Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - Curiosity is the Secret Sauce According to Sahil Bloom

Episode Date: February 1, 2023

In this episode, Anthony talks with investor, entrepreneur and creator, Sahil Bloom. Hitting over 1.1 billion Twitter impressions in 2022 alone, Sahil sure knows how to reach an audience. His weekly newsletter The Curiosity Chronicle demystifies the world of finance, money, business, and economics, whilst sharing his life lessons along the way.  Together, Anthony and Sahil cross the generations, discussing the need to refresh the American experiment, as baby boomers have “failed the next generation.” They unpack the differences between the age groups, what both can learn from one another, and how to better align across politics and real-world issues.  Sahil explains how he learned to manage some of his own insecurities; why learning to not care what people think, or say about you is so empowering–and whether we ever really know ourselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. I am Anthony Scaramucci and welcome to. to Open Book, where I talk to some of the most interesting and brilliant minds in our world today. In this show, I'll bring on guests in business, politics, entertainment, and more to go deep into a piece of their work, whether it's a highly anticipated book, an in-depth feature story, or an opinion piece that has captured my attention. We'll dig into why it matters to you and how their work is shaping our future.

On today's episode, I talk with investor, entrepreneur, and creator, Saw Hill Bloom. If you own a Twitter account, you'll have seen a post or threat from Sawhill Bloom, amassing over 1.1 billion impressions in 2022 alone, he's quickly becoming the philosopher guru we all need. His weekly newsletter, The Curiosity Chronicle, provides actionable ideas to help you build a high-performing, healthy and wealthy life. In today's conversation, we discuss the concept of time and why it's so complex. We confess some of our insecurities and learning to manage them. The importance of discipline and consistency. Our political system, tribalism, and misalignment. And why us baby boomers have failed the next generation?

Joining us now on Open Book, even though you haven't written a book yet, Saw Hill, I believe that you will write one in the future, but you are writing something called The Curiosity Chronicle. It's a great newsletter. There's a little bit of Ben Franklin in that newsletter. You're an investor, an entrepreneur, and a creator, and I'm a fan of yours. And so I brought you on the podcast. And you've done a little bit of research on you. Your Twitter feed has hit around 1.1 billion impressions in 2022, which is huge, by the way. So congratulations on that. I appreciate us through your journey. How did you manage to pull that together? And why are you the philosopher guru? Well, I definitely wouldn't consider myself a philosopher guru. I appreciate the hype track, though. You got to let me know where I have to Venmo you or whatever later, the hype. I bring you around with me more often. It's a very expensive Venmo in my yeah, I know, I imagine. I imagine. I'll buy you a dinner or something. No, I mean, look,

it's, it's been a sort of labor of love, I suppose, over, I guess, two years ago I started the writing, started sharing things publicly. This is like right in the middle of COVID, COVID hit. And I mean, your life changed a lot when COVID hit, I'm sure. And like everyone else, mine did. You know, I was working in finance. I was working in like a pretty traditional investing role, working 80 to 100 hour weeks, traveling three, four days a week, you know, pretty miserable, like head down type stuff. And all of a sudden, I was stuck at home and had nothing else to do. I wasn't traveling. I couldn't see my friends. I couldn't really do much of anything. Couldn't travel. I see family, et cetera. And so I was trying to figure out what to do with all that time that I all of a sudden

had on my hands. And I'm not into like video games. I'm not into, I don't know, whatever stuff kids are doing these days to blow hours. And so for me, it was writing. And right around that time was when, like, you remember this, but markets were going like up. and to the right, but the economy was literally shut down. People were stuck at home. There was no jobs. And for some reason, the market was crushing it. And I had all these friends, you know, I played baseball and I had all these baseball friends who weren't from finance backgrounds that were asking me, like, what the fuck is going on? Excuse my language. You know, like, how is the market soaring like this? You know, when the economy is shut down. And so I started realizing there's this massive gap in education that exists

in our country where basic information about financial economy is not getting disseminated in a way that people understand. And so that was how it originally started was I was going to share, you know, simple layman's term, digestible explanations of things that were happening in the world. And it was generally around the market, finance economy at the time. And over time, it expanded to be much broader, as you say, around philosophy, life, etc. Okay. But you are like a philosopher like Ben Franklin, but yet you're a very young man. So where is the philosophy coming from? Is it coming from you being a man of letters, that you're a great reader and writer? Is it coming from what? Was it going to be parents? I would say there's a couple things. You know, first and foremost,

I don't consider anything that I'm doing to be teaching people. I don't consider any of it to be particular, you know, degree of wisdom. What I do consider it to be is lived experience, and I'm sharing it in real time. So I think a lot of history's great philosophers and people that you talk about Benjamin Franklin as an example, most of them wrote about all these things much later in life. they were much older and they were reflecting back on their experience and writing about it. What I'm trying to do and, you know, what I'm hope I'm doing with my newsletter or with different things I'm writing is taking people along my journey and my personal struggle with all of these things that I'm writing about. So none of it is me saying like, I have learned to these things. I'm so much smarter and here's what I know now. It's, hey, I've wrestled with this thing in real time or I am wrestling with this.

Being a new parent is a great example of it. Like all of these new things that I'm experiencing from being a first time father that are leading to a lot of interesting insights on life and how we think about time and the passage of it. And I'm sharing that in real time with people. So there's not really, you know, some feeling from me that I'm sharing some amazing wisdom or philosophy as this like elder statesman by any means. It's much more so sharing my journey and sharing my struggle, hopefully with personality along the way that allows people to feel like they can connect with it in a real way. Okay. So connect with me. Tell me what, what I should be learning from, Sawhill Bloom. I mean, for you, you're probably wrestling with something

that a lot of people are today, which is time. And it's been one of the concepts that I've been writing about and really focused on recently, because I think it applies universally, no matter what age you are today, no matter what ethnicity, where you're from, all of these things. We all have the exact same time, right? It's ticking and it's going away and you're never going to get it back. And so thinking about your time, thinking about who you spend your time with, thinking about whether you should be trading your time for those extra dollars or should you be focusing it on X, Y, or Z that's more important to you, maybe spending time with your kids, spending time with your wife, etc. Those questions are universal. And so wrestling with those and asking the right questions about

how you think about your time, I would say is something you should definitely be thinking about, as well as everyone else that's out there. So what should I be thinking? So I shared these graphs recently that I think are a good way to summarize this whole idea. It was basically, it was looking at the American time use survey. So data from Americans on how we spend our time over the course of our lives. It's this, you know, longitudinal survey. It's really robust and an incredible data set. And I made these graphs that came out of it that were basically showing who you spend your time with over the course of your life. So at different ages, how many hours per week or hours per day are you spending with your parents? Are you spending with your partner? Are you spending

with your coworkers, your children, alone, et cetera? And it's really powerful when you look at the data actually visualized. Because what you see is that basically, the amount of time you're spending with your parents falls off an absolute cliff after you leave the house, after age eight. You basically aren't spending any time with them the rest of your life. Same thing with your friends. Kind of peaks around like early 20s and then slowly declines over the course of your life. Co-workers spikes and you end up spending a ton of time with your coworkers over the course of your life. Time with your partner basically rises until one of you dies.

And then time alone is the only one that steadily increases throughout your entire life. You just spend more and more time alone. You know, there's this loneliness epidemic, etc. And then the last one was children, which is a really challenging one for a lot of people to see because you basically spend most of your time with them over there kind of growing up years, and then you don't get to spend time with them the rest of your life. And so when you see this data visualized, I think it brings to the fore this whole idea of like, how do you bend these curves?

Who do you want to be spending your time with? Who are the people that really matter to you, the important friendships, the relationship with your parents, how many times are you going to see your parents before they die? There's these incredible questions that you need to start asking yourself if you want to make changes in your life and you want to start prioritizing the things that really do matter to you. Okay. Are you a physicist? Do you study physics? Not formally. I think the last time I took a physics class was in high school. Why? Well, because there's a, you know, there's a couple of theories about time, which are fascinating theories. I mean, one of the theories is that does it actually

exist? Are we actually ourselves in a time machine where we're synthesizing information from the universe that looks like it's sequential? But is Richard Feynman or Albert Einstein correct? That all of time has happened at the same time, but yet for whatever reason, the way our bodies are programmed, of course, Elon Musk has once said, I'd love to meet the person that software design our personalities, because there's so many things about our personalities that we ourselves don't fully understand. Are you a believer in the simulation? Like, do you think that we're living in a simulation? I don't, I don't know if we're living in a simulation or not, but I think it would be impossible to say that we're not living in a simulation any more than it's possible to say that we are.

I'm not a, you know, I'm one of these weirdos where I take in every theory and I'm willing to examine them. There are atheists that believe that there's no creator, if you will, there's no God. Then there are a dais who believe that there's a God, but they don't religion. And so on and so on and so forth, I'm a practicing Roman Catholic. So I'm probably more jaded to believe and be predisposed to the teachings of my church. But that's me, you know, and that's probably the way I got raised by my strict Italian-American grandmother. But having said that, I'm open to reincarnation. I'm open to thoughts about time.

But you're saying something that's interesting, and I just want to test this on you, if I have a book here, let's say I open this book and, oh, look at this. It happens to be one of my books. Look at that. Okay. So I have a book here. And the end of the book has already been completed. And so is the beginning of the book. But where I start the book and start reading, time is elapsing between the beginning and the end.

Yet it's all already happened. That's a physical theory. That's a law of physics that Einstein and final. and believe to be true. What's your reaction to that? You're bending me here. I don't know what my reaction is to that. I don't have a perspective on the theoretical construct around time here. All right. Let me flip something back. It's just interesting because you are an out-of-the-box thinker and there's a lot of contemporary thought to your personality as well. So what is it about your writing style and your philosophical tenets that has grabbed

your generation? Don't be modest. So I'm writing a book currently. You mentioned this at the outset that that I might be working on something. I signed a big book deal in September of last year. So I'm kind of in the early process of writing a book with Penguin Random House. And one of the interesting things that came out of that process was my agency did a whole demographic profile of my subscriber base and of people that are following me. And my assumption was that it was going to be a lot of like 20 to 30 year olds. You know, a lot of people who were like early in life, you know, hustling, wanting career hacks, get ahead, et cetera. And the reality was it was actually like 35 to 55 was my biggest demographic.

by a long shot. And what jumped out to me about that was that I think it's a lot of people who are sort of entering that like middle phase of their life, which is what I am in now. I think I've entered it at a slightly earlier point than most people do these days by virtue of the fact that I married my high school sweetheart and we got married young and had a baby pretty young by current constructs, etc. But I think that that journey is what has connected with people. And most of my growth has come while I've been on that journey. It wasn't me like in my early finance day hustle culture, bro life sharing like, yo, I'm working 100 hour weeks, you know, get the coffee, whatever, like fire me up, etc. That wasn't the type of stuff I was sharing. What I've been sharing is my journey

basically since I decided to quit my job and go all in on this more personal set of pursuits and entrepreneurial journey and pursue something that's all together really different and pursue it alongside building a family and hopefully building a more balanced life. So I think that is what is connecting with people. It's that slightly more dynamic and slightly more journey-oriented personality that's coming across in the things that I'm sharing. You know, I look at your threads, and I love your threads, and I love the way you think about life. How is your generation, because you're young enough to be my son, how is your generation going to view success? And I'll just say plaintively, and you can agree or disagree with me, I grew up in the, you know, elementary school in the 70s,

formal education in the 80s, meaning college and law school, and the 90s, which was fairly robust boomer materialism and consumerism. So the 80s and 90s were robust consumerists, if you will. So we view our success, whether we like it or not, through our materiality. Will that be true for your generation? Again, I'm making a bold editorial statement. That's my observation of my generation. No, I think this generation is characterized by low attention and the inability to hold focus over a long period of time. And I think a lot of that is driven by the fact that we're the social media generation. We live in a generation where technology has programmed us to jump from thing to thing very quickly and to be unable to hold our focus for a long period of time.

And we all feel it, right? When we sit on social media, we spend time on these different platforms trying to build our personal brands, that's eating into us. It's hitting you with the dopamine drip over and over again. You lose your ability to actually focus for a long period of time, to be in that deep work state, et cetera. And I think that, think about it a lot. I think it's a generation that we live in that is entirely focused on the prize and not nearly enough on the process. I say this all the time. The person who loves climbing is going to climb a whole lot higher than the person who loves the summit. And there's a huge difference between those two people. And I think social media is training an entire generation of people to only focus on the

summit. It's focusing on the light count. It's focusing on the follower count. It's focusing on all of those little things that sit out there, the dopamine hits that are sitting out there, rather than focusing on loving punching the clock, the person who loves that climb and actually loves climbing. I think about it all the time. My grandfather, when I was a kid, telling me that there was pride to be taken in punching the clock every single day, in showing up to work. No matter what it was, you were doing, by the way. I mean, now we have this thing where we just like to glorify this one type of work and it's sexy and it looks good. Well, what I was always taught as a kid is that like my grandfather on my dad's side was a great-grandfather. My dad said was a vegetable peddler in New York. And he showed up every single

day, 5 a.m., 4 a.m., whatever time you had to get there to go get the vegetables, drag your card out, etc. And he took so much pride in just punching the clock every single day. And I think with social media and what these technology systems and what the constant dopamine drip have done to us is, we've lost an ability to really punch the clock and take pride in it in that deep way. I think it's well said. I want to add something. I want to test your reaction to it. So the generation before me and my grandparents, the World War II generation, many of these people were involved with the military or had family members in the military. And with the military, you get structure. And the military gives you command and control. It also created some level of comity, C-O-M-I-T-Y in the country,

where somebody like George McGovern, a left-leaning senator could get along with Bob Dole, a right-leaning senator, even though they disagreed on a lot of policy because they were connected through the American military. You also saw the advent of the madmen world, which was by and large command control, sort of the Sinclair Lewis, man in the gray flannel suit, business idea, the IBMs of the world, General Electric, these large corporations GM. You then morphed as you got into the 90s as we started to move away from the military, less and less of our people were involved in the American military down to like 2% now. In the same time that was happening, we got all these choices, social media choices, cable television choices, reaffirmation of our own biases,

so now we're all tunneled into our own places. Do you think that we've lost some level of our community? Do you think your generation is going to struggle with that tribalism? Yes, absolutely. I think the common cause, losing your common cause is a really impactful thing. The movie Independence Day is something that I always think about in kind of a funny context, I suppose of like the alien invasion is coming and, you know, Will Smith has his whole heroic thing going on in that movie. But the whole idea was that the entire planet comes together for this common cause of avoiding extinction by this alien enemy. And I've long thought that the only thing that would ever bring us together is an alien invasion that brings together all of humanity to fight against this common foe. More recently, I think we would all just argue over what to call the aliens and we'd probably just get wiped out immediately because I don't see our ability to actually come together around common cause.

I think the aliens would come and be like ready to blow us up with their big laser beam. And we would somehow be like squabbling over whether it was like calling it a spaceship or should we call it a UFO or what should we call this thing that's up there? And they would be zapping us and killing us. So I do think we've lost our ability to some extent to circle around a common cause. And we prefer arguing. You know, I've always just thought, I think my grandmother used to say this that no one ever argued their way to happiness.

And yet we live in this society and we live in a social media world where, arguing gets glorified. Like, you can go dunk on someone on social media and get 100 likes and everyone pat's it on the back and you're like, oh, damn, that was productive for me. I got this huge dopamine hit out of dunking on on the mooch on Twitter. That was great. I got to go do that again. Now I'm going to go do that to not just the mooch. I'm going to go do that to Sawhil. I'm going to go do that to, you know, to our friend Dan. I'm going to go do that to whoever. Like, I'm going to go start dunking on people because I'm getting patted on the back when I go and do that. And it just perpetuates this cycle of behavior that is just like, it's ridiculous, right? Mike

Tyson said in this really funny line, he said social media has made y'all way too comfortable with disrespecting someone and not getting punched in the face for it. And it's so damn true when you think about it. Like how many of those people that will dunk on you on social media would actually say it to your face? Village idiot became the global village idiot. But I do think Elon Musk is right about the freedom of speech. I don't, I don't understand why we had to take all these people off of social network. I would rather fight these people in the free marketplace of ideas. Let them say whatever they want to say anonymously from their keyboard. So this way people feel plugged into the society. When you're taking people off the network, you're deplugging them. And I think that form of

deplatforming makes people feel like they're being left out. And you listen, I experienced this with the Trump world. There's a good 20% of the United States that feels left out. They are mad at the establishment. They're mad at social media. They're mad at the medical establishment, the political establishment, et cetera. And I think we're doing a disservice to ourselves, not trying to figure out a way to reconnect them. You bring up a good point. about the tribalism. And so the movie that DiCaprio was in last December, it was called Don't Look Up. He was in it with Jennifer Lawrence. Okay, do you remember the movie? Did you see it? And so just for viewers and listeners, they didn't see it, it was a satire about our contemporary world where it's become clear to a group

of astrophysicist that a meteor is about to hit, which will be as damaging as the one that struck the Yucatan Peninsula that wiped out the dinosaurs. And yet we can't engage ourselves through our tribalism and our craziness, we can't get it together to solve for the global crisis. So you think that parody, that satire is a likely outcome. I do, sadly. And I think like all of these satires hold a seat of truth. And I think that one, I mean like 1984, right? I'm rereading 1984 again right now. It's a book that I tend to reread once a year. I saw it on Lex Friedman's reading list as his first book he was going to read this year, which by the way, everyone started dunking on Lex for this reading list, which I found ironic as well. But I read 1984 again. I just finished it

today. And it's another piece of content that you read and you say like, holy shit when you're reading it. This is terrifying. It's just, you know, satire, whatever you want to call it. It has these seeds of truth that are almost painful to read when you feel like, oh my, like they have a connection to what could actually occur and what could happen. And I mean, I watched that movie on Netflix. I did feel like there wasn't that unreasonable a set of situations there of something that could happen. There was obviously comedy and dramatization around it, but the general set of circumstances wouldn't shock me. If an alien invasion came and we started squabbling over stupid shit that didn't have to do with survival and extinction, I wouldn't be shocked. Well, you bring up 1984.

And so obviously Orwell said that the source for 1984 was actually Minkoff. And it was also his observations of Joseph Goebbels, who people that don't remember, he was. the minister of information. He was the perpetrator of the big lie. He's famous for a lot of different quotations, but the one that's probably more famous that I'm paraphrasing is that it's not enough to just lie in a small way. It's the bigger the lie is, the more believable it will become to the population. Again, I'm paraphrasing, but Orwell understood that. So that allegory was trying to force people that are democratically minded to recognize that their democracy, which creates this wonderful decentralization, gives them their individual liberty and gives them

their freedom. Yet we have a tendency to sometimes forget that, which is why some countries, Italy, Germany, they go wayward. They go into dictatorship. They think that's a faster, quicker way to solve economic solutions, economic issues. But then when it's up happening is because the power is so corrupting, you get your economic freedom taken away. And then unless you're carrying favor with the leadership, you sort of lose everything. So how do you refresh the American experiment? How do you get people back on the idea that a couple hundred years ago, a group of people got together and said, okay, we want to create a flat, decentralized government with lots of checks and balances, protect ourselves from tyranny, which will ultimately lead

to great prosperity for many, many people. This great experiment, what Lincoln called the last best hope for mankind, how do you hit the refresh button? How do you get the education into the system where people actually believe that what Cicero said, what does Cicero said, what is Cicero say. He said, we are slaves to the law in order to be free. We have to subordinate ourselves to the rule of law, not the rule of man, a Putin-istic or Hitleristic idea, but to subordinate ourselves. How do we refresh that, Soil? For me, there are three things that would go a long way to help. And the first one is the rise of a third party within the United States. That's a viable third party, middle ground party. The second one is clear

term limits on everyone that's engaged in government. And the third one would be campaign finance reform and getting rid of all of these special interests and all of these loopholes that allow people to be controlled by money. I think term limits would help with that to some extent because you wouldn't have this desire to accumulate power over long periods of time. But if you go back to the earliest roots of the country, there was never a desire for there to be a career politician. It's called public service. You'd go leave industry for a few years and go serve your country. And this whole idea now that you can have a cushy gig as a career politician and then leave, you know, after your 30 year run and make $10 million a year due to your political connections, etc, is absolutely ludicrous to me and it's harmful to the country. And so I think that really having very, very clear term limits in place, I think people should demand this, by the way. The government is never going to do it because it's not in their interests. All the people are making money. They're riding the gravy train. They love it. It's awesome. And so I think it has to come from the people. That's why I think the third party is important because it has to rise. you know, around this middle ground that's, you know, logic oriented and not sensationalist,

etc. Not looking for the like viral tweet or TikTok video or soundbite that they're all currently looking for, you know, to rise in the middle and then to push these things, to push the fact that you shouldn't be allowed to be serving in government for more than four to six years, four years, whatever it might be. And as a result of that, no longer, you know, need to feel like you're accumulating power that you have to bow down and kiss the ring of a certain, you know, faction within the government because of them not then voting for your next bill. I mean, I have a friend who works on the Hill and his party member when he won, went to Washington and had their first vote, and he was going to vote no on this thing. And head of their party came and said, the person working for

the head of the party came and said, no, you're voting yes on that. And he said, no, I'm going to vote no. You know, it's aligned with my, you know, my overall values. And they said, if you vote no on this, you're never going to get your name on a bill the entire time you're in Congress. And imagine that, right? Like you go run on something on your principles and values. People vote you in office. You get there and you're going to go vote on those values, which is what people have elected you to do.

And you get told that you actually can't do that because if you don't get in line, you're going to have a whole really tough time here for the next however long you want to be a part of this thing. And because you know that you might be a part of this thing for the next 20, 30 years, that matters. If you're only going to be a part of it for the next two to four, the next four, six, whatever it is, you might not care. You might say, you know, screw off. You're in a club. You have to play by the club's rules. If you don't play by the club's rules, they'll ostracize you. You also know,

you mentioned people leaving making $10 million a year. How about the people making $10 million of dollars a year staying? Trading. Yeah, because they're trading, you know. And that was exposed about 12 years ago. Peter Schweitzer wrote a book about it. It got exposed 60 minutes at a big ex-bosé on it. And they then passed a rule that there would no longer be any insider trading. And then when nobody was looking wasn't even a floor vote they did it over a conference call they reinstated it and why do they do that because that's one of their big sources of income they see what bills are coming and say okay that's going to help this pharmaceutical company or that's going to help that company and so it just speaks to that the system is too flawed you know i was in washington and said something which was probably

one of the reasons why i got ejected so quickly from Washington i was like what did we just pay these people. I said to you, we were going to pay the Congress $20 million in after-tax money a year. And to your point about term limits, we can debate those. But let's say you could be in the House for six years. You could be in the Senate for one term, six years. But here's the deal. If you can all get together and balance the budget, the U.S. government will give each of you $20 million of after-tax cash. Okay, no more insider trading, no more shenanigans. All you've got to do is balance the budget. You $20 million of after-tax cash that would cost the Treasury $10.4 billion, which is a rounding error. You know how many people would be signing up for that job and competing for that job and

qualified people? Yeah. And you know how quickly the budget would get balanced? My point is, is that we've obscured the incentives. We've misaligned the incentive so dramatically now that the system has become a negative feedback loop of cynicism. We have to reboot the system. no constitutional amendment in 30 plus years. Last major amendment, 56 years ago, the Civil Rights Voting Act, yet there's 27 amendments. So if you look, we've had an amendment every nine years. Yet in the last 55 years, we've only had one significant amendment. So, you know, we're failing the society and we're failing our next generation by not rebooting. The reason why there are amendments is the same reason why your iPhone needs to be upgraded or a computer. We have to recreate the system for a next generation.

generation of leaders and the next generation of people that aspire to freedom. So what are you going to do about this? It's really well said. My generation sucks. I mean, let's just be honest. The baby boomers, I'm the last vestige of the baby boomers. We suck. We over promised. We overspent. We underdelivered in terms of a political group of people. We racked up $25 trillion of debt in 14 years. So let's just go over that. George Washington to George W. Bush, $7 trillion of debt, Barack Obama into Donald Trump, out to Joe Biden, $25 trillion of debt. I mean, what are we doing? I mean, sort of bizarre. So go ahead. How are you going to fix it, Sawhill? How are you going to put your philosophical mind to that problem? Well, I think it comes down

to the incentives, as you said. I thought the way you framed it actually was really brilliant. It's like the Charlie Munger quote of, show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome. The fact that we pay these people so little and that it's no longer a desirable job. I mean, when I was a kid, And even when I went to college, I studied public policy. I did my master's in public policy under Condoleezza Rice. She was my advisor at Stanford. And at the time, I really thought I wanted to go into politics at some point in my life. You know, I thought maybe, you know, I'd run for governor at some point in my life or run for Congress, et cetera.

And, you know, over the last eight years, that's been completely wiped out of my mind as a potential path that I want to go down. Because I've seen how bad the mud slinging is. I've seen how rough of a path it is. I've seen what the sausage making actually looks like via friends that have. gone down that path. And it's no longer, I think, a career path that attracts people that you'd want to be serving in those roles. And that's really sad. And that's something that's just going to be self-perpetuating unless we make a change. So I think people proposing the type of things that you're proposing, which on paper sound radical when you say them, and then you kind of take a second,

digest them a bit, and realize, hmm, maybe there's actually really something to that. Maybe there's a middle ground here. Maybe there's something we can all agree on is really important. And as I said, it's not going to come from the inside because the gravy train's rolling and those people don't want to get off it, they're happy. They're eventually going to die off because it's really old. I don't know what the average age of Congress is today, but it's super freaking old. But there needs to be a change and there needs to be a lot more youth that comes into Congress. Could I see myself eventually going down a path later in life? Sure.

But something would really have to change. And I think a third party would really have to rise for it to be more attractive. Well, it's going to be very hard to have a third party. What killed the third party in our country was Ross Perot. Once Ross Perrault, got 19.9 million votes, scared the lights out of both. the Democrats and the Republicans, they closed rank, and they tighten legally the duopoly. They've made it almost impossible for a third party to rise. If you don't believe me, you can ask Andrew Yang about how difficult it is to start and formalize a third party in a country like ours.

All right, let's go to you. Let's go to you as a human being. Okay, let's open you up a little bit. What's your biggest insecurity? Mine at this point in my life is my man boobs. We'll just talk about that. Okay, so I just had shoulder surgery. Probably need breast reduction at this point, but I'm going to be working on my man boobs. in 2023. What is your biggest insecurity? My biggest insecurities is that I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. Excuse my language again. I suppose if my mom's listening to this, I'll have to shoot her an apology text. I constantly feel like I have no clue what I'm doing at a lot of points of time. I was marching down a path in my prior job where I always knew what I was doing because there was a very clear title to it and there was a very clear progression to it and I knew where I was

going to be in five, 10 years. I was going to be a partner and I was going to be an MD, whatever. I I knew exactly what it looked like. And today, I don't have that. If I, you know, if I go to a cocktail party and someone asks, hey, what do you do? You know, the classic question, I don't really know. I can't really put it into a nice little two-sentence sound bite like everyone else can. And that makes me insecure. It's kind of stupid because I'm working on a lot of really cool things and I'm impacting people's lives and I'm making more money than I could have imagined making, you know, in my prior job.

But I don't really know what I'm doing. And that bothers me. And I would say it's an insecurity that I don't know. how it manifests itself today, but it's certainly something I feel pretty regularly. I've had insecurities my entire life about different things. What are some of your other insecurities? I mean, I would say when I was a, when I was a kid and when I was a lot younger, I was just generally pretty insecure about how I kind of like fit in. Uh, you know, I come from a mixed race background. I'm half Indian. My mom's from India. My dad's white Jewish from the Bronx. And I really struggled

with figuring out where I fit in in the world. Was I brown or was I white? Was I a nerd like my mom wanted me to be or was I a jock? Like my dad maybe wanted me to be. You know, was I a nice guy or was I a bully? I really couldn't figure out my path and that insecurity manifested itself as just like bad behavior and puffing myself up, bragging, lying, saying things about myself that just weren't true, you know, not being honest. Like just in high school, I think about the type of person I was and the type of things I was into and doing. It was all because of insecurity and not just being comfortable with who I was and who I was becoming. Let's talk about the spotlight effect, which you talk about and explain how we overestimate the degree to which other people notice our actions. Yeah, I mean,

this is this really powerful effect once you realize that basically we go around life thinking that everyone's staring at us. It's like in high school, you're, you know, you spill something on your shirt. You basically think that everyone's laughing at you the entire day. You're just like, you're sitting in class and you're thinking about how everyone's staring at you or now as an adult you're at a bar by yourself god forbid you know your friend hasn't arrived yet and you feel like everyone's staring and laughing at you and the reality is no one is paying attention to you we think that we are the center of the entire universe because that's how we perceive life and so when we have these situations happening we think that everyone is focused on us and staring at us and that the person laughing in the corner is laughing at us the reality is everybody is just focused on themselves and no one is thinking about you as much as you are. So really, the net result of that is just do you. Like, do your, do your thing and stop worrying about what everyone else is thinking along the way, because the reality is they're probably not even thinking about you. Okay, so I've experienced that, you know, and, you know, by the way, this is something that Trump once said to me. He said he said he had horrible things written about him in the

80s and the 90s, and lo and behold, nobody cares. Okay, I have a money manager friend that got lit up in 2006. I'm not going to mention his name, but nobody remembers that. He's a multi-billionaire. He paid a fine to the SEC in 2006. Nobody remembers it. Okay. And the point being is it almost destroyed him. I have a buddy of mine that got bamboozled in WorldCom. Got bamboozled. And he lost his money and he's still mad about it. And he still thinks that people are staring at him with embarrassment. You know, I got creamed by Sam Bankman Fried. That was two months ago. I've already moved on from it. I've already dusted myself off, don't care. But I've also been under threat of cancellation for most of my life.

And I've had friends of mine that have been fired from jobs or they feel like they got a bad story written about them in the press. And I think it's that big of a deal. The truth that matters, nobody gives a you-know-what. Okay. And so why does nobody care? I know the answer, but I want to hear it from you. Well, there's two things I would say here.

The first one is a great piece of advice that I got from my grandfather when I had something bad happened when I was a kid, which was today's news is used to wrap tomorrow. is fish. And I always thought that was such a good saying and one that I will repeat to my son at some point in my life, which is when you're going through a bad time or you have some bad press or something bad hits or you're getting canceled or whatever it is, there's always the next day and there's some new person that's having that happen to them and people move on. And so when you're going through a hard time remembering that, remembering that today's news, the thing that everyone's writing about you is literally going to be used to wrap tomorrow's fish is a powerful realization.

Because it is really true, right? Like your friend that blew up, no one's writing articles on it anymore. People move on. And so unless, obviously, like, if you're going to jail and there's things that bad that are happening and the ramifications continue, that's separate. Like, Sam Bank, Brin-Fried, today's news may be used to wrap tomorrow's fish, but today's news is sending him to jail. And that's going to be an issue for him. You got to live your life with integrity. You know, somebody asked me yesterday, well, you had a bad year.

So what are you going to happen to Skybury? I don't know what's going to happen in Skybury. But I live my life with integrity. Somebody will become knocking on this door or I'll knock on their job. door and we'll come up with something together that is a really cool thing. Okay. And we'll see what that is. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I just think, look, look, if you're operating within the context of your set of values that you believe in and that are true to you, then there's no need to worry about what other people think. There's a thing in America and in the world probably now, but there

is a thing in America that people love cheering for you on the way up. We love the heroes rise. It's amazing. You see all the Forbes articles about Sam Bankman-Fried on the way up. Oh, he's the Wonder Kid, all this stuff. But one thing that people in America love even more than the heroes rise is the fall. And people love, it was in billions, I think Paul Giumati said it, of like, people are cheering now, but they are dying to boo. And it's a sad thing, but it's a very, very true thing, is that whenever people are clapping for you on the way up, just know that that same person is going to be booing you on the way down once you turn the other way. And if you're comfortable with that, And then you're ready to be in the arena because that's the reality is like the arena is a lonely place.

If you're going to put yourself out there, you have to be comfortable with the fact that those people in the stands are cheering for you. The second you turn, they're going to be booing and you've got to be able to roll with it. Coming to the end of this very fun interview for me, I'm going to hit you with a few things. Okay, ready? All right. And these are rapid fire. I'm going to say a word. I need to get your raw shot test reaction.

Ready? Time. Precious. Perspective. Important. Luck. Engineerable. Rejection.

Crucial. Confidence. Overrated. Okay. Let me ask you this. It was good reactions, okay? Do you ever really know yourself? No.

You're seeking to know yourself, but why is it? Why is it that you seek to know yourself? Well, first of all, a third of yourself is asleep. So, I mean, you're not really living in that world. So why is it? The only constant is change. and I think the whole idea of knowing yourself is a flawed idea because you're constantly changing. And the whole concept of, oh, all of a sudden I know myself.

Well, you shouldn't actually. You should have changed. By the time you figure out yourself from yesterday, you should be some totally new person. You've figured out something new, some new idea. Yeah, well, that's a concept from General Orelius. You know, he said that the five-year version of you has died longer there. It's a new version of you. every passing moment, you're in a, you're in systematic change. But I think the most important

critical thing for me is I don't know myself. You know, the Oracle of Delphi said, know thyself. You do the best you can to know yourself with great humility, but you don't know yourself and you have to embrace the unknowable of self. How about that? I like that. All right. So, so let's go to your Friday 5 newsletter, which is an awesome newsletter. For our listeners here, where can they subscribe to that? My website is probably the best place, sahamloom.com. It's just my first name, last name. And then obviously you can find me on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, you know, wherever, uh, wherever things are out there. You know who owns scaramucci sucks.com? No. That would be me. I bought that. Oh, yeah? Yeah,

I said fucking, you're a smart guy, man. I should, I should go buy that. I should go buy, uh, Sahel Bloom sucks.com. That's smart. Go buy that like tonight, okay, because you're reroute it to your newsletter. You can continue to be successful. And what comes with success is a tremendous amount of So, you know, I think, why not let me take that one off the table for these people. Hey, listen, you're an awesome guy. I wish another of a great success. And congratulations on your baby. And I look forward to having you back on Open Book.

Thanks for joining us today. Thanks so much for all your support. What I love about him is, is never ending intellectual curiosity on his 32nd birthday. He went around asking several 90-year-olds what advice they would give. And obviously, they all said that time was precious. But I thought one of the more unique things that was said that I emphasized with my kids, with students, with my employees, et cetera, my partners is the whole spotlight effect. The notion that everyone is thinking about you.

You could have a pimple on your nose. I mean, my friend Brian, he had a pimple on his nose the other day. I mean, this is like a 65-year-old guy. He had a pimple on his nose that if he turned to the left, he could probably tell me the weather in Suffolk County. Of course, I said that to Brian. The pimple was reaching Suffolk County before he did. And he got really pissed to me for saying that to him.

But the truth of the matter is he's walking around with a pimple on his nose. Nobody really cares. At the end of the day, if you care less about people and what they think of you and more about yourself and what you're doing to improve yourself, you're going to be in a whole world of happy as opposed to a world of hurt. Ma. Hello. Yes. Well, first off, happy birthday again, okay? I'm bringing you back on the podcast due to popular demand.

You're very popular, ma. Oh, my God. Yeah, you did good. So what's it like to be 86? Go ahead, tell me. What six? And not look it. I love it.

And you got the men chasing you still? Yes, I do. I can't. Someday I'll let you all know. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so she's got boyfriends left and right, all flirting with her hitting on her in the restaurant. So, so Ma, let me ask you something. I had a guy on this week.

He's 32. He just turned 32. He's a very smart guy. But let me ask you something, okay? Because he's asked people that are your age. He basically has asked them what advice would they give to people that are in their 30s. So what would be the advice that you would give to people that are in their 30s based on your time here on Earth? I would say to enjoy your life to the fullest and every way you can and live a little bit on the edge because I used to drive a motorcycle when I was young.

And I loved it, and I used to ride horses and do whatever you feel like doing, because the years do creep up on you. But I've had a full life. I have beautiful children. Right. So you like driving the motorcycle. Also, how old were you when you started smoking, Mark? Go ahead. I know Nana was mad at you.

How old were you? I was 17. My father was American. My mother was from Italy. And my mother thought that if you smoked, you weren't a good girl. I was always a little edgy. I used to open the bathroom when. window and spray the bathroom and blow the smoke out the window.

Did she catch you? No. Oh, and then when I lived in Louisiana, I'd lasso there's a steer. All right. Let me. And I think when you're in your 30s, that's your real fun in life, and you should enjoy every minute. So let me ask you this.

When you say pop was American, he was from Italy, right? The family was from Italy, but he was born in the United States. But he had, he was very bright, and he was a very big business. man in port washington and he for 10 years and he sat on the chair and he would give me all of these quotes one quote was uh almost funny he used to say god doesn't pay on a friday he's not a merchant he pays whenever he can and he would say he would say different quotes it was like yeah that was his way of saying life is unfair and there's karma but sometimes it comes back slowly i remember all that then he thought they were high and mighty um he would say well god look at that they

think their shit doesn't stink, but their farts give them away. But, Ma, are you as young as you feel, Ma? Let me ask you this, though. Do you feel 86? When I have, I have leukemia. So when I have the leukemia bat, which comes up on me once in a while, I do feel 86. But when I don't have it, I feel much younger than 86. And people tell me I look younger, so, you know, it helps me feel younger.

And my little grandson wrote something so beautiful that I read me a little bit. to everybody. Wait a minute. Hi, Nanny. Happy birthday. Beautiful. You are a Belgian button aging backwards. You got the best style out of all of us. You have taught me well, and I've always boosted my confidence. Thank you for being my nana and also for my nose. I think that's adorable. Well, because you have a nice nose, right, ma'am? Yeah, I have a good nose. You have it, too. Oh, okay. Thank you, Ma. All right. So what keeps you young, Ma? What keeps a person young? I have that playful attitude in my heart.

You know, I've had a crazy life. I've had a very good childhood, a weird marriage, and very good kids. And that keeps me young. I love my children and my grandchildren and their families very, very much. All right, ma. Thank you for joining Open Book. It's always fun to have you on. Happy Birthday.

Thank you, baby. All right. Love you. All right, love you. I am Anthony Scaramucci, and that was Open Book. Thank you for listen. If you like what you hear, tell you. your friends and make sure you hit follow or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. While you're

there, please leave us a rating or review. If you want to connect with me to chat more about the discussions, it's at Scaramucci on Twitter. It's also at Scaramucci on Instagram. You can text me at 1, 917-909-29-296. I'd love to hear from you. Let me know what you think and who you'd like to see on our show next. I'll see you back here next week.