The Chris Voss Show

Liam Sharpe - Actor, Filmmaker, Writer and Linguist on The Head of Joaquín Murrieta on Amazon Prime Video Amzn.to/3mJnDRG Actor, filmmaker, and linguist Liam Sharpe is poised to be one of the most talked about antagonist of 2023, playing the role of “Oliver” as one of the leads for Amazon’s first Latin American Western, ‘The Head of Joaquín Murrieta.” The well-traveled language expert and thespian also founded Sharpe Studios working out of the Bay area and has worked on countless projects including filmmaking, podcasting, photography videography, voiceover work and more. “The Head of Joaquín Murrieta” tells the story of a historical Mexican figure who gave battle to the Americans during the Gold Rush. On the newly drawn border between Mexico and the United States, an all-out war was waged due to the Gold Rush, the series is fueled by greed, anger and xenophobia. In New California, a group of immigrants, bandits and natives join forces, thus creating the myth of the Latin American Robin Hood: Joaquín Murrieta. Initiating one of Amazon’s most ambitious titles ever in Latin America, “La cabeza de Joaquín Murrieta,” is the region’s first Western Amazon Original series, Amazon Prime Video announced Tuesday. Set in 1851 around the Mexico-US border, the series episodes are directed by Humberto Hinojosa Ozcariz (“El Candidato,” “Luis Miguel, The Series”) and David Pablos, fresh of his success with “Dance of the 41,” and director of “The Chosen Ones,” selected for Cannes’ Un Certain Regard). Liam brings to life the villain ‘Oliver’ the main antagonist in this gritty wild west series. Growing up in the Bay area, Liam was exposed to many cultures and backgrounds at a young age and sparked his love for learning languages. Now fluent in 7 languages including English, German, Spanish, Portages, French, Italian and Mandarin, Liam learned the majority of the languages between the ages of 14-20. Liam abroad as a teen in Germany, and then traveled to Ecuador and taught at an alternative school when he was 18 before moving to China at 19 where he learned Mandarin. Liam would eventually graduate from UC Santa Cruz and begin working as an electrical design engineer for a solar company before moving to Germany to earn his masters.

The Power of Wonder: The Extraordinary Emotion That Will Change the Way You Live, Learn, and Lead by Monica C. Parker An eye-opening journey through the magical, yet surprisingly little-understood, human emotion that is wonder. From the first tickle of curiosity to an unexpected shift in how we perceive the world, there isn’t a person who hasn’t experienced wonder, and yet the why and how of this profoundly beneficial emotion is only just beginning to be scientifically examined. This inspiring book from thought leader Monica Parker explores the power of wonder to transform the way we learn, develop new ideas, drive social change, and ultimately become better humans. The Power of Wonder takes readers on a multidisciplinary journey through psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, literature, and business to share some of the surprising secrets behind the mechanics of wonder and guides readers in bringing more of it into their lives. From art and architecture, to love and sex, to sleep and psychedelics, you will learn about the elements and elicitors of wonder, and how it can transform our bodies and brains. Whether it’s taking a daily “wonder walk” or discovering a new absorbing intellectual pursuit, this book shows us how to become more wonderprone and reconnect with a reverence for the world and all the magic in it.

Fragile Cargo: The World War II Race to Save the Treasures of China's Forbidden City by Adam Brookes The gripping true story of the bold and determined museum curators who saved the priceless treasures of China’s Forbidden City in the years leading up to World War II and beyond. Spring 1933: The silent courtyards and palaces of Peking’s Forbidden City, for centuries the home of Chinese emperors, are tense with fear and expectation. Japan’s aircrafts drone overhead, its troops and tanks are only hours away. All-out war between China and Japan is coming, and the curators of the Forbidden City are faced with an impossible question: how will they protect the vast imperial art collections in their charge? A difficult and monumental decision is made: to safeguard the treasures, they will need to be evacuated. The magnificent collections contain a million pieces of art—objects that carry China’s deepest and most ancient memories. Among them are irreplaceable artefacts: exquisite paintings on silk, vanishingly rare Ming porcelain, and the extraordinary Stone Drums of Qin, which are adorned with 2,500-year-old inscriptions of crucial cultural significance. For sixteen terrifying years, under the quiet leadership of museum director Ma Heng, the curators would go on to transport the imperial art collections thousands of miles across China—up rivers of white water, across mountain ranges, and through burning cities. In their search for safety the curators and their fragile, invaluable cargo journeyed through the maelstrom of violence, chaos, and starvation that was China’s Second World War. Told for the first time in English and playing out across a vast historical canvas, this is the exhilarating story of a small group of men and women who, when faced with war’s onslaught on civilization, chose to resist. Fragile Cargo reminds us of the enduring power of beauty in a world beset by conflict and violence.

Rule of 3, How Elite Leaders Win by Atlas Aultman Leaders-kit.com To be released in June 2023, this is the pre-purchase of the Rule of 3 book that changes how leaders look at leadership. Atlas Aultman has decades of experience successfully leading selectively manned military and innovation teams in combat, White House, and Special Operations mission sets. This book can be consumed in as little as 10 minutes and be ready to apply, or you can enjoy the stories that help paint the picture. Atlas hasn't written a leadership book that hasn't become a bestseller, this one will be no exception. Get your copy first, pre-order today.

Africatown: America's Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created by Nick Tabor An evocative and epic story, Nick Tabor's Africatown charts the fraught history of America from those who were brought here as slaves but nevertheless established a home for themselves and their descendants, a community which often thrived despite persistent racism and environmental pollution. In 1860, a ship called the Clotilda was smuggled through the Alabama Gulf Coast, carrying the last group of enslaved people ever brought to the U.S. from West Africa. Five years later, the shipmates were emancipated, but they had no way of getting back home. Instead they created their own community outside the city of Mobile, where they spoke Yoruba and appointed their own leaders, a story chronicled in Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon. That community, Africatown, has endured to the present day, and many of the community residents are the shipmates’ direct descendants. After many decades of neglect and a Jim Crow legal system that targeted the area for industrialization, the community is struggling to survive. Many community members believe the pollution from the heavy industry surrounding their homes has caused a cancer epidemic among residents, and companies are eyeing even more land for development. At the same time, after the discovery of the remains of the Clotilda in the riverbed nearby, a renewed effort is underway to create a living memorial to the community and the lives of the slaves who founded it.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.