Listen to the chapter here!
[Oliver Burkeman]
Does this enlarge me or diminish me is a way to get to that because you can usually tell, oh yes, this is bad, this is hard, but it's enlarging me.
[Jacqueline]
If it's not their family, if it's not their loved one, they don't care, they do not care. And that's the biggest breakdown.
[Robin Dunbar]
The single best predictor of your psychological health and well-being, your physical health and well-being, and even how long you're going to live into the future from today, the single best predictor of that is the number and quality of close friends you have.
[Neil Pasricha]
Hey everybody, this is Neil Pasricha, and welcome to the seventh annual best of episode of 3 Books. This is the only podcast in the world buy and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers and librarians using books as the Archimedes lever to get into life's biggest themes. Let's start off with Celine Song, the writer, director, creator of the incredible film Past Lives.
If you haven't seen it, please check it out. It was nominated for best screenplay, best picture at this year's Oscars. And I asked Celine, how do we learn to identify, see and fill voids in our lives?
[Celine Song]
I think sometimes it's really hard to identify, right? And sometimes, and I've usually find that it is literature or movies or TV show or something like that, that will fill that void. And I think that's part of the reason why we're so drawn to stories and why we'd still read and watch things, right?
Because we want to find out what part of ourselves that we're missing. And then of course, when you encounter things that mean something to then I think that it is enabled to fill that void. And I think that, of course, my dream for Past Lives, and I think that it means the most to me when somebody, after having seen the movie, tells me about the void that it filled, is that I wanted to mean something to someone so that part of the thing that they felt like that was missing from their lives is a filled.
And that's what else can an artist want?
[Neil Pasricha]
I love that quote from Celine to kind of get us started to remind us that, you know, literature, art, film, all these things create stories that reflect back to ourselves who we are. Art as putty. Podcasts, I would insert into there.
That's partly what The Best Of is all about, kind of giving us a moment to reflect and pause and sort of see parts of ourselves we might not otherwise see. Let's take that conversation a little bit further. When we see parts of ourselves we might not otherwise see, we introduce it to our own corpus of knowledge.
Do we need to be aware of something called cultural appropriation? You know, the adoption of an element of one culture into another culture? That's the new like, be careful, don't do that out there right now.
Well, I asked Maria Popova about it, author of The Marginalian, the incredible website that was formerly called Brain Pickings. She's also the author of one of my favorite books of 2024 called Figuring. And I asked her about a quote she said, where she said, The very notion of intellectual property is so bizarre.
The law is taxing our cultural understanding of authorship. It is not conducive to evolving it. What do you think, Maria?
[Maria Popova]
We are constantly borrowing, consciously or unconsciously, ideas, impressions from other sources, combining them, recombining them into what we call our own creations. But of course, creativity is just this combinatorial thing. It's a mosaic of pieces that we pick up because nobody's born with knowledge.
And in fact, in recent years, too, I must have said this some years ago when all the kind of commons, creative commons and all that stuff was happening. But right now, what I'm very troubled by is this whole thing about cultural appropriation. Because when you think about, I mean, education, right, learning, that is appropriation.
You are literally taking in somebody else's knowledge and incorporating it into your corpus of knowledge and calling it your own. That is what it means to learn anything. And so without appropriation, there could be no learning.
And out of that comes everything we create. Everything we create comes out of the library in the mind that we hold. And that library comes from somewhere.
I mean, nobody's born with it, right? So we have become ourselves by appropriating pieces of knowledge, experience, impression, influence.
[Neil Pasricha]
And anyway, that's the fundamental behavior of the mirror neurons in our brain.
[Maria Popova]
Exactly.
[Neil Pasricha]
Boom! I love the way Maria Popova just slammed down the entire concept of cultural appropriation like that. She's got a blistering mind.
It's so wondrous to be in the presence of. If you don't already subscribe to themarginalian.org, I highly recommend it. It's totally free.
You can donate if you want. I get her Sunday email, which has all of her blog posts from the previous week. And sometimes I feel smaller when I get it, thinking, I have not written this many blogs on neil.blog over the past week. Larger, smaller, bigger, better. What version of ourselves do we want to live? Let's jump from July, which was Chapter 138 with Maria Popova.
And let's head all the way down to November, where we're going to hang out with Oliver Berkman, author of the rampant bestseller, 4,000 Weeks, and the brand new book, Meditations for Mortals. Speaking of this idea of larger or smaller, I think it's a good question for all of us to think about as we go into 2025 here. We're talking specifically about a book in this part of the conversation called Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life by Dr. James Hollis, and I encountered this question. Does this path, this choice, make me larger or smaller? And that's the question I ask Oliver to reflect back on. Does this path, this choice, make me larger or smaller?
[Oliver Burkeman]
This has been huge for me, and I have sort of written about it. And even though I have always attributed it to James Hollis, I now see things floating around on social media sometimes suggesting that I came up with it. This is a great kind of question that sort of, there's something about it that connects me to my intuitive, felt sense of what is the meaningful and enriching and generous to other people direction to move in, in a way that the question, will this make me happy or not, or will this help me reach my goals or not, just can't do.
Because we're very bad at predicting, as all the research shows, we're very bad at predicting what's going to make us feel happy. And even beyond that, we all have these experiences of times in life when we were not happy, because what was happening was not enjoyable, but we did know and feel deeply that we were in the right place. I think people often get this experience, if you've ever had the experience of sort of, not of a terrible crisis or tragedy happening to yourself, that's a slightly different thing, but of helping a friend through something like that.
Maybe you're just doing their dry cleaning or fetching a takeout. It's not necessarily that you're the person who is guiding them with great wisdom and emotional intelligence through a very dark period. You might be doing errands, there's something about that which is just, oh yeah, this is actually why I was put on the planet for these hours anyway.
That sort of enlarging versus diminishing thing can help in that respect. It also helps a lot, I think, in trying to disentangle good difficulty from bad difficulty, by which I mean there are kinds of negative experience that you encounter in, say, a relationship, although it could also be in a job or place that you live, which are really red flags to get out of that thing. But there are also kinds of difficulty which just are the very substance of growing into that thing.
There are difficulties and ways of dealing with your own triggeredness that are just fundamental to getting better at being married, just as there are things that your partner could do which you should take as an urgent warning sign that you shouldn't be in that relationship.
[Neil Pasricha]
I love that. Sorry.
[Oliver Burkeman]
Does this enlarge me or diminish me is a way to get to that because you can usually tell, oh yes, this is bad, this is hard, but it's enlarging me.
[Neil Pasricha]
So what in your life is bad, is hard right now, but is enlarging you in some way? Oliver went on to share that twice he was living in the US wondering if he should move back to England, two different stages of life. One time it would be shrinking him, it would be making him smaller, he'd be running away from his problems, not facing the things he needed to face.
And another time, later in life, he would be growing. It would be enlarging him to move back to England. So that's what he did.
And now he lives in England and that's where we talked to him from there. Why don't we hang out and stay in England for a little bit? We're going to go back to January where in Chapter 132 of this show, I was very lucky to speak to Professor Robin Dunbar.
First mentioned in this podcast series in Chapter 101 with Daniels, the creators of Everything Everywhere All at Once, where he started talking about Dunbar's number, this kind of idea of having 150 friends, maximum, that your brain can hold, two-way trusted relationships. So I thought with Robin on the line, it was a perfect time to ask what is trust just in general? And more specifically, what is the single best predictor of our long-term psychological health and well-being?
Let's jump over to Oxford evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar now.
[Robin Dunbar]
Trust is some quality of relationship that you and I have as individuals between us, that's to say, it's very much like gravity between bodies in the sky, that results in our behavior being changed so that, you know, I can persuade you to behave in a particular way or vice versa. We can collaborate on something because there's a sense in which we believe as individuals that the other person isn't going to, in effect, stab us in the back or run off with our money or whatever. And the marker of that is when you look at relationships and you ask people, you know, who've had a relationship breakdown in some form, whether it's with a romantic partner, whether it's with a family member, whether it's with a friend, you know, what caused the rift between you?
And very often these rifts are irreparable if they're close relationships, they're permanent, absolutely catastrophic failure of a relationship. It's almost always trust. One person has done something which has really broken trust.
You know, sometimes it's lots of little breakages along the way which finally add up to enough's enough. You keep letting me down. We keep, you know, I keep making these arrangements with you to meet for a beer or a dinner or whatever.
And I'm left standing in the rain on the street because you never turn up.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah.
[Robin Dunbar]
Right.
And okay, I forgive you.
[Neil Pasricha]
Or you didn't reply to my text message or whatever.
[Robin Dunbar]
Exactly. And, you know, each of those is probably, you know, not a crisis, but I'm a bit annoyed. But if you keep doing it, eventually I'm just going to say a lot. Enough's enough.
That's it. And I'm not making any arrangements with you. You're going to be dropped from my 150.
Or they're kind of major crises where, you know, somebody has stolen something from the person they have the relationship with. So, you know, they've stolen money or belongings or, you know, what have you, of some value emotionally or financially that has just caused an instantaneous, you know, it is just one step beyond the acceptable. And in those cases, these relationships just become irreparable.
You know, if it ever repairs, it's a deathbed reconciliation. So that's kind of the issue with trust. It's there.
And of course, the whole of our life depends on it because, you know, when you drive a car, even in Canada, despite the fact that there's only one car every mile on the highway, nonetheless, when that car hovers into view across the mountains, you assume that the other person is going to stay on their side of the road and not drive straight at you. So all these things, when you get on an airplane to fly somewhere, you assume the captain in the cockpit is going to do the decent job and not attempt to crash land it somewhere. So, you know, it just goes on and on.
And in the end, you know, crossing at any light, stopping at any sign, anybody in a uniform that's a police officer, everything we do is the food that's not poisonous from the packaging. Exactly. Exactly.
Absolutely. And this also extends then by definition to science, because science is very, very complicated. And this applies to any form of knowledge, if you like, whether it's theology or it's physics at the two extremes, because you are not an expert yourself, you might be an expert in, let's say, I don't know, psychology, but you're not an expert in physics because you don't have the training.
And therefore, when somebody in physics tells you this will work, you know, you believe that they know what they're doing and you trust them and so on. And, you know, every time you go to the hospital and, you know, they stick you in some dirty, great brain scanner and fire whatever is inside at you, you can then show you a picture afterwards of your brain and say, you know, look, there's a lot of it missing or look, no, it's fine. As circumstances may be, you know, you trust them and you trust the physicists that built the machine and the theory, the physics that it was all based on, because somebody kind of vouchers for it and says, yep, I know what I'm talking about, you know, but trust me, I'm a doctor.
Of course, sometimes it doesn't work and then you're kind of disillusioned and it may colour your whole picture of who these people are. But, you know, if we didn't trust people, we wouldn't be living in a society as complex as we are. We'd all be sitting on our own mountains, on our own, you know, probably firing arrows at anybody who tried to come up the mountain because, you know, who knows what they might be climbing the mountain to do to us.
[Neil Pasricha]
So, trust is conducive to collective living.
[Robin Dunbar]
Absolutely, yeah.
[Neil Pasricha]
Which improves our quality of life.
[Robin Dunbar]
Oh, absolutely, yes. I mean, as you know, the medical evidence is just crystal clear on this, that the single best predictor of your psychological health and wellbeing, your physical health and wellbeing, and even how long you're going to live into the future from today, the single best predictor of that is the number and quality of close friends you have. And that is, you know, everything else that your friendly neighbourhood GP worries about on your behalf, like, you know, how many beef burgers do you eat and how much alcohol do you drink?
What drugs are you on? You know, how much exercise do you take? You just slob about in front of the television.
All these things, they're not insignificant in affecting your health and wellbeing, but they really are way down the list compared with simply the number and quality of close friendships.
[Neil Pasricha]
Wise words from Professor Robin Dunbar himself, the single best predictor of your psychological health and wellbeing, your physical health and wellbeing, and even how long you're going to live into the future from today, is simply the number and quality of close friends that you have. Everything else is way down the list. How many burgers you eat, how many drugs you take, how many drinks you have, how much exercise you get.
Nothing matters as much as the quality and number of friends that you have. Another word for saying that is, of course, community. Community.
So why don't we hop down to St. Louis, Missouri. I was down there when I released Chapter 136, and I talked to three different St. Louis Uber drivers on Bullets, Bruises, and Babies. We're going to hang out with Jacqueline right now.
She was a bus driver in St. Louis for 30 years, talking about what St. Louis used to be like, and we're going to kind of get into community a little bit here. Here we go. You told me that St. Louis used to feel like a community, and now it doesn't. So what changed?
[Jacqueline]
I think families changed. And what I mean by that, like I said, you've heard the saying, it takes a community, a village to raise a child. I think that structure kind of fell apart at some point.
You know what I'm saying? And you get a lot of don't say nothing to my kids. I mean, even in school, the teacher called you up there, oh, she said this to my, instead of everybody being in line with, you know what I'm saying, caring for this child, or making an education for this child, the mother gets all defensive because it's crazy.
[Neil Pasricha]
I know what you mean. The education system's changed. It used to be like, we created the schools to take care of each other and to educate each other.
And then it became this discipline oriented thing.
[Jacqueline]
Yeah, that's why it became well, well, it became it like, because it always been a disciplinary, because when we were in school, we got whipped. I don't know if you that old, but the principal was able to whoop us, the teacher was able to whoop us. They took that out of school.
Like I said, and then if the teacher even called a parent up there, she got a hand on her hip, rolling her head. I know you ain't touch my son. You know what I'm saying?
Instead of finding out the core, the root of the problem, because somewhere your kid, it's a little bad ass, okay? But we don't want to do that anymore.
[Neil Pasricha]
Well, you still want to do it anymore, Jacqueline says, but what else? What was St. Louis life like back in the 70s?
[Jacqueline]
In the 70s, you had people that cared about not just their people, but other people. You know what I'm saying? When people watch their kids, they watching the neighbor up the street kids, like if they see them, oh baby, don't do that.
All night, you can't take care of that. That's Shirley's daughter. You know what I'm saying?
Now people, they'll tell you when they see stuff, snitches get stitches. Don't nobody want to say nothing. You know what I'm saying?
People don't care if it doesn't resonate to them. If it's not their family, if it's not their loved one, they don't care. They do not care.
And that's the biggest breakdown in our community. It is. That's the biggest breakdown because that's just like, if I'm coming down the street and I know this is Mr. Smith's house, but I see this strange guy coming out of his house with a TV in his hand. First thing I'm going to do is get on the phone and say, hey, they don't look like Mr. Smith. Well, you might just want to come check this out. You know what I'm saying? And a lot of people won't do that. They won't do that.
[Neil Pasricha]
Because snitches get stitches.
[Jacqueline]
Yeah, because they get stitches. That's what they say. Snitches get stitches.
Well, give me stitches. You know what I'm saying? Because if I see it, I'm going to tell it.
[Neil Pasricha]
Because if I see it, I'm going to tell it. You tell them, Jacqueline. I could listen to Jacqueline all day.
That's what all these little snips and the best of really are, by the way. Morsels, treats, little, you know, whipped cream, peaks. They're trying to get you interested in going back and listen to the full chapters if you are so inclined.
If I see it, I'm going to tell it. Is that always good advice? Back in June, we spoke to Jonathan Franz, an author of The Corrections and Freedom and Crossroads, three books I have read and loved dearly.
And we were speaking about one of Jonathan's most formative books, which is Reason in a Dark Time, why the struggle against climate change failed and what it means for our future by Dale Jameson. Let's jump into the chat about that book with Jonathan now.
[Jonathan Franzen]
Some reader I'd met somewhere and had a little bit of an email correspondence with, I think knew Dale, and said, I think I might have been talking about conservation with her, this email friend. And she said, you really ought to read Dale's book. It just came out, Reason in a Dark Time.
And I looked it up and I said, oh my god, this is going to make me feel really depressed. I don't want to do that. Nevertheless, I ordered it and then it sat on the shelf for six months.
And I don't know what, I think I just felt like I could tell from the cover, the phrase on the cover, why the fight against climate change failed past tense. In other words, it's over, baby. We failed.
I felt it might've had to do with the drought here in Santa Cruz. We'd had a very dry winter and it was just oppressively hot, sunny day after oppressively hot, sunny day. For whatever reason, I said, okay, I don't want to consider myself a fearful person.
I'm going to pick up this book and I'm going to read it. And I did. And I found it disturbing.
Of course, to understand why we are doing it and why we won't stop doing it. But it was also exhilarating. I read with great excitement and a weird sense of comfort because he was explaining something that I didn't even want to think about, but I knew in my bones.
And he was doing it in this very, very lovely, almost Buddhist way. He was basically not judging. He was laying out very, very limpidly eight different reasons why this problem, climate change, is unlike anything the species has ever faced before.
And eight different reasons why attempts to do something about it have been futile. And it was intellectually exhilarating, but it was also, it's like you've spent years clenched with fear about something. And that moment when you finally just open up to what you're afraid of, it's painful.
And there's a lot of grief that comes that can come with that. But it's also very liberating. And it kind of eases the soul to just finally let it in and inhabit the awful reality.
[Neil Pasricha]
A little bit dark there, of course. But like what Jonathan says, that moment when you finally just open up to what you're afraid of, you unclench, it's painful. There's a lot of grief, but it's also very liberating.
And it kind of eases the soul to finally let it in. Ah, one of many wise and wonderful phrases said by Jonathan Franzen in that conversation we had on finding freaks and forging fantastic fiction. Jonathan is a New Yorker writer too, so why don't we jump back to March where he hung out with the New Yorker writer Susan Orlean.
We talked to her about lusty leads and literary lessons for life. Susan Orlean, if you don't know, wrote The Orchid Thief, which turned into the wonderful movie that has a totally different name starring Nicolas Cage called Adaptation. And she also wrote The Library Book, which is the book I read that kind of really provoked my thinking.
And so I thought I'd ask Susan, amongst other things, it was a three-hour conversation. I started off by asking her, Susan, how do you organize the shoes in your closet?
[Susan Orlean]
Oh, gosh, you got me in. I mean, I'm a little compulsive about organization. And I feel, honestly, that I function better in an orderly environment.
So it's actually really hard for me to work or be happy in chaos. It doesn't have to be sterile or absolutely minimal. It just needs to be orderly.
So shoes. We live in a mid-century modern house that, back in 1946 when the house was built, closets were not a great kind of focus in home building. And closets of older houses are generally very small.
I think people just didn't have a lot of clothes. So I have to be really careful about my shoes and have them organized so that I can find them and see them. So some years ago, and I don't remember when, I realized that it would be better for me to take shoes out of the shoe box and put them in a clear shoe box so that I could see the shoes.
And that worked.
[Neil Pasricha]
From the container store, right?
[Susan Orlean]
From the container store.
[Neil Pasricha]
For those that want to buy one.
[Susan Orlean]
Yes. And you buy them in a box of like 20. They're great for organizing a lot of stuff, but they're meant for shoes.
And then it started to become harder for me to see the shoes. So I came up with an idea that makes me sound super OCD. I'm not, but I will own the fact that this is more effort than some people might choose to make.
But I started taking a picture of each pair of shoes, printing out the picture in a small format, and then taping that to the front of the shoe box so that I could see instantly which the shoes were.
[Neil Pasricha]
Just front view or side view or both?
[Susan Orlean]
Just front view. And I have the boxes stacked with the short end visible. So it's just a small picture, but it's the most effective thing I've probably ever done in my life.
You know, it took something that was sort of ungovernable and challenging and frustrating on a daily basis because I would try to find shoes and think, wait, where are those green sneakers? And it'd be pawing through a pile of shoes or opening different shoe boxes. And now I am in a kind of Zen space when I go in to pick a pair of shoes.
I just walk in and look, and I see the ones I want, and I pull them out, and I take the shoes out, and I'm very happy.
[Neil Pasricha]
Nice. I love this. I've been telling—
[Susan Orlean]
I should have been a librarian. Look, I mean, this is all—you know, we—I mean, humanity is into taxonomy. I mean, it's a human impulse to find and categorize and index and organize.
And there's a real reason for it, obviously, scientifically. But I think people respond also to knowing where things are and how to find them and making things like with like in terms of, you know, organizing. And I'm not somebody who, you know, alphabetizes the books on my shelf, or I did alphabetize my spices, I will confess.
[Neil Pasricha]
Do you alphabetize your spices, too? There's a lot more down the rabbit hole there with Susan. I agree with what she says, though.
Humans are into taxonomy. It's a human impulse to find and categorize and index and organize. Maybe nobody knows this better than James Daunt.
You know, he started up Daunt Books over in England. He didn't organize them by the Dewey Decimal System or by genre. He organized his bookstore by place.
Fiction and nonfiction merged together by an area that you are interested in around the world, which is fascinating. He did not carry over that kind of concept when he took over the entire Waterstones bookstore chain or the entire Barnes & Noble bookstore chain, making him the largest bookseller of bookstores in the whole world. He has more bookstores than anybody.
A thousand bookstores. I wanted to ask James about big books. How do we sell big books, big ideas, long podcasts, long movies in an era of shorter and shorter attention spans?
Here's James.
[James Daunt]
I sort of take a sort of view that these are not new problems. I've been a bookseller for 35 years or something, so I've predated really the internet. I've certainly predated e-books.
I've certainly predated audio and podcasts and all of these things. And TikTok and all of those things. And the reality throughout all of this is that how people are, the time people have available to read and the enthusiasm with which they read changes by not much.
Oh, interesting. Girls read more than boys. There are a few things that are just sort of stereotypical and have remained the case.
We as booksellers need to really focus on those who are more reluctant to read. But we can do it and publishers do it also when you get Jeff Keeney and Dogman, Pilkey, all those kind of things. And boys start reading some more and we get going on that and it all sort of levels its way up.
Every year gets a little better than the preceding year. Reading and getting absolutely immersed in the excitement of books by young adults, as obviously Harry Potter did change that, J.K. Rowling, but now it still goes on. And we had Twilight and we've now got, let's say, Sarah J.
Maas and we've got other things going on. Sarah J. Maas's books are massive.
And there are a lot of them. And the kids can buy the whole bang lot. That's a good point.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah.
[James Daunt]
They're practicing at a young age. But when people come into their working phase of life, particularly men, they're just working too hard that they don't read and they never did read and they don't read now. Interestingly for us is they're now engaging with podcasts in particular, engaging in this short form.
And those are often attached to ideas and attached to books. So we're seeing a growth even from them. Most of these trends are underpinning more engagement with books, more engagement with ideas.
And it's always been tough to sell Time, Team of Rivals or the latest big book, but there is an appetite for it and there's a time for it. And there is an enduring engagement with these great books. We sell Team of Rivals today in the tens of thousands still.
Robert Caro's Power Broker was the book of the pandemic. That makes Team of Rivals look like a short novella.
[Neil Pasricha]
That's inspiring, right? Power Broker being the book of the pandemic. James Daunt kind of course correcting us.
The enthusiasm by which people read changes by not much. I just love the way he says that. Now we're on one side of the book industry here, right?
Barnes & Noble bookstores opening up 60 plus new stores this year, big lineups at the doors, as James told us in the larger Fuller conversation. But what about the number one book retailer, Amazon? What is it like working inside there?
Chris Smalls, who created the first ever Amazon Labor Union inside an Amazon warehouse in the US, talked to us about how working at Amazon feels like prison. He compared it to slavery. And part of what I asked him about is what he and people who work at Amazon want.
Where does the message go from here?
[Chris Smalls]
Oh, we got to get a contract. That's the number one thing. We won our contract, so I want to make sure that happens.
That's my number one mission besides everything else.
[Neil Pasricha]
$30 starting salary, starting wage.
[Chris Smalls]
Job security, better medical leave.
[Neil Pasricha]
When you say job security, what do you mean? You can't get fired?
[Chris Smalls]
There's a process, due process.
[Neil Pasricha]
Oh, so it's not like just you're out?
[Chris Smalls]
Yeah, there's not no text message. There's not no email. There's arbitration with the union.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, right.
[Chris Smalls]
You can say your side of the story. There's union representation, the Weingarten right.
[Neil Pasricha]
Right, right, right.
[Chris Smalls]
It's representation.
[Neil Pasricha]
And then what do you want in terms of sick leave and holidays and all that stuff?
[Chris Smalls]
We want none. We don't have none.
[Neil Pasricha]
You don't have any holidays?
[Chris Smalls]
We have nine. We have eight holidays that are paid. Nine.
One is missing. That's Juneteenth. And then we have on sick time.
Eight. It's not that many.
[Neil Pasricha]
In Canada, we have like 12 or 13.
[Chris Smalls]
Yeah, probably. You're right. They don't recognize certain holidays.
[Neil Pasricha]
We get two days on Easter. We get family day in February.
[Chris Smalls]
Yeah.
[Neil Pasricha]
We got Christmas and boxing day, day after, New Year's Day.
[Chris Smalls]
They don't care about none of that. So.
[Neil Pasricha]
We don't have Halloween yet, though. We're trying to get Halloween like official.
[Chris Smalls]
Well, that's the beauty of arguing something like that. That might be small, but it's actually it matters. So for for Americans, yeah, we settle for breadcrumbs.
We get eight eight at Amazon. And once again, they fail to recognize Juneteenth, which has been declared as a federal holiday. So it doesn't make any sense.
You know, they continue to play in our face.
[Neil Pasricha]
Just a little snip of a much larger conversation, as always, about kind of what it's like working inside the largest company in the world. And we tried to illuminate a little bit of what that's like with a great conversation with Chris at his backyard in Hackensack, New Jersey. Now, we like to go deep on the show, have big, serious conversations about big, meaningful, meaty things.
And also, we like to have some fun. We were able to hang out with a duck this year, specifically Lewis Mallard. A real name not shared, real looks and identity not shared.
He dresses up and walks around the city as an interpretive artist. Who I found inspiring. Here's a little bit of the story of how we met and how our first interaction looked.
The kickoff to a four hour conversation, but here's just a few seconds of it. I was up inside. Tony was serving me the barista and he yells out all of a sudden, there's that duck.
And I look out the window and you are on the other side of the street in orange spandex, orange Chuck Taylors, a full gigantic duck costume. I'm like, what is this? What's going on?
You come across the street. I run out with my friend Aptaka. She knows you.
She's seen you on social media. Lewis! She says, hey, Lewis.
Hi, Lewis. And I run up to him like, oh, who are you? What are you doing?
And you're just, what did you do?
[Lewis Mallard]
I quacked at you.
[Neil Pasricha]
You just refused to talk to me.
[Lewis Mallard]
No, I refused to use English words with you.
[Neil Pasricha]
Because?
[Lewis Mallard]
Because I was performing and I stay in character while I'm performing.
Almost in every circumstance I come into.
[Neil Pasricha]
How long is a performance?
[Lewis Mallard]
How long was?
[Neil Pasricha]
How long is it? You're walking around for like hours here?
[Lewis Mallard]
It depends on my bladder.
[Neil Pasricha]
As soon as you have to pee, the show's over.
[Lewis Mallard]
When I get the feeling, I start to head home.
[Neil Pasricha]
Ah, I love Lewis. He's become a friend and he's recently moved to Montreal. So the streets of Montreal are now duck slathered over there.
But before he left Toronto, he left us some memories. He repainted a few different subway stops and streetcar tracks and the TTC, the Toronto Transit Commission has been really supportive of his work. So now we have some colorful leave-behinds in Toronto that make me think about whenever I drive by or walk past.
Okay. Now, one big issue that we've been talking about a lot this year is internet, cell phones. We're past the 15 year mark now, the 5,000 day mark now of cell phones and social media, smartphones.
And we're starting to wonder what they're doing to our culture and be more intentional and thoughtful about how we work them into how we live. My number one book of the year this year was The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, also a past guest on the show. Head over to neil.blog and you'll see my top 20 list. You can sign up for my book club there as well. But I had a lucky opportunity to chat to Cal Newport, who was also a father of two boys. He wrote the book Slow Productivity as well as Deep Work, which he's very famous for.
And I asked him, when should kids get unrestricted internet access? How does Cal think about that?
[Cal Newport]
Unrestricted internet access. When is it appropriate for someone to get unrestricted internet access? The safe answer is 16.
And the culture's not there yet, but I think we're like a year or two away from that being a very common thing. Just like we're like, yeah, probably a 17 year old shouldn't drink alcohol. Like when we kind of made that decision in the 70s.
Or kids shouldn't, we should really care about kids smoking. You know, we made that decision. We got serious about that in the 80s and 90s.
I think we're going there culturally with smartphones, unrestricted smartphone access to kids. 16 is where the research is pointing.
[Neil Pasricha]
Really?
[Cal Newport]
It's not 21? Well, maybe it'd be better. But the key thing about 16, like John would point out, is that you're through puberty.
And like, that's critical. So you've gone through that very malleable developmental period. You have a more stable sense of self and identity at that point.
Like you don't want, while you're trying to establish a sense of yourself and identity, to also be exposed to algorithms. Like that leads to weird places. Also, your social setup, your social structures are all relatively strongly in place.
By the time you're that age, you're like, here's who I am. Here's who my friends are. Here's what I'm involved in.
I have a pretty stable sense of self. My emotional regulation is not quite as dynamic as it was when I was 12 or 13.
[Neil Pasricha]
I must have been a late bloomer. I gotta say.
[Cal Newport]
Yeah, well.
[Neil Pasricha]
I didn't hit this till at least five more years, if not more.
[Cal Newport]
Well, but at least it's better, right?
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, certainly better than 10. Yeah, for sure.
[Cal Newport]
So that's why John's been pushing 16, right? And I think that makes sense. The Surgeon General has also pushed that age.
Yeah, Murthy's been pushing that age. It's sort of emerging some of the new legislation state. And there's national state legislation all over right now.
Think about these issues. But we're seeing more like the bill that was just passed in Florida basically says no social media 13 or younger, which all the way was the law already, but an unenforced federal law. But what the Florida Act added was under 16, but above 13, there has to be parental consent.
So like, you know, someone has to say you're allowed to use this. So I think 16 is becoming a de facto threshold when thinking about these services.
[Neil Pasricha]
What about you? What about your family? When are you gonna get your kids' phones? That's kind of what I'm asking.
[Cal Newport]
Yeah, well, there's two different.
[Neil Pasricha]
What's your screen time policy at home? What's your video game rules?
[Cal Newport]
Yeah, so there's multiple different things going on here. To me, phone is a misnomer. It's unrestricted internet access.
That's the danger, right? So we have to be really clear. So unrestricted internet access, 16.
So that would mean, for example, having a smartphone that you could just use. That's got to be 16. Having a phone as a communication device, let's say a phone that doesn't have a smartphone screen, but you can do text messages on it or a watch.
You could do text messages. The policy there is if there's a demonstrated logistical need, then you can get one of those. If it is, okay, you're doing all these sports and you have to...
It'd be very convenient if you could let us know what time practice is gonna be over, then we can get you a device that does that. We don't have to let that need, that narrow need, lead us to say, okay, here's your iPhone, get after it.
[Neil Pasricha]
Do kids have devices now?
[Cal Newport]
Well, they don't have any telephonic or internet-connected devices. On video games, I'm very worried about any video game, looking at the research, especially with boys. Anything that's connected to the internet, I'm very worried about.
Anything you didn't have to pay $50 for the game, I'm very worried about, because they're getting their money. And if you didn't pay for the game, where are they getting their money? They're making you addicted to it so they can upsell you on things.
[Neil Pasricha]
I thought that was such a smart point from Cal, just inspecting the business model of the video games you're buying to try to figure out whether they're addictive or not. You pay for Mario Kart or Zelda, they got your money. But if you don't, then they're gonna get your money by upselling you and with very addictive tendencies and probably not good.
Larger, fuller conversation, as always, awaits below that little iceberg popping up from the water. And so I hope you feel like in this best of, we made it shorter than usual. I think last year, I clocked in at over four hours.
And I like those long conversations as well, for sure. They're hangouts, I'm with you on long drives, long walks, with you for a serious, meatier conversation. But I want this best of to be like the icebergs, Oh, I want to know what's more.
I want to know more about that one. I want to go down into the longer form. Great.
So let's close off the best of with Amy Einhorn. Amy Einhorn was the editor of the Book of Awesome, my book, my very first book in 2010. But she's also the editor of The Help by Katherine Stockett.
Let's pretend this never happened by our guests in 75. Jenny Lawson, American Dirt, Big Little Lies. This is how it always is.
So many huge, gigantic books. And she leaves us, all of us, writers, the people that are going for anything, going for a job, going for a date, going for someone to fall in love with, with sort of a classic piece of advice I thought would be great to close us off with. Amy, what's your final big piece of advice for writers out there?
[Amy Einhorn]
I guess I would say, OK, I would say so, for instance, I'm publishing this book. Do I have it here? No, I don't.
Yes, I do. OK, I'm publishing this novel called The Correspondent by a woman named Virginia Evans. And it's an epistolary novel about a woman who's 73 years old, right?
[Neil Pasricha]
Epistolary?
[Amy Einhorn]
Epistolary. So it's all... Now I can't...
[Neil Pasricha]
No, you're right. I just don't know what it means.
[Neil Pasricha]
I'm the dumb one.
[Amy Einhorn]
It's all letters.
[Neil Pasricha]
Oh, it's all letters.
[Amy Einhorn]
So it's all written as letters either from this woman or to this woman. And it's her first novel. And it's actually, it turns out it's Virginia's 10th novel that she's written.
It's her first one to get published. And when she came to New York a couple months ago with her son, because she told her son, if I ever get a novel published, you get to pick where we go. And he picked New York.
And they came, we had lunch, and then she came back to the office and we took a picture in front of the Penguin Random House sign. So I just sort of feel like, again, going back to the eternal optimist, you know, you just need one person to like your book.
[Neil Pasricha]
Oh, interesting. You just need one person to like your book.
[Amy Einhorn]
Or to hire you or...
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that. Amy Einhorn, thank you so much.
It was worth the six-year wait. Thank you so much for coming on Three Books. It's been a wonderful conversation.
[Amy Einhorn]
Thank you, Neil.
[Neil Pasricha]
And thank you to all of you for being part of this episode, this best of, playing back some of the snips, the highlights, the little bits and morsels of wisdom dropped on us from our guests all throughout 2024. Now, like I said, last year's best of was like four hours. The year before was like three hours.
I tried to make this one shorter, teenier, tiner. But as a result, I did not say which three formative books each guest gave us. I did not say the titles of each show.
I did not say all the other themes and questions and learnings and outcomes that you get from every single other chapter. I did not have the end of the podcast club with your letters, your voicemails, your phone calls, as we always do at the end of every chapter. I did not have the cover to cover club shout out.
I did not have the secret club shout out where I encourage you to call 1-833-READALOT and leave me your voicemails. I did not point you over to the website like I usually do, threebooks.co for all the detailed show notes. I did not point you to neil.blog, N-E-I-L.B-L-O-G, although I guess I'm doing it now, to sign up for the email list. Always ad-free, sponsor-free, commercial-free as the show is. But then I can send you a letter whenever I have a new chapter. We're going on this pilgrimage.
We're going. We started in 2018. We're going all the way up to 2040.
It's 2024 now, soon to be 2025. Six, seven, this is our seventh best of, eighth best of next year. Please use this conversation as a way to get into deeper, richer, longer form themes.
But if not, if you're just a best of cruiser, I hear that too, very much so. No book guilt, no book shame, no podcast book guilt, no podcast book shame. Thank you all of you for hanging out in the three books community, three bookers.
I love you. I need you. I adore you.
Have a wonderful 2025, everybody. Take care.