The Chris Voss Show Podcast – After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul by Tripp Mickle

The Curse of the Marquis de Sade: A Notorious Scoundrel, a Mythical Manuscript, and the Biggest Scandal in Literary History by Joel Warner The captivating, deeply reported true story of how one of the most notorious novels ever written—Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom—landed at the heart of one of the biggest scams in modern literary history. “Reading The Curse of the Marquis de Sade, with the Marquis, the sabotage of rare manuscript sales, and a massive Ponzi scheme at its center,felt like a twisty waterslide shooting through a sleazy and bizarre landscape. This book is wild.”—Adam McKay, Academy Award–winning filmmaker Described as both “one of the most important novels ever written” and “the gospel of evil,” 120 Days of Sodom was written by the Marquis de Sade, a notorious eighteenth-century aristocrat who waged a campaign of mayhem and debauchery across France, evaded execution, and inspired the word “sadism,” which came to mean receiving pleasure from pain. Despite all his crimes, Sade considered this work to be his greatest transgression. The original manuscript of 120 Days of Sodom, a tiny scroll penned in the bowels of the Bastille in Paris, would embark on a centuries-spanning odyssey across Europe, passing from nineteenth-century banned book collectors to pioneering sex researchers to avant-garde artists before being hidden away from Nazi book burnings. In 2014, the world heralded its return to France when the scroll was purchased for millions by Gérard Lhéritier, the self-made son of a plumber who had used his savvy business skills to upend France’s renowned rare-book market. But the sale opened the door to vendettas by the government, feuds among antiquarian booksellers, manuscript sales derailed by sabotage, a record-breaking lottery jackpot, and allegations of a decade-long billion-euro con, the specifics of which, if true, would make the scroll part of France’s largest-ever Ponzi scheme. Told with gripping reporting and flush with deceit and scandal, The Curse of the Marquis de Sade weaves together the sweeping odyssey of 120 Days of Sodom and the spectacular rise and fall of Lhéritier, once the “king of manuscripts” and now known to many as the Bernie Madoff of France. At its center is an urgent question for all those who cherish the written word: As the age of handwriting comes to an end, what do we owe the original texts left behind? About the Author Joel Warner is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Esquire, Wired, Newsweek, Men’s Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, Popular Science, and Slate, among others. He currently serves as managing editor of the investigative news outlet The Lever and previously worked as a staff writer at International Business Times and Westword. He is also co-author of The Humor Code. He lives with his family in Denver, Colorado.

2 Mars 202329min

A Christian Health Nonprofit Saddled Thousands With Debt as It Built a Family Empire Including a Pot Farm, a Bank and an Airline by J. David McSwane Propublica.org

1 Mars 202340min

Side Hustle & Flow: 10 Principles to Live and Lead a More Productive Life in Less Time by Cliff Beach Ten chapters, chronicling Cliff’s journey in music from getting kicked off “American Idol” to finding success with his hit song “Confident”. It tells people how to start doing more passion projects while continuing to work their day job. It describes a detailed and realistic approach, unlike those which promise that you can become a multi-millionaire with minimal effort. Rather than setting lofty, unobtainable goals, Cliff embodies the “every man”, taking slow and strategic, methodical steps to my version of success, which the readers can also aspire to and achieve in their own right.

28 Feb 202315min

Blood Money: The Story of Life, Death, and Profit Inside America’s Blood Industry by Kathleen McLaughlin A “haunting” (Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can’t Even) and deeply personal investigation of an underground for-profit medical industry and the American underclass it drains for blood and profit. Journalist Kathleen McLaughlin knew she’d found a treatment that worked on her rare autoimmune disorder. She had no idea it had been drawn from the veins of America’s most vulnerable. So begins McLaughlin’s ten-year investigation researching and reporting on the $20-billion-a year business she found at the other end of her medication, revealing an industry that targets America’s most economically vulnerable for immense profit. Assigned to work in China, McLaughlin hesitated to utilize that country’s scandal-plagued plasma supply—outbreaks throughout the 1990s and early 2000s struck thousands with blood-borne diseases as impoverished areas of the country were milked for blood with reckless abandon. Instead, McLaughlin becomes her own runner, hiding American plasma in her luggage during trips from the United States to China. She finishes the job, but never could get the plasma story out of her head. Suspicions become certainties when a source from the past, a visiting Chinese researcher, warns McLaughlin of troubling echoes between America’s domestic plasma supply chain and the one she’d seen spin out into chaos in China. Blood Money shares McLaughlin’s decade-long mission to learn the full story of where her medicine comes from. She travels the United States in search of the truth about human blood plasma and learns that twenty million Americans each year sell their plasma for profit—a human-derived commodity extracted inside our borders to be processed and packaged for retail across the globe. She investigates the thin evidence pharmaceutical companies have used to push plasma as a wonder drug for everything from COVID-19 to wrinkled skin. And she unearths an American economic crisis hidden in plain sight: single mothers, college students, laid-off Rust Belt auto workers, and a booming blood market at America’s southern border, where collection agencies target Mexican citizens willing to cross over and sell their plasma for substandard pay. McLaughlin’s findings push her to ask difficult questions about her own complicity in this wheel of exploitation, as both a patient in need and a customer who stands to benefit from the suffering of others. Blood Money weaves together McLaughlin’s personal battle to overcome illness as a working American with an electrifying exposé of capitalism run amok in a searing portrait that shows what happens when big business is allowed to feed unchecked on those least empowered to fight back. Kathleen McLaughlin is an award-winning journalist who reports and writes about the consequences of economic inequality around the world. A frequent contributor to The Washington Post and The Guardian, McLaughlin’s reporting has also appeared in The New York Times, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, The Economist, NPR, and more. She is a former Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT and has won multiple awards for her reporting on labor in China. Blood Money is her first book.

24 Feb 202350min

Ori Inbar Co-Founder of AWE and Super Ventures Talks ChatGPT, AI, VR, XR and Metaverse Futures Awexr.com Ori Inbar is a pioneer and champion of the augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) industry since 2007, and is a sought-after thought leader, investor and adviser to numerous augmented reality startups and corporations. In 2009, Ori co-founded Ogmento, an AR games startup which in 2015 was acquired by Apple. In 2010 he co-founded AWE, the world’s largest community dedicated to advancing AR and VR via tradeshows, meetups, courses, and award competitions, In 2016 he founded Super Ventures, a fund dedicated to investing in early-stage AR startups.

23 Feb 202345min

Alain Dumonceaux of The Awakened Man Theawakenedman.net As the Purposeful Action (Men)tor for the Awakened Man movement, Alain Dumonceaux has been on a mission as the beacon for what it means to live an authentic life. For the past three decades, Alain has lived the highs of the Culinary Olympics to the lows of losing it all…almost twice. Today, Alain’s purpose is to guide men to rediscover their life’s mission starting with a purposeful action plan called: The Return of The King that sets the stage for their Hero’s Quest.

22 Feb 20231h 10min

The Syrian Sunset by Howard Kaplan A sweeping novel of international intrigue about the Syrian Civil War, the failure of the West to save the Syrian people, and how that inaction against the Russian incursion in Syria emboldened Vladimir Putin to attack Ukraine. In 2012, President Obama declared that if Assad used chemical weapons in Syria, that would cross a red line. A year later, Assad murdered a thousand people in East Damascus with sarin, and the West did not respond. Soon after, the Russians vastly augmented their presence in Syria, built a huge air base to add to their warm water port on the Syrian Mediterranean and from those runways bombed the Free Syrian Army across the breadth of Syria. Based around these true events, THE SYRIAN SUNSET tells the tale of a fictional Syrian Military Intelligence general who wants a better Syria, and the events that led to the death of 500,000 civilians, 5 million people fleeing Syria, another 15 million being displaced internally.

21 Feb 202330min

Do This, Not That: Career: What to Do (and NOT Do) in 75+ Difficult Workplace Situations by Jenny Foss Jobjenny.com A must-have step-by-step guide on what to do (and what NOT to do) in the workplace featuring clear instructions and helpful scripts so you can deal with any unexpected situation at work. How do you deal with a difficult boss who is always unavailable? How should you handle a coworker who never completes their portion of a project on schedule? How can you establish a strong work-life balance when starting a new job? The workplace can be full of challenging situations and no matter how passionate, frustrated, excited, or downright angry you feel, it’s important to stay polite and professional. Whether you struggle with finding the right words or simply aren’t sure how to approach a topic, Do This, Not That: Career is here to help! This book gives you the tools you need to move forward productively so you can learn when to let go and move on. You’ll find more than 75 common workplace issues that cover everything from your first day on the job to your last. For each situation, discover what to do and what to avoid, then learn exactly how to make it happen. Find tips to reframe your thinking, simple scripts to help you figure out what to say, and even advice on your next steps depending on your initial response. Do This, Not That: Career is your one-stop-shop to handling any situation that work throws your way so you can prepare yourself for a successful career.

20 Feb 202345min