Welcome to the Playing Books podcast. We thank you for tuning in to the sex episode of the podcast. We're exploring one of the most misunderstood aspects of human experience: sex. This episode focuses on Meg-John Barker’s The Psychology of Sex (The Psychology of Everything).

What can psychology teach us about sex? How do different bodies and brains respond sexually? How can we prevent people from being stigmatized for their sexuality? Many such questions are explored in this episode and in Meg-John Barker’s The Psychology of Sex. 

On the side, we love to hear your take on this: how is Artificial Intelligence (AI) influencing sex today? What will the future of sex be like?

Barker takes us on a remarkable tour of how psychologists have created and sustained certain understandings of sex and sexuality. Since so much of our sexual relationship happens in the mind, understanding where our ideas about sex come from becomes essential. We discuss cultural concerns around sexualization, pornography, and sex addiction while drawing on cutting-edge research from sexual communities and the applied field of sex therapy.

In this episode, we reveal how psychology reshapes your understanding of desire, attraction, and intimacy. You should discover the surprising ways your brain influences your sexuality, challenge the narratives you've absorbed, and gain permission to question what you've always been told. This practical episode helps you navigate your own sexual identity, build healthier relationships, or simply be curious about human sexuality. This episode should shift how you think about this subject.

Meg-John Barker’s The Psychology of Sex (The Psychology of Everything) deserves close reading and thoughtful engagement with Barker’s expository approach to this subject. We recommend it from Amazon, your favorite local bookstore, or request it at your public library. The author would greatly appreciate your support, and the publishers who wager on such matters.

How was sex regarded in your childhood? Do you take the Scriptural or liberal view on sex and gender, male and female? What is your stance on sex before marriage? Is protection during sex enough to prevent sexually transmitted diseases? Which gender and race loves sex the most?

Please, we love to hear your thoughts. Comment, share this episode, follow, and subscribe to the Playing Books podcast for more racy conversations like this.

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Thank you again so much for your time and for listening to our sex episode of the podcast.

Welcome to the Playing Books podcast. We thank you for tuning into the mental health episode of the podcast.

Today’s conversation centers on a book that feels urgent, humane, and quietly revolutionary. The Unfragile Mind: A Physician’s Call for Restoring Hope and Humanity to Mental Health Care by Gavin Francis is not just another title in the mental‑health space. It’s a reminder, delivered with clarity, compassion, and clinical honesty, that people are not diagnoses, and care should never feel mechanical, rushed, or stripped of dignity.

In this episode, we talk about what it means to build a mind that bends without breaking, a mind strengthened by connection, meaning, and the simple act of being seen. Francis writes with the rare combination of medical authority and human warmth, and his message lands with force: mental health care can be better, kinder, and more hopeful, and we all have a role in shaping that future.

This is a conversation for anyone who has felt overwhelmed, overlooked, or misunderstood. Anyone who wants a mental health system that treats people as whole beings, anyone who believes that with a positive attitude, and wants to fight many dilutions and isolations that follow mental health misdiagnosis, and the like, should consider listening to this episode as many times as possible.

Learn how the quote, ‘the map is not the territory’ applies to mental health and other surprising tips for sound mental health from the book. Consider purchasing The Unfragile Mind on Amazon, at your favorite local bookstore, or request it at your public library.

Mental health is getting discussed more today. What is your call on Gavin Francis’ The Unfragile Mind: A Physician’s Call for Restoring Hope and Humanity to Mental Health Care, and this episode? Please comment, share, follow, subscribe, and recommend the Playing Books podcast to someone who might need a moment of clarity or encouragement today.

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Thank you again so much for your time and for listening to our mental health episode. Please, take a preventative approach to your mental health and don’t let anyone shame you for your temporary mental health challenges.

Welcome to the Playing Books podcast. We thank you for tuning into the memoir episode of the podcast. You made a great choice.

This episode is largely about desiring a quality life, dreaming it, and going to work with everything you’ve got to make it a reality. We discuss Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life, one of the most unexpectedly raw, refreshingly honest, and genuinely life-changing books to come out in years.

Yes, that Arnold, the BIG MUSCULAR, HEAVY WEIGHT BODYBUILDER, with the last name, Schwarzenegger, that is hard to pronounce. Schwarzenegger went from a small, cold-water farmhouse in rural Austria, where ambition itself felt illegal, to becoming the greatest bodybuilder on the planet, the highest-paid movie star in Hollywood history, and the Governor of California's $2.7 trillion economy. Three completely different worlds. Three mountain peaks. One man: Arnold Schwarzenegger.

That's not luck. That's not genetics. That's persistence, determination, focus, and intense desire.

In Be Useful, Arnold breaks down the exact mental tools he forged as a young man with nothing but a dream too big for anyone around him to take seriously. And here's the thing that hits hardest: he doesn't sugarcoat a single word. This isn't a celebrity memoir dressed up as a self-help book. It's a no-nonsense, blunt, almost uncomfortable conversation about vision, hard work, resilience, and one lesson his father never let him forget: be useful. Not famous. Not rich. Useful.

What makes this book feel different? Arnold doesn't just tell you what to do, he shows you how it cost him, in failures, near-disasters, and defining moments he's never spoken about publicly before. He talks about purpose the way a man talks about something he fought for, not something he stumbled into, accidentally.

Too many of us are stuck. Waiting. Spinning in self-pity, scrolling instead of building, hoping someone will arrive with the answers. Arnold's message, delivered in that unmistakable, no-filter voice, is both a cold splash of water and a warm hand on the shoulder: no one is coming to rescue you. But the good news? You're all you need.

If you've ever felt like your life has more in it than what's currently showing up on the surface, this episode and this book are for you.

Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life is an invaluable addition to your library. You can purchase the book on Amazon, at your favorite local bookstore, or request it at your public library. However you get it, just get it.

Please, we love to hear from you. What tool from Arnold's life hit closest to home for you? Feel free to drop your thoughts in the comments; your perspective might be exactly what another listener needs to read today.

If this episode added something to your day, share it with someone who's ready to stop waiting and start building. And if you haven't already, follow, subscribe, and recommend the Playing Books Podcast to anyone who believes that the right book at the right moment can genuinely change a life. Because it can, we've seen it happen.

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Thank you for being here. Truly. In a world full of noise, you chose to spend your time with words that matter, and that says everything about who you are and who you're becoming. We'll see you in the next episode. Keep reading. Keep growing. Keep being useful.

Welcome to the Playing Books podcast. We thank you for tuning into the history episode of the podcast.

What if the "New World" wasn't new to everyone?

Our conversation is about Ivan Van Sertima’s They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America (Journal of African Civilizations). We step outside the lines of traditional history to explore a masterpiece that didn’t just stir the pot; it shattered it.

Forget the standard 1492 narrative. Van Sertima presents a meticulously researched, revolutionary case for a pre-Columbian African presence in the Americas. From the colossal Olmec stone heads with distinct African features to the botanical mysteries of the African bottle gourd and the chemical signatures of West African gold alloys found in the Caribbean, this isn’t just speculation; it’s a forensic investigation into our global past.

This episode is not about portraying any race as the most ancient and intelligent; it is about uncovering history as it is.

Ivan Van Sertima’s They Came Before Columbus is more than a history lesson; it’s a paradigm shift. It challenges us to rethink the capabilities of ancient civilizations and the vast, interconnected nature of our world long before the age of steam and steel. If you’ve ever felt like the story of human achievement was missing a few vital chapters, this episode is your invitation to find them.

We recommend you read about the research and archaeological evidence that answers questions about the pre-Columbus era, settling controversies that are accepted without books like Sertima’s They Came Before Columbus. You can purchase the book on Amazon, at your regular bookstore, or get it through your local library.

Get ready to change how you view the map, prevailing historical perspectives, and the Columbus Day holiday in the U.S., celebrated every October since 1937. 

How have you always doubted the narratives about Columbus as the first to discover and settle in the New World? Or are you a proponent of that history?

Please leave us your feedback, follow, and subscribe to the Playing Books podcast to continue to learn the realities of our world as objectively as possible.

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Happy Columbus Day in advance :). Thank you for tuning in and for giving us some of your precious time.

Welcome to the Playing Books podcast. We thank you for tuning into the cognitive episode of the podcast.

We discuss Barbara Oakley, PhD’s A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra). Being a human being itself makes everyone highly intelligent and cognitive, far more than imagined. Many students, parents, teachers, bosses, and supposed geniuses have assumed that being smart isn’t for everyone. Only a handful of people are geniuses. But as cognitive researchers and experts like Dr. Oakley would find, intelligence is innate and requires learning how to release it.

That is what this episode explores:

Learn the importance of mindset

Learn the difference between long and short-term memory

Regular exercise is so useful to the brain

Utilize mental techniques like chunking to learn abstract subjects like Physics, Maths, Chemistry, and others.

Understand the power of persistent, focused practice

Dr. Oakley is known to always say, ‘Practice makes permanent.” Which, in reality, is what makes anyone a genius. Just as biological growth takes time, cognitive growth is no different. The nervous system expects human beings to practice and be patient for that wow spark to strike naturally.

It is available on Amazon, in other bookstores, or through your local library.
You are not an unintelligent, dense person. As you allow this episode and Dr. Oakley’s A Mind for Numbers to change your mindset while you make a consistent, diligent, persistent effort to learn how to code, communicate better, and exercise as a lifestyle, you will find out your intelligence is rare, waiting this long to be tapped out and utilized to accomplish significant feats. Please leave your feedback, share this cognitive episode with inquisitive folks, follow the podcast, subscribe for more insights, and recommend the Playing Books podcast.

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We challenge you to disabuse yourself of the belief that math and other abstract subjects and fields are way out of your league and not for your type.

Please, when you start tackling some of the world’s most cognitive problems, remember Barbara Oakley, PhD’s A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra), and this episode.

Thank you again for listening.

Welcome to the Playing Books podcast. We thank you for tuning into the health episode of the podcast.

What if your grocery list could become your first line of defense against disease?

In this week’s episode, we dive into the groundbreaking book Eat to Beat Disease: The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself by William W. Li, MD, a powerful, eye-opening exploration of how food can do far more than just fuel and fill you; it can heal you or make you sick.

This isn’t another “don’t eat this, avoid that” conversation. Instead, it’s a refreshing shift: a celebration of what you can add to your plate to unlock your body’s natural defense systems. Think every day, accessible foods like plums, cinnamon, jasmine tea, red wine (yes, really), black beans, San Marzano tomatoes, olive oil—and so much more.

We unpack how these foods activate five critical health systems—angiogenesis, regeneration, microbiome, DNA protection, and immunity—helping your body fight cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune conditions, and beyond. It’s science made practical, empowering, and surprisingly delicious.

You’ll hear why this book has been called “groundbreaking” by Mehmet Oz, praised by Cindy Crawford as a total mindset shift, and described by Bono as both entertaining and empowering. But more importantly, you’ll discover how to apply these insights in real life without turning your lifestyle upside down.

If you’ve ever wondered whether your daily meals could be doing more for you, this episode might just change how you shop, cook, and eat forever.

Food is medicine. That is a solid reason to purchase William W. Li, MD’s Eat to Beat Disease: The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself. 

It is available on Amazon, in other bookstores, or through your local library.
Don’t you feel sick or lively when you eat some food? Food is beyond taking care of hunger; eat to beat disease should come to mind at breakfast, lunch, dinner, or whenever hunger hits. Please, leave your feedback, share this health episode with someone you care about, follow the podcast, subscribe for more insights, and recommend the Playing Books podcast to your health enthusiasts.

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We challenge you to start eating to beat disease and lead a healthier lifestyle.

Thank you for listening and for choosing to grow, learn, and live better with us.

Welcome to the Playing Books podcast. We thank you for tuning into the mystery episode of the podcast.

Do you ever feel like invisible hands manage the world’s stage? Do you suspect that history isn’t a series of accidents, but a carefully scripted play? Humans must never be independent! We must become docile.

In this episode of Playing Books, we discuss Jüri Lina’s "Architects of Deception." Lina didn't just write a book; he beat out an expository blueprint that strips the gold leaf from global power structures, revealing the cold, hard machinery underneath. Many things, including good ones, were founded on deception from many years ago.

Lina moves beyond mere theory. He delivers a chillingly documented exploration of the occult influences and secret societies that quietly steered the course of human events for centuries. We discuss why this eye-opening work remains one of the most controversial texts in modern literature and how its revelations will change the way you view the evening news forever.

There are groups in the underworld determined to control what people see, think, eat, read, hear, and where they live. The attempts to create a New World Order go beyond rumors, controversies, fear-mongering, or ignorance. This episode and Lina’s book, Architects of Deception, should at least challenge your mind to recognize that something dark, more than imagined, is going on, and that it is not for the good of the people; it is for the evil interests of a few, primarily to accomplish satan’s mission for humans, animals, places, and things. Please, we beg you to share this episode and recommend the book Architects of Deception at your Church, workplace, business, and to your family, relatives, friends, significant other, neighbors, colleagues, roommate, classmates, schoolmates, buddies, and others.

Deception in any sense deserves caution, a proactive one at that. Don’t just take our word for it; examine the evidence yourself. Purchase your copy of "Architects of Deception" on Amazon, at your local library, or visit your favorite local bookstore. After reading the book and listening to this episode, you may reexamine what you think of Napoleon, Lenin, Trotsky, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Roosevelt, Truman, and others.

Watch out for the elites' ancient desires of microchipping every human being as their puppets.

Have you encountered anything secretive at this level that Lina exposed in Architects of Deception? Do you belong to any of one or all of these secret societies? What do you think of your fate as JESUS CHRIST is on His way? Please, comment, share, follow, tag us, and subscribe to the Playing Books podcast.

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Thank you for your time and for tuning in to this episode of the Playing Books podcast.

Thank you for tuning in to the Playing Books podcast. Welcome to the character episode of the podcast.

What if the fastest way to real success, truly loving, mutual relationships, and lasting influence isn’t grinding harder or posting louder, but getting smaller on purpose?  

In this fresh, no-fluff episode of Playing Books, we crack open Humility: True Greatness by C.J. Mahaney, a foundational, expository book that quietly dismantles every cultural myth about what “winning” actually looks like.  

We explore why humility isn’t weakness or false modesty; it’s the hidden engine behind every truly great leader, parent, friend, and dreamer. Through sharp biblical insight and disarmingly practical steps, Mahaney shows how pride sneaks in wearing success’s clothes and how choosing humility instead unlocks freedom, favor, and fruit that self-promotion can never touch.  

If you’re tired of the highlight-reel life, craving something real, and ready to trade ego for impact, this episode will hit you right where you live.  

Purchase the book today on Amazon, at any bookstore, or library, and start applying these truths immediately. Your next level of greatness might be one humble choice away.  

Does humility make sense to you? Does the idea of God opposing the proud scare you or encourage you to be humble? Comments, text it to that one friend who needs it most. Please, connect with other art and literature advocates on our social media: 

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Thank you for your time and for tuning in to this episode of the Playing Books podcast.

Thank you for tuning into the Playing Books Podcast. Welcome to the writing episode of the podcast.

 Have you felt it, that sinking moment when you reread something you wrote and thought: this isn't it? The idea was there. The feeling was real. But somehow, between the brain and the page, something leaked out, leaving behind a sentence that works but doesn't sing.

"Most writers know what they want to say. Fewer know how to actually say it. That gap? That's where Neal Allen and Anne Lamott live."

In this episode of Playing Books, we discuss Neal Allen and Anne Lamott’s Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences, a small, precise, and genuinely revelatory book that treats the sentence not as grammar homework but as the fundamental unit of human thought. Thirty-six techniques. No fluff. And co-authored by a writing teacher whose structural insight cuts like a scalpel, alongside Anne Lamott, one of the most beloved writing voices of the last thirty years.

We talk about why so many writers unknowingly bury their strongest words in the middle of their sentences. Why passive voice isn't always villainous, but usually is foul. Why clarity and beauty are not opposites, and how the space between a comma and a period can change everything a reader feels.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and growing technological advancements are making writing a necessity for survival. Everyone, even in developing countries, has to write emails, send texts, or reply to lead a normal life. Since writing is essential, why not learn how to write well? 

This episode would help you avoid those awkward feelings about your essays, novels, blog posts, or just long messages that somehow never land the way you meant them to, especially in an embarrassing way, giving the impression that you are not an intelligent person. 

Neal Allen and Anne Lamott’s Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences addresses everyday situations. It’s practically useful, and a reliable reference to consult at your key moment of getting a writing out, and you don’t want to come short. Consider purchasing Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences on Amazon, borrowing it from your library, or purchasing it from your favorite bookstore.

This is a relevant episode you want to share with your family, friends, colleagues, and other significant people in your life. Please, comment, follow, like, and subscribe to the Playing Books Podcast.

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Thank you so much once again for your time and for listening.

Thank you for tuning in to the Playing Books Podcast. We welcome you to the biography episode of our podcast.

In this episode of the Playing Books Podcast, we discuss Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, a book that strips away the myth, the marketing fog, and the glossy hero stories to reveal the real human behind Apple’s iconic glow. This isn’t just a biography; it’s a brutally honest autopsy of genius, ambition, obsession, and the messy edges of creativity.

If you’ve ever felt torn between your ideas and your reality, if you’ve wrestled with perfectionism, or if you’ve wondered whether passion can coexist with peace, Jobs’s story hits harder than expected. 

Isaacson doesn’t glorify him; he exposes him. And in that exposure, we find lessons we can actually use: how to build, how to think, how to simplify, how to dream audaciously, and how not to treat people along the way.

We’re unpacking what makes the book unforgettable, what makes Jobs magnetic and maddening at the same time, and how you can take these lessons into your own creative, entrepreneurial, or personal journey. If you want to read along, you can grab the book on Amazon, at your favorite local bookstore, or library.

After you listen, tell us what resonated with you. Please, comment, share this episode with another curious mind, follow the show, subscribe for more book-deep-dives, and recommend the podcast to a friend who needs a spark of inspiration today.

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Thank you so much once again for your time and for listening.