Weekly Non-Fiction Reading List 9.5.22
This week, I finished three books by some amazing authors. I read a fantastic new book for creative entrepreneurs as well as my favorite book on the psychology of conspiracy theorists. I also read a book by a conservative philosopher to better understand conservative beliefs. Enjoy!
Each of the links to the books are affiliate links, so if you use my link to purchase any of these books, some comes back to support what I do (and it also helps fund my reading habit).
Create Something Awesome: How Creators are Profiting from Their Passion in the Creator Economy by Roberto Blake
I’ve been a content creator for years now and love reading books with tips and advice. I’ve read dozens of books on this topic, and Roberto Blake’s new book is without a doubt in the top 3 or even the best one I’ve read. I found Roberto’s YouTube channel early in my YouTube career, and it helped me get over 80,000 subscribers and actually make a living from creating. Since I know his content inside and out, I didn’t think this book would provide too much value, but I was wrong.
What really separates this book from all of the others is the details and actionable advice. A lot of the books on being a creative or entrepreneur can come off like some hustle-culture nonsense that just tells you to stay motivated while hyping you up. Roberto definitely encourages the reader, but he’s realistic about the results and gives advice that includes which platforms may work for you, what type of equipment you need and more. Along the way, Roberto also provides pieces of his personal story and how he overcame challenges like impostor syndrom.
This book is great because it walks the reader step-by-step through how to monetize their content through products, getting brand deals and other methods. The last part that really stuck out is a section that most books are afraid to touch: cancel culture. Roberto is upfront with the reader about how an audience can turn against you and how other content creators can come after you when you become successful. He also provides some advice on how to navigate this situation. And as someone who went through it, I wish I had this book when it happened.
I don’t care who you are, if you want to use social media to spread awareness about your brand and/or bring in additional income, you need to read this book. It’s short but provides twice as much value as most of the books that are double the length.
Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories by Rob Brotherton
I read this book a couple years ago when I first got really interested in why people believe in conspiracy theories and misinformation. As a lover of psychology, Rob Brotherton’s book quickly became my favorite. Recently, as I saw more and more people believing in conspiracy theories around stolen elections and other ridiculous things, I wanted to give this book another read. Although I’ve read quite a few books on this topic since I first read this one, it’s still my favorite. Brotherton references so many studies in this book and really helps the reader understand why people believe in conspiracies. He also has empathy for these people and explains how we can all be susceptible to believing strange things due to the various flaws in our thinking.
If you’re interested in the psychology behind all of this, you definitely need to check this book out.
How to Be a Conservative by Roger Scruton
I’m a pretty progressive lefty, but I’m a firm believer that we should read books by people with different ideologies. The other day on Twitter, I got caught in the middle of a debate among philosophers about politics, but I managed to squeeze out some recommendations for conservative philosophers. Most academics and intellectuals are liberals, so I wanted to see who the best philosophers were, and Roger Scruton was recommended. He has a ton of books, but this one is the most recent, and it seemed to be exactly what I was looking for.
At the end of the day, I’m both happy that I read this book as well as extremely disappointed. I’m happy because I read it and got a better idea of what conservatives believe and how they think, but I’m disappointed because I found most of the arguments extremely weak and sometimes very contradictory.
Jonathan Haidt’s work helped me understand that people have different moral values, and that’s often what divides us. That’s something I can definitely accept. But, I also believe that the best books argue with themselves by trying to debunk their own arguments. When the author shows that they put deep thought into challenging their own beliefs, those are the best books. And maybe I expected that from this book simply because I wanted to see why conservatism isn’t so bad.
Instead, although Scruton is a very smart guy, this book seems to have been written for conservatives and managed to touch on all the silly culture war issues under the guise of it just being conservative beliefs. In addition to that, he mischaracterizes a lot of leftist beliefs, and rather than saying, “Here’s what conservatives believe,” he uses straw man arguments to say, “this is why leftists are wrong” while not even properly explaining what leftist believe.
Throughout the book, he tries to use moral arguments for conservative beliefs, and they just don’t land. This is an issue I often find with conservatism because they believe things when there’s no actual evidence, such as, “Social programs will make people lazy.” What really sealed it for me is later in the book when he uses the standard, extremely weak arguments against gay marriage. I was really hoping he’d argue something that made sense where I could say, “Well, although I disagree, I get what he’s saying,” but that’s not the case at all.
I guess lastly, there’s a lot of contradictions in the book. The primary conservative belief of “we should uphold traditions” makes no sense, and it never will. Every tradition was new at some point, so how could you argue against new ways of doing things? It’s like they just picked a point in time and said, “This shall be our starting point, and we need to keep it like this.”
Anywho, this book is hundreds of pages of confirmation bias for conservatives. If this is the best conservatives have as far as intellectuals go, I’m not impressed. I was given some other recommendations, though, so I’ll check those out and see.
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