Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - Don't Judge A Book By It's Cover with Alex and Books

Episode Date: March 30, 2023

In this episode, Anthony sits down with Alex Wieckowski aka Alex and Books. Alex has taken the reading world by storm with his popular newsletter that provides weekly reading tips, book recommendations and thoughtful analysis. From The Great Gatsby and the Stoics, to which popular title is the most overrated - who better to tell us everything we need to know.  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'm Anthony Scaramucci and welcome to Open Book, where I talk with 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 reader, writer, and podcaster Alex Wukowski. If having a podcast called Open Book wasn't enough of a giveaway, well, guess what? I love books.

I am a bibliophile. I see that a fancy pants name for a book lover. I'm always finding an excuse to read. And a big part of me starting open book was to get you reading with me. Someone who shares my love for reading is Alex. You may have seen his social media posts as Alex. and Books, where he provides summaries, reviews, and recommendations. I wanted to have Alex on to get some of his top reading tips, but also to help us understand the many great benefits of reading, and we get into

some of our favorite titles, too. Your book Learn to Love Reading and the Alex and Books newsletter, which I find fascinating and I go to, and I also go to your website for book ideas. And so some of the book ideas that you've had on your website or authors that I've had the chance to interview. And so it's great to have you on. You know, I love reading. You love reading from one bookworm to another bookworm. Why? Why is reading such a big part of your life, Alex? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think why reading is so important is because nowadays we have so many sources of information. But with books, you have this curated source of knowledge that's coming from an expert. And what I like to say is like with a book, you get 10 years of knowledge in just 10 hours by paying $10.

And that's like one of the ultimate real life hacks. Like sure, you can watch like YouTube videos, but with the book, authors spend like years studying a specific topic. Then they curate it with the best lessons that they know. And then you could just buy it in a bookstore for like $10. So that's like the deal of the century. Well, it's interesting. You know, I stole that from you, Alex, but I'm an inflationist. So I say it's $20.

now because it really can't get away with 10, although sometimes some of these books are discounted on Amazon and so forth. But take us through your personal reading journey. When I read about your life, you weren't always a book lover. Where did you get the fever from? Where did you catch fire? So I definitely have to say that my college professor, he had a huge impact on my life and he probably doesn't even know it. But like most people, like when you go to middle school and high school, you really start hating books because you're assigned all these old books that are like 200, 500 years old. And they're in English, but you still don't understand them. And then I was like one of those kids where I loved reading fiction books, you know, Harry Potter,

series of unfortunate events as like in elementary school. But then once you get assigned all these boring books, reading turns you off and you just kind of like hate it. So you stop completely. But then sophomore year of college, I have this management professor and he pulls out a book from like his backpack. And he goes, this is the most important book I ever read. and this book is why I'm successful. And that book was How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. And up until that point, I didn't know like self-help books existed.

I thought it was like textbooks, poetry books and fiction. Like I didn't know there was a whole genre called self-improvement, self-help. And then I went home that night. And he only assigned us the first two chapters. But that book was so good, I ended up reading like half of it the first night. And what really was surprised me was that this book was like as entertaining as a fiction book, but as educational as a textbook. And I was like a shy kid growing up wasn't the best I'm making friends.

And here was this book that was over 50 years old teaching me how to get better, like, how to make friends, how to improve my social skills. So that kind of like blew my mind that book could teach me all of that. And then I thought to myself, what else could books teach me? And the answer was like everything. Like anything I wanted to learn, there was a book out there written by an expert that I could just spend a few hours reading and I would absorb all of their knowledge and all of their best lessons and best practices. So at that point, I just got like sucked into reading and just try to read everything I get my hands on. So that book in 1988 to really date myself, that's probably before you were born, Alex, okay, I took a course called Dale Carnegie. The legendary Warren Buffett now 91 recommending that course. He said he took it in the 1950s.

And so I don't even know if that course is still available today, but I took a course in public speaking and they handed out those books. And so there was how to win friends and influence people, but there was also how to stop worrying and start living, which I'm sure you read that book as well. There was a book on public speaking that Dale Carnegie wrote. Believe it or not, he wrote a great book on Abraham Lincoln called Lincoln Unknown. Did you know that? No, I didn't actually. Yeah, that's a phenomenal book. You can go on your Apple Eyebooks. It's available there. It was at a print for about 35 years, but because of this great thing known as Kindle and digital books, it's back in print and now available. But that's also a great book about our 16th president. Just thought I would point it out to you.

What about Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill? Did you read that? Yeah, that was also one of the early books I read that really kind of like, especially when you first started reading journey, there's certain books like They can grow rich. I would say rich dad, poor dad, that really kind of change your whole perspective on life. So those two books definitely had impact.

So people, you know, I wanted to start this podcast for a number of different reasons. I have this whole theory. I want to bounce it off of you that people are distracted. They're addicted to Twitter or Instagram. It's easy to scroll through it. It gives you a little bit of a dopamine release. But yet, if you converted that energy into reading, it would be more enriching. It would be better for your IQ, probably stave off dementia, all these other things.

And since most people won't do that, they may listen to a 30 to 40 minute podcast where I'm talking about books and listening to authors describe their work related to books. But make the case. Make the case for me why somebody should stop what they're doing, stop, stop, scrolling on Instagram, stop making TikTok videos, make the case for doing something that's ancient to do, goes back to papyrus, is to read, make the case for me. Yeah, so everything you mentioned, like all the social media, Instagram, TikTok, all of those are like forms of entertainment that kind of just distract you.

But if you could find like a book about a topic that you actually enjoy, that book will be just as entertaining as any movie, as any TikTok, anything like that, because it'll be telling you what you need to do to improve your life. If you spend 10 hours a week scrolling TikTok, your life is still going to be the same. But if you spend 10 hours reading a book, that could have a huge mindset shift on you and completely change the trajectory of your life. And also, like, reading books is one of those things that what I found is every successful person I met, they're huge readers, huge advocate of readers.

So it kind of just depends what you want to do in life. If you just want to be, like, distracted and have a little bit of entertainment, there's social media for that. But if you really want to grow in life, become a better person, learn new skills, become the best version of yourself possible, I would recommend reading a book to help achieve that. All right. So give me your top five, Alex. I got my pen out. I'm writing them down. Go ahead. Give me your top five. So, of course, how to win friends and influence people. That's like a must about communication, atomic habits. It's like one best selling productivity

books for the past few years for a good reason. Just an incredible read. Mindset by Carol Dweck. That book completely changed my life. It talks about why you want to have a growth mindset instead of fixed mindset. The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday. Great book to get learned about stochism. We'll teach you everything about like patience, how to control your emotions. So that's just a fantastic book on that. Also, Can't Hurt Me by David Gagins. Probably the most motivational book I've ever read. It got me running five miles every week. It took my motivation to go to gym to the next level. Are we at five? I'm writing. One, two, three, four, five. Keep going. Yeah, I can feel you have more. I can feel you have more. Can I keep going. Man Search for Meaning by

Victor Frankel. If anyone's in like a dark spot, it needs to help finding like the purpose in life. That book's just incredible about an Auschwitz survivor, how he was able to find meaning in a concentration camp of all places and goes on to have an incredible life. So that's like a must read. The compound effect by Darren Hardy. If you haven't learned about the power of compounding, I think Warren Buffett said it's like like the eighth power of the world. Yeah, you have to learn the importance of compounding, you know, your money, your investments, your health, your relationships, just an incredible book for that. And the last one. If you're in any creative field, The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield, that's like a must read for anyone in any creative industry.

So, I mean, there's so many interesting ones there. Let's go to Stephen Pressfield for a second because he didn't think he was even going to be a writer, right? He ended up getting there late. He's written a couple of exceptional novels about war, some of them related to ancient Greece. Tell us about Stephen Pressfield and your interactions there. He would describe what he had was a shadow career. It's like people who know what they want to do in life, but they're too. too afraid to go on that path. So they do something kind of similar to it. So now everyone knows him as like a famous writer. But before he was in like the ad industry. And he was doing something similar to what you wanted to do. But he was kind of too afraid to take the full leap and go all in on his like writing path. And that's what he talks about in the book. It's also called resistance. We know what we should be doing. But there's something stopping us from doing it. So that book just talks about how to like overcome resistant, how to pursue what you actually want to do in life. And then if you actually do that, you'll be much happier. And you'll be living the life that you want to live. I've read almost every one of those books, but you left out a book that I'm pretty sure that you've read, and I want to get your reaction to it. It's called Meditations, and it's written by Marcus Aurelius. Okay, did you read that one? Yes. Okay, so give our listeners a Alex and books synopsis of Marcus Aurelius in Meditation.

So Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor about like 2,000 years ago. So if you could imagine the most powerful and like wealthiest man in the whole world, and he was taking notes in his notebook just for his, own personal life about how he could be a better person, what actually matters in life. And this was never meant to be published. This is like his own personal journal. So you can imagine the most powerful, richest man in the world. And he's trying to keep himself humble. He's trying to keep himself human down to earth. And it's just like incredible that this person, this kind of position with all his power is trying to be like down to earth, humble. His one mission was just, how can I be a good man? That was really what his goal was. And it's incredible to read his work.

And two thousand years later, everything that he's written is still applicable today. So it's just mind blowing to have this access and perspective into his world of view. It's just like a must read book. Give me one thing. Orreelian. Give me one Arreelian thing. So definitely knowing what's out of your control and accepting it. But if it is in your control, do something about it. So if your plane is late, you can't do anything about that. There's no reason to complain, to cry, to do anything like that because out of your control. But if you're, you know, running late for a meeting or, you know, if you fall down and you hurt yourself, instead of crying and complaining about it, that's when you want to put like a band-aid on it, put some oint on it or something like that. So just if something's in your control, you know, you want to take action. If it's not, there's not much you could do, just accept it. And so many things are outside of your control. I think with the stoicism is embracing the fact that you really don't have control. You didn't pick your family of origin. You didn't pick the location of your birth. Your parents obviously picked your school systems. You didn't have a lot of choice related to that. Your economic.

standing in life. Some of us are born to very wealthy parents. Others are born to under-privileged environments. And so his point was just do the best that you possibly can with all of these different vagaries that happen to you in life, but also recognize the fleeting nature of life, right? Momento moray, right? The Latin expression, and at this hour, it could be my death. And so why allow myself to be overwhelmed as opposed to just try to seek some levels of enjoyment? But context and sort of a grounding wire for all things. Fair enough. Oh, yeah, 100% spot on. You know, and what's interesting about his story is he told the, and let's say, you know, to say what it actually was, it was a slave. I mean, we can revise history now with our

woke culture, but whites have enslaved whites, blacks have enslaved blacks. People don't want to hear it, but that's actually what happened. But he had a slave that loved him. He took very good care of him. And again, not judging, of course, slavery is bad, all that of the stuff, but about 1800 years ago. He told the slave to burn the diary, and he didn't. And he turns it over to other Roman centurians, and they eventually got it in the hands of the clerics who decided that they were going to replicate the book because it was some timeless wisdom in the book. Let's talk about your own book. You love to read. You wrote a book, Learn to Love Reading. It's got 365 quotes in it, which are inspirational. One of these quotes is from Cicero, one of my favorite.

Roman curmudgins. A room without books is like a body without a soul. Or how about from Menander? You wrote those who can read, see twice as well. What are some of your favorite quotes that you put in that book of yours? Yeah. The first one by Ray Bradbury, so the author of Fahrenheit 451. You don't have to burn books to the story culture. Just get people to stop reading them. Another one by James Clare, so the author of Atomic Habits. The quality of your thoughts is determined by the quality of your reading, which I found definitely to be true. A great one from J.K. Rowling, so the author of Harry Potter, if you don't like to read, you haven't found the right book. That's one that I tell people all the time. Everyone loves to read. You just have to find the right

book to get you started. Well, on that note, before you go to the next one, what are some of your favorite fiction books? Is the Harry Potter series part of that or no? I definitely liked growing up. Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief as a kid, that was a great series as well. Some more like classic fiction books. A big fan of the Great Gaspi by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Sure. Ernest Heimway, the old man in the sea. That's a super short but powerful story.

I interrupted you though. You were going to give you some other quotes. Yeah, just had one more. So it's by Mortimer Adler, who wrote the book, How to Read Book. So in the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you could get through, but rather how many can get through you. And this is something that goes out to all the people that think, To be smart, I need to read like 100, 150 books a year or something like that.

But the truth is, you just have to find those, like 10, maybe 20 amazing books. And if you just spend a year reading those, those will be much more impactful than trying to read as many books as possible. It's going for quality instead of quantity. And he's also the editor in the 1950s for Encyclopedia Britannica. The great books of the Western World, Mortimer Adler, edited those books for Encyclopedia Britannica. They're still available. You can get them digitally now as well. How do you go from being a reader to an author?

I'm a big reader. I've written a few books myself. I find the writing process to be very hard, by the way, because I'm a little bit of a perfectionist and I have some OCD when I'm writing. But how did you manage it? Well, in this case, the book is a collection of quotes. So growing up, I knew successful people did two things.

They worked out and they read books. And I figured I'm already doing the work app part. Now I just need to read more books. So whenever I would come across any successful person, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, and they had a quote about importance of reading or the value of books. I just saved it in my notes. And then eventually I had like over 100, 200 quotes. And I'm like, oh, this could be like material for a book. The goal of this book was just to create something that would inspire people to read more. So as you mentioned, it's like

366 quotes. So you can read a quote a day or you can open up the book to any page. And you'll, inside there, there'll be a quote talking about the value of reading, the importance of reading. Anyone can use it as a source of like just whenever they need some inspiration. or motivation to read, they open it up to any page and read it. But I ended up self-publishing the book through Amazon, which was a pretty easy process. And it only took me like a month or two to do it. So it was a cool project. And a lot of people really liked it. So happy about that. What's the best thing you've learned from a book? Like I say, okay, that is quintessential knowledge, eternal knowledge. It's wisdom that's been granted to me from an author.

Yeah. So whenever I read books, I try to find like universal lessons. A lot of people have different experiences, but they usually come down to the same conclusion. And one of the conclusions was you want to take full ownership of your life or as Jockel Willings says, you want to take extreme ownership of your life. So basically, you know, as we talked about earlier, the family you're born in or where you're born in, you know, you don't get to choose that. And it's not your fault that you didn't get to choose to be born in this country instead of that country.

But it is up to you to take full responsibility for your life. So you can't blame your parents. You can't blame the system. You can't blame some other people because that way you give power to them. But if you say, okay, I'm fully responsible for my life, that means you have the power to change it. And just accepting that truth has been incredibly impactful. And that's one of the lessons that, you know, I'll remember for the rest of my life. It's an amazing lesson.

You're a young man. You've got so much of your life ahead of you. I'm going to bounce these five words off of you or these five sort of concepts. I want to get your sort of immediate reaction. Give me a book title or give me some thought that you're thinking about. Best fictional storyline. I really like the picture of Doreen Gray by Oscar Wilde. Okay, so this is Oscar Wilde's book about Doreen Gray.

What happens in that book? So you have a man who just wants to enjoy his youth and all of his vices and a painter paints a portrait of him. And whenever anything bad happens to him, it doesn't happen to him. It happens to the portrait. And he kind of just goes after pursuing pleasure. And by doing so, by doing drugs and other stuff, Like the portrait of him starts to get ugly and uglier. And eventually, like, he hides this because he doesn't want anyone to see it.

And decades later go by, the man's still young. He's still the same. Meanwhile, everyone else has gone on with their life. You know, start a family, has done a bunch of other things. He's still just partying and having wildlife. And then eventually, like, one day, all of his vices end up catching up to him. He'll unveil the portrait and it's like a hideous picture of him. It ends up catching fire.

And he dies along with the portrait. And it's kind of like just a mission or the theme of. You can't just pursue pleasure all year of your life because if you do so, you won't have like that much to live for. But there's also something. There's Oscar Wilde, who is a man of many great sayings and wit. He was gay at a time when it was quote unquote inappropriate to be gay. And so he had this sharp satirical nature to his personality.

But I think his message was that you better like it or lump it. You're going to go through the process of life where you're going to start out as a baby and you're going to die as an old man. If you're lucky, they die as a young man. You don't know. I mean, the, of this improbability. But what you should do in your life is enjoy the process, the good and the bad, and not try to freeze it or have Peter Pan's syndrome or anything like that. It's a great metaphor for life and how to live your life.

It's the most important book. Now, let's leave out the Bible for this discussion. I mean, I mean, we know it's the best selling book of all time and a lot of wisdom in the Bible, whether you're an atheist or secularist or religious. There's a lot of wisdom in the Bible. I've read it several times. Let's leave the Bible out, the most important book other than the Bible. I don't think in terms of like mindset, yeah, mindset by Carol Dweck, once you learn about like the difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset, whereas a growth mindset is, okay,

I'm not good at this thing, not because I'm just terrible at it, but because I haven't put enough time or effort or practice to get better at it. And instead of looking at it as, oh, this is an obstacle or a problem I can't do, it's a challenge. How can I overcome it? How can I get around this? How can I learn about this topic? So just having that view of the world of, oh, it's not that I'm bad at map.

It's just that I haven't put enough hours to get good at it. Having this expectation of being good at something that you've never done before is kind of silly. But a lot of people and myself used to have a fixed mindset about a lot of things. But just reading that book, completely changed my mindset. And I love how she applies it to families, to relationships, yeah, to parenting and just all areas in life. So that's like a must read a psychology book. So, I mean, it was a amazing bestseller. It still sells to this day.

I have a bit of trivia for you. My first book, My Agent, is also Carol Jouac's agent. So my book, Goodbye Gordon Beko, was repped by the same agent. Of course, I didn't have as much success as she did. But what I love about that book is there's a saying from Henry Ford. Henry Ford once said, if you think you can or you think you can't, you're right. And his point was your mindset is going to shape and set everything. If you're down in the dumps because you have had some setbacks, well, guess what?

The world's loaded with setbacks. Can't be a baby. You're going to shake off your setbacks and move forward. I think Carol's point is that the way you shape your thoughts will create your attitude and back to your atomic habits. It'll create your habits as well. Most underrated book that you've read. This really good book is called A Calendar of Wisdom by Leo Tolstoy. So everyone knows Tolstory for all of the fiction books.

He wrote, you know, War and Peace, Anna Krenica, all of the. those fiction books, but a calendar wisdom is like a nonfiction book. So he spent 14 years collecting all of the best quotes, all the best lessons he's learned in life. And it took him 14 years to kind of collect all these pieces of information. So there's wisdom from all different types of cultures, philosophy, religion. And the best part is, it's similar to the Daily Stoic. It's kind of like the original Daily Stoic, because you could read it one page per day, which is how it's meant to be read. And it's just like three to five short quotes about philosophy, religion, or some other life lesson. And what you want to do, just read a page a day and just take a few minutes to reflect on it.

And that's kind of like a great hidden gem book that a lot of people don't know about. It's a old school book, but he's also Russian. So let's talk about that for a second, because the stuff in that book is from a Russian perspective. And so what do I mean by that, Alex? I think you know what I mean by that, but I want you to capture it for me. I think the Russian authors especially have a history of having a tough life, which leads them to really reflect on it and create some, they turn their pain into beautiful pieces of art, especially writing. And I think that's it. I think that was Tolstoy's message. You know, the Russian winters were harsh, the autocracies, the czars, the pressure on the Russian people. And yet it was a beautiful country with beautiful literature and beautiful people. And you could take any circumstance in your life. life and turned it into something beneficial, right? And so Victor, Victor Frankel was a big Tolstoy reader as well who wrote the, what was the name of the Victor Frankel book? A man search for meaning.

Man search for meaning. Yeah, I mean, it was a great book. I always recommended the people. I've had a few of my friends go to prison. You know, my friend Michael Cohen as an example, I gave him that book before he went to prison. And I think it helped him. Most overrated book. What's the most overrated book? who that's tough to say and I work with a lot of like

authors and publishers so a little words say any specific there I think though maybe some books were great at their time

but they kind of a little bit outdated today so maybe you look at a book like Tim Ferriss's a four hour work week like a great book really loved it

but now like 10 15 years later some of the stuff might be a bit outdated not as applicable today so So yeah, I would say maybe not overrated, but just, you know, a little bit outdated or not as like actionable as it was when it was first released. So it's interesting.

So I would say to you that the wins of war by Herman Wolk and War and Remembrance. Now, you may be too young for those books, but what he tried to do was from an American perspective, he was doing what Tolstoy did with war and peace, war and peace being a rendition of the Napoleonic wars and the individual personalities that were fraught and facing that war. Wins of War was the precursor leading up to World War II, and then War and remembrance was the actual war itself and the eventual ending. And so there are fictional characters alongside of real life characters and a historical drama. I think that's probably one of the most underrated books, because it's sort of left as I guess now. They did a miniseries about it on television, but it's gone. Overrated for me

was, I don't, you wouldn't know these books probably, but they were from Leon Eurus. I don't know if you recognize that name, but he was a very famous novelist in the 70s. And, you know, his books, unfortunately, they never really, they never made it to what I would call the regulars I'd guessed, if you will. And so these were books like about QB7, which was about the court cases in Great Britain or Exodus, which was really about the founding of Israel. you know, sort of like pop culture reading, but nothing overly, I'm sure the sentence of Leon yours are going to be super mad at me now for mentioning that. What book would you read again? You know, the book you wish you could read again for the first time, meaning, yeah, I love this

book. I wish I could just crack it open. It's something that's stuck with me. So I'm going to answer first, anything that Ken Follett writes. Anything can follow it writes, I find to be fascinating. I he's a great writer. And so anything that he writes is for me. But what about for you? I would say 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson. He was kind of the first author that kind of combined religion, psychology, and philosophy all in one book. And that book would, like, completely change the way, yeah, I lived my life. Yeah, he's kind of known as like the father of the internet. And yeah, I just love how he kind of looks at religion from like a psychological point of view and kind of like break things down. I was a psychology minor in college, grew up Catholic

Christian. So yeah, that book just really helped explain religion to me in a way like I've never thought of before. Yeah, obviously a huge bestseller. And where can we find your newsletter, which I'm a subscriber to? How would somebody subscribe to your newsletter? So if you just go on Alexandbooks.com, you'll find a link to the newsletter, access to the podcast, and all of that great stuff over there. And then also on social media, Alex and Books, just search that in. And yeah, I always have the link in my bio to my newsletter. And what's next for you, my friend? Just continuing to like motivate people to read books, just growing the Alex and Books brand. I always thought like, you know, you have fitness influencers, you have beauty influencers,

video game influencers. Why isn't there like a book influencer or someone that inspires people to, you know, read more books? So that's kind of just been my mission, just help motivate people to read books. And when I get those DMs of like, oh, I used to love reading as a kid, but then I stopped, but then you inspired me to, you know, pick up reading again and that changed my life. Those are kind of like the DMs I love to get. Hey, listen, I'm wishing you great success. You got a great future ahead of you. And I see a ton of books behind you, but I know there's a ton of books in your future. Okay. And smell like a book hoarder like me. So do yourself a favor, the stuff that you've read, get them out of the house,

Give them to somebody else. Gift them to somebody. Yeah, I'm definitely running out of space here, so I got to figure out what to do next. As Alex says, read what you love until you love to read. Don't get sucked up into the Instagram hype of reading for appearances. Actually enjoy it. Young and old, everybody should be reading. I stole a great line from Alex.

He said, in 10 hours of reading, and for $10, you can get 10 years worth of information. Of course, I've been stealing that from. I love that line. It's a team of people. It takes a team or a village to write a book. Authors have a point of view. They spend years researching something. They have editors, husbands or wives, proof reading. And lo and behold, you have this beautifully compacted, condensed piece of information or entertainment. And by the way, as most people know from reading, you get a lot out of fiction as much as nonfiction. If anything, I think fiction writers have the best sense. of human nature. When they describe their characters in a book, I say, oh, geez, there's a part of me

in that character, or there's a part of one of my friends in that character. Oh, I didn't understand what this person was doing until I read about that person in a book. And who among us has not gotten a psychology education from William Shakespeare? All you have to do is read his works, and you learn so much about human nature. So for all of these reasons, young and old, You should be reading. Follow Alex, Alex and books. It's a phenomenal way to get started. And of course, his love of books is shared by me.

Okay, so you know I love reading, right? Didn't I love reading even as a kid? Always. Always had a book, right? You're very advanced. You have a very photographic memory and a very, very good memory. So you retain everything you read. Even if you read 100 books, you can pick out the book that you need to quote when you're doing a speech.

And I love to watch you talk on TV because I know you're going to say something that will give everyone the attention of what you're saying. All right. Well, that's very sweet of you, Ma. What's your favorite book, Ma? What's something that you've enjoyed reading? I've enjoyed Washington Post because it was about... So the Catherine Graham, the Catherine Graham story, her memoir, right? And I also like Nelson DeMills, a Gold Coast because I come from the area that he wrote in.

and I also like the Gersh and the firm but his books are very similar so I stopped reading them. John Grisham. You like the John Grisham novels but you said it's too repetitive. He comes up with the same thing. Too repetitive. Yeah. Okay.

David Amon is a little repetitive. Daniel Amon. Daniel Amon about the brain, right? You like those books. I like to hear about the brain and I read the whole book about Ben Goh. He was bipolar and he was at his best when he was in a manic state. I find bipolar people very fascinating.

Don't ask me why. Maybe I have it a little bit. I don't know, but I love to read that. Yeah, you probably don't have it, but you got definitely a lot of brain chemistry going there, Mom. You remember getting me the encyclopedia when I was a kid? Yes, you had a full set of a world book and Wikipedia. You remember me reading that thing as a kid, though, right?

Well, you were a very easy trial to grow because you would be content reading, and you were always absorbing what you read. And you were like a very happy kind of kid. And it was a very rewarding to have a child that could be so happy. You were happy always in your own skin. And you've developed as a man being happy in your own skin. You reflect people that hurt you. You don't absorb it.

Like that stupid lizard, and I could be quoted, who said that about you. And Trump, who did not defend you because you speak better than him, you were happy in your own skin. Another party would have fallen apart. And you didn't. You just went over it. All right, so reading is important then, right, ma?

Reading is important. It keeps you very acknowledged on life and things that have happened. Like, I read the book about Truman and I thought he was one of our best presidents. You thought Harry Truman was a good president, right? Very good president. Why did you think Harry Truman was a good president, ma'am? Because he handled the war very well. and my brother Tony was in World War II, and so was my brother Sam.

But my brother Tony was the first one off the Normandy boat. And he survived the war. He survived the D-Day. Brownie fire wounded him with a hand grenade. Someone went nuts at the end of the war, and he got wounded. Right. I remember the whole thing, but he was also at the Potsdam conference with Harry Truman, and he had a lot of respect for President Truman.

Absolutely. And my two brothers and I were. I will pat myself on the back, never argued in our life. And I hope to God that my two sons of my daughter do the same. All right, Mom. All right. You tell me that every five minutes, Ma. So, okay, you're the best brainwasher that anybody knows.

You know how to brainwash people better than anybody. I love you, ma. I'll call you later. I love you, baby. All right, bye. All right, honey. I am Anthony Scaramucci, and that was Open Book. Thank you for listening.

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