Mauling The Self-Help Industry: If Books Could Kill & Bad Therapist

 I think these two podcasts -- If Books Could Kill and Bad Therapists -- should be classified in a new genre, which is Public Service. Both shows perform a public good, informing unsuspecting and gullible citizens such as myself that self-help books only help the authors who wrote them while mental health gurus (AKA life coaches, motivational speakers) enrich themselves through psychobabble.

If Books Could Kill (IBCK) has been around since late 2022 while Bad Therapist just started in 2025. Both shows have genealogical roots back to the You're Wrong About podcast where Sarah Marshall (And previously IBCK's Hobbes) reconsidered a person or event that's been miscast in the public imagination.

What both podcasts have in common, and both handle brilliantly, is the sharp-witted and cleverly insightful dissection of popular culture. If Books Could Kill targets self-help books, while Bad Therapist zeroes in on mental health carpetbaggers.

If Books Could Kill focuses on "The airport bestsellers that captured our hearts and ruined our minds," says co-hosts Peter Shamshiri (a lawyer) and Michael Hobbes (a journalist).

The podcast expertly critiques bestselling nonfiction books of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Books featured on the podcast include Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, and The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama.

The podcast began in November 2022, and has received largely positive reviews from critics. Co-host Michael Hobbes describes these self-help books as "the superspreader events of American stupidity."

Each episode is dedicated to the discussion of a single book, along with the book's wider cultural influence. The hosts focus on flawed arguments, poor uses of data, factual errors, and the drawing of unsound conclusions or overgeneralizations. They often take a comic tone and will poke fun at the books and their authors.

If Books Could Kill was listed by Vulture as one of the best podcasts of 2023, described by the website as a "cutting and ambitious criticism of the nexus linking publishing, media, and elite power."

The co-hosts are Peter Shamshiri, an attorney, and Michael Hobbes, a journalist. Michael Hobbes is a reporter for HuffPost. "He grew up in Seattle and attended a third-tier university and moved abroad as soon as he graduated because he thought that’s where boyfriends lived. He spent 11 years in Europe working in international development and telling the internet how he felt weird about it. In 2016, he moved back to Seattle because America is going great, and maybe the boyfriends lived there now."

Hobbes and Aubrey Gordon have co-hosted the podcast Maintenance Phase since October 2020. The show examines the myths and "junk science" behind health, nutrition, and wellness trends, and have discussed topics including popular diets and diet foods, anti-fat bias, and eating disorders. (Note: We will review it next month, and we highly recommend the show.)

“Peter,” lost his job as in-house counsel at Metlife, the insurance company, after his employers learned about his role on a podcast. Peter was featured in an October 2022 Vulture article in which the writer explained how Peter, in-house counsel at Metlife, the insurance company, lost his job after his employer discovered he was one of the hosts of the 5-4 podcast. Every week, the shamelessly irreverent show proffered enthusiastically acidic takes on the once-widely revered American legal institution known as the U.S. Supreme Court, whose legitimacy has grown shakier over the past few years. 

Check out If Books Could Kill. The co-hosts are superb with wit and wisdom to spare, and the show is entertaining and informative. You'll never look at another pop culture self-help book the same way again.

 Bad Therapist has the same irreverent, skeptical, and incisive tone as If Books Could Kill with two co-hosts that can twist the knife into mental health scammers with the same rhetorical and analytical force.

 Bad Therapist began in November 2024 and has built momentum quickly. The co-hosts include Rachel Monroe, a podcaster and contributing writer for The New Yorker, known for hosting the BBC Sounds podcast Lost at Sea and co-hosting Emotional Labor with Ash Compton of Bad Therapist.

Monroe is the author of the book Savage Appetites: True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession. Monroe has been a finalist for a Livingston Award for Young Journalists and named as one of 56 women journalists everyone should read by New York Magazine. 

 

Ash Compton, of course, was a co-host on the Emotional Labor podcast with Rachel Monroe and is a practicing psychotherapist. On her website, Compton describes her work this way: "I am a psychotherapist and cultural ecologist whose practice encompasses systems thinking, communications design and design of the built environment, research and writing, and climate trauma and resiliency consulting for corporate and individual clients."

 

Since Monroe and Compton have already co-hosted a podcast together, their chemistry and synchronicity are immediate. They're funny, insightful, caustic like apple cider vinegar, and enjoy skewering hypocrisy.

 

The episode on the strange trend toward life coaches may be their best to date. This largely unregulated industry now tells hundreds of thousands of Americans how to run their lives. Scary!

 

Their January 22, 2025, episode titled, Polarity, takes a highly skeptical look at a weird reincarnation of the Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus John Gray book from 1992. Under the guide of polarity, Monroe and Compton dissect and dismantle this view that relationships work best when women lean into femininity and men do the same with masculinity. In the episode, they discuss how these con-artists twist the essence of Jungian theories for their own gratification.

Bad Therapist is a podcast that your ears will enjoy, as the co-hosts deconstruct the flimflam quality of bad actors mucking about in the world of psychology and mental health. 

Both podcasts -- Bad Therapist & If Books Could Kill -- act as warning labels on a product that is dangerous to use. Therefore, be careful of nonfiction, self-help, pop culture books and wear your skeptic hat when consuming. Beware any semi-regulated mental health / lifestyle titles like life coach that purport to have expertise in areas of psychology, life skills, and coping mechanisms.