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?"

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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!