Stuff You Should Know

The podcast is way better.

★ ★ 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.