New Additions to My Library: Books, Books, and More Books!

Welcome to the SyndicateX Library. This is my personal library here. Today, I'm going to talk to you about additions to the library. So these are books that I have acquired for the library.

Also, I'm going to go over our upcoming guests for the series we do, Books That Changed My Life. And I mean, really, I'm just hoping that I get to hang out with some book nerds like myself and talk about how books can change your life. The truth of the matter is, is that people like us that read books are usually happier. We're more accomplished, more successful, better looking for sure, better collaborators.

We have better luck.

Like just good things happen to us all because of the love of books and reading. And that's really how it is. Book nerds understand this. Everybody else we'll call haters. But yeah, that's the fun of it. I clearly, I have a problem. My theory is that whoever has the most books when they die go to heaven. And I think I'm in the lead.

I, you can put in comments if anybody has more than, what do we have, Josh?

26,000 books now?

Yeah.

Yeah. If you have more than 26, and I mean, also we're not talking about just any books. Like I'll go through some of the editions, like we're lovers of books and we're acquiring, you know, some heavy, heavy weight stuff. It's fun though. If you, if, uh, I would be curious to post in the comments what you have recently acquired for your library. And I would just say to anybody out there who feels a little intimidated by this situation, if you have 2 books, you've started a library. That's all it takes.

So we have had some incredible guests on Books That Changed My Life episodes that are up right now. Joan London. And the book that changed her life is Stand Like Mountain, Flow Like Water. And then she talked about her book, Life Beyond the Script. She was early. She had an incredible handshake. She is so charming and charismatic and smart. We also are giving away copies of her book that are signed. Sometimes we get or able to acquire books for our audience. And so I think there, there's still a few available. So if you go to the video on YouTube on this channel, subscribe, comment, whatever it says to do in there, you will get one of these sent out free of charge just because you're a book lover. But check out Joan London. The cool thing is a lot of our moms were excited about that episode because she is an American icon. Then Justin Halpern. He is just, uh, man, I don't even know how to say it, but his book was Lord of the Flies. So smart. We talked about comedy, we talked about all kinds of stuff. I would say of the episodes that we've done, that one is in my top 3 personally, just the conversation that we had. So that one's up now too, check that one out. Then We had Jordy. Man, what an incredible— First, when somebody has one name, they got to be pretty special, right? Jordy. His book, which what is fun about this show is we get introduced to books that we would've never known about otherwise because there's so many great books out there, but it's I Let You Go by Claire McIntosh. It's a thriller. The conversation is also kind of a thriller. We go through his background, his story, just a really special human being that he is. Then he brought us— we got to preview it before it came out, so it's out now. Everybody should go check it out. His album, it's called In Retrospect, but he brought it on vinyl and we got to listen to it here on our system in the library. My favorite song on here is Stop Texting My Friends. But if you haven't heard Jordy, pull up this album. It's kind of hard to explain because it's it's up, it's happy, but it's also dark. It's very vulnerable. And that, you know, maybe is what makes a great album. It's really, really, really good. So check out Jordie. Then we have an upcoming episode with Patton Oswalt. And the book he picked is This Paradise by Ruby Cowling. And this is a collection of short stories There's an overall story arc to it.

I would just say Patton Oswalt's probably smarter than a lot of us in some ways.

He is really well spoken and thought out, and he thinks about things very deeply. He's a special human. Incredible conversation. There was a little tension between me and him for one reason, and that was he didn't want to spoil the book, and I don't I just believe in telling people, hey, we're going to spoil the book, but I want to talk about the book. And so we didn't really spoil the book, but I kind of did a little bit. You'll have to check it out and see. But really, really fun. Then Harry Hamlin came in. He came in mostly because his wife had such a good time. So his wife had an incredible time and she's like, oh, my husband's got to see this library. You guys would get along great. We did. He's, he's also very smart. The book he picked is A Course in Miracles. We talked about nuclear science. We talked about stuff that you wouldn't think, but that episode is coming out here pretty quick. Then episodes that we've, we've filmed but aren't in the queue yet. Margaret Cho, I'm with the Band by Pamela DeBarrs. This book is iconic. It's been around forever. It's about groupies, a gang of groupies, a groupie, but it's way more than that. And she's really, really fun and funny, of course. Then Victoria Aveyard. This, the boys here were so excited about this to the point that they conned me into buying tickets to the Lord of the Rings 50th anniversary orchestra thing going on here in LA. We'll see how that goes. I've never seen the movie Lord of the Rings, but this was her book. So she's a writer, and, ah, there's so many things about the conversation with her. But she read this when she, when she was in like junior high, and I think she said she read it like 7 times in one school year because they, they had a period in school where you could just read, and she read it over over and over and over and over and over again. And just a little insight into, once you've read something 2 or 3 times, you start to pay attention to how it's written, the things that you kind of skip over when you're just reading it for entertainment. It starts to become something bigger and you start to understand and piece it together in a way that's more scientific. In her mind, definitely thinks that way when it comes to storytelling. So really, really fun. You'll know her from Red Queen, which is a huge smash. Her new book is Tempest, which we have an early copy of, and it's incredible. We talk about it. It's so funny, right? Because we read the book and we tabbed it up. And we were ready to talk about it, but to talk about it would spoil it. And so I left it up to her and you'll have to watch to see how that goes. Yeah, man, how lucky are we that we get to do these and talk to these people? Then Caitlin Palufo, Screw Everyone by Ophelia Eisenberg. So Caitlin is a comedian, and I mean, you could, you know, say the obvious that she's funny, but she's really smart. And it was, it was a really fun conversation. This book is, you know, on this, like any books, right? Like think about How to Win Friends and Influence People. The title is a little misleading because there's way more to it than that. But her story is fascinating. That episode is coming up. I don't know if you guys can tell, but the demand for people to come on the show is pretty high. So we've— some weeks we're just putting out 2 of these. We're trying to do them as fast as we can. But yeah, we got quite a few in the queue, as you can tell. Then Michael Blosstein, comedian. You've probably heard of him. He's pretty popular. He had this book that changed his life, which is Inner Excellence by Jim Murphy. Man, there's a part to this book that literally— there's one quote in this book that will make you drop the mic. Like, I don't want to ruin it, but if you're somebody looking to improve kind of looking to get your head on straight, this, this will be an episode that you will enjoy. He's very insightful and smart, and this book has a lot of incredible lessons in here that we go into quite depth for. Then the person that I was saying at the beginning that we're still like walking 10 feet off the ground. Like, after we did the episode, even, even today, I've been thinking about it all morning. Yeah, so he— we started around 3 and we were done at 5 something. I didn't get out of here until 6. Yeah, Joe Rohde. So one of our team members who used to work at Disneyland pitched the idea because Joe has a book. We should have his book too. Joe. He has a book coming out and he's like, hey, I think we could get this guy. And then he played us some clips of him talking about creativity. And so Joe is kind of famous for creating Animal Kingdom at Disneyland. And then he's done all kinds of art and other stuff. He's an expert in experiential stuff, I would say. Oh, sorry, the Disney nerds here are telling me that it's Disney World, not Disneyland. So that's the one in Florida?

Yeah. Yeah.

Have you been there?

Yeah.

Oh, I've never—

yeah.

The book that Joe picks is Pagu, which is a children's book that really is pretty, pretty elevated for a children's book. Like, we talked about, like, at what age would a child read this? Probably around 9 or 10. But he wrote— he read it when he was 6. Like he says this thing, how there's books that— like, I'm paraphrasing because I don't remember exactly what he said, but he said there's books that change your life, like they change the destiny of your life. And then there's books that affect you in a positive way. And he's like, this is the book that changed it. Like, literally his life became something different because of this book. And for me, because, you know, I'm a huge student of human behavior and why we do things the way that we do and how different things affect us experientially. And he is an expert and has been thinking about this sort of thing his whole life. So his new book is Floating Mountains: The Art of Imagining the Impossible. And we got, I mean, this is one of the few guests where I'm like, we have to have him back. I have so many more questions for him. And I don't know, I offered that he could use the library to do a workshop. And I said, there's 10 of us that I will sign up immediately if you, if you want to do anything like that. But, um, yeah. And support his, his book. We're trying to acquire some of these to giveaway also, kind of like the Joan London, but it's coming out here pretty quick. Floating Mountains, make sure that you support him. So that's what we have coming up that's either shot and going up, or we just shot it. I would also like to say that we have merch, so you can click on the link and go to the website, but these are great for summer. These booty shorts, Bookworm. We got Plot Twist, Well Read, Book Nerd. And then we have some t-shirts that were part of a contest we did with viewers that we helped contribute to, to their local library. They got to pick their library and we made a donation. And I, about 50 people entered that contest and we we gave prizes to the top 3, but those are all on the SyndicateX website. If you are feeling like showing off your book nerdness, nerdness, summer. Now I'm going to go over additions to the library. And I don't know, I just love talking about what we added. So we have a room here in the library that we've redone over the last, I think, 4 months. We've moved a bunch of stuff over there, and one of the rooms is primarily photography. It's a photography room, and I'm trying to round out my collection of Eggleston, Haido. I almost have every Martin Parr book. If you're not familiar with Martin Parr, he passed away not that long ago, but he is one of the more influential photographers and a huge fan of photography from England, that he had a huge library too. But I don't know, he put out like 140 books, something like that. And I acquired a collection and then mixing that with what I already had. And then I went through and found a bunch that I didn't have. But we're up to about 110, I think. So in some, some of those books, like there's only, you know, one of or whatever, they're, they will be hard to get, but we'll get most of it. But this was one of the last things that I didn't have for Eggleston. And I found it for a price that I was okay with and acquired it. And I'm pretty excited. And if you're not familiar with Eggleston, he's Americana, really. I won't open that up because we'll be here all day if we start talking about that. Then Toshin did this book, Francis Corre architecture. I added that. My dream is to have an architecture section because we have, I don't know, what would you say, Josh? 1,500 architecture books? I said 1,500 and he goes, which I don't know if means more or less. But then I ordered this. Obseline. So Obseline came out with this book on Vespas and I ordered it. There was a special edition of the book that came with a helmet. A little upset because I got the helmet yesterday and the box was ripped, which kind of hurts my feelings. And then, I don't know, I could email Obseline and try to get a different box, but I just don't have the time to deal with that. Just takes forever, but it comes with this limited edition helmet. It's pretty cool. I think it's pretty cool. Put it on. I'm not really a Vespa guy. I mean, I, I like, uh, attractive girls on Vespas. I look like, uh, I look more like a riot, a hip riot police My head is too big. They needed a— that's an XL. I needed a double XL. But I like it when people do stuff like that. Okay, now I'm just going to go through books that, that I've added. This is a cool little book called Burgers in LA. It's pictures of burgers in Los Angeles. We have really— I mean, I know In-N-Out Burger is something, but there's some great burgers here in LA. Um, saw this actually on a YouTube video. Mover of Men and Mountains. That's my cue to read. Subliminal.

What does it say?

Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior. Then, uh, Glen Ligon, Ligon, Ligon, Distinguishing Piss from Rain: Writings and Interviews. Oh, this one. Ah man, it's a little book, but it's a very sad book. Nick Cave on the Fragility of Life. So Nick Cave, the, the artist, had a son pass away and I saw this and, uh, have not read it, but I'm going to. I just got to be in the mood because, um, I feel like, I feel like it's going to be sad. Charlie Morrow, Morrow's Last Breath. High Crime, Cult Minds. This is about cults, and, um, one of my favorite cults is in here. Heaven's Gate. I love Heaven's Gate. That's my cult. The fashion. If we ever start a cult, we're gonna model it after Heaven's Gate without the sad ending. Um, The Psychology of Prayer. That's in my queue now. Yeah, I could explain that, but it'd take too long. We Are As Gods. This was sent to me. Peter Diamantes. I actually started listening to this on Audible and pretty excited about that. New book here on Alberts. Interestingly enough, Anthony Jeselnik, Jeselnik, Jeselnik, Nick, Jeselnik has a book club and he literally like gets a book. Reads it, talks about it for an hour. Pretty, pretty great. In the background of— I'm gonna guess it's his dining room, I don't know— he has an Albert's art piece print behind him, which we have a huge collection of Albert's and some pretty special stuff here. You know, we share, we share the love of books in common, and that So kind of fun. This is a photography book about bondsmen, defendants, and bounty hunters. For the photography section, Girls' World by Kat Burns. So this Stromholm, I ended up buying two. And let me tell you why, because we have the, I think, one of the largest, if not the largest collection of books on Marcel Duchamp. And there's a picture in this book of Marcel Duchamp that's so cool. Can you see that?

Yeah.

Look at how cool that is. He's smoking a cigar with his shirt off. Good old Marcel. So I wanted this print and you can't buy this print anywhere. So I bought another copy of this book because I'm going to cut this dude out to frame it and put it in our Duchamp section because I just think it's so cool. But there's a lot of great photographs in this book. Over the 4th of July weekend, we rented an Airbnb for our family up at the lake house. It's kind of, uh, by our lake house. And in that Airbnb, they had this book and it's so cool. Trespass: The History of Uncommissioned Urban Art. Graffiti, basically. So cool. Never seen this book before. I just ordered it used because it's out of print, but really, really great. It's just so fun when like I just ordered it right there on the spot. Perfect Intimacy by Lily Almog. This is nuns. Pretty cool photography book. Anchor the Landscape. By Adam Brunberg and Rafael Gonzalez. Then the last one, Thomas Pryor, Slip Me the Master Key. That's the name of it. Another photography book. Those are a little bit of the additions to the library. We're always acquiring and adding, but that's it. Please make sure you subscribe, check out The Books That Changed My Life episodes. Post in the comments what you've added to your library recently, and then do me a favor, have some fun reading some books this summer. And hopefully we get to, uh, hang out sometime soon.

Bye.