Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: Interview with Anthony Scaramucci

I recently interviewed Anthony Scaramucci on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today is the founder of the investment firm Skybridge and the Salt Conference. He also spent 11 days as White House communications director. Anthony Scaramucci served on Donald Trump's transition team but has transitioned into, among other things, an outspoken Trump critic. Anthony, thank you for joining us.

Anthony: Hey, how are you, man? Great to be on. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Adam: Great to have you on. 

Anthony: I got my Mo Eazy shirt on. I dress for success. 

Adam: Better than Mo Vaughn. We're talking baseball off air, and I've actually done an interview with Mo Vaughn. 

Anthony: He was part of the Angels for a while, right? 

Adam: Yeah, he played for the Angels and the Mets. I know you mentioned that you're a minority owner of the Mets.

Anthony: He went to the Red Sox. He was part of the Mets for a while. He had a bicep tendon tear, which slowed him down a little bit, but he was a pretty good hitter.

Adam: Yeah, when I was a kid, Mo was actually my least favorite baseball player, because he signed a huge contract with the Angels and didn't live up to it. But when I interviewed him I got to know that he's actually a pretty good guy. So there you go. 

Anthony: An interesting experience that happens to us in life. Sometimes our boyhood idols are not what you make them out to be and sometimes our boyhood nemesis are great guys, right?

Adam: Yeah definitely. I wanted to ask you a question that applies to politics, but it also applies to business until leadership. How do you go from being a fervent supporter of a candidate, a political party, or a point of view, and come to a place where you realize that it's okay to change your perspective and to do so publicly? Could you talk about your experience and what others can take away?

Anthony: Oh, man, yeah, well, listen, I see it as a business person. I don't abide by the quote-unquote, rules of politics because I'm not a politician. I see it as a business person, you're looking at a situation you're making analysis, you unfortunately in the United States, you only have two choices for the presidency. You know, it's not a hiring contest. It is a popularity contest. And so, you know, it was a hiring process. We would sit around, we'd have a search firm, we'd have tons of resumes. There would be a board. We would select the best-qualified person to do the job, but in our process, that's not really what’s happening. It's more like a high school popularity contest. So because of the way these parties are solidified in our culture, there are only two parties and so you've got these two choices. You're doing your best you can. I was a lifelong traditional Republican. I was with Jeb Bush, then he came out of the race. Then Mr. Trump asked me to help him. I went to go help them. Again, nothing personal. I liked him. I enjoyed working on the campaign. I did my very best to advocate for him. He promised me the job in the White House. I actually wanted to go work in the White House, but, you know, I thought, okay, how many times am I gonna be able to work for the American president? Let me take the job. And Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon blocked that job. And then I called the president and said, “Okay, those are bad guys. If you need me to come in and help you take care of them, I'm happy to do that.” He brought me in in July of 2017. It didn't work out for me. I made a mistake. I've never blamed anybody else for that mistake, either. I hold myself accountable for the mistake I made on the phone with the reporter that I trusted. That's my fault. I got fired alongside Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus and I view that as my main contribution to America; getting those two jackasses out of the White House. I mean, if you could only imagine Steve Bannon with Donald Trump right now, if it's bad now, just imagine how bad it would be with those two together. And then I left the White House and was supportive and loyal to the President for two years. And I tried to be supportive of him. He started doing things that didn't make sense. You know, you're separating women from children and putting the children in cages at the border. Sorry, that doesn't make sense. You're disavowing the intelligence agents at the intelligence agencies at Helsinki, in front of the Russian president. Didn't think that made sense. You're calling the press the enemy of the people. I wrote an op-ed and said, “Look, I want to be very supportive of the President. He's got very good ideas on business and the economy, but can't call the press the enemy of the people but first, it's the first amendment. It's number one in the bill of rights for a reason. Please don't do that.” And then you know, for me the piece de resistance was going after the Congress Women. Three of them were born in the United States. One was naturalized, all four democratically elected. He said to go back to the countries that you originally came from and so that's going after my personal history. You know, my grandmother was Italian American and she came to the United States emigrated at the age of 18, was told to go back to the country that she originally came from. That is a racist, nativist trope being uttered by the president, I'd say. So I'm on the Bill Maher show, again, supporting the president trying to be supportive and say, “Yeah, I like a lot of stuff he's doing. I really wish he would not talk like that.” After the show, Bill says to me, “Do you think President Trump watches that?” I don't know. My wife said, “Well, of course he did. YouTube. Bozo’s on live television. He's addicted to television. Of course he watched it.” And then Bill said to me, “Well, if he watched that he's going to come after you tomorrow on Twitter. I said, “Well, why would he do that? I gave him a million dollars. I supported his campaign and supported them by raising money for the transition after the Access Hollywood tape. I was on his executive transition team. I worked for a short period of time in the White House, got fired, and stayed loyal to him. I don't like the racist tropes that he's saying, but I'm still supporting him. With President Trump, you’ve got to go 13 for 10. 7 for 8 is not going to be enough. And then he started attacking me. I'm a New Yorker, Adam. So if you're going to attack me, what do you think I'm going to do? I'm going to attack you right back. But that's, you know, he's a low life and so he started to go after my wife. So my wife is a suburban housewife living out here on Long Island raising two young kids. Do I look like Ted Cruz? Okay, I don't look like Ted Cruz. You're not allowed to go after my wife. So I went out and it was pretty hard. I said in August of last year, that he was going to devolve into a full-blown maniac. There's obviously something mentally wrong with him. I said it's like Trump-noble, he will start to meltdown, the Republicans will make a decision whether to clean it up, or cover it up. And if they decide to cover it up, it's going to be a disaster for the country. If they decide to clean it up, they'll eventually find a way to remove him from office. And there he is breaking the law. Shortly thereafter, he's impeached. He's got this fiasco going with COVID-19. He's totally mishandled that. But they let him do it. And so they went for the cover-up as opposed to the cleanup. And I think if you are a citizen of the United States and you're a responsible patriot, and you're looking at what's going on, you have to speak up, you have to be candid about it. And just imagine if we were on a publicly-traded company’s board, and the CEO of that company was acting in the way that Donald Trump acts. Even the maniac tweets last night about President Obama. I mean, the guy is a full-blown maniac with several screws loose. And it's shocking to me that responsible patriotic republicans are not stepping up to say, “Hey, you know, this guy's got to take a powder at this point.” Me and his decision making put us in a, you know, we won't be in a full-blown depression because we'll be able to open the economy at some point. But he has put us in a statistical depression as a result of the stupidity of his decision making.

Adam: I do want to ask you about your background and how you got to where you are today. The general public knows you as The Mooch. You have a major media personality. But what a lot of people might not know about you is that you were fired from your first job out of school, which might surprise some listeners. Can you share that experience in a little bit more detail and how you dealt with it and what you learned?

Anthony: Yeah, sure. John Kelly wasn't the first person to fire me. I got hired by Goldman Sachs coming out of Harvard Law School and 18 months into that job, I was fired. It was a combination of two things. Number one: I absolutely sucked at that job. It was the wrong job for me. And I was like a fish out of water. And of the 60 people that they hired into that division, that was the real estate investment banking division, that year, I was probably in the bottom quartile or I was probably in the bottom 15% in terms of performers, and not because I wasn't working hard. I mean, I worked the entire summer of 1990. I didn't take one day off. It's just that I wasn't good at the job. I didn't have the analytical and financial, analytical training that I needed having come out of law school. The great irony is I was just starting to get good at the job when I got fired. That's fine. They fired me on February 1st, 1991. And that was a Friday night. And I had to go start looking for a job on the fourth of February, which was that Monday and I started that roll of quarters. There were no cell phones back then. And I went down back into New York City, started putting quarters into the pay phones and tried to get a new job. One of my buddies called me and said that Goldman Sachs had a job opening in the sales area. And this is a very big learning lesson for young people. I didn't burn a bridge when I got fired. The guy that fired me was a gentleman. I said, “Hey, if you can help me somehow I've got a good attitude. I obviously wasn't great at the job that you had designated me for, but if there's another job you think I'd be good at I would love your endorsement.” And so that job came available upstairs in the sales area. And the gentleman that fired me actually commended me for that job. And so I was fired from Goldman On February 1 1991. I was rehired into Goldman Sachs on March 28. And one of the cuter stories about that as I received an $11,000 severance check from Goldman. When I got fired, I cashed that check and I used it to pay off some of my school loans and bought myself a new suit. And then Tony Infante, the personnel director at Goldman when they hired me back she called me she was like, “Hey, got really good news for you. We're just gonna mark you down as an interdepartmental transfer. You're never gonna have to tell anybody that you got fired.” Nobody on a podcast 30 years from now or anything. I said, “Okay, great.” And then she said I needed to give back the $11,000. And I said, “Well, you can tell the entire planet earth that I get fired.” I said, “I could care less, I've already spent the money.” And so I like telling young people I got fired because, you know, you can have ups and downs in your career. You’re thinking it's gonna go like this, it’s gonna be a 45 degree straight line, everything's going to go perfect for you. And you're going to be mistaken whether it's Jeff Bezos or Michael Dell or you pick whoever your role model is, that's a contemporary of mine. Their careers had some of this and they had to make a lot of different decisions to get to where they are and so I've had my ups and downs in my career. But I think the number one thing is to have the right attitude about it and to embrace it and not to be embarrassed by it and to have no self-consciousness related to it. I think those are the really important things that you can train yourself to do.

Adam: What advice do you have for entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs on how they can build a public-facing persona? It's something that you've done with unbelievable expertise. And as someone who's spent countless hours in front of the camera, what are your best tips on how to be a powerful communicator?

Anthony: Well, I would say number one, have different things I would say the first thing is I didn't go on television until I was about 45 years old. My first television appearance was St. Patrick's Day 2009. And I was nervous, I would be the first person to admit that to you. There's some level of self consciousness that invades your personality when you're on TV for the first time. And the only reason why I went on TV at that point is I thought we were going out of business. I thought that our small new business Skybridge Capital was getting pummeled by the global financial crisis at that time, and I needed to get on television, they tell people what our message was and speak with some level of confidence. You and I were talking before the podcast started about the salt conference, we created that conference during that last crisis. And I thought, geez, you know, we need to get our message out. And so I started out on Fox Business, which was a new channel back then and then I gravitated over to CNBC. And I was doing CNBC pretty regularly for about four years. And then I came up with the idea of buying Louis Rukeyser, his old show Wall Street Week, and putting it back on the air. And so I did that I sold it to Fox Business. And so I was hosting a television show, I was running Skybridge Capital, I was hosting the salt conference. And I was also out there on the Republican Party presidential campaign. And then when it rolled into President Trump, and he won the election, and he asked me to go on his transition team, I had to give up, due to a conflict of interest, the hosting stuff. And so that's a long-winded version of how I got into television. But I think what I would say to entrepreneurs first is I would say, develop some standing. Get confident in what you're doing. You certainly want to have an underpinning of some level of foundation to what you're doing. You don't have to go on television. Jeff Bezos is rarely on television or really seen publicly and he's still the richest person in the world. Michael Dell, I think he's on television once or twice a year. So you don't have to go on television. But if you want to do that, it can be very helpful to your business. But you should also be thinking about how it's going to be helpful. In my case, we're a hedge fund manager for mass affluent people, we have 25 to $50,000 minimums. And so going on TV gets our name up there, gets our name awareness up there. I can also articulate our story. And I think those are all positives. And I think that leads to more business for us. The flip side is if you're in the political foray, as I had been, you could upset 50% of the people because if you're a Republican, and you're talking against the Democratic Party, or the democratic principles have to mail out like you, and vice versa. And so I would say that I don't have a regret about that because I am involved in politics. I've been involved in politics, most of my career. It was a bit of a big entree to help me develop my relationship network that I've developed on Wall Street through politics. I grew up in a blue-collar family, so I didn't really have a network. And I did. I did it mostly through politics. So, you know, I mean, you live or die by the sword. So you have to be careful with the media because my hedge fund suffered about a 22% loss in March of 2020. There were other hedge funds, Adam, that did 40%, 70%. You know, one hedge fund, Skybridge, just lost over 50 billion U.S. dollars, yet they wrote about my hedge fund, and they wrote about the losses that my hedge fund suffered. And so if you have a very high profile that cuts both ways, you know, when bad news is happening to you, the reporters are looking for eyeballs to read their story, and so they'll write about you. So if you're an entrepreneur out there, you have to weigh the strengths and weaknesses. Going into the media and being available to the media as an expert and obviously when your expert opinion is wrong, they're gonna light you up and you've got to be fair for that. So you have to have thick skin if you want to be in the media.

Adam: You've done your fair share of selling throughout your career. You still do your fair share selling now. What are your best sales tips for listeners?

Anthony: Well, I would say that I started selling when I got my paper route at Long Island Newsday Paper at age 11. I'm 56 years old. I've been selling every single day. I love the process of selling. I think if you're an entrepreneur, I don't care if you're an engineer or you're not an Angel, whatever you are, you are selling somebody something. You're selling them on yourself, you're selling them on your idea. If you're developing a product or a piece of software or new innovation, or if it's programming, whatever it is, you're selling something and so you gotta focus on relationships. At the end of the day, the entire thing goes right down to what Ben Franklin said, you're as good as your relationships. You're as good as the five or six people you're closest to. And what Dr. Franklin said I think is an amazing comment. If you want a friend, ask the person for a favor. It sounds counterintuitive, but what ends up happening is you endear yourself. You go to the person and say, “Hey, I need XYZ. Would you be willing to help me?” And oftentimes people are willing to help you and then they will do something for you. It endears you to them. And there's a reciprocity that's drawn from that. And I would say, you know, you have to have high integrity because think of your relationships as being very long term. Try to do the right thing, even if sometimes it's against your immediate self-interest. Don't be transactional with your relationships, and it'll come back and really help you. You know, we mentioned my poor performance in March. I called up five or six of the greatest hedge fund managers in the world. And I said, “Hey, I had poor performance in March, but I'd like to allocate some of my money into your funds.” And because of those long term, multiple decade relationships, I was able to get access for my clients, taking advantage of the crisis. Those are funds that haven't been open for 10, 12, 15 years, where some of the best hedge fund managers in the world opened up their funds for me and my clients to put our money into their funds during the middle of this global pandemic, and that's 100% born from the relationship and so it took 30 years in some cases, but it's worth it. And so think very long term about your relationship. That's my message. And don't be self-conscious about selling

Adam: You spent 11 days as White House Communications Director, what are your best lessons from that experience?

Anthony: Well, listen, I mean, I loved serving the country. I mean, it was awe-inspiring to be inside the White House. I flew Air Force One three times and I get to sit with the president in the cabin. It was frenetic, a lot of stuff was going on. At the same time, the White House was a little bit in disarray. I made a mistake, obviously, that contributed to that. So when I got fired, I had no problem with that. But here's what I would say for younger people’ when you put your pride and your ego into something, you end up getting emotional. You know, when your pride and ego are involved, your emotions are going up and your intelligence is going down. And so for me when Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus went to do a political hit job on me, I should have had enough self-awareness and a lack of pride and ego at that moment to say, “Okay, no mas, I get it. Let me walk away from this situation and return to the private sector.” But I didn't do that, you know? I had this bullheaded determination that come hell or high water I was going to go work in the White House. And that was a mistake because, you know, they were two incredible losers. I mean, you couldn't imagine the incompetence. I mean, it's like, in the case of Steve Bannon, and it's like, if Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler had a baby, that would be like Steve Bannon, you know what I mean? I mean, so we could go into what a lunatic he is, but, you know, when President Trump realized he had a problem with them, he brought me in. I mishandled myself. I was too emotional, and I got myself fired. But, as I said, I think I did a service to the contrary getting those two guys out of the situation. So in hindsight, it was a great experience. I learned a lot. It certainly increased my profile- for better or worse, it increased my profile. But I've met a lot of friends, you know, I've got a very good personal relationship with Bill Maher. Now, we both own a piece of the Mets. He's a phenomenal guy, I get a chance to socialize with him when I'm out in LA. I do shows a couple times a year. But there's a lot of people in my life that I would not have met, had I not had that level of exposure. My come up into it was very humbling. So by and large, it was a very good set of experiences. I'm very happy I did it. But I think my learning lesson about mentoring is don't get your pride and don't get your ego in the way of your decision making. I think that's where you start really making stupid mistakes.

Adam: Anthony, at your press conference, when you first took over even Trump detractors, even people who are critical of you have to admit that was a pretty incredible performance. Can you talk about what went into that and can you talk about just your level of preparation and how to excel in high pressure moments like that?

Anthony: Well, I mean, so we’re talking about- repetition is the mother of memory. And, you know, I had gotten on television for the first time at age 45. I had had the requisite 10,000 hours of television time. So, you know, I wasn't unnerved or anything like that. I wasn't nervous. I think that when the President asked me to do the press conference that day, I turned to Sarah, who I just named press secretary and said, “Okay, I'll do it this one time, but I'm the Comms. director. You're the press secretary. You're going to be one doing this. I don't need to be out there. I want to see if I can help sculpt the President's message.” And if your listeners have an interest in that I wrote a seven-page communications plan. That's on the CNN website, you have to look up Scaramucci Comms plan that shows you what I was thinking about in terms of putting together to help The President. But you know, when I went up there, I guess the funny part of the story is Sarah is a very nice person. She had the 30 person comms team in the press secretary's office and they were ready to brief me. And so I walked into the room and they said, Okay, here's our soundbites on Iraq, South Korea, North Korea, the economy. I was like, “Whoa,” I said, “I'm going into the James Brady press room in about 45 minutes. I don't want to be inundated with that level of factoids and all of that information. Let me just answer the questions to the best of my capability. And the ones that I don't know the answer to I’ll say, geez, I don't know the answer to that. Let me get back”. And so I began the process by doing that. And I answered the questions and to be totally candid, I got very good feedback on that. But upon reflection, the president actually didn't like that because he doesn't like people stealing any thunder, it's got to be 100% about him 100% of the time, so there are no coal stores in his orbit. So he gets upset, you know, Mike Pompeo gets out there. It's high-profile. Go ahead. Rex Tillerson, boom, Steve Bannon, boom, boom, John Kelly boom. You know, my point is that he really doesn't like anybody other than himself having any focus or any attention. So when people told him I was doing a good job that didn't really help me.

Adam: You mentioned John Kelly. Something you mentioned earlier in the interview, which I thought was really interesting was when you got fired by Goldman, instead of making it personal instead of having an acrimonious relationship with the person who fired you, you ended up becoming friends and there's a similar story there with you and John Kelly, and can you share that with listeners and what listeners can learn about how to build winning relationships?

Anthony: Well, I mean, here's what I would tell you. I said, you know, when John fired me, I shook his hand. I said, I hope we can, at some point when the dust settles, we can develop a relationship. And after he left the White House him and I went to lunch together. He's a four-star general. He's a Gold Star family member. He's a decorated U.S. Marine for 40 plus years. We were talking about the Salt Conference earlier. He was my keynote speaker at the Salt Conference last year. And here we were- he had fired me. We were probably a little bit of a tussle in the beginning and we cleared the air and we became friends. I spoke to him on Easter Sunday, this past Easter and him and I have a really good relationship. He'll hopefully be at future events with me. We did an event in Arizona together in late January at the Biltmore. We brought him to Abu Dhabi to speak again, in Abu Dhabi, at the Salt Conference in the Middle East, and we've grown to like each other. And I think it's a big lesson, you know? Don't allow circumstances to overly affect your relationships and don't hold any grudges, you know? Whatever my philosophical disagreement is with President Trump or my assessment of his performance as President, I don't have any grudge against the guy or anything like that. I mean, I guess I'm a little sore at him for attacking my wife, I don't think that that was necessarily cool, going after my wife, but the flipside is, if I could bury the hatchet with anybody I would so I have no problem. And I think I think that's a big lesson for younger people.

Adam: Anthony, how can anyone develop a winning mindset?

Anthony: It's habits, you know? Google the habit poem and read the habit poem. It talks about how you have to ingrain in yourself certain levels of activity, positivity. You have to take care of yourself physically, you gotta hit the gym, you gotta have a position of gratitude in your life, you have to have a campus position of non-comparison. You can't wake up in the morning and look to your left and look to your right and say, “Oh, that guy's doing better than me, that person's better than me or worse than me.” Who cares? God gave you and so I would imagine that if you had everybody's cards on the table, and you look at everybody's cards and everything that they're dealing with in their lives, maybe you'd like to take your own cards back. Maybe you don't want other people's cards. So a positive mindset comes from love, gratitude, commitment, self-discipline, and also testing yourself. When you're going through a very rough situation- you're fired from the White House, you're being humiliated in the press, you're being picked on by the nation's late-night comedy shows. How do you handle yourself? Are you going to, you know, cower, or are you going to step into it, and enjoy it and roll with it. How are you going to manage that? Maybe getting your ass kicked in business? And your funds down, 22% of them in the month of March 2020? Are you operating on the back side of your foot? Are you operating on the front side of your foot? How are you going to handle yourself? For me, I learned long ago, that whining is for babies. There's no sense in complaining because my grandfather, who was an immigrant, is a very hard working man. He said, “What's the sense of complaining? Nobody's listening anyway, nobody cares. Get up and go to work. And make the best of yourself and do it with a sense of humor and do it with a sense of gratitude.” If you're listening to this podcast, you're one of the luckiest people on planet Earth, because you've got internet access, you probably have a smartphone, you probably have a laptop computer you can draw from. And there's a lot of people that are living on one to $5 a day. And so take a chill pill, love your life. Love the possibilities that you have going forward. And the biggest thing I think for entrepreneurs is when you make a mistake to be accountable for the mistake but also forgive yourself. I don't wake up in the morning and say, “Wow, I made such a mistake in the White House. Let me kick myself in the pants again this morning and be regretful of that mistake.” Who cares? Take the millstone of regret off your neck, put it on the ground and get up and get back to work. Forgive yourself for past mistakes, but learn from them and figure out a way to improve yourself. If you want to be a leader, you have to lead by example, you have to set an example for people, and sometimes you have to do things that are not popular. But, you know, what are the right things to do? And if you do those things, you're gonna have a great life. No matter what happens, whatever your checkbook or what car you're driving or how big your house is, you'll have a great life because you'll have some amazing relationships.

Adam: Anthony, I love it. Thanks so much for all the advice and thanks for being on the show.

Anthony: Okay, great. Great to be here. Thank you, man.