June 2024 Reading List

Greetings from the surface of the sun! I did some traveling this month to the Midwest and Northeast, and it seems like everyone is dealing with extreme heat, but every time I get back to Georgia it just seems to hit harder. I remember spending hours and hours outside during the Summer when I was younger, but I would move to a cold-weather state in a heartbeat if my wife would come with me. We finally got to the local library to pick up the kids' Summer reading list books, so we spent a good bit of time doing some family reading in the air conditioning this month. A couple of this month's books were last second pickups, but they all ended up being great reads!

Price Wars: How the Commodities Markets Made Our Chaotic World by Rupert Russell

I came across this book by complete accident, but it will go down as one of the most important books I have read in the last few years. The book was published right about the time inflation began seriously increasing in the United States and I thought it would be talking about how the Covid pandemic had affected commodities world-wide. Instead, it ended up being one of the most clear looks at how a global economy works that I have come across. Russell argues that everything from Brexit, to the Arab Spring uprisings, to hyperinflation in Venezuela can be traced to rapid swings in the prices of commodities futures. Futures in the commodities market were originally developed to give farmers a guaranteed price for their year-long work harvesting crops, but, as the decades wore on, speculative trading of these futures completely detached the prices from the underlying commodities. Russell’s argument is that in places where people are dealing daily with overzealous dictators, harsh living conditions, and constant fear, the sudden increase of core food costs can be the proverbial “straw that breaks the camel’s back.” These swings in prices are what cause civil wars and hyperinflation that result in mass migrations from Central America and the Middle East to Western countries where stable employment is more available. I think this book is extremely important for understanding how actions in one part of the world can have devastating effects on another part of the world, and this is something that many people still don’t understand.

Hot Dog Money: Inside the Biggest Scandal in the History of College Sports by Guy Lawson

It seems like every 7-10 years college athletics has a gigantic blow up, and they make for some great reading. Typically, these books are looking at the state of college football, like The System by Jeff Benedict or Billion-Dollar Ball by Gilbert Gaul, but Hot Dog Money is different in a couple of big ways. First, it's the first book I can remember about wide-spread corruption in college basketball. Second, instead of relying on hundreds of interviews to try and speculate on the level of corruption, this book follows one Financial Advisor as he works undercover for the FBI. You get first-hand accounts of the corruption that took place in some of the biggest college basketball programs in the country. It's a fast-paced story that will shock you by the sheer expanse of corruption throughout the industry.

Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That's a Good Thing) by Salman Khan

I was excited to read this book beacause the company I work for, Digital Promise Global, puts a large focus on how AI and future technologies will impact education, and specifically, historically and systematically excluded students. Large Language Models like OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 and Anthropic's Claude-3.5 have taken the world by storm, and there has been widespread debate about what that means for the future of education. When these technologies were first introduced, the overwhelming reaction was to ban them from classrooms and universities to stem the inevitable cheating that would occur. However, this book presents a sort of "roadmap" of how LLM's can be used to revolutionize personalized learning. Khan has integrated GPT-4 into his Khan Academy offerings through the use of guardrails that define how GPT-4 can respond to students. He doesn't go into detail on how those guardrails were achieved, but the examples he provides have the potential to be world-changing. Students today have the opportunity to have conversations with historical figures and immerse themselves in periods my generation could only read about. AI Tutors, programmed to use the Socratic method, have the ability to provide personalized assistance in multiple subjects without simply giving students the answers. I was a little disappointed that the book was completely Khan Academy focused and didn't include examples of how other EdTech companies are utilizing the technology, but the book's goal of presenting the wide-open possibilities for the future of education was definitely met.

Books I'm Excited About for Next Month

How Leaders Learn: Master the Habits of the World's Most Successful People by David Novak

Money & Promises: Seven Deals that Changed the World by Paolo Zannoni

The Last Drop: Solving the World's Water Crisis by Tim Smedley

Nobody Cares About Your Career: Why Failure is Good, the Great Ones Play Hurt, and Other Hard Truths by Erika Ayers Badan

As always, I'd love to hear from you if you've read any of these books or have thoughts on them. My biggest goal for this newsletter is to build a group of people who enjoy discussing non-fiction books and what can be learned. Better yet, if you know of another book that's worth checking out, I'd love to hear about it!

Enjoy the books, have a wonderful month, and let me know what you learn!

-Blake