Scott H Young Podcast

This is the wrap-up video for the seventh month of the book club. This month we read Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott.

This is the wrap-up video for the sixth month of the book club. This month we read Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.

This is the wrap-up video for the fifth month of the book club. This month we read Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen.

This is the wrap-up video for the third month of the book club. This month we read Don’t Sleep There Snakes: Life & Language in the Amazonian Jungle by Daniel Everett.

This is the wrap-up video for the third month of the book club. This month we read Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely and I'm joined by Vat Jaiswal. About the book: Why do our headaches persist after we take a one-cent aspirin but disappear when we take a fifty-cent aspirin? Why do we splurge on a lavish meal but cut coupons to save twenty-five cents on a can of soup? When it comes to making decisions in our lives, we think we're making smart, rational choices. But are we? In this newly revised and expanded edition of the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller, Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. From drinking coffee to losing weight, from buying a car to choosing a romantic partner, we consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They're systematic and predictable—making us predictably irrational.

Kalid Azad and I discuss August’s book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman. This is the autobiography of the Nobel-prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman. As I make the case at the start of the video, the benefit of reading biographies is that you get to see how someone very accomplished lived and thought in ways different from you. I find this a lot more effective than reading books expounding the virtues of creativity, curiosity or courage–you actually get to see how someone who embodied those characteristics lived in concrete terms.

James Clear and I discuss July’s book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. We cover the major themes in the book as well as the author’s thought provoking interpretation of human history, contemporary society, and beyond.