Audiobooks by Chris Matthews

Start Telling People: The guide to marketing strategy and brand building for future-defining startup

At last, a book focused on revealing the marketing strategies, tactics, and opportunities unique to early-stage startups as they emerge, grow, and change the world! *** “If you’re a hardware founder, ‘Start Telling People’ will stop you from screwing up your biggest opportunities to shine.” Andra Keay Managing Director of Silicon Valley Robotics, IEEE Entrepreneurship Vice Chair, 2023 *** 'No one wants to read a lecture on marketing theory. That's exactly why we need books like Start Telling People...The book doesn't focus on overnight successes or crash-and-burn failures, but rather on the hard work that goes into building a company day-to-day. If you're a startup founder, read this book.' Megan Lamb Co-Founder and Senior Partner, Cutline Communications At some point, every early-stage startup needs to stop being a secret and start telling people. As your company begins to take shape, building fast attention and strong demand become essential - and just buying ads won't be enough. Matthews provides frameworks, examples, and interviews that reinforce the book’s central thesis: marketing is a discipline, not just an activity. The book offers practical, jargon-free ideas that seamlessly blend marketing fundamentals with the functional realities of fast-paced, growth-focused startups. Key topics include market positioning for new companies and categories, how to balance creativity and data in decision making, mastering product demos, crafting exceptional customer experiences, communications strategy, and much more - all specifically tailored to the realities of early-stage startups. Matthews' clear, engaging narrative, combined with actionable advice, transforms this book into a unique and relevant resource for early-stage startup founders, investors, and marketers.

Chris Matthews (Author), Chris Matthews (Narrator)

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Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit

A revealing new portrait of Robert F. Kennedy that gets closer to the man than any book before, by bestselling author Chris Matthews, an esteemed Kennedy expert and anchor of MSNBC's Hardball. With his bestselling biography Jack Kennedy, Chris Matthews shared a new look of one of America's most beloved Presidents and the patriotic spirit that defined him. Now, with Bobby Kennedy, Matthews returns with a gripping, in-depth, behind-the-scenes portrait of one of the great figures of the American twentieth century. Overlooked by his father, and overshadowed by his war-hero brother, Bobby Kennedy was the perpetual underdog. When he had the chance to become a naval officer like Jack, Bobby turned it down, choosing instead to join the Navy as a common sailor. It was a life changing experience that led him to connect with voters from all walks of life: young or old, black or white, rich or poor. They were the people who turned out for him in his 1968 campaign. RFK would prove himself to be the rarest of politicians-both a pragmatist who knew how to get the job done and an unwavering idealist who could inspire millions. Drawing on extensive research and interviews, Matthews pulls back the curtain on the public and private worlds of Robert Francis Kennedy. He shines a light on all the important moments of his life, from his early years and his start in politics to his crucial role as attorney general in his brother's administration and his tragic run for president. This definitive book brings Bobby Kennedy to life like never before and is destined to become a political classic.

Chris Matthews (Author), Chris Matthews (Narrator)

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Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

From Chris Matthews: Tip O’Neill brought me in as his top guy just as the struggle was beginning to brew between those two guys. Reagan had just ended a press conference by accusing him of “sheer demagoguery.” Tip’s old pal, Leo Diehl, told him, “Let it go, Tom.” Leo was of the old school who believed you did politics in back rooms like this and shut the door to the TV camera crews. To him and Tip’s secretary Eleanor Kelley, they might as well have been vacuum cleaner salesmen coming round to waste your time. That day in June 1981, Tip decided to fight. “I’m going up to the gallery,” he said and went back into his office, back into that other door that was his private bathroom. He came out smelling of hair spray or cologne, whatever it was that I’d get used to when he would ready himself to meet the cameras and the questions. At 6’3” and close to 300 pounds, the dandruff flaking on his giant shoulders, the hair defiantly thick for his age, he began his relentless stride up to the Radio-TV press gallery where he knew the correspondents would have raced to be ready for him. Once up there, he’d give his response to “the president of the United States” who had spoken with such disrespect of “the Speakership.” This is how it began—for him and Reagan—and, it turned out, for me. A few weeks later, he named me to be his administrative assistant, the old Capitol Hill title for chief-of-staff. For the next six years I was on the inside of the best political story in the country - one of the best ever - the roaring, sometimes rosy relations between the two most powerful men in the country, a pair who couldn't be more different or more the same.

Chris Matthews (Author), Chris Matthews (Narrator)

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Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero

'What was he like?' Jack Kennedy said the reason people read biography is to answer that basic question. With the verve of a novelist, Chris Matthews gives us just that. We see this most beloved president in the company of friends. We see and feel him close-up, having fun and giving off that restlessness of his. We watch him navigate his life from privileged, rebellious youth to gutsy American president. We witness his bravery in war and selfless rescue of his PT boat crew. We watch JFK as a young politician learning to play hardball and watch him grow into the leader who averts a nuclear war. What was he like, this person whose own wife called him 'that elusive, unforgettable man'? The Jack Kennedy you discover here wanted never to be alone, never to be bored. He loved courage, hated war, lived each day as if it were his last. Chris Matthews's extraordinary biography is based on personal interviews with those closest to JFK, oral histories by top political aide Kenneth O'Donnell and others, documents from his years as a student at Choate, and notes from Jacqueline Kennedy's first interview after Dallas. You'll learn the origins of his inaugural call to 'Ask what you can do for your country.' You'll discover his role in the genesis of the Peace Corps, his stand on civil rights, his push to put a man on the moon, his ban on nuclear arms testing. You'll get, more than ever before, to the root of the man, including the unsettling aspects of his personal life. As Matthews writes, 'I found a fighting prince never free of pain, never far from trouble, never accepting the world he found, never wanting to be his father's son. He was a far greater hero than he ever wished us to know.'

Chris Matthews (Author), Holter Graham (Narrator)

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Life's a Campaign: What Politics Has Taught Me About Friendship, Rivalry, Reputation, and Success

Chris Matthews is like no other TV interviewer. Life’s a Campaign is like no other book on success. Famous for demanding the truth from his Hardball guests, Chris Matthews now reveals what the people running this country rarely confess: the secrets of how they got to the top. Here is the first book on power with insight snatched from those who wield it. Life’s a Campaign exposes the tactics, tricks, and truths that help people get ahead–and can help you, too, whatever your field of ambition. Written in the assertive, good-natured style that is Matthews’s trademark, Life’s a Campaign is the most useful kind of investigative reporting. You’ll benefit from his insider’s scrutiny of the Congress, the White House, and the national news media. Here are the methods, showcased in fascinating anecdotes and case histories, that presidents, senators, and other powerful people use to persuade others and win–and the life lessons they provide for the rest of us. You’ll learn about Bill Clinton’s laser-focused ability to listen to those he wants to seduce–and how he’s been teaching that craft to his wife, Hillary; how Ronald Reagan employed his basic optimism to win history to his side; the simple steps in human diplomacy that the first President Bush exploited to assemble a worldwide posse to attack Saddam Hussein and gain global approval in a way his son has failed to do; how Nancy Pelosi became the first woman Speaker of the House by practicing the most fundamental of human qualities: hardnosed loyalty. You’ll also find out, for the first time, about Matthews’s own wild ride through the turbulent, converging rapids of politics and journalism. The big payoff in Life’s a Campaign is what you’ll learn about human nature: • People would rather be listened to than listen. • People don’t mind being used; what they mind is being discarded. • People are more loyal to the people they’ve helped than the people they’ve helped are loyal to them. • Not everyone’s going to like you. • No matter what anybody says, nobody wants a level playing field. Knowing such truths is the successful person’s number one advantage in life. As you’ll learn in Life’s a Campaign, mastering–and employing–these truths separates the leaders from the followers.

Chris Matthews (Author), Chris Matthews (Narrator)

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American: Beyond Our Grandest Notions

From Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's Hardball, star of NBC's The Chris Matthews Show, and the New York Times bestselling author of Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, comes this celebration of the American Spirit. Fiercely independent, in love with freedom, convinced we can make it, we are like no other people on earth. We are a people reluctant to fight who become ferocious warriors when threatened or attacked. We are suspicious of govermental power yet quick to embrace our flag in times of danger. A deeply practical nation, we loom as the world's great optimists. What unites us Americans is not so much language or ethnicity, but a set of distinct notions about ourselves that comprise our American-ness. The self-made country. The constant rebel. The reluctant warrior. The lone hero. The pioneer. The optimist. You see them in the movies we make, the books we write, the history we have lived. What stirred the souls of our ancestors two centuries ago -- and all the generations in between -- still does. In American, Matthews presents a portrait of a country that enters the world arena armed with an extremely potent weapon: the collective notions we carry of America at its best. It's a picture of more than just a nation challenged but of a people ready, and eager to prevail.

Chris Matthews (Author), Chris Matthews (Narrator)

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Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think

Chris Matthews is the host and anchor of CNBC's & MSNBC's Hardball as well as being a frequent contributor to NBC's The Today Show and substitute anchor of Weekend Today. He is a nationally syndicated columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, appearing in 200 newspapers nationwide. Matthews got his start as a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter and later as the top aide to House Speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill, Jr. He is the author of Hardball and Kennedy & Nixon. Matthews lives with his wife Kathleen Matthews, news anchor for ABC affiliate in Washington, D.C., and their three children in Chevy Chase, MD.

Chris Mattews, Chris Matthews (Author), Chris Mattews, Chris Matthews (Narrator)

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