kind of rhetoric, that kind of financing, that kind of belief, it's a belief, it's not actually factual in terms of what it will do for humanity and the earth and living creatures. That kind of thing plagues the climate movement.

Now that's on the tech side. But there's also on just the activist side, we're going to what? Fight, tackle, combat, climate change, you know.

Just stop right there for a minute. First of all, those verbs are male verbs. Okay, very male.

I'm not saying women can't fight, tackle, and combat, but I'm just saying is that that's how men think. You know, first of all, that's Don Quixote. You know, the fact is climate, you can't fight it, you can't combat it, you can't tackle it, you know.

And so what you've done, you know, is other, climate. You've made it a thing that you can do things to, fix. Here's another male verb, you know.

And that thinking is the cause of global warming. Othering nature, othering people, obviously, othering resources, othering the earth that we live upon, you know. And then, you know, and then it just goes out there to, oh, we're going to fix the climate, we're going to do this to the climate, you know.

We're going to combat it, tackle it, you know, this sort of heroic imagery of complete nonsense because the biosphere and the climate are absolutely inseparable. That's what creates the climate is the biosphere. And again, just these basic understandings, you know, they are just fact.

Now, can we talk together? Can we share? Can we listen?

Let's talk now. But we can't talk in a mindscape of untruth and BS and being right, for example. You know, that doesn't help.

So the climate movement has failed, no question about it. Now, it doesn't mean people out there aren't doing extraordinary things with respect to the biosphere and culture and people and place. They are.

[Neil Pasricha]

But when you talk about that despair that feeling people have and you're talking about how it's story-based and, you know, jargon is partly pervasive, so where do we find these kind of lucid, clear voices?

[Paul Hawken]

They're everywhere. They're everywhere. We just don't listen to them.

We listen to the people who have the microphone, you know, who have the New York Times editorials. We listen to the people who are running these companies. We listen to Silicon Valley saying, oh, you know, we're going to fund climate tech.

You know, I mean, we're listening to the wrong people. Not the wrong people. We're not listening to the people who actually have these clear, resonant, beautiful, extraordinary minds and voices on Earth.

And they're here. They are here. But you don't meet them in the New York Times.

[Neil Pasricha]

Are you talking about a lot of the indigenous cultures that you reference throughout your book?

[Paul Hawken]

I'm including that, but I'm not limiting to that. You know, there's farmers and there's activists all over the world that we don't know about, that we don't hear. You know, we don't hear their voice, you know.

And they're barely recognized. You know, at least every so often you get an award or something. Oh, yeah, that's great, you know.

But we did a lot of work with Greta Thunberg and just, you know. But I'm sorry. There are so many other people besides Greta Thunberg, and yet the media is always the perfect, you know, thing.

You know, she sat on the steps with her sign, you know. And we want to honor her for sure, you know, for her courage and bravery. But then to make her kind of the archetype.

[Neil Pasricha]

Because humans, we can't focus on too much stuff. So we have to simplify it down to like one name or face and one key point. And, you know, you're a keynote speaker.

I'm sure you're told all the time, make it simple, Paul. Have three key takeaways for us. Talking to farmers and indigenous communities is not something that's easy for a lot of people to do.

[Paul Hawken]

Right. But what's missing here is farmers talking to farmers, okay. Students talking to students, you know.

I mean, indigenous people talking to indigenous people. And they hope that we would listen who are not indigenous, you know. But we are not part of the conversation if we're city-bound activists, you know, who are jargonized by what I call the pseudo-climate movement.

You know what I mean? It's like not really. That's why we have the highest rate of carbon emissions after 50 years.

After 50 years. But this is, last year was the highest, number one.

[Neil Pasricha]

And it never stops going up. And as you pointed out, or I think it was actually Dale Jameson's book that pointed it out to me that, you know, this is something that John F. Kennedy said in his inauguration speech was a massive issue then.

And every, I think you've said before, every minute since, we've increased our net output of greenhouse gas emissions to our own detriment. Every minute since. And so in some ways it was sad for me to read, you know, ending the climate crisis in one generation, your book Regeneration, because a lot of the dates and times you're talking about, of course, this book is not that old, right?

Published in 2021, but a lot of the days you're talking about are like by 2030, by 2030. And I'm like, oh crap, now we're talking 2025, 2026, like we're five years into this book. And it's only gotten worse.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah, but what the subtitle is, ending the climate crisis in one generation, isn't a crisis. It's the crisis of our thinking, the crisis of our mind, the crisis of our belief. That's what we can end in one generation, is a complete insanity with which the climate, and really let's put climate aside.

Climate is perfect. It always will be. That's not the problem.

The problem is heating. It's warming. That's the problem and so forth.

And I wanted to put global warming on the cover and the publishers didn't, they wanted a crisis. Okay. But that's what I'm talking about.

Not like, hey, I've got all the tools. I've got the techniques. I've got the solutions.

Listen up. If you do this, this, and this, we're good to go in one generation. No, we're good to go in one generation.

If we actually relate to each other in the living world in a completely different way. And that's what regeneration is about.

[Neil Pasricha]

Hey, I heard I'm Canadian, one of the most famous Canadian actors in this space. I won't say environmentalist, is David Suzuki. And he often says, you know, we mistake economy for ecology.

And he talks about that root word of eco and how we have superseded economy over ecology in our minds and in our society. And he says we have to re-prioritize ecology over economy. And that is the tip he talked about.

I mean, I'm talking about a speech I heard him give maybe 10 years ago. But when you talk about at a high level, climate is fine and it always will be. I mean, that's not a phrase that I think most people have heard before.

[Paul Hawken]

Well, it has no choice. It's not like climate is volitional.

[Neil Pasricha]

Volitional?

[Paul Hawken]

It doesn't choose. I mean, it doesn't have desires. You know, it's not animate.

Although on a higher level, that would be an interesting discussion. But I mean, and so we have to stop. We have a crisis.

We have a crisis. I couldn't agree more. It's not a climate crisis.

It's a human crisis. A relationship, understanding, greed, violence, power. There's a whole list there.

That's the crisis. Warming is the symptom.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, exactly. How do you see things playing out?

[Paul Hawken]

I have no idea. I have no idea.

At this point, especially with the new administration in the United States, the giant leap backwards. Not to say that were the policies of the Biden administration continued, that that would be sufficient until today. They would not be.

But they would certainly at least be directionally correct. Let's go this way instead of that way. And so I don't know how it's going to work out.

I feel, let me share something with you. Okay. And so you're listening.

This will be the first you hear about this. You can go online and see it. Okay.

So it's going to be online. And it's called the Alliance for Earth. Okay.

The Alliance for Earth. And you can go to a splash page, the Alliance for Earth, and go look at it. And what you'll see is a mandala.

And what you'll see is a phrase that said, the way you heal a system is to connect more of it to itself coming soon. And then on the upper right-hand corner, you'll see 105 languages. In other words, you can read that in 105 different languages.

All right. Now, who cares about reading that in different languages? But actually it's there for a reason, which is that what it will do or pretends to do, whatever we're trying to create, is to bring together we, I, whatever, think, that there's an extraordinary amount of work and people and efforts all over the world to not only reverse global warming, but actually to, you know, restore the Earth and all its manifestations and cultures and people and to take care of each other. And that sounds so wishy-washy, except when you understand the number of organizations that do that around the Earth right now.

It's quite extraordinary. You never hear about them. You don't read them.

Occasionally they pop up here and there, but, you know, otherwise you don't. Where this came from, Neil, was, you know, in the Sierras, I was a caretaker at this ranch in Nevada City. And there you get fires.

California's fire ecology is a fire state. You're always going to have fires, whether people set them or not. And like in the Pacific Palisades in L.A., that was a human-made fire. But there's always going to be fires. And so in those places in California and so forth, you're all volunteer fire people. That is to say, oh, fire, and the community gets together, you know, and they put on their metal sole boots and this and that and they have equipment maybe at the firehouse, and you're taught to not fight fires downwind.

Things, you know, basics go that way. And anyway, eventually the fires go out and then you tamp it down to make sure there's no Antonita embers there, you know, that could light up the fire in the middle of the night with the wind. And then it's out.

You go home, shower, all that sort of stuff. Okay. But in the spring, everybody, I think, been around a fire has seen this.

And, you know, you get this beautiful explosion of grass, right? And the color of the grass is so exquisite. And why?

Because that grass seed is fed by the ash, the minerals in the ash. You know, it's a highly fertilized grass. And the human eye, human brain, really, can see more colors of green than any other color.

Red, blue, don't even hold a candle to green. Why is that? Well, because plants have been important to us since we were, you know, whatever, you know, sedge and moss.

For the 420 million years that, you know, life has been on the planet and on land, you know, green was a tell, a signal, you know. And so we have that ability still, you know, to look at green. Okay.

Then, you know, there was a fire in Berkeley, Oakland, and eucalyptus trees, a really hot fire. And I think 200 or 300 homes were destroyed. And I was just coming back from Bhutan, and I was reading about it.

And then I wasn't there. But then I noticed that botanists were saying, we're seeing wildflowers that we haven't seen for 75 or 100 years. Wow.

I went, what? How? That was scorched, you know.

I mean, eucalyptus burns really hot. And what they pointed out on queries, that's called fire-triggered succession, that there are seeds that are in the soil that require heat, not directly on them, but surrounding them, above them, for the carapace to flake off, be removed, and to germinate. Hmm.

It's like, how beautiful this adapt, these plants are so adaptive. These will wait 50 years, wait 100 years, and then when we show up again, then we'll have bloom, the seeds, and we'll put them back in the ground. And what I think we're seeing right now is fire-triggered succession.

The world is on fire, literally, and every other way you can think of it. You know, it's self-immolating, it's burning itself, it's destroying itself, and I say it being humanity, okay? But what we don't see is that simultaneously, there's fire-triggered succession.

And there's hundreds of thousands of communities and co-ops and land trusts and so many different ways to describe, the body you use and scientists that are working on the restoration, the revival, the regeneration, the restoration of life honors. They're here, and they are multitudinous in ways that are mind-boggling. So the Alliance, what it's going to try to do is be a website that makes itself.

In other words, it's not like somebody's in charge. I mean, obviously, they'll be technically in charge to make sure it works. But that is that it will have the organizations inside it, okay?

And then you can search, you know, and you can search because it'll have agentic AI within it. So you can go in and say, I want to know about people in Botswana who are working on reforestation. Good question.

Who's that? I don't know. It'll be there, but it'll be there in maybe a different language.

It may be your query in English. It can come back. In other words, you can take whatever information's out there and read it in your native language.

And it'll show the website. It'll have scraped it. It'll show the citation, where it is and who it is, and the science of the people or the communities and the indigenous and whoever is part of it.

And that way, a teacher, say, wants to teach, is told to teach climate, you know, and what do I know? And then she can go there and start to ask questions. You know, how do I teach?

How do I do this? What does this mean? So forth.

And she can be in Somalia. She can be in Chile. She can be anywhere in the world.

She can ask it in her native language, and she'll get it back in her native language, or she can convert it if it comes back in English. And the midst of all this is going to be what's called the Earth Oracle. And that Earth Oracle, again, is AI for sure, but it's there.

You know, it can't go anywhere. And it's not trying to figure out what the rest of the world is doing. It's just showing what is happening on the Alliance.

And it's really important, I think, for people to understand that humanity is on the case. They really are. They are us.

And you can read the New York Times until you're blue in the face, and The Guardian and The Post and FT and, you know, all these papers, you know, very much. You know, you can read and listen, watch, hear, see, and stay away from social media. And you'll never know that this is true.

This is fascinating that the greatest human movement in history is right there underneath, not underneath, but hidden, occluded, and we can't see it. It's here. So that's what the Alliance for Earth is about.

And again, you put your own organization. We have a place for podcasts. It's a category.

It's a really important category. Look at you and Rich, and you can name a whole bunch of podcasters. You know, Rachel Donald, I mean, it just goes on and on and on.

They're amazing, amazing people, podcasts, and their guests are amazing too, you know. Right. Yeah, yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

Oh my gosh, it's another one in a series of really inspiring and kind of collectively convulsing projects that you kind of have done throughout your life. I'm inspired by it, and I'm excited to see that launch, the Alliance for Earth. We've gone down into Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin.

I wondered if we could just sort of tip over to one of your other formative books, and I thought we might introduce people to Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe. Not to be confused with Tom Wolfe, you know, the guy that wrote Bonfire of the Vanities and Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and stuff. This guy actually lived only 37 years, from 1900 in Asheville, North Carolina, to 1938 over in Maryland.

Two novels published during his lifetime, and five published after he died. I have, once again, a newer paperback cover, but the original cover is kind of these angular color and motion shards of red and fuchsia and orange type of bursts. I don't know if that's the version you originally read, perhaps.

With an Art Deco kind of all-caps, it says LOOK HOMEWARD, and then ANGEL. It's a coming-of-age story of Eugene Gant, in the fictional mountain town of Altamont, North Carolina, from his birth in 1900 to his departure in 19, exploring formative experiences shaping his identity, passions and conflicts in his family, bittersweet beauty at first love, and the awakening of his artistic dreams. This guy's a very unique writer.

He's what people call rich, lyrical prose, just these long, stringing, hanging sentences that bring to life the vibrant characters and rugged landscapes of Altamont, while probing universal struggles of belonging and individuality. You can follow this one, do e-mail us at 813.52, for American Fiction in English, 1900-1945. Paul, would you tell us about your relationship with LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL, by Thomas Wolfe?

[Paul Hawken]

No, his entire work I read was, he's just a hell of a writer.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, it really is. It's stunning prose.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah, it's stunning. And for me, when you read something like that, at least for me anyway, and so forth, your brain cells change. In other words, your capacity to understand, to speak, to parse, to discern, changes, because it's coming right at you and going into your neurons.

That's literally, yeah. Yeah, number two, his story, I felt I could identify with it. Not exactly, especially when he was in New York and stuff, but I actually started reading it when I was in New York and waiting for a freighter to take me to Europe, a coal freighter from Norfolk News, and so I had no place to stay.

The cheapest place was the Y in New York, also the most dangerous place for a young boy. By the way. Really?

Oh, yeah. I mean, you had to be in your room at 6.37 because of all the predators, sexual predators at the Y. I mean, it was just open season on boys for older men.

You couldn't take a shower except during the middle of the day. You got your takeout food, got it in, put it in your room, and locked the door. So I would start reading, I don't know what time, early in the evening and be reading right into 2, 3 a.m., book after book after book. I was just gobbling up this stuff. So he just, it's hard to say what his influence was or what the influence of those books were, except I do remember just gobbling them up at a very influential age in my mind.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, exactly. That's the definition of formative to the point where it's shifted you in ways that you can't really see anymore.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, I was, it just opened up my eyes, and, you know, to, you know, I was very poor, getting by, you know, scrambling.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, well, I wonder if one thing you got from him, and I don't know if you did or not, but he has this ability to conceptualize time on these vast scales that not many people have. Like, one of the quotes from this book is, each of us is all the sums he has not counted. Subtract us into the nakedness and night again, and you shall see, begin in Crete, 4,000 years ago, the love that ended yesterday in Texas.

Yeah, I could. And that type of stuff, you do that. I mean, in the book Carbon, I was, like, stunned by your illuminating the metaphor of the Mahakalpa.

The Mahakalpa, yeah. Mahakalpa, the amount of time it would take a pigeon to, like, wipe a silk sheet over the top of a mountain higher than Everest down to dust, was, like, you were using that as a metaphor for time. You use all, you just said earlier, like, the trillion atoms of carbon that are in each of your brain cells.

Any cell. Yeah, you're doing this in each cell. You're doing this high-flying, like, gymnastics all the time, and it's really vertiginous and exciting.

And, I mean, ultimately, I think a lot of it gets to the root of our own existence. You know, that famous Einstein quote that you kind of close your book with, with Einstein saying, the biggest question we have to ask ourselves is whether the universe is friendly or not.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

Which is, like, I still don't think I understand it. You know? Obviously, I'm no Einstein, but what is happening here with your time scales and what are you trying to say in terms of where we are and when we are?

And I think this is partly what you even open the book with, which I said at the very beginning of this conversation. The Earth's going to be fine, guys. It's just that we won't make it.

That's kind of what you, that's, again, like a separation of time that kind of hits you in the head, like, oh, it's just, the Earth's fine. Right. It's just us.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah. I mean, one of the teachings in Hinduism is periods of time that start to, time compresses. That sounds so weird, you know, because compression is a physical thing and time is not physical.

But, and it's kind of like an ice skater, you know, who is twirling, and when she or he brings their arms closer to their body, they spin faster and faster and faster.

[Neil Pasricha]

Oh, yeah. Yeah, of course. I mean, I can picture that from the Olympics.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah, in Hinduism, we have a period where time gets speeded up, you know, and this is a cycle, just, you know, and we're in that time, and it's speeding up, and it's very hard to get your bearings when time is so fast. You know, at the end of the day, you go, wow, wow, that was some day, but I've got to get up and do this and this. I mean, you just feel it, you know, and read it.

So, to me, the Mahakalpa really was a story of cyclicality, that this idea that, you know, the universe, you know, was born, you know, it was an explosion. It was such a Western. You're talking about the Big Bang?

Yeah, the Big Bang, yeah. I mean, there's such a Western concept.

[Neil Pasricha]

But you're saying that that is obviously immersed in a much larger thing that we don't really know or understand.

[Paul Hawken]

I'm not saying it is or isn't. I'm just saying is that there are other ways of seeing the Big Bang, which is that time is cyclical and over extraordinary expanses of what we call time, and that it is like everything else we see in the universe, you know, it ebbs and flows, it dies, it's born. And that our concept of time is a very Western one, you know, based on, you know, the observation of the Big Bang.

I'm not arguing with that observation. What I'm saying is this culture says that, yep, Big Bang, that happened, and, you know, that's a whole cycle on the universe, and then it happens again, and then it happens again, you know, which is kind of mind-boggling when you think about it. But it's also meant to convey to all of us, and to myself for sure, to relax a little bit.

You know, we're part of this extraordinary journey, and we're going to come here, and then we're going to go. You know, we're going to, we leave, you know, I mean, our body anyway. And to just open that up, because you read and hear and see, you know, that we don't have much more time.

If we don't do this, you know, we're going to all be screwed and all that sort of stuff. It doesn't mean there's not urgency that we must have in order to address human suffering. And to me, global warming is about human suffering, and it's the suffering of all creatures on the planet.

And we're not only engendering it, but we're also speeding that up. And then we feel that ourselves, you know, as families, as people, as women, as children. And it's freaky.

It's really freaky to feel that, to go to sleep with that, to wake up with it, or to ignore it, which is oftentimes what people do, because they choose things that are distractive and addictive in order to blot it out. And I just suggest that there's another way of looking at time in our passage, and that can be imbued with grace and kindness and patience and understanding as to what other people are experiencing. But it doesn't mean we have to do that.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, exactly. Another quote from the book kind of reflecting what you're saying. Each moment is the fruit of 40,000 years, the minute-winning days like flies buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all of time. You say distract us, you know, with social media and addictive stuff.

Partly, probably, at least for me, it's just because it's hard to hold that thought. It's a hard, it's a big, vast thing to hold, the idea that time is much more massive than we can picture. We're much smaller, and it's in cycles and not waves, and our role here is, you know, we're almost just this thing flying through space to briefly experience these endless pleasures and delights and senses, and to contribute to them, as you said, with patience and with kindness and with generosity and so on.

And that's it. I mean, I'm assuming that's it. And then we go into the soil, and we become a tree, or we get reborn as another form of sentient life.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah, and we don't know, and what happens. And I feel like it's more about patience and kindness to self and other. So if we're here for a short time, it's a very short time that we are in our body, who do we want to be during that time?

And what are we going to do? People often have said this, what will we remember?

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, the legacy question is pervasive.

[Paul Hawken]

It is, but in a larger context, this idea that you're dead, you're gone forever, we come and go. I mean, whatever we is, I don't know what we is, by the way. I'm not a scholar, I'm not a teacher, I'm not a religious figure, I'm not.

But I think it quickens the mind. And it's just a matter of time before somebody actually sees themself. And I just feel like those teachings, these ancient teachings, 4,000 or 5,000 years old, and in some cases longer, provide a way of being on the world at this time that is sane, makes us more sane, more calm.

It doesn't make us inactive or indifferent, not at all, to the contrary. And so what are those touch points that would enliven us in a time when almost everything that's coming at us is making us smaller?

[Neil Pasricha]

Wow. Wow. Yeah, what a great question.

It reflects back to me something I got from a conversation with former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who says that exact question, does this make me bigger or smaller, as a directional guide, because he feels that all decisions are based in love or fear, if I'm paraphrasing him properly. But patience and kindness to self, pause there before you get to other, those are two things I would like to have more of. I don't know how to learn them.

I mean, you're a lot older than me. I'm assuming some of this comes with being a student, a curious student of the world, and more times or rotations here. But patience and kindness to self, that'd be a great place to start.

That'd be a heart. I don't know, you have kids. Are there things that you tell them to do to try to do some of these things, or lessons that you share with them as a father?

I'm a dad as well. I would like my kids to be speaking to themselves better than I speak to myself. And the risk, of course, is that when I say comments about myself, which I do all the time publicly in my house, I catch myself, if I'm lucky, and then I see my kids saying that, and I'm horrified that I put thoughts into their heads.

So a food that isn't good to eat, or a show that isn't good to watch, or a candy that they shouldn't be eating, or something they shouldn't be doing, or they should be doing. A lot of shoulds, a lot of right and wrong, a lot of good and bad, a lot of this is healthy, this is not, until I read your book, and then you say, even oatmeal and protein bars are ultra processed. I'm like, oh shit, Paul once again, I should just be eating apples and celery, man.

Like, I am still screwed on that. The point is, I don't know how much I don't know, but that would be a wonderful place to start, is patience and kindness to self. I'd love your advice on that.

[Paul Hawken]

I have no advice. I have no advice on being a parent, you know. I do think it's all about embodiment, and my kids are really amazing, and I don't take any credit for that at all.

[Neil Pasricha]

Really, my kids are really amazing, and I don't take any credit for that. No, no.

[Paul Hawken]

And, no, I don't. And, yeah, I don't know.

[Neil Pasricha]

You said it's all about embodiment, so you're saying something by saying that, which is, you know, you can't pour from an empty vessel. Put the oxygen mask on yourself first. Don't do as I say.

You're going to do as I do. This is what your type is saying.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah, well, it's a mixed family, and so it's so interestingly complex. I don't think it's something so easily dispatched in a conversation. Okay, okay, okay.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah. I hear you. I hear you.

Okay, let's move to your third book. I got a few closing questions on that, and then I want to be respectful of your generosity here on your time. So we're going to close things off with a very interesting and unusual book.

Of course, like many on the show, I had not heard of before, and you give me a couple by him, but it is Kokoro, K-O-K-O-R-O, by Lafcadio Hearn.

[Paul Hawken]

Lafcadio Hearn, and the book is called, in Japanese, Kokoro.

[Neil Pasricha]

Kokoro, okay, which means, I think, heart. Yes, it does. Okay, Lafcadio Hearn.

It was published in 1896 by Houghton Mifflin. I have a shiny covered paperback with no details, by the way, on my copy of author or anything, just a downward kind of sepia pencil drawing of the author on the cover. He lived from 1850 to 1904.

At that time, it's pretty amazing that this guy lived from the islands off of Greece to Dublin to London to Cincinnati to New Orleans, and then he died in Tokyo at age 54. He's best known for bringing the culture and literature of Japan to the Western world, the inner culture, the mind culture, the psychological culture. Fifteen essays are in here examining the inner spiritual life of Japan.

Dewey Decimal has just got an interesting one, 915.204 for history and geography slash travel slash Asia slash Japan. Paul, tell us about your relationship with, I know it's not just Kokoro, but the broader work of Lafcadio Hearn, H-E-A-R-N.

[Paul Hawken]

I think because I grew up in Berkeley, and there was a big interest at that time in Zen, Buddhism, Suzuki Roshi, Alan Watts. It was on a lot of people's minds, and there was a lot of talk about it in practice, too. And so I became very curious about Japan myself, about Buddhism.

And so Lafcadio Hearn was, I forget his racial thing, but anyway, he married... Ionian Islands was where he was from. Yeah, I mean, he was an American, and he married, of all things, a black woman at that time.

And then at one point they go to Japan. I can't imagine, a gaijin is what Japanese call foreigners, a gaijin with a black wife going to Japan and integrating, just integrating into the culture. But somehow he did get under...

in and started to... I don't know who his teachers were or who he was talking to, how quickly he learned Japanese, which is both a very difficult and simple language, depending on how you look at it. Simply, I don't mean simplistic, but I mean...

And so I write about Japan, and for me it was just the beginning of understanding, reading about Japan, and learning more about it, and then ending up eventually spending time there myself and living there. So I think that... It was the first book I read, and Kokoro means heart.

And it's a very heart-based culture in that sense. I mean, the way Japanese relate to each other, the way they speak, the way they interact and respect not only each other, but also the living world, that is nature. And so for me, it was the doorway in.

It's not that the door was that important, but that was the one that showed up for me.

[Neil Pasricha]

I know you don't dispense didactic advice. I get it. I hear you, and I understand that.

And the way you communicate is really eloquent and beautiful and sort of post-didactic in a lot of sense. This book on Japan turned my mind to my first trip there. I went there once.

I was in my early 20s. Of course, lots of things about the culture struck me. The food was one of the biggest points where I had culture awareness and clash.

You read a lot about food, a lot about food, and you read a lot about food and carbon. On page 48, you say, there are an estimated 300,000 edible plants, but less than 200 are commonly used by humans. And today, 12 plants and 5 animals provide 75% of the human diet.

On page 51, you echo something you mentioned earlier. We became culinary hamsters in the treadwheel of supermarket food. Glistening fat-infested desserts, sugary ketchup, salty heart-eroding snacks exploit innate appetites that are there to protect us, not kill.

Nutritional literacy was reduced to intense taste only. Salty, fatty, and sweet. For 99.5% of time, humans have lived on the planet. Fat, sugar, and salt were difficult to obtain. I'm looking at a very healthy and vital man on his 80th trip around the sun. I'm just curious, and I've been looking on the internet for this.

I couldn't find it. How do you eat? What are your principles for yourself on your diet?

And how do you think about that?

[Paul Hawken]

Oh, I mean, I eat very simply. You know, I eat vegetables and food and some grain and protein. Usually small, either eggs or small fish like sardines.

It's like, but I mean, there's, you know, I'll do soups, you know, that are Japanese, you know, with miso and sea vegetables and root vegetables and, you know, white miso. And then sometimes I'll just poach some fish in it, you know. And that's a treat for me.

But I just eat very simply. I don't have any dietary restrictions per se, no dietary directives to anybody else, you know.

[Neil Pasricha]

Well, here I am at age 46, kind of following, you know, the emerging longevity movement, which is saying to sort of start your day with these 10 pills and end your day with these 10 pills and make sure you have this many grams of protein and make sure, you know, it's just, it's so, what do you make of this longevity fascination, the idea that's emerging very quickly that we're not going to die?

[Paul Hawken]

It's just another form of narcissism. And I don't take any pills at all. I don't take any vitamins.

I don't take, you know, I don't swallow things like that. I chew. And if there's something that, like berberine or something, I want to take for whatever reason, I'll chew it.

If I, and if you don't, if you're wanting- Berberines, right? Berberine, B-E-R-B-E-R-I-N-E, berberine. But if you want to take something that shows up as a capsule or a pill, eat it.

Don't swallow it because your body, your tongue, your mouth is absolutely brilliant on what it will accept and not take. How do you eat vitamin D? Don't bypass it.

Well, I don't. Well, I have the sun, you know. It's like, well, I buy something that shines on you.

And sometimes for days it doesn't, for sure. But your body is very resilient that way.

[Neil Pasricha]

But- Yeah. But you're saying rather than taking pills for creatine and vitamin C and whey protein, get it from the thing it's made in and eat that and chew that.

[Paul Hawken]

Well, whey protein is not a vitamin. It's actually just protein from milk. So that's a choice.

Some people need more protein, some need less. But when I was early 20s, I knew that being a vegan was the- Come on, get out of here. It's the smartest thing to do.

Everything else was kind of stupid. And so I was living in Boston. I had access to Harvard library and BU library.

And so I researched it, you know. And then what I discovered was the opposite, which is there's no third generation vegan in the history of the human species. No third generation vegan.

And I've challenged people. If there was one, find it. I'm happy to be wrong on that one.

So then I said, well, why? Come on, let's figure this one out and so forth. But then you look latitudinally, if you're living in the far north, the Nunavuts and so forth.

I mean, what's your diet? It's going to be primarily seafood. It's going to be fish and could be seals, could be other things.

And you do get some berries and stuff in the summer. There's a short period when you can eat those. And then you go back to pretty much a solid carnivore diet, pretty much.

And these people live there for 10,000, 20,000 years and then seem to do okay. Okay, and so then you go down equatorially. Then as you go down to India, places that are very warm and where there's a very abundant amount of natural food and trees and this, you could live almost off the land without even cooking or buying anything.

And there's a lot of sweet foods, fruits and mangoes and things like that. And there you do find people who are very close to vegan. For sure, they'll maybe eat some milk, cream, maybe not.

Maybe they'll eat some honey. Maybe they'll, you know, whatever. It depends on the religion almost, you know.

But so here's the big difference, Neil. So I said, okay, intestines. So if you live where you can only survive on animal food, you're just like a dog intestinally speaking, which is your intestines need to be short.

That's who basically evolved to be there because you don't want to leave meat in your intestines for very long. It putrefies and it'll poison you, okay? So if you live equatorially, the food density is not there like it is, you know, in the north in terms of animal food.

So you're eating foods that are less nutrient dense, right? And the intestinal length can be three times longer than somebody who lives in the north because it takes that long before the intestine is able to get all the nourishment out of these foods. All right, I'm speaking sort of.

[Neil Pasricha]

No, I love it. I love it. I want it, I need it, I'm asking, yeah.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah, so in terms of what to eat, how much protein, how little, what kind of protein or vegan, all that sort of stuff, it depends on where your biological inheritance, you know. Yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, and you know. Mine's near Lahore in India and I live in a formerly frozen tundra land. Hence, my allergies are all skittery in the falls and the springs.

I think my nasal passages and sinuses are like, what the hell is going on here, you know?

[Paul Hawken]

Right, so there's no question you can be a vegan. There's monks in monasteries who are vegan, no question about it. But in terms of reproduction, find me a third generation vegan at all, but find me one that reproduced, in the history of humanity as we know it and so forth.

So pro-vegan, anti-vegan, everything in between and so forth, it really depends on place and who you are and your physiology.

[Neil Pasricha]

And it's not like you're drawing upon a certain book or a dictum or a guide. You are drawing upon the Earth's natural producing food. Yeah, and you're also not trying to bypass it.

[Paul Hawken]

You're not trying to outthink it. You're not trying to be smarter than your body. And so your body will tell you what to eat if you listen.

But if you are coming at it from a conceptual point of view, you're bypassing and overriding what your body is telling you.

[Neil Pasricha]

How will your body tell you? What will you notice in your body?

[Paul Hawken]

What do you notice?

[Neil Pasricha]

Well, you said your body will tell you what to eat if you listen, and I agree and love that phrase. And now I'm like, how do I unlearn what I've learned and how do I learn how to listen to my body?

[Paul Hawken]

I don't know how you would, because I don't know your lifestyle, but the first thing I would do probably is not take pills and then see how you feel. And then you say, well, I don't feel good, or I feel fine, or I feel better. I mean, there's going to be some in that spectrum.

And then you want to look at why you're taking this supplement, this supplement, this supplement. Is it because you read something somewhere? Because somebody told you?

[Neil Pasricha]

Doctor says I have low iron. Take the iron pill. Doctor says I have low vitamin D.

Take the vitamin D pill. Influencer says everybody should take five grams of creatine. Helps with this.

Helps with brain health. Helps with muscle. I take that.

I mean, it's an array of sources that I'm trying to keep up with.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah, and basically, I won't name the doctor, but he's well-known. They also sell the products. And so they benefit from the idea that somehow.

[Neil Pasricha]

That's part of the issue is that we live under the saran wrap bubble of late-stage capitalism. And so it's hard to puncture that seal and see outside of the matrix. Always.

Right. About our news. It's a theme here about our elders, about people that are making a change in the world because they're quiet and they are not on the cover of the papers.

About our food supply. It's disheartening. That's why I love your stuff.

That's why books. I mean, look. Read Carbon.

Like read Paul's latest book. It is so magnificently eye-opening. It's like a flower blossoming in front of you as you read it.

And it's on my reread permanent. My permanent reread shelf. I have a shelf of books I just want to keep reading for my whole life.

It's on there. Besides Siddhartha, you know? But that's why I'm loving talking to you.

And also I noticed, I happened to notice, that all three of your formative authors, I know there's many. You were one of the generous guests who when I asked about this question, you give me a list, you know? And Seth Godin did this and others who are massive, voracious readers did this.

But you know, James Baldwin lived until his 60s. This guy lived until his 50s. Thomas Wolfe lived until his 30s.

I'm looking at you. I'm like, you're thriving. You're healthy.

I've interviewed a few people of your age and experience. I interviewed, I didn't interview, but I met a Zen Buddhist priest last year. And I said, how old are you?

And he said, no, don't ask how old I am. Ask, when was I born in this life? And I wondered if you had principles or precepts that you've used to guide yourself or steady yourself directionally or in other ways through your healthy and productive, very 60s and 70s and soon to be 80s, outliving, I will point out, many of your inspirants.

[Paul Hawken]

I mean, I was just making it up as I went along and just trying to figure it out by listening to my body. I've never had health insurance, which is weird, I know. And I did go to a hospital once when something happened.

Suddenly I was chewing some vegetables that were less rawish and one got stuck in my sarcus. And so I had to go and have them push it down. So I have been in a hospital that way.

[Neil Pasricha]

You talk about it like it was one instance long ago. I was in a hospital this morning, getting a picture of my heart taken with iodine flooded through it. I mean, I hang out there.

Yeah, no, I don't. I have no relations.

[Paul Hawken]

I love this. It's really medical.

[Neil Pasricha]

But it's not just health. Is there something you're doing in terms of purpose or time? You know, you're outside.

We get this from you. It comes through in spades. Vitamin D comes from outside.

Especially rugged terrain, outside a lot. Outside in nature, talking to the mountains. Huge ingredient that is, I'm sorry to say, but I would wager, unless you're listening to this while on a walk, most of us are like a fraction of a percent of what you're doing on outside.

I've read that the percentage of time our kids are spending outside is currently the lowest in history.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

Where kids today spend 7% of their days outside, which I know you can't multiply percentages, but if you multiply 7% times 7 days a week, it means it takes kids a whole week to spend half a day outside now. Recesses have been tightened. Lunch hours have been shortened.

What used to be they'd come home with two hours of outside time at school, now they come home with like 45 to 75 minutes. Like I'm just saying, I've interviewed a woman about this topic, and of course in the evenings they have seven extracurriculars and piles of homework. Never mind the addictive tendency of all the screens that we feed them to as Jonathan Haidt past guest said in 103, we serve to them as old as they can lie because this hilariously fake age 13 limit on TikTok and Instagram, you know, if you just say you're 12, it doesn't check.

There's no, it doesn't matter. It doesn't care. It wants you anyway.

So what an uphill battle just being on the side is now on the food, I take great inspiration and then I'm asking you, and this is kind of a closing question, but you just ooze wisdom. So I just, I'm looking foolish by saying what other tools or principles or precepts have you used to guide your life for the last few decades and will you continue? Because I know a friend of yours, Jane Goodell, just died when she was 91 and your blurbs are from like luminaries, right?

Like cornfield is in your book. It's clear to me that you surround yourself with the sages of our era. Yeah.

[Paul Hawken]

And Rick Roll is one of your guests. He's amazing. I would say first of all, back to children, we're creating ultra-processed children, okay?

And because they have to be smarter and better and they have to get ahead of thinking in junior high school, junior high school about what universities and colleges they're going to apply to. I mean, getting ready and studying those universities and who gets in and who doesn't and all that sort of stuff. I mean, there goes childhood.

So childhood is a teaching and learning is how children learn. They can't learn just by being outside. They also need to be with elders.

Elders are people who have spent a lifetime learning about self and other in place and in a way that is admirable and that children gravitate to. I mean, I never saw, I saw many times, but children love Jane Goodall. Why?

Well, not because of what she did as primates. It's because who she was, her presence. You know, they're like, they want to be there.

And so where are those elders? What are they doing? And Paul Goodman is one who famously, you know, in Growing Up Absurd, talked about we do an interesting thing in this culture.

We put the elders off in rest homes and we put the children into nursing schools and things. In other words, the children need attention and love and care from the elders and the elders need something to care and to pay attention to. Yeah.

And they're completely separated.

[Neil Pasricha]

I mean, I completely agree.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

It's so opposite to how I grew up. I mean, obviously I'm first generation kind of in Canada, Indian, but just one generation above, of course, in Indian communities you have the oldest and the youngest living together. Yeah, absolutely.

But even now, as I say it, you know, if I picture my own parents at age 80 and 75 knocking on my door and saying, hey, one of us died. Can the other one live with you? I have a gulp in my chest knowing my life and my lifestyle and my partner in that world being so different than the one I now live in.

So it's hard for me. I embrace it mentally.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah, yeah. No, no. It's very, very difficult now.

We don't live that way. We have too much. There's too much money.

And it's kind of like stepping on a fork, you know, a rake really just hits us. We have the money and now we pay and pay and pay, not in monetary terms but in so many other ways in terms of our life and our relationships to whether it's our parents, our children or others. And it's very difficult to be wealthy in this culture at this time.

And that sounds like a ridiculous term because everybody's trying to be more wealthy. But I think that actually it works against us. Because it's like a rake.

But hey, families used to live together. They used to sleep in one room together for goodness sakes. And what was that like?

What happened to the people that had that sort of attention and warmth and connection to their family? There's a continuity there that doesn't exist anymore in the United States. Not that it ever did in the same way as it does in India.

I don't know what's happening in India now. But that should be true. But we definitely balkanized family due to money.

And I'm just going on and on and preaching. I should shut up. But I'm just saying that the beauty of a child, the beauty of an elder should not be separated, should not be pushed apart.

They should be together. And I think we'd have a healthier, kinder world. But you have nine-year-olds running around with phones.

Hello?

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, and the 1950s life insurance movement to advertise retirement as something you work towards so that you deserve. There was this active living theory I'm sure you're familiar. Nobody wanted to retire.

This was a marketed thing for decade after decade to the point where the people that said I want to actively retire is now the majority. But it never used to be this way. There was active living theory.

And then, of course, that created the Dell, the Sunshine State, Phoenix, Arizona, the rise of these places that are separate from ours. And again, it rises back up to the manner in which we live. But through your wisdom, I will say, and you have an ability to see that since the days in Berkeley when you sat in that bed and you read those books and you said I feel like I'm an outsider here.

To today where, you know, post being captured and driven down a highway by the Ku Klux Klan and living in Japan and traveling around the world and creating these incredible movements, not environmental per se as those of living and breathing through wisdom and elders. I met you through a commencement speech that I still think about all the time that you gave 16 years ago, and it's touched me so deeply. The book Harbin is truly a life-changing read and one that I highly recommend.

So you are pointing us to this, as you say, this large movement that's just not in the news. There's a lot of people. And by the way, when you look at those charts, the newest generation, the newest, they're using cell phones and social media less, less.

It's like one of the best charts I've ever seen. It's going down, and the schools are starting to ban them. And there's a rise of the local food movement.

So we can feel together that, yeah, we're smart enough to know that what does us poorly over the long term must, as you put in the beginning of your book, must be extracted. We have to get rid of things that don't serve us.

[Paul Hawken]

Right. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I have a lot of faith in humanity, as long as I read the headlines.

And I really do. And that's what I was talking about with the alliance, actually. We don't see how extraordinary, generous, kind, brilliant people are.

I mean, we do in our personal life, maybe amongst our friends or this or that. I'm not trying to describe anybody else's life. I'm just saying on a macro level, it doesn't come through.

And because it doesn't have scale. It doesn't, you know. And people rather read about some ridiculous thing that Donald Trump said yesterday because it gets their, you know, whatever going.

[Neil Pasricha]

And getting their whatever going is all he's going for.

[Paul Hawken]

That's all he's going for. He's just trying to be in the news every single day.

[Neil Pasricha]

And if there's a FIFA headline for five days, well, then he's got to talk about canceling the sports. Like it's just, you know, he'll go where the headline is.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

Tail wags the dog, as that old movie used to say, right? Wag the dog, I think. Yeah.

Or infinite jests, right? David Foster Wallace warned us about this in 1996. The total entertainment forever world.

So we're aware of it. And that's why we listen to our podcast with wise people like you. And we read your books and we follow your work.

And you help us connect to the deeper connected roots that connect all living things.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah. I mean, we just have to realize that we have an earworm in chief, you know, as our political leader in the United States. And it's your ear and you have choices.

[Neil Pasricha]

Paul Hawken, thank you so much for this gift. I love what you're doing.

[Paul Hawken]

I love the way you do it. I love the way you crawl, but, you know, you move into the inner spaces of the people you interview, who oftentimes are writers too, but people of real interest and real, you know, a lot of really thoughtful people. But I love the fact that I didn't understand it at first, you know, three books.

Okay, here. But now I actually do understand it. If we ever do it again, I'll give you three more books.

But I really, really, really respect what you're doing and I'm very grateful to it.

[Neil Pasricha]

Those words mean more than you can imagine. Thank you so much, Paul Hawken. I'm touched and this is a real honor to talk to you.

Thank you.

[Paul Hawken]

Thank you, Neil. Thank you.

[Neil Pasricha]

Hey, everybody.

[Neil Pasricha]

It's just me, just Neil again, hanging out in my basement, wearing my Paul Hawken-inspired dress shirt.

[Neil Pasricha]

I have this dress shirt from Dan the Tailor. Cousins has a baby and the baby says like two words, Mama, Dada and Santa, I guess it's three words. And she kept pointing at my shirt saying, Santa, Santa, Santa, because there's a couple of characters on here that kind of look like Santa.

So I'm feeling, you know, inspired by Paul. I mean, he kind of brings the mood down a bit, but necessarily so, because of course we are, what are we talking about? Like, what are we talking about?

We're talking about Venezuela and Trump taking over, you know, countries. And we're talking about, you know, authoritarianism. And we're talking about, like, what are we talking about?

Like, we're not talking about life on this planet and the long-term trajectories that we're seeing and experiencing. But if you know, if you go outside, you know, you're probably like, there used to be more chimney swifts above my house last year. And yeah, this winter isn't really as cold as it was.

I remember when we used to do the rink at the park and it used to be every winter and now it's so often. Now it's like, yeah, it used to be big snow banks. You know what I mean?

I'm like not that old and I can notice these trends. And of course I can see them and I rely on somebody like Paul to kind of expose me to them. So many quotes jump out to me from this conversation.

I'm going to have to, I usually do three. I might have to do nine or six right here. How about, the living world is extraordinarily cooperative.

Cooperative actually is a kind of a small term for what they're doing because exquisitely interactive and symbiotic is probably a better description. So the living world is exquisitely interactive and symbiotic. I love that.

So much about colonialism and history is all about like capitulation and taking over and winning and like, you know, being overbearing, but it's not the way it really works. Everyone is an environmentalist because they live in the environment. You know, I thought that was an interesting way of putting it.

Really, he's kind of refusing that term, which is, sometimes the more you look into something, you know, the more you don't like that term, right? That happens a lot. He has this quote on walking that I really love.

I think when you're walking, you're entering into a non-static relationship and most of our relationship with nature is static. I was reading an interview in the Financial Times this past weekend with the former head of AI of Meta and apparently his ouster or his leaving, because he was reporting to like some 25-year-old that Mark Zuckerberg hired for like $100 million or something, and this guy's like old school, like this guy's like a, you know, Geoffrey Hinton type character from University of Toronto from like the 70s, and he was like, my big argument to Mark Zuckerberg was that all of our LLMs, which he thinks are terrible, large language models, he's like, none of them understand the natural world. That was his argument. That was like led to his ouster.

That's what he's starting as his own personal startup. How does AI understand the natural world? I don't understand what he's talking about, but I like the idea that this guy who's kind of like running AI for like the world's, you know, second or third largest company, his big ouster was because he thought AI doesn't understand the natural world, which is kind of true, right?

I mean, it makes sense. It's a really long quote, so it's hard to read it, but he has this whole point, Paul, about how we use these male-dominated kind of violent images to talk about climate, like tackling climate change, fighting climate change. And, you know, there's a problem with that, combating things, because it creates, in his words, heroic imagery of complete nonsense, because the biosphere and the climate are absolutely inseparable.

You can't be it. You are part of it. It's like saying we want to conquer life, you know?

More specifically, Paul says, we have a crisis. I couldn't agree more, but it's not a climate crisis. It's a human crisis.

It's a relationship crisis, understanding, greed, violence, and power crisis. Global warming is the symptom. Such a good point.

Like, is it global warming is the problem, or is it like what we want and need way more stuff to have a higher quality of living, so we need more boats, like, you know, dispersing more gas in the oceans and killing things to get furniture to our houses? Like, that's kind of, is that climate the problem, or is it like, you know, late-stage capitalism and crazy income inequality? You know, these things kind of exacerbate the issue.

Global warming is the symptom. That's the quote. Global warming is the symptom.

And then he says, I suggest there's another way of looking at time and our passage, and that can be imbued with grace and kindness and patience and understanding as to what other people are experiencing. Those are the big things, right? I think novels give us that.

That's kind of what gets missed in nonfiction a lot, I think, is that, you know, unless you're reading a book about grace or patience or something or understanding, it's really the feeling of human emotions in specific situations that novels can sort of share with us in its unique way. Paul says, I have no advice on being a parent. My kids are really amazing, and I don't take any credit for that.

I thought that was kind of interesting from somebody who's so deeply connected to the earth that whether his kids end up great or not great or however you define that, he doesn't take any credit for that. And then the last quote, this kind of probably falls in line with a lot of stuff we've been talking about on the show, with our conversations with Jonathan Haidt and with Jenny Urich and with Lenore Skenazy. He says, we are creating ultra-processed children.

When he goes on, and I won't include this as part of the quote, but he talks about, you know, they've got to be smarter and they've got to be better. They've got to get ahead in junior high school. They've got to, like, apply to college universities at a young age.

So you end up, you know, creating ultra-processed children. I actually toured a private school in Toronto with my wife and my kid. You know, he didn't end up wanting to be interested in it.

But it was like, I honestly felt like I was walking into a pamphlet. I felt like I was walking into a pamphlet. The music, the setup, the design, the speech the kids gave.

I was like, has this been edited like 12 times by administration? Like, this just feels like everyone in here ends up kind of same-y. You know?

And then when you talk to the grads and where they go into and what they study, it's like, you know, finance. And I had no judgment on finance. I have lots of friends in finance.

I have no problem with finance as an idea, but it's just like we're all going into just the managing of capital and moving money. Like, that's not... Well, what's happening with makers?

You know, Jonathan Fields, he's the host of Good Life Project, a wonderful podcast. He's a good friend of mine. He just gave a wonderful TED Talk.

We should put that in the show notes. He just gave a wonderful new TED Talk. I think where he lives in Boulder or Boise.

I think he lives in Boulder, but I think that's where he gave the TED Talk. And it's all about like rekindling the making aspects of our identities and our personalities, like hands in the dirt, working with your hands. Martels Bennett told that too, right?

Honestly, we were on a holiday trip. We went to France and I was in this like tiny wooden, like almost outhouse, you know, in nature. And, you know, it was just cold water and like kind of a dirty toilet.

And as I closed the door, there was this like cross-stitch, you know, of a mountain scene. And I could just feel in that cross-stitch. I was like, you know, somebody spent time, you know, like doing needlepoint.

I think is needlepoint and cross-stitch the same thing? Needlepoint and like creating this big image. It's probably been there for 50 years and no one's ever moved it when this bathroom was like a really nice bathroom.

And you know what my compulsion was? I wanted to do it. I could just feel my hands like unclenching from like, you know, cell phone fingers.

And just I was like, oh yeah. Like how fun would it be to do needlepoint? And of course I was reminded of my own TED talk 15 years ago, 16 years ago now, where I talk about Rosie Greer, the NFL player who created the book, Rosie Greer's Needlepoint for Men, which I thought where he's needlepointing his own face on the cover.

Needlepoint, bring back needlepoint. Not sure how we ended up there, but that was just the rant. I went on lots of quotes, lots of quotes from the eminent and wise and sagacious Paul Hawken.

Of course, he also gave us three more books to add to our top 1000. We have number 545, Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin. Number 544, Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe.

Not to be confused with Tom Wolfe. That's Thomas Wolfe, T-H-O-M-A-S. Maybe Tom Wolfe later on went by Tom because of this guy.

And number 543, Kikoro by Lafcadio Hearn, H-E-A-R-N. Three more books, no asterisks added to our top 1000. On today, the snow moon of 2026.

February 1st, 2026 at 10.09 p.m. We will be back, of course. I wanted to say another day in February because there's always one month that has a couple full moons. It's not February, people.

It's March 3rd. We're going to be back. We're going to be back.

It's going to be a fun conversation. Stick around, everybody. Thanks so much for being here.

Until next time, you are what you eat and you are what you read. Thanks so much for listening to Three Books. Are you still here?

Did you make it past the three-second pause? And so I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club. One of three books, not three books, one of three clubs that we have for Three Books listeners, including the Cover to Cover Club, people trying to listen to every single chapter of the show, hardcore listeners.

We got you out there. We feel you. I hear your energy.

And, of course, The Secret Club. If you want to know more about The Secret Club, you've got to call our phone number, which is 1-833-READ-A-LOT. Call the phone number, then listen to the message, and you will be given a clue to joining The Secret Club.

And there's many steps afterwards if you dare to enter. Anyway, as we kick off the end of the podcast club, let's do what we always do, which is go to the phones.

[Karen]

Hi, Neil. This is Karen Danczowski. I'm calling you from Glencoe, New York.

I've actually called once before. I just wanted to recommend a guest. His name is Steven Johnson, and he is an author.

He wrote The Ghost Map, which, by the way, is the very first book I read that just ignited a passion in me, and I haven't stopped reading since. He's also written Where Good Ideas Come From, How We Got to Now. So I'm wondering if you've ever heard of him or if you've ever reached out to have him as a guest, but I think that two of you would hit it off because he is gifted.

He's a very gifted thinker and writer about connecting themes and ideas across broad categories, and I just think that two of you would hit it off and have a lot to talk about. And that's it, and I love your show. I truly love your show.

Thank you very much. Bye-bye.

[Neil Pasricha]

Thank you so much to Karen from Glen Cove, New York, for that really kind message. I feel your heart. I feel your energy, Karen.

I feel like I found my people here too. My wife isn't as into books as me. My closest friends are not as into books as me.

I myself go up and down through my own love of books and my ability to kind of fly through books. Right now I'm almost at the end of Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy, which I'm really loving, and I've got the William Stieg book on my bedside table. I've got a Stephen King book, The Dark Half, that I read when I was a kid.

I saw it in Doug Miller Bookstore. I was like, oh, I should read this again. By now I'm like 50 pages in, and I'm like, oh, it's scary.

I read this when I was 12, but it's scary. So I go up and down through my own interest in books, but I love this show and this community and these lovely, amazing people like you, Karen, to just help push me and cajole me and kind of be with me here in spirit and in this container of love towards reading. And I think we get each other, and we get how good books are and what they can do for us.

Stephen Johnson gets that. I heard of him years ago, I think probably one of his first couple of books. I checked him out again online just now.

I will add him to the pitches. I will send him an invite to see if we could kind of meet minds. And I really appreciate you dropping along with his name.

Who else do you want on the show? I actually should have mentioned that Joe B., at the beginning, the guy whose letter I read, at the top of the show, he said, could you get any crime writers like Dennis Lehane, Richard Price, George Pelokonos, and Daniel Woodrow? I mean, I don't know any of those people, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't.

And I have so many blind spots, as we all do, but thank you for your calls and your suggestions because they point me and poke me out of my blind spots. If you have a guest you'd like to hear on the show, please call me, 1-833-READALOT. If you have a formative book that you want to share with us, that's also another kind of voicemail I love sharing.

Just call, say, hey Neil, one book changed my life is this, because then we get the suffix, you know, long-form conversation with a really short message. 1-833-READALOT, R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T. And what some people are doing now, because it's just easier on your phone, is they just record like a little voice memo, and they just email it to me, Neil at globalhappiness.org.

If that's easier for you than doing the calling like voicemail answer machine thing, which I guess is somewhat archaic now, but I still am going to keep it for sure, then do that. Just email me and attach the two in a voice note, and that's just as well. That works just as well.

Thank you. So we did the letter, we did the voice note. Now it's time for the word of the chapter.

Is it already time for the word? Oh yeah, baby. The eminent wordsmith, Paul Hawken, you know he's going to get a word cloud.

Let's jump into that word cloud now.

[Paul Hawken]

I feel like there's so much rhetoric. It doesn't obfuscate, but it's jargonizing, exquisitely interactive and symbiotic. I felt like I was a changeling, and that's what regeneration's about.

It's not like climate is volitional, fire triggered succession. Time is cyclical. It's all about embodiment.

We're creating ultra-processed children. We definitely Balkanize.

[Neil Pasricha]

Holy cow, that was a great word cloud. There's a lot of good stuff in there. Ultra-processed children is sticking with me.

But I think ultimately, we're going to have to go with jargon.

[Neil Pasricha]

Jargon.

[Neil Pasricha]

Jargon. Jargon. According to Merriam-Webster, that would be the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group, such as sports jargon.

Ah, that's just the first definition. The second definition is obscure and often pretentious language marked by circumlocutions and long words. Circumcolutions, by the way, is using an unnecessarily large number of words to express an idea.

I'm sure I'm guilty of that sometimes, as we all are. It's just maybe a function of trying to be the opposite of that, but you just kind of scramble and search and you float around. That's what words are sometimes.

But here's the third definition, and this one I think is the most interesting. Confused, unintelligible language, like strange, outlandish language. Right?

And then it says it could also be like synonyms for the verb jargon, like to jargonize. It could also be to Twitter or to warble. What?

Ah, that's because in the mid-14th century, this word came from the chattering of birds, unintelligible talk, gibberish, chattering, jabbering from the old French jargon, which means a chattering, a chattering of birds. So you see a bunch of European starlings on the sidewalk making that amazing squeaky, warbly, almost metallic radio type of sound that they make. If you know, you know.

They are indeed chattering. They are speaking in jargon. Jargon, people.

That is where it comes from. What a cool, interesting history. In the 1640s, people used it as like mixed speech pigeon.

Phraseology peculiar to a sect or profession. Jargon, mixed speech pigeon. Oh, in reference to the bird screeches.

Yeah, I love that. Okay, that's good. Anything that gets us back to birds is always a win for me.

Hey everybody, thank you so much for being here. This is a fun pilgrimage. We're just, we're just hanging out.

We're hanging out with smart, interesting people. I'm talking about you. I'm talking about Paul Hawken.

Thank you for being here. I hope you took one thing away. And if, you know, if you're like thinking about your day today and you're like, hey, did I have a good day today?

You did, you already did. Because we hung out, we talked, we explored, we learned, we had fun together. It's a win, people.

You don't need to do much more. Go easy on yourself. Don't be too hard on yourself.

You don't have to do everything. Just take it a little easier. And remember, until next time, 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.

Listen to the chapter here!

Chapter 156: Salim Amin chronicles courage and compassion in crisis and conflict

Listen to the chapter here!

[Salim Amin]

And that is what journalism was always about. It's supposed to be objective, unbiased reporting. Unfortunately, that has changed.

Young people today think what they see on social media is reality. We really do need to mobilize humanity. We are in an age where people want to get everything in 148 characters.

And you can't. Be good to people, be kind to people.

[Neil Pasricha]

Hey everybody, this is Neil Pasricha and welcome. Welcome back to the ninth year of 3 Books. Yes, it is January 3rd, 2026.

We are on the official first full moon of the year. The wolf moon, if you want to call it the wolf moon, that's fine. And it's the ninth year of the show all of a sudden.

I mean, we started in 2018, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26. And I want to invite you back into our third episode, chapter, our third chapter in our traveling to Africa series with Neil. All right.

So you remember chapter 154 with Peter Kimani, the incredible novelist that we hung out with down, down in Nairobi or the outskirts of Nairobi. And then we had chapter 155 upstairs in the bookstore, Nuria bookshop in Nairobi again. And since I only went to one city, well, two cities, if you include Mombasa in Africa, I've got my third chapter for all of you and it is going to be a doozy.

We are going to be hanging out with Salim Amin. But before we get into that, as you know, our show has no ads, no sponsors, no interruptions, no promotions, but we do have a community of three bookers that we think of as a very sacred force. It's one of three clubs that we have at the very end of the show.

We've got the end of the podcast club. We've got the cover to cover club. And of course we have the secret club, which is referenced in today's letter from Dan.

Hi, Neil. Thank you for sending me a reading light. And to all of those in the paper cutters club, I often forget about the club and carry no expectations.

Opening the package created a moment of surprise delight. Before opening it, my wife and I puzzled over the package. Did you order something?

No. Did you? I find it funny that anytime she realizes something has come from you, she says something like, Oh, it's from your Canadian friend.

I also just listened to chapter 153 with Carl Honoré and was thinking about your discussion about when a phone fits well into one's day and life versus when it is an unhelpful distraction. You also brought up AI during the end of the podcast club and commented on its over complimentary programming. I agree, but I've also found that an LLM, I use Clode, can be a wonderful companion to reading complex books.

I first tried it with Middlemarch last year, and I understood so much more by asking Clode questions. I've now done the same for Jane Austen and William Shakespeare book clubs organized by Henry Oliver. He's recommending I check out Henry Oliver.

I appreciate Clode's patience. No question is too dumb. If I misinterpret a passage, the correction is expressed without criticism and it lends itself to back and forth exchanges, exploring things like how the meaning of some words has shifted over time.

My questions would likely bore a human expert, but Clode doesn't express boredom. Well, I think I could do without Clode's sycophancy. I suspect the compliments like brilliant question or great close reading actually nudge me to appreciate the experience more.

I don't want Claude as a companion for everyday life, but kind words combined with deep expertise, enrich my reading of hard material. I get so much more out of books that I would without the help. Now I love Jane Austen's work.

I didn't before, and I want to read everything by Shakespeare. I would now consider Middlemarch a formative book, which I read at age 48 because of how this experience has opened a door to challenging works of art. Maybe Clode is my metaphorical reading light to tie this email into a theme.

So then of course I wrote back to Dan and he wrote back and said, I just got your response while waiting in line at Powell's bookstore in Portland, Oregon. I'm only in Portland for a day and I can't pass up the opportunity to go to Powell's. Your email plus Powell's was great book, loving synergy.

And then he said, I found a great use for my reading light. I've been recommending these reading lights. Now it's been in my book club guys.

You've seen it. And I did mail a reading light up to everybody who's in the paper cut club. What's the paper cut club.

Well, you're going to have to listen for clues. There's a phone number at the end. You got to get the secret word.

I can't say more about it. It is our analog only through the mail fan club for the show. And Dan says, I realize I don't need a reading light for reading in bed.

Since my wife has no trouble sleeping with my bedside reading lamp on, but then when the clocks were set back for an hour this weekend and it's dark and I walk home from work and I love to read while walking and I don't love reading on my phone. So winter usually means podcasts or music, but not anymore. I realized I can now walk and read with the book light.

People might think I'm crazy when they see me, which just brings a mischievous joy to the experience. I love that Dan. So book lights, reading lights, everybody.

You just stick it on the top of your book, walk down the street and you've got a little lamp while reading, by the way, I also really love reading while walking. I think I'm going to write that down as an awesome thing. Reading a book while walking.

I don't know what it is. It's, um, it's like you're in a place and in another place kind of more combined. It's like doubling the places you're in.

Right. And yeah, you have to be careful. And I recommend on the sidewalk, not the road, et cetera, et cetera.

But yeah, reading while walking is great. And I do recommend that by the way, because a good friend of mine, Jay Pinkerton, who was the editor at golden words newspaper at Queens university, he got hit by a car. And when I asked him, Jay, are you okay?

He's like, I'm okay. I broke a bone. I'm fine.

I was like, what were you doing? He's like, I was reading a book while crossing the street. So you have to be careful a little bit.

All right. Let's get back into Nairobi. We are going to hang out in the studio, the office, uh, The Mr. Byrne sized office or really kind of like almost like a museum of Salim. I mean, who is the shepherd or the CEO of camera picks? What is camera picks? Well, that was the company started by his dad, Mohammed.

I mean, or Mo I mean, also known as the man who moved the world. I'm holding up the book by Bob Smith. This is a guy who.

You know, Saved 8 million lives by photographing the, um, Ethiopian famine. His photos were the spark that created, um, you know, the Bob Geldof concert that everybody knows about live aid. And he really kind of helped bring light to the dark continent over, you know, a number of years of far too short life.

He was sadly killed. And, uh, a plane that was hijacked and somewhat apropos cause he was a photo journalist. The hijacking was filmed, including the crash by newlyweds on a beach in South Africa.

When the plane crashed. It's a, it's a, it's a crazy story. We're going to hear more about that.

These are the, his, he had one child and his child is still alive. And we met up with his son in Nairobi. And Salim is a fascinating guy of his own, right?

He is, he is at home taking care of his aging mother. Who's in her nineties, but he himself is a documentary maker, producer, author. He's a talk show host.

He has written two books, including one that I'm holding up right now called Kenya through my father's eyes and incredible photo journalist book with just the photos are just really stunning, you know, like lions and boxers and, you know, um, uh, African dictators being sworn in at elaborate ceremonies. And he also made the film Mo and me, the sound man returned to quorum stand together as one. Those are other films he's made, but Mo and me of course is the one about his dad.

He's been published in time magazine, uh, including when he was a very young child, he has a degree in journalism. He's had his own talk show called the scoop. And, uh, I should mention by the way, also that the documentary Mo and me won 15 awards, including a bunch of awards for best documentary.

If you want to see it. And I did watch it before interviewing him. Uh, it's a really incredible piece.

Um, I kind of like drove out of the hotel in Nairobi. Um, you know, via Uber. And when you get picked up at an Uber in a Nairobi hotel, it's a big deal.

Like they have, every car has to have all the doors open, all the trunks open. They have dogs like searching and smelling the cars. They have these giant concrete barriers that are lifted up that they have to come down.

So like no car can kind of like ram up to the, to the front. There's metal detectors going in and out of the hotel. Let's just like to leave the hotel.

And then, you know, we dropped, we're driving past, like, you know, busy streets, um, slum areas. And we kind of make a left turn and you can sort of see Nairobi gentrifying here. There's a little kind of little luxury condos type thing coming up, but in a little hidden pocket, there is the offices of camera picks.

And so I go up the stairs in the office. I'm, you know, register. I go through and I meet the wonderful kind, magnamious, gregarious Salim, who I have an instant heart connection with.

It feels like we're old friends and we just have a really powerful conversation talking about a ton of things around kind of injustice, humanity. you know, he has a lot of strong statements about, well, they, they really aren't strong, but they sound strong today. I don't want to kind of take too much away from it, but you'll see here.

It's a really fascinating conversation. I'm really excited to kind of welcome him onto three books to share his work, to share the kind of memory and homage and, and kind of legacy that his father created as well through this conversation, our third and final and our series traveling to Africa. I hope one of many traveling around the world series.

I hope you've enjoyed this. Let's jump into the conversation now. Good morning.

How are you? You know, I'm usually the one that says like, ah, I hit report. I like how you are.

You're, you're various persons. I, as soon as I turned, you started it off, which I like, which I like. I feel like I'm in a museum by the way.

[Salim Amin]

I feel, I'm glad you're in liking the space. It is a little bit of a, a sort of a, um, uh, homage, a museum of, uh, you know, interesting objects, artifacts that kind of defined, you know, my past and my father's life.

[Neil Pasricha]

Your past, your father's life. We're in, would you call this, would you refer to this room as a studio? No, it's my office.

[Salim Amin]

I mean, it's my office, but it's, it doubles up as a studio.

[Neil Pasricha]

It's like a Mr. Burns office. It's like, you know, that Simpsons office where it's like, this is, people can't see if you're watching a video. It goes right down.

There's like a huge desk. And, and just so people know what I'm looking at, I see many, many old cameras. Okay.

I see framed things on the walls, which clearly have a manner of, that's why I said museum. There is a bionic arm, which we're going to talk about. There is like, kind of like a gold record, like you kind of see in like a recording studio.

There's all kinds of awards. There is hats, like down, you could probably see this if you're watching on YouTube. There's like a dictator's hat.

Yes. Which, which dictator?

[Salim Amin]

Bengistu Halimaryam of Ethiopia.

[Neil Pasricha]

Ethiopia.

[Salim Amin]

Who ruled the country from, from 90, from the early, early seventies, mid seventies, all the way to 91 when he was overthrown. And somebody grabbed his hat. Well, my dad got his hat because he was in there when they, when they overthrew him.

Oh. He went in with the rebel armies. He did.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah. Oh my gosh. Okay.

We got lots of, there's a map over on the wall that people can't see. And obviously most people on our show, just so you know, I'm starting to videotape. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm starting to put them on YouTube. Yeah.

Good idea. But the vast majority of our audience is still audio only. They're, they're at the gym.

They're on a long walk with the dog. They, you know, and so I try to like visually describe the scene. There's a map of the world upside down and Africa is in the center.

The writing is right side up. So you've got Africa in the center of the world and all 55 African countries labeled.

[Salim Amin]

Yeah. And the idea of that map, it was given to me as a present by my, my production partner in the U S uh, Chip Duncan. So Chip gave it to me and he basically said, you know, who said the world should be the way it is, you know, on a map.

Why isn't it, you know, the other way around? Who decided that?

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah.

[Salim Amin]

So nevermind putting what country.

[Neil Pasricha]

Exactly.

[Salim Amin]

Exactly. You know, he said, this is a, you know, this is a way to, to say that not everything is the right way up. Yes.

You know, the world can sometimes be the other way around.

[Neil Pasricha]

If you're flying in outer space, you know, you see things from a different angle. Yeah. There are little statues or lots of other cameras.

There's a whole kind of shelf behind us with books, lots of old books, which I love. We are sitting on a giant Brown leather couch. I'm padding it now here.

I've got my clipboard, I've got books with me. There's like a, like a little metal car, like a, like a safari car.

[Salim Amin]

So yeah, this was a Land Rover that was, was built by blind artisans in, in Nakuru. So it says that they, they, Nakuru is a little bit down near Pasna. I've actually going up towards the lakes.

It's, it's in Kenya. In Kenya. Yes.

And these are, you know, somebody, you know, blind artisans made a realistic Land Rover.

[Neil Pasricha]

Just from touch and feel. Yeah. It's like the size of a turtle. Like it's pretty big. Yeah.

And there's, and the bionic arm, just before we hit record, you said NASA made that.

[Salim Amin]

NASA designed that. Designed that. It was built in a, in a lab in Youngstown, Ohio.

Um, but it was designed, it was myoelectrics designed by NASA. Because when he lost his arm, he was at that time, the most famous cameraman in the world.

[Neil Pasricha]

I, I saw, I saw a note saying your dad had his photos published in every single newspaper in the whole world. I mean, that level of virality is not attainable today.

[Salim Amin]

In spite of the technology being available.

[Neil Pasricha]

You've been with it. It's like, but even like a friend of mine is Mel Robbins and she's, you know, yes, she's on Jimmy Fallon now and she's on Stephen Colbert and she's on Seth Meyers and she, her book's been number one forever and she's got the more followers on Instagram ever. But if I went to a newspaper in Jakarta, I don't think I'd see her face.

Do you know what I'm saying? Like that level of everywhere omnipresence is just, it's not attainable because the world is so fragmented.

[Salim Amin]

And given where he came from and his background and his history, you know, he achieved a lot in a very short life. Um, your dad was born what year? He was born in 1943.

And, and, and where? In Nairobi. He was born, but his parents were from where?

His parents were from Jalandhar at that time was, you know, was India, no partition. British ruled India.

[Neil Pasricha]

British ruled India.

[Salim Amin]

And they were born in like the 1910s? I would say probably, no, probably earlier than that, probably late, late 1800s. Um, and my grandfather then came to East Africa to build a railway, like many, like many Asians.

Oh, it's a railway. You know, he was a Mason. Um, he was a Mason and, and so he was brought to build, to build a railway, um, here.

So posted first in Nairobi. Yeah. And then, um, when my father was born here and, and then my grandfather was kind of moved around.

So my dad and his siblings were born in various parts of East Africa.

[Neil Pasricha]

So your grandparents on your dad's side, cause we're going to talk a little bit about your dad. We're going to talk about you. One of your former books, of course, is about your dad.

Um, it's called Mo, M-O, the story of Muhammad Amin, A-M-I-N by Brian Tetley, T-E-T-L-E-Y published in 1988 by Moonstone books, which I believe you read when you were like 15. Maybe it was published in 1985 then. I might have got the wrong pub date.

[Salim Amin]

Maybe, maybe, uh, maybe it was 15 or 16.

[Neil Pasricha]

I want listeners to know like we're leading into your dad because it's a formative book because you read it very young, but also because, um, we're, we're sitting in the offices in Nairobi of CameraPix. Yes. C-A-M-E-R-A-P-I-X, a company founded by your dad.

Yes. In the year. 1963.

1963. But just going back a little bit, because British ruled Kenya and British ruled India were, you know, part of the British empire. And India wasn't India yet.

I mean, it wasn't an independent country. That was not until 1947. And then pretty quickly after they were like, oh shit, we got to give a chunk of this to Pakistan for the Muslims.

Like how much after that was that like a year?

[Salim Amin]

Yeah. That, that, no, no, I mean, 47 was when partition happened, right? So, so I think independence was independence in inverted commas, you know, was, was, was sort of talked about from 44 onwards.

But 47 is when they celebrate independence from. For India. For both India and Pakistan.

[Neil Pasricha]

Oh, so the same year.

[Salim Amin]

Yeah, same year. So then Pakistan.

[Neil Pasricha]

I'm a little rusty. It wasn't like India was a country and then they split Pakistan off. It was like they did them both at the same time.

[Salim Amin]

They did them both. That was when the British kind of overnight disappeared. But I am again, divide and rule was the British is, you know, the, the, the modus operandi globally.

And that's what they did here. You know, splitting up all the countries in East and Central Africa, you know, along borders that were drawn up in Europe by people who had never set foot on the continent. And, and India and Pakistan was purely a divide and rule.

I mean, can you imagine India now what kind of a powerhouse it would be if it had never been partitioned and never happened? You know, so these are, these are some of the things that I think, sadly, we're paying the price for that now. Look at Gaza and, and, and Israel, you know, the British, the British had no right to give any of that land to, to Israel, you know, the right to create.

It wasn't their land to give, you know, it wasn't their land to give at all.

[Neil Pasricha]

You know, and this is, this is the tragedy of, of the time they gave it in 1948, it was called what? The entire. It was Palestine.

Palestine. It was Palestine. And they took a chunk of Palestine or all of Palestine.

[Salim Amin]

I mean, you know, first they came here, they, you know, they were looking at Uganda as a place to settle the Jews after the second world war. And I think they found that it's a little bit too wild for them. Then they tried Kenya and that didn't work.

And again, maybe just too sort of wild for them to, to, to, to settle in. And then, you know, the, the Holy land is, there's a, we seem to be the right thing to do, but who's under whose right was it, you know? And the Palestinians welcomed them with open arms because they felt these were, you know, their brothers and sisters who had suffered a pressure, tremendously, you know, in, in the Holocaust and, and, and, and so they welcomed them and look where we are now.

[Neil Pasricha]

The welcome mat has been lost since pulled away. It's been, yeah. And it's not, it's not, it's, it's, you know, Netanyahu on TV this morning at the hotel gym here in Nairobi, the, the quote on CNN.

And I said to the guy in the gym, I was like, can you turn off the news please? And then they put on like, this dance music. You would know it.

It's like, you know, like a Kenyan DJ with like eight people just dancing behind them the whole time. Bag. Yeah.

B-A-G. Okay. You know, so that was, that changed the vibe in the gym.

But the headline on CNN was Netanyahu declares independent Palestinian state, quote unquote, sheer madness.

[Salim Amin]

Yeah. I mean, it really, it's, you know, I sometimes wake up in the morning and I discussed this with, with my wife, Rizana with, with our daughters. And we all think, well, have we gone mad?

You know, are we just, you know, because it's insanity. What is happening in the world at the moment is absolutely insane.

[Neil Pasricha]

Watching it happen.

[Salim Amin]

You know, whether it's still happening, the Middle East is a disaster that, you know, it's a genocide. It's a slaughter. What's happening in the U S it's just, I mean, you know, Trump wants to go and invade Portland, Oregon, for God's sake.

You know, I mean, basically any blue state, any blue state, you know, that seems to be doing fine. You know, he wants to put his troops in, but it's just the, the, how split the world is and how, how, you know, how polarized we've become. It's, it's, it's shocking.

[Neil Pasricha]

It's shocking. And I just recently read Autocracy Inc by Anne Applebaum. She's a New York, sorry, an Atlantic staff writer who talks about the rise of autocracy.

And she says this line in the near the beginning of the book, which really stuck with me, which is during Arab spring, like the advent of Facebook, kind of creating like fervent movements for democracy that like helped to originally overthrow the then leader of Egypt, whose name I forgot.

[Salim Amin]

it was not Sisi came in off that it was, there was the, it was the Islamic government.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah.

[Salim Amin]

But I can't remember.

[Neil Pasricha]

It's okay. She, she wrote, and I would remember it after the show was recorded. But, but she says, you know, the assumption was that democracy would take over autocracy.

And actually the reverse has happened. That autocracy has taken over democracy because when you have centralized technology and centralized powers, you can actually more easily retain super extreme power and centralized positions. You can weaponize justice.

Like he's just, like he's doing with Trump is doing it. Put James Comey under arrest.

[Salim Amin]

A guy who actually made him president the first time around who basically facilitated it and made it easier for him to become president because the Comey report, because of Hillary Clinton's, uh, you know, uh, email, uh, you, when you look back now, you think you look and see what is happening now. And you look back at, you know, emails being sent from a private email address. You think, my God, was that really what, you know, what was so bad at the time when you see the kind of injustice that is being done now.

And, and it's, it's just crazy.

[Neil Pasricha]

I love your eyes right now. Cause they're glistening and you're fervent and you're a passionate. No, because you have energy, you have energy and you have, your dad is from a Muslim family and pre partition colonial British India, uh, which became part of Pakistan when he came over here in 1960.

[Salim Amin]

There would be sort of late, it would be sort of mid late 40, sorry, early 40s.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, early 40s. Then your dad sort of had a secret wedding. Or at least it was a wedding under secrecy as I understand it.

Marrying your mom because she's from a different religion.

[Salim Amin]

She was Ismaili. Ismaili. Yeah.

And he, and it was not acceptable in that.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah. And Ismaili, for those that don't know, how would you describe it?

[Salim Amin]

Well, I guess followers of the Al-Qa'an. Um, so it's a subsect of, of the Muslims, like the Shias, like the, you know, other, they're part of the Shia sect. Um, uh, but followers of the Al-Qa'an.

So, you know, there's all these kind of split. 10, 15 million around the world.

[Neil Pasricha]

Uh, heavily settled originally in East Africa. Now, obviously diaspora around the world.

[Salim Amin]

Big in Canada. Huge in Canada. And now Portugal as well.

[Neil Pasricha]

My wonderful chiropractor phase. Is, Is, Is, Ismaili. Yeah, Ismaili, wonderful people.

Yeah. Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, by the way, for those that may be listening in Toronto or visiting Toronto, it's, uh, like a breathtaking masterpiece.

[Salim Amin]

Worth seeing for sure.

[Neil Pasricha]

You've been? Yes. Oh, amazing.

[Salim Amin]

it's beautiful.

[Neil Pasricha]

Oh, this is great.

[Salim Amin]

What the Al-Qa'an has done, I mean, we're going off topic here, but what the Al-Qa'an has done, the, the, the previous Al-Qa'an who just passed away, I mean, quite incredible. The kind of work that they've done in, in, um, uh, sort of places in, in Southeast Asia. Hope like behavior.

Bless Africa.

[Neil Pasricha]

We're building hospitals, building schools.

[Salim Amin]

Universities, education, health. Yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

Novelists, Kenya Bay, and he is a professor at the Al-Qa'an University.

[Salim Amin]

That's right. He teaches in the, in the journalism department of the graduate school of media studies. Um, and, uh, no, it's, it's, it's quite a phenomenal story.

Um, but yeah, so it was back then. Yeah. Being a photographer first was not a profession, not considered a profession.

So my grandfather was, you know, extremely disappointed in my father, the wayward artists. Yes. You know, Because as like most South Asian families, you had to be doctor, accountant, lawyer.

That hasn't changed. That has nothing changed. That has not changed.

But back in those days, it was even worse.

[Neil Pasricha]

I still feel this pressure. I'm 46 years old. My dad still thinks I have a shot at men's middle.

[Salim Amin]

And you do. You're never too old.

[Neil Pasricha]

I could go to gay men's.

[Salim Amin]

Never too old. Never too old to learn. So they started off on the wrong footing.

My grandfather then, as soon as his term with building the railway was over, there was no doubt in his mind that he was going to go back to what was Pakistan at that time. But he was going to go back and insisted that my father follow him and that never was going to happen. Because dad had already started photographing and getting into photography and he was sort of 17, 18 years old at this point and decided that he was never going to go back.

[Neil Pasricha]

And your dad, for those that don't know, and Mohammed Amin was, as you have said already, the world's most prominent photographer, the world. And he went to Zanzibar. He was young, in his 20s, right?

[Salim Amin]

Yes, early 20s.

[Neil Pasricha]

And he took photographs of something you weren't supposed to take pictures of.

[Salim Amin]

Yeah. He stumbled, but using common sense, stumbled across a Soviet training camp. A Soviet training camp.

Training Zanzibar soldiers and building a missile base on Zanzibar. Now, this is at the height of the Cold War.

[Neil Pasricha]

Year approximately?

[Salim Amin]

The year was, I would say, 60, 67. Okay. 67.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, yeah.

[Salim Amin]

So we're like halfway between. The Cuban Missile Crisis was coming up. And so he stumbled and photographed and filmed the Soviet and East German advisors, trainings of Zanzibar troops.

They got him. No, they got him afterwards. And that footage went around the world.

Viral. It went around the world. It was used by Kennedy to negotiate with Khrushchev over the Cuban Missile Crisis because he had evidence that Khrushchev was denying that the Soviets had any kind of interest in Zanzibar or were building anything there.

So this was a vital piece of evidence that was used to negotiate the Cuban Missile Crisis. And so the KGB then, of course, found out who had shot this footage. And dad didn't know this, it's all happening behind the scenes.

And then he went back to Zanzibar to cover the visit of Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president at the time, was a state visit. So it was a normal assignment just to go and cover that. And so he went back to Zanzibar for that and the KGB picked him up at the airport and locked him up in Quilombo Migu prison, which at that time was one of the most notorious prisons.

And he was tortured and beaten for a month. Tortured for all sorts of things. I mean, they whipped him and they used sort of electrical, all that kind of ancient torture stuff.

[Neil Pasricha]

Ancient torture in the 1960s at a Soviet prison in Zanzibar where he came out after 28 days, he had lost 28 pounds.

[Salim Amin]

Yeah, a pound a day pretty much. Pound a day. Yeah.

And he's 22 years old at this point.

[Neil Pasricha]

Survived, but also thrived after that.

[Salim Amin]

Well, it was his baptism of fire. I think he could have at that point chucked it all in and said, so would I.

[Neil Pasricha]

I don't think I would have been like, you know what, I'm going to go to Ethiopia and shoot the famine now.

[Salim Amin]

No, it was his baptism of fire and he could have given up. I think his whole family told him to give it up, but it just hardened him. It forged him.

[Neil Pasricha]

Why do you think that happened?

[Salim Amin]

I think he just...

[Neil Pasricha]

You and I both just said, if we were tortured for 28 days...

[Salim Amin]

I would have given it up in a second.

[Neil Pasricha]

I would have gone undercover and gone right away.

[Salim Amin]

But I think he realized that... So he was deported to Kenya, you know, that was one of the conditions of his release. And I think he realized that, you know, this is the power that he has with this camera to tell people's stories that, you know, the voiceless is something that I think motivated and moved him.

And I think he realized that he was able to do this. And he also got a... You know, it wasn't purely, you know, charitable.

This was also, you know, it was also a very lucrative business because... There were not many people operating in this part of the world at that time. You sell the photos to Reuters or something.

And to multiple agencies. You know, you can... It became quite lucrative if you were able to get into places that nobody else was.

And he was very, very good at that. He may not have been the best, technically the best photographer or cameraman or photojournalist, but he could get into places that nobody else could.

[Neil Pasricha]

Like that French coronation. What was that about?

[Salim Amin]

Oh, Bukasa. Emperor Bukasa.

[Neil Pasricha]

Tell us a couple of stories about how he got into places or what places he got into. And then also, I'm curious, like, how do you get into... How is he doing this?

[Salim Amin]

So I mean, you know, again, at the time...

[Neil Pasricha]

For those of you that don't know, he kind of looks like, if you can picture, like... He looks a bit like Salman Rushdie kind of vibe.

[Salim Amin]

Yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

You know, he's got like glasses, the beard.

[Salim Amin]

The goatee. The goatee.

[Neil Pasricha]

And he's got this...

[Salim Amin]

Yeah, balding.

[Neil Pasricha]

I don't mean to say that, but I'm just trying to give people like an image. We could show an image on screen for those on YouTube. But for those listening, it's like, picture a guy who looks kind of like that.

He's in his 20s and his 30s. Tell us some places he got into. I mean, how did he...

[Salim Amin]

You know, some of the world exclusives that he got, when he came to Kenya, he was obviously starting up. He had to start anew. And it was a new territory, a new country for him.

But a few months after he came, he moved to Kenya. His office was in downtown Nairobi at that time. And a building or so down the street was a chemist pharmacy.

And he was in the office as he was pretty much 24-7. He spent most of his time in the office. This was a Saturday afternoon.

And he hears a gunshot and, you know, just instinctively grabs his cameras and goes down. And there's the assassination of Tom Boyer, who was touted to be Kenya's next president after Jomo Kenyatta. Tom Boyer was a very prominent minister.

One of the architects of the airlift that took Kenyans to the US to study Barack Obama's father was one of the recipients of that airlift that Boyer did with the Kennedys, with Bobby Kennedy in particular and JFK. And so he was a very prominent politician. He was just getting medicines from this pharmacy.

And a gunman assassinated him. From the government. Well, nobody knows.

I mean, it's questionable.

[Neil Pasricha]

Somebody wanted him out of the way.

[Salim Amin]

Because Boyer was a Luo. And Kenyatta, the ruling party at that time, was a majority Kikuyu. So you're talking about tribes names?

Tribal names, yes. So tribalism is one of the serious problems we have on this continent, not just in Kenya, but across the continent.

[Neil Pasricha]

Tribalism is defined as?

[Salim Amin]

You know, people of different tribes that can't really kind of seem to get... They all want power. And, you know, whether it's the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda that led to one of the darkest genocides in our history.

Or it was, you know, the Luo and Kikuyu tribes in Kenya that led to the post-election violence here in 2007. And one of your previous guests.

[Neil Pasricha]

Boniface Malengi, Chapter 104, the person who connected us, who I love, Boniface.

[Salim Amin]

Yes, you know, he made his name as a photojournalist covering the post-election violence. And so this is where that post-election violence stems from, is from these incidences that happened in the 60s, you know, where tribalism was never addressed. The issues were never addressed.

And they keep coming back to bite us in every election cycle.

[Neil Pasricha]

Although I hear that for Boniface's 2027 election campaign, in talking to his people, they're not bringing tribalism into the race.

[Salim Amin]

The young people now, this generation now, the Gen Zs and others don't seem to be paying much attention to tribalism, which is good. Yeah. And hopefully that'll be...

It just takes time to work through these things.

[Neil Pasricha]

It does.

[Salim Amin]

But every conflict in the world has got something to do with tribalism, whether it's religious differences, or it's ethnicity, or it's color. These are all forms of tribalism or of prejudice in some way, shape, or form. So yes, so Tom Boyer, so he was there with his cameras immediately after Mboya was shot.

Got a picture of the dead body. Filmed and photographed the doctors in the pharmacy trying to revive him. The ambulance company went into the ambulance with them.

He just walked in. Well, you know, the ambulance driver was like, you know, panicking. Yeah, it's an emergency.

He told him where to go, which hospital to take him to. Doctors are trying to revive Mboya inside the ambulance. Then at Nairobi Hospital.

He was there photographing and filming every single...

[Neil Pasricha]

And it sounds like he's also helpful on the scene.

[Salim Amin]

He was also helpful. He even went to hide Mboya's body because there was a mass of people that came to the hospital to try and get his body out. Wow.

Again, because they felt that he was such a hero. So they wanted to come and claim the body. And he helped to hide it.

With the doctors, they went and hid it in some other room in the hospital so people couldn't find him. You know, but it was a massive story.

[Neil Pasricha]

Being helpful is one tool for getting into places.

[Salim Amin]

It was a massive, massive story. Of course, of course. And those pictures still resonate today.

And then, you know, you mentioned the coronation of Jean Bidel Bukassa, who was the so-called emperor of the Central African Republic. You know, small little tin pot country.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, small. Give us a little bit of tiny bit of context on this.

[Salim Amin]

So the Central African Republic is in Central Africa. It's a little, little country. And Bukassa wanted to be crowned as emperor.

This is the year...

[Neil Pasricha]

This would be sort of early 70s. Okay, now we're in the early 70s. You're not in his 30s now, maybe?

[Salim Amin]

Now he's in his, yeah, sort of his late 20s, early 30s. And there's this coronation that's going to happen that's being styled around the coronation of Napoleon. Okay.

But this is a country...

[Neil Pasricha]

Is this like a bribery coronation? Is this one of those...

[Salim Amin]

No, no, no. This is a country that basically Bukassa blew a quarter of his country's national budget on this one event.

[Neil Pasricha]

It's kind of like Trump's heading that way.

[Salim Amin]

I would completely agree with you.

[Neil Pasricha]

But when you put posters in every building and you make parades on your birthday, you are spending national money in your honor. Yes, absolutely. Whether that's 0.1% of the budget or then 1% of the budget, this guy...

So we're talking extreme wealth inequality, extreme dictatorship, extreme autocracy. Then at that point, we still have... Just so people watching this can have a rule of thumb, it's 25% of your country's budget you spent on your birthday party on coronation by becoming king, right?

And then do tell, they had an official deal with some photo outlet.

[Salim Amin]

Well, yeah. So it was the French because it was a French colony, a former French colony. The French had obviously got exclusive rights, negotiated exclusive rights to film this.

And dad, sitting in Nairobi, was like, bugger this. I'm not going to... This is my patch.

I'm going to go and see this. So they do... Him and a correspondent make some inquiries and they realize that they're told, yes, you come there, but you have to be properly dressed in a morning suit with the top hat and tails and everything.

Otherwise, they will cut off your ears when you arrive. So they don't have this attire. So they go to the local theater company here and they rent this morning suit and top hat.

As if they're attendees. And so they change on the plane so that when they land, they're doing this. And it's like 40, 45 degrees Celsius, right?

Which is over 100 and something degrees Fahrenheit.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah. Double it by 30.

[Salim Amin]

Yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

It's 120.

[Salim Amin]

So it's sweltering hot. And they don't have visas or anything. They haven't got any visas.

But the immigration guys are laughing so much because they're sweating and they're laughing so much they just stamp their passports and let them in. So then they come to the church. They don't have anywhere to stay.

Everything's booked out. Small little town. So they go and sleep in the church where the coronation is going to happen.

And obviously, security is not like it was, like it is now. It was not like that then. And so they sleep in the church.

And the next morning, everyone's getting prepared. And because they're so well-dressed, the French media assumed that they were just guests, amateurs taking. It's only when a little bit later on, they realize, shit, this guy's a professional photographer.

[Neil Pasricha]

He has like six cameras hanging from his back.

[Salim Amin]

He was kind of hiding them. And then he kind of took them out when they knew the emperor was on his way or Bokassa was on his way. And there was a fight.

The French media started, you know, starting a fight. Like punching each other. And so he just kicked over their cameras.

They had set up their cameras on tripods. So he just kicked all the cameras over. And so all their cameras, camera equipment shattered on the ground.

And as this ruckus was going on, the bugle sounded and Bokassa entered the church. And I just went right up the red carpet, right in front of Bokassa, wide angle lens, and walking backwards, photographing the emperor coming in, in all his regalia and his crown.

[Neil Pasricha]

He must have had a crown, like a lion's crown or something.

[Salim Amin]

He had jewels and all sorts of, exactly like Napoleon. And he had a throne set up and built with an eagle, you know, beautiful pictures. And he ended up getting the only images of that.

So these are some of the things that, you know, getting into Idi Amin's Uganda, you know, again, Tells this story now.

[Neil Pasricha]

Now what you're, you know, He's here.

[Salim Amin]

This is now early 70s. And there's been a military coup in Uganda. This army general, you know, called Idi Amin has taken over.

But there's, you know, the press corps is all sitting in Nairobi because this was always the base for the foreign correspondents. So he calls, he has a black book of contacts. So he calls up a state house in Kampala and the operator picks it up.

And, you know, he's like, you know, How is the capital of Uganda? Kampala is the capital of Uganda. Uganda's touching Kenya.

It's the bordering East African community, Tanzania and Kenya. And the operator picks it up. And, you know, that just says, can I speak to General Amin?

And the operator is like, well, who are you? And so without thinking, he says, well, my name is Muhammad Amin. And the operator put him directly through to Idi.

[Neil Pasricha]

Oh my God.

[Salim Amin]

Because I think the operator assumed he's a relative.

[Neil Pasricha]

So for those that have seen the movie, The Last King of Scotland starring Forest Whitaker, this is one of the most tyrannical dictators of human history. And you just call him on the phone.

[Salim Amin]

Well, you call state house. And like I said, this operator assumed that he was a family member, must be a brother or a cousin because he had the law. And that didn't put two and two together.

It didn't think that way. When the guy said, who are you?

[Neil Pasricha]

It's a common last name.

[Salim Amin]

It is, I mean, it's not common-ish. I mean, I've heard of it. Muslims, Idi was a Muslim as well.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah. And so Amin is- But this is like, it's not like you'd never heard it before.

[Salim Amin]

No, but the operator in that moment must have thought, bloody hell, this is a new president has come in. As a relative, I must put him straight through to the general. And Idi was very good.

And dad explained, I'm a journalist in Kenya. I'd like to come and film your triumph.

[Speaker 4]

Complimentary.

[Salim Amin]

You know, I'll always have to- So he knew he wanted to get on the right side of Idi. And Idi was, you know, loved the publicity, obviously wanted to recover- But he never let any other people in. And he just said, give me the details of your plane, your flight number, and I will meet you at the airport.

In Entebbe, which is where the airport is in Uganda. And the city where the airport is. And sure enough, he was there on the runway when they came and drove them himself around Kampala to say, you see how happy my people are that I've taken over.

And, you know, this is an example of using your contacts, but then also making the most of the situation that you're in and taking advantage once you get in of, you know, saying and doing the right things. And this is where the experience of being an African in Africa is something that foreign correspondents will have, always had difficulty doing it. The people that came to parachute in for a story and leave, they didn't make those kind of connections and contacts and, you know, didn't know the lay of the land.

[Neil Pasricha]

Relationship and networking. There's ingratiation, which we've heard, like just like, I want to talk about your triumph. Yeah.

There's also like, and I'm just speculating here because you're also a photojournalist and your dad's a photojournalist and our mutual friend Boniface Mwangi is a photojournalist. There's almost like a moral ambivalence that you have to hold because, and to the point of like not expressing a view, what I'm saying is, if you were going to try to capture inside Netanyahu's house right now or inside the Hamas facility, you would need to hold your personal viewpoints deeply in check.

[Salim Amin]

And that is what journalism was always about. It's supposed to be objective, unbiased reporting. Unfortunately, that has changed.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, that's...

[Salim Amin]

That has changed completely over the last...

[Neil Pasricha]

There is no such thing anymore.

[Salim Amin]

Doesn't exist anymore.

[Neil Pasricha]

What we consider, when I grew up, what we considered the CBC, Canadian Broadcast Corporation, similar to the KBC or the BBC. Well, this was considered like the most, they don't have advertisements, it's from the government.

[Salim Amin]

The BBC was the same.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah.

[Salim Amin]

You know, NBC, ABC, CBS.

[Neil Pasricha]

These were considered like objective, straightforward, blunt.

[Salim Amin]

Absolutely.

[Neil Pasricha]

The guy on the 10 o'clock news isn't smiling or frowning. You know.

[Salim Amin]

They just said it as it was. Said it, say it as it is. And then it was up to you as the viewer to decide your opinion on that piece.

Nowadays, unfortunately, I think, unfortunately, journalists have become more important than the story, in many cases. The personalities have become more important than the actual people that they're reporting.

[Neil Pasricha]

You gotta look good. How's your Instagram story? How many followers do you have on your sub stack?

How many readers do you have? And then we get this incredible fragmentation, which is so difficult to follow. My poor dad is eight years old.

I mean, I grew up with him reading the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail, two newspapers a day. I'm begging him to get a newspaper subscription again. I get everything I need on Apple News.

I'm like, Dad, Apple News is an algorithm. It's run by the largest technology company in the world that owns more money than the top 100 companies in Europe. You trust them to tell you what to read?

That's what you think about. So then my dad, my 80-year-old father, who's a brilliant man, he will come up to me and he'll say, oh, did you hear Taylor Swift got engaged?

[Salim Amin]

But that's what his algorithm is giving him, right? Exactly.

[Neil Pasricha]

This is the guy that used to tell me what was going on in the stock market. And I love my dad. It's not my dad's fault.

It's just that as our brains get a little bit more acceptable.

[Salim Amin]

Young people today think what they see on social media is reality. That if you read it on X or you see it on Instagram or on TikTok, Facebook maybe is a different generation. But what you see on social media is fact rather than saying this is somebody's viewpoint.

Go and check with three or four. If I want to know the reality behind a news story or a breaking news story or any event, I will have to watch four or five different channels. That's exhausting.

It's completely exhausting. Read three or four different newspapers.

[Neil Pasricha]

And it's such a level of intellectual discernment that is not taught anymore and it's very difficult to parse.

[Salim Amin]

We are in an age where people want to get everything in 148 characters.

[Neil Pasricha]

I saw on Twitter, and I refuse to call it X, I just think Twitter is a far better name, and a post on X is so inferior to a tweet on Twitter. So it's Twitter to me style. I saw on Twitter last week a shot of Alkaraz, the number one ranked men's tennis player, not the big open, but whatever, the junior tour, falling over, grabbing his leg and screaming in pain.

And the person hovered over their thing and their thing said something legit. It sounded legit. They had a lot of followers.

Oh no, Alkaraz is down with severe pain. Achilles? So I thought, oh my gosh, poor Alkaraz.

He snapped his Achilles. Then later in the day, I'm walking through an airport or something, and I see in the corner of the screen, Alkaraz...

[Salim Amin]

16262, I remember that day.

[Neil Pasricha]

I was like, wait, I finally snapped his Achilles. And I Google it and it's like, there's no mention of this anywhere. It's like he fell down for a second.

[Salim Amin]

But I saw... He kind of twisted his ankle.

[Neil Pasricha]

I thought for sure it was like... Because I saw that on Twitter. And it looked like from a good source.

It had a lot of followers. It had the photo evidence. I knew he was playing that day.

He was wearing the new purple clothes with the blonde hair. I was like, this is a fresh video. It passed through my brain like it was a fact.

[Salim Amin]

But it did happen and it was a fact, but it wasn't Achilles. It was basically he twisted his ankle. But it's that split second when you capture something that then is blown out of proportion.

We seem to do that a lot. We seem to do that a lot with context. Now, there is no context.

And this is what journalism and photojournalism in particular... Now, I keep telling young people when I have a chance to speak to people or lecture at universities, the chances of a photojournalist, a real photojournalist being the first person at a breaking news story with the first pictures is like winning the lottery. Those are the odds.

Because there will always be somebody with a mobile phone that will capture the bomb blast, the car accident, plane crash, whatever it is, train crash, whatever it might be. So our job now has changed from being the bearer of the news to providing context and background and reality and giving people a historical look at why this incident happened, what is the context behind it, and then where are we going to go in the future rather than just that one snapshot.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, 100%. And how both infuriating that must be for those that have practiced in the craft and skill of true photojournalism and how also worrisome it is for those like me who are slightly paranoid about living in a panopticon, like a surveillance state where nothing can happen without everyone having a film of it. Doesn't that make you think that you're always on tape?

The art hall was on tape. I could walk out of this place. I could go to my hotel.

I'm being film tracks followed the whole time. It's like crazy. That's like people would just accept that this is okay.

[Salim Amin]

Yeah, no, it worries the hell out of me that we have no privacy, whether it's other people filming you or it's the CCTV coverage that seems to be everywhere on most city streets. This is one of the good things about living in Africa is that we don't have that kind of coverage.

[Neil Pasricha]

There's no police looking like...

[Salim Amin]

There's supposed to be, but most of it doesn't work.

[Neil Pasricha]

But they're not tracking your faces and matching up...

[Salim Amin]

No, not yet, not yet. It'll come because, again, we are very tech savvy. Yeah.

Kenya, in particular, is very tech savvy.

[Neil Pasricha]

But privacy is the new luxury. If you can go off to some distant island that you own... Yes.

No one knows where Jeff Bezos is because he has $180 million yacht. It's in the middle of the ocean. So he's hiding.

He's living in hiding.

[Salim Amin]

Somebody still knows.

[Neil Pasricha]

Somebody might know.

[Salim Amin]

Somebody still knows. Satellites, remember. Somebody still knows.

[Neil Pasricha]

Remember Elon Musk? Elon Musk buys Twitter. And one of the first things he does is disable the feed of the guy who was tracking his plane.

Yes, that's right. So he said, the bird is free. You know, we'll take off the handcuffs.

And the first thing I'm gonna do is shut down you, shut down you, shut down you. You're out of here.

[Salim Amin]

Hypocrisy is, you know, it's mind-blowing. But nobody calls these people out on it. Or they do, and that gets...

[Neil Pasricha]

The algorithm has decided to mute that story. Yes, suppress it. Suppress it because someone owns the algorithm.

So just for those that don't know, so your dad is like the world's preeminent photojournalist. But then in 1980, in the early 80s, he covers something that's sort of truly life-changing for him and a lot of people. And then he very sadly has an untimely and early demise.

Would you mind just sharing those two incidents? And this is kind of wrapped around the way, you know, you at age 15 sort of learn about your dad through a blue-covered, hardcover book that's written by Brian Tetley, which, by the way, you can find under 778.59 for art slash photography slash filmmaking slash video production. You know, because we're kind of underneath this umbrella of this book, The Story of Muhammad Amin, which I have right here and I'll show up on the camera.

To talk about... And by the way, the back says, Massacre on the Horn, Bloodbath in Bangladesh, Bokassa and the Congo, Bombs in Beirut, and in big letters, Ethiopian Famine, 1984.

[Salim Amin]

So the famine was... You know, he'd been covering Ethiopia for decades, but the famine was... You know, there was rumblings of a famine.

There was rumors of a famine. You asked about the hat earlier on. Yeah, Mengistu Hailemariam was running the country.

There was a rebel movement from the north, which was trying to oust Mengistu. And there had been drought, almost 10 years of drought. And then, you know, the famine started coming into effect because Mengistu was using food as a weapon.

So he was strangling the amount of food...

[Neil Pasricha]

Kind of like what's happening in Palestine.

[Salim Amin]

Absolutely right. What is happening in Sudan, what is happening in northern Ethiopia, again today... Is happening today.

[Neil Pasricha]

So I'm not aware of Sudan.

[Salim Amin]

There's 26 million people on the verge of starvation. It's one of the great untold stories of this world. Right now.

At the moment. Right now, as we speak.

[Neil Pasricha]

We must uncover it. By the way, I'm doing this... Why am I in Nairobi for four days doing three interviews back to back?

I'm trying my best to take a 55 country, 1 billion person populace and bring stories back to our listenership, which is global. But if I look at the top countries that listen, it's Canada, US, England, Australia. You know, there's some China, there's some India, there's some Japan.

But we're not getting these stories, like at all. So Ethiopian famine, there's a rebel coming in. He's using food as a weapon.

He's purposely starving his own populace, which is millions of people.

[Salim Amin]

Yes. Which is about 8 or 9 million people on the verge of starvation.

[Neil Pasricha]

It's a tool of war, as is happening in Palestine and Sudan and northern Ethiopia today. Then there's rumors of it.

[Salim Amin]

There's rumors because those days, there was no mobile phones, there was no satellites, there was no drones, there was none of that. So, and he, through his contacts, through the people that he knows, hears about this, you know, and hears about the situation. It's almost impossible to get permission from the Ethiopian government in order to get to these areas in the north, because there's also a war happening, a civil war that's going on.

So it's very easy for the Ethiopian government to deny permission.

[Neil Pasricha]

You can't just rest on your tails.

[Salim Amin]

Yeah, and you don't have... So, you know, he works, his contacts and everything, and eventually gets the permission only because the people in the Ministry of Information in Ethiopia realize that there is, the roads and flight networks have been blocked and stopped because of the war. So there's no way, even if they give permission, there's no way for them to get there.

So not knowing that he had had conversations with World Vision, which at that time was one of the largest NGOs in the world.

[Neil Pasricha]

Of course, it's the logo right now.

[Salim Amin]

Yes, and World Vision had a plane with food, but no permissions. The government wasn't going to give them permission. So he had done this deal with Peter Searle, who was the head of World Vision at the time, and said, Fried Pete, if I get the permissions, you get us on that plane and we go to Northern Ethiopia.

And that's how they made it there. When the Ethiopian government...

[Neil Pasricha]

I don't get it. So they said...

[Salim Amin]

So the government didn't know that he had any contact with...

[Neil Pasricha]

The government got the permission. His contacts had a plane, World Vision, with food.

[Salim Amin]

With no permission.

[Neil Pasricha]

With no permission, so they put them together.

[Salim Amin]

Exactly, and they got on that.

[Neil Pasricha]

It's kind of like helping the ambulance driver get to the hospital again.

[Salim Amin]

Exactly. And so they got there. Him, BBC correspondent Michael Burke, and BBC radio correspondent Mike Wooldridge, the three of them, and got on this plane, landed in Mekelle in Northern Ethiopia, and basically walked into the single largest natural disaster or human disaster of the 20th century.

[Neil Pasricha]

Just to give people the size of the scope of what was happening, so 10 million people...

[Salim Amin]

10 million people on the verge of starvation. What do you mean on the verge? On the verge, like with nothing.

We're like people who were not lost. There's nothing in the storehouse, there's nothing in the harvest, there's no food coming in. They moved out of their villages and their homes, and come to these, you know, bigger areas.

[Neil Pasricha]

As we all remember through the 80s of the emaciated...

[Salim Amin]

Children.

[Neil Pasricha]

Young, basically bones with flies around.

[Salim Amin]

Absolutely right. And those were... And so they stepped into this famine, and, you know, the footage that came out of that is the footage that it was the single longest news piece ever broadcast in broadcast history.

The single longest news piece? Eight minutes. It was an eight minute piece, which in the history of broadcasting had never been broadcast on primetime television.

So BBC, CBC...

[Neil Pasricha]

Because he got this, he sold it through his company.

[Salim Amin]

Well, no, he was working with the BBC, he was working with an organization called Reuters. He was a bureau chief for an agency called Viz News, which then became Reuters Television in the 90s. And the BBC was one of the owners of Viz.

So it was a BBC team, Michael Burke and Mike Wooldridge, and he was doing the filming. And they went out on the BBC first, and then NBC, who was their affiliate partner...

[Neil Pasricha]

With the government, of course, not knowing about this.

[Salim Amin]

With the Ethiopian government not knowing about this until it was too late. And NBC in the US, with Tom Brokaw, picked up that. Of course.

A CBC crew was a few days... We'll take that story. Yeah, a CBC crew was a few days behind them, and they then also did a big deal...

[Neil Pasricha]

And it became the front page news of the whole world.

[Salim Amin]

And it became the single... Yeah, I mean, over a billion people watched that news piece.

[Neil Pasricha]

And just so people know, the world population at the time was like four to five billion.

[Salim Amin]

So Live Aid, then Band Aid, Do They Know It's Christmas, Bob Geldof watched this piece on BBC.

[Neil Pasricha]

We went through that real quick. So for people that don't know...

[Salim Amin]

Bob Geldof watched this on the news and decided that he needed to do something. Sitting around and being outraged or being disgusted was not good enough. So he was not a very successful singer.

The Boomtown Rats was not a very successful band at the time, but he had contacts in the music industry. So he got people together and created this super group that was called Band Aid, which had people like George Michael and Sting and Bono. You know, it was this...

It was... I don't remember all of the artists.

[Neil Pasricha]

Axl Rose was in there.

[Salim Amin]

Not for Band Aid. I'm not sure for Band Aid. No, that was We Are The World.

Now we're looking at the UK. This was the UK version of...

[Neil Pasricha]

It's pretty much like they take the top singers. Imagine right now...

[Salim Amin]

George Michael.

[Neil Pasricha]

Everybody together.

[Salim Amin]

Boy George. On one stage. Yeah, David Bowie.

All of them were part of the Band Aid initiative.

[Neil Pasricha]

With call in, please and pledge some money.

[Salim Amin]

Well, this was just the recording of the song first. And then so they recorded Do They Know It's Christmas? And it came out on Christmas.

Massive response, I think, became the fastest selling single of all time. So that was a combination of Midyear and Bob Geldof that wrote They wrote that song. Do They Know It's Christmas?

So then Harry Belafonte, who was this amazing singer, as well as activist and campaigner of human rights, UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador back in the day. Harry is inspired by what Bob has done in the UK and decides that we need to do the same thing in the US. So he pulls in Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder and Quincy Jones.

And they record We Are The World with 40 of America's most popular musicians from Springsteen to Dylan, Bob Dylan. Michael Jackson there. Michael Jackson was there.

Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie wrote the song. We Are The World. We Are The World.

They wrote We Are The World. Quincy Jones was the maestro that put everything together. And you had basically Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder.

Everyone who was anyone in the music industry in the US was there. And they recorded this song, which to date is I think the third largest selling single of all time. It became an anthem for the ages.

And then Geldof in the summer of 1985, July 1985, puts together Live Aid. And Live Aid is still the single largest concert in our history. Really?

Still to this day. How big was it? Well, 1.9 billion people watched Live Aid on television. And that was 40% of the world's population.

[Neil Pasricha]

And did this work? Did all this...

[Salim Amin]

Billions and billions of dollars were raised. And? Seven or eight million people's lives were saved in Ethiopia.

[Neil Pasricha]

How many people died?

[Salim Amin]

A million, a million and a half died. 1.5 million died of that from seven to eight million. But you know, we were talking about 10 million earlier.

So you're looking at about, you know, eight and a half million people survived because of those pictures, because of that movement. And 40 years on, what's interesting, Neil, is when the world is in a much worse place than it was in the 1980s, we have so much more technology and resources, but yet we cannot do a movement like that again. And this is a question that fascinated me and drove me and my partnership to make our new documentary called Stand Together As One.

And this came out a couple of months ago in the US doing the circuit of the film festivals at the moment.

[Neil Pasricha]

The famine, the music, the impact.

[Salim Amin]

So we look at the famine and the story of the famine. We look at the music. We look at, you know, Band Aid USA for Africa, which is We Are The World and Live Aid.

And then we look at where the money went over the last 40 years. And it's a great story because USA for Africa in particular was only supposed to be around for two or three years for famine relief efforts. And 40 years on is still going, still giving half a million dollars a year to different organizations around the continent, whether it's a community radio station in Senegal or an LGBT theater group in Uganda or an orphanage in Ethiopia.

They still are giving $5,000, $10,000 grants to like 60 or 70 organizations.

[Neil Pasricha]

From the propulsive force of this 1.9 billion person-watched concert, you still are getting half a million dollars a day.

[Salim Amin]

From the song of We Are The World, not even from the concert.

[Neil Pasricha]

Oh, not even from the concert.

[Salim Amin]

It's from We Are The World itself. The royalties of We Are The World, the downloads now that there's Spotify and all these other platforms. So the downloads are still happening.

Every time there's a crisis, We Are The World is revisited in terms of an anthem that people can use to mobilize humanity. But we really do need to mobilize humanity again. And there's never been another concert like Live Aid.

No. There's never in our history, there never was one before that. And there's never where two continents simultaneously have 16 hours of live music.

You have the biggest musicians, Queens, Freddie Mercury's most famous performance was at Live Aid in Wembley.

[Neil Pasricha]

And this is all happening. You're like 14 years old.

[Salim Amin]

I'm like 15 years old. I'm not realizing that this is all because of my father.

[Neil Pasricha]

And you're the only child of your father.

[Salim Amin]

Yes.

[Neil Pasricha]

You're the only child of your father and your mother.

[Salim Amin]

Yes.

[Neil Pasricha]

And you have this giant thing happening around you.

[Salim Amin]

But I had no idea that this was... I mean, we watched Live Aid and whatever. We love the music because I knew...

He had no idea about music. He had no clue about who these musicians were, what they were. But I didn't realize the importance of the fact that it was his images that created this movement, that started this movement, that changed history and the history of humanitarian aid as well.

1984-85 was pivotal in how NGOs operated globally. It became a business. Sadly, in a bit of a negative way, it became a trillion-dollar business as well.

There were hundreds of NGOs that were formed because of the famine in Ethiopia. And it became a business. Sadly, instead of it being to help people in a lot of ways, it was a business.

[Neil Pasricha]

And it wasn't that many years after that your dad sadly passed away.

[Salim Amin]

So then, yeah. So then we fast forward to 1991, which is the fall of Mengistu, the dictator. The rebel armies now have made it to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.

And they're taking over the country. Mengistu flees to Zimbabwe to his friend Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. But there's a massive explosion in the city that was set off.

It was the largest ammunition dump in Africa, was hidden, buried, hidden under one of the shanty towns in Addis Ababa. And this somehow caught, nobody knows how it caught, went up. Someone either sabotaged it or it went off on its own.

But this huge explosion, four o'clock in the morning, he goes out to cover the explosion. There's a secondary explosion which blows off his left arm, his left arm gets taken out by an RPG from this ammunition dump. His sound engineer, John Bethai, dies next to him, is killed immediately by the force of the blast next to him.

So he loses his left arm. He's evacuated back to Nairobi. They amputate the arm.

Within three months, he scours the world for a bionic arm that will allow him to shoot again, to film and photograph again. Finds it through NASA technology at a clinic in Ohio in the U.S. And they fix him with this bionic arm that's designed to operate a camera lens.

[Neil Pasricha]

So he flies home from Ethiopia with no arm.

[Salim Amin]

Yeah, airlifted by an ambulance, air ambulance. With just his arms gone. Yeah, I mean, his hand was intact up to the elbow, but between the hand, the wrist and the elbow, there was nothing left.

They thought that they might be able to use, you know, they had neuro...

[Neil Pasricha]

They put a tourniquet or something. Yeah, they put a tourniquet. Imagine the sheer amount of shock that would cause.

[Salim Amin]

And he was lucky he was carrying his stills camera around on his shoulder. So the RPG went into the stills cameras and that saved it. RPG stands for?

Rocket propelled grenade. That was part of the stuff that was the explosion. And his right arm...

[Neil Pasricha]

And the baptism by fire many years ago in the KGB-run Zanzibar prison also steeled his resolve to handle this, what is almost like a psychologically insurmountable crisis.

[Salim Amin]

Yeah, I mean, there was no one-armed cameraman in the world.

[Neil Pasricha]

It almost seems, and I don't mean to sound... This might sound odd, but it's almost like... So he dies in an Ethiopian hijacked plane, your dad.

[Salim Amin]

A few years, five years later, yes.

[Neil Pasricha]

I mean, this life, this story...

[Salim Amin]

It's a hell of a story.

[Neil Pasricha]

It's like a crazy freaking story, man.

[Salim Amin]

You can't write this stuff, put it that way. I mean, people will not believe...

[Neil Pasricha]

You're the only child of him.

[Salim Amin]

Yeah, people will not believe. And we're hoping, there's a feature film in the works as well, a biopic on his life. Who's playing him?

We don't know yet. We're talking to a couple of people, but there's some interesting people. There is the wonderful Gurinder Chadha of Bended Like Beckham fame, who will be the producer, who's the executive producer.

She's written the script with this wonderful writer in South Africa.

[Neil Pasricha]

What also pressure for you, though?

[Salim Amin]

No, no pressure for me, Neil, at all. You don't feel like you got...

[Neil Pasricha]

Look, I know they'll never be...

[Salim Amin]

He was a unique individual. And there's not... These kinds of people come around once in a generation that can do those things.

He was only 52 years old when he died, which is very young. I'm older than him. You've lived longer than he has.

So I've lived longer than he has. But in his lifetime, he accumulated this archive of 8.5 million images, 25,000 hours of video. I was basically a steward.

I've done two books in my 55 years. He published over 100 coffee table books and stuff in that time, as well as making over 100 documentaries and covering every major news. You know, no, too late now, unfortunately.

I wish I should have. I should have done that a long time ago. I always had this bug from when I was eight or nine years old.

I started shooting when I was eight or nine years old. I was first published when I was 10 in Time magazine. And I don't think they knew it was a 10-year-old that was whose photo it was.

But I used to go and cover the East African Safari Rally with him. And that was where I learned my photography and my passion. And he never wanted me to do this.

His father before him, he was like, you know, get a real job. Don't do this. But that's all I ever wanted to do.

So I went to university. Do not as I do, do as I say. He said, it's a tough life.

It's not a great life. You know, it's difficult with family and everything. And because I never did see much of him.

I mean, I went away to university and did a degree in journalism. But I, you know, he came to visit my university. He came for my graduation for one day.

That was the only time he ever came to visit me in university. I would come back here over holidays.

[Neil Pasricha]

But he was an assistant. He was an absent.

[Salim Amin]

Well, he was absent because he was busy all the time.

[Neil Pasricha]

I'm not, I'm not, I'm not like saying he wasn't busy. And obviously his career certainly speaks for itself. I mean, I'm, you know, I get it and in times and eras.

But like, if I were to ask you like lessons as a father that you gleaned.

[Salim Amin]

Well, yeah, not to be like, I figured that if my children ever have to make a film about me, then I've seriously failed them. You know, I made, I made a documentary on his life called Moe and Me.

[Neil Pasricha]

I don't mean that way, I'm saying it the other way.

[Salim Amin]

But I, you know, I, I mean, I, I, no, look, he was.

[Neil Pasricha]

Like you're a present dad.

[Salim Amin]

Yes, I've spent a lot of time. I have a very close relationship with my daughter. This is the opposite of what your dad does.

Yes, yes. I think, I know that he loved me. I know that he adored me.

I think that he felt he had more time. Um, I don't think he anticipated living only 52 years. And, uh, I think he anticipated that we would have more time together to be able to, but he still was trying to finish things.

[Neil Pasricha]

When I'm in my sixties and he's in his thirties, we will have his life together. Exactly. Though he was constantly putting himself in a clearly dangerous situation.

[Salim Amin]

Yeah, but I mean, the hijacked Ethiopian Airlines plane that he died on was no, you know, it wasn't a situation he put himself in. No. It was a bunch of amateurs hijacking a flight that, uh, that ran out of fuel and crashed.

[Neil Pasricha]

And someone else captured that.

[Salim Amin]

And yes, uh, the honeymoon couple from South Africa on the beach of the Camorras, uh, islands, uh, you know, just filming each other on their honeymoon and, uh, turned around and saw this plane coming 737 coming out and crashing into the ocean. That was 1996. That he was the arm.

Was the arm. November 96.

[Neil Pasricha]

He came to your graduation.

[Salim Amin]

Yes, in Vancouver, in Vancouver. So yeah, so I went to university in Vancouver. No, no, actually I went to Langara, which was a college at the time because when I was there, Langara was the only, um, institute on the West coast that taught journalism.

UBC or SFU, um, never taught journalism or communications. Now they're big, big deals on that. But the Vancouver community college, uh, uh, system had, uh, um, BCCI, Langara and, and VCC or something Vancouver community college.

And they taught journalism and, uh, and the only, I was, you know, I had the option of going to McGill or, um, or, or Ryerson on in Toronto, which was also big on journalism, but I couldn't handle the weather on that side. So, uh, you know, and I had family, my mom's family was in Vancouver.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah.

[Salim Amin]

You don't feel pressure. Because I, I made it very clear to people that I will never achieve what he achieved. I will do my own thing.

[Neil Pasricha]

You say that right up.

[Salim Amin]

I will do my own thing.

[Neil Pasricha]

I will, I will. I'm not in this game. No.

[Salim Amin]

I'm not playing. I'm not playing. I'm happy to be.

[Neil Pasricha]

He got a Royal flush on this career. I'm happy to just get a couple pairs.

[Salim Amin]

I still get introduced as his son and that makes me proud. Aw. You know, I still get introduced as his son, especially from a certain generation of people.

They will say, Oh, do you remember this person? This is his son. So, um, you know, it's, and I put the pressure on myself because I chose the same career.

Yeah. As him. Yeah.

If I'd been something completely different, like a doctor or an accountant or whatever, I wouldn't have that type of pressure. But then I think that I would have lost out on what I love doing, which is, which is telling stories, um, which is doing interviews, which is, I had my own talk show for, um, for five years. I told people here, I was interviewing you.

[Neil Pasricha]

They're all like, Oh, is he still on the TV?

[Salim Amin]

Yeah. So I did the scoop for five years and, and, and, you know, 150 amazing interviews with people from around the continent. Um, I, I, I, you know, we've been working on building, um, uh, Kenya's largest museum for the last five, six years with the government.

Well, it's called, it's called Uhuru Gardens National Museum. It's in Nairobi by Wilson airport. Um, it's this magnificent, absolutely magnificent museum.

It's not open yet, sadly. I can't go. So you can't go because it's, um, it's not open yet.

And you know, it's just, again, this, this things have slowed down.

[Neil Pasricha]

But when you work on the projects that you work on, these things take forever. Like that's just the way they are.

[Salim Amin]

That's just the way they are. But what it did give me an opportunity to do was to interview people that are, have been instrumental in this country's history, which I love people in their nineties, hundreds, eighties, nineties, hundreds, who have never spoken about their lives and played a huge role in getting Kenya's independence and, and stewarding the country, uh, through, through the, the, the, the, the post-independence era.

And I absolutely love it. And then I find that we have all of their content in our archive because dad photographed them, filmed them, was at the same events that they were presiding over. And so we have all this amazing content.

So it was like, I mean, it's insane. And we look at countries, people, you know, Mozambique to Nigeria, to the Middle East. It wasn't, he was the first person to ever be allowed to photograph the Hajj in 1972.

And he ended up, which was where the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, the first person to ever be allowed to do it. So he went for four years and photographed it. And his first coffee table book was pilgrimage to Mecca.

It was the first book on the Hajj. They let him do it, why? Well, the Saudi royal family agreed for him to come and gave him all the facilities.

And he did that in 1972. He had a great black book. You know, yeah.

And he, so he had these contacts. He, you know, he was made commander in chief of the Pakistan armed forces.

[Neil Pasricha]

I see the book right behind you.

[Salim Amin]

Yeah. So he was made commander in chief of the Pakistan armed forces for nine months by Zia ul Haq. Because Zia wanted a book on the armed forces.

So it ended up Defenders of Pakistan was what it was called. It was a book and a documentary. So he went to, and he's got stuff that nobody in the world will ever get.

Of course. You know, you can't get access to armed forces now.

[Speaker 4]

Yeah.

[Salim Amin]

You know, he did 19 hours in F-16s photographing, you know, air to air combats. And then you got all the air force in front of the K2 and the Himalayas and, you know, incredible content.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah.

[Salim Amin]

You'd never get the Hajj in the seventies. Very different place.

[Neil Pasricha]

So you were just like exploding with stories and like, I'm trying to take, I mean, we're just touching, like skimming the surface of so much here. And unlike your dad, you're very present with your kids. Yes.

Which I'm going to say, like, that's a very different, but equally, if not greater form of legacy in the world.

[Salim Amin]

I hope so. I hope so. I mean, I think we, I mean, their mom is.

[Neil Pasricha]

I'm a continent away from my kids right now.

[Salim Amin]

Their mom is instrumental, is instrumental in how well they were brought up. Yeah. I mean, she, because I also traveled an enormous amount in the early years, in the first sort of 25 years of their lives, I traveled an enormous amount, but their mom was the, there was the sort of a very, very influential figure in bringing them up to the young ladies that they are.

And, you know, one is in, one is in Toronto, one is in Zurich, Canada, there's an underwriter, one is a lawyer in London. So they've done okay, you know, and I think we've, we've, you know, we've, we've brought them up to be good girls.

[Neil Pasricha]

And neither of them is a photojournalist.

[Salim Amin]

They are excellent photographers, both of them.

[Neil Pasricha]

I can imagine.

[Salim Amin]

But they, this is not their profession.

[Neil Pasricha]

By the way, Boniface Mwangi, our mutual friend and guest in chapter 104, I asked him for a question for you. I like to do this. And he said, do you think in an era of AI, there's still a career of photojournalism?

[Salim Amin]

I think it's even more important now. I think the, the fact that people are not sure about, so one of the things that we, we want to do, and I'll discuss this with Boniface as well, one, we know that our archive is hugely valuable for AI companies because they don't have this. Now, when you type in AI or you search AI for things, you come back with a very white Western male dominated answer.

Of course, because they scoop the internet.

[Neil Pasricha]

And that's what the internet was when they scooped it.

[Salim Amin]

This kind of content that we have about countries in Africa and Southeast Asia, in the Middle East, about fashion and art and, and, you know, hairstyles and, and, and glasses and culture and all of this stuff is not available because our archive is not digital. So it's never been online. We're still struggling with digitizing this archive.

But it's never been online. So nobody has been able to scrub it.

[Neil Pasricha]

Because we never put it anywhere where they could see it.

[Salim Amin]

But should we, we want to make it available, especially for educational purposes, for people to be able to make sure that we get our own, when AI makes things about Africans, that they have the right reference points for it. So we want to make it available and to do that. But one of the things, this is when I say we, it's me.

And again, my partner in the US, because he has an equally large archive of content from different parts of the world, from South America, from the US sides, from even parts of Africa, and he's still photographing. So it adds current content to our archive. But one of the things we want to put together is an institute of truth.

So where the original, where the original content can sit and people can come and visit, physically see original negatives.

[Neil Pasricha]

You know, it's before 2023, when ChachiPT started.

[Salim Amin]

And see the original picture. Because even when dad was shooting images, they cropped them. When they were in the darkroom, they would crop them based on what was important at the time.

Now, in the context of history, that cropping also could change the perspective of that image. So to be able to see the original negative, or the original image, when in an age where we don't know what we're seeing, whether it's fake or real, I think is hugely important. And a university like the University of Toronto, or Cambridge University, or Oxford, to house this archive, physical archives, and actually allow people to come in and watch the original video of Black Hawk Down, or the Rwanda genocide, or the Ethiopian famine, before AI has got its hands on it and changed it, I think would be hugely invaluable for education.

[Neil Pasricha]

The only problem is, how do you create a new trusted institute in an era of such high distrust? I mean, to what extent could something even as stable, secure, and seemingly impervious to distrust, as like the University of Toronto? But then we see what's happened to Harvard.

[Salim Amin]

Yes. That's the problem.

[Neil Pasricha]

They've smudged shit over the Harvard Veritas logo by saying, you can't do this, we're going to take all your money, you can't let in people from four, and then they have to fight the government, and there's lawsuits. Then Columbia folds, so that looks like the other ones are going to fold as well. And then it's just like, then you just ostracize the school.

And now the school has its own like, well, Harvard's like a 500-year-old institute of truth that has held standards for a long time. But even if you put the archive there, then you go down with the ship.

[Salim Amin]

Exactly. So again, maybe it's an independent institute.

[Neil Pasricha]

Speaking as an alumni, whose degree now looks a little shoddier.

[Salim Amin]

You know, it could be an independent institute that's set up. I mean, there's one thing, Neil, there's no shortage of money in the world. There's no shortage of people with money in the world who want, I hope, who want to do something good, that will want to have something that is there.

It's not only our archive that would be in this. It would be open to every, there's people in their 70s and 80s and 90s, photographers who have captured some of the most iconic moments in our history. Whether it's news or politics or sports or entertainment.

And they are sitting on their original content. They don't have the ability to digitize all of this. It's sitting in cabinets and boxes.

And they're just, they're going to die. And their children and grandchildren have no interest in this at all. And we'll probably chuck it out or burn it or do something.

And if we can get our hands on that stuff, because we know between us, we know other photographers. And we can help them digitize, get hold of their original content, give them legacy, pay them some money. That I think to me would be a real fulfillment of my father's, because I don't think my father would have wanted his archive to sit at rotten in shelves, in boxes and cabinets.

He would have wanted it to be used to educate future generations of people. And I think this is where we would like to go.

[Neil Pasricha]

Capture of human history and not just human history. Some of the photos that if you're watching on YouTube, you'll see is like a lion kind of curling in to drink water. I mean, it's everything.

I've done a terrible job as an interviewer. I don't say this very often on my own podcast, but so excitedly thirsty have I been for these like human altering stories that I have failed to even mention your other two formative books. I wonder if to close us off, you might tell us a little bit about how they shaped you and we can try together to loop those into this larger, epic, epic fabled conversation similar to the ones that inspired you, including at a young age when you read the Iliad by Homer.

I-L-I-A-D written controversially either in the seventh or eighth century by Homer who lived and died in eighth century Greece. There's very few details about his life and death. He also wrote famously the Odyssey.

There's a million covers, so why even describe one? But you know, obviously it's an epic poem set during the final weeks of the Trojan war focusing on the Greek hero Achilles and his anger towards Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek forces. You can follow this one to 883.01 for literature slash classical modern Greek literature slash classical Greek epic poetry. It's interesting to mention that because of course, the book you read in your twenties, which also introduced symbolism and fables to you or amplified it, was The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. That came out in 2003 from Doubleday. People will know this because Dan Brown is alive today.

He was born in 1964 in New Hampshire. And this is, I mean, I read it when it came out. Everybody read it when it came out.

Robert Langdon, of course, is in Paris on business. He's a symbologist at Harvard and he gets an urgent late night phone call. The elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum.

Near the body, police have found a baffling cipher. While working to solve the enigmatic riddle, Langdon is stunned to discover it leads to a trail of clues hidden in the works of Da Vinci, visible for all to see, yet disguised by the painter. Follow that one under 813.54 for 1945 to 1999 American literature. So how did these two books kind of fold into this larger story we're talking about here?

[Salim Amin]

Look, I think these were more sort of personal. The Iliad, I just found the story of the Trojan War fascinating. You know, how it began, you know, all these characters.

I don't know if they were real or not. I mean, Homer, you know, was a poet and I'm sure had a lot of creative license even back then. But, you know, the stories of Achilles and Agamemnon and Melillaus and Paris and Troy and taking Helen, the most beautiful woman, you know, away, stealing her away and causing the downfall of this great empire.

It was just, it just to me was just fascinating. Yeah. And how the gods kind of got involved as well.

[Speaker 4]

Yeah.

[Salim Amin]

Some on this side, some on that side and how they, you know, they manipulated. And I just thought this is such an interesting way to describe history.

[Speaker 4]

Yeah.

[Salim Amin]

And it's, and I've followed then the Odyssey and all these other sort of the Iliad, all these different Greek books who have, as you said, had, there've been so many covers since then. There've been feature films, Brad Pitt, it was Achilles and Troy. Very sexy.

In that, yes. And then you've got Eric Bana playing Hector and, you know, there's tragedy, there is hope, there is joy, there's love, there's all the things that I think is part of our life. But it's, it's a fantastic story.

[Neil Pasricha]

And you read that in school.

[Salim Amin]

I read, well, we were, we were taught, you know, Latin and divinity and stuff in, in primary school and in high school. In Nairobi. These were British schools, right?

These were part of the British curriculum.

[Neil Pasricha]

I was going to ask, because sorry to say this, I've tried to crack the Iliad or the Odyssey a couple of times and I'm a slow mind, Salim. I'm like, this is hard. This is too hard for me to read and understand.

Did you have like a, you know, like a, like an edition or a translator? Do you remember, like, how do you?

[Salim Amin]

You know, there are sort of simpler books that don't have the complicated language of Homer. Okay.

[Neil Pasricha]

So we gotta go there.

[Salim Amin]

So you can just, if you Google them, there's plenty of different versions that some have been turned into novels and actual stories.

[Neil Pasricha]

Or do the thing I do, which is read the Wikipedia plot summary and try to read the book at the same time.

[Salim Amin]

But, but, you know, it's such interesting.

[Neil Pasricha]

How cool that you got assigned that at school, though.

[Salim Amin]

Yeah. Yeah. I thought it was really...

[Neil Pasricha]

We kind of skipped over that stuff.

[Salim Amin]

I thought Greek mythology was fascinating for me. And then, and then it kind of also kind of dovetails a little bit into comic books. Because again, these, those ancient Greek heroes are, you know, the modern versions of Superman and Batman and others are, I think, derived a little bit from, from those heroes.

You know, their powers, their, the way, I think the, the, the Schuster, Jerry Schuster and the people that wrote comic books, Stan Lee and others, I think got their inspiration for many of their comic book heroes from, from the, the Greek mythology.

[Speaker 4]

Yeah.

[Salim Amin]

And so I, again, going into comic books was something really natural. There was a little store in downtown Nairobi that used to sell comic books. And I'd go with my mom.

She used to go and buy her Indian film magazines, Filmfare and, you know, Stardust and all these things about Bollywood magazines. And I would go and get a comic book every week with her. That's why you have a shop.

And then I'd have an entire cupboard of comic books. Now I buy the, the, the graphic novels, which they're rather than the weekly comic books.

[Neil Pasricha]

But it's almost like Williad was like, it wasn't drawn, but...

[Salim Amin]

It was a precursor of this. Yeah, exactly. It was a precursor of these.

[Neil Pasricha]

Epic tales of, you know, yeah, it's, it's, and then it kind of, kind of sort of feeds into Dan Brown.

[Salim Amin]

Absolutely. I mean, again, this idea of, of, of, you know, I was always fascinated about how religion has played such an important role in every major war I think we've had in, in our history. Yeah, there is religion.

[Neil Pasricha]

What you believe versus what I believe.

[Salim Amin]

The religion is always, is always the underlying principle and, and, you know, understanding Catholicism and Islam. I mean, I said, I went to a very Christian school, you know, we would sing the songs Oh, your dad was Muslim and your mom was Ismaili, you went to Christian education. Christian education, we sing the songs of praise every morning in assembly.

You know, we'd, we'd learn divinity in the Bible as part of our classes. My, our daughters went to a very Christian high school here and I wanted them to do that because of the discipline that was there as well as understanding and learning about other religions, because I think it's very important. You know, and they, they obviously they did madrasas and went and learned about their own religion as well, but were able to, to, to get a good overview of other things.

And I think in a world of increasing intolerance, this is very important to educate people on this. I remember somebody saying to, to my daughters in, in, in, in their high school, one of the daughters said, Oh, but, um, you know, what do you know about Jesus? You get Muslim, you know, what do you know about Jesus and stuff?

And you guys don't even teach that. And she said, well, hang on a minute. Jesus is named more in the Quran than Muhammad is.

No way. Jesus is named come because he is one of our primary prophets. In Islam, Jesus is considered to be above Muhammad even in terms of prophets.

The only difference is we don't consider him to be the son of God, but he is the, on the day of judgment, Jesus is going to come, not Muhammad. So, you know, this is the, the teachers were like, are you serious? I said, yes.

In the Quran, Jesus is mentioned more than Muhammad as prophet Isa. And so, you know, this is, but people don't do this to assume that we are here and not understanding that every religion, major religion in the world has come from the same place.

[Speaker 4]

Well, yeah.

[Salim Amin]

You know, and it's, it's, we all believe the same things that we call them by different names and we believe about the same people.

[Neil Pasricha]

And we change too. Like there's, uh, for those that have read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, like, ah, it was animals for quite a long time. It wasn't even people.

[Salim Amin]

It wasn't people. It was nymphs, you know, you do the tree, you know, tree nymphs, ocean nymphs.

[Neil Pasricha]

My mom's Hindu, you know, she also went to, uh, like, uh, Kenya high as he was learning, like Lord's parents. But like, you know, growing up, like in the little kind of altar that my mom had, it's like, I'm saying like, you know, blue elephants with many arms, like, you know, and, um, do you start this? Like we started just chatting and, you know, you were talking Israel, Palestine, you're talking about, you know, uh, the work that your dad's done opening up and exposing the to not just Kenya where he was born and raised, uh, from, from, you know, people that have come from kind of colonial England, but also what he did in Ethiopia and central African Republic and going all over this continent, the dark continent, the continent that we

[Speaker 4]

didn't know what was going on.

[Neil Pasricha]

And, and the added light and color and stories and meanings. And the more we see that, the more we realize that we are the same, we are connected. We all bleed the same color.

[Salim Amin]

Absolutely. We bleed the same color. We shit the same poop, you know, we, we, you know, everything is the same.

There is nothing that is different about us. We may have, you know, you're, you're a product of your upbringing, you're a product of your environment, you know, and at the end of the day, that is pure luck. Whether you were born in a palace in, in Europe, or you were born in a slum in, in Kibera in East Africa, that is you, you don't feel privileged because you had nothing to do with that.

It is pure and utter luck. And so, you need to just humble yourself to understanding this is where I was born. Let me make the best of what my situation and circumstances are.

Not be envious or jealous of other people and not look down at other people because of, of what you feel is your privilege in life. We are all born the same. It's just where we were born, that, and then you had, you as a person had nothing to do with that.

You know, you had no influence on that. So, you know, be good to people, be kind to people. I know watching my father and how he operated, he was comfortable with, he would treat princes and kings and presidents the same as he would treat a waiter or a driver or, or a fixer or, or, or a woman selling fruit on the side of the road.

He saw no difference in these people and that's why people were open to talking to him because he treated everybody exactly the same way.

[Neil Pasricha]

You fill your father's shadow and legacy. You amplify it. You illuminate it.

You enlarge it. You lengthen it. And the work he's done, your family has done, and your family continues to do is making a tremendous difference in the world.

[Salim Amin]

Thank you, Neil. I'm not sure it is, but I appreciate you saying that.

[Neil Pasricha]

I believe it is. I appreciate it. We'll continue to do so in this era of disbelief.

I think that's really important. And I think your answer to Bonnie's question is quite profound. Salim Amin, thank you so much for coming on.

[Salim Amin]

Thank you very much, man. Appreciate it. Thank you for your time.

Thank you for doing this. I really appreciate it. It was fun.

Real fun talking to you. Thank you. Yeah.

Thank you.

[Neil Pasricha]

Hey, everybody. It's me. It's just Neil hanging out in my basement, listening back to the powerful, kind, open hearted, big brain, Salim Amin regaling us with stories.

I mean, we could have gone on and on and on. So many quotes jump out to me. Like right now, when you search AI for things, you come back with a very white Western male dominated answer and kind of looping that back into the letter from Dan at the beginning.

Like we're all together grappling and connecting with what AI is, what it means, how we use it, how we don't, what, where we want in our lives, where we don't, where we can see it in our lives, where we can't. And so I think it's refreshing to just kind of hear that perspective and remember that, you know, like I went to the doctor and I have low vitamin D. I've had low vitamin D forever.

I'm like plowing vitamin D. I'm like taking a thousand a day, then 2000 a day, then 5,000 a day. And I always get my blood checked and it's always low.

Eventually my doctor says to me, he's like, you know, it might just be that the data from the study is a bunch of white men from North America. And you, I know you were born here, but he's like, you know, your, your heritage and ancestry comes from a different part of the world. So maybe the numbers on your vitamin D score just are different.

And it's nice to hear that because yeah, you can't always know what dataset you're comparing yourself to. So it's nice for somebody from Africa to point out that, hey, this is pretty biased. It's nice to kind of try to recognize and see the bias where we can.

How about this quote? Our job, and he's talking about journalists. Our job has changed from being the bearer of news to providing context and background and reality and giving people a historical look at why this incident happened, what the context is behind it.

And then where are we going in the future rather than just a snapshot? It's true. I agree with that completely.

Trust, truth, explanation. These things are more and more important than just kind of like there was a fire or here's a photo of a crazy scene. And I kind of, I like the little sort of 60 second kind of first person camera snippets that like the New York Times is doing from their journalists.

And I feel like in the current media complex, it just constantly and quickly evolves to something being new, everything following that, and then that thing not being new anymore. And then that thing being kind of littered with other ways that we can't see the truth anymore. So first person camera to the journalist is great.

And then when you have first person camera to everybody, it's confusing. It's confusing, right? So I guess we have to just kind of keep thinking.

I mean, for this show, Three Books, it's like long form journalism, long form interviews. And I do think in some sense, when you have conversations like we're having, you know, an hour, two hours, sometimes three hours, the truth doubles up. Like honesty comes through.

You hear tone and intonation, the complexity of language and the kind of river-like flow of a conversation. And through that, you get reality. And so that's kind of a place that I'm clinging to.

I still enjoy listening to podcasts that are longer. I like a good, long Rich Roll podcast episode or Tim Ferriss episode. You know, I don't always listen to the whole thing, but I like that that is kind of where my brain wants to go.

Books are like that, obviously. Short-form video. More and more research keeps coming out saying it's bad for our brains.

Okay. We knew that, but now we know that even more. Another quote.

Let me make the best of my situation and circumstances. Not be envious or jealous of other people and not look down at other people because of what you feel is privilege in your own life. A great and healthy and helpful mental reminder for us all.

Thank you so much to Saleem Amin for giving us three more books to add to our top 1000, including number 548, Moe, the story of Muhammad Amin by Brian Tetley. Number 547, The Iliad by Homer. Man, we didn't have that on the list yet, people.

That was good to get out there. And number 546, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. I still remember reading that book and feeling that sort of, don't you love books that have two-page chapters?

Books with two-page chapters is an awesome thing. I'm going to write that down. Books with short chapters.

We've got to add that to the list. By the way, if you don't get my Daily Awesome Thing, you can just go to Neil.blog and click newsletters. One of the newsletters I send out every single day at midnight is a Daily Awesome Thing.

I've been doing that since 2008, and I now made them all on one page at Neil.blog slash awesome things. So if you want to read thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of awesome things, you can go there. It's still a daily practice for me and something I have committed to for now too long to stop.

And when I do stop it, I notice it. So I got to keep going. Thank you so much, Celine, for coming on the show.

This concludes our three-part chapter series where we flew to Africa. We did some different kinds of conversations. I'm very excited about the conversations that we have coming.

We've got Paul Hawken coming. We've got Morgan Housel coming. We've got Eve Harlow coming.

We've got some great, great guests coming. As always, thank you so much for being here, and thank you so much for listening. All right.

Did you make it past the three-second pause? So I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club, one of three clubs we have for Three Books members. As always, if you're listening to this, call me.

Please call me. I love to hear from you. 1-833-READALOT, R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T.

Give me a call. Tell me a formative book. Give me a slice of your life.

Let's hear feedback on a show. I love feedback on a show, good or bad. With that, let's start off by going to the phones.

[Caller]

RF Kuang is a woman. Poor assumption, Neil. Any time you see an author with initials instead of a name, you should automatically think that's a woman trying to get away from misconceptions that women can't write.

Just so you know.

[Neil Pasricha]

RF Kuang is indeed Rebecca F. Kuang, 29 years old, born in China, raised in the States, went to Yale and Cambridge and Oxford, and has written books like Babble and Yellowface. Sorry that I had assumed that that was a guy.

I don't remember doing that, but obviously I can hear the passionate, fiery vitriol in your voice, and I appreciate you calling in to give me feedback. Apologies. Huge mistake.

I did not realize. Yeah, and it's a good point you're saying. Like, if you hear, like, J.K. Rowling, obviously that's Joanne, but it's a woman trying to get away from the biases against female writers is what you're saying. I hadn't necessarily figured that. I mean, I guess I'm struggling to think of a guy writer who uses initials. So anyway, apologies, and thanks for the call.

I wish I could say your name and send you a book, but I don't know your name, but I appreciate the call. Negative feedback, by the way. Always feel free.

It's always good. 1-833-READ-A-LOT. Appreciate it.

All right. Now, we already did a letter from day at the beginning. We could do a letter now.

I've been posting stuff on YouTube like this, so, you know, you end up getting a lot of comments that way, but I think we'll skip the letter because we did a letter at the beginning. And if you want to send me a letter, though, please do. Obviously, you could do it as a review on Apple or Spotify or YouTube, and you can also email me, neil at globalhappiness.org, and then I get your letter that way. And I will, if I read it on the show, I'll send you a book. All right. Now, let's go to the word of the chapter, and for this chapter's word, we go back to Selim.

Are you no small little tin pot country? Yes, indeed, it is tin pot. Tin pot? Tin pot. Tin pot. Selim referred to a tiny tin pot country and made me think tin pot. What's a tin pot country?

Because, you know, you've heard that phrase before, like a tin pot dictator, and I looked up the etymology, and of course, as you probably realize, but I did not realize, pots used to be made of kind of fancy metals, right? You know, gold, silver, that kind of thing. And so in the 1700s, when they started making some pots out of tin, they were, of course, much cheaper, but of much lower quality.

Inferior quality, shoddy, insignificant, or minor. You can use it especially in regards to a dictator, the cheapness and poor quality of pots that were made from tin. So a tin pot dictator, of course, is a cheap or inferior dictator.

It ain't no Hitler or Pol Pot. That's like somebody who's like, you know, doesn't know what they're doing. It's a tin pot dictator.

That's the term. That's the phrase. But also, you can use it in regards to anything else.

They say you can use it for a tin pot university or tin pot country. Kind of small, petty, or insignificant. Tin, of course, is a metal element primarily extracted from the mineral castor, right?

Used primarily as an alloy, right? You mix it with copper, and you get bronze. You mix it with something else, you get pewter.

So tin is an alloy. It's used to make things lighter, cheaper. And, of course, it also is a protective metal that can be used on tin cans.

So a tin pot anything is a shoddy or inferior version of it. We've been using that in our culture for 300 years since the creation of tin pots to replace, you know, heavier metal pots made with silver and iron and things like that. Interesting etymology, a tin pot anything.

Try to use that word in a phrase today. It's a fun one. I like the sound of it.

It just goes rolls off the tongue. We are aiming for this, of course, not to be a tin pot podcast. It's a 22-year pilgrimage, and you are joining us now in our ninth year of the show.

So, you know, we're not at the halfway point yet. Still a couple more years to go, but it is a journey. We are kind of climaxing the show on every single full moon.

We're going to alternate the new moons with classic chapters, which I'm going to strip out the kind of openings and closings and just have that be the conversation through this year. I really love this community. Three Bookers, if you hear this, give me a call.

1-833-READALOT. Drop me a line, and let's continue to hang out together. Let's continue to talk about books amidst the sea of rabble, amidst the short-form videos that we are pummeled with every single day.

Let's think of this show as a tool, as a doorway, as a path that leads into the longer and deeper pleasures of life. Thank you so much for being here. And until next time, remember that you are what you eat, and you are what you read.

Keep turning that page, everybody. I'll talk to you soon. Take care.

Listen to the chapter here!

The Best Of 2025: Neil Pasricha mines memorable, mind-shifting moments and messages

Listen to the chapter here!

What more highlights for 2025? Here are the best books I read this year!

[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.

Listen to the chapter here!

What more highlights for 2025? Here are the best books I read this year!

Chapter 155: Bulle the Bookseller broadens borders and births bibliophiles

Listen to the chapter here!

[Bulle]

When you travel to Nairobi or other parts or when you go to a foreign country, she used to tell us that may the people of that place be your brothers and sisters. So once you visualize something, you have to do something about it. So me, I said I will not reject any offer.

Beside the school books, which I think schools, the work is to shape you to become a worker, but other books, the non academic books shape you to become a better human being, a better person.

[Neil]

Hey everybody, this is Neil Pasricha. Welcome or welcome back to 3 books. The only podcast in the world buying for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians.

I got a special chapter for you today, chapter 155 with Bulle, the bookseller. I flew all the way over to Nairobi, Kenya. So this is kind of like the second chapter in our three part Africa series.

I know it's not really an Africa series so much as it is a Kenya series. And Kenya was the only country I visited in Africa. However, it was my first foray to the 55 country, 1.5 billion person continent. And so I tried my best to collect stories while I was there. Our guest in chapter 104, you may recall was Boniface Mwangi, the photojournalist, the activist who's now running for president of Kenya. When I got to Nairobi, he sent me a text saying, I have the perfect guest for you.

I already had a couple planned with his help, but he's like, I got the perfect guest for you. So late at night, the first night I got there after coming in off, off of an overnight flight, my belly stuffed full of fresh samosas and pakoras that I ate for breakfast along with goat tripe. First time in my life I ever had goat tripe.

I'm pretty sure that's what I ate. A really chewy, curried intestine of a goat, which was delicious, but I never ate it before, but I ate it. That night, I loaded up my podcast bag.

I got picked up by Perlexi, the wonderful and kind driver who drives Boniface Mwangi around. And, and his assistant and really a cerebral counterpart to Bonnie. And he drove me over to Nuria Bookshop.

And so, you know, when I think bookshop here in Canada, I'm sort of thinking, you know, maybe it's on the main street. Maybe it's in a plaza. Maybe it's in a mall.

There's like a walk-up bookstore with a frontage onto the road or the street or the mall entrance. Not the case here. This was a busy downtown CBD Nairobi, so central business district.

It's, it's not a tent scene, but you got to kind of keep your wits about you. There's people walking in all directions. There's like a throb, throbbing nature of this city with kind of music going on, people kind of everywhere.

And we go into this plaza. We go up to the second floor and then we curve into the front of a small, I'd say probably about a thousand square foot bookshop right there in this plaza. I'm introduced to Bule.

His name is spelled B-U-L-L-E, but it's pronounced Bulle. He said like bullet with no T. A Kenyan born man who was raised 700 kilometers north of the city by largely his camel herding grandmother, and a family that has kind of come down and sort of spread roots.

So Bulle has a really fascinating story. I don't want to take too much away from it, but needless to say, he went the business route and then as life often does, life intervened. Today, he's running the most successful and most prominent bookstore in all of Kenya, where he actually promotes self-published African authors in a way that's very successful and supportive.

So we are going to talk all things Africa in Africa itself with Bulle the bookseller. It's a wonderful and interesting and stimulating conversation that I won't forget, and I hope you enjoy it as well. Let's jump and flip the page into chapter 155.

Hi, Bulle. Hi. My name is Neil.

I feel like, you know, I met you about five minutes ago, but because we have so many connections, I feel like I've known you a long time.

[Bulle]

It's nice. Since you have roots in Kenya, your mother is a Kenyan, so maybe that's the reason why we had that connection.

[Neil]

Plus, Boniface Mwangi, our guest in chapter 104, he says this is his favorite bookstore in the whole country.

[Bulle]

Yeah, he is, and he really supported me. So when we struck his book, he's a friend and very dear to me as well, and he's running for president in a beautiful country. Hopefully, we pray for him, and he has a chance to become number one in 2027, God willing.

[Neil]

Absolutely. I love and courage. Love and courage.

And I'm excited. You know, this is a show by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. It's a book podcast for book people.

And here we are sitting in your beautiful bookstore, which, by the way, I know it says 4.8 on Google, which is hard. I've never seen a bookstore ranked so high with hundreds of reviews. It's like the best ranked bookstore I've seen.

Thanks. And we're sitting in Nairobi. You say Kenya, my mom says Kenya, Kenya, Kenya.

[Bulle]

It depends on the accent, but we call it Kenya.

[Neil]

Yeah. How do you describe Kenya to people who aren't from here? Because we're sitting and it's hot, it's dark, we're upstairs in a building, it's noisy, there's lights, there's lots.

But if I tell people I'm doing a podcast in Kenya or Kenya, how do you describe this country to them? Our listeners are all over the world.

[Bulle]

We are the home of champions. We are known for marathon. So Elid Kipchoge, I think the guy who broke the two-hour, I think, marathon.

Yeah. He comes from Kenya. We are on east of Africa.

[Neil]

Yes.

[Bulle]

We are known for innovation. Kenya innovated the first mobile transfer. Really?

Where you can easily send money. Really? From one number to another number.

[Neil]

Really? I did not know that. That's why everybody here is always saying M-Pesa.

[Bulle]

M-Pesa, yes.

[Neil]

Which I never heard of before I got here.

[Bulle]

It's the fastest and safest. So you cannot lose money if you have money in your M-Pesa account. And it has close to, I think, 35, 40 million Kenyans who are subscribed to M-Pesa.

[Neil]

Wow. And it has- There's only 58 or something million, right?

[Bulle]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 35, 40, yeah. We are close to 60 million.

60 million? Yeah, so our next census will be 2029. So I think the previous census in 2019, I think, was over 50 million.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Bulle]

So now we are over 50, 57 million.

[Neil]

Wow, it's growing fast.

[Bulle]

Yeah, we are growing fast. So we are also ahead of, I think, most countries, not only in Africa, in terms of innovation, in terms of adapting to technology. So there are a lot of crypto users in Kenya as well.

Interesting. We use a lot of cryptocurrency in Kenya. At some point, we used to accept Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Doge.

At the bookstore? Yes, yes. If you want to buy a book, you can use coins to buy books equivalent to that.

[Neil]

You still do?

[Bulle]

Yeah, we do. We still accept Bitcoin. We still accept it if you have.

So even though in Kenya, people use it for not buying goods and services, but for trading purposes, for holding and selling it, for buy and sell. So we have a lot of traders who use crypto in Kenya.

[Neil]

A lot of traders in Kenya. A country, a burgeoning, fast-growing country of nearly 60 million people, full of marathon runners, technology innovators, Bitcoin owners, interesting bookstores. This is the culture you're describing.

And apparently, I heard this is one of the youngest demographics in the world.

[Bulle]

It is, it is. We have Gen Zs and Gen Alphas, of course, millennials like me. So we have fairly a good number of young Kenyans.

[Neil]

Average age is like, what, 18 to 25 or something like that? Yes, yes. Because why?

Why is it so? Most countries are the opposite. Canada, Japan, everyone's dying and getting old.

China, Singapore, it's like a population.

[Bulle]

I think we are fertile and we're still producing.

[Neil]

Fertile and producing. Exactly. Fertile and producing, technology, innovation.

This is a nice stage set because I'm seeing a lot of these things in the story. I mean, this bookstore is known for being very innovative. You said Bonnie was a friend of yours because you started carrying the book and then he was coming into the bookstore.

But you carry, as I understand it, 1,800 self-published authors' books.

[Bulle]

Yeah. Currently, as of today, we have over 2,500 self-published authors. Initially, when we started, we started promoting Kenyan authors.

We expanded to Africa, African authors. Now, we support over 2,550 independent authors.

[Neil]

2,550 independent authors, which is mesmerizing. We're going to get into that because it's mesmerizing to me for a lot of reasons. Because most bookstores you walk in and there's like three self-published books in the corner that nobody wants to buy and they're dusty.

And there's a guy maybe at a table trying to sell them. But you've actually turned that on its head. Innovation from Kenya, we talked about.

And you've made that the center point of your business. So you're a millennial. Yes.

Where'd you grow up? How'd you get into this? Where did this come from?

Where did this bookstore idea come from?

[Bulle]

I'm an ex-banker. I worked in the banking industry for eight and a half years. I was born in northern part of Kenya, a place, a county called Wajir.

[Neil]

W-A-J-I-R.

[Bulle]

Yes.

[Neil]

Northern part of Kenya, which means that borders close to Somalia?

[Bulle]

Somalia and Ethiopia.

[Neil]

Ah, Somalia, Ethiopia.

[Bulle]

So it's, I think, 700 kilometers from Nairobi. 700 to 800 kilometers from Nairobi.

[Neil]

On bumpy roads.

[Bulle]

So it's there. Yes, it is.

[Neil]

Okay. Oh, there's a map of Kenya up there. We're going to throw a picture on it.

So if you're watching this on YouTube, the map will flash up right now.

[Bulle]

Yeah, that's the map of Kenya. So I went to school, my primary, 1984. 1984.

That is May 10th, May. May 10th, 1984.

[Neil]

My wife is 1985. I'm 1979. So you're right in between us.

And you're born near which border? Is your family from Kenya?

[Bulle]

My father used to be a police officer. So yes, my father was born here. My grandfather was born here as well.

So way before we got independence. So I went to high school and primary school in Wajir. But I did my university here in Nairobi.

[Neil]

Wow. And the year of Kenyan independence is 1964. My mom was born in Nairobi in 1950, the youngest of eight children in Pangani neighborhood.

So her family also is kind of pre-independence. And after you grew up there, your dad was a police officer. Mom?

[Bulle]

My mom, no. My mom never went to school. So she stayed home.

[Neil]

She was home helping you?

[Bulle]

My father. So she's the one who raised us. Though we come from an extended family.

So my father had other wives.

[Neil]

Yes, right. Multiple wives.

[Bulle]

Exactly, yeah.

[Neil]

Is that cultural, religious?

[Bulle]

Religious and also culturally. There are many African cultures who practice polygamy.

[Neil]

Yeah, it's common around the world.

[Bulle]

It's both culture and religion. And from my mom's side, we're seven.

[Neil]

Which religion?

[Bulle]

I'm Muslim. Muslim? I'm a Muslim, yeah.

[Neil]

And culture is?

[Bulle]

Somali.

[Neil]

Somali, Somali Muslim. Yes.

[Bulle]

OK.

[Neil]

Not to label because everybody's everything. Everybody's everything. But just you're giving us some nice background on you.

[Bulle]

So from my father's side, we're 14. From my mother's side, we're seven.

[Neil]

Wow. Yeah. 14, what, kids?

[Bulle]

Yes, kids, yeah.

[Neil]

You have 14 brothers and sisters?

[Bulle]

Yes. Seven from my mom and the rest are from three of his wives.

[Neil]

So three of his wives. You grow up there. Yes.

You become a banker. Yes. I'm still not following how this gets into the books.

But I'm also curious, as a kid, if anything you read in your life, any books you read, because the underpinning of the show, of course, is what are the books that shaped you and changed you? Do you remember when you were growing up in northern Kenya? Yes.

[Bulle]

I remember my father, he never went to school. During the earlier years, even before independence and after independence, any person who was healthy used to be forced into serve military or police. So him, he used to work as a house help in an AP camp.

AP camp? Yeah, an administration police camp. Okay.

[Neil]

If you're healthy, you're in the military or the police.

[Bulle]

Exactly.

[Neil]

We need you.

[Bulle]

I think he was recruited when he was young, the age of 18, 19. And he became an administration police officer. Okay.

He didn't know how to speak Swahili or English.

[Neil]

What did he speak?

[Bulle]

Somali. So he learned both while he was in camp. That's unbelievable.

[Neil]

I've always heard these stories, like I didn't know anything. Yesterday, I met a guy in Amsterdam who said he landed there from Syria. They told him it was Canada.

That's what he told me in Newport. He told me he didn't figure it out for a year and he didn't know any of the languages. Obviously, Dutch, it's a bit hard to learn.

But these people, like your dad, he just learns a whole new language.

[Bulle]

So he learned, I think while he was trained, and he speaks fluent English. He also worked in Middle East. He speaks Arabic.

He speaks Swahili, of course, fluently. So since he never went to school, he made sure that all his kids get education.

[Neil]

Oh, interesting. He never went to school, so he wanted to make sure all of his kids, which, by the way, was a lot because there was a lot of kids to do that. It was a lot of kids to do this for.

[Bulle]

Because his father died when he was 13 years old, and all the burden now shifted to our grandmother, which was his mother. My grandmother is 100 plus years old now.

[Neil]

She's alive.

[Bulle]

She's alive. She's alive, yeah. She used to be a camel herder, so she used to keep camel goats.

So she raised all the kids by herself. So that's how my father now ended up in serving administration police.

[Neil]

So when you were born, your then 60-year-old camel herder grandmother raised you.

[Bulle]

Yes. So my father now, what he started doing is every time he used to come home, he must come with books or some gifts, and part of those gifts used to be books. But then I was not fond of reading books at that time.

Yes, I used to go to school, but used to have a lot of books at our home. I still have some of those old books. Some used to be on science, some biology, chemistry, some on nature.

So I used to love nature as well. My father used to love nature. Fast forward to the fourth from my father's side, no, number five from my father's side, and number three from my mom's side.

So he succeeded to take, while he was working, two of my brothers to study in India to do their degree there. So one is a lawyer and another one is an IT. So when later on, he managed now to take two of my sisters to school as well, and I was the fifth to go to university in Nairobi.

So I think that's what he did to raise us and to at least make sure that we go to school and we get necessary education so that we at least make our lives better. So I fell in love with books while I was on campus. So when I joined my first year, the first book that really changed my life, I think it's the second year, was The Power of Your Subconscious Mind.

[Neil]

The Power of Your Subconscious Mind. But this childhood that you've quickly described, you know I have a million questions about this childhood. And I'll just do a couple quick ones.

One is, what's one piece of wisdom you learned from a camel herding grandmother? Like, I don't understand the job of camel herding. That means helping the camels go where they need to be.

[Bulle]

Exactly.

[Neil]

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. And remember, she never went to school as well.

She used to tell us that everywhere you go, try and you know, 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. Yeah. 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]

The ears are open.

[Bulle]

Yes. The eyes are open.

[Neil]

And the mouth... The nostrils are open. The nostrils are open.

Yes. But the mouth can close.

[Bulle]

Yes, it 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]

What's the Somali phrase?

[Bulle]

A closed mouth is gold. Af means mouth. Dabolon means a closed one.

[Neil]

Yes.

[Bulle]

And Dhab means gold. Wow. I love this.

So... I love this.

[Neil]

This is like...

[Bulle]

A closed mouth is gold. Wow. So she used to tell us that.

And one of the blessings she used to give us is... She used to tell us that when you travel to Nairobi or other parts or when you go to a foreign country, she used to tell us that may the people of that place be your brothers and sisters. So those are some of the blessings that...

[Neil]

May the people of that place be your brothers and sisters.

[Bulle]

Brothers and sisters and they take care of you and let their harm not harm you. Or if there's a harm in that environment. So those are some of the blessings that even still even my mom blesses us with.

So wherever you go, may God make those people that interact with be your brothers and sisters. Wow. If there's any harm or something, may God protect you against that harm.

So to some extent, they were spiritual. And all of them, they were not educated. So these are now knowledge they used to get from the animals.

These are knowledge they used to get from nature. So all of them, they lived with nature harmoniously. So it's sometimes...

Yes, there are some people who never went to school, but they carry a lot of wisdom. A lot of knowledge.

[Neil]

Absolutely.

[Bulle]

Because of how they interacted with the environment and animals and other things.

[Neil]

So the camels.

[Bulle]

A lot, yeah.

[Neil]

When they go to a different herd of camels. Now you're offering this brotherhood to people, the public. You have your doors open to the public here.

And a busy and it's an edgy street. There's a lot happening out there. You have to kind of keep your wits about you.

[Bulle]

And I've learned also a lot from how they used to use astronomy. With animals and also a camel. Every time there's a certain star that's linked to when to milk a camel.

Yeah, when to take them to their place, their homestead. So what a certain star means. So they used to have some ancient knowledge as they use the moon.

As they use the stars. What certain stars mean. Yeah, what clouds mean.

Where will you go to look for pasture? So, you know, she used to move with animals to look for water and pasture. So we come from an arid area.

So you have to seek and look for pasture for your animals. Water and grass. So they used to use a lot of stars.

They used to gaze at the stars and everything. As they now move from one area to another area. That is now knowledge and wisdom they just acquired from the environment and from animals.

From animals, yeah. So that's how I think a lot of ancient knowledge, I think, which we never documented. And that should be documented.

That our grandmothers, our great-grandfathers used to use it.

[Neil]

That's incredible. Yeah. But from a young age and through your childhood, you were taught that there's things a lot bigger than the mind. A lot of things out there that you can't articulate, that you can't see.

And then your second year of university, as you're going on to study to become a banker, you hit this book, The Power of the Subconscious Mind. So tell us about this book and what it did for you.

[Bulle]

So I've read a long time ago. Basically, the book is about how powerful subconscious mind is. And when you go to sleep, actually, we divide our life into eight hours.

That's three into three. Eight hours working, eight hours maybe committing or reading, whatever. And eight hours that we sleep.

So the most powerful eight hours is when we sleep. Yes, our soul leaves us. I don't know where it goes.

Maybe it graces. I don't know where. As we sleep, but our body and everything is working.

You're not conscious, but you are half dead, if I might call it. But you still, all your organs are functioning. It's as if you're fasting.

But all your organs are functioning well. So what is happening is...

[Neil]

You're fully living. Yes. That you have no awareness of this life.

[Bulle]

So sometimes you dream about something that maybe happens. Sometimes that will happen. There are those people who are good in interpreting dreams.

Personally, me, I'm not good at it. But now what your brain is doing is, the subconscious mind is, whatever you program it with during the day, if you're a positive person, if you do something good, that will be registered automatically into your subconscious mind. And I think some people say that our conscious brain is just 5%.

And 95% is unconscious. A lot of things that we do is done unconsciously without even knowing. Even now, me moving my hands is unconscious.

How our eyes move. Which means over 90%, 95% of our body is controlled by the subconscious. So the book talks about how you can tap into that subconscious brain and bring it into conscious or take advantage of it.

So one of it is visualization, how you can visualize something that you think over it over and over again about something. It's like practice, practice makes perfect. Yeah.

[Neil]

Or like the vision board idea.

[Bulle]

Yeah, exactly. So now where you visualize things that you will have a certain car, a certain house, a certain partner, or visualizing that your business will grow into certain things. And then now leave it with your subconscious brain now to make it happen.

So that the same way you unconsciously move your eyes and your hand and everything, and you walk and your organs work and we are not even aware. Our hearts beats, you're not aware. Your kidneys are functioning.

Your liver is functioning. So that's the subconscious mind that is doing it. So the book now talks about that, how you can visualize something.

Some other people say the law of attraction, how you can attract something to yourself. But now the power of subconscious mind is now tapping into your subconscious mind. So basically, sometimes they say that we are cosmologically blind or cosmologically unaware of a lot of things.

So whatever we see and whatever we think of most of the time is maybe 5% of what you should have. So 90% of what you should have achieved as human beings, we are yet to tap into that. So we are powerhouse, but we are unable to tap into that just because we are unable to tap into that subconscious mind.

So sometimes there's those people who are gifted, who can see with their eyes, multiple colors, multiple heights of something is how they open their eyes. Yeah, how they open their eyes. So the power of subconscious mind.

And I tested it when I used to work at the bank. I said, let me put it into test where I used to say that I will park tomorrow at certain spot. So sometimes I used to...

[Neil]

I'll park my car tomorrow at the second last spot in the corner. You say that in the bank, the day before. And the next day, without thinking about it, you would park in that spot.

So you would probably program or, not trick, but you're pre-planning because you know that at night, anything you take in during the day is going to be thought about, ruminated over, played upon.

[Bulle]

So your brain wakes you up at that time. You go to the shower. You do everything you want as quickly as possible.

And I don't know how the universe helps you with that. And then you end up parking in that spot.

[Neil]

Because we're cosmologically blind. And I have this feeling all the time where I think, oh, I have an important exam the next morning. I have to set my alarm for 5.30. And inevitably, I open my eyes, it's 5.29. My brain is just decided. It knows exactly when to wake up, a minute before you do. Everybody knows this feeling, right? Yes.

And this book, The Power of the Subconscious Mind. And by the way, our guest in Chapter 102 of the show, Jonathan Haidt, H-A-I-D-T, he wrote the book The Righteous Mind. He talks about it using the metaphor of the elephant and the rider.

We think that we are the rider on the elephant, but actually the vast, giant, moving animal underneath us is controlling our entire behavior, which is in this book. He also wrote The Anxious Generation, which is now a big hit.

[Bulle]

Yeah, I stock it, yeah. Yeah, you have it, you have it, I'm sure.

[Neil]

Yeah, exactly. So anything else that those listening, including me, can do to harness or enable or support our subconscious to help our lives? Anything else?

So visualization was one. Yes. Knowing that you will remember and kind of pre-program.

[Bulle]

Exactly, yeah.

[Neil]

Are you one of these people that keeps a dream diary or keeps a notebook right beside your bed before and after? Because I've heard that this is a tool some people use.

[Bulle]

No, I usually have my own notebook that I keep, but I don't have it next to my bed. The other thing after visualization is actualizing it, the actual part. So once you visualize something, you have to do something about it.

So I like the logo or the mantra of Nike, just do it. Just do it. Just do it.

So sometimes I think by not acting, we'll be losing a lot. So failure and trying, I think, is the key to success. So most of the time, yes, you have subconsciously programmed yourself.

The next thing is the action part. So you have visualized it. So you have to work towards it.

So even the law of attraction is good. You want to attract certain things, but you have to work towards that thing.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Bulle]

Because the universe will not hand it over to you for free.

[Neil]

Right.

[Bulle]

You have to work for it.

[Neil]

There's a combined piece.

[Bulle]

Exactly.

[Neil]

There's the knowing what to do, and then there's the actual doing it.

[Bulle]

Exactly.

[Neil]

Failure and trying is the key to success. Just do it. By the way, we were talking about my book, The Happiness Equation.

This isn't an advertisement for my book. We were talking about it before we recorded, and I gave you a copy. And we were talking about it.

Two chapters in that book. One is about splitting your day into three eight-hour chunks, and the week into three. And I have a whole chapter on the Nike slogan, just do it, talking about how the company went from $800 million to $10 billion over the ducky, where they used that.

It's like you're quoting my book back to me without having read it. It's so interesting. Now, you're a second-year university.

You read this book. I can see how much of a difference it's made to you. Yeah, exactly.

You go become a banker. Yeah. How does a banker, because there's people listening that maybe dream about opening a bookstore.

But I'm sorry to say this, but I picture the banker profession being more lucrative. So I'm missing a big left turn here somehow. What happens?

[Bulle]

It's interesting. So when I was also in campus, before I joined in the campus, you know, employment, I used to be involved in small, small businesses that I used to run. I used to run a small shop in Nairobi where I used to sell fresh juice, so drinks.

[Neil]

Yeah, like passion fruit, tamarind, and all these things that you can only get here. Exactly. I had a tamarind juice today, and it was like, I said to the guy, this is better than any juice I've ever had in my life.

He said, take me back to Kando, Opa, the juice stand. I said, but I can't get the fresh fruit there.

[Bulle]

So I used to do, to make them. So the business never lasted close to a year. So it was less than, I think, 11 months.

After 11 months, I think I closed. And I had other businesses along the way. And then I got employed.

That's when I was in campus, when I was running those businesses. And then I got employed as an intern.

[Neil]

Okay, in Nairobi?

[Bulle]

In Nairobi, yeah. So in Kenya, you know, I don't know, maybe even maybe in Europe and in US and Canada. So here in Kenya, how it works is you go to school.

Once you're done with the school, you look for work.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Bulle]

Exactly. So I started applying while I finished campus. Before, as I was waiting to graduate, I started applying for a job.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Bulle]

So I started sending my CV. So I sent to UMREF. UMREF is a non-governmental organization.

I sent to another non-governmental organization. I think it was UNF or UNDP. I can't remember.

And then I sent to a bank. So bank was the last option. Yeah.

I've never thought of, you know, joining.

[Neil]

And your degree was in which area?

[Bulle]

Bachelor of Commerce.

[Neil]

Okay, so you're in business. Okay, so you can say I can qualify here. I've done some accounting classes.

[Bulle]

Yeah, I did actually accounting. The option was accounting. So I majored in accounting.

So, but I didn't want to go to bank in industry. So it was the last thing. So at that time, you know, the thing that was liberative was to go to non-governmental organization, NGOs.

[Neil]

NGOs.

[Bulle]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Non-governmental organization.

[Bulle]

Exactly. So luckily, the bank called me.

[Neil]

Not the NGOs, they didn't call you.

[Bulle]

Yeah, they didn't call me. So the bank called me and told me, I told them I haven't finished yet. I'm graduating in six, seven months.

No, they told me, it's okay. Bring your papers. We'll take you as an intern.

Wow. So I worked there for seven months. After seven months, when I graduated, they gave me full-time employment.

[Neil]

And this is like, I want to say like 2005, 2006?

[Bulle]

That's 2009.

[Neil]

2009, okay.

[Bulle]

So I graduated in 2010 August. Okay. So 2010 August, when I graduated, they fully employed me as a full-time employee.

Ah. So I was supposed to become a salesperson at a branch. Yeah.

In Nairobi.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Bulle]

But later on, I ended up in the finance department.

[Neil]

So you're in the finance department of a bank.

[Bulle]

Yes.

[Neil]

I'm still missing the bookstore part.

[Neil]

This sounds like a good job. You're happy.

[Bulle]

So I went to the finance. Yeah. Helping with reports and something of the sorts.

And then later on, I was moved, 10, 9 months later, I was moved to credit department. Now the loaning part. So that's where I think almost seven and a half years of my life in the banking was.

So I used to give a lot of loans to, I used to lend on behalf of the bank. So I started an officer. When I left employment, I was a manager, a credit manager, giving big loans to big companies in Kenya, including Kenya Airways.

Big mall.

[Neil]

Which I flew here on.

[Bulle]

Yeah. We also took part. I took part in financing one of the biggest mall in Kenya, Two Rivers, and many other real estate companies.

[Neil]

You're really neck deep in this.

[Bulle]

Yes. You're a banker. Exactly.

So now 2015, at that time, I was also running some other businesses. So in 2011, I was involved in other businesses. I was also into the spare parts and car spare parts and rims and tires.

I used to sell those stuff, car accessories. So it didn't do well. And then I opened the first online store for selling car accessories and car spare parts.

So it didn't do well because I was half in. So it didn't do well. I opened, I employed a couple of guys.

They were not doing good sales and selling is hard. So then I took what I call it business sabbatical. So I took a break from business.

[Neil]

Business?

[Bulle]

Sabbatical. Sabbatical.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Bulle]

So that is 2014.

[Neil]

You're like, enough of this. I'm taking a break. But you're still working as a banker.

[Bulle]

Yeah, I'm still in the bank, but I took a break from business. That's 2014, 2015. That's now when I started immersing myself into books.

So one good year. So I used to read four to five books every month. So close to 50 books every year.

Though in 2011, when I graduated 2010, 2011, 2013, I did my master's. So master's in strategic management. So I went back to school a few months after I graduated.

I did my undergrad. So while I was doing my MBA, that's also when I started loving books. At that time, I was doing my MBA and also running my businesses and started reading books.

So along the way in 2014, that's after I graduated with my first master's. That's when I left now doing business. And I said, let me take a break.

Maybe all this business didn't work. So I need to reflect. So now that's when I started getting involved into books.

[Neil]

Is that when you started the bookstore?

[Bulle]

Not yet. So when I started reading books, I used to take books to my workplace. So we used to have between 30 to one hour lunch break.

So at that time, I used to read my book for 15 minutes, 20 minutes to read the book on my free time. So my colleagues used to see me carrying books and reading books. And they used to borrow books from me.

They used to tell me, oh, I would love to have this book. Can I read? So once I finish, I will give it to them.

I'll give it to them. So I used to have a deskmate who was a lady who was a close friend of mine. She's called Jackie.

And she told me, and she saw me giving books for a couple of months. She told me, why can't you sell books to us? Why are you gifting us books?

Sell it to me at a fee. Ah, I said, this is an opportunity. Why can't I get them?

[Neil]

People want books and there isn't anywhere to get them.

[Bulle]

Exactly. Then I thought about it. I said, I'm failing these businesses.

So what is the approach I can use to get into the go-to-market approach? What can I do? So at that time, we didn't have a lot of e-commerces.

That's 2015. So we only had, I think, two or three companies that were doing e-commerce or online. Online sale of items.

But they were selling other products, not books. So I said, oh, there's an opportunity here. So my go-to-market will be an online sale of books.

I will be selling books online and open a small store, but I will be delivering to customers. So 2015, December, I opened a Facebook page, started selling books. The same year, we opened our first website and I started selling books.

Later on, the website crashed in January. And then I looked for a developer again. He developed it for me again.

What was the bookstore called? Nuria. Where'd you come up with the name?

It's coincidence. Initially, I wanted to call it Jua. J-U-A.

So Jua means to know in Swahili. It can also mean the sun, sun. So it can mean light.

It can also mean to know in Swahili. Perfect. Yeah.

And the guy who was designing for me the logo, when I gave him the name, he told me it doesn't look good. So think about another name.

[Neil]

Because the logo didn't look good.

[Bulle]

Yes, exactly. So...

[Neil]

He said, okay, I'll get a new logo guy.

[Bulle]

No, no, no. So he was a brilliant gentleman. So he used to specialize in designing logos and doing graphics.

And there were not many at that time.

[Neil]

Yeah. You had to stick with that guy. He said he doesn't like the name.

So he said, get a new one. So then you picked N-U-R-I-A, Nuria Books. Exactly.

[Bulle]

The reason is, one, Nuria is a Spanish name, Arabic name, and also Somalis use it. So it comes from the word in the Swahili context, from the word nuru or nur. Nur is Arabic.

Nuru is a Swahili, which is light, which means light. So Nuria means light, the one that gives light. So and my mom also, her name is Nuria.

[Neil]

Your mom's name is Nuria. So the name of the bookstore is light in three languages. Exactly.

And it's your mom's name. Exactly. And the logo guy approved it.

Yes. He's like, I can make this one into a good logo. And I'm looking at the logo right now.

It's got, you've got, I mean, we'll have to flash it on the screen right now, but it's got like a green triangle, a little... That is N. Oh, that's the N.

Yeah, that's N. Okay. And it's like in the colors, I'm assuming, like the Kenyan color.

[Bulle]

Yeah, the green, yes. And then the black and the white. There's a lot of green in this country.

[Neil]

The ecology is green. Bonnie's presidential campaign stickers I've got. There's green everywhere.

[Bulle]

We love green. They love green.

[Neil]

In the Western world, there's hardly any green. Look at the flags of Canada, the United States. There's no green.

[Bulle]

Oh, there's no green, yeah.

[Neil]

They don't have green on anything. Green is like a sub-color. Yes.

Here, it's the lead color. Nuria Books launched as a Facebook page. You had demand from people that you were lending books to.

It starts to organically build up. You think of a go-to-market strategy because you've done an MBA, so you've got this business brain on it. But you're still working as a banker?

Correct. And at some point, I'm assuming... Yes.

...you read...

[Bulle]

The Why Nation's Fail, yeah.

[Neil]

Is this a formative book for you? Yes. And can you hold it up to the camera so people can see if they're watching?

So you're in your 20s?

[Bulle]

Now, at that time, I'm in mid-20s.

[Neil]

You're mid-20s? Yeah, exactly. You got the banking job.

You've got this organic book thing happening. Yes, yes. How do you come across this book, and what does it do for you?

[Bulle]

This book, I started reading, I think, in my late 20s. I think 30.

[Neil]

Late 20s.

[Bulle]

When I was 30, I think.

[Neil]

Why Nation's Fail by Darren... And James. Darren James.

Darren Asimoglu, A-C-E-M-O-G-L-U. And James A. Robinson.

And it says around the front, it won the Nobel Prize.

[Bulle]

Yes.

[Neil]

The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. Yes. So take us into your life and tell us what this book did for you.

[Bulle]

This book, I think, spoke to me deeply. I think it was in my early 30s. It spoke to me because of how they compare societies that live together.

How some flourishing, or some are wealthy, and some are poor to the extreme. So both of them, they give an example, I think, in South Africa, where there is one side of South Africans who are wealthy, and maybe divided by a road, or maybe divided by a wall. On the other side, some are so poor.

They can't even get a dollar or two dollars a day. And the other side, they are so wealthy and flourishing. So he compares, actually, both of them, they look at why some got it right, some nations, and some didn't get it right.

[Neil]

By the way, in Canada, the richest postal code in the whole country, which is Rosedale in Toronto, is touching the poorest postal code in the whole country, which is Regent Park. They actually are touching in Toronto, which is richest and poorest in the whole Canada. Yes.

Sounds like similar there. Similar. And he goes into why that is.

Why is that?

[Bulle]

I don't know. Is it because of how capital is structured? Is it because of capitalism?

Is it because of greed? I don't know. I think maybe someone needs to study human beings, how I think we operate.

So this one, these are now slums. This is a picture of a slum.

[Neil]

Ah, the picture on the front.

[Bulle]

Yes.

[Neil]

I wonder which country that is.

[Bulle]

It must be, I think, South African.

[Neil]

Okay, because that's what he's talking about.

[Bulle]

But also compared locally here in Kenya, there's a place called Mudaiga, which most of the rich or some of the rich Kenyans live. Yeah. And on the other side, which is close to their name, it's called Madare, just a road that divides them, people who are poor live on the other side.

If you go to Kibra and Karen, K, K, this other side is M, M, Madare, Mudaiga. This other side is Kibera and Karen. So on the other side of the road, people who are wealthy, on this other side, people who are extremely poor.

So each nation have such. So they compare.

[Neil]

This is interesting.

[Bulle]

Yeah, it is.

[Neil]

It's very interesting. They show off, based on 15 years of research, the authors show that it is our man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success or lack of it. Korea, to take just one example, is a remarkably homogenous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth, while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest.

The difference is between the Koreas is due to the politics that created those two different institutional trajectories. So do you think about this? Like you're running a communal space.

Yeah. You have a door open policy here. You have over 2,000 self-published authors who sell their books through your website.

[Bulle]

Yeah.

[Neil]

At www.

[Bulle]

NuriaKenya.com.

[Neil]

NuriaKenya.com.

[Bulle]

Go to it.

[Neil]

N-U-R-I-A-K-E-N-Y-A dot com. And you're doing very well, because you have opened multiple stores. Correct.

So you figured something out here, economically.

[Bulle]

Yeah. 2016, actually, I onboarded five Kenyan authors, and I saw, besides taking advantage of the online presence, I also saw an opportunity where self-published authors or independent authors were not accommodated by local bookstores at that time. Yeah.

[Neil]

Because they go through the big publishers, and they don't publish the African authors.

[Bulle]

Yes. If you are nobody, and you have written a book, you wouldn't have a place to take your book. So I became housing such books.

So I started housing such books. So one of the things, challenges, the first was the bookstores that were in Kenya at that time were thinking of the shelf space. So why will I put your book that's not selling, and it will occupy my shelf space?

So they were looking from the economic side, but they were not looking at it from the angle of supporting the local authors, the social aspect, and also uplifting other authors. So many authors came from humble backgrounds, and there are many that were rejected, including J.K. Rowling. Yeah.

Including, I think, is it John Grisham? I don't know which other author. Yeah.

That was rejected by publishers.

[Neil]

Tim Ferriss had 17 rejected before the four-hour workweek.

[Bulle]

So me, I said, I will not reject any author.

[Neil]

I will not reject any author.

[Bulle]

Yeah. I won't.

[Neil]

Even if the book doesn't sell.

[Bulle]

Exactly.

[Neil]

There are some of the 2,000 people that have self-published books with you, with your platform, who have never sold a single copy.

[Bulle]

We still sell the books, but even if the book doesn't perform, we will not turn down. Oh, I see. We will stock the book. And thereby— I will help them on how to sell. We will guide them. We'll coach them.

We'll teach them on how it works and how to sell. So we guide them. So we will help them.

Many authors, we have some authors who are as young as seven, six years old, who were brought to us by their parents, so who had the gift of writing, and the parents helped them to write the books. So if we will say no to such author, so that will be now— wouldn't be fair to them.

[Neil]

You're creating a reading culture. Exactly. In a country which, sorry to ask you this, does it have one already?

[Bulle]

Like, what's the— The reading culture is peaking, but it's not as good as other markets outside Africa. But we are number three in Africa in terms of readership. After?

After Nigeria and South Africa.

[Neil]

Those are the top two.

[Bulle]

Yes, Nigeria is because of the population. Measured by percentage of total book sales. Yes, sales and readership.

Ah. And also population. So Nigeria is because of the— Yeah, like six times the population.

And also, the other thing that contributes to the book sales in Africa is the purchasing power of that country. So South Africa is fairly close to our population, if not more, in terms of population-wise. But the readership is high because of the— the purchasing power is high in South Africa compared to Kenya.

Right.

[Neil]

People on the other side of the road. Yes. They can buy a lot of books.

[Bulle]

Exactly. And they have more wealthy people than us, as Kenyans. So that's why you see a lot of billionaires from Africa, from South Africa and Nigeria.

Yes. Because of the whites in South Africa, they're billionaires, most of them. Especially the ones who run businesses there.

Yeah, of course.

[Neil]

Of course.

[Bulle]

So you— Not all of them, but a handful of them.

[Neil]

Did you just quit your job then? Or did you just let it be a slow trickle away? And they're like, hey, where's this guy?

Where's Bulle on Friday afternoons? And hey, I saw him on Saturday. He's also running a bookstore.

[Bulle]

So the thing that happened was interesting. It's as if the universe was trying to help me get out of employment.

[Neil]

Or your subconscious.

[Bulle]

I don't know. So in 2016, April, the bank I was working with was put under receivership.

[Neil]

The bank went bankrupt?

[Bulle]

Yes, exactly. Because of some kind of insider dealings that the shareholders or the owners were doing. So the Central Bank of Kenya moved in and put that bank under receivership.

And later on sold the license to another bank called Mauritius Bank. It's called SBM. It's from Mauritius.

So the license was transferred and the asset was given to SBM Bank. For two good years, we did transfer of assets from this bank to the other. So basically, they bidded, blah, blah.

And then later on, they sold— But the bank went bankrupt.

[Neil]

Yes. Thereby pushing you, accelerating you into this business that you started. Is it going okay?

Is it going well? I mean, Bonnie says this is the best bookstore in the whole country. I see the ratings online.

And the reviews are unbelievable. For those that haven't checked it out, go to check the reviews. It's like everyone's raving about your bookstore.

You have a second location now in Mombasa.

[Bulle]

Yes, yes.

[Neil]

And you're in your early 40s now, if I'm wrong.

[Bulle]

Yeah, we are 40s now.

[Neil]

Happy 41st, I think-ish, right?

[Bulle]

Yes, yes.

[Neil]

Because I knew, because my wife just celebrated her 40th, and it was 1985.

[Neil]

Exactly.

[Neil]

I had a trick, because I knew you were one year earlier. Yes. And you're running this bookstore.

Culture's here. Yes. So, our listenership's all over.

How do you help people orient themselves in African literature, African books? And I'm asking for myself, too. Only a couple months ago, I realized, I don't think I've read a single book from Africa.

Other than Bonny's, I haven't read a single book from this country. I've heard of some out of Africa. Now, I've got Dance of the Jacaranda by Peter Kamini.

I just read Weep Not Child.

[Bulle]

Child by Ngugi. Ngugi.

[Neil]

But help us. So, for those that are listening to this, that are looking for a bookseller like you, who's running a thriving bookstore, where do we start?

[Bulle]

Because what we did when we realized in 2016, when we onboarded five independent authors, the readership was poor. And I think this was because of how our environment shaped us. So, our environment is a bit different and interesting, especially in Africa and also in Kenya.

Say more, yeah. Because when you go to school, you read to pass exam. You don't read for leisure or you don't read to better your life.

Everything revolves around passing exams so that you become a better person. So, you're forced to read books. So, you're forced to memorize.

And then when it comes to exams, you put them down into the paper. So, you see both in high school and in primary school, you see that as a punishment.

[Neil]

Yeah, I was just thinking that. Punishment was the word I was thinking of.

[Bulle]

Exactly.

[Neil]

Reading is something you have to do, you're forced to do, and you're told what to read.

[Bulle]

You're forced to go to school. Exactly. Because of that, once you finish university, nobody wants to see books.

Because you look back and say that, ah, no.

[Neil]

It's like seeing a pencil case or a homework.

[Bulle]

Exactly. Because of that now, people don't tend to read, especially here in Kenya and Africa. So now, the second thing you think about is once you finish university is you start looking for work.

Your first priority is where will I find one job? So, book will be the list of things that you're thinking about. So, yours is how can I find a job?

How can I find a girlfriend and marry her and start building my own family? How will I get a car? How will I build a house?

So, book is the list of all priorities. So, it took us many years of marketing so that at least we remind Kenyans that for you to be a better person, you must start reading. So, self-development, which is...

[Neil]

The exception in the story, sir.

[Bulle]

Exactly. So, one of the key things we used to push for it was build yourself personally. And the only way you can build yourself is through books.

[Neil]

You market this online.

[Bulle]

Exactly. Self-education.

That's what we should say. Self-education. The other one was forced education.

The other one was forced knowledge. The one for schools. You're forced because you go to school to pass.

You're not there to better yourself. So, you must become... You must get a good GPA score.

You must pass exams. You must... Everything is pass, pass, pass, pass.

Nothing involves you as the person. So, now what we started pitching or marketing is around you now. Be a better version of yourself.

Go read. Self-education. Go learn and learn and relearn.

So, that's what...

[Neil]

You start with the self-help side. That's why on your shelves I saw Start With Why by Simon Sinek. I saw Gabor Mate's book.

I think you sell a lot of Atomic Habits as everybody does. It's sold 25 million copies. And so, is there African self-help authors that we should be thinking about reading?

Yeah, we do. I see there's a display right here, by the way. I walk in.

It says Bestsellers. Selected using sales reigns on Nuria.com. And there's a pile here saying The Fight For Order.

[Bulle]

There's a new book. So, we displayed it here because he released it two days ago.

[Neil]

Okay, this is a new. And then on top of it is Preserving Marriage Institutions with a husband and wife at their wedding with their faces covered by leaves. What's this one about?

[Bulle]

I know there's a lady also. She brought them today. So, we put just to promote her.

[Neil]

Okay, but help me. So, I'm understanding the path that you're on both as a country and as a bookstore and as a reading culture nation in terms of teaching people and reminding people that books can be a pleasure device, not just a force device. You're using self-help as the bridge to that. And then for people outside of this continent, do you want to read more African writers?

[Bulle]

We have, because initially when we started, we started stocking Kenyan books.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Bulle]

Because it was within reach. Yeah. It was easy.

They can find us and we can sell those books. Later on, as we do a lot of marketing on social media and on our platforms, more self-help authors outside Kenya started reaching out to us from Zambia, South Africa, Nigeria, Uganda, Tanzania. So, now we have over 35 African authors outside Kenya.

[Neil]

Oh, wow.

[Bulle]

Yeah. And we have another five from outside Africa.

[Neil]

And people are finding books that they love here.

[Bulle]

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And also, we ship. You know, Neil, the other thing also we do is we ship to the rest of the world.

Right. We use DHL and FedEx and UPS.

[Neil]

You're an entrepreneur.

[Bulle]

You figured out a million ways to do it. Exactly. So, we partnered with DHL on how we can ship books outside Africa.

In Canada, you can get it within two or three days, maximum.

[Neil]

Really? Yeah. Two or three days?

[Bulle]

Three days, yeah.

[Neil]

From here?

[Bulle]

From here to Canada is two or three days.

[Neil]

It took me two or three days to get here.

[Bulle]

Exactly. So, we use DHL. We have partnership with them.

And then we ship books everywhere on this planet Earth. The farthest, which is the most expensive one, are New Zealand and Australia.

[Neil]

Yeah, of course.

[Bulle]

Those are the two countries.

[Neil]

They're far from everywhere.

[Bulle]

Exactly. So, those are only two countries, I think. It's a bit steep when it comes to sending books.

[Neil]

And it's working. And this business is profitable. You're opening a second location.

You recommend book selling to people. Any advice for people that want to open a bookstore? Daydreamers that are out there thinking that they want to do this?

[Bulle]

They can do it, but it needs a lot of patience. It needs consistency. And it needs a lot of marketing.

Yeah, you must make noise about it.

[Neil]

How do you do this marketing? I don't see any bookstore marketing in my life.

[Bulle]

Us, we market a lot.

[Neil]

Instagram?

[Bulle]

All social medias. No, we do organic most of the time. 90% of our posts and marketing are organic.

[Neil]

I saw when I came here, you had over 16,000 followers on Instagram. And I saw that you had over three Instagram posts in the last four hours.

[Bulle]

Correct.

[Neil]

Meanwhile, you're running a store. So something's going on here.

[Bulle]

So every day we do 20 posts across all platforms. We do Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. That's like a full-time job.

Yeah, it is. How we structured our team is everyone has access to our social media accounts. Everybody?

Everybody.

[Neil]

Oh, and anybody can post anything anytime.

[Bulle]

You create content and then post.

[Neil]

Wow, what a great philosophy.

[Bulle]

Yeah, so everyone has access to it. A couple of years, we went for training on Facebook. One of my colleagues went for training on Facebook on how to post and how to schedule posts.

Later on, I realized that we shouldn't follow the policies of how to post, when to post. They will tell you this is the right time to post for Kenyans. This is the right time to post for this.

So because of the number of posts and the number of information that are shared on platform, you cannot structure posting unless you're creating a video. But normal posts, we went against the tide, against the normal, where you're supposed to post at 10 a.m. This is when all Kenyans or maybe 70% of Kenyans have access to internet. Maybe some of them, they are at workplace.

Maybe they're accessing. They have access to free internet. So a few years ago, it was like that.

But nowadays, access of internet is high. So people can easily buy data. So we said that we should not be following that structure.

So what we'll be doing is we will post as and when we have content that's ready. Because billions and billions of posts are shared every minute, every second. So if you say, I will post only two, it will be swallowed by the other posts.

[Neil]

That's all I'm doing. I'm doing like one post every three, four days. This is my problem.

[Bulle]

No, maybe it's better because maybe you have good following. But when you are growing and growing organically and you don't have a lot of following. Yeah.

So the best way to catch up or to compliment or to... Never stop yelling. Exactly.

[Neil]

Go, go, go, go, go. And it takes time and it takes patience.

[Bulle]

A lot of patience.

[Neil]

And then sometimes... You're open seven days a week too. You're working hard.

[Bulle]

We started accommodating opening on Sundays two years ago. And the reason why we did was there were some customers who asked us, who were asking us, do you open on Sundays? Do you guys open on Sundays?

So we started collecting that data. So there were not many. So we said that let's open for half day on Sundays.

So we work full day from Monday to Saturday and then half day on Sunday. And then Sunday all became now a normal day. Almost become a normal day.

It's not a normal person, but normal. So there are some of customers who come. Reason why they do that is because there's less traffic.

And parking on Sundays in Nairobi CBD is free or in Nairobi. But you pay for parking from Monday to Saturday. So of course, also it's shaped by the...

[Neil]

Free parking, less traffic. Exactly. I've been in the traffic already.

I've been here one day. I know what you mean. There's a lot of traffic.

[Bulle]

So the decision was shaped by the pain. Yeah. And the opportunity.

[Neil]

And you're listening to your people.

[Bulle]

Exactly. And then that is now how, you know. And then we started now having events, in-store events.

Yeah, we have in-store events here. Like what? This lady, we hosted her.

[Neil]

You're pointing. You're pointing at a wall. There's a woman, she's in a dress, holding a giant white circle.

What is that?

[Bulle]

That's called nyatiti. It's like guitar, but it's not guitar. Okay.

So it's a traditional...

[Neil]

You hosted her in the store.

[Bulle]

So this lady visited Kenya like 20 years ago. She went to a county called Siaya.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Bulle]

She lived there for 20 years. Yep. She learned how to play that equivalent of guitar.

It's called nyatiti.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Bulle]

She's an expert in that. And she became the first female to play that guitar, that nyatiti.

[Neil]

Really?

[Bulle]

Yes. She's the first female to play that.

[Neil]

Oh, wow.

[Bulle]

She was here last week.

[Neil]

And Yango, you're Siaya. Nyatiti Queen. Yes.

Okay. Can we take this?

[Bulle]

Yes, yes, yes.

[Neil]

Okay, I'm going to buy this book. I'm going to buy a few books before I leave here.

[Bulle]

No, we will gift you some. No, no, no.

[Neil]

I'm buying. I'm supporting the bookstore.

[Bulle]

Actually, this book we played at...

[Neil]

As long as it's in English, I can read it. That's the only thing.

[Bulle]

We are the main distributors. Oh, you're writing the inside cover.

[Neil]

Yeah, she... That's thin. So I like this for my suitcase.

[Bulle]

She did it in Japanese in her mother's time. And also now it's in English. And she launched it a week ago.

Wow. And she did a book reading here.

[Neil]

You're right immersed in it. You got authors coming in now. You must be working around the clock here.

[Bulle]

Yeah, we have a lot of authors who visit us outside Africa. She visited us this year. Last year, we hosted seven international authors outside Africa.

Also, we take part in festivals. There's one that ended called Macondo Festival. Hopefully, we might invite you one of these days.

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

[Neil]

I'm looking for an excuse to come back already.

[Bulle]

Exactly. So that festival basically is a fusion of international authors and Kenyan authors. Yeah.

So it happens every September on 20th and 21st. You got a lot going on. So one of these days, we'll invite you so that at least you become a speaker.

[Neil]

I would love that.

[Bulle]

They usually take care of everything. They stay here.

[Neil]

You get here on Kenyan Airlines.

[Bulle]

Exactly.

[Neil]

So we want to wrap things up here with Bule, the bookseller, who's given us a couple formative books so far, but also told us your inspiring journey and story from coming from Wajir.

[Bulle]

Is that right? Yeah, very correct.

[Neil]

Is that right? 700 kilometers northeast of here near the Somalian-Ethiopian borders, raised by your camel-herding grandmother and father with 14 brothers and sisters and both of your mom and dad's eyes. Yes.

Right? Yes. Coming up, learning how to be a baker and running a thriving bookstore, two of them.

[Bulle]

Yes.

[Neil]

And I'm going to Mombasa from here, by the way. So maybe I'll go to your other store.

[Bulle]

Hopefully. I'll visit us. Karibu.

[Neil]

And we also have a mutual friend going for president in 2027. Our guest in Chapter 104, Boniface Mwangi. So what role can bookstores like yours play in the advancement of culture and politics, do you think, in this country?

Where does this country need to go? And then let's wrap things up from there.

[Bulle]

That's a hard question. I think books play a vital key in shaping humanity in every angle. If you look at some of the people, the richest people on the planet, they were all shaped by books.

Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk. Most of them, they had fond of reading books. That's what I was talking about earlier was seeking self-knowledge, where you find yourself and see how you can help.

So books, literature and everything. Actually, even here in Africa, it helped a lot. There were many in our earlier years, people couldn't talk about or couldn't challenge the government.

So they used to put it in books, into books, either plays or fictions or in poetry, where they address what was affecting the society. So books tend to talk or convey the pains and the aspirations of the society. So it's not only, I think, even in Africa, we look at also what Dostoyevsky and all those guys wrote.

So, or Friedrich Nietzsche, all those. So they wrote about the society, how we can change, how. So they challenged the status quo and also sometimes gave solutions of how the society should be treated and how society look like.

So books does play a key role in that, not only in preserving, but also in advancing societies. So besides the school books, which I think schools, their work is to shape you to become a worker. But other books, the non-academic books, shape you to become a better human being, a better person.

So that's the difference between school books and general books.

[Neil]

Yeah, a better human being and a better person. Going from cosmologically blind to cosmologically aware, building on the power of your subconscious mind, using things like visualization, understanding what leads to things like nations failing and businesses booming. Bulle, the bookseller, thank you so much for coming on.

[Bulle]

Thanks for coming.

[Neil]

This has been a real joy. I really love talking to you.

[Bulle]

You're most welcome. And this is your home, visit us. And I want to say thanks to your mom as well, for being a Kenyan.

So you're half Kenyan, basically. Yes, I've become myself this way.

[Neil]

Now for coming here, I'm telling you, I'm going to be back here.

[Bulle]

We invite everyone. I think Kenya will be a big nation. Just near future.

We are not far from becoming a powerful nation sooner or later. We have brilliant people here in Kenya. Very brilliant people.

And Kenya is now like, let me say, the US of Africa to most African nations. Tanzanians rely on Kenyans. Ugandans rely on Kenyans.

Congolese, all Somalia, Ethiopia, they see Kenya like US to them. Because our currency is stronger, our economy is free. Nobody cares about what you do as long as you are not harming them.

You can successfully run a business here if you're a foreigner, as long as you're not breaking any law. And that's how I think the US was built. Now that's how Kenya has been built.

So it's a platform where you can come and plug and play if you follow the norms and the laws of this country. Anyone can become successful and do a lot of stuff. Welcome to Kenya.

Welcome to Nuria.

[Neil]

Wow, Nuria Books. Make sure you go follow Nuria Books online. www.nuriakenya.com Shipping in two or three days anywhere around the world. I know you're advertising on social media. Is it at Nuria Books?

[Bulle]

Our Instagram is Nuria underscore The Honest Store. We used to call ourselves The Honest Store. Now we are called The Home of African Books or Independent Authors.

Our Twitter is Nuria at Nuria Store and at Nuria Books. We have two handles. That's at Nuria Store at Nuria Books.

On TikTok is at Nuria Store. And on Facebook is Nuria Your Store. And Nuria Your Store.

So that's our Facebook page as well.

[Neil]

And I'm about to buy a whole bunch of books for you in the show notes. And in the end notes, I will share which books I've bought that I'm bringing home. And please support this store, support Independent Books or support the Kenyan growing, thriving, profiting economy.

And vote Boniface Mwangi 2027.

[Bulle]

Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thanks for coming in.

[Neil]

Thank you for having me. OK, what a joy and pleasure it's been. Hey, everybody, it's just me, just Neil again, back in my basement with my bag of wires, listening back to that wonderful conversation on the hot streets with passion fruit juice everywhere.

The smell of the kind of breeze there. You know, the sun hits you different in Kenya, I found. It's like it's not scorching.

It's not sweltering. It's like just this beautiful, warm sun. It's where we're from, right?

The cradle of humanity, as Peter Comande said in our last chapter of three books. Thank you so much for listening to Bule, the bookseller, who gave us so many little bits of advice, such as I find his thoughts really interesting. Like you can visualize something that you think over and over again and then leave it with your subconscious brain to make it happen.

First of all, I love the philosophy of this because it feels like very relieving. And also, in general, in life, I'm always looking for ways to let go of my mind, stop gripping the wheel too tightly, as my friend Mel Robbins would say. You know, when she started her TV show, we were all so excited for her.

And she was very excited too. And then she said, I just don't want to grip the wheel too tight in case it fails. Like, I don't want my whole persona to be resting on this.

Sure enough, it did fail, not because of her. I think there was pandemic issues and so on. And now today, she's kind of doing the same thing on a bigger scale with her podcast and her book, The Let Them Theory.

But my point is, the subconscious mind is going to do a lot of the work. It's the same idea with writing down goals or creating a vision board. I think for me, while those things, you wonder, like, does writing down goals work?

Well, yeah, it's proven to work. Does making a vision board work? Well, it depends what you believe.

But both of them are doing the same thing, which is creating new neural pathways that help you towards a specific goal. I think for anything really important in my life, I truthfully have written it down. You know, whether that's the contracts that I have with Leslie on things like Nights Away From Home or Mountain Days I'm Going to Travel.

Like, without writing it down, it's not really a legit thing. It's sort of ethereal and ephemeral, and it can shift. But when you write it down and we sort of sign it and think about it, it makes it real.

I think the subconscious mind's involved there. All right, that was one quote I expanded. I know that failure and trying is the key to success.

Sounds simple, but just remember, the more you fail, the more you try, the more you learn. No matter what it is in life you're trying to do, if you're sucking at it right now, you're learning. Like me, I signed up for hockey, okay?

I signed up for hockey. I've never played hockey before. I'm playing hockey on Wednesday nights now.

Every time I go, I am by far and away the worst player on the team. It's an over 45 league. I'm 46.

However, almost everyone in the league is like 65. But they're really good. They're good 65-year-olds.

And I'm like, I'm terrible. I'm the worst. But then I think I'm there for learning the most.

You know, I'm learning a sport that I've never played before. So failure and trying is the key to success. And then how about this?

He had a lot of comments about this. I think books play a vital role in shaping humanity, right? Bookstores play a key role in advancing society.

It's kind of like Peter's point in the last chapter where he says, even the greatest societies ever in human civilization, all we have to document them are their words, their stories. And so, so steadfast is Boulay's belief in the power of books and the power of reading that he's let go of, you know, a high finance job or career path in order to start and spread books. I was able to connect Boulay afterwards with James Daunt, the CEO of Barnes & Noble.

And credit to James Daunt, Boulay asked me if I could connect him. And I was like, well, I'll give it a shot. So I emailed James Daunt.

He's like, yes, I'd love to talk to him. And then Boulay sent me notes. I made a great conversation.

He gave me lots of tips and ideas for how to grow my independent bookstore in Africa. So here's James Daunt, you know, the head of Waterstones and Barnes & Noble and Daunt Books, taking time out of his schedule to like help Boulay. I mean, I think there's a love affair amongst book people globally.

That's why you're here right now. That's why I'm here right now. We love books.

We love books. We fall out of them sometimes. We get into, you know, we get into like quicksand sometimes, but we love books.

And thank you so much to Boulay, the bookseller, for adding a couple more books to our top 1000. I didn't get three this time. That's not me.

It was a lot happening that night. We were wandering around the bookstore. We're trying to find books.

I'm trying to get the story. I'm making up the questions. I'm like, but we got two.

We got two. We're going to add number 550, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy, M-U-R-P-H-Y, which I, by the way, have on my bookshelf as well. I flipped through it a little bit.

It is a great book. And I've been fascinated by this in general since I was a kid, is the idea that there's a lot more mind than we use in general. So how do you use it?

Channeling it, guiding it. I think what you do right when you go to bed and right when you wake up are really important. That's kind of where two-minute evenings, you know, play Rose, Rose, Thorn, Bud before bed, and two-minute mornings, right?

I will let go of, I am grateful for, I will focus on. The reason I do those two practices at the end and the beginning of every day is because I think I want to kind of feed that sleeping mind a little more. Okay, and then we're also going to add number 549, Why Nations Fail by Darren Acemoglu, A-C-E-M-O-G-L-U, and James A.

Robinson. Two more books that we're going to add to the top 1,000. Thank you so much to Bule.

Thanks so much to Perlexi. Thanks so much to Boniface Mwangi. Thanks so much for people having me over in Africa.

I hope I brought some color and community over from Africa, over to wherever you are listening. Thank you all so much for listening to chapter 155 of three books. 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, one of the three clubs that we have for three books listeners. As if you're listening here, give us a call, 1-833-READALOT, R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T.

Give me your thoughts. Give me your voice notes. I love hearing from you.

Let's start off as we always do by going to the phones.

[Pheobe]

Hi, Neil. This is Phoebe from Charlotte, North Carolina. It's funny.

I love typing in the 1-833-READALOT because my muscle memory kicks in with the numbers and the letters. I just finished the episode with Robin Sloan, and I just have to say the best part of that episode was just the end bit where you're talking because, man, oh, man, I have been listening to this podcast since chapter one, and I could not make it through some of it. He was just rattling on.

My God, it was very funny that when you had to cut it off, thank you at the end. It's this outro music. You just had to cut him off because he just keeps on going, and he was doing something with his saliva.

I don't know. Whatever. And then the quotes that you picked out were like the only tolerable moments of him talking.

Sorry, this is not very complimentary about him. I don't know him, and I've never heard of him before, but I don't know. I couldn't help myself.

And then you were like, oh, well, please call in. This is the push. And I was like, okay, well, I'm doing it.

All right. Well, anyway, thanks. Love this podcast.

Part of all of the different clubs. Appreciate you. Have a good one.

[Neil]

Thank you so much to Phoebe from Charlotte for the honest and unfiltered review of Conversation with Robin Sloan. It's nice to hear calls like that because you never know what works, what resonates. Obviously, I love Robin, and I love his book.

But hey, that's why we have listener lines. 1-833-READALOT because I love hearing your thoughts and your reflections. So thank you, Phoebe, for being brave, making the call.

If you're listening right now and you want the push, here it is. What's one thing you liked? What's one thing you didn't?

What's a guess you want to have on the show? Or you can just call and say, what's one of your formative books? Hey, Neil, here's a book that changed my life.

Just let me know. I'd love to hear and play it for you. As always, if I play your message, drop me a line, and I will send you a signed book of your choice.

All right, let's move on to the letter of the chapter. I normally do this at the beginning. This time, I kind of just went right into boule.

So if I ever miss at the beginning, I'll do it at the end. Letter comes from Sarah S. Hi, Neil.

I want to let you know I've gotten my whole family onto the Rose, Rose, Thorn, Bud game. My husband, my 12, 11, and 9-year-old kids. We do it at bedtime.

The 9-year-old takes it so personally when the world doesn't happen as he wants to. Or thinks it should. And I've already seen a shift in his attitude even one weekend.

Day one, I started with the morning practice as well. But I can only remember two of the three, and I haven't been writing. Just thinking.

I will say I'm definitely going to spend at least two minutes deciding what to let go of and what to focus on every day before I grab my phone. Which is still in arm's reach. But I will get there.

Letting go of is easier than I thought. Most of the time, when I think about it later in the day, I can't even remember what I was supposed to let go of. Ha ha ha.

So I introduced the morning practice. At least those two pieces. I still haven't revisited my notes.

So the kids and the husband, too. Have a great rest of your week, Neil. Sarah.

Thank you so much, Sarah. You know, it's nice to hear from you. For those that don't know, Leslie and I end our days with Rose, Rose, Thorn, Bud.

That's the basis of our journal called Two Minute Evenings. And if you want a kind of a way to put it together, you can use that. Or you can just talk around your dinner table.

Just as a gratitude game to reflect on. And the only piece you missed in the morning there was, I am grateful for. Once again, when you think back and reflect on one or two things that happened that you're positive about, it's like a bicep curl for your mind.

Right? All right. That's the letter of the chapter.

And now let's move on to the word of the podcast. For this chapter's word, let's go back to Bule.

[Bulle]

Yes, indeed.

[Neil]

It is Afdabalon. That's two words. The first word is A-F, and then the second word is D-A-B-O-O-L-A-N, which means a closed mouth is gold.

If I research this online, this is one of the most famous Somali proverbs. Afdabalon, a closed mouth is gold. The opposite of what I do on this show, where my mouth is, my tongue is wagging the whole time, but a good proverb from the camel herding grandmother, now 101, that we should all think about and remember.

This is a journey, guys. It really is. When I started this in 2018, I didn't know where it would take me or take us.

There's a number of you out there that are Cover to Clever Club members. I mean, you're listening to every single chapter of the show. This was different, right?

We were in a different place, different time, different organization in the world. I didn't know what to expect. We got a really unique story.

For me, a really big part of this is sharing stories and building community. If you're here, if you're listening, thank you. Thank you for being part of this community.

I really love chatting with you and celebrating our love of reading together. If you're out there, drop me a line any time, Neil at GlobalHappiness.org. Letters that I read, I'll give you a signed book, as I always do.

And also, drop me a review anytime and make a phone call anytime, 1-833-READALOT. And now, until next time, until chapter 156, the last chapter in our little African sub-series, let's remember that 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.

Listen to the chapter here!

Chapter 154: Peter Kimani on conquering the curse of choreographed colonialism

Listen to the chapter here!

Peter:

I mean, that's what writers of the world do, to keep memory, to memorialize our origins, to invoke the past, to, you know, understand the future. We haven't even begun telling our story. It is our brains that have been colonized not to be able to understand and to unpack the nuances.

We have to start thinking about this animal we call democracy. We must remember even the most advanced societies in the world, their only claim to fame is through the stories narrated by the writers. If you've got this burning desire to do something, but this desire has been nurturing for years, the only way you can make a difference between those who have these desires and making it happen is actually by starting today.

Neil:

Hey everybody, this is Neil Pasricha and welcome or welcome back to 3 Books. This is the only podcast in the world by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. You are listening to chapter 154, 54, 54 of our show.

Thank you for joining our 22 year long pilgrimage. Every single chapter of the show, we talk to one of the world's most inspiring or interesting people and we asked them which three books most shaped their lives. And I cannot wait to talk to you today about Peter, or PK as he's often known, Kimani, K-I-M-A-N-I, a wonderful Nairobi based novelist who I cannot wait to introduce you to if you don't already know him.

But before we do, I am vibing right now. I am vibing. I have just had the most wonderful trip to Africa to sit down and interview Peter and two other guests.

We're going to do like an African expose, expose, introduction. For me, it was my first trip to Africa and my mom's from there. My mom is from Nairobi, Kenya, and she hadn't been back since she had left when she was 18 and I hadn't been there ever.

So seeing an opportunity to amplify some of the voices and the stories to get from there, from Africa. I mean, Africa is not a country. That was the first slide on a Walmart presentation I remember from 10 years ago when Walmart bought like a retail there.

Africa is 55 countries, 1.5 billion people. And it has been the subject of a tremendous amount of colonization, slavery. There's been a de-peopling there.

There's been a kind of cultures torn apart, ripped apart as European colonists in the mid 1800s sort of divvied up the land, made a lot of new lines. How do I know this? Not very well, but just through regular ongoing conversations with the people I was meeting, with the people that were driving me somewhere, the people in the hotels.

There is a line that Peter says in this interview that we need to begin by decolonizing our minds, which sort of hit home. And it's going to be a bit of a thread line through some of these conversations. And before we jump into Peter, and I can't wait to introduce you to him.

I'm going to tell you all about him. I want to start as I always do by reading a letter, one of the pieces of feedback from the 3 Booker community. You can always send me your letters at my email, neil.globalhappiness.org, or you can put it as a comment or a review online. Those are always great to help share the show, but I'm not too fussed about them because I want to be intrinsically motivated. This letter comes from Devin. She writes, in regards to our Jean Chrétien chapter that we dropped three months ago, she says, Wow, it is incredible how sharp Mr. Chrétien still is. It's maybe not a surprise that the books he chose are about simplicity and perseverance. Man, I miss politicians like him. He pissed people off, but he managed to do it in a good way.

I suppose that explains his approval numbers. He hit the nail on the head about lying. You've probably seen clips of Kamala Harris talking to Stephen Colbert, who he was essentially congratulating her for predicting so many of Trump's moves during the campaign.

She dejectedly admitted she didn't foresee the capitulation of so many strong groups and voices. That was definitely my favorite chapter so far, but it wasn't because of the books. And then she adds a PS, which is really interesting, saying, By the way, I'm about to board a flight here in the Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada airport, and they have these vending machines there.

I'll hold up a picture if you're watching on YouTube. Vending machines that run by the Halifax library, where you slide in your library card and you can take out a library book from a vending machine in the airport. Imagine that.

You're at the airport in Halifax. You're about to go on a flight. Say you're going to Africa.

And by the way, I met people in Africa from Halifax who had flown to Toronto and then I think to Amsterdam and then to Africa. And you could just be like, You know, I don't have a book. I'll just take a book out of the library.

Genius move by the Halifax public library librarians. I know there are many of you out there. Check it out.

Halifax. We got to check out how Halifax is doing that. Maybe spread the word around.

All right. Now I'd like to talk about a value of the show. I like to, you know, 3books.co slash values. I'm going to have a whole bunch of values listed for the show, things that we espouse and believe in. As always, you can skip forward. We don't have ads in the shows.

You can all skip forward to the conversation. But the value I want to talk about today is a reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.

This is actually a quote. It's a shortened quote because it has like other little, you know, it's like some guy said this, some guy said that, but that's the line. It comes from Game of Thrones, George RR Martin.

And it just is a profound and simple way of amplifying the many over the self in my mind. You know, I like a lot of us, like I'm sure all of us at some point, you know, I can get obsessed with myself. How am I feeling?

How am I doing? What's wrong with my life? What's going well?

What's going, what's not going well. There's just endless trivialities that come in the nature of living. And I find that this quote helps minimize my own self-worth in a healthy way.

It reduces and diminishes my ego in a healthy way. It makes me think about the lives of others. Not just other people.

I mean, you can read a book like Black Beauty and you're a horse. You know, I mean, it's just other situations, other places, other times in the world, other places in the world. A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies.

The man who never reads lives only one. And, you know, there's a gender bias there built in there, but the idea is strong. And it's part of what gives rise to me feeling passionate and excited about bringing forth some of these voices that I heard in Africa from this trip and sharing them with you.

And I'm one person. I don't know most things, right? Like I'm a tiny little person.

And to be able to speak confidently about what's happened in different African countries and different African people is not going to be something I'm ever going to be able to confidently do. So that's why I'm trying to think of this, you know, this mantle, this stage of three books as a way to expose and learn and share my curiosity with all of you so we can all learn together. So I was there a few days, right?

I was just in Africa a few days and I've done three deep interviews there with a novelist at his home. That's this one. A bookseller in his bookstore, which is really a fun one as well.

And a photojournalist, son of maybe the most famous photojournalist ever in the world. He's the son of a family who's passed away in his studio, which is really cool. And we talk openly.

The Threadline definitely is about, you know, East Africa and Africa rising and just hearing some of these stories that we don't get to hear. So we are going to talk about normalizing abnormalities. We're going to talk about Out of Africa, a famous book you might've heard of.

We're going to talk about Plato, writing as an extension of living. We're going to talk about the Hardy Boys, about whitewashing conservation, the tale of Adlon Watts, and so many of the stories that came about along the way. Join me in this sort of garden setting.

We're going to be outside. You might hear pied crows, P-I-E-D, honking and screeching in the background. You might hear the wind go through.

If you're watching on YouTube, we'll put up the video of the conversation as well. After the conversation, PK's lovely wife, Ann, who took the day off to support this interview, she had been cooking all morning. She welcomed my mom into her kitchen and they made chapatis and they made like the stewed greens.

You know, there's so many different kinds of stewed and wilted greens that I had that have vegetables I'd never heard of that I can't get here. You know, fresh chicken. And when I say fresh chicken, I mean like fresh chicken, like chicken from the backyard chicken, you know, chopped up and cooked and marinated.

So we had this kind of following. The sun was shining as it does almost every day. I passed a sign on the highway there and it says, welcome to Nairobi, the city under the sun.

And I thought that was a really profound and simple way to put it. Who is Peter Kimani? Well, if you don't know him, he was born in 1971 in Kenya.

He's an award-winning Kenyan novelist, best known for his award-winning novel, Dance of the JaKaranda, which was a New York Times notable book, a book that I've read and loved and recommend. His work has also appeared in The Guardian, New African, and Sky News. So he's also a journalist on the side.

He's also a professor. He did school at University of Iowa and got his doctorate at the University of Houston, and now is a professor at the Aga Khan University in Nairobi. And he was awarded the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature, which is Kenya's highest literary honor.

A former international writing fellow, and he was also selected by NPR to compose a poem for Barack Obama's inauguration, which we're going to talk about that as well. Peter is a kind and sagacious soul. There's a lot to learn from him, as you will very soon hear as we flip the page together into the next chapter of Three Books.

Thank you all for being here. Thanks so much for listening. If you are here, stick around to the end.

When I play your voicemails from 1-833-READ-ALOT, we share a little bit of a word cloud, sound cloud, geek out a little bit about the show. Stick around to the end. It's always a fun hangout here.

Thank you so much for being here, and let's dive in now. Hi, Peter.

Peter:

Hey, Neil.

Neil:

Thank you so much. I feel like I am in the very, very lucky position of flying around the world, collecting stories and moving them around. I feel like I'm sitting in an actual heaven, both in Africa, then in Kenya, and then in your home.

I feel very blessed and lucky to be here. Thank you for having me.

Peter:

Well, the pleasure is all mine and wonderful to meet you and welcome to our house and our country.

Neil:

And our continent. I've never even been to Africa before. I'm embarrassed to say.

I always say no book guilt, no book shame. So I should also say no travel guilt, no travel shame. But I've never been to Africa.

My mom was born here in Pangani neighborhood of Nairobi in 1950. She left in 68 and this is her first time back too. She's in the kitchen with your wife, Anne, making chapatis.

Peter:

Yes.

Neil:

Because you're such a hospitable host that you are even entertaining my mom through cooking with her.

Peter:

Well, thank you. Well, writing is just an extension of living. So we intersect those two.

So hosting people, welcoming you and your mom is a really delightful pleasure.

Neil:

Writing is an extension of living. Yes. I love that.

And, um, before we kind of get into things, a few table setting questions. First, I have to ask the basic question of, um, first of all, is it Kenya or Kenya? I should ask that.

Kenya.

Peter:

Kenya.

Neil:

So why does my mom, when I grew up, she always said Kenya. Then I would say Kenya, people would say where?

Peter:

That's one of the colonial aberrations that our country, even the name itself is indeed a corruption of, uh, British history. Tell me more.

Neil:

Well, I did not know this.

Peter:

Yeah. So the two, the two or three elements to our name, uh, that, uh, the, the mountain that the country derived its name from, uh, is called Kirinyaga

[Neil]

Kirinyaga? Yeah. I'm not saying it right.

Peter:

Yes.

[Neil]

So are you trying?

[PK]

Uh, this is in Gikoyo. Uh, and, uh, that's a language spoken by a majority of people in central Kenya, where this mountain is located. Uh, so when the Brits came, um, uh, it was, uh, the hallowed ground of the Agikoyo.

They used to pray facing Mount Kenya. So, uh, so, and, uh, this, this mountain also had ostriches. So ostriches, um, are called Nyaga.

So the mountain with the ostriches, that's what it means, but because they couldn't pronounce Kirinyaga, they invented Kenya.

[Neil]

Oh, so Kenya is an aberration of Kirei Nyaga. Yes. Can I, teach me how to say it or, or how to spell it or...

[PK]

K-I-R-I-N-Y-A-G-A. Okay.

[Neil]

K-I-R-I-N-Y-A-G-A. Kirei Nyaga.

[Neil]

Kirinyaga

[Neil]

And they could not say this, so they said Kenya. Kenya.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Neil]

And then Kenya is a further aberration of this. Yes.

[PK]

So, um, so it's, it's a, it's a physical, uh, feature that gives the country its name. Uh, but, um, even how it is spelled, I think there was a huge discussion surrounding how it should be spelled because on the other side of the mountain, you have the Kamba community who call it Kenya.

[Neil]

Kenya.

[PK]

So it's K-I-N-Y-A. Kenya. Kenya.

Yeah.

[PK]

Yeah.

[PK]

So they said, if you're going to be honoring, uh, this physical feature, why don't you spell it properly as, and, uh, this, uh, this means K with an I, but it's a squiggler on top to, uh, to, to change this from Kenya to Kenya. So Kenya, in other words, K-E-N-Y-A is an invention, uh, that, that makes no sense from local languages.

[Neil]

Right.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

But yet it's still used today. And then the Kenya aberration that my mom uses, I have heard it sometimes here. So some people do say it.

It's not like just my mom. Well, if it was just my mom, I'd ask more questions, but it sounds like it's a percentage of people still use the long E.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Maybe they're trying to say this old word. I don't know.

[PK]

Yeah. Only, only, uh, when you go to English vowels, you find, um, now K-E like key, you know, uh, key that you use to open a door. Then, um, we use K-E as key like K-I.

Yeah. Give me, give me your keys. I may have the keys.

So those who spell or pronounce it as Kenya, uh, probably, uh, reflecting the more common usage of K-E. So instead of Kenya, they say Kenya.

[Neil]

I see. I see. So it would be better if not better, not judgment, but I should try to slowly change my language back to Kenya.

If not Kenya, Kenya, if not Kirinyega, you know, there's a lot of historical kind of like in Canada, by the way, the, the, um, you know, French explorer, um, Jacques Cartier, uh, 500 years ago from France asked through an interpreter, the local native population in Canada, what the place was called. And he said, Kanata, which meant the village. And in, um, Cartier's notebooks, which is called bref recit, he wrote, they call this place, the village, the villages, Kanata.

So he took the word for village and labeled it the whole place and it's broadened that, but you see, once again, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a indigenous or first nations word brought about by a colonialist explorer and conqueror and taking over-ish type of vibe, you know.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

And it's hard to evaluate, but I'm just sharing the Canada version of this.

[PK]

Yes. Yes. And I think that's a good point you make that, uh, these are not just, uh, accidental or, or innocent linguistic experiments.

They were, uh, in other words, as, um, my friend Ngugi wa Thiong'o taught us for 60 years, um, uh, you know, the burial of indigenous cultures were part of the conquest. So, so you've got, uh, you've got countries and physical features, um, like the fresh, the largest freshwater lake, uh, Lake Victoria honoring the Queen of England.

[PK]

Exactly.

[PK]

So, so what happens to Namlolwe, which is what, uh, the Lua people who inhabit that side of the world.

[Neil]

And Lake Victoria is touching which countries?

[PK]

Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.

[Neil]

It touches three countries.

[PK]

It is a three African countries.

[Neil]

Newly lined countries for the last hundred plus years, but obviously thousands of years, it's like touched many peoples. Yes. And it was called, you gave me the name of the lake.

[PK]

Namlolwe.

[Neil]

Namlolwe. So is there indeed a movement to rename it or to try to change this name back?

[PK]

Yeah, there is, um, we can say heightened awareness. Uh, people are more, more, more attuned to, um, that past and, uh, the desire to resurrect, you know, buried African memory, uh, you know, supplanted with, um, European, uh, European inventions. Uh, so, so Namlolwe should have been the proper name for Lake Victoria, the source of River Nile.

[Neil]

Um, source of River Nile. Yes. That's what it's called.

Yes. That's the translation.

[PK]

Well, uh, Lake Victoria, the lake itself is the one that gives birth to the River Nile.

[Neil]

Really?

[PK]

Yeah. Yeah. So that's the riverhead.

Yes.

[Neil]

It's the riverhead. Lake Victoria, which you, Nam, I'm sorry, I just can't get. Namlolwe.

Namlolwe.

[PK]

L-O-L-W-E.

[Neil]

W-E. Namlolwe.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Okay. Is the source. And the desire to resurrect buried African.

Memory. Memory is growing and strong. However, as I understand from Amitra from Paralaxy, who's been helping me since I landed, he's like, you know, sometimes you pull up a, he didn't say this, my paraphrase.

Sometimes you pull up the carpet and the ground is missing underneath. Like it's because he was explaining to me so much was translated through the oral tradition.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Neil]

That when you squelch the history for multiple generations, the oral tradition has almost some, in some cases, a permanent breakage in it. It's hard to resurrect.

[PK]

Yeah. Yeah. It's, the kind of erasure we, we are experiencing because they served a particular purpose to perpetuate histories, to narrate, you know, human civilizations.

I mean, that's what writers of the world do to, to keep memory, to keep, to memorialize their own origins, to invoke the past, to, you know, understand their future. So when, when you think about Africa's history, I think that's one of the travesties of our past that when, when, you know, many, many African and Asian, even Latin American societies were colonized. The first thing the colonizers tried to do was to invent new histories that seem to only begin with the arrival of, of the colonialists.

So, so when you talk about the desire to resurrect and to, and to revive that past, there is a generation of young people, you know, my son, I was 18. He doesn't speak our, my first language, neither does he speak my, my wife's language because we come from two different communities, but he speaks Swahili, which is his first language. So we can say he represents perhaps a generation of young Kenyans who are somewhat as, as, they're not strongly footed as, as I was, because I can speak and write in Gikuyu.

[Neil]

Languages?

[PK]

Gikuyu, which is, or Kikuyu. So Kikuyu is the anglicized pronunciation. Gikuyu is a proper.

Gikuyu.

[Neil]

I mean, this is going to happen the whole conversation. Gikuyu, my notes are already filled with me trying to make sure, cause I'm going to, I'm so sorry. I'm going to say these words and they're going to sound not the proper way, nor the British way, but in this even worse way that I'm trying to learn them as we speak.

So you, your first language is Gikuyu and your, and your wife's is?

[PK]

Kamba.

[Neil]

Kamba.

[PK]

Okay.

[Neil]

But he doesn't speak either, but he has Swahili and there's a new generation of?

[PK]

Kenyans who do not have an indigenous language. So, but, but you see, in our case, we have a very deliberate desire that he gets grounded in the language of his environment, which is Swahili. So he speaks, both boys speak fluent Swahili.

It's a language of the environment. And, you know, there are opportunities for him to build on other languages, but he's got Swahili. If you couldn't get Kamba or Gikuyu from me, he's got Swahili as this common denominator, that that's a language that's spoken within our country.

It's a national language. Also the official language in this country.

[Neil]

Any other countries have Swahili as official language? Yes.

[PK]

Tanzania.

[Neil]

Tanzania? Not Tanzania.

[PK]

Tanzania, which my mom says Tanzania as well.

[PK]

Yeah.

[PK]

And, and, uh, it's widely spoken around, uh, East Africa, East and Central and parts of Southern Africa, nearly more than 200 million speakers.

[Neil]

It is a language of commerce. It continues to thrive. Yes.

[PK]

Yes.

[Neil]

Unlike so many languages that are very...

[PK]

All the way down to Mozambique.

[PK]

All the way down to Mozambique.

[Neil]

Okay. Now I started a few minutes ago. This is, the great nature of a conversation, like the Nile, it flows like a river, but I said, I feel like I'm in a heaven.

And I normally start by describing the scene. And, you know, a lot of our listeners are all over the world, and this is a show buying for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, book sellers, and librarians. So this is a book people podcast, book nerds, literary students of the world.

And we take great, great pride in our 3 bookers, we call them. And because we have this really literary, wonderful, kind, generous, thoughtful, very thoughtful community. So for those that may be listening in Canada, or in the United States, or in England, or in India, or in China, or in Australia, I'm thinking of the countries that I see on the list of the listenership.

Where are we right now? And I mean that in the grand sense. Could you help us zoom in to this map of the spinning blue planet into this continent a little bit, describe the continent a little bit where we are, the country, if you want to use those lines, or maybe not use those lines, the part of the city we are, and then into your home, if you don't mind.

And it's open ended, but just people are listening, they might be walking a dog, they might be at a gym, they might be driving a truck. Where are they with us? And we have the chairs here with us.

They are here now, they can hear the crows, they can hear the birds. From Africa to Kenya to here, where are we?

[PK]

So we are in Kenya. The country is Kenya. That's, you know, the country properly in the heart of the continent of Africa, the eastern part of Africa.

And so Kenya is neighboured by Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Somalia. Those are our immediate neighbours. You might even extend to Rwanda and Sudan.

So we are properly in the heart of Africa and the ocean. So yeah, Kenya is one of those.

[Neil]

The Indian Ocean, right? The Indian Ocean. That's what they call it, the Indian Ocean.

They call it that here still? Yes.

[Neil]

Just to make sure, I don't know. They didn't change it to England Ocean. No, they didn't.

Just like they changed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. It's to your point about rewriting histories immediately. First thing he did, changed the name of the Gulf to America, right?

[PK]

Yeah. And Kenya we can say is a country with...

[Neil]

Before Kenya though, may I ask? Africa, to those who have never been. We know that our three million year Homo erectus history originates here.

We are aware that our 300,000 year old Homo sapien history originates here. We have proof, we have bones, we have carbon dating. We know our people somehow came from around here.

Yes. And so where around here and where did we go and what is the story here?

[PK]

Indeed. This indeed is a cradle of mankind because archaeology has proven to us that the earliest man existed around the area called Turukana, which is in Kenya. A place they call Olduvai Gorge.

So the earliest remains of man were traced to East Africa. And Kenya has such fascinating natural features because you've got a coastal line that nestles the Indian Ocean. You've got the mountain towards the central part.

You know, the second highest peaks in Africa are in Kenya.

[Neil]

Second highest peak in Africa is in Kenya? Yes. Which is Mount?

[PK]

Mount Kenya.

[Neil]

Mount Kenya. And the highest peak is?

[PK]

Kilimanjaro.

[Neil]

Kilimanjaro.

[PK]

Which is in Tanzania.

[Neil]

Which is in Tanzania. So both the two highest are here.

[PK]

Are in East Africa.

[Neil]

East Africa. Yes.

[PK]

You've got a desert.

[Neil]

And by the way, sorry to say this, East Africa, when you see people say East Africa here, they're referring to all the countries you just articulated. This is the East Africa. No, we didn't miss any.

[PK]

No.

[Neil]

So it's Kenya, Tanzania, Somalia, Uganda, Ethiopia.

[PK]

Sudan. Sudan.

[Neil]

And it's like...

[PK]

A bit of Rwanda and Burundi.

[Neil]

Am I guessing 500 million people or something?

[PK]

Yes. Is that about it?

[Neil]

About half a billion people in the world live in this cradle of civilization. Okay. Yes.

[PK]

And...

[Neil]

Second highest peak.

[PK]

Yes. And so you've got the coast. You've got the coastal line.

You've got the mountain. Coastal line. I'm sorry.

[Neil]

I thought you said coastal line.

[PK]

Coastal line. Yep.

So we've got the Indian Ocean with all the breeze, the warm breeze on that side. You've got a cold part, Mount Kenya can be freezing at some point. It's got snow peaks.

So very extreme cold on that side of the world. So you can say it's a land of contrasts. You've got the plains, the dry savannah land.

[Neil]

That's what people say when they refer to like Maasai Mara.

[PK]

Maasai Mara. They refer to the plains. Yes.

[Neil]

Yes.

[PK]

You've got the warmer parts towards northeastern Kenya, which has desert and semi-desert. Like there is a place called Chalbi Desert. It's a desert in Kenya.

Yes. I did not know this.

[PK]

Okay.

[PK]

So we are indeed...

[PK]

It's everything.

[PK]

...land of all natural beauty and meshed in one land, which explains why the Brits never really wanted to leave Kenya. They wanted to stay here.

[Neil]

And they're still here.

[PK]

In perpetuity. Yeah. And they never left.

And they never left. They never left.

[Neil]

They never left.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

So there's still a lot of Brits here now.

[PK]

Yeah. We are conversing in their language. This is an enduring legacy.

[Neil]

The podcast is being recorded in English from England, from the Engle tribe.

[PK]

So we are indeed subjects of the crown. We are still perpetuating the British metaphysical empire.

We are extending their cultural hegemony.

[Neil]

Yes. Yes. So this is the...

Thank you. Because I was asking for a pretty hard level there. And you zoomed us into Africa, the cradle of civilization.

How far is this place from here? I mean, now I'm desperate to go visit there. Can you go see...

Is there a museum there or something where there's... They found the remains. Like there must be...

Here's the oldest bones. Like what did they have there?

[PK]

The remains are likely to be at the National Museums of Kenya.

[PK]

Okay.

[PK]

Which is again modeled around the British museums. So if the Brits have not loaned those bones, they will be found at the National Museums of Kenya.

[Neil]

Aha. I see. Because there's ownership and so on.

And this is similar to... I had a past conversation with Kamini Guruswami, who is actually my wife's midwife for the birth of our children. And we interviewed her and she made the statement that, you know, they should return the jewels in the museums because they're stolen from her land, our land, their land, right?

And so... And to be honest with you, a few days ago, I was just in Rijk Museum, R-I-J-K Museum in Amsterdam. One of the largest museums in the Netherlands.

And as I'm touring around, it's beautiful, wonderful museum. It's the Dutch masters and Renoir and Van Gogh and Van Gogh. And they have a crown there, a giant red velvet crown full of gold that was presented to a West African king in 1500 in exchange for permission by the VOC, which is the first international company in the world, the Dutch East India Company.

First international company in the world ever. To capture enslaved people and take them back. And in exchange, they gave him a crown.

And they have the crown in the museum.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Neil]

And it's not like the descendants of the descendants of the descendants of the descendants that feel this way, but we have this. And then the write-up is astonishing. I took a picture.

I was like, wow, like they gave the guy a crown and they said, can we take the people? They did.

[PK]

Some of the absurdities of our past. I mean, a very familiar story. One of the guys who resisted, I know we shall get into the story of Dance of the Jacaranda, but the railway line, you know, was, its construction was resisted by a community in the Rift Valley for nearly 10 years.

And the guy who was leading the young, young, young fighters, like the seer, they called him the Orcoyote, the spiritual leader of the community. When the Brits finally, a military commander tricked him into a peace meeting only for this guy to show up and his gun down, his head was chopped off and sent to the Queen of England. So, the example that you're narrating, you know, severing, you know, torsos, some of those gestures, the colonial gestures of mutilating or dismembering, you know, physical bodies was also an attempt to just disconnect, you know, the body from the soul, disconnecting the mind from the body.

Also, you know, disconnecting the cultures that hold people together.

[Neil]

Wow. So, this is partly a story of Africa. Most countries here have had a colonial heritage, though not all.

I hear Ethiopia, maybe less so, maybe some countries less so. And then we zoom into Kenya. You've described the natural beauty.

I was in the Kenya National Park yesterday and I got to see right in front of my eyes a 2,000 pound rhino with its baby looking at us. And I've read the book, Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari. And he makes the argument in the book that the only reason the large game remains here with the people, which we killed all the large game in Australia and North America and every other, we killed because we co-evolved with them here.

But everywhere else we landed and then we saw something big and we killed it. You know, we killed the giant 500 pound Moa birds in New Zealand. We killed the giant buffalo in North America.

We killed everything everywhere except here because we co-existed with it. So, there is some heaven feeling here. You feel the sun, you feel the light, you feel the energy, you feel the people.

I've been here just 40 hours and I feel almost like my soul has sparked and has rejuvenated. And when I came here, I was in Amsterdam and Simon Sinek spoke after me and I said, I'm going to Africa. And he said, you're about to fall in love.

He said, you're about to fall in love. That's what he said.

[PK]

That sounds very appropriate. I can tell you, Neil, one of the things we are experiencing in this country, well, conservation has been whitewashed because our ancestors, not just in Kenya, but in large parts of the continent, took care of the wildlife for centuries.

[PK]

Millennium.

[PK]

For millennium, yes. Because when you think about it, we never took elephant tusks or the lions' skins or the teeth or horns of this and that big animal. It is actually only the royals, the chiefs, you know, the leaders within the community who wore maybe hats that had certain features from animals and those, whether it's a Colobus monkey, whose skin was used to maybe make a garment for a royal.

The rest of the community took care of the animals. So now the commercial hunting of this wildlife has come with the colonial expeditions. You might remember that even hunting was legalized for those who could afford to pay for their permits.

So like the former American president Roosevelt came to Kenya in 1920s.

[Neil]

Theodore Roosevelt.

[PK]

Yes. And you had, you know, prominent writers like Hemingway coming to this side of the world in the 30s, 1930s as a professional hunter, come and pay for a license and then you can come and kill any animals. The plunder and the chaos that started with the commercial hunting was something that was unprecedented in our past.

So we've been, our ancestors were very prudent custodians of this heaven that we were given from the onset. And so what you're seeing, I am certain, we needed to find ways in which we can connect the environment and the animals that inhabit those spaces and the needs of those people who live within those spaces. Because the government has now criminalized any acts of even discovering even small animals.

People cannot hunt for meat in Kenya because apparently there is an interesting part that virtually every wild animal in this country has a tag, electronic tag, and they can trace zebras and say, we haven't seen this zebra, this number 243 in this cluster. There's so few left. There's so few left.

[Neil]

Yeah, we're talking thousands. Yeah, very few. There's just thousands of rhinos left.

There's just thousands of, you know, these hippos. There's just thousands, we've killed them all.

[PK]

Yes.

[Neil]

And because of the tags, they can now track if you kill one that you get in big trouble.

[PK]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you do.

[Neil]

So I hear hunting is still allowed in some parts of Africa, like Namibia, maybe South Africa. You know, so it's not like it's eradicated.

[PK]

No, no.

[Neil]

But it's at least the government here has figured out that conservation is a vital source of nutrition for the vastness of this community and culture. Now Zuma's saying 60 million people live in Kenya. I think, what is it, four live in Nairobi?

This is the capital. About five million. Five million in greater Nairobi.

So where are we sitting now? And then we'll get into your books. And I got a million questions on those.

So the introduction here, you know, for those listening. But I hope they're finding it. This is fascinating to me.

And I have so many side questions.

[PK]

Thank you.

[Neil]

There's a bug right on your microphone. I don't know if it matters. We don't want to kill it.

We just want to give it a different home for a moment. Okay. They want to be heard.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

That's a great line. They want to be heard. And so does the pied crow.

If you hear that squeaking in the background, that rah, rah, rah, that's a pied crow. It's like an American crow that people will be familiar with, but it has like a lighter head. And it's like a cousin of the American crow.

[PK]

And it's a recent resident here. I didn't, I never used to hear that sound until like a year or two ago.

[Neil]

Oh, and we're not in Nairobi proper, right? We're in a surrounding.

[PK]

We are on the outcasts, outskirts of Nairobi, about an hour from the city center. Depending how fast you drive.

[Neil]

I got here in like 30 minutes. He was bolted and it was fast.

[PK]

Because we have the expressway that allows us a very quick dash. So you are fortunate because at times, Nairobians complain of the strangulating traffic that tends to be in rush hour. And I think our people have this hard mentality.

So they go to work at a certain time. They return home at a certain time. So we are on the fringe of the city.

In a part that you can say is an extension of the larger Rift Valley.

[Neil]

Okay. Oh, okay. The larger Rift Valley you define as?

[PK]

You've got these very interesting natural features. Like the plunge, you know, hundreds of meters down towards the escarpment. On the other side going to Naivasha.

So we are in Kajedo County. But I can say it's an extension of the larger Nairobi metropolitan area. Because most people who live here actually work in Nairobi.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

And as I was coming here, I was taking a video out my phone out the window. And I don't know if it was exaggerating. But the driver said, pull your phone in quick.

There's a motorbike behind us with two people on it. If it's two people, then the guy in the back will grab your phone.

[PK]

This may or may not be true. You know, we've got some, I don't call it paranoia. But, you know, we can say, you're likely to have your phone grabbed anywhere in the world.

Anyway, whether in a street, in the streets of London.

[Neil]

An expensive small thing. Having AirPods on people lost.

[PK]

Yeah. And so when he came here some 10 years ago and he moved here, we've been here for 10 years.

From Nairobi.

[Neil]

Just from the inner to the outer of the city.

[PK]

Yes. And I was in the, you know, I grew up in Nairobi. And I was looking for some room to think, some room to write.

And I was looking for a place that I can actually get to breathe. Because Nairobi felt like it was suffocating. One of the concerns I had was that everybody was living behind a wall.

You know, a stone wall, gated communities. And then beyond the gated community, which has its own perimeter wall around us, people are all behind stone walls.

[Neil]

So there's a gated community and then inside the gated community, there's a stone wall around every individual house. Yes, yes. With wires on top.

[PK]

Yes. And I told my wife, I'm not going to live in a prison in my own house. So we're not going to have a stone wall.

So we had a natural hedge around our property until maybe some three, four years ago. She kept complaining she needed to have a stone wall for her own. We've created walls in our minds that people feel exposed and vulnerable.

I do not. So the only trade-off we had, I said, we're going to have a stone wall, but you're going to have grills so I can see outside and my trees can thrive. So that was a trade-off.

[Neil]

What do you mean she had walls in her mind? What do you mean by that? She grew up in Nairobi.

She's very comfortable here. She's part of the community here. Where'd the walls come from in her mind?

[PK]

Well, people have, we can say security is psychological. You might feel most insecure when you are in the most unsafe spot in the world, depending on how you visualize and understand your own safety. So this is what I think, Neil.

If anybody really wanted to take my car or some music stereo, they don't need to hurt me to get those items. They have ways in which they access those things. And my biggest risk as a writer will actually be what I write rather than what I possess.

So I've never thought of my safety in the sense of material things. I think of my safety in what am I saying to whom and how.

[PK]

Wow.

[PK]

Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

[Neil]

Wow. And there's a, we got to get into the books because there's so many of the things you've set up here in this really helpful kind of opening, you know, 20, 30 minute contextual over story is so great. We have a geographical view now of where we are.

We have a cultural and colonial view. We'll touch on cultural and colonial instances many times. It's very present, this in the air here.

You know, I mean, I asked my driver when I got here, should I go to the Karen Blixen museum? I mean, she wrote the most famous book everyone's heard of out of Africa. And you know what he said?

No, do not go. And so I said, oh, okay. So I typed into chat GPT, what are the reasons to go or not go?

And it said three reasons to go cultural history. She was a friend of the land. She's a, you know, she talks about the stories of the people and he said, that is a lie.

How can you be a friend of the land when you steal their land? And I wrote that back to chat GPT and it apologized to him. The AI said, we're really sorry.

It's true. Land was taken. It's through the colonial gaze.

So it just is, you can feel it in the air here. This is not a story that's finished. Absolutely.

It's a story that's in the middle of the book here.

[PK]

I agree. It's an unfinished story. I would even argue we haven't even begun telling our story.

It's our turn to tell our story. And I think what, um, uh, when you read out of Africa, what Karen Blixen, um, um, a British colonialist, uh, who wrote a story that was a memoir of her time growing up here, which is quite a famous book. Actually, Danish, she was, she was a Dan, um, who, who made a home in Kenya in 1930s.

Um, uh, bought, bought a farm in a locality that's now memorialized in her name. It's called Karen, uh, estate, uh, the poshest side of town.

[Neil]

They've named the whole part of town after this.

[PK]

A neck of land, an empty piece of land, um, going for maybe half a million dollars.

[Neil]

Wow. Dollars.

[PK]

Am I talking the right figures? No. Nearly a million dollars.

Million dollars.

[Neil]

A million dollars.

[PK]

An empty, an empty piece of land.

[Neil]

Yeah. It's actually about. Which would be like 130 million Kenyan shillings.

Yes. Completely unaffordable. And just to, for reference, you know, in our, we're, we're leaving a hundred shilling note on our pillow in the hotel room as a tip.

So 130 million Kenyan shillings for one acre of empty land.

[PK]

Right.

[Neil]

Not just unaffordable, almost unimaginable.

[PK]

Unimaginable anywhere in the world, anywhere, even in Canada. Um, so my, my response to this guy who said, you know, don't go to this is because she, uh, Karen Blixen, uh, represents one of the abnormalities of this continent. Uh, and, um, once again, I can invoke my name, my, my mentor Ngugi

He said we've normalized abnormalities. So why should we remember Karen Blixen? A Dane who comes to our land, inhabits, uh, lives among, among us for 15 years, runs, uh, an enterprise, an agricultural enterprise, growing farm, high estate fields, the coffee estate fields.

And then she returns to, to her country of origin and publishes a memoir. Um, and she calls it out of Africa, but we're in Africa. We are 55 countries in this wide world.

Um, and, um, she takes her very specific, very specific experience in a small part of this country to typify a continent wide phenomenon. So this, this is how, uh, colonial writers.

[Neil]

It makes me want to, honestly, I get, I get choked up because it's so, um, and I'm, and I feel so ignorant too, at the same time, I got this joint emotion of so desperation to learn the stories that you're desperate to share.

[PK]

So, yeah, we're starting somewhere because we're only beginning to tell our story. So this is what happens. She, she writes her memoir, um, a very specific experience, which becomes, uh, globalized.

So specificity becomes typicality. So, so she typifies, you know, this is Africa, although she was in a small part of this continent in a small community. Um, and, uh, so you can see this trope has been replicated for 200 years by missionaries, colonial writers, uh, travelers, um, all of them writing about.

In fact, if you read, um, um, Elspeth Hatchley's, uh, memoir, uh, the, um, uh, the flame trees of Thika, another colonial writer. The flame trees? Of Thika.

[Neil]

Of Thika.

[PK]

How do you spell it? T-H-I-K-A.

[Neil]

That's Thika. That's another memoir from Kenya or somewhere else?

[PK]

Another colonial writer from Kenya. Yeah. You find, uh, again, her family, uh, situated in, uh, central Kenya, growing coffee.

Um, they become cultural signposts, but these are foreigners who are supplanting the interpretation of the people they find to be the signifiers of this experience. So they become the spokes persons of, uh, these communities. So that's not the problem.

The problem is when you read out of Africa, um, there's an interesting trope that you find not just in, uh, um, uh, Elspeth Hatchley or Karen Blixen, it's even extended to Ernest Hemingway in that, uh, Africans in those texts are treated as mute or, um, uh, or daft. Daft. Unintelligent.

[Neil]

Yeah. Yeah.

Um, I know what you mean. Yeah. Yeah.

[PK]

They lack sophistication. They're not developed as characters. In other words, I am, I am, I am gently saying they don't have to be gentle.

They're very racist interpretations and depictions of these communities. Yeah. And yet when you go to a supermarket in, uh, in Ottawa, you're going to find a coffee brand exported to that side of the world, branded out of Africa, evoking, uh, and, uh, um, maintaining these, uh, cultural imperialism.

It's not been accepted by, by, by Kenyans and Africans. In other words, uh, these, these are manifestations of colonial nostalgia and even Africans are invoking such terminologies. So that's why when I talked about, uh, the colonial, the metaphysical empire, uh, it is our brains that have been colonized, uh, not to be able to understand and to unpack the nuances.

[Neil]

Yeah. Cause as an example, you mentioned missionaries and it sticks in my head just because two things, one at the airport, I saw a whole string of people coming off, um, with huge suitcases, uh, all white. Um, no judge, no judgment through this conversation, but just explain our stories that we can openly discuss.

And they all were in suits and ties with shirts. And I said, is this a baseball? I said, is this a football team?

I thought it was a football team from a school. Yeah. And they said, no, we're missionaries.

Yes. And this was recent. This is a day or two ago.

[PK]

Wow.

[Neil]

And so, um, it's not like it's, and I asked the driver, the first driver I met, I said, um, you know, what, to what manifestation is colonialism still present? And he said, it's our religions. It's the first thing he said was, it was a surprise for me.

I thought he was going to say like statues.

[PK]

He's right.

[Neil]

He said the religions are the first form of cold currently existing colonialism. Yes. That was a, I didn't understand that.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Neil]

But you said, you know, and I, and again, no judgment because I've had elder Cox and elder Corona on this podcast. I had a wonderful conversation with them, two Mormon missionaries, far from home to 18 year old boys who I interviewed at the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They have a wonderful story to share.

However, for the year that they are doing this missionary work, they can be exposed to no other form of news media or visual media other than the one book, the book of Mormon and the one TV show, the Mormon TV show. They have this for a whole year and they imparted. And I asked them how many people, you know, have converted to the religion.

They said zero. So in my head, I was a bit left thinking, I wonder if they, you know, I wonder what manifestations and ramifications are of this type of thing around the world.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

You don't fly to the States and teach them your religion.

[PK]

No. Well, You don't yet.

[Neil]

Maybe the stories to coming out of Africa are going to, we're going to be going around and saying, try to do it this way. Well, Try to do it that way.

[PK]

Well, the thing about religion, and this is a, that's a fascinating question in a variety of ways. The first is that it is the most harmless way of accessing a mind of another human being.

[Neil]

Oh, wow. Yeah. Wow.

Religion is the most harmless way of accessing the mind of another human being.

[PK]

So because you pose no threat, you are advocating for things that are unseen. So there's no burden of proof that you need to prove to me God exists. And the moment you initiate this conversation, which is essentially what Chinua Achebe is telling us in Things Fall Apart, the moment you enter a community that way, then you start making inroads.

So, so it's a very, it's a very gentle, gentle space because you're not arguing about difficult questions.

[Neil]

Yes.

[PK]

They're very soft. So, so the colonialists understood that, you know, the, the, the ideology when they came to Africa was triple C, Christianity, commerce, and civilization.

[Neil]

Well, wait. So the, this is a written known proof of, of they had a little PowerPoint presentation in the back room.

[PK]

Yes. Yeah.

[Neil]

500 years.

[PK]

It was indeed. Christianity, commerce. That was a PowerPoint presentation.

Yeah. That's when they set three C's. These are our shows.

They're going to, uh, yes, they're going to present these triple C's.

[Neil]

Really?

[PK]

Yes.

[Neil]

Really? It was a thought of articulated, specific, purposeful, like my TED talk is called the three A's. Awesome.

Yeah. They had the three C's of colonialism. Yes, they do.

Christianity, commerce, and civilization.

[PK]

Yes.

[PK]

And this is how they're connected. This is how they're connected. So Christianity was how the early missionaries, uh, and they were sponsored by church organizations, by the way, uh, um, the, the, the greater Livingstone, David Livingstone, Dr. David Livingstone, the Scottish explorer was sponsored by the church mission society, church missionary society, uh, um, John's peak. They were all affiliated with church.

[Neil]

Started there.

[PK]

Yes. Started there. So.

[Neil]

And with the philosophy underpinning this, like one of helpfulness, like one of like, sorry to say this, and I know this is going to sound horrible. Okay. But was it one of, let us help these quote unquote savages, uh, learn the ways of truth and meaning that we have been so blessed to discover.

[PK]

And yet though in the dark ages for, for millennia before, you know, Africa had a very, very sophisticated civilizations where 2000 years before the earliest civilizations in Europe, in Greece and elsewhere were reported, which Timbuktu, um, um, when, when, uh, uh, when, when, when you look at, uh, one, one strand of history that's teaching ancient Africa, Ethiopia, uh, you know, uh, you know, when Ethiopia was being. Egypt.

Vandalized. Uh, and.

[Neil]

But our story for me, I'm sorry to say this in my education is it started in Athens. The foundation of democracy.

[PK]

Well, when you read, when you read, um, uh.

[Neil]

Rome.

[PK]

When you, yeah.

[Neil]

My history goes to there.

[PK]

When you read, uh, Plato, you're going to find, um, they were, uh, they were accessing civilizations that were in Northern part of Africa. Um, I'm trying to remember the name of the philosopher who was hacking to the superiority of the philosophers on the other side of the border. Carthage, Carthage.

If you read Carthage, you will see they were advanced scholars of literature, of religion, of philosophy.

[Neil]

Yes, yes, yes. But I am so ignorant to ask what, because I do not even know. I'm embarrassed, you know, but I thank you for your, you're letting me have the dumb question.

[PK]

We are starting to tell our story now. Timbuktu.

[PK]

Yeah. And Carthage, Ethiopia. Addis Ababa, is it?

Or am I getting it wrong? Aksum was the earlier civilization. Aksum.

[PK]

Aksum, A-K-S-U-M.

[PK]

Yep, Aksum, yeah.

[PK]

You go to, you go to, um, the ruins in Zimbabwe. Mwanamutapa Kingdom in Zimbabwe. You go to Sudan.

I mean, the ancient civilizations that were thriving way ahead of any European philosophy, even a glimpse of it.

[Neil]

Because we were here first. All of us. The royal we, the human we. We started, and we, history repeats. We go up, we go down. We have empires, we have failures.

It's like, woo, woo, woo. We just started the same brain still, so we're doing the same things. And then it happens that some of this gets erased.

A lot of it gets erased. Absolutely. Books get burned.

The libraries get destroyed. The famous libraries in the Middle East have been burned, and we have nothing from them. So the histories get tarnished and blurry.

And then we have the advancements of the modern technologies where they get advanced, where they get blurrier, faster. You know, the Gulf of, change the name of the Gulf overnight. You know what I mean?

Stuff like this. So we are, we are. Go, go.

Yeah, sorry, sorry.

[PK]

Yeah, I wanted to connect the three Cs, the triple Cs, because they are connected with that campaign. That Christianity is only 200 years old. Africa had- 2,000 years old.

[PK]

Jesus, 2,000 years, right?

[PK]

Jesus, 2,000 years. But then when they started making inroads in East Africa, it was only 200 years. I see, I see, yeah.

Remember, the contact between East Africa and 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 Cs, because we had, for many, many years, Islamic civilizations on the coast. The Zanzibar, you go all the way to this 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 to a social problem.

But then the larger...

[Neil]

Solution to the problem, the panacea to the problem.

[PK]

Yes, but the larger problem isn't in East Africa. It is that there is the abolition movement in Europe, that slaves and slave trade are no longer permissible in those hemispheres. So why did they come earlier?

But because the markets were no longer going to operate. The auction, slave auctions, were going to be... There were enactments of law.

William Wilberforce...

[Neil]

Slavery was beginning to be outlawed across the Western world, including in the United States. Exactly. Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln.

[PK]

1776, yes.

[Neil]

Also, the Emancipation Proclamation was in the 1800s, I believe. 1800, yeah. And then you're saying the abolition movement was starting to kill their markets.

The money was going to be lost. So then they did what?

[PK]

Right.

[Neil]

Then what happened?

[PK]

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 the first front. The second one, and they're saying, let's do legitimate business. Stop enslaving your brethren.

So following 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, they have binges of this enterprise, the Imperial British East Africa Company. A company. Starts there.

Registered and licensed by the Queen, Her Majesty, the Queen of England.

[Neil]

Yeah, it says it on the logo, the crown of the logo.

[PK]

Yes, yes. And when you go to Nairobi, by the way, that building, there is a building on Moy Avenue. IBE, Imperial British East Africa Company still exists to this day.

[Neil]

Really?

[PK]

On Moy Avenue, yes. Wow.

[Neil]

What's it used for today?

[PK]

Just a commercial building. Right.

[Neil]

But the East Africa Company, you're talking about tea and spices and sugar, and this is beginning the larger trade as a commerce. That's the second C.

[PK]

Yes.

[Neil]

And what's the third C? You call it civilization.

[PK]

Civilization.

[Neil]

So the metaphysical part of it?

[PK]

Yes, yes. We come from Europe. We are civilized people.

Your cultures appear to be perpetuating superstition, although Halloween is practicing this side of the world.

[Neil]

Oh, you could argue a lot of religions. It's perspective, but you pray to animals. You may not wear as many clothes.

You may kill animals and eat them without cooking.

[PK]

Right. My point is the three threads were connected. And they were choreographed.

[Neil]

Another C.

[PK]

Yeah, it's another C. Yeah, they're choreographed to appear to be harmless intervention of, you know, these outsiders who wanted to come into our countries. And we can see the model used in East Africa, in Kenya, in Uganda, in Tanzania was replicated across the continent. Yes. So they decided there were different parts of the world, but the model was the same. So in Kenya, in Zimbabwe, in South Africa, those became settler colonies. So the Brits actually made homes in those three countries.

They made a home in these locations. So you had settler colonies because they wanted to live there in perpetuity. They had no desire to leave.

In other parts of the continent, they applied indirect rule, like in some parts of Nigeria or Uganda. So that means you are maintaining the traditional structures of governance. So you're using indirect rule.

You're using the chief. If you want to tax people, you don't come and do it personally, but you're using the chiefs. You are declaring them to be...

Give them the crown. Yeah, give them a title, chief of chiefs or paramount chief, you know, glorified titles. But the point here...

[Neil]

Walk through them, be invisible, be in the background. Exactly. Don't see it.

Exactly. And then the chief pays the taxes to you at the end. And this is, by the way, my own story, because my mom, I've mentioned, is born in Nairobi in 1950, right?

She's Indian. You can look at her. Her skin is brown.

She's from India. She's never been to India, my mom. She's never been there once because her dad was transplanted with pay.

It wasn't through the enslaved trade, but with pay. The British, because they were ruling India too, you know, India didn't get independent until 1947. So in the 1930s, 40s, her dad was transplanted to run an administrative job for the railway.

Yeah, yeah. And that, of course, was the pathway into the interior. But the government job raised eight kids.

My mom's the youngest of eight. Her origin, she considers herself Kenyan. She's grown up here.

I'm starting to call myself half Kenyan.

[Neil]

Yeah, you did. I mean, I'm starting to feel that when I'm here.

[Neil]

But look at the history. Look why we're here. Like why we're here because of the same three Cs.

Yes. That PowerPoint went viral.

[PK]

That's true. That's true. And Neil, if we may even extend the triple Cs to the railway line, you can see it was configured.

[Neil]

So tell us now about Dance of the Jakaranda, your wonderful novel, which I've just told everybody about my book. I'll put it in front of the coconut water that you gave me, poured from a fresh coconut, which you cut in your own kitchen and poured for me. That's so everybody knows.

If you're looking at this on YouTube and you're looking at my water, and you're wondering why it's cloudy, you're like, oh, I wonder if the water's good over there. This is the opposite. This is like I'm drinking like nectar from the earth.

Like it's chopped coconut. What's he called? My mom calls it?

[PK]

Mandafu.

[Neil]

She's been raving about this. She's been going on about this my whole life.

We go on any vacation she asks for Mandafu. She's been for 56 years since she left. She's been looking for this drink.

[PK]

Yes. Wow. And here we have it.

[Neil]

Yeah, but when you move it around the world, it doesn't taste the same, right? You're talking about Dance of the Jakaranda because of course you talk about the story here. Just tie this to your book because I have to get to your three most formative books.

Normally by this time in the conversation, you know, I've covered the three books, but the opening is not an opening. It is the story. It is what we were talking about starting to tell the stories.

I'm here to help collect and share stories from 55 countries, a quarter of the countries in the world, more than a quarter are in this continent. And I'm sorry to say this, but when you walk into a North American bookstore, where are they? They're like missing completely.

Like completely.

[PK]

It's one of the erasures of our past and our present. So we can say, Neil, in writing, it's an act of recovering our past.

[Neil]

Writing is an act of recovering.

[PK]

Yeah. We are trying to recover our past and Dance of the Jakaranda does precisely that because I return to the founding of this nation. The colony that the Brits made in late 19th century and the vehicle that they used to access our nation and its heart was the railway line, which I discover represented an interesting metaphor.

Just in the way that the train is laid as a virtual and literal penetration of the land. It's an ion, a piece of ion cutting through the land from the shores of the ocean.

[Neil]

It's very sexual in some sense, like a raping almost.

[PK]

It is a rape. It is a rape. And, you know, getting through the country until it terminates at the headwaters of Lake Victoria or Namlolwe as natives called it.

I found if I wanted to narrate the experience of my country and its peoples, the singular visual, you can say spine that connects all these histories was represented in the railway. By the same token, you can say how the Brits envisioned this. It wasn't to develop or ease movement for locals.

It was to harvest everything and anything that the land could produce and ship it out.

[Neil]

Including all the animals and the people.

[PK]

Including the animals and the people.

[Neil]

So, unfortunately... But there was no slave trade here, was there? Yes.

In Kenya in the 1800s?

[PK]

Yes, there was slave trade there.

[Neil]

Nobody wanted the slaves in England. What did they do with the slaves?

[PK]

So what we're doing, we should remember, and this replicates the cycles of exploitation, is that the train tracks, the railway tracks, in some instances, followed the tracks that were used by the slave traders. So where people were cutting through the forest line or the forest, they literally followed or replicated the same route, or route as Canadians would call it, to follow the very path that those who were exploiting our country and region had done. Finally, something that I tried to espouse in this book is that we find that the very exploitation that had been done by the Arab traders, you have the Brits coming in to perpetuate the same trajectory, get into the land and get anything you can manage.

Because every train station evolved into a township, we maintained this train economy for 50 years. So all the major townships to this day in this country are situated in areas that were serving the interests of the British economy.

[Neil]

Of course, because that's, yeah.

[PK]

We did not, areas that were of course not productive were cut off. And what we didn't do until maybe some 15 years ago, we recognized this is an abnormality. This is not a normal configuration of a national economy.

We need to get everybody integrated into the country and for them to feel they have a stake in its future. So what we have now evolved as, you know, federal, you can say federal or devolved units of government, we call it county administration, where you've got fragments of, you know, governments scattered around the country, was supposed to cure this colonial aberration that our beginnings were structured around the railway line, whose primary motive was to take away the produce or the peoples or the products that the land could produce.

[Neil]

And that's a work that's ongoing today. Can you have optimism, history, awareness? I noticed this everywhere.

There's an urgent and yearning desire. Boniface Mwangi, our guest in chapter 104 of this podcast, is now running for president of this country. With love and courage as his motto and for, you know, being a kind of a moral and spiritual, I would say, like thrust is what I'm sensing from a distance into this country.

I'm sensing other people going for president also have the same vibe and aesthetic, arguing that the current head of state, I don't know him, but it's understanding that that pang in the background is that that's the understanding I'm hearing from like the stuff I read.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Yeah, I might be biased because I don't know, from such a distance away.

[PK]

Yeah, you can say. I mean, are there many ways of looking at that question? And I will say for writers who are engaged in politics or write, we can say writing is a political act, no matter what you're writing about.

[Neil]

Exactly. Yeah, of course.

[PK]

And what our country teaches us, because I'm interested in politics, not as a politician, but as someone who reflects about our past and what the present appears to tease out, is that we have to start thinking about this animal we call democracy. What is it exactly? If it's Western democracy, because the model that we have replicated has worked or has not worked.

Mainly, you can see what all democracy teaches us, actually, is its limits. If you see the kind of chaos in Europe and North America, the kind of individuals who are ascending to power because of democracy, they are telling us there's so huge limitations of democracy because anyone can go to a podium with a megaphone. And money.

And money. Lots of it. Yes, the megaphone is a platform that allows you to be hard, fine, wide.

So you have to fundraise enormously to be able to put adverts that saturate the media space. So we are saying without that kind of characteristic, you've got no real prospects for the Mwangis of this world from having a meaningful and realistic shot at the top. Because we have maintained structures of power in ways that power perpetuates itself.

So those individuals who make it to the national platform in Kenya, at least in most parts of Africa, is that you have to have very deep pockets. How do you make money unless you're crooked in Kenya? I mean, to have the kind of money that people say will be a meaningful budget for a national campaign, you're talking of some two billion, maybe three billion Kenya shillings.

That's more than 200 million.

[Neil]

You need $100 million to run for US president. And never mind the gerrymandering, which is a whole separate issue. Like Ralph Nader was our guest on a past chapter of this podcast.

He ran for president four times, famously in the US. And he says the electoral college is an abhorrent mutation of what the founding fathers intended, which in the US, the electoral college, of course, dictates who represents you. I mean, democracy started with 100 people probably.

And now it's trying to apply to like 500 million people. Well, it's going to have all kinds of mutant metastasizations. Argument, I guess, is what's better.

So that's kind of the, you know, that's where we get to local politics being such a big deal right now in the world. In Toronto, where I live, there's a lot more conversation locally about your councillor and about your mayor than there is about the premier and the prime minister, because there's things that affect you on a daily basis, whether there's a bike lanes or do we build more roads, or whether people are discussing this locally. Locally is kind of, you know.

[PK]

I was watching a film on one of the mayors of Canada, the famous one.

[Neil]

Oh, okay. Rob Ford.

[PK]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Neil]

A crack-smoking Toronto mayor died while in office at a very young age.

[PK]

And I thought that's a very Kenyan, that's a very, looks like a very Kenyan politician.

[Neil]

Oh, really?

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Yeah. It's quite humiliating that he's our only known mayor. We have a wonderful mayor right now, but things go up and down.

Now, just before we get into your three informative books, which, by the way, I'm eager to talk about, Dance of the Jakaranda. I'm going to hold it up here to the camera. We can flash it on screen.

This is, you know, New York Times said, it's one of the most notable books of the year. And you've been talking about the penetration of the railway. I have found the opening page of your book so evocative.

I wondered if you might, for anybody watching this or listening to this, please get this book. Please, you know, support the resurrection of buried stories. And would you just, I don't know if you would be willing to read the first paragraph or first page for us.

[PK]

For sure, sure.

[Neil]

It's so mesmerizing. It really captures, I think, what you're talking about.

[PK]

Thank you. In that year, the glowworms in the marshes were replaced by light bulbs. Villagers were roused out of their hamlets by a massive rambling that many mistook for seismic shifts of the earth.

These are not uncommon occurrences. Locals experienced earthquakes across the Rift Valley so often, they even had an explanation for it. They said it was God taking a walk in his universe.

They believed this without needing to see it. But on that day, the villagers saw the source of the noise as well. It was a monstrous snake-like creature whose black head, erect like a cobra's, pulled rusty brown boxes and slithered down the savannah, coughing spasmodically as it emitted blue-black smoke.

The villagers clapped their hands and wailed, Yo kine! Come and see! The strips of iron that those strange men planted seasons earlier, which left undisturbed, had grown into a monster gliding through the land.

The gigantic snake was a train and the year was 1901, an age when white men were still discovering the world for their kings and queens in faraway lands. So when the Railway Superintendent, or simply Master, as he was known to many, peered out the window of his first-class cabin that misty morning, his mind did not register the dazzled villagers who dropped their hoes and took off, or laid their hearts away from the grazing fields in sheer terror of the strange creature cutting through their land.

[Neil]

Ah, that is one of the best-written paragraphs opening any book I've ever read. It's so, if you fall into that the way I did, the visual, the metaphorical, you can feel the story underneath the story there. The cobra-like head, the spasmodically emitting blue-black smoke.

It's a real powerful work.

[Neil]

Thank you.

[Neil]

You're a very gifted writer.

[Neil]

Thank you.

[Neil]

And you were shaped like all of us were by the books you read, including from a very young age, The Hardy Boys by Franklin W. Dixon. Published originally in 1927 by Grosset and Dunlap, The Hardy Boys covers typically feature vivid dramatic illustrations about the mystery or suspense inside, about their two teenage sleuths, Frank and Joe Hardy.

You know, they're sneaking through a darkened room, or they're confronting a shadowy figure. Franklin W. Dixon, D-I-X-O-N, for those that may not know, was actually a pseudonym used by over 30 ghost writers.

Characters were originally created by Edward Stratemeyer from New Jersey, who lived from 1862 to 1930. Leslie McFarland, a Canadian journalist, was one of the first writers. He wrote about 19 of the first 25 books.

But there's been, like I said, 30 writers since. And the books have been revised and heavily revised from 1959 to today, to the point where now there's many series. My kids have read these yellow paperback Hardy Boys, the blue paperbacks that came out in the 80s, the old original hardcover.

This is a series that has grown and mutated vastly. I think we know the story. For those that don't, Frank and Joe Hardy are teenage amateur sleuths.

They solve mysteries in their fictional hometown of Bayport, which by the way, in terms of coloring stories, it was never revealed where Bayport was. There was no state. It wasn't even said because they wanted the reader to visualize it as if they were their own town.

For Dewey Decimal Heads, you can find this under J-FIC for Juvenile Fiction, by the way. Peter, tell us about your relationship with the Hardy Boys by Franklin W. Dixon.

[PK]

Yeah, I must have encountered the Hardy Boys when I was about 13 and 14. So those are very vivid, you know, moments of one's evolution. And I remember being struck by these youngsters who were immersed in what seemed like very dangerous endeavors.

And so my first understanding of, you know, empathy for reader or readers is that I was invested in their pursuits. I was worried, you know, sick for their investigations and hoping that they're going to crack this and come out of it safely. Because a child, it's interesting about the universality of the human experience.

Because I grew up in a small village in central Kenya and I'm reading stuff about North American townships that I have no idea about. And so it was an extension.

[Neil]

Two guys named Frank and Joe. Two names you probably never heard of before.

[PK]

Yes, and so what I find fascinating about reading and writing and how the two are connected is that we grew up on a melee of British fiction for younger kids. So it was called the Lady Bird series.

[PK]

I know this, yes. Lady Bird series.

[PK]

Lady Bird series. So I have never really connected all these readings. But when I went to study in the States as a grad student and I was teaching, you know, freshmen.

[Neil]

You were at the University of Iowa and then the University of Houston.

[PK]

Yes, yes, indeed. And I was teaching a freshman comp. And, you know, I'm guiding these youngsters to write their biography of how they learned how to read.

And I recall, you know, the Lady Bird series then I have the Hardy Boys series. And it occurred to me that it was that investment in reading those texts. And of course, they were illustrated, many of them with blonde, blonde, blonde hair and, you know, white skins and blue eyes.

And then in Houston, I have kids who look like those kids from those texts. And I realized my journey in writing and reading are so connected to those foundational texts. So even my quest for knowledge and travel around the world, you can say has been spurred by reading those formative texts.

[Neil]

You, I mean, maybe it helped propagate your desire to study and work over in the U.S. Yes. In some sense, or you were surrounded by the stories that you had implanted in your head. From a young age, or had implanted in your head with the emphasis on the had.

[PK]

The curiosity of seeing the world and the way I see the world has, has, I can say, was impacted by those foundational readings.

[PK]

Yeah.

[PK]

And so the curiosity that drives me constantly.

[Neil]

Yeah. Is there, is there any, like your kids, 10 and 18, two boys, when you were raising them, did you pass them the Hardy Boys? Are there African literature stories or African, similar children's books that exist that you're able to provide, or are they not here?

[PK]

I am laughing because only yesterday, so there was an Nairobi International Book Fair that just ended, I think yesterday.

[Neil]

Oh no, I just missed it.

[PK]

Yeah. Yeah. And I know, and for some reason it never occurred to me, it was happening this very week.

So I went there on Sunday or Saturday. And I picked one storybook for my youngest son who is 10. And it's called the Tales of Abunwasi.

[PK]

Tell me, yeah.

[PK]

So...

[PK]

Tales of... Abunwasi. Abunwasi.

[PK]

Abunwasi, A-B-U-N-W-A-S-I. I'll show you a copy of it.

[PK]

Yeah. Tales of Abunwasi.

[PK]

Got it.

[PK]

Yeah.

[PK]

It's like a guy who engages in tricks. It's a coastal fable from coastal Kenya. We grew up essentially reading about this guy engaged in all manner of tomfoolery.

And I thought my son might enjoy this. So I came home with a copy and I gave it to him yesterday. So I said, you can read this.

It's a storybook. And then he frowned and said, well, I'm reading some other books for school. I don't want to be confused by reading too many books.

And I said, no, it's for you to read when you are on holiday. And he said, well, that would be my time to play. So he doesn't.

So that's my long way of saying they don't read what we read. They are reading other things, mostly online, mostly on phones. Really?

So even with the schools? Yes. Well, the school will have their books.

But then they tend to connect the reading with schoolwork, which is a shame.

[Neil]

I've heard this also from Bule, who runs the bookstore. And that reading is a forced upon academic pursuit, rather than a pleasure-based, agency-based.

[PK]

Yes, he's very right.

[Neil]

Culturally, unfortunately. Hence his 2,000 plus self-published authors as stories. He's amplifying stories much more than I am trying, though I'm trying to amplify his as well.

So Tales of Abunwasi, you'd give us. You have a relationship with America. You have this American book series.

You, of course, have studied in University of Iowa. You, of course, have taught and been a professor. You got your doctorate at the University of Houston.

You've been a professor at University of Houston. You're now a professor at Aga Khan University here. I wonder if, two things, you could tell us about the relationship between...

Because the United States is 70% of the world's global economy. 70% by market capitalization. And it has an outsized weighting on the rest of the world's language, culture, behaviors, and beliefs.

And there's a history here between this part of the world and that part of the world. We've talked about British a little bit and Dutch. But I wonder if you could tell us about the relationship between the US and East Africa, both then and now, today.

And I wonder if you, as you could tell us the story, could you weave in here how you were asked to write a poem for the inauguration of Barack Obama? I mean, I just have to hear about that too.

[PK]

Well, it's one of those networks that you begin here and then somebody knows you from some other place. So I went to the international writing program in Iowa in 2007.

[Neil]

One of the world's most famous, for those that may not know. Marilynne Robinson, I think, is a teacher there, right?

[Neil]

Right, right.

[Neil]

Who wrote Gilead, who's chapter 15, which album, one of his most formative books, long story. This is, the University of Iowa is like saying, you know, the Harvard of writing.

[PK]

Yeah, you may say that.

[Neil]

With Syracuse, maybe, or some other school with George Sanders in it.

[PK]

Right. Yeah, so I was lucky to have networks from that school. So when NPR were looking for poets to compose poems to honor Obama at his inauguration, they reached out to me and two other poets who also are from Iowa network.

So they had three poems, one from Kenya, another from Europe, and another from North America. So I was asked to write and record for him. And then it was broadcast on NPR on the day of inauguration.

And I call it freeing the spirits.

[Neil]

Wow, what an honor. Yes. First black president of the United States to be asked to write a poem for his inauguration on the public broadcast.

I mean, they're broadcasting the inauguration. And then relationship. I mean, obviously there is the Obama's heritage that he was half Kenyan, though he was born in Hawaii.

And I mentioned that only because it became a source of controversy where he was born. You remember the argument, of course, by future president was that he was born here. That was actually the argument.

But the argument against his eligibility for president was that he was born in Kenya. That was the argument.

[PK]

Sure.

[Neil]

That he was from here. Though we're all from here.

[PK]

Yeah, I mean, I think this illustrates to you the power of stories and storytelling. Because the entire Trump presidency was only made possible by that fiction that Obama was born in Kenya.

[Neil]

That was the start of it.

[PK]

That was the start of it.

[Neil]

That was the root of his popularity in politics.

[PK]

Yes, yes. And his access to a national podium in America was to deny Obama being American and the whole birtherism movement based on a fiction. So that's a power of fiction.

If you think about it, that...

[Neil]

Birtherism. I haven't heard that word in a while, but that's exactly what it was, right?

[PK]

Birtherism.

[Neil]

I forgot about that word.

[PK]

Right. And so when Obama was running for president and, you know, his honoring his extended family and his connections to Kenya, of course, Kenya became a point of focus for North America or for the US. But you can say Kenya in a great sense.

If you think about the Anglo-American interests that have been manifest on the continent for such a long time, you might not remember or you might not be aware of this historical fact, but even the major world war, the Second World War. Please, yeah. In 1945, it only ended because America developed the atomic bombs that were made possible by uranium mined from the mines in DRC, the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1941.

So in other words, the resources of Africa, Africa is a continent, um, whether, whether, whether, you know, it's, uh, it's human beings that are being exported, uh, to go work for them or, uh, you know, imposing that you produce for us in your country through colonization or taking actual resources like gold, uranium, coca, tea. Ah, coca.

[Neil]

Yes. Coca-Cola. Yes.

From the coca leaf from Ghana. Yes.

[PK]

Right.

[Neil]

Yes. Is that right? Yes.

And it had caffeine in it. Yeah. Oh no, it had cocaine in it.

[PK]

And, and, and you might even extend this to Switzerland and this chocolate business that's become a diet of European families. Those are resources from this continent.

[Neil]

Nevermind music or art or, or clothing and stuff.

[PK]

Right. So the Anglo American interests, um, uh, so, so the connection between, um, this continent and, uh, in America and, uh, perhaps Obama coming in, uh, partly to, in a sense, uh, become this symbolic figure, uh, that is, um, you know, Kenyans and Africans are notoriously religious, um, seeing this as a reenactment or an evocation of the biblical Joseph who is enslaved, but then he comes to save his country.

So, so Obama gained these mythical, mythical proportions. The people were seeing him to symbolize something larger than the man himself. So again, if you think of the Bible as a, as a story or series of stories, that's the power of how human narratives are, you know, enacted and reenacted to gain more power than even the authors ever envisioned.

[Neil]

Absolutely. Um, okay. I have about five other questions about the Hardy Boys, but in the interest of time, we're going to move forward because you've been mentioning Ngugi, your, your mentor for so long and we've been hinting at it for so, so long.

Your second most formative book is Weep Not, Child, which is Weep Not, W-E-E-P, then Not, N-O-T comma Child, Weep Not, Child. Like Do Not Cry, Child, Weep Not, Child by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o. And I'm going to, you know, it's N-G-U with the curve, which is called what?

[PK]

Squiggle.

[Neil]

Squiggle, G-I with the squiggle, then lowercase w-a, that's the second word, and then Thiong'o, which is T-H-I-O-N-G apostrophe O.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Who lived, by the way, from 1938, born in Karimitu? Kamireto. Kamireto, sorry.

In, in, in Kenya colon, Kenya.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

And he died a few months ago in May of this year. I'm sorry.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Neil]

You have a deep relationship with him. I just saw your whole Ngougi bookshelf inside in Georgia, USA. I guess he was living there at the time.

Often considered East Africa's leading novelist. This book, by the way, was the very first book ever translated out of Africa to the wider world. Yes.

That's what I know about it. I have an old Penguin Classics cover with like a black ribbon at the bottom with the author's name in all caps and the book title in the smaller caps, you know, and there's this like evocative either sunrise or sunset orange scene with the three silhouettes of two young children, one holding a baby, a spear planted over beside, outside a hut, maybe another hut or a rock in the distance. Your cover is quite different.

It's paperback with, I want to say green, yellow, and orange. I don't want to call these abstract images, but I cannot tell what they are.

[PK]

They are abstract.

[Neil]

They are abstract images with similar kind of unadorned cover. What is this book about? Weep Not Child is a moving novel about the effects of the Mau Mau uprising on the lives of ordinary men and women in one family in particular.

Two brothers, Njoroge and Kamau, stand on a garbage heap and look into their futures. Njoroge is to attend school while Kamau will train to be a carpenter, but this is Kenya and the times are against them. In the forest, the Mau Mau is waging war against the white government and the two brothers and their family need to decide where their loyalties lie.

Unfortunately, the Dewey Decimal System files this one under 896. I have replaced it there, to be honest with you, African literature and English because when I look it up through all the official things online, it puts it into English literature because the Dewey Decimal System itself is a function of colonialism.

[PK]

Absolutely.

[Neil]

So it doesn't even have a place to go in the whole categorization of the system. We talk about the lack of books, there isn't even a spot for them in the library classification system. Peter, please tell us about your relationship with the Weep Not Child.

Ngugi Wa Thiong'o.

[PK]

So I must have been in form one, so high school as a 15-year-old kid.

[Neil]

We might call grade 10, 10th grade or freshman or sophomore.

[PK]

Right.

[Neil]

Yeah, just equivalent size. Sorry to the form one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[PK]

So early high school education. So very curious about the world and you've got, you've got, when I look back, you've got no way of seeing the world. You don't know how the world functions, you've got no way of seeing the world, but it is a book that helped me clarify, you know, what had gone through unconsciously.

So I am 15, I read this story and they're narrating an experience that mirrors like a community where I lived in the village. People who had names like, you know, mine and other kids in the village. So having grown on these westernized notions of fiction, it was the first story that I read that had names and a setting that mirrored my own environment.

[Neil]

You saw yourself.

[PK]

I saw myself in the text. And so, and these youngsters are going through a life that is turmoil, you know, the war of liberation, because you've got freedom fighters who are trying to resist British occupation of our country. And so the story spoke to me in a manner that I had never experienced any kind of fiction.

There was this connection that this is me, this is my experience, this is my country. So when I read Weep Not Child, I remember being entranced just by this universe I had entered. I had read other stories in other contexts.

So it spoke to me in that profound way because I understood my own experience is a story worth narrating. I think that that was the first moment when I thought, maybe I could write my own story.

[Neil]

Permission to be a writer.

[PK]

Yes, yes, essentially. So when I encountered in the same year, I encountered, you know, more writings by Ngugi. It fortified my desire to actually consider writing.

So by the time I got to the second year in high school, so I'm about 16, I'll confidently tell my classmates, I think I'm going to be a writer. I want to be a writer. So this sounds audacious.

Yes. But because I had no idea what it meant to be a writer or the enormous, you know, tasks that are required into the making. It looks easy.

It looked easy.

[Neil]

But when you read this book, I mean, the writing is very simple.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

It sounds easy.

[PK]

Yes.

[Neil]

Sounds like you could do it.

[PK]

Yes. But what's vital is that the invocation of the desire is what makes that possible or plausible. So I'm saying, having read him, I want to become a writer was something I may never have had the courage to even imagine that as a possibility.

And what's fascinating is that when you read Ngugi's own memoirs, he says how his own invocation of his desire to become a writer is sneered not just by his classmates, but even the teachers in this colonial school that he attends.

[Neil]

It's, sorry, you said mirrored? Mirrored?

[PK]

Yeah, when he sneered.

[Neil]

Oh, sneered at.

[PK]

Sneered at.

[Neil]

Oh, so when he told them he wanted to be a writer, they said, you aren't, you can't do it.

[PK]

You can't be serious.

[Neil]

You won't be. And he had no Ngugi to be inspiring him.

[PK]

Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so that's what I found interesting, that even Ngugi going through Alliance High School, one of the earliest and one of the most prominent colonial schools, was that they were sneering at his invocation of this possibility of him becoming a writer.

[Neil]

Even the act of wanting to become a writer itself, pre-writing, is itself an activist act.

[Neil]

It is, it is.

[Neil]

A political act.

[Neil]

It is. Absolutely.

[Neil]

And for anyone watching this or listening to this that's thinking about it, like, this is why we're here. Like, do it. Like, put down your story.

Tell us your truth. Like, speak about what you know, what you're learning, because it's the only way our cultures can evolve and how we learn and share. And like, it's the path.

[PK]

Absolutely. Still. Absolutely.

Absolutely. I mean, we must remember, even the most advanced societies in the world, their only claim to fame is through the stories narrated by the writers of those countries.

[Neil]

It's all that we have left from them.

[PK]

It's all that we have, yes.

[Neil]

And it might be all that we have from today. It is. In the future.

I mean, it depends how long the silicone lasts on the hard drives. But even Kevin Kelly, who's a past guest of ours and the co-founder of WIRE Magazine, and you know, a real big tech futurist now in his late 70s, I believe, or mid-70s, um, he says that printed word is more durable than technology. He says that now, even him.

You know. I believe that. So you read this book.

You were inspired to become a writer. I've just seen your bookshelf and you have a whole Ngugi collection. He's the most prominent writer.

And by the way, I was embarrassed to discover that when I ordered this book, in order to read it in advance of this conversation, I had another Ngugi Nyong'o book on my bookshelf, A Grain of Wheat, which I had not read. But it was on my bookshelf. We all have this knowing of big, lots of books on our bookshelf we have not read.

And I was like, that means somewhere in my past life, someone told me somewhere, somehow, I should read this book. And I purchased it or I found it or I saw it, but I never read it. And I was like, now I have a two by him.

So I've read one.

[PK]

Wonderful.

[Neil]

And for those that are new to Ngugi and new to kind of African stories through literature, what would be your syllabus? What would be your syllabus? What would you be?

What would you start with? What would you tell us to read?

[PK]

Well, if you're speaking about Kenya, Ngugi will be a good beginning to understand.

[Neil]

Say all you've read is out of Africa. Say that's all you've read.

[PK]

No, start with that. You know Africa.

[Neil]

You don't know 55 countries.

[PK]

Right, right.

[Neil]

By the way, when I was at Walmart and I worked there from 2006 to 2016, and we were purchasing a share of MassMart, a South African retailer conglomerate, a PowerPoint circulated inside internally at the company.

I can say this now it's been many years to all the executives, just the executives got to see his PowerPoint of us teaching ourselves about Africa. And the opening slide said, Africa is not a country.

[Neil]

Yes.

[Neil]

That's the opening slide. And then the second slide showed a picture of the United States and China and India, and all these fitting in the silhouette of Africa.

[Neil]

Right.

[Neil]

Just the second slide was, and this is how big it is.

[Neil]

Yeah, yeah.

[Neil]

Because on the map, we flattened the earth. It's very huge. And Greenland's huge.

But Greenland is tiny. Yes, yes.

[Neil]

So now we've read out of Africa. We know Africa is not a country. That's all.

Now what's the syllabus?

[PK]

So Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.

[Neil]

Conveniently, the next book for us to discuss. That's where you would start.

[PK]

Yes, that's where I'll start. Partly because its own inspiration is quite inspiring. You know, Achebe, a young man studying at a local university in Nigeria, encounters a very racist colonial text.

And he thought the way those characters are depicted didn't convey the kind of complexity of the people he knew.

[Neil]

This is 1940s.

[PK]

1950s.

[Neil]

40s, 50s, okay. It was published in 1950s. He's born in 30 in Nigeria.

So he encounters these racist texts in his teen years, 20s or something.

[PK]

20s, yeah, at college.

[Neil]

And he says, this doesn't match my version of my people.

[PK]

Yeah, yeah. So he said he's going to write his own story. And he's very young and also invested in narrating his own country in a way that he knows it.

So when Things Fall Apart was published, Heinemann was the publisher.

[PK]

In 1965 in London.

[PK]

Yes, yes. So they had started what they called African Writers Series.

[Neil]

Right, which is why Ngugi's book, which you just talked about, came out in 1964 by Heinemann.

[PK]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they were among the early authors being published under that imprint. And what made Chinua Achebe get as widely read as he was that Heinemann had this policy of publishing these books simultaneously across the continent and Europe and North America.

So a writer becomes a global phenomenon almost overnight. So those distribution networks have since dissipated. So when I read Things Fall Apart, what was important for me was that it fortified an idea that African writers can tell their stories and they are telling their stories.

But the connection between Ngugi and Achebe was actually not the storylines for me. The logic that I applied was the book blobs both said these guys had served as journalists. That Ngugi had been a journalist on The Daily Nation and Chinua Achebe had worked at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation.

And I thought, this is very useful career guidance. Then I'm going to become a journalist. Then I'll become a novelist.

That was the only indication.

[Neil]

Because that was the path that was illuminated by both of these writers that you read in your formative years. That you become a journalist. First, you learn how to write non-fiction or report, reportage or whatever.

Then you take those skills and you apply that trade to fiction or to stories.

[PK]

Well, that sounds very, very rational. It wasn't very rational. For me, I thought I'm going to become a novelist.

But then books, I realized books take a long time to get published. They get even longer to write. So what can I, what was the other career possibility?

Then I found journalism, having these two guys having been journalists. Then I started nurturing interest in journalism as perhaps something to hold me over as a way to write my books. So my...

[Neil]

Hold you over, like earn an income.

[PK]

Yes.

[Neil]

To provide cover.

Yes. Pre-advance. I'm talking to future writers and current writers.

[PK]

Pay the bills. Yes. In the meantime, keep writing your big book. That's exactly what I did.

Because when I got into the newsroom writing for the Daily Nation, one of the largest newspaper around the region, I also embarked on my first book, which I wrote through my work as a journalist. And I will be writing my fiction in the evening. So I'm writing nonfiction during the day to pay my bills.

And I'm writing fiction when I go home. And in a couple of years before the rooster crows, I'll show you a copy here. That was the first book that I got published.

So as...

[Neil]

What year?

[PK]

That was 2002.

[Neil]

Right. Yeah. You were how old?

[PK]

I was 30.

[Neil]

30. Your first book published at 30. And I'm saying that because the vision for when we go on to become a writer came at around 15.

The first book came out 15 years later. This is good for people to hear this. Yes.

15 years it took.

[PK]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. To get that dream into reality. And then I read Chinua Achebe and I find my idea, Ngugi's idea.

So my life as a writer or my life in writing is becoming more and more clarified by these readings. So I see a clear connection between good reading habits and good writing habits. It is a very clear connection.

You cannot become a writer unless you're a reader. So good reading habits yield in good writing habits.

[Neil]

What would you tell people to become better readers? Which, by the way, the number one driver for people to listen to the show is, oh, this guy's had a podcast about books. I should do that more.

Like, that's the universal. I would like to read more. That's thrust to the work I'm doing here.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Neil]

So now, since you know, that's the thrust. Yes. What is the solution?

What is the advice you'd give someone who's trying to develop stronger and richer reading life?

[PK]

Right. The most immediate, of course, we've got contemporary fiction that's, you know, marketed aggressively. You've got, you know, festivals where writers are getting unveiled.

But also look at not just your own immediate environment, but also look at books in other contexts. It's the best way to travel. By reading, you immerse yourself in a culture, in a country, in a community, in a continent that will give you the deepest nuances that you can experience life as known by those who've never set foot elsewhere.

You can do your best travels through reading.

[Neil]

So read outside your country, read outside your land, read outside what you know.

[PK]

Yes.

[Neil]

Not just the contemporary stuff, but the stuff that comes from places and civilizations and times and experiences that you know nothing about.

[PK]

Absolutely.

[Neil]

Try to find the most juvenile or most accessible book. Don't be judging yourself. Because if I read the biggest, most advanced literature from like Russia, sorry, but like, I'm going to fail probably on the first try.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

You know, and I feel bad about myself. Find the thinnest Tolstoy. Find the thinnest Tolstoy.

Don't start with necessarily Anna Karenina. Although it's accessible. I know the writing is very accessible.

Don't get me wrong. I'm just saying, lower the bar.

[PK]

And I can say, to just build on the Tolstoy analogy, is that it's interesting, you know, Tolstoy writing nearly 150, 200 years ago.

[PK]

Yeah.

[PK]

And his stories appear to be speaking larger truths about our very moment in Kenya, in the U.S. universally. So fiction holds universal truths about our existence as a human species.

[Neil]

Absolutely.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

What are you working on now?

[PK]

I'm working on another historical fiction set in Kenya in 1990s. It is my first book that's set in Nairobi, my city of boyhood. So you can say I'm confronting my childhood and my boyhood.

It's an interesting moment for world history, but the end of Cold War, collapse of the Berlin Wall. And, you know, African society is getting reconfigured because the tensions between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. have dissipated. And there is quite a bit of turmoil in many parts of the world.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[PK]

So I'm trying to see this young man emerging out of this chaos to his coming of age at a moment of deep crisis. And yeah, trying to distill that moment and also returning to my own haunts as a young man coming of age.

[Neil]

Right. Because you were 18 in 1990.

[PK]

Yes.

[Neil]

Right. So you have the awareness of what will happen in the years preceding and up to that. I'm excited for this book.

I want to read it now, but I know I have to wait till whenever it comes out, which I know writing time is very malleable. It could be. Yeah.

You don't have a pub date.

[PK]

Not yet.

[Neil]

Not yet. But when we do.

[PK]

But it is coming soon, hopefully. Yeah, we'll keep it posted.

[Neil]

Okay. Okay. That would be great because we will talk about this.

I could have hold this chapter until then, but I would rather release this right away and then talk about that when it comes out.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, A-C-H-E-B-E, as you mentioned, published in 1965. Bahaineman Achebe lived from 1930 in Nigeria, died in 2013 in Boston. We've talked about Ngubi.

We talked about Franklin W. Dixon. We've talked about really conquering colonialism through...

I wrote a phrase that you said earlier. You see how I take notes in the middle of the speech, or speech, in the middle of the interview? And so at the end of the interview, I have like pages of all these notes, and then I have to type them all up and try to remember everything I talked about.

So once a writer... I said to my kids, the difference between a writer and everybody else is a writer writes. A writer writes it down.

So when you say something funny, you see me run over and grab a paper.

[Neil]

He said, why are you writing this down?

[Neil]

Because I'm a writer. What do you think a writer does? I'm like, that is the spirit.

Everybody has good ideas. Everybody has a funny line. Everybody has a thing they want to remember.

The only difference, the only difference is the writer writes it down.

[Neil]

That's it, right?

[Neil]

We talked about conquering the curse of choreographed colonialism. PK, this has been a pleasure. I don't know.

I mean, I know we're probably both starving, and we're sitting in now the midday sun. Do you have time for like a quick, fast money round questions? Okay.

Hardcover, paperback, audio, or E? Hardcover. Hardcover, because?

[PK]

It's enduring, lasts forever. Yeah, yeah. And in the beginning, there was a word, and the word was published.

The word was written, so published.

[Neil]

Okay. Yeah. Remind me of our conversation with Timothy Goodman.

I said, why hardcover? He said, because it's the original. It's the OG.

How do you organize your books on your bookshelf?

[PK]

Well, in a manner that only makes sense to me. Could be periods, could be authors, could be regions, could be subjects. So it's a mishmash.

That only makes sense to me.

[Neil]

Well, but having said that, you showed me your study. You showed me your bookshelf. You had a Ngugi bookshelf, but then below that, you said, here's books from Africa.

You said, here's literature from, you had a Canada. I saw Canada on there.

[Neil]

Yeah, yeah.

[Neil]

By the way, you were hanging a bag from James Daunt or Daunt Books. And as you know this, he organized his bookstore by place. It's an almost unusual bookstore because you think Kenya, and then you find the books, fiction and nonfiction.

Through that, he organizes the books from that geography.

[PK]

And the one thing that we missed in my study is that I have Ngugi and me portrait on the wall.

[Neil]

Really? Yeah. What did you learn from him directly that he told you that you could share with us?

[PK]

Well, we, you know, my encounter with Ndugugi started with fiction, but then I write, I get published. Then I mail him a copy in California. And I told him, you're partly responsible for this journey.

And I'm writing to thank you. Wow. So when I finally made it to the States, I went to visit him in his very university.

[Neil]

Because he becomes like you, becomes a professor. Yes. Yeah.

You went into California.

[PK]

Yes. And he's probably an old man at this time. So 2003, he's not too old.

He's late sixties. Okay. So I got to know him for nearly 20 years.

So it became the beginning of a lifelong friendship. And so we're meeting for lunch for maybe an hour or so, was extended into four, five, six hour encounter. You know, he's been to my house.

He's been here. Wow. And I went to his home many, many times in the States.

Wow. And then I was seated in this very space when I received a call from him. And I sat in this very pagoda and I answered his call.

And that was on the May 25th, which is Africa Day. Celebrated by African Union is Africa Day. I was sitting in this very pagoda on Africa Day, May 25th this year.

And Ngugi calls me and we have a chat. And 72 hours later, he was gone. So he was essentially saying farewell to me.

So I was sitting here when he called me last, we chatted. And then, you know, I received the news that he had gone. So we had a very...

[Neil]

In his late eighties. Yeah. So you know him from his late sixties to his late eighties.

[PK]

Yeah.

[Neil]

What a special time frame for the friendship to form. When he was so, I'm assuming at this point in time, most incredibly wise.

[PK]

Yes. And what's remarkable is his clarity of mind. He remained very clear to the very, very last hours of his life.

And so although we had this writer, older writer, younger writer relationship, he's really the father figure in many ways, because he was the father of Kenyan fiction.

[Neil]

First writer translated outside of Africa.

[PK]

Absolutely. And so getting him to also be involved in my day-to-day life. He came here, he met my son when he was, you know, like a month or two old to bless the boy.

You know, come meet my family. And you know, he was also my doctoral supervisor. I don't know if you know that.

I did not know this. He was on my committee.

[Neil]

Okay. My research has failed me.

[PK]

Yeah. He was on my doctoral committee. So, so a mentor in every sense of the word.

[Neil]

And is there a piece of wisdom he's left you with? Or a piece of advice that you might want to share with us?

[PK]

Yes. Lots of, lots of it. Um, so the idea of this, uh, the decolonial project, um, that should be one of his flagship, uh, you know, legacies to this continent, that we, we, we must learn, we must make an effort to decolonize our minds, to decolonize our people, our communities.

And then we're going to, to have the opportunity to rewrite, uh, you know, our own histories. So, so the, the other wisdom that I like to share about, about Ngugi was a question he kept, uh, no matter what we're talking about, he would always ask me, are you writing? So as you said, a writer writes.

So that's a message I like to convey to, um, to our audience as well. That if you've got this burning desire to do something, but this desire has been, uh, nurturing for, for years. The only way you can make a difference between those who have these desires and making it happen is actually by starting today.

Starting today, not tomorrow, not today. Just start today. Write something today.

That's what, that's the wisdom I gained from him. Constant nudging, constant reminders. Are you writing?

Are you writing?

[Neil]

He just kept asking that. Yes. Because you would tell him what's happening and he'd ask if you're documenting it.

[PK]

Yes.

[PK]

Yes.

[Neil]

Write something today. We must make an effort to decolonize our minds, to decolonize our people, to tell our own stories. Are you writing?

Are you writing? Write something today.

[PK]

And every story is valid.

[Neil]

Don't say I can't, I'm not interesting. I'm boring. I don't know.

I don't have. Every one of us believes this.

[PK]

We all have incredibly interesting stories. We just don't believe in it or don't understand the value of what you have.

[Neil]

Peter Kimani, this has been an unbelievable conversation. One I will treasure, savour and remember. I hope the beginning of a lifelong friendship through our 60s, 70s, 80s and hopefully far beyond.

I really am grateful for your time, for your space, for your energy, for inviting me into your continent, your country and your home. Thank you so much for coming on Three Books.

[PK]

You're so kind, Neil. Thank you for coming home.

[Neil]

Hey everybody, it's just me again. Just Neil. Wow, listen back to that.

Theory-wise and just mind-expanding, Peter Kimani.

[Neil]

I walked away from that conversation in that sun and I walked around Peter's garden with him and we had that delicious lunch and he gave us a tour of those mango trees and those orange trees. If you're watching this on YouTube, I took video kind of on the drive in and out of the town he lived in about an hour outside of Nairobi. And so I'll paste some of those videos overlaying the interview so you can see kind of the context, the visual context of that day.

And just a really warm and talented soul. He was on his way to Senegal the next day to give a keynote speech at a conference on literature. And just a shame to say, you know, knowing so little about African novels and stories, I'm like, Peter was a wonderful kind of way in.

He gave us three more books to add to our top 1000, of course, including number 553, not an African book, but The Hardy Boys by Franklin W. Dixon. We're going to swipe the whole series off the board here and add it there.

And then two African books following. Number 552, Weep Not, Child by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o. And I did read this book and I loved it.

And he's got a whole bunch of famous books. A Grain of Wheat is another one I have on my bookshelf. And number 551, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, A-C-H-E-B-E, which I actually am like eight pages in right now.

I have it on my bedside table. I'm trying to read that while simultaneously trying to read Dune, which I'm like 500 pages in. I can see that the remaining 300 pages is getting closer.

That was a book, by the way, you might remember, was suggested to us back in chapter 151 from Penn Holderness. So you can see sometimes I'll read the book a little later, depending on how big it is and how much time I have and so on. What are some quotes that jumped out to you from the show?

I wrote down a few. Writing is just an extension of living. For those of us who are writers, and I'm going to include a lot of us in that, don't you think that's true?

Whether you're keeping an emoji trip diary, as I did when I went to Nairobi, or you're writing down interesting Swahili phrases that you hear, as I did when I went to Nairobi. Like, what am I doing? Am I going to publish that?

Am I going to put that out there? No, I'm not. I also wrote a trip diary for myself.

You know, a 10,000 word document just on my own trip. You know, and I was in Amsterdam before that and Bucharest before that, two new cities I hadn't been to before. So, I just want to keep a record of what I noticed and experienced, so I can revisit it.

It's an extension of living for me. I completely agree with that. PK, again, we've normalized abnormalities.

He was quoting Nagoogi there, but... I mean, that just feels so true today. There's just so much weird stuff going on and we amplify it with our algorithms that reward controversy and inflammatory reactions as the net benefit of, you know, their business model.

And so, because our human brains have evolutionarily old parts in them that are, I won't say turned on, but we're certainly stimulated when there's blood or something's dying or... You know, I was just walking home this morning from dropping off my kids and I walked by, like, a dead squirrel. Like, it could see my brain, you know, instinctively looks at it.

Like, what happened? Did it get hit by a car? There's blood all over the sidewalk.

I have to be careful. I can't touch it. It's dangerous.

Well, that's the same kind of reaction we get from disaster, right? And from anger. And those who know how to manipulate those algorithms, you know who I'm talking about, can just create inflammatory behavior in order to manipulate the algorithm or to control the storyline in order to...

It's just, it's endless, right? So, we have to decide to change the channel ourselves. It's hard.

And that's why, back to the value we talked about at the beginning, reading is a great pathway and Archimedes' lever into these bigger thoughts. Thank you for being part of the physical exercise that it is to kind of do this work. It's hard, right?

I don't always want to read a book. Like, I'd rather just scroll through something stimulating online, but I have to plug my phone downstairs and lock it in a case safe and buy an alarm clock and change the batteries. Like, I have to leave books at my bedside table and get a dimmer on my lamp because I don't like...

You know, I'm doing this stuff to try to create the kind of private place where my mind can... I'm picturing like pizza dough. My mind can kind of stretch a little bit and expand more naturally.

Another quote from PK is, we must make an effort to decolonize our minds. Of course, a theme of this conversation. He says, I see a connection between good reading habits and good writing habits.

You cannot become a writer unless you are a reader. Amen. Writing is an act of recovering our past.

I love that one. Religion is the most harmless way of accessing the mind of another human being. Like, that was powerful.

That was powerful. I just think about that. Religion is the most harmless way of accessing the mind of another human being.

And then he also said, in terms of colonization, we are still perpetuating the British metaphysical empire. We're extending their cultural hegemony. We also have the three Cs of colonization, which I'm going to talk about a little bit more.

I'll kind of put that in some of our artwork and stuff for the show. You made it. You're at the end.

That was a long conversation. We went on a big trip together there. That was a voyage.

That was a journey. Thank you so much for being here. And now, if you're still here, if you made it past the three second pause, I want to welcome you back into the end of the podcast club.

This is one of three clubs we have for three bookers, along with The Secret Club and The Cover to Cover Club. How do you join The Secret Club? Just give me a phone call.

It's 1-833-READALOT, R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T. It is a real phone number. You can drop the T off if it doesn't work, because it's eight letters.

It's readalot, actually, but I wanted to make it into a word. So it's readalot. And let's start off, as we always do, by going to the phones.

[Jill From Washington]

Hey, Neil. It's Jill from Washington. I continue to enjoy all of your podcasts, and I just finished the one with Robin Sloan, which I wish that I had been able to listen to on half speed, because my brain is still whirring.

I'm still processing all of the things that he said and thinking about it. And I did go to Amazon and purchased Moonbound and Mr. Penabra's 24-Hour Bookstore, which I can't wait to read. He was very interesting.

And thank you for bringing on great people with great ideas. Love your podcast.

[Neil]

Thank you, Jill, from Washington, for giving us a call, for listening to the show. Amen on Robin Sloan. Chapter 152 with Robin Sloan, he's just such a big brand, and he talks so fast, and he also assumes a lot.

I don't mean that in a bad way, but you can tell his mind is going 1, 3, 5, 7, and sometimes I'm like, wait, what's 2 and 4 and 6 again? So I know what you mean about half speed, but that also is the massive mind required to write a big novel. Let me know what you think of Moonbound.

I am curious what you think, because Ginny Urit, she was our guest in Chapter 148 when she came to Toronto to hang out with us for the day. She was like, what is Moonbound? I couldn't get into it.

It wasn't really my cup of tea. And she's a voracious reader, and she reads a ton. So obviously, as always, not every book is for everyone, but I really liked it.

I'm curious what you think. But it's also really different from Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour. So I was like, whoa, they have some things in common, but also one's a little more like...

Mr. Penumbra's is a little bit more like the Da Vinci Code type of vibe. Anyway, let me know what you think. Also, if I play your voicemail on the show, as you know, Jill, or maybe you don't, and Devin, who I read your letter, just always email me, send me your address, and tell me which of my books you would like me to sign.

It'd be my pleasure to sign and drop one in the mail to you as a way to say thanks. And if you're listening to this and you're like, wait, I want a free book. Well, that's easy.

All you have to do is call. It's 1-833-READALOT. And what am I looking for in a call?

Anything. You can have a reflection on a specific guest. You can have your dream guest that you want to add to the show.

You can have a point of controversy or a complaint or something that you didn't agree with a guest said, or you can share one of your formative books. That's all. What's one book that changed your life?

Because we talk about three over like an hour or two, but it'd be nice to hear your one or two or three over a minute or two. Like what other books change people's lives? We're collecting and sharing books on this show kind of more than anything else.

All right. Now, let's move on to the, but you know what's interesting? I, you know, I kind of usually do a letter here, but I want to tell you guys, I posted this little clip on YouTube a couple of days ago called Why Reading Feels So Hard by David Foster Walsh.

It's an excerpt from an interview he did like 30 years ago, something like 20, 20, 30 years ago on a German TV station talking about the speed of things. Well, in a couple of days, this tiny little clip has 79,000 views and 352 comments. Some of the comments are everything was so fast and it was 2003.

Okay. David Foster Walsh died in 2008. Imagine if he was alive to see the state of the world now.

Back then it wasn't half as bad as it is today. Great. The Dark Chum adds, during the pandemic, I started reading all the books I wanted to read but never did.

Since then, I've now read 100 novels and many nonfiction. I'm so glad I've made that decision. Read if you want to.

The time is now. I love that. Kenneth Bennett adds, being a teacher has made me aware and appreciative of quiet spaces I used to have on background noise, whether a show or music, but now I can have nothing on in my home for hours and it has become peaceful.

I'm not there yet. I like that. I aspire to that.

That's a good, that's a good vision. For me, Kenneth. How about this one from Pixie Dust 1664?

I live in rural Appalachia, Virginia, and my internet and power go out all the time for weeks. Wow. I use a generator a lot just to survive.

I do notice how quiet it is, except for birds and wind. I love it. I don't have anything but my phone to begin with.

Isn't that amazing that we are now sort of visioning these luxury worlds that are just kind of plain, quiet nature? You know, that's the luxury now. Sometimes I go to this sauna and cold plunge place in Toronto called Othership, and like the most common thing I hear afterwards, people are like, wow, I can't believe I went 75 minutes without my phone.

Finding peaceful, quiet times. Just plain empty spaces. Reminds me a lot of Michael Harris who wrote that book, Solitude.

If you haven't read that, I highly recommend it. If loneliness is alone and sad, solitude is alone and happy. I should probably revisit that book myself.

All right. Now, you know what? Such an articulate fellow.

I think it's time for a word cloud, people. Let's jump in and play a word cloud now.

[PK]

Austriches are called Nyaga. They couldn't pronounce Kerenyaga. They invented Kenya.

Namlolwe should have been the proper name for Lake Victoria. So Kikuyu is the anglicized pronunciation in perpetuity. We are extending their cultural hegemony.

The strangulating traffic typify a continent-wide phenomenon. Foreigners who are supplanting the interpretation panacea to a social problem. The whole birtherism movement based on affliction, invocation of the desire.

[Neil]

Holy cow. A lot of interesting words there. All those indigenous words at the beginning were so fascinating.

Kerenyaga, the word for ostriches, Nyaga. Typify, strangulating, supplanting. Um, but I'm gonna...

Birtherism, remember that whole thing? And we won't talk about that. But I'm gonna talk about a word that I realize I've been pronouncing wrong my whole life until right now.

[Neil]

Hegemony.

[Neil]

Hegemony. I always thought that was hegemony. Like cultural hegemony.

Fine, with a hard or soft G, but either way, it's hegemony, according to the dictionary, ladies.

[Neil]

Hegemony.

[Neil]

Hegemony. I just find that word so interesting. And according to Miriam Webster, it means the preponderant influence or authority over others.

Another word for it is domination. The social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence exerted by a dominant group. Hegemony.

Where did this come from? It is an ancient Greek word. It was originally the noun hegemonia for authority, rule, or political supremacy.

PK's quote, of course, was around, we are still perpetuating the British metaphysical empire. We are still extending their cultural hegemony. Hegemony.

Domination over others. I hope that books have domination over your mind, over the next moon. I'll be back on the new moon with a re-release, with a classic chapter, as always.

And until next time, remember that you are what you eat and you are what you read. Take care, everybody, and talk to you soon. you

Listen to the chapter here!

Chapter 153: Carl Honoré imparts illuminating insights into intentional idleness

Listen to the chapter here!

Carl:

This slow revolution is about doing things at the right speed. I just love words, I love how they move around in the world, how they shape how we feel, how they change things, how they sound, how they look on the page. I'm trying to save myself through my writing and try to help others live better lives and help the world be a better place.

We can't really know ever anything. We need that headspace, right? We need that bandwidth.

We need quiet in order to go deep. Whole libraries are going to end up being written about our tortured relationship with phones.

Neil:

Hey everybody, this is Neil Pasricha and welcome or welcome back to chapter 153, 53, 53 of three books. You are listening to the only podcast in the world buying for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. We are counting down the thousand most formative books in the world, 333 straight, full moon from 2018 all the way up to 2040.

We have an incredible show for you today, chapter 153 with Carl Honoré, wise man, kind soul. You're going to love Carl. He wrote the book In Praise of Slowness, which has been a bestseller for like two decades and really changed my life.

I love this book. I can't wait to share a conversation with Carl with all of you. And if you want to skip ahead, go ahead, skip ahead right to the chat.

But we got no ads, no sponsors, no interruptions on the show. So we always like to have a little hangout at the beginning, a little hangout at the end. So if you want to hang out, first off, thank you.

Thank you, three bookers. Thank you for your energy, for your love, for your letters. I like to start off the show always with a letter.

Before I get to that, you know what I thought I would do just before the letter this time? Is I would give you all an update on some of our past guests, because a lot of our past guests have been up to like really cool stuff, like Jen Agg, our guest in chapter 35. Did you know her restaurant in Toronto, General Public, was named the number one new restaurant in the whole city in Toronto Life Magazine?

So if you are living in Toronto, if you're visiting Toronto, Jen Agg, our guest in chapter 35, she's the number one restaurant in town. Or did you know that our guest in chapter 52, Mr. Wagner Moura, who played Pablo Escobar in Narcos, has been in a number of amazing movies, including Civil War last year. He's in a new movie coming out this fall, probably a big Oscar contender.

It's called The Secret Agent. He won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival, and Leslie and I were lucky enough to be his guest at the North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival recently. I can tell you this movie is wonderful.

Go see it if you can. It's like a 1977 historical political drama, a real story about a schoolteacher that's caught in the middle of a dictatorship and stressful situations and civilization. We can kind of all relate or at least picture that type of scenario.

Wagner, as always, delivers a great performance. He's a real beautiful guy, really, in every way, in every spirit. We've managed to keep in touch and connected over the years, and he's just a truly big-hearted soul, like I guess a lot of actors who put that on the screen for all of us.

And lastly, I wanted to let you know that our guest in Chapter 127, Lenore Skenazy, just dropped an incredible TED Talk on the main stage at TED over in Vancouver with a provocative title from TED 2025 called Why You Should Spend Less Time With Your Kids, whether micromanaging playtime, hovering over incessant texting, the adult takeover of childhood has created a crisis of anxiety in both kids and parents. You know, what I've noticed is that Lenore's work has gained newfound popularity with the kind of growth and popularity of The Anxious Generation, which was written, of course, by Jonathan Haidt, our guest, H-A-I-D-T, in Chapter 103.

The Anxious Generation has now been a New York Times bestseller for something like 75 straight weeks. He calls for a number of manifesto-like asks, raising the age of social media, banning phones in schools, and, of course, increasing free play. So grab this TED Talk.

We'll put it in our show notes. I've emailed it to all our kids' public school teachers because I'm like, can we have more free play in schools? And actually, amazingly, my second grade kid, grade two if you're Canadian, his teacher's added her own recess.

She's added another recess to the day. They get two re-sci, re-sci, recesses. Re-sci sounds weird.

We're not gonna go with that. But I like weird. It's weird not to be weird said John Lennon.

So she's added a third recess to the day. My kids love it. Well, one kid loves it.

The other kids are jealous. And it's free play, free play. That's what we need more of as we talk to Jenny Yurich about recently.

All right, now it's time for the letter of the podcast. And this chapter's letter comes from Alex P. Alex writes, Hi, Neil.

As a cover to cover club member and being a little behind on the chapters, I've recently listened to your bookmark on birding. That was recorded out in Alberta. I'm coming to enjoy these, so hope they're here to stay.

Not only do we get to hear you on the other side of the mic, so to speak, but it's a chance to join you in a different part of your life. This episode was special to me for more than one reason. The Shinrin Yoku discussion on forest bathing.

I read that book, which is called Forest Bathing by Qing Li, after it was talked about in your podcast, and now I am enamored. There's a reason I'm drawn to trail running and mountain biking and just being engulfed in nature. I'm grateful and grew up every summer at a cottage without screens in the mid to late 90s.

Bikes, swimming, cassettes, and reading were my days at McKenzie Lake near Bancroft. Number two, you spoke briefly about Sunset Heights. I had to check it out because I am from Oshawa, nestled just west of Simcoe Street near Somerville.

I knew it sounded familiar. I had been teaching dollars for cents with junior achievement a few years back. I have fond memories of doing that for a couple of years.

Wanted to drop you a line. I have actively removed all social media apps from my phone. I'm trying to stay off my phone and games and TV at night, and I'm spending more time being active or reading.

And the current books I'm reading are Irresistible, the Rise of Addicted Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter. I also read and love that book, that's me. The Happy Camper by Kevin Callan or Callan, C-A-L-L-A-N, don't know that one.

And I recently finished the book Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer. Happy birding, I have the windows open and there are a ton of birds in the ravine behind my house. A beautiful soundtrack for a Friday afternoon from Alex P.

Thank you so much, Alex P, for your letter. Three bookers, I love you. I love your energy.

I love you, I need you. You know, like the community that we create in the podcast is special. We have three clubs for our three bookers.

One is the End of the Podcast Club. You can just stick around to the end of the show and we, you know, play your voicemails, nerd out over like an interesting word etymology and stuff like that. I also have the Cover to Cover Club, which Alex is a member of.

People striving to listen to every single chapter of the show. There will be 333 chapters, so we're 153 in. And there is also the Secret Club.

The way to find out more about the Secret Club is by calling our phone number, which is 1-833-READALOT, R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T. Please do call me. Leave me a formative book.

Leave me a feedback, suggestion, comment, or just say hi or hello. We play a voicemail at the end of every show. If I play your voicemail or if I read your letter, I send you a free book.

I will grab a book from my bookshelf, I will sign it, and I will mail it to you as a way to say thanks for your love and your connection. This keeps me going, honestly. Like, I get stressed.

I get stressed, I get overwhelmed. I think about AI. I read an article, a long piece article about how China and the U.S. need to come to terms on AI agreements, and I start stressing about that and thinking about what could happen about that. And of course, I'm traveling a lot. By the time you listen to this, I will have been in Bucharest, Amsterdam, Nairobi, and Mombasa just in the last few weeks. Sometimes traveling itself creates its own stress, and so listening to these conversations, hearing your phone calls, reading your letters, it really fills me up, and it makes me feel like I'm tethered to a community of people who has consciously and intentionally unsubscribed from the pace, the fast-paced, screen-addled, overwhelming, addictive, algorithmically-derived type of civilization we're living in and chosen instead to live largely offline through our ears, through conversations with groups of friends, with books, with reading lights, with camps, with tents in our backyards, with birds out of our window. That is the kind of life I want to live.

And there is maybe no better person to talk to about that kind of life than Carl Honoré. His last name is H-O-N-O-R-E, French background, but born in Edmonton, Alberta, and now lives over in England. He is an incredibly world-renowned journalist.

He's worked for The Economist. He's worked for Time. He's written for, of course, the National Post over in Canada, but he's written for a whole bunch of publications all around the world.

And he wrote his first book in 2004. It's called 'In Praise of Slowness.' You know, it's against the cult of speed.

It's this deeply well-researched book with incredible history about humans have come to sort of be ruled by the clock. There's an incredible chapter at the beginning, like going through our species history like 2,000 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 500 years ago, how we kind of came to be ruled by the clock, by the dictum of time, and how there has always been resistance amongst human communities against that. One of those resistors is, of course, this show.

We don't release the podcast on the Gregorian calendar. We release it on the full moon calendar because it's a hint at a 35,000-year-old clock rather than a 500-year-old clock, and it's something that connects us with the natural world. I like looking up, seeing the moon getting full, and thinking, oh, yeah, it's time to have a conversation as opposed to I got to look at my clock and kind of speed around.

Like me, Carl is a guy who talks really fast. He's given a couple of TED Talks. He's written a number of bestselling books afterwards, but including 'Under Pressure', which I'm holding up here, which is all about kind of putting the child back in childhood, good overlap with Lenore, and 'Bolder', which is kind of like a manifesto against ageism.

It's a really fascinating book. He wrote that when he realized he was like the oldest guy in his hockey league. I love his work.

I think that we all need to read 'In Praise of Slowness.' If you haven't, I really highly recommend it. It's one of my, I've read it probably three times now.

I have at least three pages of notes on the inside covers. I'm not holding it right now, which I want to be because I've lent it out to somebody, I think my mother-in-law or my mother, and they haven't given it back, so I can't hold it right now, but it is well used, as David Mitchell said in chapter 58, if I was a book, I'd want to be used. Tune in now, and we are going to talk about, oh, tips for making great risotto, because Carl is, of course, also a chef manqué and a polyglot, and if you don't know what those words mean, like I didn't, stay tuned, we're going to explain them.

We should talk about why you should read Orwell, George Orwell to your kids, even when they're in their 20s, how social media has changed traveling over the last few decades, the benefits of learning new languages, how we can work more elements of the slow movement into our lives. Carl's 3 most formative books, one of which, by the way, overlaps with the aforementioned Wagner Mura, interestingly, and, of course, much, much more. Thank you for being here.

Thank you for continuing to focus on reading, on books in the middle of this busy, busy world. It's a pleasure and a joy to be here with you. Let's flip the page into chapter 153, now.

Hi, Carl. Hi, Neil, good to be with you. Good to be with you, too, and you know, you are the father of the slow movement, and it makes a lot of sense that we took five years to book this.

Like, I looked up my first email to you, It was in 2020. Really? Yeah, 2020, where we first, but you know, 2020 was one of those years.

So, you know, like everything kind of went haywire, including the planning of this conversation. But we ended up taking five years to book this chat. So I'm delighted as I've gotten to know you through 'In Praise of Slowness', which I have cherished.

I have notes and notes and notes in there. And I love your more recent books, 'Bolder' on aging and under pressure on putting the child back into childhood. I'm a huge fan of your work.

So thank you so much for coming on the show and being up for this. I appreciate it.

Carl:

Thank you very much. I love the fact that this is perhaps the slowest booking I've ever experienced.

Neil:

Yeah, ditto. And because you were so kind and I knew you were the father of the slow movement. So when I came back to you, like at six months and like kind of June, 2020, after the world had quote unquote ended, you know, I said, do you mind if we kind of revisit this? And you're like, I'm the last person in the world you ever need to kind of rush with.

Yeah.

Carl:

Walking the talk, right? Yeah.

Neil:

Like you could never, if you were, if you sent me like a Calendly link with like all these little half an hour increments, I'd be like, this is, is this the slow guy? So it was very on brand. And we even talked about your three formative books back then.

So I was able to contrast the three formative books you picked in 2025 with the three formative books you actually picked in 2020. Oh. Of which there was some overlap, but not entire overlap.

Carl:

Oh, gosh, that's an interesting intellectual exercise. I would have assumed they were the same, but.

Neil:

Yes, of course. Pray tell. Well, I'll just tell you like, for example, in 2020, you told me that one of your formative books was Tintin.

Cigars of the Pharaoh by Hergé, I believe. H-E-R-G-E. And I'm assuming that shaped you as a kid, but we didn't talk about it in 2025.

Carl:

Well, we so easily could talk about it. I'm actually sitting in a room with a poster on my right of the front cover of, yeah, it's in French, but it's the poster of the Cigars of the Pharaoh.

Neil:

Oh, no way. Okay, because you are a polyglot as you identify yourself on your, because I looked at your Instagram profile and I love all your ways you identify yourself. You are voice of the slow movement, right?

Carl:

That just, yeah, that's just happened.

Neil:

Maybe for our listeners, you could just say how you define the slow movement.

Carl:

Sure, I usually kick off by defining what the slow movement is not, because I think in this fast forward culture, people hear the word slow and they think, well, that's very, very slow. Everything must be in slow motion, but that's really not what this is about. I'm not an extremist or a fundamentalist of slowness.

I love speed, right? Faster is often better, but the slow revolution is about doing things at the right speed. So musicians have a beautiful term.

They talk about the tempo justo, right? The correct tempo for each piece of music, and that kind of gets at what slow is about. It's understanding that sometimes there are moments to go fast, right?

You get into hair mode or roadrunner mode, but other times you've got to slow things down and connect with your inner tortoise. So it's about finding that balance at fast and slow and playing with all different speeds and tempos in between.

Neil:

In a world that is trying to speed us up.

Carl:

The world that's having a lot of success in pushing us to do everything faster and faster. And of course, with the emergence of AI recently, that whole drive to accelerate everything has ratcheted up even more. The pressure is on and the temptation is there to speed every single thing up that we do now, which is not, I would argue, a good thing.

Neil:

No, no, exactly. And we're going to get into this in a lot of depth. Your 2004 massive global bestseller, I think something like 36 languages 'In Praise of Slowness' with the subtitle, challenging the cult of speed is a true formative classic.

I recommend this book highly to everybody listening. You must read it. And everything about it, because I reread it now, five years later, after pitching you the first time, it completely holds up, everything in it.

I mean, some of the organizations, I was going to ask you, I can't find them online anymore. Like the Society for the Deceleration of Time, where'd they go? I couldn't find them.

But there's a lot in there that I'm like, yes, yes, yes. You're quoting Bertrand Russell. You're quoting you know, there's a lot in there.

I'm like, it's a magical piece. So that's the first identifier for you. But then you also say you're a sportsman with a hockey emoji.

Carl:

Oh, yeah.

Neil:

So you're a huge hockey player. And I know, of course, the opening chapter of 'Bolder', you know, your amazing book on aging opens with you realizing that you're the oldest player in the entire hockey league that you play in.

Carl:

Yeah, it was a bit of a, it was a bit of a jolt, a bit of a shock to the system. I knew I was one of the oldest, right? I'm not deluded, but to be the oldest really rocked me to my core.

Yeah, no, I'm a, I love sports. I mean, I'm like you, I'm a Canadian.

Neil:

You're from Edmonton, right?

Carl:

Western Canada, Edmonton, Alberta. And so hockey was just a part of everything, right? And it's, now as I've lived now, I live in London, England now.

That's where I'm speaking to from now on, my home in the old country. You know, hockey for me is still the connection, not only to my childhood, but to my Canadian roots. So it's something I play, I played last night, right?

I play, I still play all the time, right? A couple of times a week, I played tournaments on the weekend. I'm still very much an avid hockey player.

[Neil]

And how old are you now?

Carl:

I am now 57.

[Neil]

57, because of course, one of your big points from your book, 'Bolder', but also from your TED Talk on ageism is that everybody should be open about their age.

I love that. And I ask people their age, and I always tell people my age, and I don't think it's a thing, you know, 45. I'm 45.

Once in a while, I bump into someone and they're like, oh, please, you know, you should never ask. But yeah, I'm interested. I think it's an interesting data point.

And you have that great line in your TED Talk, like, I have a friend that just turned 39 for the fourth year in a row, right? Next quote on your bio is Chef Manque, M-A-N-Q-U-E.

Carl:

Yeah, well, I come from a real food gastronomic family, right? We talked about two things sitting around the table growing up at home. One was language.

Both my parents are great linguists and experts in Latin and Greek, so we were always talking about words. And the second thing was food. Always loved food, the way you make it, the way you share it, the way you consume it, and so on.

So that was always something very high on my agenda. And I guess in a parallel universe somewhere, I am running a little restaurant on the coast in Puglia, you know, in Southern Italy, right? Going down to talk to the fishermen in the morning and taking the fresh catch up to whip up an unusual and quirky plate of deliciousness for the lunch menu sort of thing.

So that's always kind of there in the back of my mind. And even now, you know, though I don't work as a chef, I mean, I cook every day. For me, cooking is yoga, right?

It's my moment of just disconnecting from everything, doing all that kind of being present and in the moment. It's tactile, it's sensory. I'm alive to the moment, and it's just a joy.

It's my little moment of joy every day is to cook. And I love, it's my language of love, too. It's how I think I show love most to people is by cooking for them, making something nice to eat, and then breaking bread around the table together.

That's very much a part of who I am.

[Neil]

Very beautiful. Of course, you have a lot on food in 'In Praise of Slowness.' But manque, M-A-N-Q-U-E, sorry to ask, what does that word mean?

[Carl]

It's like manque, to miss out, the French verb to manque, miss. So if usually in English, if you take the past participle, right, manque, something manque is somebody who kind of could have been this, but, you know, could have been a contender, right? Could have done the thing, right?

[Neil]

You just missed being a chef type thing.

[Carl]

Yeah, or could have. Although, of course, in harmony with my more recent work on reimagining later life and seizing the later years with both hands, I haven't necessarily missed, you know, maybe I've just put off becoming a chef and that my next chapter will involve that little seaside eatery in Puglia.

[Neil]

You got 57 years to go potentially, or more based on how quickly longevity is skyrocketing. We're gonna talk about that. And so interesting, your parents speak Latin and Greek.

Chef Manque, what is your family favorite meal? Like if you were making a meal that you loved, your partner loved, and your, I believe two kids loved, what is that for you right now?

[Carl]

That's a funny question. In some ways, that's the hardest question to ask someone like me because I just love so many different things. But in some ways, it's the easiest question because the answer is risotto, right?

Because it's the first dish that I learned to make. I learned to make it partly through my mom, who's a great cook as well, like my father, but also from an Italian friend who I got to know when I was living abroad. And she sort of shared a couple of tricks.

So for me, it's all caught up with Proustian memories of connection, of being with the people who matter to you most, of feeling your way through a recipe, of tasting. And then of course, slow, risotto is the dish, slow dish par excellence, right? You can't rush a risotto.

The whole point of it is that you stir slowly and gently and you allow it to infuse and to evolve and to find its place in the world. And rushing risotto never ends well. So yeah, I would choose some kind of risotto.

And my most recent favorite on that front is using Namako mushrooms, particularly. Namako? Which I put there on the side and then add on top of a kind of basic mushroom risotto.

And it's, oh, it's ambrosia. Yeah, my mouth is watering just telling you about it.

[Neil]

Mine too. And I started making risotto years ago off of the Chez Piggy Cookbook, which is a famous restaurant based in Kingston, Ontario. It was one of very, very few things that my wife and I had trouble splitting up in our divorce in 2008. We were like, okay, clearly that's your car and clearly that's your stereo.

And we'd been married just two years, you know, we've been together for four. But the Chez Piggy Cookbook, you know, that was a special one. That was your Kramer versus Kramer moment.

That was our Kramer versus Kramer moment. No, I obviously gave her the cookbook and thought to myself, I'll get another one of these. And I never did.

But you said, I learned a couple of tricks about risotto. What are the couple tricks?

[Carl]

Well, the one I remember most was my Italian friend saying that when you, that moment when you add the wine into the kind of the sautéed onions and so on in the rice, before you start adding the stock, you add a bit of wine. And she said, you need to let it absorb, like absorb more than you think, almost to the point of burning.

And I remember the phrase she used, you've got to hear it crying out for more liquid, right? And I just remember that every time I pour a little bit of wine and wait for that moment to start adding the stock, I remember my friend Louisa. And I remember her saying that.

[Neil]

That's great. So we've already learned a risotto cooking tip, which you've got to hear it crying out for more liquid post wine, when you pour that into the arborio and onions and so on. The last word on your kind of Instagram bio, and I like that you've got these quick things, you know, your voice of the slow movement, you are an age disruptor, you are a sportsman, you're an author in 36 languages, you're a chef manqué.

And then the last word is, the emoji is a picture of the globe and the word is polyglot.

[Carl]

Yeah. Yeah, that's very much a part of who I am. I mean, I mentioned earlier.

[Neil]

Which I didn't even, sorry, I'd say I didn't know what it even meant.

[Carl]

Oh, you didn't know what a polyglot was? Oh, right. Well, for anyone in the audience who doesn't know, I guess we should say it's someone who speaks several languages.

[Neil]

Poly meaning multi, multiple, and glot?

[Carl]

I'm going to guess that's from Greek rather than Latin. Yeah.

Okay. You know, the glottal stop, I think that's to do with tongue, right? I'm guessing it's Greek.

See, I leapfrogged Latin and Greek and went straight to the Romance languages. My parents, earlier generation, burrowed deep into the foundations, you know, the Latin and the Greek. Then they moved on to learning, you know, Latin, French, Italian, all that kind of stuff.

I went straight to the low-hanging fruit, as it were. But yeah, so yeah, so I guess if you're asking what polyglot means to me, it means joy. I just love words.

I love them, how they move around in the world, how they shape, how we feel, how they change things, how they sound, how they look on the page. And the more words you have, right, across different languages, the more kaleidoscopically happy your life is, from my point of view. I just find that you can, I just love languages, right?

It's something I've picked them up easily. It's something that I've got a natural, you know, ability to do. I mean, I taught myself both Portuguese and Spanish, and I never went to a class of either.

And I stand up on stages and give talks in front of thousands of people with no notes in both those languages, right? So it's something that, it's there, right? It's something in the veins, and I can see it in my parents.

And it's a big part of the work I do, because I mean, I may at some point talk about the fact that I was a foreign correspondent, right, for 11 years. So I've always had a very global view of what's going on. And I've always had an interest in having a finger in different pies, a foot in different terrains.

So I'm, you know, Canadian, I live in London, I was based in South America a long time, and so on. And I just feel like languages is the perfect passport, isn't it? There's something, and it's weird.

The world has changed. I see it with my son now. You know, so many people everywhere speak English.

They didn't do that 30 years ago when I was learning languages, right? So I could tip up in a remote village in Brazil, or even Buenos Aires in Argentina, and people wouldn't speak back to me in English, right? They would just have to wait for me to get my Spanish out or my Portuguese out, because that's the only language we had in common.

Now everybody, thanks to social media and globalization, speaks English or wants to speak it. So I remember when my son went off to do a French exchange in Strasbourg. He found it so hard to get anyone to speak French to him, because they all spoke fluent English already, right?

And they wanted to practice their English even more. So it's harder now, I think, to do what I did, which is to be a kind of autodidact with languages and just go out there, and you can still do it. I'm not saying you can't, but it is harder just because English has won the race, right?

It's the global lingua franca, and that's a double-edged sword in some ways for anglophones like us. It's a gift. It's a gimme, but on the other side, I think it takes away the room and the space for learning other languages, which is an immensely enriching experience, right?

It changes, it rotates the world. You see things differently. I'm a slightly different person in each language I speak, and that just pushes you into different corners of your character.

It allows you to see the world through different lenses. It just brings so many more layers and so much more texture and so much more color to the way you move through the world. And I think languages, it's just a kind of poetry that we have at our fingertips.

And I think it's a tough one when I see English speakers just leaning on English. I feel like you're missing out, but I think that's kind of why it's fun.

[Neil]

Of course you are, because you can't articulate what you don't know. And every language is just one tiny little shard of the vastness of communication. And we have a collection of books upstairs, Leslie and I, that are all about, Leslie's my wife, I've been married to her 11 years.

Leslie and I have a collection of books that are all about this word in Finnish, or Swahili means this in English, and it's, of course, something you've never thought of before.

[Carl]

Yes, that's true.

[Neil]

Like when she sees someone trip on the sidewalk, my wife always says pole.

She says pole because her sister spent six years in East Africa and learned and mastered Swahili, and pole means I'm sorry for you. And it's a very simple, and that's a rough English definition of it, but like pole, we don't have that word in English. We don't have, I'm sorry for you.

When someone trips, falls, like has a coughing attack, we're just like, whoa, that's a big coughing attack you just had. But we don't have pole as an example, as one of infinite examples.

[Carl]

So one that reminds me of one that I love, I mean, Japanese is great for this as well, right? You know, it's got words that just explain whole phenomena, social phenomena that we don't have, or we need a sentence to, and there's one that I love, which is it describes that sensation, that feeling you have when you come out of a hairdresser looking worse than you did when you went in.

[Carl]

I get it.

[Neil]

There's a Japanese word for that?

[Carl]

I often have recourse to the, I can't remember what the word is at the moment off the top of my head.

[Neil]

But what a very specific example.

[Carl]

What a world to live in, right? Where there's a language that has a word that just says, that encapsulates that feeling that we've all felt at some point, right?

[Neil]

And it also just makes me think of people like David Foster Wallace and these sort of master linguists that use words, you know, every, if you're reading somebody where every page you don't know a word, I used to, I remember an old librarian said to me, you're reading the right book because you're learning a lot of new words. And I remember like, you know, stumbling across the word in a book and it was petrichor, P-E-T-R-I-C-H-O-R. I was like, what's petrichor?

I look it up in the dictionary. Petrichor is this, and I had actually ironically written about this on 1000awesomethings.com. It is the smell of rain on a hot sidewalk.

[Carl]

Oh, isn't that beautiful?

[Neil]

That is petrichor. That is the actual definition of it. So, in case you smell rain on a hot sidewalk, it's petrichor, P-E-T-R-I-C-H-O-R.

I had to learn and master that one. And I like that you are a big word nerd because so are we on Three Books. At the end of every show, we have the end of the podcast club.

I play people's voice, emails, letters, and we always close off by defining the etymological history of a word that my guests use that I didn't understand while I was talking to them. So, that is how we close every show. We've done that for 150 chapters or so.

So, that's a great little scenescape because now we know a little bit more about Carl. We know he's Canadian. We know he's living in England.

We know he was a foreign press journalist. We know he's 57. We know he has a couple of kids.

We know he plays hockey still, and he's probably gonna play for decades more. His books have been translated into 36 languages. He's given two very viral TED Talks.

He is a polyglot. He's a chef manqué. That is a wonderful, I love getting to know you this way because you've trimmed it into like five words on your Instagram bio, and you let us expand them into like 10 minutes of getting to know you. Thank you for that.

[Carl]

That was fun to do, actually. Yeah, it's been a long time.

You know, you go to your profiles on social media, and you just glaze over them. You don't think about what, but then you realize that other people are reading them, and they're trying to unpack them and make sense. So, yeah, it's interesting.

I guess it was quite a while ago that I put together that very concise, succinct list. But yeah, there's all kinds of stories behind every line. Yeah, it's fun to revisit that.

[Neil]

Absolutely. And we are big believers in the slow movement here because this is a slow podcast. I mean, if you're listening to this, you know, we're 15, 20 minutes in now.

We're talking to Carl. We haven't even broached his three most formative books, which we're gonna get into now. For each book, I'm gonna describe them as if the listener is holding the book in a bookstore, and then I'm gonna ask you to tell us about your relationship with each one.

So we are gonna start and kick us off with a book called Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, a book that I have in front of me, and I, oh, there it is. I have the Mass Market Paperback Edition. Is that the one you have as well?

[Carl]

That's the one that looks very similar to mine, yeah.

[Neil]

Okay, it's based on the play that debuted in 1955. Of course, the book is a play, so it's one of those books that you just open it, and you, well, what happened in 1925? Well, it's based on the play, who was a Tennessee teacher, was tried for teaching evolution.

The accused was a slight frightened man who deliberately broken the law. His trial was a Roman circus, the chief gladiators being the two great legal giants of the century. Locked in mortal combat, they bellowed and roared imprecations and abuse, while the spectator sat uneasily in the sweltering heat with murder in their hearts, barely restraining themselves with America's freedom at stake.

Okay, the cover of this book is this really interesting, like, you know, if sepia is like red-toned black and white, this book cover is blue-toned black and white, with a picture of a jury box. Most figures are seated in the box, appear to be white men in suits, and a guy leans on the edge of the jury box in that classic legal thriller pose of a lawyer speaking to the jury. Very top has a red bar that says in white font, the powerful courtroom drama in which two men wage the legal war of the century, and below that is the title in a giant all-cap serif font, Inherit the Wind.

Jerome Lawrence was an American playwright from 1915 to 2004, and Robert Edwin Lee, another American playwright who lived from 1918 to 1994. Dewey Decimal Heads, you can file this one under 812.54 for literature slash 20th century American drama in English. Carl, please tell us about your relationship with Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee.

[Carl]

Well, this is a book that I read in my middle teens. I think I was probably about 16 years old, and it was at that, I'd say, unnerving time when you're coming out of childhood and beginning to think about where you're gonna stand in the world. How are you gonna make a mark?

What matters to you? All those big questions. And I think it's at that time, I think most of us throw our minds back, that we also begin to grapple with big questions with a capital B, right?

Sort of epic questions about right and wrong, truth and lies. Well, in this case, evolution versus creationism and so on. And so you think back to those long nights in college dorms, right?

Where you set the worlds to rights, and that tends to be something that you start doing around the age of 16, and maybe most of us stop around the age of 21 or 22, right? Some of us carry on, but it's that kind of particular, particularly fertile and fervent moment in the evolution of a human being, I think, that kind of late teens into early 20s. And this book landed on me in that point when I was grappling myself with how to turn my own love of language, because I knew I had that love of language already.

I could already feel that I had a strong yen to save the world. And I still think of myself now, all the work I'm doing has a save the world syndrome or complex aspect to it, right? I'm trying to save myself through my writing and try to help others live better lives and help the world be a better place.

So I had that impulse. I could feel it in my veins back at age of 16. And my first thought, I mean, the thought of being a journalist at that point, I thought I will do this through the law.

I will go into courtrooms, a bit like the person you've described, like a Perry Mason figure, and I will make the world bend in a better direction with words, right? With the force of my arguments and so on. And so I was fascinated by the idea of this clash of both not just ideas, but also characters behind it, the language they use, because it's one of the beautiful things, I reread the play in preparation for our conversation was just how smooth and clean the prose was and how, I don't know, it was just, I actually felt, reading it again now as a 57-year-old, 40 years later, I thought, God, maybe I should put lawyer monkey on my side. You know, I thought maybe I could have done that and it could have been, because now I've spent 40 years now trying to change the world by writing about it.

You could argue that I've had an impact and that my works left an imprint, but maybe I could have done it, or maybe in the future. So I guess it was a book that really, I remember racing through it at 60. I read it in one sitting.

How did the book come to you? You know, I was trying to remember that. I think that my mother suggested it, recommended it to me.

I don't know why she would. I mean, my mom's an avid reader and a wide reader and pushed a lot of books towards me at different stages of my adolescence. And so I'm guessing it came through her.

So yeah, that would just be a guess.

[Neil]

Well, it's an amazing book and I highly recommend it to people. It's a wonderful read. And, you know, Wagner Mura, who is an incredible filmmaker and now new director, also picked it for three books.

So it inspires, you know, many people. It's gonna get the, what we call the asterisk treatment on our show. We're gonna mark it as two people have picked it.

And I remember reading The Fountainhead, you know, around age 16, and having like a sharp hit to the brain, because at that age, as you said, you know, you're primed for, you're primed and ready and thirsty for conversations about morals and justice and how to live. And your mom and dad, sounds like they were both polyglots, if I'm using the word right. Lots of languages, lots of books.

I know you are the same. And I know you've raised two readers as kids, I believe. Yes.

[Carl]

Both very avid readers, yeah.

[Neil]

And you're a big proponent of discussing how to raise kids well and better now. So what, do you think about, did you think about, as your kids are passing through these formative years, what and how to insert into their reading life?

[Carl]

Yeah. 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. 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, 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 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 it's just a kind of magic. We've occasionally read bits of plays together, 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 in 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]

And it sounds like don't stop reading with them. Like to be reading out loud to your 21 year old, like I just finished the Fellowship of the Ring, reading it out loud to my 10 year old. I'm embarrassed to tell you, it took me eight months.

Like it was like a four point font, the 400 page version. Like I was like, some days we would get a page done and it was like 10 minutes. Like it was, I was stumbling over words and I'm like, who's that Glorian son of Florian again?

Like I'm like, you know, flipping back pages. Multiple times he yelled at me.

And he's like, I have no idea what's going on right now. You know, but yes, having persevered through the eight months of reading him, Lord of the Rings, part one, at his age, like 10. I mean, I'm ready for a Garfield, I'll tell you that.

But I'll also say it was a glorious time together, right? And something that you can't take away from us. Like Animal Farm with your daughter at 21, that's spectacular.

That's very inspiring to me.

[Carl]

He will remember and cherish that for the rest of his life. You know, you can't, that's, you've made, you've made a deep, etched memory there that will bind you together forever, right? And sometimes it's a little different depending on the text you choose.

I remember I went through a phase of trying to, when the kids were younger, reading some 19th century stuff, you know, like Arthur Conan Doyle and it was just too turgid. It was just too hard to read. So we gave up and we moved into the 20th century.

[Neil]

Well, that kind of gets me to the, a little bit more on specifics here. You know, you're a big reader. That's the nature of our show.

This is the only podcast in the world buying for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. Like that's our MO. And what books would you sprinkle into anyone who either is a teenager or has teenage children?

So I've got Inherit the Wind on that list already because you read that when you were 16, it was given to you by your mom. And I'm assuming that that's one that you would share with your kids. I have Animal Farm and I have Steinbeck of Mice and Men for your 21 year old.

What else would you suggest teens read these days? And this is also partly to seduce them into reading. You know, like I, for you to have two kids in their 20s that are big avid readers, hurrah.

You know, you've like, you've smashed through the TikTok saran wrap that most of us have around our head. So good job. And give us a few titles if you don't mind, like teenager books that you suggest.

[Carl]

I mean, I think we talked about Animal Farm, but I think anything by Orwell, because Orwell is such a beautiful, clear, crisp pro stylist. So it's an easy thing.

[Neil]

And the books aren't too long, like 1984.

[Carl]

If you've got a teenager who's not read books or is just accustomed to consuming online content, Orwell is a good gateway drug to other forms of literary fiction, I think, because he is very accessible and he's such a tight writer. So I think anything by Orwell. Yeah, I mean, Steinbeck is wonderful.

I mean, Hemingway as well. I think Anne Tyler, one of my favorite authors is Anne Tyler. She writes very simple but poetic tales about ordinary life in suburban Baltimore.

But they're luminous, you know, they take us to places that can be dark and she grapples in a very light way with big, big, heavy ideas. I think she's a genius. And I think any teenager would find her fun.

[Neil]

Back in chapter 105, Nancy, the librarian, gave us 'Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant' by Anne Tyler, which I just passed to my mom this past weekend and said, you have to read this. It's so good. Yeah, she is just- It's like Jonathan Franzen, but easier.

Like good easier.

[Carl]

Yeah.

[Neil]

You know what I mean? Yeah, shorter, definitely. Shorter, but not as big words and so on, you know?

Not to say he is hard to read, he's not, but like it's intimidating when someone hands you 'The Corrections', right? Whereas a little mass market paperback doesn't look as amazing as it really is. So that's great.

Hemingway, too, yeah, Old Man and the Sea is one of my kind of like 100 page or less books, right? And then the other book I thought I'd just throw into this little part of the conversation was at that age that I read, was Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse.

[Carl]

Yeah. I'll tell you what, you know, just this could work as a segue. I would recommend anything by Graham Greene as well.

Because Graham Greene, I think Graham Greene's wonderful for the same reason, he writes very clear, crisp prose, but he's also grappling with very big ideas with a light touch in the same way as Orwell is and Tyler does. And I read a ton of Graham Greene in my teens and late teens. And I think it was very formative, a lot of it for me.

[Neil]

So we may as well go with this now. I had some more questions on Inherit the Wind, but I'm gonna pocket those for the moment. And one of them was around your particular writing style, writing routines, you're an incredible writer.

And the way you write is kind of like what you just did. Like you're kind of always seguing between lots of things at once, but it never feels unclear. It's very well carried.

And I found, like when I read 'In Praise of Slowness', I felt like I read a thousand books because every paragraph has a quote from this guy, a piece of this person's poetry, this stat from this study in Norway, that was like per paragraph. Like you just roll things in. So I wanna know at some point in this conversation, how you, Carl Honoré, the award-winning global journalist and best-selling author, how you write.

But I can put that in any of these three books. So we have that in our head, it's coming. But since you segued so well, let us now go to your second formative book, which of course I've completely dropped.

Oh, here it is. It is The Quiet American by Graham Green, G-R-E-E-N-E, the extra E at the end, don't forget. Published in 1955, again, we're gonna say, by William Heinemann in London.

There are many covers. So I've got a few different ones. I'm not gonna reference my cover though, because I think I have like one of these new ones, but the original cover that I found online appears to be a whole bunch of horizontal green lines that look like a woven mat.

The top says Graham Green in this sort of red retro 50s fast food restaurant type of serif font. The bottom says The Quiet American in a black all-cap serif. There's a red dash going from left to right in the middle of the cover, and it's thicker and kind of vanishes into thinness before it reaches the right side.

Graham Green lived from 1904 to 1991. He was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading novelists of the 20th century. He wrote over 25 novels, several books of poetry and short stories, and contributed to many anthologies in a 75-year career.

So, like, what is this book about, 'The Quiet American'? It's kind of like some kind of 50s literary spy novel. I mean, we're in Vietnam.

It's the 1950s. British journalist Thomas Fowler is covering the insurgency against the French colonial rule, but it's not just a political tangle that's kept him tethered to the country. There's also his lover, Phuong, P-H-U-O-N-G, a young Vietnamese woman who clings to Fowler for protection.

Then along comes Alden Pyle, P-Y-L-E, an idealistic American working in service of the CIA. Devotedly, disastrously patriotic, he believed neither communism nor colonialism is what's best for Southeast Asia, but rather the third force of American democracy, by any means necessary. His ideas of conquest include Phuong herself, to whom he promises a sweet life in the States.

But as Pyle's blind moral conviction wreaks havoc upon innocent lives, it's ultimately his romantic compulsions that play a role in his undoing. Dewey Desmonds, you can follow us on 823.912 for literature in English in the first half of the 20th century. Carl, please tell us about your relationship with 'The Quiet American' by Graham Greene.

[Carl]

Well, for me, 'The Quiet American' follows on pretty clearly from 'Inherit the Wind'. So if you think of Inherit the Wind was me beginning to reckon with big ideas and wondering how I could go out and engage with them in the world through the law, Graham Greene's 'The Quiet American' was the moment where I realized that I was gonna do it through journalism, through writing. So it landed in my lap probably around the age of 20, maybe 21, 20.

And it was around the time when I took a year out from university between second and third year to do a, do you know the program Canada World Youth?

[Neil]

No, I don't.

[Carl]

Right, it's a program- Yeah, that's right. Got my inner Canada World Youth.

What they do is they pair up groups of young Canadians with young people from developing countries. And you spend, you create a group together, you spend sort of a few months in somewhere in Canada, and then you spend a few months in another country. And I actually wanted to go into Africa.

I applied for three African countries and they gave me Brazil, which completely changed my life because I ended up learning Portuguese and becoming a foreign correspondent in South America. But at the time I was terribly disappointed. Went to Brazil, did the whole program.

And around this time, the book landed in my hands. And I was beginning to lose faith in the law. And I'd studied jurisprudence at university.

I began to feel like the law just was going to be a straitjacket. It wasn't going to be the right way for me to move through the world. And so I went out to Brazil around the time I was reading 'The Quiet American' and began to see how, you know, Graham Greene was engaging with these big ideas on the page rather than in the courtroom.

And then I went out to Brazil, then I began to think, I thought I need to write about this this injustice and these horrors that are out there in the world. I need to write about them to bring them to light so something can be done. And so it all came together at once.

And I came away from that counter-world youth program knowing that I was going to become a journalist.

[Neil]

I'm still curious about what told Carl at age 20, 21, I gotta get out of this place. Like, that is amazing that you did that.

[Carl]

Out of Edmonton, do you mean?

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Carl]

Well, I had already, I was already in, I had gone to Edinburgh University.

So I had left at the age of 17, Edmonton.

[Neil]

Okay, so you were in Scotland when you went to Brazil.

[Carl]

Well, it's a little bit more complicated than that because I came back and did one year in Canada and then I did my final two years in Edinburgh.

So I did like one year in Edinburgh, one year in Canada, one year in Brazil, and then two years in Edinburgh. So it was very unorthodox.

[Neil]

What gave you the global bug at first?

[Carl]

I don't, I guess my parents are very cosmopolitan. I mean, they're both first generation immigrants. I think the word, sorry.

[Neil]

From where?

[Carl]

Oh, my mother is from Scotland. She's from Edinburgh.

And my father is from Mauritius. And they actually met at Edinburgh University.

[Neil]

Oh, wow.

[Carl]

So we had a natural connection there. And as it happens, all those years later, I met the woman who is now my wife also at Edinburgh University. So we've got a bit of a family tradition going on.

[Neil]

Oh my gosh. Pitching the reception up in the clock tower or something.

[Carl]

Yes, that's true.

[Neil]

Okay, that's amazing. What an incredible global kind of connection, but also something inside you, that has sent you around the world as you've done it. And your reportage, if that's the right way to pronounce that word, is always, has always been very global.

When I watch your TED Talks again, when I listen to another podcast, it's like, you just seem like a student of the world. Like you are referencing studies and people and experiences in every country all the time. Yeah.

That's so unusual now, because you've already talked about the homogenization of culture, kind of with English and social media and like, something like, what is it? Two thirds of Americans don't have a passport, I believe, or it's some shockingly high number, right? So, yeah, incredible that you've done that.

I think the world- I hope to do the same with my kids, but I don't know how.

[Carl]

I think the reason, I think curiosity has always been my kind of defining trait. I remember in junior high, my phys ed teacher, I was always asking questions, right? Just always, I have a question, or I guess that's part one reason you end up as a journalist and then my books are very journalistic in their spirit and then always inquiring and asking questions and show me the data, show me the stories, tell me the, and I remember my phys ed teacher in junior high used to call me Curious Carl.

And I think that's kind of, I still am Curious Carl, right? I still want to know. And if you're enclosed in one culture, you're gonna run out of things to be curious about.

And that's, I guess, the joy of treating the world as an endless smorgasbord, right? Just go up there and pick a little bit here and a bit more from that dish and go back to my table, finish, and then go back and pick some more, you know, that kind of thing. And there's another food metaphor, right, coming out.

[Carl]

So, yeah.

[Neil]

I love that sort of mental image of curiosity as this sort of like, you know, icebreaker edge of the ship as a sort of a string that kind of tugs you along. Back in chapter 141 of this podcast, we interviewed James Dot, who is, I call him the largest bookseller in the world because of course he runs Barnes & Noble and Waterstones, but also the nine Dot bookstores. And when he told us about how he designs those stores, he says the reason his bookstores, his nine independent Dot bookstores, which I'm sure you're very familiar with, are organized by place.

And he organizes them by place because his idea is that, you know, if you're interested in Mexico, well, you owe it to yourself to say what literature is from Mexico, what poetry is from Mexico, what travel books are from Mexico, what cookbooks are from Mexico. And then you go down, he's really oriented the stores around curiosity, but before that is a global perspective. Like you choose your where and then you choose your what in his stores.

[Carl]

I feel like curiosity is even more urgently needed today because it feels to me like people have retreated into echo chambers and silos and little patches where they don't need to be challenged or questioned. They're just, they have their own nostrums, their own truths, and they stay there, they hunker down. And that has led us to a pretty dark place, I think at the moment.

And one way to puncture that is curiosity, is asking questions, is asking why that person in the other silo thinks that way and actually listening to the answer. That seems to me, that's our secret weapon. That's our superpower now.

We need to mobilize it like never before, curiosity, I think.

[Neil]

Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree. I partly wonder, as I've thought about this, if the retreat into factions and echo chambers and tribal tribalists may or may not be partly due to the fact that so much of what we assume to be constant is now proven to be no longer so.

So obviously when there was three news channels, there was an objective set of news. Of course, I'm using air quotes because it wasn't objective. We just didn't have the 12 other perspectives that YouTube channels and social media and singular journalists on Substack are providing now, which then destabilizes what reality looks like, which then makes you, from a safety perspective, say, oh my gosh, I can't trust X, Y, or Z as input.

So I have to, you feel more secure in a tribal class because of course, reality is much more destabilized. And it always has been. Chapter 75 of George Saunders, he said, we really do live in blurs of inchoate motion, but we assemble the truths around ourselves to make it seem like, okay, there's ground beneath our feet, it's flat, it doesn't move.

I can put clothes on, I can walk. We create order amidst chaos. It's just lately, the chaos has been revealed to be under the rug all along, a little more than usual, partly because of the internet and the flattening of information.

[Carl]

Yeah, I think there's a lot to that. I mean, I've been kicking around the idea of, I don't know if it'll ever happen, of writing a book about the fact that we can't really know ever anything. I mean, that feels to me so much the hallmark of this moment is that just as soon as you think you've got a fact, it turns out that fact is slippery and wobbly, and it's not as solid as you thought it was.

[Neil]

Yeah, there's a lot to go into here. Few places to kind of go with Graham Greene and The Quiet American. I mean, we could just pause on the title for a second.

Quiet, right? We've kind of talked a little bit of American for a second. Quiet.

On the Slow Baja podcast, which is a great conversation that you had. I don't know the oath's name, but you guys had this great vibe. You had this quote I wrote down.

We used to walk around with nothing but our own thoughts, rattling around our head. Of course, it made me think of that old Blaise Pascal quote, all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. So my question is sort of what and how are the benefits of embracing quiet?

Like to why should we do this and to how should we do this?

[Carl]

Well, the why I think is pretty clear. And that is that we need that headspace, right? We need that bandwidth.

We need quiet in order to go deep, right? I think this is, there's, I was gonna pull on a thread that'll be in the next book. So I'll put that to one side.

I think that this is something that exists, this need for moments of serenity, of stillness, of tranquility, of looking inside and connecting with yourself, that encounter with your own self. That is at the heart of, Socrates talked about the examined life. And I think that's what this boils down to is that taking the time to look inside.

This is a society that's so much geared towards external, towards broadcasting, towards performing outward. And in that, there's nothing wrong with some of that being part of your life. But if that's all you have, you're skimming through life instead of actually living it.

You need to have the other side of the equation, which is moments of quiet, stillness, silence, where you go inward, right? And you start to grapple with who you are. You ask those big questions.

What's my purpose here? Am I living the right life for me? All those questions that allow you to design a life worthy of the name, those things only happen when you stop the shouting and the broadcasting and the showing off, and you go quiet.

Because when you go quiet, you go inside. And when you go inside, you reckon. You reckon with the big stuff.

And that's, I think, explains why we live in this world where we're more connected than ever before, where there's lots of noise and sound and fury, but we feel very uneasy, right? Lonely, disconnected, like we're not really living the right lives for ourselves. And I think the big part of that is we just don't create space and moments for silence.

[Neil]

How do you do that in practice in your life? What are some habits we can pick up on our own?

[Carl]

One of my best moments for silence goes together with another slow practice, if you like, which is walking, right? I mean, I do a lot of sports, so I'm running or skating or whatever a lot. But I also walk, like just go on long walks without a podcast, without music.

Nothing with me, yeah.

[Neil]

Yeah, nothing with you, no pen and paper?

[Carl]

Sorry?

[Neil]

No pen and paper?

[Carl]

I do sometimes take a pen and paper, because of course, because of the silence, really good ideas pop to the surface, like fish, you know, breaking through the top of a lake.

So yes, I do sometimes. But I feel like if I take pen and paper, then I've, in an unspoken way, I'm setting a goal, or I'm hoping to get something out of it. And I think a part of that walking in that silence is that it's for its own sake.

I think, I mean, there's all great people getting into meditation and mindfulness and stuff, but I don't know. I think that if you're going in there trying to be a better hedge fund manager, that's okay, that's fine. But should that really be the main driving force for taking up something like meditation?

I'm in two minds about that. I think we want to be coming to these slow practices for their own sake, and then getting all the benefits that go along with it, right, better clarity, better decision-making, more productivity, which is all great for the workplace, right? But I think you kind of want to, in my mind anyway, I like to flip it around and think I'm doing this for its own sake.

And if I have a great idea at the time, let's just hope I remember it when I get home, right?

[Neil]

Yeah, that's powerful. I put a video up on YouTube eons ago, kind of the last internet millennia, but it was like the life-changing magic of the five-hour walk. And I said that all I take with me on my walks are a pocket of cue cards and a pen so that I can write down ideas.

My two big inspirations, I wasn't yet familiar with your stuff, but my two big inspirations were an incredible essay in the back of the paperback copy of The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb called Why I Do All This Walking, and an incredible essay, which you've probably read because you quote Thoreau a lot, called Walking by Henry David Thoreau. And more recently, I've purchased a device which you might be interested in, but it's called a Rabbit R1. It's like a $200 piece of technology that allows you to take parts of your phone with you without taking your phone with you.

So I am just kind of getting it up and working, but I could use that device to take a podcast with me, but like nothing but the podcast. Do you know what I'm saying? So hilarious.

This is like the old Walkman now or whatever, right? It's like I'm going back to, right? But it's because it's tethered to my phone, it can pull stuff off of my phone without me taking my phone.

So I'm not getting texts, I'm not getting alerts, I'm not getting, it doesn't have a screen. It doesn't have a screen, it's like a square with dials, you know what I mean? And so, yeah, that's a device that I'm exploring to see if I can enable more phone-free walking, you know what I mean?

Because otherwise I'm like, well, I wanna take, I wanna go walking without my phone, but of course my phone is my eBird app, which I use to track the birds I see, and it's also the grocery list that my wife added me to the iPhone note on, right? So do I have to write up the grocery list on paper and then leave the phone? So I'm always trying to leave the phone, but I'm less successful than I used to be at doing it.

[Carl]

Yeah, it is, I mean, goodness me, whole libraries are gonna end up being written about our tortured relationship with phones. And I don't think anyone has a fixed relationship because we're all in this dance, right? Push, pull, it's like a tango, right?

It's got an undercurrent of violence and darkness. And I'm the same myself, you know, I'm a kind of avatar of slow, but I'm constantly having to redraw the lines and rethink how I use my phone and when I use it and where I have it in the house and when I have it out and all that kind of stuff. I mean, certain things remain constant for me.

My notifications, for instance, are permanently switched off, right? I just, that's non-negotiable, they're just off. So I never get interrupted by my phone, which is, that's not on the table, that always happens.

But there's other stuff like, yeah, when to use a podcast, when to, I've recently, I used to have things like LinkedIn and Facebook on my phone as well to look at sometimes. I've removed them recently. Great.

[Neil]

[Carl]

So I now have to see them on my laptop, right? I cannot look at them on the phone, which actually, you know, it turns out, I thought, you know, why didn't I do that before anyway? So it's a constant negotiation, I think, with these gadgets, these weapons of mass distraction that we're all carrying around.

[Neil]

Oh yeah, that's a great way to put it. We're still looking for the tempo giusto. Yes.

With our relationship with the phone. Now, I want to also talk about leisure here, because in chapter nine of In Praise of Slowness, you have a chapter called, literally, leisure, the importance of being at rest. And you have a number of quotes in there that are just so powerful.

I've underlined them, highlighted them. I want to share them with our listeners. And then I want to ask what your current thinking is on these, now that we're 20 years out from the publication of In Praise of Slowness.

So you introduced the concept on page 217 by saying this great, great, quick history I didn't know. During the early part of the Industrial Revolution, the masses worked too hard or were too poor to make the most of what free time they had. But as incomes rose and working hours fell, a leisure culture began to slowly emerge.

Leisure, dot, dot, dot, became formalized, dot, dot, dot. Football, rugby, hockey, and baseball turned into spectator sports. Cities built parks for the public to stroll and picnic in.

The middle classes joined tennis and golf clubs and flocked to the new museums, theaters, and music halls. Better printing presses coupled with rising literacy fueled an explosion in reading. You even quote Bertrand Russell, who says, to be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.

And there's more quotes, but I'll pause it there. Let's hang on that Bertrand Russell quote for a second. To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.

What is your current medical assessment of the state of leisure in our world today?

[Carl]

I think, well, I think that Bertrand Russell quote is as apposite today as maybe even more than it was before. Because what's always happened with leisure, and you mentioned it there in a couple of examples, how, you know, sports people played at home became spectator sports. So they got packaged, they got turned into a product or a service that was sold back to us.

And I think that has been a constant feature of our relationship, our evolving relationship with leisure is that there is the kind of leisure that Bertrand Russell is talking about, which is simple and pure, right? It's kind of what I was talking about before about going for the walk without thinking, I'm gonna get a really productive idea out of this walk. Right?

You just go for the walk for its own sake and then other stuff will come out of it, right? That's, I think, very much a Russell view of leisure. And one that I lean towards myself.

Now, we've seen this all the way through, you know, modern history is, leisure has got more and more commoditized, but that has really ratcheted up since I first wrote in Praise and Slow, which I've obviously I've done prefaces, you know, to update it. And whenever I've done that, I tend to mention, you know, social media, right? And what's happened with the internet, because that's taken things to a whole new level where so much of what would have been leisure now is packaged up as a product that not only is being sold to us, but that we're selling to other people, right?

So we're turning our own leisure into a performance, right? And there's a, we haven't come up to my third book yet, Milan Kundera's Slowness, but one of the, I was really struck by this. Is it okay if I jump ahead to the end?

Yeah. I was really, when I first read that 20 years ago, it was all about the kind of what he was, his thoughts on pace, slowness, the relationship between speed and forgetting and all that stuff that really grabbed me. But there's another element that is, I read at the time and didn't kind of clock, but didn't, but makes so much more sense now, which is the way he talks about the figure of the dancer, that the modern man or modern human being is a dancer.

And what he means by that is a performer. And that the camera, the presence of the camera changed modern man. And he's writing about this in the 1990s.

Fast forward 25 years, cameras on us every second of the day. You and I are talking on a camera, right? Even before we got on here now, I'm not giving away too much.

We talked about whether we would use some of the video later on, right? So everybody now is a dancer, right? And I think when you're a dancer in that Kundera sense, you've moved away from the Russell view of leisure because everything is now filtered through the lens of eyeballs, clicks, followers, monetizing, commodification, all that stuff that erodes the very soul of leisure.

And I think that's where we are now. And that's much worse, I think, than it was when In Praise of Slow first came out.

[Neil]

And almost leisure has become a more granular, more fractal version of itself where we're using, I don't mean to say that they're direct proxies, but we're using the word attention a lot more now. And the, of course, we have a limited attention. It's very finite.

Everybody knows this. We also know that, therefore, he who commands the attention the most, in some ways, that's where you gain the most. Like, if you can, I once sat on a, this was 10 years ago.

So it's, even it is outdated, but I sat beside the manager of one of the top three biggest rappers in the world. I'll not say his name, but everyone knows this person. And I sat beside the manager and it was a business class flight and it was late at night and we're both sitting at the front and we're drinking white wines.

And by the end of the conversation, this guy's fully blinged out, like the jewels, the diamonds. And I was like, so how do you keep him in the news all the time? He's like, oh no, that's very strategic.

Every three months we manufacture a controversial story that we don't have the answer to on purpose, whether it's a fight at a nightclub, whether it's is he not dating this other celebrity, because that's what keeps him in the news. And that's actually what, of course, creates the album sales and the singles. So it's like the game he was already playing a decade ago, this is the manager of one of the world's biggest rappers was, how do we keep him in the news?

Well, there's a lot of people playing that game right now. You know, how do we stay in the news? If there's fires over here, well, I got to say something controversial about them over there.

If there's 20 famous people all speaking at this thing, well, I have to do the most outlandish kind of physical signifier. So I get the headlines of it because that's what we're competing for. Because the tension is limited and then you won't even keep track of the fact that, you know, the other guys were even there.

And it's a recipe for disaster because it's exactly what David Foster Wallace predicted in 1996, right, with Infinite Jest. Like, it is the total entertainment forever of our minds and we can't, it's not like it just starts one day. Like, we're in it now.

[Carl]

Yeah, we are in it. I mean, Donald Trump, I think, is the apotheosis of this phenomenon, is he not, right?

I mean, he's a creature of reality TV. And what is the dynamic of reality TV? It's to keep your attention.

And it does that by manufacturing moments of outrage, little scandals. And so you look at the way he runs the presidency, it seems very much like that, where he's just, every day there has to be some new thing that's going to land like a grenade and it's going to draw all the attention, suck all the oxygen out of the room and draw all the eyeballs towards him. Just him, I was going to say his team, but mainly him.

And I think this is where we are. Maybe he's the end point of this moment in human history, or maybe this is just going to get worse. I don't know.

I feel like it's not good for us. I feel that we know it. It's eroding so many things that make us happy and healthy, that we're finding it really hard to break out of it.

It feels like a straitjacket, a paradox.

[Neil]

Because in a way, the news has never been more interesting. I've been reading the news my whole life and I never remember the seventh headline being as scintillating as it is today. You know what I mean?

I've never remembered being that gripping. But of course, that's because it's pulling me away from going on walks and reading books and having long talks with my wife, because it's endlessly gripping. And so the drastic actions people like you and I and many others are taking to actually forcibly delete apps, actually go from a smartphone to a dumb phone, actually, I mean, I walked into this downtown bar in Toronto is candlelit, and at the bars is a beautiful young woman reading a big thick book by the candlelight.

And I said to her, oh my gosh, that's so beautiful. Like, it's just such a beautiful image. You're sitting and reading a big book.

And she looked at me, she said, I dropped my cell phone a few weeks ago, it's smashed. And I just haven't got it fixed. And I'm only reading this book because my cell phone's broken, but I can just feel my life changing.

It's almost like you don't realize you're in the matrix until you accidentally get unplugged.

[Carl]

That's so true, yeah, yeah. It's funny, isn't it? She didn't choose to take that step.

It was just fate. But as soon as she tasted what it was like to slow down and to get out of that matrix, she was thinking, I don't wanna go back. So it shows that the basic human need for the slow stuff, right, the reflection, the reading, the stillness, the quiet, the conversations, the listening, all that stuff, it's there, right?

The muscles that want that are maybe a little atrophied, a bit tired, and they don't get used enough. But as soon as you give human beings that offering, they want it, right? They want it, they want it.

[Neil]

And I don't know if you've been following this growth of the sort of Luddite clubs.

[Carl]

Oh, yeah, exactly, yeah. I think that's a real sign of that.

[Neil]

It's a real sign of that. But when you read into the origin stories, usually they are saying, my phone got broken or I lost my phone. Like, that's often the way people start into them.

So since you tipped us off to your third informative book, another beautiful, eloquent transition as you do so well in your writing, let's talk about it now. It is called Slowness by Milan Kundera, K-U-N-D-E-R-A, published in 1995 in France by Gallimard. This is a bizarre cover.

It looks like a five-year-old stick figure drawing of like a smiley-faced man wearing nothing but a red tie and a pair of pants with his legs up in the air in some like, it's like he fell, you know what I mean? It's not like a yoga pose. And it says Kundera in like a red marker, like a kid's marker font.

At the top, Milan, like underneath to the right, like you would just never write anyone's name like that. And then slowness in a black scribbly marker at the bottom. It says a novel, it says national bestseller, and it says in small font translated from the French.

This was Kundera's first, I believe, novel written in France. Who is Milan Kundera? If you don't know him, he lived from 1929 to 2023.

He was a Czech novelist who went into exile in France in 1975 after his books were banned by the Czech government in 1968. What is it about? Well, it's hard to follow this disjoint narration of a Midsummer's night with a series of abstract tales of seduction centuries apart.

But the interweave and the oscillate, and he's such a gifted writer that the sentences of their very nature, like if they don't connect necessarily, but the sentences are gold. It's like a modern art type of book. And to be honest, it made no sense to me for much of the time, but it was punctuated by such moments of clairvoyant poignancy that my kind of me reading it, I was constantly like going between like totally frustrated and like delighted at like these little sentences that I was like highlighting and saying like, I gotta blow this one up.

So follow this wonder 891.8653 for 20th century Czech fiction. Carl, tell us about your relationship with Slowness by Milan Kundera.

[Carl]

Well, when I, coming back to that moment of epiphany, when I realized that I was racing through bedtime stories and I needed to slow down, you know, I kicked into my curious Carl mode and started casting around for things to read and so on. And this was the first book that I wrote, read about slowness. I mean, it's called Slowness, so it was even an obvious.

[Neil]

Well, it makes sense. You would type it into any search and it would have come up, right?

[Carl]

I think it probably was the first one that came up. Although that was 95. So were we even Googling back then?

No, I suppose it was a bit later when I did that. We were 2000, so we probably were. And I'd read some other Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and so on.

And I knew him to be a deep thinker, an unusual, very sort of, I mean, difficult, I think. I mean, sometimes it can be difficult and you put your finger on it. This book particularly is an odd beast, right?

[Neil]

I mean, it's- Hilarious, I heard it described online as the most accessible of his works.

[Carl]

Yeah. That's a great way of damning the same phrase. And I love the fact that it's very short as well, because I'm not sure if I could have done, gone through the same book if it was 500 pages.

It's a tight, what is it? My very- 150. Yeah, there you go.

Mine's from 130 or something. Anyway, so I read it and it just blew me away. I mean, I grappled and struggled with some of the, just working out what was going on some of the time and it was a bit disjointed and so on.

But it did have little moments of, yeah, you talked about, I think you said clairvoyant and then gold. I mean, just moments of startling precision and insight. And it's particularly due with slowness, right?

Which of course was what I was wrestling with myself. And it helped set me up, I think, for writing that book in praise of slowness. Funnily enough, it just kind of, it laid some of the philosophical foundations that then became the springboard for writing the book you got in your hand there, yeah.

[Neil]

Yeah, and by the way, I mentioned I have three pages of notes written within the front covers of my 2020 quarantine read of In Praise of Slowness. I'm assuming you saw a big spike in book sales at that time. Right?

But on page nine, you quote Milan Kundera. You wrote, as Milan, y'all just read the whole paragraph, actually. Inevitably, a life of hurry can become superficial.

When we rush, we skim the surface and fail to make real connections with the world or with other people. As Milan Kundera wrote in his 1996 novella, Slowness, quote, when things happen too fast, nobody can be certain about anything, about anything at all, not even about himself, end quote. All the things that bind us together and make life worth living, community, family, friendship, thrive on the one thing we never have enough of, colon, time.

In a recent poll, half of British adults said their hectic schedules had caused them to lose touch with friends. Half seems small now.

[Carl]

Seems small, I bet it's even higher now, exactly, yeah. It's lovely hearing that Kundera quote again. I think he, it ties in a little bit with what we were talking about earlier, isn't it, the kind of, the disjointed, fragmented mediascape we live in now, all of these stories coming at us, we're not sure what's true.

Things are moving so fast. I mean, the media moves at warp speed. And I think that feeds into the sense of, well, like Kundera says, like you can't be certain of anything, anything at all.

You can't even be certain of yourself. And that's sort of, that really gets at the heart of early 21st century human condition, I think, is that we're not sure of our own selves anymore. And a big part of that is speed, right?

We're just whooshing through and nothing sticks. There's a lovely phrase in that book as well, where he talks about that this, the whole era almost collectively is speeding up deliberately because there's a secret bond between memory and slowness. And the other side of that equation is that forgetting and speed go hand in hand.

So this new, this era is accelerating. We're going faster and faster because we want to forget. We want to forget the horror of modern life.

And so we're trying to, the phrase I think he used was something, we are going faster and faster in order to blow out the tiny trembling flame of memory.

[Neil]

Wow, wow, wow, wow. That's amazing. That reminds me of an incredible chapter of In Praise of Slowness, which one of my favorite where you decry, you talk about throughout history how we've always decried clocks, how like, you know, some guy in like the third century BC, like kind of wrote the scathing essay about the sort of, the sundial is now controlling everybody in the town.

You know what I mean? And in the 13th century, like people like smashed the clocks because it was like trying to split our day into these tiny pieces that you can't focus on. Like we've actually railed against time as a way to kind of measure and track our existence.

Well, time one, you know what I mean? Like we're looking at the clock, first thing, last thing, and now throughout everything, we're clocking personal best, we're timing our work, it's every meeting is on, we're all on a time-based life now. But I thought that history was really amazing.

And just to expand on that quote you mentioned, it's page 39, I'll just go read it. This is from the book Slowness. There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.

Consider this utterly commonplace situation, colon. A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him.

Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time. Yeah.

So good, so true, so unarticulatable. Like that's a real master at work saying like, don't you think like if something happens, you just run kind of run away from it. But if you're looking for an address of a house, you know, you slow down your car, you turn off the radio.

[Carl]

Yeah, it's so true, yeah.

[Neil]

Right, you start to look closely, like you're trying to pair the slowness and the memory because they are naturally paired.

[Carl]

They are natural bedfellows, they are inextricably linked. I love when a writer identifies something that you know from your own life, you know to be true, but you've never articulated it, you've never put it into words. And Kundera is especially good at that, I think just spotting those little foibles, those little impulses, those little vignettes, and just telling us who we are and doing it with such beautiful prose as well.

[Neil]

Yeah, and accessible. Like, I mean, the book itself might not be, but like he has these little sentences, you're like, well, not that Jackie, tricky about the sentence. I did want to, there's a couple of big tangents here I want to get into.

One is, well, let's go into age here. So Kundera died 94, right? So he's publishing novels still at 85.

His last novel was written in 2014, The Festival of Insignificance. You've written a wonderful, and I believe very underrated book called Bolder. And I don't know what it was, Carl, like, you know, you can look at your writer.

So like, is it the publisher? Is it the editor? Is it the cover?

You know, I don't know. But like, in praise of slowness, I still see everywhere. Yeah.

And like, I'm sorry to say this, I did not know about Bolder until I began researching. I was like, oh my gosh, he has another book all about age. He's written a book about time.

Now he's got a book about age. They're doubly related. And it's written in the same style, same format, equally captivating, but has gained the 10 years of wisdom and research that you've added.

So I'm like, okay. Couple things. You gave a 2019 main stage TED Talk called Why We Should Embrace Aging as an Adventure.

I am curious, pulling from this book Bolder, which I think is dramatically underrated and I highly recommend. I even just love how the chapters are titled. You know, you basically go through, you know, Create, Old Dogs, New Tricks is a chapter title.

Work, Old Hands on Deck is a chapter title. Happiness, Minding Less and Enjoying More is the chapter title. Attract, Swiping Right.

Like you have really put your finger on aging in a really good way. I wonder if you could just present for us, because remember people listening just may not have heard your kind of thesis and then your current state of things today as you look around the world on aging. You have a very unique and interesting perspective here.

[Carl]

Well, my take on aging, and this is essentially what Bolder makes the case for, is that we are living through a, this is a new era of longevity, right? A demographic revolution. We're living better for longer than ever before, but our ideas about aging have failed to keep pace, right?

So we're still locked into the old ageist narratives, the cult of youth, in other words, the idea that aging is bad, that younger is better, that aging is a punishment or a disease or a form of failure. And obviously there's some things that change as we grow older that we don't like, but the truth is that many things stay the same and many actually get better. And so I wanted to write Bolder in a way to sort of smash through that ageist industrial complex.

And I guess with my earlier work, I was taking on the cult of speed. In this, with Bolder, I'm taking on the cult of youth and saying, look, there is a whole other way to think about growing older. There's a better story to tell here.

And the story is this, that if you embrace aging, and we're all doing it, right? Aging is not something you start doing at the age of 35 or 40, right?

[Neil]

Right.

[Carl]

You're all aging. If you embrace it wherever you are, as a process of opening doors instead of closing them, as an adventure instead of as a punishment, then aging can be an upward curve. And I was myself a card-carrying member of the cult of youth, right?

All of my books start from a personal existential crisis when I realized that I'm not living the way that I want to, something's not right. And I realized, actually, it was a hockey thing, right? We talked about earlier, right?

I was suddenly the oldest player at a hockey tournament, and that just totally shook me to the core. And I felt so bad, suddenly. I thought, how can it be that my chronological age has taken on this terrible power to define and limit me?

And I came away from that hockey tournament thinking, there has to be another story to tell about aging. And, you know, spoiler alert, there is, right? So that, I guess, Bolder came out, I think one reason it didn't get as much attention as I would like to think it deserved is it came out just as the pandemic broke.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Carl]

And that didn't help. It was just wrong. No.

Everything was, you know, the world just got stuck in other things. And plus the whole idea of aging because of what the links to age and COVID, I think that it was a harder case to make, that aging, you know, the second half of life could be pretty good. So I think that's it.

But it's, yeah, it's still out there. And people, I hear from people all the time who are reading it and doing stuff with it. So it's pretty much on the radar.

[Neil]

Which is well-deserved. And I hope that more people can kind of pick it up after we have this conversation. It's a really, really good book.

And as you say, like the culture of youth is alive and well. Like, I ride the subway in Toronto, all the ads suddenly are like about Botox. Like, it's like, it just happened overnight.

Like I thought Botox was like this fringe thing. You know what I mean? That like celebrities got in LA or something, but I didn't realize it was like, no, no, everyone is doing Botox.

Yeah, my wife was in the subway recently in Toronto and she sent me a picture of a poem that was just like, they have this new like subway poetry thing. And it was by Rupi Kaur. It's called Laugh Lines and Wrinkles.

And the poem opens with these two lines. Give me laugh lines and wrinkles. I want proof of the jokes we shared.

And I'll put the full poem in the show notes, but it really struck me that we're gonna end up as a society 10 years, 20 years, 30 years out, where like half of us look like we have Instagram face, which is a real term written by in the New Yorker about like the sort of like kind of very specific uniform face. And then the other half of us, we're gonna have gaps between our teeth. We're gonna have yellow teeth.

We're gonna have unibrows and we're gonna have, you know, and that will be beauty because that will be rare, you know, I think. I mean, I could be wrong and then I'm just the only guy with yellow buck teeth and unibrow in 10 years. But my point is like, yeah, we're uniformly kind of squeezing this notion of beauty into these really homogenous places that is so ugly when you think about that, you know?

[Carl]

Yeah, it's the homogenization I think that's so, so tawdry and tedious and bland and boring, right? This is what really sets, even if you've got a group of very conventionally attractive people, the person, the one person in that group who always stands out is the one who's got something slightly off, right? Maybe their nose is a bit too big or their eyes are a bit squiffy or something.

It's almost, the beauty is in the uniqueness, right? And the uniqueness comes from the story that your face tells about you. And if you were erasing all trace of the story, then what are you?

You're just a mannequin off the shelf. And that, I mean, that seems a pretty sad place to end up, I think, right?

[Neil]

Well, yeah, except of course then in the future in 10 to 20 years, we'll all be getting treatments to like re-wrinkle-ify our faces probably. I haven't yet got to the writing routines question. And so Kundera is, I don't believe as well as you are kind of sifting and swerving us left, right, and center.

You do that in a controlled way where I feel very well held as a reader. I feel very well, I feel like your organization of your books is like very strong. Your research is unparalleled.

I'm very curious about what your research practices are. Obviously with your kind of decade plus as a, you know, you've been working as a journalist for many, many years, so there's something there. But what are your research and writing routines look like, Carl?

[Carl]

Well, I'm glad you talked about structure because structure to me is hugely important, is having the right architecture for the book. And it always takes me quite a while to work out what the frame is going to be, but I don't rush it. I sit with it, I play around with ideas, and then eventually it settles.

And once I've got that, then I can start to plug things in. In terms of research, I've always, apart from one book, under pressure, I hired a researcher who helped me out a little bit. But for most part, I do all my own.

All my own research. And I think that's, I read recently that Malcolm Gladwell does the same thing, which is interesting, because he, I mean, if anybody could afford to pay for researchers, Malcolm Gladwell, right? And I just, I think there's something about getting back to the first principles, you know, getting, exposing yourself to the raw material rather than having someone else do that, do the first lift and then deliver some curated version of the facts.

I just want to get right, I guess it comes back to my journalistic curious tendency I talked about earlier. I want to get right there and I want to experience it myself, right? I need to feel it, to smell it, up close and personal in order to understand it.

So I feel my research, that's why my books always take from start to finish a good 20, 22 months normally, getting up for two years, right? Because there's a lot of research goes into them. I don't do, I tend not to do long range interview.

I go to the place and I spend time with the people I'm interviewing and I'm absorbing what's happening. And so I can, it just, I feel like deepens my understanding of what I'm trying to explore. It also makes it more fun and more colourful to write about because I've got a lot more at my fingertips to tell the story, you know, what, you know, just to engage all five senses in the telling of the story because I was there rather than sitting in a room doing a Zoom.

[Neil]

Yeah, you can feel that. Susan Cain does that too, with her books, Quiet and Bittersweet. You can feel like you're at the Tony Robbins seminar she's describing.

You feel you're walking through Harvard Business School when she's describing it. You talk about the Society of Time Decelerators. Yeah, the Society for the Deceleration of Time.

That's right. Yeah, those people sound amazing. Although I could not find a trace of them online.

I wondered if that was on purpose. I was like, well, smart move. They deleted their website.

You know what I mean? Like, maybe they just decelerated so much that they no longer exist. Yeah, I just love that people are like fighting against time.

And then when you do this research, like this copious research, I'm doing that too. And then where I struggle is, okay, how are you, what are you doing? Are you like writing things on little note cards and putting them into like the kind of classic whatever Benjamin Franklin kind of note card system?

Are you doing, like, how are you able to pull all this?

[Carl]

Is it- I suppose, gosh, I've not really thought that much about it. The way I tend to do it, this is I've done for every single book, is that I have files, numbered files for different, so an interview will have a file, a book will have a file, an article will have a file, and each will be numbered. And then I'll have another, so that's in one folder.

And I call that fodder, right? Then I have fodder filtered, which is where I've read through all of the different bits of fodder, and I've put them into ideas buckets that could be chapters, it could be sort of, you know, they're all kind of connected. So let's say from the first five bits of fodder, you know, I find one bit in each of those that fits into fodder filtered one.

So it's about, I don't know, family life, let's call that one. So from five of these original bits, I put something in there. And then once I've got those, that becomes the first step towards creating architecture, saying, okay, I've got all these, I've got 30 buckets, I can't have 30 chapters, but I can see the silhouette of maybe 10 chapters.

And so I start to group those into smaller buckets, right? So I end up coming down to the number of chapters I want. And then from there, I use the, I have all my notes, I can trace it right back to first principles to where I got the stuff originally, because it's going through on a through line.

And then I start writing. And I don't write, you know, first page all the way through, I'm writing, I'm jumping around depending on how I feel in the day. I think this subject is lighting me up this morning, I'm gonna write about that.

Or I saw something on TV last night, or I had a conversation with someone who thought, yeah, so tomorrow morning, I get up and write about that. And so I'm kind of always jumping around, but I'm always thinking about the overall structure and how things fit together and wanting to carry people through. I think that's probably a journalist's instinct as well, or it's something you hone as a journalist, the craft of, because in journalism, you don't have so many words, right?

And you really want to pull someone all the way through. So that's something that's often been said about my writing that people, you mentioned it there, that people, there's a lot of stuff, but I never stay too long in one place.

[Neil]

No, you don't. And that's why it's really appealing.

[Carl]

But I do stay there. It's not like I'm going very fast. And sometimes I'm thinking, oh, am I staying too long?

So I'm often thinking, am I, could I lose this extra bit of color here? Or do I need it? Is it, what's it?

So I'm always sort of thinking about the experience of, particularly from my own point of view, I don't tend to write for the reader, weirdly. I mean, it sounds like I am, but I'm mostly writing to please myself. So I want to write a book that I want to read through and that I don't want to put down and that I don't feel gets turgid and stalls and overstays its welcome in certain anecdotes.

So I'm kind of always thinking, what do I want from it? I love that.

[Neil]

Well, that's really, that's a really vivid description. And I really love this fodder and fodder filtered idea. That is an incredible little writing tip right there.

Carl, this has been a real joy. I feel like I could keep asking lots of questions, certainly have a lot more written down. This is my tendency.

I'm like you, I have 10 pages of notes, just questions and stuff when I come into these things. Because I have so much to ask, but I think to close this off, I will say huge thanks for doing this. And do you have time for a fast money round set of questions to close off the conversation?

[Carl]

Yeah, I'm all in.

[Neil]

Hardcover, paperback, audio, or e?

[Carl]

Paperback.

[Neil]

How do you organize your books on your bookshelf?

[Carl]

Randomly.

[Neil]

Randomly.

What is your book lending policy?

[Carl]

I lend in hope of getting it back, but in the expectation that I won't.

[Neil]

Oh, I like that. I lend in hope. I like that. That's a great three word phrase.

I lend in hope, I like that. My father-in-law's girlfriend just got me one of those little like metal stamps that says like, from the library of Neil Pasricha

[Carl]

My daughter bought that for my wife for her Christmas present. No way. This last Christmas, yeah.

[Neil]

Oh, it's life changing. Because you feel like a bit of a jerk when you're like, oh yeah, here's your book. And I'm just going to quietly write my name in the front as I hand it to you.

You never forget who owns it. But with this stamp, it's like this eloquent passing. And then of course you've got this like embossed permanently.

You're giving it back to me, but I don't know if your wife's the same. It doesn't make a print. It just makes an imprint.

[Carl]

Yeah, it's the old, is there a particular word for it? But you know, it just, yeah, it creates a- Yeah, there is a word, but I don't know what it is.

[Neil]

A relief, if you like. You could run your finger over it. A relief, nice.

Do you have a white whale book or a book that you've been chasing in any way?

[Carl]

To read or to write?

[Neil]

Either.

[Carl]

I'd like to write a book about food.

[Neil]

Oh yeah, yeah, exactly. Then we can take the man K off the end of that moniker. Yeah, exactly.

Do you have a favorite bookstore, living or dead?

[Carl]

Yeah, well, gosh, I love so many bookstores, but one that I often think of and I love very much is in Cork in Ireland. And it's, I think it's called Charles Clark. Is it Charles Clark or Charlie Clark or something like that?

It's in the center of Cork and it's just a glorious, slightly random, no, I'm just gonna say chaotic, but no, it's lived in. So it's a little rabbit worn of rooms with new books, but then on the outside, there's just endless shelves on the outside, like literally on the pavement outside of secondhand books. So it's just a mix of the old and the new.

And I just, I love that bookshop.

[Neil]

Well, it sounds like also Cork's a bit of a bookstore paradise because our guest in chapter 58 of this show was David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, Thousand Alms of Jacob's Zoo and so on. And of course he lives in Cork County and his favorite bookstore is in Cork, but it was a different bookstore and I can't remember the name, but I know it wasn't that one. So I'm like, oh, there's gotta be another bookstore there.

Oh wow, gosh, am I getting the wrong name? No, maybe it's different. There's gotta be more than one bookstore.

Yeah, oh, there definitely has been more than one. There's probably lots. And then finally, since this is a show by and for book writers, lovers, makers, sellers, and librarian, you are a prolific writer.

You've written both as a journalist and as a nonfiction author and there's more books to come, it sounds like, inside you. What is your biggest, hard-fought piece of writing wisdom that you might leave us with as we close off the conversation?

[Carl]

I would say, check your facts. We live in a time of fallout, fake news, of disinformation and misinformation. I think as much as possible, be sure that what you're basing your arguments, your story on, is true.

It's right, it's solid. Check your facts. That's a good old journalism, right?

You know, double check your facts.

[Neil]

I like that, check your facts. Something we're certainly not doing much of in the world right now, but which you are inspiring and encouraging us to get back into. I absolutely loved In Praise of Slowness.

It was a life-changing book for me. I've read it, I plan to read it again and again and again. It's a dream to be able to read books and then talk to the authors behind them and discover the rest of the works and the books that are formative to them.

So Carl Honoré, thank you so much for taking the time and coming on to Three Books. We really, really greatly appreciate it. Thank you.

[Carl]

Thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you.

I've thoroughly enjoyed it.

[Neil]

Hey everybody, it's just me, just Neil again, hanging out with you from my basement in Toronto. Canada, listening back to the wise and just such a beautiful heart, Carl Honoré. He's become a friend.

He's a good guy. And to me, he's like the kind of journalist I grew up loving. Someone who thinks deeply, is really pure and honest, is coming to things from a really unbiased perspective, but with a lot of giving, giving, giving.

It's harder to find that now. I guess you find it if you kind of thumb around on Substack or you follow people on their blogs or the newsletters, but it's still a bit more spread out than picking up a newspaper or magazine and finding a whole bunch of voices all together. But we got a whole bunch of voices together today.

Carl gave us a lot of quotes that jumped out to me, like, language is just a kind of poetry that we have at our fingertips. I feel so bad that I only know English. I mean, my mom knew eight languages growing up.

My dad knew five. They came to Canada in the 60s, 70s, in the era of immersion, learning how to speak English at home, teach English to your kids. And I just feel so, like I'm missing, I feel like I have a missing limb, you know?

And if I were to say that out loud, but more publicly, people would say, well, just do, you know, do a lingo or whatever it's called. Like do whatever, sign up, like learn the new language. But it's not that, it's just that I can feel an area missing in my life and I feel like I need the time and the energy to focus on growing up.

Maybe I'll get that in a slow moment in my life. But it's true what he says about language being a poetry at our fingertips. How about this one?

I feel like curiosity is even more urgently needed today because it feels to me like people have retreated into echo chambers and silos. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And not only that, but like when you talk to AI, doesn't it always just like cheer you on and make you feel good?

And it's sort of like automatically supportive, which is a great skill that you'd want, like in a helpful, empathetic listening frame. But if it comes forever without any like chafing or stress or pushback, it's sort of like, wait a minute, am I just talking to myself here? And I know you can tell the AI to like, you know, be a little bit harder on me or whatever, but that's not the solution.

It's that the AIs and to a broader extent, the algorithms and the funnels that we're getting our information of, they're more intellectually and emotionally soothing to us than ever before. So of course we wanna drink from those hoses, you know? And it's just dangerous to do that.

So we have to create friction in our lives, whether that's through traveling or through reading different takes or reading controversial or counterintuitive stuff, or just listening to podcasts where you're gonna bump into random people and random thoughts like you're doing right now. So kudos to you. How about this?

When you go quiet, you go inside. And when you go inside, you reckon. You reckon with the big stuff.

When you go quiet, you go inside. You reckon with the big stuff. How true is that?

I mean, I think that's behind that old question, you know, what keeps you up at night? Because point about that, or even just things like subreddit sour thoughts is that when our mind slows down, things bubble up. Lately, I've been having trouble sleeping.

I've been getting up like almost like two in the morning and I can't get back to sleep for like two hours. And I think that happens sometimes when I'm in the middle of like busy travel periods and also the transition of like lastly going back to school as a teacher and my kids, you know, being very full on and you know, having four boys is a very loud and boisterous and busy house. You know, and it's not like we have a nanny.

Like we don't have someone like taking care of them for us. They're just like on us, which is wonderful. Like I woke up this morning with two small six-year-old feet kind of kicking me because at some point in the middle of the night, briefly remembering it, my six-year-old kind of comes to the bed and says, there's a black fly in my bed.

You know, he's having like a waking nightmare. Of course I get kicked and punched. I wouldn't want it any other way, but it just feels like a lot.

And then it's only in the quiet times that you get to kind of, whoa, like process and reckon and sort of like feel everything. So anyway, that's just the little window into me right now. That's why conversations like the one with Carl help me.

How about this? I love when a writer identifies something that you know from your own life, you know to be true, but you've never articulated it. Yeah, that's what it's all about.

The human experience, the human journey, how we navigate what George Saunders, you know, maybe called in chapter 75, you know, the blur of inchoate motion that is reality until we add stricture structures and stories to it that, you know, help us make a semblance of sense in things as we try to do. It's really wonderful to talk to you, Carl. Thank you for coming on Three Books and thank you for giving us two more books to add to our top 1,000, including number 555, The Quiet American by Graham Greene, and number 554, Slowness by Milan Kundera.

Kundera, Kundera? K-U-N-D-E-R-A. And of course I missed Inherit the Wind because that is an asterisk.

We have Inherit the Wind already on the top 1,000 at number 862, which came to us from Wagner Moura. So yeah, I mean, that's great because, you know, we had the Penn and Kim Holderness recently that added like five new books because they had Weird the Sidewalk In. So we're like reorienting ourselves.

It's like meant to be three books per show, but sometimes it's two and sometimes it's four. Like Ryan Holiday was a four, right? So I got to do like a recalculation soon.

But thank you to Carl for coming on three books and thank you to all of you for listening. 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. Let's kick it off as we always do by going to the phones.

[Jackie]

Hi Neil, this is Jackie. I'm from outside of Seattle. I've been listening to your show for about, I want to say three years now.

And I just listened to your latest one and I thought I would call in, say how much I enjoy it, especially the fact that you have guests who are not all famous to me. So I can learn more about interesting people who are doing interesting things and like to encourage you just to keep it up. Thanks.

[Neil]

Oh, thank you so much, Jackie from Seattle for your phone call. Thank you for calling 1-833-READ-A-LOT, R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T. Being brave enough to just put your voice on the phone.

It's really nice to hear your voice. I feel like I'm with you. Email me, neil at globalhappiness.org, N-E-I-L at globalhappiness.org with your address so I can mail you a book to say thanks. And yeah, I love the lesser known people. You know, one of our values on the show, if you go to threebooks.co.us values is interesting over famous. And I always tell that story about like sitting beside a rapper on an airplane that was like business class, drinking wine at like 10 p.m. on like blue plastic cups and like United Airlines flight to Toronto. And he was like, yeah, I only really know Drake in Toronto, do you know anyone else? And I won't say his name, but he's a very famous and well-known rapper and actor. And we had great connection and we exchanged numbers and it was so well.

And at the end of the chat, I said, do you read books? And he's like, no, never. I've never really read a book.

And I was like, fuck, like now I can't have you on the podcast. Because I do want that side of people to open up here. I mean, we're trying to inspire ourselves and each other to read more.

So I do need that. So like when you talk to Nikita the dog walker in chapter 147, or the St. Louis Uber drivers in chapter 136, or Chefs Osama and Hussan in 125 who make the best shawarma in the city, or at least one of them, you know, you get a different tack, a different flavor, a different sort of frame of looking at things than you would from famous people. Anyway, thank you so much for the phone call.

We'll skip the letter since we read one at the top. Why don't we go back to Carl? I think this one deserves a word cloud, people.

What do you think? Let's go over to Carl Honoré now.

[Carl]

Musicians have a beautiful term. They talk about the tempo giusto. It's like manqué, to miss out.

For me, it's all caught up with Proustian memories. What polyglot means to me, it means joy. The more kaleidoscopically happy your life is, it's the global lingua franca.

Particularly fertile and fervent moment in the evolution of a human being that I don't feel gets turgid. The apotheosis of this phenomenon, foibles spotting those little tawdry and tedious, and I call that fodder, right?

[Neil]

Ho mama, it was time for us to do a word cloud. We haven't done one in a while, but who else but a polyglot to ask to put together a word cloud full of interesting and unique and interesting etymological words, you know, that we can kind of dig in and kind of hear about like the word monk. Really, manqué, M-A-N-Q-U-E, accent, a goo, which is from the French to be missed.

A person who has failed to live up to a specific expectation or ambition, usually combined with a profession. For example, a career civil servant with political prowess who fails to reach office might be a politician monqué, or a second-rate method actor might be referred to as a Marlon Brando monqué. Of course, Carl described himself as a chef monqué.

The term derives from the past participle of the French for monqué, M-A-N-Q-U-E, to miss, to fail, to lack. In English, it is used post-positively. That is, following the noun, it modifies in the manner of most adjectives in French.

Yeah, you don't see that in English much, right? Like chef monqué, like we don't say I'm a runner fast, you know, we don't use that after descriptive thing, you know. A quote from Lolita by Nabokov, Humbert Humbert reminisces, At first, I planned to take a degree in psychiatry as many monqué talents do, but I was even more monqué than that, and I switched to English literature.

Double use in one word. Who else but Nabokov could pull that off? In French, the word monqué is also sometimes applied to someone who's failed to gain professional status, right?

In English, it doesn't have that pejorative as much. So in a game of roulette, the numbers one to 18 are described as monqué, meaning the ball has failed to land in one of the 19 to 36 slots. So, you know, in French, it's like a little bit more of an insult.

Where'd this come from? Well, from the Latin word mancus, M-A-N-C-U-S, which means maimed or crippled by. What an interesting word, manqué, M-A-N-Q-U-E- and like so versatile and usable, you know.

We got a cult podcast here. We've got thousands of listeners to every single chapter around the show, but I'm not Joe Rogan. I'm not Rich Roll.

I'm not Mel Robbins. So I'm like a giant podcast monqué. Well, yeah, or you could use it the opposite way and say, you know, you could use it in regards to yourself with other things, but maybe we use it as a little string to kind of pull us forward there too, or to examine what we truly want.

In my case, I don't really want to be a giant podcaster that's like putting out two shows a week and making eight shows a month and having tons of ads at the beginning and the middle. Yuck, I hate those middle podcast ads. They're even worse than the beginning ones.

Like, what is a commercial break throughout the whole thing now? Come on. So yeah, it helps us examine ourselves like Carl did, like In Praise of Slowness does.

Grab the book, check it out if you don't know it, or one of his formative books, Graham Greene book, Inherit the Winds, great play to read if you don't have it. Now I have two copies because I bought it without remembering that I'd read it before for bigger. And remember guys, it's fun.

We're hanging out on full moons, we'll have a new moon classic released between now and then, but until November, remember, you are what you eat and you are what you read. Keep turning that page everybody, and I'll talk to you soon. Take care.

Listen to the chapter here!

Chapter 152: Robin Sloan weaves wonder and weirdness into the warbly world of words

Listen to the chapter here!

Neil:

Hey everybody, this is Neil Pasricha Welcome or welcome back to Chapter 152, 52, 52 of 3 Books. We're listening to the only pockets in the world buy and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians.

We are having a long-term hangout here, a 22-year long hangout, right? Because down every single new moon and every single full moon, we drop a conversation with somebody about the three most formative books in their life. We've done that since 2018.

We're doing it all the way up to 2040. I was in my 30s when I started this project. I will be in my 60s when it's done.

It is a worldwide hang. It is for people who want to read more. It's for people that are like, I need a good book.

Where should I turn to? I don't want to get my feeds. I want to get tips from the Amazon recommendation engine or the piles in the front of the bookstore.

I mean, that stuff's great, but you know what? We want to plumb the archives of our collective human minds here. We want to talk about the three most formative books in the world for each person.

Three most formative books for each person, 333 people. That should be a thousand formative books total. That is our goal on the show.

Now let's kick off the conversation. You can always forward over to the conversation itself. No problem.

If you want to jump ahead, I do that too, but there are no ads and no interruptions on the show. So it's just going to be me and you and our community of three bookers hanging out. So let's start off as we always do with a letter.

This chapter's letter before we jump into Robin Sloan, who I'm very excited to have here. This chapter's letter comes from Haya McKinley. Haya writes, Hi Neil.

I just finished listening to chapter 150 with the great prime minister, Jean Chrétien, and I want to write you to tell you how much I enjoyed it. I didn't know that much about Jean Chrétien until recently. I came to Canada as a teenager in 1997 and it wasn't paying much attention to politics.

Last year, when my family and our friends took our annual summer road trip to the mountain biking areas of Quebec, we decided to spend a few nights in Chewinnigan to check out some of their MTB trails, mountain bike trails. On our way, I was reading up on Chewinnigan and that is when I learned that the prime minister was from there. I learned about his childhood of being rouge in the great zoo of Bleuze, the Chewinnigan strangler story, and many other anecdotes from his long, interesting, and meaningful life.

Though we didn't make it to the Jean Chrétien museum, maybe we'll go next time. His spirit captured me and I joined the Jean Chrétien fan club for life. My riding of Burlington, Ontario was one of Mr. Chrétien's many stops on the most recent federal election, where he joined MP Karina Gould, also awesome, on her campaign. How cool was it to see that at 91, he's still out there making a difference in the world? I loved listening to chapter 150. What an incredible privilege and honor to have a candid conversation with such an iconic Canadian.

I had to pause the audio on my walk every minute or two to make a note of a great quote to write down in my commonplace book. I ended with 17 lines and probably need to check your transcript to see if there are any more I missed. I just finished reading the recent book The Correspondent, highly recommend it, and it has inspired me to write more letters.

Thank you for all the work you do on three books for book lovers and readers. I've discovered so many amazing folks from listening, like Lewis Mallard, Ginny Urich, Vishwas Agarwal, and many others. Best, Haya, H-A-Y-A.

Haya, back to Haya. Haya, thank you so much for the letter. As always, if I read your letter on the air, I owe you a book.

So just go to neil.blogspot.com books, pick any book you like. I have a stack in my basement. My wife is very eager to see that stack shrink over time.

Tell me which book you want. I will sign one, personalize it, and mail it out to you when I get your address. I love the letter for a lot of reasons.

It was a real privilege and honor to interview Jean Chrétien Thank you so much for shouting a number of other guests as well, like Vishwas Agarwal way back in Chapter 7. If you want to drop me a letter, please do.

My email address is neil.globalhappiness.org. That's N-E-I-L at global happiness, G-L-O-B-A-L H-A-P-P-I-N-E-S-S .org. Drop me a line anytime with a reflection, comment, criticism, whatever.

I've read the critical letters once in a while. It's nice to get some criticism in there. Things you could do better, things you could do differently.

Always good to hear from you three bookers. Thanks so much. Drop me a line anytime.

And now let's get into the background on our wonderful, mind-expanding, super genius, super nerdy guest today. How? How did it start?

Well, I got a text one night from Michael Bungay Stanier. He's the author of The Coaching Habit and a number of other books. And he was our guest back in Chapter 48 where I interviewed him at his home on the front porch of his house at the beginning of the conversation.

I still remember our car was tearing up the wrong way on a one-way street. Anyway, he texted me and he said, have you read Robin Sloan's new book? Mate, it's so good.

Well, I take Michael's recommendations seriously. So I picked up Robin Sloan's new book, Moonbound, and it completely blew me away. Reading this book was like riding some kind of rainbow speckled rocket ship where I had experienced the rare combination of having no idea what was going on.

Well, also couldn't wait to find out what was happening next. The book is full of talking beavers, talking swords, strange video games, and ever expanding worlds with wizards who maybe aren't really wizards. And oh, the entire book is narrated by a microscopic AI type chronicler who's been in many different lives across millenniums, but who now sits in our protagonist's left shoulder.

The book felt like some kind of jacked up Star Wars meets Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, our guest in Chapter 58, by the way, featuring Willy Wonka and Mad Hatter types with little moments of poignancy and reflection dashed in to let us see and see around our endlessly twisting lives together. It is a big, loud, symbol crash of a book. So after I was done, I reached out to Robin to invite him on the show.

Robin Sloan is a writer, printer, and manufacturer that's his new three-word biography, which we will discuss in our chat. He has three excellent and mind-expanding novels, including, of course, Moonbound, which I mentioned came out in 2024. Just came out in paperback, by the way.

And as well, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. I think that's his biggest and most popular book. If you go by Goodreads reviews, there's just way more people have read that.

That came out in 2012. That was a big New Times bestseller. I have bought it and read it since to prepare for the chat.

And it's also excellent, although very different. Still mind-expanding, but starts in a bookstore. It goes to places of wizards and wizardry and secret societies.

It's really cool and really fun. He's a genius to put these things together. And can't forget Sourdough, which is a book that came out in 2017.

Robin splits his time between the San Francisco Bay Area and the San Joaquin Valley of California, where he, guess what, makes California extra virgin olive oil. Yes, did you know they make olive oil in California? I admit I did not.

I always pictured it coming from Greece or Italy. But no, in olive oil, they make in California, they make olive oil, including Robin, who actually is the miller of the olives. His wife runs the company.

He runs a lot of parts of it. It's amazing. He also makes zines.

He sells them on his website and he sends out a nerdy and mind-expanding newsletter precisely every 29 and a half days. You can sign up for all that stuff at robinsloan.com. That's r-o-b-i-n-s-l-o-a-n.com.

I highly recommend you get his newsletter. He's a really fascinating dude. So strap in as we discuss social media, by the way, Robin used to work at Twitter, interestingly, about a decade and a half ago.

AI ethics, childhood obsession, books as technology, olive oil, myths, identity, and of course, the brilliant Robin Sloan's three most formative books. Let's flip the page into chapter 152 now. Okay.

Hi Robin.

Robin:

Hi. Welcome to be here.

Neil:

Thank you so much for coming on three books.

Robin:

It is a pleasure to be here. Thanks.

Neil:

The occasion of course, being the paperback release of Moonbound. I understand paperback is your preferred format.

Robin:

Yeah, you know, it is.

It's, it's hard to choose favorites in the vast and glorious realm of books, but you know, as a reader, I just think a whippy, slim, tight little paperback at the, at the paperback price point is about as ideal as it gets, particularly for a novel. I should say, I think it's the best way to read fiction.

Neil:

This is one of our questions we always have in the show, but you, when you announced the release of it, you also talked about the cover, how, how they switched it from cover color to monochrome.

Robin:

Yeah, that's right. That's right. You know, I always think it's interesting the way covers evolve over time.

Of course, when a book's been around for years and years and years, you have the opportunity to see many different designers kind of, you know, take a spin at it, which is awesome. Even in the transition from hardcover to paperback, sometimes, not always, but sometimes there's that opportunity to kind of shake things up and, and, you know, present a fresh, a fresh face to the world. And yeah, the interesting thing about book covers these days, you know, in the internet saturated 2020s, this has been widely remarked upon, is that it seems that many of them, for better and for worse, are being designed for Instagram, right?

You know, an Instagram-able book cover. And not only that, but also the demands of the internet in general, you know, if you're, if you're browsing a bookstore online or, you know, a collection of books online, the cover is this little thing. It's like this little, you know, squished icon in the corner.

So the design has to, has to read, you know, well, and kind of do the work in those situations. That does create an opportunity, I think. And the great paperback designer for Moonbound, whose name is Alex Myrto, took that opportunity, which is to zig where everyone else zags.

So on the paperback shelves now of, of all the bookstores, there's going to be this wash of, of color and, you know, this riot of bright, you know, warm shades and hues. And then there will be the, the brand new Moonbound paperback, which is basically black and white. Except of course, like all of my books, it, it has a little bit of a secret, which is that when you turn the lights off, the cover glows in the dark.

Neil:

No way.

Robin:

Yes. Yes.

Neil:

Oh my God.

Robin:

Yeah, it's fun. Yeah.

Neil:

It's funny. I was out for dinner last night with Michael Bungay Stanier. He's, he wrote the book, The Coaching Habit.

He was our guest in chapter 48. He's the one that texted me originally and said, do you know Robin Sloan? Have you read Moonbound?

I think he'd be perfect. And he was just telling me last night that they just discovered that platypuses are iridescent. Like they have the, the bioluminescent and that nobody knew that they had this before.

Robin:

Awesome.

Neil:

And so there's another overlap. I loved, I loved Moonbound.

I put it in my best of 2024 reads. It just really blew me away. So big minded, so interesting.

I kind of, I wore this shirt because it was sort of my most Moonbound-y.

Robin:

It's Moonbound-y. Yeah.

There's a whole universe. There's a whole like ecosystem unfolding on your shirt there. Absolutely.

Neil:

I was trying, I was trying, it's compliments of Dan the Tailor, who's another past guest on the show. And yeah, that's what the book did to me. It just really opened me up in a lot of different ways.

I had a lot of opening questions for you. One of course was how many particles are there in the universe? 

Robin:

Yeah, that is, that is a good question.

Two to the 75th. It's, it's lower. The number, I love, I love, of course you're, you're referring to the question I sort of posed to myself in a recent newsletter.

The thing about those big numbers from, you know, physicists have got all sorts of them. They've got, you know, you know, the number, yeah. Number of particles in the universe, number of galaxies in the universe.

They're all big numbers, but they're sort of weirdly not as big as you almost would hope they would be. You know, a physicist would be like, oh yeah, well, you know, 10 to the 75th. Oh yeah.

That's a, that's a bigger number than could fit in, you know, the entire known cosmos and, and 10 more. And you're like, oh man, that, that makes me uncomfortable for some reason. 

Neil: 

Yeah, exactly. It's funny that you said 10 to the 75th because I did ask Claude and, and, and he said, or they said 10 to the 78th. Okay. So, you were like off by only three zeros.

Robin:

Not too bad. Not too bad.

Neil:

Very close. And I was of course hinting at your newsletter, which comes out every 29 and a half days. Yeah.

Yeah. Or close, close to it. Yeah.

Robin:

Does 29 and a half days mean anything to you? Any, any, any, ring any bells? 

Neil:

It's not, well, my first instinct was it was the year divided by 12.

Robin:

No, it's the, it's the phase of the moon, more or less, more or less. Yeah. The cycle of the moon runs pretty close to 29 and a half days.

And, you know, I really, a while back, years, years and years ago, I did a little, little mini newsletter for maybe half a year. And I guess just because nothing can ever be simple because I can never do things the normal way. I sent it on prime numbered days, you know, two, three, five, seven.

And it was fun because it didn't, you know, a lot of people obviously do, do things on a normal calendar. They send their newsletter on Tuesdays or they publish their podcasts, you know, every other Thursday or, or whatever it is and more power to them. But I find that sort of frankly, unpredictable and more organic pace, weirdly fun.

And it's almost like a game you play, you know, with yourself and, and with the calendar. So, so yeah, the 29 and a half days. I would have known that.

Well, you know, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to stack up all of our, our sort of cosmic factoids in this conversation, the number of particles of the universe, the length of the phase of the moon. Yeah. Yeah.

Neil:

Well this lens, you know, for three, three bookers, this is what we do. We drop a new chapter on the exact minute of every single full moon and it was new moon, but now I'm doing classics on the new moon. So I have like a little bit more of a safe thing, but I never actually put it into a day calculation for it to ring a bell for me.

I just like, look, I go to time and date.com. I look up the, I look up the moon schedules and I just go precisely on that, which has been terrible for Apple podcast algorithm. You know, when I first came out with this podcast, it was like, it, I was releasing pockets, you know, Tuesday at three 38 AM.

Robin:

I think that's fantastic. I so support that. It's great.

It's great. Yeah. We're working, we're working on deeper calendars here, you know?

Neil:

Exactly. Um, now you, you, uh, you know, I was listening to a podcast called the difference, which you were on in March 2025. Um, and they called you novelist, olive oil, entrepreneur, AI experimenter, and musician.

And then as if on cue leading up to this conversation in 2025,  you changed your bio online. Yeah. So tell me about the change, what you now identify yourself as.

Robin:

Yeah, right.

You know, isn't that the kind of the, the meta, the meta observation I think is interesting, which is that like in years past, ages past, there wasn't maybe quite as wide a latitude to describe yourself, you know, and, what you do or what you think of yourself as more often people were described, you know, it was like, Oh yeah, I'm going to wait for somebody to write about me in a newspaper or magazine. And I'll hope they say what I want them to say, you know, what I wish they'd say.

But it wasn't really up to you. And now in the era of people being able to sort of hang their own shingle out online and, and that could be a website. That's mostly the case with me.

It's for me, my home is really my own personal website, but it could also be a social media profile, right? There's always that little space that will bio you cram in a few words. And it's just interesting that it kind of, to me, those, those words that you put into those spaces are descriptions, but I think they can also be aspirations and they have been for me historically.

You know, I remember very, very vividly with almost a, a sensory clarity, like where I was and, and, and also how I was feeling years and years ago when I changed my Twitter bio back in the days when Twitter was really, really the place to be, to include the word writer. Um, and that's weird to remember now, cause that's been such a part of my life and a part of my working life for so long. But there was a moment where I was like, Oh boy, I'm not really a writer yet, but I want to be, and I hope nobody makes fun of me.

Of course, nobody did because there's nobody else cares really, except for you. So yeah, that's all to say. I did,  after just being, you know, Robin Sloan, a writer for, for really a long time.

Neil:

So when, when did you change it on Twitter? 

Robin:

Oh, I mean, that would have been, that was, I mean, that was 2008, I think. 

Neil:

And you worked for Twitter the year after that?

Robin:

Yeah. It wasn't even a Twitter employee yet. That's how cool Twitter was.

I, at that time I cared about my bio on the website and then I went to work for the company. But then quickly discovered that I was not cut out to work in a tech office. So yeah, the, the new description, you know, it's writers still part of it, but I, you know, for years now I've been spending a lot more time making things.

And that includes making olive oil, it includes printing. And I found just a real kind of both practical satisfaction and, and frankly, some real creative energy in, in kind of going beyond just making the words and handing them off to someone else. So yeah, the new, the new self-definition, which, which does have a bit of aspiration in it is, you know, Robin Sloan, a writer, printer and manufacturer.

And, uh, I'm pretty happy with that. I'm pretty happy with that as a vision. Yeah.

Neil:

Right. Absolutely. Writer. Of course, we know you as the novelist behind Moonbound, Mr. Penumbra's 24 hour bookstore, sourdough and, printer because you produce zines and meaning that you actually write them, print them, mail them the whole deal. 

Robin:

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Create creation, you know, production and distribution, I guess I do everything except carry it to people's front door.

Neil:

Okay. And then manufacturer, that's the olive oil. 

Robin:

Yeah, that's, that's the olive oil.

And I guess I would say it also, you know, in a way I almost want to,  I want to insist that, that printing and publishing are sort of cousins to manufacturing. It's easy to overlook the technology, really the still really profound technology involved in, in every step of the printing, publishing bookmaking process. Uh, this is kind of, I think, familiar terrain for readers of Mr. Penumbra's 24 hour bookstore. Um, but, uh, books that are so familiar and so, you know, cozy that I think we often forget, or it's just easy to sort of overlook the, the deeply kind of technical and technological aspect. You know, the printed book is a technology. I could go on and on and argue about how it's like kind of a, a more reliable technology than, you know, the computers we're talking on right now, but it's, it's just to say manufacturer is my way of saying like, yeah, we're doing some, we're doing some real industry here.

This is not just, uh, you know, arts and crafts.

Neil:

Right. Absolutely.

And by the way, I did order Fat Gold to my assistant who lives in New York because I'm in Canada. And of course it was such a great disappointment that we can't ship up there yet, but you know, she reports it was delicious. She's a real foodie.

So thank you. Uh, Fat Gold, olive oil made in California.

Robin:

Made by yours truly. You could, somebody could have a real 360 experience if they sat down to read Monbound while perhaps, you know, drizzling their salad with some Fat Dold, which, you know, I, operate the, the olive mill during the harvest season. So they could just have a real Robin Sloan evening.

It sounds like they either won or lost a contest if they do.

Neil:

I think it sounds, it sounds delicious. And for every sense I want to kind of park that the olive oil, cause I have a couple of questions about that, but we'll save them for a little bit. But on the bio thing you just mentioned, you know, you kind of enter, you hang up mostly online, but mostly on your website, robinsloan.com.

You have this wonderful 29 and a half day newsletter, which I subscribe to. I love, I recommend. And then you also mentioned your, you know, you could put it on social media.

And then when I go on your Instagram, you know, you only have three posts total. And you even have a little note there saying I post frequently to stories, stories rarely to the grid.

Yeah. Why is that? So I went and checked your Instagram stories.

It's like, you know, the fear a lot report. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Literally the only holiday recognizing you're like zooming on the, like, you know, it's very niche.

Robin:

Yeah.

It's very,  my stories, t's a, the definition of niche, I think, or cult is, you know, that you have few, but intense, you know, fans and aficionados and not very many people look at my Instagram stories, but I do think I have turned the feral, you know, overgrown lot in my neighborhood into like a mini, mini micro celebrity in a certain community, which I, which I'm very proud of. I think that's great.

Neil:

But what was the reason for not posting to the grid? I thought it was something suspicions or something.

Robin:

No, no, it's honestly, I don't think this is uncommon.

I, um, like a lot of people have been historically early to a lot of these platforms. Um, you know, again, I was here in the Bay area in the mid two thousands and onward, and you know, all this stuff was, was appearing and it was literally bubbling up out of right here. You know, the people who made Twitter and these other platforms that are now defunct and Instagram,  they were all either people that I had encountered or knew, or, you know, people, friends of mine knew them.

And you'd kind of be walking around the neighborhood and someone would point and say, oh, that's that office of that new thing called Twitter. So it's all very like present and, frankly felt pretty cool and exciting at that time. It was, it was really a different time before this stuff had grown and I don't know, kind of darkened into its, into its present form.

It was also frankly time before, the iPhone, which is, which is a weird thing to recall, but, but our relationship to these platforms and, and how we use them was, was really, really different when they didn't follow us around everywhere we went in the world. So that's all to say time has passed. I spent a lot of years on timeline based algorithmic social media platforms.

And several years ago, this is actually not a recent thing for me, but it's at this point, pretty, pretty well established. I just realized I had burned out on the, on the experience. Um, I personally wasn't getting much out of it, um, either personally or really professionally to be candid.

I mean, it's, it's not like this was, was doing much for me in terms of finding readers or selling books or, or anything like that. Um, and, and I didn't like the companies running in these platforms either. So, um, because I was like, I was like, don't, don't like doing it.

Don't like the people who are making it, or their values or their objectives. So maybe I'm going to kind of scale this back.

I'm not a complete abstainer and I'm certainly not evangelical about it. I think people, if people want to use these platforms more power to them. But, uh, for me, it's just, it's just not a big part of my life.

Neil:

Was there a note, could you point to a part of anywhere in time where it went from exciting and local to a value, you know, kind of conflicting values? 

Robin:

That's a good question. It was for me, I think some people did have, you know, there's, there's a lot of stories kind of, of breaking points, right.

Or these like sharp ruptures that really wasn't the case for me. Um, it was more of a slow crossfade. And, and I think the amazing to, to consider that people have been using these platforms for this long, but as I recognize that I had been using a lot of this stuff for about 10 years, you know, give or take.

So that's, this is kind of, you know, a little about 10 years ago, or maybe a little under 10 years ago. I kind of went like, well, I'm just, am I just going to do this for another 10 years and 10 years after that? You know?

And that thought did not fill me with excitement and, uh, and optimism. You know, if I think about other activities going on for decades, like writing books, publishing books, you know, zines, you name it. I'm like, yeah, oh man, I should be so lucky.

But when it came to Twitter and when it came to, you know, building up a big library of weird old images on Instagram, I kind of went, oh, I think, I think maybe I've had enough. 

Neil:

So it was a novelty wearing off thing, as opposed to you sort of sensing that what they were prioritizing and what they were doing to society was like.

Robin:

Oh no, it's both. No, no, it's both. It's I would say, you know, if they're, if they're, um, if they were different organizations,  run with different objectives and,  you know, in some , imagine some fantasy world where this is, I mean, this is like something out of Moonbound.

It's so, uh, fantastical. Imagine, that Twitter, instead of being, you know, bought by a, you know, industrialist super billionaire had, been converted into a great, worker owned tech cooperative. And they said, we're going to try to make Twitter into a truly public space and a healthy platform.

And it's just like wonderful ecosystem for conversation. Now, I actually think I probably might still not be on Twitter because I really just, I just am not interested in like posting on the timeline anymore. I will say that would be a much more interesting alternative.

It’d be a much more live question than the, than the current reality. 

Neil:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

And that was always the sort of fabled, future kind of vision for it at the beginning. 

Robin:

I mean, again, you know, you, you don't want to, it's easy to feel like quite naive. Um, and, and maybe I should, and maybe a lot of people who were around at that time in, in San Francisco should, but, um, there were, there were some real utopian visions for the web. Um, some real, real, you know, I think very lovely dreams in that kind of call it 2005 to 2010, 2012, um, era.

It was, it was, of course it had followed the great dot com bust, you know, this, this previous bubble that was just off the charts. Um, and, and as is often the case, um, sometimes those busts and the, and the, the disappointments, the way the money all kind of runs away. Oh, it's almost like the tide going out, you know?

And, and suddenly like there's like new spaces and new opportunities. Uh, it was a cool time. It was a cool and fertile time in, in this area.

Neil:

Well, speaking of lovely visions and mythological dreams, it's a nice transition into your first of three formative books. You've been kind enough to share with us. I wouldn't mind taking just quick 30 seconds to introduce this book to our listeners.

Then I'll ask you to tell us about your relationship with it. Why don't we begin with D'Aulaires  Book of Greek myths. 

Robin:

D'Aulaires  Book of Greek myths.

There, there is of course also a D'Aulaires  Book of Norse Myths, which is, which is very good as well, but it is not, it doesn't have the same umami as the, as the Greek compendium. So this is a book notionally for children, uh, always, always published in large format. Um, it's just a big, you know, armful of a book and, um, it was written and illustrated by this, by this married couple, the D'Aulaires um, uh, years ago.

I mean, I think, yeah. And I, I, you know, actually I, I don't know that I even could tell you the publication date, um, off the top of my head other than that is definitely before the eighties. It may be a book.

Neil:

Random House Children's Books, 1962. 

Robin:

There you go. 62 boy. God, that's great. 

Neil:

So, so do you want me to just say a couple of quick things about it for listeners holding it in a bookstore? So you're picking it up in a bookstore.

It's like, as Robin said, it's like, you know, it gotta be eight inches wide by 12 inches tall. It's a big book, kind of the size and shape of like a big design magazine, dark blue cover with the title in gold Greek style font. Below the title is a drawing of a person riding in a chariot drawn by four white horses.

They are stylized gold borders adorning the top and the bottom with small gold silhouettes containing centaur and minotaur type of figures across the bottom. Ingrid and Edgar Perrin D'Aulaire, um, you know, uh, were a married couple who met in art school in Munich in 1921. Born in the 1800s, they came to America and were successful artists.

They won the Caldecott for a book called Abraham Lincoln, actually. Um, and you know, Edgar illustrated the books, Ingrid painted portraits. They were considered some of the very first picture book artists ever.

What is the book? It is a children's slash middle grade collection of ancient Greek and Roman myth narratives with lyrical prose and whimsical illustrations. Dewey decimal has please follow us under 398.21 for social sciences slash folklore slash tales and lore of paranatural beings of human and semi-human form. Semi-human. That is the filing. Robin, please tell us about your relationship with D'Aulaires  book of Greek myths by Edgar Perrin D'Aulaire and Ingrid Perrin D'Aulaire.

Robin:

So, you know, it begins in elementary school. Um, I grew up in a suburb of Detroit called Troy. Um, and, uh, my little elementary school was a, uh, short, but not too short walk from my house.

I would kind of walk down the sidewalk and then go down this path that went over a bridge, um, across a Creek, um, with this kind of in this overgrown sort of semi wild area. Maybe that's where I got my taste for feral urban spaces. Cause I kind of passed through one every day of my young life.

And there, uh, in this elementary school, we had a really, really nice library kind of in a central area in the school. And of course, once a week, um, our teacher, you know, every year that I was in school there would, would march us down to the library to, to return a book, check out a book, whatever. Uh, I believe it was third grade.

I could be wrong of course, cause it kind of all smushes together, but I think that's right. It was in third grade. Um, when I discovered D'Aulaires  book of Greek myths on the shelf.

Neil:

So we're talking like late eighties. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, yeah.

Robin:

Um, yeah, just, that's all right. That's all right.

Late eighties. Um, and, um, woe unto any of my classmates that year that also might've been interested in checking out that book because it was not available. I would take it dutifully back, you know, to school, back to the library on library day, and then just present it again to the library and be like, I'll take this one again.

I did that in my, in my, of course it's again, you, who knows? Memory is a little unreliable in my memory. I literally did that all year.

I don't, I don't think that's really the case. I think maybe it was for a couple months or something like that. But the point is I kept that book.

Um, and, and I have this, these, these memories of like laying cause it is, it's such a big, beautiful book. So you kind of lay on your belly, you know, on the carpet and the books open. And I, I was looking at it so intensely.

I almost like it felt like my gaze might like etch something in the page, you know, or, or produce, produce heat there on the page. It was just, it was, I mean, if the dictionary definition of captivation of readerly captivation, I loved it. I read it.

I reread it. I looked at the, the beautiful, weird, you know, interesting illustrations. There's big, they're small, they're large, they're kind of interspersed in the text, summer, monochrome, summer, summer color.

And, um, I just had a ball. So I never forgot about it ever since I, of course, I shortly after that, um, we, we did get our own copy at home and, um, I read it for years and years after that. And then I will say that the kind of the, the cherry on top, the thing that really sort of has sealed dollars, um, position in my, in my cosmology is that, um, as after, you know, kind of grew up and started my adult life every so often, I would meet somebody who, I don't know, I just brought it up randomly.

We just mentioned it. And, and the response was not like, oh yeah, I read that. And said, it was like dollars.

I mean, there's a, there's a cult, there's a cult of us out there. I, in fact, I guarantee there's some, some folks listening to this podcast who, when, at the moment you first mentioned it, they may have leapt up out of their chair and said, dollars. Um, you know, there's a lot of books, a lot of kids books that people love.

I think there is, and has been something really special and deep about this book, the way it has, um, captured and molded, um, the attention and imagination of a certain kind of kid. So it's been, it's been fun to meet my, uh, fellow cultists. Yeah.

Neil:

Yeah. And what a formative book. So early in your child experience, I love the image of you checking it out over and over again.

Of course, the book has the word myth in, in the cover and thinking about today with where we are in life, I really loved and enjoyed your long form essay that you wrote on AI earlier this year called, Is It Okay? And I want to quote back to you a couple of pieces for near the end of that quote. Of course, it doesn't do justice to the full piece, which I will share in the show notes as well, but talking about AI, and I want to talk to you a little bit about the mythology of AI and where we are today and what your views are.

To answer that question in the title, you said, if their primary application, speaking of the LLMs or the large language models, is to produce writing and other media that crowds at human composition, human production, no, it's not okay. You also say, if an AI application delivers some profound public good, or even if it might, it probably is okay that its value is rooted in this unprecedented opera, opera. I know that's that word.

Robin:

I literally have never been able to say that word aloud straight. Why did I use the word operationalization? It's no, no, no.

It was, it was, it was brutal as a brutal choice of the common.

Neil:

So you are openly wrestling with the idea of what is happening in AI right now. Is it okay or not?

And of course, by whenever this podcast is released, it will become outdated because everything's changing so fast, but you have a profound insight and a very close feel and grasp of this universe. I'd really love you to share your thoughts with everybody here. Where are you today on the ethical side of AI?

Robin:

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 you're, I mean, I think you're right to, to connect myths to that. Cause 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, in the shared toy box of humanity, you know, picked up some of the great, some of the classics and said, oh, I wanna, I wanna, we want to play with these toys. And then they did, and they, 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, and, you know, now, now I've become someone who, who also is in, in different ways and in different, you know, different pieces of work, a myth retailer.

And, you know, I'm, I'm playing with toys myself. So deep interest. And, and I think that connects very, very directly to one of the huge questions and really the, the central question of my essay and that, you know, the, the big, is, 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, the, 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, the analogy of, of growth, almost organic growth, like a, like a rose bush growing on a trellis is, is, is really not only, you know, kind of artful and appealing, but, but actually very technically accurate. When they do that growing, the sunlight they're responding to, the forest that's guiding that shape is that commons.

It's this incredible shared body of work. And of course it's not only the Greek myths and not only, you know, books and stories and poems, it's like weird web pages 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. Everything else.

I mean, it's, it's actually an basically unfathomable, unfathomable amount of text and writing and human expression. But the point is it is human expression. It's this huge shared cultural.

Neil:

You call it everything. 

Robin:

Call it everything. Yeah.

I mean, it's not, that's, you know, it's like everything asterisk because of course there's actually, 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, that's both kind of appealing and also technically correct.

There's this, this resource that was built up over time. And the only way to, 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 was a big windup to say, I think anybody, particularly folks who are, who feel kind of invested in the idea of like, um, the public domain, um, a cultural commons, you know, the shared, you know, sort of written inheritance of of humanity, um, ought to, to kind of consider how these things are being used and, and, and say like, I mean, is that, is that a, do we agree as, as, as people invested in the commons that that's like an okay use of, um, of this material to kind of fold it into these machines, um, 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, it's totally fine. Um, 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.

Um, it might be okay. In other cases, I think it's quite, it's quite, um, offensive actually. Yeah.

Neil:

You've really kind of predicted some of this, right? And so, cause I think Mr. Penumbra came out in 2011, 2012, 2012, right? And on page 86, just to read you a quote from your own book, ah, books, Raj pauses a moment chewing, then his brain slots into a groove.

You know, old books are a big problem for us. Old knowledge in general, we call it okay. Old knowledge.

Okay. Did you know that 95% of the internet was only created in the last five years? But we know that when it comes to all human knowledge, the ratio is just the opposite.

In fact, okay. Accounts for most things that most people know and have ever known. That was like 12, 13 years.

And that was a conversation that takes place in the Google cafeteria. Yeah. Right.

And, um, uh, my big worry is that, uh, you know, you wrote this essay from your own brain with your own fingers on your own blog and this endless recursive nature. Like I was, um, asking chat GPS something yesterday and it quoted my own blog back to me, like my own blog. My own blog was the source right in the label.

I thought, well, if it's quoting my own blog back to me, well then, you know, it's an endlessly recursive thing. It's like a homogenization of everyone's thoughts. And of course I go really far out of my way to like, not use AI to come up with my podcast questions just because I want them to be coming from me.

Yeah. I don't know how long it can last. 

Robin:

I think you can, I think you can hold out.

I think you can hold out. It does. You gotta, you gotta care.

Um, I, I, I really think, um, we're, we're starting to see a sort of, um, bifurcation there's, you know, it's, it's not the only one, but, but it's an important kind of cleavage in the world and, and the set of tasks and, and people, you know, doing work. And on one hand there's, you know, the people who, who care about what they're doing and they like, they want it to be at the highest possible level, the best they can do. They want it to, as you say, they want it to reflect their own, you know, real specific personality and, and viewpoint on the world.

And then there's, I don't know, a set of tasks, a set of people, maybe it's a set of companies and managers who are like, I mean, I don't really care. Just, just do something. And, um, and you know, AI slop, um, is, is kind of good enough.

And there's always been a difference in the world between the, the, you know, the good enough universe and the, I don't know, call it the, the, we really care universe, the artisanal universe, the, the, the, the, you know, the world-class workers of the world. Um, and I think this just sharpens that distinction. And I think if, if a person feels like they want to be in the, in the world that cares, I actually, I do think it's really important to, to hold the line and take that responsibility really seriously.

Neil:

Wow. Be in the world that cares. I love that.

Okay. Next question on this topic. So obviously this book is written by husband and wife, a husband and wife team, um, on the fat gold, uh, olive oil page, Catherine Tomajan.

I don't know if I said her.

Robin:

Tomajan.

Neil:

Tomajan. Yeah. It's a little tricky.

Yeah. Catherine Tomajan. Has an incredible bio, an olive oil maker, taster educator with a master's degree in food culture from the university of gastronomic sciences in Palenzo, Italy.

Her thesis explored the opportunities and challenges of new world, olive oil in Australia, New Zealand, and California. Of course, you're listed on the bio page right below as our apprentice Miller communications chief. Yeah.

So my question was really around how do you work well with your wife? 

Robin:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I, for us, it's a good question.

Um, I mean, for us, it has been such a boon and a, I don't know, like, um, just a wonderful shared project. It's it truly to have something, um, that we, and of course it, you know, started small and was not always, it was, it was neither our design nor our, um, you know, we didn't imagine that, um, this thing that we work on together very closely would grow to become really a big, big part of our professional lives and, and economic lives and everything else. Um, it just started as kind of a, how big is it?

It's, I mean, it's, it's big. It's a, for us, it's a, it's a, it's a super successful, small olive oil producer. Um, and, uh, you know, where before, uh, it was writing and publishing books that, that, you know, accounted for most of my income.

Now it's pretty evenly shared with, um, with fat gold, which is great. I mean, it's just, it's, it's super, um, it's thriving, um, not shipping to Canada yet that we're really, we're, we're, I wish, I wish I know that. Yeah.

Neil:

Tariffs are coming down. 

Robin:

So, yeah, I, yeah. I mean, they do.

We, we actually, in all sincerity, we, um, we were, we were all set to go. Like, we were like, we finally figured this out. And it was like, literally the month before the entire universe of global trade was sort of like upended.

And like, it was like, it was like, uh, you know, pressing reset on your Nintendo. You're like, oh my, I was doing so well at super Mario brothers. Um, I got to start over.

Yeah. Yeah. So anyways, so that's, that's all to say, um, uh, having, having the shared project has been great.

Uh, we're, we're, um, you know, our, our temperaments are very compatible and I will add that the, um, division of labor, I mean, this is, this is true for any partnership, any professional partnership. Um, not just one where you happen to be married to the other person. I think the division of labor and, and this real sense of, of sort of complimentary strengths is just so great.

And so it can be so effective and also like quite fun because there's always this set of tasks that like one person finds just, just disgusting. I mean, just like, oh God, for just, for example, to make a concrete mine would be something like, um, bookkeeping. I just, the idea, the idea of going through receipts in any part of my life, I'm like, oh God, oh, I'd never, I just, I don't know, round it up or round it down.

Uh, so Catherine has no problem with that. She handles it with precision and a plume. Um, you know, conversely, uh, I do do all of our marketing.

I write the emails, I manage the website. I, I, um, uh, write and, and, and print these, um, zines that we pack with, with every order that we send. And that's not something that Catherine would be excited to do.

She, she's done that in other jobs before. And for her, it was always, uh, it was grind, you know, she was like, you know, I'm, I can do it. I can do it to a very high, you know, degree of, uh, quality, but, uh, this is not what I would choose to do with my, you know, Thursday afternoon.

Whereas God has actually accused me. Um, she has said, you know, looking at something I'm, I'm writing for, for fat gold, maybe a little more substantial than it needs to be. And she'll say, you really will find a way to turn anything into a publishing project.

Won't you? Oh, that's so funny. And I'm, uh, I'm forced to confess that's probably true.

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah. Which is to, to all, uh, we, we love it, but yeah, I can see why not everybody would, and I can relate to that completely.

And a curiosity, just because I know so little about, you know, food culture globally, are there some macro food trends happening? I mean, this new world olive oil seemed to be an interesting thing, but when you and she are talking, you must have some visibility to some macro level trends globally that the rest of us can't see. Yeah.

Robin:

I mean, that's a, that's a huge question. Of course, um, there are, there, there's some, some huge, um, mega, mega, mega trends. Um, I mean, one of them is this is probably a little more obvious, but the, the idea that sort of global trade is going to never quite be the same is, is really big and really important for, um, for food production because food production for better, for worse is fully globalized.

I mean, it's just stuff is coming from all over and going everywhere. Um, that's, you know, thanks really in, in large part to this, this incredible technological, I don't know, um, triumph that is the cold chain. You know, you go back even 50 years, 60 years, and it was not possible to transfer a pork chop from, you know, America to China and back.

You're like, you can't do that. And now you totally can and people do. Um, so although maybe not, maybe not for much longer, maybe that's gonna, that's gonna change.

Um, but that's just to say that that creates all sorts of new costs, but also new opportunities for, for all sorts of folks. And that is, I would say at this moment, um, accounts for the great majority of what people are talking about. I do think this is a little, um, you know, aspirational on my part.

It's, it's both, it's my observation, but it's also my hope. Um, I do think that a recognition, um, that, I mean, it really is as simple as this, like there's been a lot of food for a lot of years now that has a list of ingredients on the side and you're like, what are all those long, strange words? Um, and that's just been, you know, kind of the normal culture of, of food, particularly, you know, in the United States and at the supermarket, it's just a, it's a bunch of weird stuff in, in boxes and, you know, in the freezer case.

Neil:

Everything in a 7-Eleven. Yeah. Oh boy.

Robin:

Oh yeah. That's some, those are some long, some long chemical names on the, on the side of the 7-Eleven wrapper. Um, and you know, that's obviously not going to change overnight, but I do, I really do believe that more and more people are kind of waking up to the reality that like one of the best changes you can make for your, both for yourself in terms of your health and frankly, your enjoyment of food and also for like your community and your ecosystem is to sort of insist on eating foods that you, that you recognize the ingredients of, you know, that are like, ah, ah, yes, flour, salt. I know what those things are.

And that sounds simple. It sounds simplistic. Um, and I think for some people, including, I suspect many listening to this podcast, um, they'll be like, yeah, no kidding.

Been there a long time. Um, but the truth is, you know, there's, there's a lot of people out there eating a lot of different stuff. And I, I think that wave of kind of awareness and in a way it's, it's going back in time, you know, it's kind of unwinding some of the, um, weird machinations of the, of the very industrial, um, 20th century.

Um, and I think, I think in this particular case, a sort of, uh, turning back the clock to, to a simpler approach, um, is actually just a better thing for everybody. And certainly for the, for the whole planet. I hope, I hope you're right.

Neil:

I like how you called it, um, aspirational. Yeah. Um, so let's transition now.

Thank you for opening that up. Thank you for talking about your partner. Thank you for talking about the, the, the fat gold company.

Thank you for talking about your, your current views on AI, which we may be, maybe poke at a little bit more, a little bit deeper in a moment, but the Player of Games is by Ian M. Banks. I want to hold this up published in 1989 by a little Brown group.

Um, the cover, there's different covers. Uh, the most famous one actually is a blurry photo of a man's silhouette on a set of stairs. He stands obscure with his arms folded, looking at the reader cover comes in varying shades of blue with the author's name standing out.

I happen to have a black and yellow kind of speckled cover. Ian M. Banks, by the way, Scottish sci-fi writer who died in 2013 at the age of 29.

What is this book about? I'm going to pronounce this wrong, but Jamal Moragirgay, a skilled player of various games is recruited by the culture's contact division to participate in an alien game called Azad. Azad is not just a game, but a high stakes political contest that determines the social hierarchy of the alien empire of Azad.

File this one, Dewey Decimal Heads under 823.08762 for literature slash old English literature slash adventure fiction slash speculative fiction slash science fiction. Robin, tell us about your relationship with the player of games.

Robin:

Yeah, I will. I will.

For the record, Ian M. Banks died. He was in his fifties.

He wasn't 29, but still, still.

You know, incredibly, incredibly, way too, way too young. Um, it's really, it's one, I mean, no, no shortage of, uh, of, you know, tragic stories like that. But, um, he, uh, he was just way too young to the thought that he, you know, in just except for the roll of the dice and, um, some, some real bad luck, he would still be here writing more culture novels is just almost too much to bear.

Um, yeah. So let me situate player games just slightly in a, in a slightly larger context, then I'll, then I'll talk about the book in particular. Um, so Ian M.

Banks prolific author, um, wrote a lot in, in many genres, the genre that I'm most familiar with and the books of his that have meant so much to me are his science fiction books, um, which are interesting because they, they take place in a shared universe with sort of a shared history and, and, and you get to know it over the course of reading many of the books, but it's not a series. I mean, it's not, it doesn't have that sort of unbig, large-scale unfolding story the way that say the expanse books, um, by James essay, Corey do, or, or even, you know, foundation, the foundation series from Asimov or, you know, there's a, there's a bunch more, obviously you could choose as, um, uh, as comparisons. Um, so it, it has this odd status of being, I mean, a very developed far future science fictional world.

I mean, it is way out there. This is not, um, this is not merely Star Trek where we're like, Oh, look, these earthlings going out in their spaceships. No, nobody's ever heard of earth in the culture.

It's, you know, it's, we're just way out, way out there in the galaxy doing, doing stuff tens of thousands of years from now. Um, but it's not like you can pick up one and then book two and then book three and book four. It's still a more of a sampling platter.

You know, when you kind of follow your nose in terms of which books you're interested in. Um, player of games is the first one that I read. It was my introduction to this universe.

I've now read almost all of them. In fact, I haven't actually read all of them because, um, a couple, I just thought were pretty bad and pretty boring. Um, I've read almost all of them, but player games was my first and it is still my favorite.

Um, because it is, first of all, a, I think a very, um, uh, useful, practical and sort of seductive introduction to the culture, you know, to this, this creation, this imaginative creation of, um, Ian and Banks's. And also it's a story basically about games. Uh, and there's, there's, there's other, you know, novels about games or, you know, stories that have games at their heart.

And if there's a name for that sub subgenre, whatever it is, I think it's a really good one. Games are fun. They're interesting.

They're, they're kind of weird to think about. I think they, they bring out a lot of the best in, in thinkers, actually, you know, um, we, we see this with, uh, you know, uh, economists and physicists in the, in the 20th century. It's, it's weird actually how many of these people, these brilliant thinkers were like low key obsessed with all sorts of games and, and kind of as much as they thought about like protons or computers or black holes, they like thought about games.

Um, and the, that the interactions of these games and the complexities that could emerge out of the simple rules of the games became really, really rich and really instructive for all these, um, all these people. So player games has at its heart, this super weird game. I don't even going to try to characterize it cause it's weird and cool and wild.

I mean, it's a game kind of big enough to, to obsess an entire civilization in, uh, in this story. Uh, but it's cool. It's just, it's a great, it's a great thing to read about.

And, and the main thing I, to, to kind of wrap up my, my initial response, the thing that has meant so much to me about by the, the, the thing about Ian M. Banks and the culture that has meant so much to me is that I love science fiction. Uh, and having read a lot of it at this point, I now believe that there is science fiction and there is science fiction and the latter kind just goes bigger in terms of, uh, the scope in terms of a time and space it considers more, um, you know, that, that bigger, more muscular, um, more wildly imaginative science fiction is like not satisfied with like the solar system, earth and Mars and Jupiter. It's gotta go to like the boundaries of the cosmos and maybe to the end of time in the universe. Um, you know, another example, just, just to kind of frame it up another example of a, a book and a, and a series that, that play in culture level scale is the, um, the series that begins with the three body problem.

Um, I mean, this is big, big, big, big stuff. And I find that as a writer, I find that really, um, inspiring. It's, it's in some ways quite challenging.

It's a, you know, it's a implicit challenge. Like, Hey, can you imagine something this big? And you know, the answer is usually no, not quite, not yet.

Um, it's, it's really just, uh, it's, it's almost, it's an almost athletic feat to observe on the page. 

Neil:

Wow. Wow.

That's a great way to describe it. Um, so the phrase that I had written down, but you didn't mention, but maybe it's the same thing is, is world creation. 

You know, and, and so I was picturing this phrase, uh, world creation, creating a world and you do this of course. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, and you're writing so well. Um, I love that. I think it's Cory Doctorow review of, of Moonbound where he says like, this is quite a leap.

What you try to pull off and he lands it perfectly.

Robin:

Yeah.

And also I got to say, coming from the great Cory Doctorow, that was a, that was a meaningful, a meaningful assessment.

It is, you know, I will say, I mean, to that, to that, to that point, and it's, it's all actually very connected. My, my appreciation for banks and for the culture is not just sort of, you know, casual and like, oh yeah, as a reader, it is linked in deep with my writing and my aspirations for myself as a writer. Um, as I have read more of the culture novels and thought about them more deeply, um, and, and other science fiction too, um, that's kind of operates on that scale.

I have thought, you know, that's what I want to do. I want to, I want to be able to think that big and imagine that big. Now I am not at banks scale yet or three body problem scale.

Um, but Moonbound does represent a leap for me. It's bigger. It's much bigger than my, than my previous two novels.

Um, and I'm proud, I'm proud of the, uh, the way I kind of have pushed it out. 

Neil:

Yeah. And thank you.

And you know, a lot of people listening to this are, this is the only pockets in the world, buy in four book, lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians like that's our audience. There's all, there's all the best people in the world, all the best people in the world. And so I was curious, cause you do this, you're inspired by it.

It's formative to you. If you were, you know, I've only counted that kind of richness myself. I'm like maybe a junior reader, but like in like books like Lord of the Rings or cloud Atlas.

And, um, so if you were teaching a master's in world creation at like Syracuse or Iowa writers workshop, what would your curriculum look like? 

Robin:

Oh boy, that's a great question. Great question.

So not sure of the exact list, but I can tell you it would, it would, it would approach it a few different ways because there's, there's at least, you know, again, it's, it's multidimensional, but you can imagine at least one kind of two dimensional or, you know, one, a linear spectrum in the approach to this. Um, because often when people talk about world building and the, the, the creation of these, you know, rich histories and, you know, fantasy backdrops, they, they do think of Tolkien as they should. So we would read Tolkien.

And that's like, that's like one end of my, of my spectrum because it's explicit and it's the, you know, you can think of it as the writer who, you know, put all this amazing detail on the page. And that was only 2% of the detail in their notes, which are stacked up in a huge, insane pile, you know, on their desk.

Neil:

Oh really? I mean, that's like all the languages he created. 

Robin:

Exactly.

The history. And so you could ask, you know, and you know, the, the, it seems that probably not at Tolkien level, but it seems like George R.R. Martin was also operating on that end of the spectrum. You know, you could, a fan could email in and yeah, the Game of Thrones and say, um, um, the second day of this month, what was Sir Robinius doing?

And what color was the horse that he was riding? You know, and George R.R. Martin would probably ask his assistant or consult the files and say, ah, it was a, it was a brown horse, you know? Um, so great, incredible, you know, impressive.

Um, and, and often, you know, the results are quite, um, captivating, right? There is another approach and I think it's important because I think fantasy readers, fantasy fans, they often fixate on that, on that approach. Um, and it's, it really, Tolkien is just this, this like gravity well, just this, this just always kind of pulling in people's attention, people's affection and literally describing every element of a new place and then writing from that.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think, and I think part of, you know, part of the reason also people respond to it is that it's both, it seems fun to do and it is fun to do.

I mean, that's anyone who, for instance, has ever played, um, Dungeons and Dragons, you know, as a, as a game master and who's like kind of worked up a scenario and a, in a cool quest for their, their friends to go through, they've done a little bit of that world building and it's not, you know, they haven't figured every single thing out, but they probably drew some maps and made a list of the people you might encounter and you know, all this cool stuff.

And you realize like, it's really fun. It's a fun thing to do, but it's important to say that there is a whole other approach. Um, and I admire it just as much.

And I think it's just as important and it's what I'll call, you know, if that's, if that, that end is the explicit, there's the implicit or the sort of art, the, the world building of artful gaps. Um, and there's a lot of people who do it well. There's two writers that I think of.

One is Ursula K. Le Guin, um, particularly in her, in her series about Earthsea that begins with a wizard of Earthsea and another, another David Mitchell, our guest. I mean, just it's, it's one of the great, really one of the all-time greats that could have easily been on my list.

Um, another is, um, uh, M. John Harrison, who's a writer of mostly science fiction. I think some of books you, you could just call weird, uh, and or literary.

I mean, he actually is just a phenomenal, phenomenal prose writer. One of the best actually in any genre, um, uh, working today, um, in English, just, just outstanding. And in particular, um, again, I could select from, from his books, but he has a little trilogy and it begins with a book called Light.

Tremendous book. And it's, you know, we were talking before about imagination and scope. The scope of light is big, you know, it might not be quite culture level, but, but it's big and it's about people zooming around faster than light and doing weird things with physics and, and it hopscotches through time.

You know, there's sort of scenes that are set here in our time. And then suddenly you're like, you know, in the, on the edge of a throbbing pulsar, you know, on some, some strange space scene. And it's, it's dizzying.

Um, and the way, but this is, I think what's so interesting, the world there feels more than rich. It feels almost psychedelic. Um, and it's completely captivating, super cool.

I mean, you just, you kind of look around the page and go, wow, this is great. And this is M. John Harrison.

Didn't, didn't imagine a thing except the words on the page. There's no secret guidebook. There's no stack of, you know, drawings and maps and the names of all the planets.

This is a writer who, who kind of just goes straight at the language, um, and puts it down and leaves things out. I mean, sometimes there will be an omission and you kind of go, well, wait, am I supposed to know what that is or, or who that is? Or it'll just be someone or something that's mentioned once.

And then we kind of leave them behind. And rather than being like confusing or disappointing, it's absolutely delicious. I mean, it's just, it's phenomenal.

The energy that creates on the page. It's very different from the energy of the, the Tolkien esque, you know, info dump, which, which honestly can be plotting sometimes if you're not careful, if you don't know, definitely. 

Neil:

I read the first one out loud last year to my oldest child.

And it was like, it's a little rough.

Robin:

It's a little rough.

Yeah. So, so anyways, that's, that's, that's, I would call it implicit and explicit. Yeah.

It was interesting.

Neil:

So I, I don't know. I don't know if that would, the role is contained within the book. There's not, it's not drawing upon like a kind of a false history somewhere else.

Robin:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And, and, and also the sense that like, you know, in a way there's a recognition in the implicit, um, I think this by the way, applies to a lot of art, you know, and this is not just about novels. I think this applies to movies and visual art, all sorts of things. Um, there's the recognition that it's all co-created.

Um, I mean, that's especially true for fiction, for fiction to come alive, you know, it's words on a page. Don't do anything. A movie can play in an empty room, but, uh, words on a page are inert, um, until, until activated, um, by the, the imaginative mind of a reader.

And, and I think the implicit world builder recognizes how much country, the, the depth of the contribution that a reader makes and, and frankly, leaves a little more space for that. Um, I, I mean, I, I kind of like both ends of the spectrum and I think there's instruments from both that are, that are worth using. I think my heart, it's a little challenging to say, cause I do love Tolkien, but I think my heart is with the implicit world builders, the ones who say like, I mean, famously, uh, Ursula K.

Le Guin, she's got these great lines at the conclusion of, uh, the first Wizard of Earthsea book. She didn't know she was going to write more in that world. And, um, actually, no, it's at the beginning of the book.

It's at the very beginning. She says, she's kind of setting it up, you know, the story we're going to hear about this character. And she says, well, this was before he had sailed the dragon's run or, you know, recovered the ring of Ereth-Akbe.

And then it goes on and says some more stuff. And then the kind of story begins. And, you know, at that time, if people asked her, Whoa, like the ring of Ereth-Akbe, that sounds sick.

What's that? If Le Guin was Tolkien, she would have said, Oh, I'm so glad you asked, you know, and pulled out her notes. The answer was, I don't know, just sounded cool.

Um, and that's so fabulous because on the page I can report as a reader, you know, I read that book when I was young and have read it many times since on the page, it is freaking dynamite. Um, and it doesn't matter that it wasn't written down in some stack of notes somewhere. All that matters is that it's there on the page you encounter as a reader, you go, wow, cool.

And then you keep going with the story. 

Neil:

So that split between the implicit and explicit and this type of, you know, kind of curriculum, the reading list would kind of be how the course starts. And then for people that want to learn how to write this way, is there any early writing prescription you would recommend writing tools or ideas for how, I'm a nonfiction writer as an example, I've never written fiction.

Uh, I'm just looking for a way in here. 

Robin:

You know, I actually think, you know, I'd probably have to think about that some more and maybe I could come up with a better, you know, yeah, better kind of exercise sequence.

But, um, my instinct is to say that it's the same as the preparation for any kind of fiction writing, which is that you do just have to do it. I actually think again, it's, it's maybe paradoxical. I think, you know, if I was, if somebody said, I want to, I want to learn how to create captivating worlds, other worlds in my fiction.

And, you know, particularly if they, if they had in mind a game of Thrones or the Lord of the Rings, whatever my assignment to them would be to write something. And I'm not kidding here. I would say, I want you to write something four paragraphs long.

It's going to be a story or something. It's going to, it's going to produce an effect. It's going to be captivating and readable, and it's going to create a whole world.

It's going to conjure it. And I'm going to be in that. I'm going to go say, wow, so cool.

And you get one page. And I, cause I think that's really, really important to be able to do that and create that sense of otherness and of, and of, and of richness and of like the great Vista with just, you know, one or two or three strokes of the, the metaphorical, you know, brush of fiction. I think that's the key.

And then, cause you can always build up, you can build out from there. But, but I guess I would go so far as to say that if you can't do that and do that well, then, then your, your large scale attempt is going to, it's going to be a problem. Right.

Neil:

Right. Okay. That's, that's a great, that's a great homework assignment for anyone listening.

Because it's small and it also makes it much more intellectually manageable.

It might not be easy.

Robin:

That's important, right?

Yeah. I mean, this is my thing. This is about my, my thing about writing.

I actually think any, any kind of writing, of course I know fiction best, but I think it applies across the board. I think the most important thing anybody can do, especially as they're learning and getting better is finished things. To have a draft that is kind of half done or trails off or is constantly in that state of like, oh yeah, I've been working on that for a while.

It is, I mean, it's, it's better than nothing maybe. But it's fundamentally not useful because you can never show it to someone and say like, tell me what you think, because it's always like, well, yeah, it's not, what's not finished or like, oh no, it's not actually a whole thing or like, oh, I'm going to change that. No, it's gotta be finished and it's gotta be something that you yourself or other people can actually evaluate.

And the beautiful thing is that it is possible, totally possible and quite fun to evaluate a story that is four paragraphs long or two pages long or 3000 words long. Um, and that's how you get better. That's it.

You write things, you get an idea, you start it, you draft it, you revise it, you finish it. Yeah. Most important.

No. And you get feedback, difficult. And then you go and then you go again and again and again.

And that's it. 

Neil:

I really appreciate and like that. When I was running a blog that published every night, um, sometimes they were good.

Sometimes they were bad, but there are other books I've been working on for years and giant Scribner files are just like sitting there as 75,000 words about something. It was like, I'm not even done chapter two. I guess it's problematic for many reasons, but yeah, I can relate to the idea of wanting to finish it or ship it as Seth Godin chapter three of our show.

Okay. Now, uh, more conversation potentially about writing, but let's use your third formative book as a way in. And that would be the Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper.

C O O P E R.

Robin:

Look, I've got my copy here too. 

Neil:

Oh, look, they're identical. 

Robin:

Yeah, there are. Well, one of them's a little more loved.

Yeah. This is the, this is the copy. This copy I read when I was like 10 years, 10 years old.

Neil:

Amazing. Yeah. Amazing.

Published in 1973. The cover shows a drawing of a young boy in a long cape riding a black stallion with its front legs high in the air above a second boy in a red sweater sitting maybe tossed or fallen in front of a brightly lit open door with black birds flying all around paces across the top is the title. The dark is rising in Navy blue calligraphy with Susan Cooper in a white all caps sans seriff below on top of the book, there's a ribbon saying a Newberry honor book and below the dark is rising sequence.

Susan Cooper born in 1935, I believe alive today, age ninety

Went to Oxford where she was the first ever female editor of the school paper and then went to be a reporter for London Sunday times. She wrote her first book oversee Understone for a publishing house competition.

And it became the first book in the five book darkness and is rising series. This would be the second. What's the book about?

11 year old Will Stand discovers h e is the last of the old ones and mortal beings dedicated to defending the world against dark forces as the newest and youngest old one will must undertake a quest to find six magical signs that together can ward off the rising power of the dark file. This one, Dewey decimals are eight to 3.914 for literature slash English and old slash English fiction. Robin, tell us about your relationship with the dark is rising. I see. 

Robin:

This is this is another young read.

It's interesting that to, you know, two out of my three here are young reads. And I do think there's a reason for that. I wish this wasn't the case, but I do pretty strongly believe that no book can hit you as hard as a book you read when you're like between the ages of 10 and maybe 20.

You know, it's just your brain is boring. Yeah. Your neurons are all squishy and they just get they just get the impressions, you know, they really stick.

And I've got a whole a whole list of books I read in those years that still continue just to mean so much to me. This one is it's good in a lot of ways. When I think of it, one of the distinctions, you know, compared to maybe some of the others that are favorites is that, I mean, I can sort of recount the story.

I know I know what happens and what the situation, the scenario is, although it kind of gets fuzzed out. There's there's more books in the series and I'm like, yeah, then they go to find a guy with a sword. I don't know what I can recall and and kind of line up with just like perfect precision is the images.

And they are as like perfect and evocative and deep as like, you know, the classic freaking Rider Waite tarot card deck, you know, where you look at each card and you're like, I don't know, but this is doing something in my brain. It just is this this pile up of these like culturally resonant images. Susan Cooper, just a terrific writer of prose.

I mean, she's one of the people I would say like Ursula K. Le Guin, who just writes a wonderful, clear sentence so that kind of the prose becomes this transparent, you know, glass holding the story and the content and the images. But then her images.

And I would say this is more so than many others, including even Le Guin, which is which is really saying something. Her images are just perfect. I always want to use the word delicious, I think, as if it's like a bag of chips.

Neil:

And you're like, you know, umami a lot. 

Robin:

Yeah, I do. I do.

For some reason, the taste. Yeah. The taste of these things, really, that seems like the right analogy to me for some reason.

I think that makes total sense. Yeah, I could go through. But it's like it's like, I mean, a, you know, a red haired writer pounding down this this dark village lane, you know, between dark pines on a winter's day, a bright country, English country house, you know, totally snowed in.

But inside, it's bright and warm. And all these siblings are kind of running around and harassing each other while the parents are cooking in the kitchen. There's this you could call it the MacGuffin, except I think it's they actually are important, you know, to the story in the world.

There's this set of signs that our protagonist, young Will, has to has to assemble. And there are these like sort of like proto crosses. And so he can thread them on his belt like it was like Batman, you know, this sort of weird, like pagan utility belt.

And over the course of the book, he you know, he's given the quest. He's got to find them. It's very important to like the cosmos.

And he does in all these different situations, but they represent the elements. You know, there's one for iron and there's one for stone and there's one for water. There's one for wood and a couple more.

And it just is like, I don't know. Those are like it's like it's like Susan Cooper just so clearly could see the keyboard in front of her. I don't mean the computer keyboard or the typewriter keyboard.

I mean, like the like the piano keyboard and the keys are like myth. I mean, we've been talking about myth a lot. It's myth and it's legend and it's, you know, vibe.

And it's just all ghosts and castles and swords and King Arthur. And just I mean, everybody kind of everybody kind of plays not everybody, but a lot of people play that keyboard. I don't think everybody sees it clearly and and or plays it like with that virtuoso command.

And and Susan Cooper does and did. It just it's awesome. 

Neil:

Absolutely.

It is awesome. There's a really famous quote from this book. It's the most popular quote when you look online.

Every man has a last choice after the first. A chance of forgiveness. Turn, period.

Come to the light. I was just struck by the concept of light, you know, in life. You actually use that.

You used light in a couple of the the images you just cast for for us. And I know it's a trope across many stories, but I just wondered what light looks like to you in life or more broadly to you. What are the elements of a good life?

Robin:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, those are those are kind of two different questions. The light I actually think is profound in the context of this conversation, talking about books, readers, libraries, bookstores, because reading is, among many other things, reading is the empire of light.

There's I think it's hard if you just imagine some weird alternate history where I don't know, maybe human culture got real weird and everybody around the whole world decided there's no artificial light. That's no, that's not we don't do that. And so there were no candles, no lanterns, no lamps, no LED bulbs, no phones, you know, that could like make their own light.

None of that stuff in that world. I actually think it's kind of hard to imagine fiction being an important medium. I think it's so crucial to reading that we that we have these bubbles of light and they can be private and they can be quiet and they can, you know, be at night and all this all this other kind of stuff.

I don't I don't think I don't think the sun is enough to enjoy books and comic books and newspapers. And so I have often thought of reading as being kind of like it kind of has traveled with light and with humankind's mastery and kind of command of light. And so I am I'm very I'm very grateful for for all the all the ways we make light, you know, that that can't you know, it doesn't have to be freaking high tech stuff.

It's as simple as simple as the candle. But that's it's good stuff. And I think I think readers ought to recognize the the debt they owe to to, you know, all the ways we we make and manage light.

Neil:

You even said in your very first ever newsletter in 2020, what is a book? I'm fond of Craig Mott's argument that what makes a book is its edges to which I will add a book requires collimation. 

Robin:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The collimation of light. The idea is light is said to be collimated when all of its photons are pointing in the same direction. Yeah, that's right.

Neil:

So there's reading is I wrote down reading is the empire of light.

The next question is, you know, to you, because I've heard you talk a lot about animals and birds and nature and fear a lot. And so and but you've also described yourself as techno hyphen, lots of different words at the end of that.

Robin:

Yeah, I have.

Neil:

You know, you're you got your you got an Apple Watch on, I think, right now.

Robin:

I do. I do.

Neil:

You've got, you know, headphones plugged in. I think your shirt says. 

Robin:

Yeah, this is my this is my homage to that here.

I'll back up so you can see this is wonderful. One of my favorite, favorite T-shirts is actually printed by the writer and musician Claire Evans. And it's she made the ENIAC six, the original original computer programmers look kind of like a punk rock band.

And I just I love it. Beautiful. 

Neil:

Yeah, it's a great shirt.

So you've got a really, you know, you've tilted heavily into the techno technological world. You're writing, you know, thousands of words long essays about the ethics and morals of AI. Yeah.

And you also speak very confidently through your books. And as I as I watch you online about like how, you know, nothing that we create through computers will ever match the flight of a hummingbird and so on. 

So I and you make you're physically making olive oil, you know, what are the elements of a good life to you? 

Robin:

You know, I always enjoy kind of recognizing some of those what seem like contradictions. Right. You know, sort of like, well, hey, well, which one is it?

And I remember it always makes me think back a little bit to when I first published Mr. Penumbra's 24 hour bookstore. And, you know, because that's a novel very much about the interplay between old technology, you know, books and printing. And there's a lot in it.

You know, if you don't know it already, you learn a lot about the deep history of books and typography. But there's also a ton of technology, you know, and you can make my clear interest in, you know, data visualization and programming and, you know, ebooks and all that kind of stuff is very apparent on the page as well.

So people would often, you know, to be kind of clever, you know, you know, or kind of, you know, provocative in a interview or something would ask, well, OK, well, which which is it, Robin? You know, do you print books or ebooks, you know, the paper, paper or the Internet? And I just always had to say, like, there's no decision or rather I choose all of it.

I'll take. Yes. Yes, please.

I'll take one of each. And I actually think it's really important to insist that there there is no contradiction. There is no dichotomy.

We are we are human beings. You know, the world and all these interesting things are there for us to explore and enjoy and and evaluate. By the way, it doesn't mean that it's all good or all healthy.

But I guess this has been true ever since I was a kid, you know, the same period of time that I was, you know, vibing out on the book of Greek myths and, you know, reading The Dark is Rising. We had a early, early Macintosh computer down and down in our basement was a Mac plus. And I would go down there and I would use that Mac plus and I would like draw little pixel figures and I would I would write stuff and print it out, you know, and make weird little books.

And I saw as a as a, you know, naive child, I saw no contradiction there. I just seemed like it seemed like it was a bunch of cool stuff for me to explore. And I guess that's how I still feel.

I just I you can't nobody nobody can get me to choose because it's just all interesting. Yeah. 

Neil:

A bunch of cool stuff for me to explore.

It's all interesting.

Robin:

Doesn't that sound by the way, but it doesn't that sound it's that's I often very often I'm I feel very grateful to both my parents, of course, for just creating the space and the life, you know, that made that possible, but also to that community. It was a it was a cool place to grow up.

It was, you know, safe and interesting. And, you know, there was kind of enough to do and there was a great public library. And, you know, there's the library in my school and that I that I had that feeling is really not something to be taken for granted.

Neil:

No, absolutely not. It's what affords us the ability to be able to play with these curiosities. And it has been the fertile ground for your massive mind, which we're enjoying the fruits of through your books and your blogs and your zines and your olive oil.

So to close things off, I got just a few fast money round questions here. Let's wrap things up. I will avoid the hardcover paperback audio or e-question because we kind of covered it at the beginning.

Robin:

Yeah, I could only pass on that one. 

Neil:

But how about how do you organize your books on your bookshelf? 

Robin:

Yeah, if my, you know, if my if my camera here wasn't was mobile, I could I could show you because I've got huge shelves on both sides of the of the room here.

Neil:

What room are you in? It's for most people are listening to this.

They won't be able to see. But I see so much happening in this room. 

Robin:

It's a mess.

Yeah, that's that's fair. You're very diplomatic. Yeah, I'll do the description. Robin stands in a room that seems to be cluttered with a strange assortment of machinery, stacks of papers, weird bibliographic detritus and on the back wall, a neon sign currently dark. That is the neon sign from the pages of Mr. Penumbra's 24 hour bookstore. Yeah, this is my office, which I call the media lab. And it's really cruddy. But in a way, I've become sort of proud of the fact that it's like not for show.

I feel like I have sometimes seen other people's, you know, creative offices in person or maybe, you know, in the background of a video. And yeah, and they're really they're so nice. I mean, they're beautiful.

And all the all the all the surfaces are clean and everything. And I'm like, I don't know if you do any any real work there. I don't know if that's really where the magic totally.

Neil:

You've heard the Albert Einstein quote, probably. If you know, I have a desk is the sign of a cluttered mind. Then please tell me what the sign of an empty desk is.

Robin:

Yeah, that's great. That's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. So anyways, that's where I am. But but yeah.

Neil:

So so do you organize the books on the shelves? I love that phrase, bibliographic detritus. 

Robin:

Yeah, detritus.

I do. I do a rough I do a rough chop. I do believe in thematic shelving, you know, basic subjects.

So I've got a science fiction shelf. I've got a kind of nature and ecology shelf. I've got a hard, weird science shelf.

I've got actually the shelf that's been most active lately because of the printing is kind of the book history graphic design shelf. And those kind of, you know, those grow and sometimes we'll take over part of another shelf within that space. It is pure chaos.

It is random. It is just books. I just don't I cannot manage.

I'd like, you know, alphabetical or, you know, Library of Congress system. But it is I used to actually used to be even believe it or not used to be even more of a mess. And I and I found it was with the number of books I have, it was getting hard to when I would think of something, I'd be like, I want to see that book.

And then I would turn into like an afternoon project to find the book. And I was like, this is not going to work. This has got to be this collection of books.

If I'm going to have this many books, it's got to actually be a tool that works for me. So I've gotten much better, actually, about about kind of keeping books in the right place. And yeah, yeah, perfect.

It really works.

Neil:

What is your book lending policy? 

Robin:

Oh, yeah, I'm I actually am a bit of a what would you call it?

And I'm extreme on this end. And I don't think it's going to be what you expect. I think that if you lend a book or borrow a book, the expectation should actually be that it's never coming back.

I just think it's like, and you know what, if it's like if it is that precious and you're like, no, no, no, this needs to come back. I do not think you should be lending it. I think I think the right I think the healthy, generous modality is, you know, either either I just give someone a book and say, yeah, keep it, keep it, enjoy it.

Or I say you can bring it back if you want. But it's this is not this is this is not a lending library. This is this is we are we are in full circulation mode here.

Neil:

Yeah, exactly. I love that. Does a book come to mind that you wish you could read again for the first time?

Robin:

Oh, yeah. You know, well, I'll tell you, that's a great question. Interesting sometimes to just note literally the first thing that leaps to mind.

And I will say the book Hild by Nicola Griffith, which is kind of kind of almost fits in actually to The Dark is Rising in terms of Hild, H-I-L-D. It came out a few years ago and it is it's big. It's a fat book.

I mean, it probably is 600 pages. It's a it's historical fiction. It's set in England in like the I don't can't remember if it's like the 800s or 900s.

It's really a quite a remote, you know, bit of English medieval history. Yeah. And it's it's just one of those books.

I truly believe you have to read it either in wintertime or like, I don't know, during like during a rainstorm or something. You need to be home and cozy for like a period of time so that you can just dive into this book and like not come out until it's over. It's so completely 360 like you are in this world.

It's full of detail. The voices are great. The characters are great.

And you know, I I'm sure I could read it again and and I probably ought to. And it'd be a good time. But I remember so vividly that first time reading it and just true.

I mean, as as cozy and comfortable as like a big blanket, you just were like, I'm just so happy to be here. And that's a great that's a great feeling. Yeah.

Neil:

Hild okay, I’ll Check that out.

That's great. I didn't ask you about your writing process per se. Yeah.

But with how much stuff you're doing is do you have a like a set practice or is that day and time or way you write or it's not?

Robin:

I don't I don't do a day and time. My you know, my it's interesting the way it's kind of connects to the to the manufacturing and the olive oil and some other things to my year has become really seasonal was not always the case.

You know, back years and years ago, I worked in an office and, you know, the rhythm was kind of more weekly, like many people, I think. Now it's very seasonal, you know, in the sense that there is this period of the year, really about three months in the fall and winter when I mean, that is not a time for writing. There is not a spare minute for me to sit down and, you know, work on Chapter seven of my manuscript of whatever it is, because it is the olive harvest and it waits for no one and you got to do it all then.

And rather than that feeling like a burden or like a problem, it has actually felt really clarifying and liberating because you're like, oh, good. I know exactly what I need to be doing. There's no question.

And I kind of don't have a choice in the matter. But then as kind of the complement to that, I have discovered that there can be other times of year that are almost like the season for writing, you know, the season for zine printing. And so kind of making the modularity less about hours of the day or even days of the week and more about like weeks and months of the year.

It's been a change for me, but it's been one that's been just really, really, I don't know, energizing and it's felt really productive. I mean, we both publish on the lunar calendar. Part of what relieves me about the lunar calendar is just that hint back to time being measured in circles as opposed to lines.

It just feels so much more relaxing. And it's not up to you. I mean, yeah, part of it is like, hey, I didn't make it up.

It's the, you know, the world is telling me that now is the time. It is. It's great.

Neil:

I like that. 

I like that as a challenge for all of us, which is how can we tap back into natural cycles in our lives a bit more. Do you have a favorite bookstore, Living or Dead? Yeah, you know, I do.

Robin:

It's a bit sentimental, but the sentiment is powerful. So it's like the freaking warp core, you know, in the enterprise. Green Apple Books, they have two locations in San Francisco.

I mean, I still go there all the time. They've been great allies to my novels and to me just in a really meaningful way. And back actually around the time this kind of comes full circle because we were talking about, you know, years ago when I first decided maybe I could call myself a writer in public.

At that time, I was living in a neighborhood in San Francisco called the Richmond, and my apartment was just around the corner, just like two blocks up and one block over from the main, the largest Green Apple Books on Clement Street there in San Francisco. Amazing bookstore, big, weird, shadowy and open till 10 p.m., which for San Francisco is like kind of late. Actually, that's like that's like quite that's that's really luxurious.

And so I would go there at that time and I would just usually kind of toward closing time and I'll kind of just wander in and I would always look at the new books, particularly the paperbacks. You know, as we as we discussed, I really like those paperbacks and I would just see what was new and I'd see the little bookseller notes describing, you know, how great these books were. And I would look at the titles.

I would look at the author names. And I mean, honestly, I would just like dream of being there on that shelf. And I would say, oh, man, that'd be so cool.

You know, I want I want that to be me. I want that to be something that that I made. I mean, I did that a lot.

I think I probably I don't know, maybe some bookseller there was like worried about me. They're like, oh, is that guy OK? But it just was a very meaningful place to go and kind of see the goal.

And frankly, you know, of course, I bought books and I and I read them and I loved them. And it was really just an inspiring, yeah, an inspiring destination. The paperback table at Green Apple Books turned into a vision that you manifest.

Yeah, that's true. And my books, my books have been on that on that exact paperback table so that it just means a lot to me. 

Neil:

Absolutely.

Well, thank you, Robin, so much for your time, for your thought, for energy. The very last question I have written down my page is the one I always close with, which is if you know, this is a show with a lot of writers and book lovers. I know writers is the first of kind of three words now in your bio.

But if you could give one last hard fought piece of advice to those out there who are aspiring to write, is there one thing that would come to mind that you would share with us to help close off this conversation? 

Robin:

Yeah, I would say that, you know, in some respects, storytelling across different media is kind of the same, right? You know, you can imagine certain principles or approaches being broadly useful.

I think fiction has at least one really important and liberatory difference, which is that the only thing a work of fiction has to do, and it is mandatory, it has to do this one thing, but the only thing it has to do is just make you want to keep reading and make you want to read to the next page. And what's awesome is that there are an infinite number of ways to do that. I mean, you can read, obviously, and I'm sure you've had many of these conversations on the show.

You can, lots of people will tell you how to do it and they'll say, oh, you got to make your story work this way, or you got to like sequence it out like this. So you got to create this sense of conflict. Oh, you got to create these kinds of images, you know, all that kind of stuff.

All true. However, you could also not do any of those things. Anything like this is so true.

Anything can work as long as it works. I mean, there's examples of truly the most unbelievable books. Like, um, I think Nicholson Baker actually is a, is a great example for kind of the outer limits of like, that's a novel.

Like it'll be literally he's, he's written novels that like take place in someone's thought process for the like 45 seconds they're on an escalator and they're, and they're captivating because, because, you know, there's a version of that story in that book that is really, really boring and maybe unreadable, but Nicholson Baker made it work because the voice on the page is wonderful and smart and funny and interesting.

And anyway, I just think that anybody who wants to write and wants to, you know, maybe get published by a publisher, large or small ought to really take that to heart that like, it doesn't mean that it's easy, but it does mean that like anything you imagine, any approach, any structure, any voice can work. And like, what an exciting thing. And there's like, it's like staring out at like a huge cosmos of, of stars and planets.

And you're like, yeah, you could go to anyone, just, uh, just choose and then, you know, put in the work to, to actually make it good. 

Neil:

Absolutely. Uh, I love your books, Robin.

I find them dizzying vertiginous. They really do, uh, are seductive. Uh, they're challenging.

I find my mind being very stretched by them. And, uh, it's, it's fun talking to you because you're, you go very fast. You, your brain is like going a mile a minute and you have really big thoughts.

And thank you for kind of stepping down to the level of this show, talking about your childhood books. It's been a really inspiring and engaging conversation. I really appreciate it.

Robin:

Well, hey, thank you. Thank you for your, your kind invitation. It's really, it's great to be here.

Neil:

Hey, everybody. It's just me, just Neil again, hanging out in my basement with, thank with all of you from around the world to the wise, brilliant and wonderful Robin Sloan. Oh my gosh.

That guy thinks so fast and he moves so quickly. I don't know if you could hear my brain, like trying to catch up with them the whole time. So many quotes jumped out to me in that conversation.

Uh, hard to pick favorites, but I'll choose a few on the ethics at AI. I like what Robin said. I think if a person feels like they want to be in the world that cares, it's really important to hold the line and take that responsibility seriously.

I feel so puzzled and confused by what's going on with AI. I just read this book, Empire of AI, which you would know if get my book club. If you don't go to neil.blog, you can sign up for my book club. And, uh, it's by Karen Howe, H-A-O. And it really opened my eyes to the negative sides of AI. Not just the environmental stuff.

I mean, they're building data centers now that are the size of Manhattan that you can't live within 20 miles of because they're buzzing all day. And by the way, they take, they only run on distilled water. So they also need like huge purified water plants near them.

It's not just the environmental stuff. It's not just the human impact. Like there's people in a lot of developing countries, which she calls the global South in the book that are doing a lot of the sort of harder jobs, like assessing whether content is like, you know, sexual assault or not.

And they have to look at it to help the AI learn what's appropriate or not. But then people are getting traumatized. It's also just the sort of unethical way that the industry started.

And yet, simultaneously, even though my eyes are open to all that, here I am using, you know, Clode and ChatGPT and Grok and Gemini and all these new software pieces because I'm like, oh, this could be a quick, easy way to like find a six minute baby bok choy recipe. Like I have six minutes to make it and rather than looking on Google. So I find myself both using it and also not liking it, but I'm trying to figure out where I land on that.

Robin's wonderful essay on AI on his website, we will point to in the show notes, by the way, if you go to threebooks.co, you can click every chapter, we have a full notes and summary of everything we discussed. The essay is called I believe, Is It Okay? And it's just a wonderful take on whether or not there's, it's ethically appropriate what we're doing with AI right now.

That doesn't mean it will stop. But it's just a really nice way to sort of see some of the ethical sides of this thing. All right, that was just one quote.

I kind of went on a big rant there. And then how about this one? I think that if you lend a book or borrow a book, the expectation should be that it's never coming back.

I just like that as a principle. We had a babysitter over at our house last night, Leslie and I got our weekly date night. It's not always weekly, but we call it a weekly date night so that we try to always put it in because even if we don't feel like it, even if we're too tired, and if we don't think we have the time, when we go on a date, just the two of us, of course, it infuses our the energy of our total system, our total family system with what's needed in order to make a busy life with four boys run and hum.

And anyway, as we said goodnight to our babysitter, I noticed on my bookshelf I have this mass market paperback shelf. I noticed there's this metal rail on the top of my ceiling. And I started realizing that only mass market paperbacks can sit on that rail because something like four-fifths of the book sits on them and one-fifth sits off them.

So if I was to hit them, they would fall off, but every other book would completely fall off. And I looked up there and I said, oh, Lisa, we've got two copies of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And she's like, oh great, I've never read that book.

I've always wanted to read it. I said, oh great, you can have it. Yes, I had two copies specifically to give away.

By the way, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was, of course, chosen by Robin Dunbar in chapter 132 as one of his three most formative books. So I gave her the book. I never need to see it again.

Even if I had one copy, would I give it away? I'm not sure, but point is, Robin's point stands. All right, another quote.

I think this one is good for writers. You know, whenever we have a novelist on the show, as we've had with David Mitchell, as we had with Mohsen Haman and George Saunders in chapter 75, I really do want to try to get some writing craft tips. And the tip that we got out of writing from Robin is, the only thing a work of fiction has to do, and it is mandatory, is just make you want to keep reading.

Three quotes from the wise and wonderful Robin Sloan, who adds three more books to our top 1,000, including number 558, D'Aulaires  Book of Greek Myths by Ingrid and Edgar Dolaire. Number 557, Player of Games by Ian Banks, B-A-N-K-S. Note that Ian is spelled I-A-I-N.

And then number 556, The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. Three more books that will be added to our top 1,000. If you want to read the top 1,000, i.e. a list of every single formative book mentioned on the show, just go to threebooks.co slash, you guessed it, the top 1,000. And they are there. We are getting close to 500 now. We are getting close to 500 now.

That will be halfway down our list. But of course, the pace slowed because from 2018 to 2023, we were releasing a new chapter, every new moon and full moon. Now we're just releasing a chapter every full moon to help preserve my sanity as I try to read all these books and interview all these people.

And of course, we aren't abandoning new moons. We're just dropping classic chapters on them. Most recently, of course, the classic chapter was with Blue Jays announcer Cherry Howard.

And the next classic chapter will be coming out from Robin the bartender. Mixing, you know, big names, small names, interesting. Always trying to go for interesting.

Thank you to you. Thank you to Robin. Thank you so much for being here.

It's a real pleasure, and I really appreciate your time. Okay. 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 a chat just for me and you just to hang out.

It's the after party of the show. Three bookers reunite. We get together.

We play your voicemails. We read your letters. We talk about a word of the chapter and we just hang out a little bit.

So let's kick it off as we always do by going to the phones.

Robin

Hi, Neil. I live in Boston and I am a huge fan of the show. There are many days that three books is the only thing getting me through my very long commute.

And I just want to thank you for everything you're doing. I just caught up on an old episode that you did with Katie Mack, fascinated by the conversation that you were having around language and kind of the connections between words and reading between the lines. And I wanted to recommend one of my most formative books, which is called Babble by R.F. Kuang. This book lives rent free in my head. It is one of the best things I've ever read. And it has kept me thinking many, many months after I finished reading it.

So I highly recommend you check it out. I think even just reading the description, you'll see that it is a fascinating book about language. And as someone who's trying to learn a second language, I have a whole new appreciation for the weak ties between words and the power they have as you move between one language and another.

So I highly recommend you check that out. And as you were talking with Allie Ward about potentially capitalizing on some of the work you're doing here, I just wanted to throw out a recommendation for some cover to cover club merch. So I would be proud to wear a cover to cover club sweatshirt or tote bag.

So definitely recommend you look into that as well. Thank you so much. And I look forward to the next chapter.

Neil

Thank you so much too. I believe it's Kate from Boston. I think it was Kate, the voicemail cut out like kind of right when you were saying your name.

So I'm hoping I got the name right. What a really generous and kind voice. Now, I'm really glad that you kind of resonated with Katie Mack.

Katie Mack, of course, was our guest, the astrophysicist. We've only had one astrophysicist on the show. Our guest back in chapter 112.

She was really mind expanding for sure. I remember my first question was like, where are we? So what do you mean?

I'm like, well, where are we? And then she's like, she's like, well, obviously we're in the, and then she explains the solar system from such a cool perspective. I want to just shout out the book you recommended, Babel, or The Necessity of Violence, an Arcane History of the Oxford Translator's Revolution, a 2022 novel of speculative fiction by R.

F. Quang, K-U-A-N-G, set in a fantastical version of Oxford in 1830s England. The story goes up to 1840.

It's thematically similar to The Poppy War, his first book series. The book criticizes British imperialism, racism, capitalism, and the complicity of academia and perpetuating and enabling them. Whoa, an alternative reality, fantastical fiction, kind of a nice pairing a little bit with Robin Sloan here, which Britain's global economic and colonial supremacy are fueled by the use of magical silver bars.

Okay, we will add this to our TBR, Babel, an Arcane History by R. F. Quang, a number one New York Times bestseller.

I really appreciate the suggestion. Now, if you're listening to this and you're like, I don't have the courage to call. What am I going to talk to Neil about?

Please do. I love your calls. It's 1-833-READALOT, R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T.

If you're waiting for a push, here it is. Anything's fine. You can suggest a guest.

You can tell us one of your formative books. You can disagree with something that somebody said, or give us your view or your take. There's no wrong questions.

There's no wrong voicemails. And of course, as always, if I play your voicemail, drop me a line with your address so I can sign and send you a book. As I will do from, I think it's Kate from Boston.

If it's not Kate, I will find out your proper name when you email me. Neil at globalhappiness.org. And that's also where you can send letters for the show, too.

Speaking of letters for the show, we opened with a letter for the show. Should we do another one? Let's just see a couple of the comments.

Jean Chrétien got a lot of comments. Marky Mark says, Wow, Neil, thanks for making this one happen. Yes, a very special man, not without faults, not without mistakes.

But after the arena, he only became wiser and more ministerial. That is to serve, to keep serving one another. Thanks for serving us with this great law reform interview.

Avec Jean! And then I had a comment here from Jackson Kirchis who says, On behalf of America, I offer you a collective apology. Smiley face, crying face.

To which I replied, by the way. I replied to that one because it was public on YouTube. I said, You got Mr. Chrétien pretty riled up. But in his memoirs and in many interviews, he talks at length about the long trusting relationship between Canada and the U.S., one I have personally had the pleasure of feeling for really all my life, including when I lived in the States from 2005 to 2007 and Boston. Hopefully the vitriol blasted towards Canada is just a momentary blip because we really do need each other. And I really do mean that and feel that way.

Like all Canadians, we have friends in the U.S. We have family in the U.S. We travel to the U.S. more than any other country. We buy stuff from the U.S. more than any other country. The countries are very connected.

And so I think the whole kind of Trump spew about, you know, making Canada the 51st state, but also just annexing us and just like, you know, tariffing everything that we've been shipping there. It was just like caught Canadians by surprise because we have assumed and taken for granted the strong, healthy relationship forever. Longest, I'll remember as a kid in school, learning that Canada and the United States had the longest undefended border in the world.

And I think that is probably still true today. No walls up here yet. Also appreciate the suggestion to do some merch.

You know what, that is something I have been looking into. If you are in the secret club, which by the way, if you want to be in the secret club, you have to call our phone number 1-833-READALOT. You get a secret code, you enter it on a secret website, you get a secret address, you mail a secret envelope, and then you get onto our analog club, which does include, I mean, I have sent out three books, bookmarks, and three books, merch, you know, a few times.

And yeah, it makes me think maybe we should do something on a larger scale. Also seeing what Robin Sloan is doing with zines, how he's turned his website into like kind of a little shop. Maybe I should do a little Shopify shop on 3books.co and start selling, you know, elements of the show and things like that. It might be fun and I appreciate that. If you have more thoughts on that, like what kind of merchandise you might like, what should it say? Should it say our tagline at the end?

You are what you eat, you are what you read. Should it say the book was better? I always like that, but then people say that's kind of judgy and presumptuous.

And you know what, really? Was Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton better than the Steven Spielberg movie? You know, so I have to think about the phrase, but it would be fun to do that.

And I think it will be something I look into. All right, thank you so much. Thank you so much.

We've done letters, we've done phone calls, and now it's time for the word of the chapter. And of course, for this chapter's word, we could do a SoundCloud. I mean, he had so many big, giant, beautiful words, but I think for this one, let's just go back and play one word from Mr. Sloan himself. Here we go. It doesn't have the same umami as the Greek. Yes, indeed.

The word is umami. Umami. Umami.

Umami. U-M-A-M-I. U-M-A-M-I.

Of course, it is Japanese in origin. It means literally deliciousness. It came from 1908.

It's called a neologism, a recently coined word because it's only 117 years old. And it means delicious, right? Umai.

U-M-A-I means delicious. And me, the suffix means quality or essence. Coined in 1908 by Japanese chemists to describe the distinct savory taste of kombu dashi.

But wait, wait, wait, wait. People taste umami through taste receptors that typically respond to glutamate and neoclutides, which who knows what those are, which are widely present in things like meat broths and fermented products. But you probably know that they were able to mimic this taste with MSG or monosodium glutamate, the chemical that, you know, when I was growing up, it was like Chinese restaurants were famous for using MSG.

And then there came a whole spate of Chinese restaurants with giant neon signs saying no MSG. Of course, the MSG stuff tasted better. But now you don't see MSG on ingredients lists anymore, probably because it's not healthy for us.

And yet it naturally occurs, not MSG, but the idea of umami flavor in things like shellfish, including fish sauce, preserved fish like sardines and anchovies, dashi, which I think is a family of stocks used in Japanese cuisine, like the basis for miso soup and broth soup, tomatoes, mushrooms, hydrolyzed vegetable proteins, meat extracts, yeast extracts, kimchi, cheeses, and soy sauce. Yes, thank you to Kanui Ikeda at the University of Tokyo in 1908 for scientifically identifying umami as a distinct taste. Then it wasn't until the year 2000, only 92 years later, where researchers at the University of Miami identified the presence of umami receptors on the tongue.

And then more recently in 2006, less than 20 years ago, where other research libraries found similar umami receptors in the stomach. Isn't it amazing that we know so little about anything? Really, it isn't an amazing that we know so little about a thing.

We come up with these labelings and the norms. I mean, you remember us talking to Susan Orlean about that, how she categorized her shoes and so on. And we talked about Katie Mack, that was a conversation that came up earlier in this chapter.

And what is it like 80 or 90% of outer space is labeled dark matter, i.e. even the smartest astrophysicists in the world have no idea what is composing outer space. We don't even know what outer space is made of. And now I'm reading this book called Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake about fungi.

And it's like, he says in the beginning of the book that there's like, you know, tens of thousands of species of fungi in the world. Well, we only know like a few of them. Like we don't even know who we are.

As Tim Urban, I guess I think it was chapter 22 says, we don't even know what the universe is. So when you're having a bad day or a stressful day, as I have, and you have, and we all have sometimes, just remember, no one really knows anything. No one knows anything.

We don't even know what taste receptors we have in our stomachs. We don't. We don't know what AI is going to do.

We don't. We don't know where we are. We don't.

We don't know why we're here. We don't. We come up with purposes and reasons and stories and theses that help us navigate and, you know, kind of quiet the sort of ambiguous static that our lives will be flooded with.

As George Saunders said in chapter 75, the sheer volume of inchoate motion that is sort of the blur of reality that we decipher and distill into something that makes us whir and tick and call friends and go for a run and make nice dinners. Yet we're here and in and across space and time, you are here with me and I am here with you. We have this moment together.

Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for listening to chapter 152. Thank you so much for being on the wild ride that is the Three Books Project.

It's an art project. It's a labor of love. I love being here with you.

Drop me a line, neil at globalhoppings.org. Drop me a voicemail or a voice note, 1-833-READALOVE. Let's keep the conversation going.

Thank you all so much. And until next time, remember that you are what you eat and you are what you read. Keep turning that page, everybody, and I'll talk to you soon.

Take care.

Listen to the chapter here!

Chapter 151: The Holderness Family conquers content creation by corralling chaos

Listen to the chapter here!

Penn:

Listen to the mustn’ts, boy, listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, and won'ts. Listen to the never-haves and listen close to me.

Anything can happen, child, anything can be.

Neil:

Hey, everybody, this is Neil Pasricha, and welcome or welcome back to Chapter 151, 51, 51 of 3 Books. You are listening to the only podcast in the world by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians.

We believe in no book guilt and no book shame. We believe in reading what you love until you love to read. This podcast is meant to provoke and push us all back into the written word.

We think there is great wisdom to be gleaned from not scrolling all the time, but just getting back into books. This chapter's letter comes from Coralie from Forrester, Australia, who writes:

Hi, Neil, I stumbled across your podcast 3 Books by accident only recently. It has given me the intellectual stimulation I have been craving for a long time and encouraged me to start reading again because this was one of my favorite pastimes before I had children.

Thank you again for the fantastic podcast. From Coralie L. from Forster, Australia.

I looked up Forster, by the way. It's on the Gold Coast above Sydney, below Byron's Bay. I guess that's the Tasmanian Sea. Is that what that's called? Beautiful. Thank you so much for writing in.

As always, if I read one of your letters on the air, drop me a line with your address. I'd love to sign and mail you a book. Yes, even to Australia.

You can also call us anytime at 1-833-READALOT, R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T. All right, now let's get into Chapter 151. I'm very excited to let you know that the Holderness family is here.

Penn and Kim Holderness, the Holdernesses, the winners of Season 33 of The Amazing Race, although that's not kind of like a suffix on their bio with how much stuff that they have done. I mean, they have created videos that have been viewed two billion times. I mean, I've watched their videos. Leslie's watched their videos. We send them around all the time.

They have this wonderful Under the Sea parody all about ADHD. They have this Frozen parody that's called Where Is My Phone? And my favorite, I guess the first one that I kind of really loved and sent to everybody and got into was the Hamilton Mask Up parody, which came out right at the beginning of the pandemic when people were like struggling and confused about wearing masks. Should we wear masks? Should we not wear masks? Well, cue the Holdernesses who use Hamilton music to say, I am not throwing away my mask. I am not throwing away my mask.

It was a wonderful video. It's got millions of views. Many of their videos have millions of views. They got eight million followers online. They host the weekly Holderness Family Podcast. I don't know how they put out at such a staggering pace such good content, but it's a wonderful show.

If you don't know it, download it, subscribe to it, follow it, check it out. And also they are the authors of one of my favorite books I read all of last year, which is called ADHD is Awesome. We're going to talk about it a little more on the show, but essentially Leslie and I were going through the conversations and diagnoses with like psychologists about one of our children.

And it was pretty obvious that I also have ADHD, but ADHD isn't the right name for it. We're going to talk about better names for ADHD, the secrets of making great comedy, the benefits of turning 40, premarital counseling tips, Shel Silverstein's best poems, the benefits of introverts, and of course, Penn and Kim Holderness's three most formative books. This is going to be a four-way conversation.

My beautiful and lovely wife Leslie is joining us too. Let's flip the page into chapter 151.

Kim:

Yeah, I talk about it all the time. I talk about it to anybody who'll listen. I have a friend who is in therapy with some severe anxiety, and she's very, and as I was, I was very resistant to prescription medication.

And then finally my doctor was like, why? Because I'm afraid I'll need it for the rest of my life. And so this is what goes through my head.

And like, what if there's a zombie apocalypse and I can't get it? And she, I said that out loud. And she's like, I feel like you're going to have a lot of other problems at that point.

You were so right. Give me the medication. And it has been, it has changed my life, but I'm also in perimenopause.

So that's, that's, you know, different too, but I just want my kids to hear it. I want anybody to hear it. You don't even need to be on it forever, but if this is something you're struggling with, get help.

Yeah. Get on some meds.

Neil:

Beautiful. And thank you so much for your openness and vulnerability as always. It's part of what makes your podcast.

So like I saw many people send me your podcast all the time. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. My friend Fred is always like, you know, he listens to like Hard Fork and Ezra Klein and then he'll send me a Holderness family. I was like, Oh, this is a bit out of character.

And he's like, don't pigeonhole me. You know, like he, this is the thing. You appeal to so many people, so many different perspectives.

And you guys were kind enough to give us three formative books each. As you know, the show's format is to talk about which books kind of help shape you in some way for each book. I'd love to take a quick 30 seconds to introduce it to our listeners or viewers.

And then I'm going to ask each of you to tell us about your relationship for the book that's yours. And I didn't know where to start. So I thought I would choose the oldest kind of book.

I thought we could start with the oldest, raggediest one I have in our house. Is that okay to start with this one?

Leslie:

I think this is a toilet paper bookmark.

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah. Just inserted.

Penn:

So where'd you read that is what I want to know. What was going on? What was happening when you read that?

Leslie:

Speaking of refined.

Penn:

Didn't you say at the start of this that people were out of toilet paper somewhere in your house? 

Neil:

Toilet paper bookmarks inserted for Penn's favorite poems, which he was texting me. I don't want to tell you where I was.

Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein published in 1974 by Harper Collins. This is a white cover with black font images. The top of the cover has a line illustration of a thin crumbling sidewalk stretching across the cover.

On the left is a sign that says edge, keep off. Next to that is a dog struggling to stay on the sidewalk. And to the right are two kids peering off the ledge.

The title, Where the Sidewalk Ends, is in a bold cursive. Centered below the drawing on the smaller says the poems and drawings of Shel Silverstein, who lived from 1930 to 1999. Born in Chicago, died in Florida.

He's an American writer, cartoonist, songwriter, and musician whose works have been translated into 47 languages and sold over 20 million copies. He even wrote the 1969 Johnny Cash song, A Boy Named Sue. What's it about?

It's a poetry collection, outrageously funny, deeply profound, a lot like your videos. And you meet a boy who turns into a TV set, a girl who eats a whale, a unicorn, and a, you know, and a blowth. Your favorite one about the peanut butter and jelly sandwich is awesome.

This one, Dewey Desmonds, can be found under 811.54 for literature slash 20th century American poetry. Penn, please tell us about your relationship with Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein.

Penn:

Well, I don't think I held it until it had been read to me two or three times, because my mother read them to me. She, that one, and also A Light in the Attic. But she, that was, it's so crazy, Neil.

Like, yesterday, I picked it up for the first time in I don't know how long to read it. And I'm a visual memory kind of guy. And so many things came back to me.

The wallpaper on my room when I was a kid, the bunk bed that I had in my room, how my mom, who was tall, had to, like, crouch to get under the bunk bed where she sat on the bed when she was reading this book. What she looked like, she had this, like, crazy perm that was, like, bordering on an afro.

Leslie:

My mom had one of those, too, 

Kim:

As all moms had in the 80s.

Penn:

Yeah, it made her even taller. And just the cadence of her reading me these poems. And so she didn't go in a straight line.

She would just pick a random page and she would read it. We didn't go from start to finish. I would sometimes request her to read some of them more than once.

By the way, I should give you some reference. I think I was probably five.

Neil:

And where were you?

Penn:

What's that? 

Neil:

Where were you, sorry? 

Penn:

Probably five years old.

Leslie:

Yeah, where in the world were you? 

Penn:

Oh, I was in Durham, North Carolina.

Neil:

You're where you are-ish.

Penn:

Yeah. Yeah.

Neil:

So you're five, you're reading this, you're in the bunk beds, your mom read it to you. And so when you read it yesterday, which you texted me saying, I just read the whole book cover to cover, like, an hour after I texted you. I was like, wow, holy cow, you read that fast.

And you had pointed out that I think some certain poems jumped out at you as well, right?

Penn:

Yes. I remembered almost all of them. Wow.

But here's the crazy thing that happened, Neil, that I was not expecting, is I think my mom picked up very early that when I listen to poems, I hear music. So they don't come to me as spoken word, they actually become songs. So I started remembering some of the songs that were in my head.

There's this poem called The Musntn’ts, because I didn't know a lot of songs at that time. So that was Mary Had a Little Lamb.

Neil:

Oh my gosh. Because that's a poem that Leslie knows really well.

Leslie:

Sing it for us.

Penn:

Listen to the mustn’ts, boy, listen to the don'ts, listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, and won'ts. Listen to the never haves and listen close to me. Anything can happen, child, anything can be.

Neil:

Wow. Via Timothee Chalamet, Bob Dylan, too. Like that was like a little bit of a cold. No, that was good.

That was it, man. And that's that is on page 27. That is the poem that Leslie read at her cousin's christening when she was a kid, having made it the very first formative book chosen on this podcast in March 2018.

You guys share a formative book on here. 

Penn:

Oh, that's cool.

Leslie:

Yeah, my memories of it are very similar to yours, like memories of my parents reading it to me and just that cozy, like so loved and everything's well in the world feeling that kids get when they lie in bed with their parents and read.

Penn:

Did you get the vibe that there was those kind of wonderful ones? And then I think Shel, when he wrote this was like, OK, we're going to let the kid imagine. And then we're going to sneak in some shit that's going to make you not pick your nose.

Because there's this I'll never forget. There's this poem and I believed it forever that if you stick your finger too far up your nose, someone will bite your nose off.

Kim:

Like your finger off?

Penn:

Sorry. If you stick your finger up your nose too far, someone will bite your finger. 

Leslie:

Like there's someone waiting.

Penn:

Yeah. Do you think I don't know if you remember this. And it's just a picture of like an old dude with his finger up.

Leslie:

Yeah, there's one where like an alligator goes to the dentist and the dentist is pulling out all his teeth and then the alligator just like chomps the dentist and eats him up.

Penn:

And if you watch too much TV, you turn into a TV set. Yeah.

Neil:

Yeah. And you singing, by the way, is like genuine music to my ears. Like I have, you know, I mean, you have such a great voice.

You're so musical. And so you singing that to us is really profound. I wanted to just stop and say that so that you know how much we appreciate that.

And if ever and any time in this conversation you feel like singing, always feel free.

Leslie:

We used to play. We used to play that game growing up where all of a sudden we would just like everybody would be singing like it was a musical like please pass the peanut butter. Yeah.

Penn:

Is your life better that way?

Leslie:

We should do the podcast like that.

Neil:

Oh my gosh.

Kim:

Except for I would have to do interpretive dance because I do not sing. Okay, there we go. 

Leslie:

Important that we're doing a video.

Penn:

Yeah, she could do the like the John Ralfio singing. If you guys watch Parks and Rec, there's this character called John Ralfio, and he ends every sentence with like this terrible. We do that.

Leslie:

Well, I feel like I mean, Penn, I think you and Shel Silverstein have a lot in common that there's such like creativity and wisdom, some of the wisdom being like, you know, that maybe threats that you might pick your nose too much, but also some of it really be like there are some good nuggets of wisdom that he kind of weaves into his into his poems. And I think you guys have that in common, like poking fun at truth, commenting on lies, like imagining endless possibilities, having fun with the way that you're saying what you want to say, you know, what would you think? What do you think your secrets are for distilling knowledge in this way or like teaching in like a creative, accessible way for kids, but also for the masses, right? Like your videos aren't just for kids, they're for for adults now.

Neil:

Much more than 47 languages and 70 million now, like you guys are in billions and hundreds on those things. So yeah, you're doing it? You're striking the nerve? Like how? How do you do that?

Penn:

He was just really specific. And everything that he wrote about it wasn't what maybe with the exception of the one that we just that I just sang, but you know, a king who's obsessed with a peanut butter sandwich, a guy who, you know, throws a stone at the sun, and the sun goes out, like he just he finds like you said nugget, like that's such a good term for it. He's like something he starts with something very simple, like a guy's taken, you know, an alligator goes to the dentist.

And then he just lets his mind wander into what happens next. And he probably does that before he makes it rhyme and before he draws the picture. But he starts with something really, really simple.

And then the other thing is just to try to try to find a way. And Kim's really good at this too, try to find a way to look at the everyday and what's going on, and then make it a banger, like make it explode into something that's really, really funny, and relatable and hysterical. There is, Oh my God, there's a poem called Sick.

And I don't remember the entire because it's long, but it's I cannot go to school today.

Leslie:

Yeah, I remember.

Penn:

Mary Alice McKay or whatever her name is. And then just bitches for two pages about everything that's wrong with.

And then the last line is what? What's that you say? You say today is Saturday.

I'm going out to play. Is that not the most relatable thing you have ever heard as a parent?

Neil:

Yeah, totally.

Penn:

That's a great just started with the concept. I bet you his kid probably had something similar that happened who's like, came into the room and said, I'm really sick. And the guy's like, it's Saturday, and she ran outside.

Leslie:

I love that idea that you're starting with the idea and then coming up with the rhymes or the way to communicate it after because I think that is really almost like instructive in how to get started, right? When you have it, when you have a creative idea, it's like, what is the really small little nugget that you want to say? And the how to do it is what really takes longer and you know, is where the creative work comes into play.

Penn:

Yeah, I want to give a shout out to my mom, because she knew all this. I think she knew that this was music. I think she knew that this was rhythm.

I think she knew that like I was learning. Maybe, maybe I was like learning what I was supposed to be when she like, kept coming into my room and reading this. 

Neil:

She wasn't a teacher?

Penn:

She was a teacher. She, but for the most part, she was a mom. She was a teacher before us.

She was like Michelle Pfeiffer in dangerous minds.

Leslie:

I love your mom.

Neil:

That's the exact metaphor. I used to describe Leslie all the time. She teaches inner city down in Toronto. 

Leslie:

Before I had kids. Yeah, I'm gonna be going back in September. But yeah, like I love motherhood coming first, right? It sounds like your your mom prioritize that too.

Neil:

Before we get jump into Kim's first formative book, is there any other poems here? Because I flagged them all with TP, as you know, that you want me to hold up to the camera for you to either say or sing if you want to no pressure.

Penn:

Yeah, no, I mean, there's so many good ones. And the pictures are so good to that point. Because he drew and and what do you got there?

Oh, yeah. Oh, this is so good. The Loser.

So okay, this was my first realization of what ADHD looks like. And it was about a mom who said I'd lose my head if it weren't attached, which my mom literally said to me over a large portion of my life. And so this guy, like actually loses his head, and he can't find it.

He looks all over the place. And then at the end, he's like, I'll just sit on this rock. And then if you pan up a little bit, the rock is in fact his head.

Don't you think like a lot of his drawings are, they go back and forth between very neutral and like expressionless, kind of like that head, and then just completely outrageous. And I just thought I thought Silverstein was such a dynamic drawer. Oh, yeah.

Okay, this is the king who ate so the king.. 

Neil:

Page 84.

Feel free.

Penn:

The king likes peanut butter sandwiches so much. It's all he eats. And then he, he makes a decree that it's the only thing you can eat in his kingdom.

And it's it's, he ends up his mouth gets jammed shut, like you can't open it. And they finally take a bunch of people in pride open and the first thing he says is I'd like another peanut butter sandwich. 

Neil:

I love your descriptions of them.

I'm gonna have to put the actual lyrics text of these in the show notes. So for those that want to see I can tell me the whole poem like that was a three page poem. It'll be on 3books.co. It's an amazing book. It's an amazing book. Shel is an amazing guy. And like, what's the deal with the author photos on this guy's books?

Like, how do you interpret these?

Kim:

Very adult.

Neil:

So it's like, it's like he's so yeah, he's like sitting with a bare foot facing the camera, a guitar leaning to him. He's darkly looking down and sour and like, you know, there's like a dark shadow. It looks sinister almost like he's like, he's like the villain of a Superman film.

Penn:

He was in a relationship with someone who was like, I really want to take your picture for the book.

Kim:

Yeah, he's like, it's sort of a childish poem book. And they're like, not anymore.

Penn:

Yeah.

Leslie:

Well, this is the best book.

Kim:

This is now gonna be on wiki feed.

Neil:

Do you have a preference on what we start with Kim for you?

Kim:

No preference.

Neil:

Okay. Okay. So why don't we start with the one and only and thank you, Penn.

That was fun. That was a fun little deep dive into Where the Sidewalk Ends. And so cool that you and Leslie share a formative book.

So the next book is Kim's, one of Kim's formative books, which is Quiet, The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain. So the cover here is like this kind of concrete gray like painted kind of almost grim looking cover.

But Quiet is in a large red serif font. The Q is overly large with a curly kind of bottom. And the subtitle is in the middle of the Q.

I don't know what that middle part of the Q is called. But I must research that for later. The top of the book says now in its seventh year in New York Times bestseller list many more years since then, quote by Gretchen Rubin author of the Happiness Project “superbly researched, deeply insightful a fascinating read.”

Well, what is this book about? Basically, Susan Cain who was like, you know, a Harvard educated lawyer like she hadn't written a book before. She basically spent years of her life researching introverts.

And so she's born in 1968. She's 57 years old. She argues that we dramatically undervalue introverts and she shows how much we lose in doing so. She charts the rise of the extrovert ideal throughout the 20th century and explores how deeply it has come to permeate our culture.

She also introduced us to successful introverts from a witty high octane public speaker who recharges in solitude after his talks, to a record-breaking salesman who quietly taps into the power of questions. Passionately argued, superbly researched and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet has the power to permanently change how we see introverts and how they see themselves. Dewey Decimal has filed this owner 155.2 for philosophy and psychology slash differential and development psychology slash individual psychology. Kim, please tell us about your relationship with Quiet by Susan Cain.

Kim:

It's interesting. In looking at the books I chose. I definitely, it's like when I read them, that it was they kind of came in a very impactful time 

Before this, I don't know that I had the language to describe who I was. I think we had done a pre before we got married. We did the Myers-Briggs test like you do that like mandatory pre-marriage counseling.

Neil:

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Before you got married, you did a mandatory pre-marriage Myers-Briggs?

Kim:

And guess what? Guess who did it? Penn's dad, who was a preacher who married us. It was deeply unfair.

Penn:

Like a home game for me.

Kim:

I know, it was really hard to have your future father-in-law. It was very, it was very neutral, but I thought it was honestly, it was really helpful because he was the first person to say like, okay, you're INFJ.

You are an introvert. I'm like, I'm not an introvert. At the time, I was a news reporter, which is a very public job.

I felt like I lived a pretty big life, but there was a profound difference between Penn and I and one of our bigger issues in our relationship to that point is he always, we lived in New York City, and he always wanted to be out, out, out. I, after a week of work, literally I had no more words to say. Like I couldn't form words and he would want to talk and really like he was just like the biggest love bug.

And I'm like, honey, I don't have any, I love you deeply. I'm out of words. Like I've used all my words.

And so I thought that was a problem. I thought that I was flawed. I felt shame and guilt over that.

And then, you know, when we had kids, I saw that my daughter tended to be more like me. And I was trying to coach her, even as a toddler by like, okay, no, no, no, you got to, you got to have to go and make friends.

You have to like get yourself out there and, you know, preschool. I'm like, oh, go, go with that group. Like go make friends.

And, and when she was quietly happy to play by herself, you know, and play dough at the table. So I was always really worried about her. And I, I read Quiet and I had the opportunity to briefly meet Susan Cain at a conference last year.

So that was, I was like starstruck. And I was like, oh, wait, not only am I not flawed, the world needs me. Our relationship would not work if, if we were both extroverts, the world would not work if everybody was an extrovert.

I think her part of the work she's done is to educate the world that the world needs extroverts. But I think it was really profound to me. And it's, I felt like I had evidence to give myself permission to erase that shame.

And I could be proud of being an introvert. In fact, we've made some comedy and some sketches about it. And those have done really, really well because people, you know, the more specific you are with your, you know, comedy, I think it works better.

People relate to it so much. So I was just really grateful for that book because every page, I was just nodding aggressively. I'm like, yeah, see, I mean, it was a little discouraging.

I mean, one of the, I'm remembering that she did some, you know, interviews at Harvard business school and it appeared like everybody at Harvard business school was an extreme extrovert. And so that was, you know, it got a little discouraging to think like, okay, if I want to be a titan of business, I have to be an extrovert. But then I'm like, do I want to be a titan of business?

Not really. So, I mean, I thought she did a beautiful job with it. I'm endlessly grateful for the work that she did.

And I just am thankful for the language that it gave me. And it helped me honestly parent my daughter who took a Myers Briggs and came out an extrovert, which is, that was, that was shocking.

Penn:

Yeah. That happened. That switched in high school.

Kim:

In high school. I think COVID.

Penn:

For sure.

Kim:

I think COVID profoundly changed both of my kids' personalities, if that can happen. 

Penn:

They switched. 

Kim:

They switched and my son has now become the introvert, which is really funny.

So anyway, but it's helped me, like, I'm not trying to coach either of them in, you know, to be louder, you know, or to, if they want to chill by themselves, like that's cool.

Leslie:

Yeah. They say these things are stable, but don't you feel like they do change throughout life? Like I know like motherhood made me much more introverted.

Kim:

Yeah. And I think that Penn, my big, huge extrovert. COVID helped him sort of appreciate. The silence.

Penn:

The silence.

To quote Depeche Mode.

Kim:

I think he'll admit he's become more introverted with age. He still needs like to get energy. He needs to be around people and he needs to socialize and all that.

But I think he values quiet time more. Yeah.

Leslie:

How do you guys balance that and making sure that you both, you know, have your needs met and also like honor your differences?

Penn:

Yeah. It was a big topic of our marriage counseling.

Kim:

Yeah. And this is very helpful.

Penn:

Yeah. It was, um, you have to understand that this is a, it's not a personality trait. It's a source of energy.

Like it's how you get your energy, right. It's not, um, it's, it's, it's not, I want to do this. It's I have to do this. In order to refuel, she needs time alone, she needs time to recharge, as crazy as this can sound to people. Extroverts sometimes need a big group of people to recharge.

It like recharges your battery. It can seem exhausting from time to time, but it fills your heart and your soul with what you need.

Kim:

Yeah. Because I love, I mean, we do a lot of public speaking. We had a book, we had a very, um, like we had a book tour with people who would line up to meet us, which was so flattering.

I loved every minute of that. I love, uh, the public speaking part. I love all of that.

I do have to sleep all day the next day, but that's fine. But I know that, you know, and so that's what I'm like, okay, I'm going to sit here and hug and love every moment of meeting 1000 people because they're, they're one-on-one conversations. I actually did a lot better with it because it was one-on-one.

He struggled more because it was one-on-one.

Whereas he's good to talk to many people at a time. 

Penn:

So just give you like a breakdown of this. When we went on our book tour, we would have, we'd speak in front of a big group of people and that would be an hour.

And then it was supposed to be like an hour afterwards. And so that first hour, I am incredibly comfortable. And then it's, it's, it's two to three hours of one-on-one conversations with people.

Kim was unbelievable at that. I got, I finally, I think we realized like that was tough for me. And it's because of the, of the one-on-one instead of the.

Kim:

Well, I think there's a whole ADHD thing going on too. So I think that, I think honestly having my father-in-law be the person who did this, like it was very generic. It wasn't, it wasn't any sort of deep dive into trauma or anything like that.

He looked at his son and said, listen, Kim is going to need after, uh, after a busy week of work, Friday night she's going to need to stay in. And then Saturday you guys can go out. And that became our thing.

We lived in New York City. And so Friday night, we stayed in Saturday night and we went out with friends. And so I, it was, I, I need time alone, but I also need time with him on the couch.

So we have just been able, and now that our kids are a little older, we do have more flexibility with that. So we can do that. So I think we just simply balance it.

And there are times I have to say, and he's so generous with this, we will be invited like, hey, let's go down the street. Like we have this like restaurant we always go to down the street and there's a bar and he's like the mayor of the place. He'd be like, Oh, let's go, go grab a drink.

And I'll say, you know what? Cause I know if we go in there, everybody will want to talk to him because he's the mayor. Like you should go, you should go sit there and you should have fun because I know..

Leslie:

And I'm getting in the bath.

Kim:

Yeah. Cause if I also go, it will just be me nodding and sitting and appreciating all these people, but they really just want to talk to him. So he'll go and not, he'll not be like, well, I wish I had the type of wife that would go with.

He's like, no, this is just the, this is the way it is. Um, right. 

Penn:

Yes. I have no notes.

Kim:

So he doesn't judge me for it. I don't judge him for it. He gets the time. He needs to get the time. 

Neil:

This is like a mirror. This is like a mirror.

We also took marriage counseling before our, our wedding. One of the things she also said to us was Neil, uh, are you okay going out by yourself? Leslie, are you okay staying in by yourself?

Like that was a dawning insight for us.

Leslie:

I was like, heaven, like you're going to go be in a loud restaurant and I get to stay home and be in like the dark candlelit quiet house, please. Like that sounds perfect.

Neil:

Oh my gosh. It was unbelievable.

Leslie:

Whereas I remember you saying like, Oh, like I thought it would be that I would be like leaving her at home and that she'd be feeling like disappointed to not come along. And I was like, Oh no, like it's better for me to be home alone if you're out. Cause then nobody's going to talk to me.

And like he gets to go sit at the bar and chat with everybody and meet people from different places and different accents.

Neil:

Can you start calling me the mayor, I like that.

Kim:

I love that we go on vacation and we have this kind of, you know, secret contract in our marriage. And I don't know when it started, but I never want it to end is, he wakes up and immediately goes to get me coffee. Even if there's coffee in the room.

Leslie:

I'll call you mayor, If you do that. 

Kim:

Yeah. He, he gets me the, he's like, no, don't drink the room coffee.

Although the room coffee's fine. He goes to get me like good coffee. Like he'll find the best coffee shop nearby and he'll come back and he'll have, he's like, I just met the greatest guy.

Like he'll come back with like a best friend. And I love that about him. Cause, he finds a friends for us.

But then like, then I don't have to do that.

Penn:

Unrelated. Also while I'm down there, I take a dump because you should never poop in a hotel room. It's basically like pooping in the middle of the couch because there's no ventilation.

Kim:

Yeah. So it goes, does his business. And I feel like that's the secret of our marriage.

Leslie

Do you exercise then too?

Penn:

No, I gotta get a coffee. Usually I order the coffee and then like, it takes a while for the coffee. 

Neil:

So where are you taking the dumps though?

In any rogue coffee shop.

I do always think about that. I'm like, like, Oh, there's always a lineup for the coffee shop bathroom. Like it's just weird.

Penn:

Yup, it’s me, I’m in there if you are wondering who it is.

Neil:

Like, I feel like lineups for toilet stalls are just generally depressing to me. Like, especially like O'Hare or something like, you know, the urinals are free, but there's a lineup for the stalls. Cause you know, that always, but I like that you're saying you shouldn't shit where you sleep.

I think I'm hearing, I'm hearing you say.

Kim:

Well, just, just, he, he is such a good partner when traveling. He just really gives me my space.

Leslie:

You're making me think of on our honeymoon. Um, we discovered, and it's good that we discovered this early in our relationship that like, it's quite perfect for me to just sit in the beach chair and like, look out at the ocean and read my book. And Neil wants to like explore the whole property of the whole hotel, meet all the different people, figure out which restaurant we might go for dinner.

Penn:

So Neil, did it take you a while to not take that personally? Like, cause for me it did. You know, like she doesn't want to hang out with me, like, and do all this stuff.

Neil:

Definitely. Yeah. Yeah.

This is, this, this is like, I'm, I'm, again, this feels like a total mirror. Like, I can't believe how, and like, you're sitting on the same side of the screen as me. Like, it's like, I feel like this is like a Mortal Kombat mirror match of couples counseling.

Like, this is like, wow. And I also want to throw in, do you have your Myers-Briggs?

Kim:

I'm INFJ.

Penn:

I'm a E straddling SNN FP.

Neil:

Okay. Okay. Okay.

And I'm an ENTJ. So this is interesting. And then also just to throw a couple of things in, uh, Jonathan Fields, our guest in chapter 26, host of the Good Life Project and Tim Ferriss have heard them chatting about this.

Both say they don't do book signings after their talks. Interestingly, as introverts, I thought that was interesting that they say no to that. I also want to point out that my favorite leader ever in the history of my life is Dave Cheesewright, who is a huge introvert, but also was the CEO of $800 billion and 120,000 people at Walmart International.

So there is this thing about like Jim Collins level five leadership that is that humble kind of quiet leader, but it's much more rare, to your point. And I did go to Harvard business school and yes, it's like, I'm in Harvard business school, fantasy football group chats.

I happen to be the most talkative one in that chat, but everyone else, it's all blue.

 Okay. And I have questions from Susan herself here for you, Kim.

Yeah. Okay. So I texted Susan when you chose her book.

And of course she said, oh my gosh, I love them so much. I just met them at a conference. They're brilliant.

I love their stuff. I love their videos about introverts. Like she was gushing about you.

Similarly, she was our guest in chapter 102 at the very first live chapter of 3 books at the 92nd street Y in New York, she says, and there's followups here. I guess my question for Kim would be how she feels about all the public performance she does for her job, because there's definitely a subset of introverts who find performance to exist in a happy space of its own. Kim's a natural performer and so gifted, so she could be one of those. But if she's not one of those though, I'd be curious to know how she handles the problem of her chosen art form causing her an energy depletion and or anxiety.

Kim:

Susan must be listening to my therapy sessions. So I do believe that my chosen work is what I was meant to do. I love, there's something inside me that heals when I create something out of nothing, even if it's my morning journal writing or it's I've written a script or something like my, it is therapy for my brain to create something.

And I love that this, what we get to do is we get to put on these glasses and look at life through these lenses of, is that funny? You know, like I just started, I took one mahjong lesson and I was like, Penn, this is like, this is so, this, this whole, like, and I had a lot of friends had started playing mahjong. I'm like, this is so funny how all these like white people are playing this like traditionally ancient Chinese game.

And so the next day he wrote a parody of like mahjong to the thong song, which is really funny. But, um, I just, I love that process. So we joke that we're still going to be doing this in the retirement home.

And there's like, the plug is going to be outside out of the wall and we're going to be posting it to no one. I think that we, I think that is very healing for me. I do love the stage part.

I love that more than I love speaking on stage. I love when we get to perform on stage, I don't get nervous. In fact, I'm like, I wish I were a bit more nervous.

So I feel like I could prepare a little better. I love all of that. That being said, where I, where I feel like I wish I could have, if we had to do it over again, I wish we had not used our real names.

I wish we had not.

Neil:

Oh, that's interesting.

Penn:

A lot of people don't.

Kim:

And a lot of people don't. And I think I wish we would have, but then I don't know if it would have worked. Like we, like our house was on there.

And so people know where we live. And so I think where I feel, and this probably isn't strange, but I feel, um, we are, I love that we feel relatable to people, but then there are people that come to our house, which is such an intrusion. And I think that because we aren't, I don't think we're like, we're not like JLo or Jennifer Aniston, right?

Like we're not like actual celebrity celebrities, but I think people feel comfortable enough to come up to us in times when we're with our family. So I think Penn, he handles that very well and he loves talking to people.

I struggle with those moments because I feel like I want to be like, I am more shy. It's not the right word because I'm not shy. I'm more private.

I am more private. I, we don't actually put everything in our life on the internet. So I am more private.

So that is the part I'm struggling with, but I have created it. So I can't really put that, you know, put it back in the box, but that's the only part I struggle with. So I am that interesting sort of dance of an introvert of like, I do enjoy this, but it does take me, if we do like, we shot videos yesterday and it means we have like our crew in our house and we're, I'm kind of on all day.

Today is like a wipe out day for me. Like I'll be productive in that. Like, well, we're doing this, but then like, we have a call, we have a few calls later.

Maybe I'll do some writing, but it is not a day in which I could be incredibly creative. And I know that about myself now. So I just have like a plan.

Leslie:

You know your ebbs and flows.

Kim:

Right. A rhythm to my recovery. 

Neil:

Oh, a rhythm to my recovery. That's a great way.

Leslie:

And even just the word recovery, right? Like that, that being that creative and extroverted and on requires recovery.

Neil:

Whereas for me, for Penn and me, it might be like, it gives you the energy to do another.

Kim:

On a day after a shoot day, he's firing on all cylinders. He's editing. He's thinking of other ideas and I just need a pause.

Penn:

By the way, whatever you just said was really good because you got blue pen. Like this isn't so Neil, when something's really good, he takes out this blue pen and he writes it down. I want to see what's on the page when he's done, but he's only, he's only done it like six or seven times.

Neil:

Well, like, like, so I go to nuggets. I've been using, I've been using the same pen since 2001 when I was a assistant editor of golden words at Queens University. And I have stayed with the same pen since, which is the V5 high tech point by Pilot, even though once a year it explodes in my pocket on an airplane.

Leslie:

I think it's more than once a year.

Neil:

Oh God.

I thought this was going to be an ad, but then it exploded in your pocket.

Leslie:

He still wears his favorite, like light white jeans that have pen exploded all over them because the jeans are so good. It's amazing. He's like, maybe they look tight.

I don't know.

Neil:

Two things. I got a lot of crotch problems with my pants too. I got, uh, so el Robbins, uh, once told me that she started, this was years ago.

She said, she once told me that she started, um, staying in different hotels than where her speaking engagements were. And I remember asking her like, how come? And she said, cause you mentioned like the lineup is not only, um, people that love you, but also people that, you know, the lineup, the energy, the time, the three hours is also people that have or identify with ADHD.

She's like Neil, I've equipped people with the five second rule. I've equipped people with saying five, four, three, two, one, and coming up and doing the thing that they're scared of coming to talk to me. So she created that little separation of staying in a different hotel, which I thought was interesting.

I don't do that myself for speaking engagements, but I thought, oh, that's a cool little escape plan. If I ever needed one. And the other thing that made me think of was chapter two of the show.

Our guest was Frank Warren who created the website postsecret.com. And of course, as he launched postsecret.com, he put his home address on it. And so his wife, Jan said, Oh my God, we can never move because everyone's mailing us postcards.

He's out of a million postcards mailed in with people's confessions. And then eventually finally one day they moved, they moved and it wasn't as big a deal as they, and he, especially thought. He just changed his address and everything and put a forward thing on permanently.

Not the two week one, but like he talked to the U.S. postal service and they like agreed to do like a forever forward for him or whatever. So it was like, he was like all those years. I thought I couldn't move, but I could.

I thought that was interesting too, but we've only done 2 out of 6 books. So why don't we move on to book number three, which of course is back to you, Penn. And we are going to go with the one and only Dune.

I am talking about, I am talking about the Dune. The Dune. Dune of course is.

Penn:

Yeah. Yeah. He's got so many pieces of paper.

Kim:

Poor Neil. I really admire the fact that you're doing six books. Bless your heart.

Penn:

Dune is a book by Frank Herbert that feels like it was written this year, but it was written in like the sixties.

Neil:

1965 by Tilton Books. So many covers. My thick, giant mass market paperback, which you can grab from me if you don't mind. There's a retro illustration of orange, red, and yellow gradient dunes.

Frank Herbert lived from 1920 in Tacoma, Washington to 1986, only age 65 American science fiction author, best known of course for Dune and it's five sequels. Holy cow. Five sequels.

By the way, Dune is the bestselling science fiction novel of all time. Set in the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of the boy, Paul Atreides, heir to the noble family tasked with ruling an inhospitable world where the only thing of value is spice. File this one or 813.087 for literature slash sci-fi slash space opera. Kudos to Melville Dewey for having a space opera subcategory. Um, Penn, please tell us about your relationship with Dune by Frank Herbert.

Penn:

Yeah. First of all, shout out to Timothy Chalamet and Zendaya for making this now like popular to the Gen Zs because it's a popular thing now, but I read it when I was, I read it when I was 12 and I read it with guidance from my dad. It's so crazy.

The two, I didn't realize this when I gave you the books, but Where The Sidewalk Ends was my relationship with my mom. Dune was my relationship with my dad. 

Neil:

Blue pen!

Penn:

Uh, he, when the original David Lynch movie came out, he urged me not to watch it. He said, it doesn't cover enough of the book. I'd like you to read the book and I want to help you.

So I never watched that one until I think I was 45 or something.. The original movie.

Um, and it's because he wanted to, I think, wanted to explore some of the themes with me. Um, and a lot of them are things that I took with me for most of my life. Some of them very good.

And some of them probably have seeded some paranoia in my life, which I'll talk about in a second. Um, my dad, uh, and I's main interaction was at a place called Cape Lookout, which was this Island, uh, off of the coast of North Carolina that you can't get to without, um, a boat. And then once you get there, there's no, um, there's no actual electricity.

You have to bring your own food. You have a generator that you can turn on, but you got to bring your own gasoline. Um, and everything you take with you, you have to take back because there's no trash, right?

So I lived in a very conservationist mindset on every vacation that I took from the time that I was six to the time that I went until the government took away our house. And, um, Dune really is like a, um, it's a book about conservationism. So this, this King goes from this world, he takes his son, this Prince from this world of abundance, this like beautiful land to a desert.

Um, and the reason they go to the desert is because of this spice that you were just talking about. But really most of it is him becoming one of essentially embedding himself because his family's assassinated in the world of these people where water is the important thing. Well, it's the only thing. And they don't talk about this quite as much in the movies, but when you die, you give someone your water, your every bit of water leaves your body because there's no water in the desert.

When you, um, if you meet someone, if you spit on the floor, it is, it is the most respectful thing you can do because you're giving them a small amount of your body's water. They will, they wear these suits that take like half an hour to put on and they have to get adjusted a certain way where all of your sweat, all of your saliva gets recycled and then you drink it gross, right? That's gross.

But, um, my dad always believed. And the reason why he took us to the ocean so much, that this was all temporary if we don't learn how to take care of it.

Okay. And so fast forward to where we are now and icebergs are falling off and it's getting hotter every summer. Um, this was, this was where I, I think first learned at a very early age that, um, you get one world and we seem destined to fuck it up.

Um, so I know that's a little bit terrifying to say. Um, and then the other thing is he, he taught me about AI when I was 13 years old. Right.

Neil:

So you were 13 when you read this.

Penn:

So yeah, we had like an Apple two GS or so we had a decent computer. I was obsessed with computers, but the reason why they mine this spice and why it's so valuable in Dune, and they don't talk about this in the movie really either. Maybe they will in the later ones but it's the only way that you can securely navigate through space without using computers.

And long before this book had started in the timeline of Dune, um, mankind has abandoned computers because of something that's happened, uh, that made them untrustworthy. And, uh, well it's that, that whole AI rebellion from The Matrix and whatnot.

Kim:

So Penn is, uh, has his tinfoil hat on with all the, um, you know, the proliferation of AI really is. Whereas I'm trying to learn like how to use it, uh, in our family and planning trips and in our job, he's like, no AI.

Penn:

I'm not saying no, I just don't trust it. And I don't, um, I, like I, there was, there's the deep, these deep fakes now, right? I'm like, we're in North Carolina, the head coach in North Carolina had a press conference after this game on Tuesday night.

And he was like cussing and saying all these vulgar words. It wasn't him. So it was a deep, fake AI press conference that I completely got tricked on until I realized the coach like never cusses.

Neil:

Wow. And just totally reality destabilizing reading this at 13. So I picked this up for, I'd seen both the movies, love both of them because of you picked up the book. Um, I'm only on like about page 83 or so right now, only about a thousand pages left, but I love it.

And it's so good. And I'm reading through it. And funny that you mentioned the AI, because one of the quotes I picked up to talk to you about was actually from page 17, right before the Reverend mother explains to Paul before putting his hand in that like pain box thing, she's testing him for humanness because, and here's the quote: “once men turned their thinking over to machines and the hope that this would set them free, but that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them” to which Paul replies by quoting something, which I think as the reader, I don't know what it is yet. The quote is “thou shall not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind.”

Penn:

That was written in 1965, which we, you know, we're idiots. We think that 1965 was like 20 years ago, but it was really 60 years ago.

We've lost track of how long ago 1965 was, but it was a long time ago. Uh, and isn't that just, I mean, that's the reason it's the most popular science fiction book of all time. It was incredibly forward thinking.

And, uh, I listen, it's so hypocritical because every single penny that we've made has been because of something that we've either sent out digitally or we've used our digital footprint to market.

If you look at our books as well.

Neil:

Yeah, but you're not, but you're still not, you're not making a machine in the likeness of a man's mind.

Leslie:

That's human intelligence, even though you're using technology.

Neil:

Yeah. Like what we're getting is yeah, the wires beam you over to us, but your, your videos are decidedly human and they speak to the human condition in such unique, unique ways that I read this one little list. It's like the last job ever for AI to take, you know, it's like number three on the list is like, you know, massage therapist number, but number one was standup comic because the, the root of a standup comic is commenting on the human condition.

Like that's the root of what they're doing. Kind of like, so it's like an AI would have trouble getting up on stage and being like, don't you hate when you can't open the peanuts on an airplane? Like, what the fuck are you talking about?

Penn:

Terrifyingly, Neil? Um, there are influencers who I know who are very successful who I won't quote here, but who have written their skits recently by using chat GPT.

Leslie:

Really? Well, like you could, you could type into chat GPT, like write a comedic skit about ADHD and why it is both a superpower and something that you can manage, you know,

Kim:

It was funny ha ha, but it was so bad.

Penn:

Yeah. No, I hear you. I'm glad it was bad.

Um, it's, and I think Neil's right. I just was blown away when I was talking to some, like, I have some, you know, you have some contemporaries in this world and they were, they were like, yeah, I don't like AI, but just for the heck of it, I needed some ideas and  holy crap. It's getting pretty funny.

Neil:

I mean, I just saw a recent interview with a Tyler Cohen who runs the podcast Conversations with Tyler and is kind of just known as like a kind of a genius among geniuses. And they were asking him, Hey, how does AI change your podcast prep for both of us? And he said, well, I used to like when there was a guest coming on my show and I was like relating to this, he's like, I'd order all 11 books they've ever referenced or written.

I'd read all 11 books they've ever referenced or written. Now I ordered two of those 11 and I asked chat GPT over and over again to summarize, distill and pull out the other nine. So the other nine books I'm actually reading are like fiction that I want to read.

And I was like, whoa.

Kim:

Yeah. So yeah, I get it. Um, similarly, we had a podcast, um, guest this week.

She has a book that's coming out. I read the book over the weekend. I came up with like 20 questions and then I am trying to use, you know, AI more.

Neil:

Claude, Claude, Claude.

I'm dropping Claude bombs so we can get on the one that doesn't use your data. Like Claude doesn't use your data from Anthropic. Whereas the other one, the big one, it uses your data.

Just the way like WhatsApp uses your conversations, but Signal does not. So I'm like a big signal guy. 

Penn:

Good to know.

Kim:

Okay, I'm going to use Claude, but I went on to the other one, which I'm not going to do that anymore. And I typed in like, you know, some, some, I think some pretty good prompts and it gave me 20 questions that some of them were better than mine. And I'm like, you know what, dude, this is annoying, but I used the questions.

So there you go. Yeah.

Neil:

It's like, do we want to put our, you know, heel in the sand and say like, no AI, like, you know, that's like a recipe for disaster. Like we have to navigate.

Kim:

We have to use it as a tool.

Leslie:

And it's happening whether we like it or not. So are we just going to like turn our eyes away and not look at it? Or are we going to see it and try to figure out how to use it, how to stay safe with it?

Penn:

Yeah. I don't mind it as a tool. I, right now, everything that's not working in AI is the fault of larger organizations and governments who found a way to regulate it.

Neil:

And now those two things are merging.

Kim:

Fun. Yes. I'm excited about that.

I'm excited about it.

Neil:

Well, it's all about getting an education, don't you think? And that's why our fourth formative book… 

Penn:

That was amazing. I’m pumped, we were talking about this this morning.

Neil:

Is educated by Tara Westover. This is, of course, one of Kim's formative books, a book that I had picked up to prepare for this podcast and have enjoyed the hell out of it is so, so, so good. Published in 2018 by Random House that covers the striking photo of like dead yellow grass with a distant mountain in the background with an old school, like elementary desk just sitting plumb in the middle of the field, has a memoir in the tie in the bottom corner and little letters.

Tara Westover, get this, born September 27th, 1986, to a rural Mormon family of rugged individualists. And so she's like a stunningly young 38 today, which I think makes her have written this book. And like when she was 30.

Kim:

Yeah, she was a baby.

Neil:

Educated, debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. And I remember personally going down to Book Expo in New York and I had a dinner with every like whatever publishing people and every like everyone was holding a copy of it. Everyone in the room was reading the same book.

I could not believe it. Tara Westover was 17 when she first set foot in the classroom, born to isolated survivalists in the mountains of Idaho. She prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home canned peaches and sleeping with her head for the hills bag in her bed beside her.

Needless to say, the kids, her being the youngest of seven, didn't go to school. Tara began to educate herself, learning enough math and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young. Her quest for knowledge would transform her, taking her over oceans, across continents, to Harvard, to Cambridge.

Only then she wondered if she traveled too far, if there was still a way home. Dewey Decimal gives us a weird one here. 270.092 for religion slash history of Christianity slash biography. Okay, Dewey. A little bit off perhaps on that one. But this is the thing about Dewey.

Dewey tries. Dewey tries. Dewey helpful.

Dewey not perfect. Dewey not AI yet. And I don't know why I'm speaking in a weird pigeon.

Tell us about your relationship with Educated by Tara Westover.

Kim:

Again, it was one of those like when it came out, everybody was reading it, everybody was talking about it. You know, I don't know if you saw that TikTok trend, like how often they asked men, like how often they thought about the Roman Empire. And then they're like, oh, at least once a week, I think about the Roman Empire.

And so now the phrase is like, my Roman Empire is like that thing you think about at least once a week. I think about this book at least once a week. 

Neil:

Wow.

Kim:

Because it was, if you've not read it, it was so first of all, deeply fascinating, because, you know, that's so far from anything most people grow up with. But the unique motivation of her and a couple of her siblings to educate themselves. And you can't help but put yourself in that position of like, if this was my life, and I was actually, obviously not encouraged to get an education, but actually discouraged from being educated, would I hide in the closet and try to steal away like hide math books? Probably not.

You know, and I think this hit at a time when my kids, it was 2018 or 2016? 2018. 2018 it came out.

Yeah. You know, kind of like in the middle of what my kids and like, we're like, okay, now we have to do flashcards. And we have like, we were doing so much work to educate our kids, right, to supplement and to, to make sure we're just like adding in the right amount and doing all this, like, it was, I felt like a lot, we were at that stage where you have to do a lot of work to kind of make sure your kids are, you know, achieving in school.

And I'm like, if I just left my kids alone, and would they do this? And I think again, the answer is no. I even asked my kids this morning in preparation for this, and I gave them the scenario.

I'm like, you would be working in the fields. You have like no Wi-Fi. So there's not like you would be playing, no phones. There's no basketball practice. There's like none of that.

And your option is working like 12 hours in a field to help you know, prepare for the end of the world or like in your only way out is to educate yourself like would you and my son's like, maybe like even that he's like, I don't know. So I'm just I am just fascinated by how she did this iand it was I thought beautifully written. And I thought what she's achieved is just really inspiring.

So I think about it all the time in the like, would I if given the same resources at the same time what I've could I've written a book like this? Could have I achieved like this? Could I be this educated?

And I just think it's really inspiring.

Neil:

What makes it pop into your head? Like when you say you think about it once a week, the story being inspiring, but also just the concept of self education or auto didactic?

Kim:

Yeah, I mean, I think motivation. I think I'm a very curious person. I think I wonder a lot about people and I wonder like what I'm taking a like an online class because I want to know more about a AI like I'm trying to educate myself on AI and I'm taking like this little online course.

And, but it is work I have to it is I have to get like, I signed up for this. I paid for it. I have to do it.

I'm like doing it begrudgingly. I'm like, you know what that she would have done. Remember Tara. What would Tara Do. 

It's a motivation thing.

Penn:

So is it motivation?. I mean, motivation is what the book is about.

But to your point, like motivating in that way that you just said is like, Oh my god, if she can do it.

Kim:

Yeah, I mean, because I think I'm curious about a lot of things. But then life gets in the way. I'm like, Oh my god, I have to drive my son to basketball practice across town.

And I'm just so tired. And it would just be easier to, I love to read, I would be easier just to like, read the mindless thing I'm reading than actually educate myself. And or talk to my mom on the phone or scroll Tik Tok, like it would be easier to do that.

But to get curious and follow through with the education of yourself is like, that's something that I'm just fascinated by.

Penn:

But also the guilt by comparison of this person did all this. And here I am. It's my way on Tik Tok.

Kim:

Yeah, it's my way.

Neil:

I love this book so much, like Dune, I'm like about on page I'm on chapter four. I'm not gonna lie and tell you I'm on chapter five or finished it. But it's a can't wait to get back into tonight book for me.

I know I'll be done in like probably a week or two because I just every night I'm like, this morning I woke up at 2am our kid was screaming and I could not get back to sleep. So I flick on the reading light and I read a couple chapters of Educated, so good to  wind myself back down.

Two things jump out for me about this book between the beginning and chapter four. On page 15. Tara's mom becomes a midwife but doesn't have a phone.

So she writes that in quotes, quoting here, “the midwife would call grandma down the hill who walked up the hill tired and ornery and barked that it was time for mother to go play doctor. Why you people can't just go to a hospital like everyone else is beyond me, she shout, slamming the door on her way out.” And so my question for both of you is how do you balance your relationships with your in-laws?

Kim:

Well, not to be 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 and father-in-law. 

I like, 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's 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:

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, like 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 like read the room, I think is what I've learned is like I've got to read the room and follow her lead or his lead.

Kim:

Yeah, I think that Penn is kind of like, you know, like the dancing monkey. You know, you can just kind of like wind him up. And he is so good in a room.

Like 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 like, great.

It's actually it's wonderful.

Penn:

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, you know, as someone coming into a family, yeah, you don't get some of the inside jokes and you don't like you may not have the same relationships with these people. But you also are this like wonderful, clean slate that you can bring into a situation. And if I think if you tap into that, you can like learn so much about everybody else there.

And I think that there's some real positives to being an in-law.

Kim:

Yeah. And I think we've also learned like he like I can talk crap about my family, but he can't.

Penn:

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

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 you can't.

Kim:

Yeah, I think he did that one time. And I'm like, what?

Penn:

And I was just agreeing with you, honey. Yeah, you just go.

Leslie:

I love your positive perspective, though. It is true. It's like it's a get to write like you get to have the second family.

And I think Neil and I both feel very blessed to have each other's families as a second family.

Penn:

Kim's dad, his wife. Like, she cooks so much food for me. It's so much more food than anyone's ever cooked for me. And so she's like, this is something I didn't have as a kid.

I didn't have an Italian.

Neil:

Oh, wow.

Penn:

On Christmas Eve. Do you know what Italians do on Christmas Eve? 

Neil:

Don't say gnocchi.

Penn:

No. Well, they make seven meats.

Kim:

It's like seven dishes. Like they and then the first time he met my stepmom or first, I mean, I don't even know what you're going to do. He ate so much. He puked. 

Penn:

I had to puke and rally.

Kim:

Then he came back to eat more. And so I think like she is the member of the family. I think she likes him more than she likes me, which is fine. It's totally fine. It works.

Penn:

I don't think that's true. But I think that it's it's it's different, right?

You come in with this tabula rasa. Whoa. Kind of.

Oh, here. Yes. Blue pen.

Neil:

That might be the word of the chapter people.

You don't feel like, like I feel I worry at least that I tire some of your extended family out, you know, because I have the same personality as Penn. I do feel like I got the great gift of grandparents. Three or four of mine were dead when I was born.

And the other one lived in a different continent and didn't speak English. But with Leslie, our kids have had the privilege, extreme privilege of having three living great grandparents. And I've heard about grandparents in law.

All of them live walking distance from us. And yeah, I do worry. I feel like I tire out your dad.

Leslie:

You said the read the room, right? Like the read the room is an important skill. 

Neil:

Is that why you sometimes kick me when I come in like, Oh, that's like the room is a little lower than where you're at.

Leslie:

Yeah, my dad is more of an introvert. And Neil is a big extrovert. And maybe my dad hasn't quite embraced his introversion the same way that you have, Kim.

And so sometimes I think that he feels like, oh, wow, I can't quite get to that level. And then it kind of feels like pressure when Neil is so extroverted and happy and talking so fast. And my dad's like, needing a little more.

Neil:

I just know that I'm exhausting.

Leslie:

I don't know how to do that dance because he's my dad. And you know, so I think yeah, the reading the room

Neil:

Yeah, it's reading the room. I've written that and underlined it twice. Last question on Educated. This is for Leslie and Kim/ Kim and Leslie on questioning but you called Penn a dancing monkey.

But I was wondering about how you balance a flamboyant attention seeking husband because the page 22 of educated it says in the same midwife chapter, Tara is recounting her mother's tale of playing dumb. So the doctors do not suspect she's an illegal midwife. And she writes, “men like to think they're saving some brain dead woman, all I have to do was step aside and let them play hero.”

And I was like, whoa, like, 

Leslie:

But then she must come in and be the midwife.

Neil:

No, she does not. Because midwifery is illegal in Idaho.

So she is like, there was a problem with this lady giving birth. Could you save her doctor? I don't know what I'm doing.

And then the doctor afterwards was like, why were you there? I don't know.

Kim:

It's just like a universal understanding of women. And I sort of hate it. That, like, we've sort of accepted that men want this role.

And if we give them this role, they're just not going to question it. And I think, yeah, that's, that's a universal truth. And it's super duper sad.

I fight it. I am. I'm never going to acquiesce like that.

Leslie:

But we're, we're, you know, we're all four of us raising men, right? Like, I think that we're some of that, like, toxic masculinity that we're working to move away from as a society allows us to teach the skills of reading the room, teach the skills of thinking about, you know, how you can assert yourself as a woman. And as a man, sorry, as a man can leave room for a woman to assert herself and that both people can have their own strong way to communicate whether male or female extroverted, introvert, fast talker, slow talker, high energy, low energy, there's room for all of that.

Kim:

I love that about our son, because he has an older sister who's very, I mean, Lola is 10 out of 10, type A oldest daughter, high achieving. So I think, and conversely, he sees like, if there's an issue to be solved, he would probably go to a woman because he loves his sister. He admires his sister.

I think he loves his mom. Like, I think he would, he's going to be the guy that like, if there's a problem to be solved, like he's going to find a woman to solve it.

Leslie:

Yeah. And we are burning as a society, some of those memos that it is always a man or a doctor. That's the one that knows all like, I, you know, I think of how amazing it is, even just to think of the midwife example that our four boys hear us talk, both you and me about how incredibly wise the midwives that brought helped bring each of them into the world and why we made that choice to have home births and why we believe that this profession that is a woman's profession is actually superior than this Western medicine man doctor.

Neil:

Yeah, that was a learning for me when we, sorry, oh, I almost said we got pregnant. When Leslie got pregnant, oh, that would have been close.

Kim:

But you noticed that. 

Leslie:

And he's like, there's lots of that, like unlearning or, you know, relearning or restating. And I think it takes a strong woman and a strong man to navigate that territory.

Right. Like, you know, there's been times, I hope you don't mind me saying this, where Neil will say something like, but I said so. And I'm the dad.

And there's the space in our family for me to be like, well, just a minute, like you may very well be the dad, but I'm the mom. And like, I have something to say to you. And he's like, you're right.

OK, what do you have to say? You know, like, yeah, some of these old learned lessons and learnings that we have that are like built into us from society, from like archaic lessons that we just carry in our DNA.

Neil:

You know, I do feel good, though, when we go up to that ski place and I see every other dad just like berating their kids. I'm like, whoa, what is like? So I shouldn't say I feel good, but I'm just like… 

Leslie:

Oh, Neil, you are an amazing 

Neil:

Like I go to the hockey game. I like cheering every kid on. Everyone's looking at me because I'm way too loud. But every lot of the dads are like, hurry up, get the puck, pass it, pass.

I'm like, well, like everyone's just yelling at their kids.

Leslie:

I felt so proud of you to use like sports and toxic masculinity in that whole conversation when like, I don't know if you guys watch that Canada versus U.S. hockey game and in that first minute, how there was so much fighting and our boys, some of them play hockey. And Neil and I were both like, oh, my God, like we have to turn this off like this is just so disgusting.

Neil:

Leslie stood up and said, these men have not learned how to control their emotions.

Leslie:

I was like, how is the thing for these men and their families and their parents and their partners that they are that unable to regulate their emotions, that on TV they're doing this like this? How embarrassing like that just so does not look strong to me. It looks so, so weak.

Penn:

And unfortunately, because of that, more people tuned in.

Leslie:

So sad.

Penn:

The games that ensued, they were like, oh, they fought three times in the first nine seconds.

Leslie:

And that's why they fought. Right. Like in that, you know.

That's why we're in the political situation that we are in the world, too, because those extreme aggressive, violent thinking like gets attention and the algorithm likes it. And so then it gets louder. 

Neil:

We like the you're fired complex, like all that stuff is like.

Leslie:

But what I was going to say is that I was so proud of you when then, you know, that week I was around our kids hockey rink and we were talking about that.

Some moms and dads and I and I was like, oh, gosh, like my husband and I were both just like disgusted by that. And this one woman was like, oh, my gosh, like you're so lucky that you're that your husband felt that way, because I said the same thing. We got to turn that TV off.

And my husband was like, you don't understand hockey if you don't understand why there's not fighting like this is OK. Come on, like, boys, you listen to me. The fighting's OK.

And I was just like, OK, well, I'm married to the right man because like, you know, there's a lot of honorable hard work for men to do, I guess, in and women who are raising men like us in supporting boys and men to undo some of those thinkings. So, yes, women need to continue to be able to, like, stand up strong and voice that they're a very strong, powerful midwife. And also here's to like a little cheers to all of the amazing men of the world that allow women to speak and to and to like unlearn some of these messages of what it means to be a man.

Kim:

Get that blue pen out.

Leslie:

Where's the blue pen for me? Where's the blue pen?

Neil:

The bookends of that. I stopped my foot and say, listen to me. I'm the dad.

And where's the you didn't write down what? But the middle was great, honey. That was one cap to the whole middle.

Leslie:

And onto the next book. That's what he's thinking.

Neil:

No, I'm not thinking that.

I'm thinking pause and see if there's any reaction to that before the next book.

Kim:

I think that it's it is interesting because we have both genders in our house and Penn’s mom because his dad was a preacher who and a very successful, wonderful, hardworking man. But he was a preacher is very busy. You know, he's gone a lot.

So his mom was the most present physically. His, you know, mom taught him to play basketball and his mom taught him to read and his mom taught him to play music. And his mom was such a person in his life that Penn is very like he does look if there's a problem to be solved, like he's looking for a woman.

He's very comfortable with, and a lot of companies he worked for before we had our own business. He worked for women very like he's not one of those men that think like a man's got to do it. In fact, like he's so I think the way it's it is very fascinating because we all know we all know people who are different.

We all know men who are different. So I feel really lucky, too.

Leslie:

Yeah. What do our kids say that Neil will say something like, you know, well, that's you know, that I said that there's no apple juice for dinner. So you have to listen to that being the answer.

And the kids will be like, but mommy is really in charge.

Neil:

They're like, ask mom.

Leslie:

You're not really in charge, daddy. Mommy's in charge.

Neil:

We'll just go ask her. Um, our fifth of six books today, although we could do seven, is, of course, Seveneves by Neil Stevenson.

Penn:

Keep talking. I gotta go to the bathroom. Okay.

Like you're fine. This is the part where he doesn't do a decibel system, right? I'll be back by the time you're done with it.

Neil:

Okay, perfect.

Okay, normally we would cut tape. But in this case, we're just going to go and assume that and of course, you know, the background which he doesn't care about.

Okay, published in 2015 by Harper Collins. This is a black and white close-up photograph of a human eye.

It says, author of the number one international bestseller, Anathem. So I guess that's his other book. Neil Stevenson is 65 years old today, born in Fort Meade, Maryland, and October 31st, 1959.

Hey, shares his birthday with your sister and Halloween. Intriguing fact that Neil Stevenson was actually an advisor on Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos like rocket ship company in the 2000s. What's it about?

What would happen if the world were ending? A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb, in a feverish race against the inevitable nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity beyond our atmosphere and outer space. Dewey Decimal heads, you can follow this one under 813.54 for 20th century American literature. And while we're waiting for Penn to rejoin the chat, I may as well just tell you a little bit more about this. But first of all, Neil Stevens has got the best giant handlebar mustache of all time.

Kim:

I will also say Penn's genre that he is attracted to the most in terms of reading, and he just finished a 700 page book last night. It's the category, they call it hard science fiction. So it sounds a little pornographic, but he's into hard science fiction.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah. The prefix hard is not used to describe hard. Yeah.

But you know, hard boiled, hard boiled writing is Hemingway, hardcore sex, obviously, but hard science. So we don't know what hard science fiction is.

Leslie:

Probably 800 plus pages, too.

Penn:

Would you like me to tell you what hard science is?

Neil:

I sure would like you to tell us about your relationship with Seveneves and, of course, hard science fiction in general.

Penn:

Sorry. I'm sorry. Thanks for letting me.

I overhydrated this morning. OK. 

Leslie:

You have that too, Neil.

Penn:

At least it wasn't number two.

Leslie:

He'd be leaving the house.

The mirror continues. That's such a thing in our relationship, too, that like we're at a restaurant and Neil has to pee like three times for every time I have to go.

Neil:

Thank you for changing the four to three at the last second.

Penn:

Yeah. So hard science fiction is just any science fiction where they adhere to actual either proven or theoretically possible physics. So like when you know, when you're when you're watching, you know, when you're watching Star Wars and there's Jedi and there's, you know, who can like levitate the Millennium Falcon off of a rock or Star Wars, you can travel the speed of light just by hitting a warp button. 

Leslie:

Like that can't happen?

Penn:

Not yet. So that might become hard science fiction if someone figures out how to do it. 

But the books that I read are based on things that could actually happen if we put enough money into it.

Neil:

Why are you drawn to those versus like you're drawn to like The Martian, which I remember being like, that's how we came up with, like, you know, planting stuff on Mars or whatever.

Kim:

OK. Another thing about my husband, if there is a book, a show or a movie in which the best in their field have been assembled. Oh, yeah.

He, that's his favorite.

Penn:

Yeah. Like, you know, something's going wrong. So you may wonder why you've all been brought here under the cloak of secrecy.

Kim:

It's because you're the best in your field.

Penn:

We're going to share a secret with you.

Kim:

And the world is ending and you're here to help us.

You have hooked my husband.

Neil:

Wow. That is amazing. I've never heard that genre ever articulated.

Penn:

Assemble the best in your fieldedness?

Kim:

Yeah. And I think the Dewey Decimal System really needs to pick up here in terms of a category because it could be the OK, just just go list the movies and books that you've read in which the best of the field has been assembled.

Neil:

Armageddon and Ocean's Eleven

Penn:

Ocean's Eleven is good.

Kim:

But the end of the world is not happening there. 

Neil:

Oh, yeah.

Oh, it's assemble the best against the fate of humanity.

Kim:

Yeah. Fate of humanity is. Yeah.

Penn:

Armageddon.

Kim:

The Core, Independence Day.

Penn:

I mean, what are we watching now? Paradise.

Kim:

Paradise.

Penn:

Yeah. They actually said you guys have all been brought here because you're the best in your field.

Kim:

And he's hit. We're in.

So anyway, so continue.

Neil:

Why? Why are you drawn? Why are you drawn to that?

Penn:

Yeah, I love feeling small and insignificant and leaving this planet and seeing a world that no one else can possibly imagine, but is possible. I love when everybody and usually that happens in space because everyone has to come together. We live in and I'm liking it more and more because of everything that I see. is argued about.

We have a social media channel that for the most part, people just agree with us, which is great, but anywhere on the Internet, someone is going to to call someone else an idiot and disagree with them on stuff. It's what leads to wars, and that's not very fun. But in wars, everybody kind of in a country comes together.

If the world's going to end, the world comes together. The world comes together to try to figure out an impossible problem. And it is oddly utopian for me if the world is coming to an end because we're all working together.

And I'm so sick of it not happening in the world that I live in.

Neil:

Oh, wow. So you love that story, like whatever it was a few weeks ago about the asteroid that might hit us in like 20 years.

Penn:

Are you kidding me? Do you want to talk about the dark project?

Kim:

Because I'm sorry, Neil.

Penn:

This is real.

Kim:

I hope you know that the rest of the podcast is going to be about the dark project. But we're going to we're going to condense it, baby.

Penn:

All right.

Now, NASA fired a freaking rocket about the size of a refrigerator, a million miles away. And there were two asteroids that were one was, this happens all the time, they're binary asteroids. So one orbits the other one. And they wanted to see if they could alter the orbit of the asteroid orbiting the outside one, which was the size of the Rose Bowl.

OK, that's a big asteroid. If it hits our planet, we're bleeped. They fucking hit it a million miles away.

Look up the dark. They hit the asteroid and they changed its orbit.

Kim:

So that is something.

Penn:

Why are we not all talking about this every single day?

Kim:

So I think it's newsworthy. We talked about it, this is his Roman Empire. He thinks about it every day.

And so sometimes when I'm having trouble sleeping, I'm like, hey Pen, can you just read me like a page of your book? 

Leslie:

Yeah, I just felt myself gloss over too. 

Kim:

And he'll start reading his book.

And then I'm like, softly snoring.

Neil:

We don't not have that in our relationship.

Leslie:

I need the blue pen for that. We're going to condense this, babe. That was a good one.

Neil:

We is a key word there.

Kim:

I admire this about him because this is one of the things like he's deeply curious. He does educate himself on this. This is stuff that like I will catch him reading.

He has textbooks on like orbital spaceflight because he's so curious about it. But he could have joked like pennies its own separate podcast on this stuff. Like it is, it's like a separate podcast.

Space Penn, space cadet.

It's an ADHD / space podcast.

Penn:

Way better.

Kim:

Way better. Because he needs somebody to talk to about this, like he just needs. And I'm not fulfilling that for him.

Penn:

But that's what a book is, right? Like, yeah. Have you noticed how different our genres are?

So all of mine are incredibly out there, science fiction, and hers are valuable, inspiring, connection in real life, nonfiction stuff.

Kim:

The stuff I read, though, on the day to day is like, I mean, I cross a lot of genres, but like, I'm drawn to like historical fiction or something. And because I love history, too. But so we are on opposite ends of the timeline to like, I'll be in World War Two.

And he's like, deep into the future. Yeah.

Neil:

We're gonna connect this babe, but the story that, similar Penn, that like,I'm like, why isn't this on the front page of every newspaper every day since the two weeks since I've heard it is the one where like the head guy at Microsoft that came up with this new like computer chip said in a quote, like he actually said this thing head guy at Microsoft. This is like a corporate executive. He's like, yeah, in order to invent this new computer chip, we had to interact with energies from other dimensions.

Penn:

What?

Is it like a Higgs boson particle? Or is it like, did he say?

Neil:

 So that's as far as my knowledge goes, unfortunately.

But that was like legit quote from like the corporate exec like in charge of the charge of the computer. So sorry to kill the rest of your day. If you want to go down that rabbit hole, but we need to go.

That is like maybe a topic for space get at episode three.

Last of the six books to your point about the genre overlapping, but also how the like we're not going to talk about this big was kind of like, you know, I like that pants sharing thing. Let's get into Bossy Pants by Tina Fey published in 2011 by Little Brown.

The cover is one of the best covers of all time. Hilariously, I bought this book for this podcast and lost it in my house. So I don't know where it is right now.

But it's in this house somewhere. Tina Fey is wearing, everyone knows this cover. Tina Fey is wearing a black hat, a white button down and a tie with their arms photoshopped to look like the large, hairy man arms of like some other guy, but it looks like her arms wearing a leather watch.

And one of the hands is like, you know, holding the side of her face like that. Tina Fey, born in Upper Derby Township in Pennsylvania in 1970. She's 54 today, best known as so many things.

Head writer, first ever female head writer for Saturday Night Live, host of Weekend Update for Saturday Night Live, host of so many Golden Globes with Amy Poehler. She wrote Mean Girls. And of course, she created and wrote 30 Rock in addition to writing tons of other stuff.

She's won nine Primetime Emmys, three Golden Globes, five Screen Actors Guild and seven Writers Guild of America Awards. Before Liz Lemon, before Weekend Update, before Sarah Palin, Tina Fey was just a young girl with a dream. And by the way, I'm reading the back copy because it's so good here.

A recurring stress dream that she was being chased through a local airport by her middle school gym teacher. She also had a dream that one day she'd be a comedian on TV. She has seen both these dreams come true.

At last, Tina Fey's story can be told from her youthful days as a vicious nerd to her tour of duty on Saturday Night Live, from her passionately health hearted pursuit of physical beauty to her life as a mother eating things off the floor, from her one-sided college romance to her nearly fatal honeymoon. From the beginning of this paragraph to this final sentence, Tina Fey reveals all and proves what we've suspected. You're no one until someone calls you bossy.

Dewey Decimal Heads 792.7028 for art slash sports games entertainment slash stage presentations slash variety shows and theatrical dancing. By the way, that'd be a good memoir category for you guys. Bossypants by Tina Fey.

Kim, tell us about your relationship with the book.

Kim:

I think, again, like every book, it's when it hits you. And I think Tina Fey and I have kids of a similar age. And what she talked about, and I read it when it came out. It's been a million years.

Neil:

21 and 14, she has.

Kim:

Yeah. So they're, I mean, around the same time. I was struggling with feeling like I still wanted to work and create, but also I didn't have this like rosy, like it wasn't a, I wasn't a perfect mom and I felt guilty for not being a perfect mom.

And then she just had some really good, funny language about just trying to survive that part of motherhood. And also something that I have struggled with. I mean, I'm not saying I'm like Tina Fey, but she was the first in a lot of areas and didn't, I think she never really saw her value in those places.

And then we are huge fans of 30 Rock. Penn and I have seen every 30 Rock episode five times probably. And it was interesting reading about how she gave Alec Baldwin a lot of credit, probably too much credit, but she was really the star of that show.

But like awkwardly, she admitted how awkward it was to kind of go from being the writer to like the on-camera person. And I struggle with that too. Like if I think if I didn't have to be on camera, I would love a behind the scenes more role, but I found myself on camera and just, I just find her, she's the one person she's, she doesn't have social media and she's not like that, but she's the one person like I would pay to go see.

And again, is this like a most beloved piece of literary fiction? No, like I, it's probably very few people's favorite book, but I think the time in which it hit me, I was like, okay, Tina Fey struggles with this too. Like Tina Fey is thinking about what she looks like and Tina Fey is struggling, stepping into a role that's been offered to her.

So I just felt like a very real kind of talent and she's so freaking funny. So it was just like an easy, funny read. The end.

Penn:

I think that Tina Fey is the funniest person on the planet. And I think she has been for a while.

Kim:

But she would not accept that. And I think if you told, and so, as you can see, I'm also drawn to female authors, although I'm on a screen with like male authors and I apologize. I typically, if you look at the stack of books on my nightstand, 98% of them are written by women.

So I just fiction or nonfiction, I just am drawn to women and I'm drawn to women's stories who have a powerful, who've made something out of nothing and created successful environments for people. I am really, I'm just in awe of Tina Fey, Amy Poehler too, and how they've created opportunities for women. I could only aspire to do that.

Neil:

Well, you are doing that for sure. Yeah. With your channels, with your books, with ADHD is Awesome, which by the way, I checked before coming on here and I'm like, oh my gosh, this came out a year ago and it's still top 100 on Amazon.com.

Kim:

Is it? Yeah.

Neil:

It's crushing it.

Kim:

Is it?

Neil:

Yeah. I think it was crushing it.

Penn:

We did the Tamron Hall show and it helped out with that.

Leslie:

I have a question for you then. 

Because it sounds like this book really helped, like all of the books in a way that you picked helped you know who you are. And I love that that's something that you guys talk about as you celebrate aging too. And so I'm curious, how you feel like you have worked to know who you are as a woman and how to tilt and balance all the different parts that makes us women, because I know motherhood is a part of the puzzle.

And then you talked about, I can't remember the exact words that you used, but like not being a good mother, which are like not loving motherhood in the way that you kind of expected or were told that you should. How have you honed really knowing who you are and figuring out how to tilt and balance all those different parts of who you are?

Kim:

That's a good question. As you've realized in the books I've picked, and I think this is kind of on track for my life, I do better with some distance from it.

Like I can see now what I, like what was going on when I was parenting a toddler. Like if I have some space and I do better when somebody has given me a word for it. I wish I, so with Bossypants and with Educated and with Quiet, I, when I have the word, when somebody has given me the words for it.

And so that's why I think the journaling helps and therapy helps. I think that I, I struggle with knowing what's happening right now. Like our daughter is going to college.

So, and we're a very tight knit family. So it is, I'm finding, I'm trying to find the language about it. Like what I'm feeling right now, but I struggle with it.

You know I had a therapy session and I was like, no, I'm great. Like everything's great. I'm super happy for her.

And she's like, okay, but really, I'm like, listen, I don't, I don't see the need to just like sit here and be sad about it. She's like, or you could be sad. You could admit you're sad.

And so I, I am, I just, this is not answering your question, but I'm working on trying to identify the space I'm in and the feelings I'm feeling and naming the feelings that I'm currently feeling. Because as of right now, I can only name it once I'm past that season. And that's really, um, it's not a deal really.

Penn:

Isn't it super relatable and don't a lot of other people go through the same thing?

Kim:

Leslie:

I think so.

And, maybe then rather than trying to like look forward, are you able to look back and see what helped you before to know how you were feeling?

Kim:

Yes. And I think that one of the reasons we talk about what we talk about and create what we create is I want people to feel less alone because I do feel like, okay, 2007, that's where my daughter was born. There's a lot of mommy bloggers out there, but social media wasn't what it is now.

I could not find a voice that talked about postpartum depression. I could not find a voice that talked about postpartum anxiety. I could not find somebody else who didn't love every minute of it.

Cause I, of course, I mean, I would jump in front of 12 buses and trains and for my children. And I would have in that day, and I loved them so deeply, but I had postpartum anxiety so bad that like, I couldn't walk down the stairs holding my baby. Cause I was afraid it was going to fall.

And I couldn't find voices that said that. So that's, I think one of my motivations for creating this, but I can only do it now. And I can only say the words now because I'm through it.

Leslie:

And because you wrote about it. 

Penn:

And also you shrouded that so well.

Kim:

But that's not good either.

Penn:

No, no, I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that is didn't, I mean, didn't Tina talk a lot about internalizing difficulties? Like that's just something that women are incredibly good at.

Kim:

But again, it's not good for you.

Leslie:

And so we can like soldier on or become like energizer bunny and just keep going and going and maybe then not feeling what's happening right in that moment.

Kim:

So I'm trying to do a better job of naming the emotions in my present. And that's like the challenge my therapist is giving me. If like I am, and like, don't say like, I'm happy.

I'm sad. I'm anxious. Like what, what is it exactly that I'm feeling in this moment so that I can express that in front of my kids because I want them to have that skill.

Penn:

And also, meanwhile, I had no idea any of this was going on. Like when you were having postpartum until after, until like, until after you, you know, you were over the deepest, darkest part of it, which, um, well.

Kim:

Well, you're so busy, I mean, like he was working and then, you know, you, you just, yeah.

And then it's not like I didn't have the words for it. Like I didn't have the words for what was happening.

Penn:

I'm glad more people talk about it now. I'm glad you talk about it.

Kim:

Yeah. This took a turn. Sorry about that.

Leslie:

Yeah. And I don't know. I just, I really appreciate the vulnerability.

Kim:

Yeah. I don't know if that answered your question, but if there's a mom out there, it was like, and I like, I love my kids. And I look back at pictures.

I'm like, Oh, I just want to munch their faces. But I have friends that are like, Oh, I wish I could just, I would give out anything to go back and hug them when they were two years old. I loved them when they were two, but I'm like, but then you would lose the person they are now.

Like I love where they like, I've loved every stage. Like I found reasons to love every stage. Right.

Neil:

I like that. Looking back, looking forward, finding little pauses in the speeding nature of time, helping people feel less alone, finding voices and providing voices about unheralded or undiscussed issues from postpartum depression, to messy husbands, to ADHD, to so many other things. What you two do is more than a gift and more than a voice.

It is an articulation.

Penn:

It was really nice what he was saying. I'm like, I don't think I'm going to make it through.

Neil:

That was awesome. And so appropriate because that's kind of what you do is you provide it, you provide like a, like a sneeze within the pressure release. 

And it's a gift. And so, um, you know, uh, you braved the wilderness of trudging through six formative books with us, um, being up for this wild four person conversation. It's a real gift and honor our community of book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians is deeply grateful.

All the 3 bookers out there really appreciate it. I can speak on behalf of them. And I just really want to say a big, huge thank you for this opportunity.

Kim:

Oh my gosh, this was lovely. I love books. I love reading.

I wish more people read books. And so I just love this podcast and it's in the, how you use your platform to, to celebrate authors and readers.

Penn:

Yeah, dude. Super positive vibe always, always with you, Neil. 

Um, thanks.

Leslie:

So great chatting with you guys. This has been fun. 

Kim:

I like the couple talk.

Neil:

Yeah. Leslie joins on, um, kind of a few and far between. And then the number one comment and email we get is how come she doesn't, why doesn't she host the podcast?

Penn:

I almost literally almost said that, but I didn't want to hurt your feelings.

Neil:

No, it would not hurt my feelings. I'm well aware that she's better at me than this.

She's just not available.

Leslie:

I only sometimes say, yes, I wanted to talk to you guys.

Penn:

She also brings out a little bit in you, dude, like a little bit of, um, like a different vibe from Neil. Like that, we do this as well. And we realized that sometimes we're better together where sometimes we're better.

Most of the time we're just, we're better together.

Kim:

Most of the time.

Neil:

So I just need to figure out how to like work these in.

Um, Peen, Kim, Holderness family, thank you so much for coming on three books. It's been a joy.

Kim:

Ah, joyful. Thank you so much for having us. Thanks you guys.

Neil:

Hey everybody. It's just me, just Neil, just hanging out in my basement again, listening back to the wise and wonderful Penn and Kim Holderness of the Holderness family. Did you write down or pull out a few gems in there?

Like I did, I got a few things written down. Like: try and find a way to look at the everyday and what's going on and then make it a banger. So much wisdom in that, you know, I think with the Book of Awesome and 1000 Awesome Things, that's all I was doing, right?

It's flipping to the cold side of the pillow, uh, smelling bakery air. It's like simple stuff, basic stuff. I mean, probably the root origin in like Seinfeld's observational humor in there somewhere for us both, I'm guessing.

Or how about this quote? Before I read Quiet, I didn't have the language to describe who I was, uh, by Kim. Just a wonderful kind of illumination of the power of a book.

I thought I'd mention that one. Penn: the thing I've learned with in-laws is you should come into every event with a sense of love and excitement. I should confess that I needed to get better at this.

I don't know. It's hard, I think sometimes. I think early in our relationship, you know, I was always like feeling this push-pull between both sides of our family.

My first marriage, interestingly enough, I was very close with my family and, um, my ex, who I loved deeply, was not as, you know, didn't, we didn't see her side of the family as often. And so I always thought, hey, this is going to be great. We'll just fill all these slots of like my side of the family.

But of course that didn't work because it was really more about a value in terms of wanting to spend time in different ways that she had. And so it wasn't that she wanted to not spend time with her family, more with my family. It was like, she just wasn't super keen on tons of family time.

And then it created, you know, one of many kind of pieces of friction in our relationship. A relationship that feels honestly like it was in a different era to me right now. I know I went into a rabbit hole there.

Penn: I love feeling small and insignificant. Isn't that true? Like, isn't that the definition of awe, right?

Feeling small and insignificant, feeling lesser than you are so that your problems and your trials and your tribulations are not as severe in any sense. Kim: I wish more people read books. Why don't we just end there?

That seems like a great quote to finish on. And now get into the... Well, it's really five books to add to the top 1,000.

It really is five because the first book, Where the Sidewalk Ends, is actually an asterisk on number 1,000, also brought to us by Leslie Richardson in chapter one. And then we've got number 561. I got them in the wrong order here.

Uh-oh. Number 561 is Quiet, The Power of Introverts by Susan Cain. And then number 560 is Dune by Frank Herbert.

My 559 is Educated by Tara Westover. 558 is Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. And 557 is Bossypants by Tina Fey.

Wow. Okay, five books to add. And you might be thinking, well, five books, you know, how can you have five?

Like, isn't it three books? Well, yeah, but Jean Chrétien gave us two, right? And some other people gave us books that have been mentioned before, like Nakeisha the Dogwalker gave us Catcher in the Rye, which is also an asterisk.

So she ultimately had two new ones. And I think as the list goes on and on, like, it's going to be like 2030. We're going to be in the 300s or something.

And I'll be like, thank you so much for your three books. I have all of them on the list. You have three more?

Do you have three more? So I'm—it's a bit of a prickly puzzle that I'm trying to—I'm trying to think of a P word—prickly puzzle that I'm trying to possibility? I'm trying to pull out?

I'm trying to figure out whatever. We'll put the alliteration to the side for once on this show. Penn, Kim, love ya.

Thank you so much for commenting on3 books. It was a real treat and a real trip. Thank you so much.

Really appreciate you being here. 

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 we hang out.

We've got a bit of an after party. It's one of three clubs that we have for 3 books listeners, including the Cover to Cover Club, which is people that attempt to listen to every single chapter of the show over the 22 year lifespan of the show. And we also have The Secret Club, which I can't tell you more about.

But the way to find out more about it is to call our phone number at 1-833-READALOT. And as always, let's kick off the show or the end of the podcast club by going to the phones.

Louis Mallard:

Hey, what's going on, handsome? I am sitting in Brazil in a beautiful backyard doing some work and just finished listening to episode 29. I like that you're republishing the older episodes because I'm too lazy to go through and kind of like pick which ones sound good.

So I just, I always think it's a new episode and then I'm listening to you talk and you're like, I'm 39. And I'm like, oh, Neil recorded this a long time ago. So it's kind of neat to listen to you in the past.

I really enjoy your podcast. I know I say it a lot, but it's got some of my favorite intro music, too. Whenever my phone is just playing random podcasts and I hear your intro music, I'm like, sweet, this is going to be fun.

And then I kind of feel like I'm hanging out with you, too. So that's nice.

Neil:

Wow. Does anybody recognize the voice? Because he actually didn't say his name at the beginning there, but that was the one and only Louis Mallard.

That was Louis Mallard. Call him back. That was our guest in Chapter 139.

Yes, indeed. The Duck. The Duck, the interdimensional, psychedelic folk artist, the man who is now taking over the streets in not just Brazil, where he was calling me from, but Montreal, Canada.

He's been parading around, been featured on the news. I love what he does. I love street art.

I love street performers. And I love his hilarious quote about releasing the classics, kind of interspersed with the new chapters. Because, yeah, aren't we all too lazy to scroll backwards?

I don't have time to scroll backwards, Louis, and neither do you. I love and appreciate the honesty. Thanks for the shout out for the music.

That was composed for the show by Roberto Ercole. I put his name on the FAQ, 3books.co slash FAQ, for those that want to look him up and maybe have him compose some music for you. It was great.

And I do kind of want to get back in the long form, I think. We've been lately kind of trimming the opening music. I like to let it ride.

I like to let it kind of just go for a while. It just feels like entering a place, an interdimensional, psychedelic place. Louis, thank you so much for the phone call.

It's always wonderful to hear what past guests are up to as well. 

Now, it is time for the Word of the Chapter. Should we do Word of the Chapter? What do you guys want to do? You want to do Word? Or, you know what?

I was thinking we could do a letter in the form of... I've been getting some real snarky comments lately on our chapter with Jonathan Franzen. And I remember when I spoke to him, I was like, oh, do you want me to send you the feedback we get?

And he's like, no, I never read them, and I can't, or I don't, or something like that. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. He doesn't read his own feedback.

Although, you know, I imagine if you're writing really kind of thoughtful and dense literary fiction, you have a really thoughtful and dense literary crowd. And sometimes those people have a lot to say, good and bad. And I imagine some of those pieces of feedback hurt.

They certainly hurt when I'm reading them. Like Rona1220 who says, I don't care about the room you're in. I don't care about the lamp next to you.

The host talks way too much. It's his channel, so he can do what he wants, but I will not be visiting again. There's a reason this channel doesn't have more views in all this time.

Ouch. Another one two weeks ago.

 He is not a good writer. You are lying about this, and you don't even know how to read. 

Okay. Trevin Alger says, maintaining and propping up spaces for speakers like Franzen is important, but this interview was tough. There have been years worth of time Franzen has been asked to stop speaking about a dead friend in this tone with the same type of questions, and that would have taken days worth of research. There were so many painfully awkward moments brought on by a lack of connection and a kind of formal practice toast personality. Ouch.

It goes on, you know. It's like, it's like, I'm getting like, I'm getting like pillory, is that the right word, on YouTube with Jonathan Franzen. Why?

I love Jonathan Franzen. I thought the conversation was great. We've kept in touch.

We've been talking about birding. He's been recommending I get a scope, for the birders out there. A scope is kind of like, you can see a lot further than binoculars, and it goes on a tripod, so it's kind of tough to lug around.

But if you see like a small bird perched on a tree in the distance, or like shorebirds, you know, walking on a beach, and you can't quite see them with your binoculars, pull out the scope. So I've been talking to him about that, and I eagerly await the potential next book in his Crossroads trilogy, if indeed that does happen. Why did I read a bunch of reviews?

Because I just want you guys to know, I'm human too. I get negative reviews too. It's not all just glowing ones.

I'll put the glowing ones at the beginning. How about that? And now it's time for a word of the chapter.

And for this chapter's words, we got to, of course, go back to our guest. Let's flip back into the show now.

Penn:

You come in with this tabula rasa.

Neil:

Yes, indeed. It is tabula rasa. What does that mean?

Tabula rasa. Dictionary lady, can you help us out? Let's hear how we pronounce that.

Tabula rasa. What about you, Miriam Webster? Tabula rasa.

Tabula rasa. A little bit more emphasis. By the way, Miriam Webster says there's two definitions for tabula rasa.

The mind in its hypothetical primary blank or empty state before receiving outside impressions or something existing in its original pristine state. Tabula rasa. This is very interesting.

Basically, it's the idea that individuals are born empty of any built-in mental content. So all knowledge comes from later perceptions or sensory experiences. People who support this idea are usually on the extreme nurture side of the nature versus nurture debate.

By the way, I think I would be on the nature side. That's kind of what I read about in Freakonomics and kind of what I've come to believe, that it's nature over nurture. But, of course, you could argue the other way.

So this would be nurture over nature, that you come to the world as a blank slate, a tabula rasa, and then everything's imprinted on you after. But where does that word come from? It's, by the way, two words.

T-A-B-U-L-A is the first word, tabula, and rasa is the second. So it translates as clean slate into English. It's from the Roman tabula, which is a wax-covered tablet used for taking notes, which was blanked, rasa, by heating the wax and then smoothing it.

Heating the wax and then smoothing it, turning it into a blank slate, a tabula, that became rasa, blanked, by heating wax and smoothing it. So it refers to your mind or you being open to input as a blank slate, tabula rasa. That one blew my mind.

After the full conversation with Penn and Kim Holderness, Leslie, thanks for being here. Penn, thanks for being here. Kim, thanks for being here.

And all of you 3 bookers out there from Forster, Australia to Tokyo to Japan to Russia to England to Brazil and everywhere in between, we love this conversation. Thank you for joining me on 22 Years of Book Digging Pilgrimage. Until next time, remember that 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.

Listen to the chapter here!

Chapter 150: Prime Minister Jean Chrétien lays down lifelong lessons on leadership, liberalism, and longevity

Listen to the chapter here!

Mr. 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 in the United States they said in the first term of Trump he lied 14,000 times.

Neil:

And we're familiar with your liberal convention speech in January where you said...

Mr. Chrétien:

From one old guy to another old guy. Stop this nonsense.

Neil:

Today, if you sat down and had a beer with him today...

Mr. Chrétien:

It would be the same thing, but he would not enjoy it. Or he would ignore me. I've never seen an ego that big.

President Trump:

Frankly, Canada should be the 51st state, okay? It really should.

Mr. Chrétien:

Perhaps we're living the end of the American empire.

Destroying what took 80 years to build since the war. And proud of our value. And we became the envy of the world. I want to die standing.

Neil:

Hey everybody, it's Neil Pasricha and welcome to chapter 150, 50, 50 of 3 Books. Born in 1934, the 18th of 19 children in the small blue-collar town of Shawinigan Falls, Quebec, Jean Chrétien has risen to become the grandfather of Canada. The definitive force in Canadian politics for over 50 years.

From leading the Young Liberals Club at Laval University in 1956, to winning 12 straight federal elections, to serving as minister under Lester B. Pearson, helping to create the Canadian flag, to serving as many different ministers under Pierre Elliott Trudeau, helping to establish national parks, create stronger indigenous relations, help develop two official languages, repatriate our constitution, create the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and of course, then after all that, serving as our prime minister for three consecutive majority governments from 1993 to 2003, helping to define and shape and kind of change the trajectory of our country, eliminating the federal deficit completely, right?

Saying no to George W. Bush and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, helping to win the 1995 referendum for Quebec to stay in Canada as part of the country. He left office with the highest approval ratings of any other prime minister in history, and today we are flying up to Ottawa, Canada, and sitting in the office of the 91-year-old leader and getting ready to discuss the secrets of healthy living into your 90s, Canada on the global stage, how to get along with almost anyone, humility as a virtue, lessons from a 63-year-old marriage, thoughts on Alberta secession, the definition of a liberal, how he said no to the Iraq war, and of course, the right Honorable Jean Chrétien's most formative books. Let's flip the page into Chapter 150 now. Good morning, Mr. Chrétien. Good morning. Thank you so much for being up for chatting with me. I appreciate it.

My pleasure. You were my first prime minister when I turned 18 in 1998, and you continue to be my favorite. Very generous.

Thank you very much. We've been so inspired by you for many, many years. I wasn't sure what I should call you because at the front, I noticed everybody inside here calls you monsieur, just monsieur plain, because there's a right honorable.

What do people address you as?

Mr. Chrétien:

Oh, it depends. Some call me prime minister like they do in the United States, for example. Former president, they still call him president. You call me the way you want.

Neil:

Oh, okay, okay.

Mr. Chrétien:

There is no protocol in Canada about it.

Neil:

There's no protocol in Canada. Okay, so Mr. Chrétien, I will go with if it's okay. And we're here.

We're in your office. You're in a suit. I'm in a suit.

We're overlooking Parliament Hill, the beautiful Rideau River. And it sounds like when I got here, you are busy. You are back to back to back meeting me.

Mr. Chrétien:

I'm only 91 years old, so I have to earn my living.

Neil:

You're busy. You're very busy. And I love this because one of the chapters in one of my books I talk about is this idea.

I call it never retire. So for me, you're a big inspiration.

Mr. Chrétien:

I want to die standing.

Neil:

I want to die standing. I thought maybe before we get into some of our opening questions, I could just read you some of today's headlines from this morning to see if you have any thoughts on them. These are today's headlines.

I'll tell you the source it's from, the headline, and just ask for your open opinion if you have one. And you can say pass if there's no opinion.

Mr. Chrétien:

You know, I'm not following. I didn't watch the news this morning or last night because I was outside. So I'd rather pass. Go ahead on something else.

Neil:

Okay. Okay, great.

I'll skip the headlines then. And what I want to say at the beginning was that, you know, I was reading many of your books. I want to talk to you about Canadian priorities.

On page 42 of your memoirs, My Years as Prime Minister, which was written 18 years ago in 2007, and of course is about your time as Prime Minister 22 to 32 years ago, you wrote on page 42 that your three biggest priorities as Prime Minister were, quote, to reduce our horrendous deficit, to reassert our independence and protect Canada from being seen as the 51st state of the United States, and in the face of separatist threats and sense of alienation in other parts of the country, to keep Canada united.

Mr. Chrétien:

That sounds... Very much of actuality.

Neil:

Yeah, it sounds like today.

Mr. Chrétien:

Talking about a 51st state some 18 years ago.

Neil:

Yeah.

Mr. Chrétien:

You know, it was always there as a threat.

You know, there was a lot of debate in the United States more than 100 years ago about taking Canada over. There was discussion at that time. There was even a war.

We were with the Brits, as I said this week. You know, we won. We burned the White House.

And that is a reality. We have our reason to remain independent. We're proud Canadians.

We want to be good neighbors, but we don't want to be the 51st state. And I was thinking like that in those days, like I'm still very strong on that today.

Neil:

Yeah, absolutely. And then on the separatism thing, you know, you're very famous for presiding over the 1995 Quebec referendum or the no side one and introducing the 2000 Clarity Act, which set a higher bar and threshold for future referendums. Today we have conversation about Alberta lowering the threshold for having a referendum.

Mr. Chrétien:

Yeah, but they can have a referendum. But they have to read the Clarity Act too. You can have a referendum on anything.

They can have a referendum tomorrow on is the moon square. You know, we're in a society of freedom. But what would be the effect of a referendum?

The referendum will have to meet the requirements that apply to all the provinces of Canada, as I have established in the Clarity Act. And I said in Calgary last week, that perhaps the premier should read that act. The question has to be approved by parliament.

There's no separation, just say I'm going. It's just like a divorce. You know, you have obligation with the other partners.

And the Clarity Act is dealing with all the problem and the health that they will have to overcome. And it's not just a tool for blackmail. There's a reality behind it.

And I'm very proud that I passed the Clarity Act. Because the word means something. And the word clarity, you understand the meaning of it.

Neil:

Yeah, absolutely.

Mr. Chrétien:

So the question will have to be clear. The majority will have to be clear. We'll have to take all sort of element that are all mentioned.

What will happen with the natives? And what will happen with this and that? And what about the minorities in that community?

What kind of guarantee they will give to the minorities? You know, I'm telling you, it's better not to start on that. It's going to be a hell of a long negotiation.

For nothing.

Neil:

Yeah, exactly. And I heard you.

Mr. Chrétien:

Because, you know, this year they have produced more oil than they have ever produced. And, you know, and when I was a minister, you know, if they have tar sand, it's because I'm, me and Don McDonald, minister of energy at that time, I was a president of a treasury board who made a deal. Because they had started the tar sand and they went bankrupt.

And it is with the money of the government of Canada and the government of Ontario that they restarted the process. The price of producing, you see, was 40 bucks, and the market price was 20 bucks. But we had the wisdom to see that there was a future.

So we invested money into that.

Neil:

So they've made more oil this year than ever before. Justin Trudeau, member of the Liberal Party, famously bought them a pipeline.

Mr. Chrétien:

Yes, and they never said thank you.

Neil:

They never said thank you.

Mr. Chrétien:

$30 billion.

Neil:

$30 billion, right.

Mr. Chrétien:

And he gave them the permission to build a pipeline to go to Texas. And it was blocked in Dakota. You know, he did everything that was requested.

And I asked them when I'm there, how many miles, yards, feet of inches of pipeline that Mr. Harper built in 10 years? Zero.

Neil:

Mr. Harper is the conservative prime minister.

Mr. Chrétien:

A friend of mine said that to him in public. And he has to say it's true.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's record-breaking production. There's new pipelines and the approval for others that haven't got built because of opposition in the U.S. And there is the idea that if there was a separation, where would they go?

Mr. Chrétien:

Yeah. Do you think it would be easier to build a pipeline in Canada if they are no more part of Canada?

Neil:

No, it would be harder.

Mr. Chrétien:

And to get out of Canada, they are landlocked. They have to go through B.C. or through Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, and so on. In the Northeast, the North is Canadian too.

And if they want to have a pipeline in the state of Washington and Oregon, I wish them good luck. So they could not have a pipeline in the Dakotas, imagine there.

Neil:

Yeah. And so what do you say to Western discontent in general or the idea in the Western provinces that the country is governed and led by the heavy population?

Mr. Chrétien:

Yeah, now the prime minister is from Alberta. Harper was from Alberta, you know? So for guys who are complaining, it is myths that they love to keep. And they think that complaining has been successful, so they will keep doing that.

Neil:

Mm-hmm. Because good news is not news, and bad news is big news. Of course.

Before I came to meet you here today, of course I told people that I was coming to meet you. My wife calls you the grandfather of Canada. You have stirred together the country like nobody else.

A woman I met in an Indigo bookstore in Calgary, Elaine, said, I grew up in Whitehorse, Yukon. Mr. Jean Chrétien stayed at the hotel where my mom's salon was. He took a family photo with me and told me I was a very peppy girl.

He is a wonderful person. Nice. And a family friend said that she met you while she was doing a sit-in protest in the principal's office at Queen's University in the late 1980s, and you actually specifically came to visit and speak to the students there.

Mr. Chrétien:

I probably did.

Neil:

And my therapist told me he loves Jean Chrétien. My friend Kevin said I'm a fan.

He's a great statesman. So you've really spirited this country together in a very unique way.

Mr. Chrétien:

I've been around since 1963. And I was a president of the Young Liberals at Laval University in 1956. So it's a long time I've been around a political debate.

Neil:

Yeah.

Mr. Chrétien:

And I enjoy it, and I still talk about it and participated in many, many ridings in the last election. Yes, been busy. And, you know, I made speeches that were noticed at the leadership, and I wrote a letter to Trump as my personal gift for my birthday on the 11th of January and so on, and attracted apparently a lot of attention.

And so I'm happy. When you're useful at 9-1-1, you feel good.

Neil:

Absolutely. What do you see as the job of the prime minister? What is the prime minister's...

Mr. Chrétien:

He has to do his best, you know. You know, politics is made of problems. Most of them, you don't know the problem before the day that the problem occurs.

So you cannot have all these visions and so on. Your job is, when you have a problem, to find a solution. But I say that to fill a hole, sometimes you create two more holes.

Neil:

So we're shoveling all the time. Yeah, exactly. But in terms of solving problems that come up, I get the sense, both through your books, but also in our conversations, none of which lasted, I think, more than 22 seconds, because I could see on my phone, we had an 8-second conversation, a 15-second conversation.

You get a lot done. You get a massive amount done. And over the course of your time as prime minister, it's very easy to count.

You signed the Kyoto Agreement. You passed the Clarity Act. You did Operation Yellow Ribbon.

You created more national parks. It goes on and on and on. The Canadian flag, you know.

Do you feel that people have a problem getting stuff done now? Is it harder to get things done today? It was not easy.

Mr. Chrétien:

It's never easy in public life. Parliament is there. You are the so-called loyal opposition, but they are more opposition than loyal.

And they do their job. It's what they are there. And you have to live with that and convince them and make it attractive enough that it will pass and defend it in the public and convince the public that it's right.

And there is always a risk that you will be defeated in an election. And a good sign of a defeat, you go back home and your wife is happy. So, you know, it is.

I was lucky. I was never lost in an election. So I was a 12-time elected member of parliament.

I was 30 years in the cabinet, of which 10 as the prime minister. I was three years leader of the opposition. And I survived that all.

But I was lucky and probably hard-working too.

Neil:

Absolutely. I can sense that you're hard-working. You're very hard-working, even today with back-to-back-to-back.

So I'm trying to go quick here. You were very kind enough, Mr. Chrétien, to give us a couple books that shaped you over your life. And when I spoke to you on the phone, a couple that came to mind included a book that I'd like to explain to our listeners.

It's called The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It was published in 1943 by Reynal and Hitchcock. It's got a white cover.

I have it there beside you, the second one down in that pile there. And, you know, it says The Little Prince in a black script. There's this little boy, you know, blond boy with pink cheeks and a green outfit standing on a tiny gray planet with a few flowers poking out of it and some stars, a moon, and a plant in the background.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born in 1900 in Lyon, France. He died in 1944 at age 44 when his plane was shot down over the Mediterranean Sea off of occupied France. This is a simple story of a pilot forced to land in a remote desert.

And then he meets a small boy, The Little Prince, who shares stories with him. Dewey Decimal Heads can put it under 843.912 for French fiction in the library. Mr. Chrétien, tell us about your relationship with this book.

Mr. Chrétien:

But it was a book about good values, basically. that go into the basic in life. And I'm like that.

I'm not apparently very complicated. I do my job, go back home, rest. I'm not, you know, strong on being with the big shots and being seen.

I have a very quiet life. I've been married to the same girl for 62 years, and she was my girlfriend for five. And that is, you know, my life was my family and my work.

Neil:

And I was happy with that. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, I looked into his politics out of curiosity, and they changed throughout his life, as many people's do. He was focused, as you said, values, human dignity, personal responsibility, the importance of community bonds.

He believed in an aristocracy of spirit rather than in birth or wealth, with the idea that true nobility comes from service to others. So on page 11 of your 1984 memoir, Straight From the Heart, you wrote, My family has always been rouge, liberal in the free-thinking, anti-clerical, anti-establishment tradition of the 19th century. I thought I might ask you to open that up.

Maybe tell us how you define liberal and conservative today.

Mr. Chrétien:

But, you know, it's evolving over years. But fundamentally, the liberal party is a centrist party. It is.

We're not doctrinaire. We implement good ideas. We borrow good ideas and implement them.

You know, in my career, a lot of people would say that I stole their ideas. But I said an idea is an idea. I would say to them, 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 know, an idea is an idea. Nobody is the owner of an idea.

Neil:

Yes.

Mr. Chrétien:

And, you know, I'm curious, and I look at the left and I look at the right, and if there's something good there, I pick it up.

Neil:

Yeah.

Mr. Chrétien:

But basically, I, you know, people were always asking me, was this a liberal? Because in Europe, a liberal is more or less a center-right politician, but strong on human rights. In the United States, it is a left-wing politician.

The right in the United States, the liberals are the left. When you say, you know, you see the debate in the United States and they refer to socialists, the communists, and the liberals are all in the same bag for the right. So for me, I say that I have to explain it this way.

A liberal in Canada is when the right says of you, you're a left-winger. When the left says you're a right-winger, you're a good Canadian liberal Chrétien. You know?

The radical center. The radical center. And a country is a moderate country, so you're necessarily moderate if you want to reflect the mood of the nation, the aspiration of the nation.

And you read and heard all my speech about the values of Canada. And proud of our values.

Neil:

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mr. Chrétien:

And we became the envy of the world.

Neil:

Yes, yes. You often quote a study that was done last year citing that Canada is the number one country in the world that people want to move to to start a new life.

Mr. Chrétien:

There was a poll about three months ago, four months ago. Yeah. We're asking people, if you are asked to start again your life, where would you like to go?

Canada was the number one.

Neil:

Mm-hmm. Do these party lines matter as much anymore, calling yourself by certain identities? A lot of younger people today, of course, are growing up in this environment where it's harder to see any sort of long-form speeches or to kind of hear long-form statements or read any kind of, you know, bills that are going through.

They get information in very small sound bites. You hear the extreme gets amplified.

Mr. Chrétien:

But we live in a revolution at this moment of technology. And what will be the result of people having all their information on this machine? Within seconds, very short.

A lot of people don't give a damn about truth. And how to sort it out, it will be a big problem for the past. You know, when I was in politics, to be called a liar was the worst insult you could have.

If someone will accuse you of lying, cannot prove it in the House, he was suspended. And in the United States, they said in the first term of Trump, he lied 14,000 times. Wow.

According to the Washington Post. Right. And, you know, and the people say, oh, they even invented the word, the alternative truth.

Right.

Neil:

Alternative, yeah.

Mr. Chrétien:

So, yeah, come on. When you live in a society like that, you have to sort it out. And eventually, the need for truth will be such that you will find a mechanism to sort out the truth and the lies.

But it's going to be complicated.

Neil:

Very much so, yeah.

Mr. Chrétien:

And it's like, and you know, it will be complicated. It's just like, you know, good news and bad news. Good news is not a news, but a bad news is a news.

So in California, apparently, there was a group who formed a newspaper and it was only with good news. And, you know, they had one bad news. You went bankrupt.

So, good news is not news.

Neil:

It's true. I know. I've been trying to play in the good news world for a long time.

It is difficult to be there. We naturally don't want to think that way. You mentioned Trump.

You mentioned 14,000 lies. You mentioned that you wrote him a letter on your birthday. And we're familiar with your liberal convention speech in January where you said, from one old guy to another, I would say, stop this nonsense.

Today, if you sat down and had a beer with him, today, summer 2020.

Mr. Chrétien:

I would repeat the same thing. But he will not enjoy it. Or he will ignore me.

You know, because it's him. Nobody can't for him. It's him.

Never seen an ego that big. And the people comply. You know, to be accused of lying in my days, it was a worse insult.

For him, he does not give a damn. Is the alternative true? Come on.

When you live with that, I cannot understand that now he's dropping in the polls, but that they voted for him as president. But they did. And perhaps we're living the end of the American empire.

He is destroying what took 80 years to build since the war.

Neil:

So if the American empire is on its way down from your perspective, what fills that gap globally?

Mr. Chrétien:

I don't know. Probably, you know, in 25 years, the big nation will be China. They might have competition from India because they have the number.

And we'll have to adjust. You know, others survive under the American empire. There was a British empire.

This has disappeared. There was Napoleon. He's not there.

Will not come back. You know, so it's a reality. You have to live with reality.

And I believe that we will be in good position because of the wealth, the land, the water, the resources, quality of our society. We'll survive quite well.

Neil:

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay.

Speaking of the land and the resources and the quality of our life, in page 14 of your memoir, you say, the mantra of my life has been, when I look in the mirror, I despair. But when I compare myself to others, I am consoled. What did you mean by that?

Mr. Chrétien:

But I know all my weaknesses better than anybody. Ah, okay. And I know that.

I have witnesses. I tried to overcome that, and I did quite well. But I know that I'm not a genius, that I'm just a human being.

And when I get up in the morning, I say, Jean, you have to do your best today.

Neil:

Mm-hmm.

Mr. Chrétien:

And I like to go to bed and say, I've done my best today.

Neil:

Mm-hmm.

Mr. Chrétien:

And I sleep well.

Neil:

Well, that's interesting you say, I'm not a genius. I'm just trying to do my best. You're famously from Shawinigan Falls, a famously blue-collar town in Quebec.

You often talk about, in your memoirs, how you like to keep connected with the people and go to the bar or go to the places downtown, kind of talk to people. Even as you were prime minister, you would do this, and you maintain connection. Of course, Antoine d'Expery does this with the 40 million people that have bought The Little Prince.

He has an accessibility. It does seem that global leaders now are above us, beyond us. They're usually millionaires or bankers or billionaires.

They're no longer accessible.

Mr. Chrétien:

Nobody would have ever seen Jean Chrétien being sworn in with the richest man of the world.

Neil:

Right.

Mr. Chrétien:

I know some of them, and I don't brag about it.

Normally, I should be the establishment. I've been 40 years on the Hill. I've been elected 12 times member of parliament.

I've been 30 years in the cabinet, as I said, 10 of them as prime minister. I've been minister of all the big, important departments. I was three years the leader of the opposition.

My daughter is married in a very rich family, and nobody thinks when they see me as the establishment. My greatest success in the mind of Canadians is I am still the little guy from Shawinigan.

Neil:

Amazing. How? How did you keep that?

Mr. Chrétien:

I remained myself.

Ah. You know, I know people. Everybody knows the queen gave me the Order of Merit, for example.

I was the first Canadian in 50 years that received that honor. That is a choice of the monarch herself or himself. And that, you know, and I accepted that with pleasure and humility, because apparently I've done my best for 40 years, as they said.

And there was only three other Canadians since 1902 who had received it. And never brag about it. You didn't even know.

So, but it's a reality.

Neil:

Well, I only know because of all the letters in front of your name, partly. Yeah, but nobody even knows what that means. I know, unless you Google it.

But I will also say, another thing I looked up before I interviewed you was the average exit poll approval rating of every Canadian prime minister ever in history who's been prime minister for longer than six months. And you, my friend, are number one overall since they started tracking approval ratings, which is in about the 1950s or 60s. So before this, they didn't do that.

But from then until now, your exit polling, which was 45% approval rating after three consecutive majorities from 1993 to 2003, was the highest of all time. Brian Mulroney was the lowest, and Justin Trudeau was the second lowest. Not the huge range in the middle.

Mr. Chrétien:

I didn't know that. Thank you for... You know, I... Somebody was... Look at that.

Apparently, of all the prime ministers in my elections, I am the one who had received plus 2.3% of the vote in my election. I was the number one of 17 elected prime ministers. Brian was the last again.

And that is... You know, on the honeymoon, as they say. You know, I never went below the day, the vote I had the day of the election.

They claim that a honeymoon is all over when you go in the poll lower than the vote you had in the election. For me, I never went lower. In between, you know, when I was having more.

When I quit, according to Gallup, I had 60% of approval rate and 59% intention of voting. So I could have won easily a fourth mandate if I had enough. Three was more than enough.

And 40 years in public life.

Neil:

You made some promises to Aileen, I believe.

Mr. Chrétien:

Yes. I said to Aileen that I was to quit before 70. And I quit.

I was 69, 11 months and one day.

Neil:

So you had three weeks left that you gave her as a bonus, a little extra vacation. Your second formative book, Monsieur, is Ernest Hemingway's famous book, The Old Man and the Sea. This was originally published in 1952, just four years before you were president of the Young Liberals at Laval.

Originally in Life Magazine, but then they published it in a book the same year by Scribner. My cover is just a shimmering blue sea, but there's many covers with a man in a boat holding a fishing line, holding a huge marlin. Ernest Hemingway is the Nobel Prize winning writer who lived from 1899 to 1961.

And of course, the story is about an old Cuban fisherman and a supreme ordeal, a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. This one goes under 813.52 for American Fiction. Mr. Chrétien, tell us about your relationship with The Old Man and the Sea.

Mr. Chrétien:

He never gave up. And he got his fish. I never give up. I am persistent. And it's very important when you know what you need, you try to get it.

And it was a beautiful book, beautifully written by Hemingway. He was a great writer.

Neil:

Yeah.

Mr. Chrétien:

It's one of the two books, you know, I'm happy. I remember these two and I'm happy I chose these two.

Neil:

Yeah, they're beautiful.

Mr. Chrétien:

There's a lot of simplicity in that.

Neil:

Absolutely.

Mr. Chrétien:

It's all simple. Clear, like the Clarity Act. I like to have, if I had a quality, apparently I was able to go to the nub of the problem easily.

Some people get, that's kind of the way you're thinking, they get embroiled into the details of everything. For me, I try to go to where is the problem. And if you know exactly what is the problem, you can find it.

The problem is if you want to cover everything, you get mixed up. And it is, for me, the way I was acting. If you can get the nub of the problem, the rest fall in place.

But some can do that, some cannot do that. It's a way of thinking, I guess, that some are very preoccupied to have everything before they move. For me, I knew that if I was convinced that where I had to go, what I had to do, I knew that a part would fall in places.

But some get stuck in the parts and it takes time and becoming decisive and so on.

Neil:

Is getting to the nub of a problem a skill you can learn?

Mr. Chrétien:

Yes.

Neil:

How would you recommend you learn it?

Mr. Chrétien:

You have so many problems. When you're in politics, you know, they always come to see you for problems.

Neil:

How do you prioritize the problems? How do you know which one is the most...

Mr. Chrétien:

You look at the problem one by one and you realize that something is not important, so you give it to somebody else to solve. And when it's very important and it is your responsibility, you know, you take it and you work on it.

Neil:

Mm-hmm. Speed. And this is getting to become a bigger issue in this era of confusion with media as we were talking about. Now, the title, of course, is The Old Man and the Sea, so I thought I would just ask you about both of those phrases, old man and then the sea.

On the old man, I don't mean to call you an old man, but you were born the 18th of 19 children in 1934. Of course, nine survived infancy. Today, you're 91 1⁄2.

You're still going to the office. That's where we're talking right now. To what do you attribute your cognitive and physical longevity?

Mr. Chrétien:

Well, in my family, we have probably good genes. Mom lost babies one year or one week. In those days, they had no medication of today.

My brothers who are in medicine all say that most of them would have survived today, but at that time, they were losing a lot of kids of sickness. But the rest, the nine who survived, the first trio live an average of 85. The second trio live an average of 97.

I'm part of the third trio. We lost one last year at 95, and we are two. Me, 91, and my brother, 89.

To build the 97, both him and I, we have to survive until we are 98. We would succeed. To beat the average.

My father died 93.

Neil:

Wow. It is part of our genes. There is a big genetic component, of course, and I think any doctor would point to that. Discipline.

Mr. Chrétien:

We are a family that we're all hardworking. That came from mom and dad, and very disciplined. How do you define discipline?

Discipline. Not drinking, not smoking, not doing this, and having an orderly life, and so on. You know, I think that we did not have a divorce in my family.

Neil:

Oh, wow. Yeah.

Mr. Chrétien:

And, you know...

Neil:

Eating well?

Mr. Chrétien:

Eating well, good food, not in too great quantities, and, you know, discipline.

Discipline was very important to be on time. I'm a maniac about that. You know, if I'm five minutes late, I am upset.

Dad used to say, it is the politeness of a king to be on time. And that I'm always on time.

Neil:

And that discipline really rings a bell for me because last year on this podcast, I interviewed 87-year-old Ralph Nader, and he said very similar. No drinking, no smoking, eating good food, having small meals, walking, being tight, you know, communing.

He used that phrase, communing with nature. I just heard you say at the beginning, I heard you say you were in the garden last night. So there's some basic, simple elements here that seem to weave in with genetics.

Mr. Chrétien:

You know, it's simple life.

Neil:

Yeah.

Mr. Chrétien:

And, you know, when I'm at my lake, I swim and walk, and I'm going there two days. I will be 10 weeks there. Still working on the phone, but not much.

And enjoying life, but quiet life.

Neil:

The quiet life. I like this. Okay.

That's on longevity. And then on the sea, there's the old man, there's the sea. Canada, of course, has the longest coastline in the world and is one of only two countries in the world that borders three oceans.

The other is Russia. I guess, technically, you could also count the U.S. if you include Alaska touching the Arctic Ocean. So it's just two or three countries that touch three oceans.

You were the Minister of the Environment and Fisheries. You have many great accomplishments from this period, including the 1997 Oceans Act, which made Canada the first country in the world to adopt an approach to ocean management, emphasizing conservation and sustainable use of marine resources. So I want to ask you about the oceans today.

Two sides. One is the environment side. Just the state of the oceans appears to be at risk globally.

Seems like a petrifying big problem with the plastics and the dumping for so long. But we're aware of it.

Mr. Chrétien:

Before, we're not paying attention to that. Now we're starting to pay attention to that. So it will diminish.

You know, we'll find ways to dispose of the plastic. We're moving there now. You know, you see some ads on TV where the Coca-Cola and Pepsi claim that they use only recycled plastic.

But I'd say it's true. So when, you know, they're recycling, that means that it's not going into the ocean.

Neil:

Right.

Mr. Chrétien:

Perhaps we will replace plastic someday by something else. It's a problem. It's very useful.

We use it every day 10 times a day or more. But in the old days, we had cellophane. You remember that word?

Neil:

Yes, yes.

Mr. Chrétien:

But cellophane was not plastic. Cellophane was made out of wood.

It was a natural product. Now we don't use it. It has disappeared probably for all sorts of technical reasons.

I'm not an expert. But it was. It is transparent.

It was covering the pack of cigarettes and all that. It was thin and not very strong, but doing a good job. And something someday will appear.

I'm an optimist person, you know. If we're making so much progress in so many fields, that someday we will make progress on that.

Neil:

Yeah. I bet you that optimism is a big part of the longevity too. And then you mentioned, of course, our water. We have 20% of the world's fresh water.

We have 2 million lakes, more than the rest of the world combined. You're going to go swimming in one in a couple of days. The northern passage appears to be opening.

Ice is melting. Prime Minister Mark Carney just declared that the six-year goal of joining NATO's 2% defense, he will reach it this year. He said, only one of our four submarines is operational.

It's time to get some new ones. So I would like to understand your view about the oceans from a defense point of view or from a...

Mr. Chrétien:

You know, the north, we have the passage. When I was Minister of Northern Affairs, the Americans sent the Manhattan. They didn't have the Canadian flag.

I was a minister. I went there. I went on the Louis Saint-Laurent icebreaker and I called the captain and said, I'm going to your ship in an hour and expect to see the Canadian flag.

It was off the coast at Pond Inlet. When I wanted to prove that it was international water, when I said, it's better for you to have the Canadian flag, he put out the Canadian flag. It was a gesture of recognition.

And today, if they are afraid that the Chinese or the Japanese or everybody will use it, they have nothing to do. Just say that it's Canadian water. They solved the problem.

The minute it's Canadian water, it's no more international water. But if we have to develop the North's passage, we'll have to build icebreakers and that will come earlier than expected because of the climate change. And it is the shortest way to Europe from Japan or from China to go to the eastern side of the United States and to the middle side of the United States.

It could probably eventually use Churchill to go to right in the middle of the United States. And this is the way to go to Europe. So it's a hell of an asset. They don't need to say it's Canadian water. It helped us to develop it.

Who's they? The Americans.

Neil:

Ah, if the Americans say it's Canadian water and then help us develop it.

Mr. Chrétien:

That will help.

Neil:

Mm-hmm.

As opposed to trying to...

Mr. Chrétien:

And we can manage it the way we managed the air defense with NORAD.

Neil:

Mm-hmm.

Mr. Chrétien:

Since generations.

Nobody talks about NORAD because it's working very well.

Neil:

It's like an umpire in baseball. We only talked about them when they miss a call, not when they get them right. Yeah, that's interesting because, you know, you talk about the Japanese, you talk about the Chinese.

Of course, Trump has made overtures towards Greenland. Of course, he's made overtures towards us as a 51st state. Comments have riled up even as early as this morning on the Toronto Star.

That comment is still there. I must be a dreamer, but I always still imagine the idea and concept of world peace. Do you feel like there are some steps globally we could be taking to better inch ourselves towards more peace in this era of many wars happening today?

Mr. Chrétien:

You know, we have to realize that we are a middle power. We can play a role, but we can't carry the weight because we're not a big power. So we use our best.

You know, like me, I said no to the war in Iraq. Yes. So everybody was scared in Canada.

Yes. And I did that. Now everybody approved me, but it was not easy.

No. How did you do that? I said no.

Neil:

But George W. Bush at the time, of course, was a friend of yours. You had had him up here many times for the Summit of Americas in Quebec.

Mr. Chrétien:

Yeah, but it's not a question of him. It's a question of country. He was making the wrong decision, and I was not to do the same. That has nothing to do with friendship.

You know, when you're a president of a country or a prime minister, friendship is important. But you serve the interests of the nation, not the interests of the friendship.

Neil:

But England was going along with them. This is post 9-11.

Mr. Chrétien:

Tony Blair lost his reputation in England for that. Like for me, you know, when he wrote a book, he gave the proceed to the veterans, and he could not go and sign book. There was too much protest.

Never had that problem. But he made the wrong decision, and I made the right decision. He wanted to be with the Americans, and I could not say yes because I thought they were wrong.

Neil:

Mm-hmm. You said there was no proof of weapons of mass destruction, and the United Nations has not supported it, the decision.

Mr. Chrétien:

That's what I said. And I said, I told him, you know, I read all these documents, and you don't have the proof. I said in one of my books that there was not enough proof to convince the judge of the municipal court in Schoeningen.

That there was a proof of weapons of mass destruction. And it turned out there was none.

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah. Though they did take out the leader at the end of this war.

Mr. Chrétien:

But, you know, there was a war with Iran at that time, and Iraq was the proxy of the Americans against Iran. Remember that? That lasted for 10 years.

Neil:

Mm-hmm.

Mr. Chrétien:

Hundreds of thousands of people were killed.

Neil:

And there was no winner at the end of it. Mm-hmm. And this is the state we live in today. I know you don't want to talk about today's headlines, but, of course, Iran and Israel are renewing a battle today. And I think it was 175 people this morning were killed in Gaza from Israel.

There's just a tremendous amount of human lives lost on a daily basis.

Mr. Chrétien:

It's terrible. You know, we have Gaza now. And we have Ukraine.

And we have Iran.

Neil:

Mm-hmm.

Mr. Chrétien:

And, you know, I think that, you know, the bragging is sometimes irresponsible. When Trump was telling the Americans the day after I would be president, the war would be terminated, it was all BS. But people, when a guy who had been president, we expect he would be a responsible guy.

It was just BS. It was not to happen like that. I know that file very well.

I was there with Putin and Yeltsin and the G in NATO and all that. I spent a lot of time and effort there. So, you know, you have to be truthful.

Mm-hmm.

Neil:

How do you see it playing out?

Mr. Chrétien:

I don't know.

If I could, I would be very happy. It is going to be very tough for the Americans and for the rest of the world. You know, the Americans are not isolated.

What they do affects everybody.

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

OK. I appreciate your honesty and your openness to speak so candidly. And, you know, you don't pull any punches.

And this is what some people love about you. You've stayed yourself and you are honest and clear, which is a big part of your legacy. I want to talk quickly about marriage.

Ernest Hemingway had four wives in his life. And each of his wives he married the year he divorced the last one. Of course, you had one, your wife, Aileen Kretchen, who you credited as your top advisor.

And you often joked was running the country with you. Or you made comments all the time. I have to go ask Aileen.

And you spent 68 years together, including 63 years of marriage. What advice do you have for a long and happy marriage?

Mr. Chrétien:

You know, she was my first girlfriend. As I say, I hit the target the first day. And we had very compatible characters.

And we're happy together. You know, we knew she, we knew our responsibility. I was making joke.

I said, if you, you know, I said on a TV program one day that the recipe. Oh, it's easy. You have to put water in your wine.

And if it's not working, you gave her the glass of wine and you drink only the water. And she was receiving phone calls from her friends. And you're so lucky, you know, but it is, you know.

For me, she was running a household. Not me. If she wanted to have a wall yellow, it was yellow.

That's it. You know, I said, do it. Sometimes it's with the kids.

I was always on her side and not developed, you know, but sometimes she, she was very, very good. But we could discuss that. But in front of the kids, we were united.

And, and we'll make the adjustment. Anyway, we have problems with our kids like anybody else. But we, that never interfere in our marriage.

We were trying to solve the problems together.

Neil:

And you would, I'm assuming, go home and have her as a sounding board and a person, a trusted advisor beyond the world of politics.

Mr. Chrétien:

Oh, but she was quite aware of politics without talking about it. You know, I was involved in politics. I was a kid.

When we married, I told her before our wedding that, you know, someday I will try politics. So she knew. And she was very young.

I was making speeches, 21, 22 in the villages and so on. And she would come with me. But she never, she would always say that there's only one person on the stage.

It's my husband, not me.

Neil:

Beautiful. Thank you. And inspiring.

And I hope I get to 63 years of marriage. I'm not even a quarter of the way there, but leaning towards that, looking towards that and have a beautiful, lovely wife, Leslie. So I want to ask you quickly about the Canadian flag.

And then we'll kind of wrap things up here. As I know you have a very, very busy day and you're moving meetings around as we speak to get around this. I appreciate that.

So we have you wearing a red tie today. I know you often wear red. It's the color of liberals.

But also the color of the Canadian flag, which stands about four feet beside you. You were instrumental as a big part of creating this flag.

Mr. Chrétien:

I was a member of parliament. There was a hell of a debate because the conservatives wanted to keep the union jacked. And we wanted to have a distinct big flag.

And when Mike Pearson talked about it the first time in front of the legion in Winnipeg, he was booed out of the room. And it was very emotional. We went through that.

And now it's accepted by everybody. And we're very lucky. It's extremely distinctive.

Your flags are as distinctive as Canada. Yeah. You know, in my belief, the colors are not complicated in the heart of Heraldic art.

Simplicity is supposed to be the key. So it's red and white. There's only two colors.

And, you know, the Japanese have a very simple flag. The Swiss have a very simple flag, only two colors. And that's supposed to be the goal you should reach.

But it's complicated with the number of countries these days and so on. But the Canada flag is very distinctive, very easy to spot, you know. And it's become a good sign of a lot of people.

Myself and the other former premier, as the people show up, the Canadian flag, we did that in February. You remember?

Neil:

That's right.

Mr. Chrétien:

And I see a lot more flags now than before.

Neil:

That's right. I have one hanging in my window. You often end your books and your speeches with a three-word phrase, viva la Canada.

Would you open that phrase up for me as we close this conversation off? I'm grateful for your time. What does viva la Canada mean to you today?

What is the case for Canada? What is our reason for being and what does viva la Canada represent?

Mr. Chrétien:

Because we have achieved what other countries have not achieved. We have two official languages. We respect the native rights better than any other country in the world.

We have welcomed people from all over the world. You know, and when you become a Canadian, you know, we respect the diversity. You know, if somebody is, you know, 50% of the population are first, second or third generation of immigrants.

Neil:

Right.

Mr. Chrétien:

And the French-Canadian now represent probably 21, 22% of the population. The British island, no more than 27, because 50 are immigrants, one way or the other.

And we are immigrants too, but my family arrived in 1660, so a long time ago. And we live in unity. We don't have ghettos, very obvious discrimination.

There is always bad characters and people who are racist, you know, that's human nature. But it's not a value that is broadcast, not a value, but a problem that is broadcast. We don't, we're not proud of that.

We try not to be racist. And we're rich. We share.

We have less very rich people per capita than United States, but we have a lot less poor people. You know, we have healthcare that you don't have to pay. It makes a hell of a difference.

You know, I make the joke. I used to make, you know, our goal when we established that in 1967, in my speech, I would say, and like others, nobody will lose their home anymore, Canada, because somebody is sick in the family. And it's true.

It's paid. Sometimes it's difficult to get in, but it is, you know, a question of too many people use it for nothing too. And there is, it's difficult.

It is, people are going home and it is the biggest demand of financial resources of their country. But generally speaking, if you're very sick, they take care of you. There's a lot of people who have to wait for knee replacement and that type of thing that are convenient, but not vital.

And I remember a joke I was making that I had a friend of mine who was in Florida. He had a heart attack and he went to the hospital. And when he got up, he's got his bill and he had another heart attack.

You know, Canada does not happen. You know, I was interviewed one day by a board in Washington of a big Washington Post. And they were arguing that perhaps their system is better than ours.

And there was one guy there. He said, I got sick. He was an American in Toronto.

He said, I called the desk. Within minutes, I was in an ambulance. I was rushed to the emergency.

They saved my life. And he saw me after that, he came to ask the question, who will pay? It's not that like that in United States.

You have to explain which company is paying for you with tons of questions. You know, in Canada, you have just your credit card of health. You put it there and you're in.

So there is some administrative problem. It's a very difficult public service. But on the whole, it's doing quite well.

Neil:

The Right Honorable Mr. Jean Chrétien. This has been a real lifelong honor. And I'm very grateful to you.

Viva la Canada, sir.

Mr. Chrétien:

Merci beaucoup. Fini?

Neil:

Fini.

Mr. Chrétien:

Done it in an hour.

Neil:

Hey, everybody. It's just me. Just Neil again.

Turned on a tiny bit of French to close things off. I was caught off guard because he was starting to, I think, compliment me in French. And my brain was like, do I know what he's talking about?

And I was just like, Fini? Fini? But then actually we kept going.

And so if you stick around to the very end of this chat, I'll throw in a little suffix, a super, super bonus suffix that he shared with me at the end on the record. About a conversation he had with Tony Blair down in South Africa, which is pretty eye-opening as it relates to world events. But we'll stick that at the very end of the end of the Podcast Club, which doesn't come yet.

For now, I will say that was quite the trip. It was quite the trip going up to his office. And I got there an hour and a half early.

And nobody was there. And it was dark. And I was like, am I just at the wrong spot?

But when somebody let me in, they're like, oh, he's here. He's been in meetings since 8 o'clock. He's got a meeting at 8.

He's got a meeting at 8.15. He's got a meeting at 8.30. He's got a meeting at 8.45. And I was like, oh, well, what about my two-hour podcast? They're like, two hours? What do you mean two hours?

Like, we don't do meetings longer than one hour here. We pretty much don't do that. He's never done an hour-long interview ever, they said.

Ever. So I was able to explain my case and that I thought approval to do this. And they were able to fit me in and move another meeting around.

But it was like a busy day for him and for me, but just flying up there and interviewing him. And he was very passionate. He's very sharp, as you can tell.

I mean, he's 91. And I hope I have that kind of cognitive faculty and functioning when I'm up there. Fingers crossed for all of us.

But that's why these role models are so important. He is serving as a living icon who still breathes this deep national Canadian spirit that people like me soak up. I just put out a new book called Canada is Awesome.

And I'd love you to check that out. It was partly inspired by his January speech. So there's a lot of quotes from him that I just love and I captured and I wrote down.

So many. We can start anywhere. But how about just, I want to die standing up.

That's a great metaphor for, you know, what I call in chapter four of The Happiness Equation, the idea of never retiring. Wanting to always do something, be doing something with purpose, with passion, with connection, with commitment. Right?

The four S's, social structure, stimulation, and story. He has absolutely all of them in spades. This one, a lot of people say I stole their ideas.

I say, if you don't want me to steal your ideas, shut up. Don't tell me to do this and do that and complain because I've done it. I thought that was great.

A wonderful line. I asked him what he would tell Trump about, like, would he say stop this nonsense? And I tell him the same thing, but it's him.

He will ignore me because it's him. Never seen an ego that big, which I thought was interesting. I mean, not surprising, but interesting.

In my day, to be accused of lying, it was the worst insult. Isn't that true? That, you know, we went from this era of telling the truth to an era of what's the truth almost overnight.

He quotes that. I think it's a New York Times piece that had counted every line. You know, the president had lied 14,000 times over one term.

Another great quote. A liberal is when the left says you're on the right and the right says you're on the left. Just the idea of finding the quote-unquote radical center.

The Right Honorable Jean Chrétien, what an honor and privilege and pleasure to be sitting with you, to spend some time with you, to have your wisdom pervade the airways across the universe through this podcast. And thank you so much for giving us two books that are neither going to be added, but both going to be asterisks. Because The Old Man and the Sea, that's number 933 on our list already.

I had this coming down. I was like, oh, we're going to add it to the 500s. But no, Jonathan Fields picked it in Chapter 26.

Brandon Stanton of Humans of New York picked it in Chapter 63. And Doug the Bookseller also picked it in Chapter 99. So this is like one of the rare triple asterisks on the show.

Meaning that more than one person picked it. Because we want the top 1,000 to be 1,000 different books, right? Over at 3books.co/thetop1000 if you want to check it out. And then his second book, The Little Prince or Le Petit Prince, chosen in Chapter 96 by Dave Cheeswright, former CEO of Walmart International, and by Maria Popova in Chapter 138, creator and founder of what was then called Brain Pickings and is now called The Marginalian. So Mr. Chrétien shares space with a lot of other luminaries on the show and has asterisked our list heavily. Thank you so much to him, to Bob Wright for helping to arrange this, for Bruce for putting up with me and barging into the office and making space for me, for all the people at the wonderful firm that he's a part of that helped make space for me.

I really appreciate your kindness. Thank you all of you for listening. And now, 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 read your letters.

Let's start off as we always do by going to the phones.

Claire:

Hi, Neil. This is Claire. I'm calling from Nova Scotia.

I started listening to your podcast years ago when you first began and I was doing a lot of driving then, so it was not all the time. And then I kind of forgot about it up until now and was on another road trip and picked up where you have now left off, listening to some of the most influential, wonderful people that I love to read, Maria Popova, David Eggers, Holy Smokes. So congrats on how it's grown and how you've maintained it ad-free.

Thank you so much for what you're doing for the book world and book lovers. What a cool, special thing. Oh, I've got to go.

I just got a paper cut. Okay, bye-bye.

Neil:

Thank you so much to Claire from Nova Scotia for calling us at 1-833-READALOT. That's R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T. Claire, I can totally relate to falling out of a podcast and falling back in.

I will be here for many moons, either way, commute or not. And I'm so glad you mentioned Dave Eggers and Maria Popova because those are two of my favorite guests because they don't do interviews, right? Dave Eggers just doesn't do interviews.

Maria Popova just doesn't do interviews. But they are book people, and they were attracted to the ad-free nature of the show. Both of them mentioned that to me offline, that because I don't monetize the show, i.e. I lose money on the podcast, they were attracted to it because then their IP or the things they say won't be used to sell more ads, which they're both personally against. So, you know, the marginalian doesn't have any ads. It's the same kind of idea. And Dave Eggers is kind of a values-first guy, too.

So, it's hard sometimes to be that way, but I like it, and I just don't want to be spending my time reading ads. So, I've even disabled ads on my YouTube channel, which, by the way, Google makes it very hard to do. You have to, like, go in and email Google and disable the stuff.

I don't like ads. So, there aren't going to be any ads on the show. I'm very lucky to be able to do that, I know.

But thank you so much for pointing it out and appreciating it. And if you are listening to this, call me, 1-833-READALOT. Let me know one of your formative books.

Let me know one of your dream guests. Let me know something that stood out to you from a guest. What's something that Monsieur Jean Chrétien said that you agreed with or you disagreed with, that you were hoping we would get into, or you wish that we had covered?

Like, it's good to just feed stuff back. 1-833-READALOT, R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T. And don't worry, if you butcher it, if you put your foot in your mouth, just call back.

Call back 12 times. Some people do that. I won't play anything that makes you look bad.

I just never will. That's not my goal. And if I do play your message, as I just did with Claire, I will send you a book.

Signed book, any of my books. You pick the book. Drop me a line with your address.

Claire, there will be one in the mail for you soon. All right. And now, let's move on to the letter of the chapter.

All right. This chapter's letter comes from Emilio Arcatola. Hi, Emilio.

I started listening to your podcast a couple years ago as I wanted to get back into reading. One of the first chapters I listened to was chapter four. Ever since hearing that podcast, which, by the way, was with Sarah Ramsey, my favorite bookseller, I want to visit Book City and more local bookstores when I travel.

I will be traveling to Toronto in a couple of weeks and was wondering if you had any recommendations for book lovers and food lovers. Huge thank you for sharing your thoughts and conversations with me and the world. From Emilio.

First of all, thank you, Emilio, for the letter and for coming to Toronto. Yes, I've got lots of recommendations. Another story is a great one.

That's where Sarah worked after Book City. But here's the thing. Type Bookstore on Queen Street West is probably the best independent bookstore in the city, although we have a tremendous amount of varied bookstores.

So Tite Bookstore, Queen Street West, for sure. The Monkey's Paw has the world's only bibliomat, which is a vending machine that dispenses books. It has the world's only.

It's actually mentioned in Atlas Obscura because of that. And the owner, Steve, he calls himself a book antiquarian. And he is the incredible curator of, I think it's called Old and Unusual Printed Matter.

That's the tagline in the window. He's got old maps. He's got, like, you know, field guides for bird books in the 1800s.

He's got children's literature, like original Roald Dahl hardcovers. It's an amazing bookstore. And you really feel like you're part of the ages when you're in there.

And then, of course, I would be—I can't not mention BMV Bookstore. BMV. That's where the podcast logo of Three Books was taken, the first one, where I'm standing reading a book in a bookstore.

BMV stands for, hilariously, Books Music Video. I guess that's what they called it when they started the store in 1997. And now it's a four-story building, four stories of books that have, you know, new, used, remainder books, collector's books.

It's just a world unto itself. I mean, the top story, three stories up, is just a room with just graphic novels and, like, old vintage magazines from, like, the 50s and 60s and 70s. They've got vinyl in the basement.

They've got an incredible DVD collection. They still have that. The literature is amazing.

I'm always finding, like, old and interesting covers or interesting books. They've got a knack for doing it and doing it well. In terms of food, my favorite restaurant in Toronto is probably Rasa, R-A-S-A.

And I also really love Bar Raval, R-A-V-A-L. Those will be a couple to get you going. All right.

And now it's time for the word of the chapter. And for this chapter's word, let's go back to the one and only Right Honorable Monsieur Chrétien.

Mr. Chrétien:

You're a good Canadian liberal. President of the Young Liberals at Laval University. The Liberal Party is a centrist party.

Neil:

Yes, indeed, it is liberal. Liberal. Liberal.

Liberal. According to Merriam Webster, that is somebody inclined to be open to ideas and ways of behaving that are not conventional or traditional, i.e., broad-minded, comma, tolerant. Second definition, of relating to or favoring a philosophy of liberalism, especially political liberalism, and social liberalism, which also means an inclination to be open to new ways of behaving.

We already talked about that, Merriam Webster. You're being circular now. What about you, Google?

What do you say? Ah, Google says... Liberal.

Willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one's own. Open to new ideas. Relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.

Now, you know, we use that word a lot in Canada because, of course, there's the Liberal Party, but as Monsieur Chrétien pointed out, that definition is varied around the world. So, why don't we go back into the history? That word actually comes from liber, which means free in Latin.

Then, liberalis, from a free man. The original sense was suitable for a free man, hence suitable for a gentleman, i.e., one not tied to a trade, surviving, for example, in liberal arts. Another early sense of the word was generous, giving rise to the now obsolete meaning free from restraint.

Okay, there's a lot of definitions of that word. For me, the word liberal is defined, really, and as a person, it is prime minister, right, honorable, which means he won the Order of Merit, first guy in 50 years to win that from the actual queen herself, Monsieur Jean Chrétien. The definition with his red tie, always in a suit, his passionate fiery speeches, my very first prime minister, and like I said, my favorite.

I am so honored to have been able to have that conversation with Monsieur Chrétien. I hope you found it enjoyable. Thank you so much, all of you, for being here, and until next time, remember that you are what you eat, and you are what you read.

Keep turning the page, and I'll talk to you soon.

Mr. Chrétien:

You know, when I announced the war in Iraq, I know one of the big reproach, you know, that I had received was I did not make a statement. The question was asked by the leader of the opposition. I expected that.

I had replied. I think I used less than one minute, so they said I should have explained that and blah, blah, blah. No, when you say no, you say no, that's it, you know.

It's a no. Why you have a no? No, it's a no.

You know, I didn't have to explain. It was controversial at that time. Half of the population was yes, and the other half was no, but they didn't have weapons of mass destruction.

Neil:

Which made it an easy-ish decision.

Mr. Chrétien:

And I had a discussion with Tony Blair at a Commonwealth meeting in South Africa, where he was urging me to go along with them. And I said to him, he said to me, he was not using weapons of mass destruction. He said to me, we have to get rid of Saddam Hussein, he's a terrible dictator.

So I said, Tony, if we are in the business of getting rid of dictators we don't like, I'm not very enthusiastic about the regime of Mugabe here next door in Zimbabwe. And I said, he is a member of the family. Why don't you look at the problem within the Commonwealth family first, rather than going elsewhere?

Oh, he said he's a terrible dictator and so on. And I said, yes, you know, he said to me basically, in reply to a question, he said, yes, but there is a big difference, that was his reply, between Mugabe and Saddam Hussein. And I said to him, oh yes, Mugabe has no oil.

He became white. I think I hit the target.

Neil:

The nub.

Mr. Chrétien:

The nub, I imagine.

Neil:

Goodbye

Listen to the chapter here!

Chapter 149: John and Alison on fascism-fighting fiction fomenting freedom and fraternity

Listen to the chapter here!

Neil:

Hey everybody, it's Neil Pasricha and welcome or welcome back to chapter 149, 49, 49 of three books. Forgive the bizarre echo in this recording. I am walking around very slowly in an odd triangle shaped second floor boardroom that you can rent at the airport when your flight to Chicago gets delayed by high winds.

Yeah, they call it the windy city for a reason. I have been blowing around like the wind the last few weeks. In the last few weeks, I have been in Nashville, hanging out with 5,000 of the funnest Marriott general managers ever.

Over in Vancouver, hanging out with about 3,500 McDonald's store managers, which is a lot of fun. I've been in Vegas. I've been in Dallas.

I've been in Chicago. I've been in Ottawa today, speaking to the federal government this morning. I was in Barcelona last week, speaking to a big bank out there.

And you know what? A few weeks ago, I was down in San Diego. That's when I went birdwatching in the morning.

I like to go birding before I speak. Grounds me physiologically, gives me a lot of good phytoncides, checks off my list maker tendency. So I was birding down in like Torrey Pines, seeing peregrine falcons, common ravens, California scrub jays.

And then I walk up the coast, the Pacific Ocean. An hour later, I bump into John and Alison, the booksellers, wonderful 42-year-long booksellers who John, at age 67, just opened Camino Books for the road ahead. But before we get into John and Alison, as always, I want to kick things off with a letter.

If you want to send me a letter, just mail it to 719 Bloor Street West, Suite 307, Toronto, Ontario, M6G1L5. I love getting your letters in the mail. And if you don't want to leave a letter, you can always call me at 1-833-READALOT.

I play a voicemail at the end of every chapter. Okay. This chapter's letter comes from Timothy Abbatacola, who writes to us from Oak Park, Illinois.

Dear Neil, he writes, I am an avid listener of three books. I think what you've hit on is such a gem. It's almost unbelievably perfect from a book lover's perspective.

I'm reaching out because a friend and I are starting a bookstore in Oak Park, Illinois, where we both live. It's the birthplace of Hemingway, so we've got that going for us. We believe that the bookstore's naturally flexible form can be experimented with to expand its cultural and intellectual reach in order to address some of the cultural illnesses of our lonely, anxious time.

Some things you've touched on in multiple chapters, isolation, anxiety, along with things like cultural illiteracy and just plain old regular illiteracy. We're thinking of our bookstore primarily as a place offering a convening ground for writers, artists, thinkers, those who aspire to such work, and those who aspire to simply live a life that is examined and good. To do this, our adjoining unit is going to feature a cocktail bar, where we hope to utilize a shared floor plan and continuity of design to bring the interiority and stillness of books to the verve and conviviality of the cocktail house.

We believe, and I think you'd agree, that our interior lives ought to push us back out into friendship and the social realm, that stillness and conviviality are not in opposition, but equally vital organs of one full and precious life. I'm reaching out because our work is a convening ground for all the different types of people in the book world. I love your work, and I want our community to be formed in part by it.

I'm making and sustaining friendships with the people we love and who we believe do great work in other worlds. We want to highlight what you do to our community, all the while strengthening our own culture. By being attentive to the work you put out, we would love to help that inform our bookstore.

The letter goes on and on. I've had a really fun time going back and forth to Timothy. We basically established that three books can be used anywhere, and I say this to any bookseller.

The three formative books of Quentin Tarantino, the three formative books of Brené Brown. Whatever you want to do. It's totally fine with me.

And then I also just love verb and conviviality and community, so we're having fun conversations about other ways of organizing bookstores. How else might you organize a bookstore? 1-833-READALOT, if you want to drop me a line, and you know the mailing address, I mentioned it at the beginning.

All right. Why did I read a letter from an aspiring independent bookseller, Timothy? Well, because we're going to talk to a veteran independent bookseller today.

After I went birdwatching at Torrey Pines before my speech in San Diego a couple weeks ago, holding, by the way, these gigantic pine cones that are bigger than the size of your hand from the endangered Torrey Pine, seeing all these wonderful, cool, interesting birds. I walk up the coast. I bump into Del Mar.

I ask a couple people in town, hey, is there a local bookstore here? Everyone says no. The locals tell me there is no bookstore, but then I see a bookstore, like a hobbit hole bookstore in the side of a brick wall.

Big round entrance, Camino Books, it says, for the road ahead. I walk into the bookstore, and it's like a Biblio paradise. Staff pics, walls everywhere, handwritten signs, bustling people everywhere.

These interesting kids' corners. I checked the Lord of the Rings section. They've got like big print and small print and a fancy version and a cloth version.

This is just Lord of the Rings. It's just like a 1500 group of bookstores. There's autographs from Dave Eggers on the wall.

He was just there for Independent Bookstore Day. They've got all kinds of sign books at the front. It's got pizazz.

I asked them, hey, I started to say, hey, sorry to ask you, but like my phone just died. I'm visiting from Canada. Can I plug it in somewhere?

And the guy looks at me. Guy, late 60s, he's got white hair combed over his head. He's got like dark glasses, a really nice, he's nicely dressed.

He's got like tight pants. He's got a, he's, he's a, he's a handsome man. He's wearing like a, not a Hawaiian shirt, but like a, like a silk dress shirt coming out kind of just hanging out there.

He's a, he's a handsome man. And he gives me like a quirky smile. And he says, oh, from Canada, how many tariffs should I add to your free charge?

And he smiles at me with this kind of funny way. And I look at him and I'm like, I start laughing. We end up connecting over this funny joke and we start talking politics, which you probably shouldn't do just randomly, but we just did it.

And I made the comment, I said, you know, I wonder if the most right-wing guy in Canada is left of the most left-wing guy in the U.S. And he says, oh yeah, absolutely. He says, we don't have a left wing. We're like a, we're like an eagle slowly spiraling to the ground with just one right wing.

And I look at him and I'm like, uh, whoa, did you just make that up? He's like, yeah, yeah. I was like, do you think like this all the time?

He's like, yeah, yeah. I was like, wow. I said, you know what?

The way you're speaking and the way you look, you kind of remind me of George Saunders. He says, George, great guy. Had lunch with him at a bookseller convention recently.

Yeah. He said, yeah, we have the same aura, don't we? We have the same warm gnarliness.

That's what he said. He said, we have the same warm gnarliness. Well, you guys know George, our guest in chapter 75, author of Lincoln and the Bardo.

He's got a pretty cool warm gnarliness, doesn't he? And if you haven't checked out his recent op-ed in the New York Times about the firing of the librarian from the Library of Congress, I do implore you to check it out. We'll throw that in the show notes.

But anyway, this guy is like another George Saunders, and he's been a bookseller for 42 years since 1983 in Berkeley, California. That's where he met his 30 plus year girlfriend, maybe 40 plus year, but now recent wife. They've just got married, so we can wish that newly happily married couple well.

We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about a lot of things. We're going to talk about building bookstores, about California independence, about fighting fascism and much, much more.

I basically turned on the recorder right after we had that opening exchange. So what follows is the conversation I had live in Camino Books in Del Mar, California, 30, 40 feet away from the sandy edge of the water into the twinkling Pacific Ocean down a dusty, sandy main street in town with the fresh bookshop feeling. You can smell the paper.

You can smell the binding glue. There's light coming in the front. There's people milling around, and we had this conversation.

Let's flip the page into chapter 149. I guess it takes as long as you want. How long do you want it to take?

John:

Well, let's not start right now.

Let's go outside.

Neil:

Outside? What's outside?

John:

It's beautiful.

Neil:

You don't want to do a podcast inside?

John:

No, no. I just don't want to distract my co-worker.

Neil:

I can't shoplift. I'll have to buy your book first. Can't just walk out of here with my next breath by Jeremy Renner.

Although this is before, as we walk outside, John, we're walking from the back of your store to the front. Could you just give us a tour? What am I looking at here?

You just moved here.

John:

You're looking at me.

Neil:

Yeah.

And your beautiful pink striped shirt, your thin black glasses, the aura of George Saunders, the same warm gnarliness. That's right.

John:

We're right by the poetry section, my favorite section.

Neil:

All your signs are handwritten. You wrote handwritten.

John:

Some of them are.

Neil:

Mystery is handwritten.

Fiction is handwritten. True crime is written. We've only been here three weeks in this location.

Oh, mythology section. What other sections do you have here that most bookstores don't?

John:

Let's see. Do we have... What other sections?

We have just a global section. We have a divination section. But we have most of the subject categories.

Yeah. I'd say. I don't know.

We have romance for all those.

Neil:

You have a Middle Eastern category. That's pretty rare.

John:

Yeah. We have all the different sort of regional studies. It's all done due...

Neil:

And it's a small bookstore.

John:

Yeah. It's only 1,300 square feet.

Neil:

Wow. And you've been in the bookselling business since 1989.

John:

1981, actually, but 89, we've had bookstores since then. Diesel, a bookstore, was our first bookstore. We just sold the LA store along with the name.

And then six months ago, changed our names to Camino Books for the Road Ahead.

Neil:

For the Road Ahead? For your Road Ahead?

John:

And yours.

Neil:

Wow. May I ask how old you are?

John:

67.

Neil:

Wow.

Neil:

So you've been in the bookselling business since what age? I guess it's... 81.

81. That would have been 24. You were 24.

John:

Yeah.

Neil:

24 to 67.

John:

Yeah.

Neil:

That's a long time. Yeah. That's 43 years.

John:

Good. You're good with math.

Neil:

Well, I'm Indian.

That's the low stakes in my, in my, you know, in our field. Yeah. You gotta be able to...

John:

Many mathematical geniuses.

[Neil]

Yeah. No, it's just two-digit numbers, actually, my personal specialty.

Don't get me on three.

[John]

It's good enough for most things.

[Neil]

John, and you run the store with your wife, Alison?

[John]

Yes.

[Neil]

And so when you were 24 in 1981, and you opened Diesel?

[John]

No, we opened in 1989. We opened Diesel. But 1981, I first became a bookseller.

[Neil]

Where was that?

[John]

Berkeley. University. Berkeley and Oakland.

Yeah. Near the university. Yeah.

[Neil]

What was the name of that bookstore?

[John]

One was called Talusadar, which is the center of the earth in Edgar Rice Burroughs' novels. And the other one was called Pegasus.

[Neil]

Oh, Pegasus books.

[John]

Oh, Pendragon, actually.

[Neil]

Okay.

[John]

Pendragon was the other one. And then Pegasus opened. So all three of those were the same owner.

[Neil]

Wow.

[Neil]

Is that where you met Alison?

[John]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Oh, she was a bookseller as well.

[John]

Yeah. I met her before she started working there.

[Neil]

But yeah. Wow. You were 24.

She was...

[John]

Older.

[Neil]

Wow.

[John]

A little bit.

[Neil]

Yeah. Did you end up getting married?

[John]

Yeah.

[Neil]

You're married. How long?

[John]

Well, we haven't been married very long.

But we've been together since 83 or something. And what year did you get married? Mm, 2000...

I don't really remember. Maybe five years ago. So what is it?

Like, no, it was before that.

[Neil]

So what makes you, after being boyfriend and girlfriend for 37 years, decide to get hitched? That's a good question.

[John]

You know, I think a couple of different things. It felt good. Wow.

[Neil]

Wow.

[John]

So it was that. But actually, I mean, the wedding was fantastic.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[John]

I mean, it wasn't a big wedding. It was only two, two people, three people were witnesses.

But it was just felt so good.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[John]

Weddings are great.

[Neil]

Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

But you held off for, you know, quite a while. And you're like, put it...

[John]

We wanted to be sure.

[Neil]

37 years of making sure

[John]

You know, there's a lot of ideas swirling around a bookstore. You're a natural skeptic and curious at the same time.

You're a believer and, you know, don't believe too much.

[Neil]

You know, way back in, I think, Chapter 18 of this show, we interviewed a guy named Mitchell Kaplan, who runs a bookstore chain called Books and Books down in Coral Gables Florida. Do you know Mitchell?

[John]

I know him very well, yeah.

[Neil]

Oh, how do you know him?

[John]

He's a friend of mine. Well, he was on the American Booksellers Association board before I was. I've known him, I don't know, 40 years.

[Neil]

So he also, I would say, has a warm gnarliness.

[John]

Yeah. Yes, definitely.

It comes with bookish, curious people, I think.

[Neil]

Why?

[John]

Because I think there's a lot of critical intelligence going on.

That's the gnarliness. And then there's a lot of humanity and warmth with all the people you see. I mean, people coming in, you see a great swath of humanity, right, coming through the store.

All ages, all types of people, interested in all types of things. But basically, they're pretty civil and kind in a bookstore.

[Neil]

Wow. Wow.

[John]

So it's pretty heartwarming.

[Neil]

So then would you argue that, because the way we met was, you know, I've been recording this for five minutes. We met seven minutes ago when I asked you if you could plug in my phone as I walked into this bookstore, which two people on the street said, there is no bookstore in town.

I asked two people and they both said, there is no bookstore. Then I walk in and I was awestruck by the beauty of this place. It hit me right away.

There's no chargers at the front. No, I walked to the back and you asked me, what kind of tariffs you should add to my free charge.

[John]

Yeah, because you had said that you were Canadian. It's the first thing that came to mind.

[Neil]

What do you make of the tariffs?

[John]

Oh, no. It's just a bad idea.

[Neil]

The most right wing guy in Canada is more left than your leftist wing guy. And you said,

[John]

I said that there isn't really a left wing in America. It's like an eagle without a left wing and it's just spiraling to the ground.

[Neil]

Wow.

[John]

Yeah. So that's what I think. And the tariffs thing is just not friendly.

It's not neighborly.

[Neil]

There's that old joke from Jimmy Fallon. I think right when it started, he said, you know, maybe it's the New Yorker in me, but when you got both your upstairs neighbor and your downstairs neighbor mad at you, it's not a good situation. That's right.

Yeah.

[John]

Yeah. It's just not, not good.

[Neil]

Could we not solve this, though, if we became the 51st state? No. Do you think Alaska should be the 11th province?

That's the joke you said to me.

[John]

Alaska could be the 11th province or California.

[Neil]

Oh, you would rather join us than us join you.

[John]

Yeah. At this moment. But things change, you know.

[Neil]

The only problem is California doesn't actually touch Canada. So we've got a couple of states in the middle there we have to talk to.

[John]

Yeah.

Well, that's true. But look at Alaska. We've set an excellent example. Alaska doesn't touch any other part.

Same with Hawaii.

[Neil]

In fact, there's a country in the middle of Alaska. Yeah, that's true. We do have an island.

Yeah.

[John]

A couple islands there.

[Neil]

Yeah.

And, you know, Oregon and Washington, like, you know, they could be convinced.

[John]

They might. Yeah, just one whole state. We could also just go independent because it is a big economy. You know, California, Oregon, Washington, Pacific.

[Neil]

What do you think the likelihood of California seceding is? Because in Canada there's a province called Alberta, which is far more right wing than the rest of Canada. And they're very unhappy with the results of the recent federal election as well as the past three federal elections.

So there's talk of succession where Alberta could leave and become, you know, maybe part of the states.

[John]

Yeah. I mean, there is talk about that in California. In fact, historically, parts of California have seceded from attempted to secede from California.

But it has to be approved by Congress. And so in both cases, the state of Jefferson, as it was going to be called up in northern California and southern southwestern Oregon, were going to become a state called Jefferson. They voted it.

It went before Congress. And the I think the yeah, that was when World War Two broke out. So Congress never dealt with it.

So it's actually still pending. And then earlier, southern California, just before the Civil War, voted to secede from northern California because of all the craziness around the settlement up there and around the gold.

[Neil]

What year was that?

[John]

That was like 19, I mean, 1859, something like that. And so they voted for the southern like third of the state. And then it went before Congress and the Civil War broke out.

So it was never dealt with either.

[Neil]

So there's that still pending as well.

[John]

Yeah.

They're both theoretically pending, but nobody takes it up again. But so there is talk about California seceding. Do I think what are the chances, you ask me?

And I think pretty minuscule because because I don't think you'd get enough people to do it. It's a complicated thing. Like it's like when Scotland was thinking of separating from Britain, which it thinks about a lot.

A lot of people were like, well, it'll take 20 years of, you know, chaos kind of to an extent to get things stabilized. May take less for.

[Neil]

So therefore, you feel as as the as the eagle circles and the one downside of I see you stepping outside. The one side says the wind. I don't have a wind muffler on my phone.

That's the one thing I know. I don't want to interrupt your your customers. Who do you call?

They call them customers or guests.

[John]

Well, that's interesting. We were just talking about that the other day about what I call them. Readers. Right.

[Neil]

Yeah. J.K. Rowling was once challenged on Twitter because.

[John]

Once?

[Neil]

John, I walk in the front door of your beautiful bookstore. By the way, James Daunt was a past guest on our show, a CEO of Barnes and Noble. And he says a good bookstore is lots of weird corners, lots of weird posts, lots of weird ceilings, a lot of weird shapes.

For some reason, that makes a good bookstore. And you have nailed it with this.

[John]

That's right.

[Neil]

It's 13, 14 hundred square feet. But it's on like I want to say like a seven sided room that has pillars everywhere, all these random walls. But you've painted a beautiful bright orange.

You've got kind of like almost like a royal or a blue jay blue like kind of door and window. There's white ceilings. You've got the blue dot sail on the front cabin.

You've got a big ladder right behind me. Nice cards. And the front display, you've got The Maid's Secret by Nita Prose, Who is Government by Michael Lewis, The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins.

You've got Careless People, the Facebook book by Sarah Wynne Williams, On Tyranny, a small book by Timothy Snyder. What else?

[John]

He just moved to Canada.

[Neil]

Really?

[John]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Because?

[John]

Made a lot of people nervous. Because if there is a sort of left, he would be in it. And he and three other political critics of tyranny, fascism, things like that just moved to Canada.

[Neil]

Wow. OK, I'm picking it up. It's called On Tyranny, 20 Lessons from the 20th Century by Timothy Snyder.

It's a small little crown publishing like paperback for twelve dollars US, sixteen dollars Canadian. What else did you put in the front display here and why?

[John]

This is all bestsellers.

These are the books that people in Del Mar are reading.

[Neil]

The Service Berry by Robin Wall Kimmerer you're picking up.

[John]

Yeah, she wrote Braiding Sweetgrass.

[Neil]

I have that book.

[John]

Upstate New York, yeah.

[Neil]

I read Martyr by Kaveh Akbar. I've picked up Abundance by Ezra Klein, but I have not read it.

[John]

Pico Ayer is great and that started.

[Neil]

Aflame. Yeah. OK, what's Aflame about by Pico Ayer?

[John]

It's about the loss of his home by fire, which I mean, Californians, you know, just went. In fact, Alison and I lost a place up in Pacific Palisades in L.A. in January.

[Neil]

Wow.

[John]

As part of that huge fire.

[Neil]

Wow. Beautiful store. Beautiful displays.

Cards. You've got hats here. There's a smiling woman with red hair on the phone in the front left counter.

It's one of your booksellers. There are customers picking books off the shelves. It's a busy store considering, you know, it must have just, you know, just opened.

You got the door propped open.

[John]

Three weeks ago.

[Neil]

Three weeks ago.

[John]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Wow.

[John]

Yeah, we moved from a few miles away, so.

[Neil]

So the sub headline of the store, why did you not make that the name of the store?

[John]

You'd have to ask Alison that because she named it. We had to all of a sudden realize that when we sold our store, we would have to come up with another name.

[Neil]

And you had Diesel?

[John]

Diesel, a bookstore. So we're used to punctuated names for our.

[Neil]

Diesel. How do you spell diesel?

[John]

D-I-E-S-E-L, like the gasoline.

[Neil]

And it's the name of the bookstore for that many years you had that bookstore. You just sold it.

[John]

Yeah, from 1989 until last August.

[Neil]

Wow, where was that?

[John]

We started in Berkeley, Emeryville, Oakland, then down to Malibu, Brentwood in L.A. We had a store in Larkspur in Marin. And then we had one just three miles away from here. And now we're here.

[Neil]

So how many stores did you have when you sold it?

[John]

Two.

[Neil]

Oh, but it sounds like you had about eight.

[John]

We had four total, but we moved around a little bit.

[Neil]

And when you sold two bookstores, is selling bookstores a common thing? And then opening your own new one?

[John]

We sold one and kept one. So we just had to rename it. And that's how Camino happened.

[Neil]

So this is the one you kept. But you had to change the name because you sold the name. Wow, and is there a good market for people buying bookstores these days?

[John]

Well, you know, you were talking about secession. This is like succession. Like how do you keep a bookstore going in a community past the original owner's intent, right?

Like when you mentioned Mitch Kaplan, he's like around my age. And what's he going to do in 20 years? Is one of his kids going to take over it?

Or is it the people that are working there?

[Neil]

Or Judy Blume?

[John]

Judy Blume, yeah.

She could expand.

[Neil]

I interviewed her in her bookstore, Books and Books in Key West, which of course is a books and books bookstore. But it's a nonprofit bookstore.

[John]

So who knows? But, you know, so people are, yes, people are buying bookstores right now as well as opening them. I mean independent bookstores are doing okay.

Not as good as they should do. But I'm kind of an evangelist for that.

[Neil]

Yeah, but when you think about succession, one idea is you sell the chain, you sell the name, you open a smaller one that you can run for the next road.

[John]

Yeah, if you're continuing on. I mean it didn't make sense really for someone in L.A. to buy both stores, right? And so we got a very nice offer to move here from the landlord here who wanted a bookstore.

They had had one before. And our lease was up in the other space. So we decided to move the store at the same time as change the name.

It was a busy year.

[Neil]

And where are we? We're in Del Mar. Which is where?

Where is Del Mar?

[John]

It's in North County, just north of San Diego, just over the border, just north of UC San Diego. And it's right next to the Del Mar Racetrack, which is where the surf meets the turf, a sort of storied racetrack, horse racing. They have a county fair for a couple months every year and then horse races.

[Neil]

And what's Del Mar, California, known for? I know George Saunders and Dave Eggers are amongst the at least passing through customers. I saw a huge display of signed Dave Eggers books at the back and he was just here.

He made a big poster for you. So what else is the town about?

[John]

The town is also known as one of the places where humanistic psychology started in the 60s. And so if you have to go back to I'd say the 60s and 40s and 50s, it was more known for the track and that kind of thing.

And then later on, sort of overflow from UCSD with professors living here and people who graduated from there. And it's a beautiful, beautiful place.

[Neil]

A learned professorial, academic, well-read, left-leaning surf town.

[John]

Yeah, it's a mix of left and right, I'm sure, to the extent there's a left, as we talked about. But yeah, and it's beautiful. I mean, we're three blocks from the beach and the weather's great and it's lovely.

[Neil]

Wow. Signed Dave Eggers shelf behind you with what is the what, the every, you shall know our velocity, and it was a tone. Author of the month is Kate DiCamillo, which is his author of all the Mercy Watson books.

And because of Winn-Dixie, there's all these staff picks notes and your next great read. And you're really well tagged and well read. It's a really fulsome, hearty store.

Now if you're 67, does that mean you were born in 1958?

[John]

57.

[Neil]

1957. And so that means you grew up in the 60s?

[John]

Yeah.

[Neil]

And isn't that old adage that if you remember the 60s, you weren't there?

[John]

Yeah, I remember them pretty well, though, because I was younger.

[Neil]

Where were you?

[John]

I've been places.

[Neil]

Where were you born?

[John]

I was born in Pennsylvania, in coal mining area. Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

And then lived in Kansas for the wonder years, from 3 to 10.

[Neil]

The wonder years.

[John]

And then went to Massachusetts for one year, and then Delaware.

My father worked for DuPont. And that's where DuPont is centered.

[Neil]

So tracing back the roots, back behind Delaware through Pennsylvania and Massachusetts and Kansas, was there a book or two that pops out in your early memory as somewhat shaping your warm gnarliness and general personality?

[John]

It's funny. I didn't think about my, for a while there, as a young adult, and for quite a while, I didn't really think about my childhood all that much. And then all of a sudden I thought, Ferdinand, that book Ferdinand.

And I looked at it, and it all came back to me, how much I loved that book when I was a little kid, and that I had a little Ferdinand stuffed animal that was made with velvet or something like velvet.

[Neil]

Do you have it in the store? Can you take us to it as you tell us about the book? And do tell us about this book.

[John]

So Ferdinand was written during the Spanish Civil War.

[Neil]

We're walking to the back, past the red shelf, past the blue display of all the places you'll go. Two white metal wicker chairs here. We're in the kids' section now.

We're in the back nook, a corner, lots of brown shelves, lots of board books. John is scanning floor-to-ceiling walls of picture books, kids' poetry, sleepy time, kids' music. He's found it.

He's pulled off the board book. 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.

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.

[Neil]

How old were you when you read it? Was this Pennsylvania days?

[John]

Probably Kansas, I would think.

[Neil]

Wonder years.

[John]

Maybe Pennsylvania, yeah.

[Neil]

Three to ten.

[John]

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. So what about it?

Warm hearted and gnarly? A bull who's a dreamer? You know what I'm saying?

[Neil]

A bull who's a dreamer?

[John]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Would you describe yourself as a bull who's a dreamer?

[John]

Yeah, I would today.

[Neil]

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.

[John]

That was brutal.

[Neil]

As Oprah agrees. Anyway, one of Susan Cain's most formative books is Ferdinand.

[John]

Oh, really? That's funny. Yeah, so it is that kind of, 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 realize 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?

I said, yeah, that's just the way it is.

[Neil]

Say that sentence again. I'm so much more social than I am. I'm so much more social than I am.

Because you're, because Susan.

[John]

I really assume that much.

[Neil]

Yeah. So Susan wrote the book about introverts, Quiet. Yeah.

This is her first recalled most formative book.

[John]

Yeah. So we've got that in common.

[Neil]

Do you want to know her second?

[John]

Yeah.

[Neil]

I wonder if it's the same as yours. Is yours Colette?

[John]

No.

No, but it could have been. But no, no. Oh, yeah. See, I'm being called back to work now.

[Neil]

Do you have a second book in the wonder years?

[John]

Second book? Yes.

What was it called, though? It's I know exactly what it's about. I can see the cover. Yeah, I'll be right there.

[Neil]

Alison, sorry. We're going to cut this off soon.

How much more time do I have? A couple minutes? That's your better half, right?

Now that you're married, we can't mess this up.

[John]

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 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]

I understand why Secret Treasure is anti-fascist, stealing the gold before the Nazis could steal it from you. It's got James Bond type imagery. But how is Ferdinand anti-fascist?

[John]

Because it was all leading up into the Spanish Civil War, which was the test of Hitler and Mussolini joining Franco and suppressing the democratic government of Spain.

[Neil]

So this book being written in 1936, when was the Spanish Civil War? 36, 7, 8, 9. Wow.

So when we talk about Trump and in the U.S., 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, you know, tag teaming behaviors.

Autocracy Inc., as Ann Applebaum would say.

[John]

Yeah. Yeah, all that seems real. In fact, you know, the other book I would say that influenced me later in life that Alison recommended is that 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.

[Neil]

So what's the name of the book?

[John]

Homage to Catalonia.

[Neil]

Can you spell that?

[John]

H-O-M-A-G-E.

Homage or homage.

[Neil]

Oh, homage. OK. Homage to?

[John]

To Catalonia.

[Neil]

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 who knows when. Certainly World War II.

[Neil]

And I'm so dumb and ignorant that I— No, you aren't. Well, I would love a little—can you give me two more minutes of context around that book?

[John]

I got to get back to work now.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[John]

OK, OK. So he goes and volunteers in Spain and then he gets assigned to an anarchist regiment.

[Neil]

He being George Orwell?

[John]

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 like global on-the-ground political understanding of the forces of mid-century global culture, the attempts of power to subvert democracy.

[Neil]

Oh, my gosh. 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 and also—

[John]

None of them were like intentional reading in that sense. They were just great books, great reads. But it was like took root.

[Neil]

What took root?

[John]

Those ideas, those like liberatory ideas, it's 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.

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]

Stay awake. What are three ways to run a profitable bookstore?

[John]

Be passionate, be curious, and listen and take care of everybody that's in here.

[Neil]

Wow. John, what's your last name?

[John]

Evans.

[Neil]

John Evans.

And is it Alison Evans?

[John]

No.

[Neil]

What's Alison's last name?

[John]

Reid. R-E-I-D.

[Neil]

John Evans, Alison Reid, bookseller since 1981, bookstore owner since 1989, and now the new proprietors of Del Mar's local Camino Books for the Road Ahead.

Thank you so much for coming on Three Books. That was a real joy, John. Thank you.

[John]

That was fun. Thanks.

[Neil]

Is there anything else you want to say before I turn this off?

Okay, thanks.

[Alison]

I was just going to say that sounded so much fun. I didn't know you were recording.

[Neil]

Oh, oh, oh, oh. I'm still recording. I can turn this off.

But Alison, would you like to say – would you have one for – you know, because his first formative book is Ferdinand, which overlaps with Susan Cain. So if Alison has one formative book to throw in –

[John]

And I did mention The Homage to Catalonia that I always think everybody should read

[Alison]

Yeah.

[John]

Yeah.

But what's your formative book? When you were little.

[Alison]

I have no mind.

[John]

Heidi?

[Alison]

Oh, I loved Heidi.

[Neil]

Oh, we don't have Heidi on the list. And I've read Heidi, too. It was popular.

I was a kid in Oshawa, Ontario, our east of Toronto. Mom from Nairobi, dad from Amritsar, India, arranged marriage in England. I was born in the suburbs, 1979, and we were read Heidi in school.

Uh-huh.

[Alison]

No, I read Heidi on my own. I just loved the idea of going up a mountain in the summer.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Alison]

You know, getting out of the city.

[Neil]

Were you living in a city?

[Alison]

Yeah, I grew up in Glasgow.

[Neil]

Oh, and how old were you when you read Heidi?

[Alison]

I don't know, maybe six or seven or something.

[Neil]

Wow, and you came over to Berkeley from there.

[Alison]

Oh, I came over a lot later, yeah. Yeah, I came through New York and then Berkeley.

[Neil]

And, you know, now that you're on the coast of Delmar, right on the edge of the Pacific Ocean with the mountains up above you, you kind of have played the role of Heidi in your life a bit.

[Alison]

This is true, but I don't have a cowbell.

[Neil]

Alison, John, thank you so much for coming on 3 Books. I really appreciate it. Hey, everybody, it's just me, just Neil again.

I'm not hanging out in my basement with my backpack full of wires. I'm holding a tiny lapel microphone with the receiver plugged into my iPhone in the Bellagio in Vegas. A bit of a turnabout, but hopefully the sound quality is good enough.

As we listen to John and Alison, the 40-plus-year booksellers with their incredible wisdom, taking us back through their lives through the power of their own formative books, which include an asterisk. That's what we're going to start with. We're going to start with an asterisk on number 836.

That would be The Story of Ferdinand by Munroe Leaf. I said it was Susan Cain, but I totally screwed up because, yes, it's one of Susan Cain's formative books. Yes, she actually talks and writes about that book in quiet, but no, she did not give it to me on the podcast.

She did give me Collette, but I totally screwed up. She gave it to Rumi. She gave it to Collette.

Actually, it is on the podcast from Kate the Therapist in Chapter 56. Oh, my gosh. I totally messed that up.

Anyway, we move on. That's all we can do is move on. Then we've got number 566, Snow Treasure by Marie McSwigan, M-C-S-W-I-G-A-N.

Number 565, Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, which I've decided to pick up and read. I really want to get that and read that. It sounds like an incredible basis for Animal Farm in 1984, which I love both but never heard of this other one.

Number 564, this is Alison kind of kindly sweeping in at the end to give us three, and that would be Heidi by Joanna Spyri, S-P-Y-R-I. Thank you so much to John and Alison for their formative books. I did pull in a few quotes here.

How about this one? You see a great swath of humanity coming through the store, all ages, all types of people interested in all types of things. They're pretty civil in the bookstore, and it's pretty heartwarming.

Two, there isn't really a left wing in America. It's like an eagle without a left wing, and it's just spiraling to the ground. Three, be passionate, be curious, listen and take care of everyone.

That was John's wisdom on opening and running a profitable bookstore. Then he gave me a quote right after he recorded because we kept chatting for a few minutes. He said, gradually you become okay with whatever strange beast you've become.

I thought that was a really beautiful way to put it. I remarked that he was sort of settled into his skin. He said, gradually you become okay with whatever strange beast you've become, which I love, which wasn't in the podcast, but I'm throwing it in there as an Easter egg.

John, Alison, Camino Books, Del Mar community, support these people. Get out there. Get to your local bookstore.

Thank you so much for coming on Three Books. Now, if you made it to the end of the podcast, I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club. To kick it off, as we always do, let's go to the phones.

[Dave]

Hey, Neil. It's Dave from Des Moines. Love your show.

Very informative. I'm driving now, and I especially love listening to it when I'm walking in the morning or driving. Wanted to share three books with you.

The first is When You Give a Mouse a Cookie. It's an awesome metaphor. I've used it for 30 years at work when people aren't thinking forward on the implications of their decisions and the associated costs.

I give them the child book, When You Give a Mouse a Cookie. It's a great reminder of that. The second book is I just read, and it is The Ultimate Coach.

It's a book that's similar to Seth Godin's book Est, where he read it and it impacted him. Didn't say it was a great literary piece of work, but it had a big impact on him. The Ultimate Coach had similar to me in that I really ingested what it meant to me, not what it meant to The Ultimate Coach as it was written.

The third book I would say I also recently read was The Happiness Equation by yourself. I think as I read and digested all of those books in a recent retreat, it really had a huge impact on how I want to think about my own life, its reinvention, and what it means to me. Keep doing what you're doing, Neil.

It's great. Love listening to your show. Thanks.

[Neil]

Very kind of you to mention my book. I really appreciate that. Also, thank you for listening.

Thank you for calling in. That's a great way to do it, guys. Call 1-833-READ-ALOT anytime, 1-833-R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T.

Just leave me a form in a book, feedback, a dream guest, any reflection, any challenge, any debate. We just love listening to you. Call us, 3bookers.

It's always fun. I won't go into another letter because I opened with a letter, but instead let's do a word of the chapter. For this chapter's word, let's go back to John.

[John]

You were talking about secession. This is like succession.

[Neil]

Yes, indeed. It is secession. Secession. S-E-C-E-S-S-I-O-N.

Note that this is a very different word than succession. Succession is S-U-C-C-E-S-S-I-O-N. Secession is S-E-C-E-S-S-I-O-N.

They sound, they look like they would be very, very similar words, but that one letter difference, the S-E instead of the S-U, completely changes it, right? Because succession means the order in which someone or something takes over a position or role. Like at a big company, like when I worked at Walmart, we had a succession plan.

Who's going to be the CEO if this guy leaves? Whatever, right? But then secession is very different.

Secession means the separation or withdrawal from a larger entity, like the secession of states from a union, like the secession of southern states from the U.S. states, or the secession of a region from a country, the secession of a group from an organization. Secession is from the Latin word seceder, S-E-C-E-D-E-R, which means to go apart, to go apart, which you can kind of see where succession came from there, too. But secession is really from the mid-16th century, which denotes the withdrawal of plebeians from ancient Rome in order to compel the patricians to redress their grievances.

We all remember that, right? No, the point is, secession is a softer sound, but it has a big meaning, to leave the thing that you're a part of, to secede. Well, Camino Books, in a way, has seceded from Diesel Books, and now it's off on its own, a sprightly little offshoot in a hobble hole in down north California.

And if you go in, you will probably bump into John, or you'll probably bump into Alison, you'll bump into their lovely booksellers, and you will have a grand old time just soaking into the Biblio paradise that is Camino Books for the road ahead. Look, for all of your roads ahead, I hope you enjoyed this conversation of three books, and remember until next time that 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.

Listen to the chapter here!

Chapter 148: Ginny Yurich obviates obsolete offspring with 1000 hours outside

Listen to the chapter here!

Neil:

Hey everybody, it's Neil Pasricha and welcome or welcome back to chapter 148, 48, 48 of 3 Books. Yes, you are listening to the world's only podcast by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians trying to provoke all of us into lives of intention, lives of connection, rich, meaningful lives through the power of reading. And we have a super reader on the show today.

Her name is Ginny Yurich. You guys have been recommending I have her on the show for a long time. She's finally here.

And when I say she's here, I mean, she's really here. I mean, she really drove five hours up the road from Michigan to Toronto to hang out with Leslie and I in our home. And then we went for a walk, which is what we recorded for this podcast outside.

Why did we go outside? Because Ginny is the homeschooling mother of five matriarch and her family down in Michigan who has spirited a giant online movement called 1,000 Hours Outside. You know I'm a fan of 1,000, 1,000 formative books on the show.

1,000 Awesome Things was my first blog. I love this concept. Get three hours outside a day on average.

Why? Why 1,000 hours outside? And she's got trackers for it.

She's got ways to measure it, ways to kind of, the whole book that she wrote called 1,000 Hours Outside is like full of all these projects and games and crafts and stuff you can do outside to make outside more interesting and fulfilling. Why? Because we're not outside today.

We're inside looking at screens the whole time. We're getting outside for minutes instead of hours. And it's really killing us.

It's hurting our, it's hurting our bones. It's hurting our eyeballs. It's making us hunched over.

It is absolutely decimating our ability to thrive. And Ginny Yurich is here today to help provoke and prompt us all to get outside. But it's not just outside.

She's got a brand new book. It's coming out next week. It's a great book.

I got an early peek at it. It's called Homeschooling. You're Doing It Right Just By Doing It.

Now, I should say, Leslie and I don't homeschool. So why am I advocating a book about homeschooling? Because it's not about homeschooling to me.

It's about the principles, the ideas, the connection with kids. And we're going to talk about that and a lot of things, including parenting pressures, what it looks like to have your best day ever. We're going to talk about Dr. Peter Gray, raising wild children, old dangerous playground equipment, your vestibular sense, the benefits of spinning, why osteoporosis is actually a childhood disease, how to avoid doctor's appointments, and raising readers. There is a lot here to discuss. But without further ado, let's get outside with the one and only Ginny Yurich, Y-U-R-I-C-H, of the 1000 Hours Outside Movement and the new book, Homeschooling. Let's go.

We wanted to do this conversation outside, okay? So Ginny's driven here from Michigan in order to make this happen, which I'm really deeply grateful. And as we come up to the mural, which is about like 30 to 45 seconds away, that's a perfect time to say, so how did all this get started?

Oh, that's a good... I just have to put that out. It just has to sit down here.

We got to start with that. So people are like, for the people that know you, they love you, they've heard this a million times, for the new to Ginny people, we just got to get this on the record.

Ginny:

It's not really that great of a story. I just really was a crummy mom.

Leslie:

That's the story. You're going to say, oh, but it was the truth. It's such an important place to start because I feel like that's where you get us already liking you from the beginning instead of like, who's this mom that spends 1000 hours outside?

I can't do that. When you admit that you started from a vulnerable place, I think we all get on board. I'm distracted.

Neil:

We all are. That's the danger of a walking podcast.

Leslie:

You need to find a place to sit down.

Ginny:

I really do just like this whole concept so much. When you meet someone online, you came on my show. Look how beautiful.

Wow, Nick did wonderful.

Neil:

She's walking up to the bird mural right now. You're hearing a live reaction.

Ginny:

Oh, it's gorgeous. When did he do it?

Neil:

September 17th and November 1st, 2024.

Ginny:

Oh, he just did it.

Neil:

Yeah.

Ginny:

So what was it before? Just concrete?

Neil:

Brutalist, a brutalist. And I met this Russian guy in the elevator going down. I was like, so what do you think of the new wall?

He's like, I prefer brutalist concrete.

Ginny:

I prefer this. I mean, it's stunning. Do you know most of these birds?

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah. It's a black and white warbler, a blue jay, a white, a white-breasted nuthatch, a cedar waxwing, a northern flicker, a rose-breasted grosbeak, a white-throated sparrow, a scarlet tanger, a ruby-throated hummingbird, a European starling, a red-tailed hawk, a house finch, a ruby-crowned kinglet, a turkey vulture, a black-burned warbler, and a common grackle.

Ginny:

Isn't nature cool? There could be just one kind of bird.

Neil:

Yeah. Look at this. Yeah.

Yeah.

Ginny:

Wow.

Neil:

And we've only been here three million years, but like owls have been around. And I saw you at Jennifer Ackerman on A Thousand Hours. And like owls have been here 90 million years.

They've been here 30 times longer than the homo, like not homo sapiens, just homo, just like cavemen, like 30 times longer. It's insane.

Ginny:

Oh, so cool. The owls are really cool. They look like people.

Neil:

Yeah.

Ginny:

In a way. Yeah.

Their faces. What a cool place to live. It's a walkable city.

You say you started... Okay. I was a crummy mom.

And I was a crummy mom because I sort of just did like a very straight line of life. You know, it's like I went to school. And then after that...

Neil:

You went to school.

Ginny:

After that, I went to more school.

Neil:

Unique. Yeah.

Ginny:

Yeah. And then after that, I went back to school as a teacher. And so this was like a very straightforward, rhythmic, predictable life.

And when I was pregnant with our first, toward the end, I started to think, what are we going to do all day? And I had no idea. You know, my days used to be filled up very predictably.

And then you have this baby and you're kind of like, well, well, how are we going to fill this 10, 12? And it's so much time.

[Leslie]

I can really relate to that. Like, I feel like maybe, I don't know if this is the same for you as it was for me, but like, I'm a teacher as well. And I'd always worked with kids.

And I knew I was going to be a mom. And I was excited to be a mom. And I knew I was going to love being a mom.

And then I became a mom. And I'm like, whoa, this is way harder than I thought it was going to be. And I wonder if it's harder for people like us, who think we're going to be good, have been successful in other areas of our lives.

You can't just like apply the same, do this, and then you're going to be successful model.

[Ginny]

Right. Yeah. So I think I tried this schedule thing that some of my friends had done.

Basically, I started to look around and see what was everyone else doing, which basically is how I lived my whole life up until that point. And everyone else, well, some of my friends, they had already had kids, so they were doing a schedule. And they were living life in like these two hour time blocks.

And so it worked for them. I know you laugh.

[Neil]

No, I'm laughing. It sounds hilarious. But yeah.

[Ginny]

But I was like, no problem. I was like, I'll do the 8 a.m. block and the 10 a.m. block. And it was supposed to be like, they would have an activity.

[Neil]

Right. And then a nap.

[Ginny]

Yeah. And then a nap. But then the naps never happened.

So it was just like constant nursing and crying. And I was like, I am not surviving at all. I would call my husband at like one o'clock in the afternoon.

Like, how much longer? So I enrolled in a lot of stuff, because that's another thing that people do. I think to pass the time, but also like extracurricular, that type of thing, trying to get them ahead.

And that was also miserable.

[Neil]

Baby Einstein. Yeah.

[Ginny]

And like those classes are like 45 minutes. So you're investing money that, I mean, we didn't have money that we didn't have to load up a bunch of little kids to go to some class that they didn't really want to be at and try and like cajole them through it and then come home and it will be like 11 a.m. And I'm like, I'm done. Like, I'm already toast.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Ginny]

So that was sort of my early motherhood. I got nervous about the cords there.

[Neil]

No, no. We're going to take a seat at the benches outside of the Toronto Archives as we hear your origin story more and then tip into your first formative book. And then as we get into that, we're going to walk up 122 steps up towards that castle.

Okay. Okay. There's a huge castle on the hill here called Castle Loma, and we're going to walk up the hill towards that castle.

But I want us to give it, we're going to have some bench breaks. It's a thousand hours outside. It's not a thousand hours always moving.

[Ginny]

And that's true.

[Neil]

You know.

[Ginny]

That's very true. Cause you could take your work outside.

[Neil]

Yeah. You could take your work outside. You could just chill.

So you think you're a crummy mom. You're enrolled in all these activities.

[Ginny]

I love my kids, but I hated being a mom.

[Leslie]

You're not really enjoying it.

[Ginny]

I wasn't enjoying it at all.

And one of the activities I did was Mops, which is mothers of preschoolers. I think they changed their name, but it was a program where you would go and they would take your kids for two hours in a class and you would be with friends. And my kids never made it through the class.

They would always be crying. So they'd always bring me my babies back. And I'd be holding my babies and talking to these friends.

And one of them was going to homeschool.

[Neil]

Oh, okay.

[Ginny]

One of these friends at my table was going to homeschool.

And we were also planning on homeschooling.

[Neil]

You were planning on this at the time?

[Ginny]

We were planning on homeschooling, but her son was one year older than our oldest.

And so she had started to research. I was like, this is great. She can do all the research and just tell me.

And she came one day and said, I've been reading, I've been researching. And she said, Charlotte Mason says that kids should be outside for four to six hours a day whenever the weather is tolerable.

[Neil]

Four to six hours?

[Ginny]

Four to six hours. And I thought in my mind, that's ridiculous. That's really ridiculous.

Who goes outside for four to six hours? Who has that amount of time to begin with? And why would you do that when there's all these other activities you can put your kids in?

And she didn't tell me that Charlotte Mason was from the 1800s. Shouldn't she have said that? I had no idea.

[Neil]

That's hilarious.

[Ginny]

I know some Charlottes. So I'm thinking this is current wisdom, current statistics.

So I found out years later that Charlotte Mason was from the 1800s. But then this friend said, well, we should try it. And I thought, no way we should try that.

I'm like, have you been to this program or that program? It's 45 minutes. The kids don't want to be there.

They're unhappy. It's awful. I'm like, this is going to be, you know, five, six times longer.

And she was like, no, no, I think we should try it. We're going to meet at this park from nine in the morning to one in the afternoon.

[Neil]

Oh.

[Ginny]

And you're not supposed to bring anything.

[Neil]

Oh, OK.

[Ginny]

I was like, we're not supposed to bring anything. I was like, I've got homemade Play-Doh. I'm like, I should bring everything, like my train table, right?

I mean, what are we going to do? And it was just a park. It wasn't even like you guys had this cool playground up the road, but it wasn't like that.

It was like just grass. And there was a little creek that ran through shallow creek. And I thought, oh, my gosh, this is going to crash and burn.

And I I tell people it was the best day of my life because it was the first good day I had as a mom. I hadn't had a good day. And our oldest was three at that time.

We had two younger ones. And I had not had a good day in three years. That's a long time.

Every single day.

[Neil]

To have your bearings, like to have your psychological bearings of what a good day even is.

[Ginny]

Day down, you just like, you feel like you're failing constantly. These kids are crying and the days are so long and you're exhausted. And what happened was we just laid our picnic blankets out.

We brought some food. And the older kids, she had two that were toddler preschool age. And she had a baby and then so did I.

So six kids. And the toddler preschoolers, they just ran around. I was like, I didn't even know kids could do that for four hours.

And they're running after stuff and jumping off of things. And the babies would nurse and sleep, not in two hour time increments, on their own time frame. And I got to have some conversations that lasted and weren't interrupted constantly.

And at one o'clock, I felt good. And the kids felt good. They'd had a great day.

It started there. It started in the fall of 2011 when we went to a park from nine in the morning till one in the afternoon. And it changed my life.

[Neil]

And that's 2011. Now we're talking 2025, 14 years later. Two additional kids later, right?

Because you had three little ones. Now you got five, kind of age eight to 15-ish?

[Ginny]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Right? And you have one of the most popular podcasts in the world, a thousand hours outside. You've written two books.

We're talking before your, I believe, third book comes out, which is called Homeschooling. I know, that's the title.

[Ginny]

It's just homeschooling. I'm so excited about this.

[Neil]

I like the subtitle. You're doing it right just by doing it.

[Ginny]

Yep, yep.

[Neil]

Right? So we're talking in advance of that. We might, maybe we should time this.

We'll drop this right as it's hot. So it just explodes your pre-sales, you know? But you got three books out.

You've got this active, vibrant podcast. You know, I'm a thousand awesome things, thousand farming a book, thousand hours outside. It was your people, your fervent community that's been emailing me, passionately commenting my things.

You gotta get Ginny on. Check out Ginny. Like, you know, seriously, like you have this, you're building a movement.

You've built a movement.

[Ginny]

Isn't that bananas? And I don't even know like what we're making for dinner. I mean, I'm not.

It's a, it's a kind of a bizarre thing. Like I'm not any type of special mom. I'm actually like self-conscious.

I'm like overweight, you know? But, and I'm not some outdoorsy, amazing, you know, person that's like skiing and doing all these cool things. I'm not doing any of that.

But the simple fact of getting outside changed my life. And then in turn, it changed the life, the lives of our kids and our family. And I started to learn pretty early on that when we let kids play outside and we don't have to bring stuff, you don't have to bring a train table or a scavenger hunt.

You can, but you don't have to, that that interaction and immersion with nature. And I know you talk about this a lot for mental health and happiness, but for kids, it helps their cognition. It helps their social skills.

It helps them emotionally. And it helps their physical bodies from everything from movement, which we need obviously, but also to like the eyesight and the full spectrum. I mean, there's so much going on with the body and I didn't know that.

[Leslie]

I just, I love talking to you, Ginny. And I think, you know, I said this earlier that I love that you're so open about it. You know, coming out of a place of finding motherhood hard because I think so many people do.

And I think right now more than ever before, parents are finding parenting so hard. And, you know, hearing something like a thousand hours outside or hearing something like homeschooling, like, you know, I'm a pretty confident person, but even in me, it brings up this feeling of insecurity that you also just spoke to, like this feeling that we're not doing enough or that we don't have dinner plan or that, you know, this added list of all these shoulds of how we should be parenting our kids. And so I love how in this movement that you've created, you so quickly come to a place of being like, this is not supposed to be like adding another thing that parents should do or another more complicated way to raise your kids.

It's not about pressure or perfection. It's just actually a way to simplify really, right?

[Ginny]

Like I think there's a bit of a letting go. And I remember, and this is not one of my formative books, but I know you're going to put it in the list because I can say other books because then you make the list.

[Neil]

Yes, that's right.

[Ginny]

The formative books are going to be a surprise. Like you're going to have to, you know, it's going to say the number and what time, but the other books, they're going to just go there and you can click on them.

[Neil]

That's in the show notes, threebooks.co. Yes, in the show notes.

[Ginny]

So Free to Learn was a book I read by Dr. Peter Gray.

[Neil]

Free to Learn.

[Ginny]

Free to Learn by Dr. Peter Gray.

[Neil]

Which is already on our top 1000, courtesy of Lenore Skenazy.

[Ginny]

Well, it's a phenomenal book.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Ginny]

But what he says, and his book is phenomenal, but that kids are biologically designed to self-educate. They're biologically designed to self-educate. So the pressure's off a little bit that we can take our kids and let them do what seems like nothing, but it's really a lot that's going on there.

[Leslie]

You know, what it actually makes me think of is that like parents are also biologically made to parent. Like if we take away all of these pressures that we put on parents and these courses that you need to sign up for and these like, even it bugs me that we have like, you know, oh, that's so free range of you or like, oh, you know, you know, are you screen free or are you, you know, like organic and all these different ways, these different pressures on parents. But in fact, actually, when you strip that away and we go back to our instincts and that like, you know, 18th century inspiration to have our kids outside for as many hours as that, then we get to like relax and do it right because we're actually programmed to do it too.

[Ginny]

That's so good.

[Neil]

These comments by both of you, Ginny and Leslie, are reminding me of your first formative book, which is of course, Balanced and Barefoot by Angela Hanscom, H-A-N-S-C-O-M, published in 2016, by new harbinger publications. I have the book in my backpack. You brought your own copy.

The cover's a picture of a kid with long blonde hair and a ponytail wearing a floral print bathing suit, crouching in the mud with dirty hands. And yes, of course, bare feet reaching towards a small creek. The subtitle here is How Unrestricted Outdoor Play Makes for Strong, Confident and Capable Children.

Who's Angela? She's a pediatric occupational therapist. She founded this company called Timberknock an award-winning nature-based program.

She's got her master's in occupational therapy, undergrad and kinesiology. She's alive today. She's alive today.

[Ginny]

She's wonderful. We're friends.

[Neil]

She's the only living author of your three formative books, right?

Now, basically, she goes through how outdoor play and unstructured freedom are vital for children's cognitive development and growth, offering detailed research-based ways on why playing outside is really, really good for you. Dewey Decimal Heads follows under 304.2 for social sciences slash factors affecting social behavior slash human ecology. Ginny, tell us about your relationship with Balanced and Barefoot by your good friend.

I added a good there for you. Angela Hanscom. And we'll do this while walking slowly up the street again.

[Ginny]

Okay, this is surreal. This is surreal. I've heard you do this for so many people.

And you just did it for mine. I just think this is the coolest thing. It's the coolest thing for us too.

[Neil]

Thank you so much for doing this.

[Ginny]

Wow. It's a cool thing what you're doing though. Just getting people back to reading and the idea of focusing in.

There's so many books. It's hard to focus in. Focusing in on people's formative books.

Angela Hanscom is wonderful and Timber Nook is wonderful. Here's the thing about my three books. First of all, I was pretty self-conscious of them and thought about lying.

I don't know if anybody else thinks about lying.

[Neil]

A lot of people say that.

[Leslie]

A lot of people do.

[Neil]

We have some guests also that have just suggested books that are like from the last five years. And I'm like, come on.

Like, what'd you read a while ago? You know what I mean? Yeah.

[Ginny]

But some people are picking books from their childhood.

[Neil]

That's cool.

[Ginny]

And I always think that's super cool.

[Leslie]

Of course that formed you.

[Ginny]

But my whole life was fairly straight. And when you're talking about things that formed you, the three books that I picked, I looked back.

I bought them within a period of two months.

[Neil]

Oh, wow.

[Ginny]

I bought them the same year.

[Neil]

It's like a formative moment for you, right?

[Ginny]

It's a formative year because I realized that- Is this post that play?

[Neil]

Is this post that day?

[Ginny]

Yes, it's post the day.

[Neil]

Post best day ever.

[Ginny]

Post best day ever. Because then I started to notice that our kids were thriving. I was thriving.

So I changed what we were doing for early childhood and started to spend a lot of time outside. We skipped preschool.

[Neil]

Wow.

[Ginny]

That's a big deal. Huge. Like we're out of it.

They did.

[Leslie]

And you must have been lonely. Were you lonely while you were skipping preschool?

[Ginny]

Well, there was a few other friends that did it too.

[Neil]

That's all you need.

[Leslie]

That's a big, yeah. That's it. That's all you need.

[Neil]

That's such a game changer. We walked by a Waldorf Academy.

[Leslie]

Well, I say it thinking also about the fact that, you know, over the years while I've had kids at home with me and I've been at the park and there've been barely any other parents there, right? Like even when you're outside looking for the other parents, they're not always there with their kids. They're either inside or they're at work and their kids are in preschools.

And so it can be lonely trying to, you know, do these counterculture things.

[Ginny]

I'm trying to, with one hand, take a picture of the Waldorf window star. Isn't that beautiful?

[Neil]

You're not a Waldorf person though, right?

[Ginny]

Well, I was really influenced by Waldorf because they do later reading.

[Neil]

Right, right, right.

[Ginny]

A lot of outdoor time. A lot of outdoor time. A lot of natural choice.

Like look on the porch. They've got broom. See that wooden car?

[Neil]

Yeah, yeah. Wooden car, yeah. Bird feeders hanging outside.

[Ginny]

This is climbing furniture.

[Neil]

Climbing furniture, yeah. Well, the most popular school in Silicon Valley amongst the tech executives who ply us with screens and apps is of course the Waldorf Academy, you know.

[Ginny]

And they look at the little fairy door. They have on the tree. This is a cool place.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Ginny]

Aw.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Ginny]

I definitely was influenced by Waldorf. Now, we didn't go to the school. It was too expensive for our family.

And there's only one in our area. But a lot of those...

[Neil]

Conceptual alignment.

[Ginny]

Rudolf Steiner type things, yeah.

[Neil]

So two months span post Best Day Ever, you order three books, one of which is Balanced and Barefoot.

[Ginny]

Yes, and it gave words to what I was seeing. Now, I had read other books too. Dr. Scott Sampson came out with a book. It's called How to Raise a Wild Child. So he's from PBS Dinosaur Train. Richard Louv had had books out like Last Child in the Woods.

But Angela Hanscom was a mom. Her kids are the same age as mine.

[Neil]

Oh, okay.

[Ginny]

So she was on the front lines seeing the decline of skills in children as an occupational pediatric therapist. Maybe I said that backwards. A pediatric occupational therapist.

[Neil]

Yeah, yeah. All those three words.

[Ginny]

And she was seeing that these kids are struggling, including her own.

[Neil]

Right.

[Ginny]

So from a mom's perspective, it made a big impact on me because it was right sort of where I was at too.

[Neil]

Yeah, yeah. And the thing about this book is it's researchy. It's like page 13, comparing kids from 1998 to 2008, only 10 years, the number of sit-ups 10-year-olds could do declined 27.1%. Arm strength has fallen 26%. Grip strength has fallen 7%. I mean, there's studies quoted like this, three studies per page for like 100 pages. And it goes through every single thing that has gone down.

And every single thing has gone up. Like on page 82, the benefits of spinning. I was floored by this.

Research shows spinning. You know, you always see that kid on the park that's just spinning around and you think they're sorry to say this. I was always like, what's wrong with that kid?

They're just like spinning around.

[Ginny]

But they're brilliant.

[Neil]

They're brilliant.

[Ginny]

That kid knows their body is driving them on.

[Neil]

Apparently, they're activating hair cells on their inner ear, sending motor messages through their spinal cord to help maintain muscle tone and body posture. The vestibular senses that are grown from merry-go-rounds and spinners, which have been eliminated from playgrounds, has also led to a decline in alertness, attention, and a sense of calm.

[Ginny]

What's interesting is there's this fluid inside the inner ear. So she talks about this. It's called the endolymph fluid.

And that's moving around in your inner ear. And it's moving those hairs. There's little hairs in there.

And then the hairs have to prong back up to their original spot. And that's how your body learns where it is in space. And it's just really good for development, right?

So when you hit puberty, that fluid, it thickens. And so it takes a lot longer for those hairs to prong back up to their original spot. And you get motion sick.

[Leslie]

So there is a time and a space. That's why, like, it actually feels different to go in the swing as an adult than it did when you were a kid.

[Neil]

A roller coaster.

[Leslie]

Yeah, exactly.

[Neil]

You're like, whoa, my tummy's flipping on the swing. My fluid has thickened.

[Ginny]

I didn't spin enough. But even on a swing, it's different. So there's a time and a place for that.

My favorite quote from Angela's book is actually similar to the children are biologically designed to self-educate. She says, as adults, we may feel that we know best what we should do with a kid. But she says their neurological system begs to differ.

That a child knows how fast, how high at any given moment so that they're going to grow a little bit. They have that instinct in them. And that's how they learn things when they're little.

And they will continue to do that as long as we give them the time and space to do so.

[Leslie]

Full body shivers over here. It's just so true, right? And like it can be both to those physical things of like, you know, them being the experts on how high they should go up in a tree or how fast they should spin.

And it then extends into building their own trust with themselves so that they can apply it to way more complex things like which friends should they hang out with? What decisions are right or wrong? You know, what passions should they follow?

And if they learn that they're their inner guide instead of this external source, then their whole life falls into place so much better.

[Ginny]

Oh, it's so much practice that they're getting as a little child. Like no one would say to a six month old, I'm going to teach you how to crawl.

[Leslie]

Exactly.

[Ginny]

I mean, they don't even know how to talk. They don't know what day of the week it is. And yet they know how to learn from mastery.

And because I think we swoop in so young, we forget that their body has so much to offer. Their instincts have so much to offer. They're biologically, biologically designed to self-educate.

And that was probably one of the biggest things I got out of that time period was that this is OK. It's OK for me to step back. I don't have to be the one that's driving every decision.

I love that Peter Gray calls it because everyone says unstructured. Kids need unstructured play. He says it's not unstructured.

It's self-structured.

[Neil]

Yes. It's OK. It's better for them.

[Ginny]

Right.

[Neil]

You know, there's phytoncides released by trees that reduce cortisol, that reduce adrenaline. I'm interested in this quote.

I wonder what both of you thought, Page 22. We never saw peanut milk and gluten allergies when we were kids.

[Ginny]

Well, because of the immune system is bulking up. But some people would say that's because you're supposed to be exposed a little bit to those allergens. But outside is giving you a chance to work up your immune system.

The kids are supposed to touch dirt and touch all these different things. And then their immune system builds up to deal with them. I'm not super strong on the science there, but the outdoors, the dirt is good for your immune system.

[Neil]

I was also amazed by like the jumping off of like trees that are a bit too high or rocks that are a bit too high is like actually growing their skeletons. That was interesting.

[Ginny]

Yeah. So every time a child jumps and lands, Katie Bowman, she says osteoporosis is a childhood disease that shows up in adulthood. Well, why?

Because if we had a two-year-old right here, they would step up on this step.

[Neil]

Pointing on the stairs. All right.

[Ginny]

There's a little step and they would step up and they would jump off and jump off and jump off. And they might fall down a few times. And they get a little bit older.

And then if there wasn't a pot here, they'd be coming up onto a higher thing. And what's interesting in the perspective that I'm at, it's been a long time. Our best day ever was in 2011.

It's 2025. And we're still living the same way. And there aren't many other parenting hacks or parenting things that you learn that last that long.

[Leslie]

So how does this perspective that you hold and that you've kind of articulated for us, like how it plays out in those preschool years, how does it play out in your kids entering adolescence?

[Ginny]

It's wonderful. It's wonderful. We do not have all of these problems that a lot of modern parents have, which is fighting over the screens.

We just don't have those. And the kids are vibrant and healthy and they can have conversations. We haven't needed a doctor's appointment for an acute anything, except for one pink eye since 2011.

We have five kids. So this is clearing their lymphatic system and the fresh air and the full spectrum light and all those types of things. But it's just gotten more fun when they were all little.

[Neil]

Are they all readers?

[Ginny]

They're all readers.

[Neil]

They're all readers.

[Ginny]

They carry books around.

[Neil]

That's the thing, like all readers. You know you're doing something right. That tells you right away, like they're all readers.

[Ginny]

They're interesting. I just talked to Dr. Nicholas Kardaris. He has two fabulous books.

They're going to end up in the show notes. They are called Glow Kids and Digital Madness.

[Neil]

I listened to your interview with him. It was great.

[Ginny]

And he has talked about, well, in the first interview, he said kids will come into, because he actually works with clients. And he said the kids will be two, three years old. They can't even stack blocks.

They don't know how to play. Well, in the latest interview, he said this is a new thing. He's got kids that are coming in that he works with a lot of failure to launch, 17 to early 20s, addicted to pornography, addicted to gaming, addicted to social media.

And he said that a lot of these guys these age, I guess he was talking to guys, they cannot self-visualize when they read. And so he said that he would read a story like, and then the train left the station. And in your mind, you would have a mental picture of that.

And he said they don't have that.

[Neil]

That's an interesting thing to find out. It'd be hard to discover that.

[Ginny]

So then he asked the whole group, and they said we're all the same. They haven't developed the capacity for mental imagery.

[Neil]

Oh, my God.

[Leslie]

It's kind of the same as not being able to climb up the stairs. Like they haven't had the chance to practice it. Yeah.

[Ginny]

And it's all been fed to them. A pre, a pre done something to watch something to interact with on a screen. Then you lose.

That's a skill. And I thought I got actually emotional. I was almost crying because I thought, well, reading is such an important part of my adult life.

One of the favorite parts of my adult life. And what if what if that was capped? Because as a kid, I wasn't given the opportunity to develop mental imagery.

It's a pretty big deal.

[Neil]

Well, it seems like also interested in how he figures out how to work that back in.

[Ginny]

I mean, right.

[Neil]

You know, it must be so painful. And I hear this all the time. I mean, this part of the reason why, you know, the first value on this podcast is no book, shame, no book guilt.

And I partly say that so staunchly because I want to remove any expectations on reading. It's fine to read kids books. It's fine to read young adult.

It's fine to read comic books. Just to, you know, read what you love till you love to read. Like, we have to get back to that because that is the that's what's happened for me.

[Ginny]

Have you made that into like a bumper sticker?

[Neil]

No, I need your help. I like the next mega pack.

[Ginny]

Read what you love until you love to read. Well, I brought up Nicholas Carderas because you were asking Leslie about the teens. And he said that a lot of these teens.

[Neil]

We're going to dangerously listen to Ginny while crossing the street here in front of a college. OK, so we're pulling this off.

[Ginny]

Look at all these people outside walking around, though. This is so cool. He said that a lot of these teens are uninterested and uninteresting.

Uninterested and uninteresting.

[Neil]

Yeah, because all they're doing is, you know, I mean, parroting what they see, probably. You know, here's the latest TikTok viral meme. The conversation devolves into like meme exchange.

[Ginny]

Right. OK, so Kim John Payne, he wrote Simplicity Parenting. He says that low screen and no screen kids are enduringly popular.

[Leslie]

Goosebumps. Full body goosebumps on that one again. Of course.

Of course. Right. Because they're actually like head up from their screen, seeing the birds fly through the sky, climbing a mountain, talking to their friends, doing interesting things.

They're practicing those skills, just like those ones that were practicing to climb up the stoop and jump off there. They're out there living life the way kids have always been supposed to be.

[Neil]

I also feel like for me, I'm 45, like my ability to like come up with stories when we first had kids at night before bed was great. And my ability to like kind of have, you know, I was wondering about this or I had this crazy idea. Like I had more of that in me.

And now seven years or more than that, 10 years later, I feel like I'm losing. So in somewhat agreeing with your argument, but looking at myself personally, I'm losing my ability to make up wild stories at night before my kids go to sleep. I'm somewhat losing my ability.

I just don't say as much. I have this because I'm looking at screens all day because I'm looking at screens.

[Leslie]

You actually just said before this interview, I hope you don't mind me, like admitting this vulnerable thing that you said to me. Feeling kind of like physiologically a little bit more anxious than I normally do. I think it's because I've been on Twitter too much lately.

[Neil]

I did say that.

[Ginny]

Yeah, well, it's interesting. I think we're all struggling with that. And I think it's a good point to bring up that this is a protective measure, getting outside or just having time away from screens, whether because you're reading more, you're moving more, whatever it is. If you have time away from screens, it's a protective measure. And it's for kids and adults.

And I could have never predicted when our kids were three and under and there wasn't really hardly anything. Maybe there was Facebook, I guess, but there wasn't Instagram. I wasn't on social media.

Like I didn't make a challenge for social media for the turn of the year.

[Neil]

Your work has become disproportionately more important as the world has increasingly shifted.

[Ginny]

As has yours.

[Neil]

Yeah, yeah. But it's interesting too because you run a digital company.

[Ginny]

Right. So I have the same sort of things. About 10 years in, I started to feel like the nature wasn't enough.

And I added in the reading because our youngest was old enough to sort of have a little bit extra time for reading. And I tried to add in movement. I've not been quite as good with that, but I felt like I had to add in even a little bit more protective measure.

[Neil]

Right. A train's going by. I love that sound.

You know, it reminds me of like when you used to watch a movie and it'd be like Dolby surround sound.

[Ginny]

And like a kid would love this. If you had a toddler and you're in a walkable city, this is like the creme de la creme.

[Leslie]

We have sat watching this train go by wondering, like, how much longer is it going to keep going so many times?

[Ginny]

Look at it. And look at the red cars. And look at that.

I mean, it's wonderful.

[Neil]

It's amazing. Yeah, it's so stimulating. And as Nick Sweet wanted to point out, our guest at Chapter 144, he admires all the graffiti on the trains.

Like I was literally talking to him once. Oh shit, I just saw a full car go by. He was like talking to his buddy and he was like, I was like, wow, he's identifying all the people who've done all the graffiti on the trains.

[Ginny]

Wow. You know? Yeah, so this is the thing.

There is not much in life that is engaging to both a child and an adult. Like I always say, I don't like Candyland. And I don't...

[Leslie]

How boring that game is.

[Neil]

It is.

[Leslie]

I hate that game.

[Ginny]

Yes.

[Neil]

I do get stuck playing it occasionally, yeah.

[Ginny]

But you do it because you love your kids. You know, I don't like the Dora the Explorer. I don't like some of the movies we've gone to see with our kids.

I don't like that stuff. But we all like to be outside.

[Leslie]

Oh, yeah.

[Neil]

Oh, that's true. It's age. Yeah, it's like the Christmas song.

It's age limitless. Yeah, yeah. For kids from one to 92 or more.

Yeah. Even more. Under one, over 92.

[Ginny]

Yes, a baby, a newborn. And Angela Hanscom talks about that in that book, Balanced and Barefoot. She talks about infants, you zero to one.

So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, okay, well, when they're two or three, I'm going to... No, she says that first year of life is really important for babies to be outside, but also teens and also your grandma's going to love it too. So what a thing.

[Neil]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. A hundred percent.

By the way, when you say you fold it in reading, you mean into your family life, right?

[Ginny]

Into my own, into my own more. I just made sure that I read at a minimum three chapters a day.

[Neil]

Okay.

[Ginny]

I probably read a lot more most days.

[Neil]

So this is interesting because you and I both have systems oriented minds. Like I just showed you in my house that on the inside cover of my dishes, I have like a tracker for which days I write, which days I don't. I have a tracker for which days I travel, which days I don't.

Because I have goals and how I want to be away this few nights as possible. I want to write this many days as possible. You have, of course, your very famous thousand hours.

You know, in the pandemic, Leslie was saying, oh, my friend Robin's doing the thousand hours challenge. I was like, what's that? Yeah, right.

[Ginny]

Hi, Robin.

[Neil]

Yeah, Robin's doing the thousand hours challenge.

[Leslie]

Yeah, totally. I just texted her this morning and she's like, oh my gosh, amazing.

[Neil]

In the pandemic. So like you have these sheets you put out and you know, people can like color in the number of hours they're doing. So trackers.

What else is going on?

[Ginny]

Well, let me tell you where that came from. So the tracker came because for two years we were doing that Charlotte Mason idea of getting outside for four to six hours whenever the weather is tolerable. And that's a good caveat, right?

The weather is not always tolerable.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Ginny]

So four to six hours.

So we had usually picked three days a week. We get together with three or four other families and we would go for a chunk of time, four to six hours. So that was 18 to 20 hours a week.

And I read in Dr. Scott Sampson's book, How to Raise a Wild Child, that the average American kid was outside for four to seven minutes, but on screens for four to seven hours.

[Neil]

That's right.

[Ginny]

A day.

[Neil]

Four to seven minutes a day outside.

Hey, we've heard the stat that it takes a kid a whole week now to add up to half a day outside. That actually might be generous compared to the stat you're saying. So yeah.

So it was an interesting statistic. Kids have never been outside less than today. That's what we are agreeing on.

[Ginny]

And we're not anti-screen. Like our kids still watch TV and we've got some video game stuff. But I thought, well, four to seven minutes versus four to seven hours, that's a pretty big disparity.

And so because I'm a numbers person, like you're a numbers person, I thought, I wonder how much time we're outside in a year. So we were outside for 18 to 20 hours a week on average.

[Neil]

Okay.

[Ginny]

We're Michigan. So similar to you is a little more in the summer, a little less, you know, in the dead of winter. But still aiming for that.

[Neil]

So 20 hours a week times 50.

[Ginny]

And that was 1,200 hours a year, which at that time was the average amount of time that kids were on screens. And what I thought was, what if all of that time had gone towards screens?

Like how much less life would we have lived? And so it sort of came from that. I called it 1,000 hours outside because that's catchier than 1,200, right?

[Neil]

I'm bought into the 1,000 being catchy thing.

[Ginny]

Yeah, I know.

[Neil]

I know you are.

[Ginny]

We're like right there.

[Neil]

Well, 1,000 awesome things was my block from 2008 to 2012.

[Ginny]

Right.

[Neil]

Overlapping.

I'm doing 1,000 informative books. 1,000 is also the number of months in the average lifespan.

[Ginny]

It's amazing.

[Neil]

And it's the number of minutes in the average day.

[Ginny]

And if you get outside, if you aim to get outside for 1,000 hours a year, or if you aim to get outside really for any amount of time, you've got a single parent situation, split custody, dual parents working, you make a different goal. It's going to change your life.

[Neil]

Well, you also say openly that when you were a kid, you had two 45 minute recesses. I told my kids this by the way.

And a 45 minute lunch. So add that up. You were at two and a quarter hours, just within the school confines.

[Ginny]

Yes. Because for a lot of years, Neil, people made fun of this. So I never expected that I would be here with you ever in my wildest dreams.

Drive to Toronto. We're walking around. I have no idea where we are.

And here we are. I'm on this podcast with all these people that like other people know of. Dave Barry.

I'm like, how did I end up in this group of people? So I had no idea that it would catch on like how it did, but it used to be very normal.

[Neil]

Well, that's the thing. That's what I was going to say. My kids have 15 minute recesses now.

15. So like how much of time is there to like do anything once you've got your boots on and have to take your boots off? And then their lunch is like, how long was their lunch?

45? So they have to get this time. As you've said, it's on the parents now.

It's on the parents now.

[Ginny]

And this is in Angela's book. Going back to the formative books. She says that when she asks people who grew up in the 70s and the 60s and the 80s, maybe the 90s.

She says that people had three to four hours of time outside.

[Neil]

Yeah. It was just natural.

[Ginny]

Because of recess.

[Neil]

We're having to work back to something that was just way more kind of in the system naturally. And that's kind of what balance and barefoot is really all about. It's your first formative book.

I picked it because it was kind of like what the conversation was naturally leading towards. But you've also given us two things. One of which.

Do you want to do this one next? Or do you want to do this one next? Yeah.

Okay. One of which is called Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto. G-A-T-T-O.

Published in 2002 by New Society Publishers. My copy is a dark black and gray cover with a brassy all cap serif title saying, Dumbing Us Down. With a similarly brassy seal on the top right saying 25th anniversary.

John Taylor Gatto lived from 1935 to 2018. He died at age 82. An American author and teacher who taught 30 years in the public school system.

But then wrote a bunch of books criticizing the public school system. He promoted homeschooling, specifically unschooling and open source learning. This book is filed under 370 for social science slash education.

Ginny, tell us about your relationship with Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto. Gatto or Gatto? Gatto.

[Ginny]

Okay. So this is quite the title, isn't it?

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Ginny]

And it's a little offensive. It's not one that you necessarily bring up like at Thanksgiving dinner. The subtitle is The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling.

And I just want to say that John Taylor Gatto was a teacher, like you said, an award-winning one. I mean, he was like New York State Teacher of the Year, I think, twice.

[Neil]

Yeah, twice.

[Ginny]

So he was a part of the school system. And what he's criticizing is the system. He is not criticizing the lovely individuals that are day-to-day in the trenches with kids.

That is a crazy difficult job, as you know, Leslie. You feel like a clown. You have to have stuff prepared every single day.

You're dealing with all sorts of different personalities and adults and co-workers, and it's exhausting. So this is not criticizing teachers.

[Leslie]

Disclaimer here.

[Ginny]

Yes, because the title is definitely kind of offensive. And I think that up until COVID, I mean, even talking about homeschooling was definitely a little shaky. I mean, people would get pretty upset.

It's definitely gotten more mainstream since COVID. Yeah, it's a little bit more accepted to talk about it. But this is a formative book for me because I lived a life that was extremely straight and extremely rhythmic and extremely predictable.

And we had decided that we were going to homeschool for two reasons. One is that I taught public high school math, and I just, being in the classroom, felt like it seemed like a whole lot of wasted time at that point. And people would ask me, they would say, the kids, they would say, well, why do we have to do this?

You know, taking Algebra 2, and they're kids that are, you know, not going to go on into a math and science field. Why do we have to do this? And I would just say, because the government says you can't be left behind.

Wasn't that a thing?

[Leslie]

Right.

[Ginny]

It was like a whole thing.

[Leslie]

No kid left behind.

[Ginny]

No child left behind, whatever. It reminds me of that Trolls movie.

No troll left behind. And I didn't really have any good reasons. I think for some kids, it's great to go into those higher level math.

But for some kids, this is like a huge waste of their childhood. And then also at the same time, they switched to full-day kindergarten. Do they have full-day kindergarten?

[Leslie]

Yes, yeah, they do.

[Ginny]

Was it always full-day kindergarten?

[Leslie]

No, it was a switch in the last 10 years.

[Ginny]

Yeah, and it was a switch for us too. And I was in the administrative wing when that switch happened. And it was pretty life-changing because I got to see firsthand the teachers who were fighting for the kids, for these little kindergarteners who were saying, well, if we go to full-day, they're going to need a nap.

We're going to have to bring back stations. I was like, I didn't know they got rid of stations. Stations were like, you remember that?

They have like a doll station and a book station and cars and Play-Doh.

[Neil]

The water station.

[Ginny]

Sure, there's all these stations. So they'd gotten rid of that. They said, we need to bring back stations.

They're going to need to play. And when the final decisions were made, they did not listen to the teachers. And so much of the time went to academics.

And the same thing in our district. I just spoke at a school district at a board meeting. And I spoke at a board meeting.

And because the same thing, the four-year-olds that are in there for pre-K, they're getting 20-minute recess once in the afternoon, nothing in the morning and a 40-minute lunch recess. But that's also your time to walk to the cafeteria and get your food. So we made this decision to homeschool for the sake of time.

Pretty much. And now I have a lot of reasons why I love it. So I'm always hoping to not be offensive if you're listening.

And it's a, you know what?

[Neil]

It's touchy.

[Ginny]

It's also touchy.

[Neil]

We want your most acerbic self.

[Leslie]

Yes.

[Neil]

We want your honest views.

[Leslie]

Well, and I can just tell that you're the type of person that is speaking from your heart about something that really matters to you. And that you respect that someone else might have something else that really matters to them. And that's okay.

[Ginny]

And that people are limited. People are limited. You know, that there may be a mom that's listening that says, I really want to homeschool, but I can't for this or the other reason, or financially, or there's just a lot of factors in life that I really want to be compassionate about.

[Leslie]

And you're so inclusive in the way that you talk about all of this. Just even a minute ago saying like, if you're not able to do that four to six hours a few times a week, like just even one little change, right? So like walking your kid to school versus not walking your kid to school.

It would change your life. It would be a big deal. So we can make little steps towards a more homeschooling like life, even if we're not fully going to go into homeschooling.

So you tell us, you go the full way with us.

[Ginny]

So I knew we're going to homeschool for those reasons. But I was really shaky about it.

[Neil]

How did you define homeschooling at that time in your head?

[Ginny]

Well, so the story is that I was going to copy what they do in the public school at home. That was my plan. I knew where to find all the content expectations because I was a teacher.

So my plan was to print out this list. And I remember them. One of them was like determined between yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

That was a content standard for kindergarten. And I was like, I can teach that. You know, maybe they might already even know that.

You know, one of them was for phys ed. It was like can throw the ball with one hand with the other foot forward, which I actually learned the other day that that's what you're supposed to do when you bowl. And I don't do it right.

Josh was like, no, you're supposed to like the one foot goes in the other hand. Yeah, I don't do it right.

[Neil]

Foot forward. Yeah, right. Yeah.

So it's like planting with your left foot and but pulling back of the ball bowling ball with your right.

[Ginny]

Yes.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Ginny]

That's apparently how you're supposed to do it. I must have. I never learned.

So I have a hole in my education. But that was my plan. And at the time, I think this is sort of the story of my life is like nothing really worked out.

So I had to adjust. It didn't work out for me to do the two hour time block thing for my kids. And I had to adjust.

And I was planning on printing them out like a scroll. I mean, I thought I'm going to roll this out. I'm going to tape it to the wall.

We're going to check it off. Well, at the same time, when our oldest was heading into kindergarten, he was five. I also had a three year old and a two year old, and I just had a baby.

And at the same time, at the same time, my husband lost his job. He was out of work for three months. He was not a teacher.

He's in. Well, he works for us now, which is really cool. It's a cool, cool thing.

But he was in sales. He's OK.

[Neil]

He lost his job at the SAC. He's going to be like all these young kids.

[Ginny]

You butchered my job.

[Leslie]

You don't even know what I do, honey.

[Ginny]

Oh, I should have done better. Sorry, Josh.

[Neil]

No, no. Here's all you do. You take a deep breath and you start back on the sentence you remember.

[Ginny]

Well, I don't. I don't totally know. And so that's going to be the problem.

I've got nothing better. I will say that he's very successful. Like he'd worked his way up in these companies.

He was helping sell like web services for really big companies. And they're redoing their websites. And he was well known in his field, going to all the big conferences.

Everyone likes him. He's got a great personality. So there we go, Josh.

All right. I love you. So he was in that line of work.

Lost his job for three months. And also, we lost our home. We had been renting from this woman, and she wasn't paying the mortgage.

And we didn't know. And so all of a sudden, there was foreclosure notices showing up. And so we had to move.

And in a moment, I was realizing that I'm not going to be able to do this homeschooling thing like how I thought. So I had heard inklings from Waldorf people, from the Waldorf people. My midwife, her sons had gone to the Waldorf school for a little while.

And she was telling me how they don't start reading until kids are eight. And they wait until seven or eight. They wait until the adult teeth are in.

And that signifies that the internal organs have formed. And so they can have a really good eyesight, really good hearing. Otherwise, maybe they're not hearing the difference between D and P or B.

And you know, so I'd heard that. You have to be able to reach over your head and touch your ear. I'm actually doing it right now like a weirdo in this park.

In order to show that your body is ready to read. So I'd heard about that. And then they introduce it in story form.

It's just a really beautiful thing. And in Finland, they also don't do formal education until around age seven. And so I thought, oh, I've got a couple years.

But I was really, really nervous about it. And people asked about it. I remember I had a friend over and her son was in first grade.

And we hadn't done any formal schooling. None. Her kid had done maybe two years.

And she asked me, well, what are you guys doing? And I was like, nothing. That was the wrong thing to say.

I should have said that. She never came over again. But we are doing everything.

The kids are learning. They're growing, like the Balanced in Barefoot book. Their self is driving them on.

And they're learning. But we weren't really doing anything formal. And I was just kind of nervous about it.

And John Taylor Gatto's book is about the hidden curriculum. And I think often we look at the rosy things. We look at when people want to talk to you about homeschooling, they say, well, what about prom?

What about calculus? How are you going to teach that? What about dual enrollment?

What about all these different things that are wonderful about your school years? And there are a lot of wonderful things. But he's bringing up, well, what about these things that no one's talking about?

And I'll give an example. So it's a very short book. I mean, you'd read it in a day.

It's like 10 bucks.

[Neil]

It's a bunch of essays and speeches he's given really just put together.

[Ginny]

Yes. And it's about the things that no one's really talking about. And one of the ones, like apathy.

You know, a kid in the school system can really start to learn apathy. They can start to learn, like, you know, there's some segregation there. That type of thing.

[Neil]

How about this, page five. Indeed, the lesson of Bell's is that no work is worth finishing. So why care too deeply about anything?

Years of Bell's will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do.

[Ginny]

So that's one of the things, right? So the one that really stuck out to me was the one about that you have to wait for someone else to give you permission or to tell you what to do. And it reminded me of my own life that I have felt lost as an entrepreneur.

No one is telling me what to do. And yet our life is increasingly, the world is increasingly going toward entrepreneurship. Kim John Payne says by 2035, something like 75 percent will be entrepreneurs or have a mix of several jobs trying to make ends meet.

And so it is a tricky thing when you have a K-12 education. And often for me, it went four years further and then really went five years further than that because I went right back into the school system. But when you have a life where someone tells you what to do all of the time, and then all of a sudden you don't have that.

And so what you're learning is dependence.

[Neil]

Yeah, of course. Of course. Of course.

And you have that one on here, actual dependence. Yeah, exactly. This is the most important lesson of them all.

This is from the book. We must wait for other people better trained than ourselves to make meanings of our lives. Of the millions of things of value to study, I decide what few we have time for.

Actually, this is decided by my faceless employers.

[Ginny]

I mean, he is. He is cutthroat. I mean, he's got his one of his books is called Weapons of Mass Instruction. He just went for it.

[Leslie]

And I think he's not trying to be inclusive and welcoming in his language at all. I think he's just being a man in this.

[Ginny]

Right, right. He's trying to maybe show that there's another side to it. And I related a lot to the book, and it gave me a lot of confidence moving forward in this day and age with the decision that we made.

And so that's why it was incredibly formative for me. And I go back to it a lot. Even that one that you just said of the millions of things of value there are to study.

I never thought about that. Well, there are millions of things of value to study. And it reminded me of my own childhood.

I have a brother who was like he would memorize the backs of baseball cards. He knew everybody's stats. Well, that's not a part of the school system, but you can use those types of things to develop your brain and to learn all sorts of other things.

And it's a way to learn that's cross-curricular and cohesive. There's a lot to think about.

[Neil]

Also, passion. You're learning passion. You're learning natural benefits of things you pay attention to.

Like one of our kids gets up early every morning, goes downstairs by himself. No one's awake in the house. And he just pulls up paper and markers and pens and just draws for hours by himself.

You can't quite articulate the value, but you can see that it's there. And I did ask you, how did you define homeschooling when you started this 14 years ago? And you said, I was going to print out the curriculum, put it on the walls and go through step by step.

So now you've got a book about to come out called Homeschooling. How do you define what that is today? And what would you say would be the first steps for people that are interested in it to kind of how do they take those first steps that you kind of plunged into?

How would you recommend them do that today?

[Ginny]

I would define homeschooling as parent-directed education. Some would define it as parent-directed, parent-funded education. There's a little bit of warfare.

That's totally the wrong word. That's the one that came to mind, because it's not that big of a deal. But there's definitely some dissension there on who funds it.

But I would say homeschooling is parent-directed education. And that might include...

[Neil]

Because some people think who should pay for it?

[Ginny]

In a lot of places, the government does pay for it.

[Neil]

All homeschool, but you send me the stuff.

[Ginny]

Yes, yes. And so the government pays for it. And all the different states are different.

So the parent directs. Now, that doesn't mean that your kid is always home. That might mean that your kid is doing a co-op.

That might mean that your kid is doing a part-time program. That might mean that your kid is, you know, doing online.

[Neil]

Right. That word direct is really key. It's not parent presence.

[Ginny]

Right.

[Neil]

Because as soon as I say homeschooling, people are like, I can't do that. I got it. I'm busy all day.

But you can homeschool without being home because you're directing the education.

[Ginny]

You're choosing what it's going to look like for them. And the...

[Neil]

Permanent co-op.

[Ginny]

And the thing is, is it doesn't take all that long. So one of the things that John Taylor Gatto said that blew my mind is he said that it only takes 50 to 100 hours to reach functional literacy. So that's not like the gold star standard.

But the interesting thing there is 50 to 100 hours is to get you to the point where you could learn anything that you wanted to learn. That's not that much time. Now, he says it's got to be at the right age and stage.

It's maybe not when they're four. It might be when they're nine. It might be when they're 12.

I love this woman, Dr. Carla Hanford. Find it in the show notes. She wrote this book called Smart Moves.

Why learning is not all in your head. And she didn't learn to read till she was 10. She's a PhD.

She's in her 80s. And she said when she was a kid, it didn't really matter. But if a kid today didn't learn to read until they were in the fourth grade, they would go into life with all sorts of stigmas.

[Neil]

Well, they'd be shipped well away from the school probably by then.

[Ginny]

Yeah. So at the right age and stage, it's 50 to 100 hours to functional literacy. And what I've seen, similar to your son, and this is kind of what you were talking about, Leslie, these premises can be built in no matter how you choose to live your life.

You can have open space so that your kid has time to self-educate.

[Neil]

So this is good. So what are the principles of homeschooling? One is open space.

[Ginny]

Well, I think that in general, and this is why the book is called You're Doing It Right Just By Doing It, is because as a homeschooler, you cannot recreate the classroom. So I talk about this experience where I went and substitute for kindergarten. And I did it one time.

I was so tired. I was like, this is the most tiring job. These wonderful teachers that are dealing with these little five and six year olds.

And the lesson plan, because I was substitute teaching, it was just like this on a little clipboard. And it was minute by minute. You know, it was like 852 to 855.

You sing this song. 855 to 858. Read this book.

858 to 904. And I was like, well, someone had to go to the bathroom. I'm already behind.

Someone has their shoe. They have to be tight. And someone's tooth is wiggly.

And they're talking to you about their cousin. And I was like, this is so hard.

[Neil]

Leslie also taught kindergarten.

[Ginny]

Oh, what a saint. What a saint.

[Neil]

No, one year, right?

[Leslie]

Yeah, just one year.

[Ginny]

To even make those lesson plans. I mean, that was so much work for that teacher.

But I think that when you pull yourself out of that system, you sort of think, well, I have to have every minute filled. And you just simply cannot. There's no way that one adult can fill every single minute of the day for one child.

Sometimes there's more than one child. And so there's just left with open space. There's just time.

[Neil]

Oh, that's open space.

[Ginny]

Based on.

[Neil]

I was thinking physical space. You mean curriculum space.

[Ginny]

But even just in the day, time space is really what I'm thinking.

[Neil]

Time space, right.

[Ginny]

And physical space, right? Like where you have places in your home, maybe different places in your home that you can go.

[Leslie]

Different places in your neighborhood that you can go. So are these things that you're suggesting to somebody who is either fully homeschooling or to potentially a teacher or a parent who is operating inside of the. Homeschooling principles.

[Ginny]

Yeah, you sprinkle in a little bit of boredom.

[Leslie]

Like we could have our kids still going to school and have some of these homeschooling practices in place by having the open space in the morning or on the weekends or.

[Ginny]

Yeah. And you see it like with the Waldorf, same thing. So you could sprinkle in some of that.

If you have a child that's six and not reading and that school is hounding you, then you could say, oh, well, I don't care. Or these some of these the doctors and things like I really like Dr. Madeline Levine, Dr. Victoria Dunkley. They all say things like I prescribe no homework.

I'll write a prescription. This child does not have to do any homework. And I.

[Neil]

Oh, the doctor prescribes that. The doctor. Because Leslie's always talking.

[Leslie]

I'm actually like I'm sitting here right now feeling really quite lucky to be in Canada and to be in Toronto, I have to say, because I know that, you know, there still is probably some dumbing us down happening in our Canadian school system. But I do think when I think about teaching kindergarten, like there was so much open space asked of me as a teacher. I know at our kids school, like the kindergartens have a designated outdoor space.

It's just for them and like a certain number of hours a day that they're supposed to be outside. So thankfully.

[Neil]

Five, three, one, none of whom have ever brought home any homework.

[Leslie]

Oh, that's so we are very lucky to be operating in a system that is a little bit more towards these best case scenarios. There's still, of course, room to grow. But I think, you know, yeah, there are people in much more destitute situations where their kids are programmed to the minute and not outside as much.

[Ginny]

So it's very common to have a first grade where we're in a packet. You're going to they're going to bring home a packet of worksheets. It's very common like that.

And so Dr. Not Dr. John Taylor Gatto calls that surveillance.

[Leslie]

You're just checking on the parents. And I mean, one stat that we've that we've talked about is that there's no research that supports any homework other than reading. Like there's never once been one study that shows that kids doing homework benefits anybody in any way.

But teachers just do all of this busy work because they think they're supposed to or they think the parents want them. And as a teacher, I've had parents ask for homework. Like when I wasn't giving homework, I've had parents be like, please, please, please send homework.

We need math packages.

[Neil]

I actually loved that we went to I went to our oldest third grade classroom. I took a picture of this. I wish I could pull it up right now.

But he's in third grade public school, Toronto District School Board. And the sign on the wall said, here's your homework tonight. And I could tell by the sign it didn't change all year.

And it was like seven things. It was like, number one, help your parents cook dinner. It was like that.

It was like, number two, work of the home.

[Leslie]

Sometimes we've had some teachers that have said that, right? Right. Like your homework is work of the home.

[Neil]

If you have a dog, walk your dog. It was like stuff like that could go on the poster.

[Leslie]

We're going to make this like manifesto, right?

[Neil]

Yeah. Oh, that's really good. Manifesto genesis session.

[Ginny]

I think that's a good reminder that work of the home. And he uses the phrase curriculum of family. And I've always thought that was really beautiful.

Your family has a curriculum. And I think that those things are what make people unique and have unique experiences. And then you talk about where you came from.

And like you were talking about your seventh generation, eighth generation. You got grandparents. You can walk to their house.

It's like these are the unique things about us. And I think those should be celebrated. And there's just some really thoughtful things in John Taylor Gatto's work that I'd never been exposed to.

And it really changed my view on a lot of things and gave me a lot of freedom and permission.

[Leslie]

Yeah. I love the permission piece because that's kind of where you started, right? Was talking about how like you felt a little bit wobbly or you felt a little bit, you know, that there was maybe some like external pressure to be doing things that you weren't doing by homeschooling.

Um, and I, I even in my mind was making connections between you just quickly dropping that you used a midwife or, you know, I imagine that we would probably line up about some more like peaceful, intentionally parenting and you're not doing consequences. You don't have your kids in time. I was like all of these, these old outdated expectations on parents that you should be doing this and they should be meeting these benchmarks or whatever.

It is actually a very active, conscious choice to not do like sometimes not doing is just as even potentially more of a choice. I'm not going to go to the hospital to have my baby, right?

[Neil]

Like that's the line for the manifesto. Not doing can be more doing than doing.

[Leslie]

These are big, these are big decisions. Why do we choose not to do?

[Ginny]

And I guess I didn't realize that there were other ways to do life. I had no idea. I mean, I grew up with some like really good friends that were homeschooled and I would spend the night at their house. We never talked about it.

Never. How did we never, how did I never say, well, what do you do all day? Never.

[Neil]

Even to grow up with friends that were homeschooled is, you're lucky that you had that and that you had other families that also were doing this.

[Leslie]

And that you found a partner who wanted to do this too.

[Neil]

Oh yeah. I bet you a one parent wants to do it a lot, right? Whereas you'd have to kind of get to, what percent of people...

[Ginny]

You give them that book.

[Leslie]

We're dumbing them down.

[Neil]

What percent of people homeschool?

[Ginny]

I think it's around 5%.

[Neil]

So 5%. It was like, it was like probably lower before the pandemic than spike to 100% in the pandemic and that has gone down, but not down to where it was.

[Ginny]

Right. I think it's, I think it was maybe around 2%. So it's doubled.

[Neil]

Right.

[Ginny]

And there's a lot of variations on it now too. So I'm not quite sure what people count as homeschooling.

[Leslie]

Yeah, exactly. Like, does it count if your kid is doing online school? Like, you know, that, there's come risks of that too.

[Ginny]

If they're home and in your home and you've chosen an online program that takes them a couple hours a day, like I would consider that. That's the parent has chosen. Right.

The government didn't choose or the state municipality or whatever. You have chosen. They're going to do this online program.

[Leslie]

I guess I just have a little bit of like a social justice concern for, you know, hopefully we hope that when parents are choosing, they're choosing based on what's best for their child. But what about in the situations where a parent say like, is anxious for their child to be exposed to germs or doesn't want them to cross the street and has them doing like online at home school and therefore is like holding them back.

[Neil]

Would that not risk like social stunting? I mean, you have five kids. That's not the like homeschooling in the way you're thinking of it.

Right.

[Ginny]

Right. And I do think, you know, the title of the book, the subtitle of my book is you're doing it right just by doing it. And I know I was like, people are going to push back because they're going to say, well, what about, and they're very rare cases, but there are cases where it's a front for abuse and the parents are abusing their kids at home and they're saying we're homeschooling and they're not.

And that's not homeschooling.

[Leslie]

No.

[Ginny]

Homeschooling is what you were talking about earlier, which is that you have an innate drive and you love your kids. No one loves your kids more than you. And that drives you to, to offer them the best of the opportunities that you can find for them.

And socially, you know, that's one of the things that people bring up a whole lot. And I always say I taught high school. So there was some really weird seniors.

I mean, it just, it just sounds awful, but it just, they were like super awkward. I would find that.

[Neil]

You can make it through the traditional school system and still be weird.

[Ginny]

Yeah. Your person. And that, and I also don't think weird matters.

I think quirk is, quirk is fine. And, and what I would find is that when the parents would come in for parent teacher conference, I would be like, Oh, I get it. You know, your, your personality, you come into the world with social skills, you teach.

And so we're teaching those to our kids. Don't talk too much, you know, you know, make sure you're asking questions, all of these different things. I read this thing.

It was, um, Tom Corley has a book called Rich Habits, Poor Habits. And there is this, I think a version for kids and there's, uh, my midwife sent it to me. It's this 40 questions.

It's really interesting. I'll send it to you. It's 40 questions.

It's called the rich parents test or rich habits test or something like that. And it's these 40 questions. Are you having your kids do these things?

I don't care if my kids are rich, but it's about habits of successful people basically. And of the 40 things, not one of them has to do with grade point average. Not one of them has to do with standardized test scores.

It's things like, do you call the people that are important in your life? Do you call them for their birthday? Of 40 things.

You require your children to read biographies. Ooh, interesting. That changed my life because I just read Steve Martin's biography based off of your 2024 best books list.

And I, I thought it was a little slow until about the last third. And then I'm so glad I read it. And I wouldn't have read it.

And I probably might have, I don't quit books too much. I know Austin Cleon says to quit books. I don't quit books too much, but I might have set it aside.

Like Moonbound. I'm really the talking badger. I'm like, am I going to make it?

[Neil]

It's a toughie, Robin Sloan, Moonbound. But Steve Martin's book. We do also say quit more to read more on this show.

So we'll have to talk about that separately. Otherwise it could clog you for the next one, but it doesn't seem to be clogging you. You just go into the next one anyway.

[Ginny]

Yeah. Well, the Steve Martin one was really, he was performing for no one. He's performing for no one.

He's, he's in these spots and he's performing for no one for, for years. And then all of a sudden, you know, things get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And now he's performing for 20,000.

Now he's performing for 45,000 and then it peaked, it peaked. And then he started to say, oh, there's empty seats. I haven't seen empty seats in years.

Now there's empty seats. And so I just think when you read biographies, it reminds you that no one has a straight shot to the top. Everyone has slogged through and struggled.

And also the peak may not be what you think it might be. And you get there and he said he was lonely. He was going back alone.

He's having to get shuffled out. It was really fun for a period of time. He would do his show and then he would go stand outside.

They would go walk around outside and there's, I don't know, a hundred people. And then it got too big for that. So the biography is a really interesting, calling people on their birthdays, calling people on their birthday, limit of junk food, limit of screen time is one of them.

So it was something like my kids watch no more than an hour, no more than an hour of screen time a day. A limit of this amount of calories of junk food to a degree. One of them is about exercise.

The birthday one came up twice because then it said something about how you acknowledge their significant life events. That's social skills. My kids are encouraged to express gratitude.

I know more of these than I realized. They're encouraged to express gratitude for what they have. They're discouraged from listening to or engaging in gossip.

[Leslie]

So like I'm sitting here with absolutely no doubt in my mind that kids growing up being homeschooled by you or somebody like you or somebody who reads your book and is inspired by you are going to develop all of the skills that they need to thrive in the world. Like that's just, I'm so, so, so confident in that. The thing that I'm a little bit less ready to totally feel confident about is the wellness of the parents.

Like, how do you think about that? Because I feel like for me, one of the things that gets in the way of me being able to be like, yeah, I could totally have all of my kids home is my own wellness and me needing some time to myself and me liking to have to be with them a lot. And then also liking to have other parts of my own identity explored and celebrated.

And so how do you, how do you think about that and recommend that for homeschoolers?

[Ginny]

That's a good question. I love my life and I have no regrets. If I were to do it over again, I would do it all the same.

I would skip preschool. It has not mattered. Now we have kids that are, our oldest is 16.

And I remember he got it. He has an internship in the field that he really likes. He wants to go into movies.

He wants to create movies and write scripts. And he got this internship where he does video work. And I just remember thinking like no one asked him what age did he learn to read?

Did you go to preschool? Like that wasn't a part of it. But for a lot of years, I was like, oh no.

I would do it the exact same way. I have grown so much as a person and the 50 to 100 hour thing, which I brought up earlier, which is not, you know, you don't only spend 50 to 100 hours in childhood on learning, but it doesn't take as much time as you would think. People say about two hours a day would get you through all your subjects for all your kids, for them to be really well-versed in a lot of different things.

So there just is a lot of time. There's a lot of time for me. There's a lot of time for me to grow.

I've been challenged to learn a lot of things. And so my life was just this boring path and it has exploded and expanded since we made the decisions to do things a little bit differently than the way I went for many, many, many, many years. But your question is a really valid one.

I think that for the time when you have little kids, like seven and under, I think seven is kind of a pivotal age. That's just hard. Those are really hard years.

And eventually it shifts. Whether your kids are homeschooling or not homeschooling, those are hard years. I spent time this last weekend with some friends.

They both had four-year-olds. I was like, oh my gosh, these kids are so busy. They're so volatile.

They're so upset about this, that, or the other thing. And you just, you kind of forget. But once they're out of that, your life really does open up.

And I feel like I've expanded as a person because of it. Yeah.

[Leslie]

Yeah, I can see. I can see how it's...

[Neil]

It's not an empty screen, so...

[Ginny]

Yeah, they have some screen time.

[Leslie]

And some free time. Do you have, do you pull...

You can central in your own time. And how do you call in the village to raise, like to raise your children and support you while you parent?

[Ginny]

Well, we have a lot of friends. I mean, a lot of friends. And we've had friendship up and down too. We also had a big, I mean, this past year, we had a massive friendship blow up.

And, you know, those things happen. But I've also learned that friends come and go. And that's a thing also that I want to teach my kids.

[Neil]

A reason, a season, or a lifetime. Have you heard that before?

[Ginny]

Oh, you know, all these things. And you always are putting them in the podcast too. One of the ones you said was Warren Buffett.

It was like, give them enough. It was about money.

[Neil]

Yeah, so when you... For anyone that's listening to this, that's extremely wealthy, rich, that could potentially trouble their kids life by giving them all their money. Warren Buffett says, I want to give my kids enough money that they can do anything.

But I don't want to give them so much that they can do nothing.

[Ginny]

Yeah, you're always, you're always coming out with these one-liners. That was a good one. Reason, season.

[Neil]

Ah, so my mom used to have, someone gave her a greeting card when she, like for one of her birthdays, when she turned 50 or something. She cut, so my mom, she cut off the front of it and framed it on our kitchen wall. And I can still see the actual colors and everything.

And it said, because I guess, I don't know what the friend wrote inside, but the front of the greeting card said, friends come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. So I'm presuming the inside of that card said, and you and me are lifetime ones or whatever, right? Like, but, but I don't know.

Cause I never saw the inside. Or maybe there was like a friendship blow up. I never saw the inside of the card.

It was just all of her card framed in my kitchen.

[Ginny]

Aw, well that's a wonderful way to teach about socialization.

[Neil]

Yeah. Yeah. As the snow starts falling around you.

[Ginny]

This is awesome.

[Neil]

That's what's great about outside too. Ever-changing, the wind changes, the noise changes, people walking by change. Jane Jacobs, who lived in Toronto, called the view out your window, the ballet of the street, or the sidewalk ballet.

You know what I mean? Another great testament to walkable city, by the way, those look looking to, look into walkable cities a little bit more. I recommend the book Walkable City by Jeff Speck, chapter 52, introduced to us by Ann Bogle in chapter 48, I believe.

I like to think of the show as a 333 chapter book that you could potentially read or listen to from chapter one to 333, or for somehow, in some reason, in the year 3214, if someone stumbles upon, you know, an old hologram of chapter 142 and they are referred back to, I like the idea that you could then, you know, how you flip a book and open in the bookstore, you could then flip to the chapters you want.

You know what I mean? And I don't think you need to read a book front to back ever. Speaking of reading though, I will say we've opened up homeschooling quite a bit.

There's principles of homeschooling we've discussed. We've defined homeschooling then and now. We've talked about some of the challenges.

We've talked about your arguments against some of the more common kind of questions or criticisms or challenges that you may hear. So I want to take that one notch further with your third and final book, which by the way, I read all three of them. I loved all three of them, but this one in particular was like, this is going to be in the best of 2025.

This one, or I already know because this book blew my mind and I've already been recommending it to so many people. And it is called Learning All the Time by John Holt, H-O-L-T. The cover is like a totally white cover with kids painted hands and footprints in bright blue, red, and green.

You know, it was published in 1989, but DiCapo Publishing. And the subtitle is very interesting. How small children begin to read, write, count, and investigate the world without being taught.

And I was like, well, that didn't, I thought, like that doesn't make any sense. John Holt lived from 1923, born in New York City to 1985, died in Boston, age 62, was an American author, educator, and a proponent of homeschooling, specifically unschooling, and a pioneer in youth rights theory, which is interesting. What's this book about?

This is why it blew my mind. It shows how children learn to read, write, and count in their, read, like reading in their everyday life at home. And adults can just respect and encourage this without actually doing it.

Like, it just, it's so interesting, this book. It follows under 372 social sciences, education, primary education, elementary education. There are parts of this book that I've, literally, I was stunned at.

I put it down, I highlighted it, I folded it. And I was like, oh my gosh, my kid's actually doing that. And if I just listen and nudge and say, like as he's saying, then the kid's going to recognize or they're going to recognize another letter.

Like he's teaching me how to teach my kid without saying anything. So amazing. Tell us about your relationship, Ginny, with Learning All the Time by John Holt.

[Ginny]

Oh, what a subtitle. What a subtitle. So I bought these books within two months of each other.

I didn't read them right away. This, I read the first two together. And then this one, I didn't read quite as quickly.

I just was mulling over that subtitle for a really long time because I didn't believe it. Same thing, same thing. How young children learn to read, especially read, read right.

And so then I had this experience where, and actually what changed my life in this book is not that part, but I want to, I will talk about that. I, my youngest, we have five kids. That gives me room to experiment.

[Leslie]

Totally.

[Ginny]

So for our oldest four, we waited until they were seven and no longer, because I was really nervous about it. And, you know, are people judging me and that whole thing.

So at seven.

[Neil]

Seven for what, reading?

[Ginny]

For reading. So I went with the Waldorf thing, basically because that's all I could do. All these little kids.

And then I kind of kept with that. It worked fine. I did this book.

It's called How to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. It cost $20 and it was kind of boring, but everybody learned to read by less than 70 something. And they were fine.

They went from being illiterate at seven to within two months reading Magic Tree House and then onward and upward. They read all the time. Well, our youngest, when she was four, we hadn't done any reading lessons or writing lessons, nothing formal.

And we were getting ready for a birthday party where we were putting kids' names in a hat to pull out. It was a Dude Perfect birthday party. We do watch, see, we watch YouTube.

So the kids know Dude Perfect and we're pulling names out of a hat. We were going to do Wheel Unfortunate at this birthday party. And we're sitting at the kitchen table and everyone's- Dude Perfect.

And Wheel Unfortunate.

[Neil]

Just so I don't know what either of those things are at all.

[Ginny]

So Dude Perfect is, they're YouTubers.

[Neil]

Okay, YouTubers.

[Ginny]

And they do trick shots. So they do, they can like, they would make a basket from here all the way over there. And they do trick shots.

They've gotten huge. They have this warehouse. Our kids think that they're cool.

And so the Wheel Unfortunate is one part of their episode where they spin the wheel. And if you get stuck in that segment, you have to do some unfortunate thing. It's like shave your eyebrows, something like that.

So we were going to do this at the birthday party and we were putting people's names on slips of paper to put in a hat to draw them out. So our youngest daughter, she was four. We haven't written anything.

We read tons of books. We sing her name. She likes letters.

I mean, they get curious on their own. And she took a slip of her paper, of papers, just sitting on the table. She takes a slip and she wrote her name out.

Every single letter, six letters, writes it right out. And I was like, what in the world? I didn't have to teach her.

We didn't have to have a lesson. I didn't have to write it on any board. And then she took another one and she writes it again.

She takes another one, she writes it again. She took all the papers and then she has to cut more because we need more papers because this is what we're doing for these other kids. And so then I'm like, well, she's getting fine motor.

And for years, three years, every once in a while, she would come to me with a stack of little sheets of paper that would all say the same thing, like hug me or I love you or mommy. And it reminded me of when they're learning to crawl or when they're learning to walk, that they do enough repetition till they have that one mastered and then they go on to something else. And so that was her little way.

And I didn't do the hundred easy lessons with her. She's eight and she reads everything.

[Leslie]

Yeah, exactly.

[Ginny]

We didn't do any lessons.

[Leslie]

I love that.

[Neil]

From the book, what children need to get ready for reading is exposure to a lot of print, not pictures, but print. And this is the part I like the most. They need to bathe their eyes in print as when smaller, they bathe their ears in talk.

[Ginny]

Yeah, and what he says is they have to know that it's beneficial for them. So he would say like, if you're trying to teach someone to talk, the first thing that they need to know is that this is gonna benefit you. You're gonna be able to communicate her.

So they get to an age where other kids are playing games and they wanna join in, but they can't read. Or they wanna go read the sign, but they can't read. And so I have a child that I did not teach to read, not one lesson.

And she walks around the house every day with an I Survived book. That's her favorite series right now. She loves those.

She has one in her hand constantly, anywhere we go, she brings those. And I just ordered her your favorite book. Have you only put one out?

On 100, the episode 100, you put out one of your formative books.

[Leslie]

I just ordered her that one.

[Ginny]

She's gonna love it.

[Neil]

That is still one of my favorites.

[Ginny]

And she's eight. So it's like the perfect age, but she just loves, she has just recently, we got her four books about chemistry. That's what she's interested in.

There's a Smithsonian, the DK book, and she just carries them everywhere. And I didn't teach her.

[Neil]

Do you not find that your kids, cause you are also exposing them to screens and I do watch YouTube. Does that not become more seductive than reading?

[Ginny]

Well, we limit it.

[Neil]

What's your rule? What's your home?

[Ginny]

What's your house rules? You get an hour-ish, you know, at the most.

And it's not even every day because I always say our best days are the days where we run out of time for screens. So if we're home and there is time and we wanna play a video game, sure, you got an hour and then you're gonna turn it off. And that's similar to that Tom Corley thing.

[Neil]

And we do Sundays, Sunday screen days.

[Ginny]

And we have limits.

[Neil]

We're binging on Sunday, daddy's football.

[Ginny]

And that's fun.

[Leslie]

They get two hours on Sunday and they don't have any screens on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.

[Ginny]

And that's Waldorfy. Do you know Waldorf has a policy or at least they used to that there was no screens?

[Neil]

I've wondered about that. Even though we both align on this, I've wondered if we are inadvertently creating a lock up the liquor cabinet.

[Leslie]

I don't know. I think I say that.

[Neil]

And then when they have the ability to have full binge anytime, like-

[Ginny]

No, I don't think so. And here's why.

[Leslie]

And it's not as strict as I just made it.

[Ginny]

Because it's the way that their brains are structured. They're structuring their brains toward hands-on living and screens are the aftereffects. So I've always said, our best days are the days where we run out of time for screens.

And screens are the second choice. They're not the first choice. And so what happens is when you have a teenager, their brain is wired for real life and interaction.

They're not the uninteresting people that Dr. Nicholas Carderas is talking about. They're wired for this. And so their brain has already been wired that way.

So they do not. That's what everybody says when they go off to college. They're not the kids that go off the rails with screens because that's not how they've grown up.

[Neil]

It's almost like you got to protect screen time from a certain age to a certain age. And then it is enough to make it so that you are unlikely to fall into a screen.

[Ginny]

Yeah, their brain has formed based around real life experiences. But I'm gonna tell you about why this book was formative to me because it's not that. I only sit here today because of this book.

And the other books led to it. So that's why they were formative. But this book in particular, I read.

And there's a section in there where he talks about how kids don't see adult work. And it said that if you're an adult, kids need to see adult work so that they can know what is it like to build a table? What is it like to write a book?

They're so siphoned off from that. And he says, if you have no skills, which I thought was really funny because I think a lot of parents reading it would be like, well, I've got nothing. You know, I'm supposed to show kids, whatever.

I don't have anything. He says, well, you should learn something and allow them to see you learning. And I read the book and we were, I mean, I was still really trying to like, I mean, I want to just have it be just like school.

I would love that. I want to be in control. I want to check boxes.

This is my personality and it's gone off the rails. And then I read that and I was like, shoot, I'm not doing that. I am trying to direct these kids for the most part.

And then I started to think, well, am I growing? Am I stepping out and showing them bravery? Are they seeing adult work?

And then it says, as they get older and older, they have more of a view of what the adult world is like. So I asked Josh, I was like, hey, in this business that you do that, I don't quite know. Can you take our kids?

You know, I'm like, I've read this book.

[Ginny]

Look at it.

[Ginny]

It says kids should have a view of adult work. He was like, absolutely not. I cannot, you know, I'm in these meetings.

I'm having these client dinners. He's like, I cannot take them. I was like, okay.

What if we zoom in? Can we FaceTime? Like, can you FaceTime?

Can you set up a little iPad? We're going to watch you while you do these presentations. He's like, no, I cannot do that.

And so I was like, I have to, I have to have something to show them. And I already had 1000 Hours Outside. I'm sorry, just a blog.

It was just for sharing the fact that this had changed our life. And I thought I could probably do a little bit more with that in order for it to be a vessel to help our kids have these adult experiences. And so we made a line of t-shirts and they're hideous.

They're so ugly. I look back now and I'm like, I cannot believe anybody bought those t-shirts. And they did.

I spent a thousand dollars, which is a ton of money when you've got a bunch of kids and you're on one income. And I thought I am just wasting this, but I was so challenged by this to have something.

[Neil]

Great work to show them adult work.

[Ginny]

Yeah, and they came and we had a meeting. The t-shirt guy came over, we sat, everyone had a little clipboard. We're choosing colors.

And they sold. And one of the stories I talk about often in that particular instance, and now it's been a lot of things, that I go speak at places and the kids come up and they do music.

[Neil]

Are they helping with the podcast?

[Ginny]

Not yet. They're going to help edit. I think our oldest will help edit when he gets a little older.

He's working on audio things. And then they've been on here and there. They've been, you know, they joined in on the episode or we talk about it quite a bit.

But there's a lot of options.

[Leslie]

If inadvertently, this actually is part of what allowed you to take care of you while you homeschooled, you know, like that was back to our conversation before. Like, I know that maybe wasn't your initial motivation. Like you were wanting to show them your work, but it sounds to me like you actually really did keep your own life alive beyond just taking care of and directing your children's learning.

And I think that that's something, at least that's eye-opening for me as somebody who doesn't, you know, see homeschoolers lives up close. And when I've talked to some people who are homeschooling their kids, their whole life is about homeschooling their children. And I have talked to some moms who feel like they're kind of just like drowning in that, right?

Because they're only living and breathing their children's schooling, but not necessarily taking care of themselves and their own wellness. And I wonder if maybe you got some of your own wellness taken care of by having your own project.

[Ginny]

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]

Like what?

[Ginny]

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 garage. 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, 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 were 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 and Michigan, everything was really shut down.

He said, everything shut down, all the schools. I was making shirts and 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. And so it's just been a really fulfilling thing to have read that and to try it and to look at my life as something that's a model as well as like a shepherd, you know, or however we look at parenting.

[Neil]

You are spurred into increased courageous and bravery and leadership and modeling from the book, which only amplifies what your kids learn.

[Ginny]

And it opens up opportunities. Like our kids have, they have pictures of themselves with famous people, which they're not, I mean, they're like, I don't even know what level famous that they would be, but you know, they're like, they like this set of singers or, and here and there because of my own platform or own experiences, like they get to meet that person. And it's just been very eyeopening that when we grow as people, it opens doors for our kids as well.

[Leslie]

Brené Brown says one of my favorite quotes of hers and of parenting in general is who we are matters much more than anything we do. And I love that that just takes off some of that pressure that we feel as parents. And I think you are talking about that so beautifully that you are really working on yourself and you're getting yourself outside and then your kids are outside.

You're reading more and your kids are reading more. You're taking risks and then your kids are taking risks. You know, you're growing as a human and therefore they're growing as humans.

And I think that that's just so inspiring. You embody that. So it's an inspiration to talk to you.

[Neil]

It really is. It's almost like that's a wrap because that was such a good little. It was really good.

[Leslie]

I mean, Leslie, wow.

[Neil]

I mean, yeah. See why I begged her off a field trip. She was supposed to be at Little Canada today, which is.

[Leslie]

I really wanted to go on a field trip with our 10 year old. Meet all his friends.

[Neil]

Yeah, that's the one thing about parenting competing demands, especially with husbands with podcasts. Hey, to close things off, let's do a few fast money round questions.

[Ginny]

All right, here we go.

[Neil]

But you know, some of these because you've listened, but.

[Ginny]

Yep. OK, there's like one time like I would prefer this one over that one. Let's see what happens.

[Neil]

Well, do you want to be? And even to ask you this, I also have forgotten to print them out. So I'm going off my head here.

Do I remember my own questions? First one is hardcover, paperback, audio or E.

[Ginny]

OK, paperback. 100% paperback. I like that because I'm lazy and they're and they're easier to open.

So paperback to me is easier to read than a hardcover. If I didn't have kids and probably down the road, audiobook is something I really like, but they interrupt all the time and you're constantly having to rewind. But I like the idea of audiobook because you hear the words.

So there actually are a lot of words that I don't know when I'm reading a book and I don't even know how you would pronounce it. So I think that that would increase my vocabulary if I were listening to audiobooks.

[Neil]

That's interesting. We've only ever adjusted one value on the show since its inception on March 31st, 2018. Chapter one with Leslie Richardson.

And it was the value real books.

[Leslie]

I love how you always have to just say my last name, my full name there. Leslie Richardson. Even though I'm sitting right beside you. And am your wife.

[Ginny]

And she's also on episode 100. What else? A lot of them.

[Neil]

We've only adjusted one value on the show and it was I had the value originally real books have real pages and then I received quite a lot of hate mail about it. And so I ended up changing the value slightly to real books are real pages, comma, audiobooks and ebooks are beautiful mutants. And I still got hate mail.

So now I've deleted the value completely. Although I will say I just read a tweet that went viral online by Naval Ravikant, who's a dream guest for this show, by the way. Naval, if you're listening, come on on.

And he said he said this is what he said. I don't know what you what you think, Ginny. He said, listening to your books instead of reading them is like drinking your vegetables instead of eating them.

Oh, he probably got a lot of hate mail, too. Oh, I'm sure he did. He's very polarizing.

But what do you think of that?

[Ginny]

I think audiobooks count. And I think that there's a lot of value. Like I'm missing the value of an increased vocabulary because I don't listen and I wish I could listen more.

[Neil]

I just can't not in a season of like, you know, you're an audiobook aspirant or aspirant.

[Leslie]

I was going to say it reminds me of how if you would have heard it on an audiobook, then it would be in your mind. Yeah. My dermatologist said the best sunscreen is the sunscreen that you wear.

And I feel like that applies about books, too, right? Like the best books are the one you read. Like if you're actually going to listen to an audiobook and that's going to get the book into your brain, then it got into your brain.

[Neil]

Exactly.

[Ginny]

And there's benefits there that aren't even some podcasts, too. Yeah, there we go.

[Neil]

Hey, hey.

[Ginny]

And you're going to learn words like aspirant.

[Neil]

That's going to go in the show notes. The word of the chapter, if it's a real word, which is questionable. I have to check the Scrabble Dictionary.

What's one book you wish you could reread or read again for the first time?

[Ginny]

Hunger Games. All the way, Hunger Games. Oh, so good.

Oh, I love the Hunger Games. Katniss, are you kidding me? We went and saw the movies and I was like 30.

And it was like, I mean, it was all teenagers. And like me and my 30-year-old mom friends. I mean, I love Katniss and I love Hunger Games.

[Neil]

Well, I loved Hunger Games while I was reading them. They certainly stuck me in. But looking back, I'm like, wow, the child on child.

I read all of them.

[Leslie]

Our Hunger Games story? Oh, I forgot about that. Neil was reading Hunger Games on our honeymoon on a cobo.

[Neil]

And it was pre-honeymoon.

[Leslie]

Oh, yeah, it was pre-honeymoon. And he was reading Hunger Games and we were so into it, like lying on a beach, reading this book over and over and over again. And then he stood up and he stepped on it and it crunched the e-reader and he read the end of the book on his iPhone because he was so into it that he wanted to finish it.

[Neil]

First I went to bookstores in Havar, desperate for a paper copy, but there was no English copies to be found to read the last 10 pages.

[Leslie]

It was so juicy and good.

[Neil]

And he was so into it. Download the e-book reader app, then I think I had to buy it again just to get the last 10 pages like while we were away.

[Ginny]

They're so good. I feel the same way about Harry Potter.

[Leslie]

It was worth it.

[Neil]

I've stepped on a lot of books. I only break the e-ones. What is your book lending policy?

[Ginny]

Oh, I don't give out my books because I've written in them. So actually one time...

[Neil]

But you just showed up at our house with a bag of books for us.

[Leslie]

No, no, they were not to be given.

[Ginny]

Oh, they're not for you. I was just showing you. Those are my books. She doesn't move around the world without her books. I would buy, I would buy people. I was just showing you them.

[Neil]

Because you inspired... You showed a Jonathan Franzen book.

[Ginny]

But that was on your list. I was showing you, I picked I think six books from your 2024 list. That I was planning on reading.

So Breath was one or Breathe, I guess was one of them.

[Neil]

Breath by Nestor.

[Ginny]

Yeah, Breath was one.

[Leslie]

Is your mouth tape ready?

[Ginny]

Yeah, oh, I do mouth tape. Yep, I'm a mouth taper.

I got hostage tape. I wear it at night. So then, well, there's a brand.

There's actually a brand called hostage tape. It's great. It's a good brand of it.

[Leslie]

Neil needs that because he fully like talks and laughs and snores through his mouth tape.

There you go.

[Neil]

Yeah, it's a gift for all when I tape my mouth shut.

[Ginny]

So I was showing you, I was trying to show you like, oh, I think I'm reading six books. I've already chosen six from your 2024 list. And then there were some older ones that I was just showing.

[Neil]

So then were you saying you don't lend?

[Ginny]

I don't. I don't lend because my books are, I mean, written in to the nth degree. I buy.

So if there's books, like I gave away this book.

[Neil]

And I know your pen.

[Ginny]

I got this book. I know.

[Neil]

Oh, it's the same one I use.

[Ginny]

The V5s. I gave away for Christmas this year, Will the Circle Be Unbroken by Sean Diedrich. It's my favorite book that I read in 2024.

It's just like, he is an incredible writer.

[Neil]

Sorry, what do you mean you gave it away? How many copies did you buy?

[Ginny]

I gave away six. I don't have that many friends.

No, you bought six. I, that's embarrassing. I should have said like, I've got 60 friends.

This is a problem. Every year I try and get something for my friends. Like this one lady was selling these cute little pencil pouches.

And I got it like in September. And I was like, how many friends do I have? Probably 20.

And so I'll buy 20 and then it would come at Christmas. And then I would feel like I'm super lame because I'm like, I don't have 20 friends. So in my closet, I have got like extra pencil pouches.

I've got these cute little vases that like for like a single flower that says, I'm glad we're friends. I have extras of everything.

[Leslie]

It's good to have a gift cupboard.

[Ginny]

So this year, this year I did six and I did have six people to give it to. So I do have at least six friends.

[Neil]

Well, just buying six of any book is like

[Ginny]

But I do buy, there we go.

[Leslie]

You have five kids. There's no room for friends.

[Ginny]

Can we homeschool?

[Ginny]

There's no room for anything. But I do buy books for friends is how I do it. I don't lend any.

[Neil]

Okay. So we got all the way back to my book lending policy is do not, do not lend. Buy.

Buy in multiples.

[Ginny]

And I think buying books is a good thing. I think the library is great too, but I also think it really supports authors. And I think in this day and age, you're investing in something that's really important.

And I like, I love giving books as gifts. I love getting books as gifts. I got a book this for Christmas from my sister-in-law.

It is, you're going to love this. Okay. It is meals that you can make with Costco ingredients, all Costco.

So, you know, sometimes you go to Costco and you're like, okay, but I don't have, you know, the cilantro. You can't get whatever, but every single recipe is strict Costco. Wow.

I was like, this is a life-changing book. And there's, and the lady, I bought another one because she made, does it with Trader Joe's too.

[Neil]

I was imagining this like, throw a couple of those fudgy Costco muffins in a blender and make a nice sauce for your.

[Leslie]

Really good olive oil, quinoa.

[Ginny]

There we go.

[Leslie]

Big Parmesan cheese.

[Ginny]

And it's got a picture of all the ingredients and you're like, oh, I know, I know that thing, but maybe I've not bought them all together. So I like books as gifts for sure.

[Neil]

How do you organize your books on your bookshelf?

[Ginny]

Oh, okay. This is good. Okay.

I've got, we just have to keep getting more bookshelves. They're all over the house and we're constantly looking for them. So in the hallway going into our room, there's three bookshelves in a row and then one on the other side.

And in my closet, there's another one. So the middle shelf is all people that have come on my podcast. And also, but they have to be a book that I would possibly go back to.

So like yours would be there, right? There's interesting stuff in here. The buckets, that like really changed my life.

Actually, I talk to people all the time about the buckets. I'm like, no work is good because you have to have the three buckets and they're going to give structure to your third bucket. And it's really, like my mom was saying the other day, I really like to volunteer.

I like to have this structure to my life almost in a way they're retired, almost in a way that was like apologetic. Like, you know, I should just be living this freedom. And I was like, no, no, Neil says you got to have the three buckets.

[Neil]

The week has 168 hours in it. So divide by three, 56, 56, 56. Yeah.

[Ginny]

So I have the ones that I would go back to. And then if it's a podcast, I wouldn't go back to their book. It goes to the basement, but it's on a spreadsheet so that I can find it if I do end up needing it.

[Neil]

Sorry, the spreadsheet is tracking the books in the basement?

[Ginny]

Yes, because everyone's like, find my book. Yeah, I can't find it.

[Neil]

So your spreadsheet is, all your books are in a spreadsheet?

[Ginny]

Well, the ones in the basement are on the spreadsheet.

[Neil]

Oh, if it makes it to the upstairs, doesn't need to be on the spreadsheet.

[Ginny]

I would never share that.

[Neil]

It's like your card catalog.

[Ginny]

Yeah, but I would never share who's in the basement books.

[Neil]

No, I know. But you have a tracker of them. It's not like you're dumping them to the curb.

[Leslie]

Password protected.

[Neil]

Seth Godin told us way back in chapter three, that he gave away a ton of his books and then he started getting notes like, hey, found this book in a used bookstore that said like to Seth from, you know, friends, right? So when a book is like signed to you and you give it away, that creates like, you know.

[Ginny]

So my left bookshelf has books that are about nature, that the people haven't been on the podcast. And it's got some kids books that are all about nature. The right bookshelf is the bottom section is people that are going to be coming on the podcast and I still have to read their books.

And the top of it is books like John Taylor Gatto and John Holtz. I've got a whole section about education, but also people I want to get on the podcast. Like I've got Jocko Willink, all these people that basically...

Yes, they keep saying no, or they're like absolutely. Bear Grylls is on the list. He said no.

I'm trying to think who else I've got. Or it might be someone like they've been on already, like Gretchen Rubin. But then I got a new book of hers.

And so like the next set, so like yours will go there. Like yours will go on the, well, let's talk about this other book of yours that we haven't talked about yet.

[Neil]

Right.

[Ginny]

That's where it will land.

[Neil]

You can have guests multiple times, which I'm jealous of, because sometimes I have someone kind of like I had Jonathan Haidt on chapter 108. No, I wasn't 118. It was pre 100, actually.

And then, you know, The Anxious Generation came out like two years later. I was like, I really want to interview him about The Ink's Generation, but like I can't really crush the format here.

[Ginny]

Oh, that's interesting because he wouldn't come on mine until The Anxious Generation came out. I had to wait two years for an interview with Jonathan Haidt because I wanted to talk about Coddling of the American Mind.

[Leslie]

Right.

[Ginny]

And they said, no, check back in two years.

[Leslie]

Well, hey, at least they knew it was coming down the pipe.

[Ginny]

Yeah.

[Neil]

And that book, by the way, number one on my best of 2024. So we've talked about your lending policy. We've talked about your guys, your books.

[Ginny]

We talked about my right bookshelf is fiction. And my favorite fiction that I read in 2024 is called God of the Woods. Oh, it was really good.

And the other was Circle Unbroken or something. Well, The Circle Be Unbroken. That's a memoir.

And I love Sean Diedrich books.

[Neil]

The memoir of who?

[Ginny]

Of him. His dad took his life when he was in middle school, 12. He dropped out of school and is this really incredible writer and performer.

And his story is really touching and he's funny. Because you're crying on one page and laughing in the same page. I mean, they're just phenomenal books.

[Neil]

Wow.

[Ginny]

That's the one I gave for Christmas.

[Neil]

What's the last children's book you bought for somebody?

[Ginny]

Well, The Sideways Stories.

[Neil]

Oh, Sideways Stories, where he says Lewis Sacker. Yeah. Okay.

Chapter 68.

[Ginny]

Chapter 68.

[Neil]

We gotta go pick up our kids from school.

If they weren't at school, we would have to pick them up.

[Ginny]

We could be doing this together.

[Neil]

Now, the final closing question. We didn't even get to talk about your podcast, but I wanted to talk about a lot because the thing is, you started a podcast when there was three million podcasts already existing and you've gone to the top of the charts. Like your podcast is massive.

Your audience is passionate. You have created something that is like this five million podcasts. Like it's hard to stick out.

So I was gonna, I had a whole series of questions I didn't get to about like, how did you do that? What's your advice for other podcasters? And as we trundle back here and start our pilgrimage walking, because we found out pretty early in this conversation when I was listening that we were like all jimmying around with wires and backpacks.

And we just started to sit in benches. That's how we had to make this work. We...

[Ginny]

And I have a cold. So I was kind of like, I'm sucking in all this cold air and it's getting to my lungs and I'm trying not to cough. But it is interesting that we were, I was warm, warm enough while we were walking. And that's what people always ask with the winter.

It's like, if you're moving, you're usually fine. Exactly. But once you sit, like my toes are pretty...

Numb. Yes.

[Neil]

You come out of the word numb. You've created a movement. You have a huge platform.

You've created a great, great podcast. You have two books out and a third one on its way, homeschooling. So my last question, which could either be related to reading or it could be related to writing or it could be related to what you've grown and are putting into the world is, what is your one hard fought piece of advice you would give to those listening who aspire to be doing things in line with what you are, have created?

[Ginny]

That's an excellent question. My answer is, I'm chewing on a cough drop. It went into the microphone.

That's kind of embarrassing. My answer is don't quit. Because I think that everybody has dreams and passions.

You want to make sourdough bread and sell it. You want to become an author. Actually, this is the craziest thing.

So when I was crossing the border to come up to the wonderful country of Canada, the lady in the booth was like, who are you going to go see? I was like, some friends. How do you know him?

I was like, well, they've been on my podcast and we're going to go hang out. I'm going to go hang out with them. She was like, well, what's your career?

I said, well, I'm an author and a podcaster. She was like, I've always wanted to be an author. And I sat in that spot for probably 10 minutes.

And we talked about how to become an author. She took down my information. And she was at the border.

Everyone's always told me I'm good with words. I'm good with words. I know people are probably like this lady.

What does she have in her car or whatever? But anyway, I just think that you have these dreams, whatever that they are. Everyone listening has their own dreams of what they want to do.

But when you start to pursue your dreams, you're going to have days. This is a loud spot, isn't it? Do I wait?

Do I keep talking? You can keep talking. I know you like the background noise.

[Neil]

I like background noise.

[Ginny]

OK, so everyone is going to have times where they get discouraged. And your book isn't going to sell as good as you hoped. I mean, I really got a lot out of when you said I wish I would have called that book The Resilience Equation.

I've talked to other people about that because when you try new things, inevitably, you're going to have regrets and you're going to do some things wrong. You're going to have time when you're sick. You get tired.

Someone's, you know, passing away in your family. And so I think a lot of times people throw in the towel because it doesn't blow up as soon as they thought it would or because they have a hard season. And I think you just set it aside.

Maybe you pull back, but you don't give up altogether on the thing that you're doing. So that would be my advice is don't quit.

[Neil]

Don't quit. A magical outdoors conversation with the one and only Ginny Yurich. If you are listening to this and you have not already downloaded or subscribed to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast or joined the movement or checked out Ginny's books 1000 Hours Outside until the streetlights come on or her new one, Homeschooling, please do.

And are you at Ginny Yurich? Is that your, I don't, I'm not a social media person.

[Ginny]

Yes, and this is the most embarrassing thing ever because I should have done it at the beginning. It's Yurich. So I should have said it at the very beginning and I didn't.

And then I was like, oh, he probably won't say it again. I'm just going to leave it.

[Neil]

Meanwhile, Leslie asked me and I said it so confidently because I heard about another podcast, which also and I probably should have.

[Ginny]

I'm just not. So my name is Ginny. It's short for Virginia.

And so my whole life, people call me Ginny and I just, I'm not going there. I don't care. Call me what you want.

I'm not every single time going to be like, no. I didn't say Ginny, did I? No, you didn't.

Okay, but I'm just used to, I'm used to people calling me the wrong thing.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Ginny]

And I don't really care.

[Neil]

Yeah. I had that with a girlfriend, Gillian, people would say.

[Ginny]

Oh, gosh. Yeah. So you just kind of, like, if you're the type of person that's used to getting called the wrong name.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Ginny]

You don't really correct. But then I think, well, this is way worse than yours. But you do a good job of saying pass, reach up.

You know my little app.

[Neil]

That's so funny that you know that.

[Ginny]

And I have always said, yes, I say Ginny. It rhymes with skinny. But that's kind of weird because I'm not.

And so it's just awkward. Or, well, here's the scoop. I was named after my grandma.

It's Virginia, but people would call me vagina. Oh, my gosh. We'll end with that.

I'm just kidding.

[Ginny]

And we'll end with that.

[Ginny]

But what's the little way to memorize your itch? Your itch? I just say like chicken, like a CH.

[Neil]

I'm like a mosquito on you.

[Ginny]

Your itch. It's your itch. Or, yeah, you're rich.

Follow your itch. You're rich.

[Neil]

Oh, follow your itch.

[Ginny]

Or, like, you're rich. You're rich. You're rich.

But, you know, it's like that's not my. You know, that's like my husband's name. So I'm like, I'm not.

I'm not about to come up with some cool thing.

[Neil]

Ginny, you're rich in spirit. You're rich of mind. You're rich in love.

It's been a pleasure having you on Three Books. Thank you so much.

[Ginny]

I love what you do. This has been such an honor and a total thrill. And I'll remember it for my whole life.

Thank you so much. So great chatting with you, Ginny.

[Neil]

Thank you so much.

[Ginny]

Thanks for having me.

[Neil]

Hey, everybody. It's just me. Just Neil again, hanging out in my basement with my pile full of wires on the brown couch.

And you might hear some, like, drilling and stuff in the background. We got a basement flood situation happening here. So now we have people in here helping us.

Like, how do you unflood a basement? Well, what you do is you look outside your house for, like, cracks. And then you try to fill all the cracks in.

That's as scientific as it gets. You look outside your house for cracks, and you try to fill in the cracks in. Which can be a loud and long process sometimes, and potentially expensive.

So that's where we are today. But we're not going to talk about that. We're going to talk about the conversation we had with Ginny Erich, which quotes jumped out to you.

Here's a few for me. Low-screen and no-screen kids are enduringly popular. So true.

So true. There is not much in life that is engaging to both a child and an adult, but we all like to be outside. Also true.

And the story of my life is that nothing really worked out, so I had to adjust. I love that there's a lot of resilience in Ginny. Did you hear that?

Like, I tried this, it didn't work. I tried this, it didn't work. If you go to her website, if you sign up for her email list, you can kind of see that in practice.

She's, like, trying things a lot. There's a trying things gene that she has, which is inspiring in and of itself. I took a lot away from this conversation.

Everything will be at threebooks.co slash chapter slash 148, which is where the show notes will live forever with every book that Ginny mentioned. Every conversation topic we had is all going to be up there, plus a lot more quotes, because I've got piles of quotes in front of me right now, and I can only say a few of them. But I can read you the top three books that we add to our top 1,000.

That's what I'm going to do right now. Ginny has added three books, including Balanced and Barefoot by Angela Hanscom. That would be, I think, number 569.

Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto, G-A-T-T-O. That's number 568. And Learning All the Time by John Holt, H-O-L-T, number 567, which is a really fascinating book.

By the way, I'm teaching my younger kids to read right now, and there is such an inspiring chapter in that book, Learning All the Time, about how to actually do that. And basically, the takeaway is, don't do anything. Just lie beside them.

Smile. Don't correct them. Don't dress them out.

Just listen and let them stumble. Let them trip over the words. Just let them.

Let them. You've heard that before from Mel and so on. So, Ginny, thank you so much for driving all the way up here from Michigan.

Thank you so much for coming on three books. I hope you all enjoyed listening. And now, if you made it past the three-second pause, I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club.

This is one of three clubs that we have for three bookers, including the Cover to Cover Club and the Secret Club, which I can't tell you more about. But you can listen to a voicemail to find out. That would be 1-833-READALOT, R-E-A-D-L-O-T.

And without further ado, let's go to the phones right now.

[Tabitha]

Hi, Neil. My name's Tabitha, also a Canadian. Calling this morning, I'm a new fan of three books.

I'm working on becoming a Cover to Cover Club member, but really wanted to share that I finished listening to the Oliver Burkeman podcast, and the quote from James Hollis that you shared about family was a wow moment for me. It was a quote that I sent to my teenage boys this morning, because I don't think it can encapsulate any better the way that a parent feels about their love for a child. So thank you so much for sharing that.

Have a wonderful day.

[Neil]

Thank you so much to Tabitha for calling 1-833-READALOT. And of course, when you say the quote about family from Oliver Berkman, I'm like, what was that quote? And so I went back into my notes that I used to prepare for Oliver Berkman.

I've got a 26-page 5,308-word document that I've saved to prep for him. And I have both the quote from 127 from James Hollis, which is, What usually has the strongest psychic effect on the child is the life which the parents have not lived. But I am actually thinking that the quote you're probably referring to is the one that he talks about family on page 132, which is, The modern family is one in which the divergent values of our separate souls are supported, valued, encouraged.

Diversity is not just tolerated, it is affirmed as the radical gift of relationship. Conflict is mediated with accepting love despite disagreement, and no one carries the assigned burden of becoming something other than what they are. I'm guessing that was it.

That's a big one. I should print that out and put it on the wall. That is a great kind of encapsulating quote.

Kind of reminds me of the Brené Brown, you know, manifesto. She has like that whole parent manifesto. Thank you so much, Tabitha.

And if you're listening to this right now, give me a call, 1-833-READALOT, R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T. You can type that into your phone and just, you know, comment on the show. Tell me something you like, something you don't like, a guest you'd like to have on, one of your formative books.

There's no such thing as a wrong way to call. I love hearing from you. And Tabitha, send me your address because you know whenever I play your voicemail or read your letter, I always love mailing you a book after.

Speaking of reading a letter, this chapter's letter, which I forgot to put at the beginning, but sometimes I put them at the beginning and sometimes I put them at the end. There's different places to put the letters of the chapter. Comes from Jason Langan from Haverford Middle School from Havertown, Pennsylvania.

Writes, Hey Neil, hope all is well. I just wanted to share with you a new virtual scrapbook of my students' favorite awesome things from your original list. We've shared this with our families and are now working on a rap using iambic pentameter to put these things into one song.

Awesome. Now, confession, I have been getting a letter from Jason Langan from Haverford Middle School for, I want to say, maybe 10 straight years. He emails me every year and he's got a scrapbook or he's got submissions from his students about awesome things.

He spirits the awesome thing philosophy into classwork. Like, Oh bubble wrap, you joy unwrapped a simple sheet but oh so strapped with tiny bubbles rose and rose a perfect joy that always grows. Or how about this one?

This one comes from Cameron Diaz. The fries at the bottom of the bag. Deep in the bag after your food, the last golden fry starts to brighten your mood.

Drenched in salt and covered with care, you eat that last fry and give it a happy stare. Jason, I love you. Thanks for the letter.

Drop me a note so I can send you a book. All right. And now it is time for the word of the chapter.

And for this chapter's word, let's go back to Ginny.

[Ginny]

I would define homeschooling as parent-directed education.

[Neil]

Kind of only made sense to go with homeschooling. I mean, it is the name of her book, which wasn't it so cute as she laughed at that. She's like, it's just called homeschooling.

It's just homeschooling. But you might not know, as I did not, that homeschooling, while that has appeared as a compound word formed by the words home and school since the 1850s, the actual verb homeschooling, that's new. That didn't start until the 1980s.

It's kind of maybe one of those things where you don't need it till there isn't it in a way. Like, of course, homeschooling makes sense objectively when almost all schooling is at home, but as it goes the other way and almost all schooling is in schools, well, then homeschooling becomes its own verb and stands out. Well, anyway, maybe that's the point of it.

I don't know. I don't know. Ginny Yurich, it was a slice in a tree and a pleasure to have you up here in Toronto for our second outdoor chapter in a row, like Nikisha and Ginny back to back outdoors on the sidewalk.

I don't know. I just love getting outside. 1,000 hours outside is, I think, a noble direction for us all.

Thank you so much to all of you for listening. Until next time, remember that 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.

Listen to the chapter here!

Chapter 147: Nickisha the Dog Walker on dangerous drivers and dog doo diligence

Listen to the chapter here!

Nickisha:

I gotta go pick up another dog.

Neil:

How many dogs you got?

Nickisha:

Uh, five and I'm gonna pick up a sixth one.

Neil:

So you're walking five dogs now. What's your max? How many dogs can you walk at once?

Nickisha:

I've walked like eight.

Neil:

Eight! Can I ask how much people pay per dog?

Nickisha:

Um, so right now I charge twenty-two.

Neil:

Twenty-two, what, per dog? Per what?

Nickisha:

It's for an hour.

Neil:

Oh, you walk them for an hour. That's actually a good deal.

Nickisha:

By the time I pick up the dogs, it's about an hour.

Neil:

And you have to drop, it might even be longer. You have to be very thoughtful about your route. I notice 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:

Oh, okay, you like hanging out with me.

Nickisha:

Well, no, that's not it. I'm having a conversation with you, so.

Neil:

Okay, let's be one thing clear. You don't actually like me.

Nickisha:

You're a lovely person.

Neil:

Oh, thank you. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Nickisha, the dog walker.

And is it N-I-C-K-I-S-H-A?

Nickisha:

N for November, yes.

Neil:

Okay, and you prefer Nick or Nickisha?

Nickisha:

Either or works.

Neil:

Either or worse?

Nickisha:

No, either or works.

Neil:

Oh, okay, okay, okay.

Nickisha:

Nick or Nickisha. I don't know, I just never really...

Neil:

When you grew up, did people call you Nickisha or Nick? 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.

Nickisha:

I have a last name, but Nickisha is my full first name.

Neil:

Okay, so Nickisha the dog walker, we're okay with that?

Nickisha:

Yeah.

Neil:

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. Also a bright blue hoodie.

[Neil]

Yeah, I love the bright blue, bright blue double feature.

[Nickisha]

Light blue sneakers.

[Neil]

What kind? Dog walker?

[Nickisha]

These are Asics.

[Neil]

Okay, Asics dog walker approved. You probably walk more miles, more kilometers than anybody in the whole city.

[Nickisha]

I walk about 20 kilometers a day.

[Neil]

20K a day. Seven days a week?

[Nickisha]

Not seven days a week.

[Neil]

Five days a week?

[Nickisha]

Yeah.

[Neil]

So 100 kilometers a week you're walking?

Yes. Okay, so just to put that in perspective, Toronto to Montreal is, you know, what, 500 kilometers? So every month you're walking from Toronto to Montreal.

That's crazy.

[Nickisha]

Pretty much.

[Neil]

That's far.

That's like a one-hour flight. Yeah, you're like walking to New York City.

[Nickisha]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Yeah, that's crazy. That's far. And so you must also have to take care of your body, like your legs, you're stretching your calves.

[Nickisha]

I just started doing Pilates.

[Neil]

Pilates. Okay, okay, we're going to talk about Pilates later.

But now we haven't got to your outerwear, your leashes, your leash setup here, and your hair and your sunglasses. Because you got very interesting, cool hair.

[Nickisha]

Well, it's getting redyed tomorrow.

[Neil]

Okay, so it's blonde, would you say? Or green?

[Nickisha]

I'm a fake blonde.

[Neil]

Fake blonde?

[Nickisha]

You know what?

[Neil]

I love the blonde.

[Nickisha]

I do like the roots coming in, but I also like when I get a fresh color.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Nickisha]

And I don't know.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Nickisha]

I look different.

[Neil]

Right, right. Now, what I'm most curious about on your persona, although thanks for sharing about your thick shades, are those like Ray-Bans?

[Nickisha]

No, they're some $20 sunglasses I got off Amazon like two years ago.

[Neil]

Uh-huh. So when you're walking 100 kilometers a week, you got to take care of your eyes.

[Nickisha]

Yes, my eyes are super sensitive.

[Neil]

Yeah, of course. Everybody's are, but we just don't take care of them.

[Nickisha]

I wear contact lenses, and I mean, I'm usually wearing glasses.

[Neil]

Yeah, and they're big, chunky sunglasses. They're like three inches per lens across.

[Nickisha]

Have to cover my face and my eyes.

[Neil]

Uh-huh, uh-huh. But what I'm most curious about, like I was saying, is your rig. So basically, you've got like a fanny pack strapped sideways diagonal from your right shoulder, and you're holding it on your left hip.

It's got a whole complicated series of zippers. Inside the middle fat zipper, it's unopened. You've got a chain rig with like 20 different keys.

Like you're holding like, you know, the set of keys you'd see on like the superintendent of this Empire State Building.

[Nickisha]

Yes.

[Neil]

You know what I mean?

You are holding like, and they're all color-coded. You don't put people's addresses on them, though, that's good.

[Nickisha]

No, it's just a thing.

[Neil]

Because if you drop it, they would know what house to go to to steal stuff. Yeah, which way are you going? Oh, past this traffic?

[Nickisha]

I know, that's why I stopped here.

[Neil]

Okay, well, just tell us the name of the five dogs in the five breeds.

[Nickisha]

Okay, so there's Milo. He's a Labrador. And then there is Brooke, who's a Border Collie.

[Neil]

How should I say hi to these dogs? Like, what do they want? Do they want hand up, hand down, scratch their face? Nothing?

[Nickisha]

Some of them are sensitive, so.

[Neil]

Okay, so don't touch the dog.

[Nickisha]

There's Opie.

[Neil]

Border Collie.

[Nickisha]

A Portuguese Water Dog.

[Neil]

Okay, Portuguese Water Dog, that's like a big black dog. That's like a tall one.

[Nickisha]

Sylvester, he's a Havanese.

[Neil]

Sylvester's a Havanese.

[Nickisha]

And Whistler. Whistler is an Aussie Doodle.

[Neil]

Aussie Doodle.

[Nickisha]

So, Australian Shepherd and Poodle mix.

[Neil]

I'm surprised you only have a 20% doodle ratio here. When I walk around, it's like 75% doodles.

[Nickisha]

I do have days where I have a few doodles.

[Neil]

And you got four big dogs and one small dog.

[Nickisha]

I'm getting a second small dog.

[Neil]

Okay, great.

[Nickisha]

Great.

[Neil]

Well, you told me one book already. The Five People You Meet in Heaven.

[Nickisha]

The other one is, oh my gosh. Hayden Caulfield. Catcher in the Rye.

Catcher in the Rye.

[Neil]

J.D. Salinger.

[Nickisha]

Love Catcher in the Rye. I've read it like five, six times.

[Neil]

Can you come closer to the microphone?

[Nickisha]

Yes.

[Neil]

Oh my gosh, great nail polish, by the way. Epic.

[Nickisha]

Needs to be done. Getting done today.

[Neil]

Oh, you don't gotta change your look. You look great.

[Nickisha]

Yes, so Catcher in the Rye. And oh, I also love The Kite Runner.

[Neil]

Oh, Khaled Hosseini.

Oh, wow.

[Nickisha]

I love reading. Yeah.

But I haven't been able to read a book in a long time, just because I think I have attention issues.

[Neil]

Yeah, me too. I was recently diagnosed with ADHD.

[Nickisha]

But I used to read like three or four books.

[Neil]

Not diagnosed. I was recently, it was illuminated to me that I have it. Because my son has and I clearly have it when I read the books.

[Nickisha]

I used to read like three or four books a week. I was an avid, avid reader. Not in the clinic, but I love reading.

[Neil]

So when you grew up in Jamaica, which city?

[Nickisha]

Kingston.

[Neil]

Kingston, capital. What are we talking, 70s, 80s, 90s?

[Nickisha]

80s.

[Neil]

80s. So you grew up in the capital city, Kingston, Jamaica, in the 80s. And you grew up reading.

[Nickisha]

Pretty much.

[Neil]

Was the school system, sorry to ask, I feel like Jamaica is like an English colony, right?

[Nickisha]

It's on the British system, yeah.

[Neil]

Right, so you were doing like British school?

[Nickisha]

I guess so.

[Neil]

And so of those three books that you just mentioned, The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, and The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. I think it's H-O-S-S-E-I-N-I or something. He's a doctor in like San Francisco, I think.

I think he's in Afghan diaspora, right? Because all his books take place in Afghanistan. I've read the other book as well.

So was J.D. Salinger Catcher in the Rye, was that the first one?

[Nickisha]

Yes. I read that book in high school, in Jamaica.

[Neil]

Why don't I pause it, we walk by the construction, then I'll catch you on the other side.

[Nickisha]

I met a dog just now.

[Neil]

We'll wait for you. Okay, I'll wait right here. No rush.

Okay, see you in a minute. I'm on like a side street in downtown Toronto. Toronto is one of these cities that's really unusual where there's a really vibrant, healthy downtown core that's busy morning, noon, night and overnight.

And it's not scary and it's totally safe. And there are throngs of people from tourists going to see Broadway, well, you know, Canadian Broadway shows, The Lion King or whatever, to couples who live in condos downtown that are like 80 stories tall, like going out on like a date night to like a Furkin for like beers and wings and maybe watching a Jays game or a Leafs game or a Raptors game or a Marlies game. Or an AFC Toronto game.

Shout out to the new Toronto girls soccer team coming in. And, you know, it's got an active, vibrant subway system and the streetcar system. And there's the CN towers there and the Skydome is there.

And, you know, Air Canada Center is there. Like that's where Taylor Swift played six nights in a row last year, right? Three nights, one week, three nights the other week.

The city was so grateful, gave her a key to the city. And, you know, she infused something like $300 million in the downtown core. So it's got this active, vibrant downtown core.

And it's surrounded by houses. Like that's what's unusual. So you can actually live in a house, a townhouse, a row house, you know, a mixed-use house, a three-unit house, a basement apartment of a house, an attic of a house with five guys from your frat at University of Toronto or like, you know, the love of your life after college or like, you know, your family with like a kid or like as an older couple, like, you know, downsizing.

Like every functional kind of family, yeah, you could live in a house here. And affordability has skyrocketed severely in the last 20 years. Toronto and Canada being like this big kind of, I think, a center point of global migration and especially climate migration, especially political stability migration.

There's tons of Americans who live on my streets. Like I have a friend that's from Seattle. My neighbors across the street are both biologists from the West Coast who came here to like work at the university and never left.

And so now their kids are Canadian. And, you know, we also have exodus from here. Like Jordan Peterson used to live around here.

And he just announced that he's moved to the U.S. So there certainly is travel both ways. But we got lots of people here. Like the guy that just fixed my kid's bike is from Cuba.

Nickisha, who we're talking to today, you know, she's from Jamaica. There's such a great mix everywhere. I just met this Russian guy.

I showed him Nick Sweetman's wall. I was like, what do you think of the wall? He's like, I prefer brutalist concrete.

So, you know, we got everybody here, you know, as you heard in our chapter with Lewis Mallard. And so it's kind of cool because you've got like the things that come with the neighborhood, right? Nickisha, you've got like dog walkers and paper boys and, you know, you've got like a little neighborhood ice rinks in the winter that everyone comes together and skates on and you've got like a corn roast and you've got like the, you know, the big barbecue and there's alley parties like in the alleys and there's graffiti going up everywhere and you've got this vibrancy.

And so to celebrate the vibrancy, I thought, hey, you and I talk a lot. How long have you been doing this?

[Nickisha]

Four years on my own.

[Neil]

Four years on your, oh, you broke away from the giant dog walking conglomerate.

[Nickisha]

I knew I wanted to branch out on my own. And, well, I was gifted eight dogs.

[Neil]

Gifted eight dogs?

[Nickisha]

Yeah, another dog walker decided she was going to do something else and gave me eight dogs.

[Neil]

Okay.

[Nickisha]

So that helped.

[Neil]

It's a pretty good book to start with.

[Nickisha]

Yeah, yeah.

[Neil]

You're not starting from scratch.

[Nickisha]

And I am quite visible as, you know, in the neighborhood, so people see me.

[Neil]

What do you mean quite visible? Are you talking about the blonde?

[Nickisha]

Oh, no, no, but people see me all the time. Like, I'm outside all the time.

[Neil]

Okay, okay. Everybody knows everybody if you're outside a lot, you know?

[Nickisha]

So, yeah, I like being outside. I hate it in the cold. But I like being outside, so.

[Neil]

Okay, we're walking through an alley right now. There's boarded up graffiti on one side. On the other side, there's a new condo going in.

This has happened a lot. So they tore down probably like a four-story condo and now they're building like an eight-story condo. So there's a lot of this kind of stuff, like increase the density, which is great.

And then in these laneways, you know, as you're seeing, Nickisha, there's a lot of laneway houses going in now. So they're taking these lanes and someone's taking an old garage that they've had for 100 years or 150 years. They're paying 300 grand or 500 grand or maybe 700 grand.

And then they have like something, you know, they have a laneway house that they can then rent for three grand a month or whatever, right? Am I right?

[Nickisha]

That is correct.

[Neil]

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, it's not affordable housing, which of course is what the city wants. I'm going to go whichever way you're going because we're having a conversation on three books right now!

How are you, brother? Good, you? Good, man.

Just walked by a construction guy, big orange vest, like yellow crisscross. He's got like orange shades on, a white hat, and he's building this condo here. Sometimes they build condos.

Sometimes they build like skyscrapers.

[Nickisha]

Yes.

[Neil]

You know, I think it's like condos, yeah, skyscrapers, no. Do you kind of, people don't like living under looming, ominous, dark towers from the, you know, from like, you know, Lord of the Rings. You know what I mean?

Like, it's like intimidating. You get tons of dead birds. You get dog shit fucking everywhere.

Do you pick up your dog poo? Not everyone does.

[Nickisha]

I do.

[Neil]

I mean, what would you do? What would you guys do? Your dog poos, you don't have a bag.

What's the game? Nikesha's game is going back afterwards, right? So, you're hitting the button here on the crosswalk.

We're on Lansdowne Avenue. We're, you know, kind of in a grittier part. Here comes a big bus here.

Careful. Like, the buses smoke you, you're gone. Like, that's what I always tell my kids.

Like, you don't cross the street until the bus stops. Because if the bus doesn't stop, you know, it could bonk you. So, if you're making $22 an hour per dog now, and you've just got a, you've just added what?

A seventh dog here? One, two, three, four, five, six. And is that your max today?

[Nickisha]

For this walk, yeah.

[Neil]

Because some people want two walks a week, and some people want three walks a week, and some people want two walks a day.

[Nickisha]

True, like Sylvester. He's a Havanese.

[Neil]

And how would you describe the personality or size or look of that dog?

[Nickisha]

He's sweet. He loves to eat. He's very, very food motivated.

He just turned 14, I believe. And he's a calm dog.

[Neil]

And he's like brown curls.

[Nickisha]

Right, he's a caramel wavy.

[Neil]

Wavy caramel. And what size would you say he is?

[Nickisha]

He's a small dog. He's a small dog. So, he's probably about 15 pounds.

[Neil]

15 pounds. So, you measure dogs in weight, right?

[Nickisha]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Like, a small, like a Chihuahua is probably like three pounds. You don't walk in a Chihuahua size.

[Nickisha]

I do not have any Chihuauas.

[Neil]

Any other species of dog that you walk that we haven't mentioned yet, so I can pass it on to our dog-loving listeners?

[Nickisha]

I walk a few doodles.

[Neil]

Doodle, yeah, like I said, the doodle percentage is high.

[Nickisha]

I walk, so this may be a rare breed. It's called a Norwegian Buhund.

[Neil]

How do you spell that?

[Nickisha]

B-U-H-U-N-D. Picture sort of a husky, but smaller. That's kind of, she looks actually kind of like a fox.

But she has fur, like a husky, and she loves being outside in the cold. What other breed? Australian Shepherds.

I take photos of the dogs, so I'll be doing that now.

[Neil]

Really?

[Nickisha]

Yeah.

[Neil]

You take photos for the owners?

[Nickisha]

Yeah.

[Neil]

What, they get a free picture every dog walk?

[Nickisha]

Some dogs, some owners don't really care whether they get a photo or not. It's called Dale's Tales.

[Neil]

It's called what?

[Nickisha]

Dale's Tales.

[Neil]

D-A-L-E-S-T-A-L-E-S?

[Nickisha]

That was an option.

[Neil]

T-A-I-L-S, of course that makes a lot more sense.

[Nickisha]

Both make sense, I think.

[Neil]

At Dale's Tails.

[Nickisha]

Oh, I only have 266 followers.

[Neil]

No, no, no, I would not say only.

[Nickisha]

I have 266 followers.

[Neil]

What I would have thought is if you have, you know, say 30 dogs on the week, you have 30 followers. I thought what you were telling me was you post them on Instagram for the people to see them. Instead of having to send 10 different texts every which way.

[Nickisha]

Oh, yeah, I do both.

[Neil]

A carousel.

[Nickisha]

Sometimes I forget to post on Instagram. I'm tired. So sometimes I'm just like.

[Neil]

266 followers is a lot. And by the way, my old boss, Dave Cheesewright, who was a guest on the show Chapter 96. Dave, the CEO.

And he's a three booker as well. Hi, Dave. He, he was the CEO of Walmart.

He's the CEO of Walmart, Nickisha. And you know how many followers he had on Instagram?

[Nickisha]

Two?

[Neil]

Like 12. And then his kids would make fun of him. They'd say, Dad, you only got four likes.

Or you only got eight likes. And you know what he'd say? I got 33 to 66% likes.

How many percentage did you get? And they'd say, oh, I got like 5%. He's like, yeah, you got a lot, a lot more friends.

But you know, it's the level of interaction.

[Nickisha]

I once had a video that had over 118,000 views. I'm still shocked as to why.

[Neil]

Did you pin? I hope you pinned it.

[Nickisha]

Oh, no.

[Neil]

You should pin that one at the top left. Some people go, they're like, oh, yeah. Go pin it now.

That one we send our listeners to at Dale's Tales.

[Nickisha]

It's like two years old. I've got to go through.

[Neil]

Well, just pin it. Pin it. So now what are you doing?

You're also simultaneously taking out like one, two, three, four, five, six dog treats. You use the treats to, uh.

[Nickisha]

To get them. Okay, so I can take one of them.

[Neil]

Oh, nice. You want me to help you? You want me to hold the leashes?

[Nickisha]

Here. Oh, no, it's okay.

[Neil]

I can hold them. I will say if a dog were to run away from me, I have no idea what to do.

[Nickisha]

Don't chase them.

[Neil]

Oh, really?

[Nickisha]

Don't chase them.

[Neil]

Oh, really?

[Nickisha]

When you start chasing them, they think it's a joke. So don't, um.

You just stay where you are.

[Neil]

Nickisha's now squatting here in this park. It's like wet, muddy ground. Snow.

There's still like little chiseled corners of snow here and there. But for the most part, it's like a lot of dead leaves. The trees are not blooming.

It looks like a maple tree at the corner here. It looks like it has its first day of like fresh buds. You can sort of see little white flowers with like wreaths of thick maroon little sprouts, which you know each of those sprouts is going to be a leaf, which is pretty cool.

So we had like one warm day and then a cold day. And spring's like that, right?

[Nickisha]

Spring's like that.

[Neil]

Up and down.

[Nickisha]

Which is, uh, not a fan of spring.

[Neil]

Well, you don't like winter.

[Nickisha]

I don't. The only season I like is summer.

[Neil]

But you're outside every day.

[Nickisha]

I know.

[Neil]

So how do you get over that mentally?

[Nickisha]

Oh, you know, I, um, I'm actually miserable most days.

[Neil]

No. It's true. Well, that's why we got to get you into the audiobooks.

Well, that's before I hit the recorder while we were talking about that.

[Nickisha]

What?

[Neil]

You know, downloading Libro FM, which is the app I use. And we talked about reading Born a Crime by Trevor Noah because you and I were both decrying some of the, you know, perceived racism that's happening right now with, you know, deporting Venezuelans and deporting Ukrainians and sort of causing this, like, tremendous emotional jilting for all of us. Like, we're all immigrants here.

You know, what if they... My mom had this happen. She was growing up in Nairobi, born in 1950.

And when she's 16, 17, 18 years old, Idi Amin, you know, in Uganda, says to all the Indian people, like, get out, get out of here. Like, you got to leave the country. So all the people that are Indian in, like, you know, Kenya and in, you know, Tanzania, they...

Which is how my mom says those words, by the way.

[Nickisha]

I always thought it was Tanzania.

[Neil]

Well, of course. That's how everyone says it. But just my mom says Kenya and Tanzania.

So I don't know. I kind of go with her pronunciation. Tomato, tomato.

[Nickisha]

Am I saying it wrong?

[Neil]

Tomato, tomato, tomato, tomato. Red Wing Blackbird calling there.

So, yeah. So, you know, we're already... Like, it kind of creates that stress and tension.

So then we got to talk about Trevor Noah's wonderful book, Born a Crime. And then we were talking about downloading the Libro FM app. And then we discovered that you were a big book lover.

And then I flicked it. I flicked on the mic just to see if you'd hang out. And you've been into this, which is fun.

[Nickisha]

Well, it's been an interesting Friday. This was not on my...

[Neil]

Bingo card? On your bingo card? Well, plus, you haven't even told me, you know, when you were in high school in Kingston, Jamaica, and you were assigned the book The Catcher in the Rye, you haven't told me about that experience yet.

[Nickisha]

Because I don't know if I remember the experience. I just remember thinking, this is a great book. And I read it there.

And I think I read it when... Because I finished high school here. And I think I read it again here in high school.

You got assigned twice. And I've read it just on my own because it's a great book.

[Neil]

It's a great book.

[Nickisha]

It really is.

[Neil]

Well, it's a great book.

The vivid writing of that book is, like, amazing. You know, I don't know if you know there's a store on Queen Street called 18 Waits. The number 18 and the word W-A-I-T-S.

It's a men's clothing store. And I buy, like, shirts there to, like, give speeches in and stuff. And he's amazing.

And the guy who runs it, his name is Dan Torchman. I call him Dan the Tailor. He's a sixth-generation tailor.

His dad's a hatter from Montreal. And he wears a big hat. He's got long hair.

And he's lost his voice from removing his larynx. So he speaks with his fingers on his throat. And he's like, time it like this.

And he's a wonderful guy. And I love him dearly. And we go see Flaming Lips concerts together.

One of his three most formative books, Akisha, was The Catcher in the Rye. Pretty sure. Yeah.

And he loved the book The Americans, too, that photo book of, like, that time of the U.S. Do you know that book?

[Nickisha]

No.

[Neil]

Oh, I should get it.

I would love to get you a copy of that. Yeah. And then what about when you read Five People You Meet in Heaven? How old were you then? Well, what did you read next?

Was it that one or was it the one before?

[Nickisha]

I think I read Five People You Meet. Wait, what was the one before? Well, you said— I've read a couple of his books.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Nickisha]

But I also feel like I read— Tuesdays with Maury. Tuesdays with Maury. So I think I read Tuesdays with Maury first because I feel like I heard about him from Oprah.

[Neil]

Of course. Of course. Everybody—hey, Oprah makes or breaks it, you know?

[Nickisha]

Yeah. So I think—so I think I actually read Tuesdays with Maury first, which is also a great book.

[Neil]

Were you in Canada or Jamaica?

[Nickisha]

I'm pretty sure it was here.

[Neil]

Because that book was definitely worldwide.

[Nickisha]

Yeah.

[Neil]

That was like—what year was that? Like, how old? Like, I feel like I read that, like, 1990, maybe?

1995? Is that right? Or 2000?

I don't know. It's old anyway.

[Nickisha]

It would have been after 1996.

[Neil]

I studied it. I studied it in my fourth-year commerce class, 2002 Leadership. We had to read it.

So it was at least 2002.

[Nickisha]

I think it was in the 2000s for sure.

[Neil]

Yeah. So you were in your 20s?

[Nickisha]

Yes.

[Neil]

Right.

[Nickisha]

I was in my early 20s then.

[Neil]

What were you doing?

[Nickisha]

I worked for a travel company.

[Neil]

Oh, cool.

[Nickisha]

So I worked in travel until 2019.

[Neil]

Oh.

[Nickisha]

Mostly on, but I had, like, maybe two years off. So I was actually working at a travel company, Flight Center.

[Neil]

Like the ones in the mall?

[Nickisha]

There is one down at King's, but I don't know.

[Neil]

Yeah, people walk by. It says on, like, a little sidewalk sign, you know, Go to Punta Cana for $699 this weekend.

[Nickisha]

I don't think they had that sign there.

[Neil]

No.

[Nickisha]

Because they were more corporate traveler in the sense of they helped with corporate company bookings. But I worked there from 2019, and I quit in 2021, middle of the pandemic, to do this.

[Neil]

Oh, you became a dog walker in the pandemic.

[Nickisha]

Well, full time.

[Neil]

Well, everyone needed a dog walker.

[Nickisha]

It's true.

[Neil]

Because everybody had this crisis of life happening. Heading up and down. Yeah.

I think that's a girl learning how to drive. I can see her, like, dad, and the girl driving looks like she's, like, she looks like she's 14, so she's probably 16.

[Nickisha]

Yeah, yeah.

[Neil]

You know? It's shocking when you see someone really young driving a car sometimes. Even though everyone did it.

What's the driving age in Jamaica?

[Nickisha]

I don't know. Because I left before.

[Neil]

Oh, you left before 16?

[Nickisha]

Yeah, I left when I was 16.

[Neil]

What was the context of you leaving?

[Nickisha]

My mom was here.

[Neil]

So when you grew up, you grew up with your dad?

[Nickisha]

No. I know. No.

I grew up with my mom until she moved here. And so we were separated for about six years.

[Neil]

And then you lived with your dad?

[Nickisha]

No.

[Neil]

Oh. Who'd you live with? Oh, so when you were 10, you started living alone.

[Nickisha]

I know. I've been self-sufficient since I was 10, no.

[Neil]

You've been self-sufficient?

[Nickisha]

No, no. No.

[Neil]

I didn't mean living on the streets. I didn't mean living alone. I meant you have been independent of mother or father figures from age 10 to age 16.

[Nickisha]

Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, I do. There were.

[Neil]

Older aunts or uncles or cousins or, yeah. Would you live in a house with like 20 people or something?

[Nickisha]

No. That's kind of crazy.

[Neil]

Nickisha is bending over and picking up the dog poo.

[Nickisha]

See, I'm doing it.

[Neil]

Yeah, of course. You're a dog walker. Word would get around pretty fast.

If you're like, you know who's leaving all the dog turds around? The lady with seven dogs. We'll get her.

That truck was freaking wailing down the road. So I'm driving my bike the wrong way on a road. But it's a tiny residential road.

You know, there's like houses on the side. Some of the houses are like, you can see six doorbells on the outside. So like six apartments are inside.

Some of them you see three mailboxes. There's little street signs here saying, I support my neighbors in tents. There's little street signs here saying, stop the 413.

Less highways, more green space. There's little signs here saying Pro Safe Supply Movement, which of course we are too. Chapter 49 of this podcast, we talked to Dr. Andrea Serrata, who's a leader of the Pro Safe Supply Movement. And when I met her at the Top 40 Under 40 in Canada, that's where I met her. She said, what do you do? I said, I'm a writer.

I said, what do you do? She said, I give drugs to drugs users.

[Nickisha]

She said that?

[Neil]

Yeah, she said that. And she laughed. And she has dark tattoos and dark glasses.

She looked at me like, is this guy going to get that? And I was like, what? And then we had a podcast at the Sherbrooke Health Clinic, and I really support her work.

Basically, if you read the book Chasing the Screen by Johan Hari, who we also had on the show, basically the thesis is just so freaking clear, the research is so freaking clear, that the way to get someone off heroin, as I understand it, is to give them methadone, and then to continue to monitor the quality of the supply, and then change the dosage down.

[Nickisha]

That's why they have those clinics.

[Neil]

That's why they have those clinics, because they actually legitimately help people and work. The thing that kills is actually the tainted nature of the street stuff. So if you give people clean needles and a clean place, then they won't die, and you'll help them live a better life.

It costs a bit more money. You actually got to pay people to work there and stuff, but everyone likes it. And I'll tell you straight up, Nikesha, this is maybe going to get edited later.

I'll have to ask Leslie if she's okay with it. She went to drop one of her kids at school. He's like three years old, my kid.

So she's driving a three-year-old down an alley to park at this little school. He goes to this little tiny Montessori school, and my older three kids all go to public school. So we are supporters of the public school system, but below age three, there's no public school available.

Kindergarten doesn't start yet. So anyway, and we love the Montessori system, so that's great. So she goes down the alley, and guess what she sees?

A woman, legit, right makes eye contact with Leslie, eye contact, right as she's shooting up, her eyes go back into her head, and she falls down backwards, and Leslie's like driving past her, dropping my kid off to school, like at like, you know, eight in the morning, on like a Tuesday. So that's what you get when you close the needle places. You know what I mean?

So I love these signs that we're seeing on people's houses.

[Nickisha]

It lacks compassion, you know, and it's sad.

[Neil]

And it also lacks following like the science, like when you rip out bike lanes, you say, oh, well, we need that space for the cars. No, you get more cars. Like all the people on bikes are not driving.

So it's like helping take way more cars off the road, and it helps the environment, and it helps traffic, and it helps the air quality, and it helps the congestion. And when you go to Amsterdam or wherever these other countries are, hey, we were just in Mexico City, and you know what? There's bike lanes on every street there.

Every street has bike lanes, separated bike lanes on almost all of them, not always separated, but often there's like a metal pole.

[Nickisha]

Right. So I've been to Amsterdam, and it's incredible. And it was in Munich that I saw like the separation of the bike lanes from the actual street. And I'm like, Toronto should do this.

[Neil]

Well, we're starting to do elevated ones in some places. Like on College Street, they got these new, like the bike lane's like six inches higher than the road. So if you were to hit it, it's like you're hitting a curb, like you're tire punching a curb.

So you can still run up on the bike lane if you have to deliver a package, which is unfortunate because Amazon delivery guys, if you're listening to this, stop doing that, please. But, you know, it's at least better than just like, you know, a tiny painted line of like, you know, 18 inches wide or something, right?

[Nickisha]

Yeah. I mean, I just don't see why we can't coexist. And the, I think also one of the issues is with the new, like they're going to tear up the bike lanes, is them putting a clause in that if somebody dies, they can't be sued.

So they are very well aware.

[Neil]

Yeah. This is the Doug Ford government. That's the provincial government.

Ontario has put a clause in the contract saying when we take the bike lanes out, if someone like dies, they can't sue us. They know right away how much unsafer it is, but they put that clause in the contract.

[Nickisha]

They did. And says a lot about them.

[Neil]

What does it say about them, Nickisha?

[Nickisha]

You know, they're intolerant. They don't want anything good for the climate. So I'm not a fan.

I am not a fan.

[Neil]

See, this guy did it right. He slowed down. He sees me coming.

I go on the sidewalk. Then I wave him down. He nods at me.

He waves at me. That's community.

[Nickisha]

You should have seen what happened to me a few weeks ago when we had all that snow.

[Neil]

What happened?

[Nickisha]

This guy almost ran me over. I was walking in the middle of the street because there's so much snow. It's difficult to walk.

[Neil]

The sidewalks are interversible. And you're walking 100 km a week.

[Nickisha]

It's difficult to walk the dog. So it was at night. It was around 7.

It wasn't daylight saving yet. And I had a dog who stopped to poop right in the middle of the street. So I stopped to pick up the poop.

And I can see him coming.

[Neil]

Who's him? What's the car?

[Nickisha]

It was like a Toyota.

[Neil]

How far away is he from you?

[Nickisha]

He wasn't far.

[Neil]

Like 30 feet, 40 feet, 100 feet? As far as that construction guy is?

[Nickisha]

No, he was closer.

[Neil]

That construction guy is like 400 feet away.

[Nickisha]

So he was probably 100 feet away from me. And I'm picking up the poop. And he sped up.

[Neil]

No.

[Nickisha]

He did. Are you kidding me? And then he stopped the brake just as to where I was.

He wasn't far at all. How far was he from you? He was probably 100 feet away.

[Neil]

No, but when he hit the stop...

[Nickisha]

Then he was right. We were face to face.

[Neil]

I'm standing at probably what? Like two feet from you? One foot from you?

And there's a yellow lab in between us?

[Nickisha]

We were pretty much that close. He went down the window. And he went like this with his hand.

[Neil]

What? He just did like this. What is this hand?

What are you doing? You're putting your palm up. You're doing it in front of you.

You got your head backwards. And you're putting your palm sideways.

[Nickisha]

So he did like this.

[Neil]

Like you can walk? Like you can go?

[Nickisha]

No.

[Neil]

What does that mean?

[Nickisha]

It's more like, what are you doing? Like, why are you in the middle of the road? And I'm like, well, I'm just picking up the...

[Neil]

Dog poop?

[Nickisha]

The dog poop. And I'm like, what are you doing?

And then I started getting angry because I'm like, he sped up. And he's like, no, I didn't. I'm like, yes, you did.

And I took a photo of him. And once I took the photo, he started apologizing.

[Neil]

What did he say after you took the photo?

[Nickisha]

He was like, no, that's not what I was doing. That's not what I was doing. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. I'm like, that's what you did.

[Neil]

So what did you do with the photo?

[Nickisha]

I didn't do anything with it.

[Neil]

Did you want to do anything with it? Did you want to post it on Dale's Tales?

[Nickisha]

No, I'm not going to do that.

[Neil]

You know what you should do? You post it. You blur the license plate because you're a nice person.

[Nickisha]

I didn't have the license plate. I just have his face.

[Neil]

Oh, well, yeah, you don't want to post that.

[Nickisha]

Yeah, I just have his face.

[Neil]

You don't want to get into like vigilante. It's hard to get into like vigilante territory.

[Nickisha]

It's a tough line, you know? I had to think about it because I was going to post about it on my Facebook page. But I didn't.

I was just like, you know what? It is what it is. Perhaps.

[Neil]

So you posted on the Facebook page, the neighborhood Facebook page, the community Facebook page. Then what? You know, like the local 500 people, they see that guy, then they could.

Yeah, that's an interesting idea because you know what? There was an Amazon delivery truck that was wailing down the street last year right in front of my house. And guess what?

Me, another guy and another guy saw him. He comes up on the curb. OK, like six houses south south of me.

And he completely smashes into a 50 year old cherry tree that comes up six feet and splinters into three branches. And he completely knocks off one branch. I see the guy.

I start running there. Somebody else sees him. There's another dog walker.

There's a lady that lives in the house. She's also from Jamaica, by the way. But wait, guess what he does?

He grabs the branch of the tree, puts it. Yeah, there's another car. Look at this truck.

He's like coming down, contracting ink. Dude, just give me a minute here. I'm walking off the road here.

Thank you. Yeah, the problem with living downtown is you could get run over anytime. No, but wait, but wait.

He grabs the branch. It's still hanging off. It's still hanging off.

So he runs out to check out what's happening. The branch is still on the roof of his truck. He just drives off.

We see him go. There's like a little park at like another couple hundred feet away. So he goes there.

He stops the car. He guns around the side. He grabs a branch.

He throws in the park and he takes off. He does not deliver the package. But she said it's an app.

I know it's I'm getting like an Amazon delivery. But there's no way to track the guy because Amazon, you know, they have all freelancers. They don't they don't know.

It's not like a UPS truck where it's like driver number 2786. It's not like that with Amazon. So as a result, the lady gets the city to come because it's a city tree.

Trees planted within the first 10 feet of your property in the city of Toronto are owned by the city, planted by the city and changed by the city because they are managing the ecology, you know. And so, you know, a whole street of Norway maples, if they all die out or have a virus, they might change it to birch trees like they do that stuff. So they come and check it out.

They send an arborist from the city to check out the cherry tree. You know what they say? It's dead.

He killed the tree.

[Nickisha]

He killed the tree.

[Neil]

Well, he killed it. And then this year, I'll tell you what happened because it was a year ago. That tree ain't dead yet, baby.

There's stuff coming out of there.

[Nickisha]

I need to know what number.

[Neil]

I'm going to show you. I'm going to show you. Are you getting another dog here?

[Nickisha]

No, I'm dropping off.

[Neil]

OK, go ahead. OK, go ahead. Drop off.

How do you drop off a dog? What are the steps of that? Three steps.

OK, well, I'm going to articulate your steps so I can learn. $22 an hour per dog. Eight dogs today.

That's great. And then you have to do an afternoon walk, too. It's still hard to get by on that, though.

Like when you were working for the company, what cut do they take?

[Nickisha]

Like probably 50%.

[Neil]

50%, right. And then minimum wage right now in Canada, or at least in Ontario or in Toronto, minimum wage, I think it's a provincial thing, is $17. $17.25 or something. $17.25. It's gone up a lot. When I had my Quiznos restaurant in 2003.

[Nickisha]

You had a Quiznos?

[Neil]

In 2003.

[Nickisha]

Where was it?

[Neil]

Whitby, Ontario.

[Nickisha]

Oh, OK.

[Neil]

First one in town.

[Nickisha]

Was it?

[Neil]

It wasn't so hot when there was five in town the next year.

[Nickisha]

I enjoyed Quiznos. There used to be a Quiznos on Eglinton.

[Neil]

No way. Yeah, in Mount Pleasant. Five dogs are latched up at that porch.

One dog's getting brought into this porch. No treat for the drop off?

[Nickisha]

Yeah, I tossed it to them.

[Neil]

Pardon?

[Nickisha]

I tossed it to him.

[Neil]

Oh, so you do a treat for a photo and a treat for a drop off. Are those the only treat times you use, or do you do a treat for a hello?

[Nickisha]

Sometimes I get a treat for a hello, but not most of the time.

[Neil]

What do you use for your treats?

[Nickisha]

A bunch of different stuff.

[Neil]

Uh-huh.

[Nickisha]

Is that your papa?

[Neil]

Opening the door to a nice house. Kind of like hardwood floor. See lots of plants.

White carpet on the staircase. So this is part of where the kind of conversation about density comes from. Is this a great use of space?

Well, I mean, obviously you could chop this down and build a condo. But it's right in the middle of like four other houses. Like they're all attached.

It's like one brick house. They're all like two stories high with a third story window. So it's decently high.

I can see basement apartments. So they're like, you know, there's basement apartments. Maybe someone rents it out.

And then, you know, you also get a neighborhood. You get the benefits of a neighborhood. You get people tending to their gardens.

And you get, you know, signs in the windows. And you get people walking to work. And, you know, it's kind of like a Catch-22.

We're a very expensive city. But what Torontonians may not always realize is we're very affordable on the global scale. Like Toronto is still cheaper than Sydney, Vancouver, England, New York.

Like, you know, you go to most big western cities, it's more expensive. Nickisha is getting on her knees. Squatting.

Getting some squats in. Taking pictures of all the dogs. That's a lot of work texting all those later.

Texting everyone. Half your job is texting photos. That's probably true.

That is probably true. So if you walk in 20K, no, 20K a day, that's 10K in the morning, 10K in the afternoon? Or do you do an evening walk, too?

[Nickisha]

No.

[Neil]

So you do a morning walk and an afternoon walk?

[Nickisha]

Yeah.

[Neil]

So you're out of the house from when to when?

[Nickisha]

I'm out of the house from like 8.45 until... I sometimes get a break in between, but from around 8.45 until around 2 o'clock in the afternoon.

[Neil]

Okay, that's a great schedule.

[Nickisha]

And then I do another walk around 3.34.

[Neil]

Til what time?

[Nickisha]

Until around 4.15, 4.30.

[Neil]

How come the first walk is so long and the second walk is so short?

[Nickisha]

Because the second walk is just usually with this guy.

[Neil]

Oh, yeah. Oh, because only one dog needs two walks a day.

[Nickisha]

Right.

[Neil]

Every other dog is one walk a day. So the two walk a day, those people are paying $44 a day to walk their dog.

[Nickisha]

She gets a bit of a discount, but...

[Neil]

Bulk discount buy two walks.

[Nickisha]

Someone else used to walk.

[Neil]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Nickisha]

So I just sort of continued with it.

[Neil]

That's nice. That's nice. What's the dog walking price range in Toronto?

So, like, if Leslie and I and the kids get, like, a golden retriever or something, now no one's home during the day, so let's just say, you know, someone's got to walk it. What's the cheapest I can pay and what's the most expensive I can pay? Your pricing is premium, though.

It includes photos.

[Nickisha]

Oh, true.

[Neil]

And three treats that they're not paying for. You have to pay for all the treats. And what kind of treat do you use, by the way?

[Nickisha]

There's different types of treats I have. Sometimes I have cod, salmon. I used to have beef liver a lot because dogs love that, but not so much anymore because some dogs are...

It's a bit rich and some dogs...

[Neil]

Cod and salmon, you sound like a falconer, you know? Birders often use very, very small pieces of, like, dried fish for, like, owls and falcons, you know? You might get an owl come swoop down from a tree and grab it.

[Nickisha]

I know, I know. And they'll have a full meal.

[Neil]

Really?

[Nickisha]

Come on.

[Neil]

Okay, she's down to four dogs now. We got two dropped off. Hey, luckily I'm heading the same direction.

So weird. So what's the price range on dog walkers in Toronto?

[Nickisha]

It's... You know what? Some people start at $25.

Some people charge by the minute.

[Neil]

No way.

[Nickisha]

Yeah.

[Neil]

By the minute?

What do they charge per minute? It's like a massage.

[Nickisha]

30 minutes, it's going to be $30.

[Neil]

Wow, yeah. Like a massage is like, whatever, $60 for 60 minutes. So, you know, you're like, if they're a minute late, you're like, come on, this is costing me a buck or two.

[Nickisha]

The pricing varies.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Nickisha]

Because some people do private walks, which is just kind of one-on-one.

[Neil]

Okay. Oh, private walks. Wow.

It's like therapy.

[Nickisha]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Group therapy or one-on-one.

[Nickisha]

Right. Some may do...

[Neil]

Do some offer, like, dog back massages and short stories to the dogs?

[Nickisha]

I don't know. Maybe.

[Neil]

There's a $50 price range we should talk to you about, Nickisha, where you give each dog, like, you know, a special back rub or something.

[Nickisha]

Yeah.

[Neil]

And you have to take a photo of it.

[Nickisha]

Yeah, I may not offer that.

[Neil]

Just joking around.

[Nickisha]

Oh.

[Neil]

Well, hey, listen, two dog treats and a photo, that's expensive. I think you're actually... I think you're underpriced.

If people are starting at $25 for a walk and you walk them for a full hour and you give them two treats and you take a photo and you're good and you move, you're not a slow dog walker. You're like... Yeah, oftentimes you're dropping and picking up, so it might be like, hey, you got an hour and a half.

[Nickisha]

I'm walking slow because you're here.

[Neil]

Oh, sorry. I'm sorry. Sorry, dog owners ripping you off today.

Okay. Would you recommend the dog walking business and the dog walking lifestyle?

[Nickisha]

Yes. I mean, I love it. You know, it gets me out.

Gets me...

[Neil]

You know everybody.

[Nickisha]

I know a lot of people.

[Neil]

Because everybody knows you. Because everybody sees you every day.

[Nickisha]

I know a lot of people.

[Neil]

You got a lot of Neils in your life. I'm not the only person that says hi and talks to you. Like, you got, like, lots of me and you got...

Our guest in Chapter 42 and 43 was Pete Holmes. It might be 44, actually. I think it was.

Pete Holmes, he's a comedian. He lives in L.A. And, you know, one thing I've often wrestled with is in 2010, I got too popular. I got too famous.

Like, I got publicly noticeable. I got, like, people buying me meals at restaurants and I never saw who they were. People stopping on the street when I was in...

[Nickisha]

You're a famous writer?

[Neil]

No. No, I was 15 years ago. You know, I didn't like that.

And it was unnerving for me. And, of course, I've tried to lead, you know, a more private and anonymous type of life. Because it's important to me that, like, I don't put my pictures of my wife and my kids on Instagram.

You know, I don't say my kids' names publicly. Like, I don't... You know, I'm not...

I'm not... I don't want to, like, pimp out my kids. You know what I'm saying?

I don't want my life to be about getting likes. So, five people who love you worth a lot more than five people who like you. Okay.

And then I want to ask you more about why you recommend the Dog Walker Life, who it's good for, and how someone should start their business. Oh, I don't know.

[Nickisha]

I just kind of do it.

[Neil]

Get someone to give you eight dogs to start with.

[Nickisha]

Well, I mean, I fell into it in 2014.

[Neil]

Yeah. You fell into it in 2014. Early.

But you get also really good at it. You get known in the neighborhood. You don't get advertised.

Like, everybody knows you.

[Nickisha]

Yeah, I never...

[Neil]

Hi, I'm friends with Nickisha. Hi.

[Nickisha]

Oh. I'm being interviewed. Because I'm now famous.

[Dog Owner]

You are. You're fancy.

[Nickisha]

See you.

[Neil]

Bye. Thanks for letting us... Thanks for letting us walk your beautiful dog.

There's a few house sparrows chirping in the dead bush out here. Nickisha's seemingly brought some medicine for the dog from the pharmacy. Just so nice of her.

Some European starlings above us, kind of squeaking. A few grackles just flew by. American robins are everywhere.

I saw my first mockingbird yesterday of the year. So yeah, birds are coming back. Cardinals, of course.

Any other birds you've seen today?

[Nickisha]

I don't think I've seen any birds.

[Neil]

Okay. Well, we just walked by a whole bush full of house sparrows. And there's some starlings on the wire.

But yeah. It's not birdie. It's not full birdie season yet.

[Nickisha]

It's happening, though.

[Neil]

It's happening. It's happening. I saw my first mockingbird.

[Nickisha]

You did?

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Nickisha]

Where?

[Neil]

You know up on like... Kind of like Lansdowne-DuPont area? They're often on like the big hydro poles.

Like by the train tracks. Yeah, mockingbirds are interesting because they come up really well in the Merlin Sound ID app. So I usually hear them on my app.

And then I say, Oh my gosh, there's one around here. And then I start looking for it. And then I find it.

So I'm kind of cheating a little bit. Because they mimic over 200 other birds' calls. So there might be a mockingbird, but it sounds like a robin.

So you think it's a robin, but you know. Or it's like, it's doing a cardinal call. It's going like this.

So you think it's a cardinal. But then, you know, then it changes. And then it changes.

And so the app knows that's a mockingbird.

[Nickisha]

Is that why they're called mockingbirds?

[Neil]

That's why they're called mockingbirds. We were talking, of course, about the northern mockingbird. There are also, I think, tropical mockingbirds.

They have like a bit of a more of like a white stripe on their wing. Grade 10. Kingston, Jamaica.

Nickisha Reads. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. Prompted something.

Opened something. Remembered something. She comes to Toronto.

She was living away from her mom from age 10. But her mom, until age 10, she comes back and reunites with her mom. Lives up near Eglinton in Toronto in the 90s.

[Nickisha]

Did you?

[Neil]

No, you did tell me that today.

[Nickisha]

Eglinton?

[Neil]

Well, you said Eglinton.

[Nickisha]

I did?

[Neil]

Yeah.

You said somewhere near Eglinton, I think.

[Nickisha]

I did.

[Neil]

Okay.

[Nickisha]

I grew up in Eglinton.

[Neil]

Yeah, yeah, you grew up in Eglinton. And you went to whatever high school up there.

[Nickisha]

No. So I lived at Jane and Finch.

[Neil]

You lived at Jane and Finch. A notoriously rough neighborhood, I would say.

[Nickisha]

And I went to C.W. Jeffries.

[Neil]

C.W. Jeffries. Where that kid got murdered.

[Nickisha]

Yes.

[Neil]

Were you there when there was that murder?

[Nickisha]

No.

[Neil]

Oh man, that was the worst.

That was like... I think a kid gets murdered in a high school in Toronto like once every like decade or two. Like that's very rare up here.

[Nickisha]

Yeah, it was a while ago.

[Neil]

Uh-huh.

[Nickisha]

And I was probably too young to go to high school by then.

[Neil]

Yeah, that's scary though.

[Nickisha]

Yeah, no, it is scary.

[Neil]

I went and spoke up there after that happened. I went there. I gave everyone a free book.

I went to the gym. I did this whole listening session with the whole school. Or all the grades 7s and 8s, I think.

No, not grades 7s and 8s. 11s and 12s. I don't know, something like that.

Yeah. So it was like this cool JV. Like it was like, you know, I get to go around to a whole bunch of high schools.

I went to tons of them. And it also helps get the books out there. And people get it.

But the kids are getting the books for free. In fact, that's the name of the charity, First Book. It's often giving kids their first book, which is sad to say.

So I think we gave Book of Awesome or something.

[Nickisha]

I loved reading.

[Neil]

Yeah. That's in my book, by the way. I got to sign you a copy now.

The Book of Awesome. Oh, I love reading. Keep going.

[Nickisha]

No, yeah, no, I, well, loved reading. No, I just love listening to a book.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Nickisha]

But I've been reading since I could read, which was at a very young age, probably like three or four. And I would just read and read and read.

[Neil]

These days, kids here learn at like five, six, seven to read. It's that. So you were really reading very young.

[Nickisha]

Well, I don't remember when I learned to read.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Nickisha]

But I know because in Jamaica, we start school at a very young age.

[Neil]

Oh, really?

[Nickisha]

So we probably start school like maybe around two, three.

[Neil]

No way, like kindergarten?

[Nickisha]

Yeah.

[Neil]

It's called kindergarten?

[Nickisha]

I don't know what it's called.

[Neil]

That's the German name, so probably not.

[Nickisha]

But, yeah, I mean, it helped me sort of navigate through childhood.

[Neil]

How so?

[Nickisha]

Well, it was kind of my escape, you know, like to read.

[Neil]

Do you remember any of the books you read when you were a kid, like a little kid?

[Nickisha]

I remember at a young age, at like 10, 9, 10, I was reading Daniel Steele books.

[Neil]

Whoa.

[Nickisha]

That was way above what I should be reading.

[Neil]

Wow. Yeah, my mom used to read those on the beach. Is there like sex in those or like softcore sex?

[Nickisha]

I don't know. I wouldn't say soft porn at all.

[Neil]

No, not porn. I'm not judging, certainly. I'm just like how far, how racy is it get?

It's not Sydney Sheldon. It's not like.

[Nickisha]

I used to love Sydney Sheldon.

[Neil]

Okay, but it's not Fifty Shades of Grey. It's not like sex scenes, is it?

[Nickisha]

No, it's not.

[Neil]

It's like just before the sex scene. It's like the softcore movie where they like, just when the characters get in bed and you see their like feet or their butt or like the, and then it cuts to the next morning breakfast.

[Nickisha]

It's just, it's, for me, it was, it's like reading that book and kind of wanting like a lifestyle kind of thing.

[Neil]

Whoa. What was the lifestyle advertised in the Daniel Steele and Sydney Sheldon books?

[Nickisha]

People having a comfortable life.

[Neil]

People are rich.

[Nickisha]

Yes.

[Neil]

Oh, it's about rich people.

[Nickisha]

Well, they were poor and poor.

[Neil]

Yeah, but it was relatively rich for you. But no, but you were saying relative to your upbringing, as I was describing my mom's family. By the way, my mom's family lost everything in the India-Pakistan partition, became a poor family, which is why my parents met.

Because normally with the caste system and with arranged marriages, you would never marry like a rich and a poor. True. But my mom was newly poor.

You know the new rich? She was the new poor.

[Nickisha]

That sucks.

[Neil]

Yeah, well, that's why she's so educated though. She like knew eight languages. She went to Kenya High.

She got a scholarship, was the only one in her whole, she got like top mark in the country. Her roommate was Jomo Kenyatta's daughter, the founder, the first president ever of Kenya. The airport in Nairobi is called Jomo Kenyatta airport.

And everyone else was white. Everyone else was a colonialist and she didn't have to pay because she got a scholarship because she got a high mark. So she learned Latin and she learned German and she was reciting Shakespeare and she like did a boarding school university and she like got to become like the top FCCA, like accountant you could become.

She could like memorize numbers. She memorized all the license plates in town when she was a kid on her front porch. And she ended up with this villager from India whose only criteria to marry her, because you know, she's going to get a Canadian passport.

That's a big part of the deal here. But the only criteria was, does she eat a hamburger? Because he didn't want to marry a vegetarian.

Once she ate the hamburger, they got married the next week.

[Nickisha]

No cows?

[Neil]

They got married the next week.

Yeah, it was specifically beef. My dad's transgressive and sacrilegious too. Yeah.

He's a physicist. He wasn't that into the religious doctrine. My mom, they were both Hindu.

My mom was religious and is religious still.

[Nickisha]

Do you speak Hindi?

[Neil]

I wish.

Back then the thinking was talk English at home so your kids learn English. Now it's all like teach your kid Mandarin.

[Nickisha]

Assimilation?

[Neil]

Assimilation, assimilation.

[Nickisha]

It's kind of sad.

[Neil]

Very sad. In today's context, you realize how sad it is. When I was a kid, people would sometimes say, oh yeah, if I was at a party with all these Indian people, like in Brampton, like with my parents' friends or something, they'd be like, oh, you're whitewashed.

They'd say to me, you're whitewashed. You're like a coconut. My cousin once called me a coconut, my older cousin Vanita.

She was probably like 16 and I was like seven or something. And she was like, you're a coconut. I said, what's a coconut?

She said, you're brown on the outside, you're white on the inside.

[Nickisha]

Yeah, I don't like that.

[Neil]

That's mean, eh?

[Nickisha]

And people have said that to me too, just because I've kind of lost my Jamaican accent because I quote unquote assimilated. And I don't like it. I don't like when people say stuff like that.

[Neil]

They don't say coconut, though, for a black person. What do they say for...

[Nickisha]

They say oh you're so white.

[Neil]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just, I'm just... I know, I know, but it says road closed and they've got like, what is that?

Like a 40-foot crane? What are you guys doing? Oh, you're taking a tree out.

Wow. Wow. What a tree that is too.

Wow. Wow. You know what?

If you sliced that giant, huge log that you have there, which has got to be like three foot wide. What kind of tree is that?

[Tree Remover]

Norway maple.

[Neil]

And why are you taking that out?

[Tree Remover]

It was dead.

[Neil]

It was dead?

And then the owners called you and said, could you take that out?

[Tree Remover]

No, this is where we're contracting for the city.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Tree Remover]

The city's coming.

[Neil]

And then on the thing it says, it's under contract to Toronto Parks, Forest and Recreation, Urban Forestry for more info call 301. But your truck actually says, Weller Tree Service from Georgina, Ontario.

Four generations of tree care, which is cool. My name is Neil Pasricha. I'm interviewing Nickisha the dog walker for a podcast called Three Books.

But I just was curious, like, okay, one day, five guys, how tall was this tree?

[Tree Remover]

I'd say about 60, 65 feet tall.

[Neil]

Wow.

And what do you cut up, the small branches first or the big branches first? I'm coming with you. Yeah.

So I can't believe you could do all that one day. Wow. Thanks, man.

Any advice on tree care you'd give us? What's the number? No.

What's the best advice to grow trees in the city?

[Tree Remover]

Lots of water.

[Neil]

Just lots of water.

And if there's not enough rain, you should water it.

[Tree Remover]

Yeah, for sure.

[Neil]

I do not water my tree ever.

[Tree Remover]

Yeah, lots of water.

[Neil]

Like how much?

[Tree Remover]

As much as you can, really.

[Neil]

There's no such thing as drowning a tree.

[Tree Remover]

You know, if it's really heavy rain, you're not going to water it.

[Neil]

See you guys. There's so much stuff you just can't learn on the internet. You know, like, that's kind of what I want this podcast to be about.

Like, would you know if a dog walking business is good for you? Yes. You like the outside.

You can handle walking 20 kilometers a day. Even in the middle of four feet of snow. You are good with pets.

You know how to take pictures of animals. You have good customer service. You have to walk into people's house and you have to like fit into their vibe, their culture.

There's like barefoot dudes with beards and t-shirts getting their dog. And then there's also like, you know.

[Nickisha]

You know, my social skills are pretty top notch.

[Neil]

I know. Because you just pulled off an hour and a half's podcast out of the back of your pants as if it was no big deal. What's that?

You're a great conversationalist. You know how to tell your story. You have passionate views.

[Nickisha]

Thank you.

[Neil]

Yeah. And now that you've enlightened us about how deporting, oh, there's another dog walker.

Dog walkers unite. Are dog walkers friendly with other dog walkers? It's not like a business where you're trying to compete.

[Nickisha]

Oh, I'm competing with him all the time.

[Neil]

Really?

[Nickisha]

I'm like, come to me. Don't go to him. Don't go to him.

No, I don't do that.

[Neil]

She's joking.

[Nickisha]

There's enough dogs for all of us.

[Dog Walker]

It's kind of a friendly competition.

[Neil]

Yeah. And I actually was thinking about getting a dog, Golden Retriever. We're thinking about it.

My wife's mom has one. How much do you charge per dog, per walk?

[Dog Walker]

$250 per walk.

[Neil]

That's the smart answer. That's the smart answer. What do you charge?

[Dog Walker]

No, no.

[Neil]

$25. Okay.

And it's an hour walk?

[Dog Walker]

Yeah.

[Neil]

That's great.

Okay. Thank you, sir. $250 was a good answer though.

Three construction guys walking towards us. And enlightening us about the safe supply movement and enlightening us about kind of the rights of pedestrian traffic in Toronto and like, you know, the passion we have for like urban walking and urban cycling. Is there any other issues that are happening in the world right now, Nickisha, that you feel comfortable telling us your view on?

Because there's a lot happening in the world right now.

[Nickisha]

There's so much. I mean, it's also sad deporting people back to a place that is filled with such violence. There's a war going on there now.

And it's cruel.

[Neil]

It's inhumane.

[Nickisha]

It's very inhumane.

[Neil]

It's anti-humanist, I think Kurt Vonnegut would say.

[Nickisha]

Very subhuman.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Nickisha]

So it's sad. And it's especially sad to see people cheer this on. Because you know what?

Our lives can be in the complete reverse. And the things that we wish for people could also happen to us. So it's been a good time.

[Neil]

First they came for them, then they came for me.

[Nickisha]

Oh, and they will come for us.

[Neil]

And if I can just quickly recap, after moving to Toronto, growing up in Eglinton, you were assigned Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Sounder again in high school. Then in your 20s, you used the Five People You Meet in Heaven from Mitch's album, not for aspiration towards like a kind of better quality, more comfortable quality of living, but more for like, I feel like that's a more spiritual book.

[Nickisha]

Yeah. No, it is. It's a very spiritual book.

And it's also kind of grounding. I did enjoy, and I've read the Five People You Meet in Heaven, I think, a couple times, as well as probably the other one, Jesus is Mori, because I don't know. It's very kind of retrospective.

[Neil]

Well, you know, there's something Buddhist about dog walking. And I feel like Mitch's album embraces a lot of these tenets.

[Nickisha]

It's very calming.

[Neil]

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. It's spiritual. It's soul soothing.

[Nickisha]

Yes. I like it.

[Neil]

And then Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. Were you in your 30s?

[Nickisha]

I was probably in my 20s when I wrote that.

[Neil]

Uh-huh. Yeah, because that book came out 20 years ago or whatever.

[Nickisha]

The other book. I can't remember the name of the other book.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Nickisha]

I'm pretty sure I read two of his books. The Kite Runner.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Nickisha]

Thousand. Splendid Suns.

[Neil]

Yeah. Well, you know, I found it very not depressing and not sad. I found it a beautiful sunny day walking around for like an hour with you.

And talking to you about your three months former book. I've known you for years and years and years. You started dog walking kind of full time 11 years ago.

And then you started again kind of full time in the pandemic. You are an amazing dog walker. But more importantly, you are an amazing person.

And I have known that.

[Nickisha]

Stop it.

[Neil]

Well, why do you think I have such a kinship connection with you for so long?

[Nickisha]

Thank you.

[Neil]

It was 11 years. I've been seeing you everywhere and talking to you.

[Nickisha]

No, I haven't been around you.

[Neil]

No, but in the pandemic. Yeah.

I was probably like taking my trash out every day trying to get not go crazy. Newly looking at birds.

[Nickisha]

And a baby.

[Neil]

Yeah. Always a baby around here. Do you have one final piece of wisdom or closing advice for everybody out there? You're going to be reaching people in every country with this.

[Nickisha]

Oh, gosh. The only thing that I can say is just be kind. In a world where there is so much hate and so much weird things going on.

Just be kind. You never know how someone will feel.

[Neil]

Pick up the dog poo in the middle of the street. And when you see someone stop 100 feet away, don't hit the gas. And wave at them to cross.

[Nickisha]

That and that too.

[Neil]

You are a beacon of kindness. You are. Your smile radiates not just the street, but the city.

You illuminate us all with your presence. The reader. The lover.

The dog walker. The Kingston, Jamaica born Toronto, Canadian living. Nikesha, the dog walker.

[Nickisha]

Tess me.

[Neil]

Let's do a hug. Oh, my gosh. That was so fun.

[Nickisha]

I will see you around. You'll probably see me again in a minute's time.

[Neil]

Hey, everybody. It's me again. Just Neil.

Just sitting in my basement. Literally sitting on the floor of my basement on the carpet. My kids are bonking around upstairs.

I'm trying to find a little bit of quiet to go back and listen to that. Fun recent conversation with Nickisha, the dog walker. So many quotes jumped out to me.

What jumped out to you? First of all, I didn't know you shouldn't chase a dog when it runs away. So don't chase them.

When you start chasing them, they think it's a joke. I feel like there's a metaphor in there. I felt sad when she said the only season I like is summer.

I'm actually miserable most days. She has been a ray of sunshine in my life, and I guess it's just a reminder for me and others that sometimes when somebody is filling you up with their smile and their waves, you don't know what's going on on the inside. So good to check in and give them your love if you have some to give, to spare.

And then she said, I'm sad by the world we're living in right now. I hate all the racist rhetorics. I hate the anti-immigrant talk.

It bothers me because I am an immigrant. So yes, I'm speaking about that personally. They may not be talking about me, but it's hurtful to me, which I thought was a powerful quote.

And then the last quote, I may as well just do her closing. We live in a world where there is so much hate and so many weird things going on. Just be kind.

You never know how someone will feel. Thank you so much to Nickisha, the dog walker, at Dales Tales. If you want to follow her at D-A-L-E-S-T-A-I-L-S for adding a few more books to add to our top 1,000.

Catch her on the ride, by the way, we're not going to add. We're going to put an asterisk on number 721, which was given to us by Dan the Tailor in chapter 94. We are going to add the five people you meet in heaven.

So that'll be number 571 on our list by Mitch Albom, who was our guest in chapter 15. We will also throw an asterisk besides Tuesdays with Maury, since we mentioned that and talked about it briefly. That was given to us by Adam Grant in chapter 72.

And then we will also add, I'm excited to add number 570. I'm excited to add all the books, but 570, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. Thank you so much to Nickisha for commenting on three books.

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.

Let's kick off the end of the podcast club like we always do by going to the phones.

[Scott]

Hey Neil, this is Scott Kirkwood in Washington, D.C. I just discovered your book club thanks to Austin Kleon, who mentioned it in his email. And I quickly found a lot of books that I'd already read. I love The Long Walk by Stephen King.

And I just, I love your taste. So I'm thinking there'd be more books for me. I was thinking about telling you, given your taste, that you might like the book Boom Town by New York Times writer Sam Anderson.

It's all about Oklahoma City, which seems random. But I saw it in a Denver bookstore with a recommendation. And I picked it up and it's amazing.

And I saw in some one of your other posts that you mentioned The Flaming Lips and being a huge fan. And they are a big part of the book. So I'm guessing maybe you've already read it.

If you haven't, you'll have to get it ASAP because I think you'll love it. Thanks for what you're doing. Appreciate it.

Bye.

[Neil]

Thank you so much, Scott, from Washington, D.C., for the shoutout, for the love. Hey, Boom Town by Sam Anderson, the big orange and blue cover. You know, I'm embarrassed to admit I have that book.

I have not cracked it open yet. You know what's funny? I think it was actually Austin Kleon that sent me off to that book, hilariously.

Austin being a bit of a connector for both of us here. I love The Flaming Lips. They are my favorite band.

I've seen them live six times, including last year with my son. And I dress up. I run to the front.

I'm jumping up and down. These are some of the funnest days of my life. So if there's a book that talks about The Flaming Lips, I need to read it.

Sam Anderson's Boom Town has been added to my list. By the way, I love the subtitle on it. The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, its chaotic founding, its apocalyptic weather, its purloined basketball team, and the dream of becoming a world-class metropolis.

That's a great, great, great long subtitle. Nothing like a good long subtitle, I think. Okay, now let's go to the letter of the chapter.

And we didn't do one at the beginning today because I kind of just jumped in with Nickisha. I wanted to give that vibe of what it felt like when I just kind of bumped into her. And I will, however, read a letter right now.

This letter comes from Connie. Subject is, I love your podcast, but, Hey Neil, I'm a big fan. I enjoy three books.

I constantly add new books to my want-to-read list as a result of listening, but I have one request. Can you do anything about the sound? It seems like one person, usually the guest, can be heard loud and clear, but I can barely hear you unless I turn up the volume to an uncomfortable level.

I can't imagine I'm the first person to mention this. Maybe it's just a matter of getting a new microphone, but the sound definitely needs to be balanced better so you and the guest can be heard equally. The discrepancy discourages me from listening.

Please see what you can do. Connie. Thank you, Connie.

I wrote back. I think it's time we merged the audio and abandoned the left ear, right ear thing. I've been working so hard on that for six years, but it seems no matter what, you know, even though we try leveling and stuff, you know, different people have different speakers, different people have different, you know, Bluetooth headphones, et cetera.

So it just doesn't work some of the time for some of the people. So I think we're going to go back to one-track stereo sound. This is kind of a funny one to say because I recorded this one on my iPhone because I just bumped into her.

But going forward, we've merged Angie Thomas, so we just re-released Chapter 26 with Angie Thomas, so that's come out. So that should sound not left ear, right ear. And then we're going to do that from now on.

So I hope that helps, Connie. And Scott, please drop me a line with your address so I can mail you a book to say thank you. And now we're going to do the word of the chapter.

Let's go back to Nickisha.

[Nickisha]

Quote, unquote, assimilated.

[Neil]

Yes, indeed, it is assimilation or assimilate. Assimilate. Assimilate is a verb that means to take into the mind and thoroughly understand or to take in and utilize as nourishment, like the body assimilates digested food.

But it also means to absorb into the cultural tradition of a population or group, to make similar. Hear that word, similar? That's the Latin root origin there, people.

It's ad, which means to, and similis, similis, which means like or similar. Assimilate means to make similar. I know it's right there in the word, as it so often is, hidden in plain sight.

Thank you so much, Nickisha. Thank you so much to all of you. We are going to be coming back to you hot and heavy pretty soon.

We're going to replay Mark Manson, and then we've got a really special one that Leslie and I did together on the streets of Toronto with Ginny Yurich from the Thousand Hours Outside Movement. Coming soon! We're going to have a fun spring together, everybody.

Thanks so much for being here. And remember, until next time, 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.

Listen to the chapter here!

Chapter 146: Emily Nagoski on exuberant erotic exploration

Listen to the chapter here!

Emily:

Writing this sex book kind of destroyed my sex life. Our habitat is increasingly hostile to our continued existence. The wildest stuff happens when you pause in your pursuit of the ideal and consider the possibility that the body you have is already worth loving.

Couples who have great sex lives talk about sex all the time.

Neil:

Hey everybody, this is Neal Pasricha and welcome or welcome back to 3 Books. Yes, you are listening to the world's only podcast brought in for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. We are counting down the thousand most formative books in the world on every single full moon from 2018 all the way up to 2040, that is 333 lunar cycles.

We are talking to people that we find inspiring and interesting, like today's dream guest Emily Nagoski, New York Times bestselling author of Come As You Are, Come Together, and an incredible book that she wrote in the middle with her twin sister Amelia, Burnout. All three books are wonderful. We're going to talk more about Emily in just a second.

If you want to jump over to the conversation, just go ahead and skip ahead. We always like to hang out before, we like to hang out after. This show is a hangout.

We are with you on your dog walk, on your long drive, on your basement workout at the hotel gym in Mongolia, wherever you are. And so we always like to kick off with an overture from the Three Booker community. Three Bookers, I love your letters.

I love your reviews. I love your notes. Keep them coming.

Address is on 3books.co. Email address is on 3books.co. And of course, if you want to do it formally through Apple or Spotify or YouTube, you can always leave a comment online. I will find it. I will read it.

Today's letter comes from Tyler S. Tyler says, Hey Neil, love the podcast. I'm late to it.

So working on becoming a cover to cover member, just wanted to reach out because I heard you mention your favorite book was A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz. I started it a week ago and I'm about 200 pages in, but I got to say, all caps, THANK YOU! Exclamation mark.

This thing is incredible. It is very rare to be reading something and hope it goes on forever. This is one of those books.

Man, what a hidden gem. This is well on its way to being one of my top five books of all time. In brackets.

By the way, number one of that list is The Brothers K by David James Duncan. You should read it if you haven't. So good.

Thanks for all you do. Tyler. Okay.

Tyler, thanks so much for your note. Did you know, I'm sure you did, that Steve Toltz, author of A Fraction of the Whole, was our guest on chapter 119, so click on over to that if you want, but maybe not before you're done. And I will say, I took your advice and I ordered The Brothers K, which by the way, in my head, I got confused with The Brothers Karamazov, the classic, like Dostoyevsky, I think, right?

But no, this is a contemporary book, The Brothers K. And so I'm looking forward to reading it. It looks very big, thick, heavy, and intense, but that's just how it looks, it's not how it is.

I'm going to dive in. I promise. This sounds great.

Thank you so much for your note. And I have added you, by the way, on the 3books.co page, with your permission, I wrote back and asked you if I had your permission, to the FAQ where I have a list ongoing of every single cover-to-cover club member. That would be anybody who listens to the show, who is attempting to listen to every single one of the 333 chapters, drop me a note, and I will add you to our page.

Okay. Now, the other thing we'd like to do before we kick off the show is talk about one of our 3 Books values. And so today I want to talk to you about the value, what are you reading, greater than sign, what are you watching?

This value came about because, I don't know if it was like Netflix early days, I think it was. When like Netflix early days happened, it's like we all suddenly went from watching the same six shows, you know, like pretty much everyone had been watching whatever it was, The Wire, Soprano, Six Feet Under, and now we were splintering. And of course, with Netflix expanding into every single streaming option potentially available and everybody going down their own personal rabbit holes.

That's all great, except that what are you watching conversations now spike everywhere. You go to a party. So what are you watching?

Have you seen this? Have you seen that? Have you streamed this?

Have you streamed that? No. I haven't because I've been reading.

And so I like to switch the conversation back to what it was when I was growing up, when I saw my cousin, Adrian, I was 10 and he was 11 and I was 11 and he was 12 and I was 15 and he was 16. He'd always say to me, Neil, what are you reading? He just asked it all the time.

And I love that because it created a conversation where I got to learn what he was reading too. I got to talk about books. I got inspired and excited the way I did from Tyler's letter about the Brothers K and it is a great question because it promotes reading and you know, it helps make sure that all of us have something on the go.

So value is what are you reading over greater than sign? What are you watching? Try it at your next party and see how it goes.

All right. Now let's jump in with the incredible sex educator and New York Times bestselling author and TED speaker. That's by the way for TED Talk.

And she also calls herself an activist and she calls herself a nerd. We got connections there as I'm sure we do with all of you. Emily Nagoski.

That's N-A-G-O-S-K-I. Emily began working as a sex educator 30 years ago at the University of Delaware. We get to hear a great story about how this happened.

Involves a bike, a library and a thick book. Before she went to Indiana University for a master's in counseling psychology and then she worked at the very famous Kinsey Institute, right? This is maybe the most famous sex institute in the world.

She has taught graduate and undergraduate classes in human sexuality, relationships and communication, stress management and sex education. She was director of wellness education at Smith College for eight years before jumping from there to writing full time. She is a trained Gottman seven principles educator with extensive specialized training in bystander intervention, motivational interviewing and cultural inclusivity, including race, gender and class.

Her mission in life is to teach us how to live with confidence and joy inside our bodies. I highly recommend her books. I have all three on my bookshelf and Leslie's bookshelf.

Leslie loves them too. They are Come As You Are, Burnout, which she co-authored with her equally magnificent twin sister Amelia Nagoski. And by the way, there's a wonderful conversation with Emily and Amelia with Brené Brown on Unlocking Us, which I can't recommend enough.

It was so good. I was in tears listening to that. And her latest book, which is Come Together.

We talk about a lot of stuff, neurodiversity versus neurodivergence, maintaining long-term sexual connection, Alok Vaid-Menon, OkCupid, masturbation, ADHD, pleasure, teaching kids about sex and much, much more. Stick around to the very end of the show for the end of the podcast club, where I play your voicemails. We talk about great quotes.

We do a little bit of etymology, nerding out. But until then, please enjoy this conversation with the wonderful Emily Nagoski. Let's flip the page now.

We both got matching glasses, kind of the big thing, just like giant black glasses. Yeah, exactly. We've moved past the like the invisibility, you know, that because there's two trends you can go with glasses or braces.

And, you know, it's like shockingly in your face or trying to make sure nobody sees them, you know?

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

So, Emily, it's so great to have you on Three Books. Thank you. Thank you so much for doing this.

I really appreciate it. I've been looking forward to this for a long time.

[Emily]

Me too. And... Can I say I feel self-conscious about my choices?

Because I made them based on your questions. And then I looked at what everybody else chose. And it looks like other people are all like, let me impress you with my hyper intellectual blah, blah.

And I'm like, first book, children's book. Oh, well, I was like, if this is for readers by readers, isn't everyone starting with a children's book?

[Neil]

Well, yeah, exactly. And most many people do. So if you're on the top 1000 on threebooks.co so far, there are at least got to be 30, 40, 50 children's books. So we have a lot. We go down. And children's books are great because they go way out there, you know.

You know, Tim Urban in Chapter 22, author of the blog Wait But Why, gave us the Stinky Cheese Man, you know, which was just a classic that I'd never heard of. And it always happens on the show that I guess I've never heard of. So I'm sorry that you feel self-conscious, but please don't.

I thought your book choices were wonderful. I have spent time with all books, all the books you gave me. I really enjoyed them all.

[Emily]

One of them is, for the record, over a thousand pages.

[Neil]

I know. So that one, I was kind of like feeling like a dictionary, like I was like going through bits and pieces of it. And I like love your whole vibe, your aesthetic, your wonderful podcast, Feminist Survival Project, the books you've written.

I had Come As You Are when Come Together came out. So it was like a really natural extension. I've seen all of your TED Talks, all three of them.

I've watched all of them multiple times, I've sent them around to friends that have told me that they're experiencing X or Y or Z in their relationship. I use your resources heavily. I think you're putting out such great education and knowledge and wisdom in a world that's very desperately lacking on sexual health, wisdom, and so on.

So I thought we might start with your last Instagram post, which I looked up right before I was reaching you yesterday. You said, had a dream I had to go back to high school at age 48. Hated, but was weirdly excited to do something so easy?

Is this a metaphor? And then I like your hashtag. Hashtag 365 Feminist Selfie.

Hashtag we are not going anywhere.

[Emily]

Oh, so you don't have a reason to know this, but that is actually the hashtags are big feelings for me. So I truly just did have this dream where my experience was like, oh, no, I have to go back to high school, but man, glad to do something easy. I have a variety of disabilities, like I'm physically disabled by long COVID.

I'm autistic. The one thing I'm good at is school. And if all I had to do in the world was go to school from like eight to three, like that's a breeze, I can do that.

But the 365 Feminist Selfie hashtag comes from a friend of mine. Her name's Anna, a librarian and fiber artist who did this 365 Feminist Selfie during the first Trump administration, taking photos of herself every day somewhere without like posing, without putting on makeup, without making herself look great. And in January of 2022, she died of cancer.

And after the second Trump election, her wife, whom I still follow on Instagram, posted a selfie and said, I'm going to do this again for Anna. And I'm going to add the hashtag we are not going anywhere. And I was like, well, then anytime I post a selfie, I'm going to do the same thing.

And I'm not going to pose or put on makeup. This is just what a feminist looks like living my day to day life. And I still miss Anna and fuck cancer.

And her wife posted a picture not long ago saying, if you know where I am, then you know why I'm here. And it was sitting on a bench with a little brass plaque with a quote from Anna. Queer joy matters.

Stay safe. I quoted at the end of Come Together, and now I can't remember the whole thing because my brain is like, all right, it's in the conclusion.

[Neil]

Queer joy matters. Yeah. And I read the conclusion of Come Together, and I really and your writing is so accessible.

You have this incredible, you know, it's blogger accessible with a tremendous amount of research punch behind it. So I have your conclusion here. Queer joy matters. So stay safe, stay fierce, practice hope.

[Emily]

Yes.

[Neil]

Yeah, that's right. That's a sentence above the one I'd highlighted, by the way, which is life is too short and too uncertain to have sex you don't like, or at the very least, aren't curious to try, which I love that quote.

[Emily]

She was right around my age. I'm in my late 40s now. She did not make it to her late 40s, which is why I say life is too short and too uncertain.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Emily]

Have sex you don't like.

[Neil]

Yeah, absolutely. And appreciate you opening with your heart open. Yeah, PS fuck cancer.

And you were also really open there just to talk about your health challenges, because I listened to this incredible 2020 interview that you and your sister, identical twin sister Amelia did with Brené Brown on Unlocking Us. And in that podcast, I remember you, I think it was you or Amelia or both of you saying long COVID.

[Emily]

Like at that point, it was Amelia. I didn't get COVID for the first time until 2022 until August of 2022. And I pretty much immediately got long COVID.

Yeah.

[Neil]

And so now three years later, ish, the symptoms persist.

[Emily]

Yeah, I'm better than I was in 2023. In 2023, I couldn't walk from my house to the road to get the mail. Now I can.

[Neil]

Wow. OK, so not only do symptoms persist, but they're like pretty acute and you sense them daily.

[Emily]

Yeah, it affects me every day.

[Neil]

And it feels like long COVID has disappeared from like the news. You know what I mean?

[Emily]

Yeah, one of the books I almost chose was Ed Young's An Immense World. Oh, I haven't read it. Which is like the modern version of the book that I did list last chance to see.

It's less funny than Douglas Adams books, but it's more journalistic. It is so gorgeously written. And it was Ed Yong's reporting on long COVID that let me know the long COVID is what was happening with me.

[Neil]

Oh, my gosh. OK, this is so interesting. OK, Ed Yong is a dream guest for three books.

Last name is Y-O-N-G. He was the science editor of The Atlantic through the pandemic, carried a lot of people, including me, through with his in-depth, detailed, fact-based reporting.

[Emily]

And I believe a Pulitzer for it.

[Neil]

I believe he won a Pulitzer for it. That's right. And has a wonderful email list called, I think, The Ed's Up or something.

And he's also become a birder, which I have also become. And so his bird photography is like delightful in and of itself. And I know he's working on a new book.

An Immense World We're added to the show notes there. Now, you also threw in there, I'm autistic, which I think you wrote about that being a relatively recent diagnosis as well.

[Emily]

It is. So in 2021 is when I finally went through a formal neuropsych evaluation. Self-diagnosis with autism is very common and it is entirely valid.

Uh, my first degree is in cognitive science. So like the kind of autistic I am really wanted a formal diagnosis. So I went through many hours of formal neuropsych evaluation.

It was actually pretty fun. And yeah, it came back like knocked it out of the park. One hundred percent for sure.

Definitely. This is this is not your childhood trauma. This is autism.

[Neil]

OK, right. And you are also open about the I'm learning because I was trying to research this as well that like the DSM or the sort of standard long term medical diagnosis journal has reclassified autism many times over the years to the point where now it's how is autism now classified, labeled, et cetera, because. I think it's changed quite a bit, if I'm not changed a lot.

[Emily]

So currently in the diagnostic and statistical manual of the American Psychiatric Association, which is how I got diagnosed, you can be diagnosed as autism, autistic, ASD, autistic syndrome, just ASD levels one, two or three. And the level reports the level refers to your level of support need. So I am ASD level one.

That is the lowest level of support need. And let me tell you, a low level support need is still like a very high level.

[Neil]

What level of support need is it or what level of support is that?

[Emily]

I have handed my email over to my spouse like I really struggled with email and he was like, I don't struggle with your email. Let me take your email over so that you don't have to do that. I have a literary agent who deals with all of the business stuff.

So I never have to negotiate anything. Um, I also have a publicist who negotiate like all the like hard work people stuff gets managed by somebody else.

[Neil]

So I can tell you Eileen, who's amazing and who I've known for years because she was the publicist on my 2017 journal, two minute mornings with Chronicle Books.

[Emily]

Isn't she amazing?

[Neil]

Yeah, yeah. I've known her forever.

[Emily]

Totally love her. And, and she does, she's extraordinary at things that I literally cannot do. And that I would have worked really hard to try and be capable of doing, but still wouldn't have done even a quarter as well as she does it.

[Neil]

So this is autism level one. And by the way, you know, some of my, my oldest child just got labeled gifted, which is a really poor word in general. I think you probably agree.

[Emily]

I was also gifted.

[Neil]

You're also gifted and I was not. But as I spoke to his class teacher, I was saying, hey, what are the issues that are you seeing? Because, you know, we're going through some diagnosing stuff, etc.

He's like autism by far and away, number one. And as a child, I didn't, that wasn't a word I had in my vocabulary, but it seems like there's a massive increase also in the number frequency range of diagnoses.

[Emily]

Yes, because we're figuring out what it is in a way that we didn't before. It used to be that autism was only, was mostly diagnosed among boys, especially white boys, but boys who also had intellectual disabilities, which is not part of the autism diagnosis, but sometimes co-occurs. Autism is basically a diagnosis of extremes.

There are three sort of categories of diagnosis in the DSM. You're probably in Canada being diagnosed under the ICD, the International Classification of Diseases. I think we're up to 11 now, which has finally caught up and is classifying autism in the same way.

So if your kid's diagnosed as autistic and gifted, chances are probably hyperverbal.

[Neil]

Yeah, my child hasn't been diagnosed with autism. I was asking his teacher what she's seeing a lot because I will put this out there. I wasn't sure if I should or not, but I think I will because my kid has been diagnosed with ADHD.

As we went through the ADHD process with the tools and the forms in the meeting, it became very clear that I have undiagnosed ADHD, as I'm sure happens all the time.

[Emily]

Happens all the time. My brother, my brother's 50, and he was diagnosed with ADHD way the fuck back in 1991. Old school.

Back when the age wasn't even in it. Yeah, yeah. There was ADD and ADHD, and he was diagnosed with ADD.

And while that was being diagnosed, the person doing the diagnosis was like, and your father almost certainly also has the same diagnosis. So he went through the diagnostic procedure and got formally diagnosed. Wow.

Yeah.

[Barbie]

And that happens with autistic women.

[Emily]

That happens very, like their kids will get diagnosed on the spectrum. And the person doing the evaluation will be like, hi, mom, have you considered seeking evaluation for autism?

[Neil]

So like, are we all neurodiverse then, Emily?

[Emily]

We're all neurodiverse. We are not all neurodivergent.

[Neil]

Oh, bam. One of many what we're going to get like that. We're all neurodiverse.

We're not all neurodivergent. Okay.

[Emily]

Everybody's brain is different from everybody else's brain. But some brains are outside what the world is built for.

[Neil]

Right, right. Oh, interesting what the world is built for. So and then can you define autism for me?

[Emily]

Sure. So there are three diagnostic criteria. One is about, I mean, the main thing that people who are not on the spectrum will recognize as autism is social differences.

I experience it. Other people with autism do not experience it the same way. If you've met one autistic person, which you have now, you've met one autistic person.

We are all very different from each other because it's a diagnosis of extremes. I experience it as a social deficit, which is that if I'm sitting like in a circle, in a group of people, people who are allistic, which is to say not autistic, though they may be neurodiverse or neurodivergent in any number of ways, will be able to notice the way one person influences each individual other person. And you can not just feel like a general vibe in the room, but watch what happens with each person and get a sense of what the group dynamic is.

My master's degree is in counseling, and I had a group counseling class. And I could not do that. I do not have whatever the sense is that can tell what's going on in individuals in a room full of people.

So social differences are one of the primary differences. The other one is, there's two other sensory differences. So we're either going to be hyper or hypo, over or under sensitive to any of the extroceptive senses or the interoceptive senses, and also neuroception.

So your extroceptive senses are everything you can see, hear, smell, touch, or taste. Your interoception is your bodily sensations, the stretch of your muscles, the sensation of your digestion. Your neuroception is your sense of safety.

[Neil]

Wow. Okay. This is so good.

So social, sensory, and...

[Emily]

Rigidity is often how it is talked about. So it's struggling with transitions. Um, so when I was writing Come As You Are, I was also working a full-time job.

So I was mostly writing on the weekends. And I could sit at my desk and 12 hours would disappear. I would sort of like come to from the trance of writing and reading, and there'd be a plate on my desk.

And I could like taste the food in my mouth and realize my husband had brought me food and I had eaten it without my attention ever shifting away from my work. And like, I would like have lunch with other writers and they'd be like, I can write like four or five, maybe five hours in a day. And I was like, I just sit down and like the whole day disappears.

And they'd be like, that must be really nice for you. And it is. But it also means that I very much struggle with transitions in my day-to-day life, like transitioning from work mode to being a person in a relationship mode.

So those are those are those three categories.

[Neil]

And I'm assuming the job you were working while you were writing on the weekends was the director of wellness at Smith College. Right. Which you did for eight years from 07 to 15, right?

[Emily]

Oh, eight to 16.

[Neil]

Oh, wait to 16. Ah, sorry. Okay.

So social sensory rigidity is I never heard that before. And I really appreciate you opening that up for us, as well as being so open about the things that you are working through with your health, because as happens, you know, like I haven't got the formal ADHD diagnosis yet, but you're making me think I should probably go do that because I bet you if I do that, then there will be some things in my life that I will probably feel less shame and guilt around and probably some techniques that I can put into place. I'm like, one of the things is like, how often do you lose stuff and find it in your fridge? I'm like, well, you know, I mean, like, how'd you know? You know what I mean? I had that. And then another thing is like, ADHD people really like clear systems. And like, Leslie opens like the kitchen cupboard door. And like, I have all these like my vacate, my like days away from the family tracker, my like writing days tracker, my like cardio day.

I have like all these trackers like down the inside of our kitchen cabinets. And she's like, you know, you know, so I just got it. But I read a great for anyone that's listening to this is like, hey, I lose stuff a lot too.

The book ADHD is awesome. That came out last year by Penn and Kim Holderness. The Holderness family.

They won the great. They won the amazing race. They do all those funny skits on YouTube.

They wrote this book because Penn had a 20 year old ADHD diagnosis and it's a great book. I've recommended and bought many copies for people. It's just the book I have found to be really helpful for me.

[Emily]

There's a book called ADHD after dark about sex for ADHD people. Oh, OK.

[Neil]

OK, OK, great. You I knew you're going to add to our bookshelf today because you have the sex books. Well, you just have the books coming out that bam, bam, bam, which I love.

And by the way, I should also give a little shout out. I like because this this podcast is like a three hundred and thirty three chapter podcast. So I'm going to shout out Temple Grandin in chapter sixty one, who we opened that show with her talking about how her mind works when I give her like a word and she talks about she only thinks in pictures.

It was a really cool. Right. Right.

[Emily]

That's a great example of how if you've met one autistic person and now you've met two autistic people, at least I have barely any visual imagination. I think almost exclusively in words.

[Neil]

Right. So like complete opposite. Yeah.

But yeah, but on this. And so this is probably because the ADHD, of course, is now changing its name. Edward Hallowell, who wrote Driven to Distraction about 20 years ago, wrote the forward for ADHD is awesome.

And in that book, they both talk about how it should be called vast because it's neither a deficit nor a disorder. And it's actually a variable attention stimulus trait, the trait, not a disorder. And it's variable attention, not just hyper.

It's both. You can be super one way or the other. And so perhaps autism is just simply throughout the course of our lifetime, because I'm also I'm forty five.

I think you said you're late forties. I think you're seventy nineteen seventy seven. I'm nineteen seventy nine.

You know, from our life, it was like I grew up with like I won't say the words because they're so offensive now, but I grew up in elementary school with like these just looking back like just horrible words and and idioms in culture to a point now where we're having scientific based discussions to the point where now probably in five, ten, fifteen years, it'll be at a level of detail that's even makes today look sort of caveman ask.

[Emily]

We're so still at the beginning of these things. The reason my brother got diagnosed so early was partly because these things got recognized in boys when they didn't get recognized in girls. And also these things got recognized because it was really obvious that my brother was an extraordinary intellect.

He's just he's now an ethnomusicologist. He just curated an exhibit at the Jewish Museum in Baltimore. He's an extraordinary human being.

He's profoundly compassionate and way too smart for his own good. And he was failing out of high school. And my parents were like, what is going on?

A.D.D. brain differences so profound that at 16, they sent him to college.

[Neil]

Wow. Wow. Seems like the whole family is genius because I've also been listening to Amelia with those conversations.

I'm like, wow, like I thought you talk fast. And then I realized, oh, they both talk super fast and are super smart.

[Emily]

So like we are the kind of autistic that is hyper verbal. You can be hypo verbal. And we are just like, which is when I lived in Indiana for seven years, I was the fast talking east coaster.

And then I moved back to the east coast and I was still the fast talker. Plus, I taught undergrad for a really long time. Eighty percent of college students are dangerously sleep deprived, which trained me as an educator to be walking, talking caffeine.

[Neil]

Well, exactly. And by the way, I still relate to this. I'm a fast talker, too.

And I have always been told to talk slower, talk slower my whole life. And I know you give a lot of public talks as do I. And I was told earlier in my speaking career, talk slower, talk slower.

I'm not told that anymore, which is partly an issue. I think in society that the editing of YouTube and TikTok has sped up our brains. But there is a limit for how fast people can listen.

Like the whole 2.5X podcast thing doesn't make any sense to me because it's past my threshold. But yeah, I don't get told I talk too fast anymore.

[Emily]

Yeah, me either.

[Neil]

Because there's been a ratcheting up of all of our listening.

[Emily]

So this is a... We should probably talk about the books. But while I was working...

[Neil]

I'm over this. It's OK. I even have quotes to lead us into the books.

But yeah.

[Emily]

While I was working at Smith, again, walking, talking caffeine. That's how I got trained with the students.

[Neil]

But you weren't taking caffeine. You were just talking fast.

[Emily]

No, this is like what you're getting now. So this is who I am. But it is my mask.

This is what I call the Emily Show, where I put on a performance that is a highly curated version of myself, intended to be interesting so that you will continue listening to the thing I want to talk about, which I think is really important. It's going to make your life better. So this is the Emily Show.

And I had to present some data to an administrative committee at Smith. And I was undiagnosed. And they were running over time.

So I had less time to talk about my stuff. And I didn't want to leave any of it out. So I just talked like boo, boo, boo.

I just went really fast. And the head of the committee literally contacted my boss and asked if I was on drugs.

[Neil]

Oh, I've had that too. Yeah, that's the worst.

[Emily]

No, man. I'm the wellness director. I don't take any drugs.

Barely even drink.

[Neil]

I know. Isn't that crazy, though? When I was in undergrad, I went to Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario from 98 to 02, consumed zero cannabis, consumed zero alcohol, consumed zero caffeine, consumed zero coffee, consumed zero tea. And everyone thought I was on stuff.

You know what I mean? And the joke was always like, you don't want to see that guy on coffee. You know, you don't want to see that guy drinking.

You don't want to see that guy because he's already seemingly super strung out. But this was just how I knew we were going to have a good conference. I knew it was coming.

I could just feel it coming. I'm so excited about this.

[Emily]

As a joke, my brother got me a guarana chocolate bar for Christmas because he's like, I want to if this is what you're like, I want to see what you're like when you're like super hyped up on like caffeine and sugar and blah, blah. And I was like, you're not going to notice a difference. Like, I can't get any faster.

Give me a downer and find out what I'm like then.

[Neil]

Oh, interesting. Interesting. So is part of your internal...

So now I'm 45. And so now all those things I just mentioned that I didn't use in college, I do use them, not in any extreme amounts, but like I am. So do you stay away from all other stimulants up or down?

Because you know, or how do you navigate your relationship with things like alcohol, cannabis, caffeine?

[Emily]

I'm beautifully medicated. The world has come a long way. Because in addition to the autism, I also have depression that dates back to like earlier than I can remember.

And social anxiety that probably derives from like masking so hard for so long, assuming that everyone is pretending to be a person. And like everybody, when they get home is so exhausted from pretending to be a person that they like collapse in tears every day. I thought everybody was doing that.

Turns out no. So I have great formal medication that I do take as prescribed. Perimenopause, I'm 48.

I'll be 48 in April. Perimenopause has been rough, mostly on my sleep. And low dose alcohol is the most reliable thing to get me to sleep.

My psychiatrist is very much like, let's find a replacement for you for that. And that's a process that is happening. But yeah, I don't.

I drink caffeine now. So this coffee cup, you'll notice it's a Denny's mug. Yeah.

Y'all have Denny's in Canada, right?

[Neil]

A few of them, mostly around the border towns, like Niagara Falls and stuff. We don't mind the occasional Grand Slam here or there.

[Emily]

I stole this from a Denny's in Newark, Delaware when I was 19 years old and in college.

[Neil]

Well, it's really had a substantial life since then.

[Emily]

It really has. It's amazing how the printing hasn't gone anywhere.

[Neil]

Same logo. Oh my gosh. Again, once again, I have 12 other questions that are unrelated to page one of my 10 pages of prepared notes.

Oh my gosh. I have so many things I want to ask you. You're so fascinating.

You're so interesting. Ask me things. Yeah.

You like being asked things, right? Yes. Yeah. Okay. So my wife's about to turn 40.

Leslie and I have been married for just over a decade.

[Emily]

Congratulations.

[Neil]

And so this perimenopause, I was going to ask you what advice do you have for the partner of?

[Emily]

The best book. I have read all of the perimenopause books, obviously.

[Neil]

And I'm not saying Leslie start. I've heard it. Emily McDowell, chapter 18, told me it lasts between 2 and 20 years from about age 35 to 65.

I was like, oh my gosh. So as a partner, you want to be a bit more equipped than nothing. Yeah.

[Emily]

And even as well-informed as I was and am, in particular, I was not informed of the way it was going to impact my sleep. So that has been the primary impact for me. The book.

The best book is What Fresh Hell Is This? by Heather Corrinna.

[Neil]

That's a great title.

[Emily]

It's a great title.

[Neil]

What Fresh Hell Is This?

[Emily]

They're a non-binary person. So it's an excellent way to get all of the endocrinology that you need from a point of view that is profoundly gender inclusive and intersectional in its approach.

[Neil]

What's the author's last name spelling?

[Emily]

C-O-R-R-I-N-N-A. I'm pretty sure.

[Neil]

OK, great. We'll put that in the show notes. Threebooks.co for anyone that wants all the book recommendations that Emily has given us so far, which are two and the ones that are forthcoming for sure. Now to kick off the three books that I have right here in a pile. Excited to go into. I actually brought forth three quotes that I've picked out from you from different, you know, TED Talks and interviews and so on.

I just want to offer them up to you because to me, I think this helps set the stage for a little bit of Emily and you can comment on them or expand, explain or elucidate as you see fit or as George Saunders told us in Chapter 75, deny if you would like to. Number one, pleasure is the measure.

[Emily]

Yeah. As I was writing Come As You Are, I learned, first of all, that statistics are not how people learn stuff. People do not.

I can't just report the statistical findings and be like, look at this effect size. And people would be like, wow, I understand how to integrate this into my life. The way actual people in real life learn is through storytelling and metaphor.

I am the weirdo because I learned from the science itself. But my job is to translate from the science into stuff real people can actually use in their real life. And while I was writing Come As You Are, I learned that people will remember what you say better if it rhymes.

But more than that, they will believe it more. People believe things are true more if they rhyme. And so I made it rhyme.

Pleasure is the measure of sexual well-being. It is not how much you want it, how often you do it, where you do it, with whom, how many positions or even how many orgasms you have. It is whether or not you like the sex you are having.

Here's a wacky fact. It's not a dysfunction not to want sex you do not like. That's just normal.

[Neil]

That calls back the title of one of your I think was your second TED Talk.

[Emily]

Yes.

[Neil]

Which was called.

[Emily]

It was the second one is about arousal non-concordance.

[Neil]

That's what I'm talking about. Yeah.

[Emily]

There's a whole big story about there was a so for months you prepare a TED Talk like months. And one month away from TED. It was twenty eighteen height of me too.

And I was like. I have to talk about arousal non-concordance because it is part of a culture that lets people think that like your body says yes, even when you say no, that's bogus. And I need I need to tackle this.

This is a much more important serious topic. And my sister who was helping me prepare was like, oh, yeah, you have to talk about that. So I went to TED and I was like, I'm sure I'm not the only person to do this.

But like I know I've been working on this other talk for months, but I'm going to totally and I'm going to start from scratch. And they were like, don't don't do that. And I was like, well, I'm going to I'm going to because this is much more important.

So I did and.

[Neil]

Thunderous standing ovation. If you haven't watched it, go back 2018.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

And we'll put a we'll put a link to that as well as all your TED Talks. They're really fantastic. And they're really I mean, not many people have given three TED Talks.

Just to just I will point that out.

[Emily]

So the only one is like I call it TEDxTED. It's like TED, TED, TED, all the way, Ted. The two others are TEDx.

One is in Nevada and the other one is in Connecticut. The first one is sort of like I thought I'd never be able to give a TED Talk again. So I tried to shoehorn everything into one talk.

That's about confidence and joy as the keys to a great sex life. The TED, TED, TED Talk, which I someone came and found me later at TED to to say, hey, look, I see I have I am required by my job to watch a lot of TEDx Talks. None of them make me cry.

Your TEDx Talk made me cry and that's why you're here. So and then I did one in Connecticut because it was really close to me and it was an opportunity to use the talk I originally wrote for TED.

[Neil]

Oh, that's amazing. The Framington Library one. Yeah.

And our guest in Chapter 12 was Chris Anderson, head of TED. And he has said on the record, TEDx Talks are TED Talks. So just so you know, you could say you have free TED Talks.

He has said he said that. Second quote I want to pull out is this is from your We Can Do Hard Things podcast with Glennon Doyle and Abby Womback. Here's the full quote.

If I wrote it down properly because I was listening and kind of laughing at the same time.

[Neil]

Did you find your pretty little toes? Did you find your toes? Did you find your labia?

Did you find your pretty little labia? She found it.

[Emily]

Yeah. So this is from a story that was told to me in Europe by a woman who read Come As You Are and then watched her adult brother change his baby daughter's diaper. And he turns out she's all clean.

He turns away for a second just to grab a diaper. And when he turns back, his baby has her hand on her vulva. And dad goes, don't touch that.

And this woman who was talking to me was like, I realized, like, how would he have responded if. If his baby had a penis instead, would he have been so harsh and like. Maybe.

[Neil]

Maybe, maybe. Like, I mean, he might have been like a no private part kind of person.

[Emily]

Maybe.

[Neil]

Oh, you think it's just a no female private part thing.

[Emily]

When I have told this story other places. People have all been like, yeah, it's not as big a deal when. Because like a penis is right there.

It's out there. to be found.

[Neil]

Oh, I see.

[Emily]

Whereas a vulva. So this, this goes back to sort of like the English language origins of women's sexual shame as specific and special to women because our parts are tucked away and private as if they want to be hidden because they are a source of shame. Whereas a penis is out and proud and the scrotum is right there.

So like women's sexual shame is special and different from the sexual shame that comes with having a penis. And I'm currently talking in cisgender biological terms because we're talking about the deep history of the Western world around gender, which is a deep history of the gender binary and colonialism where my ancestors traveled all around the world and erased the complexity of gender all over the world, insisting there were only two genders and two biological sexes. There's like the two of them overlap all the time.

But you know what? Even if it weren't about genitals, don't we get so excited when a baby finds her feet? Did you find your feet?

[Neil]

Right.

[Emily]

Oh, you put your feet in your mouth. There's some delicious tiny little baby toes. Like what would the world be like if we were just as excited?

Like, did you find your own genitals?

[Neil]

I mean, it starts there, right? Encouraging kids to explore their bodies and allowing their natural curiosities to be unchopped off. I mean, I completely agree with that.

[Emily]

Because neurologically, what's happening?

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Emily]

Neurologically, they're learning that their body belongs to them, that those sensations of their body are shame-free and all of them are acceptable and they can learn to listen to the signals of their body and what feels good and what doesn't. So we're creating a grounding of them being able to communicate with a sexual partner. And this baby is not going to remember this story, but it's going to accumulate with countless other similarly culturally informed moments so that there's going to be like a blank place in her brain where the sensations of her genitals are supposed to be.

And she's going to wonder why she struggles with orgasm or why she can't tell what feels good or she doesn't have a vocabulary to explain to her partner what feels good to her. If indeed she grows up to identify as a girl.

[Neil]

Right, right, right, right. So a few things. It's weird because when I talk to you, I keep having like 12 questions when I want to ask one.

But first of all, shout out to Chapter 106 with Alok Vaid-Menon, whose wonderful book Beyond the Gender Binary.

[Emily]

Oh God, Alok is so amazing.

[Neil]

Yeah, Alok is amazing. They have this 40 or 50 page chapbook, which has sold over 100,000 copies. It's done really well, Beyond the Gender Binary.

I own two of them. Oh yeah, okay, great. Wonderful.

So a conversation on a park bench in Central Park to point people to, but also...

[Emily]

If you haven't watched their comedy special, Biology, you should definitely watch it. It's so good. It's on YouTube.

[Neil]

YouTube, Alok's comedy special. Okay, great.

Biology. It's called Biology?

[Emily]

It's called Biology.

[Neil]

Okay, great. I'll check that out. And the third quote, I got to keep moving because I want to get to the third book.

The third quote is, the question I get asked most is the question underneath all the other questions. Can I get addicted to my vibrator? Can you help me with my erections?

Underneath all that is the question, am I normal? To which my reply is, what even is normal? And why is that what you want your sexuality to be?

[Emily]

Right. So, so many things. Because in the first place, you don't spend the time that it takes to read a hundred thousand word book because you want your sexuality to be normal.

You want to be the sex, the best sex partner that your partner has ever had. That's what you want to be is not normal, but excellent at sex. And I absolutely am here to help you be excellent at sex, but you're not going to be excellent at sex until you are willing and able to turn toward what's genuinely true about your sexuality right now, as it is with kindness, compassion, affection, joy, and a sense of play.

So when people ask, am I normal? I think what they want to know is, do I belong within the human community? And I, it's like the midpoint, there's a sort of like false idea that there's broken, there's normal, and there's extraordinary.

And you're sort of on a trajectory away from the broken that you were through the normal that you hope to be to the extraordinary that is the aspiration.

[Neil]

Wow, I love that visual.

[Emily]

That is not how it works.

[Neil]

Okay.

[Emily]

Everyone is already normal.

So normal is just normal sex. People ask me so often, I put definitions of it. Normal sex is any sex where everybody involved is glad to be there and free to leave with no unwanted consequences.

That includes no unwanted emotional consequences.

[Neil]

And no unwanted pain.

[Emily]

Yeah, and no unwanted pain.

[Neil]

I've just heard you say that a lot, yeah.

[Emily]

None of this like, but you said you would, or if you loved me, you would. None of that stuff. When I made a podcast, I had a co-host named Mo, and she identifies as a lesbian now, but in high school had a lot of sexual experiences with men.

And she was like, the whining, the whining I had to deal with from men who were like, come on, but you have to. And I'm not shitting on men. Many of my best friends are men.

The person I'm married to, cishet dude. And y'all, cishet men get very screwed over by the patriarchy also, in particular in the ways that they are taught that they are supposed to pursue sex at any cost or else they are not truly a man. So that whining is coming from a place of like, not, but like you said you would, but They're trying to fit in with their peer groups too, right?

But if I don't push, if I don't press, then I am not an adequate man.

[Neil]

How does that fit in with all the new data coming out that shows that people aren't, like teens today aren't dating and sleeping around anymore?

[Emily]

I don't know what's up with that. Part of me is like, good, because adolescent brains are not yet developed to the point where they understand long-term consequences. And sex is the kind of thing where like, you can absolutely have life-altering consequences.

So delay. What I don't know, what doesn't get talked about in that research, to my knowledge, I haven't seen like a study that asks, but like, do you masturbate and enjoy those sensations? Do you make out with people and really love how that feels?

Do you have permission to share and communicate what you like and what you don't like with people? It's being framed as prudery, but like, we don't know what all they might be doing. No, exactly.

Like what is their relationship with their own pleasure?

[Neil]

Do you have a healthy, erotic self?

[Emily]

Yeah. And I want to live in a world where people develop a sense of their own erotic self. At least the beginnings of it come before they build a sense of themselves in an erotic relationship.

I've gotten asked by people in their 20s, myths they heard in high school. So I heard, girls, I heard that if I masturbate, that's going to make it impossible for me to have an orgasm with a partner. Is that true?

No, on the contrary. Learn what pleasure feels like for you. Learn what feels good and what makes orgasm happen for your body so that when you're with a partner and your attention is sort of divided between what it feels like inside your body and like what's going on with your partner, there's like all these worries we get taught to feel about like, am I meeting my partner's expectations?

Are they okay? All this attention that we put onto our partner, do you still have a basic grounding in what's going on with your body so that when, as any good partner should, they say, do you like that? You know the answer.

Because if you don't actually know the answer and you were raised to be a good girl and your partner's doing whatever they're doing and they're like, do you like that?

[Emily]

What's the answer? Because the only right thing to do is to make sure your partner's okay.

[Emily]

And what will it do to your partner if you say, actually a little lower to the left, less pressure and faster?

[Neil]

Well it makes you both better

[Emily]

Yes. If the partner receiving the feedback is not so fragile that they shut down and their whole sense of sexual self breaks because they've received feedback about how to be the best possible erotic partner with this other person who has the gift of being able to communicate clearly about what they want and like.

[Neil]

Yeah. And that feedback getting presented in the form of, for example, like devastatingly unreal internet pornography, et cetera, et cetera. So we got, I got a lot more questions about sex.

Fortunately for me, you picked a sex book. So it's coming. And I've got a lot there.

And so what we have done in this opening kind of 40 ish minutes, 45 minutes is we have met Emily and we've gotten to know Emily. We've made a vibe connection with Emily and we've opened up some of Emily's kind of what I call, or at least for me, famous phrases like pleasure is the measure. And by the way, hilarious that not only does rhyming increase, they believe you more. Yeah. Memory. Like we are far right federal political candidate in, in, in Canada. And there hasn't been an election called yet, but you know, the prime minister is resigning and so on. But he, all he says is ax the tax.

That's all he, that's all he says. So, you know, the, it's just interesting. The rhyme increases the believability.

We've talked about, you know, being more cognizant, understanding, empathetic and supportive of explore, exploratory, even from very young ages, from imprinting perspective, which is really helpful for me as a dad, but also for, I think a lot of people as who have grown up and, you know, your flower and your dink, like we've, we don't even label them. Right. Right.

Oh yeah. That was ding-a-ling, dink. Oh yeah.

[Emily]

You're Duda. PP. We, we, yeah, yeah, for sure.

[Neil]

I mean, certainly there were many more, you know. My wife grew up. Yeah.

When she grew up, I think they called it your privacy. You know what I mean? There was always, there was always euphemisms at play here.

But as a result, people don't, people don't know what a vagina is like, you know what I mean? Because they don't know what it is. They think it's, they think it's the thing that they see, but it's not, you know what I mean?

Because the internal part. Exactly. And many things like that, you know what I mean?

And so we've talked about that and we've also talked about, so we've opened up, we've opened up the conversation, which is now going to allow us to get into your three most formative books.

[Emily]

I want to give myself credit for not telling these seven anecdotes that got triggered by all the things you just said.

[Neil]

Okay.

[Emily]

So me.

[Neil]

Thank you. But they're going to come out just in a later part of this conversation. And for those listening, yes, I'm going to tack on an introduction at the beginning of this, but also like Emily became a peer health educator at the university of Delaware in undergrad, starting her sex education career, like around 1985.

So we're talking like 30 years ago, right? Then you got your master's in counseling from Indiana university, 2002. Then you got your PhD in health behavior from Indiana university school of public health, 2006.

Then you were director of wellness education, Smith college, 2008 to 2016, 2015. Come as you are the surprise, the surprising new science that will transform your sex life comes out. It's a rampant bestseller, which it should be noted.

Not many sex books are like big, huge bestsellers, like selling hundreds of thousands and millions of copies. Like it was a huge hit everywhere. Every single, you know, in front of the book, front of the bookstore type of thing.

Then she takes it only from my perspective, a sort of surprising left turn where in 2020, you coauthor with your sister, the book burnout, the secret to unlocking the stress cycle. And I will say, and I'm going to point people to it in the show notes, but also my book club, the conversation you and Amelia had with Brene was profound. It was so good.

I mean, Brene is so good and you are so good, but together it was like really magical. I'm going to, everyone needs to listen to that 2020 conversation. If you were stressed, if you're experiencing burnout, if you like, it's a must listen.

And then you come back to the sex world here in 2024, we are celebrating, of course, the paperback release, but come together the science and art of creating lasting sexual connections. And so through this lens of your now 30 year long career as a global sex educator, we're going to plumb the depths of the Nagoski archives. And we are going to go into your three most formative books, starting with, and for each of these books, by the way, I will say, I am planning to describe the book as if the people listening are holding it in a bookstore.

The very first book was very hard for me to find.

[Emily]

Yep.

[Neil]

But I did find it though.

It is not in print. I found it on thrift books online. It is called what to do when your mom or dad says dot, dot, dot, clean your room, exclamation mark by Joy Berry B-E-R-R-Y.

Oh my gosh. This book published in 1982 by Children's Press covers white. It's got a full color like exaggerated, almost like editorial cartoon style of a redheaded boy frowning with one eye fully open, the other eye squinting suspiciously wearing a white with yellow text number 10 jersey and blue shorts and white sneakers standing in the middle of a messy room complete with a baseball baseball cap on a bedpost posters dramatically off kilter on the walls, trucks and balls and drums and yo-yos and clothes all over the floor and even a cross-eyed green fish swimming, seemingly holding its breath and discussed in a large aquarium on the table.

The top is written in this super round Seraphia, what I call like a Garfield type font. And at the top, of course, it says the survival series for kids. Joy Berry is actually alive today.

She is an 80 year old American writer, teacher and child development specialist who's written over 250 self-help books. What's it about? It's basically an illustrated book offering step-by-step instructions for cleaning a dirty bedroom, including how to make a bed, fold the clothes and make different piles of your stuff.

Hilarious Dewey Decimal heads file under 643.534 technology slash home and family management slash housing slash remodeling. Emily, tell us about your relationship. They're like, I guess remodeling, you know what to do.

Melville Dewey didn't solve everything. What to do when your mom or dad says clean your room.

[Emily]

So this book was gifted to Amelia and me. We shared a room until we were about 16. I think we got this book when we were about seven, which would have been just a couple of years after it was published.

We were... To say that we were messy as children does a disservice to messes. We were disgusting.

We were totally incapable of keeping our room clean. And so we got gifted this book. And as you say, it's step-by-step instructions on what to do, how to clean your room.

And we now know that Amelia and I are both autistic. Step-by-step instructions are like, yes, please. So over and over and over again, we would take turns every month.

One of us would sit on the bed and read each page of the book out loud, and then we would do the step. And then we would read the next step aloud, and we would do that step. And then we'd read the next, and then we'd do the step.

So it literally... We read it out loud to each other so that we knew what to do literally when our mom or dad said, clean your room. You were showing a picture of the step-by-step instructions for folding, for example, a shirt.

That is how I folded a shirt until the KonMari method taught me about the envelope fold.

[Neil]

I do not know the envelope fold. This fold is, of course, one sleeve backwards, the other sleeve backwards, behind, picked up, and, you know. But what's the KonMari method?

[Emily]

So, in...

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Emily]

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, which I'm sure is a book somebody has talked about.

[Neil]

Nobody's mentioned that, actually. It has not changed anyone's life yet.

[Emily]

Decluttering has turned into a special interest for me. Decluttering, organizing. So, from this book and my total inability to keep my room clean or organized that stretched deep into my thirties, this is the book that started me looking for a system.

Right. And when you see the illustrations of what this kid's room looked like, our room was way worse than that.

[Neil]

Right.

[Emily]

I mean, we were knee-deep in crap. Like, you couldn't see the rug. Oh my gosh.

Our beds were never made. It was. But we followed those instructions for how to make a bed.

[Neil]

Like, it would have been harder if one of you was super neat.

[Emily]

Well, the thing is, we were sharing a small room.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Emily]

Two kids stuck.

[Neil]

Where was this, by the way? Was it in Indiana? No.

[Emily]

Born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware.

[Neil]

Wilmington, Delaware. Right.

[Emily]

My one actual claim to fame as my 10th grade English teacher was Jill Biden.

[Neil]

No way. Way!

[Emily]

Whoa. It's a real small state. And what was she like as a teacher?

Really great. So we're in, like, the honors gifted class. And we're pains in the patoot.

I feel moderately confident that she would remember us because there were no other identical twins in the high school. And we were not typical, as you can imagine. But she did say, like, to me, you're a good writer.

You should keep writing. And here I am, three New York Times bestsellers in.

[Neil]

Wow. Wow. I can't wait to hear Jill Biden on Feminist Survival Project down the road.

And by the way, it should be mentioned. Your Come As You Are podcast is evergreen content. And it's so good.

And like, not for nothing, it is very popular still. I mean, I clicked open Spotify, like hundreds, thousands of reviews. You're a multi-podcaster even.

So on top of that. Okay. So cool thing I noticed when I got this book from Thrift Books.

They mailed to you like in a green plastic. It's like super, super sticky. You have to like tear it open, you know.

And then and then as soon as I opened it, of course, I didn't see the cover. I noticed this cover because it's one of those flip over books where the other side of the book is a completely other book upside down. And so you turn it over and it's like what to do when your mom or dad says be prepared.

And of course, it's step by step instructions on like writing down your name and phone number and like piece of paper and memorizing and knowing your address.

[Emily]

We didn't have that. I would remember that.

[Neil]

Oh, really? So yours was not the double flat? No.

Oh, okay. Well, that kind of ruins my next question, which was you also navigate multiple worlds and that you've written, you know, these these sex books and your business book, Burnout, which Brené calls Burnout, Burnout, Burnout, Burnout, Burnout, you know, was a remarkable contribution to like the canon of like business books. And also, I know it's not business per se, but I just mean that that that that world is like a different world.

Like, oh, right. Right.

[Emily]

So I was like promotion for my sex books was a very different from book promotion for the stress book.

[Neil]

I wanted to ask you what that felt like, you know, kind of, you know, going to a sex shops, for example, and like, you know, touring around come as you are right. You weren't doing that for the Burnout book. But also, could you also just connect the dots for us listening?

You really talk a lot there about the tunneling of emotions and burnout and then sex. And I thought, if you don't mind, just pairing those together for us. And then I had a couple of questions down this trip, because is it not true that you said during the book tour of Come As You Are when you were having no sex, as you've publicly written about, including in the introduction of Come Together and in a New York Times profile of you, you would end your days tired, exhausted, crying and sleeping like like it was kind of like that was the thing.

And I think a lot of people listening could definitely relate to the fact that they may or may not have as much sex as they want because of stress, exhaustion, burnout work. So tie these together for us. Let us get above it somehow.

And maybe steer us out of that if people are listening and relate to that feeling.

[Emily]

Yeah. So the usual first step, if your first book is about the science of women's sexual well-being, which is what Come As You Are is, the usual next step would either be a relationship book or a book about men. But as I was traveling around in 2015, talking to anyone who would listen about the science of women's sexual well-being, a weird thing started happening, which is women would come up to me after my talks all the time and be like, all that sex science is great.

Sure. Thank you for that. But you know, the one chapter that changed everything was a chapter about stress and emotion processing.

And I was like, great. I'm glad that helped you. And I went and told that I was surprised.

So I told Amelia and Amelia was like, am I allowed to swear?

[Emily]

Oh, of course. Yeah.

[Emily]

And then I was like, no shit. Remember when you taught me that stuff about how like stress exists in your body and is a physiological response? And you remember how that, you know, saved my life?

[Neil]

During her PhD dissertation?

[Emily]

While she was earning her doctorate, she was hospitalized twice for what the doctors called just stress. And I believe Amelia remains the only person who is not a man to finish that doctoral program, lying on the bathroom floor in agony, wondering if they're going to die. Kind of pain.

[Emily]

Wakes their husband up. We have to go to the emergency room.

[Emily]

It's the middle of the night. You're sitting in a red light. No one else is there.

And Amelia just goes, can you please go through the red light? Because they're just in so much pain. And so I'm a health educator.

My primary domain is sexuality. But there's a reason there's a chapter on stress and why I fought to keep that chapter, because my editor was like, very gently, is this related to sex? And I'm like, yeah, everything's related to sex because sex happens in a larger context.

So the reason why the second book is about stress is because readers kept telling me that was really important. And then Amelia told me, yeah, I remember when that actually saved my life, though. And I was like, well, I guess I should write a book about that.

But writing a book is terrible. So if we write it together, that'll make it easier. It did not.

It did not make it easier. It was just a very different experience. And so the second book is about stress because of that.

[Neil]

Okay, got it. Got it. And for those who say or feel or think that they aren't having the type of sex that they want because of stress, you would say.

[Emily]

Girl, same. Literally. So while I was writing Come As You Are, you might think that like thinking and reading and writing and talking about sex all day could be real sexy.

It is not. I was so stressed. I had never written a book before.

I didn't know that I would ever have another opportunity to write a book. So like the pressure felt very intense. So writing this sex book kind of destroyed my sex life.

I finished the book, things got better. I went on book tour, things got a lot worse. And I would try to follow my own advice.

So my own advice is, hey, responsive desire. Desire doesn't have to just like spontaneously poof emerge out of the blue. You're super horny.

And so you like go get your person. You can set up a time, take off your clothes, put your body in the bed. You let your skin touch your partner's skin.

And a lot of the time what happens is your body goes, oh, right. I really like this. I really like this person.

This was a great idea. So I try to follow my own advice, but I would put my body in the bed and let my skin touch my partner's skin. And I would literally sob and fall asleep.

And that's when I was like, I need more advice than I give in my own book, which I did what any good sex nerd does. I went to Google Scholar and I looked at the peer-reviewed research on how couples sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term. And what I found there contradicted the whole cultural discourse around sex and long-term relationships because the cultural discourse, particularly at the time, so this is 2015, 16, was either intimacy is the enemy of the erotic and you need distance to keep the spark alive, or intimacy is the foundation of the erotic and you need closeness to keep the spark alive.

And the reality is that people who self-identify as having extraordinary sex, having magnificent sex, optimal sex, I'm referring here specifically to the optimal sexual experiences research led by Peggy Kleinplotz in Ottawa, Canadians for the win, where she interviewed dozens of people who self-identify as having extraordinary sex. And these people do not talk about the spark. They do not talk about desire.

They talk about pleasure. Desire barely scrapes into the top 10 characteristics of great sex. They talk about pleasure.

They talk about liking the sex that's available in their relationship. They talk about authenticity and vulnerability and play and exploration. So I understand that a lot of people have desire as their sort of like goal.

And if you have desire as your goal, that's going to lead you down a path that doesn't go anywhere. If the reason I say pleasure is the measure is if you put pleasure at the center of your definition of sexual well-being.

[Emily]

All the other pieces are going to fall into place.

[Neil]

There's a lot.

[Emily]

This is a difficult idea.

[Emily]

It's a hard sell. It took me three drafts from my editor even to understand what I was talking about. So ask questions.

[Neil]

Lots of questions and good and partly because I have heard you speak so eloquently before on this topic, which is partly what made me so excited to bring it to our three books audience. You're speaking to book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians globally right now. So first up, two types of desire.

I just heard you say one of them. So there are two types of desire.

[Emily]

Right. Spontaneous is the kind that sort of Erika Moen, who's the cartoonist who illustrated Come As You Are, draws spontaneous desire as a lightning bolt to the genitals. Kaboom!

You just don't want it. And you show up to your partner with, I got the kaboom. Do you want a kaboom?

And life is simple and easy. So your partner definitely has exactly the same level of interest in sex as you in the exact same kind of sex as you literally all the time for decades. That's how that works, right?

No, no. What characterizes most long-term relationships? Yes, spontaneous desire.

I want to not make anyone feel broken just because they experience spontaneous desire. Spontaneous desire is 100% normal. You belong in the human community.

And a lot of people experience what researchers call responsive desire, where spontaneous desire emerges in anticipation of pleasure. Responsive desire emerges in response to pleasure.

[Neil]

Oh, my God. It so reminds me of the research on motivation, where people think motivation leads to action, but it turns out action leads to motivation.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

In other words, it is easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking rather than think yourself into a new way of acting.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

This seems to jive directly with that. There's two types of pleasure. But I've heard you say, quote, you, me, and the red undies Saturday at 2 p.m. Right. End quote. That's like, that's an Emily-ism, I think, is a seemingly unsexy plan until it's executed upon and potentially despite...

[Emily]

Right. You sort of drag yourself up the stairs. You throw the last toys in the toy box.

You've managed to get child care. Thank God. You're like, all right, let's go.

[Neil]

And also being forgiving of yourself. If indeed, let's go. Doesn't always happen.

It doesn't happen sometimes. But prioritizing it. And one thing that I'll just throw in the mix here as somebody who has young children is the prioritization of date nights.

It's so obvious and so cliche and hackneyed at this point. But it wasn't me that thought of it. It was my partner, Leslie, just wanting to have a once a week date night in our schedule.

Here's how it came about for us. We had a new baby. The baby is one hour or one day old.

And she's like, I want to plan a date night for this week. The first week of the baby's life. And I was like, what are you talking about?

We should at least wait a few weeks, months. You know what I mean? And she's like, the way the day is going to work is my mom's going to come over and watch the baby for half an hour while we walk around the block holding hands.

And because we did that with the first child's first week, we then, with some exceptions and so and so traveling, blah, blah, blah. But the weekly date has emerged in our relationship as something that we prioritize. And always I mention it and talk about it is because it has proved to become a vital energy source for our relationship and our system as a whole, including managing children.

And so it is. But yet it's so strange to me. But I totally understand that the majority of couples with young children simply do not date at all, period, for years.

You know, it's like it's just like it's just like sitting right there as like a low hanging fruit thing. And of course, it requires like the babysitter and so on. But like date nights.

[Emily]

But you like each other.

[Neil]

We very much like each other. And we very much love each other. Yeah.

[Emily]

Three characteristics of couples who's a state of strong sexual connection. Number one, they are friends who admire and trust each other.

[Neil]

Yeah. Yeah. And you define trust with was it Sue Johansson?

[Emily]

Sue Johnson's. Okay.

[Neil]

Not to be confused with the Canadian sex educator, Sue Johansson. I grew up listening to talk sex with Sue Sunday nights on the radio.

[Emily]

Total OG amazeballs. Sue Johnson is a was a god. Sue Johnson died last year, but her work on emotionally focused therapy changed the world.

No research is for everyone, but EFT is great. And the way she defined trust was the answer to the question. Are you there for me?

And R is an acronym for emotionally accessible, emotionally responsive, and emotionally engaged. Notice that all of them are emotional. Trust is emotional, not intellectual.

Are you there for me? And it is so beautiful to me that spontaneously and voluntarily in the first week of your brand new human's life, your partner was like, I want to make sure you and I get to spend time together that is not centered around these tiny humans who didn't choose to become alive. We did that.

But you and I need to stay us so that we can bring these humans up. That is gorgeous.

[Neil]

And she is gorgeous in every way. I wish you can meet her and you hopefully will meet her at some point. I admire her in millions of ways.

[Emily]

So I wrote this in like 2022. It was very obvious in the research, and I thought it would be utterly non-controversial. And then I started like book tour.

And it turns out there's a lot of people who have genuinely, especially, honestly, heterosexual people. I'm super worried about the straights. There's a lot of heterosexual people who have actually bought into the idea that friendship and sexual desire cannot coexist.

You either want your partner or like your partner. And liking sort of kills the wanting. And the opposite is true.

[Neil]

So this is interesting because what we're doing here is I'm just going to from the outside, sort of try to structure us a little bit. So what you've said is, first of all, there's two types of desire. We talked about spontaneous responsive.

You've also talked about you introduced this question. How do couples retain a strong sexual connection over the long term? We've got item number one, which is the friendship component, which is based on the trust component, which you quoted Sue Johnson.

And then you use the definition of trust being emotionally accessible, responsive, responsive or responsive, responsive and engaged. All three, we start with emotion, but also spell the word A-R-E. Are you there for me?

Are you there for me? A-R-E. Are you there for me?

And the second element, I believe, of this answer to this question, how do couples retain a strong sexual connection over the long term is, I've written down what I thought you were going to say, but I don't want to quote you to you.

[Emily]

Prioritizing sex. Deciding.

[Neil]

I wrote down prioritize. OK, OK.

[Emily]

Sex contributes something unique and important to the relationship. And this doesn't mean that sex stays a priority all the time. But because a couple has understands what sex contributes, they're motivated to find their way back to each other.

[Neil]

Yeah. And you even talk about prioritizing it above and beyond almost everything else. I mean, not not.

I've heard you describe in interviews, you know, that the prioritization of sex should take precedent over. Or in healthy long term couples.

[Emily]

I don't use the word should. Sex educators. We talk about like, stop shitting on yourself.

[Neil]

I love that phrase. Sorry, I should.

[Emily]

Would like us to imagine a world where your shared erotic connection is like a shared hobby. It's like your favorite sports team or your favorite musician. We're like you talk about it kind of all the time because you're both really into it.

You both think it's a fun game to play. You talk about one really well last time and like what you're sort of hoping is going to happen next time and you're making plans about it. Couples share all kinds of hobbies.

Often when I talk about sex in these terms of like, yeah, schedule it is actually a really good idea. You people think that if you have to talk about it, that means there's something wrong. On the contrary, couples who have great sex lives talk about sex all the time.

So this stuff doesn't go wrong in the same way that you communicate every day about like what your plans are and who's going to pick up who from where. Like you talk about your sex life with each other as a sort of like ongoing. This is part of our shared connection.

And so we talk about it.

[Neil]

Right. Okay. So the prioritization and the friendship trust basis are the two ingredients for a long term sexual connection that lasts based on the research.

[Emily]

Okay, no third one.

[Neil]

Oh, there's a third one.

[Emily]

It is the most difficult one.

[Neil]

And that is the thing you just described. Sounds pretty difficult. But okay, what's more difficult than that?

[Emily]

Yeah, the more difficult one is the reason why the second one sounds difficult, which is the couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term recognize that they have been following somebody else's rules about who they're supposed to be a sexual people and what their sex life is supposed to be like. And they decide to stop doing that. They decide to get serious about understanding who they truly are as a sexual person.

They decide to get profoundly curious about who their partner truly is as a sexual person and what their erotic connection is like in this season of their relationship. And so they create a sexual connection that is highly personalized and right for them in this moment without any reference to any outside person's opinion about how you're supposed to be doing the sex thing in your relationship.

[Neil]

Which I imagine is probably harder than ever to do given the increasing homogenization of beauty standards and certainly porn, things like that.

[Emily]

I don't know if it's harder than it ever was because fortunately, we do live in a world where sex advice is taking diversity into account, taking variability into account. We're going to talk about the Hype Report, which is really like where qualitative research, understanding of women's sexuality in particular, and the diversity of women's sexual experiences was born in 1976. So on the one hand, yeah, porn is many things.

There are many things I could say about porn, but the one thing porn super is not is sex education. My sort of standard line you may have heard before is that learning to have sex by watching porn is like learning to drive by watching Formula One racing. Those are professionals on a closed course with a pit crew.

Is someone rotating your tires that often?

[Neil]

Oh, my gosh. OK, this is I have a lot more here and I'm going to save them for your second book, which you've already nicely introduced for us. But I'm just going to give the people the people listening the I'm holding in a bookstore feeling it is indeed, as you mentioned, the Hite Report by is it Shere Hite?

[Emily]

Shere Hite. Like Shere Hite, yeah.

[Neil]

Yeah. And it's like C-H-E-R, but she spells it.

[Emily]

S-H-E-R-E?

[Neil]

E-R-E.

[Emily]

And her friends called her Sherry.

[Neil]

OK, Sherry.

And the last name is spelled H-I-T-E. So the Hype Report is the H-I-T-E report. The Hype Report, published in 1976 by Dell, a revised edition, which I have published in 2004 by the wonderful Seven Stories Press.

Shout out to Seven Stories Press. One of the foremost purpose over profit publishers in the world. They're really an exceptional publishing.

They give free copies of all their books. Oh, shout out to the old version you have.

[Emily]

I have a first edition.

[Neil]

Oh, nice, nice. OK, OK, good. That takes that off my list of because, you know, what I do after every conversation is I usually give my guests a first or signed edition of one of the three most formative books.

But now I know not to give you that one. OK, and so this has been called the 30th bestselling book of all time. Because it has sold over 50 million copies.

It's a dark purple cover with a white square with rounded corners on the top that says and almost like a sultry, if I can say that, like a seraphy sultry font, like where the the caps look like kind of like legs in some way. At least it looked like that to me. Maybe I was seeing things.

It says a nationwide study of female sexuality in green. And then the bottom of the cover has a little text bubble, which that's quite a bit of text. I'm going to read it out to you.

It says more than 3000 women describe in their own words their most intimate feelings about sex, including what they like and don't like, how orgasm really feels with and without intercourse and how it feels not to have an orgasm during sex, the importance of clitoral stimulation and masturbation and the greatest pleasures and frustrations of their sexual lives. That's all on the cover here. Height lived 77 long years from 1942 to 2000.

Twice he was an American born German sex educator and feminist. Her work was sometimes criticized for being based on self-reports. And she also received death threats, which led to her renouncing her American citizenship.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

What does this 1976 book declare? It declares that orgasm is easy and strong for women. Given the right stimulation, it declares that most women have orgasm most easily during masturbation or clitoral stimulation by hand.

That sex as we define it is a cultural institution, not a biological one, which I didn't understand what that meant. So I'm hoping you can explain. Oh, yeah.

And that attitudes must change to include the stimulation women desire. Dewey Decimal Heads, you can follow this one under 306.74 social sciences slash cultural institutions slash sexual relations. Emily, please tell us about your relationship with The Hite Report by Shere Hite.

[Emily]

So it's important to note that my copy has all the same text on the front, except it also says with a new cultural interpretation of female sexuality.

[Neil]

Oh, one extra line.

[Emily]

Cultural interpretation. It was new in 1976. But I actually I quote The Hite Report in Come As You Are, because Shere Hite offers a definition of normal sex that is essentially pleasure.

It's about liking what's happening. It's not about what behaviors you engage in. It's not even about whether or not you have an orgasm.

It is not about frequency. It's like, do you like it? Are you doing things you like?

And are you there because you want to be there? And this is a thing I have done in my classes. I'll read Shere Hite's definition of normal sexuality from 1976, and I'll use another sex manual's definition of normal sex from actually 1926.

So 50 years earlier, which is penis and vagina sex with simultaneous orgasm. And I ask my students which one of these definitions, the definition that's only 40 years old at the time, or the definition that is approaching 100 years old. Unanimously, my students were raised with the definition of sex that conforms with norms from 100 years ago, rather than from this book that was published the year before I was born.

So here's my personal story of discovering the Hite Report and sex research in general. My very first day at college, I got on my bike and I went to the library because that's the kind of nerd I am. I don't know why, but I went to the sex section of the University of Delaware Campus Library, and I picked up the Height Report because it was the biggest book on the shelf.

I opened it up, I sat at a table in the library, and I just started reading.

[Emily]

And jaw-dropping, jaw-dropping, this book.

[Emily]

Hearing in women's own words what their sexual pleasure looked like, and felt like, their relationships with men, the ways that men were surprised by what worked for them. This is before, like I had barely ever made out with anyone at this point in my life. I was just really intellectually curious about sex.

A funny thing about the copy in my library is that a big chunk of pages were sliced out. So I never actually read the whole thing for several years.

[Neil]

Wow. Interesting. And this awoke in you the interest that carries you forward to this day, 25 years later?

[Emily]

I wonder why did I go to the library and look for just the biggest book on sex that I could find? Why?

[Neil]

On the first day of school.

[Emily]

Like I didn't have classes yet. The first thing I did when I had access to a university library was go right to the sex research section.

[Neil]

Well, I mean, this is a natural thing. That's what's beautiful about libraries and bookstores in general, is that the wandering tendency helps awaken our own curiosities to ourselves. I mean, how many times I'm speaking about personal experience here, like I've been wandering through a bookstore, there's literature, there's some business, erotica.

I'll just bump into that. I'll be like, Oh, I didn't know there was a section. You glance at it.

You're like, Yeah, there's these... What's this? Of course, you pick up stuff that's naturally interesting to you.

And so I love that that happened to you. And I love that the nerdy, bicycling first day student went to the library and then wandered around and found this book and then picked it off and started reading it.

[Emily]

Yeah. You'll note I sat at a table and read it. I was too embarrassed to check it out.

[Neil]

Oh, interesting. Yeah.

[Emily]

I still had that thing in my head about like, it's embarrassing to check out this book that has the word sexuality on the cover.

[Neil]

Yeah. Oh, right. Even though it's kind of hidden a little bit because it's called The Height Report.

Yeah. But yeah, it's an interesting book. By the way, has there ever been anything like this for men?

Like, is there a Height Report equivalent?

[Emily]

There was an immediate follow up, The Hite Report on Men.

[Neil]

Oh.

[Emily]

And yeah, it was that book.

[Neil]

Funny, you don't hear about that.

[Emily]

That got Cher Height the death threats.

[Neil]

Oh, really?

[Emily]

So the methodology, Shere Hite is not a formally trained sex researcher. This is a qualitative, she mailed questionnaires, physically mailed questionnaires. And people sent her responses either written by hand or recorded on a cassette tape.

[Neil]

Wow.

[Emily]

They would send her these cassette tapes.

[Neil]

Well, how do you have the trust of people to do this though? To send thousands of people like surveys about their intimate lives, seems a bit like, you know, like, where does that come from?

[Emily]

She advertised in women's magazines.

[Neil]

Okay. Okay. It was like, I'm a researcher.

Here's what I'm studying. Help me out.

[Emily]

Yeah. Dakota Fanning, I guess, sort of, I think it's Dakota Fanning. It might not be Dakota Fanning.

It might be the other famous Dakota. Oh, my God. I feel really bad.

[Neil]

We'll put it in the show notes. Don't worry.

[Emily]

There is actually a sort of a memoir. It's not an autobiography. It's not like a biographical movie, but it's a memoir of this time in Cher Height's life of when she was publishing these books.

And it talks about some of her research methodology, the impact that receiving these answers had on her as a person and a professional. But she was just, all right, we're going to backtrack because my formal training that would come in the years that followed, 1995, me showing up at the University of Delaware library. I went to Indian University, which is the home of the Kinsey Institute.

It's called the Height Report after what was colloquially known as the Kinsey Reports, which were these massive best-selling tomes of Kinsey's research on both male and female sexuality is the language that was used.

[Neil]

Circa 1940s?

[Emily]

Yep, 1947 is the male volume. 1953 is the female volume.

[Neil]

Mm-hmm.

[Emily]

And Kinsey's book originates from him being the biology professor teaching one of the lectures in the marriage and family class in the 1920s and 30s at Indiana University. And his students would come up after class or come to his office hours and ask questions about sex that he could not answer. He went and looked for research-based answers because that's the kind of guy he was, could not find any because there weren't any.

And so he did the simple thing of turning the questions around on his students and interviewed, he and his team interviewed thousands of people and asked them really structured, it's much more formalized than here's open-ended questions, tell me whatever you want to tell me. Mm-hmm. So that's the origin of the way this kind of research was informed.

So 20 plus years later, Scherheit is just collecting qualitative research, just asking people questions. Tell me your story. Sure.

What is this like for you?

[Neil]

Yeah. How do you masturbate? What does an orgasm feel like?

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

The book is very detailed.

[Emily]

Very. There are so many questions and she includes so many different answers. And we live in a world of TikTok, right?

Where people can cut together a video where they make it seem like, you know, man on the street asking people questions and they can cut it in a way that makes it sound like literally everybody gives exactly the same answer. And that's the only answer that anybody gives. So selection is a bias.

And one of the critiques people have had at the time is that Scherheit was being selective in what she reported. No, when you read it, and when I read it now and I compare it to the stories hundreds, thousands of women have told me, this is women's experience still. This is and we know like there's so much research now on how women's orgasms happen.

And it's all like the clitoris is the hokey pokey. It's what it's all about for a lot of women. Not all, obviously, because people vary tremendously.

And she talks about that variety. She even talks about intersectional issues of how socioeconomic level and race and being racialized in America influences women's experience of their sexuality. So she did the same thing with men.

And the result was men were talking about being really worried about measuring up to standards. And it made men look really vulnerable and concerned. And she would go on all these talk shows, she'd be put on a panel where she's the only woman and the only expert and a bunch of just like douchebags.

And they all be like, that's not my experience. I'm not worried about measuring up and and I'm not worried about being manly enough. And like, obviously, these super duper were because that's why they were there to argue with a woman on TV about sex, like how?

Because it is a direct contradiction of the rules of masculinity to acknowledge that vulnerability of being worried about whether or not you are good enough as a lover. And it was the response to the men's volume that started the death threats and is why she moved to Europe and ultimately renounced her US citizenship.

[Neil]

Right. Yeah. Even to go to renounce your citizenship.

So for you, 1995, Delaware Library, it seems like this was part of your sexual education. How do we teach kids about sex today?

[Emily]

How ought we to or how do we?

[Neil]

How ought we to? I'm thinking about this quite personally. Yeah. Like I have four young kids, and they are all identifying as male today.

And I worry about Internet pornography. I have bought vintage Playboys and tried to leave them around. And that did not go over well because then my kid is like, you know, flip it through a Playboy and my wife's like, what are you doing here?

And I was like, well, I thought this was better than, you know. So I'm just like, how ought we to have? How ought we to be teaching our kids about sex today?

[Emily]

A step one is to teach them about their own basic bodily autonomy, that they have a right to say yes and no about how and when they their body is touched. That includes how and when their parents touch their bodies. If you're like, can I give you a hug?

And your kid is like, I don't want to hug. A lot of adults first response is I'm going to hug you anyway.

[Neil]

I think it's really funny. I know. It's like the tickly uncle kind of thing, right?

[Emily]

Yeah. Oh, every kid says no. And like, they're going to go through a phase where they're like, I'm going to say no for the sake of saying no, because I'm going to test this boundary.

Are you being real when you say that my body belongs to me and I truly get to decide when and how I am touched?

[Neil]

Amen. And that is so crucial and so new for a lot of people, including me, I will say. I read this book, I want to say five years ago called C is for Consent by Eleanor Morrison.

And it's so good. And honestly, then I since then I like go to my niece and I'm like, which I used to just hug. I used to just hug her every time I saw her and left her.

And now I say, Lexi, do you want to hug? And 75% of the time, it's yes. I'm proud to say 25% that he's like, no.

And I'll be like, high five. You'd be like, yeah, well, then I'm not remainder of 25%. It's like 75%.

And then 25% she just doesn't not want to have any physical interaction, which I have to respect for the other intimacy to be of any value.

[Emily]

Don't you want every man in her life? Yeah, the rest of her life to respect when she's like, no, man.

[Neil]

100%. And this is like, I'm fully confessing this as a father. This is like, I've gone from zero to one on this.

This is I've totally didn't understand it. And now I think to whatever extent I'm able to with my current faculties

[Emily]

The current narrative around children is their your possession

[Neil]

Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. There's an emerging body of work called Sovereign Child, which I've started to look into a little bit.

It's very interesting. But then there's also homeschooling. Anyway, parenting itself has become this like really.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Kind of octopussy.

[Emily]

Let the record show I am child free by choice. I'm not the ideal person to answer questions about like how to raise kids, but I know.

[Neil]

No, no. Step one, you nailed it. Body autonomy is step one.

Okay, now step two.

[Emily]

Step two is that rule that's true for you. That's true for everybody, you know. Everybody, you know, gets to choose how and when they are touched, which means you ask first.

And if they say no, you will listen to their no.

[Neil]

Absolutely. Okay. So we're talking autonomy and consent as like primary education.

[Emily]

And.

[Neil]

Okay.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Okay. That's great. And that obviously the cool thing about that is it starts at any age.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

It isn't like where I am now, which is I'm like kind of like waiting for moments to like, you know, slipping conversational bits. But this is like.

[Emily]

Do you have to drive your kids places?

[Neil]

Yeah. I find that the non eye contact conversation is the best.

[Emily]

Captive audience.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Emily]

Your next step, especially when they get into the sort of tween age is to talk about your journey around your gender identity.

[Neil]

Oh, interesting.

[Emily]

The ways.

[Neil]

That's the step two.

[Emily]

You were lied to about what it means to be the gender you identify as the ways that worked for you, the ways you struggled to measure up and the shit you let go of. And freed yourself to be like, actually, it turns out that like it can be like this and you, child, get to decide how you want to be this kind of person or even whether you want to be.

[Neil]

Absolutely. Oh, man. Yeah.

This is so healthy because if I'm interpreting this properly, I think I already do. I think I already do this because I am very open. I'm 45.

I'm very open with my kids about how I did not like my body or my genitals. And I thought they were, you know, wrong size and wrong colored. And, you know, I'm sure this is very common, but for like 30 plus years of my life, you know, like, like, I'm very open about this with my kids.

I don't sort of couch it in gender specific terms, but I do talk it and I do talk openly about it from a body positivity perspective. I'm like, you know, I always thought my penis was too small. Oh, my gosh.

I can't believe how many years I ended up worrying about that. Like, I'll just throw that out there. Right.

Because what I'm trying to do.

[Emily]

Dad, shut up about your penis. You're doing it right. Peggy Ornstein, Girls and Sex and Boys and Sex.

Two really good books about like teenagers in particular and how they're being trained around sexuality.

[Neil]

The two books are called Girls and Sex and Boys and Sex.

[Emily]

Those are two books. One is pink and one is blue. Guess which?

[Neil]

Girls and Sex and Boys and Sex by Peggy Ornstein. Ornstein. OK.

O-R-E-N-S-T-I-E-N.

[Emily]

S-T-E-I-N. I think I could be wrong.

[Neil]

Yeah. I before E except after C. Ornstein.

I got it.

[Emily]

And.

[Neil]

Or Neil.

[Emily]

Yeah. She talks about how her own mom would talk positively about her own sex life. And as a teenager, Peggy would be like, oh, please stop.

Stop talking to me about how good dad is. And. But.

[Neil]

Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

[Emily]

But.

[Neil]

Yeah. But.

[Emily]

That creates a model in her mind of what it's supposed to be like.

[Neil]

Well, you know, that is so interesting because Leslie and I, you know, will kiss and, you know, touch and stuff like that. Right. But but I never saw my parents doing that.

And so in my first marriage where my wife left me for somebody else, I would have probably stayed in that relationship because I just thought it was normal to not be so sexually connected because I didn't see that. So what I'm hearing in step two or maybe step two B or maybe step three is like there's a modeling component to healthy sexual connection.

[Emily]

Yeah. You're.

[Neil]

Right.

[Emily]

Allowed to talk about things that your kids react to, of course, staying age appropriate and not disclosing things that like they don't need to know specifically what all y'all get up to.

[Neil]

No, no, nor does anyone.

[Emily]

But they need to know that you prioritize your partner's pleasure.

[Neil]

Oh, interesting. They need to know that you prioritize your partner's pleasure.

[Emily]

Because you're building a model in their mind.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Emily]

This is when we get into like the teen years when like they're approaching, starting to have their own sexual relationships with other people.

[Neil]

Right, right, right.

[Emily]

Talking about. So my Amelia has three step kids. And because I am a relative, like I could equip them with all kinds of language.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Emily]

So Amelia sat down, which with each one of them, as they got to like third of ninth grade, I was like, this is a condom. This is how you use a condom. This is lube.

This is why lube is important. This is exactly how you use it. This is the box where we're going to keep all of the sex supplies that you might need for safer sex.

You can just go and get it anytime you need it.

[Neil]

Oh, wow.

[Emily]

Your bodily autonomy really matters. Your pleasure really matters. And you're going to take care of your partner too.

[Neil]

Well, I would be afraid of doing that in ninth grade as like way too early. Like I would be probably my instinct, but I have kids much younger than that, but.

[Emily]

Yeah, yeah. And it's developmentally appropriate. People grow at different rates.

We're at a place where only about half of 18 year olds have had partnered sex. So like you're giving this information before they're using it.

[Neil]

Mm hmm.

[Emily]

But I like the piece that comes before talking about partnered sex is them being able to recognize what pleasure feels like in their body. And I'm not necessarily talking about sexual pleasure. They need to be like, what is it like when you eat your like, what's your favorite food?

Kind of love favorite stuff, right? What does it feel like when you eat your favorite food? Like what happens in your body?

That's your you're like, that's delicious. What does that feel like? Get real curious to like learn about their internal experience of pleasure and joy.

If they play a sport, like if they succeed at whatever sport thing they do, like what does it feel like in your body when you win a game or when you score a goal? Like what was that like for you in that moment? Learning what pleasure feels like so that they can identify it when it happens inside them.

If they had. So I had a friend whose mom was real, real sex positive and just truly delightful. He had his first ejaculation, humping his mattress, which is the thing he'd been doing since he was a little boy.

But all of a sudden, instead of just like humping the mattress and having this pleasurable feeling, this stuff came out. And he truly believed he had broken something. And he ran to his mom. Bless this mother. He ran to his mom like, I was doing this thing and all this stuff came out. And I think I broke my penis.

And this spectacular mom was like, explained what happened and it's completely normal.

[Emily]

And we're just going to run laundry and it's fine.

[Emily]

So hopefully you have the kind of relationship where like, you can explain ahead of time that this is the kind of thing that happens. I love how there's so many books. There's so many great books.

I don't know what all the ages of your kids are. If you want to start at the very beginning, there's What Makes a Baby.

[Neil]

What Makes a Baby. I have four steps written down here. There's the body autonomy piece.

There's sharing your personal journey on your gender identity, but also I'm assuming your body positivity is how I was sharing my stories. But that's fair and fine.

[Emily]

Gender is one of the primary obstacles to people feeling like they have permission to go ahead and like their body just the way it is. Yeah.

[Neil]

What do you mean? Sorry. Gender is one of the primary issues.

[Emily]

Well, like you were saying with porn, there's a very specific and narrow culturally constructed aspirational aesthetic ideal for how a woman type person is supposed to look and how a man type person is supposed to look. And there's only the two, obviously. Haven't you read Trump's executive orders?

There's only two. There's not only two. Hopefully, everyone listening to this has met a trans person by now or a non-binary person and recognizes that there's not.

[Neil]

A hundred percent.

[Emily]

Only two.

[Neil]

Abhorrent to be doing this in 2025 and at that level.

[Emily]

Yeah. I find it very difficult to talk about because I get so angry. But there are these very narrowly defined standards of what you're supposed to look like.

And they are deliberately impossible, unachievable. And so there's this gap between who you are and who the world is telling you you are supposed to be. And you have this project.

[Neil]

Yeah. They don't have any hair and I have hair everywhere. They are one color and I'm the other color.

They, you know.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Yeah, exactly.

[Emily]

They have muscles here and no fat there. And oh my God, their dicks are so huge.

[Neil]

Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.

[Emily]

All of it is absurd and silly and designed to make you continue to torture your body into conforming with this ideal.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Emily]

Which the closer you get to it, the more they're going to get. Because if you get real close, they're going to be like, no, but your biceps need to be bigger than that. So that every time you look in the mirror, all you can see is the things that are heavy air quotes wrong.

[Neil]

This is like kind of tipping into the trillion dollar beauty industry and the increasingly normalization of incredibly sophisticated techniques that were almost essentially unheard of mere a decade ago in terms of like, you know, Botox and plastic this and changing face shapes and planing and hair removals and with no judgment on those who do it. And I myself, I'm taking a pill for my hair right now. You know what I mean?

But I'm just saying like, yeah, you tip into that world and you recognize that it's a pretty bottomless pit.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

And unfortunately, one that many people fall into.

[Emily]

And that bottomless pit represents the emotional experience of people who are pursuing it. There is a bottomless pit of I'm going to go ahead and use the word self-hatred rather than self-acceptance, because the wildest stuff happens when you pause in your pursuit of the ideal and consider the possibility that the body you have is already worth loving.

[Neil]

I know, I know. Oh, wow. That's so beautiful.

And you know what? One of my very first posts on my blog 1000 awesome things in 2008 was called yellow teeth. And I was like, given an awesome thing shout out to like, gap teeth and yellow teeth and things are like artificially white.

And we don't want to find you like face down on a motel room floor with a pack of crest white strips in your mouth. And I was going on my like blogger nine 2008 blogger rant. And to this day, like to this day, like, like, obviously, almost 20 years later, I saw people coming to me, you know, my favorite awesome thing is like what they're like, that one yellow teeth.

I was always thinking my teeth were too yellow. And I was like, you just made it a good thing instead of a bad thing. And I mean, my future prognostication skills are not necessarily awesome.

But I will say I'm expecting that when I'm in my 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. That one person with the gap teeth, they're going to be the prettiest of all because they that's something that you won't be able to get. You know what I mean?

Like, it's like, you know, well, everyone's else's are straight or whatever.

[Emily]

And there are cultures where a big gap in your front teeth is like the ultimate beauty marker.

[Neil]

Ah, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah. So step one, here are the collective works of Yava Bley.

Okay, who's that?

[Emily]

Yaba Blay is a public intellectual who studies racialized beauty.

[Neil]

Wow. And how's the last name spelt there?

[Emily]

B-L-A-Y.

[Neil]

Wow. Okay. Yeah, we'll put that in the show notes.

Step two, journey, gender identity. Step three, healthy sexual connection with your partner. You know, prioritizing your partner's pleasure, talking about that, being open by that.

Step four, recognizing pleasure in yourself and in your body. But we haven't got to yet. And kind of like, I guess where I was starting, which is like, you know, letter W here, when you are helpfully taking us through the larger conversation is like, what I'm worried about is like pornography.

Because now in fifth grade in Canada, everyone's equipped with a school laptop. Everyone has to sign a form, whether you want to or not. And by the way, it's a Chromebook.

Of course, Google has got its tentacles in the public school system. And everyone has to sign a contract at home. When you get the thing saying.

No one's responsible, basically, for what happens.

[Emily]

Oh, yeah. The school abdicates all responsibility for whether or not your child runs into sexually explicit media on the Internet.

[Neil]

Well, exactly. But also the firewalls are only at school. You know what I mean?

So so I'm like, this is going to happen soon for me, where I've got kids kind of forcibly given computers from the public education system with the waiver saying whatever happens on them happens on them. And I know boys who are 10. Yeah, OK.

Because I was one.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

You know, and so we were clamoring to look at anything with nudity.

[Emily]

Sure.

[Neil]

You know, and so I'm like, I'm very afraid because I also, you know, see pornography today. And I'm like.

[Emily]

And pornography today is super different from pornography when we were kids.

[Neil]

I'm like, I'm like, where do we go? How do we teach? What do we show?

What do we share? What do we leave lying around the house? And that's kind of where I got to my like, maybe false step.

I'm like buying some vintage 70s pornos. There's one there's many wonderful bookstores in Toronto, but there's a four story bookstore called BMV in Toronto. They own their building.

Thank goodness. So that's going to be there forever. Baby blue painted.

And it's like, you know, the fourth floor is like just graphic novels. And in the basement, they have many things. But one of the things they have is like vintage mags, vintage magazines, all like, you know, perfectly kept in mint condition, blah, blah, blah.

But it's like a vintage magazine. So I'm like, oh, my gosh, I should grab some of these for when my kids are interested. And they'd rather than find these than those.

But that's the part I don't know how and when and where to teach if you can. And that's what I'm that's really what I'm really truly worried about is internet pornography at too young of an age and too hardcore of viewing. Yeah, that's that's my I think about that regularly as a big worry.

[Emily]

Obviously, keep safe search on. That's not going to stop everything. But that's a starting place to like set limits on what they're likely to be exposed to.

One of the difficulties is that safe search is probably also going to obstruct sex education. But like, that's why the actual human conversations are so very important. We are living in a golden age of sex education books for kids.

The collected works of Corey Silverberg is spectacular.

[Neil]

I know Corey Silverberg. Yeah, Silverberg. I know those books.

[Emily]

Their books are so good.

[Neil]

Yeah. Are those those books like How Are Babies Made?

[Emily]

What Makes a Baby.

[Neil]

What Makes a Baby.

[Emily]

Yeah, I saw them read What Makes a Baby out loud at a conference back in like 2014. And everybody was like in tears because without gendering anything, it's just like a uterus exists and sperm exists and it comes from somewhere and like this is how a baby grows. And people wait.

And the last sentence of it is who waited for you?

[Neil]

Oh, that's so beautiful. We've given that book as a gift many times to friends that have had surrogates because everyone's got such different birth stories. And that book is almost universally applicable.

So the collective works of Corey Silverberg, you've pointed me to what other books should I be buying here today? Give me two or three like, you know, I don't want to give my kids like, here you go, son, you know, and here's like 50 books. But what are the top two?

[Emily]

Give them all the things. Have a medical encyclopedia in the house so that they can look up stuff.

[Neil]

Yeah, that's a good idea.

[Emily]

Like they can find it.

[Neil]

We do have a gigantic old dictionary that I put yellow sticky notes in anywhere that anybody looked up of. So first it was like, you know, fart and then like, you know, racial slurs and like, you know, because I want them to learn that this dictionary is like a safe space for you to like look up words that you've heard on the playground. So now we have this thick red dictionary that I got in someone's like garbage pile and it's got yellow stickies outside of like if someone were to see it, they'd be like, whoa, your kids are really, you know, have dirty minds.

But what I've tried to do is the dictionary serves its function as a safe place to find the meaning of anything you hear.

[Emily]

As a hyperverbal kid, I was always asking what a big word I stumbled into meant, and that included the word tryst and the word vagina. And the answers, broadly speaking, were look it up, which I did. I learned a lot of words, looking them up in the dictionary.

[Neil]

So smart. So have a medical dictionary around. Check out the Collected Words of Corey Silverberg.

Any anything else?

[Emily]

Erica Moen and Matthew Nolan wrote a book. I'm pretty sure the title is just Let's Talk About It, which is for sort of like tween teen age. There's a brilliant, inclusive, hilarious book called Wait, What?

Which is written by Heather Carina. It's called Wait, What? A Comic Book Guide to Relationships, Bodies and Growing Up.

[Neil]

You know what? That title is so good.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Because that is, I remember very clearly in my head for like fifth grade, sixth grade, seventh grade, having this like, what feeling around my growing understanding of what sex was. And I was like, what? Like what?

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Everyone?

[Emily]

Really?

[Neil]

Every kid?

[Emily]

When I was in like fifth grade, sixth grade, it was all about biomedical facts is like all I could get access to. And with a book like Wait, What? It's about like relationships and identity.

And it goes so much deeper and is so much more about like what sex is like in people's actual lives.

[Neil]

Okay.

[Emily]

So much better.

[Neil]

A comic book called Wait, What? Okay. You've given us a great literary catalog here.

[Emily]

A character called Weird Platypus.

[Speaker 5]

Weird Platypus.

[Neil]

Okay. That's a good teaser for people when they figure it out. By the way, page 11 of the Hite Report, I should say.

So this is like the intro to the 2004 edition. So I don't know if you have this in yours or not. But she opens by saying women have come a long way in the last half of the 20th century from a time when the existence of the female orgasm was doubted.

And when women were effectively owned as property in marriage, the landmark victory such as the 1995 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Women signed by 140 countries, which proclaims a woman's autonomy over her own body. However, despite today's shrill insistence that women have all their rights now and sexualities all over the place, there is still some way to go.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

How prophetic, because it seems as though there has been an actual backtracking in a lot of places.

[Emily]

I get hard for me to talk about because I get so angry. I'm here in America. It's real bad.

It's real bad. One of the end goals for Project 2025 is removing access to birth control. That's how regressive the agenda is.

It's bad.

[Neil]

Sorry, stupid question. Why is that? What is the thinking behind that?

[Emily]

I mean, there's a lot of different... One is it's a fundamentalist Christian reactionary. Women need to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.

And then there's the autocracy explanation. So in 2020, how did you spend your lockdown? I spent my lockdown reading books about autocracy, fascism, and dictatorships.

And one of the things I learned is...

[Neil]

Did you read Autocracy, Inc.?

[Emily]

Oh, that was absolutely on the list.

[Neil]

That's... I'm like a quarter of the way through it. Really liking it.

[Emily]

My favorite one was actually... Yeah. And Applebomb.

Whose new book... Oh, so Autocracy, Inc. is the new one.

The Twilight of Democracy is the one I read in 2020.

[Neil]

Okay. Both. I think at least the new one's a Pulitzer Prize winner too.

Autocracy, Inc. Very small. Heather's pick up here in Canada for Indigo people.

So you spent... You weren't making sourdough.

[Emily]

No, I was worried that Trump might be reelected. And I wanted to understand what my role as a sex educator would be under autocratic rule. So I read all these books.

My favorite one was Defying Hitler, written contemporaneously by Sebastian Hoeffner, to explain what was happening in Germany to an Anglophone audience so that they could understand. I believe his wife was Jewish. And so they got refugee status in the UK.

And that's how we ended up being a journalist there. And so I read all these books. And what I discovered is that across history and across geography, every autocracy, dictatorship, fascism is going to have a them.

The them is going to be different depending on the culture. But all of them depend on a misogynist, patriarchal gender binary. Why?

Because they are relying on the production of enough of the right kind of babies by women who need to be obedient to their reproductive role, therefore. And they need enough men to serve the capitalist machine and then become cannon fodder.

[Emily]

I know that's dark. And that is...

[Emily]

When you look across even just Europe, even just the last 100 years, you see the ways that gender is enforced and punished when people fall short. Of their reproductive role.

[Neil]

Because what you're saying, if I'm understanding, is that in order to maintain the autocracy, which benefits the extremely small minority of people ruling and controlling it, there needs to be a system that...

[Emily]

A population that generates wealth for the elite.

[Neil]

Ah, hmm.

[Emily]

We are the livestock.

[Neil]

Right. Right. It's weird.

Not weird. It's shocking how quickly brazen things like Mark Zuckerberg announcing censorship control, taken off of Metta, wearing a $905,000 watch. And the tech founders all at the inauguration in the front row. And Elon Musk tweeting things like, spent the weekend feeding UCEDD into the woodchipper, which of course is the richest person in the world, taking money away from the literal poorest people in the world.

And it's just like right there. Yeah. It's like right there. It's like there's nothing hidden. I would have assumed that when Hitler came to power, I wasn't around.

But I was like, I would assume there was a bit of a surprise factor. Yeah.

[Emily]

One of the things I really liked about Defying Hitler is that the author makes it very clear that people knew exactly what the agenda was.

[Neil]

Right. Right.

[Emily]

Like people... I'm going to cut out the various stories because this is not the central thing.

[Neil]

No, no. But it's very interesting.

[Emily]

People afterwards could be like, we had no idea what was going on. We had no idea. Yeah, they did.

Everybody knew. It was right out there in the open.

[Neil]

Yeah. You know what you might love if you don't already know it is there's this incredible um, uh, drawn and quarterly produced graphic novel that took the guy Jason Lutz, L-U-T-E-S, like 22 years to make it. And it's called Berlin.

And it is the... Do you know this graphic novel? Yeah.

About like...

[Emily]

I'm married to a cartoonist. Yeah.

[Neil]

Oh, yeah. That you met on OkCupid. Shout out to OkCupid in 2011.

Because I was on OkCupid back then. Oh my gosh. Yeah.

OkCupid. Like I met the most interesting people. That was like a very...

[Emily]

They had the best algorithm.

[Neil]

It was like, well, it was Christian Rutter, right? Who originally ran Sparknotes.

[Emily]

I didn't know that.

[Neil]

Did you not know that? Okay. So Sparknotes. Remember that old like quiz site? Are you...

Like we would in first year of college be like, oh, uh, you know, so and so is the 77% slut and so and so is like 95%. Oh, that totally makes sense. And I'm a 48.

You know, like there was like all these like little surveys that, you know, college kids would love to forward around to each other. And that was a site called Sparknotes, which evolved into OkCupid. Yeah, cool.

Well, nice that I can somewhat add a little asterisk and backstory to your How We Met story to your incredible cartoonist partner, who also was able to set us up with the internet for today. We don't want to go too far down that rabbit hole, but we will also...

[Emily]

But like if people are looking to understand what the fuck is going wrong, that's sort of like, that's why. That's why they're like, there's only two sexes, your biological reproductive role. That's why.

It's because we're, uh, we're the livestock. It feels yucky in my body to say that out loud. So let me, I just want to create a moment of like, that was yucky.

That felt yucky in my body to say out loud. It probably felt kind of yucky to other people to hear it. Like we could add on a whole level of like the ableism of my autism and the context of Nazis, but like OkCupid back before it was an app, when it was a fucking website.

I met my husband. Let me tell you the How We Met story in order to like get rid of the yucky in my body. Cause like my brain is like, I'm going to lie down and cry now because it's so bad.

So let me tell you about how I met my husband. Um, my therapist challenged me. She said, you are not doing everything you could be doing to meet people.

And I was like, I am. And the way I proved I was doing everything I could is by following OkCupid's mathematically established advice for how to use OkCupid most effectively. Right.

Why did it take me so long to get diagnosed on the spectrum? So, uh, so Rich was one of the people and, uh, we were chatting. I had just gotten home from work and we were chatting on the website.

And, uh, I was like, I'm hungry. I got to make dinner. I'm tired from work.

And I really feel like, and he's like, I could come over and bring you pierogies. And I was like, okay. And I met him outside my building with my 70 pound hound lab mix named Green Bean, who I adopted from a shelter.

Uh, about eight months previously, he had been in the shelter for four or five years having been removed from his home because he was being tortured by the teenage boys in the house. So he did not like men. Uh, so I had this dog.

I met him outside with my 70 pound hound lab mix who came up to my hip. And I took him upstairs to my apartment and he brought the pierogi and they were on the stove cooking. Um, and like, again, Green Bean did not like men and like, I'd bring dates over and Green Bean would pace, like, just so uncomfortable.

Just like, I need this person out of my space. Or he literally would like sit between me and the other person to like be a physical barrier. So Rich comes up, pierogies are heating.

Rich sits down on the couch.

[Emily]

Green Bean lies down on the floor at his feet. And I was like, well, that's it then. That's the one.

[Emily]

Green Bean picked my husband.

[Neil]

14 years later.

[Emily]

Yeah. And that was in 2011. Uh, in 2018, uh, he and the other dog that we adopted both had to be put down and it was, uh, like agony, heartbreaking.

And then we adopted Thunder. Who is our now 15 year old, uh, Pipple, who is a clown and a delight. And, uh, I'm not a full human being without a dog.

[Neil]

Oh, many people can relate to that. I'm sure. I'm East Indian. So like there were no, there were no pets in our culture growing up, but my wife's mother has a 11 year old deaf golden retriever and she travels a lot.

So we often have Chelsea, the golden retriever in our house. And I'm like starting to slowly become a dog person very slowly. Um, let's transition to masturbation on page 53.

A chapter opens called feelings about masturbation. It has the bold conclusion that most women say they enjoy masturbation physically. After all, it did lead to orgasm, but usually not psychologically.

So here we are, you know, 50 years after this book came out, I wondered if you could give us your Emily isms on masturbation for men and women or male identifying female identifying.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

So advice, tips, tricks, how to do it better or how to, you know, what, what do you got?

[Emily]

Uh, I'm in favor of it. Uh, because there's, 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]

Interesting. The goal of masturbation is to learn what pleasure feels like in your body. That's a nice way to put it.

[Emily]

95% of people can have an orgasm on their own if you're among the 5%. There's whole books and workshops just about that. Betty Dodson's Sex for One.

Julia, You're Gonna Laugh. Hyman's Becoming Orgasmic. These are books that are products of their time.

I'm looking for... If any sex therapist out there wants to write specifically how to have your first orgasm, or if you struggle with orgasm, book, we need an updated version. Desperately.

[Neil]

I see. Well, I remember... So I was a teen boy who, pre-internet, really, would read the back page of the street mag, the street newspaper in Toronto, which was called Savage Love by Dan Savage, who was also the editor, I think, of the Seattle version of the newspaper.

And I remember being... Like, as a 14-year-old boy, I remember my mind being blown when I read him writing. One of the goals of masturbation is to change it up.

Is to change the rhythm and frequency and touch and duration and length and stimulation. And because of what you are doing when you change it up is you are allowing your body to both expand the sexual terrain that you will have throughout your life. Right?

And I was like, what?

[Emily]

It's not just to have an orgasm as fast as possible.

[Neil]

It was like a... I remember reading that thing on the go train, the commuter train in Toronto. I miss that when people would leave newspapers on things.

And I miss people... I obviously still read books on Subways and so on. And I always give a quiet shout out.

And I would say, it looks good on you, the book. I'm a very extroverted book reader to other people reading. But I miss the fact that when everyone's on the phone, you just don't know what they're reading.

[Emily]

Right.

[Neil]

I like the covers being visible of what everyone's into. That's such a big part of it to me.

Anyway, speaking of seeing book covers, let's get into your third and final book, which is, of course, last chance to see a fascinating book by Douglas Adams with Mark Carwardine. I hope I said that right. C-A-R-W-A-R-D-I-N-E.

Published in 1990 by Heinemann Publishing. I had to hunt for this book too. Covers a grassy green background with the words last chance to see in like a spray-painted sans serif all cap spa and an off-white interspersed with black silhouettes of animals that are crossed out with red Xs.

Mine actually has the covers like the Komodo dragon and the pygmy rhino and stuff like that right on them. The author's name is at the bottom in black, and it says on the New York Times book review, amusing, thought-provoking. Its detail on the heroic efforts being made to save these animals are inspirational.

Basically, Douglas Adams, who everybody knows From Hitchhiker's Guide. As the author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Somewhat later in life, sadly, because he only lived till 49.

He died in 2001 in Montecito, California. Born in Cambridge, England. He went on a trip around the world with a zoologist to try and see a number of the world's most endangered species.

And basically, it's like his trip diary. And I didn't know this book existed. I'm so glad I do.

I'm very curious to understand and hear what your relationship is, Emily, with Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams.

[Emily]

Boy, I'm gonna cry.

[Neil]

with the zoologist Mark Carwardine.

[Emily]

So, yeah, he died much too young. I first read the Hitchhiker books because my brother bought one home from a library. And the cover was funny.

And so I read it. And it was the funniest thing I'd ever read in my entire life. And I became a Douglas Adams obsessive.

And I had essentially no friends from fourth grade through eighth grade. Uh, but the guy who sat behind me in the sixth grade, Caillou, I was like, this is the funniest book I've ever read. And he went and read it and became just as much of a fan as I was.

And then Caillou went to MIT for all three of his degrees. And he worked at the Media Lab. And he got to meet Douglas Adams, who came to visit the Media Lab.

Even though I'm the one who introduced him to Douglas Adams' work. He's the one who got to meet him. But when Douglas Adams died, Caillou and I reached in grad school.

I was in Indiana. He was in Cambridge. But he emailed me.

He's like, you probably heard about this. And my first thought was, I should email Emily because she'll understand.

[Neil]

Oh.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

What a heartbreak, eh?

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

I mean, 49?

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

And also a self-deprecating guy.

You've seen the journal entries that have come out that he's written to himself.

[Emily]

Oh, yeah.

[Neil]

Yeah, right. Like a real big-hearted self.

[Emily]

Talk about undiagnosed ADHD.

[Neil]

Oh, oh, oh, really?

[Emily]

Probably. His relationship with deadlines. He used to say, I love deadlines.

I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly past. And it's that kind of humor that makes Last Chance to See. So again, I almost picked An Immense World, which is a really similar book because they're both books that dive really deeply into animal cognition.

[Neil]

Oh, interesting. That's the connection point.

[Emily]

Ways animals perceive the world.

But Last Chance to See is more of a travelogue also. It's a book of its time. It was written in, I believe, the late 80s.

And it's actually a book based on a radio show, which you can actually get. You can get the original BBC production and hear the animals. He tells a story of going to find the Baiji dolphin in China.

He tells this very long, hilarious story about they wanted to get sound recording of what the river sounds like from underwater. And so they wanted to put a microphone in the water, and they hadn't packed a waterproof microphone. So they had to use this trick of putting their microphone in a condom.

So they had to find a condom in China. It's a long story. So it's not just about animal cognition and about the efforts to save the animals, but also the struggles of traveling around the world in order to see some of the rarest animals in the world.

Baiji dolphin, sadly, now fully extinct.

[Neil]

Oh, really? Yeah. I was going to ask you how many of the animals that they're cataloging here have made it.

[Emily]

White rhinos, also fully extinct.

[Neil]

Right. Because it's not just Komodo dragons, but there's the lovable Kakapo of New Zealand, the blind river dolphin of China, the white rhinos of Zaire, the rare birds of Mauritius. Right?

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

And his writing on page 28, just to just give people a flavor. It is then quite an education to learn that two cats fighting can make easily as much noise as 40 dogs. It is a pity to have to learn this at 2.15 in the morning. But then the cats have a lot to complain about, and Labuan Bajo. They all have their tails docked at birth. Labuan Bajo, thank you.

Which is supposed to bring good luck, though presumably not to the cats. You know, it's this tone. It's this style.

It's very accessible, tongue in cheek, but like a Surbeck style. On page 16, I was wondering about your comment on this one, because I wondered if it connected a bit to sex here. David Attenborough has said that Bali is the most beautiful place in the world, but he must have been there longer than we were and seen different bits.

Because most of what we saw in the couple of days we were there, sorting out our travel arrangements, was awful. It was just the tourist area, i.e. that part of Bali, which has been made almost exactly the same as everywhere else in the world, for the sake of people who have come all the way to see Bali.

[Emily]

I thought that was really interesting.

[Neil]

Like, you know, we used to only be able to get sushi in Japan.

[Emily]

Right.

[Neil]

Like, traveling itself is pretty unlikely you're going to try a new cuisine.

[Emily]

And that experience of the touristiness of Bali has probably only gotten more and more true in the years since he wrote that. In 2010, Mark Howardian collaborated with Stephen Fry, who was really good friends with Douglas Adams, and they did a follow-up, Last Chance to See, to see the animals that remained and to go see what the conservation efforts were like. There's a very hilarious scene.

It's a full camera documentary as opposed to just being a radio show. And there's this extremely funny shot of Kakapo climbing up on Mark Howardian's head and flapping his wings against his head, basically trying to mate with Mark Howardian. He's like, this is such an honor.

He's got like, bleeding marks on his face from the talons of what Douglas Adams describes as the world's largest, fattest, least able to fly parrot.

[Neil]

Oh, okay.

[Emily]

Not only has it forgotten how to fly, it has forgotten that it has forgotten how to fly. And so it will, in times of extreme distress, run up a tree and jump off and fly very much like a brick.

[Neil]

Oh, interesting. I can see why you love this book. It's a really good book.

So there's also a Stephen Fry Carwardine new version we can kind of look up. By the way, I forgot to tell you the Dewey Decimal, which I think you would enjoy, which is 591.529 for science slash animals, zoology slash specific topic in natural history of animals, slash habits and behavior, slash abode, semicolon migration. I'll close with this one, this question.

I'd love to get into a fast money round to close this off. But you mentioned that we are... What was the word you didn't say?

Ponds.

[Emily]

Livestock.

[Neil]

We are the livestock in the...

Because you've done a lot of rich, deep reading, as I know you do on many topics on autocracies. And it's pretty obvious. There's many books on the best list right now about our autocratic regimes around the world, not just the one in the U.S. Madeleine Albright's Autocracy A Warning is another one. Okay. Madeleine Albright, Autocracy A Warning. There's a quote in this book.

We are not an endangered species yet, but this is not for lack of trying. So I thought I might just ask you with your eminent wisdom and your deep, well-readedness in many topics, especially around biology, humans, animals. Where do you see us going?

How do you see this playing out?

[Emily]

So one of the fascinating things about the book, for me, is learning that the way you define endangeredness isn't necessarily related to the number of them. When they go to see the Komodo dragon, how many are there? About 8,000.

How many have there generally been? About 8,000. It's not that there's a small number.

It's that their habitats are being endangered. And when their habitat is endangered, that's how the species becomes endangered.

[Neil]

I see this all the time in the birdwatching, obviously.

[Emily]

And the reason why we lean on charismatic megafauna is because if we can get people's hearts attached to the big species, they'll be motivated to protect the habitat of that big species like the gorillas that they go to see. The western lowland gorillas, I believe, they go to see.

[Neil]

Yeah, polar bears.

[Emily]

Which, that might be my favorite. No, the kakapo's are my favorite, but the gorillas are a close second. And so I think about us, we're not endangered in a number point of view.

There's plenty of us. But our habitat is increasingly hostile to our continued existence. And I believe in the power of human innovation.

I believe that the arc of history is long and bends toward justice. The reason it bends toward justice is because the vast majority of us want it to, and so we pull it like hell. And it's not a straight line.

We're currently in a moment where we're veering away. And I feel very confident that we'll transition back to saving us. But it's going to take all of us working as hard as we can.

[Neil]

Yeah, yeah. Chris Rock has a great bit that he used a lot during Trump's first term where he's like, you look at, and I'm obviously paraphrasing and I'm not Chris Rock by a mile. He's like, if you look at the most extreme elected officials throughout history, they're usually followed by the most extreme the other way.

So he's like, we're about to get Jesus after this. You know, that was his, that was kind of like the punchline. And in chapter 137 with Jonathan Franzen, one of his three most formative books is Reason in a Dark Time by Dale Jamison.

You're nodding. It's like you've read every book. You're unbelievable.

[Emily]

And... Audiobooks in particular. Reading a physical book now is frustrating to me because you can't do anything else while you're doing it.

[Neil]

Well, I can't do anything else while I'm doing it anyway. If I'm listening to an audiobook, I'm like stopping in the dishes to listen, you know? So you're able to multitask in ways that not all of us can.

And so may we close this wide-ranging and incredibly deep conversation with a few fast money round questions. It is a book show, so I will go this way.

[Emily]

Can I just share my one favorite sentence from Last Chance to See?

[Neil]

Oh, please. I didn't mean to cut off that conversation. I was just being sensitive to your time.

I'm like, I'm like two and a half hours deep with you here. I don't want to take your whole day.

[Emily]

My undergrad degree is in cognitive science. And this book is one of the reasons why I got really interested in animal cognition. Because Douglas Adams is who he was.

My favorite sentence. You can't help but try and follow an animal's thought processes. And you can't help when faced with an animal like a three-ton rhinoceros with nasal passages bigger than its brain, but fail.

[Neil]

Have you ever? Have you? Have you done any of this yourself?

Have you? Have you? Are you like?

[Emily]

No, I hate to travel. I'm a be at home and read about the animals person.

[Neil]

Yeah. That's fun. But the fact like you are, you must be reading like hundreds of books a year.

Because I've heard you on a lot of podcasts to prepare for this. And like, none of the books you talked about, well, except for a couple like overlap. But the other books you talk like, I'm like, you have you are one of the most well read people I've I've ever talked to.

[Emily]

Books are my lifeline. I learned how to be a person by reading books.

[Neil]

Wow. Oh, my gosh.

[Emily]

I learned how to have relationships reading John Gottman's work. And then Sue Johnson's.

[Neil]

I'm going to write that one down. I learned how to be a person by reading.

[Emily]

I've had the same therapist since 2008. And I felt more connected to her when I read a chapter that she wrote than I've ever felt in all of our many years working together. Aw.

I know people better through their writing than.

[Neil]

You sound like Maria Popova to me. You know her?

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Brain brain picking.

[Emily]

I profoundly disagree with about cultural appropriation, just by the way.

[Neil]

Oh, interesting. Oh, OK. Oh, interesting.

Do tell.

[Emily]

Well, so.

[Neil]

Maria says, for the record, there can be no learning without appropriation.

[Emily]

And that's a misunderstanding of what is meant by cultural appropriation. And like as a white lady living in the United States, it's not up to her to decide whether or not it's OK to appropriate. So appropriation is the extraction of an element of a culture from its larger context, generally used by.

It's taken from a marginalized group and used without reference to its larger context by the dominant group and the extraction without context, without referencing the original culture. That's the appropriation part. I'm just going to take this thing that you have probably been marginalized for, like braids, for example.

You've been told that your hair looks unprofessional, but I'm going to go ahead and do it and be told I look cute.

[Neil]

How do we figure that out? Like, how do we figure that? I didn't know that about braids.

How do you know you're doing that?

[Emily]

You listen to people.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Emily]

And so one of the things we talk about is burnout.

[Neil]

Like if I braid my kids hair, I don't know. I don't really know I'm doing that. You know what I mean?

[Emily]

Braids, dreadlocks, there's different ways of doing it. Like two pigtails is not appropriative because every hair example is a complicated one.

[Neil]

You're saying if I put my six year old son's long hair, he's half Indian, half white into like cornrows. This is what you're saying?

[Emily]

Yeah. Your kid's not going to get any shit for that.

[Emily]

And a Black kid with 4C hair, putting their hair in a protective style is going to be perceived in a very different way.

[Neil]

I see.

[Emily]

But in burnout, we talk about the distinction between connected knowing versus separate knowing. Separate knowing is the sort of science, it's called the doubting game, where you extract a piece of information from its contact and you poke it and prod it and try to figure out the ways that it might not belong. And connected knowing is where you go to a piece of information and you observe it in its native context so that you can come to understand it.

One of these ways of knowing is more associated with men, and another one is more associated with the women. One is treated as a way of knowing, and the other one is treated as just like intuition, women's intuition. And it turns out, it was really important for me as a person with a PhD who just loves science.

It was very important for me to grow into a place where I recognized the intense value of connected knowing, of putting myself in the position of a culture or a piece of information, recognizing how it came to be the thing that it is, and the ways in which I am connected to it and the ways in which I'm not connected to it. And when we understand that connected knowing is a way of knowing, it shifts our relationship with the information. It deepens it and extends it.

One of the reasons my degrees are all in different fields, and I do read very widely and way outside my area of expertise, is because all of that context builds a structure for me to understand the thing that I do know the most about.

[Neil]

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And it's partly why we all love listening to you so much. Because you are a sieve and a filter of a lot through an incredible communication skill and nonjudgmental. You're a real gift to the world.

[Emily]

Oh, that's very nice of you. It's not just that I talk fast. I do actually sometimes say things.

[Neil]

No, I felt really comfortable to talk about a bunch of stuff today that I really haven't and don't. And because I have heard a lot of you and read a lot of you that I'm like, oh, you create space for that, therefore the conversation furthers. Thousands and thousands of people will listen to this and take it their own way through their own conversations.

[Emily]

So great that you were willing to disclose the things that you did talk about. It's great.

[Neil]

Thanks. Yeah, we'll see what makes it through the editing, hopefully. All of it.

So hardcover, paperback, audio, or e? I guess you already said audio. Is that right?

[Emily]

Audio is my favorite. Can I brag just a little bit?

[Neil]

Please. Yeah, I want you to.

[Emily]

So the only thing I ever ask for in any of my book contracts is that I narrate my own audiobooks. They matter a lot to me because they make the book accessible to more and different readers. And the audiobook for Come Together just got nominated for an audio.

It's not going to win. No sex book ever has. But the fact that it even got nominated.

Common is nominated in the same category.

[Neil]

It just got nominated now?

[Emily]

Like a couple of... like last week.

[Neil]

And what's the... what else just got nominated in the category? Common?

[Emily]

Yeah, Common.

[Neil]

What's Common?

[Emily]

Common is a rapper and a poet.

[Neil]

Oh, I see. Oh, Common.

[Emily]

Okay. Yeah.

[Neil]

You know. I see.

[Emily]

Oh, and...

[Neil]

So what I think you're saying is you have been recognized for your ability to speak. That's what it is, right?

[Emily]

To narrate. It's a specific skill. I love audiobooks.

[Neil]

Thank you. Well, you're making great ones that are winning awards. How do you organize your...

I know you still have books. How do you organize your books on your bookshelf?

[Emily]

Oh, not in a system that would make sense to anybody who is not in my head, because it's a combination of like... So there's a shelf of books I haven't read yet. There's a...

[Neil]

TBR?

[Emily]

Yeah. There's a shelf of... These are the ones.

These are like the books that made me who I am. Last Chance to See is on there. The Hype Report is on there.

Even What to Do When Your Mom or Dad Says Clean Your Room is on there. The Kinsey Reports are... You have a formative bookshelf.

Yeah. I have a shelf of... These are the most important books in the world for my brain.

And then they're arranged sort of by topic. There's a bunch of sex books. And then there's books that are arranged by era of my life.

These are the books that I read in grad school that remain important enough for me to keep them. And then I have the fiction part, which is all...

[Neil]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. By genre. TBR, formative, topic-based, era of my life-based, and fiction.

Any other subsections that we haven't hit?

[Emily]

Well, there's... The fiction is mostly divided into... There's the romance novels and the mysteries.

[Neil]

Oh, okay. Okay. Okay.

Gotcha. Gotcha.

[Emily]

Sherlock Holmes was a big thing for me when I was 12.

[Neil]

Oh, yeah. Do you have a White Whale book or any book you've been chasing the longest?

[Emily]

I have been searching for and ordered and may soon have... There's a book called The Hite Report on Shere Hite, which is her autobiography. Oh, cool. Long out of print.

[Neil]

Oh, cool.

[Emily]

Shere Hite died in 2020. And much too soon. And I've wanted to read this book, but it's impossible to find.

So we'll see if it actually makes it to me.

[Neil]

Oh, that's great. That's exciting. Do you have a favorite bookstore, living or dead?

[Emily]

The bookstore in my town is called Book Moon Books. And they're great.

[Neil]

And your town is in Massachusetts? You're in...

[Emily]

East Hampton.

[Neil]

East Hampton. Okay. I was about to say Northampton for some reason.

Sorry. And this is a show by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. It's fair to say all of us listening have sex lives of some sort.

And you are one of the world's foremost sex educators. Would you mind closing us off? I usually ask for writing advice, but it makes more sense, I think, today.

Would you mind closing us off with one hard-fought piece of wisdom, a rule of thumb, or a piece of advice you'd like to close us off with today? Take as long as you feel like.

[Emily]

I'm going to stall for time by saying that I did not choose the book Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey, also known as the Nap Bishop, because the instructions were to choose formative, early books. In 2016, I had already written the first draft of the Rest chapter in Burnout. And then in 2017, I saw Tricia Hersey speak, and I was like, I got to deepen my analysis.

Holy crap. This is amazing. So this is not sex advice, but it is like human being advice.

[Neil]

Perfect.

[Speaker 5]

That's where the question was meant to get to.

[Emily]

Yeah. Sleep is the keystone to all of the things.

[Emily]

If you have to choose between, I was so worried about Kamala Harris, because she's like, doesn't matter how little sleep I got, I wake up, I have a workout. And I was like, you need more sleep. Prioritize sleep.

If you have to choose between sleeping and working out, choose sleep. Why? Because sleep is when your body actually generates all the good stuff that happens during physical activity.

When you're being physically active, you're doing damage. You're wearing muscles. You're wearing bones and ligaments and other tissues.

The healing and strengthening happens the next night while you are asleep. Your body recovers and gets stronger than it was before. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

No, what doesn't kill you, uh, didn't kill you. What makes you stronger is rest.

[Neil]

I love that. Sleep is the keystone. Emily and I both learned how to be people by reading books.

A wide ranging conversation dotted with so much advice. I have filled these notes, like every single page I have in front of me is like covered in your sentences, little pull quotes. Emily, this has been a real treat, a real honor.

Come as you are, come together. The two books that we kind of focused on today, but also burnout as well with your sister. Sleep is the keystone.

I learned how to be a person by reading books. As Emily said, I did too. I have so many notes, takeaways, pull out, stick around at the very end of this.

We're going to get into all the weeds. We're going to pull out all of our favorite quotes, play your phone calls, read your letters, hang it at the end. As we always do.

I'm sure we're going to have a word cloud for you, Emily. That is why we pull it all the words. I didn't understand that we talk about the definitions because that's what we do on this show.

Um, this has been a real joy and a real pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on three books. It's been wonderful to connect hearts with you.

Thank you so much.

[Emily]

Can we end on good news? Yes, please. At the time of writing last chance to see there were 42 Kakapo in the world.

There are now almost 250.

[Neil]

Nice. Shout out to the Kakapo. Thank you so much for coming on three books.

[Emily]

Thank you. It was my pleasure.

[Neil]

Hey, everybody. It's just me. Just Neil again, hanging out in my basement in my studio because I'm doing video this time, listening back to that wide and wonderfully ranging conversation with Emily Nagoski.

Don't you just love her mind? Oh my gosh. The way she just, I mean, that's maybe why I picked the like, what do you read or what do you watch?

Because Emily's just like, I'm reading this. I'm reading that. I read this.

I read that. She is just like, a fountain of book titles. Don't you love people that can just do that and kind of point us in a million different directions.

Make sure you go to 3books.co for the show notes. If you want to kind of get a list of everything mentioned afterwards, there is a lot of energy to take away from this conversation. I have so many quotes highlighted here.

How am I going to limit to three? How about some brains are outside what the world is built for? I think that's a really helpful phrase just to remember.

Because of course, as humans, I'm sure Professor Robin Dunbar would remind us that we've constructed a reality that works for most of us, most of the time. But most doesn't include everybody and most of the time and certainly not all of the time. And so some brains are outside what the world is built for.

And that's tipping back to her great point near the beginning, which is we're all neurodiverse. We're not all neurodivergent. I love her definition of normal sex.

Although I know the word normal is funny, but she says normal sex is any sex where everybody involved is glad to be there and free to leave with no unwanted consequences. The way she puts that, just so casually, like glad to be there and free to leave. I mean, that's a nice and simple way to do it.

As I chimed into the conversation, I've also heard her describe the no pain part of that, but this is a simple way to remember it. I like this quote. This is three.

Oh my gosh, I'm going to be doing six again. If you put pleasure at the center of your definition of sexual well-being, all the other pieces are going to fall into place. Nice.

Or couples who have great sex lives talk about sex all the time. Did you write that down? That makes me feel a little less bad.

I mean, I remember in certain conversations with certain relationships, I'm like careful here, not to spill too much. It's like, you're like, are we just talking about this too much? But no, that's a great way to put it.

It's like couples who have great sex lives talk about sex all the time, which makes sense. What you focus on is what you value and prioritize and improve at. How about this one?

Five. Learning to have sex by watching porn is like learning to drive by watching Formula One, period. Professionals, comma, on a close course, comma, with a pit crew.

I'm going to close with one about reading. There's so many to pick out for. I'm going to put way more quotes on the Three Books website, but she says, books are my lifeline, semicolon.

I learned how to be a person by reading books. I learned how to be a person by reading books. Amen.

That's so, so good. I learned how to be a person by reading books. I completely hear and relate to that.

And now three more books to add to our top 1000 from Emily Nagoski, number 574, What to Do When Your Mom or Dad Says, dot, dot, dot, end quote, with an exclamation mark, Clean Your Room by Joy Berry, B-E-R-R-Y. Number 573, The Hite Report, H-I-T-E, The Height Report by Shere Hite, H-I-T-E. And number 572.

Oh, I love this book so much. Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams with Mark Karwardine, C-A-R-W-A-R-D-I-N-E. I just put that in my Neal's book club for the month of February that just passed.

By the way, if you don't get my book club, just go to neal.blog and you can get it. It's another ad-free, sponsor-free, interruption-free production where I write a 3,000 to 4,000 word review of every book I read over the past month. Okay.

Lots of emails. I know everyone's inbox full. I know.

No pressure to get anything. But yeah, there you go. neal.blog if you want that, or the podcast letter that I will send out, or my daily awesome thing that I send out every single day since 2008. 5,000 awesome things in a row now. And sometimes I send out like bits of poetry there too. So neal.blog if you want to get on my list. Emily, thank you so much for coming on 3 Books. It's been a joy and a pleasure and a treat. 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 part of the podcast where I talk directly to you.

You talk directly to me. We play your voicemails or read your letters, but we did one earlier. We talk about a funny or interesting word that I didn't know the definition of and we define it.

But for us, let's get started as we always do by going to the phones.

[Barbie]

Hi, Neal. This is Barbie from Goodyear, Arizona, and I'm finally calling you. I put the nerves aside because I just finished listening to episode 46 with Dr. Laura Markham and all I can say is wow, wow, wow. It blew me away. I didn't want the conversation to end. What an incredible and insightful conversation as always, but I think this one touched me more emotionally just because of the current climate in the U.S. right now. I've been feeling so much dread and anxiety the past few months, but between you and Dr. Laura's calming voices and words of wisdom, they just really made an impact on me to stop and calm down and just breathe. I'm putting all three of her books on my reading list, which is quite large, but those will be moved to the top. Neal, I can't thank you enough for your gift to this podcast.

I listen to it every chance I get. I'm listening to each episode in the order you recorded them, so yes, I have a lot of catching up to do, but that's okay. I'm getting off of social media as of today, so I'm going to have much more time to listen and absorb each and every episode.

It's my daily gift to myself. Okay, I'm probably talking longer than the recording time, but please know you are making a difference in the world, Neal, when there is so much hate and negativity out there. Your podcast is positive and uplifting and much needed.

Okay, I'm going to stop talking now, but thank you again from the bottom of my heart, and p.s. I mispronounce words all the time. Thank you, Neal. Bye.

[Neil]

Aw, Barbie, that voicemail made me cry. I mean, it was a beautiful message. Thank you so much for calling in, and it's great to hear your lovely voice, and you are a heart spirit, a heart kindred spirit.

I'm so lucky to have this podcast, to find all these amazing free bookers around the world, and Barbie, you are on a roll. I remember when I got a letter from you in December of 2024, you were on chapter 24 with Jonathan Fields, and now you're mentioning chapter 46 with Dr. Laura Markham. I mean, that's quite a feat.

You're up 22 chapters in just a couple of months. Wow, you are listening on fire. Dr. Laura Markham is very calm and centering and grounding, kind of like my wife. Whenever she's on the show hosting with me, people are like, you're fine, but has Leslie ever considered taking over hosting your podcast? She has this wise and centering and grounding energy. Dr. Laura is so like that. She is entrancing. I love her three books, by the way. I thought if you're ordering all three of her books, I may want to just give them a quick shout out.

They are number 866, Dibs in Search of Self by Virginia M Axline, A-X-L-I-N-E. That book was so good. I still think about it.

In terms of child development, patience, quiet, calm, how to pull kids out of their shell. It's just wonderful, masterful. I highly recommend it.

I got the mass market paperback edition too, so I can put it on my mass market paperback shelf. Power Vs. Force by David Hawkins and Who Dies by Steven and Andrea Levin didn't stick with me as much.

Although I remember Who Dies by Steven and Andrea being forceful, as you probably heard Laura talk about. And then the last thing I wanted to say and shout out is we all need daily gifts to ourselves. I'm so glad that I am part of your daily gift to yourself and you are very much part of mine.

Thank you so much, Barbie from Goodyear, Arizona, for calling. All right. And now, you know, I know I sometimes do the letter here, but we did a letter from Tyler earlier, so let's not do two.

Kind of indulgent, right? So let's skip that. But I think we should probably do a word of the chapter.

And for this chapter's word, let's go back to Ms. Emily Nagoski.

[Emily]

This is just what a feminist looks like. Self-diagnosis with autism is very common, and it is entirely valid. Your interoception, your neuroception is autistic, that is hyperverbal.

I have to talk about arousal non-concordance, basic bodily autonomy, abdicates all responsibility, misogynist, patriarchal gender binary.

[Neil]

Lots of incredible, uh, big words there from Emily. I was taking notes the whole time. I'm like writing stuff down.

I'm like, okay, what does this mean? What does this mean? What is this?

We could have gone with a lot of words, but you know what? That phrase that was just so unusual that I hadn't really processed it myself before, which is arousal non-concordance. So arousal and then non-concordance.

Okay. So when Emily writes about it in Come as You Are and online on Medium, she says arousal non-concordance is the well-established phenomenon of a lack of overlap between how much blood is flowing to a person's genitals and how turned on they feel. So for example, trauma survivors understand that a sexual response can be about nerve endings being stimulated, not about desire, right?

So that's why she says in her incredible TED talk, like when I say no, you know, people can't say, well, you're obviously turned on, you know, you're wet, you're hard, you're whatever. It's what I say that matters more than what my physiological outlay or symptoms might be. So one analogy that she talks about is being tickled.

So a person can be tickled despite not wanting to be tickled, and yet they will still laugh. This can happen despite struggling. So if nerve endings are stimulated, the result is laughter.

She also uses the analogy of how to separate brain and body when it comes to thinking about or talking to people who have been victims of sexual assault. She says, this is a quote for Emily, if I told you my mouth watered when I bit into an apple that was wormy and rotten, would you think, well, if her mouth watered, then she must really enjoy eating wormy rotten apples. No, you would know that salivation is just an automatic response.

So she's pointing out that general response to is automatic, unrelated to whether or not we enjoy something. In a large meta-analysis of 2,505 women and 1,910 men, Meredith Chivers and colleagues in 2010 described studies reporting that, here's four takeaways for us to learn from. Some men report feeling sexual arousal without concomitant genital changes.

Experimental manipulations can increase penile erection without affecting subjective reports of sexual arousal. I think any guy who's experienced erection kind of knows this, like you sometimes have one without it being related to sexual feelings. Some women show genital responses without reporting any experience of sexual arousal.

There we go again. And women can experience genital response during unwanted sex. So this is like such a big topic for Emily that she's given an entire TED Talk about it.

And I want to give you the exact name of the TED Talk, although of course we will put it on our show notes. It is called, here I am pulling it up right now in real time, The Truth About Unwanted Arousal. So she gave that TED Talk in 2018 on the main stage at TED.

And currently, as we speak, here in 2025, seven years later, it has been watched by, I don't know, because the TED website is not loading. Oh, actually, 3,220,451 people. So it's a big popular TED Talk, but of course, 3 million is still a very small minority of the whole world.

Just like the three bookers listening to this, we are a small minority of the whole world, just like everyone and everything and every community that we're a part of is a small minority of the whole world. But I am so glad that you are here with me, hanging out with Emily Nagoski on Chapter 146 of 3 Books and Beyond. It's been a pleasure.

Thank you so much for being here. And until next time, remember that you are what you eat, and you are what you read. Keep turning that page, everybody, and I'll talk to you soon.

Take care.

Listen to the chapter here!

Chapter 145: Lindyman leverages long-lasting lessons on living a limitless life

Listen to the chapter here!

Paul:

You have to watch out for things that are modern, that may disrupt something, you know, a natural process. Don't take any advice on writing. I think that's my writing advice.

There's an inverse relationship between popularity at first and length of time it lasts. I guess your haters follow your work more closely than the people who actually like you, so it takes a lot more energy to hate someone. How would you tell if a society is like healthy or not?

Check the suicide rates.

Neil:

Hey everybody, this is Neil Pasricha and welcome or welcome back to chapter 145, 45, 45 of 3Books. You are listening to the world's only podcast by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. We have an incredible 3Booker community, coast to coast, overseas, all over the world, reading your voicemails from 1-833-READALOT, your letters that you send in, which I love, which I think of as the real pride of the show, honestly.

And we talk with interesting people around the world about which 3Books most changed their lives, speaking to people like Nick Sweetman, who was our guest in chapter 144, David Sedaris, who was our guest in chapter 18, which we just recently released, and James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces, who we also just released as a classic chapter, Every New Moon, Every Full Moon from 2018 to 2040, 333 chapters. This is a joy and a pleasure and a treat. I feel super lucky to be here, to be talking to all of you.

So we always talk about one of our values, and then we read a letter, and then we talk about our guest, who, by the way, today it's a fascinating gentleman named Lindyman, Lindyman. His real name is Paul Skallas, but he goes by Lindyman online to his 129,144 followers as of right now, where he applies this heuristic of the Lindy effect, popularized by Nassim Taleb's 2012 book, Anti-Fragile. The longer something's been popular, the longer it's gonna stay popular.

That length of life to this point is one heuristic to see how long something's gonna last. The longest Broadway musical is probably gonna last longer than the one that just opened, and on and on it goes. The Lindyman has popularized this ancient wisdom being applied to kind of modern scenarios.

More on him in just a second. So, like I said, we always start with the value, and so the value I wanna talk about for chapter 145 is you have the right to dip, the right to skip, and the right to quit. I think so many of us, when it comes to reading, we're taught with the sort of, you know, industrial revolution-invented education system that you must start a book, read it from front to back, and then finish it.

If you are assigned The Great Gatsby in 10th grade, or Lord of the Flies in 10th grade, or Hamlet in 10th grade, those were the three books I was assigned, you gotta read them all. And you might even analyze them chapter by chapter with discussion groups or book reports. And so you kind of are taught to read that way.

However, if you plumb the deep archives of your mind for how you flip through picture books when you were a young lad or lassie, you know, you just flip through picture books. Sometimes you ate the picture books. Sometimes you started at the back or read them upside down.

And the book was an extension of your curiosity. You certainly felt comfortable, I think, to dip into them, to skip past certain parts, and quit certain parts. So many people over the seven years now I've been running three books have said to me, I have a problem quitting books, or I can't quit, or I, you know, I have a thing in my head or my mind that tells me I have to read the whole book.

We gotta drop that. We gotta drop that baggage. Because the problem is when you get stuck in a book that is suddenly uninteresting or becomes uninteresting to you, you let it sort of sit and fossilify and atrophy on your bedside table.

And that book becomes a brick that blocks all future books, right? Like you can't get another book into your system until this one's gone. And so that's why I think that we as readers, in order to read better, in order to read, you know, more just in general, we have to remember we have the right to dip, the right to skip, the right to quit.

Like Lindyman's three books were a 44-page pamphlet of aphorisms, which were wonderful to skip through and dip through. Then a gigantic 423-page book, Anti-Fragile by Nassim Taleb. You can kind of predict that one coming.

And then I won't reveal it right now, but like then a 1,200-page book. The 1,200-page book was interesting. Very.

I have lots of folded pages, lots of highlight pages, but to think that I read that cover to cover would be very false. I read the table of contents. Then I read the index.

Then I jumped through some sections I was interested in. Then I kind of started from the beginning again. And that was a wonderful way to eat that.

I'm not gonna eat a slice of pizza from the tip to the crust every time. Sometimes I go for that bite of green olive and pepperoni hanging on the side, you know what I mean? So you gotta follow your interest.

That is a better way to read. It helps you read more, helps you read better, and helps you not judge yourself when you quit a book. It's fine to quit a book.

You're not quitting it. You're just making space for the gem that follows. All right?

Let's remember that. That's the value for chapter 145. Now the letter.

So many good letters coming in these days. If you have a thought on the show, please leave it as a review on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, or a comment on YouTube. I read them all.

I read one at the start of every single show. Like this one. From Meredith Frasier.

I have a daughter, Gracie, she writes, who is a senior in high school. Man, for the past decade, you've been a huge part of our life, unbeknownst to you. After we moved from Kentucky to Florida 11 years ago, I took a job as a program manager at a nonprofit.

I worked with after-school programs. I brought STEM into low-income areas. I always talked about the importance of embracing failure as part of a STEM education.

So much of science and engineering is figuring out ways something doesn't work before you have success. At the same time, I was starting a professional library of books that educational professionals could use to embrace failure, but also find wonder in every day. Needless to say, your books were part of that collection.

I started with the Book of Awesome, then I started speaking at educational after-school conferences, and I always mentioned your books, and I soon downloaded the app of Awesome on my phone. My daughter and I would check the app religiously every day on the way to school. We were sad when it went away.

We decided to start our own list, and now, a decade later, our list of awesome things has been stored on three iterations of cell phones and now contains hundreds of awesome things, most of them rooted in a specific moment in time. That list is truly one of my most prized possessions. As a graduation gift, I am making my daughter a book from her own awesome things and adding some pictures with the memories.

I would also love to give her a signed copy of the Book of Awesome, as it has had such a huge impact on how we both see the world every day. Thank you for being part of our lives for over a decade. From Meredith Fraser, F-R-A-Y-S-U-R-E, who said I could read her letter on the air, and of course, when I read people's letters or their comments or their letters or their reviews, I do always mail them a signed book to say thanks.

So, no worries, the signed Book of Awesome is on the way as a graduation present. Side note, the app of Awesome was super fun. Bonneville Labs in Australia reached out to me.

They were fans of 1000awesomethings.com, and they made the app for free. And kudos to them for making a free app that popped up with a new awesome thing every day. For the next four generations of iPhones, they just updated it for free and kept it going.

But then eventually, apps need maintenance and time and effort, and it just faded away. And I didn't... I knew a lot of people liked the app and were using it, but I wasn't in a position at that time to spend a big amount of money and make a big app, especially because I had the blog, the books, the calendars, I was like, there's lots of ways to get these.

Lots of them are free to get these awesome things. And even today now, 16 years later, oh my gosh, is it 16 years? 17 years now.

After starting 1000awesomethings in 2008, I still, to this day, write a brand new awesome thing every single day. And I email it out to a loyal legion of global fans. I post them on Facebook still, facebook.com slash neilpassariccia. I post them on Instagram, slash neilpassariccia is my Instagram story every day. So if you want my awesome thing, it's still going out to something like a couple hundred thousand people every single night. I do worry about running out.

I mean, like 17 years now, it's a lot. Plus the books and the calendars and everything. But somehow, like always, people keep sending them to me.

When people do, I credit them with their name. I think I'm writing probably 75, 80% myself still. Then 20, 25% are coming from people around the world.

So it's been a joy that I've been able to do this. And my list of awesome things is also a prized possession. Keep your list of awesome things sacred and close.

Well, one guy that keeps lots of lists is of course, Mr. Lindyman, L-I-N-D-Y-M-A-N. In the 2012 book, Anti-Fragile by Nassim Taleb, Mr. Taleb, a statistician and scholar, created something called the Lindy effect. He said, he wrote, for the perishable, every additional day in life translates to a shorter additional life expectancy.

Kind of like me and you and the cheese in our fridge, or the milk in our fridge. But for the non-perishable, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy. For example, a play that has run on Broadway for five years will likely stick around for five more.

And he says in Anti-Fragile, the robustness of an item is proportional to its life. Well, Paul Skallas, a Chicago born technology lawyer, really latched on to the popularity of this heuristic and came to apply it to a broad range of things, including health. He's like, don't use mouthwash, it kills good and bad bacteria and actually creates higher cancer rates.

But floss, poking stuff out of your teeth has been around for thousands of years. So this heuristic is a really helpful way to look at the world. And I have subscribed to the Lindy newsletter.

He writes two to three long form pieces every week. You'll hear in the interview him explain how exactly he does this, which I find interesting of itself. Focus and time is kind of the shorthand.

And he applies this heuristic to so many different ways. He applies it to cities, to urban planning. He applies it to dating.

He applies it to medical trends, health trends, health influencers. And his original thinking really knows no bounds. I was fascinated to read a New York Times profile of Paul Skallas, who goes by Lindyman, which has the title The Lindy Way of Living.

And it was a very popular New York Times profile, so I reached out to him and Paul very kindly agreed to be on the show. He gave me three very good, very interesting, formative books. We talk about them at length, along with a lot of other unique and interesting ideas, like what's happening in the world on about 12 different levels.

He's a big, dynamic, confident, outspoken, and gregarious mind that reminds me of Tim Urban, our guest in chapter 22 of the show. So if you like to have your brain stretched like taffy and provoked with unusual and interesting thoughts, this is the chapter for you. Please enjoy chapter 145 with the one and only Lindyman.

Let's flip the page and get into it now. You've tweeted 16 times in the last 24 hours, by my count.

Paul:

Did I? Yeah.

Neil:

Yeah, 129,144 followers. And the last one I grabbed before I came downstairs to record with you is, you tweeted, not worried, it'll grow back.

Paul:

That's a, somebody said they're going to eat my liver because I criticized some architecture and I said, it'll just grow back, right?

Neil:

But yeah, I like that you engage with your haters. This is like a new trend. You know, Bryan Johnson's always like tweet at replying his haters with like, you know, a mean spirited comeback, not mean spirited, but like, he kind of fights fire with fire.

Paul:

I guess your haters follow your work more closely than the people who actually like you. So it takes a lot more energy to hate someone.

Neil:

Oh, that's interesting. And then at 11, 10 AM this morning, you tweeted, the end result of 15 years of identity politics in all caps and DEI is raising white consciousness in America, period. Enter, enter. Congrats.

Paul:

Yeah. I mean, it's, that's what it looks like to me, what happened with a lot of the, that Trump just rolled into office with Elon Musk. And it's.

And Bezos. And the sort of white working class wave, he kind of, you know, and then also some Latin wave. And it just seems like the reaction to the woke movement was this other group of people, people who are, you know, mostly race blind recently were kind of the ones who were the odd man out of all this, like pushing this, this certain political agenda.

You know, I don't think the woke movement is like necessary evil or like, how do you define woke movement? I would say just like a preferential treatment to people who are maybe not part of the majority population trying to help out certain groups, but yeah. But in the end result, I think this other group sort of became said, well, we're the one grouping sort of excluded or perceived that way.

So all of a sudden now we're going to look around and, you know, essentially that's what Elon Musk has been tweeting about the last six months or a year.

Neil:

You, you're saying that all those people that he was surrounded by when he's inaugurated, and we're speaking on January 21st, 2025. And so his inauguration was literally yesterday.

Paul:

Right.

Neil:

You know, Elon Biden's last day was, I guess the day before. So that's, that's the context for your tweets. But you're saying like everyone in the front row is all white, white consciousness.

Paul:

Yeah, no, I just think it brought, he brought up this, this group that, you know, may, may not have been as racially conscious maybe 20, 30 years ago, but is, is now. And yeah, it's a reaction to a cultural trend that's been going on for a while. That's unexpected.

I think unexpected things you have to watch out for, especially when you're pushing, pushing certain agendas.

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah. And that's why I love your thoughts.

Cause they kind of zig and zag. Cause then yesterday at around lunchtime, this is around when we're speaking. So I'm going to get to your 24 hour timeline here.

You tweeted. I thought this was interesting. You tweet.

And by the way, 125,000 people have, have, have liked your share of this thing or viewed it. You said Biden's presidency felt intense, very Roman empire esque opens the border completely. For four years, let's an ally commit atrocities and genocide finances, a small country's military against a huge neighbor prices on homes and food double in a span of 18 months, confusion over succession and late last minute replacement.

Paul:

Yeah. I mean, it felt like something you'd read like a Roman empire emperor happens 2000 years ago. Just these massive changes that foreign policy with, you know, utilizing allies with middle Eastern sort of, sort of exterminationist war going on that, that seems to not be in line with Geneva conventions or anything.

And you're talking about, you're talking about Gaza and then, and then this like major serious war in Ukraine and Russia where, you know, hundreds of thousands of people are dying. And then at home you have, yeah, these prices, prices are doubling for homes. Coffee's $8.

I'm not saying it's his fault or he kind of engineered all this, but I'm just saying it's, it felt like a very historic times. And it felt like the United States wasn't just a nation. We were really like an empire and things were happening.

And yeah, it just, it just felt like very serious to me and I, it's kind of an underrated presidency. And I think it ended with Biden doing all these like pardons, especially proactive pardons, where nobody, you know, did anything wrong, but he's still parting them. So nobody can prosecute them like Fauci or his family.

Just felt like an odd non-normal presidency.

Neil:

Yeah. That's funny that you mentioned that because the tweet I was, the last year I was going to quote, you had tweeted at 12:17 PM yesterday. The presidential pardon is fascinating.

It's a holdover from the English monarchy, but the founders explicitly gave to the president. No other democratic leader has this type of discretion. There's no congressional veto of it.

It's interesting seeing Biden really flex it like no other president before has, it will play a bigger role in the future as politics get more divided, constant jailing and setting free political opponents. And of course you tweeted that before today, you know, Donald Trump just freed all the, all the January 6th insurrectionists via presidential pardon. Like the last thing the other guy does is pardon.

The first thing the new guy does is pardon.

Paul:

Yeah. It's, and it's, it's kind of an, it's kind of a serious kind of power. Like there's other, other countries have their presidents have parting power, but there's checks and balances.

I have to go through their Senate or they have to go through the judicial arena or they can't give out proactive pardons. But the American president has this almost King like power where it hasn't been seriously used. I mean, I think it was used with Nixon.

I think Gerald Ford was Nixon. I think generally some presidents pardon their friends after the administration or some tokens. But now I think it's in play as more of a, kind of like a serious executive maneuver that we haven't seen before.

And as politics get more divided, it's going to become, it's become, it might become weird. Like we might, somebody might go to jail and then somebody get pardons four years later and then thousands of people, this might happen to.

Neil:

Right. And we've seen that in history over time. Someone gets exiled, then somebody brings them back and Nelson Mandela goes to jail and then he is free.

You know, Malcolm X or Martin Luther King. We've seen this over and over. But what you do is you point out that Biden has pardoned over 8,000 people.

And the next closest president is like 2000 or sub.

Paul:

Yeah.

Neil:

You, as you always do so wonderfully, and this is your name, Lindy man, put it in a longterm historical context with the British monarchy or, you know, a Russ or Roman empire.

And that longterm historical contextualization is, we're going to come back to that over and over again. And with your three books, which I'm very excited to dive into, I've read all three of them to the extent I could pattern language.

Paul:

That's a big one.

Neil:

This is 1187 pages, but I did my best. And so I love the books you've chosen. I can't wait to talk about them.

And interestingly, you know, Paul slash Lindy man, I'm going to, I'm going to stick with Lindy man. I'm going to stick with Lindy man. The way I met you, as I think a lot of people did probably is, is your, is your June 17th, 2021 big feature profile in the New York times, which was called the Lindy way of living.

And so I thought I'd just, before we get into your three quotes about reading that I picked out, then your three formative books, I thought I might just read back to some paragraphs from that feature. And just to see if now with the benefit of another thousand days, another three and a half years since then, if these things still reflect your current beliefs, Also, maybe they misquoted you back then, you know, back then. So the sub headline is a technology lawyer named Paul Scalas argues.

We should be gleaning more wisdom from antiquity. I guess you're 40. Now, if you're 36, then yeah.

Did you do a 40th birthday?

Paul:

No, I, I think birthdays are best when they're like, when you're really young and when you're really old, it's like a bathtub distribution. And in the middle, like, we'll just, we'll just get to the, you know, when we really appreciate it, then we can celebrate it.

Neil:

That is a great line. And then you say he's an evangelist for wisdom derived from the distant past. Like say, skip the mouthwash. And then they quote you.

Everyone tells you to do it. Your breath is clean. It feels like the right thing.

Said Scalas during a zoom call from Deville, France, where he moved from New York last fall to write out the pandemic. And then you read about higher cancer rates for people who use it, how it destroys good and bad bacteria. And you go, you're right.

There was no mouthwash back then.

Paul:

Yeah. So some advancements like for bad breath actually can harm, you know, destroy all like the good and bad bacteria in your, in your mouth. And it's something I don't use.

And I'm not against modern medicine. I think there's great advancements. Brushing your teeth and toothpaste is great.

It's just, you have to watch out for things that are modern that may disrupt something, you know, natural process.

Neil:

So, so mouthwash is not Lindy.

Paul:

Right.

Neil:

I can say.

Right. But, but we can say that like floss is Lindy.

Paul:

Right.

Neil:

Flossing is probably an extension of like sticking your fingers in your teeth or a stick in your teeth.

Paul:

Right.

Neil:

Toothpicks are very Lindy.

Paul:

Yes.

Neil:

Yeah. But toothpaste or fluoride.

Paul:

Right.

Neil:

But, but I'll tell you straight up, Paul, I had burning mouth syndrome last year for six months. I went to multiple doctors and dentists at the end of it all.

Turns out I was allergic to an ingredient in Sensodyne toothpaste.

Paul:

Oh, okay. I think when you do a Lindy like analysis, you also, you know, how, how old is toothpaste now where it's over a little bit over a hundred years. And generally we're not seeing any like problems from it.

Or we, you know, like with cigarettes, you know, that came and went in the 20th century. Although nicotine seems to always come back now with like Zen patches or Zen.

Neil:

David Chappelle was on SNL doing a 17 minute monologue two days ago, smoking cigarettes. So it's not like it's gone, but to your point, we know what it does. We, and, and, and, you know, there's a heuristic here at play, which is the longer something's lasted, the longer it's likely to last in the future.

Paul:

Right.

Neil:

And that is, as you've helped popularize and Nassim Taleb has helped coin. And of course the famous thing, it was the comedians back at Lindy's diner in the sixties helped create.

There's this Lindy effect at play, right?

Paul:

It's a great heuristic for examining things that have been around. You know, if you want to be super safe, don't eat food that's less than 500 years old or liquids less than a thousand years old.

Neil:

No more whey protein.

Paul:

Like, yeah, probably the pathways matter too. Like you have these people taking supplements all the time where it's this like mega dose of this distilled ingredient that you're, you know, we'd never really had. Uh, and I think, I think they've done, you know, studies on B-12 supplementation and leads to like lung cancer in certain people.

So, I mean, you're not saying that.

Neil:

Johnson, uh, Bryan Johnson famously went rapamycin for five years and told all his supporters to do it and then went off of it saying, Oh my gosh, after five years of analysis, I realized that dramatically lowers longevity.

Paul:

Yeah. I mean, he just kind of looks at our study and then if the study says it's beneficial, he just takes it and put it in his pro protocol. But I don't think he's actually looking at, you know, he, we don't have studies on a lot of the stuff that he's doing for longterm use, you know, which is, you know, so it could be good, you know, in the studies for like the year or two that they tested it.

But, um, over the lifetime of a person that's, they don't have studies for that yet. So I think what he does is kind of, he mixes in a lot of like Lindy applicable, like exercise every day, try to get to a hunter gather type movement, um, which is very important, which most people don't have, or don't get into a day. I think he eats mostly vegetarian.

Um, I think he, so you think he does, he tries to get enough sleep, doesn't eat right before bed, which, because digestion, he only eats from eight to 11 am. Right. So digestion interrupts, uh, good sleep.

All of these are like pretty good, uh, Lindy tested ways. And then he'll just like take out his blood plasma and replace it with like, I forgot when you play some, some, some, some substance. I thought it was his son's blood.

No, he did that too, but he actually replaced all his plasma with some other substance. I can't, uh, I can't remember the name of it, but I mean, he'll just do things that are little. Um, and I think he, I think it's going to, his protocol is going to get crazier in the future.

I think you might start like replacing organs. Um, but generally, so I think he's mixing in a lot of, I said, it's not really a health movement. It's a longevity movement.

And there's two different things, which is you're taking an, you're taking risks that nobody else has, nobody else has done before. And you kind of have to kind of have to watch out for that because, um, you know, body's a complex system. Um, we already have, uh, foods and type of movement patterns that we know are healthy.

But if you want to really extend lifespan to 120, 140, or never die, you're going to have to take, um, extreme measures that come with a side effects that, uh, we don't know what's going to happen.

Neil:

and it's amazing your commentary on the health industry and the health influence industry, because it's a really, uh, giant bulb, this thing. And most of our faces every day, like I can't go on YouTube without it starting with a diet.

[Paul]

It's everywhere.

Neil:

Ozempic's on the front. Ozempic's on the front page of every single thing. You know, the opening joke at the golden globes, like last week is that welcome to the nation's largest gathering of Ozempic.

We know things that are popular with celebrity and with wealth filters down. It always has. So like, we're seeing it everywhere.

It's the number one drug in the world. Right. Um, and in fact, and in fact, I wasn't sure when to bring this up, but I may as well.

Now it's also your commentary on, uh, from March 9th, 24, where you wrote the unbearable sadness of the health influence. I love the title. I love the title.

Um, that was the one that Luigi, um, the alleged assassin of the United health CEO DMG about, right. That was, uh, yeah, I want to open up the Luigi conversation. I have some notes written to provoke you to, or I can hear your perspective on above.

Well, my, I was just going to read the DM actually. So, cause you wrote a piece about this on GQ. Of course began one of the most emailed articles on GQ.

Interestingly, you announced it on Twitter. I thought in an interesting way, you said I've written up for GQ, but no link provided.

[Paul]

Yeah.

Neil:

So I had to, I had to go Google it. You know, you made me do like an extra second of work and you said, you got this DM. Here's the DM from Luigi that you published to you.

And by the way, Luigi, for those that don't know, no, no, no reason anyone should, he only followed like a handful of people. Like he didn't follow that many people. He followed like Tim Urban.

He followed like, you know, health influencers, some of them, he was a ripped guy. Um, and he also paid for your newsletter as I do. I think you have a really wonderfully interesting, unique thinking newsletter.

It's wonderful. I recommend people. I know you probably have thousands and thousands of subscribers.

He was a paid subscriber of your newsletter.

[Paul]

Yeah. Yeah. He was, he was following me paying for the newsletter, all of it.

Neil:

And he actually, he actually commented on Bryan Johnson to you. It baffles me so much that anyone could possibly follow Bryan Johnson. The dude just asterisk looks asterisk eerie period.

Next paragraph. I'm a fairly rational, non-superstitious person. But even when I look at the guy, it's immediately obvious.

He's a literal vampire period, pale gaunt avoids the sun dead. Look in his eyes feasts on the blood of his own son, new paragraph, last paragraph. How can you be obsessed with health and longevity, but literally avoid the source of all life slash energy on earth in brackets, the sun question mark.

[Paul]

Yeah, I think that's a common kind of response I got from that article or what people have. Um, I think sort of Bryan Johnson's is the leading sort of longevity, uh,

Neil:

but you didn't reply.

[Paul]

No.

Cause I think he called himself, he said, I'm fairly rational. And he said, yes, I'm fair, which is, I don't know. It's one of those red flags you hear, like maybe you're on a date with a girl and she says, I'm a rational person.

And then like the next two years is going to be a bad time for you.

Neil:

So why is that? Why is it? I don't know. I don't know.

[Paul]

It's just, it's just, I think if you're, if you tell yourself that you're, if you tell somebody you're rational, you might not be, uh, it's just a weird, it's just an odd way. It's like, it's like screaming something. It's just, I am calm.

Yeah, I'm calm. So it's just like, Oh, you're not rational. Cause you just have to tell me that.

Yeah. It's just, you rational people don't, don't really say that.

Neil:

What percent of your DMS do you reply to?

[Paul]

Probably like half, half of them are.

Neil:

Okay. It wasn't like he ghosted him, but, but then when you, when, you know, December 10th, 2024 comes out, your phone's blowing up because it comes out that he follows you.

[Paul]

Right.

Neil:

And he's just been arrested. I mean, I'm assuming that's a pretty complex suite of emotions.

[Paul]

Yeah. I mean, it's, um, I was, that's like a weird, that was a really weird day. Cause it's like, does this guy have like a bag, my tweets like in his, in his bag or something?

Like, is how crazy is this going to get? Cause the story blew up so much. It wasn't just a normal story.

[Neil]

Well, Tim Urban tweeted, Tim Urban tweeted, um, just, um, he tweeted just on that first. And then the second tweet, his second tweet was very much not the point of my book.

[Paul]

Right.

[Neil]

Cause, cause he had, that guy had said he loved Tim Urban's book. Tim Urban, our past guest in chapter 22. I guess you must've felt like some part of your work was an inspiration.

But like to, to this guy who's done this really kind of outlandish act, you know?

[Paul]

So yeah, I think he was just into, I think it was young. He's like 26 or 24. Um, so I, you know, he's in this online world of like piecing together and he was like, uh, Ivy league student.

So very smart.

[Neil]

Yeah. He went to two degrees from Penn.

[Paul]

And, um, so I think he's just into this, into the wellness and, um, into, uh, questioning certain things of modern life. And, you know, um, so he's into a lot of social science writers, a lot of people who are also, um, into that world. Um, but there's nothing I've written that sort of would, would, I don't know, lead someone to do anything like this.

I found it very strange. Cause I'm very much a pretty vanilla, especially when you consider what else is going on in X, especially now, you know?

[Neil]

Yeah. I do. Interestingly, like to me, it was interesting because before they caught him and identified him, you had written an email newsletter that I got, like I subscribed to.

And it was about the rise of assassinate, you know, you had pointed out, cause you always do. You couch it in, you couch it in antiquity. You're saying historically the elites and the aristocrats have always feared for their own safety.

You're like, you had said, this is why Zuckerberg pays 32 million and a has eight security guys. And he's learning MMA. Like, you know, when you're worth $200 billion and you're wearing a $905,000 watch to announce no more censorship on your platforms, you know, you are well aware that you have, there's a, Yeah.

[Paul]

A bit of a dynamic here. You know what I'm saying? Yeah.

And especially in America, which is this exception, which is elite send their kids, you know, they go there, they walk the streets of Manhattan, LA, you know, go to colleges, college campuses, you're safe. Like nobody's going to kidnap you. Uh, rich people don't really live behind these gates like they do in other countries.

Um, which is, you know, you gotta worry about, I mean, Kim Kardashian got basically kidnapped in Paris and got robbed in a hotel room. And you generally don't see that in America. And for a lot of reasons.

Number one, America's got very strong kidnapping laws, like you're going to go at least, you know, prison for at least 20 to life for any type of kidnapping, which is a big deal. Yeah. And regular people in America don't necessarily hate people who are rich.

Like it's it's like they achieve the American dream. And nobody's nobody's it's just not in like the character of the country to to sort of like there's a lot of rhetoric, but just on the street, there's not a lot of people, you know, like a South American country of like kidnapping or assassination business leaders. Yeah, there is for some presidents.

And we saw with Trump recently or Reagan or but but not with just like general political opponents or CEOs. So it's this exception in America, which, you know, it's this thing that might fall because it's not really Lindy, right? It's not really, you know, the rich and powerful.

[Neil]

Well, they're starting to release all these reports saying, you know, and I feel bad for these people, but they're saying like, you know, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's got broken into while they're at the game. Joe Burrell's house got broken into while he was at the game. Right.

It's like you're starting to see Elon Musk, like everyone's doubling their security. Obviously, the CEO was assassinated.

[Paul]

So I think with Zuckerberg, it's like he's like a real student of history. He's upset. He really reads a lot about Roman times.

And and to the point was, I think he might be the guy that says, look, I know this. This has happened throughout history. I have lots of security.

I travel in a convoy. I train MMA literally for self-defense, not because I want to be a better person or I need help with exercise. He literally could, you know, could be a practical measure.

So so he might he might see it as just and that's why he's doing all this in a way. So, yeah, there could be could be a wave coming. America stops being an exception.

You never really know. I mean, I think America is an interesting place.

[Neil]

So do you plan to move back? I guess you do still live there.

[Paul]

I know I still live there. Yeah, it's great.

[Neil]

And is your background is your background American look generationally or no?

[Paul]

My parents come from Greece. So your parents are Greek.

[Neil]

OK. Yeah. So and my parents are India and Nairobi, Kenya.

But my mom from Kenya is Indian.

[Paul]

Right.

[Neil]

A generation above, you know, before the partition.

Can I go back to the article?

[Paul]

Absolutely.

[Neil]

OK.

No breakfast, he said. Breakfast was a note. This is the New York Times article.

Breakfast was unknown in early history. Rome, Byzantium, ancient Greece. Breakfast wasn't really a thing.

Paul Skallas has written about the anti breakfast positions of Plutarch and Thomas Aquinas.

[Paul]

Yeah. You know, breakfast, like this huge breakfast of cereals and what we think is more of like a creation of like 150 years of marketing. Generally, you had a little bit of food and then you go and work throughout the day and then you'd then you'd have your first meal around lunch or a you know, you get the benefits of fasting.

[Neil]

So I think you do this. You're a you're a. Yeah.

I just 16, eight person or whatever.

[Paul]

Yeah. I just generally have a cup of coffee. But the croissants here are so good that it's sometimes it's hard to resist.

[Neil]

Well, you know, it's funny. I said this to my wife, Leslie, who has been a co-host on the show a bunch of times and to my barista. Her name is Nicole Bersafi.

And both of them said that can't be true. And Nicole said she said she's from Lebanon. She's she's she's I'm Arab.

The Byzantine Empire always a breakfast. Aren't we part of antiquity to say my family goes back 11 on thousands of years, the imperialist nations that, quote unquote, influenced the way we didn't have any say over my culture to modern day. Breakfast is always in part of it.

They have little pieces of fruit, tomatoes, cut up some cheese, a little bit of bread, a little bit of tea or Turkish coffee. She's 29. She's a coffee shop or she's a writer.

My wife is like, can you ask him, like, which parts of history you take from and which ones you don't? Because, of course, yeah, you can also say you can do you know. So how do you.

[Paul]

Yeah, it's it's not really like a scientific thing. I mostly focus on the Greco Roman world, southern Europe. That's not to say that people didn't eat bread, you know, something in the morning, but generally it was pretty light and it wasn't this full meal.

[Neil]

Certainly it wasn't Fruit Loops.

[Paul]

Yeah. Or, you know, this big spread.

So, yeah, it's not something it's not something that just comes up like a meal like today is.

[Neil]

So that's the hard part of your job is you have to kind of pick, you know, because I heard you say, I don't advocate bloodletting. But of course, I've seen you write and say donating blood is actually really good for you. So it's kind of like there's lessons from the past, but you also have to be quite the interpretation of them is the is is challenging or it's like the only like it works.

[Paul]

But the problem is that's the only thing they knew that works. So they would just do that with everyone and then they would hope the placebo effect would kind of the problem with ancient medicine is, you know, they didn't have it was all about prevention and was, you know, if you got really seriously injured, you're in trouble. So the goal is to just, you know, treat food as medicine, treat exercise as medicine and just stay away from kind of really bad results.

But in a way, that's the philosophy we should have today, which is you shouldn't go to the hospital unless you seriously need to or something really bad happens because you're going to all of a sudden you're going to get on pharmaceuticals, you're going to get dependent on things and, you know, bad things can kind of happen in clusters. So even just that concept of preventative medicine is foreign to us today.

[Neil]

Yeah, I mean, it's not it's not the model we treat, we treat, we treat, we treat ailments, right? Like we've paid officers when we're sick, we should be paying them when we're healthy.

[Paul]

Yeah, that's true.

[Neil]

You know, two more paragraphs, because this is going to relate directly to everything else. Here's the next quote. Mr. Scalise is proponent for a lifestyle based on a relatively obscure theory called the Lindy Effect, from which he's derived his Twitter handle, Lindyman, his sub stack, the Lindy newsletter, his podcast, Lindy Talk, which I don't think you're doing anymore, and this practical philosophy of health, exercise, diet, and consumer choice. The Lindy Effect can be traced to a 1964 article in the New Republic called Lindy's Law by historian Albert Goldman, who describes the bald-headed, cigar-chomping know-it-alls who foregather every night at Lindy's, the diner on Broadway known for its cheesecake. And they postulated that since comedians have an exhaustible supply of good material, since they don't have forever comedy, therefore the life expectancy of a television comedian is proportional to the total amount of their exposure on TV, on the medium. They've been on forever, they can keep being on forever.

If they've only got one five-minute set on Carson, you know, we don't know if they could do it again. That's the principle, right? So, you know, Jerry Seinfeld, 70, he just played two sold-out shows here in Toronto at Scotiabank, you know, that's where like the Raptors play, you know, and he's 70.

So, and he's been doing this since Carson. So like this guy, he's, you know, this is a long-term comedian, whereas if you go on the Netflix comedy thing, like all these people are, you know, all these people are new.

[Paul]

His show is probably a better example, which is, you know, his show's still being played while so many other shows have just gone away, you know, and you still have these. And it crosses generations, which is another big thing with the Lindy effect. It has to, there has to be churn, generational churn, and it has to cross into it, which is why somebody asked me, is Bitcoin Lindy?

It's just, we haven't, hasn't really existed long enough for more, you know, generations to come after, which is how we get all of this, like these ancient literature, these old books, they were just handed over from person to person each generation. And, you know, somebody said, okay, this is valuable. And then next generation said, this is valuable.

And so there's some quality there that makes it timeless. But that takes, you know, a lot of time and we're kind of being assaulted by tons of media and works now. So it's going to be not a many things survive.

So you can kind of trick yourself into thinking that there's a lot of kind of Lindy works happening right now. And, you know, for the future generations won't care about any of this, really, it's happening right now.

[Neil]

Well, I, I relate to this because I, my first book got popular in 2010. So I developed a hundred thousand person following on Facebook. Those people have grown up with me, but they're now I can see from the messages and so on.

They're in the older generation. And then I have less followers on Instagram where I have 35,000 followers. Cause I, that generation doesn't cross with me as much.

And then on Tiktok, like I got like one, I got like three, I don't even have Tiktok up because I can see generationally that each of these social media medium has lasted precisely one generation, precisely one generation. Whereas YouTube, maybe you could argue is actually Lindy, you know,

[Paul]

YouTube has replaced television as, as actually the kind of homepage of the internet. And there's also a funny thing happening, which is a lot of old web pages are being deleted. So if you go to these old Wikipedia pages a lot of, there's a lot of dead links.

If you go to these articles from blogs, like they don't exist anymore.

[Neil]

That's why they're all looking to the way back machine.

[Paul]

Yeah. So like there's, yeah, people, people think, okay, we have the way back that's going to preserve it, but that's not really how that's not really how things work. How things work is one person, you know, give something to another person and that person sees value.

And then that person hands it over and, you know, it goes through people. It's just not really like frozen into like a website, you know, the library of Alexandria burned down, but the is, we didn't really lose anything there because everything that was valuable, w

[Neil]

What year, what can you give us some context for those of us who aren't as, I think that was just like a, is this the Roman empire like 2000 years ago?

[Paul]

Yeah.

[Neil]

This is this a little bit before that was to have said to have contained at that time, all known written rights.

[Paul]

But, but the thing is, it's not like, it's not like everything was there. Things are scattered around the ancient world. There were copies everywhere.

You know, this was just one place that held a large number of those works. So did we really lose anything? I don't know.

Things were already being copied everywhere. And they went through the, you know, the Byzantium, they went through the Arab conquest and people sort of took Aristotle. They took Plato.

They took all these classics that we have stories like the Odyssey and kept copying them and transmitting them. So if they're truly valuable people, people preserve them, people hand them over, they make multiple copies.

[Neil]

Yeah. Okay. Generational churn has been introduced as a concept of importance for the rest of our conversation, which means something must survive across generations.

Hence the definition of a book being a classic, for example, which is why that phrase modern classic should not really exist. Right. Because you can't just label Roald Dahl a modern classic until he's lasted, you know, my parents and my kids kind of thing, you know.

[Paul]

It's also a, like, I think I spoke to Nassim Taleb about this, actually the most, there's an inverse relationship between popularity at first and, and length of time at last. So it's something that's very, very popular. Like a lot of sports biographies are very popular, you know, popular, or your social science book of the year is very popular.

It sells millions of copies. Those things don't actually tend to last. He told me that things that mostly last have, are kind of like a medium to low medium popularity that just consistently books get bought at that, at that sort of lower level, where it's just, you have to break through the first filter.

It has to be somewhat popular, can't be completely obscure. And it just sort of has to kind of, kind of continue at this, at this certain kind of lower level pace, rather than the whole, when we sold 20 million copies, cause this was the topic of the day and then nobody reads this anymore. So.

[Neil]

That's interesting. Like the longest running show on Broadway right now is Wicked, which has been there 20 years. Well, I've been to New York five or 10 times in the 20 years. I don't remember hearing about it at first, but now of course it's everywhere and likely will, I'm sure now with the movie, they'd be on Broadway kind of another 20 years.

Right. But when it started, it was probably like the U2 play Spider-Man was like the biggest thing headline. Okay.

You have three quotes on reading. I'm not going to, I normally would ask you for your comment on them, but I really want to get into your three most formative books. I'm just going to read them from August 12th, 2024.

You wrote a famous newsletter on your Lindy newsletter called don't give up on reading just yet. But you said up until recently, everyone read novels, men, women, it didn't matter. You then quote a Nielsen statistic saying that now men only make up 20% of the audience for literary fiction.

And you write men have mostly left books behind and gravitated towards podcasts, YouTube channels, or Twitter. This is a common pattern occurring, not only the decline of literary fiction for men, but also activities getting more gendered like poetry and horse riding.

[Paul]

Yeah. Um, I mean, you can kind of see that, uh, when you walk into a bookstore, it's very female coded, like the books are, um, representative of the readers, which is mostly, um, women. So there's lots of, uh, fiction geared toward women.

Um, a lot of, um, certain books around spirituality. Uh, I don't know what you want to say, but it's very obvious when you walk into them that the readership of books and, you know, it brings up really to digress here. A lot of women are actually doing things that men used to do, like write poetry, like men used to write poetry.

Women kind of do that. A lot of women love horse riding. Men used to love horse riding.

[Neil]

It's been taken over. Actually, you argued that it was almost all men and now it's almost all women.

[Paul]

Yeah.

[Neil]

So there's a little bit of a shift. I think women, you show some graphs, you show some, you know, you, you're always quoting something.

[Paul]

Yeah. So it's funny. A lot of women are taking over a lot of things that we consider maybe older aristocratic male culture.

And a lot of, um, men are kind of into, um, you know, specialized YouTube videos, uh, for their interests, right? Like you just nerd out on some like really specific interest that you have, you know, building a ship or house or whatever you want, whatever it is. Um, and, um, and so things are a little bit more gendered now, which I think is Lindy.

Like you always had like a different, um, traditions between women and men. So I don't think that's a big issue, but I do think book reading, especially, uh, by men is, is going to decline even more in the future. And I think, um, they're going online to find, uh, to find their, you know, stimulate to get stimulated by ideas or, or their interests.

[Neil]

Yeah. It was interesting with gender because of course I've always thought, at least for the last five plus years that we live in like a post-gender society. Like that's been my view.

Uh, that's how I've seen people in my extended family that identify as non-binary or identify as a trans or, or kind of neither gender. And, um, and then, you know, yesterday in Trump's inauguration, he said, again, in 2025, there were only two genders in America, men and women. And I'm like, what the hell?

Like, isn't that we already moved past. So I, I do wonder about your thoughts in gender in particular as a thing, you know, being, being Lindy or not, because I guess maybe I'm living in Toronto, Canada. Like I don't our bathrooms don't say men and women on them.

And they haven't in years, you know, like no urinal.

[Paul]

Oh, really? And I didn't know that.

[Neil]

Yeah. They say, they say like what's inside or they say like all welcome. And like, we don't have gendered, at least I don't from my vantage point, I don't usually see gendered bathrooms anymore.

[Paul]

You know, I assume all the time. Wow. Um, okay.

Uh, I thought, although I do, although I think do see a few unisex bathrooms, but, um, I generally think, Oh, look, a restaurant will have our restaurant.

[Neil]

We'll have like all these things. And then they just have like a row of eight bathrooms, but the bathrooms all have their own door. You know, you go to, you go to othership, which is like the sauna pop, really popular sauna, cold plunge place, or some in New York, or some in Toronto, it's like a co-ed change room.

And of course there's little stalls where you go behind a curtain for your private parts, but everyone's taking off their clothes together, putting them on their clothes. It's just like, again, I don't mean to say this, but I've always thought like, we're kind of moving past the gender binary. We had a look, they may not on the show, you know, a low wrote a really famous book called beyond the gender binary.

Uh, they were our guests in chapter one of six. So I just feel like the everything is also kind of old, you know, like kind of, I guess it's Lindy to your point, but then if you read beyond the gender binary by a look, they might not, they argue that the gender splitting was actually kind of a colonial thing that when they went and took over another country like India, you need to stamp people's ID cards. And so they kind of forced people into this male or female archetype.

But before you had blue long haired flute playing gods that were not, you know, specifically a male or female. So they argue that the gender binary is actually new.

[Paul]

No, I don't, I don't, I don't think that, I mean, I think, I think gender and sort of, uh, as a concept has been pretty Lindy it's been around a while. I think it's also harder. I think you're seeing a lot of resistance to that here, uh, because there's an attempt to and make sort of take, take gender away.

Um, yeah, I don't know. I, I, I tend to see there's a lot of differences, differences between men and women. And I think trying to shoehorn everybody into one thing is actually causing a lot of problems.

Um, for example, like mass employment in a way, I think it's obviously, um, uh, it's actually probably a good thing for the most part, but I think putting men and women both in this sort of employment, uh, box where they're doing exactly the same thing may actually be the thing that's hurting like people, you know, forming relationships, having children in the future. Um, I think like, well, what kind of jobs are you thinking about anything involving, you know, what I call just regular, maybe white collar employment, which is, um, you know, you're putting people, they're trying to mix gender roles and work. No, I think it's actually making it harder to like raise a family, um, raise, you know, spend time with your children, uh, having, having, because I think when you look at the elite, what are the elite do?

I think a lot, a lot of the elite actually have a stay at home partner. And then the one person goes to work or, you know, that's considered kind of, um, a luxury right now. And I think that's, that's for that reason is because it does kind of, uh, kind of mess up with certain roles that, you know, kind of, uh, we've kind of evolved into not saying women have never worked.

Women have always worked, but in sort of more of like ad hoc ways. Whereas I think modern employment is a bit like a prison, which is, or a school that, um, and you're competing with other people and you're trying to reach a certain level. And I think it takes a lot out of, you know, I think employment is one of the central concepts of our time that we don't discuss enough because I think it takes a lot of energy to build a real career.

And then, then to find a mate who also is at your level and then who supposedly you're supposed to love and then also raise a family. And, um, I think it just takes a lot of energy and effort to do all those things. Um, and I think it's kind of causing a little bit of problems, especially if the, if the government isn't coming to help, I almost think that the government could somehow help by instituting some UBI, maybe just for women, knowing that they are, you know, uh, also, you know, carrying a child and are, um, you know, historically, you know, being more involved in raising them.

Um, so I think there's, there's, there's some gender realities.

[Neil]

You're married, right? You're married and no kids.

[Paul]

Yes.

[Neil]

So if you're living in Canada, like I have a lot of friends in New York where you live and I know you're from Chicago and you have a kid, I don't know if it's six weeks or 12 weeks, but it's something like that. Or you get time off or, or as Canada it's 52 weeks paid.

[Paul]

Right.

[Neil]

Right. And I'm not calling it UBI, but we have institutionalized in our government for a very long time that if you have a baby, you have one year paid time off with your job guarantee at the end of that. It seems like we're prioritized, you know, it seems like that's not an over priority.

[Paul]

That's not enough

[Neil]

I agree. I agree completely with that.

[Paul]

I generally think you need to restructure society to make it easier to sort of raise a family financially and time. I think modern parenting in a way doesn't resemble classical parenting.

[Neil]

Oh, interesting.

[Paul]

So actually what you're getting modern parenting resembles or something completely different. And like classical parenting may resemble modern pet ownership. I think people like pets because you can still go on vacation and have a pet.

You can still live your life and have a pet. It's a very casual thing to have a pet. Obviously you take care of it and people enjoy having it.

And I've noticed people now have not just one dog, they have two dogs. We're entering like a two dog society.

[Neil]

Modern parenting resembles pet ownership.

[Paul]

Classical parenting resembles classical, right? I think classical parenting is a little bit more laid back, a little bit more, you know, kids playing on the streets, coming in at night, a lot of hands off kind of. Whereas modern parenting is very, you know, hands on driving your kids everywhere.

You're essentially a chauffeur. You have to be with them all the time. And there's a lot of, you know, there's stress and competition, a lot of peer pressure with also making sure everyone's in 12 activities.

Yeah. They, they don't fall off the conveyor belt. Like you don't want to fall off the, you don't want to fall off the race, especially in America where like, you know, there's both the carrot and stick, right?

The carrot is very successful. You can become a millionaire, you can be rich, but the carrot is if you fall social classes, like you enter a really bad place. You don't want to be kind of poor in America.

Like it becomes a very first world, a very third world, very fast. So I just think there's a lot of, there's a lot of pressure. There's a lot of new kind of ways we think about parenting.

Cause if you think about like a hundred, even a hundred years ago, where just, you know, kids were walking around maybe 50 years ago, even like my childhood, I remember just kind of going out and not coming in until later in the day and without supervision. So I think a lot's changed. There's a lot of things around raising children and that makes it a decision that's it's a lot more serious than it used to be.

It just used to be a pattern that people would do. And now it's not.

[Neil]

So our guest in chapter 127 was Lenore Skenazy, also dubbed America's worst mom by the today show for letting her nine-year-old son ride the subway by himself in New York city, author of free range parenting, that book, the movement, which is one of the four core tenets proposed by Jonathan Haidt in his number one nonfiction book of the year is our guest in chapter 103 called the anxious generation. So there's some movement back towards the son of Lindy concept, but you said structural changes.

Is that what you're talking about? Like more free range as unless, and is there anything else that you'd insert into that? Like I came out, I came out with the Matt leave comment.

So is there anything else structurally that you see that society could benefit from, from the parenting perspective by making more Lindy?

[Paul]

I'll be a safer society. Probably like allowing more free range allowing. But, but it's, I think it's so we're so in, in this world we're in, I think we're really in a new world where I think parenting is, is like a, it's like a race.

There's a lot of peer pressure and you're seeing it with, you know, less people going, going that route. So if we just enter like historically, where we would be, where it was just as a regular pattern of life, that'd be easier, but it's hard to do when the environment has changed.

[Neil]

Yeah, totally. It's interesting too. Cause my family just came back from a beach vacation.

I'm very privileged to be able to say, and on the beach, there's like, you know, annual beach soccer game just happening in the like little resort. And one of the guys is way better than everybody else. Like by a mile, like I couldn't get the ball.

I couldn't even get close to getting the ball off them anytime. And I was like, what do you, what do you do? He's like, I play in the, in the premier.

Like I said, what do you mean? He said, well, I'm in Chelsea. So what, what, what, what team?

He said, well, I'm, I'm the under whatever, seventeens. I said, well, how many is there? He said, oh, there's seven levels of league below the top league, starting from under, I want to say like six or eight or something like super young.

And I said, what's the percent chance you make it, you know? And he said, cause he's four levels back. He said, you know, like less than 5%.

And this special, like I said, there's seven levels. Well, we have the same thing in Canada with hockey, you know, like there's a forced pressurization to these and Nassim Talib has talked about a lot, these very finite spots at these prestigious schools, where if you don't get a ticket to the right private school or the right high school or the right college, then you're not going up into the right channel. So it's forcing a lot of specialization.

A lot of kids are in a lot of programs from a very young age.

[Paul]

Yeah. I think it's historically unprecedented at this level of competition and structure and organization, but yeah.

[Neil]

Yeah. Okay, cool. Well, listen, listeners now, you know, this deep into the conversation, we haven't even gotten to your books yet.

Listeners now can see why I consider you to be one of the most original thinkers over time. I don't agree with everything you say, nor should I, nor will I, and nor do I think everybody listening well. And this is why it's fun to talk to you because original thinking in this 3 billion people logging into meta everyday society is the hardest thing to come by.

Is there an order that you can point at these three that I can introduce them? Which would you like to talk about first, either in your life or in the chronology of the show?

[Paul]

We can talk about Publius Syrus first, his little aphorisms.

[Neil]

Yeah. Yeah. Great.

Oh, thanks for saying aphorisms because I've been saying aphorisms in my head. Okay. Okay.

So let's get into your three most formative books with Lindy man. I'm very excited. I read these books.

I actually really like all of them. The very first one, and I'll take a minute to introduce it to our guests. Those listening, I want you to picture like you're holding it in a bookstore.

So I'm holding up a very thin, like 44 page book called the moral sayings of Publius Syrus S Y R U S translated by Darius Lyman. So Sirius also known as Publius Sirius lived from 85 BCE to 43 BC and Antioch, which is present day Turkey. He was a slave turned into a playwright.

This plays are apparently lost to history, maybe in the library. I don't know. But what remains are these crystallized distillations, the aphorisms of 1,087 pithy one-liners starting from number one as men, we are all equal in the presence of death all the way up to number 1,087 man's life is short.

Therefore an honorable death is his immortality. And again, it's like a 44 page book. It looks like a pamphlet, but the vastness in here is like, you can't read not even a full page before stopping.

Like it's, it's a vastness deep as an ocean. The cover is a thick purple ribbon across the bottom that says his name Publius Sirius and a white ribbon on top of it says a Roman slave. There's a painting of a man in a gold robe with a long beard beside a man with a white turban and a red and gray tunic both standing while a third man sits on a stone behind them.

There's a small town visible in the in the distance. Publius' moral sayings defy categorization. Are they stoic?

Are they Epicurean? Are they skeptic? Are they cynic?

All we know is that they are witty and wise and the former slave term playwright, he transcends doctrine and eventually ultimately embraces humanism. File this one under 430.042 for languages slash Germanic languages. Probably not a good Dewey decimal.

Lindy man, please tell us about your relationship with the moral sayings of Publius Sirius translated by Darius Lyman.

[Paul]

Yeah, it's a wisdom distilled. One sentence, you know, a few sentences maybe per line. And it's actually takes a while to read because you stop and you think about it.

And if you lived a long enough life, you can recognize how right he is on many of them, right? You've seen it yourself, right? And he's articulating something maybe you've you know, but you've never really seen written out.

And I just I just love I love this format. It's thousands of years old. You see it pop up in ancient literature all the time, which is here's one or two sentences of life.

It's real. And we're moving on to the next one. And it's it's I mean, it's a joy.

And I think it really for me, especially in a land, you know, in a world of like lower, really lower attention span and, you know, surrounded by lots of media, lots of video, it's kind of it makes reading fun again, because you're really getting.

[Neil]

It's like Twitter.

[Paul]

Yeah. Yeah. And in a way, that's why I think a lot of Twitter so addicting because it is this it's just maxims.

And there's all this like there's this long literature of these of these the Ten Commandments is the first listicle. Right. And but there's way more than that.

People just focus on the ten. There's like a whole body of literature. There's like the French French moralists.

[Neil]

Yeah. Yeah. This is why I was going to say orient us because I've heard you talk about aphorisms often.

I don't know how you came across Publius Serious. Like, I mean, this guy's stuff is still getting printed two thousand years later. I'm ashamed to say I never heard of the guy.

You know, I never heard of the guy. So was it Nassim Taleb's writing? Was it like?

[Paul]

Yeah, it was Nassim Taleb mentioned it, I think, a long time ago and then he was reading it. And then but he's he actually published his own aphorisms, his own book.

[Neil]

Head of Procrastinates.

[Paul]

Yeah. Which is which is just as you know, which is really good. I like it, too.

But there's this long literature of a lot of like Nietzsche did it a lot of like Oscar Wilde, a lot of authors write a lot of treatises and then they and then they enter the world of, you know, aphorisms and maxims. And and it's really it's really a pleasure to read because it's such distilled wisdom and it hits hard and and you can tell, you know, it's lasted. It's so simple.

Right. He sent these like just a few sentences and that, you know, been filtered throughout time. So I kind of recommend I read a few.

[Neil]

Yeah, good. Well, just let me give people a taste of this and you can comment on these. Number two, I already mentioned number one, as men, we are all equal in the presence of death.

Number two, the evil you do unto others, you may expect in return.

[Paul]

No.

[Neil]

Number four, to dispute a drunkard is to debate an empty house. Number 18, do not find your happiness in another's sorrow. Number 19, an angry lover tells himself many lies.

[Paul]

Love it. All true.

[Neil]

He has a lot of confusing ones, too.

I mean, number 144, society in shipwreck is comfort to all.

[Paul]

I mean, I don't get people have like a lot of comfort and complaining, right, about how bad things are.

[Neil]

Oh, that's what he's saying. Number 155, a god can hardly disturb a man truly happy.

[Paul]

Yeah, I've seen it. I don't think I'm one of those, but I've seen other people.

[Neil]

I get pulled by the vicissitudes, by the news, by the you know, I get angry about this. I get I've been down by that. But truly, you know, it kind of sort of slaps you into into like clear thinking.

You're like a god can hardly disturb. Well, if I was really happy, I wouldn't be bothered by all that by anything. You know, there is no need to 16.

There is no need of spurs when the horse is running away.

[Paul]

That's that's a one. Yeah, that's a good one. I can't I can't decide what he's saying with that one.

[Neil]

Well, I think he's saying, you know, it's kind of Tim Ferriss's adage that like who he who speaks less at the end of the negotiation wins. Like, if you if you're trying to negotiate for a mattress, and it's $1,000, and you're like 900, and the guy's, I don't know, see what I can do. Okay.

And then you're asking for more. Like, I think that's what I got from it. It's like, you already won.

Like, you don't need to spur the horse. It's already leaving. It's already running away.

I don't know. Maybe I misread that. I guess that's part of the problem with these things slash good thing is that they take your mind down whichever path your mind wants to go.

You know, how about this one to 18? Give you give me your thoughts. Speed itself is slow.

When cupidity awaits cupidly like Cupid, Cupid arrow, like I'm assuming speed itself is slow and cupidity awaits like falling in love makes time stop.

[Paul]

Yeah, that could be it. I'd have to sit back and think about that one. That's that's an interesting one.

[Neil]

So it goes on and on, you know, number 360. It is a weak mind that cannot bear the possession of riches.

[Paul]

Yeah, it's that's that famous. Some of these sayings actually pop up in multiple other places. Like it takes a better man to handle wealth than the handle poverty.

[Neil]

Right.

[Paul]

Right.

[Neil]

Right.

[Paul]

That's like the one that pops up all the time. And then once you start getting some success, you realize how true it is. So you're like, oh, I can batten down the hatches.

I can like we humans are almost like pretty good with scarcity. But like all of a sudden I have options. Oh, I have temptation.

That's actually actually is kind of difficult to handle a little bit.

[Neil]

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Listen to this one, 385. And that's kind of converse of that one, I think, but maybe not. Poverty needs little semicolon avarice everything.

[Paul]

Yeah, I think we're we don't really have like a way to satiate like our greed, right? There's no there's no there's no top. There's no ceiling for greed.

There's no ceiling for more like as a human, you sort of just keep going if you want. There's no satisfaction. Right.

So.

[Neil]

Yeah, that's kind of like the Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut adage that they were at a party for a billionaire on Shelter Island. Kurt Vonnegut said to Joseph Heller, you've written the greatest work of literature of the 20th century. This guy is a hedge fund manager who made more money than you have your whole life last year.

How do you feel about that? And Joseph Heller said, well, I have something he'll never have. Enough.

[Paul]

Right.

[Neil]

There you go. So you mentioned there's a lot of people like, you know, through the work of like Tim Ferriss, really, his podcast that came out in 2014. He's the first person that brought onto my radar this sort of big three Stoic philosophers, Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius.

And then I kind of bought and read through, you know, meditations, letters from a Stoic, the art of living. But you and others like NNT, Nassim Taleb, Brian Holliday, who was our guest in chapter 38, others have really gone down this pathway. I wondered if you might give us a little bit of a starter, either reading list or, you know, people we should check out.

Like, what's your mental map of the greatest thinkers throughout history? Because you seem to be coming at it from an interesting perspective and one that is not affiliated with a particular religion. So I'm curious how you think about who you read from the past, how you how you filter that, and if you can kind of orient us to your thinking.

[Paul]

Yeah, there's a lot, especially if you, you know, you could sign up for the Loeb Classical Library, I think, and you'll... LOEB. Yeah, LOEB.

And you'll just get access to thousands of works of classical antiquity. And there's all these kind of obscure authors, and then there's well-known ones, like the Stoics, very popular, very good. A lot of great lessons about how to handle fortune, how to handle luck, going against you and going with you, how to not having it affect you.

I mean, that's, I mean, that's a great...

[Neil]

So you're talking about Marcus Aurelius.

[Paul]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Marcus Aurelius. Any others?

[Paul]

There's others like, you know, there's a guy named Theophrastus, T-H-E-O-P-H-R-A-S-T-U-S. And he was a student of Aristotle, and he wrote these, he wrote a great book called Characters about all these types of people you meet in day-to-day life, like a liar, someone who, somebody who tries to flatter, all these descriptions of these, these like maybe 30 or 40 archetypes that are still used today. So, you know, that's, that's also a great way of...

[Neil]

This guy's like 2000 years old as well.

[Paul]

Yeah, he's 2000 years old, but these characters are all modern that he's, he's like, he's like portraying. So there's, there's people like that. There's people like Plutarch who write, you know, history and he's, and he's sort of, he, he takes these historical figures and then he compares them.

So there's, there's, there's a lot of material out there and you can kind of go into it as much as you want. Then you can go farther into, you know, history and you go into like the French, you know, there's like, there's like these French from the 17th, 16th century, also aphoris, like La Bruyere, La Rochefoucauld.

[Neil]

Do you say aphorers, A-P-H-O-R-E-R-S, the people that are making their writing into aphorisms?

[Paul]

Yeah. And, and they're like, they're, they're excellent as well. Then you have the Germans like a hundred years later with...

[Neil]

Sorry, one second, before we get to the Germans, what was going on in France, 16th, 17th century? Is this, is this the...

[Paul]

Just the richest country in the world has had the most talent.

Oh, this is the beginning of the enlightenment and the... You see that a lot, which is, we have the works from the Greeks when Greece was, you know, really successful, advanced country in the world. Right.

And then it went to Rome and then we have all these like great literature from Rome. And then we go to France because France was the richest country in the world at that time when they were writing. And then Germany, which is also became rich.

So in a way like... England probably, Shakespeare. Like Shakespeare.

That's when England was kind of becoming...

[Neil]

Chaucer

[Paul]

Yeah. So in a way, well...

[Neil]

Follow the richest country to find the...

So you're saying Elon Musk from the vantage point of 200 to 500 years as the richest human in the richest country, his tweets will one day be crystallized and distilled down to like a hundred pithy phrases.

[Paul]

I don't know if he will, but I think there's something to be said about talent goes to where the money is, the opportunity is, where the action is. And, you know, I use the example of priests, like throughout the last 500,000 years, Catholic priests were scientists of the day. And like, if you Google Catholic priest scientists, you'll come up with your Wikipedia page of all these inventions they came up right with, because that was a very prestigious job.

And people sent their firstborn sons to become priests. It was like a very high status position. You had a lot of power and a lot of time to also study on your own.

And today, though, in a post-religious age... Often they were the only people that read. Right.

That too. You know, in a society. And now we're living in a post-religious age.

So the amount of talent going into the priesthood, probably of all religions, too. It's not just about Catholic priests, but Islam and Hinduism, because religion is relatively low status now, you have that talent going into business, law, you know, wherever, right? Academia.

So that's where you're getting a lot more output.

[Neil]

Influencers, right?

[Paul]

Yeah.

[Neil]

YouTubers.

I mean, like, you know. So a friend told me, a friend just told me, my son doesn't want to be a doctor. It doesn't make enough money.

Like, I literally heard that phrase the other day. It doesn't make enough money. I said, what are you talking about?

Doctors are the most paid job in society. Like, I'm Indian. Like, are you kidding me?

Like, doctor's number one, you know? And he's like, no, no. He just asked me how much, just like a 16-year-old kid.

He asked me how much all these jobs paid and it turns out all the business people were way higher, you know? So he wants to be a business person.

[Paul]

Doctors have a really good high status. That's a good Lindy profession that I think actually hasn't been, like, we all kind of respect doctors, right? Still, like, it's not, it's kind of, it's kind of stayed steady.

It'll probably stay steady for a while. People talk about what, what positions will AI replace, but I think doctors are always going to be here, you know?

[Neil]

Well, my dad was born in Tarantaran, which is a village outside of Amritsar in India, and a poor family in 1944. And I asked him, dad, you know, I was born in Oshawa, Ontario in 1979 here. I said, why'd you become a teacher?

Because all, all our Indian friends are, the dad's a doc, the dad's a doctor in every single family, except you. And you know what he told me? When I grew up where I grew up, doctors and teachers got paid the same.

Oh, interesting. Education was on par with health as a, as a, as a, you know.

[Paul]

Like a professor, right?

[Neil]

Yeah. Well, no, just, just education. Like, you know, when you see the starting salary for teachers in like, you know, Arkansas is $28,000.

And you kind of wonder what's going on with the education system. You can sort of see, like, we've devalued it over the longterm as. Teachers?

An important, yeah, teachers.

[Paul]

Yeah. Interesting question. I wonder if teachers, that's interesting.

I always consider teachers to be middle status throughout, like not necessarily the highest.

[Neil]

Well, they are in terms of, they all have, you know, two degrees, you know, uh, from colleges and they are teaching our kids and they're loved by their communities, but they're not paid anywhere commensurate to the value in society that they provide, which is, you know, Warren Buffett has famously said, like, I could have become a kindergarten teacher, but I was just a guy that looked at books and said, this company is not worth as much as people think.

Like that was, that was worth more in society, but being a kindergarten teacher could arguably be just as important, you know? So Aristotle was a teacher. Plato was a teacher.

[Paul]

They started in an academy, right? They were like, they were like alternative teachers, right? They were kind of, we're starting our own school here.

[Neil]

Kind of like the singularity university vibe.

[Paul]

A little bit.

[Neil]

Yeah.

Okay. So, um, we've got your thought on some of the moral sayings. Um, I wanted to get your, you know, some of the thoughts in this book are around death and dying.

You know, it's literally the first aphorism. Um, you wrote an article November 6th, 2023 for your popular newsletter, which I've met that recommended a few times. And the title is soon you will legally choose when you pass away.

You show, and I was shocked to read this as partly why I liked your work so much. I'm like, what? Canada had over 10,000 people who died by euthanasia in 2021, 10 times higher than the U S and far higher than any country in the world.

And I know as a Canadian, I do hear old people in my family and my friends in their eighties and nineties openly. I've had conversations about assisted dying and them talking about it openly. And we've had conversations.

I just didn't realize we were the world leader in this area. And you, and you're now saying, not only are you the world leader Canada, but you think everyone's going to choose when they die in the next couple of generations.

[Paul]

Yeah. I don't think it's unprecedented. I think it's assisted died.

Dying's always been around as a kind of a gray area that people, you know, the doctor would kind of tell the family and then, you know, a decision would be made that, you know, life isn't worth living, you know, there'd be this, and then they would kind of end it in some humane way, you know, with painkillers. But now it's actually an explicit, it's taking like a, it's funny, it's like, it's a transformation of kind of a gray area norm into an explicit right. And a lot of times society doesn't know what to do when you turn something into an explicit kind of right.

And it sort of takes us into another, takes us into another society where we're like, do you want to choose to die? I mean, you can. And there's like a host, you know, you have to go through a panel.

You can say you're depressed. So it is really like kind of like a, a newer thing.

[Neil]

Sorry to throw this, sorry to throw this in there in a slightly dark way, but we also have higher than ever suicide rates than we've had is over 70 years since the, since it's kind of around the war. So who is assisted? And then there's also like taking it, you're doing it yourself that are both higher, higher than ever.

And conversely, we have the longevity move. We have the longevity movement with literally selling t-shirts saying hashtag don't die. So there's this new bifurcation coming, it seems between choice of death and never dying both in opposition to what I grew up with, which was, you just naturally die eventually.

[Paul]

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? Well, 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]

I don't know. But Dr. Gabor Mate called, and he was our guest in chapter 115. He calls our current society a toxic culture, and he uses suicide rates as one example.

He also uses addiction rates as another example.

[Paul]

I definitely think it's a place you don't want to go down the ladder. And I think it's not a nice world if you are not. And I think that's why there's this really work stress in the air.

There's this hustle culture in the air, especially in places in, you know, North America, where, you know, there's a tension because you don't want to slide down the ladder, because if you slide down the ladder, bad things are happening and it's hard to kind of come back up again. So I think there's a lot going on while we celebrate winners. I also, you know, I travel a lot and I notice what's the biggest insult you can call someone in your country.

In America, it's you're a loser. But that's not the biggest insult in, like, the United Kingdom. It's something along the lines of, like, you're not funny or you're not like, you know, you can't get along.

Or in France, something like you're not civilized. But like in America, it's like you're a loser, right? You lost.

What did I lose? This game we're all playing, you know? So we have winners.

So what happens to the losers? They're in a bad psychological state.

[Neil]

So I think there's a lot. Even the Trump inauguration and the Jimmy Carter funeral, the article said Trump only sits beside Obama because he thinks Obama was a winner and all the other past presidents, no one else won two terms. He only sits beside Obama.

I was like, what? Like, but to your point, this is like the loser winner economy.

[Paul]

Yeah, I think generally.

[Neil]

And I think you're making a broader point about what's what's considered negative in society gives you a glimpse into what's valued.

[Paul]

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think Trump is a great example of someone who considers himself a winner and that there's losers and he's not one of them and he wants to be around other winners.

That's why he's almost he's almost like this grandfather figure in America at this point, almost like this ethos of the nation, whether you like it or not.

[Neil]

Expansionism is Lindy.

[Paul]

Yeah, absolutely. And I think we're seeing that now. I mean, we're back to borders changing with Ukraine and Russia.

I think you're seeing movements happening in Israel and Palestine.

[Neil]

And I think Syria had a regime change and even China with Taiwan, the Uighur Muslim population, like I mean, just when you see it, there's societies or Taiwan or Hong Kong, like, you know, there's and I'm not a geopolitical guy. I'm just saying from a distance, Trump saying I want Greenland, Panama and Canada does not seem out of context from a Lindy perspective.

[Paul]

It's actually a very normal early 20th century, 19th century American view of, you know, we're expanding territory. It's just we've decided to become to freeze borders after 1945. But, you know, you can't I don't know if you can really do that to a natural system that that changes and things change.

And I think we're we're in a moment of change again.

[Neil]

So how do you decide where to go? Because, you know, you're living in France right now. The article in 2021 also quotes you living in a part of France.

You write confidently and with detail about a lot of countries that you presumably have lived in. Like I've seen you writing about Istanbul. I've seen you writing about.

So what do you what's a healthy city to you?

[Paul]

Well, I have a lot of followers. So when I go to a city, I like hang out with have a meet up. So we talk.

And so that helps with knowing just the city that I'm in and what's going on with the day to day people and not just sort of the tourist sites. So that always helps.

[Neil]

And your wife is just cool with being like, let's just live wherever, wherever.

[Paul]

No, we live in New York, but, you know, we're on.

[Neil]

OK, OK.

[Paul]

We travel.

Yeah. Yeah. Or sometimes I just travel just because I have to write an article, right.

Or about a place or, you know, see a place. So it's not. Yeah, it's if it's if you're making money from it, you get a lot more respect.

Right. If it's if you're just sort of traveling. I don't know.

I think women kind of, you know, she's like, are we are we, you know, is this a business or is this you're just doing this for pleasure? No, it's just, you know, you get more respect once you turn things into one of my favorite online writers right now is Thomas Pao.

[Neil]

He's actually a dream guest for the show. He writes the substack or newsletter called Uncharted Territories. And he first gained popularity at the beginning of the pandemic when he wrote the first ever long form graph filled research based article on medium dot com about why this thing is going to go big.

And he was right about everything. But he also travels all around the world writing from the perspective of different cultures. It's almost like a bit of a parlor trick to actually see what's happening anywhere.

You almost have to be outside of it.

[Paul]

Yeah. I mean, it's it's very tempting to just mediate reality through a computer screen. And I think generally that's what a lot of what we're seeing is.

And it's all but it creates like a weird feedback loop, which is, you know, because the online world isn't necessarily reality. It's like a version of it, especially with like Twitter and X. You're getting like some exaggerated view of things.

So you kind of do have to go to places and at least like walk around and talk to people a little bit. Ideally, you'd live there, but you only have one life and you can't you can't really do everything you want to do. But you definitely don't want to mediate reality through a computer screen, I think.

[Neil]

I think that's that's a really interesting point. Because you're huge on X, but you don't really have like Instagram, TikTok following some people are, you know, Dr. Becky is all on Instagram, but not other things. Some people are just big on YouTube.

Some people are Nassim Taleb, arguably. I know he's got probably a hundred thousand or something followers, but originally it was through his books. So you see people kind of confirming the medium is the message as well.

Like, it's nice for you to say that because you have a vantage point through Twitter, but of course, Twitter is. Well, that's that's Twitter. Twitter itself has become itself a bit of a black mirror, you know?

[Paul]

Oh, yeah. I mean, but it's it's a way to communicate with people. I'm just not very good at video or I tried podcasts for a while, but it's actually hard to like email people you like and then you get rejected.

You're like, oh, I'd really like to talk to you. It's it's a it's actually takes a lot of work.

[Neil]

That's why you stopped the podcast, the pitching part.

[Paul]

Yeah, it's I think it's you have these lists of guests and you can get some of them and then other ones you can't. So you have to go to others. It's I don't know.

I just rather just write and it's like, yeah, it's it's enjoyable and I feel it gets the good stuff out. But podcasting is great if you can get like what you have, your situation, you have a good guest on. So it's so ideal.

[Neil]

Well, one of our dream guests is the author of your second most formative book, and that, of course, is the one and only heretofore, multiple time mentioned already, author of one of my formative books, which is The Black Swan. He wrote your formative book, Antifragile, Things That Gain From Disorder. I am holding a thick, beat up, well read, well loved, but never in big doses because I can only it's so dense.

I read like three pages and like I put it down. This is the one and only antifragile. It's got a giant ripped piece of paper separating the left and the right sides of the book.

On the on the left, it's white with antifra written in like a 96 point black caps, aerial narrow. On the right, it's orange with agile written in a 96 point white caps, aerial narrow subtitle underneath Things That Gain From Disorder. And also on the cover, it says New York Times bestseller, author of The Black Swan and an incredible Wall Street Journal blurb that says startling, richly crammed with insights, stories, fine phrases and intriguing asides.

I will have to read it again and again, which isn't even as glowing as the HBR blurb, Harvard Business Review from the inside cover, which says you will learn more about more things from this book and be challenged in more ways than by any other book you have read this year. Trust me on this. But this is, this is massive in terms of its scope and its scale and its intellectual ferocity.

Published in November 27th, 2012 by the actual Random House, by the way, the imprint of Random House Publishing, a division of at the time Random House LLC before they bought Penguin. MNT, as he's called, Nassim Nicholas Taleb was born in Lebanon in 1960 and is a mathematical statistician who got an MBA from Wharton in 1983 before working as a hedge fund manager and derivatives trader before getting his PhD 15 years later at the University of one of your favorite cities in the world, Paris. He also wrote Fool by Randomness in 2001, The Black Swan 2007, one of my own formative books, as I mentioned, and The Bed of Procrustes, which I have not read in 2010.

Today, I think he lives in New York. You would know as a professor at NYU, he's listed as a professor at NYU and he basically stands uncertainty on its head, making it a desirable, even necessary, just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, many things in life benefit from disorder, volatility, and turmoil. Those things are, of course, anti-fragile.

Follow this wonder 155.2 philosophy and psychology slash differential and development psychology. Lindy, man, please tell us about your relationship with the one and only anti-fragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

[Paul]

Yeah, a formative book that I read years and years ago that it's when I first encountered the concept of Lindy, which is related to anti-fragile, which is the more disorder, certain things get stronger. There's a level above resilience. And we should be a resilient survives disorder.

Anti-fragile gets stronger and stronger and gets more powerful over time, which kind of kind of an interesting topic because you don't really, you don't really think of things that get stronger. When they encounter a lot of chaos, you think of things get my head. It's just resilience, but actually things that grow is a fascinating kind of idea.

And like any complex system, you know, I think like you mentioned bones or stressing your heart, you know, things can actually get stronger and better. And then there's the realm of the non-biological, which is ideas, traditions, works of art actually gain more prominence over time. The more that they're sort of attacked, the more they're filtered.

And so there must be something fundamental in these things that have survived. Not everything, you know, there's a reason why certain things kind of survive and that in the longer they survive, there's less survivorship bias too. So like you should really appreciate things that have been around for a long time.

There's some locked in adaptive value there that happens. So it gets you out of neomania, especially it's easy, especially in America to think every new technology is going to change the way we live. Or if it does change the way we live, that's a good thing.

Again, you know, and there's a trade-off. It got me thinking to trade-offs too, which is, you know, the car is great for going long distances, but if you build your society around the car, then you're going to be sedentary, which leads to all these health issues. So these, there's a lot of trade-offs that happen with, you know, new technology.

Some of them are good, like windows, windows on houses allow us to see, you know, beautiful trees, beautiful nature. So in a way not all technology is bad.

[Neil]

They do kill, they do also kill nature quite a bit.

[Paul]

That's true. They could do that as well.

[Neil]

I mean, I just, you know, the glass condos are putting up in Toronto are surrounded by birds.

[Paul]

The problem with those are you're only looking at other condos, which is not like, you're not looking at these like fractal natural shapes. Um, definitely that's why a lot of modern places kind of look depressing is if they're surrounded by other modern places. But if they're actually, if you see, if you read like dwell magazine, they're always have like a picture of this, like really ultra modern house and like a forest or like woodland surrounded by trees, all these nice soothing shapes.

Right.

[Neil]

But then you see, it's only good if others don't join you.

[Paul]

Right. Um, but then you see them all bunched up together. Uh, and it's just like, oh, no, nothing here has, has a shape.

Right. And, you know, we got rid of our ornate architecture in the past, which, you know, made these buildings look beautiful. Um, you can, you can, you can only replace that with kind of a nature.

That's what windows do. But if you, if you surround ourselves with other windows, that doesn't work.

[Neil]

So, um, And the other argument I've heard thrown into this is like, you know, Nassim Taleb writes about, you know, the pyramids being anti-fragile versus, you know, I don't mean to use it, but like the twin towers or the CN tower, or, you know, the empire state building, because it's lasted 2,500 years, it's more likely to last the next 2,500, if there's a big natural disaster.

[Paul]

Yeah, absolutely. It's sort of, uh, these pyramids are, uh, ancient people talked about how old the pyramids were and, you know, they'll probably survive all of us. Right.

I mean, so that's true as well. Um, certain traditions last for a reason, uh, getting rid of them. You don't know, uh, what's going to happen if you get rid of them.

I think, uh, we're seeing some of that a little bit, uh, like, like which ones I think generally like getting rid of all religion, even, even kind of leads, leads a void where people try to find religion and other things. Um, and you're kind of, you know, coming up with like these little deities and, uh, which can cause disorder and sort of, um, I think they call it Chesterson, Chesterson's fence, which is if you, there's a fence there for a reason, taking it down, we don't really know why, uh, what would happen if we take it down. Um, so yeah, we got to be careful with some, some, um, kind of destruction of tradition.

Um, the other thing he talks about a scale, which is great, like things don't just scale, they transform. So I'll use the example of books, books were used to have, used to be these manuscripts with these beautiful pictures and, um, it's interesting type of, you know, these pictures on it and the handwriting was kind of interesting. And then the printing press came in and the printing press can, you know, uh, copy text, copy words or letters.

Um, but it can't copy the actual pictures or the, or the artisan artisanal kind of, um, type of handwriting. So we kind of read books that are all texts now without a lot of pictures. That's normal.

Whereas perhaps books should be a little bit more ornamental. They should have a little bit more pictures, be a little bit more fun to read, maybe not as much as like a comic book, but, um, so we kind of just lose in that scale, um, a little, little art, like we see with like, uh, houses to, uh, houses kind of look the same architecture looks the same because they're built kind of, um, to be made to look like each other. So getting away from kind of local, getting away from, um, kind of artisanal type of living gets us to, you know, everybody's having the same fast food, everybody's dressing the same.

So, um, yeah, there's, there's a little, there's a little worrisome about all of us being connected because that's where diversity kind of dies. Like if you travel around the world, everybody kind of looks the same, is dressed the same, like the baseball hat you can see from America to China and the world a hundred, 200 years ago had all these different types of hats and they're all gone. And just the baseball hats, one of the last ones left.

So it's all these like interesting concepts of like connectivity and scale that he talks about.

[Neil]

It's a big book. It's a dense book. It's kind of a book I've had on my bedside table for like five years.

And like, I read like 10 pages of it. And I'm like, I feel like I've eaten like the richest slice of pie for dessert. You know, it's like so many ideas in this book that it's so dense, but he writes in such an accessible tone.

I mean, like the very first, you know, once you get through the first 30 pages of intro notes, the very first paragraph in the entire book is you are in the post office about to send a gift, a package full of champagne glasses to a cousin in central Siberia. But that's the opening sentence. Like he gets here, like, as the package can be damaged during transportation, you would stamp fragile breakable or handle with care on it in red.

Now, what is the exact opposite of such a situation? The exact opposite of fragile, you know, like he's like, it's accessible, but then he gets into the big ideas. So the very last paragraph of this book, which comes on page 423, there's about a hundred pages of notes after this.

So if you, if you're looking at the book, the last paragraph is like, not near the end of the pages. It's like, you know, there's a lot left after that, but the very last paragraph he writes, and I'd like to get your comment on this. The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking.

If you like variations, remember that food would not have a taste. If it weren't for hunger results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness convictions without uncertainty and an ethical life isn't so when stripped of personal risks.

[Paul]

Yeah. I mean, I call, I call that kind of the payoff space, which is, I think we're kind of, if you're in employment, you've got most people, majority are just want a very stable life. And, but I think in general, there's a lot more depth to life.

Once you enter like the world of like taking risks, starting a business or, or even like approaching a girl that you like, or, um, you know, fasting and then eating or, you know, putting your body at risk.

[Neil]

That's another thing he talks about. He talks about that a lot. Page 243, he, the subject line is, and two failures.

If it's Wednesday, I must be vegan.

[Paul]

Yeah.

[Neil]

That's the point. Well, the point there is as deprivation as a stressor.

[Paul]

That's based on the Greek Orthodox diet, which is like, I don't know, a few thousand thousand years old of Wednesday and Friday you're vegan. And then 30 days before Christmas and 30 days before Easter, you're vegan. Uh, and then throughout the year, the rest of the year, there's some days, which is cyclical, like, like, uh, dieting instead of eating the same thing every day, you're, you're, you're, you know, you're doing a variation and your body's adapting to it.

And it's adapting to the stressors or to the, you know, it's getting stronger, getting weaker and then getting stronger. So, um, that's built into a lot of ancestral diets as well.

[Neil]

Do you do this?

[Paul]

Yeah, I do it too.

[Neil]

So you're vegan two days a week.

[Paul]

Yep.

[Neil]

And, uh, everything else is normal. You just are vegan. No, no meat products or by-products as he puts it, even butter.

He says that even butter. I might, I might, I might have some butter, but yeah, but no, no, I'm not, I'm not pegging you down on it. I'm just curious about this because that means to me in my head, I think, okay, that means eat local is Lindy eat organic is Lindy.

Like eat the foods that were ripening around the time of the year that made sense for them to ripen. And in the winter, you are a little bit skinnier and you eat a little bit less and maybe you have less kills or less meat, you know, like I'm detecting some long-term bias towards, as he says, deprivation is a stressor and you want to stress your body a bit because then it gets stronger. So, you know, you're going on the record of saying this, he's writing about it.

Brian Johnson's in this. I'm looking at myself. I eat from morning till night.

[Paul]

I don't do this at all, but you're making me think about it. Yeah. It's also what we eat too.

Sometimes like with meat, we're eating a lot of muscle and we're not eating the loins, the offal, the intestines. We're not eating the bone marrow. There's a lot of stuff we don't actually eat anymore that we ate a lot more of in the past because meat is so, the actual muscle is so delicious and readily available.

There's a lot, there's also a lot going on with diet.

[Neil]

So you recommend things like bone marrow and things like offal. I think offal is that like intestines.

[Paul]

Yeah. Even like the head.

[Neil]

What's that? Haggis.

[Paul]

Yeah.

[Neil]

You eat haggis.

[Paul]

Brains. Sometimes you can eat a little, like, I mean, there's a whole, it just goes out of fashion.

[Neil]

It's called, um, yeah, I was at a Spanish bar in Toronto called Bar Raval and I ordered something without realizing it was, you know, uh, I think it's not called head cheese. Is it? Yeah.

Yeah. I thought it was cheese. It says has the word cheese in it.

You know what I mean?

[Paul]

Um, so there's also what we're eating now is also, it goes through like fats too. Give us some Lindy diet tips. I mean, that's, that's really what, uh, that those are it.

I follow variation. I tried to not eat meat all the time.

[Neil]

I assume processed stuff is out

[Paul]

I try to avoid seed oils. Uh, that's, that's relatively new. Again, that hasn't been tested much with food and liquids. Probably the easiest Lindy thing to do is just if it's not, if it's really new thing full of artificial preservatives, don't, don't eat it.

You know, what's the problem with seed oils increases inflammation. Uh, it's, it's sort of industrial engineered, uh, where they take these seed oil is out. Yeah.

And it's just kind of like a newer process. Uh, canola is actually what the biggest product from, from, from Canada. Uh, it's just became, it's called that's right.

And it's very cheap. So restaurants and companies kind of just put it into other products and cook with it, uh, instead of olive oil or, you know, uh, or, or with beef. Um, so, or butter or ghee.

So yeah, it's just, it came, I think it became popular in the seventies for most people and now it's in everything. And there's some theories that it's, uh, it's related to heart attacks, cardiovascular issues, whether it is or isn't, you can just avoid it and not take the risk, you know, you can't eat at restaurants anymore. Yeah.

[Neil]

You're, you'd have to ask the waiter, although, excuse me, are you, uh, are you frying these French fries and avocado oil?

[Paul]

Although some places are now sweet green. And I think what's what's there's another popular fast food place that is going to start offering seed oil free meals.

[Neil]

So you're in favor of this because it's more Lindy because of course the seed oils are new.

[Paul]

Yeah.

[Neil]

You're in favor of the guy saying, get rid of high fructose corn syrup from the Coca-Cola.

[Paul]

Yeah.

[Neil]

I mean, hard to do this in practice, especially with cost. I mean, the, I was at the store the other day, Luke, uh, raspberries are four 99. The organic ones are 12 99.

It's like, what the hell? Like, yeah. Three times the price.

I mean, we, we sort of, again, no sprays that are new and bad for you.

[Paul]

It's, it's easier to eat. Yeah. Non-Lindy cheaper.

It's actually a real effort to live your life. And it's, but the highest richest people are kind of, I feel like are doing that. And like, there's like a big health movement at the top.

Uh, they can access it, but a lot of people probably can't, or they don't have the willpower, especially if you're working some job you don't want to do or, you know, family chef. Yeah. And it's just, it takes a lot of effort, but if you have that mindset, it'd be that kind of Lindy mindset of like, well, I'm just not going to engage with this.

[Neil]

If it's not, you know, 500 years old that I do notice that, you know, they show all these health exec execs at the Trump inauguration yesterday, you know, Jeff Bezos is 61. Like he's 61. Mark Zuckerberg is 40.

These guys both look 20 years younger than their age. Like Zuckerberg looks like he's 20. Brian Johnson is like the strength of an 18 year old.

Like there's this, you've pointed out that idolizing youthfulness is very Lindy.

[Paul]

No, I think idolizing youthfulness is, is actually a kind of a newer thing, especially in America.

[Neil]

Okay. I thought, Oh, I thought you've said that that's like a historical thing. People have always wanted to be younger.

I think, no, I think it's a longevity being the, being the obsession.

[Paul]

I think, I think it's, I think it's I think in America, we don't, people don't want to get old. I think it's like a really youthful kind of, it's actually not, there's no, there's no respect that comes with being older. You don't have this, it's not a really traditional society.

And I think you're just seen as like unattractive and old. And that's why you've all these celebrities and all these, not even just celebrities, regular kind of people kind of getting Botox getting on testosterone, taking whatever it takes to sort of look youthful and dressing youthful.

[Neil]

So that reminds me of my very favorite quote in your third and final book, which is called a pattern language by Christopher Alexander, Sarah Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein. This is a complete masterwork took a decade in the making by them with a whole team of people. It published finally January 1st, 1977.

Talk about a pub date, first day of the new year by Oxford university press. This is no joke. It's a butter yellow cover on a thick, gigantic, like 1159 page hardcover.

I don't even know what I paid for this, probably like 50 bucks. It's got the thinnest paper ever. And it says a pattern language.

The name of this book is completely misleading. It's really how to design. It's like Sim City in 1977.

It's like how to design a town 50 years ago, how, how far apart should everybody live? How tall should everybody's fence be? How high should everybody's windows be?

Why should nothing be more than four stories? Why should old people live next to young people? Why should, and it's not just that it's culturally, why should there be an arcade?

Why should there be a billiards hall? Why should there be a, a legion? Why, what are these things do?

Why should there be a night scene? Why is this good? It's a, I can see why this is formative to you.

It is like a dense proof. The guy got the first ever PhD in architecture from Harvard ever. And then he taught architecture at the university of California and Berkeley.

And then at the end of his life in the seventies, he wrote like this definitive masterwork on how everything should be designed. Okay. It is an incredible, incredible book that I am going to be flipping through the rest of my life.

It's you follow this one or seven to 0.1 for arts slash architecture slash theory and instruction. Lindy man, tell us about your relationship with a pattern language, towns, buildings, construction by Christopher Alexander et al.

[Paul]

Yeah. It's just like you mentioned, it's someone takes architecture, community towns from the ground up in excruciating detail. But it's not a, it's not a bad read.

Like there's pictures, the way he divides each section is very readable. You know, and he utilizes a lot of, some of it is his preferences, but he has an interesting star system, which is if there's a certain number of stars, there's an ancient precedent, or at least a historical precedent for what he's talking about. And so you can actually go, okay, I want the most Lindy um, uh, patterns for designing from windows to the living room, to the bedroom, to the street, to how the building should look, to how the town should run.

So you can go to like the four stars and then like he, but then he also adds his opinion at like the first or second star, which is why he thinks, you know, um, we should, we should do this pattern while we should put this door here. And you know, we should put the bathroom here.

[Neil]

Um, it's got a bit of a, like, uh, that book with the red kettle on the front, the art of design. It's got one of those, like a vibe of like, I just, I'm at the end of my life. I got the most education to stop with anyone.

I've read everything there is to know, and here's how it should be done.

[Paul]

Yeah. And it's, I mean, this book is, this book is part of, uh, being an architect. Um, people read this it's, it's, it's in schools.

It's not, it's not completely alternative. Um, it's mainstream, but it is, it is, but it is it like, if you want a guide for designing a home, a community, a street, um, I mean, there it is with, with, uh, he discusses the historical precedents. Uh, and to me, it's just, it's just, you know, there's like, so there's some concepts that like never occurred to me, like light on two sides, right?

If you have an apartment or a home with windows on one side, it creates a cave like feeling. But if you have a window, uh, on, you know, another, another wall, you have two windows, uh, all of a sudden you feel like you're outside and it completely changes, um, how you feel in that room. And you'll gravitate to being in that room more than the room that just has windows on one side.

And like, you'll, you know, it's just, he's right. Like there's, I'm gravitating toward this specific spot of the house more. Um, so there's all these like concepts that, uh, are intuitive, but you never really see explained.

Um, and some things I disagree with a lot, but a lot, it just kind of opens your mind on how, uh, design, how you function in a space and how things should be designed. Like, I think he, he dislikes, uh, courtyards that are enclosed because it feels like, and like, and then he'll say like, nobody actually hangs out in these courtyards that are enclosed because he feels like everybody's watching you. And like people, people need a little bit more privacy or something.

And you're like, and then you'd like, look out at courtyards are enclosed and you'll see, you won't see a lot of people out there hanging out. And you're like, and that may be it. Like he could be right on that.

So he is, I don't know. It's like a great guide to, um, to design.

[Neil]

Well, absolutely. And it gets right into the culture and you're right. He kind of writes like, you know, I didn't really notice this, but like short paragraphs, lots of pictures, quote, a bit of research quote, quote, a little study.

You know, it's very readable. Um, the thing that brought me into this book, it was a quote you had said about anti-fragile, which is around age mixing, you know, a principle 40 in this book is called old people everywhere. Like it's not written in a pretentious language.

It's literally the chapter of title is old people everywhere. And on page two 16, he writes when elderly communities are too isolated or too large, they damage young and old alike. The young and other parts of town have no chance to benefit from older company.

And the old people are far too isolated goes on. Contemporary society shunts old people. And the more shunted they are, the deeper, the rift between old and young, the segregation of old causes the same rift inside each individual life.

As old people pass into old age communities, their ties with their own past become unacknowledged lost and broken. Their youth is no longer alive in their old age. They become dissociated.

Their lives get cut in two.

[Paul]

Yeah. That's, that's a powerful quote. He's right.

[Neil]

Yeah. And you know, like Leslie and I were just talking earlier today about, Oh, I wish I had my mom in, you know, like I realized, you know, one generation ago, like my parents would be living with me right now to the, to this day, I'm 45. My dad's once in a while will say like, why don't you guys just move in with us?

Like I got, I'm married with kids in a downtown Toronto setting. They live in the suburbs. He's 80 and he still suggests, you know, maybe we should live together.

Um, and he mentions that the house near them was recently purchased and like 15 people moved in, you know what I mean? Like, it's making a comeback, you know, you know. Um, but I quoted this, this passage from this book this morning, we were talking about how my mom over here's a quote from the same page.

She's quoting a 1945 book by Yale university press called the role of agent in primitive society. He says frequently the very young and the very old have been left together at home while the able-bodied have gone forth to earn the living. These oldsters in their wisdom and experience have protected and instructed the little ones while the children have acted as the eyes, ears, hands, and feet of their feeble old friends.

[Paul]

Oh, that's a great quote. That's right. The thing is also there's, there's like a month.

It's the same for you.

[Neil]

It's, it's, um, you got an OPA somewhere in the back.

[Paul]

It's a modern person. Sometimes we want more space, right? Or we want more privacy or we're okay with a little bit more alienation in the West.

So there is, there is a transformation that happens. I think when you're, when you're in a society, um, that what, what is your preference for, for privacy and space? Right.

[Neil]

Well, you know, you've been an active proponent of something I call never retire. I wrote a book in 2016 right behind me called the happiest equation. There's a whole chapter in there.

I call never retire. You've been a proponent of this. Um, and of course, one of the most fascinating graphs, I don't know if you've seen this is a table throughout the 20th century that shows the percentage of people over 65 who choose to voluntarily retire.

And it goes from like 9% in like the late 1800s to like 95% in like the two thousands, because in the fifties insurance companies marketed retirement as a thing you earn for a lifetime of hard work. And they create sunshine state, you know, Arizona, Florida kind of retirement communities completely annexing and cutting off old from young. Now we have an upwardly mobile society where the busiest day on the airlines is Thanksgiving because everyone's going home to see their parents.

Do they no longer even live near?

[Paul]

Yeah. I mean, modern cities now are generally playgrounds for the young before they move to the suburbs and sort of the wealthy. And so like, that's just accelerating over time here in New York or DC or Boston.

Um, you'll see families here and there, but a lot, a lot of the times you'll just see, you know, generally younger people until living there until they kind of, uh, rotate toward the suburbs. So that is an issue where we're kind of always around young people. Then you're around families and suburbs, then you're retiring around people, your age.

So you're always just in this category of people, your own age, your entire time. And there's like less mixing.

[Neil]

Well, this is the problem with colleges. You know, Leslie was experiencing some anxiety in college. She called her parents and they said, volunteer for an old folks home or a kindergarten classroom.

She did that. And she found her anxiety dissolved. She had to puncture the college bubble as a way to increase her mental health.

You know, um, I have a couple more things to ask you about this, about this incredible book. Uh, you're from Chicago, right? Like everyone, a lot of people listening and maybe taking that Chicago boat tour, you know, with the, all the architecture, the tallest buildings, you can see other bill.

It's an incredible tour. If you haven't done it, you know, I highly recommend it. And I thought I saw your tweet yesterday about, you know, someone who lives in New York saying, I love Roosevelt Island, you know, and I was just thinking I'm page 115 and I live in Toronto.

We're number one on the crane index. Like we are getting more skyscrapers built here than anywhere. And page one 15 says there is abundant evidence to show high buildings make people crazy.

And they go on and on high buildings have no genuine advantage except in speculative gains for banks and landowners. They are not cheaper. They do not help create open space.

They destroy the townscape. They destroy social life. They promote crime.

They make it life difficult for children. They are expensive to maintain. They wreck open space near them.

They damage light, they damage air, they damage view. And apart from all this empirical evidence shows they actually damage people's minds and feelings. And the book prescribes a mandatory four story limit for any development of any city.

[Paul]

Yeah. I mean, I agree a little bit with that. I mean, you're a walk around Manhattan.

You don't really feel cozy. I mean, it's kind of feel like daunting, like you're like, like an insect.

[Neil]

Unlike Paris, which is probably the best.

[Paul]

You take lower, you know, maybe nine, I don't know, four seems pretty low, but maybe nine stories. And then you just create these clusters of density and just recreate this neighborhood, just keep it going. And that way you never have to sort of bunch people into like, you know, these skyscraper type places because you just always, you know, you're kind of copying kind of neighborhood density, you know, as much as it shows that we live in.

[Neil]

It shows that we live in tribes of 7,000, you know, Robin Dunbar, who was our guest last year on the show, way back in chapter 132, he says, you know, it's always in multiples of, of, of three, you have three closest friends and you've got 15 shoulders to cry on friends that goes up to one 50 kind of two way relationship friends, 500 acquaintances. And then he multiplies up 5,000, the number of faces you can remember 15,000 number of group. So he shows that we have a cognitive limit for living like this.

And in fact, there was an urban planning report just published in the Toronto star. As I, as I talked to you today saying new study shows, Ontario does not need bigger cities. It just needs more cities.

I thought it was a really interesting way of putting it. And lastly, I just got back from Mexico city where no buildings are tall because they built the whole city on a lake. So everything's going down a couple inches every year.

They can't build up. It will just, you know, it's this water underneath it, you know? So I thought this was fascinating.

It's so the opposite of what's happening to my city and most cities right now, everything's becoming a Shanghai.

[Paul]

Right. I think it's just easier to build these gigantic towers.

[Neil]

But people don't prefer living there. I don't think so.

[Paul]

I mean, where do people go on vacation? Like that's where people prefer to live. Like, and in a way, you know, these, these cities in Europe or these small towns, you should, that's, I think that's where people, we should be recreating, but you know, any cities doing it right, right now.

Well, I think most in Europe are great to be in because they're built before, you know, modern times when they could build at such high density or, or they have all these, like, this very ornate, pleasant places to live. And it was taken with these, you know, these traditions. So I think, yeah, I think there's a reason why, but I don't think we can build them again.

I think we have a trouble building new cities or new neighborhoods. So it's one of the problems with kind of modern life is the places that are really nice are expensive. It's very hard for us to create like new places that are enjoyable and beautiful.

[Neil]

Yeah. And maybe that's why the density here is skyrocketing where I live because it isn't as much like those, you know, like people are drawn to, we've got hiking trails, we've got lakes, we've got 2 million lakes. We've got more lakes in Canada than any other country in the world combined, you know?

So, you know, people are drawn to the place where there's a cottage, you have the opportunity for a lake house, you have a place you can relax by the beach, you know, like that's that mentality that Canada has, you know, a hundred square kilometers per person, right? Just if you do the math. So, you know, arguably it makes it more desirable, but interesting dynamics at play.

Of course, you can't say the things I'm saying, because you get labeled like a NIMBY who doesn't like density.

[Paul]

Yeah. The problem with the, is that the YIMBYs is that all density is good and, you know, there's no, there's no discretion for style or for how a human can live, right? It's just shove as many people in there as possible.

And there's, yeah, that's, that's what their argument is, right? So, but nope, there's, there's other considerations here if you want to do this correctly, but I think it's, it's very difficult to do it correctly.

[Neil]

So you've taken us through a over 2000 year old book of aphorisms from a slave term in the Roman empire, a guy who quotes all this stuff in his writing over time and longevity who popularized the Lindy effect and a pattern language, which is also a 50 year old book drawing upon thousands of years of history and research. There's a real connection here between the stuff you read. It's almost counterintuitive considering how prominent you are on Twitter.

Why is it counterintuitive? But to me, it's like, I would picture someone like that, just like being in a library all day.

[Paul]

Oh, I think it's nice. I think there's lots of ways to get information quickly now. So you don't necessarily need it.

I mean, I've read this, thankfully.

[Neil]

Like Twitter's not Lindy.

[Paul]

Yeah.

But I think, I think the style of writing is, and I think text in a way is, I think text in a way is easier to remember than video and even probably audio. Although I think audio can compete with text pretty well, but I think really text hits hard. Text somehow can get people to remember things from years ago in a way that other forms of media cannot, especially in that sentence style.

[Neil]

Completely agree. Completely agree. And text is easier to remember than video. This is a show that espouses books.

We have detailed 10 page long shows for every single show. We have all the quotes pulled out. We have all the things mentioned pulled out.

We have like, I write a blog post for everyone. Like I believe in the long-termification of text.

[Paul]

I also came of age before social media. So I read a lot more. So I read all these stuff before I kind of became locked into the, this world we're in now where we're actually reading is harder to do because there's so many options and also there's life.

So there's an advantage to, to being a little older, not too old, but just being a little older in, I think today.

[Neil]

We're the last generation that will know life before the internet. And weirdly, you know, you said before I got locked in and I, if I could as a friend say, you know, for now, because you know, you did, you did tweet pretty recently that reading is dead books. You actually said that they said books, books, books are dead, you know, until we get to the other side of this, the other side, what's the other side.

[Paul]

I mean, I don't know what the other side is, but it's, I don't think it's a sustainable. I don't think everybody on these few apps just spending all their days scrolling on infinite scroll. I mean, I think this is, I don't think this is a good way to you know, structure society and certain people owning the algorithm and can put that into your face.

[Neil]

I think there's going to be read books.

[Paul]

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 we're going through a, through another time right now, but I think books and literacy are going to come back in another form.

[Neil]

Do you think we're going through an illiterate, a moment of illiteracy?

[Paul]

I think we're going through real transformation and how, you know, we can consume and live. And I think we're going to think in a way we're going to get off of these, like 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 some, with technology, I don't know what it's going to look like, but yeah.

[Neil]

This is partly why I'm so drawn to your work is that you get to this amazing place of looking really far in the back mirror and then you get to a place of trying to apply it to the front mirror and you both do it and are smart enough to say, and I don't know, you know what I mean? Yeah. I don't like, don't use mouthwash.

I'm good with floss. And as for all the other stuff, I don't know.

[Paul]

It's important. Like a lot of people say, I don't know. Right.

Yeah. Everyone has an answer, but a lot of times you don't know.

[Neil]

So, Hey, listen, this guy wrote a thousand, you know, 1,159 page book. You are similarly um, productive. Like, like I subscribed to your newsletter.

You are writing a gigantic long form researched with images. Yeah. Piece.

[Paul]

That's important too.

[Neil]

Images are important. You're doing that like two or three times a week. Yeah.

Yeah. How are you doing this? How are you writing so heavily?

And so frequently long form journalism, like you are writing, like if it was a newspaper, you're writing like a long feature two or three times a week.

[Paul]

It's four to five hours of directed creative work every day, no days off. And, um, you kind of follow what stimulates you. And then you kind of like use a pattern, which is you go back, you go forward and you, you know, and then you go back to the present.

And, um, the good thing is we have all this kind of media around us. So people enjoy, you know, as an image with text or video with text, so you can just kind of put that in there, um, to, to help support your argument. Um, but generally it's just, um, I think when you have like an angle, you just follow that angle.

Uh, and you just, that's what I do. So, but it's, it's interesting. It's interesting to me.

And I just followed that interesting kind of, uh, route.

[Neil]

Okay. I'm going to close this conversation. This very stimulating conversation with Lindy man, Paul Scalas, but some fast money round questions to help close us off hardcover, paperback, audio, or e paperback.

How do you organize your books on your bookshelf? Random. What's your favorite bookstore living or dead?

[Paul]

Oh, favorite bookstore. Um, what's that? What's that place in New York.

So nice.

[Neil]

The strand strand or Ben McNally strand.

[Paul]

I like strand. Yeah.

[Neil]

Yeah. What's your book lending policy?

[Paul]

Uh, my book lending policy. That's I try not to, uh, give some, as far as like the interest in the person or is like the time. Yeah.

Yeah. Either I try to match the person's personality with where they, what they're asking for with, sometimes I get DMs of like, Hey, what do you think I should be reading? And then I asked him like, what are you into?

So I just try to match interest with, um, with something I've read before that I know is good.

[Neil]

You are a successful writer. I know you brandish the label technology lawyer. However, what I see as someone who is living a flaneur lifestyle in multiple cities around the world with an incredibly quick to distill acute trend spotting and trend articulation through this heuristic of the Lindy effect.

I'm like, you're right. Like you're a writer. That's how I, you know, no offense to the technology lawyer side, but I see you as like a very prominent writer and you're selling your writing.

That's a, that's a very important point. You actually sell your writing. You cannot read Paul Scalas for free.

You can read Paul Scalas on Twitter for free, but all your articles are never for free anywhere. You have to pay. And I followed you for a long time before I started paying you, right?

Like I was like, I have to know how this ends, you know? And it's like, how much does it cost? Like, is it like $5 a month or something?

So you have to have to make a choice about how much you're going to charge. Presumably you have hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people who pay you. And therefore that provides a salary, which therefore provides an income.

So I guess I'm wondering what your writing advice is.

[Paul]

Oh God. I don't know. I mean, don't take any advice on writing.

I think that's my writing advice, honestly, because I never, I never approached anybody with advice on writing. And I think, I think you just develop your own style and you live and die with that style and anything else just makes your writing into something else. Um, but I consume, but I consume, um, to create.

So I'm always, if I've wanted a piece of advice, it's, it's always be sensitive to see what excites you when you're just browsing the newspapers, the blogs, the tweets, the books, just be sensitive to what, uh, cause then that's what your audience is going to like. Cause eventually once you become a real, once you have an audience, uh, the pathway is this is interesting to me. And I, and the side effect is the audience will find it interesting.

So it all goes through what you think is interesting. And I think, I think if you get, try to get funny with, I think this is what my audience will like. You break that, you break that connection and something goes wrong or will go wrong in the future.

Once you, once you think you can outsmart, once you think like, Oh, I think the audience would love this, even though I don't like this. So yeah, I guess that's, that's the only advice, but it's writing style. I don't, I don't know.

[Neil]

Paul Skallas, Lindyman. Uh, I am one of the 129,000 people who follow and look forward to your original thoughts on applying the Lindy effect heuristic to our complicated, overwhelming cacophony of noise that we call today's civilization is a real treat and pleasure to hear your thinking out loud through the lens of my heuristic, which is three most formative books, and always be sensitive to what excites you take lessons from the past and apply them to today for guidance. It is a real honor and pleasure to have you on three books. Thank you so much for doing this and for the generous gifts of so much of your time and your class.

I really, really appreciate it.

[Paul]

It's pleasure speaking to you. It was a great conversation. Thank you so much.

[Neil]

Hey everybody. It's just me, just Neil again, hanging back in my basement, my wires and my microphone. I'm in my office this time.

I don't record video for it. I don't know. I don't know.

You know, I oscillate between video and non-video. We did video for Nick Sweetman in chapter 144. I'm like, that was a banger job, right?

Like we did documentary with time lapses and all this footage, but it also took us a month of work to do it. And kudos to incredible editors and videographers and filmmakers along the way, but they also cost a lot of money to do all that too. So I actually really respect the podcasters who are going full video because now that I've gone down to like LA and hung out with Rich Roll and I see is like 22 cameras set up and a six full-time editors and this, you know, four people working on Instagram reels and all this stuff.

I'm like, dude, this is a lot of work. I mean, it's kind of like a TV show, right? So I oscillate between them.

Well, this is an interesting conversation. Don't you think? What'd you think of Lindy man?

What'd you think of Paul Skallas? You know, he hasn't really done a lot of podcasts, but I find him so intriguing and his perspective is it's hard to discern between what to take from history, but some of the interesting thoughts. I like the last advice, always be sensitive to what excites you, right?

Or how about this quote, talent goes where the money is, or is quote, it's very tempting to mediate reality through a computer screen. This point really took me a while, but as he was talking, the longer something survives, the less the survivorship bias. So basically you have the tendency amongst things that last to over inflate their propensity to be strong or successful things, but the longer it's lasted, then you, it's not just survivorship.

Now it's like legitimacy. Now it's like quality. And now it's like stood the test of time, which is more than just kind of being biased towards something that's lasted over a short time.

That's an interesting one. I like his quote here. I do four to five hours of directive creative work every day.

You know what, for all the creators out there, all the writers, there it is. There's the secret sauce. I do four to five hours of directed creative work every day.

This guy is, yes, he's been on Twitter a lot. Like I quoted like the 16 tweets in less than four hours. But if you look at the timelines, it was clear that he was like on Twitter deeply, like a couple hours one day, and then off it for like 22 hours.

And then like on Twitter deeply for like a couple hours another day and then off it deeply. And it's clear to me that he's also using Twitter as his writing aid. It is his Evernote.

It is his Scrivener file. He is constantly attaching tweets and things he sees to old strings from a year ago, two years ago, three years ago. And when the strings get long enough for this intriguing note-taking process, he then writes it up into an article.

And then of course does more research along the way. So you get these really detailed combinations of writing and images, tweets and graphs and research all folded in together that naturally appeals to the way that people's brains want to consume information. It made the point that he said kind of interesting to me where he I think people remember text better than they remember video.

Maybe because text has experienced more generational churn. That other phrase he talked about that only true generational churn creates powerful indie things. TikTok has not experienced generational churn yet.

Snapchat maybe never will. Certainly MySpace and Friendster didn't. And ICQ.

I was on MySpace and Friendster and ICQ when I was 18 and 19 and 20 on the internet. Those were my social media. And those are the ways I talked to my friends.

I literally used ICQ all the time in first year university. But there is no generational churn. Now no one uses it.

So what has that and what doesn't? What a cool lens to filter stuff through. Makes me feel happy for flossing.

And thank you so much to Paul Lindemann-Scalis for adding three more books to our top 1,000. Oh yes, I am talking about number 577, The Moral Sayings of Plubeus Serus. I cannot recommend this pamphlet book enough.

It stood 2,000 years for a reason. Then number 576, Anti-Fragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I have been backpocketing The Black Swan as one of my three most formative books, maybe to do in the last ever chapter or something.

Because The Black Swan taught me that life works best when you make small bets on lots of things. Make a small bet on a podcast and a newsletter and a speaking career and a blog post and writing a book. Well, one of those things hopefully will work.

It will experience the Black Swan effect. I got A Black Swan with the popularity of The Book of Awesome in 2010 and arguably again in 2016 with The Happiness Equation. Have my other eight books sold nearly as well as those two?

Not even close. But for The Book of Awesome, somebody at TEDxToronto asked me to do a TEDxToronto talk. Then somebody at TED.com put it on their website. At the same time, 6,000 copies were printed in Canada and Heather Reisman, the CEO of Indigo made it a Heather's pick, which sold 90,000 hardcovers in three months at her stores. So I cannot control the confluence of extrinsic factors that affect my behavior and the results of the things I do. However, I can make myself ripe for exposure to them by doing lots of little things and placing lots of small bets.

That's the principle of The Black Swan. So then Antifragile comes along. I bought it.

It sat on my bedside table a long time. Like I said, it's very nutritively dense. It's like one of these intellectually overstimulating books.

You can see that it's from a genius, almost ADHD, genius-y type of brain. But now with Lindyman's Prompting, I revisited the book and read longer and thicker and deeper sections in depth and it continues to blow me away. It's such a good way to think about life.

How do you create post-traumatic growth in your life? How do you make yourself susceptible to small shocks purposely? Because those small shocks, small tears and small failures actually open you up to stronger living like the once a week or twice a week vegan fasting principle.

So it's interesting how big this book really plays a role in my life and obviously a lot of other people's as it's still selling a lot of copies 13 years later. And then finally, his third most important book is probably one I would wager that almost none of you have heard of. I don't say that with any dismissiveness, more just like who's reading a 1300 page hardcover Oxford University Press book about architecture from the 70s.

Yet that book is also offering a very long-term lens by which and how we live. It's an incredible book reflecting back to what's working and what's not in our culture. It's amazing as all three books are.

Thank you so much to Lindyman for joining us on Three Books and thank you to all of you for listening. Did you make it past the three second pause? If so, I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast.

This is one of three clubs we have for Three Books listeners, including the Cover to Cover Club and the Secret Club. Let's kick off the end of the podcast club, the after party of the show, as we always do by going to the phones. Here we go.

[Diego]

Hi, Neil. Happy New Year. My name is Diego.

I'm calling from Yokohama, Japan where I've lived for 20 years. Sorry, I'm kind of walking and talking. I just finished listening to your talk with David Sedaris.

Yeah, his choice of Tobias Wolff was amazing. I've read a couple of his collections and actually when I finished one, I was so impressed by it that I found his email address and I sent him an email saying thanks for writing the book and he replied back and I have an email that I'll always cherish. Anyway, if you want three formative books, On the Road by Kerouac.

I don't know if it stands up today, but it got me into reading. The second one, Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway. It's about a 90 page novella.

I think I've read it about four times. It just made me feel good about being able to read a Nobel Prize winner when I didn't have much confidence as a reader. And the last one, Knut Hampson's Mysteries, which is a book I picked up at a second-hand bookshop in Sydney where I'm from.

And it's like a David Lynch movie. It was written in the late 1800s, I believe, and yeah, I just read very contemporary and highly recommend it if you haven't read it. Anyway, it's getting late over here in Japan.

It's cold. And just thanks for all your podcasts. They're all great.

Cheers. Thank you.

[Neil]

Wow. Thank you so much to Diego from Sydney by way of Japan. That's an incredible life you're living, you know, over in Sydney and featuring Steve Toltz over there and featuring, you know, Dr. Ching-Li over in Japan, some of our past guests on the show. Um, you know what? I love that you can email authors. This is something we talked about with Dave Barry back in chapter nine, that authors are the most accessible celebrity in the world.

Like they're like, like you can't email a movie star. You can't email a musician, but you can email an author and there's a 50% chance they'll write you back. Like that's amazing.

Tobias Wolfe, by the way, is a dream guest for the show. I've approached him a couple of times and he's not written back. Tobias, if you're listening, come on three books.

It'd be a pleasure to talk to you. And I love your stuff as well. Um, I love that on the road got you into reading.

That's that's that, that right away is the definition of a formative book, right? Like it kind of gets you into reading. And, uh, I don't know if you've listened to chapter 94 with Dan the tailor, but if you haven't Daniel Torgeman, we talk about on the road, it's one of his three most formative books, old man and the sea.

I also felt that way, that exact same way of like, wow, I can read like a smart person book. Um, that was first proposed to us as a formative book in chapter 24 with Jonathan field. When interestingly, he read it or owned it in its original published capacity, which is not a 90 page novella, which is amazing, but it was like a feature short story in life magazine.

So like life magazine, which was, I guess like a hundred pages or whatever. I like a 20 page insert in it of that whole book. Imagine reading a whole book in the middle of a magazine.

Like it's just, it just speaks to like what magazines used to do. I think magazines, by the way, are very Lindy. Don't you think like, I think so there's a magazine store that's open till midnight in downtown Toronto.

And they've recently moved, uh, from the main floor to the second floor because of, uh, exploding rents. And I just love the fact that you can still survive these days. I'll be it on the second floor of retail now as a magazine store, like all they sell is magazines.

But I read an article, an interview with, you know, Bill Gates back in the early nineties. And he said, I go to magazine stores because inevitably they're deep subject matter experts on a topic. I know nothing about, but picking up a magazine on like woodworking or birdwatching or stereo filiac that, you know, people are obsessed with stereos, or I just learned so much about a topic in detail.

And it's a wonderful way to explore my curiosity because magazines still offer that yet are now combined with the increasingly value curation. You know what I mean? Like in an era of infinite choice, the value of curation skyrockets that sort of doubly makes them important.

And I think there's a lot more stuff you can do with like size and format and print. I love spacing magazine, which is sideways. I love inner interview magazine, which is super tall.

I love what magazines are doing as they constantly reinvent themselves. And I like to have one magazine subscription per year just to support the form and the medium. Don't want it to distract from my book reading.

So I usually just have one for a while. I was getting bust magazine after chapter four with Sarah Ramsey. And of course, you know, interviewing Debbie Stoller way back in chapter 20, who was the editor of bus magazine.

Then I was getting the Atlantic for a while. Then I was getting the New Yorker for a while. And now I'm open.

I need a new magazine. Does anyone subscribe to a paper magazine that you recommend? Give me a call at 1-833-READALOT.

And by the way, Diego, the last book that you recommended was one I've never heard of. It's called Mysteries, as you said, by Knut Hampson, H-A-M-S-U-N. On Goodreads it says, in a Norwegian coastal town, society's carefully woven threads begin to unravel when an unsettling stranger named Johan arrives.

With an often brutal insight into human nature, Nagel draws out the town's folk, exposing their darkest instincts and suppressed desires. Okay, this sounds interesting. It was published in 1892.

1892. It's Lindy, people. It's Lindy.

It made it through 100 years and still getting word of mouth recommendations through generational transfer. It's working. It's very Lindy.

But thank you so much, Diego. And hey, if you're listening to this right now, you made it. You're a part of our inner sanctum, our inner circle.

No one gets here that isn't part of this love fest, right? I love you. I love you.

I love you. I really appreciate you, your time, your energy, your ears. I love your notes, your messages.

Please give me a call. There's no... You can't do it wrong.

If you do, just call back again and try again. I'm not going to embarrass anybody. 1-833-READALOT, R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T.

It should work from everywhere in the world. Leave me one of your formative books or a dream guest or a reflection or something you agreed with or disagree with from one of the chapters. I love hearing from you.

It's my greatest joy. Thank you so much for calling me. Now, we've already done a letter.

I guess we could do another one. It's getting a little self-indulgent here. Let's go to the word of the chapter.

And for this chapter's word, let's of course go back to Lindy Man himself.

[Paul]

Aphorers Like La Brière, La Rochefoucauld.

[Neil]

Yes, indeed. The word is Aphorers. Aphorers? A-P-H-O-R-E-R-S.

Is that a real word? Aphorist. Okay.

Well, Vocabulary.com seems to think Aphorist is the word. A-P-H-O-R-I-S-T. Which means someone who formulates aphorisms or who repeats aphorisms.

Okay. What about you, Miriam Webster? Aphorism.

Well, you got aphorism over there. A-P-H-O-R-I-S-M. There's no reason if aphorism is a word and an aphorist is a word that an aphor shouldn't be.

Maybe he meant aphorist, but whatever. We'll go with the word that he invented. I like that word.

What is an aphorism, by the way? It is a concise statement of a principle or it is a terse formulation of a truth or a sentiment. For example, a high-minded aphorism might be, let us value the quality of life, not the quantity.

Or this is the third definition, which is kind of interesting. It's also an ingeniously terse style of an expression. For example, aphoristic language.

A quote mentioned is, there are dazzling chapters packed with perfectly chosen anecdotes pithy with aphorism. Okay. Well, that one's getting to the sort of like pithy nature of it or the ingeniously terse style of it, which for sure, Masim Taleb writes in.

For sure, Lindyman writes in. For sure, Publius Serus writes in. Where did it come from?

Actually, interestingly, the word aphorism comes from Lindyman's own heritage. That would be the Greek physician Hippocrates. Hippocrates, often considered the father of modern medicine, created the word aphorismos, which is a Greek ancestor of aphorism, entitling a book outlining his principles on the diagnosis and treatments of disease.

Okay. When you open that book, Hippocrates' book, very Lindy, he writes in the book's introduction. Here's the first sentence.

You heard some of it before. Ready? Here it is.

It's an aphorism. Ready? Life is short, art long, occasion sudden and dangerous, experience deceitful, judgment difficult.

Like that's the whole sentence. Life is short, art long, occasion sudden and dangerous, experience deceitful, judgment difficult, like declaring six things to be specifically one way. That is aphoristic.

You are an aphorer, Hippocrates and Lindyman. Now says here, English speakers originally use the term mainly in the realm of the physical sciences, but they eventually broadened it to cover principles and other fields. Look, you could call this wisdom.

You could call it one liners. You could call it like life's little instruction book. But I think Lindyman's point is that to filter signal from noise these days, we have to have techniques.

One of my techniques is the limiting of three formative books, a thousand formative books, total 333 chapters. That kind of guarantees me good ones because I'm asking interesting people which three books most changed their life. So that's a way I'm trying to use a filter to kind of pump signal over noise.

And aphorisms sort of do the same. They are quick and distilled morsels of wisdom meant to provide hyperlinks for lack of better words into vast sums of human knowledge in a quick way. You're thinking quick.

That wasn't quick. It was two hours together. This is different, man.

It's pleasure too. We're hanging out in the parks. We're walking down the street together.

We're in basement gyms together. I'm with you on your flight and you're walking in your kitchen while you do the dishes and you're with me. It's been a pleasure as always.

Thank you so much for hanging out with me on chapter 145 of free books. And until next time, remember that you are what you eat and you are what you read. Keep turning that page, everybody.

And I'll talk to you soon. Bye.

Listen to the chapter here!

Chapter 144: Nick Sweetman on breaking boundaries with brilliant birds

Listen to the chapter here!

Neil:

Hey everybody, this is Neil Pasricha and welcome, or welcome back, to 3 Books. It is the Wolf Moon. We are kicking off 2025 with an incredible, rare, unique, unusual conversation with the muralist, the graffiti spray painter extraordinaire, Nick Sweetman.

If you want to jump ahead straight to the interview, feel free. I do that in podcasts sometimes too. But if you want to hang out a little bit at the beginning, we always like to read a letter or a comment that came in about the show.

I always check out all your reviews, your letters. I read one every single time if I read your letter on there. You get a free book.

Drop me a line and I will mail you a signed book. And of course, I'd like to talk about one of the values. We have a series of values on the show.

We bring them to life a little bit in our openings. So before we get into Nick, I'm very excited to tell you about, I want to quickly read a letter. Again, leave your letters, your reviews anywhere, Apple, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you want to drop us some feedback.

This one came in via email. Hi Neil, I just finished listening to Chapter 24 with Jonathan Fields. And I was literally moved to tears when he started talking about when breath becomes air.

I've had that book on my TBR for quite some time. And after listening to this episode, I'm going to pull it out and start reading it right away. I always listen to the end of the podcast.

It's my favorite part. And you said not to be nervous about calling the phone number, but I didn't trust myself to call and not break down in tears or just start babbling without making sense. So I decided to take a chance and write you a letter instead.

I didn't know who you were until I listened to an episode of another podcast called What Should I Read Next by Ann Bogle. Your story of how you started your blog, which led to your writing books and doing TED Talks made quite an impression on me. And I knew I had to check out your podcast immediately.

I was not disappointed. It has now become my favorite and I listen to it whenever I can, especially when I'm out on my morning walks in the Arizona desert. Anyway, I just want to thank you for your podcast and create something so amazing and wonderful and positive and uplifting.

It's introduced me to many new people, authors, writers that I would never have discovered on my own. For that, I am truly grateful. Sincerely, Barbie Wells from Goodyear, Arizona.

Okay, thank you so much, Barbie, for your letter. And I like your last point there. People I may never have otherwise known.

That's the thing on the value I want to talk about today, which is about interesting over notable. That's one of our values, interesting over notable. When you start a podcast, there is a lot of pressure to have notable people on, of course, because they're notable.

And when they have big names, they get more downloads and they get more people listening. And of course, if you are like me and you listen to podcasts, you are attracted to the names you recognize. But it's this healthy tension because in my life, as I'm sure in yours, most of the most interesting conversations I've ever had are not with anybody who's famous in any way.

They're not notable in any way. They're the people we meet on the street, the people with the interesting heart connections, the soul connections. And so I wanted to find that balance on the show.

And I think it's also a metaphor for reading books. It is interesting over notable. That's why in Chapter 7, we had a long conversation with Vishwas Agarwal.

That's why we've had Shirley the nurse on the show. We've had Robin the bartender, Robin Goodfellow. We want to go for people that maybe have never been on a podcast before, but in a deep and interesting conversation, we can kind of get some interesting stuff out of them.

Chris Smalls was our last chapter in December. I know David Sedaris, we dropped in between as a classic. He is very notable.

But Nick Sweetman, Nick Sweetman is not as notable. So who is Nick Sweetman? Well, to tell you a little bit about Nick, I got to tell you a story first.

I was walking down the street in Toronto on Lansdowne with a friend of mine named Michael Bungay Stanier, who was our guest back in Chapter 48. He's the author of The Coaching Habit. And as we were walking under this bridge on Lansdowne Avenue, there was this giant look like a photo.

It wasn't a photo. It was a spray painted huge image of a hooded merganser. For all the bird lovers out there, a hooded merganser is a spectacular bird with a giant hood, like it's a big, huge, extravagant head.

And at the very bottom corner of the picture was a signature that just said Sweetman. Sweetman. I was like, what's Sweetman?

Text a bunch of friends, look a little bit online. And I discovered that there's this Toronto mural artist named Nick Sweetman. As I start combing through his website at nicksweetman.ca, I want to make sure I got the URL right, and his Instagram at Nick underscore Sweetman, that's N-I-C-K underscore S-W-E-E-T-M-A-N. I realized I've seen this guy's stuff all over the place. He paints pollinators, giant, huge sweat bees, they're called. He paints birds.

I love birds. He paints insects. He painted a whale shark that I've ridden by on my bike for years and I didn't know it was him.

So I reach out to Nick Sweetman and I ask him about maybe doing a partnership with Three Books somehow. And guess what? We found a 750 square foot wall.

750 square foot 10 feet high, 75 feet long behind a subway station in Toronto, Dupont subway station. He started painting it on my birthday, September 17th, 2024. He finished it on November the 1st for the next month and a half.

While he was there, I pulled out my recorder a number of times and I asked Nick Sweetman questions about mural painting, graffiti, street art, what it means to a world where humans overtake everything, but he's celebrating the non-humans, the insects, the birds. He painted a giant mural of 16 local native birds, including scarlet tanager, ruby-throated hummingbirds, common grackles. It's an incredible wall.

And so what we've done on this chapter of 3 Books is there is, of course, the audio component. Maybe you're listening to this on audio, but we've also partnered with an incredible filmographer, videographer named Scott Baker, who's put together a video, a video as well. So if you go over to YouTube, maybe you're watching me on YouTube right now, you will see Nick in the process of making this magical wall in Toronto.

Nick Sweetman, everybody, one of Toronto's most prominent graffiti artists. The stuff he does is unbelievable. If you haven't checked out nicksweetman.ca or nick underscore sweetman on Instagram, do, do check it out. This is a a very special, creative flair for life, for everything. Interesting, over-notable, although he's pretty notable too. Welcome to the conversation with the one and only Nick Sweetman.

Let's flip the page in the chapter 144 now.

Nick:

These birds are lined up, ready to go.

Neil:

Wow. Look at these things. Now what are you doing, Nick?

Tell us.

Nick:

I'm adding that same glow to the blue jay eye, just to kind of, uh, you know, harmonize all this light together. The blue jay right now sort of looks like he's sitting on top of the background instead of, instead of in that world. So now he's going to be in that world.

Neil:

Wow. How many colors are you using for the blue jay's eyeballs? Like how many different shades is that?

Nick:

Like 10 or so.

Neil:

Wow. 10 different shades for an eyeball.

What colors do you have in the blue jay's eye?

Nick:

You need a lot of colors to make it look full color. Otherwise, like it, it looks kind of, um, so how many colors, like what are the names of the colors in this eyeball?

Okay. Pick a color. I'll tell you.

Neil:

Uh the red.

Nick:

The dark red is called fire rose. The medium red is called lollipop. Then I went in with a light, uh, sort of like a pinker red with a, that's called a bazooka Joe.

And then I went over that with that light pink orange. That's called Mr. Crab.

Neil:

Mr. Crab.

Nick:

The shines up top are blue velvet and ice blue and then white for the highlight.

Neil:

Wow. You are crushing this wall. Like you are crushing.

Let me see what you're looking at. So I am, I am squatting. I am squatting on a patch of two foot wide dirt with like, I mean, there's been needles here.

You said, you said someone dropped a dookie. So we can call it an unclean. We can call it an unclean corner.

There's lots of cigarette butts all over the place. Newspapers, broken bottles. Um, but you're doing something to this wall, Nick.

It's a 10 foot by 75 foot curved concrete wall. So a 750 square foot fucking wall and you're painting 15 hyper realistic local birds on it.

Nick:

16 16 16 baby. We upped it. We got the grackle in there.

Neil:

Oh my gosh. This is unbelievable. So, so I don't know. Do you call yourself a muralist and a graffiti artist?

Uh, uh, what do you, what are you?

Nick:

I call myself An artist. And if other people want to call me other things that categorize me more narrowly than that, that's okay with me.

Yeah.

Neil:

It's a bright, sunny Friday afternoon in October. You've been at this wall for a month.

Nick:

That is a fact.

Neil:

A month. I saw a hooded Merganza. Your painting on Lansdowne.

I took a picture of me and my kid in front of like the, the pinks bees on Bloor street, like seven, eight years ago, before I knew who you were before I knew that was you. I I've seen your art all over the city. So for me, it'll be walking by and see Nick Sweetman, the graffiti muralist spray paint, like hyper real, like no one in the city could do what you're doing.

And there's a new 750 square foot wall featuring a black and white warbler, a blue Jay, a white breasted nut hatch, a Cedar waxwing, a Northern flicker. I'm looking above my head, a giant Rose breasted gross speak by the way, my spark bird, a white throated Sparrow, a Scarlet Tanger, a Ruby throated hummingbird, a European starling, a red tailed hawk. And I'm standing up a giant house Finch.

What's over there? A Ruby crown Kinglet way down there is a Turkey vulture. Oh my God.

The head of that thing is like speckled is perfect. A black Bernie and warblers might be one of my favorite birds and a common grackle, man. People got to see this thing.

It's at DuPont station at DuPont and Spadina in downtown Toronto. There's the Castle Loma castle right above us. There's a shoppers drama or a subway here.

There's a bus going by. There's the subway running underneath. It's just North of Spadina station, man.

This corner has been like, there's people look at the garbage right there. People just dump their bags of garbage here. There's pigeons there.

There's shit everywhere. Human feces.

Nick:

Somebody left a, somebody left three cans of tuna and a, and a little like, I don't know what's in that cardboard box, but a little plastic bag that a little package for a cat or something, hopefully for a cat. You know, it's funny when you are passing this little alcove, how little of it you really see unless you're really staring at it. I find like when I drive by, unless it's at night at night, it's really lit up and it's one of the only things lit up over here.

But I find in the daytime, even though there's just the two trees, well, I guess three, but it really is tucked in.

Neil:

So you got to be in your late thirties, right?

Nick:

Yep.

I'm actually turning 39 in four weeks.

Neil:

Okay. So you've been spray painting murals and graffiti and walls for how many years full time?

Nick:

10 years.

Neil:

And so what, I get that you are now doing it as a vocation, as a profession, as a like, this is like your job, which not many people can say, but what drew you to doing this?

Why do you do this?

Nick:

I started my art career in galleries, like making paintings, you know, in a studio and hanging them in galleries and, you know, going to the gallery on the opening night and, you know, whatever, having wine with everybody and talking about my paintings and um, the whole gallery world. Um, it felt for me a bit, uh, disconnected from like regular people. And I don't want to, I realized I don't want to make art.

I come from like academic art. So I got my master's of fine art from OCAD, uh, Ontario College of Art and Design.

Neil:

And you went to an art high school, right?

Nick:

And I went to an art high school. Yeah. But I, in between there...

Neil:

In Toronto, public school.

Nick:

Etobicoke School of the Arts. I did an undergrad degree at University of Toronto. That was in semiotics and communication theory with a minor in, uh, geography.

And then I did my master's of fine art after that.

Neil:

Wow.

Nick:

After teaching English in Korea for one year.

Neil:

Oh my God.

Nick:

Yeah. It was awesome.

Neil:

Wow. So how does someone go from fine art to spray painting walls?

Nick:

I, I had already been spray painting walls since I was like 20.

Neil:

Like illegally.

Nick:

Illegally and legally, uh, you know, doing some murals for people I knew and some, um, rascal stuff.

Neil:

Were you ever in the tagging business?

Nick:

Yeah. I think, uh, I started out for, for a, for a couple of years, I was running around, uh, painting my name on things and, you know, uh, biking up the next day to take pictures of it and kind of feeling like, eh, that's sort of like mediocre.

Neil:

What age, what age did you spray paint your first wall?

Nick:

What age? Um...

Neil:

Take me into that scene.

Nick:

The first time I ever did a graffiti piece, uh, I think was... Oh my God. What year would that have been?

It would have been, I would say 2004-ish, 2004 or 5.

Neil:

You're like 18 years old.

Nick:

Yeah.

Neighborhood Child:

It's unbelievable.

Neighborhood Dad:

Yeah, it's amazing. It's amazing. The artist is incredible.

We live around the neighborhood and it's just very nice to have this wall here by our house.

Neighborhood Child:

It's so pretty.

Neil:

What do you notice?

Neighborhood Dad:

All the detail, like, it takes a lot of, like, especially in the eyes. The eyes give a lot of... All Canadian birds.

Of course. The idea, the execution, amazing.

Neil:

I saw a woman here one night at like midnight, I was walking by her and someone was just like, you know, two girls are here, first year universities at the University of Toronto, you know, um, taking pictures of it. Like, people love this. It's cool.

But I'm curious about a little bit about you too. Like, I'm curious about your three most formative books. Nick Sweetman, 39 years old in four weeks, street artist, Toronto.

His first most formative book everybody is, drum roll please, Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson. Published in 1955 by Harper and Brothers. This is a dark burgundy brown cover with a purple scribble.

The purple scribble comes from a drawing from a young boy in blue footie pajamas holding a purple crayon on the bottom right of the cover. On the top half of the cover it says Harold and the Purple Crayon in light purple. Below that to the left it says by Crockett Johnson in white italics.

Crockett Johnson, of course, born in 1906 in New York, died 1975 in Connecticut, age 68. Studied art like you at Cooper Union at NYU. And basically this is a crazy book for those that have not read it.

This little boy starts drawing and then he's out of his bedroom. He's on the deep seas. He's in a boat.

He's on a desert island. Then he can't figure out how to get home so he climbs a cliff. And then he realizes, oh yeah, my window was right here.

So then he draws his window, draws his bed and goes to sleep. And the crayon falls to the floor. That's the whole book.

So Nick, tell us about your relationship with Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson.

Nick:

Uh, okay. Well, this was the third book that I chose as my three most formative books. And it was the one that took me the longest to select because I just couldn't think of my third book. I don't know.

It was really hard to come up with something that felt authentic. And so actually your wife, Leslie, was the one who said, you know, it could be like a book from your childhood. And when I said Harold and the Purple Crayon, she was like, that's such a perfect selection because of that.

But yeah, we went to go feed the ducks and we would see this one duck that was different. It's like, wait, does this duck think it's a mallard? So we always liked it.

We called it Hoodie.

Neil:

You called it Hoodie?

Nick:

We called it Hoodie.

Neil:

And there was no formative book in your life around this time, was there, Nick?

Nick:

Formative book.

Nick:

Maybe some book about a duck.

Neil:

I really haven't been thinking about this for like months, man. Like I can't think of what the third one would be.

Nick:

A good book, even like a kid's book that's something you read growing up that showed you art or showed you, you know, something like that. Developed some value that you had.

Neil:

I mean, one kid's book that I think is really important to talk about is Harold and the Purple Crayon. But is that too typical?

Neil:

Never. No, no, no.

Nick:

What's so hard is like, I want to say things like Hundred Years of Solitude, Lord of the Rings.

Nick:

No, no, no, no, no. Harold and the Purple Crayon is perfect.

Nick:

But really like books that I just couldn't put down, read again and again, you know, but those are like classics and they have the big silver seal on them. It's like, you can't just choose Oprah Winfrey's top three books as your top three books, you know, like it's a cop out in a way. So if you're saying children's books, I think Harold and the Purple Crayon because that really is about like defining your world, taking creativity out into the world and defining your reality with it and like making your own vision come to life and living inside it.

You know, that was a really special thing to see, I think, for me and a lot of kids.

Nick:

A hundred percent. And sometimes I feel like people think like that book is about imagination, but it actually is really about the fact that you can create your own world.

Nick:

Yes.

Nick:

Yeah. That you can actually, like art and reality can intermix and imagination and truth.

Nick:

I think that's got to be it then. The core, I think, idea of the book, which is that through art, through drawing, Harold can kind of like create his world and he can create it however he wants. He sometimes creates things even that scare him or, you know, that like get him into dangerous situations.

But he he sort of like draws the solution that he needs. And yeah, when he's tired, he just draws himself a bed and goes, yeah, rest. I don't know.

It's like there's a metaphor there for what art can make possible. I think a lot of my favorite artists talk about art as sort of like a bridge to what's possible, like between between like reality and sort of an imagined reality that maybe doesn't seem possible without seeing it in images.

Neil:

So like what's beauty, what's art, what can art make possible?

Nick:

I think like one of the things I like to do when I'm, for example, painting bees is showing somebody that creature large on a wall. That's a way that most people will never look at a bee. But it can kind of inspire them to see real bees in a new way.

And just personally, since I started research, painting and researching bees, I look way more closely at bees myself. And they are actually bananas. When you see a bee that's not like a honeybee, not like a bumblebee, not like a bee you see all the time, one of these like green metallic ones or, you know, one of these like tiny, tiny golden ones that's like smaller than you can possibly imagine.

I don't know. It really like fills me with a different level of wonder that I think is like a really important thing for people to feel. And regular life doesn't really afford that many chances to feel that.

So if I can create an opportunity for somebody to feel that and maybe even change in a sort of lasting way their relationship with bees or whatever it is, foxes. I think that's like making something possible that, you know, only through that art was that person's relationship maybe going to change with that thing.

Neil:

When I approached you about doing this podcast and I reached out to you once I saw your Hooded Merganser on Lansdowne, I started realizing how many pieces of art you've done around the city and you've done the bee you're talking about, Sweat Bee, I think it's called.

Nick:

Yep.

Neil:

And you've done a whale shark.

Nick:

I have.

Neil:

Right. So my kids and I have been seeing that whale shark all over the place.

That's you.

Nick:

Yep.

Neil:

So it's animals only that you do or is it all animals?

Nick:

I'm really only interested in painting animals and sort of like, you know, that's where I ground things. And then what I love to do is paint light. Animals sort of are the structure around which I do what I really enjoy, which is pushing color around and, you know, expressing the beauty of light and the beauty of sort of my way of seeing reality, which is, I think, informed by a lot of different things, art that I'm inspired by.

Yeah.

Neil:

Well, what do you mean light? What do you mean painting light? What is drawing you to light?

I see the sun reflecting off the greenhouse-domed DuPont station behind you. We're in the speckly shadows right now with light coming through the trees. I see the shadow of a rock pigeon.

Oh, actually, that was a hawk. I think it was a hawk that was whipping down the street right there.

Nick:

There's definitely some hawks that fly around here.

Neil:

Yeah. So I think it was a hawk that just went by, a red-tailed hawk. I see the shadow of that.

I see light bouncing on your wall. In your birds, you've got like, you're using eight, nine, ten colors for the eyeballs. You've got like light reflecting up.

You've got like, you know, all kinds of light going off the feathers. But what is this? Open that up for me.

I'm trying to paint light.

Nick:

Well, we see everything because light bounces off that thing into our eyes. And there are different ways that painters over the years have learned to trick our eyes into thinking it's seeing something that it's not. Like a really obvious example would be like painting a shadow and a highlight on something so that it looks three-dimensional to the eye.

I think what I really like to do is explore, you know, through a lot of the time through photography, how light can be like expressed in paint. You know, looking at the piece right here, how, for example, right now that branch beside the blue jay looks a little bit flat. It's like really only a couple of medium to dark browns right now that are filling that silhouette.

What I need to do is start adding lighter browns to that top side so that it will start to look a little bit more three-dimensional. It will look like there's a space at the top of that that curves away from us and thus light from above is hitting it. Wow, right?

So we have all these tricks that you and I as viewers of art just take for granted that artists have learned to take advantage of because our eyes can be tricked. And so our brains can have this like crazy understanding of what we're seeing that actually isn't there. You know, it's like really not a blue jay, obviously, but because of the lights and darks, the patterns of lights and darks I've put on the wall with these cans, that's all you're going to see.

You're never going to look at that wall and not see a blue jay. Now it's like, yeah, that light from below is like bouncing up into it.

Neil:

Wow. Now what color are you doing?

Nick:

It's called pink panther.

Neil:

Whoa. So you're picking up those pinks and purples from down here.

Nick:

So now I want to get a little bit warmer as I get lighter, which is one of my tricks for making that glow that you know from all my shit.

Neil:

So how do you do that?

Nick:

Well, to do a glow, you're basically moving from dark to light and getting smaller as you go inwards. So you go from like a dark blue to a slightly lighter blue to a slightly lighter blue to a slightly lighter blue to a slightly lighter blue until you're at white. White's in the middle, right?

Well, when you do a glow like I do, you're not only moving up in lightness, you're moving down the hue spectrum. So you're going lighter, but also closer to warm. So you're going from dark blue, which is that really dark color to a slightly lighter purple to a slightly lighter purple to a slightly lighter pink.

Neil:

Okay, okay. I can't, I can't believe this. This is amazing how deep you're like, how much you look, how much you see out of that.

Nick:

I read this book in as part of my master's thesis that was all about the biology of seeing like how really like the brain and I work together to produce vision. And I think vision, you need to understand vision as like those two things always working together. You are never seeing without your understanding coming into play.

And that's like a pre-conscious thing that happens.

Neil:

Wow.

Nick:

Right?

You could never like, we could never look at that object without our understanding of bicycles and, um, you know, um, uh, vehicles for moving children around, you know, our culture, uh, will always speak to, uh, speak to us through that object because of our understanding of, does that make sense?

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, the pre-cognitive idea of vision being something that is a lens through which we filter the entire world without perception is amazing.

Uh, you know, um, and so to play with that and toy with that and to give people like, like any book, like Harold and the Purple Crayon, the Purple Crayon is transporting Harold from where he is to where he wants to be endlessly through like peril and intrigue and adventure. And then back in his bed and he goes to sleep as like, whoa, for what that can do to stimulate and provoke your imagination and what you do in your art. Like I can, I can think of no better formative book.

Like the, the lie, the throughput to what you do now is so clear. Did that make you want to pick up a can of spray paint? Like what, what, what drew you to the form?

Nick:

No, you know, it's funny. Like he does, he's sort of like drawing on the walls, right? Like it's a bit of a, like, it's a reference to like that, that trope, you know, Calvin and Hobbes and like so many others of like the kid gets a hold of the crayons and doesn't want to color on the paper.

They want to color on the walls. Um, I never really put Harold and graffiti together. Uh, as much as they do have a kind of resonance now, I see, but like, it never was that for me.

Um, when I, when I got into graffiti, I was never thinking, oh, just like Harold, you know, and, and, and thinking about Harold as an adult, uh, and the meaning behind that I never put it with graffiti, which to me was sort of like always, uh, always sort of an act of defiance.

Neil:

Yeah.

Nick:

Like Harold, to me, isn't about defiance. He's about creation. Yeah.

Neil:

He's not about defiance. It's about creation.

Nick:

Harold isn't trying to reject a reality and use the crayon to select a new reality. Harold is given no reality. He starts with a blank page and starts from scratch.

Like he builds everything from the ground up. Um, I don't really see graffiti that way. Graffiti requires something to reject, to fight against.

Uh, I think graffiti requires the city walls on which it is painted, um, to, you know, close in on the graffiti artists and make them feel like, ah, I need to like act out against this, uh, this imposing force of like capitalism and, and, uh, whatever message corporate messaging. Yeah.

Neil:

So this is the back of the house finch, which I think is the largest bird on the wall.

Nick:

It is definitely the largest bird.

Neil:

You made the house finch, the smallest bird bigger than the red-tailed hawk and the turkey vulture. How did you decide to do that? What was your, what was your goal?

Nick:

Uh, I don't know when I was laying it out, it just looked good coming way up high like that. I thought I don't want to do this small. I want it to be very prominent.

Neil:

What do you picture him saying?

Nick:

Uh, he's kind of like, hey, what's, what's going on over here? What are you doing over there? He's Italian. Hey, what's going on over there? What's going on over there?

Neil:

Yeah. Oh, go, please keep doing this. Tell me what the birds are saying.

Neighborhood Dad:

Yeah. This beak's fucking disgusting. Yeah.

You disgust me too. That's the first thing he says. Yeah.

You fucking disgust me.

Neil:

What's the starling saying, Nick?

Nick:

I don't know. I'm not a performing monkey right now.

Neil:

Okay. Okay. So now we're going to a book that I think you read in high school, which is, okay, it is The Day of the Triffids, T-R-I-F-F-I-D-S by John Wyndham.

The original cover of this book is insane. It's a giant bright yellow book with a pen and ink drawing of like a, like a, like a Georgian European square with like a fountain and like, you know, three, four story tall, like kind of mid 1800s buildings. And then, but in the foreground is like, is like an animal.

It's like a, it's like a tiny Brachiosaurus made out of leaves.

Nick:

It's not an animal, actually.

Neil:

This book is published in 1951 by Michael Joseph Publishing.

And basically it's about, it's a novel. Our second John Wyndham book ever on the top 1000, by the way, number 975 on our countdown is The Chrysalids given to us in chapter 10 by Ilan Masai.

Nick:

Great book.

Great book.

Neil:

That's a great book. So this is written by John Wyndham.

He lived from 1903 to 1969 in England.

Nick:

I'm going to get a little close to you.

Neil:

Yeah, I can move over.

He's known for writing post-apocalyptic science fiction. And basically what happens is there's this interstellar event, like the equivalent of like a comet or like something going by. Everybody looks at it.

But our protagonist is talking about how he's in a hospital getting eye surgery that day. And he's so sad and upset that he misses this thing. But then he takes the bandages off the next day and everyone else in the world has gone blind.

Because when looking at this thing, it makes you blind the next day. He's one of the very few people left on Earth that can see. And then it's this post-apocalyptic thing with these plants that have always existed.

They start wandering around and like killing people.

Nick:

Right. So basically, one of the things you sort of have to accept in this book is that the Earth is populated by these plants called triffids, which are carnivorous plants. They have a whip-like sting that they deploy to catch prey.

And they essentially are these sightless dangers wherever they grow. And so humanity sort of, as they do with all things that are a danger to them, have sort of tamed them. And so the book starts in this world where humanity has realized, oh, damn, these triffids have a super valuable oil that they produce.

And so they've made farms where they farm triffids. They grow them. And those farms are really dangerous places to work because of the stings of these triffids.

So this guy, the main character, is working at a triffids farm. And a juvenile triffids stings his protective mask. And so some of the venom from the triffids stings him in the eye.

And so that's why he's in the hospital when this whatever astronomical event occurs that blinds everyone else in the world. And yeah, so the triffids, once everyone is blinded, are suddenly no longer at a disadvantage in our world. Humanity can't see, can't avoid them anymore.

And so they sort of take over society and prey on these blind humans that are everywhere trying to live their lives without sight for the first time ever.

Neil:

This is a crazy book. I mean, it's a crazy 75 year old. It's a post-apocalyptic, like scary as hell.

Nick:

Yeah.

Neil:

And you're in high school. You're reading this.

So how is this thing formative to you?

Nick:

Well, I think what it really showed me was literature could be really wild and wacky. This to me is sort of like a precursor to the zombie genre.

Neil:

Yeah. You're outline the ruby throated hummingbird's tail with purple as you do this.

Nick:

Yeah. I'm punching some color into this background because this was all raw concrete.

And so it's a little bit thin in some places. The color just looks like not as robust. So I'm just trying to robustify it.

Got to robustify wherever you can. I need one more color. So maybe think of a really nice wordy question starting right now.

Neil:

Okay. Well, wait, I still want to. So I get why the book is like a big deal to you.

The zombie genre, I still want to hear more about how it was shaping you. Like you're a high school kid. You're reading this for fun.

This isn't an assigned book, right? This is like a fun book. So Nick, the high school student is picking up John Wyndham on the side because you were probably assigned the chrysalids or something.

Nick:

Yes.

Neil:

Why was it? Why formative?

How did this change you, shape you, affect you, change your mind? But what did this do for you?

Nick:

I think it just was sort of outside of the normal literature that I thought.

Neil:

So you're like books can do this.

Nick:

Books can do this. It was when I reread it later in life, like after high school. I can't remember when.

Probably in university. When I reread it, I realized, oh, it really is like a beautiful, a beautifully written sort of piece about almost morality. Like I think the main character's sense of duty to his fellow man is very strong in the beginning of the story.

Neil:

Do you think we have obligations to others? Isn't that what society is? Isn't that what community is?

Nick:

I think we absolutely do. I think those people who have, have a duty to the people who do not have. And in general, I think society largely fails to look after the people who don't have because most people don't think it's their problem to look after anyone but themselves.

Neil:

Well, it's kind of like democratic capitalism.

Nick:

Yeah, I think capitalism is a huge problem.

Neil:

What's your vote for?

Nick:

Who's my vote for?

Neil:

Yeah, what system do you vote for?

Nick:

Well, we don't have a better one, unfortunately, right now. So I don't really know what to vote for other than the person who is doing the least shitty things.

Neil:

Yeah.

Nick:

Well, I don't have a lot of faith in our current system of government, to be honest with you. It doesn't seem to really produce good leaders and the people who do seem to be good people don't seem to succeed in the same way as the corrupt. It just feels like the system is stacked against good people and in favor of those willing to uphold the status quo.

Neil:

Yeah.

Nick:

Maintain corporate power and just like destruction of the environment.

Neil:

And it's that capitalistic power that also is, I'm assuming in a lot of senses, paying for your livelihood. Corporations are what buys your murals most, right?

Nick:

That's one really difficult thing for me, ethically, about what I do is the fact that without TD Bank, there would be no Bump Festival. Bump Festival was what saved me this summer, got me out of the debt that I was in. It was a really great experience.

It was a chance to see Calgary and paint a huge mural about climate change. But it was funded by TD Bank and TD Bank has all kinds of investments in the oil and gas sector and probably in countries that we're going to war with.

Neil:

They just got busted, actually, for doing all this Colombian drug funneling through the U.S. They got a huge billion dollar fine.

Nick:

TD is fucked. TD are horrible.

Neil:

Yeah, but we take their money. We'll take their money.

Nick:

I have to get the paychecks that come my way. Would I want to paint a mural on a fucking oil field to make that oil field look better to the community? Hell no.

Would I want to greenwash some corporation with my art? No. But I guess that's sort of like arguably in some ways what I am already doing, you know, by like making the Bump Festival look good.

You could argue making Bump look good is making TD look good is supporting the status quo. I don't know. It's a really hard thing.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah. Well, the fact that you're willing to let your mind go there and hang out there and kind of weigh these moral back and forth is a big, in some sense, a big reflection of this book. I mean, that's quite a pull from this book.

You're thinking about it in a lot of different perspectives.

Nick:

I mean, one thing that's cool about Day of the Triffids is, and I think the zombie genre really like gets away with not doing this because it's so much more fun to have all the characters die at the end of a zombie movie than it is to go, OK, so how are we going to move forward and like live as a society? And Day of the Triffids really tries to answer that. It goes, and I don't want to spoil it for anyone who's going to read it, but, you know, they try and establish a way of life that is protected from the Triffids and allows them to, you know, still have a sense of community altogether.

And I don't remember where I was.

Neil:

Well, this is interesting to me because like humans are the king of the planet right now. Like there was 100 million of us 100 years ago. Now there's 9 billion of us.

Like we took over. We eat other things. We kill other things.

Nick:

Right.

Neil:

We rule the planet. Like we eat other things for breakfast.

Literally, you know, like we are the bosses here. We took over.

Nick:

And what you're describing is the most problematic attitude that humanity has.

Neil:

Right. And then your book, The Day of the Triffids and your next book, which is even more goes down this path

Nick:

This is a really good segue, I see where you're going here and bravo

Neil:

which is a nonfiction book.

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman.

Nick:

This is a masterclass in segues, guys. That was an absolute masterclass in segues.

Neil:

2007 Saint Martins. That's a white background. There's a city skyline.

I got New York City here. It's like the Empire State Building. But in the foreground are like deer, broken concrete, broken buildings, grass growing out of the sidewalks.

It's like called The World Without Us. Basically, this journalist took a look at like what would happen to the earth if humans suddenly disappeared? Follows on a 3-0-4 point to social sciences, sociology, anthropology, social behavior, human ecology.

Like what would happen to the earth if humans suddenly disappeared? Drawing on the expertise of engineers, atmospheric scientists, art conservationists, zoologists, oil refiners, marine biologists, astrophysicists, religious leaders, paleontologists.

Nick:

My favorite nonfiction book ever.

Neil:

Why are you so drawn to the idea of like what would happen to the world without us?

Nick:

It gives me hope that the damage we're doing is not permanent. I know that lots of things are permanent. If you've read the book, you know that lots of changes that we've made to the planet will be around for thousands of years.

Neil:

Plastics, like millions.

Nick:

Plastics, millions, yeah. Nuclear waste in the millions.

Our radio signals will be like traveling outside the planet for a super long time. I think that's the longest. But yeah, nuclear waste and plastic are the two big things that we've really added to the planet that are not going to go anywhere anytime soon.

There's a lot of stuff we've added that's killed a lot of things too. Yeah. So I don't know if you...

You said you didn't read it?

Neil:

I have read the whole book.

Nick:

You've read it?

Neil:

I love it.

Amazing.

Nick:

So that chapter on storing nuclear waste, how our solution is basically dig a giant hole and then lock it up and put every language on Earth, never open this. That's the solution.

Neil:

That's what we got to, yeah.

Nick:

And when we fill that up, we make another one. That's our fucking solution to like a major, major environmental hazard.

Neil:

Oh my God. That chapter hit me hard.

Nick:

You know, and we're making more nuclear power all the time. Nuclear capacity is increasing all over the planet. And all of those reactors are creating nuclear waste every day.

That is going to have to go somewhere.

Neil:

And that's just one chapter. The book is chapter by chapter by chapter. You're drawing a mural here of local birds.

So the two chapters on birds, just the idea that the domestic cat, it's a new thing. One in three families now have a domestic cat. 50 years ago, no one had one.

Nick:

So that's another one of the irreparable changes we've made in the world.

Neil:

It kills 290 million birds per year just in rural Wisconsin.

Nick:

Crazy.

Neil:

Just in one half of one state where they've checked it.

Nick:

Yeah. This has become a really widely known fact since I started reading or first read this book.

Neil:

Well, 2007, yeah. 15 years. Now everyone knows. Now everybody knows this.

They let their cats out.

Nick:

But I was one of the first people in my circles saying cats are murderers, you guys. Cats are murderers. They are beautiful, intelligent, fascinating animals.

They are murderers.

Neil:

They're domestic, killing wild. That's a big thing.

Nick:

They love to kill. The fact is we used weasels to protect our crops before we used cats. And we switched to cats because cats are more enthusiastic about killing.

They will kill way after they're hungry. They just want to kill.

Neil:

Well, and that's the thing.

Nick:

That's what makes them way better for protecting the crop.

Neil:

In Canada, I looked it up, they kill 100 million songbirds a year just in Canada. 100 million songbirds a year.

Nick:

We've brought cats to every part of the globe where the reptiles, rodents, and small birds have never evolved next to cats. They have never faced a predator this small and agile and thirsty for death.

Neil:

And they show that the domestic cats are the same species as jungle cats.

Nick:

Yeah.

Neil:

They're the same species. You've got a ruby-throated hummingbird, like you are about six feet tall. You've got a ruby-throated hummingbird behind you that's like five feet tall, like a huge one, right?

This is a three-ounce bird. It loses half of its body weight flying over the Gulf of Mexico. And you know what it finds on the other half of the Gulf of Mexico, Nick?

Feral cats that just fucking murder them as soon as they land.

Nick:

So sad.

Neil:

It's unbelievable.

Nick:

Cruel, guys. Yeah. You know, cats will just be a whole new kind of creature, I guess, when humans disappear.

They'll all go feral, and they'll interbreed until they're sort of an amalgam of all the breeds. And there will be a North American wildcat. There will be a South American wildcat.

These things will just pour out of cities and go into the woods and just wreak havoc.

Neil:

And this book— It'll be insane. And when you talk like that, it's like, this book gives me not hope, but this book gives you hope.

Nick:

Well, what it shows you is in not that much time when you sort of think on a geological scale. I think in the book, it's like it's about 200 years, and every city on earth would be gone without a trace.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah.

Nick:

That is exciting to me. That makes me feel like— That's exciting to me. That makes me feel like all the trees were cutting down, all the animals were making go extinct, all the waterways were poisoning with industry and transportation.

All the creeks of Toronto are buried. They're on the roads. They'll come back up.

All these things that we've done to damage what was there before us are not irreversible.

Neil:

Yeah, irreparable or whatever, yeah.

Nick:

Are not like this death of things. It's just sort of like a reorganizing of things, a reshuffling of certain things.

Neil:

Well, geological time scale is kind of a hard place for most people to live. Like, you know, our lives are 30,000 days long. They feel very long.

Obviously, they're very short. Yet, if you put humans back to back 100 years after 100 years, you know, our species is only really evolved for like, whatever it is, like 100 lifetimes or something like it's— Like all of modern antiquity is only like something like 60 to 100 lifetimes old. If you multiply it by 100 years to 100 years.

Nick:

That's crazy.

Neil:

Like 6,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago. And our species in general is only 300,000 years old. Like birds.

There's birds that are like 90 million, like owls are 90 million years old. There's loons that are 100 million years old. There's birds that are dinosaurs.

They are dinosaurs. Like loons don't even have hollow bones because their bones have not evolved to be hollow yet.

Nick:

I did know that the loon is the oldest bird on Earth.

Neil:

They take a quarter mile of water to take off. Unchanged the longest. You know what kills loons, by the way?

Wet parking lots of big superstores that from the sky look like lakes. So they land on them and then they have no water to take off again. And they just wander around till they die because loons— They can't walk.

Well, they migrate. They breed on freshwater lakes like all the whole Minnesota, Ontario. But then they live on the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean the other half of the year.

They're like totally black birds. So they have to migrate from— So they go from like here to New Jersey and you got to make a flight. You know how many malls you pass?

You land. You can't get back up again. They say if you ever see a loon walking around, transport it to water.

Nick:

Yeah.

Neil:

Because it can't get to water. It needs water to take off.

Nick:

That's really tough.

Neil:

And we're going to— Like I said, we're going to— If you're not watching this on YouTube, go to YouTube, 3 Books, Nick Sweetman, Neil Pasricha. And we're going to put a time-lapse video of him drawing this thing because it's the visual that's really crazy.

But to talk to the muralist behind it and get his formative books is real eye-opening. I read this book. I love this book.

I got a dog ear. I got flapped. I got papers everywhere.

I mean, look, I want to tell you about this. Page 55 in this book, it says this. In New York, the European starling, which again, you have a seven-foot European starling over your left shoulder.

Now a ubiquitous avian pest from Alaska to Mexico was introduced because someone thought the city, New York, would be more cultured if Central Park were home to every bird ever mentioned in Shakespeare. So they're like, oh, starlings were in Shakespeare. Let's bring some starlings.

They took over. You ever see a bluebird in Toronto? No, but they used to be here.

But guess who stole all their nests? The European starling. But now I talked to J.

Drew Lamb about this. He's like, okay, non-native species, what's your problem? It sounds a lot like— He said it sounds like slavery to him.

You say, oh, a non-native species comes here, you decry that. Well, he's like, there's nothing against the Eurasian collared dove. So maybe that's just the way things work.

But we have these pests that take over, like house sparrows have taken over. Cats are taken over. I love the fact that on page 86 of this book, it asks you why this question.

Why aren't Africa's big mammals extinct? Because we've made all the big mammals extinct in Australia. We've made all the big mammals extinct in South America.

We've made all the big mammals extinct in North America. We've made all the big mammals extinct in Asia. So why are the big mammals not extinct in Africa?

Because we're from Africa, and we co-evolved with them. Here, humans and megafauna evolved together. Unlike unsuspecting American, Australia, Polynesian, and Caribbean herbivores, who had no inkling of how dangerous we were when we arrived, African animals had the chance to adjust as our presence increased.

So that's why big game only exists in Africa still. Because they got used to us. We didn't just show up on rafts and kill it all.

Nick:

Another answer to that question is, big game in Africa produce a ton of wealth for the countries that have been able to preserve their habitat. My sister lives in Tanzania, and her husband is Maasai. And they've told me that basically, the reason there are so many national parks in Tanzania is there are so many wealthy people that want to come and shoot these animals and also look at them.

Neil:

You mean hunting them is still a thing?

Nick:

They make a ton of money selling hunting licenses for big game. And so it's actually the killing of big game in a controlled manner that it makes it possible for us to still see giraffes and animals, giraffes and lions and elephants in these game preserves.

Because part of the game preserve is set up for hunting, and part of the game preserve is set up for viewing animals. And so, you know, is it awful that these beautiful animals are still being shot by snipers in a totally legal way? Yes, of course.

And it's horrible, too, how many indigenous tribes are being kicked off their land by the government so that rich sheiks can come and just shoot whatever animals they want. It's, like, disgusting. But at the same time, those tourist dollars fund a lot of the conservation and research that leads to preserving those animals.

So it's, like, a really tough kind of, like, question. Like, is that a good or a bad thing? I think as long as it's done in a controlled way and we don't lose those species, you know, I guess that's the way.

Neil:

But we are losing species.

Nick:

But we are losing species.

Neil:

There's 11,000 species of birds.

We've lost, like, 100 of them already. We shot the passenger pigeon to death just out of the sky and ate it.

Nick:

Sorry, bud.

Neil:

You know, into the 1920s, 30s. You know, we're just murdering. We're cats.

Nick:

We're the worst.

Neil:

We're the domestic cats.

Nick:

Humans are the worst. And I don't mean, you know, the indigenous tribes that have learned to coexist with nature in a sustainable way. I don't mean all the amazing, you know, new technologies and cultures that are developing to deal with the situations that we're in.

But for the most part, I think people don't really live in a sustainable way. If you look at history, one of the books I didn't select, but A Short History of Progress is a great one.

Neil:

Oh, I love that book.

Nick:

Yeah. And what they talk about in there is like, really, humans have never lived within our limits. Mesopotamia was like a beautiful, rich, you know, what's now Afghanistan was this beautiful, rich jungle.

And we cut all the fucking trees down. And then the river brought all the, like, silt. And, you know, we couldn't grow things anymore.

I don't remember exactly how it all happened. But we basically like we don't we don't listen to the the Earth's carrying capacity ever. We never have.

Neil:

To that point, on page 185 of this book, it says that we have taken over 3% of the Earth for where we live, like towns, cities and stuff. That's 3% of the land. But we've cultivated 12% of the land.

Like we've four times the space of where we live. We've also taken over just to like make things, you know, 12% of the total landmass. That's a lot.

Nick:

Keep talking.

Neil:

That's a lot. This is partly why I love that.

This is you painting this on like a concrete jungle like this is you're painting this somewhere where there isn't much nature around. Yet all these birds are seen within the vicinity.

Nick:

And I mean, like, yeah, I think if I can change anything about people's understanding of their place in the world, it would be. Well, just because we're in a city doesn't mean we're not in the environment. The environment is the word that we use to mean things other than we built, other than what we built.

But everything that exists is part of the environment. Like this pavement is part of the environment. You wouldn't believe how many things come fucking running out of the wall when you start spray painting a wall.

All over the place. Things live in these little holes. Things live in the cracks.

Things live in the like underbrush at the base of the wall. I feel bad. Like sometimes a spider will walk by and it's clear.

I just like doused him in color.

Neil:

Oh no.

Nick:

And, you know, like I just have to kill those spiders because they're not gonna clean themselves. That toxic, you know, paint is all over them. I feel bad a lot of the time.

Sometimes, you know, a big nice spider just has a horrible end because, you know, I'm painting this wall. A parking lot has wildlife in it. You know, it has caterpillars or butterflies or weird beetles or potato bugs.

You know, a potato bug is a crustacean. Did you know there's a crustacean walking around your parking lot? You know, like I just think when people are given a chance, and it has to be a chance that they give themselves, but also an opportunity that's maybe presented to them by someone else.

When they give themselves a chance to become fascinated by the local nature around them, there is really like you can have that sense of wonder that you get looking at elephants, giraffes, jungles, whales. I think, you know, like it really is spectacular. One of the things that I think as an adult, I appreciate in a totally different way than when I was a kid and learned about these things.

You know, as a child, you learn that giraffes have long necks and elephants have trunks and whales are mammals and caterpillars eat leaves until they make a freaking house around themselves and then grow wings.

Neil:

And completely dissolve.

Nick:

Dissolve, turn into a winged creature that then, like in the case of the monarch butterfly, flies almost all the way from where we are right now to Mexico. You know, like that is insane to me. And it's sort of like just something that we all take for granted.

Like this little worm thing becomes a butterfly. Yep. I don't know.

When you look at the way a butterfly's wing moves, it's this stock that just goes up and down. And this membrane creates a ripple that pushes it through the air. Like it's the most amazing.

It doesn't look like it knows what it's doing, but it knows exactly what it's doing. It's the most amazing feat, you know, of evolution. And I think we all just sort of go, yeah, like, yeah, butterflies are around there.

Of course, they're around. I just love, I love drawing attention to these things that are kind of basic, maybe. You know, I did a painting of a tick this year.

Neil:

Oh, wow.

Nick:

I tried to make the tick so majestic and like beautiful. When I went to Australia, their version of a raccoon is this type of ibis that they call a bin chicken.

They're kind of ugly. They have this like vulture-y like skin.

Neil:

Yeah.

Nick:

And they look all beat up, and they're like rooting through the garbage. But like I painted one there, and I gave it a crown, and I tried to make it look really majestic. And people were like, oh, this bin chicken's beautiful.

Like, you know, I like to like give those animals that are maybe scowled upon.

Neil:

That's why you got the turkey vulture in there. Yeah, you're not just picking beautiful birds, right? You're picking all the birds.

Nick:

I like painting the possum, you know, painting the like jellyfish, or like the weird gross thing that doesn't have a face. That's all cute and cuddly. I like to paint cute, cuddly things too.

And like, depending on what it is, I'll paint like beautiful animals that get painted all the time, like a tiger or a cheetah or something.

Neil:

But you like bringing beauty to the things that are not inherently thought of as beautiful.

Nick:

Yes.

Neil:

What do you think of this painting, man? This is the painter right here. Yeah.

Yeah. You've been watching? Come say something on the microphone.

We're talking right now. Give us your view.

Nick:

This guy has a sick fit on right now. What do you, what's his outfit?

Neil:

It's like a cheetah. It's like a cheetah outfit, like a purple cheetah.

Nick:

Damn. This is Nick, Nick Sweetman.

Neil:

He's made of this. Good to meet you. Nice to meet you.

It's called 3 Books. I'm interviewing about what books change his life. What do you think of the wall?

Neighborhood Man:

Man, it's amazing. I mean, we went from blah and blank.

Neil:

Yeah.

Neighborhood Man:

Like now it looks like somebody lives here, you know?

Neil:

Yeah. We live here. Birds live here. There's no pigeons anymore. The birds are scaring them off. But you know.

Nick:

That's the Blue Jay. Yeah. No, there's no cardinal.

That's a hawk. Yeah. There's a red-tailed hawk.

Yep.

Neil:

Tell me which one. Give us. They're all found in Toronto.

Do you want? They're all locals. Is there one of them you want to talk about?

We can talk to you about one of them or two of them. Which one are you interested in?

Nick:

That was really cool.

Neil:

This is a woodpecker here. Northern flicker. Yeah.

This is a rose-breasted gross beak. That's a migrating bird. It comes from Belize.

Nick:

This is like the third time that people listening to this podcast are going to listen to Neil.

Neil:

Well, it's okay. This is a scarlet tanager. By the way, some people call it a red-winged blackbird.

Some people call that a black-winged redbird. It's just kind of a reversi. Yeah.

Well, Nick's thinking about getting a legend here or something. But thanks for saying all that. Changes the neighborhood.

I appreciate it, man. Thank you so much. Respect.

Nick:

In conclusion.

Neil:

In conclusion. From big to small, from high to low, from legal to illegal, from.

Nick:

From red to blue.

Neil:

From on the street to in the wild.

Nick:

From yellow to purple.

Neil:

To sort of examining our existence at the biggest and smallest scales. Nick Sweetman, it's a real pleasure, a delight. The stuff you add to the city.

I'm worried this thing's going to get painted over. That's my worry. What if someone comes and tags it, then what happens?

Nick:

I don't think it's going to get tagged. But as with anything, it could be ruined tomorrow.

Neil:

Well, the thing about the world without us, you know, like nothing lasts. This is a bit of a tribute to impermanence.

Nick:

Art form is ephemeral. Mural art is sort of. It's like it sort of plays this game of being permanent, like murals are always sort of like, oh, yeah, we're going to put this mural up and then it'll be there forever.

No, murals are just like any other thing. Painting on a wall there, you know, they're subject to the elements and the building falling down or getting destroyed or other people painting over it. You know, we can hope.

Neil:

I think it'll last a long time, but I think it'll last a long time. Nick Sweetman, a joy, a pleasure. The delight, the vibrancy, the art you bring to the city, to the world.

Thank you so much for coming on 3 Books. It's been a real pleasure.

Nick:

If I can quote one of the leaves on this wall. Thanks, Neil P.

Neil:

Thank you. Hey, everybody, it's just me, just Neil again, hanging out in my basement, not on the brown couch like I usually am, but this time in my office because I'm recording video for this one as well. You can't have Nick's incredible graffiti wall on a video and just be audio.

So I figured I got to be on video, too. It's the least I could do to kind of match where he's at. The wall is stunning, beautiful, fills me with joy.

It's one of the best pieces of public art, I think, in the entire city. And, you know, there's so many lessons to take away from here. I pulled out some quotes like I always do.

Nick says, art is a bridge to what's possible. You know, as cities change, I don't know what your city is like, but Toronto is changing fast. There are skyscrapers.

There are more cranes in Toronto than any other city in North America by a factor of more than two to one. So the city is going kind of from a small, condensed, concentrated city to like a world of Shanghai level kind of skyscrapers quickly. And as that happens, you know, we lose public space.

We lose art. We lose nature. But we can build it back.

That's kind of what Nick's teaching me. He makes it feel like we live in a natural landscape. And he creates these beautiful picturesque places that you can completely fall into and that can act like sacred spaces in a lot of ways.

Art really is a bridge to what's possible. This quote was funny. Nick said, you got to robustify it however you can.

I watched Nick say on that mural, I'm done. Then the next day, he'd come back and say, oh, you know what? The blue jay, its stomach is a little too wide.

Let me fix that up. I don't think the eye on the cedar wax has enough attitude. So I got to work on the colors.

He'd kind of repaint the eye. Then he'd come back the next day and say, you know what? I think the color behind the hummingbird should be a little lighter so that the hummingbird pops.

This went on day after day. He's like, I think we're done. But he was never done.

He kept wanting to make it better. And there is something about striving for continuous improvement there that I just personally am attracted to. We got to be careful.

I know Leslie and I always worry about pushing our kids too hard. You want to avoid that. But you got to robustify it however you can.

If you can make something better, go for it. Nick Sweetman, a pleasure and a privilege to have you on 3 Books. And thank you for adding three more books to our top 1,000, all three of which I've read and loved, including number 580, Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson.

So metaphorically perfect for a muralist, for a spray paint artist. Basically, Harold spray paints a new reality, as kind of Nick is doing in his own life. Number 579, The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham.

That was a new book on our top 1,000. But for those that have listened to chapter 10 with Elan Mastai, The Chrysalids coming in at number 975 was our first John Wyndham. So now we have two John Wyndham books on the list.

And number 578, The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. I can't recommend this book enough. Didn't get enough press and coverage.

It's 10 years old, but one that's scientific, but journalistically written. So it's really fun and entertaining to read. What would happen to the world if humans disappeared?

But it's told in a way that is less of a thought experiment and more of a fascinating kind of pro-nature way of looking at the world. As Nick said, it gives him hope that the damage that we're doing here is not permanent. Thank you so much to all of you for listening.

And thank you so much to Nick Sweetman for coming on 3 Books. And now, if you made it past the three-second pause, I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club. This is one of three clubs that we have for Three Books listeners, including the cover to cover club.

Sorry, not the chapter to chapter club. The cover to cover club. People listening to every single chapter of the show from 2018 to 2040.

No small feat. 22 years of attempting to listen to every single chapter. And of course, The Secret Club, which I can't tell you more about.

But you can listen for clues. The best way to find the clue is to call our phone number 1-833-READALOT and to get a ticket into our analog only fan club. But of course, let's kick off the end of the podcast club, as we always do, by going to the phones.

Mary:

Hi, Neil. I am Mary from Belgium. I wanted to drop you a message to thank you for your podcast.

3 Books is like a literary treasure hunt, and I'm loving every chapter. It's the perfect blend of wisdom and wit, like having a book club with the world's most interesting people. I'm a mother of two young children and working full time, so it's not always easy to find time to read.

But listening to you and your guests always reignites my motivation to do so. I'm lucky because I grew up in a house full of books, and I was one of these kids who would compulsively re-read Harry Potter novels until the next one in the series came out. My best friend is a librarian.

I'm a bit jealous of her job, I must admit. But with you, I am reminded that I belong to this exclusive club of book lovers. So thanks again, especially for turning my to-be-read pile into a mountain.

I'm looking forward to the next chapters of the 3 Book journey and hope to follow along for many new moons. Bye.

Neil:

Most interesting people and a perfect combination of wisdom and wit. I could listen to you all day. Thank you so much for calling.

And of course, as always, if I play your voicemail, that means you get a free book. Drop me a line. Let me know your address and I will drop one in the mail.

You get to pick the book. I've got about 10 to choose from. There's a pile in the basement just outside this little door that I'm recording from, and my wife, Leslie, will be happy to have one less on the shelf.

All right. So we've done that. Do you want to do a letter of the chapter?

I guess we did a letter at the beginning. Should we do another one? Well, actually, you know what?

I'll do a sequel for the letter that we got from Barbie Wells from Goodyear, Arizona. I wrote back to her, and then she wrote back again and said, guess what? Today I listened to the conversation you had with Mark Manson.

And I have to say, it blew my mind in a good way and gave me so much to think about. I have seen his book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. And I must admit, I prejudged him as being full of himself.

And I thought, oh, geez, here we go again with another slick marketing ploy. But that wasn't the case whatsoever. I found him to be a truly humble and very articulate and authentic person who really cares about the craft of writing and does not want to be another one of those self-help gurus.

What an amazing conversation. I might have to listen to one of that one again. Thanks so much, Barbie.

Mark Manson, by the way, was our guest back on chapter 28. At that time, I think it was probably 2018, 2019, he didn't have his follow-up book, Everything is Fucked, out. That's the name of the book.

Part of my language, but that's the name of the book. Nor had he launched his YouTube channel, which has just done gangbusters. So I'm like a little videophobic, right?

Like I'm sitting here right now recording video like, oh my gosh, does my hair look okay? Oh, my face is shiny. Oh my gosh, I have to record.

He's the opposite. Mark is videophilic. He is just like, bam.

If you haven't checked out his YouTube channel, do check it out. He's putting all of his wisdom, of which he has much, into this new medium. And it's just wonderful.

I think he's already got something like 2 million people following him on YouTube. So if you don't follow Mark on YouTube, that is a good place to kind of find him these days. All right.

And now it is time for our word of the chapter. For this chapter's word, let's, of course, go back to Mr. Nick Sweetman. Graffiti requires something to reject.

Yes, indeed. The word is graffiti. Usually the unauthorized writing or drawing on a public surface, Miriam Webster, come on, we can do a little better than that.

Wikipedia has got a little more fulsome definition. Graffiti is writing or drawings made on a wall or other surface, usually without permission and within public view. I like those two little add-ins.

Usually without permission, not always. In the case of the DuPont subway station in downtown Toronto, there was permission. In fact, it took us six months to get permission.

It took us six months to get permission from the TTC, the Toronto Transit Commission that owns that wall, who was kind and supportive and generous, by the way. Shout out to the construction crew that's been there. Five guys, three of whom were named Tony, by the way, who helped out Nick along the way and the TTC.

They've been really, really supportive. And within public view, that's a key thing. Where did it come from?

By the way, a couple of interesting things about graffiti. First of all, did you know graffiti is actually a plural? The singular form of graffiti is graffito.

Graffito. G-R-A-F-F-I-T-O. Not used very often, but it is graffito.

Both words come from Italian, which means to write. In Italian, the word graffito, or the Italian graffito, is singular, graffiti is plural, means to write. That's all it is.

It comes from Italy. But wait, modern graffiti is a controversial subject. And because in most countries, marking or painting property without permission is vandalism.

Modern graffiti began in the New York City subway station, subway system, and Philadelphia in the early 1970s. How cool is that? That it started 55 years ago in the New York City subway system.

And now here we are today with the latest addition to the city of Toronto, a 750 square foot wall at the corner of DuPont Spadina, also in the subway system. Very cool. Comes from the Italian word for writing.

But did you know, did you know most, most megalithic graffiti symbols date, old ancient ones date between 40,000 and 10,000 years old. The oldest being the cave paintings in Australia. Paintings in the Chauvet Cave were made 35,000 years ago.

But little is known about who made them and why. There is ancient graffiti. Ancient Rome has graffiti 2,400, 2,500 years ago.

Most graffiti from the time boasts about sexual experiences, but also includes word games, such as the in Satur Square, I was here type markings. That's kind of continued to today. Graffiti in ancient Rome was a form of communication and generally was not considered vandalism.

Certain graffiti that was blasphemous was removed, such as the Alexemenos graffiti, which may contain one of the earliest depictions of Jesus. It features a human with the head of a donkey on a cross with the text. Now, medieval graffiti, ancient graffiti, all the way up to today's graffiti.

What a wonderful way to open up a word and talk about it from many different standpoints. It was really interesting to hear Nick's perspective. And he told me off, off recording, that he maintains a strong relationship with both the legal graffiti artists and the illegal graffiti artists of the city, to the point where he doesn't paint over anyone else's graffiti, even if it's a tag or whatever, because he doesn't want to offend anybody and he won't kind of cover their name and they won't cover his kind of thing.

Nick Sweetman, Chapter 144, a pleasure and an honor to share space with you and to create a piece of art together. The very first piece of public art co-created by this three books podcast. Thank you everybody for listening.

We'll be back with another classic chapter on the new moon and of course, a brand new chapter on the next full moon. Until next time, remember everybody that you are what you eat and you are what you read. Keep turning that page and I'll talk to you soon.

Take care.

Listen to the chapter here!

Best Of 2024: Neil Pasricha plucks pithy pointers to prime ponderings

Listen to the chapter here!

[Oliver Burkeman]

Does this enlarge me or diminish me is a way to get to that because you can usually tell, oh yes, this is bad, this is hard, but it's enlarging me.

[Jacqueline]

If it's not their family, if it's not their loved one, they don't care, they do not care. And that's the biggest breakdown.

[Robin Dunbar]

The single best predictor of your psychological health and well-being, your physical health and well-being, and even how long you're going to live into the future from today, the single best predictor of that is the number and quality of close friends you have.

[Neil Pasricha]

Hey everybody, this is Neil Pasricha, and welcome to the seventh annual best of episode of 3 Books. This is the only podcast in the world buy and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers and librarians using books as the Archimedes lever to get into life's biggest themes. Let's start off with Celine Song, the writer, director, creator of the incredible film Past Lives.

If you haven't seen it, please check it out. It was nominated for best screenplay, best picture at this year's Oscars. And I asked Celine, how do we learn to identify, see and fill voids in our lives?

[Celine Song]

I think sometimes it's really hard to identify, right? And sometimes, and I've usually find that it is literature or movies or TV show or something like that, that will fill that void. And I think that's part of the reason why we're so drawn to stories and why we'd still read and watch things, right?

Because we want to find out what part of ourselves that we're missing. And then of course, when you encounter things that mean something to then I think that it is enabled to fill that void. And I think that, of course, my dream for Past Lives, and I think that it means the most to me when somebody, after having seen the movie, tells me about the void that it filled, is that I wanted to mean something to someone so that part of the thing that they felt like that was missing from their lives is a filled.

And that's what else can an artist want?

[Neil Pasricha]

I love that quote from Celine to kind of get us started to remind us that, you know, literature, art, film, all these things create stories that reflect back to ourselves who we are. Art as putty. Podcasts, I would insert into there.

That's partly what The Best Of is all about, kind of giving us a moment to reflect and pause and sort of see parts of ourselves we might not otherwise see. Let's take that conversation a little bit further. When we see parts of ourselves we might not otherwise see, we introduce it to our own corpus of knowledge.

Do we need to be aware of something called cultural appropriation? You know, the adoption of an element of one culture into another culture? That's the new like, be careful, don't do that out there right now.

Well, I asked Maria Popova about it, author of The Marginalian, the incredible website that was formerly called Brain Pickings. She's also the author of one of my favorite books of 2024 called Figuring. And I asked her about a quote she said, where she said, The very notion of intellectual property is so bizarre.

The law is taxing our cultural understanding of authorship. It is not conducive to evolving it. What do you think, Maria?

[Maria Popova]

We are constantly borrowing, consciously or unconsciously, ideas, impressions from other sources, combining them, recombining them into what we call our own creations. But of course, creativity is just this combinatorial thing. It's a mosaic of pieces that we pick up because nobody's born with knowledge.

And in fact, in recent years, too, I must have said this some years ago when all the kind of commons, creative commons and all that stuff was happening. But right now, what I'm very troubled by is this whole thing about cultural appropriation. Because when you think about, I mean, education, right, learning, that is appropriation.

You are literally taking in somebody else's knowledge and incorporating it into your corpus of knowledge and calling it your own. That is what it means to learn anything. And so without appropriation, there could be no learning.

And out of that comes everything we create. Everything we create comes out of the library in the mind that we hold. And that library comes from somewhere.

I mean, nobody's born with it, right? So we have become ourselves by appropriating pieces of knowledge, experience, impression, influence.

[Neil Pasricha]

And anyway, that's the fundamental behavior of the mirror neurons in our brain.

[Maria Popova]

Exactly.

[Neil Pasricha]

Boom! I love the way Maria Popova just slammed down the entire concept of cultural appropriation like that. She's got a blistering mind.

It's so wondrous to be in the presence of. If you don't already subscribe to themarginalian.org, I highly recommend it. It's totally free.

You can donate if you want. I get her Sunday email, which has all of her blog posts from the previous week. And sometimes I feel smaller when I get it, thinking, I have not written this many blogs on neil.blog over the past week. Larger, smaller, bigger, better. What version of ourselves do we want to live? Let's jump from July, which was Chapter 138 with Maria Popova.

And let's head all the way down to November, where we're going to hang out with Oliver Berkman, author of the rampant bestseller, 4,000 Weeks, and the brand new book, Meditations for Mortals. Speaking of this idea of larger or smaller, I think it's a good question for all of us to think about as we go into 2025 here. We're talking specifically about a book in this part of the conversation called Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life by Dr. James Hollis, and I encountered this question. Does this path, this choice, make me larger or smaller? And that's the question I ask Oliver to reflect back on. Does this path, this choice, make me larger or smaller?

[Oliver Burkeman]

This has been huge for me, and I have sort of written about it. And even though I have always attributed it to James Hollis, I now see things floating around on social media sometimes suggesting that I came up with it. This is a great kind of question that sort of, there's something about it that connects me to my intuitive, felt sense of what is the meaningful and enriching and generous to other people direction to move in, in a way that the question, will this make me happy or not, or will this help me reach my goals or not, just can't do.

Because we're very bad at predicting, as all the research shows, we're very bad at predicting what's going to make us feel happy. And even beyond that, we all have these experiences of times in life when we were not happy, because what was happening was not enjoyable, but we did know and feel deeply that we were in the right place. I think people often get this experience, if you've ever had the experience of sort of, not of a terrible crisis or tragedy happening to yourself, that's a slightly different thing, but of helping a friend through something like that.

Maybe you're just doing their dry cleaning or fetching a takeout. It's not necessarily that you're the person who is guiding them with great wisdom and emotional intelligence through a very dark period. You might be doing errands, there's something about that which is just, oh yeah, this is actually why I was put on the planet for these hours anyway.

That sort of enlarging versus diminishing thing can help in that respect. It also helps a lot, I think, in trying to disentangle good difficulty from bad difficulty, by which I mean there are kinds of negative experience that you encounter in, say, a relationship, although it could also be in a job or place that you live, which are really red flags to get out of that thing. But there are also kinds of difficulty which just are the very substance of growing into that thing.

There are difficulties and ways of dealing with your own triggeredness that are just fundamental to getting better at being married, just as there are things that your partner could do which you should take as an urgent warning sign that you shouldn't be in that relationship.

[Neil Pasricha]

I love that. Sorry.

[Oliver Burkeman]

Does this enlarge me or diminish me is a way to get to that because you can usually tell, oh yes, this is bad, this is hard, but it's enlarging me.

[Neil Pasricha]

So what in your life is bad, is hard right now, but is enlarging you in some way? Oliver went on to share that twice he was living in the US wondering if he should move back to England, two different stages of life. One time it would be shrinking him, it would be making him smaller, he'd be running away from his problems, not facing the things he needed to face.

And another time, later in life, he would be growing. It would be enlarging him to move back to England. So that's what he did.

And now he lives in England and that's where we talked to him from there. Why don't we hang out and stay in England for a little bit? We're going to go back to January where in Chapter 132 of this show, I was very lucky to speak to Professor Robin Dunbar.

First mentioned in this podcast series in Chapter 101 with Daniels, the creators of Everything Everywhere All at Once, where he started talking about Dunbar's number, this kind of idea of having 150 friends, maximum, that your brain can hold, two-way trusted relationships. So I thought with Robin on the line, it was a perfect time to ask what is trust just in general? And more specifically, what is the single best predictor of our long-term psychological health and well-being?

Let's jump over to Oxford evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar now.

[Robin Dunbar]

Trust is some quality of relationship that you and I have as individuals between us, that's to say, it's very much like gravity between bodies in the sky, that results in our behavior being changed so that, you know, I can persuade you to behave in a particular way or vice versa. We can collaborate on something because there's a sense in which we believe as individuals that the other person isn't going to, in effect, stab us in the back or run off with our money or whatever. And the marker of that is when you look at relationships and you ask people, you know, who've had a relationship breakdown in some form, whether it's with a romantic partner, whether it's with a family member, whether it's with a friend, you know, what caused the rift between you?

And very often these rifts are irreparable if they're close relationships, they're permanent, absolutely catastrophic failure of a relationship. It's almost always trust. One person has done something which has really broken trust.

You know, sometimes it's lots of little breakages along the way which finally add up to enough's enough. You keep letting me down. We keep, you know, I keep making these arrangements with you to meet for a beer or a dinner or whatever.

And I'm left standing in the rain on the street because you never turn up.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah.

[Robin Dunbar]

Right.

And okay, I forgive you.

[Neil Pasricha]

Or you didn't reply to my text message or whatever.

[Robin Dunbar]

Exactly. And, you know, each of those is probably, you know, not a crisis, but I'm a bit annoyed. But if you keep doing it, eventually I'm just going to say a lot. Enough's enough.

That's it. And I'm not making any arrangements with you. You're going to be dropped from my 150.

Or they're kind of major crises where, you know, somebody has stolen something from the person they have the relationship with. So, you know, they've stolen money or belongings or, you know, what have you, of some value emotionally or financially that has just caused an instantaneous, you know, it is just one step beyond the acceptable. And in those cases, these relationships just become irreparable.

You know, if it ever repairs, it's a deathbed reconciliation. So that's kind of the issue with trust. It's there.

And of course, the whole of our life depends on it because, you know, when you drive a car, even in Canada, despite the fact that there's only one car every mile on the highway, nonetheless, when that car hovers into view across the mountains, you assume that the other person is going to stay on their side of the road and not drive straight at you. So all these things, when you get on an airplane to fly somewhere, you assume the captain in the cockpit is going to do the decent job and not attempt to crash land it somewhere. So, you know, it just goes on and on.

And in the end, you know, crossing at any light, stopping at any sign, anybody in a uniform that's a police officer, everything we do is the food that's not poisonous from the packaging. Exactly. Exactly.

Absolutely. And this also extends then by definition to science, because science is very, very complicated. And this applies to any form of knowledge, if you like, whether it's theology or it's physics at the two extremes, because you are not an expert yourself, you might be an expert in, let's say, I don't know, psychology, but you're not an expert in physics because you don't have the training.

And therefore, when somebody in physics tells you this will work, you know, you believe that they know what they're doing and you trust them and so on. And, you know, every time you go to the hospital and, you know, they stick you in some dirty, great brain scanner and fire whatever is inside at you, you can then show you a picture afterwards of your brain and say, you know, look, there's a lot of it missing or look, no, it's fine. As circumstances may be, you know, you trust them and you trust the physicists that built the machine and the theory, the physics that it was all based on, because somebody kind of vouchers for it and says, yep, I know what I'm talking about, you know, but trust me, I'm a doctor.

Of course, sometimes it doesn't work and then you're kind of disillusioned and it may colour your whole picture of who these people are. But, you know, if we didn't trust people, we wouldn't be living in a society as complex as we are. We'd all be sitting on our own mountains, on our own, you know, probably firing arrows at anybody who tried to come up the mountain because, you know, who knows what they might be climbing the mountain to do to us.

[Neil Pasricha]

So, trust is conducive to collective living.

[Robin Dunbar]

Absolutely, yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

Which improves our quality of life.

[Robin Dunbar]

Oh, absolutely, yes. I mean, as you know, the medical evidence is just crystal clear on this, that the single best predictor of your psychological health and wellbeing, your physical health and wellbeing, and even how long you're going to live into the future from today, the single best predictor of that is the number and quality of close friends you have. And that is, you know, everything else that your friendly neighbourhood GP worries about on your behalf, like, you know, how many beef burgers do you eat and how much alcohol do you drink?

What drugs are you on? You know, how much exercise do you take? You just slob about in front of the television.

All these things, they're not insignificant in affecting your health and wellbeing, but they really are way down the list compared with simply the number and quality of close friendships.

[Neil Pasricha]

Wise words from Professor Robin Dunbar himself, the single best predictor of your psychological health and wellbeing, your physical health and wellbeing, and even how long you're going to live into the future from today, is simply the number and quality of close friends that you have. Everything else is way down the list. How many burgers you eat, how many drugs you take, how many drinks you have, how much exercise you get.

Nothing matters as much as the quality and number of friends that you have. Another word for saying that is, of course, community. Community.

So why don't we hop down to St. Louis, Missouri. I was down there when I released Chapter 136, and I talked to three different St. Louis Uber drivers on Bullets, Bruises, and Babies. We're going to hang out with Jacqueline right now.

She was a bus driver in St. Louis for 30 years, talking about what St. Louis used to be like, and we're going to kind of get into community a little bit here. Here we go. You told me that St. Louis used to feel like a community, and now it doesn't. So what changed?

[Jacqueline]

I think families changed. And what I mean by that, like I said, you've heard the saying, it takes a community, a village to raise a child. I think that structure kind of fell apart at some point.

You know what I'm saying? And you get a lot of don't say nothing to my kids. I mean, even in school, the teacher called you up there, oh, she said this to my, instead of everybody being in line with, you know what I'm saying, caring for this child, or making an education for this child, the mother gets all defensive because it's crazy.

[Neil Pasricha]

I know what you mean. The education system's changed. It used to be like, we created the schools to take care of each other and to educate each other.

And then it became this discipline oriented thing.

[Jacqueline]

Yeah, that's why it became well, well, it became it like, because it always been a disciplinary, because when we were in school, we got whipped. I don't know if you that old, but the principal was able to whoop us, the teacher was able to whoop us. They took that out of school.

Like I said, and then if the teacher even called a parent up there, she got a hand on her hip, rolling her head. I know you ain't touch my son. You know what I'm saying?

Instead of finding out the core, the root of the problem, because somewhere your kid, it's a little bad ass, okay? But we don't want to do that anymore.

[Neil Pasricha]

Well, you still want to do it anymore, Jacqueline says, but what else? What was St. Louis life like back in the 70s?

[Jacqueline]

In the 70s, you had people that cared about not just their people, but other people. You know what I'm saying? When people watch their kids, they watching the neighbor up the street kids, like if they see them, oh baby, don't do that.

All night, you can't take care of that. That's Shirley's daughter. You know what I'm saying?

Now people, they'll tell you when they see stuff, snitches get stitches. Don't nobody want to say nothing. You know what I'm saying?

People don't care if it doesn't resonate to them. If it's not their family, if it's not their loved one, they don't care. They do not care.

And that's the biggest breakdown in our community. It is. That's the biggest breakdown because that's just like, if I'm coming down the street and I know this is Mr. Smith's house, but I see this strange guy coming out of his house with a TV in his hand. First thing I'm going to do is get on the phone and say, hey, they don't look like Mr. Smith. Well, you might just want to come check this out. You know what I'm saying? And a lot of people won't do that. They won't do that.

[Neil Pasricha]

Because snitches get stitches.

[Jacqueline]

Yeah, because they get stitches. That's what they say. Snitches get stitches.

Well, give me stitches. You know what I'm saying? Because if I see it, I'm going to tell it.

[Neil Pasricha]

Because if I see it, I'm going to tell it. You tell them, Jacqueline. I could listen to Jacqueline all day.

That's what all these little snips and the best of really are, by the way. Morsels, treats, little, you know, whipped cream, peaks. They're trying to get you interested in going back and listen to the full chapters if you are so inclined.

If I see it, I'm going to tell it. Is that always good advice? Back in June, we spoke to Jonathan Franz, an author of The Corrections and Freedom and Crossroads, three books I have read and loved dearly.

And we were speaking about one of Jonathan's most formative books, which is Reason in a Dark Time, why the struggle against climate change failed and what it means for our future by Dale Jameson. Let's jump into the chat about that book with Jonathan now.

[Jonathan Franzen]

Some reader I'd met somewhere and had a little bit of an email correspondence with, I think knew Dale, and said, I think I might have been talking about conservation with her, this email friend. And she said, you really ought to read Dale's book. It just came out, Reason in a Dark Time.

And I looked it up and I said, oh my god, this is going to make me feel really depressed. I don't want to do that. Nevertheless, I ordered it and then it sat on the shelf for six months.

And I don't know what, I think I just felt like I could tell from the cover, the phrase on the cover, why the fight against climate change failed past tense. In other words, it's over, baby. We failed.

I felt it might've had to do with the drought here in Santa Cruz. We'd had a very dry winter and it was just oppressively hot, sunny day after oppressively hot, sunny day. For whatever reason, I said, okay, I don't want to consider myself a fearful person.

I'm going to pick up this book and I'm going to read it. And I did. And I found it disturbing.

Of course, to understand why we are doing it and why we won't stop doing it. But it was also exhilarating. I read with great excitement and a weird sense of comfort because he was explaining something that I didn't even want to think about, but I knew in my bones.

And he was doing it in this very, very lovely, almost Buddhist way. He was basically not judging. He was laying out very, very limpidly eight different reasons why this problem, climate change, is unlike anything the species has ever faced before.

And eight different reasons why attempts to do something about it have been futile. And it was intellectually exhilarating, but it was also, it's like you've spent years clenched with fear about something. And that moment when you finally just open up to what you're afraid of, it's painful.

And there's a lot of grief that comes that can come with that. But it's also very liberating. And it kind of eases the soul to just finally let it in and inhabit the awful reality.

[Neil Pasricha]

A little bit dark there, of course. But like what Jonathan says, that moment when you finally just open up to what you're afraid of, you unclench, it's painful. There's a lot of grief, but it's also very liberating.

And it kind of eases the soul to finally let it in. Ah, one of many wise and wonderful phrases said by Jonathan Franzen in that conversation we had on finding freaks and forging fantastic fiction. Jonathan is a New Yorker writer too, so why don't we jump back to March where he hung out with the New Yorker writer Susan Orlean.

We talked to her about lusty leads and literary lessons for life. Susan Orlean, if you don't know, wrote The Orchid Thief, which turned into the wonderful movie that has a totally different name starring Nicolas Cage called Adaptation. And she also wrote The Library Book, which is the book I read that kind of really provoked my thinking.

And so I thought I'd ask Susan, amongst other things, it was a three-hour conversation. I started off by asking her, Susan, how do you organize the shoes in your closet?

[Susan Orlean]

Oh, gosh, you got me in. I mean, I'm a little compulsive about organization. And I feel, honestly, that I function better in an orderly environment.

So it's actually really hard for me to work or be happy in chaos. It doesn't have to be sterile or absolutely minimal. It just needs to be orderly.

So shoes. We live in a mid-century modern house that, back in 1946 when the house was built, closets were not a great kind of focus in home building. And closets of older houses are generally very small.

I think people just didn't have a lot of clothes. So I have to be really careful about my shoes and have them organized so that I can find them and see them. So some years ago, and I don't remember when, I realized that it would be better for me to take shoes out of the shoe box and put them in a clear shoe box so that I could see the shoes.

And that worked.

[Neil Pasricha]

From the container store, right?

[Susan Orlean]

From the container store.

[Neil Pasricha]

For those that want to buy one.

[Susan Orlean]

Yes. And you buy them in a box of like 20. They're great for organizing a lot of stuff, but they're meant for shoes.

And then it started to become harder for me to see the shoes. So I came up with an idea that makes me sound super OCD. I'm not, but I will own the fact that this is more effort than some people might choose to make.

But I started taking a picture of each pair of shoes, printing out the picture in a small format, and then taping that to the front of the shoe box so that I could see instantly which the shoes were.

[Neil Pasricha]

Just front view or side view or both?

[Susan Orlean]

Just front view. And I have the boxes stacked with the short end visible. So it's just a small picture, but it's the most effective thing I've probably ever done in my life.

You know, it took something that was sort of ungovernable and challenging and frustrating on a daily basis because I would try to find shoes and think, wait, where are those green sneakers? And it'd be pawing through a pile of shoes or opening different shoe boxes. And now I am in a kind of Zen space when I go in to pick a pair of shoes.

I just walk in and look, and I see the ones I want, and I pull them out, and I take the shoes out, and I'm very happy.

[Neil Pasricha]

Nice. I love this. I've been telling—

[Susan Orlean]

I should have been a librarian. Look, I mean, this is all—you know, we—I mean, humanity is into taxonomy. I mean, it's a human impulse to find and categorize and index and organize.

And there's a real reason for it, obviously, scientifically. But I think people respond also to knowing where things are and how to find them and making things like with like in terms of, you know, organizing. And I'm not somebody who, you know, alphabetizes the books on my shelf, or I did alphabetize my spices, I will confess.

[Neil Pasricha]

Do you alphabetize your spices, too? There's a lot more down the rabbit hole there with Susan. I agree with what she says, though.

Humans are into taxonomy. It's a human impulse to find and categorize and index and organize. Maybe nobody knows this better than James Daunt.

You know, he started up Daunt Books over in England. He didn't organize them by the Dewey Decimal System or by genre. He organized his bookstore by place.

Fiction and nonfiction merged together by an area that you are interested in around the world, which is fascinating. He did not carry over that kind of concept when he took over the entire Waterstones bookstore chain or the entire Barnes & Noble bookstore chain, making him the largest bookseller of bookstores in the whole world. He has more bookstores than anybody.

A thousand bookstores. I wanted to ask James about big books. How do we sell big books, big ideas, long podcasts, long movies in an era of shorter and shorter attention spans?

Here's James.

[James Daunt]

I sort of take a sort of view that these are not new problems. I've been a bookseller for 35 years or something, so I've predated really the internet. I've certainly predated e-books.

I've certainly predated audio and podcasts and all of these things. And TikTok and all of those things. And the reality throughout all of this is that how people are, the time people have available to read and the enthusiasm with which they read changes by not much.

Oh, interesting. Girls read more than boys. There are a few things that are just sort of stereotypical and have remained the case.

We as booksellers need to really focus on those who are more reluctant to read. But we can do it and publishers do it also when you get Jeff Keeney and Dogman, Pilkey, all those kind of things. And boys start reading some more and we get going on that and it all sort of levels its way up.

Every year gets a little better than the preceding year. Reading and getting absolutely immersed in the excitement of books by young adults, as obviously Harry Potter did change that, J.K. Rowling, but now it still goes on. And we had Twilight and we've now got, let's say, Sarah J.

Maas and we've got other things going on. Sarah J. Maas's books are massive.

And there are a lot of them. And the kids can buy the whole bang lot. That's a good point.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah.

[James Daunt]

They're practicing at a young age. But when people come into their working phase of life, particularly men, they're just working too hard that they don't read and they never did read and they don't read now. Interestingly for us is they're now engaging with podcasts in particular, engaging in this short form.

And those are often attached to ideas and attached to books. So we're seeing a growth even from them. Most of these trends are underpinning more engagement with books, more engagement with ideas.

And it's always been tough to sell Time, Team of Rivals or the latest big book, but there is an appetite for it and there's a time for it. And there is an enduring engagement with these great books. We sell Team of Rivals today in the tens of thousands still.

Robert Caro's Power Broker was the book of the pandemic. That makes Team of Rivals look like a short novella.

[Neil Pasricha]

That's inspiring, right? Power Broker being the book of the pandemic. James Daunt kind of course correcting us.

The enthusiasm by which people read changes by not much. I just love the way he says that. Now we're on one side of the book industry here, right?

Barnes & Noble bookstores opening up 60 plus new stores this year, big lineups at the doors, as James told us in the larger Fuller conversation. But what about the number one book retailer, Amazon? What is it like working inside there?

Chris Smalls, who created the first ever Amazon Labor Union inside an Amazon warehouse in the US, talked to us about how working at Amazon feels like prison. He compared it to slavery. And part of what I asked him about is what he and people who work at Amazon want.

Where does the message go from here?

[Chris Smalls]

Oh, we got to get a contract. That's the number one thing. We won our contract, so I want to make sure that happens.

That's my number one mission besides everything else.

[Neil Pasricha]

$30 starting salary, starting wage.

[Chris Smalls]

Job security, better medical leave.

[Neil Pasricha]

When you say job security, what do you mean? You can't get fired?

[Chris Smalls]

There's a process, due process.

[Neil Pasricha]

Oh, so it's not like just you're out?

[Chris Smalls]

Yeah, there's not no text message. There's not no email. There's arbitration with the union.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, right.

[Chris Smalls]

You can say your side of the story. There's union representation, the Weingarten right.

[Neil Pasricha]

Right, right, right.

[Chris Smalls]

It's representation.

[Neil Pasricha]

And then what do you want in terms of sick leave and holidays and all that stuff?

[Chris Smalls]

We want none. We don't have none.

[Neil Pasricha]

You don't have any holidays?

[Chris Smalls]

We have nine. We have eight holidays that are paid. Nine.

One is missing. That's Juneteenth. And then we have on sick time.

Eight. It's not that many.

[Neil Pasricha]

In Canada, we have like 12 or 13.

[Chris Smalls]

Yeah, probably. You're right. They don't recognize certain holidays.

[Neil Pasricha]

We get two days on Easter. We get family day in February.

[Chris Smalls]

Yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

We got Christmas and boxing day, day after, New Year's Day.

[Chris Smalls]

They don't care about none of that. So.

[Neil Pasricha]

We don't have Halloween yet, though. We're trying to get Halloween like official.

[Chris Smalls]

Well, that's the beauty of arguing something like that. That might be small, but it's actually it matters. So for for Americans, yeah, we settle for breadcrumbs.

We get eight eight at Amazon. And once again, they fail to recognize Juneteenth, which has been declared as a federal holiday. So it doesn't make any sense.

You know, they continue to play in our face.

[Neil Pasricha]

Just a little snip of a much larger conversation, as always, about kind of what it's like working inside the largest company in the world. And we tried to illuminate a little bit of what that's like with a great conversation with Chris at his backyard in Hackensack, New Jersey. Now, we like to go deep on the show, have big, serious conversations about big, meaningful, meaty things.

And also, we like to have some fun. We were able to hang out with a duck this year, specifically Lewis Mallard. A real name not shared, real looks and identity not shared.

He dresses up and walks around the city as an interpretive artist. Who I found inspiring. Here's a little bit of the story of how we met and how our first interaction looked.

The kickoff to a four hour conversation, but here's just a few seconds of it. I was up inside. Tony was serving me the barista and he yells out all of a sudden, there's that duck.

And I look out the window and you are on the other side of the street in orange spandex, orange Chuck Taylors, a full gigantic duck costume. I'm like, what is this? What's going on?

You come across the street. I run out with my friend Aptaka. She knows you.

She's seen you on social media. Lewis! She says, hey, Lewis.

Hi, Lewis. And I run up to him like, oh, who are you? What are you doing?

And you're just, what did you do?

[Lewis Mallard]

I quacked at you.

[Neil Pasricha]

You just refused to talk to me.

[Lewis Mallard]

No, I refused to use English words with you.

[Neil Pasricha]

Because?

[Lewis Mallard]

Because I was performing and I stay in character while I'm performing.

Almost in every circumstance I come into.

[Neil Pasricha]

How long is a performance?

[Lewis Mallard]

How long was?

[Neil Pasricha]

How long is it? You're walking around for like hours here?

[Lewis Mallard]

It depends on my bladder.

[Neil Pasricha]

As soon as you have to pee, the show's over.

[Lewis Mallard]

When I get the feeling, I start to head home.

[Neil Pasricha]

Ah, I love Lewis. He's become a friend and he's recently moved to Montreal. So the streets of Montreal are now duck slathered over there.

But before he left Toronto, he left us some memories. He repainted a few different subway stops and streetcar tracks and the TTC, the Toronto Transit Commission has been really supportive of his work. So now we have some colorful leave-behinds in Toronto that make me think about whenever I drive by or walk past.

Okay. Now, one big issue that we've been talking about a lot this year is internet, cell phones. We're past the 15 year mark now, the 5,000 day mark now of cell phones and social media, smartphones.

And we're starting to wonder what they're doing to our culture and be more intentional and thoughtful about how we work them into how we live. My number one book of the year this year was The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, also a past guest on the show. Head over to neil.blog and you'll see my top 20 list. You can sign up for my book club there as well. But I had a lucky opportunity to chat to Cal Newport, who was also a father of two boys. He wrote the book Slow Productivity as well as Deep Work, which he's very famous for.

And I asked him, when should kids get unrestricted internet access? How does Cal think about that?

[Cal Newport]

Unrestricted internet access. When is it appropriate for someone to get unrestricted internet access? The safe answer is 16.

And the culture's not there yet, but I think we're like a year or two away from that being a very common thing. Just like we're like, yeah, probably a 17 year old shouldn't drink alcohol. Like when we kind of made that decision in the 70s.

Or kids shouldn't, we should really care about kids smoking. You know, we made that decision. We got serious about that in the 80s and 90s.

I think we're going there culturally with smartphones, unrestricted smartphone access to kids. 16 is where the research is pointing.

[Neil Pasricha]

Really?

[Cal Newport]

It's not 21? Well, maybe it'd be better. But the key thing about 16, like John would point out, is that you're through puberty.

And like, that's critical. So you've gone through that very malleable developmental period. You have a more stable sense of self and identity at that point.

Like you don't want, while you're trying to establish a sense of yourself and identity, to also be exposed to algorithms. Like that leads to weird places. Also, your social setup, your social structures are all relatively strongly in place.

By the time you're that age, you're like, here's who I am. Here's who my friends are. Here's what I'm involved in.

I have a pretty stable sense of self. My emotional regulation is not quite as dynamic as it was when I was 12 or 13.

[Neil Pasricha]

I must have been a late bloomer. I gotta say.

[Cal Newport]

Yeah, well.

[Neil Pasricha]

I didn't hit this till at least five more years, if not more.

[Cal Newport]

Well, but at least it's better, right?

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, certainly better than 10. Yeah, for sure.

[Cal Newport]

So that's why John's been pushing 16, right? And I think that makes sense. The Surgeon General has also pushed that age.

Yeah, Murthy's been pushing that age. It's sort of emerging some of the new legislation state. And there's national state legislation all over right now.

Think about these issues. But we're seeing more like the bill that was just passed in Florida basically says no social media 13 or younger, which all the way was the law already, but an unenforced federal law. But what the Florida Act added was under 16, but above 13, there has to be parental consent.

So like, you know, someone has to say you're allowed to use this. So I think 16 is becoming a de facto threshold when thinking about these services.

[Neil Pasricha]

What about you? What about your family? When are you gonna get your kids' phones? That's kind of what I'm asking.

[Cal Newport]

Yeah, well, there's two different.

[Neil Pasricha]

What's your screen time policy at home? What's your video game rules?

[Cal Newport]

Yeah, so there's multiple different things going on here. To me, phone is a misnomer. It's unrestricted internet access.

That's the danger, right? So we have to be really clear. So unrestricted internet access, 16.

So that would mean, for example, having a smartphone that you could just use. That's got to be 16. Having a phone as a communication device, let's say a phone that doesn't have a smartphone screen, but you can do text messages on it or a watch.

You could do text messages. The policy there is if there's a demonstrated logistical need, then you can get one of those. If it is, okay, you're doing all these sports and you have to...

It'd be very convenient if you could let us know what time practice is gonna be over, then we can get you a device that does that. We don't have to let that need, that narrow need, lead us to say, okay, here's your iPhone, get after it.

[Neil Pasricha]

Do kids have devices now?

[Cal Newport]

Well, they don't have any telephonic or internet-connected devices. On video games, I'm very worried about any video game, looking at the research, especially with boys. Anything that's connected to the internet, I'm very worried about.

Anything you didn't have to pay $50 for the game, I'm very worried about, because they're getting their money. And if you didn't pay for the game, where are they getting their money? They're making you addicted to it so they can upsell you on things.

[Neil Pasricha]

I thought that was such a smart point from Cal, just inspecting the business model of the video games you're buying to try to figure out whether they're addictive or not. You pay for Mario Kart or Zelda, they got your money. But if you don't, then they're gonna get your money by upselling you and with very addictive tendencies and probably not good.

Larger, fuller conversation, as always, awaits below that little iceberg popping up from the water. And so I hope you feel like in this best of, we made it shorter than usual. I think last year, I clocked in at over four hours.

And I like those long conversations as well, for sure. They're hangouts, I'm with you on long drives, long walks, with you for a serious, meatier conversation. But I want this best of to be like the icebergs, Oh, I want to know what's more.

I want to know more about that one. I want to go down into the longer form. Great.

So let's close off the best of with Amy Einhorn. Amy Einhorn was the editor of the Book of Awesome, my book, my very first book in 2010. But she's also the editor of The Help by Katherine Stockett.

Let's pretend this never happened by our guests in 75. Jenny Lawson, American Dirt, Big Little Lies. This is how it always is.

So many huge, gigantic books. And she leaves us, all of us, writers, the people that are going for anything, going for a job, going for a date, going for someone to fall in love with, with sort of a classic piece of advice I thought would be great to close us off with. Amy, what's your final big piece of advice for writers out there?

[Amy Einhorn]

I guess I would say, OK, I would say so, for instance, I'm publishing this book. Do I have it here? No, I don't.

Yes, I do. OK, I'm publishing this novel called The Correspondent by a woman named Virginia Evans. And it's an epistolary novel about a woman who's 73 years old, right?

[Neil Pasricha]

Epistolary?

[Amy Einhorn]

Epistolary. So it's all... Now I can't...

[Neil Pasricha]

No, you're right. I just don't know what it means.

[Neil Pasricha]

I'm the dumb one.

[Amy Einhorn]

It's all letters.

[Neil Pasricha]

Oh, it's all letters.

[Amy Einhorn]

So it's all written as letters either from this woman or to this woman. And it's her first novel. And it's actually, it turns out it's Virginia's 10th novel that she's written.

It's her first one to get published. And when she came to New York a couple months ago with her son, because she told her son, if I ever get a novel published, you get to pick where we go. And he picked New York.

And they came, we had lunch, and then she came back to the office and we took a picture in front of the Penguin Random House sign. So I just sort of feel like, again, going back to the eternal optimist, you know, you just need one person to like your book.

[Neil Pasricha]

Oh, interesting. You just need one person to like your book.

[Amy Einhorn]

Or to hire you or...

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that. Amy Einhorn, thank you so much.

It was worth the six-year wait. Thank you so much for coming on Three Books. It's been a wonderful conversation.

[Amy Einhorn]

Thank you, Neil.

[Neil Pasricha]

And thank you to all of you for being part of this episode, this best of, playing back some of the snips, the highlights, the little bits and morsels of wisdom dropped on us from our guests all throughout 2024. Now, like I said, last year's best of was like four hours. The year before was like three hours.

I tried to make this one shorter, teenier, tiner. But as a result, I did not say which three formative books each guest gave us. I did not say the titles of each show.

I did not say all the other themes and questions and learnings and outcomes that you get from every single other chapter. I did not have the end of the podcast club with your letters, your voicemails, your phone calls, as we always do at the end of every chapter. I did not have the cover to cover club shout out.

I did not have the secret club shout out where I encourage you to call 1-833-READALOT and leave me your voicemails. I did not point you over to the website like I usually do, threebooks.co for all the detailed show notes. I did not point you to neil.blog, N-E-I-L.B-L-O-G, although I guess I'm doing it now, to sign up for the email list. Always ad-free, sponsor-free, commercial-free as the show is. But then I can send you a letter whenever I have a new chapter. We're going on this pilgrimage.

We're going. We started in 2018. We're going all the way up to 2040.

It's 2024 now, soon to be 2025. Six, seven, this is our seventh best of, eighth best of next year. Please use this conversation as a way to get into deeper, richer, longer form themes.

But if not, if you're just a best of cruiser, I hear that too, very much so. No book guilt, no book shame, no podcast book guilt, no podcast book shame. Thank you all of you for hanging out in the three books community, three bookers.

I love you. I need you. I adore you.

Have a wonderful 2025, everybody. Take care.

Listen to the chapter here!

Chapter 143: Chris Smalls on anti-Amazon activism and abolishing aristocracy

Listen to the chapter here!

[Chris]

Yeah, because it feels like prison. It's exactly what it does. Solitary confinement.

You had a station. You had a square cubicle station moving in the same repetitive motion for 12 hours. Slave wages, slaving conditions leads to injuries and death.

And that's exactly why they're the number one in their country for injuries. You got billionaires breaking federal law every day. Every single day a worker gets fired in this country for retaliation, for organizing, our discrimination, our fight for bullshit.

Whatever the case may be, every day. Where's your accountability?

[Neil]

Hey everybody, it's Neil Pasricha.

[Neil]

Welcome or welcome back to chapter 143. 43, 43 of 3 Books. Yes, you are listening to our epic 22-year-long quest to uncover and discuss the 1,000 most formative books in the world.

We are so pleased, proud, and excited to have Chris Smalls on the show today. If you want to skip ahead straight to the conversation, no problem. I do that too sometimes on podcasts, but because this show is no ads, no sponsors, no commercials, no interruptions, I also like to have a little entree with you at the beginning and the end where I read a review that came in.

We talk about a value of the show. At the end, we have an after party where I play your phone calls. We just hang out.

It's a vibe here. It's a community here. We call ourselves three bookers.

We've got three different clubs, as you know. I can talk about more of those at the end of the show, but I always kick it off with a review. I read every single review you leave on YouTube, on Apple, on Spotify, and I read one.

If I read yours, drop me a line, send me your address, I will be sending you a free signed book. All right. This one comes from Arnie Goldman, who says, It has been a long time since I listened to the 3 Books podcast, and I was delighted to start fresh with Jonathan Franzen.

So many good moments. I appreciate the attention to detail, no commercials, and the delight in reading. I love the story about writing itself, the amount of details that Jon puts into his choice of words.

Both of your mutual love of books and the thoughtful conversation between two intellectuals who appreciate each other. Thank you very much, Arnie Goldman. I appreciate being called an intellectual.

I don't know, that's a high bar. That's a high bar, but I know what you mean about the pausing before word selection. Brené Brown, our guest in Chapter 70, does that really well, too.

There's just this dramatic pause, and then they kind of always come out with that perfect word choice. Jonathan Franzen and Brené Brown, two of the best, two of the best. As David Mitchell told us in Chapter 58, you know, sometimes you're looking for the right word, and it's like searching between tall, swaying grasses, just waiting to find that perfect word choice.

There is joy in perfect word choice. Absolutely. Now, as you guys know, on threebooks.co slash values, we have a whole bunch of values of the show, and so I want to talk about a different value every time to kick it off. One of the values that we haven't spoken about much is wallet, phone, keys, book. That's the whole value. Just those four words.

Wallet, phone, keys, book. I actually got this on an article written by Ryan Holiday. I want to say, and he was our guest in Chapter 28, but I want to say he wrote this article more than 10 years ago, and the point was just that he carries a book everywhere.

He carries a book everywhere. He just folds the top corner. He's like, I read a page in line at the coffee shop.

I read two pages in line at the coffee shop. Whatever. If you're listening to audiobooks, you can kind of do this easily.

It's so easy to turn to your phone and scroll. That's the tendency. That's what the algorithms want.

That's what they are trying to seduce us to do, but if you have a book with you at all times, it's a little less tempting, right, because you can just kind of fall back into your book, and I love the feeling also at the end of the day, if I'm getting into bed, and I'm excited for the 20 or 30 pages of a book I'm about to read, kind of flipping it back open and saying, oh, I'm on page 81. I remember I was on page 74 earlier today. Yeah, it's only seven pages, but it adds up, and it helps me kind of keep my reading rate going and feel less bad for falling into the traps of news media and social media, so wallet, phone, keys, book.

This means always taking a book with you everywhere you go, including potentially to Hackensack, New Jersey, which is where we are going to head down today on a hot, sunny September afternoon. A little bit of background here. Amazon, okay, you know Amazon is pretty much the largest company in the world if you measure it based on market capitalization, if you measure it based on just the fact that there's three Amazon boxes on everybody's porch every single day, including mine.

They got a million employees in the US alone, trillions of dollars of revenue kind of go through Amazon, if you include retail, if you include entertainment, Amazon Prime, if you include AWS, all that stuff. It's a giant, massive, biggest company in the universe, but have you ever talked to anybody who worked there? Have you ever spoken to anybody who worked there?

I have a bunch of times. A friend of mine used to run HR at a warehouse at Amazon. He said it was a terrible job.

He said it was honestly hard for him because all the directives came from algorithms. He wasn't able to have kind of meaningful human-to-human conversations, and when there was a giant snowstorm in a crazy warehouse, everybody's pay would get docked because they were all late. Well, of course they were all late because there was a giant snowstorm.

It doesn't matter. The ship punishes you either way. He didn't find it a good culture fit.

He left pretty early, but I've talked to other people that work in the warehouses. I've talked to the guys delivering packages to my door. One day, a truck drove down my street, and like nailed a 50-year-old cherry tree, like crunched the side of the tree.

A huge limb fell off. The driver jumps back in his car, screeches down the street, tosses the branch off at the park, and flies off. Of course, the guy had just delivered an Amazon package on my neighbor's porch.

I saw him. The neighbor saw him. The dog walker saw him.

Why'd he flee? Well, he'd get punished if he didn't pass the seven-second delivery time that he's allotted to stop and hand up the package. Unlike UPS, where you could say, ah, there is a guy that delivered a UPS truck and broke this tree.

You can't do that. As freelance contractors, often, they have seven seconds. They're flying around the streets like super dangerously, parking on the sidewalks.

By the way, City of Toronto came to inspect the tree. It's completely dead, and there's no recourse, no accountability. I don't necessarily blame the people that work there.

It's a tough company to work for. With efficiency and productivity cranked up to the nines, customers are delighted and happy with the expediency which they get their package. But what's going on on the human side of the story, kind of behind the warehouse walls?

What's going on? I want to know. And I've been following the story for a while about this guy named Chris Smalls.

S-M-A-L-L-S. Have you heard his name before? Chris Smalls had worked at Amazon for five years before he was fired in March 2020 for leading a walkout on a Staten Island warehouse, Amazon warehouse, to protest pandemic working conditions.

They were all close together. They didn't have masks. They didn't have PPE.

So he was protesting that. He was immediately fired. What he told me is that we all get radicalized at some point in our lives.

My life changed forever the day I got fired from Amazon. Chris used that motivation to work with his former colleagues to try and unionize the warehouse on Staten Island. The first attempt failed, but in March 2022, the vote passed, and the warehouse became the very first Amazon warehouse unionized ever in the United States.

And what are they asking for? Well, maybe, like, breaks longer than 15 minutes, you know, shifts shorter than 12 hours. Like, they're asking for, like, reasonable, humane conditions, is my understanding of the stuff I'm reading.

But Amazon has not come to the bargaining table. They've refused, and they can kind of appeal and appeal and appeal and kind of carry these appeals all the way up to the Supreme Court. So they're pursuing legal action against the National Labor Review Board as we speak right now in 2024.

Two and a half years later, they still have not recognized the union, even though the union has been formed. This you could kind of attribute to potentially labor laws at the highest levels in the country, in the world. But what is going on?

I gotta know what's happening here. If I fly down to Hackensack, New Jersey, I spend a hot September day in Chris's brother's backyard. He isn't keeping a place now because he's traveling a lot.

He's got his sunglasses on, his jacket. I'm gonna post some pictures on the blog post. He talks about why he's been traveling the globe, what happened after the union drive, his experience being under surveillance by Amazon and the police, why the Amazon Labor Union has recently affiliated with the Teamsters.

Chris calls bullshit on a lot of stuff. A lot of what we hear in mainstream media about labor organizing. He reports on what people in the streets are saying.

What's going on as the pitchforks are getting sharpened these days? What can we learn from communist and socialist countries? Why is the U.S. government reluctant to enforce antitrust regulations? And what does fair and dignified work look like in a day and age when AI is taking jobs by the millions at record pace? We are having a massive disruption in our labor workforce. What does that look like on the ground level?

Join Chris and me in his backyard. Sit with us in the white plastic chairs. The air is going to be sticky from smoke from Chris's joints.

We're going to talk about how working at Amazon is, in Chris's words, like slavery fast forwarded 400 years into the future. What's going to happen with jobs as automation grows? Whether unions can still be effective today?

What political parties represent the working class? And of course, Chris Small's three most formative books. It's going to be a fun, wide ranging conversation, trying to explore, as we always do, the curiosities that we have that don't always get uncovered with kind of traditional press.

We are going down to New Jersey, everybody. Let's flip the page into chapter 143 now.

[Chris]

You know, my life changed forever when I got fired from Amazon. And one day I went from having a job to not having a job that I had for five years. And once again, I'm 30 years old.

So it's a different feeling, especially during the pandemic when you don't have no other option. So you had no choice but to fight.

[Neil]

You also told me that Malcolm X was a big inspiration to you. You wanted to put the autobiography of Malcolm X. I told you Angie Thomas picked Humble the Poet and to pick something else.

I feel like there's an element of him and you, like just like just how you're living. Like that book opens with the Ku Klux Klan circling his house when he was a kid growing up, you know, on horseback. Like if that's like the opening scene.

[Chris]

Being demonized, you know, being surveilled, it's not meant for everybody. And that's what people don't understand. They think because I make it look easy, I make it look cool.

That shit is sweet, but this is very dangerous. Very. I go to impoverished neighborhoods.

I go to autonomous neighborhoods. I go to third world countries. You know, I'm going with people that are struggling, struggling.

So it's it's more dangerous than I make it seem.

[Neil]

What are the dangers?

[Chris]

And once again, when I was organizing Amazon, I was living in Newark, New Jersey. For those who know, Newark, New Jersey is like murder capital. Life expectancy for a black man is 25.

Get shot every day. There was a shootout in front of my house. Pretty much every other week.

I lived in the South Ward while I was organizing Amazon. I could have died, killed many times. And I don't want my kids to ever have to experience that.

You know, I fight so that not only that I can provide for myself, but provide for them in the midst of fighting for everybody else. And that's a huge burden to have to be fighting for everybody else when everybody's fighting against each other, you know.

[Neil]

So Malcolm, what was Malcolm X's movement called? How does it live today? And what do you want?

[Chris]

The Malcolm X movement?

[Neil]

Yeah, like, is it what's his? He was connected with the Black Panthers at one point.

[Chris]

Yeah, I mean, he when he when he came up here. And I mean, like to Harlem and the New York area, New Jersey as well. He really started to like build relationships with the community, with the Black community.

And that helped, I think, shaped out what his vision of what society should look like. And yeah, you know, we all got radicalized at some point in time in my life. So it was good to see that I had similar things that happened.

Like it happened to me pretty quick. So that was, you know. That's the similarities I consider with Malcolm X's.

He felt that his his options in society have ran thin. He learned his roots. He learned his culture.

And, you know, he got completely indulged in it and embraced it. And that's what I had to do at some point. I had to embrace what was happening to me so that I could continue to, you know, continue to fight.

Otherwise, once again, it ain't meant for everybody.

[Neil]

Talk to me about the surveillance. First of all, what do you mean when you say surveillance?

[Chris]

Yeah, I mean, when I was fired, there was definitely Black unmarked cars following me at the time coming to my house. In Newark at the time where Malcolm X also was very fond of. And also, we had a protest in front of the building.

And, you know, my camera people, they picked up Black cars following me on the way out.

[Neil]

Camera people?

[Chris]

Yeah, we were shooting the film, the documentary at the time. So they have footage of the Black cars that were following me that day. And, yeah, there's every protest I've done in front of Jeff Bezos' house, he hires the entire police department.

They surround us every time.

[Neil]

The whole police department? Like, the whole city's police department?

[Chris]

Forty cops will be there waiting for us by the time we show up. They watch my social media. Anything I tweet, if I tweet right now that I'm going to Jeff Bezos' house, you're going to see 40 cops outside of his house.

[Neil]

And how long?

[Chris]

They'll stay there while I'm protesting the entire time.

[Neil]

Okay. But you still are allowed to do your protests?

[Chris]

Yeah. Oh, yeah, we do them, yeah.

[Neil]

Yeah. What do you say?

[Chris]

Well, yeah, we've done a number of things for COVID safety. We've done things for the union, Labor Day, May Day, International Workers' Day. We do all these protests for a number of reasons.

For Poushawn Brown, the worker who died in the warehouse. There's so many different reasons why we protest in front of his house. We still do it.

You know, we were just there a few months ago, two months ago, in D.C., at his mansion in D.C., so.

[Neil]

How many people are there?

[Chris]

Oh, it could be hundreds, could be thousands. You know, I've been in front of small crowds.

[Neil]

What was the last one? D.C.? 2024?

[Chris]

Oh, no, no. The last big crowd was London, about a quarter million. That was the largest crowd I ever spoke to.

[Neil]

And what do you say? There or in front of his house? What do you tell people?

What's your view?

[Chris]

Jeff Bezos is tied into everything, every struggle, even the Palestinian struggle, you know? So, for those, when I went to London, when I went to London, it was about Palestine and about how Amazon supports the Nimbus project, which is $7.2 billion investment into Israel's military and industrial complex. So, Amazon is directly funding genocide right now.

They're surveilling with the AWS services. They are invested into Israel's government. And yeah, they're running their system.

How do you know that? Oh, it's public.

[Neil]

Where is it public?

[Chris]

Articles. You can read them up.

[Neil]

Okay, so that's happening. And then what else do you say at the protest in front of Jeff Bezos' house? What else are you asking for?

[Chris]

Oh, the bargain with the union. Of course, that's the number one priority. Bargaining with the union come to the table.

[Neil]

Do they have to come to the table by any specific time?

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Neil]

When?

[Chris]

With this now slow process in America, it could take anywhere between one to four years.

[Neil]

So, when do they have to come to the table? Four years? If it works its way through the appeals court?

[Chris]

If it gets to the Supreme Court.

[Neil]

Okay. Which is a might because it just got lost in the state court or whatever, right?

[Chris]

Federal.

[Neil]

Federal, okay. Where does the message go from here?

[Chris]

Oh, we got to get a contract. That's the number one thing. We won.

We won our contract. So, I want to make sure that happens. That's my number one mission besides everything else.

[Neil]

$30 starting salary. Starting wage.

[Chris]

Job security. Better medical leave.

[Neil]

When you say job security, what do you mean? You can't get fired?

[Chris]

There's a process. Due process.

[Neil]

Oh, so it's not like just you're out?

[Chris]

Yeah, there's not no text message. There's not no email. There's an arbitration with the union.

[Neil]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, right. You can say your side of the story.

[Chris]

There's union representation. The Weingarten right.

[Neil]

Right, right, right.

[Chris]

There's representation.

[Neil]

And then what do you want in terms of sick leave and holidays and all that stuff?

[Chris]

We want it. We don't have none.

[Neil]

You don't have any holidays?

[Chris]

We have nine. We have eight holidays that are paid. One is missing.

That's Juneteenth. Then we have on sick time.

[Neil]

Eight's not that many.

In Canada, we have like 12 or 13.

[Chris]

Yeah, probably. You're right.

They don't recognize certain holidays.

[Neil]

We get two days on Easter. We get family day in February.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Neil]

We got Christmas and Boxing Day. Day after. New Year's Day.

[Chris]

They don't care about none of that.

[Neil]

So we don't have Halloween yet, though. We're trying to get Halloween like official.

[Chris]

Well, that's the beauty of arguing something like that. That might be small, but it's actually it matters. So for for Americans, yeah, we settle for breadcrumbs.

We get eight eight at Amazon. And once again, they fail to recognize Juneteenth, which has been declared as a federal holiday. So it doesn't make any sense.

You know, they continue to play in our face.

[Neil]

OK, so you want you want more holidays and how much vacation do you get?

[Chris]

I don't want I want just more. I want more paid time off.

[Neil]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It should be at least 12 days, 13 days. I mean, that's just getting up to Canada.

We're not even close to Europe. All right.

[Chris]

You know, these workers deserve that vacation time.

[Neil]

They don't. We got a new CEO at Walmart from England named Dave Cheesewright. He was actually our guest on an earlier chapter of the show, 96.

And when he came over from England, he got to the Walmart canned office. He's like, there's no windows in here. Everyone's like, yeah, we don't have any windows.

He's like, make some windows. So he punctured all these holes in the building and the people were so grateful to him because he gave them light. And he said, oh, well, you got to give people light in like Europe.

[Chris]

You have to. Yeah, because it's

[Neil]

Just giving people light. Is there windows on the factories?

[Chris]

No, there's only windows in the break area.

[Neil]

You need windows, right?

[Chris]

Yeah, because it feels like prison.

Exactly what it does. Solitary confinement. You had a station, you had a square cubicle station moving in the same repetitive motion for 12 hours.

And then you're not. Then you have to commute.

[Neil]

Are you allowed to listen to podcasts?

[Chris]

That just now started to happen. But all the other years, no. You weren't allowed to.

[Neil]

Are they letting people listen to podcasts now?

[Chris]

I believe so. They're starting to enroll some.

[Neil]

Oh, that's good.

[Chris]

There's been enough complaints.

[Neil]

Yeah. Otherwise you go crazy. It's like, it is like solitary.

[Chris]

Yeah, it's been, it's been crazy. It's been crazy.

[Neil]

How many people work at Amazon?

[Chris]

A million and a half, I believe.

[Neil]

How many are on your team? Whatever you call it.

[Chris]

ALU, IBT is almost 8,000.

[Neil]

Okay, so how do you get the other million then on your team?

[Chris]

The Teamsters.

[Neil]

Ah, you're going through the Teamsters.

[Chris]

Not only that, I'm going through the relationships we already established and the relationships I continue to build.

[Neil]

Who does the Teamsters represent?

[Chris]

The Amazon division that they have in California.

[Neil]

Oh, they have a union at Amazon.

[Chris]

No, no, no. They have a division that's fighting for.

[Neil]

I mean, who else do they represent?

[Chris]

UPS.

[Neil]

On the street. Oh, they represent UPS.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Oh, that's good. So UPS, what's the starting wage?

[Chris]

I'm not sure.

Maybe 20, 25.

[Neil]

Yeah, you know what? David Sedaris always says, I want to work for UPS because they have respectable uniforms.

Just starting with that.

[Chris]

Well, yeah. I mean, they have a union that fought for a better contract. And they threatened them with a strike.

That just happened. And they're going up to $40 an hour.

[Neil]

Oh, really?

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Oh, that's big.

Who else do they represent?

[Chris]

Teamsters, actors, everything.

[Neil]

Oh, actors.

[Chris]

Yeah, they got certain times with actors and every industry, pretty much.

They have a little bit of everything.

[Neil]

Actors have the most power.

[Chris]

Truck drivers, a lot of truck drivers. But yeah, they're pretty militant.

[Neil]

Truck drivers are kind of, isn't that job going away soon? Like completely? What are they going to do?

[Chris]

They all are. And they do the Amazon. Amazon is taking away jobs from that, too.

That's why they're starting up these little DSPs or third party dispatchers.

[Neil]

What are they asking for for minimum wage?

[Chris]

I don't have to say that. It's more of what the workers say. What I do is, I say my piece, but I let the workers speak.

[Neil]

I see. That's smart.

[Chris]

That's the best part.

[Neil]

That's smart, because you're not a worker anymore.

[Chris]

No.

[Neil]

You were a former worker.

[Chris]

No. So most of these demonstrations will be bringing Amazon workers up.

[Neil]

Yeah, yeah. Or a big politician. You've had Bernie Sanders.

You've had AOC.

[Chris]

Only one time.

[Neil]

You had.

[Chris]

Yeah, they came once, but we've done hundreds.

[Neil]

Yeah. So there's a lot more happening than you hear about, basically, because I don't hear about any of this stuff when I read the New York Times every day. CNN. I'll check Fox News. I'll check. Where are you reading your news?

[Chris]

I don't read the news. I would never read that shit. Because, you know, I knew what they expect with the New York media.

They love you today, hate you tomorrow. But when you are deliberately misinforming people by writing negative shit about my union and myself, knowing the truth, then I know that you're a part of.

[Neil]

Who wrote what?

[Chris]

One of their journalists. You know, they wrote nasty articles about us. And he got assigned to us after a former journalist that was, you know, at the time.

[Neil]

What paper is this with?

[Chris]

The New York Times.

[Neil]

Oh, New York Times. You had some negative coverage there.

[Chris]

Yeah, not just them, but they're the leading factor. It's like, you know, everybody copycats.

[Neil]

But where do you get your news then? Are you on like secret 4chan channels?

[Chris]

Nah, fuck all of that.

[Neil]

Social media is the same. Isn't that even worse with the algorithms? Like, it can feed you a total different echo chamber.

[Chris]

I get my news from the people. If people tell me what's going on, I know what's going on. I don't have to watch the news.

And that's the beauty of it. It's like, I don't need to watch the news because somebody already told me or I'm actually there. One of the two.

By the time people hear it on the news, I'm already there. The protests in D.C., I was there. You know, I don't speak at every event.

Sometimes I just show up to support. Like yesterday, I wasn't supposed to speak at the Labor Day. I just showed up to support.

Come to find out the leader of the whole thing. I spoke at her commencement speech. She recognized me in the crowd.

So it wasn't even over who I am.

[Neil]

You were called up on stage to speak?

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Neil]

What'd you say?

At the Labor Day 2024, 10,000 people rally. You get up on stage, what do you say? How long you talk for?

[Chris]

A few minutes.

[Neil]

And what was your message?

[Chris]

It was basically that, you know, as a union leader, unions have to be out here with the people.

Not at parades in Brooklyn, the West Indian Parade with politicians that don't have the same message as ceasefire. You can't talk out of both sides. You're not supporting the Democrats and supporting the ceasefire if they're still funding genocide.

So we can't do that. And also that, you know, we got a free Palestine. So it's very simple.

I want people to know that I took a stance with the right side to say that unions need to stand on business and not just follow the sheep mentality because the Democrats ain't giving a shit in return for a very long time. If they want change, they have to do things differently. They can't continue to vote for Democrats and we're not seeing no real change.

The Green Party been around decades. They've been around. So people got to see through the bullshit and wake up.

There's something else sinister going on here. There's something. Kamala Harris wasn't nominated.

She was appointed. People don't understand that. They're like, we live in a democracy.

No, we don't. She got appointed after Joe Biden stepped down. We didn't have a choice in that.

So what are people talking about? It's ridiculous.

[Neil]

Yeah, Ralph Nader was on this podcast. He was saying the mainstream media fall for this trick every time by believing that there's a two party system. They create one, you know?

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Like they create it, you know, whereas he has an independent candidate. He can't get on the debate stages.

He can't get on to represent his policies about like his whole thing was health and safety, health and safety environment.

[Chris]

Why do you think I haven't been invited back to Congress? Because what they saw that day, it was like, oh shit. And real people, you know, my video went crazy viral against Lindsey Graham.

And real people see this.

[Neil]

What'd you say on Lindsey Graham?

[Chris]

That we are the ones, the workers are the ones who make these corporations who they are. And it's not a left or a right thing.

[Neil]

It's a worker thing. Hey guys, it's just Neil in my basement here. I just got to jump in and let you know that there was a Senate Budget Committee meeting in 2022 for the Republican Senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, defended corporations who had faced unionization efforts, attacking laws that would prevent them from swaying a union election.

And then the mic got switched over to Chris Smalls, who was testifying there. He's wearing his Yankees cap. He's wearing a red vinyl jacket.

He's got big diamond earrings in both ears. It cuts over to him, and I think I want you to hear what he says.

[Chris]

Well, first of all, I want to address Mr. Graham. First of all, you know, you sound like you was talking about more of the companies and the businesses in your speech, but you forgot that the people are the ones who make these companies operate. And that we're not protected.

The process for when we hold these companies accountable is not working for us. And that's not what, that's the reason why we're here today. That's the reason why I'm here, to represent the workers who make these companies go.

And I think that it's in your best interest to realize that it's not a left or right thing. It's not a Democrat or Republican thing. It's a worker's thing.

It's a worker's issue. And we're the ones that are suffering and the corporations that you're talking about and the businesses that you're talking about and the warehouses that you're talking about. So that's the reason why I think I was invited today to speak on that behalf.

And you should listen because we do represent your constituents as well. So just take that into consideration that the people are the ones that make these corporations go. It's not the other way around.

When people heard that, they're like, oh shit. People like that. We don't need them.

So we can't bring Chris Smalls back anymore. You know who was sitting right next to me was the teamster's president.

[Neil]

Sean O'Brien, yeah. What would it take to start a labor party? Could we not start a labor party then?

[Chris]

To be determined. It'd be a lot of work, but anything is possible. I don't know.

[Neil]

There's going to be a lot of laborers. I mean, AI is taking jobs. I saw something on Twitter that said, in a year from now, there won't be any call centers.

And it was demonstrating some advanced AI that was like, hey, I'm calling about my flight. It's delayed. I'm in Newark.

Help me get home on the earliest flight. I'm happy to pay up to $500. And it'll be like, oh, how about this one through Boston?

It's faster and better. That's like millions and millions and millions of jobs.

[Chris]

They're about to wipe out 50% of American jobs. These unions, they're about to wake the fuck up, because less than 6%, private sector, less than 10% in the public sector.

[Neil]

Are you for a universal basic income?

[Chris]

Hell yeah. It works. We're broke out here.

Like, it don't make sense. They disrespected us in the pandemic, you know?

[Neil]

You're living with your brother's place. You don't have a place right now.

[Chris]

No, by choice, but I have my own place. You know, I just, my life's been on the plane, so it's no point in me paying rent.

[Neil]

Where are you going? Where are you speaking at? I saw you were at the Tesla factory in Sweden.

Where else are you going?

[Chris]

I wasn't there. We were in Norway.

[Neil]

Oh, Norway.

Sorry.

[Chris]

Austria, then Greece.

[Neil]

What are you speaking at in Austria?

[Chris]

Winochi Festival. Brought together by community organizers and the Australian Trade Union. You know, they reached out, and they want to bring me out, so.

[Neil]

So then where are you speaking at in the next place?

[Chris]

Oh, Greece, man. That's going to be a huge event. It's the 50th anniversary of the Young Communist Party. The KNE.

It's going to be hundreds of thousands of people there.

[Neil]

Wow. Where in Greece?

[Chris]

In Athens.

[Neil]

Wow. Hundreds of thousands.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Neil]

What's the mission of that group?

[Chris]

Right now, the students are on strike. Right now, as we speak, because they're trying to privatize the universities. Same thing, you know?

[Neil]

In Greece.

[Chris]

Yeah, the students are on strikes right now.

[Neil]

You don't hear about that story very much.

[Chris]

Oh, no. People saw how militant these unions are over there. Oh, my God.

You talk about the Roman gods and all of that. Greek gods. It still exists in people over there because they stick together.

[Neil]

You do hear not that many stories about general strikes, but you do hear that they happen.

[Chris]

Oh, they happen all the time.

[Neil]

But you don't hear about it much.

[Chris]

No, no.

[Neil]

So what do you want people to know about how they do things over there? What would you say to Americans and Canadians?

[Chris]

That's what I said. It's not about how much money they have, because we got people power.

That's it. That's all we need. People coming together.

That's it. Locking arm in arm, just taking it to the boss, taking it to the government. There's nothing that can stop us from getting what we need to get.

[Neil]

Hey, guys, it's just me in my basement again. I gotta jump in here and explain that I completely messed up this recording. I recorded an hour and a half with Chris in his backyard, and then we keep hanging out.

He keeps talking. I realize I wanna get some more of this. I press record again, and I accidentally record over the first chunk of our conversation.

I didn't realize this till I got home. I was trying to listen to it, and I was like, oh my gosh, did I just overwrite the first part of the conversation? So I've kind of re-chopped it and mixed it all back together so that it works as a conversation, but I missed my scene setting.

So I just wanna let you know. It's like, yeah, I'm taking an Uber like an hour from Newark Airport. The towns get smaller and smaller.

There's more and more people on the roads. There's kind of black men with no shirts on like lying on park benches. There's kind of people out there, dogs in the street.

You can tell the neighborhood's getting kind of rougher and rougher. I pull up to a house across the street. There is a guy on his porch, American flags, and I support the police signs all over his lawn.

It was like really covered in American flags and support the police. I looked at him and I said, hi, nice to meet you. He said, hi.

I said, mind if I take a couple pictures of the street? I'm interviewing Chris Smalls across the street. He's like, you can take a picture, but just so you know, I have a gun on me at all times.

That's what he said. I'm from Canada, okay? It's pretty unusual for anyone to say or have, well, you know, has a gun up here.

So it was just, okay, okay. I'm like, okay, just trying to get my bearings. You know, my spidey sense is going up a little bit.

I go around the side of this house because I knock on the front door. Nobody answers. I go around the side.

There's a kind of a grassy backyard. There's some kids yelling over like a small chain link fence. The sun is like blaring down, like it's hot.

Chris has got a baseball hat on. I can see a lot of smoke coming out of him. I know he kind of, he's got chain smokes.

I don't know if he chain smokes. I shouldn't label him as a chain smoker, but he's smoking joints. He's got a plastic table in front of him.

He's got like big kicks on, and he's texting. He's got a big red jacket on, and I introduce myself. I sit down, and then we jump into the conversation.

Let's kind of pick it up again with him talking a little bit about going to Congress, and then we're going to lean in to the first official book about Fidel Castro in just a second.

[Chris]

You know, notoriety and everything, but they got pretty much excluded from the conversation when we was there.

[Neil]

Did they invite you from your perspective as really just to photo op, because otherwise there'd be some actual movement, some change, some laws, some policies, and you're looking for a little more structural changes.

[Chris]

Well, I mean, it would look horrible if they would have had six white union leaders there, and I just beat Amazon. So for them, they're like, oh, we have to have them. We have to have them there, and yeah, I think I was thrown in there to make sure that they have black representation.

[Neil]

And so what are, if you were the president, or you have an open dialogue here, you've had conversations with a lot of very senior politicians that people would be very envious of that you could have been talking to Bernie Sanders, you've been talking to Joe Biden, Kamala Harris. I mean, if they say, okay, Chris, what's the number one thing you need me to fix? What's the number one or two things you need me to change from the highest possible level?

[Chris]

I've never got that question. They never said that to me. What are the things that need to change?

Accountability. There is none. You know, what are we talking about?

They don't, you got billionaires breaking federal law every day. Every single day a worker gets fired in this country for retaliation, for organizing, or discrimination, or fired for bullshit. Whatever the case may be, every day.

Where's the accountability? And then where's the antitrust? You got a company like Amazon owning every fucking thing.

Where's the monopoly? Where's the antitrust? So there's, it's, they're talking down the two, no, two sides.

You know, we, they want to be pro-union, but at the same time, they had Jeff Bezos stock parties and Christmas parties, and they're inviting billionaires like Oprah to speak at the DNC. So it's in plain sight.

[Neil]

Yeah. It's interesting too, what you're saying, because I was reading up on this and I was trying to, you know, I'm trying to approach this from as open a side as possible, but I did notice Amazon's the most vile, like they have violated the most employment laws of any organization. I don't know if partly virtue of the size, but they've been found guilty of tremendous amounts of labor laws.

And the safety stuff that I've dug up is shocking. Like for a retail company to have worse safety standards than almost anybody, it's really surprising. You know, it's really surprising.

Is that a function of the hours and the job and the pace and the productivity, that whole thing, or there's something else going on from a safety perspective?

[Chris]

Defiant against everything.

[Neil]

To your point, it's like, this is just staring us in plain sight. You've been very vocal about it. Hard to be a target.

And so what's happening?

[Chris]

Amazon is the modern day slavery. That's just what it is. You know, it's slavery, fast forward 400 years, productivity, calling us pickers.

That's what we're doing. We're still continuing the process of slavery with some technology involved. And that's what it is.

slave wages, slaving conditions leads to injuries and death. And that's exactly why they're the number one in the country for injuries.

[Neil]

And what do you say to people that say, well, hey, this is not slavery. It's people choosing to apply for jobs and going for raises. And this is all optional.

[Chris]

Yeah, I know. You're jumping from one fire into the next, you know, no matter where you work. So it's not really a choice after a while.

You know, it's a part of our society. Amazon's only been around for, what, 30 years? Look at our main streets.

Look at our stores that closed down. Mom and pop, they're not there anymore because of Amazon. So we're allowing it.

We're doing it to ourselves.

[Neil]

Me again, jumping in. Gotta properly explain this book, because that's part of like a cutoff. So the book is a giant, huge, thick book called Fidel Castro, My Life by Fidel Castro and Ignacio Ramon Estem, who's a Spanish writer who partnered with him.

This book was originally published in Spanish in 2006 by Random House and published in English in 2008 by Scribner. And the black cover has a sepia tone photo of Fidel Castro facing the right side of the book, smoking a cigar. And at the top of the cover are the words Fidel Castro in a little cap, kind of gray serif font.

And below the words, My Life in the same font, but smaller and orange. Fidel Castro was a Cuban revolutionary and politician. He was the leader of Cuba from 1959 to 2008, serving as the prime minister from 59 to 76 and president from 76 to 2008.

This is basically the first time near the end of his life where someone does a huge, super long interview and kind of collects from his perspective, this biographical story of his life, the endless kind of attacks he's had and put up with over a hundred kind of assassination attempts. It's all told in a great detail in this giant, thick book. And I'll jump back to Chris now.

One thing I noticed on all the comments on YouTube when you're out there and you're on C-SPAN, you're testifying to the Senate. A lot of people are saying, I commend this guy for looking the way he looks, for dressing the way he dresses, for going to the white house with a gold grill and a do-rag. And this comes up over and over again.

I can't help but think of it on the Castro cover. I mean, he's wearing military fatigues, right? Like this guy's the president.

I mean, he's in charge of the country, but he's, he's, he's like a, he's like a warrior. He's like a soldier. He's wearing military garments.

He's, you know, there's a lot about the look and the appearance and people make, people are talking about your appearance a lot. It comes up in a lot of conversations because you represent something that, I don't know if it's scary for people or if it's just unusual for people, but you, you don't dress up. You're not wearing a suit or anything.

[Chris]

You can look at pictures 15 years ago, 20 years ago, me and you'll see the same thing. As is. Same thing.

People just don't know me.

[Neil]

It's hard. Yeah.

[Chris]

Yeah. It's hard to say like, hey, this is me. It's been me.

But if you've been around me, all my workers, I walked in Amazon like this when I got hired day one, you know, so they knew everybody knew, oh no, that's Chris. So I don't really have to defend it. It's just like, whatever, believe what you want to believe.

I know who I am and the people around me know who I am and they don't, you know, they defend me a lot. You know, people defend me if they see things that are people talk about me. But then again, you know, you got the ones that obviously, you know, a lot of sheep mentality.

They just take things surface level, judging the book by its cover. If I dress like a rapper, I must be a gangster. I must be a gangbanger.

So I'm just breaking down all those stigmas by showing up as it is and continue to talk about the issues.

[Neil]

Yeah. Yeah. Talk about the issues.

Talk about the values. One quote from this book is a quality, quality of life lies in knowledge and culture values are what constitute true quality of life. The Supreme quality of life, even above food, shelter, and clothing.

I was going to ask like, what's it like working in the Amazon warehouse? What values are not represented there? And you can use Amazon or you can use kind of like jobs like this one, you know, and what values do you want people to see?

[Chris]

Yeah. Well, once again, Amazon for me was not a hard job to do. It's very tedious assignments, very trainable, very learnable.

Issue was the conditions. So what values people is they wanted a decent break. They want a decent bathroom break.

They wanted a decent amount of time to get to their station without being rushed on the clock. So it was little things like that. I tried to preserve people's jobs there.

That's all I could do. Tell them the do's and don'ts, but I had no authority to have them hired or fired. And that was something I didn't like, you know, the fact that I work with the people 60 hours a week, more time than I spend with my own family to watch good people, good people that I get to know over years and years and years get fired for nothing.

I realized the company didn't value us. And then when they came after me, I just had enough, you know, my whole life, as you said, other companies, I started to notice like at 30, you know, getting hired at 25, but now I'm, I'm 30 years old when I got fired five years later, it's like, I dealt with it since I was 15. My first job 16 at Target.

So fighting for 15 years straight in all these different industries, I realized that this pandemic was, was like my breaking point. So to do, to be defiant against everything and just do what I did was it was not a choice. It was like, this is it.

This company said, we don't give a fuck about you. Whether you live or die, whether your family gets sick or not, whether your kids get sick or not, we don't care. So by them saying that to not just me, to everybody, that just motivated me to fight even harder.

[Neil]

And after you formed the union, what happened? What happened? What was the, what was the reaction?

[Chris]

Oh man, we sparked a resurgent all over the world. We went from having $2 in our bank account to over 300,000 the next day. And we were able to secure a headquarters, able to start other campaigns across the country that are still going on.

And, and also been able to support movements worldwide that are going on. The first union in Canada just happened a few, a few months ago. I've been out there and Vancouver as well, where they filed a few times they're trying to get over the hump.

The one in UK, Coventry, I've been there day one. So to go see these movements spread worldwide off of the inspiration of our victory, you know, it's over over 30 something campaigns worldwide right now. And it's more to come in the future.

[Neil]

Yeah. I love it. And that looks like you are pulling out a joint.

So I'll let you, you can put the microphone in here if you want. Like if you don't want to hold you up, we're outside here. So, okay.

So we talked a little bit about Castro. We've got a little, it's weird to me. Cause like I got a trophy from the airport and an Uber, right.

And so, you know, the Uber drivers like following the map and it's clear that, you know, Uber has had like self-driving car research inside. It's clear that like the direction it's going is the driver, the human, you know, will eventually be replaced by the self-driving car and I, you know, in factories and warehouses, you see that trend as well. The amount of automation is going up.

There's the delivery is going to, is getting more and more automated. It seems like there's a real fricture kind of happening in our culture at the highest possible level. On one hand, you've got, yeah, we're talking about labor and organizing and unions.

And also at the same time, it's like the amount of automation, everybody who's buying stuff, we all want it cheaper. We want it faster. And so we're willing to have less humans involved in the delivery of our goods.

You mentioned main street. Well, but we're ordering off of online, you know, it's us, it's not, you know, like we're not going to mainstream shopping at the hardware store. They don't have the right screw.

And so we're buying it online. And so the amount of tension that happens as humans get taken out of the system is just going up. You know, the humans are being pulled out of the system and we're not even interacting with each other anymore.

[Chris]

You can't even interact with your neighbor. You know, I grew up when you could borrow sugar from your neighbor, borrow everybody in the village, raise the kids. My crossing guard would snitch on me.

If I did something, my, you know, my teachers would, you know, walk us through the hood, you know, walk us through McDonald's, walk us to the park. You know, we used to interact outside with kids. Kids don't do that no more.

You know, they got iPads and TikTok, you know we grew up in different times. And when Amazon got into this, you know, one day shipping, same day shipping, you know, same hour, the increase in the productivity, people don't see the behind the scenes. They don't see that there's 10 people that's going to touch that package before it gets to your door.

The one person who's a picker has to pick this item in less than seven seconds.

[Neil]

Seven seconds.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Neil]

How are you supposed to get across the place?

[Chris]

It's a robot that brings it to you and it comes to your station. You have to pick it off the robot and that times you.

[Neil]

They call it a robot to bring it, but they don't have a robot to pick it yet.

[Chris]

That's what they're working on, you know? And, but for the last 30 years, there's been people picking these items and packing them and the packers have a time. They have to do it.

You know, everything is timed. Soon the moment you clock in. So people don't see that when they order in these packages, they just go on these websites, they fill up their carts.

And then they think these packages magically appear or they see the driver and they think that, you know, his job is this. He got it made because he has a brand on Amazon, but it's not, you know, he's in terrible conditions and they can be, they can be improved. And the company has the money to do it, but instead they're, they'd rather give it to the top.

[Neil]

It's almost like the, it's almost like the more separated we are, the more dehumanizing of each other we become. Because as you said, we don't see it. We don't see it.

It's true. We don't see it. We know from all the research on happiness, that being separated, it's probably why I like doing all these interviews together in person, being separated, doing all this stuff virtually impedes our happiness.

We're not as happy when we're not together. Being lonely is worse for our health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. And one in two American adults now says that they're lonely.

This is the next big epidemic. Surgeon General's warning us about this. But of course we don't see it because we're more and more separated.

And so we're more and more separated. We don't, it's harder and harder to make friends with the crossing guard. Cause that job's changing every, I got a different crossing guard.

on my corner every two weeks.

[Chris]

Yeah. Well, it wasn't like, I mean, I go to my town now and still see the same crossing guards from when I was a kid.

[Neil]

No way.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Oh, wow.

[Chris]

Yeah. You know, and that's, that's the community, you know, people, you know, the cost of living has pushed a lot of people out, but, um, it's good to see that there's still some people there and it's sad to see that they're still there because, you know, this, this is not a quality, a quality of life that we deserve, especially from visiting other countries where they believe, you know, three, three day, four day work weeks.

And they believe that you should have two month vacation and sick time and free housing and free college. And we don't do that here.

[Neil]

Hearing you talk like this is sounding to me a little like Jane McAlevey. I got this book from you called raising expectations. And then in brackets and raising hell, my decade fighting for the labor movement by Jane McAlevey, M C A L E V E Y.

It's a bright red 2012 book says raising expectations and like an all caps black, like cut and paste stencil font, and then raising hells in brackets afterwards. Uh, the blurb on the front from Barbara Ehrenreich says who I love, by the way, Barbara Ehrenreich, uh, wrote a book. I just love on joy dancing in the streets.

The blurb says a breathtaking trip through the union organizing scene of America in the 21st century. Jane McAlevey lived from 1964 to 2024 dying just a couple of months ago. She was an American union organizer, author, political commentator, senior policy fellow at the university of California, Berkeley's Institute for research on labor and employment and a columnist at the nation as well as writing for books.

What's this book about? Well, she's famous and notorious in the American labor movement as the hard charging organizer racked up a string of victories, right? When people said it wasn't possible, then she was bounced from the movement.

We're going to talk about this, maybe with you a victim of the high level warfare that's been tearing apart organized labor. And this engrossing funding narrative that reflects the personality of its charismatic wisecracking author McAlevey tells the story of a number of dramatic organizing and contract victories and the unconventional strategies that helped achieve them. Dewey Decimal as far as one of three, three, 1.880 for social sciences slash economics slash labor economics, slash labor unions. Chris, can you tell us about your relationship with raising expectations and raising hell?

[Chris]

Yeah. Rest in peace, Jane McAlevey. Yeah.

I mean, she was considered the goat for a lot of people. And respectfully, so I was fortunate enough before she passed to spend a lot of intimate moments with her, you know, right here in New York at our apartment. I used to go visit her, have dinner with her, you know we used to have very, very in depth conversations about organizing.

And I learned a lot about her, you know, we, we, we, we butted heads a few times and there was some things that came out of media that was misconstrued about our relationship, but we cleared it up. And then she gave me that book. I asked her which one of the three, cause she didn't write the fourth one yet.

She was writing it, but I asked her which one of the three is her favorite. And she signed and gave me a book and she gave me, you know, a copy of that one. So, you know, I realized we have a lot in common, but we were just two different generations.

and that, you know, that's the beauty of, of organizing face to face. You know, even when you had disagreements, you can agree on certain things. And the one story that people don't know is one day she wrote her because Jane McAlevey was a warrior, even with her battling cancer, you would never tell she was a warrior.

Until her last day, she used to ride her bike from New York, from the upper west side to Jersey over here. And one day her bike broke down. She crashed her bike.

So she called me up, said, can I come pick her up? So I picked her up, had the Chuck at the time and took her to the bike shop. Then I took her home.

And then we, you know, we sat on her balcony and had a good night talking about organizing, talking about, you know, the bigger movement, everything. And, you know, these are the stories that people would never hear. But to share that people, I want people to know that I have a great deal of respect for her.

And even though we weren't able to use her tactics during our campaign, well, a lot of it is, you know, she organized in a strategic way that was beneficial for public unions, like nurse, nursing and teachers for us being in the private sector and going up against Amazon. It was a different monster. So there were certain tactics that she wanted us to use.

And we tried, we tried to feel them somewhere, you know, getting the majority signatures and the building for just a majority petition, which was a great strategy still is. But the problem is Amazon's turnover rate. It wasn't possible.

That was the thing. You know, we would sign people up, they'd be fired the next day. So it was certain tactics that she had that just wasn't aligned into the way we needed to be.

And that's when we butted heads a little bit. But other than that, going up against other unions, going up against politicians, going up against the status quo, standing on business, me and her are aligned on that. And that's, that's something that and the last thing she said to me was, you need to sign with the team says that was the last her last words to me.

So I want to say thank you because I did. And I signed the union to the team says before I left my, my post.

[Neil]

Yeah. So that's the part of the story we haven't got to yet is that the Amazon labor union that you were president of has more recently in 2024 signed on to a larger, I think it's like a, it's a million and a half or 10 and 10 or half million, a million and a half person union called the teamsters union. Founded by Jimmy Hoffa

I think, yeah, like three generations ago and now, but that's not worker led now, Chris.

[Chris]

Oh, no, no, no.

[Neil]

Am I misunderstanding why she stayed assigned with them?

Cause now you've put the Amazon labor union over, over to the larger union. I guess it's, I'm assuming it's partly resources.

[Chris]

I didn't sign them over. I signed an affiliation, meaning that there's an agreement in place. And in this agreement, we have full jurisdiction.

So we have full autonomy. So that it's nothing's changed. We still have our independency.

We still have the same core people. And, um, our bylaw committee will be able to incorporate policies in the constitution that were aligned the way we organize.

[Neil]

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But why did you do it? Like what, what's the, what were the reasons to, to do this?

[Chris]

We need resources.

We need money. They have money and resources.

[Neil]

They have, they probably see this as a opportunity to, cause as you've pointed out in other interviews, Amazon does work with the unions and other countries today.

[Chris]

Yeah. Yeah.

Of course. France 10 years, decade, you know, Germany. So yeah, they, they work with other unions.

[Neil]

They have teams as an opportunity to get more support across the country.

[Chris]

Well, yes. Opportunity for them to get in the warehouse and there's an opportunity for us to get resources.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Money that we didn't have.

[Neil]

If you're playing a money game with any big company, you're probably going to, cause they have a lot more money. I mean, it's just like, you know, it's kind of like the money doesn't, the money doesn't help.

[Chris]

I mean, well, the money is not going to determine our, our victory. We use it. Right.

It's not a mountain of the amount of money we, we already beat them with less than a hundred thousand.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Chris]

It's the way you use it.

[Neil]

Right. Right.

[Chris]

If it's done right, correctly. And we were able to go on strike and the relationships that I'm building internationally, we could call it international strike. We have, we have some leverage.

[Neil]

International strike. What's that?

[Chris]

Well, yeah. Like you mentioned the unions that are unionized against Amazon. I met them.

I flew out there to their country. So for me to have these conversations, it's never been done in history to go to communist countries, to sit down with communist unions. No, no American union president has ever done this, what I'm doing.

So I know what I'm doing is a bigger picture that people don't even fathom yet. So hopefully it plays out correctly. We'll be able to build that relationship.

[Neil]

Yeah. Yeah. I hear what you're saying.

This is partly, you know, what, what Jane talks about with whole worker organizing, right? Like on page 14, she writes whole worker organizing begins with the recognition that real people do not live two separate lives. One beginning when they arrive at work and punch the clock and another, when they punch out at the end of their shift.

So, you know, on one hand, we're talking about unions and we're talking about the labor movement in the U S on the other hand, we're talking about bigger picture issues. You know, that's partly why I think you don't support either candidate running for president. You're really open about that because you don't see either of them addressing some of the bigger issues, the whole worker, the people working three jobs, the people trying to commute to our, you were commuting to two and a half hours each way to get to get to the warehouse every day.

So what does the whole worker organizing look like to you? The whole worker, the whole person, what are some of the big macro issues here?

[Chris]

Well, that's, that's why we were successful because we had workers. It wasn't a third party. It wasn't led by union salts.

It was led by the workers. My lead organizers were going on nine years, Derek Palmer, no other union has a organizer that's been at their job to organize against Amazon that long. People don't last at Amazon nine days.

For him to last nine years, if you don't have an, a veteran employee leader organizer like that leading these campaigns, it's going to be very, very difficult there. Yeah.

[Neil]

He's still working there.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Nine years now.

[Chris]

Nine years. And if I didn't get fired nine years, right?

So we have a different case.

[Neil]

Sorry to say that you had a case against Amazon for wrongful dismissal. What happened with that?

[Chris]

Yeah. Leticia James didn't do shit with it. It was just, you know, for show.

[Neil]

Nothing. What was the result of the case?

[Chris]

Dismissed. Yeah.

[Neil]

Who's Leticia's James?

[Chris]

She's the attorney general of New York state.

[Neil]

Ah, when that that's where it went. Yeah. And then he dismissed the case.

[Chris]

Yeah. Cause they were so focused on Trump.

[Neil]

Pinballing around.

[Chris]

Yeah. I mean, I, I seen how they use our victory. They use me.

I seen how the media did all of that. And then I became a union president. Now I'm something else, you know, I'm flashy.

I'm this, I'm that. And it's like, what are you talking about? I'm just an Amazon worker who got fired.

Remember the company said they were going to smear me. And now you guys are doing it. Y'all doing the work for Amazon, which is crazy to me.

And this is, you know, that's why that's how I think about it. It's just ironic.

[Neil]

Yeah. You maintain a sense of groundedness and comfort with your identity. That I think would be very hard for me and other people to do.

I mean, if you're getting kind of pushed around like this in the press so much.

[Chris]

Yeah, no, because once again, the work speaks for itself, people can look at my Instagram and see what I do every single day, every single week.

[Neil]

You're posting about it.

[Chris]

All the time. And people see me, you know, I was just at labor day protest with Palestine. Over 10,000 people there. Meanwhile, people are attacking, you know, attacking me online for support, for not supporting Kamala Harris.

I could tell you right now they're delusional. I've been at all of these encampments all around the country, all around the world. I see what these young people are doing.

If you think they're going to vote for Kamala Harris, people are crazy. So I don't care what the polls say. I don't care what these online Twitter bots.

Our sheep say, because I'm out in the streets.

[Neil]

What are you seeing? What are you seeing in the 10,000? I saw you post about yesterday. You said 10,000 people, the largest labor day movement history is not covered at all by any of the main, main newspapers.

[Chris]

Yeah because they're too busy at the West Indian parade with the politicians and the unions, you know, gaslighting. So because they, when they ignore what's going on, I could tell you what I see and what I know. I can, I can tell you that they're, they're not going to support Kamala Harris.

They will either not vote or they're going to vote third party because these other presidential candidates like Jill Stein and Cornell West and Claudia de la Cruz, they're showing up to these same rallies and they got their support. So yeah, they may not win, but they building a movement that it's going to take years to build.

[Neil]

Yeah. We had Ralph Nader on the podcast last year and a lot of the ills he talks about is this two party system. You know, you end up having a two party system and then as a result, the middle is shown to be unprofitable and a lot of the stuff drops in the middle as he went for president four times as a third party candidate.

[Chris]

Yeah. I mean, it's tough when you're trying to do something, but you know, they have to, they have to build it. You know, it was kinda to me late in the game to really be out and open about your candidacy the year of, but they're definitely sparking something that's going to last and carry over into the next election.

And the Democrats are disconnected. So are the Republicans, but the Democrats are too far gone for me, for me to even be quiet about it. You know, I met, like you said, I met a lot of them.

I met the president, I met Kamala and I took away nothing from this conversation. Nothing, absolutely nothing. People can say what they want.

I'm talking from experience. I'm not talking from my ass. You know, I'm not making shit up, you know?

So people that's online, that's why it doesn't bother me because they have no idea that I've already made my rounds and I'm a very fast learner. It only took me one time. I don't need to have multiple followups unless I'm trying to inquire about it.

But for my first conversation, first impressions, everything, and none of the people I met are, are, are doing anything.

[Neil]

You know, a lot of the stuff you're talking about is the system, the system, you know, it's like the, the larger system at play here that we're, that we're living within both you and me to a lesser extent. I'm in Canada, so it's a slightly different system and in every country is a little bit different. We've got a lot of listeners for the show around the world, but the third and final book you gave me is kind of about the system, right?

It's a new book.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Neil]

It just came out in 2023.

It's called, it's not you, it's capitalism by Malaika Jabali. If I said that right, J A B A L I. It's a bright blue cover with three emojis on a broken heart, a dollar sign bag on fire and a Brown solidarity fist with pink fingernails with the sub headline, why it's time to break up and how to move on pretty, you know, unconventional kind of book.

Malaika Jabali is a journalist whose writings appear in the Guardian, Teen Vogue, New Republic, and Essence. She's got a JD from Columbia and MS from Columbia university, a school of social work. And she's the former co-chair of something called operation power or P O W E R grassroots organization based in Brooklyn.

Focus on bringing black radical politics to New York city. What's this book about? It's a guide to socialism.

That's what it is for budding anti-capitalists. He debunks myths centers, forgotten socialists of color have shaped our world and shows socialism is not all marks and Bernie bros. It can actually be pretty sexy.

There are whole, like I've found it fun to flip through because the whole thing is designed like for a short attention spans with infographics and so on. That's right. She's got like the history of like what happened, what's happening with universal healthcare in the U S and talks about how like we've been talking about this 1914 and now it's, you know, 110 years later and we still don't have it.

So she's talking about a lot of kind of big picture. So social issues that affect the majority, you know you can follow this book on a three, three, 5.43 social sciences, economics, Marxian system slash communism. Tell us about your relationship with it's not you.

It's capitalism. by Malaika Jabali.

[Chris]

Yeah. Shout out to Malaika. Yeah.

That's my home girl. And she's been a supporter of me for a while for years. And I'm, I'm in the book.

So she interviewed me. I want to say even before we, we won, she started interviewing me and yeah, we just stayed in touch, kept in contact. And then when she came here to Brooklyn for the book release, I did a book release with her in Brooklyn.

And that was a, you know, a great experience and she's right.

[Neil]

You know, we got some people come out for that.

[Chris]

Oh yeah. Yeah. Hard to get people to stand up.

[Neil]

Hard to get people to come out for book book events. I'm very familiar with.

[Chris]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Neil]

I'm very familiar with the half empty bookstore.

[Chris]

Yeah. No, she, she did her thing. I mean, it was standing room.

[Neil]

That's amazing.

[Chris]

Yeah. Standard room only. It was, it was great.

Yeah. It was great. Great experience.

And yeah, she motivated me to not only read the book, but also to write, to finish my book, which I did. And I was able to finish mine this summer too.

[Neil]

So you got a book coming out.

[Chris]

Yeah. I've got a book coming out.

[Neil]

What's it called?

[Chris]

I don't know yet.

[Neil]

Title still in progress.

[Chris]

I think so.

[Neil]

Yeah. Tk. As they call it.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Publishing terms. Is it your memoir?

[Chris]

Somewhat.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Neil]

And so if it's not us, that's the problem. Or if it, if capitalism has these massive issues that make it the system, you know, that, that, that kind of, you know, we can't thrive. Then she's proposing socialism as an alternative.

[Chris]

Yeah. I mean, she's right. I've seen it.

I've seen what socialism do. I've seen it from visiting other countries, you know, 70% of Americans don't have passports, you know, they, they gave me a hard time. I was 35 when I got my passport, you know, what do you mean?

[Neil]

Gave you a hard time to get your passport was hard time.

[Chris]

Yeah. Yeah. I have no idea.

What was the, they didn't want me to leave the country, I guess, but for some reason I had to go through an extra process to get my passport. And yeah, I did.

[Neil]

Now you're going to these more social countries, Sweden, Canada, Norway.

[Chris]

Yeah. Cuba, Austria, Cuba, Greece. I'm going to Greece in a few weeks. I'm seeing what life could be like, meaning that every country has its pros and cons. They're not all perfect, but I'll take childcare.

I'll take free housing. I'll take free Medicare. I'll, I'll take, you know, being forced to go on vacation.

I'll take 90% union density. I'll take all of that because even with their issues that they have, they, they still have it better off. The amount of debt that you are in at a, as a 20 year old in America is ridiculous.

Just to go to college. My first semester was 16,000. My second semester, 19,000 out of state tuition.

So you're in debt in your twenties. And then if you get hurt, you know, I played sports, broken finger, jam, bruises, whatever, medical bills, thousands, tens of thousands. And then you got the doctor who's a millionaire suing you, assuming the patient.

So it is insane. You know, I'm still paying student debt in my thirties and I dropped out of school. I didn't even finish college.

I dropped out my second semester and I'm still in debt because of interest and years of years of not paying, because I don't have the money. It's, it's so hard to get out of that. And capitalism has a lot to do with it, has everything to do with it.

So, yeah, we have to find another way. We have to, you know, all this democratic socialist shit doesn't make sense to me. You can't play defense.

You gotta be all the way in. And that's what we're not in America.

[Neil]

Privatizing everything too. I mean, you spoken openly about how your dad's been in prison most of your life. I always come out sometimes and come back in sometimes, but prisons are getting prisons are turning into a business.

[Chris]

They are, you know, there's couples and regular, ordinary people owning prisons. Now it's, it's, it's a sad thing to see.

[Neil]

A lot of people would say, Hey, look, there's people coming on rafts from Cuba to here. No one's going on a raft from here to Cuba.

[Chris]

Well, I would say America has a lot to do with that because the embargo that they had for 60 years that don't allow resources to get to the country. You know, it's not Cuba's fault.

[Neil]

A lot of people would say, okay, Sweden, you're putting these up there, but then the taxes, you know, the taxes, Chris, you're doubling, tripling people's taxes. If you add free, free college, healthcare.

[Chris]

I mean, like I said, there's always something to fight for. It's, it's, it's always something to fight for. And we're too complacent here.

You know, we're too complacent. We allow the government and give you food stamps. The government gives you, you know, child support are the government bit gives you tax refunds.

You know, once a year it's breadcrumbs. And as a 36 year old man, I can't live my entire life doing the same thing, like going through the same thing, check the check with this stigma over my head every day. As I clock in that, I'm going to lose my job.

There's no job security. You don't even know you walk in as your last day. So it's insanity really.

[Neil]

That adds anxiety. This is what fuels mental illness. Even just on the half an hour truck up from New Jersey.

I'm driving by it. Endless homeless people, you know, people living with homelessness on the way, you know, you see it in the streets. Like there's a real, there's some, you know, Gabor Mate, a former guest on our show.

We'll call it toxic culture. We're living in a toxic culture right now. Some of the things you're advocating sound radical.

Bernie Sanders is very famous for saying, you know, they accused me of being a radical. I'll tell you what's radical is having billionaires paying for the election. You know, he's, he's really, he's really good at kind of turning that around.

You're rolling your eyes a bit at me.

[Chris]

I love Bernie, but you know, you got to call bullshit out when it's bullshit. First of all, you went to Ireland and said that genocide makes you queasy. He fucked up there.

And then, you know, once again, what's the, what is that?

[Neil]

Sorry, what happened in Ireland?

[Chris]

He went to Ireland, spoke at this. I think he might've spoke at Trinity college of all places or wherever he spoke at. And it doesn't even matter.

And he went there and he was addressing Gaza and Palestine. And he said that he doesn't want to call it a genocide because genocide makes him queasy. And then somebody disrupted the speech and they went at him and say, you're a bullshitter.

And they called him out. And I, I loved it. Then he did a, a week later, he did an interview in London trying to clarify what he meant.

It was bullshit. He's doing the same shit that AOC do, play defense. Oh, I got to clean up everything.

So I just don't respect that. You know, I don't respect that. And I don't respect the fact that you continue to call these CEOs in and give them slaps on the wrist.

What's the point of that? You got to help committee. You're sitting on the board as the leader of the health committee.

I asked him to, I tweeted out bringing Andy Jassy over a year ago, over two years ago now, nothing. And then I got his people on the side that want to be in my airline. Oh, we got your tweet.

What the fuck does that mean? Are you going to do it?

[Neil]

You asking him to bring in who?

[Chris]

The CEO of Amazon. He brought in Howard Schultz from Starbucks, but they want to bury our history. They want to bury the fact that I was ever staying in my union was ever.

So they've been putting up Starbucks more than Amazon labor union, which is fine. But at the same time, we're talking about warehouse workers compared to coffee makers, baristas, what people are dying in our warehouse. And I get it.

They deserve a union. The college kids that make coffee, the young adults that make coffee, they deserve their union. But we're talking about Amazon workers that was considered the lifeline in the country.

And you ain't bringing the CEO yet. The leading injury in the country over any industry. So it doesn't make any sense to me.

He's just a lot of gaslighting that goes for all of them.

[Neil]

What advice would you give people? Listen, people listen all over the place. People call you an activist.

They call you a revolutionary.

[Chris]

Well, I just want to tell people that, you know, we deserve better. It's very, it's that simple. It's that simple.

Like Malaika said, we have to break up with capitalism and, you know, breakups hurt, but then time heals all, you know, I can tell you from being a divorced man, it don't matter. You, whatever you're going through, you can't allow be complacent. You can't just think that one day these politicians are going to wake up and say, Hey, I'm going to, I'm going to give the people what they want.

That'll never happen. And all of that, you know, we got to vote, vote, vote. When you're voting for breadcrumbs, the time you see anything, you'd be dead.

If you see it at all, any real change, you shouldn't have to go your whole lifetime, working so hard to get some breadcrumbs when they can be done overnight. One man, Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world can end homelessness right now and still be rich. Doesn't make any sense.

So we got to make it make sense. And we got to fight like hell.

[Neil]

It's just me in my basement again. I'm here with my pile of wires, my laptop screen full open, listening back to that conversation with Chris Smalls. You know, I didn't really know what to expect flying down there to hang out with him in his backyard.

All I knew was that through talking to people who worked with Amazon, the people delivering packages to my house, my friend who worked there and didn't work there after a while, it was like, there's just more to the story that we can hear or see. And I wanted to get an on the ground peek from the person who organized the first ever Amazon warehouse union in the United States. Ever in history.

Like that's quite a big feat. No wonder Bernie Sanders went over there to give a speech when they did that. AOC went over to give a big speech, you know, but the flame seems to be, you know, dying down here because Amazon kind of feel it forever.

You know, years go by money gets used up. Turnover stays really high. So the people that even voted are probably no longer there.

I mean, turnovers in the hundreds of percentage points. So you're flipping people over all the time. The structural setup isn't one that allows people to come together and argue and make claims for rights.

You know, where do I personally sit on these issues? I think it needs to be better than it is now. I mean, here's some quotes from Chris that I completely agree with.

I would love to actually have three days off and four days on a 10 hour shift or an eight hour shift with an hour lunch. I mean, when you hear him say that it doesn't sound crazy at all, does it? Right.

When I talk to people that work at Amazon, they say, yeah, it's a 12 hour shift. You get two 15 minute breaks and one 30 minute lunch. So that means you're working 11 out of the 12 hours.

And the most time you get off is 30 minutes. Then think about what the work is. Here's another quote from Chris.

It feels like prison. Exactly what it does. Solitary confinement.

You have a station, you have a square cubicle, you're moving in the same repetitive motion for 12 hours. As he describes it, you know, the robots pick the products off of the shelves, they bring it to you. The part that humans are currently doing, at least with Chris's information, it may have changed or may already be changing to entirely robotics.

But you know, it's like they're just taking the products off of the robot and putting it in a box. Like that's like a more complicated, you can imagine like a human hand kind of being required. Right.

He had more controversial statements. We got billionaires breaking federal law every day. Every single day, a worker gets fired in this country for retaliation, for organizing, for discrimination, for bullshit, whatever the case may be.

Where's the accountability? He says, Amazon is modern day slavery. That's what it is.

Fast forward. Fast forward is 400 years productivity calling us pickers. That's what we're doing.

We're still continuing the process of slavery with some technology involved. Do you agree with that? This is me again.

Do you agree with that? You think that's what it is? I mentioned this, uh, afterwards to somebody I met later in the day and they were like, well, this is an optional job.

Like you, you get, you get, you don't have to work there. It's not slavery by definition. And, and that's true.

Um, you know, uh, or are there systemic issues that prevent people that have been historically discriminated against from moving beyond poverty? Like is, is this kind of the design of the system, right? Like that's kind of what he's arguing for.

And then it gets even loftier when he says, I met the president, I met Kamala, I took away nothing from this conversation. Now, remember we recorded this before the election and he was even saying then like, they're not going to vote for Kamala. Um, and you know, what we've seen is a dramatic shift in the, uh, us kind of tilting to the right where, as I speak today, as I record this now in December of 2024, you know, all three elected bodies of government in the U S are one Republican or one way Republican.

So there's no kind of checks and balances, things can just kind of go through. Now I'm not here to, um, kind of espouse political views. And at the same time, it is politics.

Like politics is as Ryan Holiday describes it, all the things that we do together, that's what politics is. And so when you see situations and, um, kind of setups that just smell foul and seem foul. And when you poke under the roof and you find out this kind of Amazon, uh, union process has been dragged on endlessly and probably will get dragged on endlessly still to the point where it's drowned out.

Like it's not in the news anymore. It's not, you don't hear about anymore. These are just really bad jobs.

I was talking to about a buddy of mine who worked at HR at Amazon. He's like, you know, they post for 12 week contract jobs because nobody wants to do a six week contract job, but really it's a six week contract job. But then we fire everybody after six weeks because, and he's in Canada, my buddy, he's like in Canada, you can fire people after six weeks is 12, 800 job.

Then there's no liability. There's no repercussions. So we post them for six weeks.

Nobody applies. We post them for 12 weeks. Everybody applies, but we fire everybody after six weeks.

And we do that over and over again. So that over two or three years, you may have worked at Amazon for six weeks, numerous times. Then you become temp.

Okay. Then you become part time. And he said to me, this is a guy that used to work in HR at Amazon.

He said the hallways and the posters internally all advertise that when you start at Amazon, you get benefits, you start with benefits, you get orthodontic care, you get, you know, see the dentist, all that stuff. But he's like, the dirty little secret is you don't start full time for like five years. Cause you have to be like temp fired five times and seasonal.

And then you're part time. And like, we don't hire anyone to be full time until they've gone through all that stuff. So it's years and years and years away.

But meanwhile, the posters are always set. This is just one guy, one story, but I can only share what I know to Chris's point. I get my news from the people.

This is some of the news I've got from the people. And when you see the Amazon drivers kind of whipping down your street, driving dangerously recklessly, they're on the sidewalks. They shouldn't be.

They're knocking down trees in my neighborhood. They shouldn't be. And you talk to them.

These poor guys are telling me I only have seven seconds to deliver a package. Like if I don't, I'm going to get fired. Like we've just squeezed capitalism to such a high degree that now we can't pause.

We can't possibly measure all the societal repercussions and ramifications. And that's why conversations like this are super important. Thank you so much to Chris Smalls for coming on three books and giving us three more books to add to our top 1000, including number 583, Fidel Castro, my life by Fidel Castro and Ignacio Ramona, R-A-M-O-N-E-T.

Number 582, raising expectations and raising hell. My decade fighting for the labor movement by Jane McAlevey. He pronounced her name completely different than me, but he knows her and knew her.

So I'm going to give him the nod. McAlevey that's M-C-A-L-E-V-E-Y. A really blistering read a little all over the place, but I did read it and it is fascinating to kind of be in the unions.

So you see, you see how edgy and how raw and how vicious kind of things are on the front lines and the battleground. The book opens with like George W. Bush versus Al Gore in Florida and like what the unions were doing on the ground and how they were like, it was like real, like, just like, you know, what did Chris say?

It's like gladiator stuff. That's what he said. And number 581, it's not you, it's capitalism by Malaika Jabali.

J-A-B-A-L-I. I did read that book as well. I don't as strongly recommend it as Chris did is my personal take.

It was complicated, hard to read. I didn't find it kind of, it didn't have a great through line to me. Okay.

That's just my view. Cause you guys have been asking me, Hey Neil, can you give us your view? But then the other book that Chris wanted to talk about, we kind of touched on it at the beginning.

It was the autobiography of Malcolm X. So that was actually number 926 on our list from Angie Thomas. And then we had two other guests mention it so far, including, I'm going to get these right for you guys.

Humble the poet in chapter 73. And somebody else picked that. Cause there's two asterisks on it.

Or do we already asterisk it for Chris Smalls? Anyway, Autobiography of Malcolm X, highly recommended. Thank you so much to you for listening.

Thank you so much to Chris Smalls for coming on the show. I really appreciate all of you for being here. All right.

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 one of three clubs that we have for three bookers out there.

And of the podcast club are people that hang out at the end of the show. We play your voicemails, read your more letters. We hang out, we talk about a word of the chapter.

And there's also the cover to cover club, people listening to every single chapter of the show, all 333, like me from my thirties to my sixties. Let me know, drop me a line. I'll add you to the FAQ.

And of course there is the secret club, which I can't say more about. Although then you can listen for clues. The number one way to find a clue for the secret club is to call our phone number, which is 1 8 3 3 read a lot.

And with that, as we always do, let's kick off the end of the podcast club by going to the phones.

[Claire]

Hi Neal. This is Claire. I'm calling from Nova Scotia.

I started listening to your podcast years ago when you first began and I was doing a lot of driving then. So it was all the time. And then I kind of forgot about it for up until now.

And was on another road trip and picked up where you have now left off, listening to some of the most influential, wonderful, people that I love to read. Maria Popova, David Eggers. Holy smokes.

Um, so congrats, uh, at how it's grown and how you've maintained it ad free. Thank you so much for what you're doing for the book world and book lovers. What a cool, special thing.

And, um, Oh, I gotta go. I just got a paper cut. Okay.

Bye. Bye.

[Neil]

That's a great voicemail. Thank you so much, Claire from Nova Scotia. First of all, shout out to the comeback listeners.

I'm a comebacker. Like I listened to the Tim Ferriss podcast when it first came out in 2013, 2014. And then of course I abandoned it because there's other podcasts.

And then I occasionally come back to it. I think the comeback, listen, I'm going to be here. I'm not going anywhere.

Full moons. Keep coming. I keep coming too.

So it's perfect. Come back, re reengage. It's wonderful.

And then when you come back, it's kind of fun. I think to go to three books.co slash, um, guests. That's why I set up because that's gas.

So you can see, Oh yeah. Who's he talked to lately? Chapter 81 is with Dave Eggers.

Chapter at one 38 is with Maria Popova. And you know, if you'd like Dave Eggers and Maria Popova, artistic cerebral, well, it's kind of in that worldview. I highly recommend the one to one 23, Susie Batisse.

I think, I think you got to listen to that one. That was, that's if you're interested, Mohsin Hamid, man, the way that guy kind of took us into Pakistan was wonderful. Chapter 108.

Anyway, um, never get high off your own supply. Uh, really appreciate that. And thank you for the shadows of the secret club there at the end.

All right. And now, you know, it's kind of like, do we do another letter? Cause we did a lot at the beginning.

I think we do. I think we do another letter. It's a different letter.

It's a different letter. It's not about the other letter. It's about a different thing.

Okay. So let's see here. Let's grab, you know, let's grab a YouTube comment.

Cause you know, uh, two chapters ago, we talked to Amy Einhorn. That was chapter 140, actually three chapters ago. Uh, the editor for the book of awesome, as well as a lot of books like the help and big little lies.

And there was a comment and it came from Zuby and Zuby says, I don't share Philip Ross ideas of the death of the novel. Social media hasn't replaced the book. It's opened up whole fields of book culture on TikTok, Goodreads, YouTube, Instagram, catering to millions.

There is something about the form and nature of reading, which I think is perennial, intimate, insular, and original. And I replied, I agree. And I hope you're right.

Zuby. Yeah, that's nice. You know, Philip Roth talks about the death of novel.

And I think it was Yohan Hari, which, uh, back in chapter one 21, he said like, you know, reading literature is going to go the way of people who are interested in volleyball or people who go to the opera. It'll be like a smaller, smaller subset. And you do hear about this happening.

It's like, okay, automatic self-driving cars are coming. Well, what's going to happen to people who like driving cars, but they're going to people. They're going to become people who like driving horses.

They're going to go to like the driving track. Instead of the horse track, they're good. So that's kind of like one view.

But then the other view, I think espoused by James Daunt chapter 141, is that like books are in a very good place. There's more people reading than ever before. We've got lines of 400 people at new Barnes and Nobles.

And like, you know, some of this young fantasy and young adult stuff, it's like really helping breeding take off. And books are the antidote to screen culture. They're the opposite of endless scrolling.

They provide like safety, sanctity, intimacy, emotional connection. You, you, you find out what hope is and what life feels like you, you live other lives and nothing can replace the experience of being inside someone's mind through a book. So which side do you net at on?

Well, we're going to remain book optimists here. We're going to constantly question and examine our relationship with books because that's part of what we do, but we're book optimists. We buy books a lot.

We read books a lot. We take books out of the library. We share them.

We swap them. We highlight them. We cover them.

I got a book club. If you aren't on it yet, Neil's monthly book club at the end of every month, last Saturday morning of every month, I send out a list of every single book I've loved and read over the past month. That's all it is.

It's just a list of books I've read over the last month. And in December, I do my very best books I've read all year. So if you haven't read that, go to neil.blog. You can read the best books I've read in 2024. So yes, thank you for the letter. All right, now let's head back to the backyard in Hackensack, New Jersey, and let's pick up a word of the chapter from Chris Smalls directly.

[Chris]

It feels like prison, solitary confinement. We all got radicalized at some point. He gets fired in this country for retaliation.

Where's the monopoly? Where's the antitrust? My crossing guard with snitch on me.

I've been at all of these encampments. It's the embargo that they had for 60 years. You can't be complacent.

[Neil]

So many good and interesting words said there. I was actually going to go with snitch, but unfortunately the word is of unknown origin. So we can't really talk about the origin of a word that has unknown origin.

Why don't we go with monopoly? M-O-N-O-P-O-L-Y, a noun, which according to Merriam-Webster means exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action. Right?

All right. We know what that word means, but mono, as you may know, means one, right? Single, right?

Mono, culture. We hear mono in lots of places. But what you didn't know, or what I didn't know, I should say, not what you didn't know, what I didn't know is that polin, P-O-L-E-I-N, is from the ancient Greek word for sell.

So monopoly means single sell, S-E-L-L, not C-E-L-L. So single selling is monopoly. It's a Greek word, which means from the mid 16th century all the way up is you have a monopoly.

We're talking about, because it's kind of what Amazon has in certain things, and I remember the day and age when Amazon used to kind of have like low prices on all the back catalog of books. And then like literally overnight one day when the stock was kind of like, you know, they'd always reported like, break even, break even, break even. But then you remember seeing it, like all the back lists of books kind of went up in price, and then they started reporting a profit, and then there wasn't really many people to compete with them.

Google has recently been declared a monopoly. And so the antitrust commissions are now saying that Google has to sell Chrome because they have a monopoly on search. Competition is healthy for customers.

Monopoly is unhealthy for customers because it leads to price gouging. You remember that story about the guy who bought like the AIDS medication and then like changed the price up by like 10,000%? Because of course it was the only place to get the medication.

How do we fight this? We have conversations. We become aware.

We send notes and letters to our MPs and our representatives. We kind of stay engaged, stay informed, stay connected. And Chris Smalls has really helped us stay connected.

I want to keep staying connected with him, with the movement, with what he's working for in solidarity, which is better working conditions, safer working conditions, windows in the warehouses, longer breaks, less strenuous back-breaking practices that create healthy and happy employees and healthy and happy communities for all of us to live in. And, fingers crossed, healthcare for all from your avid Canadian healthcare person. All right.

Thank you all so much for hanging out this whole year. Stick around. We're on the solstice.

We're going to put out our annual Best Of. That'll be our seventh Best Of ever. Stick around for our Best Of.

Have a wonderful holiday. Until next time, remember that you are what you eat, and you are what you read. Keep turning the page, everybody, and I'll see you in 2025.

Take care.

Listen to the chapter here!

Chapter 142: Oliver Burkeman relishes reflection and reveals writing rituals

Listen to the chapter here!

Oliver:

You've got to sort of have the right level of internal non-attachment. Some degree of huge mess is actually essential. The whole act of growth is seeing more of yourself.

There are ways to choose not to be part of this kind of surveillance world today. We want something that will do the living, or the thinking, or the writing for us. And there isn't such a thing.

Neil:

Hey everybody, it's Neil Pasricha. And welcome or welcome back to Chapter 142 of 3 Books. We are delighted to be joined by the wonderful Oliver Burkman today, author of Meditations for Mortals, his new book, and his previous book, Four Thousand Weeks.

And we're going to talk about Oliver in just a moment. But first, if you're new here, or if you're not new here, this is the world's only podcast by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. And we kind of think of it as a hangout, a place of respite, of peacefulness, a way to kind of unplug from the daily grind, and just hang out with a bunch of people who love books and love reading, and like to geek out about literary things.

And so I thought in the intro, I want to do a few things before we get into our guest, and then get into the interview. And I want to kind of experiment with a slightly different interview now. If you want to skip the interview and jump ahead to the conversation, obviously feel free.

There are no ads in the show, no sponsors, no commercials, no interruptions, nothing like that. So it's just going to be us hanging out. Now, a couple of things.

First of all, I want to talk about a couple of letters. You know, I love the tribe, the community, three bookers out there. I feel your love.

A couple of things I want to read to you today. And again, if I read your letter on the show, remember that you can always email me, and I'll send you a signed book to say thanks. I got a note actually from a teacher at Menomonee Falls High School last year.

Hi, Neil. Miss Leonard, right? Ms. Emily Leonard. I'm a high school librarian and a big fan of free books. I'm working on a project for AP students based on the show. Students will listen to one of your podcast chapters, then choose someone in their lives to interview about their three most formative books.

I'm thinking there'll be a writing component as well for the students to reflect on their own most formative books. The goal is to get students to see themselves and the people around them as readers. It's so important for kids to see the people around them are readers, not just their old English teacher or the librarian.

So she asked me if I had any tips for interviewing people that I could pass along. And I said, yes, prepare. Ask for the three books in advance.

Try to read at least one of them or more if you can. Have questions written down before you go in. Ask them to tell you about your relationship with the book.

Maybe make them chronological in their life. Follow the conversation. Don't get stuck on your questions.

Try not to look at the clock. You can always add it later. And remember, you get to do this, not you have to do this.

And then she asked for suggestions on which chapters would be good to start on. And I said, maybe Chapter 26 with Angie Thomas, Chapter 123 with Suzy Batiste, or Chapter 7 with Vishwas Agarwal, which we just released, again, as a classic. And I just heard back a year later from Miss Leonard, and she said that it went great.

She worked with two AP language teachers. She created the project, and they put it together. They made a project guide that she put together, which I will post at 3 Books. And they had so much fun with the project. Thanks for being our inspiration. Thanks again for sending us a couple of books.

Or maybe I already sent them a couple of books. Wonderful. So that's just kind of a shout out for teachers.

If you want to do a project where you ask people to interview a person about the three most forwarded books, feel free. And we're going to post the teaching guide on threebooks.ca as well, which is great. Another quick letter that just popped in that I wanted to read so we could share the love, so we could kind of all hang out together, comes from a show band via our review on Apple Podcasts.

This is not your typical books podcast. Endless curiosity and well-researched questions always uncover something fascinating about the guest. There is a kind and respectful vibe, and the conversations bring out wisdoms and the best in the guest, inspiring a greater love for books and reading.

To pull a quote from Seth Godin, who was our guest in chapter three, kindness scales. It creates trust and openness and truth and enthusiasm and patience and possibility. You owe it to yourself to dive in and listen to an episode in brackets chapter.

You won't stop there. You can join the 3 Books community. We look forward to having you.

Thanks show band. That's very nice of you. Drop me a line so I can send you a book to say thanks.

And if you are thinking about writing a note or review, please do. I always read one or two at the beginning, and I read every single one. All right.

Now I also was thinking at the beginning, I want to do like not like a sermon, but we have a values page for the shows. That's 3books.co/values. I have a whole page of values there, but I don't talk about them often enough.

So I want to just kind of cue into a couple of them here and there. The one value I want to talk about today is humans are the best algorithm. Obviously that's kind of the design of the show, right?

Like I'm interviewing humans about which books they found most formative. I'm not going on to the Amazon recommendation engine or I'm not trying to follow like, you know, some sort of algorithmically derived book recommendation, but I want to ask people. And I thought about that value for a few reasons.

One, Oliver, as you're going to hear, is going to talk about how he gets ideas for his next newsletters from his previous newsletters. He writes a wonderful biweekly newsletter called The Imperfectionist, which I highly recommend that you subscribe to. And then he gets ideas for the next one from responses to that, which I thought was kind of cool.

And it also made me think of Douglas Rushkoff, who you may remember is the author of Team Human as well as our guest way back in chapter 83. And he wrote this little note online talking about the pressure that algorithms put on creators. He says, while I love, this is Douglas now, while I love being able to engage with readers and listeners, I'm coming to realize my sense of guilty obligation to all the people and all these platforms is actually misplaced.

The platforms themselves are configured to tug on the triggers of responsibility, the same way Snapchat uses the streak feature to keep tween girls messaging each other every day. They're not messaging out of social obligation, but to keep the platform's metric rising. It's early training for the way their eventual economic precarity will keep them checking for how much money a medium post earned or how many new subscribers are generated by a sub stack post.

Ironically, the more content we churn out for all these algorithms, the less valuable our own content becomes. There is simply too much stuff. The problem isn't information overload, so much as perspective abundance.

We may need to redefine discipline from the ability to write and publish something every day to the ability to hold back. What if people started to produce content when they actually had something to say rather than coming up with something to say in order to fill another slot? I love that because the other thing is human pace.

Humans live in systems and cycles. We're awake, and then we sleep. We have summer, and then we have winter.

We have work, and then we have rest. I think we acknowledge and understand that intuitively, and I don't think algorithms do. There's an always-on-ness about algorithms, which also aggrieves me.

Humans are the best algorithms, one of the values that underpins this entire podcast. Okay, now, who is our guest today? Well, basically, I want to ask you if you're ready for a writing masterclass for someone who I think is honestly probably the best self-help writer in the world today.

And why wouldn't he be? After graduating from Cambridge University over in England, Oliver Burkeman wrote the popular column called This Column Will Change Your Life in The Guardian for over 15 years. That's like over 500 columns, and they were these wonderful, real-world, real-time, poetic explorations of the entire self-help universe.

And The Guardian is a free website. They aren't paywalled, although they accept donations, so you can still read all of his columns today. It might have a warning at the top, like, warning, 12 years old, warning, 18 years old, but they're really wonderful columns.

And afterwards, he then stopped the column in 2020 and then put out a book in 2021 called 4,000 Weeks, Average Human Lifespan in Weeks. And this is, again, a wonderfully poetic literary examination of how we live today, which Mark Manson, our guest in Chapter 28, called A Reality Check on Our Culture's Crazy Assumptions Around Work, Productivity, and Living a Meaningful Life, and which Adam Grant, our guest in Chapter 72, called the most important book ever written about time management. And I kind of feel like he said that tongue-in-cheek because it's not really about time management and it's like how to live a good life.

That's not really like a systems and acts and tools type of book, you know, the way that like Tim Ferriss' books might be or something like that. But the occasion of our actual first ever in-person connection, I say in-person because we were virtual, but we didn't turn the cameras on for a reason that we're gonna talk about at the beginning, is the fact that he has a new book called Meditations for Mortals, a wonderful follow-up to 4,000 Weeks, which just came out, and offers the reader 28 short chapters meant to be read one a day over four weeks, over 28 days.

So you can read it like that if you want to. I kind of gulped and swallowed and read seven at a time and then didn't read any for a few days. But the design of the book is one where if you were to follow this and have a little quiet downtime each night with Oliver, who is, like I said, poetic and literary and just a wonderful person to be around, then it is meant to be a bit of a trigger to sort of create some new behaviors in your life, which is wonderful.

So what are we talking about? Well, honestly, I feel like this is at a high level, like a writing masterclass here. There are so many systems and tools and habits for how Oliver thinks about writing and how he works that I just swallowed up.

For any writers out there, you are gonna love this. But then, of course, we're gonna talk about formative books. And of course, when we do that, we're gonna have a lot of jumping off conversations.

So we're also gonna talk about things like totalitarianism. How do you know when you're living in a totalitarian state? And Jungian analysis and what Jungian analysis means.

And we're gonna go in a hundred different directions because that's what we like to do on the show, but we go deep, we go wide, we go far, we hang out and stick around at the very end of the show for the end of the podcast, but we will hang out again, play your voicemails, talk about the word of the chapter and have a little bit of a post-party follow-up. All right, everybody. Are you ready?

Here we go. Let's turn the page into Oliver Burkman and Chapter 142. Now.

Oliver:

I'm all for audio only, believe me, but I'll do whatever you want.

Neil:

Why are you all for audio only?

Oliver:

I think it makes for, I don't know why, I think it makes for a better conversation.

Neil:

Yeah, because I can't see you right now. You can't see me. We've never met in person before, face to face, and yet we have had a sort of a letter-based relationship for a number of years.

And I don't know if it's, I don't know if you agree, but I feel like audio only also is just much more akin to reading. Like it's much more, you know, when you're reading a book, you hear a voice, it's in your head, you're in your own self, you have your own surroundings, and you aren't being prompted to try to interpret stuff from a whole bunch of different inputs.

Oliver:

Yeah, no, that's a good point. And I think it's part of why people find audiobooks so sort of intimate as well. Yeah, no, it's fascinating.

Yeah, I'm always happy to have a conversation without visuals. Also, I'm sort of insecure, not about my appearance, although I'm sure plenty of people are, but I don't think I've figured out my video backdrop and lighting and all that stuff, whereas a good microphone near my mouth, that's what I've got.

Neil:

Well, yeah, exactly. Well, it feels more like a phone call too. I was just about to interview Maria Popova a few months ago, who's the author of The Marginalian, and formerly Brain Pickings, and she emailed me probably just a moment before we hit record, and she said, oh, I just noticed you record video.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to politely decline.

Oliver:

Right.

Neil:

I don't do video.

Her argument was that that's not what it's about, and it's collecting something that's kind of like a momentary version of the truth. I said, yeah, whenever I turn on the video, it gives me this internal, ugh, and she's like, listening to the internal, ugh, is one of the best directions in the artistic life I know.

Oliver:

I don't have feelings that strong, and if you wanted us to record video, well, that was what I was assuming we'd be doing, to be honest. So you just tell me.

Neil:

I like it. I want to stick with this. I want to stick with audio only. I also think it's a bit of a, of an F you to the world.

Like everything's oriented to wanting everybody to create video. I even walk down the street now in Toronto, and like, you know, someone holding their phone up above their head or holding it as they walk down the street, people don't blanket that. I'm like, you know, when I was a kid, you can't just walk around videotaping people.

That's not allowed. So I resist the video everywhere culture, and I know all the largest markets in the world, you know, the Joe Rogans and the Mel Robbins and the Rich Rolls, and I know they're all migrating towards video-based consumption, but that's for purposes that are different than ours, which is to have a theater-of-the-mind conversation about your incredible work with this new book, Meditations for Mortals, your previous book, 4,000 Weeks, your books before that, your columns before that, and your most formative book. So I really am so thrilled to welcome you, Oliver, onto three books.

This is the only podcast in the world by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. And we are having this conversation on October 17th, 2024. Meditations for Mortals came out in the US and North America on October the 7th.

I know it came out in the UK before that, and it appears to be a huge hit. I mean, already on Amazon, I see 86 reviews. It's ranked, you know, 554 in all of books, which is, might not sound high, but like, the happiest equation, my most popular book is 178,885.

Okay, just checking. The average rating is 4.6. So, you know, this is like, you're sort of like a week or two after the birth of this thing. How's the book feeling to you right now?

What's the relationship you have with the book? And if you don't mind, what's the relationship you have now with your writing career in general as this is coming out into the world?

Oliver:

Wow, yeah. Lots of questions. You've been paying more attention to my Amazon ranking than I have, which I'm actually quite pleased to realize that I haven't been as addicted as I thought I would be.

Neil:

And I should say, I also checked the amazon.co.uk this morning. It was 110. So it's even higher in the UK.

So it's a hit all around. But it's good that you're not checking. I was just checking for the question.

Oliver:

What happened was it came out in the UK in early September and then in the US in early August. And in many ways, the US launches a bigger deal, depending on how you measure it, and copies available and all the rest of it. But because the UK launch had already happened, it's like that whole sort of emotional psychodrama part.

I'd sort of got through it already the first few weeks of like, you know, waiting on tenterhooks to see how people respond. What I learned from 4,000 weeks, my last book, which did much, much better than anything I'd previously written at that point, was that it really can be quite a slow burn thing. It's a long time before you can really say of a book, even if numbers are what count for you, which maybe they shouldn't be, but even if they are, it's a long time after it's been launched before you can really reach any kind of judgment on that.

So what I love at this stage, honestly, is just sort of hearing from individual people who are sort of making their way through it. That is just like the best. It's very self-selecting because you don't really hear from anyone who hates it, right?

You know, email communication is therefore wonderfully positive and reassuring and interesting. But yeah, it's just such a weird thing, right? I mean, as you know so well, right?

You just sort of, you pour your heart and soul into it and then you stick it out there and then you start sort of talking about it in various contexts to promote it. But that's like a completely different job and I've got no idea whether I'm really talking about it in the same head space almost as well. You know, I don't know.

Neil:

It's a totally different thing. You mentioned emotional psychodrama, so let's hold on to that phrase, emotional psychodrama. You also said the phrase, it can be a really slow burn, so let's hold on to that.

You said in a December 2022 email to me, you said, I think it was Robert Wright who wrote Why Buddhism is True, who described the pre-book launch moment as the calm before the calm. Let's hold on to that. And then I want to just ask you one level step deeper, keeping in mind that the audience here, in a lot of cases, are book writers or book writers to be.

A lot of people who are listening to this show are aspiring writers or are writers. So then using the phrases you've mentioned so far, how might you recommend doing a book launch now? What might be your, and that could be internally or externally, but what is Oliver Berkman, who's had a couple massive popular book launches now in the last couple years, what's your book launch advice to another writer?

Oliver:

Well, I guess the first thing that springs to mind is if there is a point at which you feel like you're completely on top of it and you know what you're doing and you didn't leave anything too late, I haven't reached that stage yet. In some ways, I'm pleased about that because if you do want to talk at all about the substance of the new book, that idea of not waiting until you feel like you're on top of things is kind of a central theme. I think you've got to sort of have the right level of internal non-attachment to it, right?

You can't make it that if it goes, you can't make it that how well the book does is the sole and final judgment on whether it was worth writing or whether it's a good book by some other standard. But equally, I don't know, I have an awful lot of support and help from the publishers. I'm not one of the writers who, and I think there are many, many, who sort of feel that they have to do everything themselves in terms of promoting it.

But I also think you do want to try to consider that that's a really fun challenge, right? It's not some terrible burden. I'm not in the mindset of maybe a previous generation of writers who thought it was somehow offensive that it's their job to spread the word about a book.

I think that can be totally fun. And then, you know, just to get completely down to brass tacks, I think it really helps to do whatever you can to get a lot of pre-orders. People know this.

And a lot may be a very different figure depending on the place you're at in your career. And it's not, you know, it's not the be all and end all. But I think it's very helpful if you can start out of the gate with a little bit of pre-order action because all the different retailers and everybody pay close attention.

Neil:

Yeah, the retailers, we just interviewed our last chapter of the show was with James Daunt of Daunt Books and Waterstones and Barnes & Noble. And yeah, pre-orders signify to publishers and bookstores, even though the numbers might be small, you know, I think the pre-orders, I think the total number of pre-orders I had for my most popular book ever was like 500. You know what I mean?

The numbers don't have to be massive, but they are a signifier that there's built up demand and that it encourages retailers and booksellers to take a chance on maybe a front of shop display. And as you know, from following James Daunt's career, potentially he's oriented these big bookstores in both the UK and the US to be more like independent bookstores where they're tracking and following and choosing their book merchandising based on their individual store, not based on planograms anymore or co-op dollars. So even if the publisher wants Meditations for Morals to be at the front of every Barnes & Noble, that's just unlikely to happen now because it's unlikely to happen for anybody.

So as a result, maybe it's better. You just have to write a better book that wins people over and gets the word of mouth and gets the email you're talking about. So I like that.

All that combined with healthy, non-attachment.

Oliver:

Yeah, I mean, I probably shouldn't, this is probably too candid in case my, you know, editors or anybody are listening, but I did realize I had enough presence of mind to realize this time around that like there was real truth in the idea that as a friend of mine reminded me like whether I'm able to enjoy this process really is the criterion of success. I mean, I know someone might hear that and be like, well, no, like whether you work hard and sell a lot of copies is the criterion of success, but the two are not incompatible. I think if anything, you know, enjoying yourself is going to easily feed onto the motivation to sort of promote books and stuff.

And yeah, at some point in your life, you've got to be able to measure what you're doing by whether it's fun as well.

Neil:

Yeah. It reminds me of that phrase, he who has the most fun wins, you know, that old adage, right? If you can enjoy it, then you've already won.

Oliver:

Obviously we are deep in your ballpark here, right? So I understand, but like that, the question of like measuring things by whether they are, by the feelings that they can evoke in you, I think is quite important.

Neil:

Yeah. So we've, like basically right now we've got like a messy table between us, right? We've got a lot of, there's gratitude, there's imperfectionism, there's meditations for mortals.

We've got this self-help universe that we both kind of sit in, that we both sort of see and are around. We're both trying to have fun in this universe. And in this place, we're going to touch on meditations for mortals a number of times, I'm sure, but you've also given us your three most formative books, the three books that shaped you or, you know, ignited you or altered a direction in some special way.

I've bought all three of those books. I want to say I've read all three of them, but I've read big chunks of all three of them, I will say. Fair enough.

And I'm thrilled and delighted and excited to sort of share them back with you and our listeners and then ask you a number of questions. So we're going to kind of pretend because we can't see each other and nobody can see us that we're all in a bookstore. And I'm going to talk about each book for about a minute and then I'm going to ask you to tell us about your relationship with it.

And then I've got a few follow-up questions for each one.

Oliver:

Great.

Neil:

So your very first formative book is Stasiland, stories from behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder. F-U-N-D-E-R. The cover is a photo of soldiers standing on a tall graffiti covered Berlin Wall with a dark kind of gloomy sky behind them. The bottom is sort of a cream background with a skinny all caps, almost prison bar like font that reads Stasiland with a blurb from Alina Lappin at the Sunday Times ribboned across the bottom in a light blue that reads brilliant. A masterpiece of investigative analysis written almost like a novel with a perfect mix of compassion and distance. There's also a maroon burst publishing term, the circle on the cover of a book that says winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. But what is this book about?

Well, basically in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. Shortly afterwards, two Germanys reunited. East Germany ceased to exist.

Anna Funder's bestselling Stasiland brings us an extraordinary tale of real lives from the former East Germany, including a woman who tried to scale the wall on New Year's Eve. Heartbreaking story of Frau Paul who was separated from her baby by the Berlin Wall. We get to meet some of the Stasi men themselves who are still proud of their surveillance methods. There's a really fascinating kind of Studs Terkel-like kind of on the ground real stories that illuminate a part of history that a lot of people have forgotten. This book was published in Australia by Text Publishing in 2002. Oliver, tell us about your relationship with Stasiland. Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder.

Oliver:

So it's, in a way, it's almost funny to call this a formative book because I feel like formative implies that you have to be kind of like 13 or 14 when you first encounter it. This book I encountered pretty, you know, when it was published pretty near the beginning of my journalistic career but it's not that old of a book.

Neil:

Yeah, so 2002, if you just play this, you graduated from Cambridge in 1996, started writing your column for The Guardian I think in 2006. Is that right?

Oliver:

Yeah, so I was in that period where I was sort of getting, I was getting into a career as a journalist, 2002. I was, you know, that was what I did and how I paid the rent but I wasn't sort of fully immersed in it maybe at that point. Anyway, this book, you know, firstly it's just, on the level of story and the level of its substance, it's a completely fascinating book about this just extraordinary surveillance society that was created in East Germany during the Cold War.

And, you know, I've seen Anna Funder write about it since and talk about it as the most advanced surveillance society that at the time had existed, right? Because it's all pre-internet and it's kind of astounding what these people did in terms of persuading everybody to spy on their neighbours and keeping sort of extraordinary documentation of what was going on. Anyone who's seen the movie The Lives of Others, this is the same, we're in the same field of subject matter here.

And actually there are a few interesting themes in that idea of trying to exert total central control over a society that I think have kind of, whether by chance or not, become quite central to my writing in a totally different way. But what really got to me about that book and where it's placed in my heart is that it's a journalistic account, it's reported, but Anna Funder inserts herself into the narrative. It's about her being on a reporting journey in, overwhelmingly I think, in former East Berlin.

You know, it's kind of funny at the same time as dealing with such kind of serious stuff and such sort of terrible kind of life histories and experiences. And it really just like made me realise that you could do something, there was something you could do as a journalist. I would call it journalism.

I would call what I do very differently, but still kind of journalism. And, you know, I've struggled to sort of convey it, but it's something to do with the idea of the journalist being in the story and the ideas being really serious and very big sort of sweeping ideas being addressed through the granular details of people's lives and feeling yourself to be in the little apartment where the interview is being conducted and all of that. I've always been incredibly attracted to any kind of writing that manages this, right, that puts big ideas into really vivid situations.

When you asked me for this list of books, I was partly minded instead to recommend virtually anything by Janet Malcolm, who's another writer who does this just astoundingly well. So that's my first pass at an answer.

Neil:

Yeah, no, no, it's a great pass. You know, there's a Kirkus review on the inside cover here, by the way, it says, Funder's fully humanised portrait of the Stasi's tentacles reads like a warning of totalitarian futures to come. I can't skip over this book without asking you to comment on our political climate.

Obviously it's, we're talking in October. There's a big US election in November. I'll just give you one more quote from the book here to maybe help inform your reflection, but she describes her feeling for the former German Democratic Republic as horror romance.

She says, quote, the romance comes from the dream of a better world. The German communists wanted to build out of the ashes of their Nazi past from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs. Yet the horror comes from what they did in its name.

So I just wonder, you know, we talking about totalitarian states, I'd love your views on the political climate and maybe some of the steps you think are necessary to improve the quality and level of discourse as somebody who has been participating in a really healthy way for decades now.

Oliver:

Ah, that's fascinating. You know, I mean, I do think that there are sort of totalitarian aspects to the culture that we find ourselves in. In my understanding, what really makes, what really marks out totalitarianism from other concepts like fascism, dictatorship, tyranny, all this rest of it, is that notion that there's no part of your inner soul that is beyond the reach of the central authority, right?

It's that. I think this is what makes sort of North Korea sort of a classic modern day example. It's this notion that there's no private sphere.

There's no private space. And to me, when I think about that today, I go primarily to sort of the tech culture that we live in, the voluntary ways in which we offer up our most intimate lives on social media, the ways in which kind of we are surveilled through our purchases and our movements and everything that Shoshana Zuboff writes about in her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

Neil:

Yes, I have that book written down here for that exact reason.

Oliver:

I don't go immediately quite so quickly to sort of the politics of extreme partisanship and Trumpism and all the rest of it because I think that while, of course, you can see aspects of that, you know, debates over reproductive rights are absolutely debates about the most basic parts of your inner and private world. But generally speaking, I feel like that is the emphasis there is on sort of chaos and disorder and certainly the harnessing of the energies of disorder to sort of feed authoritarianism. I think that that's true.

But it's different in interesting ways as well as the same. And I don't know, it still feels to me like maybe this will prove deeply naive in hindsight, but it still feels to me like there are ways to choose not to be difficult, but ways to choose not to be part of this kind of surveillance world today that maybe were not available in the GDR just because of the fact that it used more lower tech means to achieve it. And then obviously, you know, the Chinese social credit system and all of that is a very important example of this kind of technological totalitarianism.

And in the interests of seeing the whole picture, let's point out that there are plenty of people on the sort of MAGA side of the American polarisation, which is of course not my side, who would see this kind of... who would see their opponents as being the ones trying to exert ever greater control. Right?

Through the COVID lockdowns, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, it's all very sort of current and alive, this material.

Neil:

Yeah. And one of the things that Shoshana Zuboff talks about in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is the distillation of all of our behaviours into sort of zeros and ones. You know, we were talking at the beginning of this conversation about, OK, not turning the video on because of course the internet wants us to have video on so that we can have a YouTube video of both of our heads talking so that that can be sliced and diced into endless little kind of 30-second snippets, or not even 30 seconds, more like 5-second snippets.

And I think about that because Jonathan Franzen, a past guest on 3 Books, has said the middle has been shown to be unprofitable. And yet your work, both in 4,000 Weeks and Meditations for Mortal and your column in The Guardian for a decade, you know, is a thoughtful, nuanced, both sides kind of way of talking about issues. And you've been successful doing it.

So in a way, you're almost like the counter culture to what I see as the algorithmically defined behaviours that we're all encouraged to live in now. You go on Netflix, you watch what the thing tells you to watch. You know what I mean?

You are driving with a map app. You stop at the place that pops up. You check the Google review.

You distill down any review of any food you ever eat to a number out of five. It's like we're living in this increasingly black and white, zero middle ground place. But yet you've been able to hang out in the middle still.

So I don't know how you're doing it, but you're pulling this off. And I thought you might have some advice for how the rest of us might choose to live like that too.

Oliver:

You know, it's interesting, and I do have thoughts about this. And I mean, they start off in a self-deprecating way, because I think the part of the answer here is that success for a writer is not the same thing as success for a movie studio. So yeah, I'm really enjoying the state of my career, and it's great, and I make a living from writing.

And it's all kind of, I understand that it's wonderful and from many people's perspectives, enviable. But the sort of scale at which this is happening is not like putting out a movie, you know? It's not millions of dollars investment, and then you have to make it all back, otherwise it's all like lots and lots of people lose their jobs, and et cetera, et cetera.

So I think one of the things is that, you know, and I think this is a positive aspect of the digital revolution, a really clearly positive one, is that it's the thousand true fans idea of Kevin Kelly, right? You can connect to that slice of people who are into what you're doing, and you can connect to them globally, so there's going to be enough of them to sustain a career, or at least there can be enough of them to sustain a career, without them being a remotely large percentage of the world's population. So, you know, as you know, a book can be enormously successful.

It doesn't really mean that like the majority of people if you walk down a street...

Neil:

Yeah, sure, it might sell 50,000 copies, and that'll be a bestseller for six months, right?

Oliver:

Exactly, and even the books that sell like a million, the very rare breakout, incredible big successes, and, you know, that's a minuscule percentage of the population of North America, for example.

Neil:

Exactly, that's less than the number of tickets sold to the 10th most popular movie of the last weekend.

Oliver:

Right, so all those blockbuster dynamics, all those algorithmic things that sort of take everyone to the extremes or to the lowest common denominators, like they almost create this shadow world where I think a lot of creators are working, and I'm not suggesting it's a sort of age of great plenty where anybody can make tons and tons of money. That's probably overstated as well, but I think it really does mean that you can get a lot of sort of... There's something to be done if you're someone like me who doesn't want to be sort of fueling those dynamics or whose ideas just seem naturally to feel like they're not at one polarized extreme or another.

And doing my email newsletter has been just like the biggest revelation in this regard. It's just a sort of complete...

Neil:

Oh, say more about that. So for people listening, you created an email newsletter called The Imperfectionist. You've been doing that, is it like a biweekly?

Oliver:

Yeah, it's roughly every two weeks.

Neil:

And you've been doing that for how many years?

Oliver:

Since just after 4,000 weeks came out, I think. So it's like three years, really, four years, maybe four months.

Neil:

Right, so three years of biweekly long-form essay type reminds me of your Guardian column type of reflection. And then I'm assuming what you're saying is that's been a reminder because you're noticing that the community kind of comes up, people forward it around, you get notes, and then your community grows organically around the work you're passionate about.

Oliver:

Yeah, and you just, you know, obviously the people who respond to me are a tiny fraction of the people who read it, and they themselves are a pleasingly large percentage, but still not 100, of the people who receive the email. So, you know, it's not representative, but I just have this really strong sense of, you know, the things that I write resonating with people or people adding new suggestions and taking my thinking in new ways. I've absolutely had ideas for further newsletter essays or for parts of books, parts of the new book, from emails that I get sent.

Neil:

And you send the introduction to Meditations for Mortals that the book largely came from your emails. Like, you also got a book out of it too.

Oliver:

Yeah, no, exactly. I made a lot of, you know, there's a lot of new stuff and it had to be adapted in all sorts of ways, but it has its origins there completely.

Neil:

Sounds similar to 1000 Awesome Things. File, print, here's my book. You know, I mean, this is my, I'm joking, but like, I wrote a daily blog and the great thing we're both talking about is that it can add up to something more substantial later if you ever wanted to.

Oliver:

No, I certainly didn't file print, but yeah, I knew that I was onto something. I knew what sort of ideas connected with people and what ways of expressing things connected with people. And right, to the extent that someone who's very, very, like someone who's really closely read all my newsletters picks up this new book, they will recognise certain stretches as being related to stuff they've read.

But another great thing about this kind of, you know, corner of the economy, it seems to me, or corner of the cultural industry or whatever, is that they will be the people for whom that's a welcome thing. Oh no, I really would like your greatest hits in a nice bound volume that I can go back to.

Neil:

And I will throw myself there too. I read, I have been reading your biweekly newsletter since it's come out and I often respond to you when reflecting on it. And I read this book and I did not notice like my own brain was not smart enough to remember anything that you'd written a couple of years ago if even you had.

So yeah, I can relate to that completely. And it's great that you're opening up kind of writing, like the writing side of what you do because I want to hang up there for a second as we transition into your second book, which we're going to, for the Dewey Decimal fans at home, I'll include myself in this, we're going to go from the very end of the Dewey Decimal system, 943. So your last book was classified History and Geography slash Europe slash Germany and Central Europe.

That's 943. Now we're going to go all the way down to 071 for Information slash Journalism and Publishing where we're going to talk about your second form in a book, which is The New New Journalism Conversations with America's Best Nonfiction Writers On Their Craft by Robert S. Boynton B-O-Y-N-T-O-N published in 2005 by Vintage.

I'm holding a cream paperback with an up-tilted, splashy newspaper headline type in like a white and black kind of sans serif, all caps font that says THE NEW NEW JOURNALISM and there's tons, well 19, I'll be specific, there's 19 red, blue and yellow bursts filled of the names of famous authors like Susan Orlean, Michael Lewis, Gay Talese, John Krakauer, Eric Schlossler. Robert S. Boynton, by the way, he was an editor for The New Yorker and Harper's and director of Literary Reportage at NYU's Journalism School.

Basically, 40 years after, he argues, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and Gay Talese launched the New New Journalism movement, he sits down with 19 practitioners of what he calls the New New Journalism to discuss their writing methods, outputs, and careers. As I mentioned, follow this one under 0.1071.30 for information slash journalism. Oliver, tell us about your relationship with the New New Journalism by Robert S. Boynton.

Oliver:

I mean, in some ways, this kind of intensifies and doubles down on some things I was already saying about Stasiland. I think that all of these interviews in this book really speak, well, speak to two things. Firstly, my kind of obsession with other people's writing routines and everything, which we can totally talk about because it's like a glorious topic for some of us anyway to sort of discuss how the day unfolds for people in doing the kind of writing that we want to be doing ourselves.

But also, it's that question of a sensibility. It's the idea that you could be a journalist and not be trying to just take yourself out of the story, not be reporting solely on kind of day-to-day events, but reporting on big, big ideas and making ideas vivid and accessible and funny and all the rest of it. you know, I'm thinking, I mean, John Krakauer is one of these interviewees and he's brilliant at it, but that's a very sort of, to me, a very sort of concrete kind of writing, that sort of adventure writing for which he's best known in the mountaineering books and things like that.

Neil:

Into the wild, into thin air.

Oliver:

Yeah. And then at the other end of the scale, perhaps, I'm just looking back over the list here, but I see Ron Rosenbaum wrote a huge book called Explaining Hitler, which is about explaining Hitler. And then Michael Lewis, possibly of all these names, I'm just trying to see if I'm slandering anybody, but he might well be the sort of currently most high-flying name.

Neil:

I think so. Him or maybe Susan Orlean too.

Oliver:

Right. Writing in this kind of extraordinarily fluid, very, very sort of makes it look incredibly easy manner about very complicated financial transactions or about sort of the deepest workings of the federal government. I know he's been criticized for swallowing Sam Bankman-Fried's stories too credulously, but, you know, whatever. I don't know if that's fair. But there's a real sense of all these people sort of taking potentially very obscure ideas and putting life into them. If magazines had been allowed in the format of your podcast, Neil, I might have also mentioned here a magazine called Lingua Franca, which doesn't exist anymore.

It's one of those if you know, you know kind of things.

Neil:

I don't know.

Oliver:

Which was a relatively short-lived, I think it was monthly publication. Which is, it's very hard to describe. It was essentially a magazine of academia, of sort of largely American and Canadian sort of academic life.

But it was coming at the ideas as if it was a soap opera, right? It was about, it was about feuds between scholars and scandals, not of the kind that, you know, not HR scandals, but sort of intellectual scandals. It's just really hard to kind of convey what that is.

But it's something about the life in ideas. It's the complete rejection of the position that some people sometimes have that like, I just want to hear about a philosopher's ideas. I don't want anything about his personal life or her personal life.

You know, it's the sort of, it's really just the sort of humanising of really obscure ideas. And there's something almost just intrinsically funny about writing, about, you know, disagreements at the core of metaphysics or of Heidegger studies or of existentialism, partly through the kind of enmities that arise in the senior common room at the university. Anyway, I've gone off the topic of this, but it's the same idea.

It's that kind of thing that I've always been, that I've always just been kind of addicted to. And I think that is the through line maybe to some of what I do.

Neil:

I like that. I like that. Addicted, my obsession with other people's writing routines.

I have your rough writing resume as something like, 1994, you graduated from Christ College, Cambridge. From 2006 to 2020, you wrote this column will change your life at the Guardian. I think over 500 columns.

You published two books over 10 years ago, 2011, a book called Help, How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done. 2012, The Antidote, Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking. Then nine years later, 2021, 4,000 Weeks, Time Management for Mortals.

And 2024 now, Meditations for Mortals. And so you're prolific. You've obviously been writing through your university career, but also writing as, for one of the most prominent newspapers in the entire world, four books.

And so I thought we would take your obsession with other people's writing routines, I would actually borrow specific questions from this book, and then I'll turn them onto you as if you were included in the book, but I'll tell you who the questions are from, and I'll ask them of you now, so you might illuminate and help us all become better writers. Does that work for you?

Oliver:

I will happily try, yeah.

Neil:

Okay, so John Krakauer, who you mentioned, author of Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, has an incredibly juicy interview from page 154 to 182 in this book, kind of gives you the idea of how long these interviews are. So I'm going to give you the five questions I pulled out from his interview. Number one, what kind of ideas are you drawn to?

Oliver:

I think that I am drawn to stories that sort of capture the excitement of ideas, the excitement of figuring out how the world works and the personalities behind those, but I think I'd also have to be very honest, certainly in my recent writing, I have to say that I'm also very much drawn to ideas that I think might kind of help me directly, personally, internally, you know, live a less anxious, more focused, more fulfilling, and sort of richly relational life. It's funny that we've got to this point in the conversation and not really talked about the fact that on some level it's self-help, right? I don't have a great objection to that label, at least not anymore, and so I'm drawn to the ideas I think might help me.

Neil:

Yeah, okay. So then the next question he was asked is what kind of research do you do?

Oliver:

Yeah, and this is where I diverge from a lot of the people in this book, and probably John Krakauer too, and you read some of them and they're like, well, first of all, I spent two years just walking around, like, you know, I think Ted Conover's in this book, and he spent like a year and a half riding the railways as a hobo in America before he even thought about putting pen to paper. And of course, the absolute classic of this, he's not in this book, but the absolute classic case here is Robert Caro, who's monumental and brilliant multipart biography of Lyndon Johnson initially just entailed moving to the area where Lyndon Johnson grew up as a boy and kind of not even trying to write for some time as I recall, just sort of living that extraordinary level of fidelity to your subject, and I'm not quite sure how the economics of that would work out these days.

Neil:

That's The Power Broker, which was mentioned on our show in Chapter 63.

Oliver:

No, The Power Broker is about Robert Moses. Yeah, right.

Neil:

Oh, it's not Power Broker.

Oliver:

And then the rest, I forget what the sort of umbrella name for the multi-volume, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, I think it's called. There's been three of them and there's one still to come.

Neil:

Oh, no way.

Oliver:

Anyway, no, I am much more of a...

Neil:

So what kind of research do you do?

Oliver:

I'm much more of a person who is just sort of researching and living and writing all of a piece. So, you know, I'll certainly read a lot of relevant books and I'll certainly track down a lot of relevant pieces of interviews. I'll go and interview people about the ideas that I'm writing about and I'll go on sort of reporting trips and spend a few days somewhere trying to sort of be able to tell a story about my engagement with that place or that idea.

But I will also just absolutely use stuff that happened to me anyway that wasn't part of a... that wasn't part of a planned sort of reporting trip. And I also feel like there's a much shorter term...

like sometimes I'm writing about something that I first thought about or first read about or first discovered, dug out some information about like hours previously. It might not be. It might be things that have been simmering on some level in my mind for years.

So I'm very sort of eclectic. This is what I think part of what sort of British journalism experience means to me. It's the ability to sort of go out very quickly and find like a huge variety of little morsels that you can build into something.

So I'm... you know, people sometimes remark in reviews and stuff on how like I can... I'll include like quotes from an ancient Greek philosopher and quotes from an interview in a magazine with Danielle Steele as if this is kind of a surprising kind of juxtaposition.

But I'm just like a magpie, really. I'm just sort of going out and sort of vacuuming it all up. Magpies don't vacuum things up, you know what I mean.

Neil:

Well, Seth Godin, our guest in Chapter 3, once described himself as a whale sifting around the ocean soaking up plankton. So we'll use that metaphor if you like it. How would you define your reportorial stance?

Oliver:

That's a great question for some of these writers. I'm trying to think about what my answer to that is. I mean, this is where it begins to stretch a point to call what I do reporting, right?

Neil:

You're definitely... I've read so many of your columns that you're always like exploring like a productivity tool, a hack, a suggestion, the parado principle. But I think...

Oliver:

Yeah, no, totally. Okay, I see that. I guess what reporting connotes to me in some sense is that you sort of go to a place and you talk to a lot of people and the question is are you on their side?

Are you deeply sceptical that they're trying to mislead you? Are you there with a thesis you have to prove? You know, there's all sorts of different...

that sort of classic kind of reported journalism. But yeah, I suppose my stance is that I am deeply invested because I'm not going to be pursuing an idea unless I think it's something that could make a big difference to me as well as to the reader. I think I definitely have a sort of knee-jerk tendency towards being charitable, right?

It's more interesting to me if I do end up interviewing somebody who I don't like on some level to try to figure out what makes them tick from their point of view, the kind of thing that Robert Wright, who we mentioned earlier, calls cognitive empathy, not necessarily feeling their pain, but trying to understand why they could have ended up being the person that they are. You know, I think it would be a fair thing to say about my books that I am often in the business of trying to establish a thesis. So, you know, in the context of the new book, if there are a lot of people out there who really want to make the case that perfectionism is an extremely good and motivating and wonderful value to live your life by, then, you know, I'm not going to be spending an awful lot of time with them.

I think it's good to pressure test your ideas a bit, but, you know, when it comes to your basic thesis, you know, in the same way that if you felt that human happiness was completely impossible and beyond reach, I think you might have approached some of your inquiries into it in a different way as well. Yeah. You know, so it's definitely sort of, there's no attempted objectivity.

Neil:

No, I like that.

Oliver:

I hope I'm being accurate when I'm talking about the actual side of things.

Neil:

I like all these words you mentioned. Invested, charitable, thesis establishing, subjective. Yeah, these are great.

So these are all informing your reportorial stance. And then the last question I'll ask you from John Krakauer and then we'll jump over to some questions that he asked Michael Lewis. But the last question for Krakauer is, what kind of notebooks do you use?

Oliver:

My sort of main work writing doesn't unfold in notebooks. So, I use the I use the digital equivalent and just recently I've I've really started using Scrivener properly. I'm sure there'll be many people listening who Yeah, that's what I use as well.

are much more familiar with it than me. But I've whether it's because of its newest iteration or my attempts to find something somehow cooler having all failed, I don't know. But I'm there.

And then I do write, you know, in a journal I would always write in a how is this word pronounced? Leuchtturm? Leuchtturm?

Neil:

Oh, yeah.

It's like the competitor to Moleskine.

Oliver:

It is. I'm on the I'm on the Leuchtturm side of that.

Neil:

So you've got the Leuchtturms with you, kind of like pocket size. I'm assuming you're carrying them with you to jot stuff down if things come across your mind. But you've got Scrivener as

Oliver:

If we're really going into the weeds here, jotting things down I do on scraps and on index cards because something weird in my still recovering perfectionist psyche doesn't like just jotting things down in a very nice notebook. The ones I'm talking about are A5 and I use them I write sort of morning pages type stuff in them almost every day for several pages. And then if I'm not always first thing in the morning but it's for journaling really.

Neil:

So when you say this is a lot here sorry I know I know I know we might just pause here for a second. So when you say you write morning pages do you mean like in the Artist's Life by Julia Cameron that idea of sort of like expulsing from your body you know whatever kind of crap is in your mind and your brain and just sort of getting your writing muscles working like that type of morning pages or am I interpreting that wrong?

Oliver:

Well I mean certainly the phrase comes from Julia Cameron I'm trying to remember whether that that sort of um you gave a very sort of expulsive definition of Yeah I thought it was meant to like just get stuff out of your head that nobody ever sees that you're just like kind of getting your kind of like stretching before you do a workout or play sports that type of stuff. Maybe that is right about what she what she means by I don't know to me it's more it is about getting my head straight for the day but it's but it's but it's and it's not that I go back and refer to them and use the material but it's more constructive than you made it sound I think it's more in my case it's more sort of I'm you know honestly it's sort of therapy type writing right? It's like me writing about my how I'm feeling and what I'm how I'm planning to do things and what's going on and it's not it's not a diary in the sense of recording all the main events of that take place but it also isn't just a sort of cleaning out the cobwebs thing it's also not really creative writing in the sense that I'm not trying to phrase things that I would then write about later that day or anything it's just sort of I don't know it's what I think journaling means but maybe that's true

Neil:

How many years have you been doing that?

And do you keep all your old journals? Do you have them like on a bookshelf somewhere?

Oliver:

That is the one thing that I've really been doing consistently for a very long time I mean there are interruptions and I'm you know even when there are even when I'm in a period of really doing it it's not going to be every single day but I must have been doing that since since my early 20s

Neil:

Wow that's amazing That's great so you have this as a great deeply ingrained kind of multi-decade habit now I'm assuming you've got like shelves of journals somewhere

Oliver:

I have although you know half of them are in our basement in Brooklyn and some of those are on legal pads and probably too damp to see anymore and you know there's a little it's I'm not I'm not lovingly curating them for the Library of Congress but

Neil:

Yeah yeah yeah I know but it's also helpful for yourself though I mean for yourself for your own personal like when I pick up an old journal I've only been doing it really for about 10 years myself and the problem for me is that I turn to journaling as a practice when I'm usually in a negative state of mind so when I flip through my own journals it sounds like someone who's kind of dour and negative all the time even though that's just when I turn to the practice you know what I mean like if I'm in a good mood I kind of just jump out of bed you know what I mean or or I turn I turn in I tuck in for the night I don't need to like write it out for three pages right so there's a bias in my journals

Oliver:

no I mean to some extent that's sorry go

Neil:

no no no just that's my own perspective but I still love looking at the old ones because I'm like oh man I got through that you know or I can't believe I was all bogged down worrying about that I was worried about making revenue in 2020 or whatever it was when the that was an unnecessary worry like you know what I mean like it's just you get that kind of feeling a lot you know what I mean

Oliver:

yeah no absolutely I mean I don't go back and refer to them like it sounds that you do I have done it but it's not really part of it but yeah I think there's a real just you know putting it onto the page is an act of sort of disidentification and then yeah even within the spate of even within a week you know a lot of the things that it sort of calls to mind and makes you conscious of how swiftly one problem is replaced by the next that is actually quite that is quite freeing and then yes the other thing I have done occasionally the reason I don't go back and look at them too much is that if I pick a journal from five years ago it's a little alarming sometimes how how I just go back round and round over the same the same issue but I don't think I don't think that that I genuinely and sincerely don't think that that is because I am sort of frozen in place I think it's like it really charts the very slow drip drip drip process that that real change and growth actually actually is

Neil:

right right which is why the design and structure of your new book is so wonderful how it's 28 essays meant to be read kind of one a day for four weeks I think that's just a lovely kind of it just really nicely paces the feeling of the writing and also doesn't encourage people to kind of read too much too fast or feel overwhelming now I want to give you some questions from Michael Lu oh wait one last question on the lectern sorry to bog you down here whenever I buy a lectern or a moleskin I have the option of grid lined or blank which of those three do you choose and why

Oliver:

they have dotted as well now don't they yes they do

Neil:

have dotted that's right

Oliver:

lined I'm a lined.

Neil:

okay that's funny that's what I do too grid is too overwhelming and blank is too under like it's like I'm all over the place okay there's a boxer brief metaphor in there somewhere okay so Michael Lewis I want to ask you a few questions you kind of called and I agree like you know he wrote liar's poker he wrote moneyball he wrote the big short there's a 22 page interview in this book from 248 to 270 so here are some of the questions I pulled from Boynton asking Lewis that I thought we could ask Berkman so do you prefer writing books or articles

Oliver:

I think I prefer writing books but the way that I approach them is as partly as sequences of articles that then need to be sort of molded into a coherent whole yeah I think ultimately I'm sort of proudest of books and there's a chance it feels like there's a chance to really sort of burnish and polish a book that there often isn't with an article

Neil:

oh that's nice chance to burnish and polish with a book that there isn't an article like that how many projects do you work on simultaneously

Oliver:

if we're talking about writing projects yes then it's and then it gets very quite weird what is simultaneous is it like they're on my plate at the same time or I work on them within the space of the same day I mean I'm always I'm always writing my newsletter right every week or two or right now week or three but never mind and then there's been a book for in the recent times and there'll be another one of those and then I might also have a article here or there so I guess it's two to three is the answer to that question okay that's great I think it's good to have more than one so you can sort of you know keep the variety up when you need to

Neil:

yeah right what is in front of you when you begin to write

Oliver:

um

Neil:

so we want like a visual image

Oliver:

right yeah I mean if we're talking about beginning to write as in begin to write things that actually look like something like the sentences that will be uh in the finished thing as opposed to capaciously defining writing so that it involves all the stages of the process then by the time I'm sitting down to try to write a section of something I have various pages of notes of sort of firstly of just sort of brain dump notes and then secondly of research notes depending on what it is printed out around my laptop because being printing them out seems to really help and then I will for that um that little section have some weird little geeky diagram that I have drawn while probably on a walk up the hill between behind our house um which will consist of sort of little boxes each being one sort of block of the probably for a small thing it would be like each paragraph but for a bigger thing it might be larger chunks I think in diagrams a lot when people say are you a visual or a verbal thinker I'm like I'm kind of a diagram thinker um and so I'll have that in front of me and that will be the little almost you know literally map um and then

Neil:

Are those boxes labelled?

Oliver:

Yeah or they might have the trace of the beginning of a sentence or something right it's just I think of it as like blocking the thing it's not a detailed outline it certainly doesn't have I have never been able to handle some of the writers in that book have definitely the kind of people who like outline every single detail

Neil:

it's full of cue cards on all the walls and so on

Oliver:

right right right

Neil:

but I'm still curious about this process I haven't heard this before I find it really interesting so you'll block out with images the rough structural outline of the piece you're about to write and in those boxes you're writing the beginnings of sentences or themes so it's providing a little bit of a route map of the article or chapter is that right?

Oliver:

Yes I mean images is pushing it these are just like I just you know it's a diagram in the sense that it is words inside squares or rectangles or with arrows connecting one to the next or something as opposed to anything else but I do at some point usually while walking kind of see the progression that an idea needs to make it feels quite sort of magical in the moment that it happens although it may well be that it's on some level quite formulaic right? I think if you're writing an email newsletter or you're writing a short section of a book very often there's a sort of journalistic formula that will emerge where you sort of have a vivid introduction a nut graph where you establish the point of reading the section a couple of paragraphs where you unpack the main idea and then a couple more paragraphs where you kind of take the idea into some unexpected places so it's not necessarily anything that special once I've gone through it but going through it feels quite important and yeah I will have that little one side of paper probably folded 100 times from walking around with it or whatever and that will be the guide I might you know it often doesn't work out that way because it turns out that something I thought would be one paragraph needs three paragraphs to be unpacked but it gives me just enough like security that I know what the hell I'm doing

Neil:

well yeah this sounds really fascinating to me but also when you say you fold in like say the epic t-disc quote or the daniel steel quote are those coming in like are those like coming just from your mind while you're writing or are you using any kind of like additional classic you know the note card system that Ryan Holiday is often talking about which I think is from Benjamin Franklin or somebody like that

Oliver:

yeah so the answer to that is that some of them some of them really do just come from my my head I've collected them in my mind some of them will have come from research that I've done just before you know that day or earlier and then some of them come from my what passes for my version of what gets called a second brain right which I think is part of what you're referring to yes I've gone through a long set of iterations of this there's a there's an approach I'm sure you're aware of called the Zettelkasten which is a kind of densely cross-referenced system of of of sort of permanent notes that you keep and that you add to. And Ryan Holiday's index card system is somewhat similar to this.

I have, after all of these processes come back down to one very big file where I add snippets of things and I try to give a bit of time, you know, for half an hour, several times a week to just sort of, you know, nurturing that garden and and sort of adding bits to it from scraps of notes that I've taken or from books I'm reading and have piled on my desk. So I try to have a conscious process where I'm, where I'm adding a little bit regularly to that big file, but it is like a word document on your desktop kind of thing. I mean, currently it is two fairly disordered folders in Scrivener.

So that's the thing. And a box of printouts from an earlier version of it. So, you know, it's a huge mess.

But one thing I'm pretty confident about is that some degree of huge mess is actually essential for me. There is a, I mean, I'm not saying I'm not condemning people who are more sort of organised in their systems. But for me, I have discovered that, and this does speak to some of the themes of Meditations for Mortals, actually, I have discovered that the mess, leaving them messy is what is what keeps them juicy, really.

And I agree also with Cal Newport, who's, who's written very, spoken very interestingly on this, that there's a strange idea around that, that if you have the right kind of note taking system and the right kind of second brain, then the books will almost write themselves, that'll just sort of pop out the other end. And I think that for me has also been a very, that's that doesn't work. This is, this is, these are ingredients.

So if I have a big, if I have a several big files with a lot of disorder in them, that's fine, because the process of going through that disordered file, seeing what pops out, pasting it into a different file, you know, that's all, that's the process. So I don't really want to eliminate that.

Neil:

I love that. I feel like that's a following the energy type of system. I love the way you described it.

And one degree of huge mess is actually essential to me. Cal Newport was our guest in Chapter 135. And I also want to point people to your wonderful conversation with him in Washington, DC, which came out this morning, and I listened to this morning before talking to you, which is

Oliver:

I didn't even know it was out!

Neil:

It's out today. Yeah, it's out today. I listened to it already. Yeah, it's, it's a great, it's a great chat.

I mean, I didn't get through all of it yet. But I like it was my bike ride. Listen, and just to play back to a couple things on this, if it's interesting or helpful.

I asked James Clear once how he came up with the two quotes he uses every Thursday and his 321 email newsletter, which goes out to like, something absurd, like 3 million people. And he said, very similar to you, I keep one, I think it's a WordDoc or like an iPhone note of every interesting quote, I come across, I throw everything in there. And every week, what I do is read through that entire file, and just keep cutting and pasting the ones I like the most and putting them at the top.

So that therefore, what you're really getting are like the top two quotes from my like, gigantic document each week, which I thought was a kind of a neat visual. And then for me, you know, I've been writing awesome things now one a day for 14 years. I keep an awesome things iPhone note, because the iPhone note connects from my computers to my phone and anything.

I collect them also on scrap pieces of paper like you, but then there's a pile of scrap pieces of paper on my, my white cabinet, then I put them into the iPhone note. And then I want to have another batch due I go through Simr sort, and then from there kind of curate. So very similar.

But But yeah, I thought that I'd play those back to you for interest.

Oliver:

No, absolutely. It's funny, isn't it? It's like, it's like, and it's fascinating to me also that you can systematise too much.

I mean, I know James Clear is obviously, you know, he's very much associated with the idea of the benefits of systems and, and, and that is a system. But you can, you can definitely be led into the misunderstanding of thinking that rigidity is your friend, that there's a way of doing I think the sort of appeal that a lot of these very rigorous approaches have is it's the same as any kind of productivity technique or life rule, right? We want something that will do the living or the thinking or the writing for us.

And that there isn't such a thing. And it's, and so these systems that seem to work are the systems that like, offer up the best terrain on which to then do some work, but you do have to do some work.

Neil:

And the key part about all of this, I say this to my kids is like the difference between writers and everybody else's writers, write it down. Like my parents, my kids will say to me like, dad, I thought of an awesome thing. When you think it's going to be really hard.

And so I'm like, great, write it down. And then I'm like, well, just the writing down of it is the, it's the thing that 99% of people skip. You know what I mean?

Like that's the easy to skip or just pause and write it down. Because otherwise it's gone forever. Like I've determined this so many times, like how many good ideas have you had?

You're like, Oh, I know I had a good one, but it's just gone now.

Oliver:

You know, I feel like I got to add one more thing about eccentric writing techniques. Just what, just since you seem similarly up for talking about them as I, which is that, that sometimes during that process of collecting ideas, but, but more so in the final sort of writing of something, a thing that I have always done and continue to do. And that strikes people as odd, I think sometimes is to print out what I've written and then type it back in to a blank file.

And I have found that editing in this way, rather than futzing around just on the screen, it seems to me to, to lead to all sorts of improvements in the writing almost without my trying, right? Because I sort of, I start from the beginning again, I get some momentum and it just seems to be natural to make something a little bit better or to cut something out or to unpack something in more detail. So, it's probably rather old fashioned of me at this point, but I'm always like, you know, if I ever travel somewhere and I'm planning to write for a few days, like, or I'm on a business trip and I hope to get some writing done in the hotel or something like that.

I'm always like, okay, I got somewhere I can print things off.

Neil:

Yeah, I think that's really smart. And for the first couple of years, I was doing my birthday advice, which I also borrowed from Kevin Kelly, who you mentioned earlier. A thousand true fans.

And by the way, for people, we have this group called the cover to cover club listens to every chapter of the show. He was our guest in chapter 110. But the first few years I was writing that I had to transcribe them into Twitter and Twitter still had like a capacity limit.

And I found that was super helpful because then I was like, oh, I can shorten this one. And then I was always feeling bad about my, you know, kind of thing I'd posted on my blog, which was longer, but yeah, that's writing it out. I mean, Dave Sedaris says he writes out great phrases.

A lot of writers do this from other books. I asked him, does it work? And he said, no, but, but, but no, it doesn't work.

But, but that writing, doing it yourself is great. The other thing just, just to throw in a little bit for writers is reading it out, you know, the reading it out loud part. I don't know if you did the audio book yourself for Meditations for Mortals, but I'm guessing if you did, you found that when you read it out loud, there was shit you wanted to change then.

Oliver:

Yeah, I mean, I, I'm not as, yes, I did record it myself. I'm not as disciplined as I should be about reading out what I write before I submit it or before, before the final proofs go in. I yeah, no.

So I wish I did more of that. I think it's a really good skill. I don't think I encountered too much in the recent version in the recent book where I'm like, sort of, oh, I should have phrased that differently.

But there were definitely a couple along with like names of writers and philosophers that I have never had to pronounce out loud.

Neil:

Oh, yeah, that's always fun and embarrassing. Well, we could go keep going down this rabbit hole. But you know, this is a really wonderful book, The New New Journalism.

And perhaps part of the reason that you don't find you have to change a lot when you read your stuff out loud is because very similar to James Hollis, you have a very poetic literary style. And so I wanted to save a chunk of time to talk about this third and foremost formative book, which I believe you have the most to share. You told me in advance and I found this book.

Wow, like this is a this is like a punch in the face this book for me. And it is indeed finding meaning in the second half of life by James Hollis comma PhD on the cover in a red ribbon. There's nothing else on the cover except a picture of a butterfly and the in red sub headline how to finally comma really italicized grow up across the top Lisa my version is a blurb from the plane dealer from Cleveland.

That's a that's a newspaper you don't hear about anymore. That says nourishing like a master chef James Hollis knows that good food for the soul cannot be ordered to go. Well, what is this a book about?

Well, what does it really mean to be a grown up in today's world? We assume that once we quote, get it together with the right job, marry the right person have children and buy a home all is settled and well, but adulthood presents a varying levels of growth and is rarely the respite of stability we expected. Turbulent emotional shifts can take place anywhere between the age of 35 and 70.

When we question the choices we've made realize our limitations and feel stuck, commonly known as the midlife crisis. Union psychoanalyst James Hollis believes it is only in the second half of life that we can truly come to know who we are and thus create a life that has meaning James Hollis is 84 years old today, born in 1940 in Springfield, Illinois. He is as mentioned a young and psycho analyst, author and public speaker, formerly of Houston and now based in Washington, DC.

While this wonder 155 we're back in the middle here now point six six for philosophy and psychology slash psychology slash developmental and differential psychology slash adult slash midlife. Oliver, tell us about your relationship with finding meaning in the second half of life by James Hollis.

Oliver:

This book was Yeah, I mean, it, it really marked a threshold or turning point or something in my life. And in my sort of psychological life, I guess. It's one of those rare books, even though I'm a big fan of ebooks, really, it's one of those rare books where I needed to make a second purchase after encountering it in electronic form first, so that I had it in them in physical form.

And I nominated it because it was the first of James Hollis's books that I encountered. But really, this is an entry for all of James Hollis's books. And you know, there is definitely something about his writing, which is about returning to the same ideas again and again and again, and it's no bad thing.

This was my introduction to the whole kind of way of thinking that I have Jungian thought, you know, work associated with Carl Jung, and just a real sort of deepening, I suppose, in my understanding of myself, etc, etc. So how can I put some flesh on those bones? I mean, I think the thing about the second half of life is a good place to start, because I have wondered whether this was an unwise title for the book, because it sort of requires you to accept the possibility that you might be in the second half of your life and there's a slice of the readership who are going to rail against that idea.

But firstly, it's not chronological, as what you read suggests, right? This can be something that people in their early 30s start to reckon with and one hopes for them that they're not in the second half of their life yet, sure. Secondly, maybe it self selects people who are willing to sort of deal with the knock to their pride that is implicit in that title.

And it's really a book for people, I think, who are beginning to find that ways of living and working and relating that did serve them perfectly well, you know, and maybe very well, in young adulthood are beginning to seem like played out, are beginning to not carry on working. There are a number of books, most recently, I think David Brooks's book, The Second Mountain, that sort of play to this same thought that there are sort of meaningfully two stages, at least to adulthood, the stage where you're sort of driving forwards and building and trying to establish yourself as somebody who's independent of your parental family of origin and all the rest of it. And then there's the stage where you're like, well, okay, now what?

And there's just, I don't know, I'm struggling to talk about it just because I think the Jungian perspective and Hollis' writing, especially is just so rich and multifaceted that you don't really know, one doesn't really know where to begin. But I suppose one big part of that attitude towards psychology is the idea that symptoms, things like depression, things like anxiety, things like feelings of meaninglessness are not things to be got rid of by the quickest technique or medication that you can come up with, but messengers from the unconscious that there is some aspect of your whole self that is not getting its opportunity to be felt and to live.

So that's a good place maybe to try to sum it up.

Neil:

No, that's a great setup. And it was a hard book. I was kind of expecting it to be a little lighter.

The font is small, the pages have very small margins. And I was like, this is going to take effort to kind of read this. You wrote in a 2015 column for The Guardian, you had a title, Misery, Failure, Death and a Slap in the Face.

Great Advice for Life from James Hollis. I thought I might just ask you why Misery, Failure and Death would be Great Advice for Life?

Oliver:

Well, in some ways, James Hollis' writing and Jungian perspectives in general and then my own thought have sort of become so entangled that I don't know who to attribute what to. But he was definitely the sort of doorway into a lot of this for me. And I would say that there is this focus on human limitation and finitude on the idea that we spend a lot of our lives trying to sort of escape experiences like misery and failure, probably ultimately because we're trying to escape the fact of our mortality.

And that there is a much sort of deeper and more capacious way of being that comes from opening up to them and asking what they have to tell you about how you're living. Jungian psychology is characterised much more, I think, than the sort of classic Freudian stuff that it originally grew out of by a focus on sort of constant growth on things going somewhere. It's not just about if we unpick your childhood issues, maybe you can be delivered from neurotic misery to ordinary unhappiness.

I do like that quote a lot. It's wonderfully downbeat. But I think there's something a little bit more optimistic in Jungian, that there is some kind of unfurling of your innermost self that is something that is with us throughout our lives, and that you can keep growing and keep getting deeper and keep doing that.

But that it might require midlife some fairly significant changes in direction. Yeah.

Neil:

Well, let's rappel one level deeper. I'm going to give you some actual bits from the book here. Actually, let's go back to your Guardian article in 2015 for a second, because you said in that article, Hollis does not reveal the meaning of life, but, to use your phrase, quote, he does drop hints.

At any major juncture in life, Hollis argues we should ask, does this path, this choice make me larger or smaller? I thought I would just ask you to give us your interpretation of what that question means for you and how you might use it in your life. Does this path, this choice make me larger or smaller?

Oliver:

This has been huge for me, and I have sort of written about it. And even though I have always attributed it to James Hollis, I now see things floating around on social media sometimes suggesting that I came up with it. This is a great kind of question that sort of, there's something about it that connects me to my intuitive, felt sense of what is the meaningful and enriching and generous to other people direction to move in, in a way that the question, will this make me happy or not, or will this help me reach my goals or not, just can't do, because we're very bad at predicting, as all the research shows, we're bad at predicting what's going to make us feel happy. And even beyond that, we all have these experiences of times in life when we were not happy, because what was happening was not enjoyable, but we did know and feel deeply that we were in the right place. I think people often get this experience, if you've ever had the experience of sort of, not of a terrible crisis or tragedy happening to yourself, that's a slightly different thing, but of helping a friend through something like that.

Maybe you're just doing their dry cleaning or fetching a takeout. It's not necessarily that you're the person who is guiding them with great wisdom and emotional intelligence through a very dark period. You might be doing errands, but there's something about that which is just, oh yeah, this is actually why I was put on the planet for these hours anyway.

And that sort of enlarging versus diminishing thing can help in that respect. It also helps a lot, I think, in trying to disentangle good difficulty from bad difficulty. By which I mean, there are kinds of negative experience that you encounter in, say, a relationship, although it could also be in a job or place that you live, which are really red flags to get out of that thing.

But there are also kinds of difficulty which just are the very substance of growing into that thing, right? There are difficulties and ways of dealing with your own triggeredness that are just fundamental to getting better at being married, right? Just as there are things that your partner could do, which you should take as an urgent warning sign that you shouldn't be in that relationship.

Does this enlarge me or diminish me as a way to get to that? Because you can usually tell, oh yes, this is bad, this is hard, but it's enlarging me. I always think, just to finish that thought, one example in my life that always surprises me is I've had, I don't particularly need to go into detail, I don't mind doing, but I've had two moments in my adulthood where I faced exactly the same question, which was, should I leave the United States of America and go back to living in the United Kingdom?

One time in my life situation, it would have been diminishing. It would have been running away from things that needed to be faced to do that. Then the second time, even though quite a lot of me resisted doing it and couldn't quite bring myself to get around to doing it and relied on my wife being more proactive about these things, it was the enlarging choice.

It's just interesting to me because it's the exact same movement, but with a completely different answer to that question.

Neil:

Right, which is why the question can be so helpfully guiding. Our guest in chapter 66, Vivek Murthy, who is now the Surgeon General of the US, but he wasn't at the time of the interview. At the time of the interview, he was between stints.

He said that he is guided by the question, is this driven by love or fear? He uses that as a kind of moral compass.

Oliver:

Yeah, that's another closely related. Yeah, absolutely.

Neil:

Okay, now let's go into ego. Hollis calls the ego a thin wafer of consciousness floating on an iridescent ocean called the soul. The quote continues by saying, the vast forces of the unconscious, the psyche or the gods, you say when Hollis is feeling more lyrical, have their own plans for us.

So, you know, I'd love to talk about this a bit more. Jonathan Haidt, who I'm sure you know, he's most recently written The Anxious Generation. But in a previous book, he has that metaphor called the elephant and the rider, where he says, you know, our mind is what we perceive to be the rider on the elephant, but the actual vast animal below us is almost imperceptible to us.

If that is true, and it sounds like many people agree, how do we seek to be more aware of our soul, of our unconscious, of the elephant under the rider we are aware of? And do you do any, do you take personally any actions or practices to try to uncover and kind of work the subconscious part of your mind more?

Oliver:

Well, I think, you know, in the Jungian perspective on things, I'm not a qualified professional at all, I should be careful, but in my understanding of it

Neil:

Much more than me and most of us.So we'll take it, we'll take what you offer us.

Oliver:

The whole game is, is bringing things into consciousness, right? The whole act of growth is seeing more and more of yourself. And that's what, there's a big, this is what sort of shadow work is.

It's suddenly, it seems extremely fashionable on social media, YouTube and places to talk about shadow work.

Neil:

There's a big popular journal, right? The shadow journal or something.

Oliver:

Right. I think so. Yeah.

But that's always been a part of it, that the shadow being the parts of us that are sort of not just not just sort of slide out of consciousness, but are kind of actively kept down in the unconscious because they feel difficult or anxiety inducing to face. I think anything that creates a sort of space in your life for letting those, any sort of frame that lets those things bubble up and be looked at that they will sort of, you know, getting a little bit supernatural, but it's almost like they will, these things will poke their noses out into the light of consciousness once they feel that they can do so. So the journaling that I spoke about, I think is absolutely a form of that.

And therapy itself is the obviously the most obvious case of that. Good therapy is all about and I've got, you know, quite a bit of experience of that.

Neil:

Me too.

Oliver:

And, and then, and just reading, right? I mean, on some level, you read a book by James Hollis, and it triggers certain things in you and you don't shy away from them, partly because he's got such a gentle and humorous and, and, and friendly and warm tone that you don't feel you have to and then it's surfaced a little bit.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah. So this is great. So it's like, paying attention to what you're journaling about, you know, seeing what you're talking about in therapy, my therapist often says to me, like, if we have nothing to talk about, which doesn't happen very often, but if we do, he says, Okay, let's go to your dreams, then what have you been dreaming about lately?

Like, he'll kind of kick that off, which is kind of a famous way to get into some of the things, right?

Oliver:

Yeah, Jungians are very, very much into the dream analysis. And I would also say that, you know, if it's, if another another great resource here is a spectacularly good podcast called This Jungian Life, which is presented by three Jungian analysts. And I did, full disclosure, did go on an episode of that podcast.

But usually, it's not interviews. Usually it's the three of them talking about some issue, and then they analyze a listener's dream at the end. And it's like, oh, that's great.

The dream analysis is fascinating to me, because it's so, you know, I'm primed to think, come on, dreams are just random neural noise. What good can come of treating them like they carry deep meanings? And while your average Jungian therapist will, I think, say they really do carry deep meanings, that's why we dream.

There's a sort of middle position here you can take, which is like, kind of who cares? If you treat them as if they do, you will surface important things from your unconscious, even if they were random all along, you know what I mean?

Neil:

Exactly. It's even like, what do you pay attention to from your dreams? What do you remember from them?

Like, that's telling you something about your conscious mind.

Oliver:

Right, right, right. If something gives you goosebumps, it gives you goosebumps, even if it was created by a random image generator. Yeah.

Neil:

Right. That's an interesting observation. Okay, a couple quick things here.

When I talked to Jonathan Haidt about this, by the way, Elephant and the Rider, a big part for him was LSD. So he talks openly about how when he was doing his PhD, I believe in Virginia, you know, there's he said has the date and like firmly, I think it's like June 6 1992, like the day before the day after, I decided not to be angry again. So I was just curious with the amount of work and research you've done, if you have a perspective on psychedelic therapies at all, as we continue to uncover kind of the depths of our soul here, do you have a current view or experience that you want to talk about in any way?

And if not, no problem?

Oliver:

No, I don't. I don't have the experience. I kind of, it's not because I think I think I'd quite like to have that experience.

That might be my next project. But I've, I'm definitely sort of, you know, a bit cowardly about such things.

Neil:

But yeah, I think there are definitely ways right now, it just seems like it's out of nowhere, you know, Michael Pollan's book, how to change your mind, which I think was about four years ago, then the Netflix special of it. And Canada, where I live, you know, cannabis has become legal five years ago. And now psilocybin is a appears to be on the precipice of legality here with kind of micro dosing.

This is all coming fast at us. I want to Yeah, no, absolutely.

Oliver:

I mean, my, my, no, in terms of in terms of the psychedelic side of this, my experience is, is, is, is not there. And I know that there are people who sometimes contact me as if that basically invalidates everything, because it's like, yeah, you're struggling to I get a certain kind of email from people who sort of imply in a slightly patronizing way that I'm struggling towards insights that can be obtained much more swiftly by other means. But then I also am aware from reading and talking with people that that's not, that's not the whole story.

It's not It isn't a sort of total alternative

Neil:

Quick fixes are rarely quick nor fixing in general.

Oliver:

Right?

Neil:

Right.

So that's something I'm butchering a quote, but there's something like that. Okay. There's a couple more sentences from Hollis.

I'm wondering if we want to just reflect on them. Yeah, I think I might just I know you're a father, and I cannot remember the age of your child, or if I know and that's okay. But I just want to read you this therapeutic line that I sent after reading it from this book.

I've now emailed it to my wife, we've printed it out. And we've stuck this on the wall of our kitchen. Okay.

Like, since, since you tipped me off to this book's existing, I'm just going to read it to you. I love your perspective on it. He says, what would it's about family?

What would happen to our lives? Our way? No, it's not.

You know, this, if the parent again

Oliver:

I love it. Yeah, sorry.

Neil:

I won't. Okay, sorry to read it to that. You know it?

Oliver:

No, no, I love it. I want to hear it again. I'm looking forward to it.

Neil:

Okay. What would happen to our lives, our world if the parent could unconditionally affirm the child saying in so many words, colon, you are precious to us, you will always have our love and support. You are here to be who you are.

Try never to hurt another, but never stop trying to become yourself as fully as you can. When you fall and fail, you are still loved by us and welcomed to us. But you are also here to leave us and to go onward towards your own destiny without having to worry about pleasing us.

I mean, like, I want to say that to my kids every day. And I want my parents to say it to me, even though I'm 45. I don't have to please you.

You know, yeah.

Oliver:

I mean, I, I think it's so true. I think that anybody who's listening, who is thoughtful, and who also feels that it's true will also probably then immediately think, Oh, but I'm not doing it well enough. Right.

Or, you know, and there, I think it's aspirational in a way. Well, and there, I think it's really critical to, and reassuring to remember something that Jungians like to say as well, in my experience, which is that it's half the battle, maybe more than half the battle that you're thinking about these things, that you're working them through. It's not that you should be in a situation where you are not putting any of your issues onto your children.

It's that you should be seriously thinking about that idea and working it over in your own time and in your own space. There's a lovely quote from Jung, which is roughly that the greatest burden the child must bear is the unlived life of the parent.

Neil:

Oh, I have that pulled out here to talk to you about as well. That is so interesting.

Oliver:

Right. On some level, it's the same thing, right? It's so natural and easy to try to get what you want in your life from your kids.

And that sounds awful, but it could be something very simple, such as the reassurance that you're being a good person in the world or something. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to sort of push them into careers that they hate just to make you feel like you realised your ambitions by proxy or something. It can be very gentle and subtle.

It strikes me as almost impossible that I don't respond to our son, who's seven, in ways that convey my feeling that being good at writing and being in academics is more valuable than being good at sports or something. I don't want that to be the case. If his strengths are not the same or his passions are not the same, I want him to really deeply know that it makes zero difference to the sort of fullness of how much joy I take in him and his being.

But it's probably impossible for none of that to be true.

Neil:

Yeah, but it's certainly worth thinking about. And the quote I have from page 127 of the book is, and he ascribes it to Jung is, what usually has the strongest psychic effect on the child is the life which the parents dot dot dot have not lived. Yeah.

So yeah. Okay. Wow.

Okay. So we somehow, an hour and a half has flown by. And we're gonna wrap this all up.

This has been a delight, by the way. I could just listen to you forever. You're so, you know, it's funny when I talk to you, because I'm like, and I listened to a lot of podcasts with you before this interview, but I was like, you really do write like you talk like it just, it just sounds like complete, full, thoughtful paragraphs at all times.

I'm, I really...

Oliver:

It's a trick created by a British accent, I think.

Neil:

Oh, no, no, no, don't. No, you have a really big and vast and complex mind. And it's really beautiful to, to be able to interact with it like this.

I really appreciate it.

Oliver:

That's very kind and the feeling's mutual. I have been aware, traveling in the United States sometimes of being given an enormous, I know you're not in the United States, but of being given an enormous benefit of the doubt because of my because of something that I can neither help nor chose.

Neil:

Yeah, it does. Well, just the fast money. It's just the fast money round. Like, so basically, it's like, I'm gonna set a timer here for like one minute, because I know you want to kind of wrap things up here.

And I'm just going to go through a series of fast money round questions. Try to just give me whatever comes to mind first. They're all about books and writing.

Okay. Here we go. Hardcover, paperback, audio or e?

Oliver:

Paperback. You want to say why? Or am I just answering?

Neil:

No, say why if you want.

Oliver:

Oh, right.

Because I do ultimately prefer the physicality of paper. But I also want to be able to, like, stuff it in a pocket and write all over it. I feel inhibited with a hardback.

Neil:

Yeah, exactly. I understand that feeling. You feel like you're wrecking it.

What's the perfect background for you while you are writing? Whether that's music or noise or a view?

Oliver:

Oh, sound wise, there has to be silence probably. I write these days in a little sort of one room studio just not far from my house in the middle of the hills and beautiful village. It's silent, but I still put earplugs in my ears because I've become conditioned to the focus that I get from putting earplugs in my ears.

I used to have to, you know, to block out the traffic noises. I certainly don't anymore, but I still do. I love being in this rural environment.

I don't find beautiful views sort of distracting like some people sometimes do.

Neil:

I love the earplugs in a silent room. That's good. I'm going to try that.

See if my productivity shoots up. Okay, we'll find out. What time of the day do you like to write?

Oliver:

If I just ran my life, I would be writing from about six till 11am. I'm in a family, so it's much more likely to be something like nine to two. That is the focus point.

Neil:

Okay, great. Still a good chunk. That's great.

Oliver:

Oh, I didn't say I write without distraction for the whole period. No, no, no.

Neil:

I hear you. I hear you. I hear you.

Do you have a favorite children's book or a favorite book you have bought multiple times for a child?

Oliver:

Favorite book I bought multiple times for a child. I mean, I loved a whole bunch of almost the books you would expect as a child, you know, the various works of Roald Dahl. I remember reading the Just William books by Richmond Crompton, which were already many, many decades old by the time I read them. Okay, maybe that's more of an English thing.

Neil:

No, no, I want to grab it though.

Oliver:

They've got Ian and Blighton famous five-esque aspects to them.

Neil:

Yeah, okay, I know Ian and Blighton.

Oliver:

Yeah, I think that's probably the answer that I give. My son has been absolutely wrapped up in a series of unfortunate events, Lemony Snicket. From what I've read of them and from what I've seen of the TV show, that's brilliant.

I'm so happy he's into that.

Neil:

Oh, that's great. It's always the unlived life of the parent. You get so excited and proud of your kid for reading a book that you like, for sure.

Do you have a favorite bookstore, living or dead?

Oliver:

Bookstore?

Neil:

Yes.

Oliver:

When I'm in London, I'm a bit torn between multiple options. But I could mention there's a little bookstore called Watkins off Leicester Square in London, which is an esoteric bookstore where Alan Watts and all those kind of 1940s, 1950s English spiritualist types used to gather. It's very weird and eccentric, but I always find something fascinating on the shelves there.

In New York, when I'm visiting back again, which I know is an amazing, has such a plethora of wonderful, independent bookshops, though I don't want to insult, but I do I usually end up at the huge Barnes and Noble on Union Square.

Neil:

Well, that's becoming more... James Daunt, who's our guest right before you on the series, says that bookstores offer the serendipity of illogical choice, which seems to tie well in with your comment on Watkins and how Barnes and Noble is reinventing itself. So, okay.

Do you have a favorite library, by chance? Or is there a library that you really enjoy going into for any reason?

Oliver:

It's quite a while now since I've been into any sort of academic-type libraries or big, big sort of capital city libraries. I'm much more likely to be taking our son to the local library, which is great, but it's not what I think this question really...

Neil:

No, no. There's no book shame, no book guilt. I just, sometimes people say...

Oliver:

No, no, no. I mean, they're just, you know, they're small local libraries. There's a library buff that comes to his very rural school and they get to go on board and check out what's there.

Neil:

Oh, that's cool. That's neat.

Oliver:

Yeah. So, I mean, I have got some good writing done and found some fascinating stuff in like the... I somehow wangled my way into the Columbia University libraries while I was writing 4,000 weeks.

And that was...

Neil:

It comes through.

Oliver:

I had some pretty long corridors to wander down.

Yeah.

Neil:

What is your book lending policy?

Oliver:

Oh, I lend books. I sort of optimistically write my name in them to think that I might sort of back them down and keep them going. But I then make no effort whatsoever to get them back.

I want to be clear about that.

Neil:

That is so funny. I do the exact same thing. I optimistically write my name in them.

I love that phrase. How do you organise your books on your bookshelf? Like all the books you own, I mean, on your bookshelf?

Oliver:

Well, we're sort of, we're in house renovating at the moment. So they're in literally in teetering piles. But when they're not, I either...

we've tended to have a big shelf of sort of fiction in the house organised roughly alphabetically but everything else, pretty hodgepodge. I did go through a phase of doing it by spine colour, which I kind of... it looks very nice to have your books organised by...

Neil:

And are you familiar with the Japanese term, Tsundoku? T-S-U-N-D-O-K-U?

Oliver:

It's something to do with unread books, right?

Neil:

Well, it has to do with leaving teetering piles of books everywhere.

Oliver:

Oh, right.

Neil:

Yeah.

So you're not leaving teetering piles, you're practicing tsundoku.

Oliver:

Oh, brilliant. Yeah. At the workspace that I used in Brooklyn, I had one of those great bookshelves that looks like the books are all just stacked in a pile, but it's actually got a...

it's actually got little shelves behind it and a spine. So that was kind of...

Neil:

Very cool. Okay, last question on the whole bit. What is one hard fought piece of closing wisdom around writing that you would leave our global community of book lovers, writers, makers, sellers and librarians?

A bit of writing advice to close us off.

Oliver:

Yeah, I think the hardest one part of it for me really is that you as a sort of recovering perfectionist is that you really do have to be willing to kind of make a mess first and then clean it up as the process of getting your ideas out there. You have to be willing to write whether in a journal or in a first draft or however you work, you have to be able to write in a way that involves writing first and then maybe there'll be some good ideas in there rather than figure out a very good idea before you dare write anything. And that is a sort of constant struggle for me.

I'm still winning that knowledge. But I think it's really important.

Neil:

Ah, beautiful. That's a really, really wise way to put it. Oliver Burkeman, this has been a real pleasure. I am so grateful to have this come to life finally. And thank you so much, so much for coming on 3 Books.

Oliver:

I've really enjoyed it. Thank you.

Neil:

All right, everybody. It's just me, just me, a little fast reacher, hanging out in the basement with you. Formerly Oliver, but now it's just me, you and a couch or a chair or a dog you're walking or a flight you're taking or a truck you're driving.

I don't know where you are, but I'm where I am where you are. I don't know where you are, but I'm where you are with you. I'm hanging out.

As you can hear in my voice, I've got a bit of a cold. One of those colds that just kind of seems to go on and on and every day it's like a different version of the cough. So apologies for my voice in advance.

There's a lot of colds that jumped out to me from Mr. Oliver Burkeman. So many, so many. I think I'll choose six.

I usually choose three, but six is a nice multiple of three. This is a bit of a, this quote is a nod to the value I talked about, which is what I love at this stage is hearing from individual people who are making their way through. Because I said humans are the best algorithm.

And I said in chapter one of this podcast, you know, the way that we will measure success in the show is with letters, with the voice notes. It's with actual human feedback. It's not with downloads and ratings, although those are nice.

And those are helpful. I want the actual letters that get in the mail to mean something more. And if you want to be part of a letters in the mail club, you know what to do.

Call the phone number 1-833-READ-A-LOT. We would love to hear your voice notes. Tell us, tell us about a formative book, a dream guest, where you are, something that a conversation jogged for you or made you think about.

It's wonderful to hear from you. Okay, you've got to sort of have the right level of internal non attachment to it. Right?

And he said that like a pithy kind of throw off phrase when I was asking about like book launches. But just the idea that there is a right level of internal non attachment is a phrase I think I'm going to hold with me. Because internal non attachment, I like that very Buddhist, you know, very like, you know, pebble dropping in the ocean type of thing.

You're the ocean, that's the pebble and you want to sort of live life that way at some level. But when you're launching the book, if you are totally not attached, you won't try very hard and then you won't do any interviews and then you won't promote your book and then it won't do it very well. So you have to find the right level, basically, of internal non attachment.

Think of that with any big project you're working on today. I kind of like the conversation about totalitarianism. It was a bit freaky, but and especially after reading Stazzyland, which I really recommend.

It's a great book, really good book, really readable and really kind of eye opening. And it wasn't that long ago, really. But he says what really marks out totalitarianism from other concepts like fascism, dictatorship, tyranny, etc, is the notion that there's no part of your inner soul beyond the reach of the central authority.

And I think that's so important, because, you know, we have these phones, we keep them in our pockets. That means that Apple or Samsung knows where we are at all times. And that means that the apps that we use know where we are at all times.

Okay, that's fine. But then they also know what we're doing. So if we are on listening to a specific book or a specific piece of music, or texting with a certain friend, you know, all that stuff is available, it's information, it's gathered by companies, and that it can be shared.

And it can be used to, in the words of Shoshana Zuboff, who wrote The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, nudge our behavior in different directions without us even knowing it. And that's the kind of scary part to me, is that like, you know, when I was a kid, people used to say like, oh, they're sheep, they're sheep, you know, they just follow the herd. But now it's like, to some extent, unless you are untethered completely, a lot, or at least a portion of what you do is algorithmically dictated.

And how do we preserve the parts of our inner soul, that we want to be kind of garden-like, that we want to be open to us only, like, it's just an interesting thing to think about, especially as technology gets just kind of so deeper and deeper inroads into our lives. Okay, I loved his comments on writing so many good quotes on writing, and all the kind of masterclassy stuff he was sharing. But a couple things jumped out for me, some degree of huge mess is actually essential for me, he said that.

Then he also said, jotting things down on scraps and on index cards, because something he kind of said it apologetically, something weird of myself for covering perfectionist psyche, doesn't like jotting things down in a very nice notebook. And I love that he said both of those things. Because I require a degree of huge mess as well.

And I like writing stuff on little pieces of scraps, as well. And I feel bad when I see blank notebooks. But then, as he points out, perhaps this is just part of the process.

The process doesn't work when it's crisp and clean. It's got to be a little bit messy and untethered, right? All right.

Lastly, let's close with a banger. The whole act of growth is seeing more and more of yourself. He said that near the end, the whole act of growth is seeing more and more of yourself.

Mr. Oliver Berkman, thank you so much for giving us number 586, Stazzyland by Anna Funder. Number 585, The New New Journalism by Robert S. Boynton.

And number 584, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life by James Hollis. Three wonderful books that we will add officially to our Top 1000, which is over at threebooks.co slash thetop1000. All right.

So that's all, I think. Goodbye. It's not all, I don't think.

It's not goodbye. If you made it past the three second pause, I'd like to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club, where we always kick off the after party by going to the phones.

Kathy:

Hello, Neil. This is Kathy from Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. And I'm calling to wish you a happy birthday.

I have called before to let you know how much I love three books. I have been listening from January of 2019, when David Sedaris was the first chapter I listened to. And I am definitely a member of the cover to cover club.

I listened to everything, not necessarily in the order that it was laid down according to the moon. But I do listen to everything I skip around. And I want you to know, I definitely read the back of the shampoo bottle.

I love the word clouds. I love the lightning round where you ask, how do you arrange your book? Do you loan books, different things that people have in their own personal library collection?

I love three books. I passed it on to so many friends, you're doing a great job. And thank you so much to Leslie for being a part of this, and giving you the space and your family to put out this wonderful three books podcast.

Most of all, I'm calling to wish you a very, very happy birthday. Aloha from Hawaii.

Neil:

Aloha, Kathy, it's great to hear your voice all the way from Honolulu, Hawaii. Thank you so much for calling 1-833-READALOT. This is wonderful to have you as part of the three books community.

David Sedaris, I just checked, as you mentioned it, that has closing in on 200,000 downloads, making that the number one most popular chapter in three books history. I'm pretty sure. So you started off with the banger, and I'm glad that the quality was up to snuff for the rest.

You know, if you start off, sometimes it's like, oh, yeah, I listened to like, Dax Shepard when he had on, you know, Kamala Harris. Well, it's gonna be hard to top that, right? The next one.

Anyway, back of the shampoo bottle, shout out, yes, for anyone that's read the three books FAQ, that is the little Easter egg I threw at the very bottom. And word clouds, since you love word clouds, why don't we cut over and to Oliver Burkeman and jump into a Kathy-inspired word cloud right now.

Oliver:

Waiting on tenterhooks to see down to brass tacks, technological totalitarianism, level of fidelity to your subject, burnish and polish a book, capaciously defining writing, human limitation and finitude, pretty hodgepodge.

Neil:

Oh, there was a beautiful word cloud there from the wonderfully literary Oliver Burkeman, who talks the way he writes, which is why it's so wonderful to read his writing. Tenterhooks, technological totalitarianism, hodgepodge, which by the way, was a really interesting etymology. I kind of went down a rabbit hole on that one.

But it is the one I want to focus on. But hodgepot, like a pot, like a stew pot, and hodge, like a mixture, right? Hodgepodge, a mixture in a pot, kind of makes sense.

Beef or mutton cut into small pieces, mixed together, boiled together, a hodge or a group. Anyway, we're not going to focus on hodgepodge. Instead, we're going to focus on brass tacks, as in get down to brass tacks.

Very interestingly, there is no consensus on where this phrase comes from. The Belleville News Democrat newspaper had an article written six years ago, almost seven years ago by Roger Schluter, who went into the deep origin of trying to figure out where this phrase came from, because the question came in, when people prepare to discuss serious business, they often say they're getting down to brass tacks. Why tacks?

Why brass? And apparently he traced it all the way back to Abraham Lincoln's assassination, which was in 1865. Afterwards, there was an article on April 17, three days later, in the Washington Star that said the outside of the coffin is festooned with massive silver tacks, representing drapery, and each fold of which is a silver star.

There are eight massive handles to the coffin, four on each side, and it goes on and on and on. And basically, using tacks was a popular method of decorating, you know, coffins, and people use them to spell out initials, etc, etc. And so silver normally was too gaudy or too expensive for average families, so typically brass tacks and baster materials were used for everyday average people.

As a result, etymologists argue, getting down to brass tacks became synonymous with getting down to serious business. Like if you were discussing what you want to spell a loved one's coffin out of brass tacks, then that's serious business, the serious business of death, right? So that is maybe it.

But then again, there's another blog post on the Oxford University Press, which as you know, is kind of famous for the Oxford English Dictionary, the OED. And this blog post come from nine years ago, by Anatoly Lieberman in 2015. And it goes all over the place.

It's like a gigantic, long winded article. And basically, it doesn't have a conclusion. It does not say where the statement actually comes from.

It just has all these references. In the 1940s, it was this, 1930s, it was this, it was 1910s, it was this, none of which is about Abraham Lincoln at all. So two of the hypotheses are around the fact that, you know, let us get, it used to be, let us get down to tin tacks was a wartime phrase.

And so they think it was maybe a kind of a muddled up military idiom. I don't know about that. So then I went over to like the Trusted Wiktionary.

And basically, they say, okay, it comes from 1863 in Texas. One theory is that it comes from brass tacks on the counter of a hardware store that are used to measure cloth in precise units, rather than what people used to do, which is holding the cloth up to your nose and stretching an arm to make approximately one yard. If you actually use cloth, measuring tacks on a countertop, you're being more precise, you're being more detailed, you are kind of doing it exactly.

Right. They also mentioned in 19th century American practice using brass tacks to spell out people's initials on dead people's coffins. Was it Abraham Lincoln or just every everyday dead people?

I don't know. Getting down to brass tacks probably is related to spelling out people's initials in brass tacks on coffins. So when you get down to brass tacks, you were getting down to serious business.

Okay, that's as far as we got. We're tracing it down as far as we can go. As always, an enriching and lively conversation that goes everywhere.

Thank you so much to the wonderful Oliver Burkeman for coming on 3 Books. Thank you to all of you for listening. You made it all the way to the very end.

And until next time, remember that you are what you eat, and you are what you read. Keep turning that page everybody, and I'll talk to you soon. Take care.

Listen to the chapter here!

Chapter 141: James Daunt on bespoke bookselling building Barnes and bonds

Listen to the chapter here!

James:

We are the greatest dating place that there is. Forget the bar, forget the nightclub, forget everything else. Come to a bookstore.

Technology can be extremely helpful and dynamic, but if you want to get, you know, a reluctant reader, some, you know, young boy to read books, you're going to probably be most successful with a highly skilled bookseller whose passion is to encourage kids to read. If you are interested in a country or a place, then I think you should, but you need to read very broadly within it. You definitely need to read the history, but you also want to understand the anthropology, you want to understand the novels, you want to understand the movies, you want to understand everything.

Neil:

Hey everybody, it's Neil Pasricha, and welcome or welcome back to 3 Books, our epic 22 year long quest to uncover and discuss the 1000 most formative books in the world. This is the world's only podcast by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. And we really enjoy going deep into the books that shape people's life.

Now today on chapter 141, we're going to be talking to the one and only James Daunt. James Daunt grew up in England, the child of a diplomat. He moved countries a little bit growing up, tasting cultures, living a life with books and history at its center.

He went to Turkey, he went to Cyprus, he came back to England for boarding school. And then after studying history at Cambridge, he didn't know what he wanted to do. So he went to the career services department and they pointed him towards investment banking in New York city, across the ocean, you know, a financially lucrative job, something new included travel, which he loved.

He went over, he actually liked investment banking, but his girlfriend now wife said, you can't do this forever. This is the most boring profession to listen to forever. I can't imagine doing this forever.

He thought, how do I combine my loves of reading and my loves of travel into doing something wholly different? Because he thought, if I'm not going to do investment banking, I don't want to work at another office job, I want to try something different. And so he opened up a bookstore, an independent bookstore named Daunt Books, D-A-U-N-T, Daunt Books, named after him, his last name on the Marylebone high street in London. He didn't know anything about running a bookstore, but he knew he loved books. He knew he loved travel. So he organized the bookstore by country, not by genre as most bookstores are not by the Dewey decimal, which I do, which most libraries do, but by country.

And you know, it wasn't easy. There was lots of struggling, lots of pain, lots of bookstores were going out of business at the time, but eventually he found his groove. And he found a knack for it.

And so he went to bookselling school. He took mentorship seriously. He took development seriously.

He took career planning seriously, performance management seriously. And eventually the little bookstore Daunt Books grew into, you know, a second one, a third one. And what was happening in the world at this time was of course, Amazon was kind of taking off big bookstore chains like Borders.

They were going out of business. And so eventually in the UK, there was like one noble chain left, Waterstones. It was purchased by a Russian entrepreneur who approached James Daunt and said, what do you think about leaving this?

James Daunt then continued to run his independent bookstores, Daunt Books, but then went on to also lead Waterstones. And he led it so well. He kind of turned the bookstore chain model on its head.

He stripped out co-op fees. Those are the fees that publishers pay bookstores to display their new releases on the front tables to almost guarantee bestsellers. He took those completely out of the system.

He said he wanted each of the stores to run like independent bookstores, which is what he was familiar with. But he also knew that there would be different customers, different tastes in every store. And he wanted the booksellers to be booksellers, to figure out what to sell, to order them, to sell them.

And he wanted them to be passionate about them. He took a lot of that head office out of the chain, the planograms, the what to do, the how to do it. And instead the stores managed themselves.

What happened? Sales went up, profits went up. The chain survived and it's very successful today.

And so what happened is on this side of the pond, the largest bookstore chain in the world, Barnes & Noble, when it went through receivership, when it was going through chapter 11, they called the one and only James Daunt, the bookstore fixer. And he comes over and he does the exact same thing, turning the stores into independent bookstores in philosophy, having the booksellers kind of run and manage the store, changing things now, including things like pay structures, having less temp workers, part-time workers, incentivizing people to stay longer and have a career. So this guy is essentially the largest bookseller in the entire world.

Do you know anyone else that runs a thousand bookstores? There is no one else does this. And he has a wholly unique way of thinking about how to run bookstores.

So I was very excited to reach out to James Daunt, not thrilled when he said yes to coming on 3 Books, slightly less excited when the three books he gave me were massive giant tomes, but I hung out with these giant tomes. I paced through them. I flipped them.

I fell into them. So we are going to go deep with the world's largest bookseller, the wonderful, wise, kind leader of bookstores and people, James Daunt. Let's turn the page into chapter 141 now.

James, thank you so much for coming on 3 Books. This is a podcast by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. I know you fit at least two of those titles, if not maybe three of them.

There couldn't be a better dream guest for a conversation about books. You are currently overseeing, I believe, the nine shop independent book chain, Dom Books, a 300 shop Waterstones book chain. And by my count, if I have it right, 628 store Barnes & Noble chain.

So, you know, that's the largest bookseller in the world. This is about a thousand bookstores total. It's all over the world.

I thought we might start by just asking you for your current diagnosis and prognosis on the state of books in the world.

James:

Well, in the world, I would sort of hesitate to pine because I think there are parts of the world where it must be really tough. And we only got to look at Russia or other places where that is almost certainly the case. But I'm broadly ignorant of that beyond reading my newspapers.

In the United Kingdom and the United States, books are in a very good place. We've had the rather unexpected circumstance of coming out of COVID with a lot more people reading, particularly younger readers, any teenagers up through into their early 20s reading dramatically more. And happily for us as a bookseller, choosing bookstores as a place to interact with books more than perhaps was the case before.

So strong sales growth of books generally, so publishers doing very nicely, but disproportionately favoring bookstores, whether they be independent bookstores or us as the large chain bookseller.

Neil:

I don't mean to sound surprised, but you do hear about, you know, Amazon's record numbers. And I thought that COVID was, I mean, I guess I assumed it was more of a momentary spike with everybody being at home, but you're saying here we're talking in fall 2024, a couple years out, you're seeing young people and people in general reading more and visiting bookstores more than in the past, which is music to my ears. I'm just like, I'm kind of surprised to hear it that way.

James:

I think COVID did cause people to read a lot more, engage with books a lot more. That didn't favor us as a physical bookseller. Yes, we have an online operation and that went up and grew, but primarily, as you say, it favored Amazon.

But when we reopened our stores, we found them dramatically busier than they had been before COVID. And it hasn't stopped. The habit, I think, of reading was reestablished.

And perhaps immediately after COVID, as people wanted to get into physical spaces and wanted to get out and I think meet each other and be in congenial environments, the bookstore became one of the big beneficiaries of that. And our stores remain every bit as busy as they were then. And great waves of trends and popularity coming through.

Big authors, Sarah J. Maas, Rebecca Yaros, those kind of the romantic fantasy and all the iterations of that garnering a readership and a level of excitement, which hasn't really happened since Harry Potter. So it's very exciting.

Neil:

Oh, that's great to hear. I have to admit my ignorance now. I know Colleen Hoover.

I know James Clear. I know, you know, but the names you mentioned, are those a young adult Harry Potter type of trends you're seeing? Oh, great.

That's wonderful. Well, before we get into your three most formative books, you've had a large and varied and dynamic career. I thought before we jump into your three formative books, I could replay back to you three quotes I picked out that you have said about books over the years and ask you to expand, explain, elucidate them as you see fit, if you still agree with them or so on.

So if you don't mind, I will offer those over to you now, including in 2021 in the Sunday Times, you said, when you were asked what your favorite book is, you said Anna Karenina. I'm a bit sentimental, so I never quite finish it.

James:

I've read Anna Karenina a few times. I think it is just a fabulous book, but I am also extremely sentimental. I obviously know how it's going to end.

It's one of those novels of immense texture and emotion and locks you into these characters who are deeply flawed. But, you know, one cannot but help be emotive in the tragedy that is steadily unfolding. And then I always think, well, I don't need to finish this.

And I never quite have.

Neil:

So you're not finishing it so that you can preserve the feeling of wanting to read it again. Is that right? Because I have had that not wanting to finish a book before, but I have not articulated it that way.

So I'm really curious about this particular emotion.

James:

Generally, I always finish a book. That's actually not true. If I start a book that I'm not enjoying and I don't think is of adequate quality, then I stop reading it and that's that.

But if I'm absolutely loving a book, I will finish it. Except occasionally, and it's true in my case also with films and movies, is when you can see some awful denouement. I can't quite face it.

And then I always come back to them and I watch them again. I had it most recently with The Banshees of Inniskillen, which is a sort of fabulous movie, but absolutely torture in terms of the trajectory, the awful dynamic and the tragedy of what's unfolding before you. And by not finishing it, I can then go back and watch it again relatively quickly and do it again.

Neil:

That's an incredible strategy. I am liking this. This is a unique way of thinking about film and books for me.

But yeah, I like that, especially if the author is, I guess, you know, dead and not going to be producing new stuff. You know, you feel like it's a place of savoury. There's no sequel.

Exactly. OK, from the 2023 article feature about you in The Guardian, and I'm taking these really out of context purposely to try to give you something to talk about here. But you said Amazon doesn't care about books.

James:

Oh, that was a bit mean. I think it is out of context. I think what I was sort of trying to get at is that I think Amazon is actually a fabulous thing for books.

It's in many ways democratised the buying of books. It's made buying books extremely easy and reliable. And more people own books in consequence of Amazon than if they hadn't existed.

And that's a great thing. But they are a website, self-evidently. They have a single proposition.

They're driven by algorithms, typically reasonably, I think, crudely orientated as necessarily they must be. And they, by definition, are absent what we can do within bookstores, which is the serendipity of illogical choice, be that personal recommendations of booksellers or other customers or the chance of how displays and the interactions and juxtapositions of books alight upon yourselves. And it is, I think, self-evidently true that Amazon is a commercial organisation which just wants to sell a lot of things to you and as many as it can.

It's extremely interested in the book buyer. It started with the book buyer because it's attached to a level of education and affluence and to a wallet with a credit card in it that can buy all sorts of other things. But they will want to sell you your sneakers and they want to sell you a medical plan and they want to sell you everything else in the world, whereas we as booksellers are only interested in books and in the world of books and literature, which is a different focus.

Neil:

Yeah, I love that. And I love that phrase, the serendipity of illogical choice. And it's interesting because, you know, for those of us who have been part of Amazon's trajectory in books, you know, when it was first a bookstore originally and then they did debut the Amazon recommendation engine, which was dynamic at the time.

They also, for a long time, hired editors and then I don't think have kept that whole curation element up. They also tried to do Amazon publishing and I don't think they've kept that up. They also tried to do Amazon bookstores and I don't think they've kept that.

So it's almost like they've dabbled in trying to do what you do, but they've always kind of run skittering away from it.

James:

Yeah, I think Amazon does what it does exceptionally well and as soon as it sort of strays out and tries to go beyond that, it all becomes a bit complicated and actually the online and the digital format is not the best place to do that. But, you know, I do think there are immensely positive things about what Amazon does. I mean, the search functionality of Amazon.com is fabulous and it allows you to find books in a way with an ease and a precision and a pace that nobody else really can match or had matched prior to Amazon.

Neil:

Yeah, OK, great. Thank you for taking that little tiny few words and expanding on it so much. The last quote I had for you was from a 2023 podcast, which I thought was a really brilliant interview on this podcast called Always Taking Notes.

The host did a wonderful job and as did you. And you said, I arrange Don't Books and continue to arrange it by country, which is how I read. I put novels, histories, and anything based on where it's set.

I guess I wanted you to expand on that, but also to explain to people what you mean by reading by country.

James:

I find myself interested in cultures and peoples and one of the ways in which those sort of are most easily understood is about a country or a place. And if you are interested in a country or a place, then I think you should need to read very broadly within it. You definitely need to read the history, but you also want to understand the anthropology, you understand the novels, you understand the movies, you want to understand everything.

But in the world of books, that takes you quite broadly. If you read like that and perhaps arrange your shelves like that, which I personally do at home, you get books which all speak to each other and lean on and draw upon each other. And if you arrange a bookstore like that, you get something that's actually really interesting, obviously quite different to the conventional bookstore of which 99 out of 100 bookstores are arranged, which is simply by subject.

But if you arrange by country, that throws it all up in the air and it forces you to browse and consider books in a completely different way. And I think that is an intellectually interesting exercise to go through. And we've got lots and lots of bookstores where you can go in and find a history section or a business section or a religion section or whatever it might be.

We have very, very few bookstores which throw all that together and mix it up, but it's still totally coherent. And that's what my stores are.

Neil:

I love that. I love that. So I live in Toronto, and my books upstairs, I took a lot of pain and time to organize them into the Dewey Decimal classification system a couple years ago.

And I like them like that because I think they talk to each other in kind of the way a library does. But I tried to mentally experiment with what you do. Right away, I was like, OK, my favorite novel is A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz, Australian writer.

That takes place very clearly in three different parts of the world. And then I'm like, well, where would I put Harry Potter? So on a detailed level, when it comes to novels, I'm assuming that there's a lot of...

You're making a lot of calls in every specific book.

James:

There's a lot of subjectivity. And then we also have a little part of the store which is just all the stuff that doesn't fit into...

Neil:

OK, OK. That's what I was kind of getting at.

James:

And we have such a book. All the books that you are going to ask for and which you will want to read but which we don't have a place for, they're all here. And if you ask for one of those, we can find them.

Neil:

I read a lot about your mentorship at Daunt Books. When it was one store, Marylebone I believe, and then you expanded slowly as other booksellers in your midst were interested in running their own shop. Did you have a key question or two you taught booksellers to ask when customers would come into the store?

When a customer or when a reader comes into a store, what's your philosophy there on what the interaction should or should not look like? How much silence do you let remain? What's the question you ask?

What is your gentle steering thought?

James:

I think booksellers need to and can read body language. Is this somebody who's looking to engage or not? And that also customers, as they come into stores, they know that the bookseller is lurking there, like sort of the spider in this web.

But there are people who quite clearly just want to get on with it and browse and they don't want interactions. And there are those who signal that they do. And then you have a series of decisions to make about how closely you interact with that customer.

There are standard questions to ask. Somebody's looking for help. What was the last great book you read?

If they say Colleen Hoover, kind of thing, that places them immediately. We don't judge as booksellers what people read. There's no great books to read or terrible books to read.

We want to put the best possible book for that reader into their hands. That's obviously self-evidently the case when we're dealing with children. You know, we're not going to sell Anna Karenina to a six-year-old.

We want to know what they like and then follow that through. And as soon as you know and you're given just enough of a clue from that. But as a bookseller, you can read that as they come into your store.

What are they looking at? What have they picked up? And you can map somebody pretty quickly.

And then on the basis of what they've either picked up or looked at and the speed with which they've, where they've lingered, you'll know what kind of a reader you're dealing with. And then you want to respond to that. There are some where you've got that sort of perfect customer and they're interested in things that you generally want to sell and generally are of interest.

In which case, I would always recommend to them from a distance, which allows me to raise my voice, which means I'm not just talking to them. I'm talking to the four or five other people within Earshot. If it's something a bit more specialist, a bit more technical, I'll get up, you know, not close, close, but closer, so that I don't have to raise my voice.

So it's just a personal conversation because I know it won't interest other people in the store. So it's all those kind of things that as a bookseller you're doing. Above all, you're trying to create a friendly environment, where you're stimulating people as they come in and they're having an interesting time and hopefully jogging them to look at different books slightly sort of adjacent to perhaps their sort of core focus.

Neil:

I find this so fascinating. I feel like we could spend the whole conversation just going deep down this like little tree diagram of all the things James does when people come in. So I find this whole world like, and I know you used to teach this, right?

You went to Italy, I believe, and taught bookselling school at some level.

James:

Never miss my invitation to this. They have a wonderful bookselling school over there. Never miss my invitation to that.

Neil:

What is that bookselling school?

James:

They have the Italian set up, well, it was set up in memory of a family member of one of the major publishers, the Maoris. And they have a school for booksellers. And they run it all year round.

Booksellers from the chains, from the smallest independent everywhere come in to the school and they are taught bookselling. And bookselling is definitely something one can teach. They're the only sort of school, as I understand it, which sort of works at a national level and welcomes booksellers of any stripe.

And consequence of which I think the calibre of bookselling in Italy is much more diverse than it is in terms of the scale and quantity of independent booksellers that there are. And more skilled. And it's just been a great stimulus within Italian bookselling.

Neil:

Well, that is interesting. I have a lot. I'm so curious about that.

I do wonder, part of my brain wonders, do you think that there are elements of bookselling that an algorithm will never be able to mimic in any sense now that we have things like StoryGraph has emerged as an algorithm? There's all these new dynamic algorithms that are trying to do what I think bookselling did. But do you feel like it's a uniquely human skill?

James:

I personally believe it is, and I think it's, of course, technology can be extremely helpful and dynamic. But if you want to get a reluctant reader, some young boy to read books, you're going to probably be most successful with a highly-skilled bookseller whose passion is to encourage kids to read, and particularly kids who find reading off-putting or haven't quite engaged with it. That is a very, very human thing, just the same as I think that in schools you need a teacher, and plunking people in front of a screen ain't ever going to replace the mentorship and enthusiasm and inspiration of a great educator.

Neil:

Nice. Okay, good. We have one of our values on the show is humans are the best algorithm, so it's very much up our alley.

Okay, now let's jump into your three most formative books. I asked you before we hit record if there was a general order here, and I didn't think there was, so I'm going to try to put a book up. I'm going to try to do a quick 30-second background for the reader so that they can picture, if they're listening to this, which most people are listening to this, they can picture holding the book in their hands, like they're in a Barnes & Noble, or a Waterstones, or a Daunt Books, and then I'm going to ask you to tell us about your relationship with the book, and then from there I've got a few follow-up questions.

If that's okay?

James:

Sure.

Neil:

Okay, all right.

We'll start with A Savage War of Peace, colon, Algeria, 1954-1962 by Alastair Horne, H-O-R-N-E. This was originally published in 1977 by Viking Press. The cover is this black-and-white photo of a crowd of Algerians and French military packed tightly in a street with Algerians on a building ledge waving flags calling for independence.

In the middle of the cover is this brown box with an orange, a thin orange border that reads A Savage War of Peace in an all-caps, aerial-type font with Algeria 1954-1962 below, Alastair Horne's name in cream below that. Sir Alastair Horne was a British Oxford Fellow who lived from 1925-2017 and was knighted for his service to Anglo-French relations. What is the book about?

Well, the Algerian War lasted from 1954-1962. It brought down six French governments, led to the collapse of the Fourth Republic, returned De Gaulle to power, and came close to provoking a civil war on French soil. More than a million Muslim Algerians died in the conflict and as many European settlers were driven into exile.

A Savage War of Peace is the definitive history of the Algerian War. Dewey Decimal Heads can file this under 965.046 for History and Geography slash Africa slash Algeria. James, tell us about your relationship with A Savage War of Peace by Alastair Horne.

James:

Let me just say that the very interesting question that was posed to me was, you know, what are the three most influential books? And I answered that sort of quickly and on the basis of what's happening in the world today. It is somewhat complicated and the Middle East is very much, I think, in most people's front of mind.

But also, what are the books that sort of have an enduring sense of education to me personally? And The Savage War of Peace, which is an absolute page-turning read. I mean, it is a book that you race through.

But it's also a book that teaches that, frankly, if our lords and masters, political lords and masters in very many countries over the last sort of 20 years had read it and digested it in any way, some of the misadventures that we've been taken on, be it in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the like, would hopefully have been avoided. But those lessons have not been absorbed. History does teach, and this is a very good example of a book that can teach.

Having said which, it is a far from perfect book. It is a book of its time, and Alistair Horne was a man of his age. And one of the joys, I think, of reading history is that you read it to learn and to educate yourself and to consider and be able to reflect on current affairs with hopefully more intelligence and more insight, but also be able to navigate through the prism of the writer.

And in this case, Alistair Horne was, as you've said, he died a decade or more ago and belonged to a period probably that we can characterize into the 50s and 60s himself. I think it's very insightful, but it's also curious in terms of its interaction and understanding of Islam. I don't think that this is a text that one just accepts for what it is, but it's provocative and it's interesting and it tells a story in a really dynamic way, so it's hugely entertaining as well.

Neil:

I started reading about the Algerian War because of your book choice. It was often online part of larger write-ups called Decolonization of Africa. That was the superseded headline on Wikipedia and so on.

And then I thought, hey, this reminds me of what James is doing at Barnes & Noble. He's decolonizing it in a way, as I understand, you're pulling head office strictures and planograms and so on out of stores, mandated co-op displays, head office planograms, and, of course, you're trying to balance some of the benefits. If I think about India, where my dad is from, obviously people in India largely still speak English and use systems of government and rules that have been put in place by the British before India gained its independence, so you're also trying to presumably balance the benefits of what the head office can offer.

How do you think about that, the balance of how much head office you want in the stores, how much head office you don't? Where do you draw the lines on where that is? And if you don't mind, as you answer this, could you also just give a quick backgrounder for those that don't know, on what you have done since you joined Barnes & Noble, because I know it's well documented, but in this podcast we haven't talked about it yet.

So if you don't mind just saying, here's what we're doing, and here's how it's going.

James:

The general principle that I have is to try and get each of the bookstores within these very large chains to run themselves and think of themselves as independent bookstores. That's in simple form what one's hoping to do. And all I'm really doing is taking the principles that I have within my own bookstores, which are by definition independent bookstores, where I've always run my own on Maribyrn High Street.

I sit in it and I really, it's got my name above the door, but that helps sort of give one a focus to it. But where I'm really trying to run the best possible bookstore for Marylebone High Street, and then each of my stores does that, each of my Daunt books. When Waterstones got into big trouble and effectively was going to close, I went there because I thought this was just a catastrophe to lose all these bookstores.

And I also knew that if the booksellers within each store were just sensible and allowed to do what I knew that they wanted to do, it would be fine. And that, which I started in 2011, has proved to be the case, that actually just encourage people to use common sense and you set standards and have expectations, but leave them to get on with it. You will create much better bookstores and sales will go up and everything's fine.

When Barnes & Noble also got itself into this sort of mess, I arrived in 2019, again, with that simple message, which is, guys, our stores aren't good enough. The reason that we're going bankrupt and the reason our sales are declining is because the stores don't appeal to our customers and we have to figure out how to make them more appealing. And I can't dictate that to you.

I can set the principles of good bookselling, but you're going to have to execute against them. So we're going to take away all of the directive side of corporate retailing and instead replace them with clear expectations of quality and setting of standards and principles, but encourage each of you within your stores and your store teams to really address what it is to become a really good bookstore. And if you do that well, I'm sure that more people will come into your stores and they will buy more books from you and we will be fine.

And that's happening imperfectly across the estate. But overall, our sales have completely been transformed and our profitability and all the other good things that come with being a profitable business. You can invest in pay and promotions and the career structures of your booksellers.

So that helps you, again, spend more money on your infrastructure, start doing up stores, open up new stores, invest in new IT. All of these good things make the stores better and you're in a virtuous cycle now of better and better stores, more empowerment at the local level, itself driving better performance and better bookstores. And up we go.

It's not perfect yet, but it's going extremely well.

Neil:

So taking away the publisher paid kind of cold placements, letting booksellers in the store choose what they're selling based on the local readership, downloading empowerment, I mean, if you're a bookseller, this is like you're cheering for this off the rooftops. This is what you've been asking for probably your entire career. But you said you had some central body principles.

What were those thou shalts or the do-dos that were consistent?

James:

I think everybody who works at Waterstones at various points and now at Barnes & Noble will definitely be saying, it's a lot more difficult this way. I mean, yes, we like the idea of being allowed to do whatever we want, but that's difficult. It's much easier to be told precisely what to do and then you just do it.

With empowerment comes responsibility and the intellectual effort required to rethink your store is considerable. And if you're the store managers, you've then got to motivate your store teams. It's hard work.

And if you, as we've done, we've reorganized, literally relayed our stores, moved furniture around, constantly changing and tweaking how we present the stores. Every time you do that, it's a lot of work. And bookselling is a tough trade.

One, you're working in a store every day. You're not working from home having a nice time. It's unfortunately been traditionally extremely badly paid.

And even as we improve things, this remains a very ill-advised route to riches. It's hugely rewarding in many other ways, but we are going to have to- Very ill-advised route to riches. We're going to have to, we rely on- Nobody comes into books for the money, that old adage.

They really don't. And on the other hand, as we do actually transform this business and run it better, one of the key objectives is to make it a more rewarding career. And it's intellectually rewarding.

I think it's emotionally and spiritually and all other ways, and vocationally, very rewarding. But we also now have to really make true on it being financially sensible for people to devote their careers to it. Too often, people come into bookselling and then leave after a year or two, have a nice time and go, because they need to get a mortgage and a car and all of those good things.

But again, underpinning the success of Waterstones has been putting in a career structure and having people stay with us, good people stay with us. And we're now beginning increasingly to do that at Barnes & Noble.

Neil:

Underpinning the success has been putting in a career structure. I did hear you say in another conversation that that meant moving, because you have a set amount of labor dollars, presumably as a percentage of sales or something, and then you have to decide to move more of that to people that stay longer as opposed to people who start. So it may be even less lucrative to start here, but now it's even more rewarding to stay on.

Is that right?

James:

I mean, you have, obviously, to the extent that you can drive your sales up, then you have more dollars. So that's helpful. But there is always going to be a difficult series of decisions around where you spend those dollars within your team.

Generally speaking, we want to move away from a model which effectively had a very small number of people who were properly paid and full-time and benefits and all of those things. And then the vast majority, part-time, kept below a certain number of hours because then you don't have to give them a break and you don't have to give them benefits and you don't have to do this and you don't have to do that. Effectively, the standard retail model to...

And there's nothing wrong with that. They give good local jobs that are flexible and people can do it for two days a week or three shifts a week or whatever it might be. And you can splice that into all sorts of other things that people are doing in their lives, students, mothers, the parents, dog walkers, whatever it might be.

These are temporary and flexible jobs. I'm not denigrating that at all and it will be part of what we do. But if you want people to become really tenured and expert, then they need to work full-time.

You will learn how to be a better bookseller if you work five days a week more effectively than if you work two days a week. You've got longer at it. And then we need to keep those people and pay those people appropriately and that requires a career structure.

And so yes, the dollars get moved increasingly into a promotional ladder. And you want that to be quick. You want people to be able to see the opportunity fast.

And I always say, you want people at that manager level, when you're being properly paid, by the time they're sort of 30, that should be your objective. Get them up fast and then keep the job interesting and keep opportunity beyond that. To do that, you need a vibrant business and you need an expanding business.

So one of the key things for us is to grow physically so that there are opportunities for people. You don't have to wait for your manager to retire to become a manager because we're going to open up new stores or new opportunities.

Neil:

How heartening and inspiring that view is today in an era of growing freelance and gig workers and that stretching of working in factories or warehouses where you don't get even breaks and you're hired for eight-week contracts and you're laid off after four weeks and you're hired back and then you may be part-time. These are the stories I hear. It's the antithesis to how the labor pool feels right now to think about inserting steps and layers and management opportunities and we want more full-time workers.

That creates a better bookselling experience and it increases your sales. It makes so much sense.

James:

It's not without its challenges, of course. If you're promoting people on the basis of performance, then you have performance management and that's saying, well, sorry, Neil, you're just not cut out for this. That's a tough thing to be doing and that was entirely absent before.

So I don't shy away from the fact that bookselling is a tough, tough gig. It's a tough job. It requires intelligence.

It requires an open personality. It requires an immense number of skills and hard work and dedication and it's something that I know lots of people enjoy but I don't, at any point, pretend that it's not difficult.

Neil:

Yeah, no, exactly. Okay, that's really, thank you for opening that up for us. That is really interesting and I still find it quite heartening for society at large that this is succeeding and this is working and this is good for our communities.

I wanted to ask you about reviews. This came up in my head because I had just read this book by John Green called The Anthropocene Reviewed and he said, I find it interesting that the five star scale has taken over a qualitative analysis because it isn't for people. It was originally meant for data aggregation systems and while I think the five star scale system is somewhat ludicrous, it has also become indispensable and I thought, yeah, that's true.

John Green points out, of course, that a bench can be reviewed, a bathroom can be reviewed, everything has, and then we're looking at the reviews of everything. It's like so oriented to this review culture so I, of course, I went to see A Savage War of Peace on barnesandnoble.com and it has three ratings, one of which is a written review which is 15 years ago. The other two are no rating but they've compiled into the four out of five.

Amazon's got 527 ratings for this book with a 4.5. Goodreads has 2740 people. So this is how many people have read this book at least, right? 2740 people and it's come up to a 4.2. I know I'm like the kind of person who wants to support my local independent bookstore so I go review hunting, right? And then I have to make a conscious decision to not buy at the review place but to then leap over to buy from the place I'm trying to support. I live in downtown Toronto so I support all these amazing bookstores here. But Barnes & Noble seems way behind on this.

Like, you know, it's... What do you think is the importance of reviews? And what...

Do you have a strategy for like trying to... Is it a catch-up game now? Or is there some other philosophy underpinning the historical lack of reviews on every other website?

It's not just yours. It's just, you know, reviews seem to have... Google's trying to grab everybody's reviews too.

James:

Yeah, but Barnes & Noble has a very antiquated and very poor website and we're just about to replatform and redo it. We have, some years ago, done that at Waterstones and really worked on the Waterstones website. And there we have...

We endeavor to put a website which is fundamentally a bookseller-driven website. We have...

Neil:

Ah, cool.

James:

Customers can leave reviews and that's fine and things, but we lead with bookseller reviews. Not of everything because we can't cover everything, but everything that we think is important and certainly everything that's new and prominent. And there are...

On some, it's just a single bookseller and it says... Waterstones says, that is a bookseller who has reviewed. And then there will be other Waterstones booksellers, which is an entirely voluntary process, but now quite well populated.

And our view is that the bookseller can give you a sense of what that book is like. We have shied away from the stars rating, as you said. We kind of have to do enough of it because you want Google to pick you up and get you up the search rankings and there are things that you have to do.

But what we hope and believe that our customers are increasingly doing is appreciating the book, the recommendation of the book within the context with which we're recommending it. And it's pretty nonsensical to have a star rating review on classic literature. Is Middlemarch better than Anna Karenina?

I mean, for goodness sake. But the ability of the bookseller to articulate why you might want to read this book. Now, obviously, if you're online, then you've arrived at that, either because we've done something to cause you to come there or somebody else says, Neil recommended me this, I look it up and here I am.

But then we seek to give an intelligent, bookseller-driven interpretation of why we think you should read this book and what the merits of it is. At Waterstones, our online sales have been dramatically increased over the COVID period but have carried on growing. Oh, great.

At B&N, they grew in the COVID period and then they just dropped back down again and they're pretty awful. And that's simply, I think, on the calibre of the recommendation that's being delivered in the respective websites. And yes, Goodreads and any other myriad of LitHub or whoever it might be, there are so many places in which you can aggregate readers' experiences.

And I think all of that is valuable. But actually getting a sensible interpretation around why you're looking at this book and how do you, within the context of a website, replicate what I think we do beautifully within a bookstore, which is just nudge you to the side. That's why you come in for discovery.

We've always found books through review process, be it the newspaper reviews and the good old days, magazines, podcasts, whatever, whatever. And it's great that you're inspired to read a book and buy a book. And one wants to sort of bottle that and capture it.

And the enthusiasm of that recommendation to attach itself to the book and off you go because a push into the reading, it makes a book inherently more enjoyable, actually, if it comes with a recommendation that you like. The amalgam of short little nuggets that all add up to 4.8 rather than 4.6, I don't understand how that really propels true engagement with a book. Whereas a bookseller or a friend or a podcast or something intelligently recommending you a book, that propels you.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true. I don't look, personally, I don't look at the number.

I look at the number of reviews as a proxy for the volume of sales. But that itself can be quite misleading in other ways as well. But if you see a book with 100,000 reviews, you're like, oh my God, everyone's reading this.

There's a social signal here. You know?

James:

And people love all reading the same book, which is why we have these again and again and again, these several times a year. You'll have this bushfire of sales and enthusiasm around a book. And the merit of the book that underpins it may be quite slight.

But the great thing is everyone's reading it.

Neil:

Everyone's talking about it. Exactly, yeah. Or it gets a big, you know, Tim Ferriss or the Today Show or, you know, some bigger, some bigger megaphone talked about it in some way, you know?

And of course, as an author, everyone's trying to figure out how to get somebody to talk about your book. Right? But that new website sounds fantastic.

And I love the focus on bookseller-oriented recommendations that makes it so differentiated. And if you have a bookseller that's really well-written and they have pithy reviews and you start to follow them and, you know, I start to see what Brandon suggests or whatever it is, and then I'm digging that. I think that sounds wonderful.

I can't wait to see it. I got like five more questions on this one book, but I think in the interest of time we should probably move to your second book. Alistair Horne was a spy.

I was going to ask you about that and the organizing. But, you know, I want to be respectful of your time. So let's move on to your second book here.

Maybe if we have time we can come back to some of those. And it is the one and only Team of Rivals, The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin, G-O-O-D-W-I-N, published in 2005 by Simon & Schuster. This is a, the cover's like a cool sepia-toned painting of Abraham Lincoln at a table surrounded by serious-looking men in dark jackets, bow ties, and long beards.

There's a gold ribbon at the top reading now a major motion picture, Lincoln, by Steven Spielberg, along with tons of other hype material like a number one New York Times bestseller, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize under Doris' name, and a blurb from none other than President Barack Obama saying a remarkable study in leadership on a gold burst. Doris Kearns Goodwin is an 81-year-old American biographer who's taught history at Harvard, also written books about Franklin Eleanor Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and the Kennedys. In this book, she illuminates Lincoln's political genius as the prairie lawyer rising from obscurity to prevail over three gifted rivals to become president.

And then, in bringing his disgruntled opponents together to create the most unusual cabinet in history and marshal their talents to preserving the Union and winning the war. File this under, for Dewey Decimal Heads, 973.7092 History and Geography, this is a funny one here, James, slash United States slash Administration of Abraham Lincoln slash 1861-1865 Civil War. I did not know there would be such a subcategory, but sure enough, there is.

So please, James, tell us about your relationship with Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

James:

Again, it's another page-turner. I mean, you just, it reads like a political novel. You just flick your way through it in seconds.

It also has Lincoln at the heart of it Everyone knows Lincoln. Everyone's read lots about Lincoln, but I think she captures the humanity of him exceptionally well and then places it in this really rich development of how he intersected with these key political rivals who not for one second thought they would ever be serving under him or be vested by him, but through his ability to empathize with their positions, restrain his own sense of self-importance to use them effectively and then develop, in not all cases, he remained a deep rival to a couple of them throughout, but nonetheless benefited from their expertise and achieved this extraordinarily strong, as you said, sort of team of rivals to get the United States through a moment of sort of existential horror of the Civil War, of all of these sort of currents of race and identity and ideology and religion and all the rest. And he did that, you know, obviously tragically cut short in this sort of appalling way, but it's absolutely masterfully rendered in the book and an example of leadership, which Mr. Obama is better placed than me to extol.

Neil:

Oh, don't be. Yes, okay, of course, compared to Obama, but you are definitely a leader in a big capacity. This is a big book.

Like this is big. I mean, it's 916 pages. So I like read all the front matter, read all the back matter.

Sorry, I read the first chapter and then I read the last chapter. Then I downloaded. I went on Libro FM.

I use Libro FM because I can pick my local independent bookstore to support. And then I started listing. It's 42 and a half hours, you know, so that I'm like, OK, I'm going to listen to chapter two on like a long walk.

So I'm like, I'm a book fan. I'm a reader. I read a lot of books.

How do you think about as a bookseller and as the CEO of a couple of big book chains, making big books more accessible in this era of well-documented, shortening attention spans and endless distraction? David Brooks is now calling it, you know, we've gone from entertainment to distraction, from distraction to junk. You know, like we're just getting like our amygdalas like teased or something like, oh, this is a hard thing to sell to people.

916 pages, even though it is a page turner. It's very gripping. It's a wonderfully told story.

So I'd love your commentary on attention spans and distraction and combined with that, how you think about the deeper, more succulent aspects of rich, dense reading and how you market that or how you sell that as a bookseller.

James:

I sort of take a sort of view that these are not new problems. I've been a bookseller for 35 years or something. So I've predated really the internet.

I certainly predated e-books. I've certainly predated audio and podcasts and all of these things. And nothing seems to change.

Neil:

And TikTok.

James:

And TikTok and all of those things. And the reality throughout all of this is that how people are, the time people have available to read and the enthusiasm with which they read changes by not much.

Neil:

Oh, interesting.

James:

The girls read more than boys. There are a few things that are just sort of stereotypical and have remained the case. We as booksellers need to really focus on those who are more reluctant to read.

But we can do it and publishers do it also when you get Jeff Keeney and Dogman and Pilkey and those kind of things. And boys start reading some more and we get going on that. And it all sort of levels its way up.

It's every year gets a little better than the preceding year. Reading and getting absolutely immersed in the excitement of books by young adults as obviously Harry Potter did change that, J.K. Rowling. But now it still goes on.

And we had Twilight and we've now got, let's say, Sarah J. Maas and we've got other things going on. Sarah J.

Maas's books are massive. And there are lots of them. And the kids can buy the whole bang lot.

Neil:

That's a good point. Yeah. They're practicing at a young age.

James:

But when people come into their working phase of life, particularly men, they're just working too hard that they don't read and they never did read and they don't read now. Interestingly for us, is they're now engaging with podcasts in particular, engaging in this short form. And those are often attached to ideas and attached to books.

So we're seeing a growth even from them. Most of these trends are underpinning more engagement with books, more engagement with ideas. And it's always been tough to sell Time, Team of Rivals or the latest big book.

But there is an appetite for it and there's a time for it. And there is an enduring engagement with these great books. We sell Team of Rivals today in the tens of thousands still.

Robert Caro's Power Broker was the book of the pandemic. That makes Team of Rivals look like a short novella. But again, that...

Neil:

I have Infinite Jest right beside me. I've been playing with this for years but I read like 100 pages a year but I love it. When you fall into it, you really fall deep into it.

James:

You fall deep. And if you happen to stick your nose into Team of Rivals and get gripped by it, you spend a couple of hours a day and we can all find a couple of hours a day. You will get through it pretty quickly.

If it takes 42 hours to listen to, it takes 22 hours to read.

Neil:

And it feels good. Like at the end of binging a season of a TV show, you don't feel good at the end of that. But at the end of finishing a big book, you feel great.

It feels like such an achievement.

James:

And book clubs have been, again, something I started bookselling before book clubs became the thing and then book clubs became the thing. But they still endure. And I think, again, if you read Team of Rivals with two or three other people or four or five if you're lucky enough to, you have a subject of conversation which is superior and more engaged and more developed than almost anything else that you can easily access.

And there are a lot of people, that's actually what drives a lot of the sales of these big books is you will sell in a store suddenly 10 copies. And you think, why does that happen? It's because there's a book club.

Neil:

Yeah.

James:

And then you've got people and that then has an echo in that store which will carry on because they will be talking to their friends at the barbecue, at this and that, and then we sell more and more. And you just see these things flare up and it's the great books that do that the best.

Neil:

Have you ever been into Left Bank Books in St. Louis?

James:

I have not.

Neil:

I chant.

So when you walk in the front door there, there's a great wall of like, you know, four by 10 books and it says at the top, book clubs. And, you know, it says like gay men's book club, gay women's book club, trans book club. And then as you keep going on, you realize that the first two or three shelves are created by the bookstore.

But then as you keep going on, it's like, you know, the YMCA book club and Donna Marie's Kitchen Party book club. And you're like, what's going on here? And what they've done is they've just figured out which book clubs in the community over the years have enduring quality and the book club itself, just the woman comes in or Donna Marie comes in, she tells them what it's going to be.

They keep that stocked at the front and they have their own book clubs and it's this powerful wall. I can send you some pictures. It's like amazing.

It's a really cool treat in Left Bank Books in St. Louis.

James:

Yeah, a little digression. We do a walking book club at Daunt Books, which is great where you, obviously it's the same thing, but you go for a walk. So obviously in a park and you're in twos on your walk, just discussing and then you've stopped under a tree if it's raining, is it always in London or on the grass and then have it as a group discussion and then you walk off again.

But the pairings shift and you get a nice lot of exercise, a couple of hours walk and you've discussed a book.

Neil:

Oh my gosh, I love this. And Daunt Books is choosing the titles? Like it's a walking club as part of the bookstore?

James:

And then by the end of each book, then the group agree on the next book. But there is a bookseller there who is the curator of it all.

Neil:

Daunt Books is creative, right? I was on the website and I'm like, you know, living in Canada, I have not been there, but I'm noticing you have, you curate libraries for people, you've got the wedding registries, you've got the mystery, you've got the mystery book subscriptions. There's like, I'm presuming there's a nimbleness and an agility there and independent book world that you can't mimic at the larger chains.

But when I hear things like that, I'm like, wow, like that would be amazing to have. So I've never experienced that at a bookstore here. You know, the mystery subscription.

James:

It's fun. Well, we do lots of those. You basically give us some money and we'll send you a book once a month.

Neil:

Yeah.

James:

Our choice, not yours. And it's really fun as a bookseller because each subscription is unique to the individual.

Neil:

Well, I saw that. You have open captions, like what kind of, tell us about what kinds of books you like. It's like, you can write an essay in there.

James:

It's fun. It's really fun.

Neil:

Yeah.

James:

And then there's, as booksellers, you know, these nice conversations where she's like, you know, he said he didn't like this book. What's wrong with him? What are we going to send him now?

Let's send him this. That'll get him back on track. Those kind of discussions.

Neil:

Oh, interesting. Oh, that's amazing. Well, that is like, kudos to you.

What a brilliant idea. It sounds like with The Walking Club and some of these conversations we're talking about, you know, you have this strong belief in the third place. On page seven of Team of Rivals, I'm going to read you this quote.

She says, because she's discussing Springfield, Illinois, where the opening scene of the book takes place and Lincoln is sort of nervously waiting for the results of the Republican primary or the nomination. And she writes, I was like, wow. Like, I was just picturing this community.

Our guest in chapter 66 of three books was Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who has put out a 2020 through report called Our Nation's Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, where he says, one in ten people loneliness now, which is worse for health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. I wanted to zoom up from Barnes & Noble and Waterstones for a second to ask you, what do you think are the elements of community? And then zooming back down, what role can bookstores play?

But what are the principles that you think we need as people to build back the community and connection that appears to be, well, we've lost a lot from that sentence in the book.

James:

We have lost a lot. And, you know, the nature of modern life, be it how we travel, if you travel by car rather than by public transport, you're isolating yourself and all the rest. I do think it's immensely complicated and obviously starts at a political and administrative level.

The extent to which we make our choices as to what we invest in. There has been an unfortunate trend, I think, to consolidate rather than localize. You reduce the number of small libraries and have one big library.

Neil:

I see.

James:

Bigger schools, they're more efficient, they're cheaper to run. Bigger hospitals, they can give more expert care, but then you lose the local. Quite important, I think, to understand what we're doing both at the start of life and at the end of life.

It matters how you educate people clearly, how you nurture from earliest childcare through the education system, and then how do we look after our elderly? And then how do we look after the vulnerable? And I speak as a European, you're a Canadian, very different in the different countries, very, very different in the United States and in different worlds.

But we probably, from every sort of happiness indicator, the more inclusive and the more supportive the society is, generally the happier people are within it. And do bookstores have a role within that? I very much think they do.

Again, we're nowhere near as important as libraries, public libraries. But nonetheless, we do provide a community space that's inherently democratic in the sense that everybody can come inside it. We don't ask you to spend any money.

We let you browse the books within the store. It's a place that kids come after school. If you're a latchkey kid, you're waiting for your parents to come home, come to a bookstore.

It's safe. It's unthreatening. But it's also a place in which all ages have a place.

And that's unusual as a retail space. We appeal to the youngest kid. We've got books for them, the oldest citizen, we've got books for them, and everybody in between.

Everybody can interact and everybody can actually sort of kill time in a bookstore. But also they can come to meet. I mean, we are the greatest dating place that there is.

Forget the bar, forget the nightclub, forget everything else. Come to a bookstore. Meet people, see people.

And that's also important.

Neil:

We are the greatest date. You remind me of that vulgar quote that is often repeated, that if you go to his house and he doesn't have books on the bookshelf, don't F him. You've heard that classic phrase.

Everybody can kill time. It's safe. It's unthreatening.

It's inherently democratic. It's community space. I've interviewed a lot of people in bookstores.

Mitchell Kaplan is the owner of Books and Books, the Florida bookstore independent chain. About the same number, I think, as Daunt Books. Judy Bloom's got one.

Hers is non-profit in Key West. Mitchell jokes, I'm not in the non-profit business. I'm in the no-profit business.

But when I walk through that, when I walk through his bookstore, yeah, there's like book clubs sitting right there talking. Everybody's walking through. He has an outdoor magazine stand, as you can only have in Coral Gables, Florida.

And it feels like so convivial and yet I just know from growing up in the suburbs of... I grew up in a 100,000-person suburb, one hour east of Toronto, with zero bookstores my entire life. So I had to go to this town or this town to find them.

And when I went to this town or this town, there were independents in the mall. And then there became big box stores, chapters, before they were purchased by Indigo. And they were open until like 11pm.

So we started going as teenagers. But then of course, post-merger and post-whatever, it's like now they're closing at eight. And I was like, oh man, we used to go after the movies.

Nothing better than after the movies before your parents pick you up to go to the bookstore. And I interviewed Quentin Tarantino. He said the same thing.

He'd go to the movie, then he'd go to B. Dalton's in the mall and then always trace back. There's nothing like visiting a bookstore after a movie.

So it's like even in the communities we have with 100,000 people to this day, there's no bookstore in that town. It has affluence, it has education, it just doesn't have a bookstore.

James:

Yeah, we've started opening up a lot of bookstores in the US. And it's been completely fascinating to do so. And you open up these stores.

We're doing about, we'll do 65 this year. So a lot, just a real lot. And the day you open, you have a queue of 400 people in a place which didn't have a bookstore and where we were nervous about kind of like, how are we going to find things here?

The appetite is astonishing. And the more extreme the reaction is directly correlated to how isolated the location and the absence of existing bookstores. Oh, interesting.

If we're opening one that's 20 minutes away from an existing bookstore, yeah, you get a nice queue. Everybody's excited and everything. But you open up one in a more...

Neil:

Give us some of the town or city names where you're opening these.

James:

We opened in Visalia, California, which is not fancy California.

Neil:

I don't know that, yeah.

James:

It's inland California.

It's Agricultural Worker California. It's blue collar California. It had a bookstore, it had a Borders back in, closed in 2009 or whenever it closed.

Nothing ever since. We think, well, we'll try one there. 400 people line up every day.

It's like you're absolutely packed. Been a spectacular success. And it's just really heartwarming actually to find these stores being received so enthusiastically.

And when I do mall stores, same thing. Very, very heartening.

Neil:

I love that. This is what we want to hear. The podcast is all about books, so this is beautiful.

And opening bookstores in cities like this, the community gets to come together and see each other and have a place. I love the adage of this. There's no better dating place than a bookstore.

Of course, you're connecting over an intellectual connection, which is ultimately what relationship's going to be. You mentioned beginning of life and end of life. And I thought that was really astute.

In Canada, of course, we have a one-year maternity leave here instead of the six or 12 weeks that is in the US. There's hospices down the street from where I live in downtown Toronto. They always have long lineups now.

And I'm sort of thinking about this. The death scene in this book is so vivid. I didn't know it.

Of course, you heard about how Lincoln died. But it just made me feel closer to death than I had felt in a long time. And I was reading it at night and so on.

And I was kind of just thinking about death so much. My parents are currently 79, 73 years old. My mom's from Nairobi, Kenya.

My dad's from Amritsar, India. I came to Canada in the 60s. And I think I read that.

I don't know if it's accurate that you maybe sadly lost your parents recently. And I guess I just happen to have a compulsion about thinking about my own final years. I wonder if you might pontificate for us what a good death looks like.

James:

Oh, Lord. I mean, old ages and the healthcare systems and generally either through family or the wider society, how we support people through that. And obviously everybody's lifespan is individual to them.

But collectively, we are grappling with much longer lives, which in many respects is great, but also dementia and Alzheimer's and all of these afflictions and endless further medical afflictions. And that makes old age a challenge. None of us know what our future is to be.

But one hopes that we all, I'm sure, aspire to families that will support us and friendship groups that will support us. And a society that will support us. And I can't speak for Canada remotely, for the United Kingdom, the stresses upon the national health system, which we revere, but is a post-war creation and now under considerable stress.

Where is the money and where are the priorities of expenditure? And where does keeping and looking after old age fit within that? I think it's something that different political parties will espouse clearly different strategies against, but it seems hugely important to us.

And I'm fortunate personally to come now to enjoy good, solid middle-class affluence, which makes it much easier than if one lacks that. But if one lacks that, there has to be some form of safety net, which creates a humane support and guidance for people through all their phases of life. And it's extremely noticeable in the United States as you travel around, the number of people that are excluded from proper support, either because of mental health issues or living on the street or drugs or all these other catastrophes that can inflict themselves upon individuals.

A prison population, what are we doing in our prison? How are we looking after that part of our society? Which again, if we don't put enough money in it, if it's cruel and uncaring, it's going to have very adverse long-term consequences.

Neil:

Well, exactly, exactly. Do you have a book or two that when people walk into the bookstore and ask you for books on grief or that they have told you that they've lost somebody, I feel like I get this question a lot. I don't have any good go-tos.

I've personally read Christopher Hitchens' book, those essays he wrote before he died, and I know there's A Year of Magical Thinking. That book comes up a lot. But do you have any grief books that you suggest?

James:

There's a reasonably strong body of work that's come out relatively recently that I think has been very effective, particularly from practitioners themselves. A nurse did a wonderful sort of best-selling book in the UK, which I lost it. I'm going to have to bring it to you in a second.

Sort of coming back to thinking about also taking the books from sort of different religions, and there is a lovely book sort of called On Kaddish, and you don't have to be Jewish, and I'm not Jewish, to read it and sort of see through the prison of Kaddish. Amongst our books on sort of Buddhism and reflection, there are, again, lovely books. And so I quite like as a bookseller sort of to take people through sort of how different cultures are approaching this.

And again, it's something where the curation that goes on within a store, you were saying Left Bank Books had their sort of book club, but you can also create a nice bay of books which just take people through the reflections around, if it's grief, though I think also just dementia, which is something that impacts so many families and so many people. Again, really nice body of work, which is, well, you know, here are 12 books that give you different insights into this, if it's entered into your life in whatever shape or form, and which will help you reflect on it and think about it. And I think good booksellers are just grasping onto all of these moments of life and moments of reflection and trying to bring an assembly of books across different disciplines, not necessarily head-on, but obliquely as well.

Neil:

Yeah, it's not everything solved by a how-to. It's touching on these difficult-to-articulate emotions and feelings and ways that are unique to us. I can't jump off this book without asking the most obvious question, of course, from Team of Rivals, which is how do you think about organizing your teams?

You're the CEO of a couple massive companies here. Do you follow Lincoln's kind of idea? Are you setting up boardroom meetings where there's a lot of conflicting opinions?

Or how do you think about forming an executive team?

James:

I think it's having the right people in the roles and playing to their strengths. And you can and should be able to tolerate divergences of opinions, but try and have people locked onto their skill sets and their core capabilities, which he does sort of beautifully. He can see their values.

He had this sort of very adversarial time with Chase in the Treasury, but knew he was brilliant at him and kept him at it and would absorb some of the antagonisms because the outputs were so fantastic. But equally, when Cameron, isn't it, who is his initial war secretary, is not good enough, he replaces him with Stanton, which is one of the great relationships also in the book. So unfortunately, or necessarily, there are moments when you, when executives need to be changed, ideally, as soon as possible.

I've certainly, in coming into both companies, had a lot of change initially and then settled down and the same people then run it for a decade or so.

Neil:

Okay, cool, wonderful.

James:

I wasn't knocked off my perch, as poor Mr. Lincoln was.

Neil:

Yeah, no, exactly, exactly. And the epilogue is kind of fascinating to read in this book. You know, I am, you know, William C on page 751, William Seward remained Secretary of State through President Andrew Johnson's term and took great pride in what was originally lampooned as Seward's Folly, the purchase of Alaska.

And I thought that was so interesting because your dad was Lieutenant Governor to the Isle of Man. And I thought I might ask what landmass you might purchase if you were a head of state. And also this guy went on 1872, he went on a trip around the world before he died, Japan, China, India, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, and France.

I thought, wow, for a Cambridge student of history who's created a travel-oriented bookshop, I just had to ask you, what would your last trip around the world look like? What would it or what doesn't? Yeah, what would it?

Not does it, not this is going to happen for 30 years, but, so what unremarkable landmass might you purchase? And then what would your last dying trip around the world look like? You can say today or it could be in 1872.

I just found this fascinating that in 1872 this guy was like, I'm going to hit these like 10 different countries before I die. And I thought that was fascinating.

James:

Yeah, he's rather more cultured. I think the landmass, if anyone can preserve the environment, well, since I'm looking at a Canadian, I think I would, having unimaginable wealth, I would buy all the tar lands and exclude anybody from doing anything environmental within them.

Neil:

Oh my gosh, yeah. Well, the forests are getting dead seas, dead lakes, the wildfires, it's just we're pillaging our land.

James:

We are pillaging our land. We are pillaging our land and to the extent that one can leave it pristine and present that, I think that would be the ideal thing. And then if I was going to go on, I think I would travel through all of the former Soviet countries one after another because they're probably the countries that would have changed the least.

Nicaragua, Cuba, the Stans.

Neil:

Changed the least?

James:

Yeah.

Neil:

What do you mean?

James:

Well, that one of the, it probably wasn't the best thing to have been within the Soviet orbit, be you in South America or Africa or Asia or wherever you are. But the legacy of that is that you're probably less developed now than you would otherwise be and therefore is a place in which to visit.

It will be much more authentic and agreeable and less uniform because everywhere that was within a US orbit tended to homogenize.

Neil:

Wow. What a fascinating way to think about it. I love that.

Less uniform. Yeah. Avoid the homogenization of culture around the world.

Nicaragua, Cuba, the Stans. What else is on this list? This is I might come back to this.

James:

I mean, some of them, Libya has gone through probably a fairly unhelpful phase and I'm not going to be traveling there. But again, Ethiopia is actually somewhere that I have been but is a fabulous country. Now has developed subsequently and now is going through troubles.

But those are the countries that are going to probably be the most insightful to visit or inspiring to me.

Neil:

I like that. I like that. What a unique way to approach the question.

I had that written down. I was like, well, should I ask him this? I was like, I have a feeling you'd have a really good answer.

Okay, let's jump into your third and last book. It is De Gaulle. Both The Rebel, 1890-1944, which is the book I have, but there's also, it's a two-part book, there's also De Gaulle, The Ruler, 1945-1970.

Now it was originally a three-part book and so the author has written a little note in the front of this one saying I'm really sad to inform you the publisher squeezed books two and three into just book two. I like that they put that right in there. This is written by Jean LaCouture, if I said that right. L-A-C-O-U-T-U-R-E translated by Alan Sheridan. Originally published as three volumes in France in 1984, 1985, 1986 and then in the U.S. in 1990 and 1991 by Norton. Both covers feature black and white photos of Charles De Gaulle.

This one has him in a military uniform with a small mustache and a hat, but there's also one with him in a black suit with his arms listed above his head in the second. The title is in like a giant hundred point all caps gold font with a red drop shadow. De Gaulle.

He was, by the way, for those that don't know, a French military officer and statesman who led three free French forces, or led the French forces against Nazi Germany in World War II, chaired the provisional government of the French Republic from 44 to 46 to restore democracy in France and in 1958, amid the Algerian War, came out of retirement when appointed Prime Minister by President René Coty. He then rewrote the Constitution, founded the Fifth Republic, and was elected President of France later that year, a position he held until he resigned in 1969. Jean LaCouture was a French journalist, historian and author who lived from 1921 to 2015 who also wrote famed biographies about a lot of people like Ho Chi Min, Montan, and Kennedy. So, I could go into a lot more details here about De Gaulle, but why don't we just turn it over to you, James. Would you tell us about your relationship with De Gaulle, the rebel and that's the first half, and the ruler by Jean LaCouture.

James:

De Gaulle is, again, he's a really, really good story. He's clearly an impossible individual in many respects.

Neil:

I got that sense. It sounded like very ornery.

James:

A level of arrogance and self-importance. But actually, throughout it all, one can't but admire what he achieved through adhering to this obstinate sense of his own destiny, but also, and one can be extremely critical of him very easily in terms of his own sense of his own self-aggrandizement, but actually his focus was on France, and in taking over and leading the Free French, and he was not remotely in a position to make that claim. It was accident that he happened to be all the more senior generals and leaders in France had either stayed in France or gone to North Africa or, and he was in London, was able to firmly establish himself, causing Winston Churchill no end of trouble as he did so.

And one has that leadership through the war, the manner in which he constantly articulated the grandeur of France and the importance of France, even when, let's face it, they'd been invaded by the Germans. They had a Vichy government which was collaborating. It was absolutely the darkest hour, and he ignored it all, and he articulated this grand vision of la France and defiance and Free French, and it is inspiring.

He also writes magically. De Gaulle was an instinctive and creative writer, and that is truly inspiring.

Neil:

You have all these letters that he wrote when he was a little kid published in here.

James:

Astonishing.

Neil:

Like, when I'm older, I'm ruling the army.

Here's what I'm going to do. It was just captivating to read.

James:

A little obnoxious. You just want to slap him figuratively around, but when he's articulating it in terms of where he wants to lead the country and the sense of self-sacrifice and adherence to a vision, it's brilliant. And on a personal level, he had a daughter who was disabled and who he kept close to him throughout.

She was generally, throughout the war years, she spent most of her time under his desk. She wanted to be close to him, and he absolutely devoted himself to her. So there was a human side to him that was obscured, but it was there.

He went through considerable trials and tribulations throughout, but maintained. And then, I think, as you say, when he actually came back to power, rather unexpectedly, the Fifth Republic and able to make a settlement particularly over Algeria that only somebody of his stature was capable to do and effectively surrender all that it would have been expected, I think, of him to protect. He gave up Algeria.

He found a way of navigating through what was looking a catastrophic situation. He yielded up not all of the French Empire, and he's by no means a saint and by no means perfect. But nonetheless, he did navigate France through an extraordinary period, as well as being, and this is true to my heart, as well as being difficult about it.

One of the key creators of the European Union, and the sense that international cooperation was important. He was deeply suspicious of the English, the Brits, but again, not without reason. But he welded France to Germany, and that is crucial for the stability of Europe, and I think was deeply insightful and forward-thinking in a way that is easily masked by his sense of la grandeur de la France.

Neil:

Yeah, welding France to Germany in a way that, yeah, it calls to mind the famous trip you made as Waterstones' CEO to Amazon to sell the Kindles in the shop.

James:

Maybe I'm summoning my inner de Gaulle.

Neil:

Yeah, I mean, yeah, but there's, he's a man of, you talked about his writing, there's a ton of quotes that I wanted to just play back to you and get your reflection on them.

You can agree, you can disagree, you can tell me if you interpret them differently. Here's a few of things that he said. Silence is the ultimate weapon of power.

James:

Which is absolutely classic de Gaulle. It's, it causes you just to stop, doesn't it? Silence, it's, it makes you think, and as you think, you think, hmm, this man has actually got it and he can express it.

It's not some huge long sentence, it's short, it's precise, it's deeply challenging. And you reflect upon it, and I think that is constant through de Gaulle. The windbag, Winston Churchill was something of a windbag, very lyrical, he could write beautifully, but he just went on and on.

De Gaulle isn't, it's short, sharp, they're challenging, and there's a lot of wisdom in them.

Neil:

Donald Trump is a windbag. He's a windbag, you know? The way that the dialogue happens now, we have both the windbaggedness and we have the sort of pithy phrases that go viral because they're controversial, like you have both extremes now in the discourse.

Anyway, silence is the ultimate weapon of power. How about this one? A man of character finds a special attractiveness in difficulty, since it is only by coming to grips with difficulty that he realizes his potential.

James:

Again, classic de Gaulle. Much to reflect on in that. Much to say, oh for goodness sake, you are so up yourself.

Because it is intended to amplify his own extraordinariness. But it also has some significant element of truth to it, and it's framed in this amazing language. It's a translation you have, but the French is even more so.

This absolute precision, and evoking something far larger than seems remotely reasonable for somebody to do, but he can do it again and again and again and again and again.

Neil:

It's interesting that it's become a dictum in society today, that the obstacle is the way, the hard way is the right way. I've said and written some of these phrases myself, but it seems like we have this bent in society sort of chasing the difficult path, and at the same time, our instincts are probably not to do that.

James:

And most of what he was done was in the context of trying to lead a nation through a period of extreme contradiction and difficulty, as the leader of the Free French. Just a vassal to the Allies. No power, no influence.

You've got all the great of France is collaborating with the Germans. No military prowess at all. Total abject defeat, and yet an ability to evoke in a language an alternative reality and enable people to coalesce and rebuild themselves around that.

Neil:

I mean, this is sounding... We're getting... James Daunt and Charles De Gaulle are getting closer and closer now here with these examples. How about this one? This is going to sound like you a little bit too. Don't ask me who's influenced me.

A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

James:

Did he really write that?

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah.

James:

I mean, he is utterly obnoxious sometimes.

Neil:

I'll give you one last one. In order to be the master, the politician poses as the servant.

James:

There is much of truth in that, and that back to Lincoln. Lincoln was par excellence the practitioner of that.

Neil:

Do you hold on to that? I mean, you're a bookseller from England, and you're leading the largest book chain in the world here in the US.

James:

I think there are people who lead from the front, and de Gaulle happened to have been one of those, and there are those who can lead from the back, and Lincoln was one of those. I think the latter, the Lincoln way of leading is I think generally, well, certainly the one that fits with my personality. And I think there are heroic leaders, and then there are people who are reliant entirely upon their teams, and if they have any skill, it is cajoling and persuading and encouraging that team to work at its best.

Neil:

Beautiful. We're lucky that the larger world of readers, the Republic of Letters as David Mitchell calls it, is lucky to have you at the helm with its growth and what you're doing for book chains around the world. Got a ton more questions on de Gaulle.

In the interest of time, I wonder if we might just transfer over to our closing Fast Money Round questions to kind of end this wonderful conversation. I will go with, these are a couple obvious ones for you. Hardcover, paperback, audio, or e?

James:

Personally, hardcover, but I understand that most people are paperback, and I don't understand the rest.

Neil:

I know, I got in trouble for having a value on the show as audiobooks and ebooks are beautiful mutants, I once said, and it got me into some hot water.

James:

Just for myself, I've never managed to get to grips with either e. I can never remember what I've read on e.

Neil:

You can't highlight it, you can't fold the corners, you can't give it to somebody. Do you have a book lending policy?

James:

Personally?

Neil:

Yeah.

James:

Yeah, I know I will lend any book all the time, and it gets me in less trouble with my wife because otherwise the place overflows with books.

Neil:

So it's very generous, you're trying to always outlay. I do normally ask people how they organize the books on their bookshelf, but you've already suggested that you organize them by country. I do.

Other than the ones you have personally overseen, do you have one or two favorite bookstores, living or dead?

James:

All the time. Here in New York, McNally Jackson is the best bookstore. In London, John Sandow.

I could go on.

Neil:

Keep going, keep going.

James:

Books and books. There is a bookstore.

Neil:

Books and books in Florida? Oh, great.

James:

I think there are fabulous bookstores around the world. Less than there should be, but you know, the thing that I actually find is the moment of genius in a bookstore, and there are very few, is when they have new and used, and it's small, and it's really curated. The interesting thing about those is that you can go in, they tend to be stores of a moment in time, and they don't tend to sustain themselves particularly easily, but they create genius.

But the ones I like are the ones with somebody's name across the front of them, and somebody inside them is buying all the books and is curating them, and it's theirs, and there's a personality to it, and you don't even need to meet the person you know what it's like. I mean, you walk into books and books, you know what Mitch Kaplan's going to be like. And when he turns up and you meet him, it's like, uh-huh, oh, I knew you were going to be this.

Because you do not know Mitch Kaplan. He's a personality, and his bookstore is also one. It's just...

Neil:

Absolutely. He's a wonderful, wonderful...

James:

It's welcoming, it's all of the things. But each of these stores is a different thing.

Neil:

Yes, exactly. I've got to ask, when you walk into a bookstore you haven't walked into for the first time, where do your eyes and brain go? What do you...

You've mentioned the name outside, the person inside that's buying it, so you walk in, and I used to work for a British leader named Dave Cheesewright, and I'd walk with him inside Walmart all the time, and I'd always be interested, like, what's Dave looking at? When you walk into a bookstore, what are the first few things you're looking at?

James:

Obviously, I'm walking mainly into my own stores, one way or the other.

Neil:

I mean, a new one.

James:

I can come in and walk into the store, and I do, and I just sort of look to begin with. I don't actually advance beyond the front. I would generally expect to know exactly what their receiving room looks like, having absorbed what I'm looking at at the front of the store.

But that's because I'm an operator. These are the stores I've got to run and figure out what's right and what's wrong in them. You can also, without moving off that front moment, you know the personality.

You can see it. It's writ large, and then you may have further surprises as you go through. You may find the kids' section, which obviously you can't see from the front.

You may find, ah, there's a fabulous kids' bookseller in here, or there's somebody who really gets philosophy, or whatever it might be. The overall harmony of the store presents itself the minute you walk in it.

Neil:

Nice. Beautiful. What should bookstores never sell?

Because I'm asking that specifically because bookstores have obviously massively expanded the range of what they sell, and I've heard you talk about some things that you've pulled out of bookstores. Bookshops tend to sell lots of non-books these days. What should bookstores not be into?

James:

Well, I would have sort of I would want to say much, but actually what I think is if the bookstore is a true bookstore, you can sell pretty much anything else in it, but you definitely shouldn't have much of it. And the very best at this are Japanese. And you can go into a Japanese bookstore and it's a fabulous bookstore.

And they will have a little model with a scarf on it. That's it. And the scarf is amazingly beautiful.

Now, it shouldn't be in that bookstore because it's the only thing that isn't a book. And it's exquisite. It represents the values of the bookstore.

But my own view is bookstores should be, if they want to be bookstores, should be about books. Unequivocally about books. You should come into books and see books and focus on books.

And actually a percentage of sales should come from books. And I really worry when our sales drop below 80%. And quite a lot of Barnes & Noble are lower than 80%.

All of our new stores are about 80%. But we've got a ton of older stores where they are, and they are unbalanced. And the problem with them is they are still full of books.

They've got, you know, on the face of it, they're good bookstores. But they've become too much of other things. And it changes the nature of customers' engagement with the store.

And it really undermines their credibility and authenticity as a bookstore. Even though they have the books in them. And they have as many books in them as the little store down the road which has only got books in it.

But they don't make us good bookstores. And that's something we're kind of figuring out is how do we change them and evolve them to make them true bookstores if they've departed from that path because they sell too much that isn't. I slung out an immense amount of things that weren't books out of BNN to make them better bookstores even though it hurt us because they were things that we were selling perfectly well.

And they obviously made some sense to all the people who were buying water. Just bottled water. We had a little thing of bottled water.

You could just buy bottled water from us. And we sold one of our best selling items every single day. But you don't need that in a bookstore.

So we slung them out. And I do think it's something that is very difficult as a chain bookseller to work how you evolve. Given also there are commercial imperatives to make some money.

And you make quite a lot of money on these things without books.

Neil:

Yeah, exactly. Do you have a white whale book or any book that you have been in some sense chasing the longest?

James:

I chased a book on Ethiopia by Paul Henzer. And I just couldn't find it. It wasn't on Abe.

Occasionally they came on Abe and it was like $1,000 and I refused to pay $1,000 for a book.

Neil:

Oh, Abe books. Right, right, right. I was like, what's Abe?

Right, Abe books. Or Amazon, which is part of Amazon.

James:

Yeah. And I looked and really wanted to read this book and I read others of his and I wanted this one. And there's a little used bookstore in the village next to where I live.

Terrible store. It's one of the worst used bookstores that you can go into. It just has grubby, dirty paperbacks in it of mass market rubbish.

And I walked in there and it was sitting there. I mean, just sitting there. And I was just like, I actually must be dreaming.

This cannot be possible. And it was two pounds. No way.

I solved a search that had gone on for about a decade.

Neil:

Oh my gosh, what a great story. And the last question of all, you know, usually we're talking to a legion globally of book lovers, writers, makers, sellers and librarians. I often close by asking people what's one hard-fought piece of wisdom or advice you would leave to this group.

I could tie it to page 752 of Team of Rivals where it's reported that on Seward's deathbed, his daughter-in-law Jenny asked him if he had any final advice before he died. And he said, love one another. So I thought, if you don't mind, I know it's a bit dark, but maybe close with me asking you for what your deathbed advice may be to all the people who've stuck with us for the hour and a half conversation that I found very rich and stimulating personally.

James:

Seward is right. If there is any genuine advice of this sort, it has to be about kindness and tolerance and love in some shape or form. It should be part of all of our lives.

We burst our way through professional endeavors and educational endeavors and there's competitiveness and there's management and there's all these sort of things going on, but if you can absolutely endeavor always to be reasonable and kind and appreciative. And yes, sort of, actually that is the book that I failed to remember since I've just done it. It was called The Language of Kindness.

Ah! So, there we go. I needed the jog.

Neil:

Yes, exactly. The Language of Kindness. Endeavor to be reasonable and kind.

James Daunt, it has been a real honor and a pleasure to have you on 3 Books. Thank you so much for your generosity of time, of spirit, of giving us these books and sharing so much of your wisdom. Really, really grateful to you.

Thank you so much. Hey everybody, it's just me, just Neil again listening back to The Wise and Wonderful. So eloquent.

Mr. James Daunt, as he gave us the three daunting books that were... Actually, before we get into these, should I do my quotes? I was just about to forget my quotes, guys.

You've got to help me remember my quotes. Every single show, I try to highlight a few good quotes that I wrote down as I was going through. How about this one?

Books are in a very good place. He said that right at the beginning. I worry about literature, in a sense.

The Anna Kareninas of the world. Are we reading those still? Is our reading changing into more of the book talk and the self-help universe and the Colleen Hoovers?

I don't know. But just hearing the guy who runs more bookstores in the world more than anybody say books are in a very good place is heartening. It's a great, great sign for all of us.

This might be my favorite quote in the whole day. Bookstores offer the serendipity of illogical choice. I just love the words.

The serendipity of illogical choice. What a great, magical way of putting it. It's kind of like Chapter 99 with Doug Miller over at Doug Miller Books when he says, Amazon's great for finding what you want.

Bookstores are great for finding what you don't know you want. How about this one? Bookstores provide a community space that is inherently democratic in the sense that everybody can come inside it.

That is such a good point. We talk a lot about community on this show. There is, of course, the famous Putnam book, Bowling Alone, but most of the things that we talk about are just for adults or just for kids and so on.

Bookstores have, as he put it, they're inherently democratic. I'll throw one more quote in here just for fun. The reality through all of this, because he's talking about 35 years being a bookseller, is that how people are, the time people have available to read and the enthusiasm with which they read changes by not much.

Which is a wonderful perspective to have from the, I was going to say septuagenarian, but I don't think he's that old. I think he's in his early 60s. 61!

He's only 61. What am I talking about? James Daunt, thank you so much for giving us three more books to add to our top 1000, including number 589, A Savage War of Peace by Alastair Horn, H-O-R-N-E.

Number 588, Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin, which I really do recommend. It's a massive book. It's so daunting.

Like I said to James, the audiobook's like 42 and a half hours, but it is gripping. I mean, it really does take you into the 1800s, Springfield, Illinois. You feel like you're right there.

If you have an interest in US politics or kind of the highest sort of echelons of leadership, then this is a good book for you. And number 587, which is kind of two books. It's like a two-book set.

De Gaulle, The Rebel and De Gaulle, The Ruler by Jean LaCouture, okay? L-E-C-O-U-T-U-R-E. Thank you so much to James Daunt for coming on three books, and thank you to all of you for listening.

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 where I kind of lean back on the couch now, put my arms above my head now, and I say, hey, it's time for the after party. It's one of three clubs we have on three books. We also have the cover-to-cover club.

That's people that attempt to listen to every single chapter of the show from 2018 to 2040. I was in my 30s when I started. I'll be in my 60s when I'm done, and I know I'm hanging out with a lot of you around the world with me.

And by the way, as I mentioned, if you are part of the cover-to-cover club, drop me a line, let me know. We'll add you to our FAQ if you want to be. A lot of people don't want their name on there.

That's fine, but we can add you to the threebooks.co FAQ if you like. And, of course, the secret club. All I can tell you about the secret club is the way you find out how to join is by calling our phone number.

Yes, we have a real phone number. It is 1-833-READALOT. R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T.

You can drop that last T while dialing if you're having trouble getting to go through. I love hearing your voice. It's so wonderful hearing from you.

Let's go to the phones to kick off the end of the podcast club now.

Caitlin:

Phone ringing. Hey, Neal. It's Caitlin Beekhouse from Edmonton, Alberta.

I just got home from a run listening to Chapter 93, and it felt like you and Chris Hatfield were running right beside me. I love that there's no commercials, so no interruptions as I'm running and just great conversation and inspiration of what to read next. Another way that I love to learn about great reads is from friends and family, and I'm actually hosting at my community week next week the first ever book swab, which combines the best parts of a book swap and a book club, which is why we call it a swab.

As a sustainably minded professional organizer, I love to see books re-homed and re-loved and to explore the relationship that we have with physically owning and possessing books. There's no way for you to know this unless I throw it out into the universe, but one of my three-year goals is to be able to discuss with you the sustainability side of books, our relationship with books, and my three, four-minute book. Thanks so much for the inspiring podcast and for introducing me to so many great people, Neil.

Keep it up.

Neil:

Thank you so much to Caitlin from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada for calling in and for shouting out Chris Hatfield chapter 93. That was a fun one. I remember going to Chris's house and his whole table was just full of Christmas cards, and I was amazed that this guy was sending out 500 Christmas cards and personally writing notes in each one of them when I got there.

When I went over that day, it was around the time of his first novel, The Apollo Murders, that had come out. And since then, he's so prolific. It's unbelievable.

He's got another novel called The Defector, I guess part two of that same Apollo Murders series. So if you're interested in, I want to say Tom Clancy-esque type of books, then that would be for you. He, of course, has also a really famous memoir called An Astronaut's Guide to Life, and a kid's book that my kids still enjoy called The Darkest Dark.

And he's got a lot of wonderful books. I also love that you were running while listening to it because like Chris, I guess being the astronaut, it's just in such physical shape. One of the memory takeaways I have of that conversation was the idea of doing 20 push-ups before you ever get into the shower.

Just drop and give me 20 every time. I love some of the other topics you raise. I love the book swab idea.

A book swap and a book club. A mixture of the two. Wonderful.

I love the idea of talking about the sustainability side of books. I will endeavor to give you a call or to reach out to you so that we can have a short chat about the sustainability side of books. I don't think about it much, but of course, we should.

Absolutely. Once we solve all the things, of course, like fracking and carbon emissions and so on. Books are printed on paper, right?

We're chopping down trees for them. How does that all work? That's what we need to talk about, Caitlin.

Thank you so much for calling in. If you're listening to this, by the way, please give me a call. Drop me a line.

1-833-READALOT. There's no pressure to be eloquent or as articulate as Caitlin was. Just drop me a line.

Let me know a formative book, a dream guest. Any reflection or bit. It's always wonderful hearing from you.

Thank you so much. Now, let's move on to the letter of the chapter. This chapter's letter comes from Marge.

Oh, yeah. We love Marge down in Antioch, Illinois. Marge says, on Jonathan Franzen's podcast, I'm not finished the conversation yet, but what a great guest.

His descriptions of books were so interesting and thoughtful. I now want to read A Christmas Carol. My daughter wants to read Prince Caspian, and I will recommend his books to my son since Franzen said he writes so people will have good books to read.

Thank you for your efforts to get him on the show. Well, thank you, Marge. I also think, you know what we should do?

We should head on over to YouTube because there's been a lot of comments on that one. And I'm just going to pull it up right now. Basically, you know how it is on YouTube.

Everyone's got their opinions. And so there was, I won't say like a salty comment, but you know, somebody wrote and said, the sheer amount of pretension that comes from Franzen should be a scientific quantity. His youthful arrogance has continued to add all arrogance.

That was from David Watson. I replied, sorry, David. Another friend texted me after listening to this chat saying something similar.

I will say for my end, I didn't perceive John that way at all in our chats leading up to the interview and before and after the interview. My sense was he was incredibly kind, thoughtful, introspective, self-critical, self-wondering, you know, basically a person to try and show up and do their best like any of us are. And that is my experience.

And I hope that other people felt that way. But of course, we're open to other people's opinions. Jonathan Henderson also wrote, I just read the corrections earlier this month.

I loved it so much. I basically inhaled it over a period of two days. Being a middle-aged man who's now in the unenviable position of taking care of my elderly parents, I really felt like for the first time in ages an author was writing my life.

It has that painful but powerful combination that happens when the ugly truth meets the poetically beautiful. That's a great way to put it, Jonathan. And by the way, in the top 100 books of all time, or the books of the 20th century from the New York Times, the corrections is in the top 10.

In the top 10. Here's the last comment I'll give you, last letter of the chapter, we'll say, from Jules Seghetti. I liked the conversation, although some of the reactions of the interviewer were a bit too much.

Wow! For my taste. So then I wrote back, and then the person wrote, it was worth the two hours.

Two and a half hours. And I said, worth the two and a half hours is a great compliment. Sorry for my hyperbolic reactions.

And then Jules wrote back, sorry, I didn't mean to offend. Hope I didn't. The important thing is that it's so rare to have the time to watch a 2.5 hour interview. And that was amazing. And I said, no, you definitely didn't offend me. That's the thing about YouTube, it gets you like, there's like a more unfiltered nature of the comments over there, so it's nice to combine those with Marge's comments.

Alright, and now let's head over to the word of the chapter. And for this chapter's word, we will of course have a nice word cloud from the eloquent Mr. James Daunt. Let's cue over to him now.

James:

Hesitate to pine some awful denouement Mr. Obama is better placed than me to extol the national health system which we revere but obliquely as well. This obstinate sense of his own destiny, a vassal to the allies total abject defeat it's writ large and it's exquisite

Neil:

So many interesting words to choose from there, but let's go with denouement

Neil:

denouement

Neil:

d-e-n-o-u-e-m-e-n-t which I will confess I did not know what it meant at all but Miriam Webster comes in to help us tell us that it is the final outcome of the main dramatic complication in a novel, play, film, etc. Or the outcome of a complex sequence of events.

For example, in the novel's denouement the two hostages escape to freedom. Huh. That's wonderful.

So the denouement is kind of like the ending. Well, where does it come from? It comes from the French and what it means is untying.

Untying. From old French de, you know, to undo nouer is a tie. To untie.

So think about denouement as like the untying of the complex strands of a plot. Wonderful word from of course the very eloquent James Daunt the world's largest bookseller running the biggest chain in England, the biggest chain in the U.S. which are gotta be two of the top five markets in the world for books. I know the U.S. is number one. England is, I think, I think it's the number two English speaking market, but I don't know if it's up around, you know, China and India and so on. So let's say two top five markets and then of course he's still running his nine store independent bookstore chain in London Daunt Books, which of course having a bag from is apparently like the thing to do if you're over there. I gotta visit when I'm over in England.

When am I gonna be over in England? I do not know, but I want to visit Daunt Books and see how they're organized by country and where they put Harry Potter. It was a wonderful conversation with James, with you, with me all the way up here in chapter 141.

We've been intersplicing classic chapters with new chapters now. You just heard Judy Bloom on the new moon. We'll have Vishwas Aggrawal and David Sedaris coming to visit over the next couple months, which will be fun and until next time remember everybody that you are what you eat and you are what you read. Keep turning that page and I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Bye.

Listen to the chapter here!