3 Books With Neil Pasricha

This is a very unique chapter!   It is a double chapter, in a way.   To begin with I was so lucky to interview Susan Cain at our very first live chapter of 3 Books at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. So many 3 Bookers came out and celebrated on a snowy night just before the pandemic began. (We had no idea!) At the time Susan was deep in the throes of writing her new book Bittersweet: How Sorrow...

The best movie I have seen in years is called Everything, Everywhere All At Once and it was written and directed by Daniels. Daniels? Yes, Daniels. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, to be specific. Two brilliant artists who met in college and began stitching together short films before working on music videos like Turn Down For What by DJ Snake and Lil John (over a billion views), Simple Song by T...

Welcome to Chapter 100!   Thank you for four years of this journey and conversation.   To mark the move into triple digits I thought we could do a reflection and visioning discussion … back in the basement with Leslie just like we did in Chapter 1 .   We will discuss some highs and lows, lessons learned, current podcast challenges, and some dreams for the future.   Thank you for being a 3 Booker a...

Welcome to Bookmark #5.   Last year we started experimenting with the idea of releasing four extra episodes during the year to mark the spring and fall equinoxes, as well as the summer and winter solstices.   You may recall we released my guest appearance on Nora McInerny's wonderful podcast, Terrible Thanks for Asking , we then released my SXSW Talk: Building Trust in Distrustful Times , we follo...

Just dial 416-482-5665 and chances are Doug Miller will pick up the phone at Doug Miller Books, an incredible stuffed-to-the-ceiling bookstore that represents a mere sliver of the over 500,000-book collection of self-described bibliomaniac Doug Miller. Why do I say chances are? Well, Doug works in his shop 364 days a week. He comes mid-morning every day and shovels the front walks of six of his ne...

I'm very pleased, privileged, and proud to introduce or re- introduce you to the sunbeaming sage that is IN-Q.   IN-Q is an award winning poet, multi-platinum song-writer and the bestselling author of the book Inquire Within which I highly, highly recommend. It deserves an even bigger spotlight! It's a wonderful collection of IN-Q's poetry. Poetry? Oh yes. Oh, oh yes.   His achievements include be...

Are you a passionate fan of Design Matters like I am? It's one of the world's oldest podcasts and one of the best shows out there. Debbie Millman scratches her insatiable curiosity and explores what it means to live a rich, fulfilling, intentional life with luminaries like Brené Brown , Cheryl Strayed , Brandon Stanton , Seth Godin , and, of course, Roxane Gay . (All guests of 3 Books , too! Clear...

David Cheesewright is the former CEO of Walmart International.   In that role he led over a million people, across over fifty different businesses, and nearly thirty countries.   A behemoth! Both the job and the company. How much of a behemoth? Well, Walmart is literally # 1 overall on the Fortune 500 which means no company in the entire world made more money than they did.   How did a small town...

"Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny? Please do not pretend to know what I am talking about."   So begins a 2007 Vanity Fair article by Christopher Hitchens called "Why Women Aren't Funny".   College student Bess Kalb picked up a copy of the magazine, read it on her train ride from New York to Rhode Island, and, in her words, "became radicalized." She decided the...

Daniel Torjman is beautiful.   And so is his incredible store 18 Waits .   Two years ago I was walking down Queen Street West in Toronto and I noticed a couple nice men's shirts in a window and stepped inside. I was greeted by an old hardwood floor, jazz playing on a record, classic literature on display, and an incredibly curated assortment of shirts, coats, bandanas, and hats. I started chatting...

Can you believe it?   We started 3 Books back on March 31, 2018 with the goal of counting down the 1000 most formative books in the world. We said we would hang out on the exact minute of every single new moon and every single full moon for nearly 15 straight years until we collected all 1000 of them. We set the intention of making this show an 'intrinsically-motivated journey' and pledged to doin...

Hello 3 Bookers!   Let's close off our fourth year of 3 Books by sitting down with Chris Hadfield at his kitchen table. His five-month old puppy New Henry is sniffling and occasionally barking on his lap. Fat snowflakes slowly drift down outside the big window above the shelf full of succulents. And lying between us is a stack of Christmas cards that Chris is signing along with my copy of his bran...

Were you one of the 500 million people who read Choose Your Own Adventure books?   When I was growing up in the 80s these books were at the front of every library in every elementary school. Or, at least, in mine! I know for sure the kids at Sunset Heights Public School in Oshawa, Canada all went gonzo for them.   If you don't know Choose Your Own Adventure , the books are written in the second pe...

Welcome to Chapter 91 of 3 Books!   How are you holding up in 2021? It has been a wild 20 months.   You've been telling me you are thankful for the show and I have been telling you I'm thankful for you. I appreciate your notes, your phone calls, your letters, and your reviews and we travel and meet across space and time — meeting up whenever the moon above is is completely full or completely empty...

Welcome.   Have a seat on the couch. Plug your headphones in for the dishes. Strap in for the long car ride. Let's chill for a bit.   I'm so happy to have you as part of the 3 Books community. Welcome 3 Bookers! Welcome, Cover to Cover Club Members! And welcome, Secret Club Members. Thank you for being part of our ridiculous conversation over nearly 15 years. I was in my late 30s when I started 3...

I was riding my bike in downtown Toronto the other day and rolled past my old neighborhood a couple blocks north of Lake Ontario. And as I was riding I noticed my old burger joint! The whole neighborhood has changed — parking lots have become condos, motels have become hotels — but the burger joint has survived. I was excited so I locked my bike up in the middle of the concrete jungle and popped m...

I love Mel Robbins. I am one of the 30 million people who've viewed her TED Talk "How to stop screwing yourself over" and I'm one of the two million people who have a copy of The Five-Second Rule on my bookshelf. If you asked me five years ago if I'd have a book on my shelf telling people to simply count backwards from five to get out of bed, ask somebody out, or leave a toxic relationship well …...

Happy Fall Equinox Northern Hemisphere people. And Happy Spring Equinox to our friends south of the equator!   Are you ready for a new Bookmark? Just as a reminder, I'm experimenting with offering you a Bookmark four times this year. A little place to put the marginilia of this show.   Six months ago on the Spring equinox we had our first bookmark with my guest appearance on Nora McInerny's award...

I grew up reading the Choose Your Own Adventure series but it had been years — decades even! — since I'd read a game book. Then I stumbled upon the fascinating book Meanwhile by Jason Shiga and was completely sucked back into this incredible genre.   When you open Meanwhile you are a young boy on his way to an ice-cream shop. If you get vanilla? You go home. The end! But if you get chocolate? You...

Do you ever feel book guilt?   Do you ever feel book shame?   Do you ever feel bad when you quit a book?   Do you ever feel like the books you read aren't 'hard' enough?   These are common feelings that I know I've had. I say we need to get rid of all the book shame and book guilt we learn as we grow up because there really is no right or wrong way to read. We need to escape the book exhaustion th...

Happy Sturgeon Moon, everybody! And happy Blue Moon, too! Jane McGonigal joins us on Chapter 85 of 3 Books to help us celebrate.   Let's start off with a question.   What would you do if you jumped out of a desk chair and slammed your head directly into an open cupboard door which gave you a massive concussion that left you bedridden for months? Oh, and you were told "No reading, no writing, no vi...

Do you have a therapist?   Do you meet up with someone on a regular basis to open up, talk about yourself, and get into the weeds of your emotions? Maybe the ones you can articulate, the ones you can't articulate, the ones you're angry about having, the ones you're confused about having.   I started seeing a therapist about 10 years ago.   After the loss of my marriage and my best friend, it was s...

"Our technologies, markets and cultural institutions, once forces for human connection and expression, now isolate and repress us. It is time to remake society together, not as individual players, but as the team we actually are: Team Human."   That little paragraph is printed right on the cover of the latest book by Douglas Rushkoff.   Do you know Douglas Rushkoff?   He's a vivid, big-thinking au...

What was your first Tarantino experience?   I was thirteen years old in an unfinished basement watching Reservoir Dogs on VHS and can still remember how shook my friends and I were when we saw it.   Was that your first Tarantino experience? Or was it Pulp Fiction ? Jackie Brown ? Kill Bill ? Inglourious Basterds ? Django Unchained ? The Hateful Eight ? Once Upon a Time in Hollywood ?   Well, the T...

I discovered Dave Eggers in the late 90s when the Internet was all belts and pinions and the only two comedy websites that I remember reading were The Onion and McSweeney's . The Onion's site was the notorious outcropping of a campus comedy newspaper from Wisconsin and McSweeney's was founded by a publishing dynamo Whiz Kid named Dave Eggers who'd worked at places like Wired and Might Magazine , w...