## Total Recall
I happened to read Arnold's autobiography - [[Total Recall](https://www.amazon.com/Total-Recall-Unbelievably-True-Story/dp/1451662440)](https://www.amazon.com/Total-Recall-Unbelievably-True-Story/dp/1451662440) - long ago. I recommend it without hesitation, mostly for the hilarious anecdotes. "Be Useful" extracts the lessons; "Total Recall" gives you the stories that made the lessons stick.
A few things that stuck with me:
- Arnold was, first and foremost, a businessman and a salesman. He made a fortune in real estate well before his film career took off.
- On "Twins" with Danny DeVito, he negotiated a percentage of the gross instead of a flat fee. That one deal made him more money than his more famous movies.
- He married into the Kennedys, had an affair, lied about it, and that lie is what ultimately blew up the marriage. He's candid about that too.
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<details class="wp-block-details"><summary>I think my favorite story is about his "European Bricklayers" business - from the Tim Ferriss show (click to expand)</summary><!-- wp:quote -->
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<p>Since Franco’s talent was to be a bricklayer, and a very skilled bricklayer, and he learned that in Italy and Germany, we were able to go and start thinking about putting together the idea of putting an ad in the <em>LA Times</em>, creating a company and calling it European bricklayers and masonry experts, marble experts, building chimneys and fireplaces the European style. This was also a time where everything that was European was huge in America, so we benefited from that. Swedish massages and everything had to be kind of a foreign name. Japanese this and this. Europe and Japan and all these places; the names were used because for some reason or another people thought that it was better. So we used that in the ad and we put the ad in the paper and literally a week later we had the big earthquake in Los Angeles. The chimneys fell off the apartment houses and all that stuff and there were cracked walls and all this. One of the friend’s of ours wife who was very smart and she worked in a supermarket, she did answering the phones and calling people back and all this just to make sure our English doesn’t get all screwed up with talking over the phone. She gave us the addresses and then we got to do the estimates and I was kind of like set up to be the math genius that figures out the square footage. Franco would play the bad guy and I played the good guy. We would go to someone’s house and then someone would say, “Well, look at my patio. It’s all cracked. Can you guys put a new patio in here?” I would say yes and then we would run out and get the tape measure, but it would be a tape measure with centimeters. No one in those days could at all figure out anything with centimeters. We would be measuring up and I would say 4 meters and 82 centimeters. They had no idea what we were talking about. This is so much and we were writing up dollars and amounts and square centimeters and square meters. Then I would go to the guy and say, “It’s $5,000,” and the guy would be in a state of shock. He’d say, “It’s $5,000? This is outrageous.” I’d say, “What did you expect? and he’d say, “I expected like $2,000 or $3,000.” I’d say, “Let me talk to my guy because he’s really the masonry expert, but I can beat him down for you a little bit. Let me soften the meat.” Then I would go to Franco and we would start arguing in German. [25:40 Content in German.] This would be going on and on and he was screaming back at me in Italian. Then all of a sudden he would calm down and I would go to the guy and say, “Okay, here it is. I could get him as low as $3,800. Can you go with that?” He says, “Thank you very much. I really think that you’re a great man and blah, blah, blah and all this stuff.” I’d say, “Give us half down right now and we’ll go right away and get the cement and the bricks and everything we need for here and we’ll start working on Monday.”</p>
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### Arnold's rules (from Total Recall)
We dont haev a transform for the preview block.
Here is how https://piszek.com/2026/05/17/be-useful-arnold/ behaves: