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Chapter 145: Lindyman leverages long-lasting lessons on living a limitless life

3 Books With Neil Pasricha

Release Date: 02/12/2025

Chapter 147: Nickisha the Dog Walker on dangerous drivers and dog doo diligence show art 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 show art 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 show art 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 show art 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 show art 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 show art 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 show art 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 show art 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 show art 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 show art 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...

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