Bryan Kohberger’s Reading: How “Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway” Became His Mindset
True Crime Today | Daily True Crime News & Interviews
Tony Brueski
4.2 • 612 Ratings
🗓️ 11 November 2025
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Months later, reporting from the Idaho Statesman revealed that book was Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers — a self-help classic about conquering fear through action.
In this episode of Hidden Killers with Tony Brueski, we dig into what that detail really means. Was Kohberger simply reading a popular motivational book? Or was he absorbing a philosophy that, in his hands, took on something much darker?
Tony breaks down how Jeffers’ message — “The only way to get rid of the fear of doing something is to go out and do it” — could have resonated with Kohberger’s obsessive need for control and dominance. Through psychological analysis and factual reporting, this episode explores how self-help principles can be warped by pathological minds — transforming courage into justification, empowerment into entitlement, and action into violence.
We examine the context of the discovery, Kohberger’s academic writings about “emotions and criminal decision-making,” and his disturbing fascination with overcoming hesitation. The result is a chilling portrait of a man who may have misread a book about personal growth as a guide to fearlessness at any cost.
It’s not about blame. It’s about understanding how ordinary ideas can become extraordinary distortions inside extraordinary minds.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Hidden Killers with Tony Bruske. |
| 0:03.0 | Here now, Tony Bruske. |
| 0:06.8 | There's something kind of darkly poetic about the idea that Brian Coburger, |
| 0:11.7 | the man accused of one of the most methodical and chilling crimes in modern American memory, |
| 0:16.1 | was reading, |
| 0:17.4 | Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. |
| 0:22.4 | That's the accusation anyway. |
| 0:24.8 | Not a manifesto, not some obscure academic text on criminal psychology, |
| 0:29.7 | but a self-help book. |
| 0:31.6 | And there's nothing wrong with the self-help book. |
| 0:33.7 | There's nothing wrong with this book. |
| 0:36.4 | So don't take it as that. It's just the irony of |
| 0:40.0 | the man we're talking about reading it and what he did. And again, this is not a book that's going |
| 0:46.1 | to make you turn into a killer and feel the fear and do it anyway in terms of what he did. So let's take a step back from that, too. |
| 0:56.7 | It's a paperback that millions of people have picked up in moments of insecurity or self-doubt. |
| 1:02.4 | Nothing wrong with it. |
| 1:03.3 | Looking for strength, reassurance, maybe even redemption. |
| 1:06.7 | And in his hands, it becomes something else kind of different entirely. |
| 1:11.4 | When investigators took Coburger into custody in December of 2022, they catalogs the entire contents that was a small apartment in Pullman, Washington. |
| 1:20.4 | Among the everyday items, knives, gloves, receipts, laptops, there was allegedly a book, unnamed in the initial Pennsylvania warrant returns, |
| 1:30.8 | but described in one chillingly simple note, book with underlining on page 118. |
| 1:40.5 | Months later, reporting by the Idaho statesmen's, identified that book as Susan Jeffers feel the |
... |
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