One of my favorite parts about summer is that I have an excuse to read more. Between travel and the kids wanting to spend all day in the pool, there is plenty of time to catch up on that stack of books that grows every time I go to the bookstore, which is often. I tend to lean towards non-fiction, but I do have my favorite fiction authors that I get excited about every time they release a new title.
I believe that reading is important and that we don’t read enough. There is so much knowledge out there, so many wonderful stories, so many smart people, and so many things to learn! Every book that captures me makes me want to read everything else about that topic or from that author. It is a never-ending adventure of pursuing knowledge where the well only gets deeper.
Below you’ll find a few of the books that I am reading this summer. These are from the non-fiction stack. While I love to get lost in a good story, I truly love focusing on one topic and learning from the experts. This year, I continue the tradition (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024) of highlighting mostly books on finance, business, and the economy.
Before you get started, I’d like to point out three things:
- The summaries provided are not my own. They are taken from either the book itself, the publisher, or the distributor.
- Each of these should be great reads, but that doesn’t mean that I, nor TCI, for that matter, endorse everything that is written in the pages.
- The list is in no particular order.
I hope you enjoy!
“A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.”
—Abraham Lincoln
Primal Intelligence: You Are Smarter Than You Know
By Angus Fletcher
How are some people so much smarter than the rest of us? Where do visionary creatives and savvy decision-makers like Vincent van Gogh, Steve Jobs, Abraham Lincoln, Maya Angelou, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Wayne Gretzky, Warren Buffett, and William Shakespeare get their extraordinary mental abilities?
In 2021, researchers at Ohio State’s Project Narrative, renowned for collaborations with NASA, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley, announced they had the answer. They named it Primal Intelligence. And they published scientific proof that Primal Intelligence was impossible for computers—but could be strengthened in humans.
Intrigued, U.S. Army Special Operations developed Primal training for its most classified units. The training succeeded. The Operators saw the future faster. They healed quicker from trauma. In life-and-death situations, they chose wiser.
The Army then authorized trials on civilian entrepreneurs, doctors, engineers, managers, salesforces, coaches, teachers, investors, and NFL players. Their leadership and innovation improved significantly. They coped better with change and uncertainty. They experienced less anger and anxiety. Finally, the Army provided Primal training to college and K-12 classrooms. It produced substantial effects in students as young as eight.
That revolutionary training is now available for the first time in this book. It’s not an optimization hack or a cheat code. It’s a different way of using your brain. It offers a new neuroscientific approach to intuition, imagination, emotion, and commonsense, helping you think more like van Gogh and Jobs, Lincoln and Shakespeare.
It’s your edge over AI. Your human genius. Your Primal Intelligence.
The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All
By Mary Childs
Before Bill Gross was known among investors as the Bond King, he was a gambler. In 1966, a fresh college grad, he went to Vegas armed with his net worth ($200) and a knack for counting cards. $10,000 and countless casino bans later, he was hooked: so he enrolled in business school.
The Bond King is the story of how that whiz kid made American finance his casino. Over the course of decades, Bill Gross turned the sleepy bond market into a destabilized game of high risk, high reward; founded Pimco, one of today’s most powerful, secretive, and cutthroat investment firms; helped to reshape our financial system in the aftermath of the Great Recession―to his own advantage; and gained legions of admirers, and enemies, along the way. Like every American antihero, his ambition would also be his undoing.
To understand the winners and losers of today’s money game, journalist Mary Childs argues, is to understand the bond market―and to understand the bond market is to understand the Bond King.
Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company
By Patrick McGee
After struggling to build its products on three continents, Apple was lured by China’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of cheap labor. Soon it was sending thousands of engineers across the Pacific, training millions of workers, and spending hundreds of billions of dollars to create the world’s most sophisticated supply chain. These capabilities enabled Apple to build the 21st century’s most iconic products—in staggering volume and for enormous profit.
Without explicitly intending to, Apple built an advanced electronics industry within China, only to discover that its massive investments in technology upgrades had inadvertently given Beijing a power that could be weaponized.
In Apple in China, journalist Patrick McGee draws on more than two hundred interviews with former executives and engineers, supplementing their stories with unreported meetings held by Steve Jobs, emails between top executives, and internal memos regarding threats from Chinese competition. The book highlights the unknown characters who were instrumental in Apple’s ascent and who tried to forge a different path, including the Mormon missionary who established the Apple Store in China; the “Gang of Eight” executives tasked with placating Beijing; and an idealistic veteran whose hopes of improving the lives of factory workers were crushed by both Cupertino’s operational demands and Xi Jinping’s war on civil society.
Apple in China is the sometimes disturbing and always revelatory story of how an outspoken, proud company that once praised “rebels” and “troublemakers”—the company that encouraged us all to “Think Different”—devolved into passively cooperating with a belligerent regime that increasingly controls its fate.
You Already Know: The Science of Mastering Your Intuition
By Laura Huang
From celebrated business school professor and author of Edge, a research-backed framework for honing and harnessing your intuition to make the right decisions and attain greater levels of achievement.
What sets the most successful people apart? You may think that the correct answer is hard work (and it’s certainly part of it), but in her interviews of the most accomplished individuals—from entrepreneurs and investors to Olympic athletes and Pulitzer Prize winners—Distinguished Professor of Management Laura Huang discovered that what they called their gut feel, the product of their intuition, played the most important role.
We all have intuition, our brain’s intelligent synthesis of external data and the entirety of our personal experiences. As such, it draws from what we already know and what we didn’t even realize we knew. This culminates in a gut feel that manifests as a eureka moment, a Spidey sense, or a jolt that changes how we see things and compels us to act. Most people experience these flashes of clarity passively, as random occurrences that come out of the blue.
In You Already Know, Laura Huang scientifically breaks down what happens during the intuiting process and details the personified, physical, emotional, and cognitive components of the gut feel that results. Along the way, she provides valuable exercises to help you recognize, understand, and strengthen your intuition. Purposeful practice enables you to:
- take it from passive and accidental to active and intentional
- develop it to deliver increasingly reliable signals
- heighten your own sensitivity to the signals it sends
Drawing on Huang’s pioneering research on individual judgments and decision-making, organizational psychology, and behavioral economics, as well as hundreds of interviews, You Already Know offers a highly practical model that equips you to leverage your most powerful and underutilized resource to make better decisions, take swift action, and accomplish your most ambitious goals.
As the external world gets ever noisier, often, the smartest thing you can do is turn your focus inward and trust your gut to guide you in the right direction.
The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can’t Stop Talking About
By Mel Robbins and Sawyer Robbins
What if the key to happiness, success, and love was as simple as two words?
If you’ve ever felt stuck, overwhelmed, or frustrated with where you are, the problem isn’t you. The problem is the power you give to other people. Two simple words—Let Them—will set you free. Free from the opinions, drama, and judgments of others. Free from the exhausting cycle of trying to manage everything and everyone around you. The Let Them Theory puts the power to create a life you love back in your hands—and this book will show you exactly how to do it.
In her latest groundbreaking book, The Let Them Theory, Mel Robbins—New York Times bestselling author and one of the world’s most respected experts on motivation, confidence, and mindset—teaches you how to stop wasting energy on what you can’t control and start focusing on what truly matters: YOU. Your happiness. Your goals. Your life.
Using the same no-nonsense, science-backed approach that’s made The Mel Robbins Podcast a global sensation, Robbins explains why The Let Them Theory is already loved by millions and how you can apply it in eight key areas of your life to make the biggest impact. Within a few pages, you’ll realize how much energy and time you’ve been wasting trying to control the wrong things—at work, in relationships, and in pursuing your goals—and how this is keeping you from the happiness and success you deserve.
Written as an easy-to-understand guide, Robbins shares relatable stories from her own life, highlights key takeaways, relevant research and introduces you to world-renowned experts in psychology, neuroscience, relationships, happiness, and ancient wisdom who champion The Let Them Theory every step of the way.
Undeniable: How to Reach the Top and Stay There
By Cameron Hanes
“I like people who put themselves in a position to become undeniable at what they do. You might not like me, but you cannot deny the work I put in and the results to show for it. You can say whatever [you] want, but I want to be undeniable and how it makes you feel is no factor.”
Endure, Cameron Hanes’ New York Times bestselling book, demonstrated how to push beyond your physical limits to improve yourself. In Undeniable, Hanes brings together outliers of today―men and women who are experts in their field―to share their unique and motivating perspectives on reaching the pinnacle of success and remaining there. From popular neuroscientist Andrew Huberman to ultramarathon runner Courtney Dauwalter, you will hear how undeniable individuals have obtained their winning mindset.
Many books show how to pursue a dream and successfully make it happen, but few spotlight what to do when you’ve reached the pinnacle. After fighting so hard and reaching your goals, how do you stay on top? In his pursuit for greatness, Cam has trained with and interviewed track athletes, MMA fighters, NFL Super Bowl champions and experts in other disciplines. All of them legends who have earned their names. What makes them tick? How do they remain undeniable?
In Undeniable, Cam reveals the lessons he has learned from truly exceptional people. By examining their unique traits and abilities, you will earn an edge from these greats and add tools on your own journey toward greatness.
Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI
By Karen Hao
When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?
Over time, Hao began to wrestle ever more deeply with that question. Increasingly, she realized that the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that its vision of success requires an almost unprecedented amount of resources: the “compute” power of high-end chips and the processing capacity to create massive large language models, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans “cleaning up” that data for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the usage of energy and water underlying it all. The truth is that we have entered a new and ominous age of empire: only a small handful of globally scaled companies can even enter the field of play. At the head of the pack with its ChatGPT breakthrough, how would OpenAI resist such temptations?
Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Armed with Microsoft’s billions, OpenAI is setting a breakneck pace, chased by a small group of the most valuable companies in human history—toward what end, not even they can define. All this time, Hao has maintained her deep sourcing within the company and the industry, and so she was in intimate contact with the story that shocked the entire tech industry—Altman’s sudden firing and triumphant return. The behind-the-scenes story of what happened, told here in full for the first time, is revelatory of who the people controlling this technology really are. But this isn’t just the story of a single company, however fascinating it is. The g forces pressing down on the people of OpenAI are deforming the judgment of everyone else too—as such forces do. Naked power finds the ideology to cloak itself; no one thinks they’re the bad guy. But in the meantime, as Hao shows through intrepid reporting on the ground around the world, the enormous wheels of extraction grind on. By drawing on the viewpoints of Silicon Valley engineers, Kenyan data laborers, and Chilean water activists, Hao presents the fullest picture of AI and its impact we’ve seen to date, alongside a trenchant analysis of where things are headed. An astonishing eyewitness view from both up in the command capsule of the new economy and down where the real suffering happens, Empire of AI pierces the veil of the industry defining our era.
