Chapter 144: Nick Sweetman on breaking boundaries with brilliant birds
Release Date: 01/13/2025
Chapter 147: Nickisha the Dog Walker on dangerous drivers and dog doo diligence
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
Let's go for a walk! I've sometimes imagined 3 Books as a long walk with a friend. So today—let's take one! Nickisha moved to Toronto from Jamaica when she was 16 to reunite with her mom and after working as a travel agent she broke out on her own to run a successful business full of fresh air, exercise, community, and lots of love. I sometimes see Nickisha with five, six, or seven dogs around her—giving them the highlight of their day! Tongues wagging. Skip in their step. Motoring around town clocking 100km on foot each week! One of our traditions on 3 Books is doing...
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Chapter 26: Angie Thomas on righting racist wrongs and remembering radicals
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
No one does it like Angie. Racial tensions, police shootings, citizen uprisings. Does this sound like the setting of a YA novel? How about three of them? Her debut '' her sophomore release ',' and her third '' were all on The New York Times bestseller list, and her fantasy middle school-level book '' was *also* an instant New York Times bestseller! In this classic chapter of 3 Books, we sat down together at the busiest hotel in downtown Toronto on the tail end of Angie’s 15-city book tour to discuss how we find the truth for ourselves, when do we bring up harsh realities to kids, and...
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Chapter 146: Emily Nagoski on exuberant erotic exploration
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
Is porn good sex education? Why does body autonomy matter for kids? Does talking about sex kill the mood? Emily Nagoski has the answers! Emily is a sex educator and activist whose mission is to teach us how to live with confidence and joy inside our bodies. She does this as the New York Times bestselling author of 'Come As You Are,' 'Burnout,' and 'Come Together,' as well as through her 3 popular TED Talks including—with over 3 million views—"How couples can sustain a strong sexual connection for a lifetime." Emily began working as a sex educator 30 years ago at the University of...
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Chapter 25: James Frey on drunk, defiant differentiation
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
What do you know about James Frey? Or what do you think you know about James Frey? I’m guessing it’s not nothing. Everyone has an opinion! When I first spotted '' on my wife’s bookshelf when we were moving in together I was like “Oh? Really? That book? The Oprah guy?” And she was like “Have you read it?” And I was like “No, no idea what it’s even about. Just that it’s not real or whatever.” She looked at me with disappointed eyes. Understandably so! I hadn’t bothered to go below the surface. To read about it on my own. I had just soaked in some distant fumes off...
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Chapter 145: Lindyman leverages long-lasting lessons on living a limitless life
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
Don't use mouthwash. Why? It's not Lindy. At least that's what Paul Skallas, a Chicago-born technology lawyer who goes by Lindyman online, says. I was fascinated to read a New York Times profile of him titled "The Lindy Way of Living," and knew I wanted to have him on 3 Books. In the 2012 book 'Antifragile,' the statistician and scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined "the Lindy Effect." He wrote, "For the perishable, every additional day in life translates to a shorter additional life expectancy, kind of like me and you and the cheese and our fridge, or the milk and...
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Chapter 22: Tim Urban on shivering in shorts and shifting from sheep to chef
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
We live in interesting times. And they're getting interestinger! I keep my eyes open for big thinkers to help guide and inform me as I keep trying to make sense of the world. My friend Tim Urban is one of those people: Tim has a giant mind willing to engage with our fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence. The big questions! Tim's blog still scores millions of readers per month with big-name fans like , Bari Weiss, Sam Harris, Bryan Johnson, and (yes) Elon Musk. Why? Because Tim has an incredible way of smallifying...
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Chapter 144: Nick Sweetman on breaking boundaries with brilliant birds
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
is one of Toronto's most prominent graffiti artists. Last February I was walking down Lansdowne Avenue in Toronto with my friend , who was our guest back in , 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 , 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 , , , and ...
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Chapter 18: David Sedaris on holding happiness hostage and healing holes in our hearts
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
Who else loves David Sedaris? I discovered him in 1997 when an old mentor/editor at Golden Words, my college humor papers, suggested I pick up his book 'Naked' to become a better writer myself. I found the essays sardonic, witty, uncannily observational, and laugh-out-loud funny. I couldn't believe how gently and elegantly he wrote about topics ranging from his obsessive compulsive tics to dropping out of school to (in the namesake essay) visiting a nudist colony. Like millions of people around the world I became obsessed with David Sedaris. I’ve read all of his books—'Me Talk Pretty One...
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Best Of 2024: Neil Pasricha plucks pithy pointers to prime ponderings
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
Happy Solstice! As we do every December solstice it's time for our 7th Annual "Best Of" episode of 3 Books. 3 Books is our 22-year-long conversation to uncover and discuss the 1000 most formative books in the world. This year we sat with to , with in Santa Cruz to in the North York Moors, with the and , with to a . This year I've changed tack and made the "Best Of" highly concentrated—under 50 minutes long!—with little snippets from our diverse guests to provide reflection, provoke your thinking, and help to set intentions for 2025 and beyond. Thank...
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Chapter 143: Chris Smalls on anti-Amazon activism and abolishing aristocracy
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world with over a million employees in the U.S. alone. A monolith responsible for trillions of dollars of revenue through retail, entertainment, and infrastructure. But Chris Smalls took it on anyway. Chris had worked at Amazon for 5 years before he was fired in March 2020 after leading a walkout at Amazon's Staten Island warehouse to protest pandemic working conditions. "We all got radicalized at some point in our lives," he told me. "My life changed forever when I got fired from Amazon." Chris used that motivation to...
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.