Neil Pasricha, OUR BOOK OF AWESOME: A Celebration of the Small Joys That Bring Us Together
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[0:58]Neil Pestričia is the author of our book of awesome, a celebration of the small joys that bring us together.
[1:03]Neil is the author of 10 books and journals, including the book of awesome,
[1:07]spinning Rolex of simple pleasures based on his 100 million hit award-winning blog, A Thousand Awesome Things,
[1:13]The Happiness Equation, originally written as a 300-page love letter to his unborn son on how to live a happy life.
[1:19]Awesome is everywhere, an interactive introduction to guided meditation for children, two minute mornings,
[1:24]the simple daily morning practice, and you are awesome, a nine-step guide to building resilience told through stories and research.
[1:31]Neil's books are New York Times and number one international bestsellers and have spent over 200 weeks on bestseller list,
[1:38]and has sold over two million copies across dozens of languages.
[1:42]Neil also gives over 50 speeches a year and places like Harvard, South by Southwest, and Shopify.
[1:47]His first TED Talk, The Three As of Awesome, is ranked one of the ten most intriguing of all time,
[1:53]and his second is called How Do You Maximize Your Tiny Short Life.
[1:56]An artistic side project called the world's first TED listen composed entirely of questions.
[2:01]Neil gave the most attended feature keynote at South by Southwest 2019, called Building Trust in Distrustful Times.
[2:08]Neil also hosts an Apple Best of Award-winning podcast called Three Books,
[2:14]where he is on an epic 15-year-long quest to uncover the 1,000 most formative books in the world.
[2:21]Neil shares his current writing on his blog in a series of newsletters spread by over 100,000 people.
[2:27]Neil's pro bono work focuses on youth literacy and mental health.
[2:30]He has degrees from Queen's University and Harvard Business School, Neil lives in Toronto with his family,
[2:35]where I actually saw him when I was there for the Toronto Film Festival.
[2:38]Welcome, Neil. Thank you so much for coming back on most of no time to read books to discuss our book
[2:43]of Awesome, a celebration of the small joys that bring us together.
[2:47]And dads don't have time to read books.
[2:50]Okay, you have such an amazing story.
[2:54]We've talked about it before, but it was a long time ago.
[2:57]So maybe listeners now haven't heard.
[2:59]And they don't know why you've started this whole Awesome series of books,
[3:02]celebrating the little moments of life in all the different ways that you do, which is wonderful.
[3:06]So would you mind giving your backstory of how you started and then how you ended up with this book?
[3:11]Yeah, absolutely. Sure. So my mom from Nairobi, Kenya, my dad from Emirates, or India.
[3:15]They had an arranged marriage in England in the 1970s.
[3:18]They moved to Canada, to the shady suburb of Toronto called Oshwontario, where I was born in 1979.
[3:23]When I grew up, my parents told me that, you know what?
[3:25]It's work hard, then you have a big success, then you're happy.
[3:28]You know, I followed the normal life plan.
[3:31]So I did. I did everything I could.
[3:32]I graduated from school. I had good marks.
[3:34]I went to university, Queens University, if anyone is listening to the Canadian,
[3:38]it was Queens. I went to Queens that I went to Harvard Business School, then in Boston,
[3:42]which I know it's another matter that we share.
[3:44]And I come home to Toronto. I'm married. I got a good job.
[3:47]I'm working on Walmart. I've got my, you know, I'm a manager of leadership development.
[3:50]Everything's going according to plan. This is in my late 20s.
[3:53]Then everything falls off the rails.
[3:55]In the span of a few days, my wife tells me she no longer wants to be married to me.
[3:58]And my best friend takes his own life.
[4:00]These two things propagate a sense of, you know,
[4:04]listlessness, depression, anxiety, overwhelm, everything all at once,
[4:09]partially amplified by the fact that I hadn't experienced a tremendous amount of setbacks before.
[4:15]And so I immediately sprung into twice a week therapy at my mom's strong suggestion.
[4:22]And started a blog called 1000 AwesomeThings.com as a way to try to cheer myself up.
[4:28]So for the next 1000 straight weekdays,
[4:31]I went to a website called 1000 AwesomeThings. Wordpress.com and then wrote about,
[4:36]you know, wearing warm underwear from out of the dryer, playing an old dangerous playground equipment,
[4:41]getting called up to the dinner buffet first at a wedding.
[4:44]And nobody around this website except for my mom.
[4:46]For the one that she senses in my dad and my traffic duffled.
[4:49]And then I got bigger and bigger and bigger.
[4:50]And I started getting hits on things like, you know,
[4:52]farm.com or dig.com and reddit.com just to throw a bunch of names out there
[4:56]for people that are like surfing online in 2008.
[4:59]And the blog got 100 million hits.
[5:03]One, the webbed award for best vlog in the world from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.
[5:08]Then I was approached by 10 literary agents.
[5:12]And I went with Air Malone from William Morrison Never.
[5:16]And she conducted a five publishing house auction.
[5:19]And I heard my blog 1000 AwesomeThings.com into my first book,
[5:24]which came out in 2010 from Amy on Horn Publishing,
[5:27]which was at that time a division of Putnam.
[5:30]And it was called The Book of Awesome.
[5:32]And so they printed 6,000 copies of the things.
[5:34]They'd be so like, you know, despite the blog, you know, being popular,
[5:37]blah, blah, blah, blah.
[5:38]6,000. That seems like enough books, right?
[5:40]Well, it's all the million copies.
[5:42]And I say that with like a stunned experience.
[5:44]It's still surprising.
[5:45]I mean, a number of things totally fell into play solo once.
[5:50]It helped that the world like now was like riddled with bad news.
[5:53]So the sort of punctured the zeitgeist with a dose of sort of cynical positivity.
[5:58]Because of course, I was running from how I was feeling.
[6:00]And it wasn't just Pollyanna.
[6:02]I was like, when I talked about old fingers, play rock room.
[6:04]And I'm talking about like burning your legs and hot slides and falling in the cigarette buds.
[6:08]And you know, I actually have the sense of self that I had when I was going through my depression
[6:13]in baked into these awesome things.
[6:15]You know, so they come across quite a survey sometimes.
[6:19]And of course Heather reasonably made it a Heather's pick and Indigo Canada.
[6:22]And I had a TED Talk.
[6:23]I was invented into a TED Talk right after it came out in the map.
[6:26]They went and buy her also just all these things fell in the place together.
[6:29]And to this day now, 12 years later, I have never.
[6:33]I've written 10 books and journals to this day now.
[6:35]Okay.
[6:36]Nothing.
[6:37]Nothing.
[6:38]Nothing's come close to that person.
[6:40]Okay.
[6:41]Like it's like Tuesdays with Maury for Mitch album, right?
[6:44]Like it's like my first, my first book.
[6:46]And by the way, people often ask me, well, what are you going to do?
[6:50]You're never going to top this assess your first book.
[6:52]And I draw upon a paraphrase quote from Diablo Cody, who was an extra prefer
[6:57]Minnesota who wrote a movie called Juno, which ended up getting nominated for
[7:01]Best Picture.
[7:02]And she was asked, well, how are you going to top Juno?
[7:04]And she said, I'm not.
[7:05]And I never will.
[7:06]And the fact that the first movie I wrote became Best Picture released me from the
[7:09]obligation of ever worrying about it.
[7:11]So I like to think, Zippy, that I have had the chance over the past 12 years to just explore
[7:18]with my writing.
[7:19]I got lucky early.
[7:20]It doesn't happen often.
[7:22]Lightning struck me.
[7:23]I'm very grateful.
[7:24]And now I have ended up getting remarried on the flight home from my honeymoon.
[7:29]My wife Leslie told me she was pregnant.
[7:30]I spent the next nine months writing a 300 page letter to my unborn child called The Happiness
[7:35]Equation.
[7:36]I don't know if people are watching this on video or not.
[7:38]I can't quite reach it with the wires, but it's right behind me.
[7:40]Look, that's the happiest equation.
[7:42]I'm realizing that I'm thin-skinned.
[7:44]I get a bad email.
[7:45]I'm like destitute for days.
[7:46]I wrote a book about resilience.
[7:48]Okay.
[7:49]That's the resilience equation.
[7:50]This title is, you're awesome.
[7:52]And then now 12 years later, after running away from the project and the concept forever,
[7:58]I have decided that in this era of algorithm infused addictions, endless social media,
[8:05]strife.
[8:06]I believe it's really causing massive problems in our society higher than ever rates in
[8:10]the human history of anxiety, loneliness, depression, and suicide.
[8:13]I'm telling you all four of those things are at all times.
[8:15]I was like, when do you know the one?
[8:17]And I need it too.
[8:18]I need it too.
[8:19]The pandemic's been horrible.
[8:20]So I wrote our book of awesome.
[8:22]It is a brand new 432 page hardcover from Simon & Schuster.
[8:26]Yes, it changed publishers.
[8:27]Long story.
[8:28]We could talk about it.
[8:29]Basically, my editor left the company.
[8:31]So then, you know, you can't, you're kind of, you don't have a home.
[8:34]And so I'm really grateful that Simon and Schuster is like, we want it.
[8:38]And so I wrote a new one.
[8:40]And it's the biggest one I've ever written.
[8:43]And it includes tons of them written by me, awesome things, like, you know, texting your
[8:48]husband to do something when he's upstairs and you're downstairs, right, adding a gift
[8:53]note to yourself in your online order, carrying the ice cube tray.
[8:57]You don't do that.
[8:58]I don't do that.
[8:59]It's so great when you get it.
[9:00]You're like, oh, yeah.
[9:01]It tears in me.
[9:02]I thought you liked this.
[9:03]Carrying the ice cube tray from the sink to the freezer without spilling, right?
[9:08]Finally unsubscribing from that annoying email you've been getting forever.
[9:11]Right.
[9:12]And so I write these things and you know, what I usually do is I add between 100 and 1000
[9:17]little kind of like a write up, like almost like a blog post, but I purposely stick them
[9:22]in the book without table of contents, without any index, without any dedication, acknowledgements,
[9:28]about the author photo of the author, why do I strip all that out?
[9:31]Because I want it to feel like just a giant thing that just pops into a good mood whenever
[9:37]you need it.
[9:38]So, for example, if you were to read, finally unsubscribing from the annoying email you've
[9:42]been getting forever, it goes.
[9:44]Let freedom ring from the felt covered walls of cubicle farms.
[9:48]Let freedom ring from the dimly lit university dorms.
[9:51]Let freedom ring from phone at the back of the train.
[9:55]Let freedom ring from laptops at the back of the plane, but not only that.
[9:59]Let freedom ring from the back of the plane.
[10:00]in a ring from daily coupon deals,
[10:02]let freedom ring from annual donation appeals,
[10:04]let freedom ring from local sponsorship requests
[10:07]and let freedom ring from spammy marketing contests.
[10:11]And when this happens, when we let freedom ring,
[10:13]let's all join hands in saying free at last,
[10:16]free at last, look at this empty inbox.
[10:18]We are free at last.
[10:20]Awesome.
[10:21]Now they aren't all Martin Luther King, you know, speeches.
[10:24]But that's just, since I mentioned that one,
[10:25]I thought I'd read that one real quickly.
[10:26]And there's just, that's the whole freaking thing.
[10:29]So maybe you're like,
[10:31]well, no wonder the first book did good.
[10:32]It seems, it's not even like a book.
[10:35]It's just like a bunch of stuff stapled together.
[10:37]I mean, that's all it is.
[10:39]And I just came back to it because I needed it myself.
[10:41]And I know from the research we get talk about it
[10:43]if you want, there's all kinds of research and gratitude.
[10:45]There's all kinds of research on awe.
[10:47]And there's all kinds of research on journaling.
[10:48]And there's all kinds of research
[10:49]of sharing positive things socially.
[10:51]All those things loop together means
[10:53]if you pick up the book, you're gonna be happy.
[10:55]This is simple as that, it works.
[10:57]It's medicine.
[10:59]Wow.
[11:00]That's amazing.
[11:00]Did you record the audio book?
[11:02]I have to ask.
[11:03]Yeah, I did.
[11:03]But you know, this book I wanted it to be
[11:05]by Neil Passrich and friends.
[11:08]Yes, I can't even say my own name, right?
[11:09]Neil Passrich and friends.
[11:10]So in the publishers, I know,
[11:12]they're like, yeah, it can be, you know,
[11:14]legally it's not in friends as I said.
[11:15]But although I wrote 80% of them,
[11:17]I had over 10,000 submissions over the past 12 years
[11:20]from people writing their own.
[11:21]And I wanted some of those voices
[11:23]and those comments and those ideas to be in this book.
[11:26]So I've weaved them and they amplify throughout the book.
[11:29]It ends in a culmination of awesome from around the world,
[11:32]where like the last 10 pages of the book
[11:33]are written on a different color paper.
[11:35]It fades to black and the awesome things get smaller
[11:37]and even the back page of the art cover
[11:39]is just another 200 awesome things in one point font
[11:43]that it's a whole best, the whole back cover.
[11:45]That's it, that's all it is.
[11:46]Cause I wanted to feel like a cacophony of awesome
[11:49]amongst in between all these sort of, you know,
[11:51]positively looking people around the world.
[11:54]So I put and friends on the cover.
[11:57]I recorded the introduction.
[11:59]I recorded about 50 of the awesome things myself.
[12:02]But like the book itself,
[12:03]I wanted the audiobook to continue to amplify
[12:06]and reflect more and more diverse voices.
[12:08]So we hired as many actors as the publisher would let me,
[12:10]which is eight and, you know,
[12:12]cause I was inspired by Lincoln and the Bardo,
[12:14]the audiobook from Lincoln and the Bardo
[12:16]tells like 130s of people in it.
[12:18]I don't have the same budget that George Saunders has I guess.
[12:20]So I got eight.
[12:21]And so the eight people plus my voice amplified
[12:24]throughout the book and it sort of feels
[12:26]like a conversation amongst people talking about positivity.
[12:29]I wanted that to be the vision like any artist,
[12:32]like any writer, you know, we'll see how it ends up
[12:35]cause I'm talking to you before pub day,
[12:37]which is December 6th, 2022.
[12:39]But if after pub day that actually worked,
[12:43]then great.
[12:44]And if it didn't, as always, I tried.
[12:46]Yeah.
[12:48]Testing is good.
[12:48]That's the only way you really know.
[12:50]The only way you really know.
[12:51]We try other things made the book a bit smaller this time
[12:54]a little bit more like pockety size,
[12:56]but we kept it as a hardcover cause we wanted to be
[12:58]giftable, right?
[12:59]Cause like, you know, when you give a book of awesome
[13:02]to a teacher or to a sick family member in the hospital,
[13:06]yeah, you want to communicate like,
[13:08]I care about you enough that like, you know,
[13:09]I've got you something sort of, you know, hard hard.
[13:12]That's it for some reason.
[13:14]Like you wouldn't give someone an audio book, right?
[13:17]Like you wouldn't give someone like an ebook.
[13:19]So paperback and hardcover really only giftable book
[13:22]for them.
[13:22]Are they not?
[13:23]I mean, I just have never given something.
[13:25]You think it's an insult to give someone a paper bank?
[13:27]I do not think it's insult to give someone a paper.
[13:29]I'm saying paperback and hardcover
[13:31]the only giftable formats because although ebook
[13:33]and audio book are skyrocketing and popularity,
[13:36]et cetera, have you ever given one as a gift?
[13:38]I don't think so.
[13:39]No, but I think that's because they don't have the right
[13:41]packaging for it yet.
[13:42]I think that's what I'm saying.
[13:43]It could totally do a better job.
[13:44]This is a market opportunity for moms don't have time to.
[13:48]I'm on it.
[13:49]I'm putting it on my, on my master list.
[13:52]That was seriously, there's a real opportunity here.
[13:54]Like there's tons of audio originals, right?
[13:57]That you can't hear anywhere else.
[13:58]If I want this specific Michael Lewis book
[14:01]or Adam Grant book that's only an audio,
[14:03]I should be able to get that as a gift.
[14:05]And then that receiving that gift
[14:06]shouldn't bite me onto the platform, right?
[14:08]Well, they, I mean, you could give them as a gift,
[14:10]but it's just like an email.
[14:11]And so yeah, that's not fun.
[14:13]That's not fun.
[14:14]It's a notch below gift card, which is already bad
[14:16]because it's a little piece of plastic,
[14:18]but you really want something that is wrapped in a box
[14:21]and maybe this is, maybe this is us being
[14:23]two capitalistic and commercial or something.
[14:25]I don't think so.
[14:26]I think we got to run with this sign.
[14:27]I'm loving it.
[14:28]I think you could, I think you could print out
[14:30]like custom barcodes with like,
[14:33]with the unique thing and you would just scan it
[14:35]and get your audio back.
[14:36]Yeah, or you, if you want to go really big,
[14:39]you give someone an audio book device.
[14:43]And headphones.
[14:43]Yeah, and headphones, yeah, that's a good way to do it.
[14:46]You should actually go to the Beats people
[14:49]and ask if you could put your book in
[14:51]with the packaging.
[14:52]See, and now you're talking.
[14:54]Yeah, it's something like that.
[14:55]It's because you still, then you get some physical,
[14:57]and also the other thing I'm pointing out here
[14:59]in my mental exploration with you on this is that
[15:03]I can't listen to anything on my phone.
[15:06]My phone is full of temptation.
[15:10]It's full of temptation.
[15:11]I don't know why Oprah's going around telling people
[15:13]that they should be reading on her iPad,
[15:15]why do Apple pay $100 million,
[15:16]but she shouldn't be doing that.
[15:17]iPad feed you endless text messages, alerts, notifications.
[15:23]Single tasking is the new multitasking.
[15:25]I think if you want to read a book,
[15:27]good luck getting through Anna Kerenina
[15:28]on a device that can text you every 10 seconds.
[15:31]And don't tell me your play mode
[15:32]because it's also just the bright screen.
[15:34]Research from Australia says,
[15:35]if you look at a bright screen an hour before a bit time,
[15:37]your brain doesn't produce as much melatonin overnight.
[15:40]In fact, evolutionary biologists are suggesting that
[15:42]you actually get an increase in energy
[15:44]after you turn off the screen because, you know,
[15:46]your primal brain wants to get the cave
[15:48]in the fire set up before you go, you know,
[15:49]before you go to bed.
[15:50]So what I'm trying to say is we need to get back
[15:54]to reading in formats in ways that are easy on our eyes,
[15:57]that are ideally off screens,
[15:59]and that are single tasking devices.
[16:02]Which, luckily for all of us,
[16:05]books satisfy it actually paper books.
[16:07]Are we trying to bring back the Walkman?
[16:09]Is that really where we're headed?
[16:11]Oh, that's funny.
[16:12]Yeah, that's funny.
[16:13]Well, when I was saying single tasking,
[16:15]I mean, a Kindle is a single tasking device, right?
[16:18]So I think when Bezos came up with that,
[16:21]he had a pretty famous quote,
[16:22]which is he wanted people to have a device
[16:24]that only read books.
[16:26]That was the point.
[16:27]And he used e-paper, so it was easy on your eyes.
[16:29]You can remember the whole ads that were,
[16:30]you can read it in even in bright sun.
[16:33]The whole captivating proposition was that you could
[16:35]read it on a beach.
[16:36]And if San Felona didn't wreck the screen,
[16:39]and you can't do anything else on it.
[16:41]So I actually applaud the Kindle,
[16:43]ironically, because it prevents you from trying to do
[16:47]anything else.
[16:48]And of course, the accessibility is wonderful, right?
[16:50]And I get lots of emails from readers
[16:51]that are like, you know, they want a big font.
[16:54]And that's totally fine.
[16:56]My eyes are on the cusp of falling apart.
[16:58]So I can now totally relate.
[17:00]Cause I'm 43 and I just got glasses again.
[17:03]After getting laser, I served 350 years ago
[17:05]and thinking my eyes were fixed forever.
[17:06]Turns out I was wrong.
[17:07]And now I'm back in glasses world.
[17:08]And now I want big font.
[17:10]Yeah, my font is embarrassingly large.
[17:13]And by the way, my mother flew here yesterday
[17:16]from Arizona.
[17:18]And she was like, sieve, I had the whole,
[17:21]I was ready to listen to your audiobook.
[17:23]The man next to me, we couldn't figure it out.
[17:25]All I kept saying was sample, sample, sample.
[17:27]And for him, I was like, mom, did you ever buy
[17:29]the audiobook?
[17:30]You know, you have to buy it.
[17:31]She's like, um.
[17:33]And she was in the samples.
[17:36]It's not so user friendly.
[17:37]I feel like the audio apps.
[17:39]Yeah, I mean, I can never get my parents
[17:40]to figure that out.
[17:41]I just give them a book.
[17:42]But you know, when I started my podcast three books,
[17:45]I got, and I had one of our values was real books
[17:47]on real pages.
[17:48]I got critical emails from people saying,
[17:51]that's not fair.
[17:52]And so, cause like my original value was
[17:55]real books have real pages.
[17:56]And audio books are beautiful mutants.
[17:59]That's what I called them.
[18:00]But I got really called out by that.
[18:01]So I deleted that value.
[18:03]And now I think you can read any way you want to read.
[18:05]As long as you're reading.
[18:06]Cause you know what, Sieve, you probably know this.
[18:07]Most people probably don't.
[18:09]57% of Americans read zero books last year.
[18:12]That's from the American Time New Survey.
[18:14]It's the highest number in history.
[18:16]And that number has doubled since the 1980s.
[18:18]So let me say one more time for people to say.
[18:20]57% of Americans.
[18:22]The vast majority read zero books last year.
[18:25]Meanwhile, our time on our cell phones is over five hours.
[18:29]Our screen time per day is over 11 hours.
[18:32]And don't look at me and say, oh, well,
[18:34]of course it is.
[18:35]Like yeah, well, seven years ago,
[18:37]it was 18 minutes per day on our cell phones.
[18:40]Like it's skyrocketed.
[18:42]And the attention spans that we're fracturing with TikTok
[18:48]and other social media is truly horrifying.
[18:52]And I applaud the work of Jonathan Hight
[18:54]who lives somewhere down the street from you, NYU,
[18:57]H-A-I-D-T, was working in a book called After Babel.
[19:00]And just about a recent cover story in the Atlantic
[19:02]called House Social Media is fracturing
[19:04]the mortar of society.
[19:05]And he was just featured on 60 Minutes
[19:08]together with Tristan Harris,
[19:09]who's the founder of the Center for Humane Technology,
[19:12]talking about how I'll give you just a couple examples of it.
[19:15]The age of allowing people on social media is 12.
[19:19]Well, that age was come up with in the 1990s.
[19:22]Far before the technologies that were protecting our kids
[19:24]against were developed and turns out
[19:27]the technologies can actually affect the developing brain.
[19:29]And we really shouldn't allow people on social media
[19:31]until at least 16, it should be more like 19 or 21.
[19:35]I mean, there's no reason they shouldn't be thought of
[19:37]as anything different than alcohol, for example,
[19:40]in terms of what they do to the long-term ramifications
[19:42]of their brain.
[19:43]But because as Kevin Kelly says,
[19:45]these technologies are only 5,000 days old.
[19:47]We don't know yet the long-term ramifications.
[19:51]So that's just one that we should be increasing the age.
[19:54]The second thing is every single social media platform
[19:57]needs to have baked in a time use.
[20:00]It should be time-use warnings and shut-offs should be baked into the
[20:05]Does anyone feel good after four hours on Instagram?
[20:08]I have a time. I have a time you salute on my Instagram. So what do you make it for?
[20:12]How much I'm making it for an hour a day? One hour a day. Okay, right. Yeah, I do that on my fantasy
[20:19]And I make it for 15 minutes a day, but the only problem is when it pops up and says you've had 15 minutes
[20:23]I can press a button right there. This says ignore. I do ignore it, but then at least I know you know
[20:29]I know it's I'm I'm hungry to the line. I know but what I'm saying is this is you a very aware and
[20:35]conscious tax-savvy person who's running a podcast and of course is running a big media thing all through Instagram
[20:42]You have come up with a thing and for years the average person and I'm speaking of my own family and friend
[20:49]Like on no chance
[20:50]It comes that no it comes down to the default settings
[20:55]Yeah, if the detail you read when you first get an Instagram account or a TikTok account or a Twitter account
[20:59]It should say okay maximum. You know one hour a day
[21:03]Otherwise if you got a compulsive personality like me
[21:06]You're racked. I'll tell you is it be I have to not only delete all those apps from my phone
[21:10]Which I do I have to then give my actual phone to my wife last day on Friday and say do not give this to me
[21:15]So football sorts on Sunday
[21:17]That's 48 hours. I have to give her my phone every week. Otherwise. I'm compulsively addicted to it
[21:22]It's bad and I've also deleted my email app. I've deleted any news media. I deleted all social media
[21:29]I have nothing on my phone that can get me because otherwise. I won't stop
[21:33]I read a hundred books a year
[21:36]The only way I can do it is by being hardcore on deleting everything else on my phone. Wow
[21:42]Yeah, I think that we forget sometimes that social media is and I don't even know why we're talking about this
[21:48]But it's fun. There's a choice like the that the convenience like getting everything delivered
[21:53]Like I was it's almost the holiday time and when your book is coming out
[21:55]It's like mid holiday season and everything and I'm like it's not as fun to just go on random websites and buy things like
[22:01]It's so much more fun to go to a store in a lot of people pick something out
[22:06]Have that experience like what is productivity? Really? Yeah, activity comes at a cost
[22:11]Well, I just I just bought a book literally yesterday by Jason
[22:15]Gereel called on
[22:17]Browsing the last name is G. You are IEL and it's like a tiny little skin thing
[22:22]And I also am a big fan of the work of David Saxe his last name is s a x and he has a book called the Revenge of Anilon
[22:30]And he has a follow-up about it coming. You should really have a moment. I have I have that here
[22:34]I have that right here, but anyway, gone
[22:36]Well, I'm just saying I think that what you are talking about when I'm talking about with David Saxe is talking about with Jason
[22:42]Gereel something yeah, that's exactly
[22:47]Yeah, you might notice my name on the cover as I've learned it. I didn't but he's coming on great
[22:53]I'm happy to hear that because he's a fellow. He took you off the cover. I hate to tell you
[22:59]It's on the back cover. There you go. Oh, okay. We're demoted. I'm sorry. What does it say?
[23:03]It says there's magic in life. There's magic in real. There is magic in analog
[23:08]This book is allowed in much needed back crack for our twisted techno obsessed society. Oh much needed back crack. That's awesome
[23:15]Okay, yeah
[23:17]By the way, I still didn't even read the one thing I wanted to read you from your book
[23:20]Which says this is my favorite that I'm taking away and maybe listeners can take away
[23:24]When your friend returns your book and they actually read it books
[23:28]Books are personal sanctuaries of secret silent moments lifting you up sending you sideways
[23:33]Staring emotions deep in your soul reading a book feels like an invisible adventure
[23:38]So when a friend returns your copy and tells you they loved the book too
[23:41]It's like they were on the adventure with you
[23:43]Let's expand this adventure together right now because we're all here celebrating life's little moments smile
[23:49]And sense us all around you as we smile and sense you welcome to our book of awesome
[23:54]Aww
[23:56]They knew what pages that what pages that on like 12 or something
[23:59]21 okay, I got the numbers backwards
[24:01]The reason I asked for the page numbers because up until that point of the book readers will observe if they read our book
[24:07]I'm awesome that I wrote all the awesome things and that little tweak is because the next awesome thing has comments on it
[24:14]So then you start to hear the other voices of other readers around the world and then there's letters as the book kind of goes
[24:21]Halfway and then near the end of the book
[24:23]The those people start to submit which means the awesome things have like little bylines on them
[24:28]And as you probably also noticed because you're in a suit reader
[24:31]There's Easter eggs meaning that some pretty cool nonfiction authors if you're in this face like Oliver Berkman
[24:38]Who wrote 4,000 weeks or Seth Godin who lives up the street for me
[24:42]You know who wrote endless books like lynchpin or Ryan Holliday who's kind of the stoic philosopher
[24:47]They wrote awesome things like I put the I just put them in the Emily McDowell wrote one
[24:51]So you know it's just fun. It's just fun a smattering of awesome
[24:56]A much-needed back crack for our our negative success society. I just reuse my own blurb
[25:04]Yeah, we should all floor my own books. I think that would be great. We do. This is like everything is written by us all
[25:10]I know that's true. That's true. I know I guess everything else all the copy
[25:13]Yeah, this is amazing
[25:14]I I view another million copy hit on our hands here
[25:18]And this is a perfect gift for everybody who is scrambling for a holiday gift or a new year's gift or
[25:25]Valentine's or whatever you're looking for birthdays our book of awesome Neil past reach up and friends in italics
[25:32]And now we know why thank you for coming on Neil. Thanks for having me to be keep up the wonderful work
[25:37]You are
[25:38]Amplifying reading to the world and we need it. Thank you. Thank you. You too
[25:43]Bye
[25:45]Thanks for listening to this episode of moms don't have time to read books
[25:48]Don't forget to follow me on instagram at the be Owens and at moms don't have time to read books
[25:54]Also sign up for my newsletter at zbowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on zoom
[26:00]Every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan fact texture sound for the sound editing and thank you to morning moon productions for
[26:06]Providing this fantastic intro and now trim music