Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - Digital Media Buzzkill on the Horizon? With Ben Smith

Episode Date: May 25, 2023

In this episode, Anthony talks with Ben Smith, co-founder of Semafor. Ben’s new book Traffic chronicles the genius and delusion that makes up the internet’s media pioneers. Anthony and Ben explore the rise and fall of innovators like Gawker and BuzzFeed News, and the many egos that came to play. Ben shares his inside knowledge on the space, the industry and it’s many faces. 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. Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcast and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying are. or how we can do better. You know I can roll with the punches, so let me know. Anyways, let's get to it. What killed BuzzFeed News? Is social media on the decline? Could this all have been prevented? And what about the old establishment media? The media landscape is constantly changing,

and someone who has been across it is my guest today. Ben Smith. So joining us now on Open Book, Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of Semaphore, but he's also a former media columnist for the New York Times and founding editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, but he's now out with a best-selling book, Traffic, Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the billion-dollar race to go viral. So, Ben, you've had quite an illustrious career. You know, if you were on Wall Street, you would have been a partner in one of these big firms. You've done a lot of big jobs, Ben. I made some poor choices in my life, I guess.

Well, no, I'm not saying that. You're at the top of your game, but I'm impressed with the things that you've done and the way you think about the media. So let's just go right there. When you talk about going viral or traffic, I'm an old guy. So that was like clicks and page views back in the day. But it's a little different now, right? It's a little bit of TikTok virality, Instagram virality, something catches favor or a meme on Twitter and it goes in an explosive zone. Tell us about what traffic means to you. What did it? mean and what does it mean today? Yeah, I mean, I think we're in this moment of real kind of weird change in really digital

media entirely. I think it's not totally clear what comes next. You know, we're sort of the end point of what were the huge drivers of traffic, Facebook first of all, but Twitter was the driver of political kind of attention and conversation. And it's not like those things will turn off the lights tomorrow, but they were the centrally cultural relevant forces for a decade and they're not anymore and then they're fading. And actually, you know, I was at the New York Times as the media columnist and I left BuzzFeed in 2020, got to the Times and was just sort of like, what just happened? Like, what did we all just live through? And the book was my attempt to kind of go back to the origin story of this moment where we all became obsessed with traffic and where people, particularly in the worlds I'm most familiar with, which are media and politics, sort of shifted toward this, yeah, this kind of new kind of connection to people on the internet.

So some people would accuse the media of going for the eyeballs and potentially slanting and creating more bias than the media that you and I grew up with, sort of that Columbia School of Journalism, Objectivity Standard. Where do you think things really are? Because I don't want the tribal angle. I want the reality angle. So I think, I mean, everybody has always liked to complain about the media. And I bet if I talked to you in 2004, you wouldn't have said, wow, the media. media is perfect. I love how they all went to the Columbia School of Journalism. And to me, honestly, this book is more kind of a history and the way I think about it is more history than kind of diagnosis. I mean, I think if you, in fact, if you go back to the beginnings of this moment of thinking of this new generation of digital media, what you had were, you know, readers who hated what they were getting, right? You had a choice of a couple of newspapers,

a couple of television networks that conservatives felt like totally didn't represent them, that lots of people felt accurately had totally blown coverage of the Iraq War, the most important story of their generation and who weren't on the internet, which is where we were all actually talking to each other by then. And so there was this, it wasn't like it came out of nowhere. There was this like popular interest in these new outsider voices that challenge this mainstream consensus. And they, you know, and we, I was part of that, like happily, you know, had also had these new tools of measuring what people were interested. And of course, journalists had always had the impulse to pander to their audience and to tell people what they want to hear.

But suddenly you could really see it. Like you could know what people wanted to hear. And that was a big change and in some cases a very kind of, you know, that led some people down a bad path. I don't want to give away the book. The title of the book is Traffic, Genius, Rivalry, and the delusion and the billion dollar race to go viral. But there's some fascinating Vignettes in the book, and I'd like you to tease people with it if you don't mind. Let's go right back to Gawker and Nick Denton and the party that you open the book with. Some people don't even know what Gawker is, Ben. So tell us a little bit about what Gawker is. Set the scene for you. us and tell us the significance of that vignette.

Yeah, I mean, you know, in that early moment, in 2003, say, different people are looking at this, suddenly you can kind of like see who's coming to your website and why and think about what can you give them to make them come back more and measure it. And one of the people, the pioneers of this guy named Nick Denton, a former British journalist at the Daily Telegraph and the Financial Times, who, you know, when he looked at American media and sort of American culture, he just saw lots of hypocrisy of people who wrote these kind of polite, wooden sounding stories in the New York Times and then went to a bar and trashed to the people that they were writing about. And I think his view was like, well, you should just, you should be

writing what you actually think. Like, journalism should be meaner and more, you know, more honest and say what it says. And there were parts of this that honestly, to me, are still feel really right. Like, to be actually an emblematic one, he started a, he kind of accidentally started a feminist blog called Jezebel. And the first thing they did was offer a $10,000 bounty for an unretouched photo of a celebrity in a fashion magazine. And sure enough, like, somebody stole a picture from Red Book of Faith Hill, where she still had freckles and smile lines, which had gotten erased in the publication. And, like, and they published it, and it was kind of sensation.

And, like, that was something that was probably good to get rid of in media in some way, not just obviously in women's magazines, but broadly, this kind of photoshopping of reality. But there was also kind of a cruelty to it, a sense of like, well, look, if people just want pornography, we'll just show them pornography, and that's fine. And like a sort of eagerness, almost like a belief in plain. to people's worst instincts. And Gawker, which began as kind of a media gossip blog, you know, written by bright young women in New York

who were fun writers and very plugged into the moment and it was this very outsidery voice, you know, gradually became more powerful, more important, more insidery, but kept that cruelty sometimes. And I think kind of became known for what started to feel like bullying. And its worst was publishing, you know, sex tapes without people's consent. You see, it's fascinating.

and after reading the book, I want to test a theory on you, get your reaction to it. So the media really was the first big movement in decentralization. Once the internet exploded, you had the arrival of drudge, you were, you yourself were at Politico, you then went over to BuzzFeed, become one of the founders there. And all of a sudden, you didn't need the printing press. You didn't need the papers dropped off and that whole distribution mechanism. You had this sort of viral decentralized distribution mechanism for your property, if you will, your intellectual property. I guess some cruelty came with that, though, didn't there or did they're not?

And if there did, what was that from? Is that a lack of editor-in-chief saying, whoa, that's too nasty or not objective enough? Or what do you think it was? Yeah, I mean, I think your basic read that there were, you know, people talk about gatekeepers in media, but like you owned a printing press or you owned a broad, or you had access to a broadcast tower. And most people didn't. And if you didn't have those things, like that was a gate. It was a real gatekeeper. It wasn't kind of a sort of metaphorical. There are gatekeepers in society thing. It was like, well, if you don't have access to a printing press or a broadcast tower,

you can't send your message widely. And that really changed. And there were these new people. Nick Denton was one of them, Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed was another who had ideas about what people would want in this new space. And for Denton, it was this kind of rawness and unreserved exposure, which often was cruel. You know, Peretti, who I worked for at BuzzFeed, had this totally different point of view that in some ways was accurate and other ways totally diluted,

which was that he was the first to really see the social internet coming, the Facebooks and the Twitters in the sense that the main way that your content will be distributed is somebody will share it with a friend, somebody will share it on a social platform, and you've got to be thinking,

what will people share? And his initial theory was people will share things that make them look good to their friends. They'll share appeals for earthquake relief. They'll share cute memes and cat pictures and funny jokes. They'll share like kind of thoughtful articles.

They'll share new news. That's what he hired me to get. But they would certainly not go on these platforms and scream about politics. Because like who wants to be that person? Who wants to look to their friends like some maniac yelling about divisive politics all the time? I mean, that obviously turned out to be a massive mistake. And that was all people wanted to use these platforms for. Yeah, no, listen, I mean, I find the whole thing fascinating.

Obviously, you know, I'm a media aficionado. You know, I'm a media participant. I've spent a lot of time consuming the media. I spend some time getting attacked by the media. It's all good. I'm a big proponent of free speech and so people can write whatever they want. And people are upset with me right now because I see no problem with CNN bringing on Donald Trump. I don't like Donald Trump.

I certainly don't want him to be president. But let me tell you, he's the leading Republican figure. And he's a congenital liar. But, you know, he's going to be part of the mix in 2024. And we're a free speech society. So we have to sort of live with these things. I want to ask you about mythology, if you don't mind. If I say Arianna Huffington, we see sort of a left-wing rival to Matthew Drudge and the judge report.

But if I say Andrew Breitbart, because of his death, I think it means different things of different people. You knew Andrew personally. I had a relationship with him as well. I don't see him the way he is lionized today, but I'm just curious of what your reaction is. Has he been mythologized in any way? Who was Andrew Breitbart for the young people that may not know him or know him personally? He was, I mean, I think maybe it's in some ways more interesting to start with the myth, which is I think he's now seen as the father of contemporary conservative media. He had kind of an appetite for confrontation and a belief that politics starts in culture and in fights over, you know, kind of divisive cultural subjects, which may sound a little familiar to people. And people who can't, and you know, when he died, I think it was in 2012, I believe, you know, the people around him included Steve Bannon, who took over Breitbart, pulled it into this very kind of device. and political support, full-on support for Donald Trump,

included Ben Shapiro, who went into this, a direction that maybe was more about fighting the culture wars and producing something that connected with young people and young conservatives. But lots of people came out of his orbit, all of whom kind of fight, I think, in some ways, try to claim his legacy and say what it was. I mean, he was this very complicated, difficult guy

who had this strange experience if he was in Hollywood and kind of a misfit in Hollywood because he was a conservative and got really addicted to this like early internet conversation on these message boards where this guy named Matt Drudge was sending around an email of updates of like anti-Clinton theories and stuff. And when he was obsessed with Drudgeman Drudge, who was in many ways like a real breakthrough and the sort of tension between this wide open digital media and this sort of closed off traditional media. And he broke out when he heard that Newsweek was working on this story about Monica Lewinsky. And as Newsweek is deliberating about publishing it, Drudge just publishes it.

And pretty soon after that, Andrew goes to work for him, kind of as this anonymous minion. Like he was, he's getting paid kind of irregularly, like whenever Dredge feels like sending him a check. You know, he has all this power of, you know, having access for like six hours a day to the most important political platform in the country. But nobody knows who he is except for like occasional journalists like me who caught on to it and started sending him links to our stories. And there was this moment in, I said probably when was the Janet Jackson and Super Bowl? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Somebody told me they were a party with him. And he's there like programming the national conversation on this crazy thing that just happened. The language he's using on the Drudge report is immediately on television. But no one at this party knows who the hell he is. And he tried to get out from Drudge's shadow in various ways. He co-founded Huffington Post with Ariana, which was meant to be a left-wing Drudge report. He then founded Brightbart.com, which at first was trying to sort of siphon traffic and money off of the Drudge report.

Like his likes, it was sort of a side hustle that Drudge granted him. and then eventually launched a set of blogs, which were modeled on Gawker, on Nick Denton's Gawker, both in their structure and in that their big scoop was, you know, a picture of Anthony Wiener's genitals, which was a very gawkery thing to do. Yeah. Well, I remember that well, and I got the date wrong. I said 2007, it's a sign of old age, Ben. It was the 2004 January Super Bowl. She was with Justin Timberlake, and obviously she had her famous wardrobe malfunction. So as crazy as that sounds, almost 20 years ago.

now, which seems like it was yesterday. But I had met Andrew at a David Coke conference. Now, the Cokes have also been mythologized, but back then, and just so everybody's clear, who paid tribute to Andrew Breitbart at his funeral, it would have included the likes of Mitt Romney, who was now a supposed rhino, but back then was sort of in the bell curve of conservatism. Of course, the Cokes now have been demonized, but I would have thought of them in 2009, 10, and 11 as more in the bell curve of conservatism. And so here's the optimal question for you. Has the media contributed to spinning things out or were things spinning out of control anyway? Or was the segmentation and the decentralization that you describe in your book creating the

political environment or vice versa or how are they harmonious with each other? Yes. Is that the right answer to that question? Maybe yes, yes. So you think the media had something to do with it, right? Of course. And I think, I mean, you of all people, I think, kind of understand the extent to which these lines that people imagine between there's this thing called politics. There's this thing called technology. There's something called business. There's something else called the media. Like those are fake lines. That's not how power works. And in fact, these things flow into each other very naturally. And they're in the same trends run through all of them. And I think that's really when you sort of step back and look at the story. of the sort of period that I wrote about, you know, these deep changes in particularly in digital media, but also in society, this collapse and trust in institutions that isn't just media institutions, rise in kind of individual voices. And, you know, in the institutions that are being replaced by individuals include the media, they include the Republican Party, where Donald Trump

is more important than the party. And all these trends sort of run together. And I think are really amplified in that kind of 2015 to 2017 period in particular by decisions made technically at the social platforms, Facebook in particular, that they're seeing this rise in what they see as engagement. And from their perspective, you know, they want you're spending four minutes on their site. They think that they can get you to spend four minutes and 30 seconds a day if they make some tweaks. Like, they're not thinking we want to elect some kind of politician or other. But what they do is provide this very rich platform, you know, for something that is very well suited to right-wing populism to this kind of confrontational, provocative stuff where like, whether I like

it or I hate it. I'm like, I want to write a comment and say, fuck you or say, this is great. And the system then sees, wow, this is this guy is really engaged. Let's show him more like that. And I think, there were a lot of forces in society that in real things, people were angry about driving it, too. And cable news is, you know, part of this system, too. It's not like there's some one factor. But certainly, this all played out on social media. And actually, one of the big ironies, like I was, because, you know, I spent a lot of time in the book covering these new digital sites, notably the Huffington Post, that had sprung up to help Democrats and that were part of, that were progressive and that saw the Internet as like, obviously is for young people and Democrats and progressives.

And the election of Barack Obama is very naturally the culmination of the new media. I think that's how people saw it in the a aughts. And in 2011, Obama went to visit Facebook. And he kind of went without saying, like, oh, Facebook's a democratic institution. It's where college kids are. It's like visiting at campus. And I think that was just this huge misunderstanding of what digital media was going to do. And in fact, the sort of politician who used it best, the movement that used the best was Trump.

Well, let me say this. And I want to get tested. I mean, I think because you have such insight into this and you're so real and honest about it. Are we at a point in time? I don't know, maybe 30, 40, it could even be 50 years ago. David Halversam wrote the book, The Powers That Big. There's just this great book about centralized media. I think he had Henry Luce in the book and Bill Paley. And there was centralized media. And there was, frankly, some. coordination with the American politicians. As an example of Franklin Roosevelt, they never showed him in the wheelchair. Sort of that was okay. Jack Kennedy had his share of adulterous affairs. They sort of left that in a quote unquote lockbox somewhere. That era of obviously is gone never to come back, but I guess what I'm wondering is the era of our national unity also gone because when you had the centralized media, and that was a centralized light beam into everybody's home, there was more of a unifying message. You know, we sometimes say to each other, wow, we can't even debate anymore

because I'm getting my facts from Fox News. You may be getting your facts from MSNBC or vice versa. And so now we don't even have the same facts when we come to the debate stage. Am I right about this? Am I wrong about this? Is there a cure for this? Or what is the outcome? And how do you think it affects our national unity and our current tribalism? That's a good question. I mean, I do think that the, you know, that era that's gone, that, you know, that people remember more fondly than honestly they experienced it. Lots of people, including like conservatives and people cared about civil rights and lots of others felt like totally shut out by that sort of shared fact zone and those shared facts weren't always facts. But I do think that era is over. But I think the era we all just lived through is over two where you have this unbelievably divisive landscape all playing out on Facebook. and on Twitter and on one platform. And we're headed into something more splintered, but maybe a little less divisive and shoddy too.

I think podcasts like this are part of it. People are finding voices they connect with and trust and looking for help synthesizing all the chaos out there rather than wanting just to like immerse themselves and swim in the chaos. I mean, I started this new thing semifor and that's how we're thinking about. I was just going to say that I think semifor represents that because let's go there for a second.

What does semaphore represent? I find the writing in Semaphore, you guys seem to be first of the news, give you a lot of credit on scooping, but I think you're also laying it out there fairly objectively. Am I getting it wrong? Or are you coming at it from a slant that I'm not totally getting? And I think I'm pretty good at reading the slant. Yeah, I mean, I hope, yes. I mean, it's Semaphore. I mean, I think our goal, I mean, I don't think anybody buys that, that, like, we can create a new class of news robots who just tell you, tell you the facts as they are with no perspective. So I think what we're trying to do is say, you know, we're reporters who know what we're talking about.

And we can get, you know, we can break news. We can tell you things you didn't know. And we'll also tell you what we think about that, what we think it means that, like, we think Scaramucci totally screwed this thing up. But also, we want to recognize, like, we could be wrong about that. We're not going to be wrong about the facts. I mean, enough people have written that about me. I don't think you guys need to pile on.

And if somebody else thinks you did a fabulous job, we're going to include, we're going to go out of our way to find somebody who disagrees with us and include their voice too. And, you know, if there's perspectives from other kinds of, countries, from other angles, we're going to try to sort of pull all that stuff together. Because I think part of the experience of reading the news now is thinking, like, what, like, what isn't this publication telling me? Like, this all seems too simple. Like, what's the alternate point of view? And then you read something in the New York Times and you go out and Google the same story to, like, read it a few other places and try to triangulate what's going on.

And I think our sort of perspective is we want to help you do that rather than try to feed you a kind of simpler story or simpler perspective. I think I think it's very, very fair. I want to, I'm going to go to the subtitle of this book, genius, rivalry, and the delusion in the billion-dollar race to go viral. So let's, I'm going to go to delusion first, if you don't mind. Yeah. Okay. And then we'll go to rivalry and genius. But let's focus on delusion.

Who are the most deluded? I mean, I think that the people, you know, Jonah Peretti, Nick Denton, me, like everybody who thought that we could kind of ride this tiger and both that we could exercise some level of control over it, but also that the people running these big platforms, Mark Zuckerberg in particular, would ultimately want to align them with professional journalism and professional entertainment, that it was going to be in their interest to, like the way the cable operators, you know, create an environment where CNN and ESPN and MTV could thrive, that these new social platforms would ultimately need to create an environment where journalism could thrive, among other things. Just wasn't true. Like that was a mistake.

I don't know if it was an evident. It was a delusion or just wrong, but that was a huge error. That's why I think you look around, you see vice, you see BuzzFeed. You see all these places really struggling. I think it would make something a delusion is that you have some certainty or you at least have some belief that it's going to go a certain way when the facts represent otherwise. I mean, I mean, there was delusion on the Trump campaign in 2016 about the ability to control the president, who was going to control him. I had dinner. I went with General Kelly to the Marine Corps Scholarship

Foundation dinner. And we were obviously reminiscing about my firing, but we were also reminiscing about the Trump administration and how difficult it was, but how we were all delusional. Okay, so delusion is an interesting word. We can get things wrong. And sometimes we get it wrong, not because the facts are wrong, but because of our prism in terms of looking at the fact. You know, we have a tendency to want to alter it to fit a truth that we may believe. I guess where I'm going from in that, Ben, what is the thing that you all were guided to? You thought you were going to be the next time magazine virtually, you thought, like, what was the vision at the time? I mean, it really was the idea that just as like, you know, the advent of printing had

created this whole profusion of newspapers, like, that hadn't existed before of the certain kind of like mass ability to print. And particularly, though, Cable, just to dwell on that and go back to it. Because it's so, it's hard to understand how people were thinking, like, what were investors who put hundreds of millions of dollars into new media thinking? Like, how do you explain that? And the actual answer is Cable, you know, people, laid wires in the ground, they needed all this content to fill those new pipes. And they, you know, hired MTV and ESPN to do that. And they built huge businesses and made enormous amounts of money. And I think people who were investing in that space, that was fundamentally what they thought was

going to happen. That these were new permanent pipes for the transmission of information, Facebook and Twitter and Snap and Pinterest and whatever. I think it's fascinating. I mean, it makes your book a very, your book is great, even for people that are not interested in journalism, just interested in business and the current Ziteguess, the book is phenomenal. We're running out of time here. I want to go to my five words. So every one of my authors gets five words, Ben, and then you need to react to those five words, sort of like the Malcolm Gladwell Blink sort of a thing. I say the word and you say blank. Ready? Let's start. Buzzfeed. Viral. Are we just, we're just free associating here? Or should I

like talk for a while? Yeah, no, free associate. Yeah, viral, right? Viral. I say BuzzFeed, you say viral. About vice. I say vice. You say what? Brand. Very big. Your brand. Okay. Facebook. Out of fashion.

Okay. So Facebook has jumped a shark. What about semaphore? You know, please sign up. All right. That could be your best one. Okay, I got to go to one subject, which is a thorny one for me and less so prox for you. Let's go to Sam Bankman-Fried.

I say, I say what? I'll tell you what I say. I say betrayal. I mean, that's my one word. but what do you say? Yeah, I mean, I feel that way too. I mean, I didn't have the kind of, we didn't, you know, he invested in our company and didn't, I didn't have the kind of complicated relationship or exposure that you guys did,

but also, yeah, I mean, he really presented himself as something he wasn't. Yeah. Yeah, which is, you know, unfortunately going to happen. Okay, in our last 30 seconds, I don't know anything about the media. I'm in the bookstore on Amazon. I see the title, traffic, genius, rivalry, and delusion in the billion dollar race to go viral. I'm buying the book because why, Ben Smith? Because it tells you how we got here. Yeah, I think that's it. I mean, it's an excellent examination of the social Zyde guest and it'll get you right up to

speed on where we are and potentially where we're going. You wrote a phenomenal book. I wish you great success with it. And thank you for joining us today on Open Book. Yeah, thanks for having me. This is really fun. So you just heard from the legendary Ben Smith, who's been around the block in the old world, the new world, and the future world, let's just face it. Whatever's going on in the media in the next decade, I surely expect Ben Smith will be at the cutting edge of it. I thought he provided us great insight today into the history of online news media. And his book, Traffic, is an incredibly important read if you want to know not only where

we were, how we got to where we were, where we are now, but where we're going. I think it's elemental to understand that the political process here in the United States, and around the world has been affected by technology because the technology allows us for more variety. It allows us for more segmentation and more confirmed biases where we can just sit in our right-leaning or left-leaning pods and stew amongst ourselves. It's also become very clear that we are no longer litigating the facts together. It's not like we're watching Walter Cronkite on CBS Evening News at 630. And then we talk about it at the watercour. cooler the next day. We're scrolling in areas of the world that make us feel good about ourselves

and reassure us, which is why we're seeing all of this tribalism now and all of this contention. So the technology is changing. Who knows? Maybe Twitter is going to silently or surprisingly become a cable news operation. I could see a scenario where there's 15 or 20 shows on Twitter. Some of them are left-leaning shows, right-leaning shows. Could be the Krasenstein-Bride. others. The point being is that Elon Musk is trying to create this very robust platform. We go on Twitter today, you can get 800,000 to a million viewers very quickly, often eclipsing anything that is in the more traditional cable news business. So listen to Ben, pick up his book, Traffic. I think it's super important to understand where things are going right now and where they could be in the next 10 years.

And man, it's going to affect our politics as it is already. All right, Ma, you're ready to join the show? I'll try. Go ahead. Okay, so what happened with the Maserati, Ma'am? What happened? You were driving on Main Street in Port Washington, and then... And maybe you turned right in front of a cop, and I wasn't paying attention to see who was behind me. And he was on the motorcycle, and I told him that I was the only... I was 86 years old, and I never had a ticket in my life, and I said, if you give me a ticket, you'll never have luck. I said, but by the way, if you half off the bike, I'll show you how to drive it.

Okay, so what did the police officer say to all? all that. So just to be clear, you did a U-turn right in front of them. You affronted him. So he put the sirens on. He stopped you. He asked you for your license and registration. And then, of course, you started talking back to him, right? Yeah. And I think, and Ghost probably taught you how to drive the bike? And he said, yeah, how do you know that? I think it's ghost is my brother. Right. So that would be my 94-year-old World War II veteran who passed away a few years ago, your brother, known as the ghost in the town, who had a motorcycle shop. Right. Okay. He let you let you off the ticket, tomorrow, what happened? So he looked at my license and he said, you're scaramucci. I said, yeah, but I'm

born to feel. So, I mean, how can you give me a ticket? Okay. I don't think you can give me a ticket. He's what, but don't get him in trouble. He said, I have to go through the motion. And they believe I'm giving you a ticket because people have seen you make the U-Church. Okay. So I said, are you going to give me a ticket or not? You know, and I was challenging him, like, you know, and he says, well, you shut the hell up for a minute. I'm not going to give you a ticket because you'd go sister. Okay. And you would, and you would like to hop on my wife and Shelby had drive it. All right. So you talked yourself out of the ticket. I talked myself. And you're, and you're driving around at 86 and a Maserati on sport, on sport, on sport mode. And this is the first or

second time you've been stopped in the last year in the car. Uh, second. Okay. All right. I mean, so this is totally normal for an 86 year old, right? I don't know, but I, I know how to handle the car very well. I just left your house and your driveway is a little complicated. And she came out to make sure I would do it, right? And I did it fine, one, two, three. Okay. So far, knock on wood, I can really do it. All right, let me switch topics for a second.

I just think it's interesting so that, you know, because people think I'm crazy. And so, I mean, they just need to know that the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree, which is why I like having you on the show. So let me switch topics. We had somebody on that wrote a book about the news, Ma. So the news has really changed from the days of Walter Cronkite and CBS News. Right. And so how has it changed?

What do you think of the news today? How do you consume the news, Ma? What do you watch? I watch Channel 2. Okay, so you watch the local news, Channel 2. Yeah, Channel 2. Is that any different from what you did 50 years ago? Not really.

It's very similar. You know, there's more violence in this world. And I don't like all the countries. I don't know what you would call me, but I think China is trying to be number one, and the United States is trying to be number two. And I don't think they'll ever be number one because it's not the land of the three. Okay.

All right. Let me ask you a different question, okay? You ready? Go ahead. What papers are you reading? I read the newsday, safely, and the New York Post. Okay. So those are your two favorite papers.

And have they changed a lot over the years? Or they still sort of... Well, I think the New York Post is more gossipy. You know, when the Newsday is just a regular account. You know, it's okay. It's not been great. You know? All right.

So, Ma, the way you really get your news, though, I mean, who's fooling who? The way you really get your news is through the telephone. Am I wrong? How many hours a day? How many hours a day do you think you talk on the telephone? Be honest. I love to talk on the phone.

I have a lot of acquaintances that I have some very good friends and my very good friends, and I talk almost every day. So, you know, I talk quite a bit on the phone. Several hours a day, right? Right, absolutely. And then you have call waiting. I could be sometimes calling you, but the phone's busy, which means you have two people going at once. You're like, hold on a minute, and you're switching back and forth between the different people, right?

That's true. Uh-huh. Why are you laughing, Ma, because you like the cacchia on? Yeah, I am a cat-yard-on. What does that mean? What is that? That's the slang expression in Italian. It's my mind that I like to talk.

You like to talk a lot. Cac-Git-on, right? I love people, and I don't, my mother was very tall, and I'm very short, and she was very regal and very straight. And I didn't really take after her in looks, but I took after her with, I like people in my house. I don't like my house quiet. I like people. I like my children in my house, my grandchildren, friends in my house. I like my house full of people.

And I don't care if people walk in in my house on the down. Okay. And that was my mother. And my father was the opposite. He used to say, why the hell do you have so many people? And she said, you baby leave my country and they're my friends. They're my friends. You're really like a local news junkie, though, meaning like you love the news in and around Port Washington, right?

Like, have I asked you who was having an affair with who, you probably know, right? Or who's gossiping about who? Someone's bound to tell you. Someone's bound to tell you, right? There's no secret unless one of the other persons is dead, right, ma? Right. Right. Okay.

And so someone's bound to tell you. So how do you get the information out of people, ma'am? You just sit there and listen, or you do a little Barbara Walters like prying on them? Or how do you do it? No, I just sit and listen. Honestly, I've had mixed. experience of that. So I just kind of sit and listen and I don't, I don't really dwell on it. Right. You don't really like hurting people. That's one of your good traits. So you don't,

you don't like, you don't like using that against people. No, I don't. All right. But Ma, let me ask you this. When you read the paper or watch the news, do you believe everything you see, or now there's some level of skepticism about everything? Right now, I think that, I don't think there is a level of the insectical. I can't say the word right, but I don't think there is, because I think that the world has changed, not for the better. I think that we need a, I don't know if I'm going to be quoted, but I think our president is too easy, greasy, and I think we need someone strong like you.

All right, Ma, I know you want me. You make the country better. Right, you want to ruin my life. Okay. All right, what outs, ma'am? That's it, baby. All right, I love you. I'll call you later.

Thank you for joining Open Book. I am Anthony Scaramucci, and that was Open Book. Thank you for listening. If you like what you hear, tell 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 or chat more about the discussions, it's at Scaramucci on Twitter or Instagram. You can also text me at plus 1, 917, 909-2996. I'd love to hear from you.

I'll see you back here next week.