Chapter: 153: Carl Honoré imparts illuminating insights into intentional idleness

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
This slow revolution is about doing things at the right speed.
I just love words, I love how they move around in the world, how they shape how we feel, how they change things, how they sound, how they look on the page.
I'm trying to save myself through my writing and try to help others live better lives and help the world be a better place.
We can't really know ever anything.

(00:23):
We need that headspace, right?
We need that bandwidth.
We need quiet in order to go deep.
Whole libraries are going to end up being written about our tortured relationship with phones.

(00:46):
Hey everybody, this is Neil Pasricha and welcome or welcome back to chapter 153, 53, 53 of three books.
You are listening to the only podcast in the world buying for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians.
We are counting down the thousand most formative books in the world, 333 straight, full moon from 2018 all the way up to 2040.

(01:12):
We have an incredible show for you today, chapter 153 with Carl Honoré, wise man, kind soul.
You're going to love Carl.
He wrote the book In Praise of Slowness, which has been a bestseller for like two decades and really changed my life.
I love this book.
I can't wait to share a conversation with Carl with all of you.
And if you want to skip ahead, go ahead, skip ahead right to the chat.

(01:33):
But we got no ads, no sponsors, no interruptions on the show.
So we always like to have a little hangout at the beginning, a little hangout at the end.
So if you want to hang out, first off, thank you.
Thank you, three bookers.
Thank you for your energy, for your love, for your letters.
I like to start off the show always with a letter.
Before I get to that, you know what I thought I would do just before the letter this time?

(01:56):
Is I would give you all an update on some of our past guests, because a lot of our past guests have been up to like really cool stuff, like Jen Agg, our guest in chapter 35.
Did you know her restaurant in Toronto, General Public, was named the number one new restaurant in the whole city in Toronto Life Magazine?
So if you are living in Toronto, if you're visiting Toronto, Jen Agg, our guest in chapter 35, she's the number one restaurant in town.

(02:20):
Or did you know that our guest in chapter 52, Mr. Wagner Moura, who played Pablo Escobar in Narcos, has been in a number of amazing movies, including Civil War last year.
He's in a new movie coming out this fall, probably a big Oscar contender.
It's called The Secret Agent.
He won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival, and Leslie and I were lucky enough to be his guest at the North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival recently.

(02:47):
I can tell you this movie is wonderful.
Go see it if you can.
It's like a 1977 historical political drama, a real story about a schoolteacher that's caught in the middle of a dictatorship and stressful situations and civilization.
We can kind of all relate or at least picture that type of scenario.
Wagner, as always, delivers a great performance.

(03:08):
He's a real beautiful guy, really, in every way, in every spirit.
We've managed to keep in touch and connected over the years, and he's just a truly big-hearted soul, like I guess a lot of actors who put that on the screen for all of us.
And lastly, I wanted to let you know that our guest in Chapter 127,
Lenore Skenazy, just dropped an incredible TED Talk

(03:31):
on the main stage at TED over in Vancouver
with a provocative title from TED 2025 called
Why You Should Spend Less Time With Your Kids,
whether micromanaging playtime, hovering over incessant texting,
the adult takeover of childhood has created a crisis of anxiety
in both kids and parents.
You know, what I've noticed is that Lenore's work has gained newfound popularity with the kind of growth and popularity of The Anxious Generation, which was written, of course, by Jonathan Haidt, our guest, H-A-I-D-T, in Chapter 103.

(04:04):
The Anxious Generation has now been a New York Times bestseller for something like 75 straight weeks.
He calls for a number of manifesto-like asks, raising the age of social media, banning phones in schools, and, of course, increasing free play.
So grab this TED Talk.
We'll put it in our show notes.
I've emailed it to all our kids' public school teachers because I'm like, can we have more free play in schools?

(04:25):
And actually, amazingly, my second grade kid, grade two if you're Canadian, his teacher's added her own recess.
She's added another recess to the day.
They get two re-sci, re-sci, recesses.
Re-sci sounds weird.
We're not gonna go with that.
But I like weird.
It's weird not to be weird said John Lennon.
So she's added a third recess to the day.

(04:46):
My kids love it.
Well, one kid loves it.
The other kids are jealous.
And it's free play, free play.
That's what we need more of as we talk to Jenny Yurich about recently.
All right, now it's time for the letter of the podcast.
And this chapter's letter comes from Alex P.

(05:09):
Alex writes, Hi, Neil.
As a cover to cover club member and being a little behind on the chapters, I've recently listened to your bookmark on birding.
That was recorded out in Alberta.
I'm coming to enjoy these, so hope they're here to stay.
Not only do we get to hear you on the other side of the mic, so to speak, but it's a chance to join you in a different part of your life.
This episode was special to me for more than one reason.
The Shinrin Yoku discussion on forest bathing.

(05:32):
I read that book, which is called Forest Bathing by Qing Li, after it was talked about in your podcast, and now I am enamored.
There's a reason I'm drawn to trail running and mountain biking and just being engulfed in nature.
I'm grateful and grew up every summer at a cottage without screens in the mid to late 90s.
Bikes, swimming, cassettes, and reading were my days at McKenzie Lake near Bancroft.

(05:56):
Number two, you spoke briefly about Sunset Heights.
I had to check it out because I am from Oshawa, nestled just west of Simcoe Street near Somerville.
I knew it sounded familiar.
I had been teaching dollars for cents with junior achievement a few years back.
I have fond memories of doing that for a couple of years.
Wanted to drop you a line.
I have actively removed all social media apps from my phone.
I'm trying to stay off my phone and games and TV at night, and I'm spending more time being active or reading.

(06:21):
And the current books I'm reading are Irresistible, the Rise of Addicted Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter.
I also read and love that book, that's me.
The Happy Camper by Kevin Callan or Callan, C-A-L-L-A-N, don't know that one.
And I recently finished the book Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer.
Happy birding, I have the windows open and there are a ton of birds in the ravine behind my house.

(06:42):
A beautiful soundtrack for a Friday afternoon from Alex P.
Thank you so much, Alex P, for your letter.
Three bookers, I love you.
I love your energy.
I love you, I need you.
You know, like the community that we create in the podcast is special.
We have three clubs for our three bookers.
One is the End of the Podcast Club.
You can just stick around to the end of the show and we, you know, play your voicemails, nerd out over like an interesting word etymology and stuff like that.

(07:09):
I also have the Cover to Cover Club, which Alex is a member of.
People striving to listen to every single chapter of the show.
There will be 333 chapters, so we're 153 in.
And there is also the Secret Club.
The way to find out more about the Secret Club is by calling our phone number, which is 1-833-READALOT, R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T.

(07:30):
Please do call me.
Leave me a formative book.
Leave me a feedback, suggestion, comment, or just say hi or hello.
We play a voicemail at the end of every show.
If I play your voicemail or if I read your letter, I send you a free book.
I will grab a book from my bookshelf, I will sign it, and I will mail it to you as a way to say thanks for your love and your connection.
This keeps me going, honestly.

(07:50):
Like, I get stressed.
I get stressed, I get overwhelmed.
I think about AI.
I read an article, a long piece article about how China and the U.S. need to come to terms on AI agreements, and I start stressing about that and thinking about what could happen about that.
And of course, I'm traveling a lot.
By the time you listen to this, I will have been in Bucharest, Amsterdam, Nairobi, and Mombasa just in the last few weeks.

(08:19):
Sometimes traveling itself creates its own stress,
and so listening to these conversations,
hearing your phone calls, reading your letters,
it really fills me up, and it makes me feel like
I'm tethered to a community of people
who has consciously and intentionally unsubscribed
from the pace, the fast-paced, screen-addled,

(08:39):
overwhelming, addictive, algorithmically-derived
type of civilization we're living in
and chosen instead to live largely offline
through our ears, through conversations
with groups of friends, with books,
with reading lights, with camps,
with tents in our backyards,
with birds out of our window.
That is the kind of life I want to live.

(09:01):
And there is maybe no better person to talk to about that kind of life than Carl Honoré.
His last name is H-O-N-O-R-E, French background, but born in Edmonton, Alberta, and now lives over in England.
He is an incredibly world-renowned journalist.
He's worked for The Economist.

(09:22):
He's worked for Time.
He's written for, of course, the National Post over in Canada, but he's written for a whole bunch of publications all around the world.
And he wrote his first book in 2004.
It's called 'In Praise of Slowness.'
You know, it's against the cult of speed.
It's this deeply well-researched book with incredible history about humans have come to sort of be ruled by the clock.

(09:44):
There's an incredible chapter at the beginning, like going through our species history like 2,000 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 500 years ago, how we kind of came to be ruled by the clock, by the dictum of time, and how there has always been resistance amongst human communities against that.
One of those resistors is, of course, this show.
We don't release the podcast on the Gregorian calendar.

(10:07):
We release it on the full moon calendar because it's a hint at a 35,000-year-old clock rather than a 500-year-old clock, and it's something that connects us with the natural world.
I like looking up, seeing the moon getting full, and thinking, oh, yeah, it's time to have a conversation as opposed to I got to look at my clock and kind of speed around.
Like me, Carl is a guy who talks really fast.

(10:28):
He's given a couple of TED Talks.
He's written a number of bestselling books afterwards, but including 'Under Pressure', which I'm holding up here, which is all about kind of putting the child back in childhood, good overlap with Lenore, and 'Bolder', which is kind of like a manifesto against ageism.
It's a really fascinating book.
He wrote that when he realized he was like the oldest guy in his hockey league.
I love his work.

(10:49):
I think that we all need to read 'In Praise of Slowness.'
If you haven't, I really highly recommend it.
It's one of my, I've read it probably three times now.
I have at least three pages of notes on the inside covers.
I'm not holding it right now, which I want to be because I've lent it out to somebody, I think my mother-in-law or my mother, and they haven't given it back, so I can't hold it right now, but it is well used, as David Mitchell said in chapter 58, if I was a book, I'd want to be used.

(11:15):
Tune in now, and we are going to talk about, oh, tips for making great risotto, because Carl is, of course, also a chef manqué and a polyglot, and if you don't know what those words mean, like I didn't, stay tuned, we're going to explain them.
We should talk about why you should read Orwell, George Orwell to your kids, even when they're in their 20s, how social media has changed traveling over the last few decades, the benefits of learning new languages, how we can work more elements of the slow movement into our lives.

(11:42):
Carl's 3 most formative books, one of which, by the way, overlaps with the aforementioned Wagner Mura, interestingly, and, of course, much, much more.
Thank you for being here.
Thank you for continuing to focus on reading, on books in the middle of this busy, busy world.
It's a pleasure and a joy to be here with you.
Let's flip the page into chapter 153, now.

(12:15):
Hi, Carl.
Hi, Neil, good to be with you.
Good to be with you, too, and you know, you are the father of the slow movement, and it makes a lot of sense that we took five years to book this.
Like, I looked up my first email to you, It was in 2020.

(12:35):
Really?
Yeah, 2020, where we first, but you know, 2020 was one of those years.
So, you know, like everything kind of went haywire, including the planning of this conversation.
But we ended up taking five years to book this chat.
So I'm delighted as I've gotten to know you through 'In Praise of Slowness', which I have cherished.
I have notes and notes and notes in there.

(12:55):
And I love your more recent books, 'Bolder' on aging and under pressure on putting the child back into childhood.
I'm a huge fan of your work.
So thank you so much for coming on the show and being up for this.
I appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
I love the fact that this is perhaps the slowest booking I've ever experienced.
Yeah, ditto.
And because you were so kind and I knew you were the father of the slow movement.

(13:17):
So when I came back to you, like at six months and like kind of June, 2020, after the world had quote unquote ended, you know, I said, do you mind if we kind of revisit this?
And you're like, I'm the last person in the world you ever need to kind of rush with.
Yeah.

Walking the talk, right?
Yeah.
Like you could never, if you were, if you sent me like a Calendly link with like all these little half an hour increments, I'd be like, this is, is this the slow guy?

(13:45):
So it was very on brand.
And we even talked about your three formative books back then.
So I was able to contrast the three formative books you picked in 2025 with the three formative books you actually picked in 2020.
Oh.
Of which there was some overlap, but not entire overlap.
Oh, gosh, that's an interesting intellectual exercise.
I would have assumed they were the same, but.
Yes, of course.

(14:06):
Pray tell.
Well, I'll just tell you like, for example, in 2020, you told me that one of your formative books was Tintin.
Cigars of the Pharaoh by Hergé, I believe.
H-E-R-G-E.
And I'm assuming that shaped you as a kid, but we didn't talk about it in 2025.
Well, we so easily could talk about it.
I'm actually sitting in a room with a poster on my right of the front cover of, yeah, it's in French, but it's the poster of the Cigars of the Pharaoh.

(14:36):
Oh, no way.
Okay, because you are a polyglot as you identify yourself on your, because I looked at your Instagram profile and I love all your ways you identify yourself.
You are voice of the slow movement, right?
That just, yeah, that's just happened.
Maybe for our listeners, you could just say how you define the slow movement.
Sure, I usually kick off by defining what the slow movement is not, because I think in this fast forward culture, people hear the word slow and they think, well, that's very, very slow.

(15:05):
Everything must be in slow motion, but that's really not what this is about.
I'm not an extremist or a fundamentalist of slowness.
I love speed, right?
Faster is often better, but the slow revolution is about doing things at the right speed.
So musicians have a beautiful term.
They talk about the tempo justo, right?
The correct tempo for each piece of music, and that kind of gets at what slow is about.
It's understanding that sometimes there are moments to go fast, right?

(15:28):
You get into hair mode or roadrunner mode, but other times you've got to slow things down and connect with your inner tortoise.
So it's about finding that balance at fast and slow and playing with all different speeds and tempos in between.
In a world that is trying to speed us up.
The world that's having a lot of success in pushing us to do everything faster and faster.

(15:49):
And of course, with the emergence of AI recently, that whole drive to accelerate everything has ratcheted up even more.
The pressure is on and the temptation is there to speed every single thing up that we do now, which is not, I would argue, a good thing.
No, no, exactly.
And we're going to get into this in a lot of depth.
Your 2004 massive global bestseller, I think something like 36 languages 'In Praise of Slowness' with the subtitle, challenging the cult of speed is a true formative classic.

(16:22):
I recommend this book highly to everybody listening.
You must read it.
And everything about it, because I reread it now, five years later, after pitching you the first time, it completely holds up, everything in it.
I mean, some of the organizations, I was going to ask you, I can't find them online anymore.
Like the Society for the Deceleration of Time, where'd they go?
I couldn't find them.

(16:43):
But there's a lot in there that I'm like, yes, yes, yes.
You're quoting Bertrand Russell.
You're quoting you know, there's a lot in there.
I'm like, it's a magical piece.
So that's the first identifier for you.
But then you also say you're a sportsman with a hockey emoji.
Oh, yeah.
So you're a huge hockey player.
And I know, of course, the opening chapter of 'Bolder', you know, your amazing book on aging opens with you realizing that you're the oldest player in the entire hockey league that you play in.

(17:11):
Yeah, it was a bit of a, it was a bit of a jolt, a bit of a shock to the system.
I knew I was one of the oldest, right?
I'm not deluded, but to be the oldest really rocked me to my core.
Yeah, no, I'm a, I love sports.
I mean, I'm like you, I'm a Canadian.
You're from Edmonton, right?
Western Canada, Edmonton, Alberta.
And so hockey was just a part of everything, right?

(17:33):
And it's, now as I've lived now, I live in London, England now.
That's where I'm speaking to from now on, my home in the old country.
You know, hockey for me is still the connection, not only to my childhood, but to my Canadian roots.
So it's something I play, I played last night, right?
I play, I still play all the time, right?
A couple of times a week, I played tournaments on the weekend.

(17:54):
I'm still very much an avid hockey player.
And how old are you now?
I am now 57.
57, because of course, one of your big points from your book, 'Bolder', but also from your TED Talk on ageism is that everybody should be open about their age.
I love that.
And I ask people their age, and I always tell people my age, and I don't think it's a thing, you know, 45.

(18:14):
I'm 45.
Once in a while, I bump into someone and they're like, oh, please, you know, you should never ask.
But yeah, I'm interested.
I think it's an interesting data point.
And you have that great line in your TED Talk, like, I have a friend that just turned 39 for the fourth year in a row, right?
Next quote on your bio is Chef Manque, M-A-N-Q-U-E.

(18:37):
Yeah, well, I come from a real food gastronomic family, right?
We talked about two things sitting around the table growing up at home.
One was language.
Both my parents are great linguists and experts in Latin and Greek, so we were always talking about words.
And the second thing was food.
Always loved food, the way you make it, the way you share it, the way you consume it, and so on.

(18:59):
So that was always something very high on my agenda.
And I guess in a parallel universe somewhere, I am running a little restaurant on the coast in Puglia, you know, in Southern Italy, right?
Going down to talk to the fishermen in the morning and taking the fresh catch up to whip up an unusual and quirky plate of deliciousness for the lunch menu sort of thing.

(19:20):
So that's always kind of there in the back of my mind.
And even now, you know, though I don't work as a chef, I mean, I cook every day.
For me, cooking is yoga, right?
It's my moment of just disconnecting from everything, doing all that kind of being present and in the moment.
It's tactile, it's sensory.
I'm alive to the moment, and it's just a joy.
It's my little moment of joy every day is to cook.

(19:43):
And I love, it's my language of love, too.
It's how I think I show love most to people is by cooking for them, making something nice to eat, and then breaking bread around the table together.
That's very much a part of who I am.
Very beautiful.
Of course, you have a lot on food in 'In Praise of Slowness.'
But manque, M-A-N-Q-U-E, sorry to ask, what does that word mean?

(20:03):
It's like manque, to miss out, the French verb to manque, miss.
So if usually in English, if you take the past participle, right, manque, something manque is somebody who kind of could have been this, but, you know, could have been a contender, right?
Could have done the thing, right?
You just missed being a chef type thing.
Yeah, or could have.
Although, of course, in harmony with my more recent work on reimagining later life and seizing the later years with both hands, I haven't necessarily missed, you know, maybe I've just put off becoming a chef and that my next chapter will involve that little seaside eatery in Puglia.

(20:38):
You got 57 years to go potentially, or more based on how quickly longevity is skyrocketing.
We're gonna talk about that.
And so interesting, your parents speak Latin and Greek.
Chef Manque, what is your family favorite meal?
Like if you were making a meal that you loved, your partner loved, and your, I believe two kids loved, what is that for you right now?

(21:01):
That's a funny question.
In some ways, that's the hardest question to ask someone like me because I just love so many different things.
But in some ways, it's the easiest question because the answer is risotto, right?
Because it's the first dish that I learned to make.
I learned to make it partly through my mom, who's a great cook as well, like my father, but also from an Italian friend who I got to know when I was living abroad.

(21:22):
And she sort of shared a couple of tricks.
So for me, it's all caught up with Proustian memories of connection, of being with the people who matter to you most, of feeling your way through a recipe, of tasting.
And then of course, slow, risotto is the dish, slow dish par excellence, right?
You can't rush a risotto.

(21:43):
The whole point of it is that you stir slowly and gently and you allow it to infuse and to evolve and to find its place in the world.
And rushing risotto never ends well.
So yeah, I would choose some kind of risotto.
And my most recent favorite on that front is using Namako mushrooms, particularly.

(22:03):
Namako?
Which I put there on the side and then add on top of a kind of basic mushroom risotto.
And it's, oh, it's ambrosia.
Yeah, my mouth is watering just telling you about it.
Mine too.
And I started making risotto years ago off of the Chez Piggy Cookbook, which is a famous restaurant based in Kingston, Ontario.
It was one of very, very few things that my wife and I had trouble splitting up in our divorce in 2008.

(22:31):
We were like, okay, clearly that's your car and clearly that's your stereo.
And we'd been married just two years, you know, we've been together for four.
But the Chez Piggy Cookbook, you know, that was a special one.
That was your Kramer versus Kramer moment.
That was our Kramer versus Kramer moment.
No, I obviously gave her the cookbook and thought to myself, I'll get another one of these.

(22:51):
And I never did.
But you said, I learned a couple of tricks about risotto.
What are the couple tricks?
Well, the one I remember most was my Italian friend saying that when you, that moment when you add the wine into the kind of the sautéed onions and so on in the rice, before you start adding the stock, you add a bit of wine.
And she said, you need to let it absorb, like absorb more than you think, almost to the point of burning.

(23:15):
And I remember the phrase she used, you've got to hear it crying out for more liquid, right?
And I just remember that every time I pour a little bit of wine and wait for that moment to start adding the stock, I remember my friend Louisa.
And I remember her saying that.
That's great.
So we've already learned a risotto cooking tip, which you've got to hear it crying out for more liquid post wine, when you pour that into the arborio and onions and so on.

(23:42):
The last word on your kind of Instagram bio, and I like that you've got these quick things, you know, your voice of the slow movement, you are an age disruptor, you are a sportsman, you're an author in 36 languages, you're a chef manqué.
And then the last word is, the emoji is a picture of the globe and the word is polyglot.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's very much a part of who I am.

(24:02):
I mean, I mentioned earlier.
Which I didn't even, sorry, I'd say I didn't know what it even meant.
Oh, you didn't know what a polyglot was?
Oh, right.
Well, for anyone in the audience who doesn't know, I guess we should say it's someone who speaks several languages.
Poly meaning multi, multiple, and glot?
I'm going to guess that's from Greek rather than Latin.
Yeah.
Okay.
You know, the glottal stop, I think that's to do with tongue, right?

(24:24):
I'm guessing it's Greek.
See, I leapfrogged Latin and Greek and went straight to the Romance languages.
My parents, earlier generation, burrowed deep into the foundations, you know, the Latin and the Greek.
Then they moved on to learning, you know, Latin, French, Italian, all that kind of stuff.
I went straight to the low-hanging fruit, as it were.

(24:45):
But yeah, so yeah, so I guess if you're asking what polyglot means to me, it means joy.
I just love words.
I love them, how they move around in the world, how they shape, how we feel, how they change things, how they sound, how they look on the page.
And the more words you have, right, across different languages, the more kaleidoscopically happy your life is, from my point of view.

(25:06):
I just find that you can, I just love languages, right?
It's something I've picked them up easily.
It's something that I've got a natural, you know, ability to do.
I mean, I taught myself both Portuguese and Spanish, and I never went to a class of either.
And I stand up on stages and give talks in front of thousands of people with no notes in both those languages, right?

(25:27):
So it's something that, it's there, right?
It's something in the veins, and I can see it in my parents.
And it's a big part of the work I do, because I mean, I may at some point talk about the fact that I was a foreign correspondent, right, for 11 years.
So I've always had a very global view of what's going on.
And I've always had an interest in having a finger in different pies, a foot in different terrains.

(25:52):
So I'm, you know, Canadian, I live in London, I was based in South America a long time, and so on.
And I just feel like languages is the perfect passport, isn't it?
There's something, and it's weird.
The world has changed.
I see it with my son now.
You know, so many people everywhere speak English.
They didn't do that 30 years ago when I was learning languages, right?

(26:12):
So I could tip up in a remote village in Brazil, or even Buenos Aires in Argentina, and people wouldn't speak back to me in English, right?
They would just have to wait for me to get my Spanish out or my Portuguese out, because that's the only language we had in common.
Now everybody, thanks to social media and globalization, speaks English or wants to speak it.

(26:33):
So I remember when my son went off to do a French exchange in Strasbourg.
He found it so hard to get anyone to speak French to him, because they all spoke fluent English already, right?
And they wanted to practice their English even more.
So it's harder now, I think, to do what I did, which is to be a kind of autodidact with languages and just go out there, and you can still do it.

(26:53):
I'm not saying you can't, but it is harder just because English has won the race, right?
It's the global lingua franca, and that's a double-edged sword in some ways for anglophones like us.
It's a gift.
It's a gimme, but on the other side, I think it takes away the room and the space for learning other languages, which is an immensely enriching experience, right?

(27:16):
It changes, it rotates the world.
You see things differently.
I'm a slightly different person in each language I speak, and that just pushes you into different corners of your character.
It allows you to see the world through different lenses.
It just brings so many more layers and so much more texture and so much more color to the way you move through the world.
And I think languages, it's just a kind of poetry that we have at our fingertips.

(27:38):
And I think it's a tough one when I see English speakers just leaning on English.
I feel like you're missing out, but I think that's kind of why it's fun.
Of course you are, because you can't articulate what you don't know.
And every language is just one tiny little shard of the vastness of communication.
And we have a collection of books upstairs, Leslie and I, that are all about, Leslie's my wife, I've been married to her 11 years.

(28:03):
Leslie and I have a collection of books that are all about this word in Finnish, or Swahili means this in English, and it's, of course, something you've never thought of before.
Yes, that's true.
Like when she sees someone trip on the sidewalk, my wife always says pole.
She says pole because her sister spent six years in East Africa and learned and mastered Swahili, and pole means I'm sorry for you.

(28:24):
And it's a very simple, and that's a rough English definition of it, but like pole, we don't have that word in English.
We don't have, I'm sorry for you.
When someone trips, falls, like has a coughing attack, we're just like, whoa, that's a big coughing attack you just had.
But we don't have pole as an example, as one of infinite examples.

(28:46):
So one that reminds me of one that I love, I mean, Japanese is great for this as well, right?
You know, it's got words that just explain whole phenomena, social phenomena that we don't have, or we need a sentence to, and there's one that I love, which is it describes that sensation, that feeling you have when you come out of a hairdresser looking worse than you did when you went in.

(29:07):
I get it.
There's a Japanese word for that?
I often have recourse to the, I can't remember what the word is at the moment off the top of my head.
But what a very specific example.
What a world to live in, right?
Where there's a language that has a word that just says, that encapsulates that feeling that we've all felt at some point, right?
And it also just makes me think of people like David Foster Wallace and these sort of master linguists that use words, you know, every, if you're reading somebody where every page you don't know a word, I used to, I remember an old librarian said to me, you're reading the right book because you're learning a lot of new words.

(29:42):
And I remember like, you know, stumbling across the word in a book and it was petrichor, P-E-T-R-I-C-H-O-R.
I was like, what's petrichor?
I look it up in the dictionary.
Petrichor is this, and I had actually ironically written about this on 1000awesomethings.com.
It is the smell of rain on a hot sidewalk.
Oh, isn't that beautiful?
That is petrichor.

(30:03):
That is the actual definition of it.
So, in case you smell rain on a hot sidewalk, it's petrichor, P-E-T-R-I-C-H-O-R.
I had to learn and master that one.
And I like that you are a big word nerd because so are we on Three Books.
At the end of every show, we have the end of the podcast club.
I play people's voice, emails, letters, and we always close off by defining the etymological history of a word that my guests use that I didn't understand while I was talking to them.

(30:32):
So, that is how we close every show.
We've done that for 150 chapters or so.
So, that's a great little scenescape because now we know a little bit more about Carl.
We know he's Canadian.
We know he's living in England.
We know he was a foreign press journalist.
We know he's 57.
We know he has a couple of kids.
We know he plays hockey still, and he's probably gonna play for decades more.
His books have been translated into 36 languages.

(30:53):
He's given two very viral TED Talks.
He is a polyglot.
He's a chef manqué.
That is a wonderful, I love getting to know you this way because you've trimmed it into like five words on your Instagram bio, and you let us expand them into like 10 minutes of getting to know you.
Thank you for that.
That was fun to do, actually.
Yeah, it's been a long time.
You know, you go to your profiles on social media, and you just glaze over them.

(31:18):
You don't think about what, but then you realize that other people are reading them, and they're trying to unpack them and make sense.
So, yeah, it's interesting.
I guess it was quite a while ago that I put together that very concise, succinct list.
But yeah, there's all kinds of stories behind every line.
Yeah, it's fun to revisit that.
Absolutely.
And we are big believers in the slow movement here because this is a slow podcast.

(31:40):
I mean, if you're listening to this, you know, we're 15, 20 minutes in now.
We're talking to Carl.
We haven't even broached his three most formative books, which we're gonna get into now.
For each book, I'm gonna describe them as if the listener is holding the book in a bookstore, and then I'm gonna ask you to tell us about your relationship with each one.
So we are gonna start and kick us off with a book called Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, a book that I have in front of me, and I, oh, there it is.

(32:09):
I have the Mass Market Paperback Edition.
Is that the one you have as well?
That's the one that looks very similar to mine, yeah.
Okay, it's based on the play that debuted in 1955.
Of course, the book is a play, so it's one of those books that you just open it, and you, well, what happened in 1925?
Well, it's based on the play, who was a Tennessee teacher, was tried for teaching evolution.

(32:30):
The accused was a slight frightened man who deliberately broken the law.
His trial was a Roman circus, the chief gladiators being the two great legal giants of the century.
Locked in mortal combat, they bellowed and roared imprecations and abuse, while the spectator sat uneasily in the sweltering heat with murder in their hearts, barely restraining themselves with America's freedom at stake.

(32:50):
Okay, the cover of this book is this really interesting, like, you know, if sepia is like red-toned black and white, this book cover is blue-toned black and white, with a picture of a jury box.
Most figures are seated in the box, appear to be white men in suits, and a guy leans on the edge of the jury box in that classic legal thriller pose of a lawyer speaking to the jury.

(33:10):
Very top has a red bar that says in white font, the powerful courtroom drama in which two men wage the legal war of the century, and below that is the title in a giant all-cap serif font, Inherit the Wind.
Jerome Lawrence was an American playwright from 1915 to 2004, and Robert Edwin Lee, another American playwright who lived from 1918 to 1994.

(33:32):
Dewey Decimal Heads, you can file this one under 812.54 for literature slash 20th century American drama in English.
Carl, please tell us about your relationship with Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee.
Well, this is a book that I read in my middle teens.
I think I was probably about 16 years old, and it was at that, I'd say, unnerving time when you're coming out of childhood and beginning to think about where you're gonna stand in the world.

(34:00):
How are you gonna make a mark?
What matters to you?
All those big questions.
And I think it's at that time, I think most of us throw our minds back, that we also begin to grapple with big questions with a capital B, right?
Sort of epic questions about right and wrong, truth and lies.
Well, in this case, evolution versus creationism and so on.

(34:22):
And so you think back to those long nights in college dorms, right?
Where you set the worlds to rights, and that tends to be something that you start doing around the age of 16, and maybe most of us stop around the age of 21 or 22, right?
Some of us carry on, but it's that kind of particular, particularly fertile and fervent moment in the evolution of a human being, I think, that kind of late teens into early 20s.

(34:46):
And this book landed on me in that point when I was grappling myself with how to turn my own love of language, because I knew I had that love of language already.
I could already feel that I had a strong yen to save the world.
And I still think of myself now, all the work I'm doing has a save the world syndrome or complex aspect to it, right?

(35:12):
I'm trying to save myself through my writing and try to help others live better lives and help the world be a better place.
So I had that impulse.
I could feel it in my veins back at age of 16.
And my first thought, I mean, the thought of being a journalist at that point, I thought I will do this through the law.
I will go into courtrooms, a bit like the person you've described, like a Perry Mason figure, and I will make the world bend in a better direction with words, right?

(35:44):
With the force of my arguments and so on.
And so I was fascinated by the idea of this clash
of both not just ideas,
but also characters behind it,
the language they use,
because it's one of the beautiful things,
I reread the play in preparation for our conversation
was just how smooth and clean the prose was
and how, I don't know,

(36:05):
it was just, I actually felt,
reading it again now as a 57-year-old,
40 years later, I thought,
God, maybe I should put lawyer monkey on my side.
You know, I thought maybe I could have done that and it could have been, because now I've spent 40 years now trying to change the world by writing about it.
You could argue that I've had an impact and that my works left an imprint, but maybe I could have done it, or maybe in the future.

(36:30):
So I guess it was a book that really, I remember racing through it at 60.
I read it in one sitting.
How did the book come to you?
You know, I was trying to remember that.
I think that my mother suggested it, recommended it to me.
I don't know why she would.
I mean, my mom's an avid reader and a wide reader and pushed a lot of books towards me at different stages of my adolescence.

(36:55):
And so I'm guessing it came through her.
So yeah, that would just be a guess.
Well, it's an amazing book and I highly recommend it to people.
It's a wonderful read.
And, you know, Wagner Mura, who is an incredible filmmaker and now new director, also picked it for three books.

(37:16):
So it inspires, you know, many people.
It's gonna get the, what we call the asterisk treatment on our show.
We're gonna mark it as two people have picked it.
And I remember reading The Fountainhead, you know, around age 16, and having like a sharp hit to the brain, because at that age, as you said, you know, you're primed for, you're primed and ready and thirsty for conversations about morals and justice and how to live.

(37:41):
And your mom and dad, sounds like they were both polyglots, if I'm using the word right.
Lots of languages, lots of books.
I know you are the same.
And I know you've raised two readers as kids, I believe.
Yes.
Both very avid readers, yeah.
And you're a big proponent of discussing how to raise kids well and better now.

(38:05):
So what, do you think about, did you think about, as your kids are passing through these formative years, what and how to insert into their reading life?
Yeah.
I mean, reading was a central part of parenting family life for us.
I mean, it started off not quite right, because of course the whole spark for my moving into thinking about slowing down was when I caught myself speed reading Snow White to my son, right?

(38:31):
You know, that was when I, you know, my version was so fast, it only had three dwarves.
It was not a good look.
And I realized then when I caught myself flirting with buying a book called The One Minute Bedtime Story, so Snow White in 60 Seconds, I thought this is insane, right?
I'm racing through my life.
Instead of living it, I've forgotten the lessons of my own childhood, right?
Because I think we all have that, or those of us who are lucky enough to have had books read to us as kids have that folk memory of that sacred magical moment when a parent sits down with a kid and the world around you just vanishes and you're in that bubble together and you're telling stories.

(39:05):
You're doing the most eternal, simple human thing together.
You are telling a story and you're sharing words and you're cuddling and you're reacting together.
You're happy, you're sad, all that stuff, right?
This is so much of child development runs through stories and reading, I think.
I mean, that's something we're kind of sacrificing on the altar of the iPad and AI now.

(39:26):
But it was something that once I slowed myself down, stopped speed reading Snow White, reading was a huge part of our family life.
And so all four of us, I've got two kids now, both in their 20s, both very, very avid readers of books.
We're always sharing in our family group chat book recommendations, we share books, we give books back and forth, books for Christmas.

(39:47):
And I've read books out aloud to my...
I read when my daughter was 21, I read Animal Farm by Orwell out loud and Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck out loud.
And of course my daughter could read it herself, but that wasn't the point.
The point was being together, the human voice, sharing the story in a different way.

(40:10):
And it's just a kind of magic.
We've occasionally read bits of plays together, not so much that, but more reading stories.
So yeah, I think that that's something that when any, I mean, I think pretty much across the board, if you look at people who consider themselves to be experts in what could work well for kids in parenting, reading is usually on the top five list of things to do, right?

(40:33):
Get children reading on their own and reading with them.
Start reading with them and then make sure you cultivate the habit.
And it sounds like don't stop reading with them.
Like to be reading out loud to your 21 year old, like I just finished the Fellowship of the Ring, reading it out loud to my 10 year old.
I'm embarrassed to tell you, it took me eight months.
Like it was like a four point font, the 400 page version.

(40:54):
Like I was like, some days we would get a page done and it was like 10 minutes.
Like it was, I was stumbling over words and I'm like, who's that Glorian son of Florian again?
Like I'm like, you know, flipping back pages.

Multiple times he yelled at me.
And he's like, I have no idea what's going on right now.

(41:16):
You know, but yes, having persevered through the eight months of reading him, Lord of the Rings, part one, at his age, like 10.
I mean, I'm ready for a Garfield, I'll tell you that.
But I'll also say it was a glorious time together, right?
And something that you can't take away from us.
Like Animal Farm with your daughter at 21, that's spectacular.
That's very inspiring to me.

(41:36):
He will remember and cherish that for the rest of his life.
You know, you can't, that's, you've made, you've made a deep, etched memory there that will bind you together forever, right?
And sometimes it's a little different depending on the text you choose.
I remember I went through a phase of trying to, when the kids were younger, reading some 19th century stuff, you know, like Arthur Conan Doyle and it was just too turgid.

(41:59):
It was just too hard to read.
So we gave up and we moved into the 20th century.
Well, that kind of gets me to the, a little bit more on specifics here.
You know, you're a big reader.
That's the nature of our show.
This is the only podcast in the world buying for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians.
Like that's our MO.
And what books would you sprinkle into anyone who either is a teenager or has teenage children?

(42:25):
So I've got Inherit the Wind on that list already because you read that when you were 16, it was given to you by your mom.
And I'm assuming that that's one that you would share with your kids.
I have Animal Farm and I have Steinbeck of Mice and Men for your 21 year old.
What else would you suggest teens read these days?
And this is also partly to seduce them into reading.

(42:47):
You know, like I, for you to have two kids in their 20s that are big avid readers, hurrah.
You know, you've like, you've smashed through the TikTok saran wrap that most of us have around our head.
So good job.
And give us a few titles if you don't mind, like teenager books that you suggest.

(43:08):
I mean, I think we talked about Animal Farm, but I think anything by Orwell, because Orwell is such a beautiful, clear, crisp pro stylist.
So it's an easy thing.
And the books aren't too long, like 1984.
If you've got a teenager who's not read books or is just accustomed to consuming online content, Orwell is a good gateway drug to other forms of literary fiction, I think, because he is very accessible and he's such a tight writer.

(43:33):
So I think anything by Orwell.
Yeah, I mean, Steinbeck is wonderful.
I mean, Hemingway as well.
I think Anne Tyler, one of my favorite authors is Anne Tyler.
She writes very simple but poetic tales about ordinary life in suburban Baltimore.
But they're luminous, you know, they take us to places that can be dark and she grapples in a very light way with big, big, heavy ideas.

(44:02):
I think she's a genius.
And I think any teenager would find her fun.
Back in chapter 105, Nancy, the librarian, gave us 'Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant' by Anne Tyler, which I just passed to my mom this past weekend and said, you have to read this.
It's so good.
Yeah, she is just- It's like Jonathan Franzen, but easier.

(44:24):
Like good easier.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, shorter, definitely.
Shorter, but not as big words and so on, you know?
Not to say he is hard to read, he's not, but like it's intimidating when someone hands you 'The Corrections', right?
Whereas a little mass market paperback doesn't look as amazing as it really is.
So that's great.
Hemingway, too, yeah, Old Man and the Sea is one of my kind of like 100 page or less books, right?

(44:50):
And then the other book I thought I'd just throw into this little part of the conversation was at that age that I read, was Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse.
Yeah.
I'll tell you what, you know, just this could work as a segue.
I would recommend anything by Graham Greene as well.
Because Graham Greene, I think Graham Greene's wonderful for the same reason, he writes very clear, crisp prose, but he's also grappling with very big ideas with a light touch in the same way as Orwell is and Tyler does.

(45:17):
And I read a ton of Graham Greene in my teens and late teens.
And I think it was very formative, a lot of it for me.
So we may as well go with this now.
I had some more questions on Inherit the Wind, but I'm gonna pocket those for the moment.
And one of them was around your particular writing style, writing routines, you're an incredible writer.
And the way you write is kind of like what you just did.
Like you're kind of always seguing between lots of things at once, but it never feels unclear.

(45:42):
It's very well carried.
And I found, like when I read 'In Praise of Slowness', I felt like I read a thousand books because every paragraph has a quote from this guy, a piece of this person's poetry, this stat from this study in Norway, that was like per paragraph.
Like you just roll things in.
So I wanna know at some point in this conversation, how you, Carl Honoré, the award-winning global journalist and best-selling author, how you write.

(46:10):
But I can put that in any of these three books.
So we have that in our head, it's coming.
But since you segued so well, let us now go to your second formative book, which of course I've completely dropped.
Oh, here it is.
It is The Quiet American by Graham Green, G-R-E-E-N-E, the extra E at the end, don't forget.
Published in 1955, again, we're gonna say, by William Heinemann in London.

(46:34):
There are many covers.
So I've got a few different ones.
I'm not gonna reference my cover though, because I think I have like one of these new ones, but the original cover that I found online appears to be a whole bunch of horizontal green lines that look like a woven mat.
The top says Graham Green in this sort of red retro 50s fast food restaurant type of serif font.
The bottom says The Quiet American in a black all-cap serif.

(46:56):
There's a red dash going from left to right in the middle of the cover, and it's thicker and kind of vanishes into thinness before it reaches the right side.
Graham Green lived from 1904 to 1991.
He was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading novelists of the 20th century.
He wrote over 25 novels, several books of poetry and short stories, and contributed to many anthologies in a 75-year career.

(47:19):
So, like, what is this book about, 'The Quiet American'?
It's kind of like some kind of 50s literary spy novel.
I mean, we're in Vietnam.
It's the 1950s.
British journalist Thomas Fowler is covering the insurgency against the French colonial rule, but it's not just a political tangle that's kept him tethered to the country.
There's also his lover, Phuong, P-H-U-O-N-G, a young Vietnamese woman who clings to Fowler for protection.

(47:43):
Then along comes Alden Pyle, P-Y-L-E, an idealistic American working in service of the CIA.
Devotedly, disastrously patriotic, he believed neither communism nor colonialism is what's best for Southeast Asia, but rather the third force of American democracy, by any means necessary.
His ideas of conquest include Phuong herself, to whom he promises a sweet life in the States.

(48:05):
But as Pyle's blind moral conviction wreaks havoc upon innocent lives, it's ultimately his romantic compulsions that play a role in his undoing.
Dewey Desmonds, you can follow us on 823.912 for literature in English in the first half of the 20th century.
Carl, please tell us about your relationship with 'The Quiet American' by Graham Greene.

(48:26):
Well, for me, 'The Quiet American' follows on pretty clearly from 'Inherit the Wind'.
So if you think of Inherit the Wind was me beginning to reckon with big ideas and wondering how I could go out and engage with them in the world through the law, Graham Greene's 'The Quiet American' was the moment where I realized that I was gonna do it through journalism, through writing.
So it landed in my lap probably around the age of 20, maybe 21, 20.

(48:53):
And it was around the time when I took a year out from university between second and third year to do a, do you know the program Canada World Youth?
No, I don't.
Right, it's a program-
Yeah, that's right.
Got my inner Canada World Youth.
What they do is they pair up groups of young Canadians with young people from developing countries.

(49:17):
And you spend, you create a group together, you spend sort of a few months in somewhere in Canada, and then you spend a few months in another country.
And I actually wanted to go into Africa.
I applied for three African countries and they gave me Brazil, which completely changed my life because I ended up learning Portuguese and becoming a foreign correspondent in South America.

(49:38):
But at the time I was terribly disappointed.
Went to Brazil, did the whole program.
And around this time, the book landed in my hands.
And I was beginning to lose faith in the law.
And I'd studied jurisprudence at university.
I began to feel like the law just was going to be a straitjacket.
It wasn't going to be the right way for me to move through the world.

(49:59):
And so I went out to Brazil around the time I was reading 'The Quiet American' and began to see how, you know, Graham Greene was engaging with these big ideas on the page rather than in the courtroom.
And then I went out to Brazil, then I began to think, I thought I need to write about this this injustice and these horrors that are out there in the world.

(50:21):
I need to write about them to bring them to light so something can be done.
And so it all came together at once.
And I came away from that counter-world youth program knowing that I was going to become a journalist.
I'm still curious about what told Carl at age 20, 21, I gotta get out of this place.
Like, that is amazing that you did that.

(50:41):
Out of Edmonton, do you mean?
Yeah.
Well, I had already, I was already in, I had gone to Edinburgh University.
So I had left at the age of 17, Edmonton.
Okay, so you were in Scotland when you went to Brazil.
Well, it's a little bit more complicated than that because I came back and did one year in Canada and then I did my final two years in Edinburgh.
So I did like one year in Edinburgh, one year in Canada, one year in Brazil, and then two years in Edinburgh.

(51:04):
So it was very unorthodox.
What gave you the global bug at first?
I don't, I guess my parents are very cosmopolitan.
I mean, they're both first generation immigrants.
I think the word, sorry.
From where?
Oh, my mother is from Scotland.
She's from Edinburgh.
And my father is from Mauritius.
And they actually met at Edinburgh University.

(51:27):
Oh, wow.
So we had a natural connection there.
And as it happens, all those years later, I met the woman who is now my wife also at Edinburgh University.
So we've got a bit of a family tradition going on.
Oh my gosh.
Pitching the reception up in the clock tower or something.
Yes, that's true.
Okay, that's amazing.
What an incredible global kind of connection, but also something inside you, that has sent you around the world as you've done it.

(51:52):
And your reportage, if that's the right way to pronounce that word, is always, has always been very global.
When I watch your TED Talks again, when I listen to another podcast, it's like, you just seem like a student of the world.
Like you are referencing studies and people and experiences in every country all the time.

(52:12):
Yeah.
That's so unusual now, because you've already talked about the homogenization of culture, kind of with English and social media and like, something like, what is it?
Two thirds of Americans don't have a passport, I believe, or it's some shockingly high number, right?
So, yeah, incredible that you've done that.
I think the world- I hope to do the same with my kids, but I don't know how.

(52:35):
I think the reason, I think curiosity has always been my kind of defining trait.
I remember in junior high, my phys ed teacher, I was always asking questions, right?
Just always, I have a question, or I guess that's part one reason you end up as a journalist and then my books are very journalistic in their spirit and then always inquiring and asking questions and show me the data, show me the stories, tell me the, and I remember my phys ed teacher in junior high used to call me Curious Carl.

(53:03):
And I think that's kind of, I still am Curious Carl, right?
I still want to know.
And if you're enclosed in one culture, you're gonna run out of things to be curious about.
And that's, I guess, the joy of treating the world as an endless smorgasbord, right?
Just go up there and pick a little bit here and a bit more from that dish and go back to my table, finish, and then go back and pick some more, you know, that kind of thing.

(53:29):
And there's another food metaphor, right, coming out.
So, yeah.
I love that sort of mental image of curiosity as this sort of like, you know, icebreaker edge of the ship as a sort of a string that kind of tugs you along.
Back in chapter 141 of this podcast, we interviewed James Dot, who is, I call him the largest bookseller in the world because of course he runs Barnes & Noble and Waterstones, but also the nine Dot bookstores.

(53:55):
And when he told us about how he designs those stores, he says the reason his bookstores, his nine independent Dot bookstores, which I'm sure you're very familiar with, are organized by place.
And he organizes them by place because his idea is that, you know, if you're interested in Mexico, well, you owe it to yourself to say what literature is from Mexico, what poetry is from Mexico, what travel books are from Mexico, what cookbooks are from Mexico.

(54:19):
And then you go down, he's really oriented the stores around curiosity, but before that is a global perspective.
Like you choose your where and then you choose your what in his stores.
I feel like curiosity is even more urgently needed today because it feels to me like people have retreated into echo chambers and silos and little patches where they don't need to be challenged or questioned.

(54:46):
They're just, they have their own nostrums, their own truths, and they stay there, they hunker down.
And that has led us to a pretty dark place, I think at the moment.
And one way to puncture that is curiosity, is asking questions, is asking why that person in the other silo thinks that way and actually listening to the answer.
That seems to me, that's our secret weapon.
That's our superpower now.

(55:06):
We need to mobilize it like never before, curiosity, I think.
Yeah, absolutely.
I completely agree.
I partly wonder, as I've thought about this, if the retreat into factions and echo chambers and tribal tribalists may or may not be partly due to the fact that so much of what we assume to be constant is now proven to be no longer so.

(55:30):
So obviously when there was three news channels, there was an objective set of news.
Of course, I'm using air quotes because it wasn't objective.
We just didn't have the 12 other perspectives that YouTube channels and social media and singular journalists on Substack are providing now, which then destabilizes what reality looks like, which then makes you, from a safety perspective, say, oh my gosh, I can't trust X, Y, or Z as input.

(55:54):
So I have to, you feel more secure in a tribal class because of course, reality is much more destabilized.
And it always has been.
Chapter 75 of George Saunders, he said, we really do live in blurs of inchoate motion, but we assemble the truths around ourselves to make it seem like, okay, there's ground beneath our feet, it's flat, it doesn't move.

(56:18):
I can put clothes on, I can walk.
We create order amidst chaos.
It's just lately, the chaos has been revealed to be under the rug all along, a little more than usual, partly because of the internet and the flattening of information.
Yeah, I think there's a lot to that.
I mean, I've been kicking around the idea of, I don't know if it'll ever happen, of writing a book about the fact that we can't really know ever anything.

(56:43):
I mean, that feels to me so much the hallmark of this moment is that just as soon as you think you've got a fact, it turns out that fact is slippery and wobbly, and it's not as solid as you thought it was.
Yeah, there's a lot to go into here.
Few places to kind of go with Graham Greene and The Quiet American.

(57:04):
I mean, we could just pause on the title for a second.
Quiet, right?
We've kind of talked a little bit of American for a second.
Quiet.
On the Slow Baja podcast, which is a great conversation that you had.
I don't know the oath's name, but you guys had this great vibe.
You had this quote I wrote down.
We used to walk around with nothing but our own thoughts, rattling around our head.
Of course, it made me think of that old Blaise Pascal quote, all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

(57:32):
So my question is sort of what and how are the benefits of embracing quiet?
Like to why should we do this and to how should we do this?
Well, the why I think is pretty clear.
And that is that we need that headspace, right?
We need that bandwidth.

(57:52):
We need quiet in order to go deep, right?
I think this is, there's, I was gonna pull on a thread that'll be in the next book.
So I'll put that to one side.
I think that this is something that exists, this need for moments of serenity, of stillness, of tranquility, of looking inside and connecting with yourself, that encounter with your own self.

(58:18):
That is at the heart of, Socrates talked about the examined life.
And I think that's what this boils down to is that taking the time to look inside.
This is a society that's so much geared towards external, towards broadcasting, towards performing outward.
And in that, there's nothing wrong with some of that being part of your life.
But if that's all you have, you're skimming through life instead of actually living it.

(58:44):
You need to have the other side of the equation, which is moments of quiet, stillness, silence, where you go inward, right?
And you start to grapple with who you are.
You ask those big questions.
What's my purpose here?
Am I living the right life for me?
All those questions that allow you to design a life worthy of the name, those things only happen when you stop the shouting and the broadcasting and the showing off, and you go quiet.

(59:06):
Because when you go quiet, you go inside.
And when you go inside, you reckon.
You reckon with the big stuff.
And that's, I think, explains why we live in this world where we're more connected than ever before, where there's lots of noise and sound and fury, but we feel very uneasy, right?
Lonely, disconnected, like we're not really living the right lives for ourselves.

(59:27):
And I think the big part of that is we just don't create space and moments for silence.
How do you do that in practice in your life?
What are some habits we can pick up on our own?
One of my best moments for silence goes together with another slow practice, if you like, which is walking, right?
I mean, I do a lot of sports, so I'm running or skating or whatever a lot.

(59:50):
But I also walk, like just go on long walks without a podcast, without music.
Nothing with me, yeah.
Yeah, nothing with you, no pen and paper?
Sorry?
No pen and paper?
I do sometimes take a pen and paper, because of course, because of the silence, really good ideas pop to the surface, like fish, you know, breaking through the top of a lake.

(01:00:12):
So yes, I do sometimes.
But I feel like if I take pen and paper, then I've, in an unspoken way, I'm setting a goal, or I'm hoping to get something out of it.
And I think a part of that walking in that silence is that it's for its own sake.
I think, I mean, there's all great people getting into meditation and mindfulness and stuff, but I don't know.

(01:00:34):
I think that if you're going in there trying to be a better hedge fund manager, that's okay, that's fine.
But should that really be the main driving force for taking up something like meditation?
I'm in two minds about that.
I think we want to be coming to these slow practices for their own sake, and then getting all the benefits that go along with it, right, better clarity, better decision-making, more productivity, which is all great for the workplace, right?

(01:01:02):
But I think you kind of want to, in my mind anyway, I like to flip it around and think I'm doing this for its own sake.
And if I have a great idea at the time, let's just hope I remember it when I get home, right?
Yeah, that's powerful.
I put a video up on YouTube eons ago, kind of the last internet millennia, but it was like the life-changing magic of the five-hour walk.

(01:01:23):
And I said that all I take with me on my walks are a pocket of cue cards and a pen so that I can write down ideas.
My two big inspirations, I wasn't yet familiar with your stuff, but my two big inspirations were an incredible essay in the back of the paperback copy of The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb called Why I Do All This Walking, and an incredible essay, which you've probably read because you quote Thoreau a lot, called Walking by Henry David Thoreau.

(01:01:48):
And more recently, I've purchased a device which you might be interested in, but it's called a Rabbit R1.
It's like a $200 piece of technology that allows you to take parts of your phone with you without taking your phone with you.
So I am just kind of getting it up and working, but I could use that device to take a podcast with me, but like nothing but the podcast.

(01:02:15):
Do you know what I'm saying?
So hilarious.
This is like the old Walkman now or whatever, right?
It's like I'm going back to, right?
But it's because it's tethered to my phone, it can pull stuff off of my phone without me taking my phone.
So I'm not getting texts, I'm not getting alerts, I'm not getting, it doesn't have a screen.
It doesn't have a screen, it's like a square with dials, you know what I mean?

(01:02:37):
And so, yeah, that's a device that I'm exploring to see if I can enable more phone-free walking, you know what I mean?
Because otherwise I'm like, well, I wanna take, I wanna go walking without my phone, but of course my phone is my eBird app, which I use to track the birds I see, and it's also the grocery list that my wife added me to the iPhone note on, right?

(01:03:01):
So do I have to write up the grocery list on paper and then leave the phone?
So I'm always trying to leave the phone, but I'm less successful than I used to be at doing it.
Yeah, it is, I mean, goodness me, whole libraries are gonna end up being written about our tortured relationship with phones.
And I don't think anyone has a fixed relationship because we're all in this dance, right?

(01:03:23):
Push, pull, it's like a tango, right?
It's got an undercurrent of violence and darkness.
And I'm the same myself, you know, I'm a kind of avatar of slow, but I'm constantly having to redraw the lines and rethink how I use my phone and when I use it and where I have it in the house and when I have it out and all that kind of stuff.
I mean, certain things remain constant for me.
My notifications, for instance, are permanently switched off, right?

(01:03:45):
I just, that's non-negotiable, they're just off.
So I never get interrupted by my phone, which is, that's not on the table, that always happens.
But there's other stuff like, yeah, when to use a podcast, when to, I've recently, I used to have things like LinkedIn and Facebook on my phone as well to look at sometimes.

(01:04:06):
I've removed them recently.
Great.

So I now have to see them on my laptop, right?
I cannot look at them on the phone, which actually, you know, it turns out, I thought, you know, why didn't I do that before anyway?
So it's a constant negotiation, I think, with these gadgets, these weapons of mass distraction that we're all carrying around.
Oh yeah, that's a great way to put it.
We're still looking for the tempo giusto.

(01:04:28):
Yes.
With our relationship with the phone.
Now, I want to also talk about leisure here, because in chapter nine of In Praise of Slowness, you have a chapter called, literally, leisure, the importance of being at rest.
And you have a number of quotes in there that are just so powerful.
I've underlined them, highlighted them.
I want to share them with our listeners.
And then I want to ask what your current thinking is on these, now that we're 20 years out from the publication of In Praise of Slowness.

(01:04:52):
So you introduced the concept on page 217 by saying this great, great, quick history I didn't know.
During the early part of the Industrial Revolution, the masses worked too hard or were too poor to make the most of what free time they had.
But as incomes rose and working hours fell, a leisure culture began to slowly emerge.
Leisure, dot, dot, dot, became formalized, dot, dot, dot.

(01:05:12):
Football, rugby, hockey, and baseball turned into spectator sports.
Cities built parks for the public to stroll and picnic in.
The middle classes joined tennis and golf clubs and flocked to the new museums, theaters, and music halls.
Better printing presses coupled with rising literacy fueled an explosion in reading.
You even quote Bertrand Russell, who says, to be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.

(01:05:40):
And there's more quotes, but I'll pause it there.
Let's hang on that Bertrand Russell quote for a second.
To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.
What is your current medical assessment of the state of leisure in our world today?
I think, well, I think that Bertrand Russell quote is as apposite today as maybe even more than it was before.

(01:06:04):
Because what's always happened with leisure, and you mentioned it there in a couple of examples, how, you know, sports people played at home became spectator sports.
So they got packaged, they got turned into a product or a service that was sold back to us.
And I think that has been a constant feature of our relationship, our evolving relationship with leisure is that there is the kind of leisure that Bertrand Russell is talking about, which is simple and pure, right?

(01:06:31):
It's kind of what I was talking about before about going for the walk without thinking, I'm gonna get a really productive idea out of this walk.
Right?
You just go for the walk for its own sake and then other stuff will come out of it, right?
That's, I think, very much a Russell view of leisure.
And one that I lean towards myself.
Now, we've seen this all the way through, you know, modern history is, leisure has got more and more commoditized, but that has really ratcheted up since I first wrote in Praise and Slow, which I've obviously I've done prefaces, you know, to update it.

(01:06:58):
And whenever I've done that, I tend to mention, you know, social media, right?
And what's happened with the internet, because that's taken things to a whole new level where so much of what would have been leisure now is packaged up as a product that not only is being sold to us, but that we're selling to other people, right?
So we're turning our own leisure into a performance, right?

(01:07:21):
And there's a, we haven't come up to my third book yet, Milan Kundera's Slowness, but one of the, I was really struck by this.
Is it okay if I jump ahead to the end?
Yeah.
I was really, when I first read that 20 years ago, it was all about the kind of what he was, his thoughts on pace, slowness, the relationship between speed and forgetting and all that stuff that really grabbed me.

(01:07:44):
But there's another element that is, I read at the time and didn't kind of clock, but didn't, but makes so much more sense now, which is the way he talks about the figure of the dancer, that the modern man or modern human being is a dancer.
And what he means by that is a performer.
And that the camera, the presence of the camera changed modern man.
And he's writing about this in the 1990s.

(01:08:05):
Fast forward 25 years, cameras on us every second of the day.
You and I are talking on a camera, right?
Even before we got on here now, I'm not giving away too much.
We talked about whether we would use some of the video later on, right?
So everybody now is a dancer, right?
And I think when you're a dancer in that Kundera sense, you've moved away from the Russell view of leisure because everything is now filtered through the lens of eyeballs, clicks, followers, monetizing, commodification, all that stuff that erodes the very soul of leisure.

(01:08:40):
And I think that's where we are now.
And that's much worse, I think, than it was when In Praise of Slow first came out.
And almost leisure has become a more granular, more fractal version of itself where we're using, I don't mean to say that they're direct proxies, but we're using the word attention a lot more now.
And the, of course, we have a limited attention.

(01:09:04):
It's very finite.
Everybody knows this.
We also know that, therefore, he who commands the attention the most, in some ways, that's where you gain the most.
Like, if you can, I once sat on a, this was 10 years ago.
So it's, even it is outdated, but I sat beside the manager of one of the top three biggest rappers in the world.

(01:09:30):
I'll not say his name, but everyone knows this person.
And I sat beside the manager and it was a business class flight and it was late at night and we're both sitting at the front and we're drinking white wines.
And by the end of the conversation, this guy's fully blinged out, like the jewels, the diamonds.
And I was like, so how do you keep him in the news all the time?
He's like, oh no, that's very strategic.
Every three months we manufacture a controversial story that we don't have the answer to on purpose, whether it's a fight at a nightclub, whether it's is he not dating this other celebrity, because that's what keeps him in the news.

(01:10:00):
And that's actually what, of course, creates the album sales and the singles.
So it's like the game he was already playing a decade ago, this is the manager of one of the world's biggest rappers was, how do we keep him in the news?
Well, there's a lot of people playing that game right now.
You know, how do we stay in the news?
If there's fires over here, well, I got to say something controversial about them over there.

(01:10:21):
If there's 20 famous people all speaking at this thing, well, I have to do the most outlandish kind of physical signifier.
So I get the headlines of it because that's what we're competing for.
Because the tension is limited and then you won't even keep track of the fact that, you know, the other guys were even there.
And it's a recipe for disaster because it's exactly what David Foster Wallace predicted in 1996, right, with Infinite Jest.

(01:10:45):
Like, it is the total entertainment forever of our minds and we can't, it's not like it just starts one day.
Like, we're in it now.
Yeah, we are in it.
I mean, Donald Trump, I think, is the apotheosis of this phenomenon, is he not, right?
I mean, he's a creature of reality TV.
And what is the dynamic of reality TV?

(01:11:07):
It's to keep your attention.
And it does that by manufacturing moments of outrage, little scandals.
And so you look at the way he runs the presidency, it seems very much like that, where he's just, every day there has to be some new thing that's going to land like a grenade and it's going to draw all the attention, suck all the oxygen out of the room and draw all the eyeballs towards him.
Just him, I was going to say his team, but mainly him.

(01:11:29):
And I think this is where we are.
Maybe he's the end point of this moment in human history, or maybe this is just going to get worse.
I don't know.
I feel like it's not good for us.
I feel that we know it.
It's eroding so many things that make us happy and healthy, that we're finding it really hard to break out of it.
It feels like a straitjacket, a paradox.

(01:11:50):
Because in a way, the news has never been more interesting.
I've been reading the news my whole life and I never remember the seventh headline being as scintillating as it is today.
I've never remembered being that gripping.
But of course, that's because it's pulling me away from going on walks and reading books and having long talks with my wife, because it's endlessly gripping.

(01:12:15):
And so the drastic actions people like you and I and many others are taking to actually forcibly delete apps, actually go from a smartphone to a dumb phone, actually, I mean, I walked into this downtown bar in Toronto is candlelit, and at the bars is a beautiful young woman reading a big thick book by the candlelight.

(01:12:39):
And I said to her, oh my gosh, that's so beautiful.
Like, it's just such a beautiful image.
You're sitting and reading a big book.
And she looked at me, she said, I dropped my cell phone a few weeks ago, it's smashed.
And I just haven't got it fixed.
And I'm only reading this book because my cell phone's broken, but I can just feel my life changing.

(01:12:59):
It's almost like you don't realize you're in the matrix until you accidentally get unplugged.
That's so true, yeah, yeah.
It's funny, isn't it?
She didn't choose to take that step.
It was just fate.
But as soon as she tasted what it was like to slow down and to get out of that matrix, she was thinking, I don't wanna go back.
So it shows that the basic human need for the slow stuff, right, the reflection, the reading, the stillness, the quiet, the conversations, the listening, all that stuff, it's there, right?

(01:13:32):
The muscles that want that are maybe a little atrophied, a bit tired, and they don't get used enough.
But as soon as you give human beings that offering, they want it, right?
They want it, they want it.
And I don't know if you've been following this growth of the sort of Luddite clubs.
Oh, yeah, exactly, yeah.
I think that's a real sign of that.
It's a real sign of that.

(01:13:52):
But when you read into the origin stories, usually they are saying, my phone got broken or I lost my phone.
Like, that's often the way people start into them.
So since you tipped us off to your third informative book, another beautiful, eloquent transition as you do so well in your writing, let's talk about it now.
It is called Slowness by Milan Kundera, K-U-N-D-E-R-A, published in 1995 in France by Gallimard.

(01:14:17):
This is a bizarre cover.
It looks like a five-year-old stick figure drawing of like a smiley-faced man wearing nothing but a red tie and a pair of pants with his legs up in the air in some like, it's like he fell, you know what I mean?
It's not like a yoga pose.
And it says Kundera in like a red marker, like a kid's marker font.
At the top, Milan, like underneath to the right, like you would just never write anyone's name like that.

(01:14:40):
And then slowness in a black scribbly marker at the bottom.
It says a novel, it says national bestseller, and it says in small font translated from the French.
This was Kundera's first, I believe, novel written in France.
Who is Milan Kundera?
If you don't know him, he lived from 1929 to 2023.
He was a Czech novelist who went into exile in France in 1975 after his books were banned by the Czech government in 1968.

(01:15:05):
What is it about?
Well, it's hard to follow this disjoint narration of a Midsummer's night with a series of abstract tales of seduction centuries apart.
But the interweave and the oscillate, and he's such a gifted writer that the sentences of their very nature, like if they don't connect necessarily, but the sentences are gold.
It's like a modern art type of book.

(01:15:26):
And to be honest, it made no sense to me for much of the time, but it was punctuated by such moments of clairvoyant poignancy that my kind of me reading it, I was constantly like going between like totally frustrated and like delighted at like these little sentences that I was like highlighting and saying like, I gotta blow this one up.
So follow this wonder 891.8653 for 20th century Czech fiction.

(01:15:48):
Carl, tell us about your relationship with Slowness by Milan Kundera.
Well, when I, coming back to that moment of epiphany, when I realized that I was racing through bedtime stories and I needed to slow down, you know, I kicked into my curious Carl mode and started casting around for things to read and so on.

(01:16:09):
And this was the first book that I wrote, read about slowness.
I mean, it's called Slowness, so it was even an obvious.
Well, it makes sense.
You would type it into any search and it would have come up, right?
I think it probably was the first one that came up.
Although that was 95.
So were we even Googling back then?
No, I suppose it was a bit later when I did that.
We were 2000, so we probably were.
And I'd read some other Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and so on.

(01:16:29):
And I knew him to be a deep thinker, an unusual, very sort of, I mean, difficult, I think.
I mean, sometimes it can be difficult and you put your finger on it.
This book particularly is an odd beast, right?
I mean, it's- Hilarious, I heard it described online as the most accessible of his works.
Yeah.
That's a great way of damning the same phrase.

(01:16:52):
And I love the fact that it's very short as well, because I'm not sure if I could have done, gone through the same book if it was 500 pages.
It's a tight, what is it?
My very- 150.
Yeah, there you go.
Mine's from 130 or something.
Anyway, so I read it and it just blew me away.
I mean, I grappled and struggled with some of the, just working out what was going on some of the time and it was a bit disjointed and so on.

(01:17:15):
But it did have little moments of, yeah, you talked about, I think you said clairvoyant and then gold.
I mean, just moments of startling precision and insight.
And it's particularly due with slowness, right?
Which of course was what I was wrestling with myself.
And it helped set me up, I think, for writing that book in praise of slowness.

(01:17:37):
Funnily enough, it just kind of, it laid some of the philosophical foundations that then became the springboard for writing the book you got in your hand there, yeah.
Yeah, and by the way, I mentioned I have three pages of notes written within the front covers of my 2020 quarantine read of In Praise of Slowness.

(01:17:58):
I'm assuming you saw a big spike in book sales at that time.
Right?
But on page nine, you quote Milan Kundera.
You wrote, as Milan, y'all just read the whole paragraph, actually.
Inevitably, a life of hurry can become superficial.
When we rush, we skim the surface and fail to make real connections with the world or with other people.
As Milan Kundera wrote in his 1996 novella, Slowness, quote, when things happen too fast, nobody can be certain about anything, about anything at all, not even about himself, end quote.

(01:18:29):
All the things that bind us together and make life worth living, community, family, friendship, thrive on the one thing we never have enough of, colon, time.
In a recent poll, half of British adults said their hectic schedules had caused them to lose touch with friends.
Half seems small now.
Seems small, I bet it's even higher now, exactly, yeah.

(01:18:50):
It's lovely hearing that Kundera quote again.
I think he, it ties in a little bit with what we were talking about earlier, isn't it, the kind of, the disjointed, fragmented mediascape we live in now, all of these stories coming at us, we're not sure what's true.
Things are moving so fast.
I mean, the media moves at warp speed.

(01:19:10):
And I think that feeds into the sense of, well, like Kundera says, like you can't be certain of anything, anything at all.
You can't even be certain of yourself.
And that's sort of, that really gets at the heart of early 21st century human condition, I think, is that we're not sure of our own selves anymore.
And a big part of that is speed, right?

(01:19:31):
We're just whooshing through and nothing sticks.
There's a lovely phrase in that book as well, where he talks about that this, the whole era almost collectively is speeding up deliberately because there's a secret bond between memory and slowness.
And the other side of that equation is that forgetting and speed go hand in hand.
So this new, this era is accelerating.

(01:19:53):
We're going faster and faster because we want to forget.
We want to forget the horror of modern life.
And so we're trying to, the phrase I think he used was something, we are going faster and faster in order to blow out the tiny trembling flame of memory.
Wow, wow, wow, wow.
That's amazing.
That reminds me of an incredible chapter of In Praise of Slowness, which one of my favorite where you decry, you talk about throughout history how we've always decried clocks, how like, you know, some guy in like the third century BC, like kind of wrote the scathing essay about the sort of, the sundial is now controlling everybody in the town.

(01:20:31):
And in the 13th century, like people like smashed the clocks because it was like trying to split our day into these tiny pieces that you can't focus on.
Like we've actually railed against time as a way to kind of measure and track our existence.
Well, time one, you know what I mean?
Like we're looking at the clock, first thing, last thing, and now throughout everything, we're clocking personal best, we're timing our work, it's every meeting is on, we're all on a time-based life now.

(01:21:00):
But I thought that history was really amazing.
And just to expand on that quote you mentioned, it's page 39, I'll just go read it.
This is from the book Slowness.
There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.
Consider this utterly commonplace situation, colon.
A man is walking down the street.
At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him.

(01:21:25):
Automatically, he slows down.
Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.
Yeah.
So good, so true, so unarticulatable.
Like that's a real master at work saying like, don't you think like if something happens, you just run kind of run away from it.

(01:21:50):
But if you're looking for an address of a house, you know, you slow down your car, you turn off the radio.
Yeah, it's so true, yeah.
Right, you start to look closely, like you're trying to pair the slowness and the memory because they are naturally paired.
They are natural bedfellows, they are inextricably linked.

(01:22:10):
I love when a writer identifies something that you know from your own life, you know to be true, but you've never articulated it, you've never put it into words.
And Kundera is especially good at that, I think just spotting those little foibles, those little impulses, those little vignettes, and just telling us who we are and doing it with such beautiful prose as well.

(01:22:33):
Yeah, and accessible.
Like, I mean, the book itself might not be, but like he has these little sentences, you're like, well, not that Jackie, tricky about the sentence.
I did want to, there's a couple of big tangents here I want to get into.
One is, well, let's go into age here.
So Kundera died 94, right?
So he's publishing novels still at 85.
His last novel was written in 2014, The Festival of Insignificance.

(01:22:54):
You've written a wonderful, and I believe very underrated book called Bolder.
And I don't know what it was, Carl, like, you know, you can look at your writer.
So like, is it the publisher?
Is it the editor?
Is it the cover?
You know, I don't know.
But like, in praise of slowness, I still see everywhere.
Yeah.
And like, I'm sorry to say this, I did not know about Bolder until I began researching.

(01:23:15):
I was like, oh my gosh, he has another book all about age.
He's written a book about time.
Now he's got a book about age.
They're doubly related.
And it's written in the same style, same format, equally captivating, but has gained the 10 years of wisdom and research that you've added.
So I'm like, okay.
Couple things.
You gave a 2019 main stage TED Talk called Why We Should Embrace Aging as an Adventure.

(01:23:39):
I am curious, pulling from this book Bolder, which I think is dramatically underrated and I highly recommend.
I even just love how the chapters are titled.
You know, you basically go through, you know, Create, Old Dogs, New Tricks is a chapter title.
Work, Old Hands on Deck is a chapter title.
Happiness, Minding Less and Enjoying More is the chapter title.
Attract, Swiping Right.

(01:24:00):
Like you have really put your finger on aging in a really good way.
I wonder if you could just present for us, because remember people listening just may not have heard your kind of thesis and then your current state of things today as you look around the world on aging.
You have a very unique and interesting perspective here.
Well, my take on aging, and this is essentially what Bolder makes the case for, is that we are living through a, this is a new era of longevity, right?

(01:24:25):
A demographic revolution.
We're living better for longer than ever before, but our ideas about aging have failed to keep pace, right?
So we're still locked into the old ageist narratives, the cult of youth, in other words, the idea that aging is bad, that younger is better, that aging is a punishment or a disease or a form of failure.

(01:24:49):
And obviously there's some things that change as we grow older that we don't like, but the truth is that many things stay the same and many actually get better.
And so I wanted to write Bolder in a way to sort of smash through that ageist industrial complex.
And I guess with my earlier work, I was taking on the cult of speed.
In this, with Bolder, I'm taking on the cult of youth and saying, look, there is a whole other way to think about growing older.

(01:25:13):
There's a better story to tell here.
And the story is this, that if you embrace aging, and we're all doing it, right?
Aging is not something you start doing at the age of 35 or 40, right?
Right.
You're all aging.
If you embrace it wherever you are, as a process of opening doors instead of closing them, as an adventure instead of as a punishment, then aging can be an upward curve.

(01:25:36):
And I was myself a card-carrying member of the cult of youth, right?
All of my books start from a personal existential crisis when I realized that I'm not living the way that I want to, something's not right.
And I realized, actually, it was a hockey thing, right?
We talked about earlier, right?
I was suddenly the oldest player at a hockey tournament, and that just totally shook me to the core.

(01:25:58):
And I felt so bad, suddenly.
I thought, how can it be that my chronological age has taken on this terrible power to define and limit me?
And I came away from that hockey tournament thinking, there has to be another story to tell about aging.
And, you know, spoiler alert, there is, right?
So that, I guess, Bolder came out, I think one reason it didn't get as much attention as I would like to think it deserved is it came out just as the pandemic broke.

(01:26:22):
Yeah.
And that didn't help.
It was just wrong.
No.
Everything was, you know, the world just got stuck in other things.
And plus the whole idea of aging because of what the links to age and COVID, I think that it was a harder case to make, that aging, you know, the second half of life could be pretty good.
So I think that's it.
But it's, yeah, it's still out there.

(01:26:43):
And people, I hear from people all the time who are reading it and doing stuff with it.
So it's pretty much on the radar.
Which is well-deserved.
And I hope that more people can kind of pick it up after we have this conversation.
It's a really, really good book.
And as you say, like the culture of youth is alive and well.
Like, I ride the subway in Toronto, all the ads suddenly are like about Botox.

(01:27:10):
Like, it's like, it just happened overnight.
Like I thought Botox was like this fringe thing.
That like celebrities got in LA or something, but I didn't realize it was like, no, no, everyone is doing Botox.
Yeah, my wife was in the subway recently in Toronto and she sent me a picture of a poem that was just like, they have this new like subway poetry thing.
And it was by Rupi Kaur.

(01:27:30):
It's called Laugh Lines and Wrinkles.
And the poem opens with these two lines.
Give me laugh lines and wrinkles.
I want proof of the jokes we shared.
And I'll put the full poem in the show notes, but it really struck me that we're gonna end up as a society 10 years, 20 years, 30 years out, where like half of us look like we have Instagram face, which is a real term written by in the New Yorker about like the sort of like kind of very specific uniform face.

(01:27:56):
And then the other half of us, we're gonna have gaps between our teeth.
We're gonna have yellow teeth.
We're gonna have unibrows and we're gonna have, you know, and that will be beauty because that will be rare, you know, I think.
I mean, I could be wrong and then I'm just the only guy with yellow buck teeth and unibrow in 10 years.
But my point is like, yeah, we're uniformly kind of squeezing this notion of beauty into these really homogenous places that is so ugly when you think about that, you know?

(01:28:27):
Yeah, it's the homogenization I think that's so, so tawdry and tedious and bland and boring, right?
This is what really sets, even if you've got a group of very conventionally attractive people, the person, the one person in that group who always stands out is the one who's got something slightly off, right?
Maybe their nose is a bit too big or their eyes are a bit squiffy or something.

(01:28:50):
It's almost, the beauty is in the uniqueness, right?
And the uniqueness comes from the story that your face tells about you.
And if you were erasing all trace of the story, then what are you?
You're just a mannequin off the shelf.
And that, I mean, that seems a pretty sad place to end up, I think, right?
Well, yeah, except of course then in the future in 10 to 20 years, we'll all be getting treatments to like re-wrinkle-ify our faces probably.

(01:29:17):
I haven't yet got to the writing routines question.
And so Kundera is, I don't believe as well as you are kind of sifting and swerving us left, right, and center.
You do that in a controlled way where I feel very well held as a reader.
I feel very well, I feel like your organization of your books is like very strong.

(01:29:40):
Your research is unparalleled.
I'm very curious about what your research practices are.
Obviously with your kind of decade plus as a, you know, you've been working as a journalist for many, many years, so there's something there.
But what are your research and writing routines look like, Carl?
Well, I'm glad you talked about structure because structure to me is hugely important, is having the right architecture for the book.

(01:30:01):
And it always takes me quite a while to work out what the frame is going to be, but I don't rush it.
I sit with it, I play around with ideas, and then eventually it settles.
And once I've got that, then I can start to plug things in.
In terms of research, I've always, apart from one book, under pressure, I hired a researcher who helped me out a little bit.
But for most part, I do all my own.

(01:30:23):
All my own research.
And I think that's, I read recently that Malcolm Gladwell does the same thing, which is interesting, because he, I mean, if anybody could afford to pay for researchers, Malcolm Gladwell, right?
And I just, I think there's something about getting back to the first principles, you know, getting, exposing yourself to the raw material rather than having someone else do that, do the first lift and then deliver some curated version of the facts.

(01:30:54):
I just want to get right, I guess it comes back to my journalistic curious tendency I talked about earlier.
I want to get right there and I want to experience it myself, right?
I need to feel it, to smell it, up close and personal in order to understand it.
So I feel my research, that's why my books always take from start to finish a good 20, 22 months normally, getting up for two years, right?

(01:31:15):
Because there's a lot of research goes into them.
I don't do, I tend not to do long range interview.
I go to the place and I spend time with the people I'm interviewing and I'm absorbing what's happening.
And so I can, it just, I feel like deepens my understanding of what I'm trying to explore.
It also makes it more fun and more colourful to write about because I've got a lot more at my fingertips to tell the story, you know, what, you know, just to engage all five senses in the telling of the story because I was there rather than sitting in a room doing a Zoom.

(01:31:46):
Yeah, you can feel that.
Susan Cain does that too, with her books, Quiet and Bittersweet.
You can feel like you're at the Tony Robbins seminar she's describing.
You feel you're walking through Harvard Business School when she's describing it.
You talk about the Society of Time Decelerators.
Yeah, the Society for the Deceleration of Time.
That's right.
Yeah, those people sound amazing.
Although I could not find a trace of them online.

(01:32:07):
I wondered if that was on purpose.
I was like, well, smart move.
They deleted their website.
Like, maybe they just decelerated so much that they no longer exist.
Yeah, I just love that people are like fighting against time.
And then when you do this research, like this copious research, I'm doing that too.
And then where I struggle is, okay, how are you, what are you doing?

(01:32:31):
Are you like writing things on little note cards and putting them into like the kind of classic whatever Benjamin Franklin kind of note card system?
Are you doing, like, how are you able to pull all this?
Is it- I suppose, gosh, I've not really thought that much about it.
The way I tend to do it, this is I've done for every single book, is that I have files, numbered files for different, so an interview will have a file, a book will have a file, an article will have a file, and each will be numbered.

(01:32:57):
And then I'll have another, so that's in one folder.
And I call that fodder, right?
Then I have fodder filtered, which is where I've read through all of the different bits of fodder, and I've put them into ideas buckets that could be chapters, it could be sort of, you know, they're all kind of connected.
So let's say from the first five bits of fodder, you know, I find one bit in each of those that fits into fodder filtered one.

(01:33:22):
So it's about, I don't know, family life, let's call that one.
So from five of these original bits, I put something in there.
And then once I've got those, that becomes the first step towards creating architecture, saying, okay, I've got all these, I've got 30 buckets, I can't have 30 chapters, but I can see the silhouette of maybe 10 chapters.
And so I start to group those into smaller buckets, right?

(01:33:43):
So I end up coming down to the number of chapters I want.
And then from there, I use the, I have all my notes, I can trace it right back to first principles to where I got the stuff originally, because it's going through on a through line.
And then I start writing.
And I don't write, you know, first page all the way through, I'm writing, I'm jumping around depending on how I feel in the day.

(01:34:05):
I think this subject is lighting me up this morning, I'm gonna write about that.
Or I saw something on TV last night, or I had a conversation with someone who thought, yeah, so tomorrow morning, I get up and write about that.
And so I'm kind of always jumping around, but I'm always thinking about the overall structure and how things fit together and wanting to carry people through.

(01:34:25):
I think that's probably a journalist's instinct as well, or it's something you hone as a journalist, the craft of, because in journalism, you don't have so many words, right?
And you really want to pull someone all the way through.
So that's something that's often been said about my writing that people, you mentioned it there, that people, there's a lot of stuff, but I never stay too long in one place.
No, you don't.
And that's why it's really appealing.

(01:34:45):
But I do stay there.
It's not like I'm going very fast.
And sometimes I'm thinking, oh, am I staying too long?
So I'm often thinking, am I, could I lose this extra bit of color here?
Or do I need it?
Is it, what's it?
So I'm always sort of thinking about the experience of, particularly from my own point of view, I don't tend to write for the reader, weirdly.
I mean, it sounds like I am, but I'm mostly writing to please myself.
So I want to write a book that I want to read through and that I don't want to put down and that I don't feel gets turgid and stalls and overstays its welcome in certain anecdotes.

(01:35:16):
So I'm kind of always thinking, what do I want from it?
I love that.
Well, that's really, that's a really vivid description.
And I really love this fodder and fodder filtered idea.
That is an incredible little writing tip right there.
Carl, this has been a real joy.
I feel like I could keep asking lots of questions, certainly have a lot more written down.

(01:35:37):
This is my tendency.
I'm like you, I have 10 pages of notes, just questions and stuff when I come into these things.
Because I have so much to ask, but I think to close this off, I will say huge thanks for doing this.
And do you have time for a fast money round set of questions to close off the conversation?
Yeah, I'm all in.

(01:35:57):
Hardcover, paperback, audio, or e?
Paperback.
How do you organize your books on your bookshelf?
Randomly.
Randomly.
What is your book lending policy?
I lend in hope of getting it back, but in the expectation that I won't.

(01:36:19):
Oh, I like that.
I lend in hope.
I like that.
That's a great three word phrase.
I lend in hope, I like that.
My father-in-law's girlfriend just got me one of those little like metal stamps that says like, from the library of Neil Pasricha
My daughter bought that for my wife for her Christmas present.
No way.
This last Christmas, yeah.
Oh, it's life changing.

(01:36:39):
Because you feel like a bit of a jerk when you're like, oh yeah, here's your book.
And I'm just going to quietly write my name in the front as I hand it to you.
You never forget who owns it.
But with this stamp, it's like this eloquent passing.
And then of course you've got this like embossed permanently.
You're giving it back to me, but I don't know if your wife's the same.
It doesn't make a print.
It just makes an imprint.
Yeah, it's the old, is there a particular word for it?

(01:37:01):
But you know, it just, yeah, it creates a- Yeah, there is a word, but I don't know what it is.
A relief, if you like.
You could run your finger over it.
A relief, nice.
Do you have a white whale book or a book that you've been chasing in any way?
To read or to write?
Either.
I'd like to write a book about food.
Oh yeah, yeah, exactly.

(01:37:21):
Then we can take the man K off the end of that moniker.
Yeah, exactly.
Do you have a favorite bookstore, living or dead?
Yeah, well, gosh, I love so many bookstores, but one that I often think of and I love very much is in Cork in Ireland.
And it's, I think it's called Charles Clark.

(01:37:41):
Is it Charles Clark or Charlie Clark or something like that?
It's in the center of Cork and it's just a glorious, slightly random, no, I'm just gonna say chaotic, but no, it's lived in.
So it's a little rabbit worn of rooms with new books, but then on the outside, there's just endless shelves on the outside, like literally on the pavement outside of secondhand books.

(01:38:04):
So it's just a mix of the old and the new.
And I just, I love that bookshop.
Well, it sounds like also Cork's a bit of a bookstore paradise because our guest in chapter 58 of this show was David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, Thousand Alms of Jacob's Zoo and so on.
And of course he lives in Cork County and his favorite bookstore is in Cork, but it was a different bookstore and I can't remember the name, but I know it wasn't that one.

(01:38:27):
So I'm like, oh, there's gotta be another bookstore there.
Oh wow, gosh, am I getting the wrong name?
No, maybe it's different.
There's gotta be more than one bookstore.
Yeah, oh, there definitely has been more than one.
There's probably lots.
And then finally, since this is a show by and for book writers, lovers, makers, sellers, and librarian, you are a prolific writer.
You've written both as a journalist and as a nonfiction author and there's more books to come, it sounds like, inside you.

(01:38:54):
What is your biggest, hard-fought piece of writing wisdom that you might leave us with as we close off the conversation?
I would say, check your facts.
We live in a time of fallout, fake news, of disinformation and misinformation.
I think as much as possible, be sure that what you're basing your arguments, your story on, is true.

(01:39:19):
It's right, it's solid.
Check your facts.
That's a good old journalism, right?
You know, double check your facts.
I like that, check your facts.
Something we're certainly not doing much of in the world right now, but which you are inspiring and encouraging us to get back into.
I absolutely loved In Praise of Slowness.
It was a life-changing book for me.
I've read it, I plan to read it again and again and again.

(01:39:40):
It's a dream to be able to read books and then talk to the authors behind them and discover the rest of the works and the books that are formative to them.
So Carl Honoré, thank you so much for taking the time and coming on to Three Books.
We really, really greatly appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
It's been a real pleasure.
Thank you.
I've thoroughly enjoyed it.

(01:40:11):
Hey everybody, it's just me, just Neil again, hanging out with you from my basement in Toronto.
Canada, listening back to the wise and just such a beautiful heart, Carl Honoré.
He's become a friend.
He's a good guy.
And to me, he's like the kind of journalist I grew up loving.

(01:40:33):
Someone who thinks deeply, is really pure and honest, is coming to things from a really unbiased perspective, but with a lot of giving, giving, giving.
It's harder to find that now.
I guess you find it if you kind of thumb around on Substack or you follow people on their blogs or the newsletters, but it's still a bit more spread out than picking up a newspaper or magazine and finding a whole bunch of voices all together.

(01:40:56):
But we got a whole bunch of voices together today.
Carl gave us a lot of quotes that jumped out to me, like, language is just a kind of poetry that we have at our fingertips.
I feel so bad that I only know English.
I mean, my mom knew eight languages growing up.
My dad knew five.
They came to Canada in the 60s, 70s, in the era of immersion, learning how to speak English at home, teach English to your kids.

(01:41:22):
And I just feel so, like I'm missing, I feel like I have a missing limb, you know?
And if I were to say that out loud, but more publicly, people would say, well, just do, you know, do a lingo or whatever it's called.
Like do whatever, sign up, like learn the new language.
But it's not that, it's just that I can feel an area missing in my life and I feel like I need the time and the energy to focus on growing up.

(01:41:45):
Maybe I'll get that in a slow moment in my life.
But it's true what he says about language being a poetry at our fingertips.
How about this one?
I feel like curiosity is even more urgently needed today because it feels to me like people have retreated into echo chambers and silos.
Yeah, I totally agree with that.
And not only that, but like when you talk to AI, doesn't it always just like cheer you on and make you feel good?

(01:42:09):
And it's sort of like automatically supportive, which is a great skill that you'd want, like in a helpful, empathetic listening frame.
But if it comes forever without any like chafing or stress or pushback, it's sort of like, wait a minute, am I just talking to myself here?
And I know you can tell the AI to like, you know, be a little bit harder on me or whatever, but that's not the solution.

(01:42:30):
It's that the AIs and to a broader extent, the algorithms and the funnels that we're getting our information of, they're more intellectually and emotionally soothing to us than ever before.
So of course we wanna drink from those hoses, you know?
And it's just dangerous to do that.
So we have to create friction in our lives, whether that's through traveling or through reading different takes or reading controversial or counterintuitive stuff, or just listening to podcasts where you're gonna bump into random people and random thoughts like you're doing right now.

(01:42:59):
So kudos to you.
How about this?
When you go quiet, you go inside.
And when you go inside, you reckon.
When you go quiet, you go inside.
How true is that?
I mean, I think that's behind that old question, you know, what keeps you up at night?
Because point about that, or even just things like subreddit sour thoughts is that when our mind slows down, things bubble up.

(01:43:26):
Lately, I've been having trouble sleeping.
I've been getting up like almost like two in the morning and I can't get back to sleep for like two hours.
And I think that happens sometimes when I'm in the middle of like busy travel periods and also the transition of like lastly going back to school as a teacher and my kids, you know, being very full on and you know, having four boys is a very loud and boisterous and busy house.

(01:43:51):
You know, and it's not like we have a nanny.
Like we don't have someone like taking care of them for us.
They're just like on us, which is wonderful.
Like I woke up this morning with two small six-year-old feet kind of kicking me because at some point in the middle of the night, briefly remembering it, my six-year-old kind of comes to the bed and says, there's a black fly in my bed.

(01:44:14):
You know, he's having like a waking nightmare.
Of course I get kicked and punched.
I wouldn't want it any other way, but it just feels like a lot.
And then it's only in the quiet times that you get to kind of, whoa, like process and reckon and sort of like feel everything.
So anyway, that's just the little window into me right now.

(01:44:37):
That's why conversations like the one with Carl help me.
How about this?
I love when a writer identifies something that you know from your own life, you know to be true, but you've never articulated it.
Yeah, that's what it's all about.
The human experience, the human journey, how we navigate what George Saunders, you know, maybe called in chapter 75, you know, the blur of inchoate motion that is reality until we add stricture structures and stories to it that, you know, help us make a semblance of sense in things as we try to do.

(01:45:15):
It's really wonderful to talk to you, Carl.
Thank you for coming on Three Books and thank you for giving us two more books to add to our top 1,000, including number 555, The Quiet American by Graham Greene, and number 554, Slowness by Milan Kundera.
Kundera, Kundera?
K-U-N-D-E-R-A.
And of course I missed Inherit the Wind because that is an asterisk.

(01:45:39):
We have Inherit the Wind already on the top 1,000 at number 862, which came to us from Wagner Moura.
So yeah, I mean, that's great because, you know, we had the Penn and Kim Holderness recently that added like five new books because they had Weird the Sidewalk In.
So we're like reorienting ourselves.
It's like meant to be three books per show, but sometimes it's two and sometimes it's four.

(01:46:03):
Like Ryan Holiday was a four, right?
So I got to do like a recalculation soon.
But thank you to Carl for coming on three books and thank you to all of you for listening.
Are you still here?
Did you make it past the three second pause?

(01:46:24):
If so, I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club.
Let's kick it off as we always do by going to the phones.
Hi Neil, this is Jackie.
I'm from outside of Seattle.
I've been listening to your show for about, I want to say three years now.
And I just listened to your latest one and I thought I would call in, say how much I enjoy it, especially the fact that you have guests who are not all famous to me.

(01:46:54):
So I can learn more about interesting people who are doing interesting things and like to encourage you just to keep it up.
Thanks.
Oh, thank you so much, Jackie from Seattle for your phone call.
Thank you for calling 1-833-READ-A-LOT, R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T.
Being brave enough to just put your voice on the phone.
It's really nice to hear your voice.

(01:47:14):
I feel like I'm with you.
Email me, neil at globalhappiness.org, N-E-I-L at globalhappiness.org with your address so I can mail you a book to say thanks.
And yeah, I love the lesser known people.
You know, one of our values on the show, if you go to threebooks.co.us values is interesting over famous.

(01:47:35):
And I always tell that story about like sitting beside a rapper on an airplane that was like business class, drinking wine at like 10 p.m. on like blue plastic cups and like United Airlines flight to Toronto.
And he was like, yeah, I only really know Drake in Toronto, do you know anyone else?
And I won't say his name, but he's a very famous and well-known rapper and actor.

(01:47:56):
And we had great connection and we exchanged numbers and it was so well.
And at the end of the chat, I said, do you read books?
And he's like, no, never.
I've never really read a book.
And I was like, fuck, like now I can't have you on the podcast.
Because I do want that side of people to open up here.
I mean, we're trying to inspire ourselves and each other to read more.
So I do need that.

(01:48:17):
So like when you talk to Nikita the dog walker in chapter 147, or the St. Louis Uber drivers in chapter 136, or Chefs Osama and Hussan in 125 who make the best shawarma in the city, or at least one of them, you know, you get a different tack, a different flavor, a different sort of frame of looking at things than you would from famous people.

(01:48:39):
Anyway, thank you so much for the phone call.
We'll skip the letter since we read one at the top.
Why don't we go back to Carl?
I think this one deserves a word cloud, people.
What do you think?
Let's go over to Carl Honoré now.
Musicians have a beautiful term.
They talk about the tempo giusto.
It's like manqué, to miss out.

(01:49:01):
For me, it's all caught up with Proustian memories.
What polyglot means to me, it means joy.
The more kaleidoscopically happy your life is, it's the global lingua franca.
Particularly fertile and fervent moment in the evolution of a human being that I don't feel gets turgid.
The apotheosis of this phenomenon, foibles spotting those little tawdry and tedious, and I call that fodder, right?

(01:49:24):
Ho mama, it was time for us to do a word cloud.
We haven't done one in a while, but who else but a polyglot to ask to put together a word cloud full of interesting and unique and interesting etymological words, you know, that we can kind of dig in and kind of hear about like the word monk.
Really, manqué, M-A-N-Q-U-E, accent, a goo, which is from the French to be missed.

(01:49:50):
A person who has failed to live up to a specific expectation or ambition, usually combined with a profession.
For example, a career civil servant with political prowess who fails to reach office might be a politician monqué, or a second-rate method actor might be referred to as a Marlon Brando monqué.
Of course, Carl described himself as a chef monqué.

(01:50:13):
The term derives from the past participle of the French for monqué, M-A-N-Q-U-E, to miss, to fail, to lack.
In English, it is used post-positively.
That is, following the noun, it modifies in the manner of most adjectives in French.
Yeah, you don't see that in English much, right?
Like chef monqué, like we don't say I'm a runner fast, you know, we don't use that after descriptive thing, you know.

(01:50:40):
A quote from Lolita by Nabokov, Humbert Humbert reminisces, At first, I planned to take a degree in psychiatry as many monqué talents do, but I was even more monqué than that, and I switched to English literature.
Double use in one word.
Who else but Nabokov could pull that off?
In French, the word monqué is also sometimes applied to someone who's failed to gain professional status, right?

(01:51:05):
In English, it doesn't have that pejorative as much.
So in a game of roulette, the numbers one to 18 are described as monqué, meaning the ball has failed to land in one of the 19 to 36 slots.
So, you know, in French, it's like a little bit more of an insult.
Where'd this come from?
Well, from the Latin word mancus, M-A-N-C-U-S, which means maimed or crippled by.

(01:51:27):
What an interesting word, manqué, M-A-N-Q-U-E- and like so versatile and usable, you know.
We got a cult podcast here.
We've got thousands of listeners to every single chapter around the show, but I'm not Joe Rogan.
I'm not Rich Roll.
I'm not Mel Robbins.
So I'm like a giant podcast monqué.

(01:51:49):
Well, yeah, or you could use it the opposite way and say, you know, you could use it in regards to yourself with other things, but maybe we use it as a little string to kind of pull us forward there too, or to examine what we truly want.
In my case, I don't really want to be a giant podcaster that's like putting out two shows a week and making eight shows a month and having tons of ads at the beginning and the middle.

(01:52:14):
Yuck, I hate those middle podcast ads.
They're even worse than the beginning ones.
Like, what is a commercial break throughout the whole thing now?
Come on.
So yeah, it helps us examine ourselves like Carl did, like In Praise of Slowness does.
Grab the book, check it out if you don't know it, or one of his formative books, Graham Greene book, Inherit the Winds, great play to read if you don't have it.

(01:52:34):
Now I have two copies because I bought it without remembering that I'd read it before for bigger.
And remember guys, it's fun.
We're hanging out on full moons, we'll have a new moon classic released between now and then, but until November, remember, you are what you eat and you are what you read.
Keep turning that page everybody, and I'll talk to you soon.

(01:52:54):
Take care.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Chapter: 153: Carl Honoré imparts illuminating insights into intentional idleness

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.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}On Purpose with Jay Shetty

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Chapter: 153: Carl Honoré imparts illuminating insights into intentional idleness

On Purpose with Jay Shetty