Chris Voss's Blog, page 119

The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science by Alan Lightman

The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science by Alan Lightman

From the acclaimed author of Einstein’s Dreams comes a rich, fascinating answer to the question, Can the scientifically inclined still hold space for spirituality?

Gazing at the stars, falling in love, or listening to music, we sometimes feel a transcendent connection with a cosmic unity and things larger than ourselves. But these experiences are not easily understood by science, which holds that all things can be explained in terms of atoms and molecules. Is there space in our scientific worldview for these spiritual experiences?

According to acclaimed physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, there may be. Drawing on intellectual history and conversations with contemporary scientists, philosophers, and psychologists, Lightman asks a series of thought-provoking questions that illuminate our strange place between the world of particles and forces and the world of complex human experience. Can strict materialism explain our appreciation of beauty? Or our feelings of connection to nature and to other people? Is there a physical basis for consciousness, the most slippery of all scientific problems?

Lightman weaves these investigations together to propose what he calls “spiritual materialism”— the belief that we can embrace spiritual experiences without letting go of our scientific worldview. In his view, the breadth of the human condition is not only rooted in material atoms and molecules but can also be explained in terms of Darwinian evolution.

What is revealed in this lyrical, enlightening book is that spirituality may not only be compatible with science, it also ought to remain at the core of what it means to be human.

The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Malady of the Mind: Schizophrenia and the Path to Prevention by Jeffrey A. Lieberman

Malady of the Mind: Schizophrenia and the Path to Prevention by Jeffrey A. Lieberman

Of the many myths and misconceptions that obscure our understanding of schizophrenia, the most pernicious is that there is no effective treatment or cure. Though that may have been true in the past, the current reality couldn’t be more different: today’s treatments have the potential to be game-changing—and often lifesaving.

This powerful portrait of schizophrenia, the most malignant and mysterious mental illness, by renowned psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman, interweaves cultural and scientific history with dramatic patient profiles and clinical experiences to impart a revolutionary message of hope. For the first time in history, we can effectively treat schizophrenia, limiting its disabling effects—and we’re on the verge of being able to prevent the disease’s onset entirely.

In this rigorously researched, profoundly compelling biography of schizophrenia, Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman draws on his four-decade career to illuminate the past, present, and future of this historically dreaded and devastating illness. From his vantage point at the pinnacle of academic psychiatry, informed by extensive research experience and clinical care of thousands of patients, Dr. Lieberman explains how the complexity of the brain, the checkered history of psychiatric medicine, and centuries of stigma combined with misguided legislation and health care policies have impeded scientific advances and clinical progress. Despite this, there is reason for optimism: by offering evidence-based treatments that combine medication with psychosocial services and principles learned from the recovery movement, doctors can now effectively treat schizophrenia by diagnosing patients at a very early stage, achieving a mutually respectful therapeutic alliance, and preventing relapse, thus limiting the progression of the illness. Even more auspiciously, decades of work on diagnosis, detection, and early intervention have pushed scientific progress to the cusp of prevention—meaning that in the near future, doctors may be able to prevent the onset of this disorder.

A must-read for fans of medical histories, psychology, and those whose lives have been affected by schizophrenia, this revelatory work offers a comprehensive scientific portrait, crucial insights, sound advice for families and friends, and most importantly, hope for sufferers now and in the generations to come.

The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Investing in a Recession – Time to Think about Gold by Simon Popple

Investing in a Recession – Time to Think about Gold by Simon Popple

Brookvillecapital.com

The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Bayou Beloved (Butterfly Bayou) by Lexi Blake

Bayou Beloved (Butterfly Bayou) by Lexi Blake

When a woman returns home to Louisiana’s Butterfly Bayou, her high school crush finally notices she exists, in a small-town contemporary romance from New York Times bestselling author Lexi Blake.

Quaid Havery always planned to follow in his father’s footsteps. He went to law school and then came home to take over his dad’s legal practice. Being the only lawyer in small-town Papillon, Quaid is pretty sure he’s seen everything. After all, he was once asked to sue an alligator for defamation of character. He’s prepared for anything the town can throw at him, until he encounters Jayna Cardet. She’s gorgeous, smart, funny, and unlike any woman he’s met before….Except he has.

Jayna never thought she’d return to Papillon, but when her life gets turned around she must learn to live in the close-knit community again. She certainly never dreamed she would practice law in her little town, but she finds herself in the courtroom, and the opposing counsel is her former high school crush, Quaid. It wouldn’t be so bad if the man had developed a beer belly, but Quaid is more handsome than ever. And instead of ignoring her like he did in high school, he’s made it plain that he wants to get to know her.

Thus begins a courtship destined to end in a wedding or a war. Either way, the locals are popping some corn and eagerly awaiting the outcome.

The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The World Itself: Consciousness and the Everything of Physics by Ulf Danielsson

The World Itself: Consciousness and the Everything of Physics by Ulf Danielsson

There is a wonderfully weird but real world out there, and we are a part of it. It is time for physics to take life seriously.

Can we ever truly comprehend the universe before we fully understand consciousness and the wonders, and limits, of the mind? Ulf Danielsson, an acclaimed theoretical physicist who has dedicated his career to probing the deepest mysteries of nature, thinks not. As he dismantles the arguments of esteemed mathematicians and scientists, who would substitute their mathematical models for reality and equate the mind to a computer, he makes a lucid and passionate case that it is nature, full of beauty and meaning, which must compel us. In challenging established worldviews, he also takes a fresh look at major philosophical debates, including the notion of free will.

Fearless, provocative, and witty, The World Itself is essential reading for anyone curious about the profound questions surrounding life, the universe, and everything.

The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Creators Take Control: How NFTs Revolutionize Art, Business, and Entertainment by Edward Lee

Creators Take Control: How NFTs Revolutionize Art, Business, and Entertainment by Edward Lee

A leading legal scholar offers a compelling new theory to explain the meteoric rise of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and their impact on art, business, entertainment, and society, and explains how they are revolutionizing our understanding of ownership.

If you buy an NFT, do you own anything? Critics say no. Then why are people spending so much money to own them—to the tune of $27 billion in 2021? And why are big businesses and venture capital firms investing hundreds of millions to develop NFTs for people’s use in the metaverse, a purely imaginary world?

In Creators Take Control, Edward Lee offers a compelling new theory he calls “Tokenism” that answers these perplexing questions. Using vivid examples, Lee lucidly explains how NFTs operate—and how they fundamentally change our understanding of ownership. Tokenism is an artistic, cultural, and technological movement that creates value in a new kind of ownership of a new type of property—symbolized by a virtual token—through a process of technological abstraction and artificial scarcity effectuated by NFTs. Ownership becomes virtual. What Cubism did in radically changing the twentieth-century perspective of creating and viewing art through cubes, Tokenism does today in altering our perspective of owning art and other things through tokens. Both movements radically reimagine what’s possible.

Creators and businesses have seized upon this profound transformation. In a short time, they have developed a new market for digital art, important new rights for creators, innovative business models based on decentralized collaboration, and a new type of interactive ownership that enables identity, community, and patronage through NFTs. These innovations are just the start of revolutionary changes to society. Lee shows how NFTs create a new form of decentralized intellectual property, or De-IP. Comparable to the movement to decentralized finance (DeFi), De-IP empowers creators to take control of their artistic productions and livelihood.

Lee’s intellectual tour de force is filled with practical insights—and hope—for fostering creativity and a Virtual Renaissance for the ages.

About the Author
Edward Lee is a leading legal expert on NFTs and intellectual property. He is a professor of law and co-director of Illinois Tech Chicago-Kent College of Law’s Center for Design, Law, and Technology, the first U.S. institution devoted to research of creativity, technology,…

The Chris Voss Show Podcast – They Ask, You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today’s Digital Consumer by Marcus Sheridan

They Ask, You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today’s Digital Consumer by Marcus Sheridan

The revolutionary guide that challenged businesses around the world to stop selling to their buyers and start answering their questions to get results; revised and updated to address new technology, trends, the continuous evolution of the digital consumer, and much more

In today’s digital age, the traditional sales funnel―marketing at the top, sales in the middle, customer service at the bottom―is no longer effective. To be successful, businesses must obsess over the questions, concerns, and problems their buyers have, and address them as honestly and as thoroughly as possible. Every day, buyers turn to search engines to ask billions of questions. Having the answers they need can attract thousands of potential buyers to your company―but only if your content strategy puts your answers at the top of those search results. It’s a simple and powerful equation that produces growth and success: They Ask, You Answer.

Using these principles, author Marcus Sheridan led his struggling pool company from the bleak depths of the housing crash of 2008 to become one of the largest pool installers in the United States. Discover how his proven strategy can work for your business and master the principles of inbound and content marketing that have empowered thousands of companies to achieve exceptional growth.

They Ask, You Answer is a straightforward guide filled with practical tactics and insights for transforming your marketing strategy. This new edition has been fully revised and updated to reflect the evolution of content marketing and the increasing demands of today’s internet-savvy buyers. New chapters explore the impact of technology, conversational marketing, the essential elements every business website should possess, the rise of video, and new stories from companies that have achieved remarkable results with They Ask, You Answer.

Upon reading this book, you will know:

How to build trust with buyers through content and video.
How to turn your web presence into a magnet for qualified buyers.
What works and what doesn’t through new case studies, featuring real-world results from companies that have embraced these principles.
Why you need to think of your business as a media company, instead of relying on more traditional (and ineffective) ways of advertising and marketing.
How to achieve buy-in at your company and truly embrace a culture of content and video.
How to transform your current customer base into loyal brand advocates for your company.
They Ask, You Answer is a must-have resource for companies that want a fresh approach to marketing and sales that is proven to generate more traffic, leads, and sales.

The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II by Ian Buruma

The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II by Ian Buruma

Ian Buruma’s spellbinding account of three near-mythic figures—a Dutch fixer, a Manchu princess, and Himmler’s masseur—who may have been con artists and collaborators under Japanese and German rule, or true heroes, or something in between.

On the face of it, the three characters in this book seem to have little in common—aside from the fact that each committed wartime acts that led some to see them as national heroes, and others as villains. All three were mythmakers, larger-than-life storytellers, for whom the truth was beside the point. Felix Kersten was a plump Finnish pleasure-seeker who became Heinrich Himmler’s indispensable personal masseur—Himmler calling him his “magic Buddha.” Kersten presented himself after the war as a resistance hero who convinced Himmler to save countless people from mass murder. Kawashima Yoshiko, a gender-fluid Manchu princess, spied for the Japanese secret police in China, and was mythologized by the Japanese as a heroic combination of Mata Hari and Joan of Arc. Friedrich Weinreb was a Hasidic Jew in Holland who took large amounts of money from fellow Jews in an imaginary scheme to save them from deportation, while in fact betraying some of them to the German secret police. Sentenced after the war as a con artist, he was regarded regarded by supporters as the “Dutch Dreyfus.”

All three figures have been vilified and mythologized, out of a never-ending need, Ian Buruma argues, to see history, and particularly war, and above all World War II, as a neat story of angels and devils. The Collaborators is a fascinating reconstruction of what in fact we can know about these incredible figures and what will always remain out of reach. What emerges is all the more mesmerizing for being painted in chiaroscuro. In times of life-and-death stakes, the truth quickly gets buried under lies and self-deception. Now, when demagogues abroad and at home are assaulting the truth once more, the stories of the collaborators and their lessons are indispensable.

The Chris Voss Show Podcast – How I’ll Kill You by Ren DeStefano

How I’ll Kill You by Ren DeStefano

Your next stay-up-all-night thriller, about identical triplets who have a nasty habit of killing their boyfriends, and what happens when the youngest commits their worst crime yet: falling in love with her mark.

Make him want you.
Make him love you.
Make him dead.

Sissy has an…interesting family. Always the careful one, always the cautious one, she has handled the cleanup while her serial killer sisters have carved a path of carnage across the U.S. Now, as they arrive in the Arizona heat, Sissy must step up and embrace the family pastime of making a man fall in love and then murdering him. Her first target? A young widower named Edison—and their mutual attraction is instant. While their relationship progresses, and most couples would be thinking about picking out china patterns and moving in together, Sissy’s family is reminding her to think about picking out burial sites and moving on.

Then something happens that Sissy never anticipated: She begins to feel protective of Edison, and before she can help it, she’s fallen in love. But the clock is ticking, and her sisters are growing restless. It becomes clear that the gravesite she chooses will hide a body no matter what happens; but if she betrays her family, will it be hers?

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The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Angel Makers: Arsenic, a Midwife, and Modern History’s Most Astonishing Murder Ring by Patti McCracken

The Angel Makers: Arsenic, a Midwife, and Modern History’s Most Astonishing Murder Ring by Patti McCracken

The Angel Makers is a true-crime story like no other—a 1920s midwife who may have been the century’s most prolific killer leading a murder ring of women responsible for the deaths of at least 160 men.

The horror occurred in a rustic farming enclave in modern-day Hungary. To look at the unlikely lineup of murderesses—village wives, mothers, and daughters—was to come to the shocking realization that this could have happened anywhere, and to anyone. At the center of it all was a sharp-minded village midwife, a “smiling Buddha” known as Auntie Suzy, who distilled arsenic from flypaper and distributed it to the women of Nagyrév. “Why are you bothering with him?” Auntie Suzy would ask, as she produced an arsenic-filled vial from her apron pocket. In the beginning, a great many used the deadly solution to finally be free of cruel and abusive spouses.

But as the number of dead bodies grew without consequence, the killers grew bolder. With each vial of poison emptied, a new reason surfaced to drain yet another. Some women disposed of sickly relatives. Some used arsenic as “inheritance powder” to secure land and houses. For more than fifteen years, the unlikely murderers aided death unfettered and tended to it as if it were simply another chore—spooning doses of arsenic into soup and wine, stirring it into coffee and brandy. By the time their crimes were discovered, hundreds were feared dead.

Anonymous notes brought the crimes to light in 1929. As a skillful prosecutor hungry for justice ran the investigation, newsmen from around the world—including the New York Times—poured in to cover the dramatic events as they unfolded.

The Angel Makers captures in expertly researched detail the entirety of this harrowing story, from the early murders to the final hanging—the story of one of the most sensational and astonishing murder rings in all of modern history.

The post The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Angel Makers: Arsenic, a Midwife, and Modern History’s Most Astonishing Murder Ring by Patti McCracken appeared first on The Chris Voss Show.