Let's go for a walk! I've sometimes imagined 3 Books as a long walk with a friend. So today—let's take one! Nickisha moved to Toronto from Jamaica when she was 16 to reunite with her mom and after working as a travel agent she broke out on her own to run a successful business full of fresh air, exercise, community, and lots of love. I sometimes see Nickisha with five, six, or seven dogs around her—giving them the highlight of their day! Tongues wagging. Skip in their step. Motoring around town c...
Apr 13, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 147
No one does it like Angie. Racial tensions, police shootings, citizen uprisings. Does this sound like the setting of a YA novel? How about three of them? Her debut ' The Hate U Give, ' her sophomore release ' On The Come Up ,' and her third ' Concrete Rose ' were all on The New York Times bestseller list, and her fantasy middle school-level book ' Nic Blake and the Remarkables: The Manifestor Prophecy ' was *also* an instant New York Times bestseller! In this classic chapter of 3 Books ,...
Mar 29, 2025•49 min•Season 1Ep. 26
Is porn good sex education? Why does body autonomy matter for kids? Does talking about sex kill the mood? Emily Nagoski has the answers! Emily is a sex educator and activist whose mission is to teach us how to live with confidence and joy inside our bodies. She does this as the New York Times bestselling author of 'Come As You Are,' 'Burnout,' and 'Come Together,' as well as through her 3 popular TED Talks including—with over 3 million views—"How couples can sustain a strong sexual connection fo...
Mar 14, 2025•2 hr 58 min•Season 1Ep. 146
What do you know about James Frey? Or what do you think you know about James Frey? I'm guessing it's not nothing. Everyone has an opinion! When I first spotted ' A Million Little Pieces ' on my wife's bookshelf when we were moving in together I was like "Oh? Really? That book? The Oprah guy?" And she was like "Have you read it?" And I was like "No, no idea what it's even about. Just that it's not real or whatever." She looked at me with disappointed eyes. Understandably so! I hadn't bothered t...
Feb 28, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 25
Don't use mouthwash. Why? It's not Lindy. At least that's what Paul Skallas, a Chicago-born technology lawyer who goes by Lindyman online, says. I was fascinated to read a New York Times profile of him titled "The Lindy Way of Living," and knew I wanted to have him on 3 Books . In the 2012 book 'Antifragile,' the statistician and scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined "the Lindy Effect." He wrote, "For the perishable, every additional day in life translates to a shorter additional life expectancy,...
Feb 12, 2025•2 hr 32 min•Season 1Ep. 145
We live in interesting times. And they're getting interestinger! I keep my eyes open for big thinkers to help guide and inform me as I keep trying to make sense of the world. My friend Tim Urban (@waitbutwhy) is one of those people: Tim has a giant mind willing to engage with our fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence. The big questions! Tim's blog Wait Buy Why still scores millions of readers per month with big-name fans like Jonathan Haidt , Bari Weiss, Sam Harris, Bryan Johns...
Jan 29, 2025•1 hr 53 min•Season 1Ep. 22
Nick Sweetman is one of Toronto's most prominent graffiti artists. Last February I was walking down Lansdowne Avenue in Toronto with my friend Michael Bungay Stanier , who was our guest back in Chapter 48 , and as we strolled under a giant bridge I saw a giant ... well, it looked like a photo! But it wasn't a photo. It was a massive spray-painted image of a Hooded Merganser , and at the very bottom corner was a signature that said "Nick Sweetman." Looks like a photo, right? Look at that ...
Jan 13, 2025•1 hr 18 min•Season 1Ep. 144
Who else loves David Sedaris? I discovered him in 1997 when an old mentor/editor at Golden Words , my college humor papers, suggested I pick up his book 'Naked' to become a better writer myself. I found the essays sardonic, witty, uncannily observational, and laugh-out-loud funny. I couldn't believe how gently and elegantly he wrote about topics ranging from his obsessive compulsive tics to dropping out of school to (in the namesake essay) visiting a nudist colony. Like millions of people around...
Dec 30, 2024•1 hr 32 min•Season 1Ep. 18
Happy Solstice! As we do every December solstice it's time for our 7th Annual "Best Of" episode of 3 Books . 3 Books is our 22-year-long conversation to uncover and discuss the 1000 most formative books in the world. This year we sat with academics at Oxford to bus drivers in St. Louis , with Jonathan Franzen in Santa Cruz to Oliver Burkeman in the North York Moors, with the world's largest bookseller and Amazon union organizers , with Oscar nominees to a guy who dresses up all da...
Dec 21, 2024•49 min
Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world with over a million employees in the U.S. alone. A monolith responsible for trillions of dollars of revenue through retail, entertainment, and infrastructure. But Chris Smalls took it on anyway. Chris had worked at Amazon for 5 years before he was fired in March 2020 after leading a walkout at Amazon's Staten Island warehouse to protest pandemic working conditions. "We all got radicalized at some point in our lives," he told me. "My life change...
Dec 15, 2024•1 hr 39 min•Season 1Ep. 143
Once you find purpose, and once you find style… what's left? Beauty. What's left is finding and putting out beauty into the world. There are not many writers who have genuinely figured this out … but one of them is Mitch Albom. Mitch is the author of ' Tuesdays with Morrie ,' the bestselling memoir of all time, as well as ' The Five People You Meet in Heaven ' and his latest bestseller ' The Little Liar ' which came out in 2023 and debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. His b...
Dec 01, 2024•40 min•Season 1Ep. 15
Are you ready for a writing masterclass from one of the best self-help writers in the world? After graduating from Cambridge, Oliver Burkeman wrote the popular column " This Column Will Change Your Life " in 'The Guardian' for over 15 years sharing his real-world, real-time poetic exploration of the self-help universe. In 2021 he published ' Four Thousand Weeks ,' a literary examination of how we live today. Mark Manson (our guest in Chapter 28 ) called it "a reality check on our culture's crazy...
Nov 15, 2024•2 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 142
Let's jump into the backseat of Vishwas Aggrawal's Uber and take a trip you won't forget. This is a story about setting your own standards in a world constantly hammering us into "human resources." This is a story about setting your own winning lines in a world that wants us to be widgets. This is a story about raising the bar for yourself and deeply valuing the human connection and love that has the potential to exist between every single one of us. Uber has no formal leaderboard, reward mechan...
Nov 01, 2024•1 hr 48 min•Season 1Ep. 7
James Daunt grew up in England the child of a diplomat—moving countries, tasting cultures, living a life with books and history at its core. He lived in Turkey and Cyprus before coming back to England for boarding school. After studying history at Cambridge, he didn't know what he wanted to do, so the Career Services department pointed him towards investment banking across the sea in New York City. He actually liked the job but his girlfriend thought it was incredibly boring and encouraged him t...
Oct 17, 2024•2 hr•Season 1Ep. 141
Did you grow up with Judy Blume? My mom says I "found my voice" reading 'Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing' to my sister in the bathtub when I was a little kid. Well, I grabbed that tattered copy and carried it with me down to Key West, Florida where I had the extreme privilege of sitting down with the one and only Judy Blume. Judy and I met on a hot and sweaty day in her Books & Books bookstore … where she works! I'm not joking. Step off your cruise ship and Judy Blume will ring up a copy of ...
Oct 02, 2024•53 min•Season 1Ep. 6
"Happiness is a choice." Heard that saying before? Betting you have. We all have! It's almost cliché. And yes, while research shows that a good deal of our happiness really is a choice, the saying gives us a "what" without a "how." And if your life is anything like mine, you have a million things going on—emaisl! texts! driving kids to soccer practice! finding time for date night!—and you need a "how" that can get you there fast, especially when your night time angst bubbles up, that dangerous m...
Sep 22, 2024•5 min
'The Help' by Kathryn Stockett. 'Big Little Lies' by Liane Moriarty. 'Let's Pretend This Never Happened' by Jenny Lawson. 'American Dirt' by Jeanine Cummins. 'This Is How It Always Is' by Laurie Frankel. 'Listen for the Lie' by Amy Tintera. 'We Begin At the End' by Chris Whittaker. 'A Higher Loyalty' by James Comey. 'The Book of Awesome' by Neil Pasricha. What do these books have in common? The famed but invisible editor pulling the strings from behind the curtain: Amy Einhorn Fifteen years ago ...
Sep 18, 2024•2 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 140
Happy new moon, everybody! I am going to release a few of my favorite classic chapters of 3 Books . Let's start with Seth Godin! I flew down to New York to uncover and discuss the most formative books of the one and only Seth Godin ( @ThisIsSethsBlog ) from his Hastings-On-Hudson studio. Seth is the bestselling author of ' Linchpin ', ' Purple Cow ', ' Tribes ' and many more books and is known as one of the world's biggest thinkers in communities such as TED and the Marketing Hall o...
Sep 03, 2024•1 hr 49 min•Season 1Ep. 3
I was at a coffee shop on College Street when the barista Tony yelled "Hey! There's that duck!" I turned and, sure enough, out the front window was a… duck. A giant pixelated-looking green-headed Mallard set atop a rubber-tire-sized body on top of orange-stockinged legs and a pair of orange Converse. And he was just … walking by. Like some kind of interdimensional tumbleweed. Uh, what … was this? Some gimmick from the local radio station? An ad campaign for a boot company? I ran outside with my ...
Aug 19, 2024•3 hr 55 min•Season 1Ep. 139
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 "being sold on the liberal arts promise of being taught how to live." 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 bit of culture shock. "I mean, fitted sheets? Brunch?" She worked hard, a defin...
Jul 21, 2024•2 hr 28 min•Season 1Ep. 138
I remember getting the knife. It was near Christmas about 10 years ago and Leslie and I were zipping up a tiny suitcase before a beach trip with her grandparents and extended family. We weren't married and I was making a desperate last-second plea to stuff a 576-page novel called 'The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen into our bag. "It just won't fit," Leslie said. "You have … 100 pages left? Want to leave it and read it when we're back?" I did *not* want to do that. The book was slipping under m...
Jun 22, 2024•2 hr 25 min•Season 1Ep. 137
I just got back from St. Louis. It was my first time there and I met a wonderfully rich collection of people who I'm so excited to introduce you to in a special on-the-ground, in-the-street, from-the-backseat Chapter of 3 Books. On the way from the airport to the hotel, the driver regaled me with St. Louis trivia from a deep well of St. Louis pride. "Did you know we hosted the World Fair and the Olympics the same year?" he asked. I knew about the World Fair! "Most do," he said. "But not many kno...
May 23, 2024•1 hr 20 min•Season 1Ep. 136
Cal Newport is a guide, a visionary, a role model to me and millions of others on living an intentional and productive life amidst our noisy, scatterbrained, tech-drenched world. He's an MIT-trained computer science professor at Georgetown University and author of 10 books which have collectively sold over 2 million copies including 'Deep Work,' 'Digital Minimalism,' and his latest bestseller, 'Slow Productivity.' "I sometimes joke that my entire career is built on giving two-word terms to thing...
Apr 23, 2024•2 hr 26 min•Season 1Ep. 135
I got an email from longtime 3 Booker Bo Boswell who told me he found an enticingly-titled thread on reddit called "What's your field or study (hobbyist or professional) and what's a cornerstone beginners book for that topic/field?" The most upvoted reply on the thread read: "Librarian here, Susan Orlean's 'The Library Book' is at first glance a true-crime book about tracking the arsonist who set fire and burned down the main library in Los Angeles, but it also gives a comprehensive glimpse into...
Mar 25, 2024•3 hr 19 min•Season 1Ep. 134
It's Oscar season! I was so thrilled to see ' Past Lives ', the astounding slow-moving-yet-somehow-fast-paced debut film from Celine Song nominated for Best Picture. Best Picture! On her very first film. Oh, and no biggie, Best Screenplay, too. This following a slew of other noms like 5 Golden Globes, 3 Critics Choice Awards, 3 BAFTAs, and a recent Director's Guild of America win for Outstanding Directorial Achievement for a First-Time Feature Film. Leslie and I loved 'Past Lives' so much we wen...
Feb 24, 2024•59 min•Season 1Ep. 133
Back in Chapter 101 of '3 Books' we had a magical, eve-of-'Everything-Everywhere-All-At-Once'-coming-out moment-in-time conversation with creative super-geniuses Daniels — who are Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. We were discussing the fascinating book 'Sex At Dawn' and our conversation led to discussing Dunbar's Number. Dunbar's Number! Have you heard of Dunbar's Number? It's 150! That's the cognitive limit on the number of social relationships we can have. We, as in humans. Limit, as in our b...
Jan 25, 2024•3 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 132
Buckle up! We are heading down to the fields of Clemson, South Carolina! I got an email from 3 Booker Rumble D. back in February which said "Neil, I have a guest suggestion for you. J Drew Lanham is a 2022 MacArthur fellow and an American ornithologist. I loved his book and would love to hear you interview him (maybe while you guys go birding?)" Intrigued, I looked him up and discovered I … sort of already knew him? I had read and loved his wonderfully thoughtful and nuanced essay last year call...
Dec 27, 2023•2 hr 55 min•Season 1Ep. 131
Another year around the sun! It is the Winter Solstice which means it is time for our sixth annual "Best Of" episode of 3 Books . 3 Books began back in 2018 with a simple goal of counting down the 1000 most formative books in the world ... 3 books at a time. We wanted this show to help all of us read more and read better and we wanted to do that by being different -- with a lunar-based schedule and a deep intention of being an 'intrinsically-motivated journey' with no ads, sponsors, commercial...
Dec 22, 2023•3 hr 23 min
"Your airbag" by Ralph Nader. "Your seatbelt" by Ralph Nader. "Your cleaner air" by Ralph Nader. "Your safer food" by Ralph Nader. "Your lead protection when you get dental x-rays", "Your warning labels on cigarettes", "Your right to know if you're exposed to dangerous chemicals at your job". By Ralph Nader, by Ralph Nader, by Ralph Nader. We slap names on everything! Bylines. Authorship! We see names on everything in our ego-oriented society with commercialization and profit maximization near i...
Nov 27, 2023•1 hr 48 min•Season 1Ep. 130
Today I'm putting out a special Bookmark episode of 3 Books featuring my incredible wife Leslie Richardson . If you've been listening to 3 Books for a while you've heard Leslie interviewing guests like Brené Brown , Kristen Neff , and Rebecca the Sex Therapist . And, of course, I started the show by interviewing her way back in Chapter 1 . But this time she takes center stage on a topic she's deeply passionate about: parenting. And, specifically here, how to nurture self-compassion as ...
Nov 20, 2023•1 hr 13 min
