Face the Music: Anthony Scaramucci

0:00A CNBC original podcast.

0:05Anthony Scaramucci has made plenty of decisions he regrets, but one would force him to rethink almost everything. In 2017, after a career that had taken him from Goldman Sachs to building his own investment business, Scaramucci joined the Trump White House. Looking back, he's blunt about what drove that decision. The two big ones, which I have to own for the rest of my life, are the pride one and the ego one. 11 days later, he was fired. His marriage was in crisis. He'd missed the birth of his son. And his very public downfall had become the material for late night TV. I think it forced a real moral and intellectual reckoning.

0:42One of America's leading crisis communications experts advised him to disappear from public life for years. Scaramucci made the opposite decision. He said, Howard, I'm not doing that. Instead of hiding from the humiliation, he went straight toward it. appearing on the very shows that were mocking him and putting himself back in front of his critics. I felt I needed to face the music. It's an instinct that Scaramucci would return to through later setbacks, from rebuilding Skybridge to the fallout from its relationship with Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. It taught him to own his mistakes, confront them and keep moving forward.

1:17What other people think of you is none of your business. You know, you're thinking about you and you're thinking about them thinking about you, but they're not thinking about you. These are Anthony Scaramucci's Executive Decisions.

1:34Many of the guests I interview for Executive Decisions, I know what they do professionally. I don't know much about their private lives. But you have given the world so much raw emotion and energy and yourself. Do you give the full Anthony Scaramucci or is this just a persona that you've created? Well, I like to think it's a full Anthony Scaramucci. I think if you ask my wife, I sort of feel like I'm the same person on or off the camera or in the office or outside of the office. I mean, it's just certain things that I... I mean, listen, I grew up pretty unfiltered, Steve. I was at Goldman and I went to go see Mario Gabelli.

2:15Do you know Mario? And I was having lunch with him, 30 years old. And he's like, hey man, you got to leave Goldman. I said, I got to leave Goldman. I thought Goldman was such a great place. He said, let me tell you what's going to happen. He says, you're going to get into your 40s or your 50s with your personality, forget it. Unless you shave the points off your personality, number one, you won't make the partnership because you're not corporate enough. And then number two, you're going to want to work when you're 50 or 60 and you think it's a long period of time away, but you're going to blank and you're going to be there.

2:44You'll want to have your own company. And so I think I've lived relatively unfiltered because of that. I left Goldman at age 32, built my own company. Not without its trials and tribulations, not with a lot of shortcomings and failures, but I think I'm more or less what you see. The good, bad, and the ugly, by the way. I'm pretty open about it. See, having looked at your career and Goldman's Oscar and Skybridge and the Trump administration episode. And then since then, I think there's a more measured, calmer, more resilient Anthony Scaramucci that's emerged. And you seem to have kind of be very, very happy in yourself now.

3:25Whereas at times I've looked at episodes where you seemed quite skittish. Well, I think what Sedgwick just said to the viewers and listeners is I've gotten the living shit beaten out of me about three or four times. And I've been humbled by life and humble by markets. I think that's more or less what you said. But if we're going to be brutally honest, I think the White House experience and the effect that it had on my personal life did change me. And I'll just set the scene for you. I had missed the birth of my son. I think it's pretty well documented at the time. People don't remember - So it was that July 24th, 2017?

3:58July 24th. That Monday, I was at the Boy Scouts event with the president and there was a 60 mile no fly zone around. I made a lot of mistakes, Stephen, but that was a big one on top of other things. And then Deirdre and I, she had filed for divorce on me. And so getting fired, having a comeuppance in my career like that, and then having a personal crisis where I'm in love with somebody who happens to be my wife and I want to fix my marriage, I think it forced a real moral and intellectual reckoning. If it being very reflective here, I probably had a lot of things going up into the right in my career and in my personal life that I was taking for granted.

4:41And so that explosion that happened to me, I think helped me. And again, it sucked, by the way. I'm not trying to make light of it. I'll take people back to it. I wouldn't wish what happened to me on the 31st of July and the explosion and the excoriation in the media and the late night comics coming after me and all that other stuff. I mean, we can laugh about it today, but it was brutal. I'm not going to suggest otherwise. I can't fail to change you as a person going through that experience. There's no question. And it made me more psychologically minded. It also made me a lot more empathetic.

5:13And you have children, I have five children. I'll tell you what it also did for me. And I say this to a lot of people, be careful with your kids. I've read all of the billionaire memoirs. And a lot of them are very self-congratulatory. And a lot of them apparently never made mistakes and they've gotten everything right from an early age. But that's just not true. It isn't true, but it's also casting a very big shadow on your children. When I got fired from the White House, my oldest son, who was, he's 33 now, so he's probably like 24, 25 at the time. I was on the promenade in Santa Monica. I've never been out there.

5:51Yeah. That beautiful shopping area. I've just been fired from the White House. It's maybe five days after my firing. I'm walking with him on the promenade. He's living out in LA. And he looks over at me. He's like, dad, are you going to be okay? Are you all right? And I looked over at him. I said, oh my God, I'm being parented by my 25 year old son. This is the first time where the thing had flipped. And it was in his mind, my dad's fallible. My dad's mortal. my dad is getting his ass kicked. And in a weird way, it improved my relationship with my children. And I'm going to tell you something else it did for my kids.

6:29It gave them a lot of space to explore their lives and recognize that you could have a comeuppance or a failure or shortcoming, and it was okay, and you could get through it. And I think a big part of me making the decisions I made post my White House firing were related to my kids. I wanted my actions to speak to them about, hey, it's okay. You can fail at things. I tell people, and probably some of your guests on Executive Cities, you got to be very careful with your kids. Don't bullshit them. Don't cast this big shadow over them. Don't make it like you're the man or you're the woman and you've gotten everything right because it'll create pockets of insecurity in them and pockets of self-doubt.

7:12And don't gloss over your failures as well, or your setbacks, and actually learn from them and let them know that actually it's okay to have setbacks. They're actually really good for creating a better you in the longer term. Be accountable. I was at an event last night. Somebody asked me a question. I shocked them. They said, oh, so what was one of your number one regrets? I looked at them. I said, well, my number one regret is I grew up in a pretty tough household and I became a conflict avoider. And so in my first marriage, I probably wasn't communicating properly. Maybe things weren't going well in the marriage and I was chicken shit and I probably wasn't talking in the way that I needed to talk in my first marriage.

7:56And I regret that. And I think in some ways it was unfair. I didn't do it on purpose. Yeah. Like I floored the person. The person almost fell over because you can't be much more honest than that. I mean, that's basically, if you force yourself into that honest self-awareness, I think you find more peace in that, Steve. I think you find more comfort in that. Before I ask you one or two more questions about what came of your firing, I just want to go back one stage. Why did you take that job? You were politically fluid. You've supported Barack Obama in the past. You've supported Hillary Clinton.

8:30You've supported Mitt Romney. You've supported Scott Walker, a whole host of people. Jeb Bush as well. You were actually quite anti-Donald Trump at one stage in the middle of the last decade. What was it that enamored you or that made you think that that was the decision you wanted to take to join the administration? So I'll answer that, but I just want to stipulate something. Every Republican cycles through Trump. And how do they cycle through it? They say really nasty things about him. Ted Cruz, Kellyanne Conway, Mike Pompeo. and then they gravitate towards Trump and then they either get ejected by Trump or they eject Trump or something happens and then they end up on the outs with Trump.

9:11In the wood chipper. In the wood chipper. But Jeb is the only one. Jeb saw it from the beginning and Jeb told me, okay, my campaign is failing. I'm exiting. Do not go work for Trump. But I had five or six discombobulated things going on in my head. And discombobulation number one was I'm a Republican, pretty good fundraiser. He's not going to win. I'm going to go work for him. And then I'll be really well poised and set up for 2020. So discombobulation number one. The two big ones, which I have to own for the rest of my life, are the pride one and the ego one. My wife probably hates Trump almost as much as Melania hates him.

9:54I mean, it's at least at that scale. And I didn't listen to her because I was trying to work my resume, Steve. I was trying to take a round block into a square hole. And this is an important part of the story. One of my mentors, something I'm super close to, it would be unfair to give out his name. He was offered a big job, spent some time with Trump, and he withdrew his nomination. And I looked over at him and said, what are you doing? He said, you know, it's not going to work out. I don't have the right personality vibe and this is going to end poorly for me and my family. And that was a man that had his ego in check.

10:30I did not have mine in check. And I had something that I call Potomac fever. Okay. So let me tell you what Potomac fever is. Okay. It's like one of those pharmaceutical ads. Okay. Potomac fever is you're smart. You're a Wall Streeter. You're going to descend onto Washington. You're going to cross the river Potomac and you're going to fix Washington, okay? And you think you're smarter than the people that live in Washington, but Washington changes you. You don't change Washington, and that's the truth about Washington. You can go in with all this idealism and great motives and great ideas, but actually, the system will, look, turn you into another inhabitant of the swamp.

11:10Of course, and it has a great immune system, and any antibody that comes in there that they don't like, boom, they blow you right out. But Trump, that hasn't happened. He's turned Washington He's become an insider. We'll talk about that in a second. But I went in there with that level of naivete. One of the great symptoms of Potomac fever is you don't know you have it. Okay. Bessent has it. Lutnik has it. You're tying your ego to the significance. You're tying your ego to the motorcade, the insider thing. I'm on the inside with the Secret Service protection. You're not. And it is a aphrodisiac.

11:47It is a seductive force if you're not careful. Which is crazy. Let me just say though, you've got all these amazing people that built great careers on Wall Street and elsewhere. You mentioned Besant and Lutnik as well, but you've seen it historically over the years. And you mentioned Goldman. So many people lead Goldman to go into politics, wherever. And yet all these savvy businessmen, kings of Wall Street, and then And they go down to DC and all of a sudden they're kind of like overcome by this Potomac fever. I think so, yeah. You have to also remember something like a lot of things that have happened in my career are the doctrine of unintended consequences.

12:24So I'm at Goldman. I'm in a high net worth area, the private wealth area. I used to call it private client services when I was there. I think it's called the private bank now, but I've got no relationships. I went to Harvard, so that's an old boys network, but I'm a young guy in an old boys network. I don't know anybody. I don't play golf. I don't play tennis. I never saw the inside of a country club until I was 30. You arrived in the polyester suits. I arrived in the polyester. I was fully flammable in my first job interview. I mean, that's totally true. Those guys always still tease me about that.

12:54I started - I don't think you're the only one who did that in their first job in the city. I ended up in Brioni. Okay. This is a nice suit, ladies and gentlemen. Okay. But I started in Brioni. And by the way, I remember calling my mom and telling her, I got to go buy suits. She's like, what are you talking about? You look fantastic. You're now old Italian mothers are. We all had a really dodgy first suit when we joined the city on Wall Street. It was bad, but I had a flammable shirt. I mean, I had those cockroach-killing Capizio dance shoes. Thank God, though - Great, 1989, yeah? Yeah. The guy, I mean, the partner who I'm still friends with, he's like, okay, listen, you look like a young Brooklyn undertaker.

13:34Okay, you cannot, I cannot, I'm going to invite you back to Goldman for the callback interview. You cannot look like this. You got to change it up. I was so embarrassed by it. And Blankfein, by the way, writes about it in his book. Yeah, I know. About this rite of passage coming from... And having to buy the right ties and the right shirts. No clue. But you mentioned Blankfein, who did build his entire career at Goldman Sachs. You left and you had the advice from Mario Cabelli, get out. This isn't for you. Pay off your student debt and move on to the next one, which is what you did. But Blankfein also has his episodes where, similar to you, grew up in...

14:07In fact, he probably grew up in a tougher area than you. you as well. No question he did. But he also was enamored with people. He was taken in by Robert Maxwell as well. You were taken in later on by other people as well. Is that something about your psyche or everyone on Wall Street or you personally that actually that's just how it is? You see rich people, you see influential people and you gravitate towards them? Such a good question. So let me stipulate a few things. He did grow up poorer than me and he's a lot smarter than me. And I will say this about Lloyd, which I really respect. He knows himself.

14:39And even though he was an outsider, he wanted to work in that corporate realm and he wanted to work for a place like Goldman Sachs. And it's a very revered place. I have an enormous amount of respect for it. I didn't have that compulsion. I wanted to have my own business. Like if you read my diary on the day that I graduated from law school, I always wanted to be in my own business. it had to do with my father because my father's life was tied to the economic cycle. He was a crying up right. Yes, and it was tied to hourly wages. If there was an expansion in the economy, he did better. If there was a recession, he did poorer.

15:14My father used to tell me that you have to control your own destiny or somebody else will. My dad was like, you got to have your own business. When I got to Goldman, it was a great, great place, but I had a vector to move away from Goldman. I always admired that about Lloyd, that he had a vector to move towards Goldman. The thing that you're saying about rich people though is a very important thing because we fall victim to that whether we like it or not. And I'm going to explain why. Because if you have 99 good people and one rogue, okay, you've got to take that approach. Maybe you have 90 people in 10 rogues.

15:56My attitude has always been generally give people the benefit of the doubt because it'll help you in commerce. And as long as you're ethical, you'll come out of these things unscathed. So we can talk about Sam Baker Free at some point. I think so. I think so. I think that was my upbringing. I think my grandparents - You never lost touch with that North Star of - I think so. I think so. I mean, you could ask my staff. I mean, a very, very compliance focus. I mean - Because you have been accused at various times of, you were sacked at Goldman's at one point, then you were reinstated. Well, I was sacked at Goldman due to incompetence.

16:30I wasn't sacked for - I mean, obviously they hired me back. I wasn't sacked. I was - See, I did something really stupid. Okay. And you have young listeners that need to really listen to this. I was so insecure coming out of Harvard that I wanted the coolest, hottest, highest paying job. That was really stupid. I needed to have taken a job that I liked and I needed to take a job where I fit. The highest, coolest job in 1989, Stephen, that was to be in real estate investment banking. Don't ask me why, but if you were at Harvard Business School or Harvard Law School, the sought after job was to be a real estate.

17:05Real estate was hot and investment banking was hotter. And so I was going to take that job and I managed to get that job. And I wanted to be that insecure doofus at the cocktail party. It was a very famous cocktail party, Griswold Hall. We'd stand around with our pinky up in the air like this, and we'd have a cocktail. And where are you going to work? And I wanted to tell my friends due to my personal insecurity that I was going to Goldman Sachs as a real estate investment banker. And the problem with that is I absolutely sucked at that job. And I got fired from that job due to incompetence. And I can tell you the day I got fired, I got fired February 1st.

17:43You can look it up on your phone. It was a Friday night. Mike Facitelli, who ran the real estate department, Italian guy, very close to Mike, still love him today. He brought me to his apartment on Jane Street in Greenwich Village. He took a beer out of the refrigerator. He said, listen, I'm letting 30 people go. You're one of them. You absolutely suck at this job. And I could try to keep you because you're a nice guy. You have a good work ethic, but you really suck at the job and you'll be better off finding a different job. And I said something to him that people should really listen to. Mike, I appreciate the honesty.

18:15I want to keep my relationship with you. I'm not blaming you for the firing. I'm going to accept the accountability of myself. Would you be a good reference for me? And we shook hands. And now I want to set the scene for you. No cell phones. I'm now fired on a Friday night. I go to the bank Saturday morning. I get four rolls of quarters. I go back into the city on the train. I'm in the train station pumping quarters into pay phones. And I'm calling different people, calling different people. Finally, somebody says to me, hey, there's a It was a job opening, 29th floor, Goldman Sachs, in the institutional trading area.

18:51And I was like, oh my God, I got to try to get that job. And I called Mike. He answered the phone right away. He went upstairs to talk to the partner. And you'll love this part of the story. So Steven, they gave me an$11 ,000 severance check when they fired me. Okay. So I got the$11 ,000 of cash to check. And then he rehired me. I got fired on February 1st. I got rehired on March 28th. And Tony Infante, who's now retired, she was an awesome personnel director. And she loved me, by the way. She called me. She was like an Italian girl from Staten Island. She's like, Anthony, I got really good news for you.

19:25We're going to mark you down as interdepartmental transfer. If you're on executive decisions with Sedgwick in 40 years, I don't have to tell anybody he got fired. He goes, but could we get the$11 ,000 check back. And I was like, no, actually, I've already spent the money. I'm buying natural fiber suits. Women's suits. What's that all about? I put some money towards my school debt. Popped down to Hermes. I say, if you need to tell people I got fired, I actually don't give a shit. You can tell everybody. And she was so cool that she still marked me down as interdepartmental transfer. But I tell the story because it's a rite of passage story about being stupid and going for something that's cool based on your insecurity and not going for something that you're really good at.

20:11And it turns out that the second job I got at Goldman, I was really good at. Yeah, sales. Yeah. And marketing and research and sort of the investment process, I was way better at the investment banking. Do you still have those insecurities or have you moved on from that? You know, we all have varying insecurities, but I think I'm generally at peace with lots of different things. If you had said to the 25-year-old version of me, I would say massive insecurity, 35, a lot more confident. I would say 35 was the worst period for me. I was very smug at 35 because I had made some decent money. I had my own business.

20:49I had paid off my school debt. So I was the product of a bull market. And let me tell you something that happens in a bull market. you can mask a lot of your bad decisions in a rising tide. And so these young entrepreneurs, me and Andy, were making a lot of mistakes, making a lot of stupid decisions, but the rising tide of the market lifted us. We were able to correct whatever we were doing wrong, and we built a very, very nice business. So that created some smugness. And I got my comeuppance in 1998. I don't know if you remember the long-term capital management crisis. I remember it very well.

21:22Yeah, and the Russia crisis as well, a similar time. I got the living daylights beaten out of me in 1998. And that was a great lesson for me because it prepared me for 2008. I came into 2008, Stephen, completely unlevered. I mean, I lost money, like a lot of people that are long bias, but I was over levered in 1998, overconfident, thought I had it figured out. And so that's a product of insecurity. Security is when you're able to admit that you don't have stuff figured out. Securities will be able to admit when you can face the music in terms of your own fallibility. It's okay to be a little insecure.

22:01Get into a discomfort zone. That's where the adventure is. That's where the adrenaline is. Try something that you really want to try. Mel Brooks has one of the best lines ever, relax. None of us are getting out of here alive, Stephen, relax. I always say, I can only give my kids two things. Number one, do something you love. You have to do that. I started in real estate investment banking, didn't like it, sucked at it. I went into what I'm doing now. I love it as a result of which you can stay young perpetually. And then the second thing, which is very important, is celebrate the successes of your friends and don't measure yourself against anybody because that is a foolhardy game.

22:39That's where envy can creep in and that's where talk about insecurity or you can talk about comparative analysis, I think is terrible. You can't do that to yourself.

22:54You've had so many ups and downs in your career, and I don't want to skirt over the pre-administration, the 11 days. Not only was the firing probably really awful for you and your family, but you also got this public lambasting, whether it was Saturday Night Live, whether it was Jimmy Kimmel, whether it was Colbert as well. You were absolutely lambasted. Oh my God. John Oliver spent 30 minutes on me. It was like taking a chainsaw out of my forehead. I mean, he was just - I don't know how you coped with that. What are you going to do? Here's the number one thing. Don't be a cry. You didn't go to ground is my point.