3 Books With Neil Pasricha

Do you ever have a book go viral through your family?   Your aunt reads it and tells everyone at dinner. The copy gets passed along. A few more dog ears show up. The spine gets cracked. And a year later half a dozen people have read it?   Well that's what happened in our family with Catherine Hernandez's wonderful debut novel Scarborough. I even just put it on my Best Of 2022 list!   Catherine Hernandez is an award winning Canadian author and screenwriter.   Born in Toronto, she is a proud queer woman of Filipino, Spanish, Chinese and Indian descent. She attended Ryerson University (now called Toronto Metropolitan University) for theatre but pretty quickly realized that she wanted to write. She started in magazines but soon branched off to books and plays.   So her first novel, Scarborough tells the story of a place -- a low-income, culturally diverse neighborhood east of Toronto -- my home and the fourth largest city in North America. Scarborough is a multi-voiced novel with unforgettable characters: Victor

Can you believe it?   We started 3 Books back on March 31, 2018 with the goal of counting down the 1000 most formative books in the world. We said we would hang out on the exact minute of every single new moon and every single full moon for nearly 15 straight years until we collected all 1000 of them. We set the intention of making this show an ‘intrinsically-motivated journey’ and pledged to doing it with no ads, no sponsors, no commercials, and no interruptions. To help guide ourselves we started collecting Values like no book shame, no book guilt, quit more to read more, and the books are the hero.   For the nearly five years we’ve been hanging out I have to say this journey has felt like a warm ray of sun in my life. I hope it’s felt the same for you. My goal with this annual “Best Of” is simply to roll back through the year together and pick out moments that made us pause, ponder, and savor.   Thank you for being a 3 Booker and spending time with this incredible community of book lovers spread across the

On the heels of launching my latest book, Our Book of Awesome, I’m enjoying the fellowship of two authors in my life — one of whom I met 22 years ago when I was in my final year at Queen’s.   Bounding into my life at the time came a young professor named Ajay Agrawal. And I mean bounding! He was cold calling left, right and center,  dancing around the room, and extremely theatrical. As you listen to him you’ll see why I found him so captivating and clairvoyant.    Professor Ajay Agrawal has won Professor of the Year seven times! He’s like Canada’s Adam Grant. He is the co-author of the bestselling book, Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence, named one of the best tech books of the year by Forbes, The New York Times and The Economist. His latest book has just come out and it is called, Power and Prediction, also co-authored with Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb.   Ajay is a tenured professor at Rotman, a research associate at The National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Ma

My new book Our Book of Awesome comes out today!   Grab a copy at www.ourbookofawesome.com

I got a phone call at 1-833-READ-A-LOT from Austin Wong in Oregon telling me we had to get Bryan Stevenson on 3 Books. I looked into Austin’s request and came upon Bryan's incredible bestseller Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. I listened to his 10-million plus hit TED Talk "We need to talk about an injustice" and approached the Equal Justice Initiative to have him on as a guest.   We finally found a time to have the conversation way down in Austin, Texas, where we were both scheduled to speak at the same conference. He came to my hotel room at 7am -- 7am! -- and we had a wonderful exchange in front of floor-to-ceiling glass windows with the sun brightening the Texas hills outside our window. I then went downstairs two hours later and watched Bryan captivate a room full of 700 people and get the loudest standing O I may have ever heard. This is a man on a mission. And his work and his words are so vital.   Bryan Stevenson has been representing capital defendants and death row prisoners in the de

Let’s flash back to Budapest Hungary in 1944 where a little baby boy named Gabor lay crying in his crib. He wouldn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. His mother called the doctor who said, “All my Jewish babies are crying”.   Nazis had taken over the country and killed Gabor’s grandparents in Auschwitz. Gabor’s dad was put into forced labor and his aunt was missing. Today we understand that Gabor was experiencing trauma through his mother’s stress.   His father thankfully returned after the war and when he was 12 years old, the family moved to Canada. Gabor went to the University of British Columbia before becoming a high school english teacher through the 60s and early 70s and then returned to university to become a doctor in 1977. Gabor spent over 20 years practicing family and palliative care medicine in the downtown Eastside of Vancouver -- a neighbourhood with one of the world's highest concentrations of drug addiction.   Today Gabor is the bestselling author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Close Encounters with A

Five years ago I was invited down to Brooklyn to speak at an event called The Shine Movement. It was an intriguing soul-refueling combination of meditation, drumming, giving, and a few words by me. The event attracted a fascinating subculture of people and I felt slightly entranced meeting the man and mind behind it all: Light Watkins.   Light Watkins is someone I consider a master of spirit and mind. He grew up in Montgomery, Alabama (with siblings Candy, Trey, and Dusty!) in the 70s and 80s, traveled the world as a fashion model, and then worked as one of the most prominent yoga instructors in LA (including teaching future princesses). Deepak Chopra calls his meditation insights "simple and profound." Today Light has taught meditation to thousands of people from all walks of life in retreats and workshops around the world. He is the author of three bestselling books: The Inner Gym, Bliss More, and Knowing Where to Look. And each morning since 2016, Light has been sending out a daily dose of inspiration emai

Oh hey.    It’s the person who just dropped their phone on the bus right when the driver hit the gas and now the phone’s sliding across the sandy floor all the way to the back… Neil. Neil Pasricha. And now it is finally time for our much-anticipated 3 Books chapter with the one and only ... Alie Ward.   Alie is the Sacramento-raised youngest of 3 girls who grew up in the 80s listening to DadWard deliver the morning news from the local radio station. She spent her childhood playing with bugs and just being told by her parents, “Come back by sundown and don’t get tetanus.”   Alie fell in love with science and studied science and film in college. An unlikely but prophetic mix. She went on to win an Emmy for being CBS’s correspondent for Henry Ford’s Innovation Nation with Mo Rocco and was a host for Did I Mention Invention? on CW. She’s a consulting producer for the Barack and Michelle Obama-produced Netflix show Ada Twist Scientist and appears in the Netflix science series Brainchild and the science channel’s H

I want to make you dizzy.   I want to make you look up into the sky and comprehend, maybe for the first time, the darkness that lies beyond the evanescent wisp of the atmosphere, the endless depths of the cosmos, a desolation by degrees   These two lines begin an incredible poem called “Disorientation”... by Katie Mack.   Did you feel dizzy reading it? I did. I do!   What is the universe? Where did it come from? What was here before it? How long has it lasted? How long will it last? How could it ... end?   Do you remember being a little kid and it maybe suddenly hitting you that there was this overwhelming gigantic thing we were a part of that was almost too vast to even comprehend? I feel like a lot of us have that feeling. Sort of reminds me of this super-short clip from Annie Hall where 8-year old Alvy Singer is taken to the doctor by his mother because the vastness of the cosmos has suddenly hit him.   Why isn't he doing his homework? "What's the point?" he concludes.   That's one reaction. But if you're

Happy Equinox!   Today the sun is directly above the equator so no matter where you are the day and the night are around equal length.   Two equinoxes and two solstices give us four pause points between our regular scheduled lunar programming to drop a little bookmark in the midst of our epic journey about formative books.   Today I want share the two-minute morning practice I use to begin my day.   So: A number of years ago I was going through a tough time and found that I needed a way to ground myself and center myself, as well as my thoughts, in the morning. I was waking up without focus, with a lot of anxiety, and wasn’t in a very positive mindset. So I started this practice and then made a YouTube video about it -- which is this entire bookmark. That little practice and video turned into a number of national TV spots and a cover story in Harvard Business Review and a number of other videos that the algorithms loved more than mine and now it's turned into a journal that has sold a few hundred thousand

Buckle up!   Today we are flying down to hot, hot Austin, Texas where we’re going to grab three chairs on the grackle-filled patio of Mi Madre’s restaurant and order ourselves some enchiladas and #0 breakfast tacos before having lunch with the wise and wonderful Austin Kleon.   Austin in Austin — a treat! Austin Kleon is “a writer who draws” and the author of a number of my favorite books including Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work, and Keep Going. His books are kalaidoscopic collage-patchwork delights, focus on themes of creativity, are massive bestsellers and have sold over a million copies.   Austin has a wonderful well of wisdom at AustinKleon.com which is home to his new great Substack community and his endlessly arresting Friday Newsletter. (One of the few newsletters I open and read religiously every week!)   We are going to talk about: writer and reader energies, the Japanese word tsundoku, violence in America, dumb questions, the power of doodling, nature as a metaphor, car problems, Austin Kleon’

Kevin Kelly is a man of many titles.   Krista Tippett calls him a ‘philosopher technologist’, Tim Ferriss calls him ‘the world’s most interesting man’, and Stephen J. Dubner says simply, “If I was the Queen, I would want Kevin Kelly on my Privy Council.”   Kevin Kelly is the first person — ever! — to be hired online. When? 1983. For what job? A fascinating one! We’re going to talk about it. He dropped out of college after a year to spend ten years backpacking around Asia. (His photos have just been released in a wonderful paperweight-dwarfing book called Vanishing Asia.) In the same breath he might drop stories of spending time with the Amish just as easily as chatting with Google’s founders in the late 90s. His online home, kk.org, is a fountain of deeply insightful and wise blog posts, such as, 1000 True Fans and his annual bits of birthday advice (which are coming out as a book next year!)   Kevin also edited The Whole Earth Catalog, founded The Hacker’s Conference, and is Co-chair of the Board of the Long

What is your erotic potential? And how might you ... increase it? Online erotica? Mindful masturbation? Solo nude mirror practices? The answer is all of the above and much, much more.   To help guide us through the erotic bramblebush (erotic bramblebush? erotic bramblebush!) we are very lucky to sit down with the wise and wonderful Rebecca S. Kay.   Rebecca is a Sex Educator with over ten years of experience. She's been a sexual advisor at Planned Parenthood, the Sexual Education Centre at the University of Toronto and the Brandon Centre in London, England. She has studied Surrogate Partner Therapy with UK based ICASA and is currently obtaining her certification in Somatic Sex Education and Sexological Bodywork through the Institute for the Study of Somatic Sex Education.   Rebecca's mission is to break down sexual stigma and build up people's relationships with their bodies, sexualities, and each other. She is guided by the belief that pleasure is an essential element of this work and that nurturing inti

Mohsin Hamid is one of the greatest writers of this generation.   He was born in 1971 in Lahore, Pakistan before moving to California at age 3 while his dad did a doctorate at Stanford. At age 9, in 1980, he moved back to Pakistan and remained there until he was 18 when he came back to the US to go to Princeton. He graduated summa cum laude and studied under novelists Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates. Mohsin's first novel, Moth Smoke (2000), told the story of an ex-banker and heroin addict in contemporary Lahore. His second, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), told the tale of a Pakistani man’s abandonment of his high-flying life in New York. (This was my first Mohsin Hamid book and I can't recommend it enough.) His third novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), is my favorite -- it's a fascinating exploration of urbanization and global economic transformation ... wrapped in the guise of a self-help book ... written in the second person. An incredible feat. His fourth novel, Exit West (2017)

Happy full moon!   Hard to believe we are halfway through our fifth year of this epic pilgrimage.   Are you up for going to the Bronx to hang out on a book bus? What!? Well, a few months ago I got an email from 3 Booker Karen where she said “Hi Neil. I love this! Have you seen it?” The this was this video, going viral, about a woman in the Bronx trying to get funding to start up a bookstore on wheels.   I couldn't believe that the 1.6 million residents of Manhattan have 82 bookstores whereas the 1.4 million residents of the Bronx had ... one. That's it! One bookstore. Well, Latanya grew up in the Bronx and decided to do something about that. So she founded Bronx Bound Books -- a "bookstore that comes to you." Today we're going to hang out with her and Jerry, who's the proud driver of this bus, that serves underserved communities across New York.   We'll be hanging out in the storage locker parking lot of the (freshly painted!) bus with the 5 train ripping over the tracks behind us. We'll learn how Latanya and

Alok ("A-loke") Vaid-Menon was born in College Station, Texas in 1991 to parents from India and Malaysia.   When they were young they’d dress up in their mom and sister’s clothes and dance around the living room for all their extended family, including their Auntie Urvashi (a gender non-confirming lesbian of color and national activist). The entire room would clap and cheer them on over syrupy bowls of gulab jamon. But when they performed a similar Bollywood routine onstage at the school talent show at age six ... they got laughed at by the entire school. Thus began a shame-filled odyssey through pretending to live as a boy -- or, at least, male-presenting -- for many years. And it also began an astounding personal dialogue and examination around gender which they're helping to lead globally today.   Alok graduated summa cum laude from Stanford University with a Bachelors and Masters of Arts in feminest, gender, and sexuality studies. Stuffing their post-graduation work into boxes doesn't work but if forced t

Happy Summer Solstice! (and happy Winter Solstice!)   Have you noticed we're tilting further toward the sun compared to every other time of the year? While our Australian, Chilean, and Easter Islander friends are tilting further away? This means is time for another 3 Book bookmark -- our relatively recent innovation to add a little spice to our 333 chapters along the way. Sometimes a bookmark will be me on another podcast, sometimes it'll be me giving a speech, and sometimes, like this time, it'll literally just be a YouTube video I made years ago that's somehow struck a nerve online. Please enjoy "How to help someone with anxiety or depression."   If you'd like to spread the 3 Books love, please share online or drop us a 10-second review at this link.   Enjoy the bookmark and I'll see you on the New Moon with Alok Vaid-Menon!

Nancy Pearl is a Superhero Librarian.   One of our values on 3 Books is “Librarians and booksellers are doctors for the mind” and while we’ve hung out with a number of booksellers, Nancy is somehow our very first librarian!   How did we find Nancy? Well, 3 Booker Cindy Sharek left us a gushing voicemail at 1-833-READ-A-LOT singing Nancy’s praises and we were convinced. She’s won the Librarian of the Year Award, received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, and, get this, has even been turned into an action figure!   Nancy is a frequent guest on NPR’s Morning Edition, has her own TV show called Book Lust with Nancy Pearl, and, as if all that wasn’t enough, is also a bestselling author with titles like George and Lizzie, Book Lust, and The Writer’s Library.   Nancy joined me from her home in Seattle and we talked about the role of the library today, the power of reading, the joy of meandering, the 4 Ps of books, which books help reluctant readers get their start, wha

Boniface Mwangi is a Nairobi-based social justice activist fighting for equity in his home country and abroad. In 2007 his photos of violence following the national election went viral and spawned global attention on political instability and corruption in Kenya.   He is the subject of the Sundance-award winning documentary Softie and the author of the photojournalism book Unbounded which has been hailed by Hilary Clinton and President Barack Obama.   Over two million people follow him @bonifacemwangi on Twitter and Facebook where he remarkably fearlessly calls attention to untold cases of abuse, corruption, and cronyism. For his work he has been beaten, arrested for “organizing a revolution”, and had his home burned down.   His 2014 TED Talk is called “The Day I Stood Alone” and in it he shares that he’s called a heckler, troublemaker, irritant, rebel, activist, and … the voice of the people. He continues to fight for justice every day alongside his wife Hellen Njeri Mwangi and their three children.   Bonif

Jonathan Haidt is the Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU’s Stern School of Business and the author of bestsellers The Righteous Mind, The Happiness Hypothesis and The Coddling of the American Mind. He has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, selected as one of the Top 50 Thinkers in the world, and delivered four TED Talks.   I was lucky to be introduced to Jon by our mutual friend Roger Martin, our guest in Chapter 68.   We sit at his kitchen table to discuss his then-in-process 8000-word Atlantic cover story slammer After Babel: How Social Media Dissolved the Social Mortar of Society and Made America Stupid, which doubles as a sneak peak on the book he’s working on now.   I hope your mind is stretched like taffy as mine was when you listen to Jon. There’s a reason Roger Martin warned me “You’ll have to keep up with him. He thinks pretty quickly.” And yet he is incredibly kind, patient, and humble. A consummate teacher.   We discuss: hive culture, the binary divide, the need for