Freakonomics Radio

And it was during that meeting I started thinking, wow, this is Stan Lee. This is the man who created Spider-Man and Fantastic Four and the Hulk and all these characters, and he's an icon, and he loved The Usual Suspects and went off on it and treated me so nicely.

And it was during that meeting I started thinking, wow, this is Stan Lee. This is the man who created Spider-Man and Fantastic Four and the Hulk and all these characters, and he's an icon, and he loved The Usual Suspects and went off on it and treated me so nicely.

I happened to come across a book. It was written by a journalist, Jeff Goodell, called Big Coal.

And he was doing stories about the important and kind of quiet role that coal played in American life.

And he was the one who was describing some of the stories of people that lived in these mining communities.

He won a Pulitzer Prize for History of New England. And later he wrote a book called The Epic of America.

Even though it was written during the Great Depression, Adams took a fundamentally bullish view of the United States. His book was hugely popular and as best as we can tell, it introduced the phrase the American Dream.

Adams defined this as, that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.

We know you've written widely about business, technology and society, most notably in a book called Wonder Women, Sex, Power and the Quest for Perfection.

So I've just written a book called Panic at the Pump about the energy crisis.

Roy Neal, who was my third campaign manager and very close to Al Gore, just wrote a wonderful book called The Electors.

Let's start briefly with your most recent book, The Triumph of William McKinley. Why the election of 1896 still matters.

I didn't set out to write a book drawing parallels. I set out to write a durable history of the 1896 election.

I'm in the middle of almost about to finish Whatever Happened to the Metric System Which is written by my dear friend John Marciano great book when I was a kid We were all gonna give up, you know American Standard System and go to metric system and it just shows about the idealism of clocks of measures the French Revolution the metric system the people like John Quincy Adams and historical figures that have been idealists and practical ones

Another book that I have been reading is called Walkable City It's a great great book that kind of Looks at how we can turn places even like Los Angeles and not just think about the view from the car But how we can look at the view from the sidewalks and make sure that we have something that is more human Centered

I've been rereading Jorge Luis Borges Labyrinthos or Labyrinths. He's my favorite author and the moment that we ever think we have the world organized I just read about one of my favorite short stories and it is the library of Babel which says that the universe essentially is a set of interconnected hexagonal rooms of books and Every book that could ever be written in every combination of words and every language is in this infinite library And I love that as an idea.

And my book is called Cockpit Confidential, Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel.

Patrick Smith is an airline pilot with a website called askthepilot.com and a book called Cockpit Confidential.

That's Charlie Whelan... and I'm the author of the Naked Books, Naked Economics, Naked Statistics and most recently Naked Money