That's true of a great many books in this vein. Yes, examples and research can flesh things out a bit, but a TED Talk or an article probably provides 90% of what you might want to know. But TED Talks and articles don't put food on the table.

This came out about the time during a trend where some idea/concept like this, which could be nicely explained in a 10-20min TED talk or long form article was then padded out and published as a full size book.

It's publishing economics. If you go through a publisher, something like 250 pages is about the minimum they're willing to deal with. The one time I've gone through a publisher, I was happy enough with the second edition for, for the first edition, I really felt like I was padding out the book.

True. Something I used to do is go to a bookstore and if there was some new book that seemed like it had an interesting idea, I would look in the ToC for the chapter named the same as the book and just read that. I never felt like I walked away needing to buy the whole book when I did that, and so the only books I tended to buy were history, cooking and fiction.

Ok so it wasn't just me! The book is fine but it covered almost nothing that the TED talk didn't. About the only take away I can remember from the book over the talk was, Barry had trouble finding Jeans.

I’ve never read the book nor seen this talk, but somehow I’ve heard about the paradox through the grapevine. It just seems like one of those ideas that should be obvious once you hear about it.