John Nosta

"Byron Reese gets to the heart of what makes humans different from all others." —Midwest Book Review What makes the human mind so unique? And how did we get this way? This fascinating tale explores the three leaps in our history that made us what we are—and will change how you think about our future. Look around. Clearly, we humans are radically different from the other creatures on this planet. But why? Where are the Bronze Age beavers? The Iron Age iguanas? In Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think, Byron Reese argues that we owe our special status to our ability to imagine the future and recall the past, escaping the perpetual present that all other living creatures are trapped in. Envisioning human history as the development of a societal superorganism he names Agora, Reese shows us how this escape enabled us to share knowledge on an unprecedented scale, and predict—and eventually master—the future. Thoughtful, witty, and compulsively readable, Reese unravels our history as an intelligent species in three acts: Act I: Ancient humans undergo “the awakening,” developing the cognitive ability to mentally time-travel using language Act II: In 17th century France, the mathematical framework known as 'probability theory' is born—a science for seeing into the future that we used to build the modern world Act III: Beginning with the invention of the computer chip, humanity creates machines to gaze into the future with even more precision, overcoming the limits of our brains A fresh new look at the history and destiny of humanity, readers will come away from Stories, Dice, and Rocks that Think with a new understanding of what they are—not just another animal, but a creature with a mastery of time itself.

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2022 BY THE NEW YORKER National Bestseller * New York Times Editors’ Choice * Financial Times “Books to Read in 2022” A SABEW BEST IN BUSINESS BOOK AWARDS FINALIST “A gripping account of PayPal’s origins and a vivid portrait of the geeks and contrarians who made its meteoric rise possible” (The Wall Street Journal)—including Elon Musk, Amy Rowe Klement, Peter Thiel, Julie Anderson, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, and many others whose stories have never been shared. Today, PayPal’s founders and earliest employees are considered the technology industry’s most powerful network. Since leaving PayPal, they have formed, funded, and advised the leading companies of our era, including Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, SpaceX, Yelp, Palantir, and LinkedIn, among many others. As a group, they have driven twenty-first-century innovation and entrepreneurship. Their names stir passions; they’re as controversial as they are admired. Yet for all their influence, the story of where they first started has gone largely untold. Before igniting the commercial space race or jumpstarting social media’s rise, they were the unknown creators of a scrappy online payments start-up called PayPal. In building what became one of the world’s foremost companies, they faced bruising competition, internal strife, the emergence of widespread online fraud, and the devastating dot-com bust of the 2000s. Their success was anything but certain. In The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, award-winning author and biographer Jimmy Soni explores PayPal’s turbulent early days. With hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to thousands of pages of internal material, he shows how the seeds of so much of what shapes our world today—fast-scaling digital start-ups, cashless currency concepts, mobile money transfer—were planted two decades ago. He also reveals the stories of countless individuals who were left out of the front-page features and banner headlines but who were central to PayPal’s success. Described as “an intensely magnetic chronicle” (The New York Times) and “engrossing” (Business Insider), The Founders is a story of iteration and inventiveness—the products of which have cast a long and powerful shadow over modern life. This narrative illustrates how this rare assemblage of talent came to work together and how their collaboration changed our world forever.

Tom Peters--brilliant, original, and perhaps the most inspiring and listened-to business thinker of our time--has a lot on his mind these days. And he wants to share it in The Circle of Innovation. The world of business is in a permanent state of flux, he argues, a state of chaos in which constant innovation is the only survival strategy--for the individual and for the organization. And he presents here a lifesaving handbook--both provocative and practical--designed to turn any organization into a perpetual innovation machine. In 400 seminars in 47 states and 22 countries in the last five years, Peters has reexamined, refined, and reinvented his views on innovation. Now he brings those seminars--and his passion--to the reader in a landmark book. It is meant, he writes, to both "terrify" and "enlighten." These are "times of matchless peril for those who fail to grasp the nettle...and times of matchless opportunity for those who do." To keep us alert, limber, and ready for action, he provokes and cajoles in chapter after chapter. Among his institutions and revelations: We Are All Michelangelos. He shows how to transform every "jobholder" into a full-fledged businessperson. All Value Comes from the Professional Services. How to convert sluggish staff units into Vital Centers of Intellectual Capital Accumulation. The System is the Solution. How to build great systems--which go far beyond nuts and bolts. Create Waves of Lust. Quality is not the automatic advantage it recently was. There is a pressing need to reverse the rising tide of product and service "commoditization." Tommy Hilfiger Knows. In a crowded marketplace, branding is far more important than ever before. It's a Woman's World. How to capitalize on the fact that women purchase/are purchasing agents for well over half of U.S. commercial and consumer goods. Little Things Are the Only Things. As the Blight of Sameness encroaches on market after market, design is often the best tool in services or manufacturing for sustainable differentiation. We're Here to Live Life Out Loud. Why transformational leaders of the future must have laser-like focus, tell the truth, and live on the lunatic fringe. The hallmarks of Tom Peters legend are an insatiable curiosity, an agile intellect, a pragmatic perspective, and an uncanny ability to gauge the global zeitgeist. These qualities are all brought to bear as Peters sets out to engage, enrage, and ultimately empower his readers, amid forces that are reshaping not only business but every aspect of human experience.

Doctors are taught how to cure people. But they don’t always know how to care for them. Hardly anyone is happy with American healthcare these days. Patients are getting sicker and going bankrupt from medical bills. Doctors are burning out and making dangerous mistakes. Both parties blame our nation’s outdated and dysfunctional healthcare system. But that’s only part of the problem. In this important and timely book, Dr. Robert Pearl shines a light on the unseen and often toxic culture of medicine. Today’s physicians have a surprising disdain for technology, an unhealthy obsession with status, and an increasingly complicated relationship with their patients. All of this can be traced back to their earliest experiences in medical school, where doctors inherit a set of norms, beliefs, and expectations that shape almost every decision they make, with profound consequences for the rest of us. Uncaring draws an original and revealing portrait of what it’s actually like to be a doctor. It illuminates the complex and intimidating world of medicine for readers, and in the end offers a clear plan to save American healthcare.

From YouTube's Head of Culture and Trends, a rousing and illuminating behind-the-scenes exploration of internet video's massive impact on our world. Whether your favorite YouTube video is a cat on a Roomba, “Gangnam Style,” the “Bed Intruder” song, an ASAPscience explainer, Rebecca Black's “Friday,” or the “Evolution of Dance,” Kevin Allocca's Videocracy reveals how these beloved videos and famous trends--and many more--came to be and why they mean more than you might think. YouTube is the biggest pool of cultural data since the beginning of recorded communication, with four hundred hours of video uploaded every minute. (It would take you more than sixty-five years just to watch the vlogs, music videos, tutorials, and other content posted in a single day!) This activity reflects who we are, in all our glory and ignominy. As Allocca says, if aliens wanted to understand our planet, he'd give them Google. If they wanted to understand us, he'd give them YouTube. In Videocracy, Allocca lays bare what YouTube videos say about our society and how our actions online--watching, sharing, commenting on, and remixing the people and clips that captivate us--are changing the face of entertainment, advertising, politics, and more. Via YouTube, we are fueling social movements, enforcing human rights, and redefining art--a lot more than you'd expect from a bunch of viral clips.

We've all heard the old adage: When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. But no one ever says how. Finally, with the inspiration of Plato and the help of many other great philosophers, Tom Morris has figured it out and here gives us a recipe we all can use. Following up in the tradition of previous books like If Aristotle Ran General Motors, If Harry Potter Ran General Electric, Philosophy for Dummies, True Success, and Socrates in Silicon Valley, Tom blends powerful insights with great stories and good fun to illuminate the path of wise living in the face of challenge and change. Along the way, he shows us how to move with wisdom from difficulty to delight in everything we do. A major American corporation began to go through a period of tumultuous change and top executives had a problem: How could they stay focused and upbeat during this turbulent time while rumors were flying and everyone was worried? But they also had a solution. They turned to their favorite philosopher and invited him to create a special talk on how to handle change well. The natural reaction from the hundreds of executives and managers asked to listen to a talk on this in the midst of their tough situation might have been cynical suspicion. But Tom Morris won them over from the first minute and gave them a fast hour of wisdom they could use, delivered in a penetrating and fun way that drew rave reviews from all. The ideas of that talk grew and became this book. Are you going through any sort of major personal change? Is your industry altering? How are the people around you reacting to challenges that come their way? Is excitement in the air? Or is there far too much fear and negativity in response? This is a wise, engaging, cutting edge, and entertaining book on making the most of challenge and change. Too of us become anxious, defensive, and even angry about the change we face at work and in our lives. This manual on how to flourish in the midst of it all draws on the wisdom of the ages to reverse our common emotions, and it shows how even unsought and disruptive change can be a precondition for deep growth, extraordinary accomplishment, and real happiness.

In 2018, most Americans said that health care was their top public policy issue, ahead of taxes, immigration, the environment and education. Warren Buffett observed in 2010 that health care costs were a tapeworm eating at our economic body. Health care costs are also consuming a growing portion of Americans' household budgets, making medical spending a kitchen-table issue for most people in the U.S. Patients have morphed into health consumers and, now, payors of health care. As Americans spend more and get less return-on-investment for their personal health spending, HealthConsuming asks the basic question: can (and will) Americans morph from health consumers to health citizens? The book explains how HealthConsuming has come to be: how consumers are playing growing roles in making health for themselves, their families and friends, and in their communities, facing ever-growing financial health risks; peoples' growing use of mobile platforms and broadband connectivity, and the promise of digital health for wellness, prevention, self-care and chronic medical care; expanding access for retail health in our communities; the overwhelming evidence for investing in social determinants of health; growing challenges of personal health information privacy and security; and, ultimately, whether Americans have the prospect of becoming full health citizens like peers enjoy in the rest of the developed world.