Chapter 144: Nick Sweetman on breaking boundaries with brilliant birds
Release Date: 01/13/2025
Chapter 30: Jerry Howarth on branding, bereavement, and Blue Jays baseball
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
My friend Drew Dudley once told me that, other than his parents, he hadn’t heard anyone speak to him more in his life than Jerry Howarth… The voice of the Toronto Blue Jays. I can relate. Growing up I would listen to Jerry Howarth call the Blue Jays games on the radio on long summer drives, with my friends at the park, or just on my clock radio with the “Sleep” timer on as I fell asleep. Why do I love Jerry? Because for thirty-six years he was a local leader and community-builder who created trust with millions of baseball fans… So I was thrilled to visit the Skydome in...
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Chapter 151: The Holderness Family conquers content creation by corralling chaos
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
What do Xmas Jammies, ADHD, and The Amazing Race have in common? The Holderness Family! Penn and Kim Holderness have created viral videos with ... billions of views. They entered Season 33 of The Amazing Race ... and won. They wrote one of my favourite books ... 'ADHD is Awesome'. Penn and Kim started their careers in broadcasting but have old ditched that to find a massive 8 million person following as creators of hilarious yet educational videos on topics as wide-ranging as wearing masks during COVID, the 5 stages of pickleball, and, of course, losing your...
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Chapter 4: Sarah Ramsey on beating book blame with brilliant bookselling
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
A few years ago, I settled into the children's section of Book City in the heart of Toronto's beautiful Bloor West Village for the first chapter of 3 Books recorded live in an open bookstore with my favorite bookseller in the world—the one and only Sarah Ramsey. I love Sarah because she takes the art of bookselling seriously and seemingly reads people’s minds to find the exact book they need to help them grow. As we always say: Humans are the best algorithm. Listen in to hear us talk about how books can transcend generations, if memoirs are over, why you *can* judge a...
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Chapter 150: Prime Minister Jean Chrétien lays down lifelong lessons on leadership, liberalism, and longevity
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
Born in 1934, the 18th of 19 children in the small blue-collar town of Shawinigan Falls, Quebec, Jean Chrétien has risen to become the "grandfather of Canada" and a definitive force in global politics for over 50 years. Chrétien was one of the longest-serving Prime Ministers in Canadian history and led three successive majority terms as leader of the Liberal Party from 1993 to 2003. He famously said no to joining the US in the Iraq War (solidifying Canada’s independence on foreign policy), signed the Kyoto Protocol (committing Canada to its first-ever international...
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5 Beach Books to Stretch Your Mind
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
Long before I oriented my life around reading, I would get the majority of my (4-5!) books per year read during the summer. But summer reads get a bad rap for being too silly, too saucy, too simple. So this summer join me in bridging the gap to find great beachy reads. We want books that have a speedy pace *and* expand our minds! We want books that help us escape our everyday lives *and* teach us something new. A mesmerizing coming-of-age novel! A slim tear-jerky memoir! A crucial self-help book! An evocative life story from the deep south. And, of course, the Tom Wolfe novel I think...
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My New Book! 'Canada is Awesome' | Full Audiobook
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
BIG NEWS! I just finished writing CANADA IS AWESOME: A Little Book About A Big Country. This podcast is me reading the whole book! The book is about all the weird, wonderful, beautiful things that make Canada ... Canada. Did you ever notice Canadians speak in the collective? “What do you think of the weather we’re having?” “Shall we grab a Tims before the meeting?” “Think we have a shot at the playoffs?” We, we, we. We use the word we so much. Why do we feel like such a collective? I don’t think it’s complicated. I think it’s because we are one. We all toss...
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Chapter 149: John and Alison on fascism-fighting fiction fomenting freedom and fraternity
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
It started with a modern plea for help: "Can I charge my dead phone in your bookstore?" I was in Del Mar, California, walking up the coast of the Pacific Ocean after birding all morning in Torrey Pines. I was tracking my birds on eBird—the Peregrine Falcons, Anna's Hummingbirds, and California Scrub-Jays—and, of course, completely drained my phone's battery. When I get to Del Mar I spy this hobbit-hole looking bookstore called and when I walk in I am suddenly thrust into a gorgeous Biblio Paradise. Camino Books is one of the most spectacular bookstores...
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Chapter 29: Michael Harris on queer questions and the quest for quiet
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
Loneliness rates have doubled since the 1980s and Vivek Murthy, former US Surgeon General, says loneliness will be the next major epidemic. So if loneliness is being alone and sad … then what’s being alone and happy? Solitude. A few years ago, I picked up an incredible book called '' by Michael Harris, bestselling author and winner of the Governor General's Award for his writing. It completely blew me away. Why? Because in our era of endless machine-gun blasts at our brains, I feel strongly that the ability to be alone, and to be alone well, is a muscle that is quickly atrophying. ...
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Chapter 148: Ginny Yurich obviates obsolete offspring with 1000 hours outside
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
Ginny Yurich () drove 5 hours up the road from Michigan to Toronto to hang out with Leslie and me. We went for a walk outside (of course!) and recorded this podcast—our second outdoors podcast in a row after ! Why outside? I'm glad you asked! Ginny Yurich is the homeschooling mother of 5 (!) who has spirited a movement called . I like 1000 as you know! was my first blog, is ... this entire podcast. So when 3 Bookers globally kept telling me to interview Ginny I looked her up and saw she was a fan of 1000 and I knew ... this was going to be good. And it was even better than I thought! ...
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Chapter 28: Mark Manson on constant cursing and clearing clutter
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
Have you heard of a book called ''? I’m guessing you have since it’s sold, uh, 16 million copies since it came out in 2016. There hadn't been a non-fiction book that big and disruptive in a long, long time… Mark’s meteoric success is the product of a giant mind which has mastered the art of taking the biggest, densest books on the planet and then simmering them down into simple, profanity-laced models and stories that hit you like a ton of bricks. The world is so loud! So busy. So full. Everything is screaming at us to buy this, buy that, do this, do that. You know what we need in...
info_outlineNick Sweetman is one of Toronto's most prominent graffiti artists.
Last February I was walking down Lansdowne Avenue in Toronto with my friend Michael Bungay Stanier, who was our guest back in Chapter 48, and as we strolled under a giant bridge I saw a giant ... well, it looked like a photo! But it wasn't a photo. It was a massive spray-painted image of a Hooded Merganser, and at the very bottom corner was a signature that said "Nick Sweetman."
Looks like a photo, right? Look at that eye! That bill! But I discovered there's this Toronto mural artist named Nick Sweetman and turns out I've seen the guy's stuff all over the place. He paints pollinators, birds, insects, and animals of all kinds...
He painted a whale shark I've ridden by on my bike for years without knowing it was him! Squint and you'll see the 'Sweetman' underneath its cavernous mouth.
So I decided to reach out to Nick Sweetman and ask him about doing a unique partnership with me and 3 Books. He was game! We found a 750 square foot brutalist bare concrete wall behind a subway station in Toronto begging to be beautified. And now 11 months later I am very proud to present...
After I spent six months getting approvals from the Toronto Transit Commission (shoutout to Cameron Penman, David Nagler, Kerry-Ann Campbell, and Councillor Dianne Saxxe!), Nick started painting the wall behind Dupont Station on September 17th, 2024 (my birthday!) and finished it up on November 1st.
What resulted is honestly the most beautiful piece of public art I have ever seen. I know I'm birdy biased but Nick's beauty, his eye, his senses—they just know no bounds. He doesn't use stencils! He's not tracing anything! The guy is literally just looking at a dirty, bare, curved 750-square-foot wall and, NO BIGGIE painting 16 HYPERREALISTIC LOCAL BIRDS ON IT!
Over the six weeks of painting I pulled out my recorder many times, Nick's friend and fellow graffiti artist Blaze Wiradharma (@blazeworks) pulled up with his video gear, and then genius editor Scott Baker (@adjacentp) rolled in to edit our first-ever 3 Books audio-video documentary experience.
Listen! Watch! Be amazed by the wonder of Nick Sweetman! We explore questions like: Why did Nick leave the wine drinking art gallery world for dirty street corners? What do people who have owe to people who don't? How do we see the crustaceans in our parking lot? And ... do we still have a shared reality?
We talk about mural painting, graffiti, street art, what it means to live in a world where humans overtake everything and, of course, Nick's 3 most formative books. We even get a live splice of Leslie teasing out his third book in real-time which is pretty special!
I highly recommend you WATCH this chapter if you can as we put so much heart and soul into making Nick's masterpiece come to breathtaking visual life.
But, of course, as we flip the page to Chapter 144, you can always just listen in on Apple or Spotify, too.