In this 45-minute listen, a former spy introduces two simple tools for thinking. The first describes how we think. The second helps us think ahead. They are the essential tools for getting things done. The tools are applied to an incident in a subway car in Europe where a spy faces a new enemy. Then, they're reapplied to Saddam Hussein's stockpiling (or not) of weapons of mass destruction.

When you're a spy, you see a lot of strategies. It's your job to see grand strategies. Regional strategies. National strategies. Most of all, individual strategies. It's your job to see them and to understand them, because that's how you know when threats exist. To identify threats, you're infiltrating an enemy's organization. You're figuring out who is making decisions. And who isn't. You're collecting intelligence on what they know. And what they don't know. You're figuring out their plans.

Some people bounce back in response to setbacks; others break. We often think that these responses are hardwired, but fortunately this is not the case. Stoicism offers us an alternative approach. Plumbing the wisdom of one of the most popular and successful schools of thought from ancient Rome, philosopher William B. Irvine teaches us to turn any challenge on its head. The Stoic Challenge, then, is the ultimate guide to improving your quality of life through tactics developed by ancient Stoics, from Marcus Aurelius and Seneca to Epictetus.

In his empowering book, Dan Schilling shares how to identify and avoid threats using situational awareness and intuition just like the pros. Told with wit and wisdom, this compelling guide uses harrowing stories from Dan's special operations career and those of other experts to outline six easily implemented rules you can apply anywhere to improve your personal safety.

One of the US government's leading China experts reveals the hidden strategy fueling that country's rise - and how Americans have been seduced into helping China overtake us as the world's leading superpower.

Everyone loves a good spy story, but most of the ones we hear are fictional. That's because the most dangerous and important spycraft is done in secret, often without anyone even noticing. In Survive Like a Spy, best-selling author and former CIA officer Jason Hanson takes the listener deep inside the world of espionage, revealing true stories and expert tactics from real agents engaged in life-threatening missions around the world.

With intrigue that rivals the best le Carre novels, Russians Among Us tells the urgent story of Russia’s espionage efforts against the United States and the West from the end of the Cold War to the present.

In The Gift of Failure, leading conservative commentator Dan Bongino identifies failures in his life and how those failures led to bigger and better things. With the same laser-focused intensity that has made him one of America’s most popular voices, Bongino uncompromisingly cuts to the heart of failure with a collection that is inspirational, motivational, entertaining, touching, and redemptive.

This reissue of Thomas Sowell’s classic study of decision making, which includes a preface by the author, updates his seminal work in the context of The Vision of the Anointed. Sowell, one of America’s most celebrated public intellectuals, describes in concrete detail how knowledge is shared and disseminated throughout modern society. He warns that society suffers from an ever-widening gap between firsthand knowledge and decision making—a gap that threatens not only our economic and political efficiency but our very freedom.

University of Berkshire Hathaway is a remarkable retelling of the lessons, wisdom, and investment strategies handed down personally from Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger to shareholders during 30 years of their closed-door annual meetings. From this front row seat, you'll see one of the greatest wealth-building records in history unfold, year by year. If you're looking for dusty old investment theory, there are hundreds of other books waiting to cure you of insomnia. However, if you're looking for an investing book that's as personal as it is revelatory, look no further.

Imagine how different your life would be if you could really know what other people were thinking in any situation. Unless you hone into the non-verbal gestures people are giving off, you will never quite know exactly what they are thinking - whether it's reading your colleagues in the office, your spouse or kids at the dinner table, or even a complete stranger on the street. All too often, people fall short of really picking up the true intentions of others as they depend solely on the words that are being spoken.

Nietzsche never recovered from his mental breakdown in 1889 and therefore was unable to further any plans he had for the ‘magnum opus’ he had once intended, bringing together in a coherent whole his mature philosophy. It was left to his close friend Heinrich Köselitz and his sister Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche to go through the remaining notebooks and unpublished writings, choosing sections of particular interest to produce The Will to Power, giving it the subtitle An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values.

Amaryllis Fox's riveting memoir tells the story of her 10 years in the most elite clandestine ops unit of the CIA, hunting the world's most dangerous terrorists in 16 countries while marrying and giving birth to a daughter. Life Undercover is exhilarating, intimate, fiercely intelligent - an impossible-to-pause record of an extraordinary life, and of Amaryllis Fox's astonishing courage and passion.

Doing the Impossible is a roadmap for those who want to do something big with their lives. The book goes over 25 steps that the reader should take to re-create themselves, identify their cause, and make history. Patrick Bet-David shares his own impossible crusade and gives key principles for anyone looking to do the same.

A top performance expert reveals the secret behind many top athletes and executives: creating a heroic alter ego to activate when the chips are down.

Everyone loves a good spy story, but most of the ones we hear are fictional. That's because the most dangerous and important spycraft is done in secret, often without anyone even noticing. In Survive Like a Spy, best-selling author and former CIA officer Jason Hanson takes the listener deep inside the world of espionage, revealing true stories and expert tactics from real agents engaged in life-threatening missions around the world.

In this unprecedented audiobook, a paramilitary contractor with more than two decades of experience gives us a firsthand look into the secret lives of America's private warriors and their highly covert work around the world. Author Jamie Smith has planned and executed hundreds of missions on behalf of government agencies and private industry in some of the world's most dangerous hot spots - and lived to tell the tale.

Dreamland is the place where the nation's top minds come to develop artillery and aircraft that push beyond the cutting edge. And where the Air Force's top guns come to test them, on the frontlines of a new era in warfare. The fiasco of a spy's infiltration has the Pentagon looking for an excuse to close Dreamland down. To clean up the mess, and save Dreamland from the congressional chopping block, Lt. Colonel Tecumseh "Dog" Bastian is sent in.

In the boot were six homemade pipe bombs, all linked to detonate at the same time from a single call on a brand-new pay-as-you-go phone found on the target. Special Branch also found Chinese Type 56 assault rifles with eight full magazines of ammunition. His target was a local school. He planned to attack two coaches of teenagers returning home after a school trip to France. Approximately 60 children, their accompanying teachers and their waiting parents. He was going to kill them all.

For nearly a decade, Brett Velicovich was at the center of America's new warfare: using unmanned aerial vehicles - drones - to take down the world's deadliest terrorists across the globe. One of an elite handful in the entire military with the authority to select targets and issue death orders, he worked in concert with the full human and technological network of American intelligence - assets, analysts, spies, informants - and the military's elite operatives to stalk, capture, and eliminate high-value targets in al-Qaeda and ISIS.

The CIA is looking for walking contradictions. Recruiters seek people who can keep a secret, yet pull classified information out of others; who love their country, but are willing to leave it behind to head into dangerous places; who live double lives, but can be trusted with some of the nation's most sensitive tasks. Michele Rigby Assad was one of those people. As a CIA agent, Michele soon found that working undercover was an all-encompassing job. The threats were real. The mission was a perilous one. Trained as a counterterrorism expert, Michele spent over a decade in the agency.

Somalia was Tom Pecora's first deployment as a CIA Protective Operations Cadre (POC) officer, responsible for providing protective operations support in hostile areas of the world. He later headed up a series of the Agency's undisclosed protective operations teams. From 1989 until his retirement in 2013, he was assigned to multiple war zones across Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, doing the kind of work few are even aware exists.

Orson Scott Card is a master storyteller, who has earned millions of fans and reams of praise for his previous science-fiction and fantasy works. Now he steps a little closer to the present day with this chilling look at a near-future scenario: a new American Civil War. The American Empire has grown too fast, the fault lines at home are stressed to the breaking point, and the war of words between Right and Left has collapsed into a shooting war.

On November 4, 1979, Iranian militants stormed the American embassy in Tehran and captured dozens of American hostages, sparking a 444-day ordeal and a quake in global politics still reverberating today. But there's a little-known footnote to the crisis: six Americans escaped. And a midlevel agent named Antonio Mendez devised an ingenious yet incredibly risky plan to rescue them. Armed with foreign film visas, Mendez and an unlikely team of CIA agents and Hollywood insiders traveled to Tehran....

Antonio Mendez and his future wife, Jonna, were CIA operatives working to spy on Moscow in the late 1970s, at one of the most dangerous moments in the Cold War. Soviets kept files on all foreigners, studied their patterns, tapped their phones, and even planted listening devices within the US embassy. In short, intelligence work was effectively impossible. The Soviet threat loomed larger than ever. The Moscow Rules tells the story of the intelligence breakthroughs that turned the odds in America's favor.

Written by one of its own graduates, Class 11: Inside the CIA's First Post-9/11 Spy Class is an insider's view of the first CIA training class after September 11, 2001 - a look at the most elite and secretive espionage training program in the country.

Red Cell follows Kyra Stryker and Jonathan Burke, two outcasts in the Agency who are brought together in the Red Cell, the agency’s out-of-the-box think tank. Stryker is a young and beautiful agent who’s struggling to recover from a job gone bad, while Burke is a straight-laced analyst who’s pissed off all his colleagues. When a raid on Chinese spies in Taiwan ends in a shootout, CIA Director Cooke turns to the Red Cell to figure out why China is ready to invade the island nation without any fear of reprisal.

Louis Massina is revolutionizing the field of robotics. His technological wonders are capable of locating disaster survivors, preventing nuclear meltdowns, and replacing missing limbs. After one of Massina's creations makes a miraculous rescue, an FBI agent recruits him to pursue criminals running a massive financial scam - and, not coincidentally, suspected of killing the agent's brother. Massina agrees to deploy a surveillance bot that uses artificial intelligence to follow its target.

A small nation that bolsters the terrorist cause is flexing its military muscle in a far corner of the world. On a mission to the now-volatile Mediterranean, F/A-18 pilot Lieutenant Ed Stovic shoots down an Algerian MiG at the climax of a dramatic, high-stakes dogfight and becomes an overnight hero in the eyes of his countrymen - and the target of a zealot's revenge.

In Saving Aziz, Chad will give you a behind-the-scenes view of the evacuation efforts that saved thousands from the Taliban during the historic humanitarian crisis following the United States’ hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan.