Chapter 147: Nickisha the Dog Walker on dangerous drivers and dog doo diligence

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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 clocking 100km on foot each week!

One of our traditions on 3 Books is doing podcasts outside from ​Chapter 27​ with Robin the Bartender on the open patio of Bar Raval in Toronto to ​Chapter 106​ with Alok Vaid-Menon in Central Park in New York City to ​Chapter 131​ with J. Drew Lanham while birdwatching in South Carolina...

Another tradition here is exploring stories from people who fill our lives but aren't often represented by our screen-based culture full of politicians and billionaires. We vote with our attention so it's fun turning off the same faces to hang with people like ​Vishwas the Uber Driver​, ​Shirley the Nurse​, and ​Soyoung the Variety Store Owner​.

So strap on your running shoes! Throw in some headphones! And let's go for a walk with Nickisha to discuss urban density, pedestrian-driver relations, safe supply, the dog walking business, immigration assimilation, Danielle Steele, and, of course, Nickisha's 3 most formative books.

Let's flip the page to Chapter 147 now...

Chapter 147: Nickisha the Dog Walker on dangerous drivers and dog doo diligence

View full transcript here

CONNECT with NICKISHA

NICKISHA’s 3 Books

  • First book (23:20)

  • Second book (24:45)

  • Third book (1:25:43)

  • Fourth Book (1:25:56)

WORDCLOUD OF THE CHAPTER

Quotes

  • “Don’t chase them. When you start chasing them they think it’s a joke.” — Nickisha the Dog Walker | 3 Books Podcast

  • “The only season I like is summer...I’m actually miserable most days.” — Nickisha the Dog Walker | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I don’t see why cyclists and drivers can’t co-exist.” — Nickisha the Dog Walker | 3 Books Podcast

  • “He was 100 feet away from me and he sped up.” — Nickisha the Dog Walker | 3 Books Podcast

  • “And people said that to me, too, just because I've kind of lost my Jamaican accent because I, quote unquote, assimilated. And I don't like it.” — Nickisha the Dog Walker | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I'm sad by the world that we're living in now. I hate all the racist rhetorics. I hate all the anti-immigrant talk. It bothers me because I'm an immigrant. So yes, I'm speaking that personally. And they may not be talking about me. I understand that. But it's still, it's still hurtful to me here.” — Nickisha the Dog Walker | 3 Books Podcast

  • “People just need to mind their business.” — Nickisha the Dog Walker | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Just be kind in a world where there is so much hate and so much weird things going on. Just be kind. You never know how someone will feel.” — Nickisha the Dog Walker | 3 Books Podcast

Show Notes

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Chapter 146: Emily Nagoski on exuberant erotic exploration

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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 for a lifetime.​"

Emily began working as a sex educator 30 years ago at the University of Delaware. She has a Master's in Counseling Psychology and she worked at the famous Kinsey Institute. She has taught graduate and undergraduate classes in human sexuality, relationships, communication, stress management, and sex education. She was Director of Wellness Education at Smith College for eight years before starting to write full time.

In this deep-dive chapter we talk about neurodiversity versus neurodivergence, maintaining longterm sexual connection, OKCupid, ADHD and Autism, teaching kids about sex, and, of course, Emily's 3 most formative books...

For those who want to strengthen and improve their sexual health with themselves and others ...

Let's flip the page to Chapter 146 now...

Chapter 146: Emily Nagoski on exuberant erotic exploration

View full transcript here

CONNECT with EMILY

emily’s 3 Books

  • First book (50:49)

  • Second book (1:18:06)

  • Third book (2:11:50)

WORDCLOUD OF THE CHAPTER

Quotes

  • "We’re all neurodiverse. We’re not all neurodivergent." — Emily Nagoski | 3 Books Podcast

  • "Some brains are outside what the world is built for." — Emily Nagoski | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Statistics are not how people learn stuff.” — Emily Nagoski | 3 Books Podcast

  • “People believe things are true more if they rhyme.” — Emily Nagoski | 3 Books Podcast

  • “It’s not a dysfunction to not want sex you do not like.” — Emily Nagoski | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Normal sex is any sex where everybody involved is gladto be there and free to leave with no unwanted consequences.” — Emily Nagoski | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Men are taught they are supposed to pursue sex at anycost or else they are not truly a man.” — Emily Nagoski | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Writing the sex book kind of destroyed my sex life.” — Emily Nagoski | 3 Books Podcast

  • “If you put pleasure at the center of your definition ofsexual wellbeing, all the other pieces are going to fall into place.” — Emily Nagoski | 3 Books Podcast

  • “There’s a lot of heterosexual people who have boughtinto the idea that friendship and sexual desire cannot coexist.You either want your partner or want your partner, and the likingkills the wanting. The opposite is true.” — Emily Nagoski | 3 Books Podcast

  • Imagine a world where you shared erotic connection is a shared hobby.” — Emily Nagoski | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Couples who have great sex lives talk about sex all the time.” — Emily Nagoski | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Learning to have sex by watching porn is like learningto drive by watching Formula One. Professionals, on a closedcourse, with a pit crew.” — Emily Nagoski | 3 Books Podcast

  • “The narrative around children is that they’re your possession.” — Emily Nagoski | 3 Books Podcast

  • “The wildest stuff happens when you pause in your pursuit of the ideal and consider the possibility that the body you have is already worth loving.” — Emily Nagoski | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Every autocracy, dictatorship, fascism...All of them depend on a misogynist patriarchal gender binary. Why? Because they are relying on the production of enough of the right kind of babies. By women who need to be obedient to their reproductive role therefore. And they need enough men to serve the capitalist machine. And then become cannon fodder.” — Emily Nagoski | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Masturbation is the most efficient way to learn about your body.” — Emily Nagoski | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Allow your body to experience pleasure whether or not you pursue orgasm.” — Emily Nagoski | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Our habitat is increasingly hostile to our continued existence.” — Emily Nagoski | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Books are my lifeline; I learned how to be a person by reading books.” — Emily Nagoski | 3 Books Podcast

Show Notes

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Chapter 145: Lindyman leverages long-lasting lessons on living a limitless life

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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, kind of like me and you and the cheese and our fridge, or the milk and our fridge. But for the non-perishable, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy." The Lindy Effect says that the longer something has been around, the longer it will stay around.

Paul took this heuristic and with his unique and perceptive insights along with his deep reading of ancient history came to apply it to a broad range of things, including health. He doesn't use mouthwash, a relatively new invention that kills good *and* bad bacteria. But floss—poking stuff out of your teeth—has been around for thousands of years, so that can stay.

This Lindy heuristic is a useful way to navigate our noisy modern world. As reality destabilizes with spiking AI and a fracturing media landscape we can learn and apply long-range lessons from the past to help us today. I love the unique, provocative, and often challenging ​'The Lindy Newsletter,'​ which Lindyman publishes 2-3x weekly, to help us apply the framework to topics as diverse as urban planning, dating, medical trends, drinking trends, and even whether we should listen to health influencers.

Lindyman gave me 3 very interesting and formative books. We talk about them along with the unintended consequences of 'the woke movement,' why you should eat vegan once a week, how modern employment is destroying families, and much more. If you like to have your brain stretched like taffy and provoked by unusual thoughts this is the chapter for you.

Let's flip the page to Chapter 145 now…

Chapter 145: Lindyman leverages long-lasting lessons on living a limitless life

View full transcript here

CONNECT with LINDYMAN

LINDYMAN’s 3 Books

  • First book (54:48)

  • Second book (1:23:15)

  • Third book (1:45:28)

WORDCLOUD OF THE CHAPTER

Quotes

  • "Your haters follow your work more closely than the people who actually like you." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "Birthdays are best when you're really young or you're really old. It's like a bathtub distribution." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "You don't want to be poor in America because it goes from very first world to very third world very fast." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "You have to watch out for things that are modern that may disrupt natural processes." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "Another big thing with the Lindy effect, there has to be generational churn, it has to cross into it." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "There’s an inverse relationship between popularity at first and length of time it lasts." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "Modern employment is a bit like a prison." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "People have a lot of comfort in complaining about how bad things are." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "There is no ceiling for greed." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "Talent goes to where the money is, where the opportunity is, where the action is." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "How would you tell if a society is healthy or not? Check the suicide rates." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "It's very tempting to just mediate reality through a computer screen." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "There’s a reason why certain things survive, and the longer they survive there’s less the survivorship bias, so you should really appreciate things that have been around for a longtime." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "Things don’t just scale, they transform." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "It’s very hard for us to create new places that are enjoyable and beautiful." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "Text is easier to remember than video." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "Not a lot of people say ‘I don’t know.’" — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "I do 4-5 hours of directed creative work every day, no days off." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "Follow what stimulates you." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "Don’t take any advice on writing. That’s my writing advice." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "Always be sensitive to what excites you." — Lindyman | 3 Books Podcast

Show Notes

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Chapter 144: Nick Sweetman on breaking boundaries with brilliant birds

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​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 eye! That bill! But I discovered there's this Toronto mural artist named Nick Sweetman and turns out I've seen the guy's stuff all over the place. He paints ​pollinators​, ​birds​, ​insects​, and ​animals​ of all kinds...

He painted a ​whale shark​ I've ridden by on my bike for years without knowing it was him! Squint and you'll see the 'Sweetman' underneath its cavernous mouth:

So I decided to reach out to Nick Sweetman and ask him about doing a unique partnership with me and 3 Books. He was game! We found a 750 square foot brutalist bare concrete wall behind a subway station in Toronto begging to be beautified. And now 11 months later I am very proud to present...

After I spent six months getting approvals from the Toronto Transit Commission (shoutout to Cameron Penman, David Nagler, Kerry-Ann Campbell, and Councillor Dianne Saxxe!), Nick started painting the wall behind ​Dupont Station​ on September 17th, 2024 (my birthday!) and finished it up on November 1st.

What resulted is honestly the most beautiful piece of public art I have ever seen. I know I'm birdy biased but Nick's beauty, his eye, his senses—they just know no bounds. He doesn't use stencils! He's not tracing anything! The guy is literally just looking at a dirty, bare, curved 750-square-foot wall and, NO BIGGIE painting 16 HYPERREALISTIC LOCAL BIRDS ON IT!

Over the six weeks of painting I pulled out my recorder many times, Nick's friend and fellow graffiti artist Blaze Wiradharma (​@blazeworks​) pulled up with his video gear, and then genius editor Scott Baker (​@adjacentp​) rolled in to edit our first-ever 3 Books audio-video documentary experience.

Listen! Watch! Be amazed by the wonder of Nick Sweetman! We explore questions like: Why did Nick leave the wine drinking art gallery world for dirty street corners? What do people who have owe to people who don't? How do we see the crustaceans in our parking lot? And ... do we still have a shared reality?

We talk about mural painting, graffiti, street art, what it means to live in a world where humans overtake everything and, of course, Nick's 3 most formative books. We even get a live splice of Leslie teasing out his third book in real-time which is pretty special!

I highly recommend you WATCH this chapter if you can as we put so much heart and soul into making Nick's masterpiece come to breathtaking visual life.

But, of course, as we flip the page to Chapter 144, you can always just listen in on Apple or Spotify, too.

We will always remain platform-agnostic and there are buttons for all are below!

Chapter 144: Nick Sweetman on breaking boundaries with brilliant birds

View full transcript here

CONNECT with Nick Sweetman

Nick’s 3 Books

  • First book (34:14)

  • Second book (52:44)

  • Third book (1:07:09)

WORDCLOUD OF THE CHAPTER

Quotes

  • "Art is a bridge to what's possible." — Nick Sweetman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "The whole gallery world felt a bit disconnected from regular people." — Nick Sweetman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "I think capitalism is a huge problem." — Nick Sweetman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "Just because we're in a city doesn't mean we're not in the environment." — Nick Sweetman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "The people who have have a duty to the people who do not have." — Nick Sweetman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "People should vote for people doing the least shitty thing." — Nick Sweetman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "Our current system of government doesn’t seem to produce good leaders. Good people don’t seem to succeed in the same way as the corrupt." — Nick Sweetman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "I want to hope that the damage we’re doing is not permanent." — Nick Sweetman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "In 200 years every city on earth would be gone without a trace. That is exciting to me." — Nick Sweetman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "Humans have never lived within our limits." — Nick Sweetman | 3 Books Podcast

  • "Did you know there’s a crustacean walking around your parking lot?" — Nick Sweetman | 3 Books Podcast

Show Notes

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Best Of 2024: Neil Pasricha plucks pithy pointers to prime ponderings

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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 day as as a duck​.

This year I've changed tack and made the "Best Of" highly concentrated—under 50 minutes long!—with little snippets from our diverse guests to provide reflection, provoke your thinking, and help to set intentions for 2025 and beyond.

Thank you for being a 3 Booker and spending time with this incredible community of book lovers spread across the world.

Let’s stop to reflect and then keep enjoying the ride....

Best Of 2024: Neil Pasricha plucks pithy pointers to prime ponderings

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Chapter 143: Chris Smalls on anti-Amazon activism and abolishing aristocracy

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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 changed forever when I got fired from Amazon."

Chris used that motivation to work with his former colleagues to try to unionize the warehouse. The first attempt failed, but in March 2022 the vote passed, and it became the first Amazon warehouse in the United States to be unionized.

As of today Amazon has not come to the bargaining table and is pursuing multiple legal actions to avoid recognizing the union, including challenging the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board.

What's going on?

I flew down to Hackensack, New Jersey to find out.

What really happened at that warehouse?

And what happens next?

Chris filled me in on life after the union drive, why he's been traveling the globe, his experience being under surveillance by Amazon and the police, what it's like leading protests at Jeff Bezos house, and why the Amazon Labor Union has recently affiliated with the Teamsters.

Chris calls bullshit on a lot of what we hear about labor organizing and reports on what's happening in the street. What can we learn from socialist countries? Why is the U.S. government reluctant to enforce antitrust regulations? What does fair human work look like in an increasingly algorithmic and AI-dominated society?

Pull up a white plastic chair beside us in Chris's backyard as he leans back behind dark shades and plumes of smoke to tell us how working at Amazon is like slavery, what's happening with human jobs as automation skyrockets, whether unions can be effective today, what politicians represent the working class, his 3 most formative books, and much, much more...

Let’s flip the page to Chapter 143 now...

Chapter 143: Chris Smalls on anti-Amazon activism and abolishing aristocracy

View full transcript here

CONNECT with CHRIS SMALLS

CHRIS’ 3 Books

  • First book (30:80)

  • Second book (43:36)

  • Third book (1:02:01)

WORDCLOUD OF THE CHAPTER

Quotes

  • “...every protest I've done in front of Jeff Bezos' house he hires the entire police department.” — Chris Smalls | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I get my news from the people.” — Chris Smalls | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Why you think I haven't been invited back to Congress? Because what they saw that day, it was like, oh, shit.” — Chris Smalls | 3 Books Podcast

  • “It feels like prison. Exactly what it does. Solitary confinement. You had a station, you had a square cubicle station moving in the same repetitive motion for 12 hours.” — Chris Smalls | 3 Books Podcast

  • “We all got radicalized at some point in time in our lives...my life changed forever when I got fired from Amazon.” — Chris Smalls | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Our quality of life in America is in the gutter. And that's because we're too complacent and we don't fight for better. We don't fight for anything. We fight for breadcrumbs.” — Chris Smalls | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I would love to not work 60 hours a week for the richest man in the world. You know, let me actually have a four day weekend and three days of work. A 10 hour shift or eight hour shift with an hour lunch. It's just simple things.” — Chris Smalls | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Some free Medicare would be great. You know, nobody should be paying for health care. Child childcare, the same thing. Childcare is ridiculous.” — Chris Smalls | 3 Books Podcast

  • “We got billionaires breaking federal law every day. Every single day a worker gets fired in this country for retaliation, for organizing, or discrimination, or fired for bullshit, whatever the case may be every day. Where's the accountability?” — Chris Smalls | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Amazon is the modern day slavery. That's just what it is.You know, it's slavery. Fast forward 400 years. Productivity. Calling us pickers. That's what we're doing. We're still continuing the process of slavery with some technology involved. And that's what it is. So slave wages, slaving conditions leads to injuries and death. And that's exactly why they're the number one in the country for injuries.” — Chris Smalls | 3 Books Podcast

  • “You know, we used to interact outside with kids. Kids don't do that no more. You know, they got iPads and TikTok. You know, we grew up in different times. And when Amazon got into this, you know, one day shipping, same day shipping, you know, same hour, the increase in the productivity, people don't see the behind the scenes. They don't see that there's 10 people that's going to touch that package before it gets to your door. The one person who's a picker has to pick this item in less than seven seconds.” — Chris Smalls | 3 Books Podcast

  • “It's a robot that brings it to you. And it comes to your station. You have to pick it off the robot. And that times you. They call it. So they got a robot to bring it, but they don't have a robot to pick it yet. That's what they're working on, you know.And for the last 30 years, there's been people picking these items and packing them. And the packers have a time they have to do it. You know, everything is timed. The moment you clock in. So people don't see that when they order in these packages. They just go on these websites. They fill up their carts. And then they think these packages magically appear. Or they see the driver. And they think that, you know, his job is this. He got it made because he has a brand on, Amazon. But it's not. You know, these are terrible conditions and they can be improved. And the company has the money to do it. But instead, they rather give it to the top.” — Chris Smalls | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I met the president. I met Kamala. And I took away nothing from this conversation. Nothing, absolutely nothing.” — Chris Smalls | 3 Books Podcast

Show Notes

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Chapter 142: Oliver Burkeman relishes reflection and reveals writing rituals

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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 assumptions around work, productivity and living a meaningful life” and Adam Grant (our guest in Chapter 72) called it “the most important book ever written about time management."

Oliver's work is much more about how to live a good life in the limited time we have than the system and hacks you find in other popular productivity books, and he’s just released a wonderful follow-up called 'Meditations For Mortals.' This book offers the reader 28 short chapters meant to be read one a day for 28 days, a quiet evening ritual with Oliver's potent words.

Naturally with such a talented guest, this Chapter dives deep into writing craft. How does a productivity writer focus on meaningful work? What does Oliver always have in his pocket on a walk to help him write? And what is his dream writing schedule?

But we also mine Oliver's brilliant mind in wide conversations that ask: What are the signs of living in a totalitarian state? What is Jungian analysis? Is promotion offensive? And why does Oliver wear earplugs even in silence?

Oliver Burkeman is my favorite self-help writer so it was a great pleasure that he joined me on 3 Books. Join me to learn how Oliver manages his writing projects, his 3 most formative books, the best question to ask before making big decisions, why mess is necessary, and much, much more.

Let’s flip the page to Chapter 142 now...

Chapter 142: Oliver Burkeman relishes reflection and reveals writing rituals

View full transcript here

CONNECT with OLIVER BURKEMAN

Oliver’s 3 Books

  • First book (19:21)

  • Second book (37:57)

  • Third book (1:16:23)

WORDCLOUD OF THE CHAPTER

Quotes

  • On launching a book “What I love at this stage is hearing from individual people who are making their way through it. It’s very self-selecting because you don’t really hear from anyone who hates it.” — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

  • “You’ve got to sort of have the right level of internal non-attachment to it, right? You can’t make it that how well the book does is the sole and final judgment on whether it was worth writing. — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I’m not in the mindset of a sort of maybe previous generation of writers who thought it was sort of somehow offensive that it’s their job to spread the word about a book.” — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

  • “What really marks out totalitarianism from other concepts like facism, dictatorship, tyranny, all the rest of it, is the notion that there’s no part of your inner soul that is beyond the reach of the central authority.” — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

  • “There are ways to choose not to be part of this kind of surveillance world today.” — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Success for a writer is not the same thing as success for a movie studio.” — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

  • “On some level, it’s self-help, right? I’m drawn to the ideas I think might help me.” — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I'm very sort of eclectic. This is what I think is part of what sort of British journalism experience means to me. It's the ability to sort of go out very quickly and find like a huge variety of little morsels that you can build into something.” — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

  • “If there are a lot of people out there who really want to make the case that perfectionism is an extremely good and motivating and wonderful value to live your life by, then I'm not going to be spending an awful lot of time with them.” — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Jotting things down I do on scraps and on index cards because something weird in my still recovering perfectionist psyche doesn't like just jotting things down in a very nice notebook.” — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I think I prefer writing books, but the way that I approach them is as partly as sequences of articles that then need to be sort of molded into a coherent whole. Yeah, I think ultimately I'm sort of proudest of books and there's a chance, it feels like there's a chance to really sort of burnish and polish a book that there often isn't with an article.” — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Some degree of huge mess is actually essential for me.” — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

  • “You can definitely be led into the misunderstanding of thinking that rigidity is your friend, that there's a way of doing, I think the sort of appeal that a lot of these very rigorous approaches have is it's the same as any kind of productivity technique or life rule, right? We want something that will do the living or the thinking or the writing for us. And there isn't such a thing.” — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

  • “The whole act of growth is seeing more and more of yourself.” — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

Show Notes

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Chapter 141: James Daunt on bespoke bookselling building Barnes and bonds

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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 to quit. He thought, "How do I combine my love of reading and my love of travel into doing something wholly different?"

The first ​Daunt Books​ independent bookstore opened on Marylebone High Street in London soon after. Unlike nearly every book store in the world he organized his books … by country. Not genre! But by place. Bookselling isn't an easy business! Lots of stores were going belly-up and profits were meager but over time he found a special knack for it.

He went to bookselling school, paid fairly, and took mentorship and development seriously. When big bookstore chains started falling in the wake of Amazon, and ​Waterstones​ was essentially the only national chain left in the UK, a wealthy entrepreneur bought it and asked James to lead it.

He turned the concept of a chain bookstore on its head, suggesting that stores would do better if the head office minimized itself and helped the booksellers operate like their own independent bookstores. Gone were planograms! Head office mandates! He tore up lucrative publisher deals spelling out which books to force onto the front tables to guarantee bestseller lists! He ripped up the rulebook completely. And what happened? Sales shot up. The chain survived ... then thrived.

When the new owners of Waterstones bought ​Barnes & Noble​—the largest bookstore chain in the world—they asked James to lead it, too. Today, James Daunt is the biggest bookseller on the planet overseeing nearly 1000 bookshops including his now-9 store Daunt Books indie chain, over 300 Waterstones, and over 600 Barnes & Nobles (including 65 new ones this year!!).

I was very excited when James said "yes" to coming on 3 Books. We go deep on learning from history, the role of bookstores in society, his most formative books, the best place to find a date, the key to customer service, leading from behind, and much, much more....

Let’s flip the page to Chapter 141 now…

Chapter 141: James Daunt on bespoke bookselling building Barnes and bonds

View full transcript here

CONNECT with JAMES DAUNT

JAMES’ 3 Books

  • First book (20:26)

  • Second book (48:37)

  • Third book (1:23:36)

WORDCLOUD OF THE CHAPTER

Quotes

  • “Books are in a very good place.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast

  • “What we can do within bookstores offer the serendipity of illogical choice, be that personal recommendations of booksellers or other customers or the chance of how displays and the interactions and juxtapositions of books alight upon yourselves.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast

  • “If you are interested in a country or a place then I think you need to read very broadly within it. You definitely need to read the history, but you also want to understand the anthropology, want to understand the novels, you want to understand the movies, you want to understand everything.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I think booksellers need to and can read body language. Is this somebody who’s looking to engage or not? Also customers, as they come into the stores, they know that the bookseller is lurking there, sort of the spider in his web.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Technology can be extremely helpful and dynamic, but if you want to get a reluctant reader, some young boy to read books, you're going to probably be most successful with a highly skilled bookseller whose passion is to encourage kids to read.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast

  • “One of the joys, I think, of reading history is that you read it to learn and to educate yourself, to consider and be able to reflect on current affairs with hopefully more intelligence and more insight, but also to be able to navigate through the prism of the writer.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast

  • “With empowerment comes responsibility.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast

  • “[Bookselling] remains a very ill-advised route to riches.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast

  • “If you want people to become really tenured and expert, then they need to work full time.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast

  • [On attention spans and reading.] “These are not new problems. I've been a bookseller for 35 years or something. I've predated really the internet. I've certainly predated e-books. I've certainly predated audio and podcasts and all of these things... And the reality throughout all of this is that how people are, the time people have available to read and the enthusiasm with which they read changes by not much.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast

  • “[Bookstores] do provide a community space that's inherently democratic in the sense that everybody can come inside it.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast

  • “We are the greatest dating place that there is. Forget the bar, forget the nightclub, forget everything else, come to a bookstore. That's where you can really meet people, see people.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I think there are people who lead from the front, and de Gaulle happened to have been one of those, and there are those who can lead from the back, and Lincoln was one of those. I think the latter, the Lincoln way of leading is, I think, generally, well, certainly the one that fits with my personality.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast

Show Notes

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Bookmark: The 2-minute happiness practice to wind down your day with intention 

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“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 mind that rears its ugly head after the dust of the day has settled and your resilience is low. 

So in this special Fall Equinox Bookmark, I want to share this simple—dead simple, ruthlessly simple—system to help get you back on track. All you need is two minutes around the dinner table with your family or lying in bed to scroll back through your day. It's like wiping a wet shammy over the blackboard of your mind, and is backed up by science, too.

Ready to wind down your brain with intention? Let's flip the page...

Bookmark: The 2-minute happiness practice to wind down your day with intention 

 
 
 
 
 
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Chapter 140: Amy Einhorn on powerful pages and publishing possibilities 

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‘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 my seven-month-old blog ‘1000 Awesome Things’ was nominated for ‘Best Blog’ from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. I was approached by literary agents and my new agent Erin Malone told me she wanted to auction my blog to publishers … next week. Suddenly I was in the foreign position of interviewing editors who were somehow clamoring to publish my book.

I signed with Amy Einhorn—a woman I’d never heard of, who had just started an eponymous imprint I’d never heard of, within Putnam Publishing, which I’d also never heard of. But I was immediately and magnetically attracted to her vision for the book. “It’s a hardcover, Neil,” she said. “It’s for moms. It’s a gift book. You gotta lose the frat boy posts. No blowing your nose in the shower. And I need a lot more new content.”

I learned everything about editing from Amy in our passionate late night diatribe emails, our hot-potato-ing of 300-page Word docs back and forth with 100s of comments in red down the sides, and arguing—good arguing!—about every single element along the way. I’d sit in her office and she’d have a variety of ‘cases’ laid out on her desk. “What do you think of 5” by 7”?” she’d say. “Too precious? Too cute?”

Amy is one of the most successful editors in the world today with the highest percentage of books edited hitting the New York Times bestseller list. According to a feature in The Observer, “New York editors and publishers speak of Amy Einhorn's success as the product of an almost mystical editorial instinct.” She has a knack for sniffing out voice, for knowing what will work and what won’t and, as you can imagine, I’ve been begging her to come on 3 Books for six years to hear how it all works.

So I flew down to NYC to talk with the bright, brilliant, and beaming Amy Einhorn about what an editor does, how a book gets published, what helps a book sell, Amy's 3 most formative books, and much, much more.

Let’s flip the page to Chapter 140 now…

Chapter 140: Amy Einhorn on powerful pages and publishing possibilities

View full transcript here

AMY’S 3 Books

  • First book (13:30)

  • Second book (47:02)

  • Third book (1:22:19)

WORDCLOUD OF THE CHAPTER

Quotes

  • “I remember I was dating a boy once and he said something about a trust fund, and I said ‘what’s a trust fund?’And I’d kept walking and he had stopped.” — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “All of publishing is about being an outsider.” — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “So much about publishing is having an advocate. And since all of it is subjective, you and I can read the same book and have completely different opinions about it, but you just need one person who is going to be messianic about your book and tell everyone they need to read it.” — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I remember 1990, it was terrible the sky was falling—now you look back and those were the good old days.” — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “The book delivers something you can't get somewhere else." — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “A lot of people don’t write sex well, so usually I’m very adverse to, I’m very worried when some of my authors write sex and it seems like very purple prose.” — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “My literary authors always want to have more sales and my commercial authors always want to be perceived more literary.” — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I’m not working in a coal mine, I have a great job. But it’s a bummer when you spend a whole weekend reading a book that falls apart.” — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “You’re kind of like, what is it? But I want it.” (on the mark of a good title) — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I’m not working in a coal mine, I have a great job. But it’s a bummer when you spend a whole weekend reading a book that falls apart.” — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “If you’re a really good editor, you shouldn’t be able to see any of our work.” — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “My job is to help an author write a better book and reach as many readers as possible. But I’m not writing the book.” — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Novels can speak more truthfully because people can just say ‘Oh, I made it up.’...Fiction allows us to get at truth in away that other forms don’t.” — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Bookselling is about somebody handing you a book and saying ‘you should read this.’” — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “You just need one person to like your book.” (about getting published) — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

Show Notes

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