Story Time Podcast

Renowned interviewer David Barsamian showcases his unique access to Chomsky's thinking on a number of topics of contemporary and historical import. Chomsky offers insights into the institutions that shape the public mind in the service of power and profit.

In an interview conducted after the important November 1999 "Battle in Seattle", Chomsky discusses prospects for building a movement to challenge corporate domination of the media, the environment, and even our private lives. Whether discussing US military escalation in Colombia, attacks on Social Security, or growing inequality worldwide, Chomsky shows how ordinary people, if they work together, have the power to make meaningful change.

Narrated by Brian Jones 

Donations: https://tinyurl.com/y5hh3p8p

If you had told Roger McNamee even three years ago that he would soon be devoting himself to stopping Facebook from destroying our democracy, he would have howled with laughter. He had mentored many tech leaders in his illustrious career as an investor, but few things had made him prouder, or been better for his fund's bottom line, than his early service to Mark Zuckerberg. Still a large shareholder in Facebook, he had every good reason to stay on the bright side. Until he simply couldn't. 

Zucked is McNamee's intimate reckoning with the catastrophic failure of the head of one of the world's most powerful companies to face up to the damage he is doing. It's a story that begins with a series of rude awakenings. First, there is the author's dawning realization that the platform is being manipulated by some very bad actors. Then there is the even more unsettling realization that Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are unable or unwilling to share his concerns, polite as they may be to his face. 

And then comes the election of Donald Trump and the emergence of one horrific piece of news after another about the malign ends to which the Facebook platform has been put. To McNamee's shock, even still Facebook's leaders duck and dissemble, viewing the matter as a public relations problem. Now thoroughly alienated, McNamee digs into the issue and fortuitously meets up with some fellow travelers who share his concern and help him sharpen his focus. Soon he and a dream team of Silicon Valley technologists are charging into the fray, to raise consciousness about the existential threat of Facebook and the persuasion architecture of the attention economy more broadly - to our public health and to our political order.

Zucked is both an enthralling personal narrative and a masterful explication of the forces that have conspired to place us all on the horns of this dilemma. This is the story of a company and its leadership, but it's also a larger tale of a business sector unmoored from normal constraints, just at a moment of political and cultural crisis, the worst possible time to be given new tools for summoning the darker angels of our nature and whipping them into a frenzy. Like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, Roger McNamee happened to be in the right place to witness a crime, and it took him some time to make sense of what he was seeing and what we ought to do about it. The result of that effort is a wise, hard-hitting, and urgently necessary account that crystallizes the issue definitively for the rest of us.

Narrated by Roger McNamee

Donations: https://tinyurl.com/y5hh3p8p

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology is a 2005 non-fiction book about artificial intelligence and the future of humanity by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil.

The book builds on the ideas introduced in Kurzweil's previous books, The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990) and The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999). This time, however, Kurzweil embraces the term Singularity, which was popularized by Vernor Vinge in his 1993 essay "The Coming Technological Singularity."

Kurzweil describes his law of accelerating returns which predicts an exponential increase in technologies like computers, genetics, nanotechnology, robotics, and artificial intelligence. Once the Singularity has been reached, Kurzweil says that machine intelligence will be infinitely more powerful than all human intelligence combined. Afterward, he predicts intelligence will radiate outward from the planet until it saturates the universe. The Singularity is also the point at which machines intelligence and humans would merge.

Narrated by George Wilson

Donations: https://tinyurl.com/y5hh3p8p

Rich Dad Poor Dad will…

Explode the myth that you need to earn a high income to become rich

Challenge the belief that your house is an asset

Show parents why they can’t rely on the school system to teach their kids about money

Define once and for all an asset and a liability

Teach you what to teach your kids about money for their future financial success

Robert Kiyosaki has challenged and changed the way tens of millions of people around the world think about money. With perspectives that often contradict conventional wisdom, Robert has earned a reputation for straight talk, irreverence, and courage. He is regarded worldwide as a passionate advocate for financial education.

Narrated by Tim Wheeler

"The main reason people struggle financially is that they have spent years in school but learned nothing about money. The result is that people learn to work for money… but never learn to have money work for them."

—Robert Kiyosaki Rich Dad Poor Dad – The #1 Personal Finance Book of All Time!

Donations: https://tinyurl.com/y5hh3p8p

Hugo's vibrant portrait of the characters in late 18th century Paris is a world-famous story, which has also been made into an award-winning musical. Jean Valjean, an ex-convict, tries to turn his life around for the sake of his adopted daughter, Cosette.

Set in turbulent times, this reading by Michael Jayston of this classic tale is a bustling and thrilling trip for a listener through the streets and cafes of Paris finding its feet and losing its head.

Narrated by Michael Jayston

Donations: https://tinyurl.com/y5hh3p8p

For twelve years, Mary Buffett had the privilege to gain personal and professional access from her father-in-law, Warren Buffett. Now, she shares his investing philosophy, revealing informal discussions she had with this private genius. Buffettology is a detailed analysis of how, Warren Buffett commits capital to investment only from a business perspective, the strategy that gives him the discipline to exploit the stock market's folly, and how he selects companies that will generate extraordinarily reliable results. It answers questions that for years seem to have eluded professionals and Buffettologists, about how Warren Buffett turned $105,000 into $20 billion and became the world's most famous investor.

Mary Buffett (Author, Narrator), David Clark (Author)

Donations: https://tinyurl.com/y5hh3p8p

Stephen King's legendary debut, about a teenage outcast and the revenge she enacts on her classmates. Carrie White may have been unfashionable and unpopular, but she had a gift. Carrie could make things move by concentrating on them. 

A candle would fall. A door would lock. This was her power and her sin. Then, an act of kindness, as spontaneous as the vicious taunts of her classmates, offered Carrie a chance to be normal and go to her senior prom. 

But another act--of ferocious cruelty--turned her gift into a weapon of horror and destruction that her classmates would never forget.

Narrated by Sissy Spacek 

Donations: https://tinyurl.com/y5hh3p8p

Harper Lee’s Pulitzer prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep south - and the heroism of one man in the face of blind and violent hatred, available now for the first time as a digital audiobook.

One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than 40 languages, sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the 20th century by librarians across the country. 

A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father-a crusading local lawyer - risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.

Donations: https://tinyurl.com/y5hh3p8p

Narrator Mel Foster

A thought-provoking and wide-ranging exploration of machine learning and the race to build computer intelligence as flexible as our own. 

In the world's top research labs and universities, the race is on to invent the ultimate learning algorithm: one capable of discovering any knowledge from data, and doing anything we want, before we even ask. In The Master Algorithm, Pedro Domingos lifts the veil to give us a peek inside the learning machines that power Google, Amazon, and your smartphone. 

He assembles a blueprint for the future universal learner—the Master Algorithm—and discusses what it will mean for business, science, and society. If data-ism is today's philosophy, this book is its bible.

Donations: https://tinyurl.com/y5hh3p8p

Narrator Stefan Rudnicki 

The author of three books on CIA operations, Douglas Valentine began his research into the agency's activities when CIA director William Colby gave him free access to interview agency officials who had been involved in various aspects of the Phoenix program in South Vietnam. It was a permission Colby was to regret. The CIA would eventually rescind it and made every effort to impede publication of The Phoenix Program, which documented an elaborate system of population surveillance, control, entrapment, imprisonment, torture, and assassination in Vietnam.

While researching Phoenix, Valentine learned that the CIA allowed opium and heroin to flow from its secret bases in Laos to generals and politicians on its payroll in South Vietnam. His investigations into this illegal activity focused on the CIA's relationship with the federal agencies mandated by Congress to stop illegal drugs from entering the United States. Based on interviews with senior officials, Valentine wrote two subsequent books, The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack, showing how the CIA infiltrated federal drug enforcement agencies and commandeered their executive management, intelligence, and foreign operations staffs in order to ensure the unimpeded flow of drugs to traffickers and foreign officials in its employ.

Ultimately, portions of his research materials were archived at the National Security Archive, Texas Tech University's Vietnam Center, and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

This book includes excerpts from the aforementioned titles, along with subsequent articles and transcripts of interviews on a range of current topics, with a view to shedding light on the systemic dimensions of the CIA's ongoing illegal and extralegal activities. These articles and interviews illustrate how the agency's activities impact social and political movements abroad and at home.

A common theme is the CIA's ability to deceive and propagandize the American public through its impenetrable, government-sanctioned shield of official secrecy and plausible deniability.

Though investigated by the Church Committee in 1975, CIA praxis then continues to inform CIA praxis today. Valentine tracks the agency's steady expansion into practices targeting the last population to be subjected to the exigencies of the American empire: the American people themselves.

Donations: https://tinyurl.com/y5hh3p8p