I think I am done with this show. I have not found a single episode to be a real criticism. It’s just wall to wall shallow comments and bad jokes.
Some of these books do have dangerous bad ideas and they deserve a much more serious critique.
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Counterpoint: If Books Could Kill is smart and funny.
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And yet you frequent this forum. Curious.
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Maybe the point is that these books aren’t worthy of being taken seriously.
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That’s obviously not the point of the podcast.
I’ve listened to the first four (public ones) and think the show is OK. I’m not a huge fan of the “let’s validate your pre-existing opinions” genre of podcasts (of which 5-4 is also a prominent member). For a lot of these books there is not a lot of serious criticism to be made because the correct criticism is simply that they haven’t proven their case; like Gladwell’s whole thing is flimsy generalizations from nuggets of underlying truth. I remember Sarah Marshall of You’re Wrong About once saying that that show could be summed up as “is it, though?” which is also adequate criticism of a lot of Freakonomics, Outliers, Bobos in Paradise, etc.
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This is better said. That’s what I mean by shallow. They just assume all listeners agree already so spend almost not time on substance and just make bad jokes. It’s an hour of “see how dumb” over and over.
Not sure what you expect.
It’s about clowning on best-selling non-fiction that deserves to be clowned on. It’s not an academic podcast. It’s entertainment for an audience that they know. And the audience knows who the audience is.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say there’s just not a market for a serious scientific debunking of whether positive thinking will get your bigoted colleagues transfered away.
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Some “comedy” podcasts are just dumb.
Behind the bastards is 100% up my alley but the co-hosts and banter are generally too dumb to tolerate even when the host provides some good information.
There is another kind?
Despite it’s raison d’etre being to not do this, You’re wrong about was the apotheosis of the genre
As concrete evidence that this isn’t going very far out on a limb at all, Peter’s other podcast, 5-4, which is pretty serious, focused, and academic criticism on a much more important subject (Supreme Court jurisprudence), has a third less patrons in three years than If Books Could Kill has in three months.
5-4 is basically a political podcast.
I disagree. YWA (in its original form with Hobbes and Marshall) was a seeing how the sausage is made kind of thing, where they haul up some barely remembered cultural artefact and give you the story and then how that was filtered through the cultural and media landscape to produce the thing you barely remember. It wasn’t possible for them to flatter my opinions on like, crack babies or Anna Nicole Smith because I didn’t have any opinions on those things prior to listening to the episodes.
Listening to a 5-4 where I disagreed with them (some eminent domain case) made me realize that the “analysis” in the show is actually just assuring listeners that their political instincts are good and correct. I just don’t find “people explain in detail why an obviously good thing is good” or (as in the case of If Books Could Kill) “people explain in detail why an obviously bad thing is bad” to be very interesting or entertaining. I do if it’s the Chapo guys riffing on something obviously stupid, but the tone of 5-4 or IBCK is much more “we’re going to Educate You and Bring The Facts” and I don’t feel like I am going to learn anything when they are mostly going to be repeating my opinions back to me. Peter is a funny guy so his presence in both podcasts elevates them, but a Peter-less 5-4 would be borderline unlistenable to me.
Of course.
I would agree that if I didn’t know anything about a topic, then I suppose hearing about it for the first time wouldn’t allow for my prior (absent) opinion to be affirmed. Of course, I couldn’t then be “wrong” about it, either.
I agree with Chris. Shows like this are our Fox News in terms of confirmation bias. They are just not interesting. It would be more interesting if they talked about some of the good ideas in these books.
The fact that it is more popular than a more academic show is hardly surprising.
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I’d never thought about it, but I 100% agree and I hope I don’t have to find out if I’m right.
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I’m not sure what biases I went into this Mars Venus episode with that I was looking to get confirmed, since I’d barely heard of the book and knew nothing about it.
“Hey, this popular book is actually full of misogynist bullshit and the author is a fraud” feels like a nonzero amount of information that I otherwise didn’t have, and, along with some amusing digressions, makes for a pretty entertaining listen. There are plenty of humorless, analytical podcasts out there that are designed to challenge preconceived notions–when I’m in the mood for that, I can listen to Citations Needed. It’s apples and oranges.
I listened to the Mars/Venus episode and it was a good one, maybe the best I’ve heard so far. Always fascinating to me when people don’t realise they are projecting their own psychodrama out onto the rest of the world, that’s why I find Rod Dreher so interesting.
I’m halfway through The Secret episode though and it’s pretty boring, real shooting fish in a barrel stuff.
I don’t subscribe to the IBCK Patreon - how’s the Lab Leak episode?
I anticipate that shooting fish in a barrel is going to be a recurring thing; dunking on terrible stuff is the podcast’s whole raison d’etre rather than a serious intellectual exploration of interesting ideas.
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