Chris Voss's Blog, page 131

The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Brett McKay, Thriller and Suspense Author

Brett McKay, Thriller and Suspense Author

Brettmckaybooks.com

After an unexpected turn flushes his chosen career down the toilet, Dex Sanders is struggling to make ends meet as a used car salesman. Despite the drudgery of the job, he manages to put on a brave face for his wife, Reagan, and their two boys, until the day an unsettling encounter with a stranger coincides with a mysterious package appearing on their doorstep.

Later that night, Dex and his family are abducted by a group of armed men and taken to an underground bunker, where Dex is tortured. When Dex can’t answer any of their odd questions, the strangers conclude they’ve nabbed the wrong guy, and the entire family is marked for execution.

With the clock ticking, Dex must free his family and retrieve the strange box that seems to hold the answers. But doing so means running from relentless killers, uncovering the truth behind an evil as old as time, and stopping a supernatural power that threatens the entire world.

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The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Out of the FOG, into the CLEAR; Journaling to Help You Heal from Toxic Relationships by Shannon Petrovich

Out of the FOG, into the CLEAR; Journaling to Help You Heal from Toxic Relationships by Shannon Petrovich

In the FOG (Fear, Obligation, and Guilt) of a narcissistic, abusive, or other toxic relationship, feelings of paralysis, anxiety, depression, confusion, disorientation, not knowing who you are anymore, or how you got to this dark place in your life, are as terrifying and mystifying as ocean fog. The FOG crept into your relationship so stealthily that you didn’t notice the dramatic swings from love-bombing to devaluing, the constant pressures, the lies, the gaslighting, the flashes of anger, all of it was just a bit of water vapor that was easily dismissed. But over the months, or years, the FOG set in. Toxic relationships are not an act of nature like ocean fog; they are the result of intentional tactics of manipulation, and control. This FOG is not going to just lift. Nothing will change until you change it. So how do you find your bearings, push past this paralysis, clear away your vision, begin to heal the trauma, and rebuild your life? The insights, strategies, and journal prompts in this book are designed to help you sail through the FOG and into the CLEAR.

This book is packed with information including;

Changing your negative internal self-talk to transform the cycles of depression, self-blame, despair, and hopelessness, into self-encouragement, hope, progress and self-compassion
Understanding trauma-bonding and how to untangle this unhealthy attachment
Boundaries; how to create and maintain them with people who don’t respect them
Placating, people-pleasing, and peacekeeping, and how to stop undermining yourself
Finding clarity, staying focused on reality, and letting go of the gaslighting
Leaving emotionally as well as physically
Rebuilding your sense of self, and creating healthy self-care strategies
And so much more

It is possible to deal with and heal from toxic relationships, and this book will help you find your way. Welcome aboard, You can do this!

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The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Unreported: Domestic Abuse is an Unreported Crime, and Learning to L.I.V.E. free is a journey… by Ms. Veera Mahajan

Unreported: Domestic Abuse is an Unreported Crime, and Learning to L.I.V.E. free is a journey… by Ms. Veera Mahajan

UNREPORTED is a book for increasing awareness about domestic abuse. Through amazing real stories it provides a step by step guide for finding your way to freedom.

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The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Why Elon Musk Is Failing With Twitter

Elon’s missteps are not only alienating advertisers, even worse, now he’s costing them billions in stock valuations, likely prompting a new slate of lawsuits and damages. He continues to almost daily make snowballing errors into an avalanche of failures of what may become the worst acquisition of all time next to the Time Warner deal.

As I wrote about in my new book Beacons of Leadership, I talk about the challenges of taking over companies and pulling them back from the brink of bankruptcy as I have successfully. Why is everything going wrong for Elon? Well its a few things:

1. Operating from Ego.

Elon has been operating in an ego state where he believes his own reputation and swagger is impenetrable. Ego got him into this mess. Ego had him into lording around in Twitter to self-indulge his ego to the point of committing to buying it for a figure far beyond its worth at the top of the market. His ego believes he can buy and fix anything and in doing so he convinced himself he could easily fix Twitter and now he’s entered a gauntlet of failures that are compounding.

Sadly, many people worship money and people who make money and regard billionaires as infallible business gods. Billionaires assume that their achievements, sometimes involving luck, means they can solve the world’s problems. Books have been written about how many times they fail and actually make the world worse.

Most CEOs know you shouldn’t make a brash ego, vanity purchase and the boards are there to regulate that. It appears that many of Elon’s advisors on the deal were some from the political right who may have sought to encourage him to buy it for their interests rather than on the merits of the financials. If you’ve seen the text messages from the deal now released in a lawsuit, it was awful advice he was getting from people willing to sacrifice him for their gain.

2. Overpaying at the top of an economic market with clouds looming.

Again overpaying by ego. He contracted to buy Twitter at the top of the market, thinking by ego he could fix anything. Shortly after, market corrections lowered the value of the company. It became clear he was buying a company anywhere 2 to 3 times its valuation. Then he attempted to break the deal and could not.

He blindly ignored the coming recessionary conditions coming as the Federal Reserves tightened the economy. Now the scenario looks even worse as all tech companies took a massive stock dive. Most likely if he would have waited till now, Twitter stock price valuation would be around 7-10 billion, meaning he’s now overpaid by 4-5 times the value.

3. NEVER PANIC EARLY.

On my podcast, The Chris Voss Show Podcast, we had Apollo 13’s Fred Haise on to talk about the astronauts’ training and survival in the snowballing failures of the mission that had their lives on the line. The title of the book is from NASA’s training: NEVER PANIC EARLY. In his NASA training, it taught them that panicking will escalate problems and even amplify other failures. They go through thousands of hours of problem solving testing to teach them not to panic, but to METHODICALLY, rationally problem solve. Even in the face of death, which is itself a whole new panic potential.

Again, from my book Beacons of Leadership, bailing out failing companies is a DIFFERENT skill set than building them. Elon is used to slowly, methodically building, block by block, testing, failing small experiments in a business. Since his usual business’ are startups, it’s all “up,” the sky is the limit, plenty of runway time. Conversely, when you are trying to pull a company out of descent to its death, it’s a much different game, as many times you are up against the wall, out of time, and the gun of bankruptcy is pressed up against your head. Downward spiral is the rule of every day and you can see the ground coming up at you, which is daunting. Usually, your destination is inevitable. You’re just fighting the odds. You are fighting to right the plane in the short time you know you have left. “Just be calm,” says the man with the gun pressed against your sweating forehead.”

Instead, through over paying for an ego project, he’s taken a slow descending plane, torched it on fire and geared it into a death spiral. To resolve the mistake of overpaying, he’s brazenly in a callus manner showing instability and chaos, laid off or lost a massive amount of stabilizing staff, including those that made the platform safe for his core income: advertisers. You overpay, then you have to do massive layoffs. Even worse, he’s made ego “score settling” layoffs, bans from his platform and ego posted on Twitter unstable, panic perceived rhetoric further causing advertisers to be skittish.

Doubling down on the oligarch ego “I alone can save it” he’s shockingly attempted to threaten, call out and shame advertisers. Never bite the hand that feeds you and in response advertisers have pulled back to limit the fallout after recently going through similar issues with the Kayne West’s public meltdown. Now he’s switched gears to pleading and begging, while giving everyone the impression through his constant communication that he and Twitter are unstable and panicking.

4. Throwing switches and banging buttons.

It’s become apparent in the burning death spiral plane’s cockpit, he’s panicking and starting to just flip switches and bang buttons to find anything that works. NEVER PANIC EARLY. At this point, you’re just hitting anything to change course, instead of making methodical, well thought out decisions. He’s playing the ego invincible game of rash, quick decisions that work in a startup that has time, but not in a falling burning plane emergency with all the alarm bells screeching at you.

The opposite of what the Apollo 13 astronauts knew, each one of his panicked decisions is failing, compounding in a snowballing effect to create more problems. And now to make matters with advertisers worse, by rashly approving a new blue check system to fix a bleeding hole, he has opened brands and advertisers to an escalating unsafe and unstable environment where they can be copied and their brands trust and reputation to be subverted by trolls. The result being now those brands and advertisers attacks by trolls taking advantage of panicked decisions are costing investors and companies billions of dollars in stock losses and most likely future lawsuits to come at Elon’s Twitter. He’s literally starting to cut wings and rudders off the plane in hopes of saving it. If he didn’t have advertisers scared off fully yet, they are now completely on the fence now.

5. If you’re going to put out a fire, it’s best NOT to set YOURSELF on fire or the fire crew.

Having a gun up against your head, panicking, it doesn’t help to panic the crew trying to help you save the crashing plane by threating to shoot them as well sending out “save us or else” bankruptcy type emails. You’re not going to get the brains and performance you need if everyone is in fear and flight mode. In fact, some are jumping out or many are looking for the exits. Apollo 13 mantra applied to the entire crew: Never Panic Early. All three had to remain calm and work together to problem solve. They never panicked and methodically did their tasks.

Twitter, since its inception, has always been the “clown car that crashed into success.” It had a multitude of opportunities to be the first lead in so many technologies now commanded by other apps. The “3 stooges” who started it with massive infighting seemed at every turn to do every misstep possible to make it fail and losing never ending amounts of money. Along with users and developers who dragged the three stooges into adopting their successful features, VC’s were able to navigate, and carry it until they could dump it on public stock holders. After that, Twitters been a poorly managed, marching zombie since. By any means, for anyone interested in buying Twitter, they came away knowing it was a terd that so many suitors have passed over until Elon’s ego got the best of him.

Summary

Like the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Captain Elon has shot down the Twitter bird and like an albatross, it has been hung around his neck and the curse, as they say, “goes on and on” adrift from that fatal egotistical shot.

If I were Elon, I would have been more methodical and appeared more controlled. I would have blacked my communication out or limited my communications to those that have first been screened through serious advisors. But again, this is the same ego issue that got him in trouble tweeting with the SEC. It’s why advertisers see his long pattern of self-sabotage. I would have brought in a well regarded CEO by advertisers who is used to enlisting and having healthy relationships with them. Show stability and competence, not panic and derision. It hasn’t helped his ego to manipulate politics or make conspiracies worse on Twitter has worsened his and the platform’s reputation.

Can Elon save Twitter? If you understand the math of his overpaying 4-5 times burn rate, the damage done to attract advertisers, scaring off current clients, making the instability and toxicity of the platform even more unfriendly to brands and advertisers, and now picking up lawsuits from companies stockholders, I’m not sure even a bankruptcy would save it. Twitters and Facebooks ship have sailed as TikTok now rules the social platforms for audience attention. Most likely it will end up like Tumblr, bottomed out and sold for pennies on the dollar. I predict this will go down as the biggest acquisition flop since the Time Warner deal. Even now Elon thinks he’s winning with all the bad press attention, but really people are just tuning in for the crash. No one’s going to build a business on a crashing plane.

Elon might have been better served by that popular adage of late “Fuck around and find out.” He’s about to find out.

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The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Personality and Power: Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe by Ian Kershaw

Personality and Power: Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe by Ian Kershaw

How far can a single leader alter the course of history?

From one of the leading historians of twentieth-century Europe and the author of the definitive biography of Hitler, Personality and Power is a masterful reckoning with how character conspired with opportunity to create the modern age’s uniquely devastating despots—and how and why other countries found better paths. The modern era saw the emergence of individuals who had command over a terrifying array of instruments of control, persuasion and death. Whole societies were reshaped and wars were fought, often with a merciless contempt for the most basic norms. At the summit of these societies were leaders whose personalities somehow enabled them to do whatever they wished, regardless of the consequences for others.

Ian Kershaw’s new book is a compelling, lucid and challenging attempt to understand these rulers, whether those operating on the widest stage (Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini) or with a more national impact (Tito, Franco). What was it about these leaders, and the times in which they lived, that allowed them such untrammelled and murderous power? And what brought that era to an end? In a contrasting group of profiles—from Churchill to de Gaulle, Adenauer to Gorbachev and Thatcher to Kohl)—Kershaw uses his exceptional skills as an iconic historian to explore how strikingly different figures wielded power.

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The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

In The Future Is Analog, David Sax points out that the onset of the pandemic instantly gave us the digital universe we’d spent so long anticipating. Instant communication, online shopping, virtual everything.

It didn’t take long to realize how awful it was to live in this promised future. We craved real experiences, relationships, and spaces and got back to real life as quickly and often as we could.

In chapters exploring work, school, religion, and more, this book asks pointed questions: Is our future inevitably digital? Can we reject the downsides of digital technology without rejecting change? Can we innovate not for the sake of productivity but for the good of our social and cultural lives? Can we build a future that serves us as humans, first and foremost?

This is a manifesto for a different kind of change. We can spend our creativity and money on building new gadgets—or we can spend them on new ways to be together and experience the world, to bake bread, and climb mountains. All we need is the clarity to choose which future we want.

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The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Mike Vandemaele, CEO at Pro Services Inc. & Building A Career In The Skilled Trades and Maintenence Tech Fields

Mike Vandemaele, CEO at Pro Services Inc. & Building A Career In The Skilled Trades and Maintenence Tech Fields

Prosatwork.com

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The Chris Voss Show Podcast – George Wojciechowski, Co-Founder and CEO of Manifest Sustainable Ecommerce Fulfillment & Finding Success As An Entrepreneur

Manifest.eco

George Wojciechowski, Co-Founder and CEO of Manifest Sustainable Ecommerce Fulfillment & Finding Success As An Entrepreneur

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The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Birth of the Everyday Real Estate Investor: How Real Estate, Not Stocks, Creates Wealth by Glenn Schworm, Amber Schworm

The Birth of the Everyday Real Estate Investor: How Real Estate, Not Stocks, Creates Wealth by Glenn Schworm, Amber Schworm

Real estate investing is the answer to help you live your best life!

Whether you want to supplement your income, build your retirement, or switch careers, you know you want to make more money to build your dream life. Are you unhappy where you are, but need more income to get you where you want to go? Do you have a strong desire to advance but aren’t sure how to do so? Maybe you’re an existing real estate investor who wants to grow and scale your business to the next level, but you need guidance to do it. That’s where Glenn and Amber Schworm come in.

Whether you have a lot of money or none at all, great credit or bad credit, the average person can create wealth with real estate investing. The Schworms can teach you how—and it’s not as complicated as you think! It is, without a doubt, the best and most effective way for average people to build wealth for themselves.

People think real estate investment is risky, but it’s not if you have the right education, systems, and tools. This book takes you through every step, and in the end, you’ll have a hard asset that will help you make money. Our process turns real estate investing into a science. If you invest in the stock market, you can lose it all overnight—but with real estate, you have a hard asset. It dramatically reduces the risk factor. Think about the power of that!

Glenn and Amber Schworm are passionate about helping everyday people create their best life through real estate investing. They’ve flipped over seven hundred houses with complete success valued at over $65 million and counting, and still actively flip over one hundred houses a year. Through coaching and mentoring, they have taught thousands of people their simple home flipping formula at their Home Flipping Workshop. With this book, they can help you too.

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The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Ghosts of Riots Past: The Troubled Conflict in Derry Through The Eyes of a Volunteer First Aider by Jude Morrow

The Ghosts of Riots Past: The Troubled Conflict in Derry Through The Eyes of a Volunteer First Aider by Jude Morrow

“In The Ghosts of Riots Past, Morrow presents an insightful, imagined memoir – a unique account of Free Derry history from the perspective of a Knights of Malta First-Aider. The blend of fiction founded in fact makes this writing a powerful tool for anyone seeking to understand the human story around key events in the Bogside’s political history.’ Sue Divin, author of novels Truth Be Told and Carnegie Shortlisted Guard Your Heart.

“The Ghosts of Riots Past provides a richly evocative look at some of Derry’s darkest moments, where not only do we see the horrors that were inflicted upon this city but the courage, warmth and strength of our people. An imagined memoir, shining a light on the contribution of the often-overlooked Knights of Malta first aid volunteers, this is a story of humanity and bravery, deftly interwoven with the wonderful Derry dark humour. This is an important contribution to our city’s narrative”. Claire Allan – Bestselling Author of ‘Her Name Was Rose, ‘Apple of My Eye’, and ‘The Nurse’.

‘An evocative, richly detailed retelling of some of the most pivotal moments in the city’s history from a new perspective. Reflecting the courage and personal sacrifices of the city’s Order of Malta volunteers, among others, First-Aider Martha is a wonderfully realised character brought to life with real warmth and skill. A huge achievement.’ Brian McGilloway – Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author of DS Lucy Black thrillers and Inspector Devlin mysteries

Set against a backdrop of the late 1960s Bogside, Martha Bradley is inspired to join the Order of Malta Ambulance Corps at the age of fifteen, following a family tragedy that changes her life forever. This prompted her family to move to the legendary Rossville Flats that dominated the skyline of the Bogside.

The teenage first-aiders begin their service by attending sports fixtures, fairs, and religious services, to suddenly administering first aid in a most forbidding active war zone with live ammunition. Martha’s journey with the Order of Malta places her at The Battle of The Bogside, the daily clashes between the Free Derry residents and the security forces, Bloody Sunday, and Operation Motorman, whilst guarding a secret of her own from her unit and her family.

Even though we all wore the same thing, white coats and kit bags, everybody wore them and carried themselves a wee bit differently. I would learn everybody’s mannerisms, walks, and small details. I became so close to my unit that I could tell them all apart, even when wearing my gas mask during a riot, outside, and in the dark. I feel it quite symbolic that we wore white coats, almost like we were ghosts. We were the ghosts of riots past, the ghosts of riots present, and the ghosts of riots yet to come.

The Ghosts of Riots Past captures the nostalgic perspective of the troubles in Free Derry (1969-1972), the togetherness of the first-aiders, and the spirit of Christian charity and courage of the Order of Malta Ambulance Corps.

Also included at the back as appendices are the authentic stories of the Order of Malta First Aiders from the Free Derry era detailing their personal experiences of The Battle of The Bogside, Bloody Sunday, Operation Motorman, and the daily disturbances they heroically dealt with during that time.

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