Anthony Scaramucci | Trump’s Ballroom, Starmer’s Strategy & The King’s Visit

0:00Welcome to Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. Today we are joined by the one and only Anthony Scaramucci, the man known for spending 11 days in the White House as Director of Communications for Donald Trump. He is somewhat of a political and business superstar. So much so that when we won our Political Podcast of the Year award in January, we had a photo with him on stage and when I sent it round lots of people, most people's reaction was not about the award or the best interview with Tony Blair it was did you meet the mooch so it was great he agreed that night to kind of come on the show so big thanks to In-House Lounge for sorting that amazing evening out and a big thanks as well to the Steve Rigby team who let us record in their offices just opposite Claridge's and you should definitely check out his podcast the policy fix box light produce show hence why we were able to get involved with a couple of other things i wanted to mention as well today that i think people will find interesting is the british craft prize has launched and it is a new 60 000 pound initiative rewarding the fusion of heritage and craft with advanced technology i think it is super exciting and I think it's going to become a really big deal.

1:22It's run by Louis Elton and so you can kind of check that out. It's called the British Craft Prize. We'll be talking more about it on the show. And also, I can't say what it is yet because we're releasing a day early. But the King's Awards for Enterprise is going to have a really exciting announcement later this week. So make sure you follow me on LinkedIn where we will be discussing that and promoting it. But let's get on with today's episode, the one and only Anthony Scaramucci, the Mooch. Anthony Scaramucci, welcome to Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. It's great to be here, Jimmy. Thanks for having me.

2:04In your book, like it was fascinating listening to that it was basically a teacher that gave you that nickname that almost gave you your personal branding sort of 50 years ago, right? Yeah, Alan Tepper. He was hardcore. He took our multiple-syllable ethnic last names and he distilled it down to one of the syllables, you know. And so he took the third syllable of my last name and I haven't called the Mooch for 55 years. So when the White House detractors, when I was working for Trump, they were calling me the Mooch, they thought I was, like, upset about it, like it was a derogatory word. I'm like, I've been called that since 1972.

2:42It's not that big of a deal to me, you know. But go ahead, try, you know. Try to get me upset. But that's one of the tips in your book as well, right? It's like whatever you are self-conscious about is like bring it up first and then people can't go at you for it. Yeah. And I think that your weaknesses are actually your strengths. But you can also get to be very careful that your strengths could be your weaknesses. And I'll just tell this very quick story. Governor Romney, who was running for president, was a big jobs creator. And so they did an attack ad on him saying that he shut down a factory.

3:18People lost their health care. That put him on his heels. John Kerry, this is going way back, 21 years ago, 22 years ago, he was a Vietnam War veteran. George W. Bush was not. They attacked him with this ad called Swift Boat, where they had these Swift Boat veterans say that he was a coward during the war. Here's a guy that was decorated as a war veteran of Vietnam. So you have to be very, very careful in life. What you think your negative is, you're usually pretty good at defending. It's what you think your strength is when they start attacking your strength that you get caught off guard. So it's just a little lesson.

3:52But I mean, look, if you go into politics, you expect to get beaten up, you know. It's part of the job. It's like if you play American football and you expect not to get a concussion, you're in the long game. Yeah, it's a good metaphor for it. So we're halfway through the king's state visit to the USA. Okay. It seems to be going remarkably well. So I'm conscious that people listen to this in the future, stuff may go wrong still. But why do you think President Trump has so much respect for King Charles? Well, I think there's a lot of layers there. Number one, he wants to be king, but he's actually from Queens.

4:32And that's an area that I'm very familiar with because I grew up on Long Island. So Trump is down deep. He's really just a nobody. And down deep, he's a bombastic, insecure showman. He's also got good political instincts, so he captured an audience of people that are unhappy with the economic situation in America. But there's not enough gold leaf on planet Earth that's going to make Trump have the class or even the riz of King Charles. And one thing you've got to say about the royal family is that they stick to it. You know, they're the turtle that wins the race. You know, Charles has been at this 50 plus years.

5:11His mother was at it for 75 years. It goes all the way back for, you know, generations or, you know, millennium. And so for me, I think Trump is enamored by that. I think his mother, the fact that she was Scottish and had a love affair with the queen, I think that was also elemental of it. But ultimately, Trump respects power and prestige. that he respects the standing. And it's also the king is something that Trump could never be. I think there's some of that as well. And why do you think just generally Americans love the royal family?

5:50Well, listen, I mean, I don't know what the split is here in your country between the anti-royalists and the royalists. But I think from a distance, they look like gentlemen and gentle ladies. You know, from a distance, they look like people who handle themselves well. And in a culture where we don't, you know, we're this phenomenal experiment. I shouldn't exist. Jimmy, I shouldn't be talking to you. You're like Jimmy's jobs of the future. I had a job of the future in 1989. You know, I mean, I shouldn't be talking to you. My father was a crane operator. If you went through my genealogy in the kingdom of Naples, and you can do that because of the Napoleonic Code, I can take you back seven generations where I'm from a family of day workers.

6:39I'm from a family of peasant farmers, tenant farmers. How about feudal farmers going way back into the early 1800s? And so, you know, and I'm sitting here talking to you as a product of the establishment. You know, my father was a crane operator, but I went to Tufts and Harvard and Goldman and built two successful hedge fund businesses. I mean, I failed in Washington, but I did work in the White House. And so this is a probability assessment of 0.001, I don't know, something very low. And so for us, when we see the king or we see the royal family or the monarchy, there's sort of ancestral legacy.

7:19America doesn't have that sort of a culture. This is why America gets his ass kicked, by the way, every 80 or so years, because we have this very young group of people and this very young culture. And every time we lose generational memory, you know, after the revolution, 80 years later, we had the Civil War. 80 years after that, we had the Great Depression, which led to the Second World War. And now it's 80 years out from the Second World War. So we're going to go through it again. We're going to get dunked again. But when we look over here, you know, you're sort of like our older brothers, you know.

7:50And I thought, even though the king is younger than Donald Trump, President Trump, you know, he's more like the way he spoke in the Congress, the way he spoke at the state dinner last night, it's more like an older brother trying to provide some perspective in the common Western liberalism, the common tradition, and the common values. It is kind of crazy to think that Trump has been alive for a third of America's existence, right? And he's an evil bastard, so he'll probably be alive for another two-thirds. You know what I mean? I mean, the guy's probably going to die at like 200. Because these evil guys, they go forever.

8:26But what are your predictions for the next two years, right? Because we are beginning to get into the sort of era of the post-Trump presidency where attention will start switching after the midterms. Like, what is your political antennae saying that what might happen over the next few years? Well, I mean, you know, it's going to go in a lot of different ways. But I mean, you know, the most likely way is the whatever grift has happened in the first two years will accelerate and go exponential. Yeah. Because his attitude will be, OK, I get two years left to rate this in. Yeah. How am I going to take the 10 billion I've made from the presidency and turn it into 50 or 100 billion?

9:03Yeah. And so that'll that'll be one exponential thing about it. He's a retribution guy. And so he has a very small minded when you're like that. Right. And so he'll be going after people. You know, James Comey and this sort of thing, or ABC Disney, this sort of thing will also accelerate. But he's got problems. You know, he's now in a quagmire. The Iranian war is a vexing problem because you've started the war and you can't really get out of the war. And he can't really declare victory and leave. That would be a substantive political victory for Iran. He can't really put ground troops in Iran.

9:41The American people are like almost at a zero in terms of support for that. And so he's got a hope that his blockade of their blockade stymies their economy enough where they cry uncle. Yeah. But, you know, you've got to understand their culture. And I've said this on our podcast, and I'll share it with your viewers and listeners. The Iranians understand the Americans better than the Americans understand the Iranians. When I was in Afghanistan, I was at our forward operating base in Gambiri in October of 2015, and one of the Army captains was explaining to me the culture of the warrior that we're fighting against.

10:22And they just think very, very differently than us. And so, you know, they can last longer, frankly. They can eat less. They can put up with higher gas prices. They can put up with semi-starvation. and they don't have elections that they necessarily have to stand for. So it's going to be a very, very vexing problem for him. But for him, it's going to be about the grift and the attention-seeking and building himself a library and some Ark the Trump, you know, Ark the ballroom. He knows he's hated. It's not stupid. I mean, everybody in his field of vision hates him. You know, his family members hate him.

11:02I mean, Melania probably hates him the most, and then it goes out from there. and the members of the Congress hate him. They talk behind his back. The members of the cabinet hate him. They all talk behind his back. I mean, they're very sycophantic to his face, but he knows. That's why he's trying to build monuments to himself. He knows long after he's gone, no one's going to be building any monuments to him. And who do you think might be the players for the future presidency? Who are the people? The obvious players sometimes aren't obvious, right? I mean, so like, you know, in 2008, it was Rudy Giuliani, America's mayor, was going to run against Hillary Clinton.

11:45And John McCain got the nomination and ran against Barack Obama. But the obvious ones were, and they were literally the frontrunners in 2007. So we're sitting here with Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance on the side of the Republicans. There may be some governors that may come to play on the Republican side. And you've got guys like Pritzker. You've got guys like, you know, I would say Governor Newsom would be an obvious candidate or a potential candidate. Maybe Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro. So there's a stable of people on both sides. I think Rahm Emanuel said it better than anybody. And I do think Rahm, who's a former chief of staff for Obama, former mayor of Chicago, may run as well.

12:27he said it's an open season. There's no clear front runner, in my opinion, on either side. And then what's going on on the Republican side, I think, will be the most interesting because they have a death of a personality cult coming. And so I'm not saying Donald Trump will likely live forever, but his political personality is extinguishing in 2028. He probably goes lame duck at the end of 26 this year. But by the end of 2028, he's out of office. And so with that comes, I think, the death of the cult of the Trump personality political movement, which is known as MAGA. So I think there'll be a big intellectual civil war in that party.

13:10And so we'll have to see what happens. You know, if the war continues to go badly, weirdly, that will help Vance. Right. Because Vance was anti the war. He's done enough leaking on Hexeth and other people to try to position himself as an anti-war candidate. But Trump will destroy Vance before this is over. Trump has a way of killing his young. Trump is the classic Shakespearean figure who wants to stay in power forever and doesn't like young people coming in. And he certainly wouldn't want Vance or Rubio to secede him because then he would be like they could take potential credit for some things that he's done.

13:54He wouldn't want that. So so I know this is a weird thing to say, but I'm going to say it here. He would prefer Newsom. And people always look at me, oh, that's crazy. Oh, no, no. You have to understand Trump. Such a narcissist. He wants Jimmy. He wants to say, you guys, you were nobody. And you were nowhere. Yeah. You're getting roasted by Barack Obama. I showed up. I've loomed over the field for 10, soon to be 12 years. And you became somebody. When I leave, you're going to be nobody's again. Yeah. He would love that. See that narcissistic pleasure in saying that it was all about me and nothing more about me.

14:30You see that? Yeah. No, no, I can't. Can you see it? Yeah. Yeah. Do you think that we could see any of the technology entrepreneurs? Could somebody come from the outside? The way that Trump did 12 years ago now, right? Could somebody do that again? Is that why it's partly so? You know, I think somebody like Mark Cuban could do something like that. Somebody like Scott Galloway. I don't know if you know Scott. Yeah. I think those guys are. They have physical presence, great verbal dexterity. They've got tons of followers. Yeah. Could they rise? Stephen A. Smith, have you heard of this name? No. So Stephen A.

15:09Smith is a sportscaster on ESPN. but he's become very politically active. He was on the Bill Maher show recently. If you look him up, he's a very thoughtful African-American man. He's a sports and business entrepreneur. He's toying with the idea of running for president. Could he be somebody? I mean, it's hard to know. I think if you ask the American people, though, this is the most fascinating thing, they want to run all the bums out. What's happening right now is if you're a Republican and you're in power, they want to vote you out, put in the Democrat. But down deep, they really want to vote you and the Democrat out, and they want to hire Jimmy.

15:49They want to hire somebody off the street because they don't like what's going on. Do you see what I mean? So just think about it. We went from Trump to Biden, back to Trump, likely to a Democrat now. And it's only because it's a throw-the-bums-out mentality in the United States right now. Interesting. And you famously spent 11 days in the White House, and you talk in the book from Wall Street to the White House and back again about you wanted to go there for the status, right? And actually you realised that looking back, it was your ego that drove you there. Right. Ego. I was just, I'm fascinated by the status point because I think we don't talk about it enough when it comes to work and jobs.

16:30It's one of the large reasons that we do all that we do. And I just wonder what your kind of reflections on it were. Because you are somebody who presents well, like you care about certain status things, right? Well, this is a very painful admission, right? I'm basically admitting in a book that I wrote that I'm human. And what are humans? You know, we're touched by our vanity. We're touched by our egos. We're touched by our sense of pride. We're touched by our self-definitions. And sometimes, unfortunately, in our lives, we want external validation to make us feel good, right? And so let me just frame it for you.

17:10Again, it doesn't reflect well on me, but I think it's an important message for your viewers and listeners to think about because it's a very human and it's a very fallible message. I grew up with no money. My father and mother were blue-collar. My dad was a crane operator. My mother was a makeup artist. I had good grades. And so we have public schools in our country, different from your country, but they're the state schools, if you will. and I go to the public school, do well. I end up going to Tufts and then Harvard Law School. These are two good private schools. And now I'm at Goldman, which is a pillar of Wall Street's establishment, arguably one of the best firms in the world.

17:49And then I leave there. Think about the audacity of that. I leave there, start my own business, sell the business, start another business. The business does well. I'm now in the political realm as a fundraiser because it was helping me with my network. And here comes somebody that I know for 20 years. He's going to run for president. He's a fellow New Yorker. And I'm having a rapport with him the way you and I are. I'm talking very bilaterally. I was never one of the obsequious guys for Trump. Yeah. We were both New Yorkers. He wins. He puts me on the transition team. And my wife hates him, like, literally almost as much as Melania.

18:23So this is like, you know, Eastern European sort of ancestral hatred. My wife, I guess, got some exposure and some wind on what he's like privately. And she really did not want me to go do it. So I did it anyway. So I'm going against my family. I'm doing it for the prestige. I want to fly on Air Force One. I want to work in the White House. Now, I'm also self-talking nonsense, like, oh, I'm going to go help the people and things like that. But that wasn't really what it was. It was full-on Potomac fever. You know what Potomac fever is? You're going to cross the River Potomac, and you are going to solve people's problems.

19:00and you're a New Yorker, and you're smarter than the D.C. group. Yeah. And you know what the biggest symptom of Potomac fever is? You don't know you have it. You know, I mean, Lucknick's got it. Bacent has it. They both have it. I could go through the list. Yeah. So I have this Potomac fever. I'm wild-eyed with this notion that I'm going to, you know, change the world. Yeah. And then I get my ass kicked and my ass handed to me in that spot. And I get my comeuppance. Yeah. And so in a weird way, it was a very good thing because it made me more empathetic, more psychologically minded. It made me more thoughtful.

19:39I think it also helped my, you know, when you have children? Yes. How many? I've got three, all under six. Okay. So you've got some time here to see the development. But I had rising adult children at the time. Some were in college, some were out of college. and here's what I would say to you, which is, you know, again, painful. The kids don't listen to what you say, but they watch what you do. And so it was very important for me to pull myself out of that moment. I'm fired from the White House unceremoniously after 11 days. I'm mocked on social media. I'm destroyed by late night comedians in the United States, perhaps around the world.

20:24cable news pundits, editorialists, they're just eviscerating me. So what am I going to do? Am I going to be a baby? Am I going to play the victim? Yeah. Am I going to walk around with my head creaked and do what the scarecrow did in the Wizard of Oz, blame it on everybody else? Or am I going to own it, be accountable for it, and show my kids that you can make colossal mistakes in judgment, or you can be human, you can be fallible and frail, and you can survive it. And so that's what I tried to do. Let me tell you, it was the hardest part of my career. I mean, it looks easier in hindsight because it's nine years ago already, Jimmy.

21:03But let me tell you, just imagine I am fired from the White House. My wife has filed for divorce on me. We've reconciled, thankfully. I missed the birth of my son. Okay. He was born on the 24th of July. I was in West Virginia at the Boy Scouts event with Donald Trump. There was a 60-mile no-fly zone around the president's aircraft, Air Force One. I can't get back to New York, even if my wife wanted me there. Can't get back there. And there I am getting roasted. And, of course, I'm now fighting with him because there's things that he wants to do, which I am not equipped to do. I'm taking the job seriously.

21:45I did go to law school. I did read the Constitution and took a course on constitutional law. I don't want to do the things that he wants to do. I want to follow the precepts of the Constitution. I remember, you know, I got fired on a Monday, but on Friday, Trump was yelling at me, telling me I was a deep stater. And I'm like, I haven't even, I've been to Washington like one time on a field trip. How could I be a deep stater, you know? But he was mad at me because Because I'm like, hey, this is the institution of the presidency. This is the people's house. It's not your house. I mean, he's putting up all kinds of emulence and stuff.

22:24I always teach people to say, hey, man, somebody putting a$400 million renovation on their house, they're not expecting to leave in two years. You've got to be thinking about that, right? But what do you think, how do you think status has changed in the workplace? Since you're you know, you've been working for decades now, right? Like it's interesting you talk about Turning up at Goldman's in the polyester suit, etc. And these sort of little things matter I think when you're at the start of your career You can't notice what these things are until you've been through it Yeah, but also, you know when you grow up like I did I mean I didn't know any better I'm yeah, probably a suit is really all I could afford yeah Remember the Goldman partners said hey man, you're a smart kid, but you gotta get you you like fully flammable for this job We've got to get you in some natural fiber clothing, you know.

23:11And I remember being so embarrassed about it, you know. But here's, I think this is the big thing about the changes. I think it's gotten a little fairer for women. But again, you know, I'm going to be brutally honest. It's still unfair for women. It's still a man's world, at least in the American workplace at the white-collar level. If we're really being honest, okay, we look at the metrics and we look at the pay. It's gotten better. and there's a lot of women in these roles that do amazing jobs. And I think they've gotten a fair shake now, thank God. I mean, when I started at Goldman Sachs, it was one woman partner.

23:47I mean, you think about the magnitude of that. No African-American partners or anything like that. And so it's gotten a little fair. It's got a little bit more open. I think it's gotten a little bit more flexible. I think COVID also pushed that on us. You know, you could find me at home one or two days during the week. doesn't mean I'm working less hard. It's just that I may be able to do more of my meetings from my house, which may save me some commuting time. And maybe, you know, weirdly, I may be able to add more things to my schedule as a result of not the two hour commute in the car somewhere.

24:20So what is, how does the Anthony Scaramucci operating system break down, right? Because you're fully versed in what's going on in politics, but also the media and the markets as well. What What does the sort of like start of the Anthony Scaramucci day look like? Well, I'm a big reader. You know, Buffett once said that if you're reading 50 hours a week, you're ahead of everybody else. And, you know, I don't know if I could say that with confidence, but am I reading 30 to 40 hours a week? Yeah. Pretty much, yeah. So I'm working around my reading. And so, and I have pretty good retention skill set.

24:58So when I'm reading something, for a pretty good chance, I can assimilate it, digest it, and potentially apply it to things that are going on. Yeah. And so that would be number one. Number two, I'm a decent delegator. If you're going to have a job like mine, you've got to be confident in your delegating skills. You know, Reagan, President Reagan had a great line on it, this little bronze plaque. It said you can get anywhere you want in life as long as you don't care who gets the credit. So I have people running our money. I have people working on our conference business. I have people working on research, both political research and economic research and digital asset research related to things like Bitcoin.

25:42So we've hired a group of people that are very, very capable, very young. And the goal is to make them capable of taking my job. Yeah. Okay. And so empowering them, I think, is very important. So if you looked at my day, I always tell people this. I got this from Steve Covey. Remember the book, The Seven Habits of the Very Successful People? I don't know if that's exactly the book or the highly influential people. But he talked about your time as a jar. And you've got rocks and you've got sand. And the rocks are the most important things. You've got to put those in the jar first. You put those in the jar first, then the sand will fit around the rocks.

26:24If you put all the stuff in that's not as important, it fills up and then you can't get the rocks in. It's a good metaphor for life. So I always step back. So what's important to me? Well, what's important to me is I've got to spend time with the people that are working at Skybridge. What's important to me, I've got to make sure that our clients are in a good communication with the firm. Compliance is a very big part of our industry. We're one of the most regulated, other than food and drug securities in the United States, is probably the top regulated industry in the country. So we have to make sure that we're very cautious and over-aggressive on compliance and regulation.