If Books Could Kill

Lots of subscribers asked us to release last month's bonus episode in full so here it is! Share it with the conservatives, the boomers and the Satanists in your life.

Support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod
 

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

In 1995 a bestselling book proposed a simple dating strategy for women: Lose weight, wear bright colors and become a completely different person for the rest of your life.

Thanks to Moira Donegan for helping us with this episode!

Support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America 
• Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s essay, “Stuff Your ‘Rules’” 
• The More Things Change: The Rules And Late Eighteenth‐Century Conduct Books For Women 
• Shrinking Violets and Caspar Milquetoasts: Shyness and Heterosexuality from the Roles of the Fifties to "The Rules" of the Nineties 
• From Mountain Peak to Total Woman: An Evolutionary History of Pre-feminist Dating Advice 
• The Mating Game: How Gender Still Shapes How We Date by Ellen Lamont 
• So Many Rules, So Little Time 
• Abiding by The Rules: Instructing Women in Relationships 
• What leads to romantic attraction: similarity, reciprocity, security, or beauty? Evidence from a speed-dating study 
• "Playing Hard To Get": Understanding An Elusive Phenomenon 
• Egalitarian Daters, Traditionalist Dates 
• Aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets 
• Disintermediating your friends: How online dating in the United States displaces other ways of meeting 
• Playing Hard To Get 

 Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

This week we're discussing "Atomic Habits," a book about how to use science (and also some stuff that’s definitely not science) to train yourself to be a more functional person.

Support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• How 1% Performance Improvements Led to Olympic Gold
• From paupers to kings: The lottery-funded revolution 
• Habit Formation
• Implementation Intentions to Reduce Smoking: A Systematic Review of the Literature
• Effectiveness of the use of implementation intentions on reduction of substance use: A meta-analysis
• When Intentions Go Public
• Effect of Intensive Handwashing Promotion on Childhood Diarrhea in High-Risk Communities in Pakistan

 Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

Much has been said about globalization, but perhaps no one has said it worse than Thomas Friedman.

Content Note: Discussions of xenophobic and racist content, especially toward the end of the episode.

Support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• Why The World Isn't Flat
• The World Is Still Not Flat
• DHL Global Connectedness Index 2022
• The Fallacies of Flatness
• The Sociopathy of Thomas Friedman: A Compendium
• Thomas Friedman sums up the Iraq War (YouTube)

 Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

The Nudgening.

Support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• David Gal's "Behavioral Winter"
• The i-frame and the s-frame: How focusing on individual-level solutions has led behavioral public policy astray
• Why Is Behavioral Economics So Popular?
• Applying Behavioral Insights To Intimate Partner Violence
• What Counts as a Nudge?
• The Power of Nudges, for Good and Bad
• Allowing Patients to Waive the Right to Sue for Medical Malpractice: A Response to Thaler and Sunstein
• Obama’s Obama
• Behavioural Insights Applied to Policy - Country Overviews 2016
• The opioid crisis and nudge theory
• On the Supposed Evidence for Libertarian Paternalism
• The effect of charter schools on charter students and public schools
• Re-election Strategy Is Tied to a Shift on Smog
• Is the White House delaying too many health and safety rules?
• Down the Regulatory Rabbit Hole
• Why regulations are good — again
• Cass Sunstein: The Obama Administration's Ambivalent Regulator

 Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

In 2021, scrappy young investors from across the world joined forces to buy GameStop stock, aiming to take down greedy hedge funds. What came next was tragedy, injustice, and a conspiratorial internet cult so stupid we had to do an episode about it.

To hear the rest of the show, support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

In 2008, an economist and a law professor proposed a radical new approach to politics: Telling people not to do bad stuff.

Support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• Mike's Maintenance Phase episode on the godfather of the "cafeteria nudge"
• Nudge: Concept, Effectiveness, and Ethics
• From mechanism to virtue: Evaluating Nudge theory
• The effectiveness of nudging: A meta-analysis of choice architecture interventions across behavioral domains
• Why the Most Important Idea in Behavioral Decision-Making Is a Fallacy
• Behavioral Winter
• Why Is Behavioral Economics So Popular?
• The Origins of Anti-Litter Campaigns
• Do Normative Appeals Affect Tax Compliance? Evidence from a Controlled Experiment in Minnesota
• Opt-out legislations: the mysterious viability of the false
• Opt-out policies capacity to increase organ donors is limited
• Assessing Global Organ Donation Policies: Opt-In vs Opt-Out
• What Counts as a Nudge?
• Preventing Secondary Pregnancy In Adolescents: A Model Program
• The Effect of Monetary Incentives and Peer Support Groups on Repeat Adolescent Pregnancies A Randomized Trial of the Dollar-a-Day Program
• The i-frame and the s-frame: How focusing on individual-level solutions has led behavioral public policy astray
• Can behavioural economics make us healthier?
• On the Supposed Evidence for Libertarian Paternalism

Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

What’s your love language? Is it gifts? Words of affirmation? Or is it podcasts about books with extremely weird, reactionary gender dynamics?

Support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• Can Gary Chapman Save Your Marriage?
• The Sixth Love Language Does Not Exist
• How ‘The Five Love Languages’ Gets Misinterpreted
• The 5 Love Languages Don’t Matter as Much as You Think
• The Creator Of The 5 Love Languages Is A Homophobe And This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things
• Famed Author Gary Chapman Talks Love, Marriage, Sex 
• Evangelicals Incorporated

Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

Is it bootstraps? It's bootstraps.

To hear the rest of the show, support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

In 1997, Robert Kiyosaki revealed the secret to lifelong success: Deliver grifty seminars and hire child slaves.

Support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry
• ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad' Robert Kiyosaki Exposed
• Stupid Investment of the Week
• Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Education on Real Estate Investing Review
• The Ticket to Easy Street? The Financial Consequences of Winning the Lottery
• Why the Myth of the Miserable Lottery Winner Just Won’t Die
• Work Centrality and Post-Award Work Behavior of Lottery Winners
• "The best way to get even with A-grade students was to make them employees of mine"
• Ohio real estate investor’s warning statement on Robert Kiyosaki and Bill Gatten’s complex PACtrust for real estate investing
• Academic Discipline and Personal Finance Instruction in High School

Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

Get in loser, we're going to Oberlin.

To hear the rest of the show, support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

In 2016, J.D. Vance informally launched his political career with "Hillbilly Elegy," a memoir that blames the relative poverty of Appalachian and Rust Belt populations on their own culture. Despite its reactionary premise, mainstream and liberal press outlets were so enamored by the book that they accidentally made Vance a senator.

Support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• Appalachian Reckoning 
• America’s Divided Recovery 
• What Did Hillbilly Elegy Get Wrong? 
• J.D. Vance, the False Prophet of Blue America 
• Hillbilly Elitism
• Welfare Queens and White Trash 
• Consumer Expenditures in 2016 
• Household Expenditures and Income 
• CFPB Data Point: Payday Lending 

Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

TRIGGER WARNING: if you're a SNOWFLAKE college professor afraid of how your students are expressing themselves, you might need a SAFE SPACE, because Michael and Peter are discussing "The Coddling of The American Mind," a book about campus culture that's light on facts and heavy on cherry-picked anecdotes.

CORRECTION: The Socrates quote mentioned at the end of this episode is apocryphal. We thank the listeners who pointed this out for refusing to coddle our American minds.

Support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod


Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• The Miseducation of Free Speech (https://www.virginialawreview.org/articles/miseducation-free-speech/)
• College and the “Culture War”: Assessing Higher Education’s Influence on Moral Attitudes (
• https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00031224211041094)
• The Myth of the Campus Coddle Crisis (https://academeblog.org/2018/12/28/the-myth-of-the-campus-coddle-crisis-the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/)
• What ‘Safe Spaces’ Really Look Like on College Campuses (https://www.chronicle.com/article/what-safe-spaces-really-look-like-on-college-campuses/?bc_nonce=peduocnzcslb08jxmt1dlb&cid=reg_wall_signup)
• Are College Campuses Really in the Thrall of Leftist Censors? (https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/03/hypersensitive-campus-progressives-judith-shulevitz-is-half-right-but-takes-her-criticisms-too-far.html)
•  Speaking Freely: What Students Think about Expression at American Colleges (https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/student-attitudes-free-speech-survey)
•  ‘Not all cultures are created equal’ says Penn Law professor in op-ed (https://www.thedp.com/article/2017/08/amy-wax-penn-law-cultural-values)
•  How Right Wing Media Has Tried to Stifle Student Speech at Evergreen State College (https://psmag.com/education/the-real-free-speech-story-at-evergreen-college)
• I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me (https://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraid)
• In College and Hiding From Scary Ideas (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/opinion/sunday/judith-shulevitz-hiding-from-scary-ideas.html)

Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

The nation's most prestigious newspaper insists on asking a very stupid question. So for this month's bonus episode, we decided to answer it.

To hear the rest of the show, support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

As we mentioned at the top of the episode, we're donating this month's support to three of our trans journo-friends! They've been unbelievably patient with Mike as he's navigated the science and politics of this issue over the last year. Here's where to find and support their work:

• Parker Molloy (readtpa.com) 
• Katelyn Burns (patreon.com/katelynburns)
• Evan Urquhart  (assignedmedia.org) 

"If your thesis doesn't hold up to obvious criticisms, there's a chance that your thesis sucks."

Thanks to Paul Musgrave and Alex Cruikshanks for helping us fact-check this episode!

Support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Links!

• Huntington’s 1993 article
• Statistics on deaths in state-based conflicts 
• The Clash of Civilizations: An Islamicist’s Critique
• Paul Musgrave’s Roundtable on  Clash of Civilizations  
• “The Hispanic Challenge” 
• The “Arab Street”? Public Opinion In The Arab World 
• The Clash of Ignorance 
• Can Civilizations Clash? 

Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man" changed political discourse forever. Peter and Michael peel back his muddled history and fluffy rhetoric, revealing several more layers of muddled history and fluffy rhetoric.

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• Reflections on the End of History, Five Years Later (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2505433)
• More Proof That This Really Is the End of History (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/francis-fukuyama-still-end-history/671761/)
• Francis Fukuyama Postpones the End of History (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/03/francis-fukuyama-postpones-the-end-of-history)
• Endism: why 1989 was not the 'end of history' (https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/endism/)
• The End of the End of History (https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/maximillian-alvarez-end-end-history/)
• It's Still Not the End of History (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/09/its-still-not-the-end-of-history-francis-fukuyama/379394/)
• Bring back ideology: Fukuyama's 'end of history' 25 years on (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/21/bring-back-ideology-fukuyama-end-history-25-years-on)
• Francis Fukuyama's Shrinking Idea (https://newrepublic.com/article/152668/francis-fukuyama-identity-review-collapse-theory-liberal-democracy)

In December 2019, the coronavirus pandemic began in Wuhan, China. In May 2021, America experienced one of the most cursed weeks of punditry we've ever seen.

This is a condensed version of the full episode. To hear the rest go to patreon.com/IfBooksPod. See you next week! 

In 1992 a yoga instructor with a distance-learning PhD had the courage to ask: "Are women not getting help around the house because they're using the wrong modal verb?"

Support us on Patreon

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages?
• A critical response to John Gray's Mars and Venus portrayals of men and women 
• The Gender Similarities Hypothesis
• The Rebuttal from Uranus
• Coming home upset: Gender, marital satisfaction and the daily spillover of workday experience into couple interactions
• FDA warning letter 
• Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus: An Analysis of a Potential Meme
• Women, Men and Language 
• Women, Men, and Gender: Ongoing Debates
• Women and Men Talking: Are They World’s Apart?

Rhonda Byrne's "The Secret" sold millions of copies based on a simple premise: All of science is fake and the only reason anything ever happens is because people manifest it by communicating with the universe.

Support us on Patreon

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• Power Lines
• Oprah's Ugly Secret
• The Staggering Bullshit of The Secret
• Death by “alternative” medicine: Who’s to blame? 
• For Some Seeking Rebirth, Sweat Lodge Was End
• A Little Secret About The Secret 

Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

How a Stanford lepidopterist convinced the world to fear the breeding habits of the poor. Again.

Support us on Patreon

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• Sonia Shah’s “The Next Great Migration”
• Barbarian Hordes: The overpopulation scapegoat in international development discourse
• Optimism and Overpopulation
• The Population Bomb Revisited
• The Strange History of Birth Control
• Birth Control for Others
• How the World Survived the Population Bomb: Lessons From 50 Years of Extraordinary Demographic History
• Why the Population Bomb is a Rockefeller Baby

Our first premium episode is a deep dive into the blog of the infamously (and  dubiously) "canceled" Bari Weiss.

To hear the full episode, subscribe on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

More free episodes are on their way! 

Neil Strauss's "The Game" aimed to teach any man how to hook up with beautiful women. All he needed was a little bit of sociopathy, a lot of misogyny and a fanny pack full of props.

Support us on Patreon

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• He's Simply Resistable  
• Pickup Artists Are Still A Thing. And They Want You To Know They’ve Evolved.
• Misogynist Incels and Male Supremacism 
• Would the Pickup Artist Stand a Chance in the #MeToo Era?  

Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

David Brooks became liberals' famous conservative by telling them what they wanted to hear. But ... why did they want to hear something that was lazy and wrong?

Support us on Patreon

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• A Reasonable Man
• David Brooks: Boo-Boos in Paradise
• A Cartoon Elite
• David Brooks’s Conversion Story
• David Brooks and the Endless Grift of the Conservative Commentariat
• How The Bobos Broke America
• Death Of A Yuppie Dream: The Rise And Fall Of The Professional-Managerial Class
• Stuff the Professional-Managerial Class Likes: "Distinction" for an Egalitarian Elite
• David Brooks’s Search for Meaning
• The facts vs. David Brooks: Startling inaccuracies raise questions about his latest book
• David Brooks Is Not Buying Your Excuses, Poor People

Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

In "Outliers," Malcolm Gladwell posited that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in something. Mike and Peter prove him wrong by mastering his dumb book over the span of about 50 minutes.

Support us on Patreon

Links:

• Malcolm Gladwell talks about responding to critics, and the perils of ‘Talking to Strangers’
• Gladwell for Dummies 
• Malcolm Gladwell interview 
• The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance 
• The Dangers of Delegating Education To Journalists 
• Good intuition takes years of practice 
• Blinkered 
• How Malcolm Gladwell Tricks You Into Believing 
• Complexity and the Ten-Thousand-Hour Rule 
• Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study

In 2005, two men named Steven and Stephen published the quintessential airport book. In 2022, two men named Mike and Peter started a whole podcast just to make fun of it.

Thanks to Ted Joyce and Ames Grawert for helping with the research for this episode!

Support us on Patreon

Where to find us: 

• Twitter
• Peter's other podcast, 5-4
• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• The 2003 NYT article
• Freakonomics: What Went Wrong?
• A Review of Freakonomics
• Dismal Science
• Freak-Freakonomics
• The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime: Comment
• The Abortion–Crime Link: Evidence from England and Wales
• The Impact of an Abortion Ban on Socioeconomic Outcomes of Children: Evidence from Romania
• Did Legalized Abortion Lower Crime?
• On the Choice of Control Variables in the Crime Equation
• Steven Levitt on Abortion and Crime: Old Economics in New Bottles
• The Impact Of Legalized Abortion On Crime
• The Great American Mystery Story: Why Did Crime Decline?
• Is There an iCrime Wave?
• The Great Crime Decline
• The Crime Drop in America
• 10 (Not Entirely Crazy) Theories Explaining the Great Crime Decline
• What Caused the Crime Decline?
• Freaks and Geeks: How Freakonomics is ruining the dismal science.
• Interesting Questions in Freakonomics
• Incentives And The Economic Point Of View: The Case Of Popular Economics
• Abortion and Crime in Australia

Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!