Syndicate X Library of Leadership: A Guided Tour of the "Narnia" of Books

Welcome to the Syndicate X Library. Today I'm going to be giving you a tour of the entire library, something that I've been waiting to do for a very long time. Now, I know a lot of you probably grew up under the premise that if you do good and you don't sin, you behave yourself, that you're going to go to heaven, but I think that the person with the most books is going to go to heaven.

Sam.

Welcome to the library.

The library was conceived as a place for us to have our leadership experience. We wanted home field advantage because it's pretty interactive and requires a certain energy and control of the environment.

The main library was designed by Eric Dixon with Luis Lopez and Teal Victor. Without Luis, none of this would have happened. And then this room and part of the main library was designed by Michael Gahl. Great collaborator and really, really fun.

But we do have a lot of books and it's incredible collection, a huge passion, and if you love books, you're gonna have a lot of fun today. So let's walk around. This front room here is new, but the way we're going to set it up is it's going to be photography, design, and then specific artists that we want to reference all the time are going to be in this front room. I tend to, in my collecting, prefer books that are hardcover. And then, you know, clearly if I can get it signed, I will. I don't know if you can see this, but. Howdy, Chris. One of my favorite photographers is Gay Bourdin. I even have his New York Times insert that he did. But I love how abstract and different his style was. It was very unique for fashion. Really fun.

We have all the William Eggleston books except for one set that I'm still trying to get. Here's Nick Cave. And this was an art show we went to in Chicago that actually inspired the table in the main library.

An incredible local photographer here from la, Mary Ellen Mark. We have quite a bit of her stuff here. One of my favorite books ever is this one by Paul Graham that I was given by my significant other for Christmas. And all she said was people have been known to feel certain emotions when they go through this and it's individual books in order. I don't know if it's the placebo effect because she said that, but I definitely felt certain emotions and it's incredible. We have a lot of Rick Owens. We have a couple Rick Owens in the main library too. Rick Owens is my uniform. It's what I wear probably 80% of the time. Another Designer that I love is Yoshi Yakimoto.

Up here, this is the Louis Vuitton collection. Some people might not be aware, but they publish their own photography books. This is a set. This has Guy Bourdin in it also. But then there's individual books and whenever they come out with new ones, we try to acquire them. But they're really fun. You can see here on the table. So this is original first edition Slim errands.

This, this one. Lee from Arcana knew I would love this and he gave me the opportunity to acquire it. Mikhail Janssen, I hope I'm saying that right. He's a fashion photographer, but they had him shoot some F1 races.

The style of it is incredible. We have a bunch of Rothko here.

Albert's. This isn't all of the Albert's, but it's. It's a lot of it. This is some graphic design, logo design. This is interior designed a little bit right here. Naked yoga. Right here on the table, we have a Vincent Van Gogh sketchbooks.

The execution of this is incredible. This is a limited edition. So they actually reproduced his sketchbooks in incredible, incredible detail, even to the point where he tore pages. And so you can really kind of get a sense for his.

Process and how he created.

I am thinking about trying out for the Olympics for the breakdancing because I believe I can pop, snap and break dance you into submission. So this is the hallway. And these are kind of museum pieces here, so we have them in cases.

But it's the presidential hallway. We have a special edition Michelle Obama book. Barack Obama.

We have a Reagan Bush hat. We have two baseballs here, one signed by George Bush and one by Laura Bush. And then we have a huge collection of books by first ladies, which you'd be surprised. Some of them are really, really great. Over here we have signed Trump Art of the Deal, Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth. So this, I believe, was designed by Nancy Duarte. The book, it looks like her style of book, but I'm not sure. This whole case is jfk. But the real prize here is this inauguration edition of Profiles and Courage that he handed out to his guests that were at his inauguration. Over here we have Ronald Reagan. So we have his speeches and a special edition book. We have some playing cards that they used on Air Force One. Abraham Lincoln matches and the shot glass. Do you think a president has ever shot tequila on Air Force One?

Probably no. And then we have the collage of Rick Rubin that I did. Over here we have the creative act that became these Pages here. It's signed by Rick Rubin, and then I signed it also.

Very fun. Part of working here is that this is a vinyl lending library right here.

So we put vinyl in here. A little swap and listen, I guess this here is where we take selfies. So people will take pictures here when they come to the library, either group photos or individual photos. These are books that we have published. So we have Machiavelli, the art of war, P.T. barnum, getting rich, the other Art of War, and Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.

Sometimes we give those away. If you ever come to the library, you sit right here.

Right on the other side of this is the kitchen. When we were designing this, we had a couple chefs who use frequently kind of help us, so we're able to have them come in and prepare meals for any events that we have here in the library. You know, we have a lot of great people that work here at the library, and we owe it all to our team. But I want to introduce you to a really important member right now, our head librarian. This is Apple. Come here, mama. Turn around. This is Apple. She's the librarian. She has her master's degree in cheese. Let me show you where. Where we keep it. So right here is the cheese drawer when we stock it. How do you like being a librarian, Mama.

Gonna post with a camera. Look. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Here's what we do. Yeah. Just belly rubbings. Belly rubbings. Yeah. Sleeping on the job. When you're sleeping on the jobs.

Now, this is the part of the video where we announce our sponsor, which is the I Am Leader book set.

And if you look really closely, there are some very distinct similarities between the box that the books come in and the entrance to the library. I would go as far as to say, when you get this, you can enter the library in your own special way. And if you look really close, it kind of looks like a face.

This is where my hands are gonna be.

Come on, Michael. Okay, let's go inside and check out the Libra.

Welcome to the library.

One of the first things I want to point out in here is these two tree trunks, and I want to show you where we got the inspiration. So this is one of my favorite books in the library that Louis Vuitton did of the late Virgil Abloh.

He's got a great quote here in the box that says, life is so short, you can't waste even a day subscribing to what someone else thinks you can do versus knowing what you can do. And he has his manifesto here in the beginning, which is so cool. The way they printed this.

Right here.

Is the fall, winter of 2020, heaven on earth show that he did in that tree trunk. Right in the middle is what we used for inspiration for these. So they're 3D printed. But we did it in the spirit of this and a tribute to him. And we always keep this book right here. Buy these kind of as a, you know, memento to him. Oh, man. What's this? Ah, Michael's always leaving stuff around. His espresso, Michael. This is the rock and roll section.

There's some fun stuff in here. I think every library is not complete without a signed book from Ozzy. This one's pretty cool. Slashes, guitars done by Gibson. If you look up here, this is a Muhammad Ali goat from Tashan.

We're going to talk about Duchamp here coming up in a minute. But this was done by Jeff Koons, and it's a tribute to Duchamp. You could say when it comes to art, Duchamp was the goat. This center part here is books that I kind of reference often or that are kind of coming and going from here to my house. These are Rick Owens boxes where he has all his textiles and fragrances and stuff in there. It's pretty cool. And then down here we have mythology.

And alchemy and symbols.

I love alchemy. These are the kings of England. This is Churchill. This is all Churchill.

This is from the Paul Newman estate, his Dickinson's books. Then over here we have some really cool Napoleon.

Look at these, how beautiful they are. He's Napoleon. This. This section here is kind of the world. Shakespeare, Napoleon. But these are so cool, so hand done.

These are art journals from the world. They're pretty cool.

This is one of the busiest parts of the library. Like a lot of books right here. And it's the least effective. It's the personal development section.

As you can see, there are a lot of books.

And then down here we have hypnosis, psychology, and I think psychology takes up pretty much the rest of this. We have a lot of Jung in there. These are books on design of books. There's more kind of psychology over here. This is how to tell a story.

Communication theory, more psychology. Oh, this is our Alan Watts section. So these are all Alan Watts. This is a statue we did of Marcel Duchamp.

Here we have some art books and architecture. Yeah. Oh, and these are interior design. So we're still figuring out, like, these are going to go on that front room eventually. And some of those are going to come over here.

We're still working on that. Then over here, there's art on this side. Oh, these are creepy. Let me see this. There's only been a few Time magazines. So these are the actual Time magazines where they X'd out the COVID.

Freaky. Kind of eerie. And then you'll see here at the end that we have this special edition of my book, I Am Reader, that we did. And we reprinted the Duchamp fountain and then made it into a chessboard, which is really cool. There's a video kind of talking about it and showing it. But this is arguably the largest private collection of books on Duchamp. Lee from Arcana Books helped me curate this and put it together. It's my favorite part of the library. So all of these down here we have Val d', Seri, Damien Hurst, Richard Prince. Then this is more Duchamp. Up here.

We have a few. What in the world? Oh, my God, you guys would not believe this. Michael, it smells like there's a little bit of alcohol in there or something. What's going on here? We have the. The Duchamp chest and the valise.

Those. Here's a little replica of the fountain that we used as inspiration for that piece. Most of the books in English on Duchamp, and then there's quite a few in French. Then we have more art down here. Andy Warhol, Picasso.

And then coming around here.

These are more like Easten books on stories, like best stories ever written. Down here we have religion. There's a couple in here that I'm pretty fond of when it comes to religion.

I got quite a few books by the late Billy Graham. I remember when I was a kid, I must have been five or six, my mom worked a Billy Graham crusade in the Kingdom in Seattle. And I just remember being in awe of him and what an orator he was and how when he did the altar call, everybody went down in front. And I also remember them taking the offering. And Kentucky Fried Chicken had donated buckets that they put chicken in. You know, those striped buckets. And my mom was guarding just a huge stock of them. But here, this. This one is signed by Billy Graham. Very special.

Then we have a whole section here on Colts, which is something I'm fascinated with, trying to understand why people would join a cult or why somebody would start a cult. Then we have some comics up here.

This is more.

Literature, autobiographies. Over here we have a movie section. So all of these books are on movies. We have some bigger Taschen ones that are. That are over there. But these are pretty cool. We have all the A24 books. Most people probably don't know that A24 actually makes books on a lot of the movies that they do. And the way that they execute them is. Is incredible. They're really cool, really fun. Love that section. The back here. These books are not really categorized. They're just books that don't fit on a shelf. Caravaggio, Rembrandt. They're just bigger books. Over here we have poetry. So this section down here is poetry. Then more comic books. We have this set here, Berserk.

Education. Up here, comedy, Dan Kennedy. And then those are books on dogs. We'll go to the other side.

If you only thought we had books here, you'd be leaving out the collection of vinyl records. Now here we have vinyl.

In the back there. Those books are to be filed. This section is really cool. We call it the Matt Damon section. But when I started the library, Matt Damon was moving from the west coast to the east coast. And he offered through a mutual friend if I wanted to take his books. And so, of course, I said yes. It's this whole section. Some of the books are really cool because people write letters in there that are very sincere, wanting to make their book into a movie or just expressing gratitude to him for something. And also celebrities would send him books and write little notes in them. This is really cool. I'm not going to share them because it's private, but it was very sweet of Matt to. To do that. And there's a little vibe from this section. That's pretty cool. This over here is the business section. And then we come around here. Let me see.

I know this is. Some of. This is psychology also.

This down here. And some of this is magic, which we have magic over there. This is marketing sales. Right here is the Bukowski section. So I'm a huge fan of Bukowski. And so I have a bunch of really cool Bukowski stuff. My favorite ones are the ones where he. He draws in the back of them. So he does that in a lot of the ones that he signed. He would draw something in there.

This is pretty cool. This is the FBI's file on Charles Bukowski. So this is the file they had on him.

We have novels up there. This is our Ernest Hemingway section. And then this is biographies.

And then coming around the corner here, where we get into some leadership stuff. So we have a section on war right here. So books on war and leadership. There's more leadership here. More. More in line with, like, sports, like Coaches and athletes, that sort of thing. This is strategy. So books on strategy and propaganda. I'm a big fan of some of this, like old Russian propaganda or German propaganda. This is kind of where Shepard Fairey gets a lot of his inspiration. But I love these old free World War II propaganda. Propaganda. So this is a limited edition version of I Am Leader that we did for the chapter on androgyny. So that's Churchill in a wedding dress.

With some pink hand grenades. If you've read the I Am Leader book, you understand that part.

Here's our real presidential section. So we have some in. In the hall, but this really is all U. S. Presidents up here.

And then we have leadership.

And then just more US Presidents. And a lot of these are signs, even like these George Bush art books where he. Where he paints. So these are of his paintings signed by him or. Pretty cool.

It's really cool.

And then if you come back over here, these are actually mostly presidential books also. Now here is the formal magic section. So these books are all on magic. I'm a big fan and I've read quite a few of these books. Then over here we have the. The IM Books, which I think these books started in the late 1800s. So it's St. Germain was the character that did these. It wasn't his real name. And I think he was almost kind of a con artist. He produced this whole series of I am. It was almost like a movement. And then I kind of collect books that start with IM from there. Then we have the Manny P. Hall books. We have a couple original versions of the Secret Teaching of All Ages. This Tashin redid this one. And we have that also. But we have, I think, three of the other printings and a couple of them are signed.

And then that's Christopher Columbus. If you come up here. This is an Andy Warhol.

Kind of roller.

Suitcase. But inside is all the interviews that he did, which is pretty cool. Here's a Kubrick that would belong in the movie section but wouldn't fit. Same thing as Christopher Columbus would be down there, but it doesn't fit. The last thing I wanted to show you is this leather wash. We were trying to figure out what to do on the back wall here. And Eric Dixon had done a red leather wall in our old office. We were like, kind of all at the same time. We're like, it's got to be gold. And we're like, can we do gold? And he was like, I don't know. Let me figure it out. And he did. And they literally hand wrapped those. It's real leather that he sourced from different places, but it's incredible and I think it really sets the vibe if you ever come to the library. We set books out here trying to encourage interaction, different, just easy to grab. But sometimes when people come in here, they feel a little intimidated and that is not our intention whatsoever. So we try to put stuff out that are easy to grab and that look inviting.

That's the tour of the CindyConnects library. You can see that a lot of love and care went into it and it's constantly growing.

Hopefully someday you'll come to a workshop or experience here and we'll get to meet.

But thank you for watching and I'll see you again real soon.

Michael.