Scott H Young Podcast

Chance and randomness have a big impact on our lives. Life isn't fair, but the kind of luck that impacts your life can have dramatic differences in how you should respond.

Is it better to read the Stoics, Buddhists and other ancient wisdom? Or is older advice out of date? I try to show both sides of this debate and give my recommendations.

In this episode, I discuss how to keep on track with everything even when you don't have time.

We've updated the format of our bookclub and will be breaking each month's book into smaller, shorter discussions. Hope you enjoy! This month we're reading The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan. In this thought-provoking book, Caplan argues that the main function of education is not to enhance students' skill but to certify their intelligence, work ethic, and conformity―in other words, to signal the qualities of a good employee. The author draws on the latest social science to show how the labor market values grades over knowledge and even explains why graduation is our society's top conformity signal.

This is the wrap-up video for this month's book club where we read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn. About the book: This is the wrap up video for this mont's book club where we read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn. American historian and philosopher of science, Kuhn was a leading contributor to the change of focus in the philosophy and sociology of science in the 1960s. He taught at Harvard, the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1962, Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which depicted the development of the basic natural sciences in an innovative way. According to Kuhn, the sciences do not uniformly progress strictly by scientific method.

This is the wrap-up video for the twelfth month of the book club. This month we read The Wizard & The Prophet by Charles C. Mann.

This is the wrap-up video for the eleventh month of the book club. This month we read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.

This is the wrap-up video for the tenth month of the book club. This month we read The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber.

This is the wrap-up video for the ninth month of the book club. This month we read Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu.

This is the wrap-up video for the eight month of the book club. This month we read The Elephant In The Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson.

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.