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Eleven new listening programs, from great lives, creativity and AI to tech, factories, medicine and reading people. Each one is a 14-day plan: one short episode a day for two weeks. Today's best books beside the few classics still worth your drive.
Every program is a 14-day plan, one episode a day. Every book becomes a short episode for the road: the story, the one idea worth keeping, and what to do with it on Monday. Tap a cover to turn it over and see why it made the shelf.
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Biographies
Extraordinary lives, and the one habit, decision or failure that made each of them.
22 books
Phil Knight · 2016
A runner sells Japanese sneakers from his car trunk and almost loses everything, every year.
Walter Isaacson · 2023
Two years at the elbow of the most argued-about builder alive. Love him or not, you learn.
Walter Isaacson · 2017
The original curious mind, told through his own notebooks. Curiosity as a daily practice.
Andrew Roberts · 2018
A career of failures that turned into the right man for the worst moment.
Anita Shapira · 2014
How one stubborn founder turned a vision into a state, and paid for every decision.
Golda Meir · 1975
From a Milwaukee schoolteacher to prime minister. Plain talk from a leader who never softened it.
Nelson Mandela · 1994
Twenty-seven years in prison, then forgiveness as strategy.
Andrew Roberts · 2014
The ultimate operator: speed, detail and ambition, until ambition ran the show.
Robert K. Massie · 2011
A minor German princess takes over an empire, and keeps it for 34 years.
Brad Stone · 2013
How Amazon was built, memo by memo. Long-term thinking you can actually copy.
Robert Iger · 2019
From the TV studio floor to running Disney. Fifteen years of big bets explained by the man who made them.
Alice Schroeder · 2008
The life of the world's most patient investor, with full access to the man himself.
Ron Chernow · 1998
The man who invented the modern company, flaws and all.
Sam Walton · 1992
A small-town store owner listens to customers and builds the biggest retailer on earth.
Doris Kearns Goodwin · 2005
Lincoln hired the men who ran against him. A masterclass in leading strong egos.
Ron Chernow · 2004
An orphan immigrant designs a nation's money system. Hustle on a historic scale.
Walter Isaacson · 2007
How a patent clerk out-thought the experts by asking simpler questions.
Andrew Hodges · 1983
The life of the man who imagined computers before they existed.
Michelle Obama · 2018
From the South Side of Chicago to the White House, with every doubt left in.
Tara Westover · 2018
No school until 17. Then a PhD from Cambridge. The price of learning to think for yourself.
David McCullough · 2015
Two bicycle mechanics beat the best-funded teams in the world. Method over money.
Trevor Noah · 2016
A boy whose existence was illegal learns to talk his way through anything.
Creativity
Where original ideas really come from, in studios, labs and writers' rooms, and how to have more of them.
16 books
Ed Catmull · 2014
How Pixar kept making hits: protect the ugly first draft and tell the truth in the room.
Rick Rubin · 2023
A legendary producer on paying attention. Short chapters made for a red light.
Austin Kleon · 2012
Nothing is original, and that is good news. Ten rules you can use today.
Elizabeth Gilbert · 2015
Fear will come along for the ride. Just never let it drive.
Adam Grant · 2016
Original thinkers procrastinate, doubt and fail a lot. The data says that is the method.
Steven Johnson · 2010
Great ideas are slow hunches that collide. Learn to set up the collisions.
David Epstein · 2019
Why generalists triumph in a specialized world. Late starters, take heart.
Derek Thompson · 2017
Why some songs, apps and ideas catch on: familiar, with a surprise.
Scott Barry Kaufman, Carolyn Gregoire · 2015
Creative people are messy contradictions. Ten habits of the creative mind.
Jeff Tweedy · 2020
A rock songwriter's tiny daily routine to make something. Any something.
Seth Godin · 2020
Ship creative work on schedule, whether you feel inspired or not.
Austin Kleon · 2014
Share the process, not just the result. Make your work findable.
James Webb Young · 1940
A 60-page recipe for having ideas. Done before you park.
Steven Pressfield · 2002
Name the force that stops you from starting. Then beat it every morning.
Anne Lamott · 1994
Take it bird by bird. The kindest, funniest book on getting work done.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi · 1996
Ninety-one remarkable people explain how their best ideas actually came.
Artificial Intelligence
What AI is, how it got here and what it changes for your work, told by the people building it.
17 books
Ethan Mollick · 2024
A Wharton professor's rules for working with AI as a coworker, starting today.
Mustafa Suleyman · 2023
A founder of DeepMind on why AI is the hardest technology ever to contain.
Fei-Fei Li · 2023
An immigrant teen running a dry-cleaner becomes the scientist who taught computers to see.
Parmy Olson · 2024
The race between two AI labs and the tech giants behind them, told like a thriller.
Cade Metz · 2021
The handful of researchers who bet on neural networks when everyone laughed.
Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb · 2018
Three economists make AI simple: it makes prediction cheap. Now what?
Stuart Russell · 2019
The co-author of the standard AI textbook on how to keep smarter machines on our side.
Melanie Mitchell · 2019
What AI really can and cannot do, without hype or panic.
Brian Christian · 2020
When a machine learns the wrong lesson. Stories that make AI risk concrete.
Max Tegmark · 2017
Which future do you want with AI? A physicist lays out the options.
Kai-Fu Lee · 2018
The US and China race for AI, explained by someone who worked in both.
Pedro Domingos · 2015
The five schools of machine learning and the quest to unite them.
Hannah Fry · 2018
Algorithms already judge, drive and diagnose. Should we let them?
Marco Iansiti, Karim R. Lakhani · 2020
Why AI-run companies scale differently, and how old firms can respond.
Yuval Noah Harari · 2024
A short history of information networks, from stone tablets to AI.
Nick Bostrom · 2014
The book that made the tech world take AI risk seriously.
Douglas R. Hofstadter · 1979
A Pulitzer-winning puzzle box on how minds, and maybe machines, arise.
High Tech
The true stories behind chips, software and the internet, and the management lessons inside them.
17 books
Chris Miller · 2022
The world's most critical technology fits on your fingernail. Who controls it?
Tony Fadell · 2022
The man behind the iPod and iPhone on making things people love.
Colin Bryar, Bill Carr · 2021
Two Amazon insiders show the writing and hiring habits behind the company.
Reed Hastings, Erin Meyer · 2020
Netflix's founder on freedom, candor and paying top of market.
Frank Slootman · 2022
Raise the standards, speed and urgency. A blunt CEO's playbook.
Andrew Chen · 2021
Why most networks die early, and how the winners got their first users.
Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, Alan Eagle · 2019
The football coach who quietly coached Google, Apple and Amazon leaders.
John Carreyrou · 2018
The startup that faked it until a reporter would not let go.
Mike Isaac · 2019
Uber's wild growth and the culture that nearly destroyed it.
Sarah Frier · 2020
How Instagram's two founders built an app for a billion people, and lost it.
Satya Nadella · 2017
How a new CEO changed Microsoft's culture from know-it-all to learn-it-all.
Brad Stone · 2017
Uber and Airbnb, side by side: how two apps broke the rules and the cities.
Adam Fisher · 2018
Silicon Valley's history, told in the founders' own voices.
Kate Conger, Ryan Mac · 2024
Inside the takeover of Twitter, day by day.
Jon Gertner · 2012
One lab invented much of the modern world. How did they do it?
Andrew S. Grove · 1996
How to spot the moment your business must change or die.
Tracy Kidder · 1981
A team races to build a computer. What really drives great engineers.
Production & Manufacturing
The ideas that built modern factories, supply chains and rockets, and why they still decide who wins.
16 books
Patrick McGee · 2025
How Apple built the world's greatest factory network, and handed China the know-how.
Eric Berger · 2021
SpaceX's first four rockets, built on a Pacific island by a team that would not quit.
Tim Higgins · 2021
Tesla's bet-the-company years, from the Roadster to production hell.
Ed Conway · 2023
Six materials hold up the modern world. Follow the sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium.
Vaclav Smil · 2022
Energy, food, steel, cement, plastics, ammonia. The numbers behind everything.
Thomas Gryta, Ted Mann · 2020
How the most admired industrial company in America lost its way.
Peter Robison · 2021
When cost-cutting beat engineering at Boeing, and the 737 MAX paid the price.
Bryce G. Hoffman · 2012
One plan, one weekly meeting, no hiding bad news. How Ford was saved.
Beth Macy · 2014
One furniture maker fights cheap imports and saves his town's factory.
Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford · 2013
A novel about an IT disaster that teaches factory thinking for tech teams.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt · 1984
A plant manager has 90 days to save his factory. A novel that teaches you to find the bottleneck.
James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, Daniel Roos · 1990
The study that showed the world why one factory beat all the others.
W. Edwards Deming · 1982
Most defects come from the system, not the worker. Deming's wake-up call.
Akio Morita · 1986
Sony's founder on quality, design and daring to sell to the whole world.
Donella H. Meadows · 2008
A short, clear guide to why things keep going wrong, and where to push.
Marc Levinson · 2006
A metal box changed world trade more than any treaty.
Retail & Brands
How great stores and brands win customers, from the first ad men to today's fastest-growing names.
16 books
Will Guidara · 2022
The restaurant that turned a hot dog into a legend. Service as a growth strategy.
Rory Sutherland · 2019
Why the illogical idea often beats the logical one in marketing.
Seth Godin · 2018
You cannot be seen until you learn to see. Marketing for people who hate marketing.
Jonah Berger · 2013
Why things catch on: six reasons people share.
Byron Sharp · 2010
Evidence over myths: brands grow by reaching more buyers, not loyal ones.
April Dunford · 2019
If customers don't get your product, fix the positioning, not the pitch.
Lawrence Ingrassia · 2020
How small online brands took on the giants in razors, mattresses and glasses.
Joe Coulombe · 2021
How one grocer built a cult store by doing everything differently.
Marisa Meltzer · 2023
The beauty brand born on a blog, and what happened when it grew up.
Brad Stone · 2021
Amazon's second act: Alexa, Prime and a store that sells to the whole planet.
Danny Meyer · 2006
Hospitality is a business strategy. A restaurateur shows you how.
Howard Schultz · 1997
How one coffee shop became a global brand.
Paco Underhill · 1999
Researchers watched thousands of shoppers. What they saw will change your store.
David Ogilvy · 1983
What works in advertising, from the man who made it look easy.
Al Ries, Jack Trout · 1981
Own one word in your customer's mind. Then defend it.
Claude C. Hopkins · 1923
Test everything. The first rules of ads that actually sell.
Law & Advisors
Clear thinking, clear writing and client trust, through the great courtroom stories and advisor classics.
16 books
Bryan Stevenson · 2014
A young lawyer takes on a death row case nobody else would touch.
Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein · 2021
Two judges, same case, very different sentences. The hidden flaw in professional judgment.
Deepak Malhotra · 2016
How to break deadlocks without money or power. Real cases from history.
Alexandra Carter · 2020
Ten questions that change any negotiation, from a Columbia mediator.
Malcolm Gladwell · 2019
Why we misread people we don't know, and how courts and cops pay for it.
Annie Duke · 2018
A poker champion on deciding well when you can't know the outcome.
Todd Rogers, Jessica Lasky-Fink · 2023
Six rules that get your emails read. Backed by real experiments.
Bradley Hope, Tom Wright · 2018
How one man fooled banks, auditors and Hollywood with a country's money.
Michael Lewis · 2023
The rise and fall of a crypto prodigy, told from inside his world.
Stuart Diamond · 2010
The negotiation class Wharton students fight to get into, as a book.
David H. Maister, Charles H. Green, Robert M. Galford · 2000
Why some advisors get called first, for decades.
William Ury · 1991
What to do when the other side digs in. Calm moves for hard people.
William Zinsser · 1976
Cut the clutter. Say it simply. People will finally read your memos.
Anthony Lewis · 1964
One prisoner, one handwritten letter, and the right to a lawyer for everyone.
Jonathan Harr · 1995
A lawyer wins the case and almost loses everything. The true cost of being right.
Francis L. Wellman · 1903
How to ask the question that makes the truth come out.
Philosophy
The big questions, one short book at a time: how to live, decide and lead.
16 books
Oliver Burkeman · 2021
You get about four thousand weeks. Stop trying to do it all.
Eric Weiner · 2020
Fourteen philosophers, one train journey, lessons for everyday life.
Sarah Bakewell · 2016
Paris, apricot cocktails and the philosophy of freedom.
Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga · 2013
A young man and a philosopher argue about happiness. You will take sides.
Donald Robertson · 2019
A therapist uses Marcus Aurelius's life to teach calm under pressure.
Robert Waldinger, Marc Schulz · 2023
An 85-year study finds what makes people happy. It is not money.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb · 2012
Some things gain from disorder. Learn to build them.
Philip E. Tetlock, Dan Gardner · 2015
Ordinary people who predict the future better than experts. Here is how.
David Brooks · 2015
Résumé virtues versus eulogy virtues. Which are you building?
Massimo Pigliucci · 2017
A philosopher's conversation with Epictetus about modern life.
Seneca · 65
Letters on time, fear and friendship. Stoicism for busy people.
Lao Tzu · 400 BC
81 short verses on leading without forcing. One per red light.
Sun Tzu · 500 BC
Thirteen short chapters on winning without a fight.
Henry David Thoreau · 1854
Two years in a cabin to find out what you really need.
Albert Camus · 1942
Finding meaning in the same road, every day.
Robert M. Pirsig · 1974
A road trip about what quality really means. Made for the car.
History
Look back to see the road ahead: the turning points of history, told as stories.
16 books
David Grann · 2023
A shipwreck, a mutiny and two versions of the truth. Leadership when everything fails.
Erik Larson · 2020
Churchill's first year as prime minister, day by day, during the Blitz.
Peter Frankopan · 2015
World history retold from the middle, where trade and ideas really flowed.
Mary Beard · 2015
A thousand years of Rome, without the myths.
Adam Higginbotham · 2019
The night a reactor exploded, and the lies that made it worse.
David Graeber, David Wengrow · 2021
Humans have tried many ways to organize society. We forgot most of them.
Laura Hillenbrand · 2010
An Olympic runner survives a crash at sea and a prison camp. The limits of endurance.
S. C. Gwynne · 2010
The rise and fall of the Comanche, the most powerful tribe in American history.
Tim Marshall · 2015
Ten maps that explain world politics. Why mountains and rivers still decide.
Graham Allison · 2017
When a rising power meets a ruling one, war often follows. Can the US and China avoid it?
Barbara W. Tuchman · 1962
How smart leaders stumbled into a world war.
Richard Rhodes · 1986
Science, teams and consequences on the biggest stage.
David McCullough · 2005
One year that decided a war. Leadership when you are losing.
Dava Sobel · 1995
Sailors kept dying. A self-taught clockmaker solved it.
Jack Weatherford · 2004
The Mongols as builders of trade and merit.
John Hersey · 1946
Six survivors, one morning. A landmark of reporting that still stops people cold.
Pharma & Life Sciences
How medicines get discovered, proven, approved and sold, told through the stories that shaped the industry.
16 books
Siddhartha Mukherjee · 2010
The biography of cancer, and of every bold drug built to beat it.
Walter Isaacson · 2021
The race to edit genes with CRISPR, and the scientist who led it.
Atul Gawande · 2014
Medicine is good at keeping us alive. It is worse at helping us live well to the end.
Katherine Eban · 2019
Some generic drugs were faked. The investigators who uncovered it.
Patrick Radden Keefe · 2021
One family, one painkiller and the marketing that fueled a crisis.
Donald R. Kirsch, Ogi Ogas · 2017
Most new medicines are found by luck and stubbornness. Here is how.
Gregory Zuckerman · 2021
The scientists who made COVID vaccines in record time.
Rebecca Skloot · 2010
Her cells built modern medicine. Her family never knew.
Deborah Blum · 2018
Volunteers ate poison so your food would be safe. The wild origin of drug law.
David Quammen · 2012
How a virus jumps from an animal to a person. Gripping and calm at once.
Atul Gawande · 2009
A one-page list that saves lives. You will want one for your team by the next exit.
John M. Barry · 2004
1918: what happens when leaders hide the truth during a pandemic.
Steven Johnson · 2006
London, 1854. One man, one map, and the data that beat the experts.
Tracy Kidder · 2003
One doctor decides the poorest patients deserve the best care, and proves it can work.
Rachel Carson · 1962
One quiet scientist takes on an industry and changes the rules for everyone.
Oliver Sacks · 1973
A forgotten drug wakes patients frozen for decades. Then the hard part starts.
People Reading
A 14-day plan to read a room before you speak, and move it without tricks.
14 books
Chase Hughes · 2020
Learn how someone acts on a normal day. Then the changes start talking.
Joe Navarro · 2018
An ex-FBI agent on comfort and discomfort. Watch the feet, not the face.
Paul Ekman · 2003
Seven emotions every face shows. Seeing one is not knowing why.
Vanessa Van Edwards · 2022
The signals you send before you say a word, and how to fix them.
Malcolm Gladwell · 2005
When a first impression is gold, and when it is just bias.
Philip Houston, Michael Floyd, Susan Carnicero · 2012
Former CIA officers on the five seconds after a hard question.
Charles Duhigg · 2024
Every talk is practical, emotional or social. Match it or miss each other.
Jack Schafer, Marvin Karlins · 2015
An ex-FBI agent's formula for turning strangers into allies.
Vanessa Van Edwards · 2017
Better questions than "how are you". Conversations people remember.
Robert Cialdini · 2016
What you say right before the ask decides the answer.
Oren Klaff · 2011
Whoever holds the stronger frame wins the room.
Amy Cuddy · 2015
Walk into the hard meeting calm. What holds up, and what did not.
Robert Greene · 2018
Read character in patterns over months, not in one moment.
Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen · 1999
Every hard talk is really three. Prepare all of them.
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