Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - Power, Ego, and the Dark Side of Human Nature with Robert Greene

Episode Date: February 28, 2023

In this episode, Anthony talks with New York Times bestselling author, Robert Greene. They discuss Robert’s great work including The 48 Laws of Power, The Laws of Human Nature, The Art of Seduction, The 50th Law and more.  Robert walks Anthony through his own journey, and they dissect some of Anthony’s path.   They discuss the dark side, questioning whether we all have one, and they look at greed, cynicism and how to fully understand human nature. Robert considers our current moment and all it entails including war and conflict, and the current balance of global power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I am Anthony Scaramucci, and welcome to Open Book, where I talk 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 number one New York Times bestselling author Robert Green, and I've read every one of his books. What a fascinating man.

Most of us will have come across one of Robert Green's books, whether it's the 48 laws of power, the 33 strategies of war, the art of seduction, the laws of human nature, to name a few. I think Robert is one of the greatest thinkers of our generation. A modern-day Machiavelli.

And by the way, McIvelli has got a bad rap. And you hear the word Machiavelli, or Machiavellian, it sounds evil or somewhat malevolent. That's how we've been trained to think about it. But if you actually read the prince, and you read what Niccolo McIvelli wrote, as he was trying to talk to the princes of his time in the Renaissance, it was just common sense.

It was just an explanation of human nature. And there's a dark side to human nature. And that's one of the great mysteries for all of us. Elon Musk said once, man, I would love to meet the person that programmed the software in my brain. Because some of us like chocolate, others of us like vanilla, but we also have these peculiar predilections. And each of us has a good side and some of us have a less than good side. But of course, we want to cover that up and live in denialism. The most fascinating thing about people like Robert Green and Niccolo McIvelli is that they're willing to explain it.

They're willing to scrape off the bark and get down to the root of the matter, the root of the tree. We covered so much ground in this conversation from how we can all find our power to ego, insecurity and vulnerability, mastering our dark side. Well, the first thing you got to do in terms of mastering your dark side is to admit that you have one. How about that? War and conflict. And how we can really begin to understand human nature. It's sort of truly impossible to understand all elements of human nature,

but somebody like Robert Green is laying it out for us. It's worth the time to listen to him. It's worth the time to read his books. So you're obviously an incredibly well-read human being. And so you've taken some things from Marcus Aurelius and you've taken some things from Socrates, but you've also taken some things from Alexander the Great and Plato. There's some Julius Caesar in here.

The title of my podcast is an open book for a number of different reasons. There's a double entendre. I want to be an open book to people and revealing, because I think expressing human vulnerability brings you closer to people, but it's also an incredible therapeutic for younger people. It would be terrible for me to explain my life as Tufts Harvard Law School, successful entrepreneur, 85th person on the, you know, the Worth Magazine list of influential financiers, White House communications, albeit failed one, but I did work for the President of the United States. All of a sudden, you're glorifying yourself in the eyes of your children. You've read enough

Sophocles, read enough Euripides to know that you actually don't want to do that with your children. You want to express your vulnerability to them so that they can go through their trials and tribulations without feeling a shadow despite whatever your good or bad works are. So my public failings in some ways have helped me be a better parent, if that makes any sense. But I would say there were five things about your books that have left me with very big marks, and I would say mental tattoos that I go that far. Number one is the tract of appreciation, the idea that you have to come at life. I sometimes joke and tell people I'm too short to see the glass, Robert, is anything other than half full.

So when I'm looking at the glass, it looks pretty full to me. The second thing I would say about you is that you understand the need to appeal to people's self-interest. It's cynical in some ways, but it's just very realistic in other ways. You're a student of human nature, so we can pretend otherwise. We have these primordial instincts towards envy and hate and greed and gluttony and all these different things. And so the best among us do our best daily to try to control those things. So I first read the 48 laws of power.

Fascinating book. I don't know when you published that book, but I think I was 50 when I read the book. And I remember thinking, geez, I should have read this book when I was 25. But then I also said to myself, you know what? age 25, I probably wouldn't have got everything that you said in the book either. It's one of these things where I probably should have read it at 25 and then read it again at 50. Let's start there, finding your power, but how did you master what your power was? Well, it was a journey. It didn't come automatically to me. I had a lot of pain and suffering along the way of a lot of jobs that didn't

fit me very well. And I kind of had to go and learn from this and not get down on myself. You know, I knew that I could write and that I wanted to be a writer. I just couldn't figure out what form it would take. But in the process of apprenticing as a writer, I worked in journalism, I traveled throughout Europe, I worked in Hollywood. I had probably over 60, 70 different kinds of jobs. And I witnessed all kinds of power games being played. I was never the power player, always, always just an employee working middle level, low level, employee observing the different games that were going on. And so my experience in Hollywood was

probably the sharpest among them where I saw a lot of the manipulative tactics that I discussed in the 48 laws were actually being used in real life. And as a student of history, I read a lot of, for instance, Machiavelli is sort of one of the main figures in the 48 laws. And things that were going on in Renaissance, Italy, with Cesari Borgia, with the popes, with all the the kind of conniving and games playing. The same thing was going on in Hollywood and things that I was witnessing a lot less bloody, but still power games. And so my source of power came from just observing this all and saying, okay, I had an opportunity to write a book, which came about in the mid-90s. And I wanted to reveal all of these things that I think are kind of secrets. It's stuff

that people don't like to talk about. We don't like to talk about the manipulative side of human nature, which is actually quite pronounced and very strong. You see it as a theme throughout history. People who understand the power game, who have an instinct for it, generally get very far. Other people who can be very talented and creative, but don't understand the power game, they suffer a lot. And so I wanted to reveal all of these things, all of these secrets, if you will, that I had uncovered in my 20 years of working at all kinds of jobs. And in the course of that, I have discovered my source of power, which was revealing these tactics, these strategies. And since then, from somebody who had no power up until then, I do a lot of consulting.

I have millions of readers all around the globe. It's been an incredible transformation, at least for me. But that was sort of the starting point, the inspiration behind that book. Well, there's one law that I have consistently broken, okay? And that's law number four. It could be a result of my Italian upbringing. It could be a result of the way I got raised, my Catholicism, my confessional standing with the world, whatever it might be. I always say more than necessary.

But it's a great lesson because it gives you this opportunity. There's more bandwidth. There's more flexibility. I guess when I read your book at age 50, I said, well, I could have deployed a lot of these things and perhaps been more powerful and even perhaps kind of a more successful career. One of the things I wanted to talk to you about is the intersection of controlling your cynicism, staying fresh, staying somewhat idealistic. How do you in your work? I mean, this is a question I've been dying to ask you for several years. So I'm just going to hit you straight between the eyes, okay?

really understand human nature and to understand the impulse of the animal, one could get very cynical. Sophocles once said, perhaps the best among us are the ones that were never born because of this cynical aspect of human nature. Yet when I look at you, you seem like you have a joy de Vry of life. When I look at you, it seems like you're fulfilling yourself. And I'm reminded of what my grandmother one said to me, which I always say to my children, the best among us choose not to judge human frailty so harshly. But here you are, you're almost a clairvoyant, you've almost got an electron microscope down to the elements, the good and bad elements of human nature. And so you and I both know there are dark forces in human nature. I experienced them in the American government.

I experienced them on Wall Street. I've experienced them in the cryptocurrency markets. And yet I'm sitting here before you loving my life. So how do you blend and how do you balance all of that for yourself, Robert? Well, I'm somebody who's actually quite idealistic. And if I had to characterize myself prior to writing the book, I was actually quite naive and innocent. And so to me, the game is not to become paranoid, not to become overly cynical about human nature, but to be realistic. about the people around you, right, to understand them and to understand where they're coming from. So we talk about the law about appealing to people's self-interest, which I don't like to think of as cynical at all. So understanding that people have their own lives, their own needs, that their life is full of pressure, that people don't ever have enough time. And if you're trying to sell something to them, if you're trying to interest them in your ideas, you have to look through their

eyes, figure out what it is that they need, what they're going through, and then to make your appeal to them for help or whatever, through what they need to kind of supply them what they're missing in life. I don't personally find that cynical. I just find that realistic, right? And so, if you go around in life, like I did, being completely naive and completely innocent, what happens is you end up suffering a lot, right? So law number one is never outshine the master. You You violated always say less than necessary. I violated, never outshine the master time and time again. I tried too hard when I joined a company or group to impress people to show them how brilliant I was.

And I made a lot of enemies. And I was generally fired for it. And I never figured out why I was fired. And so to understand that people have egos, that the people above you who you're superior, who are your bosses, they all have egos, they all have insecurities, that you could inadvertently. trigger those insecurities, having that realistic attitude is going to save you a lot of pain, a lot of misery, a lot of unnecessary mistakes in life, right? So being aware of these issues, being aware that people have egos, being aware that people have their own interests, that people

are generally self-absorbed. To me, isn't cynical. It's just recognizing the human animal as we are. You know, there's a lot of shame around the concept of power. People are often ashamed of their own ambition, of their own actions, and it makes people very hypocritical. It's kind of human nature to occasionally manipulate, to never exactly say what you think about other people. So let's just accept that and not pretend that we are these angels, et cetera. So I don't see it as cynical.

I just see it as being a realistic attitude towards life. Yeah, listen, it's very well said. I want you to take the word insecurity for a moment. Yeah. What makes somebody insecure? Well, first of all, it's kind of natural to feel insecure. We all go through that. But it depends on your background and who you are. But oftentimes, when we feel insecure, when we feel like there's something about us that's vulnerable or that is kind of a weak side of us, we try to cover it up.

So people, they don't want to confront their own insecurities. They don't want to confront their own weaknesses, and that's what tends to make it worse. But if you're in a position where you feel confident, you have the experience, you know what you're doing, you know that, for instance, you're able to do this job, you're able to pull it off. You don't really have insecurities.

So a lot of insecurities stem from the fact that you're kind of pretending that you think you know what you're doing, but you're not really prepared, you're not really as experienced as you think you are, and you're in a role that you're not necessarily up for fulfilling. And deep down inside, you're aware of it. And I try and tell people, often the most powerful people around you can be the most insecure. I don't know if you confronted that with the people in government that you were dealing with. I obviously did. you know, it's not going to come as a surprise to you. My press conference, I only did one press conference inside the White House, but General Kelly, who fired me, told me it wasn't the phone call

I made at the journalist. It was my press conference that ultimately got me fired because I was answering the question straight up and it was causing too much attention to be drawn away from the principal. And boom. And so, you know, probably the best thing that ever happened was getting fired from the situation. But I definitely violated one of your laws. there, but I guess I'm trying to understand the insecurities, because if you take somebody that's the president of the United States, you would probably think that they're not going to be that insecure, that they'd have a game, that they'd have some level of self-confidence. But you're right. Sometimes these people that are in these very big, powerful positions are the most insecure, and they're overcompensating for something. So how do you handle that, sir? Well, you have to be aware of it. You know, the problem with humans is we take everything. upon appearances. If somebody acts like they're very strong and very confident, they're the boss, he or she reach this top position, they must be strong, they must not have any insecurities.

And I'm telling you, the people who reach the top are often the most insecure because, first of all, they're much more vulnerable than they were before, right? They have much more to lose than they have before. When you're young and you're starting out, you really have not much to lose when you're in your 20s. But if you become the president or the top of a corporation in your 30s, you now have much more vulnerabilities. You have your reputation at stake. You have people around you. So the other thing that happens when you're in a position of power is everyone around you is a yes man or a yes woman. They're telling you what you want to hear, right? They're trying to impress you. They're trying to get on your good side. So you're never getting an honest appraisal of who you are. And you never

quite feel comfortable about it. You never quite feel to people really like. like me? Am I as popular as I seem to be? They're saying they love my ideas, etc. But people in power are often very, very insecure about the degree to which they're liked. I think when I look at someone like Elon Musk right now, I see someone who's actually extremely insecure about himself and needs attention and wants to prove to himself that he's as strong and powerful as his reputation seems to warrant, right? And so he's kind of constantly playing for attention here. And so when you reach these positions, right? You never quite feel comfortable. You never feel, do I deserve it? Do people really like me as much as they do? You're not necessarily consciously voicing this or even

thinking it, but unconsciously is making you very, very insecure, right? We all have our superpower, if you will, again, self-described, and who the hell knows what our superpowers really are. But for me, I think what's powered me up over my life is my intellectual curiosity. I'm not stuck on one category. I'm happy to read about physics, but I'm also happy to read about philosophy, but then, you know, longevity, but then if we're going to take a turn into Machiavelli, no problem. I'm happy to spend the time and the energy in your book, the 50th law, primarily related to 50 cent. And Marcus Aurelius, when I was a kid, somebody handed me his book and insisted that I read it and there's been better translations from the one that I read

early on, but I have made it a habit of mine to try to read that book once a year. It's a short book, but it helps to refresh the ideas of stoicism and helps to refresh the ideas of living in the moment and to try to control your emotions, but also not to overreact the things that are happening to you, which sometimes we have a tendency to do on our modern society. Describe the importance of learning from history. And obviously, the general Orelius's book had a big impact on you? Why did it have a big impact on you? Tell us about the first time you read that book. Well, I read the meditations probably the first time when I was in college. And, you know, I was very, very, very impressed by it. I was very impressed by the honesty of it. He discusses things

that most people avoid just sort of everyday wisdom. You know, the thing about philosophy, so much of philosophy has no application to daily life. You read these academics, et cetera, et cetera, or someone like Kant or Schopenhauer. It's very interesting, but you don't know how to apply it. But Stoicism or Marcus Aurelius, it was like he was in the room with you. It was like your father giving you advice. It's philosophy for how to live your life to the best extent possible. But history for me is extremely important because we all need to learn.

We all need to expand our horizons. None of us is perfect. Our experience is limited, right? It's limited to the time that we live in. It's limited to the people that we're around to the experiences that we have. But history is like this incredible vast storehouse, this insanely enormous library of wisdom, of experiences, of mistakes that have been made, things that you can learn from, right? So I think it was Bismarck who says, I learned from the mistakes of other people, right? Because we all make mistakes. stakes in life and we learn very painful lessons from them. But in history, there are thousands of these lessons. And so the other thing that history gives you, it gives you a sense of proportion. It gives you a sense that things are relative. So when people get all excited in the moment like they are now about certain trends going on about, you know, this is what the moment that we're living in, when you read a lot of history, you're able to stand back and go, wait a minute, this is going to pass. This moment in history is going to pass. It's just a phase that we're going

through and things are continually repeating, but it seems to be something that's never happened before, like the crash of cryptocurrency, has happened thousands of times before in our past with all kinds of speculations and all kinds of financial bubbles, et cetera, et cetera. Nothing is new. So reading history is like, it's just like continually expanding your own experience and giving you lessons and wisdom that you can't necessarily get from the narrow experiences of your own life. It's incredibly well said. I do draw from history. I think it provides an anchor. It's almost like a grounding wire.

You're able to step back a little bit and be a little bit more dispassionate about what's happening to you on a day-to-day basis. I want to move to the dark side for a second. Sure. You know, when I read Herman Hesse's book about Damien, do you remember that book? Sure. I love that. When he talked about the Abraxas, you remember he talked about the good parts of our personality? and the bad parts of our personality.

Where I read your books, I really do feel like I'm cycling through Western and Eastern literature, and I'm like, oh, wow, Robert's brilliant. He got that from Damien, or wait a minute, he may have gotten that piece from Siddhartha, or wait a minute, obviously he probably read Magic Mountain to have this distillation from Thomas Mon. And so we have this dark side.

The dark side is interesting because we're all human, even the worst among us, Robert, are human. And we have a tendency to demonize the worst among us and try to make them either different from human. But you know, and I know, it's fair to say that we all have a dark side. So are we all aware that we have one? You mentioned the hypocrisy.

Do some of us try to pretend that we don't have one? I certainly don't try to pretend that I don't have one. I'm pretty upfront about my dark side and like the hot buttons that would get me to the point of a malevolent situation. But is that narcissism to have a dark side? How would you describe the dark side in human nature? And do we all have one and are obviously some of us in denial about it?

What's your reaction to what I'm saying? We all have a dark side. And in my book, The Laws of Human Nature, I explain where it comes from. I call it the shadow, which is to take Carl Jung's concept of the shadow. And basically, the idea is behind it is when you were a child, very early on, three or four years old. You were like a complete human being, a complete personality. You have had aggressive impulses and you had angelic impulses. You were loving to your parents, but you could be very mean and nasty to them. You could pull your sister's hair. You could play all kinds of dirty

tricks. And the next moment, you could be loving and giving and forgiving, et cetera. You are this complete person, right? You had all of these impulses that were natural to you. Then what happens is you get older. You go through school. You get five, six, seven years old. People start telling you you, Robert, you have to stop behaving like that. You have to be nicer to your sister. You have to be nicer to your parents. Teachers start telling you, this is what you should be doing. This is what you're not good at. This is what you're good at, et cetera, et cetera. Your peers, you're feeling these pressures to conform, to appear to be a nice person. And all of that dark energy, that aggressiveness, that ambition, that kind of envy that we all feel towards other people, it gets kind of pushed

down further and further we repress it. And then by the time we get into our 20s, That part of our personality is so completely repressed and forgotten that it sneaks out in moments that we're not even aware of. It comes out in sudden bursts of anger. And we could say to ourselves, God, I got so angry at this person like I was going to kill them. Where did that come from? I'm not normally like that. And then you'll say to yourself, well, that's not who I am. That was just some circumstance.

But in fact, that is exactly who you are. That is your shadow communicating. That is that four-year-old, that five-year-old inside of you. actually trying to come out. And so the problem, Anthony, is some people are complete denial of it, like the social justice warrior kind of cliche. They think that everything, they're so righteous that they have no dark side. Other people are kind of aware of it, but to actually confront it, to actually look at it and admit it to yourself, and then try to do something with that energy and not try and repress it. That is very, very difficult for us, because we all are trying to, we're

very much invested in the idea that I'm a good person. I'm rational. I'm rational. I'm moral. I'm generous, et cetera. And then to actually have to confront the truth, there's another side of you that isn't necessarily so good is very painful, but it's very, very, very necessary. And I explained in the book that this dark side contains incredible amount of energy and power behind it. If you understand it, if you confront it, and if you channel it to something that's more productive and more pro-social. So many people are kind of aware of their dark side, but they're also very much afraid of it. And so they go kind of halfway and they never sort of incorporate it into their personality. I think it's a fascinating part of your work.

I'm going to throw a couple of concepts out at you. So this will be a little bit more rapid fire. And you can answer them shortly. Ego. How do we keep our ego in check? We all have one, and we're all faced with it. Obviously, the best story on ego for me is always Achilles after the death of Petrochalus, and he's super upset at Agamemnon, and he decides that he's no longer going to fight.

He's got his ego in the game. How do we keep our ego in check? You have to be aware of the problem first. The problem that most people have is they're not aware, first of all that they have an ego, right? They're not even aware that that's an issue that they're completely self-absorbed and that they're riddled with all sorts of insecurities. And the reason that they're reacting so emotionally is because of some kind of weakness or wound to their ego

that you're inflicting on. So the main way to check your ego, the main way to check any of the negative characteristics in human nature is to be aware of it. To be aware of this is a problem. So I know in my life personally, if I get in an argument, and I'm a great believer that arguments are extremely counterproductive.

they generally don't lead to anything good. I often step back, usually afterwards, because I don't have enough self-control in the moment. And I go, the reason I reacted so angrily is because of my ego. You know, I have to be aware of that and being aware of it next time I can keep it in check. So the way to keep it in check is to monitor yourself to see how much of your behavior is actually being produced or triggered by your ego and your insecurities. Ultimately, my decision to work for Mr. Trump was based on my ego. It was an egocentric decision. My wife probably hated Trump almost as much as Malanya hates him, Robert. I mean, like very high threshold. She hates her. Oh, my God, can't stand it. And she tried to talk me out of doing it. I mean, Milania.

Oh, Malania hates him. Oh, my God. I mean, come on. I mean, when the windows open and you hear clippity clap, it's not a zebra. It's a horse. You know what I mean? Just look at her behavior and look at her reactions. And plus, you know, she's got too many tells.

It's sort of like a paid job for her at this point. But, you know, it's fine. She has her role. It is what it is. But my wife, Deirdre was like, don't work for them. It's going to be very bad for you. You guys will not mix together. Also, you made your own money.

He got it from his dad. It's going to drive him crazy. Just don't do it. It's a bad mix. But I didn't listen because my ego dictated that I needed to go work for the American president. So I was a blue collar kid. I went to Tufts at Harvard. I built a successful business.

And so now, for my personal narrative, I'm going to go work in the world. White House. You see what I mean? And so it's a cautionary tale about the misuse of ego and not having enough self-awareness or good parts of reflection to avoid that mind. Now, look, the good news is, apropos of your books, and a lot of stuff that Marcus Aurelius talks about is that obstacles and setbacks can be opportunities. I made the most of that disastrous decision and the eventual small atomic bomb that exploded in my life after I got full. fired after 11 short days, but I did have my ego in the wrong place, Robert, in terms of making that decision. So that's one of the reasons why I asked you about that. What about free will, sir,

and freedom, your concept of freedom. Do you think we have free will? Or you think we're a hive mind? It's something that interests me. It's a question that obsesses me, and I can't really say for sure one way or the other. I've always leaned more towards the idea that we do have free will, but there's always a sense of fate kind of guiding our life. If you look at your decisions, if you look at your thought process, so often you can't go back and go, was I really in control? Did that really come from me? There seems to be something else operating here.

But recently from my new book, I've been doing a lot of research in neuroscience, et cetera, and a concept that I found extremely interesting is we don't really have free will, according to how neuroscience analyzes what goes on in the brain just the moments before we make a decision. What we have is what somebody has called free won't, as opposed to free will. We have the ability to have an impulse that comes up from somewhere deep inside of us that we don't control, and we can step back and go, I'm not going to give into that impulse. I'm going to say no to it. I'm not going to smoke that cigarette.

I'm not going to have that affair. I'm not going to drink here. That is free will, but it's really free will. It's really something is coming up that you can't control, but you're saying, I'm not going to give in. I needed to meet you about 25 or 30 years ago, okay? I mean, you know, I needed to hear this sort of stuff. Let's switch to the 33 strategies of war. Another fantastic book.

So much of our civilization and things we take for granted come from warfare, which is highlighted in your book. When Teddy White, who wrote The Making of the Presidency in 1960, had the opportunity to interview Jackie Kennedy after the president died. She asked him what was on his nightstand. He said the Guns of August by Barbara Tuckman. And so when I read your book, I was like, okay, you've read all of this stuff. You've read Klaus Schwitz and Sunsou and the Guns of August and you even, you know, I think you read Rickover. Maybe you didn't, but I think you'd read Admiral Rickover stuff because it was all in there. Even Eisenhower's diaries of D-Day, I felt, were in your book. Certainly Caesar's diaries about his conquest, we're in your book, which was beautifully

written and well translated into English. But we're there again, sir, because what happened in the guns of August, you had the waning memory of statesmen and women. They were dying off from the Napoleonic Wars. You did have a small skirmish in the mid-1800s between the French and the Germans, but by and large, what von Metternich put together at the Congress of Vienna, kept peace in Europe for 100 years, which was an odd thing to happen because we both know that wars were breaking out since Charlemagne every 25 to 30 years. It was another big war in Europe. But Von Metternich understood the balance of power. You referenced Kissinger a lot, so you know he's a big student of Von Metternick. And Kennedy was obsessed with it. He was like, okay, how do we stave off war?

How do we cheat history and human nature to prevent the war? He gave that very famous speech at American University in June of 1963 talking about this, obviously push for the nuclear disarmament treaty. And yet, here we are, our nature, our nature guides us towards this. We have our living memory of war. It goes by the wayside. And a result of which we glorify it, and we become way more nationalistic. And we become way more tribal. The bellicosity of our rhetoric increases. And then we do the imperial overreach, or we do something that. it's damaging to ourselves because we don't anticipate the horror of war, not having the living life experience. So talk to me about where you think we are right now in the world. We've had

more or less 80 years, proxy wars here and there, but more or less 80 years of peace and relative prosperity in the world since World War II. Where are we now, sir? Well, we're on the surface at a dangerous moment where the kind of balances of power are shifting, looking at something like the regimes like in Russia or in China or even in Iran, we see states that I find personally extremely dangerous because they talk about in warfare, there's something called the asymmetry of forces. So when one side has many more artillery and soldiers, the other side tries to leverage its weakness into power, which is what guerrilla warfare does. But another asymmetry is on the moral level. So when countries like Russia, for instance, are willing to do everything, they fight a

kind of complete warfare that's not just on the battlefield, but it's on the information side. It's on social media. It's on the internet. It's through spying. This is something that came from the Soviet Union, etc. They practice total warfare using politics, using culture, using everything at their mean. Disinformation, server forms, tribal identification to force more dissension. And we're not like that, really, you know, I mean, we have our dark moments in history. Don't get me wrong. We're not, we're not angels. But we don't have, we're not willing to go as far as they are. And so. Why, sir? Why are we now willing to go as far as they are? Well, first of all, we have democratic traditions and we have open government, where, I mean, it's the ideal. It's not always practiced. But there are things that you can't do without all the branches of government, without the public knowing what exactly is going on. But when you live in a controlled environment, like in Russia or in China, the public doesn't even have to know half of what you're doing. There's no accountability. There's no kind of counterforce. There's no balance of power between different branches of government. So you have complete control. And I think we can be a little bit naive about these things.

So a lot of people are thinking, well, something like Ukraine, you know, that's not really in our self-interest as a country, et cetera. And I think it's extremely dangerous that we've seen through history people like Hitler that when you signal to them weakness, that is extremely dangerous. The only thing they respect is strength, right? And you have to show that to them. And so by demonstrating the fact that we're drawing a red line with Ukraine or with Taiwan, which might very, will be happening soon because things I think are going to happen there at some point in the next five years or so. By drawing a red line, we have a deterrent capability and we can control it, but by signaling that we're turning inward that it's only about Fortress America, I think is

very, very dangerous. I'm more on the real politic, more on the Kissinger side of having to look at the whole global picture. And so I think in general, we're living through a dangerous moment where there's not a real balance of power here where things can be you know things can spiral out of control it's not necessarily what led up to world war one kind of thing but it could very easily happen so it's a worrisome moment i don't know if you had a chance to read destined for war by graham alison i don't if you would recall that book he was the dean of the kennedy school when i had the opportunity to interact with president she's team from china this is going back to the transition president and she brought that book with him to Moralago in April of 2017.

Wow, that's fascinating. So I had the opportunity to have read the book prior. So I was one of the people, at least in the administration that was conversed in the book, what was the book about? There were 16 episodes throughout modern history where a rising superpower was threatening the existing power structure. In those 16 episodes, 12 of them ended up in war. the ones that didn't, there was understandable reasons. You know, when Great Britain was in decline,

but America was rising, there were enough of in terms of kissing cousins. They had the same sort of system, the same common law inheritance from Great Britain, sort of kissing cousins, if you will, so the British were more easily and readily acceptable of the American rise. But now you have just differences, you have economic differences, you have political differences in terms of an open system versus a closed system, and you have one power rising, threatening the existing power structure. Some of the stuff that's going on in the Ukraine is a signal, frankly, to the Chinese from the West. Yeah, so we both realize that. And so my position has always been that we need a transformative Western leader that's able to distill these elements of what I'm discussing with you,

and then to help the West to guide and lead the West as opposed to react to what's going on. To lead the West to better decision making and almost remake and force a reordering of things. And again, not a new world order in the conspiracy sense of the nonsense on the web, but just to say, okay, what if we were coming out of war right now in 2022, how would we remake the world, okay, to forge a newer, fresher post-World War II order, if you will? Because unfortunately the artifice of post-World War II order, the IMF, the UN, the World Bank, all these different things, they've had a good role, NATO, but we need a different rubric now. We need a different footprint. It would require a Western leader to see that, to push that, and then to sell that not only to other Western leaders, but the populations in the West to recognize, hey, we may have to give a little here to India or China. We may have to give a little on the fringes of what we're doing in order to make sure. sure that we can guarantee another generation or three or four generations apiece. So you get all of this. So this is why I was so fascinated to want to talk to you. How do we get better leadership,

sir? How do we get better leadership in the areas where we need it? Wow, these are big questions. You know, there is a maxim that we often get the kind of leadership that we deserve. The problem that we face in America is that our thinking is so short term that people in politics that rise to positions of power and political power, they have to think in terms of one year or two year time frames, elections, election cycles, et cetera, et cetera. So they don't have, they don't have the space to kind of create an overall vision of where this country should be headed. The kind of vision that Kennedy might have had when he launched the new frontier or Roosevelt. out with the New Deal.

Where you're looking at something, you're looking at problems, and we believe me, we have plenty of problems here and you're going, this is how we can solve them in a four-year or an eight-year time frame. We need to be patient. We need to do this, that and the other. So a lot of the problems that we're facing in politics stem from the public, stem from our short-term attention spans, stem from social media that's kind of continually roiling us up, and we're locked in the moment.

And it's hard to have leaders who can step out of that and who can say, All right. First of all, one thing that I always wish a politician would do today would be to say, what does it mean to be an American right now? What is our country? Who are we at this point in our history? Maybe like you were saying, we need to reevaluate the world order like that happened after World War II and NATO. Well, maybe we need the same reassessment about our own country, etc. But to sort of articulate a vision of where we're going of what you see this country should be in the next four or five years or so is extremely. extremely difficult. We don't give any of these people the space to initiate that kind of longer-term

thinking. And it's not only in politics, it's in business. I served on the board of directors of a publicly traded company, American Apparel. And I saw firsthand how this operates in business, where your attention is continually focused on the quarterly report, on how Wall Street is viewing you, on the optics of this and the other, of how much growth there is. And so to sort of step back and say, this is where the company should be in a couple of years. These are times where things are changing so quickly that you need a leader who can say, this is where our business should be going to kind of navigate all these changes. It's absolutely impossible given the pressures that leaders now face in business, in politics,

or even in sports or everywhere, shorter and shorter attention spans. So it's almost like we have to re-engineer human nature right now. We have to become more patient, more willing to have leaders who can say things, that will displease us in the moment, who will say, yes, our country is going bankrupt in a few years, so we need maybe make some cuts here or there, to deliver us some painful messages that we can accept. So it's a real problem. I think it's very well said of in my remaining moments with you, which are precious. I want to switch to something a little fun.

Oh, good. Who's your favorite fictional character, Robert? That's a good question. There's a French writer who I like a lot, Stendal. He wrote a book called A Novel called The Red and the Black. And the main character, Julien, it's sort of like he has to go through an educational process of learning what life is really about. It's what they called in German, a Bildungsroman. It's a novel of education or development.

And he sort of learns the hard way. He gets rid of all of his naive romantic notions. through all of these kind of tough experiences. I read that book in my early 20s, and I kind of really identified with the main character. So that would be one of my favorite fictional characters. There are many others, but that's who I choose for. Listen, I mean, that's a great one.

I'm probably a little more simplistic than you. My favorite by far, and it's from the book. It's not from the movie. It's Don Vito Corleone because of the understanding of his leadership role and the understanding, particularly when he talks to Santino in the book about the American presidency, and he looks at him and says, well, why are you so naive? Yes, I am killing people, but I'm killing made people. I'm not like the American president sending innocent civilians into war to prosecute my political purposes. And the point being is that power is coming in many forms, many shapes and sizes, but it comes with these same sort of tenets of responsibilities.

It's a fascinating take on the system, if you will. That's a very good choice. Very interesting. But I like the red and the black. I remember Giulian. That was something I read in my 20s as well. Okay, I'm going to, these are three famous figures. And I want you to give me a one or two sentences on each.

He started a little bit with Elon Musk and some of his insecurities. So let's skip him. I'm going to go right to Alexander the Great. Your thoughts there. He was a true visionary. He was one of the first people to see that there could be some kind of way of creating a state or a nation that transcended local ethnicities. He could create a larger kind of confederation of cultures, right? And he gets a bad rap because of the bloodiness of

some of his battles, et cetera. But he was absolutely brilliant. And he was a true philosopher king schooled by Aristotle, et cetera, et cetera. So he stands out in history as a ruler who was actually also a philosopher who happened to die very young. I don't know if you had a chance to read Anthony Everett's biography of Augustus, but there's a very famous scene. Yeah. You remember the scene where Agrippa and obviously his right-hand person, General Agrippa, who was more of a militant.

Augustus himself was more of an organizer and a good statesman but didn't have the militancy of Agrippa. They go to visit the cadaver of Alexander and, of course, the myth is, is that Augustus touched his face and broke the nose off the cadaver, which is lore in Roman history, but it's also, it's put into reverence by my fellow Italians about there is no immortality in the mortal world. So even the great Alexander, unfortunately, he's faced with his own demise, even though he's revered by everybody, he's faced with his own demise, or as our friend Marcus Aurelius would say, immomento morin. You know,

in this moment, this could be our death. One last person, and then I'm going to let you go. So you've been so generous with your time. I'm very grateful to you. Napoleon. Well, Napoleon is very dear to my heart. I wrote 33 Strategies of War was largely based on. He was the main figure in that book.

And I call him the Mozart of Warfare. He was incredibly creative and inventive. And I have my bookshelf here. I could pull it out for you. a 1600-page volume called The Campaigns of Napoleon, into the most definitive book on it, and it details every single moment of every single campaign of his. And it makes you realize that he completely revolutionized the whole concept of warfare. It has never been the same since, and he was absolutely brilliant,

and he has so many lessons in there about human nature. He had 10 years of absolute brilliance, and then 10 years of total decline. right so he runs the gamut of all these different things we can learn we talk about ego talk about insecurities talk about power going to your head it was extremely tragic what happened to him it was all of his own faults and so that era is so full of drama and so full of incredible lessons and so many things we can learn from it that i'm just i'm just obsessed with napole and i just found him endlessly fascinating I wanted to bring him up because obviously I knew that about you. And your new book, of course, The Daily Laws, which I believe came out last year.

I have it on my nightstand. I try to go through one of those a day. Thank you for writing that. Are you able to tell us what you're writing about now? If not, that's fine. This is a different book going in a slightly different direction. I had a brush with death a few years ago. I suffered a stroke.

It came very close to dying. And so I obviously, in my books, have many chapters on confronting our mortality, which is a major theme in Marcus Aurelius and all of the Stoics. And so I have this point that I talk about in human nature and in the book with 50 cent, that in confronting our mortality, it actually opens up this realm of what I call the sublime. It makes everything much more interesting, much more intense. It makes you appreciate life to a much fuller extent. So I'm writing a book that's kind of inspired by that about how utterly sublime it is to actually be alive in the 21st century and how we're not aware of that. We walk around so immersed in our banal daily lives that we're not aware of all the insane things that science is revealing to us about the world we live in, et cetera, et cetera. And so it's a book to kind of open your mind up to the awesomeness of these few precious years that we have to be alive because that is something that I had to personally confront four years ago.

Well, listen, I'm glad you're in good health now. It's such a pleasure to meet you over this podcast. Thank you for accepting my invitation. I'm going to read that book as well. And ladies and gentlemen, on Open Book, Robert Green, legendary author, and a wonderful, student of history and human nature. Thank you so much for joining the podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Anthony. I really enjoyed it. I think I could have talked to Robert all day. What a great mind he has, but I'll say something about Robert's mind,

which I find so fascinating. The reason why Robert's mind is so great is that it's open. He has an open mind, and he's reading, and he's learning, and he has figured out that there is three to five thousand years of written literature, both fiction and nonfiction, that he can dial into. This is a fascinating thing. We can have conversations with some of the great minds of the past. They're one-way conversations. We can't ask them questions, but they can tell us about their lives or they can tell us about their experiences or they can tell us about their observations of the planet. If you want a lesson in psychology and human behavior, read William Shakespeare, because he's explaining to you, exactly how humans think and how they operate. And here is Robert Green, a modern day observer of all

things related to the human being. What a fascinating person. Some amazing books. I've recommended all of them to you. I have read every one of them. And here are a few takeaways that I'd like you to think about. Number one, you have to control your cynicism and you have to control, have to, have to control your pessimism. You have to figure out very, very quickly that pessimists and cynics, they end up depressed and have terrible lives. Optimists and idealists, they end up becoming great leaders because they believe in other people and they're willing to forgive people for their human misgivings or their human failings, right? The best among us choose not to judge human beings so harshly.

This is the thing that you need to really take away from a conversation with Robert Green. There's free won't. and there's free will. Don't get yourself boxed in where you don't think you can do certain things, believe in yourself, and exercise that free will to live the life of your dreams. Ma, thanks for coming on the show. Okay, I got a couple questions for you. You ready?

Go ahead. Okay. Do you think you have a lot of self-confidence, like you know where it's at and you know who you are? Absolutely. Okay, I do too. And I think you gave me a lot of that. Who cares, right? Or like you used to say to me, festcon tends, right?

Like you keep a happy face. no matter what the hell is going on. And I used to tell my children to look in the mirror and tell them that they were beautiful or handsome so that they would have self-confidence and they would believe that they're beautiful. Yeah, from the inside out, not just the face and the Facha Bella, but the inside out, right? Inside out, yes. Right. Okay, so have you always been confident or how old were you when you finally figured out that you were this confident?

Well, I had brothers that were 10 and 12 years older than me. I was the only girl, and my dad and my brothers and my mother flourished made with material things. And it's very, very good. But I always did help with my friends that didn't have it no matter what. And that gave me confidence. I really did. Right. Right.

Okay. So you feel like you got more confident as you got older, right? Absolutely. And when I was young, I was told over and over that I looked like Natalie Wood. And how could you not have confidence when you went somewhere and people would come at you and say you look like Natalie Wood. That's a very conceited remark, but that's what happened to me. All right. What do you think about people who are conceited, though, Ma? Like, how do we keep the ego in check? You know what I mean? How do we stay humble? Well, I think you're humble

no matter what you have and how you have it. You're humble because you were raised in a family with my parents. I took care of my father who had Parkinson's and you were very instrumental in helping me. You knew that people weren't perfect and you became humble by doing that. So the way to stay humble and to keep your ego in check is to recognize that all of us have human frailty, right? All of us have varying degrees of weakness. We have to respect our mortality and try to take care of the people around us, but also not overly inflate ourselves or make ourselves feel like we're more important than we actually are, right? Is that fair to say?

No, not completely because when you can be humble and you can accept false and people like my dad having Parkinson's very, very badly. And you could help someone like that as a child. The makeup of the person's already there. You know, when you're born, you're innocent. And if you have the proper upbringing and love, you recognize love. And my mother was very loving. If she loved you, forget about it. If she didn't like you, she would let you know it. But you would give you the reason why she didn't like you. Yeah. No, I remember that about that. And you grew up with, and you grew up with her because you know, I used to shop with her, and she was a woman of status in her own way, and she taught you a lot, and my dad took you to the bank when you were a newsday carrier,

and you were a child, and he said to you, put $13 of your money in the bank, and you'll become a millionaire. That was his favorite number. He didn't like that people thought that 13 was unlucky, and so he told me, when I got my newspaper out, and I went to first federal savings and loan to get a passbook account, he told me to start it with $13, and I did. And he told you, on your way home, you just walked up there and you walked back that you would become a millionaire.

And it was funny on how he said it, but he really meant it because you opened $13. And I think it was on the 13th. It all was related to the 13th. Yeah, no, he liked it. Yeah, that's a true story. July 13th, I could tell you, it was 1976. It was right after the bicentennial. and I had the money.

I was collecting the money. You remember those little red doors where I used to hide all my stuff right by the television? I had the money in there and Pop told me, no, no. You got to get that. You don't do. Yeah. You told me you got to get the money out of there. You got to put it in the bank or an interest.

Well, Ma, let me ask you this, okay? But people are generally good, but you do think that people can be bad, though, right? More or less, everybody could have a dark side. Is that fair to say or no? The way I grew up, my dad used to say that when you have a lot of stuff, people could be envious, and that's not dangerous. But if they're jealous, then you have to pull yourself away. And that's how I was raised. And people were not really jealous of me because I shared whatever I had.

Like, if I got closed investment company and my friends didn't have it, I would give them some of the clothes that I just bought. Right. And that's true. That's true. God, that is the truth. So sometimes human nature being what it is, people have a tendency to do bad things. Some of it's not necessarily that malevolent, but some of it can be. Is that fair to say?

Yes, definitely. Yes. All right. All right. I love you, Ma. All right, thank you. I love you, honey. I am Anthony Scaramucci, and that was Open Book.

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