If Books Could Kill

The boys continue their discussion of Walter Isaacson's "Elon Musk." This is the part where Elon loses his mind. 

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• From self-proclaimed ‘socialist’ to Team Trump and DeSantis: Elon Musk’s curious politics revealed  
• The Quiet Political Rise of David Sacks, Silicon Valley’s Prophet of Urban Doom
• Elon Musk biographer admits suggestion SpaceX head blocked Ukraine drone attack was wrong 
• Elon Musk's Daughter on Dad's Biography: 'Sad Excuse for a Puff Piece'
• Character Limit
• Twitter fulfilling more government censorship requests under Musk 
• Elon Musk booed for nearly 5 minutes straight at Dave Chappelle show in San Francisco 
• New CNN Chief Trying to Please GOP Elite 
• Research finds more than 14 million preventable deaths by 2030 if USAID defunding continues, including more than 4 million children under five
• What the data says about Social Security 
• Trump Administration, DOGE Activities Risk SSA Operations and Security of Personal Data

Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

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A biography that dares to ask: Is a lifetime of worker abuse and narcissism worth it to experience robot butlers?

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Sources:

• What Elon Musk Gets Wrong about South Africa
• Elon Musk’s Anti-Semitic, Apartheid-Loving Grandfather 
• Elon Musk claims he was once one of the best Quake players around
• Watch Elon Musk Talk About Being an ‘Illegal Immigrant’ in Video From 2013 
• Elon Musk’s dad Errol says he can ‘prove’ existence of emerald mine in new bombshell claim revealing its location 
• How Elon Musk Went from Superhero to Supervillain 
• The Believer
• Elon Musk: The Architect of Tomorrow 
• How Elon Musk Plans on Reinventing the World (and Mars)
• Tesla factory workers reveal pain, injury and stress: 'Everything feels like the future but us' | Tesla
• Hundreds of Tesla workers tested positive for the virus after Elon Musk reopened a plant, data shows
• Inside Tesla as Elon Musk Pushed an Unflinching Vision for Self-Driving Cars 
• Tesla video promoting self-driving was staged, engineer testifies
• Elon Musk Says His 'Running Robot' Will 'Actually Eliminate Poverty' As He Shares Video Of Tesla Optimus Jogging 
• Elon Musk Wants ‘Strong Influence’ Over the ‘Robot Army’ He’s Building 
• There’s a Very Simple Pattern to Elon Musk’s Broken Promises

Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

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How do you tell the entire history of humanity in a single book? Whatever you do, do not open a browser window. 

Thanks to Dorsa Amir, Duncan Stibbard Hawkes and David Perry for help researching and fact-checking this episode!

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Sources:

• A Response to Yuval Harari
• Yuval Noah Harari’s History of Everyone, Ever
• How Humankind Conquered the World
• The revolution that wasn't
• Advances In The Study Of The Origin Of Humanness
• 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is a banal and risible self-help book
• Are Human Rights Western? 
• Bonaparte in Egypt
• Ship of Fools
• The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari
• A Reductionist History of Humankind
• Harari, Sapiens and historical accuracy
• The Broad Spectrum Revolution at 40
• The Neolithic Revolution in the Middle East
• Was the Agricultural Revolution a Terrible Mistake?
• The Darker Side of the "Original Affluent Society"
• Harari's world history
• Compassion with Justice: Harari’s Assault on Human Rights
• Reconsidering the link between past material culture and cognition 

Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

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Live like Dale Carnegie, neg like Calvin Coolidge.

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Sources:

• Self-help Messiah: Dale Carnegie and Success in Modern America
• The Positive Thinkers
• Age of industrial violence 1910-1915 : the activities and findings of the United States commission on industrial relations
• Representation and Rebellion: The Rockefeller Plan at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, 1914–1942 
• Dale Carnegie and the Problem of Sincerity
  New York Times review from 1937

Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

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Peter and Michael discuss a book that's light on facts and long on sentences.

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Sources:

• Book Review: ‘Summer of Our Discontent,’ by Thomas Chatterton Williams
• Police shootings database 2015-2024
• From the archive, 22 March 1991: President Bush sickened by Rodney King case
• Barack Obama Public Approval
• Letter To Christopher L. Eisgruber, President Princeton University
• Police give additional details in beating of machete-wielding man amid Dallas protest
• In City After City, Police Mishandled Black Lives Matter Protests
• RIOTS IN LOS ANGELES: Challenger; Nation Needs Healing, Clinton Says
• Median household income by race and ethnicity U.S. 1967-2023
• Majority of college students support Israel/Gaza campus protests, 1 in 10 actually participate in them
• Thomas Chatterton Williams on Race, Identity, and “Cancel Culture”

Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

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How one comedian's offhand advice launched a decent TV episode, a mediocre book and a terrible movie.

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• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• Susan Faludi's "Backlash"
• For Women Who Count on Men to Be Jerks
• Bridget Jones’s Legacy
• Single Women in Popular Culture
• A Decade of Advice for Women and Men in the Best-Selling Self-Help Literature
• The gendered nature of self-help
• Single Women in Popular Culture 

Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

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Did you know that in the split-second it took you to read the title of this episode, your subconscious already figured out that it was going to be extremely good?

Peter and Michael talk about Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink," a book that is mostly cute scientific anecdotes but also indirectly resulted in millions of taxpayer dollars being wasted on fraudulent science.

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Sources:

• Unconscious influences on decision making: A critical review
• Half a Minute: Predicting Teacher Evaluations From Thin Slices of Nonverbal Behavior and Physical Attractiveness
• 'Thin slices' of life
• Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to Disagree
• Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes
• Magic at the marketplace: Choice blindness for the taste of jam and the smell of tea
• False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant
• Reading Lies: Nonverbal Communication and Deception 
• Behavioral Science and Security
• TSA Should Limit Future Funding for Behavior Detection Activities
• TSA Does Not Have Valid Evidence Supporting Most of the Revised Behavioral Indicators Used in Its Behavior Detection Activities 
• Telling Lies: Fact, Fiction, and Nonsense
• TSA’s Secret Behavior Checklist to Spot Terrorists
• A Review of 'Blink' by Malcolm Gladwell

Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

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

This is most of the episode but if you want to hear the last 20 minutes, support us on Patreon!

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

Last episode we met two Princeton political scientists who are bad at virology. Today we learn that they are also bad at political science.

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• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• Lawrence Wright’s “The Plague Year”
• Jonathan Howard’s “We Want Them Infected”
• How the Pandemic Defeated America
• COVID-19: examining the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions
• US State Restrictions and Excess COVID-19 Pandemic Deaths
• Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions
• Policy Interventions, Social Distancing, and SARS-CoV-2 Transmission
• The Impact of Vaccines and Behavior on US Cumulative Deaths
• Pro-Trump counties now have far higher COVID death rates
• Report for the Scottish COVID-19 Inquiry
• The Effectiveness Of Government Masking Mandates 
• School closures during COVID-19
• COVID-19–Related School Closures
• The Effects of School Closures on COVID‑19
• Higher COVID-19 Deaths with Later School Closure in the United States
• Reopening America’s Schools
• Reading literacy decline in Europe
• DeSantis vs. Newsom
• Red States Have Seen Less Learning Loss
• Political partisanship and mobility restriction 
• Republicans Aren’t New To The Anti-Vaxx Movement
• KFF poll on anti-vaxx beliefs

Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

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Two political scientists look back at a deadly pandemic and ask, "could we have done even less?"

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• Peter's newsletter
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• Mike's other podcast, Maintenance Phase

Sources:

• Lawrence Wright’s “The Plague Year”
• The 2019 WHO report                
• 30‐day mortality following COVID‐19
• COVID-19: examining the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions
• Policy Interventions, Social Distancing, and SARS-CoV-2 Transmission in the United States
• What we can learn from Sweden
• A review of the Swedish policy response to COVID-19
• How Sweden approached the COVID‐19 pandemic
• The first eight months of Sweden’s COVID‐19 strategy
• The Swedish COVID-19 Response Is a Disaster
• Excess mortality in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden during the COVID-19 pandemic 
• Comparing drivers of pandemic economic decline 2020
• How Sweden approached the COVID-19 pandemic
• Comparisons of all-cause mortality between European countries and regions
• Jonathan Howard’s “We Want Them Infected.”
• Deaths: Leading Causes for 2021
• Stay-at-home orders associate with subsequent decreases in COVID-19 cases and fatalities in the United States 
• Did the Timing of State Mandated Lockdown Affect the Spread of COVID-19? 
• US State Restrictions and Excess COVID-19 Pandemic Deaths

Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

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