Monthly pod covering the Amazon best-seller book list.
Power Play is the riveting inside story of Elon Musk and Tesla's bid to build the world's greatest car—from award-winning Wall Street Journal tech and auto reporter Tim Higgins
The highly anticipated memoir from Gucci Mane, “one of hip-hop's most prolific and admired artists” (The New York Times). For the first time Gucci Mane tells his story in his own words. It is the captivating life of an artist who forged an unlikely path to stardom and personal rebirth. Gucci Mane began writing his memoir in a maximum-security federal prison. Released in 2016, he emerged radically transformed. He was sober, smiling, focused, and positive—a far cry from the Gucci Mane of years past. Born in rural Bessemer, Alabama, Radric Delantic Davis became Gucci Mane in East Atlanta, where the rap scene is as vibrant as the dope game. His name was made as a drug dealer first, rapper second. His influential mixtapes and street anthems pioneered the sound of trap music. He inspired and mentored a new generation of artists and producers: Migos, Young Thug, Nicki Minaj, Zaytoven, Mike Will Made-It, Metro Boomin. Yet every success was followed by setback. Too often, his erratic behavior threatened to end it all. Incarceration, violence, rap beefs, drug addiction. But Gucci Mane has changed, and he's decided to tell his story. In his extraordinary autobiography, the legend takes us to his roots in Alabama, the streets of East Atlanta, the trap house, and the studio where he found his voice as a peerless rapper. He reflects on his inimitable career and in the process confronts his dark past—years behind bars, the murder charge, drug addiction, career highs and lows—the making of a trap god. It is one of the greatest comeback stories in the history of music. The Autobiography of Gucci Mane is a blunt and candid account—an instant classic.
The groundbreaking investigative story of how three successive presidents and their military commanders deceived the public year after year about America's longest war, foreshadowing the Taliban's recapture of Afghanistan, by Washington Post reporter and three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Craig Whitlock. Unlike the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 had near-unanimous public support. At first, the goals were straightforward and clear: to defeat al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of 9/11. Yet soon after the United States and its allies removed the Taliban from power, the mission veered off course and US officials lost sight of their original objectives. Distracted by the war in Iraq, the US military became mired in an unwinnable guerrilla conflict in a country it did not understand. But no president wanted to admit failure, especially in a war that began as a just cause. Instead, the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations sent more and more troops to Afghanistan and repeatedly said they were making progress, even though they knew there was no realistic prospect for an outright victory. Just as the Pentagon Papers changed the public's understanding of Vietnam, The Afghanistan Papers contains startling revelation after revelation from people who played a direct role in the war, from leaders in the White House and the Pentagon to soldiers and aid workers on the front lines. In unvarnished language, they admit that the US government's strategies were a mess, that the nation-building project was a colossal failure, and that drugs and corruption gained a stranglehold over their allies in the Afghan government. All told, the account is based on interviews with more than 1,000 people who knew that the US government was presenting a distorted, and sometimes entirely fabricated, version of the facts on the ground. Documents unearthed by The Washington Post reveal that President Bush didn't know the name of his Afghanistan war commander—and didn't want to make time to meet with him. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted he had “no visibility into who the bad guys are.” His successor, Robert Gates, said: “We didn't know jack shit about al-Qaeda.” The Afghanistan Papers is a shocking account that will supercharge a long overdue reckoning over what went wrong and forever change the way the conflict is remembered.
Richard Montañez is a man who made a science out of walking through closed doors, and his success story is an empowerment manual for anyone stuck in a dead-end job or facing a system stacked against them. Having taken a job mopping floors at Frito-Lay's California factory to support his family, Montañez took his future into his own hands and created the world's hottest snack food: Flamin' Hot Cheetos. This bold move not only disrupted the food industry with some much-needed spice, but also shook up a corporate culture in which everyone stayed in their lane. When a top food scientist at Frito-Lay sent out a memo telling sales and marketing to kill the new product before it made it to the store shelves—jealous that someone with no formal education beyond the sixth grade could do his job—Montañez was forced to go rogue once again to save his idea. Through creative thinking, community building, and a few powerful mindset shifts, he outsmarted the naysayers who tried to get in his way. Flamin' Hot proves that you can break out of your career rut and that your present circumstances don't have to dictate your future.
The New York Times bestseller Shortlisted for the 2020 Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings reveals for the first time the unorthodox culture behind one of the world's most innovative, imaginative, and successful companies
In June 2017, Travis Kalanick, the hard-charging CEO of Uber, was ousted in a boardroom coup that capped a brutal year for the transportation giant. Uber had catapulted to the top of the tech world, yet for many came to symbolize everything wrong with Silicon Valley.
From Amazon: In its earliest days, WeWork promised the impossible: to make the workplace cool. Adam Neumann, an immigrant determined to make his fortune in the United States, landed on the idea of repurposing surplus New York office space for the burgeoning freelance class. Over the course of ten years, WeWork attracted billions of dollars from some of the most sought-after investors in the world, while spending it to build a global real estate empire. Based on more than two hundred interviews, Billion Dollar Loser chronicles the breakneck speed at which WeWork's CEO built and grew his company. Culminating in a day-by-day account of the five weeks leading up to WeWork's botched IPO and Neumann's dramatic ouster, Reeves Wiedeman exposes the story of the company's desperate attempt to secure the funding it needed in the final moments of a decade defined by excess. With incredible access and piercing insight into the company, Billion Dollar Loser tells the full, inside story of WeWork and its CEO Adam Neumann who together came to represent the most audacious, and improbable, rise and fall in business.
The first book in twenty-five years from Jerry Seinfeld features his best work across five decades in comedy. Since his first performance at the legendary New York nightclub “Catch a Rising Star” as a twenty-one-year-old college student in fall of 1975, Jerry Seinfeld has written his own material and saved everything. “Whenever I came up with a funny bit, whether it happened on a stage, in a conversation, or working it out on my preferred canvas, the big yellow legal pad, I kept it in one of those old school accordion folders,” Seinfeld writes. “So I have everything I thought was worth saving from forty-five years of hacking away at this for all I was worth.” For this book, Jerry Seinfeld has selected his favorite material, organized decade by decade. In page after hilarious page, one brilliantly crafted observation after another, readers will witness the evolution of one of the great comedians of our time and gain new insights into the thrilling but unforgiving art of writing stand-up comedy.
Greenlights is a book by American actor Matthew McConaughey. It was published on October 20, 2020, by the Crown imprint of Crown Publishing Group. The book includes stories and insights from McConaughey's life in chronological order. It has been described as a memoir but McConaughey has called it an "approach book".
A tiny American town’s plans for radical self-government overlooked one hairy detail: no one told the bears. Once upon a time, a group of libertarians got together and hatched the Free Town Project, a plan to take over an American town and completely eliminate its government. In 2004, they set their sights on Grafton, NH, a barely populated settlement with one paved road. When they descended on Grafton, public funding for pretty much everything shrank: the fire department, the library, the schoolhouse. State and federal laws became meek suggestions, scarcely heard in the town’s thick wilderness. The anything-goes atmosphere soon caught the attention of Grafton’s neighbors: the bears. Freedom-loving citizens ignored hunting laws and regulations on food disposal. They built a tent city in an effort to get off the grid. The bears smelled food and opportunity. A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear is the sometimes funny, sometimes terrifying tale of what happens when a government disappears into the woods. Complete with gunplay, adventure, and backstabbing politicians, this is the ultimate story of a quintessential American experiment — to live free or die, perhaps from a bear.
DEEP DIVE 2nd installment of the Reading RainBros special edition featuring Bob-0! Them: Why We Hate Each Other and How to Heal by Ben Sasse
Ep 31 covers Arthur Blank and his work with Home Depot, Atlanta Falcons, and his many philanthropic efforts.
EP. 29 I'm Your Emotional Support Animal by Adam Carolla by John Slade
Just one Bro today! First ever solo podcast from Bob-0! This is a very deep dive on China, which follows on the heels of our last episode, The Bully of Asia. Bob-0 is passionate about CHINA and its increasing presence on the world stage and covers a wide range of his favorite topics. CHINA!!
Ben Mezrich's 2009 bestseller The Accidental Billionaires is the definitive account of Facebook's founding - and the basis for the Academy Award-winning film The Social Network. Two of the story's iconic characters are Harvard students Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss: identical twins, Olympic rowers, and legal foils to Mark Zuckerberg. Bitcoin Billionaires is the story of the brothers' redemption and revenge in the wake of their epic legal battle with Facebook - and the first great book from the world of bitcoin.
Sex differences in personality are consistent worldwide and tend to widen in more gender-egalitarian cultures. On average, females worldwide have advantages in verbal ability and social cognition while males have advantages in visuospatial abilities and the extremes of mathematical ability. On average, women worldwide are more attracted to vocations centered on people and men to vocations centered on things. Many sex differences in the brain are coordinate with sex differences in personality, abilities, and social behavior Human populations are genetically distinctive in ways that correspond to self-identified race and ethnicity. Evolutionary selection pressure since humans left Africa has been extensive and mostly local. Continental population differences in variants associated with personality, abilities, and social behavior are common. The shared environment usually plays a minor role in explaining personality, abilities, and social behavior. Class structure is importantly based on differences in abilities that have a substantial genetic component. Outside interventions are inherently constrained in the effects they can have on personality, abilities, and social behavior.
The fascinating, true story of the world's deadliest disease. In 1918, the Great Flu Epidemic felled the young and healthy virtually overnight. An estimated forty million people died as the epidemic raged. Children were left orphaned and families were devastated. As many American soldiers were killed by the 1918 flu as were killed in battle during World War I. And no area of the globe was safe. Eskimos living in remote outposts in the frozen tundra were sickened and killed by the flu in such numbers that entire villages were wiped out. Scientists have recently rediscovered shards of the flu virus frozen in Alaska and preserved in scraps of tissue in a government warehouse. Gina Kolata, an acclaimed reporter for The New York Times, unravels the mystery of this lethal virus with the high drama of a great adventure story. Delving into the history of the flu and previous epidemics, detailing the science and the latest understanding of this mortal disease, Kolata addresses the prospects for a great epidemic recurring, and, most important, what can be done to prevent it.
Ep. 19 The Metropolitan Revolution by John Slade
EP. 18 When Corporations Rule the World by John Slade
Ep. 16 Great Leaders Have No Rules by John Slade
EP. 13 Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope by John Slade
Ep. 12 The Theft of a Decade: How the Boomers Stole the Millenials' Economic Future by John Slade
Ep. 11 Zucked: Waking up to the Facebook Catastrophe by John Slade
Ep 10 - Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe by John Slade
Ep 9- The Coddling of the American Mind by John Slade
EP. 8 The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright by John Slade
The Poisoned City by Anna Clark by John Slade
John Slade and Bob-0 review our most controversial book yet! Heather Mac Donald tells some very uncomfortable truths about race, gender, sex, and the out of control bureaucracy running our most hallowed institutions.
The Bros discuss flags and why we care so much about them.
Episode 4 discusses, reluctantly, Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves. 50.5/100 is our rating.
Bob-o and John Slade review the latest book about the Opioid crisis in America, Dopesick by Beth Macy.
Discussion about John Carreryrou's latest investigative thriller Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup.
Welcome to the inaugural episode of ReadingRainBROs, a hopefully monthly podcast wherein I, your host John Slade and my consigliere Bob-0, do a short 30 min review of the Amazon top sellers list. We are both avid readers and wanted to express our hot takes to whatever audience is willing to hear them.
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