Chapter 138: Maria Popova mines meaning in marginalia

Listen to the chapter here!

Maria:

Right now, what I'm very troubled by is this whole thing about cultural appropriation. Without appropriation, there could be no learning. I find identity the least interesting thing about people.

I don't think fear is the litmus test that is bad for you because we fear change.

Maria:

The question is accessing yourself on the other side of the fear, and then telling, is this a way to grow or is this a way to suffer now? Hope is the antidote to fear in bearing our future.

Neil:

Hey everybody, this is Neil Pasricha and welcome or welcome back to chapter 138 of 3 Books.

Neil:

Happy Buck Moon everybody. Did you know every single full moon has a name? This one's called the Buck Moon because it's when deer start...

I was gonna say horns. No, they aren't growing horns. They're growing antlers.

They're growing antlers, so they have named the moon the Buck Moon. Apparently in Cree, it's also called the Feather Molting Moon, or you can also refer to as the Summer Moon if you want, or the Thunder Moon, or the Halfway Summer Moon from the Anishinaabe tribe. Okay, different tribes with different names.

Raspberry Moon, say the Algonquins. Month of the ripe corn moons, says the Cherokee. I love getting deep into all these full moon names, but I just love the fact that, you know, whenever that moon is perfectly ripe and full.

For 22 straight years, from 2018, six years ago, we started the show, all the up to 2040 when we're done. When I'm in my 60s, it's hard to believe, but I will be in my 60s then, we are gonna have an ad-free, commercial-free, interruption-free conversation about books that changed people's lives. And I want to just say, you know, I don't say it often enough, I think maybe one or two chapters a year, I kind of make a point in saying I'm gonna do it now, I just want to say, thank you, thank you.

You know, when you start to focus your passions and interests on areas that not many people share, you know, like just reading books, long conversations with inspiring people about literature, you're gonna lose most of the world there. But that's partly why I find it so incredulous and heartwarming to have found this sacred three-books community. If you're listening right now, you are part of it, you are a three-booker, I am a three-booker, we are hanging out together talking about books, and I know the show is doing well, because I get all the spam.

You know, one way you know you're doing well is when you get lots and lots of spam. I get spam saying, you are one of the top 0.5% of all podcasts in the world. There must be some site that ranks all shows so they can see the downloads.

So, you know, on one hand, that's wonderful, we're a busier, bigger podcast than 99.5% of podcasts in the world, right? On the other hand, there's five million podcasts, there's a lot of pockets. There were two million when I started in 2018, and now there are over five million today, which means if you're in the top 0.5%, you're one of 250,000 podcasts. But I also just generally love the increasing splintering of interests in the world. Don't you love the super, super, super, super niche? The super, super, super, super, super detailed?

That is definitely, those are definitely the pathways that our guest today, Maria Popova, has in spades. I love Maria. I can't wait to introduce you to her if you don't know her already.

But before I do, let's do a letter of the chapter. You know, I like to read a letter of the chapter, and if I read your letter on the air, you get a free book. Just email me your address.

I don't know, I'll mail you a book. The way to send us letters is, of course, through leaving a review anywhere, you know, anywhere, all the giant digital platforms, Apple, Spotify, wherever. Comment on YouTube is good, or sending us an actual letter.

Mailing us an actual letter. My address is on 3books.co. My email address is also on 3books.co. I don't care if it's painted out front, you know, for everybody seeing out. I don't care that much about that stuff.

It's just getting letters. Sharing the love of the community. This one starts with an all caps, Neil, N-E-I-L, with five exclamation marks underneath it.

Part of it reads. It's a beautiful, long three pages. I'm just going to read part of it.

Okay, Leah from Huntsville, Alabama. I hope that's okay right now. It says, thank you.

3 Books has made me a better version of myself. I have learned so much about who I am through the conversations that I'm part of because of you, the person I have kept stifled for so many years. I tell everyone about 3 Books, friends, colleagues, strangers.

I struck up a conversation with, I even had a dream once that I saw someone in a coffee shop with a 3 Books tattoo and I struck up a conversation with them. There are so many things I love about 3 Books. It's impossible for me to list them all.

One thing is certain. I have read more now and my selections are much more diverse. I have even gotten my 19 year old son to start reading again.

I have always been fascinated by the moon. So the fact that 3 Books falls, the lunar calendar, it gives me just one more reason to look up and be delighted by its glow. Many of my formative books are already on the top 1000, but I will leave you with a series that I enjoyed as a child.

And I purchased for my child when he was little. It is called Mrs. Piggle Wiggle by Betty McDonald. Okay, Leah, consider an order.

I'm going to order Mrs. Piggle Wiggle right now. The letter continues. I was introduced to the series by my third grade teacher, Ms. Keith, she would read these stories aloud on Friday afternoons using student names in place of the characters, a delightful teacher that made learning exciting and fun keeping awesome. Neil farewell until the next chapter. Leah Leah from Huntsville, Alabama. Thank you so much for the letter.

Leah dropped me a line so I can mail you a signed book and I just love the shadow also to third grade teachers who read, you know, education, uh, needs more reading time and needs more quiet reading time. Everyone brings a book and reads and the teacher teaches you how to do that because everyone just kind of lies on the carpet. They kind of fall asleep.

And I love the teachers that tell you it's okay to fall asleep while you're reading, you know, shout out to those teachers. Anyway, if we, if you like hanging out as we do at the front of the show a little bit, then stick all the way to the end. We have the end of the podcast club.

I play your voicemails to 1-833-READALOT, read letters, talk about the etymology of an interesting word said by the guests of the show. We geek out, we have fun together. So I'll talk to you at the end of the show too.

What's going to happen in the middle is we are going to hang out with the one and only Maria Popova. I am so excited to have Maria on the show. Maria doesn't really do interviews.

Like if you go to her site, you click on interviews, you type Maria Popova podcast interview, there aren't any, like she just doesn't do interviews. She, she, she, she really is wonderfully available on her epic one woman labor of love that is themarginalian.org. Oh, let me tell you a little bit about Maria.

So Maria Popova was born in communist Bulgaria and emigrated to the U S six days after her 19th birthday back in 2003, she studied at the university of Pennsylvania after quote, being sold on the liberal arts promise of being taught how to live. end quote, did it work? Well, yes and no, she spent her family's life savings in the first few weeks on textbooks and despite attending an American high school in Bulgaria, found herself in a state of culture shock.

Quote again, I mean, fitted sheets brunch. That's a quote from her from the Brooklyn magazine podcast where she was interviewed. Now Maria worked hard, a very defining Popova characteristic, sometimes eating store brand canned tuna and oatmeal three times a day to get by.

I figured it was the most nutritious combo for the cheapest amount. She said at one of her jobs in 2006, a senior leader started sending out a Friday email of assorted miscellany to provoke innovation and I don't know how well they did, but I do know Maria took the project over and did it much better, weaving together writeups and seemingly unrelated topics like Danish pod homes, the evolution of the Pepsi logo and the nonprofit ad campaign, uh, fighting malaria, a nonprofit ad campaign, fighting malaria. These are, these are three of like the earliest posts I could find. Maria's emails got popular, got really popular.

So instead of just sending it to more and more people, like send it to my dad, send it to my cousin, send it to my friend. She actually taught herself programming in one of those kind of oatmeal and tuna can days, save up the $400 to do the night course in programming. And then she put it online on a website called brain pickings.org.

You have probably heard of brainpickings.org. It is one of the most popular sites on the entire internet. Now dubbed The Marginalian. Let's not call it brain pickings anymore. Let's call it The Marginalian. I was personally blogging every night, uh, from 2008, 2012 on my website.

1000 awesome things. I only lasted four years doing that. But so many times I remember I'd be researching some arcane bit of trivia and Google would toss me over to Maria say, I came to love the site, which at the time had a top of the page tagline.

I don't want Maria to grimace, but you know, if your past self doesn't make you grimace, you know, I guess you aren't growing, right? But the tagline resonate with me and it resonates with me still now. It said a scan of the mind boggling, the revolutionary and the idiosyncratic.

I love that. And sort of like my own blogs about page. This one on her site did not reveal.

I don't know. It was a hurry even the author's name, face, or identity. And like, again, if you click the thousand things about what you said, thousand things is a time ticking countdown of a thousand things.

That's it. It's like, was it just because the internet was more chat room anonymous or was it before, you know, Twitter and all these social media sites forced us to plug in our real names because you know, you can't advertise to non-entities, right? They realize that you get more ad revenue when you have a real name.

I remember the day Twitter sent me a note saying, you cannot be called a thousand awesome things anymore on Twitter. We have to know your real name and your birthday. We don't, we, if we don't know what target market you slip into, we can't feed you the right ads.

Well, that's why probably me and Maria never met back then, even though we were both kind of big bloggers back in the blogger heyday. However, despite the fact that I tapped out doing daily blogging four years later, Maria is still going a full 18 years later, 18 years later, still blogging almost every day. George Saunders, our guest in chapter 75 calls Maria Popova and says Maria Popova manifests abundant wit, intelligence and compassion in all of her writings.

Krista Tippett, host of On Being, calls Maria a cartographer of meaning in a digital age and the library of Congress has even included The Marginalian.org in their permanent web archive of culturally valuable materials. I agree with the accolades. And I find Maria her blog, The Marginalian.org and her wonderful books, Figuring, which I read and love the snail with the right heart picture book, which is wonderful and a velocity of being an eight year project to kind of galvanize these interesting artists from around the world on like writing the letter to the 12 year old child that like wants to know more about books and she's just pulling out exquisite beauty that reflects everything that makes life great.

And like this show, like 3 Books, her site, The Marginalian. has remained free and ad free. She's got no staff, no interns, no assistant, and it has remained in her words, a thoroughly solitary labor of love. That is also my life and my livelihood.

You don't need me to tell you that the world can feel heavy. It can feel intense. It can feel overwhelming.

Think about what media politics and the news kind of does to us. It pulls us away from those harder to measure things that make life wondrous and that is where Maria comes in. She comes to rescue us, to point our attention towards the turn of phrase in a poem, a forgotten piece of advice from Ralph Waldo Emerson on trusting ourselves or to provide a close reading with some stunning artwork of a hundred year old picture book that illuminates one of those impossible to articulate emotions that we all know and feel.

I absolutely loved this conversation with the much requested Maria Popova on a wonderfully wide ranging set of topics, including of course, her three most formative books. Are you ready, everybody? Let's flip the page into chapter 138 now.

Hi, Maria.

Maria:

Hi, Neil.

Neil:

Oh, it is such a pleasure to have you on 3 Books. You are a joy. You are them.

You are maybe the most bookish person we've ever had on the show. I'm so thrilled to have you.

Maria:

Oh, my goodness. I love your project. I love the spirit of it.

I love the seriousness with which you take it. And it is a joy to be here.

Neil:

Oh, thank you so much. Well, we were introduced, of course, by Debbie Millman, our guest back in chapter 97 of 3 Books, who you have written so lovingly about in many places I actually really I pulled out to kind of kick off our conversation, your wonderful afterward that you wrote in her 2021 book, Why Design Matters. There are I want to ask you kind of what makes a good conversation or a good interview.

Neil:

And I thought I might read back to you a couple of phrases you included in that afterward you say

Maria:

Please do because I confess I have no recollection of writing this and Debbie has been a part of my life for more than a decade. And God knows how many things I have no memory of this particular one.

Neil:

Well, it's too bad because it's just a brilliant piece of writing. You say the interview is a curious cultural artifact by design, a consensual humbly of future abashment, etching into the common record who we were at a particular state of being with particular enthusiasms animating our minds and particular sorrows gnawing at our hearts. You continue an interview petrifies us in time then lives on forever.

The thoughts of bygone selves quoted back to us across the eons of a personal evolution, a strange and discomposing taxidermy diorama of life that is no longer living. And finally, the phrase that I want to use as a baton to pass it back to you. You say a great interview is a fixity that hints at a fluidity and contours a continuity.

Maria:

So, well, I mean, I agree with all of that. I, you know, the reason I personally don't really do many interviews is precisely this awful straitjacket feeling of being trapped in a version of yourself that you once were that somehow becomes this fossil in the museum of culture that is, you know, continually revisited even though you've outgrown it. It's interesting, though, because in a way, I mean, we're going to be talking about books.

And in a way, the self is a kind of book that is constantly being reread and rewritten by the person living with it, you know. And I think a great book you reread is rereadable. You revisit many times and each time you bring a different self to it.

And so it's a different book. And with the self, too, I just. I don't know.

I am such a fan of not a fan. I'm such a believer in the fact that the self is this narrative structure that we create as we live in order to feel coherent to ourselves. But it's so important to to keep outgrowing those past self.

Right.

Neil:

Mm hmm. Mm hmm. I love that the interview being a fossil in the museum of culture.

The self being a kind of book. And then since we're starting the conversation, we're starting an interview, one that you and I really appreciate you doing this because I know you don't do many because I went and searched for you on podcasts. And of course, what comes up are the 10 year old conversations you've had with Tim Ferriss.

But, you know, you say a great interview is a fixity that hints at a fluidity and contours a continuity. And so you I know you consume a lot of interviews. I know you listen to a lot of them.

What makes a great one?

Maria:

Hmm. Honestly, I used to. I don't right now.

My life has become much more introverted over the years, much more kind of. I don't consume much contemporary stuff, to put it that way, including podcasts and interviews. But the ones that have always spoken to me, whether they were conducted, you know, this month or a century ago, have an element of a conversation with a person who is a self, but is able to touch on things that reach beyond the self that are universal, that endure, that will survive them.

Which is, of course, what a great book does, too.

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah, I like that. I appreciate that.

And thank you. I guess I was I'm quoting probably an old interview of you where I heard you talking about the podcast you listen to. But I love that you don't listen to a lot of contemporary stuff.

And, you know, before we jump into your three most formative books, I did pull out a number of quotes that you have said or written about writing or reading. And so, I mean, I have two pages of them, but I thought I could maybe use three of them to kick off the conversation. I'm going to present them to you.

You can expand, explain, elucidate them as you see fit or our guest in Chapter 75, George Sonder says you could also deny them. I know you're a George Saunders fan, so I thought I'd mentioned that funny phrase.

Maria:

I love George Saunders. Oh, my God. The living are not my forte, but of the living writers, I just what a creature.

Maria:

What an incredible writer. What a beautiful human being.

Neil:

Oh, yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah, we're speaking the same language.

Yeah, he is just an incredible heart and mind. So a few quotes that you have said about reading. First off, I'm going to start with your one that you've said many times.

So I know it's a repeat for you. But just to give our listeners a little context, you say literature is the original Internet.

Maria:

Yes. Yes, of course. Every every allusion in a piece of writing is a kind of hyperlink to some other thing outside it. Right. Some idea or prior book. Every footnote is a hyperlink.

But it's really, you know, if if the Internet is the original or literature is the original Internet. The mind is the original literature, because that's just how our minds work. There are these meshes of association, and it's impossible to tell any story without those fractal branches that touch on other stories.

Neil:

Yes, yes, the mind is the original literature. Yes, I love that.

Maria:

Well, of course, in our technologies of thought will always mirror the structure of the mind. I mean, literature is just the technology of thought and feeling. It's supposed to be an analog.

Neil:

Oh, that's beautiful. And so obvious once I hear you say it. But yes, yes, yes.

Unbelievable. Here's another quote that you said if I quoted you properly. The very notion of intellectual property is so bizarre.

The law is taxing our cultural understanding of authorship. Semicolon, it is not conducive to evolving it.

Maria:

Oh, I see what I was trying to say, I think.

Maria:

Which is basically this notion of originality, right? That that 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 born with knowledge. And in fact, in recent years, so I must have said this some years ago and 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, right? And so without appropriation, there could be no learning. Right.

And out of that comes everything we create. Everything we create comes out of the library and 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:

And anyway, I just think it's the fundamental like behavior of the mirror neurons in our brain.

Maria:

Exactly.

Neil:

And I, yeah, and there was a dot, dot, dot. And that quote was just to fill it in for people listening. You had said property ownership is a very antiquated way to think about our sharing culture, which is how we actually interact with ideas.

So exactly as you had expanded on it. And then one last quote, well, I got two more, but here's one. You said, I have a tattoo on my right arm that I see every day that reminds me what to focus on.

And I thought this was interesting because I, of course, looked up a photo of you, tried to find the tattoo, found this one with a series of 20 to 30 dark concentric circles around a word I couldn't read and the phrase what to focus on on top.

Maria:

So here's a little instruction for you to not read decade old interviews because that has since been covered up.

Maria:

And in fact, in fact, I mean, I think it's funny, but it's also poignant because tattoos are such an emblem of this tension. We're always living with the illusion of continuity of self, this ridiculous idea that what you like and want at a point in time will endure until the day you die. And we are so internally persuaded at the time.

Of course, that's why people make marriage vows. I mean, they believe them, you know? But the fact that most tattoos and that is a statistic, most tattoos people get either removed or covered up is just the ultimate concrete embodied testament to how inconstant the self is, how much it evolves.

And in fact, I think if we're not, I see this often to younger friends, if we're not a little bit embarrassed of the people we used to be, we're kind of not doing it right.

Neil:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, I can't even listen to the first five years of this podcast, but I'm sure I can't, won't be able to listen to this in a few years.

And I've never got a tattoo. And when people ask me why, I say, I don't know what I would, I don't know what I would like forever. I always say that, you know, so it's just to that exact point.

Maria:

Well, you're ahead of the common curve of enlightenment there.

Neil:

Well, I don't know. I know you're making me feel that way now. And then the story, the only last phrase on reading that I wanted to pull up because it is also the title of a book you put together that took you eight years where you collected essays from people like Neil Gaiman and Jane Goodall and Yo-Yo Ma.

And you paired them with art created by people like Debbie Milliman and Oliver Jeffers is the title of the book you put out was called A Velocity of Being. And I would just ask you to expand on that phrase for us in regards to reading.

Maria:

So these are not essays, they're letters. They're letters to children. So I asked, I think it's 121 people, interesting, original people from all walks of life, musicians, writers, artists, philosophers, to write to children about why we read, what it does for us and how it shapes the life and so forth.

And the title comes from just phrases from two of the letters. One was by Pamela Paul, who was at the time the editor of New York Times Book Review talking about literature and reading as a state of being. And the other one is from Jan 11, who's an astrophysicist and a writer writing about reading where the wild things are to her young son and the velocity of the story.

And the velocity of the boy's attention. And so I combined the two and I thought that was a perfect phrase for what reading at its best, literature at its best feels like. It is a velocity of being.

Neil:

I just loved that phrase so much, A Velocity of Being. A wonderful way for us to begin with a little series of appetizers of Maria Popova's quotes on reading. Before we jump into her three slash four, most formative books.

For each book, Maria, that you've given us, I will take a few seconds to try to describe the book to our listeners as if they're holding it in a bookstore. And then I'm going to ask you to tell us about your relationship with it. And then I have a few follow-up questions for each one.

Maria:

Okay, but let me say something first because you said to pick books that feel important to my life right now.

Maria:

Formative is a different matter because the books that formed me when I was 20 were very different. So I picked things that are very meaningful to me as I am living my life right now. But I would be wary of calling them formative.

Neil:

Okay, that's fine. I appreciate that context. And it kind of relates to the tattoo conversation, right?

As I dug up and unearthed many places where you talk about books, I came across these titles occasionally and many others in many different ways. And I'm sure if we had a reconnection down the road, there would be other titles. And that is the sort of way of the world and the way of the show.

So yeah, it's a bit of a gimmicky premise, but I was modeling it a bit after Desert Island Discs, right? But for books. And so in a sense, it was kind of like, I just didn't want to ask people, what are your three favorite books?

I just wanted to ask them, in some sense, what has stuck with you, right? And people can interpret that as they will. Should be noted by the way that when I emailed Edward Packard, the creator of Choose Your Own Adventure, this question, what are your three most formative?

He wrote back a list of about 20 questions asking to me to clarify that question.

Maria:

Yes, of course. I appreciate it. It implies a chronology, right?

Because when you actually think about what's most formative to a person's mind and imagination, everyone has to say children's books, whatever was read to them early in life, those are the first impressions we received. So technically, those are the most formative.

Neil:

Right, right, right. Just by definition of being, yeah, kind of enabling a worldview that you don't even can, you might not even be able to perceive anymore. Right.

Okay. Well, we'll go with the ones that have stuck with you today and the ones that you carry with you now.

Maria:

One of which is a children's book.

Neil:

One of which is a children's book. But let us begin with, if we don't mind, let's begin with Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. So this book was originally published in 1855, but continued to be expanded.

Maybe hinting at our conversation so far until a ninth edition was published on his deathbed in 1892. Many covers on this one, the original one had no author name or publisher name, just to steal engraving of Whitman himself as the frontispiece, if I'm saying that phrase, right? My 1994 used everyman edition is a painting of Whitman with a long white beard and a straw hat with crisscross suspenders and a rowboat.

So there's many different covers of Leaves of Grass, but you can picture whichever one you want. Walt Whitman is an American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist who lived from 1819 to 1892, often considered the most influential American poet and the father of free verse. After working as a clerk, teacher, journalist, and laborer, he wrote his masterpiece, Leaves of Grass, pioneering free verse poetry and a humanistic celebration of humanity.

So it focuses on his philosophy of life and humanity and praises nature and the individual human's role on it. Rather than focusing on religious or spiritual matters, Leaves of Grass focuses primarily on the body and the material world. The poems do not rhyme or follow standard rules for meter and line length.

He chose his idealized self as the subject of the book. For Dewey Decimalhead's out there, you can file this one to 811.3 for literature slash American poetry slash middle 19th century. Maria, please tell us about your relationship with Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.

Neil:

Yes, wonderful. Just one little footnote. Elizabeth Barrett Browning kind of pioneered free verse a decade before Whitman was born.

Maria:

So I would be wary of giving him credit for that one. But he was a pioneer in so many other ways. And even the Francis Beast you mentioned in the original edition up to that point, poets were pictured, you know, buttoned up under starched shirts and looking all serious.

And there he is with his unbuttoned peasant-like sexy stance, his hipscocked, his straw hat. I mean, nobody had done that before in poetry. And it's very consonant with the spirit of the book, which is the challenge what a poet is and what a poet is tasked with being.

I am a latecomer to poetry. I dismissed it for the reasons that people dismiss anything, which is that they are not literate in it. They don't understand it.

We are wired to discount what we do not understand. And I was very lucky to meet a wonderful woman named Emily Levine, who is a philosopher of science, comedian, incredible poetry lover who had gone to school for poetry. And we met across the aisle on the transatlantic flight.

And we became great friends. She was in her 70s. I was in my 20s.

And she opened my world to poetry. She educated me, essentially. And eventually, after she died, I made my way to Leaves of Grass.

In part because, I mean, it is very consonant with my orientation to the world. It's very much about the exuberance of life and meeting reality on its own terms, and decentralizing the human from the natural world. But I also loved the kind of meta-layered that the fact that Whitman basically spent his entire life rewriting Leaves of Grass.

So by the deathbed edition, it had quadrupled in size. He had expanded many of the poems. He had purified them in a way, making them more authentically himself.

For example, in the early edition, he had some female pronouns in the love poems, then to change them to male pronouns, which is also what Emily Dickinson did, by the way. And I just love the idea that Leaves of Grass is essentially a field guide to how to be a living poem in your life.

Neil:

Oh, that's interesting. A field guide to how to be a living poem.

Maria:

I mean, he was one, right? Whitman was a living poem. And the book was just the byproduct of his personhood.

I do this little ritual that I learned from someone. So I started as a side project when I was become a very big part of my life. I do this show called The Universe Inverse, which is now actually a book, where I trojan hoarse some serious science into people's lives through poetry.

So I tell stories from the history of science, about different discoveries, and phenomena, and then I invite different people to read a poem that somehow illustrates whatever I'm talking about scientifically. So one year, I had invited a lovely man named John Cameron Mitchell, who's a musician and kind of musical guy. He created Hedwick and the Angry Inch, the musical.

And I had asked him to read a Whitman poem. And so he gets up on stage and he says, I'm going to do a Whitman divination. And he calls out to the audience to ask a question, any question.

And from the side, one of the other performers, the poet Marie Howe, was kind of the Whitman of her time. She had just lost a friend and she calls out, how do you live brokenhearted? So John takes leaves of grass and kind of rolls the pages like a card deck and opens to random pages with his eyes closed, lets his finger fall in a random verse.

So that's apparently what a Whitman divination is and reads that verse. And it was the most perfect, succinct, timeless consolation for Marie's question. So every year on my birthday, I perform a Whitman divination for myself where I ask the most urgent, restless question that is on my mind.

And I do that kind of shuffle the pages with my eyes closed and open to random page and my finger falls in a verse. And Neil, every time, whatever Whitman has to say is the perfect answer. And there's nothing mystical about this.

This is really just a testament to what a great poem does, which is that it comes from a very personal place. If you wrote those poems from some extremely personal region of experience, then it zooms way out to the universal so that it's broad enough to be a perfect answer to pretty much any question. But then somehow, it gives you back, you the reader back something deeply precise and personal out of the universal.

And that's so hard to do. That is what a great poem does.

Neil:

Oh my gosh. That's unbelievable. I had that feeling, I will say, like the way I read Leaves of Grass was I've kept flipping it.

I mean, I kept flipping it open. I kept flipping it open and finding random poems, finding random lines and reading them and feeling the resonance. And then I wouldn't read the next one.

I would just flip it open again, you know, and kind of jump in and out that way.

Maria:

This is to this notion of being a living poem. Maybe I would love to read to the little fragment of the long preface, prose preface, to the original edition, which is one of my favorite pieces of writing of all time. There's a little paragraph where he talks about what this will give you.

May I read it?

Neil:

Oh my gosh, please. Anytime you want to read to us, we will say yes.

Maria:

Great. So he writes, This is what you shall do. Love the earth and the sun and the animals.

Despise riches. Give alms to everyone that asks. Stand up for the stupid and crazy.

Devote your income and labor to others. Hate tyrants. Argue not concerning God.

Have patience and indulgence toward the people. Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men. Go freely with powerful, uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families.

Read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life. Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book. Dismiss whatever insults your own soul and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

Neil:

Wow. There's so much there to take in and to feel.

Maria:

Probably the best instruction on life that I know. This little fragment of the 1855 preface.

Neil:

Wow. Wow. Wow.

Thank you so much for sharing that with us. I love the way you call and piece together lines and people from all over the place. I saw a gift you have that you do so well on The Marginalian. I thought I might bring a question in here from Seth Godin for you specifically. I heard you call. And yeah, I heard you say in the 2015 interview to almost 10 years old again on on being where you said you love his mind.

And so I reached out to him and I said, you know, this Maria picked leaves of grass by Walt Whitman. Do you have a question for her? And he writes to you, Maria is one of the smartest, coolest, most erudite people I know.

She's indefatigable if I said that right in her pursuits of knowledge and dignity and she does streb. Streb, that's nuts. She does her work without ever dumbing down the work.

I guess if I have a question, it is, is a passion for art projects a skill? Or is it something we're born with? If it is a skill, how do we teach it to others?

And side note, I'd also like to know what's streb is.

Maria:

Streb is Elizabeth Streb, who's a kind of hardcore choreographer, has a studio. In Brooklyn, that half of it is her dance studio and the other half, which is the half I do is trapeze, flying trapeze. So I have taken off flying trapeze.

Yeah, that is a wild card for me too. But it is one of the most profound, joyful, existential things I have ever done. Anyway, this side, well, nothing's to the side of anything.

Everything's one thing. Okay, the question is a passion is passion for our skill. Yeah, it's interesting that he says the passion for art is that the skill?

So the he's not saying the making of art because there's a whole region of reality between having the passion for something and putting it into the world, right? I think the passion to create this drive, this life force is hardwired in us. It is part of our drive for connection.

And we create as a kind of hand outstretched in the dark for another hand. And that's why anyone makes anything, I think. So I think the passion is completely there.

It might get covered up by conditioning, by fear, by people telling you you're not allowed or you're not worthy or no one wants to hear from you. Those are superimposed over the thing that's already there. I think the teachable part is how to own your passions, in a practical sense, make them a priority, which is the prerequisite for making them a reality.

And in a psychological sense, how to give yourself the self-permission to pursue them. And those things can be teachable.

Neil:

How to give yourself permission, how to make space for them, how to see that you have that internal artist inside you. You said it matter of factly, but a lot of people, of course, would not see themselves as someone who is passionate or connected to the arts, although I agree with you in the statement.

Maria:

Well, I mean, I use art and the broadest, broadest, broadest definition there is, which is leaving something of sweetness and substance in the world.

Neil:

Oh, I like that. Art is leaving something of sweetness and substance in the world.

Maria:

And my mind seems to the point about appropriation. As I was saying this, I was like, this sounds like a poem. I think this might be, it might have imprinted me from a line from an Annabelle Kaufman poem.

Maybe called Cold Solace. I might be paraphrasing, but anyway, it's just such an interesting meta-observation of the mind, literally doing the thing I was talking about.

Neil:

Oh, yeah, that's beautiful.

Maria:

It took something and appropriated in the context of my own experience and understanding.

Neil:

I also just want to point out for people that have not visited The Marginalian, which was of course called Brain Pickings for the first 15 years now. I believe that you're in your 17th year as a marginalian. You know, it has, oh, 18th now, and it has pop-ups.

But of course, the pop-ups on your site are poems. I thought you could use a poem today. It's a beautiful way to kind of interject and go against the grain of what is so normal on internet behavior, which is like getting pummeled with ads and skipping and waiting for the countdown to get to two seconds.

It's nice to just be interjected with a poem. I thought I'd also ask you on Whitman about queer culture. Walt Whitman was called by the advocate, a queer pioneer, and there are a lot of popular blog posts online with titles like Leaves of Grass, Just the Gay Parts.

Around Lit Hub, there's this really wonderful, thoughtful post written by Mark Doty, D-O-T-Y, the Booker Award-winning- He has a great book about Whitman and desire and queerness. Well, this is why I was gonna, I thought you'd be the perfect person to ask because he wrote the question of homoeroticism in Leaves of Grass, but also you wrote on The Marginalian. Walt Whitman, Bohemian Dandy, the story of America's first gay bar and its creative coterie. And I thought you might help us color in this connection to queer culture, which, you know, wasn't well established in print in any form back when in 1855 Leaves of Grass was first published.

Maria:

Well, okay, a few things about that. First of all, since whenever that was written, I have spent the last four years deeply immersed in Whitman's world. I have a very large book coming out next year, of which he's a big part.

I would say he takes up maybe 200 pages. And in the course of that, I read every biography that exists of him, which there are seven good ones. Every one of his surviving notebooks, every single word he ever published.

And it was a joy and a real sense of intimacy with this long ago person, you know, I will say about the queer question. First of all, oh, God, I am so wary of using ahistorical terms to talk about people in history because of course that whole notion didn't even exist at the time.

Neil:

Right, right.

Maria:

And when we do that, we're kind of flattening how difficult it was to live without certain permissions and containers that we now have and take for granted. But on the other hand, I will say, I find as a, you know, quote unquote, queer person myself, I find identity the least interesting thing about people, actually identity and opinion. Those are the two least interesting things about people.

And unfortunately, we live now at a time in an era of identities and opinions being kind of the frontline of personhood. And that's like not interesting to me. But what is true of Whitman and his, the life of his heart is that, I mean, people have always struggled to love whom they want it to love.

Whether it's same sex or not, I mean, this is the history of humanity, the difficulty of loving, you know, and it happens that he loved outside the conventional forms of his time and place, which made it harder. But the reason his poems endure, you know, a lot of his poems are actually love poems. The reason they endure is that that is the universal struggle.

Whatever your identity, this core thing, whether we call it spirit or soul that is so much deeper than identity, which is a costume for the soul, right? For him, that was the epicenter and that is what he struggled with. And he, so he did write a sequence of poems in Leaves of Grass.

This was in the, it appears for the first time in the second edition called the Calamus poems. Calamus is the, this very like, phallic blossom of a plan that's native to Long Island, which is where he was born. And they, it's the first time where he addresses his love poems to men and he writes pretty clearly about same-sex desire and eros.

But the wonderful thing about Whitman, which is so counter-cultural even today, is that he just didn't let any one of his desires or qualities or aspects define him. He was just so vast and he didn't, I just, I say all this because I think he would have so bristled to be called queer, to be called anything that is a kind of container, you know, that is a classification because he tried his whole life to live as wide as the sky.

Neil:

Yeah, and it's the antithesis of his famous I Contain Multitudes line. Do I contradict myself very well? I contradict myself.

I am vast. I contain multitudes. By the way, you said identity and opinion are the least interesting things about people.

May I ask what's on the opposite ends of the seesaw then for you?

Maria:

I think the most interesting things are the things that light us up, the things that are portals to wonder for us. And the thing about opinion is that it's based on certainty. To have an opinion is to have a certainty about something and wonder is the opposite of certainty.

Wonder is this openness to reality, whatever it may bring and without fear, right? And a lot of opinion is based on fear. A lot of identity is based on fear.

And I'm cutting out other things, defining yourself by what you are not. So for example, I don't subscribe to religion as such, but the term atheist literally defines me by what I am not, not a theist. And I find those things very limiting.

I think ultimately it is what we love that shapes us. And there is so much to love in this world and about this world.

Neil:

What we love shapes us and there's so much there is to love about the world. I love that. I love that.

Thank you for opening that up. I just love listening to you speak. You have such a...

You speak like you write. It's just wonderful to listen to. I wanted to ask you about anonymity and privacy.

It maybe relates a little bit to what your thoughts are on beauty, but you know, obviously we mentioned that he originally self-published this and it was anonymous. I know there was a stealing agreement, but there was no name. He paid for it himself.

It should be noted. He self-published I think 735 copies. It failed, you know.

And then he got this five page letter of congratulations from Ralph Waldo Emerson. He's famously considered the inventor of the book Blurb after printing an excerpt from that letter on the book Spine. And maybe think two questions.

Number one, on anonymity, you're also pretty anonymous. We are doing this podcast audio only. Both of us prefer that envelope of intimacy, but also we're not going to be posting a video of us talking for two hours on YouTube.

You don't share photos of yourself. I don't think on your blog at all or on social media and you don't refer. I didn't find, you know, to your partner's name or your relationship, you know, your relationships, etc.

I just wondered how you think about anonymity in the world today versus being public. Do you have views on what's happening with privacy? I was really curious to ask you this because, you know, high level we are eroding privacy rapidly.

Um, many people I talk to don't care about this. They don't have nothing to hide. You know, that sort of kind of quick come back to the erosion of privacy.

Whereas I feel like this, I feel like it's breaking my heart to like see privacy going away. I mean, this just ruins the ability of us to just navigate freely and openly without surveillance. That's how I feel.

But I wondered how you feel as someone who like Whitman remains fairly anonymous, despite being pretty public.

Maria:

Hmm, what a beautiful question that's so layered now. First of all, Whitman had a huge, huge ego. He took that line from Emerson's letter without Emerson's consent, put it on the spine of the next edition.

Emerson was furious, did not talk to him for two years. It was like a real act of self-promotion. And he was the second most photographed person in America in the 19th century after Frederick Douglass.

So he really wanted to put himself out there. But he did contain multitudes. He was also himself.

He was also entirely himself in every aspect of his being, including this kind of grandiose public-facing thing that seems so at odds with the humility of his poems. For me, well, I think we're talking about slightly different things. Anonymity is not the same thing as privacy, is not the same thing as secrecy, which is what people talk about when they say I have nothing to hide.

I am definitely not anonymous. I mean, my work has been out there for two decades, you know, and I have shared so much with the world as me. The privacy part, I guess I'm just not, I have always made what I want to read.

You know, the reason my side doesn't have ads, never has, is that I don't enjoy ads on the internet. And why would I make something with something that repulses me? And similarly, I don't enjoy this part of why I don't do interviews.

I'm not that interested in talking about myself, which is I'm interested now for us to talk about the books. And I do find it interesting to have people's selfies up there. I've posted, I think, one selfie ever, which was a public service other people with curly hair, how to make a shower cap out of a hotel trash bag when you are, right.

Maria:

I felt the urgency, it felt urgently important to share this demo with the world.

Maria:

But anyway, the premise, I think it's interesting because I write from a deeply personal place, even if it seems like it's about abstract ideas and kind of more in the essay form, which deals with more universal things or more kind of external things. But I have very close relationships in my life, people who have, with whom I have a great deal of emotional and psychological intimacy. And they read what I write and know exactly what I'm talking about from my private life through these kind of degrees of abstraction removed.

And so in that way, I'm just an open, I can be read like an open book by people who have the context, right, because knowledge is always contextual. So I find it interesting. I mean, the conversation on the internet about privacy has to do with data and reducing human beings to data.

I think you can have all the data on someone, their geolocation, their biometric and have no clue about their soul.

Neil:

Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah, we're constantly quantifying something that is hard, is impossible to quantify, right? That the sort of the human heart and the human spirit and the human soul and then we reduce it down to data.

And that's what we measure and we think that we know somebody or we try to cajole or push behavior. And this is the part I am more sensitive to after reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. I'm sensitive to how much of our day by day behaviors are controlled without our awareness of them.

That's the part I get worried about. But she calls it the right to the future tense, to think is a great way to put it.

Maria:

Right to the future tense?

Neil:

Yeah, the right to the future tense. Who has the right to your future tense? I'll send you a wonderful essay afterwards.

I can link to it afterwards. I have it on my blog.

Neil:

I would love to read and it's also relevant to the Hannah Arendt that we're going to be talking about.

Neil:

That's what I have up next. Yeah, the right to the future tense. Yeah, I'm going to send that to you after by Shoshana Zuboff.

It's the opening of I believe chapter eight or chapter 10 for a wonderful book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. But I love that idea that we don't know the soul. And I had a couple of questions about ads on the marginalian. But I'm going to pocket those for now. I was just going to ask you in 18 years if your reasons for doing no ads and donation based support have changed at all. You know, we're tying that to Whitman being self promotional.

Is it still because you don't enjoy ads on the internet? But now, you know, arguably you have this gigantic multi-million person international platform for you to say no to ads today. Obviously, it has a different opportunity cost than it used to when you started.

Maria:

Honestly, I haven't even thought about it. I haven't even thought about it. I'm so profoundly not interested that there's nothing.

There's nothing it can give me. I mean, I, you know, I'm so lucky that I received directly from my readers everything I need, roofs over my head, books in my bookshelf, food on my table. I'm not lacking for anything.

And I just don't see the point of doing something that I find repugnant. The other thing too is I have watched. I mean, one of the things that happens when you're on the internet since, you know, the dawn of social media.

I mean, when I started, there were no blogs as such. There was a very rudimentary platform called Blogger. But anyway, when I started, what was that called?

Neil:

Yeah, 2006, right?

Maria:

Right. I was hard coding every issue, literally putting it up and removing the old one manually every Friday for the first couple of years. And then, you know, things started happening slowly.

I migrated to a publishing platform, but I watched all around. Things emerged. MySpace, YouTube, Tumblr, and the commodification of cultural material, which we now call content.

I mean, if we step back for a second to consider that, that is heartbreaking. Calling someone's labor of thought and love content. And the reason is that it fills the containers that we sell, which are ads.

I mean, everything is a commodity. And look at what we've done to music. We really, really fucked up with music.

Musicians are now commercial vehicles for selling apps and subscription services. And, you know, the actors now with the strike are crying, crying, trying to turn it around and save themselves from that fate. I hope they manage.

I hope they manage. I think writers are next. And for me, it's never been worth it being reduced to content because in watching what happened over those two decades, I saw publications of substance become more and more diluted into no longer creating, you know, thought, sensibility standards, but catering to kind of lowest common denominator in order to be popular and to sell and clickbait.

And, you know, legitimate magazines that have been around for a century watching their titles become more and more clickbait in order to do well on the internet. You know, conferences that were the kind of front line of really daring ideas become self-help and trailers for, you know, uncompelling books. And it's just heartbreaking to me.

And it's never been interesting to me going that route.

Neil:

I love that. I relate to you. My spirit was so in line with yours in 2008 when I started my first kind of big public blog called A Thousand Awesome Things.

Over the four years I ran that website, I had 100 million hits. I never put ads on it. This show, 3 Books, has no ads, no commercials, no sponsors, no interruptions.

Maria:

Well, this is a big reason I agreed to do this foundation by the way, because Debbie told me.

Neil:

Yeah, you can see out no ads. Well, I be unlike you. I wrestle.

I guess the difference between me and you is I wrestle with it. I'm like, you know, I have the pangs of it occasionally, but I like the deep kind of place your your clarity of thought comes from. And I'm going to keep channeling that because from 2008 into now, you know, we're talking in 2024, a lot has changed, including the pressures on writers and interviewers and, you know, people like us who are feel the music what's happened to the music industry is so true.

And I don't know if anyone could have stopped it. You know, the forces were very strong to change the way people bought albums. Now nobody buys the album, but people pay seven hundred dollars for a concert.

It's like totally weirdly out of whack.

Maria:

I mean, it's interesting. I mean, I do want to say two things. One is that part of part of I do it the way I do it primarily for me, but I'm also looking back on the history of culture.

I see how important the power of modeling is modeling possibility, you know, seeing someone do something you didn't think was possible makes you feel like it's more possible. And I do want to be the kind of test case for it working when it's a kind of cultural commons and not a consumerist thing when young people are thinking about how to support their work. Maybe turn to the community, you know, maybe don't turn to the overlords of Silicon Valley and whatnot.

But the other thing I should say is that I have some enormous privilege in being able to do that, which is that I have no dependence. I grew up poor, which means I'm not afraid of being poor. I mean, I'm not poor.

I'm so lucky to have made a life for myself when I'm financially really well off compared to, you know, how I got to America, which is having nothing, you know. But I think that gave me a real edge that many of my peers, even back in college when I started didn't have, which is that when you're accustomed to having very little, that's just your life, you know, like it's not scary if something fails because you're used to doing well with not much. And so I think that's an enormous privilege to just have that edge of fear taken off by experience to see that you're okay, you know, generally speaking.

I mean, obviously, there are extremes of lack, which I'm very lucky never could have had. But in this kind of middle ground, it's a real privilege to be unafraid of flopping, basically.

Neil:

Yeah, well, I think that's a beautiful call. But, you know, so you did an interview in 2024 this year, a recent one with Brooklyn Magazine, the podcast, and you said, I quote, I ate store brand canned tuna, low sodium, and oatmeal three times a day, which I figured was the most nutritious combo for the cheapest amount. And I said that was one of four jobs you're working at the time.

And together by doing that, you saved $400 for a night class to teach yourself programming, just so people know, you know, the origins of which you speak.

Maria:

Let's not get over-inflating the personal myth. It wasn't programming. It was basic HTML and CSS coding just so I could make a website.

This is before blogging. I cannot program. I wish I could.

Neil:

I love that background and that thoughtfulness. Just so, you know, so people that don't know, if you go to visit The Marginalian., you are never bombarded with ads. You're given poetry.

You're given, you know, these wonderful, thoughtful, and I won't call them book reviews, but like annotated readings, so many reflections and so many kind of mixing pieces of art. And on the side, it says, you know, donating equals loving. And people can donate, you know, I think there's $3 a month or $5 a month or $7 a month in different ways.

You have to make it very easy for people to sign up, very easy for people to sign off. Are there any principles you might share for those who are looking for a non-ad-based way of putting their stuff out into the world? Any principles that you have learned over the 18 years that make that type of request more comfortable or easier for people to do?

I just, I'm asking, obviously, partly for me, I just don't know how to do that to the community in a way that feels good for everybody, you know?

Maria:

Well, I think it's two parts. The first part is, make the thing you love that you want to see exist. Don't worry about who's going to like it.

And be prepared to keep making it for a while without any kind of support, you know? I think this kind of crowdfunding stuff is very helpful to people, but it does run the risk of making you try to make something fundable before you've actually made it and before you know who you are and what you want to do, you know?

Neil:

Right, right. Creation should precede the funding not the other way around.

Maria:

That if it's substantive enough, people will love it. People will connect with it, you know? And the thing is, so this part one is do that and be prepared to take time.

I mean, Debbie says anything worthwhile takes a long time. And it's actually true. I mean, for the first maybe seven years of my project, it didn't pay for itself.

I had to work jobs. I had to do other things, you know? And then nothing changed.

I just kept showing up every day, every single day. I did what I loved and believed in and somehow it tipped over. It was incremental.

There was no great, you know, nobody like discovered me or, you know, wasn't like that. It was just very incremental. So that's part one.

And then part two is, once you're kind of in the flow of what you're doing, just say honestly, see, this takes time. This takes thought. This takes technical, financial, spatial resources.

If you find joy in it and want to see it exist, consider helping. I don't think people understand. This is part of combating this notion of content, which, you know, Silicon Valley has trained the world to expect it to come for free.

And I don't think people realize what things take. Like, even my site at this point, just having it stay up, the server cost for me, because there's so many visitors, the server cost is like, probably the biggest expense of my life. Second to books.

I mean, books are also a huge expense. And I don't think people kind of necessarily get that.

Neil:

No, exactly. I share that. I share the cost of books.

Maria:

In audio and video, it's probably been more technically demanding to keep it up resource intensive.

Neil:

Yeah, and it's funny because my brain goes to the opposite place. I'm like, how do I maybe, you know, when we decided not to videotape this and just do audio, I was kind of relieved because I was like, I'm trying to because you know what? You know, I thought Maria, I was like, oh, good, I won't have to pay the video to edit video now for this.

Like, this is an extra cost and extra time and extra thing to review, right? So there's two ways. By the way, your first thing on the seven years, it just reminded me of Todd Hansen, our first editor ever of The Onion, America's Finest newspaper originally started in Wisconsin.

He was interviewed by Mike Sacks and asked how do you become a famous, you know, comedy writer and he said, do it for free for 10 years. That was his advice.

Maria:

I mean, that's the key to anything is how to be a poet does how to be anything.

Neil:

Do it for free for 10 years. Well, somebody who did a lot of work for free for a lot of years was Hannah Arendt. So let's transition now if we if we don't mind to your second book, which is Love and St. Augustine by Hannah Arendt. If I said that right, her last name is A-R-E-N-D-T. This book was originally published as a dissertation in German in 1929. And then in English, if I have right in 1996, it is a deep teal infused forest green background with a formal all capseriff white text reading Love and St. Augustine and can all capital letters with a design of some kind. You might you probably know what this is above and in the middle of it, like almost like a Roman drawing.

Maria:

I don't remember.

Neil:

Yeah, it's okay.

Maria:

It's touching that you give the cover design space because it is somebody thought of this. Somebody put work into this. Yeah.

Neil:

Yeah, and I want to feel like we're holding this book. Hannah Arendt, one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century, born to a Jewish family in 1906 in Prussia, now part of Germany. She died in 1975 in New York City.

She was raised in a politically progressive secular family in after high school. It's funny. I have that Jewish family and secular family both come up in the research here.

After high school, she studied and had a four year affair with Renan philosopher Martin Heidegger. H-E-I-D-E-G-G-E-R. All before getting her doctorate in philosophy in 1929 and writing her dissertation, this book, under another Renan philosopher, Karl Jaspers.

Her writing covers power, evil, politics, democracy, authority and totalitarianism. Maria, tell us about your relationship with Love in St. Augustine by Hannah Arendt.

Maria:

So, first of all, Hannah Arendt was kind of rediscovered, so to speak, by lay people who were outside the philosophy realm around the kind of Trump election because her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, suddenly read like this prophetic work. And so a lot of people got to know who she is, who had never heard of her before. But throughout the 20th century, she was one of the most renowned and influential, many of the term that I don't like, but it's correct, public intellectual.

And the astonishing thing about this book, so this was, as you said, I think you said that, it was her dissertation. It was amongst her papers, dormant for more than half a century, and it was posthumously rediscovered by these two American women. One was a philosopher and one was a political theorist.

And they essentially published Love and St. Augustine in English for the first time in the 90s, I want to say. She died in 1975. Yeah, so it's been dead for a while.

The extraordinary thing about it is that she was 23 years old when she wrote it, but it has such intellectual rigor and such passion. And it's also a book about love by a person who went on to be the most analytical, kind of coolly intellectual mind, you know, and she wrote it while she was in love with Heidegger, who, by the way, such an interesting character. One of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century joined the Nazi party.

She was Jewish. And then this is kind of why now he's sidelined and dismissed. But I think what most people under appreciate is that he performed one of the hardest things in culture, especially today, which is to change your mind in public.

So he eventually left the Nazi party and was like, I don't know what I was thinking. This is the worst mistake of my life. And that part is not, I mean, he could have been more public about it.

He was, he did it. And he, you know, anyway, it doesn't matter. The point is, it's very complicated.

And the relationship between the two was therefore very complicated, but very, very formative for her ideas and informed this book on St. Augustine, which is really, I mean, it's about love, but it's really about time. It's about presence. It's about how to live with the fundamental fear of loss, which is, of course, something that makes you vacate the present in favor of the future.

I mean, all fear is future based. And like about what will happen, even if it's in the immediate future and like the next second, but it's still not present. And she just writes so beautifully.

She, at one point she writes, fearlessness is what love seeks. Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by expected events in the future. Hence, the only valid tense is the present, the now.

I mean, how countercultural is that?

Neil:

Yeah, yeah. And so hard to do with the brains we have, but that's where happiness resides, right?

Maria:

And she draws, I mean, it is called Love in St. Augustine because it's really a conversation with St. Augustine's confession. So she does with his book what I do with every book I write about, which is essentially the extended marginalia on the book. It's her writing.

Her writing is the dialogue with Augustine across the centuries in the margins of his books.

Neil:

And Augustine, for those that don't know, is a Roman African 4th century philosopher who is, I think was ruling in what is kind of present day Morocco at the time, but the far outskirts of the Roman Empire in the 4th century. There's a phrase, Amor Mundi. Have you heard this phrase?

A phrase used by Augustine, Yes, the love of the world. Borrows, which means love of the world. I wanted to ask what that phrase maybe means to you.

Maria:

I mean, in an interesting way, that's entirely what Whitman wrote about, right? Leaves of grass is one great chorus of Amor Mundi. It is, I think, our highest calling is to love the world.

To love the world as it is and as we are.

Neil:

I like that. Our highest calling is to love the world as it is and as we are.

Maria:

And I don't mean that in the sense of resignation because so much of the creative force in us is to keep bridging the world as it is and the world as we think it should be, right? This is kind of what idealism is and optimism and the idea that things can always be better. And I don't mean it in the way of, oh, we should just sort of accept things as they are, but I mean, really love the world, meet reality on its own terms because only then can we figure out where to go next and how to do it with compassion and integrity and humility and all those things.

Neil:

Yeah, you have such a beautifully broad way of perceiving reality and life. It's so counter-cultural and to how I, you know, how most of us are, I feel constricted by the world as presented to me. And so it's such a, it's a nice place to live to be in these bigger and vaster feelings that of course, you are partly drawing from from these wonderful works.

Hunter Arendt, by the way, died in 1975, as you mentioned. So 49 years ago, making her the youngest of your three most formative authors. And of course, I will also include Antoine the Saint Experean here for The Little Prince, which is the book that has been repeated on our list, but he died in 1944.

My point is, you studied dead people like very closely. You've read more letters and diaries and memoirs than anybody I know. Certainly, almost perhaps anybody, you know, everybody you study was alive at that time, but I'm curious from your perspective of studying things that are long gone, what we can learn from the dead or said another way.

What are those who are now long gone trying to tell us most of all today?

Maria:

Most of all, that we too will one day be dead, and we might as well make something beautiful and meaningful in this sliver of space climb that we've been allotted. The strangest thing about the human experience, the strangest thing is that we know, we know cerebrally that we are finite and we're transient. But how we live our days, how we spend our time, there's this real denial of death and of our own mortality.

I mean, imagine that every day you woke up with the acute awareness in every cell of your body that this is it. What are the decisions you would make? And it's not so much that I'm called to the dead as such.

It's that, well, it's two separate things. One is that I do think prior times have things to teach us about what we have relinquished that may still be recoverable. So other ways of being present, other ways of relating to one another, you know, the extraordinary loss of nuance that we're experiencing now in this culture, maybe there are ways to remind ourselves that actually there are other ways of being and other ways of seeing that are worth recovering.

The other thing is very basic kind of psycho-emotional self-help, which is that there is real consolation in knowing that others, especially others you admire, have lived through what you lived through. And there's this wonderful, how does it go? It's wonderful James Baldwin's passage from one of his essays where he says, you think your pain and suffering are unique in the history of the world and then you read.

And it's so true. I mean, all these books that I read and write about I have reached for in order to find consolation for something I'm going through, to find perspective or a different angle or sympathy or consonants or whatever, an antidote to the loneliness of a lot of these experiences. I mean, even the basic, the most fundamental human yearning love is an incredibly lonely experience actually from the inside.

And it has helped me greatly to turn to these time-tested, almost foreclosed, because the thing with the dead is that you know how their lives turned out. There's not going to be the open-endedness and uncertainty and fear that we carry in our own lives, not knowing how it's all going to end up. You know how it ended up for them.

And so there's consolation in that.

Neil:

Yeah, I love that. I travel with the Old Penguin Classics edition of On the Shortness of Life by Seneca in my suitcase at all times, partly because when I end up at a random hotel or motel with the anxious, riddled body of someone who's been traveling through airports and airplanes, I look at that book or flip it open and I just ground myself with it. Often while putting a lacrosse ball behind my back or my butt against the wall and the combination of both triggering my parasympathetic nervous system and getting my mind into a 2000-year-old book just relaxes me almost always.

Neil:

I have done that with Thoreau's journals over the years.

Maria:

This is one of the ones that was really formative for me maybe a decade ago, but I have carried it many places with me and done the exact same thing in airports and hotels and whatnot.

Neil:

By the way, Thoreau's journals were one of the three most formative books of a friend of yours, Austin Cleon. He named that as he flip-flopped between a few different kind of commentaries on Thoreau and he finally settled. He's like, I think it's actually the journal that I turn to most often.

Neil:

I'm not surprised.

Neil:

Yeah, and I found a lot of great blog posts that you'd written about him over the years. I wanted to ask you how we read hard books. I have to confess, partly nervous and intimidated for this conversation for many reasons, but one of which is that you're so erudite.

You have a wide expanse of intellect that is somewhat unnerving to touch up against because I'm worried about looking like an idiot. You know, so I found this book. Well, it's not a bad way.

Maria:

Well, thank you for saying that, but I will say first of all, I'm like the least educated person who's been on your show probably in terms of formal education.

Neil:

I don't think so.

Maria:

My only real gift is stubbornness. I think because I came to the U.S. with zero foundational knowledge of what my peers considered the classics, I didn't know where the range was, right? So, for example, I discovered a ridiculous term in the history of the world to begin with, but especially in this context, I discovered Susan Sontag at some point in my 20s, and I was convinced that every single American knew who she was and read every single word she had written.

I just assumed that. So I went on the Sontag binge, and apparently at some point I tipped over to the edge to the end of the spectrum where my peers were like, I've never heard of that. I've never read that, but I assumed they all knew that.

And so coming at it from this place of total beginner's mind, not even knowing what the parameters of erudition are, I think I kind of went so far out on some vectors. So I've read a lot about certain things and so little, so total ignorance of entire regions of culture, like I have zero pop culture knowledge, close to zero political knowledge. Which is all to say we have these minds that work in different ways that have enormous blind spots and thanks start us that we have each other to broaden each other's horizons.

Because even in this conversation, I've learned a number of things from you that I never would have before.

Neil:

Aw, well, that's the beauty of conversation, and it's true that everything we read is in exchange for reading everything else we could be reading at the same time.

Maria:

Exactly, back to the minitude.

Neil:

Exactly, well, that's kind of where I want to just poke at this a tiny bit because one thing I hear from 3 Books listeners, I call them three bookers, and they are book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians spread globally around the world. And one thing I hear from people is thanks to 3 Books, I picked up say Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker, I would never have heard of it if it was not for the conversation. And so I'm often finding that I bump up against books that are hard, challenging for me to read.

And other than sort of be smarter, I wondered what advice you might have for readers to read challenging books or books outside of their comfort zone. How do we intentionally curate and consume a nutritious reading diet?

Maria:

Well, that's a larger question about the very notion of comfort zones. So I am always curious about the tension between, am I resisting something because it is outside of my comfort zone, but it's in a direction of growth I would like to pursue and therefore I should push through the resistance and go there. Or am I resisting it out of self-knowledge and knowing that this is just not my kind of thing?

Neil:

Yeah, I'm not interested.

Maria:

Right, exactly. Like I have had this recently and I think part of growth is the self-acceptance of your parameters. I wouldn't call them limitations, but the things about you that are just part of who you are.

So I've had to accept this with dinner parties where for years I've pushed myself thinking this is what normal people do. I should enjoy it. I should grow in this way.

And finally last year I was like, you know what? Not for me. Just not interested.

Don't like it. Not going to do it anymore. And I think it takes experience to know what your limits are.

It takes a great sobriety of mind to know both your depths and your limits. And part of self-knowledge is finding that. So with reading, it's the same thing.

Let's say you start something that is feels cumbersome, feels heavy, feels just like an uphill, kind of Sisyphean experience. And in my experience, if you stick with it for a decent while and the feeling doesn't change, you should absolutely walk away from it. It's just not your thing.

Neil:

The five pages test or the 10 pages test or the 50 pages test I would say a little more than five.

Maria:

But it takes a while. But things that are difficult. Here's the rule of thumb.

And this is also true, for example, for relationships. Things that are difficult and get easier with time as you kind of harmonize and kind of learn the language and become immersed in this new world you're entering, which is when you read a book, you enter a world. When you enter a relationship with a person, you enter a world.

If the difficulty subsides and the joy increases as time goes by, that is a good signal that just stick with it and push through the remaining discomforts and there will be a reward on the other side. If the difficulty increases and the heaviness and the friction increase, get out. Close the book, lead the relationship, just get out.

Neil:

Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot because I do find in our culture we have this bias, partly the Steven Pressfield war of art type of thinking, which I did and do subscribe to in some sense, but that it's fear if I don't do it. And what you're sort of saying is it might be or it might be a self-aware boundary that you might have.

Not everything like the dinner party is fear-based. It might just be that you don't like dinner parties. And so you have to figure, you have to know yourself well enough to know whether it's fear-based or if it's just something you just don't like.

Maria:

But wait, fear is good. Fear, I don't think fear is the litmus test that is bad for you because we fear change. We are machines for homeostasis.

We want to maintain the status quo, the comfort zone, and fear is a natural response to change. So in both cases, you can feel fear. The question is accessing yourself on the other side of the fear.

And then telling, is this a way to grow or is this a way to suffer?

Neil:

I like that. Is this a way to grow or is this a way to suffer?

Maria:

And again, there's nuance. Of course, there's some level of suffering with all kinds of growth. But you know what I'm saying, more kind of broadly.

Neil:

Yeah, no, absolutely. I want to, you know, this book was translated in 1996, right? So it came out in 1929.

There was a dissertation. And it made me think, I will never be able to, like, I only read English. So there's just so much that's ever been written that I will never be able to read.

To read, you know? How do you navigate that? I mean, how do you?

Maria:

Oh, it's heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking. And also because so much beautiful stuff gets written in other languages and to read in translation is you already know that it's a lesser version.

Neil:

Yeah. What it was.

Maria:

And I mean, English is not my native language. All the reading I do is in English. So even that has given me a kind of starting point sense of how much of the life of the mind takes place in language.

I mean, language is not the container for thoughts and feelings. Language oftentimes is the thoughts and feelings. And I wish I spoke nine languages and I could read all of them.

Unfortunately, I only got two and a half and not great, you know? And it's interesting too because I do for my longer form things my book shaped projects that are very much based on very research heavy around the lives of the people I choose to write about. Not all of them are American and God, going through.

I mean, for my book figuring one of the people was Kepler, you know, he wrote in medieval German. So going to the archives and the libraries and trying. I mean, because he's Kepler, obviously most of his stuff is translated into English.

But there's something about finding original documents in the original language and getting them translated for yourself with me. My dad speaks Germans so you know he's been helpful with a lot of the German people that I write about. But there's something about the immediacy of the writing as it was written by the person who lived in that language.

Neil:

Yes, exactly.

Maria:

And having access to that, that's lost. I love this sound. So Wisława Szymborska, the Nobel winning Polish poet who is one of my favorite poets. And she was part of my introduction to poetry in general. She, her whole life, these two Americans translated her work into English. And at the end of her life, in one of the collected poems, I think it was in the introduction, she thanks them and she writes about, she says that rare miracle when a translation ceases to be a translation and becomes the second original.

Which is, of course, the gold standard in a translation is the most thankless of all the creative art. Because it is a deeply creative art and it's just nobody remembers or honors the translators and it's heartbreaking.

Neil:

Yeah, that's right. You hardly even see it. I was thinking this the other day, there's a book about translation of Murakami that's like all about the translator of Murakami.

There's a book about the translator of Murakami into English. I think it's called What We're Reading When We Read Murakami or something similar to that.

Maria:

Oh, how wonderful.

Neil:

Yeah, and I bought the book, I haven't read it yet, but it's about the person in between Japanese Murakami and English Murakami. I think what we're reading when we read Murakami, I have it, I will send it to you as a follow-up together with The Right to the Future Tense by Shoshana Zuboff afterwards.

Neil:

Yes, please do.

Neil:

Yeah, and this will all be in our show notes for people listening that are like, oh, I want to get a copy of that. We'll make sure everything we reference on here is always at 3books.co underneath the list for the show. So, I'll link to everything.

Yeah, the Murakami book will be on there as well. So, your third book is The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, which is filed for Dewey Decimal Hands under 843.912 under French fiction. Of course, showing the limitations of the Dewey Decimal System that almost every language besides French to an earlier point is like squeezed into the 900s.

My cover is, I believe, the original cover showing a small boy with spiky orange yellowish hair and a green one-piece standing on a planet in outer space with stars and yellow stars and yellow circles around him with just the little prince across the top. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince is an endearing tale of equal appeal to young and grown-up. It blends a simple story of an aviator forced to land in a remote desert in his meeting a small boy, the little prince from another planet with an allegory of human condition, entertaining, thought-provoking, mind-triggering and process.

The beautiful illustrations drawn by the author are as expressive as a simple language that conveys deeper shades of the philosophy. And I will say that that back copy that I'm reading is the 2019 edition by VIVI Books or maybe it's 6-6 books in London, England. Let's go into telling us about your relationship with The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Maria:

So The Little Prince, I grew up in Bulgaria where a lot of the American, none of the actually American children's book classics made it. I was born still during communism so the Iron Curtain was in full effect. And a lot of the children's books we had were European.

And this one is the only one I have a memory of my mother reading to me. And I loved it as a child as a story. And of course, you don't understand The Little Prince.

I mean, The Little Prince is a work of philosophy that's sized as a children's book, which is what all great children's books are in a way. They are field guides to living told in the language of children, which is a language of exquisite simplicity and sincerity, which is of course the most open channel to reality, right? That the simpler and the most sincere the language, the truer it is.

And in any case, I have been reconnected with The Little Prince in my adult life. And each time I read it, which is about once every couple of years, it gives me something different. Back, it gives me something back that I can take to my life.

It is an allegory. You know, the Little Prince, the pilots and the Little Prince, they talk about these different planets each inhabited by a person who embodies some kind of human vice or internal struggle, greed, all kinds of things. There's a dictator.

There's consumerism. There's all the things that keep us small in a way. And but it's really a story about love and mortality.

You know, it's the story of The Little Prince and the rose that he's in love with, the selfish plans that he devotes his life to. And in the end, it's a kind of, it's a prayer for aliveness, but it has to do with death in the end. I want to read you something that I have here with me, the original 1943 edition.

No way. Oh, wow. I do.

It was one of my, wow, that's amazing in life was getting this edition. And this is the dedication. So bear in mind, this is the Second World War.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is a pilot, commercial pilot, but nonetheless a pilot flying over the war in the world. And France is under Nazi occupation where people have rations or food. Just really kind of grim circumstances.

So this is the dedication of the book. It says, to Léon Werth, I ask the indulgence of the children who may read this book for dedicating it to a grown-up. I have a serious reason.

He is the best friend I have in the world. I have another reason. This grown-up understands everything, even books about children.

I have a third reason. He lives in France where he is hungry and cold. He needs cheering up.

If all these reasons are not enough, I will dedicate the book to the child from whom this grown-up grew. All grown-ups were once children. Although feels them, remember it.

And so I correct my dedication to Léon Werth when he was a little boy. I crawl every time I read this.

Neil:

Yeah, that is so beautiful.

Maria:

It's everything. It's everything about life, about love, about friendship.

Neil:

Did you read this? You were, this was read to you when you were a child?

Maria:

Yes, in Bulgarian translation from the French. And what I read too is in English translation from the French. So both in French.

I've only ever read it in translation. I do not speak or read French, which is a pity because a lot of the world's great literature was written in French.

Neil:

And so what are your memories of being a child, being read this?

Maria:

I, you know, I don't have very, I don't have many early childhood memories. I did not have a very easy childhood. And so I think this is very common for kids who grow up in difficult circumstances.

You don't really have many early childhood memories. I just remember liking it. I just remember it felt like an oasis of safety and relief and joy.

But I also liked the undercurrent of sadness. I've always had an undercurrent of sadness in my life. And I think this exuberance, this joy and wonder in the world does, if you really inhabit, it does come with this bittersweet melancholy streak because you cannot celebrate life without accepting that it is finite.

Neil:

Yes, exactly.

Maria:

And Whitman too had such a dark streak. So much sadness, so much melancholy. And he believed that those who reach the greatest heights are also capable of plummeting to the greatest depths.

And I think that's pretty kind of universally true. You have, if you have access to the full spectrum of life, if you're fully alive, you contact both. You can't not.

And the little prince is, you know, what I love about the best children's books are unafraid of going to those darker places because they are part of the light. And what I don't like about a lot of contemporary American children's literature is the saccharine nature of it. There's this total exclusion of complexity and darkness and sadness and this artificial sweetener of life.

And I feel like that is such a disservice to growing minds and hearts and spirits.

Neil:

Oh, I totally agree with that. So really wonderful and poetic way to say it. It makes me think of the children's book, Tough Boris.

If you don't know, no, I need to send that to you. Oh my gosh, I have to send you Tough Boris. Tough Boris is, I want to say from the mid 90s, but it's about a pirate who's very tough.

But then when his parrot dies, he cries and cries. And at the end of the book, it twists this tough, strong, fierce pirate in the last couple of pages of the book until like somebody who experiences to your point, you know, the vastness of emotional depth and he's crying. He's putting this parrot into like the little box that he was playing his fiddle and he's throwing it overboard.

And it's like, whoa, it's a beautiful finish to this wonderful picture book. But I know what you mean. A lot of great picture books touch on that vastness of emotion.

And certainly this was not a picture book, but Little Prince does that for sure.

Maria:

And there is this wonderful line in it where it says, it is such a secret place, the land of tears.

Neil:

Oh, interesting. How do you interpret that?

Maria:

Well, it is the most private. It is the most private. How we love and how we suffer are the most private things in life.

And I don't mean like hiding. I mean, they're the most interior experiences that are most difficult to articulate or share, even if you want to. They are just so deep and visiting the place of tears, that secret place.

I mean, crying with someone is one of the greatest acts of intimacy.

Neil:

Yeah. Oh, wow. That's a beautiful phrase.

Crying with someone is one of the greatest acts of intimacy. Yeah, that's very true. And crying is, I've always thought or more recently thought that it's the body's way of processing something it can't articulate.

I interviewed Daniels, the directors of Everything Everywhere All At Once. And when I asked them how it's been, because I talked to them just before Everything Everywhere All At Once came out in mass release, they said, we've just been crying all day. We've just been crying and we don't know why.

And it was a beautiful way to start the conversation. You gave us the log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck, which was written in 1940, but not published until 1951 by the Viking press. The cover is a painting of massive green and black waves with a white fishing boat cresting a wave in the background against a mustard yellow sky with white gulls circling above.

There is the white penguin classics ribbon across the front with an iconic penguin portrait in the middle. The bottom is black with simply John Steinbeck in an all cap sans serif white. And all caps fought underneath, saying the log from the Sea of Cortez.

Steinbeck, of course, the Pulitzer Prize winning American writer who lived from 1902 to 1968. He wrote 33 books, including 16 novels, six nonfiction books, two collections of short stories, including The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden and of Mice and Men. What is this book about?

Well, 1940 Steinbeck, basically, he was under stress and pressure as I understand it after The Grapes of Wrath came out, accused of being a communist and a labor sympathizer, et cetera. So he just took off with biologist and good friend Edward Ricketts, went aboard the Western Flyer, a sardine boat out of Monterey, California on a 4000 mile voyage around the Baja Peninsula, sort of left pinky finger down the side of Mexico into the Sea of Cortez, also called the Gulf of California. This exciting day by day account of their expedition wonderfully combines science, philosophy and high spirited adventure and provides a much fuller picture of Steinbeck and his beliefs about man and world.

Dewey Decimal-heads can file this under 508.31 for natural sciences and mathematics slash general science slash natural history slash environment slash habitats. Maria, tell us about your relationship with The Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck.

Maria:

So it's a very unusual book in the history of the literature. I mean, obviously, this is a writer who won the Nobel Prize two decades later who had two Pulitzer Prizes all for his fiction, beautiful, beautiful fiction writer, beautiful letter writer and diarist. And yet this little known tiny improbable book, I find his finest by far.

This too was written in the middle of the World War. And as the human world was coming undone, he goes with his friend Ed on this marine biology expedition to, I think, to be reminded of the interconnectedness and interdependence of life in nature of which we are apart. And of course, war is the greatest denial of that, our self-denial of ourselves being connected, being part of nature.

It's the ugliest assault on life, the life force. And so there he is on this boat and he really does it all. He's wading through the tide pools.

He's getting stung by these poisonous worms.

Neil:

Anemones and stuff.

Maria:

He's getting sea urchins in his foot. And all the while, he's thinking about thinking. So really the book is a kind of refutation of our western compulsion for teleological thinking.

This idea that everything can be explained by the purpose that it serves. Which is antithetical both to science and to more eastern notions of being, right? That actually everything just is.

And any fragment of it, any one thing examined by itself is just it. And science, what's interesting too is that bear in mind, this is because it's the middle of the war. This is back to our conversation about opinions and the danger of opinions.

A war is essentially a combat of opinions gone to the extreme on the scale of nations, right? These certitudes that are tightly held combating each other. And science, on the other hand, is this supreme act of observation without interpretation.

No opinion. There's no room for opinion in science. There's just meeting reality on its own acausal and impartial terms free from the tyranny of why.

And it's tendrils of blame, right? Because the moment we start asking, why is this happening? Why is this hurricane, you know, who's to blame?

And this is a purely human conference, blame, there's no such thing in the natural world. And he all the while, his thinking, and he, by the way, was the exact age I am now when he wrote this book. He was 39.

He had no idea how this war was going to end. He had no idea what his future held, that he was going to write these Nobel Pulitzer winning novels. He just wanted to understand how we think and what the world is.

And it's so beautifully written. It's also a book about wonder, about the meaning of hope.

Neil:

Yes. Yes, totally. I have so many quotes from the book on hope.

Hope, specifically, probably when our species developed the trick of memory and with it the counterbalancing projection called the future. This shock absorber hope had to be included in the series, else the species would have destroyed itself in despair. For if ever any man were deeply and unconsciously sure that his future would be no better than his past, he might deeply wish to cease to live.

Maria:

He says, hope is a diagnostic human trait and this simple cortex symptom seems to be a prime factor in our inspection of our universe. For hope implies a change from a present bad condition to a future better one. And it's so interesting, the kind of mirror image between this and the RN piece on love and presence, living in the now, that fear is the thing that's aimed at the future.

But hope is also the thing that's aimed at the future. And I think hope is the antidote to fear in bearing our future.

Neil:

Hope is the antidote to fear in bearing our future. Right. Because otherwise we would, if we didn't have hope, then we would think things, if we were in a bad condition, we would think it would continue to Steinbeck's point.

Maria:

Exactly, exactly.

Neil:

And then too, I love that interconnectedness of all things. You know, he says this many times, like there's a really memorable scene when some indigenous people kind of come up to the boat in a canoe with their, with their faces covered. Because as he says, you know, they've learned for 400 years, if you kind of go near white people, like you get germs that you know, you can't explain and then they kill your people.

But he says, they seem to live and remember things to be so related to the seashore and the Rocky Hills and the loneliness that they are these things to ask about the country is like asking them about themselves. How many toes have you? What toes?

Let's see. Of course, 10. I have known them all my life.

I never thought to count them. Of course it will rain tonight. I don't know why.

Something in me tells me I will rain tonight. Of course I am the whole thing now that I think about it. I ought to know when I will rain.

Maria:

That's so beautiful.

Neil:

I ought to know when I will rain.

Maria:

Well, talk about the people of the past reminding us of what we've relinquished, right? Ways of seeing, ways of being that we have cut ourselves off from. Because that is our natural condition actually.

To feel that it is all one. And everything else has been the function of opinions, basically, that we have devised in order to parse reality into fragments that we can then take and possess or feel like we control.

Neil:

Kind of to your earliest point about intellectual property rights, you know, and you know, there's the apocryphal stories about the white man landing in North America and claiming, you know, property rights from the then called Indians. And of course, the indigenous, I should say, they didn't think anybody could own property. You know, the concept of- Oh, it's a ridiculous notion.

Maria:

That they're going to property.

Maria:

I mean, I spend a lot of time in the Pacific Northwest in an old growth forest where people have houses and there are so many signs that say no trespassing, private property. It's literally the middle of the forest. And I keep thinking, no, you are the property.

You know, this forest will outlive you and it predates you so much you are the property of the forest. You can call yourself a steward, if you like, but you are not owning this land. It's like this idea that we've built an entire culture on ownership.

And of course, capitalism, we've gone to higher and higher degrees of abstraction. We now have like digital goods and this and that, but it all began with the land with privatizing the land. And that was the real kind of wrong turn in the history of humanity where we really divided ourselves from this totality of interbeing.

Neil:

It's so hard to pull it back. I remember visiting New Zealand in 2006 and hearing that they had a law down there that nobody could own the coastline just anywhere in the whole country. I'm thinking of that was a beautiful idea.

So even if you own like an expensive property on the edge of the water, anybody can walk past your front. You know, I mean, it's just because I think when, you know, 500 years ago when the white man settled there and the Maori were already there, they were like, we can either fight about this forever or just decide that nobody owns it, you know, that everybody owns it.

Maria:

And so you've gotten a lot of things right.

Neil:

They've got some things right. Absolutely. Well, I have, you know, I have pages and pages of questions still left from the Sea of Cortez, but I think in the interest of moving this conversation into a closing thought around the love of books, I have a series of fast money questions to close out with.

If you don't mind me jumping into them now and we can kind of close things off from there.

Maria:

Let's do it.

Neil:

Here we go. Number one, hardcover, paperback, audio or E.

Maria:

Oh, I loathe paperbacks, loathe them to the point where I almost evicted from my house the paperback copies of figuring that were sent to me from the publisher.

Neil:

Oh, wow.

Maria:

I hate them, hate them. I mean, part of it is very practical. I often read in the back and like when you dip the bottom of a book, you know, if it's a paperback, forget it, it's done.

But part of it is something about the flimsiness of, you know, somebody puts mirrors into something and then it's just like, feels like a stack of news magazines or something.

Maria:

Okay, these are very strong opinions.

Neil:

No, I love it. I love it. I love it.

But so is that me? Because I know you also read a lot of ebooks because you I think also read while you're at the gym on the.

Maria:

I do.

Neil:

Right, right.

Maria:

And that's part of it. I don't like ebooks, but they serve my life. And also, you know, I don't live in an infinite home and I've run out of bookshelf space.

So I'm conserving my bookshelf space for things that are pretty irreplaceable. Like this first edition of The Little Prince and books that are no longer in print that I have a lot of notes in and things like that. I literally have no more room to put physical books.

So the ebooks help with that. But of course, the challenge for me is that a lot of my reading is of bygone things that are not in print. We're definitely not in ebooks for me.

Neil:

Right. So you have to get the hardcovers probably.

Maria:

I do. They're from antiquarian booksellers and they're like falling apart because they're 200 years old. But I love that.

I mean, I understand the necessity of paperbacks, the invention of paperbacks to make books more affordable. Like I get that. One of my closest friends, Sarah McNally, she runs McNally Jackson, which is the most beloved independent bookstores here in New York.

And she is the most thoughtful, compassionate person in terms of what serves readers best. And she always reminds me that paperbacks have a lot of advantages in getting more people to read books, basically. I get it.

Props to them. No judgment. I loathe them.

Neil:

I love your passion. So it sounds like you're not an audiobook consumer either.

Maria:

It really depends on the narrator. I mean, I don't pay as much attention to an audiobook. This is a piece of self-knowledge that I've had to accept even when I'm trying to focus on it.

Something about it going through the ears for me is not as rich and effective. But a really compelling narrator makes a real difference.

Neil:

Interesting.

Maria:

Then you become taken in a story which is why I'm very deliberate about the narrators for my books.

Neil:

Oh, right. Oh, so, oh, interesting. So you have been careful to, so you don't narrate your own books, but you're careful in choosing the narrator of your books.

Maria:

Well, in this universe and verse book, it'll be interesting because it's a funny collaboration. So it's 15 essays about different aspects of science, each paired with a poem by somebody else. So I write the essays and then I choose poems.

I mean, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Maya Angelou and so forth. And so for this one, what we decided to do, I always do it with friends. My friend Lily Taylor is doing the narration, but what we decided to do is that she's an incredible actor and she has my favorite voice in the universe.

Very unique, very unique, raspy voice. We decided she's going to read the prose, the essays, and I'm going to read the poems because I'm much more comfortable reading somebody else's writing than my own. I think a lot of writers who read their own books get in their head because they wrote it and they read in this kind of weird stilted way because they're reading with their writing mind and not a performance mind.

So it's very rare for me to hear an author read their own work and like it. I think authors really, really kind of need to have some humility and understand that's a different art form. Narration and performance, they are a different art.

And if you're a great writer, that's amazing. It doesn't guarantee they're a great reader.

Neil:

Oh, I love this. This is such a fun conversation. Yeah, it's interesting.

I don't know if you've ever listened to Lincoln in the Bardo, the audiobook.

Maria:

I did. Right. That was a performance cast.

And in fact, I started reading it. So I am in a book club. I'm in my first ever book club.

That my friend Sarah McNally wrote me into. And Lincoln in the Bardo the first book we read. And I started reading it on paper and then a friend who's a poet, who's very old school, who I never would have thought as an audio person, she said, get the audiobook.

Just trust me. And we all did it in both physical and audio. It's extraordinary.

But it's very unique.

Neil:

That's a very unique one. But there are some other like I think Lin-Manuel Miranda has read, you know, who's the author? I'm thinking of Puerto Rican author A Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and those books.

I think Lin-Manuel Miranda reads. And I have heard that Audible is the number one hirer of actors in the world now because, you know, just because of how many books there. Yeah, there's more actors in, I guess, New Jersey or wherever it is than in Hollywood because they're reading e-books.

But that's interesting. Okay. Do you have a favorite bookstore, living or dead?

Now you've mentioned McNally Jackson.

Neil:

Oh, yeah.

Maria:

McNally Jackson, the South Seaport location is my favorite. Partly because it's easier for me to get to on the bike and ferry. And partly because they have a cafe that makes the best matcha latte in New York.

Neil:

So where is South Seaport? What is that? Is that in Brooklyn, Manhattan?

I'm just don't know my New York geography.

Maria:

I'm so sorry. Yes, I'm being such a New Yorker.

Neil:

No, no.

Maria:

Seaport is the kind of, I guess lower in Manhattan area on the other side, south on where the two bridges, the Brooklyn and the Manhattan Bridge land on the Manhattan side, then you go south toward the tip of the island. So it's almost the very typical tip, but it's on the edge of the water. It's the area in Manhattan that got most damaged by Sandy.

And I will also mention random fact. And it's right now, they restored it after standing. There's a lot of like shopping and fancy stores and cafes and kind of bougie little places.

McNally Jackson, the bookstore is the only business in South Seaport that survived COVID. Oh, wow. Which tells you something about the bookstore itself and New Yorkers love a book.

Neil:

Yeah, in the community.

Maria:

In the community. But McNally Jackson is, I mean, Sarah's so thoughtful about how she builds bookstores. She would take the train in the middle of the night to her Rockefeller Center store because she wants to make sure the new paint color looks good in the dark.

You know, this is a level of passion and devotion to the experience of book selling book reverence that she puts in and that makes for a great bookstore.

Neil:

I think absolutely. And by the way, interesting New York bookstore fact is that way back in Chapter 107 of 3 Books, I interviewed Latanya and Jerry of the Bronx Bound Books Bus, which is bookstore number two in the entire Bronx. So there is one bookstore in the Bronx, but this one is Books on Wheels.

It's a bus that's been painted and turned into a bookstore. Do you know about this?

Maria:

Oh, wonderful. No, but I love a library mobile. I did a little library mobile project during Occupy Wall Street, but because I love those mobile things.

Neil:

Oh, exactly. Well, the interesting note that they share with me, which I think is probably obvious to you, but maybe not to other people is that Manhattan and the Bronx have a very similar population, but Manhattan is 82 bookstores now, formerly 300, but 82 is still a lot. And the Bronx has two, you know, including the bus.

Right.

Maria:

So it's just partly, unfortunately, So that book that you mentioned that I did the Velocity of Being, the letters book, that was all the proceeds were donated to the New York Public Library system from that book. And my friend Claudia and I, who made it together, she's a publisher. She runs Enchanted Lion Books.

And this was our project for eight years. We decided deliberately to divide equally amongst all the branches of the library, even though there are so many fewer branches than the Bronx than in Manhattan and Brooklyn. And which is anyway, just a tiny little way of addressing that inequality.

But yes, I'm aware of it. And I'm so glad they have this wheeled antidote.

Neil:

Wheeled antidote is a great word for it. What is your book lending policy?

Maria:

Book lending.

Neil:

Yeah, do you lend people your books?

Maria:

My book lending policy is zero. I buy people new copies. I have notes in there.

I don't know.

Neil:

Yeah, you don't.

Maria:

I have lent maybe two books ever only to Sarah because she's the most responsible book reader in the universe. But I have doggedly, you know, claim them back.

Neil:

Well, this is the thing I lend and then and then add regret later. So this is great. This is more challenging.

Is there one book you wish you could read again for the first time?

Maria:

Oh, oh my God.

Maria:

What a great question. I mean, that's like asking which of your past selves do you want to be again for the first time? With the caveat that I have now on my fourth rereading of it.

But I wish I could read it from scratch from zero is Einstein's dreams by Alan Lightman.

Neil:

I've never read it. Oh, oh, that's partly why I asked the question. This is Einstein's dreams.

Okay, got it. This is harkening back to your point on number one, which is that you have no more space in your place for books. But I have a question.

How do you organize your books on your bookshelf at home?

Maria:

I had a very good system which was to Matt. Well, it's by sections that are thematic. So, you know, biographies and autobiographies, letters and diaries, science, philosophy, and so forth within each section I do organize by color because I just like it.

But the problem with that is that geometry is a problem. You know, a bookshelf has a finite length and your mind does not. So you acquire more books as you age and time goes on and each section expands in mental space, but you can no longer expand it in space because the walls are the wall, you know.

And so my system kind of broke down after a few years because then I ran out of space into the respective sections. I started putting them in random places. But I know exactly where each book in my house is.

So I can find it right away just have a mental map of it. It just doesn't look very, you know, handsome.

Neil:

That's amazing that you have like it sounds like a photographic memory though and where every book is. That's hard. Do you have a white whale book or any book that you have been chasing the longest whoever you want to interpret that?

Maria:

Well, not that I can think of. I'm pretty good with finding what I look for.

Neil:

Yeah. And there's not a book that you like want to read for years and years and years that you don't. If you want to read it, you tackle it immediately.

Maria:

Yeah, I would say so. I mean, I will say I have a total blind spot about the so-called classics. I haven't read most of the canon of the classics, but I'm also not super keen on it.

I mean, I do want to read the Brothers Karamozov, which I've started a couple of times and I want to do it and some kind of mental block prohibits me. So I guess that will be the closest. George Saunders actually the swim in the pond in the rain pushed me much closer to actually doing it.

His great book on the Russian masters.

Neil:

Yes, yes. I've read and loved that book. It's my favorite book on writing, even though I don't write fiction.

It's just a wonderful. Yeah, it's a wonderful book. What are one or two principles you follow about marking up or annotating your books while reading them?

Maria:

Well, I'm not sure that I have principles. It has to be spontaneous. It has to be like conversation.

I mean, the purpose of having marginalia or writing or highlighting anything is that it sparks a response to you and that has to be spontaneous and premeditated.

Neil:

I love it. Maria Popova, you are a gift. You have given the world so much through then brain pickings.

Now The Marginalian with your wonderful Sunday newsletter, which I get every Sunday with the amount of stuff you post on social media. So kindly, so generously and always ad free. I know you don't do many interviews.

That's partly why it was such a gift for you to come on the show. Thank you for sharing your formative books with us, letting me read them, ask you questions and go everywhere with your wonderful mind to explore these books. It's a real, real gift and I'm deeply grateful to you for coming on the show.

Thank you so much.

Maria:

Thank you, Neil, for having me and thank you for your wonderful counter-cultural project and your stewardship of books that will outlive us.

Neil:

Hey, everybody, it's just me, just Neil again, hanging up my basement with my backpack full of wires again. You know, I, you know, just before Maria and I hit record, maybe 10 minutes before she wrote an email because we sent her this invitation for a service called riverside.fm, which Allie Ward from Ologies told me to use. It's been great for us.

I recommend it if you're in the podcasting world and she wrote a very nice email that I'll paraphrase it. She was kind of like, oh, I didn't realize that this was videotaped. If it was, if it's videotaped, I don't do video.

I don't do videos. And so I will gracefully bow if the video is mandatory, you know, and I wrote back right away saying like, oh, no, no, no, no, it's not mandatory. We could turn it off.

Honestly, every time I have to videotape a podcast, I kind of feel this internal off and she wrote back the internal off. It's one of the best guideposts to the creative life that I know. And I've been thinking a lot about whether I want to do these podcasts on video.

You know, the number one most listened to podcast I've ever done is David Sedaris. There's no video, right? Like there's just no video.

Tarantino is up there. There's no video. We just have the sound on YouTube and a static image.

I could change that static image to a moving image. Maybe my hand flipping a book over and over again or something. Or the constellations or flying through outer space or whatever.

Something to make it visually appealing. But I find that when I videotape them, I feel like I need to get dressed up for my, like I'm wearing rags right now. For lack of better words, I'm wearing rags.

I wear rags a lot. My goal is comfort, right? I didn't shave before talking to you right now.

I didn't comb my hair. But if I record on video, I feel like I have to do all that stuff. And because it's just a more...

We talked about this with Cal Newport. It's like you have to kind of put on your front all the time. But I don't want to go through life wearing fancy clothes and combing my hair all the time.

Neither do you. Neither does anybody. And something about the video-fication of the world kind of pushes us into that professional presentation orientation a little more.

And so I'm thinking about that. But it's not just that. It's also, it just takes a lot more time.

I feel like it damages in some way the sacrosanct bubble that you can create with somebody that maybe is kind of like, you know, like late at night at a sleepover when the lights are out and you get into like the juicier conversations. But you can't see each other. Or the way that you might be facing out the front windshield of your car driving and your child might be in the backseat and you get into the juicier conversations.

Or both people are facing at the front. Like what is it about not looking at someone's face that makes the conversation more intimate? I don't know why.

But I think it's true. I certainly feel that. Terrible Thanks for Asking is a wonderful podcast by Nora McInerney, former guest in 3 Books.

She and I have talked about this because she also has been loathe to kind of videotape everything. However, other podcasts I like, like the ritual podcast, videotape everything. So something I'm certainly wrestling with.

For now, it does feel relaxing, relieving to just be audio only here. So that is my temptation, I will say. And even when I interviewed Jonathan Franzen on 137, you know, the last chapter, I kind of felt not stiffening, but there is some sort of formalification by him and by me because we were videotaping it. Maybe if we hadn't have videotaped it, we would have got even juicier. I don't know. Anyway.

Wow is the kind of emotional response to listening to Maria Popova wax prophetic on so many things. So many quotes jumped out to me out of this conversation. Here are six.

The self is a kind of book that is constantly being reread and rewritten by the person living with it. I love that. The self is a kind of book that is constantly being reread and rewritten by the person living with it.

Another quote, right now I'm very troubled by this whole thing about cultural appropriation because when you think about education, learning, that is appropriation. You are literally taking in somebody else's knowledge and incorporating it into your own 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. Amen to Maria on that one. Number three, if we're not a little bit embarrassed of the people we used to be, we're kind of not doing it right.

I love that. I relate to that. I kind of mentioned it in the intro and I was reading the byline on her on her blog.

Not byline, the sub headline. I find identity the least interesting thing about people. Actually, identity and opinion.

Unfortunately, we live now at a time and an era of identities and opinions being the kind of front line to personhood. Wow, that is such an interesting thought. As we go deeper, she says, we'll call this the fifth quote, I think the most interesting things are the things that light us up, the things that are portals to wonder for us.

Oh, yeah, that is so true. You know, when you go to a party or something, instead of saying, how are you? I think the better question is, what do you find interesting lately or what are you thinking about lately?

And then you get this gut reaction of something the person likes. When I started my Quizno sub franchise in 2003, I wrote about this in You Are Awesome or The Resilience Equation as I'm trying to call it in my mind now, the Orange book that I put out in 2019 the head office told me to hire pretty girls. I'm not kidding.

When I say that, they're not there anymore. It's a terrible thing to say. I was like, what do you mean hire pretty girls?

They're like hire pretty girls. That's how you hire. I'm like, wow, like this is a professional company purportedly.

This is terrible. So I come up with a hiring process and my first question is just a one sentence phone interview first interview and I just say, spend 10 minutes, I think say five minutes, spend five minutes telling me about something you love. That's it.

That was the entire interview. And so I got this guy named Richard who went on for five minutes about skateboarding and all these different skateboarding wheels. I was like, I can make this guy excited about sandwiches if he's excited about skateboarding.

And so I was just gauging their kind of, you know, wonder potential to put Maria's word of wonder in there. Yeah, like wonder potential. What do you find interesting?

Side note. I also love the title of the ritual pockets with Casey Neistat where he calls it Casey Neistat's relentless pursuit of interestingness. Same kind of idea.

So many more quotes. How about this one? We really fucked up music.

Musicians are now commercial vehicles for selling apps and subscription services. Amen. Because she's talking about the commodification of cultural material calling it content.

I think that was like a we'll call that five B and here's quote number six. I think our highest calling is to love the world, to love the world as it is and as we are. Wow.

I think our highest calling is to love the world, to love the world as it is and as we are. Those quotes together with a whole bunch of others will be over at 3books.co where you can always find ad free, sponsor free, not content. The creative output of the show is the show notes.

It is the quotes that we said. It is the images of me and the guests if we were live and together. There is the top 1000 page.

So you can click the top corner. It says the top 1000 and then you can scroll down and it's a list of every single formative book ever mentioned on the show including three more books that we're adding to the top 1000 today, including number 598 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. Number 597 Love and Saint Augustine by Hannah Arendt, A-R-E-N-D-T.

Number 596 Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck and we of course will add an asterisk to number 715 The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I don't say his last name nearly as well as Maria does. That was added to our list originally in chapter 96 with Dave Cheesewright. Dave, the CEO of Walmart International who was my former boss. Interesting that they both picked the same book. Now, I just want to say a big thank you to you for listening and to Maria for coming on 3 Books. Are you still here? Did you make a pass of 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 hang out.

We share your voicemails. We go deep on a word nerd quest to find the etymology of an interesting word. We're going to have a word cloud to a far shore with Maria and we just hang out.

It's like the after party of the show. I'm so glad you are here. This is one of three clubs that we have for 3 Books listeners.

Three bookers, including The Secret Club, which I just mailed out something for. So if you don't know what The Secret Club is and you want to join, just call us. Call 1-833-READ-ALOT.

It is a real phone number. If it doesn't work. So I got one from New Zealand the other time that said it didn't work.

Well, just send me like just make a recording on your phone and just email it to me. You know, you can just email me a voicemail. It should work everywhere though.

We are playing grasshopper. This phone subscription company like $29 a month to have a global phone number. Sometimes there's different zeros and ones and country codes and all that stuff though.

So 1-833-READ-ALOT. Anyway, let's start off the end of the podcast up as we always do by going to the phones.

Max:

Hi, my name is Max. I'm calling from Montreal, Canada. And it looks like my finger was having a lot of fun pressing the button three.

I was nervous to call but excitement got better of me and it was after rereading the introduction to this book, Poets Choice by Edward Hirsch. It says, quote, the poems featured in Poets Choice consistently grapple with death, suffering, and loss. They defend the importance of individual lives and rebel at the way individuals are dwarfed by mass culture.

They're unaccommodating. They portray and communicate on behalf of people at the margins of society, exiles, transplants, refugees, nomads, people with no country, people split between two different countries, split between the past and the present. They search for meaning and language and forms, particular only the poetry in the realm of emptiness for company and the face of isolation.

Poems are always in dialogue with other poems and in conversation with history and they invite readers into that conversation which offers a particular form of communication with community and fusion. And wow, does that top make you want to read poetry? Much like your podcast makes me want to read more books and discuss art forms.

Anyways, keep on keeping on and thank you for this podcast.

Neil:

Wow, I listened to that voicemail three times just now. I went back and listened to it because Max, you speak fast, a person after my own heart, a fast talker. Fast talkers unite.

Max is so wonderful to have you in the 3 Books community. Max from Montreal, alliterative of course, and you just read us a part of the introduction to a book called Poets Choice by Edward Hirsch, H-R, sorry, H-I-R-S-C-H. So many phrases jump out for that grappling with death, suffering a loss, rebelling at the way individuals are dwarfed by mass culture.

Yes, poems are always in dialogue with other poems. You asked us, does that not make you want to read poetry? Much like 3 Books makes me want to read more books.

It does make me want to read more poetry and I felt like this is a perfect voicemail to attach to Maria Popova as our queen poet herself. I mean, she kind of feels like a being of light and energy, just channeling like all the voices of the past. And she had that funny line at the beginning like I, most of my friends are dead or like I get along well with people that are gone kind of thing.

David Mitchell says that too back in chapter 58. You know, most of my friends or most of my favorite authors are good and dead. I think he says my paraphrases are not as good as the real quotes I know, but I'm trying to say the same thing.

So thank you Max for your voicemail for your phone call. If anyone else listening is like, I want to leave a note. I'm feeling a bit nervous about it.

Please don't feel nervous. I hear that all the time. Couple ways to get over nerves.

Just think of one book that changed your life and leave us with that book. Say, hey, love the show or hate the show, whatever. Here's one book that changed your life or changed my life and get my tense as well.

And then we'll look it up. I'll talk a bit about it. One reflection, a dream guest you have.

One reflection from one guest. Something you disagreed with. You know, Gina De Buoniguero, who was our guest with AJ Eggerwall last year.

She called in and disagreed with a guest. Well, I love that. This is just one view on one day of everything.

So it's nice to have disagreements. We won't do a letter of the chapter I think because I threw one in the front of the show this time as I want to start doing more and more and I keep saying that. But we're going to put that in the front.

And then we will, I guess it's time. It is. It must be time.

It is time for the word of the chapter and for this chapter's word. Let's of course go back to the ever loquacious Maria Popova. Here we go.

Maria:

Illusion creativity just this combinatorial thing and it's very confident with the spirit of the book. He would have still bristled repugnance. We know cerebrally that we are finite and we're transient.

The self-acceptance of your parameters uphill kind of Sysyphean experience. It is an allegory. It's the saccharin nature of it.

Neil:

A treat of words there for us to choose from. But I think this time we are going to go with saccharin.

Neil:

Yes, we are going to go with saccharin.

Neil:

Also known as excessively sweet or sentimental S-A-C-C-H-A-R-I-N-E. That E at the end is actually kind of interesting. We're going to talk about that in just a second.

First of all, saccharine the adjective. Miriam Webster, do you have a different voice?

Neil:

Saccharin.

Neil:

Okay, just a little bit more professional. One is of relating to or resembling that of sugar, like a saccharin taste. One B is yielding or containing sugar like saccharin vegetables.

Then there's the word that we were talking about, which I think it's most commonly used and that I know of overly or sickishly sweet. And another one a little bit more ingratiatingly or effectively agreeable or friendly. I have been called saccharin before.

I will say I will add that. Ingratiatingly or effectively agreeable or friendly. Okay, fourth is also called overly sentimental like a saccharin love story.

Another word for that is mawkish. M-A-W-K-I-S-H. Exaggeratedly or childless childlessly emotional.

I'm childlessly emotional sometimes, I guess. But why did I say that E was important? Well, because saccharin without the S-A-C-C-H-A-R-I-N is also called benzo-sulfamide or E-9-5-4.

You may know it as a non-nutritive artificial sweetener, most commonly branded as sweet and low. Over the 150-year-old history of saccharin, which by the way, the etymology of the word comes from the Greek word both the saccharin without the E, which is the chemical one, and saccharin with the E, which means the figuratively derogatory, unpleasantly over polite, overly sweet sense. Both come from the Greek word saccharin, which means gravel.

Gravel. Yes, a surprise. We were not expecting it to mean gravel.

However, that's where it comes from. It's also an obsolete name for sucrose. It was discovered 150 years ago by the chemists.

Well, there's kind of a fight over it. Konstantin Fallberg, a chemist working on coal tar derivatives. Isn't that interesting how these things are discovered?

On coal tar. He's working on coal tar at Johns Hopkins in 1879. Notice a sweet taste on his hand one night, and he realized this is probably the benzoic sulfamide, which he'd been working on that day.

He published some studies in 1879 and 1880, and then he was starting to work in New York City, and he applied for patents in countries talking about how you produce this sweet substance that he named saccharin without the E. Okay, so two years later, he began production of the substance in a factory in the suburbs of Germany, and he got rich off of it. Well, the other guy, femson.

Who's femson? Femson, who are you? Remson.

Ah, Remson was his fellow chemist who grew irritated, believing he deserved the credit for the substance produced because they were made in his factory. Remson commented, Fallenberg is a scoundrel, and nauseates me to hear my name mentioned in the same breath as him. Okay, okay.

Chemists fighting, not a new story. One guy's factory, the other guy's invention. Yeah, who owns it?

It's kind of a debate. Well, saccharin's gone in and out of legalization and popularity throughout the 20th century. For a while, people thought it was like the savior for dieting in the 60s and 70s because it's a calorie-free sweetener, right?

But then, over time, they started saying, oh no, this causes cancer in rats in the 60s. And they're like, no, no, this doesn't cause cancer in rats. Those rats already had cancer, wasn't these?

Well, this thing. Over and over, back and forth, all the way up to the year 2010, that's the most recent ruling about saccharin, where the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, has now officially removed saccharin from their list of hazardous constituents and commercial chemical products. Now, here we are in 2024, 14 years later, because the EPA has taken off their list of hazardous substances, do we just now plow saccharin?

Or are we somewhat suspicious of the EPA? Are we somewhat suspicious of our trust in these bodies that are determining what we should put in there? I don't know, guys.

A chemical that some guy in the 1800s was, kind of came up with when he was working with coal tar. I don't know. I'm sticking with a peach over here.

That's what I'm sticking with. You keep your saccharin, and it's fascinating history over there. Saccharin without the E, saccharin with the two versions of the same thing, overly or sickishly sweet.

Well, I hope you didn't find today's chapter overly or sickishly sweet, but you still found it sweet. I did too. It was wonderful hanging out with you on this buck moon in July with Maria Popova on chapter 138 of 3 Books I cannot wait. We're going to put out a few more pages. Okay, I'm still wondering if we should do pages in the fall.

I'm kind of thinking maybe we get rid of pages completely. They're gumming up the RSS feed. We just want to have chapters.

Maybe we just do chapters and then we put greatest hits on the new moon. That's what I'm thinking. What if we threw David Sedaris and Quentin Tarantino and Judy Bloom on the new moons people I'd be kind of fun.

And now we've got six years of stuff to kind of go back to kind of like Maria Popova's surprise me button on the left side of The Marginalian. where you can just get a taste from the past. If the shows are as timeless as we have designed them to be. I mean, we are talking about formative books after all, then maybe that works.

Yes, I am spit balling with you. Let me know 1-833-READ-A-LOT or via email or via review. If you have a view on the matter and until next time, Chapter 139.

Well, we are going to be talking with a walking duck. Like a human who dresses up as a duck. His name is Lewis Mallard.

Well, I say his. I don't even know if it's his. You'll you'll you will determine he is an interdimensional psychedelic folk artist.

Yes, we are going to hang out with Lewis Mallard over in August of 2024. But until then, remember that you are what you eat and you are what you read. Keep turning the page, everybody.

I'll talk to you soon.

Listen to the chapter here!

Chapter 137: Jonathan Franzen finds fellow freaks and forges fantastic fiction

Listen to the chapter here!

Jonathan Franzen:

Yeah, she was very disapproving of the idea of my becoming a novelist. It's like, you're gonna lie for a living? That this was a portrait of an asshole. That Josef K. is a royal asshole. Kids are not innocent little creatures.

It does seem a shame to spend a lot of time, when you have a lot of choices and there are a lot of good books, to spend time reading crap.

Jonathan:

It's like, I'm alive when I'm writing a novel, and part of me is not really alive when I'm not.

Neil Pasricha:

I remember getting the knife. It was 10 years ago, Christmas 2013 or so, and I was trying to make the case to stuff a 576 page book into Leslie and I's carry-on bag before we went on a beach trip with her grandparents and extended family for a week over the Christmas holidays. She's like, you only have 100 pages left, are you sure you don't want to just read this when we get home?

And I was like, I was so deep into reading The Corrections, and it was like something I'd never read before. I had to go get the knife, a steak knife with a wooden handle and big serrations. And as you can see here, if you're watching this on YouTube, and if you're not, you can kind of picture it, I sawed down the spine of the book and took the last 100 pages with me on the trip.

Now, the deep blasphemous pain that I felt slicing the paperback spine and carving off the last 100 pages was far away by the exquisite suite of pleasures I had slowly savoring the book on the beach all week. I had never read anything like The Corrections before, with such a clarity of character, wildly spinning plot, and unique three-dimensional realness that just page by page, twist by twist, left pits in my stomach, lumps in my throat, and tears in my eyes. I read Freedom, which came out in 2010, about the same way.

Purity, 2014, the same way. Crossroads, my most recent Jonathan Franzen read, came out in 2021 the same way, with equal parts admiration, fascination, and a psychologically transporting feeling of just living outside of myself for a while. Jonathan Franzen is one of the most successful, accomplished, and decorated writers in the world.

He is a Fulbright Scholar, National Book Award winner, Pulitzer Prize finalist, PEN/Faulkner finalist, two-time Oprah Book Club pick, voted to Time's 100 Most Influential, as well as gracing the Time cover as the Great American Novelist, and much, much more. The New York Mag calls his books works of total genius, and Chuck Klosterman, writing in GQ, says Franzen is the most important fiction writer in America, and, if viewed from a distance, perhaps the only important one. That is tall praise.

There is just nothing, though, like reading a Jonathan Franzen novel, and it was a sheer delight going deep with the deep master to discuss writing advice, the magic of the written word, what heroes look like today, competing with David Foster Wallace, the best that we can do for the climate, and, of course, Jon's three most formative books. Are you ready to flip the page into Chapter 137 now? Let's go.

Jon, thank you so much for coming on 3 Books. It is such an honor to have you on the show. I have been, as you know, inviting you for many years.

I have read, in order, The Corrections, then Freedom, then Purity, you know, then Crossroads, and a dabbling of your nonfiction throughout. Not a ton of your nonfiction, but Why Birds Matter was one of the massive tipping points for me to become a birder, and I am just so grateful to you for coming on the show. So, thank you.

Thank you so much for doing this.

Jonathan:

It is a pleasure. I actually have a lot of questions about you and 3 Books, and my natural mode is more of a question asker than a question answerer, but I will submit to your questions.

Neil:

Well, I am very open to them. I want to just say to our listeners, you know, most of whom do listen to us. This is a show that has started in audio format.

I think of it like theater of the mind. I have very reluctantly come to this, like, you know, must-be videotaped format. It is pretty new for me, but I will say for those listening, who I think are most of us, most people listening, you know, I am speaking to you today from Vancouver.

I just got invited out here and did not want to reschedule us, so I messed up with the local library. I was going to have this in the West Vancouver Library, but when I gunked up the invitation, they got full, and so a friend of mine, Matt Ballez, here in West Vancouver, has kindly, literally moved his piano lessons and his roofer and everything out of the house so that I can have full reign of the house. It is a light gray day here with a gentle drizzle, and I am speaking to you on a nice afternoon in Vancouver.

I am in a room that is long. It has a bookshelf on one side with a ton of interesting, you know, novels and first editions, and there are old Kafkas on the shelf, and I can see The Power Broker here in Barney's version, and A Tale of Two Cities, and like, you know, one of those big hardcovers that comes in its own sleeve. I have got a blue lamp on my left with a nice, you know, kind of yellowish light coming in and a little oil painting of some chopped up oranges above my face.

I wondered if, for the listeners, you might also describe your scene for us.

Jonathan:

I am in my office, which is, as you can see, dark, terrible picture quality. I am basically sitting in the light of a little reading lamp I have on my desk, which is in a corner of the room. You see my blackout curtain over there.

There are more blackout curtains to my right. It is fairly chilly. 66 is the temperature I keep it set at, and it is a nice, quiet day.

We are having some heavy showers in Santa Cruz. I am in Santa Cruz, California. What else can I tell you?

Books of my own are behind me. I finally have a permanent office after, oh, 25 years of itinerant borrowing of various offices. I have now a set of glass cabinets where I was able to take out all the editions of my books and put them under lock and key, so I am not tempted to actually do that really dismal thing of going and reading my own work when the new work is not going well.

There you have it.

Neil:

I am wearing—thank you for that—heavy rain. I love your weather descriptions. I should say, page one of The Corrections, the madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through.

You could feel it: Something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star, gust after gust of disorder.

Of course, page one of Crossroads, your most recent novel, the sky broken by the bare oaks and elms of new prospect was full of moist promise, a pair of frontal systems grayly colluding to deliver a white Christmas. I feel like you have this ability to touch and cajole and describe weather in such a unique way.

Jonathan:

I work at it. It doesn't come easily. Weather is, of course, incredibly important.

I think it was Faulkner who said a person is nothing but the sum of his experiences of weather. Who are you at your core? It's the weather you remember.

Of course, in Faulkner's case, that would have been the hot, hot summers in Mississippi and the gray, drizzly winters. If you're trying to create a world as a novelist and you want to put people in the world, you're trying to tap into a shared body of experiences of weather. The trick is to do it in a way that hasn't been done before, to write a sentence no one has written about the weather before without trying too hard and showing you're trying to write such a sentence.

I work on that stuff and I can feel I need a sentence about weather. It might take half a day to get a good sentence about weather.

Neil:

Wow. Wow. That is incredible.

It makes so much sense for the descriptions that we're reading in many of your books. Just before we started recording, you said, I will submit, although I have many questions about you and 3 Books. Just to help our orientation here, if you have anything you want to ask me, feel free.

I'm very happy to answer. I got 10 pages of questions for you. The least I can do is offer the same.

You can ask me anything you want if you want to get to know the show.

Jonathan:

I'll ask you one question. I also work as a journalist. As I was saying before we started recording, I'm in many ways more comfortable as a question asker.

But I'll restrict myself to one question, which was, where did this notion of three books for this now rather lengthy series come from? How did you settle on that?

Neil:

Yeah. Well, I was inspired by basically three quotes that I read. I will read you the quotes because you just quoted a bit of Faulkner to me.

The three quotes were George R. R. Martin's famous Game of Thrones quote, which is, A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies.

The man who never reads lives only one. The Seneca quote from On the Shortness of Life, which is, Of all people, only those who are at leisure, who make time for philosophy, only those are really alive. For they not only keep a good watch over their own lifetimes, but they annex every age to theirs.

And finally, a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads. And I am often fed up with the present. And so I thought that one way to tell people's stories in an interesting way, that's not just a chitchat, would be to ask them which three books most shaped their lives.

I can tell a lot by the pause I get before people answer. You know, if they answer in 10 seconds, that tells you something. And the books are all from two years ago.

That tells you something. But if they are thoughtful about it, then it lends itself to a great conversation. And I get to sort of design it so that the side benefit of the research is I get to read more.

And typically, I get to read stuff I never heard of before, or I haven't read before. In your case, I read all three of your books. And I'm sorry to say, I probably wouldn't have.

There's just too many books. And so it allows me to design a style of research that I really like. I'm able to spend typically 40 to 60 hours reading someone's books, reading every interview, listening to every interview.

And then I get these conversations, which I think are unique enough that it also enables me, because I do believe in this principle that different is better than better. So it enables me to, I think, land guests of a stature who I may not otherwise entice, if the conversation wasn't something they haven't been asked before. And so when I lobbed into that the principle of no ads, no sponsors, no promotions, no commercials, no interruptions, I'm trying to create like a sacrosanct, like a space that is special and precious and rare and antithetical to a lot of the stuff I don't like about the world, which is that it's short, it's interrupted with ads, it really is ads, you know, with a little bit of content in the middle. And it's not about stuff that lasts forever.

It's about stuff that just happened. And so it's just me trying to gently push myself into a lot of things that I know I like, but I wouldn't naturally encounter, I think.

Jonathan:

That's a good, full explanation. Thank you.

Neil:

Well, I know I'm talking to the good, full explanation master. And so I at least got to come to the plate with a paragraph so that I can hopefully encourage you to keep doing the same with me. You've been very generous to go through the depths of your experiences in your life, Jon. And I think the first thing you said to me was, you know, I've been reading for 60 plus years, and I believe you're 64 now. So this will be hard, but okay. And you went through your life.

You came up with three formative books. I've got them here beside me. But before I jump into them, I also took a look deep into everything I could find that you've ever said or written about reading or writing.

And from those collected quotes, of which there are many, I've picked out a few to kind of be a bit of an appetizer to this conversation. I'll offer them to you. And I invite you to expand, explain, elucidate, or as George Saunders told us in Chapter 75, deny, if you would like to, the quote.

So here they are. First off, I believe from The Corrections in 2001, you wrote, Fiction is a solution, the best solution to the problem of existential solitude.

Jonathan:

Yeah, I said that. It was a bit of a compromise position. Came out of a multi-year, mostly via letter conversation I was having with my friend David Wallace.

We were trying to figure out something we could agree on to answer the question, why bother writing fiction? And if I were to say that now, I would probably leave out the word existential. I might say it in a plainer way.

We read to connect. There is a magic to the written word, and particularly the written word in a novel, where you, as a writer, put a vision on the page into this very limited alphabet, 26 letters and a couple of punctuation points. And somebody decodes that, and they could be decoding it down the street, or they could be decoding it 150 years later.

And from that code comes this whole world, and with it, the person who created that world initially. And the traces of the person who created the book are all over the place. It's there in the tone.

It's there in the particular observation. It's mentioning things that hadn't been mentioned before that you recognize as true. You recognize, I've experienced this myself.

I'm seeing characters who are behaving in ways I've witnessed people behave. I'm also understanding that behavior in a way I might not have had I not read it in this form. And that creates this amazing sense of communality, if that's a word, between the writer and the reader.

It's a joint thing. Everything is happening through this medium of ink on a page, and yet you don't feel alone. You feel like somebody has been there experiencing the world the way I have.

Neil:

Wow, beautiful. Thank you. And so many things I want to jump off on, but I'll hold myself back because I have questions about Dave Wallace, of course, and about the magic of the written word, but we're going to get into that.

That's a great one.

Jonathan:

I think I'll just say one more. I mean, we actually, I just assumed not talk too much about Dave. That's all become rather water under the bridge, but I think he was very alone.

And when I say that we kind of worked out a compromise position to answer our questions so we didn't have to write letters about it anymore, and I think the emphasis on loneliness grew out of his own existential loneliness, which was really, really profound. He was a deeply isolated person. In a way, I don't feel myself to be so much.

I'm more somebody who nonetheless likes company.

Neil:

What do you mean a compromised position?

Jonathan:

Well, I would say, hey, maybe the reason to write fiction is this, and he'd say, no, no, no, no, no. Maybe it's this, and we would just go back and forth, and it just continued in this sort of ping pong way until he said, well, maybe what you're trying to say is, and I say, yeah, that's close enough. Maybe we can agree on that and stop talking about it, which is what we did.

Neil:

Interesting. Interesting. Okay, I'll avoid asking more about Dave, but obviously, I'm a big fan of a lot of stuff he wrote.

1996 Harper's essay, Perchance to Dream, you said, when a writer says publicly that the novel is doomed, it's a sure bet his new book isn't going well.

Jonathan:

I did say that. I stand by that. I would.

I don't know if it's in that essay, which was subsequently made better and shorter and retitled, Why Bother? It appears in my first essay collection. Maybe in that essay, maybe somewhere else, I also said that a writer's estimate of the number of serious readers in the culture tracks very closely with the number of copies of their last book sold.

Neil:

Oh, that's a great one. I couldn't find it.

Jonathan:

It was particularly striking. I mean, Philip Roth used to say it over and over.

There are about 100,000 serious readers in America, and I swear, you go and look at his book sales and be like, oh, yeah, it's about 100. Well, basically, a serious reader is defined as somebody who buys Philip Roth's book.

Neil:

Oh, that's too funny. So then he changes his tack when he has a big book, I guess, or something.

Jonathan:

Maybe.

Neil:

Yeah.

Jonathan:

I did.

Neil:

Yeah. Well, exactly.

Yeah. So famously, your first two books were critically well-reviewed, but then your third novel, The Corrections, was sort of the big amplification, 1.5 million copies sold, according to some records online, which I don't know if it's true.

Jonathan:

In the US? Yeah, that sounds right.

Neil:

Yeah. Which is big. Which is big.

The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read, colon, where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture? Question mark.

Jonathan:

I think that's from Why Bother as well. Yeah.

Neil:

Okay.

Jonathan:

Again, those were kind of transitional worries of mine when I actually thought it was important to engage with the culture. When I had, I was still burdened with a vestigial notion that writing should be socially useful. It should be perhaps a critique of the society we live in.

It should have some beneficial effect. And of course, you can't have a beneficial effect on the culture if you're not engaging with it. And in the 90s, with the advent of the third screen, following the movie screen and the TV screen, when computers were really taking over in the 90s, we were seeing the beginnings of internet culture.

The rather familiar notion that we were distracting ourselves to death, kind of a Neil Postman critique of modern culture also. Anyway, a long list of people who had been making that point before, but there was a, there was, this was kind of an echo of something. Here I am talking about Philip Roth again.

I'm not even that big a Philip Roth fan, but he had written an essay in the early 60s, I want to say 1961, called Writing American Fiction. And in it, he was saying like, how do you satirize an American culture that is going to be more ridiculous and amazing and extreme than anything you could possibly make up? 30 years later, the problem seemed to be the sense that I had in my 30s that, wow, this is a really diseased country.

This is a diseased culture. And I want to bring news of that disease, but the disease consists in the fact that nobody's listening to people like me.

Neil:

Right, exactly.

Jonathan:

Again, all of it sort of in hindsight, the somewhat self-serving complaints of somebody whose second novel hadn't done well, and he was struggling with his third novel.

Neil:

Interesting. But you no longer feel like the writing should be socially useful.

Jonathan:

No, I gave that up. I mean, I try to be helpful to someone or something when I go to nonfiction, particularly my journalism. I am trying to, in some probably necessarily small way, make a difference in what I choose to write about and how I choose to write it.

But the novel, no, I jettisoned all notion of social responsibility. I was liberated. So much so that I called my fourth novel Freedom, which was partly referred to that sense of liberation from this, oh, partly Midwestern, partly angry young man's feeling that I had a job to do.

And the job was to expose everything that was wrong in the country and get people to take up arms against it. Nevermind the fact that it was very hard to find novels anywhere in the history of the novel that had caused such a mass uprising. Nevertheless, I somehow had it in my head for way too long that novels should be doing that.

Neil:

I got a couple more, two more quotes still. On your 2023 interview on the Reading the Room podcast, you said, I'm competitive, period. I don't like being ignored at the expense of writers who I think are bad, period.

That irks me.

Jonathan:

Apparently I did say that. Yeah. Well, I mean, doesn't it irk you?

Well, wouldn't it irk you?

Neil:

I guess I don't, yeah. Go ahead.

Jonathan:

Well, yeah. I mean, I could put that in a less hostile way. I could speak of a sadness and even apply it to myself.

We have finite lives and very finite time for reading. And there are five to eight orders of magnitude more books than I could ever read in my lifetime. And it does seem a shame to spend a lot of time when you have a lot of choices and there are a lot of good books to spend time reading crap.

So I don't tend to read crap because it's almost physically painful.

Neil:

Yeah. The crap is subjective though. I mean, one man's crap is another man's treasure.

Jonathan:

Maybe, yeah.

Neil:

You think there's objective crap?

Jonathan:

Yeah. No, I think... Do we really even need to have that conversation?

I mean, I can find a crap book for you and I can walk you through sentence by sentence, word choice by word choice, character by character, story term by story term, how unbelievably lazy and cliched everything is. And this is not to say that lazy, cliched work doesn't have its uses. Sometimes that's exactly what you want.

You want the familiar trope. It's tiring to be challenged in sentence after sentence to actually think. Maybe you don't want to think.

Maybe you don't even want a fresh way to say, you know, quiet as a mouse. Maybe quiet as a mouse is exactly what you want to read. Nevertheless, it is objectively crap to say that.

Neil:

Yeah, I think it's... So I relate to this. And the way I relate to it though is when I feel like in the books world, there's more, a higher and higher percentage of books that are not books first or books only.

They're books to something else, or on its way to something else, or they're part of a giant marketing... It's like the person that's in the news suddenly has a book. They just have the book because that was one area that they hadn't covered in their marketing camp.

That's the stuff that bothers me. It's the sort of changing what I think of as books into a thing to a word's another end. That's sort of bothering me.

Jonathan:

At any rate, yes. So there's a sadness that people are spending time reading crap. And I'm not competitive only on my own behalf.

I'm competitive on behalf of my many fellow writers who are doing strong original work and who take care with every sentence. And it irks me when I see someone reading a bad book instead of one of our books.

Neil:

Um, thank you for that expansion there. And the last one I have is from your 2016 interview on the Other People podcast, People Spell PPL. This isn't about writing particularly, but I thought you were talking about it in terms of writing.

And you said, the ambition to dwell in the complicated middle has been shown to be unprofitable.

Jonathan:

Wow, I sound more interesting to myself than I actually experienced myself to be. That's a nicely turned phrase. Well, yes.

And it goes to what I was just talking about. It is a luxury to engage with things in a complicated way. Simplicity is comforting.

Um, bad television is comforting because it's simple. And, uh, there was a time when I thought it was a moral failing that you didn't want to engage with complicated art, nuanced art, moral ambiguity, uh, contradictions in character, uh, books or movies with no heroes and no villains, just people who are kind of a mix of the two. All of that.

I used to think, um, I used to look down on people, honestly, in my youthful arrogance who, who, uh, who weren't into that kind of thing. And I came to feel this was mean of me to look down on them because who was I to judge really? Um, I, I've come to the conclusion that it's actually a luxury to read literature, um, literature being defined by its defiance of cliche, including the cliche of, oh, here's a virtuous hero and here's an evil villain.

Um, total cliche. Uh, and you don't find that in a good literary novel. Um, but that's a luxury when you, you know, when you've had a bad day at a bad job, um, and you've got kids and you've got a problematic spouse and you've got the mother-in-law and the house is falling apart.

I mean, like, who am I to tell you, you are wrong to not feel like getting into a really complicated story of where, uh, some people who seem good are not good. Um, and, you know, the, just the whole, the whole landscape of, uh, moral and social and intellectual complexity, uh, who am I to judge you for just wanting at the end of the day to identify with someone who's good and is being, has bad stuff being inflicted on them by bad people? I mean, I get it.

Uh, and, and so it has really been brought home to me that the kind of work I do is for a small percentage of the population. It's not for an economically privileged small percentage of the population. I doubt that Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are reading good books either.

Um, so they have plenty of leisure if they want it. Um, uh, they're not threatened by anything they could, they just don't because that's not their thing. Uh, and if you go to a prison, you'll find that like 3% of the people there are not reading Michael Connelly.

They're, you know, reading George Saunders. It's a small percentage, but it's kind of, it's a, it's a, it's the same percentage across the population, um, without regard to social or economic status. It's, it's, it is a matter of, it's, it's a privilege of how you were born.

It's a privilege of not having to see the world in terms of your own victimhood.

Neil:

Wow. Wow. Wow.

Wow. It is a luxury to engage with things in a complicated way. Literature defined by its defiance of cliche.

Um, you mentioned George Saunders by the way, and I, I, I won't take the bait on Dave Wallace again, but I did, you know, he gave that eulogy at Dave Wallace's funeral, and there was that last paragraph there, and I reached out to him, told him I was going to be speaking to you, and he said, um, because I asked him what you think Dave would make of these times, and he said, uh, I don't know what Dave would make of these times. It's hard to guess what Dave would make of these times.

He was always surprising and enlightening me with his thoughts. That's one thing I really appreciate about him. He was an uncommon thinker, always ahead of the curve.

Please tell Jon, he's one of the kindest people I've ever met, in addition to being a literary giant and a genius and an ongoing inspiration. Tell him we miss him and Kathy, just to let you know.

Jonathan:

Well, that's awfully nice of George. George is, I love George and our friendship goes back many years now. I think we were actually introduced via Dave.

It was Dave who first put George on the radar for me with a tiny story called, I think Isabella, that was in a, um, in the front part of, uh, Harper's, which was just readings that had appeared in a small magazine. And Dave, Dave recognized George as the genius he is, uh, very early on. Um, and I'm grateful today for that.

And I think he kind of brokered our first meeting in person, maybe 20, 25 years ago in New York. Um, yes. And he and Paula did live for a little while in Santa Cruz.

Um, and it was like, Hey, got one of my old writer friends in town, but they have since, uh, relocated for good reason to Southern California.

Neil:

Yeah. Wow. Well, nice little, um, circle, uh, there and how beautiful that Dave introduced the two of you.

And, um, you know, we'd loved having him on 3 Books. It was very nice of him to come on the show as well. Um, and he picked all short, he picked all readable, he picked like you, he picked all readable books.

So it was a Chekhov and a Christmas Carol. And, uh, it was, it was a wonderful getting into those with him.

Jonathan:

So I could have picked those two. And frankly, the trial is not the most readable book.

Neil:

I mean, no, no it's not.

Jonathan:

And, and, and, and, and interestingly, well, we're sorry. Have I, have I just said something?

Neil:

No, it's okay. It's okay.

Jonathan:

Yes. Well, I'll come back to the Christmas Carol because, um, because that pertains to my second, the second book I chose.

Neil:

Ah, okay. So I will, I will bring that back up when we get into your second book. Now we've wet our palette.

We've wet our mental palette. You have given us some wonderful, juicy kind of wide thinking. This is a luxury to be able to engage with things in a complicated way as we are doing right now, as we delve into your three most formative books for each one, I'm going to try to describe the book as if the listener is holding it in their hands in a bookstore.

So I'll do about a 60 second spiel, and then I'll ask you to tell us about your relationship with each book. And then I have a few jumping off questions from there. So let's begin.

Your very first formative book is Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis, originally published by Jeffrey Bless, uh, by Jeffrey Bless publishing in 1951. Um, the original cover is not the one I have. The original cover is Navy blue with a cream circle in the center and a hand-drawn picture of the four pens at Pennsylvania children.

I believe holding hands in a circle, wearing flowing robes. C.S. Lewis, my cover, by the way, which we'll get into is the movie tie in addition, which was founded Doug Miller books, uh, in Korea in Toronto was the only cover he had, but I took it because I thought, let me support the local independent secondhand bookstore, regardless of what version they have. Although I wouldn't normally have grabbed the movie cover.

Um, C.S. Lewis lived from 1898 to 1963. He was the Irish born author of over 40 books with his greatest legacy being the Chronicles of Narnia, a series of seven children's fantasy books that have sold over 120 million copies. What's it about?

This Prince Caspian is the second of the seven novels in the Chronicles of Narnia Narnia where animals talk, trees walk, and a battle is about to begin. A Prince denied his rightful throne gathers an army in a desperate attempt to rid his land of a false King. But in the end, it is a battle of honor between two men alone that will decide the fate of an entire world.

Dewey decimal heads file this one under 823.91 for literature slash English and old English. Jon, please tell us about your relationship with Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis.

Jonathan:

I'm wondering where that ad copy came from. Um, I would certainly not describe it as a novel that builds to hand to hand combat.

Neil:

good reads.

Jonathan:

But yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess it is technically a fantasy novel. You know, there are dungeons and dragons and, you know, it all has that middle ages feel that so many fantasy novels have.

But that's not what the Narnia books really are. Um, they're a weird thing. They, um, they have children at the center of them.

And, uh, in the first of the novels, and we'll put a little asterisk on the numbering of the novels because the copyright holder publisher has made a disastrous decision to reorder the novels in a way that makes absolutely no sense and is abhorrent to any Narnia fan. Um, what are they thinking? I don't know, but it's a bad thought.

Um, end of asterisk. Uh, in the first novel, these, uh, four siblings find their way. Well, the lion, the witch in the first, um, they find their way to this other world by way of a wardrobe in their, um, uncle's house.

Um, uh, one of the it's, it's classic, it's, it's everything a child wants. Children love going in closets and secret little places. And the notion that you could go into that secret wardrobe and kind of get lost in the coats.

And instead of finding the back of the wardrobe, you find yourself in the middle of a dark wood in winter, uh, where there's nothing around except a glowing gas light right in the middle of this dark frozen wood. It's like, that is every child's like, why would you go into a wardrobe if that's not what you're looking for? Um, well, yeah.

So it turns out, um, they, they find their way to this other world called Narnia and, uh, things are not good there. It's eternal winter. Uh, there's a witch in charge and the witch is basically banished.

Mild seasons. Um, and it turns out they're just, they're just what, uh, was needed to restore Narnia to its proper self and vanquish the witch. Uh, and, and then they go home and no better than that.

They, um, they are rightly celebrated for having liberated Narnia and they proceed to live an entire life there. They are, they, they don't ever seem to get into sex and kids so much. It's like they just become older, bigger versions of themselves.

A king and a queen and a prince and a princess or two boys and two girls. Um, and then one day they go home and they climb out of the wardrobe and it's like one minute later. Um, so in terms of a, a metaphorical rendering of what it is like as a child to sink into a book, um, and then emerge from a book, you can't really do better than that.

That, that Lewis is one of the, one of the many reasons why that's an enduringly popular book is it basically describes what it's like. If you're a kid who has learned to read, has learned that you just pick up a book and you're sitting on this ugly sofa and your parents' blah living room and you are just transported to another world and you live there and you, and you, and in fact you experienced an entire lifetime. If you sit on the sofa long enough and read the entire book, you might experience an entire lifetime.

And then it's like, oops, suddenly you're back in this blah living room and it's time to go to bed. Um, so that was the first book. Um, and I don't know if he intended to write seven from the start.

I'm actually not a great student of his biography. I did see a movie, um, about his late love, uh, played by Deborah Winger. He was played, I believe by Anthony Hopkins.

Um, it was a pretty good movie. At any rate, I don't know if he was intending to write seven books, but he wrote a sequel and Prince Caspian was that sequel. And although it doesn't have that like perfect pair of iconic metaphors, one going into the closet and emerging in a different world and the other being replicating the experience of reading a novel, um, it, it's the one that really, really stays with me.

So very briefly, um, the four Pevensie kids are on a train platform in England. I think they're either coming back from, um, boarding school or they're on their way back to boarding school and they're to school and suddenly they're just like, they get sucked away and they find themselves on this desert Island, totally forested. Um, who knows where they are and they blunder around and they find ruins.

They find a ruined castle and they're kind of like, they're, they're freaked out, but they're not completely innocent because they've had the experience of getting sucked into another world before. So it's like their game. Let's see what's up here.

And there's this, and, and right away, one of the key things for the book is they're, they're just looking at this ruined castle. It's been ruined for hundreds of years. It's completely overgrown.

Um, and, and fall, I mean, there's no roofs. It's just, it's just rubble and, and cellars and stuff like that. It starts to dawn on them.

Wait a minute. We lived here. This was the, this was our palace.

This must be Caravelle. This is where, this is where we ruled as King and Queen and Prince and Princess and had all those parties and went hunting and riding and swimming and all of that. We had, we had this amazing, and look at it now.

How can this be? I mean, it's only a few months later for us and it seems to be like a millennium later here. And that dawning sense of deep time of, of something is really, really weird here that, um, that this thing that we knew so well is now almost completely ruined to the point of being almost unrecognizable.

So that's the first uncanny moment, uh, in the book. And, and it remains uncanny, which is to say, I can't give you a good, um, uh, discursive account of why that is such an amazing effect to achieve, but it, it, it, it's hard as a child to connect to the depth of time. Um, and, and the notion that like St. Louis, where I grew up, that once upon a time, this was forested and Native Americans hunted here and there was a civilization across the river. Now we're ruined, the Coquia Downs. You could see that, but, but, but to really grasp the depth of the, the centuries that it passed, um, actually it turned out to be easier by reading a novel. Um, so I'll just say maybe only one other thing.

Um, well, two other things. So going back to the lion and the witch in the wardrobe, I mentioned two things that make it the classic children's story, but there's a third thing that I think also accounts for its enduring popularity with children. And that is that one of the Pevensie kids, Edmund, is bad.

He, he is sort of split up from the other kids while on that winter time visit to Narnia. And he finds himself, um, getting entertained by a witch who gives him something which I've tried. It's a candy that was perhaps still is popular in England, Turkish delight, Turkish delight.

And he loves it. I've, I've tried it. It's not good, but you know, there's no accounting for what kids liked.

I liked all sorts of things as a kid myself, weren't good. Um, anyway, although this, even as a kid, I wouldn't have touched this stuff. It was, it's kind of white and has little bits of nut in it.

It's just awful. Um, uh, anyway, and he gets seduced by the endless supply of Turkish delight. And he basically is asked to betray his siblings.

Um, and he says, can I have more Turkish delight? And the answer is, well, yes, of course you can. You can have as much as you want.

If you'll just do me this little favor and get rid of those annoying siblings of yours. And he goes for it and he's really very bad. And it's not so in, in the bad novel of the sort we were talking about earlier, he would be identified right up front.

Okay. This is a troubled kid. He's going to cause trouble and he's going to be, and nobody likes him.

And, and he's a bully and, and not to be trusted. And you recognize that right away. Instead, we're totally in his point of view and it's all making perfect sense.

We're also in his point of view when he starts to have qualms and said, Hmm, maybe this thing I'm doing is not so good. And you're what, what, what, what Lewis is doing. And he does again and again in the Narnia books is he's putting you into the psychology, into the emotional world of a child who knows that there are things he does or she does that are, that are just not right.

They're bad. Kids are not innocent little creatures. Kids are full of all sorts of bad stuff.

They're greedy and selfish. They, they want to have the toy. They don't want the sibling to have the toy.

They want to have the toy. Um, and they'll actually go to considerable lengths to get what they want. I mean, if they're not sociopaths, they will grow out of it, but, um, the kids are bad and they experience real remorse.

It's pop. And for that, and they also kind of live with this awful sense of how bad they are. And it takes a literary writer like CS Lewis to have the courage to go there and give you a character you're going to sympathize with who's actually not good.

Um, and that was, that was a huge revelation. There's a little bit of that is actually less of it in Prince Caspian and Prince Caspian. Uh, what you have instead is three of the siblings behaving kind of badly.

Uh, because the youngest, Lucy, who's the most dear of the kids, um, they're blundering around in the woods, trying to find help, um, or trying to be of help. Uh, and she sees the lion. Well, the lion of course is central to the Narnia books.

That would be Aslan. Um, and Aslan is pretty obvious Christ figure who, who's, who was actually killed, uh, in the first novel, but somehow he's still alive. They all saw him killed just like some of the people in the Bible.

They saw, yeah, Jesus definitely dead. No, it turns out maybe he's still alive. Lucy sees him and she's like, oh my God, Aslan, the, the person I love more than anything in the world, it's Aslan.

And she tells the others and they say, nah, can't be, you didn't. She said, no, no, I think I did. I did.

And so it's, there's this kind of, again, it's about this sort of private life of a child. She is seeing something that no one else is seeing. And she feels incredibly alone and incredibly frustrated, but also really rather determined because she is seeing this thing that the others are denying and denying and denying.

Um, so even though there's not really a bad character, the siblings are bad because they don't listen to their sister. They probably should listen to her, um, because they know her to be a good kid. Um, and she's telling him, no, God damn it.

I mean, not God damn it, but you know, gosh, darn it. I saw, I saw Aslan and he wants us to go this way, not that way. Um, again, you know, kind of religious, wants us to go this way, not that way.

Christ-like lion, um, saying don't go that, don't do that when you're on the wrong path. Here's the right path. It's the youngest, the most innocent child who sees that blah, blah, blah.

You can do all this sort of, um, kind of Christian symbolic, um, symbology off it, but not, not really the point. The point is again, the private interior, emotional and moral life of a child. Um, and I, at least as a, as a kid responded to that, I was the youngest people didn't listen to me.

Um, and I also knew I had done bad things and I felt terrible remorse about that. So all of that is there. So that's the second thing.

The third thing is when the kids go back and see the ruins of Narnia 1300 years after they were last there.

Neil:

Yeah. That's the, that's the year spot on. That's right.

Yeah. Yeah. The first, the first book takes place in the year 1000 to 1015 in Narnia.

The second book, Prince Caspian takes place in the year 2303 in Narnia.

Jonathan:

Yeah. I, I not even that suggests a depth of research that I have not

Neil:

Well you nailed it.

Jonathan:

Um, I, no, I, uh, well, I just remembered the number 1300 from somewhere, but anyway, uh, they go back there and Narnia has been taken over by these alien people, not aliens, but just people from somewhere else.

Uh, it's been overrun with, um, people who don't believe in the things that the Narnians believed in and they persecute anyone who thinks, Oh, animals can talk. Are you kidding me? Oh, by the way, yet another thing about the Narnia books, animals talk, um, not all animals, but the talking animals talk.

So, I mean, again, just like the ultimate dream of a child to go to a place where the animals even actually talk to them. That's like he hit, he hit every important trope, um, right out of the gate in Lion, the Witch and Wardrobe. Anyway, there are still a few talking animals in, uh, Narnia, but they've been driven underground.

Um, and, and the good spirits, I mean, there are various like Nyads and Dryads and even the tree, so tree spirits and, and there are good dwarves. Um, and they've all basically been persecuted and have had no recourse, but to take refuge deep in the woods. And I have to say that of all the, all the things I love about Prince Caspian, the thing that I responded to most was this notion of this small embattled community in exile.

Um, it is a classic David and Goliath story. They are the weak, they are the persecuted. Um, and they also, and there, and there's something very sweet about them and they take care of each other.

Uh, and the rest of the world doesn't like them. Well, if you're a reader, if you're kind of a, kind of a difficult kid who maybe experienced some social difficulty later in junior high and, uh, partly because you spent so much time reading, um, maybe even as a little kid, uh, you, you, you felt apart from the social crowd. Um, and to this, this idea that there was this, you, there might be other people like you hiding underground in the woods.

Um, that sense of incredible gratitude and discovery when you found somebody else who had the secret of reading the same as you did. Um, that's really, really hooked me with this book. The, the, the notion of a, um, uh, of a band of exiles, really exiled from the, from the dominant culture, um, oppressed by the dominant culture.

That's, that's how the world came to seem to me in my twenties and my thirties. Um, and it's still actually informs my notion, although as we discussed earlier, I no longer think that these exiles are morally superior, but nonetheless, even today, when I go out and do a reading on a rainy night in Cincinnati or wherever, and 150 people come in out of the rain, um, kind of all shapes and sizes, uh, all ages, male, female, black, white, um, other ethnicities. It's a, it's a kind of motley group has come out on a rainy night to hear a read, to hear a reading.

Um, it, I still feel like I'm with those that, that, that motley crew in the woods, uh, in Prince Caspian.

Neil:

Wow. Wow.

Jonathan:

Because they don't match. That's the thing. I mean, when, when, even in the, even in the drawings and the, um, the editions of the book that I read, there's something very uniform about the monarch, the dominant culture.

They're all in uniform and they all kind of are drawn the same way. And then you see the, you know, the table where people are talking about things. Yeah.

Um, it's just a complete, like there's a rabbit and then there's like a satyr next to the rabbit. It's just like, that's, that is a picture of what it's like to go to a literary reading.

Neil:

What's a satyr? I don't even know what that is.

Jonathan:

Satyr has, I think it doesn't, it's a satyr is a, um, is it a goat? Oh, I see.

Neil:

Yes. Right, right, right, right, right.

Jonathan:

It's next to the rabbit.

Neil:

Yeah. The half goat. Right, right.

Yes, exactly. Right. The dwarf.

Yes. Okay. Yeah.

That is so, what a, what an amazing metaphor, um, for, for readings in bookstores and, uh, the small and battle community in exile, the private emotional life and moral life of a child. This is, this is, so I can see why it's formed. So it sounds like you were like, you said later in junior high.

So I'm guessing you were nine or 10 or so when you read this.

Jonathan:

Yeah. It's also, I mean, I think these are some of the very first novels I, like real novels, novels you could enjoy as an adult that I remember reading. Um, my mother was not particularly approving of reading novels, um, because they were not true.

They were made up. Um, and I saw a lot of my first reading, I was reading nonfiction. I was reading biographies and just, they were, they were, she wasn't approving cause they were made up with the belief that that meant that they were, they were lies.

Neil:

Oh, they were lies.

Jonathan:

They were lies. She was very disapproving of the idea of my becoming a novelist. It's like, you're going to lie for a living.

That doesn't sound right.

Neil:

I read a quote recently that there's more truth in fiction than there is, you know, uh, in nonfiction or something along those lines.

Jonathan:

And I would try to make that case to her. But it also goes back to what I was saying about social utility and that, and that what I was in the grip of really well into my thirties, this notion that the novel had to be useful. Um, that, that came from that Midwestern notion of social utility that I definitely got from my parents.

Um, at any rate, I did start, I think I might've started with the Dr. Dolittle books, which basically checked almost none of the amazing boxes that the Narnia books did, uh, checked, but didn't check one important box talking to animals. So, um, but I really, I mean, there were, there were really two books in grade school that, um, that I felt formed me. I could have just as easily chosen Harriet the spy as, as, as a novel that, that shaped me, um, as Prince Caspian.

Um, and there again, uh, different kind of romance, present day romance. Um, but the notion of being a child who sneaks around through alleys and climbs walls and spies on people, uh, and then writes about them, um, that had its own romance. Uh, but the, but the, but the main thing there, and this is why I think both of both the Narnia books and also Harriet the spy by Louise Fitzhugh and her wonderful followup to that, um, the long secret, why they were so particularly formative was that they did not portray children as good.

Neil:

Right. Right. Right.

Jonathan:

Which is how you, which is, which is, which, if you want it, if you actually want to hook a child, I think don't show them nice sunny pictures of happy kids who only want the best and are trying to make a better world and blah, blah, blah. No, it's like you, you put a kid in trouble, trouble of their own making because they didn't behave well. Um, and they're not very about it.

Neil:

Right.

Jonathan:

And on happiness is of course, it's not such a much better story. So, um, stepping back, it was, these were the first, what I would call adult novels I read, even though they might now be both classed as YA novels, um, Prince Caspian and Harriet the spy.

They were adult in the sense that they were, they had a real nuance to them. Um, they had a moral dimension and the morality was by no means straightforward.

Neil:

Wow. Wow. That was unbelievable.

That was such a rich, uh, thoughtful, uh, explanation. Um, on your point about, about children, I'm reminded of that, you know, no good, very bad, terrible day. You know, that book that I, the title is just looking for me, you know, that everybody loves going through the day.

Um, lots of things I want to ask you about, about here. Heroes is one topic, you know, in Narnia in 2303, Prince Caspian is described as noble. And I guess we have to check where I get the copy from, but this is from online.

I'm from Wikipedia. He's described as noble, handsome, brave, and Mary. He strives for fairness and justice at all times and is a devoted King.

My movie tie in cover. I mean, you know.

Jonathan:

Horrible. Don't show that to me again.

Neil:

Movie, by the way, came out in 2008, $225 million budget and made 420 million at the box office as a side note. But then the movie cover has this, you know, this white male teen heartthrob with shoulder length, brown hair, chiseled features. We're talking in 2024.

And I want to ask you, what does a hero look like today?

Jonathan:

Oh gosh, we were having a nice conversation. And then you'd have to go and ask a question like that. Um, I will say that Prince Caspian is not a very interesting character.

Um, I believe he reappears, uh, as a very old man in the next Narnia novel, Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Um, and he's, uh, and he's now an aged King and he wants to try to sail beyond the end of the world.

Neil:

Um, yes, that's right.

Jonathan:

He's deaf and like, and he has an ear trumpet. This is all just from memory, I haven't,

Neil:

yeah, no, that's right. I just, I'm looking at the reading order now. That's exactly right.

Jonathan:

And, uh, we introduce a new Pevensie character, uh, I believe a cousin named Eustace. And I, the line I remember is him being introduced to old King Caspian and Caspian said, useless.

You say he's useless. Um, that's really the first moment when Caspian becomes an interesting character when he's an irritating and irritable old King. Um, he's, he's kind of a nullity as the hero in,

Neil:

his titular book.

Jonathan:

His titular book, his eponymous book.

Neil:

Um, I love that word nullity.

Jonathan:

He's just a kid. I mean, probably the only interesting thing about him, um, is that he's, he's arguably corrupted by his professor.

Um, there is a character in Prince Caspian, Dr. Cornelius, who has a bit of the supernatural in his genealogy. As I recall, he might be part dwarf or elf.

Neil:

Yeah. He's half, he's half dwarf. That's right.

Jonathan:

Half dwarf. Anyway, he's, um, he's been entrusted by the King to educate young Dr. Cornelius. Exactly.

So like it's, it's every school board's nightmare. Dr. Cornelius, they're not teaching Caspian to be a good, obedient member of the dominant culture, but he's whispering to him, you know what, you know what? There was an old Narnia.

Things were different there. There were animals who talked. Um, and you know what?

I think there might still be a few of them out there. Um, and it was much better. People were nicer and more interesting.

This dominant culture that you're being educated to play a part in. Um, there is a complication in that actually he's going to be killed because his uncle in a sort of Hamlet move has killed Caspian's father and usurped the throne and Caspian is now an inconvenience. That's sort of a plot thing.

The real issue here is that Cornelius is whispering forbidden knowledge. Um, so to the hero and the hero is heroic in my book, this hero, to the extent that he actually listens to the teacher and says, Hey, I'd like to know more about these talking animals. Can you like set us up?

Um, and that, uh, so what does a teacher look, what does a hero look like in 2023? It looks like a teacher in a Florida school teaching forbidden books. That's what it looks like.

It looks like Dr. Cornelius with a shorter beard.

Neil:

Why'd you say Florida?

Jonathan:

Oh, just because it's governor DeSantis's war on school boards.

Neil:

Right. Right. Teaching forbidden books in a Florida school.

Oh, that's, that's nice. Um, I want to talk to you about movies. I won't show you the movie cover again.

We've, we've, we agree that it's horrid. Um, but I will say

Jonathan:

No offense to the actors, I'm sure they are nice people.

Neil:

You don't have to, it's okay.

Um, I got in trouble by the way, cause I have values for this show, right? I really want it to be a values based podcast. So I have, I have values like, you know, no book shame, no book guilt.

I have values like librarians are doctors of the mind. And I had one value that I got a lot of flack for Jon, which was real books have real pages. And I, and then I had, I had a semicolon that said eBooks and audio books are beautiful mutants.

Now people don't like that. I got a lot of flack for real books have real pages, but if I'm honest, it's still a value of this show. I mean, I I'm in Vancouver, my bag is extremely heavy and I will not, I will not like, I just, I just will not go to audio and eat.

I just have to have a bag full of bulky pulsing. You know, that's my way of, that's part of me. That's part of what the show is.

So that's what it is. Take it or leave it.

Jonathan:

No, well I share your preference, but let's not make it into a virtue. Okay. Yes.

It's just a preference.

Neil:

Yes. Preference, not virtue. Thank you.

So books as movies. I want to talk to you about books as movies, just as a concept books, as movies, as a concept, we live in a screens over everything world today. The American time you study has been tracking what percent of Americans do not read a single book in a year since the early eighties.

And that number is now depending where you look between 53 and 57% higher than ever and tipping into the majority now really for the first time. And so there's this thing that is true. If I'm honest, I mentioned David Mitchell in chapter 58.

Well, how did I discover David Mitchell? I went to see this movie I'd never heard of called cloud Atlas. And it said at the end of it, I was like, who's this guy, David Mitchell.

And it pulled me onto all of his work and I discovered his whole thing. And then, and I know the movie is like the trigger for like a lot of people into the books. And I was curious for somebody who sold millions of copies of many books, why you have no movies based on your books.

And so I went deep into the history and I found the 2018 New York times magazine profile of you, which has this quote that actually stunned me. And so I want to get your thought on that quote today, you know, six years later, if you still agree with this and also what your philosophy is on sort of the books as like, I don't let my kids watch Harry Potter movies period till they've read all the books. Like that's a thing in my house, which I take a lot of flack from, from my kids.

I'm trying to make that a preference, not a virtue, but that's the way it is here. And here's the quote from you. And it's a, it's, it was, it was a three sentences throughout a long paragraph.

So I'm going to stitch them as if it's one long quote here. Here we go. You have to remember what a partisan of the novel I am and that it had long been one of my ambitions to have my novels defeat all attempts to put them on the screen.

A big part of me would be very proud never having anything of mine adapted, because if you want the real experience, there's only one way to get it. You're going to actually have to be a reader.

Jonathan:

Yeah, part of me, but it would be cool to, to see a good adaptation. It'd be interesting because you know, I'm, I'm the sole creator of my little kingdom of the world of whichever novel. And I know a lot.

Every once in a while I talk to book groups and they, they come up with some cockeyed interpretation or something that's just like not supportable. And it's like, you've had me over to your book club. I am more of an expert in this text than you are.

Would you like me to tell you why, why that is an insupportable interpretation? I can, I can tell you exactly why, because I, it takes me a long time to write these and I basically end up with the entire thing memorized and that stays with you. And now I'm feeling self-conscious about saying that people are entitled to their own interpretations, but it has to be like textually supportable.

So the point was, I have like random access memory for these things I've created. And in no cases, it taken me less than four years to create it. And it's only whatever, 500 pages.

So that's a, that's a lot of time per page. And I know it well. And it's like, it has no secrets from me.

Nevertheless, it is possible to imagine an actor reading a good actor, reading a book or reading a screenplay based on the book and having a different idea and doing something that totally is consistent and works, but is nothing like I imagined. And that would be cool. I think too, when you, when you get, when you get additional great artists involved in a project, interesting things can happen.

So I'm not, it's really, yes, I'm a partisan of the novel. And yes, if my books defeated all attempts to adapt them, I would be secretly rather pleased, but I'm not hostile to adaptation.

Neil:

So it's a, it's a possibility in the future.

Jonathan:

Yeah. Yeah. No, they're adaptations are in the work on three different fronts for three books as we, as we speak.

Yeah. But these are all, these are all limited series. Yeah.

There's no way you can do a feature film from one of these things. It just doesn't, they're not, they don't, they're too multivalent to, to, to fit into even a two hour and 45 minute format.

Neil:

Oh, okay. I see. I understand.

And so, but just philosophically, you know, when my kids say, why don't you let us watch Harry Potter? I say, because I can't picture Harry Potter anymore because when Daniel Radcliffe was cast as Harry Potter, he was, you know, everywhere and you couldn't not look at him because he was on every billboard and every magazine and every, and so my vision internally of Harry Potter was plastered over by his face. And it bothers me that I can't see it anymore as I used to.

And so I want to preserve the, what I think of as a wider imaginative world that you get from reading. But I know it's an unusual thing that I, you know, force my kids to read.

Jonathan:

No, that's fair. I totally get it. I, I resisted watching the Lord of the Rings for that reason.

And finally reached the point, well, finally reached the point of having a lot of time in hotel rooms and not being able to find much else to watch. I don't think I've ever watched even one of those movies straight through, but I've watched them in overlapping pieces enough that I think I've probably seen the entire thing on TV. But that was a point when I no longer really cared about preserving my idea of what Aragorn looked like.

And frankly, Viggo Mortensen, pretty good.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay.

Jonathan:

It does look like Aragorn.

Neil:

All right. Your second formative book is of course, The Trial by Franz Kafka. That's K-A-F-K-A, originally published by Verlag de Schmid.

I'm sure I mispronounced that. In Berlin in 1925. The cover I have is a 1954 hardcover with a rough white and gray pencil drawing of a man sitting at a small table with a man in a gray suit standing beside him and a courthouse gallery watching them from above.

The is in about a 30-point all-cap serif font with Trial in about a 120-point font just below. Franz Kafka was the German-speaking Bohemian Jewish novelist and short story writer based in Prague who lived from 1883 to 1924 and is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th century literature. What's this book about?

The Trial tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote inaccessible authority with the nature of its crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader. Whether read as an existential tale, parable, or prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, The Trial has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers. Dewey Decimal heads file this one under 833.912 for literature slash German literature slash 1900 to 1945. Jon, please tell us about your relationship with The Trial by Franz Kafka.

Jonathan:

I think I tried to read this book when I was in high school. I took it out of my library in Webster Groves, Missouri, and I didn't get very far with it. It needed more paragraph breaks and dialogue.

I was a sci-fi reader, and even though there was a sort of sci-fi premise, it had a kind of futuristic feel. I wasn't that into it. Really by accident, I became a German major in college.

Wasn't the language from my family. We have no German blood. In my last year of college, I took a course in modern German prose.

One of the important titles we read was The Trial. I think I read quite a bit of it in German, but I found it tedious and frustrating, and so I read the rest of it in English. We've been reading these other books that were also challenging, but kind of more relatable.

This was about the poor man who's arrested for no reason. The opening line of the book is, somebody must have been telling lies about Josef K., because one morning, without his having done anything wrong, some people came to his apartment and he was arrested. One fine morning.

It was like, okay, yes, yes, yes. The oppressive modern state and the plight of the everyman who's unjustly persecuted, this reminds us of Stalinist Russia. It certainly reminds us of excesses of the Nazis.

I just didn't get it. He writes a beautiful German, and it's also just so weird. He's in this office building, and he hears something in the closet, and he opens the closet.

Again, sort of like Why I'm the Witch in the Wardrobe, that turns out to be a rather roomy closet, because there are two men in there beating somebody. He's like, shut that door. No, thank you.

Then it's a week later, he's walking down the hall, and he hears something coming from the same door, and he opens it. It's the exact same people, and they're still beating this guy. It's like, hey, wait a minute.

That's not realistic. That doesn't work. It doesn't work.

It's like, oh, it's sort of dreamlike, I guess, but it's boring to hear about people's dreams. It also doesn't really end. Kafka never finished it, but basically, it's the story of a man who feels himself to be unjustly accused of a crime.

He doesn't know what the crime is. He tries to get answers, can't get answers, tries to enlist people to help him. They're not very helpful.

Then the book kind of trails off, and that's that. I was like, okay, so I guess this is important world literature. What do you want me to say?

I said this when the professor asked me in the little seminar. There are never very many German majors. That was one of the nice things.

It was only six of us. This is the greatest professor I ever had. He was my Dr. Cornelius. His name was George Avery, senior year at Swarthmore College, 1981. Actually, fall of 1980, this particular class. He was very long-winded.

We didn't know he was a great professor. Many people thought he was the worst professor they'd ever had. He went into this long thing about, there are three schools of interpretation.

He cited some piece of secondary literature, and it was the policy of mine never to read secondary literature, ever. It had been on the syllabus, and I, of course, hadn't read it. He said, there are three universes of interpretation about this book.

One is that Josef K. is innocent of all crimes. One is that his guilt can't really be determined from the text. One of them is he's guilty.

I'm like, wait a minute. No, no. I was offended.

He's guilty? Come on. We all know what this story is.

It's an innocent man unjustly persecuted by this soulless bureaucracy. He said, yeah, maybe you should take another look at that book. Maybe you should go back and read it carefully.

I was just trying to find the plot. You know, Kafka is not great on plot. I went back and looked at it.

I read the first, I think just the first chapter, paying attention. I realized that this was a portrait of an asshole, that Josef K. is a royal asshole, and that I hadn't noticed it because Kafka's so much in his point of view that we're seeing everything through Josef K.'s eyes, and Josef K., of course, feels himself to be innocent. All assholes do.

He's super creepy with women. He's kind of abusive to his landlady. He's all over the map.

He's out of control. He's a weird, sick dude. If you read every sentence, speaks to that fact.

If you start paying attention and you don't come in with this preconception that it's an innocent guy, and that the genius is in how closely Kafka sticks to his point of view, he's telling you something about the way we all work. We all go through the world feeling like we're the innocent victim persecuted unjustly. Okay, so I fell hook, line, and sinker for the third school of interpretation, which is that Josef K. is totally guilty. In fact, in succeeding decades, I've recognized that it's one of the reasons the book has this enduring power, is that all of those interpretations are simultaneously in play. But at the time, what it amounted to was, I've read this book, I've read that chapter at least three times. I read it in high school.

I read it again in German, and then quickly to prepare for the first of two weeks of talking about the book, I read it again in English. I read this book three times, this chapter at least, three times, and I understood absolutely nothing. And it was there in plain sight all the time.

If you actually just stepped back and looked at what was happening, you would say, this guy is not behaving well at all. And that was kind of when the coin dropped for me with what literature can do. It's hiding in plain sight.

And you can read what you thought was read, and you're not reading at all. You're not getting it. You're not seeing it.

And I mean, the magic of literature is right there, which is somehow, these words, the words haven't changed, but your relationship to the words, your ability to decode the words, the sophistication, or at least the clue you need to decode those words changes. And that got me fired up about this thing called literature, which until then, I was kind of like, I was at a good college, and I was bright, and I got A's. And I could figure out what the meaning of this text was, and I could write a nice paper saying, this is the meaning of the text.

And I ran smack into Kafka. It's like, I don't know anything. I'm going to have to get serious about this thing called literature.

And those were the weeks, those were the months when I was, I'd always thought it'd be cool to be a writer. You have lots of free time, and sit around, make stuff up, and you get paid for it, and you become famous. That sounded great.

I wanted to do that. But I didn't imagine myself as a literary writer. I just thought, nice work if you can get it.

And I hope to get it, because I was good with language. So my ambition as a novelist began when George Avery said, you need to go back and read every sentence. A lot to learn.

That really was a life-changing book. I mean, there was, I can really specify that afternoon when George says, you're not getting it. And I go back to my room, and then I get it.

That was a kind of, that was a revelation.

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You're reminding me when I picked up by accident, the annotated version of Lolita. And were it not for the annotations, I wouldn't have got any, like, I realized how valuable it was for me to have read the annotated book when I was reading it with all these notes explaining all this stuff. I was like, wow, like, I would never have noticed all this stuff.

I have some questions here, but I did also want to remind us both that you wanted to tie a Christmas carol here, I think.

Jonathan:

Oh, right. Yes. So that was fall semester when I went home for Christmas, which was a very consequential Christmas for me, because I'd learned how to see through reading these great German writers.

I was no longer just seeing the surface, I was seeing what was going on under the surface. And my whole family was there. And I'd been part of that family for 20 plus years.

And suddenly, I could see what was going on. It was just like all, it was like, I had been seeing in two dimensions. And now I had 3D vision, I could see it.

And one of the things we did, my mother was a dutiful subscriber to the local repertory theater at what was then Webster College, it was now Webster University. And we went to see a stage version of a Christmas carol. Stepping back, the name of the trial in German is Der Prozess.

And that's a beautifully ambiguous word in German. It's equivalent to our word process. And I think you can't speak of a legal process, but we no longer use that word, we use a trial.

And you have to pick one as a translator. So you're going to call it the trial, but it could just as well be called the process. And what I had seen as I went back and re-engaged with Der Prozess was that this was a process, an internal process that Josef K. was undergoing. He was getting drawn deeper into his own personal culpability, resisting it. But things were getting ever more complicated.

The deeper he went, the more complicated things got. And that maybe this had to do with some of the ways that Kafka's own life had been in process. Anyway, we went to see a Christmas carol and it blew me away because it was the trial before the trial was written.

It's not bureaucrats who come to arrest Scrooge, it's these ghosts, four ghosts, I think. And he too, kind of like Josef K., pretty satisfied with himself. And he goes through this process where it's like layer after layer gets peeled away.

And he's finally left crying. So it's a very different, it's a 19th century view. There's not really a lot of ambiguity in Dickens.

He's working with a sort of pre-Freudian notion of what a person is. Nevertheless, I was really, it was like, oh my God, this is the same story. Of course it has a happy ending, it being Dickens.

Scrooge recognizes that he has been the world's biggest asshole and he sets out to correct it. Well, not to spoil anything, but there is an ending of the trial. It doesn't match up to what comes before it, but there is an ending and it's safe to say it's not a happy ending.

What happens to Josef K.? Just a little spoiler there. But nevertheless, yeah, that's what I wanted to say about Christmas Carol.

It's interesting that George picked that as one of his three books, because that's the deepest Dickens there is, I think.

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.

One of the points George made about it, by the way, is that he had an image of Dickens writing it in a sort of slapdashery type of manner, which he came to recognize as a part of himself that he wanted to kind of blossom in his writing. Not to put words in his mouth, but that's one part of the conversation I recall.

Jonathan:

It really stands out. It's not like any other Dickens. Yeah, exactly.

Neil:

I was blown away when I read it. I was like, wow, I had no idea this was so good.

Jonathan:

Yeah. And frankly, a much more accessible book than the trial.

Neil:

And like a hundred pages. I'm a big believer in this idea of reading two pages of fiction a night. And the reason I espouse that is to get people back into reading.

And one thing I do is I have this list of books that are a hundred pages or less, like The Old Man and the Sea, or Foster, or Animal Farm, just to make it feel like you can get it. I want to talk to you about motivation. You mentioned about half an hour ago, we were talking about Caspian.

You said Kafka never published this book. He died at age 40 in obscurity. He had written chapters in different notebooks.

He asked his friend Max in his will to burn all his books that were not published. Max didn't. He stitched it together and published them.

So the question I have around that is just around motivation. Can you relate to this desire to have written something and wanting it burned, first of all? What's behind that?

And then how does that go against the feeling to publish and to want it to be out there and to be big? And then how does your motivation or how has your motivation to write been changing? Or has it changed?

If it has, since you first started, got published, got big books published, et cetera, over time?

Jonathan:

That's a big question. I can imagine Kafka feeling, I didn't finish that book. I had some great stuff.

I didn't quite know what to do with it. He was essentially a writer of fragments. He did publish a few things.

He published stories and he published, most famously, the Metamorphosis, another unfortunate title translation. I think transformation would be a more literal translation and probably a better one. And so he was capable when he knew he had fully realized the project, publishing it.

And I think he felt that none of the novels was he able to get back to and make what he wanted of them. I think his motivations will forever remain shrouded in mystery. What exactly he was thinking when he gave that instruction to Brode.

If he did indeed give that instruction to Brode, because of course, maybe he only hinted at it or said it in a lighthearted way. Oh, Max, you should just burn all that stuff. It makes Max Brode into more of a hero, makes up for his own more or less failed literary career.

Nobody reads Max Brode anymore. If he was the person who single-handedly rescued Kafka's work. So we don't really know.

My motivation, yeah, it's changed. I mean, I wanted to show what I could do. And I wanted to show my parents that I could actually make a living as a writer.

Those were early motivations. I also wanted to change the course of American literature, like every 23-year-old does. I wanted to be famous.

Didn't really expect to make that much money, but I would probably get a good teaching job eventually, at least. And I also, as we've discussed in this already very long conversation, I wanted to change the world. I wanted to be socially effective and so forth.

At a certain point, it really became writing just because that's what I am. I'm a writer. Coupled with competition, I had a really good friend, David Wallace, who was also very talented.

And I wanted to beat him. I wanted to crush my opponents, my fellow players on the field of literature. In the same way, if you're a football player, you want to crush the opponent.

Doesn't mean you hate them. You shake hands afterwards. You're good friends.

You're all playing for the same team of the NFL and so forth. But as we're all playing for the same team of literature, nevertheless, in the course of a game, you want to win. But that has really...

All of those motivations have fallen away. Now I just do it for the money. Well, 90%.

It's nice to get paid. But I honestly do it now because people are looking for a good book to read. And I feel like I'm part of a community of readers and writers.

Part of the writer's job in that community is to write good books. And I would say that's my motivation now. It's better than having no motivation.

I mean, okay. I'll mention this, the most important thing, but it's not necessarily a motivation. Motivation having to do with exterior forces.

I want to write a novel because I'm happy when I'm writing a novel. It's not a motivation. It's like I'm alive when I'm writing a novel.

And part of me is just not really alive when I'm not. It is the story of my life that I've spent most of it not writing novels, therefore not really fully alive.

Neil:

Wow. Wow. Wow.

Wow. Because you mentioned community and being part of what David Mitchell called the Republic of Letters in an earlier conversation with us, I might go to the question I have here about the fact that on the back of my book, it says specifically Kafka is from a well-to-do family, which I thought was interesting. A Jewish merchant class is what it's sort of pegged as.

And it seems to me that staying grounded, connected with people is just so vital as part of being a writer and a novelist. I have found your ear for dialogue uncannily pitch perfect. Your books are so sound.

They're a real conversation. I feel like I'm listening to Ian Fraser in Great Plains. He transcribes the people he bumps into on the way or David Sedaris and his diary.

It just sounds like it's right there. And I wonder how you mentioned the money. Obviously, you've been very successful with your work.

But my question is around, I have a question and I have two comments from you to give you to help, if it helps. My question is, how do you stay of the people? How do you carry with you that ear for real dialogue when you, I'm assuming, inevitably become somewhat bubbled?

And the two quotes I have from you to feed into this are a 2010 Guardian quote, where you said, I always want to be an amateur. A professional is too slick. And a 2015 Financial Times quote, where you said, I am a poor person with money.

Jonathan:

Yes, I put in mind of Flannery O'Connor, you can't be any poorer than dead. And, you know, I'm a human animal who will die soon, just like everybody else. So there, you know, we keep that in mind.

It's not that hard to remain grounded in some way. You know, I do feel, to some extent, bubbled and particularly bubbled in my age group. I did have a young character, some young characters in Purity, which was written not that long ago, 10 years ago.

I think I would be, it would be, I'd have to do some work to develop an ear for the way 18-year-olds talk in 2024. But I would also note that dialogue is more art than science. People don't actually speak the way they do in my books.

It's a little magic trick. There are things you do to give the impression that you're hearing realistic dialogue, but it's actually not the way people talk. It's a very artful thing.

And yeah, and so it, and being an artful thing, you can make artful fakes and get away with it. If you, if you can hear the language, a little goes a long way. Like you hear, and this is a, this is a larger point about being isolated.

It is an isolating job being a writer, spend a lot of time alone, but you don't need that much. You don't need to be following a hundred feeds. Two feeds will do, because you're never going to put the whole thing in the book anyway.

You're going to, you're just going to use little teeny pieces of the little bit that gets through to you and then kind of use your instincts to create something that feels like complete picture, but it's absolutely not a complete picture.

Neil:

So the third and final book is Reason in a Dark Time by Dale Jamieson, J-A-M-I-E-S-O-N. The subtitle is Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed and What It Means for Our Future. Published by Oxford University Press in 2014.

The cover has dark stormy clouds over a yellow gray horizon. The title's in an all caps sans serif font with the letters getting darker as they go down the page. Dale Jamison's born in Iowa in 1947, and I believe he still teaches environmental studies, philosophy, and law at NYU.

What's the book about? From the 1992 Rio Earth Summit to the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference, there was a concerted international effort to stop climate change. And yet, greenhouse gas emissions increased, atmospheric concentrations grew, and global warming became an observable fact of life.

Jamison explains what climate change is, why we have failed to stop it, and why it still matters what we do. File this one, Dewey Decimal Heads, under 363.738 for social sciences slash social problems slash environmental problems slash pollutants. Jon, please tell us about your relationship with Reason in a Dark Time by Dale Jamison.

Jonathan:

Yeah, 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 have 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. And 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, it's depressing to contemplate how profoundly we've ruined the planet, and also 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 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 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. And so, yeah, that, and it really set me, so I've had the second career as a nonfiction writer.

Starting in 1994, I published a long piece of journalism in The New Yorker, and I'd been an essayist, and a sometime journalist, and a memoirist. And along the way, I'd also become very interested in birds. I'd become a bird lover, serious birder, and that had led me into conservation.

And I think the whole reason Dale's book came up in the first place was that there's a lot of frustration in the conservation community that the only environmental issue anyone can talk about is climate. Whereas we have this second crisis that's happening right in front of us, which is the sixth extinction, the crisis of biodiversity, and the breakdown of all of these natural systems associated with biodiversity, and no one is talking about that anymore. All the big environmental NGOs have basically begun 100% climate all the time, and people are shutting down conservation projects because, well, none of that matters if we don't solve climate change.

So I was kind of angry about that. And reading Dale's book and being able to borrow his arguments about why we failed to stop it, and why we will probably continue to fail to stop it, it energized me to start writing about climate myself and to speak up on behalf of wild animals, really, and wild nature. And I don't necessarily mean the deep Amazon.

I mean the wild nature that I could look out my window and see in that field over there. It's still happening, and those animals still need our help. It is a lot like really, really wrapping your mind around your own mortality to wrap your mind around the mortality of this nice, familiar world we live in that is going to be horribly stressed in the coming years and decades, and will probably be unrecognizable a century from now.

And although I've been doing these nonfiction pieces for 20-plus years, when I started writing about climate, I felt like I was doing something else. I felt like I really had a mission with that. I'd had a little mission trying to talk about why people might want to write and read novels, and I'd written some essays about that, but this one felt bigger, and it had nothing to do with my novels, really.

Essentially zero to do with my novels. I had some stuff about climate change in The Corrections, which was written in whatever, 1998, but basically non-intersecting, and so a kind of different, much smaller, but nonetheless significant kind of life started up when I started writing about climate. I found myself speaking to a very different kind of audience, being invited to speak to a very different kind of audience, think tanks in Italy and sober collections of German climate scientists and German climate journalists and all of that.

In that sense, for a single book, I felt I had to mention it. I wanted to mention it also because I think it's an under-recognized book. If you are in that clenched position of feeling things are really bad and I don't want to think about them, it can be a curiously positive book to read, but it doesn't often happen that a single book changes the direction of my life in a significant way.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah, it sounds like this one absolutely did. Just for the people listening that don't have as close a view as you have developed, could you just, it doesn't have to be long, but could you just paint a portrait of the next few years and coming decades as you've hinted at, if you don't mind, just bring us up to speed with where you are?

Jonathan:

Well, so we've known for more than 30 years pretty conclusively that our carbon emissions are changing the global climate. We are warming the earth. In spite of knowing this and in spite of many distinguished people meeting in nice hotel conference rooms around the world, the involvement of the United Nations, the concerted efforts of the world, environmental community, visionary politicians, and the Greta Thunbergs of the world, our carbon emissions will be higher this year than they've ever been before.

So you know you're doing a bad thing, and for 30 plus years you've done nothing but do even more of the bad thing. That's a weird one. And what Dale's book really sets out to do is explain why that is.

But you asked about what the consequences of these unchecked carbon emissions will be. I think the climate bureaucracy has a pretty well-established record of underestimating the effects of issuing predictions which are in hindsight rather rosy. The quick answer is we're making the climate much more unstable.

The parts of the world that are already dangerously hot will become unlivably hot, and the rest of the world will experience increased climate instability, increase in wildfires, increase in destructive flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, all of that. Because the atmosphere gets hot, and that means there's a lot of energy in the atmosphere, and some of that gets absorbed by the oceans, but that's kind of a mixed blessing because more heat in the oceans also energizes the oceans in unpredictable but mostly bad ways. And this is going to put an enormous amount of stress on what we consider the world order.

We're already seeing the beginnings of it in Europe and North America, the notion of a climate refugee when instead of hundreds of thousands or a few million climate refugees, you have hundreds of millions. What does that world look like? It doesn't look very good geopolitically.

I mean, that's a cruel way to talk about the levels of human suffering we're talking about and human desperation we're talking about. And if you take a kind of dim view of humanity, think we're kind of good but also kind of bad, the historical record isn't very promising about what happens when you increase stress on a system. And so you're going to have pressure on everything that makes the world livable.

You're going to have pressure on agriculture. You're going to have pressure on trade. You're going to have pressure on borders, huge pressure on borders.

You're going to have pressure on political institutions, both in the most direly affected countries, obviously, but also on the countries that people might want to immigrate to. You see this strong streak of nativism and defensive nationalism arising in various countries in Europe. And of course, in our own U.S. politics, immigration is the issue for the nationalist side of our body politic, recognizing that this is a dangerous world and it's going to become more unstable. So it's not like the world's going to end in fire. It could still end in nuclear war. Never discount that possibility.

And again, our systems of command and control for nuclear weapons and the political alliances that have kept us or systems of detente that have kept us miraculously safe since 1945, those are also going to be stressed. But barring that or barring the singularity when machines take over the world, which I'm not very impressed with the possibility of, what you're instead is going to see just ever worse crises.

Neil:

Sorry, you're not very impressed by the possibility of machines taking over?

Jonathan:

No, I'm not terribly worried about that.

Neil:

Oh, you're not?

Jonathan:

No.

Neil:

Why did I suspect you would be?

Jonathan:

No, no. I don't know. I liked sci-fi when I was 17.

Neil:

Okay. No, that's great. That's a great, great, great update.

I want to be sensitive of time. I'm going to give you a choose your own adventure. I've got five questions.

Here's the five thematic pieces. You can pick your own. It's either on collective action, on being small in a big world, on individual action, on navigating forebodingness, or on birds.

Those are the five questions I have for you. And we'll just do one and then I'll do fast money to finish this off.

Jonathan:

Okay. Individual action.

Neil:

Individual action. Okay. So the book spends a lot of time on the feeling of helplessness most people have about climate change, with the problem for many people feeling like it doesn't matter what I do.

To your point on page 105 of the book, Jamieson writes, climate change poses the world's largest collective action problem. Each of us acting on our own desires contributes to an outcome that we neither desire nor intend. Page 145 of the book really stood out to me where he talks about the alliance of small member states.

I did not realize that there's 42 countries like Cuba, Singapore, Seychelles, Maldives, Haiti, who emit less than half of 1% of the world's greenhouse gases, less than a quarter of the greenhouse gases per capita, but are essentially the ones who are about to disappear. Like it's them that get hit. They're going to be swallowed up by the sea.

It's, you know, soon. So on individual action, the book closes with seven priorities, but the priorities are big. They're like protecting carbon sinks, full cost energy accounting, raising the price of emitting greenhouse gases.

But I just have to ask, I know it's a general question, I know it's a repeated question, but how do you answer the question, what do I do?

Jonathan:

Well, this is a point that Dale makes and that I have really hammered on myself. You're riding a bike to work instead of driving. Change is nothing.

Absolutely nothing. So we have this global problem and you can feel like, oh yeah, well, I can do my part. I'll ride a bike to work.

Well, in fact, you might as well not, because if you drive a Hummer to work, it's all the same. Your contribution is too infinitesimal to have any effect on the larger systems. And for some, that could be an invitation to just do what you want.

Keep on over-consuming, over-emitting. That is kind of collectively the choice that the United States has made. But even at the individual level, it's like, well, it doesn't matter anyway, why not?

And of course, it is a collection of several billion people thinking that way that has gotten us in the fix we're in, but why should I go live in a yurt when the rest of the world's not going to live in a yurt? And anyway, I'm in Iowa and we're going to be fine. And yeah, my grandkids will have to figure it out, whatever.

So you could take the futility of individual action as permission to behave however you want. I would argue that it doesn't make it right to do that, and that it's good to try to live your life the way you wish everyone else did. That is a cousin of the categorical imperative.

And what's more, it's just, yeah. So there's, even if it's not going to make a difference still to live your life in a way that is as right as you can make it, there's an argument for that. But more, the argument that means more to me is that there are things you can do locally within your own reach that do make a difference.

And the reason when you asked me, how is this going to play out in the coming years and decades that I answered in terms of stressing systems, is that I think it's really important to recognize that anything you can do to make the world a kinder and more stable place is a climate action. And if it's effective to participate in your local city government to make things a little better, to show up at city council meetings and raise a point, to go campaign for people who have sensible ideas about what to do in your local community, those, I would argue, are climate actions because we need resilient communities in the face of increasing stresses on all systems. But even if it weren't a climate action, it's still a good thing to do.

And you actually can make something better. And you have, in climate change, a situation that nothing you can do could possibly make any better. Elon Musk personally cannot make it better.

No individual can affect that. And so you despair and you say, well, God, we're screwed and the world's going to hell. And you may just shut down or you may even go the opposite direction and drive your Hummer to work.

Or you can say, well, yeah, but the world isn't over yet and I'm not dead yet. And maybe I can go help somebody, help something, try to make something better. And instead of being so fixed on this terrible future and so obsessed with an unsolvable problem, maybe try to introduce some solvable problems in your life.

And that's really what I espouse.

Neil:

Introduce solvable problems.

Jonathan:

Yeah.

Neil:

Thank you.

Jonathan:

Thank you. This was a wide ranging actually much longer conversation than I expected, Neil. But I guess I hadn't talked for a while.

Okay. You're showing me something.

Neil:

I'm showing you five fast money questions that should take you 30 seconds.

Jonathan:

Okay.

Neil:

Let's close off with hardcover, paperback, audio, or e?

Jonathan:

Paperback.

Neil:

How do you organize your books on your bookshelf?

Jonathan:

Pretty randomly, although there is some basic division between fiction and nonfiction.

Neil:

What is your book lending policy?

Jonathan:

I've learned not to expect to get a book back.

Neil:

Do you have a favorite bookstore, living or dead?

Jonathan:

Yes. Well, I have to mention Bookshop Santa Cruz here in Santa Cruz. It's not the best bookstore in the world, but it is a great bookstore.

Neil:

And what's one final hard fought piece of wisdom or advice you might share it with aspiring novelists?

Jonathan:

Take a hard look at every sentence, shake it, shake it again. I guarantee you it can't be better.

Neil:

Jonathan Franzen, thank you so much for coming on 3 Books. This has been a real joy. I'm really grateful to you.

Thank you so much.

Jonathan:

My pleasure. Nice talking to you, Neil.

Neil:

Hey, everybody. It's just me, just Neil again, hanging out in my basement, listening back to the wonderful conversation we just had with Jon Franzen. Slow, peaceful, thoughtful, introspective, deep, like a rich, creamy dessert that you don't want to end.

I felt like I could have talked to Jon all day for many days. I had piles and piles of questions I didn't even get to because I had so much I wanted to ask him. But there's so many quotes that jump out of the conversation.

Did you write some down? I wrote some down. I highlighted some.

As always, the quotes will appear over at 3books.co. But some of my favorite ones were, I share your preference, but let's not make it into a virtue. When I was going on that rant about real books have real pages, which I know I should probably get off that high horse about that, audio books and eBooks there. But just the way he said that, I share your preference, but let's not make it into a virtue.

How about this one when he said, it is a luxury to engage with things in a complicated way. I can relate to that feeling so much. I forget that too.

I'm like, here we are having deep, rich, long form conversations with novelists. We get to do that. It's a luxury to be able to engage with things in a complicated way.

I like also the humility baked into that quote. There is a gentleness around people that just might want to relax and read a Garfield or read whatever. There's no judgment on that.

But when you want to read kind of something big and deep and challenging, that is a luxury and we should look at it that way for sure. I like this quote. What does a hero look like in 2023?

It looks like a teacher in Florida teaching forbidden books. I like the small scale approach. The world just feels so big.

If you read the big newspapers, of course, they start to talk about global issues above everything else. You can feel a bit disconnected from your local community and the local differences you can make by picking up a piece of garbage on the park or saying hi to someone on the street. Teaching a forbidden book, I guess, in Florida was a wonderful way to talk about what a hero looks like today.

How about this one? Anything you can do to make the world a kinder and more stable place is a climate action. I love that.

Anything you can do to make the world a kinder and more stable place is a climate action, as Jon and his formative book paints the picture of what the world might look like in the next 50 to 100 years. But coming fast, we're already seeing plastic islands in the sea. It seems to me like you can't predict the weather anymore.

Even the hourly forecast now with that level of detail in the morning, it's totally wildly unpredictable. Climate change is just discombobulating the earth. Anything we can do to make the world a kinder and more stable place, that's a climate action.

Then when I asked him about staying grounded, I just like the way he phrased it. I'm a human animal who will die soon like everyone else. You keep that in mind and it's not hard to stay grounded.

That's true. It's not hard to stay grounded if you keep that in mind. However, it is hard to keep that in mind.

As we get embroiled in the trivialities of our daily existence, it's hard to keep in mind the fact that you're going to die soon. This comes back to the stoic principle of memento mori. I share a fondness for On the Shortness of Life by Seneca.

Some people like Tim Ferriss keep skulls around their house as a daily remembrance of death. Feel its proximity so you don't fear its proximity. Those are five quotes.

I usually do three, but those quotes jumped out to me from Jon Franzen. You know what? Big thanks to him for adding three more books to our top 1,000, including number 601, Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis. All right, we now have two C.S. Lewis books on the top 1,000, including The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Number 600, The Trial by Franz Kafka, K-A-F-K-A. That is the first Kafka book we have on here.

A nice bingo there on number 600. And then finally, number 599, we're getting close to the halfway point. I won't say close, we're getting closer.

Reason in a Dark Time by Dale Jamieson. I read and enjoyed all three of these books. Sometimes I get a phone call saying, you didn't tell us what you thought of the books, Neil.

I actually loved all three of these books. Although I would say I would recommend the annotated version of The Trial because I realized how much I missed when I was researching the book after and talking to Jon about it. I had no idea that Josef was a bit of a dick. You couldn't pick that up as easily as he made it sound. I know his professor and teacher was teaching him that, but there's a lot of dynamics there. Same thing when I read Lolita by Nabokov.

I was lucky to pick up the annotated version. So if you get a chance to buy the annotated version, it's like they just explain everything that the writer's doing in the back the whole time. And that is just the way I want to read.

I need somebody over my shoulder to help me. So huge thanks to Jon Franzen for coming on 3 Books. It was a delightful conversation.

I hope you all enjoyed it. 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. One of three clubs that we have for 3 Books listeners, i.e. three bookers, including the cover to cover club. That's anybody who attempts to listen to all 333 chapters of the show. Email me if you want your name added to the list on our website. We're starting to slowly add to that.

And number two, and that was number two. Number three is the secret club members. I can't say more about the club other than it's entirely analog based and you can get a clue to joining by calling our phone number.

Our phone number is 1 8 3 3. Read a lot. Yes, it is a real number.

Let's start off as we always do by kicking off and going to the phones.

Emily:

This is Emily here. I'm calling from Aotearoa, New Zealand, from Te Whanganui-a-Tara, which is Wellington, the capital city, um, where I live is very beautiful. My walk to work is basically a 40 minute walk along the harbour.

Um, the water is sometimes super clear and you can see schools of fishes. Um, the hills envelope the harbour and the further back ones are kind of muted. The clouds often hang low over the hills and the way that the light illuminates the clouds in the evening is incredibly beautiful.

Um, your podcast is great and a couple of things stand out for me. First is that your values are something that I really resonate with, even if I didn't know that I resonated with them, especially, um, authenticity leading to greatness and like fulfillment is something I never knew I did resonate with. Um, but I would like to kind of engage with that more.

And another one that I didn't know that I wanted to have as a value was the scarcity and curation being of high value, just wonderful work. Keep doing what you're doing and thank you so much.

Neil:

Oh, thank you so much to Emily from Wellington, New Zealand for calling 1-833-READALOT. Actually, I got an email from Emily saying I couldn't get 1-833-READALOT to work. So here's a voice note that I'm emailing to you.

You can always do that. My email is on threebooks.co. If you're in a place of the world where the phone number's not working, although it's supposed to work everywhere, maybe it's just, you know, there's always a series of digits you got to dial in advance. Um, then feel free to send me a voice note.

So lots of stuff to respond there. Uh, in an era of infinite choice, the value of curation skyrockets. One of the principles underpinning the show is that there's just too many books to read.

Jon said it himself, right? There's just way too many books to read. I'll never get there.

And so what is one way we can come up with to curate a pile of books? Well, ask 333 inspiring people which three books most changed their life and hopefully we'll get some great ones there. So you can always head over to threebooks.co slash the top 1000, threebooks.co slash the top 1000 to find a list of every formative book discussed on the show. A good jumping off point. If you're looking for reading material, there's a little number besides you can see who picked it as well. And then I like that point on the graveyard book by Neil Gaiman being a formative to you because it scared you so much.

I, I read the dark half by Stephen King in seventh grade. I was 12 and I still can feel like the chills I got from that book, but more than anything else that taught me how powerful books could be that you could feel such deep sense senses from books. So thank you so much, Emily.

And we will add your name to the cover to cover club list for sure. And thanks for the confidence about chapter one. All right.

And now let's head over to the letter of the chapter. And this chapter's letter comes from Ketan Dedhiya. Hope I said your name, right?

Hi, Neil. This is a message due from my end for a long time. I'm a cover to cover listener of your podcast 3 Books. And before your podcast, I came across your TED talk, three days of awesome. I even listened to it today when I needed to lift myself up. I came across your podcast in the summer of 2020, when my world was going through a lot.

And personally, I was trying to find answers after my mother's passing the previous year with renewed inspiration from your podcast. I found new purpose and meaning with books and explored them with my daughter, who's an avid reader herself, uh, and different from different bookstores in New Jersey and New York. And we bought many books only to read, but to share with others as well.

I celebrated my 50th birthday last December and to celebrate, I gifted more than 50 books to my loved ones in the US and India. Earlier this week, I got an opportunity to attend two conferences in Las Vegas. And they mentioned the conferences a few years back when I intended HR tech conferences for the first time, I was reserved.

I wasn't interacting with people much, but this time I started conversing with people with no hesitation. I had a really good conversation, not only from my industry, but even other industries. Listening to my conversation with a stranger at Starbucks, a person in front of me was so surprised that she applauded and was happy with their interaction.

I had a good conversation with her later the next day and learn different things. On Friday, I strike to conversation with the person while leaving one of the sessions. And we ended up talking for more than an hour and a half.

We found a lot of common connections. He was very gentle with his time, answer many questions I had about his work. And again, to my own surprise, I gave him the covenant of water by Abraham Verghese, which I was reading in flight and spare time from the conferences.

I couldn't let him go without mentioning 3 Books as well. I believe your podcast talks, books, and my reading habit, which found new life with your resources and my meditation practice as well. Since my mom's passing, I've had something to do with this transformational change that I hope to continue for the rest of my life and only make a difference in my life, but many other people's as well.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I'm going to end with one idea, which is what do you think about having a silent conference or a place where no one's allowed to speak? There are no speeches, there are no cell phones, and there are no devices that would distract people, but just simply to display inspiring stories in the form of pictures and words of good things people are doing in this world.

With a room full of books to read, plenty of space for people to ponder with their thoughts, whether in the form of meditation or prayers or gratitude in their beliefs. From Ketan Dedhiya. Oh my gosh, what a cool idea.

It sounds like an art exhibition. You can go in, you can't talk to anybody, but you're surrounded by books, right? There's that old Borges quote, I cannot sleep unless I'm surrounded by books.

I like that idea. I love the feeling of reading together. I think I go up to people, when I see someone reading at a bar on the subway, I'm always like, I gravitate towards them.

I want to know what they're reading. I find them interesting. I find them more interesting.

I feel like instead of just talking to someone with their own brain, I'm talking to somebody with another brain and another thought, and we're annexing conversations from around the world and around history and around time into today. It's so beautiful to do that. Books let us do that.

3 Books is a reminder and a passageway for us to keep finding stories that resonate with us. A wonderful letter. As always, if I read your letter on the air, drop me a line afterwards with your address so I can send you a signed book to say thanks.

We're almost done here now. We've got a letter. We've played a voicemail.

We've talked about some favorite quotes. Now let's finish off by going back to Mr. Jon Franzen for a word cloud of the best words used in this chapter. Let's pick one out and make it our word of the chapter.

Here we go.

Jonathan:

25 years of itinerant borrowing is abhorrent to any Narnia fan. Discursive account. Satyr, next to the rabbit. It's kind of a nullity eponymous book. They're too multivalent. Streak of nativism is what I espouse.

Neil:

Oh boy. There are a lot of incredible, interesting words to choose from. Of course, from Jon Franzen, we're going to get a lot of beauties. Satyr was one of them that I had written down that I was thinking about. Eponymous, I loved. I also really love nullity.

Nullity. Nullity. N-U-L-L-I-T-Y.

Why don't we make that the word of the chapter? Definition with Merriam-Webster is the quality or state of being null, especially a legal invalidity. 1B is nothingness, insignificance, a non-entity to a one or a person that is null.

This is a really interesting word. I like the way it's described. It sounds so insulting, but in a funny way.

According to Merriam-Webster, intellectuals may speak of a book or a film as a nullity, claiming it possesses nothing original enough to justify its existence. Legal scholars also use the word. A law passed by a legislature may be called a nullity.

If, for example, it's so obviously unconstitutional, it's going to be shot down by the courts. And if you're in an unkind mood, you're also free to call a person a nullity if you're not instead calling him a nobody, a non-entity, or a zero. Nullity first appeared in 1543.

Nearly 500 years later, we are now using it in the form of a cross space, a cross time, deep rich conversation with maybe the deepest richest or certainly one of the deepest richest writers we have in the entire world. It was a treat and a pleasure to share space with you and with Mr. Jonathan Franzen in this chapter of 3 Books. I hope you enjoyed the conversation.

And until the next full moon, 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 136: 3 St. Louis Uber drivers on bullets, bruises, and babies

Listen to the chapter here!

Neil:

What's the best thing about St. Louis? What should I do?

Jacqueline:

Nothing, shit, nothing. Watch your damn back before somebody Run your ass over, put a bullet in your head.

Neil:

I'm serious.

Jacqueline:

I am too.

Deneane:

Zion, Zoe, Zena, Zen and Zavier.

Neil:

Five Zs?

Deneane:

Yeah, zzzzuh!

Jacqueline:

You know what I'm saying? And then we used to have this thing they called it the candy truck.

Neil:

Yeah.

Jacqueline:

You know what I'm saying? You could go by there, you could take, take a dime. A dime.

A quarter would get you half the fucking truck. Okay?

Albano:

Unfortunately, if teaching was something that others would care about in meaning of financial reasons, a lot of the teachers that are great in what they do wouldn't leave the profession.

Jacqueline:

This is majority white over here. That's why you're going to see the birds. Because if it wasn't, the birds wouldn't be over here.

If it wasn't, they'd pack their shit and they be gone. If you're not from St. Louis, you have no business on the north side.

Neil:

Hey everybody. I just got back from St. Louis, Missouri. Have you been down to St. Louis?

It was my first time there. I met this wonderfully rich collection of people who I'm so excited to introduce you to in this special on the ground from the street from the backseat chapter of 3 Books. Now on the way from the airport to the hotel, the first guy I met who I don't have a recording with, but he was just like filling me with all the St. Louis trivia. He was like, did you know the Gateway Arch is 630 feet by 630 feet? Did you know we hosted the Olympics and the World Fair in the same year? I was like, well, I knew about the World Fair.

He's like most people do, but not everybody realizes we hosted the Olympics too. 1904 was a banner year in St. Louis. We were the fourth largest city in the US at the time.

There's this deep well of pride coming from this guy. The next day, I had a bit of time to explore, so I went out to look for the Eurasian tree sparrow. Yes, the Eurasian tree sparrow, which looks like a house sparrow, but has this like little black cheek on it.

It's this local bird species that doesn't exist pretty much anywhere else in the whole Western world. Nowhere else other than St. Louis because German immigrants brought six species of birds to St. Louis in 1870. Five of them died that first winter, but the Eurasian tree sparrow, hardy, hardy tree sparrow, actually took hold and from, I think they brought six birds over, it's actually established a foothold in St. Louis, has not disrupted the local ecology, and I really wanted to see it. So, you know, I hailed an Uber and I met Jacqueline who drove a bus in town for 27 years. When I asked her for the best thing about St. Louis, she first said, nothing, watch your back, somebody going to put a bullet in your head. I mean, that's a direct quote.

That's really what she said. I was like, what? But it was a raw conversation and we ended up talking about the erosion of community, deprioritizing connection, and how we might find or look for new kinds of support in a disconnected world.

Jacqueline said, my family is whoever loves on me. Blood makes you kin, but it doesn't make you family. After, with Jacqueline's help, I found the Eurasian tree sparrow.

I then hailed another Uber and I met Deneane, a 28-year-old single mother of five, who does drop-off, pickup, and evening solo every day while driving Uber 30 hours a week, working at a cupcake shop, and running a small business online. We went to the Gateway Arch together and Left Bank Books, which is established in 1969, one of the best independent bookstores I've ever been to, and we talked about enduring. That's going to be the theme of her formative book, as you'll hear, how after her mom found bruises all over her body, she left her abusive relationship and found the strength to start over, found the strength to endure.

The next morning, I gave the talk that actually sent me down there, and then I got a final ride to the airport from Albano from Albania, who left his job as a public school teacher in Florida to make more than double now as a driver. Unfortunately, Albano said, if teaching was something others would care about, then teachers wouldn't be leaving the profession. I hope you feel a special kinetic pulse in this chapter.

Listen to the stories from people whose stories aren't often told. Get ready to laugh, to cry, to connect hearts as we tether ourselves to the human connection that exists around us every single day. So are you ready?

Let's head down to the backseat of a number of cars in St. Louis and hang out with Jacqueline, Deneane, and Albano as they share the love and connection that we are always searching for here on 3 Books. Let's flip the page into chapter 136 now.

Jacqueline:

I was born here.

Neil:

In St Louis? What was St. Louis like the year you were born?

Jacqueline:

It was more of a community.

Neil:

Uh-huh.

Jacqueline:

You know what I'm saying?

Neil:

People knew each other.

Jacqueline:

Yeah, you knew each other. You kind of looked out for each other. You know what I'm saying?

Neil:

What neighborhood?

Jacqueline:

I was born on the west side.

Neil:

Yeah. Was that mostly black neighborhood, white neighborhood?

Jacqueline:

Yeah

Neil:

Like 90% black?

Jacqueline:

100% black.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah.

100% black.

Jacqueline:

100% black.

Neil:

And your parents, how'd they end up in St. Louis?

Jacqueline:

And you know what? I've never asked that question. I lost my mom when I was young.

Neil:

I'm sorry.

Jacqueline:

So, yeah. And I lost my dad when I was young, too.

So my grandmother kind of raised me. And I really don't know how they ended Like, I asked my auntie and them that question, but it's like, I don't know.

We just end up here, so.

Neil:

Yeah.

GPS:

Turn left on Dale Avenue.

Jacqueline:

I wish they had ended up some damn where else, because I don't like St. Louis.

Neil:

Why not?

Jacqueline:

Because it's, I mean, it's too much here. It's just too much going on. I mean, and it's stuff going on everywhere you go.

But I guess, like, I drove for mass transit for 20-some years. So I know the city very well.

Neil:

You drove a bus?

Jacqueline:

I drove mass transit.

Neil:

Oh, like the streetcar?

Jacqueline:

Yeah.

Neil:

Yeah. Is it called streetcar?

Jacqueline:

No. It's called mass transit.

Neil:

Mass transit. It's just called mass transit. But what kind of vehicle is it?

Jacqueline:

This is a Kia.

Neil:

No, mass transit vehicle.

Jacqueline:

A big bus.

Neil:

Oh, it was a bus. It was a bus.

Jacqueline:

A huge bus.

Neil:

You drove a bus for 27 years? Wow. That's wild.

Jacqueline:

I passed your stop.

Neil:

I don't care. I like talking to you.

Jacqueline:

Where are you going now?

Neil:

I'm going to a house.

Jacqueline:

For real? Because we like...

Neil:

Well, why don't you stay here? I'll call you. I'll just need two minutes here.

I'm supposed to find a bird at a bird feeder.

Jacqueline:

You what?

Neil:

I'm finding a bird at a bird feeder. There's a, there's a bird feeder here. I'm looking for the Eurasian tree sparrow, which it only exists, it's a bird that only exists in St. Louis.

Jacqueline:

For real?

Neil:

Yeah, because they released it here in 1870. But it got eaten everywhere else by the house sparrow, but only persists in this one city pretty much. And in Europe.

It's called the...

Jacqueline:

So you think, you think a bird feeder going to have a bird there?

Neil:

Well, yeah, they say that they're in the bird feeder.

Jacqueline:

Shit, you done made me curious now.

Neil:

I know. That's why I said we should talk.

Jacqueline:

We talking. We talking.

Neil:

I love hanging out with you.

Neil:

So it's safe here?

Jacqueline:

Yeah, you good.

Neil:

Cuz you told me half the neighborhoods I gotta be careful in. So there's a lot of shootings on the streets is what you're saying? Like every day?

Jacqueline:

Yeah.

Neil:

Really? There's shootings on the street every day?

Jacqueline:

Every day. It's a killing. You can watch the news and somebody has either died on the north side or the south side.

One of these sides, they done killed somebody on. I'm telling you. I wouldn't lie to you, Neil.

Neil:

And how many of them are just people walking by, like innocent people?

Jacqueline:

That ain't too often. But we had, you know, we have had people to come in town like this volleyball some, this was some years ago. In fact, I was still driving a bus.

And she came in in time for a volleyball tournament and the guy robbed her and shot her, killed her on broad daylight.

Neil:

Don't complete the trip. Just drive me around the block a couple times so we can keep talking.

Jacqueline:

Neil, I ain't got time to talk to you.

Neil:

Why?

Jacqueline:

I got somewhere to go. Where's this bird feeder at?

Neil:

I can't. It's supposed to be at the address I said. You can't find the address?

Jacqueline:

We were here. This is it. That's it right there.

Neil:

Jacqueline, the bus driver for 27 years in St. Louis. Born in St. Louis.

Jacqueline:

Born and raised.

Neil:

And raised.

Jacqueline:

I just born. I was raised.

Neil:

And your daddy's from Arkansas.

Jacqueline:

My daddy from Arkansas. I'm not sure where my mom's from.

Neil:

Because she died when you were young.

Jacqueline:

My dad and my mom died when I was young. But I don't know how I know where my dad and not my mom. That is so odd.

That's puzzling to me. I'm going to have to find out where my mom is born and raised.

Neil:

But your daddy's not alive. So who are you going to ask?

Jacqueline:

I can ask my sister. I can ask my aunt.

Neil:

OK. OK. We got to figure this out.

Jacqueline:

It's right here. Neil where you going

Neil:

It's supposed to be some bird feeders here. I'm looking for them.

Jacqueline:

There's no bird feeders. You put in the wrong address. Who told you this bird feeders was over here?

Neil:

Well.

Jacqueline:

This is it right here.

Neil:

OK. Well, then I'll get out here. It's a safe neighborhood, right?

Jacqueline:

Yeah, it's cool.

Neil:

All right.

Jacqueline:

It's cool.

Neil:

So we're sitting at the corner of I don't know where we're in. What neighborhood are we in St. Louis?

Jacqueline:

You're on the west side.

Neil:

We're on the west side of St. Louis where the street is empty. There's nobody on the streets. The houses are old and they're all detached like clapboard houses with white picket fences and like tattered American flags and like kind of yellowed brushy bushes.

You know, the properties are kind of like it was a majestic neighborhood like 50 years ago.

Jacqueline:

It still is.

Neil:

Okay. How much of the houses cost here?

Jacqueline:

You probably can. These houses probably run you in the upper hundreds like right around 140, 50, 60 and they building it up because you got new houses.

Neil:

$150,000 is actually would be can be considered like a steal in like Toronto.

Jacqueline:

Yeah, that's a lot. Yeah, you can get you can get a lot. And I heard that you can get a lot more house for your buck here in St. Louis and we have lots of investors calling trying to buy property and stuff. Like I have I have my father my godfather's house. It's worth like a hundred and eighty. Well, I have people calling me like every day for this house.

Yeah, what like every day? They you ready to sell you ready to sell? No, I'm not.

Neil:

Jacqueline is such a bright vibrant beautiful personality. She's wearing a bright apple red silk tie and her long hair and a bright apple red turtleneck, too. She tells me she's 59 years old and that she's lost her husband about five years ago after they'd been together for 29 years.

Leslie and I have been married for 10. And so hearing stories of people losing spouses, you know, 20 30 40 years into relationships always, you know, gives me pause and makes me feel. She says they have two boys a 35 year old named Justin who is a sergeant and a 33 year old named Jamal who's a truck driver as well as two grand boys.

Jacqueline:

I'm I'm real self-sufficient. You know what I'm saying? I'm that I'm that I can get it done kind of woman.

You know what I'm saying? I don't wait on no man to do nothing for me. I do it all for myself now.

I would love to have a man to come in my life, but that hasn't happened.

Neil:

You told me that St. Louis used to feel like a community and now it doesn't so what changed

Jacqueline:

I think family's changed and what I mean by that Like I said, you know, you've heard the saying it takes a community. It takes a village to raise a child.

I think that structure kind of fell apart at some point, you know what I'm saying? And and you get a lot of that don't say nothing to my kids. I mean even in school just the teacher, you know, call you up there.

Oh, she said this to my instead of you know, everybody being in line with you know, what I'm saying? For this child, you know making education for this child, you know, the mother gets all defensive because you know, it's just it's crazy.

Neil:

I know you mean the education systems change. 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 whooped. I don't know if you that old. No, no 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 if the teacher even called a parent up there, it's like she got a hand on her here rolling her head.

I know you ain't touch my son. You know what I'm saying? Instead of finding out the the core the root of the problem because somewhere your kid is a little badass.

Okay, but we don't want to do that anymore and that's becoming a huge.

Neil:

So you think the fragility that the the everyone's everyone's to politically correct and everyone's so defensive and people are soft people are soft people are fragile people are fragile. So that's caused the lack of community. Community being lost.

There's a lot of books being written about this, you know, The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt our guest in chapter 103 and the book. I just featured in my book club last month. It talks about the decline of trust in society through the 80s with the advent of the 24-7 news cycle, which I don't know how many of us really appreciate what happened.

But you know, when we started putting news on TV at all hours of the day, we had these increased media reports of kids getting abducted or abused the reports including the sort of creation and use of the phrase stranger danger. Why? Well, of course in order to attract the attention of our fear-based amygdalas advertising revenue had to be maximized and how do you attract more advertisers?

You make people look at the screens more. How do you make them look at the screens more you put things on the screens that they're naturally afraid of that. They can't stop looking to because the parts of our brain that are evolved to look for survival at all costs can't stop staring at it.

But this is despite the fact that things have actually never been safer throughout our history books like Enlightenment Now by Harvard psychologist. Steven Pinker show that the world is safer today than ever before or I mean, this is just me saying these things. I think so.

I could just be off on this, you know, Oxford evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar. Our guest in chapter 132 in January of this year. He does have a model called Dunbar seven pillars of friendship.

So these different ways that humans use as signals for how we know if we can be friends things like language shared upbringing education hobbies humor musical taste in a shared worldview, right? So these elements of a tribe might be do they look like me talk like me think like me. So maybe mixing the benefits.

We all intellectually know come from diversity actually temporarily reduces trust because we have to examine whether or not we trust people that don't look like us think like us talk have the same worldview as us as Robin Dunbar would say or maybe it just takes time to learn new ways of connecting and that's okay. That's good. It's good.

Jacqueline:

Exactly.

That's okay. But it's it's up to me. Everybody has to open up open up and be willing to receive like I need to be able to receive your culture.

You be able to see my culture and the next person's culture and who knows what could even become of all any of that, right? You know what I'm saying?

Neil:

Yes.

Jacqueline:

I mean I can learn from you.

Neil:

You can learn exactly I can learn from you. You can learn from me. That's the whole point of 3 Books. Ultimately. I mean we start talking about what life was like in st. Louis and what it's like today.

Jacqueline told me she loved it, but now she doesn't why what's the disconnect today?

Jacqueline:

That's the huge disconnect. I think we have now people just don't care. You know what I'm saying back in the 70s.

You have 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 all baby don't do that.

You know, that's you know, all night. You can't take her day. That's surly's daughter.

You know what I'm saying? Now people they'll tell you when they see stuff snitches get stitches. Don't nobody won't say nothing.

You know what I'm saying? People don't care if it doesn't. 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.

Neil:

Wow.

Jacqueline:

It is, that's the biggest breakdown because that's just like if I'm coming down the street and I know this is this is Mr. Smith house, but I see this strange guy coming out just out of his house with a TV in his hand. First thing I'm gonna do is get on the phone. Hey, they don't look like Mr. Smith. Well, you might just want to come check this out. You know what I'm saying?

Neil:

Yeah yeah

Jacqueline:

And a lot of people won't do that.

Neil:

Yeah, don't want to you know get stitches.

Jacqueline:

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 gonna tell it.

Neil:

The breakdown of society people aren't outside together anymore. We aren't watching our neighbors kids anymore. We don't know the people outside our own house.

I heard Esther Perel say recently a phrase which stuck with me. It's that we all have a thousand friends these days, but nobody to feed our cats. Do you agree with this lack of community?

Is it a st. Louis thing? Are you seeing it where you live to you know, Jacqueline's 59 years old, which means she's born in 1965.

I asked her what it was like growing up in the 60s and 70s. Paint us the picture of what trust and community looked like back then. What was it like in West St. Louis in 19 in the 1970s?

Paint us a picture.

Jacqueline:

I loved it. I loved it. Well, first of all, my mom had my grandmother had seven girls.

And two boys, she actually had three, but she lost a boy in 64. So they brought this four-family flat on the west side of st. Louis.

So imagine that my mom has six kids. She had a sister that had nine kids. She had another sister have four.

All of us is in this fourth. Oh, wow. All of us are right here.

So it was like it was never a dull moment. You were never alone. Never.

This is first time in my life that I've ever been by myself because I grew up with sisters and brothers. Then I grew up with a huge family. So it was family.

It was like a party every day.

Neil:

Like so what was it? Like you walk home at 3 30 p.m. You walk into your house.

Jacqueline:

First of all, I'm not by myself. Remember nothing but kids. Nothing like it's like a river.

You know, have you ever been on a river and as far as you can see, it's water. That's how it was with these kids. Like it's like 15 20 kids like kids everywhere and running and playing and you know what I'm saying?

And then we we used to have this thing to call they called it the candy truck. Yeah, you know what I'm saying? You can go by there.

You got to take a dime a dime a quarter will get you half the fucking truck. Okay, you probably own that truck for a quarter. I'm telling you, I'm telling you, I'm serious.

You can probably own that truck for a quarter. But it was like you then you came home. You know, a lot of times my mom, my mom and dad was still at work, but I had older sisters and brothers because I'm the baby.

So I had older sisters and brothers. They made sure I did what I needed to do. That was, you know, change my clothes.

You always had we always had at least two pair of shoes. That was probably the most we would have you had play shoes. You had church shoes.

So you had to come out of your you had to come out of your school shoes. Anyway, like more like three pair, but you had to come out of your school shoes and take your play shoes outside shoes. You have to put them on and back there.

We have a lot of homework. You know, we did the most we did was like we had chores around the house, you know what I'm saying? But once you got through with your choice, you went back outside with them thousands of kids work and you just you played and play.

I mean, I know every childhood game red light green light, hop scotch tag, hide go seek, jacks, just all kind of games. You just we just play. We were just outside enjoying the out.

You know what I'm saying? It wasn't no video games and all that. We were outside mingling with each other and you just knew the whole entire neighborhood.

You did you knew I mean a woman can come out and had their house and she knew who I was. You you belongs in their house right there. You know what I'm saying?

You five houses down. You're your grandmother's Miss Borders. You know what I'm saying?

You just knew we knew it.

Neil:

Everyone knew everybody.

Jacqueline:

Everybody knew everybody.

Neil:

They were outside because they're outside. But the time outside is a big ingredient for community.

Jacqueline:

Yeah.

Neil:

Yeah, because when we get like the amusing ourselves to death a book by Neil Postman in the 1980s pauses the theory I think that like TVs are going to make us listen to the title of the book. Amusing ourselves to death. So the time outside is a huge problem.

Was there ever any time to read?

Jacqueline:

Nope. The only time you really read is mostly in a summer because they had you know back then the government has summer programs for the kids. I don't know if you know anything about that, but it had different programs for the kids where if you had like a neighborhood park and they had people that they called them.

I can't even remember what they call. They like leaders. They like, you know, but they they were like over with us, you know, we did craft.

We did reading. They took us on field trips. This was the whole summer.

You know what I'm saying? They took us to the library, you know, all kind of different stuff, you know, it was just we did. You can almost say you did.

Well, I guess the only difference is in the summer and during the school year is we didn't do it up during the daytime, you know what I'm saying? Because we were in school. But once we once summer came you just did it all day long.

It was just so much to do.

Neil:

There is kids everywhere. You're outside a lot. Being outside is a big ingredient to community.

You said you had community in St. Louis. Now you hate it. You don't like here anymore.

You told me when I got into the to the uber be careful certain neighborhoods. Somebody might put a bullet in your head and you weren't joking. No, I wasn't because every night there's shootings and you got to be careful.

People don't know each other anymore. We've lost community. So one reason is because people aren't outside as

Jacqueline:

And two don't get me wrong because in the in the black community and that's what I was going to tell you You gonna you say how do you know you in the wrong neighborhood? You have about 10 folks standing on one porch just drinking talking loud, you know, you're in the wrong neighborhood, you know what I'm saying?

That's not where you supposed to be did the cuz see we I don't know. I don't know about other states, but we kind of we kind of we kind of differentiate the different sides of St. Louis like we'll say the north side the south side the west side the east side. So you have to make sure what side you are on to you know what I'm saying?

Neil:

Like I know what you're saying, but of course doesn't I'm only here one day. I have no idea to figure that out.

Jacqueline:

Well, if you get what you have to get in the uber. And I can guarantee you the uber knows the driver knows.

Neil:

Yeah, so don't go somewhere random don't go. Which sides do I go to which sides do I not go to?

Jacqueline:

Okay, you you come in here on the west side. You can go as far west if you want to go and until you get South and you don't want to be on the south side either because everything back west north where I'm from that moved them to the south because they building up on the West.

Neil:

What do you mean they moved them?

Jacqueline:

You know, it's like, you know, low-income housing, so when people apply for low-income housing, that's where they send them.

Neil:

Yeah

Jacqueline:

Send them South, you know what I'm saying? Because this this area over here. Like I said, this all where we sitting right now. It's majority white.

It's considered a city, but this is majority white over here. That's why you're going to see the birds because if it wasn't the birds wouldn't be over there they'd pack they shit and they be gone. That's only why the birds over here, but and you don't want to go you don't want to go at all on the north side. If you're not from St. Louis, you have no business on the north side. So if you go somewhere you ask that driver, what side of town am I on?

Neil:

What happens if I go to the north side?

Jacqueline:

The north side is just it's I'm telling you it's horrible. It's horrible.

Neil:

What do you mean?

Jacqueline:

It's it's first of all you go. You gonna see run down houses like I mean run down like seriously run down. You know what I'm saying?

You gonna see like I said, you you probably see a few kids on the street. I'm talking little kids, but you're going to see grown-ups were like I say, they either getting smoking weed. They drinking cussing right among these little kids.

You know what I'm saying? You're going to see that. That's how you're going to know you're on the wrong side because you're going to see grown folks disrespecting babies.

Neil:

Grown folks disrespecting babies.

Jacqueline:

People that should know better, you know what I'm saying? But yeah, don't care.

Neil:

Don't care grown folks disrespecting babies. Jacqueline's painting us a portrait of trust and connection in society what it looks like when we have what it looks like when we don't. I just finished reading a book called Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs and she's famous for coining the phrase eyes on the street.

I asked Jacqueline what she thinks of that phrase. She said we used to have eyes on the street eyes on the street.

Jacqueline:

And it made a difference and made a huge difference. It did because you knew if you came in certain community, we knew what what grass we can walk on. You know what I'm saying?

Miss Miss Miss Miss Love. She looking out the window. You can't walk on her grass.

You know what I'm saying? You knew, you know, some things you couldn't do in neighborhoods because you knew who would be watching who say who gonna tell it. You just know it.

Neil:

We've lost family. We're living farther away from each other now. Have we lost togetherness?

Are we farther apart from our tribes? But then Jacqueline surprised me again.

Jacqueline:

But you know what I've learned within these last few years and I know the Holy Spirit gave me this revelation and it's like and don't get me wrong. I don't frown on family, but my philosophy now is my family is whoever loves on me. Blood does not make you family.

You know what I'm saying? It doesn't know not blood doesn't blood makes you keen doesn't make you family. You know what I'm saying?

Whoever loves on me makes me.

Neil:

I love I love you.

Jacqueline:

And you that's family to me, you know what I'm saying?

Neil:

As soon as I met you I love you. I fell in love with you.

Jacqueline:

That's family. Now I have blood cousins out there that I don't even like.

Neil:

But you might have a neighbor that loves you and you love her.

Jacqueline:

Exactly. Exactly.

Neil:

And the neighbor feels like your family.

Jacqueline:

Exactly. I was 18 when I lost my mom. I was 14 when I lost my dad, but my mom my mom made a bigger impact on me than my dad, you know, because that's mom, you know what I'm saying?

So it was a lot of things in life that you know, I either had to come by it, you know what I'm saying?

Neil:

What did your mom teach you?

Jacqueline:

Huh? Exactly because well, I mean my mom taught me for the most part my mom was a very meek woman. My mom didn't cuss.

She didn't smoke. She didn't drink, you know what I'm saying? She was very attentive to her kids.

She didn't she wasn't one to oh, I love you. I love you, but she showed us love, you know what I'm saying? I wasn't able to speak that love that word until I got with my husband and he showed me how to open up.

Neil:

Brené Brown has a quote which my wife and I are lucky to sit down with her in chapter 75 and she said professing love is so easy and so cheap showing like bell hooks All About Love. She's showing love is what's up. So how did your mom show love?

Jacqueline:

She like I said, she was very attentive. She was very attentive. I mean my mom I was like a mama's baby.

Like I said, my mom was was I was 18 with my mom. I slept in the same bed with my mom until she passed away.

Neil:

Your whole life?

Jacqueline:

My whole life, that's how close I was to my mom, but it was a lot of things

Neil:

Just you and her? Where's everybody else?

Jacqueline:

That was what I was it.

Neil:

Oh only you slept with your mom cuz you're the baby

Jacqueline:

Yeah, cuz I'm the baby.

Neil:

Yeah, we got a baby in my house.

Jacqueline:

Yeah, that's probably gonna always be a baby.

Neil:

Yeah, my wife still sleeping with him. Like he's still around at night. Like he's got my spot in the bed sometimes.

Jacqueline:

I always be well, you know boys.

Neil:

Where did your dad go?

Jacqueline:

Who knows?

Neil:

We've covered a lot so far. I mean, this is just one draft for one person in St. Louis, but Jacqueline is just so full of life and energy and thoughts. But wait, did we ever see the bird the Eurasian tree Sparrow and what is Jacqueline's most formidable book two more questions.

We still need to answer. Wait, I never saw the bird. Oh, wait, I've seen I've seen I saw Morning Dove.

I saw Blue Jay. I saw Robin no Eurasian tree sparrow Jacqueline. Well, you're my Eurasian tree.

Oh, give me 30 seconds. I'm gonna find it. It's right here.

Jacqueline:

Come on. Oh my God.

Neil:

So the birds are talking to me now you say yeah, they're talking about you. You're right.

Jacqueline:

They say look at this nut.

Neil:

Yeah, I got it. The Eurasian tree Sparrow. Oh, yeah.

Jacqueline:

Who told you they was over here?

Neil:

Well, it's got a black and white cheek, which is different than a house bear. They were released in 1870 by the Germans. They brought 60 pairs over.

They released them in Lafayette Park in St. Louis. They started to breed. They brought a bunch of birds over all the rest died.

But just after that happened a lady came out of the house right next to where we were and she's like, hi, we're like hi. She's like, what are you? What are you up to?

We're just like, oh, we're just I'm just looking at a bird and she's like the Eurasian tree Sparrow. We were like, yeah, she's like, I know I figured and I was like, oh my gosh, I'm sorry. I hope we're not bothering you.

She's like, no, no, no. We when we when we bought this house, we had to sign our names on the contract saying that we knew our home or nearby was breeding grounds for the Eurasian tree Sparrow and that we wouldn't take down the nests. So don't know the I can't verify this story, but I love the fact that a neighbor came out of the house and says like I guess you're looking for the Eurasian tree Sparrow, which was wonderful.

Now, let's keep going. What about the book? Can we tie Jaclyn's story into a book?

Can you give me one book to change your life Jacqueline?

Jacqueline:

I would say the Bible, I would

GPS:

Turn left on Central Avenue.

Neil:

What age were you when you read it?

Jacqueline:

When I start reading it? Probably probably around my 20-ish. Yeah, my late 20s.

Neil:

Yeah. Why'd you start reading it? What made you start?

[Jacqueline]

Because I felt hopeless and helpless.

Neil:

Hmm.

GPS:

Turn left on West Park Avenue.

Jacqueline:

Somebody told me hey, get God in your life.

Neil:

How did that help?

Jacqueline:

Because it gave me hope.

Neil:

This is before you're married before you work 27 years for the bus.

Jacqueline:

This yeah, this is this is like after I lost my mom, you know, you know what it's like to be an 18 year old kid with no mother to give you no guidance, no directions, you know what I'm saying? My mom was taken from me at such a young age, you know what I'm saying? And I didn't.

Neil:

How did she die?

Jacqueline:

She died of cancer. You know, that was that was before.

Neil:

My mom lost her dad at age 18. She still talks about it. My mom's 73.

Jacqueline:

Yeah. Yeah, she knows exactly.

It's a it's a it's a void in your life that could never be filled. You know what I'm saying? You never get over it.

You get you get you adapt to it, but you never get over it. You know what I'm saying? I mean, it's not too many days that goes by that.

I don't think of my mom, you know what I'm saying? And some kind of compassion.

Neil:

What's one message she gave you?

Jacqueline:

She my mom gave me family actually family, you know what I'm saying? Because my mom really believed in togetherness for his family was concerned. You helped each other, you know what I'm saying?

I mean just like when my sister, my oldest sister start having kids real early. You we lost our dad. So it was just my mom and the kids, you know what I'm saying?

Is it's like 11 years difference in me and my sister. So she started having kids my sister when my sister wasn't at home. We took care of her kids.

That's what my mom gave to us. You help your sister out when you know what I'm saying? So right now today with my niece.

It was three of them two boys and one girl. I'm talking. We're very close because I was a part of their raising even though I was young man, my niece is just like, ten years apart but I was a part of that raising so

Neil:

And did God or Jesus or the Bible did it feel some of that void?

Jacqueline:

Oh, it feels a lot of it. It feels it feels more now than than I mean, I I'm a better person because of it, you know what I'm saying? Because you know, you you just feel sorry for yourself.

You know what I'm saying? It's why me you have this pity party and the Bible lets you know that he never said that you wasn't going to have triumph. He said he would never he would be there.

He would never leave you. So he's here with me. He didn't say I wasn't going to have troubles through this world.

You know what I'm saying? He didn't say that we wasn't going to die. It's just I lost mine so early but he didn't he never told us all of us going to die.

You know, we just don't know when so that helps me. Yeah, that gives me you know what I'm saying that that really kind of caused me it brings me out a lot of times of feeling sorry for myself. You know what I'm saying?

Because we all have a story. We all have been through something. We have different stories, but we all have stories.

We all have seen like the worst in this world. So that kind of help.

Neil:

Now so inspired by that chat with Jacqueline. I wanted to go keep moving, you know, go to the bookstore go to the art. So I open up the uber app again.

And this time I meet Deneane. So your name is Deneane and you tell me you got depression for nine months.

Deneane:

Yeah, but also like I feel like it got worse. It's like of course things take course. So like after I lost the two plus like not close to people but really too close to me.

I never went through a bad breakup. And so like that really like hit it because I'm like I have kids, you know, like we have kids together. So it was just like me.

Neil:

You got kids? How many kids?

Deneane:

I have five.

Neil:

You have five kids? You're 28 years old?

Deneane:

Yeah.

Neil:

How old were you when you had your first one?

Deneane:

I was 18.

Neil:

Wow. So 18 every two years.

Deneane:

Yep

Neil:

But you guys weren't married, right? And now you guys broke up.

Deneane:

Yeah.

Neil:

What happened?

Deneane:

12 year relationship. He was a cheater and then abusive. And I finally decided to just get away.

Neil:

Two strikes. You're out.

Deneane:

Yeah, I finally decided.

Neil:

Pretty big strikes though.

Deneane:

Yeah, real big ones.

Neil:

Cheater and abusive. And abusive. What kind of you mean abusive?

Deneane:

Like hands. Like physical abuse. Yeah, physical, physical abuse.

Neil:

I'm so sorry.

Deneane:

Yeah, so I finally, but in the midst of going through all of this, I found the strength to like start over.

Neil:

It's you went solo with five kids.

Deneane:

Yeah.

Neil:

And how old are your kids?

Deneane:

Oh, my oldest is 10. And then I have an eight-year-old, seven-year-old, five-year-old, and a three-year-old.

Neil:

And what are all their names?

Deneane:

Zion, Zoe, Zena, Zen, and Zavier.

Neil:

Five Z's?

Deneane:

Yeah zzzuh!

Neil:

I'm from, I'm from Canada. So it's Z up there.

Deneane:

Yeah.

Neil:

Yeah, five Z's. I can see the arch.

Deneane:

Yep.

Neil:

I see the arch 640 feet tall and 640 feet wide. Built as the gateway to the West. But they built it apparently 100 years after they meant to build it.

Did you hear that?

Deneane:

I never heard that.

Neil:

That's what my driver said yesterday.

Neil:

Actually, the idea for the Gateway Arch in St. Louis was first presented, quote, as a suitable and permanent public memorial to the men who made possible the Western Territorial Expansion of the United States, particularly President Jefferson, his aides Livingston and Monroe, and the great explorers Lewis and Clark, and a whole bunch of other people. Now, this happened in 1933 and construction finished in 1965. So it was 58 years ago.

And mathematically, it worked out to 22 years late, not a hundred years late, like I said.

Deneane:

So how do you take care of five kids by yourself?

Neil:

That would give a lot of people depression to start with.

Deneane:

It's very challenging because like, of course, you have to be on time and like organized and it's like, it's a lot. Like you have to attend to each personality. But financially, I don't feel any different with being without them because I was still financially responsible for everything.

Neil:

So you drive Uber How many hours a week?

Deneane:

I do about 33 hours.

Neil:

Is that full-time job?

Deneane:

Full-time and then I work a part-time.

Neil:

What's your part-time?

Deneane:

Basically, a cashier at Jilly's a Cupcake Spot.

Neil:

At what? Jilly's?

Deneane:

Uh-huh.

Neil:

Pig Spot?

Deneane:

Cupcake.

Neil:

Cupcake Spot.

Deneane:

Yeah.

Neil:

Cool.

So then how do you take care of your kids? I mean, you're because you're working how many, 33 hours here, then how many hours there?

Deneane:

So there, I only work like, I'll say 5 to 11 hours. It just depends.

Neil:

You have to have someone helping you with your kids then, drop off, pick up or something.

Deneane:

No, I'm doing it.

Neil:

So you drop off?

Deneane:

But the daycare helps me where I take them. So like if I drop them off at 7.30 in the morning, they'll take them to school for me.

Neil:

Oh, okay.

Deneane:

And then I pick them up at 5.30.

Neil:

Wow. So you got them 5.30 straight till bedtime. And the bedtime is probably late now with the 10-year-old.

Deneane:

Yeah.

Neil:

You don't got any time for yourself.

Deneane:

Basically.

Neil:

And then we suddenly see the arch. We see the St. Louis Gateway Arch. We jump out.

We take some pictures. I'll paste them on the blog post at 3books.co. If you're watching this on YouTube, I'll put some pictures right here so you can see. We see it.

Oh, we're at the arch. But I want to get the picture with you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

One, two, three, cheese. And you're, and the arch is in the picture. One, two, three.

Oh, yeah. Look at me. Cheese.

Oh, yeah. Now one of us in the arch. This is awesome.

Then we get back in the car. What was the last book you read?

Deneane:

See, I've been listening to audiobooks, so.

Neil:

Do you like, do you like reading?

Deneane:

Yeah, I used to read back in high school. 12, like 12 years ago.

Neil:

What was your favorite book?

Deneane:

It had, who was it by? It was an Arabian book. It was called Something in the Sun.

It talked about the war that was going on. I forgot the name of it, but we had to do a report on it. And I really, really liked it.

I wish they would have made a movie about it.

Neil:

Arabian book.

Deneane:

It was.

Neil:

Arabian book, Sun in Title. A Thousand Splendid Suns.

Deneane:

Yeah, there we go.

Neil:

Yeah, is that it? By, by, oh, yeah, of course, by Khalid Hosseini. The guy who did The Kite Runner.

Oh, that, but that woman had a terrible life. She's married to all these terrible guys. That book, that was hard, man.

That made me depressed.

Deneane:

Yeah, so you had to read it too in school?

Neil:

No, I didn't have to. I just read it.

Deneane:

Ohh

Neil:

I read it, yeah.

Deneane:

Okay. Yeah, that was, that was, I don't know, but that was a good book.

Neil:

Did it change you?

Deneane:

She ended up, I think she ended up having a good outcome.

Neil:

At the very end.

Deneane:

Yeah, like she ended up.

Neil:

300 punishing pages, then it was like 15 good pages.

Deneane:

Yeah, she ended up having a good, I mean.

Neil:

So what'd you like about that book?

Deneane:

I think it was about the fact that she endured, like, you know, and then it's crazy because it seems like that's what I've been doing. But, um. I'm a hopeless romantic.

So it seemed like, like she got with the person that she really loved at the end. Like they love conquering, you know? So I think that's why I liked it.

Neil:

So what do you mean you're enduring? Because you're working the two jobs. You got the five kids. You're a solo mom.

Deneane:

Everything I have went through, like I went through a lot, you know, so it was just like, you know, with the abuse, with the cheating, with the just trying to figure it out, being a young mother and like my parents, like when I found out I was pregnant, my parents was like, they were mad. Cause like I had everything set up to go to college.

So they said you're on your own, you know, so I literally been on my own since 18. So it was just like just going through all the things that I went through. I endured, you know, and like, I know, I know my time is coming to, you know, have my good, you know, my good time.

So yeah.

Neil:

What's your good time look like?

Deneane:

Healthy. And when I say that, like raising healthy children, like we're in counseling now for them seeing the fighting and stuff like that and just being happy, like having a routine, having peace, just having a schedule, having, you know, just conversations with my kids, watching them grow, watching them develop and just like pushing them through whatever they want to do. Like my son wants to be an artist, you know, and my daughter wants to do ballet and stuff like that.

So it's like, I just want to see them go, you know, like just blossom, you know, and then I have a business. So I want to see my business take off.

Neil:

You got a business on top of all this? What's your business?

Deneane:

So I sell designer perfume and cologne.

Neil:

Plug it, plug it.

Deneane:

Yes. It's called Fleur and I sell.

Neil:

F-L-E-U-R?

Deneane:

Yes.

Neil:

Designer perfume.

Deneane:

Yes.

Neil:

Wow. Tell me more. Tell me more. How'd you start it?

What were you doing?

Deneane:

So my parents used to sell designer perfume and cologne in Jamestown Mall when I was younger. And so I loved it. Like I love smelling the scents and matching it up with people, the pheromones and stuff like that.

And then once I got older, I realized, actually during the pandemic, I had a niche for like putting baskets together and like the color scheme, how pretty they are, how pretty they were and everything like that. And I was like, man, and I took off during COVID because nobody wanted to go to the store and go shopping for Mother's Day, Father's Day, Christmas. So it took off and I just fell in love.

Neil:

What do you mean took off?

Deneane:

Like I started, like every holiday, I started averaging almost like 50 baskets a holiday. So it was, and I was a one person, you know, like doing this so I'll be in my room just like going, like just coming up.

Neil:

How much could you sell a basket for?

Deneane:

The highest I've sold one for is about $240.

Neil:

Wow.

Deneane:

The lowest is about $15.

Neil:

Wow. And what's the website? How do I find it?

Deneane:

So I have an Instagram, it's Deneane.

Neil:

You can never delete Instagram. So give us your Instagram handle.

Deneane:

So it's Deneane Fluer, D-E-N-E-A-N-E, but on here I've spelled F-L-U-E-R.

Neil:

Okay.

Deneane:

And.

Neil:

@deneanefluer Spell it again one more time.

Deneane:

D as in David, E-N-E-A-N-E-F-L-U-E-R.

Neil:

Wow. So people can go in there and they can buy your designer perfumes.

Deneane:

Yeah.

Neil:

And how many do you want to do? How many do you want to sell a year? So 50 per holiday.

Now, what if you want to, how many do you want to sell?

Deneane:

I want to sell, for real, I want to go bigger, but I have to get people that I trust to like help me out because I really want to, you know how like with churches and businesses, like when they have the little baskets or like little gifts, like just thank you gifts and stuff like that. I want to do those. So I really want to go corporate with it.

Like, okay, here you're at like the conference you just left.

Neil:

You remind me so much of Suzy Batiz. Suzy Batiz is the founder of Poo-Pourri and she had this vision for being like a hustler. She calls herself.

She drives a black Porsche now and she's worth about a billion dollars. And she's, yeah, and I interviewed her. So you got to listen to that.

Chapter 123 in my podcast.

Deneane:

And how do I find your podcast?

Neil:

Do you use Spotify?

Deneane:

Oh, no.

Neil:

Do you use Apple Podcasts?

Deneane:

I have Apple Music.

Neil:

Do you have Apple Podcasts? So type in podcast into your search of your iPhone and a purple button should come up that says just the word podcast. So click that open.

This is what you spend your time on more than TikTok and Facebook. Now go search and type in three, the number three, space books, B-O-O-K-S. Press enter and see that one of me.

Yep, there we go. Yes, it's me. Yeah, that's me, Neil.

I'm Neil. So just click the top, the top one. Yeah, it's weird.

Now just, okay, click five stars. No, just kidding. I'm just kidding.

So then go, that's it. So then like go down to 123. Scroll down to 123.

Deneane:

Yep. There we go. Suzy Batiz.

Neil:

Yeah. Now follow that or subscribe and listen to that. I interviewed her.

I'll tell you what, Deneane, you are like her and you're going to have that business. And you know what? You are enduring because you got rid of that guy who was cheating on you and was hitting you.

You got five kids. You want them to blossom. You got them in therapy.

You're a wonderful mom and I just have so much faith in you. I can tell it right off your, you're like, so what do you write about? Self-help?

Okay, what do you got for depression? Like you're like, let's figure this out. Like you are, you want, you know what Suzy always says?

She said, my whole life, you know, all I want was freedom.

Deneane:

Yep.

Neil:

Your parents disowned you in 18. They left you on your own. That's, that's bad move.

That's when you, that's when you need your parents most of all.

Deneane:

Yeah, but I, I really don't know cause like they're still there, but like they made me strong. Like, okay, you decided to have this child. So like you have to be responsible for this child.

Neil:

Oh, it was, it was actually a survival training.

Deneane:

It was like

Neil:

So you're happy you did it?

Deneane:

Yeah. Yeah.

Neil:

But then what'd you do? Find an apartment by yourself?

Deneane:

Um, so I had moved in with his mom and he moved out and it was just crazy. Like that's when I first found out he was cheating, but I was like, I don't know. I was just so young.

Neil:

How old was he? You were 18.

Deneane:

He was 20. Yeah.

Neil:

So how'd you guys meet?

Deneane:

High school. Yeah. So it was just like, I started seeing who he was, but I also felt like I was just, this is my brother.

I also felt like I was by myself, you know, so it was just like, huh? Okay. So then I ended up getting my own apartment.

Neil:

And was he with living with you or no?

Deneane:

No, when I first moved in, I was by myself and then he ended up coming there and saying he wanted his family and to make it work and stuff like that. And yeah.

Neil:

How long did that last?

Deneane:

That lasted while I was at the apartment for like two, almost three years and I ended up having two more kids. But he left, he left. So I got diagnosed with a kidney disease while I was pregnant and he left me hanging like once I couldn't work anymore.

Yeah.

Neil:

So where were you working then?

Deneane:

So then I was working at T-Mobile.

Neil:

So you're working all these places while you have the kids. You only get six weeks off or something.

Deneane:

Yeah.

Neil:

In Canada, you get a year off when you have a kid, a year. Every time my wife had a kid, she gets a year off, a full year. That's how everyone in the country gets it.

Deneane:

Wow.

Neil:

The whole country.

Deneane:

Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, because here we only get six weeks, but like when I got sick, my brother who's calling me now, he lives in Vegas.

Neil:

Jon Jon.

Deneane:

Yep. He lives in Vegas. And so he told me like he came in to see me and he was like, you know what?

We're packing up. You're coming with me. So I moved to Vegas with my brother and like he helped me.

I gave birth there. It was beautiful

Neil:

That was your fourth kid.

Deneane:

Yeah yep. That was my fourth one and I gave birth there and it was just like it was a it was a healing experience healing. Yeah, and I felt I wish I would have stayed but I didn't I ended up coming back because like I felt like I needed my mom my dad because like I did I got really really sick and they were saying that I only had two years to live.

Neil:

Yeah, so you're 26 24.

Deneane:

No, I was 24. Yeah.

Neil:

Wow.

Deneane:

Yep, because I got diagnosed with FSGS.

Neil:

But that's not true you have two years to live, right?

Deneane:

It's not true. I'm still here. Yeah, I'm still here and I ended up having another baby because they told me like never to have another kid again and stuff. Even though I didn't plan on having another baby, but I did.

Neil:

All with the same guy

Deneane:

Yep it was the same guy like I ended up getting back with him. He told me he had changed and I believed him.

Neil:

The cheating part or about the hitting part? The hitting was happening the whole time you're with him from the beginning?

Deneane:

No so when when we were in high school, you never did that. So what prompted this all of a sudden it started like after I had my son. So our first our first son like after I had that and it was it was I don't know if when it first happened it was like a shot because it wasn't even an argument like he had came over and I was happy that he was there and stuff like that. And I was just like when I say I was like, okay, you know, like I think he's about to come spend time but his phone kept ringing and he was like, I gotta go and I was like, but you just got here, you know, like I thought we were about to watch a movie eat, you know, hang out all this type of stuff because here it is.

I'm young. I'm stuck with a baby like and it's like he's still living life and I'm just like, okay. So where's our us time, you know, and I remember he got super super mad because he was like, where did you put my shoes?

And I was like, no, I'm not giving you your shoes. You got to stay here with me and I'm thinking it's innocent and like he just snapped like and I remember just being in shock, but I didn't want to tell my mom because I was just like I was in shock like but she said where did it come from?

Neil:

Why is he hitting? Like I would never hit my wife.

Deneane:

I think it came from because like he told me his father used to beat up his mom, but he resented his father. He said you never want to be like him. So I never thought he'll do it, but it came out and then it never went back.

It never stopped. It just kept getting worse.

Neil:

Really? He couldn't control it.

Deneane:

I think he could control it because like he wouldn't do it in front of people. Yeah, like you wouldn't do it in front of people.

Neil:

Did you get do people know what's happening?

Deneane:

Yeah.

Neil:

Who'd you tell?

Deneane:

Well, my mom ended up finding out because she seen the bruises and then it started getting to the point to where I couldn't hide it because like I had black eyes and like he had he had messed my job and yeah, like people started finding out about it.

Neil:

I'm so sorry.

Deneane:

I'm okay Now I'm good.

Neil:

My mom found out because of the bruises. Everybody's got a story. Deneane's book is A Thousand Splendid Sons by Khalid Hosseini because it has the theme of endure, enduring, a theme she resonates with in her own life after leaving an abusive relationship, solo parenting five kids at age 28, doing all the drop-off and pickups while holding down two jobs for Uber and the Cupcake Place and running her own business @deneanefluer on Instagram. It's D-E-N-E-A-N-E-F-L-U-E-R on Instagram, which we'll link to it in the show notes as well. So from here we keep going. I changed the address on the Uber to Left Bank Books, the 1969 founded oldest and most popular independent bookstore in all of St. Louis, but I also couldn't resist sneaking in a couple of our fast money questions too. A Thousand Splendid Sons taught you to endure. You got a favorite bookstore?

Deneane:

For some reason, I like Target. Like that's where I go to get my kids books, but I like Target.

Neil:

Target's good.

Deneane:

They have a nice collection, like, okay, so Audible. There's a book that I've been looking at and it's called Sacred, The Sacred Woman or Sacred. And I heard about it through The Breakfast Club because like I listen to them in the morning.

Neil:

Yeah.

Deneane:

And they brought on the author and I looked her up and like they had the book at Target, but I found it on audiobooks. I have the app already. So like I've been trying to listen to that.

Sometimes I play it while I'm driving, but I haven't really got off into it.

Neil:

What good books do you ever get from Target?

Deneane:

Kid books.

Neil:

Like what?

Deneane:

Like, what is it?

The Hair Joy.

Neil:

The Hair Joy. I like it.

Deneane:

Yeah. Dr. Seuss books.

Neil:

Yeah. Now we're on the highway. We're going by a billboard that says $485 million, $650 million.

Another billboard that says Standout Webster University. Lots of ads for lawyers. Lots of ads for lawyers everywhere.

Art and Bloom, St. Louis Art Museum. There's a Ferris wheel out here. There's a St. Louis Blues Arena. There's a big sign that says Advertise here. A big sign that says Own Tomorrow. What the hell is that?

S-I-U-E. It looks like a school. Buy one, get one for a dollar from McDonald's.

That's what we should have for dinner.

Deneane:

Ew, no.

Neil:

How do you organize the books on your bookshelf?

Deneane:

So right now I just have a basket and like I just put them in there and like it's filled in with coloring books and stuff like that.

Neil:

Nice. Coloring books. What books you read with your kids?

Deneane:

Oh, the ones that I just named and then like they usually get my grandma had just got them this book from Rochester, Minnesota, but it has music in it. I can't think of the name right now, but that's something they'll call it. The ones I just named.

Neil:

So we're going to go to Left Bank Books right now. The most famous books are independent books are I think in St. Louis. There's a bunch of the good ones here though, but I looked online.

This one's got like 900 reviews, you know, it's open till 6. Everyone says you got to go to Left Bank Books. I'm on my way to Left Bank Books.

And we got to go in. Let's buy some books. Deneane, so grateful to have met her across paths with her in St. Louis. And by the way, the last book Deneane snuck in there on our list at the end was Sacred Woman, a Guide to Healing the Feminine Body, Mind and Spirit by Queen Afua, A-F-U-A. Deneen took me to the Arch and Left Bank Books and then we went in and went book shopping together. Okay, there was a big black puffy cat in there named Orleans that was hiding in a basket.

There's a sign on the front door saying careful. You don't let the cat out. You know, there was this big wall of book club books right at the front.

You can tell a lot of local book clubs. They keep their most popular most recent pick at the front door, which doubles as a great way for other people to come and see what book clubs are reading and the store itself has their own book clubs. You go to the basement.

There's a used section, but unlike most places, it's in the POS system. So when you ask, do I have this book? They say, yes, we've got one new and we've got one used in the basement.

Anyway, the place was just wonderful, real activist streak. You know, there's lots of pins, lots of buttons, lots of posters, like it's a real strong. I felt the vibe of the store very strong.

We go shopping together and while you know, we got a nice stack of books for Deneen and her kids on behalf of our three books community. And then I also picked up a couple books for myself, a signed copy of Slow Birding, The Art and Science of Enjoying the Birds in Your Own Backyard by Joan Strassman, S-T-R-A-S-S-M-A-N, who's a St. Louis professor. And I read that book and I put it in my book club.

If you don't get my book club, just go to neil.blog and you can sign up every month, last Saturday morning of the month. I send out giant email with all the books I've read in my reviews of them all. So I read that book, loved it, fun.

It goes through like Blue Jays and Cardinals and Starlings and you know, birds that we see more often, but we don't know a lot about necessarily. And I also got The 27th City by Jonathan Franzen, which has just been republished with a new cover that features the St. Louis Gateway Arch on the cover. So I was like, I gotta get that.

Plus, I've read Jonathan Franzen's four most recent novels and a bunch of his nonfiction, but I have not read this 1988 debut novel. And why is this all important? Because Jonathan Franzen is our next guest on 3 Books Oh, yeah, baby, get ready for that. That's coming up on the next full moon. Now, is that it?

Are we done driving around St. Louis? No, I gave my speech the next morning and I had one more drive to the airport left, one more drive left. And this time there was a limo waiting for me outside the hotel to drive me to the airport.

And I'd like to introduce you to our very last St. Louis driver. That would be Albano from Albania. Let's get into the back of his car now.

Albano:

So yeah, just pretty much where it all depends on where you live inner city. Mostly it's hard-working civilians trying to keep up with high-end demand and low-paying jobs. So they would they expect more from the person they vote in and some I would say for most of the people and I've lived in St. Louis City for over 20 years and it's heavy Democrat because they want better for themselves and better for the city areas around it have a lot of money. So they want somebody that's going to help them. Maybe not pay as much taxes make more money, which we all want to make more money.

Neil:

Once you have more money that you get more right wing.

Albano:

Correct. That's right. The richer the richer the people the more right wing is what you're saying, but even though you can get more money and still be humble is still live by.

Neil:

That's what people love Warren Buffett because Warren Buffett is like a crazy billion, but he's like super blue doing the big donations and you know, he said you don't see that from others. You don't see that from us would be like the Patagonia guy because the Patagonia guy taught us that you could be super rich and then just give it all correct, you know, but the thing is when billionaires are in charge of the donations that's not good either because then you get like a billion dollars for a tiny little art school a billion dollars for a tiny little but then like meanwhile the hospital downtown Chicago like falling apart.

Albano:

Yeah priorities, right prior priorities. We give money to the things that are not supposed to be needed.

Neil:

So in Canada, you know, if you came to Canada 40 years ago guess what our airplanes are were in the in the run by the government, you know, but our trains are run by the government our boat, you know, everything's run by the we don't have private all this our hospitals run by the government schools are run by the government right now. We're starting to get private schools. Now, we're starting to get private hospitals.

Now, we're starting to get because everybody wants to live like the Americans. Nobody lives better in the world than rich Americans. That's they have the highest quality of life.

Look at these guys. They're flying around in jets. They're going to space.

Albano:

They don't know normal.

Neil:

They're all super fit.

Albano:

They're all super fit. That's crazy to me.

Neil:

They're all super fit because they have time to put into it

Albano:

Time to put into it right and they don't have to work like me every day get up at four. Yes.

Neil:

So how many hours a week are you working doing this job?

Albano:

Well, it all depends. There's days where it's really busy and there's days where it's like I'm an independent contractor.

Neil:

How old are you?

Albano:

I'm about to be 33 years from Albania. Yes.

Neil:

Born and raised?

Albano:

Yeah, I moved here when I was 10. So 22 years going on.

Neil:

How does somebody go from Albania to st. Louis?

Albano:

Well, we went through the visa lottery that they do for countries like Albania and we had family in st.

Louis and we decided to move here because it was cheaper and not as cold as Cleveland, which was our second option.

Neil:

So for somebody who's never been to st. Louis before like me yesterday and who maybe is never going to come how would you describe the city to people? What's the city?

Albano:

Honestly st. Louis is very multicultural. It has a little bit of everybody's culture.

I think the immigrants that have come to st. Louis have made the city better all the jobs that are thriving now is because those that didn't want to work for $5 an hour washing dishes. It was the foreigners who came in and actually took those jobs with no English.

If there was one Albanian, let's say for example, he brought in another Albanian that didn't speak the language worked hard and a lot of them have started from nothing. A lot of them have their own construction companies a lot of them do real estate different things and they even the Bosnian community Italians live in a specific area in st. Louis because they moved there way in the early 90s.

So if you're interested like eating somewhere you have a little bit of everybody's culture if it's Indian food, if it's whatever you're craving Thai food, Albanian, you have a little bit of everybody just depends on where you're going.

Neil:

I mean the whole city seems like it started with immigrants like you go back to the 1800s like German immigrants. I mean the reason there's I went to go see this bird yesterday the Eurasian tree sparrow. Okay, because German immigrants brought it over in 1870 with six other species from Europe to try to grow the birds here that they liked and only one of them survived and that one did not destroy the local ecology, but it never spread further than st.

Louis that are still here man. You can go see them I can give you the address.

Albano:

You spent 24 hours in st. Louis and I didn't even know that I spent 23 years.

Neil:

The first guy I met when I landed yesterday was guys did you are 630 feet cross 634 correct started 1904 World Fair was here. And did you know these summer Olympics we are most people did not know the summer Olympics really he was like so interested in making me love st. Louis.

Albano:

I got it. I know I do too.

I tell people a lot about st. Louis is a great city. I know it gets some wrong feel because of crime or whatever like but otherwise a lot of people say about about the crime and why is that not an issue?

It's it's it's an issue in certain pockets of st. Louis. It's not something that it's everywhere.

It's this happens in all of the world. Not just in st. Louis certain areas are more run down than others.

Maybe not as much money is put into those neighborhoods because maybe it's just the way others treat it. Maybe not as much money from taxes going into those neighborhoods without I give them love not give them pain. Absolutely.

Yeah, and everybody needs it like when you said your wife is it yeah teacher. Yeah, I taught for eight years prior to doing this. I taught math. I was living in Orlando prior to coming back to st. Louis during the pandemic and I taught here too for three more years and I taught inner-city students and they come from rough neighborhoods, but that doesn't mean they're not smart because people judge people by their color by their look by things like that. Every kid is able to learn and to be able to succeed.

They can't help it. They're born in a situation like that. So I'm turning the engine off for a sec.

Yeah, my name is Albano originally from Albania have lived in st. Louis for over 20 years. I've went to school in Iowa got my degree in accounting moved to Orlando taught for five years there taught three more years here in st.

Louis. I'm recently doing Luxury car service. I know it's different than a professional job, but it's something I enjoy I get them.

Neil:

Why'd you leave teaching to do limo driving?

Albano:

Unfortunately, if teaching was something that others would care about and meaning the financial reasons a lot of the teachers that are great and what they do wouldn't leave the profession how much money when you make it as a teacher in Florida?

Neil:

How much money you make now?

Albano:

I started in 2014 making $42,000 in Florida after eight years of experience. I was making $60,000 here in st. Louis doing car service.

I make about double. So just just shows you that not necessarily nowadays. You have to get your degree.

It was more needed maybe 10 to 15 years ago. If the high-end jobs require you to go to school to get your doctorate, I'm all for it. I'm a teacher.

So I recommend everybody to go to school, but you can still make a very good living nowadays by doing something different something they enjoy doing.

Neil:

We're prioritizing the wrong things in society. We're saying drive around rich people's worth more double society with us to teach our young kids how to be good people. That's why we end up, you know, messing ourselves up. If we hollow education we lose everything.

Albano:

Absolutely. And I wish that every school in America gets not only the resources that they need especially those in inner-city schools that don't have the resources that they need, but I just wish that in general everybody puts effort towards teaching and teachers in specifically.

We always talk about the kids and their mental health and their state of being in the classroom, but we never prioritize the teachers.

Neil:

Wow. Thank you. So this was a rougher a messier maybe a more human conversation than we usually do on the ground in the cars in a city. I'd never been to before as it was happening live. Obviously as you could tell I mean, I ask everybody for permission before sharing their story for recording their stories and then you know, try to stitch them together with my comments jump in because they feel kind of, you know, unglued a little bit without to help bring us all right there hearing and listening and seeing stories that we don't always see.

Thank you so much for exploring some of these stories with me. I'm very happy to add some more books to our top 1000 from a source that wasn't I could never have predicted when I started the show and so we've got to add right now and we're getting close to number 600 people. We're going to add well, first of all, we got out an asterisk, right?

So we're going to add an asterisk to number 674, which is the Holy Bible. That's what Jacqueline gave us that was picked in chapter 110 by Kevin Kelly originally. So we now have an asterisk on the Bible, not the way that that typically sounds but we've got one there.

We're going to add number 603, A Thousand Splendid Sons by Khalid Hosseini, which I'm thrilled to add. I mean, we didn't have any Khalid Hosseini books on the list. No Kite Runner yet in case anyone wants to pick that or call us at 1-833-READALOT and tell us if the Kite Runner or Khalid Hosseini book is maybe one of your most formative and then I'm just going to add because you know, we all had one there and the Bible was a duplicate. So I'm going to throw Sacred Woman by Queen Afua. We did not give it a sense of space on this show, but Deneane mentioned it and talks about it and I wanted to get a little bit more of her heart out there. So number 602 is Sacred Woman by Queen Afua.

Thank you all of you so much for coming down to St. Louis with me and listening along. Alright, 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. Yes, this is one of three secret clubs, not three secret clubs, three clubs that we have for three bucks. Three bucks is the name of the show.

So we got to have three clubs. First club is the end of the podcast club. I talk directly to you.

You talk directly to me. Play your voice notes, your letters, your phone calls. We got some letters from Vishwas Aggrawal coming which is going to be fun. And of course, we've got the Cover to Cover Club. Just drop me a line anytime. Let me know if you're in the Cover to Cover Club.

That's anybody who tries to listen to every single one of the 333 chapters. Remember, I was in my 30s when I started this show. I'll be at 60.

I think I'll be 60. Yeah, when I'm done. So who wants to hang out for 22 years?

Who's up for the 2.2 decade long hang? Those are Cover to Cover members. And then finally, we have a secret club.

This is an entirely analog club. It's completely crazy. It cost me a bunch of money.

I love doing it. It's super fun. But how do you get in?

Well, you gotta call our phone number for a clue. That's 1-833-READALOT. That is a real phone number.

If that doesn't work, just drop the T at the end, readalot, because that's a superfluous T I put in there to make the sentence make sense. Leave us a message is always great. But also get the code word and you'll know what to do because I'll tell you what to do in the voicemail.

Then you can join our analog only secret club. I can't say more about it now. All right.

Now, let's kick off the end of the podcast club as we always do by going to the phones.

Jennifer:

Hi Neil, this is Jennifer in Goldsboro, North Carolina. I was calling with a dream guest suggestion, which is actor Paul Giamatti. I heard him on another podcast and they referenced him being in front of a wall of books and he talked about how much he loved reading.

He has his own podcast, not about books, but he talked about how much he loved reading and it made me say, oh gosh, what are your favorite books? What are your formative books? But of course they didn't talk about that.

They just moved on to the next thing. So help me, Neil. You're my only hope.

How can we get to the bottom of this? Good luck and thank you for all you do. Bye.

Neil:

Thank you so much to Jennifer from Goldsboro, North Carolina for the wonderful idea and request to get Paul Giamatti on the show. I love Paul Giamatti. What's your favorite Paul Giamatti movie?

I'm going to go with the surprising Win-Win. Have you seen Win-Win? I feel like that was like a relatively poorly known movie, but Leslie and I saw it in theaters and we loved it.

We also liked The Holdovers, which we saw more recently, of course, the Best Picture nominee, and then you can go way back. There's just so many good roles. He has always struck me as a really interesting guy, so consider it done.

The invitation is going out today. I'm inviting Paul Giamatti on the show. Fingers crossed.

Let's see if we can pull it off. That would be wonderful. So now it's time for the letter of the chapter, and I got good news.

Guess who's back? It makes sense that while I was hanging out in the backseats of Jacqueline and Deneane's Ubers, guess who pops into my inbox? Vishwas Aggrawal. You might remember a couple chapters ago, we had a letter reaching out to him. What's going on with Vish? I didn't hear back and I kind of reported that, but now he's back.

We got some notes from Vish. Hey, Neil, sorry for keeping the pace for a while. It was so great knowing people still recall my work.

It's all your magical efforts, you know, Vish, which makes and keep very common things on the top of people's minds. Thanks again. Thanks very much.

You can, in fact, leave it at thanks. Thanks can be a word enough for someone like you. All I can say is God bless you ever, ever more, and all your divine efforts to touch people's lives.

Love you, Neil. You will remain a best human. As he does to us, too, as you can feel that love.

Now, he says, so I miss giving you an update. As you're aware, I've not driven Uber anymore. The last few rides I did were during the pandemic.

Since then, I've been trying my luck with self-employment in Canada with two different gigs simultaneously. I went to school again and did a post-grad in immigration law, and I appeared for entry to practice immigration licensing from the College of Immigration and Citizenship and become a regulated Canadian immigration consultant. But also, I gave multiple exams to get a real estate license and I worked in real estate initially and did a dozen odd deals.

But now, I'm focusing on immigration practice as real estate has downturned in Canada. On the family front, my daughter, Hia, has started going to university. She's currently in second year doing an honors and Bachelor of Computer Science at UTM, which is the University of Toronto, Mississauga, where Preeti, my wife, also went to school once again after having two degrees from India.

She took IT as a second career. Currently, she works as a program manager in Home Depot at their head office. Cheers, Vish!

Oh, it's so wonderful to connect the dots from Chapter 7 with Vishwas Aggrawal, which you haven't listened to, go back in time to Chapter 7 of the show, all the way up to Chapter 136 when we're in the backseat of Ubers again. Yes, a wonderful connection through space and time. Okay, and now it is time for the word of the chapter.

Let's head back into the show now.

Jacqueline:

But my philosophy now is my family is whoever loves on me. Blood does not make you family. You know what I'm saying?

It doesn't. No, no, no. Blood doesn't.

Blood makes you kin. It doesn't make you family. Oh, you know what I'm saying?

Neil:

Yes, indeed. It is kin. K-I-N, a noun that Merriam-Webster defines as number one, a group of persons of common ancestry, semicolon like a clan, one's relatives, kindred, it says here, and that or be kinsmen, like he wasn't any kin to you. As Jacqueline said, family makes you kin, but it doesn't make you family, right? No, blood makes you kin. She said one more time, blood makes you kin, but it doesn't make you family.

I don't know. It's interesting. You go back to the word, there's two really closely related words that are going to seem really obvious in retrospect.

Number one is kind, K-I-N-D, like you're from the same kind, which is an old English word from the 1200s, originally spelled C-Y-N-N, if you can believe it, but think kind. What kind of person are you? What kin are you?

I guess there's a bit of a mispronunciation with the I being long and short, but kin kind together, but also it is also a short of akin, A-K-I-N, right? So that word means related by blood. So when you think of the word kind, and you think of the word akin, you might not always think of kin, but we often think of kinship on the show.

So kin is common ancestry, but kinship, I want to say, is the love and the connection that we feel with other people. That was the theme of the conversation. I felt so much love and connection going down there with Jacqueline, Deneane, Albano, and hanging out with you in the backseat of a number of different cars in St. Louis as we truck around the country, as we soak through the world that we're living in these short 30,000 days and try to connect and reach out and touch and feel the love and feel the energy of so many people around us. I love this chapter. It was special. It was different.

It was a lot of fun, but now we're going to go back next chapter 137 with Jonathan Franzen to go deep into the giant mind that is maybe one of the arguably the best novelists in the world today, but everyone's got an opinion about that, but he's certainly in one of the tops. We're going to go there next time and that's going to be a lot of fun, but until then, until the next full moon in June, 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 135: Cal Newport severs cell subservience to steep slow success

Listen to the chapter here!

Cal Newport:

There's no YouTube video that can have as long and lasting an impact as a book, because when we read, we begin simulating the mind of the other characters that we're encountering. And through that mind meld, you can reconstitute, restructure your brain. And you can come out of a book thinking about your life completely differently, which is just the most powerful thing we can do, is that the right book at the right time can transform the way you understand the world.

Cal:

And I kind of joke sometimes, my whole career is built on giving two-word terms to things that everyone already thinks and knows. When is it appropriate for someone to get unrestricted internet access? The safe answer is 16.

Neil Pasricha:

Hey everybody, this is Neil Pasricha and welcome or welcome back to chapter 135, 35, 35 of 3 Books. Yes, you have joined our 22 year long pilgrimage to uncover and discuss the 1000 most formative books in the world. Today we have a wonderful long form conversation with the one and only Cal Newport, a guide, a visionary, a role model to me and millions of other people on living an intentional life and a productive life.

Amidst our noisy, scatterbrained, tech-drenched world. Cal is an MIT-trained computer science professor at Georgetown University, and he's the author of 10 books, which have collectively sold over two million copies, including ‘Deep Work’, Digital Minimalism, and his latest bestseller, ‘Slow Productivity’. Cal says in our conversation, I sometimes joke that my entire career is built on giving two-word terms to things everyone knows and thinks.

He's being humble when he says that because the truth is he's doing a lot more than that. Just take ‘Slow Productivity’ for example. He's boiled this new phrase down to three principles. Do fewer things, number one. Two, work at a natural pace and number three, obsess over quality. Maybe sounds simple, maybe even trite. You're like, I could, doesn't that sound obvious? But that's when you kind of pull your head up and realize that the whole world is conspiring against you doing any of those things. I mean, doesn't our world today reward doing

More things, working at an unnatural pace and obsessing over quantity. I mean, that's kind of the design of the world today. How many posts can you get out on your feet? How many how many cold calls can you make? I mean, we're always kind of going after things the wrong way. There's a reason Cal has no social media apps on his phone. Actually, it doesn't just have no social media apps on his phone. He has no social media. He's never been on social media ever with his books and his wonderful podcast called "‘Deep Questions’", which I highly recommend you check out.

Cal is focused on helping us navigate and find our way through the ever-changing technology and work patterns that increasingly feel at odds with our shared quest of living intentional lives. So, what are we gonna talk about today? Well, he's got a giant mind, Cal does, and it was on full display as we discuss how Cal measures success. We've got an opening conversation about, the new book just came out, like, how does he think about success?

The neuroscience of reading, Denis Villeneuve, the relationship between rest and work, the ideal age for unrestricted internet access, the Washington Nationals, Leet speak and productivity pr0n the role of books today and their future, Andrew Huberman, positive reinforcement theory, Jonathan Haidt and the ancient generation, technology boundaries for children and much, much more. Let's jump into Chapter 135 now.

Neil:

Hey, Cal.

Cal:

Hey, Neil.

Neil:

It's so, so nice to finally meet.

Cal:

I know.

Neil:

I mean, it was an email eight years ago.

Cal:

Eight years? Oh my God, I'm so old.

Neil:

That I have from Monday, February 29th, 2016 from Brian Johnson. Guys, I've told you both about the other. You are now connected. Have fun.

And I wrote this hilariously nerdy, like geeky, stupid reply. Calvin, I wrote Calvin. Does anyone call you Calvin?

Cal:

My foreign academic collaborators, because I might. Well, yes, because they don't know me, because I don't see them normally. They're different. When I see them at conferences, I publish academic papers under the name Calvin. So they still call me Calvin. But and you, I always say yes, my foreign collaborators and Neil.

Neil:

There that's also why I had written this note. And then you had written back a very kind note. And it was like, it's great to hear from you. And I love that you spell 'hear', H-E-R-E. That like made me feel like you were human, you know, because I do that. I spelled there, their and they're wrong. Yeah, almost one in three times I spell any of those words. I'm excited to see your book. and my address is below. You probably won't believe this, but years ago I was thinking about positive psychology and I thought someone should write a book with the exact name, The Happiness Equation. I'm glad someone did.

Cal:

Yes, I remember that. Yeah, I remember thinking about that at some point. Like, oh, if we made this mathematical, I had a whole thing on it. I think I probably still have the copy that like you or your publisher sent me. It's somewhere. I saw it recently. I think I still have it from back then.

Neil:

And you seem like a title obsessed kind of guy too, because like I loved on '‘Deep Questions’', your wonderful podcast that everybody should listen to. It's really, really good. And it's powerful how you do it. It's really like high signal, you know. You said you were talking about the title of ‘Slow Productivity’ and the resonance you were getting kind of even before it came out. And I thought...

Wow, this is a guy that thinks a lot about titles. Like you had said that you had the same sort of pre-publication resonance with, I think, '‘Deep Work’' and maybe one other of your books. So I was wondering, what is this, what is this pre-publication resonance that comes from a guy that's been publishing books since he was in undergrad? You know, like what, what is this thing that you figured out here?

Cal:

What I figured out is if you have a term that people aggressively agree with and then begin riffing on, hearing nothing but the term, you're probably hitting on something, right? And then, you know, you're on that, you know, you're capturing and I kind of joke sometimes my whole career is built on giving two-word terms to things that everyone already thinks and knows, right? But you know you're tapping something that is really out there, right?

So '‘Deep Work’' was like this, you know, people just have a term that people are aggressively agreeing with and riffing on.

Two-word terms to things that everyone already thinks and knows, right? But you know you're tapping something that is really out there, right? So like the term '‘Deep Work’', people are just like, yes, I mean, I don't even know exactly what you mean, Cal, but like this seems important. 'Digital Minimalism' was similar. Just as people were beginning to get wary about their phones, like I need to be a 'Digital Minimalist'. '‘Slow Productivity’' had a similar thing. Like yes, that's what I want.

Neil:

You famously tested it, I think, on the Tim Ferriss show in, I think, 2021?

Cal:

I did. I tested it on Tim's show. I tested it first. I tried to go back and pull this timeline. I tested it within some newsletter articles. I tested it on Tim's show, and I think that was right around the same time I tested it in the New Yorker as well. So I was sort of putting out trial balloons. And if you look at all those discussions, by the way, those early discussions, it's capturing maybe a third of the big ideas from the book. So it was still an early point, but I was seeing if the term resonated. And I saw it pop up a bunch of places after that. People like, yeah, we believe in ‘Slow Productivity’. Here's what we're doing to try to implement slow product. People started using the term even though I hadn't really defined it yet. It's all like, okay, there's something there.

Neil:

And it's funny that you're also testing things like Tim's show gets more downloads than either of us sells books, you know what I mean? Like he's got like 800 million, 900 million, and maybe a billion even now downloads. I know they're more ephemeral, but you're, you're also testing your book titles, like books, like to be in, you were number two on the New York times bestseller list in your first week. And collectively you and I both got to throw some bottles through James Clear's window. I think after this conversation, cause the 'Atomic Habits' for the 232nd week!

I wasn't necessarily number one all 232 weeks, but for 200, come on James, could you give Cal a break on like the first week of his book?

Cal:

I know he was number one. Here's the crazy thing about James, by the way, was when my last book, when my last book went on the New York times bestseller list, uh, I got a note from James. It was like, Hey, this is great. We're both on the New York times bestseller list. This is another book later. He's still on the New York times bestseller list.

Neil:

Did he give you a note this time at least?

Cal:

I don't know. I think this time it's not as novel. I think back then this was really close. I guess my last book was closer to when 'Atomic Habits' came out. I think he was still checking the list back then. I think now like why bother he could just assume like I'm sure my book is on it. So it was when he was still excited that he was still on the list. That's crazy. A whole book went by and he still hasn't left that list.

Neil:

Yeah, exactly. 232 weeks is nothing to sniff at. That is almost five years. You know in total.

Do you see the list says anything anymore? Like how do you measure success?

Cal:

I mean, honestly, the thing I care about is the two year total sale all format number.

Neil:

Ooh. Right? Great.

Cal:

That's what matters to me. Like the list is a lot about pre-orders. The list is a lot about turn converting your existing audience to buy a book sooner rather than later, which is nice. I think it's like a win. You know, it's a win for the team. There there's probably a long term effect to have the medallion on the book cover that says New York Times bestseller because that's going to maybe increase your conversion rate of someone encountering the book by, you know, 5%. But that could add up, right? Right.

Neil:

The conversion rate might be also the book, the indie bookstore that decides to sell it or, you know, the conversion rate might not also be sales, but curation,

Cal:

It could it used to be able to convert into more media, not so much anymore not necessarily coming off the advice how to list because the which is by the way the harder of the list by far

Neil:

You're competing against cookbooks!

Cal:

Which by the way the next week the number one book was a was a cookbook. Yeah, so, so that's nice. That's nice. But the thing that I care about is the two years list. And the reason why I care about the two year number is like...

Neil:

Can you tell people what that is? So people, so I mean, I really just mean two year total sales, all formats, how many books got sold in the first two years? You didn't say one year. You didn't say three years. You said two years. You said all formats.

Cal:

Yeah. If for me, if a book's going to be successful, it takes, you know, you have to add up these sales over multiple years, not what's happening in the launch window, but what happens over two years. And the reason why I care about that is my sort of entrance as a successful writer all happened on a very slow trajectory. So the book, I'll tell you the story. So here's the backstory, right? My first three books were, I wrote them when I was young.

Neil:

Tell us the titles and tell us the years.

Cal:

So the first book was '‘How to Win at College’', 2005. I wrote that during my senior year of college. And then I followed that right up in 2006 with a book called 'How to Become a Straight A Student’'. And then a couple of years later, a book called 'How to Become a High School Superstar'. Those are the only types of books you could get Random House to give a book deal to a 21 year old for. Right. Because I wanted to write, but a 21 year old, I can't show up and say, I want to write about work and distraction. I really great, you know, become 20 years older. But what I did pitch them on was I'm a student. I understand students. I'm going to write a book for students that students will resonate.

Neil:

I won at college. I'll show you how.

Cal:

Yeah, and I interviewed other people, but basically that was the idea. And then my first big hardcover idea book came out when I turned 30. This was so good. They can't ignore you. And then the book after that was '‘Deep Work’'.

Neil:

When you were 30, meaning that when it was like 2012, your first big book came out in 2012, ‘Deep Work’. Sorry, sorry, sorry. '‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You’'.

Cal:

Now, here's the thing. That book, at least for me, there was a there was an auction for it and for me, as a post-doc at the time, I was like, this is a lot of money. It was my first sort of major book that there was actually some money behind. It disappointed out of the gate.

Neil:

Right. So that was not to the advance.

Cal:

Relative to the advance and relative to just, you know, it just didn't do much out of the gate. It was at this interesting tipping point where podcasts, that whole ecosystem wasn't here yet. And there's still a traditional ecosystem. And, and so when I pitched '‘Deep Work’', they said, well, we're going to lower your advance from what you got for '‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You’' because it's not really doing that well. So then when '‘Deep Work’' comes out, I remember being disappointed right off the bat because it was low, the advance had been lowered. Um, yeah, the book was just put out there. Not a lot was happening at first. And I remember really getting upset because a good friend of mine, his parents went to Barnes and Noble to pick up a copy and like they didn't even have it in stock. This was like the first week. And I remember completely my age. Like why? Like this is such a great idea for a book. Like why, why can't I get, you know, support for this. Why is it not everywhere? It's great, I know it's a great idea for a book. And she gave me this really hard advice, which is like numbers are what matters. They just look at numbers. Like your last one didn't sell that much. This is what a launch looks like for, you know, an author whose last book sold that much. But here's the thing about '‘Deep Work’'. It started to catch on and it had this, this slow build. This is why I care about, to go back to the original point, these big windows, but also why I care about not just the launch is that ‘Deep Work’ has never been on a bestseller list, maybe like on the aggregated business, Wall Street Journal list briefly, but never was a New York Times bestseller, never on a bestseller list, never on an Amazon chart, maybe has rarely been under a thousand in any one day on sales rank. The book has sold almost 2 million copies.

Neil:

Wow, that one book? That one book. Wow.

Cal:

And it was just people talked about it and I did, I started doing, I was doing podcasts. I would just say, I would just say yes to any podcast and it just, that thing just got a life of its own. And so and then what happened to ‘So Good, They Can't Ignore You’. That's now like a three, 400,000 copy seller. It followed behind. And so my whole mindset is now geared towards, if a book's going to hit, it takes a while. Yeah. I don't know how to do the James Clear thing.

I don't know how to just get on the bestseller list and be there for five years.

Neil:

You have to have a million person email list. I mean, a lot of it starts with what Sahil Bloom is doing today or what Dan Go is doing today and the tremendous amount of investment. I don't mean just time. I mean just like...

There's a financial investment, there's a time investment, there's a Sahil’s list went from 100k to 700k in a year, Dan's list went from 500k to 200k in a year. So these guys are post book deal, but pre book publication. And so the conversion after giving some, and I felt this with ‘The Book of Awesome’ too in 2010, like when I was able to say on my blog, hey, I got a new book, everyone was like, I've been reading this guy's blog for free for years. But when I'm like, hey, I got a fifth book, people are like, oh yeah, like I already bought your first three books.

We're used to it.

Cal:

Yeah, that's true. First books with big lists, you get big conversion, but it takes time. So that's how, I mean, it's hard to sell a very large amount. When you're talking like numbers, healthily in the six figures or beyond, it just takes time to sell that many books. I mean, you can't get that many people to buy a book in a single week. You can look at the very best selling nonfiction books. And you go in the Book Scan and look at these numbers, like the very best selling, like here's my debut and it's a fantastic debut. You're not going to see more than 30,000 books sold in a week or whatever. And that's just one week. That's for the launch week though.

Neil:

Right.

Cal:

So yeah, that's, that's the reality of the book world is only so many people are buying a book on any given week. And like, even if you have a healthy percentage of those people buying your book, you cannot, you can't sell a million copies of a book in a month, you know, maybe Harry Potter.

But otherwise you can't do it takes time. So that's the time scale. I look at it because I think of my launch windows, like for, you know, I have an audience, they like me. They're interested. They'll buy my serious audience will probably buy what I do in the first week. Like to me, like the third week matters a lot more than the first because that tells me if there's legs.

Neil:

Oh, interesting. Yeah. It matters a lot more than the first.

Cal:

So the first week, no one's heard about it. I mean, no one's read it yet. So it's just like, I know Cal Newport, I saw them on, you know.

I saw him on Ferris and Huberman and, you know, Adam Grant and Rich Roll and Ryan's and like all these other guys podcasts, right? Like, yeah, like, let's give this a try. I know Cal, but like week three, most of that stuff has come out. And so hopefully they're, they're still hearing about it. So that's a weird world, man. It's a weird world.

Neil:

Well, and that's why it kind of begs the bigger, you're kind of a visionary, right? Like you are able to see around corners more than most people are. I think that's where your long form New Yorker pieces have really, you're almost like, I've always thought the New Yorker is like kind of saying how things really are, but you're almost saying how things really are becoming. And so I'm curious about your macro level view. Forget Neil, forget Cal, forget your books, forget my books. What is your macro level view on books? Period.

Cal:

Yeah. I think the format's durable.

I think it's, I mean, it's the best, it's the best bargain sort of in the human intellectual experience because you're, you're spending.

Neil:

Oooh. Books are the best bargain in the human intellectual experience.

Cal:

Yes, because you're spending $20 to get what a, a mind that has specialized on an idea for years and has spent years trying to crystallize that knowledge into like the optimal structure. You get to transfer all that cognitive effort from that brain into your brain for like 20 bucks. And that's such a powerful thing. It's the only mind reading of any sort of great bandwidth that we have right now, is a book that I can take years of thinking and transport that to your brain by giving you this artifact of information captured with characters that I'm handing off to you. And so I think this is why books have been durable. They've been durable throughout so many different media revolutions. It's hard to replicate what you get out of that.

You know what I really like, for example, about pragmatic nonfiction. So I, in my books, there's usually a real pragmatic portion to it is you can induce physiological states in your reader, right? That this is what I grew up with being around these books is that feeling of an advice book, that feeling of suddenly your internal scheme of understanding the world shifts in a way where new opportunities for you that are very exciting emerge. That just feels so good.

You know, like, oh my God, I could do this. And this opens up this opportunity and it's gonna change my life for the better. And it's such a high and you can induce that with paper. You know, it's such an awesome, interesting thing. I mean, books are really personal.

Neil:

And I agree with you, I always call books the greatest form of compressed wisdom that we have. I mean, there's a reason when people go to TEDtalks.com, they read the transcript. I mean, like, so the speech is 18 minutes long, but I can read the thing in three minutes. There's a reason why like Apple podcasts just released the transcription thing and hasn't it? Hasn't it already? Have you noticed like people open and they're like skimming reading the thing because the podcasts are so long.

So maybe you're reading this right now as opposed to listening to it and I get that so I've always been trying to say well books are the greatest form of compressor, but at the same time, Cal, 57% of Americans read zero books last year. American Time News study from our mutual friend, Johann Hari, from his book, Stolen Focus. Highest number it's ever been throughout history. From what I understand, from I think some things you've looked at, but also people like, you know, Prof Galloway and so on are showing that like, you know, below a certain age, below 25 this, below 20 that, below 15 this, and maybe you've seen this with your own kids, their consumption of reading is smaller than it has been for previous generations and TikTok is eating everything type of like…I do worry about books, even though I'm bullish on them. I'm like, do you not see this happening at the same, like, isn't everything kind of going YouTube-y?

Cal:

Maybe, but you know, the period where books lost their supremacy as the only game in town and the most appealing game in town for distraction was really radio and most definitely TV, right? So that ship has already sailed.

So the interesting counterpoint numbers to those numbers is book sales are stable or growing, right? Especially hardcover book sales, ebooks are sort of staggered, people are sort of moving away from ebooks and moving towards, if you're going to do that, you'd rather listen to a book and so audio is going up, ebooks are going down, but book sales are not falling. So when you hear these numbers, like this is the lowest the read zero books has ever been, what's happening there is what you're shifting is maybe someone who read one book going to zero.

So yeah, that number can get the zero book number can jump.

Neil:

Non-readers are growing.

Cal:

Yeah. Or margins. Yeah, you're getting like the marginal, like I if I get really excited, like I hear about, you know, Dave Goggins on Rogan and maybe I'll read his book, like sort of the marginal readers. Maybe we're losing…You lose them. That number can really jump up. But without really affecting necessarily how many books are being sold in a given year. That being said, I want that number of reading zero books to be much smaller, because what you're saying is like it's the best compressed, not the best compressed knowledge. What else do we have that can change your life so thoroughly? There's no other medium that I know of. There's no YouTube video that can have as long and lasting an impact as a book because when we read and I don't know the full neuroscience of this I think Marilyn Wolf would be good on this – I don't know the full neuroscience on this, but we begin simulating the mind of the other characters that we're encountering. It really is a mind meld.

You get this in movies as well. It's really a mind meld. And through that mind meld, you can reconstitute, restructure your brain and you can come out of a book thinking about your life completely differently, which is just the most powerful thing we can do is that the right book at the right time can transform the way you understand the world.

Neil:

Oh my gosh, you said it so well. And there is something about that first person narrative. I also always say like, look, if you read Dune, you're the director, you picture the characters, you picture the sets, you picture those things underground in the sand. I don't remember what there called. You picture all that. You picture the music. You picture the lighting. You picture the costumes. When you watch the Denis Villeneuve vehicle, as I'm going to do later today, he picks the he picks the characters. He picks the costumes. He picks the music. He picks the lights. And like just the percentage of stuff you got to do is this much smaller.

Cal:

Yeah. Yeah, it's cool. I saw it in the theater down and when I was down there in Austin, you shake in the seats as they're riding the sand worms. That's cool. But you're exactly right. It's not engaging your brain in the same way as doing all of those things in your head. There's something special about it, right? We're not evolved to read, but it's this co-evolutionary thing. Like it's hard. We have to hijack parts of our brain that were evolved to do other things. We have to hijack them and basically force them to do this very unnatural thing. But once we do, it works so synergistically with us. Like it's one of these accidents, cultural discovery accidents that this thing, which is very unnatural and humans aren't evolved to do. We have to really train for years.

Neil:

Whoa, whoa, whoa. This is not natural and humans aren't evolved to do?

Cal:

We're not evolved to read. Reading, we have to hijack portions of the brain that are used and evolved to do other things and through painstaking training, essentially rewire them to convert written letters into semantic meaning, right? I mean, the written word, and this is so recent, we're talking 10,000 years or less and humans have been around for 300,000 years in roughly their modern genetic state, right?

Neil:

Right.

Cal:

So it is really arbitrary. Whereas even something like speaking in language which is more like 50 to 80,000 years old, writing's pretty new, but it works really well. It's like one of these cultural discoveries that has stuck because it's not just useful. Our brain takes to it in a really interesting way. The way that like we imagine the scenes and the impact we get out of it and its ability to change our cognitive states.

It's like discovering, you know, they talk about how like the cavemen discovered beer by accident. I felt like this is awesome. That's sort of what reading has been like for our species.

Neil:

Wow, that's amazing. And plus the 10,000 years ago was the advent, but really, you know, Gutenberg's printing presses, maybe 500 years ago when it was actually able to be mass distributed. There are stories. I have a book called, ‘The Book’, and there are stories of like, I think it's Marcus Aurelius. Like the first time he read in his mind and people were watching him, like he wasn't like talking the words. He was just reading it in his, people were like, what's he doing? Like, you know, what's, why does he just stand there? What's he just looking at? Like they, no one knew what that even was as an idea that you could just sit there and look at something and read.

Cal:

Yeah. I have an interior monologue. Like what is going on here? Yeah. I think Augustine, about him as well.

Neil:

Yeah. Maybe that's who it was. I mean, this is, so that is giving us some great fuel for ‘3 Books’, the podcast, because here I have thought that it is like a, you know, we're in the books category, when the literature category, when they're like tiny infinitesimally small substantive society, Jonathan friends and guests on the show, you know, it says I'm part of a declining species of the literary community. You know, he kind of jokes like that. But meanwhile, you're giving us some contemporary like freshness here. Like there is, is a new thing that you know how to read. It is a new thing that you can do this great thing. You are rewiring your brain to transplant yourself into three different places every single time we have our conversation. So with that wonderful, a beautiful set of appetizers that you've given us with Cal, I really appreciate that. Why don't we dive into now your three most formative books.

For each one, I'm going to hold it up to the camera for those watching YouTube. And for those not watching YouTube, I will describe it as if you're holding it in the store. That's my goal. I'll give like a 30 to 60 second overview of the book and I'll ask you, Cal, to tell us about your relationship with each book. And then I have a few follow-up questions for each one.

Cal:

Yeah, sounds good.

Neil:

Let's kick it off with ‘‘Getting Things Done’’ by David Allen, that's A-L-L-E-N published by Penguin Books in 2001. The cover has got a picture of David Allen who looks kind of like Niles Crane from Frasier, if you know that character, It's got a white background, blue border across the top of the check mark next to the word ‘done’ depending on cover. Mine has it by the word ‘getting’ and so David Allen, born in 1945. He's an American author and productivity consultant who created the time management method ‘‘Getting Things Done’’ after graduate school. Interestingly, I wanted to just mention this. Alan began using heroin and was briefly institutionalized. He claims to have had 35 professions before age 35. In ‘Getting Things Done’, Alan shares the breakthrough methods for stress free performance with the simple premise of our productivity is directly proportional to our ability to relax. He shows us how to bullet point list, apply the do it delegate, defer it, drop it rule to get your inbox empty, reassess goals to stay focused in changing situations, plan projects as well as get them unstuck, overcome feelings of confusion, anxiety, and feeling overwhelmed and feel fine about what you are not doing.

Dewey Decimalheads, you can file this book under 646.7. Interesting subcategory, it's technology/ home and family management/sewing, clothing, management of personal life/management of personal life. Cal/Calvin, tell us about your relationship with ‘Getting Things Done’ by David Allen.

Cal:

Well, first of all, for the audience that's listening, Neil, don't you miss that period where they did covers like that? So it's David Allen with his arms kind of crossed and the contemplative hand on the chin. Wearing a three piece suit. This was like the 1980s and 90s, you used to get these book covers where you would just say a full size picture of the author standing like a full body shot in like a dramatic kind of like, Hey, pose. Miss those eras.

Neil:

There's like one finger on the cheek, three curled around on the chin.

Cal:

Oh, such classic. And I'll say, by the way, he's a fascinating guy. So I profiled, I kind of profiled him, but really like profiled the book in the New Yorker in 2021, I wrote this article called, ‘The Rise and Fall of ‘Getting Things Done’.’ And so I really kind of went deep then, he's a weird, interesting guy. Which, which is important, actually, because when I think about that book's influence on me, there's two waves of it, right? So there's going to be the influence that had when I first encountered it in college when it came out. And there's the influence.

Neil:

2001.

Cal:

Yes. And I so I read it, I listened to it on tape. And back then, I probably downloaded it. This was pre-audible, so I probably paid 30 bucks and downloaded it onto my iPod. Then there's a new resonance that we can get into more recently, where the cultural reaction and misunderstanding of ‘‘Getting Things Done’’ and what that book was really about has a new resonance that I think is also very important. But in 2000-

Neil:

I want the full relationship.

Cal:

Oh yeah, I have a long relationship with Alan and everything. I've spent an unhealthy amount of time probably thinking and writing about David Allen. So when I get to this book, when I first encountered this book, I'm in college, 2001, 2002, I would have read it. And so I would have been like a sophomore or junior. The thing that jumped out at me about it was this idea of being systematic about how you're organizing stuff in your own life, which was an idea that sort of appealed to me. Like I had read Stephen Covey, you know, and Stephen Covey had the quads and trying to work backwards from your roles to figure out like what you should prioritize. There was the sort of a late eighties time.

Neil:

Time vs. Urgency Eisenhower Matrix.

Cal:

This is all Covey. So he was, he was doing that. There were some characters around like Brian Tracy that was sort of more, uh, aphorism based, but like eat the frog, sort of a Maxim based time management, like do the hard thing first. And, uh, Alan came along and was very systematic. He's like, you have a flow chart. You make a decision here, and here. This goes on this list. You execute from that. It kicked off this movement in the 2000s that became known in leetpeak and sort of online parlance as ‘productivity pr0n’, P-R-ZERO-N, which was this belief. And by the way, my New Yorker editor at the time was so pleased that we got the word productivity pr0n, which is this like, ultimate geek term into the pages of the New Yorker and back what I wrote about David Allen…

Neil:

Being a play on the word ‘porn’.

Cal:

A play on the word porn and you write in a way that it's not going to be, it has to do with like it won't be filtered by the early like content filters. But what it was like productivity porn they call it pr0n. There's this big movement this big optimistic movement into 2000s that with the right system supported by software work could become effortless. Like that this was going to liberate work from being the sort of like relatively like confusing hard thing of like, what am I working on? That you would have the right software running the right systems. And like a lot of the organization of work would be automated algorithmically be outsourcing the sort of energy dispersal required to make decisions into systems and work would become this much more effortless thing. You get the right system and your work was going to be better.

And I interviewed some of the creators of one of the big tools that built on ‘Getting Things Done’. This was super appealing to me when I was 20, 21 years old, right? It felt new, it felt fresh. And you see this influence for sure in ‘How to Become a Straight A Student’’, my second book, where I'm really walking students through like, you need to be systematic about how you're approaching your schoolwork. Like, how are you doing it? You need to write down like, what's your GTD? Like, you need to write down this is how I'm taking notes, this is how I'm studying papers. Systems mattered, right? And so that idea that systems matter is very important. I went on a student systems quest starting my sophomore year, right around the time I encountered this, where I had gone through my freshman year and had gotten pretty good, but not great grades. Inspired in part by ‘Getting Things Done’. If I have this timeline right in my mind, I began aggressively experimenting on myself with how I was doing student work, like the systems I was using. I treated it like David Allen treated knowledge work time management. How am I taking notes? How am I sitting for a test? And it was transformative. Like what happened is my grades maxed out. 4.0, 4.0, 4.0. Every quarter starting my sophomore fall, suddenly I was getting to 4.0 until my senior spring where I got one A minus. It was like a three-year span with one A minus. Like everything else was an A.

Neil:

So the systems work.

Cal:

And I evolved them, you know, and let me try this. So this is stupid. That's a waste of time. Let me try this. And so, man, I was a believer in systems by the time I left college and it infuses my early books for sure. Infuses the stuff I do now. David Allen was the person who really introduced this idea of you can have a system. You can have a system for how you do things and that system can make things better and you can, you can let the system take on a lot of the work of, hey, what should I do next? Or how should I do this? A system could make your life easier. Like I never pulled an all-nighter in college once I got systematic about my studies. Like it could make your life easier. I had to study less time than other people. I was more relaxed, you know? I could do-

Neil:

I wanna go deep into your systems because they are pretty powerful and I've heard you talk about them before, but for those that are earmarking this part of the conversation, what is the best place for them to go if they wanna go into this part of your work? Is it how to be a straight A student?

Cal:

Well, you know, it's every stage.

Neil:

So they listen to your conversation with, I think, Andrew Huberman, where you talk about this a lot.

Cal:

It's every stage. Yeah. So if you look at ‘How to Become a Straight A Student’’, you'll see my student systems. If you look at ‘‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You’’, you'll see systems for transforming your like, choosing a job and making your career something that you're successful at. It's locked in on systems in general.

Neil:

Those that want more can look at your early books or more recently, I think your conversation with Andrew was you went pretty deep on this there.

Cal:

Yeah. Or my podcast.

Neil:

He's kind of a consummate learner.

Cal:

Yeah, that was a systems, that was a systems conversation for sure. Well, what's his term protocols? I guess yes. What's the protocols? Yeah. So he keyed in on it's funny how different people key in on different things like doing Ferris's show. Like we usually key in when we talk on like the state of technology and its impact on society. Huberman is like, what's the protocols? Like, let's, let's get that. That really wants to know about your childhood. Rich is like, how do we like, what's this all about Cal? Like, you know, you're like, he got into my interview with him. He's like, I think I'm doing too much. You know, like this is, I'm kind of stressed out and like, it's funny.

Neil:

Everyone has their angle. And it's all self oriented too, in some sense.

Cal:

That's the secret to all media.

Neil:

So, so David Allen, Cal Newport part one in 2001, when you're a sophomore or a junior is to ingrain into your brain, this idea that this is how the world, this is one way of looking at the world. And when I apply this to my life, it seems to be working.

Cal:

Yeah. Now there's going to be…This is why the article I eventually wrote about this was called the rise and fall of ‘Getting Things Done’. Because ultimately I realized and had to evolve like a lot of people who got into this, oh, systems can't do everything. So that then became another important step as I moved on to graduate school and professional writing. And these were the two things I decided in college I wanted to do was computer science and writing. And this is what I was doing. I was at MIT, studying computer science at the highest level and writing books, you know, and trying to become a better writer or whatever.

Neil:

Yeah.

Cal:

This is when I began to realize, um, oh, systems can't get you all the way to impact, systems can't get you to the meaningful life. Systems can help save energy systems.

Neil:

So why'd you think that? Why did you just, why, why'd you stop believing in the systems?

Cal:

Well, and not only did I stop believing, I began becoming a target for David Allen fans for my heresy. Because at the core of Allen's idea was this idea that all work gets reduced to widgets and categorized. And then you don't have to worry about anything. Work becomes this sort of Zen activity of just what context am I in, take an action off a list that's been reduced to something you can do in a couple minutes and execute that, then what's next. And I realized when it came to producing really meaningful things,

That's not what that work feels like. That work is grappling with the muse. That work is like grappling day after day, hour after hour, trying to create something useful or beautiful. When I was solving a theorem or trying to write a book chapter, it's not next actions. And a system couldn't make the hard work easy. And I began to then think about like, oh, these systems are maybe more about getting stuff out of the way.

Yeah. So that you could grapple with the creative beast, which is like this hard, much more messier, beautiful type of thing. And so I had this interesting evolution during grad school.

Neil:

Wow. That is…that is really interesting. And it kind of makes me think a little bit of I, it's weird that I have this, but it makes me think a little bit of this little two by two that I drew for myself, which is time versus importance. I think low time, low importance decisions, you gotta automate them, okay. Systemize them perhaps. High time, low importance decision like email, you gotta regulate it into like…start, maybe do an hour a day or whatever into one regular for me and Leslie. It's like, um, we have a little piece of paper on the inside of one of our kitchen cupboards. And so whenever something… a door is squeaky, a patio stone is wobbly, a light bulb. We just put on that list and then like one half day a month – I've invited her to an invite the last Saturday morning of the month – and we do all the house stuff. Do you know what I mean? So it's just regulated, right? Cause it takes a lot of time, but it's not that important. Effectually just means get it done cause I wanted a rhyming word that is like high importance, low time stuff, like saying hi to your team and you get to work or like picking your kids up from daycare and that all free space to grapple with the muse slash debate, which is the only word I could think of.

That means the high time, high import decision. Well, how interesting is that? It almost feels like you mentioned Tim Ferris a couple times. Like, isn't that interesting? Like I almost see that slow evolution because he's been a very systems guy, you know, for our work week. It almost, you can almost see that evolution with lots of people of our lots of our contemporaries. I throw myself happily in this mix. Like you get to the point where like. I just want to read poetry.

Cal:

Yeah, well, here's the interesting thing about Tim. So I wrote a profile, like a mini profile of him for the New Yorker, where I was I was talking about how like he got maybe he got misunderstood or maybe he evolved. And I interviewed him about this, so like I could kind of get his take on it. But the thing with Tim is I was saying, look, he wrote this book, The Four Hour Workweek, which should be like the handbook for 2020, 2021, right? I mean, it was like he was ahead of the time of like thinking about work in 2007.

And it was like perfectly fit for that time of how do you, how do you, how do you integrate and reduce the footprint of work and do these other sorts of things that are bootstrap remote work. So you could, how do you design your life? Right. And everyone was thinking about this and yet the book was getting no play. And I wrote this New Yorker piece, like, why are we not all talking about this book? And I talked to Tim about it and it was weird. Everyone honed in, in that book on the, the automation and the systems then and now he was like, well, this was all about, it was about me being in Argentina and learning the tango and going and enjoying the wine. It was about me traveling. It was about freeing you up to do the stuff you would normally wait to do when you were retired. He's like, so I wasn't, he was like the hacks almost don't matter in that book. It was like, the thing is you have, you should, if you're clever, you can free up a lot of time for what he called mini retirements. And it was completely misunderstood or people cued in on Ferris is all about, ‘How do you do things’, like ‘what are the shortcuts and how do you do things?’

Neil:

Yeah, because the left brain scratching parts of this book were so scratchy for the, for those left brain people, but that bigger holistic living thing was that we were all young alpha males, a lot of people targeted in that book were like young alpha males looking to like make a million bucks or whatever, right?

Cal:

So yep But then and then he told me and then he got captured by a little bit. He wrote a couple books like great. Well, then I’ll just talk about the hack stuff like what works for your body what works, you know with learning with the Four hours half and then you're like, okay enough of this and he is like podcasting is more interesting, you know. So it was interesting, uh, but that's another microcosm of the systems are very appealing – but like the systems by themselves. And that's how the whole productivity pr0n movement collapsed. Is eventually people discovered the systems help, but they don't give me meaning in my work. They don't, they're not important. They're not getting me fired up. Having a Kinkless GTD set up built on top of OmniFocus, optimized to the hilt is not making me happier. You know, I mean, I like twiddling with it, but it's not making me happier. It's a – this interesting evolution a lot of people go through from systems as the teleology of work to sort of systems as one of the things you deploy to get to what matters.

Neil:

That's fascinating.

Cal:

Teleology. I said that wrong.

Neil:

What was the word? I said theology, but I think I meant teleology. How do you spell it?

Cal:

T-E-L-E-O-L-O-G-Y. The intrinsic purpose of…

Neil:

That might be the word of the chapter. Keep going. I want to get this teleology.

Cal:

Teleology? Now you have me nervous that I'm saying it wrong. This is an Aristotelian-

Neil:

The explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than the cause by which they arise.

Cal:

Yeah, it's like an Aristotelian idea.

Neil:

Teleology. Does that sound right to you?

Cal:

That could be right.

Neil:

Okay. Because at the end of every chapter of the show, from way back into chapter one, we have a word of the chapter with chapter 18 and David Sedaris, the word was Lilliputian. Typically, the word is a word that I have never heard before.

Cal:

Lilliputian referring to Gulliver's travels and the little people?

Neil:

You got it. Yeah, because I asked him about his height because over his New York Times profiles over the years, it was like he kept getting taller. Like it was like, oh, interesting. He realized you could lie. Like, it doesn't really matter. Well, and the reporters maybe these were diminutive or tiny, a tiny man. And then as he got more famous, it was like, his height disappeared from his profiles. It was interesting.

Cal:

Oh, interesting, interesting.

Neil:

So he laughed and said, I was once called Lilliputian. So here's what's good about that term then. And by the way, this is a common thing about people who read a lot and writers is we say words wrong because we just see these words in our head all the time. You know, we're not talking to people, we're thinking about things. Even now, I will get common things wrong. And my wife will be like, that's not how you pronounce that word. And I'm like, I've been a professional writer my whole life. I'm in my head. You know? Yeah. That's why one of the best pieces of advice to ever give anybody who's written a book is read the whole book out loud.

Cal:

Oh yeah.

Neil:

Read your whole book out loud.

Cal:

Which I did for the book on tape for the first time for ‘Slow Productivity’. And man, that's a process.

Neil:

Oh, for the first time? First time? First time, why first time?

Cal:

Because it's a pain. I don't know.

Neil:

You said no to doing audio for ‘Deep Work’ and for ‘Digital Minimalism’ and for ‘A World Without Email.’ And this is two years ago, four years ago. These are recent big audio world. You said no, thanks?

Cal:

Yeah. Now, ‘World Without Email,’ it was easier to say no because it was in the pandemic. And so they were like, eh, it's hard. The studios aren't really open. But yeah, I'd always said no. It sounded like too hard. But then when ‘‘Slow Productivity’’ came out, they’re like, you have a podcast. People know what your voice sounds like now. Sorry, you have to do it.

Neil:

Oh, wow, you were still saying no.

Cal:

It's a pain. I really don't like it. But it was really useful and interesting. But by the way, I don't know if you've had this experience. You come away being like, this writing is trash.

When you're forced to read it slowly, you're like, I'm a terrible writer. That's how you come away. You want to edit it the whole time you're reading.

Neil:

That's exactly why it's so good to read your own book out loud. James Frey, who is the author of ‘A Million Little Pieces’ and was our guest back in chapter…I got to get this right…is it 18? James, James Frey. Sure. James Frey is chapters third…I'm getting it wrong. He said he talks while he writes. He reads every sentence as he writes it. He talked like he can't write in a room at a coffee shop because he's talking as he writes. He's…he's saying the sentence. Of course, he might with fiction be writing a little bit more…

Cal:

Adjusted the song a little bit, but yeah.

Neil:

Yeah, but still it's an interesting point. So I get your relationship with David Allen's…year of college. And I get that there was a kind of when you got to the exposure that grappling with the amuse was kind of a bigger thing. So is that, did we get to what your relationship is with it today?

Cal:

No, there's been another chapter. There's another chapter. All right. So then there's this other chapter, which is what the book tells us about our culture and our understanding of productivity. And this is a little bit more recent. So like one of the interesting things about that book is it comes up in pop culture. Like for example, there's an episode of The Office where Darryl holds it up as like reading, ‘‘Getting Things Done’’, right. And it's referenced a lot as well. It's often referenced.

Neil:

Everyone knows this book. Or they know it in the business book world. This is maybe one of the top five most well-known books with ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’, ‘Seven Habits’, ‘Highly Effective People.’ This book and one of each of ours.

Cal:

Yeah. I mean, hey, it was the my biggest one of my biggest triumphs, at least for like that version of myself is the point when finally ‘Deep Work’ consistently started topping ‘Getting Things Done’ on the time management list, you know, and that was like my biggest, that's just been the last two or three years. That's been my biggest accomplishment. But so, but it's used in culture. It's also used in a lot of critiques of productivity, a lot of critiques of work, a lot of critiques of capitalism. This book is often referenced because the people, the title indicates, they don't know about the book, but the title indicates that this book is about doing more things. Because you see that title, right? And so it's become a stand-in for how a lot of people understand productivity culture. It's like the goal, there's all these people like David Allen saying, how do you do more things? How do you optimize to get more things done? That's exactly how Darryl on The Office referenced it. He's like, I'm trying to be more efficient about how we run The Office because I'm reading, ‘Getting Things Done’. The interesting thing about this book is that's not what it's about. The book, David Allen has no interest in...getting more things done in the sense of like increasing the rate at which you accomplish things, being more impressive, trying to get ahead. The book is instead, here's my take on the book. Now it represents a huge discontinuity in the business productivity literature. That's very important for understanding how the world of business shifted right around that time period. If you go back to like Stephen Covey, ‘First Things First’, ‘Seven Habits’, it's like late eighties, early nineties. You have like a very optimistic approach to productivity. It's all about self-actualization. It believes that you can figure out like the optimal things to do to achieve all your goals and all the roles in your life. It's like very positive. David Allen is not. It's actually, and I didn't notice this when I was 20, but I noticed it today very glaringly, a very nihilistic book. Like in this book, David Allen is basically saying we're drowning. And what is our goal here? What is the goal of this book is to try to find cognitive peace amid unstoppable onslaught of things to do. That is his goal. That's why it's the art of stress-free productivity, not the art of doing really good things, not the art of getting ahead, not the art of accomplishing your goals or getting promoted, stress-free productivity. All he wants is cognitive peace. And the whole system is about how do you get stuff out of your head where it's making you stressed out and get it like in the paper where you trust it.

And it's nihilistic. He wants work to be this almost dystopian, like cranking widgets thing. So at least you don't have to be stressed by all the stuff you have to do. You can just sort of in a mechanical way zone out and just do this, do that, do this, and like let your brain get some breathing room. It's like a nihilistic book almost. And I think this is very important because what happens between Stephen Covey and David Allen, it's the front office IT revolution.

It's computers, it's networks, it's emails, it's mobile computing. That's what's different between 1994 and 2001. And what Alan is reacting to, he's like right there at the very beginning of this wave, is how once we all got connected to digital devices in the office, the amount of work on our plate and the speed and velocity at which this came at us and we had to talk about it just exploded. And he is like, he's there at D-Day, seeing the troops come on the beach, riding from the front lines.

That is what I realized today ‘Getting Things Done’ is. It is an observation, you know, dispatches from the catastrophe. He was right there at the moment that knowledge work changed.

Neil:

So now you see it as a nihilistic book.

Cal:

A milestone that marks the sharp discontinuity in the world of work. And by the way, look at every major business bestseller productivity related book after that, like in the 2010s, they're all about fighting overload and finding focus. It's, it's essentialism. It's one thing. It's my book, ‘Deep Work’. All of these books.

Neil:

Even ‘Atomic Habits’ could be labeled that way. Yeah. During the pandemic, when the book came out, everyone was looking in their wildly messy, Netflix-addled, endlessly screened lives. How do I fricking? Stop drinking coke. How do I maybe that habits book will help me?

Cal:

Hey, that'll maybe get me there.

Neil:

How do I stop scrolling TikTok?

Cal:

but the bigger point here is when you when you hear almost anyone any modern writer, especially in like the elite media world where I also play when they're writing about productivity, cultural work, they set up this straw man. That's just not true. They set up the straw man of like everyone is saying that you should hustle and like get more done and optimize your day. We haven't seen a book like that in like 25 years.

Neil:

Oh, that's interesting.

Cal:

Everything since David Allen on has been fighting back against the onslaught, the distraction, the overload. How do you just find a thing that's important and do that? How do you avoid getting dragged into too many commitments? How do you make sure in the midst of…that's the theme of all these books?

Neil:

So then what's pushing us the other way? Capitalism?

Cal:

It's not capital because we've had capitalism for a long time. We had capitalism in 1970 and knowledge workers weren't worried about this. We had capitalism in 1989 when Covey was writing and we weren't worried about being overloaded.

Neil:

Accessibility?

Cal:

Here's what I think it is. So we had a knowledge work in particular. And this comes from the ‘Slow Productivity’ book. But the rough heuristic we were using for thinking about productivity was what I call pseudo-productivity, which is like, hey, visible activity is going to just be our, our proxy for useful effort. Like if I see you doing something that's good, if you wanna be more productive, stay later at the office. Because we were going from the industrial revolution where you could put a screw and a tire on the Ford line and that was our proxy as knowledge work kind of came into being.

Neil:

Yeah, exactly.

Cal:

So in that assembly line, we could be very precise. We could measure cars produced per labor hour. We could have numbers and charts. And all that fell apart in knowledge work because it's messy or more ambiguous. So we're just like, we'll just use, visible…we'll gather in a building and like make sure that we see each other working. I argue, this has been my big contention because most of my thinking of the last 10 years of writing has really been about the story of different places that technology disrupts things than how we react to that. Because I'm a computer scientist, I care about that. I think it was the combination of pseudo-productivity, which had been in place since the late 1950s, the combination of that with the front office IT revolution that sparked the spiraling burnout crisis that we saw the first signs of in David Allen and by the pandemic had basically reached a point of epidemic proportions, not to reuse that term, but it got really bad. It's technology, these new technologies, plus this old idea of using pseudo productivity to measure your usefulness in the office. Those two things did not play nice to each other. The whole first part of ‘Slow Productivity’ is arguing that created this spiral of increasing overload and frustration and it made knowledge work increasingly unbearable.

Neil:

You’re a dad.

Cal:

Yes

Neil:

You've got kids, three, I believe.

Cal:

Three boys. Yes. All boys.

Neil:

Yeah, I'm also a father of all boys. And your age range is…

Cal:

We have five about to turn six on the young side and 11 at the old side.

Neil:

Mm hmm. And you are at the forefront of a lot of things. Podcasting world, the writing world, the, I think the digital kind of future gazing kind of world. And we are also experiencing a cultural tipping point at the same time as this is happening with Jonathan Heights’ book, ‘The Anxious Generation’, which is just out and killing it and there are movements around the world.

My wife and I have been working on a book proposal with my agent right now, like a manifesto on smartphone free childhoods, like a mother talking to a child. Like what are your internal family Newport principles, rules, ideas on screens and cell phones and smartphones with your five to 11 year old six, five to 11 year old kids?

Cal:

Yeah, well, they're all exactly aligned with John's work because I've known John for a long time And i've written about him and he's kept me up to speed on the research. He's been looking at and so…

Neil:

You’re a paid a member of ‘After Babel Substack.’

Cal:

I am a paid member of ‘After Babel Substack.’ That's absolutely true I actually have given a couple talks at my uh, my kid's school about kids and phones that's all me just basically summarizing John's research, right?

Neil:

So he's a friend of the show as well and we do a nice chat over his wife's Korean food in his kitchen.

Cal:

So he's right. I think he is right that unrestricted internet access, when is it appropriate for someone to get unrestricted internet access? The safe answer is 16. And the culture is 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:

Really? Not, not 21?

Cal:

Well, maybe 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:

I must have been a late bloomer. I gotta say. Yeah, well. I didn't hit this till at least five more years, if not more.

Cal:

Well, but at least it's better, right?

Neil:

Yeah, certainly better than 10, yeah, for sure.

Cal:

So that's why John's been pushing 16, right? And I think that makes sense. The surgeon general has also pushed that age.

Neil:

Yep, it's a big birthday, yep.

Cal:

Yeah, Murphy'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:

What about you? What about your family? When are you going to get your kids phones? It's kind of what I'm asking.

Cal:

Yeah, well, there's two different.

Neil:

What's your screen time policy at home? What's your video game rules?

Cal:

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 we have to be really clear. So unrestricted Internet access, 16. So that would mean, for example, having a smartphone that you can 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 can 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 it'd be very convenient if you could let us know what time practice is going to 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, go, you know, get after it.

Neil:

Do your kids have devices now?

Cal:

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? Through making you addicted to it so they can help upsell you on things. So for our kids, for the video games, they have Nintendo switches.

Neil:

That's what we have too.

Cal:

And I think that's absolutely fine.

Neil:

We only have one.

Cal:

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, they fight otherwise. So I think that Nintendo is fine. So it's interesting how this has shifted. And this is part of the confusion in this field.

Neil:

You're pro Mario Kart.

Cal:

I'm pro-Mario Kart. I'm pro-Zelda. Air Conflicts. I'm trying to think what they play. It was about time.

Neil:

Do you have the time restrictions?

Cal:

Of course. There's only certain times they get to use it. And it's not for…they could use it on like Saturday morning and there's they can win a half hour if they do like enough chores. They don't get very much time.

Neil:

They can win a half an hour if they do enough chores.

Cal:

Point systems. Yeah.

Neil:

And what's the what's the chores? Oh, so number of time you do on the chore?

Cal:

There's, you get various points for doing various things. Yeah.

Neil:

So you have different things you can catch. It's gold.

Cal:

Yeah. That's positive reinforcement theory, right, that when you can positively reinforce good behavior, actually that's like very compelling to kids and points are a good way of doing it.

Neil:

So you start with like two hours, you got screens, which is like largely video games, maybe they watch TV with the parents, that's not counting, but the solo screen time thing for six to 11 year olds in the new per health, but I'll happily share my mind as well. I've got boys three to nine, four boys, three, five, seven and nine. And we have a currently under negotiation screen time contract, which says everybody gets 20 tickets per week. The tickets are worth half an hour each. Uh, that's actually sorry for just for 10 and up. So they had looked forward to that. Then it's like 16 tickets at this age for 12 tickets at this age 10 tickets. I think the baby is like still under our purview and the tickets can only be used Wednesday's music practice day. So you gotta have your four music practices in if your music practices are in by the Tuesday, you can start using your screen time on Tuesday. There is a screen time window per day. It's three to six pm, that's like the after-school time before the like bedtime and it's kind of sounding similar. I mean, and by the way, my kids wrote this up like it's like in their writing on a piece of paper with scratches on it. So we're negotiating it now. It's like a live in process work. Yeah, I hesitate on how kind of like it sounds totally insane, you know, but I’m happy to hear that you do something too, like similar.

Cal:

I mean, for us, basically, there's very little you're not going to play a video game during the week except for some special occasions. So it's like weekend mornings and long car trips. Yeah, and like some special occasions. I mean what I like about Nintendo games too is they're not super addictive. They're hard and they're fun, but you also kind of get bored after a while. We, you know for a while, we didn't realize this at first, but we had put we for we were going on a flight somewhere. So we put some games on an iPad. Yeah, like the iPad arcade and our youngest when he was like playing these iPad arcade games was very different than Nintendo. It was like he couldn't control himself.

And so you, and he's like, I have to get this back.

Neil:

Candy Crush Saga-esque.

Cal:

Yeah. With the Nintendo, we're like, okay, you're like, you're done playing Nintendo. It's like when we played Nintendo as kids, like, oh, it's too bad. It's like watching a TV show you like, but you don't get that reaction. You get when the kids is on the sort of networked game. That's made to be addictive where they're like yelling at you. And like, I, you know, this is my digital crack. You know, that makes me nervous. So we're very careful about what games.

And then we don't worry as much about TV. We watch TV as a family. I'm a cinephile. We watch a lot of movies together. They don't get a lot of time just watching TV on their own, but it's interesting how this changed. Like when we first had our first kid back in 2012, the concern was still the APA talking about screen time. They meant TV, right? They meant like watching or content. Passively watching content like that was the big concern all of the young millennial parents had was like how much TV time should my kid watch. And by 2017, that shifted, like forget TV, it’s nothing. What you care about is interactive screen and internet. That's where the damage is being caused. It's interesting how these things shift where without anything else to worry about we used to worry like what if our three-year-old sees too much Sesame Street. That's not the concern now. Now the concern is the 13 year old with the iPad in their room and you know, it's like put it into my veins. God knows what they're doing. And if you try to take it away, they're going to have an aneurysm.

Neil:

Amen. And two things to add in. One is a physiological one is this an aha, the aha or the underscore point. It's just look at what Cal is doing. He's evaluating the business model of the platform. So if it's a online, you know, free game that is badge oriented versus a $50 you buy the Legend of Zelda in a box, which we just did. Um, that's a fast, that's a really sharp and astute way to evaluate, uh, what you allow you to, cause I thought that's amazing. And then physiologically, I just wanted to say, I took my kids to the eye doctor recently and she's like, how much screen time did they get? And I was like, I don't know, three hours a week. And she's like, uh, three hours a day or three hours a week. I was like, well, I don't know, maybe four hours a week, but it's a week, you know? And she's like, and what's the screen time? I was like a one hour on TV. She's like, that doesn't count. What do you mean it doesn't count? Like, from an ophthalmological perspective, the TV does not count as any screen time. It's the shrunken, tiny, close to your face stuff.

Cal:

That's the problem. Yep.

Neil:

You knew this. I did not. So we're getting the big screen TV. Daddy was against it. We were all sitting on the couch watching laptops. Turns out I was making the mistake.

Cal:

No, you need the big screen. And let me tell you what else you need to do. Right?

Get the big screen TV, get the Sonos Arc as your front speaker, and get the Sonos Sub subwoofer. Those two things alone can give you as close to cinematic sound experience.

Neil:

Wow. Sonos Arc, Sonos Sub, okay.

Cal:

Oh yeah, and you got to get the sub. And you can add two more Sonos small speakers if you want the full five points around. You don't really need it. The Arc is very good, but the Arc plus the Sub with a nice, crisp big screen TV.

You can get a really close to cinematic experience in your house. Let's be honest. That's the whole key for all this is that so you and I can enjoy movies better.

Neil:

That's funny. Yeah, that's funny. Speaking of movies, speaking of this one last question, ‘Getting Things Done’, we're going to go to your second book after this. I know the first one we're taking a little bit longer. Here's the thing. I got to ask you about your relationship with your face, your face, your relationship with your face. And the reason I'm asking about this is because Seth Godin told us in chapter three of the show that his book, ‘Permission Marketing’, which came out in 2000, he says was the very first business book in this category that featured a business author's face on the cover. Now I know you mentioned like the front suit kind of, you know, that look. Well, David Allen in this 2001 book, he's featured on the cover. Your face isn't on the cover of anything. So Cal Newport books do not have a Cal Newport face on them. Okay.

And we also, both you and I operate in a world of like podcasts, for example. I have gone one way. I had my face on the three books logo. I took it off. I don't like being recognized. I don't like the “Surprise, I know you and I want to talk to you!” I don't like that feeling. Um, I happened to me a lot when my first book and I just kind of, I have this disorienting effect when I feel like I'm being…cause that person knows who I am and they're looking at me and they want, I just don't like that. Ryan Holiday did not have his face on the Daily Stoic podcast, now he's added it. You know what I'm saying? So there's like, it seems like everybody's constantly exploring their relationship with their face. A lot of people, like again, mutual friends, let's mention Sahil Bloom, Shane Parrish, Ramit Sethi, they go to like the same photographer for like their, you know, their profile pic, which is then the same kind of perfect profile pic across all your social media handles and across all your...podcast slogans, across all your email newsletters and all this. And I'm like, what's going on? Like I need your crystal ball again. Like what's going on with your relationship with your face, my relationship, our relationship with our faces in general? What, what is happening here? Like I'm disoriented in this world.

Cal:

Yeah, I mean, look, I'm uncomfortable with this world, too. I preferred the model where like Cal Newport is almost like an abstraction, you know, it's like this. We know these ideas in this book and there's this entity Cal Newport, like I don't know if it's a real person or not. I just sort of associate this abstraction with these particular type of ideas. And that really has changed recently in the sense that visual branding seems to be just part of the new media landscape, that when people hear you and see you I guess they have a different relationship with you, that sort of parasocial relationship that I guess is positive for selling books. But I'm not, this is all new to me. I'm like you, I don't want people to recognize me. I don't want people to really know much about me. I don't want that really, but it seems to be the way the whole media world shifted. When I got started, it was like blogging and newsletters was new media. And that was pretty, that could be pretty impersonal, right? It was the ideas. It was the columnist model. It was like, I don't know anything about David Brooks other than his ideas. He's a guy for the New Yorker, Tom Friedman. I think he has a mustache. That's all I know. And he might have grown a beard after that. So the picture may just have been for that. I've always thought, like, if I had to get a picture for the paper, I would make it different than the real, you know, than the real me.

Cal:

Yeah. To your point, I like how you're uncomfortable with it. I like how you're sort of sitting here with me. And I want to just insert a couple more data points for us both. OK. Andrew Wilkinson said on Twitter: “You want to be Coen Brothers famous; the absolute top of your craft, but nobody has a clue what you look like.” This is years ago. James Clear responded. He doesn't really respond much. He responded, “Agree.” I want a brand that is known by name, not by face. Examples, Calvin Klein, Kate Spade. Most people know the name. 99% of them couldn't recognize the face. Now let's insert into your, the Instagram, Instagramification. Like if you've ever talked to anybody who like wants to grow your Instagram profile, I don't know, you don't, I know you're not on social media and I respect you and I love you and I hate social media and I desperately shouldn't be on it, right, I don't do anything with it and I don't have the apps and blah, but I have to post the new podcast is out. Come check. So I'm still doing that kind of stuff. But if you talk to them, what they always tell me is they don't know you. You aren't sharing your four AM ice baths and you're like nine AM putting your kids to bed and your kids. We don't know what your kids look like, Neil, and we don't know what your wife looks like. And I'm like, I know. And they're like, well, that's what you're going to have to do if you want to get bigger. And I'm like, what the fuck? Like, so there's Andrew Wilkinson and James Clear on one side, Coen Brothers famous. Calvin Klein, right? Mary Kay. Right. James Clear, arguably, is a face people don't know. But it's not his face is not all over his stuff. And then there's what I've heard you say. It seems to be the culture now. And that is, I think, where most of us live in. And so we just got to live with it. Can we rail against this? Should we take our faces off of everything? What's up? What's going on like? I'm still trying to figure this out.

Cal:

I think it is a good question. Like the argument, the new media argument is, if people have more of a personalized relationship with you, I suppose, um, they're more, they're more interested in what you're doing. Right. And they'll, they'll be more loyal. They'll buy the books or there's that. I don't know if that's true or not.

Neil:

Humans are rare, scarce. Yeah. So face on the front of Amex.

Cal:

That's true. Yeah. There's no face. So, so I don't know. Um, I don't know how this is going to shake out. Like, I'm more visual now than I used to be because I do, it's really the podcast that had to make me more available because in the podcast you're in someone's ear and then once you're doing a podcast you do want a visual component to it because people just, if you're going to do it people consume these in different ways so now you're visually out there. The thing that first got me occasionally recognized was just book tours because all of these other podcasters who I used to just call into from my home built these studios and I had to like fly around and go to these places. It was after ‘Digital Minimalism.’ That was really the first time.

Neil:

Do you pay for that or do they pay for you?

Cal:

It's a mix. Usually it's those tours, it's the publishers paying for the tour.

Neil:

Okay, okay. I was just curious when you start creating a podcast, because I heard your rant on like the $6,000 like Rich Roll Studio versus the like $250,000 CBS Studio. I thought that was a great point that you made. Yeah, yeah. You didn't say Rich Roll, you said, “Malibu,” but I kind of figured it was Rich.

Cal:

That might have been Rich. Yeah. So anyways, I don't know It's weird. I mean I've talked to Rich about this too, he said it got weird once he was on YouTube, like people recognize him now. I don't know how it's gonna shake out. I mean, here's the thing is I think There is the reason why people are more visible I don't know about the sharing personal details piece that I think is a social media artifact and I think that is maybe not as important as people say I don't, I mean, I don't talk, I mean, I'll talk about some of my systems. Uh, you know, I'll mention like my, what we do with my kids and screen time, but like, for example, my wife is not a character.

Neil:

I purposely didn't ask you their names.

Cal:

I don't say their names. I have an agreement with my wife that she didn't opt into this world. So I don't talk about her. I don't give her name. I don't, she doesn't want to be discussed. You know, she didn't opt into this world. Um, and, and I don't talk a lot about non-professional things other than like interest, like movies. Uh, so I don't know if that's true. I don't think you have to be, let me let you into the details. That's a very modern thing. This idea, it's very YouTube, Instagram, Tik Tok thing, of we're going to form a connection by me being vulnerable and sort of like being honest and expressing like what I'm worried about. And that I think might be more faddish. I do think a visual connection with people, this is why TV dominated radio, you know, like people like the newscaster. I don't know anything about Dan Rather, but I like that I can see them. There's all these points of visual information.

Neil:

JFK over Richard Nixon.

Cal:

And yeah, so, so I do think, uh, at least if you're doing new media that by new media, I mean not books, but you know, something digital, you're online. It's inevitably going to have a sort of video. You're a personality point to it. But what I'm trying to do is still keep myself as a professional presence online and try to keep the rest of my life separate.

Neil:

This is great. My current thinking on this, by the way, is if you work for it, you can find it, but if you don't work for it, you can't. So I've taken my face off my books, even my most recent book. I purposely don't have my face on. I've taken my face off my podcast. I've taken my face off my social media, like my Twitter thing is like not my face. And yeah, I'm doing live speeches here. I'm on a video podcast. So that's what I'm saying. It's like, if you want to like find out what I look like, and I'm not going to hide it from you, but I'm not going to push my face out at you so that I can do what Jonathan Franzen told us, which is I want to be able to ride the subway un-molested.

Cal:

Jonathan Franzen famous. That's how we should describe it. Right. Yeah. People really don’t know what he looks like, but he's incredibly well respected. Chris Nolan. That's the other example. Yeah. He's the king of the king of his medium right now. Most people don't know what Chris Nolan looks like. He could walk into a restaurant and no one's gonna be like, ‘Oh my God, it’s Chris.’ I mean, in LA they would, but like out here in DC, he could walk into a restaurant. I think everybody knows what Tarantino looks like, Tarantino and James Cameron and Spielberg. They messed that up. They got too…they're too visual. We know what they, we know what they look like, but they're kind of like, directors have it easy. Authors used to be this way like a lot Michael Crichton. I bet a lot of people don't know what Michael Crichton looks like. John Grisham is yeah, he's a tall guy, 6’5”. John Grisham I don't know if a lot of people know what John Grisham, Stephen King maybe you would know what he looks like, but you didn't know what writers look like. I bet a lot of people didn't know what Malcolm Gladwell looked like. I mean, maybe he's kind of distinctive.

Neil:

Mmmm. Big frizzy hair. Yeah.

Cal:

When he did all the speaking, I don't know. I mean, talk about narrow problems. Neil.

Neil:

No, I think it is broadly applicable though, because I think that if you're young and you're being told that you need to get out there and you need to bootstrap, you need to hustle and you need to freelance, there is this somehow algorithmically derived expectation that you need to front yourself. And we see it in negative ways, obviously, with like teens and sexting and so on and all that stuff. But I just wanted to get your pull back and I got it and I love it and I appreciate it because I felt like a lone wolf on this thing.

Cal:

Now I got to pile on for the young people. Also, all of what we're talking about, even like where you should be visual or not, all of that is given the prior of you have some craft that you're mastering doing really well. It's just a matter of how, how are you going to be in the public after doing that? Right. And so if you're young, forget all of that. All that matters is I need to build up the skill to do something really, really good. That's really valuable. Then you can worry about, okay, now that like I've done, I'm doing great things. Um, do I want to be…have my face on the book I wrote? Like, that's the right question because I think young people are, have been given this idea, this comes out of the social media companies themselves, that you can just directly alchemize yourself, just being vulnerable and visible and open, that'll just alchemize somehow into being really valuable. That's actually the thing that makes you valuable and well-known. And it's not the way it works. You still need craft. You still need to do something.

Neil:

Oh my gosh, that's a great phrase. Just being vulnerable and open and visual somehow alchemizes into valuable and it doesn't.

Cal:

That's the whole TikTok scam, right? It's like, how do they get people to post stuff to TikTok? Because they need a certain percentage of people posting stuff to TikTok? Well, because TikTok directly controls every video fed to every person. They just do this game. If you're a new creator on TikTok or like on your third or fourth video, they throw like ten thousand views at you and they give you this sense of just something about me is like really appealing and I'm like right on the border of being like a superstar influencer. They feed your vanity and now it's the cocaine pellet in the rat cage. You're like, I'm going to keep posting things on here and then they'll give you another hit. Yeah. Then like here's 10 posts later, 7,000 views. You're like, Oh my God, I'm so close. So it's a lottery mentality, right? This idea. It's like all the, all the boys, my son's oldest son's age have this idea of like, if I'm just playing Minecraft on YouTube, it might just like happen for me.

And then because I know how to play Minecraft, I know how to talk about like I'm playing. And so it's something anyone can do and it could just lottery. And then you're like Captain Sparkles or whoever. I don't know who people listen to now. You're like this personality.

Neil:

I, I'm yeah, I, I have a lot. I want to pile onto your pile on and I'm going to hold myself back, but I think people get the general takeaway of what we're saying. I'll tell you guys things though most people don't know is Henry David Thoreau, the author of ‘‘Walden’’, originally published in 1854 by Tickner and Fields in Boston. Everyone's cover of this book is different. I happen to have a version that has the introduction and annotations by Bill McKibben. So it's just like a bunch of kind of black and white sparse trees in the forest. I don't know what version you have. It just says ‘‘Walden’’ in the top in all caps and a highly kerned, heavily spaced, serifed kind of Times New Roman type of font.

Across the top, it says ‘Bill McKibben gives us Thoreau's ‘Walden’ as the gospel of the present moment by Robert Richardson.’ From the back, Filed in Nature/Literature, first published in 1854, Henry David Thoreau's groundbreaking ‘Walden’ has influenced generations of readers and continues to inspire and inform anyone with an open mind and a love of nature. With Bill McKibben providing a newly revised introduction and helpful annotations that place Thoreau firmly in his role as cultural critic and spiritual seer, this beautiful edition of ‘Walden’ for the new millennium is more accessible and relevant than ever. Obviously, that's just my version. Now, Thoreau lived from 1817 to 1862. So how he died like the age we are like I'm 44. You're ish the same.

Cal:

Forty one.

Neil:

You're 41?

Cal:

Yeah.

Neil:

Well, you finished college the same year I did, but you were three years younger than me. Holy cow.

Cal:

No, I finished college in 2004. I started college in 2000.

Neil:

Okay, so when you said you're a sophomore or junior you were a sophomore that is a little bit better in college. I thought, wow, you skipped three grades? Thoreau lived from 1817 conqueror, Massachusetts and he died 1862 in Concord, Massachusetts. American naturalist, essayist, poet, philosopher, lifelong abolitionist and delivered lectures that attacked the fugitive slave law. Thoreau’s philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of many notable figures, including Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. Sometimes he's referred to even as an anarchist. File this one 818.303 for literature/English North America/middle 19th century.

Cal, please tell us about your relationship with ‘Walden’ by Henry David Thoreau.

Cal:

Interestingly, it was the hardcover version of that edition you have right there that I first read it. Taken out of the science library at MIT that edition with the Bill McKibben introduction.

Neil:

2004. Yeah.

Cal:

And so it was it was on the new release table, and which I would go there and I would take books off of the library. We put, oh, here's our new releases in science writing. And that's how—

Neil:

Where were you, you were at Dartmouth?

Cal:

This would be now at MIT. So I graduated in this.

Neil:

Which bookstore? The Coop?

Cal:

No, in the library.

Neil:

Oh, the library. The library. Not Harvard bookstore or anything.

Cal:

Yeah, I mean, I would go to the Harvard Coop and I would go to the MIT one as well. But I would go to the science library. I had no money back then. I used to go to the Harvard Coop as I lived near Harvard Square, even though I was at MIT. And I didn't have any money. So I would just go.

Neil:

Where did you live? I lived there too.

Cal:

I was living originally off Chauncey Street.

Neil:

Don't say 1558 Mass Ave.

Cal:

Not on Mass Ave. I was a little bit north of the Cambridge Commons at first, living in a building where they had a plaque outside that said Nabokov. You mentioned him earlier. Wrote Lolita staying in this apartment building. So we lived there for a while. Yeah, it was really cool. And then we moved towards Huron.

Neil:

And I know the crisscross fries of Cambridge Common well.

Cal:

Yes, exactly. But I used to go actually the Harvard bookstore and I would just get a pile of books and go to that cafe on the second story and get coffee or tea and I would just read the books because I couldn't really afford them. So I would just sit there and read them. Anyway, so I read that edition. Here's why. So I read it in grad school. So we can set the scene. I probably got it in 2005 or something. I read it by the banks of the Charles. So it was a sort of nature-y scene. It was incredibly influential because...

I think people misunderstand ‘Walden’, especially people who haven't really encountered it in depth and they think of it as a nature book because he has this beautiful nature writing in it and he's a very good nature writer. It's not a nature book. It's not primarily a nature book. I mean, look at the first chapter. The biggest chapter in the book is called economy, right? And if you look through it, it has data tables in it, right? There's not, Hey, let me just talk about the beauty of nature. So what ‘Walden’ really was, was an incredibly erudite self-help book. And what he was doing is saying, I have a question, a key question about how to design your life, how to live your life. And he had this very key question that was at the core of the first half of the book, which is he was looking at the trappings of modern life and all the things you buy and how much you have to work to get these things. And he was thinking, I think we have this trade-off wrong. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go back to the...the bare needs of existence. So I'll go out to this cabin by Walden Pond and I'm going to figure out what's the minimum amount of money I need to survive. Beans to plant, food to eat, I'm going to build this on someone else's land. What's the actual amount of money I need to not be in deprivation? He's like, okay, so this is our baseline. And his whole experiment was what's really worth adding on top of this?

Like, how happy am I when I'm doing this? And is it worth to do like all this more labor so I can afford this nicer thing, but that nicer thing is gonna require all this labor? And he came up with this really interesting equation of you have to consider the moments of your life and the time and energy that you have to work in order to generate the money to pay for the thing. Is that thing really worth that much of your life? And so he was grappling with these like fundamental questions about how to design your life built around a combination of his own experiment. Let me live at the base amount. And he calculated how much, that's why he has data tables. Here's exactly how many dollars and cents it costs for me to be alive and not deprived. And then he calculated, okay, how much work if I was just working as an hourly laborer on my neighbor's farms, how much work would I have to do to generate this much money? And it was like a half a day a week or something.

And he was like asking this question of like, how do we get from that? Like 50 hours a week and all the stress and these mortgages. And so he was really questioning assumptions about life and the good life and what it required to live. And why did he do all that beautiful nature writing that try to indicate? Like there's all this value he was getting that didn't require him to work 50 hours a week. He's like the copper pot is nice, but also watching the ice is nice. But the copper pot required me to mortgage my farm.

Yeah, so it was an erudite self-experiment based self-help book.

Neil:

So the copper pot required me to mortgage my farm. Therefore it costs, you know, in the broadest sense of the word more.

Cal:

These were the quiet desperation, right? So, you know, famously men living lives of quiet desperation is this key line from ‘Walden’. What was he referring to? What was the desperation he was referring to? He was referring to Concord farmers who had these mortgages on their farm so that they could buy nice stuff. He talks about copper pots, he talks about Venetian blinds, and their desperation was that they were under this crushing loan debt, and they had to just work and work to try to keep up with this debt, and they were sort of desperate because they were trapped. And was this state of desperation worth the Venetian blinds and copper pot when...watching the ice on the, because he’d write about so eloquently, watching the ice change on the pond and looking at the snake and for an hour just watching this, he's like, this is just as diverting as the copper pot, but I only have to work a half day a week. So it was like a really radical self-experimental based rethinking of what's required to live a good life. I think that's such a cool genre of writing. And that really inspired me to consider radical ideas as like the foundation of writing to like the question, big assumptions, the excitement in that. And so I think it's like one of the best self-help books of all time. Even though we see it as literature and nature writing and people who love it would say, I hate self-help and self-help is so low. And why would you ever, but ‘Walden’ is a fantastic self-help book.

Neil:

Wow. There’s a lot there. There you used a couple sentences ago. You said just as diverting like he talks about walking on the pond and the winter and how the view of it looks like totally different than when he's on there in a canoe in the summer. And you said just as diverting as the copper pot and the Venetian blind. So what do you mean divert? How are you using the word diverting? What do you mean? Like just as what?

Cal:

Like capable of capturing and keeping your attention.

Neil:

Ah, just as capable of capturing your attention, meaning that is some elevated goal.

Cal:

Yeah, like this is interesting and ennobling and value producing. Just nature itself is so exciting. I mean these all became the ideas of course that the counterculture movements of the 50s, 60s, and 70s in the US were all building on these ideas, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, the ‘Voluntary Simplicity Movement’, ‘The Back to Lands Movement’, all of these movements, ‘The Commune Movements’, slow, they were the original slow movement. They all are sort of pulling from some of these same radical ideas. This is a very radical book that Thoreau was throwing bombs. And like the modern reader is like, oh, he's, that book was such a nice description of nature's beauty. You know, it's like he was throwing bombs like…

Neil:

And when you say throwing bombs, you even said, I love this genre. How would you label and define the…what else is on the shelf of this genre? What is this genre you're talking about?

Cal:

Yeah, I mean, these are any books where they try to destabilize like some idea or assumption you have in a way that then like completely changes how you think about things.

Neil:

That's what you've been. That's what you asked. We talked about the very beginning of the conversation in terms of what the value of reading and books is in general. So it seems like this is your thing. This is what you aspire your books to do and you are doing with your work in the New Yorker and with your email list and with your ‘Deep Questions’ podcast and with you. It's throwing bombs.

Cal:

You can see it directly. That's why this book is so influential to me. My first two books written before I read ‘Walden’. ‘How to Become a Straight A Student’’, ‘How to Win at College’. The premise is I talked to really successful students and here's what they do. First book I write after ‘Walden’, How to Become a High School Superstar. This is a deeply contrarian book. It's one of my favorite books that no one has read, but it's like a, it's a crazy book. It's like a college admission book written like a Malcolm Gladwell book. There's a whole backstory to it, but the whole premise of this book is that all of this like stressful striving that kids are doing to get into college, they have it wrong. And I went and spent time with these kids I called relaxed superstars, including by the way, Ramit Sethi's brother, Manish, which is interesting. Cause I knew Ramit, I've known him for a long time. And so it's his brother. Yeah, his brother Manish.

Neil:

How did you come to pass with him?

Cal:

Well, I knew Ramit just because we were the same age. He graduated Stanford right around the time I graduated from Dartmouth and we had a friend in common. And it was actually Ramit who told me early on. I have this friend, Tim Ferriss, you got to read this book. He's he's writing. So it's all a small world.

Neil:

You call them you call them relaxed superstars, relaxed superstars.

Cal:

And it was kids who got into good colleges and they were just like relaxed, interesting kids.

Neil:

I totally know those kids. I hated those kids!

Cal:

Yes. I wrote a whole book about them.

Neil:

And it was like they'd show up to the exam with like I got like all these black bags in my eyes from study all night. I got all these they like have like three words written on their hand as like just a way to recall a million things. I was like.

Who are they're skateboarding at night?

Cal:

Yeah, and they were these kids and they would get interested in things. They were like truly interesting. They didn't do a lot of things, but the things they do are interesting. Like Manish wrote a book when he was in high school, which like really made a big difference. It was like a guide to computer programming, but it really made a difference. Anyways, so I wrote that in the next book after that. ‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You’. It argues that follow your passions, bad advice. And that was like the central piece of career advice when that book came out was follow your passion, Steve Jobs said, follow your dreams. Like this is what you should do.

That's a ‘Walden’ inspired book. It was, this is no, that's wrong. Let's rethink from the ground up, very ‘Walden’-esque. Let's rethink from the ground up, how do you build a career you love? Like ‘High School Superstar’, let's rethink from the ground up, what makes someone impressive? You know, so that bomb throwing, a ‘Deep Work’ had a sort of a similar-

Neil:

Counterintuitive.

Cal:

Yeah, ‘Deep Work’ was like stop using social media, all this stuff you're doing online, all this email and stuff. Like this isn't gonna make you, this is getting in the way.

You should focus on what really matters and be the person who's like disconnected. You're going to be more successful. So it's, you know, that, there's a lot of ‘Walden’ influence in that because I love that feeling of, of destabilizing something you took for granted. And when you destabilize it opens up all these new alternatives and new opportunities for you.

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah, totally. I, um, that's really mesmerizing the story itself and the way you've painted it through the through line of your books. I mean, what a great thing to be able to have written books that you can point to past cells. I mean, you don't got to go on a Facebook timeline to see it. You can just check out my bibliography, which is awesome. And congratulations and well deserved. And now I really want to buy my kids ‘How to be a High School Superstar’ so they can learn to be like this. And a couple of things come up for me. One is, you called him the self-help guru. I mean, or you called him, Thoreau, like a, like a self, like a pre self-help, you know, self-help guy. Um, and there's a question I have been trying to formulate for like a week. And I don't, I still don't have it congealed, but you're so gifted. I'm going to, you're going to, I'm going to give you like the half, the embryonic question and see if you can take it from me.

I'm listening to you to prepare for this with Andrew Huberman, Rich Roll, Tim Ferris, Adam Grant, Chris Williams. It goes on and on. You were pretty much in every big podcast. Maybe just not Joe Rogan, but pretty much every big podcast you were on. I know a lot of these guys. I know we're one degree of separation from a lot of these guys.

They're all rich, like rich, like financially rich. And they're all. And I include myself in all this stuff, by the way, I'm not saying they are. I'm saying they're weird. Like they're weird. Like there's, there's like a, there's like a, and I don't, there's a great quote. I think it was Paul Graham said recently, these days, “The algorithm is so homogenizing that if you're doing anything remotely interesting, you are by definition weird.”

So I love weird, weird is great. So weird not to be weird, John Lennon, I'm with you on weird. But I'm just like, when you go up close to these guys, like some of them I have been, they're like way off. They're not two separations from the main, they're like eight. They're like so rich, so hot, like attractiveness. Like I saw a picture of Andrew Huberman with his shirt off on the internet this morning. Someone was sending me a tweet and I was like.

Oh my god, like that guy could be on the cover of like muscle mag.

Cal:

He's very fit. I can confirm he is very fit.

Neil:

See what I'm saying? And like, but on every level and I'm like, is it just me or are we taking our advice? Like, is it that we're taking our, is it that their stuff works so well that like this is the manifestation of it? Because I will also say, and I mean, no judgment by any of this, the whole question is non-judgmental, but there's also a lot of like,

When you go up close, there's that old Neville Ravikant phrase. It's like, what, I want to trade lives with the person. And often the answer is, again, no judgment, but like family has often not been a priority for a lot of the people or the kids are not. And that's fine. Everyone's got their own thing. Everyone does their own life. It's great. But I'm just looking at the self-help industry as a thing. And is it weird that the self-help echelon, let's call it whatever 10, 20 names anyone listening wants to put in there. Well, you go up close, you're like, this isn't really it for almost anybody. Yeah. And I don't think it's even achievable or desirable for most people. Like I'm stymied a bit by this wrestling I'm having with the industry. I know that we're both in.

Cal:

Yeah. Well, OK, here's what I think they would say. I don't think any of the people you mentioned would think of themselves as self-help gurus, I think they all think of themselves as being in the Johnny Carson role. Like their job is to bring the interesting people onto their shows and, and bring you there's one exception because Huberman does the deep dives on. So he would see like what he mainly does is actually doing research deep dives on a single topic. And you know, he'll spend 50 hours reading about melatonin and whatever. So that's a little bit different, but all these other characters they don't see themselves as like, I'm not giving advice from my own life. I bring on interesting people. I bring in interesting people. That's how they would describe themselves. And most of them, I think if you ask them, they would say, yeah, you don't want my life. Don't switch with me. Like there's a, there's a lot of stress. Like they all will tell you. And now I'll tell people the same thing about me. There's a lot of stress that comes with, um, being more public, for example, you do have wire. They don't seem like normal people. You're right about that. They're all very interesting. That's kind of a necessity, I think, to be a media figure. You have to be interesting. You’re commanding attention. It's like if you want to be on TV, you have to be.

Neil:

The classic Jay Leno versus David Letterman. They both looked really strange. They looked really strange. And they were followed by Conan, who looked even stranger.

Cal:

Movie stars are the same way. They're strikingly beautiful. They're strikingly beautiful in a distinctive way. Like, you know, if you walk past Emma Stone on the street, it would just like catch your attention.

Neil:

Or Timothée Chalamet. I'm like, oh my God, this guy is so specifically lanky and big. He's an unusual.

Cal:

Or Brad Pitt. You just have to be like, that's the most attractive human being I've ever seen. I mean, this is like I can't think about anything else in this party now. You know, and so the podcast, the visual podcast world, it's maybe not to be like the most attractive. It's everyone's distinctive. Like I'm good friends, for example, with I don't know if you know, ‘The Minimalist’, they have the show.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah, I know them.

Cal:

Yeah. But I was just out there doing it. But like Joshua, like wears his hair…It's kind of like a joke. He wears it like super bouffant high, right? Because it's interesting visually. So yeah, I agree. But I think that's, they're not really, I mean, maybe they all see themselves, I think, as channeling other interesting people.

Neil:

Is that not post-success view of yourself though? I mean, like, this is probably why I'm so attracted to like first books in general. Like the pre, like when I wrote ‘The Book of Awesome’ in 2008-2012. My wife had just left me and my best friend took his life. I'm writing an awesome thing a day. This congeals into a book. That book still has a unique energy and I don't think any of my books have equal because of what I was in my in my life like a unique like a harried up all night frenzied, anxious just weird energy in that book. Yeah I get a lot of people saying I was going through my divorce and I lost my best friend I read your book nowhere in ‘The Book of Awesome’ does it say that that's what I was doing. Yeah but yeah that it translated through you know what I'm saying.

Cal:

Like that David Goggins book it just has this like hungry weird interesting energy in it that like just from this guy and what he was going through and he's just like laying that out in a book and it just hit people who are in similar situations. It just was like, okay, this is, this is a first book. This is raw. Like this is like a, you know, it just hit people in a way. It wasn't calculated.

Neil:

I guess what I'm trying to also rail against or at least bring up in a discussion point with you, and I appreciate you going there with me is like similarly with like the ads on podcasts, like it's like the ads on pockets are, it's a ludicrously priced industry with massive thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars per read per show with full of this thing. And it's like, does that not, does that not do something with the message itself? Like, like.

Cal:

Yeah, maybe.

Neil:

Like I know I'm stuck in my own stupid no ads thing that I'm stuck on from like 1983 I don't know why I'm on this world of no ads.

Cal:

I don't know. I think it's too new I think people are trying to figure it out like or is it just you know the your favorite show on TV, then you have the Colgate commercial. It's like, yeah, the commercials are what pay for the show. And it's always the person on the show saying, that's what's different about it.

Neil:

I like it. I think you should buy it. Go to my name. Go to this.

Cal:

Yeah. So it's weird. I think it's weird how that's working. And like, should it just all be programmatic ads? But then programmatic ads are a third of the CPM. And so it's hard to support the show. I think that's all being figured out. It's a weird world, but I actually think we should have more public intellectuals giving advice. Like, I think giving advice. We have…We have this real concern about it, right? It's like in our current, especially like elite culture is like, don't give advice because someone might say who are you to give that advice? Or they'll critique you for like, well, you gave that advice but you're missing X, Y, and Z. But I actually think it's like a healthy cultural thing to have more people like Thoreau was doing. He's like, well, look, I thought about this. I'm idiosyncratic. I'm giving a take on things. Because I've always had this belief, which is really not shared right now by a lot of people who sort of write about books, but I've always had this belief that the audience is very smart. The audience is very smart. They understand their situation and context, and they're very good at, you know, I can go back and read Thoreau. A lot of what he's talking about is not directly relevant to me. I'm not a farmer in Concord in 1850, but there's like some ideas in there. I probably can adapt to me. So I was like, I want him throwing bombs and then I'll sort of see what resonates and what still is like timeless in there. And I can do that sort of filtering, but there's a, there's a culture now that says, no, the author has to do all that in advance, right? Like you can't.

Neil:

Can you give an example of this, cause I have not heard of this, ‘not giving advice’ dictum. Oh, well, I don't, I don't disagree with you. I'm like, what do you mean exactly?

Cal:

Well, first of all, like you see this with almost any journalist that goes into nonfiction writing. If they're coming out traditional journalism, they don't put advice in the book. Even if all people want it from it is advice.

Neil:

It's a meditation. It's an exploration. It's an investigation. It's a gotcha.

Cal:

It's Malcolm Gladwell coming out of the Washington Post in New Yorker. His books are, these are advice books, but he would never put a piece of advice in it. Whereas I always used to talk about West Coast, East Coast pragmatic nonfiction, all the East Coast writers came out of East Coast journalism and you can't put advice in the book. The West Coast writers are coming up entrepreneurship, like Ramit and others, and they'll put advice like, yeah, here's, people want information. Try this, try that. Like it's all full of advice. Tim Ferriss, it's different. Right. It's a different field.

Neil:

Go to this website, go to this virtual assistant category, look up this.

Cal:

Yeah, because it's a different way. So I'm a big believer. It's like, I like books that take big swings and then like people will filter it. But there's this, the two fears are the, who are you fear? Like people are very afraid. They'll say, who are you to give advice? And the point is like, everyone is their own person. We can understand the context of a person pretty easily. Give us your best swing. And we'll see which of your balls come to our part of the field. Don't be afraid to take the swing. And then there's this weird caveat concern, right? Where it's like everyone, everyone has a particular thing that they really care about. There's like a hundred things out there you could care about. And they'll get really upset if you don't specifically like address their thing or at least acknowledge their thing, but they don't care about the other 99 things. They're just going to be like, I'm really upset at you because, you know, you're not thinking about…You didn't specifically talk about childcare or something, because I really care about childcare and childcare and work.

Neil:

That's also coming up with the whole DEI stuff has gotten a little out of hand where it's almost like you're afraid to not…I just gave a speech recently and the person before me was laying out the sort of mandatory diversity and inclusion module that everyone's…and you could just feel in the room. I'm like, no one likes this. No one agrees with this. No one understands this. Everyone's afraid of this. No one wants to say the wrong thing.

No one's putting up their hand for questions. It's like, whoa, we've gotten to like an..ice shattery place with some of this stuff.

Cal:

Well, so you get it like outside of that context, like in nonfiction writing, right? I see it a lot. It's not DEI so much as there's also the audience completeness issue. Is so anything that started with that's nice for you, but what about dot, dot, dot. And so what you can do is like with anything that's prescriptive is you can just look for an audience to us. The advice doesn't apply. And then somehow this has become like a standard critique where of course all advice is for a particular audiences. So it's sort of like you write a book about running. You're going to have someone say, well, that's nice for you, but what about people whose foot is broken? Like they can't run. Right. And so it's like, okay, so should I say clearly this advice, you know, for some people though, their feet is broken. So let's talk about like how they can exercise. There's a lot of that, you know, I used to get a lot of that with ‘Deep Work’. Like I write books about knowledge workers and I'll get a lot of like, yeah, but what if you're not a knowledge worker and what if you're this, this and this? I was like, well, I didn't write a…I didn't write a book about that.

Neil:

Well, that's what you're saying now. Thank goodness because you've got the awareness through the feedback. It's like, I got the same thing on ‘The Happiness Equation’. It's like, this is good if you're privileged enough to do that. And I'm like…Well, I know, I guess that's my view.

Cal:

But yeah, but I bring it all up to say this is dissuading more people. I'm used to this, but this is dissuading new voices from giving advice. And what I would love would actually. So here's my I'm going to make my DEI pitch is: I love advice and people taking swings. I want people from all sorts of jobs and backgrounds and cultural backgrounds. Whatever it is, I want the biggest possible variety of people just taking ‘Walden’-esque big swings at like, don't caveat it and protect it. We'll do that as the audience. Just give it your best swing. Like we should destroy phones in a fire. Like give it the big swing, you know what I mean? Or like we should, jobs should only be 10 hours a week. Like take the principle and push it to an extreme and purify it and clarify it. That I think is so exciting. And then of course I'm a reasonable consumer of information. I'll….I'm not just going to go do those things and I'll get to the real point of what you mean and I'll reject some and accept some. But I wish there was a world where more people were taking more big swings with advice. But I think there's a lot of fear of like, what if people say, who are you? Or that might be nice for you, but what about? And that became scarier now because in social media, you hear more of it. And I think maybe it feels like it's everyone saying it. And so I think it's like scarier. And because of that, I think we have a lot less people than we could, like, taking swings at like interesting ideas, pragmatic ideas. And I think we need more of those ideas, not less.

Neil:

Oh man. I know you're not on Instagram, but that was an Instagram Reel, Chapter 82 with Quentin Tarantino, our question our final questions always give us one hard-fought piece of wisdom and his last piece of advice was ‘Do not censor yourself.’ Yeah, which I thought was a really good point. Do not censor yourself. Um, there's a lot there. Uh, become a digital Minimalist be slowly productive while you're doing your ‘Deep Work’ so that you can eventually be so good. We can't ignore you. There we go. Um, and I like that I’m just gonna say repeat for people I thought about this. Points you said that Thoreau said, other people say we're going to your next book is I thought about this I'm idiosyncratic I'll give you my take. I like that thanks are great about this I'm idiosyncratic I'll give you my take that being the caveat in the middle I'm idiosyncratic like you said that I thought about this I'll give you my take but in the middle you're saying I'm just, you know, that's kind of like the, the preclusion. I'm, I'm idiosyncratic.

Cal:

Let me give you a quick example. Another quick example. I recently, I liked this book. So I bought a first edition recently of Thomas Merton, ‘Seven Story Mountain’. This is a very idiosyncratic book. It's about, uh, is a NYU professor in the fifties who becomes a monk and goes to a monastery and it's, it's about this experience. It's very, it's very Catholic book. Um, but very psychological and theologically astute. There's like profound ideas in this book.

Even though, of course, it's like a very weird, idiosyncratic thing this person is doing. Like most of us have no interest in becoming a Trappist monk, but like it has profound ideas. Wendell Berry is the same way. He's a weird, idiosyncratic guy. He's still, I mean, he's like 89 now, but he uses horses on his farm still. You know, he's a weird guy. He also left NYU, went back to Kentucky to farm and write about farms and natures, but his books are, his ideas are electric and they're inspiring and interesting. Even though like, of course, like a lot of the stuff he's writing about is like, I'm not going to farm with horses and this is like really narrow. Yeah, that's narrow, but the ideas have like really deep resonances. So we like, I'd like the weird, the idiosyncratic, that people in different situations, just like taking swings and writing essays and giving proposals and giving advice. Like I wish more people were less afraid.

Neil:

But I love that. Totally agree on the same horse. Pun intended. But you also said, I also tell people, ‘Don't change lives with me.’ And you said with all of these up close weirdos and I clue myself in this like wholeheartedly, by the way, like I'm not saying I'm not looking at these guys outside of a lens. I'm looking at us in the petri dish here. I, you know, there's, and you said too much stress that I heard you say that cause there's too much stress. Is that what you said?

Cal:

Yeah. Being a, I mean, you see this, right? You have this in your own life. Like the more public, like the more exposed you are, that's just, straight-up linear function stress and like the more like exposed or public you are like careful what you wish for if you're like a young person who's like I want to be famous online. No, you don't you want to be Coen brothers famous. Make an awesome movie. Don't let people know that you look like that. That's better. Yeah, it's just trust like the more public.

Neil:

Like Jonathan Franzen famous.

Cal:

But also, they also I guess not just being visible now that I think about it just the more…like Jonathan Franzen has to care about. He's a lot more critiques of him now because he's famous or his books are more well known. He's going to get the backlashes now. It's like the more prominent you get, it rises in proportion. The better selling my book is the more like critique I get, the more the more it's like interesting to be anti-Cal Newport. It's not interesting to be anti-Cal Newport when no one knows who Cal Newport is.

Neil:

It's kind of like the more reviews you get, the more one star reviews you get.

Cal:

A hundred percent. Yeah. Like a book that's all five star reviews, it’s like a first book or it's like a quirky book, it's not a famous person's fifth book.

Neil:

Oh, nice. Okay. Speaking of a famous person's first book, let's now go and close the conversation off with your third most formative book. And I'm, I love, I really appreciate this. You're really, you're, you're we got like fifth gear cow here and I'm loving it. And, uh, I can feel your energy. It's really dynamic and palpable. Thank you. But let's now jump into. Your off days perhaps with ‘‘The Sabbath’’ by Abraham Joshua Heschel. That’s H E S C H E L originally published in 1951 by Farrar Strauss and Giroux the most…the most unpronounceable publisher of all time. It's a golden brown cover with stylized wood carving. I know it's a wood carving because the whole book is full of wood carvings of the Menorah, but as a twisted artistic series of almost not yet bloomed roses with Hebrew letters set on each flower slash candle. Abraham Joshua Heschel was born in 1907 in Warsaw, Poland, died 1972, age 65 in New York.

He was a Polish-American rabbi, one of the leading Jewish theologians and Jewish philosophers of the 20th century, he got to the US in 1940. You can kind of picture war-ish times.

Cal:

Barely got here.

Neil:

Yeah, okay, you know more than me. And then learned English and then wrote this book 11 years later, which you can file, by the way, under 296 for Religion/Other Religions/Judaism. Cal, tell us about your relationship with ‘The Sabbath’ by Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Cal:

Yes, I like a lot of his books. I think somehow when you come to a language late, it can lead to a much more interesting style. Much more like considered style, you're kind of learning it from scratch. He's a beautiful writer because he mixes in all of his books, the poetic with also like the highly structured, almost academic rationale. And he goes, he moves back and forth between those forms, like in the same chapter. So it'll be, it'll, he'll be like beautifully poetic, but also be laying out some sort of argumentative structure that's like well-structured and balanced. And so it's a, he's a really cool writer. He, it can be tough. This is like one of his more accessible books for sure. But yeah, I really admire him.

Neil:

Still tough, but it's still tough. I found it still tough for me.

Cal:

Yeah, this one's tough. Yeah, this one. This one is it's a little tough, little interesting. I mean, if you read more of him, it's interesting.

Neil:

I mean, I liked reading it, I made a ton of notes.

Cal:

Yeah, it's a cool. It's a cool book. I like reading…religious thinkers can write really cool books because they're so contemplative Jewish religious thinkers write really cool books because like all they do is sit around and think and grapple with things and it comes up with like really cool books. So I'm a fan of his, I'm a fan of the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Okay, so ‘The Sabbath’, why do I like this book? So it does a lot of things. It's a theological discussion of Shabbat, ‘The Sabbath’, the day of rest from the very sheet, from the Genesis.

Neil:

So those that don't know this, just give me three more sentences on the Sabbath, what it is.

Cal:

Right. So in that tradition, and so like the Judeo-Christian tradition. There's one day, so when you look at the seven-day story of God's creation of earth, on the seventh day he rested. So that's the Sabbath, and so you're commanded then to do that yourself. And so Christians place the Sabbath’ on Sundays, and Jews place the Sabbath on Saturdays. Comes from the same, obviously the same book of what we'd call the English Genesis.

Neil:

Right. they just started on a different day.

Cal:

They’re different calendars. Yeah, sorry. Different day. But whatever it is both the last day by however they count. So this book is trying to like understand this tradition and there's some theological arguments in it like his main theological argument is that Judaism versus like the religious cults that came before and different than Eastern religions…is sanctifies time and not space. So it's a religion that exists in history, in real time. It's not an abstraction. We're not looking back to abstractions, and it's not as much about sanctified places as it is like this time is important. But he has another argument in there that has a very secular resonance. And so he's explaining like God working to build, create Earth and God resting.

And he's putting this out as a sort of ideal template for the human experience, which I think is like really relevant. I came to this book much more recently. So I think it's really relevant for this pandemic, post-pandemic moment of work and work angst and anti-work movement and ‘Slow Productivity’ and all the stuff that's going on right now. This book really resonated with me when I read it because he's arguing, well, the work is important.

I mean, God was creating the earth, and this was important. This was important stuff, and it was good. And they used the Hebrew word for good, right? These acts of creation are good. But then God rested for the last day. And not only is that good, they didn't use the word good there. This was the one day where they described it as ‘holy’, Kedushah, ‘holy’, the Hebrew word for ‘holy.’ So like the day of rest is holy as well.

And Heschel makes this argument, like it's holy not in some instrumental sense, not in some sense of it's your reward for the work, not in some sense of it's going to recharge you so you can do more work. But because it allows you to appreciate like the other wonders of life, like they would, the tradition they would talk about is supposed to give you a taste of, like a utopian post redemption afterlife. It's like your taste of the world to come. And that's what you're celebrating. But you can see it as you're appreciating all the other stuff, that's ‘holy, that's not work. And so like the work was good, but also like the other stuff is holy as well. And so there was something really critical about that, that seemed to me to unlock, like how to think about work, how to think about anti-work, how to think about productivity, how to think about anti-productivity. That like, we had this figured out as humans back in this late Bronze Age, when these first, the things that coalesced into this book were first being told in surviving cultural evolution, was like the work can be good and important.

And also the non-work is good and important and holy even. And both of this stuff is important. And somehow we have to figure out how to keep both. So we can't just come at our current moment and be like, work or the urge to work is just an epiphenomenon of capitalist exploitation. But we also can't come at it and be like, okay, what matters is work. We need to rest just so we can get better at work. Like sleep is about maximizing work. Like all that matters is like the work. We had this figured out, you know, in 800 BC that both are important. So anyways, I found a real secular resonance from this otherwise theological book.

Neil:

Yeah, absolutely. I...National Geographic said in January, I think 2022 that, you know, the world is tilting towards the secular majority. The US, I think maybe have crossed 50% people no longer ascribed to a particular faith. I know Canada is over that threshold, Finland, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand and like the world is kind of, you know, the fastest growing religion in the world is none. You know, you've maybe heard that to the point where I wrote an article for Harvard Business Review in 2019 or something called, “Why You Need an Untouchable Day Every Week and How To Get One’, they titled it, it was a good title and then the comments I'm reading the comments and someone's like this dude is just saying the Sabbath! I didn't even…

Cal:

You invented Genesis.

Neil:

Exactly! 2800 years later, whatever, so. First of all just for context, when did you read it? How did it come to you? I get how it's been formative. So, you read this most recently of the three. So were you like, where were you in your life here? How did you get this book?

Cal:

This is like after the pandemic started, like sometime like late pandemic. Relatively recent. Relatively recently. I'd read a lot of Heschel and I hadn't read this one.

Neil:

So you read it in the pandemic. You're like, it's like pandemic time. You're reading this book. How do you practice it in your life? You're the guy that wrote the book, ‘Deep Work’. I know I've heard Mark Manson and many other people saying self-help authors are talking to themselves. You know what I mean? Like, this is a common trope in the self-help industry that we're talking to ourselves. I, whenever I complain or whine over texts or emails, someone's like, yeah, I got a real good book for you, buddy. It's called ‘The Happiness Equation’! Have you not read your own book? Like, so I'm asking just in general, you come across this book. It strikes a nerve with you is if I understand correctly, a religious based kind of treatise, that's the right word, that has broad societal and personal implications. You have also written a lot on this topic in general with books like ‘Deep Work’, ‘Digital Minimalism’, and most recently ‘Slow Productivity’. What's the Cal Newport manifestation of this today?

Cal:

Well, I mean, first of all, you'll see those fingerprints throughout ‘Slow Productivity’. I mean, this idea of take longer, you're producing the good thing over time, it's not about the hustle in every moment, it's the what did you produce over the last five years, not what did you produce today. That notion of stretching out your definition of productivity, there's a real sort of a Heschel-ian Sabbath type of idea in there. I follow, I try to actually follow something like that practice of a Sabbath or Shabbat every weekend.

Neil:

So tell me what that looks like.

Cal:

Well, I try to match it.

Neil:

The intro of the book is like, my parents are running. She's running by his daughter. My parents are roaming around like Friday night, like getting the steamer going on the cattle and this. And then like literally the clock, I think it's the sun goes down and then like they just stop. If something's going on the stove, they don't finish cooking it. Like it's like a lights out kind of thing.

Cal:

Yeah. Well, no, I'm not Shomer Shabbat, as they would say. That's the sort of like the, an Orthodox Jew like the Heschel's would you have all these things you don't do but I like the Jewish timing versus the Christian timing, because Saturday versus Sunday.

Neil:

Wait what’s the difference, sorry?

Cal:

Saturday versus Sunday. And it doesn't, it’s Friday night, it's Friday night at sundown to Saturday at sundown. But, but it's you know predominantly on Saturday versus like the Christian timing of Sunday because Sundays it's right before the week starts again Saturday that seems like the right day to try to the step away and appreciate the holy is because, your week is ended at Friday, starting Friday night. How perfect is that? Like, what do you do?

Neil:

So what do you do in your Friday, sundown and Saturday sundown? What do you do? What don't you do?

Cal:

What do you email? So no work, no email, no, uh, so no work, no email, no, um, I think no news, it's a little bit more nuanced than that. It's, it's, uh, content that is, um, created to create a reaction. So don't…nothing viral like I can see it like a newspaper or something, but no like I'm going to mess around on my phone or something like that.

Neil:

But you're allowed to use your phone.

Cal:

Yeah, but I don't know if I would use it much.

Neil:

I mean I would use it if I could. And I know your phone is kind of like my phone. No game apps, no social media, black and white. Exactly. Your phone's pretty locked down to begin with.

Cal:

I use it to like text a few people, most of them are related to me and to stream baseball games. So yeah. Shut down.

Neil:

I like the Nationals.

Cal:

And today's only day, by the way.

Neil:

My team, by the way. I mean, this is the Expos, let's be honest here.

Cal:

Okay. I get you. We will take that. We'll make that connection. We're brothers now. I'm just saying, in 1993, or ‘94, sorry, the Jays had won the ‘92 and ‘93 World Series. Shout out to Roberto Alomar and Joe Carter and Devon White. And in 1994, the Expos, the Expos, managed by Felipe Alou, I believe, had, at the time of the baseball strike, the best record of all time in baseball by that time of the season.

Cal:

That strike.

Neil:

And they never played another game in Montreal again. Yeah. Like it was like you couldn't have ended that story on a worse note in Montreal. Yeah. The first baseball team outside of the US. And then like they never won the Toronto team with a new rich city. They took over in population and skyscrapers. Now they get the World Series and then they had the best season in baseball history. And then they never played in game of Montreal again.

Cal:

Well, but we appreciate, we appreciate it down here in D.C. because we've been having a great time with the team. So it went to a good cause, Neil. I mean, we're happy. We're happy to have the team. Just pr0nise me you'll wear a Montreal Expos hat to a baseball game. I will. They're around. I was just there the other day for the Futures game. But anyways, all right. My practice. Friday after I'm done with work until Sunday.

Try not to do any work, any email, any like looking at content meant to like get you excited and just it's family time, it's reading time, it's you know, go on adventures time. My wife and I try to, when we can have like a standing date on Saturday night, we see a lot of movies and stuff like that. That's, it's huge for me, especially when I'm in these periods of high stress, like book launches, et cetera, that just know you can fully move out of that mindset.

And I'm not going to check something because I don't check something till Sunday. Like having the rules be really clear makes a difference. So that's a great.

Neil:

You're inspiring me. I'm not nearly as fastidious, although I love the differentiation between. I don't read like online news as much. I do read it. I don't read it as like when I turn stuff off, I turn that off for sure. I don't have any cancel on my news push. But I'll still like if I buy a paper Saturday or Sunday near top like that is a different part of my brain somehow.

Cal:

Yeah, you're not, it's not being curated by algorithms. You're just sort of like encountering what's there.

Neil:

I want to see the full page what Yoko Ono's got to say this week.

Cal:

Yeah, they made their money when you bought it so they don't need to now like get you to compulsively.

Neil:

The business model investigation piece again, this is you're good at peeking under the hood.

Cal:

It's also the they make it's the New Yorker model. Yeah, we got these subscribers. We have a million subscribers and they pay a lot of money. It's an expensive magazine.

Neil:

Very. It’s like $700 a year or something!

Cal:

It's cheaper than that.

Neil:

I’m in Canada.

Cal:

But yeah, well, that's different. It should be cheaper. But they've got that's it. So don't worry about ads. They don't worry about. They just like we can just like write really try to write really great stuff. Get good writers like write great stuff because we're not playing the game of like viral online spread. So we can have a writer like I work on articles for there. They're like. Go work on this. We'll help you. Let us know what help you need. And you just sort of work on it till you're done.

Neil:

You know, how many edits are you doing? How many rounds of editing with them? I've heard, David Sedaris told us people don't realize I do 17 rounds of editing before I send it to them and 11 rounds after.

Cal:

It's a lot of editing. Yeah. And then like it's, well, it depends on the article. Like if you, if you nail it, it's, you know, it takes for, I mean, it's a lot of.

Neil:

Who’s your editor there?

Cal:

I work with a couple people. I just started working with a new editor named Marella I was working with Josh Rothman as well before that.

Neil:

I'm not gonna get to my millions of New Yorker questions so I don't have to park that but I got lots to say about the New Yorker is a…It's a…I just did a massive deep dive interview with Susan Orlean, you know, the New Yorker since 1992.

Cal:

She's great writer for sure It's my favorite thing I do. it's the most fun thing I do.

Neil:

It's the favorite thing I do?

Cal:

It’s so fun. It's so fun.

Neil:

We're going to close off the fast money round questions now, Cal! You're ready? All right. Hardcover, paperback, audio or E.

Cal:

Uh, all depending on the circumstance, whatever's quick. Like if I really want to start reading the book, I'll get the e-book because I don't want to wait a day or two to get it. Uh, if I really like a book, I will go back and buy usually like a first edition or early edition hardcover. So I'll have multiple copies of it. Uh, I try to read books on audio, but I have a much worse success rate except for very specific types of books. So I'm on all the formats.

Neil:

Except paperback.

Cal:

No. So if a books and paperback, that's what I'll buy if I can wait a day or so to get it. If I love it, I'll go and buy a vintage hardcover copy of it for my library.

Neil:

Yeah, this begs the next question, which is how do you organize your books on your bookshelf?

Cal:

It's by subject. I mean I have multiple libraries, but I have a library at home with all built-in bookcases and library lights that like shine down on it. I love my library. It's all organized by topic, all types of books, like here is all of my like technology criticism books. These shelves are all fiction. This is like my business books. Here's my like vintage productivity books. I did a New Yorker article earlier this year where I walked through my collection of vintage productivity books, starting with the fifties and like, how do they change from each decade? So I'm a by topic organizer.

Neil:

Sounds like the ‘Newport Decimal System.’

Cal:

Yes. I know where every book is.

Neil:

Here I am using Dewey in my house. Wow. And what are library lights?

Cal:

So like at the top of the bookshelves, they come out and they shine down on the books in the shelf.

Neil:

How do I not know this? I don't know this.

Cal:

They're great. They come out, they’re brass.

Neil:

The thing I've heard of that I don't have in my house, but I wish I had when I built my bookshelf, is the bottom shelf kind of on a 20 degree angle. Have you seen that?

Cal:

Ooh. So you can see that.

Neil:

Every bookshelf...This is a Billy bookcase, but every one upstairs we actually did build in our walls and we did do the corner being a front facing corner unit, you know, it's like I could get my thematic. But I've seen in bookstores that the very bottom shelf tilts out at like a 10 to 20 degree angle. And it's awesome. You don't kick the books or whatever, but it's such a good way to look at the bottom shelf. Otherwise, you'd like squat to see it. Yeah. Anyway, what is your book lending policy?

Cal:

Oh, I give books out left and right. The only problem is my books are marked up six ways to Sunday. So I'm happy to lend it to you. I love people to read books that I like, but they're going to be marked up.

Neil:

How do you mark up books? What are your markup, what are your one or two key markups?

Cal:

I do corner marking. So I put a slash to one corner if I'm marking that page. And then I do brackets and check marks. And that's it. And I do that as I read real time, minimal fiction. I can go back through and follow those marks and recoup the main ideas of a book. It takes about five minutes. If you've corner marked a book, you just you go to the pages, mark, you read the things, you remember it. So all my books are corner marked. Wow. Um, do you have a ‘white whale book’ or a book you have been chasing the longest?

Cal:

You mean in terms of, uh, getting a good version of it or reading it?

Neil:

Purposefully left it vague, but I guess I meant reading.

Cal:

Oh, that's it. Yeah. Yeah, I do have I have a few books that…

Neil:

Or a genre that you're like I've never read anything by this! Me it's like the Russians, you know, I mean I've read like one of the Russian books.

Cal:

I do, like I have like, one of my New Yorker editors who's like a literature PhD was like you need to read Anna Karenina and I bought it and I have it but I haven't read it yet.

Neil:

We'll put that we'll put that as your white whale book for now. Do you have a favorite bookstore living or dead?

Cal:

A bookstore! Well, here in my hometown, an independent bookstore finally opened called People’s Book. I love that. I'm in that place all the time.

Neil:

What town? I thought Politics and Prose was your...

Cal:

I like Politics and Prose too.

Neil:

So I know you did that event there with David Epstein, but what's...

Cal:

I did. Yeah. So I’ll give you the geography. So I live in Washington, DC, but I live in a small town right at the border of DC called Takoma Park.

Neil:

Okay, got it.

Cal:

And in that small town at Takoma Park. So like I could...you know, 50 feet from sitting right now in my studio is an independent bookstore. That's right. It’s where I do all my signed copies through, you could order them through this bookstore. And we sold, you know, four or five hundred copies. People's Book. No apostrophe. It’s like People's. Like People's plural, book singular. And then Politics and Prose is like the big independent store in D.C. I've loved them as well. I've done five or six events there and I did a book launch. I did my book launch there recently. So that's an awesome store as well.

Neil:

The conversation with you and David was great in his newsletter, by the way. I thought that was really well done.

Cal:

David's the greatest. But I can walk to be able to walk to a bookstore and like know the owners and like know the staff. It's my dream. So I've been happy about that.

Neil:

Oh, I love that. Yeah, I live in downtown Toronto. When I first moved here, people said, my cousins were like, there's houses in downtown Toronto. Like, isn't it just people walking around like puking and rats and stuff. And I was like, do you know how many books there's like a walk to from my house that are open till midnight? Like that was my big, like.

Cal:

That was your pitch. Yeah.

Neil:

Um, what, and we've had a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate your time, your generosity again, especially this is post-launch for you. This is an evergreen show. I only have guests on once it's 333 inspiring conversations for a thousand formative books total. That's…the show's done on April 26th, 2040. We know that end date. So it's curated. Um, and thanks for being part of our curation. So what is your final piece of hard fought advice or wisdom for all the book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians listening to this chat?

Cal:

Well, I guess I'll focus on book writers since like among that list, that's, uh, that's what I am.

Uh, look, if you're writing, if you're writing a book, uh, in the end, the thing, there's all this other stuff we do. And we talk to, we talk to people and do interviews and have podcasts or this or that. But like in the end, the thing that matters is writing the book that delights you. That's like your best chance of, of changing minds and making an impact. Like the book that delights you that you're, and it'll do what it'll do. Um, but that's what makes this like an interesting field. It’s what makes this a rewarding career. And it's how the very best, biggest performing books are often written. It's weird and idiosyncratic and brilliant. It's like ‘Walden’ was at the time. So you gotta write what delights you. And then the other stuff, let that work out.

Neil:

Cal Newport, ‘Write what delights you.’ Thank you so much! This has been absolutely inspiring. So I'm like gonna be reeling and processing this for days after there's so much nutritional, intellectual density in this conversation. I am so grateful. Thank you so much for coming on 3 Books.

Cal:

Thanks, Neil. It was great. I enjoyed it.

Neil:

Hey everybody, it's just me, just Neil again, hanging out in my basement, listening to the wise and wonderful Cal Newport. Ah, he takes us so many different places in this chapter of 3 Books. Did any quotes jump out for you? I got a pile in front of me to just kind of give you some of my highlights. How about this one? Um…

Actually, I want to start with books. ‘I think books are the best bargain in the human intellectual experience. I just wanted to pause, underline, bold, highlight that one. I think books are the best bargain in the human intellectual experience. He expanded, because you're spending $20 to get what a mind has been specialized on, an idea that has been specialized on for years, and spent years trying to crystallize that knowledge into the optimal structure, and you get to transfer all that cognitive effort from that brain to your brain, for like 20 bucks.’ A wonderful way to put it, obviously, you know, our next chapter, or it could be the next chapter, one after that, is with Jonathan Franzen, and he talks a lot about working and reworking and reworking pieces of writing so that they become totally polished. And again, Cal Newport’s bringing us back to the value of books, the value of three books, and the value of all this stuff that we're all focused on here. Only pockets in the world buy, and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. And most of us are book lovers first and foremost. That's why we're here, that's why we're hanging out.

So it's nice to hear Cal give us, you know, solidify our purpose for being here together now. I like this one. ‘I think young people have been given this idea, which comes from the social media companies themselves, that you can just directly alchemize yourself by being vulnerable and visible and open. And that will somehow alchemize into being really valuable. That that's actually the thing that makes you valuable and well-known. And that's not the way it works. You still need craft. You still need to do something.’

This is a really nice reminder to me because I can tend to get obsessed and worried about like what's going on online and how many, you know, we're putting these things on YouTube like we're over, and now I'm recording videos, now we're editing the video version of it, you know. It's a lot of extra work, and that's like how many views do we get, how many followers do we get, how many subscribers? It's like, just focus on the craft, just take the advice and ‘Slow Productivity’ to obsess over quality focus down, not up and around right, and try to just get better and better at what you're doing.

How about this one, last one. ‘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 a year or two away from that being a very common thing.’ If you think about unrestricted internet access, I mean, I had it younger than 18 because I was coming of age when the internet access kind of came up with bulletin board services and things like that.

But now with the publication of ‘The Anxious Generation’ by Jonathan Haidt, our past guest on three books, Haidt, you know, we are shifting the classic 15 year time period. We're more aware now than ever before about the risks and damage that can be done if you just give kids the whole internet in their pocket, right? Jonathan Haidt is saying that we have been kind of overprotective of our kids physically and underprotective of them digitally and so we're kind of riding that ship now. Cal Newport, thank you so much for coming on the show and giving us three more books to add to our top 1000. We're getting close to the 500s now people. Cal has given us number 606, ‘Getting Things Done’ by David Allen. Number 605, ‘Walden’ by Henry David Thoreau. And number 604, ‘The Sabbath’ by Abraham Joshua Heschel. It's H-E-S-C-H-E-L. Thank you to Cal.

Thank you to all of you. Thank you so much for being here.

All right, did you make it past the three second pause? If so, I'd love to welcome you back to the End of the Podcast Club. You made it, you're at the very end. Now it's time for our after party. It's one of three clubs that we have for three books listeners, including the Cover2Cover Club. Just drop us a line, let us know if you are listening to every single chapter of three books. We're gonna add your name to the FAQ, put your name in lights. Okay, we started doing that, so we're getting the names coming in now. And the...secret club. I can't say more about this, but you can call our phone number for clues and please do call our number. It is one eight three read a lot. That is a real number. 1-833-READ-A-LOT. And let's start off the End of the Podcast Club as we always do by going to the phones. Here we go.

Leah:

Hi Neil. This is Leah calling from Huntsville. Alabama. I'm about five years late to your podcast. I found out about it…Sorry about the background noise. I'm walking on my lunch break? But I found out about 3 Books when you were on Rich Rolls' podcast. And since then, I have been voraciously listening to every episode. I think that was about 2 months ago, and I'm on Chapter 59 now. I just wanted to call and tell you how much I am enjoying the podcast, and let you know how much it has just broadened my reading. I love to read, but I just finished ‘Enlightenment Now’ by Steven Pinker. And I don't believe that's a book I would have read without hearing about it on your podcast. I'm currently reading ‘Quiet’. But there are so many things I love. I am planning to write you a letter to let you know because it's too long to discuss in this voicemail. But I just wanted to let you know, listen to Chapter 58 with David Mitchell. Really could not believe that you played music afterwards. I was in my car listening to that episode and thought that Apple Music had picked up and then realized it was the podcast. So I truly appreciate everything you're doing and look forward to actually catching up to episodes that you're probably currently on because right now we're still in 2020. I have no doubt that I'll pick up and then be on your moon schedule. So take care and again, just love everything you're doing. Goodbye!

Neil:

Thank you so much to Leah, from Huntsville, Alabama! For calling our number, 1-833-READ-A-LOT. First of all, I love that you’re walking on your lunch break. Everybody should walk on their lunch break. Get outside! Breathe in the phytoncides, the chemical that trees naturally release in order to reduce your cortisol and yeah, your stress hormones, great, get outside. Thank you for calling! Call me from outside! If you're outside right now, and you're wondering, just tell me one formative book in your life, one guest you dream of, one thing that you liked or didn't like from the show. Give me a call, 1-833-READ-A-LOT. Also, Leah, a couple references here to other chapters. You said you're on chapter 59 now, which is chapter, which is with Jeff Speck, author of ‘Walkable City’, which I found out about from Ann Bogle.

Okay, wonderful books, podcaster. She picked, ‘Walkable City’ when I met up with her in New York just before the pandemic. You mentioned the music at the end of chapter 58 with David Mitchell. That is the ‘Cloud Atlas Sextet’. I actually paid for the rights of the composer, but if you're on Spotify or something, you wanna find that, I recommend just putting that music on loop. I sometimes write to it. ‘Cloud Atlas Sextet,’ S-E-X-T-E-T.

And then you also mentioned ‘Enlightenment Now’, book by Steven Pinker. I had to go back and just double check, but that book was given to us in chapter 12 by Chris Anderson, head of TED. And you also mentioned Susan Cain's book, ‘Quiet’, ‘Bittersweet’, ‘Two Big Gems.’ Susan was our first ever live podcast guest back in Chapter 102 down at the 92nd Street Y. You know, just honestly going through those numbers of those chapters, I'm kind of realizing like, okay, yeah, it's been six years already.

I was 38 when I started, I'm now 44. You know, part of the value of pegging a show to the full moon and the lunar calendar, it's just that it gives us a bit of a pace-fulness. I feel like, sometimes I feel like I haven't done anything all day, you know, I have this self-critical feeling and something like, oh my gosh, I'm wasting my day. Like, oh my gosh, it's lunch, I haven't done anything yet. I have this feeling and then, you know, this is the benefit of having these thousand-point kind of calendar things, is oh yeah, we did have that conversation five years ago.

Little bits, bit by bit by bit. That's the way to do it. All right, now it is time for the letter of the chapter. And for this chapter's letter, we are gonna go to Neeti. We are gonna go to Neeti! Neeti has written us a letter. I wanna just read it out loud now.

Okay, here we go. Ah, let's zoom in on the letter here.

‘Dear Neil, I have been a devoted listener of your podcast for more than three years now, and only today have I dared to request a guest for your show. Why today? You may ask. Well, there are a handful of reasons. First, I really want to earn the right to recommend a guest, which after being a loyal listener, I would want to believe I have.’

You absolutely have.

‘Second, I came across the perfect context when listening to episode Chapter 134 with Susan Orlean. In the chapter, you ask Susan to recommend Indian writers and books. As an Indian listener, who would love to have Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni on the show, I thought this would be the perfect time. From the day I first decided to request Chitra on the show, I've been thinking of the right choice of words to describe the impact her books have had on my life. This is the third reason for waiting so long. I am convinced that my limited vocabulary and flimsy writing abilities will never be able to describe the profound impact of her writing.

Today I am banking more on the serendipity that unfolded in the last chapter than on my written expression. It would be great if you could reach out to Chitra. I'm sure many of the listeners will enjoy your conversation with her. I would be thrilled.’

From Neeta B. over in India, recommending Chitra. I want to get the last name right here, but I'm probably not going to be able to. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni on the show. Okay, who else knows Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni?

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, an Indian American author and poet. And she's currently the professor of writing at University of Houston. Oh, interesting. She got a short story collection called ‘Arranged Marriage’, which won an American Book Award in 1996.

Let's reach out to her!

We need to have more Indian…I wanna have more global guests in general, right? I wanna have, I mean, part of the advantage of recording virtually like this, you know, cause the show started just in person only, in person only. And...I love doing in-person interviews. That is obviously the dream, right? You get a connection that I don't think can be replicated virtually. But if we're going to be doing virtual conversations, which we started in the pandemic, then, you know, how do we talk to more people from India, from Africa, from Southeast Asia, from, you know, places that it's harder for me to get to?

And so I'm adding Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni to our pitch list. We have a big giant pitch list. I will add her to that. We'll look up her email address, we'll reach out to her. Really, I should probably pick up that book, ‘Arranged Marriage’, kind of get familiar with the writing myself a little bit first. It's a pressure I put on myself, you know, get familiar with the writing first. And other international guests, I will also say, you know, Neeti, you've given us the, you've given me the like kind of purpose to reach out to everybody.

If you have a guest that's...far away from North America, that you think we should have with their interesting background, their interesting experience, their interesting voices. Maybe it's connected to books, maybe it's not. Maybe they're an author, maybe they're not. Maybe they run the largest publishing house in Namibia. I don't know. Then reach out to us, give me a call, give me an email. It's 1-833-READ-ALOT if you wanna phone me. And our contact information if you wanna drop me an email is over at 3books.ca as well. Okay. And now, as always, let's go…

Now it's time for the word of the chapter. And for the word of the chapter, let's head over to Mr. Cal Newport. Over to you Cal. Teleology. Yes indeed, it is teleology. Teleology, can we hear it from the dictionary lady? Teleology. Teleology, T-E-L-E-O-L-O-G-Y. The basic meaning is the study of ends or purposes. A teleologist attempts to understand the purpose of something by looking at the results. Complicated word, big word, you know, Cal uses a lot of interesting words, productivity pr0n, schema, synergy, nihilistic, erudite, ennobling, linear function, we maybe could have done a sound cloud here, but let's focus on this word that neither of us really knew what he meant when he said it, but that's what the whole point of the word of the chapter is. On Wikipedia, teleology is: ‘finality, a branch of causality giving the reason or an explanation for something as a function of its end, its purpose or its goal, as opposed to a function of its cause. Hmm, a purpose that is imposed by human use, such as the purpose of a fork to hold food, is called extrinsic. Natural teleology, common in classical philosophy, though controversial today, contends that natural entities also have intrinsic purposes, regardless of human use or opinion.’

For example, Aristotle claimed an acorn's intrinsic telos is to become a fully grown oak tree. Right, okay. What is the telos of this show? What is the telos of you and this conversation? Something to think about as we get ready for the full moon in May, Chapter 136. Guys, 3 Bookers, thank you so much for being here. This has been a long conversation, a deep conversation, a profound conversation.

If you haven't already done so check out Cal's new book, ‘Slow Productivity. Check out his podcast, ‘Deep Questions’. Thank you so much to Cal Newport for being on here and thank you to all of you for listening. And remember until next time 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!