The Daily Stoic

I was just reading this book called Papyrus, which is about the history of paper and the early writings.

My other favorite Hollywood novelist, and maybe you know this person too, so I'm just nerding out here. I love Bud Schulberg too. What makes Sammy run is incredible, but I loved The Harder They Fall is I think his actually his best one. And then he wrote one about his time with Fitzgerald also.

I wrote a screenplay, a very unusual screenplay for the disenchanted, which he loved.

And it turns out it's not in Sherman's memoirs. It's a line in this letter that he wrote to a friend.

General Sherman, the great military strategist and Civil War hero once wrote in a letter to his friend that he had an old rule never to return by the road he had come.

This is one of my all time favorite books, The Harder They Fall by Bud Schulberg. It's this novel about this corrupt boxer and a public relations agent.

And I remember reading this book and I remembered it having changed my life. So I reread it recently. I thought it was the book that spurred me to leave the sort of corrupt, broken marketing world behind and become a writer.

I was just racking up gradually instead of all at once. Like Gus Leonard, a boxer who figured to take an awful beating from Stein for $65,000, coast through the Toro fix for an easy $36,000 and then live out his days on a farm like a country squire.

I was just thinking like a moon struck freshman when I was out there on the edge of town deciding to blow Nick off. That's a corrupt mobster. He says this wasn't selling out. This was just playing it smart. And I even wrote here, I said, is it? Is this you? That's what I wrote to myself.

I know the goddamn trouble with me. I have enough brains to see it and not enough guts to stand up to it. Thousands of us, millions of us, corrupted, rootless, career-ridden, good hearts and yellow bellies, living out our lives for the easy buck, the soft birth, indulging ourselves in the illusion that we can deal in filth without becoming the thing we touch.

I was reading it and I noticed the name and then I realized that actually read a book by the author before his name was William Cohen and he wrote this fascinating book about the fall of Bear Stearns that I read called House of Cards, a tale of hubris and wretched excess on Wall Street in 2009.

Check out Power Failure. I think you'll really like his book, House of Cards, his book Four Friends, Promising Lives Cut Short has some real memento more themes in it. And he also wrote a book about the Duke lacrosse scandal which you can check out. It's called The Price of Silence.

It's about the century plus history of GE. It's a lot about Jack Welch and his successors as well. It's fascinating. Look about power, about excess, about hubris, about money.

he talks about Jack Welch as the imperial CEO and William and I talk a lot about this idea of imperialization, which Marcus talks about in meditation.

And then his two cookbooks, the complete guide to hunting, butchering and cooking wild game. William One is about big game and the other one's about smaller game. Also a fantastic book very highly recommend it. We've used a bunch of the recipes over the years.

the only book I would compare yours towards and it's one of my absolute favorites to is is Empire of the Summer Moon.

it reminds me of kind of a gentle way but you know the passage in Didian's The White Album where she's with Jim Morrison yeah you know and you know how she writes about it it's she goes recording session they're waiting for Jim Morrison he shows up he doesn't talk to anybody you know he's like should we do this and you know and they're like we can't and Didian's like I don't even know in whose favor the conversation you know was determined in real life what happened Evie Babet's her friend talks about those who dated Morrison brought her there she was flirting with Jim Morrison he was throwing the matches that hurt it was such a different reality than how she articulated it that pieces emotional truth is mind-blowing I love that passage about how she captures what the doors are expected to be what they are yeah they're like should we go they're like making like trap they're supposed to be this revolutionary artistic you know whatever group and then it's like should we drive back from West covenants exactly it's just this it's so she presents them as so pedantic and ordinary that it essentially like flays them yeah and yeah why is she doing that that's I guess a different question but yeah the idea that it could have happened very differently exactly and then still everything's true there she had a fact checkers she just chose to leave out certain other parts and I think she did a very nice job of capturing what we thought a rock band was yeah another pants yeah sex and death you know and then the kind of everyday nature of it and that you know is like four co-workers or whatever yeah exactly and there's like they're eating like boiled eggs out of a paper bag you know like she's counting the number of buttons on the control panel but even then she's narrowing from reality all the different things that did happen that night into her version of what she wants to say and nothing is untrue yeah without that it's just leave all she leaves out to get there and I think we are even struggling to understand that in terms of subjectivity and nonfiction and truth yeah present right now

He has a new book called How to Invest, which has all sorts of fascinating investment tips and ways of thinking about money and growing wealth from a very wealthy successful investor.

But as I tell him at the beginning of the episode, I've been reading quite a bit about Jimmy Carter who is a character a little bit in the discipline book, very much a character in the Justice Book.

One of the things that he really talks about is that uh you know we have this need to label luck as good or bad um and that we need to recognize that luck is just luck for two reasons...

it's a great you would actually love it um so i really recommend that you read it if you haven't and your listeners would love it and one of the things by uh nicholas resher and the the name of the book is luck it's short it's a very quick read uh not that well no it's like about the size of like a seth godin book like it's not um but it's amazing