The Tim Ferriss Show - #588: A.J. Jacobs — How to Be Less Furious and More Curious

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Starting point is 00:04:59 AJ Jacobs. AJ Jacobs is a bestselling author, journalist, and human guinea pig. Now, all of you long-term listeners will know I do not apply that term, that label, lightly, but in this case, it applies. He has written four New York Times bestsellers, including one of my favorites, The Year of Living Biblically, for which he followed all of the rules of the Bible as literally as possible, including, I should mention, Stoning Adulterers. You'll have to read it to get that. And Thanks a Thousand, for which he went around the world and thanked every person who had even the smallest role in making his morning cup of coffee possible. I thought about this morning as I had my coffee. He has given four TED Talks with a combined 10 million plus views. He contributes

Starting point is 00:05:39 to NPR and the New York Times and wrote the article, My Outsourced Life, which was featured in the 4-Hour Workweek. What a title, 4-Hour Workweek. Who wrote that? Sounds like an infomercial. He was once the answer to one down in the New York Times crossword puzzle. You can find my 2016, good Lord, that's a long time ago, interview with AJ, where we cover a lot of backstory, a lot of our shared converging paths in life at Tim.blog slash AJ. You can find them online, ajjacobs.com. The website for the new book is thepuzzlerbook.com, and we'll link to all the social as well, but it tends to be AJ Jacobs on Twitter, Facebook, etc. And AJ, it is so lovely to see you again I am so delighted to be back and first I have to say thank you because for many things but one is that beloved entertainer Hugh Jackman

Starting point is 00:06:35 read my book on gratitude because of you you know he's a huge listener and he put it on Instagram and that was the first time in my life that my kids showed a modicum of respect to me because Wolverine said that my book was okay. So I'm indebted. Thank you. You're most welcome. Hugh is a sweet guy. And that was thanks a thousand or which book was it? You have many books. Yeah, it was thanks. And he's also into coffee. He has a coffee company. So it all worked together. That all the colliding worlds collide yet again, as the world gets smaller and smaller,

Starting point is 00:07:14 it seems, every day. AJ, you are prolific. And I wanted to start with a bit of a flashback, and then we'll come to presence. So I have read, this is on 80,000hours.org, and we may have covered quite a bit of this in our first conversation because we did discuss creative process and writing process, which I'm sure we'll touch on here again, that at least with some of your books, you've had a spreadsheet, and you send the manuscript out to say 20 friends who are nice enough to read it. And you'll ask each of them to tell you their five favorite parts, five least favorite parts. And then you sort of look for patterns to make decisions on what to cut or keep. And I'm curious to know what, you can answer this in either order, but what got cut from the puzzler that you really hoped

Starting point is 00:08:06 would make it? And then what ended up being a fan favorite, a proofreader favorite? I might well have gotten that strategy from you. I do something very similar. Yes, I do something very similar. Okay. Thank you. I'm giving you full credit now.

Starting point is 00:08:21 Well, the weird thing is that strategy usually does work. With this book, it was a complete failure because everyone has their own favorite type of puzzle, and I cover 20 different types of puzzles. So there are people who love crosswords, Sudokus, jigsaws, logic, secret codes, and everyone was like, this is the best chapter and this one sucks, and they were all over the map. There was no way to see the signal in the noise. And it was a huge flop. Spreadsheet fail. Spreadsheet fail. All right. So now just for people who don't have any context, the Puzzler subtitle, you are, and I also don't, the stow sounds a little grandiose, use this, I wouldn't say this this lightly and that is you are a

Starting point is 00:09:05 master of subtitles and subtitles are important they're long well yes they are long maybe i think that's that's part of the affinity i like long subtitles too one man's quest to solve the most baffling puzzles ever from crosswords crosswords i got a little elmer fun from crosswords to jigsaws to the meaning of life so there's's a lot to unpack there. What made the shortlist of possible next books for you and how did you settle on The Puzzler? Well, it's interesting. I actually worked on another book for three months and abandoned it right in the middle because I was miserable. And one of the big themes of the puzzler is you got to be flexible. You got to pivot. You got to always be open to new ideas. And this was an example of it. I still think it's an interesting idea. The idea was,

Starting point is 00:09:57 it was called tentatively fact-checking my life. And it was about the post-truth crisis. So what do we know and how do we know it? How do I know that the world is round? How do I know that my wife loves me? She says she loves me. I don't know. How do I know anything? And I was working on it and I was just miserable because I felt I didn't know anything and it was freaking me out. So I may come back to it. But my agent said, you know, you love puzzles. He knows that that's my obsession. And he said, why don't you just do a book about your true passion? And I thought it was fascinating because in a sense, I have loved puzzles since I was a kid. And all of my books are about metaphorical puzzles, like The Year of Living

Starting point is 00:10:46 Biblically was about the puzzle of religion. The Gratitude book was How Do You Be More Grateful in This World, where it's sometimes very difficult to be grateful. And this one, I was like, all right, I'm going to stop beating around the bush. I'm going to focus on literal puzzles, and why do I love them? Why do millions love them? What can they teach us? And how can they make us better thinkers? And so I went all in for two years, just a deep dive, and I got to meet crazy people and do puzzles as my job. So I was super grateful. You've been described as the George Plimpton of thought experiments, which I think is pretty apt. And for people who don't know George Plimpton, worth checking him out, but he would, I think he did a few rounds with

Starting point is 00:11:28 Sonny Liston, which if you don't know that name, you can look it up. But suffice to say, punches a lot harder than George Plimpton, professional boxer, and then would write about the experience or become a professional football player for a period of time and then write about the experience. I wouldn't say that what you do is purely mental, but it sounds almost like what you attempted with the fact-checking book was similar to someone else you have quite a bit of respect for. I'm blanking on her name, but a female writer who did quite a lot of, let's call it, immersive journalism. One experiment of which was admitting herself to a mental hospital to show the abuses therein. Oh, right. This was from the 1800s, not current.

Starting point is 00:12:09 No, this is not current. And I was just thinking, I was thinking as I did a little bit of research and she popped up, you having mentioned her once before, that getting admitted is the easy part. How do you, especially as a woman in the 1800s, get yourself out of a situation like that? But if you're the one imposing insanity or in the form of not knowing what is true or what is not, what is real or what is not, when you're fact-checking your life, I can see how that would be very anxiety-producing as a first attempt i have two comments first of all thank you for saying i'm the george plinton uh it was written somewhere i prefer to my think of myself as the less successful tim because you are the master of uh of life experiments and uh and i'm just trying to keep up with you i just go for the cheap applause with fat loss and writing about sex and NFTs and so on. So you're taking the more honorable paths. I don't know. Less successful, but honorable. And yes, that woman you mentioned was Nellie Bly. And she was a great character.

Starting point is 00:13:17 I don't know. There should be a movie about her. When the book Around the World in 80 Days, she actually did it. She's like, all right, I'm going to do it. So she was sort of the original guinea pig. And she also did a very Tim Ferriss experiment, I think, where she decided to write an article about, this might be a little apocryphal, but I think it's true, about why there are not more women in journalism. And she got an interview with all of the editors-in-chief of all the major newspapers in New York. And that's how she made the connection. And they're like, oh, yeah, maybe we should hire. So that's how she got her job. That, to me, is sort of how you came out of

Starting point is 00:13:56 being a first-time writer and four-hour workweek mega blockbuster. You met people, you approached me. I didn't do much for you, but other people did. Well, I would refute that you didn't do much for me. A, you were very generous with your time, and I think, were you working on the year of living biblically at the time? You might have been. So I caught you in a period where I think you were trying very hard to be compassionate. You're already a nice guy, but I may have caught you in a really good window. But you were very helpful, and you gave me a lot of great advice when I was writing. I remember the coffee shop in Buenos Aires where I was, and whenever it was, 2005, 2006,

Starting point is 00:14:36 when we were chatting. It must have been via Skype or something at the time. So I owe you thanks for that. So puzzles. I have, I don't want to say abandoned, but I was, when young, a fan of all sorts of puzzles. And I think as I got older, somehow convinced myself that I shouldn't spend time on certain frivolous activities, after college anyway, and have let certain muscles atrophy.

Starting point is 00:15:01 Perhaps you could just give us a little context, and you can tackle it any way you want, as to why puzzles are important or meaningful or valuable. And you could do that via telling a story, giving us some historical context, any way you'd like to tackle that. I think that puzzles are the opposite of frivolous, and I hope that I can entice you to come back. First of all, you do, even though you say you don't do puzzles, you do puzzles because you're one of the most curious guys I've ever met and innovative thinkers. And that is the essence of puzzles. It's a problem where you use curiosity and innovative thinking to solve it. You do puzzles even if you don't

Starting point is 00:15:39 think so. And these little puzzles, like crosswords and logic of secret codes, they're just ways to help you come up with strategies to solve the big problems in life. So little puzzles help you with the big puzzles. I've always loved puzzles, and I never lost my obsession. About five years ago, as you mentioned in your intro, I was the answer to a clue in the New York Times crossword puzzle, one down, author A.J. Blank. And as a word nerd, I was like, this is the greatest moment in my life. This is better than my kids being born, my marriage. And then my brother-in-law pointed out correctly, if a little ungenerously, that I appeared in the Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle. And if you know anything about crosswords in the New York Times, Saturday is the hardest,

Starting point is 00:16:29 harder than Sunday. All the answers are totally obscure. No one knows them. So, his point was, this is not a compliment. This is proof you're totally obscure. No one knows who you are. So, I told that story on a podcast, and it happened that a New York Times crossword constructor was listening and saved me and put me in a Tuesday puzzle, which I don't belong in. That's where, like, you might belong, where Lady Gaga, but not me. So I didn't belong, but I loved it. And that reignited. I had done a little less obsession. I was like, oh, man.

Starting point is 00:17:03 So I started doing the crossword every day, hoping to reappear after that Saturday. But I'm not monogamous. I'm promiscuous. I love all kinds of puzzles, except I did not love jigsaws, which we can get into until this project. And now I have tremendous respect for jigsaws, which is all about flexible thinking, as we mentioned, being okay with being wrong. How does one compete in the World Jigsaw Puzzle Championships? So this, I believe, was in Spain. What does such a competition look like? Because I can imagine that many people cannot imagine, including myself, what that looks like. And this is true for a lot of competitions, right? There are memory competitions and there are different events. It's kind of like a decathlon of attentional focus and so on. But what does a jigsaw puzzle championship look like?

Starting point is 00:17:54 I was totally surprised because I always think of it as a relaxing meditative. So it's like a meditation competition or a napping competition. But I found out about it because I was Googling. First of all, one of the first facts about jigsaws is that Hugh Jackman is a huge fan. Huge. He spent about 10 minutes of maybe 15 on our podcast, he and I together, talking about jigsaw puzzles. So yes, huge jigsaw puzzle fan. But one of the other results, this was right before the pandemic, was that there was a world championship in Spain and it listed all of the countries that were competing. And there were tons of them. There were 40 countries,

Starting point is 00:18:37 Mexico, Japan, Uganda, but no USA. So on a whim, I fill out the form and figure that'll be the first of this long process to qualify. I get back an email the next day, you are Team USA. And I'm like, oh, why? That's not good. The next day, no due diligence at all. It was a disaster. Yeah. And as I said, I didn't love jigsaw. I thought they were, I was a snob. I thought they were too easy. They were not sophisticated. So I was like, oh God. So I recruited my family to be as a four-person team.

Starting point is 00:19:13 And we flew to Spain. And you have eight hours to finish four giant jigsaw puzzles. And I'm sorry. I apologize to my fellow Americans because we came in second to last. We beat one of the Spanish hometown teams. So that's something. Despite the humiliation, I loved it because it was just so fascinating for so many reasons. First, just being able to see people at the top of the LeBron Jameses of Jigsaw. So even if jigsaw, as you think, is a silly pastime, seeing anyone, and you know this, you've interviewed, that's sort of the premise. You interview the top people of every category, and you're going to learn something from them. The Russian team, these women, four women from Siberia finished in just over four hours. The whole thing.

Starting point is 00:20:10 Their hands were moving so fast. And there were rumors of doping, but not confirmed. Another part I loved was just meeting people from all over the world united by this weird obsession. I talk about jigsaw diplomacy. I actually, I felt I was a little ahead of the curve because I have a paragraph in the book about how much I hate Putin. This was long before the Ukraine. Yeah, before it was cool. And I say, but I can't hate these people because I'm here and face to face and they're humans. And I am hoping that they're some of the millions who oppose what

Starting point is 00:20:45 Putin is doing now, but it was sort of what I call jigsaw diplomacy. So it was a wonderful experience. And also learning, like in everything, there are strategies you think, oh, it's just putting together. And the strategies are sometimes surprising. You don't always, everyone's like, oh, do the edges first. No, not necessarily. Some puzzles, if they are very colorful, you do the colors first. Sometimes you focus on shapes. If you're hit with the sky, like a huge expanse of blue, you've got to sort them by shapes. So this one has two outies and one innie. So it was just wonderful to see the nuances of this delightful and ridiculous competition. It was one of my favorite experiences. I have a number of questions about this.

Starting point is 00:21:32 The first is, how do you delegate or divide and conquer as a team? Because I can imagine if four people were just let loose, having no strategy, trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle, It might take longer than just one person trying to do it if you don't have some type of plan going into it. And second, I'm just curious, did you notice any sponsors? I'm just wondering what kind of financial support is offered to the World Jigsaw Puzzle Championships? I'm guessing it's not BMW. I'm just curious. I know. Maybe not yet, but this was right before the COVID when jigsaws experienced a boom during COVID, not seen since the Great Depression. So they became harder to get than Clorox wipes.

Starting point is 00:22:17 So maybe now they could be sponsored by VN Velvety. But then, yes, the only sponsor was the puzzle company itself, Ravensburger, sadly. So I didn't make a huge amount of money on it. It's the second to last finisher. Yeah, well, I feel it's something. Oh, you finished. You finished. No, it's a thing. So for strategies, what do you do as a team? Well, you're absolutely right. That was the secret that the Russians had. They told me it's all about division of labor, like in many endeavors. So there was one woman who specialized

Starting point is 00:22:51 in sorting colors, another sorted shapes, another sorted what was good at the edges, and another was really good at the trial and error. Because I often, you know, I'm afraid to put something down if I don't think. She was like, no, just do it. Just be okay with failing. You know, she put things, she'd try it. No. Next one? No.

Starting point is 00:23:17 Next one? Yes. So, yeah, it was fascinating to see the division. And I found that as a theme throughout puzzle solving. I went to this one event that was sort of the Ironman triathlon for nerds. It was called a puzzle hunt. And it was at MIT, 2,000 people, like real rocket scientists. And they come together for 72 hours and solve the hardest, craziest, most baffling, nonsensical

Starting point is 00:23:43 puzzles that involve advanced calculus and Justin Bieber's tour schedule and just the most random things you can think of. And you need 50 people on a team. The teams are 50 people because you needed specialists in all these areas. So yes, sort of a diversification and having different people do different things is a big theme, I think, in puzzles and life. I do have a number of friends or have known people through my life who have been, I don't think obsessed is an overstatement, obsessed with puzzles of different types.

Starting point is 00:24:19 I wanted to get the attribution right. One of them was one of the most curious and intelligent people i've ever met john horton conway and i'm looking at his wikipedia unfortunately he passed away some time ago but english mathematician active in the theory of finite groups not theory number theory combinatorial game theory and coding theory he was in cam Cambridge and then moved to the US and helped John von Neumann, I'm guessing that's how that's pronounced, professorship at Princeton University. And he could recite pi to several thousand digits and he would do it musically. I think he and his partner did that together as they would go for walks. And he was so, what struck me about him, I'm not saying the puzzles are entirely causal here,

Starting point is 00:25:06 right? There's a lot going into this, but he was very childlike in two respects. A is enthusiasm for any type of puzzle. They could be mathematical, could be societal, it could be a physical game. He had physical games all over his office. And he was also very, very good at explaining complex concepts simply. And I remember for a period of time, he did public lectures on mathematics and they were standing room only. And people would come from all over the place, from all different walks of life. So that is to say my connotation with puzzles also is very positive, even though I have let my muscles maybe atrophy when working with what we would consider formal games like jigsaw puzzles and so

Starting point is 00:25:51 on. The connotation is really positive. I'm wondering what you have observed over the process of working on this book, writing this book, engaging with all the puzzles, about your own thought processes or how the working on the small puzzles has helped with other types of puzzles? Well, first of all, he sounds great. I'm sorry he's not around. I would have interviewed him. And I agree. What you characterize is the enthusiasm and curiosity. I love that. To me, two of the big themes of this book in terms of thought processes are curiosity and flexible thinking. And I love, you know, you're one of the most curious people. I think it's one of the greatest drives that humans have, along with gratitude. Gratitude

Starting point is 00:26:36 and curiosity to me are two amazing forces. And actually, I interviewed Alex Trebek, the late, great Alex Trebek from Jeopardy once, and he said a quote that I still think about all the time. Even though it doesn't quite make sense, it still totally makes sense to me. And that quote is, I'm curious about everything, even the most boring things. And I love that because I think it's true. Whatever the topic is, you are going to, if you dig a little, you're going to find fascinating. And in fact, I once thought of trying like a challenge where I write a book about the most stereotypically boring thing in the world. Maybe it's accounting. And try to make it interesting because I'm sure it is. It's not about numbers. It's about people. It's about people.

Starting point is 00:27:25 It's about actions and business and love and hate. So anyway, curiosity, I think puzzles just fuel my curiosity. And as I said, I see the world as a puzzle. I have what I like to call the puzzle mindset, which is, I think, so important when you are looking at world problems to adopt the puzzle mindset, which is opposed to the motivated reasoning or anger mindset. There's a child psychologist I saw who said, don't get furious, get curious as parenting advice. But I think that's great life advice because that really is, if you're going to solve a problem, curiosity is the way to do it, not anger. Anger gives you tunnel vision., if you're going to solve a problem, curiosity is the way to do it, not anger. Anger gives you tunnel vision. Like if I'm talking to someone from the opposite side of

Starting point is 00:28:10 the political spectrum, instead of seeing it as a debate, a war of words, I try to see it as a puzzle that we can try to solve together. What is our real differences and how can we overcome them? Is there any evidence I can present to him or her to make her change her mind? How do we solve this puzzle? That, to me, is sort of the big thesis thrust of the book. Don't get furious. Well, get a little furious. Sometimes you need to, but balance it with curiosity.

Starting point is 00:28:40 What were some of the, I would imagine you still outline your books quite a bit, think about the structure in advance. Were there any particular twists or turns or surprises or things that you found surprising in the process of putting this book together? You're right. That structure to me is everything. And I have to structure, like my book on health, which was the much less selling four-hour body version. I structured it by body parts. So, you know, a part on stomach health, what you eat and lung health, how you work out, but even hand health and butt health, like, you know, how you go to the bathroom. And I will say I missed a huge opportunity. I didn't have an appendix. I should have had an appendix about appendix. What was I thinking? But anyway, so many surprises. And I think that for me, writing is a combination

Starting point is 00:29:36 of knowing where I'm going. I do structure it and outline it very thoroughly, but also allowing for some surprises and twists and turns. Like, for instance, I have a chapter on this crazy unsolved puzzle, which is located at the headquarters of the CIA. And I got permission after months to visit the CIA and see this puzzle in person. And I decided afterwards, like, how should I write this? And I decided, I'm going to write it like a thriller, like a spy thriller. So that chapter almost, I tried to make it read like a spy thriller. And that was not planned. But it is a fascinating, and we can talk about it. It's called Crypto. It's one of the craziest puzzles known. Why is there a puzzle at the CIA? So yes, let's talk about it. What is this? And why is it housed at the CIA. So yes, let's talk about it. What is this and why is it housed at the CIA?

Starting point is 00:30:27 It's one of my favorite chapters because yeah, it was commissioned 32 years ago by the CIA. They wanted to spruce up their grounds. And this guy, a sculptor teamed with an ex-CIA cryptographer, and they made the sculpture, which is basically a huge metal wall with thousands of letters on it. And the letters are a secret code. And they thought it would be solved in like a week. It's been 32 years, and no one, including the CIA, which is right there, has been able to solve it fully. They have solved parts of it. And part of it seems to indicate that there's something buried on the grounds of the CIA, and we don't know what it is. It could be treasure. It could be

Starting point is 00:31:09 the poison cigar we gave Castro. Who knows? What I love about it is many things. But one thing I love about it is that there's a group of thousands of people, I'm on the online group, that spend their days, hours a day, trying to crack this code. And 32 years they've been working at it. So that to me is like the true puzzle mindset of grit. When I help my kids with math homework and I give up after like three minutes, I now have to say, these folks have been working for 32 years on this problem. I'm going to give it another couple of minutes. So yeah, cryptos is a fantastic puzzle. And I will say just one addendum. The sculptor is not just a genius coder and sculptor. He's also a great businessman. And I think you'll appreciate this. He got sick

Starting point is 00:31:58 and tired because he would get dozens of emails every day saying, is the answer this? Is the answer that? So he decided, I will answer you yes or no, but you have to pay me $50. Genius. PayPal me. So he makes, who knows how much, hundreds of dollars a day just starting, nope, that's not right. I'm wondering if this sculptor is also just the most epic troll of all time in the sense that he just created a nonsensical- That is such a great point. the most epic troll of all time in the sense that he just created a nonsensical piece of work that

Starting point is 00:32:28 cannot be broken because there is no message, in which case he's just created this amazing annuity stream for himself that's lasted 32 years. I know. Can you imagine? It is possible. There is historical precedent for that. The most famous puzzler of the 1900s was this guy. He was like the Will Shorts of his day, the New York Times Will Short. He sold millions of this puzzle called the 15 puzzle, which you've probably seen as a kid. It's the little tiles. He moved the tiles around. They numbered one through 15, and you have to make them in a square. And he had a contest where he would give, I believe it was $10,000

Starting point is 00:33:07 at the time, which was huge, that if someone solved this particular arrangement, they would win the money. But what he didn't tell them is that half of the initial arrangements are impossible to solve, just mathematically impossible to solve. And he put it in one of those. So he was like a super troller from that era. And I will say just, I have a contest. There's a secret hidden code in the book. And if you put it into the website, you can do these puzzles and try to win $10,000. I am not a troll. They have an actual answer. so there is a real contest and I think actually since you are first out of the gate I think you might be the first time I've I've mentioned it fantastic well there you have it folks and this brings up sort of a a more meta commentary on the book which is not just about puzzles it includes quite a lot of puzzles. So you mentioned the sculptor, you mentioned this

Starting point is 00:34:06 puzzler and the 15. What makes a puzzler? If you were doing, let's just say like a CIA profile, looking for patterns across the puzzlers, what makes a good puzzler? Because you were helped in this book by master puzzle maker, Greg Pliska. Am I saying that name correctly? Yes, yes. There are hundreds of historical puzzles, but also a bunch of new puzzles by Greg, who's amazing. And I would say I actually tried to make some puzzles. My wife has a company, Watson Adventures, that puts on scavenger hunts, and she hired me by not paying me to make a bunch of puzzles. And I think they're okay, the puzzles, but I don't have it in me because you do need a certain level of sadism.

Starting point is 00:34:49 You need to be okay with putting people through the pain because that's what people want. They want to experience pain and then the release from pain. They want that dopamine hit. I don't know if you've had him on the podcast, Paul Bloom, great writer. He wrote a book about, as humans, why do we want to do these painful, why do we run marathons? Why do we do puzzles? Why S&M? And it's a lot about

Starting point is 00:35:12 this idea of we are programmed to struggle, struggle, struggle, and then get that payoff. You have to struggle to get that dopamine hit, but you have to be a little sadistic to be a great puzzler. I didn't have it in me. So I stick with the masochism of doing puzzles. Small business owners juggle a hundred balls and don't have time to interview unqualified or even underqualified job candidates. LinkedIn Jobs makes it easier for you to find the people you should interview faster and for free. Create a free job post in minutes on LinkedIn Jobs to reach the world's largest professional network of more than 770 million people. Then add that job and the purple hashtag hiring frame to your LinkedIn profile to spread the word that you're hiring so your network can help you find the best applicants for the position.

Starting point is 00:36:10 Simple tools like screening questions make it easy to focus on candidates with just the right skills and experience so you can quickly prioritize who you'd like to interview and possibly hire. It's for all of these reasons and more that small businesses rate LinkedIn Jobs number one in delivering quality hires versus leading competitors. LinkedIn Jobs helps you more quickly find the candidates you want. Did you know that every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash Tim. That's linkedin.com slash Tim to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. What other attributes do you spot, whether those are innate nature, God-given attributes,

Starting point is 00:36:57 or developed skills in people who are good at creating puzzles? Or is it just sheer volume of exposure? These have to be people who have digested and seen a million varieties of puzzles. How would you describe as a category, or Greg specifically, what are the ingredients that make a good puzzler? I do believe anyone can be a good puzzler if you can tolerate the sadism. But I would say, yeah, the idea for curiosity and innovative thing, I mean, the best puzzles are the ones that just make you go, oh my God, why didn't I see that? And it's something in your mind you feel you should have known. And you're like, oh, that is

Starting point is 00:37:37 so clever, as opposed to crappy puzzles where you're like, oh, that wasn't fair. Or they're just boring, like an escape room where you have a hundred keys and you have to try every key in the lot. That's just busy work. That's just like doing the dishes. The key is the leap, that leap of ingenuity. The cliche is outside the box. Think outside the box, which actually comes from a puzzle. That's where it originates. The puzzle has nine dots, three on each row, and you have to draw four lines to connect all the dots. To connect them all. And the only way to do it is to go, you've drawn the line so far outside

Starting point is 00:38:18 the box that the diagonals line up. Wow, I didn't realize that's the origin of that expression. That's cool. I did not know that. Yeah, think outside the box. mRNA vaccine was thinking outside the box. Make just part of the virus so that it kicks in the immune system. Don't make the whole virus. That was a leap. That was a brilliant way to approach it. So what are some techniques, mental strategies, anything that we can borrow from solving puzzles, making puzzles either, and apply in other areas? I got some for you. I thought you might.

Starting point is 00:38:58 I have four or five that I thought we could go through that, to me, illuminate some of the best strategies. So let me start with a little puzzle and we'll work through it together because I am very bad at doing puzzles on the spot and the stress. So I don't want to put you, I know you're brilliant. We all know that. This is cultivate your inner sadist. I mean, maybe it'll make you a better puzzle maker. So this is a puzzle that's based on a famous story of a German mathematician named Gauss in the 1700s. And he was nine years old in school.

Starting point is 00:39:32 And the teacher said, the assignment is add up all of the whole numbers from one to 100 and tell me the answer. And two seconds later, Gauss raises his hand. And the teacher's like, what the hell? You couldn't have done it. And Gauss says, nouss raises his hand and the teacher's like, what the hell? You couldn't have done it. And Gauss says, no, I did it. So the puzzle is how did he do it? How did he add up one through a hundred? I'm going to just go straight. Yeah. Let's skip to straight no chaser. Let's get to the spoiler. The default way, which is what I thought. And most people, you add 1 plus 2 is 3, 1 plus 2 plus 3, 3 plus 3 is 6, and you just go straight through.

Starting point is 00:40:12 But Gauss realized there's a better method because 1 plus 100 is 101, 2 plus 99 is 101, 3 plus 98 is 101. So you take these pairs and they're 50 pairs. So 50 times 101, that's not that hard. 5,050. That's the answer. So to me, this is a very Tim Ferriss way to think. What he did was he didn't immediately dive into solving the problem and doing the busy work. He took a step back and he said, what is the meta strategy? What's my goal? What is a better way to solve this problem? And many of your books have a lot of this, the four-hour work week. What is the real goal? Is the goal to have as many clients as possible, or is it to have a good life and make enough money? So fire those pain-in-the-ass clients. To me, that is a very Gaussian way.

Starting point is 00:41:06 Wow. How old? Nine years old? Good Lord. You know, who knows how true it is. Yeah, for sure. But it makes for a good story. Am I making this up? Is this the Gaussian distribution? I wonder. Yeah, the Gaussian distribution, which is a normal distribution. I won't take us too far down that rabbit hole. All right, so Gauss, nine-year-old one, Tim Ferriss, zero. But I appreciate the approach. It is very Abraham Lincoln, too. And of course, probably apocryphal.

Starting point is 00:41:37 Maybe it's attributed to Groucho Marx or Gandhi online, because those tend to be three of the top sort of blanket attributions. But if I have four hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend the first three hours sharpening the ax. So thinking about the meta strategy and the right tool for the job. I love that. Yeah, that's a good point. All right, can I give you another?

Starting point is 00:41:58 Oh, no, I didn't think to interrupt. God damn it, AJ. You're always interrupting me on this podcast when I'm supposed to be asking you questions. Please continue. Yes, number two. solutions. And I'll give you a puzzle example and then a real life example. So the puzzle example is I have a section on British crosswords, which are insane, crazy, much harder than Americans. They have all these weird, obscure word plays and you don't know what's going on. So for instance, one of the clues in the British crossword was the letters, four letters, G-E-G-S, G-E-G-S. And I'm like, what is a gag? So I focus, what is a gag? And I look it up. I even use Google, which I try not to do. And it's the symbol for the Portland airport is a gag.

Starting point is 00:43:00 And there are a couple other like urban dictionary gags that maybe are not appropriate. So anyway, I'm like, focus, what is a gag? And I finally just give up after half an hour and take a break. I don't give up. I take a break, which is also a huge puzzle and problem solving strategy. Take a break because it resets your mind. Leonardo da Vinci talked about taking breaks. So I took a break and I came back and I was like, maybe it's not a gag. Maybe there's something in the letters. And eventually I noticed that gags, if you rearrange them, is eggs, E-G-G-S. So the answer is scrambled eggs. Gags is scrambled eggs, which was annoying, but also brilliant. But that to me is the key. Don't lock in on your thesis. Have it provisional. Always be open to new ways of looking at it.

Starting point is 00:43:56 Jigsaws is an example. I hated jigsaws and I found that they are incredibly subtle and interesting. Or I was obsessed with ending this puzzle book in a certain way. And I was talking to my son and he's like, I don't know, that doesn't sound great. So I totally abandoned that. So yeah, flexible thinking, loosely held belief. I am a big fan of some beliefs you should hold deeply, like don't be an asshole. That belief to me is like, that's sacrosanct. But many other beliefs I have are just provisional probabilistic. Why are jigsaw puzzles called jigsaw puzzles? Is the jigsaw a tool they use to cut the pieces?

Starting point is 00:44:33 What is that? Well, originally, yes. Yes, it was. They made them out of wood and they used a jigsaw, which is a saw. I think it's sort of in the shape of a question mark with a saw and you carve it and there still are hand carved wooden puzzles there's one of the chapters I go to this crazy company in Vermont that makes hand carved wooden puzzles that are insanely expensive like they go up to ten thousand dollars oh they must yeah Bill Gates is a fan The guy who owns it calls himself the chief tormentor because they're

Starting point is 00:45:10 not regular puzzles. He is sadistic. He loves his sadism because they're totally different than normal puzzles. They have holes in them. They have pieces that don't fit. They have pieces that go three-dimensional. So yeah, I am a big fan. That's called Steve Puzzles. So, if you have enough money, check it out. Pete Tormenter. Oh, Tormenter. Pretty close, pretty close. Tormenter. I mean, Tormenter is like what an older sibling does to a younger sibling. I guess a little less intense than torture, but nonetheless. All right. So, what else do you

Starting point is 00:45:45 idea? Another? Yeah, another, please. All right. Well, this one I love. The idea is to reverse your thinking, to think upside down, to think totally differently. So, I'll give you a riddle, a classic riddle. There's a man in a room. The walls are cement and the floor is dirt. And the only opening is this locked door in the room and a skylight. The man has a shovel and he starts to dig. He knows it's impossible to tunnel out, but he continues to dig anyway. So what's going on? Why does he keep digging, even though he knows he can't tunnel out? So this one I'm going to admit I know the answer to. So I don't want to do too much thinking of the academy for my acting as I pretend like I don't know the answer. But

Starting point is 00:46:30 why don't you explain it? And then I'll have a little bit of commentary because I love these types of riddles. And when I was younger, I actually did. And by younger, I mean even up through high school and maybe even early college, love these types of riddles that force you to check a lot of your assumptions about whatever you've just heard. So why don't you unpack that? I'm very impressed with your honesty. It's actually just a quick side note. on escape rooms and the escape room owners tell me that there's always a guy who comes every week with a date a new woman and pretends that it's his first time at the escape room and she's supposed to be like wow you can solve the nato alphabet i want to go to bed with you

Starting point is 00:47:21 i guess that's the theory. But anyway. It's quite a racket that guy's running. No, it's like dozens of guys across the country. They all say they have one. So the idea, the way to do this is to reverse your thinking. So instead of focusing on the fact that he's digging a hole, what else is he doing? He's doing the opposite. He's building a mountain, a little mountain of dirt, and he's going to climb that mountain and get to the skylight. And I love this because I use it in everyday life. I use it collecting the laundry. I reverse my thinking. And this one came up yesterday. Hold on, hold on. Collecting the laundry? How do you apply it? Please explain the collecting the laundry. Well, sure. I live with three teenage boys, so there are clothes every corner. So I used to go around and collect an arm load and put them in the hamper in our bedroom. But I realized, what if I took the hamper with me and put the clothes in so I don't have to make as many trips? So I reversed it. I was like, bring the hamper to the clothes. So yes, I am a genius.

Starting point is 00:48:25 That is the conclusion. But to give you another example that's maybe more important, my son said to me yesterday, if the power goes out, what's to stop the elevator from plummeting to the basement and killing us? And I looked it up, and it turns out that elevator brakes work the opposite of the way you think. The default is that the elevator brakes are clamped on the elevator and they only are released when there's an electric current. So the electromagnetism opens them up. So if the electricity goes out, if there's a blackout, the brakes automatically clamp on, which is the opposite of what I would have thought. You need to activate the brakes. But some genius said, this is a better system.

Starting point is 00:49:11 So whoever it is, thank you for that. I'm sure you saved my life. I love these word riddles. And one came to mind, I'm not going to get it totally right, but this is from like 20 years ago or 25 years ago. They could be so simple. There's a woman who's afraid. She's afraid because she can't go home because the man with the mask is there. Who is the man in the mask? And then the person who's attempting to answer it can ask yes or no questions. This was sort of a common game that we would play. And you can think about it. You can go through all sorts of hoops. And ultimately, in this example, it's a game of baseball. Afraid to go to home base.

Starting point is 00:49:49 I love that one. Yeah. Sometimes I've heard it as two men in masks. Ah, right. So you've got the umpire and the caster. Yeah, that would be a better way of phrasing it, for sure. What are these types? I mean, are they just known as riddles?

Starting point is 00:50:00 Those are sometimes called lateral thinking. And again, the idea is lateral thinking involves totally reframing and looking at what your assumptions are, which again, I think is crucial in thinking about real life problems and a very fairest. So I'm surprised that you even gave them up because they are very fairest ways of thinking. I think I was just encountering them piecemeal and didn't know where to find a collection of them. I think that's probably what it came down to, is that I would very once in a blue moon run into something. I remember another one, which was, and you probably know the better phrasing, but it was something like, there's a man in a room, he's dead on the floor, and there are 53 bicycles in the room. What happened? He was cheating on cards. Right, right. Yeah, the bicycle cards. I love that. I can send you a website with all of them. I don't have it off hand. Or you can buy my book. Get the book, folks. Shameless. You got to be shameless sometimes, especially on podcasts.

Starting point is 00:51:03 That's right. If you were choosing for yourself kind of best bang for the buck puzzles, and by bang for the buck, I mean puzzles that are enjoyable slash interesting enough that you'll keep doing them, but that also seem to have an impact on the rest of your life. And that can be super broad, right? It could help you sleep. It could help you with your thinking. It could help in any way. Are there any these lateral thinking puzzles or one of these incredibly hard British crosswords. Also, one of my favorite genres that I knew very little about is Japanese puzzle boxes. So I would recommend that just for pure wonder and awe. And these are, I actually went to Japan where they make them, and they are wooden boxes, but they're works of art. They're gorgeous, and they're locked, I don't know if they can afford it anymore. Hopefully not. These expertise is giftology. It's all about giving gifts and how they can make your life better and make other people's lives better. They make these boxes and all sorts of themes.

Starting point is 00:52:53 So I gave my editor a Japanese puzzle box in the shape of a book. So if you are looking for a great gift or you're looking for something to inspire wonder and awe, that's a beautiful object. That's a good one. Japanese puzzle boxes. I've actually seen some of these in person in Japan because, as you may or may not know, I've lived there as an exchange student for a year. I've gone back many times since.

Starting point is 00:53:16 And they are stunningly beautiful and very intricate. I mean, you'll have, as you mentioned, some you have to turn upside down because there are ball bearings or other weight-loaded components that will shift only if you tilt them in a certain direction. Absolutely stunning. I was hoping to bring this up because my latest book I got is this, which makes me think of a lot about Japan. Anyway, not relevant to the conversation, but Visions of Japan by Kawase Hasei's masterpieces. A lot of people know Hokusai,

Starting point is 00:53:49 but I've been becoming more and more interested in other woodblock-based artists. I need to thank Maria Popova for that reference. Oh, yeah, she's great. And by the way, have you ever had Darren Aronofsky on the band? I have, a long time ago. Long time ago. Because he is super into puzzle boxes, and he actually designed one of the most intricate,

Starting point is 00:54:11 I mean, he commissioned one of the most intricate puzzle boxes ever. It's a desk by this artist named Kagan, Kagan Sound. And the desk has 22 secret puzzles in it. And it took Kagan four years to make. He lives in Colorado. And it literally, it's like one of Darren's movies. It drove him crazy. Like he had a mental breakdown.

Starting point is 00:54:33 Oh, no. Exactly. So, yeah, they are really remarkable. Well, let's talk about the shadow side of puzzles. It drove him crazy. Yeah, let's talk about the shadow side of puzzles. I drove him crazy. Yeah, there is a shadow side. I see a bullet here tackling a logic puzzle that literally drives people insane and has spawned 100 philosophy babers. Please tell me more about this. Oh, yes. This is called the sleeping beauty problem. And it's a cousin of the Monty Hall

Starting point is 00:55:02 problem. Do you know the Monty Hall problem? I don't. I don't know that either. Maybe you could explain. The Monty Hall problem is a very famous puzzle, very controversial. And it was popularized by Marilyn Vos Savant. I don't know if you've had her on the show, this woman who says she's got the highest IQ ever. So she wrote a column in Parade Magazine. No comment on why the smartest woman is writing Parade Magazine column, because she's smarter than me. So she would slam me. But anyway, the problem she popularized was this. Suppose you're on a game show and you're given a choice of three doors. Behind one door is a car, and behind the other two doors are goats. So you pick, assuming you want the car and not the goats, so your goal is to pick the door with

Starting point is 00:55:54 the car. So you pick door number one, and the host, he knows what's behind all three doors, and he says, well, I'm going to open door number three before I answer whether you got it right. I'm opening door number three, which behind that door is a goat. Then he says to you, so you want to switch? You want to pick door number two instead? My gut and most people's gut is like, why would it matter? It's like 50-50, right? But it's not. You should switch.

Starting point is 00:56:26 You should switch. Okay. So this is a better question for my brother who has a lot of statistics and mathematical training and inclination. I would not have passed. I would have failed that test. Most people do because it's so counterintuitive. And that's another big theme of puzzles, I think, is that don't trust your gut. I am very wary of my gut. I feel my gut is an idiot, especially when it comes to matters of probability. So yes, you should switch. And when she wrote this, she got hundreds of condescending letters from mathematicians

Starting point is 00:57:00 saying, you're an idiot. But she's right. You should switch. And you can look it up wide. But basically, instead of your initial odds of one to three, you have a two out of three probability of getting the car because Monty didn't just pick a random door. He knew what was behind all three doors and he picked a goat. So then it narrows it down. But anyway, this sleeping beauty problem, I'm not going to say it because it's super complicated and it'll put you to sleep. But it has caused, as you say, 100 philosophy papers. And I love it because this is one of the puzzles. People are still debating what the answer is. Is the answer two out of three

Starting point is 00:57:35 or is it one out of two or something else? So I love a puzzle that cannot be solved. And actually, as part of the book, I commissioned what I believe is the hardest puzzle in the history of the world. And it cannot be solved because you cannot solve it by the time the universe runs out of energy. It's a mechanical puzzle where it's got a metal rod inside a tower. And in the tower, there are all these pegs. And you have to turn the pegs to remove the metal rod. But you have to turn the pegs many times, many, many times, 1.2 decillion times, which is one with 33 digits. Yeah. So, it is literally, if you do one every second, every nanosecond, the universe will end. And I love that. I love that.

Starting point is 00:58:27 So what was the impetus for creating this puzzle? And this is Jacob's Ladder, am I right? Yes, exactly. A few reasons I loved it. One, it's part of a genre called generation puzzles, where you pass them down from generation to generation, because no one person can solve it. So I love this idea of connecting generations. And you mentioned 80,000 hours. That's the effective altruism movement. They talk a lot about the far future and our 14th great grandkids. So this is sort of a way to connect with that. One of the great Japanese puzzle makers, he was called the godfather of Sudoku, and he summarized puzzles and much of life with three symbols. The question mark, the forward arrow, the exclamation point. You arrive, you're baffled, forward arrow is the struggle, the wrestling with the, and then the exclamation point is the

Starting point is 00:59:22 revelation. And he said, this is very Zen, he said, you have to embrace the arrow. You have to learn to love the solving because you're not always going to get to the exclamation point. So, this is the ultimate arrow. This arrow goes on until you, you know, to the end of the universe. So, I love that. I love that. And it's also, I love it because it's kind of like a ritual that I can do, a little meditative ritual. There's only one in the world, Jacob's Ladder. Where is it located? I'm looking at it right now. It's the left of my desk. It's taunting me. I mean, the guy, he's a brilliant puzzle maker. Oscar van Deventer was the one who designed it. And he's going to release the plans on the

Starting point is 01:00:05 internet so you can 3D print one yourself. So it will be available. So it sounds like Jacob's Ladder, maybe if you commercialize this and sell it, the company logo should be the question mark and the forward arrow without the exclamation point. I love it. All right, I'm in. Well, you are a collector of experiments and experiences. And just if you look at your last handful of books, I mean, you certainly span a lot of disciplines. And one question I'm curious to hear your answer to related to the puzzler is what you think a year or two from now you might still have taken with you from this book, whether it's a habit, a new type of puzzle, could be anything. And I remember you and I chatting years ago after the year of living biblically, and one of the things that you took from that, for a period of time at least, was wearing white, and then after that, wearing more colors. And there's a lot more to that story,

Starting point is 01:01:10 but what do you think you may take forth from all the work you've done on The Puzzler? And just to dip into the wearing white clothes, I love that that at least at one point had an influence on you. You and I both are big believers in the outer affects the inner. Your behavior affects your thoughts. And so wearing white, it just has this connotation of lightness, like you're going to go play Wimbledon. I think I used in the book that you might go to P. Diddy's white party. I don't think exists anymore. But anyway, yes, that was one of the many things I took away. I also took away from that gratitude, which turned into its own book. For this one,

Starting point is 01:01:51 the puzzle mindset, it really reinforced this puzzle mindset, which is all about seeing the world as puzzles. Don't get furious, get curious, flexible thinking, all that. But more specifically, I do think every morning I have some rituals where I spend 15 minutes brainstorming ideas and 99% of them suck. But I just feel that the mental aerobic workout of your brain is very helpful in solving real puzzles and life puzzles and coming up with new ideas. But in addition to that, now I am addicted to several puzzles. If you're going to have an addiction, I think it's a good one. So I do the spelling bee in the New York Times. Wordle, which was such a huge phenomenon. I think it's a friend of mine described it as the Ted Lasso of puzzles,

Starting point is 01:02:41 because it's very nice. You're probably going to get it. So it's not too sadistic. And of course, the New York Times crossword puzzle. So I will continue to do that. And I will also, I loved all of the dozens of subcultures of people I met. So I do hope to keep in touch with them because they are such curious and bizarre and interesting thinkers and such great characters. Is there any subculture that if the task or the question was, okay, twice a month for the next year, you need to have dinner with someone from this subculture, like a long dinner, not a short one.

Starting point is 01:03:23 Could be beers, could be something else. But just, I'm wondering which subculture you're like, you know, I could be like an honorary or dishonorable inductee for a short period of time, depending on how things go. Where do you think you would lean? There are so many that I find fascinating. But one, I do love the code breakers, the cryptographers, and I'm terrible at codes. And they range from professional cryptographers to janitors to writers to artists, but they are all obsessed with breaking codes. The cryptos one I mentioned, but also there's something called the Zodiac Killer and his letters. They're like a few dozen codes that still have never been solved, but they obsess over them.

Starting point is 01:04:05 One of the ones I featured in my book was this amazing woman named Alanka Dunnan, who consulted on codes for the CIA and the FBI after 9-11. And she is so obsessed with cryptos that she moved to DC to be closer to cryptos. Talking to them, you realize how much secret codes, I won't say infect, just affect every part of our lives. Cryptocurrency and your bank account, your passwords and military. So secret codes may be a puzzle, but they are a crucial puzzle for humanity. And in fact, one of the historical things I mentioned in the book is that there was a puzzle in 1942 in the Telegraph newspaper, and it was a crossword puzzle, and it said at the bottom, if you solve this in 12 minutes or less, call this number. And that number turned out to

Starting point is 01:04:59 be the British Secret Service, the spy agency, and it was a recruitment tool for the people who cracked the Enigma code, the Nazi Enigma code. So you could say the crossword puzzle saved the world. And for people interested, I just want to lay out the spelling. So Kryptos is K-R-Y-P-T-O-S, sculptured by the American artist Jim Sandberg, located on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia. And there's a whole Wikipedia entry, but certainly the firsthand experience of having spent time there, as you did,

Starting point is 01:05:36 I think is worth digging into. Do you find, not to in any way imply that the woman you just mentioned falls prey to this, but that people interested in cryptography have a high risk of, I want to say psychosis, but seeing signal where there is noise, right? So ending up succumbing to all sorts of conspiracy theories or God knows what. I mean, there are a million pitfalls kind of in the gray zone. I talk about the dark side of puzzles. I think they're mostly a force for good. But if you don't have that flexibility of mind and you get obsessed with puzzles and you fall

Starting point is 01:06:14 in love with your particular hypothesis, there's a word for it. It's not psychosis, it's apophenia. Apophenia is one of my favorite words I learned. And it is when you see signal in the noise. I mean, the classic is you see Jesus's face on a piece of French toast. And yes, it is a big danger. I mean, you look at these online groups for cryptos and their people. No, it's got to be Morse code. It's got to be the Illuminati. Yes, there's definitely... I mean, QAnon is basically a puzzle gone wrong. It's people who have figured out a solution that they think is right, and no amount of counter evidence will allow them to change their mind. So yeah, you got to... And I also have a section in the book about this famous book from 1980-81 in England, where it was a picture

Starting point is 01:07:07 book with clues to a hidden treasure, a golden rabbit hidden somewhere in England. And it caused a mania, like people were digging up yards and trespassing, looking for this. Finally, someone found it. But what was crazy is that even after someone found it, there were dozens, hundreds of people who were like, no, no, my theory is right. And they refused to abandon their theory even after it was found. And that to me is a very dangerous look at the dark side of human nature. Wow. Apophenia, learning all sorts of things. So let's take a revisit of this subtitle. So One Man's Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever from Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life. So I'm going to give you, there's a fork in the road that we can take here.

Starting point is 01:07:57 We can go to Meaning of Life and you can expand on why that's in the subtitle, or we could go to the hardest corn maze in the world. If you have time, maybe I'll just do quickly the corn maze. I have time. I feel like if you do the meaning of life, that's kind of, where do you go from there? Right, right. Hard to segue from that to the corn maze. Exactly. But yes, I have a section on mazes, which were fascinating. And I found the hardest corn maze in the world is in Vermont. And it is so hard. Talk about sadism. The guy who created it revels in the amount of pain and misery. of fights, hundreds of people just breaking out in tears of frustration, a father who abandoned his family and drove off because he was so frustrated.

Starting point is 01:08:49 So it is incredibly hard. There are emergency exits because it's so hard. People get freaked out. And I did it. It took about four and a half hours and a bunch of hints. But I loved interviewing him because one of the things- Hold on, a bunch of hints. Do you just have an earpiece?

Starting point is 01:09:03 And he's like, go right. I can see you from the drone go left well what he does is he stands on a platform in the middle of the maze like a god and uh and you can go up to him and plead your case you know i'm so frustrated can you help oh my god that's incredible. He's great. But I asked him, standing on that platform, what have you learned from observing human nature? And he said, this theme that we've talked about is the ones who are never going to make it out are the ones who have no flexibility of mind, who just, they're like, this is the way, I swear. And they'll hit a wall, they'll go back. They'll do it again. They'll keep it. He does say that teenage boys are particularly prone to this. So I have teenage boys. I'm

Starting point is 01:09:51 trying to say, you know, flexibility. You got to be flexible. Because I guess the testosterone kicks in. It's like, I'm right. Yeah. So he was great. And I am a big fan of mazes, another genre that I wasn't particularly obsessed with before. but I do see the beauty of them now. Mazes. Vermont, unexpectedly, has come up quite a bit. I mean, you mentioned the sort of Bill Gates Bugatti of jigsaw puzzles from The Chief Tormentor, which I think you mentioned were made in Vermont. You've got the most difficult corn maze in the world in Vermont. It makes me think of these unlikely epicenters or places that are famous

Starting point is 01:10:33 for things you wouldn't expect, right? Like Gilroy, California is the garlic capital of the world. And you would never guess that unless you happen to be driving by it, as I had many times when I lived in California. Are there hotbeds of puzzle creation? Is Vermont one of them? I think so. I mean, these are not as unexpected. These are not Gilroy, but Japan makes amazing puzzles. Russia is known for making, and one of the chapters is about chess puzzles, which are different from chess games. I played with Gary Kasparov, who is a big fan of chess puzzles, although he himself is not the greatest chess puzzler because it's a different

Starting point is 01:11:11 skill than regular chess. And just very quickly, a chess puzzle is when you have a certain arrangement of pieces on the board, like a king and a rook and a queen, and you have to checkmate the other side in a certain number of moves. It's a constrained puzzle as opposed to an unconstrained game. And these people, it's a different skill set. There are these people who are like the Garry Kasparovs of chess puzzles. And I love talking to him because you've had him on the show, right? I imagine.

Starting point is 01:11:40 I hadn't. You know, the only time I've ever met, well, I didn't really meet him, Garry Kasparov, quick side note, is when I was presenting at TED however many years ago. And it was my first time on this big stage, this big event. And I was very nervous. And I was told by the organizers, well, before you go up, when you're like three or four out, you can go into the Zen pod. They had some word for this place. It was supposed to be very calming, had all of this beautiful imagery, and it was supposed to be this very Zen-sedating place where you could prepare for what would otherwise be very stressful. And I remember walking out, because I was sweating already, to whatever the Zen pod was. And the people on deck before me were Gary Kasparov and two other super geniuses. And they were pacing like they're on death row about to go to execution. And I was like, this is not going to help my nerves.

Starting point is 01:12:32 And so I turned around and I left. That is my one and only exposure to Gary Kasparov. That is funny. Yeah, that would not be good for your nerves. And I will tell you, he was very gracious to come to my apartment and allow me to interview him. I will say he's not like the softest and cuddliest guy, which is probably good. He saw this Vladimir Putin thing coming. But when he came, I had set up my chess set so that we wouldn't waste any time. And he looked at it and he said, that is a very cheap chess set I see. And I was like, really?

Starting point is 01:13:05 Yeah. It's like a plastic thing I had bought on Amazon. And I was like, oh. And he said, no, don't worry. I grew up in the Soviet Union. I'm used to cheap plastic chess sets. So he forgave me. But he was not impressed.

Starting point is 01:13:19 Because one of the keys, he says, to chess puzzles is, again, the counterintuitive and looking at the long view, the long view, which he's good at in life as well, that the best puzzles make you do things that are short-term crazy, like sacrifice your queen. A lot of them are about sacrificing your queen. But in the long run, they will pay off. I like that as a life lesson. Just look at the long view. Yeah, I imagine. I mean, I know very little about chess, but that perhaps the reason these chess puzzles are not comparable to chess games is that they are presenting the pieces and configurations that would almost never occur in a natural game, right? And I do know some very good chess players, but they become

Starting point is 01:14:05 very good at chunking the board into sections where they might recognize a particular sequence of moves that they have already recorded to memory from studying historic games or having played a thousand matches in a certain way but when you then get to a puzzle perhaps it's almost nonsensical right there isn't any historical record to kind of play off of to figure out what the next best move is some of the most famous puzzles are just crazy there's a genre called grotesques which which sounds very exciting. Grotesque puzzles, chess puzzles. And it'll be 16 black pieces and only two white pieces, but white can win. And you have to figure out how can white win. So it's a real like David versus Goliath thing. But

Starting point is 01:14:59 yeah, they look crazy. There's 16 black pieces huddled in the corner. Never would happen in a real game. All right. Meaning of life. I think we've pushed it as long as we can. Well, I first of all put it in there just because I wanted to show puzzles are not trivial, like waste of time, frivolous. So there's a little of that. So I may not have actually solved the meaning of life by the end, but I will say, and I hope it doesn't come off as pat, because I truly believe it, part of the meaning of life is the search for the meaning of life. Because curiosity, as we've said over and over, is to me one of the greatest gifts. It's a key to a joyous life. It's a key to resolving conflicts. It's a key to business, family, everything.

Starting point is 01:15:47 So to me, never giving up on the search for the meaning of life is a big part of the meaning of life. Less furious, more curious. So that came originally, or your source was parenting advice? Is this right? Yeah, I was watching. They had a webinar deep in the middle of the pandemic where it was, yeah, as child psychologists and, you know, ways to survive the pandemic with your kids because, you know, it was just horrible. So I was like, maybe there's something. And that was the phrase he used. And he meant it in parenting terms. So like when you're a two-year-old is throwing a tantrum, don't get curious. Why is the kid throwing a tantrum? What can we do to prevent it in the future? What will work? And I think that's very good for your own mental health. Otherwise, when I read the newspaper, or I don't read the newspaper, when I read media online, I- Parade. When you're reading Parade. My favorite column in Parade. I mean, I do read the

Starting point is 01:16:48 paper, just not like the old folded paper. But when I'm doing that, if I don't look at it like a puzzle, I get so angry and it's just not good for my health. So yeah, look at it more like there are different ways to put it. Some people say the engineer mindset versus the lawyer mindset. I like Adam Grant, as he calls it, the be a scientist, the scientist worldview instead of the prosecutor or the preacher or the, he had one other P, he was very good with the alliteration. So yeah, look at the world that way. Pete Pescatarian, maybe. – But they're all the same theme. – Could be pescatarian. – That's it. You nailed it.

Starting point is 01:17:29 Exactly. Those pescatarians are very narrow-minded. – Well, AJ, we've covered a fair bit, but I'd still love to hear you just reiterate for people what you hope they gain, not just from the book, certainly the book. I mean, I hope people check them out. I've never been disappointed by a book of yours. I think you're an excellent writer, but also an excellent entertainer. And the combination of those two, I think, often results in you being an outstanding teacher,

Starting point is 01:18:02 because you take what can otherwise be very difficult to absorb or difficult to understand and you provide a wrapper that makes it really easy to digest. And I've always admired that. And that goes back to some of your earliest work, certainly the year of living biblically, I thought was outstanding. What do you hope people will get from this and puzzles if there are any stones we haven't turned over yet? Tons. I mean, just to reiterate some of what we've covered, I mean, it's got tons of puzzles in it. So I hope that they will do those and find the joy of puzzles. It's got the contest,

Starting point is 01:18:40 which I hope you'll enjoy even if you don't win. It's got my adventures, but it's also got this way of hopefully looking at the world, which will make your life better, make you happier, more effective, more productive, both in the macro sense of looking at the world as a puzzle and in the more micro sense of here are 10 strategies for solving puzzles. And we went over three or four of them, but there are plenty more in the book. I think it's funny because I didn't plan this. I feel very lucky, but we are in a puzzle boom right now. People are obsessed with Wordle and jigsaws. And so I hope that that, as COVID hopefully ends, that that doesn't die, that people will continue this love of puzzles, because I really do think that they make the world a better place. And maybe,

Starting point is 01:19:26 you know what? Oh, this is good. I'm going to make you a little gift box of puzzles that are going to blow your mind and get you sucked back into the puzzle. Love that. The Gateway Drug Box of Puzzles by A.J. Jacobs. Yes. I would love that. I would love that. Thank you so much. And I also want to give voice to something that I've been thinking throughout this entire conversation. And that is, and you pointed this out already when I said that I dropped puzzles. I haven't dropped puzzles. It's just that my narrow definition of puzzles needs to be expanded. And if we think of puzzles in a sense as games, with certain rules, certain constraints, certain desired outcomes,

Starting point is 01:20:06 that we're all playing games. If you think about outside of the lowest rungs of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and what we're opting into, we are playing games. And I guess the first order of business is to try to identify which games we're playing and try to make sure we're playing the right games because the social conventions around us can be enabling or disabling. And I would expect that the way you present subject matter and the way you tell stories will help people to realize that the water they swim in is already full of puzzles. And that by, as you said, sort of working on the micro puzzles, you can develop capacities that then translate to the macro puzzles.

Starting point is 01:20:51 You just reminded me, you have been doing puzzles. In your first book, when you talked about the martial arts competition you won, that was a puzzle. It was. That was like you used an innovative technique and then tango also a puzzle so yeah you are a puzzler whether you know it or not i suppose that's true for a lot of people listening aj is there anything else that you would like to mention any requests you'd like to make public complaints you'd like to lodge anything at all that you would like to add before we bring this conversation to a close? I will say, I hope you buy my book or at least take it out of the library or enjoy it or talk

Starting point is 01:21:31 about it. But I have not settled on my next book. And I have found that readers or just listeners have sometimes wonderful ideas, sometimes not, but sometimes interesting ideas. So, if you feel like getting in touch with me through my website or Twitter, I would love to hear from you about what you think I should embark on next. People can find you at AJJacobs.com, AJJacobs on Twitter. What can people find at ThePuzzlerBook.com? What will people find on this website? That is where you enter the code for the contest that will open up to about 20 wild puzzles that I did not design.

Starting point is 01:22:10 Greg Pliska and these great designers made them. So if you want to enter the contest, it's thepuzzlerbook.com. And there are all these disclaimers about you have to be 18 and live in the United States, etc., etc. So that's on there. But you can also, there are a bunch of puzzles on there as well. So even if you don't enter the contest, it might be worth checking out. A little something for everybody. And we'll link to all of the social link to all the websites in the show notes at Tim.blogs slash podcast as per usual. And I'm very happy that you made it

Starting point is 01:22:42 both into the Saturday and Tuesday editions of the New York Times Crossword Puzzle. Getting a twofer, that seems, you know, unless you're Justin Bieber, I think, I mean, I have to imagine that's quite an unusual honor to actually get a double header. And I don't deserve it. I don't deserve it, but I am happy to take it. Who deserves anything? I mean, I think you were able, you managed to appear twice. So one could argue the results justify,

Starting point is 01:23:10 in this case, the means. And so nice to see you again, AJ. Thanks for taking the time. So fun. What a blast. Thank you, Tim. And for everybody listening, as always,

Starting point is 01:23:21 and as I already mentioned, we'll have links to all the resources in the show notes at tim.blog slash podcast. And certainly check out AJ's new book, The Puzzler, subtitled One Man's Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever from Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life. And until next time, be a little kinder than is necessary. Take care of yourselves and thanks for tuning in. to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool

Starting point is 01:24:16 things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog.com slash Friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog.com slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Headspace. Headspace is your daily dose

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #588: A.J. Jacobs — How to Be Less Furious and More Curious

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