​Nick Sweetman​ is one of Toronto's most prominent graffiti artists.

Last February I was walking down Lansdowne Avenue in Toronto with my friend ​Michael Bungay Stanier​, who was our guest back in ​Chapter 48​, and as we strolled under a giant bridge I saw a giant ... well, it looked like a photo! But it wasn't a photo. It was a massive spray-painted image of a ​Hooded Merganser​, and at the very bottom corner was a signature that said "Nick Sweetman."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who else loves David Sedaris?

I discovered him in 1997 when an old mentor/editor at Golden Words, my college humor papers, suggested I pick up his book 'Naked' to become a better writer myself.

I found the essays sardonic, witty, uncannily observational, and laugh-out-loud funny. I couldn't believe how gently and elegantly he wrote about topics ranging from his obsessive compulsive tics to dropping out of school to (in the namesake essay) visiting a nudist colony.

Like millions of people around the world I became obsessed with David Sedaris. I’ve read all of his books—'Me Talk Pretty One Day' (2000) being close to my heart and 'Calypso' (2018) being a recent fave.

I even went to see him speak at Massey Hall in Toronto which is where I learned—first-hand!—that he waits hours and hours after every talk to happily chat and sign books from anybody willing to wait for him. (In my case my phone died about two hours before I had a chance to say hi. Years ago we had a sixty-second conversation about pie and he wrote 'Neil, I am so happy you are alive' in my book.)

In this classic chapter of 3 Books—the all-time #1 most popular conversation ever on the podcast—I squeeze into the back of David's limo from the Four Seasons hotel in Toronto en route to the CBC building and then up to his bookstore event at the Indigo at Yorkdale.

What was supposed to be a tight 20 minute chat evolved into a beautiful hour and a half conversation covering topics like the secret to getting old, artistic integrity after commercial success, why artists have a hole in their hearts, and, of course, the incredible David Sedaris's 3 most formative books.

On this New Year's Eve let's flip the book back to Chapter 18...

Happy Solstice!   As we do every December solstice it's time for our 7th Annual "Best Of" episode of 3 Books.   3 Books is our 22-year-long conversation to uncover and discuss the 1000 most formative books in the world.   This year we sat with ​academics at Oxford​ to ​bus drivers in St. Louis​, with ​Jonathan Franzen​ in Santa Cruz to ​Oliver Burkeman​ in the North York Moors, with the ​world's largest bookseller​ and ​Amazon union organizers​, with ​Oscar nominees​ to a ​guy who dresses up all day as as a duck​.   This year I've changed tack and made the "Best Of" highly concentrated—under 50 minutes long!—with little snippets from our diverse guests to provide reflection, provoke your thinking, and help to set intentions for 2025 and beyond.   Thank you for being a 3 Booker and spending time with this incredible community of book lovers spread across the world.   Let’s stop to reflect and then keep enjoying the ride....

Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world with over a million employees in the U.S. alone. A monolith responsible for trillions of dollars of revenue through retail, entertainment, and infrastructure.   But Chris Smalls took it on anyway.   Chris had worked at Amazon for 5 years before he was fired in March 2020 after leading a walkout at Amazon's Staten Island warehouse to protest pandemic working conditions.   "We all got radicalized at some point in our lives," he told me. "My life changed forever when I got fired from Amazon."   Chris used that motivation to work with his former colleagues to try to unionize the warehouse. The first attempt failed, but in March 2022 the vote passed, and it became the first Amazon warehouse in the United States to be unionized.   As of today Amazon has not come to the bargaining table and is pursuing multiple legal actions to avoid recognizing the union, including challenging the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board.   What's going on?   I flew down to Hackensack, New Jersey to find out.   What really happened at that warehouse?   And what happens next?   Chris filled me in on life after the union drive, why he's been traveling the globe, his experience being under surveillance by Amazon and the police, what it's like leading protests at Jeff Bezos house, and why the Amazon Labor Union has recently affiliated with the Teamsters.   Chris calls bullshit on a lot of what we hear about labor organizing and reports on what's happening in the street. What can we learn from socialist countries? Why is the U.S. government reluctant to enforce antitrust regulations? What does fair human work look like in an increasingly algorithmic and AI-dominated society?   Pull up a white plastic chair beside us in Chris's backyard as he leans back behind dark shades and plumes of smoke to tell us how working at Amazon is like slavery, what's happening with human jobs as automation skyrockets, whether unions can be effective today, what politicians represent the working class, his 3 most formative books, and much, much more...   Let’s flip the page to Chapter 143 now...

Once you find purpose, and once you find style… what’s left? Beauty. What’s left is finding and putting out beauty into the world.   There are not many writers who have genuinely figured this out … but one of them is Mitch Albom.

Mitch is the author of '​Tuesdays with Morrie​,' the bestselling memoir of all time, as well as '​The Five People You Meet in Heaven​' and his latest bestseller '​The Little Liar​' which came out in 2023 and debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

His books have sold over 40 million copies.

Mitch just doesn’t turn off. He’s like a Tasmanian Devil. He’s hosting a ​radio show​, he’s on TV, he’s writing columns in the ​Detroit Free Press​, he’s a musician, he’s even running an ​orphanage in Haiti​.

Mitch is full of energy and life and moves quickly and talks quickly … and so we talked about that. We go deep into why he moves through life so fast. We unpack his relationship with Morrie and talk about how I actually misinterpreted parts of the book.

We talk about what the worst thing you can say to an artist is (which he learned from Maya Angelou) and what the true enemy of getting things done is (and surprise, it’s not time or energy).

Fly down to Detroit with me and let's take the elevator way, way up the 96-year-old ​Fisher Building​. Let's enjoy the wise Mitch Albom sharing his 3 most formative books with us in this classic chapter.

Let's flip the page to Chapter 15 now...

Are you ready for a writing masterclass from one of the best self-help writers in the world?   After graduating from Cambridge, Oliver Burkeman wrote the popular column “This Column Will Change Your Life” in ‘The Guardian’ for over 15 years sharing his real-world, real-time poetic exploration of the self-help universe. In 2021 he published 'Four Thousand Weeks,' a literary examination of how we live today. Mark Manson (our guest in Chapter 28) called it “a reality check on our culture’s crazy assumptions around work, productivity and living a meaningful life” and Adam Grant (our guest in Chapter 72) called it “the most important book ever written about time management."   Oliver's work is much more about how to live a good life in the limited time we have than the system and hacks you find in other popular productivity books, and he’s just released a wonderful follow-up called 'Meditations For Mortals.' This book offers the reader 28 short chapters meant to be read one a day for 28 days, a quiet evening ritual with Oliver's potent words.   Naturally with such a talented guest, this Chapter dives deep into writing craft. How does a productivity writer focus on meaningful work? What does Oliver always have in his pocket on a walk to help him write? And what is his dream writing schedule?   But we also mine Oliver's brilliant mind in wide conversations that ask: What are the signs of living in a totalitarian state? What is Jungian analysis? Is promotion offensive? And why does Oliver wear earplugs even in silence?   Oliver Burkeman is my favorite self-help writer so it was a great pleasure that he joined me on 3 Books. Join me to learn how Oliver manages his writing projects, his 3 most formative books, the best question to ask before making big decisions, why mess is necessary, and much, much more.   Let’s flip the page to Chapter 142 now...

Let's jump into the backseat of Vishwas Aggrawal's Uber and take a trip you won't forget. This is a story about setting your own standards in a world constantly hammering us into "human resources." This is a story about setting your own winning lines in a world that wants us to be widgets. This is a story about raising the bar for yourself and deeply valuing the human connection and love that has the potential to exist between every single one of us. Uber has no formal leaderboard, reward mechanism, or pay-for-performance tied to driver rating.   So why would Vish care? Why would he care about giving thousands of rides and pouring in day after day of high-end customer services to establish an incredible 4.99 rating? Why would he clean his mats between every trip, only eat raw vegetables in his car to avoid odors, and develop masterful scripts that help riders feel deeply valued in the middle of their busy days? Why bother? Join me in the backseat of Vish's Uber as we slowly circle closer and closer to what we're really playing for in our short time on the planet.   We discuss the books that shaped Vish from his upbringing in India to his journey to give his daughter a better education on the other side of the world... even if it meant starting back at the beginning. Vishwas Aggrawal is one of the most engaging and inspiring people I've ever met. After you listen to his story in this classic 3 Books chapter, I hope you feel the same way.   Let's flip the page to Chapter 7 now...

James Daunt grew up in England the child of a diplomat—moving countries, tasting cultures, living a life with books and history at its core. He lived in Turkey and Cyprus before coming back to England for boarding school. After studying history at Cambridge, he didn’t know what he wanted to do, so the Career Services department pointed him towards investment banking across the sea in New York City. He actually liked the job but his girlfriend thought it was incredibly boring and encouraged him to quit. He thought, "How do I combine my love of reading and my love of travel into doing something wholly different?" The first Daunt Books independent bookstore opened on Marylebone High Street in London soon after. Unlike nearly every book store in the world he organized his books … by country. Not genre! But by place. Bookselling isn't an easy business! Lots of stores were going belly-up and profits were meager but over time he found a special knack for it. He went to bookselling school, paid fairly, and took mentorship and development seriously. When big bookstore chains started falling in the wake of Amazon, and Waterstones was essentially the only national chain left in the UK, a wealthy entrepreneur bought it and asked James to lead it. He turned the concept of a chain bookstore on its head, suggesting that stores would do better if the head office minimized itself and helped the booksellers operate like their own independent bookstores. Gone were planograms! Head office mandates! He tore up lucrative publisher deals spelling out which books to force onto the front tables to guarantee bestseller lists! He ripped up the rulebook completely. And what happened? Sales shot up. The chain survived ... then thrived. When the new owners of Waterstones bought Barnes & Noble—the largest bookstore chain in the world—they asked James to lead it, too. Today, James Daunt is the biggest bookseller on the planet overseeing nearly 1000 bookshops including his now-9 store Daunt Books indie chain, over 300 Waterstones, and over 600 Barnes & Nobles (including 65 new ones this year!!). I was very excited when James said "yes" to coming on 3 Books. We go deep on learning from history, the role of bookstores in society, his most formative books, the best place to find a date, the key to customer service, leading from behind, and much, much more....   Let’s flip the page to Chapter 141 now...

Did you grow up with Judy Blume?   My mom says I “found my voice” reading 'Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing' to my sister in the bathtub when I was a little kid. Well, I grabbed that tattered copy and carried it with me down to Key West, Florida where I had the extreme privilege of sitting down with the one and only Judy Blume.   Judy and I met on a hot and sweaty day in her Books & Books bookstore … where she works! I’m not joking. Step off your cruise ship and Judy Blume will ring up a copy of 'It Starts With Us' if you like. We grabbed a little circle table, set it up in front of the bestseller wall, and then talked about her most formative books.     In this classic 3 Books chapter, Judy and I discuss censorship, why sexy scenes should be kept in books, how to get kids to love reading, the role of bookstores in a community, and a surprise reveal on which book Judy says is the only one she has left to write...

“Happiness is a choice.”   Heard that saying before? Betting you have. We all have! It’s almost cliché. And yes, while research shows that a good deal of our happiness really is a choice, the saying gives us a “what” without a “how.”     And if your life is anything like mine, you have a million things going on—emaisl! texts! driving kids to soccer practice! finding time for date night!—and you need a "how" that can get you there fast, especially when your night time angst bubbles up, that dangerous mind that rears its ugly head after the dust of the day has settled and your resilience is low.      So in this special Fall Equinox Bookmark, I want to share this simple—dead simple, ruthlessly simple—system to help get you back on track. All you need is two minutes around the dinner table with your family or lying in bed to scroll back through your day. It's like wiping a wet shammy over the blackboard of your mind, and is backed up by science, too.     Ready to wind down your brain with intention? Let's flip the page...