I flew down to New York City and sat in a plush purple corner booth at the pricey and exclusive Core Club in midtown Manhattan. Sahil Bloom is the youngest member they have because, as he says, "If you get into the right rooms, good things start to happen." Sahil Bloom is a fascinating, unconventional, maniacally disciplined, wisdom-distilling writer, thinker, and investor -- with a goal of motivating a billion people to live their best lives in a kind of Tim Ferriss or Robin Sharma for the next...
Oct 28, 2023•2 hr 50 min•Season 1Ep. 129
I started 3 Books back in 2018 . I didn't fully appreciate how big, wide, and deep the core question of this 22-year conversation was at the beginning. " What are your 3 most formative books? " Sounds simple! But as you trace back which books inspired ideals, ignited passions, altered values, slingshotted directions...well, it turns out there's always a lot there. That was definitely the case as I recorded Chapter 128 of 3 Books in a Washington DC hotel room overlooking the Potomac with writer, ...
Sep 29, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 128
Early episodes of Sesame Street from the late 1960s show five-year-olds walking streets alone, talking to strangers, and playing on vacant lots, but when those episodes were released on DVD years later a warning was added at the beginning saying "The following is intended for adult viewing only and may not be suitable for young viewers." I read about this in 'Stolen Focus', the massive bestseller by Johann Hari, our guest in Chapter 121. Johann went on in his book to discuss how 'the confinement...
Aug 31, 2023•1 hr 39 min•Season 1Ep. 127
I've been lucky enough to be invited onto 'The Social' (@TheSocialCTV) a few times. Do you know the show? It's like 'The View', but Canadian, with four dynamic hosts sharing fast-paced opinions in a raucous, bombastic, high-energy exchange. Producers hand you the topics of the day about 30 minutes before you go on — formed by that morning's early headlines — and then it's time to form an opinion and get ready to, no big deal, share it live with millions of people a few minutes later. Definitely ...
Aug 01, 2023•1 hr 44 min•Season 1Ep. 126
"All the time focus on the positive things. Not the negative things. Then the karma, it will come, it will reflect to you." Meet Chef Osama Harwash and Chef Houssam Harwash. Two brothers who came to Canada as Syrian refugees and rented a food stall to begin crafting traditional recipes learned from four generations of Syrian chefs. Listen as they share lessons learned from their sheep-farming great-grandfather at the fall of the Ottoman Empire and then tell us how mint and cardamom help make the...
Jul 03, 2023•59 min•Season 1Ep. 125
Do you have book festivals where you live? I feel like book festivals are such a sign of healthy community. Long lines to check out independent manga. Local bookstores sponsoring stages where authors answer questions. People walking by dressed as Harry Potter and wearing "The book was better" T-shirts. And, of course, just the energy that comes from thousands and thousands of readers walking around carrying bags full of books. And the air pulsating with thousands of people all talking about book...
Jun 18, 2023•44 min
Martellus Bennett is reimagining imagination. He's perhaps best known in cultural press for his championship NFL career which included the famous Super Bowl LI comeback where his Patriots were down 28-3 at halftime and rallied for a 34-28 win in OT. But Martellus, who goes by Marty now as well as the new moniker Mr.TOMONOSHi , served as starting Tight End and recorded five catches for 62 yards as well as drawing the key Pass Interference penalty that set up the game-winning touchdown. He said af...
Jun 04, 2023•2 hr 54 min•Season 1Ep. 124
Happy new moon! Here's a story and a snip from my appearance on The Rich Roll Podcast. Listen to the full show right here: YouTube Apple Spotify
May 19, 2023•20 min
"Do you realize what you've done? You've taken the smell out of shit!" Suzy Batiz says this is what her husband Hector said — shocked! amazed! — when he realized the strange essential oil spray she'd been obsessively working on late into the night for nine straight months really and actually … worked. Today Suzy is founder of billion-dollar-valued Poo-Pourri and supernatural. But the endless topline superlatives surrounding her — EY Entrepreneur of the Year, ranked #240 on Forbes "Richest Self-M...
May 05, 2023•3 hr 39 min•Season 1Ep. 123
Penn and Kim Holderness are a beam of light in the world. If you aren't one of the billion people -- like, an actual billion -- who've watched their viral videos, well then, let me quickly usher you over to their YouTube Channel or Instagram feed. From their original 2013 "#XMAS JAMMIES" singing Christmas card ( parodied by Kristin Wiig and team on SNL ) to their truly astounding " Hamilton Mask-Up Medley " at the peak of the pandemic -- well, it's all right there. Laughs, connection, love offer...
Apr 20, 2023•59 min
Diluting central news sources. Constantly narrowing echo chambers. An ever-fracturing sense of community. It's easy to feel disconnected from each other right now — and from what's collectively real and true in the world. We need people and places that help unify us and bring us together. "Fear displaces faith and vice versa," says Tank Sinatra on Chapter 122 of 3 Books . "And laughter displaces everything. It's impossible to be sad when you're laughing." It's no wonder more than 10 million peop...
Apr 06, 2023•1 hr 52 min•Season 1Ep. 122
I felt trapped early in the pandemic. I normally walk every day in downtown Toronto. I write on park benches and in distant coffee shops and love popping into bookstores and bumping into friends. I am very privileged in that I get to travel one or two days a week, too. But then: the pandemic. It hit hard and I was suddenly sitting in a makeshift office upstairs. Staring at four blank walls and peering out a glass door into the trees and electrical wires outside. And then I saw it. A bird! A bird...
Mar 21, 2023•28 min
Happy full moon, everybody! Do you feel like the world today -- our culture today -- is pulling us further and further away from things that matter? Like deep in-person, real-life, human connections. Like the ability to focus on things that require deep thought, care, and time -- like reading books. Are you feeling yourself sucked into the algorithmic abyss -- where endless dings and pings and alerts and notifications pull us into echo chambers that prey on biological tendencies beyond our compr...
Mar 07, 2023•2 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 121
Happy new moon, everybody! I have a very special Oscar Encore episode for you today -- in celebration of our guests little-film-that-could EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE scoring 11 (11!) Oscar nominations. Yes, the Oscars goes down in a few weeks on March 12th and it just seems worth pausing on how this remarkable non-sequel, non-superhero, paltry-budged, genre-smashing flick is suddenly poised for recognition in categories like (no biggie!) Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best ...
Feb 20, 2023•1 hr 7 min
Happy Snow Moon, everybody! I've been thinking a lot again about what makes life important. I'm convinced it's just not social media. News media. The endless firehose of negativity being blasted at our brains out there. No. It's not that. It's the curtains we pull around ourselves and our loved ones to create and hold space to be our truest selves. We've only got 30,000 days here and they are always, always, always fleeting. So let's make sure on 3 Books we create and hold space to talk about an...
Feb 05, 2023•1 hr 27 min•Season 1Ep. 120
Happy new moon! Today I'm sharing a recent conversation I had with veteran journalist Matt Galloway for his show The Current. Hope you enjoy!
Jan 21, 2023•35 min
What is your favorite novel? It's a hard question. A big question! A question that makes most people hmmm for a while before they get to an answer. If they get to an answer! But I think I know mine. My favorite novel is A Fraction of a Whole by Steve Toltz. First, the book came to me in an interesting way. I walked into wonderful indie bookstore Type on Queen Street West in downtown Toronto a couple days before my wedding to Leslie. I was looking for a good book to take on my honeymoon. (Insert ...
Jan 06, 2023•1 hr 54 min•Season 1Ep. 119
Do you ever have a book go viral through your family? Your aunt reads it and tells everyone at dinner. The copy gets passed along. A few more dog ears show up. The spine gets cracked. And a year later half a dozen people have read it? Well that's what happened in our family with Catherine Hernandez's wonderful debut novel Scarborough . I even just put it on my Best Of 2022 list ! Catherine Hernandez is an award winning Canadian author and screenwriter. Born in Toronto, she is a proud queer woman...
Dec 23, 2022•2 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 118
Can you believe it? We started 3 Books back on March 31, 2018 with the goal of counting down the 1000 most formative books in the world. We said we would hang out on the exact minute of every single new moon and every single full moon for nearly 15 straight years until we collected all 1000 of them. We set the intention of making this show an 'intrinsically-motivated journey' and pledged to doing it with no ads, no sponsors, no commercials, and no interruptions. To help guide ourselves we starte...
Dec 21, 2022•4 hr 49 min
On the heels of launching my latest book, Our Book of Awesome , I'm enjoying the fellowship of two authors in my life — one of whom I met 22 years ago when I was in my final year at Queen's. Bounding into my life at the time came a young professor named Ajay Agrawal . And I mean bounding! He was cold calling left, right and center, dancing around the room, and extremely theatrical. As you listen to him you'll see why I found him so captivating and clairvoyant. Professor Ajay Agrawal has won Prof...
Dec 08, 2022•2 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 117
My new book Our Book of Awesome comes out today! Grab a copy at www.ourbookofawesome.com
Dec 06, 2022•25 min
I got a phone call at 1-833-READ-A-LOT from Austin Wong in Oregon telling me we had to get Bryan Stevenson on 3 Books . I looked into Austin's request and came upon Bryan's incredible bestseller Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption . I listened to his 10-million plus hit TED Talk "We need to talk about an injustice" and approached the Equal Justice Initiative to have him on as a guest. We finally found a time to have the conversation way down in Austin, Texas, where we were both schedul...
Nov 23, 2022•1 hr 48 min•Season 1Ep. 116
Let's flash back to Budapest Hungary in 1944 where a little baby boy named Gabor lay crying in his crib. He wouldn't stop. Couldn't stop. His mother called the doctor who said, "All my Jewish babies are crying". Nazis had taken over the country and killed Gabor's grandparents in Auschwitz. Gabor's dad was put into forced labor and his aunt was missing. Today we understand that Gabor was experiencing trauma through his mother's stress. His father thankfully returned after the war and when he was ...
Nov 08, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Season 1Ep. 115
Five years ago I was invited down to Brooklyn to speak at an event called The Shine Movement . It was an intriguing soul-refueling combination of meditation, drumming, giving, and a few words by me. The event attracted a fascinating subculture of people and I felt slightly entranced meeting the man and mind behind it all: Light Watkins . Light Watkins is someone I consider a master of spirit and mind. He grew up in Montgomery, Alabama (with siblings Candy, Trey, and Dusty!) in the 70s and 80s, t...
Oct 25, 2022•1 hr 22 min•Season 1Ep. 114
Oh hey. It's the person who just dropped their phone on the bus right when the driver hit the gas and now the phone's sliding across the sandy floor all the way to the back… Neil. Neil Pasricha. And now it is finally time for our much-anticipated 3 Books chapter with the one and only ... Alie Ward. Alie is the Sacramento-raised youngest of 3 girls who grew up in the 80s listening to DadWard deliver the morning news from the local radio station. She spent her childhood playing with bugs and just ...
Oct 09, 2022•1 hr 49 min•Season 1Ep. 113
I want to make you dizzy. I want to make you look up into the sky and comprehend, maybe for the first time, the darkness that lies beyond the evanescent wisp of the atmosphere, the endless depths of the cosmos, a desolation by degrees These two lines begin an incredible poem called "Disorientation" ... by Katie Mack. Did you feel dizzy reading it? I did. I do! What is the universe? Where did it come from? What was here before it? How long has it lasted? How long will it last? How could it ... en...
Sep 25, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Season 1Ep. 112
Happy Equinox! Today the sun is directly above the equator so no matter where you are the day and the night are around equal length. Two equinoxes and two solstices give us four pause points between our regular scheduled lunar programming to drop a little bookmark in the midst of our epic journey about formative books. Today I want share the two-minute morning practice I use to begin my day. So: A number of years ago I was going through a tough time and found that I needed a way to ground myself...
Sep 23, 2022•8 min
Buckle up! Today we are flying down to hot, hot Austin, Texas where we're going to grab three chairs on the grackle-filled patio of Mi Madre's restaurant and order ourselves some enchiladas and #0 breakfast tacos before having lunch with the wise and wonderful Austin Kleon. Austin in Austin — a treat! Austin Kleon is "a writer who draws" and the author of a number of my favorite books including Steal Like an Artist , Show Your Work , and Keep Going . His books are kalaidoscopic collage-patchwork...
Sep 10, 2022•2 hr 30 min•Season 1Ep. 111
Kevin Kelly is a man of many titles. Krista Tippett calls him a 'philosopher technologist', Tim Ferriss calls him 'the world's most interesting man', and Stephen J. Dubner says simply, "If I was the Queen, I would want Kevin Kelly on my Privy Council." Kevin Kelly is the first person — ever! — to be hired online. When? 1983. For what job? A fascinating one! We're going to talk about it. He dropped out of college after a year to spend ten years backpacking around Asia. (His photos have just been ...
Aug 27, 2022•56 min•Season 1Ep. 110
What is your erotic potential? And how might you ... increase it? Online erotica? Mindful masturbation? Solo nude mirror practices? The answer is all of the above and much, much more. To help guide us through the erotic bramblebush (erotic bramblebush? erotic bramblebush!) we are very lucky to sit down with the wise and wonderful Rebecca S. Kay . Rebecca is a Sex Educator with over ten years of experience. She's been a sexual advisor at Planned Parenthood , the Sexual Education Centre at the Uni...
Aug 12, 2022•1 hr 34 min•Season 1Ep. 109
