I Recommend

Podcasts

• Change Agent

• Reply all

• Heavyweight

• My Brother My Brother and Me*

• Doughboys*

Nonfiction Books

• Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

• Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb

• On Writing by Stephen King

• How to Think by Alan Jacobs

• The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

Fiction Books

• The Shining by Stephen King*

• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

• Hits & Misses by Simon Rich

• Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Poems

• Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

• Good Bones by Maggie Smith

• The Nail by C.K. Williams

• The Swan at Edgewater Park by Ruth L. Schwartz

• This Room and Everything in It by Li-Young Lee

Documentaries

• Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

• The Devil and Daniel Johnston

• Finders Keepers*

• Three Identical Strangers

• Tickled*

If you want to become a comedian

• Buy a notebook

• Watch the documentary Comedian on Netflix

• Watch the documentary A Piece of Work

• Listen to Good One: a Podcast About Jokes, specifically the Gary Gulman episode

• Read Lose Well by Chris Gethard

If you want to become a speaker or author or just build a “platform”

• Read Show Your Work by Austin Kleon

• Subscribe to Kleon’s newsletter to see how applies his own advice

• Read Kleon’s post on why you should start daily blogging

• Start blogging

• Don’t know what to write? Read Kleon’s post on how Your Output Depends on Your Input

*I’ll just warn you that there’s some crude language in this recommendation