3 Books With Neil Pasricha

Early episodes of Sesame Street from the late 1960s show five-year-olds walking streets alone, talking to strangers, and playing on vacant lots, but when those episodes were released on DVD years later a warning was added at the beginning saying “The following is intended for adult viewing only and may not be suitable for young viewers.” I read about this in ‘Stolen Focus’, the massive bestseller by Johann Hari, our guest in Chapter 121. Johann went on in his book to discuss how ‘the confinement of our children’ is contributing to our plummeting ability to focus and he brought the idea to light wonderfully in his book by spotlighting the activism of Lenore Skenazy. Lenore Skenazy is a Jackson Heights, New York mom of two who wrote a 2008 column for The New York Sun titled ‘Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride The Subway Alone.’ The article set off a huge media firestorm where Lenore was dubbed “America’s Worst Mom.” Undeterred, Lenore went on to coin the phrase “free-range kids”, write a bestselling book by the sam

I’ve been lucky enough to be invited onto ‘The Social’ (@TheSocialCTV) a few times. Do you know the show? It’s like ‘The View’, but Canadian, with four dynamic hosts sharing fast-paced opinions in a raucous, bombastic, high-energy exchange. Producers hand you the topics of the day about 30 minutes before you go on — formed by that morning’s early headlines — and then it’s time to form an opinion and get ready to, no big deal, share it live with millions of people a few minutes later. Definitely one of the most challenging jobs I’ve ever had and I can’t tell you how much I admire people like Melissa Grelo, Cynthia Loyst, Lainey Lui, and Jess Allen, who do it day after day. Since I’m guest-hosting it’s usually me onstage with three women — while one’s away — and we end up having full-on laugh attacks. Well, one day, early in the pandemic, during the “live from everybody’s basement” era, I showed up ready to go on and discovered I was one of *two* guest hosts. The other was Jully Black! Canada’s R&B Queen.

“All the time focus on the positive things. Not the negative things. Then the karma, it will come, it will reflect to you.” Meet Chef Osama Harwash and Chef Houssam Harwash. Two brothers who came to Canada as Syrian refugees and rented a food stall to begin crafting traditional recipes learned from four generations of Syrian chefs. Listen as they share lessons learned from their sheep-farming great-grandfather at the fall of the Ottoman Empire and then tell us how mint and cardamom help make the perfect lemonade for sweltering Torontonians. I was riding past a tight row of graffiti-covered food stalls on an absolutely scorching day in downtown Toronto when I spotted these two gregarious brothers wedged into a tiny four-foot by four-foot booth smiling, wishing “happy days to their brothers and sisters” while making them chicken shawarmas, beef kofta plates, and grape leaves for a non-stop line of faithful fans. A 4.9 rating with over 500 reviews on Google since they opened doesn’t lie.   But what makes them

Do you have book festivals where you live?    I feel like book festivals are such a sign of healthy community. Long lines to check out independent manga. Local bookstores sponsoring stages where authors answer questions. People walking by dressed as Harry Potter and wearing "The book was better" T-shirts. And, of course, just the energy that comes from thousands and thousands of readers walking around carrying bags full of books. And the air pulsating with thousands of people all talking about books at the same time...   For the past 34 years -- minus a few years off for covid -- the incredible Word On The Street book festival has taken place in downtown Toronto. A giant, rapturous IRL love affair with the written word featuring all kinds of indie publisher and indie bookstore booths, the smell of churros in the air, and many intimate stages under big umbrellas in front of plastic chairs -- where people line up to meet, ask questions, and get a book signed from their favorite local author (check out the wonde

Martellus Bennett is reimagining imagination.  He’s perhaps best known in cultural press for his championship NFL career which included the famous Super Bowl LI comeback where his Patriots were down 28-3 at halftime and rallied for a 34-28 win in OT. But Martellus, who goes by Marty now as well as the new moniker Mr.TOMONOSHi, served as starting Tight End and recorded five catches for 62 yards as well as drawing the key Pass Interference penalty that set up the game-winning touchdown. He said afterwards he didn’t know they won. “I'm telling you, bro. I was in flow. Like, I don't know what the score is, right? I had no idea.” There may be a few reasons for that flow experience, though. Marty has always been a truly broad and dimensional thinker who questions and examines everything. Why? “I had parents who let us talk at the kitchen table.” As a result, he’s still only in his 30s and has just massively varied interests and pursuits. “I’m always reading, searching, asking why, what if, or how?”  Just as likel

Happy new moon! Here's a story and a snip from my appearance on The Rich Roll Podcast. Listen to the full show right here:   YouTube   Apple   Spotify

“Do you realize what you’ve done? You’ve taken the smell out of shit!” Suzy Batiz says this is what her husband Hector said — shocked! amazed! — when he realized the strange essential oil spray she’d been obsessively working on late into the night for nine straight months really and actually … worked. Today Suzy is founder of billion-dollar-valued Poo-Pourri and supernatural. But the endless topline superlatives surrounding her — EY Entrepreneur of the Year, ranked #240 on Forbes “Richest Self-Made” Woman list just above Serena Williams — actually mask the more startling, complex, inspiring story underneath. Sure, there’s no denying the wealth — after all, we did this interview in the 15,000 square foot church she lives in — but Suzy isn’t motivated by money. Never has been! She’s motivated by freedom, by energy, by making, by love — and by leading and sharing a life of inspiration. I flew down to Dallas, Texas and sat with my friend Suzy Batiz to understand how exactly she navigated a lifetime of poverty, ab

Penn and Kim Holderness are a beam of light in the world.    If you aren't one of the billion people -- like, an actual billion -- who've watched their viral videos, well then, let me quickly usher you over to their YouTube Channel or Instagram feed. From their original 2013 "#XMAS JAMMIES" singing Christmas card (parodied by Kristin Wiig and team on SNL) to their truly astounding "Hamilton Mask-Up Medley" at the peak of the pandemic -- well, it's all right there. Laughs, connection, love offered as endless simple and reorienting gifts in our disorienting world.    I was flattered a few months ago to be invited on their intimate, high-energy Holderness Family Podcast. They have such unique chemistry and I didn't know what to expect. Well, they came in hot! Pushing past the typical "Tell us your story" stuff and getting right into the meatier "Come on, really?" questions that helped us fall into a deeper, richer conversation covering so much ground in (somehow) a wee 58 minutes.  Listen to Kim, Penn, and I di

Diluting central news sources. Constantly narrowing echo chambers. An ever-fracturing sense of community. It’s easy to feel disconnected from each other right now — and from what’s collectively real and true in the world. We need people and places that help unify us and bring us together.  “Fear displaces faith and vice versa,” says Tank Sinatra on Chapter 122 of 3 Books. “And laughter displaces everything. It’s impossible to be sad when you’re laughing.” It's no wonder more than 10 million people follow Tank — the world’s #1 meme creator. At @tank.sinatra he shares with 3 million people a photo of Heath Ledger as The Joker, with stringy wet hair, in the nurse’s outfit, in the middle of a road, with smoke and fire in the background together with the caption “The CEO of Silicon Valley Bank after selling $4 million worth of his stock the day before collapse.” At @tanksgoodnews he posts a photo of a woman holding a hot water bottle over her stomach with the Spanish flag and the tag “Spain just granted worker

I felt trapped early in the pandemic. I normally walk every day in downtown Toronto. I write on park benches and in distant coffee shops and love popping into bookstores and bumping into friends. I am very privileged in that I get to travel one or two days a week, too. But then: the pandemic. It hit hard and I was suddenly sitting in a makeshift office upstairs. Staring at four blank walls and peering out a glass door into the trees and electrical wires outside. And then I saw it. A bird! A bird I'd never seen before! It was ... a robin? No. Way bigger than a robin? And the chest was red but ... the rest looked different. Some white. Was it a woodpecker? I ran downstairs, got some binoculars, and then downloaded the Merlin ID app a friend had told me about. Within a couple of minutes more of looking and using the app: I had it! It was a Rose Breasted Grosbeak. Later that day my wife and I put together a (desperately needed) trampoline in the backyard ... and the bird didn't fly away. The next day I noticed

Happy full moon, everybody!    Do you feel like the world today -- our culture today -- is pulling us further and further away from things that matter? Like deep in-person, real-life, human connections. Like the ability to focus on things that require deep thought, care, and time -- like reading books. Are you feeling yourself sucked into the algorithmic abyss -- where endless dings and pings and alerts and notifications pull us into echo chambers that prey on biological tendencies beyond our comprehension?   You may remember our chat on 3 Books six chapters ago with Dr. Gabor Maté who calls our culture today "toxic" and the record-levels of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and suicide rates we have today. So what do we do about it?   Well, our guest today is Johann Hari who will help me, help you, help all of us rekindle what is important in our life. How? By taking back our focus and our attention.    Some history: I first heard about Johann back on Chapter 49 with Dr. Andrea Sereda. One of her 3 most forma

Happy new moon, everybody!   I have a very special Oscar Encore episode for you today -- in celebration of our guests little-film-that-could EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE scoring 11 (11!) Oscar nominations. Yes, the Oscars goes down in a few weeks on March 12th and it just seems worth pausing on how this remarkable non-sequel, non-superhero, paltry-budged, genre-smashing flick is suddenly poised for recognition in categories like (no biggie!) Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress.... and on and on. Some history! Way back in November 2021 I was in theatres in downtown Toronto and saw a preview for EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE. The trailer blew me away and when I got home I remembered at the beginning it said "A Film By Daniels". Daniels? Who's Daniels!? I started googling and discovered it was two guys named Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert who have been making films together since college. They'd made one feature film before calle

Happy Snow Moon, everybody!   I've been thinking a lot again about what makes life important.   I'm convinced it's just not social media. News media. The endless firehose of negativity being blasted at our brains out there. No. It's not that. It's the curtains we pull around ourselves and our loved ones to create and hold space to be our truest selves.   We’ve only got 30,000 days here and they are always, always, always fleeting. So let's make sure on 3 Books we create and hold space to talk about and celebrate what makes life sweet. Let's always plumb into the depths of inspiring and stimulating characters and people who share their wisdom with us and feel like good company on our path.   To mark the Snow Moon we are going to be sharing company today with Timothy Goodman, one of the most open hearted, vulnerable, and artistic souls I think we've ever had on the show. How can I introduce you to him? Well, if you have this month’s issue of Time magazine Timothy drew the cover! If you live in New York City and

Happy new moon!    Today I’m sharing a recent conversation I had with veteran journalist Matt Galloway for his show The Current.   Hope you enjoy! 

What is your favorite novel?   It's a hard question. A big question! A question that makes most people hmmm for a while before they get to an answer. If they get to an answer! But I think I know mine. My favorite novel is A Fraction of a Whole by Steve Toltz.   First, the book came to me in an interesting way. I walked into wonderful indie bookstore Type on Queen Street West in downtown Toronto a couple days before my wedding to Leslie. I was looking for a good book to take on my honeymoon. (Insert obvious joke: "You wanted to read on your honeymoon?" But yes. I did. We did!)   I spent two or three hours with incredible bookseller Kalpna who painstakingly picked book after book off the shelf working through my way-too-long list of criteria: the book couldn't be too heavy, it couldn't be too *physically* large, but it also had to last the trip because I only had one tiny bag so, you know, it had to simultaneously be fairly dense. And it had to be fiction. And it had to be fast-paced. And it would be good if i

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