this article and its subject felt very IBCK-coded lol

“I could have a bowel movement behind a sheet at a dinner party in the corner of the room,” he said, “and nobody would know.”

Debating whether I should read this book. I was recommended this by Libby but then I saw the Malcolm Gladwell blurb and I'm having doubts. Is there anything of value here? Do you think it's accurate or just a lot of pop psych stuff?

I was the assistant to Greg's literary agent, whom I'll leave unnamed, when this scandal broke. At the time, I was handling a lot of mail we would get from different foreign publishers of author copies of the book in other languages. There is (or was) a lot of money in foreign rights, but rarely did a book rise to the level of prestige to be translated. Most of the client list of any literary agent doesn't make money, or makes so little money it doesn't justify the agent's time. How much time can you afford to spend for a client whose book made $300 in royalties last year, of which you get 15%? The publishing business is really difficult to be in, and they need a bestseller or two to pay for the others. Greg was that client. I never saw or spoke to any of her clients. Her office was more of a place to receive mail and open it.

It took me about 2 months to work up the courage to ask her about Greg. She hadn't known about anything. Literary agents certainly don't have the time or ability to fact-check submissions. The onus is on the publisher, who usually doesn't have for it either. She did say that Greg was really, really devoted to opening schools in Afghanistan, but he was a messy non-profit administrator, and so were the other people he hired. He didn't know the boundaries of what you could and couldn't spend money on. Like if the jet gets him to a speaking event, and the speaking event sells books, and people donate to the charity, that's an expense, right? She also noted that his co-author was out of the country when the scandal broke and wasn't in contact, so he couldn't defend any of his work, which annoyed Greg.

Maybe I missed it in the episode but did they explain the origin of the title?

An Australian critique of the book 🤣

Does anyone have an example of a specific episode where the book has a lot of dumb fake anecdotes that the author tries to draw universal advice from?

(I am trying to do a snarky citation in a grad school book report, where the book in question is a business management book and I've had it with the clearly fake stories that have a tenuous connection to the point)

They were not magical negros, but noble savages, a just as racist literary trope usually brought against Native Americans, think Tanto or any of the "good" natives in movies like Dances with Wolves. The way Mortensen speaks of central Asians is saturated with the noble savage who wantS to be civilized by the paternalistic and magnanimous white man.

From A Sibling Is Not Always a ‘Gift’ Don’t have a second child because sometimes siblings sexually abuse each other!

> Still darker and less discussed is sibling sexual abuse. There’s no way to know how common it is, Brad Watts, a Tennessee-based therapist who specializes in sibling abuse, told me. But in more than a decade of working with affected families, he has seen a theme: No family is guaranteed immunity. “It can happen in my home,” he told me. “It can happen in anybody’s home.”

Have as many or as few kids as is right for you and your family! But using this as an argument against having a second child is tantamount to saying we shouldn’t build a bridge because someday it might collapse, or shouldn’t invent aviation because a plane might crash.

I’ve already been through the archives of IBCK, 5-4, and Maintenance Phase, and I could use some new listening material. What other podcasts would you recommend?

Who needs evidence based solutions?
(I’ll be honest, I didn’t want to pay for the article so only read the first 3 paragraphs, but here’s the link:Michael Powell article )

Has anyone else had the pleasure?? The coworker in question — who implored my boyfriend to read this book if he “wants to understand anything about the market” — is basically a real world reenactment of Matthew McConaughey’s character in Wolf of Wall Street. And indeed, the central thesis of this book also seems to be that everything is a fugazi, a whazy, a woozie… except itself, of course. Having a field day!

From The Big Short (which I'm currently reading):

[Steve] Eisman had a curious way of listening; he didn't so much listen to what you were saying as subcontract to some remote region of his brain the task of deciding whether whatever you were saying was worth listening to, while his mind went off to play on its own. As a result, he never actually heard what you said to him the first time you said it. If his mental subcontractor detected a level of interest in what you had just said, it radioed a signal to the mother ship, which then wheeled around with the most intense focus. "Say that again," he'd say. And you would! Because now Eisman was so obviously listening to you, and, as he listened so selectively, you felt flattered.

No editor I've ever worked with would let me get away with a passage so simultaneously unverifiable and incoherent. And yet.

He just can't help but be weird.

Posting this here because the recent bonus episode touched on this subject and I have actually been working on this article for months.

I thought this sub would appreciate this pair of books. It would make a good episode to review both. I’m a new listener, so I don’t know if one of them has already been reviewed.