Money Talks: How to Write a Trashy Airport Book
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 23 July 2024
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For this Money Talks, lawyer/podcaster Peter Shamshiri, co-host of If Books Could Kill, reveals the secrets of junk nonfiction to host Emily Peck. He explains why “airport books” like The Secret, Hillbilly Elegy, and The Tipping Point tend to be rife with non-advice, pseudoscience, and outright junk, and what that means for our culture at large. He also tells how to get rich with your own crappy self-help book!
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Podcast production by Jared Downing and Cheyna Roth.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Money Talks. |
| 0:11.8 | It's a special extra podcast from Slate Money where we chat with brilliant and interesting people. |
| 0:17.2 | I'm Emily Peck of Axios. |
| 0:19.4 | I'm also the co-host of Slate Money, and I'm here today with |
| 0:22.5 | Peter Shomshiri. Peter, welcome to Money Talks. Thanks for having me. Peter used to be a lawyer, |
| 0:28.8 | now hosts at least two podcasts that I'm aware of. That's right. There's one about the Supreme Court |
| 0:33.6 | called 5-4, which has the great tagline of, it's a podcast about why the Supreme Court |
| 0:39.5 | sucks, and it's great. But what I wanted you to talk about is your other podcast, if books |
| 0:45.0 | could kill, which I listen to. And that's where you and Michael Hobbs basically read bad books. |
| 0:51.1 | We frame it as that we're reading airport books. It's probably a little broader than that |
| 0:56.8 | in reality, but books that we think are quite popular and are either pernicious in full or in part, |
| 1:05.4 | and we sort of try to dissect that a little bit. So that's all coming up on Money Talks. |
| 1:16.6 | You've done Freakonomics. You did the Michael Lewis Sam Bankman-Fried book, which that was an exciting day when I saw it from the feed. |
| 1:22.2 | Not going to lie. You've even done men are from Mars, women are from Venus, the rules, rich dad, poor dad. |
| 1:28.5 | Amazing. How did this come about that you decided to do a show about airport books? |
| 1:34.0 | It wasn't so discreet in the beginning. I think in the beginning we were thinking of it as like |
| 1:38.9 | a podcast about pernicious ideas that were sort of floating around. |
| 1:45.2 | And we started to sort of narrow it down into like, |
| 1:48.0 | all right, |
| 1:48.2 | how can we turn that thesis into something that's actually a focused podcast? |
| 1:53.0 | And eventually we landed on these types of books. |
| 1:57.2 | I think I'm sort of obsessed with them. |
... |
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