Stuff You Should Know
An Incomplete Compendium of Mostly Interesting Things
Ratings5
Average rating3.8
From the duo behind the massively successful and award-winning podcast Stuff You Should Know comes an unexpected look at things you thought you knew. Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant started the podcast Stuff You Should Know back in 2008 because they were curious—curious about the world around them, curious about what they might have missed in their formal educations, and curious to dig deeper on stuff they thought they understood. As it turns out, they aren't the only curious ones. They've since amassed a rabid fan base, making Stuff You Should Know one of the most popular podcasts in the world. Armed with their inquisitive natures and a passion for sharing, they uncover the weird, fascinating, delightful, or unexpected elements of a wide variety of topics. The pair have now taken their near-boundless "whys" and "hows" from your earbuds to the pages of a book for the first time—featuring a completely new array of subjects that they’ve long wondered about and wanted to explore. Each chapter is further embellished with snappy visual material to allow for rabbit-hole tangents and digressions—including charts, illustrations, sidebars, and footnotes. Follow along as the two dig into the underlying stories of everything from the origin of Murphy beds, to the history of facial hair, to the psychology of being lost. Have you ever wondered about the world around you, and wished to see the magic in everyday things? Come get curious with Stuff You Should Know. With Josh and Chuck as your guide, there’s something interesting about everything (...except maybe jackhammers).
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★ ★ 1/2 (rounded up)
This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader as part of a quick-takes catch up post. The point is to catch up on my “To Write About” stack—emphasizing pithiness, not thoroughness..
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Very little (if any) of this fits into things I should know, and I'm glad the subtitle talks about “Mostly Interesting” things. It's a strange hodgepodge of in-depth look at topics like...the history of facial hair, Murphy beds, Mezcal, and child prodigies.
It was fine, but nothing special. Before I started it, I figured this would end up turning me into a subscriber to the podcast. It didn't, but I can see why people would listen to it—the narrators/hosts are pretty engaging and had an interesting approach to their explanations. Maybe it was these topics, the randomness of the topics, or...I don't know. I just didn't see the point. It made for a good soundtrack to my workday, but within two days, I've pretty much forgotten everything I heard.
This book is exactly what you want. It's the podcast in a longer form. Personally, the spontaneous dynamic of Josh and Chuck interjecting during each other's parts in the podcast is better than them reading their individual sections of the book here. But the stuff they chose here was mostly interesting and the humor was still intact. There were a couple misses for me, though, in terms of stuff they chose I didn't think warranted a chapter in a book over an episode of the podcast. Still an enjoyable read.
