Have you heard of a book called '​The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck​'?

I’m guessing you have since it’s sold, uh, 16 million copies since it came out in 2016. There hadn't been a non-fiction book that big and disruptive in a long, long time…

Mark’s meteoric success is the product of a giant mind which has mastered the art of taking the biggest, densest books on the planet and then simmering them down into simple, profanity-laced models and stories that hit you like a ton of bricks.

The world is so loud! So busy. So full. Everything is screaming at us to buy this, buy that, do this, do that. You know what we need in this wild world? Guides! Clear voices. People who give us simple and practical advice that we can follow and put into place…

Mark Manson is one of those guides for me and millions of others. I follow his popular ​YouTube channel​ and read his ​simple and punchy tweets​.

In this classic 3 Books chapter, in Mark's cramped hotel room at The Drake Hotel in Toronto, we go deep on building trust in an era of clutter, why Mark poo-poos self-help gurus, what is the root problem with the 'advertising model,' why Mark played video games for months after the success of his book, what his writing routines and principles are, and, of course, his 3 most formative books…

Let's flip the page back to Chapter 28 now...

Let's go for a walk!

 

I've sometimes imagined 3 Books as a long walk with a friend. So today—let's take one! Nickisha moved to Toronto from Jamaica when she was 16 to reunite with her mom and after working as a travel agent she broke out on her own to run a successful business full of fresh air, exercise, community, and lots of love.

 

I sometimes see Nickisha with five, six, or seven dogs around her—giving them the highlight of their day! Tongues wagging. Skip in their step. Motoring around town clocking 100km on foot each week!

 

One of our traditions on 3 Books is doing podcasts outside from ​Chapter 27​ with Robin the Bartender on the open patio of Bar Raval in Toronto to ​Chapter 106​ with Alok Vaid-Menon in Central Park in New York City to ​Chapter 131​ with J. Drew Lanham while birdwatching in South Carolina...

 

Another tradition here is exploring stories from people who fill our lives but aren't often represented by our screen-based culture full of politicians and billionaires. We vote with our attention so it's fun turning off the same faces to hang with people like ​Vishwas the Uber Driver​, ​Shirley the Nurse​, and ​Soyoung the Variety Store Owner​.

 

So strap on your running shoes! Throw in some headphones! And let's go for a walk with Nickisha to discuss urban density, pedestrian-driver relations, safe supply, the dog walking business, immigration assimilation, Danielle Steele, and, of course, Nickisha's 3 most formative books.

 

Let's flip the page to Chapter 147 now...

No one does it like Angie.

Racial tensions, police shootings, citizen uprisings. Does this sound like the setting of a YA novel? How about three of them? Her debut '​The Hate U Give,​' her sophomore release '​On The Come Up​,' and her third '​Concrete Rose​' were all on The New York Times bestseller list, and her fantasy middle school-level book '​Nic Blake and the Remarkables: The Manifestor Prophecy​' was *also* an instant New York Times bestseller!

In this classic chapter of 3 Books, we sat down together at the busiest hotel in downtown Toronto on the tail end of Angie’s 15-city book tour to discuss how we find the truth for ourselves, when do we bring up harsh realities to kids, and what place media and religion have in society today.

We dive deep into the heightened racial and political tensions today and we search for a way out and, as always, we get to learn Angie Thomas’s three most formative books.

Let's flip the page back to Chapter 26 now...

Is porn good sex education? Why does body autonomy matter for kids? Does talking about sex kill the mood?

Emily Nagoski has the answers!

Emily is a sex educator and activist whose mission is to teach us how to live with confidence and joy inside our bodies. She does this as the New York Times bestselling author of 'Come As You Are,' 'Burnout,' and 'Come Together,' as well as through her 3 popular TED Talks including—with over 3 million views—"How couples can sustain a strong sexual connection for a lifetime."

Emily began working as a sex educator 30 years ago at the University of Delaware. She has a Master's in Counseling Psychology and she worked at the famous Kinsey Institute. She has taught graduate and undergraduate classes in human sexuality, relationships, communication, stress management, and sex education. She was Director of Wellness Education at Smith College for eight years before starting to write full time.

In this deep-dive chapter we talk about neurodiversity versus neurodivergence, maintaining longterm sexual connection, OKCupid, ADHD and Autism, teaching kids about sex, and, of course, Emily's 3 most formative books...

For those who want to strengthen and improve their sexual health with themselves and others ...

Let's flip the page to Chapter 146 now...

What do you know about James Frey?

Or what do you think you know about James Frey?

I’m guessing it’s not nothing. Everyone has an opinion! When I first spotted '​A Million Little Pieces​' on my wife’s bookshelf when we were moving in together I was like “Oh? Really? That book? The Oprah guy?”

And she was like “Have you read it?”

And I was like “No, no idea what it’s even about. Just that it’s not real or whatever.”

She looked at me with disappointed eyes. Understandably so! I hadn’t bothered to go below the surface. To read about it on my own. I had just soaked in some distant fumes off the story.

“Read it,” she said, and pushed the book into my hands.

That night I opened 'A Million Little Pieces' and was completely pulled into this pulsing, frenetic, endlessly climactic story of addiction, growth, and finding yourself. The book shook me. It was a masterpiece. I couldn’t believe it existed. I almost felt anger towards ​the Oprah saga​ because it headfaked me into thinking I knew what the book was about… when I couldn’t have been more off. I went deeper into James Frey’s catalogue and found myself similarly seduced by books like '​Bright Shiny Morning​' and '​Katerina​,' and am looking forward to Frey's new novel, '​Next To Heaven​,' which is coming out in June 2025.

His stories have a pace and staccato to them that’s perfect for distracted brains like mine. He doesn’t mince words, he doesn’t shy away, and his characters always punch you in the gut.

In this classic chapter of 3 Books. I sat down with James with a lot of questions and I loved our discussions around fatherhood and living an intentional life. We talk about teaching children to read, the importance of secular bibles, why (and how) we can slowly stop comparing ourselves to others, what getting drunk really means, and much, much more...

Let's flip the page back to Chapter 25 now...

Don't use mouthwash.   Why?   It's not Lindy.   At least that's what Paul Skallas, a Chicago-born technology lawyer who goes by Lindyman online, says. I was fascinated to read a New York Times profile of him titled "The Lindy Way of Living," and knew I wanted to have him on 3 Books.   In the 2012 book 'Antifragile,' the statistician and scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined "the Lindy Effect." He wrote, "For the perishable, every additional day in life translates to a shorter additional life expectancy, kind of like me and you and the cheese and our fridge, or the milk and our fridge. But for the non-perishable, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy." The Lindy Effect says that the longer something has been around, the longer it will stay around.   Paul took this heuristic and with his unique and perceptive insights along with his deep reading of ancient history came to apply it to a broad range of things, including health. He doesn't use mouthwash, a relatively new invention that kills good *and* bad bacteria. But floss—poking stuff out of your teeth—has been around for thousands of years, so that can stay.   This Lindy heuristic is a useful way to navigate our noisy modern world. As reality destabilizes with spiking AI and a fracturing media landscape we can learn and apply long-range lessons from the past to help us today. I love the unique, provocative, and often challenging 'The Lindy Newsletter,' which Lindyman publishes 2-3x weekly, to help us apply the framework to topics as diverse as urban planning, dating, medical trends, drinking trends, and even whether we should listen to health influencers.   Lindyman gave me 3 very interesting and formative books. We talk about them along with the unintended consequences of the woke movement, why you should eat vegan once a week, how modern employment is destroying families, and much more. If you like to have your brain stretched like taffy and provoked by unusual thoughts this is the chapter for you.   Let's flip the page to chapter 145 now.

We live in interesting times.    And they're getting interestinger!   I keep my eyes open for big thinkers to help guide and inform me as I keep trying to make sense of the world. My friend Tim Urban (@waitbutwhy) is one of those people:   Tim has a giant mind willing to engage with our fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence. The big questions!   Tim's blog Wait Buy Why still scores millions of readers per month with big-name fans like Jonathan Haidt, Bari Weiss, Sam Harris, Bryan Johnson, and (yes) Elon Musk. Why? Because Tim has an incredible way of smallifying complex topics like artificial intelligence, time we have for loved ones, or why we haven't seen aliens into simple language.    More recently Tim has self-published an incredible book called 'What's Our Problem: A Self-Help Book For Societies' (which I review here!). He’s a teacher and a philosopher. His Richard Feynman-like distillation abilities are on display in his TED Talk on procrastination which has 75 million views!   Tim’s intellectual curiosity is huge and we are very lucky to get a glimpse into how his brain works in this classic chapter of 3 Books. Fly down to New York City with me and let's sit in the corner of a crowded coffee shop in SoHo with Tim as we discuss breaking convention, retaining curiosity, the Stitches vs Band-aids test, why you should let your children wear shorts in the winter, the difference between cooks and chefs, and much, much more....   Let's flip the page back to Chapter 22 now...

​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....