James Tanton is one of my personal heroes. James has a PhD in math from Princeton and he worked as a high school math teacher for a bunch of years. He's authored a number of textbooks, puzzle books, and videos. James' love of math is quite infectious. He lives for inspiring teachers and students with the love of math.James and I talked for 46 minutes about his story of becoming a mathematician, his love of abstract algebra, his mission, his role as visiting scholar with the MAA, how he comes up with the most clever and original puzzles, and more.