If Books Could Kill: A Podcast For The Self-Help Era
Depending on which side of the internet you find yourself on, the prism through which self-help content — specifically books — is reflected through will look wildly different. If you frequent the productivity side of the World Wide Web, you will not only be recommended every popular self-help book under the sun, but you will probably also be asked to buy the self-help book that the content creator has also written. Gym bros who don’t have time for reading might recommend some app like Blinkist or Headway that will distill any self-help book down to its core essence for you to inject into your ears before chugging down your daily dose of Alpha Male Testosterone. Maybe your bootlicking coworker told you that Atomic Habits changed his entire way of doing work, and now he has a fifteen-step morning routine and a seventy-step night routine and he never works his kids into either of these. If you’re really unfortunate, you got a copy of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus from your dad when you first started dating. You’ve scrolled through Instagram and watched tradwives praise Allie Beth Stuckey’s anti-self love book. You’ve been sent the link for a Rich Dad Poor Dad seminar because you mused about money being a little tight. Self-help content is everywhere, and sometimes, it feels like we’re drowning in it.
If you’re on the podcast-listening side of the internet — don’t worry, I don’t judge — If Books Could Kill, hosted by serial podcaster Michael Hobbes and lawyer Peter Shamshiri, is the side of the digital sphere where these popular, if problematic, books are dissected. Although the concept of critiquing self-help isn’t anything new — with countless academic analyses and Goodreads reviews and social media reactions not exclusive to the podcast realm —— having two witty individuals, both intelligent and one an overly avid researcher, tear apart these books is truly a schadenfreudic treat.
If Books Could Kill also serves to highlight the flaws in these kinds of pop-anything books that the masses consume. Sometimes a book that promises to change your life does manage to do exactly that. Indeed, the field of self-care has started to diversify to include people of color, neurodivergent individuals, and others historically left out of the self-help scene. But just because it’s starting to reflect society doesn’t mean that it still isn’t rife with issues. Just because Atomic Habits helped you, or your cousin, or your coworker doesn’t mean that there’s still not some large critiques to make about the industry it’s part of.
If Books Could Kill focuses mostly on the impact many of these books had on society, and through multiple episodes has broadened their scope to examine how the authors of these books are impacting society in many negative ways. Although it always feels good to hear a bad book eviscerated — there’s a reason we all read the 1-star reviews of our most hated books on Goodreads, right? — hearing the motivations behind these self-help superstars is enough to make you raise your eyebrows. IBCK covers the exploits of Robert Kiyosaki and his years-long real estate grifts, the cringeworthy gender essentialism behind John Gray’s Men Are From Mars series, or the head-scratching evolution of conservative politics after reading William Frank Buckley, Jr.’s 1951 book, God and Man At Yale. And as a listener and a skeptic of self-help generally, it feels so good to understand why exactly these books are so obnoxious.
I was personally affected by one of these books. As a high school graduation gift I was given the bestseller The Coddling of the American Mind, warning me against the “brainwashing” that I was sure to encounter in university. I read it — I make a note to read every book I am gifted, damn it, it’s the right thing to do — and there was something about it that didn’t feel like it was adding up to me. Surely, I thought, in the midst of all this fearfulness about how my generation is going soft, there had to be something more than punching down on student activists rightfully making their voices heard? To then encounter IBCK discussing exactly why the arguments of the book don’t hold up — such as how it misrepresents recent student protests — are vindicating.
The mission behind IBCK is simple — look at why these books get popular, and how their oversimplified arguments ultimately harm society. Freakanomics’s impact is the first discussed on the show, and how its rhetoric has poisoned the way that people talk about everything from deaths from gun violence to race issues in America. And yes, I’m considering pop-poli sci books self-help, if on a broader scale; they seek to point out an issue, real or imagined, in society in the same way a self-help book promises to help you solve your hamartia of procrastinating, or not waking up at 5am and buttchugging protein powder immediately.
This is not to say that self-help or pop-science books are useless or should be discounted entirely. There is nothing wrong with trying to break down a complex issue for a more general audience to understand — in fact, most would argue that’s exactly what intellectuals of complex issues should do. But bad science and bad arguments should absolutely, and rightly, be debunked in the marketplace of ideas before they have the chance to seep into things as large as policymaking to as small as how stressed we feel about our daily lives.
Economic, political science, and psychology books exist in a Venn diagram where the center is often “harmful rhetoric that will help nobody.” That harm comes in when someone trying to explain anything from geopolitics to why you can’t get a date warps these concepts into a single solution that does not exist. Human beings and societies are complex, and shitting on student activists for being the downfall of American society, or on how you asked your spouse if they could take out the trash instead of if they would is not going to make the change these books claim to.
If you hate self-help or are disappointed by the way bad pop-science slips through the cracks and want the words to articulate why, give Peter and Michael a try. If nothing else, you’ll have the perfect thing to say when aunt Katie tries to pawn off her copy of The Secret on to you, or see right through the shiny happy exterior of self-help gurus, to those slick pasts they try to hide. Could you — rather, would you — give it a listen?
