Hi, this is Vivi Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast. Moms don't have time to read books. And speaking of books, I have two of my own books coming out this spring and summer. Princess Charming is a picture book, which debuts on April 19th. And Bookends, a memoir of love, loss, and literature comes out on July 1st, and it is truly a labor of love.

I hope you'll pre-order, order, and join me on tour as I go across the country.

You can find out more at zibbyowens.com or bookendsmemoir.com. And you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens because I always post about everything. Enjoy the show.

AJ Jacobs is the author of The Puzzler, one man's quest to solve the most baffling puzzles

ever from crosswords to jigsaws to the meaning of life. A.J. Jacobs is the author of four

New York Times bestsellers, including The Know It All, Drop Dead Healthy, and the Year of Living Biblically. He has given four TED Talks that have total views of more than 10 million. He is a contributor to NPR's weekend edition and writes for the New York Times and Esquire magazine, among others. His latest book is The Puzzler. Welcome, AJ. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss The Puzzler, One Man's Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, from Crosswords to Jigs Us to the Meaning of Life. That is it. I am delighted to be here. Thank you, Zibby. This was such an interesting read. First of all, I amused myself by trying to do a bunch of the puzzles and have decided the only ones I'm good at are the anagrams. So I don't know what that says about me, but I'm only good with those I could look at and like rearrange the letters right away. Anagrams are fun? Yeah. The other ones I was like, are you a spelling bee fan? Do you like spelling bee? You know, now that I've read your book and heard about the thing that keeps you up in the middle of the night,

and the spelling me challenge, I'm going to have to start doing that at what, three in the morning, but I hadn't been doing that. I do word. What about wordle? Yeah, you do do wordle. Yeah.

Wordle is lovely.

Yeah.

My friend calls it the Tom Hanks of puzzles.

It's very nice, non-threatening.

And I also love the whirdle spin-offs. There are so many of them. And they're so funny, like the Taylordell with Taylor Swift-related words. Oh, my gosh. I didn't. I, okay, so my teenage twins, we have a group text, and every day we send each other our

wordal, you know, the results. But my daughter will freak out when she hears that there actually

exists a Taylor Swift wordle, and that will be all she will do from now on. So maybe I won't even tell

her. Well, my son is a Taylor Swift fan, so yeah, they can compare scores. Perfect.

We'll add them to your son to the text.

Okay.

So as our conversation indicates, your book focuses a lot on different mind puzzles from where they began, pre-will shorts to how they've evolved and what it even means to be obsessed with puzzles and your understanding

of that for yourself, for your family, the Rubik's Cube. It was really, really fascinating. So talk a

little about when, I know you've been doing puzzles your whole life, and this is sort of in your DNA,

but when this became a book idea for you and how your pursuit of all of this knowledge really came

together well i i've always loved puzzles since i was a kid i didn't have a like a busy dating

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