9 Books That Will Make You a Smarter Person

- There are some books that are so mind blowing that they change how you see yourself and the world forever. In this video, I'm gonna share nine underrated books that completely changed how I see the world and made me a better person for it. And hopefully, they'll do the same for you too.

(upbeat piano music) This may be the strangest history book I've ever read, but it's still completely changed how I see the world. "The Mosquito" by Timothy Winegard takes something that you normally never think about, the mosquito, and shows how it influences almost everything you think about. Did you know that for most of human history, roughly 30 to 40% of all deaths were caused by mosquito-borne illnesses?

Mosquitoes, that is malaria, typhoid, dengue, dominated social concerns, political decisions, and the outcomes of some of the most consequential wars in human history. From the fall of the Roman Empire to the American Revolution, to the slave trade, mosquitoes and the constant struggle to avoid them was at the center of it all. We take it for granted today, but so much of human history was dictated by the reality of disease.

And nothing carried disease quite like mosquitoes did. It's one of the most fascinating books I've ever read. It's mind blowing and a ton of fun.

(upbeat music) This book is so important because most laypeople don't realize that there is a massive replication crisis going on in the social sciences. To the point that in some fields such as economics, psychology, sociology, and others, more than 70% of the research does not replicate reliably when tested by other scientists. This is a huge problem.

Ritchie does a great job of explaining not only how so much research gets fudged, but also the incentives within the peer review system behind it. It's a hugely important book for anyone who wants to take scientific inquiry seriously. It changed how I approach all the data I come across, and has made me far more skeptical as a result.

(elegant music) There are not many books that I can say change my political views, but this is certainly one of them. If you're a democracy-loving Westerner like I am, you kind of have this romantic image of democracy. That the more power and voice we give to the people, the better off we will all be.

If that's what you believe, then this book will ruin your Sunday afternoon. They show an abundance of data and examples suggesting that in many cases, greater amounts of democracy results in worse outcomes for populations. Why?

Because most people are either, A, dumb as a fucking tree stump, or B, too busy to educate themselves on the plethora of issues going on in their community. This isn't to say that democracy doesn't work. As Churchill said, it's clearly better than all the other forms of government.

The problem is that you need to balance democracy with a layer of highly-educated experts and elites who can actually get shit done. It turns out that much in the same way that there needs to be checks and balances between different branches of government, there's also a necessary check and balance between educated elites and democratic populism. Check it out.

(melancholy music) This is one of my favorite books ever. I believe I've read it three times. - [Disembodied Voice] Nerd.

- Becker was an obscure philosophy professor who found out that he had terminal cancer, and on his death bed wrote this book, "The Denial of Death". His argument is simple. Death terrifies us.

It terrifies us so much that we unconsciously seek out ways that we can metaphorically live forever. Let's call these our immortality projects. Now, immortality projects are why people are driven to run for government, to write books, to have children and build statues.

It's why they become so invested in charitable causes, political conflicts, and creating artifacts of their lives. It's the ego's way of creating something in the world that will outlast itself. Now, these immortality projects are what give our lives a sense of meaning and importance.

They are necessary for remaining psychologically healthy and stable. And when our immortality projects clash with other people's immortality projects, war and violence ensues because we are literally willing to die so that our immortality projects may survive. It's a real mind bender.

Check it out. (bright music) This book was monumentally influential in the sixties, seventies, and eighties as television rose to cultural prominence. I think today, in the social media age, it deserves another round of publicity, as its insights are more relevant than ever.

McLuhan's big insight is also his most famous quote. "The medium is the message. " McLuhan argued that the content of media is mostly inconsequential.

Whether you're watching cooking shows or murder mysteries or soap operas, it likely has far less of a cognitive effect than the media in which you consume it. This is because every medium interfaces with our brains in distinct ways that train us how to consume information and perceive the world. Back in the sixties and seventies, McLuhan's observation was that television and radio were passive forms of media.

You turned on the TV and sat there waiting for what it showed you. Whereas with reading, you had to actively seek out what to consume. TV encouraged your critical thinking to turn off while reading required it to comprehend the information in front of you.

McLuhan argued that the nature of the media that organizes society determines the character of the people within it. I would give anything to hear what McLuhan would say about social media today, but rereading this book, I can't help but feel that the way social media caters to each of us individually, enveloping us in our own distorted form of reality perfectly suited to our tastes and fears, it must be driving a kind of subtle loneliness and narcissism that we have never faced before. And speaking of being shaped by our technology, this video is brought to you by Grammarly, the AI assistant designed to make you sound and look smarter than you actually are.

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Now, back to the books. (bright music) Will Durant spent his entire career writing an 11-volume set of books called "The Story of Civilization". It took him almost 40 years to finish it, and clocking in over 13,000 pages, it starts in ancient Mesopotamia and works its way all the way up to the 20th century.

But upon completing the set, Durant wanted to write a small book summarizing in 100 pages everything he learned about humanity and civilization. The result was this book, "The Lessons of History". "The Lessons of History" lays out 12 seemingly straightforward lessons with wide implications.

It's the sort of stuff that strikes you as obvious once you read it, but at the same time, you never thought about it that way. Stuff like the importance and determinants of geography on the fates of entire empires, the way technology dictates geopolitics, the ubiquity of prejudice and competition both within and between societies. It is a lifetime worth of study all compressed into just a hundred pages of wisdom.

It's rare that such a thing happens and you are missing out if you don't check it out. (frenzied music) Scientific knowledge doesn't progress the way you think it does. This classic was written back in the 1960s, and it immediately made waves.

It's about the messy ways in which knowledge progresses and how scientific advancements don't happen the way we assume they do. - Whew! (explosion booms) - Kuhn points out that while small, iterative improvements in our knowledge come within our conventional systems, large breakthroughs in knowledge typically come from total outsiders who have no stakes in the current institutions.

As a result, these huge leaps of progress are typically ridiculed and suppressed at first, only to slowly win out over the long run. I love this book because I think it applies to human organizations in general, not just science. People who are rewarded by conventional wisdom will unconsciously try to preserve it and prevent large advancements because that would undermine their current power structures.

Meanwhile, outcasts and outsiders will take long shots at drastically remaking the conventional wisdom, mainly because they have nothing to lose. The majority of these long shots will fail and they will look like total crackpots, but occasionally, just occasionally, you get an Isaac Newton or an Einstein or a Churchill or Lincoln. (upbeat music) "The WEIRDest People in the World" by Joseph Henrich.

WEIRD, in this case stands, for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. And as Henrich notes weird people are psychometrically quite different from the rest of the world. We have different personalities, different cognitive behaviors, even some neurological differences.

Now, Henrich spends 600 pages asking the question, why? Why Europe? In the Middle Ages, Europe was a backwater compared to the Middle East and China.

Why did industrialization in the Enlightenment happened here and not anywhere else? Why did Europe become so rich and prosperous and different? Now, the answer will probably surprise you.

It has to do with marriage laws in the Catholic church. See, the early popes did not want kings and dukes of Europe to consolidate into new empires, so they passed strict marriage laws. You couldn't marry within your family.

You couldn't take more than one wife, and you couldn't get divorced. This hamstrung the feudal lords of the time, preventing them from consolidating powers like monarchs and emperors did in the rest of the world. The result was a geopolitically unique, highly competitive, industrious region with more genetic diversity and economic mobility than ever before.

It's an absolutely stunning read, both in its scope and its argument. I don't know if it's completely true, but in terms of books that have made me think about shit and see things in a new way, this is way up on the list. (bright music) Like most people in my generation, I grew up with an apocalyptic assumption about climate change.

- Our atmosphere seems to be getting warmer. - The warming will continue. - The hottest month on record.

- [[Narrator] Global Warming. - Global warming. - Global warming.

- If anything, it always seemed the reality was far worse than what most people believed, and I never came across an intelligent and informed argument otherwise, until this book, "Apocalypse Never" by Michael Shellenberger. Shellenberger is a former climate activist who has traveled all over the world learning and helping environmental causes. And this book is essentially an argument for everyone to chill out, no pun intended.

It's not as bad as we think. There is hope and the alarmism and apocalyptic rhetoric is likely counterproductive. Again, another book that I'm sure not everything is 100% true, but it's the first time I was ever exposed to a viewpoint about climate change that was both smart, well-researched, and optimistic.

And that is certainly something worth checking out. All right, that's it. Links to all of these books are in the description.

And let me know what books have changed how you see the world in the comments. Let's all blow our minds together. Okay, that sounded kind of sexual, but you get what I mean.