Speaker 1: I'm trying my best to get out of my own head,
Speaker 1: but of course it's hard to do that. And then
Speaker 1: they put the camera on the front of the eye
Speaker 1: fall and we were asking for trouble with that one.
Speaker 1: Selfies went up. We're all looking at ourselves all the time. Now,
Speaker 1: welcome to the one you feed throughout time, great tinkers
Speaker 1: have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
Speaker 1: like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
Speaker 1: ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts
Speaker 1: don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 1: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 1: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 1: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 1: Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort
Speaker 1: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 1: how other people keep themselves us moving in the right direction,
Speaker 1: how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1: Our guest on this episode is Neil pas Richa, an author, speaker,
Speaker 1: and host of the Apple Best Of Award winning podcast
Speaker 1: Three Books. Today, Neil and Eric discuss his fourth and
Speaker 1: final book of his New York Times million selling Awesome series,
Speaker 1: Our Book of Awesome. Hi, Neil, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me here. It's good
Speaker 1: to be back. Yeah, it is a pleasure to have
Speaker 1: you on. We're gonna be talking about your latest book
Speaker 1: called Our Book of Awesome, a celebration of the small
Speaker 1: joys that bring us together, and any other miscellaneous things
Speaker 1: that we come up with. But before we do that,
Speaker 1: let's start like we always do with the Parable. You'll
Speaker 1: get another cut at it. I think it's this time
Speaker 1: number three, maybe, but it changes for people interestingly over
Speaker 1: the years. So in the parable, there's a grandparent talking
Speaker 1: with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are
Speaker 1: two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
Speaker 1: One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness
Speaker 1: and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,
Speaker 1: which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
Speaker 1: the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second,
Speaker 1: looks up at their grandparents, says, well, which one wins,
Speaker 1: and the grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd
Speaker 1: like to start off by asking what does that parable
Speaker 1: mean to you? In your life and in the work
Speaker 1: that you do today. The message I get from the parable, honestly,
Speaker 1: is all about self care. I feel like we are
Speaker 1: living in a time today, Eric, where it is more
Speaker 1: and more difficult to focus on taking care of ourselves.
Speaker 1: I think the algorithm derived addictive technologies that we surround
Speaker 1: ourselves with, that we sleep beside that we wake up,
Speaker 1: beside that we touch thousands of times a day, constantly
Speaker 1: pull us away from things that we know to be true,
Speaker 1: to be good for us, like walking in nature, like deep,
Speaker 1: reastful sleep, like time with friends and family without our
Speaker 1: cell phones. And so I want to hear the parable.
Speaker 1: All I think about is focus on the things that
Speaker 1: matter so that I can live life, feeding the good wolf,
Speaker 1: the wolf of love, you know, away from all the
Speaker 1: things that the world is always trying to suck us into.
Speaker 1: So that gives us a place we might as well
Speaker 1: just jump in, which is you have some fairly strong
Speaker 1: positions on cell phone use. Here's my question. Everything you
Speaker 1: say I think I agree with, everybody agrees with right.
Speaker 1: We all know this isn't the most helpful thing. We
Speaker 1: also know that the genie is kind of out of
Speaker 1: the bottle. So to speak, right, we as a society
Speaker 1: don't tend to go backwards technically, So is it really
Speaker 1: for you? Is the focus is on how do we
Speaker 1: use these tools intelligently and wisely? Yeah? Absolutely so. I
Speaker 1: think there's three problems with cell phones, Eric, they start
Speaker 1: with the letter P. First one is psychological. I think
Speaker 1: we can't overestimate this one. You know, when I was
Speaker 1: a kid, I could be the best basketball player in
Speaker 1: my high school team. It was feasible for me to do. So.
Speaker 1: Now somebody's on YouTube throwing free throws with a blindfold
Speaker 1: on behind their back from half cour and no matter
Speaker 1: what it is, he can't be the best at it anymore.
Speaker 1: You're always a loser on the internet. And I think,
Speaker 1: no wonder we're seeing higher than ever rates of anxiety
Speaker 1: one in three college students of clinical anxiety. Dr Geen
Speaker 1: Twinky at San Diego State University says, but we've never
Speaker 1: seen anxiety rates this this high. Jonathan Height and n
Speaker 1: y U is saying the same thing. So let's just
Speaker 1: be really aware of how psychological inferior we often feel online. Second,
Speaker 1: pe is physical. You know what, when you look at
Speaker 1: a bright screen within an hour of bedtime, you don't
Speaker 1: produce so much melotone and blame your peneel gland for
Speaker 1: that one. But evolutionary biologists are now saying, you know what, actually,
Speaker 1: when you turn off a bright screen, you get a
Speaker 1: boost of energy. If you like me, ever, turn your
Speaker 1: phone off right before going to bed, don't you feel
Speaker 1: like it's time to like, you know, get the cave
Speaker 1: set up and build a fire, right, That's what probably
Speaker 1: is in us. So there's a huge, huge physical issue.
Speaker 1: And then the third one is productivity. I think that
Speaker 1: right now when you look at the phone and they
Speaker 1: keep getting more and more gamified, right, things flying and
Speaker 1: flying out and everything's that a little number in the
Speaker 1: corner to hook your attention. We all know what hooks us. Now.
Speaker 1: What's happening is, you know, we're spending more and more
Speaker 1: of our time. Some reports are saying it's thirty one
Speaker 1: percent of our time now bookmarking, prioritizing, and switching between tasks.
Speaker 1: So is the genie out of the bottle? Yes, it
Speaker 1: absolutely is. But are there simple tools and behaviors we
Speaker 1: can do to control it? I think there are, and
Speaker 1: I think honestly not very many of us are doing
Speaker 1: these things. I'll tell you right now, I'm talking to
Speaker 1: you from my basement. You know else isn't down in
Speaker 1: my basement are my cell phone charger. It lives in
Speaker 1: my furnace room, the most disgusting, you know, cobweb filled
Speaker 1: room of my house. And by leaving my charger in
Speaker 1: this room, I'm forced to take a twenty second walk
Speaker 1: from here to my bedroom. And that prevents me from
Speaker 1: sending that email I'm gonna regret the next morning or quickly.
Speaker 1: You know, low resilience me grabbing my phone in the morning.
Speaker 1: So the first thing I think we need to do
Speaker 1: is we gotta get the phone out of the bedroom.
Speaker 1: When I do polls right now, I'll tell you people
Speaker 1: are sleeping with their cell phone beside them, and what
Speaker 1: are they doing before bed? Check on the phone? What
Speaker 1: are they do when they come in the morning, check
Speaker 1: on the phone. If we're doing this with the battle
Speaker 1: of wine, we have no problem saying you're an alcoholic,
Speaker 1: But right now we don't have this phone a haul
Speaker 1: of term in society. We think it's just normal. So
Speaker 1: first thing we need to do is get the phone
Speaker 1: out of the bedroom. And if you want to go
Speaker 1: deep on it, I have a morning practice that I
Speaker 1: use to fill in the anxious tendency. My brain wants
Speaker 1: to grip something and grab something when I wake up.
Speaker 1: We may get to that. It's interesting, this phone in
Speaker 1: the morning thing. It is a plague that I fight
Speaker 1: back and I am successful with for a while, and
Speaker 1: then somehow there I am I'm like, how has this
Speaker 1: happened again? We're like, I'm checking my email first thing
Speaker 1: in the morning. So then I go through the whole
Speaker 1: process of trying to get it out. You know, I
Speaker 1: think that's a lot the way ubiquitous things that are
Speaker 1: around us all the time are like that. It's why,
Speaker 1: you know, if you didn't want to smoke cigarettes, you
Speaker 1: would get rid of them completely. It makes it easier
Speaker 1: than having cigarettes that you smoke some of the time.
Speaker 1: I think you're right, we need the distance if we
Speaker 1: can get it. I mean, the cardinal rule of good
Speaker 1: and bad habits is, if you want to do something positive,
Speaker 1: make it as easy as possible to do it, and
Speaker 1: if you don't want to do something negative, make it
Speaker 1: as hard as possible to do it right, like give
Speaker 1: yourself those things. So putting it out of the bedroom
Speaker 1: certainly means you can't get to it. I mean I
Speaker 1: know people who locked their phone in one of those
Speaker 1: you know little boxes that has a timer on at
Speaker 1: phone sell. Yeah. Yeah, there's a website phone cell dot
Speaker 1: me at p h O any celll dot me if
Speaker 1: people are interested, like a hundred dollars a glass case
Speaker 1: you can put your phone and set the timer. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The two biggest bears that here on the cell phone
Speaker 1: bedroom thing are number one, it's my alarm clock. And
Speaker 1: I always say, have you heard of Walmart? Like can
Speaker 1: you go by attend alarm clock? But even to this
Speaker 1: point now, I actually travel now with a little white
Speaker 1: box alarm clock because I noticed hotel rooms are taking
Speaker 1: them out of the rooms right because everyone they're just
Speaker 1: so used to peoples sleeping beside. And the second thing
Speaker 1: I say is get a landline. Get a landline and
Speaker 1: the cell phone. The phone compies are desperate to sell
Speaker 1: you one. They cost ten dollars a month because no
Speaker 1: one wants one. But you give that phone number to
Speaker 1: your emergency people, and the idea that they can reach
Speaker 1: you in an emergency relaves you of the obligation of
Speaker 1: leaving that phone next to you with everything else that's
Speaker 1: got in it. Those are wise tips. There's lots of
Speaker 1: places to go here, but I would love to start
Speaker 1: with let's just hit the new book for a few minutes,
Speaker 1: because that's the the top thing on the list, and
Speaker 1: then I've got I've got lots of other things we
Speaker 1: can go through. So the new book is called Our
Speaker 1: Book of Awesome, a celebration of the small joys that
Speaker 1: bring us together. You've got previous books around awesomeness. Why
Speaker 1: this one and what's different about it? Yeah? Absolutely so.
Speaker 1: More than ten years ago, my wife left me, my
Speaker 1: best friend took us on life, and I started a
Speaker 1: blog called one Thousand Awesome Things as a way to
Speaker 1: cheer me up. Right, So, from two thousand and eight
Speaker 1: to two thousand twelve, I wrote one awesome thing every
Speaker 1: single day as a journaling practice to try to focus
Speaker 1: on the positive. I wrote about flipping to the cold
Speaker 1: side of the pillow. I wrote about wearing warm underwear
Speaker 1: from matter the dryer. I wrote about playing an old
Speaker 1: dangerous playground equipment. Right if you're if you're listening and
Speaker 1: you remember hot slides and you know, falling in the
Speaker 1: cigarette butts, you know what I'm talking about. The blog,
Speaker 1: You know hit nobody at first, then my mom, then
Speaker 1: my dad, and my traffic double that got really big.
Speaker 1: It got really popular, and it turned into this book
Speaker 1: and I came out in two thousand and ten called
Speaker 1: the Book of Awesome. The Book of Auston came out, Eric,
Speaker 1: and you know, it became my life for a few years.
Speaker 1: You know, all these sequels and spinoffs and so on,
Speaker 1: And then for about a decade, I didn't write those books.
Speaker 1: I felt like I was getting pigeonholed. I thought, you
Speaker 1: know the Krusty the clown imitation gruel clip from the
Speaker 1: Simpsons flashback and through my hand, I was like, I
Speaker 1: gotta focus on other things. And you know, I was
Speaker 1: also working a full time job at Walmart. That's on.
Speaker 1: So I started focusing on like exploring happiness and exploring
Speaker 1: resilience and exploring now and now I'm exploring trust these days,
Speaker 1: other big terms under this umbrella of how we live
Speaker 1: our most intentional life. So the kind of why this
Speaker 1: book why now is honestly the last two years of
Speaker 1: the pandemic have completely beat me up. I have felt tired, anxious, overwhelmed.
Speaker 1: I have felt symptoms of depression. I felt I felt
Speaker 1: a lot of symptoms of stress, and so I started again.
Speaker 1: I started writing an awesome thing a day again as
Speaker 1: a way to cultivate a positive mindset. We know from
Speaker 1: research from Emmons and McCullough that if you can write
Speaker 1: down ten things you're grateful for a week, okay they
Speaker 1: compared to test groups of roadtown hassles and test groups
Speaker 1: of roadtown events. Then after a ten week period, you're
Speaker 1: not just happier like you may expect, you're also physically healthier,
Speaker 1: which is incredible. Right If you think you know this
Speaker 1: is a bicep curl, right, and I'm I'm flexing on
Speaker 1: screen here for those who are listening, Then gratitude turns
Speaker 1: out to be a pretty powerful brain curl. Because we've
Speaker 1: got something in our brain called our visual cortex. There's
Speaker 1: an area in there called area seventeen. And when you
Speaker 1: talk about wearing that warm under her from the dryer,
Speaker 1: or you write it down or you share it with
Speaker 1: a friend, it jogs the memory in your mind. Right,
Speaker 1: So why did I write our Book of awesome for
Speaker 1: the first time in a decade. I'm looking to try
Speaker 1: to jolt the world back into a feeling of general positivity.
Speaker 1: When I feel like outside of the one you feed,
Speaker 1: which is endless positivity, you know, all these great positiveies,
Speaker 1: for the most part, when I look outside, it's pretty negative.
Speaker 1: So this is just, you know, a four hundred page
Speaker 1: hardcover book full of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of
Speaker 1: new awesome things. And some of them the our part
Speaker 1: of the book, Oh you are not a r e,
Speaker 1: Oh you are, is that you took submissions from your
Speaker 1: community also of things that they loved. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: it's funny. In the Book of Awesome, at the very
Speaker 1: back page it put like, if you have your own
Speaker 1: awesome suggestion, you know, send it this email address. And
Speaker 1: hadn't checked any undreds and years, but there were over
Speaker 1: ten thousand people who had submitted essays. Ten thousand, right,
Speaker 1: and some of them are like, here's what we've done
Speaker 1: in my classroom. Here's what we've done, you know. And
Speaker 1: I've got these letters over the years. I'm like, why
Speaker 1: don't we stitch these together? So the book feels like
Speaker 1: something we are talking about as people. And so I
Speaker 1: also to that point trying to take myself out of
Speaker 1: it as best as I could. I put Neil Pastricha
Speaker 1: and Friends on the cover. I took up the photo,
Speaker 1: I took out the about the author, I took out
Speaker 1: the dedication, and took out the acknowledgements. At the end
Speaker 1: of the book, what happens is that if I did
Speaker 1: it right, it culminates in this sort of like cacophony
Speaker 1: of awesome from around the world, where these this voice
Speaker 1: gets louder and louder, and it's everybody from around the
Speaker 1: world screaming and sharing positive things. And so the last
Speaker 1: ten twenty pages of the book are literally just fade
Speaker 1: to black with smaller and smaller awesome things. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to sort of make it feel like you're
Speaker 1: flying out to outer space, but just surrounded by lots
Speaker 1: of simple pleasures, because to me, that is certainly the
Speaker 1: else I need, you know, right now, when I look
Speaker 1: at the news, when I look at doom scroll and
Speaker 1: social media and so on. So is writing down awesome
Speaker 1: things just a particular form of gratitude? Is that really
Speaker 1: what it is? Or do you see it differently? Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, we're not alive very long, right at the
Speaker 1: end of the day. It feels long when we're in it,
Speaker 1: but the average person is only alive for about thirty
Speaker 1: thousand days right now, that's like the North American number.
Speaker 1: It's about five thousand days lesson as a global average.
Speaker 1: So we're in live for thirty thousand days, and then
Speaker 1: a given day we are awake for about a thousand minutes.
Speaker 1: You start doing the math therek and like it starts
Speaker 1: to feel shorter and shorter to me. What we feel
Speaker 1: like we're playing for what the greeting card industry is
Speaker 1: oriented around with the you know, the there's a baby industry,
Speaker 1: there's the wedding industry. We orient our industries in capitalism
Speaker 1: around these big major life moments. Right the day you
Speaker 1: walk across the graduation stage, Well, that's a whole industry,
Speaker 1: that's the whole season, that's the whole event, right you know,
Speaker 1: you know this mother's day, father's day, graduation, and then
Speaker 1: we've got you know, when you get married, right then
Speaker 1: when you have a kid, and well, I think we're
Speaker 1: missing from this cultural focus on the big things is
Speaker 1: how many simple things you have in your day that
Speaker 1: if you just take an extra second to watch that
Speaker 1: swirl of cream dissolve into coffee, you know, those little
Speaker 1: almost micro mindfulness moments. To use a phrase I've never
Speaker 1: used before I it sounded pretty good. They awaken you
Speaker 1: to how joyful life really is. And I say this
Speaker 1: as someone who has a tendency towards anxiety. I say
Speaker 1: this as someone who has a tendency towards feeling overwhelmed
Speaker 1: and stress a lot. When I'm writing awesome things, when
Speaker 1: I'm reading awesome things, they have a pacifying quality that
Speaker 1: just sort of like reconnects me to the wider delight
Speaker 1: of consciousness, and it reconnects me to the wider appreciation
Speaker 1: for what this is. We don't know what it is, man, right,
Speaker 1: we don't know what this is. But if we can
Speaker 1: be like, oh, yeah, the the sound of the wind
Speaker 1: whispering through the trees, right, or something as funny, as
Speaker 1: simple as you know, texting your husband to do something
Speaker 1: when he's upstairs and you're downstairs. Right. I wrote that
Speaker 1: one in the book, when my wife texting me to
Speaker 1: bring down the lattery, Like, wow, that's hilarious, Like how
Speaker 1: funny is this moment? Right? I remember seeing those vacuum
Speaker 1: shoot tubes at the side of office buildings I was
Speaker 1: a kid. I'm like, the future has arrived, you know,
Speaker 1: So is it just gratitude? Yeah? And that is the
Speaker 1: research there. But if you want to layer in other research,
Speaker 1: we could talk about Slatcher and Penna Baker at the
Speaker 1: University of Texas to all the research on journaling. Perhaps
Speaker 1: it's a journaling practice, right. We can talk about all
Speaker 1: the research on mindfulness, on sort of living in the
Speaker 1: present moment. Perhaps there's some of that just pausing on
Speaker 1: things that typically take a micro second. So I think,
Speaker 1: you know, separate from all the research studies, there's just
Speaker 1: something about it. There's just something that's silly and joyful
Speaker 1: and fun makes me feel good and hopefully it makes
Speaker 1: others feel the same way. I like it because we've
Speaker 1: talked about gratitude on the show countless times. It is
Speaker 1: one of the biggest effects in the positive psychology world.
Speaker 1: When people look at what has the strongest effect gratitude
Speaker 1: and kindness to others or you know, they just stand
Speaker 1: out as these extraordinarily positive interventions. However, gratitude can become
Speaker 1: very dry and dull if it's just what am I
Speaker 1: grateful that I have? I mean, that's good to be like,
Speaker 1: it's good to be grateful that I have a house
Speaker 1: over my head. It's good to be grateful that I
Speaker 1: have a wonderful partner. It's good to be grateful that
Speaker 1: I get to do this amazing work, and I am
Speaker 1: and I do reflect those things. However, for me, I
Speaker 1: do need also, as you said, to be looking for
Speaker 1: those little moments. The word I often use and you
Speaker 1: used it somewhere in there is appreciation, you know. Can
Speaker 1: I just find little things do appreciate throughout the day
Speaker 1: and emphasis on little like little, little like really little,
Speaker 1: you know, like when your kids don't hear you're opening
Speaker 1: a bag of potato chips, right, that's why I put
Speaker 1: in the book, or sending a private message during the
Speaker 1: video conference and seeing your coworker look down and silently smirk,
Speaker 1: you know that one Like that one I like write
Speaker 1: when the cake plops flawlessly out of the pan. Part
Speaker 1: of it, to me, Eric is remembering that they got
Speaker 1: to be specific, right, so you know, writing down my husband,
Speaker 1: my kid, my dog, that ain't gonna that ain't gonna
Speaker 1: cut it. It's when my husband Eric put the toilet
Speaker 1: seat down, right when always happens, When our five year
Speaker 1: old daughters started writing her name out, when the rescue
Speaker 1: puppy we got during the pandemic stop peeing on the pillows.
Speaker 1: So just something, be really specific, And I think a
Speaker 1: way to integrate this into your life is I know
Speaker 1: you're talking about gratitude a lot, but there's a game
Speaker 1: that my wife, Leslie and I play with our kids
Speaker 1: at dinner almost every night called Rose Rose Storm Bud.
Speaker 1: We force our family and it's hard at first, and
Speaker 1: nobody wants to do it. It It feels clunky and awkward
Speaker 1: to just say, Hey, what was your rose from the day.
Speaker 1: The rose is the awesome thing. The rose is the
Speaker 1: gratitude when you force it to be from today, only
Speaker 1: your mind has a very limited timeframe to sort through
Speaker 1: and it picks out something smaller sweet. Hey there's a
Speaker 1: new doughnut at the coffee shop, or you know the
Speaker 1: crossing guard, remember my name, or you know I got
Speaker 1: a B plus on the on my math test. Whatever,
Speaker 1: you do it again, that's the second rose. Then you
Speaker 1: make space for a thorn. And I think this is
Speaker 1: missing from a lot of the gratitude practices we have
Speaker 1: in society. You gotta have a place event, and so
Speaker 1: what we try to do is just say to the kids, Oh,
Speaker 1: that sucks. Just that's it. You don't try to solve
Speaker 1: the problem, just here the thorn, and then finally a bud.
Speaker 1: It's a nice way to end. That's b u d
Speaker 1: which is something you are looking forward to, and that's
Speaker 1: not something that you are smoking with your children. Just
Speaker 1: from my stoner listeners, I want to clarify what we're
Speaker 1: talking about here, rose rose thorn bud a simple dinner time,
Speaker 1: dinner table practice, or you can do it with your
Speaker 1: partner at bedtime whatever, to get the gratitude or the
Speaker 1: awesome thing kind of into the conversation in a way
Speaker 1: where it doesn't feel like you were mentioning, you know,
Speaker 1: sort of dry or or repetitive. Right now, you're forced
Speaker 1: to think of one each day at dinner. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I think that practice. Any of these practices, right, there's
Speaker 1: different ways of doing them, but they get us looking
Speaker 1: for the positive. It's like when I went through a
Speaker 1: period where I was like, I'm going to take a
Speaker 1: picture every day, which meant that I was looking for
Speaker 1: something beautiful all the time, not just the one moment
Speaker 1: I took the picture that oriented the way I went
Speaker 1: through the world. And it's the same way. If we're
Speaker 1: looking for what we appreciate, we're just naturally going to
Speaker 1: notice more things than if we're just kind of on autopilot.
Speaker 1: Have you been hearing all of this new research coming
Speaker 1: out on just the idea of expanding or dilating your pupils,
Speaker 1: sort of consciously expanding your vision. Yes, to that idea
Speaker 1: of seeing wider vistas because it relaxes you. Have you
Speaker 1: been following all of that, Andrew Humorman and so on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've been following. And what's interesting is that my primary
Speaker 1: spiritual practices Zen, and that is a very old Zen technique.
Speaker 1: I mean that has been thousands of you know, thousands
Speaker 1: of years through the Zen well I wouldn't say thousands,
Speaker 1: a thousand years at least in the Zen tradition has
Speaker 1: had that as a practice, you know. So it's been
Speaker 1: really interesting to see it sort of show up in
Speaker 1: the scientific literature. Yeah. I think it's amazing. It's amazing
Speaker 1: how much scientific literature just tells us what our grandma
Speaker 1: told us, you know, or just just like it's like
Speaker 1: we help. Why do I have to quote research about
Speaker 1: gratitudes and journaling and all, because that's what makes people
Speaker 1: agree that it's worth it, right, It just feels good.
Speaker 1: It's just the right way to do it, you know,
Speaker 1: not everything needs science behind it, but yeah, this convinced
Speaker 1: us that's the right thing to do. Absolutely. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: are oriented that way. I've always said that I love
Speaker 1: it when there's like different points of support. So like
Speaker 1: if I read scientifically, okay, this thing is good, and
Speaker 1: then I can also see it in wisdom traditions that
Speaker 1: have been around for you know, thousands of years, then
Speaker 1: I'm like, okay, good. And then if I actually then
Speaker 1: have done it in my life and seen it to
Speaker 1: be good, then it's like I've got sort of the
Speaker 1: triple crown there, and I'm like proof point trifecta. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the proof point trifecta. Yes, And I love that. Rose
Speaker 1: Rose bud Thorn. I think you also are doing a
Speaker 1: high low buffalo with your kids. Now. Yeah, if the
Speaker 1: kids protest Rose Rose thorn butt, and they sometimes do,
Speaker 1: because again, like I said, no one wants to play
Speaker 1: at the beginning. But you can't go around the dinner
Speaker 1: table and say say Roses without people feeling good about it.
Speaker 1: So the ending of it's like a workout. You feel
Speaker 1: good when it's over. You gotta hold onto that thought
Speaker 1: the beginning. But if they protest, we say, okay, how
Speaker 1: about high low buffalo, and suddenly they're interested. Well, guess
Speaker 1: what The first two things are the same, right, High
Speaker 1: is an awesome thing, a rose, a gratitude to highlight.
Speaker 1: Low is the same as a thorn. Buffalo is something
Speaker 1: weird that happened during your day, just something funny, something strange,
Speaker 1: and ah, a strange encounter, a little anecdote, and those
Speaker 1: end up being you know what people look forward to
Speaker 1: sharing and hearing. Oh, I'm sure, how old are your kids?
Speaker 1: Well less than I have four boys under eight years old. Oh,
Speaker 1: it must be must be spectacular buffalo world. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: often relate to candy, whether it's splashing, you know, like
Speaker 1: random random stuff. But it's beautiful. I know, during those loud, chaotic,
Speaker 1: crazy moments when I can feel my overwhelmed rising, I'm
Speaker 1: just like, I'm gonna miss this. I gotta I gotta
Speaker 1: enjoy that. There's only a few years when they're going
Speaker 1: to be this small, So we're in those years right now. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if I were in your shoes, I would be writing
Speaker 1: some of those buffalo things down. Because my son I thought,
Speaker 1: I'll never forget the things he said, and of course
Speaker 1: I have forgotten the things he said. When he was
Speaker 1: a little I mean, I remember a couple of them,
Speaker 1: but not the vast majority of them. This is just
Speaker 1: the way my brain works. You're right, and actually this
Speaker 1: reminds me of a wonderful gift we got that I
Speaker 1: might share with your listeners as well. When we sent
Speaker 1: out our birth announcement, which is in the form of
Speaker 1: an email to our friends and family, a couple Martin
Speaker 1: and Farah, who were friends with they took out a
Speaker 1: line from our own birth announcement and got to print
Speaker 1: it on a hardcover, blank white book with the name
Speaker 1: of the baby on the front and just lines in between,
Speaker 1: and they mailed it to us with the story saying,
Speaker 1: we've kept a book like this with our son, who's
Speaker 1: now sixteen years old, of the funny and interesting things.
Speaker 1: He said, Well, of course we started doing that, especially
Speaker 1: on the first kid, right Eric, and then every subsequent
Speaker 1: birth announcement they've done the same thing, And so we
Speaker 1: wouldn't have done it for ourselves, like we just wouldn't
Speaker 1: have gone to the trouble of making a book with
Speaker 1: their kids name on the front. But because we have
Speaker 1: those books, we don't leave them in conspicuous locations, and
Speaker 1: the quote. It's written in their right away. In an
Speaker 1: ideal world, we missed stuff all the time. But it's
Speaker 1: a nice you know, similar to the memory box idea
Speaker 1: that some people keep for their kids in their in
Speaker 1: their closet. Are an inbox that you said you BCC
Speaker 1: emails to for years and then you eventually give them
Speaker 1: the password. Right, I guess sold that from a Google commercial.
Speaker 1: But you know, there's these ways to kind of create
Speaker 1: future memories for kids and for yourself which are kind
Speaker 1: of beautiful. Absolutely. All right, let's turn to your podcast,
Speaker 1: which is called three Books, and so what you do
Speaker 1: is well, I'll just let you tell people what you do.
Speaker 1: I don't need to tell them, you tell them, Okay,
Speaker 1: Well that's three books. So I have been obsessed with
Speaker 1: this number one thousand for a very long time. I
Speaker 1: started a blog called one thousand Awesome Things, as you know,
Speaker 1: and I talked about how we're awake for a thousand
Speaker 1: minutes a day, and I mentioned thirty five thousand days.
Speaker 1: Guess what, that's also a thousand months, Like you know,
Speaker 1: you're alive for a thousand months. So I started feeling
Speaker 1: this number of thousands a really important number. It's bigger
Speaker 1: than a small goal and smaller than a huge goal, right,
Speaker 1: And so in two thousand and eighteen, I decided that
Speaker 1: is one of the methods to force myself to read more.
Speaker 1: I introduced a number of systems in my life Eric,
Speaker 1: you know, moving the TV to the basement, putting a
Speaker 1: bookshelf at the front door, canceling my subscription to the
Speaker 1: two newspapers I was getting, and that includes news sites
Speaker 1: right online, little systems, Little systems, Little systems. One of
Speaker 1: the system was starting to podcast dedicated to uncovering the
Speaker 1: one thousand most formative books in the world. It was
Speaker 1: partly inspired by the fact that I was endlessly frustrated
Speaker 1: with the I think the algorithms are terrible when it
Speaker 1: comes to book recommendations. I think Amazon back of the
Speaker 1: day used to be pretty good, and now when it's
Speaker 1: all sponsored and ad driven, you know, you don't actually
Speaker 1: get stuff that is related to the bookery, and they
Speaker 1: can't get off the you know, the money that they
Speaker 1: make from those sponsorships, and now you don't get a
Speaker 1: good book recommendations. So what I'm doing on my podcast
Speaker 1: three Books is I'm spending almost fifteen years sitting down
Speaker 1: with three thirty three inspiring people, which is including Eric
Speaker 1: Zimmer on an upcoming chapter and asking them which three
Speaker 1: books more changed your life? So you give me your books. There,
Speaker 1: I buy the books, I read the books. That's my goal,
Speaker 1: and then I sit down with you and I talk
Speaker 1: about the themes from those books. Okay. So I am
Speaker 1: skewing everywhere, from Quentin Tarantino, Judy Bloom, Brennie Brown, Malcom
Speaker 1: Lowell to uper drivers. I had variety star owners at
Speaker 1: the corner of my street and people I meet on
Speaker 1: the back of the bus. I mean, I'm trying to
Speaker 1: get as best I can a cross section of people
Speaker 1: with the only common characteristic is and they like books.
Speaker 1: If you like books, you like reading, let's talk about
Speaker 1: which three shaped too. And that's the whole idea behind it.
Speaker 1: I've started sending a couple of text messages after each
Speaker 1: podcast listener with positive reminders about what's discussed and invitations
Speaker 1: to apply the wisdom to your life. It's free, and
Speaker 1: listeners have told me that these texts really helped to
Speaker 1: pull them out of autopilot and reconnect them with what's important.
Speaker 1: When you get a text for me during your day
Speaker 1: to day life, it's one more thing that helps you
Speaker 1: further bridge that gap between what you know and what
Speaker 1: you do. Positive messages when you need them for me
Speaker 1: to you. So if you'd like to hear from me
Speaker 1: a few times a week via text, go to one
Speaker 1: you feed dot net slash text and sign up for free.
Speaker 1: So I can't help but ask you what are three
Speaker 1: of your formative books. Maybe you've already been asked this,
Speaker 1: probably because it's an obvious question and you have them.
Speaker 1: If you haven't, then you can just pick three important
Speaker 1: books to you. No, No, I always joke that that's
Speaker 1: going to be the very last chapter of the show
Speaker 1: because it buys me time until two thousand and thirty
Speaker 1: one with the last chapter of three books actually years
Speaker 1: um and I called them chapters right instead of episodes,
Speaker 1: just just to be bookish. But truthfully, I'll share a
Speaker 1: few with you for sure. The Babysitters Club Treasuries. When
Speaker 1: I was a kid, I read outside of my gender.
Speaker 1: I'm using quotation marks because I crossed over to my
Speaker 1: sister's bookshelf and I found the idea that this woman
Speaker 1: and m Martin could write a book from five different
Speaker 1: girls perspectives where they alternated by chapter, totally fascinating and
Speaker 1: exposed me to the concept of voice in a book
Speaker 1: and the idea that a really good author could sort
Speaker 1: of remove themselves and enter into different perspectives. So why
Speaker 1: do I mention that? Well, because our book of Awesome
Speaker 1: is written in a very different voice than You Are Awesome.
Speaker 1: I know the title sound the same, but you Were
Speaker 1: Awesome is my book about resilience that came out two
Speaker 1: years ago, and that's a little bit more of like
Speaker 1: research base. Here's some theories, and that's a different voice,
Speaker 1: and I'm not as good as her, but just the
Speaker 1: idea that I could be different people under the guise
Speaker 1: of letters was a very formative discovery for me. That's one.
Speaker 1: Another one is The Black Swan by the seem Talent
Speaker 1: nonfiction Behavioral Economics. If I could boil down with that
Speaker 1: book taught me is the world is chaos, random and unpredictable.
Speaker 1: So your best bet is actually to put a chip
Speaker 1: on every single number on the roulette wheel and give
Speaker 1: it a spin. Why does Neil past Rich to have
Speaker 1: a blog called meal Dot Blog a speaking you know business,
Speaker 1: I'm giving speeches, I'm writing books, I'm doing podcasts. In
Speaker 1: a way, Eric, what I'm really doing is just constantly
Speaker 1: trying new things. You know, As Seth Golden once said,
Speaker 1: I'm a big fan of Poof. I think somebody asked
Speaker 1: him when he starts and quit so many projects. Well,
Speaker 1: this is the black Swan theory. Expose yourself to as
Speaker 1: many opportunities as possible because you don't know which one's
Speaker 1: gonna take off, and when one does, you can then
Speaker 1: increase your personal resources onto that one with very very
Speaker 1: little trade off costs. It's a important formative book to
Speaker 1: me because it constantly reminds me to try new things
Speaker 1: and not be too hung up on the outcomes because true,
Speaker 1: fully I can't control them that well, you know, I
Speaker 1: just can't. And so this book reminds me that the
Speaker 1: world is chaos and random, you know, written by someone
Speaker 1: way smarter than me, you know, so it sort of
Speaker 1: relaxes me into thinking, Okay, I'll do what I can,
Speaker 1: but the most important thing is to try new things.
Speaker 1: One other metaphorical takeaway from this is go to parties
Speaker 1: where you don't know anyone. It's the same idea. Expose
Speaker 1: yourself to places and situations where you're more likely to
Speaker 1: learn a lot, but you're less likely to know a lot.
Speaker 1: We'll get to your third book in a second. But
Speaker 1: you've got something on your personal dashboard which is to
Speaker 1: do some new experience every month. I also notice you
Speaker 1: have something called Nil's Night out each week, which is
Speaker 1: something I've started post pandemic, which is at least one
Speaker 1: night a week, I have to get out and do something.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter what it is, but I have to
Speaker 1: be out and about, and ideally it be with a friend,
Speaker 1: because I just realized, like I've gotten comfortable being at home,
Speaker 1: and if I don't actually make a specific point of it,
Speaker 1: it doesn't happen that often. It's amazing to me. I
Speaker 1: think some of that age maybe, but I share your
Speaker 1: basic thing of like how do I get a little
Speaker 1: bit of new experience into my life on a consistent
Speaker 1: basis absolutely a hundred percent. And so you know this,
Speaker 1: this little monthly dashboard that I draw is just a
Speaker 1: way for me to constantly, like right size where I'm going.
Speaker 1: The top two boxes that I call strong core business
Speaker 1: and fastest learning, and they have things on them like,
Speaker 1: you know, give four speeches, write one chapter of a book,
Speaker 1: write one article, and things like read eight books a month,
Speaker 1: have one new experience. The bottom is self care, self
Speaker 1: care for my family. Right, number of nights away it's
Speaker 1: usually a four or less per month, number of dinners
Speaker 1: at home, you know, and number of nights out, that's
Speaker 1: what you're talking about. Eric's site out, Kneel's it out.
Speaker 1: I forced myself to go. Also important to introduce new
Speaker 1: stories into the relationships I find. You know, as Leslie
Speaker 1: and I have now been married for almost nine years,
Speaker 1: you know, our tendency is to have all these experiences together.
Speaker 1: But when I go out or when she goes out,
Speaker 1: you come back with new energy, a new person you Matt,
Speaker 1: a new person you saw, etcetera. And then the bottom
Speaker 1: right quadrant is taking care of myself. This one's often read,
Speaker 1: but it's like number of workouts, number of number of
Speaker 1: cardio experiences. So on, why do I do those two things? Well,
Speaker 1: the Neil's light off unless he's light off. Lessie is
Speaker 1: my wife? Ln know, is her night off? They pay
Speaker 1: for each other. That's really an important point. So when
Speaker 1: you have lots of kids, are a little kid or
Speaker 1: whatever at home, You've got responsibilities. Me taking off for
Speaker 1: a night is guilt ridden, right, I'm leaving her alone
Speaker 1: with the babies. But because she's got right off three
Speaker 1: days from now, they pay for each other. You don't
Speaker 1: feel bad because she's got one coming, and am I
Speaker 1: not off. I'm happy to have no plan. I'll just
Speaker 1: go on a really long walk. I believe in the
Speaker 1: Jane Jacob's philosophy. And we live in downtown Toronto, you know,
Speaker 1: the urban center off for something other places cannot, namely
Speaker 1: the strange. I end up talking to a lot of people,
Speaker 1: you know, living outside or in the late night bookstores
Speaker 1: or on the street, and I'll tell you I learned
Speaker 1: more from those conversations than anything else. It just puts
Speaker 1: me in constant situations and oftentimes it makes me feel very,
Speaker 1: very lucky, right just to have a roof over my
Speaker 1: head and so on. So I try to get out tonight.
Speaker 1: I'm going to a techno concert at an underground bar
Speaker 1: um that somebody invited me to online. Okay, awesome. I
Speaker 1: don't know anything about any of those words I just said,
Speaker 1: but I'm sure something interesting will happen, and if not,
Speaker 1: that's a learning to So I do those things and
Speaker 1: the one weird growth opportunities, just like pushing myself to
Speaker 1: do something out of my comforence on each month. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so this techno event would count in that, right, because
Speaker 1: it's something you would never do. Yeah, it's not perfect.
Speaker 1: The point of this dashboard is just to kind of
Speaker 1: right size my ship. Not everything's always green. I used
Speaker 1: as the way say, oh, next month, I need to
Speaker 1: invest a bit more in self care, or oh, you know,
Speaker 1: next month I need to read to get a bit
Speaker 1: more because I didn't really read many books this month,
Speaker 1: or whatever it is. Yeah, I really like the idea.
Speaker 1: It's very simple. We'll put a link in the show
Speaker 1: notes to where there's an article about that people can
Speaker 1: see this. I have a couple of questions about it, though.
Speaker 1: Question one is do the four quadrants ever change or
Speaker 1: they always the same? And then do the things in
Speaker 1: the quadrants change? Yeah, And just to say, I stole
Speaker 1: this idea of doing this box from David cheese Right,
Speaker 1: David Cheeseer, it was my boss when I worked at Walmart.
Speaker 1: He was the president and CEO of the company, and
Speaker 1: he drew this model as the strategy for the organization.
Speaker 1: That's kind of weird to use an organizational strategy template
Speaker 1: as mine, but I really like the philosophy. Under opinion
Speaker 1: which is in the center. He wrote, we save people
Speaker 1: money so they can live better. Well that was the
Speaker 1: Walmart purpose? Or is the Walmart purpose? I don't know.
Speaker 1: I no longer work there as I'm kind of doing
Speaker 1: this artistic stuff, like even full time. But in the center,
Speaker 1: I advise people to put your ikey guy right. This
Speaker 1: is a word we talked about in our last conversation.
Speaker 1: I K I G I the reason you get up
Speaker 1: out of bed in the morning. So I write down, now,
Speaker 1: you know, helping people live happy lives or figuring out
Speaker 1: how to live an intentional life myself and sharing that
Speaker 1: with the world or whatever that is. It put that
Speaker 1: in the center. That's your That's gonna be your kind
Speaker 1: of north star. The top two boxes I mentioned, which
Speaker 1: I call strong core business and fastest learning are what
Speaker 1: I do the principal underpinnionlet's you or what I do right,
Speaker 1: and you should revisit and wrestle and change and examine right.
Speaker 1: Otherwise that means you're kind of static. So so I
Speaker 1: I do change and tweak those things all the time.
Speaker 1: And I also might be I think it was like
Speaker 1: six speeches a month, and then I one can it
Speaker 1: was five speeches a month. Then I too because it
Speaker 1: was four speeches. You see what I mean? So like,
Speaker 1: I'm changing this also things in accordance with my life situation.
Speaker 1: Those are the top two boxes. The bottom two boxes
Speaker 1: are how I do it. They're the energy source. That's
Speaker 1: why it's best family and best selve, because if I'm
Speaker 1: not properly investing in those dinners at home, those nights
Speaker 1: at home, those workouts, those meditations, I don't have the
Speaker 1: headspace and the energy to be able to do the
Speaker 1: stuff on the top. And so yes, to answer your question,
Speaker 1: the words and specific bullet points can change, but what
Speaker 1: doesn't change is the high level, the line of the dashboard.
Speaker 1: Ikey guy in the center, what you do on the top,
Speaker 1: how you do it on the bottom? Got it? I
Speaker 1: feel a bit funny describing all of this verbally. So yeah,
Speaker 1: if you're listening to this and you're like, what is
Speaker 1: he talking about? Do check out the show notes right,
Speaker 1: actually show a graphical interpretation of this dashboards so people
Speaker 1: can actually see it. All Right, we got through two books.
Speaker 1: I don't think we got to the third. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I'm picking not the three most formative, but three formative books.
Speaker 1: One the other one I really want to suggest is
Speaker 1: on the Shortness of Life by Seneca. It's less of
Speaker 1: a book than it is a two thousand year old
Speaker 1: letter written by the Stoic philosopher Seneca. It's about twenty
Speaker 1: pages long. There's something about this letter, Eric. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you've read it or not. I have at
Speaker 1: some point in the past. Yes. Yeah, it's a really
Speaker 1: really thin They made a Penguin Classics version of it,
Speaker 1: which is out of print, but you can still get online.
Speaker 1: And that's also if you buy Letters from a Stoic
Speaker 1: by Seneca. It's one of those letters. I keep a
Speaker 1: copy of this in my suitcase all times. I find
Speaker 1: it incredibly grounding and centering and stress relieving because here's
Speaker 1: the guy two thousand years ago, which is and it's
Speaker 1: written like an email from your buddy, Like it just
Speaker 1: sounds like I know it must be the translation, but
Speaker 1: it just sounds so current, it sounds fresh, and he's
Speaker 1: essentially arguing that life is long if you know how
Speaker 1: to live it a lot of ways. It's an argument
Speaker 1: towards saying no to lots and lots and lots of
Speaker 1: things so that you can say hell yeah to the
Speaker 1: ones that really matter to you. And it's a grounding
Speaker 1: and are remembering force to me to you know, be
Speaker 1: a little more kind to myself and a little bit
Speaker 1: more selfish about what I you know, say yes and
Speaker 1: no to why do I travel with it? Like why
Speaker 1: do I travel with the same book in my suitcase?
Speaker 1: Because I finally, when I land in hotels and a
Speaker 1: random city and a random times on in a random place,
Speaker 1: I'm stressed. And so I have two things in my
Speaker 1: suitcase at all times for that. One is On the
Speaker 1: Shortness of Life by Seneca, and two is I'll la
Speaker 1: cross ball so that I can rub my back and
Speaker 1: and you know, rub my arms out on the wall
Speaker 1: of the hotel and then you know Paris and but
Speaker 1: nervousnys some kicks in and I fall asleep. Perfect. So
Speaker 1: now I'm gonna flip the question a little bit and
Speaker 1: ask about a couple of books that you have heard
Speaker 1: from others, you know, people who came on your show
Speaker 1: said this is a really formative book. A couple of
Speaker 1: those that turned out to be really meaningful to you.
Speaker 1: And again I'm not going to ask you to pick
Speaker 1: the most meaningful or anything, because I hate when anybody
Speaker 1: asked me, like, what's your favorite podcast episode, I'm like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, but just any that come to mind. Yeah, absolutely, Okay,
Speaker 1: So which books have people mentioned on the show that
Speaker 1: have been really formative to me once I read them?
Speaker 1: You know what's interesting is they're often books I've completely
Speaker 1: never heard of. So this is one thing that just
Speaker 1: surprises me, although it shouldn't, is that people are allway
Speaker 1: suggesting books I've just never heard of. It's completely format
Speaker 1: to them. I've never come across that, right. So I
Speaker 1: interviewed Shane Parrish back in chapter sixty of three Books.
Speaker 1: He's the guy that runs Farnham Street. For people that
Speaker 1: don't know, this is a wonderful self improvement page. It's
Speaker 1: f stop blog. I can't recommend that enough. He tipped
Speaker 1: me off to the book called Poor Charlie's Almanac by
Speaker 1: Charles T. Munger. Have you heard of it? I have?
Speaker 1: I have, and I know that book and some of
Speaker 1: the wisdom from it. It's kind of remarkable. It's a
Speaker 1: remarkable book. This guy is still alive. In his mid
Speaker 1: to late nineties, Core founded Berkshire Hathway with Warren Buffett.
Speaker 1: In the way, he's kind of the I guess the
Speaker 1: quieter of the two of them are the less well known,
Speaker 1: but he's essentially amalgamated in a very very large, thick book,
Speaker 1: all of it sort of mental models, life advice, uh,
Speaker 1: commencement speeches and all these things. It's just a trove
Speaker 1: of wisdom. It's a wonderful, wonderful book. Poor Charlie's Almanac
Speaker 1: by Charles T. Munger one of the few books that
Speaker 1: you can go online. You have thousands of five star
Speaker 1: reviews and again, never heard of the thing. Another one
Speaker 1: that has been recommended to me recently, I interviewed the
Speaker 1: filmmakers Daniels. You know, they did that movie everything everywhere,
Speaker 1: all at once, which it came out right at the
Speaker 1: end to the pandemic or not that the pandemic is over,
Speaker 1: but you know, Spring two thousand twenty two, let's say,
Speaker 1: And you know, it made like million at the box office,
Speaker 1: which is remarkable considering how few people were going to
Speaker 1: the movie theaters. And I think we're gonna hear about
Speaker 1: it a lot more as we get into Oscar season,
Speaker 1: because this movie is just really a revolutionary in terms
Speaker 1: of how it was made and what it's about. But
Speaker 1: they took me off to a book called Sex at
Speaker 1: Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Casilda Jake, again a book
Speaker 1: I never heard of, and the reason they picked it
Speaker 1: was because essentially, the moors of society are shifting rapidly
Speaker 1: when it comes to sexuality, and for years, growing up Eric,
Speaker 1: I have felt like inside myself, my feelings about sexuality
Speaker 1: have often been folded in with feelings of guilt, and
Speaker 1: with shame, and with all kinds of other emotions that
Speaker 1: are largely negative. This book really helped me shirk a
Speaker 1: lot of those things I had been historically layering on
Speaker 1: and feel more accepting of myself for the places that
Speaker 1: my mind goes when it comes to sex, and exposes
Speaker 1: a lot of the evolutionary reasons why some of those
Speaker 1: thinking things might happen. So it is especially a good
Speaker 1: book to read for those people that may be curious, interested,
Speaker 1: or in a polly or non monogamous relationship, which is
Speaker 1: not the case with me. I am in a monogamous
Speaker 1: relationship with my wife. However, the conversations it's spurred with
Speaker 1: my wife and I were remarkable and transparent, and I
Speaker 1: think enabled by this wonderful book. So I would not
Speaker 1: have expected the start of this podcast to be going
Speaker 1: on the record and saying Sex at Dawn is a
Speaker 1: great book, but I just think it's so underrated and
Speaker 1: people don't share it because of the content. Thank you
Speaker 1: to Daniels because they had the courage that you want
Speaker 1: to talk about it and to explore how we think
Speaker 1: about sex in our society. And for those that have
Speaker 1: seen everything Every All once you know that that movie
Speaker 1: also has jarring explorations of sexuality. But we need to
Speaker 1: get sex out of the closet more, especially in regards
Speaker 1: to getting rid of some of the shame and guilt,
Speaker 1: if you like, may feel around it, around the things
Speaker 1: that you think, the things that you desire, the things
Speaker 1: that you may have felt or experienced, or even things
Speaker 1: around your body and how your body looks and how
Speaker 1: it works and why it. Ah, there's a lot in
Speaker 1: that book. It's essentially a history of sex through an
Speaker 1: evolutionary perspective. Awesome, wonderful read. Got one more? Yeah? Sure
Speaker 1: you want me to keep going? Yeah? I love this.
Speaker 1: This is really fun for me too. I interviewed the
Speaker 1: slam poet in Q and he recommended that I read
Speaker 1: Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl strade such a good you
Speaker 1: know that I do that is you know, but most
Speaker 1: people don't. I didn't that Cheryl Strayed pre Wild, So
Speaker 1: you know she wrote this famous book while to turn
Speaker 1: into the movie with Reese Witherspoon. That's kind of that's
Speaker 1: up boom right, like a big, big thing. But before that,
Speaker 1: she wrote an anonymous column and nobody knows her. She
Speaker 1: was called sugar right for an online and I'm maybe
Speaker 1: in print literary magazine called the Rumpest Again, maybe no
Speaker 1: one read this man crazy, But people would write these
Speaker 1: deep emotional questions and she would answer them. What these
Speaker 1: thousands to two thousand word essays that showed a depth
Speaker 1: of emotional empathy that I've never experienced before. Obviously it
Speaker 1: speaks of the tremendous richness of her ability to do that.
Speaker 1: But if you read this book, Tiny Beautiful Things, I'll
Speaker 1: tell you it's like an Anne Lander's column, you know,
Speaker 1: which I grew up reading in the Toronto Star for
Speaker 1: the modern emotional complexies that we feel, written by a
Speaker 1: star writer who was then writing under a total pseudonym.
Speaker 1: So Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Straight recommended to me
Speaker 1: by in Q, whose work I also recommended for those
Speaker 1: that may not know him. We had in Q on
Speaker 1: sometime in the last year. It was such a great
Speaker 1: interview and episode. He's really remarkable and that book is
Speaker 1: an amazing book. You write, her depth of emotional empathy
Speaker 1: and wisdom is truly amazing. I think when you get that,
Speaker 1: and you get it with somebody who can write as
Speaker 1: well as she can, you have something really special. Because
Speaker 1: she's an exceptional writer. I mean one of the best. Yeah,
Speaker 1: one of the absolute best. I'm like desperate for a tiny,
Speaker 1: beautiful thing too, you know. Yeah, it's the kind of thing. Also,
Speaker 1: I'll just say this book. I'm often seeking for ways
Speaker 1: to stop feeling so worried about things. I've got a
Speaker 1: book launched comming this while we're having this conversation. I'm
Speaker 1: always worried about it, man, I'm always stressed about it.
Speaker 1: Why when you read books like these Seneca books or
Speaker 1: this type of thing, it zooms you out of yourself.
Speaker 1: You stop caring so much about you, you you, and
Speaker 1: you're realize, Ah, the vast human experience that we all share.
Speaker 1: It's just a wonderful thing to be part of. I
Speaker 1: go from living in a washing machine to looking at
Speaker 1: a washing machine through often the power of books. Part
Speaker 1: of the reason why I've made such a big steak
Speaker 1: on doubling down and reading because in addition to a
Speaker 1: reading based podcast, I have multiple newsletters, I have a
Speaker 1: monthly book club where I'm telling the people which books
Speaker 1: I've read every single month. Right, I'm posting every book
Speaker 1: I've read online, like I'm trying my best to get
Speaker 1: out of my own head. But of course it's hard
Speaker 1: to It's hard to do that. And then as they
Speaker 1: put the camera on the front of the iPhone and
Speaker 1: we were asking for trouble with that one, totally selfies
Speaker 1: went up. We're all looking at ourselves all the time. Now.
Speaker 1: That zooming out time wise is such a powerful thing
Speaker 1: to do, and there's so many different ways to do it.
Speaker 1: In the Spiritual Habits program I've created, we talk a
Speaker 1: lot about that perspective, and and the core principle is
Speaker 1: just when in doubt, zoom out, like any way you
Speaker 1: can time wise, space wise, other people wise. I mean,
Speaker 1: just the broader our perspective, the better off we are,
Speaker 1: and the more narrow our perspective is, the more we
Speaker 1: tend to suffer. It's such a simple idea, but we
Speaker 1: so rarely remember to do it, and it's so hard
Speaker 1: to see how we can. Tomorrow. I would love, I
Speaker 1: think I will. I'm hoping to take the morning off
Speaker 1: to go bird watching. Okay, I got into bird watching
Speaker 1: during the pandemic. I have found it to be an incredible,
Speaker 1: wonderful way to connect with the natural world, to be
Speaker 1: part of something bigger than myself. These species have typically
Speaker 1: been here a lot longer than we have in they're
Speaker 1: right there in your backyard, these dinosaurs. It's unbelievable, right,
Speaker 1: but in my head the tape on playing right now
Speaker 1: is well liken like, I gotta I gotta pre write
Speaker 1: an email last and you know, I've got all these tweets.
Speaker 1: There's so much pressure, especially on anyone, and there's most
Speaker 1: of the creating stuff to constantly be putting out stuff
Speaker 1: across all channels at all times for everyone's consumption. And unfortunately,
Speaker 1: the side effect of that is the brash for all
Speaker 1: of us gets louder and louder, and we get a
Speaker 1: fragmented and a more fragmented reality, to the point where
Speaker 1: we're all just eventually talking to the ten people around us. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I agree, I mean as somebody who puts out two
Speaker 1: of these episodes a week, I worry a little about
Speaker 1: that element of it is like I am contributing to
Speaker 1: the noise. Now. I think it's a positive contribution to
Speaker 1: the noise, and I think it's a long form conversation
Speaker 1: where you have a chance to slow down and settle
Speaker 1: in and think about important things. But it's still a
Speaker 1: lot of content, just bam, bam bam. But kudos to
Speaker 1: you for leaving it with all those tenants and principles
Speaker 1: that you've always had, which are their long form. You
Speaker 1: aren't doing what the albums are talent you to do, Eric,
Speaker 1: which is slice it and dice it and put it
Speaker 1: in one minute morsels and two minute morsels to pump
Speaker 1: up the algorithm with your incredible daily distribute. That's what
Speaker 1: you quote unquote should be doing, right if you were
Speaker 1: feeding and to try to gamify yourself to the top
Speaker 1: of these charts to get more dollars per ads, etcetera.
Speaker 1: I'm saying you're also listening to your inner voice on
Speaker 1: what you're doing and why you're doing it, and as
Speaker 1: long as you're holding onto that, well that comes through
Speaker 1: in the art, you know. Yeah, it's obviously a and
Speaker 1: I know you talk about this is as a creative
Speaker 1: in the world, you've got to make a living, so
Speaker 1: you've got to pay some attention to the external things.
Speaker 1: But if too much attention gets drawn to the external
Speaker 1: versus the intrinsic or the internal, then what are we
Speaker 1: even doing? You know? And that's been a really interesting
Speaker 1: thing for me, is this has become what we do
Speaker 1: full time. Is how do you balance that? Like, Okay, now,
Speaker 1: I gotta make a living doing this, Like, but I
Speaker 1: don't want to let that corrode the thing that I
Speaker 1: started doing because I love doing it. And so how
Speaker 1: do you balance those things? And I think you talk
Speaker 1: really well about that in your three Essays? Yeah, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm going to dip into the three essays. And I
Speaker 1: also have you read the essay The Nature of the
Speaker 1: Fun by David Foster Wallace. No, I have not read
Speaker 1: that one. I would add this to your reading list.
Speaker 1: It's not available online. It's only available in a book
Speaker 1: called Both Flesh or Not, which is a collection of
Speaker 1: his essays released after he died. The title essay is
Speaker 1: about his essay and Roger Federer that he wrote for
Speaker 1: The New York Times magazine. But in there's an essay
Speaker 1: called the nature of the Fund and essentially what he's
Speaker 1: arguing is that when you chase commercial success, as you
Speaker 1: undoubtedly do, because you're so excited that people want the
Speaker 1: thing you're making, finally you end up, you know, producing
Speaker 1: that second Strokes album that sounds kind of like the
Speaker 1: first or whatever it is, and then you have to
Speaker 1: eventually remember and hold on to the fact that what
Speaker 1: made that first thing good in the first place was
Speaker 1: you did it for fun. You did it for fun,
Speaker 1: So holding onto that plus a question I would personally insert,
Speaker 1: and I wrote about this in the Harvard Business of
Speaker 1: your article around retirement, is would I do this for free?
Speaker 1: If you can keep answering yes to that question, would
Speaker 1: I do this for free? It tells you, it gets
Speaker 1: you the proof point to yourself that you're doing it
Speaker 1: for intrinsic reasons, because as soon as you say no,
Speaker 1: it feels like work. That's where you gotta watch out.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying oh hard left, I'm just saying, just
Speaker 1: watch out. What could you put back in place? What
Speaker 1: could you disabled access to? Could you disabled access to
Speaker 1: your your stats or could you could you separate your
Speaker 1: ad recordings from your days that you do your creative interviews,
Speaker 1: or you know, what are the things can you put
Speaker 1: in place like that? Me personally, yes, I hold onto
Speaker 1: a little triangle in my mind that I called the
Speaker 1: three Essays of success because what happened to me after
Speaker 1: the Book of Austin came out. The first one not
Speaker 1: our Book of Austin, which is, you know, the new one,
Speaker 1: but the Book of Awesome is people kept introducing me
Speaker 1: to their friends who wanted to write books. And whenever
Speaker 1: they introduced me to their friends, the friends would say,
Speaker 1: how do I do what you did? You sold a
Speaker 1: million copies of the Book of Ausom tell me how?
Speaker 1: And I'd say, well, what are your writing? And they'd
Speaker 1: say I'm writing my grandmother's memoirs And say, oh, well,
Speaker 1: can I ask you why? And they're like, well, it's
Speaker 1: just been my life goal to like capture this incredible
Speaker 1: story she had. I was like, okay, what are you
Speaker 1: hope and do with there? Like, I just really want
Speaker 1: to get it done. I just really want to have
Speaker 1: it as a thing for our extended family, as a
Speaker 1: way to pass along her family history. Okay, that's a
Speaker 1: different kind of goal, right, And so I started joining
Speaker 1: this little triangle three s. The first s is sales.
Speaker 1: This is commercial success. This is chasing the capitalism dream. Right,
Speaker 1: you made a million dollars, you sold a million books,
Speaker 1: you did a million whatever, you just got a million
Speaker 1: followers whatever. That's sales, the big number, and there's a
Speaker 1: reason as the front of a lot of people's minds.
Speaker 1: The secondness is social. We are social creatures. We often
Speaker 1: do things for social success social proof points. And there's
Speaker 1: a huge dichotomy between the two. By the way, in
Speaker 1: the book world, as an example, sales success means it
Speaker 1: sold a lot of copies. Social successes. You're in New
Speaker 1: York Times Book reviewed book. Those books don't necessarily sell
Speaker 1: that Betty Right, you win the you're nominated for the
Speaker 1: pen Hemingway Award. Those books don't necessarily sell that many, right,
Speaker 1: But you see, you've got the social proof point. And
Speaker 1: the third st is self. You're doing it because you
Speaker 1: want to, and I know it's in almost any industry.
Speaker 1: If you think of these three things like like an
Speaker 1: old school wobble board at a gym where you can
Speaker 1: kind of balance on two, but you can't get all
Speaker 1: of them. You just can't get all them at once.
Speaker 1: Look at the movie industry. I'll guarantee you whatever's gonna
Speaker 1: win Best Picture this year was a relative box office
Speaker 1: flop to The Fast and the Furious twelve movie that
Speaker 1: came out Fast in The Furious twelve May seven hundred million.
Speaker 1: You know, Moonlight or The hurt Locker, or pick these
Speaker 1: movies that actually win Best Picture. They're thirty million dollar movies.
Speaker 1: They're fifty million dollar movies. They're way smaller. Which would
Speaker 1: you rather have To be clear about those two things
Speaker 1: and the third st itself, you can't have all three
Speaker 1: of them. To pick the one you're going for and
Speaker 1: aim for that, don't try to get them all. I'll
Speaker 1: tell you what, Eric, none of my books have ever
Speaker 1: had a review in the New York Times or be
Speaker 1: nominated Freddie Litterar Enterprises. Ever, I'm saying not once. Right.
Speaker 1: Mark Manson often talks about this because he says, you know, subtle,
Speaker 1: I'm not giving a funk came out, It got zero
Speaker 1: love from the social world of books. Nobody wanted to
Speaker 1: put the effort on TV right or magazines, so they
Speaker 1: won't covering the thing. So yeah, he sold fifty million books.
Speaker 1: But no one ever gave him a prize. You can
Speaker 1: have the opposite way too, Yeah, I think that's really wise.
Speaker 1: And you know, back to that question, I would you
Speaker 1: do this if you didn't have to, if you didn't
Speaker 1: get paid. I think there's an important nuance in there,
Speaker 1: and that nuance is that it doesn't mean that every
Speaker 1: time you do it you want to do it. And
Speaker 1: what I mean by that is there are days that
Speaker 1: I don't want to record a podcast interview. I don't
Speaker 1: feel like doing it for whatever reason, I didn't get
Speaker 1: enough sleep. The nuances you're not always going to feel
Speaker 1: like doing anything all the time, and so that's not
Speaker 1: the measure where after because something I think people can
Speaker 1: get hung up on that and be like, well, if
Speaker 1: I don't want to do it all the time, is
Speaker 1: it really my passion? Well, nobody wants to do anything
Speaker 1: all the time. But broadly speaking, that's it. You know,
Speaker 1: broadly speaking, more times than not, do I really want
Speaker 1: to do this? It's interesting for me. I took a
Speaker 1: month off in June. I've never ever taken anything like
Speaker 1: that amount of time off in my entire life. I
Speaker 1: started working when I was thirteen. I mean, like it
Speaker 1: was unheard of, and boy, when I came back, I
Speaker 1: was like, I am ready to podcast. Like before I left,
Speaker 1: I was a little you know, a little tired, you know,
Speaker 1: a little ground down by it. So sometimes also if
Speaker 1: it's something you love, does a break help restore it?
Speaker 1: Sometimes can be really helpful. Absolutely. You know, there's this
Speaker 1: word I've recently discovered called kuroshi, which is a Japanese
Speaker 1: word that means death by overwork. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you've heard of this, um so you know, in English,
Speaker 1: the highest word we have for working to artists called burnout,
Speaker 1: but that that word burnout doesn't include dying rights. It's
Speaker 1: been burning out. Whereas the late eighties in Japan, they
Speaker 1: had a number of executives and major companies all dropped
Speaker 1: dead at the same time. So the huge cultural issue,
Speaker 1: and so they came up to kurochi, death by overwork.
Speaker 1: And to me, what's interesting is that thirty years of
Speaker 1: research have gone into this in Japan and they've come
Speaker 1: up with shin rin yoku. Shinr yoku with literal translation
Speaker 1: is forest bathing. And I think about this metaphor a lot,
Speaker 1: because forest bathing doesn't mean taking a bath from the
Speaker 1: forest It means actually removing yourself from the clinical surroundings
Speaker 1: you're probably and if you're in an hotel room, if
Speaker 1: you're in a conference hall, if you're in an office building,
Speaker 1: if you're in your a basement, if you're in your basement, studio, whatever,
Speaker 1: like I am right now. You know you've got a
Speaker 1: hard pavement floor around you, You've got fake walls around you,
Speaker 1: you're surrounded by artificial light. You gotta take a rest,
Speaker 1: strategic rest, and insert some shin ring yoku. Yesterday, Eric,
Speaker 1: I got off a plane back home in Toronto from
Speaker 1: Boston at one pm. I knew my kids were coming
Speaker 1: home at four. Yes, I got lots to do. What
Speaker 1: did I do? Three hour walk in the woods? Three
Speaker 1: hour walk in the woods. The pitons, eyes that trees
Speaker 1: release actually lower your cortisol and adrenaline. The birds that
Speaker 1: I was looking at make me happy, make me feel
Speaker 1: part of something bigger than myself, you know. And I
Speaker 1: didn't take my phone. That's my new thing. Even though
Speaker 1: I want to use the e bird app to track
Speaker 1: the birds, I actually just resist and write it down
Speaker 1: on a piece of paper and enter them in the app.
Speaker 1: But I get back. So your month off huh is
Speaker 1: very similar to my kind of strategic rest phenomenon. If
Speaker 1: people want to go deeper into that, I wrote an
Speaker 1: HBO article called why you need one untouchable day per
Speaker 1: week and how to get one, which is just this
Speaker 1: idea of becoming invisible to everybody one for at least
Speaker 1: one day a week so you can kind of figure
Speaker 1: out yourself. I think when I interviewed you last I
Speaker 1: came across this idea. I don't think it's that new
Speaker 1: to you. I may be wrong, but I feel like
Speaker 1: in my mind at that time, I was like, there's
Speaker 1: no way I can do that right, in the same
Speaker 1: way that if you told me I could take a
Speaker 1: month off, I would have been like, are you out
Speaker 1: of your mind? That is impossible. But once I started
Speaker 1: really thinking about it, I was like, well, you know, okay,
Speaker 1: I have to do a lot to line that up.
Speaker 1: But as I was going back through your work again,
Speaker 1: I came across the idea of the one untouchable day
Speaker 1: a weekend. I went, oh, yeah, Like that's a really
Speaker 1: good idea and I can see my way to it.
Speaker 1: But it's funny. This being able to take time started
Speaker 1: with me saying things like all right, I'm going to
Speaker 1: start taking two weekend days off. On the weekends, I'm
Speaker 1: actually not going to work. It may not sound revolutionary
Speaker 1: because I can relate to working all weekend, yeah, but
Speaker 1: to me it was it was a big deal. And
Speaker 1: I would say, you know, it's no big deal, like
Speaker 1: I only take one or two coaching calls on the weekend,
Speaker 1: or you know, I only put an hour or two in.
Speaker 1: But I didn't really get that some extended time of
Speaker 1: break was important. So this all started with me just
Speaker 1: committing to weekends off. And then as I did that,
Speaker 1: I went, oh, that actually helps. That's restorative. It works
Speaker 1: not just for me personally, but for me business wise,
Speaker 1: and so that's kind of grown. So I say all
Speaker 1: that to say, I'm going to be thinking about your
Speaker 1: Untouchable Day and I'm reinspired by it. I always write
Speaker 1: down after I go through somebody's work, kind of my
Speaker 1: key takeaway, and my key takeaway for years I wrote
Speaker 1: was untouchable day. So thank you. Yeah. People always challenge
Speaker 1: me on this, Eric They say, oh, I can't you
Speaker 1: don't know me, you don't know my boss, you don't
Speaker 1: know how many emails I get. And I say, well,
Speaker 1: could you just start with lunch, because I spent ten
Speaker 1: years working in corporate at Walmart, and we tather ourselves
Speaker 1: at lunch. What's wrong? We're leaving your phone at your desk.
Speaker 1: You don't have to take it with you. You You can
Speaker 1: go up for an hour, you can go for a
Speaker 1: nap in the park. Try it for an hour. People
Speaker 1: aren't gonna harass you for one hour at lunch. If
Speaker 1: you can do that, tried two hours, you have taken
Speaker 1: two hours off work. You're taking two hours off being
Speaker 1: connected to everything. What happens is the better thoughts, the
Speaker 1: creative thoughts, the making sure I'm doing the right things
Speaker 1: rather than just doing things right, And they naturally bubble
Speaker 1: to the surface, and so we have of to create
Speaker 1: space for them. Comparative, especially in our culture today, we've
Speaker 1: began the conversation by saying, I feel like we're drowning.
Speaker 1: How many emails do you get on a given day
Speaker 1: that you have no memory of subscribing to? Those all
Speaker 1: take your attention. Thank god I have a filtering system,
Speaker 1: otherwise I would probably hang myself from the rafters. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's so many. What do you use? I use something
Speaker 1: called sane box s A N e b o X
Speaker 1: sane box. Yeah, it does two main things for me.
Speaker 1: It gives me in my inbox what it thinks is
Speaker 1: most important. Then it has something called sane later, which
Speaker 1: it means like, I think this is somewhat important to you,
Speaker 1: but you don't need to get to it anytime soon.
Speaker 1: And then it's got something called sane news, which is
Speaker 1: all the newsletters, all the shopping, all the crap. And
Speaker 1: so I don't even see either of those categories until
Speaker 1: I go looking for them. I gotta get that. I
Speaker 1: still get too much email. But even then with all
Speaker 1: that filter, I still feel like I spend too much
Speaker 1: time on it. But oh it makes a big difference, because, yeah,
Speaker 1: I like you. I'm like every little thing that you
Speaker 1: have to look at to decide whether to get rid
Speaker 1: of or scroll pass for the fourth time. It all
Speaker 1: takes time. Plus, every single technology platform is integrating chat
Speaker 1: and messaging into their services, so most people now have
Speaker 1: like seven to ten different inboxes, including d MS on Instagram,
Speaker 1: DMS on Twitter, d MS on Facebook, text messages inbox,
Speaker 1: one inbox to the inbox you don't tell anybody about that,
Speaker 1: everybody finds out about, etcetera. Etcetera. So you know, then
Speaker 1: you suddenly now we've got another problem, which is we've
Speaker 1: got too many things to check. I know, I know.
Speaker 1: So if you're listening to this and you want to
Speaker 1: contact me, doing it on any social media platform is
Speaker 1: a terrible idea. I will never I just won't see it,
Speaker 1: or I'll see it and I'll forget about it. To
Speaker 1: your point about take an hour away, take two hours away,
Speaker 1: I've shared this before, which is for the four years
Speaker 1: that I started this podcast, I was also working in
Speaker 1: a corporate job, and I wanted as much time to
Speaker 1: do this show as I could. Plus I had two kids.
Speaker 1: I mean, so I got really good at ignoring a
Speaker 1: lot of things that I would have thought you can't ignore,
Speaker 1: and I got good at thinking about, like what's really important.
Speaker 1: And the ironic thing is that as I gave it
Speaker 1: less of my time, I got better at what I did.
Speaker 1: I mean, I kept getting promoted and they wanted to
Speaker 1: hire me, and I was like, part of me is
Speaker 1: feeling bad because I'm like, well, I'm not putting in
Speaker 1: nearly the amount of effort that people around me are,
Speaker 1: but yet I'm still considered highly successful. And I think
Speaker 1: it was just as you said, thinking about what really
Speaker 1: matters here, what's the most important thing, what drives success
Speaker 1: in this role, and given an excessive focus instead of
Speaker 1: getting swept up in all the day to day, moment
Speaker 1: to moment answering every email, feeling like I had to
Speaker 1: be in every conversation, you know. And I'm not saying
Speaker 1: that everybody can do that, but I think the point is,
Speaker 1: and you made the point, is that I think we
Speaker 1: tether ourselves more than necessarily we are being tethered. Again,
Speaker 1: that's not for everybody. There are toxic overwork cultures where
Speaker 1: you you know, you are driven way beyond what's reasonable.
Speaker 1: But my experience was I tethered myself a lot more
Speaker 1: than I needed to. Yeah, I can completely relate to that,
Speaker 1: and I do think that part of the design of
Speaker 1: the technology is to make us feel that way, you know,
Speaker 1: in the happiest equation. I write a story about a
Speaker 1: CEO that I worked for who simply did not use
Speaker 1: email at all, and he had an inbox, he'd see
Speaker 1: the emails, he just wouldn't reply to any and he
Speaker 1: had just mentally reasoned that email was work given him
Speaker 1: by other people, and so he spent his time walking
Speaker 1: around the hallways actually talking to people, and while people
Speaker 1: were always upset that you know, he didn't reply to
Speaker 1: my email, I don't know if you got it, etcetera,
Speaker 1: it freed his time to focus on what actually mattered. Now,
Speaker 1: it's a difficult practice to start, especially if like me,
Speaker 1: you're always trying to please. You want to reply, You
Speaker 1: want to reply with like thank you. You know that's
Speaker 1: the worst thing to reply, right, thank you? Just unnecessary.
Speaker 1: Email Number one is the reply just to just to
Speaker 1: say I got this, I appreciate it. But yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's about baby steps, right. If you can't take an
Speaker 1: a touchable day, take an untouchable hour. If you feel
Speaker 1: like you have too many emails, delete the one access
Speaker 1: point that you use the least first thing I've done,
Speaker 1: and the delete of every single social media app off
Speaker 1: my cell phone, so right away I only can get
Speaker 1: into them off a laptop. I do not save any passwords,
Speaker 1: so I have to enter the password because the two
Speaker 1: factor authentication, I have to go to my email box
Speaker 1: right and then log in to get the code to
Speaker 1: type it in. So just creating these extra pieces of
Speaker 1: friction also helps me do what we're both advocating, still
Speaker 1: hard to do, but systematically designed to prevent me from
Speaker 1: being tempted to compulsively chack. All right, well, we're nearing
Speaker 1: the end of our time. I want to hit just
Speaker 1: a couple of things that you wrote in an essay
Speaker 1: called forty three things I've almost learned as I turn
Speaker 1: forty three. And this one caught my attention because I
Speaker 1: agree with it and I sometimes feel like it's a
Speaker 1: bad rule, but I do live by it, which is
Speaker 1: you're not allowed to leave a bookstore without buying a book. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: just as a quick background, I've never talked about this
Speaker 1: list publicly with anybody. You're this is the very first
Speaker 1: time I've talked about it. But I have just started
Speaker 1: stealing the idea from Kevin Kelly to write a list
Speaker 1: of pieces of advice on your birthday. So just published
Speaker 1: just turn forty three, forty three things I've almost learned
Speaker 1: as a turn forty three. Yeah, one of my life rules,
Speaker 1: Eric is I cannot leave a bookstore without buying a book.
Speaker 1: And part of the reason I do that is because
Speaker 1: if you're in a bookstore, and if you're in downtown Toronto,
Speaker 1: you know, nine out of ten of the books are
Speaker 1: independent bookstores. There's a couple change. I'm surprised you've got
Speaker 1: ten of them. Yeah, we're very very well. The reason
Speaker 1: we have them is because we keep supporting them. I
Speaker 1: just think, you know, this is somebody who's paying rent,
Speaker 1: you know, paying property, texts to the local town, which
Speaker 1: buys the flowers in the park and cleaning up the
Speaker 1: cigarette butts outside of the swings, Like, this is something
Speaker 1: I want to live and work in a society full
Speaker 1: of trust. So I think buying the book at a
Speaker 1: local bookstore should be a life rule for everybody. You
Speaker 1: cannot walk out without buying a book. I agree. I
Speaker 1: always say if I want something to exist, which I
Speaker 1: always want bookstores to exist, I have to support them.
Speaker 1: Like I can't get mad when things go away that
Speaker 1: I didn't support, And so I'm the same way. I'm like,
Speaker 1: the last thing in the world I need is another book.
Speaker 1: I don't know if I'll ever read this book because
Speaker 1: I probably get mailed about five free a year. Two Oh.
Speaker 1: I mean they just show up constantly. You know, I
Speaker 1: am indated with books, but I still it's the same thing.
Speaker 1: I'm like, I want this bookstore to be here because
Speaker 1: I love the ability to walk in and browse books,
Speaker 1: even as my reading patterns have changed dramatically towards e books,
Speaker 1: which I have very mixed feelings about, but I still
Speaker 1: every time I walk into an independent bookstore, yep, I'm like,
Speaker 1: I have to buy a book, yeah, and high level.
Speaker 1: I want to just stay here. And this is something
Speaker 1: that took me a long time, just really just get
Speaker 1: stealed into my brain. You know, Amazon helps you find
Speaker 1: the book that you're looking for. Bookshers help you find
Speaker 1: the books that you aren't. It's the serendipitous and what's
Speaker 1: besides the thing on the shelf that is what you're
Speaker 1: finding and you can't find that online. You just it's
Speaker 1: very very difficult. Monocle magazine and I don't I don't
Speaker 1: know if you know that magazine. They have a wonderful
Speaker 1: list that's published every year, like the twenty most livable
Speaker 1: cities in the world, and one of their key criteria
Speaker 1: is the number of independent books like p rhunder thousand,
Speaker 1: which I think it's just a wonderful metric to weave
Speaker 1: in because what a great sign of cultural health to have,
Speaker 1: you know, independent bookstores. I'll tell you, I was just
Speaker 1: down in the Bronx interviewing Latania and Jerry, who drive
Speaker 1: around in the Bronx something called the Bronx Bound Books Bus.
Speaker 1: It's the only bookstore in the Bronx. Now, the Bronx
Speaker 1: has the same population as Manhattan. Manhattan is eighty bookstores. Wow, okay,
Speaker 1: So it's just like they're giving books to a book
Speaker 1: desert and driving around to different schools every single day
Speaker 1: to bring books. And they say, everyone tells us kids
Speaker 1: don't want to read books anymore. Kids are addicted to
Speaker 1: their phones, kids like games. They say, when we pull
Speaker 1: up in the parking lot, you should see the delight,
Speaker 1: the excitement, the joy of perusing shells full of stories
Speaker 1: and fiction and nonfiction and touching. And they love it.
Speaker 1: And so part of it it's access. Amazon's got the
Speaker 1: bookmarket or something like that in the US. So we
Speaker 1: have to very consciously spend with our time and our attention.
Speaker 1: And if you and I want to go on the
Speaker 1: record and say support your local independent books, so I'm
Speaker 1: very very proud and happy to do so. Also, I
Speaker 1: do think that at some point in my life I'm
Speaker 1: going to be the person running one of those books stars.
Speaker 1: You know, it's a it's it's a life dream of
Speaker 1: mine that has not yet been realized. You see it
Speaker 1: all over the plate. And Patch's running a bookstore in Nashville,
Speaker 1: Judy Blue's running a book during Key West, Florida. Ryan
Speaker 1: Holidays running a book in Bastrop, Texas. You know, maybe
Speaker 1: that's the path for the author eventually to go down,
Speaker 1: is you just eventually fall into the world of books
Speaker 1: and just live there. That sounds pretty good to me. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it does. And then the last thing that will hit
Speaker 1: from your forty three things as we turn forty three
Speaker 1: is easiest way to love a park. Pick up one
Speaker 1: piece of trash every visit. Yeah, you know, we lived
Speaker 1: near park and just every time I leave, I just
Speaker 1: say to my kids, so relieving, just meant it's a
Speaker 1: mental check. I gotta I gotta fly one piece of
Speaker 1: garbage and put it in, and I just you know,
Speaker 1: if they start to mimic that behavior of other people,
Speaker 1: start to do it, the park is just always clean,
Speaker 1: and I've always dirty. Yeah, you know. The way this
Speaker 1: came about, by the way, Eric was I did a
Speaker 1: study at Walmart trying to compare why two stores across
Speaker 1: the country to be the same square footage d square feet,
Speaker 1: same labor dollars, you know, the same number of people
Speaker 1: that could feasibly work in the stores. One of them
Speaker 1: would be looking like trash and the other one would
Speaker 1: be totally clean and spick and span. So I did
Speaker 1: a study at Walmart trying to compare the two stores,
Speaker 1: not just two specific stores, but like the idea of
Speaker 1: the two stores. And I'll tell you it came down
Speaker 1: to whether or not the store manager themselves picked up
Speaker 1: garbage on their way walking around the store. If that
Speaker 1: one person did, everyone mimicked and copied the behavior. So fascinating,
Speaker 1: that's it. It was just that if the stormager picked
Speaker 1: up a piece of garbage in the parking lot, the
Speaker 1: parking lot was clean. When you're in a position of leadership,
Speaker 1: what you do is mimicked and copied and followed. So
Speaker 1: I'm a leader for at least a few little kids,
Speaker 1: so I'm gonna pick up trash. Open that they do
Speaker 1: it too, so far as always by the way, you know,
Speaker 1: they're like that, what are you doing. I'm like, just
Speaker 1: just trust me on this. You to pick up a
Speaker 1: piece of garbage every time? Well, and also things you
Speaker 1: invest in, you care about, and picking up a piece
Speaker 1: of garbage is a very small investment, but it makes
Speaker 1: you care about that place more so. Well, Neil, thank
Speaker 1: you so much for coming on. As always, I love
Speaker 1: talking with you. We'll have links in the show notes
Speaker 1: to where people can get your latest book, to your blog,
Speaker 1: to a couple of things we talked about. I always
Speaker 1: enjoy it. Thank you so much for having me, Eric,
Speaker 1: and thank you for the gift of this wonderful podcast.
Speaker 1: It's a true delight. I really enjoy it listening. You
Speaker 1: have wonderful guests, you have thoughtful conversations. It's real, real
Speaker 1: gem in the world. Thank you, Thank you. If what
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