Listening to the If Books Could Kill podcast 🎙️.

Peter Shamshiri (of 5-4 cohost fame) and Michael Hobbes (from Maintenance Phase) discuss and debunk ‘airport bestseller’ books that they believe have ruined our minds.

So far they’ve covered Freakonomics and Outliers, two books that in all honesty I remember being extremely into in my youth, in a pop-sci way. The former felt even somewhat formative in terms of my future interests.

This was at a point in time I was blissfully unaware of study design shenanigans, the replication crisis and the various other practices that can infect the scientific record. Here’s hoping not too much of my worldview is built on lies.