Like tour guides or unflappable third-grade teachers, podcasters Chuck Bryant and Josh Clark love finding things out and sharing their discoveries. Their forthcoming book Stuff Kids Should Know (Holt, Aug. 1), a young readers’ adaptation of their 2020 Stuff You Should Know book for general audiences, collects some of their favorite topics from the Stuff You Should Know podcast, now in its 16th year. For longtime listeners and new readers alike, Bryant and Clark have a knack for unpacking idiosyncratic topics, zigging and zagging from fads and foods to biographies and inventions.
“We look at the world around us,” Bryant said. “We try to notice things. I’ll see a palm tree on vacation or a mangrove marsh and wonder, ‘I don’t know much about mangroves or palm trees or this lizard or this concept or this toy.’ It starts with our own curiosity.”
Bryant and Clark met as co-writers for the website How Stuff Works. “We wrote educational reference articles that were highly researched and vetted,” Bryant said. When their boss approached them about hosting a podcast, a new medium at the time, they found that they had a good rapport, “and it stuck that way.” They debuted their own Stuff You Should Know podcast in 2008 and have recorded more than 1,500 episodes, averaging three a week and gathering ample material for their books along the way.
When podcasting, “We usually work from a source document, and we go off and do additional research,” Clark said. “Then we come back and have a conversation after a couple of days. The first take is what you hear.” They revisit occasional blunders in a listener mail segment at the end of every program, sometimes playfully arguing over subjective matters like which heavy-metal band reigns supreme.
That seat-of-the-pants approach works in podcasting, but print demands a different attention to details. Clark and Bryant collaborated with Mark Podesta, associate editor at Henry Holt, and co-writer Nils Parker on fact-checking and honing their written voices. “I don’t want to say it was an extra-heavy-duty version of the podcast, but we wanted to make sure that we got to the bottom of every topic,” Clark said. “Both of us always wanted to write books, and writing by way of creating a podcast is amusing but gratifying too.”
The process gave them another shot at crafting punch lines as well. “My humor is very dry, so the chance to make it even drier was very desirable,” Clark said. “I think that’s an example of not dumbing things down for kids, because kids can get dry humor. We’ve always avoided puns” and the wackiness adults might associate with younger readers.
History Lessons in Unexpected Places
To create Stuff Kids Should Know, Bryant and Clark adapted their 2020 book for older readers. Bryant explained that he and Clark removed pieces “that weren’t a good fit.” Out went the chapters on mezcal, cyanide pills, and the history of income tax. Otherwise, he said, “you’d be surprised how little had to change. Kids are smart and they can handle what we’re doing, [so we added] stuff to make it a little more fun here and there.” A chapter on “How to Get Lost” reveals search-and-rescue techniques, and one on “Trillionaires” poses heady ideas about AI and the amount of money in the world.
Chapters derive from multiple podcasts, referenced in brief endnotes. “Do(ugh)nuts,” examining the reasons we refer to “doughnuts” as “donuts” and vice versa, is an unexpected lesson in American history from the 19th century to the present. “Dog Smells” investigates canine topics including why dogs’ feet smell like Fritos corn chips, why humans love newborn-puppy breath, and how dogs use their olfactory sense. And “Backmasking”—backward-recording hidden messages on vinyl LPs—fuses research on music history, conspiracy theories, and a 2018 podcast titled Was the PMRC Censorship in Disguise? (The 1980s-era Parents Music Resource Center, which crusaded against explicit song lyrics and put parental-advisory ratings on music, has much in common with today’s efforts to rate controversial books.)
In short, Stuff Kids Should Know represents the duo’s omnivorous tastes. “I don’t even think it occurred to us to do a book on just one topic,” Clark said. Bryant agreed that single topics are “sort of the opposite of what we do. We try to provide a good overview with the aim of stoking curiosity” about unrelated subjects like the Scotland Yard Crime Museum and the Jersey Devil.
“Every once in a while, we’ll do a classic toy, whether it’s a Slinky or Barbie or the Easy-Bake Oven,” said Bryant of Mr. Potato Head, which has its own chapter. “We’re knocking [pop–culture memories] one at a time off our childhood nostalgia list, so you’re going to find things in the book that kids may not have heard of, like Demolition Derby and Pet Rocks.”
He paused to think about anachronistic content like 1975’s Pet Rock, a stone with a cardboard house, instruction manual, and $3.95 price tag. “I don’t think there was a real effort to introduce kids to things that were before their time, but a few of them ended up working out that way,” he said.
“Everybody should know about Pet Rocks no matter what their age, you know?” Clark added.
Stuff Kids Should Know: The Mind-Blowing Histories of (Almost) Everything by Chuck Bryant and Josh Clark, with Nils Parker. Holt, $19.99 Aug. 1 ISBN 978-1-250622-44-0
