Why people recommend it
It's a Book! by Lane Smith is a charming and humorous children's picture book that explores the digital age through the interactions between a witty monkey and a tech-savvy jackass who cannot comprehend a physical object without a keyboard or mouse. While the book itself is a widely known modern classic about reading and technology, it was mentioned tangentially across multiple episodes of The Daily Stoic and The Megyn Kelly Show alongside broader discussions about the publishing industry and creative life. On The Daily Stoic, host Ryan Holiday and various guests such as Cal Newport and Gary Vee frequently reflected on the arduous process of writing books, sharing personal anecdotes about securing agents, the lengthy years spent refining a single project, and the vital importance of daily reading habits. Guests recalled pivotal phone calls that shaped their publishing careers and debated the merits of heavy marketing investments versus organic audience growth. Meanwhile, mentions on The Megyn Kelly Show touched upon entirely different political and celebrity memoirs making the media rounds, contrasting the meticulous and solitary effort of traditional authorship with the fast-paced, high-stakes publicity tours undertaken by public figures promoting scandalous or controversial personal exposés in the modern news cycle.
Who recommended it
Mentioned on the show without a named speaker — 12
“You'd go on a morning show and have only two minutes to explain a book, but on a podcast, you might have three hours.”
“Some might work on a book for seven years, which consists of many pages, but the ability to effectively communicate a big idea concisely is a skill that not enough people have.”
“And now he is making the media rounds because he's promoting a book in which he makes clear Trump is terrible Um, that he was aware of it, he was a witness to it, it did happen and he believes there is tape of it Though he doesn't know who has it or doesn't believe it'll actually ever come out”
“In the defense of my cousin Michael Skakel, I did do a book on that and tracked down the people who were actually responsible for the murder, releasing my cousin from prison. I just wanted to mention that again, though questions linger and I want to be fair.”
“We’re actually writing a book about this right now—about the artist's life.”
“Like I always tell people for me, the most important phone call probably in my life is when I decided to write a book. I called a family friend who was an agent and said, 'Explain to me how to sell books, and in particular what would be the very narrow path that like a 20 or 21-year-old could follow”
“I was like, okay, got have my standard advice for writing a book and he had this whole like alternative world built out about how he was going to run around the whole. It involved him spending a lot of money, yeah, on these marketing firms and these marketing firms were going to get a lot of attention to his”
“He encouraged us to carry a book under our arm and read every day, even if it's just a page.”
“I just read a book about Wilmington, North Carolina. What was it about, the port?”
“Yeah, I mean, honestly, for me, I'm like I could read about it in a book and be like great, thanks, I'm good!”
“I can write a book and see my life kind of expand.”
“One good investment in his 30-year career, but he wrote a book about it and tells all the VCs to kiss his rear.”