Chapter 142: Oliver Burkeman relishes reflection and reveals writing rituals

Listen to the chapter here!

Oliver:

You've got to sort of have the right level of internal non-attachment. Some degree of huge mess is actually essential. The whole act of growth is seeing more of yourself.

There are ways to choose not to be part of this kind of surveillance world today. We want something that will do the living, or the thinking, or the writing for us. And there isn't such a thing.

Neil:

Hey everybody, it's Neil Pasricha. And welcome or welcome back to Chapter 142 of 3 Books. We are delighted to be joined by the wonderful Oliver Burkman today, author of Meditations for Mortals, his new book, and his previous book, Four Thousand Weeks.

And we're going to talk about Oliver in just a moment. But first, if you're new here, or if you're not new here, this is the world's only podcast by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. And we kind of think of it as a hangout, a place of respite, of peacefulness, a way to kind of unplug from the daily grind, and just hang out with a bunch of people who love books and love reading, and like to geek out about literary things.

And so I thought in the intro, I want to do a few things before we get into our guest, and then get into the interview. And I want to kind of experiment with a slightly different interview now. If you want to skip the interview and jump ahead to the conversation, obviously feel free.

There are no ads in the show, no sponsors, no commercials, no interruptions, nothing like that. So it's just going to be us hanging out. Now, a couple of things.

First of all, I want to talk about a couple of letters. You know, I love the tribe, the community, three bookers out there. I feel your love.

A couple of things I want to read to you today. And again, if I read your letter on the show, remember that you can always email me, and I'll send you a signed book to say thanks. I got a note actually from a teacher at Menomonee Falls High School last year.

Hi, Neil. Miss Leonard, right? Ms. Emily Leonard. I'm a high school librarian and a big fan of free books. I'm working on a project for AP students based on the show. Students will listen to one of your podcast chapters, then choose someone in their lives to interview about their three most formative books.

I'm thinking there'll be a writing component as well for the students to reflect on their own most formative books. The goal is to get students to see themselves and the people around them as readers. It's so important for kids to see the people around them are readers, not just their old English teacher or the librarian.

So she asked me if I had any tips for interviewing people that I could pass along. And I said, yes, prepare. Ask for the three books in advance.

Try to read at least one of them or more if you can. Have questions written down before you go in. Ask them to tell you about your relationship with the book.

Maybe make them chronological in their life. Follow the conversation. Don't get stuck on your questions.

Try not to look at the clock. You can always add it later. And remember, you get to do this, not you have to do this.

And then she asked for suggestions on which chapters would be good to start on. And I said, maybe Chapter 26 with Angie Thomas, Chapter 123 with Suzy Batiste, or Chapter 7 with Vishwas Agarwal, which we just released, again, as a classic. And I just heard back a year later from Miss Leonard, and she said that it went great.

She worked with two AP language teachers. She created the project, and they put it together. They made a project guide that she put together, which I will post at 3 Books. And they had so much fun with the project. Thanks for being our inspiration. Thanks again for sending us a couple of books.

Or maybe I already sent them a couple of books. Wonderful. So that's just kind of a shout out for teachers.

If you want to do a project where you ask people to interview a person about the three most forwarded books, feel free. And we're going to post the teaching guide on threebooks.ca as well, which is great. Another quick letter that just popped in that I wanted to read so we could share the love, so we could kind of all hang out together, comes from a show band via our review on Apple Podcasts.

This is not your typical books podcast. Endless curiosity and well-researched questions always uncover something fascinating about the guest. There is a kind and respectful vibe, and the conversations bring out wisdoms and the best in the guest, inspiring a greater love for books and reading.

To pull a quote from Seth Godin, who was our guest in chapter three, kindness scales. It creates trust and openness and truth and enthusiasm and patience and possibility. You owe it to yourself to dive in and listen to an episode in brackets chapter.

You won't stop there. You can join the 3 Books community. We look forward to having you.

Thanks show band. That's very nice of you. Drop me a line so I can send you a book to say thanks.

And if you are thinking about writing a note or review, please do. I always read one or two at the beginning, and I read every single one. All right.

Now I also was thinking at the beginning, I want to do like not like a sermon, but we have a values page for the shows. That's 3books.co/values. I have a whole page of values there, but I don't talk about them often enough.

So I want to just kind of cue into a couple of them here and there. The one value I want to talk about today is humans are the best algorithm. Obviously that's kind of the design of the show, right?

Like I'm interviewing humans about which books they found most formative. I'm not going on to the Amazon recommendation engine or I'm not trying to follow like, you know, some sort of algorithmically derived book recommendation, but I want to ask people. And I thought about that value for a few reasons.

One, Oliver, as you're going to hear, is going to talk about how he gets ideas for his next newsletters from his previous newsletters. He writes a wonderful biweekly newsletter called The Imperfectionist, which I highly recommend that you subscribe to. And then he gets ideas for the next one from responses to that, which I thought was kind of cool.

And it also made me think of Douglas Rushkoff, who you may remember is the author of Team Human as well as our guest way back in chapter 83. And he wrote this little note online talking about the pressure that algorithms put on creators. He says, while I love, this is Douglas now, while I love being able to engage with readers and listeners, I'm coming to realize my sense of guilty obligation to all the people and all these platforms is actually misplaced.

The platforms themselves are configured to tug on the triggers of responsibility, the same way Snapchat uses the streak feature to keep tween girls messaging each other every day. They're not messaging out of social obligation, but to keep the platform's metric rising. It's early training for the way their eventual economic precarity will keep them checking for how much money a medium post earned or how many new subscribers are generated by a sub stack post.

Ironically, the more content we churn out for all these algorithms, the less valuable our own content becomes. There is simply too much stuff. The problem isn't information overload, so much as perspective abundance.

We may need to redefine discipline from the ability to write and publish something every day to the ability to hold back. What if people started to produce content when they actually had something to say rather than coming up with something to say in order to fill another slot? I love that because the other thing is human pace.

Humans live in systems and cycles. We're awake, and then we sleep. We have summer, and then we have winter.

We have work, and then we have rest. I think we acknowledge and understand that intuitively, and I don't think algorithms do. There's an always-on-ness about algorithms, which also aggrieves me.

Humans are the best algorithms, one of the values that underpins this entire podcast. Okay, now, who is our guest today? Well, basically, I want to ask you if you're ready for a writing masterclass for someone who I think is honestly probably the best self-help writer in the world today.

And why wouldn't he be? After graduating from Cambridge University over in England, Oliver Burkeman wrote the popular column called This Column Will Change Your Life in The Guardian for over 15 years. That's like over 500 columns, and they were these wonderful, real-world, real-time, poetic explorations of the entire self-help universe.

And The Guardian is a free website. They aren't paywalled, although they accept donations, so you can still read all of his columns today. It might have a warning at the top, like, warning, 12 years old, warning, 18 years old, but they're really wonderful columns.

And afterwards, he then stopped the column in 2020 and then put out a book in 2021 called 4,000 Weeks, Average Human Lifespan in Weeks. And this is, again, a wonderfully poetic literary examination of how we live today, which Mark Manson, our guest in Chapter 28, called A Reality Check on Our Culture's Crazy Assumptions Around Work, Productivity, and Living a Meaningful Life, and which Adam Grant, our guest in Chapter 72, called the most important book ever written about time management. And I kind of feel like he said that tongue-in-cheek because it's not really about time management and it's like how to live a good life.

That's not really like a systems and acts and tools type of book, you know, the way that like Tim Ferriss' books might be or something like that. But the occasion of our actual first ever in-person connection, I say in-person because we were virtual, but we didn't turn the cameras on for a reason that we're gonna talk about at the beginning, is the fact that he has a new book called Meditations for Mortals, a wonderful follow-up to 4,000 Weeks, which just came out, and offers the reader 28 short chapters meant to be read one a day over four weeks, over 28 days.

So you can read it like that if you want to. I kind of gulped and swallowed and read seven at a time and then didn't read any for a few days. But the design of the book is one where if you were to follow this and have a little quiet downtime each night with Oliver, who is, like I said, poetic and literary and just a wonderful person to be around, then it is meant to be a bit of a trigger to sort of create some new behaviors in your life, which is wonderful.

So what are we talking about? Well, honestly, I feel like this is at a high level, like a writing masterclass here. There are so many systems and tools and habits for how Oliver thinks about writing and how he works that I just swallowed up.

For any writers out there, you are gonna love this. But then, of course, we're gonna talk about formative books. And of course, when we do that, we're gonna have a lot of jumping off conversations.

So we're also gonna talk about things like totalitarianism. How do you know when you're living in a totalitarian state? And Jungian analysis and what Jungian analysis means.

And we're gonna go in a hundred different directions because that's what we like to do on the show, but we go deep, we go wide, we go far, we hang out and stick around at the very end of the show for the end of the podcast, but we will hang out again, play your voicemails, talk about the word of the chapter and have a little bit of a post-party follow-up. All right, everybody. Are you ready?

Here we go. Let's turn the page into Oliver Burkman and Chapter 142. Now.

Oliver:

I'm all for audio only, believe me, but I'll do whatever you want.

Neil:

Why are you all for audio only?

Oliver:

I think it makes for, I don't know why, I think it makes for a better conversation.

Neil:

Yeah, because I can't see you right now. You can't see me. We've never met in person before, face to face, and yet we have had a sort of a letter-based relationship for a number of years.

And I don't know if it's, I don't know if you agree, but I feel like audio only also is just much more akin to reading. Like it's much more, you know, when you're reading a book, you hear a voice, it's in your head, you're in your own self, you have your own surroundings, and you aren't being prompted to try to interpret stuff from a whole bunch of different inputs.

Oliver:

Yeah, no, that's a good point. And I think it's part of why people find audiobooks so sort of intimate as well. Yeah, no, it's fascinating.

Yeah, I'm always happy to have a conversation without visuals. Also, I'm sort of insecure, not about my appearance, although I'm sure plenty of people are, but I don't think I've figured out my video backdrop and lighting and all that stuff, whereas a good microphone near my mouth, that's what I've got.

Neil:

Well, yeah, exactly. Well, it feels more like a phone call too. I was just about to interview Maria Popova a few months ago, who's the author of The Marginalian, and formerly Brain Pickings, and she emailed me probably just a moment before we hit record, and she said, oh, I just noticed you record video.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to politely decline.

Oliver:

Right.

Neil:

I don't do video.

Her argument was that that's not what it's about, and it's collecting something that's kind of like a momentary version of the truth. I said, yeah, whenever I turn on the video, it gives me this internal, ugh, and she's like, listening to the internal, ugh, is one of the best directions in the artistic life I know.

Oliver:

I don't have feelings that strong, and if you wanted us to record video, well, that was what I was assuming we'd be doing, to be honest. So you just tell me.

Neil:

I like it. I want to stick with this. I want to stick with audio only. I also think it's a bit of a, of an F you to the world.

Like everything's oriented to wanting everybody to create video. I even walk down the street now in Toronto, and like, you know, someone holding their phone up above their head or holding it as they walk down the street, people don't blanket that. I'm like, you know, when I was a kid, you can't just walk around videotaping people.

That's not allowed. So I resist the video everywhere culture, and I know all the largest markets in the world, you know, the Joe Rogans and the Mel Robbins and the Rich Rolls, and I know they're all migrating towards video-based consumption, but that's for purposes that are different than ours, which is to have a theater-of-the-mind conversation about your incredible work with this new book, Meditations for Mortals, your previous book, 4,000 Weeks, your books before that, your columns before that, and your most formative book. So I really am so thrilled to welcome you, Oliver, onto three books.

This is the only podcast in the world by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. And we are having this conversation on October 17th, 2024. Meditations for Mortals came out in the US and North America on October the 7th.

I know it came out in the UK before that, and it appears to be a huge hit. I mean, already on Amazon, I see 86 reviews. It's ranked, you know, 554 in all of books, which is, might not sound high, but like, the happiest equation, my most popular book is 178,885.

Okay, just checking. The average rating is 4.6. So, you know, this is like, you're sort of like a week or two after the birth of this thing. How's the book feeling to you right now?

What's the relationship you have with the book? And if you don't mind, what's the relationship you have now with your writing career in general as this is coming out into the world?

Oliver:

Wow, yeah. Lots of questions. You've been paying more attention to my Amazon ranking than I have, which I'm actually quite pleased to realize that I haven't been as addicted as I thought I would be.

Neil:

And I should say, I also checked the amazon.co.uk this morning. It was 110. So it's even higher in the UK.

So it's a hit all around. But it's good that you're not checking. I was just checking for the question.

Oliver:

What happened was it came out in the UK in early September and then in the US in early August. And in many ways, the US launches a bigger deal, depending on how you measure it, and copies available and all the rest of it. But because the UK launch had already happened, it's like that whole sort of emotional psychodrama part.

I'd sort of got through it already the first few weeks of like, you know, waiting on tenterhooks to see how people respond. What I learned from 4,000 weeks, my last book, which did much, much better than anything I'd previously written at that point, was that it really can be quite a slow burn thing. It's a long time before you can really say of a book, even if numbers are what count for you, which maybe they shouldn't be, but even if they are, it's a long time after it's been launched before you can really reach any kind of judgment on that.

So what I love at this stage, honestly, is just sort of hearing from individual people who are sort of making their way through it. That is just like the best. It's very self-selecting because you don't really hear from anyone who hates it, right?

You know, email communication is therefore wonderfully positive and reassuring and interesting. But yeah, it's just such a weird thing, right? I mean, as you know so well, right?

You just sort of, you pour your heart and soul into it and then you stick it out there and then you start sort of talking about it in various contexts to promote it. But that's like a completely different job and I've got no idea whether I'm really talking about it in the same head space almost as well. You know, I don't know.

Neil:

It's a totally different thing. You mentioned emotional psychodrama, so let's hold on to that phrase, emotional psychodrama. You also said the phrase, it can be a really slow burn, so let's hold on to that.

You said in a December 2022 email to me, you said, I think it was Robert Wright who wrote Why Buddhism is True, who described the pre-book launch moment as the calm before the calm. Let's hold on to that. And then I want to just ask you one level step deeper, keeping in mind that the audience here, in a lot of cases, are book writers or book writers to be.

A lot of people who are listening to this show are aspiring writers or are writers. So then using the phrases you've mentioned so far, how might you recommend doing a book launch now? What might be your, and that could be internally or externally, but what is Oliver Berkman, who's had a couple massive popular book launches now in the last couple years, what's your book launch advice to another writer?

Oliver:

Well, I guess the first thing that springs to mind is if there is a point at which you feel like you're completely on top of it and you know what you're doing and you didn't leave anything too late, I haven't reached that stage yet. In some ways, I'm pleased about that because if you do want to talk at all about the substance of the new book, that idea of not waiting until you feel like you're on top of things is kind of a central theme. I think you've got to sort of have the right level of internal non-attachment to it, right?

You can't make it that if it goes, you can't make it that how well the book does is the sole and final judgment on whether it was worth writing or whether it's a good book by some other standard. But equally, I don't know, I have an awful lot of support and help from the publishers. I'm not one of the writers who, and I think there are many, many, who sort of feel that they have to do everything themselves in terms of promoting it.

But I also think you do want to try to consider that that's a really fun challenge, right? It's not some terrible burden. I'm not in the mindset of maybe a previous generation of writers who thought it was somehow offensive that it's their job to spread the word about a book.

I think that can be totally fun. And then, you know, just to get completely down to brass tacks, I think it really helps to do whatever you can to get a lot of pre-orders. People know this.

And a lot may be a very different figure depending on the place you're at in your career. And it's not, you know, it's not the be all and end all. But I think it's very helpful if you can start out of the gate with a little bit of pre-order action because all the different retailers and everybody pay close attention.

Neil:

Yeah, the retailers, we just interviewed our last chapter of the show was with James Daunt of Daunt Books and Waterstones and Barnes & Noble. And yeah, pre-orders signify to publishers and bookstores, even though the numbers might be small, you know, I think the pre-orders, I think the total number of pre-orders I had for my most popular book ever was like 500. You know what I mean?

The numbers don't have to be massive, but they are a signifier that there's built up demand and that it encourages retailers and booksellers to take a chance on maybe a front of shop display. And as you know, from following James Daunt's career, potentially he's oriented these big bookstores in both the UK and the US to be more like independent bookstores where they're tracking and following and choosing their book merchandising based on their individual store, not based on planograms anymore or co-op dollars. So even if the publisher wants Meditations for Morals to be at the front of every Barnes & Noble, that's just unlikely to happen now because it's unlikely to happen for anybody.

So as a result, maybe it's better. You just have to write a better book that wins people over and gets the word of mouth and gets the email you're talking about. So I like that.

All that combined with healthy, non-attachment.

Oliver:

Yeah, I mean, I probably shouldn't, this is probably too candid in case my, you know, editors or anybody are listening, but I did realize I had enough presence of mind to realize this time around that like there was real truth in the idea that as a friend of mine reminded me like whether I'm able to enjoy this process really is the criterion of success. I mean, I know someone might hear that and be like, well, no, like whether you work hard and sell a lot of copies is the criterion of success, but the two are not incompatible. I think if anything, you know, enjoying yourself is going to easily feed onto the motivation to sort of promote books and stuff.

And yeah, at some point in your life, you've got to be able to measure what you're doing by whether it's fun as well.

Neil:

Yeah. It reminds me of that phrase, he who has the most fun wins, you know, that old adage, right? If you can enjoy it, then you've already won.

Oliver:

Obviously we are deep in your ballpark here, right? So I understand, but like that, the question of like measuring things by whether they are, by the feelings that they can evoke in you, I think is quite important.

Neil:

Yeah. So we've, like basically right now we've got like a messy table between us, right? We've got a lot of, there's gratitude, there's imperfectionism, there's meditations for mortals.

We've got this self-help universe that we both kind of sit in, that we both sort of see and are around. We're both trying to have fun in this universe. And in this place, we're going to touch on meditations for mortals a number of times, I'm sure, but you've also given us your three most formative books, the three books that shaped you or, you know, ignited you or altered a direction in some special way.

I've bought all three of those books. I want to say I've read all three of them, but I've read big chunks of all three of them, I will say. Fair enough.

And I'm thrilled and delighted and excited to sort of share them back with you and our listeners and then ask you a number of questions. So we're going to kind of pretend because we can't see each other and nobody can see us that we're all in a bookstore. And I'm going to talk about each book for about a minute and then I'm going to ask you to tell us about your relationship with it.

And then I've got a few follow-up questions for each one.

Oliver:

Great.

Neil:

So your very first formative book is Stasiland, stories from behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder. F-U-N-D-E-R. The cover is a photo of soldiers standing on a tall graffiti covered Berlin Wall with a dark kind of gloomy sky behind them. The bottom is sort of a cream background with a skinny all caps, almost prison bar like font that reads Stasiland with a blurb from Alina Lappin at the Sunday Times ribboned across the bottom in a light blue that reads brilliant. A masterpiece of investigative analysis written almost like a novel with a perfect mix of compassion and distance. There's also a maroon burst publishing term, the circle on the cover of a book that says winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. But what is this book about?

Well, basically in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. Shortly afterwards, two Germanys reunited. East Germany ceased to exist.

Anna Funder's bestselling Stasiland brings us an extraordinary tale of real lives from the former East Germany, including a woman who tried to scale the wall on New Year's Eve. Heartbreaking story of Frau Paul who was separated from her baby by the Berlin Wall. We get to meet some of the Stasi men themselves who are still proud of their surveillance methods. There's a really fascinating kind of Studs Terkel-like kind of on the ground real stories that illuminate a part of history that a lot of people have forgotten. This book was published in Australia by Text Publishing in 2002. Oliver, tell us about your relationship with Stasiland. Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder.

Oliver:

So it's, in a way, it's almost funny to call this a formative book because I feel like formative implies that you have to be kind of like 13 or 14 when you first encounter it. This book I encountered pretty, you know, when it was published pretty near the beginning of my journalistic career but it's not that old of a book.

Neil:

Yeah, so 2002, if you just play this, you graduated from Cambridge in 1996, started writing your column for The Guardian I think in 2006. Is that right?

Oliver:

Yeah, so I was in that period where I was sort of getting, I was getting into a career as a journalist, 2002. I was, you know, that was what I did and how I paid the rent but I wasn't sort of fully immersed in it maybe at that point. Anyway, this book, you know, firstly it's just, on the level of story and the level of its substance, it's a completely fascinating book about this just extraordinary surveillance society that was created in East Germany during the Cold War.

And, you know, I've seen Anna Funder write about it since and talk about it as the most advanced surveillance society that at the time had existed, right? Because it's all pre-internet and it's kind of astounding what these people did in terms of persuading everybody to spy on their neighbours and keeping sort of extraordinary documentation of what was going on. Anyone who's seen the movie The Lives of Others, this is the same, we're in the same field of subject matter here.

And actually there are a few interesting themes in that idea of trying to exert total central control over a society that I think have kind of, whether by chance or not, become quite central to my writing in a totally different way. But what really got to me about that book and where it's placed in my heart is that it's a journalistic account, it's reported, but Anna Funder inserts herself into the narrative. It's about her being on a reporting journey in, overwhelmingly I think, in former East Berlin.

You know, it's kind of funny at the same time as dealing with such kind of serious stuff and such sort of terrible kind of life histories and experiences. And it really just like made me realise that you could do something, there was something you could do as a journalist. I would call it journalism.

I would call what I do very differently, but still kind of journalism. And, you know, I've struggled to sort of convey it, but it's something to do with the idea of the journalist being in the story and the ideas being really serious and very big sort of sweeping ideas being addressed through the granular details of people's lives and feeling yourself to be in the little apartment where the interview is being conducted and all of that. I've always been incredibly attracted to any kind of writing that manages this, right, that puts big ideas into really vivid situations.

When you asked me for this list of books, I was partly minded instead to recommend virtually anything by Janet Malcolm, who's another writer who does this just astoundingly well. So that's my first pass at an answer.

Neil:

Yeah, no, no, it's a great pass. You know, there's a Kirkus review on the inside cover here, by the way, it says, Funder's fully humanised portrait of the Stasi's tentacles reads like a warning of totalitarian futures to come. I can't skip over this book without asking you to comment on our political climate.

Obviously it's, we're talking in October. There's a big US election in November. I'll just give you one more quote from the book here to maybe help inform your reflection, but she describes her feeling for the former German Democratic Republic as horror romance.

She says, quote, the romance comes from the dream of a better world. The German communists wanted to build out of the ashes of their Nazi past from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs. Yet the horror comes from what they did in its name.

So I just wonder, you know, we talking about totalitarian states, I'd love your views on the political climate and maybe some of the steps you think are necessary to improve the quality and level of discourse as somebody who has been participating in a really healthy way for decades now.

Oliver:

Ah, that's fascinating. You know, I mean, I do think that there are sort of totalitarian aspects to the culture that we find ourselves in. In my understanding, what really makes, what really marks out totalitarianism from other concepts like fascism, dictatorship, tyranny, all this rest of it, is that notion that there's no part of your inner soul that is beyond the reach of the central authority, right?

It's that. I think this is what makes sort of North Korea sort of a classic modern day example. It's this notion that there's no private sphere.

There's no private space. And to me, when I think about that today, I go primarily to sort of the tech culture that we live in, the voluntary ways in which we offer up our most intimate lives on social media, the ways in which kind of we are surveilled through our purchases and our movements and everything that Shoshana Zuboff writes about in her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

Neil:

Yes, I have that book written down here for that exact reason.

Oliver:

I don't go immediately quite so quickly to sort of the politics of extreme partisanship and Trumpism and all the rest of it because I think that while, of course, you can see aspects of that, you know, debates over reproductive rights are absolutely debates about the most basic parts of your inner and private world. But generally speaking, I feel like that is the emphasis there is on sort of chaos and disorder and certainly the harnessing of the energies of disorder to sort of feed authoritarianism. I think that that's true.

But it's different in interesting ways as well as the same. And I don't know, it still feels to me like maybe this will prove deeply naive in hindsight, but it still feels to me like there are ways to choose not to be difficult, but ways to choose not to be part of this kind of surveillance world today that maybe were not available in the GDR just because of the fact that it used more lower tech means to achieve it. And then obviously, you know, the Chinese social credit system and all of that is a very important example of this kind of technological totalitarianism.

And in the interests of seeing the whole picture, let's point out that there are plenty of people on the sort of MAGA side of the American polarisation, which is of course not my side, who would see this kind of... who would see their opponents as being the ones trying to exert ever greater control. Right?

Through the COVID lockdowns, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, it's all very sort of current and alive, this material.

Neil:

Yeah. And one of the things that Shoshana Zuboff talks about in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is the distillation of all of our behaviours into sort of zeros and ones. You know, we were talking at the beginning of this conversation about, OK, not turning the video on because of course the internet wants us to have video on so that we can have a YouTube video of both of our heads talking so that that can be sliced and diced into endless little kind of 30-second snippets, or not even 30 seconds, more like 5-second snippets.

And I think about that because Jonathan Franzen, a past guest on 3 Books, has said the middle has been shown to be unprofitable. And yet your work, both in 4,000 Weeks and Meditations for Mortal and your column in The Guardian for a decade, you know, is a thoughtful, nuanced, both sides kind of way of talking about issues. And you've been successful doing it.

So in a way, you're almost like the counter culture to what I see as the algorithmically defined behaviours that we're all encouraged to live in now. You go on Netflix, you watch what the thing tells you to watch. You know what I mean?

You are driving with a map app. You stop at the place that pops up. You check the Google review.

You distill down any review of any food you ever eat to a number out of five. It's like we're living in this increasingly black and white, zero middle ground place. But yet you've been able to hang out in the middle still.

So I don't know how you're doing it, but you're pulling this off. And I thought you might have some advice for how the rest of us might choose to live like that too.

Oliver:

You know, it's interesting, and I do have thoughts about this. And I mean, they start off in a self-deprecating way, because I think the part of the answer here is that success for a writer is not the same thing as success for a movie studio. So yeah, I'm really enjoying the state of my career, and it's great, and I make a living from writing.

And it's all kind of, I understand that it's wonderful and from many people's perspectives, enviable. But the sort of scale at which this is happening is not like putting out a movie, you know? It's not millions of dollars investment, and then you have to make it all back, otherwise it's all like lots and lots of people lose their jobs, and et cetera, et cetera.

So I think one of the things is that, you know, and I think this is a positive aspect of the digital revolution, a really clearly positive one, is that it's the thousand true fans idea of Kevin Kelly, right? You can connect to that slice of people who are into what you're doing, and you can connect to them globally, so there's going to be enough of them to sustain a career, or at least there can be enough of them to sustain a career, without them being a remotely large percentage of the world's population. So, you know, as you know, a book can be enormously successful.

It doesn't really mean that like the majority of people if you walk down a street...

Neil:

Yeah, sure, it might sell 50,000 copies, and that'll be a bestseller for six months, right?

Oliver:

Exactly, and even the books that sell like a million, the very rare breakout, incredible big successes, and, you know, that's a minuscule percentage of the population of North America, for example.

Neil:

Exactly, that's less than the number of tickets sold to the 10th most popular movie of the last weekend.

Oliver:

Right, so all those blockbuster dynamics, all those algorithmic things that sort of take everyone to the extremes or to the lowest common denominators, like they almost create this shadow world where I think a lot of creators are working, and I'm not suggesting it's a sort of age of great plenty where anybody can make tons and tons of money. That's probably overstated as well, but I think it really does mean that you can get a lot of sort of... There's something to be done if you're someone like me who doesn't want to be sort of fueling those dynamics or whose ideas just seem naturally to feel like they're not at one polarized extreme or another.

And doing my email newsletter has been just like the biggest revelation in this regard. It's just a sort of complete...

Neil:

Oh, say more about that. So for people listening, you created an email newsletter called The Imperfectionist. You've been doing that, is it like a biweekly?

Oliver:

Yeah, it's roughly every two weeks.

Neil:

And you've been doing that for how many years?

Oliver:

Since just after 4,000 weeks came out, I think. So it's like three years, really, four years, maybe four months.

Neil:

Right, so three years of biweekly long-form essay type reminds me of your Guardian column type of reflection. And then I'm assuming what you're saying is that's been a reminder because you're noticing that the community kind of comes up, people forward it around, you get notes, and then your community grows organically around the work you're passionate about.

Oliver:

Yeah, and you just, you know, obviously the people who respond to me are a tiny fraction of the people who read it, and they themselves are a pleasingly large percentage, but still not 100, of the people who receive the email. So, you know, it's not representative, but I just have this really strong sense of, you know, the things that I write resonating with people or people adding new suggestions and taking my thinking in new ways. I've absolutely had ideas for further newsletter essays or for parts of books, parts of the new book, from emails that I get sent.

Neil:

And you send the introduction to Meditations for Mortals that the book largely came from your emails. Like, you also got a book out of it too.

Oliver:

Yeah, no, exactly. I made a lot of, you know, there's a lot of new stuff and it had to be adapted in all sorts of ways, but it has its origins there completely.

Neil:

Sounds similar to 1000 Awesome Things. File, print, here's my book. You know, I mean, this is my, I'm joking, but like, I wrote a daily blog and the great thing we're both talking about is that it can add up to something more substantial later if you ever wanted to.

Oliver:

No, I certainly didn't file print, but yeah, I knew that I was onto something. I knew what sort of ideas connected with people and what ways of expressing things connected with people. And right, to the extent that someone who's very, very, like someone who's really closely read all my newsletters picks up this new book, they will recognise certain stretches as being related to stuff they've read.

But another great thing about this kind of, you know, corner of the economy, it seems to me, or corner of the cultural industry or whatever, is that they will be the people for whom that's a welcome thing. Oh no, I really would like your greatest hits in a nice bound volume that I can go back to.

Neil:

And I will throw myself there too. I read, I have been reading your biweekly newsletter since it's come out and I often respond to you when reflecting on it. And I read this book and I did not notice like my own brain was not smart enough to remember anything that you'd written a couple of years ago if even you had.

So yeah, I can relate to that completely. And it's great that you're opening up kind of writing, like the writing side of what you do because I want to hang up there for a second as we transition into your second book, which we're going to, for the Dewey Decimal fans at home, I'll include myself in this, we're going to go from the very end of the Dewey Decimal system, 943. So your last book was classified History and Geography slash Europe slash Germany and Central Europe.

That's 943. Now we're going to go all the way down to 071 for Information slash Journalism and Publishing where we're going to talk about your second form in a book, which is The New New Journalism Conversations with America's Best Nonfiction Writers On Their Craft by Robert S. Boynton B-O-Y-N-T-O-N published in 2005 by Vintage.

I'm holding a cream paperback with an up-tilted, splashy newspaper headline type in like a white and black kind of sans serif, all caps font that says THE NEW NEW JOURNALISM and there's tons, well 19, I'll be specific, there's 19 red, blue and yellow bursts filled of the names of famous authors like Susan Orlean, Michael Lewis, Gay Talese, John Krakauer, Eric Schlossler. Robert S. Boynton, by the way, he was an editor for The New Yorker and Harper's and director of Literary Reportage at NYU's Journalism School.

Basically, 40 years after, he argues, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and Gay Talese launched the New New Journalism movement, he sits down with 19 practitioners of what he calls the New New Journalism to discuss their writing methods, outputs, and careers. As I mentioned, follow this one under 0.1071.30 for information slash journalism. Oliver, tell us about your relationship with the New New Journalism by Robert S. Boynton.

Oliver:

I mean, in some ways, this kind of intensifies and doubles down on some things I was already saying about Stasiland. I think that all of these interviews in this book really speak, well, speak to two things. Firstly, my kind of obsession with other people's writing routines and everything, which we can totally talk about because it's like a glorious topic for some of us anyway to sort of discuss how the day unfolds for people in doing the kind of writing that we want to be doing ourselves.

But also, it's that question of a sensibility. It's the idea that you could be a journalist and not be trying to just take yourself out of the story, not be reporting solely on kind of day-to-day events, but reporting on big, big ideas and making ideas vivid and accessible and funny and all the rest of it. you know, I'm thinking, I mean, John Krakauer is one of these interviewees and he's brilliant at it, but that's a very sort of, to me, a very sort of concrete kind of writing, that sort of adventure writing for which he's best known in the mountaineering books and things like that.

Neil:

Into the wild, into thin air.

Oliver:

Yeah. And then at the other end of the scale, perhaps, I'm just looking back over the list here, but I see Ron Rosenbaum wrote a huge book called Explaining Hitler, which is about explaining Hitler. And then Michael Lewis, possibly of all these names, I'm just trying to see if I'm slandering anybody, but he might well be the sort of currently most high-flying name.

Neil:

I think so. Him or maybe Susan Orlean too.

Oliver:

Right. Writing in this kind of extraordinarily fluid, very, very sort of makes it look incredibly easy manner about very complicated financial transactions or about sort of the deepest workings of the federal government. I know he's been criticized for swallowing Sam Bankman-Fried's stories too credulously, but, you know, whatever. I don't know if that's fair. But there's a real sense of all these people sort of taking potentially very obscure ideas and putting life into them. If magazines had been allowed in the format of your podcast, Neil, I might have also mentioned here a magazine called Lingua Franca, which doesn't exist anymore.

It's one of those if you know, you know kind of things.

Neil:

I don't know.

Oliver:

Which was a relatively short-lived, I think it was monthly publication. Which is, it's very hard to describe. It was essentially a magazine of academia, of sort of largely American and Canadian sort of academic life.

But it was coming at the ideas as if it was a soap opera, right? It was about, it was about feuds between scholars and scandals, not of the kind that, you know, not HR scandals, but sort of intellectual scandals. It's just really hard to kind of convey what that is.

But it's something about the life in ideas. It's the complete rejection of the position that some people sometimes have that like, I just want to hear about a philosopher's ideas. I don't want anything about his personal life or her personal life.

You know, it's the sort of, it's really just the sort of humanising of really obscure ideas. And there's something almost just intrinsically funny about writing, about, you know, disagreements at the core of metaphysics or of Heidegger studies or of existentialism, partly through the kind of enmities that arise in the senior common room at the university. Anyway, I've gone off the topic of this, but it's the same idea.

It's that kind of thing that I've always been, that I've always just been kind of addicted to. And I think that is the through line maybe to some of what I do.

Neil:

I like that. I like that. Addicted, my obsession with other people's writing routines.

I have your rough writing resume as something like, 1994, you graduated from Christ College, Cambridge. From 2006 to 2020, you wrote this column will change your life at the Guardian. I think over 500 columns.

You published two books over 10 years ago, 2011, a book called Help, How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done. 2012, The Antidote, Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking. Then nine years later, 2021, 4,000 Weeks, Time Management for Mortals.

And 2024 now, Meditations for Mortals. And so you're prolific. You've obviously been writing through your university career, but also writing as, for one of the most prominent newspapers in the entire world, four books.

And so I thought we would take your obsession with other people's writing routines, I would actually borrow specific questions from this book, and then I'll turn them onto you as if you were included in the book, but I'll tell you who the questions are from, and I'll ask them of you now, so you might illuminate and help us all become better writers. Does that work for you?

Oliver:

I will happily try, yeah.

Neil:

Okay, so John Krakauer, who you mentioned, author of Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, has an incredibly juicy interview from page 154 to 182 in this book, kind of gives you the idea of how long these interviews are. So I'm going to give you the five questions I pulled out from his interview. Number one, what kind of ideas are you drawn to?

Oliver:

I think that I am drawn to stories that sort of capture the excitement of ideas, the excitement of figuring out how the world works and the personalities behind those, but I think I'd also have to be very honest, certainly in my recent writing, I have to say that I'm also very much drawn to ideas that I think might kind of help me directly, personally, internally, you know, live a less anxious, more focused, more fulfilling, and sort of richly relational life. It's funny that we've got to this point in the conversation and not really talked about the fact that on some level it's self-help, right? I don't have a great objection to that label, at least not anymore, and so I'm drawn to the ideas I think might help me.

Neil:

Yeah, okay. So then the next question he was asked is what kind of research do you do?

Oliver:

Yeah, and this is where I diverge from a lot of the people in this book, and probably John Krakauer too, and you read some of them and they're like, well, first of all, I spent two years just walking around, like, you know, I think Ted Conover's in this book, and he spent like a year and a half riding the railways as a hobo in America before he even thought about putting pen to paper. And of course, the absolute classic of this, he's not in this book, but the absolute classic case here is Robert Caro, who's monumental and brilliant multipart biography of Lyndon Johnson initially just entailed moving to the area where Lyndon Johnson grew up as a boy and kind of not even trying to write for some time as I recall, just sort of living that extraordinary level of fidelity to your subject, and I'm not quite sure how the economics of that would work out these days.

Neil:

That's The Power Broker, which was mentioned on our show in Chapter 63.

Oliver:

No, The Power Broker is about Robert Moses. Yeah, right.

Neil:

Oh, it's not Power Broker.

Oliver:

And then the rest, I forget what the sort of umbrella name for the multi-volume, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, I think it's called. There's been three of them and there's one still to come.

Neil:

Oh, no way.

Oliver:

Anyway, no, I am much more of a...

Neil:

So what kind of research do you do?

Oliver:

I'm much more of a person who is just sort of researching and living and writing all of a piece. So, you know, I'll certainly read a lot of relevant books and I'll certainly track down a lot of relevant pieces of interviews. I'll go and interview people about the ideas that I'm writing about and I'll go on sort of reporting trips and spend a few days somewhere trying to sort of be able to tell a story about my engagement with that place or that idea.

But I will also just absolutely use stuff that happened to me anyway that wasn't part of a... that wasn't part of a planned sort of reporting trip. And I also feel like there's a much shorter term...

like sometimes I'm writing about something that I first thought about or first read about or first discovered, dug out some information about like hours previously. It might not be. It might be things that have been simmering on some level in my mind for years.

So I'm very sort of eclectic. This is what I think part of what sort of British journalism experience means to me. It's the ability to sort of go out very quickly and find like a huge variety of little morsels that you can build into something.

So I'm... you know, people sometimes remark in reviews and stuff on how like I can... I'll include like quotes from an ancient Greek philosopher and quotes from an interview in a magazine with Danielle Steele as if this is kind of a surprising kind of juxtaposition.

But I'm just like a magpie, really. I'm just sort of going out and sort of vacuuming it all up. Magpies don't vacuum things up, you know what I mean.

Neil:

Well, Seth Godin, our guest in Chapter 3, once described himself as a whale sifting around the ocean soaking up plankton. So we'll use that metaphor if you like it. How would you define your reportorial stance?

Oliver:

That's a great question for some of these writers. I'm trying to think about what my answer to that is. I mean, this is where it begins to stretch a point to call what I do reporting, right?

Neil:

You're definitely... I've read so many of your columns that you're always like exploring like a productivity tool, a hack, a suggestion, the parado principle. But I think...

Oliver:

Yeah, no, totally. Okay, I see that. I guess what reporting connotes to me in some sense is that you sort of go to a place and you talk to a lot of people and the question is are you on their side?

Are you deeply sceptical that they're trying to mislead you? Are you there with a thesis you have to prove? You know, there's all sorts of different...

that sort of classic kind of reported journalism. But yeah, I suppose my stance is that I am deeply invested because I'm not going to be pursuing an idea unless I think it's something that could make a big difference to me as well as to the reader. I think I definitely have a sort of knee-jerk tendency towards being charitable, right?

It's more interesting to me if I do end up interviewing somebody who I don't like on some level to try to figure out what makes them tick from their point of view, the kind of thing that Robert Wright, who we mentioned earlier, calls cognitive empathy, not necessarily feeling their pain, but trying to understand why they could have ended up being the person that they are. You know, I think it would be a fair thing to say about my books that I am often in the business of trying to establish a thesis. So, you know, in the context of the new book, if there are a lot of people out there who really want to make the case that perfectionism is an extremely good and motivating and wonderful value to live your life by, then, you know, I'm not going to be spending an awful lot of time with them.

I think it's good to pressure test your ideas a bit, but, you know, when it comes to your basic thesis, you know, in the same way that if you felt that human happiness was completely impossible and beyond reach, I think you might have approached some of your inquiries into it in a different way as well. Yeah. You know, so it's definitely sort of, there's no attempted objectivity.

Neil:

No, I like that.

Oliver:

I hope I'm being accurate when I'm talking about the actual side of things.

Neil:

I like all these words you mentioned. Invested, charitable, thesis establishing, subjective. Yeah, these are great.

So these are all informing your reportorial stance. And then the last question I'll ask you from John Krakauer and then we'll jump over to some questions that he asked Michael Lewis. But the last question for Krakauer is, what kind of notebooks do you use?

Oliver:

My sort of main work writing doesn't unfold in notebooks. So, I use the I use the digital equivalent and just recently I've I've really started using Scrivener properly. I'm sure there'll be many people listening who Yeah, that's what I use as well.

are much more familiar with it than me. But I've whether it's because of its newest iteration or my attempts to find something somehow cooler having all failed, I don't know. But I'm there.

And then I do write, you know, in a journal I would always write in a how is this word pronounced? Leuchtturm? Leuchtturm?

Neil:

Oh, yeah.

It's like the competitor to Moleskine.

Oliver:

It is. I'm on the I'm on the Leuchtturm side of that.

Neil:

So you've got the Leuchtturms with you, kind of like pocket size. I'm assuming you're carrying them with you to jot stuff down if things come across your mind. But you've got Scrivener as

Oliver:

If we're really going into the weeds here, jotting things down I do on scraps and on index cards because something weird in my still recovering perfectionist psyche doesn't like just jotting things down in a very nice notebook. The ones I'm talking about are A5 and I use them I write sort of morning pages type stuff in them almost every day for several pages. And then if I'm not always first thing in the morning but it's for journaling really.

Neil:

So when you say this is a lot here sorry I know I know I know we might just pause here for a second. So when you say you write morning pages do you mean like in the Artist's Life by Julia Cameron that idea of sort of like expulsing from your body you know whatever kind of crap is in your mind and your brain and just sort of getting your writing muscles working like that type of morning pages or am I interpreting that wrong?

Oliver:

Well I mean certainly the phrase comes from Julia Cameron I'm trying to remember whether that that sort of um you gave a very sort of expulsive definition of Yeah I thought it was meant to like just get stuff out of your head that nobody ever sees that you're just like kind of getting your kind of like stretching before you do a workout or play sports that type of stuff. Maybe that is right about what she what she means by I don't know to me it's more it is about getting my head straight for the day but it's but it's but it's and it's not that I go back and refer to them and use the material but it's more constructive than you made it sound I think it's more in my case it's more sort of I'm you know honestly it's sort of therapy type writing right? It's like me writing about my how I'm feeling and what I'm how I'm planning to do things and what's going on and it's not it's not a diary in the sense of recording all the main events of that take place but it also isn't just a sort of cleaning out the cobwebs thing it's also not really creative writing in the sense that I'm not trying to phrase things that I would then write about later that day or anything it's just sort of I don't know it's what I think journaling means but maybe that's true

Neil:

How many years have you been doing that?

And do you keep all your old journals? Do you have them like on a bookshelf somewhere?

Oliver:

That is the one thing that I've really been doing consistently for a very long time I mean there are interruptions and I'm you know even when there are even when I'm in a period of really doing it it's not going to be every single day but I must have been doing that since since my early 20s

Neil:

Wow that's amazing That's great so you have this as a great deeply ingrained kind of multi-decade habit now I'm assuming you've got like shelves of journals somewhere

Oliver:

I have although you know half of them are in our basement in Brooklyn and some of those are on legal pads and probably too damp to see anymore and you know there's a little it's I'm not I'm not lovingly curating them for the Library of Congress but

Neil:

Yeah yeah yeah I know but it's also helpful for yourself though I mean for yourself for your own personal like when I pick up an old journal I've only been doing it really for about 10 years myself and the problem for me is that I turn to journaling as a practice when I'm usually in a negative state of mind so when I flip through my own journals it sounds like someone who's kind of dour and negative all the time even though that's just when I turn to the practice you know what I mean like if I'm in a good mood I kind of just jump out of bed you know what I mean or or I turn I turn in I tuck in for the night I don't need to like write it out for three pages right so there's a bias in my journals

Oliver:

no I mean to some extent that's sorry go

Neil:

no no no just that's my own perspective but I still love looking at the old ones because I'm like oh man I got through that you know or I can't believe I was all bogged down worrying about that I was worried about making revenue in 2020 or whatever it was when the that was an unnecessary worry like you know what I mean like it's just you get that kind of feeling a lot you know what I mean

Oliver:

yeah no absolutely I mean I don't go back and refer to them like it sounds that you do I have done it but it's not really part of it but yeah I think there's a real just you know putting it onto the page is an act of sort of disidentification and then yeah even within the spate of even within a week you know a lot of the things that it sort of calls to mind and makes you conscious of how swiftly one problem is replaced by the next that is actually quite that is quite freeing and then yes the other thing I have done occasionally the reason I don't go back and look at them too much is that if I pick a journal from five years ago it's a little alarming sometimes how how I just go back round and round over the same the same issue but I don't think I don't think that that I genuinely and sincerely don't think that that is because I am sort of frozen in place I think it's like it really charts the very slow drip drip drip process that that real change and growth actually actually is

Neil:

right right which is why the design and structure of your new book is so wonderful how it's 28 essays meant to be read kind of one a day for four weeks I think that's just a lovely kind of it just really nicely paces the feeling of the writing and also doesn't encourage people to kind of read too much too fast or feel overwhelming now I want to give you some questions from Michael Lu oh wait one last question on the lectern sorry to bog you down here whenever I buy a lectern or a moleskin I have the option of grid lined or blank which of those three do you choose and why

Oliver:

they have dotted as well now don't they yes they do

Neil:

have dotted that's right

Oliver:

lined I'm a lined.

Neil:

okay that's funny that's what I do too grid is too overwhelming and blank is too under like it's like I'm all over the place okay there's a boxer brief metaphor in there somewhere okay so Michael Lewis I want to ask you a few questions you kind of called and I agree like you know he wrote liar's poker he wrote moneyball he wrote the big short there's a 22 page interview in this book from 248 to 270 so here are some of the questions I pulled from Boynton asking Lewis that I thought we could ask Berkman so do you prefer writing books or articles

Oliver:

I think I prefer writing books but the way that I approach them is as partly as sequences of articles that then need to be sort of molded into a coherent whole yeah I think ultimately I'm sort of proudest of books and there's a chance it feels like there's a chance to really sort of burnish and polish a book that there often isn't with an article

Neil:

oh that's nice chance to burnish and polish with a book that there isn't an article like that how many projects do you work on simultaneously

Oliver:

if we're talking about writing projects yes then it's and then it gets very quite weird what is simultaneous is it like they're on my plate at the same time or I work on them within the space of the same day I mean I'm always I'm always writing my newsletter right every week or two or right now week or three but never mind and then there's been a book for in the recent times and there'll be another one of those and then I might also have a article here or there so I guess it's two to three is the answer to that question okay that's great I think it's good to have more than one so you can sort of you know keep the variety up when you need to

Neil:

yeah right what is in front of you when you begin to write

Oliver:

um

Neil:

so we want like a visual image

Oliver:

right yeah I mean if we're talking about beginning to write as in begin to write things that actually look like something like the sentences that will be uh in the finished thing as opposed to capaciously defining writing so that it involves all the stages of the process then by the time I'm sitting down to try to write a section of something I have various pages of notes of sort of firstly of just sort of brain dump notes and then secondly of research notes depending on what it is printed out around my laptop because being printing them out seems to really help and then I will for that um that little section have some weird little geeky diagram that I have drawn while probably on a walk up the hill between behind our house um which will consist of sort of little boxes each being one sort of block of the probably for a small thing it would be like each paragraph but for a bigger thing it might be larger chunks I think in diagrams a lot when people say are you a visual or a verbal thinker I'm like I'm kind of a diagram thinker um and so I'll have that in front of me and that will be the little almost you know literally map um and then

Neil:

Are those boxes labelled?

Oliver:

Yeah or they might have the trace of the beginning of a sentence or something right it's just I think of it as like blocking the thing it's not a detailed outline it certainly doesn't have I have never been able to handle some of the writers in that book have definitely the kind of people who like outline every single detail

Neil:

it's full of cue cards on all the walls and so on

Oliver:

right right right

Neil:

but I'm still curious about this process I haven't heard this before I find it really interesting so you'll block out with images the rough structural outline of the piece you're about to write and in those boxes you're writing the beginnings of sentences or themes so it's providing a little bit of a route map of the article or chapter is that right?

Oliver:

Yes I mean images is pushing it these are just like I just you know it's a diagram in the sense that it is words inside squares or rectangles or with arrows connecting one to the next or something as opposed to anything else but I do at some point usually while walking kind of see the progression that an idea needs to make it feels quite sort of magical in the moment that it happens although it may well be that it's on some level quite formulaic right? I think if you're writing an email newsletter or you're writing a short section of a book very often there's a sort of journalistic formula that will emerge where you sort of have a vivid introduction a nut graph where you establish the point of reading the section a couple of paragraphs where you unpack the main idea and then a couple more paragraphs where you kind of take the idea into some unexpected places so it's not necessarily anything that special once I've gone through it but going through it feels quite important and yeah I will have that little one side of paper probably folded 100 times from walking around with it or whatever and that will be the guide I might you know it often doesn't work out that way because it turns out that something I thought would be one paragraph needs three paragraphs to be unpacked but it gives me just enough like security that I know what the hell I'm doing

Neil:

well yeah this sounds really fascinating to me but also when you say you fold in like say the epic t-disc quote or the daniel steel quote are those coming in like are those like coming just from your mind while you're writing or are you using any kind of like additional classic you know the note card system that Ryan Holiday is often talking about which I think is from Benjamin Franklin or somebody like that

Oliver:

yeah so the answer to that is that some of them some of them really do just come from my my head I've collected them in my mind some of them will have come from research that I've done just before you know that day or earlier and then some of them come from my what passes for my version of what gets called a second brain right which I think is part of what you're referring to yes I've gone through a long set of iterations of this there's a there's an approach I'm sure you're aware of called the Zettelkasten which is a kind of densely cross-referenced system of of of sort of permanent notes that you keep and that you add to. And Ryan Holiday's index card system is somewhat similar to this.

I have, after all of these processes come back down to one very big file where I add snippets of things and I try to give a bit of time, you know, for half an hour, several times a week to just sort of, you know, nurturing that garden and and sort of adding bits to it from scraps of notes that I've taken or from books I'm reading and have piled on my desk. So I try to have a conscious process where I'm, where I'm adding a little bit regularly to that big file, but it is like a word document on your desktop kind of thing. I mean, currently it is two fairly disordered folders in Scrivener.

So that's the thing. And a box of printouts from an earlier version of it. So, you know, it's a huge mess.

But one thing I'm pretty confident about is that some degree of huge mess is actually essential for me. There is a, I mean, I'm not saying I'm not condemning people who are more sort of organised in their systems. But for me, I have discovered that, and this does speak to some of the themes of Meditations for Mortals, actually, I have discovered that the mess, leaving them messy is what is what keeps them juicy, really.

And I agree also with Cal Newport, who's, who's written very, spoken very interestingly on this, that there's a strange idea around that, that if you have the right kind of note taking system and the right kind of second brain, then the books will almost write themselves, that'll just sort of pop out the other end. And I think that for me has also been a very, that's that doesn't work. This is, this is, these are ingredients.

So if I have a big, if I have a several big files with a lot of disorder in them, that's fine, because the process of going through that disordered file, seeing what pops out, pasting it into a different file, you know, that's all, that's the process. So I don't really want to eliminate that.

Neil:

I love that. I feel like that's a following the energy type of system. I love the way you described it.

And one degree of huge mess is actually essential to me. Cal Newport was our guest in Chapter 135. And I also want to point people to your wonderful conversation with him in Washington, DC, which came out this morning, and I listened to this morning before talking to you, which is

Oliver:

I didn't even know it was out!

Neil:

It's out today. Yeah, it's out today. I listened to it already. Yeah, it's, it's a great, it's a great chat.

I mean, I didn't get through all of it yet. But I like it was my bike ride. Listen, and just to play back to a couple things on this, if it's interesting or helpful.

I asked James Clear once how he came up with the two quotes he uses every Thursday and his 321 email newsletter, which goes out to like, something absurd, like 3 million people. And he said, very similar to you, I keep one, I think it's a WordDoc or like an iPhone note of every interesting quote, I come across, I throw everything in there. And every week, what I do is read through that entire file, and just keep cutting and pasting the ones I like the most and putting them at the top.

So that therefore, what you're really getting are like the top two quotes from my like, gigantic document each week, which I thought was a kind of a neat visual. And then for me, you know, I've been writing awesome things now one a day for 14 years. I keep an awesome things iPhone note, because the iPhone note connects from my computers to my phone and anything.

I collect them also on scrap pieces of paper like you, but then there's a pile of scrap pieces of paper on my, my white cabinet, then I put them into the iPhone note. And then I want to have another batch due I go through Simr sort, and then from there kind of curate. So very similar.

But But yeah, I thought that I'd play those back to you for interest.

Oliver:

No, absolutely. It's funny, isn't it? It's like, it's like, and it's fascinating to me also that you can systematise too much.

I mean, I know James Clear is obviously, you know, he's very much associated with the idea of the benefits of systems and, and, and that is a system. But you can, you can definitely be led into the misunderstanding of thinking that rigidity is your friend, that there's a way of doing I think the sort of appeal that a lot of these very rigorous approaches have is it's the same as any kind of productivity technique or life rule, right? We want something that will do the living or the thinking or the writing for us.

And that there isn't such a thing. And it's, and so these systems that seem to work are the systems that like, offer up the best terrain on which to then do some work, but you do have to do some work.

Neil:

And the key part about all of this, I say this to my kids is like the difference between writers and everybody else's writers, write it down. Like my parents, my kids will say to me like, dad, I thought of an awesome thing. When you think it's going to be really hard.

And so I'm like, great, write it down. And then I'm like, well, just the writing down of it is the, it's the thing that 99% of people skip. You know what I mean?

Like that's the easy to skip or just pause and write it down. Because otherwise it's gone forever. Like I've determined this so many times, like how many good ideas have you had?

You're like, Oh, I know I had a good one, but it's just gone now.

Oliver:

You know, I feel like I got to add one more thing about eccentric writing techniques. Just what, just since you seem similarly up for talking about them as I, which is that, that sometimes during that process of collecting ideas, but, but more so in the final sort of writing of something, a thing that I have always done and continue to do. And that strikes people as odd, I think sometimes is to print out what I've written and then type it back in to a blank file.

And I have found that editing in this way, rather than futzing around just on the screen, it seems to me to, to lead to all sorts of improvements in the writing almost without my trying, right? Because I sort of, I start from the beginning again, I get some momentum and it just seems to be natural to make something a little bit better or to cut something out or to unpack something in more detail. So, it's probably rather old fashioned of me at this point, but I'm always like, you know, if I ever travel somewhere and I'm planning to write for a few days, like, or I'm on a business trip and I hope to get some writing done in the hotel or something like that.

I'm always like, okay, I got somewhere I can print things off.

Neil:

Yeah, I think that's really smart. And for the first couple of years, I was doing my birthday advice, which I also borrowed from Kevin Kelly, who you mentioned earlier. A thousand true fans.

And by the way, for people, we have this group called the cover to cover club listens to every chapter of the show. He was our guest in chapter 110. But the first few years I was writing that I had to transcribe them into Twitter and Twitter still had like a capacity limit.

And I found that was super helpful because then I was like, oh, I can shorten this one. And then I was always feeling bad about my, you know, kind of thing I'd posted on my blog, which was longer, but yeah, that's writing it out. I mean, Dave Sedaris says he writes out great phrases.

A lot of writers do this from other books. I asked him, does it work? And he said, no, but, but, but no, it doesn't work.

But, but that writing, doing it yourself is great. The other thing just, just to throw in a little bit for writers is reading it out, you know, the reading it out loud part. I don't know if you did the audio book yourself for Meditations for Mortals, but I'm guessing if you did, you found that when you read it out loud, there was shit you wanted to change then.

Oliver:

Yeah, I mean, I, I'm not as, yes, I did record it myself. I'm not as disciplined as I should be about reading out what I write before I submit it or before, before the final proofs go in. I yeah, no.

So I wish I did more of that. I think it's a really good skill. I don't think I encountered too much in the recent version in the recent book where I'm like, sort of, oh, I should have phrased that differently.

But there were definitely a couple along with like names of writers and philosophers that I have never had to pronounce out loud.

Neil:

Oh, yeah, that's always fun and embarrassing. Well, we could go keep going down this rabbit hole. But you know, this is a really wonderful book, The New New Journalism.

And perhaps part of the reason that you don't find you have to change a lot when you read your stuff out loud is because very similar to James Hollis, you have a very poetic literary style. And so I wanted to save a chunk of time to talk about this third and foremost formative book, which I believe you have the most to share. You told me in advance and I found this book.

Wow, like this is a this is like a punch in the face this book for me. And it is indeed finding meaning in the second half of life by James Hollis comma PhD on the cover in a red ribbon. There's nothing else on the cover except a picture of a butterfly and the in red sub headline how to finally comma really italicized grow up across the top Lisa my version is a blurb from the plane dealer from Cleveland.

That's a that's a newspaper you don't hear about anymore. That says nourishing like a master chef James Hollis knows that good food for the soul cannot be ordered to go. Well, what is this a book about?

Well, what does it really mean to be a grown up in today's world? We assume that once we quote, get it together with the right job, marry the right person have children and buy a home all is settled and well, but adulthood presents a varying levels of growth and is rarely the respite of stability we expected. Turbulent emotional shifts can take place anywhere between the age of 35 and 70.

When we question the choices we've made realize our limitations and feel stuck, commonly known as the midlife crisis. Union psychoanalyst James Hollis believes it is only in the second half of life that we can truly come to know who we are and thus create a life that has meaning James Hollis is 84 years old today, born in 1940 in Springfield, Illinois. He is as mentioned a young and psycho analyst, author and public speaker, formerly of Houston and now based in Washington, DC.

While this wonder 155 we're back in the middle here now point six six for philosophy and psychology slash psychology slash developmental and differential psychology slash adult slash midlife. Oliver, tell us about your relationship with finding meaning in the second half of life by James Hollis.

Oliver:

This book was Yeah, I mean, it, it really marked a threshold or turning point or something in my life. And in my sort of psychological life, I guess. It's one of those rare books, even though I'm a big fan of ebooks, really, it's one of those rare books where I needed to make a second purchase after encountering it in electronic form first, so that I had it in them in physical form.

And I nominated it because it was the first of James Hollis's books that I encountered. But really, this is an entry for all of James Hollis's books. And you know, there is definitely something about his writing, which is about returning to the same ideas again and again and again, and it's no bad thing.

This was my introduction to the whole kind of way of thinking that I have Jungian thought, you know, work associated with Carl Jung, and just a real sort of deepening, I suppose, in my understanding of myself, etc, etc. So how can I put some flesh on those bones? I mean, I think the thing about the second half of life is a good place to start, because I have wondered whether this was an unwise title for the book, because it sort of requires you to accept the possibility that you might be in the second half of your life and there's a slice of the readership who are going to rail against that idea.

But firstly, it's not chronological, as what you read suggests, right? This can be something that people in their early 30s start to reckon with and one hopes for them that they're not in the second half of their life yet, sure. Secondly, maybe it self selects people who are willing to sort of deal with the knock to their pride that is implicit in that title.

And it's really a book for people, I think, who are beginning to find that ways of living and working and relating that did serve them perfectly well, you know, and maybe very well, in young adulthood are beginning to seem like played out, are beginning to not carry on working. There are a number of books, most recently, I think David Brooks's book, The Second Mountain, that sort of play to this same thought that there are sort of meaningfully two stages, at least to adulthood, the stage where you're sort of driving forwards and building and trying to establish yourself as somebody who's independent of your parental family of origin and all the rest of it. And then there's the stage where you're like, well, okay, now what?

And there's just, I don't know, I'm struggling to talk about it just because I think the Jungian perspective and Hollis' writing, especially is just so rich and multifaceted that you don't really know, one doesn't really know where to begin. But I suppose one big part of that attitude towards psychology is the idea that symptoms, things like depression, things like anxiety, things like feelings of meaninglessness are not things to be got rid of by the quickest technique or medication that you can come up with, but messengers from the unconscious that there is some aspect of your whole self that is not getting its opportunity to be felt and to live.

So that's a good place maybe to try to sum it up.

Neil:

No, that's a great setup. And it was a hard book. I was kind of expecting it to be a little lighter.

The font is small, the pages have very small margins. And I was like, this is going to take effort to kind of read this. You wrote in a 2015 column for The Guardian, you had a title, Misery, Failure, Death and a Slap in the Face.

Great Advice for Life from James Hollis. I thought I might just ask you why Misery, Failure and Death would be Great Advice for Life?

Oliver:

Well, in some ways, James Hollis' writing and Jungian perspectives in general and then my own thought have sort of become so entangled that I don't know who to attribute what to. But he was definitely the sort of doorway into a lot of this for me. And I would say that there is this focus on human limitation and finitude on the idea that we spend a lot of our lives trying to sort of escape experiences like misery and failure, probably ultimately because we're trying to escape the fact of our mortality.

And that there is a much sort of deeper and more capacious way of being that comes from opening up to them and asking what they have to tell you about how you're living. Jungian psychology is characterised much more, I think, than the sort of classic Freudian stuff that it originally grew out of by a focus on sort of constant growth on things going somewhere. It's not just about if we unpick your childhood issues, maybe you can be delivered from neurotic misery to ordinary unhappiness.

I do like that quote a lot. It's wonderfully downbeat. But I think there's something a little bit more optimistic in Jungian, that there is some kind of unfurling of your innermost self that is something that is with us throughout our lives, and that you can keep growing and keep getting deeper and keep doing that.

But that it might require midlife some fairly significant changes in direction. Yeah.

Neil:

Well, let's rappel one level deeper. I'm going to give you some actual bits from the book here. Actually, let's go back to your Guardian article in 2015 for a second, because you said in that article, Hollis does not reveal the meaning of life, but, to use your phrase, quote, he does drop hints.

At any major juncture in life, Hollis argues we should ask, does this path, this choice make me larger or smaller? I thought I would just ask you to give us your interpretation of what that question means for you and how you might use it in your life. Does this path, this choice make me larger or smaller?

Oliver:

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 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, but there's something about that which is just, oh yeah, this is actually why I was put on the planet for these hours anyway.

And 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, right? There are difficulties and ways of dealing with your own triggeredness that are just fundamental to getting better at being married, right? 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.

Does this enlarge me or diminish me as a way to get to that? Because you can usually tell, oh yes, this is bad, this is hard, but it's enlarging me. I always think, just to finish that thought, one example in my life that always surprises me is I've had, I don't particularly need to go into detail, I don't mind doing, but I've had two moments in my adulthood where I faced exactly the same question, which was, should I leave the United States of America and go back to living in the United Kingdom?

One time in my life situation, it would have been diminishing. It would have been running away from things that needed to be faced to do that. Then the second time, even though quite a lot of me resisted doing it and couldn't quite bring myself to get around to doing it and relied on my wife being more proactive about these things, it was the enlarging choice.

It's just interesting to me because it's the exact same movement, but with a completely different answer to that question.

Neil:

Right, which is why the question can be so helpfully guiding. Our guest in chapter 66, Vivek Murthy, who is now the Surgeon General of the US, but he wasn't at the time of the interview. At the time of the interview, he was between stints.

He said that he is guided by the question, is this driven by love or fear? He uses that as a kind of moral compass.

Oliver:

Yeah, that's another closely related. Yeah, absolutely.

Neil:

Okay, now let's go into ego. Hollis calls the ego a thin wafer of consciousness floating on an iridescent ocean called the soul. The quote continues by saying, the vast forces of the unconscious, the psyche or the gods, you say when Hollis is feeling more lyrical, have their own plans for us.

So, you know, I'd love to talk about this a bit more. Jonathan Haidt, who I'm sure you know, he's most recently written The Anxious Generation. But in a previous book, he has that metaphor called the elephant and the rider, where he says, you know, our mind is what we perceive to be the rider on the elephant, but the actual vast animal below us is almost imperceptible to us.

If that is true, and it sounds like many people agree, how do we seek to be more aware of our soul, of our unconscious, of the elephant under the rider we are aware of? And do you do any, do you take personally any actions or practices to try to uncover and kind of work the subconscious part of your mind more?

Oliver:

Well, I think, you know, in the Jungian perspective on things, I'm not a qualified professional at all, I should be careful, but in my understanding of it

Neil:

Much more than me and most of us.So we'll take it, we'll take what you offer us.

Oliver:

The whole game is, is bringing things into consciousness, right? The whole act of growth is seeing more and more of yourself. And that's what, there's a big, this is what sort of shadow work is.

It's suddenly, it seems extremely fashionable on social media, YouTube and places to talk about shadow work.

Neil:

There's a big popular journal, right? The shadow journal or something.

Oliver:

Right. I think so. Yeah.

But that's always been a part of it, that the shadow being the parts of us that are sort of not just not just sort of slide out of consciousness, but are kind of actively kept down in the unconscious because they feel difficult or anxiety inducing to face. I think anything that creates a sort of space in your life for letting those, any sort of frame that lets those things bubble up and be looked at that they will sort of, you know, getting a little bit supernatural, but it's almost like they will, these things will poke their noses out into the light of consciousness once they feel that they can do so. So the journaling that I spoke about, I think is absolutely a form of that.

And therapy itself is the obviously the most obvious case of that. Good therapy is all about and I've got, you know, quite a bit of experience of that.

Neil:

Me too.

Oliver:

And, and then, and just reading, right? I mean, on some level, you read a book by James Hollis, and it triggers certain things in you and you don't shy away from them, partly because he's got such a gentle and humorous and, and, and friendly and warm tone that you don't feel you have to and then it's surfaced a little bit.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah. So this is great. So it's like, paying attention to what you're journaling about, you know, seeing what you're talking about in therapy, my therapist often says to me, like, if we have nothing to talk about, which doesn't happen very often, but if we do, he says, Okay, let's go to your dreams, then what have you been dreaming about lately?

Like, he'll kind of kick that off, which is kind of a famous way to get into some of the things, right?

Oliver:

Yeah, Jungians are very, very much into the dream analysis. And I would also say that, you know, if it's, if another another great resource here is a spectacularly good podcast called This Jungian Life, which is presented by three Jungian analysts. And I did, full disclosure, did go on an episode of that podcast.

But usually, it's not interviews. Usually it's the three of them talking about some issue, and then they analyze a listener's dream at the end. And it's like, oh, that's great.

The dream analysis is fascinating to me, because it's so, you know, I'm primed to think, come on, dreams are just random neural noise. What good can come of treating them like they carry deep meanings? And while your average Jungian therapist will, I think, say they really do carry deep meanings, that's why we dream.

There's a sort of middle position here you can take, which is like, kind of who cares? If you treat them as if they do, you will surface important things from your unconscious, even if they were random all along, you know what I mean?

Neil:

Exactly. It's even like, what do you pay attention to from your dreams? What do you remember from them?

Like, that's telling you something about your conscious mind.

Oliver:

Right, right, right. If something gives you goosebumps, it gives you goosebumps, even if it was created by a random image generator. Yeah.

Neil:

Right. That's an interesting observation. Okay, a couple quick things here.

When I talked to Jonathan Haidt about this, by the way, Elephant and the Rider, a big part for him was LSD. So he talks openly about how when he was doing his PhD, I believe in Virginia, you know, there's he said has the date and like firmly, I think it's like June 6 1992, like the day before the day after, I decided not to be angry again. So I was just curious with the amount of work and research you've done, if you have a perspective on psychedelic therapies at all, as we continue to uncover kind of the depths of our soul here, do you have a current view or experience that you want to talk about in any way?

And if not, no problem?

Oliver:

No, I don't. I don't have the experience. I kind of, it's not because I think I think I'd quite like to have that experience.

That might be my next project. But I've, I'm definitely sort of, you know, a bit cowardly about such things.

Neil:

But yeah, I think there are definitely ways right now, it just seems like it's out of nowhere, you know, Michael Pollan's book, how to change your mind, which I think was about four years ago, then the Netflix special of it. And Canada, where I live, you know, cannabis has become legal five years ago. And now psilocybin is a appears to be on the precipice of legality here with kind of micro dosing.

This is all coming fast at us. I want to Yeah, no, absolutely.

Oliver:

I mean, my, my, no, in terms of in terms of the psychedelic side of this, my experience is, is, is, is not there. And I know that there are people who sometimes contact me as if that basically invalidates everything, because it's like, yeah, you're struggling to I get a certain kind of email from people who sort of imply in a slightly patronizing way that I'm struggling towards insights that can be obtained much more swiftly by other means. But then I also am aware from reading and talking with people that that's not, that's not the whole story.

It's not It isn't a sort of total alternative

Neil:

Quick fixes are rarely quick nor fixing in general.

Oliver:

Right?

Neil:

Right.

So that's something I'm butchering a quote, but there's something like that. Okay. There's a couple more sentences from Hollis.

I'm wondering if we want to just reflect on them. Yeah, I think I might just I know you're a father, and I cannot remember the age of your child, or if I know and that's okay. But I just want to read you this therapeutic line that I sent after reading it from this book.

I've now emailed it to my wife, we've printed it out. And we've stuck this on the wall of our kitchen. Okay.

Like, since, since you tipped me off to this book's existing, I'm just going to read it to you. I love your perspective on it. He says, what would it's about family?

What would happen to our lives? Our way? No, it's not.

You know, this, if the parent again

Oliver:

I love it. Yeah, sorry.

Neil:

I won't. Okay, sorry to read it to that. You know it?

Oliver:

No, no, I love it. I want to hear it again. I'm looking forward to it.

Neil:

Okay. What would happen to our lives, our world if the parent could unconditionally affirm the child saying in so many words, colon, you are precious to us, you will always have our love and support. You are here to be who you are.

Try never to hurt another, but never stop trying to become yourself as fully as you can. When you fall and fail, you are still loved by us and welcomed to us. But you are also here to leave us and to go onward towards your own destiny without having to worry about pleasing us.

I mean, like, I want to say that to my kids every day. And I want my parents to say it to me, even though I'm 45. I don't have to please you.

You know, yeah.

Oliver:

I mean, I, I think it's so true. I think that anybody who's listening, who is thoughtful, and who also feels that it's true will also probably then immediately think, Oh, but I'm not doing it well enough. Right.

Or, you know, and there, I think it's aspirational in a way. Well, and there, I think it's really critical to, and reassuring to remember something that Jungians like to say as well, in my experience, which is that it's half the battle, maybe more than half the battle that you're thinking about these things, that you're working them through. It's not that you should be in a situation where you are not putting any of your issues onto your children.

It's that you should be seriously thinking about that idea and working it over in your own time and in your own space. There's a lovely quote from Jung, which is roughly that the greatest burden the child must bear is the unlived life of the parent.

Neil:

Oh, I have that pulled out here to talk to you about as well. That is so interesting.

Oliver:

Right. On some level, it's the same thing, right? It's so natural and easy to try to get what you want in your life from your kids.

And that sounds awful, but it could be something very simple, such as the reassurance that you're being a good person in the world or something. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to sort of push them into careers that they hate just to make you feel like you realised your ambitions by proxy or something. It can be very gentle and subtle.

It strikes me as almost impossible that I don't respond to our son, who's seven, in ways that convey my feeling that being good at writing and being in academics is more valuable than being good at sports or something. I don't want that to be the case. If his strengths are not the same or his passions are not the same, I want him to really deeply know that it makes zero difference to the sort of fullness of how much joy I take in him and his being.

But it's probably impossible for none of that to be true.

Neil:

Yeah, but it's certainly worth thinking about. And the quote I have from page 127 of the book is, and he ascribes it to Jung is, what usually has the strongest psychic effect on the child is the life which the parents dot dot dot have not lived. Yeah.

So yeah. Okay. Wow.

Okay. So we somehow, an hour and a half has flown by. And we're gonna wrap this all up.

This has been a delight, by the way. I could just listen to you forever. You're so, you know, it's funny when I talk to you, because I'm like, and I listened to a lot of podcasts with you before this interview, but I was like, you really do write like you talk like it just, it just sounds like complete, full, thoughtful paragraphs at all times.

I'm, I really...

Oliver:

It's a trick created by a British accent, I think.

Neil:

Oh, no, no, no, don't. No, you have a really big and vast and complex mind. And it's really beautiful to, to be able to interact with it like this.

I really appreciate it.

Oliver:

That's very kind and the feeling's mutual. I have been aware, traveling in the United States sometimes of being given an enormous, I know you're not in the United States, but of being given an enormous benefit of the doubt because of my because of something that I can neither help nor chose.

Neil:

Yeah, it does. Well, just the fast money. It's just the fast money round. Like, so basically, it's like, I'm gonna set a timer here for like one minute, because I know you want to kind of wrap things up here.

And I'm just going to go through a series of fast money round questions. Try to just give me whatever comes to mind first. They're all about books and writing.

Okay. Here we go. Hardcover, paperback, audio or e?

Oliver:

Paperback. You want to say why? Or am I just answering?

Neil:

No, say why if you want.

Oliver:

Oh, right.

Because I do ultimately prefer the physicality of paper. But I also want to be able to, like, stuff it in a pocket and write all over it. I feel inhibited with a hardback.

Neil:

Yeah, exactly. I understand that feeling. You feel like you're wrecking it.

What's the perfect background for you while you are writing? Whether that's music or noise or a view?

Oliver:

Oh, sound wise, there has to be silence probably. I write these days in a little sort of one room studio just not far from my house in the middle of the hills and beautiful village. It's silent, but I still put earplugs in my ears because I've become conditioned to the focus that I get from putting earplugs in my ears.

I used to have to, you know, to block out the traffic noises. I certainly don't anymore, but I still do. I love being in this rural environment.

I don't find beautiful views sort of distracting like some people sometimes do.

Neil:

I love the earplugs in a silent room. That's good. I'm going to try that.

See if my productivity shoots up. Okay, we'll find out. What time of the day do you like to write?

Oliver:

If I just ran my life, I would be writing from about six till 11am. I'm in a family, so it's much more likely to be something like nine to two. That is the focus point.

Neil:

Okay, great. Still a good chunk. That's great.

Oliver:

Oh, I didn't say I write without distraction for the whole period. No, no, no.

Neil:

I hear you. I hear you. I hear you.

Do you have a favorite children's book or a favorite book you have bought multiple times for a child?

Oliver:

Favorite book I bought multiple times for a child. I mean, I loved a whole bunch of almost the books you would expect as a child, you know, the various works of Roald Dahl. I remember reading the Just William books by Richmond Crompton, which were already many, many decades old by the time I read them. Okay, maybe that's more of an English thing.

Neil:

No, no, I want to grab it though.

Oliver:

They've got Ian and Blighton famous five-esque aspects to them.

Neil:

Yeah, okay, I know Ian and Blighton.

Oliver:

Yeah, I think that's probably the answer that I give. My son has been absolutely wrapped up in a series of unfortunate events, Lemony Snicket. From what I've read of them and from what I've seen of the TV show, that's brilliant.

I'm so happy he's into that.

Neil:

Oh, that's great. It's always the unlived life of the parent. You get so excited and proud of your kid for reading a book that you like, for sure.

Do you have a favorite bookstore, living or dead?

Oliver:

Bookstore?

Neil:

Yes.

Oliver:

When I'm in London, I'm a bit torn between multiple options. But I could mention there's a little bookstore called Watkins off Leicester Square in London, which is an esoteric bookstore where Alan Watts and all those kind of 1940s, 1950s English spiritualist types used to gather. It's very weird and eccentric, but I always find something fascinating on the shelves there.

In New York, when I'm visiting back again, which I know is an amazing, has such a plethora of wonderful, independent bookshops, though I don't want to insult, but I do I usually end up at the huge Barnes and Noble on Union Square.

Neil:

Well, that's becoming more... James Daunt, who's our guest right before you on the series, says that bookstores offer the serendipity of illogical choice, which seems to tie well in with your comment on Watkins and how Barnes and Noble is reinventing itself. So, okay.

Do you have a favorite library, by chance? Or is there a library that you really enjoy going into for any reason?

Oliver:

It's quite a while now since I've been into any sort of academic-type libraries or big, big sort of capital city libraries. I'm much more likely to be taking our son to the local library, which is great, but it's not what I think this question really...

Neil:

No, no. There's no book shame, no book guilt. I just, sometimes people say...

Oliver:

No, no, no. I mean, they're just, you know, they're small local libraries. There's a library buff that comes to his very rural school and they get to go on board and check out what's there.

Neil:

Oh, that's cool. That's neat.

Oliver:

Yeah. So, I mean, I have got some good writing done and found some fascinating stuff in like the... I somehow wangled my way into the Columbia University libraries while I was writing 4,000 weeks.

And that was...

Neil:

It comes through.

Oliver:

I had some pretty long corridors to wander down.

Yeah.

Neil:

What is your book lending policy?

Oliver:

Oh, I lend books. I sort of optimistically write my name in them to think that I might sort of back them down and keep them going. But I then make no effort whatsoever to get them back.

I want to be clear about that.

Neil:

That is so funny. I do the exact same thing. I optimistically write my name in them.

I love that phrase. How do you organise your books on your bookshelf? Like all the books you own, I mean, on your bookshelf?

Oliver:

Well, we're sort of, we're in house renovating at the moment. So they're in literally in teetering piles. But when they're not, I either...

we've tended to have a big shelf of sort of fiction in the house organised roughly alphabetically but everything else, pretty hodgepodge. I did go through a phase of doing it by spine colour, which I kind of... it looks very nice to have your books organised by...

Neil:

And are you familiar with the Japanese term, Tsundoku? T-S-U-N-D-O-K-U?

Oliver:

It's something to do with unread books, right?

Neil:

Well, it has to do with leaving teetering piles of books everywhere.

Oliver:

Oh, right.

Neil:

Yeah.

So you're not leaving teetering piles, you're practicing tsundoku.

Oliver:

Oh, brilliant. Yeah. At the workspace that I used in Brooklyn, I had one of those great bookshelves that looks like the books are all just stacked in a pile, but it's actually got a...

it's actually got little shelves behind it and a spine. So that was kind of...

Neil:

Very cool. Okay, last question on the whole bit. What is one hard fought piece of closing wisdom around writing that you would leave our global community of book lovers, writers, makers, sellers and librarians?

A bit of writing advice to close us off.

Oliver:

Yeah, I think the hardest one part of it for me really is that you as a sort of recovering perfectionist is that you really do have to be willing to kind of make a mess first and then clean it up as the process of getting your ideas out there. You have to be willing to write whether in a journal or in a first draft or however you work, you have to be able to write in a way that involves writing first and then maybe there'll be some good ideas in there rather than figure out a very good idea before you dare write anything. And that is a sort of constant struggle for me.

I'm still winning that knowledge. But I think it's really important.

Neil:

Ah, beautiful. That's a really, really wise way to put it. Oliver Burkeman, this has been a real pleasure. I am so grateful to have this come to life finally. And thank you so much, so much for coming on 3 Books.

Oliver:

I've really enjoyed it. Thank you.

Neil:

All right, everybody. It's just me, just me, a little fast reacher, hanging out in the basement with you. Formerly Oliver, but now it's just me, you and a couch or a chair or a dog you're walking or a flight you're taking or a truck you're driving.

I don't know where you are, but I'm where I am where you are. I don't know where you are, but I'm where you are with you. I'm hanging out.

As you can hear in my voice, I've got a bit of a cold. One of those colds that just kind of seems to go on and on and every day it's like a different version of the cough. So apologies for my voice in advance.

There's a lot of colds that jumped out to me from Mr. Oliver Burkeman. So many, so many. I think I'll choose six.

I usually choose three, but six is a nice multiple of three. This is a bit of a, this quote is a nod to the value I talked about, which is what I love at this stage is hearing from individual people who are making their way through. Because I said humans are the best algorithm.

And I said in chapter one of this podcast, you know, the way that we will measure success in the show is with letters, with the voice notes. It's with actual human feedback. It's not with downloads and ratings, although those are nice.

And those are helpful. I want the actual letters that get in the mail to mean something more. And if you want to be part of a letters in the mail club, you know what to do.

Call the phone number 1-833-READ-A-LOT. We would love to hear your voice notes. Tell us, tell us about a formative book, a dream guest, where you are, something that a conversation jogged for you or made you think about.

It's wonderful to hear from you. Okay, you've got to sort of have the right level of internal non attachment to it. Right?

And he said that like a pithy kind of throw off phrase when I was asking about like book launches. But just the idea that there is a right level of internal non attachment is a phrase I think I'm going to hold with me. Because internal non attachment, I like that very Buddhist, you know, very like, you know, pebble dropping in the ocean type of thing.

You're the ocean, that's the pebble and you want to sort of live life that way at some level. But when you're launching the book, if you are totally not attached, you won't try very hard and then you won't do any interviews and then you won't promote your book and then it won't do it very well. So you have to find the right level, basically, of internal non attachment.

Think of that with any big project you're working on today. I kind of like the conversation about totalitarianism. It was a bit freaky, but and especially after reading Stazzyland, which I really recommend.

It's a great book, really good book, really readable and really kind of eye opening. And it wasn't that long ago, really. But he says what really marks out totalitarianism from other concepts like fascism, dictatorship, tyranny, etc, is the notion that there's no part of your inner soul beyond the reach of the central authority.

And I think that's so important, because, you know, we have these phones, we keep them in our pockets. That means that Apple or Samsung knows where we are at all times. And that means that the apps that we use know where we are at all times.

Okay, that's fine. But then they also know what we're doing. So if we are on listening to a specific book or a specific piece of music, or texting with a certain friend, you know, all that stuff is available, it's information, it's gathered by companies, and that it can be shared.

And it can be used to, in the words of Shoshana Zuboff, who wrote The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, nudge our behavior in different directions without us even knowing it. And that's the kind of scary part to me, is that like, you know, when I was a kid, people used to say like, oh, they're sheep, they're sheep, you know, they just follow the herd. But now it's like, to some extent, unless you are untethered completely, a lot, or at least a portion of what you do is algorithmically dictated.

And how do we preserve the parts of our inner soul, that we want to be kind of garden-like, that we want to be open to us only, like, it's just an interesting thing to think about, especially as technology gets just kind of so deeper and deeper inroads into our lives. Okay, I loved his comments on writing so many good quotes on writing, and all the kind of masterclassy stuff he was sharing. But a couple things jumped out for me, some degree of huge mess is actually essential for me, he said that.

Then he also said, jotting things down on scraps and on index cards, because something he kind of said it apologetically, something weird of myself for covering perfectionist psyche, doesn't like jotting things down in a very nice notebook. And I love that he said both of those things. Because I require a degree of huge mess as well.

And I like writing stuff on little pieces of scraps, as well. And I feel bad when I see blank notebooks. But then, as he points out, perhaps this is just part of the process.

The process doesn't work when it's crisp and clean. It's got to be a little bit messy and untethered, right? All right.

Lastly, let's close with a banger. The whole act of growth is seeing more and more of yourself. He said that near the end, the whole act of growth is seeing more and more of yourself.

Mr. Oliver Berkman, thank you so much for giving us number 586, Stazzyland by Anna Funder. Number 585, The New New Journalism by Robert S. Boynton.

And number 584, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life by James Hollis. Three wonderful books that we will add officially to our Top 1000, which is over at threebooks.co slash thetop1000. All right.

So that's all, I think. Goodbye. It's not all, I don't think.

It's not goodbye. If you made it past the three second pause, I'd like to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club, where we always kick off the after party by going to the phones.

Kathy:

Hello, Neil. This is Kathy from Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. And I'm calling to wish you a happy birthday.

I have called before to let you know how much I love three books. I have been listening from January of 2019, when David Sedaris was the first chapter I listened to. And I am definitely a member of the cover to cover club.

I listened to everything, not necessarily in the order that it was laid down according to the moon. But I do listen to everything I skip around. And I want you to know, I definitely read the back of the shampoo bottle.

I love the word clouds. I love the lightning round where you ask, how do you arrange your book? Do you loan books, different things that people have in their own personal library collection?

I love three books. I passed it on to so many friends, you're doing a great job. And thank you so much to Leslie for being a part of this, and giving you the space and your family to put out this wonderful three books podcast.

Most of all, I'm calling to wish you a very, very happy birthday. Aloha from Hawaii.

Neil:

Aloha, Kathy, it's great to hear your voice all the way from Honolulu, Hawaii. Thank you so much for calling 1-833-READALOT. This is wonderful to have you as part of the three books community.

David Sedaris, I just checked, as you mentioned it, that has closing in on 200,000 downloads, making that the number one most popular chapter in three books history. I'm pretty sure. So you started off with the banger, and I'm glad that the quality was up to snuff for the rest.

You know, if you start off, sometimes it's like, oh, yeah, I listened to like, Dax Shepard when he had on, you know, Kamala Harris. Well, it's gonna be hard to top that, right? The next one.

Anyway, back of the shampoo bottle, shout out, yes, for anyone that's read the three books FAQ, that is the little Easter egg I threw at the very bottom. And word clouds, since you love word clouds, why don't we cut over and to Oliver Burkeman and jump into a Kathy-inspired word cloud right now.

Oliver:

Waiting on tenterhooks to see down to brass tacks, technological totalitarianism, level of fidelity to your subject, burnish and polish a book, capaciously defining writing, human limitation and finitude, pretty hodgepodge.

Neil:

Oh, there was a beautiful word cloud there from the wonderfully literary Oliver Burkeman, who talks the way he writes, which is why it's so wonderful to read his writing. Tenterhooks, technological totalitarianism, hodgepodge, which by the way, was a really interesting etymology. I kind of went down a rabbit hole on that one.

But it is the one I want to focus on. But hodgepot, like a pot, like a stew pot, and hodge, like a mixture, right? Hodgepodge, a mixture in a pot, kind of makes sense.

Beef or mutton cut into small pieces, mixed together, boiled together, a hodge or a group. Anyway, we're not going to focus on hodgepodge. Instead, we're going to focus on brass tacks, as in get down to brass tacks.

Very interestingly, there is no consensus on where this phrase comes from. The Belleville News Democrat newspaper had an article written six years ago, almost seven years ago by Roger Schluter, who went into the deep origin of trying to figure out where this phrase came from, because the question came in, when people prepare to discuss serious business, they often say they're getting down to brass tacks. Why tacks?

Why brass? And apparently he traced it all the way back to Abraham Lincoln's assassination, which was in 1865. Afterwards, there was an article on April 17, three days later, in the Washington Star that said the outside of the coffin is festooned with massive silver tacks, representing drapery, and each fold of which is a silver star.

There are eight massive handles to the coffin, four on each side, and it goes on and on and on. And basically, using tacks was a popular method of decorating, you know, coffins, and people use them to spell out initials, etc, etc. And so silver normally was too gaudy or too expensive for average families, so typically brass tacks and baster materials were used for everyday average people.

As a result, etymologists argue, getting down to brass tacks became synonymous with getting down to serious business. Like if you were discussing what you want to spell a loved one's coffin out of brass tacks, then that's serious business, the serious business of death, right? So that is maybe it.

But then again, there's another blog post on the Oxford University Press, which as you know, is kind of famous for the Oxford English Dictionary, the OED. And this blog post come from nine years ago, by Anatoly Lieberman in 2015. And it goes all over the place.

It's like a gigantic, long winded article. And basically, it doesn't have a conclusion. It does not say where the statement actually comes from.

It just has all these references. In the 1940s, it was this, 1930s, it was this, it was 1910s, it was this, none of which is about Abraham Lincoln at all. So two of the hypotheses are around the fact that, you know, let us get, it used to be, let us get down to tin tacks was a wartime phrase.

And so they think it was maybe a kind of a muddled up military idiom. I don't know about that. So then I went over to like the Trusted Wiktionary.

And basically, they say, okay, it comes from 1863 in Texas. One theory is that it comes from brass tacks on the counter of a hardware store that are used to measure cloth in precise units, rather than what people used to do, which is holding the cloth up to your nose and stretching an arm to make approximately one yard. If you actually use cloth, measuring tacks on a countertop, you're being more precise, you're being more detailed, you are kind of doing it exactly.

Right. They also mentioned in 19th century American practice using brass tacks to spell out people's initials on dead people's coffins. Was it Abraham Lincoln or just every everyday dead people?

I don't know. Getting down to brass tacks probably is related to spelling out people's initials in brass tacks on coffins. So when you get down to brass tacks, you were getting down to serious business.

Okay, that's as far as we got. We're tracing it down as far as we can go. As always, an enriching and lively conversation that goes everywhere.

Thank you so much to the wonderful Oliver Burkeman for coming on 3 Books. Thank you to all of you for listening. You made it all the way to the very end.

And until next time, remember that you are what you eat, and you are what you read. Keep turning that page everybody, and I'll talk to you soon. Take care.

Listen to the chapter here!

Chapter 141: James Daunt on bespoke bookselling building Barnes and bonds

Listen to the chapter here!

James:

We are the greatest dating place that there is. Forget the bar, forget the nightclub, forget everything else. Come to a bookstore.

Technology can be extremely helpful and dynamic, but if you want to get, you know, a reluctant reader, some, you know, young boy to read books, you're going to probably be most successful with a highly skilled bookseller whose passion is to encourage kids to read. If you are interested in a country or a place, then I think you should, but you need to read very broadly within it. You definitely need to read the history, but you also want to understand the anthropology, you want to understand the novels, you want to understand the movies, you want to understand everything.

Neil:

Hey everybody, it's Neil Pasricha, and welcome or welcome back to 3 Books, our epic 22 year long quest to uncover and discuss the 1000 most formative books in the world. This is the world's only podcast by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. And we really enjoy going deep into the books that shape people's life.

Now today on chapter 141, we're going to be talking to the one and only James Daunt. James Daunt grew up in England, the child of a diplomat. He moved countries a little bit growing up, tasting cultures, living a life with books and history at its center.

He went to Turkey, he went to Cyprus, he came back to England for boarding school. And then after studying history at Cambridge, he didn't know what he wanted to do. So he went to the career services department and they pointed him towards investment banking in New York city, across the ocean, you know, a financially lucrative job, something new included travel, which he loved.

He went over, he actually liked investment banking, but his girlfriend now wife said, you can't do this forever. This is the most boring profession to listen to forever. I can't imagine doing this forever.

He thought, how do I combine my loves of reading and my loves of travel into doing something wholly different? Because he thought, if I'm not going to do investment banking, I don't want to work at another office job, I want to try something different. And so he opened up a bookstore, an independent bookstore named Daunt Books, D-A-U-N-T, Daunt Books, named after him, his last name on the Marylebone high street in London. He didn't know anything about running a bookstore, but he knew he loved books. He knew he loved travel. So he organized the bookstore by country, not by genre as most bookstores are not by the Dewey decimal, which I do, which most libraries do, but by country.

And you know, it wasn't easy. There was lots of struggling, lots of pain, lots of bookstores were going out of business at the time, but eventually he found his groove. And he found a knack for it.

And so he went to bookselling school. He took mentorship seriously. He took development seriously.

He took career planning seriously, performance management seriously. And eventually the little bookstore Daunt Books grew into, you know, a second one, a third one. And what was happening in the world at this time was of course, Amazon was kind of taking off big bookstore chains like Borders.

They were going out of business. And so eventually in the UK, there was like one noble chain left, Waterstones. It was purchased by a Russian entrepreneur who approached James Daunt and said, what do you think about leaving this?

James Daunt then continued to run his independent bookstores, Daunt Books, but then went on to also lead Waterstones. And he led it so well. He kind of turned the bookstore chain model on its head.

He stripped out co-op fees. Those are the fees that publishers pay bookstores to display their new releases on the front tables to almost guarantee bestsellers. He took those completely out of the system.

He said he wanted each of the stores to run like independent bookstores, which is what he was familiar with. But he also knew that there would be different customers, different tastes in every store. And he wanted the booksellers to be booksellers, to figure out what to sell, to order them, to sell them.

And he wanted them to be passionate about them. He took a lot of that head office out of the chain, the planograms, the what to do, the how to do it. And instead the stores managed themselves.

What happened? Sales went up, profits went up. The chain survived and it's very successful today.

And so what happened is on this side of the pond, the largest bookstore chain in the world, Barnes & Noble, when it went through receivership, when it was going through chapter 11, they called the one and only James Daunt, the bookstore fixer. And he comes over and he does the exact same thing, turning the stores into independent bookstores in philosophy, having the booksellers kind of run and manage the store, changing things now, including things like pay structures, having less temp workers, part-time workers, incentivizing people to stay longer and have a career. So this guy is essentially the largest bookseller in the entire world.

Do you know anyone else that runs a thousand bookstores? There is no one else does this. And he has a wholly unique way of thinking about how to run bookstores.

So I was very excited to reach out to James Daunt, not thrilled when he said yes to coming on 3 Books, slightly less excited when the three books he gave me were massive giant tomes, but I hung out with these giant tomes. I paced through them. I flipped them.

I fell into them. So we are going to go deep with the world's largest bookseller, the wonderful, wise, kind leader of bookstores and people, James Daunt. Let's turn the page into chapter 141 now.

James, thank you so much for coming on 3 Books. This is a podcast by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. I know you fit at least two of those titles, if not maybe three of them.

There couldn't be a better dream guest for a conversation about books. You are currently overseeing, I believe, the nine shop independent book chain, Dom Books, a 300 shop Waterstones book chain. And by my count, if I have it right, 628 store Barnes & Noble chain.

So, you know, that's the largest bookseller in the world. This is about a thousand bookstores total. It's all over the world.

I thought we might start by just asking you for your current diagnosis and prognosis on the state of books in the world.

James:

Well, in the world, I would sort of hesitate to pine because I think there are parts of the world where it must be really tough. And we only got to look at Russia or other places where that is almost certainly the case. But I'm broadly ignorant of that beyond reading my newspapers.

In the United Kingdom and the United States, books are in a very good place. We've had the rather unexpected circumstance of coming out of COVID with a lot more people reading, particularly younger readers, any teenagers up through into their early 20s reading dramatically more. And happily for us as a bookseller, choosing bookstores as a place to interact with books more than perhaps was the case before.

So strong sales growth of books generally, so publishers doing very nicely, but disproportionately favoring bookstores, whether they be independent bookstores or us as the large chain bookseller.

Neil:

I don't mean to sound surprised, but you do hear about, you know, Amazon's record numbers. And I thought that COVID was, I mean, I guess I assumed it was more of a momentary spike with everybody being at home, but you're saying here we're talking in fall 2024, a couple years out, you're seeing young people and people in general reading more and visiting bookstores more than in the past, which is music to my ears. I'm just like, I'm kind of surprised to hear it that way.

James:

I think COVID did cause people to read a lot more, engage with books a lot more. That didn't favor us as a physical bookseller. Yes, we have an online operation and that went up and grew, but primarily, as you say, it favored Amazon.

But when we reopened our stores, we found them dramatically busier than they had been before COVID. And it hasn't stopped. The habit, I think, of reading was reestablished.

And perhaps immediately after COVID, as people wanted to get into physical spaces and wanted to get out and I think meet each other and be in congenial environments, the bookstore became one of the big beneficiaries of that. And our stores remain every bit as busy as they were then. And great waves of trends and popularity coming through.

Big authors, Sarah J. Maas, Rebecca Yaros, those kind of the romantic fantasy and all the iterations of that garnering a readership and a level of excitement, which hasn't really happened since Harry Potter. So it's very exciting.

Neil:

Oh, that's great to hear. I have to admit my ignorance now. I know Colleen Hoover.

I know James Clear. I know, you know, but the names you mentioned, are those a young adult Harry Potter type of trends you're seeing? Oh, great.

That's wonderful. Well, before we get into your three most formative books, you've had a large and varied and dynamic career. I thought before we jump into your three formative books, I could replay back to you three quotes I picked out that you have said about books over the years and ask you to expand, explain, elucidate them as you see fit, if you still agree with them or so on.

So if you don't mind, I will offer those over to you now, including in 2021 in the Sunday Times, you said, when you were asked what your favorite book is, you said Anna Karenina. I'm a bit sentimental, so I never quite finish it.

James:

I've read Anna Karenina a few times. I think it is just a fabulous book, but I am also extremely sentimental. I obviously know how it's going to end.

It's one of those novels of immense texture and emotion and locks you into these characters who are deeply flawed. But, you know, one cannot but help be emotive in the tragedy that is steadily unfolding. And then I always think, well, I don't need to finish this.

And I never quite have.

Neil:

So you're not finishing it so that you can preserve the feeling of wanting to read it again. Is that right? Because I have had that not wanting to finish a book before, but I have not articulated it that way.

So I'm really curious about this particular emotion.

James:

Generally, I always finish a book. That's actually not true. If I start a book that I'm not enjoying and I don't think is of adequate quality, then I stop reading it and that's that.

But if I'm absolutely loving a book, I will finish it. Except occasionally, and it's true in my case also with films and movies, is when you can see some awful denouement. I can't quite face it.

And then I always come back to them and I watch them again. I had it most recently with The Banshees of Inniskillen, which is a sort of fabulous movie, but absolutely torture in terms of the trajectory, the awful dynamic and the tragedy of what's unfolding before you. And by not finishing it, I can then go back and watch it again relatively quickly and do it again.

Neil:

That's an incredible strategy. I am liking this. This is a unique way of thinking about film and books for me.

But yeah, I like that, especially if the author is, I guess, you know, dead and not going to be producing new stuff. You know, you feel like it's a place of savoury. There's no sequel.

Exactly. OK, from the 2023 article feature about you in The Guardian, and I'm taking these really out of context purposely to try to give you something to talk about here. But you said Amazon doesn't care about books.

James:

Oh, that was a bit mean. I think it is out of context. I think what I was sort of trying to get at is that I think Amazon is actually a fabulous thing for books.

It's in many ways democratised the buying of books. It's made buying books extremely easy and reliable. And more people own books in consequence of Amazon than if they hadn't existed.

And that's a great thing. But they are a website, self-evidently. They have a single proposition.

They're driven by algorithms, typically reasonably, I think, crudely orientated as necessarily they must be. And they, by definition, are absent what we can do within bookstores, which is the serendipity of illogical choice, be that personal recommendations of booksellers or other customers or the chance of how displays and the interactions and juxtapositions of books alight upon yourselves. And it is, I think, self-evidently true that Amazon is a commercial organisation which just wants to sell a lot of things to you and as many as it can.

It's extremely interested in the book buyer. It started with the book buyer because it's attached to a level of education and affluence and to a wallet with a credit card in it that can buy all sorts of other things. But they will want to sell you your sneakers and they want to sell you a medical plan and they want to sell you everything else in the world, whereas we as booksellers are only interested in books and in the world of books and literature, which is a different focus.

Neil:

Yeah, I love that. And I love that phrase, the serendipity of illogical choice. And it's interesting because, you know, for those of us who have been part of Amazon's trajectory in books, you know, when it was first a bookstore originally and then they did debut the Amazon recommendation engine, which was dynamic at the time.

They also, for a long time, hired editors and then I don't think have kept that whole curation element up. They also tried to do Amazon publishing and I don't think they've kept that up. They also tried to do Amazon bookstores and I don't think they've kept that.

So it's almost like they've dabbled in trying to do what you do, but they've always kind of run skittering away from it.

James:

Yeah, I think Amazon does what it does exceptionally well and as soon as it sort of strays out and tries to go beyond that, it all becomes a bit complicated and actually the online and the digital format is not the best place to do that. But, you know, I do think there are immensely positive things about what Amazon does. I mean, the search functionality of Amazon.com is fabulous and it allows you to find books in a way with an ease and a precision and a pace that nobody else really can match or had matched prior to Amazon.

Neil:

Yeah, OK, great. Thank you for taking that little tiny few words and expanding on it so much. The last quote I had for you was from a 2023 podcast, which I thought was a really brilliant interview on this podcast called Always Taking Notes.

The host did a wonderful job and as did you. And you said, I arrange Don't Books and continue to arrange it by country, which is how I read. I put novels, histories, and anything based on where it's set.

I guess I wanted you to expand on that, but also to explain to people what you mean by reading by country.

James:

I find myself interested in cultures and peoples and one of the ways in which those sort of are most easily understood is about a country or a place. And if you are interested in a country or a place, then I think you should need to read very broadly within it. You definitely need to read the history, but you also want to understand the anthropology, you understand the novels, you understand the movies, you want to understand everything.

But in the world of books, that takes you quite broadly. If you read like that and perhaps arrange your shelves like that, which I personally do at home, you get books which all speak to each other and lean on and draw upon each other. And if you arrange a bookstore like that, you get something that's actually really interesting, obviously quite different to the conventional bookstore of which 99 out of 100 bookstores are arranged, which is simply by subject.

But if you arrange by country, that throws it all up in the air and it forces you to browse and consider books in a completely different way. And I think that is an intellectually interesting exercise to go through. And we've got lots and lots of bookstores where you can go in and find a history section or a business section or a religion section or whatever it might be.

We have very, very few bookstores which throw all that together and mix it up, but it's still totally coherent. And that's what my stores are.

Neil:

I love that. I love that. So I live in Toronto, and my books upstairs, I took a lot of pain and time to organize them into the Dewey Decimal classification system a couple years ago.

And I like them like that because I think they talk to each other in kind of the way a library does. But I tried to mentally experiment with what you do. Right away, I was like, OK, my favorite novel is A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz, Australian writer.

That takes place very clearly in three different parts of the world. And then I'm like, well, where would I put Harry Potter? So on a detailed level, when it comes to novels, I'm assuming that there's a lot of...

You're making a lot of calls in every specific book.

James:

There's a lot of subjectivity. And then we also have a little part of the store which is just all the stuff that doesn't fit into...

Neil:

OK, OK. That's what I was kind of getting at.

James:

And we have such a book. All the books that you are going to ask for and which you will want to read but which we don't have a place for, they're all here. And if you ask for one of those, we can find them.

Neil:

I read a lot about your mentorship at Daunt Books. When it was one store, Marylebone I believe, and then you expanded slowly as other booksellers in your midst were interested in running their own shop. Did you have a key question or two you taught booksellers to ask when customers would come into the store?

When a customer or when a reader comes into a store, what's your philosophy there on what the interaction should or should not look like? How much silence do you let remain? What's the question you ask?

What is your gentle steering thought?

James:

I think booksellers need to and can read body language. Is this somebody who's looking to engage or not? And that also customers, as they come into stores, they know that the bookseller is lurking there, like sort of the spider in this web.

But there are people who quite clearly just want to get on with it and browse and they don't want interactions. And there are those who signal that they do. And then you have a series of decisions to make about how closely you interact with that customer.

There are standard questions to ask. Somebody's looking for help. What was the last great book you read?

If they say Colleen Hoover, kind of thing, that places them immediately. We don't judge as booksellers what people read. There's no great books to read or terrible books to read.

We want to put the best possible book for that reader into their hands. That's obviously self-evidently the case when we're dealing with children. You know, we're not going to sell Anna Karenina to a six-year-old.

We want to know what they like and then follow that through. And as soon as you know and you're given just enough of a clue from that. But as a bookseller, you can read that as they come into your store.

What are they looking at? What have they picked up? And you can map somebody pretty quickly.

And then on the basis of what they've either picked up or looked at and the speed with which they've, where they've lingered, you'll know what kind of a reader you're dealing with. And then you want to respond to that. There are some where you've got that sort of perfect customer and they're interested in things that you generally want to sell and generally are of interest.

In which case, I would always recommend to them from a distance, which allows me to raise my voice, which means I'm not just talking to them. I'm talking to the four or five other people within Earshot. If it's something a bit more specialist, a bit more technical, I'll get up, you know, not close, close, but closer, so that I don't have to raise my voice.

So it's just a personal conversation because I know it won't interest other people in the store. So it's all those kind of things that as a bookseller you're doing. Above all, you're trying to create a friendly environment, where you're stimulating people as they come in and they're having an interesting time and hopefully jogging them to look at different books slightly sort of adjacent to perhaps their sort of core focus.

Neil:

I find this so fascinating. I feel like we could spend the whole conversation just going deep down this like little tree diagram of all the things James does when people come in. So I find this whole world like, and I know you used to teach this, right?

You went to Italy, I believe, and taught bookselling school at some level.

James:

Never miss my invitation to this. They have a wonderful bookselling school over there. Never miss my invitation to that.

Neil:

What is that bookselling school?

James:

They have the Italian set up, well, it was set up in memory of a family member of one of the major publishers, the Maoris. And they have a school for booksellers. And they run it all year round.

Booksellers from the chains, from the smallest independent everywhere come in to the school and they are taught bookselling. And bookselling is definitely something one can teach. They're the only sort of school, as I understand it, which sort of works at a national level and welcomes booksellers of any stripe.

And consequence of which I think the calibre of bookselling in Italy is much more diverse than it is in terms of the scale and quantity of independent booksellers that there are. And more skilled. And it's just been a great stimulus within Italian bookselling.

Neil:

Well, that is interesting. I have a lot. I'm so curious about that.

I do wonder, part of my brain wonders, do you think that there are elements of bookselling that an algorithm will never be able to mimic in any sense now that we have things like StoryGraph has emerged as an algorithm? There's all these new dynamic algorithms that are trying to do what I think bookselling did. But do you feel like it's a uniquely human skill?

James:

I personally believe it is, and I think it's, of course, technology can be extremely helpful and dynamic. But if you want to get a reluctant reader, some young boy to read books, you're going to probably be most successful with a highly-skilled bookseller whose passion is to encourage kids to read, and particularly kids who find reading off-putting or haven't quite engaged with it. That is a very, very human thing, just the same as I think that in schools you need a teacher, and plunking people in front of a screen ain't ever going to replace the mentorship and enthusiasm and inspiration of a great educator.

Neil:

Nice. Okay, good. We have one of our values on the show is humans are the best algorithm, so it's very much up our alley.

Okay, now let's jump into your three most formative books. I asked you before we hit record if there was a general order here, and I didn't think there was, so I'm going to try to put a book up. I'm going to try to do a quick 30-second background for the reader so that they can picture, if they're listening to this, which most people are listening to this, they can picture holding the book in their hands, like they're in a Barnes & Noble, or a Waterstones, or a Daunt Books, and then I'm going to ask you to tell us about your relationship with the book, and then from there I've got a few follow-up questions.

If that's okay?

James:

Sure.

Neil:

Okay, all right.

We'll start with A Savage War of Peace, colon, Algeria, 1954-1962 by Alastair Horne, H-O-R-N-E. This was originally published in 1977 by Viking Press. The cover is this black-and-white photo of a crowd of Algerians and French military packed tightly in a street with Algerians on a building ledge waving flags calling for independence.

In the middle of the cover is this brown box with an orange, a thin orange border that reads A Savage War of Peace in an all-caps, aerial-type font with Algeria 1954-1962 below, Alastair Horne's name in cream below that. Sir Alastair Horne was a British Oxford Fellow who lived from 1925-2017 and was knighted for his service to Anglo-French relations. What is the book about?

Well, the Algerian War lasted from 1954-1962. It brought down six French governments, led to the collapse of the Fourth Republic, returned De Gaulle to power, and came close to provoking a civil war on French soil. More than a million Muslim Algerians died in the conflict and as many European settlers were driven into exile.

A Savage War of Peace is the definitive history of the Algerian War. Dewey Decimal Heads can file this under 965.046 for History and Geography slash Africa slash Algeria. James, tell us about your relationship with A Savage War of Peace by Alastair Horne.

James:

Let me just say that the very interesting question that was posed to me was, you know, what are the three most influential books? And I answered that sort of quickly and on the basis of what's happening in the world today. It is somewhat complicated and the Middle East is very much, I think, in most people's front of mind.

But also, what are the books that sort of have an enduring sense of education to me personally? And The Savage War of Peace, which is an absolute page-turning read. I mean, it is a book that you race through.

But it's also a book that teaches that, frankly, if our lords and masters, political lords and masters in very many countries over the last sort of 20 years had read it and digested it in any way, some of the misadventures that we've been taken on, be it in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the like, would hopefully have been avoided. But those lessons have not been absorbed. History does teach, and this is a very good example of a book that can teach.

Having said which, it is a far from perfect book. It is a book of its time, and Alistair Horne was a man of his age. And one of the joys, I think, of reading history is that you read it to learn and to educate yourself and to consider and be able to reflect on current affairs with hopefully more intelligence and more insight, but also be able to navigate through the prism of the writer.

And in this case, Alistair Horne was, as you've said, he died a decade or more ago and belonged to a period probably that we can characterize into the 50s and 60s himself. I think it's very insightful, but it's also curious in terms of its interaction and understanding of Islam. I don't think that this is a text that one just accepts for what it is, but it's provocative and it's interesting and it tells a story in a really dynamic way, so it's hugely entertaining as well.

Neil:

I started reading about the Algerian War because of your book choice. It was often online part of larger write-ups called Decolonization of Africa. That was the superseded headline on Wikipedia and so on.

And then I thought, hey, this reminds me of what James is doing at Barnes & Noble. He's decolonizing it in a way, as I understand, you're pulling head office strictures and planograms and so on out of stores, mandated co-op displays, head office planograms, and, of course, you're trying to balance some of the benefits. If I think about India, where my dad is from, obviously people in India largely still speak English and use systems of government and rules that have been put in place by the British before India gained its independence, so you're also trying to presumably balance the benefits of what the head office can offer.

How do you think about that, the balance of how much head office you want in the stores, how much head office you don't? Where do you draw the lines on where that is? And if you don't mind, as you answer this, could you also just give a quick backgrounder for those that don't know, on what you have done since you joined Barnes & Noble, because I know it's well documented, but in this podcast we haven't talked about it yet.

So if you don't mind just saying, here's what we're doing, and here's how it's going.

James:

The general principle that I have is to try and get each of the bookstores within these very large chains to run themselves and think of themselves as independent bookstores. That's in simple form what one's hoping to do. And all I'm really doing is taking the principles that I have within my own bookstores, which are by definition independent bookstores, where I've always run my own on Maribyrn High Street.

I sit in it and I really, it's got my name above the door, but that helps sort of give one a focus to it. But where I'm really trying to run the best possible bookstore for Marylebone High Street, and then each of my stores does that, each of my Daunt books. When Waterstones got into big trouble and effectively was going to close, I went there because I thought this was just a catastrophe to lose all these bookstores.

And I also knew that if the booksellers within each store were just sensible and allowed to do what I knew that they wanted to do, it would be fine. And that, which I started in 2011, has proved to be the case, that actually just encourage people to use common sense and you set standards and have expectations, but leave them to get on with it. You will create much better bookstores and sales will go up and everything's fine.

When Barnes & Noble also got itself into this sort of mess, I arrived in 2019, again, with that simple message, which is, guys, our stores aren't good enough. The reason that we're going bankrupt and the reason our sales are declining is because the stores don't appeal to our customers and we have to figure out how to make them more appealing. And I can't dictate that to you.

I can set the principles of good bookselling, but you're going to have to execute against them. So we're going to take away all of the directive side of corporate retailing and instead replace them with clear expectations of quality and setting of standards and principles, but encourage each of you within your stores and your store teams to really address what it is to become a really good bookstore. And if you do that well, I'm sure that more people will come into your stores and they will buy more books from you and we will be fine.

And that's happening imperfectly across the estate. But overall, our sales have completely been transformed and our profitability and all the other good things that come with being a profitable business. You can invest in pay and promotions and the career structures of your booksellers.

So that helps you, again, spend more money on your infrastructure, start doing up stores, open up new stores, invest in new IT. All of these good things make the stores better and you're in a virtuous cycle now of better and better stores, more empowerment at the local level, itself driving better performance and better bookstores. And up we go.

It's not perfect yet, but it's going extremely well.

Neil:

So taking away the publisher paid kind of cold placements, letting booksellers in the store choose what they're selling based on the local readership, downloading empowerment, I mean, if you're a bookseller, this is like you're cheering for this off the rooftops. This is what you've been asking for probably your entire career. But you said you had some central body principles.

What were those thou shalts or the do-dos that were consistent?

James:

I think everybody who works at Waterstones at various points and now at Barnes & Noble will definitely be saying, it's a lot more difficult this way. I mean, yes, we like the idea of being allowed to do whatever we want, but that's difficult. It's much easier to be told precisely what to do and then you just do it.

With empowerment comes responsibility and the intellectual effort required to rethink your store is considerable. And if you're the store managers, you've then got to motivate your store teams. It's hard work.

And if you, as we've done, we've reorganized, literally relayed our stores, moved furniture around, constantly changing and tweaking how we present the stores. Every time you do that, it's a lot of work. And bookselling is a tough trade.

One, you're working in a store every day. You're not working from home having a nice time. It's unfortunately been traditionally extremely badly paid.

And even as we improve things, this remains a very ill-advised route to riches. It's hugely rewarding in many other ways, but we are going to have to- Very ill-advised route to riches. We're going to have to, we rely on- Nobody comes into books for the money, that old adage.

They really don't. And on the other hand, as we do actually transform this business and run it better, one of the key objectives is to make it a more rewarding career. And it's intellectually rewarding.

I think it's emotionally and spiritually and all other ways, and vocationally, very rewarding. But we also now have to really make true on it being financially sensible for people to devote their careers to it. Too often, people come into bookselling and then leave after a year or two, have a nice time and go, because they need to get a mortgage and a car and all of those good things.

But again, underpinning the success of Waterstones has been putting in a career structure and having people stay with us, good people stay with us. And we're now beginning increasingly to do that at Barnes & Noble.

Neil:

Underpinning the success has been putting in a career structure. I did hear you say in another conversation that that meant moving, because you have a set amount of labor dollars, presumably as a percentage of sales or something, and then you have to decide to move more of that to people that stay longer as opposed to people who start. So it may be even less lucrative to start here, but now it's even more rewarding to stay on.

Is that right?

James:

I mean, you have, obviously, to the extent that you can drive your sales up, then you have more dollars. So that's helpful. But there is always going to be a difficult series of decisions around where you spend those dollars within your team.

Generally speaking, we want to move away from a model which effectively had a very small number of people who were properly paid and full-time and benefits and all of those things. And then the vast majority, part-time, kept below a certain number of hours because then you don't have to give them a break and you don't have to give them benefits and you don't have to do this and you don't have to do that. Effectively, the standard retail model to...

And there's nothing wrong with that. They give good local jobs that are flexible and people can do it for two days a week or three shifts a week or whatever it might be. And you can splice that into all sorts of other things that people are doing in their lives, students, mothers, the parents, dog walkers, whatever it might be.

These are temporary and flexible jobs. I'm not denigrating that at all and it will be part of what we do. But if you want people to become really tenured and expert, then they need to work full-time.

You will learn how to be a better bookseller if you work five days a week more effectively than if you work two days a week. You've got longer at it. And then we need to keep those people and pay those people appropriately and that requires a career structure.

And so yes, the dollars get moved increasingly into a promotional ladder. And you want that to be quick. You want people to be able to see the opportunity fast.

And I always say, you want people at that manager level, when you're being properly paid, by the time they're sort of 30, that should be your objective. Get them up fast and then keep the job interesting and keep opportunity beyond that. To do that, you need a vibrant business and you need an expanding business.

So one of the key things for us is to grow physically so that there are opportunities for people. You don't have to wait for your manager to retire to become a manager because we're going to open up new stores or new opportunities.

Neil:

How heartening and inspiring that view is today in an era of growing freelance and gig workers and that stretching of working in factories or warehouses where you don't get even breaks and you're hired for eight-week contracts and you're laid off after four weeks and you're hired back and then you may be part-time. These are the stories I hear. It's the antithesis to how the labor pool feels right now to think about inserting steps and layers and management opportunities and we want more full-time workers.

That creates a better bookselling experience and it increases your sales. It makes so much sense.

James:

It's not without its challenges, of course. If you're promoting people on the basis of performance, then you have performance management and that's saying, well, sorry, Neil, you're just not cut out for this. That's a tough thing to be doing and that was entirely absent before.

So I don't shy away from the fact that bookselling is a tough, tough gig. It's a tough job. It requires intelligence.

It requires an open personality. It requires an immense number of skills and hard work and dedication and it's something that I know lots of people enjoy but I don't, at any point, pretend that it's not difficult.

Neil:

Yeah, no, exactly. Okay, that's really, thank you for opening that up for us. That is really interesting and I still find it quite heartening for society at large that this is succeeding and this is working and this is good for our communities.

I wanted to ask you about reviews. This came up in my head because I had just read this book by John Green called The Anthropocene Reviewed and he said, I find it interesting that the five star scale has taken over a qualitative analysis because it isn't for people. It was originally meant for data aggregation systems and while I think the five star scale system is somewhat ludicrous, it has also become indispensable and I thought, yeah, that's true.

John Green points out, of course, that a bench can be reviewed, a bathroom can be reviewed, everything has, and then we're looking at the reviews of everything. It's like so oriented to this review culture so I, of course, I went to see A Savage War of Peace on barnesandnoble.com and it has three ratings, one of which is a written review which is 15 years ago. The other two are no rating but they've compiled into the four out of five.

Amazon's got 527 ratings for this book with a 4.5. Goodreads has 2740 people. So this is how many people have read this book at least, right? 2740 people and it's come up to a 4.2. I know I'm like the kind of person who wants to support my local independent bookstore so I go review hunting, right? And then I have to make a conscious decision to not buy at the review place but to then leap over to buy from the place I'm trying to support. I live in downtown Toronto so I support all these amazing bookstores here. But Barnes & Noble seems way behind on this.

Like, you know, it's... What do you think is the importance of reviews? And what...

Do you have a strategy for like trying to... Is it a catch-up game now? Or is there some other philosophy underpinning the historical lack of reviews on every other website?

It's not just yours. It's just, you know, reviews seem to have... Google's trying to grab everybody's reviews too.

James:

Yeah, but Barnes & Noble has a very antiquated and very poor website and we're just about to replatform and redo it. We have, some years ago, done that at Waterstones and really worked on the Waterstones website. And there we have...

We endeavor to put a website which is fundamentally a bookseller-driven website. We have...

Neil:

Ah, cool.

James:

Customers can leave reviews and that's fine and things, but we lead with bookseller reviews. Not of everything because we can't cover everything, but everything that we think is important and certainly everything that's new and prominent. And there are...

On some, it's just a single bookseller and it says... Waterstones says, that is a bookseller who has reviewed. And then there will be other Waterstones booksellers, which is an entirely voluntary process, but now quite well populated.

And our view is that the bookseller can give you a sense of what that book is like. We have shied away from the stars rating, as you said. We kind of have to do enough of it because you want Google to pick you up and get you up the search rankings and there are things that you have to do.

But what we hope and believe that our customers are increasingly doing is appreciating the book, the recommendation of the book within the context with which we're recommending it. And it's pretty nonsensical to have a star rating review on classic literature. Is Middlemarch better than Anna Karenina?

I mean, for goodness sake. But the ability of the bookseller to articulate why you might want to read this book. Now, obviously, if you're online, then you've arrived at that, either because we've done something to cause you to come there or somebody else says, Neil recommended me this, I look it up and here I am.

But then we seek to give an intelligent, bookseller-driven interpretation of why we think you should read this book and what the merits of it is. At Waterstones, our online sales have been dramatically increased over the COVID period but have carried on growing. Oh, great.

At B&N, they grew in the COVID period and then they just dropped back down again and they're pretty awful. And that's simply, I think, on the calibre of the recommendation that's being delivered in the respective websites. And yes, Goodreads and any other myriad of LitHub or whoever it might be, there are so many places in which you can aggregate readers' experiences.

And I think all of that is valuable. But actually getting a sensible interpretation around why you're looking at this book and how do you, within the context of a website, replicate what I think we do beautifully within a bookstore, which is just nudge you to the side. That's why you come in for discovery.

We've always found books through review process, be it the newspaper reviews and the good old days, magazines, podcasts, whatever, whatever. And it's great that you're inspired to read a book and buy a book. And one wants to sort of bottle that and capture it.

And the enthusiasm of that recommendation to attach itself to the book and off you go because a push into the reading, it makes a book inherently more enjoyable, actually, if it comes with a recommendation that you like. The amalgam of short little nuggets that all add up to 4.8 rather than 4.6, I don't understand how that really propels true engagement with a book. Whereas a bookseller or a friend or a podcast or something intelligently recommending you a book, that propels you.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true. I don't look, personally, I don't look at the number.

I look at the number of reviews as a proxy for the volume of sales. But that itself can be quite misleading in other ways as well. But if you see a book with 100,000 reviews, you're like, oh my God, everyone's reading this.

There's a social signal here. You know?

James:

And people love all reading the same book, which is why we have these again and again and again, these several times a year. You'll have this bushfire of sales and enthusiasm around a book. And the merit of the book that underpins it may be quite slight.

But the great thing is everyone's reading it.

Neil:

Everyone's talking about it. Exactly, yeah. Or it gets a big, you know, Tim Ferriss or the Today Show or, you know, some bigger, some bigger megaphone talked about it in some way, you know?

And of course, as an author, everyone's trying to figure out how to get somebody to talk about your book. Right? But that new website sounds fantastic.

And I love the focus on bookseller-oriented recommendations that makes it so differentiated. And if you have a bookseller that's really well-written and they have pithy reviews and you start to follow them and, you know, I start to see what Brandon suggests or whatever it is, and then I'm digging that. I think that sounds wonderful.

I can't wait to see it. I got like five more questions on this one book, but I think in the interest of time we should probably move to your second book. Alistair Horne was a spy.

I was going to ask you about that and the organizing. But, you know, I want to be respectful of your time. So let's move on to your second book here.

Maybe if we have time we can come back to some of those. And it is the one and only Team of Rivals, The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin, G-O-O-D-W-I-N, published in 2005 by Simon & Schuster. This is a, the cover's like a cool sepia-toned painting of Abraham Lincoln at a table surrounded by serious-looking men in dark jackets, bow ties, and long beards.

There's a gold ribbon at the top reading now a major motion picture, Lincoln, by Steven Spielberg, along with tons of other hype material like a number one New York Times bestseller, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize under Doris' name, and a blurb from none other than President Barack Obama saying a remarkable study in leadership on a gold burst. Doris Kearns Goodwin is an 81-year-old American biographer who's taught history at Harvard, also written books about Franklin Eleanor Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and the Kennedys. In this book, she illuminates Lincoln's political genius as the prairie lawyer rising from obscurity to prevail over three gifted rivals to become president.

And then, in bringing his disgruntled opponents together to create the most unusual cabinet in history and marshal their talents to preserving the Union and winning the war. File this under, for Dewey Decimal Heads, 973.7092 History and Geography, this is a funny one here, James, slash United States slash Administration of Abraham Lincoln slash 1861-1865 Civil War. I did not know there would be such a subcategory, but sure enough, there is.

So please, James, tell us about your relationship with Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

James:

Again, it's another page-turner. I mean, you just, it reads like a political novel. You just flick your way through it in seconds.

It also has Lincoln at the heart of it Everyone knows Lincoln. Everyone's read lots about Lincoln, but I think she captures the humanity of him exceptionally well and then places it in this really rich development of how he intersected with these key political rivals who not for one second thought they would ever be serving under him or be vested by him, but through his ability to empathize with their positions, restrain his own sense of self-importance to use them effectively and then develop, in not all cases, he remained a deep rival to a couple of them throughout, but nonetheless benefited from their expertise and achieved this extraordinarily strong, as you said, sort of team of rivals to get the United States through a moment of sort of existential horror of the Civil War, of all of these sort of currents of race and identity and ideology and religion and all the rest. And he did that, you know, obviously tragically cut short in this sort of appalling way, but it's absolutely masterfully rendered in the book and an example of leadership, which Mr. Obama is better placed than me to extol.

Neil:

Oh, don't be. Yes, okay, of course, compared to Obama, but you are definitely a leader in a big capacity. This is a big book.

Like this is big. I mean, it's 916 pages. So I like read all the front matter, read all the back matter.

Sorry, I read the first chapter and then I read the last chapter. Then I downloaded. I went on Libro FM.

I use Libro FM because I can pick my local independent bookstore to support. And then I started listing. It's 42 and a half hours, you know, so that I'm like, OK, I'm going to listen to chapter two on like a long walk.

So I'm like, I'm a book fan. I'm a reader. I read a lot of books.

How do you think about as a bookseller and as the CEO of a couple of big book chains, making big books more accessible in this era of well-documented, shortening attention spans and endless distraction? David Brooks is now calling it, you know, we've gone from entertainment to distraction, from distraction to junk. You know, like we're just getting like our amygdalas like teased or something like, oh, this is a hard thing to sell to people.

916 pages, even though it is a page turner. It's very gripping. It's a wonderfully told story.

So I'd love your commentary on attention spans and distraction and combined with that, how you think about the deeper, more succulent aspects of rich, dense reading and how you market that or how you sell that as a bookseller.

James:

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 certainly predated e-books. I've certainly predated audio and podcasts and all of these things. And nothing seems to change.

Neil:

And TikTok.

James:

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.

Neil:

Oh, interesting.

James:

The 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 and Pilkey and 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.

It's 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 lots of them. And the kids can buy the whole bang lot.

Neil:

That's a good point. Yeah. They're practicing at a young age.

James:

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. But again, that...

Neil:

I have Infinite Jest right beside me. I've been playing with this for years but I read like 100 pages a year but I love it. When you fall into it, you really fall deep into it.

James:

You fall deep. And if you happen to stick your nose into Team of Rivals and get gripped by it, you spend a couple of hours a day and we can all find a couple of hours a day. You will get through it pretty quickly.

If it takes 42 hours to listen to, it takes 22 hours to read.

Neil:

And it feels good. Like at the end of binging a season of a TV show, you don't feel good at the end of that. But at the end of finishing a big book, you feel great.

It feels like such an achievement.

James:

And book clubs have been, again, something I started bookselling before book clubs became the thing and then book clubs became the thing. But they still endure. And I think, again, if you read Team of Rivals with two or three other people or four or five if you're lucky enough to, you have a subject of conversation which is superior and more engaged and more developed than almost anything else that you can easily access.

And there are a lot of people, that's actually what drives a lot of the sales of these big books is you will sell in a store suddenly 10 copies. And you think, why does that happen? It's because there's a book club.

Neil:

Yeah.

James:

And then you've got people and that then has an echo in that store which will carry on because they will be talking to their friends at the barbecue, at this and that, and then we sell more and more. And you just see these things flare up and it's the great books that do that the best.

Neil:

Have you ever been into Left Bank Books in St. Louis?

James:

I have not.

Neil:

I chant.

So when you walk in the front door there, there's a great wall of like, you know, four by 10 books and it says at the top, book clubs. And, you know, it says like gay men's book club, gay women's book club, trans book club. And then as you keep going on, you realize that the first two or three shelves are created by the bookstore.

But then as you keep going on, it's like, you know, the YMCA book club and Donna Marie's Kitchen Party book club. And you're like, what's going on here? And what they've done is they've just figured out which book clubs in the community over the years have enduring quality and the book club itself, just the woman comes in or Donna Marie comes in, she tells them what it's going to be.

They keep that stocked at the front and they have their own book clubs and it's this powerful wall. I can send you some pictures. It's like amazing.

It's a really cool treat in Left Bank Books in St. Louis.

James:

Yeah, a little digression. We do a walking book club at Daunt Books, which is great where you, obviously it's the same thing, but you go for a walk. So obviously in a park and you're in twos on your walk, just discussing and then you've stopped under a tree if it's raining, is it always in London or on the grass and then have it as a group discussion and then you walk off again.

But the pairings shift and you get a nice lot of exercise, a couple of hours walk and you've discussed a book.

Neil:

Oh my gosh, I love this. And Daunt Books is choosing the titles? Like it's a walking club as part of the bookstore?

James:

And then by the end of each book, then the group agree on the next book. But there is a bookseller there who is the curator of it all.

Neil:

Daunt Books is creative, right? I was on the website and I'm like, you know, living in Canada, I have not been there, but I'm noticing you have, you curate libraries for people, you've got the wedding registries, you've got the mystery, you've got the mystery book subscriptions. There's like, I'm presuming there's a nimbleness and an agility there and independent book world that you can't mimic at the larger chains.

But when I hear things like that, I'm like, wow, like that would be amazing to have. So I've never experienced that at a bookstore here. You know, the mystery subscription.

James:

It's fun. Well, we do lots of those. You basically give us some money and we'll send you a book once a month.

Neil:

Yeah.

James:

Our choice, not yours. And it's really fun as a bookseller because each subscription is unique to the individual.

Neil:

Well, I saw that. You have open captions, like what kind of, tell us about what kinds of books you like. It's like, you can write an essay in there.

James:

It's fun. It's really fun.

Neil:

Yeah.

James:

And then there's, as booksellers, you know, these nice conversations where she's like, you know, he said he didn't like this book. What's wrong with him? What are we going to send him now?

Let's send him this. That'll get him back on track. Those kind of discussions.

Neil:

Oh, interesting. Oh, that's amazing. Well, that is like, kudos to you.

What a brilliant idea. It sounds like with The Walking Club and some of these conversations we're talking about, you know, you have this strong belief in the third place. On page seven of Team of Rivals, I'm going to read you this quote.

She says, because she's discussing Springfield, Illinois, where the opening scene of the book takes place and Lincoln is sort of nervously waiting for the results of the Republican primary or the nomination. And she writes, I was like, wow. Like, I was just picturing this community.

Our guest in chapter 66 of three books was Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who has put out a 2020 through report called Our Nation's Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, where he says, one in ten people loneliness now, which is worse for health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. I wanted to zoom up from Barnes & Noble and Waterstones for a second to ask you, what do you think are the elements of community? And then zooming back down, what role can bookstores play?

But what are the principles that you think we need as people to build back the community and connection that appears to be, well, we've lost a lot from that sentence in the book.

James:

We have lost a lot. And, you know, the nature of modern life, be it how we travel, if you travel by car rather than by public transport, you're isolating yourself and all the rest. I do think it's immensely complicated and obviously starts at a political and administrative level.

The extent to which we make our choices as to what we invest in. There has been an unfortunate trend, I think, to consolidate rather than localize. You reduce the number of small libraries and have one big library.

Neil:

I see.

James:

Bigger schools, they're more efficient, they're cheaper to run. Bigger hospitals, they can give more expert care, but then you lose the local. Quite important, I think, to understand what we're doing both at the start of life and at the end of life.

It matters how you educate people clearly, how you nurture from earliest childcare through the education system, and then how do we look after our elderly? And then how do we look after the vulnerable? And I speak as a European, you're a Canadian, very different in the different countries, very, very different in the United States and in different worlds.

But we probably, from every sort of happiness indicator, the more inclusive and the more supportive the society is, generally the happier people are within it. And do bookstores have a role within that? I very much think they do.

Again, we're nowhere near as important as libraries, public libraries. But nonetheless, we do provide a community space that's inherently democratic in the sense that everybody can come inside it. We don't ask you to spend any money.

We let you browse the books within the store. It's a place that kids come after school. If you're a latchkey kid, you're waiting for your parents to come home, come to a bookstore.

It's safe. It's unthreatening. But it's also a place in which all ages have a place.

And that's unusual as a retail space. We appeal to the youngest kid. We've got books for them, the oldest citizen, we've got books for them, and everybody in between.

Everybody can interact and everybody can actually sort of kill time in a bookstore. But also they can come to meet. I mean, we are the greatest dating place that there is.

Forget the bar, forget the nightclub, forget everything else. Come to a bookstore. Meet people, see people.

And that's also important.

Neil:

We are the greatest date. You remind me of that vulgar quote that is often repeated, that if you go to his house and he doesn't have books on the bookshelf, don't F him. You've heard that classic phrase.

Everybody can kill time. It's safe. It's unthreatening.

It's inherently democratic. It's community space. I've interviewed a lot of people in bookstores.

Mitchell Kaplan is the owner of Books and Books, the Florida bookstore independent chain. About the same number, I think, as Daunt Books. Judy Bloom's got one.

Hers is non-profit in Key West. Mitchell jokes, I'm not in the non-profit business. I'm in the no-profit business.

But when I walk through that, when I walk through his bookstore, yeah, there's like book clubs sitting right there talking. Everybody's walking through. He has an outdoor magazine stand, as you can only have in Coral Gables, Florida.

And it feels like so convivial and yet I just know from growing up in the suburbs of... I grew up in a 100,000-person suburb, one hour east of Toronto, with zero bookstores my entire life. So I had to go to this town or this town to find them.

And when I went to this town or this town, there were independents in the mall. And then there became big box stores, chapters, before they were purchased by Indigo. And they were open until like 11pm.

So we started going as teenagers. But then of course, post-merger and post-whatever, it's like now they're closing at eight. And I was like, oh man, we used to go after the movies.

Nothing better than after the movies before your parents pick you up to go to the bookstore. And I interviewed Quentin Tarantino. He said the same thing.

He'd go to the movie, then he'd go to B. Dalton's in the mall and then always trace back. There's nothing like visiting a bookstore after a movie.

So it's like even in the communities we have with 100,000 people to this day, there's no bookstore in that town. It has affluence, it has education, it just doesn't have a bookstore.

James:

Yeah, we've started opening up a lot of bookstores in the US. And it's been completely fascinating to do so. And you open up these stores.

We're doing about, we'll do 65 this year. So a lot, just a real lot. And the day you open, you have a queue of 400 people in a place which didn't have a bookstore and where we were nervous about kind of like, how are we going to find things here?

The appetite is astonishing. And the more extreme the reaction is directly correlated to how isolated the location and the absence of existing bookstores. Oh, interesting.

If we're opening one that's 20 minutes away from an existing bookstore, yeah, you get a nice queue. Everybody's excited and everything. But you open up one in a more...

Neil:

Give us some of the town or city names where you're opening these.

James:

We opened in Visalia, California, which is not fancy California.

Neil:

I don't know that, yeah.

James:

It's inland California.

It's Agricultural Worker California. It's blue collar California. It had a bookstore, it had a Borders back in, closed in 2009 or whenever it closed.

Nothing ever since. We think, well, we'll try one there. 400 people line up every day.

It's like you're absolutely packed. Been a spectacular success. And it's just really heartwarming actually to find these stores being received so enthusiastically.

And when I do mall stores, same thing. Very, very heartening.

Neil:

I love that. This is what we want to hear. The podcast is all about books, so this is beautiful.

And opening bookstores in cities like this, the community gets to come together and see each other and have a place. I love the adage of this. There's no better dating place than a bookstore.

Of course, you're connecting over an intellectual connection, which is ultimately what relationship's going to be. You mentioned beginning of life and end of life. And I thought that was really astute.

In Canada, of course, we have a one-year maternity leave here instead of the six or 12 weeks that is in the US. There's hospices down the street from where I live in downtown Toronto. They always have long lineups now.

And I'm sort of thinking about this. The death scene in this book is so vivid. I didn't know it.

Of course, you heard about how Lincoln died. But it just made me feel closer to death than I had felt in a long time. And I was reading it at night and so on.

And I was kind of just thinking about death so much. My parents are currently 79, 73 years old. My mom's from Nairobi, Kenya.

My dad's from Amritsar, India. I came to Canada in the 60s. And I think I read that.

I don't know if it's accurate that you maybe sadly lost your parents recently. And I guess I just happen to have a compulsion about thinking about my own final years. I wonder if you might pontificate for us what a good death looks like.

James:

Oh, Lord. I mean, old ages and the healthcare systems and generally either through family or the wider society, how we support people through that. And obviously everybody's lifespan is individual to them.

But collectively, we are grappling with much longer lives, which in many respects is great, but also dementia and Alzheimer's and all of these afflictions and endless further medical afflictions. And that makes old age a challenge. None of us know what our future is to be.

But one hopes that we all, I'm sure, aspire to families that will support us and friendship groups that will support us. And a society that will support us. And I can't speak for Canada remotely, for the United Kingdom, the stresses upon the national health system, which we revere, but is a post-war creation and now under considerable stress.

Where is the money and where are the priorities of expenditure? And where does keeping and looking after old age fit within that? I think it's something that different political parties will espouse clearly different strategies against, but it seems hugely important to us.

And I'm fortunate personally to come now to enjoy good, solid middle-class affluence, which makes it much easier than if one lacks that. But if one lacks that, there has to be some form of safety net, which creates a humane support and guidance for people through all their phases of life. And it's extremely noticeable in the United States as you travel around, the number of people that are excluded from proper support, either because of mental health issues or living on the street or drugs or all these other catastrophes that can inflict themselves upon individuals.

A prison population, what are we doing in our prison? How are we looking after that part of our society? Which again, if we don't put enough money in it, if it's cruel and uncaring, it's going to have very adverse long-term consequences.

Neil:

Well, exactly, exactly. Do you have a book or two that when people walk into the bookstore and ask you for books on grief or that they have told you that they've lost somebody, I feel like I get this question a lot. I don't have any good go-tos.

I've personally read Christopher Hitchens' book, those essays he wrote before he died, and I know there's A Year of Magical Thinking. That book comes up a lot. But do you have any grief books that you suggest?

James:

There's a reasonably strong body of work that's come out relatively recently that I think has been very effective, particularly from practitioners themselves. A nurse did a wonderful sort of best-selling book in the UK, which I lost it. I'm going to have to bring it to you in a second.

Sort of coming back to thinking about also taking the books from sort of different religions, and there is a lovely book sort of called On Kaddish, and you don't have to be Jewish, and I'm not Jewish, to read it and sort of see through the prison of Kaddish. Amongst our books on sort of Buddhism and reflection, there are, again, lovely books. And so I quite like as a bookseller sort of to take people through sort of how different cultures are approaching this.

And again, it's something where the curation that goes on within a store, you were saying Left Bank Books had their sort of book club, but you can also create a nice bay of books which just take people through the reflections around, if it's grief, though I think also just dementia, which is something that impacts so many families and so many people. Again, really nice body of work, which is, well, you know, here are 12 books that give you different insights into this, if it's entered into your life in whatever shape or form, and which will help you reflect on it and think about it. And I think good booksellers are just grasping onto all of these moments of life and moments of reflection and trying to bring an assembly of books across different disciplines, not necessarily head-on, but obliquely as well.

Neil:

Yeah, it's not everything solved by a how-to. It's touching on these difficult-to-articulate emotions and feelings and ways that are unique to us. I can't jump off this book without asking the most obvious question, of course, from Team of Rivals, which is how do you think about organizing your teams?

You're the CEO of a couple massive companies here. Do you follow Lincoln's kind of idea? Are you setting up boardroom meetings where there's a lot of conflicting opinions?

Or how do you think about forming an executive team?

James:

I think it's having the right people in the roles and playing to their strengths. And you can and should be able to tolerate divergences of opinions, but try and have people locked onto their skill sets and their core capabilities, which he does sort of beautifully. He can see their values.

He had this sort of very adversarial time with Chase in the Treasury, but knew he was brilliant at him and kept him at it and would absorb some of the antagonisms because the outputs were so fantastic. But equally, when Cameron, isn't it, who is his initial war secretary, is not good enough, he replaces him with Stanton, which is one of the great relationships also in the book. So unfortunately, or necessarily, there are moments when you, when executives need to be changed, ideally, as soon as possible.

I've certainly, in coming into both companies, had a lot of change initially and then settled down and the same people then run it for a decade or so.

Neil:

Okay, cool, wonderful.

James:

I wasn't knocked off my perch, as poor Mr. Lincoln was.

Neil:

Yeah, no, exactly, exactly. And the epilogue is kind of fascinating to read in this book. You know, I am, you know, William C on page 751, William Seward remained Secretary of State through President Andrew Johnson's term and took great pride in what was originally lampooned as Seward's Folly, the purchase of Alaska.

And I thought that was so interesting because your dad was Lieutenant Governor to the Isle of Man. And I thought I might ask what landmass you might purchase if you were a head of state. And also this guy went on 1872, he went on a trip around the world before he died, Japan, China, India, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, and France.

I thought, wow, for a Cambridge student of history who's created a travel-oriented bookshop, I just had to ask you, what would your last trip around the world look like? What would it or what doesn't? Yeah, what would it?

Not does it, not this is going to happen for 30 years, but, so what unremarkable landmass might you purchase? And then what would your last dying trip around the world look like? You can say today or it could be in 1872.

I just found this fascinating that in 1872 this guy was like, I'm going to hit these like 10 different countries before I die. And I thought that was fascinating.

James:

Yeah, he's rather more cultured. I think the landmass, if anyone can preserve the environment, well, since I'm looking at a Canadian, I think I would, having unimaginable wealth, I would buy all the tar lands and exclude anybody from doing anything environmental within them.

Neil:

Oh my gosh, yeah. Well, the forests are getting dead seas, dead lakes, the wildfires, it's just we're pillaging our land.

James:

We are pillaging our land. We are pillaging our land and to the extent that one can leave it pristine and present that, I think that would be the ideal thing. And then if I was going to go on, I think I would travel through all of the former Soviet countries one after another because they're probably the countries that would have changed the least.

Nicaragua, Cuba, the Stans.

Neil:

Changed the least?

James:

Yeah.

Neil:

What do you mean?

James:

Well, that one of the, it probably wasn't the best thing to have been within the Soviet orbit, be you in South America or Africa or Asia or wherever you are. But the legacy of that is that you're probably less developed now than you would otherwise be and therefore is a place in which to visit.

It will be much more authentic and agreeable and less uniform because everywhere that was within a US orbit tended to homogenize.

Neil:

Wow. What a fascinating way to think about it. I love that.

Less uniform. Yeah. Avoid the homogenization of culture around the world.

Nicaragua, Cuba, the Stans. What else is on this list? This is I might come back to this.

James:

I mean, some of them, Libya has gone through probably a fairly unhelpful phase and I'm not going to be traveling there. But again, Ethiopia is actually somewhere that I have been but is a fabulous country. Now has developed subsequently and now is going through troubles.

But those are the countries that are going to probably be the most insightful to visit or inspiring to me.

Neil:

I like that. I like that. What a unique way to approach the question.

I had that written down. I was like, well, should I ask him this? I was like, I have a feeling you'd have a really good answer.

Okay, let's jump into your third and last book. It is De Gaulle. Both The Rebel, 1890-1944, which is the book I have, but there's also, it's a two-part book, there's also De Gaulle, The Ruler, 1945-1970.

Now it was originally a three-part book and so the author has written a little note in the front of this one saying I'm really sad to inform you the publisher squeezed books two and three into just book two. I like that they put that right in there. This is written by Jean LaCouture, if I said that right. L-A-C-O-U-T-U-R-E translated by Alan Sheridan. Originally published as three volumes in France in 1984, 1985, 1986 and then in the U.S. in 1990 and 1991 by Norton. Both covers feature black and white photos of Charles De Gaulle.

This one has him in a military uniform with a small mustache and a hat, but there's also one with him in a black suit with his arms listed above his head in the second. The title is in like a giant hundred point all caps gold font with a red drop shadow. De Gaulle.

He was, by the way, for those that don't know, a French military officer and statesman who led three free French forces, or led the French forces against Nazi Germany in World War II, chaired the provisional government of the French Republic from 44 to 46 to restore democracy in France and in 1958, amid the Algerian War, came out of retirement when appointed Prime Minister by President René Coty. He then rewrote the Constitution, founded the Fifth Republic, and was elected President of France later that year, a position he held until he resigned in 1969. Jean LaCouture was a French journalist, historian and author who lived from 1921 to 2015 who also wrote famed biographies about a lot of people like Ho Chi Min, Montan, and Kennedy. So, I could go into a lot more details here about De Gaulle, but why don't we just turn it over to you, James. Would you tell us about your relationship with De Gaulle, the rebel and that's the first half, and the ruler by Jean LaCouture.

James:

De Gaulle is, again, he's a really, really good story. He's clearly an impossible individual in many respects.

Neil:

I got that sense. It sounded like very ornery.

James:

A level of arrogance and self-importance. But actually, throughout it all, one can't but admire what he achieved through adhering to this obstinate sense of his own destiny, but also, and one can be extremely critical of him very easily in terms of his own sense of his own self-aggrandizement, but actually his focus was on France, and in taking over and leading the Free French, and he was not remotely in a position to make that claim. It was accident that he happened to be all the more senior generals and leaders in France had either stayed in France or gone to North Africa or, and he was in London, was able to firmly establish himself, causing Winston Churchill no end of trouble as he did so.

And one has that leadership through the war, the manner in which he constantly articulated the grandeur of France and the importance of France, even when, let's face it, they'd been invaded by the Germans. They had a Vichy government which was collaborating. It was absolutely the darkest hour, and he ignored it all, and he articulated this grand vision of la France and defiance and Free French, and it is inspiring.

He also writes magically. De Gaulle was an instinctive and creative writer, and that is truly inspiring.

Neil:

You have all these letters that he wrote when he was a little kid published in here.

James:

Astonishing.

Neil:

Like, when I'm older, I'm ruling the army.

Here's what I'm going to do. It was just captivating to read.

James:

A little obnoxious. You just want to slap him figuratively around, but when he's articulating it in terms of where he wants to lead the country and the sense of self-sacrifice and adherence to a vision, it's brilliant. And on a personal level, he had a daughter who was disabled and who he kept close to him throughout.

She was generally, throughout the war years, she spent most of her time under his desk. She wanted to be close to him, and he absolutely devoted himself to her. So there was a human side to him that was obscured, but it was there.

He went through considerable trials and tribulations throughout, but maintained. And then, I think, as you say, when he actually came back to power, rather unexpectedly, the Fifth Republic and able to make a settlement particularly over Algeria that only somebody of his stature was capable to do and effectively surrender all that it would have been expected, I think, of him to protect. He gave up Algeria.

He found a way of navigating through what was looking a catastrophic situation. He yielded up not all of the French Empire, and he's by no means a saint and by no means perfect. But nonetheless, he did navigate France through an extraordinary period, as well as being, and this is true to my heart, as well as being difficult about it.

One of the key creators of the European Union, and the sense that international cooperation was important. He was deeply suspicious of the English, the Brits, but again, not without reason. But he welded France to Germany, and that is crucial for the stability of Europe, and I think was deeply insightful and forward-thinking in a way that is easily masked by his sense of la grandeur de la France.

Neil:

Yeah, welding France to Germany in a way that, yeah, it calls to mind the famous trip you made as Waterstones' CEO to Amazon to sell the Kindles in the shop.

James:

Maybe I'm summoning my inner de Gaulle.

Neil:

Yeah, I mean, yeah, but there's, he's a man of, you talked about his writing, there's a ton of quotes that I wanted to just play back to you and get your reflection on them.

You can agree, you can disagree, you can tell me if you interpret them differently. Here's a few of things that he said. Silence is the ultimate weapon of power.

James:

Which is absolutely classic de Gaulle. It's, it causes you just to stop, doesn't it? Silence, it's, it makes you think, and as you think, you think, hmm, this man has actually got it and he can express it.

It's not some huge long sentence, it's short, it's precise, it's deeply challenging. And you reflect upon it, and I think that is constant through de Gaulle. The windbag, Winston Churchill was something of a windbag, very lyrical, he could write beautifully, but he just went on and on.

De Gaulle isn't, it's short, sharp, they're challenging, and there's a lot of wisdom in them.

Neil:

Donald Trump is a windbag. He's a windbag, you know? The way that the dialogue happens now, we have both the windbaggedness and we have the sort of pithy phrases that go viral because they're controversial, like you have both extremes now in the discourse.

Anyway, silence is the ultimate weapon of power. How about this one? A man of character finds a special attractiveness in difficulty, since it is only by coming to grips with difficulty that he realizes his potential.

James:

Again, classic de Gaulle. Much to reflect on in that. Much to say, oh for goodness sake, you are so up yourself.

Because it is intended to amplify his own extraordinariness. But it also has some significant element of truth to it, and it's framed in this amazing language. It's a translation you have, but the French is even more so.

This absolute precision, and evoking something far larger than seems remotely reasonable for somebody to do, but he can do it again and again and again and again and again.

Neil:

It's interesting that it's become a dictum in society today, that the obstacle is the way, the hard way is the right way. I've said and written some of these phrases myself, but it seems like we have this bent in society sort of chasing the difficult path, and at the same time, our instincts are probably not to do that.

James:

And most of what he was done was in the context of trying to lead a nation through a period of extreme contradiction and difficulty, as the leader of the Free French. Just a vassal to the Allies. No power, no influence.

You've got all the great of France is collaborating with the Germans. No military prowess at all. Total abject defeat, and yet an ability to evoke in a language an alternative reality and enable people to coalesce and rebuild themselves around that.

Neil:

I mean, this is sounding... We're getting... James Daunt and Charles De Gaulle are getting closer and closer now here with these examples. How about this one? This is going to sound like you a little bit too. Don't ask me who's influenced me.

A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

James:

Did he really write that?

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah.

James:

I mean, he is utterly obnoxious sometimes.

Neil:

I'll give you one last one. In order to be the master, the politician poses as the servant.

James:

There is much of truth in that, and that back to Lincoln. Lincoln was par excellence the practitioner of that.

Neil:

Do you hold on to that? I mean, you're a bookseller from England, and you're leading the largest book chain in the world here in the US.

James:

I think there are people who lead from the front, and de Gaulle happened to have been one of those, and there are those who can lead from the back, and Lincoln was one of those. I think the latter, the Lincoln way of leading is I think generally, well, certainly the one that fits with my personality. And I think there are heroic leaders, and then there are people who are reliant entirely upon their teams, and if they have any skill, it is cajoling and persuading and encouraging that team to work at its best.

Neil:

Beautiful. We're lucky that the larger world of readers, the Republic of Letters as David Mitchell calls it, is lucky to have you at the helm with its growth and what you're doing for book chains around the world. Got a ton more questions on de Gaulle.

In the interest of time, I wonder if we might just transfer over to our closing Fast Money Round questions to kind of end this wonderful conversation. I will go with, these are a couple obvious ones for you. Hardcover, paperback, audio, or e?

James:

Personally, hardcover, but I understand that most people are paperback, and I don't understand the rest.

Neil:

I know, I got in trouble for having a value on the show as audiobooks and ebooks are beautiful mutants, I once said, and it got me into some hot water.

James:

Just for myself, I've never managed to get to grips with either e. I can never remember what I've read on e.

Neil:

You can't highlight it, you can't fold the corners, you can't give it to somebody. Do you have a book lending policy?

James:

Personally?

Neil:

Yeah.

James:

Yeah, I know I will lend any book all the time, and it gets me in less trouble with my wife because otherwise the place overflows with books.

Neil:

So it's very generous, you're trying to always outlay. I do normally ask people how they organize the books on their bookshelf, but you've already suggested that you organize them by country. I do.

Other than the ones you have personally overseen, do you have one or two favorite bookstores, living or dead?

James:

All the time. Here in New York, McNally Jackson is the best bookstore. In London, John Sandow.

I could go on.

Neil:

Keep going, keep going.

James:

Books and books. There is a bookstore.

Neil:

Books and books in Florida? Oh, great.

James:

I think there are fabulous bookstores around the world. Less than there should be, but you know, the thing that I actually find is the moment of genius in a bookstore, and there are very few, is when they have new and used, and it's small, and it's really curated. The interesting thing about those is that you can go in, they tend to be stores of a moment in time, and they don't tend to sustain themselves particularly easily, but they create genius.

But the ones I like are the ones with somebody's name across the front of them, and somebody inside them is buying all the books and is curating them, and it's theirs, and there's a personality to it, and you don't even need to meet the person you know what it's like. I mean, you walk into books and books, you know what Mitch Kaplan's going to be like. And when he turns up and you meet him, it's like, uh-huh, oh, I knew you were going to be this.

Because you do not know Mitch Kaplan. He's a personality, and his bookstore is also one. It's just...

Neil:

Absolutely. He's a wonderful, wonderful...

James:

It's welcoming, it's all of the things. But each of these stores is a different thing.

Neil:

Yes, exactly. I've got to ask, when you walk into a bookstore you haven't walked into for the first time, where do your eyes and brain go? What do you...

You've mentioned the name outside, the person inside that's buying it, so you walk in, and I used to work for a British leader named Dave Cheesewright, and I'd walk with him inside Walmart all the time, and I'd always be interested, like, what's Dave looking at? When you walk into a bookstore, what are the first few things you're looking at?

James:

Obviously, I'm walking mainly into my own stores, one way or the other.

Neil:

I mean, a new one.

James:

I can come in and walk into the store, and I do, and I just sort of look to begin with. I don't actually advance beyond the front. I would generally expect to know exactly what their receiving room looks like, having absorbed what I'm looking at at the front of the store.

But that's because I'm an operator. These are the stores I've got to run and figure out what's right and what's wrong in them. You can also, without moving off that front moment, you know the personality.

You can see it. It's writ large, and then you may have further surprises as you go through. You may find the kids' section, which obviously you can't see from the front.

You may find, ah, there's a fabulous kids' bookseller in here, or there's somebody who really gets philosophy, or whatever it might be. The overall harmony of the store presents itself the minute you walk in it.

Neil:

Nice. Beautiful. What should bookstores never sell?

Because I'm asking that specifically because bookstores have obviously massively expanded the range of what they sell, and I've heard you talk about some things that you've pulled out of bookstores. Bookshops tend to sell lots of non-books these days. What should bookstores not be into?

James:

Well, I would have sort of I would want to say much, but actually what I think is if the bookstore is a true bookstore, you can sell pretty much anything else in it, but you definitely shouldn't have much of it. And the very best at this are Japanese. And you can go into a Japanese bookstore and it's a fabulous bookstore.

And they will have a little model with a scarf on it. That's it. And the scarf is amazingly beautiful.

Now, it shouldn't be in that bookstore because it's the only thing that isn't a book. And it's exquisite. It represents the values of the bookstore.

But my own view is bookstores should be, if they want to be bookstores, should be about books. Unequivocally about books. You should come into books and see books and focus on books.

And actually a percentage of sales should come from books. And I really worry when our sales drop below 80%. And quite a lot of Barnes & Noble are lower than 80%.

All of our new stores are about 80%. But we've got a ton of older stores where they are, and they are unbalanced. And the problem with them is they are still full of books.

They've got, you know, on the face of it, they're good bookstores. But they've become too much of other things. And it changes the nature of customers' engagement with the store.

And it really undermines their credibility and authenticity as a bookstore. Even though they have the books in them. And they have as many books in them as the little store down the road which has only got books in it.

But they don't make us good bookstores. And that's something we're kind of figuring out is how do we change them and evolve them to make them true bookstores if they've departed from that path because they sell too much that isn't. I slung out an immense amount of things that weren't books out of BNN to make them better bookstores even though it hurt us because they were things that we were selling perfectly well.

And they obviously made some sense to all the people who were buying water. Just bottled water. We had a little thing of bottled water.

You could just buy bottled water from us. And we sold one of our best selling items every single day. But you don't need that in a bookstore.

So we slung them out. And I do think it's something that is very difficult as a chain bookseller to work how you evolve. Given also there are commercial imperatives to make some money.

And you make quite a lot of money on these things without books.

Neil:

Yeah, exactly. Do you have a white whale book or any book that you have been in some sense chasing the longest?

James:

I chased a book on Ethiopia by Paul Henzer. And I just couldn't find it. It wasn't on Abe.

Occasionally they came on Abe and it was like $1,000 and I refused to pay $1,000 for a book.

Neil:

Oh, Abe books. Right, right, right. I was like, what's Abe?

Right, Abe books. Or Amazon, which is part of Amazon.

James:

Yeah. And I looked and really wanted to read this book and I read others of his and I wanted this one. And there's a little used bookstore in the village next to where I live.

Terrible store. It's one of the worst used bookstores that you can go into. It just has grubby, dirty paperbacks in it of mass market rubbish.

And I walked in there and it was sitting there. I mean, just sitting there. And I was just like, I actually must be dreaming.

This cannot be possible. And it was two pounds. No way.

I solved a search that had gone on for about a decade.

Neil:

Oh my gosh, what a great story. And the last question of all, you know, usually we're talking to a legion globally of book lovers, writers, makers, sellers and librarians. I often close by asking people what's one hard-fought piece of wisdom or advice you would leave to this group.

I could tie it to page 752 of Team of Rivals where it's reported that on Seward's deathbed, his daughter-in-law Jenny asked him if he had any final advice before he died. And he said, love one another. So I thought, if you don't mind, I know it's a bit dark, but maybe close with me asking you for what your deathbed advice may be to all the people who've stuck with us for the hour and a half conversation that I found very rich and stimulating personally.

James:

Seward is right. If there is any genuine advice of this sort, it has to be about kindness and tolerance and love in some shape or form. It should be part of all of our lives.

We burst our way through professional endeavors and educational endeavors and there's competitiveness and there's management and there's all these sort of things going on, but if you can absolutely endeavor always to be reasonable and kind and appreciative. And yes, sort of, actually that is the book that I failed to remember since I've just done it. It was called The Language of Kindness.

Ah! So, there we go. I needed the jog.

Neil:

Yes, exactly. The Language of Kindness. Endeavor to be reasonable and kind.

James Daunt, it has been a real honor and a pleasure to have you on 3 Books. Thank you so much for your generosity of time, of spirit, of giving us these books and sharing so much of your wisdom. Really, really grateful to you.

Thank you so much. Hey everybody, it's just me, just Neil again listening back to The Wise and Wonderful. So eloquent.

Mr. James Daunt, as he gave us the three daunting books that were... Actually, before we get into these, should I do my quotes? I was just about to forget my quotes, guys.

You've got to help me remember my quotes. Every single show, I try to highlight a few good quotes that I wrote down as I was going through. How about this one?

Books are in a very good place. He said that right at the beginning. I worry about literature, in a sense.

The Anna Kareninas of the world. Are we reading those still? Is our reading changing into more of the book talk and the self-help universe and the Colleen Hoovers?

I don't know. But just hearing the guy who runs more bookstores in the world more than anybody say books are in a very good place is heartening. It's a great, great sign for all of us.

This might be my favorite quote in the whole day. Bookstores offer the serendipity of illogical choice. I just love the words.

The serendipity of illogical choice. What a great, magical way of putting it. It's kind of like Chapter 99 with Doug Miller over at Doug Miller Books when he says, Amazon's great for finding what you want.

Bookstores are great for finding what you don't know you want. How about this one? Bookstores provide a community space that is inherently democratic in the sense that everybody can come inside it.

That is such a good point. We talk a lot about community on this show. There is, of course, the famous Putnam book, Bowling Alone, but most of the things that we talk about are just for adults or just for kids and so on.

Bookstores have, as he put it, they're inherently democratic. I'll throw one more quote in here just for fun. The reality through all of this, because he's talking about 35 years being a bookseller, is that how people are, the time people have available to read and the enthusiasm with which they read changes by not much.

Which is a wonderful perspective to have from the, I was going to say septuagenarian, but I don't think he's that old. I think he's in his early 60s. 61!

He's only 61. What am I talking about? James Daunt, thank you so much for giving us three more books to add to our top 1000, including number 589, A Savage War of Peace by Alastair Horn, H-O-R-N-E.

Number 588, Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin, which I really do recommend. It's a massive book. It's so daunting.

Like I said to James, the audiobook's like 42 and a half hours, but it is gripping. I mean, it really does take you into the 1800s, Springfield, Illinois. You feel like you're right there.

If you have an interest in US politics or kind of the highest sort of echelons of leadership, then this is a good book for you. And number 587, which is kind of two books. It's like a two-book set.

De Gaulle, The Rebel and De Gaulle, The Ruler by Jean LaCouture, okay? L-E-C-O-U-T-U-R-E. Thank you so much to James Daunt for coming on three books, and thank you to all of you for listening.

Are you still here? Did you make it past the three-second pause? If so, I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club.

This is where I kind of lean back on the couch now, put my arms above my head now, and I say, hey, it's time for the after party. It's one of three clubs we have on three books. We also have the cover-to-cover club.

That's people that attempt to listen to every single chapter of the show from 2018 to 2040. I was in my 30s when I started. I'll be in my 60s when I'm done, and I know I'm hanging out with a lot of you around the world with me.

And by the way, as I mentioned, if you are part of the cover-to-cover club, drop me a line, let me know. We'll add you to our FAQ if you want to be. A lot of people don't want their name on there.

That's fine, but we can add you to the threebooks.co FAQ if you like. And, of course, the secret club. All I can tell you about the secret club is the way you find out how to join is by calling our phone number.

Yes, we have a real phone number. It is 1-833-READALOT. R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T.

You can drop that last T while dialing if you're having trouble getting to go through. I love hearing your voice. It's so wonderful hearing from you.

Let's go to the phones to kick off the end of the podcast club now.

Caitlin:

Phone ringing. Hey, Neal. It's Caitlin Beekhouse from Edmonton, Alberta.

I just got home from a run listening to Chapter 93, and it felt like you and Chris Hatfield were running right beside me. I love that there's no commercials, so no interruptions as I'm running and just great conversation and inspiration of what to read next. Another way that I love to learn about great reads is from friends and family, and I'm actually hosting at my community week next week the first ever book swab, which combines the best parts of a book swap and a book club, which is why we call it a swab.

As a sustainably minded professional organizer, I love to see books re-homed and re-loved and to explore the relationship that we have with physically owning and possessing books. There's no way for you to know this unless I throw it out into the universe, but one of my three-year goals is to be able to discuss with you the sustainability side of books, our relationship with books, and my three, four-minute book. Thanks so much for the inspiring podcast and for introducing me to so many great people, Neil.

Keep it up.

Neil:

Thank you so much to Caitlin from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada for calling in and for shouting out Chris Hatfield chapter 93. That was a fun one. I remember going to Chris's house and his whole table was just full of Christmas cards, and I was amazed that this guy was sending out 500 Christmas cards and personally writing notes in each one of them when I got there.

When I went over that day, it was around the time of his first novel, The Apollo Murders, that had come out. And since then, he's so prolific. It's unbelievable.

He's got another novel called The Defector, I guess part two of that same Apollo Murders series. So if you're interested in, I want to say Tom Clancy-esque type of books, then that would be for you. He, of course, has also a really famous memoir called An Astronaut's Guide to Life, and a kid's book that my kids still enjoy called The Darkest Dark.

And he's got a lot of wonderful books. I also love that you were running while listening to it because like Chris, I guess being the astronaut, it's just in such physical shape. One of the memory takeaways I have of that conversation was the idea of doing 20 push-ups before you ever get into the shower.

Just drop and give me 20 every time. I love some of the other topics you raise. I love the book swab idea.

A book swap and a book club. A mixture of the two. Wonderful.

I love the idea of talking about the sustainability side of books. I will endeavor to give you a call or to reach out to you so that we can have a short chat about the sustainability side of books. I don't think about it much, but of course, we should.

Absolutely. Once we solve all the things, of course, like fracking and carbon emissions and so on. Books are printed on paper, right?

We're chopping down trees for them. How does that all work? That's what we need to talk about, Caitlin.

Thank you so much for calling in. If you're listening to this, by the way, please give me a call. Drop me a line.

1-833-READALOT. There's no pressure to be eloquent or as articulate as Caitlin was. Just drop me a line.

Let me know a formative book, a dream guest. Any reflection or bit. It's always wonderful hearing from you.

Thank you so much. Now, let's move on to the letter of the chapter. This chapter's letter comes from Marge.

Oh, yeah. We love Marge down in Antioch, Illinois. Marge says, on Jonathan Franzen's podcast, I'm not finished the conversation yet, but what a great guest.

His descriptions of books were so interesting and thoughtful. I now want to read A Christmas Carol. My daughter wants to read Prince Caspian, and I will recommend his books to my son since Franzen said he writes so people will have good books to read.

Thank you for your efforts to get him on the show. Well, thank you, Marge. I also think, you know what we should do?

We should head on over to YouTube because there's been a lot of comments on that one. And I'm just going to pull it up right now. Basically, you know how it is on YouTube.

Everyone's got their opinions. And so there was, I won't say like a salty comment, but you know, somebody wrote and said, the sheer amount of pretension that comes from Franzen should be a scientific quantity. His youthful arrogance has continued to add all arrogance.

That was from David Watson. I replied, sorry, David. Another friend texted me after listening to this chat saying something similar.

I will say for my end, I didn't perceive John that way at all in our chats leading up to the interview and before and after the interview. My sense was he was incredibly kind, thoughtful, introspective, self-critical, self-wondering, you know, basically a person to try and show up and do their best like any of us are. And that is my experience.

And I hope that other people felt that way. But of course, we're open to other people's opinions. Jonathan Henderson also wrote, I just read the corrections earlier this month.

I loved it so much. I basically inhaled it over a period of two days. Being a middle-aged man who's now in the unenviable position of taking care of my elderly parents, I really felt like for the first time in ages an author was writing my life.

It has that painful but powerful combination that happens when the ugly truth meets the poetically beautiful. That's a great way to put it, Jonathan. And by the way, in the top 100 books of all time, or the books of the 20th century from the New York Times, the corrections is in the top 10.

In the top 10. Here's the last comment I'll give you, last letter of the chapter, we'll say, from Jules Seghetti. I liked the conversation, although some of the reactions of the interviewer were a bit too much.

Wow! For my taste. So then I wrote back, and then the person wrote, it was worth the two hours.

Two and a half hours. And I said, worth the two and a half hours is a great compliment. Sorry for my hyperbolic reactions.

And then Jules wrote back, sorry, I didn't mean to offend. Hope I didn't. The important thing is that it's so rare to have the time to watch a 2.5 hour interview. And that was amazing. And I said, no, you definitely didn't offend me. That's the thing about YouTube, it gets you like, there's like a more unfiltered nature of the comments over there, so it's nice to combine those with Marge's comments.

Alright, and now let's head over to the word of the chapter. And for this chapter's word, we will of course have a nice word cloud from the eloquent Mr. James Daunt. Let's cue over to him now.

James:

Hesitate to pine some awful denouement Mr. Obama is better placed than me to extol the national health system which we revere but obliquely as well. This obstinate sense of his own destiny, a vassal to the allies total abject defeat it's writ large and it's exquisite

Neil:

So many interesting words to choose from there, but let's go with denouement

Neil:

denouement

Neil:

d-e-n-o-u-e-m-e-n-t which I will confess I did not know what it meant at all but Miriam Webster comes in to help us tell us that it is the final outcome of the main dramatic complication in a novel, play, film, etc. Or the outcome of a complex sequence of events.

For example, in the novel's denouement the two hostages escape to freedom. Huh. That's wonderful.

So the denouement is kind of like the ending. Well, where does it come from? It comes from the French and what it means is untying.

Untying. From old French de, you know, to undo nouer is a tie. To untie.

So think about denouement as like the untying of the complex strands of a plot. Wonderful word from of course the very eloquent James Daunt the world's largest bookseller running the biggest chain in England, the biggest chain in the U.S. which are gotta be two of the top five markets in the world for books. I know the U.S. is number one. England is, I think, I think it's the number two English speaking market, but I don't know if it's up around, you know, China and India and so on. So let's say two top five markets and then of course he's still running his nine store independent bookstore chain in London Daunt Books, which of course having a bag from is apparently like the thing to do if you're over there. I gotta visit when I'm over in England.

When am I gonna be over in England? I do not know, but I want to visit Daunt Books and see how they're organized by country and where they put Harry Potter. It was a wonderful conversation with James, with you, with me all the way up here in chapter 141.

We've been intersplicing classic chapters with new chapters now. You just heard Judy Bloom on the new moon. We'll have Vishwas Aggrawal and David Sedaris coming to visit over the next couple months, which will be fun and until next time remember everybody that you are what you eat and you are what you read. Keep turning that page and I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Bye.

Listen to the chapter here!

Chapter 140: Amy Einhorn on powerful pages and publishing possibilities

Listen to the chapter here!

Neil:

Hey everybody, it's Neil Pasricha and welcome or welcome back to chapter 140 of three books. You are listening to our epic 22-year-long quest to uncover and discuss the 1,000 most formative books in the world with guests all over the publishing industry. Authors, writers, George Saunders, David Sedaris, Judy Blume, editors like Kerri Kolen and today's dream guest, Amy Einhorn, who we're going to get to in just a second. And of course, people I just meet and bump into every which way, like two shawarma chefs, Shirley the nurse or Vishwas the Uber driver. We're hanging out, we're talking about books and how they change our lives. Thank you so much for being here and for joining us on today's Harvest Moon.

Yes, every single time there is a full moon, including today, September 17th, 2024, we drop a new chapter of three books. By the way, it's my birthday. I turned 45 today.

It's the first time a chapter and a full moon has ever hit my birthday like a bingo. So to celebrate, I've done what I've done the last few years, which is I put out a list of advice. I don't know why I do it.

I think I copied it from Kevin Kelly, actually, originally, our guest in chapter 110. When he turned 68, he started putting out like a list of 68 pieces of advice on his birthday. It's a practice that I find great because I keep a little note on my phone all year and then I kind of curate them and write them and rewrite them.

And I started when I was 43. 43 things I've almost learned as I turned 43. And now today, I just published 45 things I've almost learned as I turned 45.

So head on over to Neil.blog if you want to see it or to my social media or email us or whoever you want to check it out. Also, quick update before we get into the dream guest is Leslie and I have a new journal. It's called Two Minute Evenings.

And it is the game Rose, Rose, Thorn, Bud, the gratitude game we play every night, either at our dinner table with our kids, or before we go to bed. And it came from Leslie's mom. I think it came from her mom.

And they played it at camp growing up. And when Leslie was a little girl, her mom would always ask her before bed, what was your rose from the day? What was your highlight, a tiny win, a small pleasure?

Then she would ask her, what is your thorn? What didn't go well? Giving Leslie a place to vent or to be heard so she wasn't sleeping on it.

And then finally, what's your bud? B-U-D, what's something you're looking forward to? We added a second rose to the game.

We complement this in the evening side with, of course, our morning practice, which is Two Minute Mornings, which is I will let go of, I am grateful for, I will focus on. And the Two Minute Morning journal came out in 2017 from Chronicle Books. And it ended up selling like 150,000 copies, has 1000 reviews on Amazon.

Nobody expected this. The top reviews are also hilarious. There's like one star review saying it's the same thing every day.

And there's five star reviews saying, I love this habit. It's the same thing every day. So everybody has their own interpretation.

So Two Minute Evenings just came out. It's called Two Minute Evenings. It is the Rose, Rose, Thorn, Bud evening gratitude practice that we use.

In case you want that for yourself or your friend, you can check it out online. But now, let's get into it. Let's get into it.

Let's get into The Help by Katherine Stockett. You know that book, Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty. Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson, who, by the way, was our guest in Chapter 76, as you'll recall.

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummings. This is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel. Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera.

We Begin at the End by Chris Whittaker. A Higher Loyalty by James Comey. And even The Book of Awesome by Neil Pasricha.

What do these books all have in common? Their editor, Amy Einhorn, the famed but always kind of invisible editor, pulling the strings from behind the curtain. How do you get a book published?

What does an editor do? How did the pieces of publishing all fit together? There's nobody better to ask than Amy Einhorn.

According to The Observer, New York editors and publishers speak of Amy Einhorn's success as the product of an almost mystical editorial instinct. Colleagues cite Ms. Einhorn's good taste, her nose, her eye, and her gut. Her unique ability to pinpoint the kinds of books that thousands of people want to read.

Most editors separate mass market books from literary enterprises, which is why Ms. Einhorn's peers marvel at her expertise in the sometimes amorphous middle ground of smart commercial fiction. Or I guess in my case, in James Comey's case, in Jenny Lawson's case, sometimes also nonfiction. How do I know Amy?

Well, 15 years ago, my seven-month-old blog, 1000 Awesome Things, was nominated for Best Blog from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. I signed on with Erin Malone, a big literary agent at William Morris Endeavor. She said, we want to auction this book next week.

Amy was one of the people that wanted to turn the blog into the book. I was very attracted to her clear, sharp vision. She was different than everybody else I talked to.

She was like, this is a hardcover, Neil. This is a gift book. This is for soccer moms.

It's not going to have all your frat boy humor in it. You got to take out the fat baseball players and the blowing your nose in the shower and all this stuff I was writing on my blog. She had a really clear vision.

I loved working with her over the next few years and over several books, handing, banding about 300-page manuscripts, having debates at midnight and 1am over email. She is a real incredible editor. I don't want to say I took it for granted, but basically when I worked for her, I thought all editors must be like this.

All editors must be this good. No, she sticks out. She has one of the highest percentages, New York Times bestseller hit rates of any other editor.

That's why I flew down to New York City, met up with her at Broadway and 55th, went up to the 19th floor and the Penguin Random House office where she is currently the Senior Vice President of Fiction at Crown, which is one of the oldest, biggest imprints that they have at Penguin Random House. And she's running fiction for it. You can tell by her instinct, she's got great taste.

And we hung out and we talked about how you get your book published. Who are the people involved in publishing a book? What's the job of an editor?

What helps make a book sell? Amy's three most formative books, of course, and much, much more. Let's jump into chapter 140 now.

Now, you know, I'm really your friend because I just told you you had something in your teeth.

Amy:

Yes.

Neil:

Right before we did a podcast, which is where nobody can see your teeth.

Amy:

Doesn't matter. Spending all this time with you. And if I came out and I had this thing on my tooth.

Neil:

It was an entry in the book of awesome. When somebody tells you there's something in your tooth.

Amy:

Right.

Neil:

Right. But people don't do it.

Amy:

But they should because you immediately have trust with somebody. Now I feel like I'm in the hands of someone who I could trust.

Neil:

Oh, that's a good way. That's a good way to feel. I really appreciate you coming on 3 Books, Amy. It's been a long time coming. We are sitting on the 19th floor. Yes.

Is this the Penguin Random House building?

Amy:

This is the PRH building.

Neil:

In midtown Manhattan?

Amy:

In midtown Manhattan.

Neil:

Overlooking the New Jersey.

Is that the Hudson River?

Amy:

That is the Hudson River. Well, we're in the house that Neil Pasricha built because we're coming back full circle to, we are just looking up how well your books did that we did together. So, yes.

So you're responsible for our lovely real estate here.

Neil:

Yeah. Right. Although when I first met you, you were down at.

Amy:

375.

Neil:

Because it was Penguin before the merger, when we started working together in 2009.

Amy:

That was a much cooler neighborhood.

Neil:

Yeah. Well, that's where I, that's where you introduced me to the chocolate chip cookies, which I still get.

Amy:

Oh, Jacques Torres?

Neil:

Yes.

Amy:

Yeah.

Neil:

The best chocolate chip cookies ever in the world.

Amy:

So funny. I don't remember.

Neil:

And the hot chocolate. You got that molten lava.

Amy:

They had the hot chocolate. They had like a spiced hot chocolate. Remember there was like, oh my God, I have a cha.

No. Oh my gosh. There's like a spicy hot chocolate that they have.

Neil:

And it was basically like a melted chocolate bar. That's why it was so good. It was like the richest.

And that's when my kids asked me to make hot chocolate. All I do is pour a bag of chocolate chips in a pot and put it on low heat. Because I remember it from the Jacques Torres chocolate chip cookie place. So we're here today. You're you're the vice president of fiction for crown.

Amy:

I think.

Neil:

Is that not your title?

Amy:

I don't know. I want to say.

Neil:

I hope I have your title right.

Amy:

I want to say I might. Maybe it is my title. I want to say I was senior vice president, but maybe not.

I should look this up. Should I see what my things.

Neil:

Maybe executive vice president. You're in charge of fiction. Let's put it that way.

Amy:

Let's just see what happens when I send somebody something.

Neil:

Oh, you're looking at your email signature.

Amy:

I'm looking at my email signature. You can tell how much I care about my titles. But then, of course, when you said it, I'm like, aren't I a senior vice president?

Let's just say I'm a vice president. Sure. I think I'm not.

But go ahead.

Neil:

No way. What does it say when you email somebody? You can't see your own name.

Amy:

Oh, it is. I'm a senior vice. I'm a senior vice president.

Neil:

That means your boss is the head of Crown Publishing.

Amy:

Yes.

Neil:

Their boss is the head of.

Amy:

Their boss is Nihar, who's in charge of all around about PRH.

Neil:

PRH. And so that's the first question I have for you is like, you know, people from the outside are like, what's a publishing company? Like, what's the publishing ecosystem?

Who are the players? Not just the publishing companies, but within the publishing company, you're an editor.

Amy:

I'm an editor and a publisher, which is confusing.

Neil:

Yeah. Can you just explain these roles? Can you define the terms of what a publishing? Who are the players in the publishing industry today?

Amy:

You mean in a generic publishing company?

Neil:

Yeah. Well, I know people know Penguin Random House, Simon and Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette. These are like the big ones, maybe the big four, big five.

But below that, inside the publishing house, you're the senior vice president of Fiction for Crown. Like, what does that mean? What are the roles inside a publisher and who does what?

Amy:

OK. It's a good question. And I will say it's confusing because we use terms interchangeably that are actually not the same term.

So we're saying that PRH is a publishing company.

Neil:

Penguin Random House.

Amy:

They're a publishing company. But then I'm saying within the publishing company, there are other publishing houses. So then I'm saying Crown is its own publishing house, right?

Because within Crown, as I was just showing you, there's Clarkson Potter and Ten Speed and Crown Currency and Fiction, Nonfiction. Basically, whatever anybody sees on the spine of a book is an imprint of another big, you know, or for instance, like we refer to Random House as Little Random House to distinguish it from when you say Random House, you might think of Random House as, oh, that's Crown, Random House, Knopf, all of that. Does that make sense?

Neil:

Yeah, well, kind of. What does an editor do?

Amy:

Oh, gosh. OK, so what does an editor do? It also depends.

There are certain editors who never actually edit. They just go and buy stuff and they're acquiring editors.

Neil:

Acquiring editors.

Amy:

And then they might give it to a lower editor to do the actual editing.

Neil:

OK.

Amy:

There are other editors who just do line editing.

Neil:

OK.

Amy:

And they're not actually acquiring.

Neil:

That's not called a copy editor.

Amy:

No, different than a copy editor. So the copy editor would be doing things like, that's faulty parallelisms and grammar. Or, you know, you said that you got on the red eye at 11 o'clock at night in L.A., but you ended up landing at 11 a.m. in New York. That doesn't make sense because you would actually land.

Neil:

They're checking like logic and coherence and spelling and grammar and so on.

Amy:

Yes. Or, you know, you said that this character was four years old in Chapter Three and all of a sudden in Chapter Five, they're 10 years old and seven years hasn't passed in between. Right.

So that's a copy editor. In theory, your editors should be catching stuff like that. But there's sort of, you know, I think I really wish I knew this.

Back in the day when I was at Penguin, they did some study of how many people worked on a book. And I think it was either 45 or 63 people touched a book. In the publishing house.

Neil:

So I want to ask you, who are the players? It's a long list.

Amy:

There's a long list. So I feel as if editors, justly or unjustly, get all the glamour of glamour. Neil just saw my cubicle, so he knows there's no glamour.

Neil:

That's why we're in this meeting room, by the way, right? Because we couldn't, we couldn't do this in your office because your office.

Amy:

Because I don't have an office.

Neil:

Because you don't have, there's no offices anymore. So you have no walls and we would be bothering people.

Amy:

Yes.

Neil:

So now we're on the 19th floor in a little boardroom overlooking the Hudson River.

Amy:

Yes.

Neil:

And you're telling me all the players of inside a publishing company, 45 to 63 people touch a book.

Amy:

So that's everything from people who you wouldn't even know exists. So from the production team to the person who is picking out the paper and the headband. So do you know what a headband is, right?

Neil:

No.

Amy:

Oh, okay. So this isn't going to be helpful for the people on the podcast, but when, if you look at it, if you take a hardcover and you look at the spine of the book.

Neil:

I'm splitting open a hardcover by Liane Moriarty.

Amy:

And there's the, how the six books are made in increments of 60, it's called a signature, which are 16 pages. And then you, those 16 pages, those signatures are sewn together and those are called headbands. So that's what color thread they're using for the headband.

Neil:

At the top of the book, when you're looking at the top, there's a different color thread and someone's choosing the color of the thread.

Amy:

Someone's choosing that.

Neil:

Pick the color of the thread inside the headband of a book.

Amy:

Well, they're also choosing what color. So for instance, see how that has like a red there. That's red.

Neil:

Okay. That's a different book.

You open all the colors.

Amy:

Of the Dark by Chris Whitaker.

Neil:

Okay.

Amy:

So anyway, so there's all these people who are doing things from everything from helping with the printing to the art, what's the cover look like to the contracts department, to the legal department, to my sales department, to my IT department. So I feel as if, you know, the whole Hillary Clinton takes a village. It really does.

Neil:

Yeah. What's the purpose of a publishing company? What are they trying to do?

Amy:

Depends what publishing company you're speaking to. And I'm being very serious in terms of there are certain publishing companies that are very much ideologically driven, especially if you're a nonprofit, there are certain publishing companies that are conservative bent. There are others that are just sort of whatever they want to do to make money.

So I think it's different to every publishing house.

Neil:

Is there a vision or a high level mission statement for Crown?

Amy:

I can't speak for Crown. I can speak for the fiction team. And I would say that I want to be publishing books that are exciting and that have very strong voice.

Neil:

Okay.

Amy:

Which I know sounds sort of, you know, I said to someone the other day, I really want books that are well written and have a real story, which sounds incredibly reductive, but you'd be surprised how usually you have one or the other.

Neil:

Right, right, right. Well-written and has a great story. Mm-hmm.

Okay. Got it.

Amy:

Can I take a drink or is this going to screw up?

Neil:

No, you can take as many drinks as you want. I got a little cup of water here. You have, you've got a coffee.

Amy:

Okay.

Neil:

And can you tell us the story of the help?

Amy:

The story of the help?

Neil:

Yeah. I don't know what the story would be. Well, you're running an imprint with your name on it.

Amy:

So I had just come to Penguin, I- 2000 and- I'll tell you, wait, I got, I think it was 2004. Does that sound right?

Neil:

No, that's too early. I think, I think the help came out in 2009 or 2010.

Amy:

Sorry. Sorry. I'll tell you this.

My daughter, sorry. My youngest was born in 2006. I came over in 2007 to Penguin.

And the first book I bought was the help. And actually I remember making the deal because I was biking to work. For some reason, I was biking to work and I made the offer on my cell phone, putting my helmet on.

I remember exactly where I was in my building on the sidewalk.

Neil:

How did it come to you?

Amy:

This was back before we, this was right before we had electrics, electronic submissions. So it was still a real submission. And I used to work when I was an assistant, I worked for a woman who would only read the first sentence of books.

And if she didn't like them, she would put them back on the shelf and then she would give them to us to read. And I always read the first sort of paragraph or two. And now I can't tell you what the first paragraph is of the book.

But I remember you do get this feeling when you read something that you love where you're like, oh, like you just sort of come alive and there's this tingly feeling. And again, obviously that's now considered a quite a controversial book. And I don't know if one could publish it now, but then it was a voice I hadn't heard.

Neil:

What do you mean could publish now? You mean so now there's more censorship in publishing?

Amy:

Oh, um, I think times have changed.

Neil:

Yeah. Just because of the voice, right? The voice of the characters.

She's writing, she's a white woman writing black characters. Is that what you mean?

Amy:

Yeah. And I do think that there's a lot of valid criticism, although I, I actually disagree, you know, in terms of, look, there is a very long history of white saviorism. I always thought actually that the white character in that book was the most stupid character.

Like I thought Skeeter was kind of an idiot and that the two black women were the smart, smarter ones and were smart. Like, like I felt like they were the heroines of the book, but I understand people viewing it through the prism of no, this is a white woman who saves these black women and that's problematic.

Neil:

Oh, I see. It seems like everything's problematic these days though. I mean, no, I mean, you get in trouble anyway.

Books are meant to, you know, provoke and send us somewhere else and be stories. And, you know, we interviewed Maria Popova on the show and she said, you know, without appropriation, there could be no learning. It was a great quote.

She's like, everything is appropriation in one sense or the other. And, you know, I asked about this story because, you know, you came in, you had an eponymous, if I said that word right, imprint at Penguin Random House at Putnam. And it was your first book by an unknown author, went on to sell like something like 15 million copies.

And people have pointed to that as an example of you having this nose, this gut, this eye, this sense for like finding that perfect blend between commercial and literary fiction. One that you have done many times with Big Little Lies and this is how it always is. And, you know, you've had, you've had this string.

And so I'm, hoping that this conversation today can open up for people listening, like what an editor does, how books get published, and also do that through the story of your life, your journey, and your three most formative books. That's what we're going for.

Amy:

Okay.

Neil:

That's what we're trying to do.

Amy:

Okay.

Neil:

You're like closing your eyes and kind of like, it's like you're going up a roller coaster. We have the trust.

Amy:

Okay.

Neil:

We have the trust.

Amy:

You told me I had something in my teeth. We're good.

Neil:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So you told me that the very first formative book that came to mind when I asked you for your three most formative books was called Goodbye Columbus by Philip Roth.

I might just take our listeners down a 30 second visual journey so they can picture all in this book. And then I'm going to ask you to tell us about your relationship with it. Okay.

So Goodbye Columbus is Philip Roth's first ever book published in 1959 by Houghton Mifflin. If I said that right, a light blue cover with black all caps, Goodbye Columbus at the top and a white all caps, Philip Roth below with a copper burst, like a little circles. I think you told me it's called a burst.

It's a national book award winner and a short blurb from Newsweek that says a masterpiece. Philip Roth was born in 1933 in Newark, New Jersey, just across the river here and died at 85 in New York City, not very far away in 2018. Considered one of the most successful decorated authors of all time.

What is it about? Well, Philip Roth's first book is about Neil Klugman. Klugman?

Amy:

I think so.

Neil:

From poor Newark and pretty spirited Brenda of wealthier, short hills, New Jersey, as they meet one summer and dive into an affair as much about social class and suspicion as about love. Dewey Decimals can fire this under 813.54 for literature slash American fiction slash 20th century American fiction. Amy, tell us about your relationship with Goodbye Columbus by Philip Roth.

Amy:

Oh God, this is like, it's like therapy, right? Does everyone, does everyone say this is just like this?

Neil:

I've heard that a few times. I mean that in a good way.

Amy:

Okay.

Neil:

Hopefully, hopefully they mean it in a good way.

Amy:

Well, when I originally think of Goodbye Columbus, I think that this was the first book I remember being in a classroom and having a book assigned to us and being electrified by something and seeing myself in a book. Um, and it was Ronald Schachter, who was my English teacher, grade, um, 11th grade, um, in Rockaway, New Jersey. I went to private school.

So I was, so actually one of the things was I was Neil in the book because I went to school in Livingston, New Jersey, where it was right adjacent to short hills. So there were all these very, very rich private school girls. And I was not, not that there were violins playing for me, but just like I came from a very middle to lower middle-class neighborhood.

Neil:

Yeah.

Amy:

Um, 6,000 person town, but like fairly blue collar. And then I was going to school with these kids who had literally, you know, on their 16th birthday, got Mercedes for their birthday and had trust funds. And I remember I was dating a boy once and he said something about a trust fund.

And I said, what's a trust fund? And I'd kept walking and he had stopped. He looked at me, he's like, you don't have a trust fund?

I was like, no, I don't have a trust fund. What is it? Um, anyway, so, so it was the first time somebody taught me literature in a way that sort of just sort of just spoke to me and just sort of like sparked that, you know, I guess a recognition, but B sort of just excitement.

Neil:

And it was assigned to you.

Amy:

It was assigned to me. And there's a scene in the book where, so Neil is, he's staying with his, with his aunt Gladys or his cousin Gladys, I think.

Neil:

Yeah. Aunt Gladys.

Amy:

Aunt Gladys. God, I really haven't seen that. And I, I swear to God, I didn't look at it beforehand.

And he is working in this library in Newark and he meets this very rich nouvelle riche girl. And he goes and he ends up staying at their house and they live in Short Hills. And he's, there's this one scene where he says something about he's in their basement.

They have a basement fridge, they have a fridge in the basement. And they were like, says something like, and there were plums in the basement. And he said something about like fruit grew from the fruit.

Fruit was in the refrigerator and sporting goods grew from their trees because her, her brother would throw sporting goods stuff into the trees. So they had like sneakers or tennis rackets in the trees. And it was just like a crazy exotic world to him that, you know, he's living in this damp, dark apartment in Newark.

And this was this completely other glamorous, shiny place.

Neil:

Wow. Page 41 of Goodbye Columbus. I flipped on the light at the foot of the stairs and was not surprised at the pine paneling, the bamboo furniture, the ping pong table, and the mirrored bar that was stocked with every kind and size of glass, ice bucket, decanter, mixer, swizzle stick, shot glass, pretzel bowl, all the bacchanalian paraphernalia, plentiful, orderly, and untouched as it can only be in the bar of a wealthy man who entertains people, who entertains drinking people, but who himself does not drink, who in fact gets a fishy look from his wife when every several months he takes a shot of schnapps before dinner.

Amy:

There's another line in there. And I kind of, um, I should also point out to people listening, Goodbye Columbus is actually a novella. So it's actually not a whole novel.

Um, there's another line where it was just, but I remember Ronald Schachter saying like, you know, fruit grew, you know, and sporting goods, sporting goods grew on their trees. And it was just sort of like, oh, this is so much more than all of that, obviously.

Neil:

Yeah. So it struck you, the voice hit you, the energy of the book hit you. It was one of the first times you said you were electrified reading.

Amy:

Yeah. And I should say the whole thing that's ironic about all of this is actually, it's funny because when I, my first job in publishing was working at FSG, Farrar Straus and Giroux. And when I got there, Philip Roth was published by FSG.

And back in the day, apparently Philip Roth would go to lunch with Roger Straus and they would both write down what they think his next advance should be. And then they'd pass the thing to note to the other person. And then they would come to some agreement.

And when I got there, Philip Roth went to Andrew Wiley and then left to go to Houghton Mifflin. And it was a huge deal. And I remember they sent around to the whole company, I think his royalty statements just sort of showing like, it was something bizarre, but like the whole company got this whole thing that Philip Roth left.

Anyway, fast forward a couple, like 20 years, I'm at a book publishing party because a guy used to work with at FSG is now a professor at Bennett Brown. He had a book coming out in the subway with this woman who had been brought in to be Philip Roth's editor. And so I said to her, I said, you know, I was always so jealous that you're Philip Roth's editor.

I love Philip Roth. And at this point, I'm all of, maybe I'm 30, maybe I'm 35. And she says to me, she goes, Oh, Amy, you're much too old for Philip Roth.

Cause Philip Roth had a lot of affairs.

Neil:

Oh, that's so funny.

Amy:

Yes. Which, um, so, so the irony is, is I don't know if I'd ever met Philip Roth, if I would love his work, but I didn't get to meet him, which was good.

Neil:

Oh yeah. Yeah. Befriend the dead.

They're not going to change kind of thing. Class fitting in is interesting. You know, the main character in the book is, is from New York, as you mentioned, Brenda's the Radcliffe going money to the object of his desire from short hills. And you're from Rockaway, New Jersey, right? Which in 2020, I looked up the census population has 6,598 people. And you describe in a 2014 interview with poets and writers magazine that you started in the industry in 1989.

That means that's the year you graduated from Stanford.

Amy:

I think I started in 1990. So I lied to poets and writers.

Neil:

You made $13,000 a year and you worked weekends cleaning apartments to help pay your bills. So both of you, you and Neil, the main character have this sort of outsider perspective, but you've climbed to the highest and you're running fiction for crown publishing. You are considered one of the best editors in the world.

You have this high percentage in New York times, bestseller hit rate that people talk about, you know, Amy can sort of pick objects from goal. How did, how did you see yourself as part of this industry? Now I've heard you talk a little bit about going to like, like, cause publishing from the outside sounds very like a fancy, you know, Seth Godin, our guest in chapter three said it's ladies and gentlemen, making books for ladies and gentlemen.

That's how he described the industry.

Amy:

That's funny.

Neil:

You know, was it like a culture shock when you came into it?

How'd you get acclimated? How do you, and also I want to just throw in here another question from Jim Levine, our guest in chapter 34. Do you recommend, do you recommend publishing for new college grads looking to get into this, this industry?

Amy:

Okay. Where do I start?

Neil:

I gave you lots of questions there. I want to talk class. I want to talk fitting in.

Amy:

I should point out class. I think like, let's just start off with the fact is I come from a very privileged background. I had my parents always to, it wasn't like, yes, I did work as a cleaning person on the weekends that said I had health insurance from my parents.

I had my parents in New Jersey if I ever needed anything. So I don't want to make it out. Like I was sort of, you know, like pulling myself up from my bootstraps.

But that said, like, I wasn't making any money and you know, I didn't have a trust fund. Sorry, then I got lost in your question. What was the next one?

Neil:

Well, it's like, how'd you fit in?

Amy:

Oh, okay. This was what I was going to say.

First of all, I feel like I want my therapist to listen to this tape recording. Cause you were just like, and I'm like, this is everything I talk about. I think, I don't know.

I think I have this whole theory about published, about literature that I think people who read books, that you find your truck, that you kind of, it's the ultimate of being an outsider and that you find, you see yourself in a book, right? And that sort of in a way, and also a lot of people who are attracted to publishing were like the nerdy kids in the library who felt like they didn't fit in. And then in a book you see yourself or you connect with something.

So I do have this theory that all of publishing is about being an outsider. But I still would say, I don't feel like I still feel today that, oh yeah, I don't have the right pedigree. You know, I didn't go to Harvard.

I didn't go to Brown. I didn't go to Vassar. I didn't go to the Paris review parties.

Like I don't do the things that kind of other people who I would say fit in more do. So I don't know if I would say I feel like, but then I would say to you, if I'm going back and forth, this really has become a therapy session. I went from not wanting to do this podcast.

And now Neil is going to be like, she just went off.

Neil:

I love talking to you. You're a wonderful conversation.

Amy:

I do think that a lot of the people who are very successful in publishing in a way actually transcend that. Like John Karp for a long time, like didn't go to lunches with people. Like he they're like the two most successful people in the industry.

So I don't think you have to run John Karp. John Karp runs Simon & Schuster and Goddoff runs Penguin Press and both are sort of renowned editors, the best in their class. And they're not the people he would see necessarily at like a party.

But I do think there's a group of sort of very socializing and doing all of that to which I've never felt.

Neil:

Why is that part of the industry? Is it because the people you're editing are often famous?

Amy:

No, because I don't think it's that. I think it's, first of all, there's very, there's, as opposed to if you were a lawyer, you could go work in how many million law firms. If you're in publishing, there's, I should point out again, if someone's listening to this, who's working at a small, like working at Milkweed or, or, you know, they would say, there's a lot of small publishers.

So it's not just all New York. If you're looking at corporate publishing for the kind of publishing we are doing, it's pretty much based in New York. There's five big publishers.

So in that respect, everybody sort of is working with someone at one point. And then the other thing is, is that part of what we do is, you know, one of the reasons Goodbye Columbus spoke to me is it take place in New Jersey. I grew up in New Jersey.

So if I'm a literary agent, I want to go out to lunch with Amy, find out about her. Oh, she has three daughters. She's from New Jersey.

She likes yoga. So then next year, if I have a novel and it's about a woman who has three daughters, oh, I'm going to send that to Amy. So there is a part where you need to know.

Neil:

The social thing creates the connection that's important for the.

Amy:

And also just sort of what is going to speak to someone. I mean, I think you and I were just talking about this earlier over lunch. So much about publishing is having an advocate.

And also, since all of it is subjective, you and I could read the same book and have completely different opinions about it. But you just need one person who's going to be messianic about your book and sort of tell everyone they need to read it. And in order to be messianic about that, I think you need to have you need to have an emotional connection.

And I would say any time I've bought a book, a cynical buy where I've sort of said, oh, you know, statistically there's this many people. It doesn't work. Which I think in a way is kind of good.

Neil:

Yeah. It's interesting you mentioned, you know, it's just in one city, New York, there's just five big publishers. That's been my experience too, is that everything's here.

Everyone's worked with everybody. So it sounds like a bit of an in groupiness. But you would imagine that that would make the industry kind of fragile at the same time, like there'd be entire waves and trends that would get missed because they weren't cool or popular or interesting to people in New York, you know?

Amy:

Oh, I mean, we're totally out of touch with the rest of America.

Neil:

That's what I'm saying.

Amy:

Yes.

Neil:

We're totally out of touch with the rest of America.

Amy:

I mean, yes, in that, you know, I can't tell you how many times you would write to your Barnes and Noble rep and you'd be like, you know, I was in the Barnes and Noble on 81st Street and Broadway and I didn't see my book, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then they would say that Barnes and Noble is not indicative of the rest of the country, you know, because the stores in New York are not indicative of the rest of the country. But yeah, I do think.

Neil:

Meanwhile, you know, it's often the cultural and taste kind of makers, right? Like books, to my mind, I know I'm a biased book podcaster, but books are creating the conversations that the culture is then having. I mean, Jonathan Haidt's Next Generation comes out.

Then, you know, you see cell phones are getting banned everywhere. Like, you know, a lot of the biggest conversations originate in like a book.

Amy:

Yes, but you could also argue that we're coming to the like sometimes we're coming after the curve.

Neil:

Right. Yeah, right. OK, cool.

But speaking of books, though, because we open this up in a 2009 interview with Tina Brown in The Daily Beast. Tina said to Philip Roth, you said in an interview, you don't think novels are going to be read in 25 years. Do you really believe that's true?

And Philip Roth replied, I was actually being optimistic about 25 years. I think it's going to be cultic. I think people will always be reading them, but will be a small group of people, maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range.

He went on to say the book simply can't compete with the screen. It could compete. Beginning with the movie screen, it couldn't compete with the television screen, and now it can't compete with the computer screen.

And now we have all those screens. So against all those screens, I don't think the book can measure up.

Amy:

I think ever since I got in publishing, people were crying about, you know, it was sort of the sky is falling. And so now you look back at FSG, I remember 1990, it was terrible. The sky was falling.

Now you look back and you're like, those are the good old days. I think everyone likes, I remember actually someone said to me, well, people in publishing love to sort of just sort of pull their hair and sort of say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, are we? I think when the ebook came out, that's going to be the death of the book, the physical book.

And in fact, it wasn't. I do think it's interesting. And I don't want to look, I think there's obviously lots of serious problems for publishing, but, and I don't want to be all kumbaya, but I do think it's interesting that part of one of the biggest discussions is about intellectual property, sorry, intellectual property and in terms of source material.

And that's why all these companies are sort of, you whether or not you had Harper Collins with Fox, whatever. I still think that at the end of the day, the book delivers something that you can't get somewhere else. I mean, there was a very funny video, a couple, maybe it was like 15 years ago when the eBooks were coming out.

And it was, it was this very funny mock of this new invention called the book. And they had it out and they're you can open it. You can read it in the sun.

You can bring it into the bathtub.

Neil:

You can rewind it in one second.

Amy:

You can do all this stuff with it. If you think about it, you're like, yeah, that's kind of cool. Right.

Can't do that with my iPad. I can't read it on the beach.

Neil:

And when you say the book can do, the book gives you something that nothing else can, how do you articulate what that is?

Amy:

I will say I'm actually right now, I'm going to say I'll make a distinction between fiction and nonfiction. I do think for nonfiction, I think, look, I think fiction is up against all of those things. You know I remember when my girls were watching Big Little Lies and my oldest daughter said, I can't wait to see what happens next.

What happens next? And my middle daughter just tells you a lot about their relationship, started screaming at her, like, it's a book. You could read the book, you know?

And she had no interest in reading the book. Right. So I think you always have that.

But I do think that novels, the book delivers a novel in a way that you can't get from reading an excerpt in The New Yorker or you can't get online or, you know, from Instagram or Snapchat or anywhere else.

Neil:

Yeah. I agree completely with you. I think the book sends you somewhere that you can't go anywhere else.

Amy:

Right. And I do think in terms of storytelling, storytelling is, I mean, thousands of years old, right? So, so I can see Philip Roth's point, but I also feel like that's a little bit sort of, I do think everyone loves to sort of talk about doom and gloom.

Neil:

And it's not what you're seeing inside here. You know, books, I think Penguin and Random House just released better numbers than ever. You know, this year has people read more books or they certainly sold more books than they ever have before in their history.

So it's, if that is the case, then we merge that with data like 58% of Americans read zero books last year from the time you study, like less people are reading, but somehow it still seems that we're good. Like books are still, I don't want to say thriving, but they're still working in our culture.

Amy:

I think they're still relevant.

Neil:

Still relevant. Yeah. That's great.

That's great. Sex scenes. I want to talk to you about.

Amy:

Oh my god.

Neil:

Philip Roth was once called a crazed penis after his 1969 book Portnoy's Complaint. And although this book was written in the 1950s, it does have soft core sex scenes, you know, page 17 of the book. I went to pull her towards me just as she started fluttering up, my hand hooked onto the front of her suit, the cloth pulled away from her, you know, her breast swam towards me like two pink nosed fish.

She let me hold them. This is 1959.

Amy:

Oh, and then they're swimming at the country club.

Neil:

They're swimming at the country club. What role does sex have in books? Do you think?

Amy:

Oh my God, that's such an interesting question. I should point out one of the other reasons why it's interesting that I chose Goodbye Columbus is because I don't think I can, I think I can say whatever I want to say cause he's dead, but I don't with, with no disrespect, you know, a lot of people think Philip, Philip Roth was a misogynist and I can't remember which book of his, there's one novel of his that I started. And literally the first opening is it's a man who is having oral sex with a woman.

And it's just all about him thrusting into this woman's mouth. And I was just like, you know what? I'm good.

I don't need to read this. And it was very, very violent. And if you read, I remember reading Goodbye Columbus years ago after, you know, and thinking, oh my God, Neil is such an asshole.

Like the whole thing with the diaphragm, like it's such a, anyway, so, so.

Neil:

He wants her to get a diaphragm, doesn't want to go with her to the appointment, all this stuff.

Amy:

Right. And he makes this huge thing about her getting a diaphragm, which is just completely just such a male power play. But in terms of sex in the novel, I guess I don't view, I feel like there's a, there, it's not just sort of sex for the sake of it's not gratuitous.

I think that was all to me. Like you read that scene, it's like, there's this, he's in this country club, what's above the water, what's happening underneath the water. He's getting secret things that are forbidden, which to me goes with the whole, so much more about the novel rather than just, oh, I'm just going to start putting in people fucking for the sake of people fucking.

Neil:

Right. Right. And so what makes, do, do the books you edit have sex in them much?

Judy Blume told us in chapter six, that she wants to see more sex scenes in books. She thinks that when she was a kid, like people learned about sex through books and they don't anymore.

Amy:

Well, they learned about sex through her books. We all had forever at camp.

Neil:

Exactly. And, and she thought that was a great thing. And she doesn't see that in the culture as much anymore.

You have three girls as well. Do you educate them through books?

Amy:

I would say they probably educate me. Did you ever watch sex education?

Neil:

No my wife has been big fan of that show for years.

Amy:

Oh, so good. But I remember the originally my daughter's like, do you want to watch this? And I would walk in and actually I think the first episode I saw, it starts with these two girls are having sex.

And it's very explicit. And I just said to my girls, like, I'm good. And they of course jumped all over me.

They're like, why is it? Cause it's two girls having sex. And I said, it's nothing to do with that.

It's two girls having sex, like just don't really. And then it was interesting. So I was always in the room when it was on.

And then you realize that actually, first of all, it's the most non-sexual show because it's like sex as a very physical thing. It's not at all. It's like really sort of almost desexualizing it.

And then you realize the show is actually incredibly sweet. Like it's a really sweet show. So to answer your question about most of my books, do they have sex in them?

I think a lot of people don't write sex well.

Neil:

Yeah.

Amy:

So usually I'm very adverse to, I'm very worried when some of my authors write sex and I feel like it seems like very purple prose.

Neil:

Purple prose. What does that mean?

Amy:

Purple prose is kind of, you know, like, it seems like it's, it's just purple prose.

Neil:

Bad?

Amy:

It's just sort of like, it's purple.

I mean, it's just like icky and just sort of sounds like a little bit like soft porny.

Neil:

Well, Philip Roth was asked in that same interview, how do you, how do you, are sex scenes harder to write than others? And he said, well, you don't want to repeat yourself for one. You don't want to fall into the cliches for another, and you don't want to be licentious.

Amy:

Licentious. Yeah.

Neil:

Licentious. Really? You want to be descriptive if you can be, and you're not setting up to arouse anybody.

I thought that was an interesting answer.

Amy:

I just don't think I, so I'm trying to think if any of my books have, oh, that's not true. I'm about a couple that have been having an affair for six years and they meet once or twice a month. And on this night, they never spend the night.

And on this one night, the man in the affair books a hotel room and they're going to spend the whole night together in Manhattan. And the novel starts with them having sex and the fire alarm goes off. And they call down, they said, oh, you know, it's a new hotel.

Fire alarm's been going on for, off where you've had this problem all week. And so then keep having sex and then fire alarm goes off again. Anyway, the novel ostensibly has a lot of sex in it, but yet I don't find it a sexy novel.

Neil:

Right. Right. Interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. I find it really interesting.

I'd like to teach my kids sex through books more. I'm worried about, you know, online and them discovering sex through visual means only. And I want to kind of explore the like, you know, thoughts and feelings and emotional side of it.

So I was looking for books to give to my kids.

Amy:

I just feel like this generation is so much better than we were.

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

What do you mean?

Amy:

I just think that they're just so much more advanced. And I remember my oldest daughter, she must've been 12. She came home one day and she's telling me something.

And like the 20th thing she said was so-and-so at school is bisexual. And I should point out, I have a gay sister, plenty of gay people in my family. And I said, the first thing that came to my mouth, I said was, well, did people make fun of him?

And she said to me, well, why would they make fun of him? And I was like, oh, isn't that lovely? Like why would they make fun of him by my year?

Neil:

Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah.

Pejoratives galore, right?

Amy:

Yeah.

Neil:

High school was a hundred percent heterosexual when I went to high school in the nineties, right? It's not that long ago. And so I see what you mean.

You mean from a progressive standpoint, we've shifted the needle quite a bit.

Amy:

And I think you could probably look at, look, if you look at sort of young adult literature, there's so much more representation, right? In terms of trans, gay, lesbian.

Neil:

People of color.

Amy:

Yeah.

Neil:

It's all there. James Wood, by the way, one quote on Philip Roth before we go to the next book said, "More than any other postwar American novelist, Roth wrote the self—the self was examined, cajoled, lampooned, fictionalized, ghosted, exalted, disgraced, but above all constituted by and in writing."

Amy:

You know, for me, Philip Roth was the exact same age as my father and my father grew up in New Jersey. And so to me, I think also I viewed him as this insight into my father in that this sort of you know, generation that grew up in World War II and post-World War II and in terms of secular Jewish assimilation. So that's another thing where I think that's what I found. You know, he wrote this book called The Counterlife, which I think is one of the best portrayals of secular Judaism.

Neil:

Yeah. And he really renounced being called a Jewish writer. He didn't like that.

Amy:

Right.

Neil:

Yeah. He was really against that. He said, I'm an American writer.

If you want to call me anything. And he even had a quote when the whole world doesn't believe in God, it will be a great place.

Amy:

Which is interesting because also for the same reason, it was funny. My daughters were talking about something and they asked me. Someone was asking me about what to read or something.

And someone said, well, what is that person considered? And I said, well, they're considered women's fiction. And then I must have said something.

And they said, what? And I said, well, they don't have a term for men's fiction. Like the fact is women's fiction is so pejorative.

Neil:

Right. Right. Even like where do you come in on like genres in general?

You know, we had David Mitchell on the show in Chapter 58, Cloud Atlas, one of his books. You know, he's like some people put it in fantasy. Some people put it, you know, he's like, well, what is fantasy?

Like and also can't gender be an organ of the novel, you know, as opposed to where the novel is filed?

Amy:

I think we in publishing love to categorize things. So in publishing, there's a huge um, divide between, you know, you publish literary books, you publish commercial books.

Neil:

Even that, what does that even mean?

Amy:

Well, I don't think I would say that most readers don't go into the bookstore or the library and say, I want literary book. I only read commercial. I think you read across all genres.

But I think in publishing, we like to put labels.

Neil:

Literary and commercial is like, was that smart and dumb? Like, what is that?

Amy:

It depends who you're talking to. So some people might use commercial pejoratively, um, you know, for the people who would say, oh, I'd never read anything on the bestseller list, you know, because that must be crap. If a lot of people like it.

Um, the interesting thing about that is my literary authors always want to have more sales and my commercial authors always want to be perceived more, more literary.

Neil:

Oh, wow.

Amy:

Well, not just mine. I would say most authors.

Neil:

Yeah, literary authors want to have more sales and commercial authors. And I can sort of somewhat relate. I think the book of awesome would be, you know, and the books I've written are clearly on the commercial side, the mass side, but I aspire to and read about and interview people that are more, more literary.

Cause that's where I'm, you know, that's where I'm, I'm looking up to, you know, commercial authors wish they were more literary. Interesting.

Amy:

I don't think it's that they wish they were more literary, but they, I think that they would get the respect that the more literary authors would get.

Neil:

Having a book reviewed in the New York times book review or being considered for some of these fancier awards and things like that.

Amy:

I don't think it's necessarily being reviewed in the New York times, but I think more like, um, I just think that there is, again, I think it goes to back to sort of publishing and bona fides and sort of, did you go to the right school?

Neil:

Um, and did you, I'm writing that down bona fides. I didn't know how to pronounce that word ever in my life until right now.

Amy:

I don't know if that's correct.

Neil:

No, I'm going to go with that. So I have a word of the chapter at the end of every show where I, so far I've already written that I wrote Messianic as well.

Amy:

Okay.

Neil:

Right. Right. And down interesting.

Amy:

I know, but you shouldn't go by me for a presentation because, um, pronunciation, my French teacher told me I spoke French with a New Jersey accent.

Neil:

Oh, really? I think you're, I think you're

Amy:

It was not a great compliment.

Neil:

What do you mean on the literary?

So literary wants more sales commercial wants, you know, to be more respected maybe. And then you said bona fides, that's one of the things in publishing, like, why is there even a split? Why they don't go to different bookstores?

Amy:

I would say, but you could say they do, right? You know, is there an indie bookstore? Is it a chain or is an airport bookstore? So I do think there's sort of, again, this sort of, I don't want to say hierarchy,

Neil:

It's an important question because this is kind of what you're known for is that you are known for, you know, finding that middle ground that others can't seem to find. It's a chasm for most people to try to find a book that's both literary and commercial, but you seem to do it over and over again. You find books that are appealing to the higher brow reader and mass appeal enough that they sell boatloads and get turned into movies and TV shows.

So you've identified some big gap here that others can't seem to see as well as you.

Amy:

Oh, I think there are plenty of people that see it as well as I do. I mean, I can name like 10 editors, but, but so, but I do think that, um, I think that we bandy these terms about, and in a way it's helping us trying to put sort of order on something that has no order.

Neil:

Oh, interesting. Yeah. Right.

Like my band is a combination of Radiohead and U2.

Amy:

Yeah. Well, I mean, that's, what's also interesting in publishing is because when you go to sell a book, you have to say, well, it's just like this book. But one of the reasons you bought it was because it wasn't like anything you've read before. Right?

Neil:

Right.

Amy:

So then you're having to say this book is so incredibly unique, but yet tell me why it's going to be exactly for the reader of X meets Y.

Neil:

This is a problem with people in general, though. It's not just editors and publishers that want to categorize. We all want to filter sort because it is a faster way to navigate the world.

You don't have time to read the first page of every book. So you go to a genre like murder mysteries or whatever, and then you try to find something that you've liked before. And arguably the algorithms deepen this tendency because they are feeding us what we are looking at in amplified terms.

So if you were to read an Agatha Christie book or whatever, you're going to get fed a lot more like that. And it's harder and harder in our culture to break out of where you've come from and find something wholly new. That's probably why the Amy Einhorn's book challenge was so inspiring.

Amy:

Oh, my God, I forgot about that.

Neil:

There's yeah, there was a big book club following online that was specifically geared towards reading every book that you edited. Fiction or nonfiction, The Help, The Book of Awesome, The Weird Sisters, The Postmistress, they were following your editorial instinct as opposed to genre, which I thought was really interesting.

Neil:

Mm hmm.

Neil:

Yeah. You don't remember that Beth Fish reads. OK, let's go to the second.

Shout out to Beth Fish. Let's go to the second of your formative books here and continuing this wonderful conversation with The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank. By the way, I loved Goodbye Columbus.

I had not read it before. And I also love this book. Some people say, Neil, you don't tell us if you loved it or not.

I loved this book way more than I was expecting.

Amy:

Well, wait a minute. That could mean like you liked it because you just thought it was going to be utter crap.

Neil:

Like, I genuinely love this book. I was in the city. One way I know that I love a book is when I don't want to finish it.

Like when I get close to the end, it's the last chapter. And I'm like, oh, I want to. This is such good gold that I want to like paste this out, maybe read a couple of pages a night.

I want to make this last a week. I just don't want to finish. And I have that feeling a lot when I was reading The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing, which is published in 1999 by Viking Press.

It's an all white paperback I'm holding with a picture of a girl from the back, seemingly running away from the reader. She's wearing a big red coat, black furry hat, black leggings and rain boots. And at the top, it says Melissa Bank in black with The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing on the bottom in the same font in gold.

There is a red plaid ribbon on the side of the book, like a tartan seal like you might see on like a Macintosh toffee chocolate bar, if you know what those are. Melissa Bank lived from 1960 to 2002, born in Boston, died in East Hampton, New York City. She worked in publishing in New York before getting her MFA from Cornell and later taught at Stony Brook University.

She published two books in her career. This, The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing and The Wonder Spot. What's it about?

Well, it maps the progress of Jane Rosenal as she sets out on a personal and spirited expedition through the perilous terrain of sex, love and relationships, as well as the treacherous waters of the workplace. Follow this one, Dewey Decimal Heads under 813.54 for literature, slash 20th century, slash 20th century fiction. You might remember that from the last book.

Amy, tell us about your relationship with The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank.

Amy:

OK, I should point out I got all of these books because I was going to look at them before this interview, and then I didn't read them because I had got I had to do editing. If I remember correctly, well, first of all, I do know because I did open this one and I remember the first opening is actually this young woman or girl. I think she's a young woman.

And she's at her parents' beach house on the Jersey Shore. And she's upset because she had wanted them to buy a house in East Hampton or the Hamptons.

Neil:

Yeah.

Amy:

Do you need me to do that?

Neil:

No, no. There's just someone like stapling the door of the room we're in while we're in it. She is looking out the window.

She wishes she was somewhere else.

Amy:

She wishes she was somewhere else. And she's on this house on this lagoon, which has been called sort of like the New Jersey Venice. And and she's waiting for her brother to come.

And also, if I'm remembering correctly, each of the chapters read almost like interconnected short stories.

Neil:

That's right.

Amy:

OK.

Neil:

And they leapfrog like if you finish chapter one, you're like, oh, she's 14. And you open that chapter and you're like, you realize she's 23.

Amy:

And she's an assistant in publishing. So I think the other thing is I love short stories. And I sort of that was one of the formative things that I read in college was Raymond Carver.

And well, and oh, my gosh.

Neil:

Tobias Wolfe.

Amy:

No, I didn't actually read that much Tobias Wolfe. I actually oddly I never loved his novels, but I loved Hemingway's short stories. William Carlos Williams short stories.

And I can't believe I'm forgetting there's a woman.

Neil:

Joy Williams.

Amy:

Oh, I'll think of it in a little bit. It'll come to me when I'm thinking about it. So I love short stories.

Very hard to do in publishing. But I think there's something about it where it's sort of and that's the interesting thinking about it because Goodbye Columbus is novella. There's something really nice about everything's more contained as a, you know, when I started in publishing, everything was, you had to submit something as a manuscript.

So a long manuscript would have been 300 pages. And now with the advent of the word processor, first word processor and then computers, you know, if you had to type a word, it really needed to it had to deserve to be typed. Right.

As opposed to when it's on a keyboard and in the ether, you can just sort of type away.

Neil:

So you're saying by going from a finite kind of paper and ink to an infinite sort of limit, people say more.

Amy:

When maybe they don't need to. You know, if you look at.

Neil:

Like it was terrible on Twitter and they abolished the 140 character limit. Then they made it 280. Then they took it off completely.

Amy:

Well, I'm not on Twitter.

Neil:

No, but the point is.

Amy:

But if you look at, like, if you look at The Great Gatsby, it's not even 200 pages.

Neil:

Right. Exactly. Or Animal Farm or Siddhartha or Old Man in the Sea.

Amy:

So I do think there's an art to that that we've sort of thrown out because we don't need it. So why did I love this book? I think, again.

Neil:

Where were you at the time? The first book you read in 11th grade in a private school in New Jersey.

Amy:

And this came out. When did this come out?

Neil:

1999.

Amy:

So 1999, I would have been in publishing for nine years. I was in New York City. I would have been a new mom.

Neil:

All of these are elements of the themes in this book.

Amy:

Right.

Neil:

So you see yourself in here.

Amy:

Yeah, I don't think there's like a huge hard thing to figure out.

Neil:

Yeah.

Amy:

Jewish woman in publishing. Oh, wow. Maybe that's why she liked the book.

But I do think in a way was also interesting, which is that you think that, oh, you had a life similar to hers and she made it feel important and worth looking at. If that makes any sense.

Neil:

Oh, yeah, totally. You had a life similar to yours and she made it feel important and worth looking at.

Amy:

In a way that I didn't feel like, you know, like.

Neil:

It added levity to your own life or like a strength, conviction.

Amy:

I don't know if I'd say levity, but it.

Neil:

Weight.

Amy:

Gravitas?

Neil:

Gravitas. That's the word. You're the editor.

Levity is like lightness.

Amy:

I did need lightness.

Neil:

It was the opposite. I meant like weight.

Amy:

And not that it added it, but I think there's like a value. It sort of was a you sort of felt there was a valid. Oh, now I'm not thinking of the word.

I'll think of it. But yes, you felt sort of like, oh, you felt. I want to say valify, but that's not the word.

Why can't I? Why can't we think of words today?

Neil:

No, it's just justified. People are saying and be like, I know the word that they're talking about.

Amy:

I'll come up with it. Grace Paley was the other woman who I wanted to, who is a short story writer. So let's go back to that.

I remember that. I loved Grace Paley's short stories and Raymond Carver. But yes, I think I think this is like a very easy thing to psychoanalyze as to why I like the book.

Neil:

It's got a very unique title. I mean, when you hear this, the girl's guide to hunting and fishing, it sounds like a nonfiction book, like about a guide to hunting and fishing. Of course, has nothing to do with hunting or fishing.

And in fact, that title is just the name of a book that the main character reads in the last chapter of the book. So you don't figure out the purpose of this title till way into it. And I thought, OK, this book has a really strange title.

Doesn't sound like fiction. Title makes no sense at all to get the last chapter. You also have said many times interviews like you think titling, of course, is extremely important.

And I looked at the list of books that you've edited and published, and so many of them have intriguing titles. This is not the story you think it is in 2010. Let's pretend this never happened.

2012. This is how it always is. 2017.

We begin at the end. 2020. Listen for the lie.

2024. I mean, how what's your how do you title? Like, how do you do it?

You have a and I will also just add for people. The Book of Awesome was not called The Book of Awesome till the 11th hour when you interjected after we had a title and a cover approved for the other side of the pillow. That's what the book was going to be called with a picture of a pillow on the cover.

You came back and said, I don't think this title is working. And you changed at the last minute past the point past the deadline that we weren't supposed to cross or whatever, you know. So you've got this knack for titling.

I'm curious what importance you think titles play and how you go about titling the books that you edit.

Amy:

I will say the only claim I can. Liane Moriarty's success is all Liane's because she's so freaking brilliant. But actually, when she submitted Big Little Lies, it was called Little Lies.

And I remember saying, well, that doesn't. So I said, what about Big Little Lies? And she loved it.

And Australia loved it. And the UK didn't. So the UK actually published it as Little Lies.

And we all published it as Big Little Lies. And then it became really big. And then they changed it to Big Little Lies.

Neil:

Oh, nice.

Amy:

So that was kind of cool.

Neil:

This is what I'm talking about. So you've added another like data point to my proof here that you have this knack for it. I think.

Something made you change that title.

Amy:

I do think in a way, you know, it's funny because I was once on this panel and it was all about your best mentors and everyone's talking about these great people they worked for. And my best mentor was this woman I worked for who was just like a horror and was just the worst boss ever. But she was a great mentor because she had the most profound influence on my career, because I would always try and do the opposite of what she did in terms of to my staff.

So I actually think it was incredibly, really helpful. I do think it's interesting how much you're shaped by the people who you started working with, because going back, and I should say these are two different women, but that woman who would only read the first sentence. And that's where I feel.

Neil:

That's not Ann Patti, is it?

Amy:

Yeah, it is Ann Patti.

Neil:

Oh, it is Ann Patti. Who I reached out to. Before this, I'll tell you what she said.

Amy:

Oh God, I remember she was amazed that I couldn't spell because it was back before I'd spell checked. She's like, your spelling is atrocious. Ann would only read the first sentence, right?

And in some respects, you could say that's ridiculous. But in other respects, you're like, you know what? You're asking readers to spend money and time to read your book.

And if you can't be bothered to figure out a way to hook them from the beginning, and I would argue the beginning is the title. So if you can't spend time on that, and you just do a title that's not intriguing, then why do you deserve my money?

Neil:

Oh, intriguing. That's the word. That's the word that you're looking for.

Intriguing. You want the title to be intriguing.

Amy:

Right.

Neil:

Interest provoking. And Little Lies was not doing that, but Big Little Lies would.

Amy:

Well, because Little Lies, you've heard that before, right? It doesn't make you say, oh, huh?

Neil:

Oh, huh. That's an interesting reaction. Yeah.

It doesn't make you say, oh, huh. I like that. Yeah.

Kind of like the Book of Awesome, right? The other side of the pillow was and by the way, the full title was going to be the other side of the pillow and 199 other awesome things in life. The Book of Awesome is a bit of an oh, huh?

What is that?

Amy:

Right. But it's also you're kind of like, what is it? But I want it.

Neil:

Right. What is it? But I want it.

These are all really powerful reactions that you're having. What is it? But I want it.

Amy:

Let's see. Book of Awesome. The Postmistress.

I came up with that title. I forget what that was called. The Weird Sisters was called The Weird Sisters, which I love that title.

You Know When The Men Are Gone, which is a collection of short stories that are about family members of family members left behind when their partners or husbands and wives were deployed that I came up with that title or I helped come up with that title. And I like that title because to me, it seemed reminiscent of Raymond Carver.

Neil:

Oh, right, right, right.

Amy:

And then I'm just trying to think of Jenny Lawson always came up with her own titles.

Neil:

You're editing such diverse people here. Jenny Lawson, James Comey, Amy Sedaris, Katherine Stockett. Do you edit differently based on who you're editing?

Amy:

Yeah, I think. Well, I think you edit differently in terms of stylistically in terms of how they want to be edited.

Neil:

They send you a manuscript. What's the first thing you do?

Amy:

Well, it depends. Sometimes I'm reading it as a proposal. So if it's nonfiction, you're reading it as a proposal.

If it's fiction, you're reading it as usually a whole novel. And usually what would happen is if I thought it needed a lot of changes or it needed any substantive editing, you have a conversation with the author before you buy it. Because as I always say to authors, our relationship is a bit like a Mormon marriage.

And so you want to make sure everyone's on the same page. And at the end of the day, it's the author's name that's on the cover of the book. So I might have a vision for the book.

But if that doesn't align with what the author's vision is, then as much as I like it, we shouldn't work together.

Neil:

So you have this conversation of making these substantive changes. And how do you define substantive? Like big changes?

Amy:

Yeah. I mean, I think that if, you know, it was funny where... Oh, I just bought a novel recently that I'm a little obsessed about.

And it's called The Beheading Game. And it's about Anne Boleyn. And Anne Boleyn wakes up the day after being beheaded.

And she's in this box and she's holding her head in her hands. And she then escapes the box and finds... She breaks into someone's house and finds a sewing kit, sews her head back on and then goes to seek vengeance against Henry.

And along the way, there's this queer love story. And so when I spoke to the author... And the beginning and the end are fantastic.

The middle doesn't really work. And so when I spoke to the author, I was telling her... And she said, well, do you want me to get rid of the queer love story?

And I said, no, no, no, the queer love story is fantastic. But it just... I was going through and it was interesting.

That would be sort of something where somebody else, I think, might have said to her, I want you to get rid of the queer love story. That, to me, would be a substantive edit, right? Because you're getting rid of a huge portion of the book.

Neil:

But what made you say the middle doesn't work?

Amy:

Right now, it doesn't work. Because it just needs to be tightened. And I need more...

There needs to be more in the middle. But it's going to be great. It sort of feels weird talking about a book before it's out.

Neil:

Well, yeah. And we don't have to talk about this book in particular. But when you say if...

I've heard... I remember you talking on like a Monday morning. And I was like, what did you do over the weekend?

You're like, I just read books. I was like, oh, yeah, what'd you read? And you're like, I read seven books over the weekend.

None of them were good. It was... The worst was the 700-page book that fell apart 500 pages in.

Amy:

Yeah.

Neil:

I remember you saying that.

Amy:

Yeah, happens a lot. That's just sort of... Again, though, I'm not working in a coal mine.

I have a great job. But it's a bummer when you spend a whole week reading a book and it falls apart.

Neil:

And it falls apart. This is all like... This is the nose.

This is the gut. This is your feeling. This is the energy you get when you're reading it.

The spark that you're having as a reader.

Amy:

Well, some of it, though, could fall apart. And then you think, oh, I know exactly how to fix this. And so that's why I want to talk to the author to see if they're on board with this.

But sometimes it falls apart and you don't know how to fix it. And then you know, OK, I can't do this because I don't see a way to get around this.

Neil:

So if you see substantive as you talk to them before you buy it. And this is the process, though, just to clarify for people, is that the editor buys the book. They offer an advance if the advances of the author is liking.

The author says yes.

Amy:

Well, there's an agent. So usually anybody listening to this, you want to have a literary agent. So there's a literary agent.

Neil:

How do you get a literary agent?

Amy:

That's a whole nother podcast in and of itself. And I think from what I've been told, I think it's harder getting a literary agent than getting published by some people. Because I do think it's sort of getting your foot in the door.

Because some people only take queries from people that they know or they're writers, friends, whatever. There are some agents that do read this. We call it the slush pile, which is you're just writing cold into somebody and saying, you know, here's my book.

Neil:

There's no like I used to use the website agentquery.com, which had a list of all literary agents. And you could try to filter it by genre or past books you liked. And I used to borrow the advice from David Sedaris, who said, go to the biggest books you can find.

Find the three or five books most similar to yours. Read the acknowledgments. They will thank their literary agent.

That gives you a name and a person to look up and then send your to be in the slush pile like query to a query is like a letter that tells you, tells the agent what your book is about and a chunk of the book and then let them get back to you if they like it.

Amy:

Then I would probably amend that and say, go find a younger or less senior agent at that agency. Don't go to David Sedaris as agent because David's because also the other thing is if you're saying I'm just like David Sedaris, guess what? That agent already has David Sedaris.

They don't need another David Sedaris or David Sedaris wannabe. But there might be a younger or less successful agent there who's hungry or who's hungry now and who would be willing to take you on.

Neil:

Yeah, that's a great that's great feedback. So then you would buy the book. You decide the substantive changes.

If you do, you talk to the editor. If they're on board, you potentially buy the book. And then comes what step of editing after that?

Amy:

Usually what will happen is when we're reading it on submission, you're reading it fairly quickly because you're competing against other people. And there's something called a preempt where someone could come in and just say, call the agent and say, give me the book right now and I'll give you this amount of money. If I give you this amount of money, will you take it?

And then you ideally they take it and they call up everyone else and say, sorry, so-and-so just bought this book. So there is you want to you need to be quick. Um, but so when you're reading, you're reading, you know, you're not reading a book, a submission over two weeks.

Like you might be reading the submission over two nights or one night. Um, so then usually what I would do is go back and read it much more slowly. Um, so then I can really pay attention to, oh, you know, does, does this chapter, did the tension, you know, did the pacing go off in this chapter or does this make sense?

Or now that I've read the whole thing and I'm reading chapter one again, does it make sense that this character is introduced this way when in fact the rest of the time they're actually not like that at all. So it gives you time to just sort of delve into the book in a much deeper way. And then I'll send an editorial letter.

So it'll be sort of a structural edit, which is all the stuff we were just talking about, along with a marked up manuscript, which would be a line edit, which would say, you know, is this the right word choice here? I thought this was a non sequitur. I think you should put a paragraph break in here.

Um, I think this could end, that you could end the chapter here, things like that.

Neil:

Wow. And then it goes back and forth until it's done, ready to go.

Amy:

Yeah.

Neil:

There's, and you mentioned acquisition editors sometimes being involved, but you talked about copy editors and then there's also line editors, you said sometimes.

Amy:

Well, there's some editors who they just line it. So it would be someone like me, for instance, buying a book and then handing it to a more junior person. And so their job is just to do what I was just saying.

Neil:

Yeah.

Amy:

But they're not the person deciding to buy the book.

Neil:

Right, right, right. And this deciding to buy the book, this is such an interesting concept, because it basically means that you're taking a bet. You're making a bet on whether a book is going to be successful or not.

And then you crunch some numbers. And if you think it's going to sell a million copies and, or 500,000 copies or 100,000, you laugh. So that's like a bizarre number.

Amy:

I just laugh because I always say that the biggest fiction we publish are our P&Ls because we have to do these numbers, right? And that's where you have to say, this book is just like this book and this book sold this many copies. And it's not a science.

Neil:

Is it the true thing that nobody knows? Like nobody can predict sales then?

Amy:

It was interesting. I remember people giving, like I've heard after all those, those, you know, the hearings. And I remember people sort of making fun because John Karp said something like, you know, we don't really know.

And I think he's right. You just don't know. Because why does one book work and one book doesn't?

And, you know, and we've all read books that we think are fantastic that no one else has heard of.

Neil:

Yeah. That's a great point. We've all read books we think are fantastic.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. My favorite book of fiction ever is A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz.

And everyone's like, no one's heard of that book.

Amy:

Yeah. I've never heard of it.

Neil:

Even though it was nominated for the Man Booker, it's an Australian writer's debut fiction. And it was like, to me, it was like just the best book I've ever read.

Amy:

Okay. And so why do you think no one's heard of it?

Neil:

I don't know. Yeah, I think it's great. Everyone I've put it in the hands of, I mean, I think it's thick, 600 pages or something. So that does dissuade people, but it's propulsive.

It has a really fast pace. I thought it was wonderful. I don't know.

I guess my taste on that particular book, like it hit me on a vibe or a valence that happens to be really uniquely me in some sense. I also read it on my honeymoon. So I probably had like some, I was probably in like an emotional state to receive it.

That was different than most people when they're reading it. I don't know. I don't know why.

But to your point, it's hard to predict sales. The biggest fiction you write, you say, is your P&Ls. Yes.

Amy:

The profit. Now I'm going to, I feel like we're going to have this thing air and all of a sudden, I'm going to get called down to finance people.

Neil:

No, but it's true. Nobody can predict sales.

Amy:

Yes.

Neil:

And so then you come up with an advance, right? How does that work? Like how do you come up with what number you're going to offer authors?

And what is the range that that usually is within?

Amy:

So you're doing a P&L, which is a profit and loss statement, right? And that's where you're saying, okay, if in the past books of this type have sold X amount of copies, that means we will advance X number of copies. If I advance X number of copies, how much is it going to cost for me to produce the book?

Like literally how much will it cost between the paper and the binding and the printing and the press material? So what is my unit cost? And then you're sort of figuring out the unit cost.

You're figuring out, okay, if I'm going out with this many copies, what's the percentage of copies I'll be selling? And based on that, what's the author's royalty on all of that? I don't know what the statistics are of how many books are now, but I feel like the majority of the books don't earn out.

I feel like it's less than...

Neil:

Earning out means that they make more money in royalties than they were given in their advance.

Amy:

Yes.

Neil:

And so as a result, most advances probably fall in the... I heard $5,000, $10,000, $20,000 range.

Amy:

It could be anywhere. It depends, again, where you are.

Neil:

And then if a book is... If a lot of editors want it from a lot of different houses, then there's like a bidding war.

Amy:

Yes.

Neil:

And then the number ratchets really high.

Amy:

Yes.

Neil:

Right. And then you hear stories about Barack Obama getting a $47 million advance or whatever it happens to be.

Amy:

So it's all depends upon... I mean, in a way, it's sort of the marketplace speaks, right?

Neil:

Right. Right. Okay.

That's interesting. Speaking of this, on page 80 of the book, there's a quote. His name was Archie Knox and my aunt liked him.

That was rare. In the cab home, I asked her if he was famous. More famous than an editor should be.

She said, the best are invisible.

Amy:

Yeah. That's why I didn't want to do your podcast.

Neil:

Because the best editors are invisible.

Amy:

I remember actually...

Neil:

You're not the first editor on the podcast. Kerri Kolen, Chapter 11 was on the podcast. These are pros will be on here.

Amy:

I remember actually doing an event with Sarah Blake, who wrote the guest book and the post mistress, and we were doing an event. And actually, I did it with her. And someone asked about what we did as editors and what you can see.

And I said, I think I said something to the equivalent of, which is true. I think that if you're a really good editor, you shouldn't be able to see any of our work. Right.

I think the authors should know what we did, but I don't think the general populace should be seeing what we've done.

Neil:

And why is this? Why is that? I pick up a book.

I can see the designer. I can see every... Like there's a lot of names listed in here.

Amy:

Oh, I think now they're actually changing that though.

Neil:

The editor's names are not on books.

Amy:

Well, no, I think they're actually changing that. I feel like Avid Press changed that. And I feel like some places are starting to do that, but they're starting to put other people.

Neil:

It was so hard for me to figure out a list of books that you'd edit. And I tried, like, I worked on ChatGPT and Google for like hours trying to figure out even just a list of books you've edited was impossible to find.

Amy:

I guess because I feel like, but I'm... My job is to help an author write a better book and to reach as many readers as possible. But I'm not writing the book.

For the same reason that it's not the same as with film. But, you know, like, it's different. The film is a bad analogy.

Neil:

No, but what you just said is really interesting. Because I had like, what's the definition of an editor? What is an editor's job?

And you said very clearly, my job is to help an author write a better book and reach as many people as possible. It's not to have your name in lights.

Amy:

Right. I mean, I think then you're in the wrong business.

Neil:

Right. That's why the phrase is more famous than an editor should be. Uh-huh.

That's great. Okay. We talked about whether a first time...

Did you answer the question that Jim Levine asked? Would you recommend publishing as an industry for a recent college grad?

Amy:

Oh.

Neil:

Because the main character in this book does work in publishing. And I won't say she doesn't really have a good experience with it.

Amy:

Right. It's so funny. I just talked to...

I had a young woman in my office yesterday who's in college who wanted to... So she shadowed me for two hours yesterday. And we talked about if she should go in publishing.

And I kind of made a bad joke, which is, you know, when someone wants to convert to Judaism, you're supposed to turn them away three times because you're supposed to say, like, no. And then if they really want it, they come back the fourth time. Um, so I usually tell people who are thinking of going to publishing all the bad things.

Neil:

Which are?

Amy:

Oh, huge corporate conglomeratization. You know, not necessarily meritocracy. You know, you could argue, like, declining industry.

You know, we're considered, quote, unquote, old media. Not exactly cutting edge.

Neil:

MSM, they call it, mainstream media.

Amy:

Okay. Financially, not, you know, not very well rewarding. All of that.

Neil:

Hence your $13,000.

Amy:

Hence my $13,000.

Neil:

Starting salary. And you point that out because it's not... Starting publishing today is also very low wages.

Amy:

Yes, exactly. All of that said, I think when I go to the few parties I go to, I happen to think I have one of the best jobs in the world. I love what I do.

Neil:

So now give us the other side. You gave us the cons list. The turning away three times.

The huge corporate. The not necessarily meritocracy. The declining.

The financially unrewarding. Now go with the other side of the tiers.

Amy:

And the other thing I should say, and being... It's like being a perpetual grad student because you always have reading to do. So you're never having, you know, you're always doing reading.

Neil:

How many books are you reading a year?

Amy:

You don't finish a lot of books. And so also the other thing is I feel like the worst read person because people say, what should I read? I don't know.

Tell me what you should read because I'm reading bad manuscripts or I'm reading things that aren't going to be published for, you know, two years or something. The good things about publishing. I just think what we do is so incredibly cool that, you know, we get to discover writers.

And it's so neat when you're an editor and you can see where you've helped an author see sort of the forest from the trees. Or no, the trees from the... Which way we forget?

Neil:

Forest from the trees. It is forest from the trees. Okay.

Amy:

So that's incredibly cool. I just think this whole note, I think in some respects, people in publishing are incredibly pessimistic. On the other respect, they're eternal optimists.

And you were saying it's a bit like gambling and it's kind of like playing the, you know, the, what is it?

Neil:

Slots.

Amy:

Slots in Las Vegas.

Because you're always thinking like, I know statistically that I'm going to lose money, right? And that this book isn't going to work.

Neil:

On most books.

Amy:

All right. But maybe the next one will be it.

Neil:

Right.

Amy:

Maybe this one will be it. Maybe I'll actually hit the jackpot.

Neil:

It's like Hollywood too, right? Boom busts, like one big winner pays for all the other failures. But as a result, it allows all those chances to be taken on a lot of books that otherwise would never see the light of day.

Amy:

Yeah.

Neil:

So culture shaping, I think is part of it.

Amy:

You mean that we get to?

Neil:

Yeah, I think so. People talk about the books that they read and then it shapes opinions and people learn through books. It's, I see that as a big pro for what the work you do.

Amy:

Oh yeah, absolutely. But I guess I would never want to, I think one of the criticisms about what we do is that we're sort of gatekeepers. And I think that's a valid criticism.

And that's going back to what you're talking about. It's sort of like the New York, are we in touch with the rest of America? I think a lot of people could argue and say, definitely not.

You know, we take the subway to work. We're not driving. We're in small apartments.

You know, it's not exactly the experience of most of the rest of America. I'm getting totally off.

Neil:

No, we were talking about cons and pros of going into publishing.

Amy:

I just think it's amazing that I get to sit and spend the day talking to colleagues. Not that I should say that's what I do all the time. A, that I get to spend, you know, we were talking about, Neil had been saying, oh, we don't have offices anymore.

I was showing him my cubicle, which is where an assistant used to sit. And he was asking me about it. And I was saying, you know what, like we're not working in a coal mine.

Like I have a very privileged life of what we get to do. The fact that I can sit there and spend all this time saying, you know what, I really think that we shouldn't use the repetition of this word in this sentence. Because it comes up two sentences later.

So it's like totally nerdy word nerdiness, right? But that also, you get to dive into these made up worlds, which is incredibly fun. And then not to sound so sort of, oh my God, Aaron, what we're doing is so great.

But I will give you an example. Lori Frankel published this book called This Is How It Always Is. And it's a family about five boys, the youngest of whom becomes a girl.

Neil:

One of my wife's favorite books, by the way, she loves that book.

Amy:

And what's cool about that is that book started off in paperback. Our first printing was 6,000 copies. And now it's sold over 300,000 in paperback, which is really interesting.

But what was interesting about that is we had a family member, a member of my family came out as trans. And their parent was having a hard time with it. And my mother said to me, well, they should just go read your book because she had read it.

And it allowed her to sort of wrap her head around something, which I think otherwise she wouldn't have been as predisposed to be open to.

Neil:

But finding that book is like, this is word of mouth too, right? Don't you find people have trouble like finding the book that speaks to them? The books that have been formative to you have been like spoke to you.

But when you walk into a bookstore, I mean, this is a challenge that we all face.

Amy:

Well, I think, yeah, because, you know, you're walking into these superstores and then that's what I think the comment you heard from most people aren't in publishing is they don't know what to read.

Neil:

Yeah. And there's different algorithmic vehicles being created, like StoryGraph and places that you can upload your reading taste and it tries to suggest something new to you that will fit. But yeah, I always say it's coming down to finding a trusted bookseller, which I have interviewed for my show, multiple of them, you know, finding someone that you can talk to about your divorce and the child, kid you're having trouble with and then sort of just thinking about all the books that they've read and trying to find something that speaks to you.

Amy:

But it's probably going to be something that wouldn't have come up in the algorithm.

Neil:

Right.

Amy:

Because the algorithm is just giving you stuff that you've read before.

Neil:

Well, exactly. Or something like that. OK, this has been great.

We went deep into this book. I loved it. The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing add it to your TBR. If you're listening to this and you want a wonderful, wonderful read. And let's get to your third and final book now, by the way, which is Mating by Norman Rush, originally published in 1991 by Alfred A. Knopf.

OK, so I've been saying that name wrong for a long time. That covers a painting of two naked people facing each other, standing on their heads across a faded and cracked royal blue background. Here it is right here under this book.

Mating is printed in yellow at the top and a wide current sans serif with Norman Rush at the bottom and a white serif font in a black box. Norman Rush, born 1933 in San Francisco and is still alive. The only of your three authors still alive today.

He's 90. He is 90 years old today. His novels and short stories are mostly set in Botswana in the 1980s, where he and his wife Elsa co-directed the Peace Corps for five years from the late 70s to early 80s.

He won the National Book Award for this book. Mating, what is it about? An unnamed American anthropologist student is at loose ends in the South African Republic of Botswana.

She is a noble and exacting mind, a good waste and a busted thesis. She also has a yen for Nelson Dune, a charismatic intellectual who is rumored to have founded a secretive and unorthodox utopian society in a remote corner of the Kalahari, one in which he is virtually the only man. What ensues is both a quest and an exuberant comedy of manners, a book that explores the deepest canyons of Eros, even as it asks large questions about the good society, the geopolitics of poverty and the baffling mystery of what men and women really want.

File this as with the other two in 813.54 for 20th Century Literature. Amy, tell us about your relationship with Mating by Norman Rush.

Amy:

So it's terrible because I feel like I don't have a relationship with Mating by Norman Rush and I'm reading it now and I'm like, oh yeah, that was really good. But I remember there was one section of the book and I really did want to reread it so I could find it because I've quoted it and I always get it wrong. But there was one, there's one part in the book where they were talking about how he uses some metaphor about people that what's great about literature is that, or that he went, people were like envelopes and that you could open them up and see what's inside of them.

Neil:

And yes, yes.

Amy:

Do you have that line?

Neil:

Yes, I do.

Amy:

Do you really?

Neil:

Yeah. Why can't every mating in the world be on the basis of souls instead of inevitability and fundamentally on the match between physical envelopes?

Amy:

Yeah, I think that might have been it.

Neil:

And I remember, I mean, I mean, because this just has the word envelopes in it, like you said.

Amy:

What page was that on?

Neil:

I have it on the page there.

Amy:

Where? Page, is that, where's, I know, but do you know what page it was on in here? You don't.

Neil:

I don't. I don't have it written down.

Amy:

So I remember reading.

Neil:

Although I was pretty impressed with myself for coming up with the exact quote you're talking about.

Amy:

That's really weird. I remember thinking, oh, isn't that, isn't that sort of mind blowing, right? Isn't that what you wish, like you wish that you could just sort of get past the exterior of everyone and get inside, like what is inside somebody?

And that's what I think always struck me about why I think in a way like novels, because I think in a way, this is going to sound really stupid, but I think novels can speak in some respects more truthfully because people can just say, oh, I made it up. Right. As opposed to if it's a memoir, are you really going to say you're, you know, there's all these other considerations, but I think in a way fiction allows us to get to edit truth in a way that other forms don't.

Neil:

Mm-hmm.

Neil:

Yeah, I do hear that phrase sometimes that there's more truth in fiction than there is a nonfiction, which is a lot more fiction than people think it is. I mean, you know, fiction allows us to get to truth, to get to deeper truth because you can just say you made it up. Yeah, exactly.

I like that. So you wrote this in your 20s, right?

Amy:

I must have, yes. And I remember going to a panel that was Mona Simpson, Norman Rush, oh my God, Michael Cunningham and maybe two other authors. And it was called, oh, that's right.

God, I forgot about this. It was a panel. It was called The Death of the Novel.

It seemed like a New Yorker cartoon. And at the panel, someone got up and asked and said, you know, they ran a shelter for homeless people and could, they asked Norman Rush this. They said, could you recommend any books that I could give to these people that I should tell these people to read?

And he actually said, you know, I don't, I'm not a homeless person. I can't, I don't, I don't want to speak for what he said, but basically he demurred and was like, I don't have any recommendations for you. And at the end of the panel, Michael Cunningham leaned in and said, would the person who asked the homeless shelter question stay after?

Because I have some books to talk to you about. And it was one of those who were like, oh, do you actually ever want to meet the people whose books you really love? Sometimes you don't.

Neil:

Right. The gilding sticks to your finger. You know, never touch the people that you put on pedestals.

Amy:

Yeah.

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah. I've heard that before, but I don't know if that's true.

I mean, I've, I've gotten close to a lot of people I've admired through this podcast and I'm always, for the most part, really touched by the relationship that ensues afterwards. There's a quote from this book. One attractive thing about me is that I'm never bored.

So I thought I'd ask, what are you finding interesting right now in publishing or in books?

Amy:

Oh, I feel like I'm the person who's like, whatever book I just most recently edited, and I'm like, that's so cool.

Neil:

Is it the Anne Boleyn one?

Amy:

No.

Neil:

Because you brought some books with you.

Amy:

I did bring some.

Neil:

So you must want to talk about a couple of these or at least tell, tell people listening what's coming out from the editorial whiz kid here. What do you got coming here?

Amy:

Okay. Well, our next book is coming out actually on Tuesday. Liane Moriarty is here one moment.

Neil:

Okay.

Amy:

And that's how you pronounce her name because I mispronounced her name for around seven years.

Neil:

Moriarty?

Amy:

No, I was saying Leanne with a New Jersey accent and it's Liane.

Neil:

Oh, Liane. Okay.

Amy:

And one day she said to me, she goes, it's so funny how you Americans pronounce my name. And then I got out of the elevator and I told her agent, her publicist, that we'd all been mispronouncing her name for seven years. So that's coming out.

And I actually think it's maybe her best book. I love this book. It's very much about sort of, and that's, she's someone I would say who I think since she has commercial success, people don't give her, I think the due that she deserves as a writer.

Cause I think she makes it look so easy. But to me, she has, is this sort of masterful plotter, but also is asking, you know, this book asks fairly profound questions, which is if you knew when you were going to die, what would you do? Would you do anything differently?

Right. Um, and she also not usually, but she does, she's taken subject matters that now are sort of mainstream, but had put them in, I would say, um, and looks at them in a way that I think hasn't been viewed often. So for instance, if you look at Big Little Lies where she's looking at domestic abuse, or if you look at Nine Perfect Strangers, which is looking at suicide, um, and here one moment, she's looking at OCD.

Um, I think like she does this masterful job of giving it, uh, making it viewed in a way that hasn't been viewed before.

Neil:

Cool. That's coming. What's the book on top?

Amy:

Um, Chris Whitaker, All the Colors of the Dark. That's out now. Um, and, um, it's very hard book to describe, to be honest.

Um, it's a book about obsession. It's a book about first love. Um, it's, um, a mystery.

It's, it's doing incredibly well, but it's, it's, it's not a very easy book to categorize.

Neil:

All the Colors of the Dark.

Amy:

Yes.

Neil:

With a Read with Jenna sticker on the front.

Amy:

Yes.

Neil:

What do you make of all these stickers now?

Amy:

These stickers.

Neil:

Reese, Reese's Book Club is big. Good morning. These are any tool to help with sales?

Amy:

Yeah. You mean, are they good?

Neil:

Well, I don't mean, are they good? I know that they're good for sales, but is this because in an era of endlessness, the value of curation skyrockets, anything that helps a book discriminate itself from the mass of everything else is good.

Amy:

Yes. I think anything that you can, for the same reason, if you're, you know, when an author has a platform or anything, that's just good. Look, I think selling books is hard.

So anything that's for, when you were saying, it's interesting when you were saying you like that Australian novel, I'm curious, why did you end up picking up that Australian novel?

Neil:

Yeah, exactly. Cause I went to Type Bookshop on Queen Street West and I said, I'm about to go away on my three week honeymoon with my, and I want a really good long book to take with me. And I want it to be paper.

And so Kalpana, the bookseller there who I trusted, had me read the first page of like probably 50 books. And this one really grabbed me. And then I read page two, then I read page three.

And I'm like, oh, this is going to be good.

Amy:

But they self-selected those.

Neil:

She kept picking because I said things like fast paced, funny. I like George Saunders. I like David Mitch.

I'd thrown thing, a bunch of things. I was just like, how about this? How about that?

How about this? I've gone back to the store by way more recently and told them that story. And of course it's not on the shelf anymore.

You know, even though it was a Man Booker nominee, I've had Steve Toltz on three books. I've loved the book. I tell everybody I can about it.

I think it's wonderful. But yeah, it's hard to sell books. What helps books sell now?

Amy:

Look, I think it all comes down to, I think it was Tip O'Neill. You're Canadians. You won't know, but he was a politician.

He always said all politics is local. I do think at the end of the day, book selling is about somebody handing you a book and saying you should read this. And I think that starts from the agent giving it to me and saying, this is great.

You should read it. To me buying it and hopefully working with the author and then going to my Salesforce and saying, this book is really good. And keep in mind, so I have a lot of agents coming to me saying, you should read this.

This is good. Multiply me by hundreds to my Salesforce, multiply my Salesforce by thousands of how many books you're going into a place like Amazon or Barnes and Noble and saying, this book is good. Right?

So why are you going to read one of these books over the other? You did that because you liked that bookseller and that bookseller knew you, right? And you trusted that, which we're going back to trust again.

Um, so I think people have just, you know, I think Jenna or Reese have developed trust with their fans where they know, oh, I really like her taste. So Reese is saying to me, you should read this. It's the same version of your bookseller saying here, read this.

Neil:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Which I try to do with, I have a book club, monthly book club.

I put books in and feature them. The books I've read in the past month, same idea. And so what, but there's another question in here, which is kind of fun for people that are trying to sell books these days, which is what do you need?

And you said a platform. So what do you, when you are looking at a nonfiction book, what do you look for these days from an author?

Amy:

Well, I'm not doing that much nonfiction anymore. I should point out you don't need a platform. I mean, plenty of my authors have zero platform.

It's just helpful.

Neil:

Which is like an email list or a Facebook account or an Instagram account or a way to talk to people and tell them to buy your book, because otherwise you're relying on the salesforce, which is selling in quantities to retailers, but not necessarily selling the book from there.

Amy:

Or a way for my publicity department to get a hook to get somebody interested in writing something about the book. Oh, you know what? This person might not have any following, but you know what?

I think this is a great story. I can pitch this in which case then I'm getting more, I'm getting publicity for the book, which again, is all is it how am I reaching an audience and getting them to say, Oh, that sounds interesting. I want to buy that book.

Neil:

What are the big difference makers these days in sales that you're seeing? Like what are the places you're trying to get books mentioned or listed on or somebody writing about it? We mentioned the big stickers on the covers.

What else? But you know, that will only apply to 10 or 20 books a year.

Amy:

Yes.

Neil:

You know, 50 or 100,000 more books are coming out than that.

Amy:

Yes, this is true.

Neil:

Maybe publishing has a quantity issue. I don't know, but how else are we just like, what else is moving the needle from what you're seeing?

Amy:

You know, it's interesting because some things move the needle sometimes, and then sometimes they don't. Right. So sometimes you get a book on fresh air and in America, Terry Gross, NPR, and that could be a huge mover.

And then other times I've had authors on there. It doesn't do anything. You know, it used to be if you had the front page of the New York Times book review, that was that moved the needle.

Now I would say that doesn't. A New York Times review, sometimes.

Neil:

A big podcast.

Amy:

A big podcast. You know, Obama's reading list is always really great.

Neil:

Bill Gates' reading list.

Amy:

Bill Gates' reading list. You know, if a book has turned into a movie or is going to be turned into a movie, that helps.

Neil:

These are all things, though, for the average author that are very difficult to come by.

Amy:

They're difficult for the non-average author also, I should point out.

Neil:

Yeah, exactly. But that's why when you make it, you know, Nita Prose did want me to ask you, what's one that got away? That was one of her questions she wanted me to ask you because, you know, you're good at acquiring.

But what's a book that you were the underbidder on that, you know, you wish you'd just put a little bit more money behind or you'd got? I've mentioned her because she wrote the book, The Maid, and then it got, it was made into the CBS kind of book of the month. And that drove it to like now I think it's sold three or four million copies.

Amy:

Oh, God, I've missed so many books. But which one did I really want? So funny because I'm thinking of this and this is it's not.

It was funny at one point when the book, what was it? Was it Marley and Me? So Marley and Me came in and I'd had lunch with the agent and they told me about the book and I said, can I see it early?

He said, no, you can't. I'm going to send it out to everyone at the same time.

Neil:

Who wrote Marley and Me?

Amy:

No, I can't remember.

Neil:

That's okay. I don't know either.

Amy:

He was out of Philadelphia. He had been in Miami. It was a male author.

Neil:

And you couldn't see the book early, even though you asked.

Amy:

I couldn't see it early. And then I think the day I got it in or the day after the agent called me and said, actually, I have a preempt offer. And I said, but wait a minute, I just got it.

And she said, well, actually, the author was friends with so-and-so and they wanted us to, she did send it out early. So she sent it out early to this one person. And so I'm getting ready to make an offer.

And then it turns out that I find, I go to my head of whoever it was and I said, you know, you're a dog person. Could you read this? She said, oh, I already read it.

I read it for our sister company, who it turns out was the people who made the preempt offer. So I wasn't allowed to bid because you're not allowed, I wasn't allowed to bid against them. So I had to, I wasn't allowed to bid in the auction.

And I remember after the auction was done, I got this big bouquet of flowers from this agent. Cause she was sorry. Cause she's like, I'm really sorry that I did, you know, I told you I wasn't going to send it out early.

And I did. And I remember my colleague at the time said, ugh, you're never going to hear about that book ever again. And then of course it was, it was Marlee.

Neil:

A gigantic hit. Yes.

Amy:

So yeah.

Neil:

So Jenny Lawson is a mutual friend of ours. She was on three books in chapter 76. You've edited, I think four of her books.

If I have it right. Let's pretend this never happened. Furiously happy, broken in the best way.

Maybe it's three.

Amy:

And you are here.

Neil:

And you are here. And I asked her for a question for you. And she says, you can ask Amy.

I've always wondered if editors edit their own work, or is it like how barbers can't cut their own hair?

Amy:

I think, well, actually my, my, it's funny. People ask me what the editing process is like. And I always tell the story that Jenny says, which Jenny says, so I hand over my baby to my editor and she's like, oh my God, this baby is so incredibly cute.

And then I'm just going to cut off its arms and its legs and hand it back to him. Like, isn't it cuter? And so I, I always think, I think everyone should have an editor.

So I'll routinely send, like, if I'm sending flap copy or any copy, descriptive copy to authors and agents, I'll always say, please edit it. Because I think everyone needs to be edited.

Neil:

So it is like how barbers can't cut their own hair. I wonder, because remember you mentioned how many books you read and how often you read. Do you have anything, any tips on, on speed reading?

Or how do you read so, such a big quantity of books? Are you doing anything? Are you doing anything to read so much, so fast?

Amy:

It sounds like you read more than I do. I just have always read, I am a fast reader. And I do think it's interesting.

I had one assistant who worked for me who was so incredibly fabulous, but they were a very slow reader. And it's hard to do our job if you're a slow reader.

Neil:

Right. You have to speed up or ship out. It sounds like.

Amy:

Yeah.

Neil:

Okay, well, this has been wonderful. I have a whole bunch of fast money questions just to close us off if you're okay with it. Hardcover, paperback, audio, or e?

Amy:

What do I like to read? Hardcover.

Neil:

The real thing.

Amy:

Yeah. But I should point out, I'm happy with people, quote unquote, reading our books, however they read them. So many people will say now that they've read the book and they listened to it on the audio and I'm thinking that's great.

Neil:

Yeah. Okay, great. Do you have a favorite bookstore?

Living or dead?

Amy:

Oh my gosh. I would say Wordsworth, which is where I worked in Cambridge at the bookstore. It no longer exists. It was an independent bookstore.

Cambridge? Cambridge Mass. Oh, you were in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I was. I stopped out of school one semester and worked in a bookstore.

Neil:

Oh, this is before Stanford.

Amy:

During Stanford.

Neil:

Oh, you left Stanford for a semester.

Amy:

Well, Stanford had this thing called stopping out and there was always.

Neil:

That's what you're saying. I stopped out for a semester and you went to work in a bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Amy:

Wordsworth. Yeah.

Neil:

Oh, that's interesting. By the way, as you mentioned, audiobooks, that's fine. Do editors have a say in the narrator?

Are you part of that decision?

Amy:

It's interesting. Different companies I've had people, it works differently. So at a previous company I was at, they would run the narrators by us.

I actually am not a big audio person. So I would always defer to the author.

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah. Deferring to the author is a skill you have.

I mean, I think that's a skill. I remember when I was working with you on the first few books, it's like, you let me make more decisions than I think every other sentence has sort of allowed me to make.

Amy:

Really?

Neil:

Yeah.

Amy:

That's not true. I made you take out all the blowing your nose in the shower stuff.

Neil:

I, in retrospect, quickly agreed with you. You were totally right. I mean, you took...

Because I was running a blog that was oriented towards a younger audience and, you know, had like a lot more gross things like that. Picking your nose is one of my first things. Fat baseball players.

You don't want any of that in the Book of Awesome. And we cut it out. One or two...

Do you mark up or annotate books or any certain way? Any specific...

Amy:

You mean for editing?

Neil:

Yeah.

Amy:

Well, it's interesting. I've just changed how I was editing. So, you know, we used to edit on a manuscript and then everything went electronic and we're editing on the computer.

And then a couple of months ago, there was a British editor who came in to visit and they had... Have you seen a Remarkable? Do you know what a Remarkable is?

Neil:

No.

Amy:

So basically, it's just a tablet and...

Neil:

Oh, yeah. I know what you're talking about.

Amy:

And you can't get... Like, I can't read news on it. I can't read email on it.

Neil:

Right.

Amy:

And I can write on it and that I can then send it to myself. And so what I just started, I've just done now two books on it. But what it allows me to do is edit not with my laptop, which I have to say has been pretty great because you can...

You know, I edited a book on the way home the other day in the car and I wouldn't have been able to do that on my computer.

Neil:

Yeah.

Amy:

So it's like next to the dog.

Neil:

And you're using like a stylus.

Amy:

You're doing a stylus. And so in a way, it's going back to how an old school editing, how you used to edit. And now I'm thinking, oh, my God, everyone can see I have handwriting that looks like a four-year-old, which is embarrassing.

Neil:

But it's better to get a manuscript back with handwriting on it than the little like text boxes, I think.

Amy:

Yeah. So I've started doing that. And I actually, it's been...

I've always loved that more. I always also felt like I knew visually where something was in a way that I didn't when I just see it.

Neil:

That's proven. I mean, they say that tactilely, we remember more what we handwrite than what we type. How do you organize your books on your bookshelf?

Like at your house?

Amy:

Oh, it's a disaster. We just unpack the books and just like they're not organized.

Neil:

There's no system?

Amy:

No.

Neil:

Do you have a book lending policy?

Amy:

We just lend books and then half the time you never get them back.

Neil:

OK, you're fine. Do you have a white whale book or any book that you've been chasing?

Amy:

Oh, I don't know if I would say I've been chasing. I mean, I think and also I'm not really doing nonfiction anymore, but I still have always thought Stevie Nicks' memoir would be fascinating.

Neil:

Oh, that's interesting.

Amy:

Yeah.

Neil:

I like that. Well, you know, the audience for this show, it's called 3 Books. Our audience is book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians.

You are renowned for your editing in this industry. Is there one or two hard fought pieces of wisdom you want to close us off with as we finish up this wonderful conversation? Bits of advice for people that are writing a book or in the publishing ecosystem?

Amy:

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:

Epistolary?

Amy:

Epistolary. So it's all...

Neil:

Epistolary. Now I can't... No, you're right.

I just don't know what it means. I'm the dumb one.

Amy:

It's all letters.

Neil:

Oh, it's all letters.

Amy:

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 of 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. And I do think we get sort of jaded by, you know, oh, it's another author, it's another book. And you realize like this woman, like she's spent her whole life wanting to get published.

She's written 10 books. And, you know, she could have very easily have just said like, you know, I'm gonna. Or for instance, I had an assistant once who had given himself, he'd gone to law school and then decided he didn't want to be a lawyer.

And I think he gave himself, I forget how many years it was to get a job in publishing, and he couldn't get a job. And I think he and his wife had sat down and he had said, here's my deadline. And I, of course, didn't know anything about this, but he ended up getting a job a week before his deadline was due.

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:

Oh, interesting. You just need one person to like your book.

Amy:

Or to hire you or.

Neil:

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 3 Books. It's been a wonderful conversation.

It's just me. It's just Neil again, hanging out in my basement with my pile full of wires. I got back last night from visiting Amy.

Got back around 1030. Couldn't get to bed. Still excited about the conversation.

Also, I think when I get off planes and get home, I'm like, I find it hard to go to sleep. So I was rolling around and this morning I woke up and I was like, time to record this. Let's put it out here.

Let's put it out there next week. So yeah, this is a very, very fresh conversation. And it was a joy kind of seeing Amy.

Her energy is like infectious. She has got such a bubbly and positive persona. And she's demure.

She's self-effacing. She's very humble about her talents and her skill and her ability. I hope you found that a helpful conversation.

So many quotes jump out to me. How about you just need one person? Great for everybody to remember.

For those of you that are wanting to write a book and get one out there, that story of the woman who is there with her grandson. I think she'd written 12 books or whatever it was. It's like, you just need one person.

If you find the one person who loves your books and will represent it and take it forward, great. That's wonderful. And that one person could be you, of course.

It's harder to break through in self-publishing, but it doesn't mean it's impossible. People like David Goggins have proved that it's possible. Michael Bungay-Stanier, our past guest, it's possible.

Fiction allows us to get to deeper truths. How true is that? My job is to help an author write a better book and reach as many people as possible.

You know, it's interesting. I feel like that's a powerful quote for two reasons. One, well, for the big reason, actually, I shouldn't say two reasons, because I think most editors would probably say, my job is to help an author write a better book.

And that is the experience I've had with some other authors as well, or editors as well. But the reach as many people as possible part is huge, right? Amy often says, I gotta sell it internally before I sell it externally.

I gotta tell my head of sales, I need you to read this book. I need you to fall in love with this book. She generates such internal passion that the sales forces and the PR teams get behind her books in a way that I haven't always seen with others.

What is it I want it? In terms of how to write a title, just for those of you that are writers, like what is it I want it? You know, that lean in quality?

What is it I want it? Which is great. My literary authors want more sales and my commercial authors want more respect.

I just thought that was great. And the book delivers something you can't get anywhere else. Three more books to add to our top 1000, including number 592, Goodbye Columbus by Philip Roth, which I read and I love.

It's short too, like 134 pages. Number 591, The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank. And number 590, Mating by Norman Rush.

OK, that was the only of the three I didn't read. But I, of course, now that Amy's so high on it, I want to, I have it on my TBR still. Thank you so much to Amy.

Thank you so much to you. Thank you so much for joining us in Chapter 140 of 3 Books. Are you still here?

Did you make it past the three second pause? If so, I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club. It's one of three clubs that we have for Three Books listeners, including the Cover to Cover Club.

Please drop us a line anytime. If you are one of those people that's trying to listen to every single chapter of Three Books, drop us a line. We're starting to add names to our FAQ.

Some people are saying, I don't want to be recognized. That's fine. But we respect the people that are like, OK, 140?

Cool. I'm ready for 141. I'm ready for 140.

There's only 333, right? So we're past the third of the way mark. So that's the Cover to Cover Club.

People are trying to listen to every chapter. And then there's also the Secret Club. I can't tell you more about the Secret Club.

Other than you got to call our phone number for a clue. It is an entirely analog only club that operates through the mail. Three bookers who are in the club, you know what I'm talking about.

And how do you find out more? Call our phone number. It's 1-833-READ-A-LOT.

Yes, it's a real number. 1-833-R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T. And with that, let's kick off the end of the podcast club, as we like to do by going to the phones.

Nadia:

Hi, Neil. I'm Nadia. I'm an educator in the Mojave Desert in California, but originally from green and luscious Minnesota.

So definitely a contrast there. I'm calling because I just finished your podcast with Nancy, the librarian, Nancy Pearl. And the part that really struck me was Nancy talking about her love and appreciation of audiobooks.

So I would like to recommend Elizabeth Acevedo, and particularly her book, The Poet X, as a great intro into audiobooks. Elizabeth Acevedo actually reads the book, The Poet X, herself. And it's a book in verse, a novel in verse.

And so it's just almost meant to be read out loud. And she does a really beautiful job. And the other thing I wanted to mention was my formative book.

I have many, but the one that I'd like to point out is Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, a really beautiful, honest, tragic, yet also hopeful book about a Korean family living in Japan. Both of these women would be incredible guests on the podcast, as they're both beautiful writers that I think would have a lot of thoughtful things to say and add. But I just wanted to thank you for your awesome podcast and share my thoughts on audiobooks, because I have become an audiobook lover, as well as a paper, hardback, really books of any form lover.

So thank you again. Bye-bye.

Neil:

Wow. Thank you so much to Nadia calling from the Mojave Desert in California. I love educators.

I love readers. Loved hearing your voice, Nadia. Thank you so much for calling.

If you are listening to this and you're like, I don't know if I should call. I feel too shy to call. I don't know if I should.

Just call. Just call. Give us a formative book.

Give us a tip off. There's a couple wonderful recommendations in here, neither of which I knew. So now I'm excited to add them and order them.

The Poet X. So it's three words. The Poet X.

X is just, you know, just the last word, just the letter X. By Elizabeth, I think you said Acevedo. It's A-C-E-V-E-D-O.

I like the fact that the audiobook is three hours and 30 minutes. It's got a 4.7 rating too. Don't miss this acclaimed audiobook read by the author winner of the Odyssey Honor Award.

Okay, cool. I'm adding this. I'm going to add this to my Libro FM.

You know, I don't use Audible, no offense to Amazon. I much prefer Libro FM because, you know, you might remember that the Bronx-bound books, Bus, Latanya, and Jerry told us about Libro FM. And basically, yeah, here I am.

So I go to Libro FM. I type in the Poet X. I click get audiobook for one credit.

Do you want to add it? Okay. And guess what?

The profit goes to my local independent bookstore. I can change it. I have changed it a few times because I want to give the money to different bookstores.

But then I press download. And now I've got it. I've got the Poet X on my phone right now.

And I like that. I'm going to start listening to that. Thank you so much.

Also, the formative book, Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. That's L-E-E. In the early 1900s, teenage Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger.

When she discovers she's pregnant and that her lover is married, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home and to reject her son's powerful father, it's off a dramatic saga that will echo down the generations. Well, that sounds wonderful.

2017, Grand Central Publishing, a daunting 496 pages. But I'm adding Pachinko to my cart. Only three left in stock.

Okay, cool. So, you know, I'm not going to add it to the cart. I'm going to call up my used bookstores first.

Sometimes, you know, I could support Doug Miller, Doug Miller Books in Koreatown. You know, it's fun to kind of call them up and have them hunt around or go hunt around and see if it's there. Okay, I'm not going to add it to my cart.

I'm going to hunt around for Pachinko. Thank you so much. And by the way, if I play your voicemail, I owe you a book.

So drop me a line with your address. Drop me a line with your address so that I can mail you a book, Nadia. I'd love to mail you a book.

Okay, cool. Now, let's move on to the letter of the chapter. And this chapter's letter comes from Dan Bonner.

Dan Bonner says, okay, The Sky Was Ours, Neil. Do you know this book? It has some parts that gave me Martin Dean vibes.

Martin Dean, of course, a main character from A Fraction of the Whole with Steve Toltz, who's been a guest on the show. Particularly the Labyrinth era from A Fraction of the Whole. I also want to say thanks for doing three books.

I've read several books from it, including Lonesome Dove and Linchpin, as well as, of course, Fraction of the Whole. Now, also, he says for Dream Guest, take a look at Stella Zawistowski, a recent interview transcript here. More for here.

She's a crossword constructor for the New York Times, which is a cool niche. Also a weightlifter, a competitive crossworder. She's gotten big in crossword circles the last several years, bringing a lot of younger, more diverse, more creativity into crosswords.

I love her cryptics in games magazines, which she started writing. From her last interview, there's a lot of threads to explore and ways to incorporate crossword-like cryptic clues if you're into those. Well, I looked into Stella Zawistowski, by the way, Dan.

Thank you for this letter. And first of all, I'm massively intimidated because I cannot figure out how to do crypt. I know cryptic crosswords are, like, I'm starting to see them in places like the New Yorker and in newspapers and stuff.

They're hard for me. They're really hard. But maybe that's the reason to get into it.

I'm going to check her out a little bit more and see if we can't have her on, or at least add her to our pitch list to check her out more. And thank you so much for the suggestion. The Sky was ours.

I am ordering it, and I will crack it open. I appreciate any book that's kind of like a fraction of the whole, because I don't know many books that are. All right.

Thank you so much to Dan for the letter. And keep the letters coming, by the way. Throw them in on, you know, Apple.

I see it. If you leave a review, it's always great. I see it.

I read it, and I will read it on the air. Or, you know, you can do it on YouTube, comments, anywhere you want. Or you can just email us, as Dan did.

Okay, now it's time for the word of the chapter. And for the word of the chapter, let's go back to Miss Amy Einhorn. Here we go.

Amy:

Be messianic about your book. A cynical buy. Intellectual properties.

It seems like very purple prose. Secular Jewish assimilation. Might use commercial pejoratively.

Publishing in bona fides. An epistolary novel.

Neil:

Oh, yes, definitely. We got to do a word cloud, Ms. Amy Einhorn. So many interesting words.

Messianic was very, very tempting. However, I'm going to go with the very interesting... Bona fides.

Bona fides? Or... Bona fides.

Is it bona fides or is it bona fides? Did you know Merriam-Webster uses both pronunciations? It is the way Amy said it, which I'd never heard before.

Dictionary:

Bona fides.

Neil:

Bona fides. But I also see a lot of conversations online, people talking about how you pronounce this. And the one that I'd heard before, bona fides...

Dictionary:

Bona fides.

Neil:

Is considered non-standard. The definition of Merriam-Webster means good faith, sincerity. The fact of being genuine, often plural.

Evidence of one's good faith or genuineness. Evidence of one's qualifications or achievements. That's the fourth definition, but that's the one I'd heard the most.

But it really just means good faith and sincerity. Did you know bona fides looks like a plural word in English? Like it is.

B-O-N-A space F-I-D-E-S. But in Latin, it's a singular noun that literally just means good faith. When bona fides entered English, it first stayed very close to Latin use, and also kept its singular form.

For example, a claimant whose bona fides is unquestionable. But in the 20th century, the use of bona fides began to widen, and it began to appear with a plural verb in certain contexts, such as the informants bona fides were ascertained. Holy cow, what an interesting word.

It's a word, but it looks like two words. And it's singular, but it looks like a plural. But it could also be a plural.

It is the one and only...

Dictionary:

Bona fides.

Neil:

Bona fides.

B-O-N-A space F-I-D-E-S. A noun. Huh.

That is a real thinker. I love that word. I'm going to...

We're adding it to our Word of the Chapter. It's going to be on 3Books.co. You can head over to 3Books.co anytime. The whole top 1,000 there.

A list of every formative book mentioned. A list of every guest. The blog post.

The show notes. Any single proper noun we mentioned on the show, it's all there. Everything's there.

We are adding to lists and lists and lists and lists. We love lists. We love categorizing.

We love sorting. We're doing our best. We got a 22-year-long project.

We're punctuating the full moons now with new moon re-releases, right? Seth Godin is already out. Judy Blume is dropping soon.

And we're going to hang out with Vish, I think, again. We got to just kind of keep the rhythm and rolling going. But every single full moon, you know, there'll be a new chapter of 3Books for sure for 22 years.

That's the promise and pledge I'm making. Thank you for coming on this ride together. Now, until next time, everybody, remember that you are what you eat and you are what you read.

Keep turning the page, and I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Bye.

Listen to the chapter here!

Chapter 139: Lewis Mallard valorizes visionary vandalism

Listen to the Listen to the chapter here!

Man on the Street:

There is a guy who lives around this area.

Neil:

Yeah.

Man on the Street:

I mean, I always see him in the area. I don't know where he lives, but he dresses like a duck, like he has a big costume.

Neil:

He dresses up as a duck.

Man on the Street:

Yeah, you don't see his face.

Neil:

Why would someone do that? Why would someone dress up as a duck?

Man on the Street:

Just for fun, I guess.

Neil:

Man, I'm sitting here at the corner of Bathurst and College. He said there's a guy who walks around this neighborhood dressed up as a duck. And I know that's true because, I don't know, three months ago?

Six months ago.

Lewis:

It was probably somewhere between that.

Neil:

I made this coffee shop right behind me. I'm sitting on an orange bench. I'm leaning against a glass wall.

Up to my right is a sign that says El Rancho Restaurant. That's not this place. Behind me is a black sans-serif, Ariel Nero-type font with an orange shadow that says MANIC with the word COFFEE in an all-caps Areil with wide kerning underneath COFFEE. And I was sitting here. 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 Ateqah. 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:

I quacked at you.

Neil:

You just refused to talk to me.

Lewis:

No, I refused to use English words with you. Because? Because I was performing.

And I stay in character while I'm performing, almost in every circumstance I come into.

Neil:

How long is the performance?

Lewis:

How long was?

Neil:

How long is it? Are you walking around for like hours here?

Lewis:

It depends on my bladder. As soon as you have to pee, the show's over. When I get the feeling, I start to head home.

Neil:

So like, there's a viral media sensation in Toronto right now, covered on CBC, BlogTO. I know the Toronto Star was just taking pictures of you here, where you've done this, you've made this installation of like, you've taken over a streetcar track. Streetcar's going by now.

You can hear that. It says 506 Carlton on it. Red ribbons on the top and bottom, white ribbons in the middle.

Toronto Transit Commission. And you took over this station. So everyone's following you.

What's going, like, what is this? What are you doing? What is, what is  Lewis Mallard?

Lewis:

Lewis is me. And it's something I created to get myself back into the art world full time. I always wanted to be an artist, ever since I could remember wanting to be anything.

And I'm just trying to figure out how to do it.

Neil:

Ever since I wanted to be anything. So go back for me. I don't know your age.

I don't know your real name. Your age and your real name will not be shared today. Secret identities are interesting.

And I heard you say before I hit record, secrets are good. So now go back in time. When, where approximately did you come into being?

Where did you start to exist?

Lewis:

Like my hometown?

Neil:

Yeah.

Neil:

I could have just said that.

Lewis:

St. Catharines.

Neil:

St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada.

Lewis:

Correct.

Neil:

And I'm gonna guess sometime in the 70s.

Lewis:

Late 70s.

Neil:

Okay. And what was St. Catharines in the 70s like? And what kind of family were you born into?

Lewis:

Well, I don't have any memories from the 70s cause I was too young.

And I would say I remember early 80s and onwards. And what was it like? It was, I think I didn't have any idea what it was really like, because I was so insulated from the real world until I could start wandering away from home probably about the age of eight.

When I had a little bit of freedom to roam.

Neil:

Yeah. Freedom to roam. Something we seem to be losing, but which of course we seem aware that we're losing.

So we're kind of trying to get it back. What was your home life like? Brothers, sisters?

Lewis:

My sister, one sister. My parents were together until I think I was like about 12 years old is when they separated.

But I spent a lot of time alone playing by myself and trying to get my parents' attention and not ever getting it.

Neil:

Why not?

Lewis:

Cause they were, were they fighting? No. And they weren't fighting.

They were just not super engaged, I guess. Not extremely interested in what I was doing.

Neil:

Hands-off approach to parenting.

Lewis:

Very hands-off.

Neil:

Not uncommon.

Lewis:

I spent a lot of time.

Neil:

The opposite of helicopter, we'll call it a flyby.

Lewis:

Yeah. Yeah. From what I was told about when I was too young to remember, my nursery was a closet and I spent a lot of time alone in there.

And when they would come and check in on me, I would throw shit from my diaper at them because I was probably angry of being left alone for so long.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

And yeah, I was, I find it, I mean, of course I don't remember doing that, but I think that it's in my personality to do that.

Neil:

Wow. A shit flinger at a young age. Not because of being interrupted in his artistic pursuits, but rather because it's just like, dude, what are you doing?

And I get that from my youngest kid now. Like, you know, that whole like classic scenario of like the dog kind of facing the corner when you come home because you didn't take it for the walk with you or whatever. Like my youngest kid is like constantly perturbed about the lack of attention and it's a heartbreaking thing as a parent too.

Lewis:

I can imagine.

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah.

So the history, are they, are the Canadian? Are you from Canadian lineage? I don't want to guess much. And I won't, I don't know if I should describe your features for people or not. Cause I want to keep your identity secret, which it is.

Lewis:

Yeah. Well, let's just say, I don't know how long my family's been in Canada and I've never looked into, you know, anybody older than my grandparents. And I know very little about them, but my family's been here for, I think probably three or four, maybe five generations.

Neil:

Wow. Five generations.

Lewis:

That's a long time. I've never heard of, I didn't remember when I heard about anybody immigrating here. It would have been 1800s, I imagine.

Neil:

Wow. 1800s.

Lewis:

And, but my, my parents met.

Neil:

From where?

Lewis:

England and Scotland.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

I'm kind of.

Neil:

Yeah. You can do it.

Lewis:

I've never done a blood test or anything, but this is what I've been told.

Neil:

Some Viking in there, maybe.

Lewis:

I don't know about that, maybe. But yeah, they met in Hamilton and they were both raised in Hamilton and then moved to St. Catharines to start a family.

Neil:

Right, right, right. Okay. So we're, I want to describe the scene a little bit more for people so they can kind of picture us.

A woman's walking by with green hair, green arms, a skull, headscarf wrapped around her waist and kind of paintball colored tights on. There's another woman by in a blue dress with about three purses walking by, very hairy legs and black flip flops. We're in a pretty urban part of the city here.

There is a TTB trading company with Chinese characters on it across the street with bars in the windows. There's a pub and eatery. There's a, I don't know what that's like.

That looks like a condemned building. I mean, there's just like spray painted signs all over the cover of it. I don't know. Maybe it's a nightclub.

Lewis:

It is a nightclub.

Neil:

Oh, it's a nightclub. Nightclubs look like condemned buildings during the day.

Lewis:

Yeah.

A lot of them do, for sure. Yeah. I've never actually seen it open because I don't stay up that late.

Neil:

Right. Yeah. You're more of a daytime person. On your Instagram, you describe yourself as an interdimensional folk artist.

Lewis:

Well, a psychedelic folk artist.

Neil:

Oh, it says psychedelic folk artist.

Lewis:

It does.

Neil:

Did I make up the interdimensional part or is that an old iteration I saw?

Lewis:

No, no, no. It is the active description.

Neil:

Psychedelic folk artist.

Lewis:

Interdimensional.

Neil:

Oh, it just says interdimensional.

Lewis:

Correct.

Neil:

So why did you say psychedelic folk artist?

Lewis:

Because you left that part out.

Neil:

Oh, interdimensional psychedelic folk artist.

Lewis:

We got there.

Neil:

We got...

Oh my gosh. We're standing... So we're facing College Street.

There's one lane in front of us. Then there's three lanes. And between the remaining three lanes, there's a giant, long, 100 foot, 100 foot concrete flat oval with giant erect glass rectangles, which I think in the old days used to call bus shelters, but they don't shelter you from much, a metal railing.

And this is what's known as a streetcar stop. At the corner of the streetcar stop is an orange triangle, like a triangular prism, and like a polygon, a square polygon. You have, in broad daylight, repainted this to look like your Lewis Mallard face with a bright yellow bill, a bright green head as the male Mallard, the Drake Mallard has, and a blue eye with the black pupil.

You did this in the middle of the day. The post of it went viral. It says, Toronto legend has his own streetcar stop now.

You were just interviewed by the Toronto Star here, up on there in costume. What, what, what, where did this come from? You're painting, you're painting subway stations now?

What's going on here?

Lewis:

Well, I...

Neil:

Is this part of your interdimensionality?

Lewis:

It's, yeah, part of my multidisciplinary, I've always liked street art, since I, you know, first realized it was a thing in my teenage years.

But I never felt comfortable participating in it in the kind of stereotypical graffiti style that you see most of the time.

Neil:

And... Most street art is graffiti.

Lewis:

Well, yes, I would say it is of that style. The vast majority that you see.

Neil:

Somebody's just yelling, give me my money. That's okay, we're not gonna give him his money.

Lewis:

Just a local guy. Just a local guy.

That guy actually, and I told you this before, but it wasn't on that particular man. I see him very often in the neighborhood.

Neil:

In the costume.

Lewis:

While I'm in the costume.

Neil:

And what does he yell at you?

Lewis:

He is convinced that I am a government psy-op.

That I'm part of CSIS.

Neil:

I shouldn't laugh. He's probably got major schizophrenia.

Lewis:

It's not just him, he's got a few buddies.

I think they're all in the same group home in the neighborhood. And they're all convinced that I am a government psy-op. And they'll yell it at me.

They don't chase me, or they're not aggressive with me, but they'll yell at me from across the street and single me out. And I think it's hilarious.

Neil:

Do they ever physically touch you?

Lewis:

No, no.

Neil:

They don't punch you or anything?

Lewis:

No, no, no.

Neil:

Yeah, because if I saw a government psy-op dressed as a duck in my neighborhood. If you really believed it was one? If I really believed it was one, I wouldn't just let him walk away.

That's interesting about the schizophrenics, not to label, but in this neighborhood, they don't ever hurt you. Like I've walked around the streets a lot here and it can be quite scary for newcomers, but I've never had anyone ever come up to me or hit me or anything like that.

Lewis:

No, I did hear a rumor like the other day here in the cafe though that there was one of the local guys was starting to take swings at people.

Neil:

Oh my gosh.

Lewis:

And I really, that caught my attention.

I was like, oh, that's an escalation.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

And I mean, he was a big man too. I just about didn't, nobody would want him taking swings at anybody.

Neil:

No, nobody would want that. So we've got a few seeds planted here. We've got, we've got Lewis Mallard, age kind of five, six, seven, not ignored, but you know, flinging shit from his diaper when left alone for long periods of time in the closet.

Lewis:

I think I was younger than five.

Neil:

We've got Lewis Mallard, based on my math, somewhere in his forties, interdimensional psychedelic folk artist sitting on an orange bench inside of Manic Coffee at College and Bathurst in downtown Toronto with planes and streetcars and delivery trucks and bikes and people. This is a busy, there's people with UHN tags going by right now. There are nurses probably at the Toronto Western Hospital.

There's a guy walking in with this Narky Puppy t-shirt, tight black pants and black boots. Maybe he played a show last night. There's a couple of people walking by, look like high school students with their orange juices and their lattes.

You know, there's a lot going on in this corner. You've decorated the corner, both with your performance art and you're now leaving marks on the city, physical marks.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

Which some people would call illegal.

Lewis:

Yes, technically.

Neil:

Just do these two together for me, you know?

Lewis:

Well, I see it as vandalism, of course, but I'm trying to do it, I wanted to clean the thing up.

Neil:

Oh, I wanted to clean the thing up.

Lewis:

Well, it was, it seemed like there must've been an accident here a while ago because you could see two different kinds of concrete and repairs that have been done to the cement barrier.

Neil:

I thought you were going to say blood or something.

Lewis:

No, no, no. I'm sure they washed the blood away. But accidents for sure, because it's like- Some kind of accident.

Neil:

It's a tough corner here.

Lewis:

Yes. And I'm sure there'll be another accident, you know, at some point in the future.

Neil:

Yeah. There's always bikes and cars yelling at each other.

Lewis:

The paint was falling off. It had been poorly graffitied.

Neil:

Oh, poorly graffitied? How do you judge that?

Lewis:

Sloppily, carelessly.

Neil:

What if that person's calling themselves a four title name on Instagram too?

Lewis:

I mean, it's fine. You can do whatever they want.

Neil:

But what makes you say sloppy?

Lewis:

Well, in my mind, it looked like it was rushed and it was not, there was no thought, real thought put into it on placement. And it seemed like somebody who was afraid of being caught and trying to do it quickly and get away when my approach is a little bit different. I prefer to operate in broad daylight, turn it into a little bit of a performance and just act like I am supposed to be doing it.

I like to get dressed up in coveralls and wear a high visibility reflective gear.

Neil:

Oh my gosh. So you look like you've been licensed to do this. You're wearing high.

Lewis:

I bring pylons.

Neil:

Oh, you bring pylons. You keep pylons. Where do you get pylons? Amazon?

Lewis:

Pylons, no.

You just find them on the street sometimes. You know, there's a lot of pylons in construction sites.

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah.

Lewis:

And sometimes they go missing.

Neil:

Right, right, right. Okay. Another form of vandalism, but it's all in contribution of improving the decorative quality of this corner, which I shall say, and we're going to link to the exact post, obviously, at Lewis Mallard, L-E-W-I-S-M-A-L-L-A-R-D is kind of your online home. That's an Instagram handle, Lewis Mallard. I get the mallard because you're a duck.

Why Lewis? Although it seems totally appropriate for a duck to be called Lewis.

Lewis:

I guess. I got the name from the biggest inspiration behind the whole project, which was one of my all-time favorite artists named Maude Lewis.

Neil:

Oh, Maude Lewis.

Lewis:

A Canadian folk artist from Nova Scotia.

Neil:

How do you define folk?

Lewis:

How do I?

Neil:

You've got folk in your name too. What is folk? F-O-L-K, what even is that?

Lewis:

Well, to me, when I first discovered folk art, I didn't really appreciate it because I was really stuck in this mentality as a teenager that art had to be as like high skill as possible. I spent a lot of time as a teenager developing my drawing ability and trying to copy reality as close as I could.

Neil:

Right, it has to be realistic.

Lewis:

Yeah, and this is how I valued things. And I didn't understand how something that was naively done was good. It wasn't until I got a little older and

Neil:

Is that a word that you would attach to the word folk, is naive?

Lewis:

Well, to me, folk art is kind of done by people who just aren't real artists. I think everybody

Neil:

Is it music? Is it visual? Visual, is it?

Lewis:

Yeah, well, there's folk music, there's folk art, there's

Neil:

What is folk art? Like, if I go to a folk art festival, what do I see on the tables?

Lewis:

Oh, I've never been to one, so I wouldn't know.

I think I'm specifically just talking about the art and folk art done by people who aren't necessarily trained.

Neil:

Oh, that's what it means. It's something akin to amateur.

Lewis:

Yeah, in a way. And so I think there's a lot of lovely magic that happens when people don't completely understand what they're looking at. And then depict it in the way that they are able.

Neil:

I think there's a lot of magic when people don't fully understand what they're looking at. Is that what you said?

Lewis:

Yeah, it was along that line.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay.

Lewis:

And so when I first discovered Maude Lewis's artwork, I was in Halifax visiting my sister when she was living out there, and I went into the museum there, and she had a very large retrospective show. And there was a little house in the middle of the gallery. It was a replica of a house that she lived in with her husband.

And it was so small, and it blew my mind that, first of all, somebody lived in there. Two people lived in there.

Neil:

What city was this?

Lewis:

This was Halifax.

Neil:

Halifax, Nova Scotia, a maritime region of Canada, kind of above Maine for U.S. geography people.

Lewis:

Yeah, and I think that she lived outside of the main city.

If I remember correctly, watching some of the footage from when she was alive, they were very poor. And she saw a reasonable amount of success in her lifetime. Refused to sell her paintings for a lot of money.

And just, she lived her art right up until the end. She couldn't help it. It was like she surrounded herself with her art.

I really admired her dedication to being an artist. It's like she didn't have a choice. She was a crippled and very small person.

Neil:

Small?

Lewis:

Yeah, she was a very tiny person.

Neil:

Very tiny person?

Lewis:

Yeah. Maybe five foot tall or shorter. I think I was just, I was in art college at the time, and I was just trying to broaden my horizons.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lewis:

To expose myself to different things.

Neil:

Oh, okay. So, what's Lewis made out of? Paper mache?

Lewis:

Largely paper mache.

Neil:

You've got like chicken wire in there?

Lewis:

No, that was the original. When I didn't know how to make a costume, and I made my very first one, I used chicken wire and paper mache.

And I didn't know how to do it, but I knew I could do it. And so I just threw it together in whatever way I thought it would work. And hoped that if it struck a chord with people, that I would have an opportunity to make a 2.0 and a 3.0. And improve upon the structure, the way it looked.

Neil:

And you began doing this in 2021?

Lewis:

In 2019, September.

Neil:

2019, in Hamilton, Ontario.

Lewis:

In Hamilton, yes.

Neil:

Where you were living at the time.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

Okay. So five years ago, you'd make a paper mache duck. You start walking around.

How'd you know? You said, if it struck a nerve, if it was popular, I would do a 2.0, 3.0. Well, how'd you know it did? What happened then?

Lewis:

Well, the pandemic happened. I launched the project at Supercrawl in September, 2019.

I was living in my studio right downtown Hamilton. I'd been thinking about this project for about a year, year and a half. About re-entering the art world full-time.

I was living in a city that I knew very well, but I did not know many people. I'd only ever visited family there. I had not taken up residence in Hamilton for a while.

I had not been there for any length of time to build a friends or community. And I wanted to stay and start my career in Hamilton again. I thought it was a smarter choice than trying to come into Toronto and compete with the way more artists here, people who try harder.

And this is more competition. And at Hamilton, I thought that, although it's a growing city and there's a lot of artists there that- It's historically known as like a steel town, like they made Stelco Steel.

Neil:

It was gentrifying for a long time. Now it's probably an up and coming artists, 500,000 person type of town, two hours or an hour and a half away from Toronto. Just a bit of, is that right?

Lewis:

Yeah, more or less.

Neil:

Please correct it.

Lewis:

I think that it, well, it's 60 kilometers roughly. Depending on traffic, it could be an hour or two.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah.

Lewis:

And it's certainly a city that is lifting itself up. A lot of people are moving there from Toronto, from, well, other places as well.

But it seems like the largest influx of people into Hamilton are Torontonians who can afford to buy a house there and have sold their house or their condo in Toronto for a lot of money and then move to Hamilton. And I thought, I knew people, many people who were doing this exact thing right as I was starting this project.

Neil:

Doing this exact thing?

Lewis:

Moving to Hamilton from Toronto.

Neil:

Okay, okay, not the art project.

Lewis:

No, no.

Neil:

Okay.

Lewis:

No, and having made, being able to afford something in Hamilton that they could never afford in Toronto.

Neil:

Right, right, right.

Lewis:

And so I thought, I understand the demographic of people that are moving here.

And I wanted to try to talk to them first, to build, this was my target demographic for audience was people who were in their 30s to 40s and who I would relate to. And I also knew about Hamilton that people who move there, they buy in really quick. They fall in love with the city.

There's a lot of charming things about the city. And before you know it, they've gone to the first Hamilton Tiger-Cats game and they're saying, Oskie-wee-wee.

Neil:

Oskie-wee-wee?

Lewis:

It's like a Tiger-Cats thing.

Neil:

Oh, okay. Yeah, Oskie-wee-wee.

Lewis:

That's a Canadian football league team. Yeah, I think it's some kind of chant they do at the game. I have been to a Tiger-Cats game, but only as a child.

Neil:

Hopefully not problematic.

Lewis:

No.

Neil:

We have no idea what it means.

Lewis:

I don't think so.

Neil:

Okay, okay.

Lewis:

I think if it was problematic- It would've canceled in two years.

Yes, it would've been gone by now. Yeah, no, it's synonymous.

Neil:

It changed a few sports teams' names up here.

Lewis:

Yeah, no, right now there's, I think the Tiger-Cats are okay. And so I knew people fall in love with Hamilton quick. And so I thought, if I can be part of that, then that will give me a bit of a boost early on.

I wanted to try to find the quickest way to developing an audience so that I could make a living off my art.

Neil:

Wow. I wanted to find the quickest way to develop an audience so that I can make a living off my art.

Neil:

Yeah.

Neil:

It wasn't like a pure artistic motive.

Lewis:

Well, it was also that.

Neil:

I'm not saying, I'm not trying to take that away from you. I'm just saying, you're using words like target market.

Lewis:

Well, unfortunately, I think the world we live in has forced me to think this way. I would rather not think this way. I would rather create purely for the sake of creating and not think too much about competing with other artists.

I don't like to compete with other artists, but I feel like I'm forced to if I want to make a meaningful living at something I'm passionate about. And so for me, Lewis was

Neil:

It's a good point. If you don't make it sustainable financially, then it's therefore not sustainable.

Lewis:

Yeah, well, it can be sustainable in that you do it just because you're passionate about it and you love to make things.

Neil:

The ghost in red beard has really given us the stare down here.

Lewis:

Well, this isn't a common thing that people see walking down the street.

Neil:

No, but he's giving us the angry look. He's walking away now, so I think we're okay. You're gonna have to protect me here.

Lewis:

You'll be okay.

Neil:

If you don't make it sustainable financially, it's not sustainable. If it's not sustainable, you're not practicing your art. So you're just, part of what you're pulling in here, and I've heard you talk in other interviews saying that your life goal is to be able to not look at prices on the grocery store.

I've heard you say that in multiple interviews.

Lewis:

Yeah, I mean, I would love to.

Neil:

So we're not talking like you're trying to make a billion dollars here. Your life goal is to not look at prices at the grocery store.

Lewis:

No, I want to make it, I don't want to be greedy. I want to be able to provide for a good life for myself and in conjunction with what my wife does and makes, and I want to be able

Neil:

An opera singer, I read. We're gonna get to that later.

Lewis:

An incredibly talented woman.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

And I would love to be able to treat the people in my life that I love and admire really well.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

And share anything I get in excess, I would love to share and contribute to making this world a better place.

Neil:

Wow, wow, I knew I liked you from the beginning. So now it's been five years. Are you looking at the prices on the groceries now?

Lewis:

Absolutely.

Neil:

Okay, so we're not at that point yet.

Lewis:

No, we're nearing.

Neil:

Five years as a full-time artist, as Lewis Mallard. Yes. You've got, I think as of this morning, 8,120 followers on Instagram.

Lewis:

Okay.

Neil:

I mean, I think that's what I checked this morning. Am I right?

Lewis:

I think it's somewhere around there.

Neil:

Maybe a bit higher.

Lewis:

It's always give or take five.

Neil:

Oh, you go up about five a day?

Lewis:

Well, I'd say it depends. Lately, it's been between five and 20 a day.

Neil:

Oh, wow. All the press is helping.

Lewis:

The legwork I'm putting in is helping.

Neil:

I see the sly grin on your face with the legwork. You're literally walking around the city for hours a day dressed as a duck. You're indulging people that want to take selfies.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

People are asking you for autographs. You quack at people. You dance.

When I saw you for the first time, you did a jump for me.

Lewis:

Nobody's ever asked me for an autograph. Actually, not true. I did autograph a beer can once inside the costume for somebody.

That was a very odd request, but I did it.

Neil:

Well, you had a beer named after you.

Lewis:

I did.

Neil:

See, that's another thing. So in Hamilton, a craft brewery has what, like the Lewis Mallard Ale?

Lewis:

Well, they did for a very short time, yes.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah.

You're so humble, though. Every time, I keep trying to lodge you with compliments and you keep trying to say, well, not every day. I don't work that hard.

Lewis:

Well, I mean-

Neil:

Yes, you do. I've seen you work it. You're painting a streetcar stop. How long does it take you to paint that?

Lewis:

Roughly three hours.

Neil:

In the coveralls, you have to get the pylons. You have to pilfer the pylons. That's the first step.

Lewis:

Pilfer the pylons.

Neil:

You gotta get an orange vest. Not many people have one of those handy.

Lewis:

You can buy them at the dollar store. They're real cheap. I'm resourceful.

Neil:

You're making merchandise. You're working hard at this.

Lewis:

Yeah, yes.

Neil:

You're working hard at this.

Lewis:

I want to build a

Neil:

Acknowledge your work. It's good.

Lewis:

No, I agree that I work hard, but I don't go out in the costume every day. I go out in the costume maybe twice a week at the most, weather permitting. Yeah, there's like kind of specific things.

Neil:

Okay, considering how rarely you're going out, you get a lot of press. You get a lot. Every time you go out, there's tons of pictures coming online.

People are, you know.

Lewis:

I'm trying here.

Neil:

Yeah, you're working hard.

Lewis:

Advertising is expensive. Yeah.

Neil:

So we've got two, I think, starting to come into focus photos of you right now, which is a wonderful way to do it, which I think is, you know, we've got this kid, fifth generation, from English guys in kind of small town, Ontario. Parents are kind of not that there. You're throwing shit from the closet when they open the door.

I mean, I'm really fixed on that image, as you can tell. Now we've got this early forties, married to an opera singer, Lewis Mallard today, who is doing graffiti and performance art, inter-dimensional psychedelic folk artist. We haven't got to the psychedelic part.

And somewhere in between the two is like this 30 to 35 years of growing up from then to now. And I have a pile of three books here. You were really kind enough to give us three formative books.

Is this one that I'm tapping the first one that came into the picture here?

Lewis:

Yeah, it's the first book I ever remember owning.

Neil:

Wow, the first book I remember owning. So if you don't mind, what I'll do for the audience here now is I will spend a minute giving them a background of the book, and then I'll ask you to tell us about your relationship with us. And I don't know if you don't mind, but if you could take us from the shit-flicking child up into this book, I wanna understand what your life looked like, the good, the bad, the ugly, the highs, the lows, like what was happening here?

This book is wonderful. I was really, really, I really loved reading it. So interesting and different.

The book is called Lu Pan, L-U space P-A-N, in brackets, The Carpenter's Apprentice by Demi Hitz, H-I-T-Z or Z, originally published in 1978 by Prentice Hall. The cover is pure red. I mean, mine that I found online is literally pure red.

It's just red.

Lewis:

It's just like the copy I had

Neil:

Oh, really? So it's just like a red linen thin hardcover. There it is hitting the microphone so you know what the book sounds like. But the cover online is fifth century BC, China, a woman holding an ax in one hand, a piece of lumber in the other with a big red and gold pagoda behind her. I say woman, but that's actually probably not a woman.

That's probably Lu Pan.

Lewis:

I think that is. I think that is Lu Pan.

Neil:

That would probably not be a woman then. Lu Pan not being a woman. I believe that the gender is not revealed, but I believe that's the case.

Demi Hitz is currently 82 years old. Did you know that?

Lewis:

I didn't know that. But I actually, I learned, I didn't even realize that Demi Hitz was the author until I was searching for this book to send you a link to it because I no longer have the copy I did when I was a child. I gave it to my nephew.

Oh, that's nice. And hoped that he would find something in it that I found in it. So I didn't realize what I loved about this book until I was older.

Neil:

Yeah, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You didn't realize what you loved about the book until, oh, that's interesting. So Demi Hitz, quickly, she's created over a hundred books for children.

Most of them are adaptations of Chinese folk tales, fables and nursery rhymes, interestingly. Lu Pan, the carpenter's apprentice, sets the tone for most of her later work. It's part biography, part adapted folk tale.

The book tells the story of a young apprentice growing up in China in the fifth century BC and how he ultimately becomes a master carpenter and one of China's greatest architects and inventors. So now we've got a real story weaved in. File this one Dewey Decimal under 694.092 for technology slash building slash carpentry semi-colon stair building. That is the exact Dewey Decimal category. That is a strange category. Carpenting and stair building.

You got to squish those together if you're Melville Dewey.  Lewis, tell us about your relationship with Lu Pan, the carpenter's apprentice by Demi Hitz.

Lewis:

Well, this book was given to me by my grandmother and I only remember that because it's written in the book.

Neil:

I love inscriptions.

Lewis:

Yeah.

And I was obsessed with this book as a kid. From before I could read to, I would just look at the photo, the drawings. I love the drawings.

They're very delicate and detailed. Black and white line drawings. And then once I could read

Neil:

Demi does those as well, by the way.

Lewis:

I believe so, yes.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah. And- Delicate line drawings is a great way to put it.

Lewis:

Yeah, I think.

Neil:

Kind of like the Giving Tree a little bit type sort of style.

I mean, some of- I'm not sure what that is. The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. I'm just noticing on some of the drawings, but also the pagodas, the lumber, the horses, the pastoral fields, the people in long flowing robes.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Delicate line drawings.

Lewis:

But once I could read well enough to understand what the story was about, I just loved the idea that this little kid had, was an apprentice to this master and was being- This knowledge was being passed down and I always wanted this in my life.

And I didn't really realize how much I wanted this until I think I was on my way through high school. And I was searching for this kind of person in my life that would take me under their wing and teach me everything they know. Because I, and I'm sure it has something to do with my relationship with my father, who never answered any real questions I had.

I would ask him why. I was a very curious kid and the answer was always like, because I told you so. Or something along those lines.

So if I ever wanted to know anything, I had to go find out for myself what it was. And my parents were not necessarily very artistic. They didn't, my father had a minor passion for carpentry when I was a child and, but he stopped doing that.

Neil:

What did your parents do?

Lewis:

My father was a salesman. He sold mechanical, industrial tools, that kind of stuff.

My mother always worked for the government. She was a, she worked at the post office when I was really young and then worked for the land registry office.

Neil:

She answered your questions?

Lewis:

A little bit. I think I

Neil:

Seems like you were kind of like ignored almost. I don't want to put words in your mouth.

Lewis:

Yeah, no, no, I feel like very much. Yeah, I was told to go, you know, go away, go play somewhere else.

Neil:

Did they not want to have kids?

Lewis:

I honestly don't know. I think that there was a short time in their lives that they were in love and happy and I never saw that.

Neil:

And so when your grandmother gave you this book, was this before your parents got divorced?

Lewis:

Oh yeah.

Neil:

They got divorced at 12. The memories, the earliest memories in the closet were probably like three, four, five. Take us through the seven years.

Lewis:

I don't remember, I don't even remember being in the closet.

I do remember having my own bedroom in the same house. I think the reason that my sister and I were put in the closet when we were kids is because it was close to my parents' room, but it was, and it was small enough and contained that, you know, I think they let us cry ourselves to sleep. That kind of thing.

Neil:

Yeah, of course, yeah. Cry it out.

That was the popular thing at the time.

Lewis:

Very, yeah.

Neil:

And did you not once tell me like maybe months ago when I was first getting to know you that your dad also did a lot of drugs?

Lewis:

Yeah, he certainly did. He liked drugs a lot. I didn't see it.

It wasn't like he was just getting high all the time at home. He kept it away from home. And I didn't really learn about this until later in life.

You know, I knew my dad liked to drink. He liked to party. Once I was old enough and I learned what marijuana smoke smells like, it kind of, I had a flashback to being like, oh, I always remember that smell coming out of the basement.

Neil:

Oh my God, yeah, of course.

Lewis:

You know, when I was a kid.

Neil:

Did you not tell me that they were also getting high at work?

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Like what kind of stuff was happening? So we're in Hamilton, we're in the 70s and 80s. Tell me what this workplace scene is like.

Lewis:

You know, a rare story my father told me about himself was it started with the time that he accidentally did heroin and he didn't intend to snort heroin. He intended to snort cocaine. And he would tell me that when he would go into the office, he worked in Mississauga.

He drove from St. Catharines to Mississauga most mornings and most of the time he would come home. Sometimes he would stay in Mississauga overnight. But he said when he would show up to work most mornings, there would be a line or two of coke on his desk.

And he would just snort it to get the day started. And then one time it wasn't coke and it hit a little different. And he's lucky that he didn't overdose because they're very different things.

Neil:

Yeah, who was putting cocaine on his desk?

Lewis:

I think it was a salesman or somebody that worked in his office. Just like, this is how we do it.

Yeah, I don't remember. The only employee or the other co-worker of his that I knew was his secretary, which I later found out he was having an affair with the whole time he was with my mother.

Neil:

You found out a lot later.

Lewis:

Sorry?

Neil:

You found out, you got a lot of scoop later.

Like you didn't obviously know this stuff.

Lewis:

Yeah, we had to pry. My sister and I had to like combine information, you know, that we were getting from different resources.

Neil:

That's a common sibling tactic.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

I hope, I hope my sister and I can continue to do that as my parents get very old.

Lewis:

Yeah, I hope your kids do it behind your back.

Neil:

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Because?

Lewis:

I think it's necessary and it's good relationship building stuff.

Neil:

Yes, exactly. So you find out your dad is having an affair with his secretary, snorting coke every morning at a sales job, accidentally did heroin once. You were not ignored, capital I, but you know, there's the tilt that way. You got a grandmother in the picture.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Who's buying you books.

Lewis:

Yeah, my family, my father was a big reader and my, I was never very close with my grandmother, either of them.

She lived in Stoney Creek. We would see her, you know, once a month, you know, a few times a year kind of thing. And, and it, it was for a birthday before I was old enough to remember or Christmas that I got this book.

And so it probably just sat in my room with like other books I was, you know, picture books. And so I wish I knew why she chose this book. And, you know, it, it didn't strike me as an odd book to have as a kid when I was a kid, but as I got older, I thought this is a little bit of a.

Neil:

I never heard, it certainly is, yeah.

Lewis:

A strange book to give a kid.

Neil:

Very unique book. This boy, you know, he's challenged by the carpenter to do all kinds of incredible feats, like spend a year, you know, lifting all these stones and, you know, building this crazy pagodas and he does it.

And then the guy's reward is like, do it again for another year. Like it was, you know, he's put through all these essentially Sisyphean type of feats, like, you know, like these endless challenges. You probably related to that though.

It sounds like because you had this desire to have a connection and a learner, learnee role with your own parents and your father, which was kind of replicated in this book, but you cultivated, it sounds like an astounding sense of independence from a very young age.

Lewis:

I always wanted, I hated being restricted. I never wanted to do anything necessarily bad. I just didn't want to be restricted.

I, you know, as soon as I could wander away from home, I started wandering away and pushing the boundaries and, but also trying to be respectful at the same time, you know, like not, didn't want to worry my parents too much. You know?

Neil:

What do you mean wander away? So you're eight, nine, 10 years old. What are you doing? Where are you going?

Lewis:

If I could walk around the block, if I could, you know, there was major streets. I lived on a major street in St. Catharines, which would have been, you know, dangerous for a young kid to be crossing willy-nilly. But once I was old enough and my parents trusted me to use crosswalk properly and, you know, then I could walk to a convenience store that was four or five blocks away and not one that was just on the same block.

Neil:

And this was all by yourself?

Lewis:

Yeah, it would be by myself.

Neil:

What was happening in your head? So an eight and nine and 10 year old today does not have A, time by themselves.

I mean, just B, but time in their own head. Like they've got screens and they've got video game systems and they've got, you know, there's, I don't see kids doing what it sounds like you did. And as you get older here, I'm picturing you as a kid, any artistic gleanings early?

What were the first demonstrations of your art history?

Lewis:

I distinctly remember a moment in daycare. It was either in a before school or an after school program at the YMCA. I spent a lot of my childhood also at the YMCA in St. Catharines. And I would spend time alone in the daycare drawing on paper with, you know, pastels and crayons. I was probably five or six years old and I taped a piece of paper on the wall and I was just drawing on it. And I thought, this is what I want to do forever.

Like, I want to be an artist.

Neil:

Wow.

Neil:

This is what I want to do forever. Where'd that come from?

Lewis:

I just, I really enjoyed any time I had when I was drawing.

I don't think that I showed any exceptional ability from a young child.

Neil:

Most kids must feel some of that when they're drawing. I mean, drawing is such a...

Lewis:

Yeah, it's a...

Neil:

I'm a big fan of Austin Kleon, who was a past guest on 3 Books. And he just really espouses like drawing as an adult. And, you know, adults are like, oh yeah, I guess I should, you know, we forget that kids love drawing. Kids love drawing. We all love drawing.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

You just never stopped.

Lewis:

No, I never did. I didn't, I mean, there was periods in my life where I went without drawing for quite a while.

And if I could go back in time and give myself a shake, I think I would.

Neil:

So what kind of student were you? A kid were you? What group did you fit into?

What, you know, how would you define yourself in regards to like student groups? Socially, I mean.

Lewis:

Early on, I didn't feel like I had a lot of say in who my friends were. It was kind of like, I was friends with whoever were the kids of my friends, my parents' friends. And you're just kind of stuck with those kids.

Neil:

And then as you get into high school, you know, in high school, there's like, I don't want to put labels on it, but most schools have like the jocks, the goths, the nerds, the, you know, how does this work for you?

Lewis:

Well, by high school, I was really starting to sort out, you know, who I wanted to be around or who I related to and who I didn't relate to. And I dealt with a lot of bullies as a young kid, as I think probably most boys do, unless you're the bully. That dynamic probably still plays itself out the same way.

And so once I was in high school and I started to really feel like I was developing my own personal style and slowly starting to realize like who I am and where I am, my place in the world, I fell in with a bunch of other students who were weird and didn't fit into that jock narrative.

Neil:

Whoa, whoa, whoa. So you fell into students that were weird. That's how you define your group.

Lewis:

Well, weird in that they were not like the stereotypical, popular in style dressing.

Neil:

Did I hear you once say in another interview, they were the only group that would have me? Am I putting words in your mouth?

Lewis:

That's how I felt, yes. It was something like that. You know, we all kind of fell in together.

We just got called the freaks basically by the popular kids. We would all move our lockers to be in the same hallway together.

Neil:

Oh, interesting. Probably weren't allowed to do that.

Lewis:

No.

Neil:

Early vandalism.

Lewis:

We had assigned lockers, yeah. But we found a secluded area of the school.

Neil:

Oh, wow.

Lewis:

And took the bolts off of the bolted up lockers and just put our locks on them.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

And then we would

Neil:

Took the bolts off? That's ballsy.

Lewis:

Well, I mean, I guess it felt like just the right amount of bad. It didn't feel like it was too bad.

Neil:

The right amount of bad.

Lewis:

We weren't doing anything irreversible. We weren't really vandalizing. We were just

Neil:

You felt like you were on okay moral grounds. This is for a community you're trying to develop here.

Lewis:

Well, we just wanted a place that we could go and be left alone.

Neil:

Oh, interesting. We wanted a place we could go, be left alone. And what we did to do that felt like the right amount of bad.

Lewis:

Yeah, I guess. And I think that plays itself out as we get further along here. But there was a fair amount of drug and alcohol abuse.

More than a fair, like a lot.

Neil:

What kind of drugs?

Lewis:

Everything.

Everything? Grade nine and 10? Grade nine and 10 was- Or 10 and 11? Alcohol, marijuana. Grade 10, 11, we're getting mushrooms, LSD, cocaine, heroin. And I think that I saw, I mean, by the time I was in grade 11 and grade 12, I knew multiple people that were shooting up at school, before school, after school.

Neil:

When you say shooting up, you mean heroin?

Lewis:

Heroin, cocaine, a mixture of both. I saw it all. Shooting up before and after school.

Neil:

So I'm sorry to say this in a, I don't mean this in a derogatory way, but like, if you're shooting heroin twice a day in high school.

Lewis:

More.

Neil:

But you're also going to school?

Lewis:

Yeah.

Sometimes, sometimes they wouldn't show up.

Neil:

I just, I just, I just would equate, sorry, like, am I way off on this? How does the combination of shooting heroin multiple times a day at age 15 or 16 tie together with being a studious person?

Lewis:

They weren't necessarily studious. They had to be out of the house.

Neil:

Okay. They just needed a place to go. Okay, so we've got a couple parameters of the freak class here. We've got the lockers moving together.

We've got the 10 or 20 students throughout the grades, or maybe over two grade splits. There's the drug and alcohol growth, but not for you. You're doing no drugs, no alcohol, right?

Lewis:

Exactly.

Neil:

Okay. What else defines that community?

I find this community really interesting. Like, it's a really nice window into the world here.

Lewis:

Grunge, like grunge music was starting to become very popular at the time.

Neil:

Oh, okay.

Lewis:

So the, you know.

Neil:

Pearl Jam Nirvana?

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Sound Garden, that kind of stuff?

Lewis:

All of that kind of stuff. So there was, there was the grungy, there was the grungy kids.

There was the.

Neil:

That's how you dressed too? Like the, like ripped pants and plaids?

Lewis:

Exactly, yeah. Ripped jeans. A lot of Salvation Army chic.

And there was the goth kids. There was always goth kids.

Neil:

But they were part of your group?

Lewis:

Yep.

Neil:

Oh, the goths were part of the freaks, a subset.

Lewis:

The punks.

Neil:

Oh, the punks.

Lewis:

And the ravers.

Neil:

The ravers.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Goths, punks, ravers.

Lewis:

Yeah, there was.

Neil:

Were you one of those three?

Lewis:

I probably fell in closer to the grunge.

Neil:

So there's grunge, goth, punk, and raver.

Lewis:

He certainly, there was.

Neil:

What's a raver and a punk? How do they differ in appearance and behavior? How do I identify the difference between a raver and a punk?

We're talking like, like lanolin mohawks here?

Lewis:

This is like 90s, 90s raver culture. So we're talking like humongous pants.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

A lot of fluorescent colors. And like big plastic jewelry.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah. Okay, I can picture that. And then what about the punks?

90s punks?

Lewis:

The punks, I.

Neil:

I heard Andrew Hieberman once in an interview with Rich Roll, by the way, that his childhood, he describes it as like the movie Kids.

Lewis:

Oh, I related to that movie so hard. When I felt like I was watching my teenage years go by.

Neil:

That's exactly what he said.

Lewis:

Just in a bigger city.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

Except in New York.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

I saw that same kind of violence, that skateboard beating. I saw that happen.

Neil:

Skateboard beatings?

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

But the skaters are not part of your group.

Lewis:

No, they were.

Neil:

Oh, skaters were also part of Freaks.

Lewis:

We were just about every subculture that didn't.

Neil:

Identify with the mainstream big ones.

Lewis:

Yeah, yes. We were kind of a catch-all for everybody who was left behind.

And.

Neil:

You saw the skateboard beatings?

Lewis:

Sure.

I mean, I.

Neil:

Who would you guys beat up?

Lewis:

Who?

We didn't beat anybody up.

Neil:

But you saw skateboard beatings.

Lewis:

Oh, yes.

I, well, that was, I was in Hamilton at a skate park when I saw that happen.

Neil:

Oh, it wasn't your friends?

Lewis:

It wasn't in high school, no.

Neil:

Okay, okay. There was a lot of fights and fighting. Stealing stuff from variety stores.

Lewis:

That's what happens in the movie.

Neil:

The drugs though, heavy, heavy drugs.

Lewis:

Yes. Most of that happened after school. It wasn't until later in high school when the real addicts were doing their thing.

Neil:

In the school lot.

Lewis:

Sorry?

Neil:

Where were they shooting up?

Lewis:

Oh, bathrooms.

Neil:

And where were they getting heroin from?

Lewis:

They're drug dealers. We all knew who they were.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

There were kids slightly older than us that either dropped out of school or had graduated school and not done anything.

Neil:

So if, I'm sorry, you know, so there's this, I think, well-held belief that we are most influenced by our culture than anything, you know? And Maria Popova, past guest on 3 Books, says that her number one piece of advice to her younger self or any younger person is to try to see the culture you are a part of and ignore its norms for your own benefit. You don't have to do X, Y, and Z as it may be propaned to.

She grew up in Bulgaria behind the Iron Curtain, so it's a little different, but that was her perspective. And yet you were surrounded by these kids who had a deep artistic sensibility like you did, but you didn't start drinking, you didn't do any drugs. And in fact, not to foreshadow here, I believe you have a large tattoo on your stomach that says the word straight edge.

Lewis:

I would classify it as a medium tattoo across my stomach that says straight edge. So it was my first tattoo.

Neil:

How did you resist this? How did you resist the drinking drug culture?

Your parents weren't around, they weren't cared, they didn't look, they weren't checking on you.

Lewis:

No, they would have been.

Neil:

They weren't looking through your knapsack.

Lewis:

My father would have encouraged it to a degree.

Neil:

Oh my gosh.

Lewis:

Not to a toxic, he wouldn't have encouraged me to do hard drugs, but I was free to try a sip of this and that and the other thing anytime I wanted as a kid. And I tried beer a couple times and it was always disgusting. And as I was in high school and I started to go to parties where people were drinking, grade nine, grade 10, I tried a beer, I just didn't, I thought it was disgusting.

Neil:

Yeah, it is.

Lewis:

And once I saw how people were acting, I was like, I don't want to act like that. I didn't, I just didn't have the, I didn't want to do it.

Neil:

I'm a parent of four boys who I desperately don't want them to try alcohol and cannabis and these drugs in high school. And you have managed to do this, even though you were immersed in a culture that did the opposite. So I'm curious for what lessons or ideas or principles or what actually created this behavior inside you.

Lewis:

I just didn't have.

Neil:

To the point where you identify with it. I mean, you just have a medium sized stomach that labels yourself as straight edge, that you got at what age?

Lewis:

At 18.

Neil:

You got at 18. So you already were labeling yourself sort of antithetical to the culture.

Lewis:

Yeah, I, you know, it was, it was a movement that the straight edge, I didn't know anybody else who was straight edge. I was just told by some of the punk rock and the hardcore guys that got to know me. And they're like, oh, you're straight edge.

And I was like, what is that? And then they would, they would tell me, it's like, oh, you know, somebody who doesn't drink or smoke or use drugs. And I was like, oh, I have an identity.

You know?

Neil:

Oh, interesting. It was partly that you connected with that label.

Lewis:

Yeah, in a way, you know, I thought, I listened to some of the music for a while. What music? Like hardcore, straight edge.

Neil:

Hardcore, straight edge?

Lewis:

Well, it was like in the genre of hardcore, which is like a subset of metal, I guess.

Neil:

Okay, so within metal, there's hardcore, within metal, hardcore, there's straight edge. Not to be confused with Christian rock.

Lewis:

So it would be, yes, more like straight edge rock, where they are talking about their values. And for me, it was all a little bit too preaching.

Neil:

Do you remember any of the lyrics or the bands or the songs?

Lewis:

I do not know.

Neil:

Straight edge music.

Lewis:

I would know it if I heard it. Even though you had no other straight edge friends.

Neil:

Yeah, so I was- They never forced you to, people weren't pushing alcohol and weed on you?

Lewis:

The odd person would offer. I would get teased a little bit, but I never felt real peer pressure. Yeah, there was never, nobody ever like put their arm around me and was like, you better take a hit of this.

Yeah, it sounds like one of the defining- We were pretty respectful of each other.

Neil:

Pieces of your culture was that we took anybody who wasn't welcome anywhere else. So by definition, that is a culture of acceptance. Yeah, we were- Maybe we all should envy hanging out with the freaks in high school, because they're the open-hearted, open-minded kindness group.

Lewis:

We were very, we tried to be. Of course, it wasn't all good, but-

Neil:

The odd skateboard beating. That wasn't your group though.

Lewis:

No, but we did get in fights from time to time.

Neil:

Really, over what?

Lewis:

Over being bullied.

Neil:

Oh, you'd fight with the other groups.

Lewis:

Well, if somebody was picking on you, if somebody had, I can't tell you how many times I got pushed into a locker, threatened to get beat up.

I mean, I was also antagonizing in my own way. I would make my own t-shirts that said, jocks suck.

Neil:

Oh, wow.

Lewis:

And I would wear it in high school.

Neil:

Wow, so the merchandise streak started young.

Lewis:

I did make my own t-shirts.

Neil:

You're wearing a Lewis Mallard red baseball cap now, I should mention.

Lewis:

Correct.

Neil:

For those that want to support your work and your art, you sell merchandise.

Lewis:

I do, yes.

Neil:

And so at Lewis Mallard, there's presumably a buy button, because I'm sure Instagram's got the mallification happening.

Lewis:

Yes, I don't have that set up, but I have a website.

Neil:

Okay, well, you got to get the buy button now that I just talked about it. Now there's some pressure on you. Oh, no.

Before this is released, the TikTok store is taking over Amazon. Haven't you heard, Lewis?

Neil:

Come on.

Neil:

Okay, so you were in a kindness-based group. You accepted everybody else. You accepted everybody.

You were in group. You were in the artistic nerve we can fear. Was it also like, did you have an art teacher anywhere in high school?

Was there some sort of art, you know?

Lewis:

I had one art teacher who tried very hard to keep me in school. I got suspended a lot. I neared expulsion a few times.

Neil:

What for?

Lewis:

For having a smart mouth, mostly. I did a lot of

Neil:

Any examples? Any memories? And anything you said to a teacher once that you can still recall, or others?

Lewis:

Well, one thing that got me, one of my suspensions was from wearing my hat in school. We weren't allowed to wear hats in school.

Neil:

Neither were we. That's it, just wore your hat?

Lewis:

No, it was after school. I was walking through the hallways after the bell had gone and was on my way out, and I just had my hat on my head.

Figured it was after school hours. I knew I was riding a line. I liked to ride the line.

And a particular teacher who I didn't get along with very well walked past me and snatched it off my head and said, you can have this on Monday. And I didn't like that. And so I snuck up behind him and I ripped it out of his hand.

And I said, fuck you.

Neil:

Oh my gosh.

Lewis:

And I said, I'll see you on Monday. And then I went home and I knew I was gonna get suspended. To me, it was worth it because I really didn't like this guy.

Neil:

And it was a moral thing here. I mean, even if you were violating the rules, you shouldn't grab it off your head. There's like, you know, that's a- It's a bit over the top.

Lewis:

Had he approached me in a respectful manner, I would have been in a completely different scenario.

Neil:

Wow. Yeah, as Omar Little says in The Wire, man's gotta have a code. Anything else that you recall?

Anything else your smart brain can remember that your smart mouth said to get you in trouble back then? And any other teachers like, you know, kind of light you up back then? Like keep taking us through that time period of your life.

It sounds pretty formative.

Lewis:

Well, the same teacher that I took the hat from, Mr. Meisner, if you're out there, I'm sorry I gave you such a hard time.

Neil:

That's nice.

Lewis:

You know, you gotta forgive and forget.

Neil:

I hope he hears that.

Lewis:

I doubt he will.

Neil:

Well, you doubt it, but you don't know.

Lewis:

I don't even know if he's alive.

Neil:

You're going Banksy, brother. This is like a secret identity performance artist in the city that's moving around and dropping stuff all over the place. Like, this is exact Banksy.

I mean, it was two years before.

Lewis:

Well, let's hope. He was substituting in an art class I was in. And I was doing an independent study at the time.

So I was going into the dark room in the photo lab in my high school. We were fortunate enough to have an old school photography studio in the school. And I spent a lot of time developing my own photos.

Neil:

Yeah. Dark room, that's great. Yeah, we had one too.

That's cool.

Lewis:

Yeah, so we got to take out cameras, take photos, develop the film, enlarge it myself. And so I was working on an independent study that was not in the actual classroom I had to leave. And so when he said, all right guys, just go about your work.

I got up to walk to the dark room. He said, where are you going? And I said, you could do my work.

And he said, no, you have to do it in the room. And I said, well, it's not in the room. He's like, well, do something in the room.

And I was like, but my work is not in the room. And it went on like that. And then I told him a couple of choice words.

Neil:

Motherfuck you.

Lewis:

Basically, and I just started to walk to the principal's office. And then he told me to go. And I said, I'm already going there because I know you're gonna send me

Neil:

You rendered his future advice moot by heading there already.

Lewis:

Yes, I knew where I was heading. I knew that as soon as I

Neil:

How many suspensions is an expulsion? For us, our high school was three. And we knew the kids that had one or two.

Lewis:

I don't remember.

Neil:

It was three strikes, you know, three suspensions, you're out of school.

Lewis:

Yeah, so Perry Vakulich, great dude. I admired him. I was getting in a lot of trouble at the time.

And the principal of the school had asked him to have a sit down meeting with me and try to convince me to rein in my behavior and finish school. And so he talked some sense into me. And he allowed me to do independent studies.

And I thought, well, what a nice challenging idea. I get to choose what I wanna study. I have to write my own curriculum and then study it and report back basically.

And just be present in school through the day. I don't have to be in any particular room. I just have to be in the building working.

Neil:

That's amazing. What an incredible Yoda-like teacher move to recognize a kid's potential for graduating, separate the suspension-laden behaviors of telling the same teacher to fuck off multiple times, and then just cultivating a curriculum for you that could allow you to do both, be independent, be learning, and finish.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

Because you were in danger of not finishing, I'm assuming. Constantly getting suspended is not a good sign towards finishing.

Lewis:

Yeah, absolutely. I was very angry at the world then. I didn't know why.

Neil:

You didn't know why?

Lewis:

No, not at the time. I didn't even realize I was angry necessarily.

But when I look back and reflect on my behavior, I was an angry young man.

Neil:

And you don't know why? Do you know why now?

Lewis:

I think that I was not reaching my potential. I was nowhere near reaching my potential.

Neil:

Oh, you were angry at how you were showing up in the world.

Lewis:

I guess. I mean, at the time, I knew I had a lot of anger in me and I didn't have many healthy avenues to express it.

Neil:

I had a lot of anger in me because I wasn't hitting my potential and nowhere to put it, so then it comes out in sharp, kind of dysfunctional ways.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

And once I started doing these independent studies, my marks increased dramatically. I went from a strong C to honor roll.

Neil:

No way.

Lewis:

And near valedictorian.

Neil:

No way!

Lewis:

I think a high 90 average.

I was highly engaged and interested because I was choosing what I could study.

Neil:

Oh my gosh, from a C student, that means your marks were in the 60s, to a high 90 average, almost valedictorian, meaning it sounds like your school anointed valedictorian based on the highest mark in the school?

Lewis:

It was something like that, yes.

Neil:

Right, not the peer elected thing.

Lewis:

No.

Neil:

Right, right. But you were, yeah, okay, so you, wow. Because, so how many years did you do the independent study stuff?

Lewis:

Well, by the end.

Neil:

Just one in the last year?

Lewis:

By the end of high school for me, I had gotten all of the mandatory stuff out of the way.

All of the English and science and math requirements I had gone through, and I'd just done the minimum. How many credits do I need? I did the minimum.

Neil:

Yes, yes.

Lewis:

And I was.

Neil:

Yeah, you need four credits and four electives, and then this teacher figured out that the whole last phase of your high school career could be all electives, basically.

Lewis:

Basically, it was all electives or other art programs.

Neil:

And you did photography, pretty much, and all this stuff?

Lewis:

I had gone through all of the photography programs the school offered, like a year ahead.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

I was doing grade 12 photography and grade 11, and.

Neil:

So it was all art stuff, though.

Lewis:

Pretty much all art credits. Any and all art programs, shop. There was a drafting class I took.

I took anything that was like making things. Home economics, I learned how to sew, I learned how to cook.

Neil:

Oh, home economics, that's a phrase I have not heard in a while. When I first had home economics, it was like, yeah, learning how to cook, learning how to sew, learning how to.

Lewis:

Yeah, I found it very valuable.

Neil:

What a terribly insulting name. Yes. Home economics. Yeah, they didn't really teach you any economics. Trying to merge the capitalistic economic value with home, but that home is, of course, sewing. You know, it's not.

Lewis:

Yeah, well, I mean, viable skill.

Neil:

I mean, it worked, though. I mean, Lu Pan, the carpenter's apprentice, is about building and making. You're learning about sewing.

You went from a C student to a high school valedictorian from.

Lewis:

Well, not high.

Neil:

Near, I put the place of nears back in there.

Thank you for constantly taking my hyperbolic phrases and bringing me back down to earth.

Lewis:

Yeah, we're going to keep you here on earth.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, but it all comes and it's home economics, sewing. And like here you are, you know, you're making the duck costume.

I saw your post on Instagram from the eclipse and like you clearly made like giant duck glasses. Like you're doing a lot of home economics today.

Lewis:

I like to make things, absolutely. I always did.

Neil:

What other words do you use to apply to your identity? We've got interdisciplinary. We understand that one.

We've got psychedelic. We do not yet understand that. We're going to pause that, but I know you're straight edge on your stomach, but I don't think you're straight edge now.

Lewis:

No, things have changed.

Neil:

Okay, okay. So there's psychedelic. Then there's folk, which you kind of got a taste of in the vein of sort of a non-professional heart forward type of art.

Artist. We're understanding artists. Now we're going to take a break.

You and I, this is, for those that are listening, you might detect this. This is a very challenging environment to do a podcast. There are house bears here.

There are chimneys just above us. There's people walking by with boom boxes playing. There's bikes flying by.

There's people looking at us. There's people's like, one person was waving at you. I think I saw another person waving at you.

Like, I think that, you know, inside they're kind of saying there's a podcast. So this is a very distracting. I need like a sensory reset.

I need to get a glass of water. I see the cops coming now down here. I need to get a glass of water.

I need to have a sensory reset. And then we're going to keep going with Lewis Mallard. Two more formative books.

I'm having a wonderful time with this conversation. I'm really, really deeply grateful for your heart and for your love, for the artistry you're doing. And thanks so much for doing this show with us.

Lewis:

Thanks, handsome.

Neil:

Okay, be back in a bit. It's called 3 Books. Yeah, 3 Books. The number three in the word books. And your name is Noah?

[Noah]

Yeah.

Neil:

And you're in like a jean shirt and a white t-shirt and a black jeans. And you're a reader because you got a book beside you. What book is that?

[Noah]

The Hidden Life of Trees.

Neil:

Oh, nice. How'd you hear about that?

[Noah]

I borrowed it from a friend this morning.

Neil:

Oh, you borrowed it from a friend this morning. And that's what we were just talking about. That when you borrow books, you fucking can't calculate.

Because I asked both of you in the break, how many people do you think are readers? And I was thinking in my head, five or 10%. And you guys were saying more like 50, 60, 70%.

Because it's more of a community that doesn't fully participate in the capitalist system with libraries and borrowing. Is that what you were saying, Noah? Am I putting words in your mouth?

[Noah]

No, that's right.

Neil:

Okay.

Lewis:

Yeah, that's how it went.

Neil:

That's how it went. Okay, okay. All right, we're gonna come back.

What's the scene look like now? It's getting a lot hotter, I'll tell you that.

Lewis:

The sun is brighter.

Neil:

I feel like I wanna put sunblock on my face. I'm sweating in my shirt, but you can't take a shirt off and just sit on a bench with a microphone. No, you can.

Lewis:

You would just get looked at a little funnier.

Neil:

It's hot though. It's getting warm. And what's your observation of the College and Bathurst intersection now?

I say, we're now in like a hot mid morning. We're recording in June. It'll probably come out in the summer. In July or August sometime.

Lewis:

The scene, it's not that much different. Just a little, it turned up a little bit in the heat.

Neil:

What's going past us?

Lewis:

Random cars, white vans, white trucks. A lot of white vehicles right now.

Neil:

Toronto called 311. A lot of four by fours. Four by four trucks with like people on their phone and guys sitting in the back, like cleaning park bathrooms and like shoveling. I saw them shoveling leaves off the corner of the sewers. And I talked to the guys and they said, we're the snowplow group. We've just been doing this all winter because there was no snow.

Lewis:

Cleaning, getting drainage. We need better drainage on these streets.

Neil:

Well, how would you describe the city of Toronto? It doesn't seem like you grew up here and the city of Toronto in 2024 is a pulsing, vibrating, like, you know, it's a city on the world stage. How would you describe this city?

Lewis:

A little bit of everything. He needs a little more than a little bit of everything. It's a...

Neil:

What's working, what's not. What's good, what's bad. You're leaving, I heard.

Lewis:

I'm moving.

Neil:

You're posting on your Lewis Mallard Instagram feed that you're moving to Montreal. Oui. We as in you and your opera singer partner or oui as in O-U-I?

Lewis:

Yeah, both forms. Yeah, that was a double entendre.

Neil:

Oh, nice. That could be the word of the chapter. At the end of every chapter, we have a word that was said that we go into the etymology of. That could be it. Double entendre.

Lewis:

Toronto, I moved back here after being away for about five and a half years.

And it's not the city I left. It's not the same city. It's changing rapidly.

I don't recognize it the same way. Many landmarks are being torn down. Many new buildings are being put up in place of them.

I'm a cyclist. The cycling infrastructure is growing, I guess, reasonably quickly, but it's kind of slapdash, bandaid, not really well thought out. And the amount of people riding bikes in the city is exploding.

And it is absolute chaos on these streets as a cyclist now, where before the chaos was other cars. And now I find the chaos is an inexperienced cyclist.

Neil:

Mm-hmm, that would be me. I'm on these bike lanes. I'm inexperienced.

I get dinged at all the time. Not honked at, dinged at. It's a much less abrasive form of vehicular communication.

The bicycle bell. No one's figured out how to put these big honking horns on bikes yet.

Neil:

Eh, eh.

Lewis:

There are, yeah. There's the few people who will do the air powered horn, the obnoxiously loud.

Neil:

They also bang, it should be said that Toronto cyclists bang on cars a lot. I've witnessed it a lot. Like they yell at drivers.

They pound their fists on hoods and things. And they're usually right. It's because someone's parking in the bike lane.

It's because someone's turning without seeing the bikes coming. They're usually right, but they do so very aggressively. Am I right about this?

Lewis:

I've seen it, unfortunately. I have also participated in it. I really try not to do that as hard as I can now.

I've tried to change that behavior and just move on with my day.

Neil:

There's a bit of 18 year old Lewis, fuck you teacher still left in there in his early 40s.

Lewis:

I think drivers who are not necessarily cyclists don't realize how threatening a car can be. Completely dangerous. And when they do things to purposefully put you in danger, it's extremely frustrating.

Neil:

Purposefully?

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

How are you going to evaluate intent when someone parking in the bike lane or turning in the corner by accident?

Lewis:

Well, that's not what I'm talking about. That's what you're talking about.

Neil:

What are you talking about?

Lewis:

When people will swerve to threaten you with their car.

Neil:

Oh.

Lewis:

Will purposefully cut you off.

Neil:

Oh, really?

Lewis:

To brake check you.

Neil:

Brake check you?

Lewis:

Absolutely.

Neil:

What does brake check you mean?

Lewis:

Like when you're following behind them and they will...

Neil:

In a lane, not a bike lane.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

In a car lane. Yes. But it's not a car lane. It's a shared lane.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

But people think it's a car lane.

Lewis:

One subtle one.

Neil:

They'll brake you because they think that you aren't going to brake and then you'll pound the back of their car.

Lewis:

Well...

Neil:

That's what they want to have happen is what you're saying.

Lewis:

I don't think they're thinking clearly. So I don't know.

Neil:

Right.

Lewis:

I don't really know what they want.

Neil:

Right. They brake check you though. And now I understand what brake check you means.

Lewis:

And another one that I've had many times is people spray you with their windshield washer fluid.

Neil:

No way.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

They spray you with their... Because they know that the windshield washer fluid on any car splashes the everywhere.

Lewis:

And so they do it as you're passing.

Neil:

Really? Just when you're passing?

Lewis:

Yeah. I've had that many times.

Neil:

So what is... I'm sorry to ask. What is it about you that's drawing all this ire?

Lewis:

I don't think it's me. I think a lot of cyclists deal with these things. It's just the frequency on the roads.

Neil:

You're like... I'm like an everyday... I'm like a drop my kids off at school kind of cyclist.

You're like a bike around town. You don't have a car.

Lewis:

I don't have a car.

Neil:

So you're using your bike in the winter.

Lewis:

All seasons.

Neil:

Right, all seasons.

Lewis:

And I also use it for commuting, for recreation.

Neil:

It should be said that the winter in Toronto, the streets can be quite snowy, slushy. You're on your bike.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

You're biking through, you're on the lanes. You're getting brake checked. You're getting washer fluid in your eyes.

You pound on cars. You try not to do that.

Lewis:

I try not to...

Neil:

But you'll engage...

Lewis:

Carry the...

I used to when I was younger.

Neil:

What's the highest amount of road rage you've been involved in? I should also say I've pounded on a few cars myself. I have done that because sometimes you're right.

When you're on a bike, it's like, what is this guy doing? He's trying to kill me.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

I do. I have felt that. But as soon as I've pounded on a car, I've only done a couple of times, I run away.

I bolt away. I'm like, I'm immediately regretful and fearful of what I've just done. I won't stand there and get into an actual fight.

I'll take off. Because I'm like a real... I can't believe I just did that.

It's out of character.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

I think, but I guess not.

Lewis:

Well, people get so irrationally angry in these road rage scenarios that I almost find it interesting to see somebody go from zero to a hundred in the anger scale over something so small.

Neil:

And we know this because George Carlin said, everyone driving faster than you is a maniac and everyone driving slower than you is an idiot. Everyone relates to this.

Lewis:

And how willing somebody who's in this state of mind is to seemingly throw away their whole life because they're angry. They're so angry about this one thing. And I recognize this behavior in people now where before I would try to, I would almost match their anger and things would come to, not come to blows, but come close to blows.

And in the most recent time that I was involved in a road range scenario, there was a driver who was threatening me with his vehicle. He was charging me and then stopping before he would hit me. He was swerving, cutting me off, not letting me pass.

I went away that he couldn't go up a one-way street with heavy traffic and I knew he couldn't follow me in his car.

Neil:

Why? So you ended up walking away from the fight?

Lewis:

I walked away from it.

Neil:

You could have been in a physical fight with him.

Lewis:

Oh, absolutely. It would have turned to blows without a doubt if I had gotten off my bike. And I was interested-

Neil:

And nobody else was around.

Lewis:

No, I-I landed into an alleyway.

Neil:

How long ago was this?

Lewis:

This was last summer.

Neil:

Okay, this is pretty recent. What have you learned over time that can help the novice rider navigate road rage better?

Lewis:

Oh.

Neil:

Just drive it away? Just get to the finish of whatever that story ended faster?

Lewis:

I think it's better

Neil:

Don't engage.

Lewis:

It's better to walk away?

Neil:

It's better to walk away.

Lewis:

If you did something wrong, apologize and move on.

Neil:

Oh, apologize?

Lewis:

I think if you actually are

Neil:

I always put my palm up. You know what I mean? When I do something wrong on the road, I put my palm up. I'm like, that was me. Like, am I bad?

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

I do that a lot. My palm is often up while I'm driving.

Lewis:

I think apologies go a long way. Apologies, yeah.

But for me, I really try to let it go. I feel like I have the power to absorb that anger that somebody else is giving out and let it go and so that it doesn't have to carry on through that branch that was just kind of created.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

Tributary or whatever you want to call it.

Neil:

Oh, tributary.

Lewis:

Of anger.

Neil:

Oh, we got to mark that one. That's a potential word of the podcast too. Tributary and double entendre popping out so far early in the conversation.

Now, here's the thing. You were in your early 40s.

Lewis:

Mid.

Neil:

Mid, okay. Okay, good, yeah. Because we never quite got the clarity on the blurry 70s.

But I'm September 17th, 1979. So I would agree with the 70s being blurry. You probably played that game I did of like, I've been around for six decades.

I'm 41. Anyway, maybe not. So we got kind of a book of your childhood, Lupin and the Carpenter's Apprentice.

I talked to you in advance. So I know that we also have a book kind of of your 20s and I know we have a book kind of of your 30s. I think what I'll do now is I'll introduce the book kind of of your 20s and we'll steer the conversation kind of towards that kind of post high school, pre-Lewis part of your life.

And then we'll talk about the book of your 30s after that. Does that sound like a good structure?

Lewis:

That is.

Neil:

You can feel free to, you know.

Lewis:

That is the structure.

Neil:

Chiropractically adjust the structure. Okay, the book of your 20s is, oh yeah, here it comes people. I'm excited for this because, you know, we're in the, we're getting into the 500s now.

Like we've counted down over 400 books on the show. So it's exciting to me that we're getting into the one and the only Moby Dick. Oh yes.

By Herman Melville, M-E-L-V-I-L-L-E. Originally published in October 18th, 1851 by Richard Bentley in the UK and a U.S., Harper and Brothers. And I love the old publisher names.

Harper and Brothers, not Harper Collins, in the U.S. This is, everyone's got different covers for this. The paperback I have.

Lewis:

It's a nice cover.

Neil:

You like that one? It's got like this gigantic white, almost like lino block kind of whale.

Lewis:

Yeah, it looks like an etching maybe. It's tough to say.

Neil:

Yeah, that's yours. By the way, you want that?

That's yours.

Lewis:

Okay.

Neil:

Okay, that's yours.

That's your signifying commemorative copy of the conversation.

Lewis:

You got it right in it though.

Neil:

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll sign Herman Melville's name in there. Yeah. So mine is like a kind of a white, gigantic, it's almost like a scary looking whale, but it's only like from the tip of its nose. I'm sure it's not called a nose, to like just past its eye.

Lewis:

That's the most recognizable part of a sperm whale.

Neil:

Yes. Oh, sperm whale. Thank you for specific.

And then it's an all caps kind of impact font, wide kerning Moby Dick with Herman Melville in an embossed all caps serif font.

Lewis:

That's debossed.

Neil:

Oh, debossed.

Lewis:

Or wait, which one? This is in, not out.

Neil:

Oh yeah, I think that is debossed. Embossed means pop, popping out.

Lewis:

And then you're debossed.

Neil:

Oh, that is interesting. So it's a debossed cover. Well, that seems like a competitor for the word of the chapter.

Herman Melville was a New Yorker. I didn't realize this. He's a New Yorker who lived from, listen to the years, 1819 to 1891.

Imagine that, 1819 to 1891. Flip the numbers around and that's how long I'll be here. He's an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance.

Came from a distinguished family, but after his father's death in 1832, his family was in poverty. From the age of 12, Melville worked just a number of jobs. It's gonna think I sound like a bit like your 20s.

Bank clerk, farmer, teacher. In the summer of 1839, he joined the crew of a merchant ship that sailed to England. Think about this.

Less than 200 years ago, Lewis, joining a merchant ship to sail to England. When he returned, he tried several jobs, but none lasted for long. He then signed on to a whaling ship that set sail.

There goes a mad vac beside us, sucking garbage off the trail. Melville, oh yeah. A whaling ship that set sail on January 3rd, 1841.

He then spent the next two years having adventures in the South Pacific. Nowhere close to New York or England. And by the way, Moby Dick, this book, which we're gonna get into, was a flop.

Only 3,715 copies precisely were sold during Melville's lifetime. Critics and readers didn't know what to take of the popular adventure novelist's turn towards dark, complex, psychological explorations. The total amount he earned from Moby Dick was $556.

Lewis:

Jesus, adjusted for inflation it's still bullshit.

Neil:

Essentially, the book more or less torpedoed his existing popularity, and the writer returned to New York and became a customs inspector in 1863.

Lewis:

That's unfortunate, Herman.

Neil:

Moby Dick torpedoed his career. What is this torpedoing book about? The sailor Ishmael's narrative of the maniacal quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, P-Q-O-D, for vengeance against Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that bit off his leg on the ship's previous voyage.

Moby Dick is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopedia of whaling lore and legend, the book can be seen as part of its author's lifelong meditation on America, written with wonderful, redemptive humor. It's also a profound inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception.

Wow! File this one to 813.3 for literature slash middle 19th century literature. Not much goes in that slot that I know of. Lewis, please tell us about your relationship with Moby Dick by Herman Melville.

Lewis:

You know, this is a book that I'd heard of growing up through school. We didn't read it in high school.

I think it was a little, probably a little too heavy for that time in my life. And it was, I kind of thought of it as like a challenge. Like, oh, one day I would like to read that book, consume that book.

And I never, I was never much of a reader. I had a difficult relationship with reading through school. You know, I was in, what do you call it nowadays?

I was in like the remedial class.

Neil:

You were in like a, well, special education.

Lewis:

Yeah, I got put into the slow kid class for some of this stuff.

And I had tutors to help me with reading and writing as a kid. So it was always kind of a sore spot, especially since my father was such a voracious reader and my sister was the scholastically smart one. And so I kind of felt bashful about...

Neil:

Sorry to ask, but how does somebody with that background then wanna read Moby Dick? The most challenging novel of all time.

Lewis:

I like a challenge.

Neil:

Wow. So with that background, it made you attracted to it. How did you come across Moby Dick?

How did it enter your brain view? How did you even know it was a book?

Lewis:

Well, I don't remember.

Neil:

Noah's standing up, Noah's taking off. He's got the secret life of trees. Enjoy the book.

Lewis:

Goodbye, Noah.

Neil:

Great chatting with you.

Lewis:

I don't remember how exactly it came on my radar.

Neil:

After high school?

Lewis:

Sometime after high school. I'm sure I heard of it in high school. And I knew it was-

Neil:

Can I ask what you did after high school?

Lewis:

I went to college.

Neil:

You took art?

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

You took illustration?

Lewis:

I did.

Neil:

You were trying to find the program that-

Lewis:

I went to Sheridan College.

Neil:

Okay. So someone that wanted to figure out your identity could start tracing these trails. You know, Banksy's been really careful. He doesn't let a peep out about them.

Lewis:

Oh, well.

Neil:

You want us to bleep out the name of the college?

Lewis:

No, that's fine. It's Sheridan College. It's in Oakville.

Boring fucking city. Horrible place. I hated Oakville.

Neil:

Oh my gosh. Wow, you're going hard on Oakville here.

Lewis:

Didn't like it.

Neil:

Oh, wow.

Lewis:

Culture-less.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

Boring.

Neil:

We interviewed Dave Cheesewright, former CEO of Walmart in Oakville on an earlier chapter of three books. We won't pass this chapter along to him for his response to you on Oakville, but maybe he wouldn't protect it.

Who knows? Now, listen, you go after to Sheridan College. You take an illustration.

You're doing art. I know Moby Dick's coming into here. Take me through this period of your life though. What's happened in your life?

Lewis:

Well, I was in college. I was doing a lot of trying to figure out-

Neil:

Still straight edge.

Lewis:

Who I am, yes.

Neil:

Pre-tattoo or post-tattoo?

Lewis:

Post-tattoo.

Neil:

Post-tattoo.

Lewis:

I got the tattoo in high school.

Neil:

When anyone asks you to drink or smoke weed, you lift up your shirt and show them the tattoo?

Lewis:

No.

Neil:

No, you just were- But you were proud of it.

Lewis:

I just said, no, thank you.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

Yes, I-

Neil:

By the way, I was too. I was straight edge until my 20s, by the way.

Lewis:

But did you identify that way? Or you just happened to be-

Neil:

No, I was actually scared to identify that way. I hid it.

Lewis:

Oh.

Neil:

I hid it, yeah. Because at my college, if you didn't drink, it was kind of like you were a major outlier.

Lewis:

Oh. I never felt that at all.

Neil:

I think my closest friends all knew I didn't drink. And I started drinking in my fourth year, my last year. After I got my job offer from Procter & Gamble, we had a rager.

Lewis:

Oh, yes. And you drank a bunch of Smirnoff Ices.

Neil:

How'd you remember that?

Lewis:

Because I just listened to your podcast episode yesterday where you talked about that.

Neil:

Oh my God. I don't even remember talking about that. But yeah, Smirnoff Ice. I still, to this day, cannot drink. Smirnoff Ices are, for the most part, vodka.

Lewis:

You did research. I did research.

Neil:

You're coming in hot. Yeah, I'm quoting past interviews you've done.

You're quoting past interviews I've done.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

Okay. Okay, so you're straight edge. You're in college.

You're taking illustration. I know the city was boring, but did you learn a lot from the perspective of craft or artistry?

Lewis:

It gave me a lot of time to solely focus on those things. So yeah, I learned a lot.

Neil:

You seemed to, you deepened your connection with it. Like, I mean, you became more of an artist.

Lewis:

Certainly, I was starting to decide on what an art career might look like for myself or how I fit into that world. I flip-flopped on whether I was gonna go into animation or illustration. The school offered both.

They were both excellent programs that were very hard to get into. I knew that the chances of getting in were slim, but I was extremely confident I would get in. It was just a matter of doing the work, and so I decided on- That should be underlined for people, and I know this because I have one other friend that tried to go.

Neil:

So at this time in the 90s- Early 2000s.

Lewis:

Early 2000s. No, late 99.

Neil:

So Sheridan College's animation and illustration program had the global reputation for being strong theater schools into places like Industrial Light and Magic, Lucasfilm. They were getting scooped and going to California to make movies. It was a real strong-

Lewis:

Big time.

Neil:

Well-known. Very, very competitive. If you wanna go work in, not Silicon Valley, I don't know what, Hollywood, I guess, really.

You go to Sheridan, you take illustration, you take animation, and they want you because you come out knowing all these hard-to-know skills, like how to use all the 3D animation software and all the-

Lewis:

They were incredible. It was unbelievable what the animation students were capable of after three years.

Neil:

Three years, and that's it?

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Wow, wow.

Lewis:

It was such an intense program.

Neil:

So I can see why you wanted to go there.

Lewis:

The illustration program didn't have that reputation necessarily because it's not as glamorous, I think, as animating Disney movies, Pixar movies.

Neil:

Although all those movies start off as illustrations.

Lewis:

Yeah, in a sense. And at that time, I was very good at realism and not much else. Drafting, I was good at.

Mechanical drawing. These are things that came very natural to me. The creative, making up stuff out of my head and putting that down on paper, to me, that was amazing and I didn't understand how people did it.

I had never really tried to do it. And so I went into a specific program in illustration called technical illustration, which was mainly scientific, medical, and technical mechanical drawing.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

It was exactly where I excelled and where I naturally fit. And I was so bored.

Neil:

Oh, really?

Lewis:

I was doing very well, getting extremely high marks. And I could see exactly where I would fit into the art world there. And I didn't want it.

I was starting to realize it's not what I wanted out of art. I wanted to be an artist. I wanted to lean more into the fine art world.

And that was more of the vision I had of myself, I think, from a child.

Neil:

Well, how do you define fine art?

Lewis:

Well, making artwork to sell in a gallery was how I viewed it then.

Neil:

Oh, interesting. Making artwork to sell in a gallery.

Lewis:

Not doing a different kind of commercial art, you know?

Neil:

No street art was really coming out of you at this age either. It doesn't sound like it. You weren't spray painting in the alleys at night?

Lewis:

No, I was absolutely doing that.

Neil:

Oh, okay.

Lewis:

Oh, really?

Neil:

Okay, I didn't hear that yet.

Lewis:

Well, in high school, I was very active as a graffiti artist.

Neil:

Really?

Lewis:

I did what I think, if you saw it now, you would refer to it as just nonsense, vandalism, graffiti.

I was experimenting, I was practicing, trying to figure out. And even while I was doing it, I was like, I like the act. I don't like how I'm doing it, but I just continued doing it.

Neil:

What about the act did you like?

Lewis:

Well, I liked the altering my surroundings. I liked the danger of it.

Neil:

Transgressiveness.

Lewis:

You know, I like doing it.

Neil:

Doing something just the right amount of bad.

Lewis:

Something that was bad, but not like catastrophic.

Neil:

Can I ask about the moral compass you use to guide yourself? From a lot of people's perspective, you're engaging heavily and frequently in acts of mischief and vandalism and stuff, but you obviously have a code. Man's gotta have it.

I'm sensing it in you. So how do you articulate what you do and not do? What are your yeses and noes?

Lewis:

Developing a code then. After high school, I didn't participate for a little while in graffiti.

And then later on in college, I think in my second or third year, I started to do some stencil graffiti. So I would make my own stencils and then I would go out with spray paint and do this kind of stencil art.

Neil:

Any notable or memorable stencils? You're not the guy that does Post No Bills and posts pictures of Bill Clinton and Bill Cosby.

Lewis:

No, but I remember when that started in Toronto and it was very funny, very clever. I loved it. I think I like the sense of humor of that very much.

This was before Bill Cosby had been discovered.

Neil:

Yeah, for those that don't know, on all kinds of Toronto downtown construction sites, they would say Post No Bills, meaning Post No Posters. And somebody came up with the idea of posting stenciled, perfect, realistic versions of Bill Cosby, Bill Clinton, and other famous bills.

Lewis:

Other famous bills, it was very funny.

Neil:

Yeah, funny, and nobody got, I think I'm also sensing like, there's nobody gets hurt with your stuff.

Lewis:

Well, I mean, how many people get hurt by graffiti other than property owners who have to pay?

Neil:

Yeah, that's a type of injury, but I'm talking no one's actually like, aggrieved really. Unless it's bad graffiti and they have to clean it up, I guess is what you're saying.

Lewis:

I would say what I was doing back then was kind of, it was not refined. It was not really with the purpose I was experimenting. Ultimately-

Neil:

You defined your code, really.

Lewis:

I didn't like, I didn't-

Neil:

Do people do stuff in graffiti that you don't agree with and that you wouldn't do? Is there places that you wouldn't graffiti? You don't graffiti a storefront window.

Lewis:

Absolutely not.

Neil:

So this is what I'm trying to ask you, like, what are your things that you would do and what are the things that you would don't do? For someone interested in becoming a street artist and well aware that it's illegal to become one, how do you navigate the morals of it? The rights and the wrongs?

Lewis:

For myself, right now, I look for places, I look for places, objects that are not typical vessels for graffiti. They're not a typical target of a stereotypical-

Neil:

Atypical vessels. Atypical vessels.

Lewis:

So we're talking about this one in front of us here.

Neil:

Yes.

Lewis:

I saw it as- The concrete.

I saw it as a forgotten piece of street furniture that the city doesn't have the time or energy to repaint.

Neil:

They don't. That's why it's covered in graffiti.

Lewis:

And peeling paint. It had an old coat of paint that it was crumbling off and I scraped that off as best I could. Forgotten piece of street furniture.

Neil:

Hmm, street furniture. That's a phrase I don't think I've heard much before.

Lewis:

I think it's the graffiti landscape of this city and in most cities is very cluttered. It's hard to stand out. Most of the best spots are already taken.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah.

Lewis:

And so I look for the spots that nobody wants and that I see potential in. And I try to make them look nicer.

Neil:

Right. Oh, so there's a beautification here too.

Lewis:

Absolutely. I try to clean up and add.

Neil:

Clean up and add.

Lewis:

But also serve a purpose for myself.

Neil:

Clean up and add. And what's the purpose you're serving for yourself? Is this the competing with other artists, standing out from the crowd?

Because you did mention that earlier too.

Lewis:

I don't want to, I don't like to compete in like a, I'd rather compete in a fun way.

Neil:

Yeah. The way football players compete. The way Jonathan Franzen told us he competes with David Foster Wallace.

Lewis:

I have no idea who those people are.

Neil:

Sorry, I just mean like a writer competing with another writer on like writing something great.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Making something great.

Lewis:

I want to push people to, I would love to see more creative, more interesting and well thought out public street art, graffiti.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

Whatever you want to call it. I would like to see people really think about what they're doing and try to do it the best way they can.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

I understand.

Neil:

Like Nick Sweetman, who's a mural artist in Toronto we both like, who draws these hyper realistic looking birds, but giant pink walls with like bumblebees and hooded mergansers, beautiful stuff. Yeah. A lot of low rising, low rise military planes flying over us today for some reason.

Would you classify that as a military plane? Like what kind of plane is that?

Lewis:

It looks like it, it might even be like the Lancaster from Hamilton. The old World War II bomber.

Neil:

Something about that plane looks like straight out of World War II. I hate that shit. Meanwhile, yeah, it is fear inducing.

Lewis:

Yeah. Can you only imagine being from a country that, how many immigrants do we have here that come from war torn fucking countries?

Neil:

It's scary for them.

Lewis:

And then they hear these war planes flying overhead and it's like, objectively, I'm sure they know that they're not being bombed, but it triggers something. It's got to trigger something.

Neil:

I mean, we have a lot of Palestinian protests happening right downtown right now. Streets are gleaming closed left, right and center. We've got encampments here.

We've had a big story in the news here in the Toronto Star last year saying this military flyovers have got to stop. Like, what the fuck are they doing? Like, why is it?

Why are we traumatizing people? That actually came out. And some people reacted to that article and said, oh my gosh, what a soft culture we live in.

You can't even fly a plane anymore. Like, I'm just saying, like there's two sides of that argument. You're on the first side.

Lewis:

Well, I think, what a waste of resources. And who gives a shit?

Neil:

So you're going to, you go to Oakville, you're taking the illustration. You're in your illustration all the way through?

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

No, you change.

Lewis:

I was in technical illustration and I switched to interpretive illustration, which meant I had to go back a year. I couldn't continue into my third year. I had to go back and redo my second year.

And I felt like if I ever wanted to be good at drawing from my imagination, I had 10,000 hours to put in because I hadn't put really any hours into it. And so the start of that journey for me was dropping back a year in college, redoing my second year, in a way saying goodbye to the friends I had made.

Neil:

Oh, no.

Lewis:

Because they had moved on to their third year, which is a very intense year.

Neil:

That's the last year.

Lewis:

And I ended up in a class full of people I had kind of seen around school, but didn't really know.

Neil:

Oh, wow.

Lewis:

And once I was dropped into this class, I met three guys who I became quick friends with and we started our art careers together just a couple of years later.

Neil:

Oh, really? How did you do that? What do you mean start your art career?

Lewis:

Well, we met in our second year of illustration.

We formed a tight bond over that year. Because of what? Is it your work that you were attracted to each other about?

I think it was a sense of humor. It was a way of creative problem solving. I was trying to find a style to draw in, a creative imaginary style, which was really pushed on us by the teachers that you have to market yourself with a style.

And so I was really-

Neil:

Oh, interesting. It's like what they tell writers to find your voice, find your voice, find your voice.

Lewis:

Yeah, and I was really anxious about this. They say to find your style, find your style, find your style. I always felt like, one, I have to pick one?

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

Wow, there's so many I like.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

And I was capable of multiple. And I just, I wasn't capable of the imaginary stuff yet. And so I figured it's just a matter of, I was starting to figure out like, oh, this is just a skill I can learn if I seek it out, if I practice every day.

So in the summer between switching programs, I tried to unlearn, in a way, all of the drawing I did. And I tried to teach myself how to draw in a different way.

Neil:

How do you unlearn?

Lewis:

Well, I just tried to break all the rules that I had learned.

Neil:

How do you, how does someone do that? I probably have all kinds of rules about podcasting and about writing, and I can't even see them.

Lewis:

I don't know, I picked up a new sketchbook that I hadn't drawn in, and I just started drawing in it in a different way.

Neil:

Wow, so you just used your power of mind to redirect yourself.

Lewis:

I wouldn't let myself draw the things I wanted to draw.

Neil:

Yep.

Lewis:

And I'd spent a lot of time just thinking about, I knew I was going into what was gonna be a difficult new year, full of challenges. And so I was trying to set myself up for it and get ahead a little bit.

Neil:

Still straight edge.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

Graduated.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

Form an art collective with a few friends.

Lewis:

This is, yeah, this is about a year and a half after meeting them.

Neil:

Move to Toronto.

Lewis:

In our last year of college. And lived together. We moved to 888 DuPont Street, the corner of Ossington and DuPont.

We got a studio.

Neil:

That's not that derelict broken glass building.

Lewis:

That doesn't exist anymore. It was.

Neil:

But that's what it was, right?

Lewis:

It was.

Neil:

You lived in a derelict broken glass building?

Lewis:

Absolutely illegally.

Neil:

Illegally?

Lewis:

Yeah, it was a commercial building.

Neil:

Oh, you weren't allowed to live there?

Lewis:

Technically, no. The landlord, Carl, at the time, he was what I consider a pretty decent slumlord.

Neil:

Oh my God.

Lewis:

He was, I don't think he realized how much he was supporting the arts in the city.

Neil:

Tell me more.

Lewis:

Well, he was allowing artists, such as ourselves and many other people to live and work in a building that they weren't technically allowed to live in.

The building was safe for living and it was fine. It had its problems. It was noisy.

It was too hot in the winter. It was too hot in the summer. There was other people there that were living there that were also not allowed to be there.

Everybody.

Neil:

I'm assuming that kind of felt like a street community in some ways.

Lewis:

Well, we didn't, there was only a few of us that hung out together. Everybody was kind of pretty separate. There was a lot of people from different art scenes in the city that lived and worked out of that building.

Neil:

Like what?

Lewis:

Oh, there was musicians. There was performance artists. There were-

Neil:

Any big names come out of there?

Lewis:

Well, Will Monroe was, to us, the biggest name at the time. He was a very prominent artist and DJ in Toronto in the gay queer scene at the time.

He threw the biggest parties. Vaseline, Vaseline.

Neil:

What's Vaseline, Vaseline?

Lewis:

Vaseline was his dance night, his party night.

Neil:

Is that the one that was on the subway?

Lewis:

No, but for Will's birthday, I think it was Will's birthday when his birthday would come up, he would throw, him and his friends would organize a subway party where we would plan to meet on a specific train traveling in a specific direction. And we would all pile into one car and eventually the people who were just riding the TTC would switch cars because it all became very noisy.

Neil:

Yeah, you take over a subway car and you're taking it over with like

Lewis:

30, 40, 50 people, sometimes more.

Neil:

Doing what?

Lewis:

Dancing, decorating. People would bring decorations, hang them over the railings. There'd be boom boxes, a lot of, not a lot of clothing, but the clothing that was on was tight and colorful.

Neil:

Not a lot of clothing.

Lewis:

Well, you know, people were out to party.

Neil:

Flamboyant, queer community.

Lewis:

Yeah, yeah.

Neil:

Not a lot of clothing.

Lewis:

A lot of fun, you know, beautiful, amazing people having a, you're doing something that is illegal, but I mean, it's, we weren't, nobody was harmed.

Neil:

Yeah, exactly.

Lewis:

People were disrupted.

Some people joined in. Random strangers joined in.

Neil:

I think when you have a party on a subway car, you're taking that risk right up front.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Like it is the subway.

Lewis:

We welcomed it.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

You know, and eventually it would get shut down.

Neil:

That's how it has to end.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

There's no other way a subway party could end rather than-

Lewis:

I hope, you know, I hope that they still exist. I hope people are still doing it.

Neil:

Nobody got arrested.

Lewis:

No.

Neil:

Just get out of here.

Lewis:

Get out of here.

Neil:

Well, also it gets to the end of the line. Yeah, we would go- How long would this party last?

Lewis:

You know, back and forth a couple of times.

Neil:

Oh, really?

Lewis:

It would switch. You know, we would move trains.

Neil:

So this is, we would get broke up for hours then.

Lewis:

We'd get off at Bloor and Spadina and then get out.

Neil:

Oh, you had a plan.

Lewis:

And then go, yeah, of course.

Neil:

Oh, and that's how you keep it going.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Oh, you switch at Bloor and Spadina, you want to go North, South and then you have to catch the- Oh, wow. That's how you keep it going. You're jumping the line.

Lewis:

Yeah. And then you go, you do the loop down to Union, back up and- And jump the line again. Yeah, yeah.

Neil:

Oh, wow. You say this like we know what you're talking about, Lewis. Like just in general, with your life and your scene and your, because, you know, part of what I'm attracted to with you in your conversation is that you're just being so wonderfully outlandish about everything. Like you're not living within this, the skirted rules of any sort of system. Like you just well acknowledge that almost everything you're doing is outside, certainly the lines of legality.

Lewis:

I'd say a lot of my life has been lived in that realm.

Neil:

Yeah. I'm noticing that with your art, with where you're living, with how you're partying, it's all illegal.

Not to, I'm not saying that we need to live within those lines.

Lewis:

But those are the most fun things, you know, and we barely scratch the surface of, we don't have time to go into all of the various things.

Neil:

Give me two or three other things you guys would do, this crazy arts collective, what the scene was like.

Lewis:

Oh, I was thinking more like going back in time to high school, the places that we would hang out.

We would hang out anywhere that was away from other people's view. And one of our favorite places to hang out was inside of a bridge.

Neil:

Inside of a bridge?

Lewis:

There was, I think it was the 406, runs through St. Catharines. And from downtown, we found, it goes over, I think it's a 12-mile creek. This bridge spans over this creek.

And just through urban exploration, we found an area where we could physically get inside of this big cement bridge.

Neil:

Oh my gosh.

Lewis:

There was a cavernous area.

Neil:

I can picture it. Like a highway tunnel.

Lewis:

Essentially, it was all just this empty space. I think the bridge was probably prefabbed and then dropped in place. Like some military aircraft.

And there was a hole in a wall that led into a dark, open room, and we went and explored this space. And eventually, you know, we weren't the first people in there. I distinctly remember going in there the first time, jumping in and turning on a flashlight, because it was pitch black.

A low ceiling, smelled bad. You could smell urine. You could smell feces.

You could smell booze, cigarettes. So it's like people had partied down here. And the first thing we all saw when we turned the light on in there was a deflated sex doll that had been abused.

Neil:

Oh no.

Lewis:

And it was just like laying there on the ground.

Neil:

Oh my gosh.

Lewis:

And I took photos of it and I handed it in for a photography project and got a good mark.

Neil:

Oh my gosh. Wow. The connection of observation with kind of living in your own lines.

Lewis:

So we would go in here and people would party. We would have fires. In the center, we would walk into the center of the structure, probably about 400 or 500 meters, ducking under beams.

Neil:

The bridge was that big?

Lewis:

Long bridge.

Neil:

400 to 500 meters?

Lewis:

It felt about...

Neil:

That's a very long bridge.

Lewis:

Okay. Less than a hundred.

Neil:

Okay, okay. Tenth of a mile.

Lewis:

It felt long because it was a bit of an arduous journey.

Neil:

Okay.

Lewis:

Ducking under these things.

Neil:

You would have fires in there.

Lewis:

Yeah, and we would...

Neil:

That's skirting the definition of no one's getting hurt here.

Lewis:

There was lung pollution. Surely.

Neil:

Lung pollution.

Lewis:

When these kinds of things are happening, I would be present. I wouldn't sit very close to the fire.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

I found it unpleasant. But I also liked the wild atmosphere.

Neil:

Okay, now take us back into your 20s. You're at this arts collective. You're at DuPont in Ossington.

You had an outside the lines kind of upbringing and childhood. You certainly are defining the rules for yourself as you go. You're really trying to maintain kind of a wide canvas of kind of within which you live and function.

Now you're in this art collective. You're in your 20s. I haven't got...

We haven't got to Moby Dick yet. We haven't got to marriage yet, by the way, like, you know, cause I know you're married now. We haven't got to Lewis yet.

There's a few things missing here from the story. So is it... Give me what happened in the 20s.

Give me your 20s.

Lewis:

Well, we...

Neil:

I also haven't got to all the tattoos you're covered in yet. But I know... And also the straight edge tattoo, you're not straight edge now.

So that's another switch that I'm waiting for at some point.

Lewis:

Yeah. Well, after meeting Nick, Steven and Lockie, the three gentlemen that really like changed... Nick, Steven and Lockie.

Changed the direction of my life.

Neil:

I love the name Lockie.

Lewis:

Yeah, keep going.

Interesting name. Very boring guy though. No, I'm kidding.

He's a great guy.

Neil:

Old man walking by in a purple striped shirt holding a case of Coca-Cola over his shoulder.

Lewis:

Yeah, like it's a boom box.

Neil:

Yeah, I love that. That's a great look for that man. Yeah.

Lewis:

Yeah. And so we became fast friends and spend a lot of time together, making art together, critiquing each other's artwork, growing as artists, being honest with each other. And we were really trying to be the best in the school.

We were trying to be... We wanted to be competitive with each other. We wanted to do well.

We wanted to show off. And once we started to develop a plan for our future, we knew we wanted to work together. We would come up to Toronto as often as possible, the four of us.

We'd take the GO train into the city to get some culture. We were so thirsty for culture. And...

Neil:

How'd you define culture when you came in on the GO train to the big city? What were you looking for?

Lewis:

From Oakville.

Neil:

Were you looking to set fires on bridges?

Lewis:

No, no. We were just looking for culture. We were just looking to be around people from somewhere other than Oakville.

Neil:

Right, right. You'd walk up and down Yonge Street, street preachers, sex theaters, that kind of world.

Lewis:

No, we would go to cafes. And we would sit down and draw in cafes.

Neil:

Oh, okay, okay, okay.

Lewis:

And so there was one particular day at a store called Tequila Bookworm.

Neil:

Oh, I know that store.

Lewis:

The old location.

It's in a new, where it's been there for a long time.

Neil:

Bar slash bookstore.

Lewis:

Yeah. And we were sitting at a table for four and we started passing around a drawing.

Neil:

Oh.

Lewis:

And then Lockie wrote on the drawing, he wrote Team Macho.

Neil:

Team Macho.

Lewis:

And this became the name of our collective.

We basically formed our collective that day in Tequila Bookworm, sitting at this beautiful table, which I tried to buy from them when they were moving and getting rid of their furniture. I went in and offered way more money for that table than it was worth. And they refused to sell it to me.

Neil:

On what grounds?

Lewis:

They just refused. I didn't ask for a reason.

I just took, I was like, all right, I'm not, you know. I offered like $400 for a shitty old table. And I had no business spending that much money on a table at that time.

I was poor.

Neil:

But it had to do something with what happened after from that table.

Lewis:

The sentimental value of the table to us.

Neil:

So that means the collective had some value too. So take us into what happened with this collective, Team Macho.

Lewis:

Oh, well, we got our studio together.

Neil:

So you lived together, you're working together.

Lewis:

More or less, yes.

Neil:

No bedrooms though. Just what, sleeping on the floor?

Lewis:

Not at the time.

When we moved into the place, it had not been lived in in recent memory.

Neil:

Is there a bathroom?

Lewis:

Not in any formal way.

The landlord built us a bathroom.

Neil:

But no shower probably.

Lewis:

With a shower.

Oh wow. Yeah. There was no kitchen.

Neil:

No kitchen. That's a bit of a...

Lewis:

So our bathroom had a pink toilet, a standup shower, and a laundry tub for a sink.

But no ceiling. The walls went... If the ceilings were nine foot, they're about nine foot in there.

The bathroom ceiling or the bathroom wall was eight foot. And there was a lot of pipes running along the ceiling. So it would have been extremely difficult for him to build the wall up to the ceiling around all the pipes.

He didn't want to do it. He built it eight foot. So any noise in the bathroom, any smell from the bathroom came out of the bathroom very easily.

Neil:

Into the artist's studio.

Lewis:

And yes. So we had rules about being in the bathroom.

Neil:

What were they?

Lewis:

Flush, the goddamn toilet.

Neil:

Yeah, that's a good one.

Lewis:

Courtesy flush.

Neil:

Oh, courtesy flush. Immediately after the defecation.

Lewis:

Yeah. But also, since any noise could be heard easily, anybody who was shy about going to the bathroom, we had a CD player in the bathroom. And we always kept the same CD in it.

And it was a kind of like big band music.

Neil:

Oh, wow. A lot of tubas in there.

Lewis:

Yeah, exactly. And there was a particular song that if you got to that song, we basically started harassing. Everybody would be like, get out of there.

You're in there for too long. When the saints come marching in.

Neil:

Oh, yeah.

Lewis:

Came on. Everybody would lift their head up from the desk and be like, who has been in the bathroom forever?

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

You know, get out of there kind of thing.

Neil:

Wow. You're shitting a month. Yeah, they always say don't sleep where you shit. You've heard that phrase.

Lewis:

We didn't have a choice.

Neil:

No beds though.

Lewis:

Well, at this point we had beds.

We didn't have bedrooms. We were all sleeping in the living room with our beds kind of like tucked in together to save space and slowly building the space.

Neil:

What happened? What about no kitchen? How do you eat? What do you eat?

Lewis:

Well, we built ourselves a kitchen.

Neil:

You built a kitchen?

Lewis:

Yeah, well, we went and bought sinks and I built countertops and cupboards. We stole-

Neil:

What kind of food were you eating though? You didn't have any income it sounds like. Not much anyway.

Lewis:

No, I was eating a lot of... So Nick, his father has chickens he's from the country up near Muskoka and his father would come down every weekend to teach at a Japanese school. He worked at a Japanese school, a Saturday school nearby and he would bring us two, three, four dozen eggs.

And so Nick and I, who at the time were the only ones living there full-time, we were sharing a bed. We were washing our dishes in the bathroom and we were eating rice, miso soup and eggs like three times a day.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

It's all we could afford. Luckily-

Neil:

Nice hookup on the eggs though.

Lewis:

High quality, excellent eggs.

I learned how to make a really good miso soup.

Neil:

Oh, you were making the miso soup?

Lewis:

Yeah, we had the paste.

Neil:

Oh, okay. Sounds like your friend, Nick is Japanese. It sounds like.

Lewis:

Half, yeah.

Neil:

So miso, you're making miso soup.

Lewis:

Yeah, I mean, it's just paste and soup stock. It was pretty simple.

Neil:

And rice.

Lewis:

And rice and eggs, yeah.

Neil:

Wow, and the other two guys were involved but they're not always living there.

Lewis:

They weren't always living there.

Neil:

And what was Team Macho producing?

Lewis:

At the time, we were trying to figure things out.

We had just finished school, I'm 24 at the time and we were making zines.

Neil:

Oh, yeah. Zine culture.

Lewis:

We got the attention of a store called Magic Pony.

Neil:

Okay.

Lewis:

Magic Pony, at this time, they were on the second floor of Queen Street in a small shop that you wouldn't notice if you didn't know it was there. We'll start with the second floor. Not many shops people know are there on the second floor of anything.

Yeah, you had to know the door to go in and there was a small sign. And they just sold zines? They were very, no, they sold, at the time, the owners would fly to Japan with empty suitcases, buy a bunch of toys and bring them home.

Neil:

Oh my gosh.

Lewis:

And sell them and just mark them up. They weren't available here.

Neil:

Oh, wow.

Lewis:

But they knew that there was a market for them.

Neil:

Yeah, probably a Nervous Customs check at the border on that one.

Lewis:

I don't know, but they did well. And they had a small space in the back. We're doing a podcast.

Neil:

It's called 3 Books.

[Person on the Street]

Is it called what?

Neil:

3 Books.

[Person on the Street]

3 Books.

Lewis:

Do you have three favorite books?

Neil:

Formative. Formative,  Lewis.

[Person on the Street]

Nice to meet you.

Neil:

You too.

Lewis:

So we, Podcasting.

Neil:

What was the first thing you said? Is something happening or are you just podcasting?

Lewis:

They, yeah. They had a small gallery space in the back that they would have shows in. They were a fan of zines that Lockie, Steven, and Nick were making.

I wasn't making zines at the time. The three of them were. They were really into this scene.

Neil:

Zine scene.

Lewis:

Yeah, the zine scene. Say that five times fast.

And they liked the zines and we just asked like, hey, could we do a show?

Neil:

How were they doing different things? I thought this was a collective.

Lewis:

But we were figuring out how it looked.

Neil:

This was very early on. It doesn't mean you just made art together.

Lewis:

We knew we wanted to make art together. We just didn't know how. We needed an opportunity.

So we got an opportunity to have a show and we were like, collectively, we were like, oh shit, what do we do now? I mean, we wanted a show. We didn't think about what we were gonna do for a show.

Neil:

The Magic Pony gave you a show?

Lewis:

Magic Pony took a chance and gave us a show. We had, I don't know, let's say for the sake of this, six to eight months to prepare.

Neil:

Wow, six to eight months. Which. That's a long time to prepare for a show for an indiscreet, second floor, not, you know. Well, you gotta plan these things ahead of time. Illegal Japanese sales store.

Lewis:

And so the four of us just put our heads together and we started to make work.

Neil:

What'd you make? I love, this is Seth Godin, by the way, chapter three. You know, the deadline creates the shipment. You know what I'm saying?

Lewis:

Oh yes, I.

Neil:

The deadline creates the product.

Lewis:

I agree with this.

Neil:

Start with the deadline.

Lewis:

There was a fifth member, I think, around this time.

We brought in a friend of ours named Jacob, who we met. He went to OCAD. He was a bit of an outsider from the group, but we brought him in.

He fit in well. And for the first few years of the collective.

Neil:

He didn't shit too long.

Lewis:

For the first few years of the collective, he was a part of it. And eventually he wanted to take his career in a different direction. And so he stepped away.

He knows that, we all signed a contract early on in our collective, that we would be friends for life. And we are still all very good friends. Because the contract decrees that.

That we are friends for life.

Neil:

Did you sign it in blood?

Lewis:

No, we didn't sign it in blood, but we did sign it.

And I think it's what we called.

Neil:

Thank you.

Lewis:

It's what we called our very first show, I believe, friends for life.

Neil:

Friends for life. So in the six to eight months, what'd you guys make?

Lewis:

We made probably 50 to 60 paintings, drawings. The idea of the collective was that we were gonna work on each other's work. That we were gonna try to remove the ego out of the art.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

Take our egos out of it.

Neil:

Remove the ego from the art.

Lewis:

And collaborate on things in a way that only we knew.

And that we wouldn't necessarily tell the audience who did what.

Neil:

Oh, kind of like Lennon and McCartney.

Lewis:

And so we would mimic each other's styles.

I saw it very much. I liked it because it was problem solving. I would be given a half finished piece.

And I could take it in any direction I wanted to.

Neil:

And no drug use here still. I don't mean to keep asking, but at some point you flip over.

Lewis:

The guys, although they did consume intoxicants, none of them did it in a way that was as abusive as my friends in high school did.

Neil:

Oh, okay. Yeah, they weren't letting the.

Lewis:

A slightly more mature approach. Maybe a little too much alcohol sometimes.

Neil:

Art came first though, would you say?

Lewis:

Art came first. We were all very dedicated to, yes, absolutely.

Neil:

Can I ask where this dedication to art came from? Clearly it wasn't financially based. No, I'm not.

Six to eight months to make the art for the.

Lewis:

No, well we all had part time jobs.

Neil:

Oh, you're all working on the side.

Lewis:

Oh yeah, yeah. The whole time through, even through college and high school.

Neil:

Okay, I guess I missed. What are you doing?

Lewis:

I was getting random kitchen jobs.

Neil:

Oh, you're working in kitchens.

Lewis:

I've worked in a lot of kitchens.

Neil:

Okay. Restaurants.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Okay. Did we skip over the part where you slept on Center Island? Did we miss that?

Lewis:

No, we're nowhere near that.

Neil:

Oh, that's coming later.

Lewis:

Yes.

Okay, okay. I heard about this. We're gonna get to that later.

So we.

Neil:

How did the show go?

Lewis:

It went better than our wildest dreams. You know, we sold almost everything. It was, we couldn't believe it.

We couldn't believe that so many people showed up for a group that nobody had ever heard of.

Neil:

Why did they?

Lewis:

Magic Pony was doing something cool.

They had a, they had a. This is 90s, 2000s? Early 2000s.

Neil:

Early 2000s.

Lewis:

Four, five, six.

Neil:

Pre-social media though.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

It wasn't like you were using social media.

Lewis:

But there's like MySpace or some shit.

Neil:

It wasn't like you were, I went to a concert recently in Toronto and I was like, me and my friend, my friend Flip from New York for it, Brian. He's like, I want to come see this, you know, concert. And it was like, he got popular off TikTok.

I didn't know that. And, but you could tell when you got there because it was all 23 year old women wearing the same denim cutoffs. And white tank tops.

Lewis:

Sounds like a Taylor Swift concert.

Neil:

We were like totally out of character. I was like, oh my God, it was Noah Kahan. K-A-H-A-N.

Lewis:

Never heard of him.

Neil:

Okay, well, I guess you don't go on TikTok because he's got like billions of followers and stuff.

Lewis:

Don't, don't. I downloaded it once when it was Musical.ly and I was like, this isn't for me. And I deleted it.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So the show, so.

Lewis:

So we prepared a show.

Neil:

We made a lot of work. You prepare for the show. You do the show.

You make a lot, you make a lot of work. You sell a lot of work.

Lewis:

Sold a lot of work.

Neil:

Nobody quits their job yet though. Their side job.

Lewis:

No way. There's no way that was possible.

So the gallery takes 50%.

Neil:

You're making like thousand bucks or something.

Lewis:

Not much, yeah. By the time our 50% gets divided by four, there's not a lot of money left over.

Neil:

Yeah, exactly.

Lewis:

But we were riding high.

We sold a lot of work. We couldn't believe it.

Neil:

And it's a sign of investment in what you're doing.

Lewis:

We were very much doing that.

Neil:

No, I'm saying like the world told you, you're doing, like, it's a belief check mark on being an artist.

Lewis:

It certainly gave us the confidence to do another one.

Neil:

That's what I'm saying.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Okay.

Lewis:

Absolutely.

Neil:

So keep taking me through the 20s then. And then also, I'm still looking, I'm searching for Moby Dick in here.

Lewis:

Okay. Well, I'm starting to read more for myself at this point. And I'm finding books that I'm interested in reading and I'm reading through them.

I'm not necessarily enjoying them, but I'm learning. And it wasn't until I started reading Harry Potter.

Neil:

Oh, Harry Potter.

Lewis:

And we had talked about this as, I mentioned this as- Might've been a formative book. Yeah, absolutely. In a way that it was the first series of books that I ever actually enjoyed reading, where I was looking forward to the next one and would read it and take time out of my day to read it and not just do it because I thought it was something I should be doing.

Neil:

What a gift Harry Potter gave to the world, turning so many, at the time, non-readers to readers.

Lewis:

Yeah. I kind of wished I had that innocent childhood, I think. That was something for me where I was like, I envied that school experience, that high school experience.

Neil:

Oh, interesting.

Lewis:

Because it was so different than mine.

Neil:

Yes. Yeah, nobody was shooting heroin at Hogwarts.

Lewis:

Yeah, it was a lot more innocent. And, but I thought it was great, great storytelling, great adventure.

Neil:

And I will point out to the listener, I hope this doesn't break your identity, but on the palm of the hand that you're holding the microphone with, is that not the Deathly Hallows?

Lewis:

Correct.

Neil:

So you've got the Harry Potter tattoo right on your palm.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

I would imagine that's a place you don't see, I don't see many palm tattoos.

Lewis:

No.

Neil:

Yeah. So what made you decide to get the Deathly Hallows tattooed on your palm? Deathly Hallows, for people that don't know, is a giant triangle with a big circle in the middle and a line through the circle, like kind of like a cat eye sort of thing.

Lewis:

An equilateral triangle with a line dividing.

Neil:

It's probably like the Elder Wand and the Invisibility Cloak and the whatever the third thing was.

Lewis:

And the stone.

Neil:

Oh, the Philosopher's Stone.

Lewis:

The, is that the name of it?

Neil:

I don't know, maybe that, maybe not.

Lewis:

It was the stone that can bring back dead people temporarily.

Neil:

Oh, okay, that's a different stone.

Lewis:

I forget the name of it.

Neil:

Okay. So what made you get that tattooed on your palm?

Lewis:

It was the only tattoo I have that was a spur of the moment decision. I didn't think too much about it ahead of time. I just got it done.

And I figured that since I use my hands a lot, that it would eventually, not completely disappear, but disintegrate to a point where it wouldn't necessarily be recognizable. And boy, was I wrong. It is very permanent.

I mean, of course I knew tattoos were gonna be permanent, but I thought that it would get beat up more than it has.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

And.

Neil:

Would you recommend a palm tattoo?

Lewis:

I mean, if you're in.

Neil:

You got tattoos, you got sleeves, you got arms. What else we got here?

Lewis:

Oh, stomach. I have a sleeve.

Neil:

One sleeve, a stomach, a palm.

Lewis:

I've got some on my ribs, a bit on my leg. Yeah, it's a painful process.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

I think that you, I tried to get into tattooing. I wanted to learn how to do it at a point in my life. And I'm glad that I never got accepted by anybody because I think I would probably have a lot more tattoos if it becomes an easier access thing.

I'm sure I would have be heavily coated. Not that I'm opposed to getting more. I just, I think that I, from going forward, I'm gonna put more thought into it if I do it.

Neil:

Ah, interesting. I'll put more thought. Which I normally have. And by the way, they say over half tattoos are now removed. More than 50% of tattoos.

Lewis:

I've considered trying. I've considered getting the straight edge tattoo removed from my stomach.

Neil:

Maybe just do strikethrough, you know, like a line and then underneath it, you now say psychedelic.

Lewis:

No, I don't think I would do that.

Neil:

Psychonaut.

Lewis:

It was a very painful place to get a tattoo.

Neil:

Your stomach? Oh my gosh. I can't even imagine.

Lewis:

The tattoo artist, you know, thought I was crazy for it being my first tattoo. But I don't know. It's like, it's gonna hurt one way or the other.

Might as well just get it.

Neil:

You know, get it where you want it. You get, so you get into Harry Potter and your toys. It gets you back into reading.

Lewis:

It got me back into reading.

Neil:

Your dad was a big reader growing up.

Lewis:

It got me into, Harry Potter got me into audio books too.

Neil:

Ah.

Lewis:

It, it was a bridge. I was listening to a lot of audio.

Neil:

Audio books was not big at the time.

Lewis:

At the time, no.

Neil:

You like doing CDs or something?

Lewis:

I listened to, well, yes.

I, a lot of my life, I listened to a lot of audio, a lot of talk radio. I loved late night AM radio, Art Bell.

Neil:

Ooh, late night AM radio. What a cool subculture.

Lewis:

As a kid, I listened to a lot of this. And as I got older, I listened to a lot of AM, just talk radio in general. I listened to Howard Stern.

Neil:

You were always a big AM late night radio guy. You were a big Stern person. You were a big listener.

You consumed the world through audio. So the audio book entry point for you to become an adult reader was natural for you.

Lewis:

Yeah. Well, I found that in the beginning, it was difficult to listen to audio books and do something else, to follow along with a story. But since I had physically read all of the Harry Potter books, when I listened to them for the first time, I already knew the story.

So I could just kind of, from then on, it was more like watching a movie, where I had already built a visual world in my head of what this looked like outside of the movies, also influenced by the movies, surely. And so just listening to the story, I didn't have to be present the whole time. And the more I listened, the better I got at listening.

And I was able to start listening to other books. And I thought, oh, this is a much better way for me to consume books, because I can do it while I'm drawing. Not in all kinds of drawing, or if I'm being creative, if I was actively doing creative work, coming up with ideas, problem solving, I could not listen to audio books.

It was too much of a distraction. I needed silence or music. But once I was doing the-

Neil:

This is part of the thing that prevents audio books from fully taking off, is it's hard to do it and do something else.

Lewis:

But once I was doing the grunt work, once all the problem solving was done, and it was just applying, finishing, rendering, whatever, then I could tune out and listen. And so that's when I would listen to books.

Neil:

Plus it's good for rereading, as you're pointing out.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

Uh-huh. But Moby Dick is not rereading. Moby Dick is a sizable challenge.

Lewis:

So I took on Moby Dick while I was painting a friend's house. I did a lot of house painting, indoor, outdoor. I started painting in school, and in my college, in the summer, I would do painting around the school in the summer, just refurbishing.

Neil:

So it wasn't a task that took all of your mental faculties?

Lewis:

Zero.

Neil:

So you could listen to Moby Dick while painting a house.

Lewis:

And so eventually, yeah.

Neil:

It's probably like a 25-hour audio book or something, I bet.

Lewis:

I think it was like 30 to 40. It was long.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah. How many hours does it take to paint a house? 30 to 40?

Lewis:

No, I think that the book was just part of that time.

Neil:

Okay.

Lewis:

But I distinctly remember listening to it in that phase of my life.

And I was somewhere in my late 20s, I think, maybe 30 at the oldest. And I really enjoyed the adventure of the book. I love the idea of this guy just changing his life, like being, I'm gonna join a crew of sailors and do something I've never done before for the sake of adventure, that kind of thing.

And I thought, wow, what a wild experience that must've been like, especially back in the day when they're using whale oil to light their lamps.

Neil:

That's why they're on a whale searching boat.

Lewis:

They were going after sperm whales, yeah.

Neil:

They're looking for the oil.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

That was the original- Spermaceti, I think. Was that not the original kind of start of like the oil industry?

Lewis:

I think it- Like, is that not the first energy- It was certainly an early, it was, I think it was easier to get.

Neil:

That was before oil was a thing.

Lewis:

Oil was a thing, I think it was just hard to refine and to deal with.

Ah, okay, yeah. And that the-

Neil:

There was no oil, there was no, nothing was running on oil though. I mean, whale oil, but not what we call gas today.

Lewis:

No, if it was, I think to refine it was very difficult.

Neil:

We've really screwed up the world fast is what I'm noticing here.

Lewis:

It's what we do really well.

Neil:

Like fast, like really fast. Like we're gonna put out more carbon emissions this year than we ever have in history. And that's the same for every fucking year.

It just seems- Since the last 50 years, we've been talking about it being a problem.

Lewis:

Yeah, it seems absolutely crazy.

Neil:

I'm very glad that we both walked here today.

Lewis:

Like such a beautiful animal, right? Like what a unique looking creature here.

Neil:

He's pointing at the cover of the book, the sperm whale.

Lewis:

You know, I was just like, although it was a book about hunting these animals, I just thought like, what a waste too. You know, like you're such a cool creature and all we can think to do with it is exploit it.

Neil:

Largest animal, amongst the largest animals ever on the planet historically. I think it dives deeper than any other whale. Dives deeper than any other whale.

Probably bigger than almost any dinosaur.

Lewis:

Yeah, likely.

Neil:

It's been around since the dinosaurs too.

I mean, arguably it is a dinosaur, is it not?

Lewis:

Battles mythical creatures at the bottom of the ocean. Giant squids and shit.

Neil:

Giant squids are real.

Lewis:

Yeah, well, you know, back then they were mythical.

Neil:

That's kind of cool that we proved one. Loch Ness never came through. Not yet.

Maybe it just went extinct.

Lewis:

Not yet.

Neil:

Yeah, exactly.

So you identified earlier in this conversation that the size and the challenge of Moby Dick was appealing to you.

Lewis:

Absolutely.

Neil:

To the point where at the end of these interviews, I sometimes ask people, what is your white whale book?

That's a closing question I have. A book you've been chasing the longest and many people answer that question by saying Moby Dick.

Lewis:

Yeah, I mean.

Neil:

And you fucking tackled it out of the gate. Like you become an adult reader. You go boom into, I know you had Harry Potter as your amuse-bouche, but pretty quick after you're going hard.

This is a huge, gigantic, overwhelming.

Lewis:

It was a difficult lesson.

Neil:

Big piece of literature.

Lewis:

There was certainly pausing, rewinding and re-listening happening.

Yeah, even just the language it's written in. It's of course English, but it's an old English.

Neil:

200 year old, yeah.

Lewis:

And yeah, I just thought that it's a book that was valued by people who were smart and that I looked up to. And I thought, if I'm gonna have a well-rounded education, at this point I was teaching myself things. I was very unsatisfied with the education I received going through grade school, middle school, high school.

And I decided to start seeking out the things I was interested in as soon as I had the wherewithal to do so and realized that I needed to because I wasn't being provided it.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah. And I love that you did so in a way that was both daunting, but also accessible because you went into Moby Dick from an audio book perspective while painting a house. I think that's good guidance for listeners like me who have not read this book like me.

I'm not gonna be ashamed of it because one of the values of the show is no book guilt, no book shame. But I've read the first 20, 30 pages and they're good. I really liked it.

I could tell it's challenging, but I really enjoyed the experience. So, but audio book would be great.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

I just need to find a house to paint now.

Lewis:

Yeah, or a banal task to tackle.

Neil:

Yeah, a banal task. You're throwing the words of the chapter out left, right and center. Now, Moby Dick is often described as being about one man's obsession. And as such, it can be read as a cautionary tale about hyper-focus on an individual pursuit. Is there a tension for you between that and being an artist?

What is the risk for you about too much hyper-focus on your individual pursuit? How do you avoid being like Ahab? Or Ishmael, I guess it is.

Lewis:

Yeah. Check in with my wife.

Neil:

Oh, that's good. Check in with my wife. I think she lets me know. Like go to bed, it's 5 a.m. kind of thing?

Lewis:

No, more like, you know, get out of your fantasy world and do some real life tasks.

Neil:

And you no longer have a part-time job, right?

Lewis:

No.

Neil:

So Lewis Mallard has achieved the goal of being self-sufficient financially. He has not achieved the goal of being-

Lewis:

I wouldn't say that. I am surviving off of savings. And when I make money, it's like, a lot comes in and then a lot doesn't come in for a long time. It comes in bursts, with shows, with I have to make a lot of my own opportunities. Right now I am-

Neil:

You're open for commissions. People can hire you to paint something, do something.

Lewis:

I open myself for commissions rarely because I'm heavily focused on other creative ventures.

I do take on commissions from time to time. Most often from people who have already been supporters of me, clients, customers, good customers, that kind of thing.

Neil:

So it's not self-sufficient financially yet, but- I'm trying to build- You want that, that's the goal you have.

Lewis:

Absolutely.

Neil:

So it's the question about obsession is you're kind of like, I'm not there yet towards my goals, but your wife will steer you away from falling too far into it.

Lewis:

Well, she tolerates it up into a point.

Neil:

Does her level of toleration work for you?

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

Not like you spite her for it?

Lewis:

No, absolutely not.

Neil:

You're grateful to have her pull you out of the abyss?

Lewis:

Yeah, she drives me to work away harder than I would for myself because it's not just me anymore, it's we.

She's also in a career path that isn't known for being extremely lucrative.

Neil:

Opera singing.

Lewis:

Yes, and she's in the beginning of her career. And we're building-

Neil:

There's not many operas.

Lewis:

No.

Neil:

Like in Canada, how many operas are there? Toronto, Vancouver, that's it?

Lewis:

Montreal. Well, we're moving to Montreal so that she has a contract with the Opera of Montreal.

Neil:

Oh, interesting. So Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, three operas in the country? There's small- A country of 40 million people that has three viable places an opera singer can work.

Lewis:

And maybe make enough to call it a living, yes.

Neil:

Right, yeah. I'm not counting the stuff you're doing on the street or on the side or the birthday parties.

Lewis:

In the small venues, yes.

Neil:

Wow, wow. I love how both of you are so, so deep down, very narrow niches.

Lewis:

It was one of the things that brought us together and that we related to each other about is how driven we are to succeed in our fields. Yes.

Neil:

Wow, okay. So I feel like I've got a nice little portrait of your 20s here. You're in this art collective, you're at 888 DuPont, what a cool number.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

You're eating eggs, you're eating rice. I think- You're yelling at people when they go to when the Saints go marching in, sitting in the middle of the studio, you're building kitchens, you're pulling people.

You told me in a past conversation that wasn't recorded that you were pulling people out of like, you'd wake up in the morning and there'd be like people sleeping in your place kind of thing.

Lewis:

Very often, we would have visitors, people from out of town that were coming by. I mean, with four or five people with keys and not all of them live there and it's kind of a 24 hour environment. You know, we did build bedrooms eventually.

Neil:

Was that not unsettling though? Was that not like somewhat trauma inducing to have like people showing up all the time?

Lewis:

I don't know, we were all pretty comfortable with it. We knew who they were.

Neil:

Yeah, and you're not on the street. Like this is one notch above living on the street.

Lewis:

Oh yeah, I'd say more than one notch, a couple notches. You know, it was not a place I think most people would want to live.

Neil:

Would your parents come downtown and visit you there?

Lewis:

I feel like my mother might've seen it once and was probably horrified by the whole thing.

Neil:

Dad never came by?

Lewis:

He might have come by.

Neil:

So the relationship with dad is still kind of, sounds like pretty distant here.

Lewis:

It was difficult to get them to come. If I had an art show, I really had to like voice my opinion that I wanted them there.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

For them to come and show interest.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

And that was a pretty common thing.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

Yeah. I don't think they really related. I was very different than they were.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

So I don't know if we really related to each other very much. Yeah.

Neil:

Even the straight edge thing was quite a different thing for your dad doing lines of Coke and when he gets to his job in the mornings.

Lewis:

Yeah. For me, I think it was a way of rebelling against my father.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

To be like just different than he was.

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah. How interesting that is, isn't it?

You know, you often see the kid that falls into abusing drugs as a form of rebellion, but here you have a drug abusing parent and your form of rebellion is sobriety.

Lewis:

In a way, I think. It certainly had something to do with it.

Neil:

Wow. That's amazing. Yeah. So parental advice for everyone listening, if you want, do be a functional alcoholic and casually consume just about any drug put in front of you. Ignore your kids so when you open the closet, they flip their diaper shit at you. Okay. Okay.

Okay. We have a nice portrait of your 20s. I know there was another big decade before we get into your 40s and I know there's a book that orients the decade around us a little bit and I know we're going to touch on it tangentially and we've done this way, but that book I just want to introduce to people is called Alaska by James A.

Michener. M-I-C-H-E-N-E-R.

Lewis:

Yeah. My father's favorite author.

Neil:

Really?

Lewis:

I grew up seeing his books, James Michener's books.

Neil:

On your bookshelf.

Lewis:

Yeah, on my father's bookshelves.

Many of them. He was a prolific author.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

He had a team that helped him write and research.

Neil:

He lived, here's another thing, he lived 1907 to 1997, another sort of numerical thing. He wrote 40 books, most of which were long fictional family sagas covering many generations set in particular geographic locales where he incorporated detailed history. Yes.

In the sweeping epic of the northernmost frontier, Michener guides us through Alaska's fierce terrain and history from the long forgotten past to the bustling present. As his characters struggle for survival, he weaves together exciting high points of Alaska's story, its brutal origins, the American acquisition, the gold rush, the growth and exploitation of salmon, the arduous construction of the Alcan Highway undertaken to defend the territory during World War II. As spellbinding portrait of a human community fighting to establish its place and voice in the world, Alaska traces a bold majestic saga of the enduring spirit of the land and its people.

Files 10813.54 for literature slash 20th century fiction. Take us into this book and to your 30s in the life of Lewis Mallard today.

Lewis:

Well, I mean, I'd always seen these books on my dad's shelves, never read one. I still haven't literally read one. Only listened to many of them. That counts.

Neil:

Yes. You have read Alaska.

Lewis:

I've listened to it a couple times.

Neil:

That counts.

Lewis:

And I chose this particular book. I mean, I would have just chosen the author had you given me the opportunity because although I didn't love every single one of his books, Alaska was one that I quite enjoyed. Hawaii was another.

Hawaii. Chesapeake, the source. There's been...

Neil:

Turkey vultures or red-tailed hawks are circling us. I'm just noticing that.

Lewis:

Yeah. No dead pigeons around us.

Neil:

No, or mallards, thankfully.

Lewis:

And so I didn't start consuming Michener until I was in my, well, very late 30s, just about to turn 40. When I was living, I had moved back. I'd moved to Hamilton to move in with my father and become a caregiver as he was approaching the end of his life.

Neil:

How did you know it was the end of his life? What happened? Was there an incident?

Lewis:

He was getting, he had dementia and it was getting progressively worse. My sister lived in Hamilton, lived in the same house as my father. She had moved my father into the house that she bought.

It was a two-unit house. So she was living upstairs with her partner and a newborn baby. My father was living downstairs on the ground floor.

Neil:

Can I ask what compelled you to be a chief full-time caregiver for a parent that doesn't sound like he was that for you ever?

Lewis:

I didn't see that I had any other choices that I could live with myself with. I was living in Toronto with a, well, now ex-girlfriend.

I was in a very confusing point in my life. I had quit my full-time job working for the YMCA, moving up through that organization, managing a group fitness department. I was very unsatisfied with my life.

I was making half-decent money. I had a salary, had benefits, had job security, and had a clear path forward.

Neil:

What were you doing for the Y?

Lewis:

I was managing fitness instructors, training staff.

Neil:

Outside the artistic world.

Lewis:

Yeah, this is a period of my life where I was not really creating much.

Neil:

The collective fell apart?

Lewis:

The collective didn't fall apart, but in our 30s, we had moved on to other things that we could actually make money in.

I, you know, in my 30s, I was like, well, art, I was working part-time jobs that were go-nowhere things, and I needed to make adult money. And I always enjoyed the YMCA. I grew up in a YMCA, essentially.

And I had great memories of being in a YMCA. And so I became a member of this particular Y, and enjoyed the environment. And I was on a, I didn't realize at the time, but I was on a journey kind of discovering myself as an athlete.

And I tried running, I didn't like it. I got into spin class and thought, I like it, I just don't like the way it's taught.

Neil:

You disagreed with the pedagogy.

Lewis:

And I thought, I could teach this better. And so eventually I was enough of a regular in the class that I got recruited by a staff member to be a volunteer, which is something the YMCA does. They love volunteers, and they recruit them.

Neil:

Not many people, not many organizations do that.

Lewis:

Not that I know of.

Neil:

Yeah. So you were a volunteer spin instructor.

Lewis:

I really liked the Y, and I became a volunteer spin instructor. And it was a challenge to myself to get over a fear of public speaking.

Neil:

Oh, wow. Because you had a little lav mic on probably.

Lewis:

Yeah, that or I just used my voice. I projected my voice.

Neil:

What didn't you like about how spinning was taught? I've only been to one spin class.

I didn't like that it was hard and I quit. What did you didn't like? Well, you didn't like the way it was taught.

Lewis:

I didn't like the music and the way the program was delivered.

Neil:

Oh, what was wrong? Why?

Lewis:

I didn't know what I didn't like about it. I just knew I didn't like it.

Neil:

You knew you didn't like it, okay.

Lewis:

I mean, the surface level was I didn't like the type of music. But I also knew that the type of music I wanted to ride my bike hard to would not be the type of music that the general public would enjoy riding their bike to.

Neil:

But it wasn't straight edge metal.

Lewis:

No, no, no. At this point, I wasn't listening to hardcore straight edge.

Neil:

I know, I'm just joking, I'm just joking.

Lewis:

Trying to do a callback to the one genre we've talked about. So when I did get my own class, I just copied in the beginning. I just mimicked what other instructors did so I could learn.

For me, getting over the fear of talking was the biggest hurdle. And once I was comfortable delivering a program and confident, I could start to be myself. And then once I learned how to be myself and deliver a class the way that I wanted one, I was also at the same time, I was becoming an avid outdoor cyclist.

I was learning about road cycling, off-road cycling, racing. I was making friends in the cycling community. I was becoming a very-

Neil:

So you're in Hamilton or Toronto?

Lewis:

Toronto. College in Davenport. Dover Court.

Neil:

Okay. So you're cycling, you're volunteering at the Y.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Dad gets sick.

Lewis:

I started working at, well, and I started working at the Y in the aquatics department. I wanted to work in the group fitness department, but I didn't have a degree in physical education, which they required.

Neil:

Oh my gosh. So here they go from being a volunteer organization, A, and B, now you need a kinesiology degree to work.

Lewis:

To work full-time in the fitness department. That's what they asked for.

Neil:

Wow, okay.

Lewis:

Leveling up here. And so I decided I wanted to work here. I liked the building.

I wanted to be there more. So I got in in the aquatics department. I learned how to swim well enough to become a lifeguard.

I basically had a chat with There was one woman there-

Neil:

Self-taught swimming. That's hard.

Lewis:

Who I admired.

She was in upper management. We became friends, and she wanted me to work there. She saw something in me, and she said, look, I can't hire you like this, but if you get your lifeguarding, I can hire you as a lifeguard.

Neil:

How'd you get a lifeguarding then?

Lewis:

Like, I- I took the courses.

Neil:

You just kept going until you got it.

Lewis:

Well, I was starting to get into swimming, because I thought it would be good cross-training for my cycling. I felt like I was plateauing in cycling.

And I knew how to swim, but I didn't know how to be an efficient swimmer. I hadn't learned, like, really proper technique. And there was a guy at the Y who was a lifeguard, an older gentleman, who was an ex-swim instructor, a high-level swim instructor.

And so he offered to show me. So I would come in and swim when he was lifeguarding, and he would just teach me how to be a better swimmer. And as I learned how to swim properly, with good form and efficient, I really enjoyed it. I thought it was-

Neil:

Man, you're inspiring me.

Lewis:

I was swimming at a level that I couldn't, I wouldn't have believed I could have swim at. And, and so this woman, Ika, she noticed my, me swimming, and thought that, you know, this guy's a good swimmer. He could easily become a lifeguard.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

And so she encouraged me to go get my lifeguarding. In my early thirties, it was uncomfortable to get it because I was only around-

Neil:

The oldest kid, probably.

Lewis:

By far.

Neil:

Yeah. It's all like teenagers, right?

Lewis:

Yes. There's one other guy who was as old as me, who had to get his lifeguarding for work.

And so we kind of just bonded, and we became each other's partners. He was a hulking, like, 230-pound dude. And for reference, I'm like 160 pounds, soaking wet.

Neil:

I'm 170. You're a lot taller than me. I got a lot of chub compared to you.

Lewis:

I'm built like a bird.

Neil:

I'm built like a bird. You are a bird.

Lewis:

I've got thin bones.

Neil:

I got thin bones.

Lewis:

I'm like, I've got my mother's frame. I got thin bones. I do.

Neil:

I've never heard anyone say that before. I'm built like a bird.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

I noticed your legs. That was one of the first things I noticed about you, the orange spandex.

Lewis:

Thanks.

Neil:

Yeah, and it's also like, you know, you're pretty close to, like, testicular level there. I mean, a duck paper mache costume doesn't go as low as you might think. You got, you're revealing a lot about yourself.

Lewis:

2.0 and 3.0, I built to be lower than 1.0.

Neil:

Because what was happening?

Lewis:

People were noticing stuff. I saw photos of myself in the costume where there was just a little too much junk showing. On a hot summer day, you know, the onesie, the orange onesie gets real hot. And I could see that I was uncircumcised. Or sorry, circumcised.

I could see that I was circumcised in a photo. And I was like, oh, dear.

Neil:

I like that the error was that you were uncircumcised. I could see that I was uncircumcised. I could see that I was, I would see that I was circumcised. Oh, we're getting a lot of looks right now.

Lewis:

And I thought like, okay, that's not what I didn't mean.

Neil:

That's not how you maintain a secret identity.

Lewis:

Yeah, and so.

Neil:

Okay, he's Jewish, he's Muslim, he's born in the seventies.

Lewis:

And so I was like, all right, well, when I remake this costume, I need to make it a little bit lower.

Neil:

Oh my gosh, you are so funny.

Lewis:

Although, you know, it's like, I'm not necessarily shy about it.

It's not a big deal. But I also, you know, I didn't make it for kids, but kids really like it. And it's not a bad thing to be kid friendly.

Neil:

I talk about you with my kids all the time. They are obsessed with you.

Lewis:

I hope it's not annoying.

Neil:

No, they love you. I'm gonna buy a bunch of these hats for them. Where if they're for sale.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

How much was it as a hat? It's a good quality ball cap, by the way.

Lewis:

$35.

Neil:

Oh, that's a deal for that hat. That's a really nice.

Who are you waving at here? You know everybody going by.

Lewis:

It was a friend of mine.

Neil:

Does he know your secret identity?

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

Oh, so how do you decide who you tell your secret identity to?

Lewis:

I've known him for a lot of years.

I used to ride bikes with him.

Neil:

Gotta know you for a lot of years. Start with that.

Lewis:

Not necessarily.

Neil:

Okay.

Lewis:

But he's just somebody I know and like, and you know, he knew me before Lewis, and he saw Lewis come to life on social media.

Neil:

Okay, okay, nice. Your dad's sick. He's got dementia. You move back home. You leave the life in Toronto.

Lewis:

I'm at a point where I wanted to, I desperately wanted to change something about my life. I wanted to be making art again. I wanted to be an artist again.

I felt like I.

Neil:

But I'm stuck here, because you said, it's the only way I could live with myself. I said, why are you becoming chief caregiver for a person who, no offense, doesn't seem like he was ever chief caregiver for you.

Lewis:

Well.

Neil:

And you said, it's the only way I could live with myself. Like, so why is that? A lot of people in your situation would say, you know, I didn't have a strong relationship, or, you know, that person was not in my life.

But you were like, moving back home, abandoning the cycling kind of, the YMCA job that you had making money, as your full-time gig. You're moving back home to be chief caregiver for your dying father. Like, I'm not, I'm not challenging you.

I'm just curious about your decision making here.

Lewis:

So also, at the time, the woman I was with, I think she realized that I was about to go into a very difficult time in my life. And she broke up with me. I was living in her condo.

I was unemployed. No, sorry.

Neil:

You're not working at the Y?

Lewis:

I was not working at the Y. I was working in my friend's bike painting shop.

Neil:

Okay.

Lewis:

I was painting bikes. Very niche job. And I wasn't happy there either.

I wasn't making art. I was making beautiful objects. And I thought that would be enough.

If I could make a living using my hands, making an extremely high-end product, I thought it would be enough. And it really wasn't. And so, when my father got to a point where my sister couldn't manage by herself anymore, and this relationship was clearly ending, and I was already spending a lot of my time in Hamilton.

I would go to Hamilton every weekend, and I would cook a week's worth of food for my father. And I would package it up, and my sister would give it to him. So he was no longer able to take his medication or cook for himself.

And so I thought, I've got to move out of this condo I'm living in in the Roncesvalles area. And I don't want to pay Toronto rent to spend all my free time in Hamilton working a job I hate. And also, my sister and I could not afford to put my dad in any type of home or anything like that.

So my father did not save for retirement.

Neil:

Where's your mom? Oh, she's not around.

Lewis:

No, my mom's gone at this point.

Neil:

Gone?

Lewis:

Cancer.

Neil:

Oh, I'm sorry.

Lewis:

That's okay.

Neil:

You mean she's dead?

Lewis:

Yeah, happened in my 30s, early 30s.

Neil:

You weren't caring for her at the end of her life, though.

Lewis:

We did a little bit.

She was married to a guy. She lived in Port Dover. And she hid her cancer from my sister and I up until near the end.

I got a call from her one day basically saying, sit down, I gotta tell you something. I just had a double mastectomy. I've had breast cancer.

It's gone. I've healed from the double mastectomy and the doctors have just found chronic lymphatic leukemia and say I've got five years to live. And so all this information was dropped on my sister and I in a casual conversation with her mother.

And we were both pretty upset about it because she didn't even give us an opportunity to be there for her. I was closer with my mom. But after that, I took every opportunity I could to be with her, to spend more time.

I tried to build like a bit more of a meaningful relationship with her.

Neil:

It's okay.

Lewis:

It's pretty serious.

Neil:

It's okay.

Lewis:

Go get them. And although she lived a little bit away it wasn't always easy to go and see her but I went as much as I could.

And the closer she got to the end the more time I spent with her.

Neil:

I kind of like this philosophy you have. I agree with it. I'm from Eastern cultures where parent-child relationships often in India historically, it's like they're living together.

I don't expect to live with my parents at this stage and age of my life. I don't know what will happen. They're both alive but in their seventies, not but, but are.

But I like this philosophy you have which is as much time as I can spend before they die. This is a thing you have.

Lewis:

I tried.

Neil:

Where's that coming from though? Like you have this sense of, it's not obligation. It seems like desire.

You are trying to soak up the relationship as much as you can.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

To make sure that for the rest of your life you can look back on those years and say, I did as much as I could.

I was connected to my family as deeply as I could. Is that the thought or the feeling?

Lewis:

I wish that I would have, it would have mattered to me more when I was younger or that I thought about it. Oh, I see. Because I didn't have a very strong relationship with either parent. It was almost like we were roommates more than anything.

Neil:

That's how I felt with my wife before my divorce, my first wife.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

That was the exact word I used.

Lewis:

We were like roommates.

Yeah. But also, I think that that was kind of natural for them too. It was just the way their family life was too.

There was a lot of stuff going on in my family that my sister and I never understood, never had an opportunity to understand. My mother was estranged from her mother and we never knew why. And many of her siblings were, and relatives on my mom's side, there was a lot of estrangement going on there.

A lot of trauma. Nobody ever talked about how, when, where or why it came from. And I still don't know.

My sister and I just kind of left to guess about this kind of thing.

Neil:

Thank God for siblings.

Lewis:

Yeah.

And so, I feel like I was fortunate to get to be with my mother when she died.

Neil:

And your father.

Lewis:

Yeah, and I was touching both of them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Neil:

And your mama sounds like in your earlier 30s, your dad in your late 30s.

Neil:

Yeah.

Neil:

What age did you switch from straight edge and why?

Lewis:

It was when I was 36.

Neil:

What changed your mind about that? Your mama died, your dad was still around.

Lewis:

Yeah.

I had started dating somebody that, I think it was a bigger part of her life, the consumption of drugs and alcohol, but not in a toxic way. It just was something that she did responsibly. And I hadn't met many people who responsibly consumed substances.

I was very much of the mindset that if you're drinking, you're getting wasted. If you're doing drugs, you're getting fucked up. And I was kind of, I wasn't interested in getting wasted or getting fucked up.

And so, with this partner, I felt comfortable enough to experiment. I had been thinking about trying things. I had started to be curious about altered states of consciousness.

And so, I felt comfortable just trying. For the longest time, it was such a part of my identity that I was identified as straight edge or just somebody who didn't consume intoxicants. I didn't even really consume caffeine that much, aside from a little bit in soda pop or something like that.

And so, I started very slowly and tried a little bit of this, a little bit of that. And some things I liked. Some things I thought were okay.

At this time, marijuana was still illegal. And I couldn't believe, when I got high for my first time and I got drunk for my first time, afterwards, I thought, I can't believe that alcohol is the legal one. Because that one feels so much more destructive.

To me, it felt extremely destructive.

Neil:

Oh, I know exactly what you're talking about. I can't believe alcohol is the legal one.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

That's a great line. Or as cannabis probably felt, not that.

Lewis:

Yeah, that one- Sensory amplifying, perhaps. I thought, I am glad I didn't find this when I was a teenager because I would have over-consumed it. Because I really liked it.

Neil:

Ah, interesting.

Lewis:

So, I thought it was better that I let my mind form and mature.

Neil:

The research says, they say don't use cannabis or alcohol really before age 25, 27 now.

Lewis:

Yeah, so I'd never been high. I had a hard time even inhaling enough to get high. But I knew that.

I'd seen enough people try their first cigarette, try their first joint. I knew that there was gonna be a hack attack. But I was on board for trying it.

Neil:

And- Did this person become your wife or no?

Lewis:

No.

Neil:

Okay.

Lewis:

No, we eventually, she broke up with me before I moved to Hamilton.

Neil:

A lot of women are breaking up with  Lewis.

Lewis:

No, just that one.

Neil:

Oh, okay. And the one before, the one that saw that the, you're going into serious- No, same person. Oh, that's the same person?

Okay, okay, okay.

Lewis:

Smart enough to get away.

Neil:

Yeah, so you're not, how much time did you have as your father's chief caregiver from the time you started chief caregiving to the time he died?

Lewis:

It was like almost a year and a half, exactly.

Neil:

Wow. And what does chief caregiving for a dying father with dementia look like?

Lewis:

It started off slow. I was still working more or less full-time in Toronto. I would commute.

I'd get up in the morning, I'd get my dad breakfast. I would leave him a note about lunch, where it was, you know. What it was, where it was.

Neil:

How to do it, yeah.

Lewis:

And my sister would help him out with like one of the meals, you know. And I'd get back from Toronto.

Neil:

Is it the YMCA job?

Lewis:

No, this is when I was painting bikes.

Neil:

Okay, you're painting, you're in the painting job. You come to Toronto. You don't have a place to live in Toronto, though.

Lewis:

No, no, I was, I'd get up at 5 a.m. I'd be on the 6 a.m. bus to Toronto with my bike on the front of the bus.

Neil:

Oh my gosh.

Lewis:

I'd show up at Union. I would arrive really early for work. I didn't start till 10.

But traffic was horrible. I didn't want to sit in traffic, so I opted to leave early.

Neil:

Get up with the ducks.

Lewis:

I was reading books at the time. I decided to read on the commute.

Neil:

With books or audio books?

Lewis:

Real, real.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

Yeah, real books.

Neil:

Seems like audio book is good for a bus, but okay, you go the other way now. You're left right on me the whole conversation. You're surprising.

Lewis:

And so I had a routine where I would, you know, get up, set my dad up, get on the bus, read, and I would then ride to a cafe that opened at like 7 in the morning.

Neil:

Oh my gosh.

Lewis:

I'd show up at the cafe.

Three hours early for work. Three hours early for work. I'd sit at the cafe, have a coffee.

I would read for another 30, 40 minutes, and then I would draw. I had a sketchbook with me, and I started.

Neil:

I've seen your sketchbook. It's unbelievable.

Lewis:

I started, this was the start of a project that's still going on, something I still do every day, where I draw patterns as an exercise to do something just solely for myself, and to develop a skill, and to see where it goes, and to see how good I can get at something. I'm now six, seven years into this practice. I've got a lot of sketchbooks full.

I've got a lot of skill that I built up.

Neil:

Who would you recommend a daily drawing practice for, and what could that look like for someone who's interested in developing one? What's the first step for that?

Lewis:

I'd say it doesn't have to be drawing. I think it's a valuable thing for people to develop more skills, to give yourself the time to go on this journey, because it's such an interesting journey from the beginning to wherever the end is. I don't know where that is for this, but I've gone past what I thought was possible in this realm of geometric pattern drawing without the use of any aids, like just freehand drawing.

Neil:

Even though it looks like you're using 10 rulers.

Lewis:

It does now, yes. It didn't in the beginning.

Neil:

So you're coming to Toronto, I'm sorry to say, you're getting to coffee shops at 7 a.m. You don't work till 10. You spend the day here, then you go back and take care of him at night.

Lewis:

I would catch the first train. I could get on with my bike back to Hamilton. I would arrive at like 8, 8.30. I'd get him dinner. I'd put him to bed and just repeat the next day. Okay, so that was the first iteration of it. Yeah, and slowly, as he progressively got worse, I would, I'd do three days a week, and then I did two days a week, and I was down to one day a week, and then no days a week.

Neil:

Working.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Coming to Toronto.

Lewis:

Yeah, and so this is when I.

Neil:

You're telling them, my dad's dying, I gotta be at home.

Lewis:

Well, they knew, they understood. These were good friends of mine, and they were very empathetic and patient with me.

Neil:

Yeah, but your life is rebalancing towards your father at this point.

Lewis:

I was going through one of the most significant relationships ending in my life. I was absolutely heartbroken. And my dad was.

Sorry?

Neil:

How old was your dad?

Lewis:

At the time, he was 76.

Neil:

Oh, he's pretty up there.

Lewis:

Yeah, he lived longer than he thought he was gonna live.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

He wanted to ride the bus until the wheels fell off, and he thought the wheels were gonna fall off in his late 60s, early 70s.

Neil:

Mm-hmm.

Lewis:

And so, I kind of forget where we were there.

Neil:

Well, I'm just trying to point out here is that, because I know that the genesis for Lewis Mallard, you have said in other interviews, came to you on a mushroom trip while you were doing chief caregiving for your father.

Lewis:

So.

Neil:

That's what I've read.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

So I feel like I'm near this point in your story.

Lewis:

Absolutely, it's all kind of coming there. So, as my father got progressively worse, and I was still working in Toronto, the commute for me was very difficult, the back and forth every day. And so, to combat that, on the days when it wasn't too cold or it wasn't raining, I would bring my camping gear to work with me.

I just left all my camping gear at work, and I would leave work up in the junction in Toronto, Keele and St. Clair area, and I would ride down to the ferry terminal to go to Toronto Island. I'd grab some kind of dinner on the way to go, and I'd jump on the ferry, go over to the island, and I'd just set up on the beach right near where the airport is. It's the clothing optional beach out there.

Neil:

Wow, you'd camp out on the nude beach rather than any park near the junction. Like, that's still a pretty hefty commute to get from the junction down to a ferry terminal, down to crossing a body of water. For those that don't know, there's about a 500 meter, maybe a kilometer wide channel right in front of the CN Tower in Skydome, where then there's a series of little islands with a tiny airport on it, there's a nude beach, there is like a amusement park, there's a life-size maze, there's a few hundred people that live there, there's all kinds of non-optional, like there's other beaches.

It's like a bird watcher's paradise as well.

Lewis:

There certainly was a lot of bird watchers out there, and I would move down the beach to be away from the people who were actually using the beach for the intended purposes of relaxing and suntanning and swimming. So this is also, I will say, like a not allowed to do, right? Not allowed to do, definitely not.

Neil:

Yeah, you never got in trouble, though, for just camping out on Center Island.

Lewis:

Yeah, I would move away from people, I would set up my tent only after the sun went down, and I would disassemble and be gone by 6.30 in the morning.

Neil:

Oh my gosh.

Lewis:

Because I would catch the first ferry.

Neil:

Weren't you scared?

Lewis:

A little, like, it was exciting, I would say. But also, I figured like- Exhilarating.

Who's, not many people are gonna approach a solo male doing something weird like camping on a beach.

Neil:

On a clothing optional beach.

Lewis:

Yeah, you know.

Neil:

You seemed like the crazy one. They're not gonna approach you.

Lewis:

That's kind of how I was like.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

Although I didn't feel crazy, of course, you know. But I just thought like, realistically, like if I was, would I ever go approach a random stranger doing something? No.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

And I was like, no.

Neil:

That's a good life rule. If you look crazier than the norm, you're not gonna be harassed in general. I think.

Lewis:

Maybe by only somebody who matches or exceeds your, so camping on the island, it wasn't great sleeping, but it was an amazing adventure. I saw some of the best sunsets of my life.

Neil:

Oh yeah.

Lewis:

Sitting out there.

Neil:

Right over the huge Great Lakes, yeah.

Lewis:

And I'd wake up in the morning to sunrise, although the sun was rising on the opposite side of the island.

But I'd wake up to like these kind of pink and orange mornings. I'd stumble out of my tent naked.

Neil:

Wow, you're nude here. Well, I guess it's summer. It's only fitting, you're on the nude beach.

Lewis:

Yeah, and I would relieve myself in the water, take a piss.

Neil:

And also get your bath in that way.

Lewis:

No, I would stop off at the Y.

Once I got to the mainland, I would come to the YMCA and have a shower.

Neil:

You're not just taking a lake dip.

Lewis:

No, no.

Neil:

Okay. Why pee in the lake then? Why not pee in the bushes?

For some reason to me, peeing in the bushes is cleaner than peeing in the lake. Even though I have no justification for that. I think it's six of one, half a dozen or the other.

Lewis:

Yeah, I'm sure you're right.

Neil:

It's a lake. It's a huge lake.

Lewis:

Yeah. But anyway.

Neil:

I'm anti-peeing in pools now, by the way.

Lewis:

Yeah, I don't like to.

Neil:

Yeah, I've switched on that.

Lewis:

I've definitely peed in a pool.

Neil:

Now you recognize the smallness of the body of water and the PPM of the urine.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Yeah, it's different than a pee in an ocean.

Lewis:

That's for sure.

Neil:

So where's the mushroom trip? So I did not.

Lewis:

So I guess this can tie into Alaska a little bit. So I went to, early on when my dad was still kind of manageable by part-time caregiving and my sister was around and could help, I had an opportunity to take a vacation. I knew I was gonna be doing this for, I assumed about two years.

Having seen my mother go through cancer and slowly deteriorate and knowing where my father was and how he was looking and how he was acting. And I guessed it was gonna be no more than two years. And so I was like, if I'm gonna take some time off I'm gonna do it now.

And so while I was still working at the bike painting shop, I decided to go to my cousin's wedding in Vancouver. Oh wow. She was getting married.

I had a lot of family and some very good friends out there. Most of my family on my father's side had moved to Vancouver. While I was at this wedding, I met relatives of mine that I'd only ever heard of and I never had met or talked to before. And they were two first cousins of mine that were raised in Haida Gwaii, which is-

Neil:

How do you spell that?

Lewis:

H-A-I-D-A. That's the first word.

Haida Gwaii, D-G-W-A-I-I.

Neil:

G-W-A-I-I, Haida Gwaii, which is a first nations indigenous community in Canada.

Lewis:

Like vast majority of the people that live out there are first nations.

Neil:

And they're known from a distance for their totem poles, I believe.

Lewis:

Yeah, the Haida people, I believe are the originators of the totem pole.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

That's what I came to understand.

Neil:

Bye, Rob. Bye, guys.

Lewis:

And so my uncle donated sperm to a lesbian couple, friends of his, and they each had a child of his.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

And so I have two first cousins that were raised outside of my family on this amazing island.

And so I met my cousins and their mothers at this wedding. And I was so interested in them. I didn't really participate in much of the wedding.

I didn't dance. I was just, I sat at the table talking to these people. Their life was so different than mine and I was extremely interested.

And they said, and they said, well, why don't you come and visit? And I thought. Why don't I?

Why don't I? It's a big trip. So I planned, I was like, okay, I'll come back at the end of the summer.

This was spring that I was out there. And so while I was out there in Vancouver for a couple of weeks for my cousin's wedding, I was staying with a very good friend of mine for most of my life who's living out there in East Van. He had his own apartment and I was just crashing on his couch for two weeks.

He had also, he had never done mushrooms before and I had not done mushrooms yet. Tried mushrooms. I had wanted to.

I was very curious. And I thought, what better place to try mushrooms for your first time than with one of your best buddies who has also never done it out in BC. So we got on our bikes and I brought my bike out there with me.

And I, we.

Neil:

On an airplane.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Wow, okay. Really into biking.

Lewis:

Very into biking.

Neil:

In front of the bus, on the GO train, on an airplane.

Lewis:

I've been riding a bike my whole life.

Neil:

Wow, okay.

Lewis:

Of one form or another. But I didn't find my passion in cycling until I was in my 30s.

Neil:

Okay. You take your bike out there, you go with your buddy.

Lewis:

Yeah, and we grab our camping gear and we ride kind of to interior. Somewhere in the interior.

It was a lake called Devil's Lake. Really small lake. You could almost throw a rock across it.

You could easily swim across any direction. It's spring. It's still kind of cold there.

We buy some mushroom chocolate bar off a random stranger. And we set up and we eat the mushrooms. And you know, it was quite a journey.

We had a great time. It was one of the most interesting experiences of my life at the time. I'd never, you know, mushrooms.

I think I maybe ate two grams at the most. I started thinking thoughts that I'd never thought before that didn't seem like typical thoughts that I had ever had. And they weren't scary thoughts or anything like that.

I had a difficult moment during the trip where all of the sadness from my relationship ending kind of came up unexpectedly. And I think I cried for maybe like 15 minutes. Extremely hard.

Like some of the hardest crying I'd ever done for about 15 minutes. And then it just was over. Wow, you got it out of you.

And I got something out of me that I didn't even know was in me. Wow. And it felt like in a very healthy way.

And I just accepted that it was like over and that I was moving in a different direction. And I just went back to having a fun time with my buddy. Even though, you know, we sat around our fire, we talked a lot, we cried a bunch, but it was a good time.

And eventually we, you know, came down and went to bed and we could hear wolves or coyotes howling around us. It was hard to fall asleep, you know, but we did, you know. We were completely alone out there.

Nobody else, we weren't allowed to camp. We were just wild camping. But we're, you know, we're respectful.

We left no trace. We, and we left the place the next morning and rode back. And when I came back to BC later that summer to go to Haida Gwaii, Haida Gwaii is up near Alaska, up near the banana belt of Alaska.

And you can even see on a clear day, you can see Alaska from the north side of the islands there. And I'd never been anywhere so remote. In order to get there, I took the ferry, multiple ferries, from Vancouver to Nanaimo.

And I took a bus from Nanaimo all the way to Port Hardy, other side of Vancouver Island, northwestern most town. Camped out there, was warned by the locals not to ride my bike down the trails at night because there's mountain lions everywhere. And so I took, I had to get up early in the morning to catch a ferry, a 16 hour ferry to Prince Rupert.

So I got up at like four in the morning in the pouring rain, packed up my gear, rode out to this ferry to get on at like 7 a.m. And it was a 16 hour journey.

Neil:

No mountain lions.

Lewis:

No mountain lions on the ferry, confirmed.

Neil:

No, I mean on the way.

Lewis:

No, I took the long way on the road. I took their advice.

Neil:

And you got on the 16 hour ferry from already a super remote location. There's no other way to get there?

Lewis:

You can fly.

Neil:

Oh, fly, okay.

Lewis:

I was interested in the journey. Yeah.

Beautiful scenery, slow moving, gigantic ferry, thousands of people on it.

Neil:

Thousands, okay.

Lewis:

Yeah, a lot of people.

Okay. Then you land in Prince Rupert.

Neil:

Is that a town in Canada?

Lewis:

Yeah, it's on the mainland. It is a very gray, rainy place. I think amongst the rainiest in the North America.

Neil:

Kind of a surprising settlement there, maybe. Maybe some sort of natural resources.

Lewis:

It seems like it's a port. Like, you know, a lot of goods come in on boat. And since it's on the mainland, there's a lot of trains picking up containers and that kind of shit.

Have a horrible night's sleep in Prince Rupert and then jump on a seven hour ferry to Haida Gwaii.

Neil:

Oh my gosh, you're not done yet? Okay, so then another seven hour ferry?

Lewis:

Kind of open water ferry, seven hours to Haida Gwaii. And then Haida Gwaii appears out of the mist like Jurassic Park. You know, it was one of the last, this is what I was told, it was one of the last settled places in North America.

Neil:

I believe it.

Lewis:

Because it was hard to find.

Neil:

Well, oh, hard to find. Because it was- Like it's shrouded in mist.

Lewis:

Yes, it's very gray and misty out there.

Neil:

Can't find it. They found it, all right.

Lewis:

Well, of course. And yeah, got off the ferry, had the address of my cousin, you know, rode to, I was with my bike, again, and went to my cousin's place, you know, met him and settled in.

Neil:

Is your cousin your uncle's sperm donor's kid?

Lewis:

Yes. I think they all met in the school system. My uncle was a teacher.

I think that one of them would have been a principal.

Neil:

What was that like meeting these people?

Lewis:

Oh, just interesting.

You know, their lifestyle was so different.

Neil:

How so?

Lewis:

Well, these two women were some of the most badass people I'd ever met in my life.

They hunted all their own meat, or fished. They drove around. They always had a loaded 22 rifle on the dashboard of the truck.

If they saw a deer, they got it. Donna would post up on the hood of her truck. She'd shoot the deer, walk over to it, gut it, throw it in the back of the truck.

It would be sausage 24 hours later. And then it would be canned or stored frozen, whatever. They didn't waste anything.

I went deep sea fishing with them. They ran a charter boat.

Neil:

Deep sea fishing?

Lewis:

Yeah. So I got a permit to catch a salmon and a halibut. I had a permit to get one of each.

You caught a halibut? Those are gigantic fish. Yeah, it was about 50 pounds.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

And then, so these two were married.

Neil:

A spear?

Lewis:

They'd been, no, it was a hook.

Neil:

Oh, a hook.

Lewis:

Heavily weighted, industrial gauge.

Neil:

Oh my God.

Lewis:

They had serious equipment. We were in a small boat, but they had radar.

They survived there for thousands of years. These women are very smart. They knew exactly where the fish were.

And they're very capable. They had more of a homestead. Their home was half conventional home, half log cabin.

They raised chickens and turkeys and bunnies. They grew vegetables. Everybody in the family had killed a black bear to save their own ass.

Neil:

Oh my gosh. Not as a right of passage, but as a thing that you just threw there.

Lewis:

There was a bear coming at them and they had no other choice.

The same way we would swat a fly or kill a spider. I was warned. They've all killed a bear.

I was warned many times to be careful about your surroundings, that the black bears are big and aggressive. They don't hibernate. They have food all year round.

It's essentially a rainforest.

Neil:

They don't hibernate.

Lewis:

This is what I was told.

Neil:

Wow, well, they would know.

Lewis:

Yeah. So big and aggressive. They can eat all year round.

Neil:

Black bears in Ontario are known to be not big or aggressive.

Lewis:

Yeah, these are very well-fed bears with no other natural predators around. So they got it.

They're not competing with people. Yes. So you gotta be ready to shoot them, to kill them.

And they all did.

Neil:

At least one. Oh my gosh.

Lewis:

And you're not allowed to do anything with it. You have to leave it.

Neil:

Why?

Lewis:

It's just, they don't want people commercial or, you know.

Neil:

Yeah, but you can't eat it. Like, isn't that more respectful to the animal to consume it?

Lewis:

You would think. But I think they just don't want any...

Neil:

Sport to develop.

Lewis:

Yeah, yeah.

Neil:

Because you got an island full of giant, big, aggressive black bears.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

Some people might.

Lewis:

Apparently.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah. It's a natural resource.

Lewis:

I never saw one.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

But we did go on hikes and my one cousin carried a rifle the whole time.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

We went to visit, you know, various hunting camps that they've used. And they were just kind of... So proximity to Alaska though.

Neil:

Very close. Is this the James Michener book?

Lewis:

Yes. And so I started listening. As I was caring for my father, I wanted to get to know him better.

I really tried to engage him more in conversation and talk about things that I wish we would have talked about. I wanted to get in touch with his emotional side more. His sensitive side.

I saw that he shared a different... His relationship with my sister was very different than his relationship with me. My sister got the sensitive, emotional side of my father.

I got... Let's talk about sports. And say derogatory things about women.

Neil:

Oh no.

Lewis:

Side of my father.

Neil:

Oh really?

Lewis:

Every woman driver was a cunt.

Neil:

Oh my God.

Lewis:

Or a fucking cunt.

Neil:

Oh my God.

Lewis:

That's kind of like...

Neil:

I'm so sorry. Oh wow. That is... Wow, that is...

Lewis:

And if I wanted to talk to my father, I had to behave this way or pay attention to sports I didn't give a shit about just to hang around him. If I wanted to...

Neil:

But it's still inspiring you the desire to care for him at the end of his life.

Lewis:

He's my father. I love him. What am I gonna do?

I can't help that. It's like born into me. And so like I was saying, I didn't see any other option that I would comfortably live with myself.

I was actively...

Neil:

Was he a misogynist to the end?

Lewis:

Oh yeah.

He would say things to the nurses, the personal caregivers that would come in and help.

Neil:

They must have refused to work with him.

Lewis:

No, no. They said he was not nearly as bad as most people. But they would come in and say, all right, Jim, are we gonna get you a shower today?

He'd say, nope, but I'll shower you.

Neil:

Oh my God.

Lewis:

And then I'd have to like chastise him and apologize for him.

And they would laugh it off. And then I would... As they were leaving, I'd be like, I'm really sorry.

If you don't wanna come back, I totally understand. And they more often than not came back. But funnily enough, he would only accept a shower from a male nurse.

He would not accept one from a female nurse. I think it was his pride there. But eventually that all got to be too much.

And he eventually let me do that for him.

Neil:

Shower him?

Lewis:

Yeah, help him out, that kind of thing.

Neil:

How did that feel for you?

Lewis:

I was happy that he was finally letting me do something I knew I was capable of doing. And it was just easier.

Neil:

Wow. Almost therapeutic for you.

Lewis:

In a way, I mean, it was difficult, especially when it got to the diaper phase.

Neil:

Yeah, you're wiping now.

Lewis:

Funnily enough, his podiatrist pointed out to me that he had diaper rash.

Because he wouldn't let me do anything hygienic. He was very stubborn. I took him to the podiatrist appointment.

He was sitting uncomfortably. And the doctor was like, what's wrong? Why can't you get comfortable, Jim?

And he said, ah, my butt hurts. And he's like, let me have a look back there. And so he took him into his office, and my dad dropped his pants, and the doctor took a look, spread the cheeks, and he recoiled right away.

And he's like, have a look. And he showed me, he's like, this is essentially extremely bad diaper rash. And he's like, you gotta help him.

And I had no idea that things were so bad. And so this was kind of the moment where he provided me with free medical advice outside of his thing. He said, go get a zinc paste.

It's an off-the-shelf thing. It's an old school treatment. He's like, I promise it'll work.

It's just like a thick, white zinc paste. He's like, you gotta wipe them, you gotta clean them. And then put this on like it's spackle.

Neil:

Spackle?

Lewis:

Like just the more the better. And so I got the stuff, I did the thing, and I couldn't believe how quickly he healed back there.

And it changed, like he could sit comfortably. It was a big improvement. I was very grateful to this doctor for doing that.

He totally didn't have to do it.

Neil:

It's hard later in life, I'm imagining, that you lose your, not just privacy, but in some cases, your dignity, right?

Lewis:

Oh yeah, he had to go with it. It was difficult for him. He wouldn't let my sister do it for the longest time.

But we had a routine, and I tried to make it fun. I would play music he liked. I tried to keep it as light as possible.

And really just like have fun. Try to find the humor in it. It was like the only way I was gonna get through it.

Neil:

And then you had a mushroom trip while you were taking care of your dad, too.

Lewis:

Yeah, and so later on through the thing, after I had a couple mushroom experiences, and I wasn't able to take time off anymore the same way. I needed to be more hands-on, and more or less 24 hours a day. So in order to get some time away that felt like a vacation, I would take a handful of mushrooms and go to Gage Park and take four or five hours off.

And that four or five hours high on mushrooms felt like 20, 30 hours away because it was a real mental vacation. It's when I really started to be like, oh, I am on a trip. You know, where I never really related to, the I'm tripping out, you know, it's like, oh no.

The metaphor became real. Yeah, it was like, oh, I never thought of it this way. It really does feel like a mini vacation.

And so on one particular trip in the park, I would set boundaries for myself because I knew that I had, I would get ideas when I was high on mushrooms and I would have desires to do things that were not what I would typically wanna do. I really wanted to be naked when I was high on mushrooms. And I knew in my mind, if I'm in public, I can't be.

So I would just be in jean shorts and nothing else. No socks, no shoes, no shirt, just shorts. I'd lay in the grass, it felt amazing.

Neil:

Do you think you wanna be naked because of the sensory experience of it?

Lewis:

I don't know. It was just like instinctually what I wanted.

Neil:

You said it felt amazing, yeah. Oh, instinctually, okay.

Lewis:

Yeah, I felt no, I wasn't worried about judgment. I didn't.

Neil:

Oh, that's interesting.

Lewis:

You know, it was something about that state of mind.

Neil:

Social mores fall away.

Lewis:

Yeah, but I also realized that they existed and I couldn't.

That I had to behave a certain way.

Neil:

Yeah, so next time I see someone in the park near my house in the middle of the night, totally naked.

Lewis:

No, middle of the day.

Neil:

Middle of the day, lying there naked, which I have seen multiple times, that they might just be high on mushrooms.

Lewis:

I mean, maybe. And so on this particular trip, I took a pretty healthy amount of mushrooms and went to the park, set boundaries for myself. And when I got to the park, there was a religious group that had gotten a permit to use a PA system and to use the main stage, the bandshell, a defining feature in this park, this blue semi-circle.

Neil:

I remember the old bandshells. There was one in Oshawa.

Lewis:

Probably.

Neil:

Yeah, just one, but in Whippy, where I moved to, there was none. So it's like a kind of a hundred year old thing.

Lewis:

It's an old thing, for sure. It had a bit of seating around it, but mostly open field there. And so, although the park is big, it's very flat and sound travels across it.

And there was no getting away from the noise of it. So I was just like, well, whatever. I'll just deal with it.

And as I started to get higher and higher, as I was going up, I was listening to people talk. And it seemed to me like it was kind of a born again Christian vibe. People were going up on stage and just talking about how they were going in a bad direction, and then they found Jesus, and it changed their life, and that they're on a better path now.

And it was all overwhelmingly positive. It was people that sincerely believed that they found this higher power, and it changed their life for the better. I was like, well, there's nothing wrong with this message.

You know? And so I just was like, that's pretty nice and innocent. And I didn't, I found my place, I laid down in the grass, and I was just looking at the band shell.

And as I got higher, I started to hallucinate, auditory hallucinate, which I learned, for me, is like a pretty common thing when I'm high on these substances. And I, all of a sudden, all of the talking on stage became Charlie Brown's parents-esque. So I was just hearing like, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.

But it was like, but I was feeling like the positive vibes wash over me. And I was looking at the band shell, and I thought, doesn't that look like the eye of a creature that's like stuck underground in this park? I bet it is.

And in fact, I'm gonna dig this creature up and figure out who it is. And I really liked this idea of that. And I carried that idea with me for a little while, and I thought about it a lot.

And I talked about it with some friends, about how I think that I might have figured out how to tie together all of these projects I'd been thinking of for a long time into one cohesive idea that I could do. And it was starting to make sense to me how I could do it. I wanted to tie in folk art, I wanted to tie in psychedelic art, things I was interested in but I didn't participate in.

Neil:

Interdimensional art.

Lewis:

I wanted to do performance art, I wanted to do street art.

Neil:

Street art, yeah, right.

Lewis:

And although I had done street art in the past, I wanted to do it in a different way. And performance art, I didn't understand it. I wanted to get in that world a little bit, but I didn't think I was able to because I wasn't a performance artist.

And so I just kind of was like, well, I'm the only one telling me that I can't do it. Right? So what the fuck do I know?

I'm just gonna do it.

Neil:

Wow, I'm the only one telling me I can't do it, so what the fuck do I know?

Lewis:

I was, right?

Neil:

Wow, what a barrier-eviscerating thought.

Lewis:

And I'd had that thought before about other things, and so I stopped telling myself that I couldn't be a performance artist, and I just was like, fuck it, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna tie it into this whole thing.

Neil:

And- I'm the only one telling me I can't do it. And what the fuck do I know?

Lewis:

I didn't know what  Lewis was gonna look like. At the time,  Lewis didn't even have a name.

It was like, I had to discover. I didn't literally go dig him up, but metaphorically I did. I spent time thinking about it and what this creature would look like, and what I needed it to be in order to make a costume.

And so over the course of the time I was with my father, I spent a lot of time thinking about this. A lot of the time I was drawing patterns in my sketchbooks, I was really thinking about this. I don't listen to anything when I do it.

I just, I'm usually in a cafe, and I just like to be around people and kind of pull ideas out of the air. And so I would plan and think about my future once my dad was gone. But what was I gonna do?

I knew I was gonna feel like alone. You know, it was similar to the feeling of leaving home for the first time. But like this time I'm really on my own, like no one-

Neil:

Untethered.

Lewis:

Yeah. And I was single. And so I didn't have to, for the first time in my life, I didn't have to think about somebody else being in my life.

And so when my dad eventually passed, I knew I was gonna have to move out of that house, and I wanted to restart my career in Hamilton. And so I got a studio downtown. I found an affordable place that I could live and work out of, again, not legally.

The landlord was very nice and let me sleep there. And his only rule was no candles.

Neil:

No candles?

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Not the one rule.

Lewis:

No open fire.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a good rule.

Lewis:

No smoking joints.

Neil:

It's just funny that that's the one rule.

Lewis:

Yeah, yeah. He seemed to really be-

Neil:

You can sleep in the place illegally.

Lewis:

Yeah, yeah.

Neil:

Just no candles. Practical guy

Lewis:

So I rented a room- A room above a bike store, 15 by 16 feet, with a decently high ceiling, couple windows.

I had no running water.

Neil:

Oh my gosh.

Lewis:

I shared a bathroom with the bike store.

Neil:

Oh my gosh.

Lewis:

That had no shower. So- Ah, what'd you bathe?

I did sponge bath, sink bath. Used a washcloth and I washed my hair in the sink.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

I washed my dishes in that sink.

Neil:

Get the armpits there.

Lewis:

Yeah, everything.

Neil:

Soap up.

Neil:

You could soap up your armpits in the sink.

Lewis:

I'm pretty like, you know, I had a whole routine. I experimented with different routines and I found one that worked really well.

Neil:

Which is what?

Lewis:

It was just required a washcloth, a bar of soap, and well, shampoo for my hair.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

And you know, just not- Hard to wash your lower half of your body in a sink. I was tall enough that I could straddle the sink in a way and wash, you know?

Neil:

Sink straddling.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

If you don't have a shower around, look into sink straddling.

Lewis:

Sink straddling.

Neil:

Yeah, I'm starting to picture that.

Lewis:

I was definitely a sink straddler. Yeah.

Neil:

You know, you're living more and more like a duck here, man. Like you just are. Like you're like a bird.

You say you're bird-like. You're living like a bird. You're flying all over the place.

You're landing wherever you want. Like, I don't mean that in a negative way, but you're like, you are like, you're like, behavior is more and more merging with this character.

Lewis:

Yeah. I mean, I think that-

Neil:

You are Lewis, man.

Lewis:

I wanted, I didn't want any distinction between like my art and my life.

Neil:

I wanted it to be- But you don't call yourself an anima thing. You don't, you know, the people that identify as animals?

Lewis:

No.

Neil:

You don't call yourself that.

Lewis:

No.

Neil:

In fact, I- You don't look down on those people, but you don't- You wouldn't get your eyes done differently and stuff like that.

Lewis:

No.

Neil:

You wouldn't shave your mustache into a beak.

Lewis:

No. No, absolutely not. It's really- No, I'm a furless non-furry.

Neil:

I'm a furless non-furry.

Lewis:

Well, I had that thought one day when I was in the costume.

Neil:

You call it a costume. You don't call it a skin.

Lewis:

No, yeah. It's a costume.

Neil:

It's a costume. But you're a furless non-furry.

Lewis:

We're wearing costumes now, you know.

Neil:

Oh, okay.

Our clothes, yeah.

Lewis:

We're presenting ourselves in a certain way.

Neil:

Oh yeah, sure, yeah. Furless non-furry.

Lewis:

And so I was in the costume one day, and I was pretty high. I like to hotbox a costume. Who wouldn't?

I mean, I'm sure a lot of people wouldn't, but if you smoke pot and you like to do wild shit, it's a pretty fun thing to do. And it's a great place to think, because again, I don't talk when I'm in there. I'm silent.

I'm alone.

Neil:

You will not talk to people who talk to you as I found out the first time I met you. You only quack at them.

Lewis:

Correct. Unless I- If I ran into you on the street now in a costume, I would probably say, hey, Neil, what's up?

Neil:

No, I think you shouldn't. Hold onto that integrity, Lewis.

Lewis:

Well, you know, sometimes I do. I'm sorry.

Neil:

Okay, okay.

Lewis:

But I usually make sure there's nobody around that's gonna hear me.

Neil:

Oh, there you go.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

No one's gonna see Lewis on film, like, talking behind an alley, smoking a cigarette.

Lewis:

It seems, well, you'd never see me smoking a cigarette, but. Yeah, okay. And so I was in the costume, and I thought, I hope people don't think I'm a furry.

Not that there's anything wrong with being a furry, but I just don't want to put out furry vibes. And I was like, well, of course they wouldn't think I'm a furry because I don't have any fur. I'm a furless.

Yeah, I was like, I'm a furless non-furry. I'm a furless non-furry. And I put a pin in that idea because I was in the costume, and I like that.

Neil:

And I- How do you take notes in there? Are you getting all these high ideas?

Lewis:

Just a mental note.

Neil:

Okay.

Lewis:

And so when I came back to the drawing board, I did a little drawing of what a badge, a little crest would look like, you know, for the National Federation of Furless Non-Furries.

Neil:

The National Federation of Furless Non-Furries.

Lewis:

And so that's what I called it. And it was one of the first merch items I ever made.

Neil:

Oh, how did it sell?

Lewis:

I did a painting of it, and the painting didn't sell right away. I didn't really try hard to sell the painting. I was more interested in the idea.

Neil:

Do you sell through Instagram?

Lewis:

I did, and I do, yes. Like, @lewismallard on Instagram is where your home is online. At lewis underscore mallard. Oh.

Neil:

L-E-W-I-S underscore M-A-L-L-A-R-D.

Lewis:

Correct. The other Lewis Mallard will not let go. I have tried- Numerous times.

To buy the real Lewis Mallard's account, but he refused to even reply to me. They, I don't, I shouldn't, you know. But anyway.

Neil:

Well, I think what we've just done in this epic conversation is we have finally come to the part in the road where Wild High on Mushroom, taking care of your dad, the James Michener reading, Alaska-inspired, final tethering you had to not living alone.

Lewis:

I love the adventure of that book. I learned about my father from these books. I learned that he liked the idea of going on wild adventures.

And there was a lot of like father-son bonding in these books that I was so jealous of that these fictional characters, these fictional fathers did amazing things with their fictional sons. And I thought, I wonder if my dad wanted to do this with his son. He would have read about it.

Yeah, he would have read about it. It's a cool thing to connect with somebody through reading the same thing that they've read.

Neil:

Yes. You know what I'm saying? You're in this interview now.

Yeah, we're doing a podcast.

Neil:

That's right.

Neil:

Okay. It's a lot of action here on the street. So the adventure of the book, the father-son bonding on the book.

Lewis:

Why is there a fight happening?

Neil:

Is it real or fake?

Lewis:

That's a real.

Neil:

That's a real fight?

Lewis:

He's being taught a lesson. That's a child.

Neil:

Looks like his mother, maybe?

Lewis:

Yeah.

[Person on the Street]

You don't know? You don't fucking know?

Lewis:

To let it go. That's something you let go. That is family business.

Neil:

Yeah, that looks like his mom, right?

Lewis:

I think we just saw a mother punching her son.

Neil:

Punching her son and pulling him into the car. It does seem like his mother, am I right? Like age-wise, race-wise.

Lewis:

He turtled and went with her. Went with her in the car.

Neil:

Head down, the friends kept walking. That was the guy that just yelled, I'm on this, I'm recording this. That was fucking crazy.

She screamed, you don't know? You don't fucking know? I guess he did know, potentially.

Lewis:

It turned out he knew.

Neil:

It seemed like it. This is the reaction. Yeah, oh my gosh.

That was a wild punch-up, though. You don't really see mothers jump out of their cars beating their sons often, I would say. What do you think just happened there?

What do you think? Okay, a woman in a hijab with a twin. Pardon me, what'd you say?

Lewis:

Good job.

Neil:

I don't know. Yeah. Okay, okay.

It didn't seem alarming at the end. We don't need to call the authorities, right?

Lewis:

I think that they would be pointless.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Lewis, we're more than three hours into this conversation here, man. We've gone all the way from the beginning to not the end, but to the end of the genesis of the project that you're now currently doing in and around cities in Canada where you're creating this performance art, this folk art, this psychedelic art.

You're taking over stations. You're dressing up as a duck. You're walking across town.

You've got a viral following online, eight, one, two, zero followers, or maybe it's getting more. After this comes out, get ready for a few more.

Lewis:

Whoa, the Neil bump.

Neil:

The Neil bump, the Tim Ferriss effect. We'll call it the Neil Pasricha effect. You got merch for sale.

You're gonna add the Instagram button. Okay, I wanna buy it only through Instagram. I wanna give Mark Zuckerberg a piece.

No, I'm just kidding. I wanna give you cash. I wanna give you cash.

So, I hope that this conversation has been inspiring to artists. We sometimes have fast money questions. I don't know if you're up for it, energy-wise.

You wanna do some fast money?

Lewis:

What's a fast money question?

Neil:

Hardcover, paperback, audio, or E?

Lewis:

Sorry?

Neil:

Hardcover, paperback, audio, or E?

Lewis:

Audio, we're talking books?

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

I prefer audio.

Neil:

How do you organize the books on your bookshelf?

Lewis:

I don't really. They just kind of fit in where they fit in by size. I don't organize them alphabetically or by topic.

Neil:

Do you have a white whale book or a book you've been chasing the longest?

Lewis:

What is a book I really wanna read, but haven't tackled yet?

Neil:

That's exactly it. I'll put Moby Dick for mine, because I wanna read it, and it was good, and it's just really overwhelmingly, dauntingly long. But length shouldn't, you know. The audio thing's a great idea.

Lewis:

Yeah. There's a few James Minchner books I haven't tackled yet.

Neil:

Are all his books 987 pages like this one?

Lewis:

The vast majority of them are very long.

Neil:

Wow, can you believe this guy produced these that long? I mean, it would take me a whole lifetime to research Alaska.

Lewis:

He had a team.

Neil:

Oh, he had a team.

Lewis:

He had to have had a team.

Neil:

He had to have had a team.

Lewis:

I think, yes.

Neil:

Okay, okay.

Lewis:

To help research and stuff, because he goes into, it's historical fiction.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah, you gotta.

Lewis:

So it was an interesting way to learn about places.

Neil:

It's a great, I would recommend this book for anyone who's going to Alaska or wants to go to Alaska. You get, you absorb the whole.

Lewis:

You certainly get some of the history.

Neil:

Cultural history of the place through a story that is not like reading the history in a history book. We're getting rained on now, by the way. I got microphones out here getting wet.

Lewis:

Little baby drops.

Neil:

What's this? Here's how we're gonna wrap.

Do you have a bookstore? What's your favorite bookstore, living or dead?

Lewis:

Favorite bookstore, living or dead?

Neil:

I don't really have a favorite bookstore.

Lewis:

That's okay, that's okay.

Yeah?

Neil:

Yeah, the audio books you're getting on CD are from the library, presumably, back in the day.

Lewis:

They were from the library sometimes. Sometimes they were downloaded.

Neil:

Do you have a favorite library?

Lewis:

Oh, yeah, the Hamilton Central Library.

Neil:

Hamilton Central, that sounds like one of those old school, big.

Lewis:

It's a brutalist building, right downtown Hamilton.

I always liked, I mean. I love old libraries like that.

Neil:

Robert McLaughlin Library in Oshawa, shout out to you. Never been there, but I would love to see it. Oh yeah, you gotta go there.

Lewis:

I spent a lot of time in the library in St. Catharines, just doing my homework. And when I met you, you were on your way to the library.

Neil:

When I met you in person, you were telling me, I just booked an hour at the library.

Lewis:

Yeah?

Neil:

You're a library guy.

Lewis:

I like the reference library in Toronto very much.

Neil:

Yeah, I like your like of the library.

Lewis:

Yeah, I think it's an extremely valuable, underutilized resource in the city, especially the one in Hamilton. The maker space there was extremely valuable to me in starting my business. It provided a very easy use and cheap use of their printers and computers.

And so I could start making my merch myself.

Neil:

Start making my merch myself.

Lewis:

Yeah, so with my ability to draw, plus the knowledge of various computer programs, and then the library having a vinyl printer and vinyl cutter, I could make and print my own stickers and make the packaging and sell them.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

And so it gave me the ability to make something for cheap. I did the labor myself and then I could keep all the money myself.

Neil:

Oh my gosh. You're well on your way to not looking at the prices at the grocery store, Lewis.

Lewis:

I hope so.

Neil:

Your jarringly left, right, you know, life story, slaloming the boundaries of societal norms, you know, basically living life from first principles, using the codes that you're developing to guide not just your art, but how you live, how you think about relationships. I mean, I'm really in awe of so much of your thinking and your articulation about how you do things. I wonder if you might close us off today with any hard-fought piece of wisdom, bit of advice, or any general reflection you wanna leave us with to be the final thoughts as we close off this deep and long conversation.

Lewis:

I think that you, not just you, anybody listening, is capable of a lot more than they think they are. And that if you give yourself a chance to amaze yourself, that you probably will. Give yourself a chance to amaze yourself, you probably will.

Neil:

Lewis Mallard, thank you so much for coming on Freebox.

Lewis:

Thank you, man. It's been a pleasure knowing you in this short time, and I look forward to keeping on knowing you in the future. I hope so.

Neil:

Hey everybody, it's just me, just Neil again, hanging out in my basement, my laptop flipped open in front of me, listening back to that wide and wonderful conversation with the one and only Lewis Mallard. I hope that you enjoyed that conversation like I did. So many quotes jumped out to me, like, when I first discovered folk art, I didn't really appreciate it because I was really stuck in this mentality as a teenager that art had to be as high skill as possible.

That really reminds me of chapter eight, way back in 2018, the conversation we had with Sarah Anderson, author of Sarah's Scribbles, where she called Hyperbole and a Half by Ali Broch, one of her three most formative books. And for those that know Hyperbole and a Half, that was number 980 in her top 1000. You know, it's like totally scribble drawings, right?

Like it's just totally messy scribble drawings. And for Sarah Anderson, that book did, I think, what the folk art did for Lewis, which is kind of just crack you out of this like, has to be perfect kind of idea of art, which is beautiful. Kind of related.

How about this quote? I think there's a lot of lovely magic that happens when people don't completely understand what they're looking at. I love that.

And then the third quote, I got lots of quotes here, you know, it's got some quotes about the poverty he was living in, altering his surroundings, but how about this one? I'm the only one telling me I can't do it. So what the fuck do I know?

I just love that. I'm the only one telling me I can't do it. So what the fuck do I know?

But like having an awareness that like you, we, I am the one limiting myself from trying anything new, doing anything new, and then having a healthy degree of skepticism about your own confidence, like that is a really beautiful mix. I love those three quotes. I love Lewis Mallard.

You can tell. I mean, I'm a big fan of this guy, the work, and just the grassroots nature of it, you know, it's a person on their own just choosing to do something and putting it out into the world. So I love really everything about this.

I'm really grateful to Lewis Mallard for coming on the show and giving us three more books to add to our top 1000, including number 595, Lu Pan by Demi Hitz, H-I-T-Z or Z. Number 594, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, also known as The Whale, but really everyone knows that as Moby Dick. And number 593, Alaska by James A.

Michener, M-I-C-H-E-N-E-R. Thank you so much to Lewis for coming on the show. Did you make it past the three second pause?

Are you still here? It's a long one. One of our longest, maybe the long, is this the longest chapter we've had ever?

It might've been. It was more of a hangout. I always wanted to do like a hangout, you know, just like a chill and sit and hang out type of show.

This is one of them. Doug Miller, I think chapter 99, you know, and Doug Miller's, Doug Miller books is also one like this. Maybe chapter 44 too with Kevin, the bookseller.

That one was all over the place, but hangouts are fun and I'm hanging out with you and you're hanging out with me and that's why we're back in the end of the podcast club. This is one of three clubs we have for three bookers, including the cover to cover club. That's people listen to or to attempt to listen to every single chapter of the show, the 333, the end in 2040, where you be then?

Maybe we should do a party for the last chapter. What do you think? And of course the secret club, which I cannot tell you more about other than you can call our phone number for clues.

Speaking of our phone number, please do call it. If you're listening to this, call the phone number. Tell me who you are.

Let's hear your voice. Tell me a formative book, a reflection, a poem, anything you want. Don't don't.

It doesn't have to be perfect. Just like the art. Just, just make a phone call 1-833-READ-A-LOT.

And as we always do, let's kick off the end of the podcast club by going to the phones now.

Neil:

Hi, good evening. My name is Shamina Hildreth, and I actually just, someone shared one of a, I think it's Harvard Business Review article that briefly touched on your untouchable day every week. And I just totally love that whole concept.

And I look to adopt it in some type of way, even if it's just in a small way. I work for a Fortune 500 company as an analyst. And so it's really hard to balance meetings and also the deliverables.

So and I know you kind of spoke to that in the article that I read about how you were to accomplish having an untouchable day and not compromising that day. So really inspired by that. I want to implement that into my life.

I don't work in a creative space, but I think that I would be a lot more productive if I wasn't just all over the place all the time. So again, I just want to leave a quick voicemail. I haven't done this in a long time.

So thank you for drawing me outside of my comfort zone and leaving this voicemail. Again, my name is Shamina. I'm here in the Minneapolis, Minnesota Twin Cities area.

And yeah, just leaving a voicemail as you asked. And thank you so much for all that you do and the books that you've written. Have a great day and enjoy your summer.

Neil:

Shamina from Minneapolis, what a beautiful voicemail. So nice to hear from you, Shamina. Yeah, I wrote that article, I want to say 2019 for Harvard Business Review, hbr.org has or you can just type in untouchable days and my name into Google or you can just go to the show notes on threebooks.co because we'll link to that at the bottom. But basically what I advocate is just taking one day a week where you're completely untethered, unplugged, not on email all day. As Shamina says, I think I'd be a lot more productive if I wasn't all over the place all the time. Yeah, you would be.

And so that's why it's so important to do this. But in the corporate setting, it's more difficult. The first thing I recommend, I don't think I put in the article because I think it came through lots of people asking me about this later, I mentioned the Rich Roll podcast though, is take an untouchable lunch.

It sounds so like obvious, but when I was at Walmart, you know, everybody is like piling into someone's Toyota Tercel like head over for sushi. And of course, we're all at the time with our work phones, you know, checking our emails like the whole time we're on lunch. So it is and what I do is when I started doing this at Walmart, I did so like brazenly I like leave the phone on your desk.

So if anyone comes by your desk to look for you, there's just a phone there knowing that they cannot reach you because the phone is left behind, you know what I mean? And I know it's different with remote work and so on. But let's just say you're in an office setting.

So leave the phone on the desk, try to go for an untouchable lunch. Now if you can pull up the untouchable lunch, then that means you can go from like, let's just say 12 to one with no contact. You come back, there's eight emails now instead of like, you know, one every six minutes.

And then you start stretching it a bit. Okay, if I can be untouchable from 12 to one, maybe I can be untouchable from 11 to one or 11 to two. And then what you do, here's the way to sell it into your boss is prepare some like half day piece of work that you really know you could crush, or maybe you crush in advance for the three hours.

And then say to your boss, after you just give yourself permission to take it, Hey, Jordan, I went I read this great article in Harvard Business Review. And I decided to take the person's advice I know we can't do untouchable days here at this office because everyone's working so hard. But I decided to try it and I took an untouchable half day I just shut off my Outlook and my email and left my phone at my desk and I went and worked in the boardroom for half a day or whatever it is.

I went and worked at home for half a day. And guess what? I finally got that like proposal that I said I was going to get to you three months ago where I finally like got back to I wrote that email to that CEO that required like deep time to like thoughtfully craft whatever it is.

And the person's like, Oh, great, great, good job. Then you keep doing that. You keep like selling in the results because the results will be there 100% like once you take a half day or a day off from like the the the overwhelming amount of ping ponging that happens in a corporate office like the busy work, you know, Cal Newport would call that pseudo productivity.

Well, it's amazing what you get done tons of stuff, right? So you keep using the results to sell in the permission, you know, and then you kind of tip off your boss, Hey, Jordan, why don't you take one too? You know, and this is how it kind of goes up grassroots through a company.

Use the HBR article. You know what, I think we should link in the show notes to the actual fancy like PDF version of it. If you don't have it, I can like send it to you like somehow when those things are sent around with the HBR logo on top with like the big square orange thing, it just looks more professional.

HBR is telling me to do it. Not this crazy podcast host. Anyway, you know what I'm saying?

All right. I use this website called chartable, which tracks reviews for every podcast around the whole world, no matter where people leave them. So just a nice new one here from P S three, five stars, interesting, heartening, love the podcast, love the concept and love books with a big smiley emoji P S three.

If you're listening, I owe you a book as you know, so you can drop me a line with your address and now it's time for the word of the chapter. Oh my gosh. How many cool and interesting words that Lewis Mallard use.

Hmm. Hmm. There was a lot.

Let's go back to Lewis now and then see if one jumps out for us. Here we go.

Lewis:

Psychedelic folk artist, my government PSYOP, vandalism. Of course I bring pylons, double entendre, tributary or whatever. It's debossed.

The forgotten piece of street furniture or banal task. It's a brutalist, uh, building, furless non-furry.

Neil:

Oh yeah. There's a lot of goodies to choose from there. That's for sure.

Why don't we go with double entendre, double entendre, Miriam Webster. Could you play it for us please? Double entendre, double entendre, number one in linguistics, a word or expression capable of two interpretations with one usually risque such as flirty talk full of double entendres or two ambiguity of meaning arising from language that tends that lends itself to more than one interpretation.

Okay. So first off, this obviously comes from the French entendre. That means, you know, uh, the verb is, what's the verb on Tante E N T E N T T here to understand to me.

It's a double entendre means two meetings, two hearings, two understandings. But what's interesting is that there's a huge entry on this on Wikipedia, um, and basically it says that, you know, one of the ways a figure speech is obvious, one of them is not obvious and it goes all the way back to like the odyssey. You know, when Odysseus is captured by the Cyclops, he tells the Cyclops his name is Odoesis, which I probably got wrong, which means no one, right?

When Odysseus attacks the Cyclops later that night and stabs him in the eye, the Cyclops runs out of his cave yelling to the other Cyclops, no one has hurt me. Right? Okay.

That's an old book. How old is it? Really old.

How old is it? Ancient Greek epic, uh, in the year eighth, in the eighth century BC. So yeah, we want to say that's about almost 3000 years old.

Okay. So that's one of the first double entendres. There's other ones from Canterbury tales, stage performances in, in Shakespeare, um, some of which I can't read on the air.

Well, you know, just C words and M just bad, bad words kind of hidden in there. Uh, there's a picture of Steve Carell who plays, you know, Michael Scott in the office and it says he often points out unintentional double entendres with the phrase, that's what she said. Also it's in the entry, which is pretty epic.

Howard Stern, the Howard Stern show in the 1980s began to use double entendres as a way to get around FCC regulations. Right? That's interesting.

So double entendres were kind of a way to like kind of secretly slip in things. Um, double entendres are also, uh, one notch below triple entendres. Triple entendres exist.

For example, Joe Harris, a professor of modern French at Royal Holloway University in London, uh, says in Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, Timon, who has realized all his fawning guests are only in it for the food and generosity, invites them to one last dinner at his house just before revealing the dinner plates are empty. He refers to them all as his present friends. To them, it just means friends who are present.

But we know it's alluding to the fact that they are only his friends for the time being at present and because they want to enjoy his generosity, his presence. A triple entendre! Yes.

Are other triple entendres possible? Yes, they are. In fact, we go to rap music, the kids and the rap music, right?

For example, Pusha T in the song Suicide says, I build mine off fed time and dope lines. You caught steam off headlines and cosigns, meaning number one, his lines are good or dope. Two, the lines he raps about are about dope.

And three, he has actually sold lines of dope himself. Three subtle things and other people are saying, what about Frank Ocean's line, I'm high and I'm bi. Wait, I mean, I'm straight.

In the song Oldie, because it's a lyric, so you can't see how it's spelt. Is it B-Y-E or is it B-I as in a sexuality, right? Lots of stuff like that.

Triple, if you type in like best triple entendres or favorite double entendres, there are entire threads online and we could go down a rabbit hole. I love that there is, I love that the internet is so big that you could literally just come up with the word of the chapter for a podcast that's strangely about formative books, right? Find your word of the chapter and then find people in chat rooms from 11 years ago on Reddit talking about their favorite double and triple entendres.

I mean, we live in a great time, don't we? I mean, you get to, you get to meet walking and talking ducks just walking around the street. You get to sit with them for an entire morning, hang out with them in the sun, talk to them about art, so much stuff there.

I just love the way we got, I love the time of life we're alive. I think that's what I'm trying to say. I love when we're alive.

I love when we're alive. I love that we're alive when I can talk in my basement. You can hear me in that basement gym of Mongolia on a long drive, on a long dog walk, wherever you are.

We can hang out on the full moons for a lot more years to come. Sixteen more years till the ways to go, everybody. Until next time, remember that you are what you eat and you are what you read.

Keep turning the page, everybody. Thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you soon. Take care. 

Listen to the chapter here!

chapter here!

Man on the Street:

There is a guy who lives around this area.

Neil:

Yeah.

Man on the Street:

I mean, I always see him in the area. I don't know where he lives, but he dresses like a duck, like he has a big costume.

Neil:

He dresses up as a duck.

Man on the Street:

Yeah, you don't see his face.

Neil:

Why would someone do that? Why would someone dress up as a duck?

Man on the Street:

Just for fun, I guess.

Neil:

Man, I'm sitting here at the corner of Bathurst and College. He said there's a guy who walks around this neighborhood dressed up as a duck. And I know that's true because, I don't know, three months ago?

Six months ago.

Lewis:

It was probably somewhere between that.

Neil:

I made this coffee shop right behind me. I'm sitting on an orange bench. I'm leaning against a glass wall.

Up to my right is a sign that says El Rancho Restaurant. That's not this place. Behind me is a black sans-serif, Ariel Nero-type font with an orange shadow that says MANIC with the word COFFEE in an all-caps Areil with wide kerning underneath COFFEE. And I was sitting here. 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 Ateqah. 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:

I quacked at you.

Neil:

You just refused to talk to me.

Lewis:

No, I refused to use English words with you. Because? Because I was performing.

And I stay in character while I'm performing, almost in every circumstance I come into.

Neil:

How long is the performance?

Lewis:

How long was?

Neil:

How long is it? Are you walking around for like hours here?

Lewis:

It depends on my bladder. As soon as you have to pee, the show's over. When I get the feeling, I start to head home.

Neil:

So like, there's a viral media sensation in Toronto right now, covered on CBC, BlogTO. I know the Toronto Star was just taking pictures of you here, where you've done this, you've made this installation of like, you've taken over a streetcar track. Streetcar's going by now.

You can hear that. It says 506 Carlton on it. Red ribbons on the top and bottom, white ribbons in the middle.

Toronto Transit Commission. And you took over this station. So everyone's following you.

What's going, like, what is this? What are you doing? What is, what is  Lewis Mallard?

Lewis:

Lewis is me. And it's something I created to get myself back into the art world full time. I always wanted to be an artist, ever since I could remember wanting to be anything.

And I'm just trying to figure out how to do it.

Neil:

Ever since I wanted to be anything. So go back for me. I don't know your age.

I don't know your real name. Your age and your real name will not be shared today. Secret identities are interesting.

And I heard you say before I hit record, secrets are good. So now go back in time. When, where approximately did you come into being?

Where did you start to exist?

Lewis:

Like my hometown?

Neil:

Yeah.

Neil:

I could have just said that.

Lewis:

St. Catharines.

Neil:

St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada.

Lewis:

Correct.

Neil:

And I'm gonna guess sometime in the 70s.

Lewis:

Late 70s.

Neil:

Okay. And what was St. Catharines in the 70s like? And what kind of family were you born into?

Lewis:

Well, I don't have any memories from the 70s cause I was too young.

And I would say I remember early 80s and onwards. And what was it like? It was, I think I didn't have any idea what it was really like, because I was so insulated from the real world until I could start wandering away from home probably about the age of eight.

When I had a little bit of freedom to roam.

Neil:

Yeah. Freedom to roam. Something we seem to be losing, but which of course we seem aware that we're losing.

So we're kind of trying to get it back. What was your home life like? Brothers, sisters?

Lewis:

My sister, one sister. My parents were together until I think I was like about 12 years old is when they separated.

But I spent a lot of time alone playing by myself and trying to get my parents' attention and not ever getting it.

Neil:

Why not?

Lewis:

Cause they were, were they fighting? No. And they weren't fighting.

They were just not super engaged, I guess. Not extremely interested in what I was doing.

Neil:

Hands-off approach to parenting.

Lewis:

Very hands-off.

Neil:

Not uncommon.

Lewis:

I spent a lot of time.

Neil:

The opposite of helicopter, we'll call it a flyby.

Lewis:

Yeah. Yeah. From what I was told about when I was too young to remember, my nursery was a closet and I spent a lot of time alone in there.

And when they would come and check in on me, I would throw shit from my diaper at them because I was probably angry of being left alone for so long.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

And yeah, I was, I find it, I mean, of course I don't remember doing that, but I think that it's in my personality to do that.

Neil:

Wow. A shit flinger at a young age. Not because of being interrupted in his artistic pursuits, but rather because it's just like, dude, what are you doing?

And I get that from my youngest kid now. Like, you know, that whole like classic scenario of like the dog kind of facing the corner when you come home because you didn't take it for the walk with you or whatever. Like my youngest kid is like constantly perturbed about the lack of attention and it's a heartbreaking thing as a parent too.

Lewis:

I can imagine.

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah.

So the history, are they, are the Canadian? Are you from Canadian lineage? I don't want to guess much. And I won't, I don't know if I should describe your features for people or not. Cause I want to keep your identity secret, which it is.

Lewis:

Yeah. Well, let's just say, I don't know how long my family's been in Canada and I've never looked into, you know, anybody older than my grandparents. And I know very little about them, but my family's been here for, I think probably three or four, maybe five generations.

Neil:

Wow. Five generations.

Lewis:

That's a long time. I've never heard of, I didn't remember when I heard about anybody immigrating here. It would have been 1800s, I imagine.

Neil:

Wow. 1800s.

Lewis:

And, but my, my parents met.

Neil:

From where?

Lewis:

England and Scotland.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

I'm kind of.

Neil:

Yeah. You can do it.

Lewis:

I've never done a blood test or anything, but this is what I've been told.

Neil:

Some Viking in there, maybe.

Lewis:

I don't know about that, maybe. But yeah, they met in Hamilton and they were both raised in Hamilton and then moved to St. Catharines to start a family.

Neil:

Right, right, right. Okay. So we're, I want to describe the scene a little bit more for people so they can kind of picture us.

A woman's walking by with green hair, green arms, a skull, headscarf wrapped around her waist and kind of paintball colored tights on. There's another woman by in a blue dress with about three purses walking by, very hairy legs and black flip flops. We're in a pretty urban part of the city here.

There is a TTB trading company with Chinese characters on it across the street with bars in the windows. There's a pub and eatery. There's a, I don't know what that's like.

That looks like a condemned building. I mean, there's just like spray painted signs all over the cover of it. I don't know. Maybe it's a nightclub.

Lewis:

It is a nightclub.

Neil:

Oh, it's a nightclub. Nightclubs look like condemned buildings during the day.

Lewis:

Yeah.

A lot of them do, for sure. Yeah. I've never actually seen it open because I don't stay up that late.

Neil:

Right. Yeah. You're more of a daytime person. On your Instagram, you describe yourself as an interdimensional folk artist.

Lewis:

Well, a psychedelic folk artist.

Neil:

Oh, it says psychedelic folk artist.

Lewis:

It does.

Neil:

Did I make up the interdimensional part or is that an old iteration I saw?

Lewis:

No, no, no. It is the active description.

Neil:

Psychedelic folk artist.

Lewis:

Interdimensional.

Neil:

Oh, it just says interdimensional.

Lewis:

Correct.

Neil:

So why did you say psychedelic folk artist?

Lewis:

Because you left that part out.

Neil:

Oh, interdimensional psychedelic folk artist.

Lewis:

We got there.

Neil:

We got...

Oh my gosh. We're standing... So we're facing College Street.

There's one lane in front of us. Then there's three lanes. And between the remaining three lanes, there's a giant, long, 100 foot, 100 foot concrete flat oval with giant erect glass rectangles, which I think in the old days used to call bus shelters, but they don't shelter you from much, a metal railing.

And this is what's known as a streetcar stop. At the corner of the streetcar stop is an orange triangle, like a triangular prism, and like a polygon, a square polygon. You have, in broad daylight, repainted this to look like your Lewis Mallard face with a bright yellow bill, a bright green head as the male Mallard, the Drake Mallard has, and a blue eye with the black pupil.

You did this in the middle of the day. The post of it went viral. It says, Toronto legend has his own streetcar stop now.

You were just interviewed by the Toronto Star here, up on there in costume. What, what, what, where did this come from? You're painting, you're painting subway stations now?

What's going on here?

Lewis:

Well, I...

Neil:

Is this part of your interdimensionality?

Lewis:

It's, yeah, part of my multidisciplinary, I've always liked street art, since I, you know, first realized it was a thing in my teenage years.

But I never felt comfortable participating in it in the kind of stereotypical graffiti style that you see most of the time.

Neil:

And... Most street art is graffiti.

Lewis:

Well, yes, I would say it is of that style. The vast majority that you see.

Neil:

Somebody's just yelling, give me my money. That's okay, we're not gonna give him his money.

Lewis:

Just a local guy. Just a local guy.

That guy actually, and I told you this before, but it wasn't on that particular man. I see him very often in the neighborhood.

Neil:

In the costume.

Lewis:

While I'm in the costume.

Neil:

And what does he yell at you?

Lewis:

He is convinced that I am a government psy-op.

That I'm part of CSIS.

Neil:

I shouldn't laugh. He's probably got major schizophrenia.

Lewis:

It's not just him, he's got a few buddies.

I think they're all in the same group home in the neighborhood. And they're all convinced that I am a government psy-op. And they'll yell it at me.

They don't chase me, or they're not aggressive with me, but they'll yell at me from across the street and single me out. And I think it's hilarious.

Neil:

Do they ever physically touch you?

Lewis:

No, no.

Neil:

They don't punch you or anything?

Lewis:

No, no, no.

Neil:

Yeah, because if I saw a government psy-op dressed as a duck in my neighborhood. If you really believed it was one? If I really believed it was one, I wouldn't just let him walk away.

That's interesting about the schizophrenics, not to label, but in this neighborhood, they don't ever hurt you. Like I've walked around the streets a lot here and it can be quite scary for newcomers, but I've never had anyone ever come up to me or hit me or anything like that.

Lewis:

No, I did hear a rumor like the other day here in the cafe though that there was one of the local guys was starting to take swings at people.

Neil:

Oh my gosh.

Lewis:

And I really, that caught my attention.

I was like, oh, that's an escalation.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

And I mean, he was a big man too. I just about didn't, nobody would want him taking swings at anybody.

Neil:

No, nobody would want that. So we've got a few seeds planted here. We've got, we've got Lewis Mallard, age kind of five, six, seven, not ignored, but you know, flinging shit from his diaper when left alone for long periods of time in the closet.

Lewis:

I think I was younger than five.

Neil:

We've got Lewis Mallard, based on my math, somewhere in his forties, interdimensional psychedelic folk artist sitting on an orange bench inside of Manic Coffee at College and Bathurst in downtown Toronto with planes and streetcars and delivery trucks and bikes and people. This is a busy, there's people with UHN tags going by right now. There are nurses probably at the Toronto Western Hospital.

There's a guy walking in with this Narky Puppy t-shirt, tight black pants and black boots. Maybe he played a show last night. There's a couple of people walking by, look like high school students with their orange juices and their lattes.

You know, there's a lot going on in this corner. You've decorated the corner, both with your performance art and you're now leaving marks on the city, physical marks.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

Which some people would call illegal.

Lewis:

Yes, technically.

Neil:

Just do these two together for me, you know?

Lewis:

Well, I see it as vandalism, of course, but I'm trying to do it, I wanted to clean the thing up.

Neil:

Oh, I wanted to clean the thing up.

Lewis:

Well, it was, it seemed like there must've been an accident here a while ago because you could see two different kinds of concrete and repairs that have been done to the cement barrier.

Neil:

I thought you were going to say blood or something.

Lewis:

No, no, no. I'm sure they washed the blood away. But accidents for sure, because it's like- Some kind of accident.

Neil:

It's a tough corner here.

Lewis:

Yes. And I'm sure there'll be another accident, you know, at some point in the future.

Neil:

Yeah. There's always bikes and cars yelling at each other.

Lewis:

The paint was falling off. It had been poorly graffitied.

Neil:

Oh, poorly graffitied? How do you judge that?

Lewis:

Sloppily, carelessly.

Neil:

What if that person's calling themselves a four title name on Instagram too?

Lewis:

I mean, it's fine. You can do whatever they want.

Neil:

But what makes you say sloppy?

Lewis:

Well, in my mind, it looked like it was rushed and it was not, there was no thought, real thought put into it on placement. And it seemed like somebody who was afraid of being caught and trying to do it quickly and get away when my approach is a little bit different. I prefer to operate in broad daylight, turn it into a little bit of a performance and just act like I am supposed to be doing it.

I like to get dressed up in coveralls and wear a high visibility reflective gear.

Neil:

Oh my gosh. So you look like you've been licensed to do this. You're wearing high.

Lewis:

I bring pylons.

Neil:

Oh, you bring pylons. You keep pylons. Where do you get pylons? Amazon?

Lewis:

Pylons, no.

You just find them on the street sometimes. You know, there's a lot of pylons in construction sites.

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah.

Lewis:

And sometimes they go missing.

Neil:

Right, right, right. Okay. Another form of vandalism, but it's all in contribution of improving the decorative quality of this corner, which I shall say, and we're going to link to the exact post, obviously, at Lewis Mallard, L-E-W-I-S-M-A-L-L-A-R-D is kind of your online home. That's an Instagram handle, Lewis Mallard. I get the mallard because you're a duck.

Why Lewis? Although it seems totally appropriate for a duck to be called Lewis.

Lewis:

I guess. I got the name from the biggest inspiration behind the whole project, which was one of my all-time favorite artists named Maude Lewis.

Neil:

Oh, Maude Lewis.

Lewis:

A Canadian folk artist from Nova Scotia.

Neil:

How do you define folk?

Lewis:

How do I?

Neil:

You've got folk in your name too. What is folk? F-O-L-K, what even is that?

Lewis:

Well, to me, when I first discovered folk art, I didn't really appreciate it because I was really stuck in this mentality as a teenager that art had to be as like high skill as possible. I spent a lot of time as a teenager developing my drawing ability and trying to copy reality as close as I could.

Neil:

Right, it has to be realistic.

Lewis:

Yeah, and this is how I valued things. And I didn't understand how something that was naively done was good. It wasn't until I got a little older and

Neil:

Is that a word that you would attach to the word folk, is naive?

Lewis:

Well, to me, folk art is kind of done by people who just aren't real artists. I think everybody

Neil:

Is it music? Is it visual? Visual, is it?

Lewis:

Yeah, well, there's folk music, there's folk art, there's

Neil:

What is folk art? Like, if I go to a folk art festival, what do I see on the tables?

Lewis:

Oh, I've never been to one, so I wouldn't know.

I think I'm specifically just talking about the art and folk art done by people who aren't necessarily trained.

Neil:

Oh, that's what it means. It's something akin to amateur.

Lewis:

Yeah, in a way. And so I think there's a lot of lovely magic that happens when people don't completely understand what they're looking at. And then depict it in the way that they are able.

Neil:

I think there's a lot of magic when people don't fully understand what they're looking at. Is that what you said?

Lewis:

Yeah, it was along that line.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay.

Lewis:

And so when I first discovered Maude Lewis's artwork, I was in Halifax visiting my sister when she was living out there, and I went into the museum there, and she had a very large retrospective show. And there was a little house in the middle of the gallery. It was a replica of a house that she lived in with her husband.

And it was so small, and it blew my mind that, first of all, somebody lived in there. Two people lived in there.

Neil:

What city was this?

Lewis:

This was Halifax.

Neil:

Halifax, Nova Scotia, a maritime region of Canada, kind of above Maine for U.S. geography people.

Lewis:

Yeah, and I think that she lived outside of the main city.

If I remember correctly, watching some of the footage from when she was alive, they were very poor. And she saw a reasonable amount of success in her lifetime. Refused to sell her paintings for a lot of money.

And just, she lived her art right up until the end. She couldn't help it. It was like she surrounded herself with her art.

I really admired her dedication to being an artist. It's like she didn't have a choice. She was a crippled and very small person.

Neil:

Small?

Lewis:

Yeah, she was a very tiny person.

Neil:

Very tiny person?

Lewis:

Yeah. Maybe five foot tall or shorter. I think I was just, I was in art college at the time, and I was just trying to broaden my horizons.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lewis:

To expose myself to different things.

Neil:

Oh, okay. So, what's Lewis made out of? Paper mache?

Lewis:

Largely paper mache.

Neil:

You've got like chicken wire in there?

Lewis:

No, that was the original. When I didn't know how to make a costume, and I made my very first one, I used chicken wire and paper mache.

And I didn't know how to do it, but I knew I could do it. And so I just threw it together in whatever way I thought it would work. And hoped that if it struck a chord with people, that I would have an opportunity to make a 2.0 and a 3.0. And improve upon the structure, the way it looked.

Neil:

And you began doing this in 2021?

Lewis:

In 2019, September.

Neil:

2019, in Hamilton, Ontario.

Lewis:

In Hamilton, yes.

Neil:

Where you were living at the time.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

Okay. So five years ago, you'd make a paper mache duck. You start walking around.

How'd you know? You said, if it struck a nerve, if it was popular, I would do a 2.0, 3.0. Well, how'd you know it did? What happened then?

Lewis:

Well, the pandemic happened. I launched the project at Supercrawl in September, 2019.

I was living in my studio right downtown Hamilton. I'd been thinking about this project for about a year, year and a half. About re-entering the art world full-time.

I was living in a city that I knew very well, but I did not know many people. I'd only ever visited family there. I had not taken up residence in Hamilton for a while.

I had not been there for any length of time to build a friends or community. And I wanted to stay and start my career in Hamilton again. I thought it was a smarter choice than trying to come into Toronto and compete with the way more artists here, people who try harder.

And this is more competition. And at Hamilton, I thought that, although it's a growing city and there's a lot of artists there that- It's historically known as like a steel town, like they made Stelco Steel.

Neil:

It was gentrifying for a long time. Now it's probably an up and coming artists, 500,000 person type of town, two hours or an hour and a half away from Toronto. Just a bit of, is that right?

Lewis:

Yeah, more or less.

Neil:

Please correct it.

Lewis:

I think that it, well, it's 60 kilometers roughly. Depending on traffic, it could be an hour or two.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah.

Lewis:

And it's certainly a city that is lifting itself up. A lot of people are moving there from Toronto, from, well, other places as well.

But it seems like the largest influx of people into Hamilton are Torontonians who can afford to buy a house there and have sold their house or their condo in Toronto for a lot of money and then move to Hamilton. And I thought, I knew people, many people who were doing this exact thing right as I was starting this project.

Neil:

Doing this exact thing?

Lewis:

Moving to Hamilton from Toronto.

Neil:

Okay, okay, not the art project.

Lewis:

No, no.

Neil:

Okay.

Lewis:

No, and having made, being able to afford something in Hamilton that they could never afford in Toronto.

Neil:

Right, right, right.

Lewis:

And so I thought, I understand the demographic of people that are moving here.

And I wanted to try to talk to them first, to build, this was my target demographic for audience was people who were in their 30s to 40s and who I would relate to. And I also knew about Hamilton that people who move there, they buy in really quick. They fall in love with the city.

There's a lot of charming things about the city. And before you know it, they've gone to the first Hamilton Tiger-Cats game and they're saying, Oskie-wee-wee.

Neil:

Oskie-wee-wee?

Lewis:

It's like a Tiger-Cats thing.

Neil:

Oh, okay. Yeah, Oskie-wee-wee.

Lewis:

That's a Canadian football league team. Yeah, I think it's some kind of chant they do at the game. I have been to a Tiger-Cats game, but only as a child.

Neil:

Hopefully not problematic.

Lewis:

No.

Neil:

We have no idea what it means.

Lewis:

I don't think so.

Neil:

Okay, okay.

Lewis:

I think if it was problematic- It would've canceled in two years.

Yes, it would've been gone by now. Yeah, no, it's synonymous.

Neil:

It changed a few sports teams' names up here.

Lewis:

Yeah, no, right now there's, I think the Tiger-Cats are okay. And so I knew people fall in love with Hamilton quick. And so I thought, if I can be part of that, then that will give me a bit of a boost early on.

I wanted to try to find the quickest way to developing an audience so that I could make a living off my art.

Neil:

Wow. I wanted to find the quickest way to develop an audience so that I can make a living off my art.

Neil:

Yeah.

Neil:

It wasn't like a pure artistic motive.

Lewis:

Well, it was also that.

Neil:

I'm not saying, I'm not trying to take that away from you. I'm just saying, you're using words like target market.

Lewis:

Well, unfortunately, I think the world we live in has forced me to think this way. I would rather not think this way. I would rather create purely for the sake of creating and not think too much about competing with other artists.

I don't like to compete with other artists, but I feel like I'm forced to if I want to make a meaningful living at something I'm passionate about. And so for me, Lewis was

Neil:

It's a good point. If you don't make it sustainable financially, then it's therefore not sustainable.

Lewis:

Yeah, well, it can be sustainable in that you do it just because you're passionate about it and you love to make things.

Neil:

The ghost in red beard has really given us the stare down here.

Lewis:

Well, this isn't a common thing that people see walking down the street.

Neil:

No, but he's giving us the angry look. He's walking away now, so I think we're okay. You're gonna have to protect me here.

Lewis:

You'll be okay.

Neil:

If you don't make it sustainable financially, it's not sustainable. If it's not sustainable, you're not practicing your art. So you're just, part of what you're pulling in here, and I've heard you talk in other interviews saying that your life goal is to be able to not look at prices on the grocery store.

I've heard you say that in multiple interviews.

Lewis:

Yeah, I mean, I would love to.

Neil:

So we're not talking like you're trying to make a billion dollars here. Your life goal is to not look at prices at the grocery store.

Lewis:

No, I want to make it, I don't want to be greedy. I want to be able to provide for a good life for myself and in conjunction with what my wife does and makes, and I want to be able

Neil:

An opera singer, I read. We're gonna get to that later.

Lewis:

An incredibly talented woman.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

And I would love to be able to treat the people in my life that I love and admire really well.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

And share anything I get in excess, I would love to share and contribute to making this world a better place.

Neil:

Wow, wow, I knew I liked you from the beginning. So now it's been five years. Are you looking at the prices on the groceries now?

Lewis:

Absolutely.

Neil:

Okay, so we're not at that point yet.

Lewis:

No, we're nearing.

Neil:

Five years as a full-time artist, as Lewis Mallard. Yes. You've got, I think as of this morning, 8,120 followers on Instagram.

Lewis:

Okay.

Neil:

I mean, I think that's what I checked this morning. Am I right?

Lewis:

I think it's somewhere around there.

Neil:

Maybe a bit higher.

Lewis:

It's always give or take five.

Neil:

Oh, you go up about five a day?

Lewis:

Well, I'd say it depends. Lately, it's been between five and 20 a day.

Neil:

Oh, wow. All the press is helping.

Lewis:

The legwork I'm putting in is helping.

Neil:

I see the sly grin on your face with the legwork. You're literally walking around the city for hours a day dressed as a duck. You're indulging people that want to take selfies.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

People are asking you for autographs. You quack at people. You dance.

When I saw you for the first time, you did a jump for me.

Lewis:

Nobody's ever asked me for an autograph. Actually, not true. I did autograph a beer can once inside the costume for somebody.

That was a very odd request, but I did it.

Neil:

Well, you had a beer named after you.

Lewis:

I did.

Neil:

See, that's another thing. So in Hamilton, a craft brewery has what, like the Lewis Mallard Ale?

Lewis:

Well, they did for a very short time, yes.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah.

You're so humble, though. Every time, I keep trying to lodge you with compliments and you keep trying to say, well, not every day. I don't work that hard.

Lewis:

Well, I mean-

Neil:

Yes, you do. I've seen you work it. You're painting a streetcar stop. How long does it take you to paint that?

Lewis:

Roughly three hours.

Neil:

In the coveralls, you have to get the pylons. You have to pilfer the pylons. That's the first step.

Lewis:

Pilfer the pylons.

Neil:

You gotta get an orange vest. Not many people have one of those handy.

Lewis:

You can buy them at the dollar store. They're real cheap. I'm resourceful.

Neil:

You're making merchandise. You're working hard at this.

Lewis:

Yeah, yes.

Neil:

You're working hard at this.

Lewis:

I want to build a

Neil:

Acknowledge your work. It's good.

Lewis:

No, I agree that I work hard, but I don't go out in the costume every day. I go out in the costume maybe twice a week at the most, weather permitting. Yeah, there's like kind of specific things.

Neil:

Okay, considering how rarely you're going out, you get a lot of press. You get a lot. Every time you go out, there's tons of pictures coming online.

People are, you know.

Lewis:

I'm trying here.

Neil:

Yeah, you're working hard.

Lewis:

Advertising is expensive. Yeah.

Neil:

So we've got two, I think, starting to come into focus photos of you right now, which is a wonderful way to do it, which I think is, you know, we've got this kid, fifth generation, from English guys in kind of small town, Ontario. Parents are kind of not that there. You're throwing shit from the closet when they open the door.

I mean, I'm really fixed on that image, as you can tell. Now we've got this early forties, married to an opera singer, Lewis Mallard today, who is doing graffiti and performance art, inter-dimensional psychedelic folk artist. We haven't got to the psychedelic part.

And somewhere in between the two is like this 30 to 35 years of growing up from then to now. And I have a pile of three books here. You were really kind enough to give us three formative books.

Is this one that I'm tapping the first one that came into the picture here?

Lewis:

Yeah, it's the first book I ever remember owning.

Neil:

Wow, the first book I remember owning. So if you don't mind, what I'll do for the audience here now is I will spend a minute giving them a background of the book, and then I'll ask you to tell us about your relationship with us. And I don't know if you don't mind, but if you could take us from the shit-flicking child up into this book, I wanna understand what your life looked like, the good, the bad, the ugly, the highs, the lows, like what was happening here?

This book is wonderful. I was really, really, I really loved reading it. So interesting and different.

The book is called Lu Pan, L-U space P-A-N, in brackets, The Carpenter's Apprentice by Demi Hitz, H-I-T-Z or Z, originally published in 1978 by Prentice Hall. The cover is pure red. I mean, mine that I found online is literally pure red.

It's just red.

Lewis:

It's just like the copy I had

Neil:

Oh, really? So it's just like a red linen thin hardcover. There it is hitting the microphone so you know what the book sounds like. But the cover online is fifth century BC, China, a woman holding an ax in one hand, a piece of lumber in the other with a big red and gold pagoda behind her. I say woman, but that's actually probably not a woman.

That's probably Lu Pan.

Lewis:

I think that is. I think that is Lu Pan.

Neil:

That would probably not be a woman then. Lu Pan not being a woman. I believe that the gender is not revealed, but I believe that's the case.

Demi Hitz is currently 82 years old. Did you know that?

Lewis:

I didn't know that. But I actually, I learned, I didn't even realize that Demi Hitz was the author until I was searching for this book to send you a link to it because I no longer have the copy I did when I was a child. I gave it to my nephew.

Oh, that's nice. And hoped that he would find something in it that I found in it. So I didn't realize what I loved about this book until I was older.

Neil:

Yeah, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You didn't realize what you loved about the book until, oh, that's interesting. So Demi Hitz, quickly, she's created over a hundred books for children.

Most of them are adaptations of Chinese folk tales, fables and nursery rhymes, interestingly. Lu Pan, the carpenter's apprentice, sets the tone for most of her later work. It's part biography, part adapted folk tale.

The book tells the story of a young apprentice growing up in China in the fifth century BC and how he ultimately becomes a master carpenter and one of China's greatest architects and inventors. So now we've got a real story weaved in. File this one Dewey Decimal under 694.092 for technology slash building slash carpentry semi-colon stair building. That is the exact Dewey Decimal category. That is a strange category. Carpenting and stair building.

You got to squish those together if you're Melville Dewey.  Lewis, tell us about your relationship with Lu Pan, the carpenter's apprentice by Demi Hitz.

Lewis:

Well, this book was given to me by my grandmother and I only remember that because it's written in the book.

Neil:

I love inscriptions.

Lewis:

Yeah.

And I was obsessed with this book as a kid. From before I could read to, I would just look at the photo, the drawings. I love the drawings.

They're very delicate and detailed. Black and white line drawings. And then once I could read

Neil:

Demi does those as well, by the way.

Lewis:

I believe so, yes.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah. And- Delicate line drawings is a great way to put it.

Lewis:

Yeah, I think.

Neil:

Kind of like the Giving Tree a little bit type sort of style.

I mean, some of- I'm not sure what that is. The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. I'm just noticing on some of the drawings, but also the pagodas, the lumber, the horses, the pastoral fields, the people in long flowing robes.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Delicate line drawings.

Lewis:

But once I could read well enough to understand what the story was about, I just loved the idea that this little kid had, was an apprentice to this master and was being- This knowledge was being passed down and I always wanted this in my life.

And I didn't really realize how much I wanted this until I think I was on my way through high school. And I was searching for this kind of person in my life that would take me under their wing and teach me everything they know. Because I, and I'm sure it has something to do with my relationship with my father, who never answered any real questions I had.

I would ask him why. I was a very curious kid and the answer was always like, because I told you so. Or something along those lines.

So if I ever wanted to know anything, I had to go find out for myself what it was. And my parents were not necessarily very artistic. They didn't, my father had a minor passion for carpentry when I was a child and, but he stopped doing that.

Neil:

What did your parents do?

Lewis:

My father was a salesman. He sold mechanical, industrial tools, that kind of stuff.

My mother always worked for the government. She was a, she worked at the post office when I was really young and then worked for the land registry office.

Neil:

She answered your questions?

Lewis:

A little bit. I think I

Neil:

Seems like you were kind of like ignored almost. I don't want to put words in your mouth.

Lewis:

Yeah, no, no, I feel like very much. Yeah, I was told to go, you know, go away, go play somewhere else.

Neil:

Did they not want to have kids?

Lewis:

I honestly don't know. I think that there was a short time in their lives that they were in love and happy and I never saw that.

Neil:

And so when your grandmother gave you this book, was this before your parents got divorced?

Lewis:

Oh yeah.

Neil:

They got divorced at 12. The memories, the earliest memories in the closet were probably like three, four, five. Take us through the seven years.

Lewis:

I don't remember, I don't even remember being in the closet.

I do remember having my own bedroom in the same house. I think the reason that my sister and I were put in the closet when we were kids is because it was close to my parents' room, but it was, and it was small enough and contained that, you know, I think they let us cry ourselves to sleep. That kind of thing.

Neil:

Yeah, of course, yeah. Cry it out.

That was the popular thing at the time.

Lewis:

Very, yeah.

Neil:

And did you not once tell me like maybe months ago when I was first getting to know you that your dad also did a lot of drugs?

Lewis:

Yeah, he certainly did. He liked drugs a lot. I didn't see it.

It wasn't like he was just getting high all the time at home. He kept it away from home. And I didn't really learn about this until later in life.

You know, I knew my dad liked to drink. He liked to party. Once I was old enough and I learned what marijuana smoke smells like, it kind of, I had a flashback to being like, oh, I always remember that smell coming out of the basement.

Neil:

Oh my God, yeah, of course.

Lewis:

You know, when I was a kid.

Neil:

Did you not tell me that they were also getting high at work?

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Like what kind of stuff was happening? So we're in Hamilton, we're in the 70s and 80s. Tell me what this workplace scene is like.

Lewis:

You know, a rare story my father told me about himself was it started with the time that he accidentally did heroin and he didn't intend to snort heroin. He intended to snort cocaine. And he would tell me that when he would go into the office, he worked in Mississauga.

He drove from St. Catharines to Mississauga most mornings and most of the time he would come home. Sometimes he would stay in Mississauga overnight. But he said when he would show up to work most mornings, there would be a line or two of coke on his desk.

And he would just snort it to get the day started. And then one time it wasn't coke and it hit a little different. And he's lucky that he didn't overdose because they're very different things.

Neil:

Yeah, who was putting cocaine on his desk?

Lewis:

I think it was a salesman or somebody that worked in his office. Just like, this is how we do it.

Yeah, I don't remember. The only employee or the other co-worker of his that I knew was his secretary, which I later found out he was having an affair with the whole time he was with my mother.

Neil:

You found out a lot later.

Lewis:

Sorry?

Neil:

You found out, you got a lot of scoop later.

Like you didn't obviously know this stuff.

Lewis:

Yeah, we had to pry. My sister and I had to like combine information, you know, that we were getting from different resources.

Neil:

That's a common sibling tactic.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

I hope, I hope my sister and I can continue to do that as my parents get very old.

Lewis:

Yeah, I hope your kids do it behind your back.

Neil:

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Because?

Lewis:

I think it's necessary and it's good relationship building stuff.

Neil:

Yes, exactly. So you find out your dad is having an affair with his secretary, snorting coke every morning at a sales job, accidentally did heroin once. You were not ignored, capital I, but you know, there's the tilt that way. You got a grandmother in the picture.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Who's buying you books.

Lewis:

Yeah, my family, my father was a big reader and my, I was never very close with my grandmother, either of them.

She lived in Stoney Creek. We would see her, you know, once a month, you know, a few times a year kind of thing. And, and it, it was for a birthday before I was old enough to remember or Christmas that I got this book.

And so it probably just sat in my room with like other books I was, you know, picture books. And so I wish I knew why she chose this book. And, you know, it, it didn't strike me as an odd book to have as a kid when I was a kid, but as I got older, I thought this is a little bit of a.

Neil:

I never heard, it certainly is, yeah.

Lewis:

A strange book to give a kid.

Neil:

Very unique book. This boy, you know, he's challenged by the carpenter to do all kinds of incredible feats, like spend a year, you know, lifting all these stones and, you know, building this crazy pagodas and he does it.

And then the guy's reward is like, do it again for another year. Like it was, you know, he's put through all these essentially Sisyphean type of feats, like, you know, like these endless challenges. You probably related to that though.

It sounds like because you had this desire to have a connection and a learner, learnee role with your own parents and your father, which was kind of replicated in this book, but you cultivated, it sounds like an astounding sense of independence from a very young age.

Lewis:

I always wanted, I hated being restricted. I never wanted to do anything necessarily bad. I just didn't want to be restricted.

I, you know, as soon as I could wander away from home, I started wandering away and pushing the boundaries and, but also trying to be respectful at the same time, you know, like not, didn't want to worry my parents too much. You know?

Neil:

What do you mean wander away? So you're eight, nine, 10 years old. What are you doing? Where are you going?

Lewis:

If I could walk around the block, if I could, you know, there was major streets. I lived on a major street in St. Catharines, which would have been, you know, dangerous for a young kid to be crossing willy-nilly. But once I was old enough and my parents trusted me to use crosswalk properly and, you know, then I could walk to a convenience store that was four or five blocks away and not one that was just on the same block.

Neil:

And this was all by yourself?

Lewis:

Yeah, it would be by myself.

Neil:

What was happening in your head? So an eight and nine and 10 year old today does not have A, time by themselves.

I mean, just B, but time in their own head. Like they've got screens and they've got video game systems and they've got, you know, there's, I don't see kids doing what it sounds like you did. And as you get older here, I'm picturing you as a kid, any artistic gleanings early?

What were the first demonstrations of your art history?

Lewis:

I distinctly remember a moment in daycare. It was either in a before school or an after school program at the YMCA. I spent a lot of my childhood also at the YMCA in St. Catharines. And I would spend time alone in the daycare drawing on paper with, you know, pastels and crayons. I was probably five or six years old and I taped a piece of paper on the wall and I was just drawing on it. And I thought, this is what I want to do forever.

Like, I want to be an artist.

Neil:

Wow.

Neil:

This is what I want to do forever. Where'd that come from?

Lewis:

I just, I really enjoyed any time I had when I was drawing.

I don't think that I showed any exceptional ability from a young child.

Neil:

Most kids must feel some of that when they're drawing. I mean, drawing is such a...

Lewis:

Yeah, it's a...

Neil:

I'm a big fan of Austin Kleon, who was a past guest on 3 Books. And he just really espouses like drawing as an adult. And, you know, adults are like, oh yeah, I guess I should, you know, we forget that kids love drawing. Kids love drawing. We all love drawing.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

You just never stopped.

Lewis:

No, I never did. I didn't, I mean, there was periods in my life where I went without drawing for quite a while.

And if I could go back in time and give myself a shake, I think I would.

Neil:

So what kind of student were you? A kid were you? What group did you fit into?

What, you know, how would you define yourself in regards to like student groups? Socially, I mean.

Lewis:

Early on, I didn't feel like I had a lot of say in who my friends were. It was kind of like, I was friends with whoever were the kids of my friends, my parents' friends. And you're just kind of stuck with those kids.

Neil:

And then as you get into high school, you know, in high school, there's like, I don't want to put labels on it, but most schools have like the jocks, the goths, the nerds, the, you know, how does this work for you?

Lewis:

Well, by high school, I was really starting to sort out, you know, who I wanted to be around or who I related to and who I didn't relate to. And I dealt with a lot of bullies as a young kid, as I think probably most boys do, unless you're the bully. That dynamic probably still plays itself out the same way.

And so once I was in high school and I started to really feel like I was developing my own personal style and slowly starting to realize like who I am and where I am, my place in the world, I fell in with a bunch of other students who were weird and didn't fit into that jock narrative.

Neil:

Whoa, whoa, whoa. So you fell into students that were weird. That's how you define your group.

Lewis:

Well, weird in that they were not like the stereotypical, popular in style dressing.

Neil:

Did I hear you once say in another interview, they were the only group that would have me? Am I putting words in your mouth?

Lewis:

That's how I felt, yes. It was something like that. You know, we all kind of fell in together.

We just got called the freaks basically by the popular kids. We would all move our lockers to be in the same hallway together.

Neil:

Oh, interesting. Probably weren't allowed to do that.

Lewis:

No.

Neil:

Early vandalism.

Lewis:

We had assigned lockers, yeah. But we found a secluded area of the school.

Neil:

Oh, wow.

Lewis:

And took the bolts off of the bolted up lockers and just put our locks on them.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

And then we would

Neil:

Took the bolts off? That's ballsy.

Lewis:

Well, I mean, I guess it felt like just the right amount of bad. It didn't feel like it was too bad.

Neil:

The right amount of bad.

Lewis:

We weren't doing anything irreversible. We weren't really vandalizing. We were just

Neil:

You felt like you were on okay moral grounds. This is for a community you're trying to develop here.

Lewis:

Well, we just wanted a place that we could go and be left alone.

Neil:

Oh, interesting. We wanted a place we could go, be left alone. And what we did to do that felt like the right amount of bad.

Lewis:

Yeah, I guess. And I think that plays itself out as we get further along here. But there was a fair amount of drug and alcohol abuse.

More than a fair, like a lot.

Neil:

What kind of drugs?

Lewis:

Everything.

Everything? Grade nine and 10? Grade nine and 10 was- Or 10 and 11? Alcohol, marijuana. Grade 10, 11, we're getting mushrooms, LSD, cocaine, heroin. And I think that I saw, I mean, by the time I was in grade 11 and grade 12, I knew multiple people that were shooting up at school, before school, after school.

Neil:

When you say shooting up, you mean heroin?

Lewis:

Heroin, cocaine, a mixture of both. I saw it all. Shooting up before and after school.

Neil:

So I'm sorry to say this in a, I don't mean this in a derogatory way, but like, if you're shooting heroin twice a day in high school.

Lewis:

More.

Neil:

But you're also going to school?

Lewis:

Yeah.

Sometimes, sometimes they wouldn't show up.

Neil:

I just, I just, I just would equate, sorry, like, am I way off on this? How does the combination of shooting heroin multiple times a day at age 15 or 16 tie together with being a studious person?

Lewis:

They weren't necessarily studious. They had to be out of the house.

Neil:

Okay. They just needed a place to go. Okay, so we've got a couple parameters of the freak class here. We've got the lockers moving together.

We've got the 10 or 20 students throughout the grades, or maybe over two grade splits. There's the drug and alcohol growth, but not for you. You're doing no drugs, no alcohol, right?

Lewis:

Exactly.

Neil:

Okay. What else defines that community?

I find this community really interesting. Like, it's a really nice window into the world here.

Lewis:

Grunge, like grunge music was starting to become very popular at the time.

Neil:

Oh, okay.

Lewis:

So the, you know.

Neil:

Pearl Jam Nirvana?

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Sound Garden, that kind of stuff?

Lewis:

All of that kind of stuff. So there was, there was the grungy, there was the grungy kids.

There was the.

Neil:

That's how you dressed too? Like the, like ripped pants and plaids?

Lewis:

Exactly, yeah. Ripped jeans. A lot of Salvation Army chic.

And there was the goth kids. There was always goth kids.

Neil:

But they were part of your group?

Lewis:

Yep.

Neil:

Oh, the goths were part of the freaks, a subset.

Lewis:

The punks.

Neil:

Oh, the punks.

Lewis:

And the ravers.

Neil:

The ravers.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Goths, punks, ravers.

Lewis:

Yeah, there was.

Neil:

Were you one of those three?

Lewis:

I probably fell in closer to the grunge.

Neil:

So there's grunge, goth, punk, and raver.

Lewis:

He certainly, there was.

Neil:

What's a raver and a punk? How do they differ in appearance and behavior? How do I identify the difference between a raver and a punk?

We're talking like, like lanolin mohawks here?

Lewis:

This is like 90s, 90s raver culture. So we're talking like humongous pants.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

A lot of fluorescent colors. And like big plastic jewelry.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah. Okay, I can picture that. And then what about the punks?

90s punks?

Lewis:

The punks, I.

Neil:

I heard Andrew Hieberman once in an interview with Rich Roll, by the way, that his childhood, he describes it as like the movie Kids.

Lewis:

Oh, I related to that movie so hard. When I felt like I was watching my teenage years go by.

Neil:

That's exactly what he said.

Lewis:

Just in a bigger city.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

Except in New York.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

I saw that same kind of violence, that skateboard beating. I saw that happen.

Neil:

Skateboard beatings?

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

But the skaters are not part of your group.

Lewis:

No, they were.

Neil:

Oh, skaters were also part of Freaks.

Lewis:

We were just about every subculture that didn't.

Neil:

Identify with the mainstream big ones.

Lewis:

Yeah, yes. We were kind of a catch-all for everybody who was left behind.

And.

Neil:

You saw the skateboard beatings?

Lewis:

Sure.

I mean, I.

Neil:

Who would you guys beat up?

Lewis:

Who?

We didn't beat anybody up.

Neil:

But you saw skateboard beatings.

Lewis:

Oh, yes.

I, well, that was, I was in Hamilton at a skate park when I saw that happen.

Neil:

Oh, it wasn't your friends?

Lewis:

It wasn't in high school, no.

Neil:

Okay, okay. There was a lot of fights and fighting. Stealing stuff from variety stores.

Lewis:

That's what happens in the movie.

Neil:

The drugs though, heavy, heavy drugs.

Lewis:

Yes. Most of that happened after school. It wasn't until later in high school when the real addicts were doing their thing.

Neil:

In the school lot.

Lewis:

Sorry?

Neil:

Where were they shooting up?

Lewis:

Oh, bathrooms.

Neil:

And where were they getting heroin from?

Lewis:

They're drug dealers. We all knew who they were.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

There were kids slightly older than us that either dropped out of school or had graduated school and not done anything.

Neil:

So if, I'm sorry, you know, so there's this, I think, well-held belief that we are most influenced by our culture than anything, you know? And Maria Popova, past guest on 3 Books, says that her number one piece of advice to her younger self or any younger person is to try to see the culture you are a part of and ignore its norms for your own benefit. You don't have to do X, Y, and Z as it may be propaned to.

She grew up in Bulgaria behind the Iron Curtain, so it's a little different, but that was her perspective. And yet you were surrounded by these kids who had a deep artistic sensibility like you did, but you didn't start drinking, you didn't do any drugs. And in fact, not to foreshadow here, I believe you have a large tattoo on your stomach that says the word straight edge.

Lewis:

I would classify it as a medium tattoo across my stomach that says straight edge. So it was my first tattoo.

Neil:

How did you resist this? How did you resist the drinking drug culture?

Your parents weren't around, they weren't cared, they didn't look, they weren't checking on you.

Lewis:

No, they would have been.

Neil:

They weren't looking through your knapsack.

Lewis:

My father would have encouraged it to a degree.

Neil:

Oh my gosh.

Lewis:

Not to a toxic, he wouldn't have encouraged me to do hard drugs, but I was free to try a sip of this and that and the other thing anytime I wanted as a kid. And I tried beer a couple times and it was always disgusting. And as I was in high school and I started to go to parties where people were drinking, grade nine, grade 10, I tried a beer, I just didn't, I thought it was disgusting.

Neil:

Yeah, it is.

Lewis:

And once I saw how people were acting, I was like, I don't want to act like that. I didn't, I just didn't have the, I didn't want to do it.

Neil:

I'm a parent of four boys who I desperately don't want them to try alcohol and cannabis and these drugs in high school. And you have managed to do this, even though you were immersed in a culture that did the opposite. So I'm curious for what lessons or ideas or principles or what actually created this behavior inside you.

Lewis:

I just didn't have.

Neil:

To the point where you identify with it. I mean, you just have a medium sized stomach that labels yourself as straight edge, that you got at what age?

Lewis:

At 18.

Neil:

You got at 18. So you already were labeling yourself sort of antithetical to the culture.

Lewis:

Yeah, I, you know, it was, it was a movement that the straight edge, I didn't know anybody else who was straight edge. I was just told by some of the punk rock and the hardcore guys that got to know me. And they're like, oh, you're straight edge.

And I was like, what is that? And then they would, they would tell me, it's like, oh, you know, somebody who doesn't drink or smoke or use drugs. And I was like, oh, I have an identity.

You know?

Neil:

Oh, interesting. It was partly that you connected with that label.

Lewis:

Yeah, in a way, you know, I thought, I listened to some of the music for a while. What music? Like hardcore, straight edge.

Neil:

Hardcore, straight edge?

Lewis:

Well, it was like in the genre of hardcore, which is like a subset of metal, I guess.

Neil:

Okay, so within metal, there's hardcore, within metal, hardcore, there's straight edge. Not to be confused with Christian rock.

Lewis:

So it would be, yes, more like straight edge rock, where they are talking about their values. And for me, it was all a little bit too preaching.

Neil:

Do you remember any of the lyrics or the bands or the songs?

Lewis:

I do not know.

Neil:

Straight edge music.

Lewis:

I would know it if I heard it. Even though you had no other straight edge friends.

Neil:

Yeah, so I was- They never forced you to, people weren't pushing alcohol and weed on you?

Lewis:

The odd person would offer. I would get teased a little bit, but I never felt real peer pressure. Yeah, there was never, nobody ever like put their arm around me and was like, you better take a hit of this.

Yeah, it sounds like one of the defining- We were pretty respectful of each other.

Neil:

Pieces of your culture was that we took anybody who wasn't welcome anywhere else. So by definition, that is a culture of acceptance. Yeah, we were- Maybe we all should envy hanging out with the freaks in high school, because they're the open-hearted, open-minded kindness group.

Lewis:

We were very, we tried to be. Of course, it wasn't all good, but-

Neil:

The odd skateboard beating. That wasn't your group though.

Lewis:

No, but we did get in fights from time to time.

Neil:

Really, over what?

Lewis:

Over being bullied.

Neil:

Oh, you'd fight with the other groups.

Lewis:

Well, if somebody was picking on you, if somebody had, I can't tell you how many times I got pushed into a locker, threatened to get beat up.

I mean, I was also antagonizing in my own way. I would make my own t-shirts that said, jocks suck.

Neil:

Oh, wow.

Lewis:

And I would wear it in high school.

Neil:

Wow, so the merchandise streak started young.

Lewis:

I did make my own t-shirts.

Neil:

You're wearing a Lewis Mallard red baseball cap now, I should mention.

Lewis:

Correct.

Neil:

For those that want to support your work and your art, you sell merchandise.

Lewis:

I do, yes.

Neil:

And so at Lewis Mallard, there's presumably a buy button, because I'm sure Instagram's got the mallification happening.

Lewis:

Yes, I don't have that set up, but I have a website.

Neil:

Okay, well, you got to get the buy button now that I just talked about it. Now there's some pressure on you. Oh, no.

Before this is released, the TikTok store is taking over Amazon. Haven't you heard, Lewis?

Neil:

Come on.

Neil:

Okay, so you were in a kindness-based group. You accepted everybody else. You accepted everybody.

You were in group. You were in the artistic nerve we can fear. Was it also like, did you have an art teacher anywhere in high school?

Was there some sort of art, you know?

Lewis:

I had one art teacher who tried very hard to keep me in school. I got suspended a lot. I neared expulsion a few times.

Neil:

What for?

Lewis:

For having a smart mouth, mostly. I did a lot of

Neil:

Any examples? Any memories? And anything you said to a teacher once that you can still recall, or others?

Lewis:

Well, one thing that got me, one of my suspensions was from wearing my hat in school. We weren't allowed to wear hats in school.

Neil:

Neither were we. That's it, just wore your hat?

Lewis:

No, it was after school. I was walking through the hallways after the bell had gone and was on my way out, and I just had my hat on my head.

Figured it was after school hours. I knew I was riding a line. I liked to ride the line.

And a particular teacher who I didn't get along with very well walked past me and snatched it off my head and said, you can have this on Monday. And I didn't like that. And so I snuck up behind him and I ripped it out of his hand.

And I said, fuck you.

Neil:

Oh my gosh.

Lewis:

And I said, I'll see you on Monday. And then I went home and I knew I was gonna get suspended. To me, it was worth it because I really didn't like this guy.

Neil:

And it was a moral thing here. I mean, even if you were violating the rules, you shouldn't grab it off your head. There's like, you know, that's a- It's a bit over the top.

Lewis:

Had he approached me in a respectful manner, I would have been in a completely different scenario.

Neil:

Wow. Yeah, as Omar Little says in The Wire, man's gotta have a code. Anything else that you recall?

Anything else your smart brain can remember that your smart mouth said to get you in trouble back then? And any other teachers like, you know, kind of light you up back then? Like keep taking us through that time period of your life.

It sounds pretty formative.

Lewis:

Well, the same teacher that I took the hat from, Mr. Meisner, if you're out there, I'm sorry I gave you such a hard time.

Neil:

That's nice.

Lewis:

You know, you gotta forgive and forget.

Neil:

I hope he hears that.

Lewis:

I doubt he will.

Neil:

Well, you doubt it, but you don't know.

Lewis:

I don't even know if he's alive.

Neil:

You're going Banksy, brother. This is like a secret identity performance artist in the city that's moving around and dropping stuff all over the place. Like, this is exact Banksy.

I mean, it was two years before.

Lewis:

Well, let's hope. He was substituting in an art class I was in. And I was doing an independent study at the time.

So I was going into the dark room in the photo lab in my high school. We were fortunate enough to have an old school photography studio in the school. And I spent a lot of time developing my own photos.

Neil:

Yeah. Dark room, that's great. Yeah, we had one too.

That's cool.

Lewis:

Yeah, so we got to take out cameras, take photos, develop the film, enlarge it myself. And so I was working on an independent study that was not in the actual classroom I had to leave. And so when he said, all right guys, just go about your work.

I got up to walk to the dark room. He said, where are you going? And I said, you could do my work.

And he said, no, you have to do it in the room. And I said, well, it's not in the room. He's like, well, do something in the room.

And I was like, but my work is not in the room. And it went on like that. And then I told him a couple of choice words.

Neil:

Motherfuck you.

Lewis:

Basically, and I just started to walk to the principal's office. And then he told me to go. And I said, I'm already going there because I know you're gonna send me

Neil:

You rendered his future advice moot by heading there already.

Lewis:

Yes, I knew where I was heading. I knew that as soon as I

Neil:

How many suspensions is an expulsion? For us, our high school was three. And we knew the kids that had one or two.

Lewis:

I don't remember.

Neil:

It was three strikes, you know, three suspensions, you're out of school.

Lewis:

Yeah, so Perry Vakulich, great dude. I admired him. I was getting in a lot of trouble at the time.

And the principal of the school had asked him to have a sit down meeting with me and try to convince me to rein in my behavior and finish school. And so he talked some sense into me. And he allowed me to do independent studies.

And I thought, well, what a nice challenging idea. I get to choose what I wanna study. I have to write my own curriculum and then study it and report back basically.

And just be present in school through the day. I don't have to be in any particular room. I just have to be in the building working.

Neil:

That's amazing. What an incredible Yoda-like teacher move to recognize a kid's potential for graduating, separate the suspension-laden behaviors of telling the same teacher to fuck off multiple times, and then just cultivating a curriculum for you that could allow you to do both, be independent, be learning, and finish.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

Because you were in danger of not finishing, I'm assuming. Constantly getting suspended is not a good sign towards finishing.

Lewis:

Yeah, absolutely. I was very angry at the world then. I didn't know why.

Neil:

You didn't know why?

Lewis:

No, not at the time. I didn't even realize I was angry necessarily.

But when I look back and reflect on my behavior, I was an angry young man.

Neil:

And you don't know why? Do you know why now?

Lewis:

I think that I was not reaching my potential. I was nowhere near reaching my potential.

Neil:

Oh, you were angry at how you were showing up in the world.

Lewis:

I guess. I mean, at the time, I knew I had a lot of anger in me and I didn't have many healthy avenues to express it.

Neil:

I had a lot of anger in me because I wasn't hitting my potential and nowhere to put it, so then it comes out in sharp, kind of dysfunctional ways.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

And once I started doing these independent studies, my marks increased dramatically. I went from a strong C to honor roll.

Neil:

No way.

Lewis:

And near valedictorian.

Neil:

No way!

Lewis:

I think a high 90 average.

I was highly engaged and interested because I was choosing what I could study.

Neil:

Oh my gosh, from a C student, that means your marks were in the 60s, to a high 90 average, almost valedictorian, meaning it sounds like your school anointed valedictorian based on the highest mark in the school?

Lewis:

It was something like that, yes.

Neil:

Right, not the peer elected thing.

Lewis:

No.

Neil:

Right, right. But you were, yeah, okay, so you, wow. Because, so how many years did you do the independent study stuff?

Lewis:

Well, by the end.

Neil:

Just one in the last year?

Lewis:

By the end of high school for me, I had gotten all of the mandatory stuff out of the way.

All of the English and science and math requirements I had gone through, and I'd just done the minimum. How many credits do I need? I did the minimum.

Neil:

Yes, yes.

Lewis:

And I was.

Neil:

Yeah, you need four credits and four electives, and then this teacher figured out that the whole last phase of your high school career could be all electives, basically.

Lewis:

Basically, it was all electives or other art programs.

Neil:

And you did photography, pretty much, and all this stuff?

Lewis:

I had gone through all of the photography programs the school offered, like a year ahead.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

I was doing grade 12 photography and grade 11, and.

Neil:

So it was all art stuff, though.

Lewis:

Pretty much all art credits. Any and all art programs, shop. There was a drafting class I took.

I took anything that was like making things. Home economics, I learned how to sew, I learned how to cook.

Neil:

Oh, home economics, that's a phrase I have not heard in a while. When I first had home economics, it was like, yeah, learning how to cook, learning how to sew, learning how to.

Lewis:

Yeah, I found it very valuable.

Neil:

What a terribly insulting name. Yes. Home economics. Yeah, they didn't really teach you any economics. Trying to merge the capitalistic economic value with home, but that home is, of course, sewing. You know, it's not.

Lewis:

Yeah, well, I mean, viable skill.

Neil:

I mean, it worked, though. I mean, Lu Pan, the carpenter's apprentice, is about building and making. You're learning about sewing.

You went from a C student to a high school valedictorian from.

Lewis:

Well, not high.

Neil:

Near, I put the place of nears back in there.

Thank you for constantly taking my hyperbolic phrases and bringing me back down to earth.

Lewis:

Yeah, we're going to keep you here on earth.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, but it all comes and it's home economics, sewing. And like here you are, you know, you're making the duck costume.

I saw your post on Instagram from the eclipse and like you clearly made like giant duck glasses. Like you're doing a lot of home economics today.

Lewis:

I like to make things, absolutely. I always did.

Neil:

What other words do you use to apply to your identity? We've got interdisciplinary. We understand that one.

We've got psychedelic. We do not yet understand that. We're going to pause that, but I know you're straight edge on your stomach, but I don't think you're straight edge now.

Lewis:

No, things have changed.

Neil:

Okay, okay. So there's psychedelic. Then there's folk, which you kind of got a taste of in the vein of sort of a non-professional heart forward type of art.

Artist. We're understanding artists. Now we're going to take a break.

You and I, this is, for those that are listening, you might detect this. This is a very challenging environment to do a podcast. There are house bears here.

There are chimneys just above us. There's people walking by with boom boxes playing. There's bikes flying by.

There's people looking at us. There's people's like, one person was waving at you. I think I saw another person waving at you.

Like, I think that, you know, inside they're kind of saying there's a podcast. So this is a very distracting. I need like a sensory reset.

I need to get a glass of water. I see the cops coming now down here. I need to get a glass of water.

I need to have a sensory reset. And then we're going to keep going with Lewis Mallard. Two more formative books.

I'm having a wonderful time with this conversation. I'm really, really deeply grateful for your heart and for your love, for the artistry you're doing. And thanks so much for doing this show with us.

Lewis:

Thanks, handsome.

Neil:

Okay, be back in a bit. It's called 3 Books. Yeah, 3 Books. The number three in the word books. And your name is Noah?

[Noah]

Yeah.

Neil:

And you're in like a jean shirt and a white t-shirt and a black jeans. And you're a reader because you got a book beside you. What book is that?

[Noah]

The Hidden Life of Trees.

Neil:

Oh, nice. How'd you hear about that?

[Noah]

I borrowed it from a friend this morning.

Neil:

Oh, you borrowed it from a friend this morning. And that's what we were just talking about. That when you borrow books, you fucking can't calculate.

Because I asked both of you in the break, how many people do you think are readers? And I was thinking in my head, five or 10%. And you guys were saying more like 50, 60, 70%.

Because it's more of a community that doesn't fully participate in the capitalist system with libraries and borrowing. Is that what you were saying, Noah? Am I putting words in your mouth?

[Noah]

No, that's right.

Neil:

Okay.

Lewis:

Yeah, that's how it went.

Neil:

That's how it went. Okay, okay. All right, we're gonna come back.

What's the scene look like now? It's getting a lot hotter, I'll tell you that.

Lewis:

The sun is brighter.

Neil:

I feel like I wanna put sunblock on my face. I'm sweating in my shirt, but you can't take a shirt off and just sit on a bench with a microphone. No, you can.

Lewis:

You would just get looked at a little funnier.

Neil:

It's hot though. It's getting warm. And what's your observation of the College and Bathurst intersection now?

I say, we're now in like a hot mid morning. We're recording in June. It'll probably come out in the summer. In July or August sometime.

Lewis:

The scene, it's not that much different. Just a little, it turned up a little bit in the heat.

Neil:

What's going past us?

Lewis:

Random cars, white vans, white trucks. A lot of white vehicles right now.

Neil:

Toronto called 311. A lot of four by fours. Four by four trucks with like people on their phone and guys sitting in the back, like cleaning park bathrooms and like shoveling. I saw them shoveling leaves off the corner of the sewers. And I talked to the guys and they said, we're the snowplow group. We've just been doing this all winter because there was no snow.

Lewis:

Cleaning, getting drainage. We need better drainage on these streets.

Neil:

Well, how would you describe the city of Toronto? It doesn't seem like you grew up here and the city of Toronto in 2024 is a pulsing, vibrating, like, you know, it's a city on the world stage. How would you describe this city?

Lewis:

A little bit of everything. He needs a little more than a little bit of everything. It's a...

Neil:

What's working, what's not. What's good, what's bad. You're leaving, I heard.

Lewis:

I'm moving.

Neil:

You're posting on your Lewis Mallard Instagram feed that you're moving to Montreal. Oui. We as in you and your opera singer partner or oui as in O-U-I?

Lewis:

Yeah, both forms. Yeah, that was a double entendre.

Neil:

Oh, nice. That could be the word of the chapter. At the end of every chapter, we have a word that was said that we go into the etymology of. That could be it. Double entendre.

Lewis:

Toronto, I moved back here after being away for about five and a half years.

And it's not the city I left. It's not the same city. It's changing rapidly.

I don't recognize it the same way. Many landmarks are being torn down. Many new buildings are being put up in place of them.

I'm a cyclist. The cycling infrastructure is growing, I guess, reasonably quickly, but it's kind of slapdash, bandaid, not really well thought out. And the amount of people riding bikes in the city is exploding.

And it is absolute chaos on these streets as a cyclist now, where before the chaos was other cars. And now I find the chaos is an inexperienced cyclist.

Neil:

Mm-hmm, that would be me. I'm on these bike lanes. I'm inexperienced.

I get dinged at all the time. Not honked at, dinged at. It's a much less abrasive form of vehicular communication.

The bicycle bell. No one's figured out how to put these big honking horns on bikes yet.

Neil:

Eh, eh.

Lewis:

There are, yeah. There's the few people who will do the air powered horn, the obnoxiously loud.

Neil:

They also bang, it should be said that Toronto cyclists bang on cars a lot. I've witnessed it a lot. Like they yell at drivers.

They pound their fists on hoods and things. And they're usually right. It's because someone's parking in the bike lane.

It's because someone's turning without seeing the bikes coming. They're usually right, but they do so very aggressively. Am I right about this?

Lewis:

I've seen it, unfortunately. I have also participated in it. I really try not to do that as hard as I can now.

I've tried to change that behavior and just move on with my day.

Neil:

There's a bit of 18 year old Lewis, fuck you teacher still left in there in his early 40s.

Lewis:

I think drivers who are not necessarily cyclists don't realize how threatening a car can be. Completely dangerous. And when they do things to purposefully put you in danger, it's extremely frustrating.

Neil:

Purposefully?

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

How are you going to evaluate intent when someone parking in the bike lane or turning in the corner by accident?

Lewis:

Well, that's not what I'm talking about. That's what you're talking about.

Neil:

What are you talking about?

Lewis:

When people will swerve to threaten you with their car.

Neil:

Oh.

Lewis:

Will purposefully cut you off.

Neil:

Oh, really?

Lewis:

To brake check you.

Neil:

Brake check you?

Lewis:

Absolutely.

Neil:

What does brake check you mean?

Lewis:

Like when you're following behind them and they will...

Neil:

In a lane, not a bike lane.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

In a car lane. Yes. But it's not a car lane. It's a shared lane.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

But people think it's a car lane.

Lewis:

One subtle one.

Neil:

They'll brake you because they think that you aren't going to brake and then you'll pound the back of their car.

Lewis:

Well...

Neil:

That's what they want to have happen is what you're saying.

Lewis:

I don't think they're thinking clearly. So I don't know.

Neil:

Right.

Lewis:

I don't really know what they want.

Neil:

Right. They brake check you though. And now I understand what brake check you means.

Lewis:

And another one that I've had many times is people spray you with their windshield washer fluid.

Neil:

No way.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

They spray you with their... Because they know that the windshield washer fluid on any car splashes the everywhere.

Lewis:

And so they do it as you're passing.

Neil:

Really? Just when you're passing?

Lewis:

Yeah. I've had that many times.

Neil:

So what is... I'm sorry to ask. What is it about you that's drawing all this ire?

Lewis:

I don't think it's me. I think a lot of cyclists deal with these things. It's just the frequency on the roads.

Neil:

You're like... I'm like an everyday... I'm like a drop my kids off at school kind of cyclist.

You're like a bike around town. You don't have a car.

Lewis:

I don't have a car.

Neil:

So you're using your bike in the winter.

Lewis:

All seasons.

Neil:

Right, all seasons.

Lewis:

And I also use it for commuting, for recreation.

Neil:

It should be said that the winter in Toronto, the streets can be quite snowy, slushy. You're on your bike.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

You're biking through, you're on the lanes. You're getting brake checked. You're getting washer fluid in your eyes.

You pound on cars. You try not to do that.

Lewis:

I try not to...

Neil:

But you'll engage...

Lewis:

Carry the...

I used to when I was younger.

Neil:

What's the highest amount of road rage you've been involved in? I should also say I've pounded on a few cars myself. I have done that because sometimes you're right.

When you're on a bike, it's like, what is this guy doing? He's trying to kill me.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

I do. I have felt that. But as soon as I've pounded on a car, I've only done a couple of times, I run away.

I bolt away. I'm like, I'm immediately regretful and fearful of what I've just done. I won't stand there and get into an actual fight.

I'll take off. Because I'm like a real... I can't believe I just did that.

It's out of character.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

I think, but I guess not.

Lewis:

Well, people get so irrationally angry in these road rage scenarios that I almost find it interesting to see somebody go from zero to a hundred in the anger scale over something so small.

Neil:

And we know this because George Carlin said, everyone driving faster than you is a maniac and everyone driving slower than you is an idiot. Everyone relates to this.

Lewis:

And how willing somebody who's in this state of mind is to seemingly throw away their whole life because they're angry. They're so angry about this one thing. And I recognize this behavior in people now where before I would try to, I would almost match their anger and things would come to, not come to blows, but come close to blows.

And in the most recent time that I was involved in a road range scenario, there was a driver who was threatening me with his vehicle. He was charging me and then stopping before he would hit me. He was swerving, cutting me off, not letting me pass.

I went away that he couldn't go up a one-way street with heavy traffic and I knew he couldn't follow me in his car.

Neil:

Why? So you ended up walking away from the fight?

Lewis:

I walked away from it.

Neil:

You could have been in a physical fight with him.

Lewis:

Oh, absolutely. It would have turned to blows without a doubt if I had gotten off my bike. And I was interested-

Neil:

And nobody else was around.

Lewis:

No, I-I landed into an alleyway.

Neil:

How long ago was this?

Lewis:

This was last summer.

Neil:

Okay, this is pretty recent. What have you learned over time that can help the novice rider navigate road rage better?

Lewis:

Oh.

Neil:

Just drive it away? Just get to the finish of whatever that story ended faster?

Lewis:

I think it's better

Neil:

Don't engage.

Lewis:

It's better to walk away?

Neil:

It's better to walk away.

Lewis:

If you did something wrong, apologize and move on.

Neil:

Oh, apologize?

Lewis:

I think if you actually are

Neil:

I always put my palm up. You know what I mean? When I do something wrong on the road, I put my palm up. I'm like, that was me. Like, am I bad?

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

I do that a lot. My palm is often up while I'm driving.

Lewis:

I think apologies go a long way. Apologies, yeah.

But for me, I really try to let it go. I feel like I have the power to absorb that anger that somebody else is giving out and let it go and so that it doesn't have to carry on through that branch that was just kind of created.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

Tributary or whatever you want to call it.

Neil:

Oh, tributary.

Lewis:

Of anger.

Neil:

Oh, we got to mark that one. That's a potential word of the podcast too. Tributary and double entendre popping out so far early in the conversation.

Now, here's the thing. You were in your early 40s.

Lewis:

Mid.

Neil:

Mid, okay. Okay, good, yeah. Because we never quite got the clarity on the blurry 70s.

But I'm September 17th, 1979. So I would agree with the 70s being blurry. You probably played that game I did of like, I've been around for six decades.

I'm 41. Anyway, maybe not. So we got kind of a book of your childhood, Lupin and the Carpenter's Apprentice.

I talked to you in advance. So I know that we also have a book kind of of your 20s and I know we have a book kind of of your 30s. I think what I'll do now is I'll introduce the book kind of of your 20s and we'll steer the conversation kind of towards that kind of post high school, pre-Lewis part of your life.

And then we'll talk about the book of your 30s after that. Does that sound like a good structure?

Lewis:

That is.

Neil:

You can feel free to, you know.

Lewis:

That is the structure.

Neil:

Chiropractically adjust the structure. Okay, the book of your 20s is, oh yeah, here it comes people. I'm excited for this because, you know, we're in the, we're getting into the 500s now.

Like we've counted down over 400 books on the show. So it's exciting to me that we're getting into the one and the only Moby Dick. Oh yes.

By Herman Melville, M-E-L-V-I-L-L-E. Originally published in October 18th, 1851 by Richard Bentley in the UK and a U.S., Harper and Brothers. And I love the old publisher names.

Harper and Brothers, not Harper Collins, in the U.S. This is, everyone's got different covers for this. The paperback I have.

Lewis:

It's a nice cover.

Neil:

You like that one? It's got like this gigantic white, almost like lino block kind of whale.

Lewis:

Yeah, it looks like an etching maybe. It's tough to say.

Neil:

Yeah, that's yours. By the way, you want that?

That's yours.

Lewis:

Okay.

Neil:

Okay, that's yours.

That's your signifying commemorative copy of the conversation.

Lewis:

You got it right in it though.

Neil:

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll sign Herman Melville's name in there. Yeah. So mine is like a kind of a white, gigantic, it's almost like a scary looking whale, but it's only like from the tip of its nose. I'm sure it's not called a nose, to like just past its eye.

Lewis:

That's the most recognizable part of a sperm whale.

Neil:

Yes. Oh, sperm whale. Thank you for specific.

And then it's an all caps kind of impact font, wide kerning Moby Dick with Herman Melville in an embossed all caps serif font.

Lewis:

That's debossed.

Neil:

Oh, debossed.

Lewis:

Or wait, which one? This is in, not out.

Neil:

Oh yeah, I think that is debossed. Embossed means pop, popping out.

Lewis:

And then you're debossed.

Neil:

Oh, that is interesting. So it's a debossed cover. Well, that seems like a competitor for the word of the chapter.

Herman Melville was a New Yorker. I didn't realize this. He's a New Yorker who lived from, listen to the years, 1819 to 1891.

Imagine that, 1819 to 1891. Flip the numbers around and that's how long I'll be here. He's an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance.

Came from a distinguished family, but after his father's death in 1832, his family was in poverty. From the age of 12, Melville worked just a number of jobs. It's gonna think I sound like a bit like your 20s.

Bank clerk, farmer, teacher. In the summer of 1839, he joined the crew of a merchant ship that sailed to England. Think about this.

Less than 200 years ago, Lewis, joining a merchant ship to sail to England. When he returned, he tried several jobs, but none lasted for long. He then signed on to a whaling ship that set sail.

There goes a mad vac beside us, sucking garbage off the trail. Melville, oh yeah. A whaling ship that set sail on January 3rd, 1841.

He then spent the next two years having adventures in the South Pacific. Nowhere close to New York or England. And by the way, Moby Dick, this book, which we're gonna get into, was a flop.

Only 3,715 copies precisely were sold during Melville's lifetime. Critics and readers didn't know what to take of the popular adventure novelist's turn towards dark, complex, psychological explorations. The total amount he earned from Moby Dick was $556.

Lewis:

Jesus, adjusted for inflation it's still bullshit.

Neil:

Essentially, the book more or less torpedoed his existing popularity, and the writer returned to New York and became a customs inspector in 1863.

Lewis:

That's unfortunate, Herman.

Neil:

Moby Dick torpedoed his career. What is this torpedoing book about? The sailor Ishmael's narrative of the maniacal quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, P-Q-O-D, for vengeance against Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that bit off his leg on the ship's previous voyage.

Moby Dick is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopedia of whaling lore and legend, the book can be seen as part of its author's lifelong meditation on America, written with wonderful, redemptive humor. It's also a profound inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception.

Wow! File this one to 813.3 for literature slash middle 19th century literature. Not much goes in that slot that I know of. Lewis, please tell us about your relationship with Moby Dick by Herman Melville.

Lewis:

You know, this is a book that I'd heard of growing up through school. We didn't read it in high school.

I think it was a little, probably a little too heavy for that time in my life. And it was, I kind of thought of it as like a challenge. Like, oh, one day I would like to read that book, consume that book.

And I never, I was never much of a reader. I had a difficult relationship with reading through school. You know, I was in, what do you call it nowadays?

I was in like the remedial class.

Neil:

You were in like a, well, special education.

Lewis:

Yeah, I got put into the slow kid class for some of this stuff.

And I had tutors to help me with reading and writing as a kid. So it was always kind of a sore spot, especially since my father was such a voracious reader and my sister was the scholastically smart one. And so I kind of felt bashful about...

Neil:

Sorry to ask, but how does somebody with that background then wanna read Moby Dick? The most challenging novel of all time.

Lewis:

I like a challenge.

Neil:

Wow. So with that background, it made you attracted to it. How did you come across Moby Dick?

How did it enter your brain view? How did you even know it was a book?

Lewis:

Well, I don't remember.

Neil:

Noah's standing up, Noah's taking off. He's got the secret life of trees. Enjoy the book.

Lewis:

Goodbye, Noah.

Neil:

Great chatting with you.

Lewis:

I don't remember how exactly it came on my radar.

Neil:

After high school?

Lewis:

Sometime after high school. I'm sure I heard of it in high school. And I knew it was-

Neil:

Can I ask what you did after high school?

Lewis:

I went to college.

Neil:

You took art?

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

You took illustration?

Lewis:

I did.

Neil:

You were trying to find the program that-

Lewis:

I went to Sheridan College.

Neil:

Okay. So someone that wanted to figure out your identity could start tracing these trails. You know, Banksy's been really careful. He doesn't let a peep out about them.

Lewis:

Oh, well.

Neil:

You want us to bleep out the name of the college?

Lewis:

No, that's fine. It's Sheridan College. It's in Oakville.

Boring fucking city. Horrible place. I hated Oakville.

Neil:

Oh my gosh. Wow, you're going hard on Oakville here.

Lewis:

Didn't like it.

Neil:

Oh, wow.

Lewis:

Culture-less.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

Boring.

Neil:

We interviewed Dave Cheesewright, former CEO of Walmart in Oakville on an earlier chapter of three books. We won't pass this chapter along to him for his response to you on Oakville, but maybe he wouldn't protect it.

Who knows? Now, listen, you go after to Sheridan College. You take an illustration.

You're doing art. I know Moby Dick's coming into here. Take me through this period of your life though. What's happened in your life?

Lewis:

Well, I was in college. I was doing a lot of trying to figure out-

Neil:

Still straight edge.

Lewis:

Who I am, yes.

Neil:

Pre-tattoo or post-tattoo?

Lewis:

Post-tattoo.

Neil:

Post-tattoo.

Lewis:

I got the tattoo in high school.

Neil:

When anyone asks you to drink or smoke weed, you lift up your shirt and show them the tattoo?

Lewis:

No.

Neil:

No, you just were- But you were proud of it.

Lewis:

I just said, no, thank you.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

Yes, I-

Neil:

By the way, I was too. I was straight edge until my 20s, by the way.

Lewis:

But did you identify that way? Or you just happened to be-

Neil:

No, I was actually scared to identify that way. I hid it.

Lewis:

Oh.

Neil:

I hid it, yeah. Because at my college, if you didn't drink, it was kind of like you were a major outlier.

Lewis:

Oh. I never felt that at all.

Neil:

I think my closest friends all knew I didn't drink. And I started drinking in my fourth year, my last year. After I got my job offer from Procter & Gamble, we had a rager.

Lewis:

Oh, yes. And you drank a bunch of Smirnoff Ices.

Neil:

How'd you remember that?

Lewis:

Because I just listened to your podcast episode yesterday where you talked about that.

Neil:

Oh my God. I don't even remember talking about that. But yeah, Smirnoff Ice. I still, to this day, cannot drink. Smirnoff Ices are, for the most part, vodka.

Lewis:

You did research. I did research.

Neil:

You're coming in hot. Yeah, I'm quoting past interviews you've done.

You're quoting past interviews I've done.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

Okay. Okay, so you're straight edge. You're in college.

You're taking illustration. I know the city was boring, but did you learn a lot from the perspective of craft or artistry?

Lewis:

It gave me a lot of time to solely focus on those things. So yeah, I learned a lot.

Neil:

You seemed to, you deepened your connection with it. Like, I mean, you became more of an artist.

Lewis:

Certainly, I was starting to decide on what an art career might look like for myself or how I fit into that world. I flip-flopped on whether I was gonna go into animation or illustration. The school offered both.

They were both excellent programs that were very hard to get into. I knew that the chances of getting in were slim, but I was extremely confident I would get in. It was just a matter of doing the work, and so I decided on- That should be underlined for people, and I know this because I have one other friend that tried to go.

Neil:

So at this time in the 90s- Early 2000s.

Lewis:

Early 2000s. No, late 99.

Neil:

So Sheridan College's animation and illustration program had the global reputation for being strong theater schools into places like Industrial Light and Magic, Lucasfilm. They were getting scooped and going to California to make movies. It was a real strong-

Lewis:

Big time.

Neil:

Well-known. Very, very competitive. If you wanna go work in, not Silicon Valley, I don't know what, Hollywood, I guess, really.

You go to Sheridan, you take illustration, you take animation, and they want you because you come out knowing all these hard-to-know skills, like how to use all the 3D animation software and all the-

Lewis:

They were incredible. It was unbelievable what the animation students were capable of after three years.

Neil:

Three years, and that's it?

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Wow, wow.

Lewis:

It was such an intense program.

Neil:

So I can see why you wanted to go there.

Lewis:

The illustration program didn't have that reputation necessarily because it's not as glamorous, I think, as animating Disney movies, Pixar movies.

Neil:

Although all those movies start off as illustrations.

Lewis:

Yeah, in a sense. And at that time, I was very good at realism and not much else. Drafting, I was good at.

Mechanical drawing. These are things that came very natural to me. The creative, making up stuff out of my head and putting that down on paper, to me, that was amazing and I didn't understand how people did it.

I had never really tried to do it. And so I went into a specific program in illustration called technical illustration, which was mainly scientific, medical, and technical mechanical drawing.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

It was exactly where I excelled and where I naturally fit. And I was so bored.

Neil:

Oh, really?

Lewis:

I was doing very well, getting extremely high marks. And I could see exactly where I would fit into the art world there. And I didn't want it.

I was starting to realize it's not what I wanted out of art. I wanted to be an artist. I wanted to lean more into the fine art world.

And that was more of the vision I had of myself, I think, from a child.

Neil:

Well, how do you define fine art?

Lewis:

Well, making artwork to sell in a gallery was how I viewed it then.

Neil:

Oh, interesting. Making artwork to sell in a gallery.

Lewis:

Not doing a different kind of commercial art, you know?

Neil:

No street art was really coming out of you at this age either. It doesn't sound like it. You weren't spray painting in the alleys at night?

Lewis:

No, I was absolutely doing that.

Neil:

Oh, okay.

Lewis:

Oh, really?

Neil:

Okay, I didn't hear that yet.

Lewis:

Well, in high school, I was very active as a graffiti artist.

Neil:

Really?

Lewis:

I did what I think, if you saw it now, you would refer to it as just nonsense, vandalism, graffiti.

I was experimenting, I was practicing, trying to figure out. And even while I was doing it, I was like, I like the act. I don't like how I'm doing it, but I just continued doing it.

Neil:

What about the act did you like?

Lewis:

Well, I liked the altering my surroundings. I liked the danger of it.

Neil:

Transgressiveness.

Lewis:

You know, I like doing it.

Neil:

Doing something just the right amount of bad.

Lewis:

Something that was bad, but not like catastrophic.

Neil:

Can I ask about the moral compass you use to guide yourself? From a lot of people's perspective, you're engaging heavily and frequently in acts of mischief and vandalism and stuff, but you obviously have a code. Man's gotta have it.

I'm sensing it in you. So how do you articulate what you do and not do? What are your yeses and noes?

Lewis:

Developing a code then. After high school, I didn't participate for a little while in graffiti.

And then later on in college, I think in my second or third year, I started to do some stencil graffiti. So I would make my own stencils and then I would go out with spray paint and do this kind of stencil art.

Neil:

Any notable or memorable stencils? You're not the guy that does Post No Bills and posts pictures of Bill Clinton and Bill Cosby.

Lewis:

No, but I remember when that started in Toronto and it was very funny, very clever. I loved it. I think I like the sense of humor of that very much.

This was before Bill Cosby had been discovered.

Neil:

Yeah, for those that don't know, on all kinds of Toronto downtown construction sites, they would say Post No Bills, meaning Post No Posters. And somebody came up with the idea of posting stenciled, perfect, realistic versions of Bill Cosby, Bill Clinton, and other famous bills.

Lewis:

Other famous bills, it was very funny.

Neil:

Yeah, funny, and nobody got, I think I'm also sensing like, there's nobody gets hurt with your stuff.

Lewis:

Well, I mean, how many people get hurt by graffiti other than property owners who have to pay?

Neil:

Yeah, that's a type of injury, but I'm talking no one's actually like, aggrieved really. Unless it's bad graffiti and they have to clean it up, I guess is what you're saying.

Lewis:

I would say what I was doing back then was kind of, it was not refined. It was not really with the purpose I was experimenting. Ultimately-

Neil:

You defined your code, really.

Lewis:

I didn't like, I didn't-

Neil:

Do people do stuff in graffiti that you don't agree with and that you wouldn't do? Is there places that you wouldn't graffiti? You don't graffiti a storefront window.

Lewis:

Absolutely not.

Neil:

So this is what I'm trying to ask you, like, what are your things that you would do and what are the things that you would don't do? For someone interested in becoming a street artist and well aware that it's illegal to become one, how do you navigate the morals of it? The rights and the wrongs?

Lewis:

For myself, right now, I look for places, I look for places, objects that are not typical vessels for graffiti. They're not a typical target of a stereotypical-

Neil:

Atypical vessels. Atypical vessels.

Lewis:

So we're talking about this one in front of us here.

Neil:

Yes.

Lewis:

I saw it as- The concrete.

I saw it as a forgotten piece of street furniture that the city doesn't have the time or energy to repaint.

Neil:

They don't. That's why it's covered in graffiti.

Lewis:

And peeling paint. It had an old coat of paint that it was crumbling off and I scraped that off as best I could. Forgotten piece of street furniture.

Neil:

Hmm, street furniture. That's a phrase I don't think I've heard much before.

Lewis:

I think it's the graffiti landscape of this city and in most cities is very cluttered. It's hard to stand out. Most of the best spots are already taken.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah.

Lewis:

And so I look for the spots that nobody wants and that I see potential in. And I try to make them look nicer.

Neil:

Right. Oh, so there's a beautification here too.

Lewis:

Absolutely. I try to clean up and add.

Neil:

Clean up and add.

Lewis:

But also serve a purpose for myself.

Neil:

Clean up and add. And what's the purpose you're serving for yourself? Is this the competing with other artists, standing out from the crowd?

Because you did mention that earlier too.

Lewis:

I don't want to, I don't like to compete in like a, I'd rather compete in a fun way.

Neil:

Yeah. The way football players compete. The way Jonathan Franzen told us he competes with David Foster Wallace.

Lewis:

I have no idea who those people are.

Neil:

Sorry, I just mean like a writer competing with another writer on like writing something great.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Making something great.

Lewis:

I want to push people to, I would love to see more creative, more interesting and well thought out public street art, graffiti.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

Whatever you want to call it. I would like to see people really think about what they're doing and try to do it the best way they can.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

I understand.

Neil:

Like Nick Sweetman, who's a mural artist in Toronto we both like, who draws these hyper realistic looking birds, but giant pink walls with like bumblebees and hooded mergansers, beautiful stuff. Yeah. A lot of low rising, low rise military planes flying over us today for some reason.

Would you classify that as a military plane? Like what kind of plane is that?

Lewis:

It looks like it, it might even be like the Lancaster from Hamilton. The old World War II bomber.

Neil:

Something about that plane looks like straight out of World War II. I hate that shit. Meanwhile, yeah, it is fear inducing.

Lewis:

Yeah. Can you only imagine being from a country that, how many immigrants do we have here that come from war torn fucking countries?

Neil:

It's scary for them.

Lewis:

And then they hear these war planes flying overhead and it's like, objectively, I'm sure they know that they're not being bombed, but it triggers something. It's got to trigger something.

Neil:

I mean, we have a lot of Palestinian protests happening right downtown right now. Streets are gleaming closed left, right and center. We've got encampments here.

We've had a big story in the news here in the Toronto Star last year saying this military flyovers have got to stop. Like, what the fuck are they doing? Like, why is it?

Why are we traumatizing people? That actually came out. And some people reacted to that article and said, oh my gosh, what a soft culture we live in.

You can't even fly a plane anymore. Like, I'm just saying, like there's two sides of that argument. You're on the first side.

Lewis:

Well, I think, what a waste of resources. And who gives a shit?

Neil:

So you're going to, you go to Oakville, you're taking the illustration. You're in your illustration all the way through?

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

No, you change.

Lewis:

I was in technical illustration and I switched to interpretive illustration, which meant I had to go back a year. I couldn't continue into my third year. I had to go back and redo my second year.

And I felt like if I ever wanted to be good at drawing from my imagination, I had 10,000 hours to put in because I hadn't put really any hours into it. And so the start of that journey for me was dropping back a year in college, redoing my second year, in a way saying goodbye to the friends I had made.

Neil:

Oh, no.

Lewis:

Because they had moved on to their third year, which is a very intense year.

Neil:

That's the last year.

Lewis:

And I ended up in a class full of people I had kind of seen around school, but didn't really know.

Neil:

Oh, wow.

Lewis:

And once I was dropped into this class, I met three guys who I became quick friends with and we started our art careers together just a couple of years later.

Neil:

Oh, really? How did you do that? What do you mean start your art career?

Lewis:

Well, we met in our second year of illustration.

We formed a tight bond over that year. Because of what? Is it your work that you were attracted to each other about?

I think it was a sense of humor. It was a way of creative problem solving. I was trying to find a style to draw in, a creative imaginary style, which was really pushed on us by the teachers that you have to market yourself with a style.

And so I was really-

Neil:

Oh, interesting. It's like what they tell writers to find your voice, find your voice, find your voice.

Lewis:

Yeah, and I was really anxious about this. They say to find your style, find your style, find your style. I always felt like, one, I have to pick one?

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

Wow, there's so many I like.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

And I was capable of multiple. And I just, I wasn't capable of the imaginary stuff yet. And so I figured it's just a matter of, I was starting to figure out like, oh, this is just a skill I can learn if I seek it out, if I practice every day.

So in the summer between switching programs, I tried to unlearn, in a way, all of the drawing I did. And I tried to teach myself how to draw in a different way.

Neil:

How do you unlearn?

Lewis:

Well, I just tried to break all the rules that I had learned.

Neil:

How do you, how does someone do that? I probably have all kinds of rules about podcasting and about writing, and I can't even see them.

Lewis:

I don't know, I picked up a new sketchbook that I hadn't drawn in, and I just started drawing in it in a different way.

Neil:

Wow, so you just used your power of mind to redirect yourself.

Lewis:

I wouldn't let myself draw the things I wanted to draw.

Neil:

Yep.

Lewis:

And I'd spent a lot of time just thinking about, I knew I was going into what was gonna be a difficult new year, full of challenges. And so I was trying to set myself up for it and get ahead a little bit.

Neil:

Still straight edge.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

Graduated.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

Form an art collective with a few friends.

Lewis:

This is, yeah, this is about a year and a half after meeting them.

Neil:

Move to Toronto.

Lewis:

In our last year of college. And lived together. We moved to 888 DuPont Street, the corner of Ossington and DuPont.

We got a studio.

Neil:

That's not that derelict broken glass building.

Lewis:

That doesn't exist anymore. It was.

Neil:

But that's what it was, right?

Lewis:

It was.

Neil:

You lived in a derelict broken glass building?

Lewis:

Absolutely illegally.

Neil:

Illegally?

Lewis:

Yeah, it was a commercial building.

Neil:

Oh, you weren't allowed to live there?

Lewis:

Technically, no. The landlord, Carl, at the time, he was what I consider a pretty decent slumlord.

Neil:

Oh my God.

Lewis:

He was, I don't think he realized how much he was supporting the arts in the city.

Neil:

Tell me more.

Lewis:

Well, he was allowing artists, such as ourselves and many other people to live and work in a building that they weren't technically allowed to live in.

The building was safe for living and it was fine. It had its problems. It was noisy.

It was too hot in the winter. It was too hot in the summer. There was other people there that were living there that were also not allowed to be there.

Everybody.

Neil:

I'm assuming that kind of felt like a street community in some ways.

Lewis:

Well, we didn't, there was only a few of us that hung out together. Everybody was kind of pretty separate. There was a lot of people from different art scenes in the city that lived and worked out of that building.

Neil:

Like what?

Lewis:

Oh, there was musicians. There was performance artists. There were-

Neil:

Any big names come out of there?

Lewis:

Well, Will Monroe was, to us, the biggest name at the time. He was a very prominent artist and DJ in Toronto in the gay queer scene at the time.

He threw the biggest parties. Vaseline, Vaseline.

Neil:

What's Vaseline, Vaseline?

Lewis:

Vaseline was his dance night, his party night.

Neil:

Is that the one that was on the subway?

Lewis:

No, but for Will's birthday, I think it was Will's birthday when his birthday would come up, he would throw, him and his friends would organize a subway party where we would plan to meet on a specific train traveling in a specific direction. And we would all pile into one car and eventually the people who were just riding the TTC would switch cars because it all became very noisy.

Neil:

Yeah, you take over a subway car and you're taking it over with like

Lewis:

30, 40, 50 people, sometimes more.

Neil:

Doing what?

Lewis:

Dancing, decorating. People would bring decorations, hang them over the railings. There'd be boom boxes, a lot of, not a lot of clothing, but the clothing that was on was tight and colorful.

Neil:

Not a lot of clothing.

Lewis:

Well, you know, people were out to party.

Neil:

Flamboyant, queer community.

Lewis:

Yeah, yeah.

Neil:

Not a lot of clothing.

Lewis:

A lot of fun, you know, beautiful, amazing people having a, you're doing something that is illegal, but I mean, it's, we weren't, nobody was harmed.

Neil:

Yeah, exactly.

Lewis:

People were disrupted.

Some people joined in. Random strangers joined in.

Neil:

I think when you have a party on a subway car, you're taking that risk right up front.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Like it is the subway.

Lewis:

We welcomed it.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

You know, and eventually it would get shut down.

Neil:

That's how it has to end.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

There's no other way a subway party could end rather than-

Lewis:

I hope, you know, I hope that they still exist. I hope people are still doing it.

Neil:

Nobody got arrested.

Lewis:

No.

Neil:

Just get out of here.

Lewis:

Get out of here.

Neil:

Well, also it gets to the end of the line. Yeah, we would go- How long would this party last?

Lewis:

You know, back and forth a couple of times.

Neil:

Oh, really?

Lewis:

It would switch. You know, we would move trains.

Neil:

So this is, we would get broke up for hours then.

Lewis:

We'd get off at Bloor and Spadina and then get out.

Neil:

Oh, you had a plan.

Lewis:

And then go, yeah, of course.

Neil:

Oh, and that's how you keep it going.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Oh, you switch at Bloor and Spadina, you want to go North, South and then you have to catch the- Oh, wow. That's how you keep it going. You're jumping the line.

Lewis:

Yeah. And then you go, you do the loop down to Union, back up and- And jump the line again. Yeah, yeah.

Neil:

Oh, wow. You say this like we know what you're talking about, Lewis. Like just in general, with your life and your scene and your, because, you know, part of what I'm attracted to with you in your conversation is that you're just being so wonderfully outlandish about everything. Like you're not living within this, the skirted rules of any sort of system. Like you just well acknowledge that almost everything you're doing is outside, certainly the lines of legality.

Lewis:

I'd say a lot of my life has been lived in that realm.

Neil:

Yeah. I'm noticing that with your art, with where you're living, with how you're partying, it's all illegal.

Not to, I'm not saying that we need to live within those lines.

Lewis:

But those are the most fun things, you know, and we barely scratch the surface of, we don't have time to go into all of the various things.

Neil:

Give me two or three other things you guys would do, this crazy arts collective, what the scene was like.

Lewis:

Oh, I was thinking more like going back in time to high school, the places that we would hang out.

We would hang out anywhere that was away from other people's view. And one of our favorite places to hang out was inside of a bridge.

Neil:

Inside of a bridge?

Lewis:

There was, I think it was the 406, runs through St. Catharines. And from downtown, we found, it goes over, I think it's a 12-mile creek. This bridge spans over this creek.

And just through urban exploration, we found an area where we could physically get inside of this big cement bridge.

Neil:

Oh my gosh.

Lewis:

There was a cavernous area.

Neil:

I can picture it. Like a highway tunnel.

Lewis:

Essentially, it was all just this empty space. I think the bridge was probably prefabbed and then dropped in place. Like some military aircraft.

And there was a hole in a wall that led into a dark, open room, and we went and explored this space. And eventually, you know, we weren't the first people in there. I distinctly remember going in there the first time, jumping in and turning on a flashlight, because it was pitch black.

A low ceiling, smelled bad. You could smell urine. You could smell feces.

You could smell booze, cigarettes. So it's like people had partied down here. And the first thing we all saw when we turned the light on in there was a deflated sex doll that had been abused.

Neil:

Oh no.

Lewis:

And it was just like laying there on the ground.

Neil:

Oh my gosh.

Lewis:

And I took photos of it and I handed it in for a photography project and got a good mark.

Neil:

Oh my gosh. Wow. The connection of observation with kind of living in your own lines.

Lewis:

So we would go in here and people would party. We would have fires. In the center, we would walk into the center of the structure, probably about 400 or 500 meters, ducking under beams.

Neil:

The bridge was that big?

Lewis:

Long bridge.

Neil:

400 to 500 meters?

Lewis:

It felt about...

Neil:

That's a very long bridge.

Lewis:

Okay. Less than a hundred.

Neil:

Okay, okay. Tenth of a mile.

Lewis:

It felt long because it was a bit of an arduous journey.

Neil:

Okay.

Lewis:

Ducking under these things.

Neil:

You would have fires in there.

Lewis:

Yeah, and we would...

Neil:

That's skirting the definition of no one's getting hurt here.

Lewis:

There was lung pollution. Surely.

Neil:

Lung pollution.

Lewis:

When these kinds of things are happening, I would be present. I wouldn't sit very close to the fire.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

I found it unpleasant. But I also liked the wild atmosphere.

Neil:

Okay, now take us back into your 20s. You're at this arts collective. You're at DuPont in Ossington.

You had an outside the lines kind of upbringing and childhood. You certainly are defining the rules for yourself as you go. You're really trying to maintain kind of a wide canvas of kind of within which you live and function.

Now you're in this art collective. You're in your 20s. I haven't got...

We haven't got to Moby Dick yet. We haven't got to marriage yet, by the way, like, you know, cause I know you're married now. We haven't got to Lewis yet.

There's a few things missing here from the story. So is it... Give me what happened in the 20s.

Give me your 20s.

Lewis:

Well, we...

Neil:

I also haven't got to all the tattoos you're covered in yet. But I know... And also the straight edge tattoo, you're not straight edge now.

So that's another switch that I'm waiting for at some point.

Lewis:

Yeah. Well, after meeting Nick, Steven and Lockie, the three gentlemen that really like changed... Nick, Steven and Lockie.

Changed the direction of my life.

Neil:

I love the name Lockie.

Lewis:

Yeah, keep going.

Interesting name. Very boring guy though. No, I'm kidding.

He's a great guy.

Neil:

Old man walking by in a purple striped shirt holding a case of Coca-Cola over his shoulder.

Lewis:

Yeah, like it's a boom box.

Neil:

Yeah, I love that. That's a great look for that man. Yeah.

Lewis:

Yeah. And so we became fast friends and spend a lot of time together, making art together, critiquing each other's artwork, growing as artists, being honest with each other. And we were really trying to be the best in the school.

We were trying to be... We wanted to be competitive with each other. We wanted to do well.

We wanted to show off. And once we started to develop a plan for our future, we knew we wanted to work together. We would come up to Toronto as often as possible, the four of us.

We'd take the GO train into the city to get some culture. We were so thirsty for culture. And...

Neil:

How'd you define culture when you came in on the GO train to the big city? What were you looking for?

Lewis:

From Oakville.

Neil:

Were you looking to set fires on bridges?

Lewis:

No, no. We were just looking for culture. We were just looking to be around people from somewhere other than Oakville.

Neil:

Right, right. You'd walk up and down Yonge Street, street preachers, sex theaters, that kind of world.

Lewis:

No, we would go to cafes. And we would sit down and draw in cafes.

Neil:

Oh, okay, okay, okay.

Lewis:

And so there was one particular day at a store called Tequila Bookworm.

Neil:

Oh, I know that store.

Lewis:

The old location.

It's in a new, where it's been there for a long time.

Neil:

Bar slash bookstore.

Lewis:

Yeah. And we were sitting at a table for four and we started passing around a drawing.

Neil:

Oh.

Lewis:

And then Lockie wrote on the drawing, he wrote Team Macho.

Neil:

Team Macho.

Lewis:

And this became the name of our collective.

We basically formed our collective that day in Tequila Bookworm, sitting at this beautiful table, which I tried to buy from them when they were moving and getting rid of their furniture. I went in and offered way more money for that table than it was worth. And they refused to sell it to me.

Neil:

On what grounds?

Lewis:

They just refused. I didn't ask for a reason.

I just took, I was like, all right, I'm not, you know. I offered like $400 for a shitty old table. And I had no business spending that much money on a table at that time.

I was poor.

Neil:

But it had to do something with what happened after from that table.

Lewis:

The sentimental value of the table to us.

Neil:

So that means the collective had some value too. So take us into what happened with this collective, Team Macho.

Lewis:

Oh, well, we got our studio together.

Neil:

So you lived together, you're working together.

Lewis:

More or less, yes.

Neil:

No bedrooms though. Just what, sleeping on the floor?

Lewis:

Not at the time.

When we moved into the place, it had not been lived in in recent memory.

Neil:

Is there a bathroom?

Lewis:

Not in any formal way.

The landlord built us a bathroom.

Neil:

But no shower probably.

Lewis:

With a shower.

Oh wow. Yeah. There was no kitchen.

Neil:

No kitchen. That's a bit of a...

Lewis:

So our bathroom had a pink toilet, a standup shower, and a laundry tub for a sink.

But no ceiling. The walls went... If the ceilings were nine foot, they're about nine foot in there.

The bathroom ceiling or the bathroom wall was eight foot. And there was a lot of pipes running along the ceiling. So it would have been extremely difficult for him to build the wall up to the ceiling around all the pipes.

He didn't want to do it. He built it eight foot. So any noise in the bathroom, any smell from the bathroom came out of the bathroom very easily.

Neil:

Into the artist's studio.

Lewis:

And yes. So we had rules about being in the bathroom.

Neil:

What were they?

Lewis:

Flush, the goddamn toilet.

Neil:

Yeah, that's a good one.

Lewis:

Courtesy flush.

Neil:

Oh, courtesy flush. Immediately after the defecation.

Lewis:

Yeah. But also, since any noise could be heard easily, anybody who was shy about going to the bathroom, we had a CD player in the bathroom. And we always kept the same CD in it.

And it was a kind of like big band music.

Neil:

Oh, wow. A lot of tubas in there.

Lewis:

Yeah, exactly. And there was a particular song that if you got to that song, we basically started harassing. Everybody would be like, get out of there.

You're in there for too long. When the saints come marching in.

Neil:

Oh, yeah.

Lewis:

Came on. Everybody would lift their head up from the desk and be like, who has been in the bathroom forever?

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

You know, get out of there kind of thing.

Neil:

Wow. You're shitting a month. Yeah, they always say don't sleep where you shit. You've heard that phrase.

Lewis:

We didn't have a choice.

Neil:

No beds though.

Lewis:

Well, at this point we had beds.

We didn't have bedrooms. We were all sleeping in the living room with our beds kind of like tucked in together to save space and slowly building the space.

Neil:

What happened? What about no kitchen? How do you eat? What do you eat?

Lewis:

Well, we built ourselves a kitchen.

Neil:

You built a kitchen?

Lewis:

Yeah, well, we went and bought sinks and I built countertops and cupboards. We stole-

Neil:

What kind of food were you eating though? You didn't have any income it sounds like. Not much anyway.

Lewis:

No, I was eating a lot of... So Nick, his father has chickens he's from the country up near Muskoka and his father would come down every weekend to teach at a Japanese school. He worked at a Japanese school, a Saturday school nearby and he would bring us two, three, four dozen eggs.

And so Nick and I, who at the time were the only ones living there full-time, we were sharing a bed. We were washing our dishes in the bathroom and we were eating rice, miso soup and eggs like three times a day.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

It's all we could afford. Luckily-

Neil:

Nice hookup on the eggs though.

Lewis:

High quality, excellent eggs.

I learned how to make a really good miso soup.

Neil:

Oh, you were making the miso soup?

Lewis:

Yeah, we had the paste.

Neil:

Oh, okay. Sounds like your friend, Nick is Japanese. It sounds like.

Lewis:

Half, yeah.

Neil:

So miso, you're making miso soup.

Lewis:

Yeah, I mean, it's just paste and soup stock. It was pretty simple.

Neil:

And rice.

Lewis:

And rice and eggs, yeah.

Neil:

Wow, and the other two guys were involved but they're not always living there.

Lewis:

They weren't always living there.

Neil:

And what was Team Macho producing?

Lewis:

At the time, we were trying to figure things out.

We had just finished school, I'm 24 at the time and we were making zines.

Neil:

Oh, yeah. Zine culture.

Lewis:

We got the attention of a store called Magic Pony.

Neil:

Okay.

Lewis:

Magic Pony, at this time, they were on the second floor of Queen Street in a small shop that you wouldn't notice if you didn't know it was there. We'll start with the second floor. Not many shops people know are there on the second floor of anything.

Yeah, you had to know the door to go in and there was a small sign. And they just sold zines? They were very, no, they sold, at the time, the owners would fly to Japan with empty suitcases, buy a bunch of toys and bring them home.

Neil:

Oh my gosh.

Lewis:

And sell them and just mark them up. They weren't available here.

Neil:

Oh, wow.

Lewis:

But they knew that there was a market for them.

Neil:

Yeah, probably a Nervous Customs check at the border on that one.

Lewis:

I don't know, but they did well. And they had a small space in the back. We're doing a podcast.

Neil:

It's called 3 Books.

[Person on the Street]

Is it called what?

Neil:

3 Books.

[Person on the Street]

3 Books.

Lewis:

Do you have three favorite books?

Neil:

Formative. Formative,  Lewis.

[Person on the Street]

Nice to meet you.

Neil:

You too.

Lewis:

So we, Podcasting.

Neil:

What was the first thing you said? Is something happening or are you just podcasting?

Lewis:

They, yeah. They had a small gallery space in the back that they would have shows in. They were a fan of zines that Lockie, Steven, and Nick were making.

I wasn't making zines at the time. The three of them were. They were really into this scene.

Neil:

Zine scene.

Lewis:

Yeah, the zine scene. Say that five times fast.

And they liked the zines and we just asked like, hey, could we do a show?

Neil:

How were they doing different things? I thought this was a collective.

Lewis:

But we were figuring out how it looked.

Neil:

This was very early on. It doesn't mean you just made art together.

Lewis:

We knew we wanted to make art together. We just didn't know how. We needed an opportunity.

So we got an opportunity to have a show and we were like, collectively, we were like, oh shit, what do we do now? I mean, we wanted a show. We didn't think about what we were gonna do for a show.

Neil:

The Magic Pony gave you a show?

Lewis:

Magic Pony took a chance and gave us a show. We had, I don't know, let's say for the sake of this, six to eight months to prepare.

Neil:

Wow, six to eight months. Which. That's a long time to prepare for a show for an indiscreet, second floor, not, you know. Well, you gotta plan these things ahead of time. Illegal Japanese sales store.

Lewis:

And so the four of us just put our heads together and we started to make work.

Neil:

What'd you make? I love, this is Seth Godin, by the way, chapter three. You know, the deadline creates the shipment. You know what I'm saying?

Lewis:

Oh yes, I.

Neil:

The deadline creates the product.

Lewis:

I agree with this.

Neil:

Start with the deadline.

Lewis:

There was a fifth member, I think, around this time.

We brought in a friend of ours named Jacob, who we met. He went to OCAD. He was a bit of an outsider from the group, but we brought him in.

He fit in well. And for the first few years of the collective.

Neil:

He didn't shit too long.

Lewis:

For the first few years of the collective, he was a part of it. And eventually he wanted to take his career in a different direction. And so he stepped away.

He knows that, we all signed a contract early on in our collective, that we would be friends for life. And we are still all very good friends. Because the contract decrees that.

That we are friends for life.

Neil:

Did you sign it in blood?

Lewis:

No, we didn't sign it in blood, but we did sign it.

And I think it's what we called.

Neil:

Thank you.

Lewis:

It's what we called our very first show, I believe, friends for life.

Neil:

Friends for life. So in the six to eight months, what'd you guys make?

Lewis:

We made probably 50 to 60 paintings, drawings. The idea of the collective was that we were gonna work on each other's work. That we were gonna try to remove the ego out of the art.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

Take our egos out of it.

Neil:

Remove the ego from the art.

Lewis:

And collaborate on things in a way that only we knew.

And that we wouldn't necessarily tell the audience who did what.

Neil:

Oh, kind of like Lennon and McCartney.

Lewis:

And so we would mimic each other's styles.

I saw it very much. I liked it because it was problem solving. I would be given a half finished piece.

And I could take it in any direction I wanted to.

Neil:

And no drug use here still. I don't mean to keep asking, but at some point you flip over.

Lewis:

The guys, although they did consume intoxicants, none of them did it in a way that was as abusive as my friends in high school did.

Neil:

Oh, okay. Yeah, they weren't letting the.

Lewis:

A slightly more mature approach. Maybe a little too much alcohol sometimes.

Neil:

Art came first though, would you say?

Lewis:

Art came first. We were all very dedicated to, yes, absolutely.

Neil:

Can I ask where this dedication to art came from? Clearly it wasn't financially based. No, I'm not.

Six to eight months to make the art for the.

Lewis:

No, well we all had part time jobs.

Neil:

Oh, you're all working on the side.

Lewis:

Oh yeah, yeah. The whole time through, even through college and high school.

Neil:

Okay, I guess I missed. What are you doing?

Lewis:

I was getting random kitchen jobs.

Neil:

Oh, you're working in kitchens.

Lewis:

I've worked in a lot of kitchens.

Neil:

Okay. Restaurants.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Okay. Did we skip over the part where you slept on Center Island? Did we miss that?

Lewis:

No, we're nowhere near that.

Neil:

Oh, that's coming later.

Lewis:

Yes.

Okay, okay. I heard about this. We're gonna get to that later.

So we.

Neil:

How did the show go?

Lewis:

It went better than our wildest dreams. You know, we sold almost everything. It was, we couldn't believe it.

We couldn't believe that so many people showed up for a group that nobody had ever heard of.

Neil:

Why did they?

Lewis:

Magic Pony was doing something cool.

They had a, they had a. This is 90s, 2000s? Early 2000s.

Neil:

Early 2000s.

Lewis:

Four, five, six.

Neil:

Pre-social media though.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

It wasn't like you were using social media.

Lewis:

But there's like MySpace or some shit.

Neil:

It wasn't like you were, I went to a concert recently in Toronto and I was like, me and my friend, my friend Flip from New York for it, Brian. He's like, I want to come see this, you know, concert. And it was like, he got popular off TikTok.

I didn't know that. And, but you could tell when you got there because it was all 23 year old women wearing the same denim cutoffs. And white tank tops.

Lewis:

Sounds like a Taylor Swift concert.

Neil:

We were like totally out of character. I was like, oh my God, it was Noah Kahan. K-A-H-A-N.

Lewis:

Never heard of him.

Neil:

Okay, well, I guess you don't go on TikTok because he's got like billions of followers and stuff.

Lewis:

Don't, don't. I downloaded it once when it was Musical.ly and I was like, this isn't for me. And I deleted it.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So the show, so.

Lewis:

So we prepared a show.

Neil:

We made a lot of work. You prepare for the show. You do the show.

You make a lot, you make a lot of work. You sell a lot of work.

Lewis:

Sold a lot of work.

Neil:

Nobody quits their job yet though. Their side job.

Lewis:

No way. There's no way that was possible.

So the gallery takes 50%.

Neil:

You're making like thousand bucks or something.

Lewis:

Not much, yeah. By the time our 50% gets divided by four, there's not a lot of money left over.

Neil:

Yeah, exactly.

Lewis:

But we were riding high.

We sold a lot of work. We couldn't believe it.

Neil:

And it's a sign of investment in what you're doing.

Lewis:

We were very much doing that.

Neil:

No, I'm saying like the world told you, you're doing, like, it's a belief check mark on being an artist.

Lewis:

It certainly gave us the confidence to do another one.

Neil:

That's what I'm saying.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Okay.

Lewis:

Absolutely.

Neil:

So keep taking me through the 20s then. And then also, I'm still looking, I'm searching for Moby Dick in here.

Lewis:

Okay. Well, I'm starting to read more for myself at this point. And I'm finding books that I'm interested in reading and I'm reading through them.

I'm not necessarily enjoying them, but I'm learning. And it wasn't until I started reading Harry Potter.

Neil:

Oh, Harry Potter.

Lewis:

And we had talked about this as, I mentioned this as- Might've been a formative book. Yeah, absolutely. In a way that it was the first series of books that I ever actually enjoyed reading, where I was looking forward to the next one and would read it and take time out of my day to read it and not just do it because I thought it was something I should be doing.

Neil:

What a gift Harry Potter gave to the world, turning so many, at the time, non-readers to readers.

Lewis:

Yeah. I kind of wished I had that innocent childhood, I think. That was something for me where I was like, I envied that school experience, that high school experience.

Neil:

Oh, interesting.

Lewis:

Because it was so different than mine.

Neil:

Yes. Yeah, nobody was shooting heroin at Hogwarts.

Lewis:

Yeah, it was a lot more innocent. And, but I thought it was great, great storytelling, great adventure.

Neil:

And I will point out to the listener, I hope this doesn't break your identity, but on the palm of the hand that you're holding the microphone with, is that not the Deathly Hallows?

Lewis:

Correct.

Neil:

So you've got the Harry Potter tattoo right on your palm.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

I would imagine that's a place you don't see, I don't see many palm tattoos.

Lewis:

No.

Neil:

Yeah. So what made you decide to get the Deathly Hallows tattooed on your palm? Deathly Hallows, for people that don't know, is a giant triangle with a big circle in the middle and a line through the circle, like kind of like a cat eye sort of thing.

Lewis:

An equilateral triangle with a line dividing.

Neil:

It's probably like the Elder Wand and the Invisibility Cloak and the whatever the third thing was.

Lewis:

And the stone.

Neil:

Oh, the Philosopher's Stone.

Lewis:

The, is that the name of it?

Neil:

I don't know, maybe that, maybe not.

Lewis:

It was the stone that can bring back dead people temporarily.

Neil:

Oh, okay, that's a different stone.

Lewis:

I forget the name of it.

Neil:

Okay. So what made you get that tattooed on your palm?

Lewis:

It was the only tattoo I have that was a spur of the moment decision. I didn't think too much about it ahead of time. I just got it done.

And I figured that since I use my hands a lot, that it would eventually, not completely disappear, but disintegrate to a point where it wouldn't necessarily be recognizable. And boy, was I wrong. It is very permanent.

I mean, of course I knew tattoos were gonna be permanent, but I thought that it would get beat up more than it has.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

And.

Neil:

Would you recommend a palm tattoo?

Lewis:

I mean, if you're in.

Neil:

You got tattoos, you got sleeves, you got arms. What else we got here?

Lewis:

Oh, stomach. I have a sleeve.

Neil:

One sleeve, a stomach, a palm.

Lewis:

I've got some on my ribs, a bit on my leg. Yeah, it's a painful process.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

I think that you, I tried to get into tattooing. I wanted to learn how to do it at a point in my life. And I'm glad that I never got accepted by anybody because I think I would probably have a lot more tattoos if it becomes an easier access thing.

I'm sure I would have be heavily coated. Not that I'm opposed to getting more. I just, I think that I, from going forward, I'm gonna put more thought into it if I do it.

Neil:

Ah, interesting. I'll put more thought. Which I normally have. And by the way, they say over half tattoos are now removed. More than 50% of tattoos.

Lewis:

I've considered trying. I've considered getting the straight edge tattoo removed from my stomach.

Neil:

Maybe just do strikethrough, you know, like a line and then underneath it, you now say psychedelic.

Lewis:

No, I don't think I would do that.

Neil:

Psychonaut.

Lewis:

It was a very painful place to get a tattoo.

Neil:

Your stomach? Oh my gosh. I can't even imagine.

Lewis:

The tattoo artist, you know, thought I was crazy for it being my first tattoo. But I don't know. It's like, it's gonna hurt one way or the other.

Might as well just get it.

Neil:

You know, get it where you want it. You get, so you get into Harry Potter and your toys. It gets you back into reading.

Lewis:

It got me back into reading.

Neil:

Your dad was a big reader growing up.

Lewis:

It got me into, Harry Potter got me into audio books too.

Neil:

Ah.

Lewis:

It, it was a bridge. I was listening to a lot of audio.

Neil:

Audio books was not big at the time.

Lewis:

At the time, no.

Neil:

You like doing CDs or something?

Lewis:

I listened to, well, yes.

I, a lot of my life, I listened to a lot of audio, a lot of talk radio. I loved late night AM radio, Art Bell.

Neil:

Ooh, late night AM radio. What a cool subculture.

Lewis:

As a kid, I listened to a lot of this. And as I got older, I listened to a lot of AM, just talk radio in general. I listened to Howard Stern.

Neil:

You were always a big AM late night radio guy. You were a big Stern person. You were a big listener.

You consumed the world through audio. So the audio book entry point for you to become an adult reader was natural for you.

Lewis:

Yeah. Well, I found that in the beginning, it was difficult to listen to audio books and do something else, to follow along with a story. But since I had physically read all of the Harry Potter books, when I listened to them for the first time, I already knew the story.

So I could just kind of, from then on, it was more like watching a movie, where I had already built a visual world in my head of what this looked like outside of the movies, also influenced by the movies, surely. And so just listening to the story, I didn't have to be present the whole time. And the more I listened, the better I got at listening.

And I was able to start listening to other books. And I thought, oh, this is a much better way for me to consume books, because I can do it while I'm drawing. Not in all kinds of drawing, or if I'm being creative, if I was actively doing creative work, coming up with ideas, problem solving, I could not listen to audio books.

It was too much of a distraction. I needed silence or music. But once I was doing the-

Neil:

This is part of the thing that prevents audio books from fully taking off, is it's hard to do it and do something else.

Lewis:

But once I was doing the grunt work, once all the problem solving was done, and it was just applying, finishing, rendering, whatever, then I could tune out and listen. And so that's when I would listen to books.

Neil:

Plus it's good for rereading, as you're pointing out.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

Uh-huh. But Moby Dick is not rereading. Moby Dick is a sizable challenge.

Lewis:

So I took on Moby Dick while I was painting a friend's house. I did a lot of house painting, indoor, outdoor. I started painting in school, and in my college, in the summer, I would do painting around the school in the summer, just refurbishing.

Neil:

So it wasn't a task that took all of your mental faculties?

Lewis:

Zero.

Neil:

So you could listen to Moby Dick while painting a house.

Lewis:

And so eventually, yeah.

Neil:

It's probably like a 25-hour audio book or something, I bet.

Lewis:

I think it was like 30 to 40. It was long.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah. How many hours does it take to paint a house? 30 to 40?

Lewis:

No, I think that the book was just part of that time.

Neil:

Okay.

Lewis:

But I distinctly remember listening to it in that phase of my life.

And I was somewhere in my late 20s, I think, maybe 30 at the oldest. And I really enjoyed the adventure of the book. I love the idea of this guy just changing his life, like being, I'm gonna join a crew of sailors and do something I've never done before for the sake of adventure, that kind of thing.

And I thought, wow, what a wild experience that must've been like, especially back in the day when they're using whale oil to light their lamps.

Neil:

That's why they're on a whale searching boat.

Lewis:

They were going after sperm whales, yeah.

Neil:

They're looking for the oil.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

That was the original- Spermaceti, I think. Was that not the original kind of start of like the oil industry?

Lewis:

I think it- Like, is that not the first energy- It was certainly an early, it was, I think it was easier to get.

Neil:

That was before oil was a thing.

Lewis:

Oil was a thing, I think it was just hard to refine and to deal with.

Ah, okay, yeah. And that the-

Neil:

There was no oil, there was no, nothing was running on oil though. I mean, whale oil, but not what we call gas today.

Lewis:

No, if it was, I think to refine it was very difficult.

Neil:

We've really screwed up the world fast is what I'm noticing here.

Lewis:

It's what we do really well.

Neil:

Like fast, like really fast. Like we're gonna put out more carbon emissions this year than we ever have in history. And that's the same for every fucking year.

It just seems- Since the last 50 years, we've been talking about it being a problem.

Lewis:

Yeah, it seems absolutely crazy.

Neil:

I'm very glad that we both walked here today.

Lewis:

Like such a beautiful animal, right? Like what a unique looking creature here.

Neil:

He's pointing at the cover of the book, the sperm whale.

Lewis:

You know, I was just like, although it was a book about hunting these animals, I just thought like, what a waste too. You know, like you're such a cool creature and all we can think to do with it is exploit it.

Neil:

Largest animal, amongst the largest animals ever on the planet historically. I think it dives deeper than any other whale. Dives deeper than any other whale.

Probably bigger than almost any dinosaur.

Lewis:

Yeah, likely.

Neil:

It's been around since the dinosaurs too.

I mean, arguably it is a dinosaur, is it not?

Lewis:

Battles mythical creatures at the bottom of the ocean. Giant squids and shit.

Neil:

Giant squids are real.

Lewis:

Yeah, well, you know, back then they were mythical.

Neil:

That's kind of cool that we proved one. Loch Ness never came through. Not yet.

Maybe it just went extinct.

Lewis:

Not yet.

Neil:

Yeah, exactly.

So you identified earlier in this conversation that the size and the challenge of Moby Dick was appealing to you.

Lewis:

Absolutely.

Neil:

To the point where at the end of these interviews, I sometimes ask people, what is your white whale book?

That's a closing question I have. A book you've been chasing the longest and many people answer that question by saying Moby Dick.

Lewis:

Yeah, I mean.

Neil:

And you fucking tackled it out of the gate. Like you become an adult reader. You go boom into, I know you had Harry Potter as your amuse-bouche, but pretty quick after you're going hard.

This is a huge, gigantic, overwhelming.

Lewis:

It was a difficult lesson.

Neil:

Big piece of literature.

Lewis:

There was certainly pausing, rewinding and re-listening happening.

Yeah, even just the language it's written in. It's of course English, but it's an old English.

Neil:

200 year old, yeah.

Lewis:

And yeah, I just thought that it's a book that was valued by people who were smart and that I looked up to. And I thought, if I'm gonna have a well-rounded education, at this point I was teaching myself things. I was very unsatisfied with the education I received going through grade school, middle school, high school.

And I decided to start seeking out the things I was interested in as soon as I had the wherewithal to do so and realized that I needed to because I wasn't being provided it.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah. And I love that you did so in a way that was both daunting, but also accessible because you went into Moby Dick from an audio book perspective while painting a house. I think that's good guidance for listeners like me who have not read this book like me.

I'm not gonna be ashamed of it because one of the values of the show is no book guilt, no book shame. But I've read the first 20, 30 pages and they're good. I really liked it.

I could tell it's challenging, but I really enjoyed the experience. So, but audio book would be great.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

I just need to find a house to paint now.

Lewis:

Yeah, or a banal task to tackle.

Neil:

Yeah, a banal task. You're throwing the words of the chapter out left, right and center. Now, Moby Dick is often described as being about one man's obsession. And as such, it can be read as a cautionary tale about hyper-focus on an individual pursuit. Is there a tension for you between that and being an artist?

What is the risk for you about too much hyper-focus on your individual pursuit? How do you avoid being like Ahab? Or Ishmael, I guess it is.

Lewis:

Yeah. Check in with my wife.

Neil:

Oh, that's good. Check in with my wife. I think she lets me know. Like go to bed, it's 5 a.m. kind of thing?

Lewis:

No, more like, you know, get out of your fantasy world and do some real life tasks.

Neil:

And you no longer have a part-time job, right?

Lewis:

No.

Neil:

So Lewis Mallard has achieved the goal of being self-sufficient financially. He has not achieved the goal of being-

Lewis:

I wouldn't say that. I am surviving off of savings. And when I make money, it's like, a lot comes in and then a lot doesn't come in for a long time. It comes in bursts, with shows, with I have to make a lot of my own opportunities. Right now I am-

Neil:

You're open for commissions. People can hire you to paint something, do something.

Lewis:

I open myself for commissions rarely because I'm heavily focused on other creative ventures.

I do take on commissions from time to time. Most often from people who have already been supporters of me, clients, customers, good customers, that kind of thing.

Neil:

So it's not self-sufficient financially yet, but- I'm trying to build- You want that, that's the goal you have.

Lewis:

Absolutely.

Neil:

So it's the question about obsession is you're kind of like, I'm not there yet towards my goals, but your wife will steer you away from falling too far into it.

Lewis:

Well, she tolerates it up into a point.

Neil:

Does her level of toleration work for you?

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

Not like you spite her for it?

Lewis:

No, absolutely not.

Neil:

You're grateful to have her pull you out of the abyss?

Lewis:

Yeah, she drives me to work away harder than I would for myself because it's not just me anymore, it's we.

She's also in a career path that isn't known for being extremely lucrative.

Neil:

Opera singing.

Lewis:

Yes, and she's in the beginning of her career. And we're building-

Neil:

There's not many operas.

Lewis:

No.

Neil:

Like in Canada, how many operas are there? Toronto, Vancouver, that's it?

Lewis:

Montreal. Well, we're moving to Montreal so that she has a contract with the Opera of Montreal.

Neil:

Oh, interesting. So Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, three operas in the country? There's small- A country of 40 million people that has three viable places an opera singer can work.

Lewis:

And maybe make enough to call it a living, yes.

Neil:

Right, yeah. I'm not counting the stuff you're doing on the street or on the side or the birthday parties.

Lewis:

In the small venues, yes.

Neil:

Wow, wow. I love how both of you are so, so deep down, very narrow niches.

Lewis:

It was one of the things that brought us together and that we related to each other about is how driven we are to succeed in our fields. Yes.

Neil:

Wow, okay. So I feel like I've got a nice little portrait of your 20s here. You're in this art collective, you're at 888 DuPont, what a cool number.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

You're eating eggs, you're eating rice. I think- You're yelling at people when they go to when the Saints go marching in, sitting in the middle of the studio, you're building kitchens, you're pulling people.

You told me in a past conversation that wasn't recorded that you were pulling people out of like, you'd wake up in the morning and there'd be like people sleeping in your place kind of thing.

Lewis:

Very often, we would have visitors, people from out of town that were coming by. I mean, with four or five people with keys and not all of them live there and it's kind of a 24 hour environment. You know, we did build bedrooms eventually.

Neil:

Was that not unsettling though? Was that not like somewhat trauma inducing to have like people showing up all the time?

Lewis:

I don't know, we were all pretty comfortable with it. We knew who they were.

Neil:

Yeah, and you're not on the street. Like this is one notch above living on the street.

Lewis:

Oh yeah, I'd say more than one notch, a couple notches. You know, it was not a place I think most people would want to live.

Neil:

Would your parents come downtown and visit you there?

Lewis:

I feel like my mother might've seen it once and was probably horrified by the whole thing.

Neil:

Dad never came by?

Lewis:

He might have come by.

Neil:

So the relationship with dad is still kind of, sounds like pretty distant here.

Lewis:

It was difficult to get them to come. If I had an art show, I really had to like voice my opinion that I wanted them there.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

For them to come and show interest.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

And that was a pretty common thing.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

Yeah. I don't think they really related. I was very different than they were.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

So I don't know if we really related to each other very much. Yeah.

Neil:

Even the straight edge thing was quite a different thing for your dad doing lines of Coke and when he gets to his job in the mornings.

Lewis:

Yeah. For me, I think it was a way of rebelling against my father.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

To be like just different than he was.

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah. How interesting that is, isn't it?

You know, you often see the kid that falls into abusing drugs as a form of rebellion, but here you have a drug abusing parent and your form of rebellion is sobriety.

Lewis:

In a way, I think. It certainly had something to do with it.

Neil:

Wow. That's amazing. Yeah. So parental advice for everyone listening, if you want, do be a functional alcoholic and casually consume just about any drug put in front of you. Ignore your kids so when you open the closet, they flip their diaper shit at you. Okay. Okay.

Okay. We have a nice portrait of your 20s. I know there was another big decade before we get into your 40s and I know there's a book that orients the decade around us a little bit and I know we're going to touch on it tangentially and we've done this way, but that book I just want to introduce to people is called Alaska by James A.

Michener. M-I-C-H-E-N-E-R.

Lewis:

Yeah. My father's favorite author.

Neil:

Really?

Lewis:

I grew up seeing his books, James Michener's books.

Neil:

On your bookshelf.

Lewis:

Yeah, on my father's bookshelves.

Many of them. He was a prolific author.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

He had a team that helped him write and research.

Neil:

He lived, here's another thing, he lived 1907 to 1997, another sort of numerical thing. He wrote 40 books, most of which were long fictional family sagas covering many generations set in particular geographic locales where he incorporated detailed history. Yes.

In the sweeping epic of the northernmost frontier, Michener guides us through Alaska's fierce terrain and history from the long forgotten past to the bustling present. As his characters struggle for survival, he weaves together exciting high points of Alaska's story, its brutal origins, the American acquisition, the gold rush, the growth and exploitation of salmon, the arduous construction of the Alcan Highway undertaken to defend the territory during World War II. As spellbinding portrait of a human community fighting to establish its place and voice in the world, Alaska traces a bold majestic saga of the enduring spirit of the land and its people.

Files 10813.54 for literature slash 20th century fiction. Take us into this book and to your 30s in the life of Lewis Mallard today.

Lewis:

Well, I mean, I'd always seen these books on my dad's shelves, never read one. I still haven't literally read one. Only listened to many of them. That counts.

Neil:

Yes. You have read Alaska.

Lewis:

I've listened to it a couple times.

Neil:

That counts.

Lewis:

And I chose this particular book. I mean, I would have just chosen the author had you given me the opportunity because although I didn't love every single one of his books, Alaska was one that I quite enjoyed. Hawaii was another.

Hawaii. Chesapeake, the source. There's been...

Neil:

Turkey vultures or red-tailed hawks are circling us. I'm just noticing that.

Lewis:

Yeah. No dead pigeons around us.

Neil:

No, or mallards, thankfully.

Lewis:

And so I didn't start consuming Michener until I was in my, well, very late 30s, just about to turn 40. When I was living, I had moved back. I'd moved to Hamilton to move in with my father and become a caregiver as he was approaching the end of his life.

Neil:

How did you know it was the end of his life? What happened? Was there an incident?

Lewis:

He was getting, he had dementia and it was getting progressively worse. My sister lived in Hamilton, lived in the same house as my father. She had moved my father into the house that she bought.

It was a two-unit house. So she was living upstairs with her partner and a newborn baby. My father was living downstairs on the ground floor.

Neil:

Can I ask what compelled you to be a chief full-time caregiver for a parent that doesn't sound like he was that for you ever?

Lewis:

I didn't see that I had any other choices that I could live with myself with. I was living in Toronto with a, well, now ex-girlfriend.

I was in a very confusing point in my life. I had quit my full-time job working for the YMCA, moving up through that organization, managing a group fitness department. I was very unsatisfied with my life.

I was making half-decent money. I had a salary, had benefits, had job security, and had a clear path forward.

Neil:

What were you doing for the Y?

Lewis:

I was managing fitness instructors, training staff.

Neil:

Outside the artistic world.

Lewis:

Yeah, this is a period of my life where I was not really creating much.

Neil:

The collective fell apart?

Lewis:

The collective didn't fall apart, but in our 30s, we had moved on to other things that we could actually make money in.

I, you know, in my 30s, I was like, well, art, I was working part-time jobs that were go-nowhere things, and I needed to make adult money. And I always enjoyed the YMCA. I grew up in a YMCA, essentially.

And I had great memories of being in a YMCA. And so I became a member of this particular Y, and enjoyed the environment. And I was on a, I didn't realize at the time, but I was on a journey kind of discovering myself as an athlete.

And I tried running, I didn't like it. I got into spin class and thought, I like it, I just don't like the way it's taught.

Neil:

You disagreed with the pedagogy.

Lewis:

And I thought, I could teach this better. And so eventually I was enough of a regular in the class that I got recruited by a staff member to be a volunteer, which is something the YMCA does. They love volunteers, and they recruit them.

Neil:

Not many people, not many organizations do that.

Lewis:

Not that I know of.

Neil:

Yeah. So you were a volunteer spin instructor.

Lewis:

I really liked the Y, and I became a volunteer spin instructor. And it was a challenge to myself to get over a fear of public speaking.

Neil:

Oh, wow. Because you had a little lav mic on probably.

Lewis:

Yeah, that or I just used my voice. I projected my voice.

Neil:

What didn't you like about how spinning was taught? I've only been to one spin class.

I didn't like that it was hard and I quit. What did you didn't like? Well, you didn't like the way it was taught.

Lewis:

I didn't like the music and the way the program was delivered.

Neil:

Oh, what was wrong? Why?

Lewis:

I didn't know what I didn't like about it. I just knew I didn't like it.

Neil:

You knew you didn't like it, okay.

Lewis:

I mean, the surface level was I didn't like the type of music. But I also knew that the type of music I wanted to ride my bike hard to would not be the type of music that the general public would enjoy riding their bike to.

Neil:

But it wasn't straight edge metal.

Lewis:

No, no, no. At this point, I wasn't listening to hardcore straight edge.

Neil:

I know, I'm just joking, I'm just joking.

Lewis:

Trying to do a callback to the one genre we've talked about. So when I did get my own class, I just copied in the beginning. I just mimicked what other instructors did so I could learn.

For me, getting over the fear of talking was the biggest hurdle. And once I was comfortable delivering a program and confident, I could start to be myself. And then once I learned how to be myself and deliver a class the way that I wanted one, I was also at the same time, I was becoming an avid outdoor cyclist.

I was learning about road cycling, off-road cycling, racing. I was making friends in the cycling community. I was becoming a very-

Neil:

So you're in Hamilton or Toronto?

Lewis:

Toronto. College in Davenport. Dover Court.

Neil:

Okay. So you're cycling, you're volunteering at the Y.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Dad gets sick.

Lewis:

I started working at, well, and I started working at the Y in the aquatics department. I wanted to work in the group fitness department, but I didn't have a degree in physical education, which they required.

Neil:

Oh my gosh. So here they go from being a volunteer organization, A, and B, now you need a kinesiology degree to work.

Lewis:

To work full-time in the fitness department. That's what they asked for.

Neil:

Wow, okay.

Lewis:

Leveling up here. And so I decided I wanted to work here. I liked the building.

I wanted to be there more. So I got in in the aquatics department. I learned how to swim well enough to become a lifeguard.

I basically had a chat with There was one woman there-

Neil:

Self-taught swimming. That's hard.

Lewis:

Who I admired.

She was in upper management. We became friends, and she wanted me to work there. She saw something in me, and she said, look, I can't hire you like this, but if you get your lifeguarding, I can hire you as a lifeguard.

Neil:

How'd you get a lifeguarding then?

Lewis:

Like, I- I took the courses.

Neil:

You just kept going until you got it.

Lewis:

Well, I was starting to get into swimming, because I thought it would be good cross-training for my cycling. I felt like I was plateauing in cycling.

And I knew how to swim, but I didn't know how to be an efficient swimmer. I hadn't learned, like, really proper technique. And there was a guy at the Y who was a lifeguard, an older gentleman, who was an ex-swim instructor, a high-level swim instructor.

And so he offered to show me. So I would come in and swim when he was lifeguarding, and he would just teach me how to be a better swimmer. And as I learned how to swim properly, with good form and efficient, I really enjoyed it. I thought it was-

Neil:

Man, you're inspiring me.

Lewis:

I was swimming at a level that I couldn't, I wouldn't have believed I could have swim at. And, and so this woman, Ika, she noticed my, me swimming, and thought that, you know, this guy's a good swimmer. He could easily become a lifeguard.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

And so she encouraged me to go get my lifeguarding. In my early thirties, it was uncomfortable to get it because I was only around-

Neil:

The oldest kid, probably.

Lewis:

By far.

Neil:

Yeah. It's all like teenagers, right?

Lewis:

Yes. There's one other guy who was as old as me, who had to get his lifeguarding for work.

And so we kind of just bonded, and we became each other's partners. He was a hulking, like, 230-pound dude. And for reference, I'm like 160 pounds, soaking wet.

Neil:

I'm 170. You're a lot taller than me. I got a lot of chub compared to you.

Lewis:

I'm built like a bird.

Neil:

I'm built like a bird. You are a bird.

Lewis:

I've got thin bones.

Neil:

I got thin bones.

Lewis:

I'm like, I've got my mother's frame. I got thin bones. I do.

Neil:

I've never heard anyone say that before. I'm built like a bird.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

I noticed your legs. That was one of the first things I noticed about you, the orange spandex.

Lewis:

Thanks.

Neil:

Yeah, and it's also like, you know, you're pretty close to, like, testicular level there. I mean, a duck paper mache costume doesn't go as low as you might think. You got, you're revealing a lot about yourself.

Lewis:

2.0 and 3.0, I built to be lower than 1.0.

Neil:

Because what was happening?

Lewis:

People were noticing stuff. I saw photos of myself in the costume where there was just a little too much junk showing. On a hot summer day, you know, the onesie, the orange onesie gets real hot. And I could see that I was uncircumcised. Or sorry, circumcised.

I could see that I was circumcised in a photo. And I was like, oh, dear.

Neil:

I like that the error was that you were uncircumcised. I could see that I was uncircumcised. I could see that I was, I would see that I was circumcised. Oh, we're getting a lot of looks right now.

Lewis:

And I thought like, okay, that's not what I didn't mean.

Neil:

That's not how you maintain a secret identity.

Lewis:

Yeah, and so.

Neil:

Okay, he's Jewish, he's Muslim, he's born in the seventies.

Lewis:

And so I was like, all right, well, when I remake this costume, I need to make it a little bit lower.

Neil:

Oh my gosh, you are so funny.

Lewis:

Although, you know, it's like, I'm not necessarily shy about it.

It's not a big deal. But I also, you know, I didn't make it for kids, but kids really like it. And it's not a bad thing to be kid friendly.

Neil:

I talk about you with my kids all the time. They are obsessed with you.

Lewis:

I hope it's not annoying.

Neil:

No, they love you. I'm gonna buy a bunch of these hats for them. Where if they're for sale.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

How much was it as a hat? It's a good quality ball cap, by the way.

Lewis:

$35.

Neil:

Oh, that's a deal for that hat. That's a really nice.

Who are you waving at here? You know everybody going by.

Lewis:

It was a friend of mine.

Neil:

Does he know your secret identity?

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

Oh, so how do you decide who you tell your secret identity to?

Lewis:

I've known him for a lot of years.

I used to ride bikes with him.

Neil:

Gotta know you for a lot of years. Start with that.

Lewis:

Not necessarily.

Neil:

Okay.

Lewis:

But he's just somebody I know and like, and you know, he knew me before Lewis, and he saw Lewis come to life on social media.

Neil:

Okay, okay, nice. Your dad's sick. He's got dementia. You move back home. You leave the life in Toronto.

Lewis:

I'm at a point where I wanted to, I desperately wanted to change something about my life. I wanted to be making art again. I wanted to be an artist again.

I felt like I.

Neil:

But I'm stuck here, because you said, it's the only way I could live with myself. I said, why are you becoming chief caregiver for a person who, no offense, doesn't seem like he was ever chief caregiver for you.

Lewis:

Well.

Neil:

And you said, it's the only way I could live with myself. Like, so why is that? A lot of people in your situation would say, you know, I didn't have a strong relationship, or, you know, that person was not in my life.

But you were like, moving back home, abandoning the cycling kind of, the YMCA job that you had making money, as your full-time gig. You're moving back home to be chief caregiver for your dying father. Like, I'm not, I'm not challenging you.

I'm just curious about your decision making here.

Lewis:

So also, at the time, the woman I was with, I think she realized that I was about to go into a very difficult time in my life. And she broke up with me. I was living in her condo.

I was unemployed. No, sorry.

Neil:

You're not working at the Y?

Lewis:

I was not working at the Y. I was working in my friend's bike painting shop.

Neil:

Okay.

Lewis:

I was painting bikes. Very niche job. And I wasn't happy there either.

I wasn't making art. I was making beautiful objects. And I thought that would be enough.

If I could make a living using my hands, making an extremely high-end product, I thought it would be enough. And it really wasn't. And so, when my father got to a point where my sister couldn't manage by herself anymore, and this relationship was clearly ending, and I was already spending a lot of my time in Hamilton.

I would go to Hamilton every weekend, and I would cook a week's worth of food for my father. And I would package it up, and my sister would give it to him. So he was no longer able to take his medication or cook for himself.

And so I thought, I've got to move out of this condo I'm living in in the Roncesvalles area. And I don't want to pay Toronto rent to spend all my free time in Hamilton working a job I hate. And also, my sister and I could not afford to put my dad in any type of home or anything like that.

So my father did not save for retirement.

Neil:

Where's your mom? Oh, she's not around.

Lewis:

No, my mom's gone at this point.

Neil:

Gone?

Lewis:

Cancer.

Neil:

Oh, I'm sorry.

Lewis:

That's okay.

Neil:

You mean she's dead?

Lewis:

Yeah, happened in my 30s, early 30s.

Neil:

You weren't caring for her at the end of her life, though.

Lewis:

We did a little bit.

She was married to a guy. She lived in Port Dover. And she hid her cancer from my sister and I up until near the end.

I got a call from her one day basically saying, sit down, I gotta tell you something. I just had a double mastectomy. I've had breast cancer.

It's gone. I've healed from the double mastectomy and the doctors have just found chronic lymphatic leukemia and say I've got five years to live. And so all this information was dropped on my sister and I in a casual conversation with her mother.

And we were both pretty upset about it because she didn't even give us an opportunity to be there for her. I was closer with my mom. But after that, I took every opportunity I could to be with her, to spend more time.

I tried to build like a bit more of a meaningful relationship with her.

Neil:

It's okay.

Lewis:

It's pretty serious.

Neil:

It's okay.

Lewis:

Go get them. And although she lived a little bit away it wasn't always easy to go and see her but I went as much as I could.

And the closer she got to the end the more time I spent with her.

Neil:

I kind of like this philosophy you have. I agree with it. I'm from Eastern cultures where parent-child relationships often in India historically, it's like they're living together.

I don't expect to live with my parents at this stage and age of my life. I don't know what will happen. They're both alive but in their seventies, not but, but are.

But I like this philosophy you have which is as much time as I can spend before they die. This is a thing you have.

Lewis:

I tried.

Neil:

Where's that coming from though? Like you have this sense of, it's not obligation. It seems like desire.

You are trying to soak up the relationship as much as you can.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

To make sure that for the rest of your life you can look back on those years and say, I did as much as I could.

I was connected to my family as deeply as I could. Is that the thought or the feeling?

Lewis:

I wish that I would have, it would have mattered to me more when I was younger or that I thought about it. Oh, I see. Because I didn't have a very strong relationship with either parent. It was almost like we were roommates more than anything.

Neil:

That's how I felt with my wife before my divorce, my first wife.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

That was the exact word I used.

Lewis:

We were like roommates.

Yeah. But also, I think that that was kind of natural for them too. It was just the way their family life was too.

There was a lot of stuff going on in my family that my sister and I never understood, never had an opportunity to understand. My mother was estranged from her mother and we never knew why. And many of her siblings were, and relatives on my mom's side, there was a lot of estrangement going on there.

A lot of trauma. Nobody ever talked about how, when, where or why it came from. And I still don't know.

My sister and I just kind of left to guess about this kind of thing.

Neil:

Thank God for siblings.

Lewis:

Yeah.

And so, I feel like I was fortunate to get to be with my mother when she died.

Neil:

And your father.

Lewis:

Yeah, and I was touching both of them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Neil:

And your mama sounds like in your earlier 30s, your dad in your late 30s.

Neil:

Yeah.

Neil:

What age did you switch from straight edge and why?

Lewis:

It was when I was 36.

Neil:

What changed your mind about that? Your mama died, your dad was still around.

Lewis:

Yeah.

I had started dating somebody that, I think it was a bigger part of her life, the consumption of drugs and alcohol, but not in a toxic way. It just was something that she did responsibly. And I hadn't met many people who responsibly consumed substances.

I was very much of the mindset that if you're drinking, you're getting wasted. If you're doing drugs, you're getting fucked up. And I was kind of, I wasn't interested in getting wasted or getting fucked up.

And so, with this partner, I felt comfortable enough to experiment. I had been thinking about trying things. I had started to be curious about altered states of consciousness.

And so, I felt comfortable just trying. For the longest time, it was such a part of my identity that I was identified as straight edge or just somebody who didn't consume intoxicants. I didn't even really consume caffeine that much, aside from a little bit in soda pop or something like that.

And so, I started very slowly and tried a little bit of this, a little bit of that. And some things I liked. Some things I thought were okay.

At this time, marijuana was still illegal. And I couldn't believe, when I got high for my first time and I got drunk for my first time, afterwards, I thought, I can't believe that alcohol is the legal one. Because that one feels so much more destructive.

To me, it felt extremely destructive.

Neil:

Oh, I know exactly what you're talking about. I can't believe alcohol is the legal one.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

That's a great line. Or as cannabis probably felt, not that.

Lewis:

Yeah, that one- Sensory amplifying, perhaps. I thought, I am glad I didn't find this when I was a teenager because I would have over-consumed it. Because I really liked it.

Neil:

Ah, interesting.

Lewis:

So, I thought it was better that I let my mind form and mature.

Neil:

The research says, they say don't use cannabis or alcohol really before age 25, 27 now.

Lewis:

Yeah, so I'd never been high. I had a hard time even inhaling enough to get high. But I knew that.

I'd seen enough people try their first cigarette, try their first joint. I knew that there was gonna be a hack attack. But I was on board for trying it.

Neil:

And- Did this person become your wife or no?

Lewis:

No.

Neil:

Okay.

Lewis:

No, we eventually, she broke up with me before I moved to Hamilton.

Neil:

A lot of women are breaking up with  Lewis.

Lewis:

No, just that one.

Neil:

Oh, okay. And the one before, the one that saw that the, you're going into serious- No, same person. Oh, that's the same person?

Okay, okay, okay.

Lewis:

Smart enough to get away.

Neil:

Yeah, so you're not, how much time did you have as your father's chief caregiver from the time you started chief caregiving to the time he died?

Lewis:

It was like almost a year and a half, exactly.

Neil:

Wow. And what does chief caregiving for a dying father with dementia look like?

Lewis:

It started off slow. I was still working more or less full-time in Toronto. I would commute.

I'd get up in the morning, I'd get my dad breakfast. I would leave him a note about lunch, where it was, you know. What it was, where it was.

Neil:

How to do it, yeah.

Lewis:

And my sister would help him out with like one of the meals, you know. And I'd get back from Toronto.

Neil:

Is it the YMCA job?

Lewis:

No, this is when I was painting bikes.

Neil:

Okay, you're painting, you're in the painting job. You come to Toronto. You don't have a place to live in Toronto, though.

Lewis:

No, no, I was, I'd get up at 5 a.m. I'd be on the 6 a.m. bus to Toronto with my bike on the front of the bus.

Neil:

Oh my gosh.

Lewis:

I'd show up at Union. I would arrive really early for work. I didn't start till 10.

But traffic was horrible. I didn't want to sit in traffic, so I opted to leave early.

Neil:

Get up with the ducks.

Lewis:

I was reading books at the time. I decided to read on the commute.

Neil:

With books or audio books?

Lewis:

Real, real.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

Yeah, real books.

Neil:

Seems like audio book is good for a bus, but okay, you go the other way now. You're left right on me the whole conversation. You're surprising.

Lewis:

And so I had a routine where I would, you know, get up, set my dad up, get on the bus, read, and I would then ride to a cafe that opened at like 7 in the morning.

Neil:

Oh my gosh.

Lewis:

I'd show up at the cafe.

Three hours early for work. Three hours early for work. I'd sit at the cafe, have a coffee.

I would read for another 30, 40 minutes, and then I would draw. I had a sketchbook with me, and I started.

Neil:

I've seen your sketchbook. It's unbelievable.

Lewis:

I started, this was the start of a project that's still going on, something I still do every day, where I draw patterns as an exercise to do something just solely for myself, and to develop a skill, and to see where it goes, and to see how good I can get at something. I'm now six, seven years into this practice. I've got a lot of sketchbooks full.

I've got a lot of skill that I built up.

Neil:

Who would you recommend a daily drawing practice for, and what could that look like for someone who's interested in developing one? What's the first step for that?

Lewis:

I'd say it doesn't have to be drawing. I think it's a valuable thing for people to develop more skills, to give yourself the time to go on this journey, because it's such an interesting journey from the beginning to wherever the end is. I don't know where that is for this, but I've gone past what I thought was possible in this realm of geometric pattern drawing without the use of any aids, like just freehand drawing.

Neil:

Even though it looks like you're using 10 rulers.

Lewis:

It does now, yes. It didn't in the beginning.

Neil:

So you're coming to Toronto, I'm sorry to say, you're getting to coffee shops at 7 a.m. You don't work till 10. You spend the day here, then you go back and take care of him at night.

Lewis:

I would catch the first train. I could get on with my bike back to Hamilton. I would arrive at like 8, 8.30. I'd get him dinner. I'd put him to bed and just repeat the next day. Okay, so that was the first iteration of it. Yeah, and slowly, as he progressively got worse, I would, I'd do three days a week, and then I did two days a week, and I was down to one day a week, and then no days a week.

Neil:

Working.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Coming to Toronto.

Lewis:

Yeah, and so this is when I.

Neil:

You're telling them, my dad's dying, I gotta be at home.

Lewis:

Well, they knew, they understood. These were good friends of mine, and they were very empathetic and patient with me.

Neil:

Yeah, but your life is rebalancing towards your father at this point.

Lewis:

I was going through one of the most significant relationships ending in my life. I was absolutely heartbroken. And my dad was.

Sorry?

Neil:

How old was your dad?

Lewis:

At the time, he was 76.

Neil:

Oh, he's pretty up there.

Lewis:

Yeah, he lived longer than he thought he was gonna live.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

He wanted to ride the bus until the wheels fell off, and he thought the wheels were gonna fall off in his late 60s, early 70s.

Neil:

Mm-hmm.

Lewis:

And so, I kind of forget where we were there.

Neil:

Well, I'm just trying to point out here is that, because I know that the genesis for Lewis Mallard, you have said in other interviews, came to you on a mushroom trip while you were doing chief caregiving for your father.

Lewis:

So.

Neil:

That's what I've read.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

So I feel like I'm near this point in your story.

Lewis:

Absolutely, it's all kind of coming there. So, as my father got progressively worse, and I was still working in Toronto, the commute for me was very difficult, the back and forth every day. And so, to combat that, on the days when it wasn't too cold or it wasn't raining, I would bring my camping gear to work with me.

I just left all my camping gear at work, and I would leave work up in the junction in Toronto, Keele and St. Clair area, and I would ride down to the ferry terminal to go to Toronto Island. I'd grab some kind of dinner on the way to go, and I'd jump on the ferry, go over to the island, and I'd just set up on the beach right near where the airport is. It's the clothing optional beach out there.

Neil:

Wow, you'd camp out on the nude beach rather than any park near the junction. Like, that's still a pretty hefty commute to get from the junction down to a ferry terminal, down to crossing a body of water. For those that don't know, there's about a 500 meter, maybe a kilometer wide channel right in front of the CN Tower in Skydome, where then there's a series of little islands with a tiny airport on it, there's a nude beach, there is like a amusement park, there's a life-size maze, there's a few hundred people that live there, there's all kinds of non-optional, like there's other beaches.

It's like a bird watcher's paradise as well.

Lewis:

There certainly was a lot of bird watchers out there, and I would move down the beach to be away from the people who were actually using the beach for the intended purposes of relaxing and suntanning and swimming. So this is also, I will say, like a not allowed to do, right? Not allowed to do, definitely not.

Neil:

Yeah, you never got in trouble, though, for just camping out on Center Island.

Lewis:

Yeah, I would move away from people, I would set up my tent only after the sun went down, and I would disassemble and be gone by 6.30 in the morning.

Neil:

Oh my gosh.

Lewis:

Because I would catch the first ferry.

Neil:

Weren't you scared?

Lewis:

A little, like, it was exciting, I would say. But also, I figured like- Exhilarating.

Who's, not many people are gonna approach a solo male doing something weird like camping on a beach.

Neil:

On a clothing optional beach.

Lewis:

Yeah, you know.

Neil:

You seemed like the crazy one. They're not gonna approach you.

Lewis:

That's kind of how I was like.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

Although I didn't feel crazy, of course, you know. But I just thought like, realistically, like if I was, would I ever go approach a random stranger doing something? No.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

And I was like, no.

Neil:

That's a good life rule. If you look crazier than the norm, you're not gonna be harassed in general. I think.

Lewis:

Maybe by only somebody who matches or exceeds your, so camping on the island, it wasn't great sleeping, but it was an amazing adventure. I saw some of the best sunsets of my life.

Neil:

Oh yeah.

Lewis:

Sitting out there.

Neil:

Right over the huge Great Lakes, yeah.

Lewis:

And I'd wake up in the morning to sunrise, although the sun was rising on the opposite side of the island.

But I'd wake up to like these kind of pink and orange mornings. I'd stumble out of my tent naked.

Neil:

Wow, you're nude here. Well, I guess it's summer. It's only fitting, you're on the nude beach.

Lewis:

Yeah, and I would relieve myself in the water, take a piss.

Neil:

And also get your bath in that way.

Lewis:

No, I would stop off at the Y.

Once I got to the mainland, I would come to the YMCA and have a shower.

Neil:

You're not just taking a lake dip.

Lewis:

No, no.

Neil:

Okay. Why pee in the lake then? Why not pee in the bushes?

For some reason to me, peeing in the bushes is cleaner than peeing in the lake. Even though I have no justification for that. I think it's six of one, half a dozen or the other.

Lewis:

Yeah, I'm sure you're right.

Neil:

It's a lake. It's a huge lake.

Lewis:

Yeah. But anyway.

Neil:

I'm anti-peeing in pools now, by the way.

Lewis:

Yeah, I don't like to.

Neil:

Yeah, I've switched on that.

Lewis:

I've definitely peed in a pool.

Neil:

Now you recognize the smallness of the body of water and the PPM of the urine.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Yeah, it's different than a pee in an ocean.

Lewis:

That's for sure.

Neil:

So where's the mushroom trip? So I did not.

Lewis:

So I guess this can tie into Alaska a little bit. So I went to, early on when my dad was still kind of manageable by part-time caregiving and my sister was around and could help, I had an opportunity to take a vacation. I knew I was gonna be doing this for, I assumed about two years.

Having seen my mother go through cancer and slowly deteriorate and knowing where my father was and how he was looking and how he was acting. And I guessed it was gonna be no more than two years. And so I was like, if I'm gonna take some time off I'm gonna do it now.

And so while I was still working at the bike painting shop, I decided to go to my cousin's wedding in Vancouver. Oh wow. She was getting married.

I had a lot of family and some very good friends out there. Most of my family on my father's side had moved to Vancouver. While I was at this wedding, I met relatives of mine that I'd only ever heard of and I never had met or talked to before. And they were two first cousins of mine that were raised in Haida Gwaii, which is-

Neil:

How do you spell that?

Lewis:

H-A-I-D-A. That's the first word.

Haida Gwaii, D-G-W-A-I-I.

Neil:

G-W-A-I-I, Haida Gwaii, which is a first nations indigenous community in Canada.

Lewis:

Like vast majority of the people that live out there are first nations.

Neil:

And they're known from a distance for their totem poles, I believe.

Lewis:

Yeah, the Haida people, I believe are the originators of the totem pole.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

That's what I came to understand.

Neil:

Bye, Rob. Bye, guys.

Lewis:

And so my uncle donated sperm to a lesbian couple, friends of his, and they each had a child of his.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

And so I have two first cousins that were raised outside of my family on this amazing island.

And so I met my cousins and their mothers at this wedding. And I was so interested in them. I didn't really participate in much of the wedding.

I didn't dance. I was just, I sat at the table talking to these people. Their life was so different than mine and I was extremely interested.

And they said, and they said, well, why don't you come and visit? And I thought. Why don't I?

Why don't I? It's a big trip. So I planned, I was like, okay, I'll come back at the end of the summer.

This was spring that I was out there. And so while I was out there in Vancouver for a couple of weeks for my cousin's wedding, I was staying with a very good friend of mine for most of my life who's living out there in East Van. He had his own apartment and I was just crashing on his couch for two weeks.

He had also, he had never done mushrooms before and I had not done mushrooms yet. Tried mushrooms. I had wanted to.

I was very curious. And I thought, what better place to try mushrooms for your first time than with one of your best buddies who has also never done it out in BC. So we got on our bikes and I brought my bike out there with me.

And I, we.

Neil:

On an airplane.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Wow, okay. Really into biking.

Lewis:

Very into biking.

Neil:

In front of the bus, on the GO train, on an airplane.

Lewis:

I've been riding a bike my whole life.

Neil:

Wow, okay.

Lewis:

Of one form or another. But I didn't find my passion in cycling until I was in my 30s.

Neil:

Okay. You take your bike out there, you go with your buddy.

Lewis:

Yeah, and we grab our camping gear and we ride kind of to interior. Somewhere in the interior.

It was a lake called Devil's Lake. Really small lake. You could almost throw a rock across it.

You could easily swim across any direction. It's spring. It's still kind of cold there.

We buy some mushroom chocolate bar off a random stranger. And we set up and we eat the mushrooms. And you know, it was quite a journey.

We had a great time. It was one of the most interesting experiences of my life at the time. I'd never, you know, mushrooms.

I think I maybe ate two grams at the most. I started thinking thoughts that I'd never thought before that didn't seem like typical thoughts that I had ever had. And they weren't scary thoughts or anything like that.

I had a difficult moment during the trip where all of the sadness from my relationship ending kind of came up unexpectedly. And I think I cried for maybe like 15 minutes. Extremely hard.

Like some of the hardest crying I'd ever done for about 15 minutes. And then it just was over. Wow, you got it out of you.

And I got something out of me that I didn't even know was in me. Wow. And it felt like in a very healthy way.

And I just accepted that it was like over and that I was moving in a different direction. And I just went back to having a fun time with my buddy. Even though, you know, we sat around our fire, we talked a lot, we cried a bunch, but it was a good time.

And eventually we, you know, came down and went to bed and we could hear wolves or coyotes howling around us. It was hard to fall asleep, you know, but we did, you know. We were completely alone out there.

Nobody else, we weren't allowed to camp. We were just wild camping. But we're, you know, we're respectful.

We left no trace. We, and we left the place the next morning and rode back. And when I came back to BC later that summer to go to Haida Gwaii, Haida Gwaii is up near Alaska, up near the banana belt of Alaska.

And you can even see on a clear day, you can see Alaska from the north side of the islands there. And I'd never been anywhere so remote. In order to get there, I took the ferry, multiple ferries, from Vancouver to Nanaimo.

And I took a bus from Nanaimo all the way to Port Hardy, other side of Vancouver Island, northwestern most town. Camped out there, was warned by the locals not to ride my bike down the trails at night because there's mountain lions everywhere. And so I took, I had to get up early in the morning to catch a ferry, a 16 hour ferry to Prince Rupert.

So I got up at like four in the morning in the pouring rain, packed up my gear, rode out to this ferry to get on at like 7 a.m. And it was a 16 hour journey.

Neil:

No mountain lions.

Lewis:

No mountain lions on the ferry, confirmed.

Neil:

No, I mean on the way.

Lewis:

No, I took the long way on the road. I took their advice.

Neil:

And you got on the 16 hour ferry from already a super remote location. There's no other way to get there?

Lewis:

You can fly.

Neil:

Oh, fly, okay.

Lewis:

I was interested in the journey. Yeah.

Beautiful scenery, slow moving, gigantic ferry, thousands of people on it.

Neil:

Thousands, okay.

Lewis:

Yeah, a lot of people.

Okay. Then you land in Prince Rupert.

Neil:

Is that a town in Canada?

Lewis:

Yeah, it's on the mainland. It is a very gray, rainy place. I think amongst the rainiest in the North America.

Neil:

Kind of a surprising settlement there, maybe. Maybe some sort of natural resources.

Lewis:

It seems like it's a port. Like, you know, a lot of goods come in on boat. And since it's on the mainland, there's a lot of trains picking up containers and that kind of shit.

Have a horrible night's sleep in Prince Rupert and then jump on a seven hour ferry to Haida Gwaii.

Neil:

Oh my gosh, you're not done yet? Okay, so then another seven hour ferry?

Lewis:

Kind of open water ferry, seven hours to Haida Gwaii. And then Haida Gwaii appears out of the mist like Jurassic Park. You know, it was one of the last, this is what I was told, it was one of the last settled places in North America.

Neil:

I believe it.

Lewis:

Because it was hard to find.

Neil:

Well, oh, hard to find. Because it was- Like it's shrouded in mist.

Lewis:

Yes, it's very gray and misty out there.

Neil:

Can't find it. They found it, all right.

Lewis:

Well, of course. And yeah, got off the ferry, had the address of my cousin, you know, rode to, I was with my bike, again, and went to my cousin's place, you know, met him and settled in.

Neil:

Is your cousin your uncle's sperm donor's kid?

Lewis:

Yes. I think they all met in the school system. My uncle was a teacher.

I think that one of them would have been a principal.

Neil:

What was that like meeting these people?

Lewis:

Oh, just interesting.

You know, their lifestyle was so different.

Neil:

How so?

Lewis:

Well, these two women were some of the most badass people I'd ever met in my life.

They hunted all their own meat, or fished. They drove around. They always had a loaded 22 rifle on the dashboard of the truck.

If they saw a deer, they got it. Donna would post up on the hood of her truck. She'd shoot the deer, walk over to it, gut it, throw it in the back of the truck.

It would be sausage 24 hours later. And then it would be canned or stored frozen, whatever. They didn't waste anything.

I went deep sea fishing with them. They ran a charter boat.

Neil:

Deep sea fishing?

Lewis:

Yeah. So I got a permit to catch a salmon and a halibut. I had a permit to get one of each.

You caught a halibut? Those are gigantic fish. Yeah, it was about 50 pounds.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

And then, so these two were married.

Neil:

A spear?

Lewis:

They'd been, no, it was a hook.

Neil:

Oh, a hook.

Lewis:

Heavily weighted, industrial gauge.

Neil:

Oh my God.

Lewis:

They had serious equipment. We were in a small boat, but they had radar.

They survived there for thousands of years. These women are very smart. They knew exactly where the fish were.

And they're very capable. They had more of a homestead. Their home was half conventional home, half log cabin.

They raised chickens and turkeys and bunnies. They grew vegetables. Everybody in the family had killed a black bear to save their own ass.

Neil:

Oh my gosh. Not as a right of passage, but as a thing that you just threw there.

Lewis:

There was a bear coming at them and they had no other choice.

The same way we would swat a fly or kill a spider. I was warned. They've all killed a bear.

I was warned many times to be careful about your surroundings, that the black bears are big and aggressive. They don't hibernate. They have food all year round.

It's essentially a rainforest.

Neil:

They don't hibernate.

Lewis:

This is what I was told.

Neil:

Wow, well, they would know.

Lewis:

Yeah. So big and aggressive. They can eat all year round.

Neil:

Black bears in Ontario are known to be not big or aggressive.

Lewis:

Yeah, these are very well-fed bears with no other natural predators around. So they got it.

They're not competing with people. Yes. So you gotta be ready to shoot them, to kill them.

And they all did.

Neil:

At least one. Oh my gosh.

Lewis:

And you're not allowed to do anything with it. You have to leave it.

Neil:

Why?

Lewis:

It's just, they don't want people commercial or, you know.

Neil:

Yeah, but you can't eat it. Like, isn't that more respectful to the animal to consume it?

Lewis:

You would think. But I think they just don't want any...

Neil:

Sport to develop.

Lewis:

Yeah, yeah.

Neil:

Because you got an island full of giant, big, aggressive black bears.

Lewis:

Yes.

Neil:

Some people might.

Lewis:

Apparently.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah. It's a natural resource.

Lewis:

I never saw one.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

But we did go on hikes and my one cousin carried a rifle the whole time.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

We went to visit, you know, various hunting camps that they've used. And they were just kind of... So proximity to Alaska though.

Neil:

Very close. Is this the James Michener book?

Lewis:

Yes. And so I started listening. As I was caring for my father, I wanted to get to know him better.

I really tried to engage him more in conversation and talk about things that I wish we would have talked about. I wanted to get in touch with his emotional side more. His sensitive side.

I saw that he shared a different... His relationship with my sister was very different than his relationship with me. My sister got the sensitive, emotional side of my father.

I got... Let's talk about sports. And say derogatory things about women.

Neil:

Oh no.

Lewis:

Side of my father.

Neil:

Oh really?

Lewis:

Every woman driver was a cunt.

Neil:

Oh my God.

Lewis:

Or a fucking cunt.

Neil:

Oh my God.

Lewis:

That's kind of like...

Neil:

I'm so sorry. Oh wow. That is... Wow, that is...

Lewis:

And if I wanted to talk to my father, I had to behave this way or pay attention to sports I didn't give a shit about just to hang around him. If I wanted to...

Neil:

But it's still inspiring you the desire to care for him at the end of his life.

Lewis:

He's my father. I love him. What am I gonna do?

I can't help that. It's like born into me. And so like I was saying, I didn't see any other option that I would comfortably live with myself.

I was actively...

Neil:

Was he a misogynist to the end?

Lewis:

Oh yeah.

He would say things to the nurses, the personal caregivers that would come in and help.

Neil:

They must have refused to work with him.

Lewis:

No, no. They said he was not nearly as bad as most people. But they would come in and say, all right, Jim, are we gonna get you a shower today?

He'd say, nope, but I'll shower you.

Neil:

Oh my God.

Lewis:

And then I'd have to like chastise him and apologize for him.

And they would laugh it off. And then I would... As they were leaving, I'd be like, I'm really sorry.

If you don't wanna come back, I totally understand. And they more often than not came back. But funnily enough, he would only accept a shower from a male nurse.

He would not accept one from a female nurse. I think it was his pride there. But eventually that all got to be too much.

And he eventually let me do that for him.

Neil:

Shower him?

Lewis:

Yeah, help him out, that kind of thing.

Neil:

How did that feel for you?

Lewis:

I was happy that he was finally letting me do something I knew I was capable of doing. And it was just easier.

Neil:

Wow. Almost therapeutic for you.

Lewis:

In a way, I mean, it was difficult, especially when it got to the diaper phase.

Neil:

Yeah, you're wiping now.

Lewis:

Funnily enough, his podiatrist pointed out to me that he had diaper rash.

Because he wouldn't let me do anything hygienic. He was very stubborn. I took him to the podiatrist appointment.

He was sitting uncomfortably. And the doctor was like, what's wrong? Why can't you get comfortable, Jim?

And he said, ah, my butt hurts. And he's like, let me have a look back there. And so he took him into his office, and my dad dropped his pants, and the doctor took a look, spread the cheeks, and he recoiled right away.

And he's like, have a look. And he showed me, he's like, this is essentially extremely bad diaper rash. And he's like, you gotta help him.

And I had no idea that things were so bad. And so this was kind of the moment where he provided me with free medical advice outside of his thing. He said, go get a zinc paste.

It's an off-the-shelf thing. It's an old school treatment. He's like, I promise it'll work.

It's just like a thick, white zinc paste. He's like, you gotta wipe them, you gotta clean them. And then put this on like it's spackle.

Neil:

Spackle?

Lewis:

Like just the more the better. And so I got the stuff, I did the thing, and I couldn't believe how quickly he healed back there.

And it changed, like he could sit comfortably. It was a big improvement. I was very grateful to this doctor for doing that.

He totally didn't have to do it.

Neil:

It's hard later in life, I'm imagining, that you lose your, not just privacy, but in some cases, your dignity, right?

Lewis:

Oh yeah, he had to go with it. It was difficult for him. He wouldn't let my sister do it for the longest time.

But we had a routine, and I tried to make it fun. I would play music he liked. I tried to keep it as light as possible.

And really just like have fun. Try to find the humor in it. It was like the only way I was gonna get through it.

Neil:

And then you had a mushroom trip while you were taking care of your dad, too.

Lewis:

Yeah, and so later on through the thing, after I had a couple mushroom experiences, and I wasn't able to take time off anymore the same way. I needed to be more hands-on, and more or less 24 hours a day. So in order to get some time away that felt like a vacation, I would take a handful of mushrooms and go to Gage Park and take four or five hours off.

And that four or five hours high on mushrooms felt like 20, 30 hours away because it was a real mental vacation. It's when I really started to be like, oh, I am on a trip. You know, where I never really related to, the I'm tripping out, you know, it's like, oh no.

The metaphor became real. Yeah, it was like, oh, I never thought of it this way. It really does feel like a mini vacation.

And so on one particular trip in the park, I would set boundaries for myself because I knew that I had, I would get ideas when I was high on mushrooms and I would have desires to do things that were not what I would typically wanna do. I really wanted to be naked when I was high on mushrooms. And I knew in my mind, if I'm in public, I can't be.

So I would just be in jean shorts and nothing else. No socks, no shoes, no shirt, just shorts. I'd lay in the grass, it felt amazing.

Neil:

Do you think you wanna be naked because of the sensory experience of it?

Lewis:

I don't know. It was just like instinctually what I wanted.

Neil:

You said it felt amazing, yeah. Oh, instinctually, okay.

Lewis:

Yeah, I felt no, I wasn't worried about judgment. I didn't.

Neil:

Oh, that's interesting.

Lewis:

You know, it was something about that state of mind.

Neil:

Social mores fall away.

Lewis:

Yeah, but I also realized that they existed and I couldn't.

That I had to behave a certain way.

Neil:

Yeah, so next time I see someone in the park near my house in the middle of the night, totally naked.

Lewis:

No, middle of the day.

Neil:

Middle of the day, lying there naked, which I have seen multiple times, that they might just be high on mushrooms.

Lewis:

I mean, maybe. And so on this particular trip, I took a pretty healthy amount of mushrooms and went to the park, set boundaries for myself. And when I got to the park, there was a religious group that had gotten a permit to use a PA system and to use the main stage, the bandshell, a defining feature in this park, this blue semi-circle.

Neil:

I remember the old bandshells. There was one in Oshawa.

Lewis:

Probably.

Neil:

Yeah, just one, but in Whippy, where I moved to, there was none. So it's like a kind of a hundred year old thing.

Lewis:

It's an old thing, for sure. It had a bit of seating around it, but mostly open field there. And so, although the park is big, it's very flat and sound travels across it.

And there was no getting away from the noise of it. So I was just like, well, whatever. I'll just deal with it.

And as I started to get higher and higher, as I was going up, I was listening to people talk. And it seemed to me like it was kind of a born again Christian vibe. People were going up on stage and just talking about how they were going in a bad direction, and then they found Jesus, and it changed their life, and that they're on a better path now.

And it was all overwhelmingly positive. It was people that sincerely believed that they found this higher power, and it changed their life for the better. I was like, well, there's nothing wrong with this message.

You know? And so I just was like, that's pretty nice and innocent. And I didn't, I found my place, I laid down in the grass, and I was just looking at the band shell.

And as I got higher, I started to hallucinate, auditory hallucinate, which I learned, for me, is like a pretty common thing when I'm high on these substances. And I, all of a sudden, all of the talking on stage became Charlie Brown's parents-esque. So I was just hearing like, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.

But it was like, but I was feeling like the positive vibes wash over me. And I was looking at the band shell, and I thought, doesn't that look like the eye of a creature that's like stuck underground in this park? I bet it is.

And in fact, I'm gonna dig this creature up and figure out who it is. And I really liked this idea of that. And I carried that idea with me for a little while, and I thought about it a lot.

And I talked about it with some friends, about how I think that I might have figured out how to tie together all of these projects I'd been thinking of for a long time into one cohesive idea that I could do. And it was starting to make sense to me how I could do it. I wanted to tie in folk art, I wanted to tie in psychedelic art, things I was interested in but I didn't participate in.

Neil:

Interdimensional art.

Lewis:

I wanted to do performance art, I wanted to do street art.

Neil:

Street art, yeah, right.

Lewis:

And although I had done street art in the past, I wanted to do it in a different way. And performance art, I didn't understand it. I wanted to get in that world a little bit, but I didn't think I was able to because I wasn't a performance artist.

And so I just kind of was like, well, I'm the only one telling me that I can't do it. Right? So what the fuck do I know?

I'm just gonna do it.

Neil:

Wow, I'm the only one telling me I can't do it, so what the fuck do I know?

Lewis:

I was, right?

Neil:

Wow, what a barrier-eviscerating thought.

Lewis:

And I'd had that thought before about other things, and so I stopped telling myself that I couldn't be a performance artist, and I just was like, fuck it, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna tie it into this whole thing.

Neil:

And- I'm the only one telling me I can't do it. And what the fuck do I know?

Lewis:

I didn't know what  Lewis was gonna look like. At the time,  Lewis didn't even have a name.

It was like, I had to discover. I didn't literally go dig him up, but metaphorically I did. I spent time thinking about it and what this creature would look like, and what I needed it to be in order to make a costume.

And so over the course of the time I was with my father, I spent a lot of time thinking about this. A lot of the time I was drawing patterns in my sketchbooks, I was really thinking about this. I don't listen to anything when I do it.

I just, I'm usually in a cafe, and I just like to be around people and kind of pull ideas out of the air. And so I would plan and think about my future once my dad was gone. But what was I gonna do?

I knew I was gonna feel like alone. You know, it was similar to the feeling of leaving home for the first time. But like this time I'm really on my own, like no one-

Neil:

Untethered.

Lewis:

Yeah. And I was single. And so I didn't have to, for the first time in my life, I didn't have to think about somebody else being in my life.

And so when my dad eventually passed, I knew I was gonna have to move out of that house, and I wanted to restart my career in Hamilton. And so I got a studio downtown. I found an affordable place that I could live and work out of, again, not legally.

The landlord was very nice and let me sleep there. And his only rule was no candles.

Neil:

No candles?

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

Not the one rule.

Lewis:

No open fire.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a good rule.

Lewis:

No smoking joints.

Neil:

It's just funny that that's the one rule.

Lewis:

Yeah, yeah. He seemed to really be-

Neil:

You can sleep in the place illegally.

Lewis:

Yeah, yeah.

Neil:

Just no candles. Practical guy

Lewis:

So I rented a room- A room above a bike store, 15 by 16 feet, with a decently high ceiling, couple windows.

I had no running water.

Neil:

Oh my gosh.

Lewis:

I shared a bathroom with the bike store.

Neil:

Oh my gosh.

Lewis:

That had no shower. So- Ah, what'd you bathe?

I did sponge bath, sink bath. Used a washcloth and I washed my hair in the sink.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

I washed my dishes in that sink.

Neil:

Get the armpits there.

Lewis:

Yeah, everything.

Neil:

Soap up.

Neil:

You could soap up your armpits in the sink.

Lewis:

I'm pretty like, you know, I had a whole routine. I experimented with different routines and I found one that worked really well.

Neil:

Which is what?

Lewis:

It was just required a washcloth, a bar of soap, and well, shampoo for my hair.

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

And you know, just not- Hard to wash your lower half of your body in a sink. I was tall enough that I could straddle the sink in a way and wash, you know?

Neil:

Sink straddling.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

If you don't have a shower around, look into sink straddling.

Lewis:

Sink straddling.

Neil:

Yeah, I'm starting to picture that.

Lewis:

I was definitely a sink straddler. Yeah.

Neil:

You know, you're living more and more like a duck here, man. Like you just are. Like you're like a bird.

You say you're bird-like. You're living like a bird. You're flying all over the place.

You're landing wherever you want. Like, I don't mean that in a negative way, but you're like, you are like, you're like, behavior is more and more merging with this character.

Lewis:

Yeah. I mean, I think that-

Neil:

You are Lewis, man.

Lewis:

I wanted, I didn't want any distinction between like my art and my life.

Neil:

I wanted it to be- But you don't call yourself an anima thing. You don't, you know, the people that identify as animals?

Lewis:

No.

Neil:

You don't call yourself that.

Lewis:

No.

Neil:

In fact, I- You don't look down on those people, but you don't- You wouldn't get your eyes done differently and stuff like that.

Lewis:

No.

Neil:

You wouldn't shave your mustache into a beak.

Lewis:

No. No, absolutely not. It's really- No, I'm a furless non-furry.

Neil:

I'm a furless non-furry.

Lewis:

Well, I had that thought one day when I was in the costume.

Neil:

You call it a costume. You don't call it a skin.

Lewis:

No, yeah. It's a costume.

Neil:

It's a costume. But you're a furless non-furry.

Lewis:

We're wearing costumes now, you know.

Neil:

Oh, okay.

Our clothes, yeah.

Lewis:

We're presenting ourselves in a certain way.

Neil:

Oh yeah, sure, yeah. Furless non-furry.

Lewis:

And so I was in the costume one day, and I was pretty high. I like to hotbox a costume. Who wouldn't?

I mean, I'm sure a lot of people wouldn't, but if you smoke pot and you like to do wild shit, it's a pretty fun thing to do. And it's a great place to think, because again, I don't talk when I'm in there. I'm silent.

I'm alone.

Neil:

You will not talk to people who talk to you as I found out the first time I met you. You only quack at them.

Lewis:

Correct. Unless I- If I ran into you on the street now in a costume, I would probably say, hey, Neil, what's up?

Neil:

No, I think you shouldn't. Hold onto that integrity, Lewis.

Lewis:

Well, you know, sometimes I do. I'm sorry.

Neil:

Okay, okay.

Lewis:

But I usually make sure there's nobody around that's gonna hear me.

Neil:

Oh, there you go.

Lewis:

Yeah.

Neil:

No one's gonna see Lewis on film, like, talking behind an alley, smoking a cigarette.

Lewis:

It seems, well, you'd never see me smoking a cigarette, but. Yeah, okay. And so I was in the costume, and I thought, I hope people don't think I'm a furry.

Not that there's anything wrong with being a furry, but I just don't want to put out furry vibes. And I was like, well, of course they wouldn't think I'm a furry because I don't have any fur. I'm a furless.

Yeah, I was like, I'm a furless non-furry. I'm a furless non-furry. And I put a pin in that idea because I was in the costume, and I like that.

Neil:

And I- How do you take notes in there? Are you getting all these high ideas?

Lewis:

Just a mental note.

Neil:

Okay.

Lewis:

And so when I came back to the drawing board, I did a little drawing of what a badge, a little crest would look like, you know, for the National Federation of Furless Non-Furries.

Neil:

The National Federation of Furless Non-Furries.

Lewis:

And so that's what I called it. And it was one of the first merch items I ever made.

Neil:

Oh, how did it sell?

Lewis:

I did a painting of it, and the painting didn't sell right away. I didn't really try hard to sell the painting. I was more interested in the idea.

Neil:

Do you sell through Instagram?

Lewis:

I did, and I do, yes. Like, @lewismallard on Instagram is where your home is online. At lewis underscore mallard. Oh.

Neil:

L-E-W-I-S underscore M-A-L-L-A-R-D.

Lewis:

Correct. The other Lewis Mallard will not let go. I have tried- Numerous times.

To buy the real Lewis Mallard's account, but he refused to even reply to me. They, I don't, I shouldn't, you know. But anyway.

Neil:

Well, I think what we've just done in this epic conversation is we have finally come to the part in the road where Wild High on Mushroom, taking care of your dad, the James Michener reading, Alaska-inspired, final tethering you had to not living alone.

Lewis:

I love the adventure of that book. I learned about my father from these books. I learned that he liked the idea of going on wild adventures.

And there was a lot of like father-son bonding in these books that I was so jealous of that these fictional characters, these fictional fathers did amazing things with their fictional sons. And I thought, I wonder if my dad wanted to do this with his son. He would have read about it.

Yeah, he would have read about it. It's a cool thing to connect with somebody through reading the same thing that they've read.

Neil:

Yes. You know what I'm saying? You're in this interview now.

Yeah, we're doing a podcast.

Neil:

That's right.

Neil:

Okay. It's a lot of action here on the street. So the adventure of the book, the father-son bonding on the book.

Lewis:

Why is there a fight happening?

Neil:

Is it real or fake?

Lewis:

That's a real.

Neil:

That's a real fight?

Lewis:

He's being taught a lesson. That's a child.

Neil:

Looks like his mother, maybe?

Lewis:

Yeah.

[Person on the Street]

You don't know? You don't fucking know?

Lewis:

To let it go. That's something you let go. That is family business.

Neil:

Yeah, that looks like his mom, right?

Lewis:

I think we just saw a mother punching her son.

Neil:

Punching her son and pulling him into the car. It does seem like his mother, am I right? Like age-wise, race-wise.

Lewis:

He turtled and went with her. Went with her in the car.

Neil:

Head down, the friends kept walking. That was the guy that just yelled, I'm on this, I'm recording this. That was fucking crazy.

She screamed, you don't know? You don't fucking know? I guess he did know, potentially.

Lewis:

It turned out he knew.

Neil:

It seemed like it. This is the reaction. Yeah, oh my gosh.

That was a wild punch-up, though. You don't really see mothers jump out of their cars beating their sons often, I would say. What do you think just happened there?

What do you think? Okay, a woman in a hijab with a twin. Pardon me, what'd you say?

Lewis:

Good job.

Neil:

I don't know. Yeah. Okay, okay.

It didn't seem alarming at the end. We don't need to call the authorities, right?

Lewis:

I think that they would be pointless.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Lewis, we're more than three hours into this conversation here, man. We've gone all the way from the beginning to not the end, but to the end of the genesis of the project that you're now currently doing in and around cities in Canada where you're creating this performance art, this folk art, this psychedelic art.

You're taking over stations. You're dressing up as a duck. You're walking across town.

You've got a viral following online, eight, one, two, zero followers, or maybe it's getting more. After this comes out, get ready for a few more.

Lewis:

Whoa, the Neil bump.

Neil:

The Neil bump, the Tim Ferriss effect. We'll call it the Neil Pasricha effect. You got merch for sale.

You're gonna add the Instagram button. Okay, I wanna buy it only through Instagram. I wanna give Mark Zuckerberg a piece.

No, I'm just kidding. I wanna give you cash. I wanna give you cash.

So, I hope that this conversation has been inspiring to artists. We sometimes have fast money questions. I don't know if you're up for it, energy-wise.

You wanna do some fast money?

Lewis:

What's a fast money question?

Neil:

Hardcover, paperback, audio, or E?

Lewis:

Sorry?

Neil:

Hardcover, paperback, audio, or E?

Lewis:

Audio, we're talking books?

Neil:

Yeah.

Lewis:

I prefer audio.

Neil:

How do you organize the books on your bookshelf?

Lewis:

I don't really. They just kind of fit in where they fit in by size. I don't organize them alphabetically or by topic.

Neil:

Do you have a white whale book or a book you've been chasing the longest?

Lewis:

What is a book I really wanna read, but haven't tackled yet?

Neil:

That's exactly it. I'll put Moby Dick for mine, because I wanna read it, and it was good, and it's just really overwhelmingly, dauntingly long. But length shouldn't, you know. The audio thing's a great idea.

Lewis:

Yeah. There's a few James Minchner books I haven't tackled yet.

Neil:

Are all his books 987 pages like this one?

Lewis:

The vast majority of them are very long.

Neil:

Wow, can you believe this guy produced these that long? I mean, it would take me a whole lifetime to research Alaska.

Lewis:

He had a team.

Neil:

Oh, he had a team.

Lewis:

He had to have had a team.

Neil:

He had to have had a team.

Lewis:

I think, yes.

Neil:

Okay, okay.

Lewis:

To help research and stuff, because he goes into, it's historical fiction.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah, you gotta.

Lewis:

So it was an interesting way to learn about places.

Neil:

It's a great, I would recommend this book for anyone who's going to Alaska or wants to go to Alaska. You get, you absorb the whole.

Lewis:

You certainly get some of the history.

Neil:

Cultural history of the place through a story that is not like reading the history in a history book. We're getting rained on now, by the way. I got microphones out here getting wet.

Lewis:

Little baby drops.

Neil:

What's this? Here's how we're gonna wrap.

Do you have a bookstore? What's your favorite bookstore, living or dead?

Lewis:

Favorite bookstore, living or dead?

Neil:

I don't really have a favorite bookstore.

Lewis:

That's okay, that's okay.

Yeah?

Neil:

Yeah, the audio books you're getting on CD are from the library, presumably, back in the day.

Lewis:

They were from the library sometimes. Sometimes they were downloaded.

Neil:

Do you have a favorite library?

Lewis:

Oh, yeah, the Hamilton Central Library.

Neil:

Hamilton Central, that sounds like one of those old school, big.

Lewis:

It's a brutalist building, right downtown Hamilton.

I always liked, I mean. I love old libraries like that.

Neil:

Robert McLaughlin Library in Oshawa, shout out to you. Never been there, but I would love to see it. Oh yeah, you gotta go there.

Lewis:

I spent a lot of time in the library in St. Catharines, just doing my homework. And when I met you, you were on your way to the library.

Neil:

When I met you in person, you were telling me, I just booked an hour at the library.

Lewis:

Yeah?

Neil:

You're a library guy.

Lewis:

I like the reference library in Toronto very much.

Neil:

Yeah, I like your like of the library.

Lewis:

Yeah, I think it's an extremely valuable, underutilized resource in the city, especially the one in Hamilton. The maker space there was extremely valuable to me in starting my business. It provided a very easy use and cheap use of their printers and computers.

And so I could start making my merch myself.

Neil:

Start making my merch myself.

Lewis:

Yeah, so with my ability to draw, plus the knowledge of various computer programs, and then the library having a vinyl printer and vinyl cutter, I could make and print my own stickers and make the packaging and sell them.

Neil:

Wow.

Lewis:

And so it gave me the ability to make something for cheap. I did the labor myself and then I could keep all the money myself.

Neil:

Oh my gosh. You're well on your way to not looking at the prices at the grocery store, Lewis.

Lewis:

I hope so.

Neil:

Your jarringly left, right, you know, life story, slaloming the boundaries of societal norms, you know, basically living life from first principles, using the codes that you're developing to guide not just your art, but how you live, how you think about relationships. I mean, I'm really in awe of so much of your thinking and your articulation about how you do things. I wonder if you might close us off today with any hard-fought piece of wisdom, bit of advice, or any general reflection you wanna leave us with to be the final thoughts as we close off this deep and long conversation.

Lewis:

I think that you, not just you, anybody listening, is capable of a lot more than they think they are. And that if you give yourself a chance to amaze yourself, that you probably will. Give yourself a chance to amaze yourself, you probably will.

Neil:

Lewis Mallard, thank you so much for coming on Freebox.

Lewis:

Thank you, man. It's been a pleasure knowing you in this short time, and I look forward to keeping on knowing you in the future. I hope so.

Neil:

Hey everybody, it's just me, just Neil again, hanging out in my basement, my laptop flipped open in front of me, listening back to that wide and wonderful conversation with the one and only Lewis Mallard. I hope that you enjoyed that conversation like I did. So many quotes jumped out to me, like, when I first discovered folk art, I didn't really appreciate it because I was really stuck in this mentality as a teenager that art had to be as high skill as possible.

That really reminds me of chapter eight, way back in 2018, the conversation we had with Sarah Anderson, author of Sarah's Scribbles, where she called Hyperbole and a Half by Ali Broch, one of her three most formative books. And for those that know Hyperbole and a Half, that was number 980 in her top 1000. You know, it's like totally scribble drawings, right?

Like it's just totally messy scribble drawings. And for Sarah Anderson, that book did, I think, what the folk art did for Lewis, which is kind of just crack you out of this like, has to be perfect kind of idea of art, which is beautiful. Kind of related.

How about this quote? I think there's a lot of lovely magic that happens when people don't completely understand what they're looking at. I love that.

And then the third quote, I got lots of quotes here, you know, it's got some quotes about the poverty he was living in, altering his surroundings, but how about this one? I'm the only one telling me I can't do it. So what the fuck do I know?

I just love that. I'm the only one telling me I can't do it. So what the fuck do I know?

But like having an awareness that like you, we, I am the one limiting myself from trying anything new, doing anything new, and then having a healthy degree of skepticism about your own confidence, like that is a really beautiful mix. I love those three quotes. I love Lewis Mallard.

You can tell. I mean, I'm a big fan of this guy, the work, and just the grassroots nature of it, you know, it's a person on their own just choosing to do something and putting it out into the world. So I love really everything about this.

I'm really grateful to Lewis Mallard for coming on the show and giving us three more books to add to our top 1000, including number 595, Lu Pan by Demi Hitz, H-I-T-Z or Z. Number 594, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, also known as The Whale, but really everyone knows that as Moby Dick. And number 593, Alaska by James A.

Michener, M-I-C-H-E-N-E-R. Thank you so much to Lewis for coming on the show. Did you make it past the three second pause?

Are you still here? It's a long one. One of our longest, maybe the long, is this the longest chapter we've had ever?

It might've been. It was more of a hangout. I always wanted to do like a hangout, you know, just like a chill and sit and hang out type of show.

This is one of them. Doug Miller, I think chapter 99, you know, and Doug Miller's, Doug Miller books is also one like this. Maybe chapter 44 too with Kevin, the bookseller.

That one was all over the place, but hangouts are fun and I'm hanging out with you and you're hanging out with me and that's why we're back in the end of the podcast club. This is one of three clubs we have for three bookers, including the cover to cover club. That's people listen to or to attempt to listen to every single chapter of the show, the 333, the end in 2040, where you be then?

Maybe we should do a party for the last chapter. What do you think? And of course the secret club, which I cannot tell you more about other than you can call our phone number for clues.

Speaking of our phone number, please do call it. If you're listening to this, call the phone number. Tell me who you are.

Let's hear your voice. Tell me a formative book, a reflection, a poem, anything you want. Don't don't.

It doesn't have to be perfect. Just like the art. Just, just make a phone call 1-833-READ-A-LOT.

And as we always do, let's kick off the end of the podcast club by going to the phones now.

Neil:

Hi, good evening. My name is Shamina Hildreth, and I actually just, someone shared one of a, I think it's Harvard Business Review article that briefly touched on your untouchable day every week. And I just totally love that whole concept.

And I look to adopt it in some type of way, even if it's just in a small way. I work for a Fortune 500 company as an analyst. And so it's really hard to balance meetings and also the deliverables.

So and I know you kind of spoke to that in the article that I read about how you were to accomplish having an untouchable day and not compromising that day. So really inspired by that. I want to implement that into my life.

I don't work in a creative space, but I think that I would be a lot more productive if I wasn't just all over the place all the time. So again, I just want to leave a quick voicemail. I haven't done this in a long time.

So thank you for drawing me outside of my comfort zone and leaving this voicemail. Again, my name is Shamina. I'm here in the Minneapolis, Minnesota Twin Cities area.

And yeah, just leaving a voicemail as you asked. And thank you so much for all that you do and the books that you've written. Have a great day and enjoy your summer.

Neil:

Shamina from Minneapolis, what a beautiful voicemail. So nice to hear from you, Shamina. Yeah, I wrote that article, I want to say 2019 for Harvard Business Review, hbr.org has or you can just type in untouchable days and my name into Google or you can just go to the show notes on threebooks.co because we'll link to that at the bottom. But basically what I advocate is just taking one day a week where you're completely untethered, unplugged, not on email all day. As Shamina says, I think I'd be a lot more productive if I wasn't all over the place all the time. Yeah, you would be.

And so that's why it's so important to do this. But in the corporate setting, it's more difficult. The first thing I recommend, I don't think I put in the article because I think it came through lots of people asking me about this later, I mentioned the Rich Roll podcast though, is take an untouchable lunch.

It sounds so like obvious, but when I was at Walmart, you know, everybody is like piling into someone's Toyota Tercel like head over for sushi. And of course, we're all at the time with our work phones, you know, checking our emails like the whole time we're on lunch. So it is and what I do is when I started doing this at Walmart, I did so like brazenly I like leave the phone on your desk.

So if anyone comes by your desk to look for you, there's just a phone there knowing that they cannot reach you because the phone is left behind, you know what I mean? And I know it's different with remote work and so on. But let's just say you're in an office setting.

So leave the phone on the desk, try to go for an untouchable lunch. Now if you can pull up the untouchable lunch, then that means you can go from like, let's just say 12 to one with no contact. You come back, there's eight emails now instead of like, you know, one every six minutes.

And then you start stretching it a bit. Okay, if I can be untouchable from 12 to one, maybe I can be untouchable from 11 to one or 11 to two. And then what you do, here's the way to sell it into your boss is prepare some like half day piece of work that you really know you could crush, or maybe you crush in advance for the three hours.

And then say to your boss, after you just give yourself permission to take it, Hey, Jordan, I went I read this great article in Harvard Business Review. And I decided to take the person's advice I know we can't do untouchable days here at this office because everyone's working so hard. But I decided to try it and I took an untouchable half day I just shut off my Outlook and my email and left my phone at my desk and I went and worked in the boardroom for half a day or whatever it is.

I went and worked at home for half a day. And guess what? I finally got that like proposal that I said I was going to get to you three months ago where I finally like got back to I wrote that email to that CEO that required like deep time to like thoughtfully craft whatever it is.

And the person's like, Oh, great, great, good job. Then you keep doing that. You keep like selling in the results because the results will be there 100% like once you take a half day or a day off from like the the the overwhelming amount of ping ponging that happens in a corporate office like the busy work, you know, Cal Newport would call that pseudo productivity.

Well, it's amazing what you get done tons of stuff, right? So you keep using the results to sell in the permission, you know, and then you kind of tip off your boss, Hey, Jordan, why don't you take one too? You know, and this is how it kind of goes up grassroots through a company.

Use the HBR article. You know what, I think we should link in the show notes to the actual fancy like PDF version of it. If you don't have it, I can like send it to you like somehow when those things are sent around with the HBR logo on top with like the big square orange thing, it just looks more professional.

HBR is telling me to do it. Not this crazy podcast host. Anyway, you know what I'm saying?

All right. I use this website called chartable, which tracks reviews for every podcast around the whole world, no matter where people leave them. So just a nice new one here from P S three, five stars, interesting, heartening, love the podcast, love the concept and love books with a big smiley emoji P S three.

If you're listening, I owe you a book as you know, so you can drop me a line with your address and now it's time for the word of the chapter. Oh my gosh. How many cool and interesting words that Lewis Mallard use.

Hmm. Hmm. There was a lot.

Let's go back to Lewis now and then see if one jumps out for us. Here we go.

Lewis:

Psychedelic folk artist, my government PSYOP, vandalism. Of course I bring pylons, double entendre, tributary or whatever. It's debossed.

The forgotten piece of street furniture or banal task. It's a brutalist, uh, building, furless non-furry.

Neil:

Oh yeah. There's a lot of goodies to choose from there. That's for sure.

Why don't we go with double entendre, double entendre, Miriam Webster. Could you play it for us please? Double entendre, double entendre, number one in linguistics, a word or expression capable of two interpretations with one usually risque such as flirty talk full of double entendres or two ambiguity of meaning arising from language that tends that lends itself to more than one interpretation.

Okay. So first off, this obviously comes from the French entendre. That means, you know, uh, the verb is, what's the verb on Tante E N T E N T T here to understand to me.

It's a double entendre means two meetings, two hearings, two understandings. But what's interesting is that there's a huge entry on this on Wikipedia, um, and basically it says that, you know, one of the ways a figure speech is obvious, one of them is not obvious and it goes all the way back to like the odyssey. You know, when Odysseus is captured by the Cyclops, he tells the Cyclops his name is Odoesis, which I probably got wrong, which means no one, right?

When Odysseus attacks the Cyclops later that night and stabs him in the eye, the Cyclops runs out of his cave yelling to the other Cyclops, no one has hurt me. Right? Okay.

That's an old book. How old is it? Really old.

How old is it? Ancient Greek epic, uh, in the year eighth, in the eighth century BC. So yeah, we want to say that's about almost 3000 years old.

Okay. So that's one of the first double entendres. There's other ones from Canterbury tales, stage performances in, in Shakespeare, um, some of which I can't read on the air.

Well, you know, just C words and M just bad, bad words kind of hidden in there. Uh, there's a picture of Steve Carell who plays, you know, Michael Scott in the office and it says he often points out unintentional double entendres with the phrase, that's what she said. Also it's in the entry, which is pretty epic.

Howard Stern, the Howard Stern show in the 1980s began to use double entendres as a way to get around FCC regulations. Right? That's interesting.

So double entendres were kind of a way to like kind of secretly slip in things. Um, double entendres are also, uh, one notch below triple entendres. Triple entendres exist.

For example, Joe Harris, a professor of modern French at Royal Holloway University in London, uh, says in Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, Timon, who has realized all his fawning guests are only in it for the food and generosity, invites them to one last dinner at his house just before revealing the dinner plates are empty. He refers to them all as his present friends. To them, it just means friends who are present.

But we know it's alluding to the fact that they are only his friends for the time being at present and because they want to enjoy his generosity, his presence. A triple entendre! Yes.

Are other triple entendres possible? Yes, they are. In fact, we go to rap music, the kids and the rap music, right?

For example, Pusha T in the song Suicide says, I build mine off fed time and dope lines. You caught steam off headlines and cosigns, meaning number one, his lines are good or dope. Two, the lines he raps about are about dope.

And three, he has actually sold lines of dope himself. Three subtle things and other people are saying, what about Frank Ocean's line, I'm high and I'm bi. Wait, I mean, I'm straight.

In the song Oldie, because it's a lyric, so you can't see how it's spelt. Is it B-Y-E or is it B-I as in a sexuality, right? Lots of stuff like that.

Triple, if you type in like best triple entendres or favorite double entendres, there are entire threads online and we could go down a rabbit hole. I love that there is, I love that the internet is so big that you could literally just come up with the word of the chapter for a podcast that's strangely about formative books, right? Find your word of the chapter and then find people in chat rooms from 11 years ago on Reddit talking about their favorite double and triple entendres.

I mean, we live in a great time, don't we? I mean, you get to, you get to meet walking and talking ducks just walking around the street. You get to sit with them for an entire morning, hang out with them in the sun, talk to them about art, so much stuff there.

I just love the way we got, I love the time of life we're alive. I think that's what I'm trying to say. I love when we're alive.

I love when we're alive. I love that we're alive when I can talk in my basement. You can hear me in that basement gym of Mongolia on a long drive, on a long dog walk, wherever you are.

We can hang out on the full moons for a lot more years to come. Sixteen more years till the ways to go, everybody. Until next time, remember that you are what you eat and you are what you read.

Keep turning the page, everybody. Thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you soon. Take care. 

Listen to the chapter here!

Chapter 138: Maria Popova mines meaning in marginalia

Listen to the chapter here!

Maria:

Right now, what I'm very troubled by is this whole thing about cultural appropriation. Without appropriation, there could be no learning. I find identity the least interesting thing about people.

I don't think fear is the litmus test that is bad for you because we fear change.

Maria:

The question is accessing yourself on the other side of the fear, and then telling, is this a way to grow or is this a way to suffer now? Hope is the antidote to fear in bearing our future.

Neil:

Hey everybody, this is Neil Pasricha and welcome or welcome back to chapter 138 of 3 Books.

Neil:

Happy Buck Moon everybody. Did you know every single full moon has a name? This one's called the Buck Moon because it's when deer start...

I was gonna say horns. No, they aren't growing horns. They're growing antlers.

They're growing antlers, so they have named the moon the Buck Moon. Apparently in Cree, it's also called the Feather Molting Moon, or you can also refer to as the Summer Moon if you want, or the Thunder Moon, or the Halfway Summer Moon from the Anishinaabe tribe. Okay, different tribes with different names.

Raspberry Moon, say the Algonquins. Month of the ripe corn moons, says the Cherokee. I love getting deep into all these full moon names, but I just love the fact that, you know, whenever that moon is perfectly ripe and full.

For 22 straight years, from 2018, six years ago, we started the show, all the up to 2040 when we're done. When I'm in my 60s, it's hard to believe, but I will be in my 60s then, we are gonna have an ad-free, commercial-free, interruption-free conversation about books that changed people's lives. And I want to just say, you know, I don't say it often enough, I think maybe one or two chapters a year, I kind of make a point in saying I'm gonna do it now, I just want to say, thank you, thank you.

You know, when you start to focus your passions and interests on areas that not many people share, you know, like just reading books, long conversations with inspiring people about literature, you're gonna lose most of the world there. But that's partly why I find it so incredulous and heartwarming to have found this sacred three-books community. If you're listening right now, you are part of it, you are a three-booker, I am a three-booker, we are hanging out together talking about books, and I know the show is doing well, because I get all the spam.

You know, one way you know you're doing well is when you get lots and lots of spam. I get spam saying, you are one of the top 0.5% of all podcasts in the world. There must be some site that ranks all shows so they can see the downloads.

So, you know, on one hand, that's wonderful, we're a busier, bigger podcast than 99.5% of podcasts in the world, right? On the other hand, there's five million podcasts, there's a lot of pockets. There were two million when I started in 2018, and now there are over five million today, which means if you're in the top 0.5%, you're one of 250,000 podcasts. But I also just generally love the increasing splintering of interests in the world. Don't you love the super, super, super, super niche? The super, super, super, super, super detailed?

That is definitely, those are definitely the pathways that our guest today, Maria Popova, has in spades. I love Maria. I can't wait to introduce you to her if you don't know her already.

But before I do, let's do a letter of the chapter. You know, I like to read a letter of the chapter, and if I read your letter on the air, you get a free book. Just email me your address.

I don't know, I'll mail you a book. The way to send us letters is, of course, through leaving a review anywhere, you know, anywhere, all the giant digital platforms, Apple, Spotify, wherever. Comment on YouTube is good, or sending us an actual letter.

Mailing us an actual letter. My address is on 3books.co. My email address is also on 3books.co. I don't care if it's painted out front, you know, for everybody seeing out. I don't care that much about that stuff.

It's just getting letters. Sharing the love of the community. This one starts with an all caps, Neil, N-E-I-L, with five exclamation marks underneath it.

Part of it reads. It's a beautiful, long three pages. I'm just going to read part of it.

Okay, Leah from Huntsville, Alabama. I hope that's okay right now. It says, thank you.

3 Books has made me a better version of myself. I have learned so much about who I am through the conversations that I'm part of because of you, the person I have kept stifled for so many years. I tell everyone about 3 Books, friends, colleagues, strangers.

I struck up a conversation with, I even had a dream once that I saw someone in a coffee shop with a 3 Books tattoo and I struck up a conversation with them. There are so many things I love about 3 Books. It's impossible for me to list them all.

One thing is certain. I have read more now and my selections are much more diverse. I have even gotten my 19 year old son to start reading again.

I have always been fascinated by the moon. So the fact that 3 Books falls, the lunar calendar, it gives me just one more reason to look up and be delighted by its glow. Many of my formative books are already on the top 1000, but I will leave you with a series that I enjoyed as a child.

And I purchased for my child when he was little. It is called Mrs. Piggle Wiggle by Betty McDonald. Okay, Leah, consider an order.

I'm going to order Mrs. Piggle Wiggle right now. The letter continues. I was introduced to the series by my third grade teacher, Ms. Keith, she would read these stories aloud on Friday afternoons using student names in place of the characters, a delightful teacher that made learning exciting and fun keeping awesome. Neil farewell until the next chapter. Leah Leah from Huntsville, Alabama. Thank you so much for the letter.

Leah dropped me a line so I can mail you a signed book and I just love the shadow also to third grade teachers who read, you know, education, uh, needs more reading time and needs more quiet reading time. Everyone brings a book and reads and the teacher teaches you how to do that because everyone just kind of lies on the carpet. They kind of fall asleep.

And I love the teachers that tell you it's okay to fall asleep while you're reading, you know, shout out to those teachers. Anyway, if we, if you like hanging out as we do at the front of the show a little bit, then stick all the way to the end. We have the end of the podcast club.

I play your voicemails to 1-833-READALOT, read letters, talk about the etymology of an interesting word said by the guests of the show. We geek out, we have fun together. So I'll talk to you at the end of the show too.

What's going to happen in the middle is we are going to hang out with the one and only Maria Popova. I am so excited to have Maria on the show. Maria doesn't really do interviews.

Like if you go to her site, you click on interviews, you type Maria Popova podcast interview, there aren't any, like she just doesn't do interviews. She, she, she, she really is wonderfully available on her epic one woman labor of love that is themarginalian.org. Oh, let me tell you a little bit about Maria.

So Maria Popova was born in communist Bulgaria and emigrated to the U S six days after her 19th birthday back in 2003, she studied at the university of Pennsylvania after quote, being sold on the liberal arts promise of being taught how to live. end quote, did it work? Well, yes and no, she spent her family's life savings in the first few weeks on textbooks and despite attending an American high school in Bulgaria, found herself in a state of culture shock.

Quote again, I mean, fitted sheets brunch. That's a quote from her from the Brooklyn magazine podcast where she was interviewed. Now Maria worked hard, a very defining Popova characteristic, sometimes eating store brand canned tuna and oatmeal three times a day to get by.

I figured it was the most nutritious combo for the cheapest amount. She said at one of her jobs in 2006, a senior leader started sending out a Friday email of assorted miscellany to provoke innovation and I don't know how well they did, but I do know Maria took the project over and did it much better, weaving together writeups and seemingly unrelated topics like Danish pod homes, the evolution of the Pepsi logo and the nonprofit ad campaign, uh, fighting malaria, a nonprofit ad campaign, fighting malaria. These are, these are three of like the earliest posts I could find. Maria's emails got popular, got really popular.

So instead of just sending it to more and more people, like send it to my dad, send it to my cousin, send it to my friend. She actually taught herself programming in one of those kind of oatmeal and tuna can days, save up the $400 to do the night course in programming. And then she put it online on a website called brain pickings.org.

You have probably heard of brainpickings.org. It is one of the most popular sites on the entire internet. Now dubbed The Marginalian. Let's not call it brain pickings anymore. Let's call it The Marginalian. I was personally blogging every night, uh, from 2008, 2012 on my website.

1000 awesome things. I only lasted four years doing that. But so many times I remember I'd be researching some arcane bit of trivia and Google would toss me over to Maria say, I came to love the site, which at the time had a top of the page tagline.

I don't want Maria to grimace, but you know, if your past self doesn't make you grimace, you know, I guess you aren't growing, right? But the tagline resonate with me and it resonates with me still now. It said a scan of the mind boggling, the revolutionary and the idiosyncratic.

I love that. And sort of like my own blogs about page. This one on her site did not reveal.

I don't know. It was a hurry even the author's name, face, or identity. And like, again, if you click the thousand things about what you said, thousand things is a time ticking countdown of a thousand things.

That's it. It's like, was it just because the internet was more chat room anonymous or was it before, you know, Twitter and all these social media sites forced us to plug in our real names because you know, you can't advertise to non-entities, right? They realize that you get more ad revenue when you have a real name.

I remember the day Twitter sent me a note saying, you cannot be called a thousand awesome things anymore on Twitter. We have to know your real name and your birthday. We don't, we, if we don't know what target market you slip into, we can't feed you the right ads.

Well, that's why probably me and Maria never met back then, even though we were both kind of big bloggers back in the blogger heyday. However, despite the fact that I tapped out doing daily blogging four years later, Maria is still going a full 18 years later, 18 years later, still blogging almost every day. George Saunders, our guest in chapter 75 calls Maria Popova and says Maria Popova manifests abundant wit, intelligence and compassion in all of her writings.

Krista Tippett, host of On Being, calls Maria a cartographer of meaning in a digital age and the library of Congress has even included The Marginalian.org in their permanent web archive of culturally valuable materials. I agree with the accolades. And I find Maria her blog, The Marginalian.org and her wonderful books, Figuring, which I read and love the snail with the right heart picture book, which is wonderful and a velocity of being an eight year project to kind of galvanize these interesting artists from around the world on like writing the letter to the 12 year old child that like wants to know more about books and she's just pulling out exquisite beauty that reflects everything that makes life great.

And like this show, like 3 Books, her site, The Marginalian. has remained free and ad free. She's got no staff, no interns, no assistant, and it has remained in her words, a thoroughly solitary labor of love. That is also my life and my livelihood.

You don't need me to tell you that the world can feel heavy. It can feel intense. It can feel overwhelming.

Think about what media politics and the news kind of does to us. It pulls us away from those harder to measure things that make life wondrous and that is where Maria comes in. She comes to rescue us, to point our attention towards the turn of phrase in a poem, a forgotten piece of advice from Ralph Waldo Emerson on trusting ourselves or to provide a close reading with some stunning artwork of a hundred year old picture book that illuminates one of those impossible to articulate emotions that we all know and feel.

I absolutely loved this conversation with the much requested Maria Popova on a wonderfully wide ranging set of topics, including of course, her three most formative books. Are you ready, everybody? Let's flip the page into chapter 138 now.

Hi, Maria.

Maria:

Hi, Neil.

Neil:

Oh, it is such a pleasure to have you on 3 Books. You are a joy. You are them.

You are maybe the most bookish person we've ever had on the show. I'm so thrilled to have you.

Maria:

Oh, my goodness. I love your project. I love the spirit of it.

I love the seriousness with which you take it. And it is a joy to be here.

Neil:

Oh, thank you so much. Well, we were introduced, of course, by Debbie Millman, our guest back in chapter 97 of 3 Books, who you have written so lovingly about in many places I actually really I pulled out to kind of kick off our conversation, your wonderful afterward that you wrote in her 2021 book, Why Design Matters. There are I want to ask you kind of what makes a good conversation or a good interview.

Neil:

And I thought I might read back to you a couple of phrases you included in that afterward you say

Maria:

Please do because I confess I have no recollection of writing this and Debbie has been a part of my life for more than a decade. And God knows how many things I have no memory of this particular one.

Neil:

Well, it's too bad because it's just a brilliant piece of writing. You say the interview is a curious cultural artifact by design, a consensual humbly of future abashment, etching into the common record who we were at a particular state of being with particular enthusiasms animating our minds and particular sorrows gnawing at our hearts. You continue an interview petrifies us in time then lives on forever.

The thoughts of bygone selves quoted back to us across the eons of a personal evolution, a strange and discomposing taxidermy diorama of life that is no longer living. And finally, the phrase that I want to use as a baton to pass it back to you. You say a great interview is a fixity that hints at a fluidity and contours a continuity.

Maria:

So, well, I mean, I agree with all of that. I, you know, the reason I personally don't really do many interviews is precisely this awful straitjacket feeling of being trapped in a version of yourself that you once were that somehow becomes this fossil in the museum of culture that is, you know, continually revisited even though you've outgrown it. It's interesting, though, because in a way, I mean, we're going to be talking about books.

And in a way, the self is a kind of book that is constantly being reread and rewritten by the person living with it, you know. And I think a great book you reread is rereadable. You revisit many times and each time you bring a different self to it.

And so it's a different book. And with the self, too, I just. I don't know.

I am such a fan of not a fan. I'm such a believer in the fact that the self is this narrative structure that we create as we live in order to feel coherent to ourselves. But it's so important to to keep outgrowing those past self.

Right.

Neil:

Mm hmm. Mm hmm. I love that the interview being a fossil in the museum of culture.

The self being a kind of book. And then since we're starting the conversation, we're starting an interview, one that you and I really appreciate you doing this because I know you don't do many because I went and searched for you on podcasts. And of course, what comes up are the 10 year old conversations you've had with Tim Ferriss.

But, you know, you say a great interview is a fixity that hints at a fluidity and contours a continuity. And so you I know you consume a lot of interviews. I know you listen to a lot of them.

What makes a great one?

Maria:

Hmm. Honestly, I used to. I don't right now.

My life has become much more introverted over the years, much more kind of. I don't consume much contemporary stuff, to put it that way, including podcasts and interviews. But the ones that have always spoken to me, whether they were conducted, you know, this month or a century ago, have an element of a conversation with a person who is a self, but is able to touch on things that reach beyond the self that are universal, that endure, that will survive them.

Which is, of course, what a great book does, too.

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah, I like that. I appreciate that.

And thank you. I guess I was I'm quoting probably an old interview of you where I heard you talking about the podcast you listen to. But I love that you don't listen to a lot of contemporary stuff.

And, you know, before we jump into your three most formative books, I did pull out a number of quotes that you have said or written about writing or reading. And so, I mean, I have two pages of them, but I thought I could maybe use three of them to kick off the conversation. I'm going to present them to you.

You can expand, explain, elucidate them as you see fit or our guest in Chapter 75, George Sonder says you could also deny them. I know you're a George Saunders fan, so I thought I'd mentioned that funny phrase.

Maria:

I love George Saunders. Oh, my God. The living are not my forte, but of the living writers, I just what a creature.

Maria:

What an incredible writer. What a beautiful human being.

Neil:

Oh, yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah, we're speaking the same language.

Yeah, he is just an incredible heart and mind. So a few quotes that you have said about reading. First off, I'm going to start with your one that you've said many times.

So I know it's a repeat for you. But just to give our listeners a little context, you say literature is the original Internet.

Maria:

Yes. Yes, of course. Every every allusion in a piece of writing is a kind of hyperlink to some other thing outside it. Right. Some idea or prior book. Every footnote is a hyperlink.

But it's really, you know, if if the Internet is the original or literature is the original Internet. The mind is the original literature, because that's just how our minds work. There are these meshes of association, and it's impossible to tell any story without those fractal branches that touch on other stories.

Neil:

Yes, yes, the mind is the original literature. Yes, I love that.

Maria:

Well, of course, in our technologies of thought will always mirror the structure of the mind. I mean, literature is just the technology of thought and feeling. It's supposed to be an analog.

Neil:

Oh, that's beautiful. And so obvious once I hear you say it. But yes, yes, yes.

Unbelievable. Here's another quote that you said if I quoted you properly. The very notion of intellectual property is so bizarre.

The law is taxing our cultural understanding of authorship. Semicolon, it is not conducive to evolving it.

Maria:

Oh, I see what I was trying to say, I think.

Maria:

Which is basically this notion of originality, right? That that 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 born with knowledge. And in fact, in recent years, so I must have said this some years ago and 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, right? And so without appropriation, there could be no learning. Right.

And out of that comes everything we create. Everything we create comes out of the library and 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:

And anyway, I just think it's the fundamental like behavior of the mirror neurons in our brain.

Maria:

Exactly.

Neil:

And I, yeah, and there was a dot, dot, dot. And that quote was just to fill it in for people listening. You had said property ownership is a very antiquated way to think about our sharing culture, which is how we actually interact with ideas.

So exactly as you had expanded on it. And then one last quote, well, I got two more, but here's one. You said, I have a tattoo on my right arm that I see every day that reminds me what to focus on.

And I thought this was interesting because I, of course, looked up a photo of you, tried to find the tattoo, found this one with a series of 20 to 30 dark concentric circles around a word I couldn't read and the phrase what to focus on on top.

Maria:

So here's a little instruction for you to not read decade old interviews because that has since been covered up.

Maria:

And in fact, in fact, I mean, I think it's funny, but it's also poignant because tattoos are such an emblem of this tension. We're always living with the illusion of continuity of self, this ridiculous idea that what you like and want at a point in time will endure until the day you die. And we are so internally persuaded at the time.

Of course, that's why people make marriage vows. I mean, they believe them, you know? But the fact that most tattoos and that is a statistic, most tattoos people get either removed or covered up is just the ultimate concrete embodied testament to how inconstant the self is, how much it evolves.

And in fact, I think if we're not, I see this often to younger friends, if we're not a little bit embarrassed of the people we used to be, we're kind of not doing it right.

Neil:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, I can't even listen to the first five years of this podcast, but I'm sure I can't, won't be able to listen to this in a few years.

And I've never got a tattoo. And when people ask me why, I say, I don't know what I would, I don't know what I would like forever. I always say that, you know, so it's just to that exact point.

Maria:

Well, you're ahead of the common curve of enlightenment there.

Neil:

Well, I don't know. I know you're making me feel that way now. And then the story, the only last phrase on reading that I wanted to pull up because it is also the title of a book you put together that took you eight years where you collected essays from people like Neil Gaiman and Jane Goodall and Yo-Yo Ma.

And you paired them with art created by people like Debbie Milliman and Oliver Jeffers is the title of the book you put out was called A Velocity of Being. And I would just ask you to expand on that phrase for us in regards to reading.

Maria:

So these are not essays, they're letters. They're letters to children. So I asked, I think it's 121 people, interesting, original people from all walks of life, musicians, writers, artists, philosophers, to write to children about why we read, what it does for us and how it shapes the life and so forth.

And the title comes from just phrases from two of the letters. One was by Pamela Paul, who was at the time the editor of New York Times Book Review talking about literature and reading as a state of being. And the other one is from Jan 11, who's an astrophysicist and a writer writing about reading where the wild things are to her young son and the velocity of the story.

And the velocity of the boy's attention. And so I combined the two and I thought that was a perfect phrase for what reading at its best, literature at its best feels like. It is a velocity of being.

Neil:

I just loved that phrase so much, A Velocity of Being. A wonderful way for us to begin with a little series of appetizers of Maria Popova's quotes on reading. Before we jump into her three slash four, most formative books.

For each book, Maria, that you've given us, I will take a few seconds to try to describe the book to our listeners as if they're holding it in a bookstore. And then I'm going to ask you to tell us about your relationship with it. And then I have a few follow-up questions for each one.

Maria:

Okay, but let me say something first because you said to pick books that feel important to my life right now.

Maria:

Formative is a different matter because the books that formed me when I was 20 were very different. So I picked things that are very meaningful to me as I am living my life right now. But I would be wary of calling them formative.

Neil:

Okay, that's fine. I appreciate that context. And it kind of relates to the tattoo conversation, right?

As I dug up and unearthed many places where you talk about books, I came across these titles occasionally and many others in many different ways. And I'm sure if we had a reconnection down the road, there would be other titles. And that is the sort of way of the world and the way of the show.

So yeah, it's a bit of a gimmicky premise, but I was modeling it a bit after Desert Island Discs, right? But for books. And so in a sense, it was kind of like, I just didn't want to ask people, what are your three favorite books?

I just wanted to ask them, in some sense, what has stuck with you, right? And people can interpret that as they will. Should be noted by the way that when I emailed Edward Packard, the creator of Choose Your Own Adventure, this question, what are your three most formative?

He wrote back a list of about 20 questions asking to me to clarify that question.

Maria:

Yes, of course. I appreciate it. It implies a chronology, right?

Because when you actually think about what's most formative to a person's mind and imagination, everyone has to say children's books, whatever was read to them early in life, those are the first impressions we received. So technically, those are the most formative.

Neil:

Right, right, right. Just by definition of being, yeah, kind of enabling a worldview that you don't even can, you might not even be able to perceive anymore. Right.

Okay. Well, we'll go with the ones that have stuck with you today and the ones that you carry with you now.

Maria:

One of which is a children's book.

Neil:

One of which is a children's book. But let us begin with, if we don't mind, let's begin with Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. So this book was originally published in 1855, but continued to be expanded.

Maybe hinting at our conversation so far until a ninth edition was published on his deathbed in 1892. Many covers on this one, the original one had no author name or publisher name, just to steal engraving of Whitman himself as the frontispiece, if I'm saying that phrase, right? My 1994 used everyman edition is a painting of Whitman with a long white beard and a straw hat with crisscross suspenders and a rowboat.

So there's many different covers of Leaves of Grass, but you can picture whichever one you want. Walt Whitman is an American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist who lived from 1819 to 1892, often considered the most influential American poet and the father of free verse. After working as a clerk, teacher, journalist, and laborer, he wrote his masterpiece, Leaves of Grass, pioneering free verse poetry and a humanistic celebration of humanity.

So it focuses on his philosophy of life and humanity and praises nature and the individual human's role on it. Rather than focusing on religious or spiritual matters, Leaves of Grass focuses primarily on the body and the material world. The poems do not rhyme or follow standard rules for meter and line length.

He chose his idealized self as the subject of the book. For Dewey Decimalhead's out there, you can file this one to 811.3 for literature slash American poetry slash middle 19th century. Maria, please tell us about your relationship with Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.

Neil:

Yes, wonderful. Just one little footnote. Elizabeth Barrett Browning kind of pioneered free verse a decade before Whitman was born.

Maria:

So I would be wary of giving him credit for that one. But he was a pioneer in so many other ways. And even the Francis Beast you mentioned in the original edition up to that point, poets were pictured, you know, buttoned up under starched shirts and looking all serious.

And there he is with his unbuttoned peasant-like sexy stance, his hipscocked, his straw hat. I mean, nobody had done that before in poetry. And it's very consonant with the spirit of the book, which is the challenge what a poet is and what a poet is tasked with being.

I am a latecomer to poetry. I dismissed it for the reasons that people dismiss anything, which is that they are not literate in it. They don't understand it.

We are wired to discount what we do not understand. And I was very lucky to meet a wonderful woman named Emily Levine, who is a philosopher of science, comedian, incredible poetry lover who had gone to school for poetry. And we met across the aisle on the transatlantic flight.

And we became great friends. She was in her 70s. I was in my 20s.

And she opened my world to poetry. She educated me, essentially. And eventually, after she died, I made my way to Leaves of Grass.

In part because, I mean, it is very consonant with my orientation to the world. It's very much about the exuberance of life and meeting reality on its own terms, and decentralizing the human from the natural world. But I also loved the kind of meta-layered that the fact that Whitman basically spent his entire life rewriting Leaves of Grass.

So by the deathbed edition, it had quadrupled in size. He had expanded many of the poems. He had purified them in a way, making them more authentically himself.

For example, in the early edition, he had some female pronouns in the love poems, then to change them to male pronouns, which is also what Emily Dickinson did, by the way. And I just love the idea that Leaves of Grass is essentially a field guide to how to be a living poem in your life.

Neil:

Oh, that's interesting. A field guide to how to be a living poem.

Maria:

I mean, he was one, right? Whitman was a living poem. And the book was just the byproduct of his personhood.

I do this little ritual that I learned from someone. So I started as a side project when I was become a very big part of my life. I do this show called The Universe Inverse, which is now actually a book, where I trojan hoarse some serious science into people's lives through poetry.

So I tell stories from the history of science, about different discoveries, and phenomena, and then I invite different people to read a poem that somehow illustrates whatever I'm talking about scientifically. So one year, I had invited a lovely man named John Cameron Mitchell, who's a musician and kind of musical guy. He created Hedwick and the Angry Inch, the musical.

And I had asked him to read a Whitman poem. And so he gets up on stage and he says, I'm going to do a Whitman divination. And he calls out to the audience to ask a question, any question.

And from the side, one of the other performers, the poet Marie Howe, was kind of the Whitman of her time. She had just lost a friend and she calls out, how do you live brokenhearted? So John takes leaves of grass and kind of rolls the pages like a card deck and opens to random pages with his eyes closed, lets his finger fall in a random verse.

So that's apparently what a Whitman divination is and reads that verse. And it was the most perfect, succinct, timeless consolation for Marie's question. So every year on my birthday, I perform a Whitman divination for myself where I ask the most urgent, restless question that is on my mind.

And I do that kind of shuffle the pages with my eyes closed and open to random page and my finger falls in a verse. And Neil, every time, whatever Whitman has to say is the perfect answer. And there's nothing mystical about this.

This is really just a testament to what a great poem does, which is that it comes from a very personal place. If you wrote those poems from some extremely personal region of experience, then it zooms way out to the universal so that it's broad enough to be a perfect answer to pretty much any question. But then somehow, it gives you back, you the reader back something deeply precise and personal out of the universal.

And that's so hard to do. That is what a great poem does.

Neil:

Oh my gosh. That's unbelievable. I had that feeling, I will say, like the way I read Leaves of Grass was I've kept flipping it.

I mean, I kept flipping it open. I kept flipping it open and finding random poems, finding random lines and reading them and feeling the resonance. And then I wouldn't read the next one.

I would just flip it open again, you know, and kind of jump in and out that way.

Maria:

This is to this notion of being a living poem. Maybe I would love to read to the little fragment of the long preface, prose preface, to the original edition, which is one of my favorite pieces of writing of all time. There's a little paragraph where he talks about what this will give you.

May I read it?

Neil:

Oh my gosh, please. Anytime you want to read to us, we will say yes.

Maria:

Great. So he writes, This is what you shall do. Love the earth and the sun and the animals.

Despise riches. Give alms to everyone that asks. Stand up for the stupid and crazy.

Devote your income and labor to others. Hate tyrants. Argue not concerning God.

Have patience and indulgence toward the people. Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men. Go freely with powerful, uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families.

Read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life. Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book. Dismiss whatever insults your own soul and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

Neil:

Wow. There's so much there to take in and to feel.

Maria:

Probably the best instruction on life that I know. This little fragment of the 1855 preface.

Neil:

Wow. Wow. Wow.

Thank you so much for sharing that with us. I love the way you call and piece together lines and people from all over the place. I saw a gift you have that you do so well on The Marginalian. I thought I might bring a question in here from Seth Godin for you specifically. I heard you call. And yeah, I heard you say in the 2015 interview to almost 10 years old again on on being where you said you love his mind.

And so I reached out to him and I said, you know, this Maria picked leaves of grass by Walt Whitman. Do you have a question for her? And he writes to you, Maria is one of the smartest, coolest, most erudite people I know.

She's indefatigable if I said that right in her pursuits of knowledge and dignity and she does streb. Streb, that's nuts. She does her work without ever dumbing down the work.

I guess if I have a question, it is, is a passion for art projects a skill? Or is it something we're born with? If it is a skill, how do we teach it to others?

And side note, I'd also like to know what's streb is.

Maria:

Streb is Elizabeth Streb, who's a kind of hardcore choreographer, has a studio. In Brooklyn, that half of it is her dance studio and the other half, which is the half I do is trapeze, flying trapeze. So I have taken off flying trapeze.

Yeah, that is a wild card for me too. But it is one of the most profound, joyful, existential things I have ever done. Anyway, this side, well, nothing's to the side of anything.

Everything's one thing. Okay, the question is a passion is passion for our skill. Yeah, it's interesting that he says the passion for art is that the skill?

So the he's not saying the making of art because there's a whole region of reality between having the passion for something and putting it into the world, right? I think the passion to create this drive, this life force is hardwired in us. It is part of our drive for connection.

And we create as a kind of hand outstretched in the dark for another hand. And that's why anyone makes anything, I think. So I think the passion is completely there.

It might get covered up by conditioning, by fear, by people telling you you're not allowed or you're not worthy or no one wants to hear from you. Those are superimposed over the thing that's already there. I think the teachable part is how to own your passions, in a practical sense, make them a priority, which is the prerequisite for making them a reality.

And in a psychological sense, how to give yourself the self-permission to pursue them. And those things can be teachable.

Neil:

How to give yourself permission, how to make space for them, how to see that you have that internal artist inside you. You said it matter of factly, but a lot of people, of course, would not see themselves as someone who is passionate or connected to the arts, although I agree with you in the statement.

Maria:

Well, I mean, I use art and the broadest, broadest, broadest definition there is, which is leaving something of sweetness and substance in the world.

Neil:

Oh, I like that. Art is leaving something of sweetness and substance in the world.

Maria:

And my mind seems to the point about appropriation. As I was saying this, I was like, this sounds like a poem. I think this might be, it might have imprinted me from a line from an Annabelle Kaufman poem.

Maybe called Cold Solace. I might be paraphrasing, but anyway, it's just such an interesting meta-observation of the mind, literally doing the thing I was talking about.

Neil:

Oh, yeah, that's beautiful.

Maria:

It took something and appropriated in the context of my own experience and understanding.

Neil:

I also just want to point out for people that have not visited The Marginalian, which was of course called Brain Pickings for the first 15 years now. I believe that you're in your 17th year as a marginalian. You know, it has, oh, 18th now, and it has pop-ups.

But of course, the pop-ups on your site are poems. I thought you could use a poem today. It's a beautiful way to kind of interject and go against the grain of what is so normal on internet behavior, which is like getting pummeled with ads and skipping and waiting for the countdown to get to two seconds.

It's nice to just be interjected with a poem. I thought I'd also ask you on Whitman about queer culture. Walt Whitman was called by the advocate, a queer pioneer, and there are a lot of popular blog posts online with titles like Leaves of Grass, Just the Gay Parts.

Around Lit Hub, there's this really wonderful, thoughtful post written by Mark Doty, D-O-T-Y, the Booker Award-winning- He has a great book about Whitman and desire and queerness. Well, this is why I was gonna, I thought you'd be the perfect person to ask because he wrote the question of homoeroticism in Leaves of Grass, but also you wrote on The Marginalian. Walt Whitman, Bohemian Dandy, the story of America's first gay bar and its creative coterie. And I thought you might help us color in this connection to queer culture, which, you know, wasn't well established in print in any form back when in 1855 Leaves of Grass was first published.

Maria:

Well, okay, a few things about that. First of all, since whenever that was written, I have spent the last four years deeply immersed in Whitman's world. I have a very large book coming out next year, of which he's a big part.

I would say he takes up maybe 200 pages. And in the course of that, I read every biography that exists of him, which there are seven good ones. Every one of his surviving notebooks, every single word he ever published.

And it was a joy and a real sense of intimacy with this long ago person, you know, I will say about the queer question. First of all, oh, God, I am so wary of using ahistorical terms to talk about people in history because of course that whole notion didn't even exist at the time.

Neil:

Right, right.

Maria:

And when we do that, we're kind of flattening how difficult it was to live without certain permissions and containers that we now have and take for granted. But on the other hand, I will say, I find as a, you know, quote unquote, queer person myself, I find identity the least interesting thing about people, actually identity and opinion. Those are the two least interesting things about people.

And unfortunately, we live now at a time in an era of identities and opinions being kind of the frontline of personhood. And that's like not interesting to me. But what is true of Whitman and his, the life of his heart is that, I mean, people have always struggled to love whom they want it to love.

Whether it's same sex or not, I mean, this is the history of humanity, the difficulty of loving, you know, and it happens that he loved outside the conventional forms of his time and place, which made it harder. But the reason his poems endure, you know, a lot of his poems are actually love poems. The reason they endure is that that is the universal struggle.

Whatever your identity, this core thing, whether we call it spirit or soul that is so much deeper than identity, which is a costume for the soul, right? For him, that was the epicenter and that is what he struggled with. And he, so he did write a sequence of poems in Leaves of Grass.

This was in the, it appears for the first time in the second edition called the Calamus poems. Calamus is the, this very like, phallic blossom of a plan that's native to Long Island, which is where he was born. And they, it's the first time where he addresses his love poems to men and he writes pretty clearly about same-sex desire and eros.

But the wonderful thing about Whitman, which is so counter-cultural even today, is that he just didn't let any one of his desires or qualities or aspects define him. He was just so vast and he didn't, I just, I say all this because I think he would have so bristled to be called queer, to be called anything that is a kind of container, you know, that is a classification because he tried his whole life to live as wide as the sky.

Neil:

Yeah, and it's the antithesis of his famous I Contain Multitudes line. Do I contradict myself very well? I contradict myself.

I am vast. I contain multitudes. By the way, you said identity and opinion are the least interesting things about people.

May I ask what's on the opposite ends of the seesaw then for you?

Maria:

I think the most interesting things are the things that light us up, the things that are portals to wonder for us. And the thing about opinion is that it's based on certainty. To have an opinion is to have a certainty about something and wonder is the opposite of certainty.

Wonder is this openness to reality, whatever it may bring and without fear, right? And a lot of opinion is based on fear. A lot of identity is based on fear.

And I'm cutting out other things, defining yourself by what you are not. So for example, I don't subscribe to religion as such, but the term atheist literally defines me by what I am not, not a theist. And I find those things very limiting.

I think ultimately it is what we love that shapes us. And there is so much to love in this world and about this world.

Neil:

What we love shapes us and there's so much there is to love about the world. I love that. I love that.

Thank you for opening that up. I just love listening to you speak. You have such a...

You speak like you write. It's just wonderful to listen to. I wanted to ask you about anonymity and privacy.

It maybe relates a little bit to what your thoughts are on beauty, but you know, obviously we mentioned that he originally self-published this and it was anonymous. I know there was a stealing agreement, but there was no name. He paid for it himself.

It should be noted. He self-published I think 735 copies. It failed, you know.

And then he got this five page letter of congratulations from Ralph Waldo Emerson. He's famously considered the inventor of the book Blurb after printing an excerpt from that letter on the book Spine. And maybe think two questions.

Number one, on anonymity, you're also pretty anonymous. We are doing this podcast audio only. Both of us prefer that envelope of intimacy, but also we're not going to be posting a video of us talking for two hours on YouTube.

You don't share photos of yourself. I don't think on your blog at all or on social media and you don't refer. I didn't find, you know, to your partner's name or your relationship, you know, your relationships, etc.

I just wondered how you think about anonymity in the world today versus being public. Do you have views on what's happening with privacy? I was really curious to ask you this because, you know, high level we are eroding privacy rapidly.

Um, many people I talk to don't care about this. They don't have nothing to hide. You know, that sort of kind of quick come back to the erosion of privacy.

Whereas I feel like this, I feel like it's breaking my heart to like see privacy going away. I mean, this just ruins the ability of us to just navigate freely and openly without surveillance. That's how I feel.

But I wondered how you feel as someone who like Whitman remains fairly anonymous, despite being pretty public.

Maria:

Hmm, what a beautiful question that's so layered now. First of all, Whitman had a huge, huge ego. He took that line from Emerson's letter without Emerson's consent, put it on the spine of the next edition.

Emerson was furious, did not talk to him for two years. It was like a real act of self-promotion. And he was the second most photographed person in America in the 19th century after Frederick Douglass.

So he really wanted to put himself out there. But he did contain multitudes. He was also himself.

He was also entirely himself in every aspect of his being, including this kind of grandiose public-facing thing that seems so at odds with the humility of his poems. For me, well, I think we're talking about slightly different things. Anonymity is not the same thing as privacy, is not the same thing as secrecy, which is what people talk about when they say I have nothing to hide.

I am definitely not anonymous. I mean, my work has been out there for two decades, you know, and I have shared so much with the world as me. The privacy part, I guess I'm just not, I have always made what I want to read.

You know, the reason my side doesn't have ads, never has, is that I don't enjoy ads on the internet. And why would I make something with something that repulses me? And similarly, I don't enjoy this part of why I don't do interviews.

I'm not that interested in talking about myself, which is I'm interested now for us to talk about the books. And I do find it interesting to have people's selfies up there. I've posted, I think, one selfie ever, which was a public service other people with curly hair, how to make a shower cap out of a hotel trash bag when you are, right.

Maria:

I felt the urgency, it felt urgently important to share this demo with the world.

Maria:

But anyway, the premise, I think it's interesting because I write from a deeply personal place, even if it seems like it's about abstract ideas and kind of more in the essay form, which deals with more universal things or more kind of external things. But I have very close relationships in my life, people who have, with whom I have a great deal of emotional and psychological intimacy. And they read what I write and know exactly what I'm talking about from my private life through these kind of degrees of abstraction removed.

And so in that way, I'm just an open, I can be read like an open book by people who have the context, right, because knowledge is always contextual. So I find it interesting. I mean, the conversation on the internet about privacy has to do with data and reducing human beings to data.

I think you can have all the data on someone, their geolocation, their biometric and have no clue about their soul.

Neil:

Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah, we're constantly quantifying something that is hard, is impossible to quantify, right? That the sort of the human heart and the human spirit and the human soul and then we reduce it down to data.

And that's what we measure and we think that we know somebody or we try to cajole or push behavior. And this is the part I am more sensitive to after reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. I'm sensitive to how much of our day by day behaviors are controlled without our awareness of them.

That's the part I get worried about. But she calls it the right to the future tense, to think is a great way to put it.

Maria:

Right to the future tense?

Neil:

Yeah, the right to the future tense. Who has the right to your future tense? I'll send you a wonderful essay afterwards.

I can link to it afterwards. I have it on my blog.

Neil:

I would love to read and it's also relevant to the Hannah Arendt that we're going to be talking about.

Neil:

That's what I have up next. Yeah, the right to the future tense. Yeah, I'm going to send that to you after by Shoshana Zuboff.

It's the opening of I believe chapter eight or chapter 10 for a wonderful book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. But I love that idea that we don't know the soul. And I had a couple of questions about ads on the marginalian. But I'm going to pocket those for now. I was just going to ask you in 18 years if your reasons for doing no ads and donation based support have changed at all. You know, we're tying that to Whitman being self promotional.

Is it still because you don't enjoy ads on the internet? But now, you know, arguably you have this gigantic multi-million person international platform for you to say no to ads today. Obviously, it has a different opportunity cost than it used to when you started.

Maria:

Honestly, I haven't even thought about it. I haven't even thought about it. I'm so profoundly not interested that there's nothing.

There's nothing it can give me. I mean, I, you know, I'm so lucky that I received directly from my readers everything I need, roofs over my head, books in my bookshelf, food on my table. I'm not lacking for anything.

And I just don't see the point of doing something that I find repugnant. The other thing too is I have watched. I mean, one of the things that happens when you're on the internet since, you know, the dawn of social media.

I mean, when I started, there were no blogs as such. There was a very rudimentary platform called Blogger. But anyway, when I started, what was that called?

Neil:

Yeah, 2006, right?

Maria:

Right. I was hard coding every issue, literally putting it up and removing the old one manually every Friday for the first couple of years. And then, you know, things started happening slowly.

I migrated to a publishing platform, but I watched all around. Things emerged. MySpace, YouTube, Tumblr, and the commodification of cultural material, which we now call content.

I mean, if we step back for a second to consider that, that is heartbreaking. Calling someone's labor of thought and love content. And the reason is that it fills the containers that we sell, which are ads.

I mean, everything is a commodity. And look at what we've done to music. We really, really fucked up with music.

Musicians are now commercial vehicles for selling apps and subscription services. And, you know, the actors now with the strike are crying, crying, trying to turn it around and save themselves from that fate. I hope they manage.

I hope they manage. I think writers are next. And for me, it's never been worth it being reduced to content because in watching what happened over those two decades, I saw publications of substance become more and more diluted into no longer creating, you know, thought, sensibility standards, but catering to kind of lowest common denominator in order to be popular and to sell and clickbait.

And, you know, legitimate magazines that have been around for a century watching their titles become more and more clickbait in order to do well on the internet. You know, conferences that were the kind of front line of really daring ideas become self-help and trailers for, you know, uncompelling books. And it's just heartbreaking to me.

And it's never been interesting to me going that route.

Neil:

I love that. I relate to you. My spirit was so in line with yours in 2008 when I started my first kind of big public blog called A Thousand Awesome Things.

Over the four years I ran that website, I had 100 million hits. I never put ads on it. This show, 3 Books, has no ads, no commercials, no sponsors, no interruptions.

Maria:

Well, this is a big reason I agreed to do this foundation by the way, because Debbie told me.

Neil:

Yeah, you can see out no ads. Well, I be unlike you. I wrestle.

I guess the difference between me and you is I wrestle with it. I'm like, you know, I have the pangs of it occasionally, but I like the deep kind of place your your clarity of thought comes from. And I'm going to keep channeling that because from 2008 into now, you know, we're talking in 2024, a lot has changed, including the pressures on writers and interviewers and, you know, people like us who are feel the music what's happened to the music industry is so true.

And I don't know if anyone could have stopped it. You know, the forces were very strong to change the way people bought albums. Now nobody buys the album, but people pay seven hundred dollars for a concert.

It's like totally weirdly out of whack.

Maria:

I mean, it's interesting. I mean, I do want to say two things. One is that part of part of I do it the way I do it primarily for me, but I'm also looking back on the history of culture.

I see how important the power of modeling is modeling possibility, you know, seeing someone do something you didn't think was possible makes you feel like it's more possible. And I do want to be the kind of test case for it working when it's a kind of cultural commons and not a consumerist thing when young people are thinking about how to support their work. Maybe turn to the community, you know, maybe don't turn to the overlords of Silicon Valley and whatnot.

But the other thing I should say is that I have some enormous privilege in being able to do that, which is that I have no dependence. I grew up poor, which means I'm not afraid of being poor. I mean, I'm not poor.

I'm so lucky to have made a life for myself when I'm financially really well off compared to, you know, how I got to America, which is having nothing, you know. But I think that gave me a real edge that many of my peers, even back in college when I started didn't have, which is that when you're accustomed to having very little, that's just your life, you know, like it's not scary if something fails because you're used to doing well with not much. And so I think that's an enormous privilege to just have that edge of fear taken off by experience to see that you're okay, you know, generally speaking.

I mean, obviously, there are extremes of lack, which I'm very lucky never could have had. But in this kind of middle ground, it's a real privilege to be unafraid of flopping, basically.

Neil:

Yeah, well, I think that's a beautiful call. But, you know, so you did an interview in 2024 this year, a recent one with Brooklyn Magazine, the podcast, and you said, I quote, I ate store brand canned tuna, low sodium, and oatmeal three times a day, which I figured was the most nutritious combo for the cheapest amount. And I said that was one of four jobs you're working at the time.

And together by doing that, you saved $400 for a night class to teach yourself programming, just so people know, you know, the origins of which you speak.

Maria:

Let's not get over-inflating the personal myth. It wasn't programming. It was basic HTML and CSS coding just so I could make a website.

This is before blogging. I cannot program. I wish I could.

Neil:

I love that background and that thoughtfulness. Just so, you know, so people that don't know, if you go to visit The Marginalian., you are never bombarded with ads. You're given poetry.

You're given, you know, these wonderful, thoughtful, and I won't call them book reviews, but like annotated readings, so many reflections and so many kind of mixing pieces of art. And on the side, it says, you know, donating equals loving. And people can donate, you know, I think there's $3 a month or $5 a month or $7 a month in different ways.

You have to make it very easy for people to sign up, very easy for people to sign off. Are there any principles you might share for those who are looking for a non-ad-based way of putting their stuff out into the world? Any principles that you have learned over the 18 years that make that type of request more comfortable or easier for people to do?

I just, I'm asking, obviously, partly for me, I just don't know how to do that to the community in a way that feels good for everybody, you know?

Maria:

Well, I think it's two parts. The first part is, make the thing you love that you want to see exist. Don't worry about who's going to like it.

And be prepared to keep making it for a while without any kind of support, you know? I think this kind of crowdfunding stuff is very helpful to people, but it does run the risk of making you try to make something fundable before you've actually made it and before you know who you are and what you want to do, you know?

Neil:

Right, right. Creation should precede the funding not the other way around.

Maria:

That if it's substantive enough, people will love it. People will connect with it, you know? And the thing is, so this part one is do that and be prepared to take time.

I mean, Debbie says anything worthwhile takes a long time. And it's actually true. I mean, for the first maybe seven years of my project, it didn't pay for itself.

I had to work jobs. I had to do other things, you know? And then nothing changed.

I just kept showing up every day, every single day. I did what I loved and believed in and somehow it tipped over. It was incremental.

There was no great, you know, nobody like discovered me or, you know, wasn't like that. It was just very incremental. So that's part one.

And then part two is, once you're kind of in the flow of what you're doing, just say honestly, see, this takes time. This takes thought. This takes technical, financial, spatial resources.

If you find joy in it and want to see it exist, consider helping. I don't think people understand. This is part of combating this notion of content, which, you know, Silicon Valley has trained the world to expect it to come for free.

And I don't think people realize what things take. Like, even my site at this point, just having it stay up, the server cost for me, because there's so many visitors, the server cost is like, probably the biggest expense of my life. Second to books.

I mean, books are also a huge expense. And I don't think people kind of necessarily get that.

Neil:

No, exactly. I share that. I share the cost of books.

Maria:

In audio and video, it's probably been more technically demanding to keep it up resource intensive.

Neil:

Yeah, and it's funny because my brain goes to the opposite place. I'm like, how do I maybe, you know, when we decided not to videotape this and just do audio, I was kind of relieved because I was like, I'm trying to because you know what? You know, I thought Maria, I was like, oh, good, I won't have to pay the video to edit video now for this.

Like, this is an extra cost and extra time and extra thing to review, right? So there's two ways. By the way, your first thing on the seven years, it just reminded me of Todd Hansen, our first editor ever of The Onion, America's Finest newspaper originally started in Wisconsin.

He was interviewed by Mike Sacks and asked how do you become a famous, you know, comedy writer and he said, do it for free for 10 years. That was his advice.

Maria:

I mean, that's the key to anything is how to be a poet does how to be anything.

Neil:

Do it for free for 10 years. Well, somebody who did a lot of work for free for a lot of years was Hannah Arendt. So let's transition now if we if we don't mind to your second book, which is Love and St. Augustine by Hannah Arendt. If I said that right, her last name is A-R-E-N-D-T. This book was originally published as a dissertation in German in 1929. And then in English, if I have right in 1996, it is a deep teal infused forest green background with a formal all capseriff white text reading Love and St. Augustine and can all capital letters with a design of some kind. You might you probably know what this is above and in the middle of it, like almost like a Roman drawing.

Maria:

I don't remember.

Neil:

Yeah, it's okay.

Maria:

It's touching that you give the cover design space because it is somebody thought of this. Somebody put work into this. Yeah.

Neil:

Yeah, and I want to feel like we're holding this book. Hannah Arendt, one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century, born to a Jewish family in 1906 in Prussia, now part of Germany. She died in 1975 in New York City.

She was raised in a politically progressive secular family in after high school. It's funny. I have that Jewish family and secular family both come up in the research here.

After high school, she studied and had a four year affair with Renan philosopher Martin Heidegger. H-E-I-D-E-G-G-E-R. All before getting her doctorate in philosophy in 1929 and writing her dissertation, this book, under another Renan philosopher, Karl Jaspers.

Her writing covers power, evil, politics, democracy, authority and totalitarianism. Maria, tell us about your relationship with Love in St. Augustine by Hannah Arendt.

Maria:

So, first of all, Hannah Arendt was kind of rediscovered, so to speak, by lay people who were outside the philosophy realm around the kind of Trump election because her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, suddenly read like this prophetic work. And so a lot of people got to know who she is, who had never heard of her before. But throughout the 20th century, she was one of the most renowned and influential, many of the term that I don't like, but it's correct, public intellectual.

And the astonishing thing about this book, so this was, as you said, I think you said that, it was her dissertation. It was amongst her papers, dormant for more than half a century, and it was posthumously rediscovered by these two American women. One was a philosopher and one was a political theorist.

And they essentially published Love and St. Augustine in English for the first time in the 90s, I want to say. She died in 1975. Yeah, so it's been dead for a while.

The extraordinary thing about it is that she was 23 years old when she wrote it, but it has such intellectual rigor and such passion. And it's also a book about love by a person who went on to be the most analytical, kind of coolly intellectual mind, you know, and she wrote it while she was in love with Heidegger, who, by the way, such an interesting character. One of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century joined the Nazi party.

She was Jewish. And then this is kind of why now he's sidelined and dismissed. But I think what most people under appreciate is that he performed one of the hardest things in culture, especially today, which is to change your mind in public.

So he eventually left the Nazi party and was like, I don't know what I was thinking. This is the worst mistake of my life. And that part is not, I mean, he could have been more public about it.

He was, he did it. And he, you know, anyway, it doesn't matter. The point is, it's very complicated.

And the relationship between the two was therefore very complicated, but very, very formative for her ideas and informed this book on St. Augustine, which is really, I mean, it's about love, but it's really about time. It's about presence. It's about how to live with the fundamental fear of loss, which is, of course, something that makes you vacate the present in favor of the future.

I mean, all fear is future based. And like about what will happen, even if it's in the immediate future and like the next second, but it's still not present. And she just writes so beautifully.

She, at one point she writes, fearlessness is what love seeks. Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by expected events in the future. Hence, the only valid tense is the present, the now.

I mean, how countercultural is that?

Neil:

Yeah, yeah. And so hard to do with the brains we have, but that's where happiness resides, right?

Maria:

And she draws, I mean, it is called Love in St. Augustine because it's really a conversation with St. Augustine's confession. So she does with his book what I do with every book I write about, which is essentially the extended marginalia on the book. It's her writing.

Her writing is the dialogue with Augustine across the centuries in the margins of his books.

Neil:

And Augustine, for those that don't know, is a Roman African 4th century philosopher who is, I think was ruling in what is kind of present day Morocco at the time, but the far outskirts of the Roman Empire in the 4th century. There's a phrase, Amor Mundi. Have you heard this phrase?

A phrase used by Augustine, Yes, the love of the world. Borrows, which means love of the world. I wanted to ask what that phrase maybe means to you.

Maria:

I mean, in an interesting way, that's entirely what Whitman wrote about, right? Leaves of grass is one great chorus of Amor Mundi. It is, I think, our highest calling is to love the world.

To love the world as it is and as we are.

Neil:

I like that. Our highest calling is to love the world as it is and as we are.

Maria:

And I don't mean that in the sense of resignation because so much of the creative force in us is to keep bridging the world as it is and the world as we think it should be, right? This is kind of what idealism is and optimism and the idea that things can always be better. And I don't mean it in the way of, oh, we should just sort of accept things as they are, but I mean, really love the world, meet reality on its own terms because only then can we figure out where to go next and how to do it with compassion and integrity and humility and all those things.

Neil:

Yeah, you have such a beautifully broad way of perceiving reality and life. It's so counter-cultural and to how I, you know, how most of us are, I feel constricted by the world as presented to me. And so it's such a, it's a nice place to live to be in these bigger and vaster feelings that of course, you are partly drawing from from these wonderful works.

Hunter Arendt, by the way, died in 1975, as you mentioned. So 49 years ago, making her the youngest of your three most formative authors. And of course, I will also include Antoine the Saint Experean here for The Little Prince, which is the book that has been repeated on our list, but he died in 1944.

My point is, you studied dead people like very closely. You've read more letters and diaries and memoirs than anybody I know. Certainly, almost perhaps anybody, you know, everybody you study was alive at that time, but I'm curious from your perspective of studying things that are long gone, what we can learn from the dead or said another way.

What are those who are now long gone trying to tell us most of all today?

Maria:

Most of all, that we too will one day be dead, and we might as well make something beautiful and meaningful in this sliver of space climb that we've been allotted. The strangest thing about the human experience, the strangest thing is that we know, we know cerebrally that we are finite and we're transient. But how we live our days, how we spend our time, there's this real denial of death and of our own mortality.

I mean, imagine that every day you woke up with the acute awareness in every cell of your body that this is it. What are the decisions you would make? And it's not so much that I'm called to the dead as such.

It's that, well, it's two separate things. One is that I do think prior times have things to teach us about what we have relinquished that may still be recoverable. So other ways of being present, other ways of relating to one another, you know, the extraordinary loss of nuance that we're experiencing now in this culture, maybe there are ways to remind ourselves that actually there are other ways of being and other ways of seeing that are worth recovering.

The other thing is very basic kind of psycho-emotional self-help, which is that there is real consolation in knowing that others, especially others you admire, have lived through what you lived through. And there's this wonderful, how does it go? It's wonderful James Baldwin's passage from one of his essays where he says, you think your pain and suffering are unique in the history of the world and then you read.

And it's so true. I mean, all these books that I read and write about I have reached for in order to find consolation for something I'm going through, to find perspective or a different angle or sympathy or consonants or whatever, an antidote to the loneliness of a lot of these experiences. I mean, even the basic, the most fundamental human yearning love is an incredibly lonely experience actually from the inside.

And it has helped me greatly to turn to these time-tested, almost foreclosed, because the thing with the dead is that you know how their lives turned out. There's not going to be the open-endedness and uncertainty and fear that we carry in our own lives, not knowing how it's all going to end up. You know how it ended up for them.

And so there's consolation in that.

Neil:

Yeah, I love that. I travel with the Old Penguin Classics edition of On the Shortness of Life by Seneca in my suitcase at all times, partly because when I end up at a random hotel or motel with the anxious, riddled body of someone who's been traveling through airports and airplanes, I look at that book or flip it open and I just ground myself with it. Often while putting a lacrosse ball behind my back or my butt against the wall and the combination of both triggering my parasympathetic nervous system and getting my mind into a 2000-year-old book just relaxes me almost always.

Neil:

I have done that with Thoreau's journals over the years.

Maria:

This is one of the ones that was really formative for me maybe a decade ago, but I have carried it many places with me and done the exact same thing in airports and hotels and whatnot.

Neil:

By the way, Thoreau's journals were one of the three most formative books of a friend of yours, Austin Cleon. He named that as he flip-flopped between a few different kind of commentaries on Thoreau and he finally settled. He's like, I think it's actually the journal that I turn to most often.

Neil:

I'm not surprised.

Neil:

Yeah, and I found a lot of great blog posts that you'd written about him over the years. I wanted to ask you how we read hard books. I have to confess, partly nervous and intimidated for this conversation for many reasons, but one of which is that you're so erudite.

You have a wide expanse of intellect that is somewhat unnerving to touch up against because I'm worried about looking like an idiot. You know, so I found this book. Well, it's not a bad way.

Maria:

Well, thank you for saying that, but I will say first of all, I'm like the least educated person who's been on your show probably in terms of formal education.

Neil:

I don't think so.

Maria:

My only real gift is stubbornness. I think because I came to the U.S. with zero foundational knowledge of what my peers considered the classics, I didn't know where the range was, right? So, for example, I discovered a ridiculous term in the history of the world to begin with, but especially in this context, I discovered Susan Sontag at some point in my 20s, and I was convinced that every single American knew who she was and read every single word she had written.

I just assumed that. So I went on the Sontag binge, and apparently at some point I tipped over to the edge to the end of the spectrum where my peers were like, I've never heard of that. I've never read that, but I assumed they all knew that.

And so coming at it from this place of total beginner's mind, not even knowing what the parameters of erudition are, I think I kind of went so far out on some vectors. So I've read a lot about certain things and so little, so total ignorance of entire regions of culture, like I have zero pop culture knowledge, close to zero political knowledge. Which is all to say we have these minds that work in different ways that have enormous blind spots and thanks start us that we have each other to broaden each other's horizons.

Because even in this conversation, I've learned a number of things from you that I never would have before.

Neil:

Aw, well, that's the beauty of conversation, and it's true that everything we read is in exchange for reading everything else we could be reading at the same time.

Maria:

Exactly, back to the minitude.

Neil:

Exactly, well, that's kind of where I want to just poke at this a tiny bit because one thing I hear from 3 Books listeners, I call them three bookers, and they are book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians spread globally around the world. And one thing I hear from people is thanks to 3 Books, I picked up say Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker, I would never have heard of it if it was not for the conversation. And so I'm often finding that I bump up against books that are hard, challenging for me to read.

And other than sort of be smarter, I wondered what advice you might have for readers to read challenging books or books outside of their comfort zone. How do we intentionally curate and consume a nutritious reading diet?

Maria:

Well, that's a larger question about the very notion of comfort zones. So I am always curious about the tension between, am I resisting something because it is outside of my comfort zone, but it's in a direction of growth I would like to pursue and therefore I should push through the resistance and go there. Or am I resisting it out of self-knowledge and knowing that this is just not my kind of thing?

Neil:

Yeah, I'm not interested.

Maria:

Right, exactly. Like I have had this recently and I think part of growth is the self-acceptance of your parameters. I wouldn't call them limitations, but the things about you that are just part of who you are.

So I've had to accept this with dinner parties where for years I've pushed myself thinking this is what normal people do. I should enjoy it. I should grow in this way.

And finally last year I was like, you know what? Not for me. Just not interested.

Don't like it. Not going to do it anymore. And I think it takes experience to know what your limits are.

It takes a great sobriety of mind to know both your depths and your limits. And part of self-knowledge is finding that. So with reading, it's the same thing.

Let's say you start something that is feels cumbersome, feels heavy, feels just like an uphill, kind of Sisyphean experience. And in my experience, if you stick with it for a decent while and the feeling doesn't change, you should absolutely walk away from it. It's just not your thing.

Neil:

The five pages test or the 10 pages test or the 50 pages test I would say a little more than five.

Maria:

But it takes a while. But things that are difficult. Here's the rule of thumb.

And this is also true, for example, for relationships. Things that are difficult and get easier with time as you kind of harmonize and kind of learn the language and become immersed in this new world you're entering, which is when you read a book, you enter a world. When you enter a relationship with a person, you enter a world.

If the difficulty subsides and the joy increases as time goes by, that is a good signal that just stick with it and push through the remaining discomforts and there will be a reward on the other side. If the difficulty increases and the heaviness and the friction increase, get out. Close the book, lead the relationship, just get out.

Neil:

Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot because I do find in our culture we have this bias, partly the Steven Pressfield war of art type of thinking, which I did and do subscribe to in some sense, but that it's fear if I don't do it. And what you're sort of saying is it might be or it might be a self-aware boundary that you might have.

Not everything like the dinner party is fear-based. It might just be that you don't like dinner parties. And so you have to figure, you have to know yourself well enough to know whether it's fear-based or if it's just something you just don't like.

Maria:

But wait, fear is good. Fear, I don't think fear is the litmus test that is bad for you because we fear change. We are machines for homeostasis.

We want to maintain the status quo, the comfort zone, and fear is a natural response to change. So in both cases, you can feel fear. The question is accessing yourself on the other side of the fear.

And then telling, is this a way to grow or is this a way to suffer?

Neil:

I like that. Is this a way to grow or is this a way to suffer?

Maria:

And again, there's nuance. Of course, there's some level of suffering with all kinds of growth. But you know what I'm saying, more kind of broadly.

Neil:

Yeah, no, absolutely. I want to, you know, this book was translated in 1996, right? So it came out in 1929.

There was a dissertation. And it made me think, I will never be able to, like, I only read English. So there's just so much that's ever been written that I will never be able to read.

To read, you know? How do you navigate that? I mean, how do you?

Maria:

Oh, it's heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking. And also because so much beautiful stuff gets written in other languages and to read in translation is you already know that it's a lesser version.

Neil:

Yeah. What it was.

Maria:

And I mean, English is not my native language. All the reading I do is in English. So even that has given me a kind of starting point sense of how much of the life of the mind takes place in language.

I mean, language is not the container for thoughts and feelings. Language oftentimes is the thoughts and feelings. And I wish I spoke nine languages and I could read all of them.

Unfortunately, I only got two and a half and not great, you know? And it's interesting too because I do for my longer form things my book shaped projects that are very much based on very research heavy around the lives of the people I choose to write about. Not all of them are American and God, going through.

I mean, for my book figuring one of the people was Kepler, you know, he wrote in medieval German. So going to the archives and the libraries and trying. I mean, because he's Kepler, obviously most of his stuff is translated into English.

But there's something about finding original documents in the original language and getting them translated for yourself with me. My dad speaks Germans so you know he's been helpful with a lot of the German people that I write about. But there's something about the immediacy of the writing as it was written by the person who lived in that language.

Neil:

Yes, exactly.

Maria:

And having access to that, that's lost. I love this sound. So Wisława Szymborska, the Nobel winning Polish poet who is one of my favorite poets. And she was part of my introduction to poetry in general. She, her whole life, these two Americans translated her work into English. And at the end of her life, in one of the collected poems, I think it was in the introduction, she thanks them and she writes about, she says that rare miracle when a translation ceases to be a translation and becomes the second original.

Which is, of course, the gold standard in a translation is the most thankless of all the creative art. Because it is a deeply creative art and it's just nobody remembers or honors the translators and it's heartbreaking.

Neil:

Yeah, that's right. You hardly even see it. I was thinking this the other day, there's a book about translation of Murakami that's like all about the translator of Murakami.

There's a book about the translator of Murakami into English. I think it's called What We're Reading When We Read Murakami or something similar to that.

Maria:

Oh, how wonderful.

Neil:

Yeah, and I bought the book, I haven't read it yet, but it's about the person in between Japanese Murakami and English Murakami. I think what we're reading when we read Murakami, I have it, I will send it to you as a follow-up together with The Right to the Future Tense by Shoshana Zuboff afterwards.

Neil:

Yes, please do.

Neil:

Yeah, and this will all be in our show notes for people listening that are like, oh, I want to get a copy of that. We'll make sure everything we reference on here is always at 3books.co underneath the list for the show. So, I'll link to everything.

Yeah, the Murakami book will be on there as well. So, your third book is The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, which is filed for Dewey Decimal Hands under 843.912 under French fiction. Of course, showing the limitations of the Dewey Decimal System that almost every language besides French to an earlier point is like squeezed into the 900s.

My cover is, I believe, the original cover showing a small boy with spiky orange yellowish hair and a green one-piece standing on a planet in outer space with stars and yellow stars and yellow circles around him with just the little prince across the top. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince is an endearing tale of equal appeal to young and grown-up. It blends a simple story of an aviator forced to land in a remote desert in his meeting a small boy, the little prince from another planet with an allegory of human condition, entertaining, thought-provoking, mind-triggering and process.

The beautiful illustrations drawn by the author are as expressive as a simple language that conveys deeper shades of the philosophy. And I will say that that back copy that I'm reading is the 2019 edition by VIVI Books or maybe it's 6-6 books in London, England. Let's go into telling us about your relationship with The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Maria:

So The Little Prince, I grew up in Bulgaria where a lot of the American, none of the actually American children's book classics made it. I was born still during communism so the Iron Curtain was in full effect. And a lot of the children's books we had were European.

And this one is the only one I have a memory of my mother reading to me. And I loved it as a child as a story. And of course, you don't understand The Little Prince.

I mean, The Little Prince is a work of philosophy that's sized as a children's book, which is what all great children's books are in a way. They are field guides to living told in the language of children, which is a language of exquisite simplicity and sincerity, which is of course the most open channel to reality, right? That the simpler and the most sincere the language, the truer it is.

And in any case, I have been reconnected with The Little Prince in my adult life. And each time I read it, which is about once every couple of years, it gives me something different. Back, it gives me something back that I can take to my life.

It is an allegory. You know, the Little Prince, the pilots and the Little Prince, they talk about these different planets each inhabited by a person who embodies some kind of human vice or internal struggle, greed, all kinds of things. There's a dictator.

There's consumerism. There's all the things that keep us small in a way. And but it's really a story about love and mortality.

You know, it's the story of The Little Prince and the rose that he's in love with, the selfish plans that he devotes his life to. And in the end, it's a kind of, it's a prayer for aliveness, but it has to do with death in the end. I want to read you something that I have here with me, the original 1943 edition.

No way. Oh, wow. I do.

It was one of my, wow, that's amazing in life was getting this edition. And this is the dedication. So bear in mind, this is the Second World War.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is a pilot, commercial pilot, but nonetheless a pilot flying over the war in the world. And France is under Nazi occupation where people have rations or food. Just really kind of grim circumstances.

So this is the dedication of the book. It says, to Léon Werth, I ask the indulgence of the children who may read this book for dedicating it to a grown-up. I have a serious reason.

He is the best friend I have in the world. I have another reason. This grown-up understands everything, even books about children.

I have a third reason. He lives in France where he is hungry and cold. He needs cheering up.

If all these reasons are not enough, I will dedicate the book to the child from whom this grown-up grew. All grown-ups were once children. Although feels them, remember it.

And so I correct my dedication to Léon Werth when he was a little boy. I crawl every time I read this.

Neil:

Yeah, that is so beautiful.

Maria:

It's everything. It's everything about life, about love, about friendship.

Neil:

Did you read this? You were, this was read to you when you were a child?

Maria:

Yes, in Bulgarian translation from the French. And what I read too is in English translation from the French. So both in French.

I've only ever read it in translation. I do not speak or read French, which is a pity because a lot of the world's great literature was written in French.

Neil:

And so what are your memories of being a child, being read this?

Maria:

I, you know, I don't have very, I don't have many early childhood memories. I did not have a very easy childhood. And so I think this is very common for kids who grow up in difficult circumstances.

You don't really have many early childhood memories. I just remember liking it. I just remember it felt like an oasis of safety and relief and joy.

But I also liked the undercurrent of sadness. I've always had an undercurrent of sadness in my life. And I think this exuberance, this joy and wonder in the world does, if you really inhabit, it does come with this bittersweet melancholy streak because you cannot celebrate life without accepting that it is finite.

Neil:

Yes, exactly.

Maria:

And Whitman too had such a dark streak. So much sadness, so much melancholy. And he believed that those who reach the greatest heights are also capable of plummeting to the greatest depths.

And I think that's pretty kind of universally true. You have, if you have access to the full spectrum of life, if you're fully alive, you contact both. You can't not.

And the little prince is, you know, what I love about the best children's books are unafraid of going to those darker places because they are part of the light. And what I don't like about a lot of contemporary American children's literature is the saccharine nature of it. There's this total exclusion of complexity and darkness and sadness and this artificial sweetener of life.

And I feel like that is such a disservice to growing minds and hearts and spirits.

Neil:

Oh, I totally agree with that. So really wonderful and poetic way to say it. It makes me think of the children's book, Tough Boris.

If you don't know, no, I need to send that to you. Oh my gosh, I have to send you Tough Boris. Tough Boris is, I want to say from the mid 90s, but it's about a pirate who's very tough.

But then when his parrot dies, he cries and cries. And at the end of the book, it twists this tough, strong, fierce pirate in the last couple of pages of the book until like somebody who experiences to your point, you know, the vastness of emotional depth and he's crying. He's putting this parrot into like the little box that he was playing his fiddle and he's throwing it overboard.

And it's like, whoa, it's a beautiful finish to this wonderful picture book. But I know what you mean. A lot of great picture books touch on that vastness of emotion.

And certainly this was not a picture book, but Little Prince does that for sure.

Maria:

And there is this wonderful line in it where it says, it is such a secret place, the land of tears.

Neil:

Oh, interesting. How do you interpret that?

Maria:

Well, it is the most private. It is the most private. How we love and how we suffer are the most private things in life.

And I don't mean like hiding. I mean, they're the most interior experiences that are most difficult to articulate or share, even if you want to. They are just so deep and visiting the place of tears, that secret place.

I mean, crying with someone is one of the greatest acts of intimacy.

Neil:

Yeah. Oh, wow. That's a beautiful phrase.

Crying with someone is one of the greatest acts of intimacy. Yeah, that's very true. And crying is, I've always thought or more recently thought that it's the body's way of processing something it can't articulate.

I interviewed Daniels, the directors of Everything Everywhere All At Once. And when I asked them how it's been, because I talked to them just before Everything Everywhere All At Once came out in mass release, they said, we've just been crying all day. We've just been crying and we don't know why.

And it was a beautiful way to start the conversation. You gave us the log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck, which was written in 1940, but not published until 1951 by the Viking press. The cover is a painting of massive green and black waves with a white fishing boat cresting a wave in the background against a mustard yellow sky with white gulls circling above.

There is the white penguin classics ribbon across the front with an iconic penguin portrait in the middle. The bottom is black with simply John Steinbeck in an all cap sans serif white. And all caps fought underneath, saying the log from the Sea of Cortez.

Steinbeck, of course, the Pulitzer Prize winning American writer who lived from 1902 to 1968. He wrote 33 books, including 16 novels, six nonfiction books, two collections of short stories, including The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden and of Mice and Men. What is this book about?

Well, 1940 Steinbeck, basically, he was under stress and pressure as I understand it after The Grapes of Wrath came out, accused of being a communist and a labor sympathizer, et cetera. So he just took off with biologist and good friend Edward Ricketts, went aboard the Western Flyer, a sardine boat out of Monterey, California on a 4000 mile voyage around the Baja Peninsula, sort of left pinky finger down the side of Mexico into the Sea of Cortez, also called the Gulf of California. This exciting day by day account of their expedition wonderfully combines science, philosophy and high spirited adventure and provides a much fuller picture of Steinbeck and his beliefs about man and world.

Dewey Decimal-heads can file this under 508.31 for natural sciences and mathematics slash general science slash natural history slash environment slash habitats. Maria, tell us about your relationship with The Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck.

Maria:

So it's a very unusual book in the history of the literature. I mean, obviously, this is a writer who won the Nobel Prize two decades later who had two Pulitzer Prizes all for his fiction, beautiful, beautiful fiction writer, beautiful letter writer and diarist. And yet this little known tiny improbable book, I find his finest by far.

This too was written in the middle of the World War. And as the human world was coming undone, he goes with his friend Ed on this marine biology expedition to, I think, to be reminded of the interconnectedness and interdependence of life in nature of which we are apart. And of course, war is the greatest denial of that, our self-denial of ourselves being connected, being part of nature.

It's the ugliest assault on life, the life force. And so there he is on this boat and he really does it all. He's wading through the tide pools.

He's getting stung by these poisonous worms.

Neil:

Anemones and stuff.

Maria:

He's getting sea urchins in his foot. And all the while, he's thinking about thinking. So really the book is a kind of refutation of our western compulsion for teleological thinking.

This idea that everything can be explained by the purpose that it serves. Which is antithetical both to science and to more eastern notions of being, right? That actually everything just is.

And any fragment of it, any one thing examined by itself is just it. And science, what's interesting too is that bear in mind, this is because it's the middle of the war. This is back to our conversation about opinions and the danger of opinions.

A war is essentially a combat of opinions gone to the extreme on the scale of nations, right? These certitudes that are tightly held combating each other. And science, on the other hand, is this supreme act of observation without interpretation.

No opinion. There's no room for opinion in science. There's just meeting reality on its own acausal and impartial terms free from the tyranny of why.

And it's tendrils of blame, right? Because the moment we start asking, why is this happening? Why is this hurricane, you know, who's to blame?

And this is a purely human conference, blame, there's no such thing in the natural world. And he all the while, his thinking, and he, by the way, was the exact age I am now when he wrote this book. He was 39.

He had no idea how this war was going to end. He had no idea what his future held, that he was going to write these Nobel Pulitzer winning novels. He just wanted to understand how we think and what the world is.

And it's so beautifully written. It's also a book about wonder, about the meaning of hope.

Neil:

Yes. Yes, totally. I have so many quotes from the book on hope.

Hope, specifically, probably when our species developed the trick of memory and with it the counterbalancing projection called the future. This shock absorber hope had to be included in the series, else the species would have destroyed itself in despair. For if ever any man were deeply and unconsciously sure that his future would be no better than his past, he might deeply wish to cease to live.

Maria:

He says, hope is a diagnostic human trait and this simple cortex symptom seems to be a prime factor in our inspection of our universe. For hope implies a change from a present bad condition to a future better one. And it's so interesting, the kind of mirror image between this and the RN piece on love and presence, living in the now, that fear is the thing that's aimed at the future.

But hope is also the thing that's aimed at the future. And I think hope is the antidote to fear in bearing our future.

Neil:

Hope is the antidote to fear in bearing our future. Right. Because otherwise we would, if we didn't have hope, then we would think things, if we were in a bad condition, we would think it would continue to Steinbeck's point.

Maria:

Exactly, exactly.

Neil:

And then too, I love that interconnectedness of all things. You know, he says this many times, like there's a really memorable scene when some indigenous people kind of come up to the boat in a canoe with their, with their faces covered. Because as he says, you know, they've learned for 400 years, if you kind of go near white people, like you get germs that you know, you can't explain and then they kill your people.

But he says, they seem to live and remember things to be so related to the seashore and the Rocky Hills and the loneliness that they are these things to ask about the country is like asking them about themselves. How many toes have you? What toes?

Let's see. Of course, 10. I have known them all my life.

I never thought to count them. Of course it will rain tonight. I don't know why.

Something in me tells me I will rain tonight. Of course I am the whole thing now that I think about it. I ought to know when I will rain.

Maria:

That's so beautiful.

Neil:

I ought to know when I will rain.

Maria:

Well, talk about the people of the past reminding us of what we've relinquished, right? Ways of seeing, ways of being that we have cut ourselves off from. Because that is our natural condition actually.

To feel that it is all one. And everything else has been the function of opinions, basically, that we have devised in order to parse reality into fragments that we can then take and possess or feel like we control.

Neil:

Kind of to your earliest point about intellectual property rights, you know, and you know, there's the apocryphal stories about the white man landing in North America and claiming, you know, property rights from the then called Indians. And of course, the indigenous, I should say, they didn't think anybody could own property. You know, the concept of- Oh, it's a ridiculous notion.

Maria:

That they're going to property.

Maria:

I mean, I spend a lot of time in the Pacific Northwest in an old growth forest where people have houses and there are so many signs that say no trespassing, private property. It's literally the middle of the forest. And I keep thinking, no, you are the property.

You know, this forest will outlive you and it predates you so much you are the property of the forest. You can call yourself a steward, if you like, but you are not owning this land. It's like this idea that we've built an entire culture on ownership.

And of course, capitalism, we've gone to higher and higher degrees of abstraction. We now have like digital goods and this and that, but it all began with the land with privatizing the land. And that was the real kind of wrong turn in the history of humanity where we really divided ourselves from this totality of interbeing.

Neil:

It's so hard to pull it back. I remember visiting New Zealand in 2006 and hearing that they had a law down there that nobody could own the coastline just anywhere in the whole country. I'm thinking of that was a beautiful idea.

So even if you own like an expensive property on the edge of the water, anybody can walk past your front. You know, I mean, it's just because I think when, you know, 500 years ago when the white man settled there and the Maori were already there, they were like, we can either fight about this forever or just decide that nobody owns it, you know, that everybody owns it.

Maria:

And so you've gotten a lot of things right.

Neil:

They've got some things right. Absolutely. Well, I have, you know, I have pages and pages of questions still left from the Sea of Cortez, but I think in the interest of moving this conversation into a closing thought around the love of books, I have a series of fast money questions to close out with.

If you don't mind me jumping into them now and we can kind of close things off from there.

Maria:

Let's do it.

Neil:

Here we go. Number one, hardcover, paperback, audio or E.

Maria:

Oh, I loathe paperbacks, loathe them to the point where I almost evicted from my house the paperback copies of figuring that were sent to me from the publisher.

Neil:

Oh, wow.

Maria:

I hate them, hate them. I mean, part of it is very practical. I often read in the back and like when you dip the bottom of a book, you know, if it's a paperback, forget it, it's done.

But part of it is something about the flimsiness of, you know, somebody puts mirrors into something and then it's just like, feels like a stack of news magazines or something.

Maria:

Okay, these are very strong opinions.

Neil:

No, I love it. I love it. I love it.

But so is that me? Because I know you also read a lot of ebooks because you I think also read while you're at the gym on the.

Maria:

I do.

Neil:

Right, right.

Maria:

And that's part of it. I don't like ebooks, but they serve my life. And also, you know, I don't live in an infinite home and I've run out of bookshelf space.

So I'm conserving my bookshelf space for things that are pretty irreplaceable. Like this first edition of The Little Prince and books that are no longer in print that I have a lot of notes in and things like that. I literally have no more room to put physical books.

So the ebooks help with that. But of course, the challenge for me is that a lot of my reading is of bygone things that are not in print. We're definitely not in ebooks for me.

Neil:

Right. So you have to get the hardcovers probably.

Maria:

I do. They're from antiquarian booksellers and they're like falling apart because they're 200 years old. But I love that.

I mean, I understand the necessity of paperbacks, the invention of paperbacks to make books more affordable. Like I get that. One of my closest friends, Sarah McNally, she runs McNally Jackson, which is the most beloved independent bookstores here in New York.

And she is the most thoughtful, compassionate person in terms of what serves readers best. And she always reminds me that paperbacks have a lot of advantages in getting more people to read books, basically. I get it.

Props to them. No judgment. I loathe them.

Neil:

I love your passion. So it sounds like you're not an audiobook consumer either.

Maria:

It really depends on the narrator. I mean, I don't pay as much attention to an audiobook. This is a piece of self-knowledge that I've had to accept even when I'm trying to focus on it.

Something about it going through the ears for me is not as rich and effective. But a really compelling narrator makes a real difference.

Neil:

Interesting.

Maria:

Then you become taken in a story which is why I'm very deliberate about the narrators for my books.

Neil:

Oh, right. Oh, so, oh, interesting. So you have been careful to, so you don't narrate your own books, but you're careful in choosing the narrator of your books.

Maria:

Well, in this universe and verse book, it'll be interesting because it's a funny collaboration. So it's 15 essays about different aspects of science, each paired with a poem by somebody else. So I write the essays and then I choose poems.

I mean, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Maya Angelou and so forth. And so for this one, what we decided to do, I always do it with friends. My friend Lily Taylor is doing the narration, but what we decided to do is that she's an incredible actor and she has my favorite voice in the universe.

Very unique, very unique, raspy voice. We decided she's going to read the prose, the essays, and I'm going to read the poems because I'm much more comfortable reading somebody else's writing than my own. I think a lot of writers who read their own books get in their head because they wrote it and they read in this kind of weird stilted way because they're reading with their writing mind and not a performance mind.

So it's very rare for me to hear an author read their own work and like it. I think authors really, really kind of need to have some humility and understand that's a different art form. Narration and performance, they are a different art.

And if you're a great writer, that's amazing. It doesn't guarantee they're a great reader.

Neil:

Oh, I love this. This is such a fun conversation. Yeah, it's interesting.

I don't know if you've ever listened to Lincoln in the Bardo, the audiobook.

Maria:

I did. Right. That was a performance cast.

And in fact, I started reading it. So I am in a book club. I'm in my first ever book club.

That my friend Sarah McNally wrote me into. And Lincoln in the Bardo the first book we read. And I started reading it on paper and then a friend who's a poet, who's very old school, who I never would have thought as an audio person, she said, get the audiobook.

Just trust me. And we all did it in both physical and audio. It's extraordinary.

But it's very unique.

Neil:

That's a very unique one. But there are some other like I think Lin-Manuel Miranda has read, you know, who's the author? I'm thinking of Puerto Rican author A Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and those books.

I think Lin-Manuel Miranda reads. And I have heard that Audible is the number one hirer of actors in the world now because, you know, just because of how many books there. Yeah, there's more actors in, I guess, New Jersey or wherever it is than in Hollywood because they're reading e-books.

But that's interesting. Okay. Do you have a favorite bookstore, living or dead?

Now you've mentioned McNally Jackson.

Neil:

Oh, yeah.

Maria:

McNally Jackson, the South Seaport location is my favorite. Partly because it's easier for me to get to on the bike and ferry. And partly because they have a cafe that makes the best matcha latte in New York.

Neil:

So where is South Seaport? What is that? Is that in Brooklyn, Manhattan?

I'm just don't know my New York geography.

Maria:

I'm so sorry. Yes, I'm being such a New Yorker.

Neil:

No, no.

Maria:

Seaport is the kind of, I guess lower in Manhattan area on the other side, south on where the two bridges, the Brooklyn and the Manhattan Bridge land on the Manhattan side, then you go south toward the tip of the island. So it's almost the very typical tip, but it's on the edge of the water. It's the area in Manhattan that got most damaged by Sandy.

And I will also mention random fact. And it's right now, they restored it after standing. There's a lot of like shopping and fancy stores and cafes and kind of bougie little places.

McNally Jackson, the bookstore is the only business in South Seaport that survived COVID. Oh, wow. Which tells you something about the bookstore itself and New Yorkers love a book.

Neil:

Yeah, in the community.

Maria:

In the community. But McNally Jackson is, I mean, Sarah's so thoughtful about how she builds bookstores. She would take the train in the middle of the night to her Rockefeller Center store because she wants to make sure the new paint color looks good in the dark.

You know, this is a level of passion and devotion to the experience of book selling book reverence that she puts in and that makes for a great bookstore.

Neil:

I think absolutely. And by the way, interesting New York bookstore fact is that way back in Chapter 107 of 3 Books, I interviewed Latanya and Jerry of the Bronx Bound Books Bus, which is bookstore number two in the entire Bronx. So there is one bookstore in the Bronx, but this one is Books on Wheels.

It's a bus that's been painted and turned into a bookstore. Do you know about this?

Maria:

Oh, wonderful. No, but I love a library mobile. I did a little library mobile project during Occupy Wall Street, but because I love those mobile things.

Neil:

Oh, exactly. Well, the interesting note that they share with me, which I think is probably obvious to you, but maybe not to other people is that Manhattan and the Bronx have a very similar population, but Manhattan is 82 bookstores now, formerly 300, but 82 is still a lot. And the Bronx has two, you know, including the bus.

Right.

Maria:

So it's just partly, unfortunately, So that book that you mentioned that I did the Velocity of Being, the letters book, that was all the proceeds were donated to the New York Public Library system from that book. And my friend Claudia and I, who made it together, she's a publisher. She runs Enchanted Lion Books.

And this was our project for eight years. We decided deliberately to divide equally amongst all the branches of the library, even though there are so many fewer branches than the Bronx than in Manhattan and Brooklyn. And which is anyway, just a tiny little way of addressing that inequality.

But yes, I'm aware of it. And I'm so glad they have this wheeled antidote.

Neil:

Wheeled antidote is a great word for it. What is your book lending policy?

Maria:

Book lending.

Neil:

Yeah, do you lend people your books?

Maria:

My book lending policy is zero. I buy people new copies. I have notes in there.

I don't know.

Neil:

Yeah, you don't.

Maria:

I have lent maybe two books ever only to Sarah because she's the most responsible book reader in the universe. But I have doggedly, you know, claim them back.

Neil:

Well, this is the thing I lend and then and then add regret later. So this is great. This is more challenging.

Is there one book you wish you could read again for the first time?

Maria:

Oh, oh my God.

Maria:

What a great question. I mean, that's like asking which of your past selves do you want to be again for the first time? With the caveat that I have now on my fourth rereading of it.

But I wish I could read it from scratch from zero is Einstein's dreams by Alan Lightman.

Neil:

I've never read it. Oh, oh, that's partly why I asked the question. This is Einstein's dreams.

Okay, got it. This is harkening back to your point on number one, which is that you have no more space in your place for books. But I have a question.

How do you organize your books on your bookshelf at home?

Maria:

I had a very good system which was to Matt. Well, it's by sections that are thematic. So, you know, biographies and autobiographies, letters and diaries, science, philosophy, and so forth within each section I do organize by color because I just like it.

But the problem with that is that geometry is a problem. You know, a bookshelf has a finite length and your mind does not. So you acquire more books as you age and time goes on and each section expands in mental space, but you can no longer expand it in space because the walls are the wall, you know.

And so my system kind of broke down after a few years because then I ran out of space into the respective sections. I started putting them in random places. But I know exactly where each book in my house is.

So I can find it right away just have a mental map of it. It just doesn't look very, you know, handsome.

Neil:

That's amazing that you have like it sounds like a photographic memory though and where every book is. That's hard. Do you have a white whale book or any book that you have been chasing the longest whoever you want to interpret that?

Maria:

Well, not that I can think of. I'm pretty good with finding what I look for.

Neil:

Yeah. And there's not a book that you like want to read for years and years and years that you don't. If you want to read it, you tackle it immediately.

Maria:

Yeah, I would say so. I mean, I will say I have a total blind spot about the so-called classics. I haven't read most of the canon of the classics, but I'm also not super keen on it.

I mean, I do want to read the Brothers Karamozov, which I've started a couple of times and I want to do it and some kind of mental block prohibits me. So I guess that will be the closest. George Saunders actually the swim in the pond in the rain pushed me much closer to actually doing it.

His great book on the Russian masters.

Neil:

Yes, yes. I've read and loved that book. It's my favorite book on writing, even though I don't write fiction.

It's just a wonderful. Yeah, it's a wonderful book. What are one or two principles you follow about marking up or annotating your books while reading them?

Maria:

Well, I'm not sure that I have principles. It has to be spontaneous. It has to be like conversation.

I mean, the purpose of having marginalia or writing or highlighting anything is that it sparks a response to you and that has to be spontaneous and premeditated.

Neil:

I love it. Maria Popova, you are a gift. You have given the world so much through then brain pickings.

Now The Marginalian with your wonderful Sunday newsletter, which I get every Sunday with the amount of stuff you post on social media. So kindly, so generously and always ad free. I know you don't do many interviews.

That's partly why it was such a gift for you to come on the show. Thank you for sharing your formative books with us, letting me read them, ask you questions and go everywhere with your wonderful mind to explore these books. It's a real, real gift and I'm deeply grateful to you for coming on the show.

Thank you so much.

Maria:

Thank you, Neil, for having me and thank you for your wonderful counter-cultural project and your stewardship of books that will outlive us.

Neil:

Hey, everybody, it's just me, just Neil again, hanging up my basement with my backpack full of wires again. You know, I, you know, just before Maria and I hit record, maybe 10 minutes before she wrote an email because we sent her this invitation for a service called riverside.fm, which Allie Ward from Ologies told me to use. It's been great for us.

I recommend it if you're in the podcasting world and she wrote a very nice email that I'll paraphrase it. She was kind of like, oh, I didn't realize that this was videotaped. If it was, if it's videotaped, I don't do video.

I don't do videos. And so I will gracefully bow if the video is mandatory, you know, and I wrote back right away saying like, oh, no, no, no, no, it's not mandatory. We could turn it off.

Honestly, every time I have to videotape a podcast, I kind of feel this internal off and she wrote back the internal off. It's one of the best guideposts to the creative life that I know. And I've been thinking a lot about whether I want to do these podcasts on video.

You know, the number one most listened to podcast I've ever done is David Sedaris. There's no video, right? Like there's just no video.

Tarantino is up there. There's no video. We just have the sound on YouTube and a static image.

I could change that static image to a moving image. Maybe my hand flipping a book over and over again or something. Or the constellations or flying through outer space or whatever.

Something to make it visually appealing. But I find that when I videotape them, I feel like I need to get dressed up for my, like I'm wearing rags right now. For lack of better words, I'm wearing rags.

I wear rags a lot. My goal is comfort, right? I didn't shave before talking to you right now.

I didn't comb my hair. But if I record on video, I feel like I have to do all that stuff. And because it's just a more...

We talked about this with Cal Newport. It's like you have to kind of put on your front all the time. But I don't want to go through life wearing fancy clothes and combing my hair all the time.

Neither do you. Neither does anybody. And something about the video-fication of the world kind of pushes us into that professional presentation orientation a little more.

And so I'm thinking about that. But it's not just that. It's also, it just takes a lot more time.

I feel like it damages in some way the sacrosanct bubble that you can create with somebody that maybe is kind of like, you know, like late at night at a sleepover when the lights are out and you get into like the juicier conversations. But you can't see each other. Or the way that you might be facing out the front windshield of your car driving and your child might be in the backseat and you get into the juicier conversations.

Or both people are facing at the front. Like what is it about not looking at someone's face that makes the conversation more intimate? I don't know why.

But I think it's true. I certainly feel that. Terrible Thanks for Asking is a wonderful podcast by Nora McInerney, former guest in 3 Books.

She and I have talked about this because she also has been loathe to kind of videotape everything. However, other podcasts I like, like the ritual podcast, videotape everything. So something I'm certainly wrestling with.

For now, it does feel relaxing, relieving to just be audio only here. So that is my temptation, I will say. And even when I interviewed Jonathan Franzen on 137, you know, the last chapter, I kind of felt not stiffening, but there is some sort of formalification by him and by me because we were videotaping it. Maybe if we hadn't have videotaped it, we would have got even juicier. I don't know. Anyway.

Wow is the kind of emotional response to listening to Maria Popova wax prophetic on so many things. So many quotes jumped out to me out of this conversation. Here are six.

The self is a kind of book that is constantly being reread and rewritten by the person living with it. I love that. The self is a kind of book that is constantly being reread and rewritten by the person living with it.

Another quote, right now I'm very troubled by this whole thing about cultural appropriation because when you think about education, learning, that is appropriation. You are literally taking in somebody else's knowledge and incorporating it into your own 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. Amen to Maria on that one. Number three, if we're not a little bit embarrassed of the people we used to be, we're kind of not doing it right.

I love that. I relate to that. I kind of mentioned it in the intro and I was reading the byline on her on her blog.

Not byline, the sub headline. I find identity the least interesting thing about people. Actually, identity and opinion.

Unfortunately, we live now at a time and an era of identities and opinions being the kind of front line to personhood. Wow, that is such an interesting thought. As we go deeper, she says, we'll call this the fifth quote, I think the most interesting things are the things that light us up, the things that are portals to wonder for us.

Oh, yeah, that is so true. You know, when you go to a party or something, instead of saying, how are you? I think the better question is, what do you find interesting lately or what are you thinking about lately?

And then you get this gut reaction of something the person likes. When I started my Quizno sub franchise in 2003, I wrote about this in You Are Awesome or The Resilience Equation as I'm trying to call it in my mind now, the Orange book that I put out in 2019 the head office told me to hire pretty girls. I'm not kidding.

When I say that, they're not there anymore. It's a terrible thing to say. I was like, what do you mean hire pretty girls?

They're like hire pretty girls. That's how you hire. I'm like, wow, like this is a professional company purportedly.

This is terrible. So I come up with a hiring process and my first question is just a one sentence phone interview first interview and I just say, spend 10 minutes, I think say five minutes, spend five minutes telling me about something you love. That's it.

That was the entire interview. And so I got this guy named Richard who went on for five minutes about skateboarding and all these different skateboarding wheels. I was like, I can make this guy excited about sandwiches if he's excited about skateboarding.

And so I was just gauging their kind of, you know, wonder potential to put Maria's word of wonder in there. Yeah, like wonder potential. What do you find interesting?

Side note. I also love the title of the ritual pockets with Casey Neistat where he calls it Casey Neistat's relentless pursuit of interestingness. Same kind of idea.

So many more quotes. How about this one? We really fucked up music.

Musicians are now commercial vehicles for selling apps and subscription services. Amen. Because she's talking about the commodification of cultural material calling it content.

I think that was like a we'll call that five B and here's quote number six. I think our highest calling is to love the world, to love the world as it is and as we are. Wow.

I think our highest calling is to love the world, to love the world as it is and as we are. Those quotes together with a whole bunch of others will be over at 3books.co where you can always find ad free, sponsor free, not content. The creative output of the show is the show notes.

It is the quotes that we said. It is the images of me and the guests if we were live and together. There is the top 1000 page.

So you can click the top corner. It says the top 1000 and then you can scroll down and it's a list of every single formative book ever mentioned on the show including three more books that we're adding to the top 1000 today, including number 598 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. Number 597 Love and Saint Augustine by Hannah Arendt, A-R-E-N-D-T.

Number 596 Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck and we of course will add an asterisk to number 715 The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I don't say his last name nearly as well as Maria does. That was added to our list originally in chapter 96 with Dave Cheesewright. Dave, the CEO of Walmart International who was my former boss. Interesting that they both picked the same book. Now, I just want to say a big thank you to you for listening and to Maria for coming on 3 Books. Are you still here? Did you make a pass of three second pause? If so, I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club.

This is the club where I talk directly to you. You talk directly to me. We hang out.

We share your voicemails. We go deep on a word nerd quest to find the etymology of an interesting word. We're going to have a word cloud to a far shore with Maria and we just hang out.

It's like the after party of the show. I'm so glad you are here. This is one of three clubs that we have for 3 Books listeners.

Three bookers, including The Secret Club, which I just mailed out something for. So if you don't know what The Secret Club is and you want to join, just call us. Call 1-833-READ-ALOT.

It is a real phone number. If it doesn't work. So I got one from New Zealand the other time that said it didn't work.

Well, just send me like just make a recording on your phone and just email it to me. You know, you can just email me a voicemail. It should work everywhere though.

We are playing grasshopper. This phone subscription company like $29 a month to have a global phone number. Sometimes there's different zeros and ones and country codes and all that stuff though.

So 1-833-READ-ALOT. Anyway, let's start off the end of the podcast up as we always do by going to the phones.

Max:

Hi, my name is Max. I'm calling from Montreal, Canada. And it looks like my finger was having a lot of fun pressing the button three.

I was nervous to call but excitement got better of me and it was after rereading the introduction to this book, Poets Choice by Edward Hirsch. It says, quote, the poems featured in Poets Choice consistently grapple with death, suffering, and loss. They defend the importance of individual lives and rebel at the way individuals are dwarfed by mass culture.

They're unaccommodating. They portray and communicate on behalf of people at the margins of society, exiles, transplants, refugees, nomads, people with no country, people split between two different countries, split between the past and the present. They search for meaning and language and forms, particular only the poetry in the realm of emptiness for company and the face of isolation.

Poems are always in dialogue with other poems and in conversation with history and they invite readers into that conversation which offers a particular form of communication with community and fusion. And wow, does that top make you want to read poetry? Much like your podcast makes me want to read more books and discuss art forms.

Anyways, keep on keeping on and thank you for this podcast.

Neil:

Wow, I listened to that voicemail three times just now. I went back and listened to it because Max, you speak fast, a person after my own heart, a fast talker. Fast talkers unite.

Max is so wonderful to have you in the 3 Books community. Max from Montreal, alliterative of course, and you just read us a part of the introduction to a book called Poets Choice by Edward Hirsch, H-R, sorry, H-I-R-S-C-H. So many phrases jump out for that grappling with death, suffering a loss, rebelling at the way individuals are dwarfed by mass culture.

Yes, poems are always in dialogue with other poems. You asked us, does that not make you want to read poetry? Much like 3 Books makes me want to read more books.

It does make me want to read more poetry and I felt like this is a perfect voicemail to attach to Maria Popova as our queen poet herself. I mean, she kind of feels like a being of light and energy, just channeling like all the voices of the past. And she had that funny line at the beginning like I, most of my friends are dead or like I get along well with people that are gone kind of thing.

David Mitchell says that too back in chapter 58. You know, most of my friends or most of my favorite authors are good and dead. I think he says my paraphrases are not as good as the real quotes I know, but I'm trying to say the same thing.

So thank you Max for your voicemail for your phone call. If anyone else listening is like, I want to leave a note. I'm feeling a bit nervous about it.

Please don't feel nervous. I hear that all the time. Couple ways to get over nerves.

Just think of one book that changed your life and leave us with that book. Say, hey, love the show or hate the show, whatever. Here's one book that changed your life or changed my life and get my tense as well.

And then we'll look it up. I'll talk a bit about it. One reflection, a dream guest you have.

One reflection from one guest. Something you disagreed with. You know, Gina De Buoniguero, who was our guest with AJ Eggerwall last year.

She called in and disagreed with a guest. Well, I love that. This is just one view on one day of everything.

So it's nice to have disagreements. We won't do a letter of the chapter I think because I threw one in the front of the show this time as I want to start doing more and more and I keep saying that. But we're going to put that in the front.

And then we will, I guess it's time. It is. It must be time.

It is time for the word of the chapter and for this chapter's word. Let's of course go back to the ever loquacious Maria Popova. Here we go.

Maria:

Illusion creativity just this combinatorial thing and it's very confident with the spirit of the book. He would have still bristled repugnance. We know cerebrally that we are finite and we're transient.

The self-acceptance of your parameters uphill kind of Sysyphean experience. It is an allegory. It's the saccharin nature of it.

Neil:

A treat of words there for us to choose from. But I think this time we are going to go with saccharin.

Neil:

Yes, we are going to go with saccharin.

Neil:

Also known as excessively sweet or sentimental S-A-C-C-H-A-R-I-N-E. That E at the end is actually kind of interesting. We're going to talk about that in just a second.

First of all, saccharine the adjective. Miriam Webster, do you have a different voice?

Neil:

Saccharin.

Neil:

Okay, just a little bit more professional. One is of relating to or resembling that of sugar, like a saccharin taste. One B is yielding or containing sugar like saccharin vegetables.

Then there's the word that we were talking about, which I think it's most commonly used and that I know of overly or sickishly sweet. And another one a little bit more ingratiatingly or effectively agreeable or friendly. I have been called saccharin before.

I will say I will add that. Ingratiatingly or effectively agreeable or friendly. Okay, fourth is also called overly sentimental like a saccharin love story.

Another word for that is mawkish. M-A-W-K-I-S-H. Exaggeratedly or childless childlessly emotional.

I'm childlessly emotional sometimes, I guess. But why did I say that E was important? Well, because saccharin without the S-A-C-C-H-A-R-I-N is also called benzo-sulfamide or E-9-5-4.

You may know it as a non-nutritive artificial sweetener, most commonly branded as sweet and low. Over the 150-year-old history of saccharin, which by the way, the etymology of the word comes from the Greek word both the saccharin without the E, which is the chemical one, and saccharin with the E, which means the figuratively derogatory, unpleasantly over polite, overly sweet sense. Both come from the Greek word saccharin, which means gravel.

Gravel. Yes, a surprise. We were not expecting it to mean gravel.

However, that's where it comes from. It's also an obsolete name for sucrose. It was discovered 150 years ago by the chemists.

Well, there's kind of a fight over it. Konstantin Fallberg, a chemist working on coal tar derivatives. Isn't that interesting how these things are discovered?

On coal tar. He's working on coal tar at Johns Hopkins in 1879. Notice a sweet taste on his hand one night, and he realized this is probably the benzoic sulfamide, which he'd been working on that day.

He published some studies in 1879 and 1880, and then he was starting to work in New York City, and he applied for patents in countries talking about how you produce this sweet substance that he named saccharin without the E. Okay, so two years later, he began production of the substance in a factory in the suburbs of Germany, and he got rich off of it. Well, the other guy, femson.

Who's femson? Femson, who are you? Remson.

Ah, Remson was his fellow chemist who grew irritated, believing he deserved the credit for the substance produced because they were made in his factory. Remson commented, Fallenberg is a scoundrel, and nauseates me to hear my name mentioned in the same breath as him. Okay, okay.

Chemists fighting, not a new story. One guy's factory, the other guy's invention. Yeah, who owns it?

It's kind of a debate. Well, saccharin's gone in and out of legalization and popularity throughout the 20th century. For a while, people thought it was like the savior for dieting in the 60s and 70s because it's a calorie-free sweetener, right?

But then, over time, they started saying, oh no, this causes cancer in rats in the 60s. And they're like, no, no, this doesn't cause cancer in rats. Those rats already had cancer, wasn't these?

Well, this thing. Over and over, back and forth, all the way up to the year 2010, that's the most recent ruling about saccharin, where the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, has now officially removed saccharin from their list of hazardous constituents and commercial chemical products. Now, here we are in 2024, 14 years later, because the EPA has taken off their list of hazardous substances, do we just now plow saccharin?

Or are we somewhat suspicious of the EPA? Are we somewhat suspicious of our trust in these bodies that are determining what we should put in there? I don't know, guys.

A chemical that some guy in the 1800s was, kind of came up with when he was working with coal tar. I don't know. I'm sticking with a peach over here.

That's what I'm sticking with. You keep your saccharin, and it's fascinating history over there. Saccharin without the E, saccharin with the two versions of the same thing, overly or sickishly sweet.

Well, I hope you didn't find today's chapter overly or sickishly sweet, but you still found it sweet. I did too. It was wonderful hanging out with you on this buck moon in July with Maria Popova on chapter 138 of 3 Books I cannot wait. We're going to put out a few more pages. Okay, I'm still wondering if we should do pages in the fall.

I'm kind of thinking maybe we get rid of pages completely. They're gumming up the RSS feed. We just want to have chapters.

Maybe we just do chapters and then we put greatest hits on the new moon. That's what I'm thinking. What if we threw David Sedaris and Quentin Tarantino and Judy Bloom on the new moons people I'd be kind of fun.

And now we've got six years of stuff to kind of go back to kind of like Maria Popova's surprise me button on the left side of The Marginalian. where you can just get a taste from the past. If the shows are as timeless as we have designed them to be. I mean, we are talking about formative books after all, then maybe that works.

Yes, I am spit balling with you. Let me know 1-833-READ-A-LOT or via email or via review. If you have a view on the matter and until next time, Chapter 139.

Well, we are going to be talking with a walking duck. Like a human who dresses up as a duck. His name is Lewis Mallard.

Well, I say his. I don't even know if it's his. You'll you'll you will determine he is an interdimensional psychedelic folk artist.

Yes, we are going to hang out with Lewis Mallard over in August of 2024. But until then, remember that you are what you eat and you are what you read. Keep turning the page, everybody.

I'll talk to you soon.

Listen to the chapter here!

Chapter 137: Jonathan Franzen finds fellow freaks and forges fantastic fiction

Listen to the chapter here!

Jonathan Franzen:

Yeah, she was very disapproving of the idea of my becoming a novelist. It's like, you're gonna lie for a living? That this was a portrait of an asshole. That Josef K. is a royal asshole. Kids are not innocent little creatures.

It does seem a shame to spend a lot of time, when you have a lot of choices and there are a lot of good books, to spend time reading crap.

Jonathan:

It's like, I'm alive when I'm writing a novel, and part of me is not really alive when I'm not.

Neil Pasricha:

I remember getting the knife. It was 10 years ago, Christmas 2013 or so, and I was trying to make the case to stuff a 576 page book into Leslie and I's carry-on bag before we went on a beach trip with her grandparents and extended family for a week over the Christmas holidays. She's like, you only have 100 pages left, are you sure you don't want to just read this when we get home?

And I was like, I was so deep into reading The Corrections, and it was like something I'd never read before. I had to go get the knife, a steak knife with a wooden handle and big serrations. And as you can see here, if you're watching this on YouTube, and if you're not, you can kind of picture it, I sawed down the spine of the book and took the last 100 pages with me on the trip.

Now, the deep blasphemous pain that I felt slicing the paperback spine and carving off the last 100 pages was far away by the exquisite suite of pleasures I had slowly savoring the book on the beach all week. I had never read anything like The Corrections before, with such a clarity of character, wildly spinning plot, and unique three-dimensional realness that just page by page, twist by twist, left pits in my stomach, lumps in my throat, and tears in my eyes. I read Freedom, which came out in 2010, about the same way.

Purity, 2014, the same way. Crossroads, my most recent Jonathan Franzen read, came out in 2021 the same way, with equal parts admiration, fascination, and a psychologically transporting feeling of just living outside of myself for a while. Jonathan Franzen is one of the most successful, accomplished, and decorated writers in the world.

He is a Fulbright Scholar, National Book Award winner, Pulitzer Prize finalist, PEN/Faulkner finalist, two-time Oprah Book Club pick, voted to Time's 100 Most Influential, as well as gracing the Time cover as the Great American Novelist, and much, much more. The New York Mag calls his books works of total genius, and Chuck Klosterman, writing in GQ, says Franzen is the most important fiction writer in America, and, if viewed from a distance, perhaps the only important one. That is tall praise.

There is just nothing, though, like reading a Jonathan Franzen novel, and it was a sheer delight going deep with the deep master to discuss writing advice, the magic of the written word, what heroes look like today, competing with David Foster Wallace, the best that we can do for the climate, and, of course, Jon's three most formative books. Are you ready to flip the page into Chapter 137 now? Let's go.

Jon, thank you so much for coming on 3 Books. It is such an honor to have you on the show. I have been, as you know, inviting you for many years.

I have read, in order, The Corrections, then Freedom, then Purity, you know, then Crossroads, and a dabbling of your nonfiction throughout. Not a ton of your nonfiction, but Why Birds Matter was one of the massive tipping points for me to become a birder, and I am just so grateful to you for coming on the show. So, thank you.

Thank you so much for doing this.

Jonathan:

It is a pleasure. I actually have a lot of questions about you and 3 Books, and my natural mode is more of a question asker than a question answerer, but I will submit to your questions.

Neil:

Well, I am very open to them. I want to just say to our listeners, you know, most of whom do listen to us. This is a show that has started in audio format.

I think of it like theater of the mind. I have very reluctantly come to this, like, you know, must-be videotaped format. It is pretty new for me, but I will say for those listening, who I think are most of us, most people listening, you know, I am speaking to you today from Vancouver.

I just got invited out here and did not want to reschedule us, so I messed up with the local library. I was going to have this in the West Vancouver Library, but when I gunked up the invitation, they got full, and so a friend of mine, Matt Ballez, here in West Vancouver, has kindly, literally moved his piano lessons and his roofer and everything out of the house so that I can have full reign of the house. It is a light gray day here with a gentle drizzle, and I am speaking to you on a nice afternoon in Vancouver.

I am in a room that is long. It has a bookshelf on one side with a ton of interesting, you know, novels and first editions, and there are old Kafkas on the shelf, and I can see The Power Broker here in Barney's version, and A Tale of Two Cities, and like, you know, one of those big hardcovers that comes in its own sleeve. I have got a blue lamp on my left with a nice, you know, kind of yellowish light coming in and a little oil painting of some chopped up oranges above my face.

I wondered if, for the listeners, you might also describe your scene for us.

Jonathan:

I am in my office, which is, as you can see, dark, terrible picture quality. I am basically sitting in the light of a little reading lamp I have on my desk, which is in a corner of the room. You see my blackout curtain over there.

There are more blackout curtains to my right. It is fairly chilly. 66 is the temperature I keep it set at, and it is a nice, quiet day.

We are having some heavy showers in Santa Cruz. I am in Santa Cruz, California. What else can I tell you?

Books of my own are behind me. I finally have a permanent office after, oh, 25 years of itinerant borrowing of various offices. I have now a set of glass cabinets where I was able to take out all the editions of my books and put them under lock and key, so I am not tempted to actually do that really dismal thing of going and reading my own work when the new work is not going well.

There you have it.

Neil:

I am wearing—thank you for that—heavy rain. I love your weather descriptions. I should say, page one of The Corrections, the madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through.

You could feel it: Something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star, gust after gust of disorder.

Of course, page one of Crossroads, your most recent novel, the sky broken by the bare oaks and elms of new prospect was full of moist promise, a pair of frontal systems grayly colluding to deliver a white Christmas. I feel like you have this ability to touch and cajole and describe weather in such a unique way.

Jonathan:

I work at it. It doesn't come easily. Weather is, of course, incredibly important.

I think it was Faulkner who said a person is nothing but the sum of his experiences of weather. Who are you at your core? It's the weather you remember.

Of course, in Faulkner's case, that would have been the hot, hot summers in Mississippi and the gray, drizzly winters. If you're trying to create a world as a novelist and you want to put people in the world, you're trying to tap into a shared body of experiences of weather. The trick is to do it in a way that hasn't been done before, to write a sentence no one has written about the weather before without trying too hard and showing you're trying to write such a sentence.

I work on that stuff and I can feel I need a sentence about weather. It might take half a day to get a good sentence about weather.

Neil:

Wow. Wow. That is incredible.

It makes so much sense for the descriptions that we're reading in many of your books. Just before we started recording, you said, I will submit, although I have many questions about you and 3 Books. Just to help our orientation here, if you have anything you want to ask me, feel free.

I'm very happy to answer. I got 10 pages of questions for you. The least I can do is offer the same.

You can ask me anything you want if you want to get to know the show.

Jonathan:

I'll ask you one question. I also work as a journalist. As I was saying before we started recording, I'm in many ways more comfortable as a question asker.

But I'll restrict myself to one question, which was, where did this notion of three books for this now rather lengthy series come from? How did you settle on that?

Neil:

Yeah. Well, I was inspired by basically three quotes that I read. I will read you the quotes because you just quoted a bit of Faulkner to me.

The three quotes were George R. R. Martin's famous Game of Thrones quote, which is, A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies.

The man who never reads lives only one. The Seneca quote from On the Shortness of Life, which is, Of all people, only those who are at leisure, who make time for philosophy, only those are really alive. For they not only keep a good watch over their own lifetimes, but they annex every age to theirs.

And finally, a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads. And I am often fed up with the present. And so I thought that one way to tell people's stories in an interesting way, that's not just a chitchat, would be to ask them which three books most shaped their lives.

I can tell a lot by the pause I get before people answer. You know, if they answer in 10 seconds, that tells you something. And the books are all from two years ago.

That tells you something. But if they are thoughtful about it, then it lends itself to a great conversation. And I get to sort of design it so that the side benefit of the research is I get to read more.

And typically, I get to read stuff I never heard of before, or I haven't read before. In your case, I read all three of your books. And I'm sorry to say, I probably wouldn't have.

There's just too many books. And so it allows me to design a style of research that I really like. I'm able to spend typically 40 to 60 hours reading someone's books, reading every interview, listening to every interview.

And then I get these conversations, which I think are unique enough that it also enables me, because I do believe in this principle that different is better than better. So it enables me to, I think, land guests of a stature who I may not otherwise entice, if the conversation wasn't something they haven't been asked before. And so when I lobbed into that the principle of no ads, no sponsors, no promotions, no commercials, no interruptions, I'm trying to create like a sacrosanct, like a space that is special and precious and rare and antithetical to a lot of the stuff I don't like about the world, which is that it's short, it's interrupted with ads, it really is ads, you know, with a little bit of content in the middle. And it's not about stuff that lasts forever.

It's about stuff that just happened. And so it's just me trying to gently push myself into a lot of things that I know I like, but I wouldn't naturally encounter, I think.

Jonathan:

That's a good, full explanation. Thank you.

Neil:

Well, I know I'm talking to the good, full explanation master. And so I at least got to come to the plate with a paragraph so that I can hopefully encourage you to keep doing the same with me. You've been very generous to go through the depths of your experiences in your life, Jon. And I think the first thing you said to me was, you know, I've been reading for 60 plus years, and I believe you're 64 now. So this will be hard, but okay. And you went through your life.

You came up with three formative books. I've got them here beside me. But before I jump into them, I also took a look deep into everything I could find that you've ever said or written about reading or writing.

And from those collected quotes, of which there are many, I've picked out a few to kind of be a bit of an appetizer to this conversation. I'll offer them to you. And I invite you to expand, explain, elucidate, or as George Saunders told us in Chapter 75, deny, if you would like to, the quote.

So here they are. First off, I believe from The Corrections in 2001, you wrote, Fiction is a solution, the best solution to the problem of existential solitude.

Jonathan:

Yeah, I said that. It was a bit of a compromise position. Came out of a multi-year, mostly via letter conversation I was having with my friend David Wallace.

We were trying to figure out something we could agree on to answer the question, why bother writing fiction? And if I were to say that now, I would probably leave out the word existential. I might say it in a plainer way.

We read to connect. There is a magic to the written word, and particularly the written word in a novel, where you, as a writer, put a vision on the page into this very limited alphabet, 26 letters and a couple of punctuation points. And somebody decodes that, and they could be decoding it down the street, or they could be decoding it 150 years later.

And from that code comes this whole world, and with it, the person who created that world initially. And the traces of the person who created the book are all over the place. It's there in the tone.

It's there in the particular observation. It's mentioning things that hadn't been mentioned before that you recognize as true. You recognize, I've experienced this myself.

I'm seeing characters who are behaving in ways I've witnessed people behave. I'm also understanding that behavior in a way I might not have had I not read it in this form. And that creates this amazing sense of communality, if that's a word, between the writer and the reader.

It's a joint thing. Everything is happening through this medium of ink on a page, and yet you don't feel alone. You feel like somebody has been there experiencing the world the way I have.

Neil:

Wow, beautiful. Thank you. And so many things I want to jump off on, but I'll hold myself back because I have questions about Dave Wallace, of course, and about the magic of the written word, but we're going to get into that.

That's a great one.

Jonathan:

I think I'll just say one more. I mean, we actually, I just assumed not talk too much about Dave. That's all become rather water under the bridge, but I think he was very alone.

And when I say that we kind of worked out a compromise position to answer our questions so we didn't have to write letters about it anymore, and I think the emphasis on loneliness grew out of his own existential loneliness, which was really, really profound. He was a deeply isolated person. In a way, I don't feel myself to be so much.

I'm more somebody who nonetheless likes company.

Neil:

What do you mean a compromised position?

Jonathan:

Well, I would say, hey, maybe the reason to write fiction is this, and he'd say, no, no, no, no, no. Maybe it's this, and we would just go back and forth, and it just continued in this sort of ping pong way until he said, well, maybe what you're trying to say is, and I say, yeah, that's close enough. Maybe we can agree on that and stop talking about it, which is what we did.

Neil:

Interesting. Interesting. Okay, I'll avoid asking more about Dave, but obviously, I'm a big fan of a lot of stuff he wrote.

1996 Harper's essay, Perchance to Dream, you said, when a writer says publicly that the novel is doomed, it's a sure bet his new book isn't going well.

Jonathan:

I did say that. I stand by that. I would.

I don't know if it's in that essay, which was subsequently made better and shorter and retitled, Why Bother? It appears in my first essay collection. Maybe in that essay, maybe somewhere else, I also said that a writer's estimate of the number of serious readers in the culture tracks very closely with the number of copies of their last book sold.

Neil:

Oh, that's a great one. I couldn't find it.

Jonathan:

It was particularly striking. I mean, Philip Roth used to say it over and over.

There are about 100,000 serious readers in America, and I swear, you go and look at his book sales and be like, oh, yeah, it's about 100. Well, basically, a serious reader is defined as somebody who buys Philip Roth's book.

Neil:

Oh, that's too funny. So then he changes his tack when he has a big book, I guess, or something.

Jonathan:

Maybe.

Neil:

Yeah.

Jonathan:

I did.

Neil:

Yeah. Well, exactly.

Yeah. So famously, your first two books were critically well-reviewed, but then your third novel, The Corrections, was sort of the big amplification, 1.5 million copies sold, according to some records online, which I don't know if it's true.

Jonathan:

In the US? Yeah, that sounds right.

Neil:

Yeah. Which is big. Which is big.

The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read, colon, where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture? Question mark.

Jonathan:

I think that's from Why Bother as well. Yeah.

Neil:

Okay.

Jonathan:

Again, those were kind of transitional worries of mine when I actually thought it was important to engage with the culture. When I had, I was still burdened with a vestigial notion that writing should be socially useful. It should be perhaps a critique of the society we live in.

It should have some beneficial effect. And of course, you can't have a beneficial effect on the culture if you're not engaging with it. And in the 90s, with the advent of the third screen, following the movie screen and the TV screen, when computers were really taking over in the 90s, we were seeing the beginnings of internet culture.

The rather familiar notion that we were distracting ourselves to death, kind of a Neil Postman critique of modern culture also. Anyway, a long list of people who had been making that point before, but there was a, there was, this was kind of an echo of something. Here I am talking about Philip Roth again.

I'm not even that big a Philip Roth fan, but he had written an essay in the early 60s, I want to say 1961, called Writing American Fiction. And in it, he was saying like, how do you satirize an American culture that is going to be more ridiculous and amazing and extreme than anything you could possibly make up? 30 years later, the problem seemed to be the sense that I had in my 30s that, wow, this is a really diseased country.

This is a diseased culture. And I want to bring news of that disease, but the disease consists in the fact that nobody's listening to people like me.

Neil:

Right, exactly.

Jonathan:

Again, all of it sort of in hindsight, the somewhat self-serving complaints of somebody whose second novel hadn't done well, and he was struggling with his third novel.

Neil:

Interesting. But you no longer feel like the writing should be socially useful.

Jonathan:

No, I gave that up. I mean, I try to be helpful to someone or something when I go to nonfiction, particularly my journalism. I am trying to, in some probably necessarily small way, make a difference in what I choose to write about and how I choose to write it.

But the novel, no, I jettisoned all notion of social responsibility. I was liberated. So much so that I called my fourth novel Freedom, which was partly referred to that sense of liberation from this, oh, partly Midwestern, partly angry young man's feeling that I had a job to do.

And the job was to expose everything that was wrong in the country and get people to take up arms against it. Nevermind the fact that it was very hard to find novels anywhere in the history of the novel that had caused such a mass uprising. Nevertheless, I somehow had it in my head for way too long that novels should be doing that.

Neil:

I got a couple more, two more quotes still. On your 2023 interview on the Reading the Room podcast, you said, I'm competitive, period. I don't like being ignored at the expense of writers who I think are bad, period.

That irks me.

Jonathan:

Apparently I did say that. Yeah. Well, I mean, doesn't it irk you?

Well, wouldn't it irk you?

Neil:

I guess I don't, yeah. Go ahead.

Jonathan:

Well, yeah. I mean, I could put that in a less hostile way. I could speak of a sadness and even apply it to myself.

We have finite lives and very finite time for reading. And there are five to eight orders of magnitude more books than I could ever read in my lifetime. And it does seem a shame to spend a lot of time when you have a lot of choices and there are a lot of good books to spend time reading crap.

So I don't tend to read crap because it's almost physically painful.

Neil:

Yeah. The crap is subjective though. I mean, one man's crap is another man's treasure.

Jonathan:

Maybe, yeah.

Neil:

You think there's objective crap?

Jonathan:

Yeah. No, I think... Do we really even need to have that conversation?

I mean, I can find a crap book for you and I can walk you through sentence by sentence, word choice by word choice, character by character, story term by story term, how unbelievably lazy and cliched everything is. And this is not to say that lazy, cliched work doesn't have its uses. Sometimes that's exactly what you want.

You want the familiar trope. It's tiring to be challenged in sentence after sentence to actually think. Maybe you don't want to think.

Maybe you don't even want a fresh way to say, you know, quiet as a mouse. Maybe quiet as a mouse is exactly what you want to read. Nevertheless, it is objectively crap to say that.

Neil:

Yeah, I think it's... So I relate to this. And the way I relate to it though is when I feel like in the books world, there's more, a higher and higher percentage of books that are not books first or books only.

They're books to something else, or on its way to something else, or they're part of a giant marketing... It's like the person that's in the news suddenly has a book. They just have the book because that was one area that they hadn't covered in their marketing camp.

That's the stuff that bothers me. It's the sort of changing what I think of as books into a thing to a word's another end. That's sort of bothering me.

Jonathan:

At any rate, yes. So there's a sadness that people are spending time reading crap. And I'm not competitive only on my own behalf.

I'm competitive on behalf of my many fellow writers who are doing strong original work and who take care with every sentence. And it irks me when I see someone reading a bad book instead of one of our books.

Neil:

Um, thank you for that expansion there. And the last one I have is from your 2016 interview on the Other People podcast, People Spell PPL. This isn't about writing particularly, but I thought you were talking about it in terms of writing.

And you said, the ambition to dwell in the complicated middle has been shown to be unprofitable.

Jonathan:

Wow, I sound more interesting to myself than I actually experienced myself to be. That's a nicely turned phrase. Well, yes.

And it goes to what I was just talking about. It is a luxury to engage with things in a complicated way. Simplicity is comforting.

Um, bad television is comforting because it's simple. And, uh, there was a time when I thought it was a moral failing that you didn't want to engage with complicated art, nuanced art, moral ambiguity, uh, contradictions in character, uh, books or movies with no heroes and no villains, just people who are kind of a mix of the two. All of that.

I used to think, um, I used to look down on people, honestly, in my youthful arrogance who, who, uh, who weren't into that kind of thing. And I came to feel this was mean of me to look down on them because who was I to judge really? Um, I, I've come to the conclusion that it's actually a luxury to read literature, um, literature being defined by its defiance of cliche, including the cliche of, oh, here's a virtuous hero and here's an evil villain.

Um, total cliche. Uh, and you don't find that in a good literary novel. Um, but that's a luxury when you, you know, when you've had a bad day at a bad job, um, and you've got kids and you've got a problematic spouse and you've got the mother-in-law and the house is falling apart.

I mean, like, who am I to tell you, you are wrong to not feel like getting into a really complicated story of where, uh, some people who seem good are not good. Um, and, you know, the, just the whole, the whole landscape of, uh, moral and social and intellectual complexity, uh, who am I to judge you for just wanting at the end of the day to identify with someone who's good and is being, has bad stuff being inflicted on them by bad people? I mean, I get it.

Uh, and, and so it has really been brought home to me that the kind of work I do is for a small percentage of the population. It's not for an economically privileged small percentage of the population. I doubt that Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are reading good books either.

Um, so they have plenty of leisure if they want it. Um, uh, they're not threatened by anything they could, they just don't because that's not their thing. Uh, and if you go to a prison, you'll find that like 3% of the people there are not reading Michael Connelly.

They're, you know, reading George Saunders. It's a small percentage, but it's kind of, it's a, it's a, it's the same percentage across the population, um, without regard to social or economic status. It's, it's, it is a matter of, it's, it's a privilege of how you were born.

It's a privilege of not having to see the world in terms of your own victimhood.

Neil:

Wow. Wow. Wow.

Wow. It is a luxury to engage with things in a complicated way. Literature defined by its defiance of cliche.

Um, you mentioned George Saunders by the way, and I, I, I won't take the bait on Dave Wallace again, but I did, you know, he gave that eulogy at Dave Wallace's funeral, and there was that last paragraph there, and I reached out to him, told him I was going to be speaking to you, and he said, um, because I asked him what you think Dave would make of these times, and he said, uh, I don't know what Dave would make of these times. It's hard to guess what Dave would make of these times.

He was always surprising and enlightening me with his thoughts. That's one thing I really appreciate about him. He was an uncommon thinker, always ahead of the curve.

Please tell Jon, he's one of the kindest people I've ever met, in addition to being a literary giant and a genius and an ongoing inspiration. Tell him we miss him and Kathy, just to let you know.

Jonathan:

Well, that's awfully nice of George. George is, I love George and our friendship goes back many years now. I think we were actually introduced via Dave.

It was Dave who first put George on the radar for me with a tiny story called, I think Isabella, that was in a, um, in the front part of, uh, Harper's, which was just readings that had appeared in a small magazine. And Dave, Dave recognized George as the genius he is, uh, very early on. Um, and I'm grateful today for that.

And I think he kind of brokered our first meeting in person, maybe 20, 25 years ago in New York. Um, yes. And he and Paula did live for a little while in Santa Cruz.

Um, and it was like, Hey, got one of my old writer friends in town, but they have since, uh, relocated for good reason to Southern California.

Neil:

Yeah. Wow. Well, nice little, um, circle, uh, there and how beautiful that Dave introduced the two of you.

And, um, you know, we'd loved having him on 3 Books. It was very nice of him to come on the show as well. Um, and he picked all short, he picked all readable, he picked like you, he picked all readable books.

So it was a Chekhov and a Christmas Carol. And, uh, it was, it was a wonderful getting into those with him.

Jonathan:

So I could have picked those two. And frankly, the trial is not the most readable book.

Neil:

I mean, no, no it's not.

Jonathan:

And, and, and, and, and interestingly, well, we're sorry. Have I, have I just said something?

Neil:

No, it's okay. It's okay.

Jonathan:

Yes. Well, I'll come back to the Christmas Carol because, um, because that pertains to my second, the second book I chose.

Neil:

Ah, okay. So I will, I will bring that back up when we get into your second book. Now we've wet our palette.

We've wet our mental palette. You have given us some wonderful, juicy kind of wide thinking. This is a luxury to be able to engage with things in a complicated way as we are doing right now, as we delve into your three most formative books for each one, I'm going to try to describe the book as if the listener is holding it in their hands in a bookstore.

So I'll do about a 60 second spiel, and then I'll ask you to tell us about your relationship with each book. And then I have a few jumping off questions from there. So let's begin.

Your very first formative book is Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis, originally published by Jeffrey Bless, uh, by Jeffrey Bless publishing in 1951. Um, the original cover is not the one I have. The original cover is Navy blue with a cream circle in the center and a hand-drawn picture of the four pens at Pennsylvania children.

I believe holding hands in a circle, wearing flowing robes. C.S. Lewis, my cover, by the way, which we'll get into is the movie tie in addition, which was founded Doug Miller books, uh, in Korea in Toronto was the only cover he had, but I took it because I thought, let me support the local independent secondhand bookstore, regardless of what version they have. Although I wouldn't normally have grabbed the movie cover.

Um, C.S. Lewis lived from 1898 to 1963. He was the Irish born author of over 40 books with his greatest legacy being the Chronicles of Narnia, a series of seven children's fantasy books that have sold over 120 million copies. What's it about?

This Prince Caspian is the second of the seven novels in the Chronicles of Narnia Narnia where animals talk, trees walk, and a battle is about to begin. A Prince denied his rightful throne gathers an army in a desperate attempt to rid his land of a false King. But in the end, it is a battle of honor between two men alone that will decide the fate of an entire world.

Dewey decimal heads file this one under 823.91 for literature slash English and old English. Jon, please tell us about your relationship with Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis.

Jonathan:

I'm wondering where that ad copy came from. Um, I would certainly not describe it as a novel that builds to hand to hand combat.

Neil:

good reads.

Jonathan:

But yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess it is technically a fantasy novel. You know, there are dungeons and dragons and, you know, it all has that middle ages feel that so many fantasy novels have.

But that's not what the Narnia books really are. Um, they're a weird thing. They, um, they have children at the center of them.

And, uh, in the first of the novels, and we'll put a little asterisk on the numbering of the novels because the copyright holder publisher has made a disastrous decision to reorder the novels in a way that makes absolutely no sense and is abhorrent to any Narnia fan. Um, what are they thinking? I don't know, but it's a bad thought.

Um, end of asterisk. Uh, in the first novel, these, uh, four siblings find their way. Well, the lion, the witch in the first, um, they find their way to this other world by way of a wardrobe in their, um, uncle's house.

Um, uh, one of the it's, it's classic, it's, it's everything a child wants. Children love going in closets and secret little places. And the notion that you could go into that secret wardrobe and kind of get lost in the coats.

And instead of finding the back of the wardrobe, you find yourself in the middle of a dark wood in winter, uh, where there's nothing around except a glowing gas light right in the middle of this dark frozen wood. It's like, that is every child's like, why would you go into a wardrobe if that's not what you're looking for? Um, well, yeah.

So it turns out, um, they, they find their way to this other world called Narnia and, uh, things are not good there. It's eternal winter. Uh, there's a witch in charge and the witch is basically banished.

Mild seasons. Um, and it turns out they're just, they're just what, uh, was needed to restore Narnia to its proper self and vanquish the witch. Uh, and, and then they go home and no better than that.

They, um, they are rightly celebrated for having liberated Narnia and they proceed to live an entire life there. They are, they, they don't ever seem to get into sex and kids so much. It's like they just become older, bigger versions of themselves.

A king and a queen and a prince and a princess or two boys and two girls. Um, and then one day they go home and they climb out of the wardrobe and it's like one minute later. Um, so in terms of a, a metaphorical rendering of what it is like as a child to sink into a book, um, and then emerge from a book, you can't really do better than that.

That, that Lewis is one of the, one of the many reasons why that's an enduringly popular book is it basically describes what it's like. If you're a kid who has learned to read, has learned that you just pick up a book and you're sitting on this ugly sofa and your parents' blah living room and you are just transported to another world and you live there and you, and you, and in fact you experienced an entire lifetime. If you sit on the sofa long enough and read the entire book, you might experience an entire lifetime.

And then it's like, oops, suddenly you're back in this blah living room and it's time to go to bed. Um, so that was the first book. Um, and I don't know if he intended to write seven from the start.

I'm actually not a great student of his biography. I did see a movie, um, about his late love, uh, played by Deborah Winger. He was played, I believe by Anthony Hopkins.

Um, it was a pretty good movie. At any rate, I don't know if he was intending to write seven books, but he wrote a sequel and Prince Caspian was that sequel. And although it doesn't have that like perfect pair of iconic metaphors, one going into the closet and emerging in a different world and the other being replicating the experience of reading a novel, um, it, it's the one that really, really stays with me.

So very briefly, um, the four Pevensie kids are on a train platform in England. I think they're either coming back from, um, boarding school or they're on their way back to boarding school and they're to school and suddenly they're just like, they get sucked away and they find themselves on this desert Island, totally forested. Um, who knows where they are and they blunder around and they find ruins.

They find a ruined castle and they're kind of like, they're, they're freaked out, but they're not completely innocent because they've had the experience of getting sucked into another world before. So it's like their game. Let's see what's up here.

And there's this, and, and right away, one of the key things for the book is they're, they're just looking at this ruined castle. It's been ruined for hundreds of years. It's completely overgrown.

Um, and, and fall, I mean, there's no roofs. It's just, it's just rubble and, and cellars and stuff like that. It starts to dawn on them.

Wait a minute. We lived here. This was the, this was our palace.

This must be Caravelle. This is where, this is where we ruled as King and Queen and Prince and Princess and had all those parties and went hunting and riding and swimming and all of that. We had, we had this amazing, and look at it now.

How can this be? I mean, it's only a few months later for us and it seems to be like a millennium later here. And that dawning sense of deep time of, of something is really, really weird here that, um, that this thing that we knew so well is now almost completely ruined to the point of being almost unrecognizable.

So that's the first uncanny moment, uh, in the book. And, and it remains uncanny, which is to say, I can't give you a good, um, uh, discursive account of why that is such an amazing effect to achieve, but it, it, it, it's hard as a child to connect to the depth of time. Um, and, and the notion that like St. Louis, where I grew up, that once upon a time, this was forested and Native Americans hunted here and there was a civilization across the river. Now we're ruined, the Coquia Downs. You could see that, but, but, but to really grasp the depth of the, the centuries that it passed, um, actually it turned out to be easier by reading a novel. Um, so I'll just say maybe only one other thing.

Um, well, two other things. So going back to the lion and the witch in the wardrobe, I mentioned two things that make it the classic children's story, but there's a third thing that I think also accounts for its enduring popularity with children. And that is that one of the Pevensie kids, Edmund, is bad.

He, he is sort of split up from the other kids while on that winter time visit to Narnia. And he finds himself, um, getting entertained by a witch who gives him something which I've tried. It's a candy that was perhaps still is popular in England, Turkish delight, Turkish delight.

And he loves it. I've, I've tried it. It's not good, but you know, there's no accounting for what kids liked.

I liked all sorts of things as a kid myself, weren't good. Um, anyway, although this, even as a kid, I wouldn't have touched this stuff. It was, it's kind of white and has little bits of nut in it.

It's just awful. Um, uh, anyway, and he gets seduced by the endless supply of Turkish delight. And he basically is asked to betray his siblings.

Um, and he says, can I have more Turkish delight? And the answer is, well, yes, of course you can. You can have as much as you want.

If you'll just do me this little favor and get rid of those annoying siblings of yours. And he goes for it and he's really very bad. And it's not so in, in the bad novel of the sort we were talking about earlier, he would be identified right up front.

Okay. This is a troubled kid. He's going to cause trouble and he's going to be, and nobody likes him.

And, and he's a bully and, and not to be trusted. And you recognize that right away. Instead, we're totally in his point of view and it's all making perfect sense.

We're also in his point of view when he starts to have qualms and said, Hmm, maybe this thing I'm doing is not so good. And you're what, what, what, what Lewis is doing. And he does again and again in the Narnia books is he's putting you into the psychology, into the emotional world of a child who knows that there are things he does or she does that are, that are just not right.

They're bad. Kids are not innocent little creatures. Kids are full of all sorts of bad stuff.

They're greedy and selfish. They, they want to have the toy. They don't want the sibling to have the toy.

They want to have the toy. Um, and they'll actually go to considerable lengths to get what they want. I mean, if they're not sociopaths, they will grow out of it, but, um, the kids are bad and they experience real remorse.

It's pop. And for that, and they also kind of live with this awful sense of how bad they are. And it takes a literary writer like CS Lewis to have the courage to go there and give you a character you're going to sympathize with who's actually not good.

Um, and that was, that was a huge revelation. There's a little bit of that is actually less of it in Prince Caspian and Prince Caspian. Uh, what you have instead is three of the siblings behaving kind of badly.

Uh, because the youngest, Lucy, who's the most dear of the kids, um, they're blundering around in the woods, trying to find help, um, or trying to be of help. Uh, and she sees the lion. Well, the lion of course is central to the Narnia books.

That would be Aslan. Um, and Aslan is pretty obvious Christ figure who, who's, who was actually killed, uh, in the first novel, but somehow he's still alive. They all saw him killed just like some of the people in the Bible.

They saw, yeah, Jesus definitely dead. No, it turns out maybe he's still alive. Lucy sees him and she's like, oh my God, Aslan, the, the person I love more than anything in the world, it's Aslan.

And she tells the others and they say, nah, can't be, you didn't. She said, no, no, I think I did. I did.

And so it's, there's this kind of, again, it's about this sort of private life of a child. She is seeing something that no one else is seeing. And she feels incredibly alone and incredibly frustrated, but also really rather determined because she is seeing this thing that the others are denying and denying and denying.

Um, so even though there's not really a bad character, the siblings are bad because they don't listen to their sister. They probably should listen to her, um, because they know her to be a good kid. Um, and she's telling him, no, God damn it.

I mean, not God damn it, but you know, gosh, darn it. I saw, I saw Aslan and he wants us to go this way, not that way. Um, again, you know, kind of religious, wants us to go this way, not that way.

Christ-like lion, um, saying don't go that, don't do that when you're on the wrong path. Here's the right path. It's the youngest, the most innocent child who sees that blah, blah, blah.

You can do all this sort of, um, kind of Christian symbolic, um, symbology off it, but not, not really the point. The point is again, the private interior, emotional and moral life of a child. Um, and I, at least as a, as a kid responded to that, I was the youngest people didn't listen to me.

Um, and I also knew I had done bad things and I felt terrible remorse about that. So all of that is there. So that's the second thing.

The third thing is when the kids go back and see the ruins of Narnia 1300 years after they were last there.

Neil:

Yeah. That's the, that's the year spot on. That's right.

Yeah. Yeah. The first, the first book takes place in the year 1000 to 1015 in Narnia.

The second book, Prince Caspian takes place in the year 2303 in Narnia.

Jonathan:

Yeah. I, I not even that suggests a depth of research that I have not

Neil:

Well you nailed it.

Jonathan:

Um, I, no, I, uh, well, I just remembered the number 1300 from somewhere, but anyway, uh, they go back there and Narnia has been taken over by these alien people, not aliens, but just people from somewhere else.

Uh, it's been overrun with, um, people who don't believe in the things that the Narnians believed in and they persecute anyone who thinks, Oh, animals can talk. Are you kidding me? Oh, by the way, yet another thing about the Narnia books, animals talk, um, not all animals, but the talking animals talk.

So, I mean, again, just like the ultimate dream of a child to go to a place where the animals even actually talk to them. That's like he hit, he hit every important trope, um, right out of the gate in Lion, the Witch and Wardrobe. Anyway, there are still a few talking animals in, uh, Narnia, but they've been driven underground.

Um, and, and the good spirits, I mean, there are various like Nyads and Dryads and even the tree, so tree spirits and, and there are good dwarves. Um, and they've all basically been persecuted and have had no recourse, but to take refuge deep in the woods. And I have to say that of all the, all the things I love about Prince Caspian, the thing that I responded to most was this notion of this small embattled community in exile.

Um, it is a classic David and Goliath story. They are the weak, they are the persecuted. Um, and they also, and there, and there's something very sweet about them and they take care of each other.

Uh, and the rest of the world doesn't like them. Well, if you're a reader, if you're kind of a, kind of a difficult kid who maybe experienced some social difficulty later in junior high and, uh, partly because you spent so much time reading, um, maybe even as a little kid, uh, you, you, you felt apart from the social crowd. Um, and to this, this idea that there was this, you, there might be other people like you hiding underground in the woods.

Um, that sense of incredible gratitude and discovery when you found somebody else who had the secret of reading the same as you did. Um, that's really, really hooked me with this book. The, the, the notion of a, um, uh, of a band of exiles, really exiled from the, from the dominant culture, um, oppressed by the dominant culture.

That's, that's how the world came to seem to me in my twenties and my thirties. Um, and it's still actually informs my notion, although as we discussed earlier, I no longer think that these exiles are morally superior, but nonetheless, even today, when I go out and do a reading on a rainy night in Cincinnati or wherever, and 150 people come in out of the rain, um, kind of all shapes and sizes, uh, all ages, male, female, black, white, um, other ethnicities. It's a, it's a kind of motley group has come out on a rainy night to hear a read, to hear a reading.

Um, it, I still feel like I'm with those that, that, that motley crew in the woods, uh, in Prince Caspian.

Neil:

Wow. Wow.

Jonathan:

Because they don't match. That's the thing. I mean, when, when, even in the, even in the drawings and the, um, the editions of the book that I read, there's something very uniform about the monarch, the dominant culture.

They're all in uniform and they all kind of are drawn the same way. And then you see the, you know, the table where people are talking about things. Yeah.

Um, it's just a complete, like there's a rabbit and then there's like a satyr next to the rabbit. It's just like, that's, that is a picture of what it's like to go to a literary reading.

Neil:

What's a satyr? I don't even know what that is.

Jonathan:

Satyr has, I think it doesn't, it's a satyr is a, um, is it a goat? Oh, I see.

Neil:

Yes. Right, right, right, right, right.

Jonathan:

It's next to the rabbit.

Neil:

Yeah. The half goat. Right, right.

Yes, exactly. Right. The dwarf.

Yes. Okay. Yeah.

That is so, what a, what an amazing metaphor, um, for, for readings in bookstores and, uh, the small and battle community in exile, the private emotional life and moral life of a child. This is, this is, so I can see why it's formed. So it sounds like you were like, you said later in junior high.

So I'm guessing you were nine or 10 or so when you read this.

Jonathan:

Yeah. It's also, I mean, I think these are some of the very first novels I, like real novels, novels you could enjoy as an adult that I remember reading. Um, my mother was not particularly approving of reading novels, um, because they were not true.

They were made up. Um, and I saw a lot of my first reading, I was reading nonfiction. I was reading biographies and just, they were, they were, she wasn't approving cause they were made up with the belief that that meant that they were, they were lies.

Neil:

Oh, they were lies.

Jonathan:

They were lies. She was very disapproving of the idea of my becoming a novelist. It's like, you're going to lie for a living.

That doesn't sound right.

Neil:

I read a quote recently that there's more truth in fiction than there is, you know, uh, in nonfiction or something along those lines.

Jonathan:

And I would try to make that case to her. But it also goes back to what I was saying about social utility and that, and that what I was in the grip of really well into my thirties, this notion that the novel had to be useful. Um, that, that came from that Midwestern notion of social utility that I definitely got from my parents.

Um, at any rate, I did start, I think I might've started with the Dr. Dolittle books, which basically checked almost none of the amazing boxes that the Narnia books did, uh, checked, but didn't check one important box talking to animals. So, um, but I really, I mean, there were, there were really two books in grade school that, um, that I felt formed me. I could have just as easily chosen Harriet the spy as, as, as a novel that, that shaped me, um, as Prince Caspian.

Um, and there again, uh, different kind of romance, present day romance. Um, but the notion of being a child who sneaks around through alleys and climbs walls and spies on people, uh, and then writes about them, um, that had its own romance. Uh, but the, but the, but the main thing there, and this is why I think both of both the Narnia books and also Harriet the spy by Louise Fitzhugh and her wonderful followup to that, um, the long secret, why they were so particularly formative was that they did not portray children as good.

Neil:

Right. Right. Right.

Jonathan:

Which is how you, which is, which is, which, if you want it, if you actually want to hook a child, I think don't show them nice sunny pictures of happy kids who only want the best and are trying to make a better world and blah, blah, blah. No, it's like you, you put a kid in trouble, trouble of their own making because they didn't behave well. Um, and they're not very about it.

Neil:

Right.

Jonathan:

And on happiness is of course, it's not such a much better story. So, um, stepping back, it was, these were the first, what I would call adult novels I read, even though they might now be both classed as YA novels, um, Prince Caspian and Harriet the spy.

They were adult in the sense that they were, they had a real nuance to them. Um, they had a moral dimension and the morality was by no means straightforward.

Neil:

Wow. Wow. That was unbelievable.

That was such a rich, uh, thoughtful, uh, explanation. Um, on your point about, about children, I'm reminded of that, you know, no good, very bad, terrible day. You know, that book that I, the title is just looking for me, you know, that everybody loves going through the day.

Um, lots of things I want to ask you about, about here. Heroes is one topic, you know, in Narnia in 2303, Prince Caspian is described as noble. And I guess we have to check where I get the copy from, but this is from online.

I'm from Wikipedia. He's described as noble, handsome, brave, and Mary. He strives for fairness and justice at all times and is a devoted King.

My movie tie in cover. I mean, you know.

Jonathan:

Horrible. Don't show that to me again.

Neil:

Movie, by the way, came out in 2008, $225 million budget and made 420 million at the box office as a side note. But then the movie cover has this, you know, this white male teen heartthrob with shoulder length, brown hair, chiseled features. We're talking in 2024.

And I want to ask you, what does a hero look like today?

Jonathan:

Oh gosh, we were having a nice conversation. And then you'd have to go and ask a question like that. Um, I will say that Prince Caspian is not a very interesting character.

Um, I believe he reappears, uh, as a very old man in the next Narnia novel, Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Um, and he's, uh, and he's now an aged King and he wants to try to sail beyond the end of the world.

Neil:

Um, yes, that's right.

Jonathan:

He's deaf and like, and he has an ear trumpet. This is all just from memory, I haven't,

Neil:

yeah, no, that's right. I just, I'm looking at the reading order now. That's exactly right.

Jonathan:

And, uh, we introduce a new Pevensie character, uh, I believe a cousin named Eustace. And I, the line I remember is him being introduced to old King Caspian and Caspian said, useless.

You say he's useless. Um, that's really the first moment when Caspian becomes an interesting character when he's an irritating and irritable old King. Um, he's, he's kind of a nullity as the hero in,

Neil:

his titular book.

Jonathan:

His titular book, his eponymous book.

Neil:

Um, I love that word nullity.

Jonathan:

He's just a kid. I mean, probably the only interesting thing about him, um, is that he's, he's arguably corrupted by his professor.

Um, there is a character in Prince Caspian, Dr. Cornelius, who has a bit of the supernatural in his genealogy. As I recall, he might be part dwarf or elf.

Neil:

Yeah. He's half, he's half dwarf. That's right.

Jonathan:

Half dwarf. Anyway, he's, um, he's been entrusted by the King to educate young Dr. Cornelius. Exactly.

So like it's, it's every school board's nightmare. Dr. Cornelius, they're not teaching Caspian to be a good, obedient member of the dominant culture, but he's whispering to him, you know what, you know what? There was an old Narnia.

Things were different there. There were animals who talked. Um, and you know what?

I think there might still be a few of them out there. Um, and it was much better. People were nicer and more interesting.

This dominant culture that you're being educated to play a part in. Um, there is a complication in that actually he's going to be killed because his uncle in a sort of Hamlet move has killed Caspian's father and usurped the throne and Caspian is now an inconvenience. That's sort of a plot thing.

The real issue here is that Cornelius is whispering forbidden knowledge. Um, so to the hero and the hero is heroic in my book, this hero, to the extent that he actually listens to the teacher and says, Hey, I'd like to know more about these talking animals. Can you like set us up?

Um, and that, uh, so what does a teacher look, what does a hero look like in 2023? It looks like a teacher in a Florida school teaching forbidden books. That's what it looks like.

It looks like Dr. Cornelius with a shorter beard.

Neil:

Why'd you say Florida?

Jonathan:

Oh, just because it's governor DeSantis's war on school boards.

Neil:

Right. Right. Teaching forbidden books in a Florida school.

Oh, that's, that's nice. Um, I want to talk to you about movies. I won't show you the movie cover again.

We've, we've, we agree that it's horrid. Um, but I will say

Jonathan:

No offense to the actors, I'm sure they are nice people.

Neil:

You don't have to, it's okay.

Um, I got in trouble by the way, cause I have values for this show, right? I really want it to be a values based podcast. So I have, I have values like, you know, no book shame, no book guilt.

I have values like librarians are doctors of the mind. And I had one value that I got a lot of flack for Jon, which was real books have real pages. And I, and then I had, I had a semicolon that said eBooks and audio books are beautiful mutants.

Now people don't like that. I got a lot of flack for real books have real pages, but if I'm honest, it's still a value of this show. I mean, I I'm in Vancouver, my bag is extremely heavy and I will not, I will not like, I just, I just will not go to audio and eat.

I just have to have a bag full of bulky pulsing. You know, that's my way of, that's part of me. That's part of what the show is.

So that's what it is. Take it or leave it.

Jonathan:

No, well I share your preference, but let's not make it into a virtue. Okay. Yes.

It's just a preference.

Neil:

Yes. Preference, not virtue. Thank you.

So books as movies. I want to talk to you about books as movies, just as a concept books, as movies, as a concept, we live in a screens over everything world today. The American time you study has been tracking what percent of Americans do not read a single book in a year since the early eighties.

And that number is now depending where you look between 53 and 57% higher than ever and tipping into the majority now really for the first time. And so there's this thing that is true. If I'm honest, I mentioned David Mitchell in chapter 58.

Well, how did I discover David Mitchell? I went to see this movie I'd never heard of called cloud Atlas. And it said at the end of it, I was like, who's this guy, David Mitchell.

And it pulled me onto all of his work and I discovered his whole thing. And then, and I know the movie is like the trigger for like a lot of people into the books. And I was curious for somebody who sold millions of copies of many books, why you have no movies based on your books.

And so I went deep into the history and I found the 2018 New York times magazine profile of you, which has this quote that actually stunned me. And so I want to get your thought on that quote today, you know, six years later, if you still agree with this and also what your philosophy is on sort of the books as like, I don't let my kids watch Harry Potter movies period till they've read all the books. Like that's a thing in my house, which I take a lot of flack from, from my kids.

I'm trying to make that a preference, not a virtue, but that's the way it is here. And here's the quote from you. And it's a, it's, it was, it was a three sentences throughout a long paragraph.

So I'm going to stitch them as if it's one long quote here. Here we go. You have to remember what a partisan of the novel I am and that it had long been one of my ambitions to have my novels defeat all attempts to put them on the screen.

A big part of me would be very proud never having anything of mine adapted, because if you want the real experience, there's only one way to get it. You're going to actually have to be a reader.

Jonathan:

Yeah, part of me, but it would be cool to, to see a good adaptation. It'd be interesting because you know, I'm, I'm the sole creator of my little kingdom of the world of whichever novel. And I know a lot.

Every once in a while I talk to book groups and they, they come up with some cockeyed interpretation or something that's just like not supportable. And it's like, you've had me over to your book club. I am more of an expert in this text than you are.

Would you like me to tell you why, why that is an insupportable interpretation? I can, I can tell you exactly why, because I, it takes me a long time to write these and I basically end up with the entire thing memorized and that stays with you. And now I'm feeling self-conscious about saying that people are entitled to their own interpretations, but it has to be like textually supportable.

So the point was, I have like random access memory for these things I've created. And in no cases, it taken me less than four years to create it. And it's only whatever, 500 pages.

So that's a, that's a lot of time per page. And I know it well. And it's like, it has no secrets from me.

Nevertheless, it is possible to imagine an actor reading a good actor, reading a book or reading a screenplay based on the book and having a different idea and doing something that totally is consistent and works, but is nothing like I imagined. And that would be cool. I think too, when you, when you get, when you get additional great artists involved in a project, interesting things can happen.

So I'm not, it's really, yes, I'm a partisan of the novel. And yes, if my books defeated all attempts to adapt them, I would be secretly rather pleased, but I'm not hostile to adaptation.

Neil:

So it's a, it's a possibility in the future.

Jonathan:

Yeah. Yeah. No, they're adaptations are in the work on three different fronts for three books as we, as we speak.

Yeah. But these are all, these are all limited series. Yeah.

There's no way you can do a feature film from one of these things. It just doesn't, they're not, they don't, they're too multivalent to, to, to fit into even a two hour and 45 minute format.

Neil:

Oh, okay. I see. I understand.

And so, but just philosophically, you know, when my kids say, why don't you let us watch Harry Potter? I say, because I can't picture Harry Potter anymore because when Daniel Radcliffe was cast as Harry Potter, he was, you know, everywhere and you couldn't not look at him because he was on every billboard and every magazine and every, and so my vision internally of Harry Potter was plastered over by his face. And it bothers me that I can't see it anymore as I used to.

And so I want to preserve the, what I think of as a wider imaginative world that you get from reading. But I know it's an unusual thing that I, you know, force my kids to read.

Jonathan:

No, that's fair. I totally get it. I, I resisted watching the Lord of the Rings for that reason.

And finally reached the point, well, finally reached the point of having a lot of time in hotel rooms and not being able to find much else to watch. I don't think I've ever watched even one of those movies straight through, but I've watched them in overlapping pieces enough that I think I've probably seen the entire thing on TV. But that was a point when I no longer really cared about preserving my idea of what Aragorn looked like.

And frankly, Viggo Mortensen, pretty good.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay.

Jonathan:

It does look like Aragorn.

Neil:

All right. Your second formative book is of course, The Trial by Franz Kafka. That's K-A-F-K-A, originally published by Verlag de Schmid.

I'm sure I mispronounced that. In Berlin in 1925. The cover I have is a 1954 hardcover with a rough white and gray pencil drawing of a man sitting at a small table with a man in a gray suit standing beside him and a courthouse gallery watching them from above.

The is in about a 30-point all-cap serif font with Trial in about a 120-point font just below. Franz Kafka was the German-speaking Bohemian Jewish novelist and short story writer based in Prague who lived from 1883 to 1924 and is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th century literature. What's this book about?

The Trial tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote inaccessible authority with the nature of its crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader. Whether read as an existential tale, parable, or prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, The Trial has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers. Dewey Decimal heads file this one under 833.912 for literature slash German literature slash 1900 to 1945. Jon, please tell us about your relationship with The Trial by Franz Kafka.

Jonathan:

I think I tried to read this book when I was in high school. I took it out of my library in Webster Groves, Missouri, and I didn't get very far with it. It needed more paragraph breaks and dialogue.

I was a sci-fi reader, and even though there was a sort of sci-fi premise, it had a kind of futuristic feel. I wasn't that into it. Really by accident, I became a German major in college.

Wasn't the language from my family. We have no German blood. In my last year of college, I took a course in modern German prose.

One of the important titles we read was The Trial. I think I read quite a bit of it in German, but I found it tedious and frustrating, and so I read the rest of it in English. We've been reading these other books that were also challenging, but kind of more relatable.

This was about the poor man who's arrested for no reason. The opening line of the book is, somebody must have been telling lies about Josef K., because one morning, without his having done anything wrong, some people came to his apartment and he was arrested. One fine morning.

It was like, okay, yes, yes, yes. The oppressive modern state and the plight of the everyman who's unjustly persecuted, this reminds us of Stalinist Russia. It certainly reminds us of excesses of the Nazis.

I just didn't get it. He writes a beautiful German, and it's also just so weird. He's in this office building, and he hears something in the closet, and he opens the closet.

Again, sort of like Why I'm the Witch in the Wardrobe, that turns out to be a rather roomy closet, because there are two men in there beating somebody. He's like, shut that door. No, thank you.

Then it's a week later, he's walking down the hall, and he hears something coming from the same door, and he opens it. It's the exact same people, and they're still beating this guy. It's like, hey, wait a minute.

That's not realistic. That doesn't work. It doesn't work.

It's like, oh, it's sort of dreamlike, I guess, but it's boring to hear about people's dreams. It also doesn't really end. Kafka never finished it, but basically, it's the story of a man who feels himself to be unjustly accused of a crime.

He doesn't know what the crime is. He tries to get answers, can't get answers, tries to enlist people to help him. They're not very helpful.

Then the book kind of trails off, and that's that. I was like, okay, so I guess this is important world literature. What do you want me to say?

I said this when the professor asked me in the little seminar. There are never very many German majors. That was one of the nice things.

It was only six of us. This is the greatest professor I ever had. He was my Dr. Cornelius. His name was George Avery, senior year at Swarthmore College, 1981. Actually, fall of 1980, this particular class. He was very long-winded.

We didn't know he was a great professor. Many people thought he was the worst professor they'd ever had. He went into this long thing about, there are three schools of interpretation.

He cited some piece of secondary literature, and it was the policy of mine never to read secondary literature, ever. It had been on the syllabus, and I, of course, hadn't read it. He said, there are three universes of interpretation about this book.

One is that Josef K. is innocent of all crimes. One is that his guilt can't really be determined from the text. One of them is he's guilty.

I'm like, wait a minute. No, no. I was offended.

He's guilty? Come on. We all know what this story is.

It's an innocent man unjustly persecuted by this soulless bureaucracy. He said, yeah, maybe you should take another look at that book. Maybe you should go back and read it carefully.

I was just trying to find the plot. You know, Kafka is not great on plot. I went back and looked at it.

I read the first, I think just the first chapter, paying attention. I realized that this was a portrait of an asshole, that Josef K. is a royal asshole, and that I hadn't noticed it because Kafka's so much in his point of view that we're seeing everything through Josef K.'s eyes, and Josef K., of course, feels himself to be innocent. All assholes do.

He's super creepy with women. He's kind of abusive to his landlady. He's all over the map.

He's out of control. He's a weird, sick dude. If you read every sentence, speaks to that fact.

If you start paying attention and you don't come in with this preconception that it's an innocent guy, and that the genius is in how closely Kafka sticks to his point of view, he's telling you something about the way we all work. We all go through the world feeling like we're the innocent victim persecuted unjustly. Okay, so I fell hook, line, and sinker for the third school of interpretation, which is that Josef K. is totally guilty. In fact, in succeeding decades, I've recognized that it's one of the reasons the book has this enduring power, is that all of those interpretations are simultaneously in play. But at the time, what it amounted to was, I've read this book, I've read that chapter at least three times. I read it in high school.

I read it again in German, and then quickly to prepare for the first of two weeks of talking about the book, I read it again in English. I read this book three times, this chapter at least, three times, and I understood absolutely nothing. And it was there in plain sight all the time.

If you actually just stepped back and looked at what was happening, you would say, this guy is not behaving well at all. And that was kind of when the coin dropped for me with what literature can do. It's hiding in plain sight.

And you can read what you thought was read, and you're not reading at all. You're not getting it. You're not seeing it.

And I mean, the magic of literature is right there, which is somehow, these words, the words haven't changed, but your relationship to the words, your ability to decode the words, the sophistication, or at least the clue you need to decode those words changes. And that got me fired up about this thing called literature, which until then, I was kind of like, I was at a good college, and I was bright, and I got A's. And I could figure out what the meaning of this text was, and I could write a nice paper saying, this is the meaning of the text.

And I ran smack into Kafka. It's like, I don't know anything. I'm going to have to get serious about this thing called literature.

And those were the weeks, those were the months when I was, I'd always thought it'd be cool to be a writer. You have lots of free time, and sit around, make stuff up, and you get paid for it, and you become famous. That sounded great.

I wanted to do that. But I didn't imagine myself as a literary writer. I just thought, nice work if you can get it.

And I hope to get it, because I was good with language. So my ambition as a novelist began when George Avery said, you need to go back and read every sentence. A lot to learn.

That really was a life-changing book. I mean, there was, I can really specify that afternoon when George says, you're not getting it. And I go back to my room, and then I get it.

That was a kind of, that was a revelation.

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You're reminding me when I picked up by accident, the annotated version of Lolita. And were it not for the annotations, I wouldn't have got any, like, I realized how valuable it was for me to have read the annotated book when I was reading it with all these notes explaining all this stuff. I was like, wow, like, I would never have noticed all this stuff.

I have some questions here, but I did also want to remind us both that you wanted to tie a Christmas carol here, I think.

Jonathan:

Oh, right. Yes. So that was fall semester when I went home for Christmas, which was a very consequential Christmas for me, because I'd learned how to see through reading these great German writers.

I was no longer just seeing the surface, I was seeing what was going on under the surface. And my whole family was there. And I'd been part of that family for 20 plus years.

And suddenly, I could see what was going on. It was just like all, it was like, I had been seeing in two dimensions. And now I had 3D vision, I could see it.

And one of the things we did, my mother was a dutiful subscriber to the local repertory theater at what was then Webster College, it was now Webster University. And we went to see a stage version of a Christmas carol. Stepping back, the name of the trial in German is Der Prozess.

And that's a beautifully ambiguous word in German. It's equivalent to our word process. And I think you can't speak of a legal process, but we no longer use that word, we use a trial.

And you have to pick one as a translator. So you're going to call it the trial, but it could just as well be called the process. And what I had seen as I went back and re-engaged with Der Prozess was that this was a process, an internal process that Josef K. was undergoing. He was getting drawn deeper into his own personal culpability, resisting it. But things were getting ever more complicated.

The deeper he went, the more complicated things got. And that maybe this had to do with some of the ways that Kafka's own life had been in process. Anyway, we went to see a Christmas carol and it blew me away because it was the trial before the trial was written.

It's not bureaucrats who come to arrest Scrooge, it's these ghosts, four ghosts, I think. And he too, kind of like Josef K., pretty satisfied with himself. And he goes through this process where it's like layer after layer gets peeled away.

And he's finally left crying. So it's a very different, it's a 19th century view. There's not really a lot of ambiguity in Dickens.

He's working with a sort of pre-Freudian notion of what a person is. Nevertheless, I was really, it was like, oh my God, this is the same story. Of course it has a happy ending, it being Dickens.

Scrooge recognizes that he has been the world's biggest asshole and he sets out to correct it. Well, not to spoil anything, but there is an ending of the trial. It doesn't match up to what comes before it, but there is an ending and it's safe to say it's not a happy ending.

What happens to Josef K.? Just a little spoiler there. But nevertheless, yeah, that's what I wanted to say about Christmas Carol.

It's interesting that George picked that as one of his three books, because that's the deepest Dickens there is, I think.

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.

One of the points George made about it, by the way, is that he had an image of Dickens writing it in a sort of slapdashery type of manner, which he came to recognize as a part of himself that he wanted to kind of blossom in his writing. Not to put words in his mouth, but that's one part of the conversation I recall.

Jonathan:

It really stands out. It's not like any other Dickens. Yeah, exactly.

Neil:

I was blown away when I read it. I was like, wow, I had no idea this was so good.

Jonathan:

Yeah. And frankly, a much more accessible book than the trial.

Neil:

And like a hundred pages. I'm a big believer in this idea of reading two pages of fiction a night. And the reason I espouse that is to get people back into reading.

And one thing I do is I have this list of books that are a hundred pages or less, like The Old Man and the Sea, or Foster, or Animal Farm, just to make it feel like you can get it. I want to talk to you about motivation. You mentioned about half an hour ago, we were talking about Caspian.

You said Kafka never published this book. He died at age 40 in obscurity. He had written chapters in different notebooks.

He asked his friend Max in his will to burn all his books that were not published. Max didn't. He stitched it together and published them.

So the question I have around that is just around motivation. Can you relate to this desire to have written something and wanting it burned, first of all? What's behind that?

And then how does that go against the feeling to publish and to want it to be out there and to be big? And then how does your motivation or how has your motivation to write been changing? Or has it changed?

If it has, since you first started, got published, got big books published, et cetera, over time?

Jonathan:

That's a big question. I can imagine Kafka feeling, I didn't finish that book. I had some great stuff.

I didn't quite know what to do with it. He was essentially a writer of fragments. He did publish a few things.

He published stories and he published, most famously, the Metamorphosis, another unfortunate title translation. I think transformation would be a more literal translation and probably a better one. And so he was capable when he knew he had fully realized the project, publishing it.

And I think he felt that none of the novels was he able to get back to and make what he wanted of them. I think his motivations will forever remain shrouded in mystery. What exactly he was thinking when he gave that instruction to Brode.

If he did indeed give that instruction to Brode, because of course, maybe he only hinted at it or said it in a lighthearted way. Oh, Max, you should just burn all that stuff. It makes Max Brode into more of a hero, makes up for his own more or less failed literary career.

Nobody reads Max Brode anymore. If he was the person who single-handedly rescued Kafka's work. So we don't really know.

My motivation, yeah, it's changed. I mean, I wanted to show what I could do. And I wanted to show my parents that I could actually make a living as a writer.

Those were early motivations. I also wanted to change the course of American literature, like every 23-year-old does. I wanted to be famous.

Didn't really expect to make that much money, but I would probably get a good teaching job eventually, at least. And I also, as we've discussed in this already very long conversation, I wanted to change the world. I wanted to be socially effective and so forth.

At a certain point, it really became writing just because that's what I am. I'm a writer. Coupled with competition, I had a really good friend, David Wallace, who was also very talented.

And I wanted to beat him. I wanted to crush my opponents, my fellow players on the field of literature. In the same way, if you're a football player, you want to crush the opponent.

Doesn't mean you hate them. You shake hands afterwards. You're good friends.

You're all playing for the same team of the NFL and so forth. But as we're all playing for the same team of literature, nevertheless, in the course of a game, you want to win. But that has really...

All of those motivations have fallen away. Now I just do it for the money. Well, 90%.

It's nice to get paid. But I honestly do it now because people are looking for a good book to read. And I feel like I'm part of a community of readers and writers.

Part of the writer's job in that community is to write good books. And I would say that's my motivation now. It's better than having no motivation.

I mean, okay. I'll mention this, the most important thing, but it's not necessarily a motivation. Motivation having to do with exterior forces.

I want to write a novel because I'm happy when I'm writing a novel. It's not a motivation. It's like I'm alive when I'm writing a novel.

And part of me is just not really alive when I'm not. It is the story of my life that I've spent most of it not writing novels, therefore not really fully alive.

Neil:

Wow. Wow. Wow.

Wow. Because you mentioned community and being part of what David Mitchell called the Republic of Letters in an earlier conversation with us, I might go to the question I have here about the fact that on the back of my book, it says specifically Kafka is from a well-to-do family, which I thought was interesting. A Jewish merchant class is what it's sort of pegged as.

And it seems to me that staying grounded, connected with people is just so vital as part of being a writer and a novelist. I have found your ear for dialogue uncannily pitch perfect. Your books are so sound.

They're a real conversation. I feel like I'm listening to Ian Fraser in Great Plains. He transcribes the people he bumps into on the way or David Sedaris and his diary.

It just sounds like it's right there. And I wonder how you mentioned the money. Obviously, you've been very successful with your work.

But my question is around, I have a question and I have two comments from you to give you to help, if it helps. My question is, how do you stay of the people? How do you carry with you that ear for real dialogue when you, I'm assuming, inevitably become somewhat bubbled?

And the two quotes I have from you to feed into this are a 2010 Guardian quote, where you said, I always want to be an amateur. A professional is too slick. And a 2015 Financial Times quote, where you said, I am a poor person with money.

Jonathan:

Yes, I put in mind of Flannery O'Connor, you can't be any poorer than dead. And, you know, I'm a human animal who will die soon, just like everybody else. So there, you know, we keep that in mind.

It's not that hard to remain grounded in some way. You know, I do feel, to some extent, bubbled and particularly bubbled in my age group. I did have a young character, some young characters in Purity, which was written not that long ago, 10 years ago.

I think I would be, it would be, I'd have to do some work to develop an ear for the way 18-year-olds talk in 2024. But I would also note that dialogue is more art than science. People don't actually speak the way they do in my books.

It's a little magic trick. There are things you do to give the impression that you're hearing realistic dialogue, but it's actually not the way people talk. It's a very artful thing.

And yeah, and so it, and being an artful thing, you can make artful fakes and get away with it. If you, if you can hear the language, a little goes a long way. Like you hear, and this is a, this is a larger point about being isolated.

It is an isolating job being a writer, spend a lot of time alone, but you don't need that much. You don't need to be following a hundred feeds. Two feeds will do, because you're never going to put the whole thing in the book anyway.

You're going to, you're just going to use little teeny pieces of the little bit that gets through to you and then kind of use your instincts to create something that feels like complete picture, but it's absolutely not a complete picture.

Neil:

So the third and final book is Reason in a Dark Time by Dale Jamieson, J-A-M-I-E-S-O-N. The subtitle is Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed and What It Means for Our Future. Published by Oxford University Press in 2014.

The cover has dark stormy clouds over a yellow gray horizon. The title's in an all caps sans serif font with the letters getting darker as they go down the page. Dale Jamison's born in Iowa in 1947, and I believe he still teaches environmental studies, philosophy, and law at NYU.

What's the book about? From the 1992 Rio Earth Summit to the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference, there was a concerted international effort to stop climate change. And yet, greenhouse gas emissions increased, atmospheric concentrations grew, and global warming became an observable fact of life.

Jamison explains what climate change is, why we have failed to stop it, and why it still matters what we do. File this one, Dewey Decimal Heads, under 363.738 for social sciences slash social problems slash environmental problems slash pollutants. Jon, please tell us about your relationship with Reason in a Dark Time by Dale Jamison.

Jonathan:

Yeah, 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 have 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. And 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, it's depressing to contemplate how profoundly we've ruined the planet, and also 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 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 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. And so, yeah, that, and it really set me, so I've had the second career as a nonfiction writer.

Starting in 1994, I published a long piece of journalism in The New Yorker, and I'd been an essayist, and a sometime journalist, and a memoirist. And along the way, I'd also become very interested in birds. I'd become a bird lover, serious birder, and that had led me into conservation.

And I think the whole reason Dale's book came up in the first place was that there's a lot of frustration in the conservation community that the only environmental issue anyone can talk about is climate. Whereas we have this second crisis that's happening right in front of us, which is the sixth extinction, the crisis of biodiversity, and the breakdown of all of these natural systems associated with biodiversity, and no one is talking about that anymore. All the big environmental NGOs have basically begun 100% climate all the time, and people are shutting down conservation projects because, well, none of that matters if we don't solve climate change.

So I was kind of angry about that. And reading Dale's book and being able to borrow his arguments about why we failed to stop it, and why we will probably continue to fail to stop it, it energized me to start writing about climate myself and to speak up on behalf of wild animals, really, and wild nature. And I don't necessarily mean the deep Amazon.

I mean the wild nature that I could look out my window and see in that field over there. It's still happening, and those animals still need our help. It is a lot like really, really wrapping your mind around your own mortality to wrap your mind around the mortality of this nice, familiar world we live in that is going to be horribly stressed in the coming years and decades, and will probably be unrecognizable a century from now.

And although I've been doing these nonfiction pieces for 20-plus years, when I started writing about climate, I felt like I was doing something else. I felt like I really had a mission with that. I'd had a little mission trying to talk about why people might want to write and read novels, and I'd written some essays about that, but this one felt bigger, and it had nothing to do with my novels, really.

Essentially zero to do with my novels. I had some stuff about climate change in The Corrections, which was written in whatever, 1998, but basically non-intersecting, and so a kind of different, much smaller, but nonetheless significant kind of life started up when I started writing about climate. I found myself speaking to a very different kind of audience, being invited to speak to a very different kind of audience, think tanks in Italy and sober collections of German climate scientists and German climate journalists and all of that.

In that sense, for a single book, I felt I had to mention it. I wanted to mention it also because I think it's an under-recognized book. If you are in that clenched position of feeling things are really bad and I don't want to think about them, it can be a curiously positive book to read, but it doesn't often happen that a single book changes the direction of my life in a significant way.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah, it sounds like this one absolutely did. Just for the people listening that don't have as close a view as you have developed, could you just, it doesn't have to be long, but could you just paint a portrait of the next few years and coming decades as you've hinted at, if you don't mind, just bring us up to speed with where you are?

Jonathan:

Well, so we've known for more than 30 years pretty conclusively that our carbon emissions are changing the global climate. We are warming the earth. In spite of knowing this and in spite of many distinguished people meeting in nice hotel conference rooms around the world, the involvement of the United Nations, the concerted efforts of the world, environmental community, visionary politicians, and the Greta Thunbergs of the world, our carbon emissions will be higher this year than they've ever been before.

So you know you're doing a bad thing, and for 30 plus years you've done nothing but do even more of the bad thing. That's a weird one. And what Dale's book really sets out to do is explain why that is.

But you asked about what the consequences of these unchecked carbon emissions will be. I think the climate bureaucracy has a pretty well-established record of underestimating the effects of issuing predictions which are in hindsight rather rosy. The quick answer is we're making the climate much more unstable.

The parts of the world that are already dangerously hot will become unlivably hot, and the rest of the world will experience increased climate instability, increase in wildfires, increase in destructive flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, all of that. Because the atmosphere gets hot, and that means there's a lot of energy in the atmosphere, and some of that gets absorbed by the oceans, but that's kind of a mixed blessing because more heat in the oceans also energizes the oceans in unpredictable but mostly bad ways. And this is going to put an enormous amount of stress on what we consider the world order.

We're already seeing the beginnings of it in Europe and North America, the notion of a climate refugee when instead of hundreds of thousands or a few million climate refugees, you have hundreds of millions. What does that world look like? It doesn't look very good geopolitically.

I mean, that's a cruel way to talk about the levels of human suffering we're talking about and human desperation we're talking about. And if you take a kind of dim view of humanity, think we're kind of good but also kind of bad, the historical record isn't very promising about what happens when you increase stress on a system. And so you're going to have pressure on everything that makes the world livable.

You're going to have pressure on agriculture. You're going to have pressure on trade. You're going to have pressure on borders, huge pressure on borders.

You're going to have pressure on political institutions, both in the most direly affected countries, obviously, but also on the countries that people might want to immigrate to. You see this strong streak of nativism and defensive nationalism arising in various countries in Europe. And of course, in our own U.S. politics, immigration is the issue for the nationalist side of our body politic, recognizing that this is a dangerous world and it's going to become more unstable. So it's not like the world's going to end in fire. It could still end in nuclear war. Never discount that possibility.

And again, our systems of command and control for nuclear weapons and the political alliances that have kept us or systems of detente that have kept us miraculously safe since 1945, those are also going to be stressed. But barring that or barring the singularity when machines take over the world, which I'm not very impressed with the possibility of, what you're instead is going to see just ever worse crises.

Neil:

Sorry, you're not very impressed by the possibility of machines taking over?

Jonathan:

No, I'm not terribly worried about that.

Neil:

Oh, you're not?

Jonathan:

No.

Neil:

Why did I suspect you would be?

Jonathan:

No, no. I don't know. I liked sci-fi when I was 17.

Neil:

Okay. No, that's great. That's a great, great, great update.

I want to be sensitive of time. I'm going to give you a choose your own adventure. I've got five questions.

Here's the five thematic pieces. You can pick your own. It's either on collective action, on being small in a big world, on individual action, on navigating forebodingness, or on birds.

Those are the five questions I have for you. And we'll just do one and then I'll do fast money to finish this off.

Jonathan:

Okay. Individual action.

Neil:

Individual action. Okay. So the book spends a lot of time on the feeling of helplessness most people have about climate change, with the problem for many people feeling like it doesn't matter what I do.

To your point on page 105 of the book, Jamieson writes, climate change poses the world's largest collective action problem. Each of us acting on our own desires contributes to an outcome that we neither desire nor intend. Page 145 of the book really stood out to me where he talks about the alliance of small member states.

I did not realize that there's 42 countries like Cuba, Singapore, Seychelles, Maldives, Haiti, who emit less than half of 1% of the world's greenhouse gases, less than a quarter of the greenhouse gases per capita, but are essentially the ones who are about to disappear. Like it's them that get hit. They're going to be swallowed up by the sea.

It's, you know, soon. So on individual action, the book closes with seven priorities, but the priorities are big. They're like protecting carbon sinks, full cost energy accounting, raising the price of emitting greenhouse gases.

But I just have to ask, I know it's a general question, I know it's a repeated question, but how do you answer the question, what do I do?

Jonathan:

Well, this is a point that Dale makes and that I have really hammered on myself. You're riding a bike to work instead of driving. Change is nothing.

Absolutely nothing. So we have this global problem and you can feel like, oh yeah, well, I can do my part. I'll ride a bike to work.

Well, in fact, you might as well not, because if you drive a Hummer to work, it's all the same. Your contribution is too infinitesimal to have any effect on the larger systems. And for some, that could be an invitation to just do what you want.

Keep on over-consuming, over-emitting. That is kind of collectively the choice that the United States has made. But even at the individual level, it's like, well, it doesn't matter anyway, why not?

And of course, it is a collection of several billion people thinking that way that has gotten us in the fix we're in, but why should I go live in a yurt when the rest of the world's not going to live in a yurt? And anyway, I'm in Iowa and we're going to be fine. And yeah, my grandkids will have to figure it out, whatever.

So you could take the futility of individual action as permission to behave however you want. I would argue that it doesn't make it right to do that, and that it's good to try to live your life the way you wish everyone else did. That is a cousin of the categorical imperative.

And what's more, it's just, yeah. So there's, even if it's not going to make a difference still to live your life in a way that is as right as you can make it, there's an argument for that. But more, the argument that means more to me is that there are things you can do locally within your own reach that do make a difference.

And the reason when you asked me, how is this going to play out in the coming years and decades that I answered in terms of stressing systems, is that I think it's really important to recognize that anything you can do to make the world a kinder and more stable place is a climate action. And if it's effective to participate in your local city government to make things a little better, to show up at city council meetings and raise a point, to go campaign for people who have sensible ideas about what to do in your local community, those, I would argue, are climate actions because we need resilient communities in the face of increasing stresses on all systems. But even if it weren't a climate action, it's still a good thing to do.

And you actually can make something better. And you have, in climate change, a situation that nothing you can do could possibly make any better. Elon Musk personally cannot make it better.

No individual can affect that. And so you despair and you say, well, God, we're screwed and the world's going to hell. And you may just shut down or you may even go the opposite direction and drive your Hummer to work.

Or you can say, well, yeah, but the world isn't over yet and I'm not dead yet. And maybe I can go help somebody, help something, try to make something better. And instead of being so fixed on this terrible future and so obsessed with an unsolvable problem, maybe try to introduce some solvable problems in your life.

And that's really what I espouse.

Neil:

Introduce solvable problems.

Jonathan:

Yeah.

Neil:

Thank you.

Jonathan:

Thank you. This was a wide ranging actually much longer conversation than I expected, Neil. But I guess I hadn't talked for a while.

Okay. You're showing me something.

Neil:

I'm showing you five fast money questions that should take you 30 seconds.

Jonathan:

Okay.

Neil:

Let's close off with hardcover, paperback, audio, or e?

Jonathan:

Paperback.

Neil:

How do you organize your books on your bookshelf?

Jonathan:

Pretty randomly, although there is some basic division between fiction and nonfiction.

Neil:

What is your book lending policy?

Jonathan:

I've learned not to expect to get a book back.

Neil:

Do you have a favorite bookstore, living or dead?

Jonathan:

Yes. Well, I have to mention Bookshop Santa Cruz here in Santa Cruz. It's not the best bookstore in the world, but it is a great bookstore.

Neil:

And what's one final hard fought piece of wisdom or advice you might share it with aspiring novelists?

Jonathan:

Take a hard look at every sentence, shake it, shake it again. I guarantee you it can't be better.

Neil:

Jonathan Franzen, thank you so much for coming on 3 Books. This has been a real joy. I'm really grateful to you.

Thank you so much.

Jonathan:

My pleasure. Nice talking to you, Neil.

Neil:

Hey, everybody. It's just me, just Neil again, hanging out in my basement, listening back to the wonderful conversation we just had with Jon Franzen. Slow, peaceful, thoughtful, introspective, deep, like a rich, creamy dessert that you don't want to end.

I felt like I could have talked to Jon all day for many days. I had piles and piles of questions I didn't even get to because I had so much I wanted to ask him. But there's so many quotes that jump out of the conversation.

Did you write some down? I wrote some down. I highlighted some.

As always, the quotes will appear over at 3books.co. But some of my favorite ones were, I share your preference, but let's not make it into a virtue. When I was going on that rant about real books have real pages, which I know I should probably get off that high horse about that, audio books and eBooks there. But just the way he said that, I share your preference, but let's not make it into a virtue.

How about this one when he said, it is a luxury to engage with things in a complicated way. I can relate to that feeling so much. I forget that too.

I'm like, here we are having deep, rich, long form conversations with novelists. We get to do that. It's a luxury to be able to engage with things in a complicated way.

I like also the humility baked into that quote. There is a gentleness around people that just might want to relax and read a Garfield or read whatever. There's no judgment on that.

But when you want to read kind of something big and deep and challenging, that is a luxury and we should look at it that way for sure. I like this quote. What does a hero look like in 2023?

It looks like a teacher in Florida teaching forbidden books. I like the small scale approach. The world just feels so big.

If you read the big newspapers, of course, they start to talk about global issues above everything else. You can feel a bit disconnected from your local community and the local differences you can make by picking up a piece of garbage on the park or saying hi to someone on the street. Teaching a forbidden book, I guess, in Florida was a wonderful way to talk about what a hero looks like today.

How about this one? Anything you can do to make the world a kinder and more stable place is a climate action. I love that.

Anything you can do to make the world a kinder and more stable place is a climate action, as Jon and his formative book paints the picture of what the world might look like in the next 50 to 100 years. But coming fast, we're already seeing plastic islands in the sea. It seems to me like you can't predict the weather anymore.

Even the hourly forecast now with that level of detail in the morning, it's totally wildly unpredictable. Climate change is just discombobulating the earth. Anything we can do to make the world a kinder and more stable place, that's a climate action.

Then when I asked him about staying grounded, I just like the way he phrased it. I'm a human animal who will die soon like everyone else. You keep that in mind and it's not hard to stay grounded.

That's true. It's not hard to stay grounded if you keep that in mind. However, it is hard to keep that in mind.

As we get embroiled in the trivialities of our daily existence, it's hard to keep in mind the fact that you're going to die soon. This comes back to the stoic principle of memento mori. I share a fondness for On the Shortness of Life by Seneca.

Some people like Tim Ferriss keep skulls around their house as a daily remembrance of death. Feel its proximity so you don't fear its proximity. Those are five quotes.

I usually do three, but those quotes jumped out to me from Jon Franzen. You know what? Big thanks to him for adding three more books to our top 1,000, including number 601, Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis. All right, we now have two C.S. Lewis books on the top 1,000, including The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Number 600, The Trial by Franz Kafka, K-A-F-K-A. That is the first Kafka book we have on here.

A nice bingo there on number 600. And then finally, number 599, we're getting close to the halfway point. I won't say close, we're getting closer.

Reason in a Dark Time by Dale Jamieson. I read and enjoyed all three of these books. Sometimes I get a phone call saying, you didn't tell us what you thought of the books, Neil.

I actually loved all three of these books. Although I would say I would recommend the annotated version of The Trial because I realized how much I missed when I was researching the book after and talking to Jon about it. I had no idea that Josef was a bit of a dick. You couldn't pick that up as easily as he made it sound. I know his professor and teacher was teaching him that, but there's a lot of dynamics there. Same thing when I read Lolita by Nabokov.

I was lucky to pick up the annotated version. So if you get a chance to buy the annotated version, it's like they just explain everything that the writer's doing in the back the whole time. And that is just the way I want to read.

I need somebody over my shoulder to help me. So huge thanks to Jon Franzen for coming on 3 Books. It was a delightful conversation.

I hope you all enjoyed it. All right. Are you still here?

Did you make it past the three second pause? If so, I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club. One of three clubs that we have for 3 Books listeners, i.e. three bookers, including the cover to cover club. That's anybody who attempts to listen to all 333 chapters of the show. Email me if you want your name added to the list on our website. We're starting to slowly add to that.

And number two, and that was number two. Number three is the secret club members. I can't say more about the club other than it's entirely analog based and you can get a clue to joining by calling our phone number.

Our phone number is 1 8 3 3. Read a lot. Yes, it is a real number.

Let's start off as we always do by kicking off and going to the phones.

Emily:

This is Emily here. I'm calling from Aotearoa, New Zealand, from Te Whanganui-a-Tara, which is Wellington, the capital city, um, where I live is very beautiful. My walk to work is basically a 40 minute walk along the harbour.

Um, the water is sometimes super clear and you can see schools of fishes. Um, the hills envelope the harbour and the further back ones are kind of muted. The clouds often hang low over the hills and the way that the light illuminates the clouds in the evening is incredibly beautiful.

Um, your podcast is great and a couple of things stand out for me. First is that your values are something that I really resonate with, even if I didn't know that I resonated with them, especially, um, authenticity leading to greatness and like fulfillment is something I never knew I did resonate with. Um, but I would like to kind of engage with that more.

And another one that I didn't know that I wanted to have as a value was the scarcity and curation being of high value, just wonderful work. Keep doing what you're doing and thank you so much.

Neil:

Oh, thank you so much to Emily from Wellington, New Zealand for calling 1-833-READALOT. Actually, I got an email from Emily saying I couldn't get 1-833-READALOT to work. So here's a voice note that I'm emailing to you.

You can always do that. My email is on threebooks.co. If you're in a place of the world where the phone number's not working, although it's supposed to work everywhere, maybe it's just, you know, there's always a series of digits you got to dial in advance. Um, then feel free to send me a voice note.

So lots of stuff to respond there. Uh, in an era of infinite choice, the value of curation skyrockets. One of the principles underpinning the show is that there's just too many books to read.

Jon said it himself, right? There's just way too many books to read. I'll never get there.

And so what is one way we can come up with to curate a pile of books? Well, ask 333 inspiring people which three books most changed their life and hopefully we'll get some great ones there. So you can always head over to threebooks.co slash the top 1000, threebooks.co slash the top 1000 to find a list of every formative book discussed on the show. A good jumping off point. If you're looking for reading material, there's a little number besides you can see who picked it as well. And then I like that point on the graveyard book by Neil Gaiman being a formative to you because it scared you so much.

I, I read the dark half by Stephen King in seventh grade. I was 12 and I still can feel like the chills I got from that book, but more than anything else that taught me how powerful books could be that you could feel such deep sense senses from books. So thank you so much, Emily.

And we will add your name to the cover to cover club list for sure. And thanks for the confidence about chapter one. All right.

And now let's head over to the letter of the chapter. And this chapter's letter comes from Ketan Dedhiya. Hope I said your name, right?

Hi, Neil. This is a message due from my end for a long time. I'm a cover to cover listener of your podcast 3 Books. And before your podcast, I came across your TED talk, three days of awesome. I even listened to it today when I needed to lift myself up. I came across your podcast in the summer of 2020, when my world was going through a lot.

And personally, I was trying to find answers after my mother's passing the previous year with renewed inspiration from your podcast. I found new purpose and meaning with books and explored them with my daughter, who's an avid reader herself, uh, and different from different bookstores in New Jersey and New York. And we bought many books only to read, but to share with others as well.

I celebrated my 50th birthday last December and to celebrate, I gifted more than 50 books to my loved ones in the US and India. Earlier this week, I got an opportunity to attend two conferences in Las Vegas. And they mentioned the conferences a few years back when I intended HR tech conferences for the first time, I was reserved.

I wasn't interacting with people much, but this time I started conversing with people with no hesitation. I had a really good conversation, not only from my industry, but even other industries. Listening to my conversation with a stranger at Starbucks, a person in front of me was so surprised that she applauded and was happy with their interaction.

I had a good conversation with her later the next day and learn different things. On Friday, I strike to conversation with the person while leaving one of the sessions. And we ended up talking for more than an hour and a half.

We found a lot of common connections. He was very gentle with his time, answer many questions I had about his work. And again, to my own surprise, I gave him the covenant of water by Abraham Verghese, which I was reading in flight and spare time from the conferences.

I couldn't let him go without mentioning 3 Books as well. I believe your podcast talks, books, and my reading habit, which found new life with your resources and my meditation practice as well. Since my mom's passing, I've had something to do with this transformational change that I hope to continue for the rest of my life and only make a difference in my life, but many other people's as well.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I'm going to end with one idea, which is what do you think about having a silent conference or a place where no one's allowed to speak? There are no speeches, there are no cell phones, and there are no devices that would distract people, but just simply to display inspiring stories in the form of pictures and words of good things people are doing in this world.

With a room full of books to read, plenty of space for people to ponder with their thoughts, whether in the form of meditation or prayers or gratitude in their beliefs. From Ketan Dedhiya. Oh my gosh, what a cool idea.

It sounds like an art exhibition. You can go in, you can't talk to anybody, but you're surrounded by books, right? There's that old Borges quote, I cannot sleep unless I'm surrounded by books.

I like that idea. I love the feeling of reading together. I think I go up to people, when I see someone reading at a bar on the subway, I'm always like, I gravitate towards them.

I want to know what they're reading. I find them interesting. I find them more interesting.

I feel like instead of just talking to someone with their own brain, I'm talking to somebody with another brain and another thought, and we're annexing conversations from around the world and around history and around time into today. It's so beautiful to do that. Books let us do that.

3 Books is a reminder and a passageway for us to keep finding stories that resonate with us. A wonderful letter. As always, if I read your letter on the air, drop me a line afterwards with your address so I can send you a signed book to say thanks.

We're almost done here now. We've got a letter. We've played a voicemail.

We've talked about some favorite quotes. Now let's finish off by going back to Mr. Jon Franzen for a word cloud of the best words used in this chapter. Let's pick one out and make it our word of the chapter.

Here we go.

Jonathan:

25 years of itinerant borrowing is abhorrent to any Narnia fan. Discursive account. Satyr, next to the rabbit. It's kind of a nullity eponymous book. They're too multivalent. Streak of nativism is what I espouse.

Neil:

Oh boy. There are a lot of incredible, interesting words to choose from. Of course, from Jon Franzen, we're going to get a lot of beauties. Satyr was one of them that I had written down that I was thinking about. Eponymous, I loved. I also really love nullity.

Nullity. Nullity. N-U-L-L-I-T-Y.

Why don't we make that the word of the chapter? Definition with Merriam-Webster is the quality or state of being null, especially a legal invalidity. 1B is nothingness, insignificance, a non-entity to a one or a person that is null.

This is a really interesting word. I like the way it's described. It sounds so insulting, but in a funny way.

According to Merriam-Webster, intellectuals may speak of a book or a film as a nullity, claiming it possesses nothing original enough to justify its existence. Legal scholars also use the word. A law passed by a legislature may be called a nullity.

If, for example, it's so obviously unconstitutional, it's going to be shot down by the courts. And if you're in an unkind mood, you're also free to call a person a nullity if you're not instead calling him a nobody, a non-entity, or a zero. Nullity first appeared in 1543.

Nearly 500 years later, we are now using it in the form of a cross space, a cross time, deep rich conversation with maybe the deepest richest or certainly one of the deepest richest writers we have in the entire world. It was a treat and a pleasure to share space with you and with Mr. Jonathan Franzen in this chapter of 3 Books. I hope you enjoyed the conversation.

And until the next full moon, remember that you are what you eat and you are what you read. Keep turning that page, everybody, and I'll talk to you soon. Take care.

Listen to the chapter here!

Chapter 136: 3 St. Louis Uber drivers on bullets, bruises, and babies

Listen to the chapter here!

Neil:

What's the best thing about St. Louis? What should I do?

Jacqueline:

Nothing, shit, nothing. Watch your damn back before somebody Run your ass over, put a bullet in your head.

Neil:

I'm serious.

Jacqueline:

I am too.

Deneane:

Zion, Zoe, Zena, Zen and Zavier.

Neil:

Five Zs?

Deneane:

Yeah, zzzzuh!

Jacqueline:

You know what I'm saying? And then we used to have this thing they called it the candy truck.

Neil:

Yeah.

Jacqueline:

You know what I'm saying? You could go by there, you could take, take a dime. A dime.

A quarter would get you half the fucking truck. Okay?

Albano:

Unfortunately, if teaching was something that others would care about in meaning of financial reasons, a lot of the teachers that are great in what they do wouldn't leave the profession.

Jacqueline:

This is majority white over here. That's why you're going to see the birds. Because if it wasn't, the birds wouldn't be over here.

If it wasn't, they'd pack their shit and they be gone. If you're not from St. Louis, you have no business on the north side.

Neil:

Hey everybody. I just got back from St. Louis, Missouri. Have you been down to St. Louis?

It was my first time there. I met this wonderfully rich collection of people who I'm so excited to introduce you to in this special on the ground from the street from the backseat chapter of 3 Books. Now on the way from the airport to the hotel, the first guy I met who I don't have a recording with, but he was just like filling me with all the St. Louis trivia. He was like, did you know the Gateway Arch is 630 feet by 630 feet? Did you know we hosted the Olympics and the World Fair in the same year? I was like, well, I knew about the World Fair.

He's like most people do, but not everybody realizes we hosted the Olympics too. 1904 was a banner year in St. Louis. We were the fourth largest city in the US at the time.

There's this deep well of pride coming from this guy. The next day, I had a bit of time to explore, so I went out to look for the Eurasian tree sparrow. Yes, the Eurasian tree sparrow, which looks like a house sparrow, but has this like little black cheek on it.

It's this local bird species that doesn't exist pretty much anywhere else in the whole Western world. Nowhere else other than St. Louis because German immigrants brought six species of birds to St. Louis in 1870. Five of them died that first winter, but the Eurasian tree sparrow, hardy, hardy tree sparrow, actually took hold and from, I think they brought six birds over, it's actually established a foothold in St. Louis, has not disrupted the local ecology, and I really wanted to see it. So, you know, I hailed an Uber and I met Jacqueline who drove a bus in town for 27 years. When I asked her for the best thing about St. Louis, she first said, nothing, watch your back, somebody going to put a bullet in your head. I mean, that's a direct quote.

That's really what she said. I was like, what? But it was a raw conversation and we ended up talking about the erosion of community, deprioritizing connection, and how we might find or look for new kinds of support in a disconnected world.

Jacqueline said, my family is whoever loves on me. Blood makes you kin, but it doesn't make you family. After, with Jacqueline's help, I found the Eurasian tree sparrow.

I then hailed another Uber and I met Deneane, a 28-year-old single mother of five, who does drop-off, pickup, and evening solo every day while driving Uber 30 hours a week, working at a cupcake shop, and running a small business online. We went to the Gateway Arch together and Left Bank Books, which is established in 1969, one of the best independent bookstores I've ever been to, and we talked about enduring. That's going to be the theme of her formative book, as you'll hear, how after her mom found bruises all over her body, she left her abusive relationship and found the strength to start over, found the strength to endure.

The next morning, I gave the talk that actually sent me down there, and then I got a final ride to the airport from Albano from Albania, who left his job as a public school teacher in Florida to make more than double now as a driver. Unfortunately, Albano said, if teaching was something others would care about, then teachers wouldn't be leaving the profession. I hope you feel a special kinetic pulse in this chapter.

Listen to the stories from people whose stories aren't often told. Get ready to laugh, to cry, to connect hearts as we tether ourselves to the human connection that exists around us every single day. So are you ready?

Let's head down to the backseat of a number of cars in St. Louis and hang out with Jacqueline, Deneane, and Albano as they share the love and connection that we are always searching for here on 3 Books. Let's flip the page into chapter 136 now.

Jacqueline:

I was born here.

Neil:

In St Louis? What was St. Louis like the year you were born?

Jacqueline:

It was more of a community.

Neil:

Uh-huh.

Jacqueline:

You know what I'm saying?

Neil:

People knew each other.

Jacqueline:

Yeah, you knew each other. You kind of looked out for each other. You know what I'm saying?

Neil:

What neighborhood?

Jacqueline:

I was born on the west side.

Neil:

Yeah. Was that mostly black neighborhood, white neighborhood?

Jacqueline:

Yeah

Neil:

Like 90% black?

Jacqueline:

100% black.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah.

100% black.

Jacqueline:

100% black.

Neil:

And your parents, how'd they end up in St. Louis?

Jacqueline:

And you know what? I've never asked that question. I lost my mom when I was young.

Neil:

I'm sorry.

Jacqueline:

So, yeah. And I lost my dad when I was young, too.

So my grandmother kind of raised me. And I really don't know how they ended Like, I asked my auntie and them that question, but it's like, I don't know.

We just end up here, so.

Neil:

Yeah.

GPS:

Turn left on Dale Avenue.

Jacqueline:

I wish they had ended up some damn where else, because I don't like St. Louis.

Neil:

Why not?

Jacqueline:

Because it's, I mean, it's too much here. It's just too much going on. I mean, and it's stuff going on everywhere you go.

But I guess, like, I drove for mass transit for 20-some years. So I know the city very well.

Neil:

You drove a bus?

Jacqueline:

I drove mass transit.

Neil:

Oh, like the streetcar?

Jacqueline:

Yeah.

Neil:

Yeah. Is it called streetcar?

Jacqueline:

No. It's called mass transit.

Neil:

Mass transit. It's just called mass transit. But what kind of vehicle is it?

Jacqueline:

This is a Kia.

Neil:

No, mass transit vehicle.

Jacqueline:

A big bus.

Neil:

Oh, it was a bus. It was a bus.

Jacqueline:

A huge bus.

Neil:

You drove a bus for 27 years? Wow. That's wild.

Jacqueline:

I passed your stop.

Neil:

I don't care. I like talking to you.

Jacqueline:

Where are you going now?

Neil:

I'm going to a house.

Jacqueline:

For real? Because we like...

Neil:

Well, why don't you stay here? I'll call you. I'll just need two minutes here.

I'm supposed to find a bird at a bird feeder.

Jacqueline:

You what?

Neil:

I'm finding a bird at a bird feeder. There's a, there's a bird feeder here. I'm looking for the Eurasian tree sparrow, which it only exists, it's a bird that only exists in St. Louis.

Jacqueline:

For real?

Neil:

Yeah, because they released it here in 1870. But it got eaten everywhere else by the house sparrow, but only persists in this one city pretty much. And in Europe.

It's called the...

Jacqueline:

So you think, you think a bird feeder going to have a bird there?

Neil:

Well, yeah, they say that they're in the bird feeder.

Jacqueline:

Shit, you done made me curious now.

Neil:

I know. That's why I said we should talk.

Jacqueline:

We talking. We talking.

Neil:

I love hanging out with you.

Neil:

So it's safe here?

Jacqueline:

Yeah, you good.

Neil:

Cuz you told me half the neighborhoods I gotta be careful in. So there's a lot of shootings on the streets is what you're saying? Like every day?

Jacqueline:

Yeah.

Neil:

Really? There's shootings on the street every day?

Jacqueline:

Every day. It's a killing. You can watch the news and somebody has either died on the north side or the south side.

One of these sides, they done killed somebody on. I'm telling you. I wouldn't lie to you, Neil.

Neil:

And how many of them are just people walking by, like innocent people?

Jacqueline:

That ain't too often. But we had, you know, we have had people to come in town like this volleyball some, this was some years ago. In fact, I was still driving a bus.

And she came in in time for a volleyball tournament and the guy robbed her and shot her, killed her on broad daylight.

Neil:

Don't complete the trip. Just drive me around the block a couple times so we can keep talking.

Jacqueline:

Neil, I ain't got time to talk to you.

Neil:

Why?

Jacqueline:

I got somewhere to go. Where's this bird feeder at?

Neil:

I can't. It's supposed to be at the address I said. You can't find the address?

Jacqueline:

We were here. This is it. That's it right there.

Neil:

Jacqueline, the bus driver for 27 years in St. Louis. Born in St. Louis.

Jacqueline:

Born and raised.

Neil:

And raised.

Jacqueline:

I just born. I was raised.

Neil:

And your daddy's from Arkansas.

Jacqueline:

My daddy from Arkansas. I'm not sure where my mom's from.

Neil:

Because she died when you were young.

Jacqueline:

My dad and my mom died when I was young. But I don't know how I know where my dad and not my mom. That is so odd.

That's puzzling to me. I'm going to have to find out where my mom is born and raised.

Neil:

But your daddy's not alive. So who are you going to ask?

Jacqueline:

I can ask my sister. I can ask my aunt.

Neil:

OK. OK. We got to figure this out.

Jacqueline:

It's right here. Neil where you going

Neil:

It's supposed to be some bird feeders here. I'm looking for them.

Jacqueline:

There's no bird feeders. You put in the wrong address. Who told you this bird feeders was over here?

Neil:

Well.

Jacqueline:

This is it right here.

Neil:

OK. Well, then I'll get out here. It's a safe neighborhood, right?

Jacqueline:

Yeah, it's cool.

Neil:

All right.

Jacqueline:

It's cool.

Neil:

So we're sitting at the corner of I don't know where we're in. What neighborhood are we in St. Louis?

Jacqueline:

You're on the west side.

Neil:

We're on the west side of St. Louis where the street is empty. There's nobody on the streets. The houses are old and they're all detached like clapboard houses with white picket fences and like tattered American flags and like kind of yellowed brushy bushes.

You know, the properties are kind of like it was a majestic neighborhood like 50 years ago.

Jacqueline:

It still is.

Neil:

Okay. How much of the houses cost here?

Jacqueline:

You probably can. These houses probably run you in the upper hundreds like right around 140, 50, 60 and they building it up because you got new houses.

Neil:

$150,000 is actually would be can be considered like a steal in like Toronto.

Jacqueline:

Yeah, that's a lot. Yeah, you can get you can get a lot. And I heard that you can get a lot more house for your buck here in St. Louis and we have lots of investors calling trying to buy property and stuff. Like I have I have my father my godfather's house. It's worth like a hundred and eighty. Well, I have people calling me like every day for this house.

Yeah, what like every day? They you ready to sell you ready to sell? No, I'm not.

Neil:

Jacqueline is such a bright vibrant beautiful personality. She's wearing a bright apple red silk tie and her long hair and a bright apple red turtleneck, too. She tells me she's 59 years old and that she's lost her husband about five years ago after they'd been together for 29 years.

Leslie and I have been married for 10. And so hearing stories of people losing spouses, you know, 20 30 40 years into relationships always, you know, gives me pause and makes me feel. She says they have two boys a 35 year old named Justin who is a sergeant and a 33 year old named Jamal who's a truck driver as well as two grand boys.

Jacqueline:

I'm I'm real self-sufficient. You know what I'm saying? I'm that I'm that I can get it done kind of woman.

You know what I'm saying? I don't wait on no man to do nothing for me. I do it all for myself now.

I would love to have a man to come in my life, but that hasn't happened.

Neil:

You told me that St. Louis used to feel like a community and now it doesn't so what changed

Jacqueline:

I think family's changed and what I mean by that Like I said, you know, you've heard the saying it takes a community. It takes a village to raise a child.

I think that structure kind of fell apart at some point, you know what I'm saying? And and you get a lot of that don't say nothing to my kids. I mean even in school just the teacher, you know, call you up there.

Oh, she said this to my instead of you know, everybody being in line with you know, what I'm saying? For this child, you know making education for this child, you know, the mother gets all defensive because you know, it's just it's crazy.

Neil:

I know you mean the education systems change. 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 whooped. I don't know if you that old. No, no 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 if the teacher even called a parent up there, it's like she got a hand on her here rolling her head.

I know you ain't touch my son. You know what I'm saying? Instead of finding out the the core the root of the problem because somewhere your kid is a little badass.

Okay, but we don't want to do that anymore and that's becoming a huge.

Neil:

So you think the fragility that the the everyone's everyone's to politically correct and everyone's so defensive and people are soft people are soft people are fragile people are fragile. So that's caused the lack of community. Community being lost.

There's a lot of books being written about this, you know, The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt our guest in chapter 103 and the book. I just featured in my book club last month. It talks about the decline of trust in society through the 80s with the advent of the 24-7 news cycle, which I don't know how many of us really appreciate what happened.

But you know, when we started putting news on TV at all hours of the day, we had these increased media reports of kids getting abducted or abused the reports including the sort of creation and use of the phrase stranger danger. Why? Well, of course in order to attract the attention of our fear-based amygdalas advertising revenue had to be maximized and how do you attract more advertisers?

You make people look at the screens more. How do you make them look at the screens more you put things on the screens that they're naturally afraid of that. They can't stop looking to because the parts of our brain that are evolved to look for survival at all costs can't stop staring at it.

But this is despite the fact that things have actually never been safer throughout our history books like Enlightenment Now by Harvard psychologist. Steven Pinker show that the world is safer today than ever before or I mean, this is just me saying these things. I think so.

I could just be off on this, you know, Oxford evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar. Our guest in chapter 132 in January of this year. He does have a model called Dunbar seven pillars of friendship.

So these different ways that humans use as signals for how we know if we can be friends things like language shared upbringing education hobbies humor musical taste in a shared worldview, right? So these elements of a tribe might be do they look like me talk like me think like me. So maybe mixing the benefits.

We all intellectually know come from diversity actually temporarily reduces trust because we have to examine whether or not we trust people that don't look like us think like us talk have the same worldview as us as Robin Dunbar would say or maybe it just takes time to learn new ways of connecting and that's okay. That's good. It's good.

Jacqueline:

Exactly.

That's okay. But it's it's up to me. Everybody has to open up open up and be willing to receive like I need to be able to receive your culture.

You be able to see my culture and the next person's culture and who knows what could even become of all any of that, right? You know what I'm saying?

Neil:

Yes.

Jacqueline:

I mean I can learn from you.

Neil:

You can learn exactly I can learn from you. You can learn from me. That's the whole point of 3 Books. Ultimately. I mean we start talking about what life was like in st. Louis and what it's like today.

Jacqueline told me she loved it, but now she doesn't why what's the disconnect today?

Jacqueline:

That's the huge disconnect. I think we have now people just don't care. You know what I'm saying back in the 70s.

You have 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 all baby don't do that.

You know, that's you know, all night. You can't take her day. That's surly's daughter.

You know what I'm saying? Now people they'll tell you when they see stuff snitches get stitches. Don't nobody won't say nothing.

You know what I'm saying? People don't care if it doesn't. 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.

Neil:

Wow.

Jacqueline:

It is, that's the biggest breakdown because that's just like if I'm coming down the street and I know this is this is Mr. Smith house, but I see this strange guy coming out just out of his house with a TV in his hand. First thing I'm gonna do is get on the phone. Hey, they don't look like Mr. Smith. Well, you might just want to come check this out. You know what I'm saying?

Neil:

Yeah yeah

Jacqueline:

And a lot of people won't do that.

Neil:

Yeah, don't want to you know get stitches.

Jacqueline:

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 gonna tell it.

Neil:

The breakdown of society people aren't outside together anymore. We aren't watching our neighbors kids anymore. We don't know the people outside our own house.

I heard Esther Perel say recently a phrase which stuck with me. It's that we all have a thousand friends these days, but nobody to feed our cats. Do you agree with this lack of community?

Is it a st. Louis thing? Are you seeing it where you live to you know, Jacqueline's 59 years old, which means she's born in 1965.

I asked her what it was like growing up in the 60s and 70s. Paint us the picture of what trust and community looked like back then. What was it like in West St. Louis in 19 in the 1970s?

Paint us a picture.

Jacqueline:

I loved it. I loved it. Well, first of all, my mom had my grandmother had seven girls.

And two boys, she actually had three, but she lost a boy in 64. So they brought this four-family flat on the west side of st. Louis.

So imagine that my mom has six kids. She had a sister that had nine kids. She had another sister have four.

All of us is in this fourth. Oh, wow. All of us are right here.

So it was like it was never a dull moment. You were never alone. Never.

This is first time in my life that I've ever been by myself because I grew up with sisters and brothers. Then I grew up with a huge family. So it was family.

It was like a party every day.

Neil:

Like so what was it? Like you walk home at 3 30 p.m. You walk into your house.

Jacqueline:

First of all, I'm not by myself. Remember nothing but kids. Nothing like it's like a river.

You know, have you ever been on a river and as far as you can see, it's water. That's how it was with these kids. Like it's like 15 20 kids like kids everywhere and running and playing and you know what I'm saying?

And then we we used to have this thing to call they called it the candy truck. Yeah, you know what I'm saying? You can go by there.

You got to take a dime a dime a quarter will get you half the fucking truck. Okay, you probably own that truck for a quarter. I'm telling you, I'm telling you, I'm serious.

You can probably own that truck for a quarter. But it was like you then you came home. You know, a lot of times my mom, my mom and dad was still at work, but I had older sisters and brothers because I'm the baby.

So I had older sisters and brothers. They made sure I did what I needed to do. That was, you know, change my clothes.

You always had we always had at least two pair of shoes. That was probably the most we would have you had play shoes. You had church shoes.

So you had to come out of your you had to come out of your school shoes. Anyway, like more like three pair, but you had to come out of your school shoes and take your play shoes outside shoes. You have to put them on and back there.

We have a lot of homework. You know, we did the most we did was like we had chores around the house, you know what I'm saying? But once you got through with your choice, you went back outside with them thousands of kids work and you just you played and play.

I mean, I know every childhood game red light green light, hop scotch tag, hide go seek, jacks, just all kind of games. You just we just play. We were just outside enjoying the out.

You know what I'm saying? It wasn't no video games and all that. We were outside mingling with each other and you just knew the whole entire neighborhood.

You did you knew I mean a woman can come out and had their house and she knew who I was. You you belongs in their house right there. You know what I'm saying?

You five houses down. You're your grandmother's Miss Borders. You know what I'm saying?

You just knew we knew it.

Neil:

Everyone knew everybody.

Jacqueline:

Everybody knew everybody.

Neil:

They were outside because they're outside. But the time outside is a big ingredient for community.

Jacqueline:

Yeah.

Neil:

Yeah, because when we get like the amusing ourselves to death a book by Neil Postman in the 1980s pauses the theory I think that like TVs are going to make us listen to the title of the book. Amusing ourselves to death. So the time outside is a huge problem.

Was there ever any time to read?

Jacqueline:

Nope. The only time you really read is mostly in a summer because they had you know back then the government has summer programs for the kids. I don't know if you know anything about that, but it had different programs for the kids where if you had like a neighborhood park and they had people that they called them.

I can't even remember what they call. They like leaders. They like, you know, but they they were like over with us, you know, we did craft.

We did reading. They took us on field trips. This was the whole summer.

You know what I'm saying? They took us to the library, you know, all kind of different stuff, you know, it was just we did. You can almost say you did.

Well, I guess the only difference is in the summer and during the school year is we didn't do it up during the daytime, you know what I'm saying? Because we were in school. But once we once summer came you just did it all day long.

It was just so much to do.

Neil:

There is kids everywhere. You're outside a lot. Being outside is a big ingredient to community.

You said you had community in St. Louis. Now you hate it. You don't like here anymore.

You told me when I got into the to the uber be careful certain neighborhoods. Somebody might put a bullet in your head and you weren't joking. No, I wasn't because every night there's shootings and you got to be careful.

People don't know each other anymore. We've lost community. So one reason is because people aren't outside as

Jacqueline:

And two don't get me wrong because in the in the black community and that's what I was going to tell you You gonna you say how do you know you in the wrong neighborhood? You have about 10 folks standing on one porch just drinking talking loud, you know, you're in the wrong neighborhood, you know what I'm saying?

That's not where you supposed to be did the cuz see we I don't know. I don't know about other states, but we kind of we kind of we kind of differentiate the different sides of St. Louis like we'll say the north side the south side the west side the east side. So you have to make sure what side you are on to you know what I'm saying?

Neil:

Like I know what you're saying, but of course doesn't I'm only here one day. I have no idea to figure that out.

Jacqueline:

Well, if you get what you have to get in the uber. And I can guarantee you the uber knows the driver knows.

Neil:

Yeah, so don't go somewhere random don't go. Which sides do I go to which sides do I not go to?

Jacqueline:

Okay, you you come in here on the west side. You can go as far west if you want to go and until you get South and you don't want to be on the south side either because everything back west north where I'm from that moved them to the south because they building up on the West.

Neil:

What do you mean they moved them?

Jacqueline:

You know, it's like, you know, low-income housing, so when people apply for low-income housing, that's where they send them.

Neil:

Yeah

Jacqueline:

Send them South, you know what I'm saying? Because this this area over here. Like I said, this all where we sitting right now. It's majority white.

It's considered a city, but this is majority white over here. That's why you're going to see the birds because if it wasn't the birds wouldn't be over there they'd pack they shit and they be gone. That's only why the birds over here, but and you don't want to go you don't want to go at all on the north side. If you're not from St. Louis, you have no business on the north side. So if you go somewhere you ask that driver, what side of town am I on?

Neil:

What happens if I go to the north side?

Jacqueline:

The north side is just it's I'm telling you it's horrible. It's horrible.

Neil:

What do you mean?

Jacqueline:

It's it's first of all you go. You gonna see run down houses like I mean run down like seriously run down. You know what I'm saying?

You gonna see like I said, you you probably see a few kids on the street. I'm talking little kids, but you're going to see grown-ups were like I say, they either getting smoking weed. They drinking cussing right among these little kids.

You know what I'm saying? You're going to see that. That's how you're going to know you're on the wrong side because you're going to see grown folks disrespecting babies.

Neil:

Grown folks disrespecting babies.

Jacqueline:

People that should know better, you know what I'm saying? But yeah, don't care.

Neil:

Don't care grown folks disrespecting babies. Jacqueline's painting us a portrait of trust and connection in society what it looks like when we have what it looks like when we don't. I just finished reading a book called Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs and she's famous for coining the phrase eyes on the street.

I asked Jacqueline what she thinks of that phrase. She said we used to have eyes on the street eyes on the street.

Jacqueline:

And it made a difference and made a huge difference. It did because you knew if you came in certain community, we knew what what grass we can walk on. You know what I'm saying?

Miss Miss Miss Miss Love. She looking out the window. You can't walk on her grass.

You know what I'm saying? You knew, you know, some things you couldn't do in neighborhoods because you knew who would be watching who say who gonna tell it. You just know it.

Neil:

We've lost family. We're living farther away from each other now. Have we lost togetherness?

Are we farther apart from our tribes? But then Jacqueline surprised me again.

Jacqueline:

But you know what I've learned within these last few years and I know the Holy Spirit gave me this revelation and it's like and don't get me wrong. I don't frown on family, but my philosophy now is my family is whoever loves on me. Blood does not make you family.

You know what I'm saying? It doesn't know not blood doesn't blood makes you keen doesn't make you family. You know what I'm saying?

Whoever loves on me makes me.

Neil:

I love I love you.

Jacqueline:

And you that's family to me, you know what I'm saying?

Neil:

As soon as I met you I love you. I fell in love with you.

Jacqueline:

That's family. Now I have blood cousins out there that I don't even like.

Neil:

But you might have a neighbor that loves you and you love her.

Jacqueline:

Exactly. Exactly.

Neil:

And the neighbor feels like your family.

Jacqueline:

Exactly. I was 18 when I lost my mom. I was 14 when I lost my dad, but my mom my mom made a bigger impact on me than my dad, you know, because that's mom, you know what I'm saying?

So it was a lot of things in life that you know, I either had to come by it, you know what I'm saying?

Neil:

What did your mom teach you?

Jacqueline:

Huh? Exactly because well, I mean my mom taught me for the most part my mom was a very meek woman. My mom didn't cuss.

She didn't smoke. She didn't drink, you know what I'm saying? She was very attentive to her kids.

She didn't she wasn't one to oh, I love you. I love you, but she showed us love, you know what I'm saying? I wasn't able to speak that love that word until I got with my husband and he showed me how to open up.

Neil:

Brené Brown has a quote which my wife and I are lucky to sit down with her in chapter 75 and she said professing love is so easy and so cheap showing like bell hooks All About Love. She's showing love is what's up. So how did your mom show love?

Jacqueline:

She like I said, she was very attentive. She was very attentive. I mean my mom I was like a mama's baby.

Like I said, my mom was was I was 18 with my mom. I slept in the same bed with my mom until she passed away.

Neil:

Your whole life?

Jacqueline:

My whole life, that's how close I was to my mom, but it was a lot of things

Neil:

Just you and her? Where's everybody else?

Jacqueline:

That was what I was it.

Neil:

Oh only you slept with your mom cuz you're the baby

Jacqueline:

Yeah, cuz I'm the baby.

Neil:

Yeah, we got a baby in my house.

Jacqueline:

Yeah, that's probably gonna always be a baby.

Neil:

Yeah, my wife still sleeping with him. Like he's still around at night. Like he's got my spot in the bed sometimes.

Jacqueline:

I always be well, you know boys.

Neil:

Where did your dad go?

Jacqueline:

Who knows?

Neil:

We've covered a lot so far. I mean, this is just one draft for one person in St. Louis, but Jacqueline is just so full of life and energy and thoughts. But wait, did we ever see the bird the Eurasian tree Sparrow and what is Jacqueline's most formidable book two more questions.

We still need to answer. Wait, I never saw the bird. Oh, wait, I've seen I've seen I saw Morning Dove.

I saw Blue Jay. I saw Robin no Eurasian tree sparrow Jacqueline. Well, you're my Eurasian tree.

Oh, give me 30 seconds. I'm gonna find it. It's right here.

Jacqueline:

Come on. Oh my God.

Neil:

So the birds are talking to me now you say yeah, they're talking about you. You're right.

Jacqueline:

They say look at this nut.

Neil:

Yeah, I got it. The Eurasian tree Sparrow. Oh, yeah.

Jacqueline:

Who told you they was over here?

Neil:

Well, it's got a black and white cheek, which is different than a house bear. They were released in 1870 by the Germans. They brought 60 pairs over.

They released them in Lafayette Park in St. Louis. They started to breed. They brought a bunch of birds over all the rest died.

But just after that happened a lady came out of the house right next to where we were and she's like, hi, we're like hi. She's like, what are you? What are you up to?

We're just like, oh, we're just I'm just looking at a bird and she's like the Eurasian tree Sparrow. We were like, yeah, she's like, I know I figured and I was like, oh my gosh, I'm sorry. I hope we're not bothering you.

She's like, no, no, no. We when we when we bought this house, we had to sign our names on the contract saying that we knew our home or nearby was breeding grounds for the Eurasian tree Sparrow and that we wouldn't take down the nests. So don't know the I can't verify this story, but I love the fact that a neighbor came out of the house and says like I guess you're looking for the Eurasian tree Sparrow, which was wonderful.

Now, let's keep going. What about the book? Can we tie Jaclyn's story into a book?

Can you give me one book to change your life Jacqueline?

Jacqueline:

I would say the Bible, I would

GPS:

Turn left on Central Avenue.

Neil:

What age were you when you read it?

Jacqueline:

When I start reading it? Probably probably around my 20-ish. Yeah, my late 20s.

Neil:

Yeah. Why'd you start reading it? What made you start?

[Jacqueline]

Because I felt hopeless and helpless.

Neil:

Hmm.

GPS:

Turn left on West Park Avenue.

Jacqueline:

Somebody told me hey, get God in your life.

Neil:

How did that help?

Jacqueline:

Because it gave me hope.

Neil:

This is before you're married before you work 27 years for the bus.

Jacqueline:

This yeah, this is this is like after I lost my mom, you know, you know what it's like to be an 18 year old kid with no mother to give you no guidance, no directions, you know what I'm saying? My mom was taken from me at such a young age, you know what I'm saying? And I didn't.

Neil:

How did she die?

Jacqueline:

She died of cancer. You know, that was that was before.

Neil:

My mom lost her dad at age 18. She still talks about it. My mom's 73.

Jacqueline:

Yeah. Yeah, she knows exactly.

It's a it's a it's a void in your life that could never be filled. You know what I'm saying? You never get over it.

You get you get you adapt to it, but you never get over it. You know what I'm saying? I mean, it's not too many days that goes by that.

I don't think of my mom, you know what I'm saying? And some kind of compassion.

Neil:

What's one message she gave you?

Jacqueline:

She my mom gave me family actually family, you know what I'm saying? Because my mom really believed in togetherness for his family was concerned. You helped each other, you know what I'm saying?

I mean just like when my sister, my oldest sister start having kids real early. You we lost our dad. So it was just my mom and the kids, you know what I'm saying?

Is it's like 11 years difference in me and my sister. So she started having kids my sister when my sister wasn't at home. We took care of her kids.

That's what my mom gave to us. You help your sister out when you know what I'm saying? So right now today with my niece.

It was three of them two boys and one girl. I'm talking. We're very close because I was a part of their raising even though I was young man, my niece is just like, ten years apart but I was a part of that raising so

Neil:

And did God or Jesus or the Bible did it feel some of that void?

Jacqueline:

Oh, it feels a lot of it. It feels it feels more now than than I mean, I I'm a better person because of it, you know what I'm saying? Because you know, you you just feel sorry for yourself.

You know what I'm saying? It's why me you have this pity party and the Bible lets you know that he never said that you wasn't going to have triumph. He said he would never he would be there.

He would never leave you. So he's here with me. He didn't say I wasn't going to have troubles through this world.

You know what I'm saying? He didn't say that we wasn't going to die. It's just I lost mine so early but he didn't he never told us all of us going to die.

You know, we just don't know when so that helps me. Yeah, that gives me you know what I'm saying that that really kind of caused me it brings me out a lot of times of feeling sorry for myself. You know what I'm saying?

Because we all have a story. We all have been through something. We have different stories, but we all have stories.

We all have seen like the worst in this world. So that kind of help.

Neil:

Now so inspired by that chat with Jacqueline. I wanted to go keep moving, you know, go to the bookstore go to the art. So I open up the uber app again.

And this time I meet Deneane. So your name is Deneane and you tell me you got depression for nine months.

Deneane:

Yeah, but also like I feel like it got worse. It's like of course things take course. So like after I lost the two plus like not close to people but really too close to me.

I never went through a bad breakup. And so like that really like hit it because I'm like I have kids, you know, like we have kids together. So it was just like me.

Neil:

You got kids? How many kids?

Deneane:

I have five.

Neil:

You have five kids? You're 28 years old?

Deneane:

Yeah.

Neil:

How old were you when you had your first one?

Deneane:

I was 18.

Neil:

Wow. So 18 every two years.

Deneane:

Yep

Neil:

But you guys weren't married, right? And now you guys broke up.

Deneane:

Yeah.

Neil:

What happened?

Deneane:

12 year relationship. He was a cheater and then abusive. And I finally decided to just get away.

Neil:

Two strikes. You're out.

Deneane:

Yeah, I finally decided.

Neil:

Pretty big strikes though.

Deneane:

Yeah, real big ones.

Neil:

Cheater and abusive. And abusive. What kind of you mean abusive?

Deneane:

Like hands. Like physical abuse. Yeah, physical, physical abuse.

Neil:

I'm so sorry.

Deneane:

Yeah, so I finally, but in the midst of going through all of this, I found the strength to like start over.

Neil:

It's you went solo with five kids.

Deneane:

Yeah.

Neil:

And how old are your kids?

Deneane:

Oh, my oldest is 10. And then I have an eight-year-old, seven-year-old, five-year-old, and a three-year-old.

Neil:

And what are all their names?

Deneane:

Zion, Zoe, Zena, Zen, and Zavier.

Neil:

Five Z's?

Deneane:

Yeah zzzuh!

Neil:

I'm from, I'm from Canada. So it's Z up there.

Deneane:

Yeah.

Neil:

Yeah, five Z's. I can see the arch.

Deneane:

Yep.

Neil:

I see the arch 640 feet tall and 640 feet wide. Built as the gateway to the West. But they built it apparently 100 years after they meant to build it.

Did you hear that?

Deneane:

I never heard that.

Neil:

That's what my driver said yesterday.

Neil:

Actually, the idea for the Gateway Arch in St. Louis was first presented, quote, as a suitable and permanent public memorial to the men who made possible the Western Territorial Expansion of the United States, particularly President Jefferson, his aides Livingston and Monroe, and the great explorers Lewis and Clark, and a whole bunch of other people. Now, this happened in 1933 and construction finished in 1965. So it was 58 years ago.

And mathematically, it worked out to 22 years late, not a hundred years late, like I said.

Deneane:

So how do you take care of five kids by yourself?

Neil:

That would give a lot of people depression to start with.

Deneane:

It's very challenging because like, of course, you have to be on time and like organized and it's like, it's a lot. Like you have to attend to each personality. But financially, I don't feel any different with being without them because I was still financially responsible for everything.

Neil:

So you drive Uber How many hours a week?

Deneane:

I do about 33 hours.

Neil:

Is that full-time job?

Deneane:

Full-time and then I work a part-time.

Neil:

What's your part-time?

Deneane:

Basically, a cashier at Jilly's a Cupcake Spot.

Neil:

At what? Jilly's?

Deneane:

Uh-huh.

Neil:

Pig Spot?

Deneane:

Cupcake.

Neil:

Cupcake Spot.

Deneane:

Yeah.

Neil:

Cool.

So then how do you take care of your kids? I mean, you're because you're working how many, 33 hours here, then how many hours there?

Deneane:

So there, I only work like, I'll say 5 to 11 hours. It just depends.

Neil:

You have to have someone helping you with your kids then, drop off, pick up or something.

Deneane:

No, I'm doing it.

Neil:

So you drop off?

Deneane:

But the daycare helps me where I take them. So like if I drop them off at 7.30 in the morning, they'll take them to school for me.

Neil:

Oh, okay.

Deneane:

And then I pick them up at 5.30.

Neil:

Wow. So you got them 5.30 straight till bedtime. And the bedtime is probably late now with the 10-year-old.

Deneane:

Yeah.

Neil:

You don't got any time for yourself.

Deneane:

Basically.

Neil:

And then we suddenly see the arch. We see the St. Louis Gateway Arch. We jump out.

We take some pictures. I'll paste them on the blog post at 3books.co. If you're watching this on YouTube, I'll put some pictures right here so you can see. We see it.

Oh, we're at the arch. But I want to get the picture with you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

One, two, three, cheese. And you're, and the arch is in the picture. One, two, three.

Oh, yeah. Look at me. Cheese.

Oh, yeah. Now one of us in the arch. This is awesome.

Then we get back in the car. What was the last book you read?

Deneane:

See, I've been listening to audiobooks, so.

Neil:

Do you like, do you like reading?

Deneane:

Yeah, I used to read back in high school. 12, like 12 years ago.

Neil:

What was your favorite book?

Deneane:

It had, who was it by? It was an Arabian book. It was called Something in the Sun.

It talked about the war that was going on. I forgot the name of it, but we had to do a report on it. And I really, really liked it.

I wish they would have made a movie about it.

Neil:

Arabian book.

Deneane:

It was.

Neil:

Arabian book, Sun in Title. A Thousand Splendid Suns.

Deneane:

Yeah, there we go.

Neil:

Yeah, is that it? By, by, oh, yeah, of course, by Khalid Hosseini. The guy who did The Kite Runner.

Oh, that, but that woman had a terrible life. She's married to all these terrible guys. That book, that was hard, man.

That made me depressed.

Deneane:

Yeah, so you had to read it too in school?

Neil:

No, I didn't have to. I just read it.

Deneane:

Ohh

Neil:

I read it, yeah.

Deneane:

Okay. Yeah, that was, that was, I don't know, but that was a good book.

Neil:

Did it change you?

Deneane:

She ended up, I think she ended up having a good outcome.

Neil:

At the very end.

Deneane:

Yeah, like she ended up.

Neil:

300 punishing pages, then it was like 15 good pages.

Deneane:

Yeah, she ended up having a good, I mean.

Neil:

So what'd you like about that book?

Deneane:

I think it was about the fact that she endured, like, you know, and then it's crazy because it seems like that's what I've been doing. But, um. I'm a hopeless romantic.

So it seemed like, like she got with the person that she really loved at the end. Like they love conquering, you know? So I think that's why I liked it.

Neil:

So what do you mean you're enduring? Because you're working the two jobs. You got the five kids. You're a solo mom.

Deneane:

Everything I have went through, like I went through a lot, you know, so it was just like, you know, with the abuse, with the cheating, with the just trying to figure it out, being a young mother and like my parents, like when I found out I was pregnant, my parents was like, they were mad. Cause like I had everything set up to go to college.

So they said you're on your own, you know, so I literally been on my own since 18. So it was just like just going through all the things that I went through. I endured, you know, and like, I know, I know my time is coming to, you know, have my good, you know, my good time.

So yeah.

Neil:

What's your good time look like?

Deneane:

Healthy. And when I say that, like raising healthy children, like we're in counseling now for them seeing the fighting and stuff like that and just being happy, like having a routine, having peace, just having a schedule, having, you know, just conversations with my kids, watching them grow, watching them develop and just like pushing them through whatever they want to do. Like my son wants to be an artist, you know, and my daughter wants to do ballet and stuff like that.

So it's like, I just want to see them go, you know, like just blossom, you know, and then I have a business. So I want to see my business take off.

Neil:

You got a business on top of all this? What's your business?

Deneane:

So I sell designer perfume and cologne.

Neil:

Plug it, plug it.

Deneane:

Yes. It's called Fleur and I sell.

Neil:

F-L-E-U-R?

Deneane:

Yes.

Neil:

Designer perfume.

Deneane:

Yes.

Neil:

Wow. Tell me more. Tell me more. How'd you start it?

What were you doing?

Deneane:

So my parents used to sell designer perfume and cologne in Jamestown Mall when I was younger. And so I loved it. Like I love smelling the scents and matching it up with people, the pheromones and stuff like that.

And then once I got older, I realized, actually during the pandemic, I had a niche for like putting baskets together and like the color scheme, how pretty they are, how pretty they were and everything like that. And I was like, man, and I took off during COVID because nobody wanted to go to the store and go shopping for Mother's Day, Father's Day, Christmas. So it took off and I just fell in love.

Neil:

What do you mean took off?

Deneane:

Like I started, like every holiday, I started averaging almost like 50 baskets a holiday. So it was, and I was a one person, you know, like doing this so I'll be in my room just like going, like just coming up.

Neil:

How much could you sell a basket for?

Deneane:

The highest I've sold one for is about $240.

Neil:

Wow.

Deneane:

The lowest is about $15.

Neil:

Wow. And what's the website? How do I find it?

Deneane:

So I have an Instagram, it's Deneane.

Neil:

You can never delete Instagram. So give us your Instagram handle.

Deneane:

So it's Deneane Fluer, D-E-N-E-A-N-E, but on here I've spelled F-L-U-E-R.

Neil:

Okay.

Deneane:

And.

Neil:

@deneanefluer Spell it again one more time.

Deneane:

D as in David, E-N-E-A-N-E-F-L-U-E-R.

Neil:

Wow. So people can go in there and they can buy your designer perfumes.

Deneane:

Yeah.

Neil:

And how many do you want to do? How many do you want to sell a year? So 50 per holiday.

Now, what if you want to, how many do you want to sell?

Deneane:

I want to sell, for real, I want to go bigger, but I have to get people that I trust to like help me out because I really want to, you know how like with churches and businesses, like when they have the little baskets or like little gifts, like just thank you gifts and stuff like that. I want to do those. So I really want to go corporate with it.

Like, okay, here you're at like the conference you just left.

Neil:

You remind me so much of Suzy Batiz. Suzy Batiz is the founder of Poo-Pourri and she had this vision for being like a hustler. She calls herself.

She drives a black Porsche now and she's worth about a billion dollars. And she's, yeah, and I interviewed her. So you got to listen to that.

Chapter 123 in my podcast.

Deneane:

And how do I find your podcast?

Neil:

Do you use Spotify?

Deneane:

Oh, no.

Neil:

Do you use Apple Podcasts?

Deneane:

I have Apple Music.

Neil:

Do you have Apple Podcasts? So type in podcast into your search of your iPhone and a purple button should come up that says just the word podcast. So click that open.

This is what you spend your time on more than TikTok and Facebook. Now go search and type in three, the number three, space books, B-O-O-K-S. Press enter and see that one of me.

Yep, there we go. Yes, it's me. Yeah, that's me, Neil.

I'm Neil. So just click the top, the top one. Yeah, it's weird.

Now just, okay, click five stars. No, just kidding. I'm just kidding.

So then go, that's it. So then like go down to 123. Scroll down to 123.

Deneane:

Yep. There we go. Suzy Batiz.

Neil:

Yeah. Now follow that or subscribe and listen to that. I interviewed her.

I'll tell you what, Deneane, you are like her and you're going to have that business. And you know what? You are enduring because you got rid of that guy who was cheating on you and was hitting you.

You got five kids. You want them to blossom. You got them in therapy.

You're a wonderful mom and I just have so much faith in you. I can tell it right off your, you're like, so what do you write about? Self-help?

Okay, what do you got for depression? Like you're like, let's figure this out. Like you are, you want, you know what Suzy always says?

She said, my whole life, you know, all I want was freedom.

Deneane:

Yep.

Neil:

Your parents disowned you in 18. They left you on your own. That's, that's bad move.

That's when you, that's when you need your parents most of all.

Deneane:

Yeah, but I, I really don't know cause like they're still there, but like they made me strong. Like, okay, you decided to have this child. So like you have to be responsible for this child.

Neil:

Oh, it was, it was actually a survival training.

Deneane:

It was like

Neil:

So you're happy you did it?

Deneane:

Yeah. Yeah.

Neil:

But then what'd you do? Find an apartment by yourself?

Deneane:

Um, so I had moved in with his mom and he moved out and it was just crazy. Like that's when I first found out he was cheating, but I was like, I don't know. I was just so young.

Neil:

How old was he? You were 18.

Deneane:

He was 20. Yeah.

Neil:

So how'd you guys meet?

Deneane:

High school. Yeah. So it was just like, I started seeing who he was, but I also felt like I was just, this is my brother.

I also felt like I was by myself, you know, so it was just like, huh? Okay. So then I ended up getting my own apartment.

Neil:

And was he with living with you or no?

Deneane:

No, when I first moved in, I was by myself and then he ended up coming there and saying he wanted his family and to make it work and stuff like that. And yeah.

Neil:

How long did that last?

Deneane:

That lasted while I was at the apartment for like two, almost three years and I ended up having two more kids. But he left, he left. So I got diagnosed with a kidney disease while I was pregnant and he left me hanging like once I couldn't work anymore.

Yeah.

Neil:

So where were you working then?

Deneane:

So then I was working at T-Mobile.

Neil:

So you're working all these places while you have the kids. You only get six weeks off or something.

Deneane:

Yeah.

Neil:

In Canada, you get a year off when you have a kid, a year. Every time my wife had a kid, she gets a year off, a full year. That's how everyone in the country gets it.

Deneane:

Wow.

Neil:

The whole country.

Deneane:

Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, because here we only get six weeks, but like when I got sick, my brother who's calling me now, he lives in Vegas.

Neil:

Jon Jon.

Deneane:

Yep. He lives in Vegas. And so he told me like he came in to see me and he was like, you know what?

We're packing up. You're coming with me. So I moved to Vegas with my brother and like he helped me.

I gave birth there. It was beautiful

Neil:

That was your fourth kid.

Deneane:

Yeah yep. That was my fourth one and I gave birth there and it was just like it was a it was a healing experience healing. Yeah, and I felt I wish I would have stayed but I didn't I ended up coming back because like I felt like I needed my mom my dad because like I did I got really really sick and they were saying that I only had two years to live.

Neil:

Yeah, so you're 26 24.

Deneane:

No, I was 24. Yeah.

Neil:

Wow.

Deneane:

Yep, because I got diagnosed with FSGS.

Neil:

But that's not true you have two years to live, right?

Deneane:

It's not true. I'm still here. Yeah, I'm still here and I ended up having another baby because they told me like never to have another kid again and stuff. Even though I didn't plan on having another baby, but I did.

Neil:

All with the same guy

Deneane:

Yep it was the same guy like I ended up getting back with him. He told me he had changed and I believed him.

Neil:

The cheating part or about the hitting part? The hitting was happening the whole time you're with him from the beginning?

Deneane:

No so when when we were in high school, you never did that. So what prompted this all of a sudden it started like after I had my son. So our first our first son like after I had that and it was it was I don't know if when it first happened it was like a shot because it wasn't even an argument like he had came over and I was happy that he was there and stuff like that. And I was just like when I say I was like, okay, you know, like I think he's about to come spend time but his phone kept ringing and he was like, I gotta go and I was like, but you just got here, you know, like I thought we were about to watch a movie eat, you know, hang out all this type of stuff because here it is.

I'm young. I'm stuck with a baby like and it's like he's still living life and I'm just like, okay. So where's our us time, you know, and I remember he got super super mad because he was like, where did you put my shoes?

And I was like, no, I'm not giving you your shoes. You got to stay here with me and I'm thinking it's innocent and like he just snapped like and I remember just being in shock, but I didn't want to tell my mom because I was just like I was in shock like but she said where did it come from?

Neil:

Why is he hitting? Like I would never hit my wife.

Deneane:

I think it came from because like he told me his father used to beat up his mom, but he resented his father. He said you never want to be like him. So I never thought he'll do it, but it came out and then it never went back.

It never stopped. It just kept getting worse.

Neil:

Really? He couldn't control it.

Deneane:

I think he could control it because like he wouldn't do it in front of people. Yeah, like you wouldn't do it in front of people.

Neil:

Did you get do people know what's happening?

Deneane:

Yeah.

Neil:

Who'd you tell?

Deneane:

Well, my mom ended up finding out because she seen the bruises and then it started getting to the point to where I couldn't hide it because like I had black eyes and like he had he had messed my job and yeah, like people started finding out about it.

Neil:

I'm so sorry.

Deneane:

I'm okay Now I'm good.

Neil:

My mom found out because of the bruises. Everybody's got a story. Deneane's book is A Thousand Splendid Sons by Khalid Hosseini because it has the theme of endure, enduring, a theme she resonates with in her own life after leaving an abusive relationship, solo parenting five kids at age 28, doing all the drop-off and pickups while holding down two jobs for Uber and the Cupcake Place and running her own business @deneanefluer on Instagram. It's D-E-N-E-A-N-E-F-L-U-E-R on Instagram, which we'll link to it in the show notes as well. So from here we keep going. I changed the address on the Uber to Left Bank Books, the 1969 founded oldest and most popular independent bookstore in all of St. Louis, but I also couldn't resist sneaking in a couple of our fast money questions too. A Thousand Splendid Sons taught you to endure. You got a favorite bookstore?

Deneane:

For some reason, I like Target. Like that's where I go to get my kids books, but I like Target.

Neil:

Target's good.

Deneane:

They have a nice collection, like, okay, so Audible. There's a book that I've been looking at and it's called Sacred, The Sacred Woman or Sacred. And I heard about it through The Breakfast Club because like I listen to them in the morning.

Neil:

Yeah.

Deneane:

And they brought on the author and I looked her up and like they had the book at Target, but I found it on audiobooks. I have the app already. So like I've been trying to listen to that.

Sometimes I play it while I'm driving, but I haven't really got off into it.

Neil:

What good books do you ever get from Target?

Deneane:

Kid books.

Neil:

Like what?

Deneane:

Like, what is it?

The Hair Joy.

Neil:

The Hair Joy. I like it.

Deneane:

Yeah. Dr. Seuss books.

Neil:

Yeah. Now we're on the highway. We're going by a billboard that says $485 million, $650 million.

Another billboard that says Standout Webster University. Lots of ads for lawyers. Lots of ads for lawyers everywhere.

Art and Bloom, St. Louis Art Museum. There's a Ferris wheel out here. There's a St. Louis Blues Arena. There's a big sign that says Advertise here. A big sign that says Own Tomorrow. What the hell is that?

S-I-U-E. It looks like a school. Buy one, get one for a dollar from McDonald's.

That's what we should have for dinner.

Deneane:

Ew, no.

Neil:

How do you organize the books on your bookshelf?

Deneane:

So right now I just have a basket and like I just put them in there and like it's filled in with coloring books and stuff like that.

Neil:

Nice. Coloring books. What books you read with your kids?

Deneane:

Oh, the ones that I just named and then like they usually get my grandma had just got them this book from Rochester, Minnesota, but it has music in it. I can't think of the name right now, but that's something they'll call it. The ones I just named.

Neil:

So we're going to go to Left Bank Books right now. The most famous books are independent books are I think in St. Louis. There's a bunch of the good ones here though, but I looked online.

This one's got like 900 reviews, you know, it's open till 6. Everyone says you got to go to Left Bank Books. I'm on my way to Left Bank Books.

And we got to go in. Let's buy some books. Deneane, so grateful to have met her across paths with her in St. Louis. And by the way, the last book Deneane snuck in there on our list at the end was Sacred Woman, a Guide to Healing the Feminine Body, Mind and Spirit by Queen Afua, A-F-U-A. Deneen took me to the Arch and Left Bank Books and then we went in and went book shopping together. Okay, there was a big black puffy cat in there named Orleans that was hiding in a basket.

There's a sign on the front door saying careful. You don't let the cat out. You know, there was this big wall of book club books right at the front.

You can tell a lot of local book clubs. They keep their most popular most recent pick at the front door, which doubles as a great way for other people to come and see what book clubs are reading and the store itself has their own book clubs. You go to the basement.

There's a used section, but unlike most places, it's in the POS system. So when you ask, do I have this book? They say, yes, we've got one new and we've got one used in the basement.

Anyway, the place was just wonderful, real activist streak. You know, there's lots of pins, lots of buttons, lots of posters, like it's a real strong. I felt the vibe of the store very strong.

We go shopping together and while you know, we got a nice stack of books for Deneen and her kids on behalf of our three books community. And then I also picked up a couple books for myself, a signed copy of Slow Birding, The Art and Science of Enjoying the Birds in Your Own Backyard by Joan Strassman, S-T-R-A-S-S-M-A-N, who's a St. Louis professor. And I read that book and I put it in my book club.

If you don't get my book club, just go to neil.blog and you can sign up every month, last Saturday morning of the month. I send out giant email with all the books I've read in my reviews of them all. So I read that book, loved it, fun.

It goes through like Blue Jays and Cardinals and Starlings and you know, birds that we see more often, but we don't know a lot about necessarily. And I also got The 27th City by Jonathan Franzen, which has just been republished with a new cover that features the St. Louis Gateway Arch on the cover. So I was like, I gotta get that.

Plus, I've read Jonathan Franzen's four most recent novels and a bunch of his nonfiction, but I have not read this 1988 debut novel. And why is this all important? Because Jonathan Franzen is our next guest on 3 Books Oh, yeah, baby, get ready for that. That's coming up on the next full moon. Now, is that it?

Are we done driving around St. Louis? No, I gave my speech the next morning and I had one more drive to the airport left, one more drive left. And this time there was a limo waiting for me outside the hotel to drive me to the airport.

And I'd like to introduce you to our very last St. Louis driver. That would be Albano from Albania. Let's get into the back of his car now.

Albano:

So yeah, just pretty much where it all depends on where you live inner city. Mostly it's hard-working civilians trying to keep up with high-end demand and low-paying jobs. So they would they expect more from the person they vote in and some I would say for most of the people and I've lived in St. Louis City for over 20 years and it's heavy Democrat because they want better for themselves and better for the city areas around it have a lot of money. So they want somebody that's going to help them. Maybe not pay as much taxes make more money, which we all want to make more money.

Neil:

Once you have more money that you get more right wing.

Albano:

Correct. That's right. The richer the richer the people the more right wing is what you're saying, but even though you can get more money and still be humble is still live by.

Neil:

That's what people love Warren Buffett because Warren Buffett is like a crazy billion, but he's like super blue doing the big donations and you know, he said you don't see that from others. You don't see that from us would be like the Patagonia guy because the Patagonia guy taught us that you could be super rich and then just give it all correct, you know, but the thing is when billionaires are in charge of the donations that's not good either because then you get like a billion dollars for a tiny little art school a billion dollars for a tiny little but then like meanwhile the hospital downtown Chicago like falling apart.

Albano:

Yeah priorities, right prior priorities. We give money to the things that are not supposed to be needed.

Neil:

So in Canada, you know, if you came to Canada 40 years ago guess what our airplanes are were in the in the run by the government, you know, but our trains are run by the government our boat, you know, everything's run by the we don't have private all this our hospitals run by the government schools are run by the government right now. We're starting to get private schools. Now, we're starting to get private hospitals.

Now, we're starting to get because everybody wants to live like the Americans. Nobody lives better in the world than rich Americans. That's they have the highest quality of life.

Look at these guys. They're flying around in jets. They're going to space.

Albano:

They don't know normal.

Neil:

They're all super fit.

Albano:

They're all super fit. That's crazy to me.

Neil:

They're all super fit because they have time to put into it

Albano:

Time to put into it right and they don't have to work like me every day get up at four. Yes.

Neil:

So how many hours a week are you working doing this job?

Albano:

Well, it all depends. There's days where it's really busy and there's days where it's like I'm an independent contractor.

Neil:

How old are you?

Albano:

I'm about to be 33 years from Albania. Yes.

Neil:

Born and raised?

Albano:

Yeah, I moved here when I was 10. So 22 years going on.

Neil:

How does somebody go from Albania to st. Louis?

Albano:

Well, we went through the visa lottery that they do for countries like Albania and we had family in st.

Louis and we decided to move here because it was cheaper and not as cold as Cleveland, which was our second option.

Neil:

So for somebody who's never been to st. Louis before like me yesterday and who maybe is never going to come how would you describe the city to people? What's the city?

Albano:

Honestly st. Louis is very multicultural. It has a little bit of everybody's culture.

I think the immigrants that have come to st. Louis have made the city better all the jobs that are thriving now is because those that didn't want to work for $5 an hour washing dishes. It was the foreigners who came in and actually took those jobs with no English.

If there was one Albanian, let's say for example, he brought in another Albanian that didn't speak the language worked hard and a lot of them have started from nothing. A lot of them have their own construction companies a lot of them do real estate different things and they even the Bosnian community Italians live in a specific area in st. Louis because they moved there way in the early 90s.

So if you're interested like eating somewhere you have a little bit of everybody's culture if it's Indian food, if it's whatever you're craving Thai food, Albanian, you have a little bit of everybody just depends on where you're going.

Neil:

I mean the whole city seems like it started with immigrants like you go back to the 1800s like German immigrants. I mean the reason there's I went to go see this bird yesterday the Eurasian tree sparrow. Okay, because German immigrants brought it over in 1870 with six other species from Europe to try to grow the birds here that they liked and only one of them survived and that one did not destroy the local ecology, but it never spread further than st.

Louis that are still here man. You can go see them I can give you the address.

Albano:

You spent 24 hours in st. Louis and I didn't even know that I spent 23 years.

Neil:

The first guy I met when I landed yesterday was guys did you are 630 feet cross 634 correct started 1904 World Fair was here. And did you know these summer Olympics we are most people did not know the summer Olympics really he was like so interested in making me love st. Louis.

Albano:

I got it. I know I do too.

I tell people a lot about st. Louis is a great city. I know it gets some wrong feel because of crime or whatever like but otherwise a lot of people say about about the crime and why is that not an issue?

It's it's it's an issue in certain pockets of st. Louis. It's not something that it's everywhere.

It's this happens in all of the world. Not just in st. Louis certain areas are more run down than others.

Maybe not as much money is put into those neighborhoods because maybe it's just the way others treat it. Maybe not as much money from taxes going into those neighborhoods without I give them love not give them pain. Absolutely.

Yeah, and everybody needs it like when you said your wife is it yeah teacher. Yeah, I taught for eight years prior to doing this. I taught math. I was living in Orlando prior to coming back to st. Louis during the pandemic and I taught here too for three more years and I taught inner-city students and they come from rough neighborhoods, but that doesn't mean they're not smart because people judge people by their color by their look by things like that. Every kid is able to learn and to be able to succeed.

They can't help it. They're born in a situation like that. So I'm turning the engine off for a sec.

Yeah, my name is Albano originally from Albania have lived in st. Louis for over 20 years. I've went to school in Iowa got my degree in accounting moved to Orlando taught for five years there taught three more years here in st.

Louis. I'm recently doing Luxury car service. I know it's different than a professional job, but it's something I enjoy I get them.

Neil:

Why'd you leave teaching to do limo driving?

Albano:

Unfortunately, if teaching was something that others would care about and meaning the financial reasons a lot of the teachers that are great and what they do wouldn't leave the profession how much money when you make it as a teacher in Florida?

Neil:

How much money you make now?

Albano:

I started in 2014 making $42,000 in Florida after eight years of experience. I was making $60,000 here in st. Louis doing car service.

I make about double. So just just shows you that not necessarily nowadays. You have to get your degree.

It was more needed maybe 10 to 15 years ago. If the high-end jobs require you to go to school to get your doctorate, I'm all for it. I'm a teacher.

So I recommend everybody to go to school, but you can still make a very good living nowadays by doing something different something they enjoy doing.

Neil:

We're prioritizing the wrong things in society. We're saying drive around rich people's worth more double society with us to teach our young kids how to be good people. That's why we end up, you know, messing ourselves up. If we hollow education we lose everything.

Albano:

Absolutely. And I wish that every school in America gets not only the resources that they need especially those in inner-city schools that don't have the resources that they need, but I just wish that in general everybody puts effort towards teaching and teachers in specifically.

We always talk about the kids and their mental health and their state of being in the classroom, but we never prioritize the teachers.

Neil:

Wow. Thank you. So this was a rougher a messier maybe a more human conversation than we usually do on the ground in the cars in a city. I'd never been to before as it was happening live. Obviously as you could tell I mean, I ask everybody for permission before sharing their story for recording their stories and then you know, try to stitch them together with my comments jump in because they feel kind of, you know, unglued a little bit without to help bring us all right there hearing and listening and seeing stories that we don't always see.

Thank you so much for exploring some of these stories with me. I'm very happy to add some more books to our top 1000 from a source that wasn't I could never have predicted when I started the show and so we've got to add right now and we're getting close to number 600 people. We're going to add well, first of all, we got out an asterisk, right?

So we're going to add an asterisk to number 674, which is the Holy Bible. That's what Jacqueline gave us that was picked in chapter 110 by Kevin Kelly originally. So we now have an asterisk on the Bible, not the way that that typically sounds but we've got one there.

We're going to add number 603, A Thousand Splendid Sons by Khalid Hosseini, which I'm thrilled to add. I mean, we didn't have any Khalid Hosseini books on the list. No Kite Runner yet in case anyone wants to pick that or call us at 1-833-READALOT and tell us if the Kite Runner or Khalid Hosseini book is maybe one of your most formative and then I'm just going to add because you know, we all had one there and the Bible was a duplicate. So I'm going to throw Sacred Woman by Queen Afua. We did not give it a sense of space on this show, but Deneane mentioned it and talks about it and I wanted to get a little bit more of her heart out there. So number 602 is Sacred Woman by Queen Afua.

Thank you all of you so much for coming down to St. Louis with me and listening along. Alright, are you still here? Did you make it past the three-second pause?

If so, I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club. Yes, this is one of three secret clubs, not three secret clubs, three clubs that we have for three bucks. Three bucks is the name of the show.

So we got to have three clubs. First club is the end of the podcast club. I talk directly to you.

You talk directly to me. Play your voice notes, your letters, your phone calls. We got some letters from Vishwas Aggrawal coming which is going to be fun. And of course, we've got the Cover to Cover Club. Just drop me a line anytime. Let me know if you're in the Cover to Cover Club.

That's anybody who tries to listen to every single one of the 333 chapters. Remember, I was in my 30s when I started this show. I'll be at 60.

I think I'll be 60. Yeah, when I'm done. So who wants to hang out for 22 years?

Who's up for the 2.2 decade long hang? Those are Cover to Cover members. And then finally, we have a secret club.

This is an entirely analog club. It's completely crazy. It cost me a bunch of money.

I love doing it. It's super fun. But how do you get in?

Well, you gotta call our phone number for a clue. That's 1-833-READALOT. That is a real phone number.

If that doesn't work, just drop the T at the end, readalot, because that's a superfluous T I put in there to make the sentence make sense. Leave us a message is always great. But also get the code word and you'll know what to do because I'll tell you what to do in the voicemail.

Then you can join our analog only secret club. I can't say more about it now. All right.

Now, let's kick off the end of the podcast club as we always do by going to the phones.

Jennifer:

Hi Neil, this is Jennifer in Goldsboro, North Carolina. I was calling with a dream guest suggestion, which is actor Paul Giamatti. I heard him on another podcast and they referenced him being in front of a wall of books and he talked about how much he loved reading.

He has his own podcast, not about books, but he talked about how much he loved reading and it made me say, oh gosh, what are your favorite books? What are your formative books? But of course they didn't talk about that.

They just moved on to the next thing. So help me, Neil. You're my only hope.

How can we get to the bottom of this? Good luck and thank you for all you do. Bye.

Neil:

Thank you so much to Jennifer from Goldsboro, North Carolina for the wonderful idea and request to get Paul Giamatti on the show. I love Paul Giamatti. What's your favorite Paul Giamatti movie?

I'm going to go with the surprising Win-Win. Have you seen Win-Win? I feel like that was like a relatively poorly known movie, but Leslie and I saw it in theaters and we loved it.

We also liked The Holdovers, which we saw more recently, of course, the Best Picture nominee, and then you can go way back. There's just so many good roles. He has always struck me as a really interesting guy, so consider it done.

The invitation is going out today. I'm inviting Paul Giamatti on the show. Fingers crossed.

Let's see if we can pull it off. That would be wonderful. So now it's time for the letter of the chapter, and I got good news.

Guess who's back? It makes sense that while I was hanging out in the backseats of Jacqueline and Deneane's Ubers, guess who pops into my inbox? Vishwas Aggrawal. You might remember a couple chapters ago, we had a letter reaching out to him. What's going on with Vish? I didn't hear back and I kind of reported that, but now he's back.

We got some notes from Vish. Hey, Neil, sorry for keeping the pace for a while. It was so great knowing people still recall my work.

It's all your magical efforts, you know, Vish, which makes and keep very common things on the top of people's minds. Thanks again. Thanks very much.

You can, in fact, leave it at thanks. Thanks can be a word enough for someone like you. All I can say is God bless you ever, ever more, and all your divine efforts to touch people's lives.

Love you, Neil. You will remain a best human. As he does to us, too, as you can feel that love.

Now, he says, so I miss giving you an update. As you're aware, I've not driven Uber anymore. The last few rides I did were during the pandemic.

Since then, I've been trying my luck with self-employment in Canada with two different gigs simultaneously. I went to school again and did a post-grad in immigration law, and I appeared for entry to practice immigration licensing from the College of Immigration and Citizenship and become a regulated Canadian immigration consultant. But also, I gave multiple exams to get a real estate license and I worked in real estate initially and did a dozen odd deals.

But now, I'm focusing on immigration practice as real estate has downturned in Canada. On the family front, my daughter, Hia, has started going to university. She's currently in second year doing an honors and Bachelor of Computer Science at UTM, which is the University of Toronto, Mississauga, where Preeti, my wife, also went to school once again after having two degrees from India.

She took IT as a second career. Currently, she works as a program manager in Home Depot at their head office. Cheers, Vish!

Oh, it's so wonderful to connect the dots from Chapter 7 with Vishwas Aggrawal, which you haven't listened to, go back in time to Chapter 7 of the show, all the way up to Chapter 136 when we're in the backseat of Ubers again. Yes, a wonderful connection through space and time. Okay, and now it is time for the word of the chapter.

Let's head back into the show now.

Jacqueline:

But my philosophy now is my family is whoever loves on me. Blood does not make you family. You know what I'm saying?

It doesn't. No, no, no. Blood doesn't.

Blood makes you kin. It doesn't make you family. Oh, you know what I'm saying?

Neil:

Yes, indeed. It is kin. K-I-N, a noun that Merriam-Webster defines as number one, a group of persons of common ancestry, semicolon like a clan, one's relatives, kindred, it says here, and that or be kinsmen, like he wasn't any kin to you. As Jacqueline said, family makes you kin, but it doesn't make you family, right? No, blood makes you kin. She said one more time, blood makes you kin, but it doesn't make you family.

I don't know. It's interesting. You go back to the word, there's two really closely related words that are going to seem really obvious in retrospect.

Number one is kind, K-I-N-D, like you're from the same kind, which is an old English word from the 1200s, originally spelled C-Y-N-N, if you can believe it, but think kind. What kind of person are you? What kin are you?

I guess there's a bit of a mispronunciation with the I being long and short, but kin kind together, but also it is also a short of akin, A-K-I-N, right? So that word means related by blood. So when you think of the word kind, and you think of the word akin, you might not always think of kin, but we often think of kinship on the show.

So kin is common ancestry, but kinship, I want to say, is the love and the connection that we feel with other people. That was the theme of the conversation. I felt so much love and connection going down there with Jacqueline, Deneane, Albano, and hanging out with you in the backseat of a number of different cars in St. Louis as we truck around the country, as we soak through the world that we're living in these short 30,000 days and try to connect and reach out and touch and feel the love and feel the energy of so many people around us. I love this chapter. It was special. It was different.

It was a lot of fun, but now we're going to go back next chapter 137 with Jonathan Franzen to go deep into the giant mind that is maybe one of the arguably the best novelists in the world today, but everyone's got an opinion about that, but he's certainly in one of the tops. We're going to go there next time and that's going to be a lot of fun, but until then, until the next full moon in June, remember that you are what you eat and you are what you read. Keep turning that page, everybody, and I'll talk to you soon.

Take care.

Listen to the chapter here!

Chapter 135: Cal Newport severs cell subservience to steep slow success

Listen to the chapter here!

Cal Newport:

There's no YouTube video that can have as long and lasting an impact as a book, because when we read, we begin simulating the mind of the other characters that we're encountering. And through that mind meld, you can reconstitute, restructure your brain. And you can come out of a book thinking about your life completely differently, which is just the most powerful thing we can do, is that the right book at the right time can transform the way you understand the world.

Cal:

And I kind of joke sometimes, my whole career is built on giving two-word terms to things that everyone already thinks and knows. When is it appropriate for someone to get unrestricted internet access? The safe answer is 16.

Neil Pasricha:

Hey everybody, this is Neil Pasricha and welcome or welcome back to chapter 135, 35, 35 of 3 Books. Yes, you have joined our 22 year long pilgrimage to uncover and discuss the 1000 most formative books in the world. Today we have a wonderful long form conversation with the one and only Cal Newport, a guide, a visionary, a role model to me and millions of other people on living an intentional life and a productive life.

Amidst our noisy, scatterbrained, tech-drenched world. Cal is an MIT-trained computer science professor at Georgetown University, and he's the author of 10 books, which have collectively sold over two million copies, including ‘Deep Work’, Digital Minimalism, and his latest bestseller, ‘Slow Productivity’. Cal says in our conversation, I sometimes joke that my entire career is built on giving two-word terms to things everyone knows and thinks.

He's being humble when he says that because the truth is he's doing a lot more than that. Just take ‘Slow Productivity’ for example. He's boiled this new phrase down to three principles. Do fewer things, number one. Two, work at a natural pace and number three, obsess over quality. Maybe sounds simple, maybe even trite. You're like, I could, doesn't that sound obvious? But that's when you kind of pull your head up and realize that the whole world is conspiring against you doing any of those things. I mean, doesn't our world today reward doing

More things, working at an unnatural pace and obsessing over quantity. I mean, that's kind of the design of the world today. How many posts can you get out on your feet? How many how many cold calls can you make? I mean, we're always kind of going after things the wrong way. There's a reason Cal has no social media apps on his phone. Actually, it doesn't just have no social media apps on his phone. He has no social media. He's never been on social media ever with his books and his wonderful podcast called "‘Deep Questions’", which I highly recommend you check out.

Cal is focused on helping us navigate and find our way through the ever-changing technology and work patterns that increasingly feel at odds with our shared quest of living intentional lives. So, what are we gonna talk about today? Well, he's got a giant mind, Cal does, and it was on full display as we discuss how Cal measures success. We've got an opening conversation about, the new book just came out, like, how does he think about success?

The neuroscience of reading, Denis Villeneuve, the relationship between rest and work, the ideal age for unrestricted internet access, the Washington Nationals, Leet speak and productivity pr0n the role of books today and their future, Andrew Huberman, positive reinforcement theory, Jonathan Haidt and the ancient generation, technology boundaries for children and much, much more. Let's jump into Chapter 135 now.

Neil:

Hey, Cal.

Cal:

Hey, Neil.

Neil:

It's so, so nice to finally meet.

Cal:

I know.

Neil:

I mean, it was an email eight years ago.

Cal:

Eight years? Oh my God, I'm so old.

Neil:

That I have from Monday, February 29th, 2016 from Brian Johnson. Guys, I've told you both about the other. You are now connected. Have fun.

And I wrote this hilariously nerdy, like geeky, stupid reply. Calvin, I wrote Calvin. Does anyone call you Calvin?

Cal:

My foreign academic collaborators, because I might. Well, yes, because they don't know me, because I don't see them normally. They're different. When I see them at conferences, I publish academic papers under the name Calvin. So they still call me Calvin. But and you, I always say yes, my foreign collaborators and Neil.

Neil:

There that's also why I had written this note. And then you had written back a very kind note. And it was like, it's great to hear from you. And I love that you spell 'hear', H-E-R-E. That like made me feel like you were human, you know, because I do that. I spelled there, their and they're wrong. Yeah, almost one in three times I spell any of those words. I'm excited to see your book. and my address is below. You probably won't believe this, but years ago I was thinking about positive psychology and I thought someone should write a book with the exact name, The Happiness Equation. I'm glad someone did.

Cal:

Yes, I remember that. Yeah, I remember thinking about that at some point. Like, oh, if we made this mathematical, I had a whole thing on it. I think I probably still have the copy that like you or your publisher sent me. It's somewhere. I saw it recently. I think I still have it from back then.

Neil:

And you seem like a title obsessed kind of guy too, because like I loved on '‘Deep Questions’', your wonderful podcast that everybody should listen to. It's really, really good. And it's powerful how you do it. It's really like high signal, you know. You said you were talking about the title of ‘Slow Productivity’ and the resonance you were getting kind of even before it came out. And I thought...

Wow, this is a guy that thinks a lot about titles. Like you had said that you had the same sort of pre-publication resonance with, I think, '‘Deep Work’' and maybe one other of your books. So I was wondering, what is this, what is this pre-publication resonance that comes from a guy that's been publishing books since he was in undergrad? You know, like what, what is this thing that you figured out here?

Cal:

What I figured out is if you have a term that people aggressively agree with and then begin riffing on, hearing nothing but the term, you're probably hitting on something, right? And then, you know, you're on that, you know, you're capturing and I kind of joke sometimes my whole career is built on giving two-word terms to things that everyone already thinks and knows, right? But you know you're tapping something that is really out there, right?

So '‘Deep Work’' was like this, you know, people just have a term that people are aggressively agreeing with and riffing on.

Two-word terms to things that everyone already thinks and knows, right? But you know you're tapping something that is really out there, right? So like the term '‘Deep Work’', people are just like, yes, I mean, I don't even know exactly what you mean, Cal, but like this seems important. 'Digital Minimalism' was similar. Just as people were beginning to get wary about their phones, like I need to be a 'Digital Minimalist'. '‘Slow Productivity’' had a similar thing. Like yes, that's what I want.

Neil:

You famously tested it, I think, on the Tim Ferriss show in, I think, 2021?

Cal:

I did. I tested it on Tim's show. I tested it first. I tried to go back and pull this timeline. I tested it within some newsletter articles. I tested it on Tim's show, and I think that was right around the same time I tested it in the New Yorker as well. So I was sort of putting out trial balloons. And if you look at all those discussions, by the way, those early discussions, it's capturing maybe a third of the big ideas from the book. So it was still an early point, but I was seeing if the term resonated. And I saw it pop up a bunch of places after that. People like, yeah, we believe in ‘Slow Productivity’. Here's what we're doing to try to implement slow product. People started using the term even though I hadn't really defined it yet. It's all like, okay, there's something there.

Neil:

And it's funny that you're also testing things like Tim's show gets more downloads than either of us sells books, you know what I mean? Like he's got like 800 million, 900 million, and maybe a billion even now downloads. I know they're more ephemeral, but you're, you're also testing your book titles, like books, like to be in, you were number two on the New York times bestseller list in your first week. And collectively you and I both got to throw some bottles through James Clear's window. I think after this conversation, cause the 'Atomic Habits' for the 232nd week!

I wasn't necessarily number one all 232 weeks, but for 200, come on James, could you give Cal a break on like the first week of his book?

Cal:

I know he was number one. Here's the crazy thing about James, by the way, was when my last book, when my last book went on the New York times bestseller list, uh, I got a note from James. It was like, Hey, this is great. We're both on the New York times bestseller list. This is another book later. He's still on the New York times bestseller list.

Neil:

Did he give you a note this time at least?

Cal:

I don't know. I think this time it's not as novel. I think back then this was really close. I guess my last book was closer to when 'Atomic Habits' came out. I think he was still checking the list back then. I think now like why bother he could just assume like I'm sure my book is on it. So it was when he was still excited that he was still on the list. That's crazy. A whole book went by and he still hasn't left that list.

Neil:

Yeah, exactly. 232 weeks is nothing to sniff at. That is almost five years. You know in total.

Do you see the list says anything anymore? Like how do you measure success?

Cal:

I mean, honestly, the thing I care about is the two year total sale all format number.

Neil:

Ooh. Right? Great.

Cal:

That's what matters to me. Like the list is a lot about pre-orders. The list is a lot about turn converting your existing audience to buy a book sooner rather than later, which is nice. I think it's like a win. You know, it's a win for the team. There there's probably a long term effect to have the medallion on the book cover that says New York Times bestseller because that's going to maybe increase your conversion rate of someone encountering the book by, you know, 5%. But that could add up, right? Right.

Neil:

The conversion rate might be also the book, the indie bookstore that decides to sell it or, you know, the conversion rate might not also be sales, but curation,

Cal:

It could it used to be able to convert into more media, not so much anymore not necessarily coming off the advice how to list because the which is by the way the harder of the list by far

Neil:

You're competing against cookbooks!

Cal:

Which by the way the next week the number one book was a was a cookbook. Yeah, so, so that's nice. That's nice. But the thing that I care about is the two years list. And the reason why I care about the two year number is like...

Neil:

Can you tell people what that is? So people, so I mean, I really just mean two year total sales, all formats, how many books got sold in the first two years? You didn't say one year. You didn't say three years. You said two years. You said all formats.

Cal:

Yeah. If for me, if a book's going to be successful, it takes, you know, you have to add up these sales over multiple years, not what's happening in the launch window, but what happens over two years. And the reason why I care about that is my sort of entrance as a successful writer all happened on a very slow trajectory. So the book, I'll tell you the story. So here's the backstory, right? My first three books were, I wrote them when I was young.

Neil:

Tell us the titles and tell us the years.

Cal:

So the first book was '‘How to Win at College’', 2005. I wrote that during my senior year of college. And then I followed that right up in 2006 with a book called 'How to Become a Straight A Student’'. And then a couple of years later, a book called 'How to Become a High School Superstar'. Those are the only types of books you could get Random House to give a book deal to a 21 year old for. Right. Because I wanted to write, but a 21 year old, I can't show up and say, I want to write about work and distraction. I really great, you know, become 20 years older. But what I did pitch them on was I'm a student. I understand students. I'm going to write a book for students that students will resonate.

Neil:

I won at college. I'll show you how.

Cal:

Yeah, and I interviewed other people, but basically that was the idea. And then my first big hardcover idea book came out when I turned 30. This was so good. They can't ignore you. And then the book after that was '‘Deep Work’'.

Neil:

When you were 30, meaning that when it was like 2012, your first big book came out in 2012, ‘Deep Work’. Sorry, sorry, sorry. '‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You’'.

Cal:

Now, here's the thing. That book, at least for me, there was a there was an auction for it and for me, as a post-doc at the time, I was like, this is a lot of money. It was my first sort of major book that there was actually some money behind. It disappointed out of the gate.

Neil:

Right. So that was not to the advance.

Cal:

Relative to the advance and relative to just, you know, it just didn't do much out of the gate. It was at this interesting tipping point where podcasts, that whole ecosystem wasn't here yet. And there's still a traditional ecosystem. And, and so when I pitched '‘Deep Work’', they said, well, we're going to lower your advance from what you got for '‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You’' because it's not really doing that well. So then when '‘Deep Work’' comes out, I remember being disappointed right off the bat because it was low, the advance had been lowered. Um, yeah, the book was just put out there. Not a lot was happening at first. And I remember really getting upset because a good friend of mine, his parents went to Barnes and Noble to pick up a copy and like they didn't even have it in stock. This was like the first week. And I remember completely my age. Like why? Like this is such a great idea for a book. Like why, why can't I get, you know, support for this. Why is it not everywhere? It's great, I know it's a great idea for a book. And she gave me this really hard advice, which is like numbers are what matters. They just look at numbers. Like your last one didn't sell that much. This is what a launch looks like for, you know, an author whose last book sold that much. But here's the thing about '‘Deep Work’'. It started to catch on and it had this, this slow build. This is why I care about, to go back to the original point, these big windows, but also why I care about not just the launch is that ‘Deep Work’ has never been on a bestseller list, maybe like on the aggregated business, Wall Street Journal list briefly, but never was a New York Times bestseller, never on a bestseller list, never on an Amazon chart, maybe has rarely been under a thousand in any one day on sales rank. The book has sold almost 2 million copies.

Neil:

Wow, that one book? That one book. Wow.

Cal:

And it was just people talked about it and I did, I started doing, I was doing podcasts. I would just say, I would just say yes to any podcast and it just, that thing just got a life of its own. And so and then what happened to ‘So Good, They Can't Ignore You’. That's now like a three, 400,000 copy seller. It followed behind. And so my whole mindset is now geared towards, if a book's going to hit, it takes a while. Yeah. I don't know how to do the James Clear thing.

I don't know how to just get on the bestseller list and be there for five years.

Neil:

You have to have a million person email list. I mean, a lot of it starts with what Sahil Bloom is doing today or what Dan Go is doing today and the tremendous amount of investment. I don't mean just time. I mean just like...

There's a financial investment, there's a time investment, there's a Sahil’s list went from 100k to 700k in a year, Dan's list went from 500k to 200k in a year. So these guys are post book deal, but pre book publication. And so the conversion after giving some, and I felt this with ‘The Book of Awesome’ too in 2010, like when I was able to say on my blog, hey, I got a new book, everyone was like, I've been reading this guy's blog for free for years. But when I'm like, hey, I got a fifth book, people are like, oh yeah, like I already bought your first three books.

We're used to it.

Cal:

Yeah, that's true. First books with big lists, you get big conversion, but it takes time. So that's how, I mean, it's hard to sell a very large amount. When you're talking like numbers, healthily in the six figures or beyond, it just takes time to sell that many books. I mean, you can't get that many people to buy a book in a single week. You can look at the very best selling nonfiction books. And you go in the Book Scan and look at these numbers, like the very best selling, like here's my debut and it's a fantastic debut. You're not going to see more than 30,000 books sold in a week or whatever. And that's just one week. That's for the launch week though.

Neil:

Right.

Cal:

So yeah, that's, that's the reality of the book world is only so many people are buying a book on any given week. And like, even if you have a healthy percentage of those people buying your book, you cannot, you can't sell a million copies of a book in a month, you know, maybe Harry Potter.

But otherwise you can't do it takes time. So that's the time scale. I look at it because I think of my launch windows, like for, you know, I have an audience, they like me. They're interested. They'll buy my serious audience will probably buy what I do in the first week. Like to me, like the third week matters a lot more than the first because that tells me if there's legs.

Neil:

Oh, interesting. Yeah. It matters a lot more than the first.

Cal:

So the first week, no one's heard about it. I mean, no one's read it yet. So it's just like, I know Cal Newport, I saw them on, you know.

I saw him on Ferris and Huberman and, you know, Adam Grant and Rich Roll and Ryan's and like all these other guys podcasts, right? Like, yeah, like, let's give this a try. I know Cal, but like week three, most of that stuff has come out. And so hopefully they're, they're still hearing about it. So that's a weird world, man. It's a weird world.

Neil:

Well, and that's why it kind of begs the bigger, you're kind of a visionary, right? Like you are able to see around corners more than most people are. I think that's where your long form New Yorker pieces have really, you're almost like, I've always thought the New Yorker is like kind of saying how things really are, but you're almost saying how things really are becoming. And so I'm curious about your macro level view. Forget Neil, forget Cal, forget your books, forget my books. What is your macro level view on books? Period.

Cal:

Yeah. I think the format's durable.

I think it's, I mean, it's the best, it's the best bargain sort of in the human intellectual experience because you're, you're spending.

Neil:

Oooh. Books are the best bargain in the human intellectual experience.

Cal:

Yes, because you're spending $20 to get what a, a mind that has specialized on an idea for years and has spent years trying to crystallize that knowledge into like the optimal structure. You get to transfer all that cognitive effort from that brain into your brain for like 20 bucks. And that's such a powerful thing. It's the only mind reading of any sort of great bandwidth that we have right now, is a book that I can take years of thinking and transport that to your brain by giving you this artifact of information captured with characters that I'm handing off to you. And so I think this is why books have been durable. They've been durable throughout so many different media revolutions. It's hard to replicate what you get out of that.

You know what I really like, for example, about pragmatic nonfiction. So I, in my books, there's usually a real pragmatic portion to it is you can induce physiological states in your reader, right? That this is what I grew up with being around these books is that feeling of an advice book, that feeling of suddenly your internal scheme of understanding the world shifts in a way where new opportunities for you that are very exciting emerge. That just feels so good.

You know, like, oh my God, I could do this. And this opens up this opportunity and it's gonna change my life for the better. And it's such a high and you can induce that with paper. You know, it's such an awesome, interesting thing. I mean, books are really personal.

Neil:

And I agree with you, I always call books the greatest form of compressed wisdom that we have. I mean, there's a reason when people go to TEDtalks.com, they read the transcript. I mean, like, so the speech is 18 minutes long, but I can read the thing in three minutes. There's a reason why like Apple podcasts just released the transcription thing and hasn't it? Hasn't it already? Have you noticed like people open and they're like skimming reading the thing because the podcasts are so long.

So maybe you're reading this right now as opposed to listening to it and I get that so I've always been trying to say well books are the greatest form of compressor, but at the same time, Cal, 57% of Americans read zero books last year. American Time News study from our mutual friend, Johann Hari, from his book, Stolen Focus. Highest number it's ever been throughout history. From what I understand, from I think some things you've looked at, but also people like, you know, Prof Galloway and so on are showing that like, you know, below a certain age, below 25 this, below 20 that, below 15 this, and maybe you've seen this with your own kids, their consumption of reading is smaller than it has been for previous generations and TikTok is eating everything type of like…I do worry about books, even though I'm bullish on them. I'm like, do you not see this happening at the same, like, isn't everything kind of going YouTube-y?

Cal:

Maybe, but you know, the period where books lost their supremacy as the only game in town and the most appealing game in town for distraction was really radio and most definitely TV, right? So that ship has already sailed.

So the interesting counterpoint numbers to those numbers is book sales are stable or growing, right? Especially hardcover book sales, ebooks are sort of staggered, people are sort of moving away from ebooks and moving towards, if you're going to do that, you'd rather listen to a book and so audio is going up, ebooks are going down, but book sales are not falling. So when you hear these numbers, like this is the lowest the read zero books has ever been, what's happening there is what you're shifting is maybe someone who read one book going to zero.

So yeah, that number can get the zero book number can jump.

Neil:

Non-readers are growing.

Cal:

Yeah. Or margins. Yeah, you're getting like the marginal, like I if I get really excited, like I hear about, you know, Dave Goggins on Rogan and maybe I'll read his book, like sort of the marginal readers. Maybe we're losing…You lose them. That number can really jump up. But without really affecting necessarily how many books are being sold in a given year. That being said, I want that number of reading zero books to be much smaller, because what you're saying is like it's the best compressed, not the best compressed knowledge. What else do we have that can change your life so thoroughly? There's no other medium that I know of. There's no YouTube video that can have as long and lasting an impact as a book because when we read and I don't know the full neuroscience of this I think Marilyn Wolf would be good on this – I don't know the full neuroscience on this, but we begin simulating the mind of the other characters that we're encountering. It really is a mind meld.

You get this in movies as well. It's really a mind meld. And through that mind meld, you can reconstitute, restructure your brain and you can come out of a book thinking about your life completely differently, which is just the most powerful thing we can do is that the right book at the right time can transform the way you understand the world.

Neil:

Oh my gosh, you said it so well. And there is something about that first person narrative. I also always say like, look, if you read Dune, you're the director, you picture the characters, you picture the sets, you picture those things underground in the sand. I don't remember what there called. You picture all that. You picture the music. You picture the lighting. You picture the costumes. When you watch the Denis Villeneuve vehicle, as I'm going to do later today, he picks the he picks the characters. He picks the costumes. He picks the music. He picks the lights. And like just the percentage of stuff you got to do is this much smaller.

Cal:

Yeah. Yeah, it's cool. I saw it in the theater down and when I was down there in Austin, you shake in the seats as they're riding the sand worms. That's cool. But you're exactly right. It's not engaging your brain in the same way as doing all of those things in your head. There's something special about it, right? We're not evolved to read, but it's this co-evolutionary thing. Like it's hard. We have to hijack parts of our brain that were evolved to do other things. We have to hijack them and basically force them to do this very unnatural thing. But once we do, it works so synergistically with us. Like it's one of these accidents, cultural discovery accidents that this thing, which is very unnatural and humans aren't evolved to do. We have to really train for years.

Neil:

Whoa, whoa, whoa. This is not natural and humans aren't evolved to do?

Cal:

We're not evolved to read. Reading, we have to hijack portions of the brain that are used and evolved to do other things and through painstaking training, essentially rewire them to convert written letters into semantic meaning, right? I mean, the written word, and this is so recent, we're talking 10,000 years or less and humans have been around for 300,000 years in roughly their modern genetic state, right?

Neil:

Right.

Cal:

So it is really arbitrary. Whereas even something like speaking in language which is more like 50 to 80,000 years old, writing's pretty new, but it works really well. It's like one of these cultural discoveries that has stuck because it's not just useful. Our brain takes to it in a really interesting way. The way that like we imagine the scenes and the impact we get out of it and its ability to change our cognitive states.

It's like discovering, you know, they talk about how like the cavemen discovered beer by accident. I felt like this is awesome. That's sort of what reading has been like for our species.

Neil:

Wow, that's amazing. And plus the 10,000 years ago was the advent, but really, you know, Gutenberg's printing presses, maybe 500 years ago when it was actually able to be mass distributed. There are stories. I have a book called, ‘The Book’, and there are stories of like, I think it's Marcus Aurelius. Like the first time he read in his mind and people were watching him, like he wasn't like talking the words. He was just reading it in his, people were like, what's he doing? Like, you know, what's, why does he just stand there? What's he just looking at? Like they, no one knew what that even was as an idea that you could just sit there and look at something and read.

Cal:

Yeah. I have an interior monologue. Like what is going on here? Yeah. I think Augustine, about him as well.

Neil:

Yeah. Maybe that's who it was. I mean, this is, so that is giving us some great fuel for ‘3 Books’, the podcast, because here I have thought that it is like a, you know, we're in the books category, when the literature category, when they're like tiny infinitesimally small substantive society, Jonathan friends and guests on the show, you know, it says I'm part of a declining species of the literary community. You know, he kind of jokes like that. But meanwhile, you're giving us some contemporary like freshness here. Like there is, is a new thing that you know how to read. It is a new thing that you can do this great thing. You are rewiring your brain to transplant yourself into three different places every single time we have our conversation. So with that wonderful, a beautiful set of appetizers that you've given us with Cal, I really appreciate that. Why don't we dive into now your three most formative books.

For each one, I'm going to hold it up to the camera for those watching YouTube. And for those not watching YouTube, I will describe it as if you're holding it in the store. That's my goal. I'll give like a 30 to 60 second overview of the book and I'll ask you, Cal, to tell us about your relationship with each book. And then I have a few follow-up questions for each one.

Cal:

Yeah, sounds good.

Neil:

Let's kick it off with ‘‘Getting Things Done’’ by David Allen, that's A-L-L-E-N published by Penguin Books in 2001. The cover has got a picture of David Allen who looks kind of like Niles Crane from Frasier, if you know that character, It's got a white background, blue border across the top of the check mark next to the word ‘done’ depending on cover. Mine has it by the word ‘getting’ and so David Allen, born in 1945. He's an American author and productivity consultant who created the time management method ‘‘Getting Things Done’’ after graduate school. Interestingly, I wanted to just mention this. Alan began using heroin and was briefly institutionalized. He claims to have had 35 professions before age 35. In ‘Getting Things Done’, Alan shares the breakthrough methods for stress free performance with the simple premise of our productivity is directly proportional to our ability to relax. He shows us how to bullet point list, apply the do it delegate, defer it, drop it rule to get your inbox empty, reassess goals to stay focused in changing situations, plan projects as well as get them unstuck, overcome feelings of confusion, anxiety, and feeling overwhelmed and feel fine about what you are not doing.

Dewey Decimalheads, you can file this book under 646.7. Interesting subcategory, it's technology/ home and family management/sewing, clothing, management of personal life/management of personal life. Cal/Calvin, tell us about your relationship with ‘Getting Things Done’ by David Allen.

Cal:

Well, first of all, for the audience that's listening, Neil, don't you miss that period where they did covers like that? So it's David Allen with his arms kind of crossed and the contemplative hand on the chin. Wearing a three piece suit. This was like the 1980s and 90s, you used to get these book covers where you would just say a full size picture of the author standing like a full body shot in like a dramatic kind of like, Hey, pose. Miss those eras.

Neil:

There's like one finger on the cheek, three curled around on the chin.

Cal:

Oh, such classic. And I'll say, by the way, he's a fascinating guy. So I profiled, I kind of profiled him, but really like profiled the book in the New Yorker in 2021, I wrote this article called, ‘The Rise and Fall of ‘Getting Things Done’.’ And so I really kind of went deep then, he's a weird, interesting guy. Which, which is important, actually, because when I think about that book's influence on me, there's two waves of it, right? So there's going to be the influence that had when I first encountered it in college when it came out. And there's the influence.

Neil:

2001.

Cal:

Yes. And I so I read it, I listened to it on tape. And back then, I probably downloaded it. This was pre-audible, so I probably paid 30 bucks and downloaded it onto my iPod. Then there's a new resonance that we can get into more recently, where the cultural reaction and misunderstanding of ‘‘Getting Things Done’’ and what that book was really about has a new resonance that I think is also very important. But in 2000-

Neil:

I want the full relationship.

Cal:

Oh yeah, I have a long relationship with Alan and everything. I've spent an unhealthy amount of time probably thinking and writing about David Allen. So when I get to this book, when I first encountered this book, I'm in college, 2001, 2002, I would have read it. And so I would have been like a sophomore or junior. The thing that jumped out at me about it was this idea of being systematic about how you're organizing stuff in your own life, which was an idea that sort of appealed to me. Like I had read Stephen Covey, you know, and Stephen Covey had the quads and trying to work backwards from your roles to figure out like what you should prioritize. There was the sort of a late eighties time.

Neil:

Time vs. Urgency Eisenhower Matrix.

Cal:

This is all Covey. So he was, he was doing that. There were some characters around like Brian Tracy that was sort of more, uh, aphorism based, but like eat the frog, sort of a Maxim based time management, like do the hard thing first. And, uh, Alan came along and was very systematic. He's like, you have a flow chart. You make a decision here, and here. This goes on this list. You execute from that. It kicked off this movement in the 2000s that became known in leetpeak and sort of online parlance as ‘productivity pr0n’, P-R-ZERO-N, which was this belief. And by the way, my New Yorker editor at the time was so pleased that we got the word productivity pr0n, which is this like, ultimate geek term into the pages of the New Yorker and back what I wrote about David Allen…

Neil:

Being a play on the word ‘porn’.

Cal:

A play on the word porn and you write in a way that it's not going to be, it has to do with like it won't be filtered by the early like content filters. But what it was like productivity porn they call it pr0n. There's this big movement this big optimistic movement into 2000s that with the right system supported by software work could become effortless. Like that this was going to liberate work from being the sort of like relatively like confusing hard thing of like, what am I working on? That you would have the right software running the right systems. And like a lot of the organization of work would be automated algorithmically be outsourcing the sort of energy dispersal required to make decisions into systems and work would become this much more effortless thing. You get the right system and your work was going to be better.

And I interviewed some of the creators of one of the big tools that built on ‘Getting Things Done’. This was super appealing to me when I was 20, 21 years old, right? It felt new, it felt fresh. And you see this influence for sure in ‘How to Become a Straight A Student’’, my second book, where I'm really walking students through like, you need to be systematic about how you're approaching your schoolwork. Like, how are you doing it? You need to write down like, what's your GTD? Like, you need to write down this is how I'm taking notes, this is how I'm studying papers. Systems mattered, right? And so that idea that systems matter is very important. I went on a student systems quest starting my sophomore year, right around the time I encountered this, where I had gone through my freshman year and had gotten pretty good, but not great grades. Inspired in part by ‘Getting Things Done’. If I have this timeline right in my mind, I began aggressively experimenting on myself with how I was doing student work, like the systems I was using. I treated it like David Allen treated knowledge work time management. How am I taking notes? How am I sitting for a test? And it was transformative. Like what happened is my grades maxed out. 4.0, 4.0, 4.0. Every quarter starting my sophomore fall, suddenly I was getting to 4.0 until my senior spring where I got one A minus. It was like a three-year span with one A minus. Like everything else was an A.

Neil:

So the systems work.

Cal:

And I evolved them, you know, and let me try this. So this is stupid. That's a waste of time. Let me try this. And so, man, I was a believer in systems by the time I left college and it infuses my early books for sure. Infuses the stuff I do now. David Allen was the person who really introduced this idea of you can have a system. You can have a system for how you do things and that system can make things better and you can, you can let the system take on a lot of the work of, hey, what should I do next? Or how should I do this? A system could make your life easier. Like I never pulled an all-nighter in college once I got systematic about my studies. Like it could make your life easier. I had to study less time than other people. I was more relaxed, you know? I could do-

Neil:

I wanna go deep into your systems because they are pretty powerful and I've heard you talk about them before, but for those that are earmarking this part of the conversation, what is the best place for them to go if they wanna go into this part of your work? Is it how to be a straight A student?

Cal:

Well, you know, it's every stage.

Neil:

So they listen to your conversation with, I think, Andrew Huberman, where you talk about this a lot.

Cal:

It's every stage. Yeah. So if you look at ‘How to Become a Straight A Student’’, you'll see my student systems. If you look at ‘‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You’’, you'll see systems for transforming your like, choosing a job and making your career something that you're successful at. It's locked in on systems in general.

Neil:

Those that want more can look at your early books or more recently, I think your conversation with Andrew was you went pretty deep on this there.

Cal:

Yeah. Or my podcast.

Neil:

He's kind of a consummate learner.

Cal:

Yeah, that was a systems, that was a systems conversation for sure. Well, what's his term protocols? I guess yes. What's the protocols? Yeah. So he keyed in on it's funny how different people key in on different things like doing Ferris's show. Like we usually key in when we talk on like the state of technology and its impact on society. Huberman is like, what's the protocols? Like, let's, let's get that. That really wants to know about your childhood. Rich is like, how do we like, what's this all about Cal? Like, you know, you're like, he got into my interview with him. He's like, I think I'm doing too much. You know, like this is, I'm kind of stressed out and like, it's funny.

Neil:

Everyone has their angle. And it's all self oriented too, in some sense.

Cal:

That's the secret to all media.

Neil:

So, so David Allen, Cal Newport part one in 2001, when you're a sophomore or a junior is to ingrain into your brain, this idea that this is how the world, this is one way of looking at the world. And when I apply this to my life, it seems to be working.

Cal:

Yeah. Now there's going to be…This is why the article I eventually wrote about this was called the rise and fall of ‘Getting Things Done’. Because ultimately I realized and had to evolve like a lot of people who got into this, oh, systems can't do everything. So that then became another important step as I moved on to graduate school and professional writing. And these were the two things I decided in college I wanted to do was computer science and writing. And this is what I was doing. I was at MIT, studying computer science at the highest level and writing books, you know, and trying to become a better writer or whatever.

Neil:

Yeah.

Cal:

This is when I began to realize, um, oh, systems can't get you all the way to impact, systems can't get you to the meaningful life. Systems can help save energy systems.

Neil:

So why'd you think that? Why did you just, why, why'd you stop believing in the systems?

Cal:

Well, and not only did I stop believing, I began becoming a target for David Allen fans for my heresy. Because at the core of Allen's idea was this idea that all work gets reduced to widgets and categorized. And then you don't have to worry about anything. Work becomes this sort of Zen activity of just what context am I in, take an action off a list that's been reduced to something you can do in a couple minutes and execute that, then what's next. And I realized when it came to producing really meaningful things,

That's not what that work feels like. That work is grappling with the muse. That work is like grappling day after day, hour after hour, trying to create something useful or beautiful. When I was solving a theorem or trying to write a book chapter, it's not next actions. And a system couldn't make the hard work easy. And I began to then think about like, oh, these systems are maybe more about getting stuff out of the way.

Yeah. So that you could grapple with the creative beast, which is like this hard, much more messier, beautiful type of thing. And so I had this interesting evolution during grad school.

Neil:

Wow. That is…that is really interesting. And it kind of makes me think a little bit of I, it's weird that I have this, but it makes me think a little bit of this little two by two that I drew for myself, which is time versus importance. I think low time, low importance decisions, you gotta automate them, okay. Systemize them perhaps. High time, low importance decision like email, you gotta regulate it into like…start, maybe do an hour a day or whatever into one regular for me and Leslie. It's like, um, we have a little piece of paper on the inside of one of our kitchen cupboards. And so whenever something… a door is squeaky, a patio stone is wobbly, a light bulb. We just put on that list and then like one half day a month – I've invited her to an invite the last Saturday morning of the month – and we do all the house stuff. Do you know what I mean? So it's just regulated, right? Cause it takes a lot of time, but it's not that important. Effectually just means get it done cause I wanted a rhyming word that is like high importance, low time stuff, like saying hi to your team and you get to work or like picking your kids up from daycare and that all free space to grapple with the muse slash debate, which is the only word I could think of.

That means the high time, high import decision. Well, how interesting is that? It almost feels like you mentioned Tim Ferris a couple times. Like, isn't that interesting? Like I almost see that slow evolution because he's been a very systems guy, you know, for our work week. It almost, you can almost see that evolution with lots of people of our lots of our contemporaries. I throw myself happily in this mix. Like you get to the point where like. I just want to read poetry.

Cal:

Yeah, well, here's the interesting thing about Tim. So I wrote a profile, like a mini profile of him for the New Yorker, where I was I was talking about how like he got maybe he got misunderstood or maybe he evolved. And I interviewed him about this, so like I could kind of get his take on it. But the thing with Tim is I was saying, look, he wrote this book, The Four Hour Workweek, which should be like the handbook for 2020, 2021, right? I mean, it was like he was ahead of the time of like thinking about work in 2007.

And it was like perfectly fit for that time of how do you, how do you, how do you integrate and reduce the footprint of work and do these other sorts of things that are bootstrap remote work. So you could, how do you design your life? Right. And everyone was thinking about this and yet the book was getting no play. And I wrote this New Yorker piece, like, why are we not all talking about this book? And I talked to Tim about it and it was weird. Everyone honed in, in that book on the, the automation and the systems then and now he was like, well, this was all about, it was about me being in Argentina and learning the tango and going and enjoying the wine. It was about me traveling. It was about freeing you up to do the stuff you would normally wait to do when you were retired. He's like, so I wasn't, he was like the hacks almost don't matter in that book. It was like, the thing is you have, you should, if you're clever, you can free up a lot of time for what he called mini retirements. And it was completely misunderstood or people cued in on Ferris is all about, ‘How do you do things’, like ‘what are the shortcuts and how do you do things?’

Neil:

Yeah, because the left brain scratching parts of this book were so scratchy for the, for those left brain people, but that bigger holistic living thing was that we were all young alpha males, a lot of people targeted in that book were like young alpha males looking to like make a million bucks or whatever, right?

Cal:

So yep But then and then he told me and then he got captured by a little bit. He wrote a couple books like great. Well, then I’ll just talk about the hack stuff like what works for your body what works, you know with learning with the Four hours half and then you're like, okay enough of this and he is like podcasting is more interesting, you know. So it was interesting, uh, but that's another microcosm of the systems are very appealing – but like the systems by themselves. And that's how the whole productivity pr0n movement collapsed. Is eventually people discovered the systems help, but they don't give me meaning in my work. They don't, they're not important. They're not getting me fired up. Having a Kinkless GTD set up built on top of OmniFocus, optimized to the hilt is not making me happier. You know, I mean, I like twiddling with it, but it's not making me happier. It's a – this interesting evolution a lot of people go through from systems as the teleology of work to sort of systems as one of the things you deploy to get to what matters.

Neil:

That's fascinating.

Cal:

Teleology. I said that wrong.

Neil:

What was the word? I said theology, but I think I meant teleology. How do you spell it?

Cal:

T-E-L-E-O-L-O-G-Y. The intrinsic purpose of…

Neil:

That might be the word of the chapter. Keep going. I want to get this teleology.

Cal:

Teleology? Now you have me nervous that I'm saying it wrong. This is an Aristotelian-

Neil:

The explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than the cause by which they arise.

Cal:

Yeah, it's like an Aristotelian idea.

Neil:

Teleology. Does that sound right to you?

Cal:

That could be right.

Neil:

Okay. Because at the end of every chapter of the show, from way back into chapter one, we have a word of the chapter with chapter 18 and David Sedaris, the word was Lilliputian. Typically, the word is a word that I have never heard before.

Cal:

Lilliputian referring to Gulliver's travels and the little people?

Neil:

You got it. Yeah, because I asked him about his height because over his New York Times profiles over the years, it was like he kept getting taller. Like it was like, oh, interesting. He realized you could lie. Like, it doesn't really matter. Well, and the reporters maybe these were diminutive or tiny, a tiny man. And then as he got more famous, it was like, his height disappeared from his profiles. It was interesting.

Cal:

Oh, interesting, interesting.

Neil:

So he laughed and said, I was once called Lilliputian. So here's what's good about that term then. And by the way, this is a common thing about people who read a lot and writers is we say words wrong because we just see these words in our head all the time. You know, we're not talking to people, we're thinking about things. Even now, I will get common things wrong. And my wife will be like, that's not how you pronounce that word. And I'm like, I've been a professional writer my whole life. I'm in my head. You know? Yeah. That's why one of the best pieces of advice to ever give anybody who's written a book is read the whole book out loud.

Cal:

Oh yeah.

Neil:

Read your whole book out loud.

Cal:

Which I did for the book on tape for the first time for ‘Slow Productivity’. And man, that's a process.

Neil:

Oh, for the first time? First time? First time, why first time?

Cal:

Because it's a pain. I don't know.

Neil:

You said no to doing audio for ‘Deep Work’ and for ‘Digital Minimalism’ and for ‘A World Without Email.’ And this is two years ago, four years ago. These are recent big audio world. You said no, thanks?

Cal:

Yeah. Now, ‘World Without Email,’ it was easier to say no because it was in the pandemic. And so they were like, eh, it's hard. The studios aren't really open. But yeah, I'd always said no. It sounded like too hard. But then when ‘‘Slow Productivity’’ came out, they’re like, you have a podcast. People know what your voice sounds like now. Sorry, you have to do it.

Neil:

Oh, wow, you were still saying no.

Cal:

It's a pain. I really don't like it. But it was really useful and interesting. But by the way, I don't know if you've had this experience. You come away being like, this writing is trash.

When you're forced to read it slowly, you're like, I'm a terrible writer. That's how you come away. You want to edit it the whole time you're reading.

Neil:

That's exactly why it's so good to read your own book out loud. James Frey, who is the author of ‘A Million Little Pieces’ and was our guest back in chapter…I got to get this right…is it 18? James, James Frey. Sure. James Frey is chapters third…I'm getting it wrong. He said he talks while he writes. He reads every sentence as he writes it. He talked like he can't write in a room at a coffee shop because he's talking as he writes. He's…he's saying the sentence. Of course, he might with fiction be writing a little bit more…

Cal:

Adjusted the song a little bit, but yeah.

Neil:

Yeah, but still it's an interesting point. So I get your relationship with David Allen's…year of college. And I get that there was a kind of when you got to the exposure that grappling with the amuse was kind of a bigger thing. So is that, did we get to what your relationship is with it today?

Cal:

No, there's been another chapter. There's another chapter. All right. So then there's this other chapter, which is what the book tells us about our culture and our understanding of productivity. And this is a little bit more recent. So like one of the interesting things about that book is it comes up in pop culture. Like for example, there's an episode of The Office where Darryl holds it up as like reading, ‘‘Getting Things Done’’, right. And it's referenced a lot as well. It's often referenced.

Neil:

Everyone knows this book. Or they know it in the business book world. This is maybe one of the top five most well-known books with ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’, ‘Seven Habits’, ‘Highly Effective People.’ This book and one of each of ours.

Cal:

Yeah. I mean, hey, it was the my biggest one of my biggest triumphs, at least for like that version of myself is the point when finally ‘Deep Work’ consistently started topping ‘Getting Things Done’ on the time management list, you know, and that was like my biggest, that's just been the last two or three years. That's been my biggest accomplishment. But so, but it's used in culture. It's also used in a lot of critiques of productivity, a lot of critiques of work, a lot of critiques of capitalism. This book is often referenced because the people, the title indicates, they don't know about the book, but the title indicates that this book is about doing more things. Because you see that title, right? And so it's become a stand-in for how a lot of people understand productivity culture. It's like the goal, there's all these people like David Allen saying, how do you do more things? How do you optimize to get more things done? That's exactly how Darryl on The Office referenced it. He's like, I'm trying to be more efficient about how we run The Office because I'm reading, ‘Getting Things Done’. The interesting thing about this book is that's not what it's about. The book, David Allen has no interest in...getting more things done in the sense of like increasing the rate at which you accomplish things, being more impressive, trying to get ahead. The book is instead, here's my take on the book. Now it represents a huge discontinuity in the business productivity literature. That's very important for understanding how the world of business shifted right around that time period. If you go back to like Stephen Covey, ‘First Things First’, ‘Seven Habits’, it's like late eighties, early nineties. You have like a very optimistic approach to productivity. It's all about self-actualization. It believes that you can figure out like the optimal things to do to achieve all your goals and all the roles in your life. It's like very positive. David Allen is not. It's actually, and I didn't notice this when I was 20, but I noticed it today very glaringly, a very nihilistic book. Like in this book, David Allen is basically saying we're drowning. And what is our goal here? What is the goal of this book is to try to find cognitive peace amid unstoppable onslaught of things to do. That is his goal. That's why it's the art of stress-free productivity, not the art of doing really good things, not the art of getting ahead, not the art of accomplishing your goals or getting promoted, stress-free productivity. All he wants is cognitive peace. And the whole system is about how do you get stuff out of your head where it's making you stressed out and get it like in the paper where you trust it.

And it's nihilistic. He wants work to be this almost dystopian, like cranking widgets thing. So at least you don't have to be stressed by all the stuff you have to do. You can just sort of in a mechanical way zone out and just do this, do that, do this, and like let your brain get some breathing room. It's like a nihilistic book almost. And I think this is very important because what happens between Stephen Covey and David Allen, it's the front office IT revolution.

It's computers, it's networks, it's emails, it's mobile computing. That's what's different between 1994 and 2001. And what Alan is reacting to, he's like right there at the very beginning of this wave, is how once we all got connected to digital devices in the office, the amount of work on our plate and the speed and velocity at which this came at us and we had to talk about it just exploded. And he is like, he's there at D-Day, seeing the troops come on the beach, riding from the front lines.

That is what I realized today ‘Getting Things Done’ is. It is an observation, you know, dispatches from the catastrophe. He was right there at the moment that knowledge work changed.

Neil:

So now you see it as a nihilistic book.

Cal:

A milestone that marks the sharp discontinuity in the world of work. And by the way, look at every major business bestseller productivity related book after that, like in the 2010s, they're all about fighting overload and finding focus. It's, it's essentialism. It's one thing. It's my book, ‘Deep Work’. All of these books.

Neil:

Even ‘Atomic Habits’ could be labeled that way. Yeah. During the pandemic, when the book came out, everyone was looking in their wildly messy, Netflix-addled, endlessly screened lives. How do I fricking? Stop drinking coke. How do I maybe that habits book will help me?

Cal:

Hey, that'll maybe get me there.

Neil:

How do I stop scrolling TikTok?

Cal:

but the bigger point here is when you when you hear almost anyone any modern writer, especially in like the elite media world where I also play when they're writing about productivity, cultural work, they set up this straw man. That's just not true. They set up the straw man of like everyone is saying that you should hustle and like get more done and optimize your day. We haven't seen a book like that in like 25 years.

Neil:

Oh, that's interesting.

Cal:

Everything since David Allen on has been fighting back against the onslaught, the distraction, the overload. How do you just find a thing that's important and do that? How do you avoid getting dragged into too many commitments? How do you make sure in the midst of…that's the theme of all these books?

Neil:

So then what's pushing us the other way? Capitalism?

Cal:

It's not capital because we've had capitalism for a long time. We had capitalism in 1970 and knowledge workers weren't worried about this. We had capitalism in 1989 when Covey was writing and we weren't worried about being overloaded.

Neil:

Accessibility?

Cal:

Here's what I think it is. So we had a knowledge work in particular. And this comes from the ‘Slow Productivity’ book. But the rough heuristic we were using for thinking about productivity was what I call pseudo-productivity, which is like, hey, visible activity is going to just be our, our proxy for useful effort. Like if I see you doing something that's good, if you wanna be more productive, stay later at the office. Because we were going from the industrial revolution where you could put a screw and a tire on the Ford line and that was our proxy as knowledge work kind of came into being.

Neil:

Yeah, exactly.

Cal:

So in that assembly line, we could be very precise. We could measure cars produced per labor hour. We could have numbers and charts. And all that fell apart in knowledge work because it's messy or more ambiguous. So we're just like, we'll just use, visible…we'll gather in a building and like make sure that we see each other working. I argue, this has been my big contention because most of my thinking of the last 10 years of writing has really been about the story of different places that technology disrupts things than how we react to that. Because I'm a computer scientist, I care about that. I think it was the combination of pseudo-productivity, which had been in place since the late 1950s, the combination of that with the front office IT revolution that sparked the spiraling burnout crisis that we saw the first signs of in David Allen and by the pandemic had basically reached a point of epidemic proportions, not to reuse that term, but it got really bad. It's technology, these new technologies, plus this old idea of using pseudo productivity to measure your usefulness in the office. Those two things did not play nice to each other. The whole first part of ‘Slow Productivity’ is arguing that created this spiral of increasing overload and frustration and it made knowledge work increasingly unbearable.

Neil:

You’re a dad.

Cal:

Yes

Neil:

You've got kids, three, I believe.

Cal:

Three boys. Yes. All boys.

Neil:

Yeah, I'm also a father of all boys. And your age range is…

Cal:

We have five about to turn six on the young side and 11 at the old side.

Neil:

Mm hmm. And you are at the forefront of a lot of things. Podcasting world, the writing world, the, I think the digital kind of future gazing kind of world. And we are also experiencing a cultural tipping point at the same time as this is happening with Jonathan Heights’ book, ‘The Anxious Generation’, which is just out and killing it and there are movements around the world.

My wife and I have been working on a book proposal with my agent right now, like a manifesto on smartphone free childhoods, like a mother talking to a child. Like what are your internal family Newport principles, rules, ideas on screens and cell phones and smartphones with your five to 11 year old six, five to 11 year old kids?

Cal:

Yeah, well, they're all exactly aligned with John's work because I've known John for a long time And i've written about him and he's kept me up to speed on the research. He's been looking at and so…

Neil:

You’re a paid a member of ‘After Babel Substack.’

Cal:

I am a paid member of ‘After Babel Substack.’ That's absolutely true I actually have given a couple talks at my uh, my kid's school about kids and phones that's all me just basically summarizing John's research, right?

Neil:

So he's a friend of the show as well and we do a nice chat over his wife's Korean food in his kitchen.

Cal:

So he's right. I think he is right that unrestricted internet access, when is it appropriate for someone to get unrestricted internet access? The safe answer is 16. And the culture is 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:

Really? Not, not 21?

Cal:

Well, maybe 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:

I must have been a late bloomer. I gotta say. Yeah, well. I didn't hit this till at least five more years, if not more.

Cal:

Well, but at least it's better, right?

Neil:

Yeah, certainly better than 10, yeah, for sure.

Cal:

So that's why John's been pushing 16, right? And I think that makes sense. The surgeon general has also pushed that age.

Neil:

Yep, it's a big birthday, yep.

Cal:

Yeah, Murphy'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:

What about you? What about your family? When are you going to get your kids phones? It's kind of what I'm asking.

Cal:

Yeah, well, there's two different.

Neil:

What's your screen time policy at home? What's your video game rules?

Cal:

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 we have to be really clear. So unrestricted Internet access, 16. So that would mean, for example, having a smartphone that you can 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 can 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 it'd be very convenient if you could let us know what time practice is going to 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, go, you know, get after it.

Neil:

Do your kids have devices now?

Cal:

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? Through making you addicted to it so they can help upsell you on things. So for our kids, for the video games, they have Nintendo switches.

Neil:

That's what we have too.

Cal:

And I think that's absolutely fine.

Neil:

We only have one.

Cal:

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, they fight otherwise. So I think that Nintendo is fine. So it's interesting how this has shifted. And this is part of the confusion in this field.

Neil:

You're pro Mario Kart.

Cal:

I'm pro-Mario Kart. I'm pro-Zelda. Air Conflicts. I'm trying to think what they play. It was about time.

Neil:

Do you have the time restrictions?

Cal:

Of course. There's only certain times they get to use it. And it's not for…they could use it on like Saturday morning and there's they can win a half hour if they do like enough chores. They don't get very much time.

Neil:

They can win a half an hour if they do enough chores.

Cal:

Point systems. Yeah.

Neil:

And what's the what's the chores? Oh, so number of time you do on the chore?

Cal:

There's, you get various points for doing various things. Yeah.

Neil:

So you have different things you can catch. It's gold.

Cal:

Yeah. That's positive reinforcement theory, right, that when you can positively reinforce good behavior, actually that's like very compelling to kids and points are a good way of doing it.

Neil:

So you start with like two hours, you got screens, which is like largely video games, maybe they watch TV with the parents, that's not counting, but the solo screen time thing for six to 11 year olds in the new per health, but I'll happily share my mind as well. I've got boys three to nine, four boys, three, five, seven and nine. And we have a currently under negotiation screen time contract, which says everybody gets 20 tickets per week. The tickets are worth half an hour each. Uh, that's actually sorry for just for 10 and up. So they had looked forward to that. Then it's like 16 tickets at this age for 12 tickets at this age 10 tickets. I think the baby is like still under our purview and the tickets can only be used Wednesday's music practice day. So you gotta have your four music practices in if your music practices are in by the Tuesday, you can start using your screen time on Tuesday. There is a screen time window per day. It's three to six pm, that's like the after-school time before the like bedtime and it's kind of sounding similar. I mean, and by the way, my kids wrote this up like it's like in their writing on a piece of paper with scratches on it. So we're negotiating it now. It's like a live in process work. Yeah, I hesitate on how kind of like it sounds totally insane, you know, but I’m happy to hear that you do something too, like similar.

Cal:

I mean, for us, basically, there's very little you're not going to play a video game during the week except for some special occasions. So it's like weekend mornings and long car trips. Yeah, and like some special occasions. I mean what I like about Nintendo games too is they're not super addictive. They're hard and they're fun, but you also kind of get bored after a while. We, you know for a while, we didn't realize this at first, but we had put we for we were going on a flight somewhere. So we put some games on an iPad. Yeah, like the iPad arcade and our youngest when he was like playing these iPad arcade games was very different than Nintendo. It was like he couldn't control himself.

And so you, and he's like, I have to get this back.

Neil:

Candy Crush Saga-esque.

Cal:

Yeah. With the Nintendo, we're like, okay, you're like, you're done playing Nintendo. It's like when we played Nintendo as kids, like, oh, it's too bad. It's like watching a TV show you like, but you don't get that reaction. You get when the kids is on the sort of networked game. That's made to be addictive where they're like yelling at you. And like, I, you know, this is my digital crack. You know, that makes me nervous. So we're very careful about what games.

And then we don't worry as much about TV. We watch TV as a family. I'm a cinephile. We watch a lot of movies together. They don't get a lot of time just watching TV on their own, but it's interesting how this changed. Like when we first had our first kid back in 2012, the concern was still the APA talking about screen time. They meant TV, right? They meant like watching or content. Passively watching content like that was the big concern all of the young millennial parents had was like how much TV time should my kid watch. And by 2017, that shifted, like forget TV, it’s nothing. What you care about is interactive screen and internet. That's where the damage is being caused. It's interesting how these things shift where without anything else to worry about we used to worry like what if our three-year-old sees too much Sesame Street. That's not the concern now. Now the concern is the 13 year old with the iPad in their room and you know, it's like put it into my veins. God knows what they're doing. And if you try to take it away, they're going to have an aneurysm.

Neil:

Amen. And two things to add in. One is a physiological one is this an aha, the aha or the underscore point. It's just look at what Cal is doing. He's evaluating the business model of the platform. So if it's a online, you know, free game that is badge oriented versus a $50 you buy the Legend of Zelda in a box, which we just did. Um, that's a fast, that's a really sharp and astute way to evaluate, uh, what you allow you to, cause I thought that's amazing. And then physiologically, I just wanted to say, I took my kids to the eye doctor recently and she's like, how much screen time did they get? And I was like, I don't know, three hours a week. And she's like, uh, three hours a day or three hours a week. I was like, well, I don't know, maybe four hours a week, but it's a week, you know? And she's like, and what's the screen time? I was like a one hour on TV. She's like, that doesn't count. What do you mean it doesn't count? Like, from an ophthalmological perspective, the TV does not count as any screen time. It's the shrunken, tiny, close to your face stuff.

Cal:

That's the problem. Yep.

Neil:

You knew this. I did not. So we're getting the big screen TV. Daddy was against it. We were all sitting on the couch watching laptops. Turns out I was making the mistake.

Cal:

No, you need the big screen. And let me tell you what else you need to do. Right?

Get the big screen TV, get the Sonos Arc as your front speaker, and get the Sonos Sub subwoofer. Those two things alone can give you as close to cinematic sound experience.

Neil:

Wow. Sonos Arc, Sonos Sub, okay.

Cal:

Oh yeah, and you got to get the sub. And you can add two more Sonos small speakers if you want the full five points around. You don't really need it. The Arc is very good, but the Arc plus the Sub with a nice, crisp big screen TV.

You can get a really close to cinematic experience in your house. Let's be honest. That's the whole key for all this is that so you and I can enjoy movies better.

Neil:

That's funny. Yeah, that's funny. Speaking of movies, speaking of this one last question, ‘Getting Things Done’, we're going to go to your second book after this. I know the first one we're taking a little bit longer. Here's the thing. I got to ask you about your relationship with your face, your face, your relationship with your face. And the reason I'm asking about this is because Seth Godin told us in chapter three of the show that his book, ‘Permission Marketing’, which came out in 2000, he says was the very first business book in this category that featured a business author's face on the cover. Now I know you mentioned like the front suit kind of, you know, that look. Well, David Allen in this 2001 book, he's featured on the cover. Your face isn't on the cover of anything. So Cal Newport books do not have a Cal Newport face on them. Okay.

And we also, both you and I operate in a world of like podcasts, for example. I have gone one way. I had my face on the three books logo. I took it off. I don't like being recognized. I don't like the “Surprise, I know you and I want to talk to you!” I don't like that feeling. Um, I happened to me a lot when my first book and I just kind of, I have this disorienting effect when I feel like I'm being…cause that person knows who I am and they're looking at me and they want, I just don't like that. Ryan Holiday did not have his face on the Daily Stoic podcast, now he's added it. You know what I'm saying? So there's like, it seems like everybody's constantly exploring their relationship with their face. A lot of people, like again, mutual friends, let's mention Sahil Bloom, Shane Parrish, Ramit Sethi, they go to like the same photographer for like their, you know, their profile pic, which is then the same kind of perfect profile pic across all your social media handles and across all your...podcast slogans, across all your email newsletters and all this. And I'm like, what's going on? Like I need your crystal ball again. Like what's going on with your relationship with your face, my relationship, our relationship with our faces in general? What, what is happening here? Like I'm disoriented in this world.

Cal:

Yeah, I mean, look, I'm uncomfortable with this world, too. I preferred the model where like Cal Newport is almost like an abstraction, you know, it's like this. We know these ideas in this book and there's this entity Cal Newport, like I don't know if it's a real person or not. I just sort of associate this abstraction with these particular type of ideas. And that really has changed recently in the sense that visual branding seems to be just part of the new media landscape, that when people hear you and see you I guess they have a different relationship with you, that sort of parasocial relationship that I guess is positive for selling books. But I'm not, this is all new to me. I'm like you, I don't want people to recognize me. I don't want people to really know much about me. I don't want that really, but it seems to be the way the whole media world shifted. When I got started, it was like blogging and newsletters was new media. And that was pretty, that could be pretty impersonal, right? It was the ideas. It was the columnist model. It was like, I don't know anything about David Brooks other than his ideas. He's a guy for the New Yorker, Tom Friedman. I think he has a mustache. That's all I know. And he might have grown a beard after that. So the picture may just have been for that. I've always thought, like, if I had to get a picture for the paper, I would make it different than the real, you know, than the real me.

Cal:

Yeah. To your point, I like how you're uncomfortable with it. I like how you're sort of sitting here with me. And I want to just insert a couple more data points for us both. OK. Andrew Wilkinson said on Twitter: “You want to be Coen Brothers famous; the absolute top of your craft, but nobody has a clue what you look like.” This is years ago. James Clear responded. He doesn't really respond much. He responded, “Agree.” I want a brand that is known by name, not by face. Examples, Calvin Klein, Kate Spade. Most people know the name. 99% of them couldn't recognize the face. Now let's insert into your, the Instagram, Instagramification. Like if you've ever talked to anybody who like wants to grow your Instagram profile, I don't know, you don't, I know you're not on social media and I respect you and I love you and I hate social media and I desperately shouldn't be on it, right, I don't do anything with it and I don't have the apps and blah, but I have to post the new podcast is out. Come check. So I'm still doing that kind of stuff. But if you talk to them, what they always tell me is they don't know you. You aren't sharing your four AM ice baths and you're like nine AM putting your kids to bed and your kids. We don't know what your kids look like, Neil, and we don't know what your wife looks like. And I'm like, I know. And they're like, well, that's what you're going to have to do if you want to get bigger. And I'm like, what the fuck? Like, so there's Andrew Wilkinson and James Clear on one side, Coen Brothers famous. Calvin Klein, right? Mary Kay. Right. James Clear, arguably, is a face people don't know. But it's not his face is not all over his stuff. And then there's what I've heard you say. It seems to be the culture now. And that is, I think, where most of us live in. And so we just got to live with it. Can we rail against this? Should we take our faces off of everything? What's up? What's going on like? I'm still trying to figure this out.

Cal:

I think it is a good question. Like the argument, the new media argument is, if people have more of a personalized relationship with you, I suppose, um, they're more, they're more interested in what you're doing. Right. And they'll, they'll be more loyal. They'll buy the books or there's that. I don't know if that's true or not.

Neil:

Humans are rare, scarce. Yeah. So face on the front of Amex.

Cal:

That's true. Yeah. There's no face. So, so I don't know. Um, I don't know how this is going to shake out. Like, I'm more visual now than I used to be because I do, it's really the podcast that had to make me more available because in the podcast you're in someone's ear and then once you're doing a podcast you do want a visual component to it because people just, if you're going to do it people consume these in different ways so now you're visually out there. The thing that first got me occasionally recognized was just book tours because all of these other podcasters who I used to just call into from my home built these studios and I had to like fly around and go to these places. It was after ‘Digital Minimalism.’ That was really the first time.

Neil:

Do you pay for that or do they pay for you?

Cal:

It's a mix. Usually it's those tours, it's the publishers paying for the tour.

Neil:

Okay, okay. I was just curious when you start creating a podcast, because I heard your rant on like the $6,000 like Rich Roll Studio versus the like $250,000 CBS Studio. I thought that was a great point that you made. Yeah, yeah. You didn't say Rich Roll, you said, “Malibu,” but I kind of figured it was Rich.

Cal:

That might have been Rich. Yeah. So anyways, I don't know It's weird. I mean I've talked to Rich about this too, he said it got weird once he was on YouTube, like people recognize him now. I don't know how it's gonna shake out. I mean, here's the thing is I think There is the reason why people are more visible I don't know about the sharing personal details piece that I think is a social media artifact and I think that is maybe not as important as people say I don't, I mean, I don't talk, I mean, I'll talk about some of my systems. Uh, you know, I'll mention like my, what we do with my kids and screen time, but like, for example, my wife is not a character.

Neil:

I purposely didn't ask you their names.

Cal:

I don't say their names. I have an agreement with my wife that she didn't opt into this world. So I don't talk about her. I don't give her name. I don't, she doesn't want to be discussed. You know, she didn't opt into this world. Um, and, and I don't talk a lot about non-professional things other than like interest, like movies. Uh, so I don't know if that's true. I don't think you have to be, let me let you into the details. That's a very modern thing. This idea, it's very YouTube, Instagram, Tik Tok thing, of we're going to form a connection by me being vulnerable and sort of like being honest and expressing like what I'm worried about. And that I think might be more faddish. I do think a visual connection with people, this is why TV dominated radio, you know, like people like the newscaster. I don't know anything about Dan Rather, but I like that I can see them. There's all these points of visual information.

Neil:

JFK over Richard Nixon.

Cal:

And yeah, so, so I do think, uh, at least if you're doing new media that by new media, I mean not books, but you know, something digital, you're online. It's inevitably going to have a sort of video. You're a personality point to it. But what I'm trying to do is still keep myself as a professional presence online and try to keep the rest of my life separate.

Neil:

This is great. My current thinking on this, by the way, is if you work for it, you can find it, but if you don't work for it, you can't. So I've taken my face off my books, even my most recent book. I purposely don't have my face on. I've taken my face off my podcast. I've taken my face off my social media, like my Twitter thing is like not my face. And yeah, I'm doing live speeches here. I'm on a video podcast. So that's what I'm saying. It's like, if you want to like find out what I look like, and I'm not going to hide it from you, but I'm not going to push my face out at you so that I can do what Jonathan Franzen told us, which is I want to be able to ride the subway un-molested.

Cal:

Jonathan Franzen famous. That's how we should describe it. Right. Yeah. People really don’t know what he looks like, but he's incredibly well respected. Chris Nolan. That's the other example. Yeah. He's the king of the king of his medium right now. Most people don't know what Chris Nolan looks like. He could walk into a restaurant and no one's gonna be like, ‘Oh my God, it’s Chris.’ I mean, in LA they would, but like out here in DC, he could walk into a restaurant. I think everybody knows what Tarantino looks like, Tarantino and James Cameron and Spielberg. They messed that up. They got too…they're too visual. We know what they, we know what they look like, but they're kind of like, directors have it easy. Authors used to be this way like a lot Michael Crichton. I bet a lot of people don't know what Michael Crichton looks like. John Grisham is yeah, he's a tall guy, 6’5”. John Grisham I don't know if a lot of people know what John Grisham, Stephen King maybe you would know what he looks like, but you didn't know what writers look like. I bet a lot of people didn't know what Malcolm Gladwell looked like. I mean, maybe he's kind of distinctive.

Neil:

Mmmm. Big frizzy hair. Yeah.

Cal:

When he did all the speaking, I don't know. I mean, talk about narrow problems. Neil.

Neil:

No, I think it is broadly applicable though, because I think that if you're young and you're being told that you need to get out there and you need to bootstrap, you need to hustle and you need to freelance, there is this somehow algorithmically derived expectation that you need to front yourself. And we see it in negative ways, obviously, with like teens and sexting and so on and all that stuff. But I just wanted to get your pull back and I got it and I love it and I appreciate it because I felt like a lone wolf on this thing.

Cal:

Now I got to pile on for the young people. Also, all of what we're talking about, even like where you should be visual or not, all of that is given the prior of you have some craft that you're mastering doing really well. It's just a matter of how, how are you going to be in the public after doing that? Right. And so if you're young, forget all of that. All that matters is I need to build up the skill to do something really, really good. That's really valuable. Then you can worry about, okay, now that like I've done, I'm doing great things. Um, do I want to be…have my face on the book I wrote? Like, that's the right question because I think young people are, have been given this idea, this comes out of the social media companies themselves, that you can just directly alchemize yourself, just being vulnerable and visible and open, that'll just alchemize somehow into being really valuable. That's actually the thing that makes you valuable and well-known. And it's not the way it works. You still need craft. You still need to do something.

Neil:

Oh my gosh, that's a great phrase. Just being vulnerable and open and visual somehow alchemizes into valuable and it doesn't.

Cal:

That's the whole TikTok scam, right? It's like, how do they get people to post stuff to TikTok? Because they need a certain percentage of people posting stuff to TikTok? Well, because TikTok directly controls every video fed to every person. They just do this game. If you're a new creator on TikTok or like on your third or fourth video, they throw like ten thousand views at you and they give you this sense of just something about me is like really appealing and I'm like right on the border of being like a superstar influencer. They feed your vanity and now it's the cocaine pellet in the rat cage. You're like, I'm going to keep posting things on here and then they'll give you another hit. Yeah. Then like here's 10 posts later, 7,000 views. You're like, Oh my God, I'm so close. So it's a lottery mentality, right? This idea. It's like all the, all the boys, my son's oldest son's age have this idea of like, if I'm just playing Minecraft on YouTube, it might just like happen for me.

And then because I know how to play Minecraft, I know how to talk about like I'm playing. And so it's something anyone can do and it could just lottery. And then you're like Captain Sparkles or whoever. I don't know who people listen to now. You're like this personality.

Neil:

I, I'm yeah, I, I have a lot. I want to pile onto your pile on and I'm going to hold myself back, but I think people get the general takeaway of what we're saying. I'll tell you guys things though most people don't know is Henry David Thoreau, the author of ‘‘Walden’’, originally published in 1854 by Tickner and Fields in Boston. Everyone's cover of this book is different. I happen to have a version that has the introduction and annotations by Bill McKibben. So it's just like a bunch of kind of black and white sparse trees in the forest. I don't know what version you have. It just says ‘‘Walden’’ in the top in all caps and a highly kerned, heavily spaced, serifed kind of Times New Roman type of font.

Across the top, it says ‘Bill McKibben gives us Thoreau's ‘Walden’ as the gospel of the present moment by Robert Richardson.’ From the back, Filed in Nature/Literature, first published in 1854, Henry David Thoreau's groundbreaking ‘Walden’ has influenced generations of readers and continues to inspire and inform anyone with an open mind and a love of nature. With Bill McKibben providing a newly revised introduction and helpful annotations that place Thoreau firmly in his role as cultural critic and spiritual seer, this beautiful edition of ‘Walden’ for the new millennium is more accessible and relevant than ever. Obviously, that's just my version. Now, Thoreau lived from 1817 to 1862. So how he died like the age we are like I'm 44. You're ish the same.

Cal:

Forty one.

Neil:

You're 41?

Cal:

Yeah.

Neil:

Well, you finished college the same year I did, but you were three years younger than me. Holy cow.

Cal:

No, I finished college in 2004. I started college in 2000.

Neil:

Okay, so when you said you're a sophomore or junior you were a sophomore that is a little bit better in college. I thought, wow, you skipped three grades? Thoreau lived from 1817 conqueror, Massachusetts and he died 1862 in Concord, Massachusetts. American naturalist, essayist, poet, philosopher, lifelong abolitionist and delivered lectures that attacked the fugitive slave law. Thoreau’s philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of many notable figures, including Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. Sometimes he's referred to even as an anarchist. File this one 818.303 for literature/English North America/middle 19th century.

Cal, please tell us about your relationship with ‘Walden’ by Henry David Thoreau.

Cal:

Interestingly, it was the hardcover version of that edition you have right there that I first read it. Taken out of the science library at MIT that edition with the Bill McKibben introduction.

Neil:

2004. Yeah.

Cal:

And so it was it was on the new release table, and which I would go there and I would take books off of the library. We put, oh, here's our new releases in science writing. And that's how—

Neil:

Where were you, you were at Dartmouth?

Cal:

This would be now at MIT. So I graduated in this.

Neil:

Which bookstore? The Coop?

Cal:

No, in the library.

Neil:

Oh, the library. The library. Not Harvard bookstore or anything.

Cal:

Yeah, I mean, I would go to the Harvard Coop and I would go to the MIT one as well. But I would go to the science library. I had no money back then. I used to go to the Harvard Coop as I lived near Harvard Square, even though I was at MIT. And I didn't have any money. So I would just go.

Neil:

Where did you live? I lived there too.

Cal:

I was living originally off Chauncey Street.

Neil:

Don't say 1558 Mass Ave.

Cal:

Not on Mass Ave. I was a little bit north of the Cambridge Commons at first, living in a building where they had a plaque outside that said Nabokov. You mentioned him earlier. Wrote Lolita staying in this apartment building. So we lived there for a while. Yeah, it was really cool. And then we moved towards Huron.

Neil:

And I know the crisscross fries of Cambridge Common well.

Cal:

Yes, exactly. But I used to go actually the Harvard bookstore and I would just get a pile of books and go to that cafe on the second story and get coffee or tea and I would just read the books because I couldn't really afford them. So I would just sit there and read them. Anyway, so I read that edition. Here's why. So I read it in grad school. So we can set the scene. I probably got it in 2005 or something. I read it by the banks of the Charles. So it was a sort of nature-y scene. It was incredibly influential because...

I think people misunderstand ‘Walden’, especially people who haven't really encountered it in depth and they think of it as a nature book because he has this beautiful nature writing in it and he's a very good nature writer. It's not a nature book. It's not primarily a nature book. I mean, look at the first chapter. The biggest chapter in the book is called economy, right? And if you look through it, it has data tables in it, right? There's not, Hey, let me just talk about the beauty of nature. So what ‘Walden’ really was, was an incredibly erudite self-help book. And what he was doing is saying, I have a question, a key question about how to design your life, how to live your life. And he had this very key question that was at the core of the first half of the book, which is he was looking at the trappings of modern life and all the things you buy and how much you have to work to get these things. And he was thinking, I think we have this trade-off wrong. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go back to the...the bare needs of existence. So I'll go out to this cabin by Walden Pond and I'm going to figure out what's the minimum amount of money I need to survive. Beans to plant, food to eat, I'm going to build this on someone else's land. What's the actual amount of money I need to not be in deprivation? He's like, okay, so this is our baseline. And his whole experiment was what's really worth adding on top of this?

Like, how happy am I when I'm doing this? And is it worth to do like all this more labor so I can afford this nicer thing, but that nicer thing is gonna require all this labor? And he came up with this really interesting equation of you have to consider the moments of your life and the time and energy that you have to work in order to generate the money to pay for the thing. Is that thing really worth that much of your life? And so he was grappling with these like fundamental questions about how to design your life built around a combination of his own experiment. Let me live at the base amount. And he calculated how much, that's why he has data tables. Here's exactly how many dollars and cents it costs for me to be alive and not deprived. And then he calculated, okay, how much work if I was just working as an hourly laborer on my neighbor's farms, how much work would I have to do to generate this much money? And it was like a half a day a week or something.

And he was like asking this question of like, how do we get from that? Like 50 hours a week and all the stress and these mortgages. And so he was really questioning assumptions about life and the good life and what it required to live. And why did he do all that beautiful nature writing that try to indicate? Like there's all this value he was getting that didn't require him to work 50 hours a week. He's like the copper pot is nice, but also watching the ice is nice. But the copper pot required me to mortgage my farm.

Yeah, so it was an erudite self-experiment based self-help book.

Neil:

So the copper pot required me to mortgage my farm. Therefore it costs, you know, in the broadest sense of the word more.

Cal:

These were the quiet desperation, right? So, you know, famously men living lives of quiet desperation is this key line from ‘Walden’. What was he referring to? What was the desperation he was referring to? He was referring to Concord farmers who had these mortgages on their farm so that they could buy nice stuff. He talks about copper pots, he talks about Venetian blinds, and their desperation was that they were under this crushing loan debt, and they had to just work and work to try to keep up with this debt, and they were sort of desperate because they were trapped. And was this state of desperation worth the Venetian blinds and copper pot when...watching the ice on the, because he’d write about so eloquently, watching the ice change on the pond and looking at the snake and for an hour just watching this, he's like, this is just as diverting as the copper pot, but I only have to work a half day a week. So it was like a really radical self-experimental based rethinking of what's required to live a good life. I think that's such a cool genre of writing. And that really inspired me to consider radical ideas as like the foundation of writing to like the question, big assumptions, the excitement in that. And so I think it's like one of the best self-help books of all time. Even though we see it as literature and nature writing and people who love it would say, I hate self-help and self-help is so low. And why would you ever, but ‘Walden’ is a fantastic self-help book.

Neil:

Wow. There’s a lot there. There you used a couple sentences ago. You said just as diverting like he talks about walking on the pond and the winter and how the view of it looks like totally different than when he's on there in a canoe in the summer. And you said just as diverting as the copper pot and the Venetian blind. So what do you mean divert? How are you using the word diverting? What do you mean? Like just as what?

Cal:

Like capable of capturing and keeping your attention.

Neil:

Ah, just as capable of capturing your attention, meaning that is some elevated goal.

Cal:

Yeah, like this is interesting and ennobling and value producing. Just nature itself is so exciting. I mean these all became the ideas of course that the counterculture movements of the 50s, 60s, and 70s in the US were all building on these ideas, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, the ‘Voluntary Simplicity Movement’, ‘The Back to Lands Movement’, all of these movements, ‘The Commune Movements’, slow, they were the original slow movement. They all are sort of pulling from some of these same radical ideas. This is a very radical book that Thoreau was throwing bombs. And like the modern reader is like, oh, he's, that book was such a nice description of nature's beauty. You know, it's like he was throwing bombs like…

Neil:

And when you say throwing bombs, you even said, I love this genre. How would you label and define the…what else is on the shelf of this genre? What is this genre you're talking about?

Cal:

Yeah, I mean, these are any books where they try to destabilize like some idea or assumption you have in a way that then like completely changes how you think about things.

Neil:

That's what you've been. That's what you asked. We talked about the very beginning of the conversation in terms of what the value of reading and books is in general. So it seems like this is your thing. This is what you aspire your books to do and you are doing with your work in the New Yorker and with your email list and with your ‘Deep Questions’ podcast and with you. It's throwing bombs.

Cal:

You can see it directly. That's why this book is so influential to me. My first two books written before I read ‘Walden’. ‘How to Become a Straight A Student’’, ‘How to Win at College’. The premise is I talked to really successful students and here's what they do. First book I write after ‘Walden’, How to Become a High School Superstar. This is a deeply contrarian book. It's one of my favorite books that no one has read, but it's like a, it's a crazy book. It's like a college admission book written like a Malcolm Gladwell book. There's a whole backstory to it, but the whole premise of this book is that all of this like stressful striving that kids are doing to get into college, they have it wrong. And I went and spent time with these kids I called relaxed superstars, including by the way, Ramit Sethi's brother, Manish, which is interesting. Cause I knew Ramit, I've known him for a long time. And so it's his brother. Yeah, his brother Manish.

Neil:

How did you come to pass with him?

Cal:

Well, I knew Ramit just because we were the same age. He graduated Stanford right around the time I graduated from Dartmouth and we had a friend in common. And it was actually Ramit who told me early on. I have this friend, Tim Ferriss, you got to read this book. He's he's writing. So it's all a small world.

Neil:

You call them you call them relaxed superstars, relaxed superstars.

Cal:

And it was kids who got into good colleges and they were just like relaxed, interesting kids.

Neil:

I totally know those kids. I hated those kids!

Cal:

Yes. I wrote a whole book about them.

Neil:

And it was like they'd show up to the exam with like I got like all these black bags in my eyes from study all night. I got all these they like have like three words written on their hand as like just a way to recall a million things. I was like.

Who are they're skateboarding at night?

Cal:

Yeah, and they were these kids and they would get interested in things. They were like truly interesting. They didn't do a lot of things, but the things they do are interesting. Like Manish wrote a book when he was in high school, which like really made a big difference. It was like a guide to computer programming, but it really made a difference. Anyways, so I wrote that in the next book after that. ‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You’. It argues that follow your passions, bad advice. And that was like the central piece of career advice when that book came out was follow your passion, Steve Jobs said, follow your dreams. Like this is what you should do.

That's a ‘Walden’ inspired book. It was, this is no, that's wrong. Let's rethink from the ground up, very ‘Walden’-esque. Let's rethink from the ground up, how do you build a career you love? Like ‘High School Superstar’, let's rethink from the ground up, what makes someone impressive? You know, so that bomb throwing, a ‘Deep Work’ had a sort of a similar-

Neil:

Counterintuitive.

Cal:

Yeah, ‘Deep Work’ was like stop using social media, all this stuff you're doing online, all this email and stuff. Like this isn't gonna make you, this is getting in the way.

You should focus on what really matters and be the person who's like disconnected. You're going to be more successful. So it's, you know, that, there's a lot of ‘Walden’ influence in that because I love that feeling of, of destabilizing something you took for granted. And when you destabilize it opens up all these new alternatives and new opportunities for you.

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah, totally. I, um, that's really mesmerizing the story itself and the way you've painted it through the through line of your books. I mean, what a great thing to be able to have written books that you can point to past cells. I mean, you don't got to go on a Facebook timeline to see it. You can just check out my bibliography, which is awesome. And congratulations and well deserved. And now I really want to buy my kids ‘How to be a High School Superstar’ so they can learn to be like this. And a couple of things come up for me. One is, you called him the self-help guru. I mean, or you called him, Thoreau, like a, like a self, like a pre self-help, you know, self-help guy. Um, and there's a question I have been trying to formulate for like a week. And I don't, I still don't have it congealed, but you're so gifted. I'm going to, you're going to, I'm going to give you like the half, the embryonic question and see if you can take it from me.

I'm listening to you to prepare for this with Andrew Huberman, Rich Roll, Tim Ferris, Adam Grant, Chris Williams. It goes on and on. You were pretty much in every big podcast. Maybe just not Joe Rogan, but pretty much every big podcast you were on. I know a lot of these guys. I know we're one degree of separation from a lot of these guys.

They're all rich, like rich, like financially rich. And they're all. And I include myself in all this stuff, by the way, I'm not saying they are. I'm saying they're weird. Like they're weird. Like there's, there's like a, there's like a, and I don't, there's a great quote. I think it was Paul Graham said recently, these days, “The algorithm is so homogenizing that if you're doing anything remotely interesting, you are by definition weird.”

So I love weird, weird is great. So weird not to be weird, John Lennon, I'm with you on weird. But I'm just like, when you go up close to these guys, like some of them I have been, they're like way off. They're not two separations from the main, they're like eight. They're like so rich, so hot, like attractiveness. Like I saw a picture of Andrew Huberman with his shirt off on the internet this morning. Someone was sending me a tweet and I was like.

Oh my god, like that guy could be on the cover of like muscle mag.

Cal:

He's very fit. I can confirm he is very fit.

Neil:

See what I'm saying? And like, but on every level and I'm like, is it just me or are we taking our advice? Like, is it that we're taking our, is it that their stuff works so well that like this is the manifestation of it? Because I will also say, and I mean, no judgment by any of this, the whole question is non-judgmental, but there's also a lot of like,

When you go up close, there's that old Neville Ravikant phrase. It's like, what, I want to trade lives with the person. And often the answer is, again, no judgment, but like family has often not been a priority for a lot of the people or the kids are not. And that's fine. Everyone's got their own thing. Everyone does their own life. It's great. But I'm just looking at the self-help industry as a thing. And is it weird that the self-help echelon, let's call it whatever 10, 20 names anyone listening wants to put in there. Well, you go up close, you're like, this isn't really it for almost anybody. Yeah. And I don't think it's even achievable or desirable for most people. Like I'm stymied a bit by this wrestling I'm having with the industry. I know that we're both in.

Cal:

Yeah. Well, OK, here's what I think they would say. I don't think any of the people you mentioned would think of themselves as self-help gurus, I think they all think of themselves as being in the Johnny Carson role. Like their job is to bring the interesting people onto their shows and, and bring you there's one exception because Huberman does the deep dives on. So he would see like what he mainly does is actually doing research deep dives on a single topic. And you know, he'll spend 50 hours reading about melatonin and whatever. So that's a little bit different, but all these other characters they don't see themselves as like, I'm not giving advice from my own life. I bring on interesting people. I bring in interesting people. That's how they would describe themselves. And most of them, I think if you ask them, they would say, yeah, you don't want my life. Don't switch with me. Like there's a, there's a lot of stress. Like they all will tell you. And now I'll tell people the same thing about me. There's a lot of stress that comes with, um, being more public, for example, you do have wire. They don't seem like normal people. You're right about that. They're all very interesting. That's kind of a necessity, I think, to be a media figure. You have to be interesting. You’re commanding attention. It's like if you want to be on TV, you have to be.

Neil:

The classic Jay Leno versus David Letterman. They both looked really strange. They looked really strange. And they were followed by Conan, who looked even stranger.

Cal:

Movie stars are the same way. They're strikingly beautiful. They're strikingly beautiful in a distinctive way. Like, you know, if you walk past Emma Stone on the street, it would just like catch your attention.

Neil:

Or Timothée Chalamet. I'm like, oh my God, this guy is so specifically lanky and big. He's an unusual.

Cal:

Or Brad Pitt. You just have to be like, that's the most attractive human being I've ever seen. I mean, this is like I can't think about anything else in this party now. You know, and so the podcast, the visual podcast world, it's maybe not to be like the most attractive. It's everyone's distinctive. Like I'm good friends, for example, with I don't know if you know, ‘The Minimalist’, they have the show.

Neil:

Yeah, yeah, I know them.

Cal:

Yeah. But I was just out there doing it. But like Joshua, like wears his hair…It's kind of like a joke. He wears it like super bouffant high, right? Because it's interesting visually. So yeah, I agree. But I think that's, they're not really, I mean, maybe they all see themselves, I think, as channeling other interesting people.

Neil:

Is that not post-success view of yourself though? I mean, like, this is probably why I'm so attracted to like first books in general. Like the pre, like when I wrote ‘The Book of Awesome’ in 2008-2012. My wife had just left me and my best friend took his life. I'm writing an awesome thing a day. This congeals into a book. That book still has a unique energy and I don't think any of my books have equal because of what I was in my in my life like a unique like a harried up all night frenzied, anxious just weird energy in that book. Yeah I get a lot of people saying I was going through my divorce and I lost my best friend I read your book nowhere in ‘The Book of Awesome’ does it say that that's what I was doing. Yeah but yeah that it translated through you know what I'm saying.

Cal:

Like that David Goggins book it just has this like hungry weird interesting energy in it that like just from this guy and what he was going through and he's just like laying that out in a book and it just hit people who are in similar situations. It just was like, okay, this is, this is a first book. This is raw. Like this is like a, you know, it just hit people in a way. It wasn't calculated.

Neil:

I guess what I'm trying to also rail against or at least bring up in a discussion point with you, and I appreciate you going there with me is like similarly with like the ads on podcasts, like it's like the ads on pockets are, it's a ludicrously priced industry with massive thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars per read per show with full of this thing. And it's like, does that not, does that not do something with the message itself? Like, like.

Cal:

Yeah, maybe.

Neil:

Like I know I'm stuck in my own stupid no ads thing that I'm stuck on from like 1983 I don't know why I'm on this world of no ads.

Cal:

I don't know. I think it's too new I think people are trying to figure it out like or is it just you know the your favorite show on TV, then you have the Colgate commercial. It's like, yeah, the commercials are what pay for the show. And it's always the person on the show saying, that's what's different about it.

Neil:

I like it. I think you should buy it. Go to my name. Go to this.

Cal:

Yeah. So it's weird. I think it's weird how that's working. And like, should it just all be programmatic ads? But then programmatic ads are a third of the CPM. And so it's hard to support the show. I think that's all being figured out. It's a weird world, but I actually think we should have more public intellectuals giving advice. Like, I think giving advice. We have…We have this real concern about it, right? It's like in our current, especially like elite culture is like, don't give advice because someone might say who are you to give that advice? Or they'll critique you for like, well, you gave that advice but you're missing X, Y, and Z. But I actually think it's like a healthy cultural thing to have more people like Thoreau was doing. He's like, well, look, I thought about this. I'm idiosyncratic. I'm giving a take on things. Because I've always had this belief, which is really not shared right now by a lot of people who sort of write about books, but I've always had this belief that the audience is very smart. The audience is very smart. They understand their situation and context, and they're very good at, you know, I can go back and read Thoreau. A lot of what he's talking about is not directly relevant to me. I'm not a farmer in Concord in 1850, but there's like some ideas in there. I probably can adapt to me. So I was like, I want him throwing bombs and then I'll sort of see what resonates and what still is like timeless in there. And I can do that sort of filtering, but there's a, there's a culture now that says, no, the author has to do all that in advance, right? Like you can't.

Neil:

Can you give an example of this, cause I have not heard of this, ‘not giving advice’ dictum. Oh, well, I don't, I don't disagree with you. I'm like, what do you mean exactly?

Cal:

Well, first of all, like you see this with almost any journalist that goes into nonfiction writing. If they're coming out traditional journalism, they don't put advice in the book. Even if all people want it from it is advice.

Neil:

It's a meditation. It's an exploration. It's an investigation. It's a gotcha.

Cal:

It's Malcolm Gladwell coming out of the Washington Post in New Yorker. His books are, these are advice books, but he would never put a piece of advice in it. Whereas I always used to talk about West Coast, East Coast pragmatic nonfiction, all the East Coast writers came out of East Coast journalism and you can't put advice in the book. The West Coast writers are coming up entrepreneurship, like Ramit and others, and they'll put advice like, yeah, here's, people want information. Try this, try that. Like it's all full of advice. Tim Ferriss, it's different. Right. It's a different field.

Neil:

Go to this website, go to this virtual assistant category, look up this.

Cal:

Yeah, because it's a different way. So I'm a big believer. It's like, I like books that take big swings and then like people will filter it. But there's this, the two fears are the, who are you fear? Like people are very afraid. They'll say, who are you to give advice? And the point is like, everyone is their own person. We can understand the context of a person pretty easily. Give us your best swing. And we'll see which of your balls come to our part of the field. Don't be afraid to take the swing. And then there's this weird caveat concern, right? Where it's like everyone, everyone has a particular thing that they really care about. There's like a hundred things out there you could care about. And they'll get really upset if you don't specifically like address their thing or at least acknowledge their thing, but they don't care about the other 99 things. They're just going to be like, I'm really upset at you because, you know, you're not thinking about…You didn't specifically talk about childcare or something, because I really care about childcare and childcare and work.

Neil:

That's also coming up with the whole DEI stuff has gotten a little out of hand where it's almost like you're afraid to not…I just gave a speech recently and the person before me was laying out the sort of mandatory diversity and inclusion module that everyone's…and you could just feel in the room. I'm like, no one likes this. No one agrees with this. No one understands this. Everyone's afraid of this. No one wants to say the wrong thing.

No one's putting up their hand for questions. It's like, whoa, we've gotten to like an..ice shattery place with some of this stuff.

Cal:

Well, so you get it like outside of that context, like in nonfiction writing, right? I see it a lot. It's not DEI so much as there's also the audience completeness issue. Is so anything that started with that's nice for you, but what about dot, dot, dot. And so what you can do is like with anything that's prescriptive is you can just look for an audience to us. The advice doesn't apply. And then somehow this has become like a standard critique where of course all advice is for a particular audiences. So it's sort of like you write a book about running. You're going to have someone say, well, that's nice for you, but what about people whose foot is broken? Like they can't run. Right. And so it's like, okay, so should I say clearly this advice, you know, for some people though, their feet is broken. So let's talk about like how they can exercise. There's a lot of that, you know, I used to get a lot of that with ‘Deep Work’. Like I write books about knowledge workers and I'll get a lot of like, yeah, but what if you're not a knowledge worker and what if you're this, this and this? I was like, well, I didn't write a…I didn't write a book about that.

Neil:

Well, that's what you're saying now. Thank goodness because you've got the awareness through the feedback. It's like, I got the same thing on ‘The Happiness Equation’. It's like, this is good if you're privileged enough to do that. And I'm like…Well, I know, I guess that's my view.

Cal:

But yeah, but I bring it all up to say this is dissuading more people. I'm used to this, but this is dissuading new voices from giving advice. And what I would love would actually. So here's my I'm going to make my DEI pitch is: I love advice and people taking swings. I want people from all sorts of jobs and backgrounds and cultural backgrounds. Whatever it is, I want the biggest possible variety of people just taking ‘Walden’-esque big swings at like, don't caveat it and protect it. We'll do that as the audience. Just give it your best swing. Like we should destroy phones in a fire. Like give it the big swing, you know what I mean? Or like we should, jobs should only be 10 hours a week. Like take the principle and push it to an extreme and purify it and clarify it. That I think is so exciting. And then of course I'm a reasonable consumer of information. I'll….I'm not just going to go do those things and I'll get to the real point of what you mean and I'll reject some and accept some. But I wish there was a world where more people were taking more big swings with advice. But I think there's a lot of fear of like, what if people say, who are you? Or that might be nice for you, but what about? And that became scarier now because in social media, you hear more of it. And I think maybe it feels like it's everyone saying it. And so I think it's like scarier. And because of that, I think we have a lot less people than we could, like, taking swings at like interesting ideas, pragmatic ideas. And I think we need more of those ideas, not less.

Neil:

Oh man. I know you're not on Instagram, but that was an Instagram Reel, Chapter 82 with Quentin Tarantino, our question our final questions always give us one hard-fought piece of wisdom and his last piece of advice was ‘Do not censor yourself.’ Yeah, which I thought was a really good point. Do not censor yourself. Um, there's a lot there. Uh, become a digital Minimalist be slowly productive while you're doing your ‘Deep Work’ so that you can eventually be so good. We can't ignore you. There we go. Um, and I like that I’m just gonna say repeat for people I thought about this. Points you said that Thoreau said, other people say we're going to your next book is I thought about this I'm idiosyncratic I'll give you my take. I like that thanks are great about this I'm idiosyncratic I'll give you my take that being the caveat in the middle I'm idiosyncratic like you said that I thought about this I'll give you my take but in the middle you're saying I'm just, you know, that's kind of like the, the preclusion. I'm, I'm idiosyncratic.

Cal:

Let me give you a quick example. Another quick example. I recently, I liked this book. So I bought a first edition recently of Thomas Merton, ‘Seven Story Mountain’. This is a very idiosyncratic book. It's about, uh, is a NYU professor in the fifties who becomes a monk and goes to a monastery and it's, it's about this experience. It's very, it's very Catholic book. Um, but very psychological and theologically astute. There's like profound ideas in this book.

Even though, of course, it's like a very weird, idiosyncratic thing this person is doing. Like most of us have no interest in becoming a Trappist monk, but like it has profound ideas. Wendell Berry is the same way. He's a weird, idiosyncratic guy. He's still, I mean, he's like 89 now, but he uses horses on his farm still. You know, he's a weird guy. He also left NYU, went back to Kentucky to farm and write about farms and natures, but his books are, his ideas are electric and they're inspiring and interesting. Even though like, of course, like a lot of the stuff he's writing about is like, I'm not going to farm with horses and this is like really narrow. Yeah, that's narrow, but the ideas have like really deep resonances. So we like, I'd like the weird, the idiosyncratic, that people in different situations, just like taking swings and writing essays and giving proposals and giving advice. Like I wish more people were less afraid.

Neil:

But I love that. Totally agree on the same horse. Pun intended. But you also said, I also tell people, ‘Don't change lives with me.’ And you said with all of these up close weirdos and I clue myself in this like wholeheartedly, by the way, like I'm not saying I'm not looking at these guys outside of a lens. I'm looking at us in the petri dish here. I, you know, there's, and you said too much stress that I heard you say that cause there's too much stress. Is that what you said?

Cal:

Yeah. Being a, I mean, you see this, right? You have this in your own life. Like the more public, like the more exposed you are, that's just, straight-up linear function stress and like the more like exposed or public you are like careful what you wish for if you're like a young person who's like I want to be famous online. No, you don't you want to be Coen brothers famous. Make an awesome movie. Don't let people know that you look like that. That's better. Yeah, it's just trust like the more public.

Neil:

Like Jonathan Franzen famous.

Cal:

But also, they also I guess not just being visible now that I think about it just the more…like Jonathan Franzen has to care about. He's a lot more critiques of him now because he's famous or his books are more well known. He's going to get the backlashes now. It's like the more prominent you get, it rises in proportion. The better selling my book is the more like critique I get, the more the more it's like interesting to be anti-Cal Newport. It's not interesting to be anti-Cal Newport when no one knows who Cal Newport is.

Neil:

It's kind of like the more reviews you get, the more one star reviews you get.

Cal:

A hundred percent. Yeah. Like a book that's all five star reviews, it’s like a first book or it's like a quirky book, it's not a famous person's fifth book.

Neil:

Oh, nice. Okay. Speaking of a famous person's first book, let's now go and close the conversation off with your third most formative book. And I'm, I love, I really appreciate this. You're really, you're, you're we got like fifth gear cow here and I'm loving it. And, uh, I can feel your energy. It's really dynamic and palpable. Thank you. But let's now jump into. Your off days perhaps with ‘‘The Sabbath’’ by Abraham Joshua Heschel. That’s H E S C H E L originally published in 1951 by Farrar Strauss and Giroux the most…the most unpronounceable publisher of all time. It's a golden brown cover with stylized wood carving. I know it's a wood carving because the whole book is full of wood carvings of the Menorah, but as a twisted artistic series of almost not yet bloomed roses with Hebrew letters set on each flower slash candle. Abraham Joshua Heschel was born in 1907 in Warsaw, Poland, died 1972, age 65 in New York.

He was a Polish-American rabbi, one of the leading Jewish theologians and Jewish philosophers of the 20th century, he got to the US in 1940. You can kind of picture war-ish times.

Cal:

Barely got here.

Neil:

Yeah, okay, you know more than me. And then learned English and then wrote this book 11 years later, which you can file, by the way, under 296 for Religion/Other Religions/Judaism. Cal, tell us about your relationship with ‘The Sabbath’ by Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Cal:

Yes, I like a lot of his books. I think somehow when you come to a language late, it can lead to a much more interesting style. Much more like considered style, you're kind of learning it from scratch. He's a beautiful writer because he mixes in all of his books, the poetic with also like the highly structured, almost academic rationale. And he goes, he moves back and forth between those forms, like in the same chapter. So it'll be, it'll, he'll be like beautifully poetic, but also be laying out some sort of argumentative structure that's like well-structured and balanced. And so it's a, he's a really cool writer. He, it can be tough. This is like one of his more accessible books for sure. But yeah, I really admire him.

Neil:

Still tough, but it's still tough. I found it still tough for me.

Cal:

Yeah, this one's tough. Yeah, this one. This one is it's a little tough, little interesting. I mean, if you read more of him, it's interesting.

Neil:

I mean, I liked reading it, I made a ton of notes.

Cal:

Yeah, it's a cool. It's a cool book. I like reading…religious thinkers can write really cool books because they're so contemplative Jewish religious thinkers write really cool books because like all they do is sit around and think and grapple with things and it comes up with like really cool books. So I'm a fan of his, I'm a fan of the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Okay, so ‘The Sabbath’, why do I like this book? So it does a lot of things. It's a theological discussion of Shabbat, ‘The Sabbath’, the day of rest from the very sheet, from the Genesis.

Neil:

So those that don't know this, just give me three more sentences on the Sabbath, what it is.

Cal:

Right. So in that tradition, and so like the Judeo-Christian tradition. There's one day, so when you look at the seven-day story of God's creation of earth, on the seventh day he rested. So that's the Sabbath, and so you're commanded then to do that yourself. And so Christians place the Sabbath’ on Sundays, and Jews place the Sabbath on Saturdays. Comes from the same, obviously the same book of what we'd call the English Genesis.

Neil:

Right. they just started on a different day.

Cal:

They’re different calendars. Yeah, sorry. Different day. But whatever it is both the last day by however they count. So this book is trying to like understand this tradition and there's some theological arguments in it like his main theological argument is that Judaism versus like the religious cults that came before and different than Eastern religions…is sanctifies time and not space. So it's a religion that exists in history, in real time. It's not an abstraction. We're not looking back to abstractions, and it's not as much about sanctified places as it is like this time is important. But he has another argument in there that has a very secular resonance. And so he's explaining like God working to build, create Earth and God resting.

And he's putting this out as a sort of ideal template for the human experience, which I think is like really relevant. I came to this book much more recently. So I think it's really relevant for this pandemic, post-pandemic moment of work and work angst and anti-work movement and ‘Slow Productivity’ and all the stuff that's going on right now. This book really resonated with me when I read it because he's arguing, well, the work is important.

I mean, God was creating the earth, and this was important. This was important stuff, and it was good. And they used the Hebrew word for good, right? These acts of creation are good. But then God rested for the last day. And not only is that good, they didn't use the word good there. This was the one day where they described it as ‘holy’, Kedushah, ‘holy’, the Hebrew word for ‘holy.’ So like the day of rest is holy as well.

And Heschel makes this argument, like it's holy not in some instrumental sense, not in some sense of it's your reward for the work, not in some sense of it's going to recharge you so you can do more work. But because it allows you to appreciate like the other wonders of life, like they would, the tradition they would talk about is supposed to give you a taste of, like a utopian post redemption afterlife. It's like your taste of the world to come. And that's what you're celebrating. But you can see it as you're appreciating all the other stuff, that's ‘holy, that's not work. And so like the work was good, but also like the other stuff is holy as well. And so there was something really critical about that, that seemed to me to unlock, like how to think about work, how to think about anti-work, how to think about productivity, how to think about anti-productivity. That like, we had this figured out as humans back in this late Bronze Age, when these first, the things that coalesced into this book were first being told in surviving cultural evolution, was like the work can be good and important.

And also the non-work is good and important and holy even. And both of this stuff is important. And somehow we have to figure out how to keep both. So we can't just come at our current moment and be like, work or the urge to work is just an epiphenomenon of capitalist exploitation. But we also can't come at it and be like, okay, what matters is work. We need to rest just so we can get better at work. Like sleep is about maximizing work. Like all that matters is like the work. We had this figured out, you know, in 800 BC that both are important. So anyways, I found a real secular resonance from this otherwise theological book.

Neil:

Yeah, absolutely. I...National Geographic said in January, I think 2022 that, you know, the world is tilting towards the secular majority. The US, I think maybe have crossed 50% people no longer ascribed to a particular faith. I know Canada is over that threshold, Finland, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand and like the world is kind of, you know, the fastest growing religion in the world is none. You know, you've maybe heard that to the point where I wrote an article for Harvard Business Review in 2019 or something called, “Why You Need an Untouchable Day Every Week and How To Get One’, they titled it, it was a good title and then the comments I'm reading the comments and someone's like this dude is just saying the Sabbath! I didn't even…

Cal:

You invented Genesis.

Neil:

Exactly! 2800 years later, whatever, so. First of all just for context, when did you read it? How did it come to you? I get how it's been formative. So, you read this most recently of the three. So were you like, where were you in your life here? How did you get this book?

Cal:

This is like after the pandemic started, like sometime like late pandemic. Relatively recent. Relatively recently. I'd read a lot of Heschel and I hadn't read this one.

Neil:

So you read it in the pandemic. You're like, it's like pandemic time. You're reading this book. How do you practice it in your life? You're the guy that wrote the book, ‘Deep Work’. I know I've heard Mark Manson and many other people saying self-help authors are talking to themselves. You know what I mean? Like, this is a common trope in the self-help industry that we're talking to ourselves. I, whenever I complain or whine over texts or emails, someone's like, yeah, I got a real good book for you, buddy. It's called ‘The Happiness Equation’! Have you not read your own book? Like, so I'm asking just in general, you come across this book. It strikes a nerve with you is if I understand correctly, a religious based kind of treatise, that's the right word, that has broad societal and personal implications. You have also written a lot on this topic in general with books like ‘Deep Work’, ‘Digital Minimalism’, and most recently ‘Slow Productivity’. What's the Cal Newport manifestation of this today?

Cal:

Well, I mean, first of all, you'll see those fingerprints throughout ‘Slow Productivity’. I mean, this idea of take longer, you're producing the good thing over time, it's not about the hustle in every moment, it's the what did you produce over the last five years, not what did you produce today. That notion of stretching out your definition of productivity, there's a real sort of a Heschel-ian Sabbath type of idea in there. I follow, I try to actually follow something like that practice of a Sabbath or Shabbat every weekend.

Neil:

So tell me what that looks like.

Cal:

Well, I try to match it.

Neil:

The intro of the book is like, my parents are running. She's running by his daughter. My parents are roaming around like Friday night, like getting the steamer going on the cattle and this. And then like literally the clock, I think it's the sun goes down and then like they just stop. If something's going on the stove, they don't finish cooking it. Like it's like a lights out kind of thing.

Cal:

Yeah. Well, no, I'm not Shomer Shabbat, as they would say. That's the sort of like the, an Orthodox Jew like the Heschel's would you have all these things you don't do but I like the Jewish timing versus the Christian timing, because Saturday versus Sunday.

Neil:

Wait what’s the difference, sorry?

Cal:

Saturday versus Sunday. And it doesn't, it’s Friday night, it's Friday night at sundown to Saturday at sundown. But, but it's you know predominantly on Saturday versus like the Christian timing of Sunday because Sundays it's right before the week starts again Saturday that seems like the right day to try to the step away and appreciate the holy is because, your week is ended at Friday, starting Friday night. How perfect is that? Like, what do you do?

Neil:

So what do you do in your Friday, sundown and Saturday sundown? What do you do? What don't you do?

Cal:

What do you email? So no work, no email, no, uh, so no work, no email, no, um, I think no news, it's a little bit more nuanced than that. It's, it's, uh, content that is, um, created to create a reaction. So don't…nothing viral like I can see it like a newspaper or something, but no like I'm going to mess around on my phone or something like that.

Neil:

But you're allowed to use your phone.

Cal:

Yeah, but I don't know if I would use it much.

Neil:

I mean I would use it if I could. And I know your phone is kind of like my phone. No game apps, no social media, black and white. Exactly. Your phone's pretty locked down to begin with.

Cal:

I use it to like text a few people, most of them are related to me and to stream baseball games. So yeah. Shut down.

Neil:

I like the Nationals.

Cal:

And today's only day, by the way.

Neil:

My team, by the way. I mean, this is the Expos, let's be honest here.

Cal:

Okay. I get you. We will take that. We'll make that connection. We're brothers now. I'm just saying, in 1993, or ‘94, sorry, the Jays had won the ‘92 and ‘93 World Series. Shout out to Roberto Alomar and Joe Carter and Devon White. And in 1994, the Expos, the Expos, managed by Felipe Alou, I believe, had, at the time of the baseball strike, the best record of all time in baseball by that time of the season.

Cal:

That strike.

Neil:

And they never played another game in Montreal again. Yeah. Like it was like you couldn't have ended that story on a worse note in Montreal. Yeah. The first baseball team outside of the US. And then like they never won the Toronto team with a new rich city. They took over in population and skyscrapers. Now they get the World Series and then they had the best season in baseball history. And then they never played in game of Montreal again.

Cal:

Well, but we appreciate, we appreciate it down here in D.C. because we've been having a great time with the team. So it went to a good cause, Neil. I mean, we're happy. We're happy to have the team. Just pr0nise me you'll wear a Montreal Expos hat to a baseball game. I will. They're around. I was just there the other day for the Futures game. But anyways, all right. My practice. Friday after I'm done with work until Sunday.

Try not to do any work, any email, any like looking at content meant to like get you excited and just it's family time, it's reading time, it's you know, go on adventures time. My wife and I try to, when we can have like a standing date on Saturday night, we see a lot of movies and stuff like that. That's, it's huge for me, especially when I'm in these periods of high stress, like book launches, et cetera, that just know you can fully move out of that mindset.

And I'm not going to check something because I don't check something till Sunday. Like having the rules be really clear makes a difference. So that's a great.

Neil:

You're inspiring me. I'm not nearly as fastidious, although I love the differentiation between. I don't read like online news as much. I do read it. I don't read it as like when I turn stuff off, I turn that off for sure. I don't have any cancel on my news push. But I'll still like if I buy a paper Saturday or Sunday near top like that is a different part of my brain somehow.

Cal:

Yeah, you're not, it's not being curated by algorithms. You're just sort of like encountering what's there.

Neil:

I want to see the full page what Yoko Ono's got to say this week.

Cal:

Yeah, they made their money when you bought it so they don't need to now like get you to compulsively.

Neil:

The business model investigation piece again, this is you're good at peeking under the hood.

Cal:

It's also the they make it's the New Yorker model. Yeah, we got these subscribers. We have a million subscribers and they pay a lot of money. It's an expensive magazine.

Neil:

Very. It’s like $700 a year or something!

Cal:

It's cheaper than that.

Neil:

I’m in Canada.

Cal:

But yeah, well, that's different. It should be cheaper. But they've got that's it. So don't worry about ads. They don't worry about. They just like we can just like write really try to write really great stuff. Get good writers like write great stuff because we're not playing the game of like viral online spread. So we can have a writer like I work on articles for there. They're like. Go work on this. We'll help you. Let us know what help you need. And you just sort of work on it till you're done.

Neil:

You know, how many edits are you doing? How many rounds of editing with them? I've heard, David Sedaris told us people don't realize I do 17 rounds of editing before I send it to them and 11 rounds after.

Cal:

It's a lot of editing. Yeah. And then like it's, well, it depends on the article. Like if you, if you nail it, it's, you know, it takes for, I mean, it's a lot of.

Neil:

Who’s your editor there?

Cal:

I work with a couple people. I just started working with a new editor named Marella I was working with Josh Rothman as well before that.

Neil:

I'm not gonna get to my millions of New Yorker questions so I don't have to park that but I got lots to say about the New Yorker is a…It's a…I just did a massive deep dive interview with Susan Orlean, you know, the New Yorker since 1992.

Cal:

She's great writer for sure It's my favorite thing I do. it's the most fun thing I do.

Neil:

It's the favorite thing I do?

Cal:

It’s so fun. It's so fun.

Neil:

We're going to close off the fast money round questions now, Cal! You're ready? All right. Hardcover, paperback, audio or E.

Cal:

Uh, all depending on the circumstance, whatever's quick. Like if I really want to start reading the book, I'll get the e-book because I don't want to wait a day or two to get it. Uh, if I really like a book, I will go back and buy usually like a first edition or early edition hardcover. So I'll have multiple copies of it. Uh, I try to read books on audio, but I have a much worse success rate except for very specific types of books. So I'm on all the formats.

Neil:

Except paperback.

Cal:

No. So if a books and paperback, that's what I'll buy if I can wait a day or so to get it. If I love it, I'll go and buy a vintage hardcover copy of it for my library.

Neil:

Yeah, this begs the next question, which is how do you organize your books on your bookshelf?

Cal:

It's by subject. I mean I have multiple libraries, but I have a library at home with all built-in bookcases and library lights that like shine down on it. I love my library. It's all organized by topic, all types of books, like here is all of my like technology criticism books. These shelves are all fiction. This is like my business books. Here's my like vintage productivity books. I did a New Yorker article earlier this year where I walked through my collection of vintage productivity books, starting with the fifties and like, how do they change from each decade? So I'm a by topic organizer.

Neil:

Sounds like the ‘Newport Decimal System.’

Cal:

Yes. I know where every book is.

Neil:

Here I am using Dewey in my house. Wow. And what are library lights?

Cal:

So like at the top of the bookshelves, they come out and they shine down on the books in the shelf.

Neil:

How do I not know this? I don't know this.

Cal:

They're great. They come out, they’re brass.

Neil:

The thing I've heard of that I don't have in my house, but I wish I had when I built my bookshelf, is the bottom shelf kind of on a 20 degree angle. Have you seen that?

Cal:

Ooh. So you can see that.

Neil:

Every bookshelf...This is a Billy bookcase, but every one upstairs we actually did build in our walls and we did do the corner being a front facing corner unit, you know, it's like I could get my thematic. But I've seen in bookstores that the very bottom shelf tilts out at like a 10 to 20 degree angle. And it's awesome. You don't kick the books or whatever, but it's such a good way to look at the bottom shelf. Otherwise, you'd like squat to see it. Yeah. Anyway, what is your book lending policy?

Cal:

Oh, I give books out left and right. The only problem is my books are marked up six ways to Sunday. So I'm happy to lend it to you. I love people to read books that I like, but they're going to be marked up.

Neil:

How do you mark up books? What are your markup, what are your one or two key markups?

Cal:

I do corner marking. So I put a slash to one corner if I'm marking that page. And then I do brackets and check marks. And that's it. And I do that as I read real time, minimal fiction. I can go back through and follow those marks and recoup the main ideas of a book. It takes about five minutes. If you've corner marked a book, you just you go to the pages, mark, you read the things, you remember it. So all my books are corner marked. Wow. Um, do you have a ‘white whale book’ or a book you have been chasing the longest?

Cal:

You mean in terms of, uh, getting a good version of it or reading it?

Neil:

Purposefully left it vague, but I guess I meant reading.

Cal:

Oh, that's it. Yeah. Yeah, I do have I have a few books that…

Neil:

Or a genre that you're like I've never read anything by this! Me it's like the Russians, you know, I mean I've read like one of the Russian books.

Cal:

I do, like I have like, one of my New Yorker editors who's like a literature PhD was like you need to read Anna Karenina and I bought it and I have it but I haven't read it yet.

Neil:

We'll put that we'll put that as your white whale book for now. Do you have a favorite bookstore living or dead?

Cal:

A bookstore! Well, here in my hometown, an independent bookstore finally opened called People’s Book. I love that. I'm in that place all the time.

Neil:

What town? I thought Politics and Prose was your...

Cal:

I like Politics and Prose too.

Neil:

So I know you did that event there with David Epstein, but what's...

Cal:

I did. Yeah. So I’ll give you the geography. So I live in Washington, DC, but I live in a small town right at the border of DC called Takoma Park.

Neil:

Okay, got it.

Cal:

And in that small town at Takoma Park. So like I could...you know, 50 feet from sitting right now in my studio is an independent bookstore. That's right. It’s where I do all my signed copies through, you could order them through this bookstore. And we sold, you know, four or five hundred copies. People's Book. No apostrophe. It’s like People's. Like People's plural, book singular. And then Politics and Prose is like the big independent store in D.C. I've loved them as well. I've done five or six events there and I did a book launch. I did my book launch there recently. So that's an awesome store as well.

Neil:

The conversation with you and David was great in his newsletter, by the way. I thought that was really well done.

Cal:

David's the greatest. But I can walk to be able to walk to a bookstore and like know the owners and like know the staff. It's my dream. So I've been happy about that.

Neil:

Oh, I love that. Yeah, I live in downtown Toronto. When I first moved here, people said, my cousins were like, there's houses in downtown Toronto. Like, isn't it just people walking around like puking and rats and stuff. And I was like, do you know how many books there's like a walk to from my house that are open till midnight? Like that was my big, like.

Cal:

That was your pitch. Yeah.

Neil:

Um, what, and we've had a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate your time, your generosity again, especially this is post-launch for you. This is an evergreen show. I only have guests on once it's 333 inspiring conversations for a thousand formative books total. That's…the show's done on April 26th, 2040. We know that end date. So it's curated. Um, and thanks for being part of our curation. So what is your final piece of hard fought advice or wisdom for all the book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians listening to this chat?

Cal:

Well, I guess I'll focus on book writers since like among that list, that's, uh, that's what I am.

Uh, look, if you're writing, if you're writing a book, uh, in the end, the thing, there's all this other stuff we do. And we talk to, we talk to people and do interviews and have podcasts or this or that. But like in the end, the thing that matters is writing the book that delights you. That's like your best chance of, of changing minds and making an impact. Like the book that delights you that you're, and it'll do what it'll do. Um, but that's what makes this like an interesting field. It’s what makes this a rewarding career. And it's how the very best, biggest performing books are often written. It's weird and idiosyncratic and brilliant. It's like ‘Walden’ was at the time. So you gotta write what delights you. And then the other stuff, let that work out.

Neil:

Cal Newport, ‘Write what delights you.’ Thank you so much! This has been absolutely inspiring. So I'm like gonna be reeling and processing this for days after there's so much nutritional, intellectual density in this conversation. I am so grateful. Thank you so much for coming on 3 Books.

Cal:

Thanks, Neil. It was great. I enjoyed it.

Neil:

Hey everybody, it's just me, just Neil again, hanging out in my basement, listening to the wise and wonderful Cal Newport. Ah, he takes us so many different places in this chapter of 3 Books. Did any quotes jump out for you? I got a pile in front of me to just kind of give you some of my highlights. How about this one? Um…

Actually, I want to start with books. ‘I think books are the best bargain in the human intellectual experience. I just wanted to pause, underline, bold, highlight that one. I think books are the best bargain in the human intellectual experience. He expanded, because you're spending $20 to get what a mind has been specialized on, an idea that has been specialized on for years, and spent years trying to crystallize that knowledge into the optimal structure, and you get to transfer all that cognitive effort from that brain to your brain, for like 20 bucks.’ A wonderful way to put it, obviously, you know, our next chapter, or it could be the next chapter, one after that, is with Jonathan Franzen, and he talks a lot about working and reworking and reworking pieces of writing so that they become totally polished. And again, Cal Newport’s bringing us back to the value of books, the value of three books, and the value of all this stuff that we're all focused on here. Only pockets in the world buy, and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. And most of us are book lovers first and foremost. That's why we're here, that's why we're hanging out.

So it's nice to hear Cal give us, you know, solidify our purpose for being here together now. I like this one. ‘I think young people have been given this idea, which comes from the social media companies themselves, that you can just directly alchemize yourself by being vulnerable and visible and open. And that will somehow alchemize into being really valuable. That that's actually the thing that makes you valuable and well-known. And that's not the way it works. You still need craft. You still need to do something.’

This is a really nice reminder to me because I can tend to get obsessed and worried about like what's going on online and how many, you know, we're putting these things on YouTube like we're over, and now I'm recording videos, now we're editing the video version of it, you know. It's a lot of extra work, and that's like how many views do we get, how many followers do we get, how many subscribers? It's like, just focus on the craft, just take the advice and ‘Slow Productivity’ to obsess over quality focus down, not up and around right, and try to just get better and better at what you're doing.

How about this one, last one. ‘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 a year or two away from that being a very common thing.’ If you think about unrestricted internet access, I mean, I had it younger than 18 because I was coming of age when the internet access kind of came up with bulletin board services and things like that.

But now with the publication of ‘The Anxious Generation’ by Jonathan Haidt, our past guest on three books, Haidt, you know, we are shifting the classic 15 year time period. We're more aware now than ever before about the risks and damage that can be done if you just give kids the whole internet in their pocket, right? Jonathan Haidt is saying that we have been kind of overprotective of our kids physically and underprotective of them digitally and so we're kind of riding that ship now. Cal Newport, thank you so much for coming on the show and giving us three more books to add to our top 1000. We're getting close to the 500s now people. Cal has given us number 606, ‘Getting Things Done’ by David Allen. Number 605, ‘Walden’ by Henry David Thoreau. And number 604, ‘The Sabbath’ by Abraham Joshua Heschel. It's H-E-S-C-H-E-L. Thank you to Cal.

Thank you to all of you. Thank you so much for being here.

All right, did you make it past the three second pause? If so, I'd love to welcome you back to the End of the Podcast Club. You made it, you're at the very end. Now it's time for our after party. It's one of three clubs that we have for three books listeners, including the Cover2Cover Club. Just drop us a line, let us know if you are listening to every single chapter of three books. We're gonna add your name to the FAQ, put your name in lights. Okay, we started doing that, so we're getting the names coming in now. And the...secret club. I can't say more about this, but you can call our phone number for clues and please do call our number. It is one eight three read a lot. That is a real number. 1-833-READ-A-LOT. And let's start off the End of the Podcast Club as we always do by going to the phones. Here we go.

Leah:

Hi Neil. This is Leah calling from Huntsville. Alabama. I'm about five years late to your podcast. I found out about it…Sorry about the background noise. I'm walking on my lunch break? But I found out about 3 Books when you were on Rich Rolls' podcast. And since then, I have been voraciously listening to every episode. I think that was about 2 months ago, and I'm on Chapter 59 now. I just wanted to call and tell you how much I am enjoying the podcast, and let you know how much it has just broadened my reading. I love to read, but I just finished ‘Enlightenment Now’ by Steven Pinker. And I don't believe that's a book I would have read without hearing about it on your podcast. I'm currently reading ‘Quiet’. But there are so many things I love. I am planning to write you a letter to let you know because it's too long to discuss in this voicemail. But I just wanted to let you know, listen to Chapter 58 with David Mitchell. Really could not believe that you played music afterwards. I was in my car listening to that episode and thought that Apple Music had picked up and then realized it was the podcast. So I truly appreciate everything you're doing and look forward to actually catching up to episodes that you're probably currently on because right now we're still in 2020. I have no doubt that I'll pick up and then be on your moon schedule. So take care and again, just love everything you're doing. Goodbye!

Neil:

Thank you so much to Leah, from Huntsville, Alabama! For calling our number, 1-833-READ-A-LOT. First of all, I love that you’re walking on your lunch break. Everybody should walk on their lunch break. Get outside! Breathe in the phytoncides, the chemical that trees naturally release in order to reduce your cortisol and yeah, your stress hormones, great, get outside. Thank you for calling! Call me from outside! If you're outside right now, and you're wondering, just tell me one formative book in your life, one guest you dream of, one thing that you liked or didn't like from the show. Give me a call, 1-833-READ-A-LOT. Also, Leah, a couple references here to other chapters. You said you're on chapter 59 now, which is chapter, which is with Jeff Speck, author of ‘Walkable City’, which I found out about from Ann Bogle.

Okay, wonderful books, podcaster. She picked, ‘Walkable City’ when I met up with her in New York just before the pandemic. You mentioned the music at the end of chapter 58 with David Mitchell. That is the ‘Cloud Atlas Sextet’. I actually paid for the rights of the composer, but if you're on Spotify or something, you wanna find that, I recommend just putting that music on loop. I sometimes write to it. ‘Cloud Atlas Sextet,’ S-E-X-T-E-T.

And then you also mentioned ‘Enlightenment Now’, book by Steven Pinker. I had to go back and just double check, but that book was given to us in chapter 12 by Chris Anderson, head of TED. And you also mentioned Susan Cain's book, ‘Quiet’, ‘Bittersweet’, ‘Two Big Gems.’ Susan was our first ever live podcast guest back in Chapter 102 down at the 92nd Street Y. You know, just honestly going through those numbers of those chapters, I'm kind of realizing like, okay, yeah, it's been six years already.

I was 38 when I started, I'm now 44. You know, part of the value of pegging a show to the full moon and the lunar calendar, it's just that it gives us a bit of a pace-fulness. I feel like, sometimes I feel like I haven't done anything all day, you know, I have this self-critical feeling and something like, oh my gosh, I'm wasting my day. Like, oh my gosh, it's lunch, I haven't done anything yet. I have this feeling and then, you know, this is the benefit of having these thousand-point kind of calendar things, is oh yeah, we did have that conversation five years ago.

Little bits, bit by bit by bit. That's the way to do it. All right, now it is time for the letter of the chapter. And for this chapter's letter, we are gonna go to Neeti. We are gonna go to Neeti! Neeti has written us a letter. I wanna just read it out loud now.

Okay, here we go. Ah, let's zoom in on the letter here.

‘Dear Neil, I have been a devoted listener of your podcast for more than three years now, and only today have I dared to request a guest for your show. Why today? You may ask. Well, there are a handful of reasons. First, I really want to earn the right to recommend a guest, which after being a loyal listener, I would want to believe I have.’

You absolutely have.

‘Second, I came across the perfect context when listening to episode Chapter 134 with Susan Orlean. In the chapter, you ask Susan to recommend Indian writers and books. As an Indian listener, who would love to have Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni on the show, I thought this would be the perfect time. From the day I first decided to request Chitra on the show, I've been thinking of the right choice of words to describe the impact her books have had on my life. This is the third reason for waiting so long. I am convinced that my limited vocabulary and flimsy writing abilities will never be able to describe the profound impact of her writing.

Today I am banking more on the serendipity that unfolded in the last chapter than on my written expression. It would be great if you could reach out to Chitra. I'm sure many of the listeners will enjoy your conversation with her. I would be thrilled.’

From Neeta B. over in India, recommending Chitra. I want to get the last name right here, but I'm probably not going to be able to. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni on the show. Okay, who else knows Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni?

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, an Indian American author and poet. And she's currently the professor of writing at University of Houston. Oh, interesting. She got a short story collection called ‘Arranged Marriage’, which won an American Book Award in 1996.

Let's reach out to her!

We need to have more Indian…I wanna have more global guests in general, right? I wanna have, I mean, part of the advantage of recording virtually like this, you know, cause the show started just in person only, in person only. And...I love doing in-person interviews. That is obviously the dream, right? You get a connection that I don't think can be replicated virtually. But if we're going to be doing virtual conversations, which we started in the pandemic, then, you know, how do we talk to more people from India, from Africa, from Southeast Asia, from, you know, places that it's harder for me to get to?

And so I'm adding Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni to our pitch list. We have a big giant pitch list. I will add her to that. We'll look up her email address, we'll reach out to her. Really, I should probably pick up that book, ‘Arranged Marriage’, kind of get familiar with the writing myself a little bit first. It's a pressure I put on myself, you know, get familiar with the writing first. And other international guests, I will also say, you know, Neeti, you've given us the, you've given me the like kind of purpose to reach out to everybody.

If you have a guest that's...far away from North America, that you think we should have with their interesting background, their interesting experience, their interesting voices. Maybe it's connected to books, maybe it's not. Maybe they're an author, maybe they're not. Maybe they run the largest publishing house in Namibia. I don't know. Then reach out to us, give me a call, give me an email. It's 1-833-READ-ALOT if you wanna phone me. And our contact information if you wanna drop me an email is over at 3books.ca as well. Okay. And now, as always, let's go…

Now it's time for the word of the chapter. And for the word of the chapter, let's head over to Mr. Cal Newport. Over to you Cal. Teleology. Yes indeed, it is teleology. Teleology, can we hear it from the dictionary lady? Teleology. Teleology, T-E-L-E-O-L-O-G-Y. The basic meaning is the study of ends or purposes. A teleologist attempts to understand the purpose of something by looking at the results. Complicated word, big word, you know, Cal uses a lot of interesting words, productivity pr0n, schema, synergy, nihilistic, erudite, ennobling, linear function, we maybe could have done a sound cloud here, but let's focus on this word that neither of us really knew what he meant when he said it, but that's what the whole point of the word of the chapter is. On Wikipedia, teleology is: ‘finality, a branch of causality giving the reason or an explanation for something as a function of its end, its purpose or its goal, as opposed to a function of its cause. Hmm, a purpose that is imposed by human use, such as the purpose of a fork to hold food, is called extrinsic. Natural teleology, common in classical philosophy, though controversial today, contends that natural entities also have intrinsic purposes, regardless of human use or opinion.’

For example, Aristotle claimed an acorn's intrinsic telos is to become a fully grown oak tree. Right, okay. What is the telos of this show? What is the telos of you and this conversation? Something to think about as we get ready for the full moon in May, Chapter 136. Guys, 3 Bookers, thank you so much for being here. This has been a long conversation, a deep conversation, a profound conversation.

If you haven't already done so check out Cal's new book, ‘Slow Productivity. Check out his podcast, ‘Deep Questions’. Thank you so much to Cal Newport for being on here and thank you to all of you for listening. And remember until next time that you are what you eat and you are what you read. Keep turning that page everybody. And I'll talk to you soon. Take care!

Listen to the chapter here!