People love solving puzzles. First off, it's like a challenge to yourself. Here's an intriguing

thing, can I solve it? And a puzzle has to be done just right. Like, if it's too hard,

you lose interest, if it's too easy, you lose interest. So puzzles are like this fascinating

form of entertainment that is existed for thousands of years. And I think I like puzzles

also for two other reasons. One is, I feel like it exercises my brain. So the more puzzles

I solve, the more I could, I don't know, avoid eventual dementia or whatever. I don't

know if that's true or not. I don't know if there's any evidence of that. But it feels

like I'm exercising my brain. Number two, I think I'm insecure. I want to think of myself

as smart. I want other people to think I'm smart. And so doing puzzles is a way for me

to see that I'm smart. I think part of that is the reason why I play chess too. Like

chess is viewed throughout culture as this intelligent thing. You have to be intelligent

to play chess. I can assure you, having known a lot of chess players, that is the opposite

of true, that some, I know some chess players that are very much not smart. And I also know

my own intelligence is greatly in question when I do puzzles. I'm not really as good at

them as I would like to be. I don't know. So I'm fascinated by the whole issue of puzzles.

And of course, we've had on AJ Jacobs before to talk about puzzles. He wrote a book called

The Puzzler. And where he explores the world, finding the most interesting puzzles, fascinating

book, you should read it. But now he has started a podcast called The Puzzler. So he's

coming on today. He's got a bunch of puzzles for me, which I hope they're audio puzzles.

So even if you're driving in your car at the gym, listen and see if you can solve the

puzzles. And at the end of this episode, we release, so each one of AJ's puzzler podcast

episodes are seven minutes. So at the end of this podcast, we have two, never before

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