Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - What Happens After the Oval Office? Seven Presidents Tell Us with Jared Cohen

Episode Date: February 14, 2024

This week, Anthony talks with New York Times bestselling author Jared Cohen. His new book Life After Power looks at seven presidents and their search for purpose beyond the White House. Jared shares untold stories of our former Commander-in-Chiefs, from departing honorably and learning to manage their egos, to questions of mortality and becoming “human” again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open book where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word from authors and historians to figures and entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe, wherever you get your podcast, and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know,

I can roll with the punches, so let me know. Anyways, let's get to it. Life beyond the White House seems like a crazy thought, doesn't it? Where do you go from there? My guest today, Jared Cohen, has written a new book, which looks at seven presidents who found an even greater purpose beyond the Oval Office. If we are lucky enough to face the question of what to do in the next chapter of life, it could be a tough decision to make.

So let's see what lessons we can take from Jared's brilliant book and what new information we can uncover about some of our former presidents. So joining us now is a dear friend, Jared Cohen. He's joining us on Open Book. He's a New York Times bestselling author. He's president of Global Affairs and co-head of Applied Innovation at Goldman Sachs. He's a former CEO of Jigsaw. And you've written a lot of different books, by the way.

You are a polymath. I'm sure your mother's very proud of you, Jared, as she should be. But this book is fascinating, and I think it's well-timed. Life after power, seven presidents and their search for purpose beyond the White House. I'm a huge fan of your books. I want to talk about a couple of them if you don't mind. But before we do that, let's start with an open-ended question. What happens after stepping down from being leader of the free world? Look, it's the most dramatic retirement in the world, right? You're literally the most powerful person in the world, and you're either fired by, you know, millions of people and you go back to being a civilian or you get termed out and you go back to being

a civilian anyway. And you look at these presidents. They're these seemingly unrelatable people, right? They're only dealing with matters of, you know, world hunger and world peace and these kind of big macro level issues. And then they wake up the next day and they all of a sudden have asymmetry of information. They watch their successors, whether they like them or not, slowly dismantle their legacy. They're left with the relationships that are often kind of broken and fragile and need to be repaired, their whole pace of life changes. There's nothing quite like it. And all of a sudden, these presidents become figures that, much to my surprise, you can start to relate to, right? I mean, we all ask this question many times in our lives of what's next. And it's not just about

the last chapter of life. We're going to ask it several times throughout the course of our time on this earth. And we don't think to look at presidents of the United States, but the more dramatic, the transition, the harder the transition is. And the harder the transition is, I think, the more prescriptive it is. And so, you know, my last book looked at happens when presidents die in office. This one looks at what happens when they live. And I look at seven different presidents. Each got after it in a very different way. And each represents a different model for how to answer the question, what's next?

Okay, so it's a good segue because we're dying to know on Open Book why you chose those seven. What was the criteria that went off in your mind? Obviously, lists the seven for our viewers, if you don't mind. And then did you consider including any others? So it's an interesting question, which presidents do you include, right? And I was looking for presidents that I felt found a greater sense of purpose after they left the White House. And what I was surprised by is the story of post-presidencies is not a particularly happy one. You know, they range from presidents developing alcohol addictions to suffering from severe depression, many meandering and not knowing what to do. You know, Alexander Hamilton, by the way, you know, famously asked the question in Federalist 72. Is it a good idea for the stability of the the Republic and the well-being of our country to have half a dozen men who served as president wandering around the rest of us like disenchanted ghosts. And frankly, many of the ex-presidents wandered around like disenchanted ghosts.

The seven that I chose were frankly the only seven that I thought were really worth covering, all for different reasons. And so I look at Thomas Jefferson, who was a lifelong founder, three things etched on his tombstone, none of which was being president. His last act was the founding of University of Virginia. It was the third volume in his life trilogy. The other is obviously the Declaration of Independence and Virginia statute of religious freedom. I look at John Quincy Adams, who is a man who's presidency was an intermission between two of the greatest acts in history, one architected for him by his parents that made him president.

The other that he sort of stumbled in as an ex-president serving nine terms in the House of Representatives, where in a much lower station he found a much higher calling of abolition. I look at Grover Cleveland, who's the man who made a comeback. He's the only president in history who's successfully run for office again. again and one. I look at William Howard Taft, who represents, you know, a story that I think is familiar to many people, which is you have some dream, something that you want to do and you have to defer it because the timing isn't right. The circumstances aren't right. And all he ever wanted to be was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. But his wife, his mentor, Theodore Roosevelt, and his brothers wanted him to be president. And it's only in his last 10 years of life that he

becomes Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. I look at Herbert Hoover, who represents a story of recovery. The man lived 90 years. He's defined by three and a half of the Great Depression while he was president. He was known as the great humanitarian and a great businessman, self-made millionaire before the presidency, and he spent his 32 years in the post-presidency, not just trying to recapture his good name, but more importantly, recapturing his ability to serve the world as a great humanitarian and leader. I look at Jimmy Carter, who wanted to turn the presidency into a lifelong appointment, and he was the first one to take the idea of being a former version of yourself and build real infrastructure around it and use it as a platform. And his 42 plus years

as a post president is the longest in history. And then when I looked at the active living presidents, right, because Carter's obviously gone into hospice since last February. So when I look at the active living presidents, there's only one whose popularity has doubled. So George W. Bush's popularity is north of 60 percent. And yet he's done less to invest in his legacy than anyone else. And so I wanted to understand why. And it's a combination of his just dogmatic, Revereance for Washington's principle of one president at a time. The fact that that's aged well in the era of Trump when you sort of juxtapose the two against each other and the fact that he's managed to find post-presidential voice that allows him to advocate for issues that he cares about

through painting in ways that doesn't undermine his successors. And he's had a popularity renaissance. And whether you like him or not, it's hard to argue with that. And you compare that with, you know, other active living presidents who dogmatically and obsessively focused. on trying to build their legacy, they would die for George W. Bush's numbers. Well, I mean, there's so much there. And that's why I'm letting you talk because you're brilliant and you're erudite. And I learned so much from you. Accidental presidents, I learned so much because that's a weird circumstance as well. You're sitting there as the vice president at one moment. And John Gardner, I think it wasn't worth more than a bucket of.

And we cleansed it up and called it spit. And then boom, you're the leader of the free world. and those stories were very intriguing. This is different. You know, Reagan said in his book, The American Life, he said that, wow, I got endless number of phone calls and messages. The day I left Washington, I was down to, I think, the dry cleaner said I had to go pick up something in Santa Barbara. Bush, in the last couple of pages of his book, he writes about taking his dog out for a walk. And of course, you have to curb your dog in the residential area he's living in in Houston. And so he's down on his knees with a plastic baggie on his hand, cleaning the dog poo from his dog. And he's just letting people know that he went from being the American president, leader of the

free world. And now he's on his knees taking care of his leader, which happens to be his dog. And so you know the story there. I guess what I would say to you that is always fascinating to me about these people is how do they see themselves. I know how you see them. I know how I see them. But when you do the homework on these people, how do they see themselves, Jared? So, Anthony, this is one of my favorite parts about writing presidential history is you get to try to really get in the head of these great leaders who've been deceased for a long period of time. It's almost like what you hear about actors doing, right? So Daniel Day Lewis, before he plays Lincoln, he spends multiple years getting in the brain of Abraham Lincoln. And that's one of I find the most interesting.

And it can also be kind of a torturing experience writing these books. But look, I think it varies. These are seven very different men that I wrote about. And to sort of begin where we left off, George W. Bush is unique to any other president in the sense that he has this ability to live life as a chapter guy. Right. So when one chapter's done, he just completely detaches and moves on. He's not at all introspective. You know, he feels like you can't long for what you can't have.

He tells me when it's over, it's over and he doesn't miss it. And frankly, I believe him. That bothers people who are critical of him. but that's who he is. But then you look at somebody like Thomas Jefferson. And Thomas Jefferson, you know, this is a man who just personality-wise, he was what we would today describe as a serial entrepreneur or a serial founder. And at a very, very young age, he was a co-founder of the United States.

And he was well aware that he had built a sort of republic business that, you know, had many, many flaws that they couldn't get around to patching up or weren't right to patch up. And he had deep, deep anxiety as one of the last living founding fathers that if they didn't train the next generation to improve the product. The product wouldn't last. And so after writing the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia statute on religious freedom, he wanted to finish the third volume of his life trilogy and found the university, the first arts and science is university in the country to do this, which became known as the University of Virginia. The problem is, like any founder, he got saddled with obligations, right? They needed him to be vice president. Yeah,

they needed him to be secretary of state. They needed him to be president twice. And he lost very valuable Those were not things that he wanted to do. He wanted to get on to found the next thing. And the poor guy at 82 years old, Anthony, this is my favorite story in the book. At 82 years old, a frail Thomas Jefferson opens the doors of the University of Virginia. And within months, students cover their faces in mass in kind of like an 1825 example of social media anonymity. And they start rioting through the campus that he personally designed and architected chanting down with European professors. And they take bags of urine and throw it at the professors.

they beat another professor with the cane, and in sort of a twisted show of Southern Honor, none of them will give each other up. So Jefferson, who's the rector of the university, calls an all-school assembly the next day for all the students to meet before the disciplinary committee. And the disciplinary committee for the University of Virginia in 1825 was Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe,

the most intimidating disciplinary committee, past, present, and future. And so Jefferson stands up to address the students, and he starts bawling, hysterically crying. And so these students, they're so awestruck by this man that they revere, you know, just being inconsolable. And at James Madison, all of five foot one, tells Jefferson to sit down and he can't get a word out of his mouth before the students one by one confess. And this is the kind of man that Thomas Jefferson was.

And each one of these presidents, I think part of why they found a greater sense of purpose after the White House is they figured out how to align who they were with what they did next. And the consistent thread, you know, there's not a lot of consistent threads across all them because they each did it in different ways. But the consistent thread is each one of them doubled down on something that they were dogmatically principled about. Listen, it's fascinating. Jefferson, quite the life, got into a big political rub and row with John Adams. Of course, they became very famous pen pals and reconnected as friends years on in life. And then they famously died on the 50th anniversary of our birth on the 4th of July, I believe it was in 1826, although I can't remember

remember who died first. I sort of feel like Adams outlived Jefferson, but I can't remember if that's the case. Go to Jimmy Carter for a second. Longest post-presidency, as you point out, you get into great detail in the book about things that he did, why he did those things. He is ignored, if I'm going to be brutally honest, by the right. They ignore him. He's loved by the left, and there's been some revisionist biographies of him recently. I've had the chance to go to the Carter Library, and I've toward it. He did a lot of really interesting and really good things for the country, including at a time of Cold War escalation, raising the defense budget. People don't give him credit for that, but he did do that. It set up Ronald Reagan quite nicely for the 80s. But how do you think

Jimmy Carter feels about his presidency? He left the presidency as a young man. It's 42 years later. Did he do more as president? Or did he do more as an ex-president? So it's interesting. When I tell people, I wrote a book called Life After Power about ex-presidents, the first thing, whether it's Democrats or Republicans, the first thing people say is, oh, you must have included Carter. It's always the one that they, you know, Carter, Carter will be known more as a former president than as a president. Some of that is a function of how long he lived and that most people have experienced him more as a former president and as a president. But I also think that he's really the father of the modern ex-presidency. You know, Herbert Hoover was the first one to become an elder

statesman and the first one to, you know, kind of enter the global stage as an ex-president. But Carter was the first one to do it as a turn the idea of being a former president and turn it into an actual institution. And the former president is an institution. And by the way, you know, I think this is a tremendous part of Carter's legacy because, you know, the idea of former presidents is unique to democratic systems, at least as it pertains to them not being behind bars or under some other, you know, ill fate. And former presidents are a feature, not a bug of our American democratic system, even when we don't always like what they do. And Carter really leaned into that and redefined it. And so if you look at his post-presidency, you know, nobody can accuse the guy of being anything

but transparent. From the moment he left office, you know, he sort of described it as his involuntary retirement. He was a million dollars in debt because he had put his peanut farm into a blind trust. He was devastated over having lost the election. He was devastated over the hostage crisis. He was devastated over, you know, the economy. And he was a man guided by tremendous faith. This gets back to the point about principles. And, you know, his view was, I am guided by God to do, the things that I was put on this earth to do, and I'm going to do it for as long as I can in whatever way I can, wherever I can,

and I'll be damned if my successor has a problem with it. So in that sense, him and Bush are kind of opposites of each other. But he did it some amazing things. I mean, if you look at this disease called Guinea Worm, he basically eradicated it from Africa. If you look at, you know, what he did in Panama when George H.W. Bush, you know,

when Noriego was trying to put his drug trafficker successor in place, he really elevated this idea of election monitoring and election transparency, which we still hold, you know, hold in high regard today. But he also caused all of his successors, Democrats and Republicans alike, a lot of annoyance, right? So when George H.W. Bush is getting ready for Operation Desert Storm to get Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, you know, Carter's anti-war mindset kicks in and he writes, you know, secret letters to the heads of state of, you know, several of the permanent members of the Security Council. I mean, who does that as an ex-president? When Bill Clinton sends him to Pyongyang in 1994 as a messenger to Kim Il-sung, you know, he tells Carter, and no uncertain turns, you're a messenger, you're not president. You're not to make any policy you're to deliver messages.

And what does Carter do? He secretly negotiates a deal without any authority, goes on CNN and announces that deal, and that's how the Clinton administration finds out about it. So look, I think Carter is, he's an example of a president who was both a tremendous ally to his successors and a formidable adversary to his successors. So in a lot of respects, he's not just the father of the post presidency, but he also kind of represents the best of the post presidency and also kind of the worst of the post presidency and everything in between. Yeah, listen, it's a fascinating story about him. And obviously, there's a messianic field of Carter in some ways where he's here

on a mission. I mean, generally, I think he's viewed favorably, but I mean, the right is given Carter a hard time. Obviously, current presidential candidate, former President Trump has juxtaposed him and Joe Biden, and he's somewhat used as a rag doll by the right. And obviously, but that's the unfairness of politics. And so I've experienced that, and I appreciate it and get it. Let's go to John Quincy Adams for a second, because he was groomed to be president. He had two founders. I would think his mother Abigail would see herself as a founding woman of the American Republic. And so he's groomed by these two founders. He goes on to become president himself. But as you say, he does better in the House of Representatives.

He's also a former Secretary of State. What a fascinating character. So why does he do better in the House of Representatives as opposed to the presidency? So I found writing about John Quincy Adams the most inspiring part of this book. And if I'm biased, I would say that my favorite ex-president is John Quincy Adams. So, again, he has this first act that's architected for him by his parents. It's not his choice. His parents are making their son president of the United States.

And he ends up as president because of a deal struck with Henry Clay when the 1824 election goes to the House of Representatives. And it gets sort of called the corrupt bargain. And there's this moment that I write about in the book where John Quincy Adams is swimming in the Potomac. And he gets overwhelmed by the current and his clothes get weighed down. And he nearly drowns and dies. And he has to strip down naked. And him and his, you know, his ballet end up riding buck naked in a horse and buggy back to the White House. and he gets there. And it's just the symbolism is just like outrageous, right? Which is, you know,

he's naked and humiliated at the precise moment where his presidency has fallen apart and he's still got three more years. And so he gets defeated for reelection in 1828, which is a foregone conclusion. And all this man knows how to do is what his parents set him up for, which is to serve the republic. And it wasn't supposed to end this way. And he obsessively writes in his diary in the most self-loathing, self-deprecating, you know, violin-playing manner. And finally, you know, he's wandering around like a disenchanted ghost in Quincy, Massachusetts. And finally they convinced him and say, look, you've just got to go back into service. It's like the only thing that you know how to do.

He's already been president. He's already been secretary of state. He's been an ambassador multiple times. He's already served in the Senate. So the only thing left to do is go and serve in the House of Representatives. It's like the lowest position that he can possibly imagine. But he does it. And so he ends up as an ex-president sort of a novel.

in the House of Representatives, and he doesn't know what to do when he's there. And in 1830, if you were in the House of Representatives and you didn't know what to do, you just kind of read petitions. And it turned out that the petitions, some of them were from anti-slavery activists and abolitionists. And the abolitionist movement was a fringe movement there. It was seen as, back then, it was seen as very radical. And there was a norm that you didn't talk about slavery in Congress at the time. But Adams is reading these petitions.

And he's shocked when the slaveocracy in the House lashes out at him for reading these petitions. and he's extremely principled about the right to petition. And the louder the critiques, the more voracious he is about accepting these petitions and reading them. The more he does that, obviously, the more demand there is. And he's just all the sudden inundated with petitions from all over the country. And they decide to gag him, right? You know, we talk about cancel culture today.

In the 1830s, they tried to cancel a former president turned member of the House of Representatives. But his brain was so outsized relative to all the others in the House of Representatives that his nine terms is just a story of him outmanage. maneuvering and out foxing and out intellectualizing, all of these mediocre men that he served with. And, you know, he sort of wakes up one day as he's sort of, you know, fighting on a daily basis to have all these petitions read. And he just wakes up one day and realizes that two things have happened. One, he's become an abolitionist. Two, he's taken a movement that was fringy and radical and he's mainstreamed it. And to put this in perspective, I mean, John Quincy Adams began his career

appointed by George Washington to serve in his administration. In his ninth term, the House of Representatives, he dies on the House floor serving alongside a freshman congressman named Abraham Lincoln from Illinois, this living connection between the founding generation and two generations later that would go on to emancipate the slaves. Listen, I could listen to you for hours, Jared. You're fascinating writer and a great public speaker. I've been dying to ask you this question, so I got to see if I can frame it right. Were we right in terms of the formation of the presidency? And so I'm I want to go back in our history.

There was discussion about a potential king. Washington declined it. And we have this weird job. You know, from a parliamentarian perspective, this executive branch is a misnomer from the way the parliamentary democracies got formed in Europe. Where we write to create a presidency. And what is the legacy of the presidency, all 46 of them? So look, it's, we take the, we take.

the evolution of Jeffersonian democracies for granted, and we often forget just how novel and revolutionary it was at the time, this idea of the peaceful transfer of power and elected by the people, albeit not all people back then. I think there's two things that are remarkable about the presidency, and I think about my two books, right? So accidental presidents and life after power in some respects, it's a tale of two transitions. It's the transition of somebody who wasn't really elected, you know, transitioning to the presidency, and then life after powers, the transition out of the presidency, both of those need to be peaceful. And if I look at the founding fathers, they didn't really offer a blueprint for either. When it came to presidential succession upon a president dying in office,

it was incredibly vague what happens. I mean, Lyndon Johnson in 1963 becomes president of the United States based on a precedent set by John Tyler in 1841 that's not even codified until 1967 with the 25th Amendment, right? And so it shows you that just how revolutionary it was that the founders set in motion something that we could basically wing throughout the course of our history and muddle through and not get it perfectly, but more or less get it right. And if you think about former presidents, they left, you know, they didn't have a two-term limit. That too gets codified in that same amendment, you know, in an earlier amendment, the 22nd Amendment FDR's presidency. And so they left no provision for what to do with ex-presidents. Washington, you know, sort of annotates it with, you know,

the precedent of two terms. But as we've seen throughout history, many presidents have chanced that. Ulysses Grant tried to come back for a non-consecutive third term. FDR was elected, you know, FDR was elected four times. And so, you know, it wasn't a foregone conclusion that, you know, you wouldn't have presidents stay forever. And so if I reflect back on the magic of our American democracy and what's so extraordinary about the idea of the American Revolution, they got so much right. I mean, they got a lot wrong also. But what they put in place in those early days before Washington becomes president, the fact that that was enough of a guide that could be iterated on over the course of history. And despite all the problems in the Republic that people, you know, get up in arms about

tonight, I think that at this moment in time, I think you have to reflect back on the last 200 plus years and we've done pretty good given, you know, how many bumps in the road there were. Systems fragile. I think that's the other thing. You know, the system was made by men, mostly. We could say men and women, but it was made mostly by men. It was a fragile system, and it took noble ideas, and it took noble decision-making, and it took a great deal of humility to bow out appropriately to allow for this succession, which has created this flat structure, has allowed the Cohen family and the Scaramucci family to flourish in a country like this because you don't have that aristocracy and you don't have that royalty, the monarchial stuff that holds back some of

these other countries. I want to flip over, I know we're running out of time, but if I can just get you a few more moments, I want to flip over to accidental presidents, eight men who changed America, which was another incredible book. And I want to talk about Harry Truman for a second. What an unexpected presidency, right? He's a failed haberdasher. He's a part of it. He's part part of this Pendergast political machine in Missouri. He gets to the Senate. He doesn't see himself anywhere close to the president. He wants to nominate Burns to be the vice president in 44. He walks into the meeting. He hears FDR's voice and wait a minute, they want me. So he reluctantly accepts it. And then of course he's told by Eleanor Roosevelt, he says, how can I help you

upon the death of her husband? And of course, Eleanor says, the real question is, how can we help you? So there he is. He's got to make some faithful decisions. Tell us a little bit about him. So Harry Truman is basically a provincial politician from Missouri who really only ends up thrown on the ticket in 1944 because the Democratic Party bosses know that FDR is a dying man, but nobody dares admit it. And FDR also knew that he was on borrowed time and he didn't want to give the party bosses any sense that they owned his presidency. So he played lots of manipulative games to kind of drag it out. And, you know, Truman, again, at the 11th hour, it ends up on the ticket because the Democratic Party bosses just cannot fathom the idea of Henry Wallace becoming president of the United States if FDR dies because they either thought he was too liberal even for them or they thought he was a communist sympathizer.

And I think it's remarkable because despite how sick FDR was, there seems to have been very little contemplation about the idea of a Harry Truman presidency. So in Truman's 82 days in office as vice president, he only meets FDR. two times. He never steps foot in the map room where World War II is being planned. He doesn't get a single intelligence briefing. He doesn't meet a single world leader. He's not briefed on the atomic bomb and the Manhattan Project. He's basically out kind of socializing as vice president, which is kind of what you do. And when FDR dies on April 12th, 1945, I don't believe that there is a man in history that has inherited a greater inflection point than Harry Truman at that particular moment in time. You had the battle of Okinawa raging one of the fiercest battles. You had the prospect of having to move a million men from the European theater to the Asian Pacific theater. You had Stalin reneging on all of his promises from Yalta. You had a turf battle between the Army and Navy. You had Churchill playing all kinds of games.

The list goes on. And Harry Truman has to spend his first couple days as president just learning where these countries are on a map in the map room. And, you know, I always say about Truman that he was set up for just utter failure and the fact that he managed to end the war. nine months, make some of the toughest decisions, reshape the post-World War II era, and reshape the international system. I don't know that it's statistically improbable as much as it shows you that leaders aren't leaders until the context gives them the opportunity to step up. And by we've seen this today with President Zelensky, you know, very different as a wartime president. And so until they're tested, leaders aren't, you can't really know that leaders are made. Sometimes leaders, you know, in the

context of a campaign, somebody who seems like a great leader, they fumble it when there's a real, then there's a real test. And, you know, Harry Truman is an example of a leader made for, you know, made by and for a crisis. I just said, I find, uh, you're writing fascinating because, uh, you're bringing things that we learned about in social studies in a very two-dimensional way about these figures and you're adding color, you're adding technical color and you're adding a perspective of their personalities and their humanness. Now, sometimes, we look at our founders and we put them in effigy. But at the end of the day, with all the frailty and all of the shortcomings of a human being, they carried all of that with them as well.

And I just find it fascinating. You capture that so well. We're at the point in the podcast where me and my producers, we come up with five words for the author. So you got to react to the words, okay? So the first word I'm thinking of Jared is power. Dangerous yet burden of responsibility. It's interesting you say dangerous because the founders would have said dangerous. The Federalist papers said we're just not equipped for it, which is why the separation of powers, those clauses in the contract, known as the Constitution, are the most important. Justice Scalia once said to me, at lunch at them, I said, what's the most important part of the Constitution? Separation of powers.

Without that, we don't have this liberty. Service. What about the word service, sir? The most important thing that one can do when put on this earth, whether they do it early in life or later in life. Well said. I think Jackie Robinson once said that we're at our best when we're serving others. Chaos. A reality. Something that can't just be managed, something that requires solution. I'm going to say America. Some people say Merica. And you know what I mean when I say Merica?

The word America. Don't give up on her. Amen. It's a beautiful place. It's been an incredible global experiment. The word president, Jared. steward of the republic. Yeah. And as you pointed out in your book, you know, it's the only job where every American citizen that's eligible to vote votes for that job. The other jobs in the Republic are limited to your location, if it's a congressional district or your state. But this federal job is one that we all get the chance to vote for. And so it's a very powerful position and one that requires a lot of responsibility. What's next for you? You know, it's interesting. I used to be one of these. So when you spend, you know, three or four years writing a book, you sort of two things

happen. One, you get obsessed with the topic. Two, you find ways to relate what you're writing to like literally anything anyone says. So somebody tells me the sky is blue. I say, we should talk about John Quincy Adams or William Howard Taft. But, you know, it's, it's been a really interesting reflective journey for me to be 42 years old. I started this book in my 30s writing about retirement. It morphed. I thought I was writing about the last chapter of life. What I realized is I was writing about a recurring question we're going to ask many times in life, which is what do we do next? And I used to be one of these people who, you know, I would say that I kind of, you know, live to work, meaning I'd get up every single day and I would think about work, think about what I was going to do

next for work, and I wasn't living in the present. And I think this book helped me get to a mental state. And I also transitioned jobs from Google to Goldman Sachs while writing this book, where I finally find myself in a situation where I think I'm somebody who works to live. And what I mean by that is when people ask me what's next. My answer is on this particular day, I engaged with the smartest people, worked on the most interesting ideas, got to feel like I was having an impact. And what's next is I want to wake up tomorrow and do it all over again. And I don't want to think about what's next. Well, I think it's brilliant. And by the way, you do work at a very special place. I spent seven years of my life there. Of course, it was 27 years ago. So it was a little different place than the one that

I left in 1996, but it is unique and top of the field for anybody. And I always remind my friends and colleagues that are there or have left there, how lucky we all are to have had that shared experience at Goldman. But you know, you've got a lot of things coming. And so I want to be one of those guys that watches and cheers you on. I'm looking forward to your next books. But the title of this book is Life After Power, Seven Presidents and their search for purpose beyond the White House, a best-selling New York Times, best-selling author Jared Cohen, with great respects. Sir, thank you for joining us on Open Book. We love your work.

Anthony, thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it. Well, that was an amazing discussion with Jared Cohen. His book is such an interesting topic. Life After Power. And, of course, one of my favorite stories is George Bush telling people that no phone call, no voicemail or emails, but lots of dog poo, picking up dog poo in residential suburban Houston. And it's just a fascinating country of ours, this grand experiment where you can one day be the most

powerful man or woman in the world. And then in the very next day, you're just another citizen of earth walking around in your civilian clothing, but perhaps having secret service protection and so forth and being very famous, of course, but certainly without the power. And so it's got to be jarring, frankly. I love Jared's book. I encourage you to read it. And I think it's a fascinating thing to throw yourself in the middle of it vicariously. What would you do if you were president of the United States and we're no longer president? And then what would you do when your career ends? Or maybe you're like me, you never want your career to end. You just want to go out with your boots on. I don't know. But I would read Jared's book, accidental presidents. It's fantastic.

it'll tell you historical stories about these great leaders, and it'll also tell you about their trials and tribulations in their post-presidency. My next guest was a guy named Jared Cohen, okay, and he wrote a book about the presidents after they left the presidency. So an example in the book would be Jimmy Carter, right? What do you think of Jimmy Carter, ma'am? Well, I'm better than him. I think Jimmy Carter was a little bit in slow motion.

Okay. And I've read about him, and I don't think he had any maliciousness in him, but I think his wife was so smart, and she helped mentally ill. And that was her thing, her goal in life. And she did a good job, and I thought she was a wonderful first lady. Okay. All right, but you didn't really go. And what do you think about him post-presidency?

He did a lot of work post-presidencies. What do you think about that? What does that mean? After he came out of the presidency, he spent 50 years building people's houses. He went around the world to make sure they were free and fair elections. Yeah, well, he came with his wife. And I don't think all the presidents had that gift. I think him and his wife, God bless them, were very gifted.

They had a unity, and that's why they did things well. But I think his wife's kindness, the way I read about them. And I think she was very kind. And she was a real beautiful, I don't meet even in looks, but she was attractive, but she was a very kind person. Maybe she had mental illness in her family, but there was certain things that she did from mentally ill that was very, very good. All right, let's switch topics because this is Valentine's week. Do you have a Valentine, Ma? Do I have a Valentine?

Yeah. My children are my Valentine's. Oh. Oh, okay. Oh, you don't want to talk about you, Valentine? All right. You want me to. Let me ask you. Let me switch gears, okay? What's the best date that you've ever been on? The best date?

Date, yeah, what's the best date? Go back in time. Or maybe going forward in time. I don't know. You're nice and young. So go back in time or go forward in time. Let me tell you. Can you something? Yeah, go ahead. You can tell your podcast fan something. Go ahead. Okay. I was going with my first love. Okay. Then I married Anthony's father.

Yes. And I dropped my first love. My daughter made her. All right. Hey, listen, no one's judging that, Ma. We all love you. You're allowed to do whatever the hell you want. How old are you, Ma?

Eighty-seven. Right, but you're still shaking and moving a little bit, right? You got some good dance moves, no? Well, yeah. Okay. All right. I think that's Uncle Sal and I, because my mind is still sharp. And you won the Super Bowl pool?

I won the silver boat full that my son Anthony bought two boxes for me, and I got a phone call today that I won five. All right. So you netted $4,500? Yeah, but I didn't get it in my hand yet, but it's, you know, it's coming. Coming, right? You're calling them left and right, waiting for the money, right? I'm waiting for the money. All right, good for you, ma.

Happy Valentine's Day, ma. Thank you, baby. All right, I love you, ma. I would like to see you, though. All right. All right? I'll come and see you, all right? Okay.

You promise? Because I haven't seen you at all. All right, ma. All right. I love you, Mom. I love you, baby. All right, bye. Bye. I love you.

I am Anthony Scaramucci, and that was open book. Thank you for listening. If you like what you hear, tell your friends and make sure you hit follow or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. While you're there, please leave us a rating or review. If you want to connect with me or chat more about the discussions, it's at Scaramucci on Twitter or Instagram. You can also text me at plus 1, 917, 909-29-29-996.

I'd love to hear from you. I'll see you back here next week.