Midwife

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

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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 my skin—serrating my soul.

So I remember getting that knife.

The deep blasphemous pain I felt slicing the paperback spine and carving the last 100-ish pages off the book was far outweighed by the exquisite suite of pleasures I had slowly savoring it on the beach all week.

I had never read anything like ‘The Corrections’—with a clarity of character, wildly spinning plot, and unique three-dimensional *realness* that, page by page, twist by twist, left pits in my stomach, lumps in my throat, and tears in my eyes.

The book single-handedly elevated what I thought books could do.

I read ‘Freedom’ (2010), ‘Purity’ (2014), and ‘Crossroads’ (2021) the same way—equal parts admiration, fascination, and with a psychologically-transporting feeling of living outside of myself.

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, 2x Oprah’s Book Club Pick, voted to TIME’s ‘100 Most Influential’ list as well as gracing their cover as "Great American Novelist," and much, much more.

The NYT calls his books "masterpieces of American fiction," NYMag 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.”

Tall praise! But there is just nothing like a Jonathan Franzen novel and it was sheer delight going deep with the master of the deep to discuss writing advice, the magic of the written word, what heroes look like today, competing with David Foster Wallace, the best thing we can do for the climate, Jon’s 3 most formative books, and much, much more…

Let’s turn the page to Chapter 137 now…

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

View full transcript here

CONNECT with JONATHAN FRANZEN

JONATHAN’S 3 Books

  • First book (38:50)

  • Second book (1:27:58)

  • Third book (1:58:06)

WORDCLOUD OF THE CHAPTER

Quotes

  • “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.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “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 time reading crap.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “It is a luxury to engage with things in a complicated way.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “There was a time I thought it was a moral failing that you didn’t want to engage with complicated art, nuanced art, moral ambiguity, contradictions in character...I used to look down on people in my youthful arrogance.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Literature defined by its defiance of cliche.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Kids are not innocent little creatures. Kids are full of all sorts of bad stuff. They’re greedy and selfish, and they’ll go to considerable lengths to get what they want. If they’re not sociopaths, they’ll grow out of it. But kids are bad and they experience real remorse for that, and they also live with this awful sense of how bad they are.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “[My mother] was very disapproving of the idea of my becoming a novelist. You’re going to lie for a living? That doesn’t sound right.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “What does a hero look like in 2023? It looks like a teacher in a Florida school teaching forbidden books.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I’d always thought it’d be cool to be a writer. Lot’s of free time, and sit around, make stuff up and you get paid for it. You become famous. That sounded great. I wanted to do that.But I didn’t imagine myself as a literary writer.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I want to write a novel because I’m happy when I’m writing a novel. 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.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Dialogue is more art than science. People don’t actually speak the way they do in my books. It’s a little magic trick.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “It’s 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’s going to be horribly stressed in the coming years and decades, and will probably be unrecognizable a century from now.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “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 and live your life the way you wish everyone else did.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Anything you can do to make the world a kinder and more stable place is a climate action.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Take a hard look at every sentence. Shake it. Shake it again. I guarantee you, it can be better.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

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Chapter 135: Cal Newport severs cell subservience to steep slow success

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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 things everyone thinks and knows,” Cal says, but the truth is he’s doing a lot more than that.

Take ‘Slow Productivity.’

He’s boiled this new phrase down into three principles: 1) Do fewer things, 2) Work at a natural pace, and 3) Obsess over quality.

Sounds simple, right? Trite, even! But that’s when you raise your head and realize the world is conspiring against you doing any of these. Doesn’t our world today reward… doing *more* things, working at an *unnatural* pace, and obsessing over *quantity*?

There’s a reason Cal has no social media apps on his phone. Why he has no social media accounts at all…and never has! With his books, and his wonderful podcast ‘Deep Questions,’ he is focused on helping us find our way as we navigate ever-changing technology and work patterns that increasingly feel at odds with our shared quest of living intentional lives.

Cal has a giant mind and it was on full display in this chat as we discuss: how Cal measures success, the neuroscience of reading, Denis Villeneuve, the relationship between rest and work, the ideal age for unrestricted Internet access, The Washington Nationals, leetspeak and productivity pr0n, the role of books today and their future, Andrew Huberman, positive reinforcement theory, Jonathan Haidt and ‘The Anxious Generation,’ technology boundaries for children, and much, much more…

Let’s turn the page to Chapter 135 now…

Chapter 135: Cal Newport severs cell subservience to steep slow success

View full transcript here

CONNECT with CAL NEWPORT

CAL’S 3 Books

  • First book (26:35)

  • Second book (1:17:53)

  • Third book (1:49:09)

Word Of The Chapter

Quotes

  • "Books are the best bargain in the human intellectual experience." — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “When is it appropriate for someone to get unrestricted internet access? The safe answer is 16." — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I think young people have been given this idea—this comes out of the social media companies themselves—that you can just be vulnerable and visible and open, that that’ll just alchemize into being really valuable. That's not the way it works. You still need craft. You still need to do something.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “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." — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I sometimes joke that my whole career is built on giving two-word terms to things that everyone thinks and knows.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Books are the only mind reading of any sort of great bandwidth. 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. I think this is why books have been durable through so many different media revolutions. It's hard to replicate what you get out of that.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “What I grew up with being around these books is that feeling of advice book, that feeling of suddenly your internal schema of understanding the world shifts in a way, where new opportunities for you that are very exciting emerge that just feel so good. And it's such a high, and you can induce that with paper.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “We're not evolved to read. 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 a cultural discovery accident." — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “You can have a system for how you do things, and that system can make things better, and you can let the system take on a lot of the work.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Systems can’t get you all the way to impact. Systems can’t get you to the meaningful life. Systems can help save energy.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “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 it came at us just exploded.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “To me phone is a misnomer. It's unrestricted internet access -- that’s the danger” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “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 if you try to take it away they’re going to have an aneurysm." — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I think people misunderstand 'Walden'. They think it’s a nature book. It’s not a nature book. What 'Walden' really was was an incredibly erudite self-help book.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “[Walden] really inspired me to consider radical ideas as the foundation of writing” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I love that feeling of destabilizing something you took for granted and when you destabilize it it opens up all these alternatives and new opportunities for you” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I wish more people were less afraid.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Friday after I’m done with work until Sunday I try not to do any work, any email, any looking at content meant to get you excited. It’s family time, it’s reading time, it’s go on adventures time." — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “If you’re writing a book the thing that matters is writing the book that delights you. That’s your best chance of changing minds and making an impact.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

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Chapter 134: Susan Orlean on lusty ledes and literary lessons for life

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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 contemporary libraries and their issues, especially updating a view of them if you haven’t been inside one since you were a kid."

Bo picked up the book, loved it, and then wrote to me that "the amount of research and bizarre detail Orlean puts into her work is so engrossing.” Bizarre detail! I was convinced. I picked up ‘The Library Book’ and it blew me away. Reading it was like … wandering a library. Surprising curiosity trails at every turn. I ended up putting the book in my Best Of 2023 and then went deeper into Susan Orlean’s back catalog where I found myself reading profiles like ‘The American Man, Age 10’ and a series of fascinating but unconventional obituaries about people like the inventor of Hawaiian Tropic or the first magician on the Las Vegas strip.

I’ve come to think of Susan Orlean as one of the best non-fiction writers on the planet. She’s been a Staff Writer for ‘The New Yorker’ since 1992 and has written more than 10 bestselling books including ‘The Library Book’, ‘On Animals’, ‘Saturday Night’, and ‘The Orchid Thief’, which was turned into the movie ‘Adaptation’, starring Meryl Streep in her Oscar-nominated role as … yes, Susan Orlean.

Susan has an endless, unbridled curiosity — that ‘bizarre detail’ — which you’ll see on full display in this conversation which begins by talking about how she organizes her shoes! She’s a writer’s writer who offers us a  true masterclass and always reminds us that “storytelling and knowledge-sharing is the essential human experience.”

We talk about organizing shoes and spices, what books do that nothing else does, finding the balance between professional and amateur, the genius of container ships, what great book design does, how to cultivate your writing voice, how you might organize your book, facing the fear of failure, LSD, the power of libraries, Susan’s 3 most formative books, and much, much more…

I am so excited to share this conversation and hope you’ll find it as endlessly inspiring, thoughtful as I did.

Let’s jump into Chapter 134 of 3 Books now…

Chapter 134: Susan Orlean on lusty ledes and literary lessons for life

CONNECT with Susan Orlean

Susan’s 3 Books

  • First book (1:26:15)

  • Second book (1:52:21)

  • Third book (2:30:46)

Word Of The Chapter

WORDCLOUD OF THE CHAPTER:

Quotes

  • “You have an experience of the person before you actually have an experience of them.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Humanity is into taxonomy. I mean, it’s a human impulse to find and categorize and index and organize.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “At the end of the day, it is a very commercial thing to cure a disease. People make money.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “This human impulse to organize and categorize probably is most explicitly shown when we think about books and knowledge and information. The idea of organizing the mental output of writers throughout history and to have come up with a system that, while it's not perfect, it's withstood the test of time, but also to begin to allow us to impose some kind of order on books is pretty extraordinary.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “[A book’s design] is the physical manifestation of what a book is all about.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “The closeness between our human soul, as it were, and a library, and how – while the connection might not seem that obvious – the way in which a library contains dreams and knowledge and facts and history and memory, and really, the whole of human experience is much the way a person contains dreams and memories and knowledge and fantasy. We contain our own personal library of thoughts.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Many of us have had this experience of trying to remember something, and you almost feel like you’re flipping through a card catalogue. ‘No. No. Not that… That’s what I’m trying to remember!’” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “[Libraries] are the collective mind of a community.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Storytelling and knowledge sharing is the essential human experience. Books are just the means by which we do it. It’s how we exist together – we tell each other stories.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “A book is almost like a whisper.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I don’t want to say rant – what’s the positive word for rant?” “Rant!” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I felt like it was a way that I could signal the tremendous contradictions of his life without saying, wow, it's pretty weird to be a cab driver but also be king.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I’d like to feel that I’m both a professional and an amateur, in the sense that, I bring to my work, the same degree of joy and surprise that I have felt since the very beginning. And that I don’t look at as ‘just gotta make a widget.’ But when it comes to work habits and discipline, I’m very much a professional, and I’m proud of it.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I do love fiction that does that, that tells a very intimate story but in a context that is a character in its own right.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I loved [The Sound and the Fury] so much that I was rereading it while I was reading it.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Writing is very humbling. And if you think because you’ve written lots of books or written for ‘The New Yorker' or had a bestseller that the next sentence you write is going to be easy then you are sorely mistaken.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I often like being funny when I don’t have to tell a joke.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I think your ultimate goal always is to try and have your writing sound as much like your actual way of expressing yourself as possible. And that seems like a simple goal but it’s actually very challenging.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “It is certainly a way to learn how to write, is to read people whose work you love, and say, I somehow want to achieve the same thing, but in my own voice.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I don’t see a conflict between having that kind of orderly drive, which I think of as ‘professional,’ and having the vulnerability and openness that an amateur might have.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “[As a journalist] it doesn’t really matter what I think–although I’m not gonna hide from you what I think–but what I’m really here for is to be your Virgil and to show you this world that I’ve uncovered.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Storytelling and knowledge sharing is the essential human experience. Books are just the means by which we do it. It’s how we exist together – we tell each other stories.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “It’s meaningful for us to know the way other people are living.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Finding a voice is the ultimate challenge. And I think the only helpful thing I can is that–the great surprise is discovering, it’s a little like The Wizard of Oz, that you were home all alone. Your voice is the voice you have in the world all along. And what makes writing hard is we get tense, we get self-conscious, you sometimes feel like you don’t even know how to say a simple sentence. But the truth of the matter, and I find it funny, the more experienceI have, the closer and closer it is to how I would’ve sat down and told this story to you.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “There is such a clear black and white. Things are either true or they’re not true. Facts either happened or they didn’t. It just doesn’t seem hard to me to... And I think readers deserve to know that if they’re reading non-fiction... it’s factual.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “It was frankly more appropriate that I never saw a Ghost Orchid, the way most of us never achieve this perfect thing that we aspire to. It also was true. I didn’t see a Ghost Orchid.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “This will sound perhaps obvious, but why not: read read read, and then write and write and write. Not to take too much away from Nike, but really, if you love writing, and you want to do, you just gotta do it.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

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Chapter 133: Celine Song stitches sumptuous stories from Seoul to soul

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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 went back to theaters to see it again. The film had such unique energy as it told the story of Nora and Hae Sung, two childhood friends in South Korea, who lose touch when Nora’s family emigrates, and then seem to be forever-chasing the goodbye they never had.

The film opens with a late-night bar scene of Hae Sung visiting Nora and her husband in New York before scrolling back to tell the unpredictable, jumping-around-the-decades story of how they got there. Every shot was such a sumptuous visual feast — from silhouetted lineups for the Staten Island Ferry to broken-transmission Skype calls to a final waiting-for-an-Uber scene that deserves its own prize. And the writing! Crisp. Punctuating. So much said ... with so little. ‘Past Lives’ is a truly magical film that I can’t recommend enough. ​96% on Rotten Tomatoes​ also means there’s a great chance your movie-going pal will love it, too.

I was thrilled ‘Past Lives’ director, writer, and filmmaker wunderkind Celine Song joined me on 3 Books from her New York apartment to talk about the Korean concept of ​in-yun​, why we’re drawn to stories, what unique role millennials play as the last pre-Internet-immersive generation, how a cannibalistic orgy makes for great literature, a surprising cure for loneliness, why sensory deprivation increases chemistry, the other job of a director, Celine’s 3 most formative books, and much, much more...

Let’s flip the page into Chapter 133 now...

Chapter 133: Celine Song stitches sumptuous stories from Seoul to soul

CONNECT with Celine Song

Celine’s 3 Books

  • First book (7:50)

  • Second book (21:45)

  • Third book (30:40)

Word Of The Chapter

Quotes

  • “I look to the book ‘Perfume’ as guidance for how I look at my own endings. I want the ending to feel like the meal you’ve been waiting for arrives.” — Celine Song | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Part of the reason we’re so drawn to stories is because we want to find out what part of ourselves we’re missing.” — Celine Song | 3 Books Podcast

  • “In-yun is the idea that everybody you encounter is somebody you’re tied to - not just in this life - but hundreds of lives before and hundreds of lives after.” — Celine Song | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Part of being a millennial, is that we are in a funny limbo. I can speak the language of both generations as a result of being born at this particular time. I take that as a very serious responsibility in a way.” — Celine Song | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I kept Teo and Greta from touching each other. The amazing thing about not doing something is that it makes you really want to do it.” — Celine Song | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Millennials are in a funny liminal space between the older generation who don’t have as close a relationship to the internet and the younger generation who have a closer relationship with the internet. I take that as a serious responsibility. I feel concern for it.” — Celine Song | 3 Books Podcast

  • “On social media it’s not the most decent or meaningful that gets looked at. And what you say becomes true. If you say something and you’re omnipresent … maybe it’s true.” — Celine Song | 3 Books Podcast

  • I think that the way immigrants are depicted is that sometimes they are depicted as reluctant to immigrate, especially children. I really wanted Nora to be a natural-born immigrant, someone who wanted to leave and had her own ambitions even as a kid. New York is a symbol of immigration. It is something that is a lovely and unbridled part of immigrants and I wanted Nora to be somebody who was an immigrant from the beginning. — Celine Song | 3 Books Podcast

  • As long as the food arrives and it’s delicious, you’re going to be happy. — Celine Song | 3 Books Podcast

  • Longing ends the moment that you’re able to have. That’s part of why I really wanted to deprave the actors of touch. If they were allowed to touch each other it would not have meant so much. But because they were not allowed to, and not doing it, it makes you really want to do it. Then the hug becomes really powerful. I don’t think you’d feel that way otherwise. — Celine Song | 3 Books Podcast

  • The job of a director is much more social. And part of the reason why I love dramatic work is because there is a way where you can be a writer that has demands that are social. When you’re making a movie you have to talk to 200 people every day. You need to be able to know how to speak to every single one of them and you aren’t going to be left alone. Being left alone is not possible when being a film director. But when it comes to feeling like I want to be left alone is that its just a desire that all artists have. I’m happy to answer these questions now because I do want to be able to feel connected to people who are watching the movie. There is also always the pain of that where I could think it would be so wonderful if I was just left alone in it. I already made it. The movie is already done and there’s nothing I can do to help it except talk to people about it. So I think that’s the funny relationship to it because the movie is up and walking around on its own, it’s going to college. — Celine Song | 3 Books Podcast

  • I think every great book should be something that you can walk into if you’re 15 and want to try something. — Celine Song | 3 Books Podcast

  • I think voids in our lives are hard to identify. I find that it is usually literature, movies, or a TV show that will fill that void. — Celine Song | 3 Books Podcast

  • I’m really drawn to the stories about people who are under the pressure of something, or under the weight of their times. Under the weight of power and are crushed under it, and are able to somehow hold onto who they are or try to do something for it. — Celine Song | 3 Books Podcast

  • Technological progress is going to march on relentlessly but humanity and the way our morality and the way we progress as people outside of technological progress is going to need to catch-up. We feel this need every day. We are really falling behind the technology that is getting away from us. There are moral questions that we don’t feel equipped for. — Celine Song | 3 Books Podcast

  • Fascism looks very different now. The way information is moving is always going to get faster than the way that we can form our moral stance as individuals and as a collective. It’s all hype. — Celine Song | 3 Books Podcast

  • What you say becomes true. If you say something and you’re omnipresent and omnipotent, then maybe it's true. And that’s scary. — Celine Song | 3 Books Podcast

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Chapter 132: Robin Dunbar on nullifying negativity with numbered natural networks

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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 brains can’t handle anymore. The number was coined, of course, by Oxford Emeritus Professor, Anthropologist, Evolutionary Psychologist, and General All-Round Super-Genius Robin, yes you guessed it, Dunbar. “There are only eight people with numbers named after them,” Robin says, with a grin. “And the other seven people are dead.” (Shoutout to Avogadro!)

Now: 150 is one in a series of numbers. More intimately: We have 15 ‘shoulders to cry on friends’, those who’d drop everything to help us or for whom we’d drop everything to help. And our cognitively limited brains can handle 500 ‘acquaintances’ and even 5000 ‘total faces.’ But 150? That’s the limit for ‘friends’. No wonder 150 is the average wedding size, it’s the average number of total people who 'see your Christmas card’, and it’s even the average size of 8000-year-old Middle East villages and 1000-year-old English countryside villages.

Once you start seeing this number — it’s hard to stop. But: Why is it important? Well, because friendships, the trust between all of us, it’s … at an all-time low. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy (our guest in Chapter 66!) has declared a ‘loneliness’ epidemic with 1 in 2 adults feeling alone now — higher than ever before in history. (Doesn’t sound too bad till you realize loneliness is worse for our health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day!) Meanwhile, the Harvard Adult Development Study, the longest study ever on happiness, says that friendship and community is the number one source of happiness.

So enter: Robin Dunbar! Wise, cheery, and ever-eloquent, he’s got a massive mind capable of distilling more than five decades of scientific work — and 16 published books including How Religion Evolved, How Many Friends Does One Person Need?, and Friends — into simple observations, prophecies, and advice on how we can all live richer, more fulfilling lives.

I found this an astoundingly nutritious conversation and we talk about: how to raise children, what HR departments should be doing, what you’re doing wrong when you go to the gym, why religion ‘dies during times of peace and revives during times of war’, the death and finding of our deep community, Robin’s 3 most formative books, and much, much, much more...

Let’s flip the page into Chapter 132 now...

Chapter 132: Robin Dunbar on nullifying negativity with numbered natural networks

CONNECT with Robin Dunbar

Robin’s 3 Books

  • First book (22:53)

  • Second book (1:12:47)

  • Third book (2:02:40)

Quotes

  • “Failure in relationships is almost always because of trust. One person has done something that has really broken trust. Sometimes its lots of little breakages along the way, which finally add up to enough’s enough.” — Robin Dunbar | 3 Books Podcast

  • “The great problem is that, if trust is lost, everything starts to fragment socially into lots of little ingroups.” — Robin Dunbar | 3 Books Podcast

  • “There are two major social skills that are very important in the context of trust. One is the ability to understand what other people are thinking, to see why they behaved in the way they did. And secondly, the capacity to inhibit what psychologists refer to as prepotent responses. You have to be able to suppress your selfish desire to help yourself to the biggest slice of cake on the plate in order to ensure that everybody else gets a bit of cake. If you don’t do that, social life is not going to be possible.” — Robin Dunbar | 3 Books Podcast

  • “The big problem you have with your friendships and your relationships, even your family relationships, is when you don't see somebody for a long period of time, the quality of that relationship just decays slowly but surely, and unavoidably.” — Robin Dunbar | 3 Books Podcast

  • “And you are never going to understand another culture or another ethnic group if you don't eat with them. You have to sit down and eat with them and live with them, as it were.” — Robin Dunbar | 3 Books Podcast

  • “There was a study of the effects done on people working together in an office that went out, eating together, and this actually benefits the kind of relationships within the organization. People weren’t so suspicious of each other from different departments.” — Robin Dunbar | 3 Books Podcast

  • “We have become less community-minded to a large extent because of two major factors. One is the television, and more recently, social media. The other is cheap alcohol and cheap food from supermarkets. So instead of going out to your local cafe, bar, or club in order to have a pleasant evening talking to different people, meeting new people who you’ve never met before, we instead sit in front of the television with a TV supper and a cheap beer.” — Robin Dunbar | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Religion dies during times of peace and revives during times of war.” — Robin Dunbar | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I think there are far too many books of advice on child rearing. Probably the best thing you can do is throw them in the trash can and just relax and take life as it comes. We’re designed by evolution to do these things.” — Robin Dunbar | 3 Books Podcast

  • “The mystical stance is what I call this sense of the unknowable that you encounter inside your mind through the use of mind-altering drugs or the practices of religion.” — Robin Dunbar | 3 Books Podcast

  • “The most important function HR departments could serve is to completely rethink what they do and become the social engineers of the company, not the social police.” — Robin Dunbar | 3 Books Podcast

  • “When you go to the gym, workout, or go for a jog, instead of putting your headphones on, take your headphones off so that you can talk to the person on the machine next to you. Go jogging with a group, with a friend. If you do these physical activities in synchrony with each other, it builds up this sense of camaraderie. You get to be fit and build friendships without having to do too much extra.” — Robin Dunbar | 3 Books Podcast

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Chapter 131: J. Drew Lanham on breaking boundaries to become better birdwatchers

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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 called "What Do We Do About John James Audubon?" and his viral YouTube clip called "Rules for the Black Birdwatcher". (“You’re gonna need at least two pieces of ID. And never wear a hoodie. Ever.”)

So I bought Drew’s memoir The Home Place and found it completely entrancing. His writing is poetry — vivid, transportive, meditative. After that, I reached out to Drew and we set a time to make the 10-hour haul down to Clemson farm country, wake up at the crack of dawn, and then get picked up by Drew in his Dodge Ram to spend a morning together — birdwatching.

J. Drew Lanham is a naturalist, birdwatcher, hunter-conservationist, MacArthur 'Genius' Grant-winning distinguished professor. He is a meditative, philosophical, nature- and wild-loving soul who has deeply considered our long relationship with the natural world and is never afraid to confront harsh truths. “European Starlings are a dark-plumaged being brought over the Atlantic for the services of others,” Drew says at one point. “Hmmm, where have I heard that before?”

You’ll be riding in the middle seat of the truck, getting out with us between fence posts and grassy meadows, hearing Blue Grosbeaks, Eastern Meadowlarks, and Red-Shouldered Hawks, and listening to Drew’s endlessly wise observations about everything from South Carolina’s slavery past, why there’s blood in tofu, what your birdwatching ‘starter kit’ should look like, how to observe a land ethic, how we might behave differently if Chicken Nuggets blinked at us, formative books (of course!), and much, much more. “You can’t see everything at once,” Drew reminds us. “So learn to see the everything in one.”

With birds serving as a metaphor for everything in life I think you’ll love this slow, soul-fueling, wisdom-stuffed conversation with Professor J. Drew Lanham. I left his truck that morning thinking “I want to be more like Drew.” I think you’ll feel the same way.

Let’s flip the page into Chapter 131 now...

Chapter 131: J. Drew Lanham on breaking boundaries to become better birdwatchers

CONNECT WITH J. Drew

J. Drew’s 3 Books

  • First book (46:10)

  • Second book (1:24:30)

  • Third book (2:01:40)

Quotes

  • "Conservation means taking some and leaving some for later."

  • "4 out of 10 kids think bacon came from a plant. They didn’t know that a pig had to die for them to eat a slice of bacon. That’s disturbing."

  • "You can't see everything at once so try and see the everything in one."

  • "European Starlings are a bird that was brought here. A dark-plumaged being brought to this country for the service of others. Hmm, where have I heard that before?"

  • "Joy is the justice we give ourselves."

  • "We’ve objectified birds into oblivion. Birding is one of the most popular outdoor avocations in North America. They’ve become something to just count. We’re counting them as they dwindle but we’re not doing enough to stop that dwindling count."

  • "When we become experts at something, sometimes it leads us to believe that we have all the answers. And we hardly have any answers."

  • "Part of what I hope that people are able to do over time is take down the binoculars and see the broader view."

  • “We’ve been told that nature is 'out there.' But it’s really all around us. I’ve been in the heart of Manhattan and I look up and there’s a Peregrine Falcon.”

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The Best of 2023: Neil Pasricha rewinds and reflects on the richness of reading

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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, commercials, or interruptions.

We started collecting ​values​ like: "No book shame, no book guilt", "Humans are the best algorithm", and "You are what you eat and you are what you read."

Over the years this journey has been a warm ray of sun in my life. I hope it’s felt the same for you.

My goal with the “Best Of” is to reflect on the year by picking a snippet from every Chapter and Bookmark that helps us pause and ponder.

You'll hear (or re-hear) wisdom from our chats with ​Steve Toltz​, ​Timothy Goodman​, ​Johann Hari​, ​Tank Sinatra​, ​Suzy Batiz​, ​Martellus Bennett​, ​Chefs Osama and Houssam​, ​Jully Black​, ​Lenore Skenazy​, ​Heather McGowan​, ​Sahil Bloom​, ​Ralph Nader​, and J. Drew Lanham (his interview is coming out on December 26th!!)

Thank you for sharing time with me and our incredible warm-hearted community of 3 Bookers around the world. I hope this (lengthy!) Best Of can keep you company on a long drive, late-night walk, or over some quiet moments through the holidays.

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

The Best of 2023: Neil Pasricha rewinds and reflects on the richness of reading

 
 
 
 

Chapter 130: Ralph Nader on corporate crime creating classist chaos

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“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 its core. But Ralph’s name isn’t on any of these things. Could be! ​Maybe should be​! But when you’ve spent nearly seven decades — seven decades! — as a tireless consumer advocate, fighting to achieve protections for a healthier and safer society for all, well, maybe you don't focus on credit. You just focus on change.

“Dissent is the mother of ascent,” Ralph reminds us in ​Chapter 130 of 3 Books​, one of many calls-to-arms issued by the four-time Presidential candidate and author of the new book ​The Rebellious CEO​ to our fiery global community of book lovers, writers, makers, sellers ... and librarians.

And while Ralph’s not running for President in 2024 — “We have a two-party duopoly not a competitive democracy" — he’s still working, day after day, calling for change. Sure, he’s turning 90 in February, joining his two active nonagenarian sisters, but he doesn’t feel old. Why not? Because, according to Ralph, “The only true aging is the erosion of one’s ideals."

I was very excited to sit down with Ralph and learn from his plentiful experience, wisdom, and ideas. On lots of things! Including de-computerizing elementary schools, shifting from a warmaking to peacemaking society, adding safety to social media, his ingredients for cognitive longevity, his current views of the famed Bush-Gore 2000 presidential election where he was called a "spoiler", and, of course, his 3 most formative books.

In an era of blaring, dopamine-spiking news and social media overwhelm this longform conversation with a true master awoke and inflamed my spirit on so many things. I think it'll do the same for you.

Let’s flip the page into Chapter 130 now...

Chapter 130: Ralph Nader on corporate crime creating classist chaos

CONNECT WITH Ralph

Ralph’s 3 Books

  • First book (9:40)

  • Second book (29:20)

  • Third book (1:11:10)

Quotes

  • We can be great peacemakers. The great warmakers can turn into peacemakers. But that’s got to start with peace movements all over the country. | Ralph Nader #3bookspodcast

  • Readers think and thinkers read. | Ralph Nader #3bookspodcast

  • You don’t see kids on sidewalks playing anymore. They’re all inside looking at screens. | Ralph Nader #3bookspodcast

  • The only true aging is the erosion of one’s ideals. | Ralph Nader #3bookspodcast

  • Dissent is the mother of ascent. | Ralph Nader #3bookspodcast

  • Abolish the Electoral College. It is totally atavistic. It was a big mistake by the founders. Nobody has ever voted for a presidential candidate in the United States. Because you vote for the electors, you don’t vote for the candidate. You vote for the electors who represent the candidate. | Ralph Nader #3bookspodcast

  • Who is going to save a society that aspires to be democratic instead of autocratic or fascistic? The answer is the people. And it doesn’t take that many of them. | Ralph Nader #3bookspodcast

  • The two parties thrive on divide and rule. That’s the way they raise money. And the press falls prey to it again and again. They don’t understand what their own polls show. These piteous ideologies don’t have as much meaning. | Ralph Nader #3bookspodcast

  • Get off the screens and hold real books in your hands. | Ralph Nader #3bookspodcast

  • There have been a lot of articles on bad CEOs, big companies, the cruel and avaricious wardens of the internet gulag. Facebook, Instagram, and Google, they’ve been sued in the European community for criminal anti-trust violations; there are lawsuits pending here. | Ralph Nader #3bookspodcast

  • There are over 42 million Americans still paying student debt into their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, even 70s. What other country would launch their young generations into a lifetime of debt? There’s no other Western country that does this. It’s because people in our country are not organized, they’ve turned inward, and they spend a lot of time fighting each other ideologically. | Ralph Nader #3bookspodcast

  • All empires devour themselves. | Ralph Nader #3bookspodcast

  • People, regardless of their political persuasions, when they are confronted by injustice, they all bleed the same color. | Ralph Nader #3bookspodcast

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Bookmark: Leslie Richardson on practicing peaceful parenting

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Hey everyone,
​
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 a parent when riding the waves through challenging times.

This recent interview Leslie did with Dajana Yoakley at the Self-Compassionate Parenting Summit was going viral on my family group texts and I knew I had to share it with you. Thank you to Dajana (delightinparenting.com) for letting us share this wonderful conversation touching topics like: the antidote to shame, the importance of guilt and regret, the 5 'R's' of good Repair, what to promise your child, growing your self-compassion muscle, resources for parents who want to build empathy, how to water the flowers not the weeds, how to help fighting siblings, practical strategies to process emotion as a parent, and much, much more...

I am very lucky to learn from Leslie on a daily basis. She's spent years as a community leader, inner-city public school teacher, trained parenting coach, and, of course, mother of our four children. Whether you're a new parent, old parent, or somewhere in between, I know you'll find this conversation as helpful, useful, and full of wisdom as I did. There are so many lessons in here I am still trying to learn. This is a conversation to help us all walk intentionally down the parenting path.

Bookmark: Leslie Richardson on practicing peaceful parenting

CONNECT WITH Leslie

Quotes

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Chapter 129: Sahil Bloom freezes at 4am to find fortune and finish first

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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 as a kind of ​Tim Ferriss​ or ​Robin Sharma​ for the next generation.

He grew up with a Harvard dad, Princeton mom, and Yale sister—but was coasting by in school and the resident jock. "My dad would come home and play catch before going back to work every night." His dad is ​David E. Bloom​, one of the world's most-renowned social scientists, who would take Sahil on business-class flights as a kid. "I would eat ice cream and watch movies but I watched my dad working on the speech he was delivering the next morning for the entire 12 hours."

Do we all need to become manically disciplined to compete in the world today? What are the benefits and what are the costs of winding ourselves up to our highest and fullest potential? And how do we measure that? The sun was setting out the window, servers setting up clinking cutlery on the tables next to us, as we drank non-alcoholic cocktails and talked: Parkinson's Law, 4am cold plunges, phone-free walks, impacting a billion lives, Dunkin Donuts, 5am writing routines, posting your kids faces online, Tim Cook, how to get a giant book deal, chasing opportunity vs energy, and, of course, Sahil Bloom's 3 most formative books... 3 Books remains ad-free, sponsor-free, commercial-free, and interruption-free. The best way you can support the show is just by listening and sharing it with family and friends. Listen directly at ​3books.co​, or by typing in "3 Books" into ​Apple Podcasts or Spotify​.

A massive thank you to Sahil Bloom for sharing his vulnerability, so many endless tools, and all that incredible wisdom. This is a conversation that has personally inspired and changed habits in my life. I hope it does the same for you.

Let’s flip the page into Chapter 129 now...

Chapter 129: Sahil Bloom freezes at 4am to find fortune and finish first

CONNECT WITH Sahil

Sahil’s 3 Books

  • First book (37:15)

  • Second book (1:37:42)

  • Third book (2:01:18)

Quotes

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