Josh Clark - Stuff You Should Know

Hey and welcome to the book everybody. Were Josh Clark and Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And this is An Incomplete Compendium of Mostly Interesting Things.

Heres the first interesting thing: weve been podcasting since 2008, and weve talked about writing an SYSK book for a long time now, but there came a point a while back when we thought it would never happen and we kind of stopped thinking about it, so were just tickled that it has all finally come together in this book you are holding or listening to right now. Actually, were not exactly sure whats interesting about that little bit of personal trivia, to be honest. We know theres got to be something, though, because we feel like theres something interesting about everything.

Understanding this ideathat theres something interesting about everythingis one of the core beliefs that make up the fabric of the entire Stuff You Should Know universe, and this book is no exception. It has had a profound effect on us as podcasters, as writers, and as humans in the world. And it has informed everything we do, most directly by supercharging a very specific trait we both possess: curiosity.

The belief that there is something interesting about everything has opened our eyes, our ears, and our minds to the world around us in ways we never could have expected before we started working together all those years ago. From the odd to the mundane, from the overlooked to the underappreciated, from the infinite to the infinitesimal; whether it involved a person, place, or thing, whether it was an idea or an event, a process or a system, real or imagined, every day we found something that made us sit up, take notice, and say huh, thats interesting we should talk about that.

Twelve years and 1,300 podcast episodes later, we decided to take the same approach with a book. This book. We said, how about Josh picks thirteen random topics that weve been curious about recently, and Chuck picks fourteen; well see what kind of interesting stuff we can find, and then write about it.

The results, if you are a fan of the show already, will hopefully feel familiar. That was the idea, at least. Theres lots of stuff you should know; theres some weirdness and some humor; there are some counterintuitive explanations, some unexpected realizations, some accidental puns, more than a few awesome band names, a heaping helping of dad jokes, tons of dives down little rabbit holes, and several dozen illustrations by an artist named Carly Monardo that we are totally in love with (the illustrations, not Carly, though she is wonderful and a total badass).

We also worked with a co-writer, a great guy named Nils Parker, who helped us tremendously with research, writing, and generally guiding us through whats what with publishing a book. Having a hired gun to help us out was a tough pill to swallow at first, both of us being writers, but as the book project unfolded in earnest, all of our illusions (delusions, really) quickly fell away and we were grateful for Nilss help right out of the gate. Had he not been around, you might be picking this book up in 2030 rather than 2020. Nils has gotten the SYSK vibe so thoroughly that hes become as much a part of the SYSK gang as Jeri and Frank the Chair, so be sure to add him to your holiday card list.

Together, like a Voltron of edutainment, we pounded out and honed this book into a sword of wisdom for you to wield at the water cooler and at cocktail parties, anywhere you feel like impressing people. Use it wisely.

Oh, and it just so happens that sword analogy is also a really great segue for our next point.

In The Book of Five Rings, the seventeenth-century samurai Miyamoto Musashi wrote, from one thing, know ten thousand things. Musashi was a master swordsman and he knew that discipline fully. But he didnt only know that. He also learned metallurgy to understand how to make the strongest sword; physiology and anatomy to understand the physical vulnerabilities of his opponents; human psychology to understand their mental vulnerabilities; geometry to understand angles of attack; physics to understand leverage. The list almost certainly goes on.

What Musashi was saying is that if you master one thing completely, it will teach you about so many other things in the process. And while we agree with the great samurai and are very grateful that we never faced the slashing end of his fury, we have respectfully chosen to take the opposite approach to knowledge. From the very beginning of Stuff You Should Know, weve had one overarching goal: to teach people as much as we can about the world, one topic at a time. What we learned writing this book is that from ten thousand things (or in this case, twenty-seven things), you can know one thing. And that is, when you look closely enough, everything is connected, one way or another.

Just as with everything else in the world, there is a deep interconnectedness to the randomness within the twenty-seven chapters of this book. You can read it front to back, back to front, or jump around; whichever reading adventure you choose, what you will find are connection points and narrative threads that join them. Thats why each chapter can stand on its own or be read in any order. It just kind of happened that way, and we are pleased as punch that it did.

The first thing youll notice is the first thing we noticed: just how many podcast episodes weve done related to topics that we only touch on in each chapter. These connections back to the show are denoted by a microphone icon and indicate a relevant podcast episode whose title we have listed in the appendix.

What you might then notice is how wide and far these connections go as we move through the chapters and through the world. We go back in time millions of years with prehistoric wildebeest and elephants to learn about water dowsing. We travel trillions of miles into space to better grasp the magnitude and proportion of massive personal wealth. We travel the globe to meet common criminals in Britain, brilliant distillers in Mexico, Benjamin Button mice in Massachusetts, and extraordinary figures from the islands of the South Pacific. Youve got in your hands a guided tour of interconnected time and space, and for a pretty fair price when you consider it like that.

Our hope is that in reading this book you feel more connected to the world around you: to the person next to you on the train and the stranger on the opposite side of the world, to the beginning of human history and to the end of eras you werent alive for, to places you may never go and people you will probably never meet. More than anything, we hope you learn some new stuff along the way. That would be pretty cool, too.

Okay, well, thats probably enough setup, lets start the book already!

Josh Clark & Chuck Bryant

Atlanta, Georgia

Summer 2020