Michael.

Peter.

What do you know about Blink?

All I know is that my first impression of this book was that it was very dumb.

And I'm looking forward to hearing about how first impressions are always true.

All right, the book is Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.

Heard of it. Heard of him.

Big bestseller, at least a few million copies sold. It came out in 2005.

This is also the first Gladwell book, I think, just based on my sort of casual perusal, to get some very negative early reviews.

I think there was like a good number of people at this point who were getting wise to the shallowness of the pop science airport book genre. Yeah, this is this is at the time when like four of the top 10 TED talks are just like thoroughly debunked. I'm sorry, grit is not a thing. I guess it's sort of perfect from me because I am ever a contrarian. And I guess the twist here is that I kind of like this book. I think this book is pretty good. I think we should talk about your complicated feelings on this because you've been agonizing about this episode for like weeks. I have. I expected this book to be pseudoscientific trash. Yeah, same. There is a lot of pseudoscience in this book and we'll talk about it. But like, I don't think it's quite as bad as some of his other work. Even though he

makes a lot of these narrative mistakes, he touches on a bunch of really interesting science.

And I'm not an expert. I might have missed something, especially because this book is just a torrent

of anecdotes. There are so many anecdotes. It's wild. But I didn't find too many significant cases of him misrepresenting the science.

Or your brain is so cooked from hosting this podcast that you're like, only 30% of the

anecdotes are fake.

Rookie numbers.

Before we get into it, we have housekeeping, right?

For the first time ever.

Yeah.

We've decided to do one episode where we do a little bit of sellout shit because we wanted to plug our merch. We have merch. T-shirts, sweaters, mugs, the whole, you know, the usual stuff. Ifbookspod.d. dashree.com. We'll put a link in the show description. And then also, because we're already doing sellout shit, subscribe to our

Patreon. Lean in. Go for it. Monthly bonus episodes. Get Peter's newsletter. Oh yeah, my newsletter.

Stringenamaze.net. What do you want to sell? Anything? Nothing. I'm against this entire thing,

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