The Best Moments of Open Book 2025 Edition

0:00Welcome to Open Book. I'm your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Listen, it's our final episode of the year. We close out another amazing year on Open Books. One of my favorite things to do, frankly, is interview authors. I wanted to take some time to pause and reflect on last year, talk about the love affair with books, but also what's coming in the future. I just want to remind people here on Open Book, our goal is to get in the minds of the authors. And again, just to repeat to everybody why I'm so attracted to books, I really feel that if an author is spending six months on something and it's going to take me 10 hours to read it and I can perhaps get 10 years of their life experience in 10 hours, it's worthwhile.

0:44I can't remember who said it. And so I'm going to butcher the quote. But you just don't have enough life experience to be on your own without reading. You need to read to open the aperture of life, to soak in so many different things that are going on and so many things that have gone on in the past, frankly. So Open Book to Me is that gift. I want to talk about a few of these great authors. And I'm going to start with the legendary 93-year-old Gates Lease. I'm always an outsider. I'm born in America. For 93 years, I've been an American. But I always feel it. I always feel I'm a little bit Puerto Rican.

1:20I'm a little bit kicked out of America. dead to California. I always look at the other side. What is it like to be them? How are they different from me? I'm a split personality. I'm not schizophrenic, but I always feel that when I'm someplace, I'm also over there looking at me being someplace. I have a double vision, two sides or three sides of every story. I'm always looking at the other side. I'm always wondering if I talk to somebody and interview them, I'd like to be the first person to interview them. I want to be the first person to put their story in print. I want to be the first person to give them grounds for having an obituary.

1:51Because if I make them well-known, they'll become part of history and maybe you'll get an obituary. Otherwise, they'll die in obscurity in the obituary. He was our first in-person guest. It was a true honor to sit across from him. And he's authored so many books, but one of the most famous things he did was write about Frank Sinatra in the mid 60s. And I got to tell you that the stories coming out of Gay Talese, his upbringing, the humble beginnings, the American dream story there was truly fantastic. Another one of the great interviews this year for me was a close friend of mine, Graydon Carter.

2:32And because magazines, they were very much a center of the culture and they helped not only report on the culture, but drive the culture. And as a result, they attracted the best and the brightest. What later went to, you know, dot com startups and to Wall Street came to magazines in those days. And it was it was exciting to be around such, you know, energetic, intelligent people and to have the wherewithal to do any kind of journalism that you wanted. The sort of the the the luxuries at conning ass were exponentially greater than those at time and um and it made it made you know very competitive difficult jobs a lot easier uh who is a fervent podcast listener here and trip us but man what a great book he wrote uh the former voice of spy magazine the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, now the founder and, of course, editor-in-chief of Airmail.

3:36Graydon Carter has done so many different things in his life, but one of the most incredible things that he's done, and we tried to capture it in the interview, is he's the great curator of what's hot. If you've got the riz, Graydon Carter understands that, and you're part of the Graydon Carter universe. And here is a guy that grew up humbly in Canada, but hit the world stage and is still with us. Hit the world stage like a meteor. And he's still with us today sharing his great insight about human nature and all things fun. If you want to have a good time, you listen to Graydon Carter or you hang out with him.

4:17And that was one of our fun interviews this year. on the history front, the legendary Sonia Purnell. I was always keen to write about a spy, and I stumbled across the mentions of Virginia Hall, this great American spy in the Second World War, an extraordinary woman with a wooden leg she called Cuffbrook, considered by the Gestapo the most dangerous Allied spy of all in France. But, you know, she was such a good spy, and she was so secretive that no one had really been able to get her life story together because it's so difficult. And I saw that as a bit of a challenge. I spent three and a half years playing detective, had a few strokes of luck, would have helped from a former MI6 officer and a former CIA officer, which certainly helped a lot, and put that story together.

5:04So these are all stories about women who did far more for the world than the world had ever realized before. Maybe no one was crazy enough to take on these stories and all this detective work, But I kind of saw it as my job. Who wrote a great biography of Clementine Churchill. This year, she blessed us with The Kingmaker. And this is a story of Pamela Harriman. She went on to become the ambassador to France. But prior to that, she was Winston Churchill's daughter-in-law. And she was a very intriguing super vixen of her time in World War II. She went on to have affairs with people like Avril Harriman.

5:46and in some ways she became one of the great intelligence resources for her legendary father-in-law Winston Churchill what a great story of her life so much complexity there lots of ups and downs but what a life well lived and this is somebody that I learned so much from I'm looking forward to Sonia Purnell's next book on wealth, history, and politics. We got perspectives from Sawhill Bloom. You got your shit together. I arguably on certain days have my shit together, but a lot of people don't. And you write about how they can get it together. So go. I am a believer that stress and anxiety feed on idleness.

6:30They grow and proliferate when you are not taking action in your life, when you are concerning yourself with other people, when you are scrolling on social media, your most unhappy moments will happen during those truly idle periods, not the periods where you're meditating. That's not idleness. That's actually processing that's growth. But those periods when you were truly idle, when you take action, when you create movement in your life, you are literally starving them of the oxygen that they breathe. What I always say is when in doubt, take action, do something. Because at the end of the day, we live in this information gathering society.

7:05We live in this world where people are getting all of their dopamine from information gathering. And dopamine from information gathering is a dangerous drug. You read the book and you get the information and you feel all good about yourself, but you haven't done anything with that information. We need to get our dopamine from action, from actually going and doing something on the back end of it. Hal Brands, I've got a domestic problem. My demography is upside down. The West thinks my country's white, but it's really not that white anymore. There's a lot of demographic changes that are taking place inside of Russia.

7:36I can't get the economy started. You guys crippled me with these sanctions. And so to quote McCain, I'm a gas station with a kleptocracy. How am I going to fix this? That's part of the reason why you got to bring the war in Ukraine to an end. At least hit pause on it. Because if you have to do another military mobilization, the last time Putin did that, that was when we saw Russian men between the ages of 20 and 50 hopping the first flight to Delhi or driving across the border to get out of the way. So that's just exacerbating the demographic problem, even before you start talking about the battlefield losses, which are severe.

8:09And it's exacerbating all of the economic. The Russians have transitioned to a war economy, I think, with greater ability than many in the West imagined. But that's not a long-term basis for the Russian economy. And I think there are real questions about how long Putin can hold this thing together. He can probably do it for another year or two, but I don't know that he can do it for another five to 10 years. He's got to find a way of normalizing the economy if he wants to hold the larger sort of Russian political experiment together. Michael Wolff, nobody likes him. Nobody likes him. The kids don't like him.

8:40The wife doesn't like him. Staff doesn't like him. I think only you and I get this. Am I wrong in saying that, sir? I mean, other than the people who don't know him out in the great land who vote for him, to know him is to really, really not like him, to dislike him actually intensely, for him to inhabit you in a way that is really, really toxic. Which is one of the reasons, by the way, all of these people talk to me and continue to talk to me. You need an outlet when you feel that. Politics, you know, and these are people, you know, the bulk of them who have made political or many of them who have made political careers.

9:17And in a way, they're used to people who are working for people who are extremely difficult. I think Trump surpasses that. Yeah. So I've never met anybody that likes him. And I talk to everybody as like you do. And they put up with him and they tolerate him and they work around him and they go into spiritual healing. But there's a high level of toxicity in his midst. all different in different ways. But I will say this about the young Saul Hill Bloom. If you don't believe in reincarnation, listen to that interview, because this is a 34-year-old man that has a generationally older soul. At least he's an older soul than me.

9:56I've learned so much from him in terms of his wisdom and insights about life. Hal Brands talked to us about the Pacific century, what's upon us with this great economic growth engine in Asia, but also the pitfalls associated with politics in Asia, which are very different from the Western world. And last but not least is the legendary Michael Wolff, who I think we got up over a half a million YouTube views, where he is writing about the reascension of the Donald Trump machinery, the campaign engine that catapulted them back to the presidency and some of the people around the president. But what I find most fascinating about this, even though Michael Wolff is quite critical of President Trump, you know he's inside of earshot of the president.

10:44He talks to him often. And I think I see Michael as a Trump whisperer. So that was another phenomenal interview for us. And we were so happy to share that with you. You know, if it's the month of July, we are going to get a Daniel Silva book. I guess what I hope people will remember about me in my books is that they aren't about pure power and about bad guys shooting up the place. I hope that people will understand my kindness and my humanity as a writer. Okay, yes, I do write popular fiction. Yes, I do write commercial fiction. But there's a message in all my books, and there are much more than that.

11:30And I hope that when I pause up, as I like to say, that that's what I'll be remembered for. And the latest in the Gabriel Alon series, thrilling as always, this takes place about a great art forger. And Daniel Silva takes us through the intrigue of great forgeries. forgeries. Of course, there's a Leonardo da Vinci that's being forged, and there's a heist involving Russia and Ukraine and payments going left and right. And it's just a deliriously fun, thrilling summer novel. And we're looking forward again to next year's piece, and it'll be sometime in mid-July of 2026, and we'll have Daniel back on the show.

12:19my dear friend Andrew Ross Sorkin how you create a crash speculation Hoover ever missteps in economic policy wild west in the banking fractional banking system but the wild west and the people don't even understand if they put their money in the bank they could lose it if the bank has credit missteps take us through the base ingredients and tell us if anything is different today and if it isn't different what should we be worried about the match that lights the fire every time you read Too Big to Fail or you reread Too Big to Fail, the match that lit that fire was too much leverage in the system in the context of subprime loans.

12:54And I would argue effectively that in 1929, it was margin loans. Now you said, could it happen again? And where are we today? The good news in my mind is, look, there was no SEC back then. There was no bank capital requirements back then. There was no rules. There was no insider trading rules. There was no nothing. So I like to believe that we can have corrections. We can even have crashes, but they don't have to turn into depressions. So could you have a crash like 1999? Sure. Could you have a crash even like 2008? Sure. But in both instances, we did come back a lot quicker than obviously what took place in 1929 and then ultimately 30, 31, 32.

13:30And I think part of the answer is we've also learned that in those moments, you do flood the system with money. Now, one difference that is very different today than even 10 or 15 years ago or 1999 or before, I don't know the full extent of just what the implication would be, which is U.S. debt is so large that it might make it more and more complicated to throw money at the problem. Back in 1929, there was a budget surplus. We hardly had any debt. But I think the biggest thing is leverage. And the biggest thing is where's the leverage and knowing about it and having transparency around it. And I do have some worries today about those issues.

14:01So we have the euphoria in the AI bubble that's clearly taking place. There's indiscriminate spending. I think everyone would agree with that. Then the question is where's the leverage and is there too much leverage in the system? And I think partially because of private credit today, which is to say that so much of it is in the shadows, I don't think we know right this moment. Wrote a phenomenal book about 1929. It was sort of a precursor to his legendary bestselling book, Too Big to Fail, which came out in 2009 about the stock market crash. Here is Andrew writing again about a crash that took place almost 95 years ago.

14:39and it is another rollicking read. And of course, it's a story of human nature where greed always overcomes wisdom. And Andrew was great at unpacking what is still the greatest crash in Wall Street history. Lionel Barber. Tucker Carlson, in his interview, he was very focused on a very small audience in America. And Putin slapped him around, if you remember, and said, you know, I thought you were going to do a serious interview, you, but you're just some kind of talk show host. And he didn't do that with me because I took advice. I did my preparation. But I think the difference between you and him is you weren't intimidated.

15:16I think Tucker, I mean, again, I'm not, I know Tucker a long time worked with him at Fox News. I think he was intimidated. You could see that he was back here. You're working for the FT and you're carrying the august institution of the FT on your back into the interview. So you have a responsibility to be more discerning with somebody like President Putin. Very important to have that combination when you're talking. And this book is I interviewed a lot of world leaders and top people on Wall Street, like, you know, Jamie Dimon a number of times. And I mean, you shouldn't be arrogant. You've got to be respectful, but you cannot afford to be intimidated because Trump, Putin, they smell weakness and they take advantage of it.

15:56the legendary editor of the Financial Times. He came in over the summer and regaled us on Gambling Man, which is the story of the SoftBank founder. But he also wrote a great book that chronicled his time at the FT. And so with Lionel, you get a little bit of everything. You get investigative reporting, phenomenal narration. But if you want to learn about Masayoshi-san, who is actually a Korean immigrate to Japan and has become the most successful entrepreneur in the economic history of Japan. It is just a phenomenal read. Learned so much there. Jake Tapper. There was a very large group of people right after 9-11 that were actually begging the Bush administration not to overreact to the terrorist attack.

16:49One of those people, frankly, was a Wall Street luminary that's now been demonized by the right. It was George Soros. He wrote a op-ed. He said, listen, it's a horrible tragedy. Don't overreact. You'll play into bin Laden's hands. And bin Laden wrote about this on the dark web. He said he would hit us on our homeland. We would respond aggressively. We would bomb their mud huts. We would kill a lot of people, but we would bleed out our treasury. They would kill our military over there. And then we would go after our own civil liberties. And when I think about this case and the forever war, you know, not to overuse a baseball analogy, I feel like it's six, nothing bin Laden.

17:24Yeah. bin laden's been replaced he's dead and gone there's a relief pitcher in now but he got a lot right we blew a hole in our treasury we went from george washington to george w bush seven trillion jake we added 31 trillion barack obama donald trump biden trump and so i'm just wondering if the forever war if we're 50 years after the forever war sometime 50 years from now 2076 are they saying, wow, they hurt themselves so badly, then they tribalized, they couldn't pull it back together? What say to you to all of that in the context of the forever war, Jake? It is a depressing and bleak thought that bin Laden could have been correct in his prediction of an overreaction.

18:06And it reminds me of two things. It reminds me of President Biden going to Israel and telling Israel not to - Don't make the mistake that we made. Don't act out of anger. I don't think Netanyahu was listening. It also reminds me of this very profound movie in retrospect called The Siege. It came out in 1998. That's what's the most amazing thing about The Siege. It's about Islamic terrorism happening in Brooklyn. And then it's about basically declaring martial law in Brooklyn because of the big Muslim population there. And the argument is it's a bad idea. Bruce Willis plays the general who is telling them, do not declare martial law and send us in there.

18:41You don't want us to do it. And then there's another scene where Denzel Washington is saying, what if what they want us to do is to declare martial law and get rid of our civil liberties? What if what they want us to do is round up kids? The fact that this came out in 1998 is what makes it so profound. The fact that it predicted the overreaction, I think it's fair to say. My friend from CNN, one of their great anchors there, wrote a book about the decline of President Joe Biden. And of course, there was so much in that story that we weren't getting from the everyday in the news. And of course, fatefully, President Biden debated President Donald Trump in late June of 2024.

19:24The debate went so badly that he actually dropped out of the race and led to the Kamala Harris matchup with President Trump. But what we learned from Jake is that sometimes presidents, we know this throughout history, whether it was Woodrow Wilson, Dwight Eisenhower, or even Ronald Reagan. We have a tendency to hide presidential infirmities. And man, was that a walloping book about some of the things that took place in Biden's term. Patrick McGee, look, I'm an Apple-phile. I own an Apple Watch, two iPhones, several iPads. I'm talking to you from an Apple Mac. So I'm an Apple person, but it's been a gradualism of innovation.

20:04There's really been no brand new products. I look at Samsung or even what Huawei's done in mainland China, they seem to have been more innovative. I feel like they don't have that innovation spark that they had under Steve Jobs. Am I wrong? No, I agree with you. And I would say Johnny Ive left Apple in 2019 and the office of chief design officer remains vacant. I mean, that is a devastating thing to even just like sort of digest. Six years without a chief design officer for a company that was a whole sort of section at the Museum of Modern Art, the things that they've created have been absolutely phenomenal.

20:39And I do think that they are resting on their laurels. The nuance here is that Steve Jobs was the product visionary of the last century, and he was the person who appointed Tim Cook. In other words, I don't think that was Tim Cook's role to play. His role was to sort of take what Steve Jobs had already done, continue to iterate them on an annual basis, but really just like ramp up the scale and the distribution around the world. I would say by 2023, it was mission accomplished, and Apple should have realized that the pendulum had begun to swing in the other direction. This criticism of Tim Cook, I think, has always been tired until now, because now, in fact, you do have companies, OpenAI, Perplexity, a whole host of companies that are doing things that are really innovative in the product space, really innovative with artificial intelligence.

21:21And whatever the qualities of Tim Cook are, product design, product vision, and AI are not among them. And I worry that with him at the helm, they don't have someone to play that role. So I would actually call for a new CEO of Apple. I think this is by far the best business book of the year. I don't think it won the FT business book of the year, but it certainly won the open book business book of the year. And that's Apple in China. This is a story that, in my opinion, not only describes Apple's renaissance and how they were able to redevelop themselves and become this multi-trillion dollar company, arguably one of the most successful companies in the history of the world.

22:01but how they did it in collaboration and partnership with the Chinese government and the manufacturing centers in China. They were bullied along the way. So it's just this fascinating, intriguing story about supply chain mechanisms globally, the advent of globalization, how it led to lower cost goods getting delivered into the US. But the Chinese were able to do something that none of us had anticipated 30 years ago, and that is a full-on stealing and a full-on transfer of our technology, what has directly benefited that economy, but also bolstered and strengthened the stronghold of the Chinese Communist Party on the people of China.

22:46So fascinating book, lots of great history in there and great reporting. We go to Kate Viggers. What I'm aiming for is parity. I want the women's stories to be up there with the men, And at some point it will just become history. It won't be women's history, men's history. It will just be our history, our common history. I think it's important now. I mean, the political climate that we are all in at the moment is less than satisfactory. and I really want people to know that they can make a difference. These women, they were normal women. They were shopkeepers, hairdressers. They were 19. They were 51.

23:29The thing that unites them, I guess, is this patriotism and this language skill. But really, I want people to be inspired by them, to look up to them. They're more than influencers. They did something amazing and it's something we should be grateful for and possibly aspire to. And I know that's a big aim, but if we don't aim high. A mission in Europe. Didn't realize how many women were involved in the saving of the allies and the saving of Western civilization. And of course, we had Catherine Grace Katz. So Stalin does during the rounds and rounds of toasting that the Soviets like to do. He raises a glass to the three daughters, recognizing their contributions and their place, a very important place with their fathers.

24:15And you kind of see this moment where Stalin, he reveals in a way a little bit of humanity. He is the father himself. He has a daughter about their age, but also he recognizes that it will play well with the fathers to recognize the daughters and their contributions. We talked about the daughters of Yalta. These are the daughters of Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt and Avril Harriman. They were all there in Yalta overseeing. their family members as the great peace was getting knocked about prior to the end of the Second World War. But again, a fascinating story about how many people sometimes get involved from families of great leaders and how they can also help the peace in so many ways.

25:02So the Daughters of Yalta was an amazing story. Last summer, we got to also hear from James Holland.

25:13writing about the economic consequences of the Versailles Treaty. He's writing this book in 1990s. He's just despairing the kind of peace treaty that's being pulled together following the catastrophic First World War. And he goes back and he goes, just consider, you know, you're a reasonably well-to-do guy living in London. You can telephone your mates. You can get, you can eat pretty much anything you want from all around the world. You can travel in a way that's more simple and quicker than it's ever been ever before in mankind. The world just seems full of possibilities. And you cannot imagine for a minute, this steady progress is ever going to end.

25:43And then suddenly it's August 1914 and the catastrophe hits the world and you know, all the rest of it, you have the First World War and Millen's dead and the catastrophe of the early part of the 1920s and wheelbarrows of money and all the rest of it. And that's the point. We have reached that point now where we're just being a bit complacent. We're taking things for granted. We're feeling entitled. You know, we're in the West. We can do what we like. All we're worried about is sort of what's going on on reality TV shows and what the next blockbuster is going to be on Netflix and stuff and who's trending on TikTok rather than kind of looking that bigger world around us, which is actually starting to corrupt in a very, very bad way.