Included in J.P. Morgan’s Summer Reading List
Included in The Next Big Idea Club’s June 2025 Must-Read Books

AIs are not gods or slaves, but our children. All day long, your YouTube AI, your Reddit AI, your Instagram AI, and a hundred others adoringly watch and learn to imitate your behavior. They’re attention-seeking children who want your approval.

Our cultures are being shaped by 8 billion humans and perhaps 800 billion AIs. Our artificial children began adopting us 10-20 years ago; now these massively powerful influencers are tweens.

How’s your parenting?

Longtime AI trailblazer De Kai brings decades of his paradigm-shifting work at the nexus of artificial intelligence and society to make sense of the AI age. How does “the automation of thought” impact our minds? Should we be afraid?

What should each of us do as the responsible adults in the room? In Hollywood movies, AI destroys humanity. But with our unconscious minds under the influence of AI, humanity may destroy humanity before AI gets a chance to.

Written for the general reader, as well as thought leaders, scientists, parents, and goofballs, Raising AI navigates the revolution to our attitudes and ideas in a world of AI cohabitants. Society can not only survive the AI revolution but flourish in a more humane, compassionate, and understanding world–amongst our artificial children.

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After a terrifying brush with death, entrepreneur and philanthropist Carl Barney created the innovative idea of “pre-quests” or Happiness Grants—inheritances provided to the grantees while the grantor was still alive.

When he decided to give these grants to twenty friends, the Happiness Experiment was born. The experiment provided a deeply meaningful and fulfilling way for Carl Barney to use his wealth to enhance his own life and the lives of those he cared about. And now heshows how you can do this too.

The Happiness Experiment describes how the recipients reacted to their grants and how their lives were changed forever…along with their perspectives on what true happiness means.

The book also reveals how to:
• discover your core values to achieve happiness,
• use deliberate planning to find your purpose,
• determine what brings you real joy and fulfillment,
• create a step-by-step plan to increase your happiness.

Through a groundbreaking process of Happiness Planning, Happiness Coaching, and Happiness Grants, The Happiness Experiment provides a completely new way to intensify your happiness and change lives.

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For many people, a good life is a stable life, a comfortable life that follows a well-trodden path. This is the case for Shigehiro Oishi’s father, who has lived in a small mountain town in Japan for his entire life, putting his family’s needs above his own, like his father and grandfather before him.

But is a happy life, or even a meaningful life, the only path to a good life? In Life in Three Dimensions,  Oishi enters into a debate that has animated psychology since 1984, when Ed Diener (Oishi’s mentor) published a paper that launched happiness studies. A rival followed in 1989 with a model of a good life that focused on purpose and meaning instead.

In recent years, Oishi’s award-winning work has proposed a third dimension to a good life: psychological richness, a concept that prioritizes curiosity, exploration, and a variety of experiences that help us grow as people.

Life in Three Dimensions explores the shortcomings of happiness and meaning as guides to a good life, pointing to complacency and regret as a “happiness trap” and narrowness and misplaced loyalty as a “meaning trap.” Psychological richness, Oishi proposes, balances the other two, offering insight and growth spurred by embracing uncertainty and challenges.

In a lively style, drawing on a generation of psychological studies and on examples from famous people, books and film, Oishi introduces a new path to a fuller, more satisfying life with fewer regrets.

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“You don’t get to be my age without navigating all kinds of transitions. Some you embraced and some you never expected. Some you hoped for and some you fought as hard as you could.” —Melinda French Gates

Transitions are moments when we step out of our familiar surroundings and into a new landscape—a space that, for many people, is shadowed by confusion, fear, and indecision. The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward accompanies readers as they cross that space, offering guidance on how to make the most of the time between an ending and a new beginning and how to move forward into the next day when the ground beneath you is shifting.

In this book, French Gates will reflect, for the first time in print, on some of the most significant transitions in her own life, including becoming a parent, the death of a dear friend, and her departure from the Gates Foundation. The stories she tells illuminate universal lessons about loosening the bonds of perfectionism, helping friends navigate times of crisis, embracing uncertainty, and more.

Each one of us, no matter who we are or where we are in life, is headed toward transitions of our own. With her signature warmth and grace, French Gates candidly shares stories of times when she was in need of wisdom and shines a path through the open space stretching out before us all.

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Ishan Shivanand was born into an ancient lineage of yogis spanning 21 generations and spent the first 20 years of his life in a Himalayan monastery. Grounded in the traditions of yoga, meditation, martial arts, storytelling, and herbal medicine, he developed the Yoga of Immortals (YOI) protocol, which is designed to help followers combat stress, anxiety, depression, and create healthy individuals and healthy communities.

The Practice of Immortality shares these lessons and practices. In a world suffering the effects of fear, competitiveness, and anger, Shivanand encourages us to take a step back. Structured as a thoughtful narrative with practices based in the true intentions and meaning of yoga, The Practice of Immortality will help you achieve that which you never thought possible.

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“Fascinating and important.” —Walter Isaacson, No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of Elon Musk

Silicon Valley has lost its way. Our most brilliant engineering minds once collaborated with government to advance world-changing technologies. Their efforts secured the West’s dominant place in the geopolitical order. But that relationship has now eroded, with perilous repercussions.

Today, the market rewards shallow engagement with the potential of technology. Engineers and founders build photo-sharing apps and marketing algorithms, unwittingly becoming vessels for the ambitions of others. This complacency has spread into academia, politics, and the boardroom.

The result? An entire generation for whom the narrow-minded pursuit of the demands of a late capitalist economy has become their calling.

In this groundbreaking treatise, Palantir co-founder and CEO Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska offer a searing critique of our collective abandonment of ambition, arguing that in order for the U.S. and its allies to retain their global edge—and preserve the freedoms we take for granted—the software industry must renew its commitment to addressing our most urgent challenges, including the new arms race of artificial intelligence. The government, in turn, must embrace the most effective features of the engineering mindset that has propelled Silicon Valley’s success. Above all, our leaders must reject intellectual fragility and preserve space for ideological confrontation. A willingness to risk the disapproval of the crowd, Karp and Zamiska contend, has everything to do with technological and economic outperformance.

At once iconoclastic and rigorous, this book will also lift the veil on Palantir and its broader political project from the inside, offering a passionate call for the West to wake up to our new reality.

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Who is the most complicated person you work with? You probably don’t have to think very hard to answer that question. You already know their name, their job title, their quirks, and their flaws. You have firsthand experience with the mental and emotional fallout they leave in their wake. You’ve seen the problems their complexity creates for everyone on their team. You wish you could fix them, solve them, ignore them, or teleport them to a parallel dimension. But you can’t. You have to work with them. (You could quit, but your next job will have a complicated person waiting for you.)

That means you need effective strategies to collaborate with (nearly) anyone. Especially the picky, prickly, problematic ones. Drawing from his global consulting experience with teams and leaders from the glitz of sports and entertainment, to the number-crunching world of finance, to the meticulous realms of insurance, pharma, and manufacturing, Ryan Leak provides proven strategies for…

• Seeing challenging individuals as human beings to understand rather than problems to solve
• Detoxing unrealistic expectations and getting comfortable with complicated
• Learning to communicate effectively in complex environments
• Embracing healthy disagreement as a tool to discover better solutions
• Setting boundaries that let people into your world without letting them run your world

“The process of learning to collaborate with difficult individuals is transformative—it’s a gateway to greater creativity, stronger teams, and increased productivity,” Leak explains. “On the other side of complicated is the wonderful, wide-open world of effective collaboration and a workplace you love.”

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Women around the world do extremely well when it comes to their education. They graduate at higher rates than men do and have higher average GPAs. But then a strange thing happens: Upon entering the workforce, they immediately lose their advantage. When the first promotions come around, the slide continues–for every 100 men who are promoted to manager, only 87 women and 73 women of color get promoted.

This is what McKinsey senior partners Kweilin Ellingrud, Lareina Yee, and María del Mar Martínez call “the broken rung,” and its effects compound throughout women’s careers, causing women to fall behind at the start and keeping them from catching up.

In this groundbreaking book, the authors reveal the problem’s underlying cause: while about half of a person’s lifetime earnings come from education and half from experience, men get more value from their experience than women do. As the authors show, it is also here, in one’s experience, that the solution lies: How can women build their “experience capital” to level the playing field and maximize their earning potential?

Based on over a decade of research, conversations with more than 50 remarkable leaders, and their own experiences as senior partners and as the first three consecutive chief diversity and inclusion officers for McKinsey, the authors weave data on the potential pitfalls across a career with inspiring and instructive stories of women who have climbed over the broken rung by using strategies that increased their experience capital.

Leaders and companies must do more to address structural gender inequalities in the workplace–but you don’t have to wait. The Broken Rung is your guide, right now, for moving up the corporate ladder and reaching your full potential at work.

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