Freakonomics Radio

And more recently, a book called Everything Is Obvious Once You Know the Answer.

My name is Justin Halpern and I created Sh** My Dad Says and I'm author of book by the same name and one of the writers of the television show by the same name.

The Sh** Halpern's Dad Says has attracted a lot of readers, nearly three million followers on Twitter.

My name is Justin Halpern and I created Shit My Dad Says and I'm author of a book by the same name and one of the writers of the television show by the same name.

Here's the blurb from Halpern's Twitter page. It says, I'm 29. I live with my 74-year-old dad. He is awesome. I just write down shit that he says.

The shit that Halpern's dad says has attracted a lot of readers, more than two million followers on Twitter. In fact, it was his Twitter feed that led to the book that led to the TV show.

He used to work for the U.S. Department of Transportation and he wrote a series of books called Commuting in America.

Most books written by an offspring, he writes, fall into one of two categories, a tell-all or a beatification.

Jim Rooney argues that his father was successful with the Steelers because of the kind of person he was. Honest, humble, compassionate.

Most books written by an offspring, he writes, fall into one of two categories, a tell-all or a beatification.

This book falls into the latter.

Jim Rooney argues that his father was successful with the Steelers because of the kind of person he was.

Honest, humble, compassionate.

He wasn't colorful like his father, the chief, but Dan Rooney cared about building things well, running things well, and he didn't need to get the credit.

Euler recently published a collection of essays called No Judgment. One of the pieces is titled My Anxiety.

Over the last seven or eight years, I have struggled with what I am quite comfortable calling an Internet addiction.

I have met great friends on social media. I've gotten boyfriends on social media, but at the same time, I do strongly feel that it can produce an actual addiction like a straightforward addiction, like a drug addiction.

It's the same sort of thought process about like compulsively wanting to either look at Twitter or like smoke a cigarette.

I think anxiety does create a barrier around actually doing things you're sitting in worrying about and sitting and looking at your phone is just kind of externalizing this worrying feeling, right?

I get anxious that I'll become depressed and depressed that I'm so anxious.

Jeff Kinney, author of The Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, which have sold more than 300 million copies.

For the past 16 years, Kinney has had a giant balloon in the Macy's parade, a balloon of Greg Hefley, the wimpy kid himself.

That is Jeff Kinney. I'm an owner of an unlikely story bookstore in Plainville, Massachusetts, and I am the author of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series.

Kinney has written 20 books in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, which have sold more than 300 million copies.

This is Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

And that is Charles King, a political scientist at Georgetown and author of the book Every Valley. We heard from him in part one of the series as well.

Here again is Charles King. The impulse behind it originally was the idea that we didn't have to live in a world in which people were just abandoned to their fate, that the wealthy, the wellconnected, had both the responsibility to and the means to create an institution that could help solve the problem.

Charles King, a political scientist at Georgetown, recently published a book about Messiah called Every Valley. He argues that Messiah has a good claim to being the greatest piece of participatory art ever created.

In 2024, he published a book called Every Valley, The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel's Messiah.

Part of the book Every Valley is about the darkness that so many people associated with this piece of music experience and were experiencing at the time.

When I was writing Every Valley at some point in the middle of the project, I said to my wife, I can't get over the wigs. I just can't relate to these people.

I don't think there's been a day since that day when I discovered your book back in December of 2024 that I haven't listened to Messiah for at least half an hour and often three or four hours.

Today on Freakonomics Radio, Trevor Noah on politics, race, religion and his excellent new memoir Born a Crime.

I don't think people would see it as a book about me growing up in apartheid.

It's not really that. Apartheid was merely the container that my life existed within. If anything, it's a story of myself and my mom.

Trevor Noah was born in South Africa in 1984. His mother was black and African, his father white and European. This meant that Noah was technically Born a Crime, the title of his book.

In 2020, Michael Porter and Catherine Gale published a book called The Politics Industry.

Joseph Schumpeter describing the virtues of capitalism as against communism and socialism at a time when many of the young were swept away by the great victories of the Soviet Union in the Second World War were embracing communism or at least state socialism.

Have you read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland?

I read it when I was a sophomore in college ... I picked up the same copy I'd had in college. It was filled with meticulous notes ... then I started reading it to my daughter and realized I'd completely missed the point of this book.

If you haven't read it, I'd suggest you do. It will make you think as it made Tom Garfinkel think.

When we spoke, he was in the throes of a tour for his new book, which is called United, Thoughts on Finding Common Ground and Advancing the Common Good.

You say common ground, I use very purposely the word love.

In Booker's view, this division is the biggest problem in modern politics.

I'm really finished with a stage of my life.

I'm going to do everything I can to help her win and focus on the real urgencies of my life, which is being a great senator and passing some infrastructure stuff I want to do for New Jersey to criminal justice reform.

and Better, A Surgeon's Notes on Performance,

And I have this nasty habit of writing long books. So The 4-Hour Chef was 670 pages.

Your books are so weird in the best way. They're not narrative from beginning to end.

Even when they kind of feel a little bit like those self-help books with boxes and charts, you are just zany in a way that reminds me, I'll be honest with you, of one person more than anyone else which is my mom.

When I read the four hour chef, it strikes me that you're a very adventurous chef and eater.

So your first book, The Four Hour Work Week, I am curious because I don't know, the word I'm looking for is not fraud, but I'm pretty sure you work many more hours than four hours per week yourself.

Well, the objective of the book for those people who haven't read it, and I'm sure many of the people have not, is to provide you with tools and principles for 10xing your hourly output.

The Four Hour Work Week title was one of 12 titles that I tested on Google AdWords.

And that performed the best of the options that I had.

But the other kind of misperception of the Four Hour Work Week is that, especially because it's got a palm tree on the cover, the objective is not to stare out into space rubbing cocoa butter on your belly for the rest of your life.

And so when I wrote the book, The End of Poverty in 2005, I used the metaphor of the ladder of development and I said that it is often crucial to help the poorest of the poor get onto the ladder.

It's very interesting because if you look at Joseph Campbell's Hero of a Thousand Faces, it's almost exactly like that. There was a part of that book, maybe I'm answering too long but anyway. No, no, I love this. My son gave me the book in 2014 and he describes that phase of your life as returning the boon.

But Michael Che's point isn't just that Jane Austen is doing all this in her novels, Emma and Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park and Sense and Sensibility.

So like, for example, like in Pride and Prejudice.